Tag: empathy disorder

+IN THIS 1957 LETTER – THE WORDS MY FATHER WROTE ABOUT HIS MOTHER

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It seems easier to focus my search light for understanding on my mother’s earliest beginnings in my efforts to see if I can learn anything useful about how she ‘got made’ to be the Borderline abusive mother that she was rather than spend the same effort looking at my father’s early beginnings.

Part of this neglect on my part of attention to my father’s early history is that we did not have his family AT ALL in our childhoods as we had my mother’s mother.

I’m not going to go into detail about this right now, but did just find this statement my father made about his parents – and his mother – in this June 17, 1957 letter he wrote to my mother.  Evidently my mother had definitely had ‘words’ with my father’s parents, and my father states here that he supports my mother:

“I wrote a note to my parents yesterday.  I told them I wasn’t sorry for anything you said to them, that my only regret was that I’d failed to do it myself a long time ago.  Don’t think that I have any idea of making up to them – I simply wanted to put them straight.  I don’t want them to have any idea that this was your doing.  I think that woman has things just the way she wants them and to H – with her!”

In considering the profoundly critical influence that mothers (and other early caregivers) have on infant-child body-brain development – including attachment patterns – these words my father wrote seem to indicate that he DID NOT have a warm, easy, loving, caring attachment relationship with either of his parents – including his mother.

What influence did my father’s mother have on the way he developed that led eventually to my father’s ability to be such a ‘perfect match’ for such the abusive and ‘unstable’ woman that my mother was?  I would have to include a lot of thinking in my forensic autobiographical study to try to figure out as specifically as I might be able to – what on earth happened early on during his development TO MY FATHER that made him so willing and able to support my mother no matter what she EVER did – during all the years of my childhood (and beyond, though he finally divorced her after 37 years of marriage).

I am too tired to go off on THAT search.  But neither could I ignore my father’s words in this 1957 letter I am transcribing today…..

[We do know that my father’s only brother and his only sister both died of alcoholism as did my father’s father.  How happy could his mother have been?  In 1990 my father told me that while he was growing up his mother never left her house except for required shopping and never had anyone come over to visit.  I strongly suspect depression – and if she was depressed from the time my father was born (he was not a wanted child), her depression would have greatly impacted my father’s body-brain development.]

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+ANOTHER ‘NASTY GRAM’ FROM MY MOTHER TO HER MOTHER RE: 6 YEAR OLD ME

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Here’s the next letter that follows the one I mentioned in the last post.  When I write about ‘where was my grandmother to protect me?’ – even after our move away from her to Alaska – my mother’s attitudes are clear in her words here.  This battle ‘over Linda’ between my mother and her mother had been going on since the day I was born.

November 26, 1957 Tuesday

“Dear Mother,

Bill brought home ‘the letter’ last night that you addressed wrong – isn’t it funny how you can do something like that.  I did it many times last summer.

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.  She does wear pretty dresses to school and looks like a Princess in her beautiful jacket (when it’s clean!!)  I no longer wish to discuss it with you and I will appreciate no further comments and psychological theories from you!  Save them for the Cahill’s [her brother’s family] – I’m sure they’ll welcome them – I never have and I especially don’t now.

We feed, clothe and love our children and we will discipline them and reward them as WE see fit now and in the future!!!!!  They are our responsibility – we brought them into the world – they’re NOT your children ‘only your grandchildren’.  PERIOD.

* * * * *

The weather has turned cold here but we like it.  The temperature has gone down to 18° nights and 20° and 22° days.  There’s no snow on the ground – although weather report predicts it today.  But it looks as if it’s snowed as the ground has a thick white coat of frost which remains all day now and the trees are also heavy with frost.  The creek is partially frozen and has widened considerably.  Parts of the surface are ice but the water still runs swift beneath and around the ice.  In places there are big chunks of ice and icicles hand around edges and from trees where water has splashed.  It’s fun to watch the changes – it looks more like a pond now, in places and although rough in spots will be good place for children to learn to ice skate when frozen solid!”

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Talk about crazy making!  It was like  the terrible abuse did not exist.  My mother could wave her magic wand and VOILA!  We are NOT talking about the terrible things done to me, we are talking about the marvels of today’s Alaskan weather!  See:  *AGE 6 – FIRST GRADE — NIGHT ON THE STOOL

My mother would probably have ACTUALLY liked to KILL her own mother for her interfering ‘on behalf of me’ – but she didn’t have to.  My mother simply CONTROLLED her mother.  Like a baseball mis-hit that disappears out of sight – nobody bothers to look for it – life just keeps on going.  In cases of severe infant-child abuse, that’s mostly what I believe DOES happen.  (These are NOT easy letters for me to read.)

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At the end of this November 26 letter, mother adds a postscript, which in my thinking is a complete sham.  The  concern for my mother actually has nothing to do with money.  Her concern is that my grandmother be prevented from ever ‘interfering’ with how my mother treated me, as she had made clear at the beginning of this same letter.  Everything in this postscript is a deflection away from THIS fact:

“P.S.  I hope I never have to mention again about children.  I don’t want to feel I can’t tell you about children or say something without a barrage of letters of advise following.

So once and for all:

We want no financial assistance in any way from now on.

Only birthday and Xmas etc. gifts and those inexpensive and no more spent on our children please by you than we can spend on them!  I don’t want Grandma giving them expensive gifts – love and thought count just as much.

We’re tight financially now and will be for two years but even if I were a millionaire I want children to learn the value of $ and saving and spending own allowance etc. – also to be considerate, polite and thoughtful.  I want to bring them up the way WE see fit – it’s one reason we wanted to come up here.

* In order to bring up our children in our own way – as we see fit!!!

I don’t want them to be materialistic or have false standards – I think it will be far more possible here than in Southern California.

We intend to scrimp and save and don’t want you (please) influencing them in any way!

You’re their grandma – their only one now – and they need grandmotherly love and we need love too.

Use your well-earned $ $ on yourself.  Take trips, buy pretty clothes for you.  Do things! – Go places!

From now on let’s limit your Birthday gifts to children to 10.00 or under and Xmas 5.00 a piece.  NO MORE!!”

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+DISORGANIZED-DISORIENTED INSECURE ATTACHMENT – AT THE CORE OF ‘BORDERLINE’

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When I wrote my reply to the comment at the end of my last post, saying that with my disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder I feel BETTER when I am outside organizing the dirt in my yard, feel better when I am oriented during daylight hours with my massive adobe yard project – I meant exactly what I said.

Now I had to take off my sweaty gloves and stand my shovel up against the tree so I could take a little break and come in here to my computer to write these words:

While I am not a ‘professional expert’ and cannot make any statements of fact about insecure attachments or Borderline Personality Disorder unless I dig around to find what the ‘legitimate’ researchers are saying about both conditions, I do know an awful lot about my dead Borderline mother and about myself as the survivor of her 18 years of terrible abuse.

While I believe it is possible to have a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment ‘disorder’, or pattern set within the very early developing infant-child body-brain WITHOUT ending up with the particular constellation of physiological body-brain patterns that we name Borderline Personality Disorder, I believe that EVERY Borderline HAS a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment ‘disorder’-pattern built within their body-brain.

I do not believe it is incorrect to say that Borderlines suffer with the following (please follow these active links for the source of these words):

“The Abandonment Wound in and of Borderline Personality Disorder

At the heart of Borderline Personality Disorder lies abandonment. Abandonment trauma, abandonment depression, abandonment fears, and the deep and most primal narcissistic intra-psychic injury a human being can ever hope to survive – the core wound of abandonment.”

I do, however, believe that the best hope for understanding the dynamics of this kind of wounding and the best hope for healing is naming this ‘disorder’ by the closest name we REALLY have for it – a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder.

