Tag: fear

+THE HEALING OF DISSOCIATONS – A 50-YEAR MISSING PIECE OF ME HAS RETURNED

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I woke up this morning thinking about all the wounds we received in the war zone of our abusive childhoods.  Often as the war raged on around us we ended up being the targets.  In this battlefield we were the victims.  Some of us received so many wounds they cannot be counted.

My mother’s war with the world began in her own childhood and so wounded her that her war never ended until the day that she died.  I was born a casualty of her war.  I had no choice, no weapon, and I could not escape.  I could not fight back or defend myself against her.  No one was there to tend my wounds when they were inflicted, either.  And yet for all the wounds I suffered both visible and invisible, my strength and resiliency still enabled me to survive and endure.

Like my mother, I carried all my wounds out of my childhood, but unlike my mother I did not carry on the war.  Perhaps that happened in part because she began to attack me on all levels as soon as I was born.  I was too young, too little, to begin to feel anger at her for what she was doing to me.  I continued to grow up through and past the age of rage without knowing what it even was.

But it’s not the rage that fueled my mother’s war against me that I woke up thinking about today.  I woke up thinking about the healing of wounds.

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When severe abuse begins so early it impacts the formation of the regions, circuits, pathways and operation of the brain so that we end up with what Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard Medical Group refer to as “an evolutionarily altered brain” as a result, the wounds that caused these changes to happen are most difficult to heal.  These wounds include dissociation.

I am thinking this morning about how long ago people lived for a much shorter time.  Their experiences were fewer and their universe was so much smaller than ours.  Their lives were centered on the core basics of staying alive in an often threatening and dangerous world throughout their entire life span.  In those worlds the ability to dissociate during or in the aftermath of traumas must have continued to serve a purpose that is difficult for me to define in the world I live in today.

Yet for those of us who endured unimaginable severe trauma during our infant-child developmental stages, the dissociation we were given as a result of our survival makes it more difficult for us to continue living in the ‘ordinary’ world we grow up to enter.  Nature has not evolved a way to ‘put us back together again’ to be like a pre-early trauma exposed person.  We are stuck with dissociational brain patterns and abilities that are directly linked to the hundreds if not thousands of near-mortal wounds from physical and mental injuries that we received many years ago.

Our wounds within can thus remain open, painful and at times extremely difficult for us to live with as we attempt to live an ‘ordinary’ life of well-being in an ordinary world without the kinds of dangers to our existence that we were programmed to survive because they existed in the times of our origins.

Without ‘medical’ care back then when we needed it most, and without access to the kind of help with our wounds and our resulting dissociation that we need now, how do we heal ANY of our wounds?

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The very length and complexity of our modern life experience is working against us now.  We cannot crawl wounded deep into a secluded cave and trust we will be protected and kept safe by our brethren standing guard over us while we receive adequate care and access the kind of quiet, unstimulated time that we need in order to heal.  (Yes, I believe we have these memories within our DNA that tell us what we need for our healing to occur.  These memories are available to us in the same way the memories in our bodies enable us to make adaptations to trauma from conception.)  If we cannot pursue nature’s intended courses of healing for even one of our childhood wounds, how do we carry on with hundreds if not thousands of them within us?

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Nature never planned for our species’ infants and children to be in danger without protection and adequate care.  Only under the most dire circumstances would offspring have been sacrificed.  The continuance of our species required that the most helpless tiny ones survive in the best condition possible.  And yet here we are at the most supposedly sophisticated period in our species’ evolution with harm being perpetrated in wars against offspring as if the little ones no longer matter as our species’ most prized hope for going forward into a better world.

Everything around us is busy and complicated.  Our multiple critical wounds are seldom if ever healed.  And then we are expected to live a ‘good life’ not only in spite of our wounds, but also as if the injuries never happened and the wounds do not exist.

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This again brings me back to healing.  Any wound has to go through a natural process of healing, often to the stage of creating permanent scar tissue at the end.  All healing requires our body’s immune system be involved.  I believe this includes the healing of our inner mental and emotional wounds as well.  On some level it is always some aspect of our physiological immune system’s negotiation on behalf of our increased well-being that accomplishes all of our healing.

I mention this today because last night I felt one of my many, many wounds close itself in healing.  I will never be able to forget how the wound originated in the first place, or how it has felt for these past 50 years to live with the wound open and unhealed.

This healing involves how I feel in relation to animals, especially to pets.  My healing came from a few simple words a trusted friend recently wrote to me about grieving the loss of both our human and our animal loved ones.  My friend was talking about her love and grief for a pet she lost years ago when she said to me, “Yes, pets are family and more.”

It was her last two words that healed me — “and more.”  Suddenly I understand that I can give myself permission to look into the eyes of not only my pets, but of all animals and SEE and FEEL and be connected with the life within them that is their SELF, and I can love them wholly – “and more.”

It feels like a channel of love and healing that has been blocked for the last 50 years has been opened so that the healing light and love that opened this channel can now flow through it unimpeded.  What I knew and felt when I was a little girl and my heart broke when my pet black rabbit, Peter, died has come back to me.

I have not asked my friend what her two simple words “and more” mean to her.  I needed to know what they mean to me.  It wasn’t the loss of Peter himself that most wounded me.  It was my reaction of dissociating myself from ever being able to feel again the loving connection I felt for that little animal.  Since that dark and rain soaked night he died, the part of myself that knows animals are not remote and distant objects that continue their own existence in a world separated from me has been missing.

My mother told me that night when Peter died that he was a bad rabbit who got what he deserved.  He was dead because that’s what is supposed to happen to all bad animals and bad children like me.  In the midst of the terrible depth of my grieving over the loss of my beloved pet through a violent death, she told me she wished I was dead just like Peter was because that is what I deserved.

The wound of this experience caused me to dissociate my ability to experience love, appreciation, and connection to and with animals (exception noted at the end of this post).  That part of me was removed from my existence until last night when I was in conversation with my sister about those two words, “and more” in relationship to animals in our lives.

