Tag: memory

+FINALLY — FIRST PICTURE OF MY MOTHER ON MY BLOG

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Sometimes I don’t think learning something new is fun.  Sometimes it is still necessary, so I have to believe this is going to get easier!!

Evidently Adobe has expired the free old version of Photoshop that came with my scanner — and I’m not one bit happy to have to dink around with their online version of photo doctoring.  There is no way I can “fix” the photo damage to my mother’s face, for example.

I’ll have to decide if I can afford to fork out the bucks to get their NEW version now.  And here I thought the one they gave me with the scanner could continue working just fine.  No warning — just tried to use it tonight and —  DEAD!

I uninstalled my Photoshop thinking I could reinstall it in case I forgot to register this software in the first place.  Only now the door on my computer for the disc drive won’t open.  It’s a fairly new computer, not abused, and now I couldn’t install a brand new version, either.  I guess these fire damaged pictures will just have to stay this way for awhile!  Anyway – – –

I FINALLY have my very first photograph of my mother — and of the homestead ready for viewing!  Please take a look!

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It strikes me that my mother is literally and figuratively standing on the epitome of a Borderline Personality Disordered woman’s BORDERLINE in this picture.  On this spot, at this point in time, she is standing on the borderline of where civilization met the wilderness, on the borderline of where civility met ‘the frontier’ — in all actuality — of madness:

*1959 June – Mom, Tractor, Stuff

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*1959 June – Two Views of Hut and Mountains

I’ll be working with more pictures — this should all eventually get easier with practice, at least, but the online photo editing is technically CRAPPY!

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+IMMUNITY AGAINST INSECURE ATTACHMENT DISORDERS BEGINS AT CONCEPTION

alchemynow6 Comments

092609 post Origins of Emotional Abuse

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Emotional Abuse Recovery NOW

Annie Kaszina offers free assistance on her site and through her free email support to women who have experienced emotional abuse.  I personally find it disheartening that she does not equally offer her advise and expertise to men as well as to women, but I am mentioning her work here because I want to consider information presented in her writing about emotional abuse.

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Emotional abuse is not JUST a woman’s issue, it is a human issue.  Emotional abuse is not JUST an adult issue.  The seed potential for being both a perpetrator and a victim of emotional abuse begins – believe it or not – even before our conception.

No matter our sex, no matter what our genetic potential makeup may be, a mother’s emotional state influences her body to such an extent that her hormones and other body chemicals affect whether or not conception even takes place, as well as affects whether or not the tiny new human can or does implant itself on her uterine wall to further its growth and development from that time forward.

A mother’s hormones and internal chemical environment constantly signal through molecular communication what the world is going to be like that this new human is going to be born into.  Those signals about stress, distress or future well being influence how the genetic potential of a human manifests itself – from conception onward.

These early signaling processes particularly influence the future sensitivity of the new human.  I mention this now because Ms. Kaszina’s words this morning, as they arrived new and shiny in my email inbox, are concerned with emotional sensitivity.

Emotional sensitivity is not something that some of us have and some of us don’t have.  All humans have emotions.  All humans also vary in degree of sensitivity according to their fundamental genetic makeup, according to the information all kinds of molecular signaling has given them about the benevolence or malevolence of the world their body is growing up to live in, and according to the information that a newborn infant’s body-brain-self receives from its first early caregiver environment.

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We cannot possibly disentangle the topic of secure and insecure attachment disorders – from conception onward – from any discussion about so-called emotional abuse.  What we are actually considering when we talk about emotions and sensitivity, in my opinion, has to do with the quality and kind of human attachment system we developed from conception.

If adults do not provide safe and secure attachments to infants and young children from the beginning of their lives, HOW this tiny person develops will be affected on every level.  This most certainly includes emotional sensitivity.  If the safe and secure attachments do not exist in an infant’s life, its body-brain-mind will be forced to take a pathway in its development that is less-than-optimal.  An insecure attachment pattern, or insecure attachment disorder, WILL result from these conditions.  That is the way our social species is designed.

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If a person could actually weigh information, tons of it exists at our fingertips about secure and insecure attachments.  My purpose is to encourage readers to go poke around and take a look at this information for themselves.  Without including the facts about our human attachment system in our thinking about ANYTHING that has to do with ANY human relationship, we are like children ourselves who might expect to sit in a broken down car out behind a weathered barn in some countryside – hoping and hoping if we just hope enough that useless car will take us out away from our miseries.

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Every human being whose brain-mind did not develop in an early environment that included a caregiver to whom that infant could safely and securely attach – on a predictable and sustained level – will end up with an altered brain-mind that includes an insecure attachment disorder built into it.  All humans are amazingly resilient, and even a tiny infant can make amazing use of whatever safe and secure human attachment opportunities that DO actually exist in its early environment.

But at the same time we ARE human, and we are vulnerable and fragile.  Degrees of damage are exactly that!  If you spend some time following links included above, you will discover enough information for yourself to begin to understand what Dr. Allan Schore says about all insecure attachment disorders include empathy disorders.  Nobody is immune to the consequences of forming a body-brain-mind in a malevolent world.

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With this very brief survey as an introduction to the following words written by Annie Kaszina, I encourage readers to begin to realize that both ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’ of emotional abuse most likely suffer from an adult version of an insecure attachment disorder – either an ‘organized’ one or a ‘disorganized’ one.  If our first displays of our emotions were not consistently appropriately and adequately responded to from the time we were born by one or more early caregivers – our emotional self will have altered the way it developed.  This naturally affects both how we respond to our own and to others’ emotions.

If we are going to refer to these changed patterns as ABUSE, we need to include in our thinking that all these emotional patterns exist in our brain’s construction and operation.  They can sometimes be changed to some degree, but our emotional construction is as much a part of our body as are our organs and limbs.

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From my own childhood experience I can say that the environment of the home I grew up in, with my Mad Monster Mother at the helm, contained no real emotional health and well being except as it was accidentally provided – mostly to my siblings.  My entire blog is devoted to this HUGE topic.  My point this morning is that I encourage every reader to read the following words as if they are simply and completely referring to interactions between parents and children – not between adults.

Focus your inner vision.  Consider your childhood – whether you were a girl or a boy — for awhile ONLY as it either sustained the development of your authentic self emotionally – or did not.   Parents are not their offspring’s’ partners.  They have assumed the job of raising their children so that they themselves can later be other human’s partners.

Please ‘translate’ this information provided below through the lens of your own very young childhood perspective.  What you were given THEN is reflected in how you are NOW!  We had no choice as infant-children but to build into our growing body-brain-mind the attachment patterns our early caregivers ‘fed us’.

Down the road, the following is exactly how insecure attachment disorders (systems) can show themselves when we are all grown up.  We can repeat them with both the adults and the children in our lives.  We need to understand what this means by beginning to in-form our thinking about how these patterns established themselves PHYSIOLOGICALLY into our very young developing bodies — and remain within us for the rest of our lives.  Once recognized consciously, we can begin to alter the effects our inner attachment system has on the quality of our life.

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Emotional Abuse Recovery NOW

Written and published by Annie Kaszina
Women’s Self-Discovery Coach
www.EmotionalAbuseRecoveryNow.com

To sign up to this ezine, go to www.EmotionalAbuseRecoveryNow.com

“My name is Annie Kaszina and I spent over twenty years in an abusive marriage, before I learned how I could become the woman I want to be. Now I work with women who have been in controlling and abusive relationships, to facilitate their journey into joy and self-realisation.”

