Tag: grief

+LOOKING BACK – I DID NOT UNDERSTAND MY MOTHER’S ABUSE OF ME. I DID NOT UNDERSTAND.

alchemynow5 Comments

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What follows is taken from a letter I just wrote to a friend.  We have established an amazing reconnection after more than 40 years without contact, having found one another through the book Dorothy wrote which I read last summer during my travels:  Eight Stars of Gold: Notes from a Mid-century Alaska Homestead Journal by Dorothy Pollard Price

Their homestead (fire damaged photograph of my dad, our jeep, their home)
Dorothy's homestead 1959 (fire damaged photograph) Our homestead was 1,500 feet elevation up the mountain to the left above here

Dorothy, her husband and two sons were our neighbors whose homestead was below ours at the foot of the mountain.  This letter is about a memory I have of something that happened one day on their property when I was a little girl.

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Dear Dorothy,

This just crossed my mind — again.  I was thinking that I don’t remember anybody from my childhood while my sister, Cindy can remember everyone.  I think I mentioned this before.

But I do have this strange memory.

Remember when there was a Bible Camp by your place when we first went back there — maybe spring of 1959?  [Way back in the valley, down a narrow, rough jeep trail]

I would have been 7 — I remember some about the camp.  I remember sitting on the ground at the edge of the road — maybe your driveway — next to your son, J.   [he was my age].  Our legs were hanging over the dirt bank; I remember sitting there with him, my palms flat on the ground on either side of me, swinging my legs and kicking my heels against the earthen bank.  We were talking.  I think I was just feeling like a kid at the moment

Not allowed.  Mother saw me and came and got me, yanked me up and dragged me away by my arm, embarrassed me in front of J.

I got in lots of trouble, and I didn’t understand any of it.  She said I was boy crazy.  She was really making sexual accusations I of course DID NOT understand — I never understood why she was so angry with me all the time.

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This memory is tied to an earlier one when we first moved to Alaska and lived in the log house — I had just turned 6 there.  One of the V. boys, the one about my age, crossed the highway and came down our driveway.  I remember it had rained.  There were golden leaves wet on the damp ground.  Everything smelled so wonderful.  The rain had brought skinny earthworms up and they lay mostly lifeless on the driveway’s mud.  Many had drowned in puddles.

I was standing there looking at them and thinking (I’d never seen worms like that in Los Angeles before) that they looked like broken rubber bands — thinking of my grandma because for some reason she always picked up rubber bands when she saw them on the pavement and in the gutters where people threw them away after they took them off their rolled newspapers.  Grandma always put them around her left wrist, often she’d have a whole bunch of them there.  I missed my grandma.

Whichever of the boys it was told me he would give me a nickel if I let him see my belly button.  So I pulled down the waistband of my white pedal pushers just far enough to show him.  He gave me the nickel and went home.  I was going back to watching those gray worms and thinking about my grandma.

But my mother opened the front door of the house and screamed for me, “LINDA!  LINDA!  GET IN THIS HOUSE RIGHT THIS MINUTE!”

I knew from her voice she was very mad at me.  I had no idea why.   I went back into the house and all hell broke lose.  Mother said she had watched me from the window pull my pants all the way down in front of this boy.  I didn’t.  I tried to tell her what had happened, that he had asked to see my belly button and given me a nickle.  She told me I was lying, that it was my idea.

NOTHING I could do or say convinced her otherwise!  She just got madder and madder at me because I had done this horrible thing AND I was lying.  She knew what she had seen with her very own eyes!  Crazy making.  Insane crazy making — and the violence and brutality that went with this……so terrible……

This incident was brought up again, all over again that Bible Camp day.  Both ‘crimes’ were added to my mother’s abuse litany — and brought up over and over again (along with hundreds of others) every time she beat me again and again throughout the years of my childhood.

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There was never anyone, not one single person that acted as a ‘reality check’ person for me in my childhood.  I was so abused — and I didn’t understand.  I did not understand.

It started when I was born, had been going on long before we moved to Alaska.

I think it bothers me I can’t write more about the abuse.  Not on my blog, not for a book.  There are a few memories I can get close to, and thousands I cannot.

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Not at all sure why I wanted to write this to you, Dorothy.  I don’t want to cause you sadness.  I guess when you mentioned my not seeing F. [her other son] when I was in Alaska this summer — I don’t remember him.  I don’t remember anyone.  I should be able to.  So much, so very much of ME, of my childhood, was robbed from me — Linda suffered.  Linda was always suffering.

Gotta go — obviously — not easy to say these things —  Just that those few brief moments of sitting there with J.  are among the ONLY moments of my childhood when I felt like a child — or made the mistake of feeling free to be a child.

I guess that is part of what’s so important about the Chocolate Lily memory — mother had no way to take that away from me.  She wasn’t there.  She never knew it happened.  She could not interfere with any part of that experience.  She couldn’t steal it, pervert it, distort it, rob me of it, contaminate it — it has remained simple and pure and good and so important to me for my entire life!!!

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Thanks, Dorothy, for reading this, and for having such a wonderful heart!  love, always, Linda

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I am also reminded of a comment I wanted to make about the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) research and the interpretation of their findings.  Not only were people without HMO insurance not included in their initial ACE studies, there is also no room in their studies for talking about the depth of horror child abuse can create within the broad categories they are using to distinguish between TYPES of abuse.  They are measuring MULTIPLE trauma sources, not degree, intensity of abuse, chronicity, duration, age of onset, etc.

They are also not assessing the presence or absence of secure attachment figures in an abused child’s life OTHER THAN THE ABUSER, which is, in my thinking, the single most important resiliency factor that mitigates the impact of child abuse on a child’s development and lifelong degree of well-being.

I also know from my own experience that I was 30 years old before I had a clue I had been abused at all.  When research on child abuse is based on self-report, this has to be taken into consideration.  How many people are like I was until age 30 when I sought therapy, having no frame of reference about what is normal and ordinary for a childhood, and what is horrendous and despicably torturous abuse?

