+++++++++++++++
I must admit I am starting a post at the same time I have no clear idea what I am going to say. When these writing and thinking moments happen for me I suspect they are in part a result of the damage done to both of my brain hemispheres during early traumatized development, and due also to the changes that happened to the development of the corpus collosum part of my brain that is supposed to transmit information between my left and right brain regions.
I apologize if my writing process creates posts that are difficult to read because they are not thought out clearly before hand, and are therefore not ‘organized and oriented’ in a straight, linear, usual-coherent manner. I am simply documenting who I am and how I am as a survivor of severe infant-child abuse. How I write and what I write is a reflection of what early trauma did to change both of these vital states — WHO I am AND HOW I am in the world.
++++
On some level I know I want to talk about the ‘choices’ a newborn infant begins to make in relationship to its earliest caregivers. It is a know fact that an infant can form safe and secure attachment with one or more of its earliest caregivers at the same time it is forming unsafe and insecure attachment with one or more other of its earliest caregivers.
I am thinking about that know fact this morning, especially after having wended my way through yesterday’s long posts about avoidant-dismissive attachment — and in light of all the other posts I have written on this blog about infant attachment patterns and how they form the body-nervous system (NS)-brain-mind-self of a developing infant — that last a lifetime.
++
So exactly WHAT does happen, and how is it possible, and what are the long-range physiological consequences for an infant who is abused, maltreated and traumatized by one or more of its earliest caregivers — at the same time it is treated perfectly well by someone else? What kind of BODY does that infant form?
++
I began my thoughts this morning thinking about my current job of trying to control and manage the hundred year old oleander bushes in my back yard.
There are two oleander plants in this mess. This one on the south side is the pink bloomer. As I eliminate the growth of this one, I can begin to see the separate clump that is the white bloomer to the north of this one.
++++
What is the connection between my thoughts and images about this oleander, its condition and human infant attachment patterns?
Let me write the words so I can know…..
It took me two days of attack on this plant before I bothered myself to search online for information about the nature of its toxicity.
I read last night that ALL parts of this plant are poisonous to humans and animals. Consumption of three of its leaves will kill a small child. Not only that, but even the dust around the plant is poisonous. Its leaves can be carefully (and separately) composted and used as mulch, but even that is risky business. It cannot be burned.
++
This leads me to think about how I react differently to this plant than I do to all others in my yard. The more information I gain about the poisonous nature of oleanders the more I wish it had never been planted in this yard in the first place. Only dynamite or a bulldozer could possibly remove these two plants and their massive roots.
How would I feel and think about trying to manage these plants if I knew absolutely nothing about their toxicity?
Which makes me think about infants from birth: How does an infant KNOW the difference between its nontoxic earliest caregivers (so that it forms safe and secure attachments with them) and its toxic earliest caregivers (which the infant forms insecure attachments with)?
+++++++++++++++++
Then I think about my own life experience from birth. I think about the pictures I found in my baby book. (see
+URGING INFORMED COMPASSION FOR OUR ABUSERS – AND LINK TO MY BABY BOOK)
I realize as I am writing that I have far too many disconnected thoughts related to the topic I am addressing. My left brain hemisphere is jumping up and down in its seat yelling at me, “Pick me! Pick me! I know the answer!”
At the same time my right brain hemisphere is quietly beginning to build its momentum in its own way: “If you don’t listen to me I am going to begin to ROAR, and believe me, you don’t want THAT to happen!”
Interesting. The left brain makes one kind of noise within me at the same time the right brain threatens to hijack my BODY and ALL of my attention if I don’t hear what it has to say.
I have to consciously negotiate how I am going to move forward now. I need the left hemisphere’s ability to order, sequence, organize and verbalize. Yet at the same time it is my right brain that is deeply and fundamentally connected to ALL of my experience as my memory of being alive has accumulated that information in my body’s memories.
Hum…….
How to proceed?