“You’re just too sensitive!”

“Has an abusive partner ever told you: “You’re just too sensitive?”

Okay, let’s be more precise about this; has your abusive partner repeatedly told you that you are too sensitive?  Because the chances are, if he has said it to you once, he’s said it a thousand times.  That’s how abusive relationships work; an abusive man throws the same complaints at you over and over again.

Why?

We’ll come to that in a moment.  First, let’s deal with the really important question: How has that left you feeling?

Clearly, I don’t know you, and I can’t know how you think, but I’m guessing that it leaves you feeling small, needy, pathetic and very, very flawed.  Accusing a partner of being ‘too sensitive’ tends to make them feel as if someone has exposed a very dark, unlovable, immature feeling at the very heart of their being.

In short, it makes them feel unlovable.

There is a reason for this.  When an abusive man says his partner is ‘too sensitive’, that is not just a throwaway remark, triggered by frustration; it is, actually, a well-calculated barb with a venomous hidden agenda.

“You’re too sensitive”, is code; a code that, I suspect, you have not been translating correctly, until now.  If you had, you probably would not have given your accuser the opportunity to wound you with that well-honed barb, time after time.

“But”, you might object, “I am very sensitive.”   You might even say: “I am too sensitive.”

There is a distinction here that we need to clarify.  When you say that you are ‘very sensitive’, or even ‘too sensitive’, what you actually mean is this: “I can feel hurt very easily; it doesn’t take much.  I really wish that it wasn’t like this, but it is.  There doesn’t seem to be much I can do about it.”

Acknowledging the acuity of their sensitivity tends to be a kind of apology that I often hear form abused women.  They wish they could change it, but they can’t; at least not with the tools currently available to them.

When an abusive partner, or other near one, tells you that you are ‘too sensitive’, it is, apparently, because they wish you could change.  (The subtext is that if you could change that it would, somehow, transform the abusive relationship.)  Not that they are offering you any clues as to how you might reduce that sensitivity.

In reality, they don’t know how you could reduce that sensitivity; nor do they care.  Much as they may criticize you for it, your sensitivity fits very nicely with their agenda.  But they are not in a rush to admit that to you.

Think for a moment about the circumstances in which have been told that you are too sensitive.  Most probably it happens when you feel hurt by something your abusive partner said; or else something they did, or did not do.  Had you been ‘less sensitive’, they figure, you would not have reacted.  In other words, you would have just ‘got on with it’, and spared them the trouble of having to consider your feelings.

This holds true for other circumstances in which your ‘hypersensitivity’ means that you would like to receive comfort or reassurance.

That is not what your abusive partner, or other near one, had in mind.

When they say: “You’re too sensitive”, what they really mean is this: “Please don’t visit your feelings on me, I don’t want to hear about them.”  There’s more as well – and it doesn’t get any better.

“You’re too sensitive” is shorthand for; “I’m really not prepared to take your feelings into account.  In fact, I thoroughly resent your visiting them on me.  As far as I am concerned, this is the way I believe our relationship should work: I can say whatever I like to you, and you will get on and deal with it, without making a fuss and trying to make me feel bad about it.  What’s wrong with you, anyway?  Why can’t you just get on with being in an abusive relationship without moaning about it?”

The question, “What’s wrong with you, anyway?” is the key to your partner’s thinking.  There must be something wrong with you, or else you would respond to whatever it is that they said or did in exactly the way they would have you respond.  In other words, what they wanted was no response from you.  (In an abusive relationship, all communication is intended to be a one way street.) Whatever it was that they said or di, they hoped that you would let them ‘get away with it’.  And you did not.

It’s not as if you took a strong stand; anything but.  A strong stand would have meant saying: “This is unacceptable.”  You would then make yourself scarce, as far as they were concerned.  Your abusive partner would duly get the message that they were out of order, and would need to clean up their act, or else lose you.

Whether or not they would clean up their act is another story.  If, instead, your refusal to accept abuse led to the earlier end of a damaging relationship that was bound to end in unhappiness anyway, then your strong stand has paid off handsomely.  That would save you time and misery.  And if it concentrated their mind, and led them to behave better in the future, even better.

But just asking an abusive man to behave, and/or speak to you, differently, is as ineffectual as saying to a child: “Oh, don’t do that!” All it conveys is your weakness and your reluctance to act.

It leaves your abuser free to repeat the pattern time and time again.  He will continue to speak and act as he pleases and, when you object, he will reproach you, again, for ‘being too sensitive’.

With that one simple phrase he has laid the blame for the hurt in the situation on you.  With one simple piece of sleight of mouth, he has dumped blame for the situation on you, so that he comes up smelling of roses.  Or, at least, as close to smelling of roses as he is ever likely to get.

How did you get into an abusive relationship like that in the first place?

Here’s the irony: it happened, in part, because of your sensitivity.  Not that there is anything wrong with being sensitive; there is not.  However, an abusive man has a finely tuned nose, and can smell sensitivity a mile off.  He knows that he can exploit that sensitivity to gain control over another person.  He knows just how to do that – as you have discovered, to your cost.

So what will you do differently about your sensitivity in the future?

First, you need to become much more vigilant; you learn that someone who is prepared to disregard your ‘sensitivity’ is telling you that they will completely and utterly disregard your feelings.  You give such people a very wide berth.  Second, you learn to honour and manage that sensitivity; treat it with respect and other people will treat you with respect, also.”

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— SEE ALSO —

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+INFO ABOUT BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER (BPD)

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New Resource for Parents: CDC Parent Portal

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Related Post:

+CHILDHOOD DISSOCIATION, DEPERSONALIZATION, DEREALIZATION – I NEVER HAD A CHOICE TO BE OR NOT TO BE

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+THE CHILD ABUSE CONTINUUM – THROW DENIAL TO THE WIND

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Deception, denial, deflection – whatever the tactic abusive parents such as my mother was – and as my father was through his compliant complacency — may use, their intent is to find ways to confuse young abused children about the facts of their condition and situation.

I remember a time in my childhood when my mother described a TRUE child abuse case to me and my siblings.  Someone in Alaska had become so furious at their young toddler for soiling its pants during potty training that they had beaten the child and then taken it outside and placed it bare bottomed, in the middle of a freezing Alaskan winter night, on the top of a car hood.

After some period of time they had yanked the child off of the car, ripping all the skin off its bottom.  They took the baby to a hospital where the truth of their crime was then uncovered.

“Now THAT was child abuse,” my mother let us know – particularly me.  She did not make clear her intentions in telling this story, but I think similar tactics are often used to present in the minds of abused children – and even in the minds of adults who were abused as children – the distorted ‘fact’ that we are not abused ourselves.  We are only punished because we are bad children and have to get what we deserve to straighten us out.

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I have written in other posts that I figured out the bare minimum sentence that my mother – and my father through his passive participation in my mother’s madness – would have deserved for the abuse perpetrated against me in my childhood.  Theirs would have been a minimum sentence at 14,500 years each.

So what do we make of the kinds of abuse acts like those referenced below?  Does the abuse we suffered ourselves so pale in comparison to these kinds of cases that we ought not to consider that we ourselves were abused at all?  Are we tempted to compare our history to much worse cases so we can minimize our own history and thus vanquish our own abuse experiences into the oblivion of ‘not so bad’?

I think not.  I believe that altered brain development caused by malevolent early childhood conditions underlies all chronic and sustained adult abuse actions against children.  These evolutionarily altered brains can be extremely dangerous.  In my mother’s case, she was wise enough and narcissistic enough to usually know exactly where the line was that would have brought outside negative attention against her for her abuse actions toward me.

