Tag: maltreatment

+THINKING ABOUT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT – MY REVIEW OF ‘THE GLASS CASTLE’, A BOOK I HAVE NEVER READ

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Differences between Child Abuse and Neglect

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I am going to pretend this morning that I am critiquing a book.  “All things are possible under the sun,” and like performing surgery on an invisible patient I am going to express my thoughts about a book I have never read.

My sister told me about this book last night in our telephone conversation.  She first heard about it while operating her used book store in Ballard (Seattle).  Customers coming up to her seeking information asked over and over again, “Where can I find the book written by that woman who was abused when she was a girl?”

“What book is that?” my sister wondered.  So she found herself a copy and eventually read it.  Perhaps you have read it, too.

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The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls

(1,311 customer reviews)

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So am I writing today about the book and its story, or am I just writing about what my sister told me about the book from her ‘take’ of it?  Well, a little of both, I guess.  Will I ever read the book?  I’m truthfully not at all sure.   I make it a polished habit not to read anything while I am engrossed in my own story hunting and writing because I do not wish to contaminate my thinking.

Perhaps I have a strange attitude, but it is born from knowing some important information about myself and about how “I” and my brain-mind operate.  Because I have suffered from dissociation ever since I was a very tiny child, and because I now know this, I understand that my brain-mind can put whole batches of information places I do not know about – most, if not all of the time.

I do not want to be writing away while I am in one dissociated state or another and have whole conglomerations of thoughts pop into my sphere of consciousness when I am not aware it is happening, or aware of where the information is coming from.

My sister assures me that because my-our story is so different from Walls’, and because my writing style is so different from hers, this should never be a problem for me even if I DO read her book.  But I lack my sister’s confidence.

So I am left today with thoughts bubbling around beneath the surface of my thoughts today coming from my sister’s description of the story printed on this book’s pages.

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I know neither me nor my siblings have anything like a corner on the market about what it is like to grow up with a crazy parent.  Walls evidently has us beat.  She grew up with two of them.  But my siblings and I can be assured that we are also closer to belonging to the eclectic group of nutty parent survivorship than we are to being a part of the ‘close to ordinary’ or ‘ordinary’ childhood survivor group even though our story, and particularly my story, is about severe child abuse rather than mostly about the kind of child neglect Walls describes.

Yet what my sister reiterated several times last night in her conversation with me about this book is that the public does not seem to understand that there is a fundamental difference between being neglected as a child growing up and being abused.  Walls’ did not seem to suffer from abuse, no matter how neglectful and nutty her parents were.  She and her siblings were obviously seriously deprived of an ‘ordinary’ childhood experience, and suffered from severe deprivation due to neglect, but these children-people were evidently not abused as children the way my sister and I understand child abuse.  Not even close.

From my sister’s description of this book, it sounds as though at one point or another one or the other of Walls’ parents were lucid.  It also sounds like Walls’ parents were able to (1) love them and (2) not commit ‘soul murder’ on them.  Because it is the very early infant and very young childhood growth windows concerned with loving secure attachment that build the foundation of the developing brain, ANYONE who has any kind of safe and secure attachment to loving early caregivers is off to a running start from the beginning of their lives.

This running start allows fundamental brain structures, patterns, and brain circuits to form themselves in an adequate way so that they will continue to operate during all the ensuing time that little person experiences the events of their ongoing childhood.  Without these relatively dependable positive early caregiver interactions the infant-child’s brain will not be based on ‘ordinary’ benevolent world information.  This fact creates a situation where the growing child is left to play an entirely different ball game, with entirely different rules, on an entirely different playing field than any relatively safe and securely attached brain-mind child will ever know.

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The quality of these very early attachments determines how a young child can bond and attach to siblings as well as to parents.  Walls and her siblings were evidently attached to one another.  It sounds as though the very youngest child was left bereft of the sustenance of the attachment to her siblings, and was also left under the care of parents whose mental illnesses caused further and further deterioration of their brain-minds.  She did not turn out so well.

Walls’ story sounds entertaining, mesmerizing, fascinating, titillating, if not entrancing.  Yet while it sounds like a story of terrible neglect and madness, of starvation and deprivation, it is not the story of terrorism that my and my siblings’ story is.  I don’t think the Walls children were raised in hostile enemy territory or brutalized by acts of parental terrorism.

