Tag: healing

+BIG, OLD PAIN – WHEN IT THREATENS MY BEING WITH SORROW

alchemynow2 Comments

The danger for those of us who suffered from long term, violent child abuse is that we can so easily be overwhelmed with sadness.  Some of us cry rivers.  Some of us slam the door to our emotions shut so fast and so firmly that we can pretend we have no emotions at all.  At the root of both reactions still lies the same thing:  an insecure attachment disorder.

It can take such applied effort to make it through a pain filled day that it can make us wonder why we bother to try to go on at all.  I know.  I had one of those days today.

I have no words of wisdom.  I have no words, either, to express how fortunate I am that I have caring friends, and a dear sister who spent hours with me on the phone today as I tried to dig my fingernails into this thing called life.

I’m still here.  I painted my bathroom through my tears today.  I cleaned out my refrigerator and my freezer.  I did laundry and hung it in the fresh air on the line to dry.  I dug and redug my compost pile.  All of it, all day, through tears I could not stop.

I know that my insecure attachment disorder is a deadly serious one.  I know at the root of it lies fundamental disorganization and disorientation.  I have to be careful.  I try to be careful.  I try to keep moving forward no matter how sad I feel.  Next I am going to make a mosaic on my wall.  Because I want to.  Because I can.  Because it will be beautiful.  Because I can leave it here behind me if I am soon forced to leave this home.

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Anything that shakes what I organize and orient myself around is going to put me at risk for deep, dire trouble.  How would I have been able to live my life differently if I knew about my insecure attachment disorder a long time ago?  Could I have understood how vitally important it is for me to have not only a home, but a home of my own?  Yet I don’t see that I’ll ever have the resources, inner or outer to accomplish this in my lifetime.  But I don’t know that for sure.

I do know for sure that the thought of having to shred my home apart yet again in my life brought me to a state of sorrow that I have so deep inside of myself I know it has no bottom.  Why today did I need so to cry, and not so yesterday?  I do not know.  I do not know what triggered my pain so badly today, and not yesterday.

I have to have hope for tomorrow.  I have to hope that these tears cried themselves out today and will not find me such a vulnerable host for them — tomorrow.  Sometimes I fear that this hurting, sad, sad Linda who cannot stop crying is the closest to the real Linda I have.  When I cannot dissociate from her, into somebody else, I can do little else but cry.

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Suicide Prevention

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+IN MY MOTHER’S WORDS: WHY SHE HAD TO ABUSE ME

alchemynow1 Comment

I just surprising discovered in my mother’s 1957 diary her own written account of her version of reality related to one of the most long term and vicious child abuse memories of my young childhood.

I am stunned by her words, by the fact that she EVER allowed herself to write them, that this diary has survived these 52 years, that I have them in my possession, and that I found them last night.

I have done my best to describe my present day reaction to these writings, though I feel I have very nearly failed completely in my efforts to understand their true value or meaning.

I wish I knew more.  I wish I understood better, could see more clearly, and comprehend more objectively how twisted my mother was and how much I suffered as a result of her insidious, malicious mental illness.

It is a bizarre and strangely bizarre experience to actually have the words of a perpetrator in the hands of the victim.  However inadequate my efforts may be, all I can offer today is my presentation of

my mother’s version of what happened to me about the bubble gum

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+APPROACHING MY MOTHER’S 1953 DIARY

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These are both completed now:

*MY INTRODUCTION TO MY MOTHER’S 1953 DIARY

**1953 – MY MOTHER’S DIARY – PART ONE

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I could not complete the transcription of my mother’s 1953 diary without stopping half way through the year.  I had to give myself permission to create a context of safety for myself as I continue to read her words.  The platform that I created for myself as I wrote my introduction to her 1953 diary feels secure enough for me to continue the transcription of her writings.  The transcription is not complete yet, but I will let you know as soon as they are published online as they will be contained within the following pages:

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*MY INTRODUCTION TO MY MOTHER’S 1953 DIARY

**1953 – MY MOTHER’S DIARY – PART ONE

**1953 – MY MOTHER’S DIARY – PART TWO

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+LEAVING NO CHAOS BEHIND – PART TWO

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This post follows —

+LEAVING NO CHAOS BEHIND – PART ONE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That fact is what this blog is all about.

