Tag: mothering

+I AM THRILLED! I WROTE MY 1ST FICTION STORY!

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Directly as a result of my having just processed a ‘quantum healing leap’ experience related to becoming crystal clear about the difference between writing a trauma memory and writing ABOUT a trauma memory, I finally realized that there is absolutely no reason on earth why I can’t write fiction.  I want to thank my dear friend who talked truthfully about how she responded to my writings, as well as also thank those commenters who gave me the gift of their observations and insights as well this morning, because without this amazing inter-personal sharing, I would not have received the incredible gift that has come to me — the gift of being able, for the first time in my life, to safely access and play with my own imagination!

True, it’s almost beyond belief that my childhood was so terrible that I was forbidden to play.  Many abuse incidents happened because my mother caught me playing!  Not any more!  Not any more!

I’m not sure when that realization would have hit me if just after my quantum leap I had talked to my sister who told me she had just discovered the writing links I posted earlier today.  I rushed to the helium.com site and began to poke around through that overly-cluttered frenetic mess of a visual information display (my opinion!).

I found a contest I can enter for a nonautobiographical fiction short story under 1500 words.  “Well, why not?” I asked myself just as a massive thunderhead forced me to turn off my computer.  I grabbed a pen and a stack of paper and wrote

my very first fiction story –

DADDY’S GONE

I don’t think I could be happier if I won the Olympics!

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I hope there are many more stories to come.  What I realized is that I now know how to keep my own many, many abuse memories separate from my imagination.  My imagination is MINE.  It is MY gift, to use and enjoy and bring to full bloom in any way I choose to USE IT!  How cool is THAT?  Today I discovered that I can go anywhere I want to in my imagination, and that does NOT mean I am at risk of ‘bothering’ my trauma memories!  I can imagine safely!

I could NEVER do that as a child.  I could not wonder, I could not imagine, and I could not PLAY.  Today I discovered that allowing myself access to imagination is (drum roll please!) –

PLAY!  By golly, it is FUN!!

It was discovering the doorway into a wide open universe that I didn’t even know I didn’t know existed!

(I guess I chose my blog heading picture for a reason I did not even realize at the time I put it there!)

I have always believed until today that I cannot write fiction.  I mean, I absolutely believed that to be true!  Somehow I believed that the developmental changes that happened to me as a result of 18 long years of that severe child abuse somehow made me into someone that could not imagine.  Imagine that!!  Now that false belief is gone.  It vanished as completely as a light mist would in bright sunshine.  I swear it’s like discovering that I can fly!

I’ll find out over time where the stories take me.  Maybe they’ll be like this one.  Maybe not.  It will take a little time for me to gain confidence that I won’t return to my former state of doubting myself.

I leave this coming Thursday, July 9, 2009 for my seven weeks of traveling and visiting lots of wonderful family.  I am going on a wonderful adventure, even though a part of me remains incredibly sad about the loss of my relationship with my best friend.  But I can do nothing to heal whatever the wounds are that sent down a lightning bolt to cut us off from one another except to work on healing myself.

In the meantime, thanks to the miracle of computers and the internet, I will be able to stay in touch while I’m traveling, so that I can – write –

and write FICTION stories!!

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+WRITING ABOUT OUR SEVERE EARLY TRAUMAS FROM THE INSIDE OUT

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Nobody might want to hear this, but I do believe that there can be wounds created within a child by severe abuse that will never heal.  These wounds are too deep and too awful from crimes committed against children during their growth developmental stages that are too much, too deep, and too overwhelming to ‘make go away’.  Knowing this fact is why we accept that there is a category called ‘criminal’ in the first place.

We do not want to be a lawless society.  We want protection.  We want accountability.  We want justice.  We want these things because we do not want to be injured, wounded or killed.  We do not want to be trespassed against.  We do not want our rights to well being to be threatened by torture and terrorism.  We do not want to pay the price that living with the consequences of these lawless, criminal actions requires.

Then why, at the same time, is it so hard for most people to understand that what life is truly like for a severe child abuse survivor, especially for those who were forced to suffer malevolent treatment from birth through the first 5 years of their lives, have lifelong serious damage as a result of powerful people harming them?

I am not saying that we survivors cannot work toward our healing.  We do that with every breath we take.  We always have, and we always will.  But that does not give us the same quality of life, the same ability or chance to experience health and well being, that we would have had if we had been kept safe from criminals when we needed it most.

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We need more fortunate people to truly be able to hear what we are saying.

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I want to note here that I don’t intentionally keep my writing either clinical or sterile.  I have difficulty realizing how people who do not have extremely severe early childhood abuse histories understand what I say and why I say it the way that I do.  I know instinctively that the people I write most for are those with histories similar to mine.  For us, especially if we have built-in serious ‘issues’ with dissociation, our brains do not work the same as more ordinary brains do.

