Tag: empathy disorder

+MY MOTHER’S ‘SPLITTING’ OF GOOD FROM EVIL AND HER ALTERED SENSE OF TIME

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I woke up THIS morning to a complete cloud cover screening the hot rays of the sun.  These are NOT rain clouds, but they are a hopeful sign of the approaching time of the summer rains.  We are parched here.  Whatever moisture remains from our winter rain has escaped deep into the earth where only the deeper tree roots and the nearly petrified, waiting frogs can find it.  The rest of that moisture is captivated within the fibrous cells of the desert plants who all know exactly how to keep it!

I chose this day to finally do my piles of laundry.  My washing machine is parked outside under the south eve of my house, with its 50-foot drainage hose at this moment poised exactly over the root system of my pomegranate tree.  Perhaps doing laundry, as many women have historically discovered, and hanging it out on the line to dry will BRING the rains!  Well, maybe NOT today I have to admit.  The air is so dry if I carry a wet load of clean clothes across the yard in my arms, I swear half the dampness in them is already gone out of them into the waiting, wet-hungry air before I even reach the clothesline with them!

But perhaps because of my present laundry doing occupation I have laundry related images in my mind this morning.  My thoughts are following twists and turns, swish, swish inside my skull.  Sometimes they appear like clothes tumbling over one another in one of those front-window dryers!

I can let them BE that way.  Or I can write something here that will take those thoughts out of their swishing, tumbling state and line them all up across this page.

Firstly, perhaps in cases where creative potential was greatest, as it might have been inside my little growing child-mother when she was young, the consequences of early neglect and maltreatment can be greatest.  Perhaps within my mother there was a potential that does not even exist in most children.  The more disturbed and disturbing the environment of her early developmental years became, perhaps correspondingly the consequences of damage correspondingly began to grow.

My mother used to recite a childhood saying, “There was a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead.  And when she was good she was very very good.  And when she was bad she was HORRID!”

Perhaps my mother could be so devastatingly abusive (evil) because she also had an equal potential for being incredibly good!  Perhaps just as she worked so hard to be so good — which demonstrated itself in her fanatical efforts to ‘do her home-work’ perfectly (cleaning, cooking, making the home cozy, etc.) — she worked equally hard at making her projected ‘evil’ better!  That projected ‘evil’, of course, was ME!

Maybe if I had been a piece of laundry (like the sheet and towel in her little childhood story she wrote – see:

She could have simply thrown me into a giant washing machine and cleaned me right up!  At the same time – given the nature of my mother’s mental illness – she could have ONCE AND FOR ALL cleaned up her own internal intolerable ‘badness’ (that she projected onto me)!  All sweet and laundered the ‘evil’ in life could have been done up right.  It could have all been banished forever and she (and her ‘loved ones’) could have lived happily ever after.

Considering what is known about the Borderline ability to SPLIT the good and the bad-evil apart from one another as a serious aspect of their mind’s altered operating patterns, happily-everaftering might just be one of the main goals of the Borderline mind — at the same time such a perfect ending is NEVER actually possible in the real world we all reside in.

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What follows next in my thinking process probably belongs to another separate post, but I am going to ignore that point and enter these words here and now.

I just went outside to check on the progress of my laundry’s washing in my machine and listened to the first spin cycle complete itself so that the fresh new rinse water can enter and was this fancy good soap out.  Even though my thinking is running in fast spinning circles nearly as fast as the barrel inside that machine just was, I am going to try to force my left brain to order and organize in linear format what the contents of my thoughts actually are.

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According to Dr. Antonio Damasio (and I suggest a solid Google search here for ‘Damasio consciousness brainstem) growth and development of the human body-nervous system-brain builds patterns for the operation of consciousness from the beginning of our life as they follow from the brainstem itself on through the rest of our growing and developing being.

When consciousness is left out of an adult’s patterns of living all hell breaks lose – as it certainly did between my mother and me.  Way down there in the brainstem, and then on through the development of the right limbic social-emotional brain with its deep ties into the main body’s information tracking and brain-delivery system, and then on up to the higher cortex of our ‘rational’ thinking and decision making brain regions — well the fact is that early infant neglect, maltreatment and abuse simply CHANGES the whole dang pathway and the operation of the resulting circuits!

I believe that connected to the early developmental changes a neglected and abuse, maltreated, traumatized infant-child experiences is a corresponding CHANGE in the way TIME and its connection to a ‘self’ in SPACE happens.

As I format and correct my mother’s manuscript right now, I will be taking very careful note of attachment disorder-related patterns in my mother’s chronicle.  These segments will be copied into the files I am going to work with for my ‘analysis and interpretation’ of my mother’s chronicle in my book, “Unspeakable Madness.”

When these above mentioned changes occur, and when these changes affect the survivor’s ability to gain consciousness of ‘self’ in time and space, these patterns lay the groundwork for unbelievable infant-child abuse to occur down the road.

In my mother’s case I can see these ‘time-space’ changes within her writings as she repeatedly uses these words:  ‘Always’, ‘Never,’ ‘Forever’, and ‘For the first time’.

If you read this book,  Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism by Dawn Prince-Hughes, you will find a description of an autism-spectrum pattern related to the passage of time in space very similar to what I think my mother experienced — and very similar to what I experience.  Prince-Hughes describes this experience for herself in relation to strong negative emotional currents in a primary relationship.  She describes her sense of ‘things will always be this way’ at the same time she is describing her sense that ‘things HAVE always been this way’.

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Most simply put, because these altered time-space patterns were built in my mother’s earliest forming body-brain within a traumatic early caregiver environment, they directly impacted ME.  My mother could not ‘finish the laundry’ related to her relationship with me (and hence the power of her abuse litany).

My guess is that because these changes happen all the way into the brainstem itself, a survivor’s biological clock and internal patterns and rhythms are changes as well.  My mother had an altered sense of cycles in her life, and these changes directly affected how she abused me!

Everything related to me had ‘always been this way’ and would ‘always be this way’.  This pattern operated in MANY ways in her life.  I can see those patterns in her chronicle.  There really was never a beginning, a middle or an end in my mother’s trauma-formed brain-mind.  How this adaptation to early trauma helps to preserve ongoing life in the ‘evolutionarily altered brain’ that Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard research group describe, I do not know.  It my view, these time-space changes are most likely to be seen my contemporary outsiders – if they know what they are looking FOR and AT — as patterns of dissociation.

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I will leave these thoughts on this page now and go outside to retrieve my now-clean laundry from the washer!

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+”DOES SILENCE HAVE A NOISE” – MORE OF MY ‘GOOD’ MOTHER’S WORDS

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NOTE:  Please always go to my blog itself to read my posts – they MORPH!

I am not ‘out of the woods’ yet on what I can possibly learn from working with my mother’s writings, even though I am GREATLY RELIEVED that the transcription is completed and I will not encounter any more ‘surprises’ because I am now familiar with what is in her words.  BUT, that does not mean I won’t continue to be surprised.  It just means that from now on the surprises I encounter will be INSIDE OF MY OWN SELF!

For example, related to what I am going to include in this post, I am rethinking these same words I posted earlier:

Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD says about BPD that ‘splitting’ is ‘very common’ among people with this disorder.   She is talking about my mother.

“Splitting is very common in people with borderline personality disorder (BPD), and it leads people with BPD to view others and themselves in “all or nothing” terms. For example, a person with BPD may view one family member as always “good” and another as always “bad.” Or, a person with BPD may see themselves as “good” one minute, but shift to seeing themselves as all “bad” or even evil the next.”

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What about those words I added bold type and underlining to?

Kristalyn is, I believe, missing an extremely important point here.  My mother never SAW HERSELF as ‘good or evil’.  She lacked the requisite capacity for self observation, analysis or self reflection.  She could not achieve even that high a level of honesty about herself – or see herself AS REALITY SAW HER!  My mother never saw the truth about herself as far as I know.  She never achieved that level of conscious awareness.  To her dying breath she would have promised to anyone that what she ‘did’ to me – I earned and deserved and, as she told my sister, “was nothing different than what any normal mother would have done.”

This did not stop my mother from ACTING ALL GOOD or ACTING ALL EVIL!

Very often the ‘all good mother’ was phony phony phony — and certainly my siblings could see-sense-know this (I’m not sure my father did).