I believe that because the root of my mother’s mental illness was established in a childhood dissociative disorder, and because her mental illness originated in disoriented and disorganized insecure attachment conditions, and because what grew into her brain-mind and out into the way she lived her life caused her children to be projections of my mother’s fragile imaginary friendship – and in my case her imaginary enemy – needs, none of us stood any chance of developing our self as we “grew down into the world” in any ordinary fashion.  This is created for the Lloyd children a very different reality than the one the Walls children evidently grew up in.

Walls’ story sounds like it expresses living madness, but it  does not sound like her parents were terrorists.  We as a nation now clearly know what terrorist actions are like from the experience of the events from the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  Those acts of terrorism were different than any that might be taken in a military combat situation against trained troops sent directly into a war zone.  9/11 devastated innocent civilians.

Terrorism penetrated the boundaries of our nation and overtook the boundaries of everyone who was attacked and left dead or devastated – on every level.  This attack changed us as a nation.  How much more so does terrorism change the development of infant-children?  The experience of 9/11 was a very different one than allowing our homeless to starve to death on our nation’s streets.

My sister told me that one commentator of Walls’ book portrayed her story as being told “without self pity.”  While the ongoing endurance and positive life outcome for Walls and her older siblings sounds if not heroic, at least miraculous and amazing, let us not lose sight of the differences between stories told by people who were directly abused through acts of brutality and terrorism from very early in their life from those stories told by people who did NOT suffer from soul murder, boundary violations by their caregivers, acts of violence and torture, and deprivation of vitally required early caregiver love and attachment.

It is critical that we know the difference between child neglect and abuse.  It is not helpful for the purposes of understanding, intervening, preventing, protection of children or healing the effects of severe child abuse and/or neglect to be comparing peanut butter with a light socket.  It is important that we be able to accept the ‘pain-full’ reality that belongs to the stories severe child abuse survivors tell, and know the difference between this level of overwhelming pain and so-called ‘self pity’.

In any case, we are left needing to examine the resiliency factors that allows victims of both severe childhood neglect and abuse to endure and sometimes to thrive.  Those resiliency factors are ALWAYS there if we look, and know what we are looking for (and at).  Some might call these “the wild cards.”  I do not.  I believe there is nothing imaginary or ‘wild’ about them.  They are very real factors that exist in a child’s life that allow them to “go on being” under extremely malevolent early developmental conditions.  If and when I ever choose to read Walls’ book, these resiliency factors are what I would be looking for in the story that she tells.

To not recognize and accept that powerful resiliency factors DID exist for Walls’ and her siblings, just as they existed for myself and my siblings, is to deny the fundamental construction of our human species.  Just as identifiable and definable circumstances create miserable childhoods, so also do identifiable and definable resiliency factors allow children to survive them, and sometimes to thrive in spite of them.

Reality, folks.  Do not forget reality.  None of us are super human.  Not me, not my siblings, not Walls, not her siblings.  Turning any kind of childhood tragedy into any kind of ongoing adult triumph means that we had powerful gifts provided to us in the midst of childhood traumas of any kind – or we would not be here to tell our stories.  Pretending otherwise is just that – imagining a world where reality’s rules do not apply.

We have a word for pure imagination:  Fantasy.  It is only in the world of fantasy that we can imagine that severe child abuse is the same thing as severe deprivation through neglect — and creates the same consequences.  Reality dictates otherwise.

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In my case, my mother malevolently and maliciously controlled every aspect of my growing and developing self for 18 years so far as was possible for her to do.  She accomplished this through physical, emotional, verbal, psychological, mental and spiritual abuse.  I do not make this statement with ‘self pity’.  I make it in recognition of fact.  She did everything she could imagine to make me miserable.  That she succeeded should be no surprise to anyone, not even to me.

In the Walls’ case, those children each had a self TO rescue, and a self with which to help rescue one another.  My mother’s violating abusive intentions were always intended to destroy her enemy she thought was me.  That I came out of my childhood with any semblance of a self at all is a miracle.  As a result of extreme child abuse, everything I ever do is about trying to find and rescue my damaged self.  I do not believe this would be the case if my childhood history had been of neglect instead of abuse.

That, dear readers, amounts to a waste of what should have been a perfectly good life time.

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+LINK TO WHAT I CAN FIND OF MY MOTHER’S 1964 LETTERS

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There are very few of my mother’s letters for 1964 – I guess they disappeared somewhere over the years.  This is the year she found herself (at 39) pregnant with her sixth and last child.

