Tag: mothering

+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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+BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER – LEARNING ABOUT MY MOTHER’S BRAIN-MIND

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Several years ago when I first began research for my writing I had no intention of focusing on Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).  The more I work with the transcription of my mother’s Alaskan homesteading letters, the more I realize that it is impossible for me to avoid the subject.

According to the statistics at the bottom of this post, approximately 1 in 50 adult Americans suffer from BPD disorder.  If I think about how BPD affects our population, I realize that the offspring of these people are severely affected.  From that ‘contagion’ the grandchildren on down are affected, as well as every person intimately (and even not so intimately) connected to the BPD person.

My mother’s letter that I present here is simply another tiny slice of the words she expressed from within her own psyche, from within her own perspective of the world.  Having been her abused child for 18 years, I can read a universe of twisted darkness not only behind the words she chooses to write, but in all the spaces between those words and between those lines.

Taken together, my mother’s letters (once I have completed transcription of them) has the possibility of being the single most comprehensive ‘case history’ of a severe Borderline Personality Disorder person ever collected.

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My mother intended to write her book about her story — her way.  She could not do it.  I believe her true story is ABOUT the mental illness that kept her from doing so.  In her September 26, 1959 letter to her mother she states:

“Please now send back all letters and this – it’s my only record and I’m determined – a book I will write!!  — I will — !!”

This letter this sentence is taken from is longer and perhaps sheds more light on her psyche than does the one I post below, and is well worth reading.  It can be found at:

*September 1959 Mother’s Letters

I cannot personally imagine any scenario in which a BPD parent can be a truly adequate parent.  I see that all such a parent’s offspring are in danger of being used in the twisted inner psychic reality world that the Borderline condition creates — used as pawns and props of an externalized psyche of a parent that has no idea what “ordinary” reality is.  These children will not be recognized as the individual actual people that they are, and will not be related to as such by their BPD parent.

Nor do I believe that Borderlines as severe as my mother was ever have the capacity to understand “ordinary” people or reality — ever.  It is an admirable effort should these people seek therapy and desire to change — and some progress might be able to be made IN THE DIRECTION of ordinary — but they will never get there.

BPD individuals do not have “ordinary” brains.  Part of their condition is that they will NEVER understand how different their thinking and acting is.  From the outside — such as from the position of readers of my mother’s letters — the difference in their thinking is almost imperceptible.

But it IS there.  Hopefully by the time I complete the job of transcribing my mother’s letters I will be able to CLEARLY pinpoint and point to examples that will make these differences as clear as possible.  In addition we can more clearly discern the insecure disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder that lies at the root of the Borderline Personality Disorder’s condition.

So how do those of us who had such a parent, usually a mother, begin to untangle for ourselves the twisted childhood that has confused us at our basis from the time we were born?  I urge readers to take a long, close, hard, thoughtful look at these letters my mother wrote, both the one copied here below and the one at the end of the link to the September 1959 letters provided above.

But most importantly, pay attention to your body as you read them, particularly to your gut. Note any sensation that your body, through your right emotional brain sends you — not what your left brain very limited logical side might wish to convince you is real.

We also have hosts of cultural admonishments not to ‘think badly’ about other people.  I learned a long time ago that by looking for the truth about my mother I am NOT judging her.  I am trying to understand the devastatingly cunning and destructive mental illness that consumed her, and therefore her life.  My mother’s was an insidious disease.  My mission-possible is to offer some small insight into how to recognize both the conditions that contributed to its onset (almost always through childhood traumas) and the damage that it does particularly to the BPD’s offspring — especially to THE CHOSEN ONE for abuse such as I was.

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October 22, 1959 7:15 PM

Dear Mother,

Just a short ‘Hi’.  Bill is only working 10 hours now and I’ve been getting children’s meals and then he arrives and another meal to get so – tonite I’m waiting for HIM – so thought I’d write a note while waiting.

Just read your long letter – so nice and informative and interesting.  It’s funny how things work out.  Now you’re $ tight and we got that loan and can start paying you back.  Thank God.  We are watched over – for certain, for certain.

