Tag: dissociative identity disorder

+WORD WARRIOR NEWS: WHOSE STORY IS WHOSE?

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At one point during my intensive chemotherapy treatment for my breast cancer the chemotherapy affected my vision.  I had previously heard a man who had this experience with his treatment say that once the treatment was finished, he threw away his glasses and retained perfect vision.

How strange it was on those days, sick sick sick sick from the chemo, that I could look at the trees on distant hillsides and actually see their individual leaves.  Not even with glasses could my vision have been this corrected.  My eyes did not keep their distance detail ability.  Yet today in the midst of my inner turmoil I think about this experience I had.

As strange as it might seem to many, I truthfully cannot say that I can tell right now the difference between my abusive Borderline Personality Disorder mother’s story and my own.  I do not have that detail ability to pick out which parts of this story I am looking at and say, “This detail belonged to me as a child and therefore belongs to me now as an adult.  This detail was not and is not my mother’s.”  At the same time I cannot look at ‘the story’ and definitively or definitely say, “This detail belonged to my mother and it is a part of HER story, not mine.”

I hate this fact.  I hate the feelings, the thoughts, the questions, the doubts and the confusion that are a part of this inability to distinguish myself from my mother.

I was born into this state.  I was designed, built and developed within this state.  This state is a part of my story, and I hate it.  This essentially means not that I hate my mother, but that I hate what happened to me — and yes, I hate those parts of myself that were affected on their most basic molecular, neurological level by what my mother did to me.

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The closest I can come to truthfully and seemingly accurately describing both WHO I am in the world along with HOW I am in the world is to say that I am closer to being like a ‘wild child’ than I am to being like anyone else.  I was ensconced (meaning sheltered and concealed) within my mother’s delusional universe.  ‘Sheltered’ seems like a strange word to assign to the insane and abusive ‘place’ I grew up in from birth.  Yet for as horrible as it was, I could not escape it and my mother did everything in her power to keep EVERYONE else out of this ‘shelter’ she kept me in.

This shelter was the wilderness I was born knowing nothing about but was taught to accept from my first breath.  I had very little chance to experience anything outside of the range of my mother’s reality that had put little tiny me at the core-center of the mad hate and fear and pain filled hell that SHOULD have simply been hers alone, and had nothing REALLY to do with me at all.

But I had to live ‘in there’ with her.  For 18 years I lived in her hell.  She built her hell into every fiber of my being, beginning with my growing and developing brain.

How much of her hell is still inside of me?  As much as she could humanly cram into another person who was not her own self.

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When looking at a group of trees in the distance, even if a person does have the vision to see the details of their individual leaves, it is impossible to tell which leave exactly belongs to which tree.  Only by moving ‘up close and personal’ could we make these distinctions.

I know I have before me a daunting task.  ‘Daunting’ – ‘tending to overwhelm and intimidate’.  I hate this task.  Yet I know this hatred is just the other end of the bizarre umbilical cord of contamination from my birth still connected to my bizarrely messed-up mean mad mother.

I think about what it might be like should I have to dive deep under water without aid of oxygen supplement to retrieve something critically important lost down there.  Or what it might be like to have to enter a raging inferno to do the same.

Yet it doesn’t feel this simple:  I am going ‘in there’ to retrieve myself.

Myself is sitting right here, right now.

Yet what exists, with the exception of the external information contained in my mother’s papers and photographs, DOES lie within me.  Myself has the memories and the intelligence to pick my way through these old shards, these old skeletal remains, these old cinders and ashes — for what?

For two things:  (1) my own story as separate from my mother’s, and (2) the factual truth as far as I can discern it about my bizarrely messed-up mean mad mother.

But wait!  There IS a third component, and this is the hardest one:  (3)  In what ways am I like my mother?

As an infant lies within the womb of its mother’s body it would take a professional expert to be able to know and describe exactly where the mother ends and the infant begins.

Under normal circumstances after birth the infant is allowed and assisted to develop its own self.  Once the shelter of the mother’s womb has been left behind, the offspring is meant to become its own entirely separate entity.

My mother never let me go.  Leaving the shelter of her body in no way allowed me to escape the hell of a shelter that her mind kept me captive within.

I strongly suspect that this pattern is true for any infant-child that experiences severe abuse and maltreatment from its mother.

‘The chord that binds’ these infant-children to their mother was never correctly severed.  Such a mother still believes her offspring not only belongs to her, and is an extension of her, but in severe cases fundamentally IS HER.

As I wrote this sentence I realized that on a foundational level ALL insecure attachment patterns-disorders happen because some degree of inability to recognize the infant as being separate from the mother has occurred.  If a mother does recognize the separateness of her infant fully, she will respond to it as such.  If a mother does NOT recognize the separateness of her infant fully, she will contaminate her interactions with her infant with her OWN — well — CRAP!

The crap that exists within the relationship between a tiny infant and its earliest caregiver does NOT COME FROM THE INFANT.

According to attachment experts the end-goal and consequence of safe and secure early attachments is the development of a healthy AUTONOMOUS self.  Any problems in the earliest relationships an infant has with its caregivers is taking aim at this ‘end goal autonomous’ self of the infant — and wounding-damaging-altering it.

On its most basic level these facts SHOULD not be that difficult to understand.  Dr. Allan N. Schore describes the correct attachment process for infants and their caregivers perfectly in his articles I frequently mention:

Here:

EFFECTS OF A SECURE ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIP ON RIGHT BRAIN DEVELOPMENT, AFFECT REGULATION, AND INFANT MENTAL HEALTH

At http://www.atlc.org/members/resources/schore1.pdf

And here:

Early organization of the nonlinear right brain and development of a predisposition to psychiatric disorders

At http://www.allanschore.com/pdf/SchoreDP97.pdf

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In approximately half of our population these optimal safe and secure attachment patterns DO happen, and those offspring DO grow into adulthood being mostly whole, healthy autonomous selves.

That leaves the other approximate half of our population with some degree of damage which has created trauma altered development in their entire body-brain  which leaves them in their lifetime being LESS THAN AUTONOMOUS.

When an infant’s earliest caregiver is NOT a fully autonomous self, they will NOT form a safe and secure attachment with their offspring, and will pass onto their children not only a lack of whole, healthy autonomy, but also the insecure attachment disorder itself.

The ONLY way these repeating patterns can be avoided is if the infant has MORE than one primary attachment, and SOMEONE important to the body-brain development of the infant IS AUTONOMOUS.  With that autonomous caregiver the infant can form a safe and secure attachment (which then builds THAT circuitry into the body-brain).

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I am therefore saying that in every case where an insecure attachment disorder exists within a person’s body-brain, a corresponding degree of non-autonomy is present — and BOTH conditions exist in response to some degree of toxicity and deprivation within an infant-toddler’s unsafe and insecure earliest caregiving malevolent environment.

My story, and the story of my mother, is an extreme example of the patterns I am describing.  My mother was not ever able to let me be fully born.  She was not able to let me leave the shelter of her own existence.  Her lack of autonomy as a self translated into depriving me of mine.

Yes, plain and simple that means the work I am doing right now is a LABOR that has the potential to set me free so that I can give birth to my own self as a differentiated person autonomous from my mother.