The ‘all evil mother’ was MY particular mother!  How special was THAT?  NOT AT ALL!

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I think that Kristalyn’s words are a HUGE soft-sell in regard to severe infant-child abusing caregivers!  They are a great understatement!  Borderlines such as my mother was have no real ability to ‘see themselves’ in the light of reality or real reason AT ALL!

So, as I work with the two versions my mother wrote of the story I include here – one a journal entry and one a letter to her mother – I realize that I did not know THIS version of my mother at all!  In fact, it is this ‘all good mother’ who, with the fewest tiny exceptions, WROTE ALL OF THESE WORDS I HAVE TRANSCRIBED and am preparing to publish!

My guess is that any unsuspecting reader of my mother’s Alaskan homesteading chronicle will probably come to adore her!

Can I adore her?

Kristalyn IS using the word ‘evil’ here  in her contrast – not saying ‘good’ and ‘bad’ but rather ‘good’ and ‘evil’.  She is not describing ‘projection’ which I cannot separate from the SPLITTING that Kristalyn is describing.  So if I take Kristalyn’s words literally, I would say I was cursed with having a nearly all-evil mother — and I have a hard time telling myself that given this fact, I had any mother at all!

I certainly DID NOT have the mother who wrote the following words, which include these words that she wrote waiting alone with four small children in a canvas hut on the side of an Alaskan mountain without telephone, electricity, water, transportation, and barely with food for my father to come home with supplies:

“As I try to go off to sleep I hear a noise – it sounds like the tractor – urging its way up the Mountain road – Does silence have a noise – it’s so quiet I can hear my heart pounding.  Silence, silence.  Where is Bill?  All I ask is for his safety and well being.”

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It is obvious to me that I still have a great deal of inner confusion about my feelings about my mother — and about what she did to me.  I do not yet ‘understand’ and therefore I do not yet ‘know’.  There is still something I need to learn and this work still has something important to teach me.  These words of my mother’s didn’t come from an obviously ‘evil mother’.  Talk about SWITCHING!  My mother was a pro!

It’s a riddle of Bat Man story caliber, I would say!  I haven’t solved it for myself.  Not even close.  I will be working my way through THESE aspects of my next stage of work with my mother’s writings.  I ask myself why I don’t let the riddle just go and forget about it.  Then I encounter an internal image of someone (a child!) being murdered over and over and over again – but being left alive – TO TELL ABOUT IT!

For now, I guess I will go ahead and post here both versions of this experience as my mother wrote about it.  I am asking my daughter and sister for their input on how I might handle duplications of stories in my mother’s work.  Do I publish both intact?  Do I find a way to merge them?  If I meld and merge, do I keep the result as a letter?  As a journal entry?  I am not sure about that, either.

I am also posting pictures that can help demonstrate WHERE we were.  Talk about a little abused child having nowhere to run!!!!  This scene – an abused child’s nightmare, an abusing ‘evil mother’s’ dream come true!

You have never known silence if you haven't been in a frozen land alone in winter
That huge beautiful mountain outlined against the sky behind our home was the one my mother named 'Pinnacle Peak'

View toward Cook Inlet, Anchorage lies behind-around the left mountain end - where my father worked

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December 29, 1959 Tuesday

*Notes:  Nice day outside – but bleak inside.  School has started again here on our homestead even if not in Eagle River as we took the week before Xmas for vacation – as I thought the children would enjoy getting ready for Xmas that week and would more easily settle down to school work after Xmas!

I was right.  They are raring to go and eager to get back on schedule of things and so anxious to do good work and not miss their work or be behind their class when they return to school and so am I!  John is busy in his Arithmetic books – both work books and school books and is learning more complicated multiplication and going on to division.  It seems we never catch up with John’s work or get all done we should do – but we keep on plugging away.

Bill never came home!  No water today again – and my propane gas gave out before I could even cook breakfast.  The children had cold cereal for breakfast and bread and jelly.  I tried to get our Coleman cook stove going but it seems to be leaking and a fire started in back of it and below.  I had to throw water on it (a half a coffee pot full).  Then I was going to get the fire extinguisher out – but before I used it I got the fire out by beating it out with a towel.  I had a scare for a minute and made a mess of the trailer with the water but far better than fire.

I checked it and rechecked it and brought it outside to light but gas seems to be spilling out so I put it away.  Now what will we do?  I yearn for some coffee and think I’ll melt some snow and try to heat some on oil heater.  We’re really out of food – except flour, sugar and staples.  I do have potatoes and one more can of Spam if I had a stove going.

Bill HAS to come home tonight [Tuesday] – yet, he told me he would be home Monday and work Tuesday and Wednesday!  This is when I don’t like to be so isolated!!

More later!

Radio says there has been a terrible storm from New Jersey, NY to Boston.  Snow, winds etc. – worst since hurricane years ago I remember so well.  We’re lucky here – not to have storms like that.

10:30 – We relented and I heated our last can of stew over the oil stove (heater) and by then even it tasted good.  I made Kool Aid for the children from melted snow – and to bed.  (Wrote Mom more this evening and will put her letter in here).

It’s now 11:30 – tomorrow we must walk OUT if Bill doesn’t come home.  I just undressed and climbed into bed.  Must stop running to the door thinking I hear the tractor.  My usual evening things tonight hold absolutely no appeal to me.  I don’t want to knit although I’ve started mittens (first time on four needles for Cindy) or read or anything.  I want to know Bill is alright and to have him here – please Bill come!!

I’ll set the alarm tonight (first time I’ve set it since Bill hasn’t been here!) for 4:00 A.M. and we’ll leave here at 5:00!! – Well is that early enough??  And it will be so cold waiting for a ride at the bottom of the mountain.  We are so dependent on Bill – for oil, gas, supplies –

I’d love to homestead way off – if Bill could be with us.  I’d like to hunt our own meat and cache it away – get all our supplies in for the winter early – have a wood cook stove – I’d truly love it.  I tease Bill and urge him to stay and try it here.  He says we could never make out – but if we had our bills paid and raised perhaps sheep – those are foolish dreams.  Still it could be ever so nice and right now he’d be here!!

Golly, what’s wrong with me.  I’ve done so well – it’s expecting him and not having him come – and knowing he would if he could and wondering.

LATER

I just simply can’t sleep.  I’m writing this by flash light – still listening – oh, how I yearn for Bill tonight.  I feel so all alone.

This is really only the second time.  Last time also was when I expected him and he didn’t come.

As I try to go off to sleep I hear a noise – it sounds like the tractor – urging its way up the Mountain road – Does silence have a noise – it’s so quiet I can hear my heart pounding.  Silence, silence.  Where is Bill?  All I ask is for his safety and well being.

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December 29, 1959 Tuesday 11:00 P.M.

Dear Mother,

Last night about this time I sat here writing you a letter – listening with straining ears for the welcome sound of a tractor to tell me Bill was coming home.  I waited up until 1:30 A.M. – I didn’t want to be asleep when he got here BUT he didn’t.

24 hours later and still no Bill.  I listened to “Mukluk Telegraph” on KENI on my wonderful radio – a special broadcast where messages are relayed to people like me, living in the bush, but no word.  So, here I sit again waiting.

It seems I’ve done a great deal of waiting since we began homesteading.  I guess it’s a woman’s role all over the world – one which I am now accustomed to but like none the more for it.  It’s hard to wait – especially when you don’t know and tonight I’ve gotten a little worried.  Jeep trouble? – could be – but no message.

Seeing he was home over the long Holiday I would have just as soon he waited several days but we’d been out of water for two whole days again and I’d been melting snow (which is a slow process and laborious but at least I’m grateful for the snow – there was a time when we had neither snow OR water – funny how one becomes grateful for such strange things).

But it was agreed he’d come home last night and work Tuesday and Wednesday and come home again Thursday.  We’re out of water and propane gas.  As of today and I almost started a fire trying to get the Coleman camp stove going – I guess it leaks and I won’t try again.  This morning we had shredded wheat (last of it).  At noon – sandwiches (good thing I saved the bread since last Thursday) – used the last of it and after waiting until tonight at 10:30 for Bill.  So we heated the last can of canned stew (ugh!!) over gas heater!!