+MAGICAL WISHFUL THINKING DOES NOT HEAL ABUSE

alchemynow2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SEE:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+SEVERE EARLY ABUSE PERMANENTLY CHANGES THE ‘SET POINT’ IN OUR BODIES

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I described in an earlier post how I define conditions that create the worst of developmental conditions for infants and young children in terms of the absence or presence of pervasive terror.  In talking to friends about this idea there needs to be an addition to my thoughts.  The absence or presence of love is directly connected to terror when the terror is caused by an early caregiver.

I also described in an earlier post how I see anger as being an appropriate response to environmental challenge because it involves active and effective coping skills.  If those skills are ineffective in meeting the challenge, the next reaction will be fear.  I am not talking about what might be a sense of fear coupled with an initial startle response to the possibility of threat.  That initial reaction is designed to lead us instantaneously to an assessment of the challenge — is it friend or foe?  Only when the challenge is identified as foe does the cycle of meeting the challenge come into play.

So if anger responses fail, and fear is triggered, it is at that stage that another, new and additional response must be found and applied to the situation in order that competent equilibrium can be restored so that well-being can be reestablished.  If the state of fear moves into sadness and despair, that means that no new adequate coping skill could be found.  In the state of despair there is absolutely no question that all else has failed, including any attempts to learn and apply something new.

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Nature has established an interrelated caregiver-infant response system so that even the big eyes that infants have elicit caregiving from adults.  Infants learn very early that they can interact with their environment to get their needs met, and they will use every single one of their innate abilities to succeed at this mission.  In circumstances where caregivers do not respond appropriately to these infant response elicitation efforts, only time will tell what happens next.

Because of an infant’s physiological limitations they are extremely limited as to what they can do to help their situation when their inborn efforts are not effective.  Along with feeling any physical consequences that may apply, such as feeling too hot or cold, hungry, thirsty or tired, their inborn abilities to respond to these challenges with an immune system response of physical emotion creates an inner experience of the feeling of anger, fear or despair.

The inner pattern of deprivation and/or maltreatment begins to operate at birth (or even before birth).  These rhythms of ‘rupture and repair’ or of ‘rupture without repair’ become directly connected in an infant’s forming brain to the experience of hope.  If an infant experiences a challenge to its well-being state of equilibrium but is repeatedly responded to adequately, hope begins to form as a comforting experience during the time of waiting ‘for help to arrive’.

If there is no adequate response pattern established within the infant’s early environment, another pattern will form that does not include hope as a solacing middle-ground experience in the ‘rupture and repair’ cycle.  If events appear to happen without any cause and effect pattern, if the infant cannot use effectively and then grow to trust and depend upon its own efforts to elicit caregiving responses within its environment, it will not build an adequate pattern of ‘rupture-hope-repair’ into its body and brain.  Instead it will be forced off onto another developmental track based on perceived threat to its own life very early in its development.  This pattern of ‘rupture without hope of repair’ then becomes the foundation upon which all future development will be built.

This, to me, is ultimately what having a secure attachment of safety or an insecure attachment of threat and harm is all about.  We are sent off down one or the other of these two paths from the time of our birth (or before).  What the angle or degree of our resulting deviation becomes, from a state of optimal experience, is determined by our genetic factors as they respond to our early environmental conditions.

The fact remains that attachment is a physiological experience that has biochemical consequences.  It changes, for better or for worse, how every cell in our body interacts on a molecular level.  How much of our experience later becomes conscious is also influenced and impacted by these biological changes.  And in the end, it is our ability to have conscious control over our lives that leads to a better future.

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Because we are a social species we have built into the chemical operation of our bodies an innate desire to be attached.  Our survival from birth depends upon our attachment relationships with our early caregivers.  Our development on all levels is dependent upon others.  Our brain, as a part of our nervous system, will be geared by these early experiences either to a ‘set point’  of balanced equilibrium from secure attachments or a ‘set point’ of unbalanced disequilibrium from insecure attachment conditions.  Our immune systems also develop in accordance with these early experiences in the same way.

We are being told even before birth about the world — is it safe or not and are we wanted or not?  Conditions of early deprivation tell an infant that the world is not safe, that they are not wanted in the world, and that they are hence left on their own to survive or die.  This is, to me, what the purist form of isolation means.  Because we are a social species not being wanted and not being cared for appropriately signal the growing body that they are absolutely alone with nobody attached to them and nobody for them to attach to.  And because our entire body is naturally geared FOR attachment, all resulting development will be forced to follow an alternative pathway.