We’re tight too and eat beans and potatoes (Carrs gave us 100 pounds) but at least we can keep those D – vehicles.

I just finally got truck started.  All week it wouldn’t run but today it’s warmed up and now it’s raining and then will freeze!!!

Anyways went to garage to see about jeep and called Bill at work and he talked to mechanic.  I’ll know when he gets home.  It will cost but we’ve GOT to get it fixed.

Took truck up to get Linda at Brownies and J. at Cub Scouts.  I feel they need that.  {Linda note:  Brownies didn’t last long in my life, but it was at least something positive while it did.}

Those D – Vanover boys still don’t like J. and Julie came over and told him and that they say “none of the boys like him” and did I tell her.  I told her.  I told her they don’t even know HIM or his friends etc. etc. and I told her they were impolite and unmannerly to say such a thing and I knew plenty who didn’t like them!  [Linda note:  Chuckle!  Oh, great mom!  Look who’s talking!]

He felt terrible but I felt worse.  [Linda note:  That sucks having a mother like ours was!  She could only care about herself!] He must play baseball, ice skate, ski etc.  He MUST – we need $ for those things.

Oh Mom, it’s not easy to be a child – or a Mother.

They got report cards.  Linda got all B’s, J. got D in spelling and otherwise B’s.  I can’t understand it and wrote her a note about it.  She said when I visited school it was his arithmetic and he got C+ in that and all other B’s.  I’ll drill him now in that too!

Work work work

I worry over our 2 months [proving up time on the homestead].  Our neighbors – Pottle, Gunter etc. say “Who will know?”  Oh, I hate that.

I say We Know!  We’re Honest.

Spring is not good, roads are impassable – mud and all.  Remember?  Must be Nov, Jan, Feb or 2 of these.  Unless you come up in March and April.  I hate to depend on that.

Still no children – just Gracie.  I don’t feel she’s good publicity.  [Linda note:  Terrible thing to say about the “artist’s retarded daughter” in her Happy Time Nursery School, and read below!]

She’s a moron but easy for me!  She does say 20 words, plays dolls etc. ? But what do others think?

Oh Mom – I want a home and to live like other people.  I’m tired of all this mixed up MESS.

Tell C and C ‘Hi’ I’ll write Carolyn this week.

You come up in March and April and I’ll go back with you for a month – kids get out of school May 15th.  I could — ?  Love, Your Loving Daughter

+++ [in same envelope – says Friday]

Dear Mom,

Enclosing your scarf – I never wear it.  It just looks like YOU – please wear it again.

Also Bill forgot your letter so you’ll get 2.

No new news!  It’s rainy today.

I’m going to try and take children out of school for 2 months.

Seriously could you come up for 2 months or would it completely throw you?

Jo Anne just was over – told me not to tell a soul – nobody – just sold 80 acres he homesteaded in Mountain View for 150,000.

Imagine!

But Jerry got 3 F’s and is on 3 week trial.

Oh Mom – she’s so interested in our place I’m suspicious and sick until I get back [there]!!!  Love, Me

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The rest of October 1959 letters here:

*October 1959 Mother’s Letters

The rest of the 1959 letters here:

*1959 MOTHER LETTERS

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Prevalence and incidence statistics for Borderline Personality Disorder:

See also prevalence and incidence page for Borderline Personality Disorder

Prevalance of Borderline Personality Disorder: 2 percent of adults (NIMH)

Prevalance Rate: approx 1 in 50 or 2.00% or 5.4 million people in USA [about data]

Incidence (annual) of Borderline Personality Disorder: 3,019 annual cases in Victora 1996 (DHS-VIC)

Incidence Rate: approx 1 in 1,510 or 0.07% or 180,074 people in USA [about data]

Incidence extrapolations for USA for Borderline Personality Disorder: 180,074 per year, 15,006 per month, 3,462 per week, 493 per day, 20 per hour, 0 per minute, 0 per second. Note: this extrapolation calculation uses the incidence statistic: 3,019 annual cases in Victora 1996 (DHS-VIC)

Prevalance of Borderline Personality Disorder: BPD is more common, affecting 2 percent of adults, mostly young women. (Source: excerpt from Borderline Personality Disorder: NIMH)

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+HEREIN LIES THE MONSTER HOMESTEADING OBSESSION SEED

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*Age 7 – Mother’s Letter (#2) April 14, 1959 – The Homesteading Obsession Grows

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I was seven when this letter was written.  I am still in the transcription process for the homesteading era this letter belongs within, but in this letter my mother’s fanatic obsession with homesteading begins to show itself clearly.

