Tag: mean mother

+DISSOCIATION IS ORDINARY AND NORMAL WHEN OUR CHILDHOODS ARE NOT

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Breaking free from denial (magical wishful childhood thinking) about our histories of child abuse is essential at some point for any recovery to be initiated.  In these next journal pages I began my attempt at that process.

This section of my age 31 journal covers my entry into trauma and addiction treatment.  My childhood experience of severe trauma was recognized and validated in this treatment process, but evidently once therapy began in earnest I was expected to turn my journal writing into my therapists and I complied.  I have no record of that treatment process.  The treatment center closed when the owner died about 10 years ago and evidently all records were destroyed.

From my 2009 perspective of today, I suggest that very few, if any severe child abuse survivors made it through their childhood without dissociating.  I now understand that even though I did not dissociate during the incidents of abuse I experienced for 18 years, I did dissociate BETWEEN them.  This means, as I have said before, that my experience of my own childhood is in dissociated fragments.  What I know now is that “as it was in the beginning, so shall it forever be.”

I do not believe there is any way to ‘heal’ myself from this fact.  It is just as important, however,  for me to recognize the dissociation built within me as it is to recognize the horrors and traumas that caused it from the time of my birth.  No therapist I have ever had helped me to understand what dissociation truly is, how it affected my childhood development and how it affects me today.

And as I begin to understand these aspects of myself now, I also am coming to understand that I am NOT BROKEN, I am simply different from ‘ordinary’ people as a result of having survived extraordinarily traumatic childhood experiences that changed me during my critical stages of child development.  In my case, I do not see dissociation as the proverbial and supposed ‘defense mechanism’ professionals seem fond of naming it.

My dissociation is not ‘psychological’ in any Freudian sense.  There is simply more than one way to ‘be’ in the world because there is more than one kind of world to ‘be’ in.  How our body-brain-mind-self gets made in the first place is a result of which kind of world we were living in while our development took place.

My dissociation happened because the separate incidents of horrible trauma that happened to me as an infant-child made no sense.  There was therefore no way for my brain to ‘associate’ them together.  The only pattern present was unpredictable, violent, scary insane chaos and nobody’s brain can build itself in any ‘ordinary’ way under these kinds of malevolent circumstances.

I was not, of course, even remotely aware of my dissociation as I wrote the June pages of my 1983 journal.  I simply recorded what I thought I remembered from my childhood, but even this was a significant step.  I had never done it before.  In the end, it is not the details of the traumas themselves that I may or may not remember (over 90% of them I’m sure I never will remember consciously) that matter.  It is how my growing body had to adapt and change as a result of experiencing these traumas that matters to me now.

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*Age 31 – Journal Starting June 10 to 27, 1983

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I do not wish to leave the information contained in these links behind as I continue with my posting.  Please consider them for your study:

+TODAY’S ARTWORK – A BORDERLINE MOTHER’S DAUGHTER –

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*Age 58 – Artwork October 29, 2009

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I could wonder if my spontaneous, quick art work images will ever come out innocuous instead of intense and unsettling, but then I would be contradicting myself.  When I write about not believing images come from any invisible ‘inner child’, I am at the same time very aware of how people could interpret this kind of creative process I am doing as being related to having an experience with such an invisible entity.

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From today's artwork link - Borderline Mother

What I know about how my child abuse altered brain operates helps me to understand my artistic process in a different way.  Particularly because my Borderline mother’s abuse of me began when I was born, neither of the hemispheres of my brain nor the way they operate together developed in an ‘ordinary’ way.  All of us have access to an unending storehouse of images.  The biggest problem is trying to get around our left brain’s inner critic, as  Betty Edwards describes in her excellent books about drawing.

Perhaps because of the affects my early abuse had on my developing brain, I have an almost literal switch I can flip, or a door I can simply open, that turns my left brain critic off and allows my creativity to escape.  I don’t believe my left and right brain hemispheres ever developed an ‘ordinary’ working partnership with one another, so I-Linda am learning that I can tell them what to do.  I can tell my left brain to just get out of the way, making an art image is not its concern.