Like my friend, my sister has never lost her ability to love animals, especially dogs.  I see this morning that the other side of this unhealed wound I have carried all these years has also prevented me from receiving the love that animals freely give to me.

I can understand today that the trusting innocence of who I was as a young child is reflected and mirrored back to me in the eyes of animals.  I have not been able to tolerate that kind of powerful experience with my own vulnerabilities for 50 years.  I have not been able to reclaim my own portion of passion regarding a deep love, valuing and sustaining friendship with animals until now.  Healing has touched that dissociated wound inside of me and – lo and behold – I can feel this fragmented piece of myself is back.

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I know every person alive has been wounded in some way at some time.  The healing of our wounds gives us an added dimension of awareness on an emotional and mental level about the better side of being alive.  Any healing that includes an improvement of connection between myself, myself and the living world I live in is especially significant for me.

Any healing gives me hope that more healing is possible.  Scar tissue might not be especially pretty to look at from the outside, but its presence means that a wound has healed, and I’m not sure there is anything I can experience that is better than that.  Yet at the same time that today I feel this wound has healed I can feel the blackness of overwhelming sadness that created this dissociational wound in the first place.

It helps me to know that I will not go backward in this healing process.  The sense of invading danger will leave me.  It will dissipate in the light of this new day.  (I will be extra tender to myself until this has happened as if I just went through surgery — because I did!)

Life can now pulse again for me where no pulse has been for 50 years.  I am different today as a result of this healing.  I know I am one step closer to being a more complete, integrated and whole ME because of it.  I have to practice being this bit-more-whole me now.  I feel different.  I see my animals around me differently.  They are back in the circle of my life and I am back in their world for the first time since before my black rabbit died.

I am reminded today that miracles of healing do happen – because they can.

This was a missing piece of myself I could recover, and that could be restored to me because it was one that was once an integral part of who I am.  I remembered my self before my rabbit died and my mother was so mean to me about his death.  I re-membered this part of myself so it can be joined with who I am today.  That’s exciting!

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NOTE:  Last summer when I visited my brother in Alaska I felt my love and connection with moose when one came to graze under my brother’s deck.  I was close enough to that glorious animal to have reached out and touched him if I had wanted to.  I realized then that my ability to love moose had never been removed from me.  Maybe having this August experience was a necessary step toward my healing so that I could again reclaim that same love and connection I felt as a child with all animals.  Now I also understand fully the “and more.”  It is my responsibility (ability to respond) to care for them at the same time that they take care of me.

1959 JUST homestead birthday - Copy
Holding that warm, fuzzy, whisker-wiggling little black rabbit, Peter, in my arms -- MY pet rabbit -- had made this sad little child happy.

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+ANSWERS THAT ARE NOT A PHONE CALL AWAY

alchemynow2 Comments

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I woke this morning with too many thoughts, each one appearing in a rush, demanding my attention, shooting through my mind in its own direction, not connected to the next thought that flashes into my inner sight.  I can’t follow them all.  Each one is chased away by the next one.  I cannot see their beginning, their intention, or their ending.

I am bombarded by thoughts as if there is a fireworks show going on within me, without being orchestrated, and it frightens me.

After my strange and stressful day yesterday, I picked up my mail at the post office on my way home.  Our mail does not get delivered to our houses in this little town.  My bank statement was there, which would have been the correct proof of my disability income that I needed yesterday in my hunt for winter utility bill assistance.  The substitute printout confirming my income from the food stamp office was not what those people wanted.

Along with the bank statement there was a letter from the social security office telling me I am to receive a ‘special one-time payment of $775 in December 2009’, and that this amount will disqualify me from receiving any disability – and the letter stopped there – “Forever?” I want to know.  “What does this mean?  What’s going on here?”

There were pages and pages to this form letter of gobbelty-goop I do not understand.  Do humans actually write these words of confusion?  I fight shock and panic as I wonder if my sole source of income is about to vanish forever.  There are telephone numbers to call, and I anticipate long waits, leaving messages without return calls, bizarre conversations with mechanical telephone voices as I try to find the answers I need.

Meanwhile my body and mind are in distress overload mode.  So I sit outside in my fleece, writing in the dappled morning sunshine as the leaves still on the trees shake and shiver in a gentle breeze.  They make a higher pitched sound now as they brittle and age with frost at night.

I scribble words in lines across these pages because it helps me to see them here.  I can focus on them one by one so the noise of cascading of thoughts and emotions within me can dim.  I organize and orient myself in this moment as I feel the paper held against my knee and watch this pen, gripped between my fingers, glide along these neat straight lines like parallel rails into the future.  I am comforted.

I sit here with my cell phone waiting for the closest SSI office to open.  Will I end up consuming all my free day minutes and get no answer at all?  I will myself not to follow my thoughts up into the air or down, down, sucked down where there is no air at all.  All I have to do is wait and try not to panic.

I do not want to think about the grief, guilt, anger and sadness churning within me because I am no longer able to feel competent, tough and strong like I managed to be while my children were growing up under my care.  I was more like a Sherman tank then, forging always forward.  Now I am dependent for all of my living needs on forces I cannot see, comprehend, control or change.  Will this ever change?

I do not want to follow all the thoughts and feelings within me about the over crowding of our planet or about the diminishment and mismanagement of its resources.  I don’t want to think about the growing masses of people, so many of them suffering and terrified.  I do not want to think about the nearly 20% unemployment rate some estimate for our nation.  I do not want to think about the money that is not being spent to help those in need, about the jobs that have vanished because of technology, foreign placement of industry, and the out-going channels of money that once belonged within the boundaries of our own country.

