+LINK TO NEWLY ADDED CHILDHOOD STORY

July 3, 2009July 3, 2009 alchemynowLeave a comment

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*Age 10 – NIGHTMARES AND BED WETTING

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This page has just been completed and published under MY CHILDHOOD STORIES. This page contains a ‘MAY TRIGGER ABUSE MEMORIES’ tag, so please be careful, cautious and considerate of yourself if you have a personal history of sexual abuse.

In this page I also wrote about how factual memory of trauma differs from emotional memory of trauma. Our emotional memory is processed through the amygdala region of our brain and is ALWAYS stored in our body even though the factual memory might not be. (When the facts are remembered this is called an ‘explicit‘ memory. When only the emotions and body memory exist without specific facts, this is called an ‘implicit‘ memory.)

The ‘semantic, autobiographical’ factual part of our memories are processed through a different region of our brain, the hippocampus. There are times particularly in very early childhood when all memory is preverbal and can only be accessed in our body and not through fact. These memories will govern our unconscious behavior for the rest of our lives. There are also times when facts related to memory, particularly of trauma memory, is ‘forgotten’ and invisible to us — sometimes forever, sometimes until it is triggered.

It is also important to realize that the stress hormone cortisol can so heat up our hippocampal memory cells as they try to process trauma-related facts that they are fried to a cinder and the facts of a memory will never be recorded – and therefore will never be available to recall. When and if this happens — and it can happen both to victims and perpetrators-in-the-act — the emotional memory is ALWAYS stored and retained within the body.

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+WE NEED NEW WORDS TO DIALOG WITH OUR BODY ABOUT TRAUMA

June 30, 2009June 30, 2009 alchemynowLeave a comment

I am trying to think of another word other than ‘renaissance’, or rebirth, to describe what I wish was happening now among those of us ordinary people who are trying to live the best lives we can without necessarily having the kind of safe and secure attachment background we needed to get along better in life.

I am thinking especially about what little information we really have about our bodies and how they operate. Sometime in our first year of life people begin to teach infants about their body — and most of us never progress much past that point! We are taught to point to our eyes, nose, mouth, ears, limbs, etc.

Eventually we learn through our public education and then through osmosis over time about the major organs of our body, and make little progress past that point unless we get sick and then learn the minimum we need to in order to understand what is happening to us. We seem to prefer to use only one syllable words to think about the only body we will ever have to live in for the rest of our lives.

Yet while we would rather leave anything more complicated than what we consider essential to the ‘experts’, at the same time I do believe our platform of information concerning our bodies is making advancements. We hear about things through the general media and that information will eventually ‘stick’ if we hear it enough and somehow we begin to understand it is important because it applies to us.

As we are doing this learning, as unintentionally as it might be, we are at the same time expanding our vocabulary. It’s no different than teaching an infant the word for their nose. We are learning to name what is going on inside of us. Yet at the same time we are learning meanings for words like diabetes, hypertension, obesity, allergies, arthritis, osteoporosis, cancer, learning disabilities, addiction, anxiety, depression, serotonin, dopamine, reward system, we less likely to learn how these kinds of ‘events’ are all connected within us to who we are within our own body.

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We all know we are dependent upon and would rather support a medical model that prefers to respond only to symptoms, prescribe every kind of expensive test to diagnosis illness, dish out every imaginable kind of drug to treat sickness than we are to put forth the effort ourselves to learn any more complicated information about our body than we have to.

Why is that? When and how did we learn to accept that we don’t need to learn anything more than a 5th grader could learn about how our body operates? Did someone tell us we are too dumb to learn anything more complicated? Looking backward, maybe this kind of thinking has worked for all of the generations that have gone before us.

Today there are more of us living longer than ever before in history. But taking material goods out of the equation, what is our quality of life? Particularly, what is the quality of our human attachments — our own attachment with our self included? As a social species, it matters. We have the desire to live our years better, last longer, and suffer less. Understanding how our attachment system operates, what has hurt it and what can help it can help us live a better life on every level because it operates on every single level of who we are.

Those of us who suffered from extra-ordinary trauma and abuse during our developmental stages especially need to learn the words that will let us be able to understand how that abuse changed our bodies. I see it as being no different than any healing process of disclosure. Any improvement we can make to talk about the effects our traumas had on us is empowering. Trauma changed our bodies, and we don’t even know — on the most vital and profound levels — what that means.

We need the words. We need them badly. A securely-attached-from-birth person has all that good-safe information built right into their body-brain-mind. They don’t have to think about it. They don’t even need to talk about it. They just live it.

Those of us who were so abused that we are the insecurely-attached-from-birth, however, have to learn NOW what these ‘others’ learned when they were supposed to learn it — as infants and young children. Our communication signals between our body, brain, mind and self are all scrambled up. We have to learn NOW what those ‘others’ learned from the time they were born. We cannot efficiently and effectively learn NOW what we have no words to talk about.

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I think at this moment how strange it seems that I, of all people, would be writing about attachment. Looking back at the strangeness, the unpredictable, escalating, irrational violence and abuse, looking back at the extreme isolation I was forced to endure through my childhood, I can’t help but say that of all the people I can imagine writing about attachment, I can be good at it because I am so bad at it.

Suffering from the long term consequences of an extremely abusive childhood can make us feel so alienated from what ‘ordinary’ people seem to now about living ‘ordinary’ lives that we might be tempted to simply throw in the towel, give up and quit. Yet as I work my way through the volumes of technical, even molecular research information about our own internal cannabinoid (‘cannabis’) (and opioid) attachment systems, I realize that by my just being alive I HAVE to know there are things about my attachment system that went right from the beginning or I most simply — would not be here.

I was attached enough to life from the beginning that I was conceived in the first place, implanted onto my mother’s uterine wall, received nourishment from her body, and made it through a difficult birth — just to GET here and to BE here. Through all the terrible traumas, through all the pain, suffering, sorrows and sadness of my childhood I was still attached enough between my inner, true self and the world to STILL be able to find, recognize, appreciate and value beauty — wherever I found it as a very small child — even in bubble shadows reflected on the bottom of a toilet bowl, even in the shimmering reflection of water on my bedroom ceiling when I was so punished for doing nothing but being alive.

I am amazed as I work on the endocannabinoid file regarding human reproduction. Perhaps because I cannot take any kind of safe and secure attachment either lightly or for granted I marvel at the very essence of the miracle of life that was each of our beginnings. How can such a perfectly ordered system like our attachment system is, be sent off into such difficult directions through insufficient if not outright malevolent circumstances of traumatic early childhood experiences?

I understand that given the requirements of staying alive — if at all possible, in the very worst of situations –that we could not make the adjustments we had to make to survive THEN and necessarily be ‘ordinary’ NOW. Yet at the same time I also understand that all of it was and is about signals of communication on the molecular and genetic level between the environment we live in and the self we live in it with.

That is the same process that happened when I was conceived, the same process that is happening in each present moment I am alive, the same process that connects every moment of my life together with me in the center of it.

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If I did not have a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder I doubt that I would have ever been motivated to go looking for the big multiple-syllable words that I know I now need to understand the ‘extra-ordinary’ way my body-brain-mind was forced to adapt, develop, and the way it works now. It is not by looking at all the ways I am dissociated, fragmented and disconnected that will make me feel more safe and secure in my own body in this world. It is by looking at the ways I am associated, connected and organized that helps me to know that things can never be all that bad! After all, I am a participant in some kind of miracle here! We all call that — LIFE!

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So maybe ‘renaissance’, or rebirth, is the word I need. Maybe as I go back all the way to my very first beginnings I can bring a new kind of understanding about my own place in my own body in my own life into my present. I find I need to know new things and I need to know new words to know these new things. I am sitting in the middle of a tragic relationship breakup, not far into a new future of cancer recovery, completely unsure of who I really am, of what I want, or of what is even possible for my future.

But maybe I do not know because I cannot know. I have to wait for the signals. The ones I need are not going to come from anywhere else other than from within my own body. On the most tiny, minute level of who I am — right where my own molecules are constantly interacting with my genetics — something interesting is ALWAYS occurring. It is that inner world that guides what happens to me as I interact with this great, big wide outer world.

I want to be amazed. I want to be more attached. Safely. Securely. Peacefully. Whatever it takes for me to get there I will try to do. This isn’t about whatever the Buddhist concept of detachment is. I have been forced to be detached from my own self in my own body all of my life. Terrible, terrifying, insane abuse put me in THAT place. I want something new and different, something I think non-abused ‘ordinary’ people can take for granted all of their lives.

I want to know, without a single shadow of any kind of doubt, that I have a right to be here and do so willingly, if not eventually happily. That was the destiny of the fertilized egg that was me in my beginnings. How could it be anything but my destiny today? I did not become lost to the path of that good journey on purpose (I had a great deal of help through a great deal of harm), and while it is taking the better part of my life to find my way back, it is not a journey I am making alone!

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+MOTHERING: WHEN IT’S RIGHT, WHEN IT’S WRONG

May 27, 2009November 21, 2010 alchemynowLeave a comment

I feel at this instant like a dancer might who is poised behind a curtain of a stage, breathing those last breaths before the music starts, before the curtain rises, about to dance a dance before an unseen but present audience. This dancer would have performed the dance before, would have practiced it step by step, part by part, before this evening’s performance. Not I. I have no idea what I am going to write here before you. I know not one word before I begin. All I can do is take that last breath and step on out, hoping.

Hoping that I know what I want to say, what needs to be said. Hoping that I can say it right, leaving nothing out but adding nothing in that does not belong within this dance of words. What is it that I will say first?

Do we, as a species, want to replace the kind of mothering that built our species from the beginning with medications that alter our brain chemicals and that might mimic what we used to be able to accomplish within our own brains without any other assistance? After all, we used to be prepared for the task of living as members of a social species in such an exact way that all the programming needed to accomplish this mothering was biologically given to mothers, and given to infants, so that in the end infants grew up to be balanced children and adults who knew the possibility of well being.

What happens to infants when the ability to mother adequately is removed from the people-growing equation? What happens to the adults that these infants grow up to be? How far back in my own family can I look in order to discover where the diversion of mothering abilities began and where mothering began to be altered and removed from the ongoing patterns particularly of how mothers raised their daughters? I can’t see back there very far, but far enough to know something passed down to me was very, very harmful.

I must tread carefully here, if treading across a public stage can be considered dancing at all? I wish I could say what needs to be said exactly, specifically so, as if the dance has already been danced before and I can follow in some earlier, preexisting invisible footsteps. If I knew ahead of time what the dance was and how to perform it, this writing would be so much easier to do.

I do not wish to alienate mothers. I do not wish to harshly condemn any mother’s efforts to raise her own children. Those of you who have been reading my posts already know that something was so wrong with the way my mother raised me that it could hardly be called mothering at all.

But she was my mother and she did mother me. Inadequately, but she did mother me. Taken from that far extreme of mothering like my mother gave me, across an entire range of possibilities of mothering, all the way over to the most perfect mother we could even collectively imagine — somewhere along this line every mother could place her own.

It is not that I am deliberately eliminating men from my writing here due to some inner bias of my own. I very specifically consider that mothering is something only women can do. Men father. They cannot mother, no matter how nurturing they may be toward their infants and children. Everything we know and can imagine about the biological, physiological differences between women and men apply here. How men father is not the topic of this post. How women mother is.