*1964 MOTHER’S LETTERS

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+TRANSCRIPTION COMPLETE FOR MOTHER’S 1963 LETTERS

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The transcription of the 1963 letters is complete:

*1963 – Mother’s Letters

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+RUPTURE IN RELATIONSHIPS ALWAYS NEEDS REPAIR – MY MOTHER’S REPAIR LETTER

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The saga continues.  Dr. Allan Schore writes in great detail about how patterns of rupture and repair are built into an infant’s developing brain — either under optimal conditions or under malevolent ones.  Nobody can ever be completely ‘in synch’ with others all of the time.  Ruptures are to be expected.  It is critical that healthy patterns of repairing these ruptures get built into the new brain through safe and secure early care giver interactions.

Without healthy, safe and securely attached rupture and repair patterns, insecure attachment patterns will predominantly ‘rule’ the brain — and a person’s resulting actions.  The dominant patters will be of rupture without hope of repair.  Humans do not do well with that scenario, and thus adapt as they find ways to accomplish the needed repair.

I DO believe that my parents were doing the best that they could do with one another — given what they knew and what they had to work with.  This letter gives us some clues about how the ‘repair after rupture’ part of their relationship worked.

*1963 – September 9 – Mother’s “repair” response letter to dad

In context:

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Please don’t rush by the active link I put up there in the post!  This link leads to important insecure attachment information: 

patterns of rupture and repair

This information describes how in early infant-caregiver interactions, the infant is never the one who causes the rupture.  It is always the caregiver, and it is vitally important that the one who causes an infant-caregiver  rupture is the one who repairs it.  Once an infant can move around in the world by itself some distance from its caregiver, rupture and repair patterns already built into the brain begin to expand their affects — and these expanded patterns begin to build what we can call the

‘shame reaction pattern’.

The increasing complexity of the brain-mind and nervous system are fundamentally tied into how the rupture-repair patterns were established in early infant development, and continue to be ‘directed’ by information the growing infant-child receives throughout the ‘shame reaction’ stage of early human development.  As this new stage of mobilization within the wider world is safely and securely negotiated with others, what our body-brain knows about rupture and repair can be expanded to include our every more increasingly complex interactions between ourselves and other members of our social species.  — see

shame and the nervous system

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+AFTER 100s OF LETTERS, THIS ONE’S GETTING CLOSER TO SHOWING THE REAL WITCH MOTHER

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(This letter also posted:  *1963 – September 4 – Letter from dad to mother)

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Hang onto your hat, the top’s down and we’re going for a ride……

1963 August 6 - Here for the first time in all my mother's letters we can begin to catch a glimpse of a glimmer of the real Mildred
1963 August 6 - Here for the first time in all my mother's letters we can begin to catch a glimpse of a glimmer of the real Mildred

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This letter is mother’s (to me, shocking) response to dad’s long (to me, thoughtful and honest) letter of —*1963 – September 3 – Dad’s Letter to Mother While the Rest of Us Are In New Mexico.   Here is an excellent opportunity to look at the pitiful and destructive dynamics in my parents’  relationship.  This is a rare letter because in it she is honest about how she felt both about her mother and my father — and neither honesty nor the truth was my mother’s strong suit in these hundreds of letters of hers I am transcribing.

This letter shows the kind of ‘switching’ that my mother would do, and shows how, even on pieces of paper with a pen as a weapon she would work herself up into a rage filled frenzy.  The best thing for us children would have been — a long time prior to when this letter was written — for our parents to have chosen a place for us to live in so we could get on with some semblance of growing up while having our needs met.

We were growing up anyway.  *1963 – Trip to Santa Fe – Here at Grand Canyon – mom and kids It was not OUR choice for five of us plus my mother to run over two thousand miles away from my father, or to be jammed into a tiny motel room in a strange town, to start school late in the year, to have no certainty about what was going to happen next in our lives.  And as much as any of us children might have loved the homestead, it was not our biggest need to have ourselves dragged back there as pawns in my mother’s sick, distorted ‘mind games’ with my father.

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Another factor that is of course not mentioned in these letters flying back and forth between my parents is the fact that we had lost what might as well have been another member of our family — the log house.  It had been sold.  In order for massive ‘trauma drama’ to be enacted within a family, there must be a stage and a setting.  The dynamics of my mother’s chaos worked prior to this time with three main settings:  the log house in Eagle River, the homestead, and the Panoramic View Apartments in Anchorage.  She had lost the log house, and that fact — like a child growing up and leaving the family — changed how mother’s, and hence our drama was to play itself out after this time.