The rest of her letters (as they are being transcribed) can be seen here:

PRESENTING THE HOMESTEADING

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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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+”I WANT MY LETTERS NOW PLEASE”

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I can’t help but stop and ponder the portion of my mother’s letter I copied below.  My ‘sick’ mother would no doubt be turning over in her grave at the thought of her daughter, Linda, DARING to be so audacious as to take on the ‘coveted’ task of working with these ‘coveted’ letters.

My mother was cremated, so no grave to turn over in.  Her ashes were spread over her beloved homestead.  I was not there when this was done.

But I am here with this collection of 50-year-old letters, and for whatever reason it seems that I BELONG to this task that my mother could never complete herself.

I believe that in the next world our sicknesses are removed from us.  In that world, my mother can love me.  She can love herself.  In that world I do not believe that my mother minds that I am working on the task of putting order to this disheveled collection of envelopes, mixed up undated letters, journal fragments and thoughts that she wrote those 50 years ago.  And in both worlds, I can love my mother.

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In my mind there is some version of ‘mothering my mother’ going on for me here.  I can never fully explain and can never justify the insane abuse that she perpetrated against me, no matter WHAT the stress level was in her and my father’s life.

I work with these pages with love, care and gentleness.  I offer in my small way the kind of post-loving to my mother’s lifetime homesteading legacy as if she were one of my children.  I was able to love my children in spite of the terrible abuse that was done to me.  I believe a major contributing factor to my ability to love came from being on that mountain.

If she had not loved that mountain, had not, with my father, somehow found what it took to get that homesteading done, my ability to love would not have been exercised enough in my brain to allow those circuits and pathways to evolve, develop and grow.

My mother’s mental illness would have followed ME anywhere during my childhood.  It began with my birth and certainly flourished in its terribly sick way in Los Angeles LONG before I was moved to Alaska a month before my 6th birthday.  My mother’s mental illness was intertwined completely with her homesteading experience.  But the mountain was pure and sustaining.  It did help her.  It helped me.  I know this.

So when I read these following words that my mother wrote to her mother about the letters that she sent to my grandmother and WANTED BACK I understand that they DID belong to my mother during her lifetime.  She is no longer here to claim them.  They were her legacy that has somehow been passed on to me, as ironical as that seems to me to be.

Or is it irony?  Is it some strange kind of opportunity to orchestrate a healing of some kind between us?  How do I set aside the insanity and abuse as I work with these letters she wrote 50 years ago, knowing at the same time that behind the scene of her words existed a brutal, terrifying, dangerous, violently destructive mother toward me — really just me — that does not seem to appear anywhere on these pages that she wrote?

I am not going to waste this opportunity.  I have no solid or clear idea about what good use transcribing these letters is to anybody other than me — and perhaps my family.  I only know that I am MOVED to put them into order, to do what my mother could not do — was prevented by her mental illness from doing in her lifetime.

Somehow through all the progressive years of mental deterioration my mother’s mind went through long after I left home and until the time of her death in 2002, she did somehow manage to retain and protect these letters.

I feel I am honoring my mother in some kind of precious way by helping to construct a more coherent life story for her, and for each of her six children that shared our childhoods with her.  After all, the disorganized, disoriented incoherency of an insecure attachment disorder is more than reflected in this mess of papers as well as in the story they tell.  That does not mean — in spite of the unbelievable suffering she caused me when she threw her ‘fits of rage’ during the 18 years of abuse toward me that she could not STOP — that there is not still something beautiful to be found in anybody’s life, including hers.

Because life itself is a precious gift.  Because once my mother left THIS world I believe she left her terrible illness behind her.  She also left these letters.  Which voice of my mother’s do I now want to hear?