++
An infant has no choice about who it is born to. It has no choice either about who its first contact with members of our human species are, or about how those beings treat it. So how can it form a wide variety and range of differing attachment patterns appropriate to how each of these beings treat it and interact with it?
This is not a meaningless topic. These earliest beings are responsible for the building of the entire body-being of the infant that it will use to process its self in its world for the rest of its life.
++
And then there is the oleander, the toxic, deadly poisonous overgrown hideous out-of-control oleander that is stretching its branches out in every possible direction from its very old roots that are equally entrenched in the earth where somebody planted it/them.
My right hemisphere knows perfectly well what needs to be said about the difference between safe and toxic interactions based on either on the ‘safe-ability’ or the ‘toxic ability’ of who-what anyone interacts with. But my right hemisphere alone does NOT have the power to sort out what it knows and make that information coherent.
So, left brain, what do YOU know?
Quiet……
Listen to my body because my left brain IS a part of my body….
I am waiting……
Here comes words……..
++
From the time an infant is born all of the channels of its being are open to experience.
Depending on the nature of these experiences the infant will respond according to its biological underpinnings.
(My right brain is beginning its roar. It wants some pictures because it thrives on images.)
Great pictures of Mother Mildred playing the role of the proud and loving mother — of the infant sent by the devil to kill her during her breach birthing.
Left brain: “Perhaps everyone could say that the reason why Grandmother Bea, Uncle Charlie and Aunt Carolyn do not appear in one single picture in your baby book is because the pictures had to be cropped so that they could fit within the pages of your baby book.”
Right brain: “We ALL know this isn’t true. Mildred intentionally, though we do not know whether consciously or not, removed all pictures of everyone — her mother and her brother and his wife — from YOUR book (OUR book) because those people were HER attachment beings and there was — as you well learned over the next 18 years of your life — no POSSIBLE way that YOU could force her to share HER beings with you!”
“The only reason pictures of your father and your brother are in your baby book is that Mildred could not ‘politically’ eliminate them and still appear publicly as the perfect mother she was pretending to be.”
“The truth of Mildred’s loathing of YOU lies in a few of its words, in the spaces within those words and lines, and in what is missing in this book including its ripped out and absent pages. As you and all your siblings know eventually the entire book itself ‘went missing’ as your mother denied that ever existed at all, to be discovered only within her storage-locker belongings after her death.”
++++
“OK,” I ask both of these brain hemispheres. “And what is your point EXACTLY?”
Left brain: “While it is a given biological fact that an infant can from the time of its birth form attachment patterns in resonance with the attachment patterns that exist within its caregivers, your mother all but eliminated all opportunities for you as an infant to experience any possible attachment with anyone else but her.”
“Your mother controlled all access to the baby that was you as much as was humanly — inhumanly — possible. You therefore experience a very particular universe that you must admit was unique. It is NOT normal for any infant to be sequestered away in a ‘chamber’ beyond the reach of only its mother.”
Right brain: “You need to know (I was interrupted by my neighbor’s daughter knocking on my door to borrow shortening to make the Mayan chocolate her teacher gave her a recipe for. I found an unopened block of yellow butter flavored Crisco for her (after making certain that she really didn’t want butter) and showed her how to measure it, and gave her enough to use again later — along with a Ziploc bag to store it in. What was my thought??? It is gone. I have no earthly clue what my right brain was about to say and I doubt that I ever will know now exactly…. I am disorganized and disoriented — again.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++
I want to say something here that I thought while I was outside before I ever started to write this post.
HEALING
What I believe most leads to our healing
Severe infant abuse survivors need to pay very close and detailed attention to figure out not so much WHO we are (against popular opinion) but HOW we are in the world.
Our ability to know WHO we are has been contaminated by the trauma altered changes in our development that radically changed HOW we are. We live in and with a trauma altered body that receives DIFFERENT information than ‘normals’ do — receives this different information DIFFERENTLY — and processes all of this information DIFFERENTLY, as well.