That all sounds nice and fine, but in reality, it is only possible to degrees because by being my mother and my primary earliest caregiver,  her interactions with me built my body-brain and the same time they built themselves into me.  It is this non-autonomous body-brain that I must use as I attempt to create my own autonomy.  There is no magic here.  It is not possible to go back to the beginning and start this entire story over again from the start.

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I have in my possession my baby book.  Some of you already know something about the significance of this fact.  I have written about it before, and I am now very near the point where I will have to unequivocally find out within myself my own truth about what is in this book.

To review, all of my childhood, and my sibling’s childhood, we were all told that “Linda does not have a baby book.”  My siblings had one.  My mother repeated over and over again as a part of her abuse litany:  “Linda, you were such a bad, horrible, difficult, impossible child from the time you were born that I could find nothing good about you to write in a baby book.  If one has nothing good to say it is better to say nothing at all.  Therefore you do not have a baby book.”

Fast forward to 2002, the year my mother died and one of my younger brothers retrieved  a massive amount of her belongings from a long term storage unit she kept for many, many years in Phoenix.  (There were three other storage lockers full when she died.  One was in Tucson, and two were in Alaska where she died.)

As my brother and I went through this collection, three baby books showed up in that locker.  One belonged to my youngest sister, one to my oldest brother, and one to me.  (The other three books were stored elsewhere).

There it was.  The nonexistent baby book.  I mailed the other two off to my siblings.  When my brother received his in the mail, he told his wife, “If my sister Linda does not have a baby book, I don’t want mine, either.”  He threw it in the trash without opening it.  His wife secretly retrieved it.

I sent my baby book home with one of my daughters years ago for safe keeping because I feared I would destroy it.  Last month when she came to visit me I asked her to bring it back to me, and here it is.

I took it to show a friend of mine when we had lunch last week.  After she carefully read it and looked at all the pictures, she said, “Linda, if I didn’t know you and your story personally, and I looked at this book your mother made, I would not believe a word you said.”

I will probably scan the baby book and post it here, though the small writing on the pages might be hard to read — and it is in my mother’s writings that I can clearly see her madness — though few others would or could.

This all matters to me NOW as I begin work on my own story as it is all blended into my mother’s.  Where is the beginning of this story?  I can’t simply say that my story began with my birth — though I would like to.  Yet I was born into a pattern like a single note appears in the midst of a song.  That pattern was of BOTH of my parents’ insecure attachment disorders — and their corresponding lack of whole, healthy autonomous selves.

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When I visited my oldest brother last summer his wife surprised him by bringing out his baby book.  My brother and I sat side by side and went over every picture and every word our mother had put in it.  All the while my sister-in-law sat across the room from us and watched and listened in her very wise silence.

When we were done oohing and aahing over the book, my brother’s wife said, “You don’t hear it, do you?  Neither of you.  Neither of you hear it.”

“Hear what?” we asked her.

She responded, “I can hear hysteria within every word your mother wrote in that book.”

I found this experience comforting.  It helps me to know that someone on the outside of our family, herself sensitized by severe abuse in her own childhood, could detect my mother’s madness in the words she wrote about her darling, precious, much favored first born son even BEFORE she gave birth to me.  Of course anything Mother wrote in his book after he was 14 months old (his age when I was born) would also have been further influenced by whatever happened within my mother when she gave birth to me.

But there my brother and I were, completely oblivious to any shade or tone, any flicker of a clue that our mother’s madness had found its way into HIS baby book.

It is only by finding and recognizing the clues that I find in my work with my story and my mother’s story that I can even begin to know what questions need to be asked.  I have done my research up to this point the best I can about attachment disorders and what trauma altered development can do to a person so very early in their developing years.

At the same time I find patterns that show me what kind of damage was done to my mother, I will also find how her patterns affected my own development (and that of my siblings, although what happened to them is not my story).

Right now I have to give myself permission to accept the fact that I don’t know whose story is whose.  What I do know is that as I looked carefully last night at my baby book, I wanted to snatch that beautiful baby and toddler ME right out of those pictures and whisk her away from her monster of a mother.  As strange as it might seem, I know that the work I am doing right now has the power to accomplish  exactly that act — as much as is humanly possible.

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+WHAT MATTERS MOST – NOT THE ABUSE, BUT WHAT IT DID TO US IN OUR BODY

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The Ripple Effect, and how we are all connected and related — I so thank this morning’s commenter for his words!  I was brought back circle at this critical juncture in my work to remembering what this is all about!

I had just been sitting with my morning coffee in my backyard under my gangling tree thinking with self pity, “I can’t do this work!  I don’t want to allow my thoughts to even turn in its direction!  I want to find something meaningless to do, and spend my days dawdling.  NO!  I won’t go ‘back there’ for my truth or my story!  I will not ever turn my eyes again upon the words my mother wrote!”  I could have just as well imagined myself in Calgon’s “Take me away” commercials!

Then I came inside and sat down at my computer screen, and there was the PLEASE MODERATE COMMENT email — and here I am.

When I wrote my last post, +REMEMBERING WHAT REALLY MATTERS ABOUT ALL OF THIS, what I am most reminding myself is that AGAIN I KNOW that it isn’t the thousands of individual beatings my mother did to me, it isn’t the forced isolation and confinements, it isn’t the continual and effective verbal erosion of my entire sense of self (let alone my esteem, worth, concept, etc.) that mattered.

It wasn’t having my mother bash my head in the toilet when I was four that matters.  It wasn’t being chased across our wilderness mountain fields by her brandishing a log intent on killing when I was ten me that matters.   It wasn’t even that she never called me “darling.”  It wasn’t that she prevented me from playing.  It wasn’t ANY of this that mattered, over the entire 18 year span that she so brutally abused me that matters MOST to me, or that lies as the motivation behind the work I have done and have yet to do.

WHAT MATTERS is that during the moments running into hours running into days, then weeks, then months of my VERY EARLIEST time on earth that matter to me most — that hurt me the most.  Her madness, complete with her psychosis, prevented her from interacting with me in a resonating, Linda-mirroring way that would have reflected back to me my own self in my own emotions as I was expressing my own inner needs.

The social-emotional dysregulation built into her own infant brain by malevolent and neglectful caregiver-infant interactions were directly downloaded into MY FORMING AND DEVELOPING infant brain — along with all the patterns of severe dissociation that affected her.

From these earliest beginnings not only was my brain development completely altered away from ‘optimal’ and ‘normal’, so too was the development of my entire nervous system and my immune system.

I don’t think I have mentioned it here, but both of my sisters who were able to be included in the massive 50,000 ‘subject’ Sister Study after I was diagnosed three years ago with my advanced, aggressive breast cancer receive a thorough assessment once a year.  This year my sister told me for the very first time this study has included a HUGE number of questions about these sisters’ earliest years PRIOR to the age of 6.

My sister who told me this and I celebrated this addition of these questions to the once-a-year survey the Study requires.  My guess is that it is that the study is accessing financial support now from the Center for Disease Control who no doubt finally mandates that this information be gathered in all studies that use their resources.

(Do a blog search on this site for ACE study and for Center for Disease Control)

ALL aspects of a traumatized and neglected, abused and maltreated infant-young child’s development are affected and CHANGED — and that is what matters to me of ALL the horrendous treatment that my mother did to me.