I also have to credit myself with the fact that from as soon as I was old enough to do so, I remained hyper-aware, hyper-alert, and hyper-involved while my mother beat me so that I could make every possible effort to protect my body from devastating impacts against hard objects as she threw me around in the midst of her frequent and extensive physical rage attacks against me.  During her severe attacks on my small body, preserving my life was not my mother’s concern.  Fortunately, it was mine.

I also know that she used food as a weapon against me, but that is substance for another post in the future.  She certainly did not starve me because she knew someone would make her pay for that act.  If she could have done so with impunity, I think she would have – and would have enjoyed doing so.

My point today is that hearing about cases such as these (below) brings to mind that child abuse exists on a continuum of damage caused by faulty brains in faulty human beings.  That child abuse DOES exist at all reflects faults within our entire society.  At no time does denial or minimization of the reality of ANY child abuse help anyone — most certainly not ourselves.

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Carnation-area woman pleads guilty in stepdaughter’s starvation case Local News A Carnation-area woman accused of starving and withholding water from her 14-year-old stepdaughter last year entered a modified guilty plea Friday to first-degree criminal mistreatment. Rebecca Long’s plea came just days after her husband, Jon Pomeroy, 43, pleaded guilty to the same charge. 9/5/2009 | seattletimes.com | find similar results

Woman pleads guilty in child starvation case Local News A 45-year-old woman accused of withholding water and starving her 14-year-old stepdaughter has entered a modified guilty plea to a charge of first-degree criminal mistreatment. 9/4/2009 | seattletimes.com | find similar results

Couple indicted in Texas starvation case Nation and World A grand jury in Dallas has indicted a couple accused of keeping the woman’s three young children starving in a hotel bathroom for at least nine months. 8/26/2009 | seattletimes.com | find similar results

Wash. man pleads guilty in daughter’s starvation Local News A Carnation man has pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal mistreatment, after his daughter was found severely emaciated last summer and told investigators she was allowed only about 6 ounces of water a day. Jon Pomeroy, 43, entered the plea Monday in King County Superior Court. 8/31/2009 | seattletimes.com | find similar results

Starvation abuse rare, shocking even to experts Local News …and the 14-year-old victim, but has studied cases of starvation involving children ranging in age from 2 months to 13 years…systematic and deliberate,” Wilson said. Kellogg said starvation victims such as the Carnation girl need far more than food… 10/14/2008 | seattletimes.com | find similar results

Pa. social workers charged after starvation death Nation and World By all accounts, there is blame to go around for the 2006 starvation death of disabled teenager Danieal Kelly. Her mother pleaded guilty to murder this week for criminally neglecting the once-vivacious… 5/1/2009 | seattletimes.com | find similar results

Vegan couple sentenced in baby’s starvation death Nation and World …sentences on Jade Sanders, 27, and Lamont Thomas, 31. Their son, Crown Shakur, weighed just 3 ½ pounds when he died of starvation on April 25, 2004. The couple were found guilty May 2 of charges including malice murder, felony murder and cruelty… 5/10/2007 | seattletimes.com | find similar results

New mental evaluations ordered for Kent mother in starvation case Local News …found Robinson passed out amid 300 beer cans. Officers also found a 6-week-old and a 16-month-old boy dead of starvation and dehydration. A 2 ½-year-old son survived, apparently by eating uncooked noodles and rice. 3/15/2007 | seattletimes.com | find similar results

Lesson In Death By Starvation Business …Red Cross, described the process of starvation. NAIROBI, Kenya – Starving to death…die of illnesses, rather than actual starvation. The victim initially feels hunger…of infection. The body copes with starvation by burning fewer calories, the fuel… 8/27/1992 | seattletimes.com | find similar results

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+THE MAD WOMAN MOTHER MOVES US ALL AGAIN!

alchemynow5 Comments

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I was nine years old when my mother wrote the following letters to her mother (in Los Angeles).  My mother had given birth 2 months prior to my brother, the 5th child.  We had left the homestead fall of 1960 and moved into a one bedroom apartment in Anchorage.  Of course that apartment was too small for six of us, so everything was hauled up the stairs into a two bedroom apartment later in the fall of 1960, the one that we are in the process of moving out of the next spring — when these letters were written.

As I work with the very few of mother’s letters I can find for the early summer of 1961, I am beginning to understand why this process is the ONLY way to begin to construct anything like a coherent time line of my childhood.  At this time (see below) we were moving back into the log house in Eagle River AT THE SAME TIME mother intended for us to return to the homestead for the summer.

In effect, this meant that at least for May and part of June 1961 we were living in three places AT THE SAME TIME — all of them in a terrific mess with boxes of things packed, piled, loaded, moved — truly insane!

What is really interesting is that not one of the older four children, myself included, have any actual memory of the moves!!  That’s part of what motivates me to go looking for them — to solve this mystery!

I had no real idea until this point in my letter transcription process of how my mother’s insanity was completely reflected in the continual changing of our place of residence, and even in the overlapping of residences!!  The following letters act as ‘signifiers’ of the states of my mother’s mind that both created the moving conditions and was itself created by the moving conditions!

I notice again and again that her maniacal cleaning was a continual thread tying all the living environments together, even on the homestead without electricity or running water.  In fact, it was even so before we made it up the mountain — in her April 14, 1959 letter where she describes how we had no water for meals because she used it all up during the day scrubbing and waxing the tiny trailer floor as it sat in another homesteader’s snow covered field — as if dropped from the air by some giant passing bird.

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May 31, 1961

Dear Mother,

It hurts me terribly to write this but I must.  The dam has broken and the flood is loose – our home is threatened by it.  I must tell you now – please cancel your plans, at least temporarily.  You mustn’t come in July at least.  Please understand.  We cannot possibly have things straightened out by then.

The past 3 years have been HECTIC in so many ways.  I don’t know, I think I’ll wire Spoerry [landlord of log house] and cancel the house.  Perhaps we should spend one more winter in town and put all in storage for the summer.

The house is 135 plus 50 oil + + +.  We have more jeep repairs as of today.

I might come down instead and next summer you could come up.

All is a mess.  I’m very unhappy.  I can’t stand it any more.  My nerves are shot to hell.  [triple underlining]

Really Mom – please tell me you understand.  All is a mess – my private life too!!  [multiple underlining]

I love you – and will write later.  Love, Mildred

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June 13, 1961

Dear Mother,

Just a note – I’m sorry but I’ve so much to do.  It’s been this way ever since moving day – 13 days of it only it started of course away before then.

2 nites ago on our (ha, ha) anniversary I slept on bare floor here – last nite on a cot (work, work, work!)

Well this is [can’t read word] that you’re to cash our check for 150 [underlined 6 times] on June 20th.

All is O.K.  We’re just busy.  Log house has had all walls washed and floors scrubbed and waxed – it was absolutely filthy which made me furious after I’d had to per-fect apartment before I left for inspection!

Now I’m doing windows on inside and out and painting bed-rooms.

Last nite went to Anchorage and bought pots, pans, stainless steel flatware and towels etc. for the place.  It’s all strictly business!

I’m so tired I could die.

Well John is on his way so I want this mailed.  He received gift from you and opened it.  He loves it – so nice!  Will spend his Birthday at Homestead at his request.

I did get David’s ‘suit’ and it’s darling was so rushed forgot to mention it.