The researchers need to add a description of what constitutes some infant and child abuse scenarios along with their questionnaires — something I doubt the CDC has ever thought about.  After 18 years of suffering from insane violence and cruel abuse, I DID NOT UNDERSTAND that I had been abused!!  No clue.  Not a clue!  Not one single clue!

I had a trauma-centered body, a trauma-centered brain, a trauma-centered mind — and no self to be aware with.  Hard to believe?  What happened to me was absolutely, completely normal in my world.  I had been born to believe I got what I deserved and I deserved what I got.  Simple as that.

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+SIMPLE MOMENTS OF HUMAN KINDNESS CAN SAVE AN ABUSED CHILD’S SELF-LIFE

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I woke up on this sunny, warm morning thinking about the post I wrote last night, feeling concerned about the darkness in it.  Somehow two topics came into my mind almost like they came to me as a balance weight against that darkness that was the history of the making of Linda.  One topic is about the Brownie scout leader I had when I was eight.  The other topic is my strange cat, Gerri.

I will only know by writing this piece how the darkness and the light within the story of the Brownie scout leader and my cat fit together.  I know attachment lies at the root of this piece of writing.

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I will start with Gerri because she is here with me in the present.  She is (I know nothing about cat breeds so I will do the best I can to describe her) a mostly black tortoise shell calico cat.  She has splashes of white markings and light tan, almost peach legs, with some tan speckles throughout her fur.  Her coat is so thick I can scrunch my fingers into it, but also a little oily and waxy.  It reminds me of a soft version of the undercoat a buffalo might wear.

Her eyes are round and always big, yellow with a pitch black slit in them.  She reminds me of an owl when she looks at me, and her look is always a stare as if she is continually looking for threat and danger.  She often looks worried as if I might eat her.  There is always tension in her small body (she is not a big or heavy cat).  I will never know her whole background or history, but what I do know explains for me why she is such an unusual and strange cat.  I don’t expect her to ever be ‘ordinary’ the way the three now mostly grown kitten-cats I rescued are.  But I am seeing the REAL Gerri emerging within this precious original cat!

Those of you who read my postings on my 1982 journal remember that I reached a point all those years ago when I packed up my spinning and weaving and put it all away when I entered college, and my life changed.  As I transcribed those journal pages I realized how sad it was that I let go one of the few parts of myself that were really an important and positive part of me.  I looked at the beautiful maple loom sitting in the corner of my living room and realized that I can place some important energy in my present life getting that part of myself that loves to work with fleece and yarn back into my life.

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Now the story about the loom and Gerri intertwine.  About four years ago I happened to hear about this loom that someone in a town about 50 miles from where I live had to give away.  I was fortunate to get this woman’s number and called her.  The following weekend the loom was in my house.  The woman who brought it here was a friend of the woman who owned it, whose Alzheimer’s had progressed to the point she had to be placed in a full-care institution.  It turns out this woman who owned the loom (I never met her) also had two cats that needed a home, too.  I offered to take the cats.

The next weekend the cats arrived, Gerri being one of them and a huge fat white cat named Poe being the other one.  The wisdom of my hindsight came very quickly into play as the woman who brought the cats in their cardboard cat carrier boxes brought them into my house, opened them up immediately, and the cats got away.  I should have insisted immediately that the cats be left in their boxes for awhile until I had time to meet and greet them before I let them out.

Poe only disappeared for a few hours.  The little black one was gone for four months.  I hoped she was still in my house and had not escaped at some sly moment when the door was open, but I didn’t know for sure.  All I could do was keep food, water and litter filled and wait.

Eventually I heard the black one.  I had not written her name down when she had been left at my house, so I called her by the name the little neighbor boy suggested.  Gerri.  After her four months of sneaking out at night and hiding thoroughly during the day, I began to see fleeting shadows of Gerri darting along the outside walls of the house from hiding place to hiding place.  As she became more trusting and daring she would appear here and there away from the walls.  That’s when I began to realize that big fat Poe bullied her.

I ended up finding a home for Poe.  No bullying allowed in my home!  It has taken 3 ½ years for Gerri to transform into my pet.  Gerri is missing her front left paw.  She was stepped on by a horse when she was so tiny she could barely walk, and the woman who owned the loom had taken her to the vet’s and saved her life.  The more I come to know Gerri, the more I realize that she has cat version posttraumatic stress disorder.  I would call her absolutely ‘mentally ill’ and neurotic if I didn’t know better.

Also, the more I have gotten to know Gerri, the more I wonder if her previous owner’s increasing dementia didn’t severely further traumatize this cat.  It makes me worry for pets who are under the care of Alzheimer people before they progress into total near-oblivion.  The hyper startle response this little cat has, her nervousness, her obvious distrust of the world she lives in, her difficulty in forming attachment to me, all make me think that there were many times in her 14-year life that she was threatened not only by a giant horse, and a huge bullying white cat, but also by her increasingly demented owner.

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But Gerri seems to realize more every day of her life that she is now safe from harm and secure in my care and affection.  Nothing will ever take away from her either the background experiences of suffering that she’s had, or her physiological responses to those traumas.  But I am watching her become, a little more every day, more and more of the fine cat, Gerri that she is.

She loves to be brushed, and I don’t mean she’s a little fond of it.  She gets ecstatic!  I keep a brush on the bathroom floor, and every time I use the toilet Gerri gets some profoundly happy moments!  I have even seen her let herself be chased by the sweetest of my three half grown kittens.  Gerri is queen of the house now.  She will never eat while the other three do, but she watches them from the middle of the kitchen floor with interest.  She will even curl up now on a corner of my sheet-covered bed in the sunlight during the day, allowing herself to be present with three other cats on the bed!

But it is what happens at night when I first go to bed that tickles me most.  I don’t know why she just started this a week ago.  It’s like some ancient Gerri-is-a-cat genetic memory has kicked into gear.  She always knows about 15 minutes before I head to bed that it is TIME, and she begins to prance around me, waiting.  As soon as the lights are off and I am snuggled under my covers and stop moving, Gerri rushes into the living room.  It took me a couple of days to put two and two together to figure out what her new routine actually was.