We are therefore always putting ourselves close to internal danger if and when we choose to recall actual memories.  It is not at all a given that feelings the feelings that were present when the abuse occurred is either wise or helpful.  We must be extremely careful of ourselves, and I am, as the writer of these pieces, certainly no exception.

Neither at this point do I choose to put the ‘Disney Special’ twist to my stories, either.  If any of you are interested, try recalling one of your own early childhood trauma events and write it.  We can write from different points of view, differing degrees of closeness or distance from the experience of the abuse.  I can never emphasize enough how important it is to keep ourselves safe while we disclose our abuse and work toward our own healing.

Because so few of us who need it will ever be able to access or afford the kind of quality state-of-the-art therapy we need and deserve in order to safely approach the kind of emotional-memory work that will usual accompany severe early trauma memory retrieval, we are left alone doing the best we can with the resources we have.  That is NOT ENOUGH in my book.  It reflects a serious lack of attention to the needs of adult survivors of horrendous child abuse.

When I speak of the ‘unitiated’ reader I do not intend to offend anyone.  I do, however, mean that word literally.  Those of us with severe child abuse histories know things as a result of having lived through what we did.  Those who have not — most fortunately — been forced to have their childhoods completely stolen from them, cannot, I believe, ever know what those of us who did have ours stolen think like or feel like.  There does exist, in my opinion, a line of differentiation between these two groups of people I am describing.

There is a vast difference between telling ABOUT a memory and telling the memory.  The former is far safer for us to do than the latter.  That is a fact.  I suspect that a reader without a severe abuse history might be ‘dying to know more’ about what the experience of abuse a survivor might be disclosing, and wants the survivor to give them enough detailed information that the reader might think they know what the survivor is talking about.

I am not at all sure that this is possible.  When reading good fiction the writer can give enough vivid description to enable the reader’s mind to actively imagine themselves as being IN the story.  That is not what my kind of writing is about — at least certainly not yet.  I am not writing fiction.  At the same time I don’t see that I am necessarily writing nonfiction, either.  I am writing the truth.

The truth is not clinical, stark, barren, dry or simple.  Reading the truth, when it hurts, requires more than imagination.  It requires a willingness to open oneself up to one’s own pain, to admit that even though there are certainly times when things were rosy and cheerful (not true in my case as a child but true for MOST readers), there were also  times when someone bigger than you hurt you when you were most small and vulnerable, whether they meant to or not.

Those times matter.  I encourage you to write about your stories yourself.  Writing is different than telling someone a story verbally, though this means of disclosure is certainly valid and important.  Writing about it uses another set of functions and abilities in body, brain and mind.  It forces us to ALLOW a linear process or organization to give order to the chaos that our traumas have created within us.  If you had no early traumas, you are most fortunate.  If you did and they are healed, you are also most fortunate.

If you do wish to write and don’t already have a blogspace, I recommend WordPress.com as a wonderful place to start.  I would love you to drop a comment over here about your writing as I would most definitely wish to come by and visit.

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+LINK TO NEW PAGE ADDED TODAY – FIGHTING BACK?

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+Age 14 – SCRUBBED IN THE TUB

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We have to be more careful than words can describe not to either blame others for their victimization or to blame ourselves for the harm that was done to us.  How realistic is it for us to expect that any long term violent, consistent, severe abuse survivor EVER had a chance to fight back?

By suggesting that it is the victim’s fault that abuse ever happened in the first place, let alone continued to happen, creates an unattainable illusion within our social consciousness that we don’t — as outsiders — REALLY need to step in and stop abuse.  We are saying that if only the victim had done THEIR JOB to stop the abuse none of the rest of us would have to be involved at all.

Sound extreme?  Read this page.

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+LINK TO NEWLY ADDED CHILDHOOD STORY

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*Age 10 – NIGHTMARES AND BED WETTING

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This page has just been completed and published under MY CHILDHOOD STORIES.  This page contains a ‘MAY TRIGGER ABUSE MEMORIES’ tag, so please be careful, cautious and considerate of yourself if you have a personal history of sexual abuse.

In this page I also wrote about how factual memory of trauma differs from emotional memory of trauma.  Our emotional memory is processed through the amygdala region of our brain and is ALWAYS stored in our body even though the factual memory might not be.  (When the facts are remembered this is called an ‘explicit‘ memory.  When only the emotions and body memory exist without specific facts, this is called an ‘implicit‘ memory.)

