Tag: infant abuse

+SILENT TRUTH – MISSING FROM MY PARENTS’ 29,000 WORDS IN THEIR JUNE 1957 LETTERS

alchemynowLeave a comment

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Having just completed the transcription of the nearly 29,000 words contained in the *JUNE 1957 LETTERS BETWEEN MOTHER AND FATHER I now face the most difficult task of all.  Do I do what I suggest in the title I have found for the collection of my essays if I ever publish them, “Breaking the Silence that Binds,” or do I let the silence of the words NOT written in my parents’ letters remain intact?

First of all, I know about the silence because I was there, and because 53 years later I can feel that silence now.  I know I feel it, because it upsets me.  “How dare I speak about what I know?”  “DARE” is a word my mother frequently used against her children, especially me.  “How DARE you look at me that way?”  “How DARE you – blah – blah – blah…..?”

How DARE I, 53 years later, speak my own truth about what I know about what went on in my family?  Well, do I dare?  Can I dare?  Will I dare?  It’s as if I stand at a silent, invisible boundary line at which I need to summon my courage, my willingness, my commitment to my own self (and to those who suffered abuse within a family similar to mine), and all of my ability to differentiate myself from both of my parents so that I CAN break this binding silence contained within these letters.

“Dive in, Linda.  What is most troubling you?”  I find it hard to think at this moment.  It’s like I am at the center of a powerful vacuum that sucks all my thoughts along with my whole version of my own reality away from me.  How do I begin?  I will simply locate the passages within my mother’s writing that I need to use my voice about.

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I can feel my fear.  I can feel the inner experience of DARING to challenge my mother, even now, all these 53 years later.  Where are my thoughts?  Where are my words?

First, there are seeds of my truth within these words from mother’s June 12, 1957 Wednesday letter to my father:

“Darling I can’t stand being away from you.  I must be with you.  I’ll never let anyone separate us again.  Never, never, not even the Army – oh darling, I love you.

We loved your letter and cards.  Linda didn’t get one – I hope you didn’t forget, I know you wouldn’t.  I gave her mine.  They were so proud and happy.  Come to think of it mornings and afternoons aren’t so bad, but far from good.  But from 4:00 on I am SICK!!  All this I’ve heard of mind over matter, I must put it into practice.  Can I??“

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Second, there are seeds of my truth within these words from my mother’s June 27, 1957 letter:

“Oh darling, my heart never ceases aching for you.  I had ‘the feeling’ this afternoon I should check again to see if there was mail again.  I usually only go in the morning but I had to go again and there was!

It was the letter written before the one I got this morning.  It was written Friday.  It’s funny to read them backwards.  I drove over to the little park in Glendora and let the kids play awhile, took a few impromptu pictures, which I’ll send to you, and read your letter there!  I took one close-up of Linda as she lost her 2nd front tooth today.  Isn’t nature wonderful, right on time?  Tonight the angel will visit her – usually you do that – I know.”

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Finally, the contrast I am going to speak about relates to this in her ‘fun filled’ descriptions in her June 27, 1957 Thursday night letter:

“I wish you could have seen John when he caught his trout!  He was so excited, he swung his line around and caught it in a tree.  Naturally, he had had several bites and near catches before he actually caught one.  It really was priceless!  He jumped up and down and exclaimed.

Cindy was such a ‘patient fisherwoman’ and soon caught a big one.  I took a picture of her holding the line with the fish on it, with the others standing close, admiring it.  J  I surely hope IT comes out!

Linda caught the biggest and is so proud!  We got home at 8:00 P.M. and so will cook them tomorrow!  Grandma will be here then, as I have errands in Pasadena (what a let-down) to do tomorrow.  I know she loves trout and I’m afraid the children might not eat it.

The only one that minded ‘hurting the fish’ was John.  He couldn’t stand to see it bled and naturally I had to get someone else to pull the hook out.  J  I was glad cleaning them was part of the price and I even had her cut the heads off.“

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OK.  Step one is completed.  I have used my net woven of my bravery and determination to snatch this collection of my mother’s words out of her letters, out of the context that she wrote them within, and I have moved them into MY universe – 53 years later.

How telling it is to me that the power of my mother’s severe abuse of me, coupled with my father’s unwillingness to EVER stop her or to even recognize that the abuse was happening, makes it this difficult even today for me to DARE to speak about what I know about my parents’ version of reality.

Now, as I try to locate MY OWN SELF, my own feelings, thoughts, words, perceptions in relationship to my mother’s words, I need to distill this down if I can into my own crystallized words about these letter passages.

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(1)  My mother’s Borderline reality began to take shape from the time she was very, very young.  The neglect, abuse, trauma and malevolent conditions that she was born into influenced the body-brain changes that led to her condition.

(2)  My mother’s Borderline reality was already well in place before she ever met and married my father on June 11, 1949.  They knew one another six months before the marriage took place.

(3)  My the time my oldest brother, John, was born on June 15, 1950 my mother’s Borderline reality had expanded to not only include the existence of her ‘perfect husband’, Bill, but also had grown to include the appearance of this firstborn ‘perfect son’.

(4)  A healthy, balanced relationship between my mother and her mother had been trashed beginning with my mother’s birth.  While I became the victim-pawn within the complex interplay of the disturbances between my mother and her mother, I was not the cause of them.

(5)  Patterns of chronic and severe abuse in a family happen because these patterns both grow into the family dynamics and shape them.  These patterns are especially well-disguised within a Borderline-based brain-nervous system-mind-self focused home.

(6)  These patterns are at the same time NOT detected because their disguise is perfect and because they have shaped every single interaction and transaction that occurs over time between the people that are part of the close family.

When my mother writes to my father in one of her June 27, 1957 letters, “We’re not ordinary people – we’re a close knit family and should never be separated!”  I believe she is recognizing within herself that her entire reality depends upon the ongoing patterns that were not only established within her own Borderline mind when she was a little girl, but also is recognizing that her ongoing reality is completely intertwined with my father’s presence in her life.

(7)  The patterns that formed the fabric of the ongoing interactions within our family worked because they were silent.  The silence of the truth about what was really going on was as completely necessary to maintain ‘reality’s existence’ as was the presence of my father.

(8)  The key point I know about the passages I selected above is that it wasn’t just the presence of my father in my mother’s life that was required for her reality to remain intact.  It was absolutely essential that my father completely understand my mother’s version of reality as it regarded me as the kingpin of her mad illusions.

My mother very effectively, efficiently and expertly manipulated how my father saw me throughout my entire childhood.  My mother had to convince my father of her mother’s love for me so that she could then justify and defend her abuse of me.

The pattern of the dynamics of my mother’s abuse of me with my father’s acceptance if not approval happened over time because:

(a)  My mother could ensure that my father knew she had undying love for him.

(b)  My mother could ensure that my father’s entire life involved his love for her at its center.

(c) My mother could ensure that my father could not understand what she did to me in any way than I ‘abused my mother’ by being such a terrible child.  My mother was ‘put upon’ by a ‘curse child’ – she bore her burdens with glorious magnanimity.  My mother created a pattern of reality that meant my father never questioned her version of the truth.

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In the two first passages I include here from my mother’s writings to my father, I know the truth is invisibly included in her words.  Both of my parents, whether they made the choices consciously or not, DID exactly choose what words they included within their letters.

Although my mother does mention their other three children in her letters, it is exactly and specifically Linda that she draws attention to in terms of her magnanimous ‘good mother’ actions toward me.  In both of these incidents she includes about me in her letter, she directly hooks my father – and his role as my father — into ‘the story’.

(a)  Father evidently ‘forgot’ to send Linda a card.  Magnanimous ‘good mother’ gives me hers.

(b)  Mother makes sure to mention that she took a picture ‘close up’ of just Linda as she hooks in my father by also drawing his attention to his usual role as the lost tooth routine.  Magnanimous ‘good mother’ takes his place and performs his job for him.

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In the third passage I included above a different dynamic is operating (from my point of view).  As mother describes the fishing adventures of her group of children, she does include Linda as one of the group.  This mention, to me, is not one that involves the kind of husband-father-conning-manipulation that she used in the first two passages.  In the fishing scene, she actually ‘forgot’ to separate me from the rest of ‘the pack’.

The problem with this thirdly-mentioned experience is that any time I was ‘accidentally’ left out of my mother’s psychosis regarding me at the same time I was ‘accidentally’ included as a member of the sibling group, I never, never, never knew when to expect my mother’s psychosis to reappear in some random violent extreme outburst against me.

I mention this fact here because these ‘happy Linda as part of the group’ experiences did as much to create major dissociational patterns in my ongoing experience of my life in the world as did the violence.  I never could anticipate ‘which was going to be which’.  I could not predict, I could not prevent, I could not understand any of it.

So when something good actually did happen, when I actually was allowed to be a child, it always happened not because I WAS a child, but happened because mother was in one of her “giddy-happy let’s-do-something-fun isn’t-this-fun” moods that NONE of us could understand.

NOTE:  My mother seems to have some peripheral comprehension of the difficulties her shifts of mental state, mood and attitude had on her children when she described this in the same letter where she talks about the fishing trip:

“Next door to us there’s a beautiful trailer court (I don’t think they allow children).  Mostly, the people seem to be retired.  It really is nice.  They have a lovely swimming pool, shuffle-board etc.  Some of them have their patios fixed so nicely with ferns, tropical plants etc.  We all enjoyed seeing it.  You can’t imagine how much I enjoy the children – they’re truly fun to be with – if no other adults are along.  When we’re alone I treat them more as adults.  We talk and laugh and have fun.  When other adults are there or in the car they’re treated as children and resent it.  I can’t blame them.  It must be hard (Pals and friends one minute and a mere child, the next).“

But it is obvious to me that even as she wrote these words, even as she noticed the process she described here, it doesn’t MEAN ANYTHING TO HER.  My mother remained consistently at the center of her own universe and everything that happened always happened to us with her at this center.

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With the exception of the simple report that I caught the biggest fish and I was proud (she doesn’t’ describe to my father what her reaction to my pride might have been), the other two examples regarding me have nothing to do with Linda.

In both of the other two events mother is the star player.  Father becomes the blind, manipulated hooked-into-my-mother’s-version-of-reality player.  All I am is the actress-prop being used to continue the solidification of the pattern-dynamics that HAD to be protected and maintained in the family even though my father was not physically present in the home.  There could be no lapse of pattern.

My mother had to SHINE.  My father had to see her SHINE.  My father had to stay entranced.  He had to see my mother SHINE as his wife.  He had to see her SHINE as a mother.  And, for the overall, overriding, overarching dynamic of my mother’s psychosis – with me at its center – to continue to operate as my mother’s Borderline madness HAD to have it happen, my father ESPECIALLY had to see my mother SHINE as MY magnanimously good mother.

My mother had to so comprehensively control the pattern-dynamics in her home that when she acted viciously toward me, even her insane, mad violence would be seen by my father as just another aspect of her SHINING ability to be this terribly BAD child’s magnanimous good mother.

To say that ‘my mother as martyr’ was an aspect of the pattern-dynamics of our home is such an understatement it’s almost ridiculous.  At the same time, my grandmother did the ‘martyr thing’ to near perfection.  Adding another bizarre twist, it was a part of my mother’s abuse litany against my father that HE played such an excellent martyr role!

All the while these dynamics were slithering around among the only grown-ups in my child life, it was ME that was being sacrificed.  I was not ‘a martyr’, I was martyred.

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I need to take my word-search detour here for a moment:

MARTYR

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English, from Late Latin, from Greek martyr-, martys witness

Date: before 12th century

1 : a person who voluntarily suffers death as the penalty of witnessing to and refusing to renounce a religion
2 : a person who sacrifices something of great value and especially life itself for the sake of principle
3 : victim; especially : a great or constant sufferer

MARTYRED

Date: before 12th century

1 : to put to death for adhering to a belief, faith, or profession
2 : to inflict agonizing pain on : torture

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As an infant-child I certainly had no ability to volunteer as a martyr.  At the same time, I was accused from birth of being sent as an agent of the devil to kill my mother, I was not given any means of defending myself.  I could not ‘renounce’ the devil!  I had no principle or religion to denounce.  I had been assigned a religion as being ‘the devil’s child’.