I would here her return to my room as she made the strangest cat deep growling  cat talking sounds.  Then they would stop, she would leave the room, and soon she would be back repeating her verbal display.  After awhile she would jump onto my bed and nestle down somewhere near my feet where she spent the night.  Eventually I noticed the pile of cat toy soft balls piled under my bed near my head.  “Oh!  She’s HUNTING for me!”

In order for this game to repeat itself for the first few nights Gerri had to move all the balls back into the living room during the day so she could hunt for them again at night.  Now I round them all up and hide them for her.  At first I kept the hiding simple and obvious so she would have no trouble finding them.  I didn’t want to discourage her from hunting for them.  Now I can be a little more challenging in where I put them in the morning, because she still finds them all at night and brings them back for me.

Now HERE is the connection to my Brownie scout leader when I was eight.  I am Gerri’s attachment person.  She hunts for me because she loves me and she is taking care of me like a momma cat would hunt and bring her kill to her kittens.  I am like her mother at the same time she is mothering me.

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When I was eight, shortly after my family had left Los Angeles and moved to Alaska, my mother was still practicing the “Let’s be a GOOD (public face) mother so I make an impression on all these new people I am meeting here!” façade.   Eventually, and it only took less than two years, she stopped caring a hoot what anyone thought about her in her new location and became again completely the mean mother she was to me.

In the meantime, I was allowed to attend Brownies for about a year, which culminated in my being allowed to attend Brownie day camp for a week the June we first began homesteading.   Mother drove me to the Eagle River Shopping Center parking lot and the Brownie leader picked me up and drove me to camp and back again.

I am thinking about how the attachment and child development experts tell us that the ability to form secure attachments lies within each individual child.  When insecure attachment happens instead, the ‘fault’ does not lie within the victim-child.  It lies with the inadequate early caregivers.  I have never forgotten the time I spent at that Brownie camp.  It was one of the very, very few times I actually GOT TO BE A CHILD!  I loved the activities, enjoyed being with the other children, and was treated grandly by every one of the adults.

Yet one particular experience that happened on a return trip back to the shopping center that remains a ‘flashbulb’ memory for me (the same as trauma can create flashbulb memories, so also can extremely positive events, especially when a child is immersed in the darkness of trauma on an ongoing basis).  We had left the camp a little early, and the Brownie scout leader asked me on the return trip if I liked flowers.  I trusted this woman completely by now, and I can remember my own ecstasy when I responded back to her with the full life-force and enthusiasm I was capable of, “Oh, YES!  I LOVE flowers.”

“OK,” this woman responded back to me with a smile.  “Just wait.  I am going to show you something very special.”

She turned off of the paved highway and drove down a narrow dirt road and parked near the edge of the great Knik River.  She walked ahead of me on a slippery damp wet packed black mud pathway along the shore until we came to a small open area where she showed me the Chocolate Lilies growing there.

So beautiful, I thought!  I had never before seen a brown flower!  But when I smelled them, the STUNK!  How could something that looked so beautiful smell so bad?

Well, I have NEVER forgotten those shining moments or the kindness of that woman.  Yet I also realize that woman’s attention and generous kindness to me where probably not one single bit out of the ordinary for her.  I had no idea at all that people ordinarily treat children that way, treat each other that way.  For me, that week at day camp, and my ‘commutes’ with this woman remained the safest, most secure, most kind and happiest days of my entire childhood.

Hope from human kindness means the universe to abused children -- budding flowers in spring -- the Chocolate Lily

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Which again takes me back to myself and little traumatized kitty Gerri.  I understand that getting stepped on by a horse and losing your paw can be put in the category of trauma that just happens sometimes.  But neither Gerri nor I ever deserved anything less than perfect kindness.  That we didn’t get it, changed us.  But just as there is a perfect cat Gerri inside that furry body sleeping in the sun at the foot of my bed right now with her three furry companions (the first she has ever let into her life), there always remains a perfect Linda present in this body no matter how difficult it is for me to remain ‘in touch’ with her.

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So, in response to the dark reality of the post I wrote last night, I want to remind all of us that because we are still alive there HAD TO BE shining moments of safe and secure attachment with someone somewhere and some time in our childhood.  I won’t talk here about the unspeakable tragedy it is that abused children have to make a few tiny moments of glowing kindness into enough of a sustaining memory to last them throughout their terrible, dark, dangerous, traumatic childhoods.

But I also believe that I would have had a different life course in the end than I did if I had NOT had those few shining moments with that perfect stranger.  Her kindness sustained me throughout my childhood because those moments with her were the only true Linda being Linda and being accepted, treated kindly and being genuinely and completely happy that I can think of.  But the quality of my attachment experiences with this woman kept the channel of secure attachment open for me within my own body-brain-mind.

I have no doubt that in those few joy-filled moments with that woman who cared enough about me to take a little detour to show me new flowers that I loved, in those few secure attachment moments borrowed from the ‘ordinary’ world, that woman saved my life in the same way I am saving little Gerri’s and she is saving mine.

Hope beats within the heart of these moments.

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+BREAKING THE TABOO — TALKING ABOUT SUICIDE

alchemynow2 Comments

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It is time for me to break my own self imposed vow of silence about the subject of suicide.  I am certainly not responsible for anyone else’s thoughts about the subject, or for anyone else’s actions.  I feel like I am breaking a social taboo by mentioning it at all.  Can we learn to talk as openly and honestly about suicide as we can talk about any other realistic health concern or threat to our well-being?