(For background on the truth of mother’s actions during the year prior to the time this letter was written in 1963, read particularly her late summer, fall and winter letters here: *1962 – MOTHER’S LETTERS and the letters *1963 – Mother’s Letters written prior to our leaving Alaska in August of 1963)

In this September 6, 1963 letter she tells dad:

“I don’t mind if we don’t live there this winter as it isn’t our fault but I’m not the one for you if you feel we should buy a house.  I can’t return under such circumstances.  I simply can’t.  I know I’ll yell, scream and fuss again and I won’t….Bill if we don’t live on the homestead I don’t want to live in Alaska with you.”

It seems clear to me from letters months and years prior to this that it has always been mother who orchestrated the moves off the mountain and  Dad simply obliged her.

From my point of view, certainly toward the second half of this letter, mother is writing ‘crazy-talk’!  She tells him,

“But I don’t, and won’t deliver ultimatums.  You must feel it’s right.  I can’t build my life or our children’s lives elsewhere and if I live there I must depend on you to build our home and work side by side….I’m convinced – always have been – and you’re not!!”

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Please follow this link to read

*1963 – September 6 – Mother’s Wicked Response to Father From Santa Fe

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In a letter September 5, 1963 she stated about the opposite of her letter 1 day later:

“You’ll know what you want to do after your trip – live there now or next summer.  I don’t care.

I want you – I love you – and will work out our problems together.

I am absolutely lost without you!!

Write soon and often.  Your ever loving wife, Mildred -”

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+HECK OF A LETTER! MY FATHER’S SEPTEMBER 3, 1963 LETTER TO MY MOTHER

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*1963 – September 3 – Dad’s Letter to Mother While the Rest of Us Are In New Mexico

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This September 3, 1963 letter is — of course — a private one my father wrote to my mother just after she and we kids arrived in Santa Fe, New Mexico while he stayed in Alaska and worked.  It describes that immediately after they received title to 120 acres of the homestead, they mortgaged it.

This letter is telling because it describes my father’s thoughts as they parallel all the confused, “mixed up” statements my mother makes in her ongoing letters.  He is her husband.  He appears to participate with her in all of it.  My father writes in this letter about the homestead, more than four years after they first moved onto it:  “But after all the wondering, worrying, fretting, back-and-forthing, this is it!  Either that’s our home or it isn’t, and now’s the time to decide.”

Reading this letter does not help me one single bit in understanding my father!  That disappoints me, but it’s a fact.  Their marriage was none of my business.  The decisions they came up with over time directly affected all of their children, as any parental decision is likely to do.  But here I feel as if I am still trying to peer though a closed door without a window to see anything about what’s really going on past it — no different now than if I was trying to understand their world when I was a child myself (though it certainly never occurred to me to think about trying to).

How does one judge ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’?  Even to me now their problems seem so strangely proportioned.  They are not talking about what color to paint the house they’ve been living in for 20 years here.  It seems that chaos was so ‘ordinary’ in our lives that nobody, certainly not my parents, ever noticed they were in the thick of it.  Perhaps it’s like thinking that living in the center of a tornado was normal.  Our family reality just WAS, without question,  in part because there never was any other reality visible within our world to compare our version of life against.

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This letter belonged to a private conversation between my parents.  The contents of it related to decisions that of course affected all of their children.  Yet, 46 years after it was written I still feel like a voyeur reading it, let alone transcribing it, let alone publishing it here on the world wide web.  Obviously it survived.  Obviously it somehow found its way into my house, into my hands, onto this clipboard of mine sitting here beside my computer at this moment.

But I ask myself the questions, “What is your purpose in doing this, Linda?  What do you hope to learn, think you might be able to come to understand about your parents, about their thinking, about their relationship, about the way they made their decisions together — and about how they observed their lives separately and then combined their two separate selves to create a marriage and hence created THE LIFE of their children?”

Do I see in this letter, for example, any of the mental, emotional, verbal and psychological abuse I suspect — no, I KNOW — went on with my mother as perpetrator and my father as victim — during my childhood?  It seems that they so shared their reality that there wasn’t a separate ‘her’ and a separate ‘him’.  I could say that was ‘ordinary’, but I also know long after I left home my father divorced my mother after staying with her for more than 30 years.

Was my father such a ‘giving’ man and such a ‘giving in’ man that he simply found a way to let her push him, push at him, for all those years and he just kept moving in whatever direction the force of her force — forced him?