Will write later, Love, Me

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Rest of letters here:

PRESENTING THE HOMESTEADING

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+INFO ABOUT BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER (BPD)

alchemynow2 Comments
http://www.about.com/

Borderline Personality Disorder


In the Spotlight | More Topics |
from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD
People with BPD and their family members are often desperate to find help. Unfortunately, this leaves the door open for opportunists who pedal phony treatments or therapies with no research support. This week, learn about some therapies for BPD that you can trust– all of these treatments have solid research backing.

In the Spotlight

Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality Disorder
An overview of empirically supported psychosocial treatments for BPD – all of these treatments have been shown to be effective in reducing BPD symptoms.
More Topics

Dialectical Behavior Therapy
Of all the psychosocial treatments for BPD, Dialectical Behavior Therapy or DBT has the largest body of research support. DBT is also now offered all over the world.
How to Get the Most Out of Treatment
Now that you’ve found the right therapy, how do you make sure that you get the most out of it? These tips will help you on the road to recovery.

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+EXTREME STATES AND BRAIN REWIRING

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PLEASE READ THIS ARTICLE BEFORE READING THIS POST:

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Mind & Brain / Senses

Extreme States

Out-of-body experiences? Near-death experiences? Researchers are beginning to understand what’s really going on.

by Steven Kotler, Photo illustration by Josef Astor

From the July 2005 issue, Discover, published online July 24, 2005

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HERE ARE SOME POINTS I PONDER AND QUESTION:

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”…I was also watching the chute’s open-close-open routine, despite knowing that what I was watching was technically impossible to see.”

Those of us with extreme early and chronic child abuse histories are very likely be able to ‘do this’.  We can have access to information about ourselves in the world that seems to defy ‘scientific’ or ‘rational’ explanation.  What’s more, these abilities appear to have been built into our growing brains.

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Interesting statement:

“…most out-of-body tales do not take place within the confines of an extreme environment. They transpire as part of normal lives.”

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“The out-of-body experience is much like the near-death experience, and any exploration of one must include the other. While out-of-body experiences are defined by a perceptual shift in consciousness, no more and no less, near-death experiences start with this shift and then proceed along a characteristic trajectory. People report entering a dark tunnel, heading into light, and feeling an all-encompassing sense of peace, warmth, love, and welcome. They recall being reassured along the way by dead friends, relatives, and a gamut of religious figures. Occasionally, there’s a life review, followed by a decision of the “should I stay or should I go?” variety. A 1990 Gallup poll of American adults found that almost 12 percent of Americans, roughly 30 million individuals, said they have had some sort of near-death experience.”

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Take a look at the information about this:

“When Whinnery reviewed his data, he noted a correlation: The longer his pilots were knocked out, the closer they got to brain death. And the closer they got to brain death, the more likely it was that an out-of-body experience would turn into a near-death experience. This was the first hard evidence for what had been long suspected—that the two states are not two divergent phenomena, but two points on a continuum.”

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It makes me wonder about how a very young growing brain processes traumatic information.  Because an infant-child person is too young to even have a completely formed sense of self when traumas occur, how would their brain even process information related to “Am I out of my body or am I dead?”

It seems to me that a very young child would first have to develop enough of a brain ability to even know they were a self-alive-in-the-world before these kinds of concepts could even apply.  What happens if the trauma-generating experiences build the very question itself into the growing brain – “Am I alive or am I dead?”

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“The simplest conclusion to draw from these studies is that, give or take some inexplicable memories, these phenomena are simply normal physical processes that occur during unusual circumstances.”

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“What researchers have studied is the effect of a near-death experience. Van Lommel conducted lengthy interviews and administered a battery of standard psychological tests to his study group of cardiac-arrest patients. The subset that had had a near-death experience reported more self-awareness, more social awareness, and more religious feelings than the others.

“Van Lommel then repeated this process after a two-year interval and found the group with near-death experience still had complete memories of the event, while others’ recollections were strikingly less vivid. He found that the near-death experience group also had an increased belief in an afterlife and a decreased fear of death compared with the others. After eight years he again repeated the whole process and found those two-year effects significantly more pronounced. The near-death experience group was much more empathetic, emotionally vulnerable, and often showed evidence of increased intuitive awareness. They still showed no fear of death and held a strong belief in an afterlife.”

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So what might that mean for those of us severely abused and traumatized at a very early age?  Might there be something about those experiences that makes us perceive our being-in-the-world in a different way – from the very start?

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“Morse, too, did follow-up studies long after his original research. He also did a separate study involving elderly people who had a near-death experience in early childhood. “The results were the same for both groups,” says Morse. “Nearly all of the people who had had a near-death experience—no matter if it was 10 years ago or 50—were still absolutely convinced their lives had meaning and that there was a universal, unifying thread of love which provided that meaning. Matched against a control group, they scored much higher on life-attitude tests, significantly lower on fear-of-death tests, gave more money to charity, and took fewer medications. There’s no other way to look at the data. These people were just transformed by the experience.”

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To me, there’s obviously an incomparable difference in experience between what a 10-year-old might know from a childhood near death experience and what a 10-week or 10-month old infant might know.

What happens when a very young infant-child perceives that their survival is being threatened LONG before they can even begin to THINK?

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So what might out-of-body experiences, near death experiences, coma experiences and religious experiences share in common?

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“Britton hypothesized that people who have undergone a near-death experience might show the same altered brain firing patterns as people with temporal lobe epilepsy….Britton thinks near-death experience somehow rewires the brain, and she has found some support for her hypothesis regarding altered activity in the temporal lobe.”

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What might they have to do with depression?

“She [Britton] then asked a University of Arizona epilepsy specialist who knew nothing about the experiment to analyze the EEGs. Two features distinguished the group with near-death experience from the controls: They needed far less sleep, and they went into REM (rapid eye movement) sleep far later in the sleep cycle than normal people. “The point at which someone goes into REM sleep is a fantastic indicator of depressive tendencies,” says Britton. “We’ve gotten very good at this kind of research. If you took 100 people and did a sleep study, we can look at the data and know, by looking at the time they entered REM, who’s going to become depressed in the next year and who isn’t.”

Normal people enter REM at 90 minutes. Depressed people enter at 60 minutes or sooner. Britton found that the vast majority of her group with near-death experience entered REM sleep at 110 minutes. With that finding, she identified the first objective neurophysiological difference in people who have had a near-death experience.

Britton thinks near-death experience somehow rewires the brain, and she has found some support for her hypothesis regarding altered activity in the temporal lobe: Twenty-two percent of the group with near-death experience showed synchrony in the temporal lobe, the same kind of firing pattern associated with temporal lobe epilepsy.

She also found something that didn’t fit with her hypothesis. The temporal lobe synchrony wasn’t happening on the right side of the brain, the site that had been linked in Penfield’s studies to religious feeling in temporal lobe epilepsy. Instead she found it on the left side of the brain. That finding made some people uncomfortable because it echoed studies that pinpointed, in far more detail than Penfield achieved, the exact locations in the brain that were most active and most inactive during periods of profound religious experience.”

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What about religious experience?

“Over the past 10 years a number of different scientists, including neurologist James Austin from the University of Colorado, neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, and the late anthropologist and psychiatrist Eugene D’Aquili from the University of Pennsylvania, have done SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) scans of the brains of Buddhists during meditation and of Franciscan nuns during prayer. They found a marked decrease in activity in the parietal lobes, an area in the upper rear of the brain. This region helps us orient ourselves in space; it allows us to judge angles and curves and distances and to know where the self ends and the rest of the world begins. People who suffer injuries in this area have great difficulties navigating life’s simplest landscapes. Sitting down on a couch, for example, becomes a task of Herculean impossibility because they are unsure where their own legs end and the sofa begins. The SPECT scans indicated that meditation temporarily blocks the processing of sensory information within both parietal lobes…..

