Tag: dissociative identity disorder

+’SHAKE IT UP BABY!’ — MOVEMENT MATTERS

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Yesterday I spent all of the generously given birthday money I received on drip-soaker irrigation supplies.  It just struck me as I decided to write a post that my thoughts FEEL about how that collection of pieces, parts, hoses and tubes looks like in their pile on my kitchen floor:  JUMBLED.

Then I thought, “Well, if one of the key indicators of a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern-disorder is ‘incoherency’ in the narrating (and living) of one’s life, then figuring out how to put together a complicated working irrigation system for my back, side and front yard is actually a similar process to organizing BOTH jumbles — the one on my kitchen floor and the one inside of me.”

OK.  Then, “If it isn’t necessary to put together my irrigation system in a simple straight LINEAR way then it isn’t necessary to put my thoughts together in a linear straight way to make them organized, oriented and coherent, either.”

I will certainly admit that putting that watering system together so that it actually WORKS within the limitations I have both financially and expertise-wise, is intimidating.  Both involve a learning curve, and if I want to get both jobs accomplished, I have to start at one single place:  THE BEGINNING.

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Regarding my jumble of thoughts, I will go back and pick up a little piece of information I found on a website early in the week when my daughter and I were discussing (via email), “How important is it for an infant to crawl before it walks, and how is crawling related to the ability to read?”

From the Minnesota Learning Resource Center I found an article titled, Movement and Brain Development which states:

“Fascinating research informs us that the baby’s brain develops through natural movements of nursing, tummy time, rolling, creeping and crawling. Baby’s most complex senses, vision and hearing, are also organized by doing the same movements.

Developmental movements organize and structure the brain for cognition, attention asset (vs. attention deficit) and emotional regulation, the ability to modulate between calm and excited states. The earliest learning takes place through movement explorations. Baby’s natural movements also provide a baseline of core strength and good coordination.”

(Bold type is mine)

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I had never until the moment my eyes scanned these words heard the term ATTENTION ASSET.  “Well how cool is that?”  I thought to myself.  “Like in so many cases, what we tend to hear about is the negative side of things.”  That’s what I have finally come to understand about all the public hoopla around ‘the stress response’.  We are not likely to hear about the other part of the WHOLE that makes up our body-brain-nervous system responses to life — THE CALM AND CONNECTION SYSTEM which is exactly part of the SAME response system.

In the same way we are likely to hear of ‘attention deficit’ without hearing at the same time about ‘attention asset’.

So, I appreciated LEARNING something new just from these few simple words.  At the same time I know that ALL learning IS MOVEMENT — and also that because I have some particular prior learning, I also understand that the interactions an infant has with its earliest caregivers ALSO are also exactly building these same abilities in the infant body-brain at the same time!

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But what I am particularly thinking about right now is about how MOVEMENT is essential throughout our entire lifespan so that we can both continue to live as we continue to GROW.  We make no significant, meaningful progress on ANYTHING (even staying alive) without movement taking place.

All the so-called ‘anxiety spectrum’ disorders that pile up inside our body-brain due to our having had to grow and develop our body-brain in the first place in horrendously inadequate, traumatic, abusive, malevolent infant-childhoods ALL involve some complication with our attention.  As our body responds continually to our environment, we are often left with a disorganized-disoriented (dissociated) condition that saps our life force and deprives us of the ability to focus our conscious, self-directed desires and will power into the channels that would allow what REALLY MATTERS MOST TO US to manifest in our lives.

I am thinking not only about dissociation, but also about ‘depression’ and ‘posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)’.  If I don’t build my irrigation system exactly right, water is going to leak and spill, overflow itself in its hoses and in its tubes in the wrong direction, overwater, underwater, and basically NOT end up where I want it where it is needed.

That’s very similar to how my thoughts and my energies (ALL of them) end up much of the time if I am not very careful to take care of the JUMBLE inside of me.  The ability to focus ATTENTION and to be resiliently flexible and responsive to our inner and outer environment has been DISRUPTED through the horrific experiences in our infant-childhood that we survived.

As a consequence, I believe we survivors have to build our conscious awareness and power of directed CHOICE every moment we are alive.  We cannot take for granted that either DECISION or CHOICE comes easily to us.  All severe trauma has the power to change our body, and if the stress response end becomes overtaxed — and hence takes over the utilization of our energy and life force on the AUTOMATIC AND UNCONSCIOUS LEVEL, we will have (pardon me) a HELL of a job (if not a battle) getting control of our own energy and life force back again — for our SELF.

The ONLY way I see to improve our well-being and the overall quality of our (survivorship) life is by finding as many ways as possible to NOTICE both what is happening in us that DOES NOT HAVE OUR CONSCIOUS ATTENTION (attention deficit) and to what DOES HAVE OUR CONSCIOUS ATTENTION (attention asset).

If I simply turn on my outside water spigots and let them run, the water will go wherever it wants to because I have not both paid attention to how the water is directed AND found ways to make it go where I want it to according to my conscious CHOICE and intentions.  This jumble of $147 worth of irrigation ‘stuff’ piled in my kitchen has no use or purpose whatsoever until I make the movements — ALL of them — that are required to make something out of them according to my wishes and my intention.

On a personal level, I have to ask myself, “What is your investment, Linda, in directing the flow of your own life today?”  In the same way that I have invested all of my birthday gift money in my hopes for a finished and working irrigation system, I need to FIND, KNOW, VALUE, and INVEST in my hopes for myself in my life regarding every part of it-me that I can wrestle away from my body’s automatic pilot that my trauma-built body-brain runs on — naturally.

Sure, my body has hopes, plans and ways to keep itself alive — but, “Wait a dang minute here?  Where is MY choice in all of this living?  What do I want, need, desire, hope for?”

Staying alive isn’t enough.  Building my irrigation system right isn’t enough to promise me a beautiful yard.  I need the plants.  I need to amend the soil, pull the weeds, chose the right plants, feed them, give them enough water for their needs, make sure they have the right amount of sunshine.

And — I need to enjoy them!

I am making all this yard-related effort and movement for simply THAT reason — it is a part of who I am since my earliest memories that I love flowers.  Along the way I figured out that growing food is also a good thing.  What I love CAN have a ‘lionesses’ share’ of my attention.  No matter how great this struggle, the more I learn how to organize and orient myself according to what my passions can make clear to me, the more I can direct the flow and consequence of my own energy and life force — at the same time I diminish how ‘anxiety’ rules my life.

The physical exercise that gardening (and my addition of adobe into the landscaping) gives to me benefits me in exactly the same way the author referenced above says about little tiny growing babies.  We NEVER leave behind the need to MOVE.  (Contrasted to being miserably STUCK anywhere along our life’s journey!)

And if I can’t get outside due to weather to do what I want to, I can jog, I can dance — I can do SOMETHING.  And I have to because physical movement of the body is absolutely necessary to human well-being.  I am convinced of that fact.  Movement helps cure the ‘jumbles’ — so off I go with my attention focused on my intention to make SOMETHING GOOD happen in my life today!