In the end it doesn’t matter one single HOOT what we ‘name’ any of this.  What matters is this rock bottom truth.  It isn’t even degrees of secure versus insecure attachment that matter.  It isn’t what we might call mental illness that matters.  What matters most are the very concrete and very real ACTUAL interactions an infant prior to the age of one year old has with its primary caregivers AS THE BRAIN, THE NERVOUS SYSTEM INCLUDING THE STRESS RESPONSE AND VAGUS NERVE SYSTEM, AND THE IMMUNE SYSTEM IS BEING BUILT.  These earliest interactions determine how our genetic DNA information will manifest in our body.  It will tell the machinery that tells our DNA what to do — what to do!!

These earliest interactions are feeding into the infant as it grows and develops information about the state of the world — be it benevolent or be it malevolent — that will last for the rest of that grown up infant’s life time.  Once these earliest trauma-affected changes have happened, down the road we will see patterns that we name as insecure attachment disorder, mental illness, etc.

We need to name it for what it is:  Trauma Altered Development.  We need to know what these changes are, how they affect us, and what we can do to moderate, modulate and live better with these changes — that can NEVER BE REVERSED.

As I summon the courage and willingness I need to plow ahead in the creation of the text of my own horrific childhood of abuse, I must not lose track of the importance of what I am saying in this post.  THIS is all that really matters.  It is what lies at the core for all of us who did not receive the benefits of early caregiver interactions in a safe and secure, LOVING world that would have let us build our best body possible — not for a continued life of trauma, abuse, turmoil, scarcity, deprivation, pain, suffering and misery — but for a world of safety, security and plenty.

The fact that we were resilient enough to stay alive has given us the chance to learn for ourselves as survivors what this MATTERS MOST actually means and what we can do about it.

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+REMEMBERING WHAT REALLY MATTERS ABOUT ALL OF THIS

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COMMENT today made at Your Page – Readers… :  I wanted to talk to someone who had been through what Dr. Daniel J. Siegel said in “The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are” about windows of tolerance and an INTERNAL SENSE OF EXPLOSION. This happened to me so I want to talk to someone who has had the same experience. Your blog has illuminated my life THANK YOU! I don’t want to miss the answer if it is a post on this site (checked the notification box below) because I don’t know how to navigate blogs, I’m a newbie. If they have a blog or something, please tell me how to connect to their site. You can send them my email address or if they will allow it I can email them. Thanks for all of your help!

REPLY:  Good Morning! This might sound strange, but I also want to say “Congratulations!” and that I am proud of you!

The kind of information Dr. Siegel and other researchers are shedding on the subject of the human experience is finally the truth that those of us with ‘unfortunate’ beginnings in our lives absolutely NEED TO KNOW!

If you are reading Siegel’s book you mention, I hope you are highlighting and underlining, writing in all margins, and have your own notebook at your side to write in as you read. You can do a Google search any time you find something like “Windows of Tolerance” and begin to follow the links that pop up.

Dr. Siegel’s website is THE MINDSIGHT INSTITUTE at http://www.mindsightinstitute.com/

If you Google ‘Siegel mindsight’ you will find many links to follow, and among them might be a blog – I don’t know.

I can tell from your question that something went wrong during the first two years of your life. Siegel has written another book in which he has done his best to simplify the information he presents in “The Developing Mind,” and if you haven’t come across it, here’s the link on Amazon for it:

Parenting From the Inside Out by Daniel J. Siegel and Mary Hartzell (Paperback – Apr 22, 2004) at

http://www.amazon.com/Parenting-Inside-Out-Daniel-Siegel/dp/1585422959/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281113146&sr=1-1

Siegel has also authored a series of extremely informative books that can be found on this Amazon.com link, though I haven’t read them all I would recommend anything he has written:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=siegel+parenting&x=0&y=0&ih=14_1_0_0_1_0_0_0_0_1.97_110&fsc=-1

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In the smallest nutshell I can put this vital information into, I would say that when the interactions between a newborn infant and its primary caregiver (nature has dictated MOTHER – though most often there are multiple earliest caregivers) cannot happen in the most safe and secure environment possible, so that the caregiver can exactly and appropriately respond to the signals the infant is sending out and resonate with the infant, mirror the infant’s state back to it appropriately and correctly, the infant cannot possibly develop itself in the best way possible.

An infant’s primary caregiver is literally ‘downloading’ its brain into its infant. As all these books describe, it is the RIGHT brain that develops first through these interactions. Our right brain, according to how these early interactions actually went, either can regulate and control emotions ‘properly’ or will be built in ‘traumatic’ infancies NOT to regulate and control emotions. Then we have problems with emotional DYSREGULATION, which is where the description of windows of tolerance fits in (along with a whole lot of other things: ability to smoothly transition between emotional-mental states, the ability to self-sooth or ‘down-regulate’ emotional intensity (yes, like a car’s gas pedal and brake system) — etc.)

This entire right brain development is NOT ONLY about emotional regulation abilities. This same right brain develops through SOCIAL interactions and is, in fact, our SOCIAL brain as well as our emotional one. All these complexities are tied through our earliest experiences with our primary caregivers into the development of our entire nervous system (of which the brain is a part of), our autonomic nervous system (and vagus nerve system) which is our STOP and GO part of our body that governs our stress-anxiety (fight flight, freeze) response AND our calm and connection system, as well as the development of our entire immune system and the development of how our very DNA manifests itself (which changes in early stressful environments).

Because you have found Siegel’s work, I strongly suspect you (as I am) fit into the category of less-than-best earliest caregiver interactions. This has affected how we grew and developed — and who we are today.

I am going to give you here a link to an article written by Dr. Allan N. Schore. His books can be found also on Amazon.com, but believe me, he is NOT easy to read though his work contains the absolute truth about how this entire human development process is affected by early caregiver-infant interactions:

On Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=schore+self&x=0&y=0&ih=9_0_2_0_0_0_0_0_0_1.102_525&fsc=-1

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AND HERE IS Dr. SCHORE’S EXTREMELY IMPORTANT ONLINE ARTICLE – which I recommend you read ASAP:

http://www.allanschore.com/pdf/SchoreDP97.pdf

and here:

EFFECTS OF A SECURE ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIP ON RIGHT BRAIN DEVELOPMENT, AFFECT REGULATION, AND INFANT MENTAL HEALTH

http://www.atlc.org/members/resources/schore1.pdf

This article is absolutely fascinating, and provides the foundational information (including drawings) that all the other developmental neuroscientists are ultimately referring to.

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As if this isn’t already a BUNCH of information, here’s what a search of this blog for “Teicher” leads to:

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/?s=teicher

His work, (search Google for Martin Teicher child abuse) concludes that given enough ‘trouble’ during early developmental years, it is possible that an entirely different brain forms from the one that would have formed in a safe and secure “good enough” early attachment environment — and he and his Harvard researchers call these trauma altered development brains, “evolutionarily altered.” I extend his thoughts to include an entirely different BODY as a whole.

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To address your mention of “an INTERNAL SENSE OF EXPLOSION” I would say that an experience of this nature, and one that led you to this blog and to Dr. Siegel’s work, is a piece of the puzzle whose bigger picture is included in all this information I have provided you links for. This ‘sense of explosion’ is probably NOT happening in a body-brain-mind-self whose earliest body-brain (especially right brain) needs were met ESPECIALLY birth to age one. It is an experience of emotional-physiological intensity that (in my thinking) missed its chance to be regulated BEFORE it reached this state because those abilities were NOT built into the body-brain adequately in the first place – as all these researchers describe. AGAIN, read the Schore online article!!

