Tag: maltreatment

+BELOW THE SURFACE – THE CONNECTION BETWEEN SEVERE EARLY CHILD ABUSE, EAGLES AND BUZZARDS

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In two of the places I have lived for any length of time in my life I’ve been able to watch one of two kinds of great soaring birds.  Both in Alaska and in northern Minnesota I watched the great soaring eagles.  Down here in the high Arizona desert right on the Mexican-American border I watch great soaring buzzards.  Each of these two bird species operates with completely different energy and drive systems.

I think about these birds today in relation to the forensic autobiographical work I am doing as I try to understand what happened to my mother in her early childhood that pushed her so far over the Borderline wall that it destroyed her life, and nearly destroyed mine in the process.

Common sense tells us that an eagle is not meant to be a buzzard.  A buzzard is not meant to be an eagle.  And yet, strange as it might seem, the developmental alterations and adaptations that a tiny developing human body must make to adjust to a malevolent early world ends up creating some fantastic combinations than we can begin to see as if they were the result of some cross-hybridizing between these two impressive species of birds.

Both species are able to soar around, floating on air currents, surveying the world far beneath them.  They have the same intent — to stay alive.  But how they do so differs greatly between the two.

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Eagles are designed with a super adrenaline system as their source of energy.  They are birds of prey with keen eyes that can see the smallest movement of prey from hundreds of feet in the air.  They can swoop down to earth at incredible speeds and unerringly nab their meal.

Buzzards, on the other hand, are designed with a thyroid-based very low energy source.  They are not solitary hunters that are designed to swoop and kill.  They are designed to hunt dead prey with conspecifics.  They can still see from hundreds of feet up in the air where they soar in great lazy circles.  Once one hunter spots food the rest are notified, and they simply settle themselves down to earth for a shared feast – the more putrefied the better.  This is the easy life!  The buzzard has broken out of the predator-prey cycle.

See:  +TOMKINS ON EVOLUTION OF AFFECT

Contained in a section from the above link Silvan Tomkins notes the following:

“In man, the thyroid is relatively larger than in any other land animal and is larger than the adrenal in comparison with the ape and virtually all the wild land animals who have a larger adrenal than thyroid.  In the fetus and human infant the adrenal gland is larger than the thyroid.  At the time of birth there begins a gradual decline of the adrenal gland dominance which continues until the twenty-first year at which time the thyroid is 2 ½ times the size of the adrenal glands.  Crile attributes some of the volatility of the infant to this early, more primitive endocrine balance.  (Tomkins/aic/157)”   [Affect – Imagery – Consciousness” volume 1:  The Positive Affects and volume 2:  The Negative Affects by Silvan S. Tomkins (Professor of Psychology, Princeton U) Springer Publishing Company, NY 1962]

In other words, what this information tells me is that very young human infant-children are designed with a hyper-drive adrenaline system that will respond to trauma with much more force and power than an adult human is even capable of.  I imagine that this is so that the tiny human’s body can receive trauma-related signals from its early environment while there is still yet time for biological developmental processes to shift all possible growth and development to allow for future survival (with hopes of reproducing offspring) in a most hostile and malevolent world.  Early malevolent conditions thus stimulate massive adrenaline responses in the human infant-child that have the most profound impact possible on the development of a tiny human being — for one single purpose — to give it the best possible odds for continued survival.

Infant-children are by design vulnerable prey.  It is important to understand that Nature has designed both predators and prey with similar, finely tuned compatible stress response systems.  If an infant-young child is born into an early malevolent environment, particularly when the predator is its early caregiver(s), the potential buried in genetic memory that allows prey to survive will become activated so far as is possible — but not without life long consequences being caused by these alterations.

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From the instant of our conception to the instant of our death, we are, as individuals, on some level ‘in charge’ of the property of our body.  We seldom consciously know, however, what direction the ‘development’ of that property is taking.  These changes happen on the molecular signal and response level.  Evolution has provided us with massive amounts of genetic information and sophisticated mechanisms that tell our genetic memory what to do in any given situation.  Is our property dry?  We best find water.  Is our property too swampy and wet?  Find a way to dry it out.  Is our property in need of soil amendments?  Find some.  Is our property in need of protection?  We better find some of that, as well.