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Monday, May 18, 1959

“Dear Mother,

*I’ll be expecting all letters back in next mail!!  [Linda note:  So that 50 years later I can transcribe them now, put them in order, and let their words tell her story — now!]

Received your latest letter on the way to town.  Idea of book, good, but as you know it’s been my idea from beginning but rush job NO – Please send me back my letters now – I write to you instead of keeping notes – I don’t want a review.  I want my letters NOW PLEASE if you want to really know all that happens this is the only way I can keep you informed but you must send each letter right back so I can put it in my 3 hole note book in order.  So please send my letters back [from] March on –

I have so much to write and my ideas are endless and there were none at apartment so at least the tough homesteading brings release of ideas and who knows, perhaps some day a book or a movie but it must be done in my way or not at all.  You alone can understand that….they are MINE and MINE ALONE…. They are MINE to do with as I want.  You must never use them in any way.  Promise???”

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Read the rest of this letter here:

*May 1959 Mother’s Letters

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+LINKS FROM THE PAST – MY MOTHER AND HER MOTHER – A LETTER

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All Borderlines, all abusive parents had mothers of one kind or another.  I am always asking the questions in the back of my mind, “What kind of mother was my grandmother to my mother?  What kind of mother was my great grandmother to my grandmother?”

It is of course extremely difficult for me to engage in my forensic autobiographical search to find any answer to my questions.  Yet I do have the written words of both my mother and my grandmother contained in these piles of old letters I am in the process of transcribing.

This is the link to the first of my grandmother’s letters I have transcribed.  Like drawing a single drop from a vast ocean, this single letter remains as only that single drop, yet also contains within it some reflection of the ocean of interactions my mother had over her lifetime with her own mother.

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Follow this link and see what you think!

*Grandmother’s 10-2-1961 Letter to Mother

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I just completed transcription of an earlier letter from my grandmother to my mother.  It contains these words of wisdom:

“Get a hot water bottle and a new diaphragm, Mil.”

*Grandmother’s 3-3-1960 Letter to Mother

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Newest transcriptions:

*Grandmother’s 1-9-1960 Letter to Mother

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*Grandmother’s 3-2-1960 Letter to Mother

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*Grandmother’s 3-19-1960 Letter to Mother

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*Grandmother’s 4-9-1960 Letter to Mother

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*Grandmother’s 4-17-1960 Letter to Mother

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+LINK TO TODAY’S WRITING: MEETING MY BORDERLINE MOTHER’S FRIEND

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J.V. was probably the calm to my mother’s storm.  J.V. was unshakable.  She was invincible.  She was consistent, steady, not emotionally involved, clear, outspoken and wise.  My mother could not throw the lasso of her insanity around J.V. and yank her in.  She could not employ J.V. to join with her in craziness in any way.  My mother could not cajole J.V. into any role in her ongoing destructive drama of her life.  Somehow J.V. had something rarer than any precious gem.  She had the ability to be a severe borderline’s friend for 46 years.

This link below connects to this piece that I wrote today about my visit in Alaska with my mother’s friend:

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*Age 58 – MEETING MY MOTHER’S FRIEND

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+LEFT, RIGHT, CENTER AND HIGHER BRAIN: MY RIGHT TO WRITE!

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While Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard Medical School research group have at least – and at last – finally told us the facts about how early brain development can be altered from extreme early child abuse, I can find no one who talks about what this altered brain feels like from the inside.

I am living with such an altered brain.  Every day I discover how that changed brain impacts on my ability to life anything like a quality life.

Since my return from Alaska, and since my decision to actually write a book rather than simply pouring all my words down the hole (whole) in the cup of my blog, I find that I cannot do it.  I think I know part of the reason why.  Perhaps if I articulate what this seems like I can move past what it is that is stopping me?

As Jill Bolte Taylor describes it in her book ‘My Stoke of Insight’, the right brain does not process anything like a sequence of time.  It also cannot write a book by itself.  Taylor describes how her thoughts operated in words even though she lost the ability during her left brain stroke to either verbalize or to comprehend others’ spoken words.  I wonder how a brain allows us to speak to ourselves within our skulls in word-thoughts even at those times that we cannot use language to communicate outside of ourselves?