I’ve even melted drinking water today – and yesterday gave everyone baths by building a fire in the Yukon stove and melting the big wash tub full of snow.  It was to be a kind of a surprise for Bill – but he never came home.

It’s unlike Bill to cause us concern or leave us when he knows we’re out of supplies!!

Last Thursday he brought food but today is pay day and he was to bring a big order up yesterday.  I almost went down yesterday – it’s been two weeks and one day since we’ve been OUT – but probably will have to walk up late at night or spend three hours on the last mile of road (how well I remember last time) so thought I’d wait until the weekend and go down and come up during day light.

Now I have no choice if Bill doesn’t come home tonight.  Then we’ll have to get up at 4:00 (and just put children to bed – waiting for Bill) and go out with Thomas or Pullen.  I hate to walk down alone and it’s snowing now.

We started school again here as we took vacation the week before Xmas but other schools are off now.  Another reason I hate to go down.

Bill has trouble pulling the trailer up now and is going to buy a flat sled to pull supplies up behind tractor – but we walk!!

The kids are marvelous sports.  Last night John stayed up and worked on the model airplane he and his Dad started Sunday.  Today after school, we worked a big cross word puzzle and I showed Linda how to purl – she knits well.  I gave her and Cindy a knitting set for Xmas – it has smaller needles in it and they can manage them much better.  Today she completed her doll blanket she started on Xmas – just plain knitting.  Cindy finds it harder but two years difference in ages.

She and Sharon played Chinese checkers – then Linda and Cindy – and so this evening passed – with a lollypop treat made by Cindy for each for Xmas and saved because they had so much sweets and so welcome tonight as a morale booster.

She made cups out of egg carton, two together and decorated and put life savers in each cup and two lollypops.  Oh, such squeals of pleasure they brought forth tonight.

I made molasses cookies in Xmas shapes and enormous gingerbread boys cut and decorated in green, red and white –

All eaten!

Fruit cake devoured.  Children and I made spice cookies and sugar cookies and each had a whole tray to do themselves in Xmas shapes (I think I told you) and then each decorated as they pleased.  They took their prettiest and did up for Xmas presents for Daddy.

But all is gone now and mince pie, apple pie, chocolate pie I made yesterday.

Still we have little up here in way of fresh fruits, vegetables etc. and mostly canned meat.  Last Thursday Bill brought up lettuce and tomatoes and oh, such a treat you can’t imagine.  We haven’t had fresh milk since we’ve been here – all canned and powdered – and now we’re OUT of all but flour, sugar and oatmeal!

Well, it’s 11:30 P.M.  I guess I better stop!  I just keep listening and listening.  Will enclose a note tomorrow to tell you what happened!

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Donned my coat etc. and thought I’d go outside to get some fresh air and listen intently.  It’s really snowing now.  The weatherman said ‘no snow’ but I found out weeks ago that we have our own weather here in the mountains – and it IS SNOWING here.  It is lonely tonight – not a light or sign of habitation.  Usually I like this but tonight I don’t.  I want Bill at night – I’ll never get used to that.

I could easily stay here all day – all winter – if I thought he’d be home come night – it’s our highlight of the day.  Even then – I don’t worry if I don’t expect him – Oh, I know he’s alright but —- —-

The children look so sweet and peaceful asleep.  Thank God they trust me and I can make them happy up here — !!

P.S.

I keep forgetting that I haven’t written oftener.  I must tell you how much your radio has meant to me – a voice – music – it means so very much to us!!!

And during Xmas the music was beautiful.  We heard Dicken’s Xmas Carol and all the stories.  It really made Xmas for us and I think especially for Sharon who couldn’t remember the songs from last year.

You’re my Xmas angel!

Love, Mildred

Later

Bill got home at 6:15 in the morning!  I was going to walk out and decided to wait until tonight –

He tried Monday night and tractor wouldn’t make first hill – battled it for three hours and then went back to log house where he arrived at 4:00 A.M.

Spent all night battling hill last night – has had no sleep – ate breakfast and now is leaving again.

He’s safe!!  How he keeps awake I’ll never know!!

Happy New Year

P.S. Only one month to go. [for the required residency time for proving up on the land to gain title under the requirements of the Homestead Act]

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+WORDS FROM MY MOTHER’S CHRONICLE: WHERE IS THE CHILD ABUSE HERE?

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Now, would you ever say that these words sound like they were written by a severely child-abusing mother?

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December 7, 1959 Monday

*Notes:  Our Family Is Never Bored!

The children spend many happy contented hours now working on various Xmas projects.  Cindy has made individual baskets for each member of her beloved family made out of egg carton sections, each wrapped in aluminum foil with a pipe cleaner handle and a marshmallow (how hard they’ll be by Xmas) and a lollypop in each one.  They’re secretly hidden and each day Sharon teases to see hers – it’s a constant thing to talk about, to whisper about and to be excited about for Xmas is coming.

Our Xmas books – we buy two each year — has grown to quite a collection.  These are taken out during the first week of December and read each day until Xmas. This year John and Linda can very expressively read them aloud!  It thrills me to see the younger two – eyes wide with wonder – listening in rapt attention to their older brother or sister read the magic words to them.

Yes, Xmas is coming.

No mention is made of money – we all know – it just isn’t there.  We will do what we can but the days of borrowing money for Xmas presents that we can’t afford are over!!  There will be Xmas presents though.

I’ve bought at half price knitting sets – with yarn and tiny needles for two girls and a needlepoint set for one – I hope John will get his skis and Grandma will buy his boots.  The girls will get a flying saucer from Santa to share and a tea set.  The 5¢ and 10¢ store and ingenuity and imagination and love will make a Xmas – you just wait and see….

What is important!!

More and more every day I realize what’s really important in life!

Being together – being a family unit and being loved and loving – these are the important things.

Health – to be healthy and well and to know that the ones you love are well.

(I hope my loved ones never suffer – how terrible it would be to see them hurt or sick – how terrible to ever think they might need me – and I wouldn’t know).

How thankful I am to be here writing this and know our family is safe and together on this night –

Dearest God in heaven above, I thank you for our family and our homestead and for the opportunities we have here to create a home for our loved ones in a land such as this.

I am content tonight – tomorrow we will plan and work for our future but I intend to fully enjoy each day as it comes – to work hard but to be content to wait – material things are really of such minor importance.  I feel we already have what really counts and must never lose it in hurrying and working too hard to get THINGS.

I see so many people – even up here in Alaska – doing just that, living in far too expensive houses – beyond what they can really afford to pay and working so hard to live there and meet the payments that the house as beautiful as it may be, holds no happiness for the occupants and they live separately in it.

No, no – never – we’ve had our share of money worries – no, no, no.

I’ll be content with less – Bill and I are so close now – never, never to be apart mentally and spiritually – nothing is worth that!

Our little hut and trailer mean more to me if we can be all together and happy and close here!!

The other – I pray God – we’ll be content to wait for.  If we can manage fine – if not, so what!?!?

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December 8, 1959 Tuesday 10:30 P.M.

*Notes:  How quiet and serene and peaceful it is.  Everyone is asleep.  Even our two kittens, Dixie and Pixie are curled up in Cindy’s bed.  I don’t approve but haven’t the heart to move them.  One is tucked under her arm with covers pulled up under it’s chin, all the world lie a toy.  The second is on the foot of her bed.

The dishes are done and the trailer is tidy and neat.

Everything looks cozy and cute and serene in the light of the single kerosene lamp I am writing by.

Bill went to bed – absolutely exhausted after a 24 hour ordeal of futile attempts to return here which finally terminated in his having to walk the last mile.  Even poor ‘Oliver’ our faithful tractor found this 10° to 20° below zero weather too cold!

I just went outside for a moment and it’s really cold and really beautiful.  The stars are so close looking you feel as if you could pick them out of the sky and the moon is so bright that you can see all the Mountains and the valley below.

How I truly love this place – no words can aptly describe how I feel about this land we hope someday to own.  It’s really an almost HOLY feeling.  I know it sounds silly but it’s the way I feel.  If only you could see it – you would see what a Shangri-la it is! – and what’s more we have created a home – be it ever so humble here!  It’s quite a grand feeling!!

Time for bed.  Good night!