All of this works smoothly and effortlessly – no matter what the conditions are surrounding the fetus-infant-child as it grows and develops just so long as physical life of the ‘property’, or the body, is maintained.  Whatever problems forced adjustment to malevolent early conditions create will, however,  show up eventually as the altered body, including altered brain-mind, later experiences conflict with the more benevolent world such an individual might find themselves living in during their life span.

Our body is our real estate.  It is the ONLY estate we will ever have.  But the conditions of our earliest beginnings do the major job of developing this property, and once that major development has occurred, we will NOT be able to change it.

The young human body is geared like an eagle is to respond from its adrenaline base.  If all is well in early childhood, the adult human becomes more like a buzzard who can soar around in a relatively relaxed state with its human social-specie mates in a state of cooperation and sharing of the relatively easy-to-spot-and-devour requisites for staying alive.  What I see of my mother is that her early distress environment signaled her body, including her brain-mind, to anticipate and prepare for a malevolent world of trauma and deprivation.  She existed in a chronic state of amplified anxiety that manifested itself in all sorts of destructive ways throughout her entire life time.

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She also communicated to my growing infant-child body that the world was malevolent, and shared with me – by building it right into my body – that an adrenaline-based anxiety system was needed as the best bet for staying alive.  My developing body-brain-mind-self had to adjust itself to survive the world that she knew from her own early childhood, and then created for me.  Hence, I have all sorts of anxiety-related manifestations within myself that damage my ability to exist in a benevolent rather than then malevolent world I was designed to exist in.

When it comes to the truth of a harsh reality, the problem for both my mother and for myself is that we simply LIVED TOO LONG.  The adjustments and adaptations that our body-brain-mind-self was forced to make as we developed came from our genetic memory ability to manage the property of our body in a world that far more closely matched an evolutionarily remote malevolent world of human earlier beginnings than it later matched the far more benevolent one we left home to join.

As I see it, the length of time we survived comes from a combination of factors.  Our genetic memory contained powerful adaptive potential, and the world we grew into was not completely distressful enough to destroy us physically at an early date.

There is no magic wand to be waved, no simple switch to flip that will ever readjust a human body once it has grown into adulthood to be a ‘different body’ designed to survive in a malevolent world.  The hands of the clock of evolutionary time can not be simply wound forward so that we can NOW live in a wonderful, benevolent world of plenty of safety and security.  What we need to do is face the facts, own the truth, understand the FULL consequences of infant-child development in a toxic and dangerous world of trauma and deprivation, and then learn how to recognize these consequences for what the truly are.

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+CHILD ART – THE THREE DRAWINGS I HAVE OF MY MOTHER’S

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Three pencil drawings.  That’s it.  That’s probably all I will ever find of my mother’s childhood artwork.   There was one other drawing, well framed and carried from place to place with every move of my childhood.  When I get the family slide shots down from Alaska, I think there’s one that actually has THAT drawing showing as it hung on a wall.

THAT is the one my mother bragged about to me when I was the age she was when she did the ones included in this link below.  THAT one was done when she was 13 and took an art class.  She was proud of it, and well she should have been — but leave it to my mother to be mean about it.

One time when I was about 9 or 10 I drew a picture of her, the very best that I could do.  I was so proud of it, but when I showed it to her she said it was the ugliest picture she had ever seen, and I better never show her another one like it.  She pointed to THAT picture on the wall — a picture of a young child’s angelic face that looked like it was copied from one by a ‘great master’ — and told me that THAT was what good drawing looked like.  Certainly not what I had carried in my small hands to show her.

She hurt me, and I never did show her anything I drew again after that, but fortunately I didn’t stop drawing.  I did it in secret, in private — the same way she did these three drawings you will see when you follow this link.  And they are NOT masterpieces!  But they are fascinating little forensic clues in my search for evidence that who my mother turned out to be was already visible in her childhood.

At the same time I find a little comfort, nearly 50 years after her nasty criticism of MY drawing to see these ones of hers.  They are no better than mine was!

