The most important work we can do, individually and globally, is the healing and prevention of traumas so that we don't pass them down to future generations. This blog is a working tool to contribute to this good work.
I would like to recommend a book that is used in the training of the best psychotherapists and analysts. I believe it should be a required study for anyone in any branch of the medical professions!
If you are of curious mind and don’t mind stimulation of your thinking, I would suggest this book not only for medical professionals, but for anyone who has ever had the feeling that medical treatment can be inhumane in terms of the attitudes of the supposed helpers – including those who consider it their main job to dish out drugs! Clients and patients BEWARE. If your ‘professional’ does not KNOW the information in this book – there’s a problem!!
I think these professionals are around sickness so much, their own minds and attitudes get sick, and they can be so cocky and sure of themselves and their power that they can become extremely toxic when they are ‘out of balance’! This book has information that can help professionals be accountable for their biases, attitudes and often their stupidity and rudeness. It will help consumers to be more responsible for their own care.
Beware, be-wary, be-aware. If you ever walk out of any professional medical appointment of any kind and feel icky, disrespected or even contaminated, it is NOT you that’s the problem. I guarantee it!! Take a look at this book — get a copy from your public library — order yourself a copy — it is worth every penny you will pay for it!!
October is Parent Involvement MonthPosted: 09 Oct 2009 02:41 AM PDTToday’s youth are tomorrow’s leaders. Their success, in and out of the class room, is the foundation of a prosperous future for all of us.
October is Parental Involvement Month, a time to highlight various ways parents can work with their children’s school to accomplish a shared goal—helping children learn and be successful.
Studies have continually shown that students from families of all different backgrounds and incomes who have involved parents are more likely to: earn higher grades and test scores and enroll in higher level programs; be promoted; pass their classes and earn academic credits; attend school regularly; have better social skills, show improved behavior, and adapt well to school; and graduate and go on to post secondary education.
Quite simply, research shows that students learn more, have higher grades, and have better school attendance when parents are involved.
Tips for becoming more involve in your child’s education:
Look for school activities or events that you could be involved in.
Attend Parent teacher meetings at your child’s school
Eat dinner together as a family.
Help your child with homework.
Take your child on regular trips to the library.
Have a family game night. Have your child keep score.
Have a family reading night. One person can read aloud, or everyone can read silently.
Talk with your children about their day. What was the best part?
After nearly a decade of work, physicians have succeeded in getting the American Board of Pediatrics to offer a specialty in child abuse treatment. Supporters of the specialty said such experts are needed to teach medical students and residents about child abuse.
The first exam in the specialty will be offered at sites around the country on November 16. An estimated 225 physicians are expected to take the test, which will be given on alternate years, and the first certificates will be issued by January 2010. The boards issue certificates in 37 general specialty and 94 subspecialty areas. Board certificates are held by about 85% of physicians licensed in the U.S.
COMING SOON! The finished transcription of my mother’s 1963 letters, including her August 14, 1963 letter with her ‘in-famous’ quote: “I’d hurry faster but I don’t know where I’m going….” Those words alone could sum up the bulk of my mother’s Borderline Personality Disordered tragic life!
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1959 Mother walking up the mountain (fire damaged photograph) - How does it feel to live one's entire life from early childhood in the darkness and not even know you are there? Could she feel or understand that she was including her children (and her spouse) with her in that darkness? I don't believe she had that capacity. Because she was our mother we had no choice but to stick with her, to follow along with her -- through all her lost upheavals as we suffered from the consequences of her troubled, troubled mind. She was lost in the darkest woods her whole lifetime and could not see the stars.
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PLEASE NOTE: I’m working to find emotional abuse recovery resources for men, as well as for women (if anyone knows a super site, please post a comment with info). My father was a severely mentally, verbally and emotionally abused spouse. Most Borderlines are women, which means it is mostly men who suffer from the devastation of being in relationship with them. If my father had been able to seek recovery for himself, he could have been able to help his children — even me.
