Tag: imagination

+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.

+FINDING THE CRACK IN MY BORDERLINE MOTHER’S REALITY

alchemynow3 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

though I read it in an earlier printing of this one

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BINGO!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+BLACK RABBIT

alchemynow1 Comment

Please see:

http://preventchildabuseny.typepad.com/prevent_child_abuse_new_y/2009/04/response-to-apples-baby-shaker-application.html

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Please follow this link to the story. It has been moved into the section on my childhood stories.

WHY NOT TO REMEMBER MY MOTHER

alchemynow4 Comments

PLEASE NOTE THIS WARNING:  This post contains triggering material which may be difficult for anyone with a history of trauma and abuse to read.  Please either do not read this alone without a support person at your side, or stop reading  immediately if you become uncomfortable with yourself as you read it.

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I received the following comment today related to + About this site

“Linda, I did not pick this up in your writing ( which is amazing ). Is your mother still alive and did you ever have an opportunity to confront her or make peace with her.”

My reply was that I would write about this in today’s post.  Not an easy task.

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The first image that presents itself in my awareness (from my right brain’s storehouse of wordless images) is one of being in a store shopping for flower and vegetable seeds.  I see a well stocked large four-sided display rack that I can turn around in circles so that I can see the entire display.

Suddenly I see that all the packages are ripped open and the seeds are dumped in a pile on the floor.  All the seeds are mixed up and it is now my job to sort them all out ‘correctly’ so that they can be resealed in new packages and put back where I found them in the first place.

I know more now about what this image is showing me than I ever could have before.  All my memories regarding my mother are sealed into separate ‘packages’ and stored according to my survival brain’s wisdom.  They are not linked together in any sort of order based on a timeline according to when these experiences happened in the first place.  Never in my childhood was I able to connect them together and it is only with great concentration and effort that I can attempt to do so today.

Every single memory I have of my mother is linked to trauma.  To  continue with my seed package image, it is like every single package and every single seed is contaminated with poison, and if I touch any of them my brain tells me I could die.   In order to “go back there” I have to apply a level of thought that can allow me to do this.

I have to find and put on a ‘safe suit’ of protection that allows me to go back and handle my memories.  That safe suit is barely adequate and consists of a mental effort I must make today to understand that there was and is no reason for what happened to me.  I use this word, reason, on many levels.  My mother’s mind was broken so she had no ability to use reason regarding anything that involved me — ever.  She was mentally ill and therefore everything about her was irrational.

Her psychosis regarding me was complete and indissoluble.  Because I do not have a mind like hers, even though she influenced nearly every thought that was built into my brain until I was 18, I cannot look into my past from a reasonable or rational place so that I can describe my experience from ‘my side of the fence’.  That is probably the final trauma of unresolved trauma.  It cannot be translated, on any level, into the realm of reason.

Yet I have to think about reason because it is the only ‘safety suit’ I have.  Everything about my relationship with my mother was, from my first breath, about the reason I needed to be hated and continually punished.  I was the devil’s child and therefore absolutely evil.  My ‘poor’ mother was given the curse of having to be my mother, and therefore she must do the best that she could to ‘deal with me’ and try to accomplish the given, hopeless task of making be ‘better’.  She applied herself to her task with vengeance.

In her mind, she had failed miserably in her mission by the time I left home at 18.  In her mind that failure was absolute and her belief in that lasted to her final breath.

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In order to ‘stack the deck’ in favor of reason I will mention a few concepts used by experts as they work with people who have posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  (This is a diagnosis which I ‘have’, along with dissociative identity disorder — without the identities, which I will discuss later) and major reoccurring depression.)  The term ‘flashbacks’ is used in relation to the unresolved traumas in PTSD.  Another term used is ‘flashbulb memories’.  What this means is that the experiences of trauma have not been integrated into the ongoing experience of the person who endured them.

This lack of integration happens for many reasons, including the fact that nothing has useful, that can lead to an increased ability to survive future related terrors — by the individual or by the species, has yet been learned as a result of these experiences.  When abuse begins from birth, before the infant has any possible capacity to ‘process’ its experiences, the very foundation of memory formation is altered within the forming and developing structure of the brain.  Having the traumatic memories ‘stuck together’ in any meaningful fashion is therefore the exception, not the rule.

Memories of the individual experiences are therefore like millions of seeds in a pile on the floor.  To even have some of them organized and sorted out into a small group of related experiences — so that they can at least be stored in separate packages — requires extremes of applied effort.  To assign them meaning is nearly impossible because they happened in and belong to a malevolent world without cause and effect and without reason or rationality.

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I believe that it takes an extremely creative and intelligent mind to survive experiences like mine and be able to come out on the other end being able to even remotely ‘act normal’.  This intelligent mind has to have had opportunities to form some active coping skills that allow this eventual ‘gluing together of the pieces’ in any meaningful way to happen at all.  I describe some of the assets that existed for me in my post THE RESILIENCY MYTH.