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I am becoming more clear every moment I am alive now about how my attachment disorder creates the patterns by which I organize and orient my self.  This serious attachment disorder, I believe, originates when early caregiver interactions harm a developing infant-child in an unsafe and insecure attachment environment so that the development of a healthy, stable, whole autonomous SELF cannot possibly happen.  Rather than being organized and oriented within our own body-brain with good strong super highways of information flow back and forth between the world and our SELF, we pattern our lives by attaching to person, places, things, and processes that we can ASSOCIATE with rather than DISSOCIATE from.

Through this process we create our ongoing existence as we find meaning in our life.  This is what my mother did as she organized and oriented herself around her babies and children (for good and for bad), around her super housewife activities, around ‘friends’ and ‘neighbors’ who she first loved and then hated, around her husband, around the many, many locations she moved herself to – including Alaska and ‘her’ mountain homestead.

But my mother had no ability to consciously reflect upon her insecure attachment disorder.  I can now see how this same disorganized-disoriented attachment works within my own self, but I cannot make myself WELL.  Fortunately I manage to not harm others.  Fortunately I can turn my need to connect to my version of a self through work with my hands – organizing cut strips of cloth into crocheted rugs, organizing shards of old dishes I find in the abandoned city dump into mosaics, organizing letters on my keyboard into lines of text, and by organizing the dirt in my yard so that I can then organize little plants out there that I will orient myself to take care of.

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It is, then, this disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment ‘disorder-pattern’ that I was forced into developing within my own infant-child growing body-brain as I survived my mother’s terrible abuse of me that I ‘inherited’ from her (with my father’s involvement in her abuse).  Yet while I have this insecure attachment as she did, complete with all the dissociations and re-associations that it brings, I did not develop the patterns of Borderline Personality Disorder within my growing body-brain as she did.

I am very lucky, more fortunate than words can ever possibly tell, that this did not happen to me.  At the same time my life of well-being was ‘stolen’ from me, just as my mother’s was.  Until we actually NAME the insecure attachment patterns that are at the physiological foundation of Borderline Personality Disorder, I do not believe we can truly address the source-cause of BPD or recognize the damage it does to the offspring of these parents.

I can at least tell that people exist as entities unto their own self.  My mother could not do this.  She could not detect where the ‘borderline’ was that keeps people separate from one another.  She could not keep her continual and massive projections within her own mind out of the world around her.  We ALL need to understand what this really means, because it matters.

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+INFANT-CHILD ABUSE: WE NEVER STOP TRYING TO HEAL

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If there’s one thing I have learned from my work with words it is that if words have something they want to say they will not only haunt me, they will swarm around inside of my head like a cloud of busy, nasty gnats that will pester me continually until I write them down.  Who am I to argue?  I have some errands to run and I need to leave the house and go into town, but before I do I choose to give these words their say.

For the resource-hungry among you, I am thinking this morning about something I read in the writings of Dr. Diana Fosha a few years back.  Without taking the time at this moment to explain what her Accelerated Experiential-Dynamic Psychotherapy is all about, I will simply suggest that you follow these active links as well as do a Google search about the work that Dr. Fosha is involved in.

What my words want to say this morning is that when Dr. Fosha says that human beings ALWAYS know deep inside of their self at their core what they need to heal and how they need to do it – like we instinctively know which way to tip a picture hanging at a crooked angle on the wall to straighten it out – when early infant-child trauma, neglect and abuse change the way a person’s body-nervous system-brain-mind-self develops from the start, well, we can simply lose ‘our way’.

In the grand picture of life, my mother did no more and no less than any other living organism, on their most basic, fundamental cellular level will do.  Everything my mother did was in effort to correct something within her that was wrong so that she could make it right.  In other words, taken from this perspective, all of life only has one choice if it is going to continue on being alive:  HEAL or DIE.

When I wrote the other day about the human specie’s opioid system as it is designed to help us form our required life-sustaining attachment systems (see post:  +FEELING GOOD AND A FULL TOILET TANK) I wasn’t joking.  Being born as a healthy infant into an early safe and secure attachment caregiving environment means that when we have a need someone appears to help us so that the blissful state that is innately ours (when our opioid system’s receptors are full) is continually reinstated.  That, to me, is what heaven on earth is all about no matter how we want to think about it.

When early attachments to caregivers are NOT safe and secure, something changes inside of our body as we develop and, as Dr. Allen Schore describes, our inner SET POINT that is supposed to be developed to return us to a state of balanced equilibrium and calm (what I call bliss) simply never gets formed in the right way or at the right ‘place’.

So when a survivor of the kind of early experiences during development doesn’t get this calm center set point, it doesn’t mean that the body won’t continually try to balance itself out, anyway.  This, to me, is the fundamental task of any immune system.  A continual, never-ending quest for healing in ones lifetime will happen, but unless there is enough of the right information, healing itself will not happen.

My mother’s life followed this pathway.  Everything she did, although of course she had no way of knowing it, was in some way related to her physiological need to reach this calm, safe and secure balance point of inner equilibrium that was denied her in her earliest development.

I have some things to do right now, so hopefully letting these words line themselves up in order across these pages will be enough to stop them from pestering me for awhile.

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+OWNING THE BURDENS CREATED BY CHILD ABUSE

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I’ve been thinking about my mother all morning as I worked out in the heat adding onto my adobe walkway.  I am trying to define my feelings about her and about her life.  I thought about ‘pity’, ‘compassion’ and ‘regret’.  I can’t become clear about my feelings or define them until I understand more about what these three words actually mean in our language.

I have always shied away from using the word ‘pity’ even in my thinking because, to me, the word has a tinge of a self-righteousness, a stance and perspective that I consider to be connected to a personal shortcoming rather than to an asset.  I looked this word up online and Webster’s defines the word this way:

PITY

Etymology: Middle English pite, from Anglo-French pité, from Latin pietat-, pietas piety, pity, from pius pious

Date: 13th century

1 a : sympathetic sorrow for one suffering, distressed, or unhappy b : capacity to feel pity
2 : something to be regretted <it’s a pity you can’t go>

synonyms pity, compassion, commiseration, condolence, sympathy

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With this clarification I can tell that my concern about taking a ‘self-righteous’ perspective IS tied to how I feel about ‘piety’ and ‘pious’ in general.  I don’t like either of those words for some reason I can’t quite grasp.  Yet words by themselves do not contain either negative or positive.  What is it about this word that causes me to want to shudder and run?

PIOUS

Etymology: Middle English, from Latin pius

Date: 15th century

1 a : marked by or showing reverence for deity and devotion to divine worship b : marked by conspicuous religiosity <a hypocrite—a thing all pious words and uncharitable deeds — Charles Reade>
2 : sacred or devotional as distinct from the profane or secular : religious <a pious opinion>
3 : showing loyal reverence for a person or thing : dutiful
4 a : marked by sham or hypocrisy b : marked by self-conscious virtue : virtuous
5 : deserving commendation : worthy <a pious effort>

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The word ‘pious’ is a young word in our English language, and no doubt directly entered our cultural awareness through the influence of ‘the church’.  Knowing my mother’s focal obsession with ‘good versus evil’ was also tied in some vague yet powerful way with ideas contained in Christian religion does not make me eager to embrace this concept.

Yet while the definition of ‘pity’ does coincide with the thoughts I have been having about my mother and her life today, it is not a word that ‘rings true’ to me about how I feel in response to her and her life today.  So I will look further into this synonym for ‘pity’:

COMPASSION

Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French or Late Latin; Anglo-French, from Late Latin compassion-, compassio, from compati to sympathize, from Latin com- + pati to bear, suffer — more at patient

Date: 14th century

: sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it

synonyms see pity

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This word, ‘patient’ did come into my thoughts as I sloshed wet mud into my adobe mold this morning.  I don’t know which way this word is connected to compassion – as a suffering ‘patient’ or as one who needs to ‘be more patient’?