There is no reason for any of us to worry about how we make our images, what they contain, or even what they look like.  To me, the important part of the process is simply to trust ourselves with the process of creating a representation of any image our right brain passes ‘out’ to us.  As humans, we have a clear inner sense of imagery.  What I really suspect is going on is that, as Alice Miller considers in her book I mentioned in yesterday’s post, Pictures of a Childhood: Sixty-Six Watercolors and an Essay, is that being an adult in our ‘modern culture’ makes us afraid of the image making process because we are afraid of what we will see.

Images cannot hurt us.  Giving them tangible visibility will not hurt us.  Most likely we will be helped, not harmed.  If we ‘give birth’ to an image that is intense or unsettling, all we have to do is put it away somewhere and keep it for as long as it takes for us to be able to be able to tolerate our own images so that we can witness our own expression.

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Every image has something powerful to say.  Because we are often raised, particularly those of us with severe child abuse histories, unable to stand in our own power as individual selves, it is often the experience of the power of creating itself that feels frightening to us.  Making art is a personal-power-enhancing process that belongs to all of us.  It is very simple.  We simply have to give ourselves permission and that whole world of making art is ours.

I am working with dollar store art supplies.  I use larger 5″ by 8″ index cards.  These ones happened to be included in a metal file box designed for that sized card I bought at the thrift store to save my childhood-related photographs in once they have been scanned and posted.  I like that size, though any size will do.  One advantage of choosing a size to begin an art image exploration series is that the limitation of size becomes a freeing factor because it does not need to be renegotiated as a choice every time a person begins to work.  I also have glue and colored paper, cheap paint, markers and crayons.  I am wishing for some oil pastels, but I don’t have any and that lack is NOT going to stop me.

I am, of course, encouraging every single one of my readers to get themselves some basic art materials and something to put them on, and go to work playing with their own image making process.  You will be amazed at the process and the results.  Show your images, keep them, hide them, post them.  One thing I strongly recommend is that on the back of whatever you make, always put the full date and the sequence number of the piece for the date you make them.  I can — and probably will at some point — explain why this matters.

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If I wanted to ‘work with’ my own images as an art therapist, I would have my work cut out for me.  They seem simple, they produce themselves quickly, but each one holds a universe all its own of ‘in-form-ation’.  I’m not at all concerned with that right now.  I only want to make them as a part of my commitment to myself to allow my self to ‘speak’.  I am eager to discover what this process has to teach me — both the process of making and the art images themselves.

But I do not wish to fly too close to the sun.  I have no intention of overwhelming myself by being too brazen about ‘digging out the truth’.  Whatever I do or don’t do, the truth already exists.  I simply need to get strong enough to visit it.

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Don’t miss this

Traumatic Childhood Can Reduce Life Expectancy

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+THE GLIMMER OF BEGINNING TO KNOW WHO I AM

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I was feeling better in this section of my journal that ends on my ‘Golden Birthday’ of turning 31 on the 31st of August, 1982.  I was beginning to take form as a person, becoming less hollow and less like a ghost-girl in my own life.

I think the successful definite steps forward I had made by working through some very difficult school work bolstered me.  My feet might have still been mired in the unknown of my past, my ‘true self’ was still missing in action, but the woman I was becoming had begun to find some sunshine for herself.  The vigorous exercise workout I was doing made me physically strong and began to anchor me into my body.  I was gaining a sense of self-confidence for the first time in my life.

I now had nearly two years ‘clean and sober’ (from nonprescription drugs), had a sponsor and faithfully attended at least one AA meeting every week.  I also attended a weekly woman’s growth and support group through the local mental health center.

Part of my transformation was coming through my ‘discovery’ of so-called ‘feminism’ as I began to understand that women experience their lives very differently than men do.  I believe I was for the first time beginning to collect for myself a sense of my own personal empowerment.

