Tag: learning

+TRAUMA AND THE 30,000 EGGS: HOW MUCH CAN WE TAKE BEFORE WE ARE OVERWHELMED?

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Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) represents an error in the ongoing processes of learning useful things in one’s life.  A traumatic experience can actually contain much more information than a person can actually use as one single individual.  The potential of what a traumatic experience can teach about survival needs to be applied (learned) in order to improve adaptation within the environment just in case a similar event happens again in the future.

Particularly in today’s world where we no longer exist in a tribal culture that would allow a whole group to learn from a dangerous experience, there can be “no room in the inn” on a personal level for the whole amount of new information that might be gained about survival from an event one person has had to experience alone.  Learning is thus interfered with on the individual level, and the wholeness of that person is interfered with, as well.  The result can be that their ongoing experience of being in their life is interrupted, and we then have a post-trauma circumstance.

If the information about what is needed to survive an overwhelming trauma cannot be shared ‘in a group’, the information out-matches the needs of a single person’s waking day and sleeping night.  Unprocessed information about trauma survival just sits in line, in the cue of ongoing information processing, and can ‘jump the line’ at every possible trigger that stimulates it – like it is impatient to be completed and finished.  It WANTS to used, and be useful.  That’s the nature of ongoing life.  Traumas are supposed to teach us something important about how to get along in a world that is not always safe.

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When an infant suffers traumas that create breaks in its ongoing experiencing of life, the interruptions will most often be built into its growing brain as dissociational patterns.  Its learning and adaptation will be interfered with just as it would be for an overwhelmed adult, only much more so.  Once these ‘crisis’ response patterns are built into the brain, they will be lying in wait to be used should any future overwhelming trauma occur.

Survival through evolution has required humans to have the widest possible range of responses to traumas.  If what is known cannot prevent a trauma from occurring, or does not allow for adaptation to a trauma, new responses must be learned.

Within a safe and secure range the best of all possible genetic phenotypes will be able to manifest.  Phenotypes are what we actually SEE on the ‘surface’ of who we are based on our genetic material as our genetic expression machinery has told our genes what to do on an ongoing basis.  If too much trauma exists during the early developmental stages of our lives through abuse, neglect, deprivation, etc., the actual phenotypes we end up with can be far different than they would have been if development had happened in a safe and secure, non traumatic environment.

Most mental illnesses, for example, are ‘visible’ phenotypes that might not have needed to develop if early trauma had not been present.  As soon as an early environment overwhelms an infant or young child with too much trauma, the body will interpret this as a threat-to-life situation, and use the most extreme adaptive phenotypes it can in order to cope with disaster.

The developing brain and body operates on a simple rule basis.  A safe world is run by safe rules and will bring out safe responses.  A dangerous world is run by dangerous rules and will bring out the most extreme adaptations possible – as needed.  Our phenotypes reflect how these rules are applied within our bodies.

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Too much or too little of anything can kill an organism.  Extremes push the body into an emergency, crisis response.  Trauma that reaches PTSD proportions for an individual represents a condition of too much information.  Information is only useful if it can be integrated and applied BY USING IT.  I believe it is because we so often are left without a ‘group’ or ‘tribe’ that would help us learn from the traumas that we are so at risk as individuals for becoming overwhelmed.  This appears obvious when we realize that strong safe and secure attachment relationships mediate the effects of traumas at every single age along the human lifespan continuum.

Making good use of the information that traumas present to us has to be in the direction of promoting and advancing life – for the individual, for the species.  Being a connected part of the ‘social group’ allows for a wider range of possibilities for learning from traumas while being isolated and alone narrows that range.

I think about it in terms of 30,000 eggs.  An ordinary family sized cake might require the input of 3 eggs, not 30,000.  Too many eggs would obviously ruin the cake!  Trauma eliminates the choice of deciding we don’t want so much overwhelming information.  Too bad.  Here it is.   What are we going to learn from it and how are we going to use this information for a better future?   We can’t decide NOT to try to proceed with our cake-bake-of-life with ONLY 3 eggs.  When life hands us 30,000 eggs, we better be ready and able to deal with it.

Trauma is an out-of-the-ordinary experience:  It is extra-ordinary, supra-ordinary.  So if we have to deal with 30,000 eggs, we better be a part of a very large family so that we can effectively bake a super-sized cake large enough to use the 10,000 times more information than what we could ordinarily make good use of by ourselves.  This is what community is truly all about.