*Fascinating – Three Childhood Drawings of My Mother’s

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I also thought it might be interesting to actually show mother’s child handwriting from her childhood stories — they were written just before to just after her 10th birthday (Dec. 1935 – Jan. 1936).  It is interesting to note that my mother’s grandfather, the same one that died right after the stock market crash in 1929 (when my mother was 4) that so devastated her family and right before her parents divorced, is buried in Wyoming Cemetery.  WYOMING, as you can see in these original pages, is very noticeable:

*Mother’s Childhood Stories — A Few Scanned Pages from Original

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+NEW PAGE ADDED TO ‘CHILDHOOD STORIES’ TONIGHT

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I just pulled a page out of my computer’s hard drive tonight and added it to the blog.  I wrote it over a year ago and have not edited it. I find that the self-state I was in when I wrote some of my pieces is not the same self-state I am in when I try to go back and reread or edit them — which makes the process of doing so just about impossible for me to do.

I was playing ‘hard ball’ when I wrote the following.  Today I can hear the crack of the bat as if I hit the ball so hard it flew over the two tall rusty steel Mexican-American boundary walls to the south of my house.  That ball flies so far and so fast and so hard that it crashes through some poor unsuspecting house owner’s front window and out a back one, spraying shards of glass in every direction.  Of course, this would be an accident.  There was nothing accidental about what my parents did to me.

Be careful when you read this.

I  placed it with

++MY CHILDHOOD STORIES

that I am trying to organize a bit better over time.

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This story describes why I was not allowed to attend my own high school graduation.  The story is an ugly one.

*Age 17 – What My Parents Taught Me About Racism

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+IN MY GRANDMOTHER’S circa 1930 WORDS – Hard times in my mother’s age 4 and 5 year old life

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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.

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I am thinking about what many

Native American cultures say about The Seven Generations.

Much of this

wisdom belongs to the Grandmothers.

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 —

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*Grandmother Cahill’s circa 1930 Writing About Her Father and Husband

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+IN THINK IN MY MIND MY FATHER AND THE MOUNTAIN WERE ONE

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*1959 July Birthday on homestead

*1959 – 1960 Serious winter – Dad smiling on tractor

— In my mind, the mountain and my father were one — I never expected either one to save me.  But never did I love him like I love that mountain place.

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*1960 – May 7 – 4 of us all genuinely HAPPY! YAY!!!

*1959 June – Homesteader Sharon and the Hut

*1962 – Summer -Mother washing face after planting fields with dad

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(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.

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+LINKS TO SOME EARLY PHOTOGRAPHS 1959

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1959 May - walking the mountain
1959 May - walking the mountain

May 1959 – Age 7 – That’s me with the round white thing!  On the edge of the road, dad’s so thin!  He looks like a refugee.

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1958 family on the big rock above hut - dad found this spot when he first discovered the homestead site - damaged photo, but homepfully I'll come across a slide or negative -- I've always felt that my 7-year-old self is excluded in this picture -- I also can see my sadness in this one
1959 May - family on the big rock above hut - dad found this spot when he first discovered the homestead site - damaged photo, but hopefully I'll come across a slide or negative -- I've always felt that my 7-year-old self is excluded from being a part of the family in this picture (a reflection of how my life was) -- I also can see my sadness in this one, and still feel that when I look at this picture. How exquisitely beautiful this place was, and still is, though!

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(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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*1957 Christmas – Back Side of the Eagle River Log House

*Age 6 – Where Am I? Not In These Xmas Tree Photographs

*1959 April 1 – Dad and the Gray Jeep Truck

*1959 April – Buy, Move, Park the Gray Trailer

*1959 Spring – Dad On Road With Stuck Jeep

*1959 – April – Tractor Pulling Truck Loaded

with Jamesway Flooring Up ‘Horror Hill’

*1960 – Still Walking Up Road – With Tractor and Snow

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Pictures are linked to my mother’s letters:

PRESENTING THE HOMESTEADING

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+CRIMES OF MY FATHER: WAS HE AS BAD AS MY MOTHER WAS?