With that clarifying step taken, I will turn in another direction and take yet another step. What we might consciously know about mothering will always be only a tiny part of the story unless we today begin to think very clearly and carefully about ourselves as a species, and particularly about being American members of our species at this point in time. We cannot leave the context of culture and society out of our discussion about mothering.

I can report facts to you about my own experiences of mothering as I consciously understand them, but I also must state I know really nothing of substance about the generations of women in my family that preceded me as mothers. I make guesses based on guesses. My guess is that my mother’s grandmother — who came into my mother’s home when her own husband died, and very closely in time to when my mother’s mother divorced her own husband — was as important to my mother as she grew up after the age of 5 or 6 as her actual mother was. I do not believe that my mother was healthily mothered by either one of these women.

It is here that my dance must take another step, a sort of flying leap into the air with a shift of the body above the stage floor, so that some distance is covered and the dancer lands in a surprising spot — of sorts. This step includes what any of us women might know or imagine about all the grand mothering in our families. What is grand mothering compared and/or contrasted to mothering? We cannot leave the grandmothers out of our mothering equation.

How my mother’s grandmother mothered my mother’s mother had to have had — my definite guess here — a major influence upon how my mother developed not only as a person, not only as a mother, but specifically as my mother. How my mother mothered me had a powerful impact on my ability to mother my own children, and backward and forward throughout the generations we see that mothers never do their own mothering in a vacuum.

Now I, as the dancer within my own mind, must take yet another step. This time the step moves into a spin, both feet close together twirling above the floor, ending with me landing into a forward fold, down on one knee, both arms stretched in front of me, palms together toward the sky. It is here I must talk about our evolution, how if we move far enough away from the kind of mothering that nature intended us to practice within our species we are running the risk of endangering ourselves — and I use this word ‘ourselves’ in both the most singular and most collective way.

I, singularly, suffered the consequences of my mother’s psychosis that was focused specifically on me. I know that all of my siblings suffered from growing up with my mother as their mother. Yet we all know that I was forced from birth to be the one chosen to grow up in the center of her storm.

I have said and I will continue to say it again, that my mother’s psychotic break and her overriding mental illness was influenced by conditions of her childhood that damaged her developing brain-mind. This next step I am taking is more like a jumping up and down firmly in one place. It is not a step of grace, it is a step of emphasis. No matter what the men may be doing in the early lives of children, it is ALWAYS to the mothers that I will look for ultimate accountability.

I take another step here away from center and follow with another and another and another until I have traveled in a wide full circle. At the center of this circle I place the young children. For every step from that center in any direction I would want another woman to be standing there. This wide movement I am taking in my dance is meant to point out that for the millions of years our species spent evolving itself, never until recent times and under the guise and the burden of so-called ‘civilization’ did we women EVER mother alone.

We can all talk until we run out of breath about the rights of women. I am not opposed to women pursuing what they may think is best for them in their lives. But I am NOT talking about women here. I am talking about mothers. I am talking about women’s fitness to mother in the first place. And ultimately, I am talking about the children we bear and bring into this world. These children not only need mothers (and fathers, not the topic of this post), they need adequate MOTHERING.

I have to let other dancers onto the stage now. This is no longer a dance I choose to dance alone. With the flurry of movement of multiple dancers I see in the patterns they create in their dancing that when women who are mothering are cut off from one another all manor of ill being replaces the well being that we always knew before.

The color I remember from stories my mother told of both her grandmother and her mother were that they were brilliant women. Each in their own way were educated career women. I hold no false belief that either of these two women were adequate as mothers. My mother paid a price for this. I and my siblings paid a price for this. My own children paid a price for this, even though I was a stay-at-home mother.

Just in looking at the influences in five generations, from my great grandmother to my own children, I see that it wasn’t the mothers themselves that were missing. No, not us. It was the necessary QUALITY of mothering that was missing, and that lack and loss is what has created the ongoing pattern of disaster.

If you read my June 1972 writing in +LEAVING NO CHAOS BEHIND – PART ONE, you will be able to instantly know what I am talking about. That writing reflected the state of dysregulation within my brain-mind that was a direct result of the trauma and terror that formed by brain from the beginning of my life. How could I, or anyone else, ever expect me to be able to adequately mother children with that brain?

True, except for the incident I described in THE DAY I ABUSED MY OWN LITTLE SON, I did not blatantly or overtly abuse my own children. But I did harm them. There was no possible way that I could not have done so, no matter how much I tried not to. That is the nature of trauma when it is not resolved. One way or the other, it passes itself on down the generations. We can whine and moan, curse and spit, but there is little we can do about it — unless and until we find the right information and the resources we need AT THE RIGHT TIME.

Dance over. I’m deadly serious now. I do not have any grandchildren. This may change in the future. What matters to me most is that my children have broken the pattern to the best of their ability.

If I could magically go back and offer to my own self when I was 18 what I know now, I have no doubt my children would be the beneficiary of radical positive changes that I would have been able to make in myself as a result of the knowledge I now have. True, there is a probable chance that they would never have been born in the first place. I cannot find it in myself to wish for that.

All I can do is what we all can do — move forward. We can learn. We can change. We can heal, each according to our abilities.

Before our species so changed our world, back before the coming of ‘civilization’ began to disconnect mothers from mothers, we did not mother alone. Grandmothers were also part of the cycle of mothering. Not isolated grandmothers, but connected grandmothers. Women breast fed one another’s children. They held them and cared for them as if they were their own.

The birth mother was not left with the full burden of caring for her child alone. She was always accessible in times when her infant could not be solaced by other women. The infant could always be returned to its birth mother (if she were alive) when necessary. But in between these times the birth mother had the ability to ‘get away’ and to work at her other tasks, but the infants never suffered for lack of mothering.

I take the stand that in today’s world of American culture we are hurting our mothers by isolating them from other mothers and we are hurting our offspring. We have gone so far away from what nature gave us in the beginning I am not at all convinced that we can ever find our way back. But I also know that if we never identify problems that exist we have absolutely NO HOPE of repairing the rupture we have created within our culture — and in increasingly wider circles within other ‘advancing’ cultures — as we interfere with mothers’ ability to adequately mother their young.

I will describe in future posts that the damage we are causing directly affects our brain’s ability to regulate itself. Adequate mothering is designed to build a regulated human brain that can experience well being as its center point of balanced equilibrium. The more mothers don’t and can’t mother their young the way nature intended us to, the more dysregulated our brains become.

Is it a good thing that we now have, as the end result of very expensive and extensive research, all kinds of prescription drugs to regulate more and more and more brain and nervous system dysregulations than ever before? Or do we look at the bigger picture and accept as fact that inadequate mothering of infants and young children is creating these dysregulations in the first place? Are we more afraid to ask the questions or to find out the true answers?

We are becoming dependent as a society on the powerful drugs we take — as adults and feed to our children — to regulate brain chemistry because we are creating the problems by building these brains that cannot regulate themselves in the first place.

I could ask, “What are we willing to know about this problem?” Or I could ask the much harder and more helpful question, “What are we NOT willing to know about this problem?” Maybe we are so acceptant of the fact that ‘everyone’ takes brain-regulating medications that we don’t even think it’s a problem in the first place.

Are we so absolutely stupid and foolish that we ‘thank our lucky stars’ that we have all these wonder drugs available to us in our super advanced civilization to fix us? Does it ever occur to us that we are creating these same problems that need these medications and that the conditions are PREVENTABLE?

Do we refuse to see harm in anything we are doing or have done to our own children that meant they had no choice but to develop brains that could not adequately regulate themselves for the task of being humans who are healthy and have well being — naturally? Just as women birth the children, they are designed to be the builders of infant brains. That job is not done at birth. If mothers cannot adequately build brains within their infants that can healthily regulate themselves, the job will not get done.

I do not ask any question that I am not willing to ask myself, no matter how difficult it might be to look at the truth. We might not need to use the word abuse in reference to how we parent our own children. But if we have our own histories of trauma we cannot help but pass this trauma down to our children, no matter how much we try not to.

There is a wealth of new information available to us about the brain development of infants and young children. Until we access this information at the ground level where we all live and struggle, we cannot make the kinds of changes within ourselves that will truly allow our children to escape what we never meant to do to them in the first place. There is no bliss in ignorance.

We HAVE to know what happened to us. We have to become crystal clear about the changes in HOW mothers mother because we are damaging our children and the future of our society. This isn’t about feeling badly. I give the example as clearly as I can that how my mother mothered me does NOT need to be an emotional issue on any level other than in my memories of the actual abuse experiences themselves.

What we need MOST are the facts. The simple clear facts. We can change nothing for the better without them. I do not believe that we can continue to bear and raise children in our present and advancing technological world without knowing the facts we need to know about how to build a healthy human brain from birth.

Interactions within inadequate daycare environments, infant isolation from lengthy quality time with healthy mothers, ongoing lengths of time interacting with electronic media, lack of exercise, lack of time outdoors, lack of quality play, are all contributing to a demise of the human brain resulting in an increased need to consume medications to regulate the brain — whether we want to admit it or not. We are social beings designed to build a social brain through powerful positive human attachments that begin most importantly with our mothers.

If we continue to choose not to pay attention to the reality of our human condition within our ‘new world’, our proverbial dance will be done. We are a specific species with specific needs during our infant brain developmental stages. How well we are mothered determines how well our brains work for the rest of our lives. There are no exceptions.

+IS THIS NORMAL?

May 27, 2009November 21, 2010 alchemynowLeave a comment

I have to ask the question, “Do we any longer even know what normal is for our species?” I have the advantage when looking backward over my life in knowing that there obviously was nothing normal about the way I was raised, nothing normal about the formation of my brain except as its growth and development reflected the human ability to adapt to dire conditions.

In the three generations that have come into being upon this planet since the time of my birth so many changes have happened in our culture and upon our planet that I am not sure we even know who we are as a species any more.

The simplest way to look at this is to consider that over 90% of veterans returning home from our current wars are consuming some version of a psychotrophic medication (prescription medications that alter brain chemistry). At the same time a huge percentage of our at home population is doing the same thing. These medications, to me, represent a need within us to supplement our own body and brain operations through the addition of powerful brain modulating chemicals that we are not evidently able to produce within our own bodies.

In the bigger picture I see that we are not only consuming our own technologies, but they are now consuming us and we don’t even see this happening. If we do, do we consider this to be normal?

I don’t have the time to write anything else at the moment, but I do believe we need to explore our own thinking about how technologies are not only changing the way humans are living on this planet, but are also changing our bodies at the same time. What do we really understand about these changes?

+LEAVING NO CHAOS BEHIND – PART TWO

May 25, 2009February 24, 2013 alchemynow7 Comments

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This post follows —

+LEAVING NO CHAOS BEHIND – PART ONE

I could say that from the instant I left home I followed an invisible bread crumb trail into the future, but I would be wrong. I began to follow that invisible pathway from the moment I was born. Because there was never any reason, no cause and effect, no reason, no logic to consequences there was never a discernible pattern to anything that ever happened to me.

All I knew was what was told to me, as I came into a body and into this world, through actions and later by words as I came to recognize and understand them. I was told I was so bad that I tried to kill my mother when I was born. I was told that I was not human, that I was the devil’s child, and that I was evil. Everything that I knew always went back to these facts.