*Age 30 – Journal from May 1982 through August 1982

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May 22, 1982

“Things OK in the water bed – Leo is keeping to himself.  I think he’s afraid to touch me – sometimes I’d like to be touched; not sexually — just touched.”

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We could not get anything larger than a double bed up our little stairs, so the king size water bed was the only solution we could think of.  Well……

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I knew inside on some level there was something ‘wrong’.  I really knew.   I found this in one of my little poems on this date —

“Do I have a personality

When there’s no one here but me?”

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June 9, 1982

“Perhaps calcium now

Will help calm me down

But I don’t feel like myself

My spirit feels larger

Than my body

Like a wad of bread dough

Or play dough

Yellow”

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June 16, 1982

“Decided I may try writing an autobiography –”

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I record a 2009 note with this journal entry about two statements made, on two occasions by two different people — that changed the course of my life — because I heard them and I knew they were true.

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June 26, 1982

“Been cleaning – sorting clothes in closets and dressers all day.  Felt real depressed yesterday – [Doctor] decided to up the Imipramine to the 150 mg.  I was taken off of Desipramine – slow the thoughts down – don’t handle being alone very well.”

I could not handle letting my own inner reality surface — not yet, anyway.  I can sense my insecure attachment disorder here, like an invisible electric current running inside a live wire.

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July 2, 1982

“I’m feeling my wild feeling, and walked down the “trail” to an old grain wagon parked in the grasses.  The sun is still above the horizon, and it is hot.  Clouds below the sun will soon swallow it.

Wind is rustling the trees, and I am reminded of the homestead – the trees on the mountainside and the river on the valley floor.

I’d like to be that wind – free – from thought.”

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“Oceans lie where we can always find them.  Why can’t I?”

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“And as I write, capturing time,

I can reread, and see my past

In my present.”

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August 3, 1982

“Now

I’m a spider

Expertly spinning

My thoughts

Into miraculous

Flowing webs

When I’m depressed

I’m a fly

Tangled

Frightened

Captured

By these same

Silken

Threads”

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I just had a 2009 thought as I read this.  I wasn’t only unaware of HOW to feel, I did not know HOW to think, either (not about anything personal).  I did not grow up in my insanely abusive childhood being able to think.  ‘Ordinary’ childhoods, without a need for continual and nearly constant dissociation, no doubt allow children to grow up THINKING, and to grow into their thoughts.  I never had that opportunity to get familiar with my own thoughts, to practice being a person WITH thoughts.  No wonder ‘thinking’ felt so foreign, uncomfortable and dangerous to me!

(Also glad to see at least I was still doing some spinning and weaving at this time.)

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AND A GIFT OF INFORMATION FROM:

Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog

 
Making Kids a Priority

 

Posted: 29 Oct 2009 10:57 AM PDT

Guest post by Michelle Gross, Project/Public Policy Manager, Prevent Child Abuse New York

In this recession, working families are struggling to meet their children’s basic needs. Five out of six children in low-income families have at least one adult who works.   These families are struggling to keep a roof over their heads, food on the table, and gas in the car so they can get to work. The stress of these difficult financial times takes the heaviest toll on at-risk families. More than ever before, programs that support families, like home visiting, parenting education, family resource centers, fatherhood and kinship support, and child advocacy centers play a pivotal role in ensuring a stable and more prosperous future.