When an infant’s earliest caregiver interactions do NOT build the right brain and its related physiology within an OPTIMAL infant developmental environment, the SET POINT for the entire body-brain will not be set at CALM. That is the GOAL, and any of us who did not get what we needed for this to happen have the center point for our entire physiology SET somewhere else — like the timing on a car, perhaps. Homeostasis, or a state of ‘balanced equilibrium’ is supposed to be where our nervous system-stress response system comes to rest. That point is CALM — not over or under amped! If we didn’t get our internal balance point set at CALM before we were one year old, we will struggle the rest of our lives to balance-regulate our emotional-physiological state.

Lots of info. Include ‘child abuse’ even if you do not believe you suffered it in your Google searches for information along with ‘brain development’. As you read what comes up I think you will be amazed at how this ‘new picture’ describes the basis of our adult difficulties all the way around! Please stop by here again with any comments you would like to make, and have a wonderful new learning experience! Linda

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+HEALING THE TINIEST DOLL AT THE CENTER

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Have you ever seen a Russian nesting doll?   All the various doll sets I have ever seen were hand painted — and most I saw in Alaska as a child were hand carved as well.  Here’s an example of a set!

All these little dolls fit inside one another

When I finished my morning’s post I headed into town to have lunch with my friend.  On the way I had some thoughts come to me that might actually be my ‘working hypothesis’ for this next stage of my writing.  As my thoughts played themselves out in my mind, this image of the Russian nesting dolls followed.

The process I am going to describe here might be the same for everyone, but for those with severe trauma and abuse histories we might have what seems like a perpetual series of nesting dolls within us!  (Well, once we begin our healing journey we will certainly never lack for something to do!)

OK.  Here’s how it might go.  Humans experience their lives in patterns.  Patterns are what I am now looking for in my mother’s writings.  Her patterns of life, as they appeared in her trauma dramas, I believe hold a key to something I WANT TO KNOW.

TRAUMA DRAMA = the outside Big Doll

Inside the doll of TRAUMA DRAMA  = another doll = a PATTERN

Inside the doll of a PATTERN = another doll = a SECRET

Inside the doll of a SECRET = another doll  = PAIN

Inside the doll of PAIN = another doll = a WOUND

Inside the doll of a WOUND = another doll = a LIE

When I look right now at everything I know, everything I think I know, everything I guess about my child abuse story and everything I wonder about and guess about my mother (and my father, and my grandmother, etc.) I at this moment feel like I can only SEE the outside Big Doll.

I will be looking for the patterns, within the patterns for the secrets, within the secrets for the pain, inside the pain for the wound, and inside the wound, the LIE.  It is the lie acted out in trauma and abuse, especially for the tiniest growing humans that cause the most severe wounds.

What will lead me through this journey is the truth as I can literally, physically feel it in my body.  We, as human beings living in our bodies for our lifespan FEEL all of what I just described.  And yet detecting where the injury is so that we can truly begin to heal the core of our wound PROBABLY means that at the heart of every trauma drama that acts out abuse and trauma lies — a LIE.

So as I spot the trauma drama, the patterns within them, the secrets that are at the heart of the patterns, the pain at the heart of the secrets, the wounds at the heart of the pain, and the lies at the center of the wounds, I will be simply taking apart stories that were the human drama of the humans that lived them, using whatever information I can find, just like I would take apart a Russian nesting doll.

I believe that there are some lies that are absolutely toxic to infants and children.  They cause a distress reaction within the actual immune system in the body that then makes adjustments to little developing body-brains so that at the end what is left are repeating trauma drama patterns that hold within them all that we cannot DIRECTLY see or know — until we dismantle and gently go after the lies that lie within.

If I am even close to accurate with my Russian nesting doll hypothesis, I should be able to spot the kill-joy lies at the heart of the stories that I am working with — including my own.  After all that dedication, willingness, prayer, and work — perhaps I will have some idea about what it takes to heal that little tiniest wounded perfect doll at the center — so he/she can get well.

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+AS THAT BEAST COWERS, KILL IT

alchemynow5 Comments

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Here I am this morning at my computer viewing a blank blog page upon which I will dump out words.  I don’t know which words, so the only thing I can do is keep on typing until the words appear here.

I feel alone in this job I am doing with my book’s writing right now.  I feel alone because I am alone.  Mine is a lonely story.

The fact that I wish to write my lonely story so well that it captures the attention, the imagination, the hearts and thoughts of as wide a public as possible reminds me of the word ‘hubris’, a word that came into English in 1884 from the Greek and means ‘exaggerated pride or self-confidence’.

I am afraid of hubris.  Right now this fear stands exactly in front of me and in my way.  It stops me ‘dead in my tracks’, removes my words from me, and will in itself guarantee hubris is exactly where my writing will end up unless I can give myself permission to know that I have value, my story has value, my words have value, and that this work that I am doing is blessed in ways I cannot mortally comprehend.

Somewhere between hubris and my fear of it lies a wide open pathway that is mine to follow.  This pathway is as clearly laid out before me, free of weeds and obstacles and as easy to stroll along, skip over or run along as is the adobe walkway I have been constructing in my own backyard.  Yes, there are a few hardy weeds that have popped their new tiny leaves out of the adobe bricks to appear where I don’t want them now that our monsoon rains have come.

But I can simply snip them off with my fingernails and they will all disappear never to trouble me again.  And it is only I who can make my fears about my work, what I am writing, and what the end result is going to be go away just as easily.

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It is the ‘nature of the beast’ of severe infant-child abuse and the mental illness that spawns and perpetrates it that silence reign.  This beast requires a particular kind of silence.  I believe that the only way this beast remains alive, and carries itself in the dis-eased form it manifests itself in down through the generations is because the silence it needs to duplicate itself is extremely difficult to break.

Difficult and impossible are not the same thing.  It is as if the beast itself is challenging me at this moment, daring me to break the silence that maintains its very existence.  It thunders.  It roars.  It bares its gigantic and terrifying fangs at me.  It shakes its shaggy mammoth-sized head at me in rage.  But thanks to the author, L. Frank Baum, I have the pitiful antihero, The Wizard of Oz, to remember as I meet my own fear of hubris, vanquish it and move on.

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I could end my morning’s verbal sputterings right here, but I am not going to.  I am going to turn around right now and stare that beast right in its eyes.  “Don’t you threaten ME with extinction, you horrible, putrefying, nasty, deceitful LIAR!  I have seen your kind before, and you mean NOTHING to me.  DO YOU HEAR ME?  Are you PAYING ATTENTION?  You STINK!  You are forever rotting, forever condemned to exist in the darkness where human fear feeds you three meals a day and lots of snacks.  Well, I don’t care if you starve to DEATH yourself!  I will no longer heed YOUR lies!  In fact, I will no longer heed you AT ALL!  You are nothing to me.  Nothing.  Because that IS what you are, like it or not.  NOTHING!”