When that happens, as Newberg and D’Aquili point out in their book Why God Won’t Go Away, “the brain would have no choice but to perceive that the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses. And this perception would feel utterly and unquestionably real.” They use the brain-scan findings to explain the interconnected cosmic unity that the Buddhists experienced, but the results could also explain what Morse calls the “universal, unifying thread of love” that people with near-death experience consistently reported.

These brain scans show that when the parietal lobes go quiet, portions of the right temporal lobe—some of the same portions that Penfield showed produced feelings of excessive religiosity, out-of-body experiences, and vivid hallucinations—become more active. ….”

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And, this article’s conclusion:

“None of this work is without controversy, but an increasing number of scientists now think that our brains are wired for mystical experiences. The studies confirm that these experiences are as real as any others, because our involvement with the rest of the universe is mediated by our brains. Whether these experiences are simply right temporal lobe activity, as many suspect, or, as Britton’s work hints and Morse believes, a whole brain effect, remains an open question. But Persinger thinks there is a simple explanation for why people with near-death experience have memories of things that occurred while they were apparently dead. The memory-forming structures lie deep within the brain, he says, and they probably remain active for a few minutes after brain activity in the outer cortex has stopped. Still, Crystal Merzlock remembered events that occurred more than 19 minutes after her heart stopped. Nobody has a full explanation for this phenomenon, and we are left in that very familiar mystical state: the one where we still don’t have all the answers.”

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For myself, I am most interested in this statement:

“…in the parietal lobes, an area in the upper rear of the brain. This region helps us orient ourselves in space; it allows us to judge angles and curves and distances and to know where the self ends and the rest of the world begins. People who suffer injuries in this area have great difficulties navigating life’s simplest landscapes.”

I think when severe threat-to-life trauma in a malevolent early brain-forming stages of brain development happens, the entire orientation of a forming ‘self-in-the-world’ is changed.  Such a growing self does not receive the right information to orient themselves in the world.  That is why, in my considerations, malevolent early developmental caregiver interactions create a disoriented disorganized insecure attachment between the growing self and the world.

How does a growing brain orient itself in an environment of trauma and chaos?  Are we to believe that such an infant-child translates its threat-to-life experiences into expressions of ‘love and bliss’?

How ludicrous an idea is that one?  Yet I do believe all these same states of being described in this article – as they exist as human potential – are involved with the alterations a trauma-built brain has to go through in order to survive in a malevolent early world.

Something to think about considering the ‘injuries’ to the development of the self-in-the-world that an abused infant-child experiences.

How do we know we are we alive in a body even though we are not dead – and where exactly IS the line between the two?  After all, the experience of trauma is itself an extreme state experience — and our brain knows it no matter HOW YOUNG WE ARE.   It is entirely possible for trauma to ‘rewire the brain’ just as any other ‘extreme state’ experience can.

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RECOMMENDED – VISIT THIS WEBSITE!!

Randi Kreger
* http://www.BPDCentral.com
* Stop Walking on Eggshells
* Stop Walking on Eggshells Workbook
* The Essential Family Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder

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+MOTHER’S MELANCHOLY, LONELY LETTER 3-1-1960

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One of the things I suspect about a severe insecure attachment disorder — like the disorganized-disoriented one my mother had and gave to me — is that we perpetually long for the closeness of the ones that love us most, and those we most love.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but in part our longing is bigger than life because we cannot summon the inner feeling connection with these people to sustain ourselves comfortably in their absence.

I believe there exists in our brains a fundamental breach or dissociation between our left brain’s attempts to ‘understand and know’ logically and verbally that we are loved and our right brain’s inability to FEEL that we are loved.

Our insecure attachment disorder also manifests itself in the fact that we cannot feel sustaining emotional connections with ‘regular’ people we might encounter or seek out in our lives, either.  Our lack of ability to form safe and secure attachments means that we ache inside all of the time except when we are in the actual, physical presence of our most important attachment figures.

This ache seems permanent.  I believe it is fundamentally connected to the unbearable pain of isolation from secure attachments when we were our youngest and needed them most.  Because sustaining early caregiver attachments were missing, unbearable pain and sadness built itself into our young growing right emotional-social-limbic brain instead of a sense of safety, security and attachment to others in the world.

I think my mother is expressing some of that unbearable pain in this letter, some of her deepest longing for HOME — for the safety and security of loving attachments connected to the HOME of the self in the world.

(Her words in this letter are unusual because she is acknowledging that not even being on the homestead will ease the longings of her heart.)

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March 1, 1960

Dear Mom,

Just walked over to mail box and got your long very much appreciated letter and also received your gorgeous — how do you find time to do it – knitting.  Oh Mom they’re really expert – really!!  The hat is a real beauty and the blue mittens just match her hat – and the socks are so warm.  I love hand knits….

Last week I felt absolutely marvelous – cold cleared up and I had too much pep.  Then Friday evening within one hour I came down with bad cold again!  Head stuffed up – feverish etc. – went to bed early but didn’t help.  Saturday I had so much to do and Sunday went to church again but felt horrible. Came home and had promised kids to go in town to walk around as Fur Rendezvous – Bill won’t even take time to go to movie but each has allowance and could spend it (Linda lost her purse and all her $ saved for camp – 3.50!)  Why she brought it to town I don’t know!  I felt too sick but we went and Monday I was ill.  George Washington’s Birthday but there was school but Bill was home and I stayed in bed all day – believe it or not.  Had sinus so bad it ached and felt sick all over.  Had the girl coming Tuesday (60.00 per month and ho how we need it) – luckily that broke the cold and loosened it.  This is Wednesday and I’m better but oh such mucous and my voice sounds hoarse but over sick part.  All kids have coughs – Linda was sick several days and Cindy threw up other nite all over sleeping bag that I had just finally gotten out of cleaners because it cost 5.00 to be cleaned.  (They’re off to nap and I’ll write more)

Well, they’re in bed for a nap and I find we’re on a better schedule with Suzie here – she’s 5 and so good – quite a homely plain child but so obedient and smart and a very nice play mate for Sharon who was lonely.

We do papers, paint etc. and eat at noon and they nap plus the extra $.  I almost had another child but her neighbor is caring for him.  Well what with more time to put in on homestead – just as well and Suzie’s $ will pay to have La Verne here then.  I wish I could save it but Bill and I will do well if we can get up and down – the kids couldn’t walk that mountain every nite.

We had planned for me to go in with Bill Monday and he was to drive the tractor out but I couldn’t have!  Maybe this week-end.  I dread the bill.  Oh Mom I too will be glad when we hold title.

I worry over where we’ll live next year but we’ll have to wait and see.  I wrote Spoerry one month ago about this house and she never answered (?)

I’m so glad you’re not rushed – it’s most upsetting.  By the way, you asked me if I wanted anything – I would love any of anything if you have it and I guess we could have Army ship up when we come on trip – we’ll wait and see.  Lately I’ve been wishing for a big old house – with library, dining room and all!!  I’m so tired of not having a home and kids are so big now and need their own rooms.  It seems so long since we’ve had a home.  I’ve been wishing we kept my bedroom set, our piano [from her childhood, mentioned in her 1945 diary before they left Boston for L.A.] and all.  Oh Mom, we had such a wonderful home – I wish ours had same now.  I marvel at how you did all you did – I really do – more and more.  Oh Mom, I wish we’d kept that chair Grandpa made – I wish I had our old things, altogether and a road to our homestead and house and all but honestly sometimes it seems it will never be and I get more discouraged now than before.