Yes, I witnessed.  Yes I sacrificed.  Yes, I greatly and nearly constantly suffered.  But this truth only appears in my parents’ letters by its silence.

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Letters: 

*JUNE 1957 LETTERS BETWEEN MOTHER AND FATHER

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+WORD WARRIOR NEWS: “GO IN PEACE, MY MOTHER.”

alchemynow4 Comments

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No reader of the autobiographical writings of my mother, Mildred Ann Cahill Lloyd, is going to be privy to what the readers of this blog already know as the truth about Mildred.  I haven’t quite worked my own self around this new turn of events, my intention to allow my mother to speak to anyone who wishes to hear her words – just in her own words.  But I do suspect that the process I might go through as I prepare her manuscript might be something akin to forgiveness.

I had a strange realization overcome me last week.  That’s exactly how it happened.  I was overcome with a thought that seemed quite unusual and odd to me.  I had no idea how it showed up in my mind.  I tried to track its origins.  I looked backwards at my thinking for the day to see if I could find what this new thought about my mother might have been connected to in my earlier thinking patterns.  Nothing.  I could find not one single lead-in line of thought that put me where I ended up.

Suddenly, out of this nowhere that I could find, I had this thought:  “What if when we get to the other side and meet our Creator, and are faced with the truth of our actions in this lifetime including what we have done that has truly HURT other people – what if our Creator blankets us with forgiveness and washes all our transgressions completely away as if they have never happened — and it’s not enough?”

Suddenly I was crying.  There I was outside with my raggedy dirt covered clothes, wearing mismatched rubber work gloves because each of the other glove in the pair had already disintegrated as I worked in the yard.  There I was, walking across the yard with a 5-gallon dirt smudged plastic bucket full of rocks (I have no wheelbarrow), when this thought hit me like an apple had just fallen from the sky and knocked some unfamiliar new sense into my head.

“What if my mother is on the other side, having been granted complete forgiveness by her God, but is still as sad as a soul can be because, stripped of the physiological changes and sickness of her mortal flesh and bone body, she now understands what she did to me how terribly she hurt me and the rest of her family.  What if she cannot be free, cannot be happy, cannot move on in her new life, without my forgiving her?”

Suddenly at the instant this thought came to me I understood what forgiveness might be for me, what it mean, and what it might be needed for.  The thought was so foreign that I sloughed it off like I might a bug that just appeared on my shoulder.

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But I woke up this morning remembering the trace of something I was dreaming last night that had something to do with thinking very hard about finding exactly the very best thing to do for people I have met in my life that I could never quite stand for something they did – something that I could not stand by them for, something that did not let me stand to have these people in my life.

My sense this morning about this dream is that for all of the people that I have decided I could not stand – not stand what they did, or who they were in my life – I found a way to make what the 12-steppers might call an amend.  Of course in the dream world different rules about who and what is safe or not safe are different.  In the dream I was safe to find my own way to – essentially – forgive them, I guess.

As I awoke this morning I knew I came out of a dream where I was standing with a palette of oil paint colors in my left hand and a 1/2″ paintbrush in my right in front of one of these people’s canvas of a painting they had wanted to complete all of their lives but could not.  In the dream I knew exactly how this person wanted the painting to look, and I was completing it for them – perfectly.

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There is something about this discovery I had last night in conversation with my daughter that contains some element of my forgiveness of my mother.  I guess what struck me hardest on the head last week as the invisible apple clunked me into the realization that God’s forgiveness of our transgressions in this lifetime might NOT BE ENOUGH to remove terrible inner suffering from the people who have hurt others was my awareness of my own understanding that IF this might be true, IF my mother needs my forgiveness to be set free I would find a way to do that for her.

Maybe my act of publishing my mother’s words exactly as she wrote them will not ACTUALLY or REALLY be an act of forgiveness.  Maybe it will not ACTUALLY or REALLY set her free or remove her great sorrow.  I ACTUALLY know nothing about what goes on in the next life.  But for me, in this lifetime, it feels like an act of my forgiveness of her – to me.

It feels like an action on my part related to mercy toward my mother to fulfill a wish of hers she always had to publish her story of her Alaskan homesteading adventures.  Her sickness and her madness stole away from her all of the truest hopes for her lifetime.  Writing and publishing was perhaps, from the outside, one of the least significant of the losses of her life due to her illness.  But I am the one that ended up not only with her writings that survived her death, but with the motivation to transcribe them and to publish them.

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I am still framing in context my relationship both to my mother and to the word she wrote in terms of us both being Word Warriors.  I think about her uncountable acts of aggression toward me while I was powerless, without any weapon, unable to defend myself against her or to escape.

At the same time I think of a conversation I had with a man not too long ago.  I described a scenario to him.  “You are at war with your greatest enemy.  Both of you are expert swordsmen and well armed.  You have both fought your way to the top of a great hill.  Your enemy finally admits defeat, lays his sword at  your feet and stands now powerless against you.  What would you do?”

The man I was talking to replied quite simply, “I would cut off his head.”

I have what could be referred to now as the distinct advantage over my mother.  I am alive in this world with her words at my disposal.  She is dead.  What I do now with my Word Warrior power will determine the fate of my mother’s words.  I  am choosing to set my mother’s story free.

I will not hold my mother’s written words captive.  I will not hold them hostage.  I will not demand a ransom for their freedom.

Because being human involves imagination (that’s the way our brains got made), and because writing is a manifestation of our gifts of imagination, I can say that using the analogy of the image I just presented about the two men in mortal combat, what I will not do is pick up my mother’s Word Warrior sword and chop her head off with it.

In my imagination I am going to use the equivalent of my ‘alchemynow’ powers in regard to my mother’s sword of words.  I am going to transform her sword into a carefully folded elegant rice-paper crane.  All her words are written upon the paper that crane is made from.  I am going to carry that sword across the globe of my mind to the shores of the Ganges River.  I am going to kneel upon the shore, place this crane gently upon the water, say these words, “Mother, I completely and forever forgive you for every hurt you did to me.”

Then I am going to give that little crane a gentle nudge with the tip of my finger to send it out into the current where it can float away.  I will stand to watch it disappear into the distance at the same time I know there is healing for me in letting that crane go free.

Ganges River Dolphin - India’s National Aquatic Animal

This does not mean that I am free of the painful and difficult experience of finishing the process of transcribing these remaining letters.  But this pain is mine, not my mother’s.  For whatever reasons my mother’s body-brain was made in such a way in this lifetime that she could not feel for me what I can feel for her.  The abilities I have are gifts my mother did not have.  I want to use them for good, and I want to use them wisely.

The Ganges is a polluted and wounded river.  My mother was a polluted and wounded woman.  If I think about my mother’s writings as being the river of her words, I am not going to pollute them by adding in my own.   I will simply publish her collection with a blessing:  “Go in peace, my mother.  Go in peace.”

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This comment just in to MY BORDERLINE MOM

chasingfairies

Hi,
It is okay for me if you want to post my comment and also okay if you don’t. Mostly I would like to express my personal feelings about your blog (basically one particular thing).

First, I read your blog on occasion. I am DID and can relate to what you write about. I think you do a wonderful work with your blog and it does help others (at least it helps me).

The thing that bothers me is how you slam your “BORDERLINE” mother. I know everything you went thru was terrible (I have my terrible experiences) but as a BPD mother it really hurts me how you always refer to her as “Borderline Mother” as if all borderline mothers are terrible monsters. I am DID and Borderline and anorexic and . . . . I have 4 outside kids who belong to a 14 yr. old alter who no longer wants them because they are not “babies” any more. I have stepped in and am working really hard to be the best mom I can be. Most of the time my BPD is contained inside (comes with a lot of “inner self-harm” because it does not get released). I do not want that crap released onto these kids.

When other people read your site and are not real familiar with BPD they will assume all BPD moms are out right crazy. Then if they come across my blog and read that I am BPD they will assume I unleash that same crazy stuff onto my kids and I do not. I wish you not refer to your mom as terrible, crazy “Borderline” mom (though I am sure she was). Maybe you could mention she was (is) borderline once or twice and then just refer to her as “crazy, horrible, terrible” instead of slamming the borderline word around when referring to her.

I cringe somewhat when I come to your site, though I like it, because I believe all borderline moms do not behave as such on the outside. I have begged my psychiatrist to remove that label from me but I know I have it. I just hate the way people out there slam it so frequently.

Thanks for listening to me rant! I only wanted to point it out to you. I will still read your site anyway I just do not need to be reminded about how terrible I am.

Thanks,
Haley

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My response:

alchemynow

Dear Haley

I just copied your comment over to the end of the post I just wrote: +WORD WARRIOR NEWS: “GO IN PEACE, MY MOTHER.”

at https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/2010/05/16/word-warrior-news-go-in-peace-my-mother/

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Thank you very much for posting your thoughts and feelings.

When I use these two words in connection to one another, “Borderline mother,” I am always and specifically referring to MY mother. At least that is what I try to do. When I include information on Borderline Personality Disorder I try to do that by referring to expert and professional descriptions and information about the ‘condition’ from the outside.

In reading your response I will make the clearest effort that I can from now on to make even more of an effort to keep these distinctions as clear as I can.

I of course can not tell this for sure, but in reading your words I perceive that you express three things I can see here that my mother never had toward me (and only peripherally demonstrated toward anyone else, including her other 5 children): (1) the ability to self-reflect, (2) the ability to connect consequences with actions, and (3) the ability to experience care, concern and compassion for the well-being of your children.

Without having these three abilities, my mother was a lethal weapon and an extremely dangerous mother.

The shortcomings related to diagnosis of so-called ‘mental health categories’ and the cultural stigmas connected to them is a problem within our society at large: http://www.jwoodphd.com/borderline_personality_disorder.htm and http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/b/borderline_personality_disorder/wiki.htm#wiki_Origin_of_the_term

There is enough neuroscientific research appearing to suggest that before much more time passes, it will be possible to diagnose something akin to what is now called Borderline Personality Disorder far more accurately by watching scans of a person’s brain operating while performing certain specific tasks.

When this time comes, I see that the diagnostic process will be very similar to the ones used now to find and diagnose something as problematic, life threatening and difficult to treat as are breast cancers discovered through mammogram procedures today.

It was not that long ago in the past that ‘having cancer’ was considered as a shameful thing. We are socially removing that stigma.

It was not that long ago in the past that child abuse was also a taboo topic for public discussion.

I make every effort to connect what my mother did to me to the suffering my mother experienced during her formative years that changed her into the terribly abusive mother she became. Nowhere do I EVER say that my mother was a bad or an evil person.

The point you make today is not only an extremely important one, but is one that is appearing at a critically important time in my own writing process. I thank you for this. I will enlist everyone on my end that is involved in the process of preparing my book on the experiences of my childhood to help me consider how best to approach the legitimate and important point you are heart-fully making making here.

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I consider my mother (who was never diagnosed with this disorder first named in 1984) to have been at the severe end of the Borderline Personality Disorder spectrum. My concern so far has been that if a mother as severely abusive as mine was could so completely hide her abuse and so completely manipulate her home environment that nobody on the outside ever suspected the abuse was occurring, how does anyone even today have a chance to intervene and rescue any child living with this kind of abuse?

I consider the entire matter of child abuse to be a life-and-death concern. I would rather not be an inconsiderate ‘bull in a China shop’ and trample all over other people who have been given this diagnosis or help create a stampede of others who would do the same. Yet because I believe that severe Borderline mothers have the physiological constitution that makes them about the most dangerous abusive parents possible, I have as yet not chosen to back off from assigning ‘Borderline’ as a prefix to the term ‘my mother’.