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My call to SSI the moment they opened their doors put me on the other end of the line with a real person.  I am grateful and amazed.  I am told it will all be OK, that an adjustment is being made to my case because of past earnings I had that weren’t in their system when my benefits were first figured, but are there now.  I am told that I won’t have medical coverage for the month of December, but by January my income should be reestablished as ongoing, and I will not have a medical review of my disability until 2015.

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Now I will process a de-escalation of my – fortunately temporary – distressed escalation caused by my concerns about my basic well-being in the world.  With the current economic crisis the numbers of people applying for disability has escalated drastically.  I know I am fortunate my cancer and resulting descent into internal fragmentation happened before the woes of this economic downturn hit our nation so hard.

I also think about how throwing crumbs to starving people can create gratitude in them, while the conditions that created the starvation in the first place have not been considered.  How about the others who remain content to gorge themselves on excesses of plenty?  Are the cracks Americans can fall through getting wider now?  Are people that have barely managed to be OK thus far, many of them from less-than-perfect childhoods, now creating a landslide of suffering people falling through those cracks that none of us can seem to get fat enough to be safe from?

I cannot begin to understand how I would be now in the world if the 18 years of severe child abuse I endured had not been allowed to happen.  I cannot easily disentangle the consequences of that abuse as it has impacted me all of my life from how it is impacting me now.  I was fortunate to make it through my mothering years without this degree of disintegration of my coping abilities hitting me like it has now.  I was able to keep moving forward before the armored tank of myself disintegrated and vanished.

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Perhaps I will always struggle between guilt and gratitude that I am receiving help to stay alive and in a home with food to eat.  On many levels I believe that when my cancer hit me it was my time to leave here.  For whatever reasons, I chose to fight it and others chose to help me with my battle.

Yet at the same time I know there are millions of people of all ages suffering who do not have access to what they need.  Am I accountable and responsible for this fact?  Is it like the co-dependency theorists suggest, I didn’t cause this problem, I cannot cure or control it?  What happens in this world that disables so many of its inhabitants from having the basics of safety and security that would alleviate so much of their sufferings?

Will it only be when those higher up on the food chain begin to grow skinny — because the rest of us down here below them can no longer consume enough to give them money to grow fatter on — that they will perhaps only then turn around and suddenly, finally sprout wings of compassion and generosity toward the rest of their kind?

How do we define poverty and disability, anyway?  Who am I to be taken care of when so many others are not?  Is there any way that I, even with my own disabilities, can find some way to be part of a solution?  How can I work each moment of my life to stabilize my body-brain-mind and emotions?  How do any of us — and all of us — turn tragedy into triumph?

Who cares enough to make sure this process ever happens?  How and where do we begin?  I know I won’t find answers to all these questions in my speed dial.  I don’t even know how to use it.

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I just received this from a dear friend in an email about:

A Personal Message from Mary Robinson Reynolds, M.S.

Do you feel like somehow, inadvertently you made a vow of poverty
because of some pivotal, if not painful, moment in your life?  Did you
make a deal with God that you thought you had to make, to keep
something bad from happening?

I remember when I did.  After my first full-term baby boy died during
labor, I was devastated.  A year later during my second pregnancy, I
had five early labor scares that landed me in the hospital for bed
rest.  I remember promising God that I would never again ask for
anything more important than having this child in my life alive and
well …ever again!  This, I would discover, had been my vow of
poverty:   I promise not to ever ask for anything ever again …
including money!

From that point forward, I would fight myself over every single need,
want and desire I had, until I began to expand my knowledge about God
and about the wealth of all good things available to me…..

SEE MORE AT:
www.MakeADifference.com/MasterMinding

www.GodWantsYouToBeRichMovie.com

www.GodWantsYoutobeRichmovie.com/FlashBook.html

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+THESE 1983 – 1984 WRITINGS LED TO TODAY’S EARLIER POST….

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I just spoke with a dear friend I’ve known for 30 years.   She suggested that I think about how the animals and bugs and plants and rocks exist on this earth.  Then think about this:  “Life is empty and meaningless and it doesn’t mean anything that it’s empty and meaningless.”

Then I can think about how humans add meaning because we can think.  That means that it’s all made up.  My friend’s suggestion is about how I might as well make up something I like for a life.  She’ll call me on Sunday to check in with me and see how I am doing in my new meaningless life!

I have to take a break from here until Monday while I try this out!  Have a great weekend!

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Nothing about being raised and abused from birth and for the next 18 years by my incredibly mean, psychotic borderline mother has made my living in this world easy.

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December 28, 1983

“Coming alive is a tenuous, delicate, natural thing.”

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As can be seen in my post from earlier today, I have lost my tolerance for facing myself in my age 31 and 32 year old journals.  I am including the link here for those writings I have transcribed so far.  What follows in those journals are the kinds of desperate questions about myself and my life that led to today’s post +THE POWER OF JOURNALING – ASKING A QUESTION THAT HAS AN ANSWER

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LINK FOR LATEST JOURNALS TRANSCRIBED:

*Ages 31 – 32 – August 13, 1983 through January 22, 1984 Journal

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+THE POWER OF JOURNALING – ASKING A QUESTION THAT HAS AN ANSWER

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I am in a battle with myself over whether or not there is any value to myself or to anyone else in my reading and transcribing my quarter of a century old journals.  Part of me wants to burn them all.  I think about how to contain the fire I could make of them so no smoldering ashes would escape and float away to light some part of this dry high desert landscape around me on fire.

Maybe I could tear them all into tiny pieces and soak them in water and then cook them into papier mache mash and make something beautiful out of them.  Maybe I could tear them up and dig them into the damp earth of my composting pile where I know the hungering masses of worms and slugs there would chew them up gladly and digest them into soil.

Maybe I could box them all up and take them camping when my sister comes next month to visit.  We could burn them more safely in the contained campground fire pit, have a little releasing ceremony and let all the words that record what all the versions of Linda talked about for 25 years vanish as if they had never been.