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IN MEMORY OF MY BORDERLINE MOTHER:

From Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD, your Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder You may not be familiar with the term “splitting,” but it is a phenomenon that many people with BPD, and their family members, will recognize. This week, learn how to cope with splitting when it happens.

[Linda note:  IMPORTANT – THIS IS WHAT MY MOTHER DID – What you just read above was from the ALL GOOD side of the split!]


What is Splitting?
Splitting is very common in people with borderline personality disorder (BPD), and it leads people with BPD to view others and themselves in “all or nothing” terms.
How to Handle Splitting
What should you do when a loved one is engaged in splitting? There isn’t always an easy answer — the best way to manage the situation will depend the nature of your relationship with your loved one, the intensity of the splitting, and the impact it is having on the family.

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Divorcing a BPD Spouse
Does BPD mean that your marriage should end in divorce? Some couples do make their BPD marriage work, but sometimes the relationship can’t be saved.
Family Therapy for BPD
Can healing from BPD be a family affair?

Must Reads
What is BPD?
Symptoms of BPD
Diagnosis of BPD
Treatment of BPD
Living with BPD

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+BEING MY MOTHER’S ‘FAIR WITNESS-OBSERVER’ – I WANT TO OWN MY CHOICE

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It gives me great comfort this morning as my thinking moves forward along the lines established in my previous two posts and in my reply to the comment included with the first of these two posts to find pages coming up in my Google search directly connected to the words “archetype fair witness.”

I never thought about it before these last days as I finished the process of organizing and transcribing my mother’s writings that in some – still seemingly bizarre way — I WAS BORN TO BE MY MOTHER’S FAIR WITNESS.

For all the billions of moments I spent as a child during my 18 years of suffering abuse from this woman, I was at the same time being her witness.

Is that something that happens as a PART of being an abused victim?  Are we at the same time we suffer the abuse being the witness to our perpetrator’s OTHER SIDE?  Do we come, as a direct result, to know our perpetrator’s truest reality (in their body-brain in this lifetime)?

According to this author of this book – I might be right on track:

Soul Psychology: How to Clear Negative Emotions and Spiritualize Your Life by Joshua David Stone

It would be logical and reasonable to accept that I was, along with the mountain and the homestead, an embodiment of what my mother needed for her healing.

I was the projection of ‘badness’ for my mother.  I was badness personified.  Hell, literally, of a place to spend one’s infant-childhood!

Yet because 99.99% of what my mother saw in me, what she blamed me for, what she ‘punished’ me for, had NOTHING whatsoever to DO WITH ME, I WAS the ‘fair witness’ of her literalized OWN suffering from inside her own SELF that she dissociated from herself and associated with me.

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“The true self-realized being uses this archetype as its main theme but is not identified with it; such a self-realized being lives in a state of consciousness as the Fair Witness or Observer, free of all archetypes.”

From  Joshua David Stone in Soul Psychology: How to Clear Negative Emotions and Spiritualize Your Life, Page 263

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When, such in cases like mine, a human being is born into particularly a mother’s malevolent world of ‘disturbed psychology’, the tiny growing and developing person JUST BARELY MIGHT be able to develop its own self as a separate being from its abuser.  ANYTHING and EVERYTHING else that happens to that little one belongs to the perpetrator and NOT to its own self.

This means for ME that I spent the majority of my infant-childhood NOT being my own self.  For ALL of the time my mother was verbally, psychologically, spiritually, and physically abusing me I was DOING one thing:  Enduring her abuse so I could survive.  During ALL of THIS time, I was in that ‘non-archetypal’ place that I believe we are born into as new and innocent beings that meant I was ONLY being my mother’s ‘fair witness’.

If there had been some other pattern to my relationship with my mother that would have meant at least SOME OF THE TIME I got to be myself, then perhaps I could have moved off of that point of being at dead center as a nonbeing observer of my mother’s madness.  Perhaps then I could have wondered about what was happening to me.  Perhaps then I could have been envious or jealous of the treatment she showed her other ‘darling’ children.  Perhaps I could have THOUGHT for myself.  Perhaps I could have not only FELT the abuse but been able to associate, connect, and string together all the associations belonging to my ongoing experience of myself in my own life – abuse included.

But I couldn’t do any of that.  I never got the chance to.  It is only now at age 58 that I am discovering this NEW information for myself about how being such a victim of such terrible abuse happened AT THE SAME time I was my mother’s primary, intimate WITNESS-observer.

Being at that ‘place’ of what Stone is describing as ‘being without an archetype’ might be fine and good for a person who has been allowed and able to develop and individual clear and strong healthy self from the start.  To ‘get back to’ that place, or to re-achieve that degree of detached non-participation in one’s life might be a goal towards so-called higher spiritual living for SOME.

But for those of us who endured and survived our infant-childhood while being the victim of our caregiver’s UNSPEAKABLE MADNESS this entire process is as reversed NOW during the times of our healing as it was reversed ‘back then’ in the times of our being so hurt and wounded.

I have to find my own choices to BE or NOT to be my mother’s Fair Witness!

As I discover this new level of deep choice, I am beginning to define my own self NOW as I needed to back there from the time I was born.

So if anyone wants to benefit from the experience of actually being able to converse in the here and now with a person who KNOWS what it is like and feels like to be a Fair Witness, talk to a severe infant-child abuse survivor.

During the time we were being overwhelmed by someone’s abuse of us, we were LIVING life as a Fair Witness-Observer being.    Yes, I believe this does mean that all abuse survivors carry the double-sided injury of being not only the victim of the trauma of abuse itself, but also of being a WITNESS ABUSE survivor on the grandest of scales.

In the end, it might be that having our power of CHOICE removed from us is what hurts survivors the most.  I can’t even say, “I want my power of choice back so that I can choose whether or not I want to be my mother’s Fair Witness.”  I never had this choice from the first of my life.  I am only seeing right now what I missed – and when I get this choice, AS I find within myself what this choice IS and how I can make it – I am moving off of this dead center of being a non-person who was the Witness-Target of my mother’s mean madness.

At the same time, these new insights are helping me to realize how FAIR I have ALWAYS been as I consider what my mother (and my father) did to me.  NOW I want the conscious choice to be FAIR or NOT!  I own that ability to be fair or not to be fair!  It was stolen from me at the start of my lie, at the moment of my birth.  So IF I say, “I want my ability to choose to be a remote-viewing observer of my mother’s abusive madness or NOT to be RETURNED to me,” I am saying that I am claiming what must be a Universal Human Right.  This right was mine from within my mother’s womb!    It is that far back that I have to re-turn to re-claim it!!  Look out!  Here I come!

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+THE LIGHT FROM WITHOUT MEETING THE LIGHT FROM WITHIN

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If we are going to survive we have to have the light from within us met by the light from without.  Abused children DO find that light – somehow, somewhere – or they could not possibly survive.  Looking back, where did we find that light?

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I was wide awake around 4 o’clock this morning and started my day as the first light began to flood the world even though the sun itself was nowhere to be seen.  Filling the outdoor animal’s water dish, sweeping lose dirt from my adobe walkway, watering and turning my ever-growing compost pile, until finally, just now right before 6:30 in the morning the first rays of the sun reach over my eastern neighbor’s trailer, and then just over my tall old corrugated steel fence where the rays begin the day by caressing the ferny tips of the tiny little carrot plants my neighbor children brought me to plant a little over a week ago.

Before long these sun rays will be blazing.  They will challenge with their parching heat every green leaf within my yard at the same time that they feed them.

I am thinking about the amazing experience I had as I transcribed that long letter yesterday that my mother wrote down over fifty years ago:  +A ROAD IS A LIVING ‘THING’ – 1959 HOMESTEADING ‘STORY’.  The more I watched the story contained in her words unfold before my eyes, the more I scanned in the photographs and trimmed them up to add in along with her words, the more my body remembered those days on that mountain road when I was seven years old.

As I remembered I felt something happening inside me that I could not name until just now as I watched these sun rays appearing out of the darkness of the night, bringing a new morning to the world on THIS day, THIS day that cannot possibly ever be exactly like any day that has ever passed over this earth in all of its very long history.

What I now can name is that especially because I was a hated, shunned, usually-frightened and terribly abused child, any time that darkness went away even for a little while the light from without that met and touched my light from within helped me to grow by ‘leaps’ and by ‘bounds’.  As I walked my little, growing feet over the virgin land of that Alaskan mountainside something new and different happened to me.