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I make no pretense (at least that I know of) to tell anyone else’s story other than my own. In my most recent process within the past 24 hours, I have even realized that my mother’s own words need to be published without my side of the story being presented at all in connection with my mother’s writings. That is a HUGE step for me because I have always believed that if I could somehow bring the light of the true reality of my mother’s violent, dangerous and consistently abusive nature into the telling of my mother’s story that it might be able to help someone in ‘the public’ rescue a child preyed upon as abusively as I was.

Yet if nobody can ‘read the mind’ of a Borderline, as this article suggests

http://profs.bpdworld.org/articles/The%20Borderline%20Empathy%20Effect.pdf

I will not be able to accomplish what I hoped for, anyway.

I am not yet able to think fully about what you are saying. I obviously retain my own bias in regard to my mother. I know fully that there are readers of this blog who DO have something to say about this topic. Please respond. Put within your comment, as this reader did, your feelings about having your comment published or not – I will of course honor your request. But, your opinion IS NEEDED here! And I thank you again, Haley as I thank other readers for their comments even before they are received.

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+IT’S IN THE BODY: TAKING THE TRAUMA AND THE DRAMA OUT OF RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHERS

alchemynowLeave a comment

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Here’s a quick note:  I just spent 90 minutes in telephone conversation with a friend I’ve had for 30 years.  It was wonderful.  But I wanted to take a minute before I run on into town to write down here something that became very clear during that conversation.

When a person is in close relationship with anyone else – children, spouse, intimate friend – even less close relationships with coworkers and others – there can be patterns that will best be dealt with if we can depersonalize problematic interactions and step back – way back!

Attachment disorders and all so-called ‘mental disorders’ take place within the body.  Changes in patterns of information transmission in the body always show themselves in how the BODY of a person responds to and within their environment.

Our culture is very short on realizing that the MIND is not the problem.  What happens within the body, brain, and nervous system – especially within our stop and go autonomic nervous system (ANS) – which is our calm-connection – stress response (fight, flight, etc) system can determine how a PERSON is because they live in and with their body.

I saw the image of two people taking a pleasant walk down the road of their lives together (in any kind of interaction).  Suddenly, one of the people trip and fall down.  Maybe they didn’t see a stick, a stone, a pothole in their way.

So the other person turns to say something to their partner, a low and behold, nobody is beside them.  This person who has not fallen has to stop, turn, look to find where back there their partner is.  They can walk back to help them.  They can erupt in rage that their partner has abandoned them.

In the worst of trauma drama situations, the falling partner grabs onto the person beside them and takes them on down, too.

We don’t gain objectivity, detachment, or our own clear sense of who we are in the world separate from other people if we don’t understand that what is most often blocking the pathway of someone else – those sticks and stones and troublesome potholes – are

physiologically in the body!  Often our body’s reactions take us completely by surprise – bowling us over, sucking us under, getting us stuck – tripping us and making us fall so we can skin our knees – and maybe not even be able to get up again.

When a person experiences anxiety, depression, eruptive uncontrolled rage and irritability, wide ranges in mood states, shame-based reactions — and so much more — all these changes are happening at the speed of light within the body itself.  I say speed of light because they happen as the electrical signals between the cells happen.

As long as we cut our ‘mind’, ‘brain’ and ‘self’ off from the body that keeps these others alive, we miss our greatest opportunity for removing trauma drama from our lives.  How thrilling is it to realize that ‘it’s just my body’ responding this or that way – ?  I mean this literally.  It is not a thrilling trauma drama reenactment to be able to recognize instantly when something in our body has happened that is affecting us now.  We can simply recognize these changes, understand how they affect us, and begin to be able to gain increasing CONSCIOUS control over our life.

Simply put – nothing could be more complicated.  But it is NOT impossible for us to accomplish as adults (obviously difficult for children).

For adults, it’s important to realize when someone we care about has had or is having one of these mishaps.  No, we didn’t cause it (can’t control it, can’t cure it).  How DO we react?  Get mad, blame self or other, get knocked down with them, get stuck so we can’t get out?  Do we turn around and help, sit down by the side of the road and whistle Dixie while our buddy figures it all out and ‘gets better’?  Do we go back for them, tow them out, or walk on ahead into our own life and leave them far behind?

Tripping on the pathway and falling down takes all kinds of time out of living a good life.  We often find ourselves trying to anticipate what is going to appear ahead to trip our partner so we can perhaps remove the stumble factor for them.  This helps us keep them beside us on OUR walk because that’s what having a relationship is.  Well………  sorry to say, more on this later……. I’m taking myself on a walk now right out the door, into my car, and………

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+UNSPEAKABLE MADNESS: INSIDE A CHILD ABUSING BORDERLINE MOTHER’S MIND

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Oh, lordy, I see that the entire article Dr. Bruce Perry refers to about Borderline Personality Disorder — in his new book, Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential–and Endangered by Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz  — is available for public viewing online at this link:

The borderline empathy effect: Do high BPD individuals have greater empathic ability? Or are they just more difficult to ‘‘read’’?

By Judith M. Flury, William Ickes, William Schweinle

While I haven’t begun yet to read Perry’s book, I have begun to thumb through it, beginning with a search of his index for information specifically about the Borderline condition as it might relate to my understanding of my abusive mother and what she did to me.

As Perry succinctly summarizes this article he mentions, this study found that Borderlines are very likely to have enough of a ‘social’ right brain to be able to read other peoples social cues-minds, but nobody else can read the Borderline’s – because a Borderline brain is JUST TOO DIFFERENT from normal for anyone with an ordinary mind to comprehend.

Because I am nowhere near ready yet to approach the reading of this article, I will take Perry at his word that both he and these researchers know what they are talking about.  Perry also mentions in his two paragraph presentation of this Borderline mental condition that the “character in the film Fatal Attraction, a movie I don’t intend to ever see, was a Borderline.

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While this ‘weird brain-mind’ information is affirming and confirming to me about what I have experienced, learned and know about my mother and the 18 years of abuse I went through thanks to her advanced Borderline condition, it doesn’t improve how I feel at this moment.

My return to complete the transcription of my mother’s remaining letters has put me on trauma-trigger overload.  I could say I’m like a space shuttle with damaged heat tiles trying to approach reentry back to earth.  At the same time I know that reading my mother’s 1957 (from the time right before my 6th birthday), I also know that I have vowed to myself to complete this job.

Perry’s reference to the ‘different mind’ of the Borderline that ordinary people cannot comprehend (I’d have to read the article above to see if they mention whether or not Borderlines are better equipped to read EACH OTHERS minds) does give credence to my sense as I read my mother’s letters that NOBODY CAN SEE HER MADNESS IN THEM.  “It’s NOT just me,” I can tell myself.  “NOBODY could see the madness of her mind.”

This also confirms that I have found exactly the right title to stick onto the front end of her writings when I publish them:  UNSPEAKABLE MADNESS.  If nobody can comprehend the Borderline mind, then OF COURSE we then correspondingly lack any ability to speak about it.  That’s true for those of us who were raised from birth by an abusive Borderline, and it’s true also for those on the outside who could not see what was happening THEN and are inexplicably (to us) prevented from understanding the depth of our stories when we try to speak about them NOW.

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My mother’s letters are triggering implicit, or body memories that are so impacting my body that I cannot eat or sleep right now.  I have to talk to myself when I step into the shower (I don’t have a bath tub) about being able to tolerate the feel of the water hitting my skin.  The water seems to POUND on the surface of my body.  All the thousands of blows I received as a child are in my body in memory that is very close to the surface right now – way too close.

Until I have finished transcribing these 50 or so remaining letters, I will be in some risky and very uncomfortable limbo danger zone – like out in space without the ability to protect myself completely from the consequences of this work.  My ‘heat tiles’ that will allow me reentry back into my present time and space of my life will be repaired when this job is done, though I will remain bruised and ICKY for some time afterward.

I know this.  I also know that I cannot afford an editor to prepare ALL of her letters for print and publication.  This last job has to be done by ME, even before a single one of her words can be uploaded through Kindle publishing.

But by the time I reach the final reading of her letters for editing I will be able to know that her ACTUAL words I am encountering now in her handwriting, in these envelopes, in these physical, material paper forms that she touched as she created this written record I have to face in the transcription process, will be buried outside in my compost pile for the worms to eat.  I will then be working ‘with a memory outside of a memory’ because her digitalized words on my computer screen are one step more remote to me than are these physical remnants of her life I am confronting right now.

Right now I am unwrapping my mummified mommy in every envelope I touch, every piece of paper I pull out, unfold and begin to read.  The contaminated dust of her mind is still here, preserved in her writings.  The implications for good with this collection as they provide this comprehensive view of a child abusing Borderline mother is profound.

I can do this job, I can complete it because I WILL it so.  My greatest hope is that someone will pay attention to her words as they reflect the mysterious and nearly unknowable-from-the-outside view of am abusive  Borderline brain-mind.

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I am reminded of the well-chosen title of this book about Borderline Personality Disorder:  Lost in the Mirror, 2nd Edition: An Inside Look at Borderline Personality Disorder by Richard A. Moskovitz

Although I haven’t read this book because I do not want to ‘contaminate’ my own thinking, sensing and knowing about my mother and her condition, I recognize the truth in this book’s title.  I think about the value that the collection of my mother’s writings will offer to anyone interested in understanding this ‘unknowable, unseeable, incomprehensible, invisible, undetectable’ kind of human brain-mind we now call Borderline Personality Disorder.

It is my opinion that because most people who suffer from so-called mental illness DID suffer from unsafe and insecure early attachments to their caregivers — and Perry’s book on empathy goes into great detail about how our current society is creating a national condition of ‘relational poverty’ that I see as nearing a national crisis of insecure attachment disorders —  suffered from neglect, maltreatment and abuse on some level.  Those deprivations along with direct malice change the developing body-brain.  They directly change the physiological ability to utilize human empathic abilities.

Our growing national ‘relational poverty’ is creating an increased risk for Borderline conditions within our population.

Any professional who works with ‘mental illness’ (as well as infant-child abuse survivors themselves) must be able to recognize patterns within their infant-child abuse survivor clients that mirror or mimic  Borderline.

My mother’s letters and diaries, I still believe, will provide the most comprehensive published opportunity to actually experience the reality of the Borderline condition as a Borderline sees it within ONE set of their brain-mind mirrors – in my Borderline mother’s words.

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In today’s modern world of electronic communication and cell phone connections, I believe it would be nearly impossible for any survivor of Borderline madness in their childhood to put together the kind of comprehensive, serial pattern of Borderline thinking that my mother’s letter contain.

Although her letters after she arrived in Alaska, written to her own mother who HAD to be one of the main contaminating influences that impacted my mother’s development, it is particularly within this batch of 1957 letters that my mother’s and father’s patterns of relational insecure attachment disorder becomes most clear and apparent.  Facing this picture of my parents in these 1957 letters is the most difficult part of the entire letter transcription process, and is the reason I know I put this part of my job off until the end.

Although Perry’s work and the work of all the attachment experts and developmental neuroscientists are providing valuable and necessary steps in the right direction, naming what is going on within our culture as ‘relational poverty’ still lets us avoid the extremely painful reality of what insecure attachment disorders and their corresponding empathy disorders are DOING to us as human beings:  They are making us suffer in nearly inconceivable and unmentionable ways.  They are HURTING US!  This hurt is rocking ‘n rolling itself right on down the generations.

When the day finally arrives that the experts at last agree, and the public finally understands, that nearly every single malaise that humans experience with other humans is because of INSECURE ATTACHMENT DISORDERS – and that nearly every known so-called ‘mental illness’ comes about directly through the influence of ‘relational poverty’ in early body-brain forming stages of development in INSECURE ATTACHMENT ENVIRONMENTS that builds the insecure attachment right into the body-brain — well, I fully expect to have left this world far behind.