Reading my father’s letters leaves me feeling as if I am standing dangerously close to an erupting volcano.  I am completely cloaked with soot and ashes.  I see the roiling lava swiftly approaching me where I stand.  Yet my feet are so fixed in place that I cannot move to safety, even if I had the thought to do so.

The air becomes so dark with smoke that I can no longer see my hands in front of my face.  I hear a deafening roar, and a cracking, breaking sound.  The earth begins to quake beneath my feet and I crumple to the ground and I cannot get up.

Unlike my mother in her childhood story of a city devoured by flames, I am completely alone.  My only hope is that my father will love me enough to save me.  He never did.

This September 3, 1963 letter shows me why he never could.  It unsettles me to realize that my father was absent to me because he absolutely shared my mother’s reality.  There was no ‘other dad’.  Just this one.  He did not exist in my world, only in hers.

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So what can I make of it when father writes this in his letter?

“I enjoy the notes and post cards the kids have sent.  I love them all (the kids, I mean), and not just as a group but each one for himself and herself.  It all seems so familiar, writing something like that, only difference is there’s one more now.”

I do not know!  The very old, often beaten into me by my mother, thought pattern arises — “We would all be fine if it wasn’t for Linda.  Linda is the cause of all the troubles in the family.  She’s more trouble than all the other children put together.  ‘Trouble’ should have been her middle name.”

Yes, my left intellectual brain knows now that I was my mother’s dissociated imaginary enemy.  But that fact does not always comfort me.  I have to reach for it — like I would have to reach for an umbrella before I wandered out into a soaking rain.

Mental illness.  Illness that affects the mind.  This letter is in the thick of it, and it’s an effort at this moment as I transcribe this letter not to feel sucked right back into it!  Crazy.  Crazy making!  “Stop this train!  I want to get off!”

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Letter appears in context with  *1963 – Mother’s Letters

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JUST FOR YOUR INFORMATION:

Depression and Heart Disease: 5 Facts You Should Know

+STEALING OUR CHILDREN’S LIGHT

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Every time we try to get our adult attachment needs met through our children we are placing them in our darkness and stealing from them the light they need to build their own strong self so they can live their own good life.  Doing so is the surest way to destroy our children’s lives — which is certainly not what we hope for.

It is critically important that we foster our children’s attachment to us as parents, not the other way around – and not mutually.  Yes, parents need to be bonded with their children, but that is not the same thing as parents having to have their attachment needs met by their children.  Parents are their children’s care givers.  We can only activate our care giving system when our attachment-need system is deactivated, or turned off.  Otherwise the whole natural process of raising healthy-minded, safely and securely attached children is contaminated, and unresolved trauma is passed down the generations.

Adults, particularly those who were not raised themselves by securely attached adults who knew how to meet their own attachment needs appropriately outside their parenting relationship – and thus have a resulting insecure attachment disorder coupled with an empathy disorder themselves — need to become crystal clear about what their own attachment needs are and how to get these needs met appropriately without involving their children.

If we ourselves have an insecure attachment disorder, we will be forever at risk for passing this insecure attachment pattern down to our offspring no matter how hard we try not to.  We need information, we need it NOW and we need it desperately!

I am most strongly recommending the writings of Dr. Daniel J. Siegel.

— WEBSITE:   Mindsight Institute

Parenting From the Inside Out by Daniel Siegel and Mary Hartzell (Paperback – April 22, 2004)

Better Parents, Better Spouses, Better People (Wired to Connect: Dialogues on Social Intelligence, 2) by Daniel J. Siegel and Daniel Goleman (Audio CD – 2007) – Audiobook

The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are by Daniel J. Siegel (Paperback – Oct 22, 2001)

The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being by Daniel J. Siegel (Hardcover – April 1, 2007)

The Neurobiology of “We”: How Relationships, the Mind, and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (Sounds True Audio Learning Course) by Daniel J. Siegel (Audio CD – May 1, 2008) – Audiobook

Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation by Daniel J. Siegel (Hardcover – Jan 12, 2010)

Healing Trauma: Attachment, Mind, Body, and Brain by Daniel J. Siegel, Marion F. Solomon, and Marion Solomon (Hardcover – Jan 2003)

The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development & Clinical Practice (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) by Diana Fosha, Daniel J. Siegel, and Marion F. Solomon (Hardcover – Nov 16, 2009)

Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy by Kekuni Minton, Pat Ogden, Clare Pain, and Daniel J. Siegel (Hardcover – Oct 13, 2006)

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Adequate parenting means we can respond adequately to the needs of our children.