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I suspect that in a perfect world no individual (family, group, etc.) would ever be given more traumatic information to deal with than what they could ordinarily use.  The more divided and isolated we are the ‘fewer eggs’ we can handle.  While being connected and safely and securely attached to others is not the only factor that leads to resilience, it is probably the most important one because we are a social species.  We did not evolve as separate beings cut-off from a whole, and our evolutionarily developed abilities to respond to trauma and to process it by learning new things when we need to, is NOT meant to happen separately, either.

Any time we try to go against the patterns that nature has given us, we are far more likely to suffer difficulties.  Healing from trauma is no different.  When the group – our family of origin – hurt us and did not protect us, and was also not there for us when we had our greatest need to depend on safe and secure attachment with dependable, available others,  we are much, much more likely to suffer from ‘too much information’, or information overload that results in a post-traumatic reaction.

Traumas happen.  Not being able to process the information contained in traumatic experience so that future responses will be better adapted responses leaves us baking the 30,000 egg cake when we can only, by ourselves, handle a 3 egg cake.  We need help.  We are made that way.

The more fragmented and insecure our connections are to others, the more at risk we are for being overwhelmed as ‘an army (or victim) of one’.  The more overwhelmed we are, the more likely we are to be fragmented (and dissociated) ourselves.  No single person was ever designed to ‘go it alone’, and certainly not infants and young children.

I say this because we cannot heal alone, either.

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+OPENING OUR OWN HEARTS AND MINDS TO THE REALITIES OF CHILD ABUSE

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There are too many new letters being transcribed to include them all on the temporary page.  I am spending time right now working on the 1960 letters and am currently working on April and May of that year – with more to follow as they are filed within the months of 1960.

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I especially would like to recommend to readers the important comments made today on this blog by Paul M. McLaughlin.

Please visit the two comment pages he posted to:  Stop the Storm’s Contact Information Page and to the post HOW DID THE ABUSE CHANGE US?  Valuable links to his website, to the record of his work to prevent child abuse, and to his personal story are contained in his comments.

I am honored that Paul has shared the heroic story of his life as a survivor of 20 years of terrible childhood abuse with me and with my readers.  Thank you, Paul!

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I have benefited over the years from the efforts of many therapists that I was able to access on my pathway of healing.  Some of the words that I heard them tell me have returned when I have needed to remember them.  I would like to say a heartfelt “THANK YOU” to all the professionals working in a wide variety of fields to help not only prevent child abuse, but to help those of us who survived it, to heal.

After my work on the ‘writings’ yesterday I had great difficulty in sleeping last night.  It is now 9:30 at night and I am only now feeling ‘strong enough’ to approach any writing for today.

The words of two separate therapists from my past echoed in my mind today.  One of them said to me, over and over again, “Linda, always do what YOU need to do to take care of yourself.”  When I look back at the sessions I had with this woman, I remember that I had to take a tape recorder with me to record every session.  Without these recordings I could never remember one single thing we talked about together.

I didn’t understand dissociation at that time.  Nor did this therapist ‘waste’ any time explaining it to me.  We simply together found a way around the problem as it related to our sessions.  I would play the tapes over again several times between sessions, and doing so helped me to ‘grow into’ the topics we discussed.  But the single most important gift I received from this woman are the words I just mentioned.  “Always do what YOU need to do to take care of yourself.”

Those simple words contain within them a universe of healing potential.  They will never be words I will outgrow, or afford to ignore.  Today has been a day when I had to take special good care of myself.  Survivors need to learn how to do this for ourselves, always.

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The other set of words a therapist of my past told me that came into my mind today are about the process of healing itself.  She told me that this process is like a finely crocheted, beautiful doily.  What makes them attractive is the balance between tight and wide open spaces within the pattern.  She told me that when we sometimes work very hard on an ‘issue’ we are making the tight, close together, denser part of the pattern of our healing.  But we need the loose times, as well.  There are times we have to leave all of it completely alone, take a break, do whatever we need to do to give ourselves a rest from the ‘work’ itself.

I thought about these words today and am so grateful for the opportunities I have been given in the past to access quality therapy.  Each time of contact I have had with each ‘specialist’ gave me what I needed at that point in time.  Today I carry so much within me of what these people gave me – as well as the work I did for myself each step of the journey along the way.

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Reading Paul McLaughlin’s words echoed with the sadness inside of me about how hurtful ANY abuse is, but particularly the abuse of infants and young children.  I believe that we have a social taboo against truly allowing ourselves to look severe abuse of the tiniest of people straight in the eye.  No species endures if their most helpless offspring are not cared for and cherished.