Current Top Searches that lead readers to this blog:
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Don’t forget, you can use the search window feature on this blog! Otherwise, feel free to stroll around-scroll around these pages. There’s a LOT of information here! And thanks for stopping by for a visit!
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So precious! I dug in the lost-and-found, and here I am out on the great 1957 Christmas tree hunt with my family when I was 6 — our first Christmas in Alaska. Although I disappeared before the tree was dragged into the log house, I am certainly in on the first part of the expedition! I never take it for granted when I see myself (in my turquoise parka with the white ruffs) as a ‘bona fide‘ part of my family!
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1957 heading out on the Christmas tree hunt1957 - so sweet! Here I am with the family! Looks like a serious occasion!1957, tree spotted, in woods behind the Eagle River log house
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See these in context with rest of this 1957 day’s photos:
May 23, 1959 - Age 7 - Me on the right - excluded from the familyJuly 1959 - Age 7 - Me on the right - cut off from the familyDecember 1959 - Age 8 - Me cut off from Smokey
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I cannot improve the focus in these pictures. I expanded from the originals because I wanted to see the similarities between the three pictures in terms of my body language reflected in the three of them.
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AND THIS IS HOW I SEE ‘THE WHOLE BALL OF WAX IN A NUT SHELL’
— the professionals back me up!
This describes what happened to me, to my mother, and the how and why of it all — the 18 years of severe child abuse I suffered — and how my mother became ‘mad’ enough to do it.
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1300/J229v05n03_09 119
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Please follow (above) link to read this entire article and to find the exact references the authors are referring to in this section of their article (below):
“There is no consensus yet on the exact etiological pathway for the development of dissociative symptomatology, but newer theoretical models stress impaired parent-child attachment patterns (Barach, 1991; Liotti, 1999; Ogawa, Sroufe, Weinfield, Carlson, & Egeland, 1997) and trauma-based disruptions in the development of self-regulation of state transitions (Putnam, 1997; Siegel, 1999).
Newer theorizing ties maladaptive attachment patterns directly to dysfunctional brain development that may inhibit integrative connections in the developing child’s brain (Schore, 2001; Stien & Kendall, 2003).
From the vantage point of treating children and adolescents, a developmental understanding of dissociation makes the most sense.
That is, dissociation may be seen as a developmental disruption in the integration of adaptive memory, sense of identity, and the self-regulation of emotion.
According to Siegel (1999), integration is broadly defined as “how the mind creates a coherent self-assembly of information and energy flow across time and context” (p. 316).
In other words, Siegel sees the development of an integrated self as an ongoing process by which the mind continues to make increasingly organized connections that allow adaptive action.
Children and adolescents may present with a variety of dissociative symptoms that reflect a lack of coherence in the self-assembly of mental functioning:
1. Inconsistent consciousness may be reflected in symptoms of fluctuating attention, such as trance states or “black outs.”
2. Autobiographical forgetfulness and fluctuations in access to knowledge may reflect incoherence in developmental memory processes.
3. Fluctuating moods and behavior, including rage episodes and regressions, may reflect difficulties in self-regulation.
4. The child’s belief in alternate selves or imaginary friends that control the child’s behavior may reflect disorganization in the development of a cohesive self.
5. Depersonalization and derealization may reflect a subjective sense of dissociation from normal body sensation and perception or from a sense of self.
This condition and these symptoms originate with insecure early attachments. I believe they lie at the core of many (if not most) later-developing adult-onset ‘mental illness’ disabilities.
These descriptions of childhood dissociation apply to me, except for #4. I did not have enough of a self to even imagine friendship, real or imaginary. I also believe they all apply to my mother, with a shift in #4. She developed the imaginary belief that she could CONTROL her imaginary friends — her children (me being the enemy) rather than being controlled by them.
I can see the lost, empty child in these pictures, cut off from being a member of a family, cut off from the development of a clear and cohesive self. Devoid of a connected lifetime of experience, I appeared simply as a physical body taking up space in the universe, not as an animated LIVING child present as an identity within that body.