The ‘semantic, autobiographical’ factual part of our memories are processed through a different region of our brain, the hippocampus.  There are times particularly in very early childhood when all memory is preverbal and can only be accessed in our body and not through fact.  These memories will govern our unconscious behavior for the rest of our lives.  There are also times when facts related to memory, particularly of trauma memory, is ‘forgotten’ and invisible to us — sometimes forever, sometimes until it is triggered.

It is also important to realize that the stress hormone cortisol can so heat up our hippocampal memory cells as they try to process trauma-related facts that they are fried to a cinder and the facts of a memory will never be recorded – and therefore will never be available to recall.  When and if this happens — and it can happen both to victims and perpetrators-in-the-act — the emotional memory is ALWAYS stored and retained within the body.

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+WE NEED NEW WORDS TO DIALOG WITH OUR BODY ABOUT TRAUMA

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I am trying to think of another word other than ‘renaissance’, or rebirth, to describe what I wish was happening now among those of us ordinary people who are trying to live the best lives we can without necessarily having the kind of safe and secure attachment background we needed to get along better in life.

I am thinking especially about what little information we really have about our bodies and how they operate.  Sometime in our first year of life people begin to teach infants about their body — and most of us never progress much past that point!  We are taught to point to our eyes, nose, mouth, ears, limbs, etc.

Eventually we learn through our public education and then through osmosis over time about the major organs of our body, and make little progress past that point unless we get sick and then learn the minimum we need to in order to understand what is happening to us.  We seem to prefer to use only one syllable words to think about the only body we will ever have to live in for the rest of our lives.

Yet while we would rather leave anything more complicated than what we consider essential to the ‘experts’, at the same time I do believe our platform of information concerning our bodies is making advancements.  We hear about things through the general media and that information will eventually ‘stick’ if we hear it enough and somehow we begin to understand it is important because it applies to us.

As we are doing this learning, as unintentionally as it might be, we are at the same time expanding our vocabulary.  It’s no different than teaching an infant the word for their nose.  We are learning to name what is going on inside of us.  Yet at the same time we are learning meanings for words like diabetes, hypertension, obesity, allergies, arthritis, osteoporosis, cancer, learning disabilities, addiction, anxiety, depression, serotonin, dopamine, reward system, we less likely to learn how these kinds of ‘events’ are all connected within us to who we are within our own body.

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We all know we are dependent upon and would rather support a medical model that prefers to respond only to symptoms,  prescribe every kind of expensive test to diagnosis illness, dish out every imaginable kind of drug to treat sickness than we are to put forth the effort ourselves to learn any more complicated information about our body than we have to.

Why is that?  When and how did we learn to accept that we don’t need to learn anything more than a 5th grader could learn about how our body operates?  Did someone tell us we are too dumb to learn anything more complicated?  Looking backward, maybe this kind of thinking has worked for all of the generations that have gone before us.

Today there are more of us living longer than ever before in history.  But taking material goods out of the equation, what is our quality of life?  Particularly, what is the quality of our human attachments — our own attachment with our self included?  As a social species, it matters.  We have the desire to live our years better, last longer, and suffer less.  Understanding how our attachment system operates, what has hurt it and what can help it can help us live a better life on every level because it operates on every single level of who we are.

Those of us who suffered from extra-ordinary trauma and abuse during our developmental stages especially need to learn the words that will let us be able to understand how that abuse changed our bodies.  I see it as being no different than any healing process of disclosure. Any improvement we can make to talk about the effects our traumas had on us is empowering.  Trauma changed our bodies, and we don’t even know — on the most vital and profound levels — what that means.

We need the words.  We need them badly.  A  securely-attached-from-birth person has all that good-safe information built right into their body-brain-mind.  They don’t have to think about it.  They don’t even need to talk about it.  They just live it.

Those of us who were so abused that we are the insecurely-attached-from-birth, however, have to learn NOW what these ‘others’ learned when they were supposed to learn it — as infants and young children.  Our communication signals between our body, brain, mind and self are all scrambled up.  We have to learn NOW what those ‘others’ learned from the time they were born.  We cannot efficiently and effectively learn NOW what we have no words to talk about.

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I think at this moment how strange it seems that I, of all people, would be writing about attachment.  Looking back at the strangeness, the unpredictable, escalating, irrational violence and abuse, looking back at the extreme isolation I was forced to endure through my childhood, I can’t help but say that of all the people I can imagine writing about attachment, I can be good at it because I am so bad at it.

Suffering from the long term consequences of an extremely abusive childhood can make us feel so alienated from what ‘ordinary’ people seem to now about living ‘ordinary’ lives that we might be tempted to simply throw in the towel, give up and quit.  Yet as I work my way through the volumes of technical, even molecular research information about our own internal cannabinoid (‘cannabis’)  (and opioid) attachment systems, I realize that by my just being alive I HAVE to know there are things about my attachment system that went right from the beginning or I most simply — would not be here.