When this word appeared in my thoughts it was connected to my thinking that nobody who has not suffered infant and/or child abuse can EVER really have a clue what ‘it’ is.  Most people in our culture have some sort of understanding about what ‘child abuse’ is, and yet if anyone had ever asked my mother or my father if there was ‘child abuse’ going on in their home they would have said “NO!”  If anyone had asked my mother’s mother if ‘child abuse’ ever happened to my mother, she would have also said “NO!”

My thinking about how ‘everyone’ assumes that they know what child abuse is at the same time that those who are committing child abuse are mostly NOT EVER going to accept the reality of the abuse they commit led me to the word ‘patient’.

The ONLY way the truth about what child abuse IS will be really KNOWN is if the public LISTENS to what infant-child abuse survivors have to say.  Yet there’s even a very big problem with THIS approach.  Just as child abuse perpetrators are not likely to NAME or OWN the abuse they commit against children, MANY, MANY infant abuse and child abuse survivors are not going to NAME what happened to them, either.

My mother certainly NEVER used ‘child abuse’ in her description of what happened to her in her infancy and childhood.  Do we think if we don’t NAME infant and ‘child abuse’ that IT NEVER REALLY HAPPENED?

This line of thinking led me again to the word ‘patient’ in terms of how ‘patient’ the public needs to be in supportive and affirming ways so that those who have OBVIOUSLY suffered greatly from ‘child abuse’ can be encouraged to KNOW the reality of what happened to them in their childhood, and to speak about it!

Now I wonder about someone who is sick, injured, wounded and is a ‘patient’.  What does this word actually mean?

PATIENT

Adjective

Etymology: Middle English pacient, from Anglo-French, from Latin patient-, patiens, from present participle of pati to suffer; perhaps akin to Greek pēma suffering

Date: 14th century

1 : bearing pains or trials calmly or without complaint
2 : manifesting forbearance under provocation or strain
3 : not hasty or impetuous
4 : steadfast despite opposition, difficulty, or adversity
5 a : able or willing to bear —used with of b : susceptible, admitting <patient of one interpretation

Noun

Date: 14th century

1 a : an individual awaiting or under medical care and treatment b : the recipient of any of various personal services
2 : one that is acted upon

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WOW!  How many ‘child abuse’ survivors had any choice BUT to bear the pains and trials of their lives ‘calmly’ and ‘without complaint’?  Did we have any choice other than to ‘manifest forbearance under provocation and strain’?  We could not act hastily or impetuously in any way that would have altered the course of our abusive childhoods.  We could not speed our childhood up like fast-forwarding a movie so that we could escape our abuse any sooner.

We had no choice but to be ‘steadfast despite opposition, difficulty and adversity’.  We HAD TO BE ABLE AND WILLING TO BEAR our suffering from what was done to us.  The alterative would have been death.  And, yes, we were turned into ‘patients awaiting care’.  We were wounded, hurt and suffering from the ways that those who had power over us ‘acted upon us’ – in the opposite of a healing way.  And we sure were not ‘recipients of any personal services’ that would have helped us.

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This topic is obviously ABOUT suffering:

SUFFER

Etymology: Middle English suffren, from Anglo-French suffrir, from Vulgar Latin *sufferire, from Latin sufferre, from sub- up + ferre to bear — more at sub-, bear

Date: 13th century

Which goes directly to what we had to ‘bear’:

BEAR

Etymology: Middle English beren to carry, bring forth, from Old English beran; akin to Old High German beran to carry, Latin ferre, Greek pherein

Date: before 12th century

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There’s the old word – ‘bear’ – literally in its roots connected to carrying.  And that IS what we did.  As I have mentioned over time the afflictions caused to us by infant and child abuse actually built themselves into our body as we grew and developed and changed us.

But what I am thinking about today is  the difference between silently carrying what happened to us – often while we don’t even KNOW the truth ourselves about the infant and child abuse we suffered – versus KNOWING the truth, having words for the truth so that we can, as survivors think thoughts in words and communicate our truth about our abuse to others and to our perpetrators if appropriate.

If I think about my mother and her life in terms of ‘patient’, she was patient until her dying breath.  She bore and carried what had happened to her as an infant-child and to my knowledge NEVER was able to KNOW the truth.  This kind of continued patience, a pattern set up early, early in life, does not help a person to heal.  It helps them to become an increasingly ‘sick’ and suffering patient who cannot ask for or receive the healing help they most need to ‘get better’.

As hard as it might sometimes be for me to understand that what my mother did to me was caused by what was done to her, I want to understand that all my mother truly knew in her lifetime was suffering.  Her suffering increased with every breath she ever took, and led to her terrible suffering at death.  As for me, I would rather ‘suffer while I bear the burden of compassion for my mother’ than not.

My personal mission is to KNOW what happened to both her and me – to give this knowledge words – and to encourage every single person who suffers from infant abuse and child abuse and the burden this abuse creates to speak their truth while the rest of us patiently listen.

This process, to me, is where ‘child abuse’ prevention begins.

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REGRET

Etymology: Middle English regretten, from Anglo-French regreter, from re- + -greter (perhaps of Germanic origin; akin to Old Norse grāta to weep) — more at greet

Date: 14th century

transitive verb 1 a : to mourn the loss or death of b : to miss very much
2 : to be very sorry for <regrets his mistakes>intransitive verb : to experience regret

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+DISSOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER HAPPENS FOR FAMILIES!

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I went outside to work on my adobe landscaping project after I finished my last post, but here I am back again to capture my next sequence of thoughts:  A family can have a Dissociative Identity Disorder just like an individual person can.

Duh!  That makes perfect sense to me now that I noticed this!  I was thinking outside that if good ‘ole Newton had had to rely on a piece of a seed falling out of an ant’s mouth and hitting the ground to come up with his theory about gravity rather than relying on an apple falling off of the branch of a tree, maybe none of us today would quite understand what keeps us stuck into our shoes other than our laces (or velcro).

It’s no less true that the same forces that bring an ant’s lost scrap of food down to earth is the same force that dropped the apple, but without being able to witness a process within the format of a bigger picture, things can be easy to miss.

My story, my mother’s story, my family’s story is an extreme one.  Therefore it perhaps offers the opportunity to discover something that might happen within many families but is just as easy to miss as the ant’s dropped fleck.

Anyone who ends up in adulthood with an insecure attachment disorder due to inadequate good caregiver interactions from birth forward during critical stages of development simply ‘catches the ball’ that was passed to it by its caregivers and carries that ball forward.

It makes sense to me to say that NOBODY who suffers from major dissociational problems in their adult life could help but ‘catch’ those dissociational patterns from their parents just like offspring can catch AIDS or any of us can catch a contagious disease.

Therefore, if we consider Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) within the larger context, we will know without a doubt that the dis-order came from being raised in a family that ALSO had Dissociative Identity Disorder.

In a culture hep on believing that everyone is born ‘equal’ and therefore equally autonomous, we need to remember that being a fully healthy autonomous person ONLY happens if adequate safe and secure attachment interactions were available to build a truly healthy autonomous body-nervous system-brain-mind-self from the start of life.

It the safe and secure attachment requirements were not met a fully healthy and autonomous person will not be the end result.  Lack of autonomy goes right along with an insecure attachment disorder because they are essentially the exact same thing.

Without the development of autonomy (for reasons just stated) an individual will NOT have a stable, healthy, balanced, fully formed and benevolently functioning IDENTITY.

Humans are not designed in the biological factory of life to hatch from an egg.  We are designed to manifest our genetic potential interactively with the environment we are born into and formed by.  Ours is an adaptive, flexible, and highly purposeful design.  This design is the reason our species is still here.