Yet, these services continue to be in danger of funding cuts. New York’s families’ health and well-being rests on the voices of advocates like you.  As we prepare for the New York State Budget proposal for 2010-11, we must be vigilant in continuing to contact our state government representatives, from the governor to the legislature, and even locally. Regularly updating your elected officials on your program’s successes helps to reinforce the important role it plays in supporting families. Every voice counts, and it is up to us to speak for those who cannot. It can be daunting to contact your representative, but your advocacy can make the difference between a program funding cut and a program funding expansion. Here are a few tips on calling your elected official’s office:

  • When calling, you will likely reach a staff member rather than your representative directly. Staff             members can be just as influential as the legislator themselves.
  • Be sure to tell the staff member your name and where you live. It’s important that they know you are a constituent.
  • Inform the staffer of the reason for your call. It can  be as simple as saying that you’d like to make sure the program does not get cut in the state budget.
  • Tell the staffer why the program is important and what difference it has made in your life or the lives of those around you.
  • Thank the staffer for their time and ask for a follow  up if you feel its necessary.
  • Always follow up a phone call with a letter restating your call.
  • Call again in a month just to check in, and ask others to call on behalf of the program. Persistence is key in advocacy!

Again, remember that what you have to say matters. As Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Children’s needs, long overlooked, should receive the highest priority during critical discussions leading to cuts in the New York State Budget. Far too few services are available at a time when demand is increasing greatly. We encourage our legislators to support programs that work, and to support families through this fiscal crisis.

For more information about Prevent Chils Abuse New York’s Advocacy Programs, please visit our website: http://preventchildabuseny.org/advocacy.shtml
Traumatic Childhood Can Reduce Life Expectancy

 

Posted: 29 Oct 2009 08:27 AM PDT

A difficult childhood reduces life expectancy by up to 20 years according to a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The study found that participants who were exposed to more then five different types of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) were over 50 percent more likely to die during the 10-year period of the study. On the other hand, people who reported fewer than six ACEs did not have a statistically increased risk of death compared with the control group.

Listen to a podcast Adversce Childhood Experiences and the Risk of Premature Mortality.

To explore the effect that childhood trauma could have on life span, Kaiser Permanente mailed questionnaires to adults who were 18 years and older, and who had visited the Kaiser clinic in San Diego from 1995 to 1997. Overall, the study subjects were middle-class and had good health coverage. Of those surveyed, 75 percent were white, 11 percent Latino, 7 percent Asian, and 5 percent African-American. They’re educated: 75 percent attended college and 40 percent have a basic or higher college education. When they filled out the questionnaire, their average age was 57. Most of them had jobs. Half were women, half were men.

The participants were asked about their exposure to eight categories of abuse or dysfunction based on previous Kaiser studies. One third of the 17,337 participants who replied to the questionnaires had an ACE score of zero, meaning they had not been exposed to any of the eight types of abuse or household dysfunction. The majority of the remaining responders registered a score of between one and four, whereas about 8 percent of the scoring participants were rated five, and roughly three percent, six to eight.

During the next decade, the study authors, kept records of which of the 17,337 participants passed away by matching identifying information such as Social Security numbers from the questionnaire with data from the National Death Index. In total 1,539 of the participants died during the follow-up period. When the increased number of deaths in those subjects with an ACE score of six or greater was compared with the control group, their mortality risk was 1.5 times higher than for people whose childhoods had been free of all eight types of abuse. They lost about 20 years from their lives, living to 60.6 years on average, whereas the average age of death for the control group was 79.1.

It is unclear why the authors saw more death ages during the 10-year period only for the group with an ACE score of six or greater. Previous studies by these authors found that the risk of chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, lung disease and cancer, was greater only for people with these high ACE scores. In contrast, the risk of substance abuse and suicide increased stepwise from low to high scores. The authors found that ACE-related health risks, namely mental illness, social problems and prescription medication use, accounted for about 30 percent of the 50 percent greater risk of death seen in this population. “As would be expected, the documented ACE-related conditions among participants appear to account for some, although not all, of the increased risk of premature death observed in the current study,” wrote David Brown, an epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and lead author of the study.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

+MISSING IN ACTION: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE SELF OF LINDA?