While the following might be a controversial statement, it is my current assessment of the relationship of ‘mental illness’ to survival.  Had I received the potential genetic combination that could have resulted in a mental illness such as my mother had, and if my body could have taken that detour in order to have survived without the self reflective abilities of a mind that was not given this detour, I would have turned out like my mother did.  I do not believe that she had a choice because whatever neglect and maltreatment she received during her brain developmental stages triggered the manifestation of her mental illness and there was nothing she could do about it, either.

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Please make no mistake here.  I was born in 1951 and raised during an era when child abuse was still not recognized and addressed by our society at large in any meaningful way.  In today’s ‘enlightened’ era, there is absolutely NO EXCUSE for outsiders of the family not to know and understand the symptoms a terribly abused child will manifest openly, and no excuse for them not intervening on behalf of the child.  Information on this topic will be presented in future posts.

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Because my writing is always a process connected to me and to my life as I write the words, and because I am always learning about myself and how I process information related to my personal experiences, I will share with you what is happening in my mind as I attempt to get closer to telling the truth about the question posed in the reader’s comment:  “Is your mother still alive and did you ever have an opportunity to confront her or make peace with her.”

In my brain of brains and mind of minds, yes, my mother IS still alive.  I do not have a basis for placing anything to do with my mother on a logical timeline and for keeping it there.  The reasonable fact is that she ceased to exist in her body in the spring of 2002.  I did not shed a single tear.  I’m not sure if any of my five siblings shed one, either.

I lack the ability to accomplish the action of finding every single separate ‘seed’ memory that involves her, facing them face to face, and making any of the equally dissociated Linda’s understand unequivocally that THEIR mother is dead.  The image that is in my mind now is that each seed has turned into a dandelion seed, that a powerful wind has come up so that each seed with its attached bit of fluff is now dashing away from me into the blue sky — and yes, to a place of safety for themselves — also leaving me in a place of safety as I sit here and write these words.

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I will make the effort of trying to grab perhaps one of those seeds or a handful of them before they vanish from me today. (By the way, future posts on attachment disorders, particularly about disorganized-disoriented attachment disorders, will describe how the lack of the ability to tell a coherent life story is one of the clearest marker that indicates these attachment disorders exist for a person.)

Moving on in my writing as I work to answer this commenter’s question, I see that I actually have a fistful of seeds grasped in each of my hands.  I guess fortunately for me I only confronted my mother once (seeds in my left hand) and disowned her once years later (seeds in my right hand).

Now I tell myself, “It’s OK Linda.”  I slowly open my left hand and protect those seeds from being whisked away before I can write the following:

(“Organize your thoughts, Linda.  Let the seeds put themselves in order.  Believe that there is a beginning and an end to this group of thoughts.  Now begin writing.”)

As I mention elsewhere on this blog, I completed 7 weeks of inpatient alcoholism treatment in 1980 and was then sent to ongoing therapy and given antidepressants.  I followed every piece of advice anyone gave me about how to ‘recover’ as avidly as a starving bird would hunt for seeds.  About a year after my exit from treatment, following the advice of my therapist, I DID call my mother to confront her.

All I knew at that time was that she had not been nice to me while she raised me, and that there was some discrepancy between her treatment of be back then and her treatment of me as a married adult mother of 2, as she sent me cute little cards with lovey-dovey I love yous enclosed.  I can return to that phone call with difficulty.  Like two powerfully opposing magnets the me in this chair writing attempts to move closer to the me I see standing in the dining room, sunlight streaming in the windows, cream colored phone in my hand, long twisted coiled cord draped around my feet as I stand there talking to my mother.

What happened?  I courageously told her that I was not willing to have a phony (no pun intended) loving relationship with her in the present (“Let me try to think here.  I got the first part out…  Catch that seed, Linda.  Hold onto it, look at it….”) — if — (“Come on, Linda, you can do this.  I know there’s all kinds of pain here, but you can find the words and not let the pain appear now.  Separate them out.  Let the words come but not the pain.”) — (“Is that possible?”)  (“Yes, trust me it is possible.”)  (Here comes the wind.  Stop this argument now.)  (“Who are you that I should trust a damn thing you are saying”)  (Stop this argument NOW.)

IF.  Getting back to the IF.  IF we can’t talk about the things you did to me while I was growing up.  That’s what I said to her.

She instantly switched to her ugly screaming rage filled voice and attacked me as she launched into the litany she had been building for me from birth.  SEE: *Litany from Start to Finish.  “You were a horrible, terrible, vile child!  You tried to kill me when you were born!  You deserved everything I ever gave you and even that was not enough!  Even your kindergarten teacher agreed with me.  She had been teaching for 35 years before you showed up in her class, and she told me you were more trouble and a worse child than any she had ever had in her class.”