I felt fine.  Absolutely fine.

I see in my mother’s homesteading letters that she often turns her scathing tone to my slowness as I trudged along with my family up that mountain.  “There’s Linda, so slow as always, lagging far behind the rest of us.”  As if I was some foreign albatross, some anchor around everyone else’s neck that dragged down the rest of them no matter what they were doing and no matter what I did.

But as the light from without touched me yesterday as I transcribed that story and remembered every smell, every sight, every tone of the mountainside itself along with what glorious shows of life that lay along the road that led back to OUR mountain along the valley’s floor, I could feel those same sun rays from fifty years ago lighting up my skin on the outside as my soul and spirit lit me up on the inside as clearly as today’s morning sun rays are out there at this instant nourishing those tiny carrot sprouts that rise above the soil’s darkness into their new life.

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At this same moment I know inside of myself that I walked that mountain as slowly as my mother would allow because I was eating it up.  I noticed every step I took, every sound I heard, every wafting sweet-smelling breath of air that swirled around me.  I noticed every twig and branch, every sight of water seeping from the cut earth banks and flowing, the edges of every patch of mud, every freshly cut root from every tree that had been hacked apart by some big caterpillar tractor that had TRIED to make that mountain road.

I heard every bird.  I saw every cloud pass above me.  And for all the meeting of light from without with my seven-year-old and growing light from within that happened to me upon that mountainside I remembered.  I dreamt about those old mountain road switchbacks and the steep walk well into my 40s.  I would travel there in my dreams on a road I knew only I could still find.  And, oh how I grieved for most of my adult life for those days, for those nights.

I grieved for the mountains as the tractors came to strip away the trees and plants to add in the power poles.  I grieved for every freshly cleared strip of land designed to reach someone’s newly built house rising among the trees.  I grieved for that light I felt then, and I didn’t even know it.  Today as I realize how naturally I responded to that Alaskan sanctity of land only newly touched by people, I also grieve for the eagles and bears and moose and beaver that fifty years ago belonged back in that valley and on that mountain before so many people came and scared them all away.

When I returned to that valley and to the place of my childhood last summer I found that the road all the way up that mountain is paved now.  How nice for those who live there, content as they must be with their money, their good vehicles, with the plows that come and clear away all snow trouble before it bothers them.  Nestled in all their houses built on subdivided land they are to me nothing more than signposts of change, of the passing of years, of the continued traveling of people who will go as far as they can around this world until there is barely a single thing left over from long ago and no more far away.

At the same time I am grateful that I was allowed as a small child to be a part of history there in that valley, on that mountain, in that time.  Because there was so very little light allowed to shine for me in my terrified, suffering and very dark childhood, what light came to me in that place, on that land was essential for my very survival.  And here I am today, writing these words, because of my part not only in the horror of my mother’s story that she never truly tells in her written words, but because of the beauty that she also knew — and wrote about.

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Our own life force is as much our light within as it would be for a plant – or for any other creation.  We are designed biologically to respond to light from without.  No matter how abused we have been, as I mentioned at the start of this post, we DID receive light from without that met our own life force light from within.

Because we are members of a social species we are designed first and foremost to respond to the light in other PEOPLE as our emotional-social brain and our entire nervous system-body grows and develops from birth (and before).  Yet for some of us the human environment was far more toxic than light-enhancing.  That could not possibly stop us from responding to nourishing, life promoting influences in our environment no matter what our age.

Perhaps we could see the love and devotion in a pet’s eyes.  Perhaps a stranger offered us a compliment.  Perhaps we became aware of a miracle of nature around us.  Perhaps we loved to run, or to draw, or to cook, or to hit a ball, or to feel damp grass under the soles of our feet or squish wet sand between our toes.

As long as we are alive in a body supportive and nurturing influences surround and encompass us.  They feed and sustain us every bit as much as air, water, food and sleep.  And in that world we were born into SOMETHING and/or SOMEONE DID delight us – or we would not have survived.

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+THE DOOMED MOVE UP MILDRED’S MOUNTAIN

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Well, in the final throes of digging up ‘stuff in words’ I have (unexpectedly) unearthed the last of my mother’s homesteading journals.  Today, if I was going to name her book I would title it something like this:

Moving Mildred’s Mountain — The Road to a Good Dream is Seldom Easy

An Alaskan Family’s Homesteading Tale

Oh - the road - 1959

“Of the deep wilderness of the wood where you and I shall walk free”

– words evidently written by Mildred around 1933 when she was 8-years-old

SEE: +SOMETHING ODD I FOUND IN MY MOTHER’S CHILDHOOD HAND

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There were nearly more obstacles in my family’s story than a person could count – and moving the mountain to make a passable ROAD was certainly one of the main ones.

But even above all others the Number One Obstacle our family carried along with us throughout all time and over all distance and to and from every place we lived was NEVER identified, recognized, named, accepted or dealt with:

My Mother’s Borderline Personality Disorder

In the end this WAS what doomed The Dream.  The demise of the homesteading dream happened not because of her mental illness itself but because it WAS never recognized, named or healed in any way.  The family was left ‘playing parts’ on my mother’s dream-stage in a continuing downward spiral no matter how hard our family participated in Mother’s ‘drive’ to move up that Mountain and to find a way to stay there.

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+’MOVING AROUND’ VERSUS ‘STAYING STILL’ – WHAT IS THE DEAL?

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Sometimes I wish I could talk to some ‘mental health professional’ just about the moving around that my mother did.  As she mentions in her piece of writing that I transcribed yesterday and posted the link to in *October 1958 – DREAMS CAN COME TRUE,  my mother believed that my father provided a kind of stabilizing counterweight to her impetuousness.  But I wonder what would have happened to her in her life if my parents had not yoked themselves to one another?

I still have not completely delineated and visibly lined up the number of moves that my mother arranged and that mostly my father accomplished during their married years prior to my leaving their home when I was 18.  Some part of me this morning wants to stop and take account of the moves that had already happened before my mother had written her October 1958 description of their Alaskan ‘venture’, as she called it.

My parents married June 11, 1949 and as far as I know they lived on/at Almont in Los Angeles at least until their first child was born on June 15, 1950.  Then comes a move.  I don’t believe I was born while they were living there, so probably by August 31, 1951 they were living in a rented house on Calavaras (wherever in LA that was).

So, from Almont to Calavaras to a rented apartment by July 10, 1953 when my sister was born, then probably to a house my parents bought in Altadena that they did not sell until they were moving to Alaska even though my spring of 1956 they were in another new house they purchased in Glendora (still in LA area).

We must not have lived in this location of the 4th move for much more than a year, but that would have been four moves in the first seven years of their marriage.  The move to Alaska, which involved my father leaving first and being gone from us for two months in June and July of 1957.  According to mother’s writing, they sold the Glendora house (and the Altadena one) before my father went to Alaska and moved into a ‘court apartment’.

From this apartment, after my father had left, my mother then moved us into a motel, out of the motel into a rented house, out of the house into her mother’s, up to the mountains for a week, back to her mothers, and then probably into another motel before she left for Anchorage.

So, adding up these longer and shorter term moves and locations, let’s see – that’s around 11 moves that were made with children in tow before mother reached Alaska and the infamous Log House in Eagle River on August 1, 1957.  The log house was probably move number 12.

We stayed ‘all cozy’ in the log house until June 1958, by which time my father had already located the 160 acres spot of our homestead and had staked claim, or filed on the land.  We moved out of the log house into Bockstahler’s ‘shack’ or ‘cabin’ (its title depended on mothers move moment to moment) where we stayed until October 1958.

At that point the six of us moved into an apartment on Government Hill in Anchorage area where we stayed until about the following March, and by April 1, 1959 we were off on our homesteading adventure.

So by the time my mother wrote her *October 1958 – DREAMS CAN COME TRUE piece she (I’m quite certain it wasn’t my father) had orchestrated, staged and managed to accomplish 14 moves.  I was 7 when this piece was written, and already by then I had been dragged around through probably 13 moves with my parents, and that was only the beginning.