I was attached enough to life from the beginning that I was conceived in the first place, implanted onto my mother’s uterine wall, received nourishment from her body, and made it through a difficult birth — just to GET here and to BE here.  Through all the terrible traumas, through all the pain, suffering, sorrows and sadness of my childhood I was still attached enough between my inner, true self and the world to STILL be able to find, recognize, appreciate and value beauty — wherever I found it as a very small child —  even in bubble shadows reflected on the bottom of a toilet bowl, even in the shimmering reflection of water on my bedroom ceiling when I was so punished for doing nothing but being alive.

I am amazed as I work on the endocannabinoid file regarding human reproduction.  Perhaps because I cannot take any kind of safe and secure attachment either lightly or for granted I marvel at the very essence of the miracle of life that was each of our beginnings.  How can such a perfectly ordered system like our attachment system is, be sent off into such difficult directions through insufficient if not outright malevolent circumstances of traumatic early childhood experiences?

I understand that given the requirements of staying alive — if at all possible, in the very worst of situations –that we could not make the adjustments we had to make to survive THEN and necessarily be ‘ordinary’ NOW.  Yet at the same time I also understand that all of it was and is about signals of communication on the molecular and genetic level between the environment we live in and the self we live in it with.

That is the same process that happened when I was conceived, the same process that is happening in each present moment I am alive, the same process that connects every moment of my life together with me in the center of it.

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If I did not have a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder I doubt that I would have ever been motivated to go looking for the big multiple-syllable words that I know I now need to understand the ‘extra-ordinary’ way my body-brain-mind was forced to adapt, develop, and the way it works now.  It is not by looking at all the ways I am dissociated, fragmented and disconnected that will make me feel more safe and secure in my own body in this world.  It is by looking at the ways I am associated, connected and organized that helps me to know that things can never be all that bad!  After all, I am a participant in some kind of miracle here!  We all call that — LIFE!

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So maybe ‘renaissance’, or rebirth, is the word I need.  Maybe as I go back all the way to my very first beginnings I can bring a new kind of understanding about my own place in my own body in my own life into my present.  I find I need to know new things and I need to know new words to know these new things.  I am sitting in the middle of a tragic relationship breakup, not far into a new future of cancer recovery, completely unsure of who I really am, of what I want, or of what is even possible for my future.

But maybe I do not know because I cannot know.  I have to wait for the signals.  The ones I need are not going to come from anywhere else other than from within my own body.  On the most tiny, minute level of who I am — right where my own molecules are constantly interacting with my genetics — something interesting is ALWAYS occurring.  It is that inner world that guides what happens to me as I interact with this great, big wide outer world.

I want to be amazed.  I want to be more attached.  Safely.  Securely.  Peacefully.  Whatever it takes for me to get there I will try to do.  This isn’t about whatever the Buddhist concept of detachment is.  I have been forced to be detached from my own self in my own body all of my life.  Terrible, terrifying, insane abuse put me in THAT place.  I want something new and different, something I think non-abused ‘ordinary’ people can take for granted all of their lives.

I want to know, without a single shadow of any kind of doubt, that I have a right to be here and do so willingly, if not eventually happily.  That was the destiny of the fertilized egg that was me in my beginnings.  How could it be anything but my destiny today?  I did not become lost to the path of that good journey on purpose (I had a great deal of help through a great deal of harm), and while it is taking the better part of my life to find my way back, it is not a journey I am making alone!

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+WHAT WE DID NOT LEARN ABOUT TRUST WILL HURT US

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I discovered Brainwave.org this morning, an excellent site devoted to infant brain development through the age of three.  Another excellent site, EQ:  Emotional Intelligence Central, covers a broad range of information on the human social brain that, of course, was formed through the nature and quality of early infant caregiver interactions and affects us for the rest of our lives.

My web search this morning also brought me to a page on brain development of young children written at the university in Fargo, North Dakota where my one of my daughters works!  Another site for The Childhood Affirmations Program covers a wide range of information about “How You Can Shape Your Child’s Brain and Change the World.”

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I have had to narrow my search in my attempt to find the specific information I am looking for today.  I want to know more about when and how the very young infant brain begins to be able to know the difference between who is trustworthy and who is not.  The ability to make this distinction is something that most people can take completely for granted because it is built into an infant’s growing and developing brain so early in life we will never have conscious awareness of how we learned to accomplish this critically important task.

Those of us who were raised in extremely abusive – neglectful, inconsistent, violent, malevolent – early environments could not possibly have developed a ‘trustworthiness meter’ that works in the same way as such a system will for someone who was born into the opposite kind of environment of predictability, benevolence, safety and security.  What our brain never learned as it was built in the first place leaves us with a dis-ability that will make it difficult to recognize critical information from the humans we come into contact with for the rest of our lives.  Who is worthy of our trust and who is not?