My, that felt good!  Not only has the flimsy immaterial curtain vaporized behind which this invisible beast lurks and groans, but the beast itself has disappeared, though I am not fooled into believing its going is forever.

That beast has resided itself, all tucked in, warm and cozy, amidst every one of my mother’s words I have confronted, do confront, and will confront as I shred apart the lie that fed her life and so harmed me not only as an infant-child, but harmed the me that writes these words, that breathes this air, that has determination to finish a job I began in this world before I left my mother’s belly.

“I WILL NAME YOU!”  I shout out with my soul in the directions that beast has fled to.  “And if I am going to HATE, it is YOUR existence I will shoot my hatred after.  And hear me, oh Beast of Human Misery!  You have stolen away the joy from enough lives in my ancestral pool!  You will no longer chaw your carnivorous teeth upon my family’s generations.  Me thinks you have already stolen more than your fill, and guess what?  Not only am I going to vanquish you, not only am I going to do my best to take back from you the joy, health and well-being that you have raked from my family and carried away into your darkness, I am going to make you pay with your life!  I am going to break this very silence you require for your survival.  And if you happen to be so stupid that you don’t believe me — well — just cower away in your hidden cracks and WATCH ME DO IT — while you still can!”

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+NOW I AM READY TO DO WHAT I WANT

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I am now ‘going in for the kill’.  The entire process of ordering and transcribing my mother’s writings has been to the largest extent so that I can do what I want to do NOW with her words and within the text-context of the story-line I now have for the very disorganized, very disoriented, very disorderly (no matter how many times M waxed the floors and washed the curtains) childhood I had.

I am beginning with the first volume of HOPE FOR A MOUNTAIN and will work my way through to the end of the fourth volume.  I have no ‘plan’.  I have absolutely no idea what will ‘come up’ or ‘be triggered’ along the way — but this — NOW — is MY journey.

What I am aiming at with MILDRED’S MOUNTAIN is money.  Plain and simple.  What else I wanted out of that extensive body of work was the hard DATA — such as it exists — about my mother according to whichever version of her self wrote all those words.  This hard data will be there for anyone who wants to question what I HAVE TO SAY – that work I have accomplished is my ‘research’ – scientific, no, but thorough and comprehensive as I — and fate — could make it.

I am digging for my own gold now in that dark, dark mine of my childhood.

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+THIS GIRL’S GOT GUTS

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I am writing myself a kudos post!  I want to give myself credit for the terrific dedication and commitment I have have had over these past, let’s see – – – six years in transcribing my mother’s writings and letters to get them into the form they are in right now.  Today has been an intensely emotional day.  I need to reach out and give myself permission to talk about how I feel with people who love me.  I need to affirm for myself that FEELING is OK.   I have to do this because the part of my work that lies ahead of me is likely to be the hardest of my life.

Thursday my beloveds come – my beloved daughter and my beloved first grandchild who I get to meet for the very first time.  He’s 4 months old now, and even though I am already crying about them leaving before they even get here, I need to let myself feel even that.  Because without my ability to feel what I feel, feel ALL OF WHAT I FEEL, I would miss the breadth and depth and height and absolute miracle of feeling all the love, all the joy, all the hope – – – along with everything else.

I also want to give myself kudos for my courage.  I have one more job to complete before I tackle the really big, hard stuff.  I ‘get’ to put together a total lie of a story about the wonderful time the Lloyd family had on their Alaskan homesteading adventure.  This would be the book far more likely to sell (and Lordy I do need some money) to the general public as an easy-read glance at some American family who decided to – well move to Alaska and homestead.

Over and over again in the 4 volumes I just completed my mother writes that she wanted to write that story.  I don’t think she COULD write it because she — in the end — could not tell the wonderful lie about homesteading that I know she wished were the truth.  Can I write her lie?  Yes, if it will put some food on my table, I certainly can — and I will.

Yet, Linda Girl, how silly is THAT idea?  Perhaps it is the exercise I need — to write the ‘normal family tale’ — well, at least as normal as I can make it while still using my mother’s words.

Contrasted to that will be the book I will write after that.   My guess is that my ++MY CHILDHOOD STORIES will be dropped in between and betwixt the ugly things my mother says about me in her writings (even though she doesn’t begin to tell the truth).  Oh well, I will cross that hot lava volcanic flow when I get to it.

I know I have the courage to write that book.  All I have to do is think about those survivors who suffered abuse as I did, and think about children who are suffering from abuse now — and then try as hard as I possibly can to tell my own truth in hopes that it can help someone SEE why paying attention to what is wrong with a child can shine the light into the darkest places of a child’s life where nobody has ever looked before.

Meanwhile, I have another day to try to move the desert dirt and dust back out of my house.  At least it rained hard yesterday.  The dirt out there is settled for a bit, and that means I can clean inside without it all coming back at me — for now.

And I will practice setting my sadness at my beloveds’ leaving aside for when THAT day comes on the 28th so I can cherish with joy their coming on the 22nd.

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+UNDERSTANDINGS IN STRANGE PLACES: DEPRESSION AND THE ENERGY FROM IRRITABILITY

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As often happens I cannot make much sense out of what I just figured out because in order to turn what I think I just stumbled upon into something I can use to improve myself in my life, I have to articulate it in writing or it won’t make any kind of linear sense.

Not that even the above sentence makes much sense to most people — so let me make it perfectly clear and tell you (and myself) what I just learned from invisible bugs and a feather duster.

I had no memory that I owned a feather duster until just a few minutes ago.  I am trying to clean my house before my daughter and my first grandbaby arrive this coming Thursday.  I never un-kept a house like I do now at almost 59.  When I had children at home for those 35 years of my life, nothing EVER got very ‘dirty’.

I puzzle about that sometimes, and usually all I end up with is that my lack of caring much about my house-home anymore has something to do with my being the only one here and with my depression.  I am disappointed in myself that I am not enthusiastically and happily attacking these months of blown-in fine desert dust that’s in every imaginable place in my house.  I am having to FORCE myself to clean — and that just ‘don’t feel RIGHT’!

So, there I was with my shop vac with its recycled emptied and stapled back together again bag inside it, with my worn, frayed and barely useable (but still vitally necessary) little ‘dusting’ end attacking my back hall shelves.  Nope, don’t start cleaning in the bathroom or living room or kitchen.  I started in the dirtiest place of all, the back hall where I come in with my mud-caked shoes, dump my collection of tools, maintain the cat litter box — well, you get the picture.

So there I was scooting things around on those metal shelves to clean underneath them when lo and behold, there was my unused (bought with best intentions) dark brown ostrich feather feather duster.

“Oh, that’s cool!” I thought to myself.  “Maybe I can figure out a way to move around dust with THAT while I somehow capture it with the vacuum cleaner — at the same time I don’t suck the duster up at the same time!”

I made the mistake of picking UP the feather duster.  Now, you have to live in the desert to appreciate what happened next.  Although the duster appeared intact and good-as-new when I spotted it — it WAS NOT.  In fact, once I grabbed its handle and picked it up, barely half of its feathers came with it.  The rest scattered in every imaginable direction in tiny fragments and breeze-floating pieces.  My only consolation is that I found it before my cleaning was finished or I would have been far more irritable than I WAS.