While the taboos against harming infants and children exist for a wide purpose, I want to encourage all of us to build up our tolerance – like building and strengthening muscles – so that we can allow ourselves to know in our minds and in our feelings what the reality of early terrible abuse of young ones really is – that it exists, that it happens, that it has severe and lifelong consequences.

I am not suggesting that we pursue a morbid approach – just an educational one for ourselves as members of a culture that continues to need to ‘raise consciousness’ about child abuse and neglect.  Paul’s writings contribute to this denial-smashing.  True, Paul was born in 1948 and I was born in 1950, both of us in a time when public awareness and consciousness about child abuse was still in the stone ages.

But what touched me most today when I visited his website is that there were no doubt many, many, many people surrounding this boy and his twin sister who SHOULD have used common sense to intervene to protect these children.  I’m not going to be the one here to point the finger, but read his story and look at it yourself.  If we were all actors and actresses in a stage play of his childhood, what would each of us have been able to do differently from what the people actually did who were there?

Where and how in today’s world, where we each live our lives, can we apply new insights and new information so that if history ever repeats itself within the sphere of our individual influence we can do something BETTER to help a child – to help many children – that so desperately need someone to notice, pay attention, and care enough to help them?

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As always, thank you for reading – your comments are welcome and appreciated!

+UNBELIEVABLE DELUSIONS – MY POOR BROTHER

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I am going to share this

November 9, 1960 letter

that I transcribed today. It is one my mother wrote to her mother, and is placed in the section on My Childhood Stories, and referred to as “The Troubles of John.”

(It will also be filed in the collection of other 1960 letters my mother wrote, which will include the February 2, 1960 letter that I also transcribed today.)

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While I have nearly 30 years’ of experience in coming to terms with what my mother did to me, I am almost ashamed to say that it is only now, right now, in the process of pulling all the various writings together that have to do with my family of origin, that I am beginning to develop enough of a tolerance for what my mother ALSO did to my siblings to actually be able to FEEL my feelings about what my mother did to THEM.

I cannot possibly tell my siblings’ stories.  Yet in the instance of this particular November 9, 1960 letter, mostly about my brother John nearly 50 years ago, my mother is writing his story for him when he is 10 years old.  I am reading her words and reacting to them as I feel my own terrible sorrow and tender sadness for the pain she had already caused my brother by that age.

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As far as I am concerned whomever it was that coined the phrase, “Read ‘em and weep,” could have been talking about this

November 9, 1960 letter.

I am experiencing a whole new level to my own healing —  being able to expand my emotional awareness of the harm that was done to me by the harm that was done to my siblings.  I cannot heal them.  But I can publish this letter and my comments to it today in honor of my dearly beloved Big Brother John. I love you!  Linda

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+TOUGH STUFF, LOOKING AT MYSELF AT 25

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0611309

It turns my stomach to read this 1976 letter I wrote to my mother.  I have a hard time showing myself mercy, or accepting today how blind I remained for so many, many years.  Nobody TOLD me my childhood was abusive.  Nobody EVER asked me about my childhood or seemed to care.  I had no idea the abuse I suffered for 18 years meant anything to anybody, and it certainly had no bearing that I was aware of on who I was in 1976.

Yet at the same time the abuse was running my life and I did not know it.  I was that same confused, hurting, scared, battered, isolated, depressed and lost person I had been throughout all of my life.  I was in pieces.  I was broken.  I was mislead.  I was so very courageous as I kept putting one foot in front of the other and marched down the road of my life – from one event to the next – never stopping to look backwards at where I had come from or at what I had endured.

At least if one survives a holocaust or a prisoner of war camp or torture as an adult, they have the advantage of knowing something HAPPENED to them that was traumatic, out of the ordinary, difficult.  I had the benefit of no such insight.  Just as I never knew what my siblings did, that my mother was NUTS, I also had no idea that what she did to me was WRONG or hurtful.

I needed to know.  How I was as an ongoing participant of the lie affected my ability to parent my own children.  I was prevented from being present in my own body or in my own life.  I was prevented from being a self even though I could pretend I was one, evidently well enough that nobody else ever noticed the truth about Linda, either.

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BE sure to  check out the newest 1955 spooky doll story at the bottom of the page with the little poem about my mother and dolls – as she indoctrinates not only me at 3 ½, but my 18 month old sister, Cindy, as well.