Please also see on this blog:

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part One

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Two

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Three

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Four

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Five

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Six

**Attachment Styles and Caregiving from Collins Article

**Attachment Styles from Collin’s Article

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+LINKS TO NEW PAGES ADDED TODAY INCLUDING MY CHILDHOOD ART

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New links today

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*Age 9 – Happy Photo of Me and Baby David

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*Grandmother’s Notes On Analyzing Mother’s Handwriting

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*A FEW OF MY CHILDHOOD HANDMADE GREETING CARDS

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I included in this link (above) ‘The Reindeer Envelope’ that is considered in far more detail in this link below!

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See more - click on the link below
See more - click on the link below

*Age 8 – The Reindeer Envelope – My Own Art Work Analyzed By Me – The Art Therapist

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And one of my mother’s letters:

*1963 – July 1 – Mother’s Letter About the Death of Her Father

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I will add here, because the topic of “I love Mother” greeting cards applies, that never in my childhood until I was 17 years old did I EVER feel angry at my mother.  I had no possible concept of that.  I had no concept of love, so I had no idea if she or my father loved me.  Nor did I have any concept of loving them — or anyone — except for my pet rabbits who were ‘one’s to me, as was the homestead, the mountains, the valley and all they contained.

Making ‘loving cards’ so one could ‘give loving cards’ was simply something one did — like eating, walking, sleeping.  Today I certainly don’t care one little bit about whether they loved me or whether I loved them.  It absolutely couldn’t matter then — what happened IS what happened, no matter what words they would have used themselves to explain their actions.  It doesn’t matter to me at this moment if I loved them or not.

Being able to read the images that my tragic, said and yet incredibly wise, strong and evidently directed self created is what matters to me.  That I can see my protective process in these images, especially in the reindeer one, gives me a renewed appreciation for the resiliency and resourcefulness of the human spirit.  That image shows that I was going to make it — and, by golly, I DID!  THAT’S WHAT MATTERS!

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+BEING MY MOTHER’S IMAGINARY SWORN ENEMY

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Deadly Child’s Play

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The consequences of some childhood imaginative play can be so destructive when carried into adulthood that we have no real choice other than to call it deadly.  My mother’s play fit this category.

For all the writings that attempt to describe and explain the behavior that some Borderline Personality Disorder parents, particularly mothers, engage in with some or all of their children, fit this category.

The reference for this post about the symptoms of dissociative disorders in children can be found below.  There is only one single aspect of the material contained in it that I wish to address right now:

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.

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I am also writing a reply to a comment my second to the youngest (1961) brother wrote today.  I believe that my mother suffered from a pre-Borderline Personality Disorder condition from the time she was no older than 6 years old.  I believe that what went wrong for her prior to that age had already spawned this condition so that without immediate and adequate childhood intervention, the course of the progression of her mental illness was – by today’s enlightened standards and knowledge about the disorder – entirely predictable.

She was, therefore, already mentally ill when my father married her.  The ‘up side’ of her disorder allowed my mother to appear as a vivacious, charming, stunningly gorgeous catch of a wife.  That she was too vivacious, charming, stunning and gorgeous could not have alerted anyone at that time to the terrible troubles that lay down the road of her life – and down the road of anyone’s life that she captured in the web of her illness.

My mother had a mind that could ‘think’ only in terms of the imaginary world of her early childhood.  My father fit the image of her perfect imaginary Perfect Husband – with only one fixable flaw.  As she used to tell us, he did not smoke a pipe.  That was easy.  She convinced him to start smoking one.

The birth of a son for a first child also fit her perfect imaginary world image of motherhood.  EVERYONE wanted a boy to be born first.  It amazed me that my oldest brother’s wife could hear the hysterical tone of my mother’s psychotic mind in the ‘voice’ used to comment in my brother’s baby book.  My brother and I were evidently still so captured in my mother’s web, even three years ago, that we could not detect that crazy woman’s crazy voice.  My astute objective sister-in-law sure could!

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So, yes, in response to my brother’s comment, my mother did become the woman she already was when my father married her – just more so.  By the time I was born, through complications of my being a breach birth that nearly killed the both of us, and due to a psychotic break that seemed to have happened to her while she birthed me, Linda, the first born daughter and second child to be born into this perfect imaginary married life of motherhood for my mother, was assigned a role all of her own.