That does not mean that as many people as possible can’t join me way out in front of ‘the envelope’ (of air, like a jet pushes through) and begin to understand NOW, way ahead of the pack, that we all suffer from insecure attachment disorders.

As I work my way through these paper edifices that contain what was wrong with my mother’s body-brain-mind, I know that first SHE made this great contribution by writing her words down and by holding onto these papers for the rest of her life, that I made a contribution in my commitment to paying her words serious attention no matter what the cost is to me personally, and that someone somewhere at sometime is going to read her words and my introduction to them and BEGIN to comprehend how extremely damaging insecure attachment patterns are in the very months and years of a human being’s growth and development as they determine the developmental trajectory of a person’s body and brain.

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The genesis of a Borderline is reflected in my mother’s writings.  Because of this fact, the genesis of an extremely violent infant-child abusing parent is ALSO contained in her writings.  That those of us on the outside – with me being still on the outside, fortunately, because I did not end up with a Borderline condition – are being given the chance to share an insider’s view of a Borderline brain-mind along with my mother by carefully reading her written words as they unfold this large section of her life, is really a miracle with great potential for helping us all understand what can happen when safe and secure infant-child attachment goes so very, very wrong.

Meanwhile, I am going into town to pick up some needed supplies as I take a short recess from hell, and then I will return to my work.

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+ONE OF MOTHER’S 1957 LETTERS – INVOLVING MY GRANDMOTHER

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I can’t imagine that anyone who studies Borderline Personality Disorder can begin to understand a Borderline without trying to find out as much information as possible about a Borderline’s mother and about their mother-daughter relationship.  If possible, as with my mother’s case, an inclusion of the grandmother of the Borderline in the case history would also be important.

Because my mother’s grandmother came to live in their household when my mother was 5 and HER mother divorced, my great grandmother was probably another powerfully negative (if not outright abusive) influence within my mother’s childhood.

It has taken me five years to get very near the bottom of the pile of my mother’s letters as I have worked to transcribe them.  I have had to remove myself from her writings at times and then force myself back to the job again.  I am back at the job, as I recently mentioned.

While there remains a small batch of assorted letters from the 1960s left for me to transcribe, it is this large collection of letters from the summer of 1957 that I have put off for last – and avoided.  My father left my mother and his four children (ages nearly 2, nearly 4, nearly 6 (me) and my brother who turned 7) behind in Los Angeles while he went on to his new job in Anchorage, Alaska – and to look for housing so that we could join him.

The letters flowed between them daily.  My mother often wrote 2 or 3 letters to him per day.  My father left on June 11, 1957 and by June 13th my mother writes as if he had been gone a life time.  (The rest of us joined dad on the 1st of August.)

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I am sharing this one letter right now that my mother wrote about her feelings related to her mother’s ‘interference’ in mother’s parenting, and actually says what I always have suspected to be true, that one of the reasons (a MAJOR reason) my mother wanted to go to Alaska was to get away from her mother’s interference.

I really doubt that any reader of the collection of my mother’s writing will ever be able to see the twisted mind – even a wisp of it or a glance of a glimmer of it – in my mother’s words.  In this letter my mother is showing her classic Borderline self – at the same time she succeeds in hiding it.

My mother would not allow her mother to rescue me.  True, my mother is referring to an incident here that involved my grandmother and my brother John – but it is a pattern that happened continually with me, not occasionally.  It is important for me to affirm this for myself because the only two people in my life that could have ‘interfered’ with my mother’s abuse of me were my father or my grandmother.

My mother describes in this letter the dynamics – not healthy ones between herself and her mother – that operated throughout my childhood to prevent my grandmother from being able to help me.  Tonight as I transcribed this letter I saw more clearly than ever how impossible my mother’s relationship with her own mother was, and had always been.

Her statements about her mother in this letter follow a whole string of them within these 1957 summer letters, such as this one in her June 13th letter to dad:

“It breaks my heart but I just had to spank Cindy – it’s 10:30 p.m and she won’t go to sleep!!!  I feel so sorry for them and Grandma does not help things.  Please Bill, don’t let me be like her and expect perfection in little children.“

I see a receding succession of roaring fire alarms going off down the corridor of time straight back to my mother’s childhood in that statement about expecting “perfection in little children” (as my mother DID expect it of all her children).  I hear the echo of the stories my mother repeated over and over to us as we grew up about how this was true in her own childhood.  NOW if I heard her tell those stories I could tell her she was abused.  But of course I couldn’t when I was a child and heard her tales.

These letters traveling back and forth between my mother and father are so strange for me to read.  All I can see in my mother’s is her disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder.  She seems to have entirely organized-oriented herself around my father and in his absence suffered great distress and duress.  She could not self-sooth herself without him.

I will post the link to all of these letters when I have finished transcribing them.  As they are read in order the pattern of their attachment blares back at me throughout these many years since they were written.  Somehow my mother was PERFECT at keeping the shadow of her ‘humanity’ alive in her words while completely disguising the violent monster.  The monster doesn’t show in her letters, but I can feel the monster between her lines.

It makes me think of driving down a highway, seeing a tree looming on the horizon, watching it grow as it’s approached, watching it diminish once it has been passed by.  That’s like the invisible monster hiding between the lines in my mother’s letters.  Even as that tree shrinks in size until it seems to be gone – we know it is still there.  It is still big.  We just can no longer see it because we have moved as its viewers, not because the tree went anywhere other than where it always is.

The monster was always in my mother.  How she maneuvered and manipulated our home’s environment so that nobody SAW the monster but its victims still  amazes me.  At the same time, I believe my grandmother DID see the monster – and my mother could not tolerate it.  She had to make grandma ‘go away’, and the only way she could truly do that was to leave her mother in Los Angeles as she moved the rest of us to Alaska.

Mother made her mother ‘go away’ as surely as we make a tree ‘go away’ as we drive on past it and leave it to shrink into invisibility over the horizon behind us.  Once that had happened, there was no hope for me.  When my connection with my grandmother vanished, when the only safe and secure person in the universe disappeared that I could TRY to attach to, the monster in my mother became invisible to my grandmother.  My mother HAD TO MAKE THAT HAPPEN.  I was getting old enough that hiding the monster from my grandmother was becoming increasingly difficult for my mother to do.

I loved my grandmother.  She was my only hope.  My mother made her disappear.

That my grandmother was part of the problem, I didn’t understand.  My grandmother certainly helped to MAKE the monster my mother was from the start.

But read this letter.  See how insidiously mother hid the truth about what was really going on (the important parts, the dangerous-to-Linda parts) as she kept the invisible monster invisible on the invisibility  side of her Borderline, between the lines of her written words, cunningly twisted in her justifications.

After all my time in trying to find a way to describe how my mother operated in some hope that I could help prevent from happening to another child the absolute holocaust of a childhood I had with my mother – I am so very close to giving up.  It seems impossible.  Any child caught in the deceiving world of a Borderline such as my mother was probably has no chance of being helped or saved – NONE WHATSOEVER!

I did endure in hell.  I survived.  I did not become a Borderline like my mother.  Maybe that’s the best it can ever get under these kinds of conditions.  Maybe sometimes there are too many monsters in the mirror that can turn sideways just exactly right and disappear so nobody else can see them and you can’t even see them to show them to someone else – and nobody, not anybody believes you when you tell them the monster is real.

Maybe that’s the way it was for my mother when she was a little girl.  Her mother was a monster the same way my mother was a monster.  Only my mother put that information somewhere where not even she could really see it in the end (though some of that conflict IS in this letter).  That put me in the middle between them, just as it put me being the projection of everything my grandmother hated about my mother when my mother was little – like I was little when this letter was being written.

How does any abused child know what’s going on between the big people, what happened down the generations that leads to their abuse?  How can a child recognize the lies?  How can they think about them, who do they tell, who would believe them when the lies are so much bigger and older than the children can even begin to imagine?

I still can’t SHOW anyone what I know about my mother.  It’s as if it were a dream.  “You were just dreaming, Linda.  It wasn’t real.  What you say happened didn’t happen.  You imagined it all.  You are making it all up.  Why are you doing that?”

The Borderline abusive mother IS in this letter!  I can see her!

My father and mother were so entangled in their mutual dependency on one another my mother could not afford for my father to see the monster – and he couldn’t afford to see it, either.  Maybe she had him so mesmerized by her madness that he never stood a chance against her.

Recipe for disaster….. that’s what I know as the principal victim target of my mother’s violent abusive madness.  What my mother writes is simply on one side of her Borderline wall.  What’s on the other side she keeps secret and hidden, even from herself – and in this letter, also from my father.

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June 19, 1957 post mark

Darling Bill,

What a day I have had – what a time I have had since you left my dearest.  I need you, I need you.  Don’t ever leave me again – I can’t stand being parted from you – find a place soon, soon, soon!  Just to be together again.  Have you investigated those apartments – they were supposed to be close enough to the base so we wouldn’t need a car!

I wish with all my heart – soul you were here with me now.  I’ve never needed you as much.  I’ve never in all my life felt so alone.

Yet, I wanted to be alone – I just sent Mother home with all her blankets and she was boiling – I don’t mean because it’s so hot out either!

She comes over tired – all full of her hectic day and I am also tired and neither of us cheer each other up.  I miss you so terribly and she can’t understand that – she says she can.  “Well, I should hope so after all you’re used to him after 8 years.”  Bill, I’ve been sidetracking comments until I can’t stand it any longer!  Yet, Bill I’m frightened to death to be alone – I long to be close to you, Oh darling, when I write to you my ‘whole being’ cries to you.

Mother, I think, is dissappointed [sic] !  She thought we’d have fun together and I’m a wet rag.  I only want YOU.  It’s all I live for, all I think about!  I feel as if I was torn away from you and will ache until I am put together again.  [Linda note:  Father has been gone 8 days – it was their choice that he start work in Alaska and find housing so the family could join him.]

If she had loved her husband it would be different but she’s truly a ‘spinster’ now and it irritates me and my complete love for you irritates her.

We enjoy each other occassionally [sic] but to have my mother come every night when I ache for you – I can’t stand it.  Darling, darling, darling.

I haven’t written many things about ‘Mom’ in the letter because I have been trying so darned hard and she has been going way out of her way for me.  I tried staying one night alone and it wasn’t too bad, I did sleep.  I went out to call her the next night not to come and no body [sic] answered.  At 6:00 she appearred [sic] and has been coming every night since.

She was here from noon Saturday until Monday morning.  Too much!!!!!  [multiple underlines]  Several times she has over ridden my discipline, pouted or grimaced and I ignored it until Sunday at the park.

It was only a little thing but important to me.  I can’t have her ‘butting in’, which she doesn’t hesitate to do!!

We had sandwiches!  John ate ½ and I gave him another.  He didn’t want it and I insisted saying he couldn’t play on an empty stomach.  Grandma had promised ice creams.  When the time came, I got up and noticed he had gone around in back of the tree and thrown the sandwich away.  I said he couldn’t have the ice cream then as he didn’t etc. etc.   Grandma pouted, stormed, said I wasn’t fair etc. etc. and I told her “It was none of her business.”  I had been wanting to for ages.  He didn’t get ice cream then but later I got him some after a talk.  Right or wrong I can’t be interfered with – perhaps parents make mistakes but they’re not as important as the children not having confidence in us!

Well, today has been bad anyway but I have managed fine (this darn pen) I didn’t want a red refill and it doesn’t work right anyways.  I can hardly write with it.  Please pardon.  Most maddening when I have so much to say!

It was another beautiful day but we didn’t get a letter.  I know you can’t write everday [sic] but I am so anxious to know if you like it or not.  We’ve had so much trouble and I still don’t know how you like the D – place!

Well, we decided to go to the beach!  More of that later.  We were almost set when John complained of his foot hurting.  It had swollen up this morning and I had gone up to get Epsom salts but realized we couldn’t go anywhere now!