Our developmental process – which continues to happen during every millisecond of our lifetime in our body as our genetic code continues to form us – happens through feedforward and feedbackward information loops.  If a major piece of information we receive and process is about a malevolent environment, we have no choice in our beginnings but to form our body in adaptation to these malevolent conditions.

That my mother was formed within an environment that was not benevolent enough and was too malevolent so that she formed an insecure attachment disorder meant that she was destined — without intervention or healing — to pass it onto her offspring.  Her attachment disorder included major dissociation due to the malevolent environment she was formed in.

My father also suffered from certain conditions from his birth that created his body-brain-mind-self to be less than autonomous, which made him a perfect match for my mother.  They meshed, enmeshed, and became ‘one person’ as their summer 1957 letters so clearly describe.  They formed a secondary identity based on their mutual interdependence on one another BECAUSE they lacked true safe and secure attachment within their own self.

This secondary identity could ASSUME the ‘outfits’ (like a wardrobe of clothing) of identity from external environmental influences that were NOT representative of WHO each of these persons COULD HAVE BEEN if they each had been raised within a safe and securely attached early environment  or of who they actually were (or could have been).

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This led me to thinking about what a challenge healing and positive change can be for a family just like it can be for an individual.  If the family is made up of insecurely attached people who have no fully formed healthy autonomous identity as separate individuals, the family will have a secondary identity that might as well BE not only the family but the individuals within it.

Family Dissociative Identity Disorder would mean that whatever systems are operating within the family, whatever patterns, actually ARE the family because there is no other autonomous identity present.  It would be not only extremely disorganizing and disorienting for a family to attempt to alter their family DID but also could be a nearly impossible goal if the autonomy of the individual members is not IMPROVED first.

This means to me that addressing the patterns of individual people’s insecure attachment within a family becomes the only reasonable first step that will be effective.  Every other change that is attempted will actually be just a continuation of ‘let’s assume another identity like a new suit of clothes’ patterns and will actually build up and add to the DID problems rather than offer the start of a solution.

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If I am correct, and in looking at the extreme picture of my family I think that I am, any so-called therapy or treatment offered to any member of a family that does not address the lack of autonomy that an unsafe and insecure attachment as the body-brain formed FIRST is actually supporting the Dissociative Identity Disorder of the family because it is feeding it.

Trying to insert ‘recovery’ into a family as if it is an outfit they can add to their repertoire of ‘things to wear’ is NOT addressing the core problem of the insecure attachment patterns within every family members body-brain that WILL be there to some extent.  The only alternative for any individual family member’s health and well-being happens ONLY if and when there is some safe and securely attached (and attachable-to) person in their life.  This is the number ONE resiliency factor.

Outside people (external resources) trying to assist a family to heal are not being representatives of safe and secure attachment if they are feeding the DID within the family rather than offering autonomous support based on the core facts of what caused a family to become so ‘sick’ in the first place and what will truly help them to heal.

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From Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD, your Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder Have trouble articulating who you are, or what you like? Do you find yourself conforming to whatever others in your current setting want you to be, with no real anchor? This week, learn more about identity issues in BPD.

Who Am I? BPD and Identity
Plenty of people without BPD struggle with identity issues, too. But people with BPD often have a very profound lack of sense of self.
Finding Meaning – The First Steps Toward Identity
If you struggle with your identity, you may wonder if there is anything you can do to “find yourself.” There are some things that can help you down the path– finding meaningful moments in your life can get you there.
Does Impulsive Behavior Interfere With Identity Formation?
Some clinicians believe that people with BPD struggle with identity issues because their behavior is so impulsive they have trouble defining “who they are” through their behaviors (which can be erratic and unpredictable). Learn more about impulsive behavior in BPD.
For Family and Friends of Individuals with BPD
Does someone you care about have BPD? BPD can affect all types of relationships, including friends, family members, and romantic partners. Learn more about how BPD may be affecting your relationship, how to cope when a loved one has BPD, and how you can help.

Must Reads

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

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+AUGUST 1957 – OUR FAMILY’S DISSOCIATION

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I am still hard at work on the seemingly unending job of transcribing the rest of my mother’s letters.  A title for the book coming out of this collection might be:  Mildred’s Romance with Alaska:  A Homesteading Adventure in Letters.

Here is a short section from the first letter my mother wrote once she arrived in her ‘Promised Land’.  “Transported’ is the word my mother used to describe how her traveling experience felt to her.  Many people know what the experience of rapid travel over great distances to a different place feels like.

What I find so interesting, having just worked my way through the nearly 80,000 words that transpired between my parents in their letters before my mother’s arrival in Alaska is that once she arrived THERE everything seemed to change right along with the change in place, the migration, that had happened for my family.

Reading my mother’s June and July 1957 letters, and then beginning to read her August 1957 letters if I didn’t KNOW the connection I would think an entirely different person was now writing.  Yet because I was a member of this family I know that nothing had REALLY changed – not my mother, not my father, and not our closed-door family dynamics.

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August 1, 1957 Thursday – Eagle River, Alaska

Dearest Mother (Charles and Carolyn)

It’s really hard to believe I am actually in Alaska!  I feel as if I were transported here on the Magic Carpet in Grandma’s stories she told when I was a little girl.

Airplane travel is certainly wonderful – I arrived in Anchorage at 10:45 yesterday morning – a half hour before scheduled, so Bill wasn’t there to greet us.

Really, Mom it was the most thrilling, exciting thing that has ever happened to me.  The trip here was all worth it just to have flown!  I could write you pages and pages just telling you about the flight but there’s so much I have to tell you.  I am bursting with news….

The children loved it, were as calm as could be.  I am still recovering.  It was a thrill, but also quite terrifying to climb 20,000 feet.  John ‘s nose was pressed to the window every minute!  (when he wasn’t sleeping).  Oh Mom, I am so anxious now for you to experience all I have – I know you’d be a wonderful traveler.  On the Northwest Orient Flight there were two Grandmothers coming up to see their daughters who had also migrated to Alaska.  One was in her 80s and the other about your age, was joining her daughter and family for a three week vacation – camping trip.  It was their third visit a piece!!!

(bold type is mine]

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And yet I wonder if the PLACE of suburban southern California had little to offer in terms of emotional resources for my family, especially for my mother, while Alaska did have something to offer her.

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Mother wrote this on a scrap of paper on the same August first day she wrote her first letter to her mother:

Second day in Alaska

We always have wild flowers on our table, picked by anxious to please tiny hands.  What greater pleasure is there then to watch small children discovering the wonder of nature in the woods – streams to watch flow, questions to answer – where does the water come from and where does it go, will it ever dry up?

Mommy are these berries good to eat?  Will this water really freeze and will we really have snow?  Yes, darling, yes darling and isn’t it a bit of heaven for us right here in the woodland and don’t you feel closer to God here as I do?  Yes, Mommy, yes and so our life in Alaska begins.

A Bit of Heaven In the Woods –

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“Always” here is obviously a relative term because we had only been in Alaska one single full day.  Mother’s use of this word ‘always’ is like a peep-hole to me through which I can watch in her writings the changes in attitude, mood, feelings, thoughts and hopes that my mother now expresses in her letters at the same time nothing has REALLY changed at all.

Insecure attachments caused my very early neglect, abuse, maltreatment and trauma – as these experiences form and change an infant-child’s growing body-brain, often include an altered experience of time.  Those altered time perceptions are part of what attachment experts can detect through their assessment tool, the Adult Attachment Interview because it is in the telling of one’s life story that these time alterations appear as they represent the underlying incoherency that trauma creates not only in a survivor’s story, but also as that incoherency has built the survivor’s body-brain.

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When I think about dissociation, I think about these altered perceptions of time and the changes in processing information regarding a person in their own life as time passes.  The second sentence my mother wrote in her August first letter makes a direct connection back to her very early childhood when her grandmother came to live in her home with her mother after her parents had divorced and her grandfather had died.