So, talking about ‘life’ and ‘childhood’ in attachment-related terms, right along with the incredible vacillation and instability of my mother’s moment-to-moment mental-mood states and the insecurity they caused in the lives of all around her came the physical moving from place to place that even further guaranteed a complete environment of lack of safety and security for my parents children.

My mother wrote *October 1958 – DREAMS CAN COME TRUE from within the small enclosure of a massive, ugly apartment complex.  True, the move ‘to town’ was no doubt simply seen as ‘as step in the right direction’ toward accomplishing fulfillment of their Alaskan homesteading dreams, but I still find the contrast in location and place interesting as I read her written piece.

By the time my mother was actually on the homestead, and had her ‘dark rainbow dream’ about the horrific wind storm contrasted to how it stopped in her dream when she met the right ‘person’, she had already in her lifetime experienced probably close to 30 moves.

If I could talk to this ‘mental health professional’ I would like to ask what this kind of moving is seen to represent in a person’s life.  That the moving, at least in our family, seemed to be connected to and integrated with this ‘pioneering’ drive makes me suspect that it was then connected to the genetic undercurrent that MANY immigrating ‘pioneers’ had within them as they traveled to America in the first place.

But it is hard to feel a part of the mainstream American current with this kind of ‘traveling’ background – and I have certainly done my share of moving around in my adult life, as well.  I still haven’t counted my own moves, but I do know that right now being here and staying here in this little house I live in now is the single most important aspect to my own current life.

So when I work in my yard on my adobe projects it is in part the grounding I experience as I work with the physical DIRT that helps me right now.  As I looked around me out in my yard this morning I just had this thought:  I wish I had thought beforehand that I could have actually encased my mother’s individual letters I have completed transcribing right into those bricks – where they also would have finally met their final grounded end — because they probably would have remained within those bricks for a very, very, very, very LONG time without GOING anywhere.

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+FALSE STARTS AND BLIND INNER PROMISES

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There must be a post that needs to be written this morning that goes along with this title that is resounding within my mind this morning:  ‘False starts and blind inner promises’.  In thinking about the comment made to yesterday’s post about the beauty of tree burls and how as severe early abuse survivors we cannot grow our first early twigs out into the world because we are in continual danger of being attacked, and about how tree burls ARE formed in response to threats in the environment so that the growing tree must form scar tissue into itself – I am also thinking about how I feel ‘at dead center’ here in my home now, and in my yard.  I can only venture out once in a great while and when I do returning home within two or three hours seems to be essential for me to regain any calm equilibrium inside of myself.

I haven’t met my first grandchild yet who was born last March 11th.  I have three grown children all living in Fargo, North Dakota.  They want me to come up to visit them this summer, but the truth is that I cannot find a Linda who can make that journey.  I am not strong enough.  I don’t feel well enough.  Now they are talking about flying down to see me.

This all leads me to thinking about how at 58 years old, as a direct result of all the trauma I survived during the first 18 formative years of my life, I don’t so much not ‘have a leg to stand on’ as I ‘don’t have a limb to go out on’.  Yes, this also brings to mind ‘Rock-a-bye Baby’ and what happens ‘when the bough breaks’.

I knew about all of the rest of my ‘knowing’ about the implications contained in yesterday’s tree burl post, but I didn’t want to think about it and I didn’t want to write it.  I didn’t want to ‘be negative’ at the same time I didn’t want to be realistic.  I just wanted to END with the beautiful part and not acknowledge the serious ramifications and implications of growing a body-brain-mind-self in such a malevolent environment that most of who I had the potential to become was never able to branch out into the world and grow strong and true.

Being all bound up with my gifts, talents, strengths and abilities, with most of my potential hidden within the inside of me – rather than being expressed and formed and extended out into the ‘bigger world’ is a reflection of the physiological changes that happened to me as I tried to grow and development within the horribly toxic, threatening and truly dangerous world my mother created for me in my infant-childhood.

BUT I went off into that ‘bigger world’ at age 18 without having one single clue about what I had been through or about what had happened to me.  This is where the title for this post appears.  I have lived a life of ‘false starts’ and ‘blind inner promises’ because I had determination, a powerful will to do what it took to survive, to always move forward, to always do the best that I could as I organized my whole life on my most fundamental levels around trying to provide the best care I could for my children.

I was running blind.

I need to go outside this morning and trim the suckers that are growing in great masses at the base of my Pomegranate tree.  When my brother was here in April we completely decked the suckers, but they only came back as fast as they possibly could.  They grow thick and green like a thicket from the underground roots, but they are weak and wild and will not be productive as they crowd out the fruit-bearing branches and suck water and nutrients from the rest of the tree.

I had the thought in contrast to the tree burl image that in so many ways, being as blind as I was when I left home, that I simply set off into whatever direction I saw in front of me as I made decisions about my life and went off and ‘did things’.  Things could certainly have been far worse then they were, but now at age 58 most of what I have done appears to me now to be little more than a ‘false start’ like these tree’s suckers.

I had ‘blind hopes’ because I had no idea about who I was or what I wanted in my life.  I didn’t know what was possible, what was realistic, what motivated me, what I was searching for.  I could not miraculously form good strong fruit-bearing branches upon the tree-that-is-me at age 18.  I did not know about dissociation.  I did not understand that I could create branches in my life by going off in disconnected directions, spending the time of my life and my life force while I THOUGHT I knew what I was doing — but didn’t.

I don’t have a life history now of having continued to build a strong foundation of roots in my life, connected to a good strong self-trunk with wide healthy branches out there soaking in sunlight so I can celebrate my participation in my OWN ongoing life.

I have been burning up my inner resources all of my life and never knew it until now.  The amount of inner resources it took to endure and survive my childhood alone were probably equal to what a safe and securely attached person would use over the span of their entire lifetime.  When I tell my children now that I am ‘too tired to travel’ I know I mean exactly that:  I am resource-less rather than resource-full like my inner bank account is empty.

This, to me, is the long-term consequence that appears in so-called clinical terms as Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that has all its own ‘suckers’ within me (depression, dissociation) that siphon off my strength.

Nobody stopped me at the threshold where I left my ‘childhood’ and crossed into my ‘adulthood’ and helped me take inventory of where I was coming from, how I had been formed, what I had endured, what had done to me, what I had to take with me and what I had left over after surviving hell itself.  Nobody then helped me to realize where and how I had to heal before I could move forward.

The major branches that I SHOULD have formed as a growing and developing self in a body were nearly ALL turned within.  I entered adulthood chasing after what I thought was a life as the life that had formed me chased after me – because it was all still inside of me.

While I am thankful I found resources to raise my children so that they are stable and able to continue to grow good, strong branches of self into their world and into their future, I have to say that my ability to take care of myself has been very limited.  Today even the chirping of birds can ‘irritate my nerves’ as I live and breath too close to the edge of continual sensory overload.  The world seems too busy, too fast, too loud, too noisy, too demanding, too stimulating — and far more than I can easily handle.

I live in a rural area.  Yet knowing that even the sound of a crinkling plastic bag irritates my senses as I remove a slice of bread lets me know that the body I formed growing up from birth in an environment of continual threat of harm and of harm itself is very real and has its own very real limitations that I was able to somehow ‘outrun’ during most of my adult life.  But I cannot do it now.

When we think about stopping child abuse, awareness of this kind of damage that child abuse often causes is what needs to motivate us.  There is long term physiological cost to surviving malevolent childhoods.  Yes, we are beautiful — but our ability to form a body-self that can grow our beauty out into the world with joy and wellness has been greatly injured by all the early wounds we have received.

No, I don’t want to have to say this.  No, I don’t want to have to know this.  No, I don’t want to have to live with these long term consequences that changed the physiology of this body I have to live in for my entire life.  But when any of us think that ‘infant-child abuse is a serious matter’, these changes, along with the difficulties and life-loss they create, are a great part of what we HAVE TO consider.

At the same time survivors of severe abuse deserve to know the degree of harm that was done to them so that they can more fully understand how their development and their entire life has been affected.  There is no magic band-aid to FIX the changes that happened to our body.  But there is information about these changes, how they affect us and how we can live better with the help of this wisdom.