At the same time that I was forced just by the fact that I was alive to follow this invisible bread crumb pathway into my future, I was trying at the same time to follow the faintest dim light of hope that was held repeatedly in front of me throughout my childhood by my mother. I did not know that I was living an unsolvable paradox.

At the same time she told me that I had been created and born evil, I was also told I remained evil because I chose to do so, and that I deliberately continued to remain evil because I was so evil that was the ongoing evil decision that I chose to make — moment after moment, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, incident after incident. I never knew that I was doomed not to ever get near to or reach the hope that was held out in front of me.

Because I was innately and essentially evil it was impossible for me to ever make the good or right decision or choice how to act BECAUSE of that fact. Yet I was also told that the fact of my evil remained a fact because I willed it that way each time I continued to make the choice to stay evil no matter how many chances my ‘loving, caring, patient, adoring, long suffering’ mother gave me to choose otherwise.

How could I as an infant begin to learn about the exercise of free will, decision and choice when I was continually punished for a choice I had been proven to have made before I was born by my actions in trying to murder my own mother? I was born evil. I was evil because I chose to be evil. I continued to choose to remain evil because I chose to be evil because I was evil.

The yet even darker blanket that grew over this entire pyschosis that my mother had was that I was born evil because of the evil I had done in some other lifetime that had condemned me to hell. This had nothing to do with any other manifestation of a thought my mother might have had regarding something that could have been construed as a belief in reincarnation. Her thinking along these lines ONLY related specifically to me.

Her belief in my evilness grew so that as I grew older it was not about me being born as an evil infant human. It came to be about my having done something so evil in my earlier lifetime that I had been judged as being so evil by God that I had been condemned to everlasting damnation in hell. I had been given up on by God and He had given me to the devil. The devil owned me. I was his possession, his puppet, his tool, his worker. I was his proxy sent first to kill her, and because that didn’t work, I continued to live on as the devil’s curse upon my mother’s life.

I suspect as I write this that this dark blanket that smothered out any hope of the light coming through to me was the inevitable result of the progression of her psychosis as I continued to live as her daughter in a body that also continued to grow. The only possible avenue of escape that could have been possible for me growing up was never provided. It would have had to have come as a result of my being able to, in any way, understand that the further development of my mother’s psychosis, which had me at its center, was a logical consequence of her mental illness, that her mental illness was the cause of her psychosis, and her actions toward me were the effect of it.

Did anyone ever tell me that? No. Was I ever able to step out from under her insanity so that I could figure it out by myself? No. Was there any possible avenue of escape open to me from birth to age 18? No.

My entire being from birth had to attempt to grow along with and in spite of my mother’s madness about me that she continually forced me to encounter in my ongoing experiences throughout my entire childhood. It makes me think about how cancers devour a body’s resources until the person is killed. I had to grow an entire being that was contaminated with the cancer of my mother’s beliefs about who I was from the time of my birth.

I was not given the choice NOT to build the cancer of my mother’s mental illness into my being. Her cancer had taken over the ‘cell’ that was her and spilled over and grew into me. I had to eat and swallow her poison. I had no way to prevent this from happening. Yet through this analogy I see that while her cancer cells were taking over space inside of who I should have been able to become as my own self, they could never invade the ‘cells’ that WERE individually my own.

I had some impermeable ‘Linda cell’ boundary abilities that prevented my mother from taking over all of me. Somehow there were pockets of my own experience of being alive that she and her psychosis could not completely take over, contaminate or consume. But neither was there the opportunity for these individual ‘Linda cells’ or pockets of Linda reality to form themselves into a whole entire separate person, or even into clear definable identities. That is where the dissociation originated from.

When I go back and read my June 1972 writing I can see how able these individual Linda cells and pockets were to co-inhabit my own being and mind. It strikes me that perhaps how I came to develop that far was due to the fact that I am innately a peaceful person. Had my separate experiences of experience ever had the need to compete with one another I would not have been able to follow my invisible bread crumb pathway into the future in one body at all successfully.

I suspect that the lack of any inner need to compete for supremacy of one single perspective — or even of one tiny part of one — also stems from the bizarre yet helpful fact that nothing I EVER did as a child successfully allowed me ANY illusion of control — related to cause and effect — over my mother’s reactions to me.

I was as a child cut off at EVERY possible turn from being able to assert myself in any effective way to change what happened to me within my environment. And no matter how strange it might be to understand this, it was because nothing worked that I never began to compete within myself so that a working model of a part of Linda ended up taking control of any part of who I was. Hence, I basically have ended up with a dissociative identity disorder without the identities.

It is hard to know about the development of a human brain-mind because we need to use the brain that has already formed in order to go back and try to understand the earlier form as it formed itself. I do believe that I have a unique situation here and something unique to offer to anyone that might wonder about the possibilities that exist within a developing brain-mind.

Brain-mind development is a process that usually proceeds through identifiable stages. Once one or several of these developmental stages has completed itself, its patterns are locked into place and used, then, for the further developments as they come along in their own sequences and patterns. Because of the very special circumstances I developed in, my brain did not ‘lock into place’ these individual growth and developmental stages as they normally occur.

My brain-mind was forced to go on and on and on and on as it attempted to find a place for its ongoing experiences in the world. I received piece after piece after never-ending piece of information through my interactions with my mother without ever being given the opportunity to hook them together in any meaningful way. I believe that some part of me knew that this was happening as it happened.

This is what makes my June 1972 writing significant. It was a message in a bottle, written down by some part of myself and sent into the future as an intact representation of the best operation my brain-mind could accomplish right before my 21st birthday. The writing itself was like taking a living slice of brain-mind tissue, cut out at that point of time, frozen within those words, and passed to me in the future so that I could accurately re-member who I was when I left the home of my origin.

Time passed. I went on in my life. I continued to follow that same invisible bread crumb path to get to where I am as I sit here today with my fingers upon this keyboard. Yet even as all this time has gone by, my inner experiences of myself in my life are not much more connected to one another than they were as represented in those June 1972 words.

My brain was never allowed to develop through its stages with a single Linda at its center. What ‘holds me together’ is more like what holds all the individual notes and patterns of silence within a song together. The individual notes, patterns of sound and silence, tones, pitches, rhythms, movements within songs do not compete with one another any more than do my experiences or my experiences of my own experiences compete with one another.

Yet holding oneself together as the ongoing pattern of one’s life song is continually being written is an exhausting and disheartening process. I cannot, as I believe that others can, just let go and let the ‘main Linda’ go on about the business of life as if such an entity exists. Because I have little sense that such a single Linda exists, I also cannot trust that she knows what she is up against or doing in this lifetime. The ongoing process of living my life is therefore continually ‘up for grabs’ between all the various aspects of myself that process both my life and my experience of it.

I believe that I continue to be able and willing to ‘do life’ only because I am able to identify some very incredible and undeniable gifts that I was born with. Among these are my innate intelligence, creativity, indomitable will to stay alive with its accompanying determination, stubbornness and courage, my ability to have consideration for the feelings of others in my life who love me, my ability to focus intensely, my ability to tolerate changes, my ability to hope, my curiosity, my willingness and intense desire to learn, my ability to be surprised, my love for beauty including my innate desire to find something beautiful in ugliness, my loyalty to others as well as to myself, my compassion, my incredible stamina and ability to withstand pain, and the never ending peaceableness of my nature.

All of these gifts and abilities help me as I try to orient myself and organize my experience through a brain-mind that was not created in anything like a normal, benevolent world. I imagine this to perhaps be like being deep under water all of the time, and having to follow the upward movements of the bubbles my gifts provide me with as I try to orient myself and my movements toward the water’s surface.

So when it comes to the question of why I never left home before I was 18 to escape the abuse, I have to say that I didn’t even know that either the abuse existed or that escape existed. One has to know one is captured and a captive before there is anything to contrast the state of captivity to. Otherwise, how can a person even conceive of escape in the first place?

There was also no unified Linda in existence, and therefore there was no one to make such a choice or decision ‘with’, ‘within’, ‘from’ or ‘for’. I had all the facets of a diamond, but no diamond. All I had was the capacity to survive in and endure being alive in a world of chaos and destruction.

When I finally did leave home, I took all the chaos as well as my ability to live with it out the door with me. Chaos by definition means that all possibilities are contained within it. Building patterns out of chaos is what a brain does from its beginnings. Neither mine nor my mother’s brains were an exception to this rule. That hers was built around a psychosis and mine was not is the difference between us. While both options are contained within the possibilities of being human, mine allows for some access to consciousness where my mother’s did not.

Both of our child brain-minds had to develop in the midst of an unsolvable paradox — how to remain alive in a malevolent world that did not give us the resources to do so. We each, however, had available to us different inner avenues to pursue that allowed each of us to accomplish this impossible task in a different way. I cannot find it within myself to fault either one of us for taking the only possible route we had available to us in childhood that ensured our continued survival.

Once our individual routes to survival were taken, in our early environments that we were equally powerless to change, those routes became permanent pathways into and through our futures. They allowed us some chance to organize and orient our inner reality within a disorganized and disoriented world. Neither one of us could ever go back to the beginning and get to develop a different ‘better’ brain in different better circumstances. We each were forced to live with the consequences of the ‘developmental brain damage’ that we suffered, and that could have been prevented.

That fact is what this blog is all about.

+EARLY ORIGIN OF OUR ONGOING EXPERIENCE OF SHAME AND FORGIVENESS

May 23, 2009November 21, 2010 alchemynowLeave a comment

I can in no way see that forgiveness is not about the patterns of rupture and repair. Lack of the ability or willingness to forgive must relate to there being a rupture for which there is no repair.

Every issue involving rupture and repair patterns occur in attachment relationship contexts of our self in relationship to our self, to others and to our world at large. All of our attachment relationships are processed through our right brain’s emotional center. This means that all our ongoing attachment relationship processes are processed through the same neuronal pathways that were built within our brains through our experiences with our early caregivers from birth to one year old.

These experiences built our social emotional brain well before we even had potential for consciousness. They will continue to operate in exactly the way they were formed unless we later can apply conscious thought and effort to change them.

When we choose to apply ‘new and more advanced’ terminology to the basic operations of our brains, minds, nervous systems and bodies, we are taking a step toward the risk of losing touch and sight of what we are actually talking about. It is no different to me than using any word in our language without knowing what the imaginal root of the word is as it came into our language from its beginnings. Words get born. They originate somewhere. They come from somewhere. They have a beginning.

If one pays particular attention to how an infant is attached within its world at about one year old as it moves from the world of its caregiver into the wider world of its own discovery, I suspect that we can tell about the origin of the operation of what we call ‘forgiveness’ as it operates in tandem with the origin of what we call ‘the shame reaction’ that occurs at this time. This ‘shame’ reaction as it is described by Dr. Allan Schore happens when an infant’s nervous system, or more specifically the ‘go’ or sympathetic arm of its autonomic nervous system responds with excitement and outgoing energy as an infant moves into its wider world of discovery.

At the same time, the potential has correspondingly increased for the infant to experience a ‘crash’ or ‘stop’ as the other arm of the automic nervous system, the parasympathetic (I think of this as the pair of breaks) will kick in if the infant returns from its excited explorations to find that its caregiver does not respond back to the infant with the same level of ‘go’ excitement. The infant will experience this clash, or rupture as a depletion of its positive state. This ‘stop’ after ‘go’ is neurologically what we come to call the shame reaction.