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+APPROACHING MY MOTHER’S 1953 DIARY

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These are both completed now:

*MY INTRODUCTION TO MY MOTHER’S 1953 DIARY

**1953 – MY MOTHER’S DIARY – PART ONE

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

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*MY INTRODUCTION TO MY MOTHER’S 1953 DIARY

**1953 – MY MOTHER’S DIARY – PART ONE

**1953 – MY MOTHER’S DIARY – PART TWO

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+THE ABILITY TO WONDER AND BEING A WITNESS TO MY OWN ABUSE

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I began the page I wrote today (published under My Childhood Stories) in response to a reader’s post on my mother’s letters that I transcribed yesterday.  My writing rapidly led me in the direction of beginning to understand that I am both a witness abuse survivor of my own abuse at the same time I am a survivor of the abuse itself.  I am beginning to understand that these were two separate and different experiences that I had, NEARLY but not exactly at the same time, as I lived in one body, and that each affected me in different ways.  Like two different rivers feeding into one, both experiences are linked in differing ways to dissociation.

Today’s writing pathway also led into the subject of the gift of having the ability to wonder (or not ) and into a clear infant abuse memory that came to me shortly after I wrote the letter disowning my mother.

This entire writing is an important contribution to my growing understanding of a new ‘real reality’ that is separate and different from the reality that was built into my body-brain-mind during 18 years of abuse by my mother.

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+NEWLY TRANSCRIBED LETTERS

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My own story of The Fire Ants has been placed in the section on My Childhood Stories.  It describes my growing reality as it differs from my mother’s version of the event she describes in her letter to my father, June 17, 1957.

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The rest of the new 1957 letters I transcribed today, 060909, including the fire ant letter, can be seen at Take Care of Mothers.

These files are in a temporary location, but can be seen after they are filed on that blog in their permanent location.

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+SIBLING LINKS

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**Cindy’s Letter to Mother 1994

**CINDY’S BLOG POST on Mother (060409)

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**FAMILY TIME – by Brother (1965)

**SELLING THE HOMESTEAD

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Please refer back to this section of the blog as time goes on for future writings by my siblings:

MY SIBLINGS’ COMMENT PAGES

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+INNOCENT TARGETS FOR MY MOTHER’S RAGE

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Trying to write the story of my childhood in a logical, chronological, coherent way is an almost overwhelming task.  As I’ve said before an inability to tell a coherent life story is perhaps the MAIN symptom of an insecure attachment.  This dis-ability to either live a coherent life or to tell the story of one’s own life in a coherent fashion manifests itself by degrees of damage in accordance with how insecurely attached a person is.

These degrees of damage move down the scale from being slightly insecurely attached to extremely insecurely attached.  For those of us like my mother and myself, the most severe insecure attachment pattern, that of disorganized-disoriented, means that we are not even securely attached in our fundamental relationship between our self and our self.  As a result, we cannot possibly either live a coherent life or tell a coherent story of our life.  That is what the disorganization and disorientation of our insecure attachment pattern, formed into our early developing brain, did and does to us.

Our condition is a direct result and manifestation of living through traumas at a very early age that built themselves into our developing brain, body and mind.  I understood very early in my own research about the reality of my condition that what is known as ‘peritrauma’ is key and central to my understanding of a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern.  Peritrauma is what happens in the middle of the experience of a traumatic event during what the experts call the Acute Trauma stage.

I suspect that we will gain far more information about how the experience of trauma affects us when we begin to connect what the medical profession knows about how trauma affects the physical body with what the psychiatric profession knows about how it affects us psychologically.  At this point in time I find that descriptions of peritrauma are mostly contained within the Acute Trauma medial realm as it relates to the physical body as if our physical body can be separated from what happens within the brain and mind.

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I always use the online Websters dictionary to find definitions for words I require so that my findings can always be consistently tracked back to this one main source of information for the Modern English I use in my thinking.  Yet not even Websters seems to contain the word ‘peritrauma’ or ‘peri-trauma’ within its data banks.  I see this as further indication that we have not yet as a culture put the most important information about what truly creates disaster in our lives into the collective data banks of our own thinking.

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Dictionary: trau·ma   (trô‘mə, trou‘-)

n., pl. -mas or -ma·ta (-mə-tə).

  1. A serious injury or shock to the body, as from violence or an accident.
  2. An emotional wound or shock that creates substantial, lasting damage to the psychological development of a person, often leading to neurosis.
  3. An event or situation that causes great distress and disruption.