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+I WILL FORGET THE ANGELS’ PRESENCE NO MORE

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Wise are the mysterious promptings of the heart that sometimes cause us to make new connections in our thoughts, to say things to those we care deeply about, to finally find our own courage to stand by what we know as our own personal truth, and to let ourselves leap into the feared unknown so that we can find hope for ourselves and for others that we never knew existed before.

I have a nearly 20-year-old cassette tape Walkman with headphones that I use while I do my 45 minute near-daily jog.  I only have two tapes that work in the player.  I have tried all kinds of other ones, but I have decided that the bands that move the tape must be geared only to the exact weight of these two tapes — and nothing else.  One is a Chet Atkins tape that is obnoxious to listen to — hard as that is for me to believe!  The music is clipped and fakey to me, no matter how great the talent recorded on it.

The other one is a Stevie Nicks tape, The Wild Heart.  I have listened to that tape throughout my jogs so many times I can’t count them.  Yet suddenly yesterday, on my 59th birthday, there was one line from one song that leaped out not only into my ears, but into my heart, mind and soul so loudly that all other sounds on the tape completely disappeared.  I can’t even say at this moment (until I do today’s jog and hear the song again) what the name of the song even is — but here is the line:

“I BLAME THE ANGELS!”

At that moment something changed inside of me — the greatest birthday present I could ever have been given.  I can’t name or describe the change exactly, but I can feel it.  For the first time in my life I can feel, sense and almost physically see that all the supposed empty space around me, around all of us here on this earth is filled not only with air — but also with angels!

There are actually so many of them that I don’t know how they fly around without bumping into one another!  I guess they have their own version of traffic control, because “Oh, my GOLLY!  There’s a whole LOT of them!”

And each of them is here to help all of us.

Well, I humbly must admit that I have to wonder how it could have taken me all the way through time to my 59th birthday to reconnect to something I so absolutely knew as a child on that mountain I had no question.  I will try to scan in a photograph that my sister just sent to me that will (again, and hopefully more clearly) introduce you to the Angel on the Mountain that was my closest friend and companion during my abusive childhood.

(Give me a moment here.  I have to dig through this pile of photographs for the one I am thinking of.)

I first met this angel when I was 7. She was more real to me than anything else in my life, and she was my Companion and my Comfort.

This angel was a Presence in my life. There was in feeling no distance between us. While I could see her visually across the valley and over there perched on her mountain peak, I felt bonded to her.

This angel heard everything I ever said to her, but mostly in my misery I had no words, yet I knew she ALWAYS knew exactly who I was and what I felt.  I knew she always watched over me and never left ‘my side’ — and never would.

I hope you can detect her up there.  In my senses she was alive — and every time I looked up at her I was in a different spot, never exactly in the same one twice, so her shape changed subtly with my movements as if she, too, could move — though of course I never THOUGHT about these things.

I can look at this photograph my mother took probably in 1959 and there on the left in the back, at the end of the mountain range across from our Alaskan homestead where this picture was taken, I can see that angel up there as clear as day!

Her head is turned slightly to her right, and as a child I knew without ever thinking of it that she was looking at me, that she could see me just as clearly as I could see her.  Her wings spread out to her left and right, her dress cascades down the mountaintop below her.  In the summer she appeared as she does here.  In the winter she donned her winter dress, her halo turned whiter and her wings grew in vastness along the top of the mountain’s crest.

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Yesterday as I loudly heard the words of Stevie’s song, “I blame the angels,” it was like a veil was torn away that has kept me from feeling the presence of angels like I was able to with THAT Angel on the Mountain when I was small and so terribly hurting.  I never knew I created that veil after I ‘grew up’.  In fact, I have shrouded my entire feeling experience of my childhood under this same (or similar) veils.

These veils, or shrouds, have buffered me from the emotional memory reality of my childhood suffering, as well as from most of the dissociated specific facts of my childhood memories.  I had to not only endure and survive my childhood, I ALSO had to endure and survive my adulthood!

Part of how I did that was to cast over my first 18 years of life a sort of cloak that not so much made it invisible as it did dim and obscure it from my awareness as I made my childhood so out-of-focus and obscure (like having a blindness, a terrible ‘vision’) that I could direct my attention elsewhere (at my adulthood).

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The way my thinking works, all of this I am writing about seems closely connected to an experience I had within hours after my double mastectomy surgery in December of 2007.  Nobody had told me prior to surgery what they told me afterward, and perhaps in part because of this I experienced the following:

I was given IV morphine for the first 20 or so hours after surgery.  During that time I did one very important activity — I stretched!  I sat up in bed, raised my arms as high over my head as I possibly could, and I stretched.  I continued to move my arms in this wide stretch in all directions — yes as I think of it, not unlike a butterfly might stretch its wings when it first exits its cocoon (or a new angel).  And as I instinctively performed this stretch without thought or intention, I could hear and feel (though there was no pain) a strange ripping, crackling, snapping inside my shoulders, across my chest and back.

I thought nothing of this until hours later when the surgeon stopped into my room and mentioned that many women experience a limitation in their range of motion due to this surgery.  As she verbally described what this limitation would be like I naturally raised my arms and searched for this limitation within myself.

It wasn’t there.

I had broken through whatever that kind of limitation could have been even before anyone had told me of its possible existence.

I mention this now because in my thought connections I realize that I am again experiencing a related kind of ripping through limitation.  Whatever veil-shroud I naturally created to obscure the pain, horror and reality of my infant-childhood of trauma and abuse  — because I HAD to do it to survive my adulthood — ALSO numbed my ability to experience my ‘Angel Love’.

Some part of that veil was ripped away yesterday on my birthday as I jogged around listening to Stevie Nicks wake up and hone in her musical echos, my ‘angel senses’.

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I realize now as I write that I am tired of words.  As a child, back there within that veiled and shrouded world of trauma and trouble, I had very little use for words, and I certainly did not use them to think with.  I was fully capable of thinking without words.  In that state of being, I could simply BE with that angel, a fact that at this moment helps me know a broader sense of Shakespeare’s statement, “To be or not to be.  That is the question.”

That is not an itty bitty personalized reality.  It is as big as the creation all of us are a part of.  I know myself well enough now to know I don’t think in terms of ‘faith’, and not even in terms of ‘belief’, either.

I didn’t have ‘faith’ in my intimate interrelationship with that Angel on the Mountain.  I didn’t have ‘belief’ in her unending and absolute love for me.  Both she and I were simply BE-ING.  We existed.  We were.

As I continue to stumble forward at this moment in my world of words I also know now that I can thank the fact that our family had no indoor bathroom for much of the assistance I received from my relationship with the presence of that Angel.  Sooner or later, no matter what punishment my mother was at the moment engaged in regarding me, I had to use the outhouse.

Those moments I walked out the door of our strange canvas-covered abode into the open air of the wilderness I was both in those moments NOT in my mother’s presence at the same time I WAS in the presence of that Angel as if she and I existed together in an entirely different universe than the one my mother existed in.

Most of my childhood my beaten body and my broken heart bled tears.  During the brief intermissions in abuse created by my having to go outside the ‘house’ into the air of wilderness freedom I was automatically blessed by the presence of that ever-present Angel on the Mountain who I understood without question knew everything about me and compassionately cared.