There has to be the basis of a safe and secure attachment relationship between an infant and the caregiver it is returning to in order for this rupture to be repaired. These rupture and repair processes are simply further continuations of the development and growth of already existing rupture and repair patterns that have been built through caregiver-infant interactions from birth and correspond to the infant’s right brain emotional center’s development.

If that area of the brain has already suffered from enough malevolent interactions to have been ‘mis-informed’ and thus ‘misformed’ by the time an infant is one year old, all ongoing patterns related to movements within the bigger world as they relate to patterns of ‘coming back together in safety and security’ with the primary caregivers surrounding the infant will also be affected. This go and stop, rupture and repair patterning seems to me to directly connect our more advanced (and thus somewhat more obscure0 words of shame to forgiveness. Even on the most profound and basic physiological level, shame reflects rupture and forgiveness reflects repair.

Because these go and stop patterns are directly related to the right brain’s emotional social center, they are both about emotions in terms of their experience through either regulation or dysregulation. These two patterns are built into the brain from birth, as I’ve mentioned. This means to me that what we call forgiveness directly ties into the right brain’s ability to regulate emotions. Even though we think of forgiveness as being a conscious activity, it still has its roots in the original patterns of our right emotional brain.

Infant brains formed through safe and secure early attachment relationships have the advantage regarding emotional regulation in every possible way over infant brains formed in unsafe and insecure early environmental interactions with early caregivers. The advantages of one and the disadvantages of the other are in the circuitry of the brain itself.

Caregivers need have no negative intent to cause an infant this ‘stop’ shame reaction. It is a natural reaction an infant actually needs to experience on occasion as it learns about safety and danger in the wider world, and about how to negotiate the space of the world with other people and their needs. But the resolution of shame through a repair of the shame reaction is essential if all is going to go well in an infant’s development. Looking at this repair process as a reinstatement of a secure attachment relationship in the world lets us know absolutely that ‘forgiveness’ is the counterpart of ‘shame’ and lies at the basis of our attachment interrelationships.

I remember specifically with my middle child that once she learned to talk well, she needed to talk about things that happened in her life and in her mind long before I would have thought she had the capacity for forming memories from those experiences. It was if she knew somehow that once she had the ability to verbalize about these early experiences that process was also necessary. She had in fact waited for her own developmental abilities to catch up with her needs.

I wonder if it isn’t the same with shame in cases where very eary experiences are harmful and detrimental to an infant. Their phsyiological development might not have developed to the point that they can actually experience the physical process of the stop and go within their nervous system. Yet if those older experiences were damaging enough to a child, I suspect that they can be there waiting for the time that infant’s body is old enough to experience that shame reaction.

I say this because the process of rupture and repair, as it builds the early infant social emotional right limbic brain, has already deeply formed itself into the brain itself well before a child reaches the age of one, the age when the infant can physically move itself around in the larger world. I believe that it is possible that if ruptures have not already been adequately met with repair early on, that even the beginnings of the physical shame and forgiveness patterns will be interfered with.

This is true because expectation, anticipation, hope and hopelessness have already begun the foundational development of the right brain from very early on. For example, when a tiny infant is hungry and someone responds adequately to feed it, that infant’s brain is already building hope into it as it learns within itself that in this safe and secure world it can trust that its needs will be met. These experiences form the basis of the first thought processes as they involve the early formation of mental representations.

If harmful and inadequate experiences are the ones that operate at these crucial early stages, hopelessness, despair and even rage can fill in the cracks where these misshapen mental representations are forming. They will already be firmly in place well before the age of one, and will influence what an infant anticipates and expects upon its return to its caregiver once it enters into the world.

This puts hope — its fulfillment or disappointment — at the pivotal point where shame and forgiveness operate from the start. These inner relationships are physiologically formed into the body and brain of an infant, and will obviously form the foundation for all our hope, shame and forgiveness experiences we have for the rest of our lives.

There is no mystery here. If we want to change the patterns that were built into our brains and bodies from the beginning we have to become conscious of how these patterns are operating within us, even though we will probably never retrieve the actual facts of the experiences we had as infants that built our inner operating systems in the first place. First we have to recognize that these patterns exist, and directly realize that they involve our right emotional brain.

Shame normally happens for an infant when it anticipates a emotional state reaction from an attachment figure that matches the infant’s own state. When that state is not matched the infant experiences this as a rupture that we come to know as shame. It is an interactional experience.

Forgiveness normally happens for an infant when the mismatch between what it anticipated from the caregiver and did not get is repaired. When a caregiver reestablishes rapport with the infant it is acting our forgiveness. The infant actually accepts the forgiveness willingly because an infant’s natural state is to be united with or reunited with its attachment figures.

In looking at both shame and forgiveness in the dictionary, both have origins in the English language before the 12th century. It is rare to find a word in what we would call modern English that came into the language earlier than that. This means to me that both these words refer to states that have been consciously known for a long, long time.

Both words, however, reflect at their basis, at least in modern English, that they relate to conditions of the mind and states of being — as they are rooted in our human physiological body and experience of being alive in that body. They are therefore related to mentalizing abilities and to Theory of Mind. Both of these two operations are interfered with in cases of mental illness like my mother had, and both are also interfered with through early trauma as they become reflected in insecure attachment disorders.

This is because the true issue at stake in both the shame rupture and the forgiveness repair require the context of an attachment relationship in order to operate in the first place. They are both physiologically rooted in our body, brain, nervous system and mind because we are members of a social species and we must form this way. Shame reflects a breech in ongoing attachment and forgiveness repairs and heals this breech.

Early developmental experiences in a malevolent world change how these two corresponding parts of who we are form and operate. If we suffered early abuse and trauma, without having access to adequate secure and safe attachment figures we could always depend on to mediate the damage-forming process as we formed our shame-forgiveness response system, we will experience complications throughout our lives related to these changes.

If we hope to affect healing for ourselves related to shame and forgiveness, I believe we need to understand and accept how and why we got these problems in the first place. To do so we must consider the quality of our attachment relationships from birth so that we can begin to understand how they were already operating in our brains, nervous system and body by the time we were old enough to begin to enter the bigger, wider world on our own at about one year old.

Main Entry:

¹shame

Pronunciation:

\ˈshām\

Function:

noun

Etymology:

Middle English, from Old English scamu; akin to Old High German scama shame

Date:

before 12th century

1 a: a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety b: the susceptibility to such emotion <have you no shame?>2: a condition of humiliating disgrace or disrepute : ignominy <the shame of being arrested>3 a: something that brings censure or reproach ; also : something to be regretted : pity <it’s a shame you can’t go> b: a cause of feeling shame

rom http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shame

Main Entry:

for·give

Pronunciation:

\fər-ˈgiv, fȯr-\

Function:

verb

Inflected Form(s):

for·gave \-ˈgāv\ ; for·giv·en \-ˈgi-vən\ ; for·giv·ing

Etymology:

Middle English, from Old English forgifan, from for- + gifan to give

Date:

before 12th century

transitive verb1 a: to give up resentment of or claim to requital for <forgive an insult> b: to grant relief from payment of <forgive a debt>2: to cease to feel resentment against (an offender) : pardon <forgive one’s enemies>intransitive verb: to grant forgiveness

synonyms see excuse

— for·giv·able \-ˈgi-və-bəl\ adjective

— for·giv·ably \-blē\ adverb

— for·giv·er noun

from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/forgive

+MAGICAL WISHFUL THINKING DOES NOT HEAL ABUSE

May 21, 2009November 21, 2010 alchemynow2 Comments

If I try to look at myself objectively I would wonder that I refer to my mother as having been mentally ill but I do not consider myself mentally ill. I would ask myself what criteria do I use and apply to myself that is different from the criteria I use in my thinking about my mother?

There seems to be a level of desription regarding the operation of a person’s brain-mind and nervous system that means to outsiders that mental illness is present. With today’s advances in brain imaging techniques I believe that if our culture wanted to, we could actually see in actual brain operating pictures the distinction that I evidently make about mental illnesses within my own mind.

I can visualize my thinking about mental health and mental illness in terms of a growing tree with branches that relate to my descriptive categories. Once a person is set off onto one of the branches related to these categories, they can never ‘jump branches’ by changing the basic origination point that leads into development along one of these branches. What is done or happens to a person before the age of two is the determining factor and cannot be changed.

It is important to realize that there is a fifth branch that I can visualize on this tree. It is actually the one that grows straight up to the sky without deviation or interruption. It relates to people who are optimally designed and who were raised from conception in a ‘good enough’ optimal caregiving environment. These people’s bodies and brains were not forced to change their development in adaptation to malevolency within the world. I only talk about these securely attached individuals in this writing as comparison points for how the rest of us ended up having to develop in one of these other four directions.

In the process of my own writing I have determined that there are four main levels leading to four different branches of this imaginary tree. They result from brain-mind-body changes that lead, in my thinking, off in one of these differing directions. Each of these categories, or types of mental illness that I recognize stem from altered brain development. I can understand that some mental illness occurs strictly through extreme genetic combinations that existed from conception and would have manifested as mental illness no matter how well a person had been cared from during their early lives. I include within this category serious changes that occur prior to birth or at birth through severe traumas to the fetus or infant that can also completely change the way a person develops. Obviously and fortunately I don’t fit this category and did not have to develop along the lines of this branch.

Now I will describe other three categories that do apply to my life personally. I also believe that in the future medical experts, including those working in the mental health fields, will recognize the accuracy of what I understand about these categories. At this point in time I believe that an understanding of which branch we grew into, which one our parents grew into, which ones our siblings grew into, etc. will help us determine what realistic changes for the better we can expect in our lives.

My personal understanding is that for any one of us that grew and developed in some form of a malevolent world during our early years were forced to adapt in some way that has placed us on one of these four ‘deviating’ limbs. We therefore experience some form of very real disability in comparison to the securely attached who grew up without severe harmful influence and who were not forced to adapt to a harmful environment.

The other three branches I am going to describe all entail the presence of some form of insecure attachment disorder. I agree with Dr. Allan Schore that every insecure attachment pattern results in some form of an empathy disorder. The toxic, malevolent, unsafe and insecure experiences we had as we developed created the breach in our ability to form secure attachments in the first place. Changes an individual was forced to make physiologically in our bodies and brains as we adapted in our development is what sends us off into one of these other three branch directions.

If we are of the luckier ones, we ONLY had to develop an insecure attachment. These manifest as what experts call dismissive-avoidant or ambivalent-preoccupied insecure attachment patterns. The FACT is that these patterns are built into the operation of the body, brain, mind and nervous system of the individual who has them.

These people have been forced to develop along an alternative branch of the tree, but do not usually end up with what we, as a society, would term a mental illness. They will, however, experience life differently than a securely attached person will, and are at risk for all kinds of ‘social’ disabilities due to the fact that their early forming social emotional brain development has been effected. They are ‘wired’ for insecure attachments.

It is here in my description of the next two branches of the tree that I deviate from the commonly accepted ideas about mental illness. Early development within an environment of severe trauma so often leads in the direction of the development of some form of ‘mental illness’ that it would be the rare, rare event to find an exception where this does not happen. Current thinking on ‘mental illness’ would therefore demand that we accept what I describe as two separate branches as being only one single large branch. Along this single branch are placed all currently used mental illness diagnostic categories.