I believe that a combination of genetic factors, including our sex, will respond in our early interactional environment to determine the emotional tone of our bodies based upon the very early emotional potential we are born with.  A safe, secure, adequate and happy early environment will build a calm set point of balanced equilibrium into a body and brain that allows a child to grow up competent and confident.  A dangerous, malevolent world will create a set point of deprivation and the resulting emotional tone will be some combination of anger, terror and despair with one of these emotions becoming dominant.

Because male bodies are designed differently from female bodies, their hormonal environment will more likely foster an anger-fight emotional tone.  Males have higher testosterone and vasopressin levels than females, and lower oxytocin (I will describe these chemicals in more detail in future posts).  Males are certainly not immune from acquiring either terror or despair as their set point, nor are females immune from acquiring anger as theirs.

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My simple point for today is that if we ask ourselves the simple question, “What is my overriding and foundational emotional tone?” and ask this question without judgment or critique, we can gain a critical piece of useful information about ourselves.  I say overriding and foundational because this emotional tone permeates our entire bodies and is directly connected to the set point of our equilibrium — or disequilibrium.

If a set point of calm balanced equilibrium — built there through safe and secure early caregiver attachment interactions — was never built into our bodies in the first place, calmness will not be our natural state at center for the rest of our lives.  If we want to have calmness at our center, we will have to WORK hard to put it there, and need to realize that we are having to do this work not because there is something ‘wrong’ with us, but that there was something ‘wrong’ in our early formational environment.

There are instances where the ‘something wrong in our early formational environment’ lies entirely within the genetic combinations we were formed with.  If this is true, we know it.  Otherwise, some form of trauma has interrupted our ability to form a ‘set point’ of calm equilibrium at our center, and thus our ability to EVER get there has been changed.

In my opinion anything that prevents us from having an optimal emotional tone based on calm  and balanced equilibrium creates an unfinished trauma cycle that is physiologically happening in our body and brain.  This  ‘unfinished’ trauma cycle built into our bodies means that on some level we will always carry a sense of anxiety no matter what point on the cycle our bodies are stuck at.

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We might assess our center state and determine that our overriding and fundamental center set point is rage.  We might find that our first response is always to fight, is always to take an aggressive position and from there we have to WORK to experience anything else.  This GO state is built into the nervous system-brain and indicates that all reactions to challenges in the environment are first attempted to be met with active coping skill reactions based on what is already known.  It can become extremely hard to realize and accept that these patterns of response are not as useful and effective as one would like to think they are.  In fact, they can get one into a whole lot of trouble.

The chronic anger reaction means that offense is always seen as being the best choice, and that failure is not an option.  We HAVE to at times accept that failure is a fact or we can never learn anything new.  Learning is risky.  Knowing how to react and using this knowledge over and over again only works if the response truly is appropriate.  If one’s internal set point rests on anger and one’s pattern of responses originate in this active survival ‘place’, letting down one’s guard and admitting one doesn’t know how to respond to a challenge can be seen as an action that will lead directly to extinction.

Being ‘stuck’ at a set point of chronic anger and rage means that the feelings of fear and sadness are being left out of the cycle.  Anger is designed to elicit an immediate and effective response to challenge of threat.  It is normally designed to solve a problem so that the center point of calm equilibrium can be returned to.  During damaging early experiences there was no calm set point created in the first place — so what does any response really accomplish for us?  All it does it keep us alive, or so we intend.  But being alive, for us, rarely means that we get to experience well-being.  There is something else always going on for us — the active act of surviving and staying alive.

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We might find that our set point is at fear and terror.  We never came to believe that we had active coping skills that we could use to solve problems stemming from challenges we faced.  We are weak on the competency-confident position on the response cycle, and often fail to realize that we do in fact have the ability to respond actively and adequately.

In addition, if we are stuck in the fear place on the trauma recovery circle we don’t even necessarily feel the despair and sadness that would normally be the result of a complete failure to respond appropriately.  We are literally frozen in a state of fear, anxiety and panic and cannot move.  Our energy, our life force, is frozen within us, also.  Because we cannot move, we cannot learn.  I believe this fear place is connected to the fact that at some point in time we tried to respond to challenge and our efforts failed.  We do not have a clue what else to do.