Of course humans give and receive signals on many levels that provide us with social-brain information.  If we were formed in, by and for a malevolent world, we will not identify and respond to ANY social signals in the same way as a benevolently-formed person will.  I ask this question today for myself because I know that a person I have trusted for nine years recently ‘flipped sides’ and now appears to be my ‘enemy’.  My mind tells me, “I didn’t see it coming.”

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Whatever the specifics of my history with this man who was so important to me might be, what I think about today are the risk factors that I have carried within my brain from my earliest beginnings.  When I think about all the ‘trauma drama’ that adult child abuse survivors seem doomed to keep repeating, I want to understand more about how my altered social brain knows and does not know about how to recognize in other people what ‘ordinary’ people know so quickly, automatically and unconsciously it would make my conscious mind spin and stagger.

It helps me to realize and begin to know how profoundly my altered brain can affect me at even the most deeply important levels.  I also have to understand that there are degrees of social brain dis-abilities in people that I meet if they come from early abusive environments because their brains did not develop ‘ordinarily’, either!

Unfortunately, the information researchers are providing about how social brain development affects trustworthiness can be complicated and hard to read.  It is important, however, for us to at least know this information is available to us, and that this is a subject that concerns all of us who did not get to develop an ‘ordinary’ social brain in the first place.  Thanks to the internet we can approach the learning of information about our brain’s dis-abilities from either end of the age spectrum.

By looking at information contained in links I provided at the beginning of this post we can learn about how very young infant and child brains learn the important social and emotional information as their brains are forming from the start.  Accessing the information is easier if we look at it from the ‘young’ end.  We can think about our own abuse histories and begin to think about what happened to us, how that affected us, what we might be missing, and how we can begin to change our brains consciously.

We can also look at the information from the adult end.  That information is more complicated.  We CAN understand it with effort, however.  We need to erase that magic, invisible line that we keep in place between what the ‘average’ public can understand and what the ‘brainy experts’ can understand.

We are no longer children.  We have excellent brains, even if their development was altered through our need to adapt to malevolent early experiences.  While we might not consider our need to pay attention to new information about how our social, emotional brain-minds were changed to be of life-saving importance, we can understand that everything about how our brains formed affects the quality of our life and our states of well-being for our entire lifespan!

Even though the study might be difficult, it is worth the effort!  I encourage readers to try it.  Information empowers us on every level.  Even the process of acquiring the information, of learning itself, exercises our brain in positive ways.  Go ahead!  Give it a try!  Follow some of these ‘live links’ I have included in this post.

Even if your studying of this information helps you to better determine safety in ONLY ONE situation, your effort will be worth it!  And have fun with this.  It is not as impossible or difficult as you might think!  Everything and anything that we learn about how our social-emotional brain works will help improve our attachments — to our self, to others, and to the world as a whole.  It will also take the power away from trauma and give it to us.

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+THE QUALITY OF OUR ATTACHMENT SYSTEM DETERMINES HOW WE ARE IN THE WORLD

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My sister recently sent me a link to an article she wanted me to read that was posted on one of the blogs she most frequents.  In two hours of work I have yet to move past the first reference posted within that article because I needed to write my own comment.  In my own mind I cannot separate what I understand about humans as attached social beings from what does or does not adequately attach us to the wider environment of the world we each live in.  I believe it is the same quality of our attachment system that’s been with us from childhood that determines all of the attachments we have in adulthood.

I couldn’t help myself.  I had to write this response to what I have read so far this morning:  *WHEN BEING SELFISH IS TOO SMALL A CONCEPT.

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+FROM OUR DEPTHS WE NEED TO LISTEN

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Fixing things.  That seems to me to be an interesting pattern some people have when faced with another person’s life circumstances.  It makes me wonder if all the fixing work has to do with someone else’s reaction to another person’s pain and discomfort.  Ah, this social network we live in — one way or the other.

Fixing things.  Giving all sorts of helpful advice, as if I haven’t already ‘thought about that’.  It makes me wonder, because I guess I am not naturally a ‘fixer upper person’.  I don’t think I naturally give advice.  I don’t think I know what another person is feeling.  Well, looking at it from my insecure attachment disorder and nearly complete lack of socialization opportunities when I was a child, I guess I would have to pretty much say I only know what another person might be feeling by tuning into my ‘sense’ of feeling what another person feels.