As we become very clear regarding the facts, we will know that what creates this branch in the first place is exposure to severe traumas during early development in an environment that does not contain enough available resources to prevent serious adjustments within the infant and young child from having to be made. Once we leave our magical wishful thinking behind about the causes of so-called mental illnesses, we will see that disorganized and disoriented insecure attachment from birth (or before) create the deviation point from which what see as two separate branches originate.

I am forced to use currently accepted thinking and terminology to describe what happens from that origination point on our visualized tree. But I believe that the two branches result from very different and distinct adaptations to trauma and into some version of what we currently consider to be mental illness. While we might magically wish that these two branches are the same, I do not believe that they are.

In my own world of ‘fact’, I know these branches are different from my own experience. My mother was forced to grow along one of these two branches while I was forced to grow along the other one. While personal knowledge is not the stuff science is based on, it can still inform our individual and collective thinking. Larger changes may well come from the bottom-up, grass root, experience based real world knowledge that those of us who have experienced and survived severe abuse from birth have within us. It is from this base that I describe the differences that exist between these last two branches as they originated from adaptations within early malevolent environments.

Do not get me wrong here. Any consideration of mental illness, either as it might currently be accepted as occurring on one single branch, or as might exist in two separate categories on two separate branches, still means that a person’s brain, mind and body has been devastatingly altered during early development. The distinction matters to me because it influences the ability to live with the resulting dis-order and helps our efforts to heal be more effective.

Of all the varying cultural and religious belief structures that exist on our planet, I am going to pick only one to illustrate my point here. In fact, I am only going to pick one sentence from one of these belief structures. I encourage anyone who cannot relate to this one sentence because of its origins to please find a related, similar thought within your own belief structure that will allow you to understand what I am trying to say here.

This one sentence is, I believe, a statement about our species’ condition that can be understood through any spiritual belief system, certainly not only from a Christian point of view. It belongs to the final “Last Seven Words” that Jesus Christ uttered from the cross of crucifixion.

Father forgive them, for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34).

SEE:

http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:c93sR4hE5jMJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayings_of_Jesus_on_the_cross+forgive+them+father+for+they+know&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

http://bibref.hebtools.com/?book=%20Luke&verse=23:34&src=!

I cannot personally find it within myself to argue with these few simple words. Nor can I really understand what they mean. All I know is that situations exist between people on this planet that often come back to this fundamental concept of forgiveness.

I will never argue about religion, nor will I ever defend my own beliefs whatever they might be (and many might say they are eclectic). But I will say that every time the topic of forgiveness arises in relation to my experience of 18 years of nearly constant, terrible insane abuse heaped upon me by my mother, my thoughts always return to the above 10 words. By doing I pass the issue of forgiveness on up the ladder in an understanding that it originates from and in my case belongs to Powers much greater than me.

I introduce the concept of forgiveness here before I describe the two branches of mental illness because believe forgiveness is ultimately about accountability and responsibility. One of the two branches I do hold both accountable and responsible for their actions and the other I do not. I belong to the first branch while I believe my mother belongs to the second.

As I have already mentioned in other posts I am ‘diagnosed’, through the current existing mental health system’s structure, as ‘having’ posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety disorder including severe recurring depression, and dissociative disorder. Within a more enlightened system I would also be described as ‘having’ a severe disoriented-disorganized insecure attachment disorder, if not an adult version of the childhood version of Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD). In the MOST enlightened system I would be considered to have logical physiological changes caused by adaptations that had to be made in order for me to survive in a devastatingly hostile world.

My mother was never formally recognized by anyone as having severe mental illness, so any attempt to ‘diagnose’ her happens in retrospect as a ‘best guess’. She appears obviously to have suffered from a psychotic break, from serious Borderline Personality Disorder, and probably had some Bi-Polar characteristics, as well.

What do I see as the main difference between the two of us, and why would I describe myself as being on one branch of mental illness and place her on an entirely different one? What do I use as the final determining factor for the difference between us?

Returning to the originating point of both of these two branches in their common source of developmental adaptation to a malevolent early environment, and to my description of disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder, I can say that both of us have the same roots to our mental illnesses in the same kind of brain operation: DISSOCIATION.

The distinction I make between the two branches and the mental illnesses that are found on each one, is that in some forms of mental illness such a dissociative break occurred during their development that the survivor has had the ability to connect to their self removed.

Continued survival necessitated that this break occur to prevent the overwhelming nature of their exposure to trauma, as experienced by a self in connection to a mind overcome by that trauma, to continue their lives hopefully without destroying their bodies. As we know, this break is not a guarantee to continued life in a physical body because some still succumb to self destruction.

This fundamental dissociative break between the experience of ongoing life and the self results in brain and body changes that protect life itself at the same time the more advanced and developed abilities to experience consciousness are interfered with. As a consequence these people lack real self reflective abilities, do not appear with what all the rest of us would consider a conscience, and have had the exercise of free will and choice based on self consciousness removed from them. Theirs is a different, and often dangerous, version of reality.

Those of us that do not have the genetic potential to take this detour during our developments that results in a single, profound and fundamental dissociative break in our connection to self — the operation of self and a connection to self being the result a very real (and visible through advanced brain imaging techniques) physiological brain operation — develop along what I see as the other branch.

Both branches, again, involve dissociational patterns as they occur in the brain’s function. Those of us that I would place on this branch I see myself on as different from the one I see my mother as being on, have NOT suffered a fundamental break that prevents us from having access to our self. Having some access to our self is still in the operational loops within our brains (most of the time) while theirs is not ALL of the time.

What do I mean by ‘most of the time’? It is the nature of dissociation when and as it occurs to create some kind of breach between the ongoing experience of being alive in a body and the self. For some, I believe, the dissociative breach happened once and for all and can only be said to be ‘a pattern of one’.

For the rest of us, dissociation can happen thousands and thousands of times throughout our life time, caused by exposure to a million trauma triggers. In between these triggered reactions those of us on this different branch can access some version of a connection to some version of our self while the others cannot.

A very graphic, though not disgustingly bloody, image just popped into my awareness as I finished writing my last sentence. I see those on the one branch where I would place my mother as having a head completely severed from their body. This head hovers closely above the body and follows where it goes but there is no connection between the two. Those of us on the other branch have a head that is partially severed by that is connected through the equivalent of vital main arteries and nerves. Strange image, I know…..

If I go outside to start my car and find the battery is dead, it does me no good at all to forgive my car’s battery for failing me and for making my life more difficult. I think about my own abuse history and my mother in the same kind of factual way I would think about a dead battery. No amount of magical wishful thinking involving denial or forgiveness is going to get my car started. Neither do I see that it applies to my thinking about my mother. If an individual is forced through conditions of early trauma to severe their connection to self they are just as cut off from their power source of consciousness as my car would be from the power of a working battery.

++++++++++

By thinking in terms of this tree, and by identifying how a person ends up on one branch or another, we can begin to separate out what really is the magical wishful thinking process of denial from the more helpful process of learning new facts about how our brains develop. Brains CAN and DO develop in such a way that the more advanced abilities related to having a self and an operational connection to this self are left out of the picture.

It might seem like an odd assessment to make, but I consider that the term and topic of ‘forgiveness’ is often tangled up with magical wishful thinking that is actually a denial of the facts regarding the risks and consequences of severe maltreatment as it affects human development.

I have no desire to protect my mother, excuse or justify her horribly abusive behavior toward me. I equally have no desire to forgive her. I see both my mother and her behavior in the light of fact, not magical wishful thinking that leads to denial. I think we have to be very careful in our thinking about forgiveness because of the risk we take in involving forgiveness with our denial of the very real physiological causes and consequences of severe maltreatment during early brain formation stages.

As long as we keep forgiveness tangled up with our denial of the facts, we will never truly find ways to heal the very real damage done to our perpetrators, to ourselves and being done to others on an ongoing basis. If we continue to apply magical wishful thinking to the real conditions of our existence, we will be at the same time also denying that we have a very REAL problem that has very REAL solutions — a problem caused by factual conditions that we can factually address, heal and resolve.

This is, to me, simply a helpful clarification process. It is a form of inventory taking that can help us identify both our possession of specific resources and our lack of resources.

I aim for realistic rather than wishful thinking. As children, we all moved through a Theory of Mind developmental stage during which we processed, incorporated, and integrated outsiders’ thinking into our own brain-mind. It can feel uncomfortable to have our final thinking structure ‘threatened’ by the introduction of thoughts that do not seem to match the Theory of Mind that we came up with.

Our individual and collective cultural Theory of Mind is always open to learning, growth and change if we are flexible and wise enough to let this happen. This growth requires of all of us that we allow new information to enter our thinking process, and as we do so we change who and how we are in the world. I see this as nothing more than a ‘reality checking’ process that allows us to continue to move past the childhood stage of ‘magical wishful thinking’ in some new way every day of our lives.

I believe that as we do this ‘work’ we can — individually and collectively –push ourselves further and further away from the EVENT HORIZON of trauma and the effects traumas have upon us throughout our adult lives. The literal meaning of an event horizon has to do with what happens near a Black Hole in space.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon

we read: “In general relativity, an event horizon is a boundary in spacetime, most often an area surrounding a black hole, beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer. Light emitted from beyond the horizon can never reach the observer, and anything that passes through the horizon from the observer’s side appears to freeze in place, with its image becoming more redshifted as time proceeds.”

I believe that this image applies to our work related to healing trauma. I believe that degrees of childhood magical wishful thinking that remain within our individual and collective Theory of Mind constructions put us at increasing risk for being sucked into the hole trauma can create in the fabric of a good life filled with well being. The good news is that we can always learn more about what is real in the world, and each time we do learning, we are replacing an immature magical wishful thought with some new fact. Facts are based in the real world as best we can understand it. Continuing to grow our Theory of Mind as it informs our actions is what I think healing is all about.

How do we know what magical wishful thinking is? I see the image of my son when he was three to four years old as he ‘plays’ with my well used tall metal kitchen stool laid down on the floor. His favorite ‘game’ for many moths was to sit on the floor inside it with his legs straight out in front of him between the stool’s supporting cross pieces. His hands were constantly moving around the top round seat piece ‘as if’ it were a space ship’s steering mechanism he had to use to maneuver himself through all of his ‘imaginary’ spaceship adventures.

When adults see young children engaged in this kind of ‘play’ we know that what is happening within the child’s mind is very different than what is happening inside our own as we watch. If we try to tell the child that their world is ‘not real’ they will look at us blankly, walk away and do something else because we have ruined their experience, or simply ignore us and go on with their game. We cannot, at this stage of their development, actually change the way their mind is perceiving their world, though how we interact with them does influence the growth process they are involved in.

The fact that the old metal kitchen stool was not a spaceship meant absolutely nothing to my son. In fact, my true concern eventually had nothing to do with his mental state. I became, as the months went by and his body continued to grow larger, became worried about his body. And I was right to worry. There DID come a day when he wedged himself so tightly into position within the legs and cross pieces of that stool that he couldn’t get out. I couldn’t get him out, either.