Yesterday while getting I the pool, on the grass, in the backyard, he stepped on a thorn.  It was pulled out and I put lots of tincture of Methyolate on it – all over – thinking of you.

By 11:00 today it was pink, blue and red and purple and very swollen.  He couldn’t even get a slipper on.  The doctor said to soak it, which we did almost all afternoon!  By 5:00 it was still bad so I took him to the doctor before I had only inquired, and he gave him a shot of penicillin and told me to come back in the morning.  He can’t walk on it and I am quite worried.  Could blood-poisoning set in?  The doctor said all the poison is centered in that one area now and he doesn’t want it spreading.  I will let you know tomorrow.

As soon as Mother came, after supper tonight and we had a very pleasant one too – She was concerned and does love us but she has to try to manage.  Anyways, she said it was as she says, the children don’t mind.  It was due to that indirectly they were told to go out back and sit on the cot until I cam out and got off but my heavens I had already explained that as a lesson, but they’re children and I don’t want her lecturing them.

After they were in bed and asleep 10:00 again (this house is like an oven until then – it’s been well over 100 all day!)  Sharon was still awake.  Last night Grandma excused her and the neighbors etc. [Linda note:  I think she’s saying the neighbors wouldn’t like the 2-hear-old’s crying) so I took her up and rocked her well tonight I spanked!

When I cam out I told her I didn’t care if she did cry I can’t rock her every night.  She said “I never interfere.”  I said something about the day and the children.  Well, one thing led to another and I told her I thought it best I stay alone nights now and that she does interfere and always has.  And it was one reason I was going to Alaska!  I told her very quietly and calmly and did not lose my temper.  [bold type is mine]

I told her I was grown and had 4 children and it wasn’t good for them to know I was afraid to stay alone and that it isn’t good for any of us to have her over every night.

Well, naturally you know the answers!  “So I’m being put out, am I.  I am soft but not that soft to come back again after that.”

Bill I’ve had so much lately that I told her I couldn’t argue but I thanked her and told her I’d see her tomorrow.  I have an appointment with Cartwright which I can’t keep if she won’t baby-sit.  Why can’t we just discuss things.  She can’t be criticized.

Really, darling even the times I’ve tried to talk to the children – she says “Now, listen to Grandma – – – – – and starts in too.”  Several times I’ve said nicely it’s easier for just me to tell them etc. and she sulks.

I know, as I said before, she’s dissappointed [sic] in me and rubs it in that you haven’t written you liked it [in Alaska] and what a mistake we’ve made and why did we want to go there anyways etc.

What with all the troubles I’ve had, mother and not knowing from you I don’t know!

I’m so cheerful every day but something new happens every day!

Poor Johnny.

Poor Grandma too.  I couldn’t talk to her and she left in a huff.  I kept on knitting.  She probably won’t speak to me tomorrow and I am frightened.  I need you, you, you, you.

Write me, advise me.  I am so lonely.  The days aren’t bad because I am used to having you at work but the nights – are terrible!

Poor Grandma can’t take you place.  I feel so sorry but I told her I’ve had to talk to her about this many times before and she swears she doesn’t ever interfere and always tells me how well I do!  (Sometimes she does) but also is plenty quick to criticize them too if they’re naughty until I do then she jumps in.  Grandma is nice to visit with sometime.

I want to live with you.  How can I wait?  God guide me and give me strength I need it so!  My darling husband I love you!  Mildred

Late.  I find it so hard to stop writing and there are so many things I have left unsaid – business things – but I will write them tomorrow.  I just made myself an iced tea and told myself that there are thousands of women alone tonight – this D. pen!  All over this [can’t read word].  Some of them probably widowed, working during the day and lonely at night.

Yes, what is it I tell the children and have told myself recently?  “One has to do with out to appreciate and place yourself in other’s position in order to understand more fully what others go through.”  I do have you.  We’re temporarily separated but you’re waiting for me – I am lucky!!  I am not widowed, my husband is not at war, but we’re separated and it’s so hard, my dearest.

I wish I could really talk to Mother and make her understand that I love her dearly but I am grown up and have 4 children and I must be let alone to bring them up as I see fit.  She can’t understand my love for my husband, I know.  It deeply upsets me.  I pray tonight for so many things.  Perhaps God can make her understand!

John awakened a few minutes ago.  He says the pain is so bad.  Darling, I get so afraid without you and I pray for guidance and strength.  I have relied on yours so much!  I gave him aspirin and will take him early to the doctor.  His foot is so puffed and unnatural looking.  I don’t like it at all!

It’s past midnight and I must try to get some rest.  I sleep on the bumpy hard couch and my life is frugal too – in it’s own way.

I love you dearly and live for your letters.  I need them until I have you.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

I kissed John for you and he says “I miss my Daddy – I love him so.”  We all miss you, my sweetheart!

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Blog will be available on the Kindle Store in 48-72 hours

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+WORD WARRIOR NEWS: PRESENTING MY CURRENT 8 WORKING BOOK TITLES

alchemynow2 Comments

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This post includes a copy of the working paper about the 8 books I am currently preparing for publication (you asked for them, here they come – to the best of my ability).  It lists their working titles along with a list of information to include in my BIG BANG BOOK that everything else I ever write is pointing toward.  (I just sent this paper off to my family and friends as fyi.)

I plan to dedicate as high a portion of the profits (above what’s needed to moderately improve my own well-being and my children’s) to the non-profits I mentioned in my earlier post, +WHAT WORD WARRIORS SAY – A BOOK BEING BORN.

I know that money needs to be generated in creative ways to build up the required capitol to afford to pay for at least the first 500 softcover copies (about $3330-$3600).

I am eager to get these projects completed – thank you again to each and every one of this blog’s readers who have affirmed my writing, my work, and my potential.  I am becoming increasingly concerned about not having done what I bet I came into this life to do before (if/when) the advanced-aggressive breast cancer comes back to snatch me.

Along with formalizing information categories into book-size sections so that I can apply for a block of 10 ISBNs (same price for ten as for one), I am forcing myself to finish transcribing my mother’s writings.  I intend to publish them with the titles listed below (barring anyone’s title-changing input) ASAP on Kindle.  I am not sure they will ever appear in hard copy.  They are voluminous and I want them accessible to people without having to cut them apart.

As I can afford it – with money from the Kindle sales if they show up – I will be able to afford a simple and efficient website that will allow for people to pay, download and print their own pdf copy of my mother’s writings if they want to.

I believe that if anyone is truly interested in how a severe Borderline’s brain might work from the outside looking in, especially a severely abusive one, my mother’s writings are a gift to the world toward this end.  Because the Borderline parent can be extremely dangerous to her offspring, and because the Borderline condition even by definition can be extremely difficult for ANYONE to detect, gaining insight into the workings of the Borderline mind has great potential for helping to understand how severe child abuse can happen as it improves all of our potential to both prevent child abuse and to intervene effectively in cases where the abusing parent is a Borderline like my mother.

I believe interested readers of my mother’s words will have to make a commitment to follow her life’s trajectory over time as it unfolds itself in her writing.  Perhaps one of the reasons the abusive Borderline is so difficult to detect is that they are the masters of illusion-delusion.  Magic happens for professionals when they can create the perfect distraction for their audience.  I believe my mother also created so many distractions within herself over time with her constant MOVING in particular, that her magic show simply spilled itself out her front door, into the street, and across the parking lot (like the ‘Porridge Pot’ overflowing in a children’s book).

If conditional so-called love and the withholding of affection, approval along with manipulations of give-and-take ‘mercy’ – in other words, deception, lies and betrayal contribute to Borderline Personality Disorder, maybe the deception builds itself into the BPD changed brain in such a way that it just grows and grows and grows……  (like a cancer).

Someone would have had to notice from a distance, and would have had to care enough to follow the porridge path of my mother’s mad illusions all the way back – inside our home – to the pot itself:  how my mother’s trauma-changed Borderline brain was working inside her skull to produce such masses of bizarre thoughts, behaviors and dangerous actions toward her offspring – that nobody – EVER – noticed.

Well, I better get back to work!! tyl

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The Devil’s Child: How 18 years of abuse by my mother did not make me like her

(I don’t like “at the hands of “) ———  need your take on this?

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360 Degrees of Change for Survivors of Difficult Childhoods


(with or without subtitle?)

This title is meant to include degrees related to the range of abuse that can happen, the range of resiliency and risk factors as they work to balance reactions to trauma, the range of dis-ability resulting, as well as the degrees of healing possible.

This book breaks down the scientific information (including attachment) in terms of a Native American format (told to readers or not?) – a circle of 360 degrees – idea that simply reading the book will create changes in people whether they actually realize what those changes are or not.

I do not want to use a calendar based concept – want this to be familiar enough from the 12-step recovery inspiration and daily reminder books – but different without ANY religious intonations.

I don’t want any ‘brain’ disruptions to happen due to ‘OH NO!  I missed March 3rd!  NOW what do I do?”  They need implicit permission to read as slowly or quickly as is comfortable, and to skip around.

Also, don’t want to identify the ‘age patterns’ below specifically, this is to organize my thinking – living with consequences of abuse WILL last a life time.  Either we recognize how abuse might have changed our physiological development or we don’t.

I am creating the subject area breaks (as per below) like they might happen over a natural lifespan, but the idea of this book is that healing happens in its own time and major healing can happen in an instant.  Every time ‘the circle’ is completed (like moving in a spiral) new perspectives are gained, new insights.  The Native elders talk about how we go through these cycles daily – and also go through them every time we are dealing with any particular problem –

I believe that even if ONE significant point (degree? – how do I connect these two ideas?  ‘degree’ and ‘point of fact’?) happens for one person, not only will their life be changed for the better but the changes in one can and probably WILL affect the many.

The Medicine Wheel actually follows ‘natural’ patterns of seasonal change as well as our human developmental life ‘segments’.  (large type underlined below is my ‘section name’)

(1) EAST (air – color yellow – spring – mind) – birth, new beginnings, childhood = ATTACHMENT (0-20)

(2) SOUTH (earth – color red – summer – body) – young adulthood, learning and practicing by ‘doing the work’ – BIOCHANGES (20-40)

(3) WEST (water – color black – fall – emotions) – our more maturing years includes introspection, self-reflection, pondering- SURVIVORSHIP (40-60)

(4)NORTH (fire – color white – winter – healing and wisdom) – our grandparent years, helping the younger generations with our wisdom – DISCLOSURE (60-80 — completes the circle so that 80 is right there with death and birth, oldest and youngest together)

My ‘sorting’ of thoughts related to these – I have around 400 points-degrees-separate pieces of information – haven’t tried sorting into these categories yet – might need to adjust my thinking, certainly need to work it through (after I have mother’s writings on Kindle) – if I keep these categories, need to NOT contaminate one with info too related specifically to a different one, need to keep them as clear as 4-seasons in Fargo are

PROCESS OF MAKING THE UNKNOWN AND THE INVISIBLE – KNOWN AND VISIBLE – THESE THINGS DON’T BENEFIT US BY REMAINING MYSTERIES!  ALL the other writings must point to this one – it’s the peak of the fireworks display!  I will need to be greatly in-spired to do this right, each of the 360 degrees need two paragraphs with a catchy title!  (just made me smile – the first one that popped into my mind as I wrote this was “the mom and pop store’ for the sperm and the egg process!)