I listen, but not so much with my ears.  I watch, but not so much with my eyes.  This seems to be leading into a story I haven’t written yet — and I mean — yet, because it is probably one I need to write.  So, here goes —–

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Once upon a time this really happened.  I was finishing my art therapy masters degree program’s requirements for internship at an adult out-patient chemical dependency treatment center that specialized in treating people with extremely severe child abuse histories.  I remember this one day clearly that I worked with a wispy woman I’ll call Nora, who seemed more to float across the carpet than walk upon it.

On this day she was silent as she entered the art therapy room for her hour and a half session.  I greeted her gently.  I had two 8 foot tables arranged end to end with four chairs placed evenly, one at the center of each table’s long side.  I could sense her mood when she walked in the door, so after she entered I turned the light dimmer switch down to take the edge off of the room’s brightness.  Then I stood quietly near the counter along one wall where the art supplies were laid out and waited for Nora to pick a chair and sit down.

Nora’s quietness led me to select the art medium for her, and I picked up a large glass of water I had ready, a pre-moistened tray of tempera paint cakes, a 2 inch paint brush, and several newsprint sized pieces of paper.  I made no sound as I laid the items on the empty table beside Nora.  She did not look at me or at the art supplies.  I  stepped off to the side, slightly behind her back, to watch what Nora chose to do next.

I did not jump in there, noisy or steer her with questions.  I made no demands and no other intrusions into her ‘space’ other than to lay those art supplies within her easy reach.  I watched to see if it made her uncomfortable that I was behind her.  Would she turn in my direction?  No.  She didn’t show that she recognized I was in the room at all.

Nora picked up the paint brush, moistened it with water, and began moving her arms, free from the shoulder, from paint to paper to water to paint to paper.  Her movements were slow but steady, as if her inner rhythms washed across each page without effort.  Her work was silent, but she paused when a page was filled and I stepped to the table, took each finished image and quietly laid it on the floor to dry while she started another one.

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Nora felt to me to be very young as she painted.  Very quiet, very young, so young that I wasn’t sure she could even talk yet.  Nora was diagnosed with what was then called Multiple Personality Disorder.  It was not my job to do anything other than facilitate her art expression.  I did not need to know what was what, which was which, who was who.  My job was to let her communicate with something other than words or symptoms.  And that’s exactly what I did.

I watched intently as each image was created.  I noticed which colors were placed where on the paper in what order.  There were absolutely no definable, recognizable pictures taking form.  Yet the images that she was creating began to speak to me — not to my eyes, but to my sense of smell.  As Nora swished and washed each page I began to smell the unmistakably sweet flowery smell of bath powder.  Before long I began to see a lavender colored round powder box with a smokey-clear lid with a yellow soft fluffy fuzzy powder puff inside it.

I had absolutely no idea where that smell and the image of that box of powder came from, but after awhile I could see it so clearly that I could nearly have reached out both of my hands and snatched it right out of the air.  I needed to decide whose information this was.  Nora’s?  Mine?  Did it have anything at all to do with what this art therapy session was all about?

I answered my own questions and knew that I next had to find a way to introduce this image to Nora that had come to me so clearly.  How could I introduce words and my speaking voice into this well of silence that Nora seemed to be so comfortable in?  I didn’t want to surprise her or jar her or disorient her.

I walked out in front of the table where Nora was so intently working and into her range of vision.  If I had been a bird I would have flapped my wings a bit to stir up a slight breeze to catch her attention as I settled onto the chair across the table from her.

“Nora,” I began quietly as if that one word was the most important one in the world.  “An image has come to me while you’ve been painting.  It surprised me and I wonder if it has anything to do with what you are painting.  Is it alright if I tell you what it is?”

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Nora agreed and as she listened to me she transformed into an entirely different mind-state person.  What I sensed in that silent room was important, so important that I will never forget it.   Every time I think about this it amazes me even though it happened 20 years ago.

Nora was sexually abused from a very young age by multiple perpetrators.  The only safe person in her child life was her grandmother.  It would make sense, then, that it would only be at this safe person’s house that Nora could finally act out her pain and her rage — one single time.

When I described the powder box and the powder puff to Nora it was as if I had passed it from my hands to hers.  She went instantly to a memory of being five years old when she locked herself in her grandmother’s bathroom and began screaming and shouting and tearing that room apart.  Everything thrown out of the medicine cabinet.  The shower curtain ripped down, objects  smashed on the floor, thrown hard against the walls and the bathroom door.   All this time her grandmother was pounding on the outside of the bathroom door, yelling at Nora to open the door, to let her come in.

Other adults joined her grandmother in pounding on the door.  Someone found a way to open it.  The instant the door banged open and Nora looked up and met her grandmother’s eyes was the instant she was dumping the powder, puff first, into the toilet.