At any given moment my exact existence was only determined by the situation I was present in at that moment. If the conductor of an orchestra points the baton at an individual with a particular instrument, it is time for all to hear that instrument play. If we place our computer cursor over a particular link and click on it, we expect and anticipate that a particular action is going to occur.
From the moment of my birth my mother determined in her profound and comprehensive control of me how Linda was allowed to be in the world. Because she never knew me as a human being, nor wished to, I existed as a puppet-fied manifestation of her inner psyche – as her projection of the BAD CHILD.
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There was no room for Linda to exist at all, and I can clearly see that emptiness of personhood and of selfhood in me in these pictures. I appear as a child ‘stripped of a self’.
My emptiness, my dissociation was on an on-again, off-again condition. The few times that I was left alone to be with myself simply existed in their own dissociative bubbles that never connected themselves to the ongoing experiences of me in my own body, in my own life.
I existed in relation to myself as I existed in the world these photographs captured – isolated, cut off, alone, unanimated, empty – like a husk of a child, a shell of a child – a body that existed to be battered, shoved, yanked, slapped, hit, punched, etc. As an empty person to be screamed at, stormed at, thrown around in every imaginable way – at any time for any reason or for no reason whatsoever.
As an individual child-person, I was not allowed to exist. I was not given permission to exist. I ONLY existed as a figment of my mother’s twisted and brutalizing imagination
I no more had an identity or existed as a person (let alone as a child) than did the stone we stood on, the background trees, the tumbling rivers, the passing clouds, or the freezing snow. I was less alive and less whole than was our dog, Smokey. I was an apparition, a wraith, a mirage of a child. Linda wasn’t there at all.
I was a missing child, and nobody noticed because nobody cared. I experienced no difference between the cells of my body, the skin I wore like my clothing, the earth I walked upon or the air I breathed. Moment to moment I could not count on anything. I had always lived in an insecure, unpredictably unsafe world.
No child can for its self, its one self, if it is not allowed to. I was never given permission to exist, so I didn’t. I was as invisible and as intangible as the sound of rushing water or the wind. I was given no more permission to exist than a leaf is, and less permission to exist than Smokey the dog was. The homestead was more real to my mother, to both my parents, than I was.
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If I isolate the image of myself out of these photographs what remains is an unfocused child posed in a rigid standing posture. That, sadly, is about all there was, a child existing by posing as a body – like a tree exists by posing with a trunk, limbs, branches, twigs and sometimes leaves – its root invisible beneath the soil.
But I had no roots. From moment to moment I had no history of my own. I didn’t even have the history of what mother did to me. Even those experiences were not retained, kept, stored or retrieved in any stuck-together ongoing autobiographical coherent story-of-an-ongoing-child’s- life. There ONLY existed each separate ongoing moment, and each of those moments was a likely to change into something else, something terrifying and painful, at any second. — unpredictably, unexpectedly, unfathomably.
Nothing mattered any more to me nor did I matter any more than if I was a snowflake, a scrap of cloth, or a pot to be scrubbed or pounded upon. I simply existed without a self as a body that continued to grow over time without ME KNOWING I was in it. I was my mother’s chosen ‘evil-bad’ projection, barely an object, not a person — and most definitely NOT a child. Does an object have a sense of itself?
Just me age 7 in a body on a rock on a mountainJust me age 7 in a body, rigid, at this second no more real than the grass I am standing onJust me age 8 in the snow in a parka that meant more to mother than I did with a dog mother could love even though she could not love me
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My mother was a master magician. She was an expert at her craft.
Often she would banish me “from her sight”
— sometimes for days or weeks at a time — so I would vanish from the family all together — body and all.
In the family pictures taken of bringing in the Christmas tree in 1957 when I was 6, our first winter in Alaska, I am nowhere to be seen.
I have disappeared completely.
I am ‘missing in action’ and nobody seems to notice I am gone.