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Yesterday I was reawakened to what that feels like not only to be so loved by an Angel but to be able to receive that love as naturally as I receive air.  THAT angel was situated on THAT mountaintop and never left it (although her love felt like a physical presence as she expanded herself all the way across that valley to wrap me in it).  What I received for my birthday gift yesterday is not only the reawakened sense and knowledge of what that love FEELS like, but also the knowledge that there are angels EVERYWHERE that are all full of that same love for humanity.

I have no desire to complicate this gift with thoughts about ‘proof’ or ‘religion’.  These angels seem to be as much a part of this creation I am a part of as everything else is.  They simply ‘BE’.  I have greatly missed knowing this.  No matter what else I have had to ‘forget’ about my childhood, I will forget the existence and presence of these loving, compassionate, caring angels no more — hopefully forever.

(I swear!  I feel as though I am walking through ANGEL SOUP now and they don’t mind a bit!)

(The song lyric is from Stevie Nicks’ song “Wild Heart,” and literally is “Blame it on the angels.”)

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CLICK HERE – TALKING ABOUT THE POWER OF LOVE

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+SEVERE EARLY ABUSE SURVIVORS: LEARNING TO READ, IT’S MORE THAN YOU THINK

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This is my 59th birthday post today.  I am deadly (life-ly) serious about this!  Learning how to read?  YES!  What is different about US and why-how it matters:  We severe infant-child abuse survivors, with our trauma-changed body-brain-mind-self, life in a different world because we were made in, by and for a different (malevolent rather than benign-benevolent) world.  I am going to present two very short articles from “O” – The Oprah Magazine that I pulled out while I was searching for little images to cut out for my daughter to use in her light switch collage project.

Because I am a severe, severe infant-child abuse survivor, and because I was FORCED to go searching for the truth nearly seven years ago when my youngest child left home (my serious disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder trigger), I have LEARNED A LOT.  It is the purpose of my blog writing, and my greatest hope that somehow what I share in everything I write can benefit the suffering FEW (overall and in perspective) of us that are severe early abuse survivors.

Yet at the same time I mention and take seriously that ONLY a recognizable half of our current population is seen by researchers to have had a safe and secure enough early attachment environment (good-enough benevolent) to NOT have ended up with some degree-version of an insecure attachment disorder that affected every single aspect both of their early growth and development and therefore how they experience and live their life.

What I see happening — and what will continue to happen for the roughly 10% + of US – the severe early neglect and abuse survivors — is that not only did our early traumatic environment change our development, including the way our genetic code manifests and operates — we are DISSED (disrespected) in every possible way from that early point forward.

We NEED information.  We need to understand the platform that we stand on within our physiology — our body-nervous system-brain-immune system-mind-self AS IT TRULY EXISTS.  We need to STOP the disempowering (life force leakage) that continues to happen for us because we live in a society that has not yet recognized the power that early infant-childhood deprivation and abuse in a malevolent environment has to  CHANGE  development and create lifelong complications for us in everything we face.

These two little articles present me with an opportunity to elucidate what the ‘gibberish’ I am talking about!

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Without further explanation, please read these (right-click on image and choose ‘open in new tab or window’,  and on page it brings up, use ZOOM from your toolbar View button if you need to):

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Those of you readers who have followed this blog for a period of time can probably already know what I am going to say.  In the first article we are reading about how MOSTLY safe and securely attached people are likely to experience ’empty nest’.  Nobody ever tells us that we early abuse survivors are NEVER GOING TO HAVE A CHANCE to experience what is being touted here as not only POSSIBLE, but within the realm of NORMAL.

No, for the abuse survivors I am talking to and about, we fit into the ‘tainted’ category of “Oh well, what else can be expected of THESE PEOPLE?  They were already flawed, already depressed.  Let’s just ignore them (after we DISS them) and go on with our happy, well-adjusted lives!”

Yes, ‘already depressed’ people are going to experience MEGA difficulties when their primary attachments are disrupted, altered and perhaps nearly evaporated.  They are also the likely ones NOT to have good partner relationships that would help support then through these transitional passages in adult life.

We MUST begin to understand the insecure attachment ‘disorders’ and the changes they created in our genetic code expression (that’s how abuse activates most depression genes in the first place) so that we can all get on with the business of recognizing that if we choose to ACCEPT the existence of early infant-child abuse, we are choosing to punish those survivors with our societal arrogance and ignorance.

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The same pattern exists in this second article about “Smoking & the Blues.”

“Oh, those ‘mentally ill’ and those ‘depressed’ (flawed) individuals….”

MOST of so-called mental illness, and I would guess a whole lot of ‘depression’ is directly tied in its origin and its continued existence to early infant-child abuse, neglect, maltreatment and trauma that so changed the little one’s early growth and development that these ‘mental illnesses’ had no choice but to manifest.  Those ‘mental illnesses’ go hand-in-hand with what our body had to do to adjust enough within our malevolent early environment to survive at ALL!

Again and again and again I will mention — it is of HIGHEST value and importance to begin to KNOW the truth about subjects like these two high-in-the-sky-apple-pie articles are ACTUALLY — and in an undistorted REAL world talking about (in other words, in a word without childish denial and magical thinking).  What you will find when you do a Google search using just these three simple terms for your search means more to me than anything that has ever been discussed in connection with “O”:

CDC ACE STUDY

No kidding!  Take a look, a refresher if you have done so before and follow those links that show up there!  (And I would suggest a serious study of this information for all attached to the ‘O-Empire’.)  When I point the proverbial “GET REAL!” finger at Oprah and all she represents — as clearly demonstrated by the angle of these two articles and the slanted information they present — we have to KNOW OUR OWN TRUTH AND OUR OWN REALITY.

The CDC’s (Center for Disease Control) ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Study is ongoing and is finally carrying enough absolute WEIGHT to begin to displace the biases, the stereotypes, the prejudices, the ignorance and the PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE that our society continues to wrap around so-called ‘mental illnesses’ at the same time our society will not recognize with grateful appreciation, humility and even SHAME what the HAVES were given in their earliest infant-child caregiver interaction environments in CONTRAST to what the HAVE NOTS were not given!

The kinds of changes that we were forced to make in our physiological development to endure and survive within our deprived malevolent early world DO NOT GO AWAY.  The contribute to, exacerbate, and CAUSE the difficulties for us over the duration of our lifespan that the CDC ACE Study recognizes — and these ridiculous “O” – Oprah articles DO NOT!

WHO IS READING AND WEEPING NOW!  It’s our time to empower ourselves to know who we are and how we are in the world WAS NEVER OUR CHOICE!  We have long ago paid the price for our survival or we wouldn’t even be here with our complicated body and our complicated life.

At the same time, “Society around us — WAKE UP!  Get real!  And be grateful you never suffered as we have!  Get with it!  Blaming and shaming victim-survivors is so PASSE!”

(These are the same kinds of processes described regarding autism in my previous post.  We need to add early abuse and neglect to the array of possible toxins and realize that nearly ALL so-called ‘mental illnesses’ are included in the kinds of consequences that originate from interactions with ‘malevolent’ and toxic early environments during early human developmental stages from conception onward.)