The look of shocked rage and betrayal on her grandmother’s face was enough to let little Nora know that she had just lost the only ally she had in the world, the only person she ever trusted or felt safe with, the person she adored, the one that never hurt her.  She was sure her grandmother hated her as much now as the people did who hurt her.  Zing!  Zap!  Crash, bash, bang!  Done!

That was the end of the trusting girl Nora.  She disappeared to any ongoing Nora at that instant, at that toilet, with that powder box in her hand.  She reappeared at that art therapy table, in that dimly lit and peaceful room, brought back to life through an hour’s work with a paintbrush sliding across pieces of paper.

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Along with all the other difficulties I might experience about how my brain did not form under ordinary conditions and is not, therefore, an ordinary brain, I can appreciate this gift that I seem to have to pay a particular kind of attention to signals that are being communicated on the subtlest of levels.  I was not feeling threatened in that room.  It was my job to be the one providing safety, security, and an appropriate art therapy experience.

So I could have my senses open in ways that I rarely can when out in the ordinary world.  Most of the time my heightened sensitivities create clash and conflict for me in that ordinary world.  But on that particular day, in that particular setting, the gifts could fly — both Nora’s in being able to transmit that image-message and in mine for being able to receive it.

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I do believe that as severe child abuse survivors we have some amazing and particular gifts that have come to us through enduring our traumas.  Yet in this ordinary world filled with mostly ordinary people, we can feel out of step in time and place, not able to modulate, moderate, or regulate how these gifts affect us — not when, where, or why.

In spite of my best intentions, and lots and lots of work to perfect my skills in my chose profession, I cannot pursue it.  Over time more of the reality of what was done to me and how I was affected by that severe and long term trauma, settled into my awareness.  It moved from an intellectual level into a very real emotional place connected to my body.  During this process of healing, the more I realized what a risk it was for me to be working with troubled people — both for them and for myself.

I would have to be in a more perfect world to do that kind of work as employment, not in an ordinary one.  My gifts were honed in trauma and do not translate into the mundane world on a regular basis.  This treatment center I served this part of my internship in could not hire me anyway, because I was not a licensed addiction counselor (which required a high school education and special training and could then be billed at $90 per hour) so insurance would not cover my services.   But finances, in the end, have nothing to do with the work itself.

This kind of work happens in a sacred space. If we want to talk about this kind of sacred in terms of ‘religion’ it needs to be connected to the root of that word:  ‘Religio’ means to tie and bind together.  What we can truly hear if we can allow ourselves to listen to one another can amaze us, and it has NOTHING to do with fixing anything or giving advice, no matter how well intentioned it might be.

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+BIG, OLD PAIN – WHEN IT THREATENS MY BEING WITH SORROW

alchemynow2 Comments

The danger for those of us who suffered from long term, violent child abuse is that we can so easily be overwhelmed with sadness.  Some of us cry rivers.  Some of us slam the door to our emotions shut so fast and so firmly that we can pretend we have no emotions at all.  At the root of both reactions still lies the same thing:  an insecure attachment disorder.

It can take such applied effort to make it through a pain filled day that it can make us wonder why we bother to try to go on at all.  I know.  I had one of those days today.

I have no words of wisdom.  I have no words, either, to express how fortunate I am that I have caring friends, and a dear sister who spent hours with me on the phone today as I tried to dig my fingernails into this thing called life.

I’m still here.  I painted my bathroom through my tears today.  I cleaned out my refrigerator and my freezer.  I did laundry and hung it in the fresh air on the line to dry.  I dug and redug my compost pile.  All of it, all day, through tears I could not stop.

I know that my insecure attachment disorder is a deadly serious one.  I know at the root of it lies fundamental disorganization and disorientation.  I have to be careful.  I try to be careful.  I try to keep moving forward no matter how sad I feel.  Next I am going to make a mosaic on my wall.  Because I want to.  Because I can.  Because it will be beautiful.  Because I can leave it here behind me if I am soon forced to leave this home.

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Anything that shakes what I organize and orient myself around is going to put me at risk for deep, dire trouble.  How would I have been able to live my life differently if I knew about my insecure attachment disorder a long time ago?  Could I have understood how vitally important it is for me to have not only a home, but a home of my own?  Yet I don’t see that I’ll ever have the resources, inner or outer to accomplish this in my lifetime.  But I don’t know that for sure.

I do know for sure that the thought of having to shred my home apart yet again in my life brought me to a state of sorrow that I have so deep inside of myself I know it has no bottom.  Why today did I need so to cry, and not so yesterday?  I do not know.  I do not know what triggered my pain so badly today, and not yesterday.