I wish you were settled or knew at least what you want.

Gunter’s plan to sell their house and build up the street this summer.

Poor family with 5 children got burned out Monday up the street.

I never go anywhere or see anyone.  Wish I had 6 children all day – I only charge 15.00 per week (includes lunch) [in her nursery school]

Lately I’ve felt so blue and lonely.  I need to be out and do things.  I’m tired of staying home and dread the lonely, long summer [on the mountain homestead].

Bill will be so busy again – I really dread it – terribly.

Wish you were coming up – I’d be so happy then – oh, that you were – for the entire summer.  I’d sing, I’d fly! – but as it is I dread [underlined 8 times] this summer.

It’s not even as if I had water to make a garden and I refuse to sit up there all summer again – and yet, what else??

Well, as I said no news and on I rattle about nothing.  Hope C and C aren’t mad I didn’t send $ for your hospital bill – oh that I could.

Write me – I wish I could see you.  Take care.  I love you so!!  Mildred

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letter is filed here:

*1960 (IN THE ACT) HOMESTEADING

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+EXPERTS LEAVE US KNOWING WE NEED ‘SOMETHING MORE’

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I would like to recommend (with the following reservations) the book

Surviving a Borderline Parent: How to Heal Your Childhood Wounds & Build Trust, Boundaries, and Self-Esteem by Kimberlee Roth, Freda B. Friedman, and Randi Kreger.

The authors have created a recovery tool for anyone exposed in childhood to the whims and rages of a parent with this form of mental illness.  The book is clearly divided into sections which cover NEARLY every topic of interest for those of us who had to endure childhoods under the care (or more likely the lack of care) of a parent whose mind never worked correctly.

Yet while the book carries within its pages hundreds of tips for working out our adult ‘issues’ created within this malevolent kind of childhood, it does not, in my opinion, speak to the single most important FACT that those of us who were raised from birth by parents – particularly mothers – who manifested the most severe ‘style’ of Borderline Personality Disorder known within the human species know instinctively about ourselves.

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This book, like most others except The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook–What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing by Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz, does not discuss or present the very real brain development changes that occur as a result of an infant being raised in a truly malevolent environment.

I find that altered brain development is a completely ignored consequence of being raised by a severe Borderline parent.  I remain disappointed that the experts in the topic of working to recover a healthy self and a healthy life post-malevolent childhoods do not consider that for every word of their expert writing those of us who HAVE one of these altered brains read, we are still left ‘starving and alone’, bereft of the most important information we need in order to make use of the information all the experts are giving us.

No matter how helpful, how accurate, how comprehensive, how informed or how ‘scientifically based’ any Borderline Personality Disorder recovery book may intend to be, either for the BPD person or for their offspring, if altered brain development is not presented as THE SINGLE most significant consequence of a malevolent childhood, then the authors’ words are missing the point.

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Even though Roth, Friedman and Kreger at least mention insecure attachment disorders in their book, they do not develop the potential that exists within this one crucial sphere of thought to its REAL conclusion.  Insecure attachment patterns from birth, if they are not altered and improved by secure attachment patterns with other adequate early infant and childhood caregivers, result in the development of a changed brain.

These changed brains will NEVER process incoming information in the same way as a securely attached, benevolently formed brain will.  When this fact is ignored in any ‘self help’ book — which I might add currently includes ALL of them – the foundational brain of the person trying to make sense of the ‘help’ and apply it to themselves is left floating around without the information most needed in order to make improvements in their lives.

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This, to me, amounts to a situation similar to one in which instruction is given in how to drive a car safely without anyone ever acknowledging or addressing the single most important aspect of the task – one must not be completely sightless.  It’s like being instructed to build a modern day wood frame house while at the same time NOT being told that one must have something to measure with, cut the wood with, and drive the nails with.

In other words, every ‘self help’ book I have ever read, with the exception of those who specifically begin from the start by identifying the fundamental brain changes that result from infant and child development in a malevolent world, make major assumptions about their readership that leaves those of us with these changed brains flailing around in the dark.  We know from our insides that something is missing.  I am here to say the missing information is not due to any fault of ours.  The missing information is in the writing and work of the ‘experts’ who are presenting THEIR information while ignoring what some of us know absolutely to be true.

‘Un-ordinary’ infancies and childhoods create ‘un-ordinary’ brain-mind-bodies.  Those with severe Borderline Personality Disorder are among such people, and it is likely that without outside assistance during our childhoods that those of us raised by these BPD parents end up with ‘un-ordinary’ brains, as well.

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The tricky part of trying to locate, access and use information helpful to improving the quality of our lives is that those people with an ‘ordinary brain’ and those with an ‘un-ordinary’ brain might both be left needing to build the proverbial modern wood frame house.  The first have the box of tools, the second do not – and may well NEVER have them because the brain that was built inside their skulls from birth was simply not made to be an ‘ordinary brain’.

Yes, the brain is plastic and can accomplish incredible feats of adjustment.  But the fundamental brain regions, circuits, pathways and patterns of operation are built into the brain’s structure before the age of two.   These most fundamental aspects of a brain, once it has been built, cannot be changed in any fundamental way.  It would seem far more helpful to me to have experts tell me what these brain changes are, how to recognize how they affect me, and how to work most constructively in order to try to create a quality life in spite of them.

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Without information about my changed brain, I am left alone deep within a pitch dark cave without a source of light.  The ‘self help’ books can tell me what it’s like up there on the earth’s surface, but they do not describe where I am to start with, nor do they give me a single solitary clue how to find my way to the surface so that I can try to begin the journey they so helpfully describe for those who are already there.

Yet even if I do somehow miraculously make my way to the ‘ordinary surface’, my journey there would STILL be a far different one than ‘ordinary’ because of my brain-mind-body changes.  I would STILL be left trying to translate their helpful instructions about how to ‘drive safely’ even though I lack the sightedness these authors take completely for granted.  Where DOES this quandary leave me?  Let me ‘count the ways’ I know there’s a field on the surface that is not covered with daisies.

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I was raised from birth by a Narcissistic Psychotic Borderline.  At the same time I can say that my experiences were obviously an exception to the RULE, I can also say that this proves to me that what is considered to be the RULE is fallible.  Therefore in my thinking the RULE is not a RULE at all.  It is simply an assumption about brain formation based on what optimal caregiving environments produce.

Similar breaches of this RULE, as I experienced them, produced my mother’s changed brain during her own early development, as well.  Therefore, in my thinking, obviously the RULE cannot apply to my experience as all ‘self help’ authors seem to assume.

My mother and I, as exceptions to the RULE, must therefore exist in a world that operates under completely different rules, and we ended up with a brain-mind-body that resulted from our adaptations to this altered ‘un-ordinary’ world.  Because nobody tells me what these changes really ARE, I am left trying to figure them out for myself.

Most simply put, I do not receive ‘ordinary’ information in an ‘ordinary’ way.  From those beginnings, I do not process the ‘un-ordinary’ information I receive or act on it in an ‘ordinary’ way, either.  Just taking these simple facts into account, I cannot read any ‘self help’ book and make any ‘ordinary’ sense out of it unless I understand that those books are not addressing the altered reality that I was forced to grow up adjusting to.