Now, this is the GOOD part.  As she streamed and screamed through her litany of abuse I moved the phone receiver away from my ear, lifted up right finger and moved it to the telephone and dropped it with a sense of accomplishment, empowerment, finality and pride onto the disconnect button and I hung the receiver up on her in mid word.

I stood stunned for a split second and then experienced a flood of joy.  I started hopping up and down, and then began to skip around the house yelling in song, “I did it!  I did it!  I hung UP ON HER!”

Now the tears are here pushing against my eyes.  No, that wasn’t the end of it.  I wasn’t ready.  It wasn’t time.  Within a matter of days she called back with her sweet voice and I apologized, and the phony loving relationship was reinstated and maintained until the spring of 1989.  That is when I had a realization (too much for me to write about right now) that allowed me to write her a simple letter thanking her for being the mother that brought me into the world and telling her directly that because of the abusive things she did to me as a child I could no longer have a relationship with her in my lifetime.

She did not respond though she continued to bemoan the curse of being my mother to my siblings for years after that until they one by one quit listening to her.  I only saw her once — out of the corner of my eye as if she were a fleeting mirage of the shadow of a ghost — after that in 1990 as she passed through my desperately ill father’s hospital room.  (He had finally divorced her by then).

My father died in 2001.  I never confronted him.  I ignored and avoided him in my adulthood just like he did me in my childhood.  I believe that both of my parents had to make internal adjustments that allowed them to ‘go on being’ while having unbearable, overwhelming pain and sadness at their core.  I would also say that both of my parents died of a broken heart.

This is all I can write today.  I have to do my ‘Linda in today” things.  I cannot describe to you right now how she died, either.

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I want to say here that the reason I do this writing is not in hopes of healing myself.  I am nearly 58 years old, and things will not get much better for me than they are now.  I accept that fact.  I write because I now there is value in sharing my experience so that others ‘out there’ with histories related to mine can perhaps see in my words a reflection of their own experience so that they can become empowered to own the fullness of their own traumatic lives.  I trust this is possible because I do not write from the top down — not from a place of put-together security based on secure attachment patterns that would create all kinds of benefits those that have them probably don’t recognize.

I write from the bottom up.  I write from a place of humiliation, terror, confusion and trauma.  I write from an incredible place called ‘the miracle of survival’.  I write from what Dr. Teicher of Harvard calls “an evolutionarily altered brain” formed in, by and for existence in a malevolent world.

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But for now I am going to watch my blue parakeet bathe itself in its small dish of drinking water as I think about and then DO the act of finding it a better bathtub.  I am going to work on the little hand made paper cross earrings I am figuring out how to make so that I can add them to my inventory of crafts to display and sell at this Saturday’s farmers market in town.  They will be pure white with silver glitter.  I will eat the last of my homemade banana bread muffins, made from my grandmother’s recipe.  I added grated apple, dried currants and lots of walnuts.  That’s good for me.  That’s where I am going next.

But first, I am going to stand in the wind with my fists open and my palms facing the sky and let all the bits of dandelion fluff, memories of myself and my mother, blow away.

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As always, thank you for visiting this site and for reading this post.  Your comments are welcome and appreciated.

+FACING OUR OWN IDEAS ABOUT MONSTERS

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There’s a woman who comes to the small free art class I voluntarily teach on Saturday afternoons whose entire being lights up when she talks about gardens.  Not any old kind of garden, but rather truly beautiful ones, hidden ones, secret ones, places where people could come to find peace and beauty and untroubled sanctuary.

This same woman always thinks about gates and doorways at the same time.  The images are connected.  These gates are not ordinary, either.  Down here in the southwest we perhaps have more images in our minds about walled courtyards and gates that are sealed off from public view by all manner of creative and appealing gates.  Some have small windows in them up high where adults can peer through to see into the secret places.

This woman has never read the children’s story or seen the movie of ‘The Secret Garden,’ though I am recommending it to her as a homework assignment to discover this story.  While in art therapy graduate school we learned much about how the psyche of humanity communicates to us in and through image.  Neuroscientists are now beginning to suspect that our brains process all incoming information into memory storage in a poetic, metaphoric fashion.  All this information is stored in our limbic, emotion, right brain and is only available to our left ‘logical’ brain when we talk about something very specific that is in some way connected to our metaphoric memories.

In the case of secret gardens and private sealed off worlds, I think about the ‘bigger picture’ of the history of two things in our collective minds:  mazes and labyrinths.  Mazes are often about what amazes us.  This might be something that we have puzzled about and are at the edge of understanding but not quite there yet.  What kinds of things amaze us?  What things capture our imaginations and captivate our thoughts?  Things that we wonder about in the world.  Wonder is an amazing mental operation of its own, and something that I as a child abused from birth could not do.  I had no points of comparison so there was no wonder in my young life.