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The following helped me when I read it today — written to a woman who had just lost her husband to suicide:

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“SEVERANCE FROM THIS WORLD”

“Thou hast written of the severe calamity that has befallen thee – the death of thy respected husband.  That honorable personage has been so much subjected to the stress and pain of this world that his highest wish became deliverance from it.  Such is this mortal abode – a storehouse of afflictions and suffering.  It is negligence that binds man to it for no comfort can be secured by any soul in this world, from monarch down to the least subject.  If once it should offer man a sweet cup, a hundred bitter ones will follow it and such is the condition of this world.  The wise man therefore does not attach himself to this mortal life and does not depend upon it; even at some moments he eagerly wishes death that he may thereby be freed from these sorrows and afflictions.  Thus it is seen that some, under extreme pressure of anguish, have committed suicide.

As to him rest assured; he will be immersed in the ocean of pardon and forgiveness and will become the recipient of bounty and favor.”  ‘Abdu’l-Baha

From the book Baha’i World Faith:  Selected Writings of Baha’u’llah and ‘Abdu’l-Baha, published by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States, 1943, 1956.  This is from the 5th printing of the 1956 edition, 1971, pages 378-379

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There is barely a single moment of a single day of my life that my ‘not wanting to be here on this earth’ does not overshadow me.  I consider myself fortunate that I have friends and a sister that I can talk about my feelings about suicide openly and completely honestly with.  I hate the thought, and I hate the feelings within me that are connected to it.  I have even asked my favorite astrologer, Zane, for a reading that might explain where in my natal-birth astrological chart there might be something I can learn about myself to club this thought to death!  Permanently would be awfully nice.

I have reason to believe that not being loved or wanted and instead being loathed, hated and greatly abused from birth has something to do with my not wanting to be here even now.  I know I have overwhelming pain and sorrow within me from my 18 year history of severe abuse.  It has always been there.  How my not wanting to be here in a body is tied to that pain, I will probably never know for certain.  The important thing is that one day at a time, I am still here.

I do not believe that guilt-tripping, shaming, denying, avoiding, or judging myself for my difficulties being alive in this body on this earth are helpful.  Having received a serious diagnosis of advanced breast cancer 2 ½ years ago put me in direct contact with my dilemma.  I fought the cancer primarily because of my children, and I think they know that.  (My boyfriend also told me at the time if I didn’t finish my chemotherapy treatments he would not see me any more.  I have some resentments about this!)

My children also clearly know my child abuse history and my struggles to live with the consequences of that abuse.  I might wish that not to be true all I want – but the facts about surviving a torturous childhood are best allowed to breath in the bright light of conscious day.

The ending last June of my relationship with the man I am in love with has not made being inside myself any easier.  I continue to suffer greatly from this loss.  Because I have a severe insecure attachment disorder stemming from my extremely abusive childhood (which also affects my attachment in my body to this world), I understand that there is not a single fiber of my being that has not been painfully touched by my continuing loss.  I also understand that probably most of this blog’s readers know exactly what I am talking about.

The choice to take one breath after another, to continue living each day as it comes, is not a minor one.  It is one we all make from our first breath until our last, whether we choose to think about it consciously or not.  The excerpt I placed at the beginning of this post uses the word ‘anguish’.  I use the word ‘agony’, because on some level I feel it every moment of my life (yup, that good old Substance P).

The advanced and I believe sophisticated dissociational survival-protection system within my body-brain-mind cannot erase all of the pain that I am split-off from consciously identifying.  Fortunately, I believe that about 90% of it is remotely being stored away from my ongoing experience of being alive.  But what my body does know and remember affects me continually.

I can ‘make it go away’ more sometimes than others, but it remains a part of me constantly because the pain is a part of my body.  Living with that level of pain is not easy.  Readers, I believe you know what I mean – and I take comfort in that knowledge – as much as it profoundly saddens me that any single one of us had to endure the kind of sufferings that we have.

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The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study: New York’s Response

Posted: 15 Nov 2009 10:09 PM PST

Recent medical research on “adverse childhood experiences” (ACEs) reveals a compelling relationship between the extent of childhood trauma and serious later in life health and social problems.   The social science knowledge base and the practical experience of social service providers become important in terms of understanding and responding to adverse life experiences in childhood and adolescence. The ACE research can be linked with prevention and intervention knowledge that involves evidence-based mental health practice, prevention of health risk behaviors, substance abuse treatment, integrated treatment of co-occurring disorders, community development, and service delivery and policy evaluations.  Social workers located in discrete professional settings can mobilize comprehensive responses to address the causal role of adverse childhood experiences by bringing together various professions to create more coherent systems for the development of children and the support of parents.

Capital Region ACE Think Tank and Action Teams have utilized ACE research to connect various areas of concern (workforce issues, trauma-informed practice, prevention and intervention, treatment of co-occurring disorders, cross-systems/service integration).  This webinar outlines the ACE research, emphasizing this connection to social service knowledge for response strategy, and reports on new research on the Prevalence of Adverse Childhood Experiences Among Homeless People.  The mission and purpose of local ACE Think Tank and Action Team Meetings is discussed, outlining the policy journey in the NYS Capital Region along with next steps.  NYS has the opportunity to demonstrate leadership in ACE response, promoting resilience, recovery, and transformation.

Proudly presented in partnership, the State University of New York at Albany’s School of Social Work, the New York State Parenting Education Partnership and Prevent Child Abuse New York are pleased to announce the next in a series of professional development webinars, presented by Professor Heather Larkin.

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Why has it taken so long to ‘figure out’ something as obvious as the connection between child abuse and long term life difficulties OF ALL KINDS?  STUPID is as STUPID DOES!  Am I a little bitter?  You bet!!  Try “Too little, too late!” on for size, folks.
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+WHEN ABUSIVE PARENTS STEAL THEIR CHILD’S THUNDER

alchemynow2 Comments

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Experts say that we cannot be truly autonomous and secure adults if we lack the ability to have safe and secure attachments.

I wanted to write today about Dr. Siegel’s next statements about secure-autonomous attachment.  I find, as usual, that I am nearly completely lost in trying to understand what he is saying (see bottom of this post) because I do not come from a childhood of safe and secure attachments.  Instead my 18 years of abuse from birth gave me the opposite – a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder.  To begin to understand what Siegel is saying, I have to turn his words upside down and backwards so that they can make sense to ‘opposite’ extra-ordinary ME.