He started screaming in panic and terror. It would not have been helpful for me to become involved in my son’s magical thinking world, even if I could have. I needed to be in the real world of fact so I could effect a solution to this very real problem. I left his older sister beside him on the floor while I ran for the apartment manager to help us. It was only through a process of him using a crow bar and force to bend the legs of the stool that we were able to extricate my son from in between the steel pieces. Obviously, that ‘game’ was over.

It had not mattered before that time what I said to my son regarding my concerns. He had to really learn the facts by getting himself so stuck within the stool that he needed serious help to get out that he was forced to finally leave behind his much loved child’s game. Before that time arrived he was not only perfectly capable of retaining his state of magical wishful thinking, but self determined to do so.

How, when, where and to what degree were we able to pass through our own Theory of Mind developmental stages so that we left some part of our magical wishful thinking behind us? How willing are we to continue in our adulthood to exercise our brain’s infinite abilities to learn, grow and change?

Nobody is going to magically appear and sweep us away from the dangers of the event horizon of ongoing effects from trauma, no matter how much we might wish that they would do so. This is something that we all must do together. Learning the actual facts about how trauma changed our bodies and our brain-minds during development in malevolent conditions can lead us to new facts, and is it not the truth what will actually set us free?

As long as we continue to keep magical wishful thinking a part of our Theory of Mind related to the causes and consequences of severe early abuse during developmental stages, we are NOT going to find the very real facts we need in order to prevent this disaster from occurring in the first place, or to find realistic hopes for healing once it has occurred.

+TRAUMA DRAMAS ARE A BRAIN’S REPEATED ATTEMPTS TO COMMUNCIATE

May 18, 2009November 21, 2010 alchemynowLeave a comment

In my reply to the comment on yesterday’s post I described why I do not believe that my mother had the ability to distinguish right from wrong.

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/2009/05/17/dissociation-and-my-version-of-an-utopian-world/#comments

In my reply I referred to my mother’s childhood stories because I believe they include her own description of the break that happened within her own mind and the point where she became not only lost to herself but also lost her ability to connect with the ‘reality’ that most others remain in contact with throughout their lives.

My Mother’s Childhood Stories
++

I believe that one of the clearest indicators that unresolved trauma from childhood continues to exist in a person can be found by looking at the ‘trauma dramas’ that repeat themselves in adulthood. This happens because the nature of unresolved trauma is that it cannot be integrated into the body-brain of a person who has been overwhelmed by it.

John J. Ratey, who authored the book “A User’s Guide To the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain”

(Vintage Books, 2002 —

http://www.amazon.com/Users-Guide-Brain-Perception-Attention/dp/0375701079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242667313&sr=1-1)

wrote the following:

“The confusing terminology that neuroscience applies to the brain and its functions will itself eventually need to change – and it will as our understanding of the brain deepens. Scientists looking at pathology are still caught up in the unitary hunt for the broken neural component they imagine to be at fault, and are doing their best to match up specific brain functions with specific neurogeographical locations. The sooner we replace our mechanistic model of the brain with an ecologically centered, systems-based view, the better off we will be, for such a model better accounts for much of human experience. (Ratey, p.4)”

“…the brain is largely composed of maps, arrays of neurons that apparently represent entire objects of perception or cognition, or at least entire sensory or cognitive qualities of those objects, such as color, texture, credibility, or speed. Most cognitive functions involve the interaction of maps from many different part [sic] of the brain at once… The brain assembles perceptions by the simultaneous interaction of whole concepts, whole images….the brain is an analog processor, meaning, essentially, that it works by analogy and metaphor. It relates whole concepts to one another and looks for similarities, differences, or relationships between them [bolding is mine]. It does not assemble thoughts and feelings from bits of data. (Ratey, p.5)”

“Although metaphor and analogy are unconventional in scientific circles, I am firmly convinced that a more nonlinear kind of thought will eventually supplant much of the logical reasoning we use today [bolding is mine]. Chris Langton, one of the primary researchers in the field of complexity theory, has speculated that in the future science will become more poetic…..real trust, when emotions are running high, is based on analogy, not calculation. (Ratey, p.5)”

I firmly believe in the truth of what Ratey is saying, and I also believe that as we move further ahead in the development of our understanding about how the brain actually works — in contrast to how we assume it works — we will know more about what the experience of mental illness actually is for people who have it. We will also know more about what creates the experience of severe child abuse for the offspring of people with mental illness such as my mother had.

As I prepare myself to write +What I Suspect of My Mother’s Early Childhood (Please read this page, it is important!), I also think about another very important piece necessary to the understanding of my mother’s abuse of me. Please follow this link to one of the important writings of Dr. Stephen B. Karpman titled, “Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis.”

http://www.itaa-net.org/tajnet/articles/karpman01.html

Having the ability to use language means that we can assign words to bits and pieces of our experiences. It is a commonly recognized fact that one of the symptoms of PTSD and unresolved trauma is that the language centers of the brain cannot actively participate in the integration process through verbal articulation of the traumatic experience. I believe that leaves the right brain’s ability to process information in wordless images responsible for attempting to heal the traumas. It does so most actively through reenactment.

Communication through bodily movements is a far, far older means of expression than words or even hand signals are, and directly links to the emotional brain through activation of the amygdala brain region. SEE:

Bonda et al, 1996

Montreal, Canada) eva bonda, Michael petrides, david ostry and alan evans “Specific involvement of human parietal systems and the amygdala in the perception of biological motion” in The Journal of Neuroscience, june 1, 1996, 16(11), 3737-3744 http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/reprint/16/11/3737

I believe that the ‘cognitive map’ interactions that Ratey talks about become disturbed as a result of overwhelming trauma. This matters MOST when we are talking about severe early chronic child abuse and maltreatment because the child is building its brain during these experiences that will establish what these maps are and how the brain will process information contained in the maps for the rest of their lives. As my mother’s childhood stories indicate, she wrote these stories as her brain was actively trying to form a working Theory of Mind, SEE Google search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=theory+of+mind+development&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307

Because the traumas of her early life had overwhelmed her abilities to resolve them, she was forever left in this unresolved state with her right brain’s dramatic, metaphoric processes trying to resolve these traumas by itself without the assistance of the left brain or higher cortical thinking. This, to me, reflects the overriding purpose of repeated trauma dramas in adulthood. The person is acting out and communicating with the BODY what the mind does not have the ability to process within itself.

This is why I believe Karpman’s writings are so critically important in our attempts to understand what our abusive childhood experiences were linked to. While we might rather believe that some cut-and-dried scientific explanation will eventually appear that will allow us to place our experiences of trauma and abuse in some clinically sterile container, all sealed off and logically explained away, I do not believe such a solution will ever be possible to attain.

Life can be extremely messy, especially when unresolved traumas have to repeat themselves through trauma dramas that nobody, either inside the situation or outside of it, seem to be able to understand. This is why I do not believe that forgiveness has anything to do with healing from the 18 years of severe abuse I suffered from under my mother. She was simply a very big, very mean, dangerous psychotic body trying to actively resolve her experiences of early trauma through the communicative actions of the trauma drama that was her life.

We expect play among children to be their age appropriate means of coming to terms with their lives. Yet we do not realize that when a brain-mind is forced in childhood through malevolent interactions with early environments to take a detour in its development, as adults we still continue to play in a similar way. Where is that magic line where acting something out in childhood becomes dangerous in adulthood? I don’t think we know exactly where that line really is, do we? When does this tendency of the human being to act out dramas become a deadly serious game, where playing for keeps means disaster and the cost is the lack of well being for human lives?

That is why a childhood such as mine was seems like a nightmare and is as illogical and unreasonable as dreams can be. In either case the brain is trying to process information through a left brain-right brain integration effort. In situations where a child’s ability to process trauma is overwhelmed, there is nothing they can do the rest of their lives to resolve it. THAT is only one part of the tragedy.

Other parts of the tragedy include the facts that we do not necessarily recognize when such traumas are overwhelming a young child, we do not actively intervene or prevent these traumas from occurring, and we sure do not make adequate and appropriate therapy available universally to those who suffered from these overwhelming traumas in the first place.

Any time I see repeating patterns indicating a lack of well being in an adult’s life, my own included, I can now easily see the trauma drama actions of the right brain trying to resolve traumas through action of the body. Those of us caught in these repeating trauma reenactment cycles never learned that life could be about anything other than suffering in an unsafe and insecure world. We were never told that we would act out in our lifetime the traumas that were impossible for our brains to process and integrate in any other way, including through the natural process of sleep and dreaming. It doesn’t take long for the very real consequences of our actual choices and actions in the real world to so encapsulate us in our lives that we have little or no hope of escape.

This is so far past judgment that I cannot even see that it applies. If we ever encounter someone with a severed artery we don’t stop and first ponder how this accident happened before we offer life saving assistance. Yet when it comes to recognizing repeated trauma dramas in our own and in one another’s lives we are rapidly coming to a point when these dramas are occurring so often among us that we think they are normal. This, to me, is creating a nearly overwhelming burden for those who were and are safely and securely attached in the world. Who else is there to show us there is a different and a better way to live other than bleeding to death?

The further we wander away from our meaningful and adequate social attachment relationships with one another as members of a social species, the more at risk we become for suffering from isolation loneliness, depression, addictions, harmful conspicuous consumption, obesity and all manner of neglect of our offspring, ourselves and our environment. We are more and more often spending our lives in a state of lack of well being trying desperately to repair what was never built right in the first place.

People such as my mother was are like the warning canaries the miners used to assess the safety of their working environments. The demise of my mother’s mind happened because nobody was paying attention. My own suffering in my childhood happened for the same reason. The environment of trauma that both of us grew up in happened because we were cut off from life saving assistance from others of our species. Isolation breeds dis-ease in a social species.

And because we are members of a social species we are innately destined to attempt to communicate within ourselves and to others the state of our reality. Trauma drama reenactments, as unconscious attempts to communicate the reality of malevolent experience both within our own brain and to others of our species, are seldom heard and seldom understood. The nature of the traumas simply keep passing themselves down the generations until someone at some time listens to these communications, GETS IT and offers the life saving means to resolving the traumas so that they can finally STOP repeating themselves.

Repeated trauma dramas always indicate not only that a lack of safety and security existed in the first place, but that this same condition continues to exist in the present. They tell us about our insecure attachments within the world we live in.

+TRAUMA MATH: THE SORROWS AND HAPPINESS OF “CRAFT SHOW APRIL”

May 11, 2009November 21, 2010 alchemynow2 Comments

I haven’t completely ‘returned’ or recovered from my out-of-town craft show adventure last weekend. I say returned because my dissociation condition causes me to experience changes as if separate parts of me are ‘out there’ floating around like dandelion fluff in the breeze, drifting around until they eventually land. I experience a waiting period while this happens, trying to learn every day more of what to do to speed up the process of consolidation of memory as best I can.

Some might call this a grounding process. I went out and watered all of my plants, most of them looking pretty darn stressed if not dead. I forgot to have one of the neighbor children come over to water them while I was gone on this 100 degree plus weekend. Now I’m washing my blankets and clothing. There’s no place for the washing machine in the house, so it sits out back on the cement rim that lies around the foundation of the house, hooked by an hundred foot extension cord running out my door and to a fifty foot hose.