OK, so there are invisible little mite buggies that eat feathers in the desert.  That’s all I know about them.  They eat feathers — and never again while I live down here (obviously) will I buy another feather duster!  But something clicked at that instant I saw all those teensy bits of ostrich feathers take off in every direction and as I watched how I responded.

I FELT INSTANTLY IRRITATED!  And, with the energy that irritation released, I cleaned the dang bits up!

BIG DEAL?  Yes.

When I get into my work with my book “Unspeakable Madness” where I will fillet and autopsy my mother’s account of those years that spanned my childhood, I am going to face — face-to-face — the truth about my depression.  Without details at this moment, I can say that when I write about my childhood I will be writing about what COULD be called depression.  Simple enough to call it that now.  I was terribly ‘depressed’ as a child.

That depression went magically nowhere when I left home.  I had no idea what it was — of course — and for many years (looking back) I used pot daily to ‘make the depression go away’ so I could get on with my life.  I didn’t know I was self medicating like that, either.

In 1980 when I quit all drug use, looking back from my perspective as the owner of a disintegrated feather duster a few moments ago, I realized that I operated to take care of myself and my children — along with EVERYTHING that entailed — without having to ever realize the extent of my depression — because I knew how to do exactly what I just did when I was HIT with the mess today with that mess of  flying-away feathers.

I used the energy of irritability to live on.

No, I didn’t FEEL the irritability until these recent months.  NEVER did I feel it.  I just USED the energy it created in my body.

DANG!  At least that was SOMETHING!  But that’s like running on an empty gas tank – on the fumes.  That’s like running straight off a car battery without a working charging system in the car.

In fact, that just barely counts as any way to live at all!

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So, what I want to articulate here is this:  I bet the irritability comes from (at least for severe child abuse survivors) a profound RAGE that one’s life was stomped on to the point of near extinction.  THAT AIN’T RIGHT, and we KNEW IT!  We knew it THEN as little children and we really (though not consciously unless you are fortunate to have a run-in with a mite eaten feather duster just when you think you can use it most) KNOW IT NOW!

When I am ready now to fillet my mother’s words, I am going to be working face-to-face with my own INNER RAGE at what my mother DID TO ME.  That experience is going to be closer, more powerful and more real than it has ever been in my life.  I can feel it coming!

And with that rage is the terrible, terrible, terrible undeniable sorrow and sadness that was beaten into me nearly every moment of my childhood — at the same time I never knew it was WRONG.  More of that later…..

But for now, I understand more about why it is so hard for me to tackle the cleaning of this house right now.  It isn’t that I don’t love my daughter.  It’s not that I don’t care.  It’s hard because I can no longer find that IRRITABILITY that is a side effect of the anxiety of depression — that is connected to the rage of knowing what caused this depression was a CRIME — so that I can live off of its energy.

I have to do it the hard way now, but using my WILL and by plugging away at the task as if I am deep under the ocean and everything is very heavy and I move very slowly.  But this has to be done.  The feather duster incident only released exactly enough irritation energy to clean up THAT  mess.  No more.  Nothing extra.  No extra irritation there to use to go hand up the laundry.

So, I better get to it — one dang way or the other!!!!!!  It’s a job that really has to get done — but at the same time I look back at my child-raising years and marvel at how effectively I managed to LIVE off of the irritation energy of my depression — and not even know it.

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+MY MOTHER’S AND MY OWN PATTERNS OF ‘HOPE FOR A MOUNTAIN’

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I need to write this morning – some aftermath thoughts from last few intensely focused hard-work days on those volumes!  I am thinking about ‘articulation’, how I need to articulate in written form.  Is that the same thing as needing to write?  Did my mother NEED to write?

Just the sheer ‘volume’ of the words I have tackled in this process with my mother’s writings is staggering.  At the same time I know all the writings did not survive (most fortunately from my point of view!).  Yet how many people really would have had the desire and the motivation to chronicle even such a story as dragging your family to the hinterlands of Alaska to homestead?

Do we today not notice our desire to articulate, express our self and communicate because advances in technology let us do it now with imperceptible ease?

On all the levels within my own self that are being affected as a result of this process I am involved with, some breach the surface in different ways at different stages.  Right now as my mother’s words are nearly exactly in linear place along the line of time that covers her story — and at the same time covers my childhood — I realize that in very serious and comprehensive ways I was never allowed to ‘grow up’.

In some distant, remote and very, very LATE ways I am going through some of that process now.  As I record in digital form the tales that my mother tells I find there are points when I actually feel stunned to realize how OLD I was, and how OLD my siblings were when some of the events Mildred describes occurred.  Because of the severe abuse I never got to ‘leave something behind’ as I grew up.  The same ‘crimes’ that I had been ‘guilty’ of committing starting with my birth were attached to the history of the child who was Linda so that they dragged right along with me like an unending series of cannonballs attached to my body, mind, soul and self.

I was never allowed to outgrow anything, and looking at the ‘story’ now as I proof its complete text, I see that the invisible parts of the story my mother did not record are as present to me as I work with the span of time that was my childhood as are the memories of what she DID record.  That long, long, long terrible chain of connected cannonballs is still here – because all those things were beat into me over and over and over and over again — until I simply ‘left home’.

There never was a transition from being an infant to a toddler, to a young child, to a prepubescent, to an adolescent and then into a young woman.  I was never given ‘privileges’ that advanced along with my expanding age range.  I was never complimented, encouraged, recognized for any growing ability to do anything — except to be increasingly beaten for the ever-longer list of crimes my mother always remembered as being who LINDA was.

I am not sure that I can articulate this.  According to my mother’s disturbed and distorted sense of the passage of time, and because that was all tied up with her ‘splitting’ and projection of evil-badness onto me, I not only had to remain in a continual state of peritrauma (in the midst of ongoing trauma) but looking at this time line now, my mother remained in that state herself.  Nothing ever changed, nothing ever got better, nothing was ever examined as useless or harmful and then discarded.  Nothing was ever learned from the consequences of repeated patterns of mistakes that she made (made together with my father).

I suspect on an underlying and as yet unexamined level, I believe that an extremely young-early-formed force literally dragged my mother forward in her life.  It seems strange to me, but what I name that force —  that both dragged her forward at the same time it beckoned her so that she blindly followed it (and yes, this feels like a sinister force because it was so ‘sick’) — is HOPE.

I am not talking about healthy hope here.  I am talking about hope that is supposed to form itself right into a newborn’s growing brain structure and operation, into a newly forming body and nervous system.  I am talking about hope for life that keeps a human being alive (any creature) at all costs.

The fulfillment of HOPE is what a safe and secure attachment provides for us.  (I’ll write more of this in the future.)

For now I will just say that I had no hope as a child.  It was all but murdered by my mother (and father).  Without that hope, and in the presence of great harm, there was no chance for me to be celebrated into my growing-up life.  Hope did not sit within me as my friend and guiding light.  And without hope, time did not exist.  I did not exist as a separate HUMAN BEING moving forward through the growth and developmental stages of my childhood.

What this means at this moment is that I do not recognize myself as being increasingly older, in a bigger body, having made significant advancements in my childhood.  I read my mother’s ‘story’ from some remote, depersonalized, disembodied viewer’s point of view — because I DID NOT exist as a person as I went through my childhood.