Let me give you a few examples.  Because from the time I was born I had no way to count on a ‘good mother’ appearing in response to my infant needs, my brain’s processing systems had to expand themselves to accept that incoherent malevolent chaos was just as equally likely to respond to ME as was coherent benevolent niceness.   Well before the age of three months my brain would already have changed from ‘ordinary optimal’ development as a consequence.

When an infant ordinarily needs something and that something is out-of-sight, it can ordinarily begin to form brain circuits that allow it to WAIT HOPEFULLY because it can TRUST that its caregiver is going to return to take care of it.  If incoherent malevolent chaos is just as likely to appear as the alternative, it seems perfectly obvious to me that this tiny forming brain is not going to have the ‘ordinary’ experiences required to build an ‘ordinary’ brain – from the start.

Most simply put, because my mother lacked the capacity to respond to me as my own self, nothing inside of me was able to respond back to her from my own internal ‘self place’.  I simply have what I can most clearly describe as blank spots in my brain where ‘ordinary’ patterns and circuits were supposed to develop.  As a consequence I am NOT an ‘ordinary’ person and never will be, no matter what good use I try to make out of information contained in expert self help books.

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As a result of my development within the malevolent conditions my mother was just as likely to provide for me as her periodic – and undependable – benevolent conditions, my brain did not build within itself any ‘ordinary’ potential to process human interactions.  This is a complicated condition that I will not cover in detail here.  But I will say here that as a consequence, my right brain did not grow to include ‘ordinary’ processing of social or emotional information.  Its connection with information in my body is different.

Once the major development of the right brain is completed before the age of one, it is time for the left brain to begin going through its major developmental stages.  Under extreme malevolent conditions, there is no way that the left brain can develop ‘ordinarily’, either.  It is not possible for the corpus coliseum, the region of the brain that transfers information between the right and left brain for processing, to develop ‘ordinarily’, either.

That’s just the very earliest beginnings of what I know about changes in my own (and my mother’s) brain development.  We could move on in our understanding of how the development of an infant’s left brain ‘happy’ center’s neurons are affected, how the ability to process social cues is affected, how the brain’s ability to form understandings about trust and hope is affected, how the brain’s neurological information processing about the self is affected, and about how all aspects of communication from the molecular to the verbal are affected as a result of a brain’s ability to adapt a human being’s development to and under malevolent environmental conditions.

There is absolutely no way that the higher functioning cortical areas develop in any ‘ordinary’ fashion, either.  As a result, future planning, decision making, and the ability to understand consequences with cognitive flexibility are affected.

I personally know that my brain does not even process the fundamental concept of TIME in an ordinary way.  Yet I am even here only describing the proverbial ‘tip of the iceberg’ of how extreme early infant and child abuse changes the fundamental ways a survivor’s brain-mind-body changes.

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In other words, even if we take every single expert self help book and put them together in one volume, the OTHER volume that some of us most need to read simply does not exist – yet.  We are left trying to find a fit for ourselves as we attempt to understand ourselves in relation to the more ‘ordinary’ world we were hatched into as adults.

I’m not saying that we can’t make good use of information found in books that do not recognize our ‘un-ordinary’ reality or what our changed brains are really like.  I’m simply making a point that no matter how hard these self help books might try to help us a create a more ‘ordinary’ life, they are evidently unable to address the specifics of what actually happened to some of us.

For any of us who have ever had the attempted-recovery-based feeling of “YES, but……..  “ when we try to apply what seems to make sense to everyone else but not QUITE to us, we are absolutely correct!!  There IS something missing – but the trouble is NOT with us.  The trouble is that what happened to us has yet to be truly recognized for what it is – the creation of ‘un-ordinary’ individuals who were able to adapt physiologically on our most fundamental levels to endure unimaginably malevolent early developmental conditions.

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We are truly extraordinary people, and it evidently remains for us to identify and describe exactly what that means!!  Nobody else seems able to do that for us!

We don’t have to look beyond ourselves to know what living with a changed brain is like.  We’ve made that quantum leap in understanding.  We were forced to, or we would not have survived the malevolent world we developed in.

The rest of the ‘expert’ world just has to catch up with us.  We know what we are talking about.  We are our own living proof!

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+AMAZING DISCOVERY – YET ANOTHER OF MY MOTHER’S CHILDHOOD STORIES

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Found 091109

[enclosed old piece of paper with April 22, 1959 homesteading letter mother had written to her mother, and that grandmother had returned to my mother.  The writing of this story on this paper is in my grandmother’s handwriting.]

Grandmother’s note on the bottom of the page says:

“Dictated by Mildred Cahill Lloyd when about 8 years old”

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The Laughing Brook

Once there was a beautiful, gurgling Brook.  Its name was “Laughing Brook.”  The animals in the nearby woods gave its name to it because the wind came and wrinkled it up and made it murmur, and gurgle, and smile all the way down the hillside.

The animals came to drink at this brook, never knowing it was a fairy brook.  Some animals were good and some were bad.  Those that were bad turned into snakes after drinking the water from the brook, but those that were good stayed as they were, beautiful and kind to each other.

There was one good fairy that lived in the Black Forest where this Laughing Brook flowed by.  That fairy had a firefly that lived with her near a waterfall.  The fireflies lit up her way as they flew about the country.

There was a lovely meadow near the brook where daisies and buttercups and clover grew.  In the meadow there was a big red barn where the farmer kept his cows and hens and pigs and horses.

One night as the fireflies were flying around with the fairies watching over the good people they saw a fire in the hay in the barn.  At once the [written they] fireflies and fairies flew in the window of the farmer’s bedroom and flash their lights so brightly and after that the farmer and his wife woke up, saw the fire from their window, and rushed out in time to save all the animals and most of the barn.

Ever after that the farmer and his wife watched every night to see the fireflies at work and play.

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Although I cannot at present access this article, in light of my mother’s childhood writings I find the following to be a fascinating concept, as reflected in this article:

Rites of Passage and the Borderline Syndrome: Perspectives in Transpersonal Anthropology By LARRY G. PETERS

The following seems to be all that is available as an abstract for this article, found in Questia, Vol. 17, 1994.

How, but in custom and ceremony, are innocence and beauty born?

— W. B. Yeats

The purpose of this study is to compare and contrast certain prevalent contemporary pathological symptoms — parasuicide (especially im­pulsive “self cutting” or wrist cutting and other forms of self-mutilation), anorexia/bulimia, substance abuse, and a predisposition to frequent tran­sient psychotic episodes, all of which, as a constellation, combination, or in some cases individually, are identified by clinicians as presumptive signs of “borderline personality disorder” (BPD) — with those same behaviors in tribal societies. The focus is anthropological and cross-cultural; it is a study of rites of passage, many of which in­volve food deprivations (fasting and purgations), body mutilations (cir­cumcision, scarification), accompan­ied by episodes of altered or nonordi­nary states of consciousness (visions, loss of boundaries). It is argued that there is a relationship between BPD and the failure of Western culture to provide context and myth for mean­ingful rites of passage. The typical symptoms of borderline disorder have neither an appropriate cultural chan­nel nor symbol system to provide di­rection and consequently are not fully appreciated by clinicians. However, these “symptoms” may actually be at­tempts at self-healing gone astray in a culture bereft of an integrative spiritual and ritualistic context, and there­fore without an education for tran­scendent states of consciousness.