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Comment today on *1962 November – The 5th Year Moose Hunt

“My belief is that my father was a sensitive man” You’ve got to be kidding? He allowed your mother to severely abuse you for 18 years! He lacks any kind of sensitivity at all.

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Reply

Well, as I say, I have to work my way through this regarding my father.  Unfortunately, I’m not kidding — yet at the same time I simply cannot yet look into my own self and KNOW anything about him.  Denial?  I don’t know.  Do I continue to ‘parent’ him in my feeling that he was nearly as much abused by her as I was, except not physically?

I don’t understand the fuller context of my father’s life.  All I know is that I remain completely STUCK in regard to the reality of my father in my life.  I must need to BELIEVE that my father was a good man caught in a terrible, terrible situation he did not have the mental or emotional resources to cope with.  There was no social context for understanding mental illness or child abuse during the years of my childhood.

I was talking to my sister last night about — *AGE 7 – MUD PUDDLE INCIDENT https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/the-devils-child-my-childhood/vignettes-from-my-abusive-childhood/age-7-mud-puddle-incident/ —-

Neither she nor I can YET understand what he could have done that night.  Stop the jeep and throw HER out?  Stop the jeep and throw himself out?  Throw me out?  Drive to the police shop?  They wouldn’t have cared?  If he had done anything else other than simply stare straight ahead and drive that jeep she would have turned that rage equally on him (except physically) and there would have been two equal hellfire rage attacks going on at the same time — instead of one.

Did he believe her actions toward me were justified?  Had she convinced him I was such a BAD child that I deserved everything I ‘got’?  Did he hate me?  Did he wish I’d never been born?  Did he agree with her actions every step down the road of my childhood?  Did he not care?

Or was he a good man caught in hell, in a situation he was helpless to understand or to cope with?  He never left us.  He never cheated on my mother.  He never raised a hand to her.  He seems to have done more than what was humanly possible in his efforts to meet her demands, to please her, to make her happy.  Nothing ever worked.  She was a seriously mentally ill woman.  Did he understand this?

What were the resources available to my father – both inner and outer?  Who was available to intervene from the outside?  Was I more a ‘burr under his saddle’ than a real live child – his child — who deserved a childhood that included protection and love?  THAT this was true I don’t seem to understand, either.  That’s what really matters to me.

Perhaps I share with him the inability to comprehend the reality of the situation.  Certainly my mother’s reality did not include loving Linda.  My identity was eroded and overwhelmed from the time I was born.  Did/do I love my father?  My mother, for that matter?  Is my love for them an issue?  What do I gain by not putting blame, responsibility, and culpability squarely onto the person that was my father?  Maybe, more importantly, what do I lose BY DOING so?

Can a person such as my father was actually be of two minds in the world?  Could he be one person toward me and a different person in relation to everything else in his life?  That’s the way it seems to me right now.  It seems that I can look at him and see the person he was regarding everyone and everything ELSE in his life – except me.

I don’t think I can just know either side of that man without looking at both.  Maybe he was really just like my mother was – like a doll with two completely different faces, one on either side of their head.  Well, that would make a hell of a conspiracy – and that might be exactly what I find.  Can a person legitimately be ‘BOTH’ – two or more different people in different situations?  Does either ‘side’ of them negate the other one?

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But I won’t know if I don’t have the willingness and courage to look.  Readers are welcome to comment as I move through my process.  This is an inside job.  Others can tell me how they feel, what they see, what they know from the outside.  That will help me.  Meanwhile I choose not to feel ashamed – or even for that matter at all bullied – into believing about my father what might SEEM to be true.

Innocent until proven guilty?  What are the clues?  What is the evidence, all the evidence I can find?  This work IS forensic autobiography.  Am I solving a crime?  Is this a mystery?  It still is to ME!

Was my father such a victim of abuse from my mother that he and I shared a platform of victimization in the home of my origin?  Can I stop excusing, defending and feeling as if I want to protect my father?  Are my ‘issues’ with my father as much at the root of my ‘terrible sadnesses’ – and damage done to me — as are the ones I have with my mother?  Can I fundamentally know that my father hurt me?  Do I need to know this?  Why?