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In order to keep my thoughts from appearing and flying away in their often random way, I had to find my own internal image to attach them to so that they could have an order I can understand.  What came to me in relation to what Siegel is saying about secure versus insecure attachment was:  “stolen thunder.”  In working with my own internal image I came to understand three basic questions about how parents raise their children.  In fact, I think it might be the simplest ‘test’ possible to determine the quality of the parenting we received and of the parenting we give our own children.

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1.  Does a parent help their child’s own personal power, uniqueness, expression and self to grow?  In other words, do they help their child’s thunder to grow or do they interfere with their child’s growing thunder (self=personal power)?

Yes or No

2.  Does a parent actually steal their child’s thunder away from them so that the child is diminished rather than helped and allowed to grow and thrive?

Yes or No

3.  Does the parent then project their own garbage onto and into their child?

Yes or No

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These questions are, of course, only showing us what the very tip of the iceberg is like about how parents can act toward their children.  But I think the answers give a pretty clear indication about what lies below the surface:

As I thought about my mother’s interactions with me from my birth, I realized that 1. was No; 2. was Yes; 3.  was Yes.  N-Y-Y.  She did not allow my personal thunder to grow, she stole it away from me and projected her garbage onto me.  (This is exactly what I believe my mother’s mother and grandmother did to her in her childhood.)

I thought about my father and 1. was No; 2. was No; 3.  was No.  N-N-N.  He did not help me to grow my own thunder, but he did not steal it away from me, either.  Nor did he project his garbage onto me.  I basically did not seem to exist in his world at all.

I thought about my interactions with my own children and 1. was Yes; 2. was No; and 3. was No.  Y-N-N.  My foremost effort with my children was to allow them and to help them grow into their own self and to grow their personal thunder.  I did not steal their thunder away from them or deny them the opportunity to grow their own strong, clear self.  I did not confuse, overpower or disempower them.  I did not project my own garbage onto them.  I had what the child development attachment experts would call an ‘earned secure’ attachment with my children.  (I think about this from my own perspective as my having built a ‘borrowed secure’ attachment with my children.)

NOTE:  Our patterns of trying to give our thunder away is a topic for some future writing…..

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Out of curiosity I wanted to know where the phrase “steal my thunder” even came from.  At trivia-library.com I found it to be 300 years old:

Origins of Sayings – Steal My Thunder

About the history, origin and story behind the famous saying

STEAL MY THUNDER

Who Said It: John Dennis

When: 1709

The Story behind It: John Dennis, English critic and playwright, invented a new way of simulating the sound of thunder on stage and used the method in one of his plays, Appius and Virginia. Dennis “made” thunder by using “troughs of wood with stops in them” instead of the large mustard bowls usually employed. The thunder was a great success, but Dennis’ play was a dismal failure. The manager at Drury Lane, where the play was performed, canceled its run after only a few performances. A short time later, Dennis returned to Drury Lane to see Shakespeare’s Macbeth. As he sat in the pit, he was horrified to discover that his method of making thunder was being used. Jumping to his feet, Dennis screamed at the audience, “That’s my thunder, by God! The villains will not play my play but they steal my thunder.”

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I have a different association with thunder.  I used to be terrified of electrical storms.  Gradually, after more than 25 years spent in friendships with traditional-believing Native Americans in northern Minnesota, I came to understand another perspective on these storms.

I had a friend who was a lawyer and Chief Magistrate, and not given to ‘flights of fancy’.  One time she told the story of driving a stretch of deserted 2-lane highway after leaving Canada as she headed home.  She glanced in her rear view mirror and saw a massive bird speeding towards her along the line of road.  It shone copper, and when it reached her car it lifted over it and swooped down in front of her and continued down the road.  It was so big its wing tips reached over the shoulders on both sides of the road.  My friend was stunned and shaken, and pulled off the road and stopped as she watched it disappear ahead of her.

Traditional Anishinabeg (Ojibway, Chippewa) and other Tribal teachings tell of how thunder is the sound of the voice of these great Thunderbirds, and lightning is the light flashing from their eyes.  I am no longer afraid of electrical storms.  Finding, claiming and growing my own personal thunder remains a bit more of a challenge!

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My entire recovery from the terrible child abuse I suffered has been about the healing of myself and the claiming of my personal power to be my self, in my power, in my life.  How does having one’s personal thunder — or not — apply to my understanding of the following words by Dr. Daniel Siegel?  I guess my discussion of this information now belongs in tomorrow’s post:

“Moreover, the capacity to reflect on the role of mental states in determining human behavior is associated with the capacity to provide sensitive and nurturing parenting….this reflective function is more than the ability to introspect; it directly influences a self-organizational process within the individual…..the reflective function also enables the parent to facilitate the self-organizational development of the child….the coherent organization of the mind depends upon an integrative process that enables such reflective processes to occur….integrative coherence within the individual may early in life depend upon, and later facilitate, interpersonal connections that foster the development of emotional well-being.  (Siegle/tdm/312)”

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This post follows:

+DISSOCIATION AND THE TRAUMA-SPECIALIZED BRAIN 11-11-09

+SECURE AND INSECURE ATTACHMENT AND THE CHILDHOOD NARRATIVE 11-13-09

+EXPLODING MOTHER, IMPLODING ME: SOME FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN US 11-14-09

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MORE INFORMATION ABOUT BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER

(IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER)

Borderline Personality Disorder

In the Spotlight | More Topics |
from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD
Most people with a diagnosis of BPD have at least one (if not more) co-occurring disorders. Common comorbid conditions include mood and anxiety disorders and substance use problems. But other disorders can occur alongside BPD as well.
In the Spotlight
Eating Disorders and BPD
Recent research is revealing how often BPD and eating disorders co-occur, why they may be related and how to treat these two types of disorders when they do co-occur.
More Topics

Alcoholism and BPD
There is a remarkable overlap between substance abuse disorders and borderline personality disorder. One study found that about 60% of patients in psychiatric hospitals who have been diagnosed with BPD also have a co-occurring substance use disorder such as alcohol dependence.