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I went ‘Missing In Action’ in the combat zone of my childhood with my severe Borderline mother from the moment I was born.  That I was still MIA at age 30 should not surprise me as I continue  my forensic autobiographical search for whatever happened to the self of Linda — even half my lifetime ago:

*Age 30 – Journal from January 1982 through April 1982

Here are a few snippets from the journal:

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January 19, 1982

“I was never socialized or given any experience as I grew up in getting along in this “real world.”  I was practiced in being extremely obedient, being isolated.”

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2009:  For most of my life all I was able to do in any of my thinking regarding the reality of the abuse in my 18 years of childhood was to make observations as if I was a mechanical reporter, as per the above.  I never understood the implications or the ramifications.  We take for granted that we are supposed to KNOW things even though nobody ever TOLD us.  I completely lacked any basis for comparing my life to an ‘ordinary’ childhood, even when I was 30 years old.

I’ve always had a sort of “vacancy” feeling.  Nothing about my childhood connected to anything in this “real world.”  It was as if I was hatched out of an egg the day I landed at boot camp at 18.  There was nothing to do with or about what had happened to me before that time.  Everyone was busy with their own lives, lived in their realities, and did not care about one person who appeared in their lives — at any time — that person being me with my past history that nobody cared about, either.  I was either going to ‘make it’ on my own, or not at all, just as it had been in my childhood.

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January 26, 1982

“Received a beautiful cream sweater and a blue skirt from Mom today.  It feels good that she loves me and I need to write thanks and love.”

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2009:  Classic example of my continued delusions about being the daughter of the mother who tormented and abused me for 18 years.  Except for very limited in-school contacts, my childhood consisted of fear, abuse and dissociation.  My internal state was a void, a vacuum.  I lived the days of my life no differently than an android would.  Once I went through treatment and stopped self-medicating myself with pot, the medication was simply switched to prescription antidepressants.  The same purpose was served.  “Zombie juiced.”  Just keep Linda doing what Linda does because she knows nothing different.

My life could have been far worse.  I was safe.  I lived with a reasonable, kind man.  The people in my life were reasonable.  I thought what I was doing was reasonable.  I tried to parent my daughters the best that I could, and certainly I did not abuse them.  But how can an empty hollow shell of a person be a ‘good enough’ parent to children?  I can only believe that with kindness and the best love I could give them, the life force and personality of my children carried them forward as they grew up — but perhaps more like growing plants would than children who lacked a securely-attached mother.

This is where professionals coin the term “earned secure attachment.”  But I KNOW it wasn’t as good as the ‘real thing’.  How could it be, to be raised by a mother who does not have her self intact?

Yet I can see that with my disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder I was able to organize and orient myself around a life as portrayed in my journals.  But it was a hollow life.  I was a hollow person.  I did not know what questions to ask anybody about what was ‘wrong’ with me, and nobody offered me the information I needed to understand what was REALLY going on with lost-soul Linda.

How I could I know that what I DO is not who I AM?  Now I would see that what I do is like a reflection of who I am, like light rays from the sun are reflected in a mirror.  I had no sun, no self — not that I knew or knew of, anyway.  Today I’m not sure I’m much better – but I do know the difference.  I can FEEL it, especially now that my children are gone from home.

Humans are not designed to organize and orient themselves around external factors of any kind.  We can, of course, organize and orient how we spend our TIME around external factors, but not our SELF!  Without a clear, strong, healthy sense of a non-dissociated self, I have been left all my life with a nearly unbearable sadness at my center.  That sadness is what the doctor was medicating with those antidepressants, and that I used to medicate with nonprescription drugs.

Is there another way for those of us who have such histories of terrible abuse of one kind or another to MEET, GREET and FEEL our true inner self — a process that is supposed to be firmly in place before we are two years old?

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April 6, 1982

“I don’t question myself all the time anymore on what I’m doing and am much better at getting through days and doing what needs to be done and what I want to do.

I’ll have to watch this as meds change and be sure it’s not something that is really affected by the depression.

My head feels clear and I like that.”

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The doctor was decreasing my antidepressants, and that concerned me.  He was talking about taking me off them completely by summer for a ‘drug holiday’.