A magic carpet ride.  Being transported in time and space.  Dissociation does this as it ‘magically’ connects experiences from the past to ongoing experience in the present moment.  This connection process is always happening for everyone, but it is for those whose infant-childhoods did not pave a smooth, continuous highway of experience — because the breaks trauma and maltreatment created in their ongoing experience of life did not allow the connections to be made in the body-brain of the survivor in a smooth and continuous way — that dissociation enters the patterns of their thinking, feeling and actions.

Both of my parents chose to create a nearly complete ‘dissociation’ between the experiences of their past in Los Angeles’ suburbia and their new life as migrants to Alaska.  The reality of suburban living that they had previously organized and oriented their lives around disappeared.  They had virtually pulled the plug on most aspects related to their lives.  All the letters following the first of August 1957 include the new organizing and orienting PLACE of Alaska.

Yet for all the opportunities that this new place offered to my parents nothing within the dynamics of our family ACTUALLY changed.  There were just a multitude of different experiences that fed the same people that brought themselves to this new and different place.  My parents created a major dissociation between their old life and their new one, but all the patterns of body-brain-mind-self dissociations that had ALWAYS been inside of the individuals who transported themselves ‘on a magic carpet’ to America’s last frontier were still there.

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As I think about what my parents DID when they moved to Alaska, no matter what their conscious intentions might have been, I realize that at the same time my parents carried their own inner woundedness right on up to Alaska with them, they were at least amputating themselves and their family from the very real pollution and toxicity of life in the Los Angeles area.

If a wound has become so infected that gangrene sets in and beings to eat up all the healthy tissue surrounding the wound (not unlike how cancer metastasizes), and if the wound itself is not healing, the best move possible is to at least address the problems the gangrene is causing so that life can at least continue on.

When my parents amputated their lives from southern California and transported themselves and their children in a migration to the purity of the north land of Alaska, they took a good step in the rupture-and-repair process that IS healing itself.  In that place, from the moment of their arrival, a new definition of identity began.  The Alaskan Lloyds were born.  This identity was soon even further clarified, solidified and defined as we ‘became’ the Alaskan Homesteading Lloyds.

Yes, we traveled a long, long way from being the Los Angeles southern California suburbanite Lloyds.  Because my mother’s Borderline illness was never identified or healed, all we really accomplished was staying alive – not healing.  But this was certainly a giant step in the right direction and I don’t even want to think what the alternative could have been had our family stayed ‘down south’.

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+MEANDERING PONDERINGS ON WORDS AND OUR PERSONAL STORY

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There are some more words I need to say today, and some words that I need to borrow.  First I will say that I would rather apologize to bugs as I take their lives because I need to eat them than sell or give away any of my words – or my rights to them.

Secondly, I will say that when I had my vision in my teens, that vision revolved around a song rather than around a story.  In the beginning our species developed a musical brain before we developed our verbal one.  In the end, my healing, our individual healing of trauma and abuse is not only about healing our own story; it is about healing our own song.

I hear daily from my first grandchild’s mother, my daughter, about the growth and development of her son.  He smiles now, smiles that light up the world.  I assure my daughter that she is watching his little brain form, one caregiver interaction at a time.  His brain’s happy center is forming, the one he will rely on for the rest of his life – right now.  Right exactly now.

What my daughter also shares with me as she holds and cuddles him while talking to me on the telephone is the singing this newly forming little man does all of the time except when he is sound asleep.  His brain is preparing for speech, but in order for speech to come, in order for his words to appear, the bedrock of his musical brain is being formed – right now.  Right exactly now.

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The human race is going through a revolution right now.  Because we each live every moment as an intimate part of this revolution, we don’t usually pay attention to the part each of us is playing in this grand transformation.

I promised you some borrowed words, and here they are:

Perhaps you have heard of “Chief Joseph.”

“The man who became a national celebrity with the name “Chief Joseph” was born in the Wallowa Valley in what is now northeastern Oregon in 1840. He was given the name Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, or Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain, but was widely known as Joseph, or Joseph the Younger, because his father had taken the Christian name Joseph when he was baptized at the Lapwai mission by Henry Spalding in 1838.”  See this link for more information on the PBS website)

The following words were spoken by “Chief Joseph” in his surrender speech on October 5, 1877:

“I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Toohoolhoolzote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say, “Yes” or “No.” He who led the young men [Olikut] is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are — perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”

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From my own writer’s point of view, I find it significant that during this same year this important event also occurred:  The first step was taken by playwrights in 1777 that led to the French Assembly passing the first law in the world to officially recognize authors’ rights to their written words.

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From here, I now turn to some more borrowed words.  This time the words, used by President Roosevelt during his 1936 campaign radio address, are borrowed from their original source as they were originally spoken in 1779 by the American Revolutionary War hero, John Paul Jones as described in this paper on the biography of John Paul Jones written by Dennis M. Conrad.

These famous words — “I have not yet begun to fight.” – that Jones returned in battle to a British warship’s captain who had asked him if he was ready to surrender stand in stark contrast to the equally famous words spoken by “Chief Joseph,” “From where the sun now stands I will fight nor more forever.”

Both of these statements reflect the opposing ends of a continuum about personal and collective power in circumstances of great duress and conflict.  Both of these statements contain reference to our physiological nervous system’s ability to face obstacles by using some range of abilities linked to the human fight-flight response.

Jones and his crew prevailed in this Revolutionary war sea battle.  “Chief Joseph” and his people did not prevail against their enemy.  Both this success and failure came with the cost of great suffering and tragedy.  Both of these statements were born out of trying and traumatic conditions.

Jones and “Joseph” are long dead, but their words live on.

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On this website, “Quotes From Our Native Past,” I found these words:

“Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.”   Ancient Indian Proverb

As I returned to the out-of-doors this morning to continue working with the wet earth’s mud in my adobe-making project, I had this thought come through to me:  Just as we do not own the earth, we do not own our stories, our words, or the songs that spring out of the earth of our soul.

What we seem to THINK we own are the rights to our property, including our stories, words and songs.  Because I exist in a material world within a culture that values what it owns more than just about anything else, I cannot set myself, my words, or my writing process apart from the structures of my culture and society.  I therefore have had to take a stand regarding my RIGHTS to my words.

In the vision I had about singing in the wilderness when I was a teenager, I did not OWN the song that expressed itself through me.  Yet in the very real world I live in, the issue of RIGHTS becomes critical.  While I might rather this reality was different, I have to face the facts.

What I believe is that the healing of traumas and the impact and consequence of abuse happens at the same time we heal our story-song.  This is the revolution we are all participating in.  As a species we are involved in creating a terrible story-song for all of life on this beautiful world we live on.  We cannot separate our own individual healing from the healing of all.

Therefore, I cannot heal my own story without following with integrity the pathway that unfolds itself before me.  I cannot write about Universal Human Rights of children and adults while excluding from these rights our own right to tell and claim our personal story.

In an antagonistic world where competition for resources results in abuses of power on so many levels, the issue of Human Rights remains at the critical center of all that we do.  At the same time we can say that America had the right not only to fight a revolution to win its freedom from foreign rule, and that it had the right to destroy well over 350 Indigenous cultures within the boundaries of the land America claimed as its own, we can also say that great wrongs were committed that very few wish to recognize, claim or attempt to make some kind of restitution to those who were so unjustly doomed.

In an antagonistic world having rights honored versus forcing them to be relinquished matters.  When I married my second husband, and as he went through the process of legally adopting my daughter from my first marriage, I had to legally relinquish my parental rights as my daughter’s mother and then adopt her back again at the same time her new father did.  Even though it might have been a legal technicality, and even though the period of time I was actually NOT my own daughter’s mother, I will never forget how horrible this procedure felt to me.