I need to mention that according to the way my mother described all during my childhood how I tried to kill her before I was born, that the devil sent me to kill her — that part of the psychosis could easily have happened with its resulting consequences no matter which sex I had been born as.  After all, back then she had no way of knowing if I was a boy or a girl until I actually appeared.  Which brings me to the clearest way I have yet found to explain and describe what happened to me next – and through contamination, to my siblings.

My mother did not have imaginary friends from childhood that controlled her as the above number 4 symptom of childhood dissociative disorder suggests.  She formed her imaginary mental and emotional structure, I believe, while playing alone with her dolls.  They were her initial imaginary friends, and she could, of course, control them absolutely.  When she began to have children of her own she simply slid her imaginary friend structure over on top of us.  With one exception.

For whatever reasons, no doubt stimulated by the difficult circumstances of my birth, I was NEVER my mother’s imaginary friend.  I was her imaginary mortal enemy – so bad that I was assigned the status of being so evil that I was not human.   I was a demon, the spawn of the devil, the devil’s child.  I strongly suspect that her psychotic break in labor was facilitated by the use of the anesthesia used at that time for women in labor, Twilight Sleep.  This drug combination is know to have induced severe nightmarish hallucinations that were SUPPOSED to be ‘not remembered’ along with the pain of birthing.  For some women, particularly those with pre-Borderline or other psychosis-related underpinnings, administration of this drug became their demise.

In taking a short-cut here, I can clearly see the pattern my mother applied to her children as we were forced to assume the cloak of her imaginary friend/enemy projections upon us.  First born (1950) son was the Hero, second born (1951) daughter the sworn mortal Demonic Enemy Satan’s Child, third born daughter (1953) God’s Child, the Angel Saint, fourth born daughter (1955) the Fairytale Princess, fifth born son (1961) the Alaskan God Son.  I cannot yet name imaginary friend status of the sixth son (1965).

My mother had no conscious capacity to recognize these patterns.  I think my father believed her fantasies without question, as well.  I doubt he had any more of a capacity to recognize what he was dealing with than she did.  She was his wife, the mother of his children, and he evidently believed her — lies about Linda.

I see us all in a police line up.  I see us all having our mug shots taken, and instead of our actual name and identity being recorded, we each have our chosen imaginary friend – or enemy – designation attached to our existence in my mother’s – and my father’s – world.

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We were all simply a part of my mother’s mentally ill child’s play.  I differ from authors who might suggest the ‘imaginary’ role belonged to my mother – witch, waif, etc.  The imaginary designations with their resulting and correlating treatment we received from her, belonged to her broken mind.  The source of all of our suffering, including to a large extent the suffering of her imaginary Perfect Husband, came from whatever combination of trauma and adaptation to trauma and neglect that my mother made well before she was six years old.

Because my mother was by physiology a female, and raised a ‘traditional doll playing girl’, her psychosis centered around home and family.  Had she been a boy, who knows where her psychotic imaginary play would have taken her in adulthood.  Perhaps she would have been likely to murder us, chop us into little pieces and store us in a wall, bury us in the yard, or eat us.

Fortunately, that’s not the story being told here.  What I know of what happened to me was on the level of soul murder, and that’s bad enough.  Because the imaginary friend status assigned to my siblings was not enemy, they were able to ‘escape around the edges’ and form some self of their own.  My history with her was of her continually controlling me and abusing me as much as she possibly could.  When it comes to being able to empathize with my mother enough to truly understand her underlying unconscious motives, nobody who did not share my mother’s psychosis can ever know what it all seemed like and felt like inside of herself.  I probably come the closest because she so pervasively invaded and obsessively controlled me.

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Herein lays the difference between siblings that are not often apparently abused by a mentally ill parent and the Chosen One that is insanely and chronically abused.  My mother did not have the ‘benefit’ of knowing who her imaginary enemy was until I was born.  Once she KNEW, she then had a specified target upon which she could focus the full destructive intent of her psychosis.  And believe me, that’s exactly what she did.

All the moving around we did, what my mother refers to in her letters as “shifting” from place to place, simply HAD to happen as a result of the unanchored mercurial madness of her extremely disturbed mind.  It began very early in her marriage and became far more pronounced with the progression of her illness once we reached Alaska when I was five.

This “shifting” deprived all of us of any stable footing beneath our childhood feet.  Coupled with the toxic contamination of being raised by an unstable mother who was obviously capable of severe depressions and violent rage attacks, all six of her children can no doubt say that they “did not have a happy childhood.”  This does not mean that there were not positive aspects to our childhood, because there were.  Yet each of our separate, individual experiences of our childhood, even with the underlying madness, depended to the largest extent upon which one of my mother’s inescapable imaginary friends – or enemy – identities we had been assigned at our birth.