I think about Pelzer’s book, “A Child called It,” and about how he fought back against his abuse even in his mind.  One has to have some means to compare one’s own experience in their private world with what one knows others experience in the public world.  If a child is abused from birth and there is no reprieve, no opportunity to spend lengths of time in interaction with a sane caregiver, then that infant’s brain will simply accept as reality all that it has experienced and had built into its brain about what the world is like.  We never question a certain reality unless our minds have the freedom to reach toward and devour the possibility that there are worlds ‘out there’ that are different.

Along with this student’s delight in imagining secret gardens comes the collective imaginal idea of labyrinths.  If you do a Google search for “labyrinth minotaur” you will bring yourself face to face with a world of not only delightful possibilities, but also bring yourself to a place that presents a collective image of the monster within us.  At the center of the labyrinth our imagination holds there an image of the minotaur, a horrible creature that both scares us nearly to death and one that is also our strongest ally and protector.

Someone mentioned to me the other day that as I clarify and focus my blog and my thoughts about who I am really writing for, I will find that my section, + Art and Creativity, is out of place and does not belong on my site.  The brain of our species is the most complex and creative ‘object’ in existence on our planet.  I believe that to live our lives to the fullest we need to exercise our connection between the two hemispheres of our brain so that we know more and more about who we are and how we are in the world.

Through artistic exploration we allow the more hidden (in our American culture) aspects of ourselves access into our lives.  Most of us keep our own poetry, our own metaphor perspectives on our lives, sealed and walled off from the world in our internal secret gardens and labyrinths.  When we allow our images to come forth, even through the spoken word, we can honor ourselves by encouraging not only further and continued access, but also exploration of meaning for ourselves.

If a person has these particular hidden, secret garden and maze-labyrinth images popping around where they can actually recognize them consciously, then a further pursuit into the images can connect to all sorts of fascinating wisdom.

As the world acclaimed astrologer, Zane,’ (SEE: http://www.zanestein.com/CentaureanAstrology.htm) describes in relation to the asteroid Nessus, we all have a monster inside of ourselves that we usually cannot face.  In Carl Jung’s thinking, this monster lies sealed off in our personal shadow, a place that he says we put all that we are afraid of about ourselves — both the best of us and the worst of us.  If a student begins to allude through their art exploration to something like mazes and labyrinths, it becomes a fascinating study to encourage that student to pursue the images until they can present into consciousness the reality of whatever ‘mythological’ base they are connecting to.

Through the infant brain development and growth years a person learns what to do with the ‘devil and the angel’ within themselves.  Normally we make adjustments so that our mind knows (coming from the operation of our brain) how to live in a world of extremes.  An infant’s brain knows at a very early age, usually beginning clearly by the third month of life, who is safe to trust and who is not.  If an infant is growing in a malevolent world this distinction obviously becomes impossible to make in a useful and healthy way.

A growing child’s brain has to learn how to sequence and prioritize information — both what is coming in from the outside and what is accumulating in ever increasingly complex formats on their inside.  If an infant and then later a young child is being raised in an environment of conflict, torture, and terrorism, it is obvious that these processes are either aborted or completed in unhealthy and inadequate ways.

But we need to know that ALL of us have a Jungian shadow, and all of us have a secret garden and a secret labyrinth whose center contains a monster that we believe is us.  This monster has power — power to destroy and power to protect.  If our brains were allowed to at least develop a minimal pathway through our cortex that allows us to use our higher cortical thinking abilities, we do not allow the monster to wreck havoc in our own or anybody else’s life.  But because our relationship to these ‘states’ was set in motion from birth, we must work as adults to access all the information that we know about these things and bring them into consciousness as we learn who, in fact, we are, who we fear we are, who we fear we could become, who we hope we could become.

I don’t know what my student holds behind the secret door in her being.  If she chooses to explore through the images in art work what she knows ‘in there’ we will all be able to share in her process.  If a young child is being raised by monsters, the boundaries between one’s own monster/protector and the monster/protector of its caregivers will be all mixed together in some kind of very nasty and unpalatable soup.  But we can never just throw the whole pot out and start over.  We have to work with what we were given beginning at the time of our birth.

We have not only the ability to safely and wisely do this work, but we have the obligation and right to do it.  Safely is the key word here.  It is because we were not SAFE from birth that we have the nasty soup in the first place.  But even if we were safe, as social beings in a social world we all made distinctions between what was acceptable about us and what wasn’t.  Most of us never go back as adults and take a good, creative look behind the secret doorways.  We need to, because what motivates us and creates our highest priorities lies in there — whether we know it or not, or even WANT to know it or not.