In the same way I will not even for an instant relinquish my human rights to my own story, even though I do not ACTUALLY own the story itself – or the words that I use to tell it – any more than I own the earth I walk upon.

My desired solution is going to be the creation of a legal entity that is a Lloyd family publishing trust that will own the rights to my (and my parents’) words.  It will be the response-ability of this trust to take care of these words that do not belong to anyone individually.  I believe in the reality of ‘the bigger picture’ our human story belongs to our species if not more broadly to all of life itself.

Life is loaned to us as long as we are in our body.  When we leave here our story remains.  I WILL eat bugs rather than sell what does not belong to me in the first place if that is what it takes to keep what really is mine – my human right to HAVE a story in the first place — and then to ‘sing it’.

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+GETTING CLEAR ABOUT A DIFFICULT DECISION REGARDING MY WORDS

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If there is one thing that I suspect everyone with the so-called diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is familiar with, it’s the inner sound of what I call ‘the clamoring within’.  What does the word CLAMOR teach me this morning as I contemplate a writing offer that has been given to me – an offer whose aftershocks set off the noisiest inner clamor that I have experienced consciously in my lifetime?

CLAMOR

Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French clamour, from Latin clamor, from clamare to cry out — more at claim

Date: 14th century

1 a : noisy shouting b : a loud continuous noise
2 : insistent public expression (as of support or protest)

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The ‘public’ nature of this clamor I am experiencing happens because ‘all involved’ in the act of clamoring are making themselves present to me, and therefore conscious.  The ‘public’ IS my conscious awareness.

At age 58, I suffer from no delusion that the multiple voices clamoring within are ever going to so-called ‘integrate’, nor do I even desire that.  Every one of the perspectives I contain as grown-up Linda – the noisy and the silent ones – have a right to exist BECAUSE THEY EXIST.  I do not wish to extinguish them.  I do not wish to disrespect any of them.  I do not wish to bulldoze my way on down the road of my life without listening to and honoring what they know and what they have to say – if I pause long enough to listen.

If I give as many of these inner perspective-takers an equal voice and an equal voice in affairs of my life that matter to them, I already know the answer to a question that has been posed to me.  Without disclosing information that I have been asked to keep confidential regarding the ‘offering agency’, I – on my own – after taking a vote among those perspective-takers within me already have my answer.

The answer to the question as it has been posed to me in the present and as it may very likely be posed to me in the future is simply – “NO!”

I will not give any rights away to my words.  Not to anyone outside of The Lloyd Family, and not even to any single member of The Lloyd Family.  Everything that ever happens with my words belongs within an intimate construct that operates through consensus taking.

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The fantastic ‘thought factory’ of my body, my right brain and my left brain has fed me accurate information about my own inner truth about the reality of my word ownership.

Some clear images have appeared to me this morning from my body-right brain information channels.  The first one comes from the memory of a skinny, beaten and abused, lost and alone little girl of about nine years old.  She is gazing toward the edges of the highest mountain tops define where earth meets the deep blue Alaskan late summer sky.

This little girl, this me-memory person, stands frozen in time and space, listening to the approaching yet still-distant call of hundreds of Canadian geese heading on migration south.  There is no anticipation that I can think of that matches the wordless awe of this waiting.

And there they come!  High, high, high above her comes the very first goose sailing along at the front of this “V” over the dividing line of mountain and sky.  Behind this goose come the two separate wings and the air is filled with the wild goose fall song.

I didn’t know, of course, as a child that the head goose is the strongest and flies to cut the wind for the rest of its flock both to its right and to its left.  When the lead goose tires, it falls all the way back in the line and flies without effort at the final back tips of the “V.”  On up moves the next strongest goose – which is, by the time the other strongest goose tires, is now THE strongest goose.

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In this offer that I was just given, I can see the seeds of a reality as they appeared to me in another image:  The roots of trauma and abuse that are my experience from the time of my laboring with my mother to come into this world, are directly tied to the stout trunk of the tree that is me complete with strong, wide-spreading branches that feed ever-growing twigs.  This tree-of-me is approaching full leaf now, and the manifestations of its hard-worked for health (such as I have been able to accomplish degrees of it) take form in the ‘public world’ IN MY WORDS.

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The next image that came to me this morning is a Sacred one, and I do not write the following words with any disrespect.  What I understand about the Lakota and Dakota women’s participation in the Sacred Sundance is that they peel pieces of their skin from their arms and offer them with prayer in support of their men who are dancing.  The women’s sacrifice adds to the sacrifice of the men, and helps to make both the men and their prayers for help and healing stronger and more powerful.

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The clamoring voices of the perspective-takers within me have let me know that the words that I write, the final messages contained in these pieces of who Linda is, do not belong to any ‘big’ or ‘old’ or ‘single’ or ‘adult’ Linda.  They are part of a whole and they cannot be owned by anyone – not even the Linda that supposedly writes them.

I seriously doubt that any public agency representative or any other version of an outside publisher, is going to understand that the whole of who Linda is owns my/her words collectively.  That my story, in the end, is a strong one that can take a place with the lead geese of great migrating flocks of trauma-healing people, does not mean that it exists as an object, or as a thing that can be bought, sold, bartered or owned in any ordinary way.

My words do, however, BELONG somewhere.  I was deprived of my words for myself in my life (and their accompanying thoughts) throughout the 18-years of my torturous abusive childhood.  As these words are now being born, as my words open their wings and flap their way like butterflies out into the cosmos beyond my computer’s keyboard, they simply become what they are:  A part of Linda and her family’s living story.  These butterflies are sacred and do not wish to be captured in any way at any time along their pathway into existence by anyone else for profit.

My words are, therefore, not actually mine.  There is no single all-knowing, all-powerful Linda person who can ultimately determine the fate of my words.  They belong with and to an entity that does not LEGALLY exist yet – but I am becoming quite clear that the legal entity of The Lloyd Family Publishing Trust needs to be formed in THIS material world before any of my words leave my Stop-the-Storm blog.

How that is going to happen, where, who is going to help me with this next step is at present unknown.

There.  That being decided and said the clamoring settles.  If anyone wishes to publish anything I write in any format they will need to have my permission to do so from The Lloyd Family Publishing Trust – CERTAINLY it cannot happen the other way around, no matter how well-intentioned or enticing any outside publishing offer might be.

I am free to leave this keyboard and go outside to continue making something out of earth-mud.

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+CHILD ABUSE: THE POWER OF THE TRUTH AND THE DANGERS OF THE LIES

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NOTE:  This post evidently has a formatting life of its own!  I can find no way to change what appears in big bold letters below.  I did not bold this part of this post, nor can I change it!

I do a lot of a different sort of thinking while I am outside spending hours digging dirt, mixing mud and laying adobe bricks in my newly forming walkway.  This morning as I think about this different sort of thinking I realize that I could probably call it ‘Jello thinking’, because that is the image that popped into my mind as I ‘looked inside my body’ to see what happens in this process.

As I have mentioned so many times before, because my body-brain had to form in the midst of ongoing and terrifying trauma, I had to change in my development and now neither my left- nor my right-brain hemispheres operate ‘normally’, nor does the corpus callosum region between them that passes back and forth information that they need to understand together.

(SEE this article for background:  McLean Researchers Document Brain Damage Linked to Child Abuse and Neglect – Release: McLean Hospital, December 14, 2000)

So it takes me much more time to put things together in my thinking, and even then I can never be assured that I end up with the same conclusions that I would have if infant-child abuse had not so changed my body-brain.  But I am left to work with the end result of these changes – who I am today – and I do the best that I can.

Which brings me back to my ‘Jello thinking’ process.  At the same time I am working my way through the transcription of my parents’ 1957 June and July letters to one another, which now includes over 60,000 words and I’m not done yet, I realize that the best thing I could ever hope for is that some day some special person finds these letters and studies them thoroughly with an attachment-informed mind toward the completion of a Doctoral thesis.