Maybe down the road of this investigation I will draw upon ‘technical’ mumbo-jumbo-jargon.  Right now I want to simply put together a collection about my father and my current in-process responses to what I find.

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Right now I seem to have plenty of questions.  I need to let myself find and know answers.  This is a process.  The more specific and concrete readers’ comments are the better.  In the reality of the time frame I was raised in, of the social beliefs about the roles of fathers and mothers (including availability of information about parenting and mental illness), in the reality that law enforcement did not recognize either child or spousal abuse ‘back then’, what could and should my father have done differently?  Was he no different than a Nazi participating in the crimes of a Holocaust?

Given the facts as I best can lay them out – what were the alternatives?

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Was I like that cow moose that stood before my father that day, who did not even try to escape as he took her life?

I could not escape when I was a child.  He did not help me even as he provided for his family.

Was my father as guilty as my mother was?

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+TIME HAS COME FOR ME TO ASK THE SERIOUS QUESTIONS ABOUT MY FATHER

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The following are the words that begin a new chapter in my healing journey.  Tonight I give myself permission  to get to know what I can about my father.  I have created a new heading page for him.

WHERE WAS MY FATHER?

Under this tab I will begin to accumulate information about my father.  I will be brave enough to let my inner self guide me in my searching and re-searching.

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Today, September 28, 2009 I feel I am finally ready to begin to face down my own feelings about my father.  I want to do this because I have NEVER made any progress toward finding my own truth about who and how my father was in my life — either when I was a child or when I was an adult — by continuing to ‘try’ to be angry with him.

My truth today is that there’s a mystery here.  I don’t KNOW my father.  He is talked about in my mother’s letters.  I even have access to letters that he wrote himself.  I have a right to explore and examine my father — as much a right as I have to do this in regard to my mother.

These pages will reflect my efforts to find my father.  I have nobody to answer to about him but myself.  I am granting myself permission to do my own explorations, find my own ‘evidence’,  search for my own understandings, come to my own conclusions — about my father.  Nobody stops me but myself.

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+LINK TO 3rd GRADER ME — WINTER PHOTOGRAPH of DISSOCIATION

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Under picture mother wrote:  Smokey telling Linda “And I want Santa to bring me a bone.” — It strikes me that she could not even relate to ME as a individual CHILD in this picture — the dog had a more real identity than I did to her — I was a frozen cut-out of a child pasted into whatever scene I happened to find myself in at any point in time and space –

DISSOCIATED

Follow link to the picture:

*Age 8 – Photograph – Me, Smokey and Snow

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Looking for something interesting to think about?  Try this Google search:  opioid system attachment

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+TERRORISM – FEAR AND THE THREAT OF BRUTAL ATTACK

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What is life like for the millions of our globe’s population that are destined to live their entire lifespan under the threat of brutal attack?

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Do we remember the community terror instigated by the fear that Russia was going to launch nuclear weapons at America?

The following letter (link below) was sent home from public schools after the events of the Bay of Pigs April 15 – 21, 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 14 – 28, 1962.  This was the closest the world has ever gotten to all-out nuclear war — so far.

— I remember my parents sending all of us older kids outside the Jamesway where I could still clearly hear through the canvas walls mother’s rantings at father about what she wanted him to do if/when the Russians invaded.  She told him to shoot her first and then gave him the order in which she wanted him to shoot the rest of us before he shot himself.

I remember standing at the kitchen of the log house doing dishes probably in the spring of 1962.  I kept looking over my shoulder out the window at the woods in back of the house waiting for the Russians in full military regalia to appear at the door.  I knew Alaska was only two miles from Russia at the narrowest passage point, and based on the adults’ terror at this time I was quite certain that an invasion was likely.

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I could THINK about this externalized terror — and I could fear it.  I had no capacity, however,  to ever think about the terror that existed within my own home.  There was a concept for attack from ‘the outside’ enemy.  There was no concept for attack from ‘the inside’ enemy — the mother who birthed and abused me.

The entire culture surrounding me in my small childhood world feared the Russians and a devastating attack from them.  There was no culture about fearing my mother!

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*Age 10 — 1962 Civil Defense Letter from School

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