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+A TURTLE CAN’T STAY ON ITS BACK — AND LIVE

alchemynow4 Comments

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There is probably little else so disturbing, disorienting and disorganizing to a turtle or a tortoise than being flipped over onto its back.  It struggles and struggles to turn itself back over because if it stays on its back it dies.

It has taken me many disoriented and disorganized days to at last have this helpful image appear to me.  I have been feeling badly, on my way down from worse to ‘more worse’ and today realized that I absolutely had to figure out how to right myself because this downhill slide — well — SUCKS!

My anxiety level escalated right along with my disorientation and disorganization, and trying to understand what started all of this has taken some time.  Of course I know it all REALLY STARTED when I was born to my insane Borderline mother who knew nothing else to do with me than to batter and abuse me.

Thinking about this upside-down turtle image, I see how its disorientation and disorganization happens at the same time its anxiety level skyrockets as it tries everything in its power to right itself to save its own life.  I have been in some version of that state since the time I was born.  Every time my mother attacked me she in effect flipped me upside-down, creating within my growing body-nervous system-brain-mind-self a state of extreme anxiety (which actually never had time to leave me between attacks, either, because they were so frequent).

I don’t believe there is a way anyone can come out of their earliest childhood with a disoriented-disorganized insecure attachment to the world (and self) without the corresponding massive alteration to their nervous system-brain-body that is later named a so-called ‘anxiety disorder.  My dissociation, my major depression, my complex posttraumatic stress disorder are ALL anxiety-related complications from the severe and long-term infant-child abuse I suffered for 18 years.

What does this all mean to me RIGHT NOW?

I spent two weeks doing my friend a favor and babysitting the very quiet little office that she cares for otherwise.  There should have been nothing to upset me to the degree it did.  Yet at the end of those two weeks which ended last Thursday I could not find any place within myself that wasn’t fully anxious, disoriented and disorganized.  I am still not wholly ‘repaired’ inside from that experience — and the whole (vibrating) mess that is inside of me can also so upset me that everything just continues to get worse and worse until I find a way to stop this spinning while remaining right-side-up.

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While I was in art therapy graduate school 20 years ago I had a series of thoughts come to me — and these thoughts returned to me today.  Back then I drew a circle, like a compass, and in each of the four directions I placed a word:

East – MAKE

South – USE

West – FIX

North – BREAK

As I thought about it, it seemed that at any given time all of us are ‘doing’ one of those four things.  Then I thought about some people seem to be more oriented in their approach to the world in one of those four directions.

Because I have felt so flipped-on-my-back disoriented, disorganized and anxious lately I had to find something that could help me feel BETTER.  My body-self was created in, by and for such traumatic conditions that GOOD or BEST are almost foreign concepts to me.  When I am really off-kilter, just finding ways to feel BETTER rather than WORSE is about all I can manage.

Today I began to simply concentrate and focus on choices I can make right now while being very conscious about which of these four directions my actions are a part of.

We have had lots and lots of rain during our monsoon season this summer, such a blessing.  The weeds are unable to offer resistance no matter how big they have grown so I went out and pulled bunches of them up by their roots this morning — fixing my yard.

I then realized that if I want to go have pizza tomorrow evening for my birthday (59th) I HAD to finally fix my headlamps.  I had tried before and couldn’t budge the screws.  No doubt the passenger side light is the original on my ’78 El Camino.  But someone told me to get a can of PB Blaster to loosen the screws and it worked.  I did it.  I can drive in the dark now for the first time in four months.  Only problem now is I dropped one of those rusty little screws in the dirt and for the life of me can’t find it.  I hope it stays away from my tire and vice verso.

Then I began to clean my freezer and my refrigerator, fixing those too.  I repotted a little houseplant someone me gave last week, fixing that.  In spite of how crappy I might feel, I know that I can find little things, little tiny things that I can do that I can consciously connect to one of these four aspects of LIVING — as it contrasts to spinning down into a destructive cycle that has been familiar to me all of my life and can easily overwhelm my present if I am not very, very careful.

As I make my choices, direct my attention and energy, and accomplish even the smallest of tasks, if I connect what I am doing to one of the four directions of human activities I feel like I am turning these terrible BLUES around in a better direction.  And as I do this I can recognize that I am orienting myself and organizing myself around the things that I do to help things be better — both in my environment and within myself — one little action at a time.

(All of this is about the history of RUPTURES with or without REPAIR — and is what makes the difference between safe and secure attachment or unsafe and insecure attachment to and in the world.)

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+WHAT ARE WE MISSING?

alchemynow2 Comments

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Today’s response to this part of a comment made to this post, +THE JOY OF SAYING ‘NOPE’ TO OPRAH

‘We do have much in common, and I don’t feel understood…ever.’

Replies:

Morning! Even for those with known childhood sexual abuse histories (I don’t have), I believe much of ‘what’s wrong’ happened way, way earlier — and is not recognized as contributing to so much of ‘what’s wrong’.

Those earlier ‘troubles’ underlie all of the later ‘troubles’ but in looking at our whole life, our whole story, our whole set of traumas, our whole resultant difficulties, we aren’t ‘taught’ how to pick all this mess apart so that we can begin to more clearly identify all the separate ‘parts’ that contribute to this ‘whole’.

We are left trying to remain intact and ‘functional’, trying to remain on our own two feet while STILL in the midst of the ongoing tornado-storm that is in our body because it was put there, built right into it, as we grew and developed.

Part of why I mention this in response to your comment is that from birth our early caregivers build our body-brain (including our emotional and social brain-self) through a process related to ‘feeling understood’. MIRRORING, REFLECTING BACK, and RESONATING are three extremely important processes that must happen — in safe and secure earliest attachment relationship-interactions — so that we can grow up with what we need.

When those three things don’t happen for us from the time we are born, and especially in our first year of life, we don’t even end up with a body-brain-mind-self that has a real CLUE what it feels like for someone to understand us — to mirror, reflect, and resonate with us so that we can FEEL FELT.

Feeling felt is actually a ‘technical term’ for what we experience when we feel understood. Add onto these complications the fact that all infant-child abuse survivors have had things happen to them that are far, far, far past what most safe and securely attached (and nonabused) people can imagine, let alone empathize with!!

As I begin to UNDERSTAND all of what I am describing I also begin to understand that the most important person who I need to UNDERSTAND me is — ME! Yes, that can be a lonely, lonely ‘place’ to be in, but all that went so wrong in our early life REALLY does to hurt us is prevent our own strong, clear, happy, safe, securely attached individual, autonomous OWN SELF from forming. We are robbed of our own self, and that, to me, is the biggest hurt, the deepest wound, and the most important one for us to heal.