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When my brother described how writing a book is like forming a shape from carving a block of wood, my right brain understood exactly what he was saying.  Yet I am now stuck with the dilemma of knowing that a book is a tangible, physical THING.  That means to me that my creative right brain efforts must become directed to the formation of an object.  That must require a multiple level of word-thinking, goal direction and focus that I don’t seem able to do – at least not right now until I LEARN how!

My experience with making anything creatively is that I enter what I understand is a right brain creative space that does not require words.  Some might call this FLOW.  In fact, only during brief periods of needing to organize specific actions (like getting materials together, or actually deciding how big to make something, etc.) do words ever enter my ‘making’ process.

How, then, do I creatively write a book?  My brain seems stuck in this dilemma.  Blogging is writing.  It is not about making a tangible, physical object.  I can evidently utilize my familiar brain circuitry and patterns while blogging that do not seem remotely available to me if I try to force my brain to make the switch to ‘writing the book’.

How interesting!  And currently, how impossible!  I suspect that an ‘ordinarily formed’ brain can enter FLOW space and not lose its orientation and organization in the process.  Based on my current experience, I don’t think my ‘evolutionarily altered’ brain can do that!

I understand that it is the higher cortical areas of the brain that are designed to direct the entire show of how we use our brain-minds to BE in the world.  Teicher’s group and other infant brain development specialists talk about how extreme early child abuse alters the development of BOTH brain hemispheres, of the corpus callosum that lies between them and sends information back and forth between them, and also changes how the higher cortices develop (causing early atrophy rather than normal development).  And these are certainly not the only regions, circuits and operations that are affected!

Great!  And we are supposed to live an ordinary, normal life with THAT brain?  Or write a book with it!  I can make jewelry, crochet rugs, make mosaics, draw a picture, make a clay pot, spin wool, weave, make a garden – in short, do all kinds of creative things with this brain because ‘making things’ has always been a part of who I was born to be.  But the process, or the FLOW of making things seems dissociated for me in certain ways from being able to set a concrete goal toward a specific concrete expression of that FLOW.

Throughout my childhood my mother berated and belittled me for being a stupid child because I sat in the middle of the living room floor making and remaking necklaces out of pop beads before I was two years old.  I doubt that as a young child I had any plan as my tiny fingers ‘worked’ with those beads.  I could interact between process and objects in the material world so that some ‘thing’ came out of it.  It was a natural, nonarticulated process that could happen without any higher cortical goal in mind, without self-censorship, and without any ‘attachment’ to outcome.

How do I do that with words?  Taylor has a lot to say in her book about how silent her brain became as her left brain lost its ability to ‘run the show’.  She applauds the benefits of finding ways to access that silence for ourselves as a good thing even when our whole brain is in operation.  (After eight years of focused and dedicated effort Taylor repaired her brain after her stroke at age 37.)

I say that along with thousands of other suggestions given by people who had safe and securely attached childhoods and were thus able to build ‘ordinary’ brains, that those of us with these malevolently-formed changed brains need to be very careful about taking what an ordinary brain person says about how THEIR ‘ordinary’ brain works and applying it across the board to ourselves.

I can assure you that having a silent brain caused by disconnection with the left hemisphere, and having predominantly right brain experiences without correct cooperative processing of information with the left brain, and being denied ordinary-kind supervision and direction from an ordinarily-formed higher cortex is NOT a blissful experience.  It is unsettling, difficult, challenging, disorienting, disorganizing, and SCARY!

Again, I highly recommend reading My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Ph.D., Jill Bolte Taylor.  It at least gives us a clear language and frame of reference to BEGIN to understand – from deep within our own altered experience – how an ‘ordinary’ brain works in contrast to how our ‘evolutionarily altered’ brain does!

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Enough words about this for the time being.  I do not have a co-writer or a publisher or an invested editor to help me write my book – or to act in place of the higher cortex I need to complete this task as I wish to accomplish it.  I have to find a way to argue this out for myself.  If I cannot do this, the blog will remain as my continual FLOW repository for words that seem to stream out easily in this format, but flee into invisibility if I try to direct them toward a final, finished, tangible, physical object – a book!