Why did I believe that questioning “myself all the time…on what I’m doing” was a BAD thing?  I had a lot of questioning that needed to be done — a life time of questioning!!  Did I need stasis or did I need to make real and legitimate changes in my life?  Nobody supported me in asking the questions, or in trying to discover who I was or what I needed.  People did support me when I was ‘nice’ and did not rock the proverbial boat.

Obviously, I believed that I liked myself better that way — why would I want to FEEL FEELINGS and learn the truth about myself?  Yet, there was a Linda in there somewhere, hiding in the shadows of my life, who needed to peek herself out and begin to ask questions about her self in the world.  I needed answers.  It has taken me a very long time to begin to get some.

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April 21, 1982

I found a poem-story of my daughter’s father and her birth written on this date here in this journal.  I wonder what I meant by

“I had a child to catch

my man”

I sure don’t remember that being the case at the time!  It’s a whole story I have yet to tell, the story of being pregnant and giving birth and what followed.  But this poem is an introduction.

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I do not wish to leave the information contained in these links behind as I continue with my posting.  Please consider them for your study:

+ALL OF ME. I DON’T HAVE ‘A CHILD WITHIN’

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In the words of Alice Miller

— Articulating the child’s authentic voice —

from

Pictures of a Childhood: Sixty-Six Watercolors and an Essay by Alice Miller

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“Only when I make room for the voice of the child within me do I feel myself to be truly genuine and creative.  I use every means now at my disposal…to help this child to find the appropriate way of expressing herself and to be understood.”  (Page 17)

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“Those who take a stand in today’s world on behalf of workers, women, or even mistreated animals will find a group to represent them, but someone who becomes a strong advocate for the child and opposes the lies society has tolerated in the guise of child-rearing practices will stand alone.  This situation is difficult to understand, especially when we consider that we were once all children ourselves.  I can explain it only by suggesting that unequivocal advocacy of the child represents a threat to most adults.  For when it becomes possible for children to speak out and confront us with their experiences, which were once ours as well, we become painfully aware of the loss of our own powers of perception, our sensibilities, feelings, and memories.  Only if the child is forced to be silent are we able to deny our pain, and we can again believe what we were told a children:  that it was necessary, valuable, and right for us to make the emotional sacrifices demanded of us in the name of traditional child-rearing.  As a consequence of the adult’s arrogant attitude toward the child’s feelings, the child is trained to be accommodating, but his or her true voice is silenced.  Another arrogant and blind adult is the result.

Is it not senseless, then, to let children speak, to help them to become articulate in an arrogant adult world as long as there is so little hope of their being listened to by adults and when the danger exists that their authentic voice will be silenced as soon as it it heard?  I do not believe it is senseless; it is essential to let their voices, the voices of those who have been afflicted by silence, speak if we hope to prevent the total disappearance of the springs of knowledge and creativity concealed in every childhood.  In this regard, the published reports by former victims of child abuse will be particularly beneficial in exposing the distortion of the truth so widespread in many areas of our life.”  (pages 18-19)

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JUST FOR FUN – LISTEN HERE

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In my own words:

Blasphemy!  I do not have a “child within me.”  There is only ME within ME.  I am today totally the full sum of every experience I have ever had.  The memory I have of them, consciously or not, and the impact they had on me are all contained within this body that is ME — right here, right now.

Because I have suffered from dissociation since I was born into a malevolent world of abuse, chaos and madness, I cannot afford to pretend there are any more stray parts of me floating around ‘somewhere’ than there already — legitimately — are.  And there certainly isn’t ‘one in there’ I would ever care to name ‘the child within me’.  How silly is that idea?

I believe we do ourselves a great disservice in suggesting that we have some ‘alien’ life force or form within us that we might even begin to think about as our ‘child within’.  We have all integrated our experiences since conception into our bodies, including our brain.  What is the purpose of denying this fact?