I would ask the question of any one of us who has some experience with opening a little rectangular box of Jello, who have ever boiled up water and poured the Jello’s brightly colored crystals into it, stirred them around until they dissolved, and then put the mixture into the refrigerator to cool – returning periodically to stir the mixture to make sure it solidifies without the thick gelatin coating on the top – at what point is the Jello, well, Jello?

Is it Jello in its powdered form?  Is it Jello while it is still soupy?  Or is it only ACTUALLY Jello when it is firm and ready to serve and to eat?

At the same time I would ask, “When is a thought ACTUALLY a thought?  Is it a thought only when it appears with proper grammar, complete in words within a sentence?”  Are the ‘body thoughts’ that I have without words while I am working to transcribe these letters and as I then go work with my hands in the mud ACTUALLY thoughts?  When has a thought ‘Jello-ed up’?

Even though as the daughter of these two people who lived with them for 18 years, and as a person who was nearly six years old at the time they were written, I perhaps SHOULD be able to put my finger on the pulse of what was going on between my parents these 53 years ago, I cannot do it.  I realize as I write this that I can’t ‘put my finger on the pulse’ of what was going on between them because what’s really going on is that there is a terrible gaping wound within BOTH of these people that means that they were both actually bleeding to death.  Would I look for the pulse in their letters while ignoring the fact the fact of their massive, mutual and mortal hemorrhaging?

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Because I have made an agreement with myself to simply publish the collection of my mother’s letters with their responses intact without censorship or editorial comment, I am attempting to ignore most of my reactions to their words contained in these spewing ‘love letters’ between Mother and Father.  I am saving my reactions for some future date when the letters have been completely transcribed, edited for format and published.  THEN I hope to write my version of this ‘Alaskan homesteading adventure story’ that belongs to my family.

In the meantime there are some glaring topics that appear to me right now.  They are as hard to ignore as someone else’s on-bright headlights as they drive too close to your rear bumper behind you as you drive down a dark highway in the middle of a moonless night.  Those lights are reflecting straight into your eyes, glaring from your rear-view mirror – and you have to do something about it.

Closing your eyes and driving blindly is not a good option.  Do you put on your sunglasses?  Do you flip the switch on your mirror that allows you to dim the reflection?  Do you slap the mirror so it aims the distracting and irritating brilliance anywhere else but into your eyes?  Do you slow down or pull over to the side of the highway, hoping the car behind you will pass so you can watch their red taillights disappear into the distant darkness ahead of you?  Or do you ignore the situation and keep on driving like the lights that belong to the driver behind you don’t even exist?

How much of what my body-brain knows as the truth about what was ACTUALLY going on between my parents in their lives do I pay attention to as I work to transcribe their letters?  I often imagine what readers of my parents’ letters might see in them.  Will they detect the madness?  Will they in their innocence and naivety believe that what they are reading IS ACTUALLY a love story?  Can I leave those readers alone to experience their reading without my added comments about what a totally living hell our home life truly was?

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I am learning to watch how my brain processes all this information.  My body has very real and powerful FEELING reactions to this work I am doing.  When someone asked me last week why I continue to do this work if it is so difficult and I don’t anticipate getting anything personally helpful out of the process, I told them, “I do this work because I believe it is important for others.  I believe there is something here that will be helpful to somebody else.”

In the meantime my right brain, tied as it intimately is with the nonverbal knowledge of the history in my body of 18 years of abuse from these exact same parents – abuse that was as hidden from the world of words as it remained hidden in the words of their letters – I feel as if I am hanging onto the broken end of a still very hot live electrical high wire.  I am a sort of conduit for the truth about the reality of the damage that a severe Borderline Personality Disorder person can do in their lifetime, particularly to their children (and to their mate).

I am very grateful that I can go outside in the pure desert air, in the sunshine, among the birds and the butterflies that stop to cool their tiny, dainty feet on the newly formed wet mud bricks, and in the midst of the sounds of Mexican life that drift through the air over the dividing borderline between our two countries – and ground out the terrible intensity of the truth about what ACTUALLY happened during my childhood and during the childhood of my siblings.

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But before I go out there today to sling my mud and make my bricks there are two things I NEED to mention.  My body, my right brain, my left brain are not going to let me leave this computer screen until I say these two things:

(1)  When my mother first wrote to my father in Alaska that she was going to relinquish the rented house she was staying in as she waited in Los Angeles for him to send for us to join him, and move into her Mother’s house, my father VERY CLEARLY warned her not to do it.  While I am not going to delve into their letters at this moment to find all of the exact words that transpired between them on this topic, I will say that my mother obviously ignored everything that my father had to say on the topic and made the move anyway.

By the time my mother has given up the rented house (which she really HAD to do because there wasn’t any money available to pay the rent), and moved in with her mother, and things went as terribly as my father had told her they would, and by the time my mother writes my father her pitiful and desperate sob story about how terrible things were indeed going at her mother’s, my father simply responds back to her by saying in his July 24, 1957 letter:

“I hate your family for making things so miserable for you!  Only a few days left, why couldn’t they let you leave in peace?”

“I have the letter you wrote Sunday night, and it’s heartbreaking to read.  I can sense the way you felt, and I know what a horrible time you’ve been having.  I feel so responsible for letting you in for all this.  It seems as though I should have been able to prevent it somehow.”

He then concludes this letter with this:

“Oh Mildred I love you, love you, love you! X X X X X Hurry to me now as fast as you can darling – I love and wait only for you.

Your Adoring Husband, Bill”

He didn’t say “I told you so.”  Did he think that?  Did he even remember he’d warned her?  Did he wonder at all at her decision to ignore his warning and move in with her mother in spite of them?  Nor does he seem to have taken any kind of an objective stance so that he could question whether or not what my mother was describing ACTUALLY happened that way or not.  He doesn’t indicate that perhaps his wife caused the difficulties to erupt with her mother.  He simply unequivocally believes her and supports her in her reported version of reality.

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By body-brain put the information just presented above in (1) with this information:

(2)  I have retained intact a memory from this time period before my 6th birthday that has never changed.  In this memory we arrive at this mountain resort cabin my mother is writing from with my beloved 14-month-older brother carefully carrying his beloved turtle, Timothy inside a Chinese food take-out container.  John was terribly worried about the affect the hot summer’s day was having on his pet.  In my memory I am walking right behind John as he enters the cabin, locates the kitchen, stands in front of the refrigerator, opens the door of the freezer as he continues to talk to Timothy.

I understood what my brother, who had just turned 7 was doing and why.  He put the little container with Timothy in it into the freezer to cool him off.

I also remember John’s horror upon discovering he had forgotten Timothy in the freezer.  In my memory I am again standing very close to John as he opens the freezer, removes the container, opens the top, and finds his beloved pet frozen inside a block of ice.  I remember his heartbroken tears.

While John has no memory 53 years later of the turtle, let alone of what happened to the turtle, I have NEVER forgotten my memory of it.  So when I read the following words last night in my mother’s July 15, 1957 Monday letter, I went into a form of ‘memory shock’.

“I drove to the town and lake this morning, poor Mother got sick after breakfast and had to go to a gas station and when we returned we found John’s turtle dead from the heat yesterday.  He broke down completely and cried and cried.  I tell you it’s been awful.”

I am still processing the confusion I feel over the conflicting accounts – mine and now my mother’s – about the death of Timothy.

First of all, she rented this mountain cabin beginning on Saturday July 13th and I would expect that this Saturday is the day that we drove through the heat to the mountain.  If my memory was accurate, the turtle would have been placed by my brother in the freezer on the Saturday when we first arrived at the cabin.  My mother is writing on a Monday and is referring to Sunday’s heat as being the contributor to the demise of John’s beloved turtle who died according to her version of the story on Monday.