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+EARLY ABUSE AFFECTS OUR REACTION TO ADULT TRAUMA EXPOSURE

alchemynow2 Comments

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My revised list — common reactions to a stressful event can include:

Shock and disbelief

Feeling powerless

(Short and/or long term immune system responses) headaches, back pains, and stomach problems

Sadness and depression (depression is an anxiety response)

Crying

Apathy and emotional numbing (dissociation, depersonalization, derealization)

(Denial – distortion or loss of memory)

Anger

Fear and anxiety about the future

(Over or under reaction to stimuli – hyper- or hypo-startle response)

Sleep difficulties

Nightmares and reoccurring thoughts about the event (left-right brain cannot process trauma information while awake or during dream sleep — ambidextrous  and left handed people at higher risk)

Difficulty concentrating

Difficulty making decisions

(Difficulty assessing meaning and prioritizing)

Loss of appetite (or increase)

(For children – disturbance in play activities)

(Difficulty with social interactions)

(Inability to use words to describe the experience)

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I cannot read information such as what is presented at the end of the post from any ‘ordinary’ perspective.  The list presented as “common reactions to a stressful event” describes the kind of traumatic stress reactions that are built into the growing body-brains of severely abused infants and young children.  On some level, these reactions have become our norm.  When additional traumas occur in our later adult lives all of these pre-existing traumatic reactions become stimulated and activated.  We are, therefore, at highest risk for having serious reactions to later traumas in our lives.

I hate having to write about these things.  I hate having to even think about them.  I hate it that my body knows far more than my conscious mind ever will about the reality of what the challenges of trauma can do to us.

Professionals call a reaction to trauma disordered when these reactions do not dissipate after a reasonable period of time goes by after a trauma has happened.  For those of us whose body-brain was built during trauma, we have never had the luxury of having a body-brain that does not include trauma reactions in its makeup.  We cannot return to a pre-trauma condition because we never had one in the first place.

That makes any childhood trauma survivor more vulnerable to post trauma stress disorders.  Personally, I don’t like the use of the word ‘disorder’ and would prefer a recognition that what happens to us after trauma exposure is as natural a reaction as what happens to us as the trauma occurs.  If our reaction is exaggerated or extended, there is a reason for this happening.  Until this fact, coupled with a complete recognition of how early infant-child abuse and trauma alter the developing body-brain from the start is recognized and respected, I do believe the word ‘disorder’ must be used carefully in trauma response considerations.  What ‘they’ see as ‘disordered’ is a different kind of ordering for the entire body-brain from the ground up, from the beginning of life onward for those who have survived severe infant-childhood traumas

Whatever words are used to describe the continued suffering from ongoing reactions to traumas, the long term effects are very real and can be debilitating in regard to quality of life and general well-being.  Adaptations in the body-brain of early trauma survivors means that we react to trauma differently than ‘ordinary’ people do.  We were ‘reordered’ and our ongoing processing of information reflects that condition in our body-brain.

To call us ‘disordered’ is to call us flawed.  We are different, not flawed.

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INFORMATION FROM:

Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog
Dealing with a Traumatic EventPosted: 14 Nov 2009 01:26 PM PSTIn the wake of the tragic events at Fort Hood November 5, 2009, it’s important to remember that when traumatic incidents occur, the Center for Disease Control’s Injury Center can assist by providing information that can help people cope and recover. Sometimes after experiencing a traumatic event, including personal or environmental disasters, or being threatened with an assault, people have a strong and lingering reaction to stress. When the symptoms of stress last too long, it can cause people to feel overwhelmed and have an effect on their ability to cope.Common reactions to a stressful event can include:
Disbelief and shock
Fear and anxiety about the future
Difficulty making decisions
Apathy and emotional numbing
Loss of appetite
Nightmares and reoccurring thoughts about the event
Anger
Increased use of alcohol and drugs
Sadness and depression
Feeling powerless
Crying
Sleep difficulties
Headaches, back pains, and stomach problems
Difficulty concentratingFor more information, tips on how to handle a traumatic experience, or to read this full article please visit: http://www.cdc.gov/Features/HandlingStress/ or http://www2c.cdc.gov/podcasts/player.asp?f=5256

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+EXPLODING MOTHER, IMPLODING ME: SOME FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN US

alchemynowLeave a comment

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I am revisiting what I see as the core differences between my borderline mother and myself.  I find that nothing has changed in my thinking about these differences in my past five years of research.  My mother’s childhood-onset dissociation became malignant while mine remained benign.

In my first ‘doodle’ I visualized the impact of infant developmental attachment deprivations she suffered from birth until age two.  Born into a family with marital discord and left with her primary care in the hands of a ‘nanny’, I envision that my mother’s developing brain-mind-self was already far off course before she reached the stage of developing a Theory of Mind.

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During the developmental stages from age 2 – 5 conditions in my mother’s childhood so severely impacted her brain-mind that I believe her later mental illness had already centralized the organization of her self.  From the age of 5 it was simply a matter of time before the bomb that was her Borderline Personality Disorder condition would explode – which it did during her terrible delivery of me.

The broader dimensions of the diamond figure that I drew show that in the bottom half powerful interactions with others in her life were feeding her unstable growing self.  She had reached what I call the ‘rage stage’ which was coupled with the following:

My mother was a victim of a lie.  She was told through word and deed by her early caregivers that sometimes she was good enough to be loved.  She was also told that sometimes she was so bad she was un-love-able.  The lie was that she had the power to change herself from being bad to being good, and if she changed into being good (made the bad go away) she would be love-able – and therefore would be loved.

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These conditions presented my mother with an impossible paradox for which there was no answer.  She never knew she was being lied to by her attachment caregivers.  She did not know that there was no solution to this paradox.  She was told she had the power to change herself into being ‘all good’, and she eventually found her solution – me.