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What is the value of this journaling process that so many therapists (and others) seem so fond of recommending?  We could just as well write our words on an area of flat dirt and then sweep them away when we are finished.  We could just as well write them with chalk on slate or with grease pencil on a mirror or a piece of glass, and erase them as soon as they no longer hold any meaning to us.

Who are we telling the intimate details of our lives to as we sit alone and tarry over our silent words so studiously copied as if we are creating lessons for ourselves out of nothing but the contents of our minds?

Does journaling help us tolerate our hard times, I would say ‘better’, but I really mean ‘tolerate them at all’?

Or does the writing simply contain the passage of time as we transition through all the changes that happen to us along the way of our lifetime, both outside of us and within?

Does journaling help us to think more clearly?  Do we create a dialog with our self because we are so alone there is no other person alive we can trust enough to pass ourselves on to?

What is it about writing the words our souls tell us in hidden places between two covers of a journal that helps us or heals us?  And in today’s world where keyboards replace ink or lead, our words simply join some cyber network, taking their place in simultaneous land where they enter themselves into an invisible cue, waiting for whom to go back and read them?

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Or do those of us who write do so simply because we are writers?  Could we find a writing gene somewhere in our constitution if we knew where to look for it?  Do we write because we care about certain things in a particular way that non-writers can’t even imagine?

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That would be all fine and worthy if I could SEE what matters about the process of journaling for me in the end.  What I am finding instead is that the same concerns I wrote about 25 years ago are really right here inside of me today if I let them be.  Questions.  I asked thousands of questions on those pages that I had no answers for.

I recorded my inner conflicts and turmoil and suffering.  I recorded how it felt to be so lost from myself and others that I could only ask the questions themselves and could never find any answers, no matter how committed I was to finding them.  The answers were intangible.  They were invisible.

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My journals portray my journey, each word on a line in the order I could see them.  Writing was my way of trying to organize and orient myself in my body in my life.

Time has moved forward.  My children grew up, left home intact, and have orchestrated their own lives free from trauma.  Because I was their mother, far from perfect but ‘good enough’, their journey will always remain connected to mine but not central.

In the meantime my journals reveal all the turbulence, all the missteps and attempts I have made to catch up to a Linda who was living a life that never has been coherent or integrated or cohesive or well planned.  I know now that I was always trying to make sense of myself in my life even though I was missing all the most important pieces.

I mistakenly thought I could create an ordinary life without knowing the extreme, long term abuse I suffered from birth and for the 18 years of my childhood had changed the way my body-brain developed, and had therefore changed me.

Not only was the development of my right and left brain hemispheres changed, and the corpus callosum that connects them and transmits information between the two changed, but also the development of my higher level thinking cortex part of my brain was changed, as well.

I have avoided writing about the development of my ‘executive cortex’.  When I am ready to do so I will have to consider how child abuse deprived me of an ‘ordinary’ ability to process information about the future and affected all my choice and decision making abilities.

Normal, ordinary brains that form without a history of severe abuse and trauma continue to grow all the way through the teen and early adult years.  A normal, ordinary cortex does not finish its development until somewhere between ages 25 and 30.  A severely abused and traumatized child’s cortex atrophies early and never finishes its development to become normal and ordinary.

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Nobody was there to stop me just as I crossed the threshold out of my parents’ home and into my own life when I was 18 to tell me that what I had just endured of a childhood was hell, wrong, and extremely hurtful to me.  Nobody explained to me that the trauma I had suffered from birth had so changed the way I had to grow and develop so I could survive it that it meant I now have a different brain that works fine in terrible, toxic, malevolent, threatening, dangerous and self-obliterating conditions but was not designed like an ordinary brain to work well in an ordinary, benevolent world.

Maybe nobody told me this in 1969 when I left home because nobody knew it.  Certainly if all the infant and child development experts didn’t know these basic facts, if the human brain development neuroscientists and physiologists didn’t know, I need not blame myself for not knowing this critical information about my chances for achieving any quality of well-being in an ‘ordinary’ life, either.

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So what exists in the last 25 years of my journals in their piles on the shelves beside my computer desk is a simple chronicling of one severe child abuse survivor’s disorganized, disoriented incoherent life story about how the changes my body and brain had to make so that I could survive the hell of my childhood could not possibly have prepared me to live any kind of an ordinary life.

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I look up above me right now as I sit here outside my door writing in the high desert gentle sunlight of this early November 2009 morning and watch the wispy tendrils of clouds drifting, white against the distant blue sky, and I know that’s the same sky that caps the lives of everyone living below it.  At the same time I know there are two kinds of people on this planet, plain and simple, no matter where they plant their feet on this grand planet earth.

There are those whose early caregivers loved them and cared for them appropriately when they were an infant-child the way human evolution has dictated in order for an ordinary-functioning brain to grow and develop.  They provided safe and secure attachment for their offspring.

And then there are the rest of us who were not loved, who were treated malevolently by our early caregivers.  The traumatizing circumstances of our early environments demanded of our growing early body-brain that we change and adapt or we die.

There are degrees of change just as there are degrees of trauma, but because I know so clearly what the circumstances of my infancy and childhood were as a result of my mother’s psychotic break when I was born and because of her severe mental illness, I no longer have to ask the thousands of questions I used to ask in my  journals without being able to find any answers.

There remains only one single answer that matters to me now.  It’s the same answer for every one of those questions I have been asking all of my adult life as I tried to make myself into a ‘better’ and a different more ordinary person who could then live a more ordinary life of ordinary well-being.

The reason I cannot become an ‘ordinary’ person is because I have an ‘extra-ordinary’ brain that had to grow, develop and form under the ‘extra-ordinary’ circumstances of severe trauma and abuse that was my infant-child environment.  My trauma-changed-body and brain does not receive ‘ordinary’ information from the environment in ‘ordinary’ ways.  It does not process information in ‘ordinary’ ways, either.  There is very little about severe-abuse-and-trauma-survivor Linda that is ‘ordinary’ or can EVER be ‘ordinary’.  Just because I look ordinary on the outside tells me nothing about how I am different on the inside.