The silence that Taylor describes as her left brain shut down was in part about the vanishing voice of judgment and criticism that the left brain seems so prone to offer us.  Blogging is not about being right or wrong, not about succeeding or not, not about approval or any of the operations and expectations that the left brain sinks its teeth into.

If my efforts at ‘making a book’ are being sabotaged by my left brain’s critic, does it have to respond by holding its ability to process language at bay where my right brain can’t get to it?  Does it have to seal my words off from my writing, creating right brain that needs them?  “Come on, you two!  Let’s do better than that!  Cooperate, already!”

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Speaking of books, I am in the process of  reading my way through two of them:

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin

The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature by Daniel J. Levitin

I am not reading them for any particular insight into music, per se.  Levitin mentions that the word for song and the word for dance are the same in many world languages because singing involves body movement.  I know that we had both abilities, and their corresponding brain networks firmly implanted within us long before the 140,000-year-ago benchmark when our FOXP2 gene became activated and we evolved to speak.

It seems obvious to me that we evolved ways to express ourselves and to communicate through song, dance, drama, pantomime and all sorts of gestures from our earliest beginnings.  It was only after those brain regions and circuits were very well formed that we were able to use them – MUCH LATER in our development – to talk and think in words!

I am reading this book because I am looking for ways to think about how screaming, shouting, yelling and all forms of verbal violence and auditory assault in the world of the unborn and the very young child affect the development of sound (and language) processing in the developing brain.

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+SOME FANTASTIC LINKS ON CHILD ABUSE AND BRAIN CHANGES!

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Greetings to each and every person who has visited this blog during the seven weeks of absence from writing here.  I am home now after more than 10,000 miles of traveling during the past seven weeks as I visited family and friends whom I love and who love me.

The time I spent in Alaska, the home of my heart, was everything I needed it to be in order for me to move forward with the writing of my book.

I will at this point be dividing my writing clearly between my book (which will not be appearing on this blog) and other assorted writing specifically for the blog.  As my precious Alaskan baby brother (now 44) told me, if it is my desire and my intention to write a book, then I need to do it.  He explained it to me this way:

A person might pick up tools and a block of wood intending to carve an image.  Perhaps they are not quite sure what image lies within the wood so they begin carving in process until that image becomes clear and the carving can then give it form.  If, however, that point never occurs where the image within the wood is found, shaped and born, all that will result from the effort of carving is a pile of wood shavings and dust.

I heard and understand the wisdom contained in my brother’s words, and I recognize that continuing to pour words out into my blog will not accomplish the creation of my book.  I will now separate the words that belong in my book from those that do not.

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As I continue through the process of getting my ‘home legs’ under me, I will at least post a few interesting links here for reader consideration!  Please follow some or all of these links – THEY ARE IMPORTANT!  Please also join me in my gratitude to every single person who is involved with this quality of work to further our understanding about the impact of severe child abuse on human development – and the work of everyone committed to ending child maltreatment around the globe.

Please also remember the abuse being done to the fragile web of life on our glorious planet and the suffering of so many species being caused by the thoughtless harm of all kinds caused by humans.

And, for a load of Alaskan MOOSE FUN….

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Back to School Tips: Parents Should Get Ready, Too!

Posted: 27 Aug 2009 08:21 AM PDT

Tips for parents on helping their kids succeed in school, adapter from information provided by our friends at Prevent Child Abuse New Jersey.

Amid the shopping trips for sharpened #2 pencils, crisp notebooks and new shoes, parents should start thinking about what they can do to become the best possible support system for their child this school year. The beginning of the new academic season is often the most important, as it sets the tone for a meaningful and successful year.  Research shows that students are more equipped to thrive academically and socially when parents are actively involved in their child’s education.