As we begin to more clearly understand the nature of our hurts, we are fine tuning our own reception abilities in terms of being able to look around us and visually begin to SEE these same early abuse survivor patterns in other people. We begin to recognize them not only in our self, but in others. Then we begin to see how MANY people did not have what they needed in safe, safe, SAFE — and secure attachment environments. These people are changed just as we are, to different degrees — and it is the quality and nature of the SAFE AND SECURE attachments that any of us have with ANYONE in our earliest years that fights back against any and all harm that was done to us THEN so that we have stronger inner resources NOW.

and

There are two pieces of information I need to add to my previous reply. Dissociation that was built into us through early trauma and abuse most often includes ‘depersonalization’ and ‘derealization’. Part of what makes this happen is that our early brain didn’t form patterns of ‘repair’ to go along in a reasonable and healthy way with the overwhelming patterns of ‘RUPTURE’ that the deprivations and traumas of our early lives created.

This means that dissociation — or patterns of all these ruptures without corresponding (and necessary) repair just leaves us with lots of holes in the fabric of our social-emotional brain processing — all the way through our nervous system. When we feel ‘depersonalization’ and ‘derealization’ as parts of dissociation, we are feeling those holes. Anything we can learn about recognizing these patterns when we feel them — and recognizing how TODAY to help ourselves gain REPAIR for the ruptures (triggers) that send us off on the dissociation pathway, the better off we will be.

The second point I need to mention is that ALL RELATIONSHIPS in our present life that are safe and secure attachments are important to our well-being. But along with this comes the fact that not even we, our self, have what it takes to REALLY be able to experience true empathy. We are not as good as we might think we are at mirroring other people back to their self, reflecting back to them or with resonating with ANYONE else as we COULD have been if someone had done that repairing-of-ruptures for us as our body-brain grew early in our lives.

I think of it as a ‘numb zone’ that pops right in between me and other people — and it is tied to these two arms of dissociation I mentioned (depersonalization and derealization). Our intentions can be the best in the world, but as Dr. Allan Schore says, everyone with an insecure attachment disorder has an empathy disorder, as well.

So if we are surrounded by people even as well intentioned to empathize as we are, yet they also have an insecure attachment disorder, they (as are we) are prevented RIGHT WITHIN OUR PHYSIOLOGY from being able to truly offer back ‘understanding’.

I will also say that many people are motivated toward the helping professions that also come from similar backgrounds as their clients do. If a therapist does not understand patterns of secure and insecure attachment chances are not good that they have made REAL progress in healing themselves in the ways that really matter. That means that they also have empathy disorders — and are probably least likely of all to know or admit this fact.

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It strikes me as I think about these words I just wrote that I am describing a PARADOX!

Being able to truly understand another person, IF it involves the process of empathy, does not require that the listener have a history of any kind of early caregiver-infant relationship trauma.  In fact, it is the fact that those of us who DID experience unsafe and insecure very early trauma had our empathy abilities tampered with that means we are the LAST people to really be good at empathy!

Being good at empathy, really healthily good at it requires that the listener did not have their empathy abilities tampered with (and changed as a result of early relationship trauma).  True, we survivors can learn what empathy actually IS and can learn to practice true empathy — but we will always be like immigrants, never natural empathy-ability citizens.

There’s lots more I can say about this — but it is saved for some other day…..

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+WORDS SPOKEN WITH THE POWER TO CHANGE ME

alchemynow7 Comments

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The first thought I have as I turn around and begin to look back over the span of my adulthood (which covers 40 years now) is, “If I had only known THEN what I know now……”  I don’t say this about anything trivial, ordinary or mundane.  I say this about something I see as being so important that if I HAD somehow had the information I have now, the entire course of my adult life would have gone differently.

There are two brilliantly lit spots in my adult history, and they both appeared within months of each other when I was nearing 30 years old.  The first one happened when my 4-year-younger sister took a bus from Edmonton, Canada to visit me in Minnesota.  She was hugely pregnant, and I can still see her resting on my humble living room couch, her head tipped back a little as I came through the doorway into the room.

“You know, Linda,” she said to me, “if you aren’t very very angry for the things Mother did to you while you were growing up there’s something very very wrong with you.”

Talk about a dead-stopper, that was it.  I’m sure my eyes popped wide open, my mouth too.  I had not one single word to speak back to her.  I just stared.  Yet on the inside something happened to me.  She opened a crack in my carefully crafted adult reality that had never been there before.  I didn’t recognize what happened at the time, but her simple statement itself changed the course of my life.

Those changes have been gradual, but I can name that moment as the one that moved something inside of me I didn’t even know was there.

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The second brilliantly lit moment in my adulthood happened about a month after my sister’s comment.  An older Native American friend of our family named Larry had stopped in for dinner with his wife.  After we had eaten, after everyone else had left the table and he and I were sitting there alone together,  Larry looked straight into my eyes across the plate cluttered table and simply said, “Linda, you aren’t the person you want everyone to think you are, are you?”

Again I was absolutely stunned.  To tell you the truth, I had no conscious idea what he was talking about, and nearly 30 years later I STILL don’t!  Did I ask him what he meant?  No.  But here again he stuck some kind of a gigantic crowbar into the crack my sister had opened up inside of me and pried that crack wide open — somehow.

I have never forgotten his words.  I remember them exactly, and I remember myself receiving his words in stunned silence, just as I had received the words my baby sister had spoken to me just as simply.

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I would say right now that both of these statements were straight ones, perhaps the most-straight statements I have ever heard in my lifetime.  These were words of truth and accuracy that shot straight into the center of ME, and never in my lifetime will I lose my appreciation and awe for the power these words had to help straighten out the course of ME in my lifetime.

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I had one similar experience during the long 18 year course of my severely abusive childhood, only this time the words came from an unknown source and I heard them inside of my own self.  I must have been about 13 or 14 when I heard them spoken.  I had been punished severely, beaten, berated, and banished — for what THAT time I do not remember.

What I do remember was lying in bed in the middle of the day.  Being put to bed was a punishment even worse than being put into a corner, both of which consumed massive segments of my childhood.  I know I had been crying, and looking back I know my pain was so deep it consumed me.  My eyes were open, and I was staring at my mother’s carefully varnished plywood wall.  I remember the wandering, curving grain of the wood and the curved ‘eye’ and ‘lip’ shapes embedded here and there.  (I had no idea as a child what these were for, and only found out as an adult that they were ‘plugs’ put into plywood to repair spots where twigs had grown into the tree.)

All of a sudden I heard a voice like none I had ever heard before.  It spoke clearly, but seemed to come from far, far away as it calmly stated, “Linda, it is not humanly possible for anyone to be as bad as your mother says you are.”

That was it.

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Many Indigenous People use a term for The Great Mystery to describe all things deeply spiritual that cannot be talked about in any other way.  I would include all three of these statements in that category, even though I know two of them crossed the lips of real human beings.  But the source of these words, the meaning of these words, the timing of when these words reached me, and what they all touched deep inside of me belongs in my mind to The Great Mystery.

As I consider the words that appeared to me in that tear stained, sorrow-filled bed when I was still a child, I think about my mad, mean mother.  I think about some invisible ‘line’ that divided her from me and me from her, as I ask a question that has no answer in this lifetime.

“Why was I gifted with those words that saved me from becoming like my mother?  Why did it happen that no words were given to my mother anywhere along the span of her lifetime that could have just as equally saved her?”