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1st half of the book is more distant, objective and ‘technical’ – inoculate readers to get them ready for the emotional reactions they will have 2nd half

(1) – ATTACHMENT – beginning at the beginning with the involvement of our ‘feel good’ body chemicals as they orchestrate attachment of sperm and egg, zygote attachment to uterus, in placenta and breast milk, connecting attachment with food and social contact in our approach/avoid patterns of life – rupture/repair– etc – all about attachment – what it is, how it forms, clearly and without ‘malice’ describe the possible attachment disorders as they are ‘given’ by parents to children, etc. – and the growing brain – origin of self firm by two – brain tracks to consciousness and conscience – introducing terminology of development:  critical windows of development, windows of tolerance, mirroring, hemisphere growth, feeling felt, theory of mind, magical thinking (tied to denial later on) – being sent off-trajectory – built by good or bad world to represent the conditions of that world to others of our species (starts in womb) – ‘hatching’ and foundation of exploration connected to shame and dissociation in nervous-system and brain –

(2) – BIOCHANGES – all the known possible ‘invisible’ changes that can happen – nervous system, vagus system, stress-calm response system, immune system – clear description of environment-genetic interactions – phenotypes and genotypes – epigenetics – how these forces affect what our cells are going every millisecond of our life time – placing our self in context of evolution, genetic memory in our DNA – changes for a malevolent world –  how we COULD have been different – stuck with memories we cannot even recall that influence our entire lifetime (explain developmental process of memory ability) – what dissociation might be caused by – how stess fries memory region (hippocampus) brain cells for both victim and perp – describing ‘limbic kindling’, emotional dysregulation, inability to self-sooth, no trust region of brain – itty bitty left brain happy center – what brain plasticity really means – describing, say, how completely different from normal a borderline’s brain is – what’s coming down the road in terms of brain research, how that will change ‘mental illness’ categories – resting brain state, consciousness and involvement of the self in brain – how many of these changes (I believe science will show) mimic (and shown to cause in some) emotional limbic kinding/seizures, autistic-symptoms, bi-polar etc – changes in social brain at same time in emotional brain connected to stress-calm response – involvement of internal steroid system – cannabinoid and opioid systems – substance P (pain hormone) – (provide a brain term word glossary – cluster the tech brain terms together – some might skip them or come back) – book has to increase vocabulary so we can include new info in our thinking) –

PREPARING READERS TO LOOK (PERHAPS WITH SORROW, SHOCK AND DISMAY – ALONG WITH DAWNING INSIGHT) at what happens in our survivorship when we don’t have the info already presented in this first half of book as we ACTUALLY entered into our life past childhood) –

2nd half of the book is up close and personal – heading toward transformation – ‘break the bone and set it right’ – opening up realizations (and closed pussy wounds) for new healing

(3) – SURVIVORSHIP – entering our adult life with wrong information, no information – unprepared and wounded and not knowing it – making major decisions while our cortex is completing growth – having no clue what is really wrong, trying to ‘recover’ and gain understanding while most critical info we need is missing – what it’s like to live in a ‘good’ world while we were formed in a ‘bad’ world – trauma drama, etc – looking around and comparing how we are doing with others – measurements of success in our culture, impossible standards, not knowing why we fail, make mistakes, can’t keep up, can’t plan for the future – asking the questions = introspection, preparing for getting the answers – how attachment works ‘invisibly’ in our relationships and parenting – what it’s LIKE living with dissociation – contamination of present with intergenerational unresolved trauma – passing on abuse and attachment disorders and can’t control, don’t understand – stuck in bad relationships – nothing but rocky road if we try to look backwards – no tools (no road grader) to smooth things out – spiritual issues (stemming from attachment disorders) – having no words even to think about what happened (no info) – oh, and NO CHILD WITHIN or ADULT CHILD! – struggle with sensory overload and don’t know why – going to war already ‘broken’ – stuck in peritrauma – too hot, too cold – buying ‘diagnosis’ – drugs – nobody talks about what REALLY happened, taboos, conspiracy of silence – feeling isolated and alone – screwed up feel good feel bad reward system biochem – tracing all back to attachment-designed physiology in the body – trying to hatch into adulthood without secure outer or inner foundation – shutting off attachment needs to experience caregiving system correctly – taking some of what we can find (AA, parenting classes, etc) and using it best we can, always feeling something is missing
(4) –DISCLOSURE – getting real about how what was done to us changed us – need the right information and get it (of course MUCH from this little book) – disclosure is about letting our own self know what happened and about ‘telling’ someone else – gaining the WORDS – knowing how to keep our self safe – not hunting for memories, etc. – comes full circle to growth in infancy, learning to TALK about our story – understanding emotional dysregulation personally – clearing the pathway of obstacles, increasing the ‘coherency’ of our vision of our life, etc – passing our healing changes on to others – being able to clear ‘the wreckage of the past’ (as 12-steppers say) about how our changes hurt others – making new, better, healed connections all the way around in self, body, relationships – gaining informed compassion and coming to terms with what was done to us (and our version of forgiveness) – turning our dis-abilities into gifts by recognizing how changes saved us – recognizing how they affected our choices and decisions so we can LEARN to do it differently while living ‘within our means’ (what is truly POSSIBLE for us considering the changes – knowing our weaknesses and strengths, knowing how to get help, where, limitations within our CULTURE on getting what we need versus NOT and not taking that lack personally – pushing for social change – connecting the circle from victim to survivor to helping victims (prevent, intercede) – reach out and connect to others – discuss healing of attachment (‘earned secure’ versus my term ‘borrowed’) – breaking taboos in breaking the silence that binds (just found a book title for my collection of essays!) –

HAS TO include reading list and resource links along with complete (I wish LEGAL disclaimer – maybe I can find one to copy)

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I could do

360 Degrees of Change for Survivors of Difficult Survivors:

Study Guide, Workbook and Exercises

Maybe will be generated at same time I am pulling the book together, that would be good – could apply for the ISBN for it

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For Mother’s writings:

Unspeakable Madness:  No Word in Our Borderline Mother’s Writings about Her Reign of Terror

Book One: Pre-Alaska diaries and letters

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Unspeakable Madness:  No Word in Our Borderline Mother’s Writings about Her Reign of Terror

Book Two: Alaskan homesteading era diaries and letters

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Unspeakable Madness:  The Making of an Abusive Borderline Mother –

Her Childhood Stories and Background with Commentary

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My adult survivor book:

Disowning Mother:

Travels of a Child Abuse Survivor from Empty Wraith to Empowered Warrior

This works for me – I know what I mean here!

And, I HAVE traveled, all of my life – and my process is directly mirrored in my travels – could organize the material, even, by geographical settings

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and last, if I ever pull this together:

Breaking the Silence that Binds:

A Collection of Essays by a Severe Infant-Child Abuse Survivor

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+BORN AS A COMPONENT OF A BORDERLINE MOTHER’S MIND-LIE

alchemynow4 Comments

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How I remembered what memories I do have that are written in my childhood stories was affected-infected by the obsession my mother had with ‘telling the truth’.  Her perception of every experience involving me including those she added to ‘her abuse litany’ involved somehow involved a deception and a lie.  Because she continued to repeat these perception-lies verbally every time she ‘punished’ (beat) me for the rest of the years of my childhood, not only were her versions of the events kept alive, but also mine because my version and her version simply never matched.

How was it that I, a child that had never been affirmed by my mother as ever existing at all as a human being but rather as a nonhuman child of the devil, could so clearly KNOW the truth (my truth) about what had ACTUALLY happened every single time my mother repeated her attacks on me through the years because of my supposed transgressions that existed only within her distorted mind?

It is affirming to me at this moment to recognize that as far back as I can remember my own memory of what actually happened for each of her twisted abuse litany versions of my actions was carried forward in time within my own mind-self intact.  Nothing my mother ever said or did to me changed the truth of what I knew.  I find comfort in realizing that obviously Linda WAS present.  I WAS there as a glimmer of a reflection of a self within my own experience of my own life.

I was the one being viciously verbally and physically attacked without having any possible way of avoiding, escaping, preventing or of understanding what was happening to me.  But I WAS there, in my body, having my life experiences.  I had them.  I knew what they were.  I knew the truth of what actually happened, and I remembered the experiences intact – every single one of them – in spite of how my mother twisted the facts and in spite of what she did to me along with twisting the reality of the facts.

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At this moment I am also detecting where one of my biggest problems originated.  As the brain-mind-self grows and develops, a person’s memory abilities are supposed to expand and become more complex and advanced.  When I say I had no ability to THINK about myself in my life in any kind of self-reflective, awareness-based way for the 18 years of my childhood, what I realize I am actually saying is that within the horrific abusive environment I was developing within, I could only go so far in my development and no further.

There is something called ‘semantic memory’ which is a term that “refers to the memory of meanings, understandings, and other concept-based knowledge unrelated to specific experiences.”  Tied to the development of semantic memory abilities is a following stage of memory development called ‘episodic memory’, a term refers to “the memory of autobiographical events (times, places, associated emotions, and other contextual knowledge) that can be explicitly (consciously – which is versus ‘implicit’ memory that is unconscious and exists in the body but is not accessible to the brain-mind) stated.”  Not only did I not develop this remembering ability at the appropriate age, but I have only with effort been able to exercise it in my adult life.

As memory abilities develop in the body-brain from birth, they form what I think of as links in a memory chain.  The next stage of memory ability development I should have been able to obtain was nearly completely obliterated by my mother’s abuse of me.  ‘Autobiographical memory‘, is not a simple process.  It is meant to allow us to connect our self from the inside out not only with the experiences of our life as we have them, but also involves being able to experience our experience (having a self to remember having an experience).  Then, we are supposed to be able to remember our experience of our self having had the experience.

We can refer to the end result of the abuse my mother did to me ‘dissociation’, but what I know is that her abuse interfered with my brain’s development, including the development of memory abilities.  I had a deadly predator in pursuit of me throughout the 18 years of my childhood.  I never had the luxury to pause for the length of time it would have taken to consolidate my memory of my life or of myself living it.  I certainly was never allowed to pause long enough to form the ability to remember myself having an experience, or to remember myself remembering having experiences.

The reality of my abusive childhood resulted in such profoundly altered brain development that I simply managed to escape my childhood with the memories of my own reality that were directly tied to the incidents my mother repeated over the years in her abuse litany.  Even then, it was only because I had been able to develop some version of semantic memory abilities so that I could not only recognize certain literal facts in the world, I could remember the details of my experiences that were directly associated with these remembered facts.

My mother always had an altered version regarding the facts than I did.  I did not think in terms like “My mother is lying” so that I could have evolved further into thinking about “Why is my mother lying?” or “What is wrong with my mother?” or “Gee, I am so angry at my mother for lying.””  I simply knew for a semantic fact that what had actually happened on each abuse litany-included occasion factually happened as they did in fact happen.

The truly strange addition to this entire pattern was my mother’s insistence on every occasion that I was lying to her if I tried to contradict her version by daring to assert myself and tell her the facts.  I never thought of these facts as real, or as being something so abstract as ‘the truth’.  I learned very young as a child, certainly by the age of six, that not only could I not ‘make things right’ by trying to tell my mother the simple facts of what happened, but my trying to do further fueled her rage like pouring gasoline on a roaring fire.

But – and this is extremely important to me – I always remembered the facts of every event she ever attacked me for the way things actually happened.  Every single time my mother viciously attacked me, verbally and/or physically for one of these events (or for her later recalling of these events), I COULD NOT LET GO OF THE FACTS as I knew them to be.

I did not recall the facts with emotion.  I did not recall them with any sense whatsoever that either the original experience of the experience belonged to me, or that the facts of the experience were a part of me or of my life.  Facts were facts.  They existed like physical objects exist in space and time.  They were literal realities and were nearly as physically tangible in my mind as any object can be.

These fact-objects only reappeared to me when my mother brought them up again and again over the span of my childhood.  They had nothing to do with me that I knew of.  I just simply and clearly recognized them as if they were a fork or a spoon or an automobile.  Although I can be grateful that at least physical objects existed for me with words attached to them, and can be equally grateful that at least I retained the facts-as-objects with names for each incident my mother kept remembering for me, I cannot be grateful for the fact that objects and object-facts had some existence in the world while I, as a human being did not.

All I was, all I knew, and all I continued to be for 18 years was a one single fact-object:  I was the devil’s child.