093009 post on my Grandmother Cahill’s 1930 autobiographical piece about the death of her father and the ‘queer’ behavior of her husband — (my mother’s grandfather and father).
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If I were about to launch into spoken speech right at this moment, I would start by saying, “I am speechless.” Because I am going to write these words, I can pause in my silence and my writing will continue across this page.
I just copied the types words that reached my hands today in my mailbox. They were written by my mother’s mother 79 years ago. They have taken a circuitous route to reach me, having once been in the hands of my sister when she read these words to me over the telephone two months ago. Before she could mail me a copy of them, the papers that she read to me vanished – inexplicably and completely.
Weeks later she came across another copy of them that were stored within a small blue file box she did not even remember was in her possession. Delighted, she made copies and here I have them with me today. Over the span of their existence, they must have passed through my mother’s brother’s hands, my mother’s cousin’s hands, and my mother’s children’s hands. I do not know, however, if they ever passed through my mother’s hands.
Wisdom. Wisdom shared down the generations. Wisdom passed onto the future generations. Living a life that considers the future seven generations that will follow me. Thinking about how 150 years seems like a long time, but it is not.
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My mother’s grandmother is dead. My grandmother Cahill is dead. My mother is dead. Here I sit, age 58. If my children had chosen to have children of their own at a young age, it is very possible that those grandchildren would be old enough at this moment to be having children of their own.
One hundred and fifty years doesn’t seem like a very long reach to me at this moment. After all, my grandmother’s words in my hands right now came to me from a time point half that distance away from me. I could easily have five generations even of my own family to consider from this chair I now sit in.
Yet what are we learning from one another? What do we pass onto one another? What word, what actions, what wisdom, WHAT? There has to be something good passed down here, not just intergenerational unresolved traumas.
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This link I am posting right now connects all who read my grandmother’s words to a time in her life, and therefore in the life of my 4 to 5 year old mother at that time, when times were hard, circumstances difficult, and emotions complex.
I have always suspected some things about my mother’s early life that are referred to in this piece of my grandmother’s writing. Yes, there was a maid, a ‘nanny’ in my mother’s young life. Yes there were emotionally difficult times that I think overloaded whatever capacity my young mother had to deal with them effectively.
There’s a lot I could say here, but I won’t. I need to remain speechless. I need to consider what it might be that my grandmother could teach today with her words. I need to listen for the wisdom. Is there anything about the story she elucidates in her words here that can somehow assist someone in the next Seven Generations? What are her words really saying now, 79 years later?
Again, like with my mother’s childhood stories, her letters and even with the letters that are still here that were preserved in mine and my siblings’ childhood handwriting, isn’t it more than mere coincidence that all these papers have endured all these years with their messages inscribed and preserved – until such time they could be translated into digital ones and zeros, coded and sent out into the worldwideweb – to perhaps inform or assist someone else ‘out there’ with their own struggles? (And there are more pages here I will be entering ASAP.)
I don’t know. I am just doing my tiny part of the job. Here’s the link for you —
I just watched my gold girl kitty, Goldilocks, sneak up on and capture a small lizard in my newest flower bed this morning. Of course, she first nabbed its tail and if fell off in her mouth. That’s OK. Only in the most dire circumstances does a lizard have to sacrifice its tail, but when they do it is in an effort to survive the nearly unsurvivable. Lizards are designed to grow a new tail — if they escape to a place of safety.
Of course Goldilocks was not about to let this poor little thing get away. She tossed it into the air and followed it wherever it went. Then the other two half grown kittens joined her. Hunter, the boy, ended up with the lizard cornered on the sidewalk. Once flipped onto its back it laid there — as if it was dead.
None of the three wanted to eat this prey, I’m sure there’s something about lizards that make them far more unpalatable than rodents are. Yet as I watched Hunter watching this tailless lizard plopped onto its back with its silver belly to the sky, feet splayed out straight to its sides — I saw it miraculously flip itself over and try to get away again.