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I feel like I am standing at the edge of a great, horror-filled and very dark abyss as I write now.  I am going to take a step off of firm ground out into thin air, trusting there is something solid I can trust will hold me up even though I can’t see it.  As I take this step, I look down, and I see two people falling into that inky blackness.  One is my mother, the other is myself as a child.

I hear again that voice and those words that came to me that day in my bed of despair, and I see that they caught me and stopped my fall as surely as if they had spun a net to catch me.  I see that there were no words to break my mother’s fall, none that she could possibly have heard anyway, and she continues to fall.  Fall, fall, fall, to the moment of her death.

What I heard in those words as a child is not what I now see as their full meaning.  As a child I needed to be told that I could not possibly be as bad as my mother said I was.  I now see the other part, the ‘humanly possible’ part.  To be told in this way at this particular time that I was HUMAN at all is what MOST saved me, though back then it was having the limit set on how bad I could NOT be that I somehow heard.

Back then I must have instinctively swallowed the whole spoonful of saving elixir contained in the whole statement.  If I had stopped to say to whomever spoke those words, “They are meaningless to me because I am not even human, therefore there is no limit to how bad I am,” I do not believe I would be alive today — and certainly not alive without the madness that consumed my mother.

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As strange as it might be to think this way, I believe the hardest part of letting go of my perpetrator, my terrible and terrifying abuser, my mother, is not that I hate her.  It is not that I don’t forgive her.  The hardest part is coming to terms with the fact that I could not then, cannot now, can NEVER save her.  I cannot save her from her falling.  And more than anything else I can possibly think of, this lets me know that in my heart of hearts — if I ever question this, and I do — I loved my mother then — and I still do.

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Now, getting back to firm ground I turn away from the edge of that wicked abyss and walk away, walk away, walk away, walk away.  I do not run because the pull of it, the gravity of it echoes, echoes, echoes.  Which leads me to the point I wanted to make at the beginning of this post.

What I know now that I didn’t know as a child, didn’t know through the first 40 years of my adulthood is that this abyss exists.  It is very real.  It is at the center of my natural life because its existence was at the center of my mother’s life when she brought me into this world, and every interaction I ever had with her, most clearly all of them for the first 18 years of my life, happened as SHE was falling through the horrible blackness of that pit and as she did everything in her power to take me down there with her.

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I can come up now from this writing so far and take a gulp of sweet fresh air, gaze out my window at the clear blue sky, listen to my parakeet chirp away at some foreign bird it hears perched on a tree branch.  And as I come back to this present world I bring back three words like they are the plug at the end of a long electric power cord of truth — and insert these three words into the history of my past as I know it.

The three words:  Insecure Attachment Disorder.

Not having some way to anchor ourselves safely and securely in the world our body lives in means that we are falling, falling, falling  into an inner world of terror and darkness without end.  Those are the words I now have to describe what I did not know even existed — as an essence of my life — as a child or as an adult person who heard the three statements I mention here.

As I look back on my entire life, including my adulthood past, I now know that this dark bottomless pit has always been with me.  It’s force, its gravity, its existence?  I have felt it, felt it in my body, and never knew its name.

As I look back on my adulthood I can see the patterns.  Over and over and over again — for every major decision I have made in my life, I was FEELING that great open pit, and I ran from it.  I didn’t walk, I RAN as fast and as hard as I could not knowing I could not escape its pull even though I seemed to be able to avoid it.

I did not.

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I met men.  I had sex.  I fell in and out of love.  I did drugs.  I drank heavily.  I had babies and cared for them.  I married and divorced and married and divorced.  I traveled.  I moved from one end of this great country to the other.  I wandered.  I found homes, made homes, took them apart and moved on.  I wandered by the crashing ocean side, I wandered by the lakes and through the forests and over fields.  I planted, I reaped, I preserved food.  I bought things and sold them and gave them away.  I tried studies, read books, went through treatments.  I tried jobs, a career, did art, made things — and gave them away as well.

Now?  I mostly sit still, and I write, and I learn to read and play music.  And now?  I am naming that hole, that inky dark pit that I live with — right here, right now.

I am beginning to comprehend that the more I struggle the more powerful the pull that black pit has upon me — because it has its tendrils built right into every cell in my body.  I can’t change that, but I can change what I know and what I do.

I no longer wish to fly off in one direction or another every time some dissociated fragment of myself is triggered by some event in life that blindsides me and makes me lose my poise and balance as I have during the days of my past.

I am intent on learning what this black pit is and how it operates.  I will run from it no more, nor will I let its influence determine my reactions within my own life.  At present I believe I am making some progress.  I can hear its tone — its single roaring tone.  I believe when all is said and done it only has ONE TONE, one main feeling that it sets to resonating within my body.

That tone?  I call it inconsolable despair.

There.  That’s not so hard!  I can learn to recognize that tone when it starts resonating within all the cells of my body, and begins to crawl around within the neurons of my brain.  Inconsolable despair.

Sure, it would be nice if I didn’t know what that tone was, and didn’t know what it feels like.  But I believe every mammal is born with it, and perhaps other kinds of species as well.  It is this, the existence of this inconsolable despair that motivates life to seek all that it needs to continue its existence.

I can thank my daughter who is such a fantastic mother for describing to me how her newly born (now five months old) son wakes from deep and peaceful slumber EXPRESSING this feeling.  There is nothing that has happened to him in his present lifetime that would explain where this feeling state comes from for him — except that he was born with it.

Most appropriately, everyone around that new little person rushes to his rescue when he wakes up crying, sobbing his sounds for his feeling of inconsolable despair.  That is as nature intends.  His needs are always met through safe and secure attachment patterns and my hope is that over time as his body grows, his nervous system and brain grows, his mind and his self that maybe he can gain so many good ways to solve that eternal problem that he will never have to feel it again.

But for those of us who DO still feel it, I think it’s helpful, no, downright empowering to know what this feeling is and where it comes from so that we can find the best ways possible to offer our own self healthy consolation that can dim — even though it might never be able to extinguish — our deeply felt feelings of inconsolable despair when they threaten to overwhelm us.

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So in response to my old friend Larry’s comment about the person I am, if I can keep from running off into some dissociated life pattern, if I can remain here true to my present task of learning not only WHO I am but most importantly HOW I am in my body in this lifetime, perhaps someday I will understand what he was telling me that day because I still have to say his words simply still remain a part of The Great Mystery.

Larry left this world a long time ago, and perhaps at this moment he is looking at me and smiling — or — shaking his head in puzzlement that I still don’t know what he meant.

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+OH WHAT A NEW FOUND JOY!

alchemynowLeave a comment

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Since I began my break (perhaps strike) from writing a few days ago, I have been spending lots of time learning to read music and to play ‘piano’ on my amazing 88-key keyboard I bought a few months ago.  What an education!  My admiration for piano players is increasing with every moment I spend engrossed in my pleasurable task!

What joy there must be in actually being able to PLAY this instrument!  I can only begin to imagine what that would be like.  I learned the ditty for naming the lines on the treble clef when I was in third grade – and that was IT for my musical education.  So I am at the beginning.