The impossible solution to her fundamental betrayal problem was to spit off all her badness and project it onto me.  That left her being all good and me being all bad.  She never had the capacity to know she had believed a lie, found an impossible solution to an impossible riddle, or that she had been tricked and fooled.  Once her child brain-mind wrapped herself around the too-big problem of her early life, her brain-mind continued to grow with this malignant lie within it.

As she moved out of her childhood into her adulthood, and then into the stage of her childbearing years, her childhood dissociation, fueled by childhood rage and a broken Theory of Mind, meant that her children remained her doll-imaginary friends with me as her imaginary enemy (as I have previously described).  By the later years of  my mother’s life she had fewer and fewer people she could influence through her mental illness, and she died as alone and unconsciously troubled as she had been from the time of her birth.

I see this ‘main impact zone’ as being the mass of incoming information that hurt her, followed my the mass of information she later could displace and project onto others to hurt them (primarily me).

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My second doodle page (above) presents the basics of what I believe are the differences between my mother and myself.  Like her, my foundation from birth was in disorganizing, disorienting insecure attachment to early caregivers.  But unlike her, I was never fooled, tricked, or betrayed.  Her projection of her own badness onto me condemned me absolutely and permanently.  I was simply doomed to be hated without hope of reprieve, salvation, or any hope of implementing my own solution to solve any of the ‘problems’ I had with her.

The simplicity of my life saved me.  I was not faced with solving an impossible riddle.  I was not presented with the impossible paradox of “you can change yourself into a good and love-able child and then I will love you.”  My childhood was one continual ‘rupture’ without either repair or hope for repair.  My mother’s childhood contained ‘ruptures’ with faulty and deceiving repairs.

In the final analysis, I was far more fortunate than my mother was.  She was set up to fail at being love-able.  I was simply not love-able.  It was the constancy of my unloved-being hated state that saved me.  It was the inconsistency of her unloved-sometimes loved state that ruined her.

I believe her brain fixated a rigid solution to an unsolvable problem.  Her childhood dissociation organized in her brain-mind-self around this solution – which became her internal and unconscious fulltime goal.  I believe her mental illness was fueled by childhood rage.  Her childhood dissociation became malignant, and I became its operational target.

My childhood dissociation had no goal other than physical enduring survival.  My brain-mind-self was left in a fluid, continually changing and adapting state because I HAD NO GOAL and I had no hope, false or otherwise.  My mother’s treatment of me was made tolerable through what I call benign dissociation and my development occurred in a world of sadness.

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My mother ended up fighting to be love-able, fueled by rage.  Rage is tied to active coping skills, whether we want to admit this or not.  I did not grow up a fighter.  I grew up a sorrow-filled victim stuck in the passive coping skill state.  My mother was told she had the power to change what happened to her, even though it was a lie and it was not within her power to change the dynamics of her caregivers’ treatment of her.

My mother was damned and didn’t know it.  I was damned and I did know it.  I knew I had no power to change what happened to me.   Nobody ever fooled me into thinking otherwise — from the time I was born.  I believe that there are two entirely different trajectories of development set up by the two different childhood scenarios I am describing.  One leads to the development of a dangerous, demonizing mother and the other one does not.

Both my life and my mother’s of course ended up being extremely complicated with devastating consequences stemming from child abuse and neglect in a malevolent environment during critical body-brain-mind-self stages of early development that resulted in a changed brain for both of us.  Yet as I see it, I was never betrayed or set-up with an impossible task to accomplish like my mother was, and being free from these overpowering early forces allowed me to become who I am.

My mother’s mental illness prevented her from ever being able to tolerate becoming conscious either of how she behaved or of what had happened to so wound her in childhood.  I am not barred in the same way from consciousness.  As I continue to explore the underlying aspects of safe and secure attachment, I will explore how having the ability to be self-aware and self-reflective makes all the difference in how and who we become in our lives.

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This post follows:

+DISSOCIATION AND THE TRAUMA-SPECIALIZED BRAIN 11-11-09 and

+SECURE AND INSECURE ATTACHMENT AND THE CHILDHOOD NARRATIVE 11-13-09

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THIS INFORMATION COMES TO YOU FROM:

Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog
Improving Children’s Mental Health through Parenting EducationPosted: 13 Nov 2009 03:01 AM PSTGuest post by Michelle Gross, Projects/Public Policy Manager, Prevent Child Abuse New York In today’s difficult times, one of the most important skills one must possess is the ability to form healthy relationships and cope with life’s challenges. Our children are not born with these skills, but rather learn them through their social and emotional development.While providers have traditionally focused on physical development, in 2006, the New York State Legislature passed the Children’s Mental Health Act. The Act required the development of a statewide plan to address issues in children’s social and emotional health, zero to eighteen. As a result of this legislation, the Children’s Plan was developed in collaboration with nine state agencies and led by the New York State Office for Mental Health.The Children’s Plan serves as a blueprint for New York state agencies, providers, and communities to
improve the social and emotional development of children and their families. The Plan focuses on engaging children and their families in services early, ensuring that systems are collaborating to provide effective and efficient services and meeting families’ needs by focusing on their strengths and abilities.

Within the Children’s Plan is a directive for the Office of Mental Health to work with parenting educators to better support parents in raising emotionally healthy children.  The New York State Parenting Education Partnership has been chosen to play this pivotal role in educating providers who work with families and supporting a network of family support and information.

NYSPEP’s efforts to provide professional development sessions for parenting educators will enhance providers’ ability to communicate the importance of social and emotional development with parents, and offer both providers and families tools to facilitate children’s healthy development.

For more information, visit our web site at: http://www.parentingeducationpartnership.org.

Positive Parenting Can have Lasting Impact for Generations

Posted: 12 Nov 2009 07:15 PM PST

A new study that looks at data on three generations of Oregon families shows that “positive parenting” not only has positive impacts on adolescents, but on the way they parent their own children. ” Positive Parenting can include factors such as warmth, monitoring children’s activities, involvement, and consistency of discipline.