If I continue to ignore what I now know about being a changed-by-severe early abuse and trauma person, I will condemn myself to the continued struggle of asking questions forever that I will never find the answers for.

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I realize now that all my journal writings up until this point in time have created a chronicle of my journey through adulthood with a changed body and brain, and what this has been like for me.  Continued research is now chronicling the life long changes severe abuse creates for its survivors on a much larger scale.  The outcomes appear extremely bleak and grim for survivors.  We have to put the facts together and realize that the very foundation in our body and brain has been changed, and these changes give us a changed life outcome.

It is not possible for us to escape the consequences of what was done to us until we begin to understand how we changed and how those changes continue to affect EVERYTHING about us and our lives.

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For those of us who journal, we will see in our own words how exploring ourselves in our life will change as we begin to include this vital information in our thinking.  Just because everyone else has remained ignorant of the changed body and brain because of early trauma and abuse survival information, does not mean we have to remain ignorant of the facts ourselves.  We owe it to ourselves not to continue archaic patterns of thinking about ourselves in the world.

In fact, those of us who experience this ‘extra-ordinary’ reality are the REAL experts.  We know, down to our last cell in our body, what being changed by child abuse and trauma did to us.  We know our truth.  Now we have to empower ourselves to know what we have known all along.

Together we can define what living in a trauma-changed body is like.  On this planet earth, under this arching blue sky, we have to begin to understand that what humanity’s right arm might know about being ‘ordinary’ is balanced by what humanity’s left arm knows about not ever being allowed to both be ‘ordinary’ and remain alive.  We can no longer afford to let ‘ordinary’ condemn us to a lifetime of suffering because of who we are – different from ordinary.

We can join together to learn how to end the suffering of all of us.  A reality of privilege can no longer remain the standard we measure survival against.  If what happened to us had happened to ‘them’, they would have been changed just as we were or they would have died.  That is the reality of being human in an imperfect world.  What happens – and happened – to infants and children that causes these changes must become the primary concern for all of us.

Otherwise we will continue to ask all the wrong questions for which there are no answers.  We need to ask the right question, “How does severe early trauma and abuse change developing humans into ‘extra-ordinary’ beings, and how do those changes affect them for the rest of their lives?”  This IS a question we can find the answer to when we are willing to consider the truth – both individually and as a species.

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PS.  What will I do with my old journals?  I still do not know.

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+History of Childhood Maltreatment Linked to Higher Rates of Poverty

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The following study confirms what common sense would tell us:

“Adults who were physically abused, sexually abused, or severely neglected as children were significantly more likely to be unemployed, living below the poverty line, and using social services than people without a history of childhood maltreatment.”

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IMPORTANT INFORMATION FROM:

Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog

 
History of Childhood Maltreatment Linked to Higher Rates of Poverty

Posted: 05 Nov 2009 02:18 PM PST

 

The long-term impacts of childhood maltreatment include higher rates of unemployment, poverty, and use of social services in adulthood, according to a new study by David Zielinski, Ph.D., of the National Institute for Mental Health. Research has shown that negative early life experiences can adversely affect a person’s physical and mental health in adulthood. Zielinski evaluated data on childhood maltreatment and socioeconomic well-being from the National Comorbidity Survey.

Adults who were physically abused, sexually abused, or severely neglected as children were significantly more likely to be unemployed, living below the poverty line, and using social services than people without a history of childhood maltreatment. Having experienced more than one type of maltreatment increased these risks further. Maltreatment was also linked to lower rates of health care coverage and greater use of social services such as Medicaid, especially among adults who had experienced childhood sexual abuse.

In the first comprehensive study of the long-term socioeconomic effects of abuse and neglect, Zielinski shows that childhood maltreatment carries significant costs to the individual and to society. Not only does the public share the burden in supporting maltreatment-related social services, but also those related to unemployment insurance, poverty-based public assistance, and publicly funded health insurance. Other societal impacts include the loss in employment productivity and tax revenues, from federal and state income taxes as well as state and local sales taxes.

Previous research has shown low socioeconomic status to be a risk factor for the perpetration of child abuse and neglect. Additional research has found that parents who were maltreated as children are more likely to abuse and neglect their own children than those without a history of maltreatment. Targeted assistance for maltreatment victims may help break this cycle. For example, Zielinski suggests that enhanced access to job training and job counseling programs may be especially helpful for victims of physical abuse or multiple types of maltreatment, who were most likely to be unemployed among those who had experienced maltreatment.

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+DISSOCIATION: PRESERVING A SELF IN HIDING

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We are born with the capacity to learn about who we are, and to remember ourselves throughout our many and varied experiences.  This is meant to happen as we grow from birth being cared for by loving caregivers, people who give us care consistently over time.

It is natural that caregivers understand an infant is not them, but is somebody else, a separate unique individual.  They communicate this knowledge by everything they say and do with the infant.

These patterns of interaction are building the infant’s growing brain.  Humans are designed from birth to be able to see their own separate and unique self as it is mirrored back and reflected to them by their caregivers, who are their attachment humans.

If a parent such as my mother was lacks the capacity to understand that her infant is NOT her, she will overwhelm her infant with information from herself that has absolutely no relevance to her infant’s developing connection with itself.  The infant will miss the critical interactions with its caregiver that are meant to feedback to it information about its own self.

If the infant has access to additional caregivers who are themselves of healthy brain-mind-self, the infant can get at least some of the feedback about its own self from them, and this information will be critical to the infant’s brain-mind-self growth and development.

Without access to other appropriate (secure attachment) caregivers, the infant’s brain-mind-self will not develop in an ordinary way.  Its body will of course continue to develop, but the self of the infant-child cannot possibly find its way into being a cohesive, integrated, clear and affirmed self-hood.