This state of inner confusion that I feel about these conflicting accounts is typical of what happens to me most of the time when I try to find my own version of reality and hold onto it in the face of my mother’s version of reality.  Working my way around and through this tiny turtle story is significantly important for me to do.

Second of all, a turtle is (DUH!) a reptile.  It cannot regulate its own body temperature.  If a turtle gets too hot, hot enough that its life is endangered it does not wait a day or two to have its fatal reaction.  It simply DIES when the overheating happens.

This is an extremely important turning point inside my own being about how my mother’s version of reality SELDOM matched the truth!  It is also an extremely important example of how subtly, thoroughly and effectively she was ALWAYS able to manipulate everyone else’s version of reality so that it matched her own.

I hold onto this FACT as if it is a life preserver thrown to me as I sink below the surface of deadly waters:  An overheated turtle does not wait to die.

Therefore, without my having to suspect MYSELF I can tell immediately within my mother’s letter that there is something fishy about her story.

This FACT helps me gain my own footing about my own memory of what happened.  For some reason, perhaps because he was a little boy, perhaps because of my mother’s continual creation of strange excitement that sucked everyone around her into her chaotic storms, perhaps because my brother was distracted by being in this foreign environment with grandmother present, and everything that was going on around him – another FACT of the matter seemed to be that John simply forgot his turtle in the freezer from late Saturday until sometime Monday.

If I give myself permission to believe my own self rather than believe my mother’s version of this story, I can learn right here, within this single, tiny, nearly insignificant (in the grand drama of our family’s life) event of the death of my brother’s turtle how expertly my mother’s created her twisted version of stories that she would tell my father.

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This is an example of the insidious way my mother controlled her family – ALL of us, including her own mother when it suited her.  (See post:  +A WORD ABOUT INSIDIOUS INFANT-CHILD ABUSE.)

I believe that there is AN EXTREMELY, CRITICALLY IMPORTANT POINT here.  This is an example of what MANY severe infant-child abuse survivors experienced when they were little.  It is an example of how difficult it is for we survivors to EVER BE ABLE TO VALIDATE OUR OWN REALITY in the face of the twisted, distorted, unbelievably destructive nature of living with ANY ABUSIVE BORDERLINE PARENT!

When people ask me why I continue this nasty work on my forensic autobiography even though it is ‘upsetting’, and I tell them there is something in this work that MATTERS to other survivors, these two examples are proof to me that I am right.

It NEVER mattered what the seed of an event ACTUALLY was, whether my mother was communicating about her terrible feelings within her relationship with her own mother or the death of the turtle that was so loved by her little son.  At the center of EVERYTHING that my mother touched was her Borderline Personality Disorder.

My mother was a MASTER manipulator of the truth.  She was a MASTER manipulator of all information about what happened within her family.  In the same way that my mother was expertly able to manipulate what my father knew about her fight with her mother or the death of John’s turtle, she also expertly manipulated what my father KNEW about me.

At the same time my father was present and KNEW about many of the terrible things my mother did to me he NEVER ONCE ‘interfered’ to stop her or to protect me in any way.  What last night’s lightning bolt of insight hit me with and triggered deep within my entire being by these two statements between my parents I am citing here today, was the realization that my father existed within my mother’s Borderline world and no other.

My father was my mother’s SAP, and everything about their relationship MEANT that exactly what happened TO ME – HAPPENED.

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Did my mother consciously KNOW and CHOOSE to distort and twist the story she told my father about the turtle?  Did she consciously KNOW and CHOOSE to distort and twist the story she told my father about ‘the fight’ she had with her mother?

What possible REASON might my mother have had to LIE to my father about the turtle’s death?  Was she afraid the truth would have implicated HER in some way?  Was she afraid that admitting the truth of her young son’s FORGETTING about his precious turtle in the freezer would somehow make her husband think badly of his – HER son – so that his view of HER through the actions of HER son would somehow reflect back BADLY on her?

The truth is that this entire topic is sickening.  That the underlying reality this topic addresses consumed my entire 18-year childhood (and that of my siblings) and hence changed our entire physiological development body-brain-mind-self and hence the entire quality of the lifetime of all of us, MATTERS!

It also MATTERS to me that nobody who has not lived with a severely abusive Borderline parent cannot even BEGIN to imagine what we endured and what we have survived.  Nor can these other people BEGIN to imagine how the madness of such a parent permeated everything we experienced not only when we were little, but also for the rest of our lives.

It is nearly impossible to disentangle THE TRUTH, let alone OUR TRUTH, from the all-encompassing, all-pervasive MENTAL MANIPULATIONS that accompany severe infant-child abuse by a severe Borderline parent.  To be able to actually find the truth means that we have to be able to detect the lies.

This lie-truth detection process is about as impossible to accomplish as it would be to consciously detect and then choose which air molecules we are going to breath before we inhale them.

Yet we survivors cannot give up on our task of sorting out the fiction of the lie from the truth of reality, no matter how difficult the job may be.  As I examine the forensic evidence bequeathed to me by my decade-dead parents, I am performing an effort that is beyond microscopic.

I am looking for the truth that exists in the WORDS THAT WERE NEVER WRITTEN in the same way that they WERE NEVER SPOKEN by either one of my parents (or by my grandmother than I know of).

This forensic level of work to claim MY REALITY out of the complete and total wreckage of my childhood is happening on the equivalent level that DNA forensic validation happens in today’s criminal investigations.

What I am learning that is valuable and useful to my own self-betterment and healing is that ANY TIME I experience even a shadow of a doubt, a glimmer of a glance of a doubt, a shimmer of a reflection of a doubt about how MY OWN VERSION of reality differs from the one created and presented by my mother AND BY MY FATHER – I NEED TO KNOW THAT MY VERSION IS RIGHT BECAUSE IT IS TRUE.

At this instant as I write these words I realize that THERE IS a way to make the invisible Borderline visible:  That invisible Borderline is defined by DOUBT.  Wherever, whenever, however I detect ANY DOUBT WHATSOEVER within my body as it relates to any experience I ever had with my parents, that DOUBT defines and makes visible the undefined and invisible Borderline.

Being able to recognize my feeling and even tiny SENSES of doubt allows me to bring the invisible Borderline into visible existence.  My father did not doubt my mother.  In the two examples presented here my father did not doubt my mother’s story about ‘the fight’ with her mother just as he did not doubt my mother’s story about the death of my brother’s turtle.

My father never doubted my mother’s version of ME, either.  Yesterday as I made mud and slung it around I thought about the only time in my life my father telephoned me.  That was in the winter of 1986.  He followed that call with the only visit he ever made to see me and my children.  Looking back on that visit yesterday I realized that he was as completely a representative THEN of my mother’s ‘version of Linda’ as he had been from the moment I was born.

I didn’t recognize my doubts in 1986, so I could not stand up for myself or against his version of reality with my own version of reality.  Yesterday I knew that if I had known in 1986 what I know at this moment, that visit with my father would have gone in an entirely different – and for me healing – direction.

Both of my parents’ words exist on these pieces of paper they wrote them down on over 50 years ago.  I recognize the powerful gift they provide not only to me, but to anyone who considers them in the light of the Borderline reality they represent.  Although I plan to publish their writings as they were written, I also plan to follow their publication with my OWN version of what these letters contain – because they DON’T contain anything about THE TRUTH.

My sister recently took her two grand daughters to a WWII museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico that has sanitized the exhibition by erasing ALL MENTION of the holocaust.  ALL OF IT!  I will not, in the end, be a contributor to that kind of deceptive, dangerous madness!

I will tell MY story.  What I am working up to is being able to tell MY story without any doubts within myself that MY story is how things actually happened and that my parents were, within both of their lifetimes, unredeemable liars.

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