If cohesiveness and coherency are the goal that any of us with less than an optimal safe and secure infancy-childhood might be aiming toward, what good does it do us to pretend that some magical, mysterious part of us is supposedly missing from the action of our living, breathing body at exactly this present moment in time?

Not only does the concept of an ‘inner child’ or a ‘child within’ feel demeaning, disrespectful and dishonoring of who I AM as a person no matter what hell I have survived in my lifetime, it also seems blatantly ridiculous.  It’s just too Twilight Zonish for me.  It’s too Alice in Wonderlandish, too Through the Looking Glass weird to me.  I spent the first 18 years of my life in the Twilight Zone.  I don’t need another split second of it now.  No way.

Let those with the luxury to afford to buy this myth — well, buy it.  Not gonna be me….  I work hard to give myself permission to be the whole of who I am, the one who has followed THIS life path from the moment of my conception to this instant in time — there is no possible way I left any part of myself behind, and I know it.  I am.  I am, most grandly, wholly ME — even if the whole of me exists as a thousand dissociated parts, they are MY ADULT parts.

The great thing is to find moments I can actually have fun being ALL OF ME!

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*Age 58 – October 28, 2009 – Dollar store paint, crayon and marker images

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+JUST A LINK TO A LITTLE “HAPPY” AND A LITTLE “BREATHER” TECHNIQUES

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Here’s a link to a couple of ‘feel good’ tips that caught my eye!  It’s a cool and very wet and gray day here today after last night’s wind.  Excellent to have the moisture, but we desert rats always miss the sunshine!  Thought these ideas might help….

HIT YOUR ZOOM BUTTON TO SEE THESE BETTER!

**Happy Tips and “Take A Breather”

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*Age 21 – Photograph of Me in 1973

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+LIVING IN THE ACCEPTANCE ZONE: WAS THE REAL ME PRESENT AND ACCOUNTED FOR?

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I question the whole 12-step requirement for ‘acceptance.’  I think we can accept ourselves into terribly destructive and unhappy situations, while we all the time blame ourselves if we DARE to whimper or question our lives.  In 1981 the antidepressants I was given (and took) just further erased Linda from the scene of my life.  I was quiet, complacent, and busy trying so hard to BE good and to DO good…..

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I have to say, never in the 10 years I’ve lived down here in the Arizona high desert right on the Mexico line have I ever heard such furious wind gusts as are appearing and disappearing around here tonight.  They come barreling through like they are on rails, intent on taking the house roof with them, and then they are — GONE — and an eerie silence fills my ears.  No big deal, I’m sure.  The power hasn’t even flickered.  I am SO GLAD I no longer live up north with those winters — like my kids in Fargo do!  In 1981 I just accepted living in a place with harsh and long winters — not any more!

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I had just turned 30 when this part of my journals were written in 1981-1982.  I post the writings here just in case there’s something from my “recovery” past that might be of use to someone going through the new stages — or even the later ones — of their own recovery.  There’s nothing spectacular here.  Just one woman, still young, living a humble life, trying to grow, always hoping…..but was I really even there?

My antidepressants have kicked in by this time, and I am zoning along doing what I (and everybody around me) thinks is best.  It really didn’t matter if I was REALLY there in the show or not!  Nobody, myself included, knew the difference.

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*Age 30 Journal – Sept. through Dec. 1981

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Excerpts:

September 7, 1981

“Got in touch with a lot of pain and loneliness and realized on a deep level for the first time that is what my “wild” feeling is.”

I used to think about this feeling when it came over me as being like the wind — only a wind that blew right through the outline-shape of who I was in my body.  I knew I had felt it in Alaska, most remembered in the wilderness — hence my name for it, my “wild” feeling.

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Recovery in families often begins with one single person.  In my case, following my entry and completion of treatment both my husband and his cousin both began recovery for alcoholism.