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Whatever the break was that happened within my mother’s brain-mind-self, it had consumed her by the time I took my first tiny breath into my body in this world in my lifetime.  She was prevented from ever looking at me and being able to allow my individual self to be born.  She could only see some split-off part of herself in me that she hated and wanted to destroy.

Her mental illness (I believe psychotic borderline) left no room for Linda to be present in my body or in my life.  All I could do was remain buried alive, hidden from her view, protected only by the miracle of life that demands that people remain intact, separate from one another.

In the meantime all the trauma she caused me from birth built my brain, the only one I have to use to get along in this world.  That my brain could not include clear and definable connections to my own selfhood HAD to be the result of my mother being not only my primary caregiver, but with the exception of early contact with my 14-month-old brother and very occasional exposure to my father or grandmother, she was my sole caregiver.

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I can try to describe every resiliency factor I can think of that probably contributed to me being able to survive my childhood with my mother so that I appeared on the adult end of my life to be mostly intact and ‘ordinary’.  At the same time, however, I have to include my dissociational abilities as being the most important resiliency factor I have.

The real me I was born as could remain hidden and protected from my mother where she could not reach me.  At the same time the self of me could not come out into the world to play, grow, learn and live.  My self could not be recognized, could not express myself.  My needs were not met except as they invisibly allowed me to continue to exist without my mother ever being able to stop me except by killing my body (which I helped her not to do).

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Evidently I was born strong.  But who and where and how the essential me is in the world still remains extremely difficult for me to detect.  I can sit here writing on this pad at this moment in time with this pen in my hand and hope I am at this moment able to open a clear, true pathway that allows the real me, the hidden-away-from-my-mean-mother me, to speak these words.

It’s like I have to keep the deep, pure waters within myself perfectly still without a single small ripple in order for the real me to appear in my life.  I do not believe this is the way ordinary people have to engage their self.  Life is busy.  It is full of stimulation and changes.  One’s self is supposed to be able to maintain its integrity in spite of external (distracting) factors.

It is only when the environment I am in is quiet, peaceful, safe and predictable that I can experience my core self.  Once anything hits my inner still pool and causes a ripple, my inner me vanishes and I cannot reach her.

When a disturbance happens, a frantic feeling that translates into anxiety follows, as professionals call this state along with the host of other labels they insist on using to describe what my fragile connection to my own true self looks like or seems like from the inside of me.

I am left having to be so careful – so full of care concerning my self in this world — now at 58, because nobody was there in the beginning to do it for me.  I can think about my connection to my self in today’s world as being like a frequently ‘dropped call’.  When life challenges me, the resulting disturbance inside of me causes a ‘call lost’ reaction.  Then some version of Linda has to keep on going, the best way that it-I can until circumstances change and complete calm around and within me returns.

Believe me, this is a hard, hard way to be in this world.

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This is a duplicate of *Age 58 – November 5, 2009 – A hard way to be in the world

written for my adult story pages on dissociation

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+BEING THE ‘ME’ I DISSOCIATE FROM

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I believe there is a difference between being a self and having a self.

‘Having a self’ is complicated for those of us who grew up under severe abuse situations that created dissociational patterns in our brains.   Sometimes it seems I have a different self for every single moment of my life that passes by me in time that is especially dependent upon whatever demands are being made of me at any given moment.   All of them are, of course, specifically confined to this body I was born with.  The whole process, whatever it is, seems connected to memory and to feeling because it involves ongoing experience and the passage of time.

Fortunately, I do have a single self that is the one I call ‘being in the world’.  It seems to be the ME that all the other versions are a dissociation from.

As I grew up from birth,  ‘being a self’ only happened when my mother was absent from being near me, and therefore from hurting and terrifying me.  ‘Being a self’ only happened when I had no feelings, and no thoughts, as I describe here:

*Age 58 – The simple state of just being in the world

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NOTE:  For me, writing itself can be a disorganizing and disorienting experience.  Many times I am acutely aware that the version of Linda that writes a post vanishes as soon as the post is completed and published.  I cannot then go back and edit a post, remember what I wrote, or often even reread it.

I am having this experience today in relation to the post I wrote yesterday.  I can only hope that there is something in it that touches the minds, hearts and lives of all those much-appreciated readers who have stopped by my blog today as the count is the highest it has ever been since I began this blog last April.

Please always know you are welcome to leave your comments!  They are always welcome and appreciated!  Linda

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+DISSOCIATION IS ORDINARY AND NORMAL WHEN OUR CHILDHOODS ARE NOT

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Breaking free from denial (magical wishful childhood thinking) about our histories of child abuse is essential at some point for any recovery to be initiated.  In these next journal pages I began my attempt at that process.

This section of my age 31 journal covers my entry into trauma and addiction treatment.  My childhood experience of severe trauma was recognized and validated in this treatment process, but evidently once therapy began in earnest I was expected to turn my journal writing into my therapists and I complied.  I have no record of that treatment process.  The treatment center closed when the owner died about 10 years ago and evidently all records were destroyed.

From my 2009 perspective of today, I suggest that very few, if any severe child abuse survivors made it through their childhood without dissociating.  I now understand that even though I did not dissociate during the incidents of abuse I experienced for 18 years, I did dissociate BETWEEN them.  This means, as I have said before, that my experience of my own childhood is in dissociated fragments.  What I know now is that “as it was in the beginning, so shall it forever be.”

I do not believe there is any way to ‘heal’ myself from this fact.  It is just as important, however,  for me to recognize the dissociation built within me as it is to recognize the horrors and traumas that caused it from the time of my birth.  No therapist I have ever had helped me to understand what dissociation truly is, how it affected my childhood development and how it affects me today.

And as I begin to understand these aspects of myself now, I also am coming to understand that I am NOT BROKEN, I am simply different from ‘ordinary’ people as a result of having survived extraordinarily traumatic childhood experiences that changed me during my critical stages of child development.  In my case, I do not see dissociation as the proverbial and supposed ‘defense mechanism’ professionals seem fond of naming it.