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+SURVIVING MY MOTHER’S HATE – HER WORDS AND MINE

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What can I possibly say in response to or in rebuttal against my mother’s words as posted earlier in +ANOTHER ‘NASTY GRAM’ FROM MY MOTHER TO HER MOTHER RE: 6 YEAR OLD ME:

November 26, 1957 Tuesday

“Dear Mother,

I am glad I wrote my recent letter and hope you fully understand so I won’t have to repeat myself in the future.  You’ve always been far overly concerned with LINDA’S actions anyways.  I am not nearly as concerned with ‘tom boyishness’ which is not as prevalent now anyways as with poor behavior in school and traits and personality.  It takes far more anyways than ‘a pretty dress and a pretty face’ to be nice. ”

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Because I actually FOUND these words written in my mother’s handwriting across a 50+ year old piece of paper the other night, they are now visibly lodged in my waking mind rather than ONLY being carved into my ‘invisible being’.

What these words reflect is my mother’s HATE for me.  They reflect the fact that I was born DOOMED as her daughter to a life in hell.  What these words reflect is the fact that my grandmother was the ONLY person in the universe who knew that fact.  Our move to Alaska effectively removed my grandmother’s influence from my life as I have mentioned before, yet his letter my mother wrote  even further banished Grandmother into the remotest distance away from me.

There is no place far enough away in the universe that I can run to or hide in to make these words go away, as much as I might wish to or think I SHOULD be able to escape them now.  It is the echo of these words within every fiber of my being that bothers me now.  I want to ignore them.  I want to pretend that things were somehow ‘different’ for me from the time I was born – but 18 years in hell, as I tried to grow and develop my body-brain-mind-self is a long, long, long time.

Every time during those 18 years that I tried to grow even the tiniest part of who Linda is – into my self and into the world – SHE was there to bash me, to crash me, to smash me.  HATE is a destructive power nearly beyond imagination, especially when an infant-child is hated by its own mother (and father, in my case).

The fact that I was at least able to access a little tiny bit of my Grandmother’s concern and affection (even though she must have had a major influence on creating the monster my mother was from the start) before I turned six when we left Los Angeles and moved to Alaska was the only life preserver I ever had except for the love my 14-month-older than me brother radiated upon me.

My body-brain internalized my grandmother’s influence on my behalf, but it clear as day that my mother HATED the fact that my grandmother loved me.  How could she NOT, given the fact that much of my mother’s demise was rooted in the ways and times that her mother despised her as she grew and formed.

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I don’t feel like I am standing at the gates of hell gazing at the devouring inferno’s flames as I try to write something in response to these words of my mother’s I just found in her letter.  I feel like I am standing in hell’s inferno itself, and there is nothing I can do to stop that fact because I have the first years’ of my life experience being exactly in that place.

But what about today?  I have a thought about burls growing on some trees in some forests.  I remember seeing those burls carved into bowls.  Those burls hold the most interesting and beautiful patterns of wandering wood grain within them.  I didn’t know as a child what formed those burls.  I guess I don’t really even know now.  But at least I have a glimmer of a grasp on the process.

As some trees grow in the forest, and send out their tiny new branches, sometimes something happens that causes the branch to turn around so that instead of it growing freely in its extension out into the air freely, it turns around and begins to grow back into itself.  That’s where those wandering lines of grain within the burls come from.

I feel like one of those burls this morning.  I can see that the resiliency of who I am and how I am in the world (and have been since I ‘got made’) – coupled with what little support I could glean from my brother and my grandmother – kept me alive so that I could endure and survive my mother.  But I had to grow my branches inward where my mother could not get to them-me – as best as I could.

Knowing that fact, and knowing my growing process was probably very similar to any other severe infant-child abuse survivor’s – I can see that within us is held the most beautiful patterns and lines, colors and swirls, the most spectacular wonder in the tracks of our survival that appear in the ‘burl’ that is us – that anyone could imagine.

A tree branch that turns around and grows into itself cannot be as easily seen as a fully stretched and reaching branch.  It is compact, and less vulnerable.  We (survivors) grew closest to the trunk that contains our very life force within it.  We grew closest to the root source that fed us life then and feeds us life now.  We must ACTUALLY have the very shortest route to take to find out who we truly as are separate, unique and wonderful individuals because we did not get to grow ourselves in any extended far reach into ‘that world out there’.

We perhaps did not lose ourselves in that outside world the way others who could romp and play, grow and thrive while being loved, cherished, supported, encouraged from the time they were born.  We are tough.  The wood grain of a burl is dense and hard, being close to a rock than any vegetable matter.  We had to be that strong, that tough, that endurable, that unbreakable, that self- and inwardly-protected – – and THIS special, unique and beautiful.

Which brings me back in my thoughts to my mother’s few brief words in her letter to her mother about me and my relationship both to my mother and to my grandmother.  There is an unbelievable universe of terrible abuse contained in those few words – as if they contain the terrible dark and destructive seed that was my mother’s hatred.  At the same time I read them, at the same time I can feel all the echoing and resonance within this body-brain-mind-self that formed itself within THAT hell, I also know that nothing my mother ever did to me – or ever could possibly do – could in any way remove from me ANY portion of who I AM as a human being.

My mother’s treatment of me DID change HOW I am in my lifetime because her treatment of me changed the way I physiologically grew and developed.  But she did not change ME.  I just grew into a different kind of branch, one with most of its health and beauty held close within me on the inside – exactly where she could never actually reach me.

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+TRAUMA DRAMA REENACTMENTS CONTINUE IN AN UNSAFE AND INSECURE WORLD

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I remember as a little girl living in the Los Angeles area being in the car when my parents passed road construction projects where steam rollers were being used.  I was fascinated by them, and even though of course I didn’t know it, it is very possible that my imagination recognized the metaphor contained within the actions of this monstrous piece of machinery that was designed specifically to roll over and completely flatten anything within its path.

My Mother the Steam Roller.  That’s just ONE of the things my mother was very good at:  flattening the life out of anyone in her way.  She flattened me, and I must have been aware of how effective my mother was at flattening my grandmother any time my grandmother tried in any way to say something or do something ‘nice’ for or about me.

Actually it never mattered WHO it was who might have tried to cross my mother.  My mother was a predatory fighter and could with ease flatten anyone within her family just like she was this piece of equipment — a steam roller.

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I will need to spend quite a bit of time eventually with the letter I posted last evening in +”GRANDMOTHER GETS A NEW CAR” – AND . . . . . because it contains so much information about my mother and her relationships with family.  From the stories my mother repeatedly told about how mean both her mother and her brother were to her in her childhood, I can see both of them also as if they were steam rollers who steam rolled right over my mother.  She was not empowered to fight back against them when she was young (even all the way into her teens).

But what a way to live.  What a way to CONTINUE to live, always being at war with those a person is supposed to feel most safe and secure with, most loved and cherished and cared about by.  I found myself thinking as I dug my way through the transcription of my mother’s words last night, “Is EVERYONE’S family like mine?  Does everyone have patterns of insecure attachment, of trouble and pain, sorrow and suffering, of war and inner emotional blackmail, hostage-taking, kidnapping of the soul, brutalization of the imagination, blocking and distortion of gifts and talents, destruction of relationships that my entire family and its history seems to have contained within it?

That led me to wondering how many people read on this blog with the words, “That could have happened in my family” ringing in their thoughts?  Different times, different participants, different versions of trauma drama, but trauma drama and terribly insecure human-to-human attachments just the same.

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It might seem like an odd connection, but this information is not randomly dragged into this post.  If you Google search for the terms ‘Israel genetics dance’ you will find some amazing research about the new discoveries about how there IS a genetic link between ‘professional dancers’ and their genes evidently related to this very ancient human activity –DANCE.

I mention this in connection with my mother’s letter I posted last night because I wish I could discover research about genetics and drama like I accidentally discovered the research about genetics and dance.  If there truly IS a genetic ‘loading’ for dramatic abilities just as there is for dancing, then I would suspect that my mother, as the amazing trauma drama specialist that she was, had those genes.

After all, human expression through gesture and sound, movement and pantomime, and reenactment of experience belongs to our species way back to our ancient beginnings – way back to before we had the ability to speak to one another with anything like a word.  Stories were transmitted, told, expressed, conveyed in all kinds of ways without words, and today we STILL watch this happen or participate in these trauma dramas if we happen to have been born into a family where the WORDS expressing the truth about trauma resounded in their empty silence.