Taking the small steps of being in my life, in my house, being in my body as I wait for all of the experiences of this past weekend to settle within me in some form of organized fashion. That’s what the combination of the dissociative disorder and the PTSD do to me now. They easily give me the feeling of ‘too much to deal with’ and a sense of being easily overwhelmed by any kind of unusual stimulation.

I believe that’s part of the role of the ‘recurring major depression’ that forms the third leg of my emotional and mental ‘disorder’ and ‘disability.’ It gives me the ‘down time’ I need to let things put themselves together after I experience more incoming information than I can handle at one time.

I am so fortunate at this moment in time to have a simple place that is my home. One has to have the safety and security of some kind of ‘home’ for their body in order that the home of the mind can maintain itself. I’ve been homeless before, several times, even when I still had young children under my care. Today more than in several generations having a home or not having a home has come back to the forefront of our concerns — both individually and as a society.

Which leads me to this story I heard from a neighboring vendor, I’ll call her April, at the craft show last weekend. I always listen with a special interest to stories told by new people I meet. It’s the only way that I have to test my own theories or ideas, things that I am coming to believe about how our early childhood experiences come to form who we are as adults.

Because April never asked that anything she was telling me be kept confidential, I am not concerned about telling you what she told me. After all, she had only just met me and spent a few hours in her booth across from mine as she sold kettle corn and ice water as I hoped to sell earrings and mosaics.

April is one year younger than me, another child of the early fifties, born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. She was second born of six children and spent her childhood with both of her parents and with her grandparents nearby. Her father was an untreated bi-polar severe alcoholic and was extremely violent and abusive to his wife and all of the children. Her father beat his wife during every one of her pregnancies, and over the years knocked out all of his wife’s teeth, and sent her to the hospital with concussions and broken bones many times.

April told of one severe attack of violence this man had perpetrated against his family, and her mother took herself and all of the children to her mother’s house for some kind of protection. It wasn’t long before her father showed up at the door with his rifle, accompanied by three uniformed police officers who were there to make sure the wife and children returned home with the man of their family immediately.

We might think this unbelievable and barbaric, but that happened only 45 years ago. It tells us about the conditions of life and of our culture that took so much hard work and effort to change — even a little bit so that things might be different and better for women and children in America today.

April appears as a very attractive, perky, positive, happy, kind, hard working, healthy woman. There’s nothing about her that meets the eye of the public that would indicate the kind of terrible traumas that she has experienced in her life. And yet it didn’t take long as we sat in her RV after Saturday’s craft show had closed for the day, talking over an ice cold beer and a container of grocery store deli chili that April had microwaved and generously shared with me, that I learned how close to the surface all of her difficult history is to her. In fact I would say none of it has gone anywhere. But what fascinates me is what April is doing with herself in relationship to it.

April is married to her third husband, a hard working truck driver who just lost one hundred thousand dollars of his 401K that he spent 32 years building for his retirement. April has worked for the past 21 years as a massage therapist for a major hotel chain in Phoenix. She still loves her work but in order, now, to hope for a retirement she decided to go into the business of traveling as a kettle corn vendor on weekends.

Certainly she had the resources of owning a RV and a sturdy steel trailer to haul her equipment. She had the resources to buy everything she needed to set up her booth and cook that candied popcorn, including a portable generator. But she also had the invisible inner resources to come up with her plan and the stamina and willingness to work extremely hard toward making her business a paying venture.

Just the physical work alone that it took to drive that rig, haul all that heavy equipment off of it, set up the canopy, stand there in 100 plus heat for two days trying to sell to a pitifully thin crowd at that show, and then pack it all up again and return home to get herself ready for a full week of work at her ‘real’ job — and do all this smiling and caring for and about every single person she saw along her way and mean it — provided me with an incredible experience to learn about, watch and benefit from personally.

April made sure that I had ice cold water to drink all weekend, that I had an iced wet cloth to lay on the back of my neck in that scorching heat, that I had chili and beer in the evening and a place to park my little truck next to her RV to sleep for the night, and that I had her friendship and her compassionate and sensitive encouragement every step of the way. April offered these kindnesses in different ways to everyone around her. She never complained, and even as she told me about her childhood there was no anger or blame. She simply described what happened.

As she talked I of course listened to discover how it was possible that April was the person she turned out to be. At first it was a mystery to me until I heard what might just be the secret of her ‘salvation’, the blessings caught among the curses.

April described to me how she had attended a cranial massage training institute and had been blindsided by the insensitive and unprofessional experience that she had by being a chosen volunteer for the technique without being given any warning about what might happen. While the instructors demonstrated in front of a large crowd of strangers, April experienced what had happened to her in the womb as her father had beaten her mother while she was carrying April. During this session she remembered what it felt like when she also, as an unborn infant, had been pummeled by her father’s blows.

The conditions of ongoing violence in her home of origin never improved. April left home very young, married and began having children of her own. Of her three children, one is schizophrenic and facing a long prison sentence for attempted manslaughter and arson after he tried to burn down his girl friend’s home with her in it. Among April’s five siblings, one became schizophrenic and two ended up with severe bi-polar conditions. One of these, her brother, committed suicide.

April’s father died a few months ago and she admits she never loved him and that her father never loved her. April’s mother suffers from several serious medical conditions in her later years that doctors suspect are directly connected to the many serious injuries that she suffered while being beaten by her husband. April has struggled with all of these trauma related conditions in her family all of her life, and is left now still trying to find a way to manage continued contact with her mentally ill siblings.

April’s one healthy sister that she is very close to, was a real estate agent in California and her brother-in-law had a successful construction business. Both sources of income have vanished, her sister’s family has lost both of the homes they owned. Stress from these challenges caused the brother-in-law to have a serious heart attack and he is facing surgery. April is not only very worried about her sister and her family, but she also is suffering from what really is the loss of one of the most important support people of her life.

So here is April woman-handling a physically and financially difficult new business, and optimistically being happy as she continues to face the challenges of her life. Because of what I understand about how vital it is that an infant’s growing brain receives happiness stimulation in order for the left brain’s happy center to form in the first place — thus allowing it to be accessed later in life — I had to ask April what her perspective is on the differences between herself and her siblings.

She told me that during her recent physical exam her physician had told her that the reason her three siblings ended up with severe mental illness is probably because they had those specific combination of genetic possibilities in them that were triggered as their bodies were stressed during early childhood. He further stated that evidently April and her other two siblings did not have these genetic sensitivities so they ended up without the mental illness. (Even then April was a carrier of the genes because she has a schizophrenic alcoholic drug addicted son. I did not ask her about her own parenting conditions nor did she tell me.)

This still did not explain to me how April manages to be so optimistically positive and so able to find active ways to cope in her life. It did not explain that while she had for a period of time become what she termed “an active psychologically dependent alcoholic,” how she managed to extricate herself from her addiction so that it didn’t affect her in the present.

This is the point in the conversation where the secret was unveiled to me. Part of her current difficulties with her bi-polar sister stem from what happened last January at the death of their father. April was very clear about her lack of feeling for her father and her sister fell to pieces and became enraged at April for her detachment. It turns out that the only person their father ever paid any affectionate attention to was this bi-polar sister. She was his favorite and she was his pet. (I don’t know whether or not there was sexual abuse occurring in this situation, though it sounds to me like a typical setup for such abuse to happen.)

What April told me next is the most important fact of this story. While her sister was her very sick, abusive, violent ‘dysfunctional’ father’s pet, April was consistently the favored pet of her father’s mother. And what is most important about THIS fact is that April describes this grandmother as being a very happy person — able to be happy in her own life and able to be extremely happy in her ongoing relationship with April.

THIS is, to me, a magic key to April’s life today. The happy center in little April’s developing brain was fed, fostered and able to grow because of this happy, safe and secure relationship she had with her happy grandmother. Because this happy center was so designed and built in April’s early-developing brain, that collection of neurons was already in her brain in spite of all the other nasty traumatic experiences that April still had to endure.

April lost touch with her happy self for many, many years. But when she was ready to take a good hard look at herself and her life, and wanted to make it so much better, she had this precious resource within her brain of a well-built happy center to fall back on and to rely on as she sought to make happier changes for a happier life. Still, today, it was and is April’s decision to exercise the heck out of these happy center neurons that is making the difference not only for her in her life, but also for all others that come into contact with her.

April described to me that she works at being happy all of the time. She WORKS HARD at it. But she is the one doing the work. The fact that she was blessed with the conditions in her early brain developmental life, through a safe, secure and happy attachment relationship with at least one other person, her grandmother, does not take away the importance that April is still doing this good work herself. She made the decision and is applying her own life force to continue to make these positive changes. Nobody else could do this for her. Yet I believe that her early secure attachment with her grandmother helped to give her both the inner resources to do this work and the ability to want to try.

I could sense the very old competition for affection and resources that still exists between April and her sister regarding their father. It was like, “She had our father but I had my grandmother.” The unspoken pain was still there caused by a father who could not love his daughters — in fact could probably not really love anyone including himself.

There’s no way a child cannot crave a father’s affection and not notice when another sibling seems to be receiving it. Yet in this situation the love from a terrible father could in no way compare to the seemingly healthy love from a happy, adoring grandmother. April got the better end of the deal, and her sister is a deteriorating bi-polar in large part, I believe, because of these inequities.

(This creates another whole set of questions in my mind. What happened in April’s father’s early life in relationship with his own mother, this happy grandmother, that set him up for a disastrous life? It is not at all uncommon for grandmother’s to be able to love and attach securely to grandchildren when they could not do this for their own children. And why did was this grandmother unable to intervene on behalf of all of her grandchildren? Why did she single out only one as her ‘pet’? But all this will be food and fodder for future writings.)

I understand that everyone who has even only a tiny happy center can still exercise that center through hard work to make it stronger. But the original nerve cells/neurons that were present at birth — designated for this happy center but NOT used while this center built itself through early attachment relationships and therefore were lost — can NEVER be replaced.

What happy center neurons we DO have can increase their dendrites and the interactions between these dendrites through exercise. That April is so clearly applying hard work to become more happy, even though she had a better happy center built in the beginning than her sister did, still lets us know that the effects of severe abuse continue for the lifespan. If they didn’t, April would not have to work so hard to become more happy herself.

People who were raised from birth in safety and security that encompassed and enveloped them as it SHOULD have, have so much more to work with on every level as they face the ongoing challenges of life. Being happy will always be easier for securely attached from birth people, just as it is for April who only had partial childhood experiences of secure attachment in the midst of trauma compared to her mentally ill siblings.

I describe this today in part as a gesture of support for everyone who has become even more challenged in their lives as a result of the economic difficulties the world is facing. If you or anyone you know is being additionally challenged right now, please do not judge them harshly if they cannot be as optimistically happy as someone else might be able to be as they struggle to get through their hard times — ANY kind of hard times.

We need to support and encourage ourselves and one another in the work of trying to live a more happy and positive life with kindness to the best of our abilities. We must be realistic and informed about the context of happiness and active coping just as we need to be about the actual traumas we have experienced.

Those who have suffered early developmental-stage traumas are always the most at risk when new traumas come along. We can do the math — the aftermath of trauma — to find what is upsetting the balance of well-being in our lives and to find what helps to create a better state of balance every step of the way.

Thank you for reading this post — your comments are welcome and appreciated. Linda

+FINDING THE CRACK IN MY BORDERLINE MOTHER’S REALITY

May 3, 2009November 21, 2010 alchemynow3 Comments

At 5:35 pm on Good Friday, March 27, 1964 I was 12 years old and not yet a woman.