My dissociation is not ‘psychological’ in any Freudian sense.  There is simply more than one way to ‘be’ in the world because there is more than one kind of world to ‘be’ in.  How our body-brain-mind-self gets made in the first place is a result of which kind of world we were living in while our development took place.

My dissociation happened because the separate incidents of horrible trauma that happened to me as an infant-child made no sense.  There was therefore no way for my brain to ‘associate’ them together.  The only pattern present was unpredictable, violent, scary insane chaos and nobody’s brain can build itself in any ‘ordinary’ way under these kinds of malevolent circumstances.

I was not, of course, even remotely aware of my dissociation as I wrote the June pages of my 1983 journal.  I simply recorded what I thought I remembered from my childhood, but even this was a significant step.  I had never done it before.  In the end, it is not the details of the traumas themselves that I may or may not remember (over 90% of them I’m sure I never will remember consciously) that matter.  It is how my growing body had to adapt and change as a result of experiencing these traumas that matters to me now.

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*Age 31 – Journal Starting June 10 to 27, 1983

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I do not wish to leave the information contained in these links behind as I continue with my posting.  Please consider them for your study:

+RETURNING WITH AGE TO HOW I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AND DIDN’T KNOW IT: DISSOCIATED

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1 t-shirt mat
From the time we are conceived life in this world it is full of stimulation and changes. In a mostly safe and secure world we can accept them all and our experiences of transition and change moves smoothly along as we grow into a person with a self that can connect all our experiences together into some kind of fabric that is the whole of our life. This image reminds me of a safe and secure organized attachment!
2 t-shirt mat
The reverse side of my little crocheted T-shirt rug reminds me of organized insecure attachment. The transitions between 'events' has been made, but on the inside some vestiges of lack of smooth transtions between experiences remains like little loose ends that most organized insecurely attached people remain completely unaware of.
3 t-shirt mat
This would be an extreme illustration of a disorganized and disoriented insecure attachment disorder. Life has been too traumatic, and without safety and security to make transitions between traumatic and nontraumatic early experiences, the body-nervous system including the brain, the mind and the self of someone raised in a malevolent world will not be able to put things together to make a solid, coherent 'story' of their self in their life.

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This is me at 11 months old, all dressed up with curls in my hair. This is me looking 'happy' during a picture taking event.
11 month old 'happy' me - mother allowed it at this moment -- it was 'be happy, picture taking time' -- which had nothing to do with my 'other' ongoing realities
1952 closeup - 11 mos baby pic
Yes, 'happy' for this instant, but I now know this is a dissociated state. It was not part of any ongoing safe and secure organization of my baby brain as it had formed itself through chaotic, unstable and dangerous early caregiver interactions. (I can't get the scratch damage off of the photo at present)

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When I first found this photograph of me two years ago in MY BABY BOOK I was pleased to see that I could ‘still be happy’ when I was eleven months old.  It gave me hope that at least some of my developing baby brain’s left hemisphere happy center neurons had been activated, and gave me hope that I can find them today and build on them.

Then the more I considered my baby picture, the more I realized that this happy picture was not showing me ‘sun and roses’.  I have come to understand that this was a dissociated state that baby me was not going to be able to transition  smoothly in my baby brain to any other kind of state that was likely to follow. What I first saw as an expression in my baby eyes close to ecstatic I have come to see as over-stimulated, too intense, and most likely a sign of my dysregulated right limbic brain development due to my mother’s psychotic abuse of me.

The early and ongoing environment I formed in was chaotic, unstable, unpredictable, often terrorizing, terrifying, violent and painful.  Safe, secure peaceful serenity and calmness did not form itself at the center of my body-nervous system-brain-mind self as it was supposed to.

My set point of balanced equilibrium is not at calm.    Patterns of adjustment and adaptation to my infant-child malevolent environment, which happened to a large extent through dissociation,  had to build themselves into me so that I could survive and ‘go on being’ — and now I clearly know they are still there.

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I had an experience last night that gave me a clear insight about how I am in the world.

Around the time of my 1980 – 1983 journals I am transcribing from around my age of 30, I could function in the world in a relatively ‘ordinary’ way.  Now, through circumstances of my life, I have returned to who-how I have always been in the world and didn’t, until now, have to know about.  Just using the experience I had last night as an example, I can see that

(1) first I learned how to get along in both of the worlds of my childhood, the chaotic, malevolent, insanely abuse world of my home life with my mother, and in the ‘ordinary’ world outside my home such as school.

(2) Once I left my childhood abusive home, I found myself living entirely in an ‘ordinary’ world.  I could fake it by then so that only those in my most intimate circle of friends could have known that things were not all right with me on my insides.

(3)  I continued down that trying-to-be-ordinary road all of my life until two things happened to me that brought into focus in the forefront how ‘unordinary’ I really am.

(4) After 35 years of having a child under the age of 18 in my care, my baby left home nearly six years ago.  I didn’t know what was happening to me at the time, but looking back the disorganization and disorientation of my insecure attachment disorder reared its head.  Breast cancer manifested itself in my body immediately, although I was not to discover its presence for another 3 years.  It seemed that the entire world of my life dropped out from under me and I tumbled down Alice’s not so wonderful rabbit hole, disoriented and disorganized and not having a clue what that was.  Then

(5) happened.  Finding out I had cancer so completely threatened the only true source of safety and security I had ever known, my body itself, and coupled with the terrors of treatment and the consequences that chemotherapy had on my brain, left me where I am today — on mental and emotional disability with an extremely limited arena of activities that I can tolerate with any degree of comfort.

I have lost any way I developed (learned) to transition into an inner feeling state of calm, serene, safety within my body no matter where I am in the world.  This ability never developed at my core as it was supposed to from infancy.  For me, a state of calm equilibrium has evidently always been a dissociative state, and seems to be one that I now have lost access to — unless I can ‘get there’ through remaining in a very controlled, calm and quiet external environment which then ‘soothes my soul’.