Excluding and excusing my father from responsibility for either his active or passive participation in my mother’s madness places him on the level of being a child rather than of being an adult.  He was no doubt a traumatized adult, but as one of my commenter’s wisely points out, he WAS an adult and we were his children.  At the same time that he might have been my mother’s imaginary husband, he was our very real father, as she was our very real mother.

There is no judge and jury here.  There is no real question of accountability.  It’s far too late for that.  My intention is to uncover what I can of the clues, the evidence and the seeming facts about my childhood of unimaginable suffering.  That it could have been worse is obvious.  That it never got any better is equally obvious.  I am, at best, simply a survivor of a childhood that should NOT have been allowed to happen.  And it wouldn’t have, if anyone, anywhere, had cared enough to pay adequate attention and take some appropriate action on behalf of my parents’ traumatized children.

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Because the early experiences of my mother’s own childhood left her with a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder, focusing on fighting her ‘war’ against the enemy that was me allowed her to find a purpose (other than homesteading so she could have her imaginary Kingdom) that to some extent allowed her to organize and orient her inner life.  Hers was a war waged in the private confines of our home.  It was a war of terrorism.  It was a clandestine war, as most wars against innocents are, with me as the victim because my mother lacked the capacity to know I was her precious little girl, not her enemy.

Main Entry: clan·des·tine
Pronunciation: \klan-ˈdes-tən also -ˌtīn or -ˌtēn or ˈklan-dəs-\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle French or Latin; Middle French clandestin, from Latin clandestinus, from clam secretly; akin to Latin celare to hide — more at hell
Date: circa 1528

: marked by, held in, or conducted with secrecy

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REFERENCE as presented in this October 1, 2009 post:  +CHILDHOOD DISSOCIATION, DEPERSONALIZATION, DEREALIZATION – I NEVER HAD A CHOICE TO BE OR NOT TO BE

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Guidelines for the Evaluation and Treatment

of Dissociative Symptoms in Children

and Adolescents

International Society for the Study of Dissociation

Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, Vol. 5(3) 2004

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.

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  What are the Causes of Borderline Personality Disorder?

  Conditions Related to Borderline Personality Disorder

  Treatments for Borderline Personality Disorder

  Getting Help for Borderline Personality Disorder

  Life With Borderline Personality Disorder

  Symptoms of BPD

  Diagnosis of BPD

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Check out this super website!

Baby Brain Development

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+COLD FISH – AGE 11 – LETTER I WROTE TO MY GRANDMA

alchemynow2 Comments

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Moving into the more ‘recent history’ of my childhood as I search through my mother’s accumulation of papers begins to make my stomach queasy and gives me a feeling that something icy is crawling around on the inside ‘surface’ of my skin.  I feel very small, nearly caught by the cast of a massive creeping shadow.

The following link is to a letter I wrote to my grandmother while we were living in the Eagle River log house the winter of my 6th grade of school.  I enjoyed very much reading about the ‘clappers’ because I have never forgotten that experience — though now I know that at the time I was (just to make you a little curious) sick to death of ‘clapping’!  I have always remembered being a part of the group with all of my classmates, on equal ground and on equal footing with them as we practiced our unique musical skills.  I have always thought what joy it would give me to be able to repeat the experience with a group of adults!

I can sense the same lack of emotion in this letter that I sense in the ones I wrote to my own mother well into my adulthood — before I disowned her.  I hear the cold distant ring of the left-brained intellect, devoid of any in-formation from passion, from body memory or emotion from the beating heart of the right brain.

It’s like I hear myself speaking in a vast, empty hollow chamber so big that all sound dissipates into nothingness before it can actually reach anyone — and I am absolutely alone.  More accurately, it feels to me today like I opened my mouth, pantomiming communication but not a single word or sound came out.   I see the image of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’.  How does a child create a self in a world of violence, where the inner and the outer world feels exactly like a vacuum?

Perhaps it’s the contrast and contradiction between supposedly attempting to communicate in my letter, while at the same time knowing that ‘Linda wasn’t at home’ when she wrote it that bothers me most.  She/I was not connected to any feeling center that was informed with the warmth of being alive in a body in her/my world.

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*Age 11 – My May 30, 1963 Letter to Grandma

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