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How a person begins from infancy to recognize and develop their individual self is dependent upon their ability to be seen, heard and responded to by others in their environment.  This begins with the earliest primary caregiver, usually the mother, being able to recognize the needs of her infant when they are expressed, mirror back to the infant its own emotional states, and appropriately respond both to the infant’s emotions and to its needs.

Thinking this through is a strenuous exercise for my mind.  From the first instants in my infancy that I should have been having my own self recognized and responded to appropriately as my brain-mind-self was forming in relationship to the world through the interactions my mother was having with me, I was fed the opposite of the truth about who I was in the world.

My mother could never respond back to me by mirroring my own existence, my own emotional states, my own needs and desires because I was ALWAYS invisible to her from the moment I was born.  She could not reflect ME back to ME because all she ever saw when it came to me was her own projected reflection of badness that her mind had split away from itself and cast onto and into me.

I did not exist.  No infant can exist to itself fully and automatically from the time it is born.  Everyone requires this mirroring of the self back to it for the identification of self to be made.  Now that I understand how the nature of caregiver-infant mirroring interactions actually physiologically determines how an infant’s brain and nervous system develops makes my effort to understand what happened to me because of my mother’s madness even more scary.  I understand how profoundly her disturbed mind affected the development of everything about me from the ground on up.

The truth is that everything that ever happened between my mother and I was based on a lie.  Because I was at ground zero, because I not only existed at the center of the lie but actually WAS the lie my mother’s deranged mind created, I never had a chance or a way to gain an alternative perspective about what was happening to me.

When I say I spent 18 years being the center of my mother’s psychosis and being the target of her hatred, rage and abuse, I mean this as a literal fact.  I WAS the target and nothing else but a target.

That target came into the world not as a human being, but as the spawn of the devil who tried to kill my mother while I was being born – because the devil sent me on a mission to do just that.  I was raised knowing not only that I was owned by the devil, that I belonged to the devil, that I was not human, but also that the devil had given me the power to ‘take’ my mother’s other children ‘to the devil’.

The last time I heard my mother verbalize her unwavering beliefs about me was on the telephone when I was 30.  She launched into her abuse litany in our conversation as if a switch had been flipped on.  The words she used in her litany were always the same.  They would defy belief it I didn’t have the continued ability to recognize facts when I encounter them.

What I never had in my entire life until the moment in that conversation when I was 30 — as these exact familiar words yet again spewed out of her mouth and into my ear through my telephone’s receiver, “The devil sent you to kill me while you were being born and because I survived, you have been nothing but a curse upon my life ever since” – was the ability to do what I did on this day.  I suddenly recognized the lie in the span of a heartbeat and just as quickly in the next heartbeat my finger flicked through the air as I pushed the phone button that hung up on her.

In that span of a heartbeat, for the first time in my life, I caught a glimpse of a glimmer that my mind existed separately from my mother’s.  It took that long, 30 years, to begin a process of differentiating my own self in my own mind from the mind of my mother that should have started when I was born.

Before this instant there had never been a boundary formed between my mother and myself so that I could have been on one side – busy developing my own self in my own brain-mind – while she was on her side of the boundary dealing with her self within her own brain-mind.  I was included as a part of her mind from the time of her difficult and near-death labor with me.  I was nothing but her mental projection of ‘evil’ before I took my first breath.

I was a captured and encapsulated part of my mother and could not escape.  I was not allowed to form a self to escape with even if escape had been an option.  And that option did not really appear for me until I was already 30 years old, 12 years after I had walked out my mother’s front door into my adulthood.

I believe my mother suffered from just about the most severe case of Borderline Personality Disorder possible, and she forced me to share the turmoil of her mental experience with her as if I was an incorporated part of her self.  She kept me on the psychotic side of her Borderline mind for my entire 18-year childhood and for the rest of her life from the time of my birthing.  I was not born free.  In fact, until I somehow managed to step across the line out of her Borderline lie and into my own reality during that telephone conversation, I had not been born as a human being at all.

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+NO REAL CHOICE: WE HAVE TO UNDERSTAND OUR DEVELOPMENTAL CHANGES FROM INFANT-CHILD ABUSE – NOW!

alchemynow1 Comment

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Trouble.  I have thousands of memories that involve this word.  All of these memories are stored in my body even if my brain cannot let me know what they all are consciously.  My mother, in her common verbal attacks on me, frequently used this word in versions of sentences such as these:  “Linda, you are nothing but trouble.  Trouble should be your middle name.  You have been nothing but trouble from the moment you were born.  You are more trouble than all the other children put together.  You are the cause of all the trouble in my marriage to Bill.  You are the cause of all of the trouble in this family.  Trouble, trouble, trouble, that’s all that you are.  You are more trouble than you are worth.  (Usually followed by some version of, “I hate you!  I wish you had never been born.”

But this word, trouble, as it applies to the developmental brain changes I suffered because of the abuse my mother did to me takes on a new meaning nearly beyond imagining when I discover information – again and again – about the truth of how child abuse changes, if not ruins, a person for a lifetime.  The only true weapon we have to fight in our own defense is to begin to read and understand how what happened to us changed us in ways that matter most.

I am in the process of writing a completely different and separate post at this moment, but I had to start this one so that I can include something I just found that is extremely important.  On the other post I am examining how my ability to remember was interfered with by my mother’s constant abuse.

Please take a look at what I just found on the effects of infant-child abuse and trauma on brain development on the web site of The Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence.

I found on this site an extremely impressive list of articles on the topic written by leading experts in the field of infant-child brain development and the consequences of child abuse.  There is a list of articles here with abstracts.  Finding them brings me mixed feelings.  At the same time I am thrilled that this work is being done, that the effects of trauma on brain development are being discovered, that the information is becoming increasingly available to the public – I also feel profoundly sad that I, along with so many others, experienced the kind of traumas during our early development that changed the development of our brain and hence changed our lives.

I will NEVER be able to repeat this fact enough:  What my mother did to me during any individual attack against me is NOT what matters to me now.  What matters is that those attacks changed my body-brain development in ways that these authors describe.

I present the following here as an example of the impact of abuse on development, and as a sample of the quality and range of information available on the web site of  The Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence.

Ito, Y., Teicher, M. H., Glod, C. A., and Ackerman, E. (1998). Preliminary evidence for aberrant cortical development in abused children: a quantitative EEG study. J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neuroscience, 10(3), 298-307.

The objectives of this study were to investigate cortical development and hemispheric asymmetry in abused children. Fifteen hospitalized children (mean age 10.7 +/- 2.5 years) with severe physical or sexual abuse and 15 normal children (10.1 +/- 3.1 years) were studied with quantitative EEG. Abused children had higher levels of left hemisphere coherence and a reversed asymmetry, with left hemisphere coherence significantly exceeding right hemisphere coherence. Left hemisphere coherence decreased more rapidly across electrode distance in normal subjects, suggesting that increased left coherence in abused patients stemmed from a deficit in left cortical differentiation. These findings support the hypothesis that early severe abuse may have a deleterious effect on brain development.

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Perry, B. D. (1994). Neurobiological Sequelae of Childhood Trauma: Post traumatic Stress Disorders in Children. In Catecholamine Function in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: Emerging Concepts (M Murburg, Ed.) American Psychiatric Press, Washington, DC, 253-276.

Abstract: The present chapter will review childhood PTSD with specific focus on neurobiological sequelae of childhood trauma and present some preliminary evidence of altered functioning of brainstem catecholamine systems in childhood PTSD. In specific, it is hypothesized that the abnormal patterns of catecholamine activity associated with prolonged ‘alarm reactions’ induced by traumatic events during infancy and childhood can result in altered development of the central nervous system (CNS). Furthermore, it is hypothesized that this altered development includes a ‘dysregulated’ brainstem which in turn results in a host of signs and symptoms related to abnormal brainstem functioning, including altered cardiovascular regulation, affective lability, behavioral impulsivity, increased anxiety, increased startle response and sleep abnormalities. Finally, early life experience is discussed, in context of childhood trauma, as an ‘expresser of genetic predispositions.

Perry, B. D. (1996). Neurodevelopmental Adaptations to Violence: How Children Survive the Intragenerational Vortex of Violence. In Violence and Childhood Trauma: Understanding and Responding to the Effects of Violence on Young Children. Cleveland, Ohio: Gund Foundation Publishers, pp.67-80.

Perry, B. D. (1997). Incubated in Terror: Neurodevelopmental Factors in the “Cycle of Violence.” In J. Osofsky (Ed.). Children, Youth and Violence: The Search for Solutions . (pp. 124-148). New York: Guilford Press.
How violence alters the brain and nervous system of the developing child.

NOTE:  Perry is the one whose new book I just ordered:  Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential–and Endangered

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Schore, A. N. (2001). The Effects of a Secure Attachment Relationship on Right Brain Development, Affect Regulation, and Infant Mental Health. Infant Journal of Mental Health, 22, 7-66.

Abstract: Over the last ten years the basic knowledge of brain structure and function has vastly expanded, and its incorporation into the developmental sciences is now allowing for more complex and heuristic models of human infancy. In a continuation of this effort, in this two part work I integrate current interdisciplinary data from attachment studies on dyadic affective communications, neuroscience on the early developing right brain, psychophysiology on stress systems, and psychiatry on psychopathogenesis in order to provide a deeper understanding of the psychoneurobiological mechanisms that underlie infant mental health.

In this paper I detail the neurobiology of a secure attachment, an exemplar of adaptive infant mental health, and focus upon the primary caregiver’s psychobiological regulation of the infant’s maturing limbic system, the brain areas specialized for adapting to a rapidly changing environment. The infant’s early developing right hemisphere has deep connections into the limbic and autonomic nervous systems and is dominant for the human stress response, and in this manner the attachment relationship facilitates the expansion of the child’s coping capacities. This model suggests that adaptive infant mental health can be fundamentally defined as the earliest expression of flexible strategies for coping with the novelty and stress that is inherent in human interactions. This efficient right brain function is a resilience factor for optimal development over the later stages of the life cycle.

Schore, A. N. (2001). The Effects of Early Relational Trauma on Right Brain Development, Affect Regulation, and Infant Mental Health. Infant Journal of Mental Health, 22, 201-269.

Abstract: A primary interest of the field of infant mental health is in the early conditions that place infants at risk for less than optimal development. The fundamental problem of what constitutes normal and abnormal development is now a focus of developmental psychology, infant psychiatry, and developmental neuroscience. In the second part of this sequential work, I present interdisciplinary data to more deeply forge the theoretical links between severe attachment failures, impairments of the early development of the right brain’s stress coping systems, and maladaptive infant mental health.

In the following I offer thoughts on the negative impact of traumatic attachments on brain development and infant mental health, the neurobiology of infant trauma, the neuropsychology of a disorganized / disoriented attachment pattern associated with abuse and neglect, trauma-induced impairments of a regulatory system in the orbitofrontal cortex, the links between orbitofrontal dysfunction and a predisposition to posttraumatic stress disorders, the neurobiology of the dissociative defense, the etiology of dissociation and body-mind psychopathology, the effects of early relational trauma on enduring right hemispheric function, and some implications for models of early intervention. These findings suggest direct connections between traumatic attachment, inefficient right brain regulatory functions, and both maladaptive infant and adult mental health.

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This information is shocking.  It cannot be denied and it cannot be ignored!  If you have any suspicion or factual knowledge (even as it exists solely as a body-based reaction to this topic) you NEED TO begin to read and understand what these researchers have discovered!  PLEASE!  Study this information for yourself, for your family, and for your global human community!  Click on this link:  The Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence.

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+PAYING SOME ATTENTION TO MY MOTHER’S ‘DARK RAINBOW’ DREAM

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As the book heads into editing, I am finding myself wondering about my mother’s dream (posted at above page link for “About This Site”).  It troubles me that for all my thinking, research and writing, I have no more of a clue what this dream might ‘mean’ than I did the day I discovered it written in her long ago journal.