None of my siblings did either, really.  We were my mother’s props.  All her children started out as cute baby dolls (except me – but she could at least tolerate me better when I was tiny and could not express being-a-real-person).  She kept having babies (doll babies) as long as she could.  She had no idea what a child was.

So how does a prop (object-projection) look at itself as having a feeling-felt autobiographical history over time?

It is not as easy as some people might imagine it to be to go back over a story that was one’s childhood and snatch out the truth — like it is all passing by on a conveyor belt and you can pick out the GOOD and ignore the BAD and let it slide right on by.

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My mother’s severe, chronic and terrible abuse of me killed my hope as a child except for one solitary, amazing, grand, majestic and perfect thing.  I HOPED for that mountain.

When severe infant-child abuse keeps a developing human being in a permanent state of peritrauma (the trauma never stops), the trauma becomes an integral part of their physiology.  It cannot be ‘picked’ off of the assembly line and tossed away.  It has built itself into the molecular operation of the entire body-brain of the survivor.

In my case, the existence of that mountain and our existence ON it and WITH it had such a positive effect on me that my capacity to HOPE remained pure, untarnished, untainted, uncontaminated and helpful to me.  In fact, it saved my life.  My hope capacity had simply remained dormant and was waiting within me with all its powers until I met Alaska and that mountain.

I am naming these volumes of my mother’s writings “Hope for a Mountain” because the same thing happened to her.  But there was one critically important difference between how that “Hope for a Mountain” operated for my mother and how it operated (and still operates within my physiology) for me.

My mother’s capacity to hope was contaminated in her infant-childhood.  That fact will become clear when I reach the stage of being able to write “Unspeakable Madness.”

The entire multi-volume story of my mother’s is about contaminated hope.  My story with that mountain is a story about UNCONTAMINATED hope.

I could sit in awe of the miracle of human resiliency that it is, that the experience of HOPE was still possible for me as a child by the time that mountain became a part of my life, and the life of my family.  Yet at this point AWE will get me nowhere.  Perhaps admiration for my own little self?  No, that won’t do anything for me (yet) either.

Water naturally flows downhill.  Pure hope naturally exists.

When water is prevented through some aberration of its natural inclination from flowing downhill, we have a thwarted natural process — and/or a contaminated one.

At this moment as I try to articulate for myself that as I ‘watch’ my mother’s story that covers a span of my childhood, I am seeing that her hatred of me (who I was to HER) prevented me from moving, or flowing forward, through the stages of my childhood.  To her, I was still all the horrible ‘things’ that I had always been (and the pattern is there in her writings – and I intend to bring them forth clearly in “Unspeakable Madness”).

I simply had the capacity to hope from the time I was born.  My capacity for hope was not allowed to ‘come forth’ into the world – or even into the operation of my physiology much past the most basic levels of hope for water, food, sleep or use of a toilet (all of which was interfered with at times by my mother’s abuse).

My mother’s infant-childhood patterns, I believe, were very different from my own.  That also belongs in another, separate body of my writings.  BETRAYED hope, CONTAMINATED hope.  That was my mother’s early experience.

That’s far different from having no hope fulfillment at all.

Yet because the capacity to have HOPE is evidently one of humans’ most powerful resiliency factors, once I ‘accidentally wandered’ through a young life course (being put there by my parents) to a PLACE where my HOPE could flow — well — it would be hard to find an example in anyone’s childhood experience where HOPE could have been more pure, powerful and REAL than it was for me.

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My mother DID feel it too.  I think we were equally in love with that mountain.  In that love both of our powers to experience PURE HOPE were equal.  HOPE is a shared human experience — and we WERE both human.

But my mother could not STAY there.  She never realized the reality of her own NEEDS that her being on that mountain met.  Everything my mother had hoped for since she was born ‘came true’ when she was on that mountain.  But she didn’t KNOW that.

Her hope for that mountain was a hope for the healing of her soul, her mind, her personality, her childhood woundedness that she could never ARTICULATE no matter how many words she scribbled on her thousands of papers.  And like water through a sieve, her hope disappeared with every breath she ever inhaled and exhaled on that mountain.  She, herself was the sieve at the same time she had an insatiable thirst for the ‘waters’ of pure hope’s fulfillment.

By the time I was six and a half the mountain took form in our family even before I had ever seen it.  The hope my mother had, and my father had for that mountain and for their homesteaded 160 acre piece of it, was the most healing force that ever flowed through our family.  But that’s just it:  It flowed right on through like transfused blood would flow through someone’s gaping-open mortal wound.

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I, however, was not an open ‘hope sieve’.  The relationship I had between that ‘place’ and my ‘self’ — well — it worked!  The hope and love and my experience with the land flowed into me entirely and it fed me, sustained me, helped me, fed me, healed me and allowed me to grow new brain and body and mind and soul connections inside my growing self that, in the end, not only kept me alive but let me ‘grow up’ in a good way.

As I write this post, as I am articulating what is inside of me, and therefore what IS ME at this moment, I have to say that I don’t believe it is possible to separate these four aspects of being here on this planet:  Life, the Life Force, Love, and Hope.  I believe they all exist together and are in reality the exact same thing.

Every single one of us has all four of these aspects operating or we would be dead.  The problem with my mother was that they were ‘all mixed up’ (a term she used many, many times in her writings) because her experience in life had been contaminated by attachment trauma.

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As counter-intuitive as this might seem, I suspect that it was exactly because of the moving my mother did up and down the mountain and off and on the homestead that was like the high-powered fertilizer that nourished my own power to hope.  Like Heidi in the story book, my very life force was invested in BEING ON THAT MOUNTAIN.  With every move our family did on and off the mountain, my life force ebbed and waned at the same time my safe and secure attachment body-brain connections grew and grew and grew.

WHY?  Because our attachment physiology, which forms the core of how our body-nervous system-brain-mind operates in our body, has to be exercised through PATTERNS OF RUPTURE AND REPAIR.  As long as we returned at some point to the mountain so that I could repair the rupture I had when we were away from it, I was fine.

Believe me, I was allowed to PRACTICE growing my hope body-brain circuitry.  Leave the mountain – hope for a return – return – hope fulfilled.  Leave the mountain – hope for a return – return – hope fulfilled.  Over and over again (as you can see by reading the volumes I have provided the links to).

But the passage of time itself only existed to me within this particular attachment relationship that I had with that mountain and the wilderness the homestead was a part of.  Time in the natural world exists primarily through patterns of rainfall and snowfall, patterns of wind, patterns of freezing and thawing, of new plant life, bearing blossoms and fruit, seasonal death and rebirth, yearly growth of bushes and trees.   These passages of time were not marked for me in any personal autobiographical-Gee!Whiz!-this-is-me-growing-into-adulthood way.  They simply happened.

When I titled Chapter 7 in Volume One, “Little Pieces of This Rock,” I was certainly talking about my own self as being a piece of that mountain.  In some ways I believe we all were exactly that.  The time of my childhood thus more closely matched the time of an unfurling fern, or the time of a coming wind down the valley flipping each leaf over in succession until the mountainsides turned silver instead of green with its approach, or the time of the movement of the snow line up and down through the seasons high above the mountains’ timber line, or the time it took from my hearing the first faint calls from a massive V of migrating geese until I watched them glide far above the mountain peaks until the sight and the sound of them vanished — until the time they passed over again going in the opposite direction.