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Emotional Abuse Recovery NOW

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Going Big: Harlem Children’s Zone on This American Life

Posted: 18 Aug 2009 02:17 AM PDT

Hats off to This American Life for shining a spotlight on the solutions to the many problems that plague our nation’s impoverished families. Going Big, this week’s episode, profiles Geoffrey Canada, a pioneer in the fields of child and family support and poverty prevention. His organization, Harlem Children’s Zone, boasts tremendous outcomes for the families and community it serves, including:

  • l00% of students in the Harlem Gems pre-K program were found to be school-ready for the sixth year in a row.
  • 81% of Baby College parents improved the frequency of reading to their children.
  • $4.8 million returned to 2,935 Harlem residents as a result of HCZ’s free tax-preparation service
  • 10,883 number of youth served by HCZ in 2008.

Listen to the This American Life podcast.

Below is a five-minute video of moms talking about the challenges of raising children in Harlem and the difference HCZ is making in their lives.

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

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Brain Development Altered by Violence

By Dale Russakoff
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 15, 1999; Page A3

LITTLETON, Colo.—More than a week had passed since Krystie DeHoff felt bullets and bombs explode all around her, since she ran in horror past young, dead bodies to safety. Now she was inching toward normality, shopping at King Soopers grocery, when the most innocent sound–a baby crying in his mother’s arms–set the Columbine High School massacre in motion again, this time in her mind. Her heart raced, her muscles coiled. She heard not a baby, but her classmates, shrieking. “All I could think was: MAKE HIM STOP!” she said.

READ MORE……

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Using Mental Strategies Can Alter

The Brain’s Reward Circuitry

ScienceDaily (June 30, 2008) — The cognitive strategies humans use to regulate emotions can determine both neurological and physiological responses to potential rewards, a team of New York University and Rutgers University neuroscientists has discovered. The findings, reported in the most recent issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, shed light on how the regulation of emotions may influence decision making.

READ MORE….

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The Neural Self: The Neurobiology of Attachment

By Phil Rich, Ed.D., LICSW

It is its basis in biology that makes attachment theory unique among theories of psychology and child development. From the biological perspective, attachment is simply an evolutionarily-evolved process to ensure species survival, and is thus as much a part our biology as that of any animal.

From this perspective, cognitive schema and the resulting mental map is not merely a psychological phenomenon, but a physical entity, hard-wired into neural circuits and reflected in neurochemical and electrical activity within the central nervous system.

The mental map into which our experiences and memories are imprinted is thus a neurobiological structure, the result of synaptic processes, out of which human cognition and behavior emerges, resulting in LeDoux’s (2002) description of our “synaptic” self.

Siegel (2001) describes the pattern and clusters of synaptic firing as “somehow creat(ing) the experience of mind” (p. 69). He writes that “integration” reflects the manner in which functionally separate neural structures and processes cluster together and interact to form a functional whole – in this case, our selves.

READ MORE…..

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Child abuse marks genes, affects ability to cope: Study

By Margaret Munro , Canwest News Service

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Stress

Your Three Brains

The neurologist Paul MacLean has proposed that our skull holds not one brain, but three, each representing a distinct evolutionary stratum that has formed upon the older layer before it, like an archaeological site – he calls it the “triune brain.” MacLean, now the director of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behaviour in Poolesville, Maryland, says that three brains operate like “three interconnected biological computers, each with its own special intelligence, its own subjectivity, its own sense of time and space and its own memory”.

READ MORE….

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+CHECKING IN FROM FARGO, NORTH DAKOTA

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It is a scary realization to know that, at least in the ‘olden days’ of the 1960s, people as nuts as my mother was could actually run day care centers.  I was too young then to realize what, if any, problems arose regarding the children under her care (I don’t believe she abused any of them) or with the children’s parents.  With so many mothers needing to or choosing to work today, how would anyone know if a daycare provider was ‘off their rocker’, potentially dangerous, or actually dangerous?

It is a known fact that particularly with Borderline Personality Disorder the alterations in perception of reality and resulting actions are extremely difficult to recognize and detect — especially from the outside.  This is part of the purpose and goal of my writings, to help us learn more about what makes these people tick so that we can recognize them better.  I believe our improved understanding of personality disorder, depression, bi-polar and other sometimes-hard-to-detect-in-others brain change-mental illnesses is necessary to keep all children safer!

Free Webinar For Parents: Will You Know High-Quality Child Care When You See It?

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