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If our set point is at despair and sadness we are in the perfect spot to learn something new but we lack the ability to see this.  All escape routes appear to be sealed off from us and our energy is gone — not stored, not held, not frozen — just plain gone.  We lack the energy available to us in the the anger-fight spot or even access to the energy frozen in the fear spot.

Some of us gave up the fight because circumstances overwhelmed our response ability from the time we were born, thus setting our emotional tone and our inner ‘set point’ at despair.  We were forced to lose the race before we ever got started.  Our inner ‘set point’ is at hopelessness.  We feel utterly and fundamentally unable to marshal competent responses to even the simplest of challenges.

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This first step of accurately bringing into our consciousness the state of our emotional tone and our ‘set point’ allows us to form a realistic picture about ourselves in the world.  If we want to change something about ourselves and about our lives we need to know where we are starting from.  That the patterns within us were formed before we were a year old in no way negates the extreme power our ‘set point’ has in determining everything we experience from that early point forward.

Nature has designed us to know about the conditions of the world from before our birth and has designed us to adapt and adjust to these conditions.  If we find ourselves wanting something different from the world we were born into and formed by, we will have to become clear and conscious of the facts as they relate to the changes our bodies were forced to make to keep us alive in malevolent environments.

I do not believe that our bodies will ever, on their own, be able to change their inner, early developed set points.  We HAVE to apply conscious effort, the physics of applied force or WORK, to attempt to change how we ARE in our lives in relationship to these set points.  Comparing ourselves to others and then judging either us or them as a result is not helpful.  This is about becoming absolutely clear about our own emotional tone which will then let us know where we became permanently stuck on the trauma recovery cycle very, very early in our development.

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Some people find that using the image of an ‘inner child’ is helpful when considering the gulf that might separate who we became from who we could have become had our early severe traumas never occurred in the first place.  I have personally never been able to rely upon this image because I know full well that the changes that happened to me were physiologically built into my body and affected every aspect of my biological development so that the body I inhabit today is directly connected to the abused and battered child that I was.

That child has grown up to be me.  Every single experience I had as a child affected how I developed.  Those experiences created within me a ‘set point’ that will never be at calm and balanced equilibrium.  My ‘set point’ is at a state of terror and despair and is directly connected to a sense of anxiety in my body.  There’s no possible way it could have been created otherwise based on my early experiences because the traumas of my early years were so severe and chronic.

The anxiety is built into my body like a background ‘noise’ that never goes away.  I believe this might be worse for me than for many others because I was genetically created to be extremely sensitive no matter what my early life had been like.  This underlying and overriding anxiety colors even my terror and my despair.  Shades of disaster were communicated to my growing body from birth and built these same responses into the operation of my nervous system-brain, my immune system, and into every cell in my body.  It is NOT some inner version of a child that experiences any part of my present day reality.  It is me, in this body, trying to live every moment of this life today and into my future.

I have to work hard to feel any other kind of feeling, and even when I do my body always responds back after a short period of time to what it knows at its center.  Is this bad?  No, it might be unfortunate but it is a natural reaction to severe trauma survival.  At least now I know what is going on in my body, how things got to be this way, and exactly what I am working with as I continually try to make my life better.

I am realistic.  My body’s set point was built in, by and for a malevolent world of disaster and trauma and that can never be changed.  This is the only body I will ever have in this lifetime.  I might as well understand it — how and why it was built the way it was.  Because I know these facts I can try to live in and with this body as I carve out niches and crannies of experiences that are not closely tied to my body’s natural ‘set point’, but are rather built out of the ‘stuff’ that securely-attached-from-birth people can take for granted all of their lives.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 Tiny Lost Kittens and Me

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One of my neighbors just knocked on my door and asked me to take 3 little kittens that he’d found underneath the trailer he’d just bought and moved.  No mom.  Guy hates cats and said he’d kill them if I didn’t take them.  At least they can drink milk and eat softened food, but they’re still too young to be away from their mother.

When I hold them they look up at me and cry, but when I talk to them they watch my eyes and stop and listen to me and then squeak back at me softly, telling me a little more of their story.

Three little gifts I needed today.  I won’t be able to keep them but I can take care of them for a little while and then find them good homes.  It’s been a long time since I’ve had little kittens around.  They feel so fragile in my big hands.

Good listening on child abuse prevention:

http://preventchildabuseny.typepad.com/prevent_child_abuse_new_y/2009/05/what-do-think-about-angela-shelton.html