What I just now experienced is the kind of evidence I can now recognize for myself, and until I became able to KNOW what I now know about HOW I am in the world I could not begin to discover WHO I am.
The girl suddenly knocking at my door came through to me as a shock wave that entirely disrupted my being in the world. My ‘systems’ do not tolerate sudden interruptions and change well. I do not (because my trauma altered body CANNOT) smoothly transition between many types of ongoing experience.
I continually am forced to cope with my own experience as it CHANGES ME during change. I — my own ongoing experience of being a self in the world — is NOT the constant I strongly suspect it is for ‘normal’ people. Changes that happen in the world I live in CHANGE ME.
Who I now am post-girl at the door is NOT the same me that I was pre-girl knocking at the door.
Which now means my direction has changed. I, as a being, have been shifted in the current of life-in-the-world and I cannot RETURN to who-how I was before the knock.
Which now means my thoughts have been altered in such a way that I need to make note again of the Bell Curve I mentioned in a recent post.
This is important to me because I continually struggle with knowing that in many, many ways my experience of abuse from birth was SO MUCH ‘definitely more than others’ experience that I fear what I have to say will mean absolutely NOTHING to other people.
As my mother controlled access of other people to me from my birth, as surely as she controlled their appearance in my baby book, she made as absolutely certain as she possibly could that trauma would change the course of development all aspects of my body would take — thus ensuring in the end that I am essentially ALONE in my experience.
++
After ‘the knock’ I returned outside to sit in the cool late fall breeze and stare at the mess of the oleander. “That is your mother,” I heard in my thoughts.
As an infant (and throughout most of the next 18 years) I was left to interact as solely as my mother could arrange with ONLY HER and her malevolent psychosis. I ONLY had the toxic, deadly poisonous out-of-control gigantic oleander to experience my own reality with.
++
Coming back to far more ordinary and normal infant experience, those infants will form within their own body-brains a variety of attachment patterns that match the ones that exist within their earliest caregivers.
Research is discovering that WHEN and IF a little person is being treated abusively by someone, but at the same time ALSO DOES have someone to form attachments with that are NOT unsafe, insecure and toxic, many genetic combinations that lead to long term detrimental adult health (including mental health) problems DO NOT GET ACTIVATED.
I am writing not even from the ‘bottom’ 5%. I am writing from the bottom 1%. (see post –+CLARIFYING MY PERSPECTIVE: INFANT ABUSE IN THE 5%). I WILL it that I WILL NOT allow this fact to silence me!
++
The kind of MAIN attachment system, secure or some version of insecure attachment system, happens NOT because of ANY limitation within an infant itself. What attachment system primarily builds all aspects of our body-brain-mind-self is DUE TO what kind of beings interacted with us during our most critical earliest developmental stages.
This is, to me, a critically important point!
An infant cannot choose to form a safe and secure attachment with an early caregiver who does not have one!
An infant cannot choose to form an unsafe and insecure attachment with an early caregiver who does not have one!
++
Left brain back online: “It seems that your mother instinctively knew this fact. The only way that she — and therefore the dictates of biological development could ensure that you received the MOST of what was toxic to you and the LEAST of what was good for you was to eliminate your contact with other people.”
DAMN! My mother, Mildred was SO GOOD at being SO BAD!
++
Nobody wants to talk about what it is like to be placed alone in isolation, in solitary confinement as the prisoner of a monster mother from birth and throughout another 18 years.
I was fortunate at least that mother Mildred had enough grasp on ‘the real world’ to know that on certain occasions she was forced to PRETEND around others that an entirely different (wonderful) reality existed that had Linda in it.
I believe that her efforts to form ‘Linda’s baby book’ in a right and publicly acceptable (and applaud-able) fashion happened because she TRIED to pretend ‘at least this much’ about herself and her daughter – me. But in the end she could not even really pull that effort off — hence the baby book was hidden away while she told ALL of her children that it never existed at all.