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This leads me to last night’s adventure.  A close friend of mine encouraged me to attend the local Fiber Arts Guild meeting that was preceded by a fantastic presentation on African textiles.  Of course I am not presently comfortable with people at all, certainly not with groups of people, certainly not with strangers.  I am not comfortable in small closed environments.  I am not comfortable with ‘noise.’  But, in light of my recent journal transcribing realization about how important weaving and spinning and related textile arts are to me, and considering that I want to TRY to ‘get better’, I went to this meeting.

Nothing disastrous happened, which is great.  But what I felt on the inside, and can still feel today is both intensely disappointing and creatively illuminating.  We cannot work with trying to change or improve what we cannot see about ourselves — so now I have some clearer information.

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In light of what I now understand about how insecure attachment disorders exist in the brain as a result of changes that happen when we are very young and our brains are growing and developing in the first place, I can FEEL and begin to understand the damage done by these changes.  My right, social, limbic, emotional brain does not receive or process ordinary information in ordinary ways.  For all the years that I was able to ‘function’ in the ordinary world in a ‘good enough’ fashion, I was able to work around and hide what my brain was really doing.  I can’t do that any more.

Too much stimulation.  My brain does not regulate input or experience correctly.  I cannot do what experts call switch states, or move smoothly and comfortably through what is called transition states.  In that group of around 40 women last night, the walls began to close in, sound became a noisy roar.  Faces became super animated, and people began to get larger and larger in relation to me.  Noise and more noise as I lost the ability to focus on one single pattern of sound or conversation.  I tolerated nearly three hours of this mayhem and madness (to me), and began to crave silence, calmness, peace and simplicity.

Because my internal self cannot provide these things for me, I am nearly completely at the mercy of where I am and what is going on around me physically and externally on the outside of my body.  It is not supposed to work this way — not in ordinary situations.  Our right brain, in balance with our reasonable left brain and our rational cortex, is supposed to be able to navigate throughout life with the peace and calm on the INSIDE of us.

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I feel I am failing at a description of what I am trying to explain and describe, so I added some visuals here that might be able to convey an image on the OUTSIDE that relates to what I know on my INSIDE.  Part of what I did to self-soothe my ‘anxiety’ level from too much stimulation last night that continued to reverberate in my brain and body, was to pick up the closest thing I could find and begin working with my hands which always calms me, focuses my attention, and provides a transition space for me to deescalate.

(My condition makes me think about the increase in ADHD and autism and about how little researchers know or are willing to admit about what they know about what is causing this condition among today’s children.  I suspect it will eventually be tracked back to inadequate conception to age one brain development — because we are losing our ancient wisdom about taking care of our babies right during early critical brain and body developmental stages.)

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Those women last night were ordinary women who meant me no harm.  They were not threatening.  They were not dangerous.  I was not in danger of being further traumatized.  But the oldest part of who I am and how I operate in this body in this world does not seem able to any longer put on the town dress, put curls in my hair, walk out into the world and be able to smoothly handle multiple stimuli from the environment and the required transitions that would enable me to be comfortable.

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+SUNFLOWER, SELF, DISSOCIATON AND THE SEEDS OF LOST MEMORIES

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I have had the image of sunflowers (in relation to the self and dissociation) in my mind for days now, so I guess I need to go ahead and write what I am thinking so  my thoughts can move off to something else.

Under ordinary conditions an infant is born into this lifetime with the potential to create a wonderful whole and healthy self.  All its experiences are integrated and stored at its center as they grow to fruition during a lifetime.

When severe trauma in a malevolent environment surrounds an infant-child, and dissociation has to take over the job of handling the memory of traumatic experiences, all this person’s ‘seed memories’ will not be central at the center of the flower of self.  The self will not be able to organize and orient itself in the ordinary way.  Instead, many or most of the seeds of experience will be missing, not connected and integrated at the center of self.

Perhaps it’s like the birds steal all the seeds away.  Perhaps it is like the seeds are simply missing, or scattered somewhere so we cannot find them.

seeds - sunflower
How can a self form right if trauma steals all the seeds of our memories?

Yet our trauma memories and reactions can pop up, unanticipated, unexpected, any time they are triggered.  We cannot control this.  It makes life hard.  It makes us different.  We cannot search for and find all our lost memories, all the lost parts of our self and put all the seeds back in our center where an  ‘ordinary’ person’s seed-memories have been stored all along — even if we want to.  And some part of our self flies away or gets lost with each disappearing part of our history.

Yet we are the same as everyone else.  We are all STILL sunflowers, even if our self is a different kind of self.  We are still beautiful, turning to follow the sun as we stand with everyone else in the field of life.

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sunflower
Sunflower -- I am thinking of the sunflower as an image of a self -- Photo courtesy PDPhoto.org
sunflower-sunset
Lots of sunflowers, lots of people in the field of life

Sunflower as the image of self, all the seeds organized as a part of the flower, in the center, memories of our expriences -- unless - - - -

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IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER:

Borderline Personality Disorder

In the Spotlight | More Topics |

from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD
BPD is a disorder that is often misunderstood and frequently stigmatized. Do you dread telling people about your diagnosis? Are you tired of trying to correct the myths about BPD that are out there? This week’s newsletter is for you!

In the Spotlight
The Stigma of BPD
The general public today is as afraid or more afraid of people with mental illness than they were decades ago. And people with BPD are among the most highly stigmatized groups.
More Topics
BPD Mythology – Help Challenge These Myths!
Borderline personality disorder is a very real and serious mental illness. It is not a “personality problem” or just a set of maladaptive ways of coping with the world.
Should You Tell Others Your Diagnosis?
Lots of you report that you’re afraid to tell other people about your BPD diagnosis. When is it safe to tell? Here are some guidelines…

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