What I was thinking about today as I begin to combine notes for some of the pieces of music I am trying to understand and play is how hard it is for me to decipher the individual sound of notes once two keys are played simultaneously.  I imagine people with trained ears can pick the two separate notes out easily, but I sure can’t.  What I hear is a brand new THIRD NOTE!

It made me think about feelings, and about how hard it is to decipher them when we are actually experiencing more than one of them at the same time!  Then we have the equivalent of the THIRD NOTE — something new and different that vibrates our body in a way we might not be able to describe.  How can we  pick the feelings apart when they happen this way?

I don’t have an answer to my own question.  I am having way too much fun healing my body-brain with sound at this point.  I love the waltzes and the lullabies!  Oh, how wonderful and amazing this is!  And learning to play these notes off the page, I feel like I am touching the fingertips, the hearts and the minds of the people who had these songs come to them and who wrote them down — a direct communication like nothing I have ever experienced before.

So as I went back to the blog here to look for the verbal abuse and music related posts I found what follows here – lots!  Perhaps there’s something useful among all these words — but for now, I’d rather do the music!!!

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+VERBAL ABUSE – CAN I HEAL MY INFANT MUSICAL BRAIN?

+POWER OF SOUND FOR HEALING OUR NERVOUS SYSTEM-BRAIN

+SOME MORE INFO ON MUSIC, VOICE AND THE BRAIN

+THE ‘TERROR-ABLE’ CONSEQUENCES OF INFANT-CHILDHOOD VERBAL ABUSE

+THE TOPIC OF TEASING: TOO HARD TO CONSIDER?

+A LONG, THOUGHTFUL LOOK AT VERBAL ABUSE AS MALIGNANT TEASING

+SECURE AND INSECURE ATTACHMENT AND THE CHILDHOOD NARRATIVE

+CHILD ABUSE: IN THE ABSENCE OF THE PRESENCE OF GOODNESS

+LINKS TO TODAY’S PAGES ON DISSOCIATION AND DISCLOSURE

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+MY JOURNEY BACKWARD IN TIME (WITH SNACKS)

alchemynowLeave a comment

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As long as I am rolling along through the topic of roads today, I might as well write about another experience with ‘road problems’.  Because I seem to be rapidly getting older, I have to say “many years ago” I was working as an art therapist with a caseload of severely traumatized children.  On this winter’s day I had to travel a long way to reach a home-based session with a foster child.  Getting there on time was my greatest concern.

At that time I was driving a monster 3/4 ton Chevy van.  Not a lot of weight for traction in that beast.  I headed across a flat land wide dirt road, and I must add, a wash-boarded one.  Any readers with experience in country living will know what that means.  Somehow very mysterious physics comes into play when enough round tires travel down certain dirt roads so that entire long series of patterns appear on the surface that look exactly like what they are named after — a wash board.

“Oh, great,” I was thinking to myself as I looked at my watch and realized that the time I had taken just to FIND this road had bitten a considerable chunk out of the remaining time I had to get to my appointment on time.  The wind had swept all the snow off of the road and into the ditches, hence providing me with a dry straight-of-way — and I took off down it flying.

Well, ALMOST flying.  Before I felt myself heading into a full blown spin off the road I noticed the cut-off trunks of some poor dead trees sticking their weathered tips out of the vast snowbanks I was now going to meet up with up close and personal.  Off we went (van and I), landing with a serious tilt in deep snow with the passenger side wheels nearly in the air.  Stopped with the van’s underside gas tank directly poised to land squarely on top of those tree tips.

Not a comely position for professional-lady me in my stockings and nicely pleated wool skirt.  “How exactly am I supposed to climb out of this beast?”  I didn’t have time to answer my own question when I felt the van beginning to move.  Gravity was having its pull, and down on top of those sharpened stakes my poor gas tank was headed.

Of course I pulled a “Linda.”  Nobody there to hear me but the van I was speaking to, I didn’t empty my verbal arsenal politely.  “Don’t you F—– DARE!” I commanded of that van firmly.  The tilting stopped.  “Good van!  Very good van!”

I managed to push the driver’s door nearly straight into the air to open it, climbed out stocking legs akimbo, plowed my way out of the snowbanked ditch onto the dry dirt road, and took off marching in the direction of my client’s house my heels clapping along with each stride as if I had planned my arrival to go like that.

Yes, a wisely slow driving farmer stopped and picked me up, delivering me to his neighbor’s house where my appointment waited.  I must have looked a riotous sight, me and my blaze red half sunk van.

Beside the obvious moral of this story, the hidden one for me today is that there are times when we are intent on ‘learning’ from our abusive past that it is not wise to barrel our way through our journey along that road as if there is no possible danger.  I had thought on that day if I just drove fast enough I could skip right over all the millions of tiny ruts, taking the high road over the washboard safely.  Not so.

What all of this means to me in real terms today, at this moment, is that I am approaching a return to my traumatic infant-childhood to retrieve my story very slowly and cautiously.  I find that to move in that direction means that I have to first traverse backward through my adulthood.  Along that road I can already see patterns that I never noticed before.

That is what growing means, I guess.  As I continue to grow in my own way, my perspective is continually changing with new added insights.  Things are not looking the same on my backward journey as I thought they might.  This is like I am playing my life backward toward the moment I will walk back into my home of origin in reverse of when I walked out of it at age 18.

What amazes me most about my adult life is that I have stayed as safe as I have.  That doesn’t mean my journey has been easy, but I did not fall for abusive men — at least I never saw that side of them.  I did not fall for anyone who abused my children, either.  I am extremely grateful for this miracle!

Beyond that, I have a little brightly colored kerchief filled with yummy snacks tied to a stick balanced upon my shoulder as I whistle some version of ‘Dixie’ as I pace myself for my long journey of return back to my childhood so I can see what I can see and learn what I can learn — and feel what I can feel — and. . . . . .

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+THE JOY OF SAYING ‘NOPE’ TO OPRAH

alchemynow13 Comments

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“Well, tickle me pink!”  I have no idea what the history of that cliche is, but it comes to mind as I entertain myself with a little humor, Linda style.  I give myself full permission to access anything that I can use to prepare for my next task — and to accomplish it — with great success!

I have (literally) a hell of a story to tell.  I am not alone in this.  Anyone who has suffered abuse in life has the same kind of story to tell, but it is those of us who were raised from birth (and perhaps from conception) within the earliest possible truly malevolent environments that have the worst stories to tell.

Not that there is some sort of new-fangled “GONG” show especially for people who want to march up to some television stage and compete for “Who has the very worst infant-child abuse story to tell” kind of prize.  But there ARE critical differences in the long term consequences of differing kinds of early abuse.

A week or so ago during my conversation with my friend I was having lunch with the topic of Oprah came up.  “Oh,” my friend said.  “I heard that now Oprah passed 50 she has decided to let her abusers go.”

“Well, I’ll be horn swaggled,” I think to myself.  Not THE great and powerful Oprah?  Such a public example of the “should do” for all other infant-child abuse survivors.

I’ve never been an Oprah fan.  That could be because I am not a personal fan of either television or magazines.  But in the last week that I have been sitting in an office taking care of its business so my friend could take her vacation I have honed my anti-Oprah insights.