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This writing I have done this morning has allowed me to articulate a profound level upon which I stand in relation to this ‘story’ of my mother’s.  I have articulated how my experience with hope fed, sustained and healed me — in permanent ways.

My mother’s experience with the feeding, sustaining and healing powers of the mountain and of her relationship with it continually appeared and then vaporized over and over and over and over again.  She had no way to step aside from the grownup body she was living in that had already formed itself within an environment that gave her shattered hope experiences and betrayed ones.

My mother was taken (at least during summers) to ‘the country’ when she was growing up.  Love of the natural world was a part of her life — but she was RAISED in the city and I know the powers of the land did not have a chance to form and heal her on the levels that it did for me, nor did those experiences have the power to counteract all the other attachment trauma and suffering she experienced as a child within her home.  (This is a major theme in her story I will focus on in “Unspeakable Madness.”)

But her ‘buried psyche’ recognized through resonating love for the natural world those experiences of her childhood as being directly connected to her experiences with the LAND of Alaska.  But she could not consciously understand what all of this MEANT so that she could use her Alaska experiences with the land to CHANGE HERSELF into a more healed person.

Her deep connection with the wilderness did sustain her, but she could not sustain her healthy, healing hope.  Yes, there were all the details of being an adult and of being a parent that presented all the obstacles she describes in her writings.  But the Mildred that COULD have been present to face those obstacles — and here I must say IN THE PRESENT moments of her life — was all tangled up in trauma-altered developmental ways that nobody ever understood.

That she happened to hate me and torture me for the eighteen years of my childhood because all I could ever be to her was an ‘evil figment of her imagination’, was just one piece of the story of my mother’s life that she writes about (or I should say, DOES NOT WRITE ABOUT) in this collection of her words I am working with.

The bigger picture of her life was HERS alone, and the ability to sustain healthy, uncontaminated  hope was barely, barely a part of it.

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+THE IN-TENSE JOB OF EDITING-PROOFING MY ABUSIVE MOTHER’S LETTERS

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Oh my, I have to say, what an intense process this is — doing what is nearing the final edit-proofs of my mother’s writings!  I have worked for ten hours today on the second volume and have only made it through 130 of the over 300 pages it contains!

I know this about myself, that I have an almost ‘strange’ ability to focus on work I am doing at times.  I suspect strongly that this ability is tied to my dissociation (as odd as that might seem).  The level of focus it is taking me to work my way through this edit-proofing process is astounding even me!  I am ‘up for air’ right now.  Or rather, I am nearly off to sleep at this hour (1:00 in the morning my time now).

I believe this effort will literally ‘pay off’ — and hopefully soon.  I received my first compliment from my sister today, who followed the link to Volume One I sent her today, and reported that she couldn’t leave ‘the story’ until she finished it.  It took her four hours — and she is an extremely fast reader.

Part of what is tricky about this process I am engaged in — said if I leave completely out of the picture WHO my mother was and WHAT she did to me — is that my mother wrote in a literary format that is becoming obsolete in today’s world.  My mother ‘speaks’ over and over and over again in the body of this text of her words that she ‘wants to write’ — while at the same time being completely engrossed in her act of writing!

Yet I sense that her form of letter writing lies as some sort of ‘mongrel cross’ between the actual ‘literary tradition’ and the ‘oral nonliteray tradition’.  Yet because her writing is being carefully crafted to fit a published book format — at the same time that I am attempting to preserve THE literary voice she uses to transmit information (most often to her mother) — I have to pay close attention not ONLY to the words she writes, but also to the pauses, the spaces, her nearly flamboyant and chronic use of dashes, her omission of punctuation — so that in the end readers will be able to follow the story Mildred is telling without falling through the ‘gaps’ that are as much a part of her writing style as are the words themselves.

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This process I am engaged in is, to put it mildly, quite BIZARRE!  I am polishing, if not honing my mother’s ability to present a complete facade of herself as being a ‘one kind of woman’ at the exclusion of the ‘other kind of woman’ that my mother was essentially extremely capable of being.  Right now I cannot think about ‘any of that’ because this job I am currently doing would be an impossible task for me to complete.

Maybe I have to ‘go to’ some dissociated and disconnected ‘place’ while I do this job that has more in common with the ‘dissociated and disconnected place’ my mother was able to ‘go to’ while she WROTE these words!  That could be an eerie and unsettling awareness if I let it breach my quasi-professional ‘role’ I have myself in right now.

Partly what concerns me, and I mean this as in ‘involves me’, is that a STORY (according to some very professional International Storytellers I was honored to converse with once upon a time) exists in its OWN RIGHT separate from its teller.

I have written about this before on my blog, how I see the history of our species’ story contained in our DNA itself, how I see genetic memory as being the living of a living story that is so ancient, and so much larger than any single separate entity that calls herself-himself human.

I am — most essentially — pursuing a course of action that I have chosen.  I am being the Fair Witness to this STORY that my mother is telling.  It is HER VERSION of this STORY that is in her words.  Yet Mildred’s husband and all of her children, along with fellow homesteaders, acquaintances (Mildred could not form friendships), and random strangers all had some part in this story.

Storytellers in the oral nonliterate tradition will speak about the requisite involvement of ‘audience’ with ‘story’.  Both the living audience and the living story combine to FORM a living work of art — in time — in space.  I am actively involved with the telling of this story so that it can become a story an audience can participate with.

Horror of Horrors, how can this be?  I certainly know my mother was vilely violent, a child abusing maniac, a dangerous, MEAN and awful mother.  I certainly also know she is not presenting THIS part of herself in this story!  No real surprise there to me any longer — though it greatly amazed and puzzled me for a long time during ‘my process’ with Mildred’s written words.

But because I have chosen my Fair Witness role, and because I have chosen to create the narrative chronicle of the shards and fragments of my mother’s writings as her completely disorganized papers came to me originally after her death, and because I am choosing not to analyze or interpret ANYTHING she says (there will be probably close to 800,000 words here in these four volumes – my guess), all I need to do is FOCUS and DO THIS WORK.

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The image that just came to me as I wrote these last words was of taking a piece of paper and some crayon or pencil — something — and finding a pattern, laying the paper on top of it, and rubbing, rubbing, rubbing — until the image becomes clear on the paper.  No, the evil genie is not going to appear through this rubbing process.  Just an image.  Just a story.  Just a version of a story, seen through my mother’s particular keyhole.  It is her perspective, and my job I have assigned myself is to rub this story, polish it, bring it forth as crystal-clearly as possible — so that THIS story, this strangely-NOT-the-mother-I-knew-wrote-this-story – story — will appear.

The next image that comes to me is of a clean room, like the ones they use at Intel, where nobody can go in THOSE rooms.  If they do, they wear suits, or they work with strange gizmos in their hands through glass.  Because I know that my mother’s story IS CONTAMINATED.  It has to be deadly toxic – somewhere — because she was.

But I leave all that alone right now.  I work with her words as if I never met this person before in my entire lifetime.  And on some strange, twisted, yet very real level, I probably never did meet THIS woman, who wrote THESE words in this story I plan to just plain publish!

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*HOPE FOR A MOUNTAIN: MILDRED’S ALASKAN HOMESTEADING TALE – VOLUME ONE – BEGINNING A DREAM

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