++
Which leads me off on a side-thinking tangent of something else that came into my mind this morning. All the time I was reading and trying to comprehend and learn from the writings particularly of developmental neuroscientist Dr. Allan Schore, such as Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self/Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self, I struggled with his conclusions that being raised by a ‘frightening mother’ has the same severely detrimental effects as being raised by a ‘frightened mother’.
I KNOW what a frightening mother can do! But a frightened mother — just as damaging? How can this possibly be true – even when one of the world’s top developmental neuroscientists says it’s true?
This morning the awareness finally filtered through to me, after six years of processing information about how severe abuse changes an infant-child’s course of development, I FELT the reality that Schore described.
I mention this now because I believe it is connected to why my mother barred all others from having access to me. She was terrified that others would form an attachment to ME that would then threaten those others attachment to HER. I believe this is also why she did not actually destroy my baby book: She was ACTUALLY terrified of me.
But, going deeper than that….. Thanks to my interviews with my mother’s long term ‘friend’ I learned that long after I had left home, and in her older years my mother’s fixation with ‘the devil coming to get me’ still existed. Not only did the ‘devil come to get her’ through MY being born, an experience that put her dangerously close to death’s door (ME TOO!), but she wrote 666 on her hands and face in her OLDER years to keep the devil from coming to get her.
(What a strange twist of thinking it was that the only safety and security she could invent to keep the terrors of ‘the devil’ from consuming her was to PRETEND through this choice of signaling that she was ‘one of his’ anyway!)
Both hemispheres: “Linda, THAT is terror! That is fear beyond what any human should EVER know. THAT terror was built into your mother, no doubt, by someone who terrified, terrorized and abused her when she was very very young.”
That level of terror was FED TO ME even before I was born. It was fed to me while my mother and I were in labor. It was during THAT time that she-we were dying and struggling for our lives. It was during THAT time that her terror fundamentally broke her regarding me in a way that could not be mended. It was during THAT time that she attached her terror of ‘the devil coming to get me’ to little tiny beautiful perfect newly born ME.
Schore is then correct in saying that a mother who is afraid of her infant causes as much damage as does a mother who forces her infant to be afraid of her.
In my case, I received the DOUBLE poison!
++
And, again, I am back to the oleander. There are TWO bushes out there. Both are equally toxic. It didn’t matter in the end if my mother was afraid of me ONLY, or if I as an infant was terrified of my mother ONLY.
In the end, although both directions of terror were fully active, toxic is toxic. Poison is poison.
It doesn’t matter if I am outside working with ONLY one oleander or if I am outside working with TWO or a thousand oleanders. Everything about every oleander is toxic, and to be safe anywhere around an oleander the fact of its deathly toxicity must be kept foremost in mind.
As for me in my yard, I cannot eliminate this species from my yard, but I can take precautions and I CAN force limitations to its existence. It is a fact I cannot remove that plant, just as I cannot remove the developmental changes that my mother forced into my body.
I plan to chop those two oleanders to within an inch of their lives. Then I plan to encircle the whole mess with an adobe wall that reaches high enough that new rapid growth from the bottom will be forced to stretch straight up (rather than sideways). I then plan to completely control the shoots that will clamber to take over my yard.
But even then I will be forced to deal with the continual cuttings that will come off of that plant in the future. I am fortunate to have a span of ‘no man’s land’ between my back fence and the Mexican-American border wall. I throw all that is toxic over that wall where it can rot its way into infinity for all I care and not bother me one single bit.
Dare I only wish that someone had done the same with my poisonous mother? If they HAD done so, I would have been spared a whole lot of trouble!
+++++++++++++++
NOTE: I just discovered something else out about the oleander. I found a branch lying so low that it grew horizontally out of the main root. Its tip ended up on the ground and grew into the soil along my neighbor’s fence line. Where it did this another oleander was formed!
Oh, great! Intergenerational transmission of toxicity!
I have the hose end laid there with water running to saturate the ground where the offspring grows. I WILL dig that one out and eliminate it!
+++++++++++
Stop the Storm 
You must be logged in to post a comment.