[Greek.]

traumatic trau·mat’ic (-măt‘ĭk) adj.
traumatically trau·mat’i·cal·ly adv.

From : http://www.answers.com/topic/psychological-trauma

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I discovered this link through my efforts to connect physical trauma to mental trauma.  I can think of no more of an accurate place to begin to think about the effects of peritrauma as it relates to child abuse than this one:

[PDF]  Psychology of Terrorism

File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
pressure to define terrorist behavior in terms of psychopathology, and he clearly suggests …… peritrauma and posttrauma risk factors, are central …… Webster’s New Collegiate Dic- tionary. Springfield, MA: G & C Merriam Company. …
bourbonandlawndarts.googlepages.com/Psychology.of.Terrorism-0195172493.pdf –

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Acute trauma is the physiological stage we are in while we experience any trauma.  Acute trauma affects every possible aspect of who we are as human beings with bodies — including our brain-mind.  Peritrauma is the ongoing experience of being in an acute trauma experience as we are enduring it.  Post traumatic stages are the result of not completing the acute trauma stage adequately so that it can be ‘passed through’ rather than NOT ‘passed through’.

In my thinking, it’s that simple.  Either we experience the acute trauma stage and come out the other end having completed the trauma cycle, or we don’t.  If we do not complete the trauma cycle this means that aspects of the peritrauma we experienced AT THE CENTER of the acute trauma stage are carried within us in our bodies, brains and minds.  We have not, therefore, re-stored ourselves to the state we were in before the trauma happened.  We have not re-covered our previous state.  We have not re-membered the being that we were before the trauma occurred.

We are left fragmented within ourselves and will not be able to tell a truly coherent story — not even to ourselves — of what the experience was like for us because we are actually still in it.  When we are left with unresolved, uncompleted traumatic experiences within us — in the form of continued and ongoing peritraumatic reactions that originated during the acute trauma experience — trauma will continue to live itself through us.  We are therefore correspondingly robbed of our own ability to live our own lives free from trauma.  It owns us.  It possesses us.  And it can consume us.

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If severe traumatic experiences happen to very young infants and children, the traumas so build themselves into the fabric and structure of the early developing brain-mind that the peritraumatic spectrum of these experiences can never be later extricated.  They instead determine how the survivor will process information about being in the world for the rest of their lives.  Dissociation, I believe, becomes the operating system of these brain-minds because the ongoing peritraumatic experience of the traumas were integrated into the brain-mind itself.

This is how a brain-mind built in, by and for a malevolent world continues to operate as it knows and is forced to always remember that the world is not only unsafe, but is also a disorganized and disorienting place to have to survive in.  It will never be able to re-member itself as having lived before in any state other than a peritraumatic one.  This kind of malevolently-formed brain, created in a severely traumatic early world, can never re-store to or re-cover back to a state it never knew in the first place.

As a result, the disorganization, disorientation, incongruity, and incoherence (and dysregulation) that is by definition a part of the peritraumatic experience during acute trauma will continue to operate through an insecure attachment system within the body and brain-mind of such a survivor for the rest of their life.  Organization, orientation, congruity and coherence, if they exist within such a brain-mind at all, will be limited to certain sections of a person’s life.  These separate sections might contain large fields of related experiences, but these fields of experience will not themselves be healthily connected to the survivor’s ongoing coherent experience of life.

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Trauma triggers create a shift in the ongoing experience of such a person’s life.  This shift is automatic and unconscious, and happens at the speed of light because the electrical communications between the cells of our bodies, including our brain-mind, happen that fast.  For severe childhood trauma survivors, both the trigger as stimulus and the automatic reaction to the trigger, directly stimulate their disorganized-disoriented dissociative core foundation of who they are in interaction with life.  We should not be surprised, therefore, that these people continue to surprise us.  If they COULD become conscious of their patterns, they would even surprise themselves.

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I want to give you a simple and seemingly innocuous example of how my mother’s self was so easily disconnected both from her self as a self and also from the reality of those around her.  My sister, Cindy, pointed this out to me after she read this part of my mother’s June 5, 1959 letter ( *1959 Alaska Letters transcribed 060309 (not filed)):

“Oh, we looked funny when we got to town – me with boots, levis etc and all of us looking – well just like homesteaders!!  I hadn’t been ‘out’ for a week and hadn’t had a real bath since then!  We took showers at the women’s dormitory on the base – and all got dressed up in summer cottons!  My, we felt good!!!