In that process I entered treatment again out-patient as the spouse of Leo when he began his treatment.  Minnesota treatment models for addiction focus on it being a “family disease.”

I noted on October 1, 1981:

“Afraid to look at myself.  I am self-centered to the max and would control everyone around me if I could and yet Lief [therapist] said tonight a lot of anger comes from me not being willing to take the risks I need to get my needs met.  I’m not sure I even know what my needs are.  Everything seems complicated – feels confusing.”

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October 24, 1981

Oh, and then there were the sex problems……never a good sign!

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November 17, 1981

“Sometimes I feel as though I were haunted by things from my past.  Not as many as before, but just a general feeling like the “real me” is not all here.  Maybe it is the “real me” that haunts me, or the “ideal me” that will never be.”

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November 19, 1981

“Spent an hour reading to the girls tonight and read old Raggedy Ann book from Mom’s and my childhood.  Also Kay saw film about menstruation in school today.  She felt good and so did I that she can talk with me.  She said she used to think her mom was mean because I wouldn’t let her go to the store, etc. but now she sees we can talk where many of her friends can’t talk to their moms.  Thank you God for helping and healing.”

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I do not wish to leave the information contained in these links behind as I continue with my posting.  Please consider them for your study:

+WHEN BEING LOST IS NORMAL – My Age 29 Journal Continued….

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In continuing to look at my journal writings from half my lifetime ago when I was 29, I don’t see in them the one word I wish I had been able to say back then that I can say now:  I was lost.  Completely, utterly, totally and absolutely lost.  Lost to myself.  Lost to my life.  Lost IN life, and I didn’t even know it.

The rest of the month of March 1981 following my return from my 30-day bus trip is covered here (link below), along with the month of April.  These writings cover the period of time when I was assessed for depression, ‘diagnosed and given my first prescription for antidepressants.  I feel dismayed to see that my therapist ‘dropped’ me as soon as the medications ‘seemed’ to be taking effect.  Like I didn’t have a lifetime of trouble to talk about with her?

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How much of ordinary people’s lives could best be described as accidental?  I can see that I was trying to apply what I now know is called Mind Sight.  I was trying hard to understand myself in my own life, but I was blind.  I didn’t have anything to compare myself to.  I didn’t know I didn’t really have a self, had never had a self, not even the self that was supposed to form by the time I was two years old.  I was a blind woman stumbling down the path of my life just as I had been doing from the moment I walked out the door of my home of origin.

All I knew how to do was to go forward.  That is how I survived my insane and abusive childhood.  I had simply continued to live, breathing in, breathing out, putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward — without mind sight or fore sight, into my own future.  If I bumped into something on the road and tripped, I caught my balance, stood up straight again, and marched on.  There was nobody there to tell me life could be any different.  Nobody had ever told me that my life could be anything different than an accident.

What is worse, being lost and not knowing it, or being lost and knowing it?  I had stumbled along blindly making choices when they had to be made until I had myself completely blocked into a corner and I believed it was my life.  If everyone else thought that taking pills was all I needed to be ‘better’, then I was willing to go along with the ‘program’.  I didn’t know there was anything else I could do.

Having a life, any kind of life, was better than having no life at all.  That’s all I knew.  I kept on trying.  I kept walking forward.  My life had been built out of pieces and parts, bits and pieces, like trying to turn a pile of sawdust into a good, strong, wholesome board.  The very simplest thing anybody could do was call it depression and give me some pills to ‘fix’ me.

The hardest thing somebody could have done was to help me go all the way back to the beginning so that I could see what had gone so terribly wrong in my childhood and how it affected me with every breath I took.  Perhaps then I could have become strong enough and clear enough to understand that the whole darn pile of pieces was not a ME at all.  It was just an attempt born of desperation to create a life when I really had nothing to go on.  As things were, I saw no other choice but to try to make a better me so that I could make the most out of a life I simply wandered around lost in.

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*Age 29 – Beginning March 1981 Journal After 30-Day Bus Trip

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