Now, I can in part thank my daughter for this.  She is a very busy professional woman with a marriage and new baby to tend to.  She hasn’t much time left over for one of her simple pleasures:  Making gorgeous, creative, stunningly artistic switchplate covers out of collage.  So I am taking advantage of the quiet time I have at the office to cut apart magazines and prepare a delicious palette of tiny images for my daughter to work with should she ever find the time to sit down and make some of her designs.

In this process I found a pile of ‘used’ Oprah magazines at our local thrift store.  This is the first time I have ever opened one of those magazines — and quite frankly what I found inside appalled me though it did not surprise me.  For all the rumors in the wind I have heard about the ‘do good’ doings of this most-rich woman in America’s spotlight I found nothing in that magazine but continued promotion of the ‘be gorgeous’ make believe woman image in VERY expensive advertising.

Putting aside what I might think about anyone who devotes an entire magazine to their self, and putting aside what I think of anyone with that kind of money who doesn’t avidly reinvest it on the level of ‘who truly needs what for a better life’ down at the bottom of America’s society, I have to be honest and tell you that my motivation for writing a hell of a book with my hell of a childhood story of abuse in it is entirely (self) motivated by my not being responded to on Oprah’s website when I left two separate emails mentioning my story.

No response then, no response ever as far as I am concerned.  I can’t think of anything more delightful than for me to actually write a bestseller that attracts someone of Oprah’s staff, who then invites me onto the Oprah show — so that I can utter back one word and one word only:  Nope.

Now maybe if they were holding my grandson hostage I MIGHT not say “Nope,” but as that’s unlikely I am quite certain there is nothing, absolutely nothing on this blue and green earth of ours that could drag me anywhere near that woman.

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My point being — I can guarantee that no matter what abuse of what kind Oprah experienced during her childhood years, someone loved her — and someone from the instant she was born provided her with safe and secure attachment.

And I WILL be the one to say this:  That is all that really matters.

Without having safe and secure earliest caregiver interactions nobody’s body-nervous system-brain can grow a safe and secure attachment pattern in it.  Without these patterns, there is nothing EVER to be done about truly leaving one’s abuser(s) in the past.  The changes (the damage) is IN THE BODY of early abuse survivors because it was built in during development.

Now, I honestly don’t care one bit what Oprah’s abuse history is.  But I will bet everything I own (inventory sight unseen for any takers) that someone was there to help Oprah’s body-brain-mind-self form correctly during the first year (ESPECIALLY!) of her life.  Once that happens, every other trauma a person experiences for the rest of their lifetime will be processed in a different way than it will be by those whose earliest experiences were not safe and secure — with SOMEBODY.

On top of conception to birth, birth to age one, we have to consider next what happens to age two, and then through age five.  All of these experiences are building the body-nervous system-brain — step by step, foundation stone upon foundation stone.  I am not saying that childhood sexual abuse is not devastating, but processing the experience (any and ALL experience) is very different between those who had safe and secure earliest caregiver interactions and those who did not.

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Out of curiosity I did try to locate the cost of placing an advertisement in “O” for my book.  As far as I can tell the least expensive ad placement is well over $50,000.  Signed.  Sealed.  Delivered.  The answer to O-Oprah is “Nope.”

My ‘bone to pick’ with the O-Oprah Empire has to do with my concerns that NOT acknowledging the existence of resiliency factors of all kinds during early infant-child development depletes the truth of any claims for so-called ‘recovery’ – no matter who makes them.  All RISK factors are always balanced by RESILIENCY factors — not by magic, not by magical thinking, and not by the power of persuasion or suggestion by anyone who is a member of the Magic Kingdom — and I don’t mean Disney’s.

As long as our society does not acknowledge risk and resiliency factors equally, we will not come to the truth about how early infant-child abuse changes physiological development so that early abuse can create very different kinds of body-brains.  The HAVES don’t have to be grateful for what they DID receive on the resiliency side of their existence at the same time they can maintain and perpetrate the MYTH that ‘everyone can be as I am, do as I do’.

NOPE!

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+EARLY ABUSE BUILT US A BODY DESIGNED FOR THE LONG, HARD HAUL THROUGH LIFE

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Having just mentioned metaphors as being useful ways the brain (particularly the right brain) has to consider and process information, I remembered this picture I just discovered yesterday.

My mother took this picture around 1960 during our family’s early Alaskan homesteading years.

Written on the back of the photograph: “See the mud spattering up — it is dark here in the woods and picture doesn’t show up the MUCK [underlined]”

Most of these photographs survived a major fire in the 1980s so the white area in the lower picture is a result of that damage.  I never knew this picture existed until yesterday, and I found it a useful addition to my metaphor thinking about how early trauma changes the development of an infant-child’s body-nervous system-brain.

What those of us with serious insecure attachment ‘disorders’ experience — as related to the physiological changes that complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) causes, is a body that cannot turn off it’s fight-flight-flee-freeze stress response.

When I think of this, I ‘hear’ the low growl of a hard-working machine trying to get us through life in a world that our body was designed to believe would ALWAYS be a dangerous one to our survival.

I know this growl because I heard it growing up on the side of an Alaskan mountain after I was seven as tractors often were heard working hard to either build roads or to repair them.

What our mountainside had was a ‘mountain marsh’ caused by water that ran underground but near to the soil surface.  Once the intricate network of tree and shrub roots that held the soil in place were cut through for road building, the mountainside continually oozed its water — creating in winter massive living glaciers that filled the roads and crawled down the mountain.

In break-up the glaciers melted and created deep ruts that were actually mountain creeks as the water ran down the easiest pathways it could find headed toward the valley below.  Except in the dead of winter, the common denominator for the entire road nightmare was MUD — what my mother is calling here MUCK.

Horrific infant-childhoods tell a little one’s growing and developing body to prepare for a lifetime of the worst.  We only have this one time in our life to grow some of the most profoundly important parts of our body.  Once our adaptations to an early malevolent environment take place, they cannot be undone ‘down the road’ or ‘later on’.  We live with them.

So, in effect I have a body-nervous system built in and designed for a very hard road through life — for one not unlike the road my father was trying to crawl over with his tractor in this picture.

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Another picture I have scanned from this era of my childhood comes to mind, and it represents another metaphor of high risk for severe child abuse survivors — that of BEING STUCK along the way.

I really have the advantage of knowing first hand what stuck looks like!

Always running in low working gear, always trying to negotiate a tough, rough road through life, always prepared for the worst, always at risk for danger, frequently getting stuck and needing to find our way out again — all these experiences are part of severe infant-child abuse survivorship.

All these ways of being in the world are built into our body, and all of it consumes vast amount of our inner resources and life force throughout our lifespan.  If we wonder as adults why we can’t reach some pie-in-the-sky level of so-called ‘recovery’ so that we can be more like other people who had entirely different, benevolent early years that gave them a different body entirely, think about all of this.

I’m not saying that improvements can’t be made for us in our lives toward increased well-being — but first, we need to KNOW what happened to us where it matters most.

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