Cultural Bound Syndromes (CBSs)

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Peters’ writing seems connected to a field of study called ‘The Anthropology of Consciousness.’  The work of Dr. Larry G. Peters, a Tibetan Shaman, presents the most accurate link I have yet found between my mother’s Alaskan homesteading obsession, her spirituality, and her mental illness.

A child has a different consciousness than an adult does.  I have always been able to sense my mother’s childhood consciousness within her childhood writings:  +MY MOTHER’S CHILDHOOD STORIES.

Having tonight discovered this additional piece of her childhood writing confirms for me that her mind, even by the age of 8, was already grappling on a profound – though unconscious – creative level with archetypal issues related to death and destruction, salvation, punishment and consequence, transformations, relationships with the natural world, and with the fundamental issues related to GOOD and BAD, RIGHT and WRONG that connect to the Borderline Personality Disorder spectrum of symptoms.

I absolutely believe that my mother had child onset pre-borderline conditions that are reflected in her childhood writings – if anybody then could, or even anybody now can make those connections.  I know a lot about my mother.  I was the victim of her insane severe abuse for 18 very long years.

My mother’s inner mental structure was built from very early childhood and probably from her earliest infancy upon a BROKEN understanding of good versus bad.  Whatever psychotic break occurred during her delivery of me was enough to toss her completely over the edge.

I was not saved from the fire as her child.  She used the term ‘snake’ in reference to me.  She believed I was not human, that I was the devil’s child.  I was the outward personification of everything BAD she could not accept about herself.  The OTHER mother, the OTHER Mildred desired to live with the fairies and the fireflies.

I believe the homestead became the outward objectification of the good world her “Laughing Brook” existed in, and the act of homesteading itself became a perpetual rite of passage for my mother as she sought what could not ‘follow her around the bend’.  Homesteading was about her need for healing.  Even her abuse of me was about her need for healing (because if she could ‘deal’ with me her own projected badness would be healed).

The most amazing thing is that Alaska DOES have the power to heal.  It even now remains mostly pure and that natural purity is what raised-up humans throughout our evolution, and it does have the power to heal.  In my mother’s case, however, it was not enough.  (Read PRESENTING THE HOMESTEADING – her letters.)

The rites of passage that Peters makes reference to occur within a healthy brain, mind and psyche.  The sick psyche of my mother’s could not have been saved past the age of 8 no matter what culture she had been a part of.  My mother was born an extremely fragile, at-risk child.  The conditions within her childhood environment from birth might have been adequate to a less sensitive and vulnerable child.  I believe that the conditions of my mother’s childhood conspired to destroy my mother.  She, in turn, very nearly destroyed me.

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This work that I am doing with my mother’s letters does seem to be about retrieving a life of suffering from the ‘lost and found’ — both hers and mine.

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Mother’s letter to Grandmother May 23, 1959 about the homestead:

“I told Bill I hope to live to be 90 and never leave here.  (I want to be buried here!)  I told him I even yearn to be a child again and live here – such a kingdom….”

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+WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT TRAUMA?

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I would think that in their own way everyone in our great nation recognizes today as the 8th anniversary of one of the most terrible crisis that ever occurred within the boundaries of our country.  Our hearts continue to go out to all those who suffered terror and unimaginable trauma as a result of the destruction brought upon them by the acts of terrorists whose own agendas allowed them to kill and destroy wantonly.  At the same time we remember each person and their loved ones whose lives have been touched in the aftermath of war, destruction and bloodshed that has followed 9-11 and the World Trade Center attacks.

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The most devastating consequences of trauma to humans can never be measured in financial terms.  Neither do we yet know the true reality of the way humans respond to extraordinary traumatic stressors.  Continued research into the ongoing, intergenerational consequence of the Holocaust’s traumatic effects shows that trauma can be CLEARLY passed down to offspring.

Researchers will be working to uncover the long range consequences of trauma caused by 9-11 for a long time to come.  They know that babies of women pregnant during the 9-11 terrorist attacks have been found to be born with the ‘markers’ for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a result of their mother’s exposure to the attacks.

We are learning more and more both about how resilient humans are and about our fragility.  Every-day people do not usually pay attention to the results of millions and millions of dollars spent on research about the consequences of trauma to humans, and yet this research can inform our thinking in new and more enlightened ways.

The Atlanta study looked at genetic potential as it interacts with children’s responses to trauma.  It found, among other things, that a child’s safe and secure attachment to ANY adult in its life influences to the positive that child’s ability to overcome traumatic experiences.  In another corner of the world researchers have discovered the same thing.  Although exposed equally to unimaginable terrors and traumas, the children of South Africa end up with severe longterm traumatic responses while the children of Kenya do not.

The more damaged South African children live in a country long torn apart, in fact all but dismantled by generations of influences that have destroyed the secure social attachment fabric of their culture.  Kenya has not suffered this intergenerational destruction of its ongoing cultural strengths so that their children have the benefit – in spite of current terrible traumas and tragedies – of being ‘held’ within a culture that still has its social supports and secure attachment systems somewhat in place.

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We cannot realistically consider the long range consequences of traumatic experience without considering the attachment contexts that form and support (or don’t) the members of any human society.  These attachments begin before birth, as the responses of infants still very much physiologically attached to their mothers during 9-11 demonstrated.

Children are held and supported by the fabric of the attachment support net that their parents either do or do not have in their lives.  Without firmly safe and secure human attachments from the beginning of our lives, we are at astronomically increased risk of suffering long term devastation in our adult lives from any traumatic experience that we might later have.  It is time that all of us realize that attachment is the single most important aspect of our lives because we are a social species.

What this means to me is that all of us, including and perhaps most importantly any mental health expert that works with troubled people of all ages, must begin to include attachment disorder understanding, concepts and vocabulary into our cultural base of knowledge about what makes our lives ‘good’ and what makes them ‘bad’.  I doubt that more than a small handful of mental health experts EVER talk with their adult clients about insecure attachment disorders.

We reserve any discussion or awareness of secure and insecure attachment disorders ONLY as it might relate to ‘troubled’ children.  Where do we think child attachment disorders disappear to once someone magically crosses some invisible line into adulthood?  They go nowhere.  Our attachment orders or disorders are as much ingrained into us as any other physiological response system our brain, body, nervous and immune system has.

We HAVE to begin talking about our attachment system as it operates in our adulthood because it formed who we are and affects how we respond both to the good and to the bad in our lives – at all times!  Those who might be having the most difficult time recovering from the devastating trauma of 9-11 are no exception.  But has ANYONE ever talked to them about their attachment system?

I am willing to bet that any adult who was formed in an extremely malevolent childhood environment and who did not have the benefit of having a safe and secure adult attachment person in their childhood life, is among those who lack the necessary resiliency to recuperate fully from any traumas that they experience.  We are doing nobody any favors by ignoring the absolute, fundamental reality of how our secure or insecure attachment system governs our ability to cope with trauma.

I therefore encourage readers to spend some time investigating some of the information connected to the live-links provided in this post.  You might help yourself beyond belief, or be able to assist someone you know in their efforts to deal with any ongoing traumatic consequences in their lives – including their ability to parent effectively.

Trauma is not bliss, and neither is ignorance.  It is the response-ability of all of us to arm ourselves with any and all information that can help us understand what we can better do to improve secure attachments in the world – no matter who we are, what age we are, or what we have experienced.

Thank you for reading this post.  Comments are welcome and appreciated.

+ATTACHMENT: SMART AND STUPID RESEARCH

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