Of course Hunter would have pursued it as long as it had life left in its body to move. So I chased away the kitten and picked the lizard up by its tiny little foot and tossed it into the massive azalea bush where I hope it can find its way to safety — and grow a new tail.
It made me think of my father, as my sister mentions in her comments perhaps nearly entirely invisible to us when we were children except for the few precious artifacts of his ‘truer’ self, his original self, his OTHER self that we were on occasion privileged to discover.
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My mother always said that she came to Alaska because father wanted to. She said it was a good thing because he loved the out-of-doors. He loved the mountains, he loved to hike and fish. Before we left Los Angeles he was a member of the Mountaineers’ Club that accomplished search and rescue for hikers in the mountains surrounding the city. He disappeared on week-ends, perhaps to escape her, but she hated that.
Move to Alaska. Homestead. For father’s benefit? For ours? Or because her sick mixed up disturbed mind found for itself the perfect obsession?
All of our lives with my mother were grueling. I wonder what happens to the spouses and partners of those with serious, unrecognized mental disorders. The 12-step program of Al-anon for people with active addicts and alcoholics in their lives says that the people who live with the addicts become ‘as sick or sicker’ than the addict. Isn’t this just as true for spouses of people like my mother was?
Did everyone in my family, my father included, end up like this tailless lizard unable to escape the pervasive effects of my mother’s disturbed psyche? Were we all her prey? Did my father pay the price of losing himself by staying with her for nearly 30 years? Did he flip onto his back and play dead during her attacks on him? If he was so ineffective in being able to preserve his own self with her, how aware and concerned could he have been about what was happening to his children — especially to me?
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It is possible that given a less-than-optimal early developmental environment that a person’s self never develops ‘optimally’ in the first place. Nor would a person’s connection to their ‘self’ develop optimally under malevolent early conditions, either. Perhaps the human ‘optimal self’ is designed through the forces of evolution under harsh conditions to be as dispensable under severe trauma conditions as is a lizard’s tail.
Perhaps only when the forces of ongoing trauma are removed can the self and connection to it be reestablished — or even be established at all, such as in my situation. My mother’s self did not develop properly in her early childhood, nor did her connection to her self. There’s a very good chance that my father’s earliest developmental environment did not allow him the chance to develop his ‘best self’, either. He was NOT a wanted child. Putting these two wounded selves together was a recipe for disaster. Need we be surprised that disaster was exactly what happened?
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PLEASE NOTE:
Just as a lizard has an ‘insecure attachment’ to its tail when its life is threatened, both of my parents came out of their early childhoods with insecure attachment disorders — primarily to their selves. My father’s was an ‘organized’ insecure attachment disorder, the dismissive-avoidant one, I believe. This allowed him to appear to function as a professional civil engineer and as a provider, even under incredible duress.
My mother’s was of the disorganized insecure attachment disorder variety, I believe of the worst kind — a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder. Her true level of functioning was just about zero! If she could manipulate her ‘stage’ according to her fairy tale wishes, she could orchestrate floor-waxing, curtain-washing and cookie-baking like a pro. Anything else? She was a disoriented, disorganized mess.
It took my father’s super human efforts, every single time, to try to get her, and us, out of the incredible messes she made — except for the most important one. He could not rescue any of us — not even himself. We would all have needed outside intervention and assistance for that to happen — and it never did!
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This is interesting!
The following website belongs to Dr. Leland M. Heller, author of the book, ‘Biological Unhappiness’.
Here’s one review of the book by Zig Ziglar:
“Open this book and it will open your mind. By combining proven medical procedure with hope and inspiration, Dr. Heller has made a significant difference in thousands of patients who had little hope for recovery. “Biological Unhappiness” contains critical information for those who have lost hope.”
(Use your ‘back button’ on these or open them in new tabs or windows you can close after each picture-link view)
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I hope one of my younger brothers might write the story of the fire that happened in my father’s apartment — with both his Alaskan sons sleeping there — that my family members — and these pictures survived. It happened long after I left home.
Stop the Storm 
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