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This leads me to the important insight that came to me last night about the trauma drama reenactment patterns in my mother’s life as they operated around her nearly continual moving around.  I have noted before that I think my mother projected ‘imaginary friends’ and ‘the imaginary enemy (me)’ onto her children.  She resonated with her infants as being her play baby dolls.  But what I didn’t GET until last night as I transcribed the letter I posted is that IN HER MOVING SHE WAS PLAYING HOUSE.

I had a “Duh, Linda!” moment!  Of COURSE that’s what she was doing.  I only SAW this last night because I was working my way through a collection of letters I had saved separately in a ziplock bag throughout the years that I have been ordering and organizing my mother’s collection of writings.  As I’ve mentioned before, it strikes me as being so unbelievably strange that all the while my mother wrote these letters over the years she ALWAYS intended to ‘put them into a book’.  Yet NEVER did she actually DATE a single one of them!

Often she put the day of the week on the letter, and most letters are at least contained in an original envelope with a post mark.  But this ziplock bag collection contained letters and parts of letters that had NO indication of date for me to work with.  I had to wait until the entire body of my mother’s letters was put into the best order I could make of them before I could add these letters into the newly coherent story I am forming of my mother’s words (and of her offspring’s childhood).

So, the letter that I posted last night was one of these ‘floating’ letters.  As I added it into the main body of the sort-of-coherent story of my mother’s life contained in her letters, I was FINALLY able to GET IT.

If you were to read through this collection of letters as I have transcribed them thus far (and there still might be missing letters to add into these files), you will see the pattern of my mother’s playing-house-by-constant-moving-around that I am talking about:

While I am not going back at this moment for the exact late June-early July letters where she begins to tell my father that she is moving herself and four children out of the one-room motel living situation into a rental house that she found in Glendora, you will see those letters as they describe her ‘playing house psychosis’.

She describes how she can NOW make a temporary cozy home (meaning safe and secure for herself) in that rented house.  But it doesn’t take long after she’s managed to accomplish the MOVE itself into that house that her whole fantasy begins to disintegrate, crumble and fall apart.  As this begins to happen my mother summons – as she ALWAYS did no matter WHAT household move trauma drama she was enacting – all the supposedly LOGICALLY BASED reasons why she HAS to make the move.

As readers it is time to take our stand and begin to understand that my mother’s madness was NEVER about logical reason.  My mother was not reason-able.  At least in this letter I posted of hers last night she is able to plead with and beg my father to help her.  Most often she so completely disguised her ‘mission’ that she fooled even my supposedly ‘reason-able’ father to move right along with her.

Because (even though I lived through 18 years of moving with my parents) I ONLY saw the pattern last night of the Fairy Tale nature of my mother’s PLAYING HOUSE with her imaginary friends, enemies (which came to include members of her family and other people other than just me), and doll babies exactly as I dropped this very important letter I was transcribing into its ‘coherency slot’ within her story I can finally say, “I get the whole picture.”

Human beings are born with the genetic capability to use our specie’s dramatic imagination in the process of becoming people who live within a massive web of drama that includes all of life.  We are supposed to develop a stable-self-core that allows us to make good sense of the constant interactions that are going on as we are forming within our earliest caregiver-attachment environments.

When these interactions, when our earliest body-brain forming attachment environment is malevolent, the nature of trauma drama begins to form itself into the patterns of our body-brain – and therefore into the life we live.  We can ‘clinicalize’ and ‘sanitize’ and ‘legitimize’ how we choose to talk about the end results of forming a body-brain-self-life within malevolent early environments, but in the end we are simply being prepared in a trauma-drama world to live a trauma-drama reenactment life – UNTIL WE LEARN THE LESSONS THE TRAUMA IS TRYING TO TEACH OUR ENTIRE SPECIES, not ‘just’ the individual members who ‘play the parts’ in this great drama that is the ongoing life of our species.

A trauma drama life is not a coherent one if the lessons contained within the drama itself are never learned.  It is only as we learn these lessons that words can begin to dissipate the vague fog of illusion that envelope the ongoing dramas themselves.

My very young mother, already as an infant being neglected if not also abused, was left isolated and all alone in a world with her dolls and her story books to try to figure out what SHE and her life – as well as that of other people – meant and how it all fit together.  Yet when I think about how in our specie’s ancient beginnings there were no warnings about keeping children away from the ongoing reenactments of trauma drama that the other members of our ‘family’ and ‘tribe’ were demonstrating, I realize that there is no corresponding magical line within the human brain-psyche that says ‘this dramatic reenactment belongs to childhood’ and ‘this dramatic reenactment belongs to adulthood’.

All the story telling and story acting belongs to the same mythic imagination that IS human life.  The psychologist Carl Jung might have divided the main characters in human drama into what he called archetypes, but in the end all the individual parts that CAN be played by humans in human drama simply either act themselves out in ongoing dramas OR are talked about in ongoing stories.

The evolutionary advantage for our entire species is the same one that operates for us each as individuals:  Trauma has something to teach us.  If the lessons are not learned they will continue to act themselves out until somebody ‘gets it’.  The GETTING of the lessons of trauma happen when we get to the more evolutionary advanced level of being able to USE WORDS to convey to our own self and to others what the traumas ARE and what they are teaching us.

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In the case of my mother – as I am now quite convinced is the case for every single human being – the MAIN theme of every drama and story of our life is about how safe and secure the world is for us to be living in.  The ongoing drama-story of our life IS about degrees of safe and secure attachment in the world – or degrees of its opposite.  The kicker is, though, that the messages are NEVER JUST meant either for the individual people who endured and survived traumas, or even for the immediate peer generation that individual is a part of.

The messages of degrees of trauma, of degrees of safe and secure attachment to and within the world are telling about the STATE OF THE WORLD, the condition of the external environment because it is THAT state of the world that the future generations are going to be left to survive in and better know something about.

We have to learn how to ‘read’ trauma and the dramatic reenactments trauma creates when it remains unresolved.  In its unresolved state the critical information about continued survival of the individual AND the species to which it belongs is NOT being understood.  Without learning something from trauma about survival the trauma will simply continue to be included in the patterns of life itself as these patterns repeat themselves like persistent and obvious nightmares until somebody pays attention.

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Nobody looked from the outside (or from the inside) at the patterns of trauma drama that unfolded within my family of origin and recognized what was going on.  Nobody said, “Gee, that family moves around too much, what’s wrong?”  Nobody said, “Gee, those children are not happy, what’s wrong?”  Nobody said, “Boy, that one little girl named Linda is the absolute picture of being lost, frightened and forlorn, what’s wrong?”

Nobody pierced through the smokescreen illusion of make-believe justification for all of the abuse, all of the moves, all of the madness that WAS the trauma-drama reenactment that WAS our family’s life.  Did any of it matter?  Did it matter that lives were being flattened within my family?  Did it matter that potential for joy, health, self-directed expression of talent and potential for a lifetime of well-being had been destroyed and continued to be destroyed within the horrible trauma drama reenactment that WAS our family?

No, evidently it didn’t matter.  Nobody saw any reason to pay attention, ask any questions, become involved, find a way to STOP what was going on.  It evidently wasn’t anyone else’s business.

But if we think we want to help prevent and STOP infant and child abuse we will have to cross that imaginary line between giving a damn and not giving a damn about the messages that trauma drama reenactments continue to convey within child-abusing — within ANY abusing — environments.  We have to allow ourselves to understand that the messages contained in these traumatic dramas are for ALL of us, not only for those who are captive within them.

The messages trauma conveys are ALWAYS about the degrees of safety, security and well-being that exist in the whole world, and are NOT SIMPLY messages about the conditions within any single family.  The human drama, the good and the bad of it, involve and belong to every member of our species.  Trauma itself is like a steam roller smashing the joy and well-being out of every member of every generation that remains in its path until somebody, somewhere, at some time FINALLY notices, pays attention and reads the signals contained within the trauma drama reenactments that tell us all what is WRONG in the world so that we can ALL do something to make what is WRONG in the world we all share  – well, quite simply, RIGHT.

This healing will not happen unless and until we find and use WORDS to think about and to talk about what needs to be changed to end as many traumas as we can so that we can make everyone’s world a safer and more secure place to be throughout everyone’s life span.  Is this too much to hope for, too much to ask for?

Nope.

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