Then the great Alaskan earthquake happened on this day at 5:36 pm — the second strongest earthquake on record anywhere on our planet.

http://images.google.com/images?q=1964+alaska+earthquake&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=Eyz-SfPnA5ectAOtoaDWAQ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title

http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/64quake.htm

I could tell you my personal story of the earthquake that day when my menarche happened, but all I want to mention now is that by the end of that three minutes of terrible shaking, I was a woman.

What matters most to me right now is that because of the earthquake, because of my mother’s writing about her personal experience during it, because those pieces of paper she wrote her story on survived for over 40 years and then found their way into my hands after her death in 2002, I now have proof of a critical point regarding Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) — most importantly of my mother’s version of this mental adaptation to early traumas and my assessment of her condition.

I believe that an abusive borderline parent will do everything in their power to keep the ‘outside world’ from seeing or being able to detect both their broken mental condition and the abuse that is a result of it. This is what makes BPD parents so extremely dangerous to their offspring. Nobody outside of the family is likely to EVER suspect the existence of either the mental illness or the abuse. (Knowing the signs to look for in order to notice in the first place and then to be able to see through the crack in the reality of BPDs will be covered in future posts).

I am not saying that my mother’s mental illness or her abuse of me was invisible to the outside. I am saying that a combination of the fact that nobody cared with the fact that these same people did not know what they were seeing even if they were looking, resulted in a complete absence of intervention for the entire 18 years of my childhood I spent being severely abused by my mother.

It is likely that my father also succumbed to these same factors, although the additional fact of him being my father SHOULD have allowed him the ability to intervene on my behalf in some way. This is a good part of why I am pursuing my writing based on my personal experience. I believe that personality disorders are so pervasive, consistent and insidious that until our present ‘enlightened era’ it has been nearly impossible for those who are on the inside to recognize what is going on, either.

This is why what I found in my mother’s writings about her earthquake experience is so empowering to me because it confirmed what I intuitively know about her condition and affirmed my assessment on many levels both of the cause of BPD and of the consequences of involvement on any level with a person — especially a mother — who has it.

You can read her story as she wrote it at My Mother’s Alaskan Earthquake Journal Entry.

In the months just prior to receiving my cancer diagnosis I was hard at work sorting and copying into my computer all my mother’s letters, notes and journal entries concerning her homesteading experiences. I will post what I have completed for you to reference, but there remains hundreds of disorganized pages and letters that still need to be included to make the entries complete.

These papers my mother wrote traveled thousands of miles, some of them being stored for up to 30 years in her various storage lockers she kept, and finally found their way to me nearly 50 years after she wrote them. It was in this collection of her papers that I found the stories that she wrote the winter of her 11th birthday. (SEE also: My Mother’s Childhood Stories)

All the time I was transcribing her writings I was searching for a clue that would show me the truth in her writings that would confirm what I know in my own heart about my mother’s mental illness. Because my mother’s stated intention in writing any of these letters and journals was to eventually write what she referred to as her “Alaskan book,” they were written from the public side of the border wall that allowed her to write under the ‘spell’ of that BPD persona. Because this borderline split between public and private is so fundamentally and profoundly crafted into the altered brain of a borderline it is usually impossible to detect it through their own description of their version of reality.

That is why what I found in her earthquake writing created in me a state of elation! I FOUND it!! I found the hole in her border wall, the crack in her reality. I found the chink in the armor that she had developed as her brain grew in childhood to protect herself from unbearable pain. I found the equivalent of my own Silver Chalice. If I never read another word she wrote I have still successfully completed my mission and my quest.

I need to take a related diversion, or detour at this moment to make a connection that I believe is vitally crucial to putting severely abusive mothers’ behavior in the social context of the human mythological imagination.

I encountered this ‘myth’ several years ago at the start of my research, Euripides’ Medea, and would like you to find a way to read it if you can. It is contained in this book

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1417908971

though I read it in an earlier printing of this one

http://www.amazon.com/Greek-Drama-Bantam-Classics-Moses/dp/0553212214/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1241397818&sr=1-1

Refer to this for historical context surrounding the Trojan War and Jason and Medea:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea

Euripides’ famous retelling of this part of Greek myth in his play about Medea was first performed in 431 B.C., hence this story is a retelling of mythology that is older than 2500 years. My point is that I believe this story is about a particular form of madness and can be seen as very closely related to aspects of what we now know of as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). For whatever reasons the authors of the myth ascribe to her, in the end Medea murders her own children.

Had my mother been able to escape any consequence for her actions, I know she would have murdered me. In fact, this is a point of argument that I hold with the experts’ version of what dissociation is and what it does. I DID NOT dissociate during my mother’s beatings of me. I felt every single one of them because I had to remain absolutely aware and present during all of them as soon as I was old enough to control my body. Her rage usually and quickly escalated to the point that she lost control of herself while she was beating me — in rhythm to her recitation of the litany she had created for me — SEE: Litany from Start to Finish — to avoid the most dangerous falls her beatings caused me or I would have been killed — if possible, killed many times over.

It is evident in Euripides’ play that all the public present knew of Medea’s intent to kill her children because she stated it publicly and yet nobody intervened — not even when they heard the children screaming as she hacked them to death in their home with a massive knife. Yet while many consider that this play refers to abandonment, one of the key symptoms of BPD, it is the ‘lower layer’ related to a mother’s ‘passion’ to kill her child or children that most fascinates me personally.

Because I understand that extreme childhood trauma can cause an evolutionarily altered brain to form, and because I believe that BPD appears as one of the manifestations possible from these changed brains, I also believe that it is the very, very ancient genetic information about surviving in the worst of all possible worlds that triggers this mother-passion to harm her offspring. It is no different an instinctual reaction as one pursued by animals when they kill offspring, abandon entire litters, or choose the most ‘fit’ of the offspring to save while abandoning the others.

This is, I believe, the human basis of the killing Medea did of her children and the attempted killing my mother did to me.

Now back to the earthquake writings: My proof is contained therein. If you read her writings at My Mother’s Alaskan Earthquake Journal Entry you will find in her story the following — (Words written in the brackets are mine as is the type bolding. Eklunds were neighboring homesteaders on the valley floor whose house my sisters, younger brother and I had been staying at while my parents were in Anchorage during the earthquake):

“Finally Eklund’s house was in sight – from outward appearances all seemed fine. She came running out as we approached. I could see our children were fine. I was so thankful! I hugged and killed [meant kissed no doubt but she wrote killed], each child in turn. We were all together again. I can’t emphasize strongly enough – that this was all that was important. We could always start over again – even though for us, who like so many Alaskans have struggled so long and hard for everything and still have so far to go. We could and would, if necessary, do it again. I’m sure there was absolutely no questioning our minds to that.”

BINGO!

Even if we call this a ” Freudian slip, or parapraxis, an error in speech, memory, or physical action that is believed to be caused by the unconscious mind,” the unmistakable evidence is here in her writings that what I suspect of her mental reality was real.

When I am ready to dig through boxes again, and ready to set up my scanner and do this, I will scan in the actual words as she wrote them with her own hand. I transcribed them into my computer exactly. There is no way, once a person sees her writing, that the two middle letters in ‘killed’ could possibly be construed as being the two middle letters in ‘kissed’.

Finding this hole through which I could see her reality may well be the only tangible vindication I can ever discover that proves my mother was who she did not say she was, particularly as she terrorized me from the moment of my birth as a result of her psychosis.

The only other related confirmations that I have found in her writings appears in the last of her childhood stories (mentioned above) and in her writing of the dream about the dark rainbow and the storm which can be seen at

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/about-stop-the-stor/

Drawing the line between the real world and the reality of the world of a borderline becomes nearly impossible particularly for those of us who were abused by one from birth. Not only the trauma is built into the body-brain, but as a result, the version of the borderline mother’s reality is built into the survivor, as well. I know my mother’s is built into me.

These three ‘holes’ that appear in my mother’s writings are thus critically important for me to both possess and to consider as I attempt to face the reality of what happened to me on all the levels that my mother damaged me. I’m not sure that anybody who was not severely abused by a borderline parent can even begin to imagine how important these tangible expressions that illustrate clearly the break in the nearly perfect facade a borderline shows to the public world is — or imagine the terrible confusion such a parent creates in the minds of those she abuses.

My mother never knew that she meant to write that word KILL, yet there it was where I was able to find it. What a gift this discovery is to me, and perhaps to someone else who reads this post. That word is a direct connection to the ancient genetic potential for survival in a traumatic world that mothers who have been abused themselves CAN form even in this very real current day world. Because the evolutionary throw-back potential can exist in a brain that was traumatized during its development, it is folly for us to remain puzzled on any level when we hear of a mother abusing her children, not even her infants.

We can no longer afford to be puzzled when mothers actually kill their offspring, either. All the evidence that trauma can turn a mother into a killer is in the 2500 year old play about Medea which I am sure only reflects a reality that has been with our species from the time of our beginnings. It was present in my mother’s writings and in her abuse of me.

I also want to note here that the infliction of self harm and self injury that is common to borderlines did not have to be a part of my mother’s spectrum of behaviors because she made no distinction between herself and me. I was a projection of all that she had been taught to abhor within herself. I was thus an externalized aspect of her mind — a mind that was, in effect, turned inside out because the burden of containing her own reality within herself was potentially too much to bear. She could then heap all kinds of punishments and injuries on me and did not have to self-harm her own body.

As always, thank you for reading — Your comments are welcome and appreciated. Linda

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Stop the Storm

The most important work we can do, individually and globally, is the healing and prevention of traumas so that we don't pass them down to future generations. This blog is a working tool to contribute to this good work.

Tag: evolution

+LINK TO NEWLY ADDED CHILDHOOD STORY

*Age 10 – NIGHTMARES AND BED WETTING

+WE NEED NEW WORDS TO DIALOG WITH OUR BODY ABOUT TRAUMA

+MOTHERING: WHEN IT’S RIGHT, WHEN IT’S WRONG

+IS THIS NORMAL?

+LEAVING NO CHAOS BEHIND – PART TWO

+EARLY ORIGIN OF OUR ONGOING EXPERIENCE OF SHAME AND FORGIVENESS

+MAGICAL WISHFUL THINKING DOES NOT HEAL ABUSE

+TRAUMA DRAMAS ARE A BRAIN’S REPEATED ATTEMPTS TO COMMUNCIATE

Bonda et al, 1996

Montreal, Canada) eva bonda, Michael petrides, david ostry and alan evans “Specific involvement of human parietal systems and the amygdala in the perception of biological motion” in The Journal of Neuroscience, june 1, 1996, 16(11), 3737-3744 http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/reprint/16/11/3737

+TRAUMA MATH: THE SORROWS AND HAPPINESS OF “CRAFT SHOW APRIL”

+FINDING THE CRACK IN MY BORDERLINE MOTHER’S REALITY

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Bonda et al, 1996

Montreal, Canada) eva bonda, Michael petrides, david ostry and alan evans “Specific involvement of human parietal systems and the amygdala in the perception of biological motion” in The Journal of Neuroscience, june 1, 1996, 16(11), 3737-3744 http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/reprint/16/11/3737

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