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MY MOTHER’S DREAM as recorded in her journal on March 29, 1960 during the early months of Alaskan mountain homesteading:

“The whole family was out walking and suddenly we looked up to see a dark rainbow appear – then it got bright and behind it a skyline appeared outlining massive dormed buildings such as I’ve never seen and skyscraper buildings – then it all disappeared and a big wind came.

We realized it was a hurricane. We could hardly stand up against the wind. We saw big apartment buildings on the sides of the streets but the entrances faced another street and we were on the wrong side. The wind grew stronger – finally a door appeared and we went in the building and the person asked us what was wrong? We told her of the great wind but as we pointed outside – all was silent and the wind was gone … and I awoke.”

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Making the connection between the work I hoped this blog would promote and this dream led to my naming this site Stop the Storm (of intergenerational trauma).

I of course had advance notice well before I discovered her dream record about the fact that she was a very disturbed woman (like from the  moment I was born).  Yet if I were to ever have a ‘wind in my sail’ about her treatment of me being intentional, or something that she ever REALLY had any control over or choice about, this dream would deaden that wind.

I didn’t wake up one morning and discover that I am a Word Warrior.  I am a member of a family with a history of word-warrioring.  There were professors on both sides of my family.  My mother’s mother was a Word Warrior.  I have Word Warrior brothers and sisters and children.  We are a family who loves literacy and books.  This is not the same thing as being a family of gifted story tellers within the oral tradition, although I recognize that I have such a yen – if not a gift.

I have spent hundreds of hours (as you readers know) transcribing my mother’s letters and journals that found their way into my hands after her death.  It is very clear throughout them that my mother WAS a writer, although her words never found their way into publication.

I have the advantage of digital equipment and information access that my ancestors never dreamed of.  No matter what has happened to me in my lifetime, having this advantage gives me a power that they never had.

In looking again at my mother’s dream, and as I think about if I am going to include it in my ‘Devil’s Child’ book, I continue to notice that when I read it I feel worms snaking their way around in my gut.  Part of this is because of the insider information I have about my mother being so out-of-control in her violence and in the patterning of her life.

Part of my reaction comes from a suspicion I have that I don’t often name:  My mother was as powerless over who she was, what she did, and what happened in her life as I was powerless over her actions toward me when I was a child.

My mother suffered enough trauma in her early life to turn her into the equivalent of a disastrous storm in our family home.  In this dream I get the sense that she was as helpless to understand or to change the course of what happened to her or how she felt and acted as she was powerless to stop this storm in her dream.

In the dream she was innocently out walking with her family.  First there was the dark rainbow, it changed into light temporarily, and then the big wind came.  She sought shelter along with her family that was denied to her along with everyone else.

I thought about how profound this truth is all afternoon as I worked making adobes outside.  When trauma is passed down in a family through the generations, EVERYONE is its victim.  The storm that is created by the existence of the unresolved trauma remains mostly unseen by outsiders who are not a part of a family’s inner circle.

“The wind grew stronger – finally a door appeared and we went in the building and the person asked us what was wrong? We told her of the great wind but as we pointed outside – all was silent and the wind was gone….”

My mother’s use of the words ‘the person’ here fascinates me.  Why didn’t she say “a woman?”  What inner unknown and desperate need do trauma survivors have to find ‘the person’ to whom they can SHOW the storm to that they know in their own lives?

‘The person’ never appeared in my mother’s life that could truly understand who she was.  The mystery person who did not have to endure the storm, and who could have offered safety and security to my mother along with the rest of her family remained missing – not only for the 18 years I suffered the worst of her madness, but also for the rest of my mother’s life.

Peering into what my Word Warrior mother wrote about her dream today ended up helping me to realize what a terrible, terrible tragedy my mother’s life was.  She COULD NOT find ‘the person’ to rescue her – or us.  She could not even find ‘the person’ she was inside of herself.  Like a missing word we can’t remember or find when we know we know it, my mother on some level might have known how desperate her condition really was, and her family’s as a result of her condition.

But she could not do anything about it in her lifetime, nothing to ever make anything better.

Which makes me think about the power of my words, what I hope for them, that in some small way some of them might be ‘the person’ someone else needs so that they might experience some version of this for themselves if they need it:  “finally a door appeared and we went in the building and the person asked us what was wrong?“

How can we be ‘the person’ and better ask this question, “What was wrong,” both of ourselves and of one another in a caring and compassionate way?  Is it this question that when asked by ‘the person’ (if we ever find one) that can Stop the Storm of unresolved trauma?

“We told her of the great wind but as we pointed outside – all was silent and the wind was gone….”

I don’t believe it was a ‘bad mother’ that had or wrote down this dream.  I believe ‘the person’ who had and wrote this dream had suffered greatly very early in her life while her body-brain was forming and developing.  As a result of the changes that early trauma forced her body to make, many abilities that we consider most vital to being human were taken from her.

This dream might be the closest she ever got to knowing the truth about herself, her life and the life of her family.  It might be the closest she ever got to understanding what was needed for the storm to stop.  Fifty years later her Word Warrior’s dream can still sound an echo about what being powerless in the face of danger is like.  It also shows the power one open door and one person can have to help Stop the Storm for others.

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My first experience with my editor as she does what editors do – morph things!

First morph – the title!

She Believed I was the Devil’s Child:

18 Years Of Abuse By My Mother Didn’t Make Me Like Her

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+WHAT WORD WARRIORS SAY – A BOOK BEING BORN

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Because I was born into an extremely hate-filled, insanely abusive home, and my universal human rights all but obliterated, I am NOT willing to sell or give away any of my rights to my story!  I am, however, more than willing to give a sizable (yet to be determined) percentage of the profits of my book’s sales to the programs I mention in this letter (below).

See related posts:

+ALIGNING OUR NATION WITH UNITED NATIONS CHILD RIGHTS IS AGAINST OUR OWN LAWS

+AMERICANS MUST NOT BELIEVE THAT CHILDREN ARE HUMAN BEINGS — THUS, NO HUMAN RIGHTS

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From here on out, any post with WORD WARRIORS in the title will have information about the progress being made to get the first book about the abuse of my childhood (in stories) into publication.

A Word document was created last night of everything I have already written at +DEVIL’S CHILD – My Childhood plus related background information posts, and emailed in attachments to Amy Elaine Long, my writing assistant and editor.

I know just as certainly as I know I am alive that this book will not be born without Amy’s assistance.  I am grateful to her for being the amazing woman she is, for her talents, and for her efforts well beyond the power of words to describe.

I am including here the letter I just emailed to her and family involved in helping this process along.  This is a low budget (actually zero budget) operation to start off with, but I have high hopes.  This letter also makes mention of the nonprofit funding support channels I want to build into the financial structure of support this book has the potential for creating.

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Hi again

LOTS OF INFO HERE BUT VERY IMPORTANT!!

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I sent this link previously:

http://www.sfwa.org/for-authors/writer-beware/pod/

but it’s worth a good read

“Booksellers don’t like dealing with POD services. E-commerce currently accounts for about 20% of book sales. But brick-and-mortar bookstores, especially the large chains, still represent the most significant single sales source. For volume sales, most books require a balance of online and offline presence.”

Makes me think about a ‘business plan’ even if sketchy

If the book goes onto Kindle, and if it generates any ‘buzz’ at all – and if people want to recommend it to others they know who do not have Kindles – the book HAS to be available via some kind of hard copy edition

From a biz plan point of view, I would count on low priced Kindle edition as marketing and advertising.  Book would then pay its own way.  (If the book cannot sell enough copies via kindle to do this, then there might be something wrong-missing with the whole deal)

Availability of hard copy and source has to be included in the Kindle edition.

Part of the issue for me is to avoid ‘used copy selling’ of the book before I/we have it settled firmly into its sale’s source.

I think print on demand could accomplish this – but would it list on Amazon?  (will have an ISBN and protected rights)  I suppose it could be listed the way our family lists any book on Amazon.

A print on demand limited signed edition would only work if orders for the book were made through me – the book would first have to come to me for signing and I would ship to customer.  If Amy Long is listed as a ‘with’ author, the book would also have to travel to her for signing – so obviously shipping would be slow and ridiculous!

But actually paying to print a limited run of 100 books would cost more than the book would sell for.  So, that’s probably out.

At double the profit for run of $500 (cost to print around $7, sale at $12.95) would need initial investment of around $3300.  The first 250 books sold would have to go toward covering the $3300 first investment.  (again question as before if another printing of 500 would have to be listed as ‘2nd printing’)

All money made from book for some time would have to go toward cost of printing more copies.  But the print on demand option would allow this to happen simultaneously – no huge initial investment, no books sitting around unsold.

I have to know if there is a contract required for POD – I will not give away or sell ANY rights to this book

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Another point:  I want the percentage of profit that’s going to nonprofit clear from first.

How is ‘profit’ determined when just getting started, don’t want to be deceptive – needs to be clear, right and up front from beginning.

I think I know what I want to do on this – is easy, solid, practical:

I want to send the first completed copy of the book to Dr. Bruce Perry (“Boy who was raised as a dog, with new book out on empathy”) – I want his, and only his ‘blurb’ on the book if it’s going to have one.

He has a nonprofit organization called The Child Trauma Academy see educational products

We could set up some kind of a ‘scholarship – grant’ process to help disseminate their information.  I particularly want to reach teens!!  I guess I’m thinking some kind of ‘small’ partnership with their organization and their work to channel my book’s $ contribution to helping prevent child abuse and provide healing for survivors.

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If the timing is right and the book takes off, another thing I would support is to get copies of Siegel’s book on parenting, Parenting From the Inside Out, out into the hands of people nationwide who are teaching and/or taking part in the STEP parenting programs .  SEE:  Center for the improvement of child caring, their site.

I just called them, they also are a nonprofit.  AND, they have a mailing list of over 30,000 – if we send a copy of the book to their director, Dr. Alby, and approved, they will add it to their list of recommended readings and market it!  How sweet is that!

Leonard and I were most fortunate to be able to take a STEP parenting class right after we went through treatment and began to recover.  I do not believe there is a more worth while channel for investing $.

I can ear mark the ‘donation’ – and if the book is very successful, they need $50,000 to put together the arm of their curriculum that is specifically geared for Native American communities.  (they lost the funding they had for this a few years ago).  They have targeted programs currently for African American and Latin American parents.  Absolutely WONDERFUL work they do – and they also have programs targeted specifically for ‘high risk for abuse’ parents!

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All feedback, input, ideas, suggestions, inspirations welcome.  Blog readers, send comments – thanks!

AND, for your information:

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11 May 2010 – Child Rights at the Human Rights Council 62

___________________________________________________________
– Human Rights Council: Session 14 [event]

– UNIVERSAL PERIODIC REVIEW: Reports and analysis of child rights references [reports]

– ELECTIONS:  Membership to the Human Rights Council [event]

– SPECIAL PROCEDURES: Upcoming Vacancies [news]

– MIGRATION: Consultation in the context of children’s rights [event]

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IN MEMORY OF MY BORDERLINE MOTHER:

From Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD, your Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder

It’s no secret that many people with BPD have difficulty controlling anger. But you may be surprised to learn that much of the “common sense” advice that you may get about ways to manage anger are actually flawed. This week, learn healthier ways to manage your anger.
The Myth of “Letting Off Steam”

Have you ever been told to punch or scream into a pillow when you’re angry in order to “let off steam?” Before you take that advice, read this article.
10 Healthier Ways to Manage Anger

Instead of venting your anger, try these 10 healthier anger management strategies.
New Research: How Does An Active Life Lift Your Mood?

For some time, we’ve known that increasing your activity level (through exercise, social activities, hobbies, etc.) can lift your mood, but we haven’t known exactly how this effect happens.
Borderline Personality Disorder Frequently Asked Questions

Answers to the most frequently asked questions about borderline personality disorder.

Must Reads

What is BPD?
Symptoms of BPD
Diagnosis of BPD
Treatment of BPD
Living with BPD

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