I had packed our things in a suit case but had forgotten soap, shower cap and bobby pins and comb!  I couldn’t do a thing until I had them and even refused to go to breakfast until we were cleaned up.  I went over to the shopping center on Govt Hill and he opened up the store early (he was cleaning it) and I purchased the things.  Oh, I hated to be seen that way.  Once you’re in the city it’s just like Pasadena or any city and you feel out of place not dressed up—

Anyways later I found my shower cap and wanted a refund of 39 cents on one I’d bought so returned it and I was sure he’d never recognize me BUT he did!”

As Cindy points out, my mother often described her country-woman self by using her first name, Mildred.  She described her town-woman self by using her middle name, Ann.  Were it not for the inside information that we have about the condition of my mother’s brain-mind, we could believe that these designations were merely playful.  Yet the words of her letter indicate that she honestly and genuinely was completely amazed if not shocked and stunned that an outsider who had seen ‘Mildred’ would recognize her as being the same person when she later met him as ‘Ann’.

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Her interaction with the shopkeeper was not a significantly traumatic experience for my mother, yet her experience of the interaction demonstrates a key and central aspect of her brain-mind’s organization, or more accurately, of its disorganization.  At the instant she realized that this man actually DID recognize her, some aspect of her inner disorientation affected her.  This illustrates only a tiny drop in the sea of my mother’s ongoing disorganized, disoriented, incongruous, incoherent interactions within her own life.

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I believe that my mother’s deepest taproot of being-a-self-in-the-world was embedded in unresolved early peritrauma.  On this day, today, I would add Dissociative Identity Disorder to the long list of suspected diagnosis I might attach to her.  This list would, in my thinking, run the range from paranoid psychotic, to manic depressive, through Borderline Personality Disorder, some form of schizoid personality disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  She was a very dangerous ‘piece of work’.

Yet all of these patterns nicely fit within a framework of disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment.  As untrue as it might be, and as hard as it might be to accept if it IS true, I would say that just as my mother did not choose the malevolent conditions that formed her early brain-mind including her connection to her own self or her connection to the world around her, I do not believe she had the conscious ability to choose her later reactions to anyone or anything that happened in her life, either.   That includes even her reactions to a shopkeeper’s reaction to her.

She was therefore no more capable of responding appropriately to the world around her, which included her mate and children, that would be a rapid dog.  Anything about her that might have ‘appeared normal’ was simply a part of one ‘larger field of related experience’ or another.  These ‘related fields’ were glued together, organized and oriented around particular patterns and themes such as ‘looking good in public’, ‘taking care of the house’, ‘having well behaved children’, and/or ‘homesteading in Alaska’.

These ‘fields’ were only tenuously and fragily connected to the taproot of one version of her self or another that had managed to form in her early childhood and to survive into her adulthood.  These fields were not solidly and coherently either bound to one another or to her ongoing self-in-the-world.  This allowed ongoing triggers of early traumas to evaporate, on any given occasion, any semblance of ongoing order (or of reasonality) that her fragile psych might periodically be able to construct and maintain.

I imagine these fields as they might exist on floating islands, separated from one another and from the self that creates them.  They are incomplete dissociative realities, but in most cases they are the best that a survivor manage to create in their lifetime.

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Life with our mother occurred in the same active peritraumatic mine field that existed within her own self.  None of us were able to know ahead of time exactly what would trip the wire that resulted in one of her mines exploding.  Her various states of mind and states of being were dis-organized around the ongoing peritrauma that filled her.  There was no healing of these toxic-filled gaps and no way to predict their explosions or to protect ourselves from them.

What I do know is that whatever happened to my mother during her early childhood, she came out of it mad as hell, full of uncontrollable hatred and rage, mean and fighting.  In some cases, ‘hell has no fury like a scorned child’.  Unfortunately my mother’s children were targets of her madness.

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+LINKS TO MY MOTHER’S NEWLY TRANSCRIBED LETTERS PRE-ALASKA AND ALASKA

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Link to letter my mother wrote to my father while we stayed at my grandmother’s house prior to mother and kids joining my father in Alaska.  My mother and my grandmother were evidently NOT getting along!

*1957 Letter to Dad from Grandmother’s House

*1957 Letters Added (not filed)

Link to Alaska letters my mother wrote to her mother:

*1961 Alaskan Letters from My Mother to Grandma

Link to newly transcribed letter my mother wrote as she drove alone with little money and 4 children south to an unknown destination.

*1963 Al-Can Highway Letter (Alaskan Highway)