Researchers from the Oregon Social Learning Center conducted surveys on 206 boys who were considered “at-risk” for juvenile delinquency. The boys and their parents were interviewed and observed, researchers information about how the boys were parented. Starting in 1984, the boys met with researchers every year from age 9 to 33. As the boys grew up and started their own families, their partners and children began participating in the study. In this way, the researchers learned how the men’s childhood experiences influenced their own parenting.

There is often an assumption that people learn parenting methods from their own parents. In fact, most research shows that a direct link between what a person experiences as a child and what she or he does as a parent is fairly weak. The researchers found that children who had parents who monitored their behavior, were consistent with rules and were warm and affectionate were more likely to have close relationships with their peers, be more engaged in school, and have better self-esteem.

For more information relating to positive parenting techniques, please visit our website http://preventchildabuseny.org/parents.shtml

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

alchemynowLeave a comment

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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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+I’M HAVING AN IRRITABLE DAY! AND SOME BPD INFO….

alchemynow2 Comments

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If I were going to anything today, I would apologize — because I am the most irritable and irritated that I can remember being.  Between the 3 hour wait with ‘the group of poor people’ last week (part of the hoop-jumping process as all they did was tell us to come back a week later and wait again), and the 5 hour wait today — outside, fortunately in beautiful weather — waiting for some winter help with fuel assistance.

When it was my turn to go inside, finally, I was told they ran out of money for the program over an hour earlier only nobody bothered to poke their head out the door and tell those of us out there still waiting — well, I am more than a bit crabby!

I didn’t realize I could GET this crabby.  It turns out there was money for anyone with an overdue utility bill through a completely different program than the one I thought I was jumping through all the hoops to participate in.  Fortunately I did have a $20 light bill that was due last Friday, so I SHOULD feel grateful that one got paid.  They told us we can come back in early December, although they don’t know exactly when yet, and go through the double-wait all over again.

But at the moment I am so irritated and irritable I can only be grateful I can return home where there is nobody to bother — and work to calm myself down.

Now at 58 it seems I have an entire lifetime of irritable-crabby that has been sitting here inside me all these years!  I know intellectually that irritability is tied to ‘depression’ and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but I think this is just another one of those emotional-dysregulated-right-brain experiences that today has taken over my body!

This is a part of my disability, but fortunately my contact with others can be very limited right now.  This was way too much stimulation for one day!  I am very much reminded of what the child diagnosis of Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) can feel like as an adult.  Where do the professionals think RAD vanishes to once our body gets bigger?  There are just some times I can no longer find the ‘nice Linda’, today — right now — being one of those times.

I mean, even the song of the Mexican ice cream truck running down the street behind my house on the other side of the Border Wall is jangling my nerves!

If I had a horse, I’d go riding.  But then if I could afford a horse, I wouldn’t be standing in line to try to get help paying my utility bills this winter.  Just more of the same:  History of Childhood Maltreatment Linked to Higher Rates of Poverty

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THIS FROM:

Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog
Child Abuse Prevention Programs at Risk: Call Your Legislators Today!Posted: 09 Nov 2009 09:53 AM PST

Special Session of the Legislature Tomorrow: Home Visitation, Trust Fund, Child Advocacy Centers, Kinship Care at Risk

Call Your State Legislators Today!

Governor David Paterson has called for a special session of the New York State Legislature to commence tomorrow, November 10th, to address the growing state deficit. While we are not certain what will take place during the special session, we know that the Governor’s proposed Deficit Reduction Plan is the wrong choice for children and families and the wrong choice for New York’s economy.

The Deficit Reduction Plan will cost New York millions in federal funding for home visitation and Community-based Child Abuse Prevention dollars, in addition to the short and long-term cost of maltreatment to our social welfare, law enforcement, education, and healthcare systems.

A champion for New York’s children is Senator John Sampson, who has committed his vote against the Governor’s Deficit Reduction Plan. Today, we ask all advocates to:

  • Call Senator Sampson at 518-455-2788 and thank him for making the right choice for kids and protecting New York’s economy.
  • Call your local Senator and Assemblymember and encourage them to follow Senator Sampson’s lead and vote against any reduction in necessary services for children and families. The script can be as simple as follows: “Hello, my name is _____ and I’m a constituent of Senator/Assemblymember _____ and I’d like to ask my legislator to vote against any cuts to services for children and families.”

If you don’t know who your elected representatives are, you can simply call the New York State Legislative Switchboards at: 518-455-2800 (Senate) and 518-455-4100 (Assembly), or look them up online.

Remember when calling to be polite, leave your name, address, and phone number, and follow up your call by encouraging another friend or colleague to make one of their own.

Read Prevent Child Abuse New York’s testimony against the Governor’s DRP (PDF).

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So, I am not going to write today.  There isn’t one single productive thing I can think of to say!!  Just to offer the following information — in memory of my mean Borderline mother.

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Borderline Personality Disorder

In the Spotlight   |  More Topics   |

from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD

BPD isn’t just about how you feel emotionally. It can affect everything in your life, from your job to your friendships to how you feel physically. Knowing what to expect can help you prepare for what may be to come.

In the Spotlight

What is Life with BPD Like?
Living with borderline personality disorder is not easy. Intense emotional pain, and feelings of emptiness, desperation, anger, hopelessness, and loneliness are common. These symptoms can affect every part of your life. However, despite the suffering that borderline personality disorder (BPD) can cause, many people learn ways to cope with the symptoms and lead normal, fulfilling lives.

BPD and Your Physical Health
BPD does not only have an impact on your mental health. People with BPD are more likely to report a variety of physical health problems, and are more likely to need to be hospitalized for medical reasons, than those without BPD.

BPD and Your Relationships
Many of the symptoms of BPD can have direct impact on relationships, and other symptoms have an indirect (but not necessarily less disruptive) influence.

More Topics

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

alchemynowLeave a comment

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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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