I have to have hope for tomorrow.  I have to hope that these tears cried themselves out today and will not find me such a vulnerable host for them — tomorrow.  Sometimes I fear that this hurting, sad, sad Linda who cannot stop crying is the closest to the real Linda I have.  When I cannot dissociate from her, into somebody else, I can do little else but cry.

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Suicide Prevention

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+DISSOCIATION FROM CHILD ABUSE NEVER LEAVES US

alchemynowLeave a comment

Written October 16, 2006

I walked into a crowded yet rural gas station-café after spending 3 weeks the summer of 2006 with my friend in her cabin in the northern Minnesota woods.  I experienced instantaneous sensory and perceptual overload.  It was not a logical reaction.  I felt like I shattered, splintered and fragmented.  I was suddenly now in a different world.  I needed a different Linda to cope with it.

It was like the ongoing ME of the past weeks was ‘a state of mind’ that could not transition into this different one, and I suffered disintegration in response to the input of ‘so many possibilities’ that I confronted once I walked in the door of this public establishment.  I could not help but react in almost panic.

It was as if every potential and possible reaction that could possibly happen consumed as much of my attention as what was actually happening at the moment I entered the room, although nothing unusual was happening around me at all.  The unusual was within my own body.  I was just as aware of what could happen as I was of what was happening.  It was as if I could notice at the same time things that might demand my attention in the future even though they didn’t in the present.

It seemed that by my walking into the café I had changed ‘their world’, and I could sense far more of their reactions than these people were probably even aware of themselves.  I do not understand how I could be that aware of what the possibilities of interactions might be, even though I only directly interacted with the cashier near the door.  It was like everything got noisy, very loud, in terms of what I could sense.  I was immediately on overload and left as fast as possible.

THAT was a disorganizing experience, the kind that I believe results from a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder.  Just because we grow into adults does not make our insecure attachments disappear.  I don’t believe it’s ‘just about’ our intimate relationships.  It’s about our whole operation as a self in the world.  I never got to build a solid, safe and secure self that can move around throughout all the transitions of life in a coherent, dependable, ongoing way.

It was as if all these possibilities of complexity triggered a transitional state for me that I could not include within my mind.  I could not narrow what was coming in to me so that I could comfortably focus on the immediate reality of the ‘place’ I was in.  Transitional states of mind are normally brief, just long enough to take in new information, assess it for value and safety, and respond appropriately.  Ordinarily this happens (in innocuous situations) so fast one does not notice that these transitional spaces even exist, let alone know that one has been passed through.

I doubt others without a severe trauma background would be aware of the ‘essence of energy’ present in that small establishment I walked into – and out of.  It was almost like little ghost selves dissolved out of all those bodies and came rushing toward me and hovered around, too close for comfort, when I walked in that door.  I was certainly noticed, stranger I was in their world.

The ghosts felt to me to be curious, pushy, forward, some of them leering.  People do have life forces and energies about them, but in our culture we are not given permission to know this.  We are supposed to ignore all but the socially acceptable versions of exchange between people that we are all supposed to be trained to recognize.

Yet because my childhood was so strange, and so altered from the ‘ordinary’, I did not learn what these appropriate social exchange patterns are really all about.  And even when I try my hardest to figure them out, that never makes me the same as people whose selves formed under far more ordinary circumstances, and this constant trying is a whole lot of work

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Our culture presumes and assumes that people are contained within the boundaries of the skin of their bodies.  Yet we are always ‘sensing’ others’ information they ‘put out’, whether we want to or not.  Most do not have to pay attention to it in their usual, ongoing lives.  I suspect for those of us whose bodies were formed during extremely threatening and dangerous conditions, our sensing abilities operate in different ways and are extremely difficult to shut off.  Just because people do not ‘ordinarily’ admit that parts of others can actually ‘journey’ outside of their bodies, communicate things and be perceived does not mean it does not happen.

It can also be very difficult for early-traumatized people to efficiently sort out the information.  It is hard for us to truly know what is important and what is not.  We were formed to be hypervigilant about ALL information, so we get more of it, have a harder time knowing what it means, and a harder time knowing how to respond to it appropriately.

Because early traumas change the formation of the body, brain and nervous system, and because we later are supposed to slide right into an ordinary life after having experienced anything but an ordinary childhood, we are exposed yet again to forms of incompatibility between ourselves and our environment.  We are as powerless to change the bigger world we live in as adults as we were to change the far narrower one we lived in as growing children.

Some of us will always be outside of the worlds that others live in, left only to imagine what their more ‘ordinary’ perceptions of being in the world is really like.  Some of us will just never know what ‘ordinary’ is.  We can’t help that.  We were formed that way.  I was dissociated from the ordinary throughout the 18 years of my childhood.  I cannot expect those patterns to disappear now.

Some things about the way our brains, bodies and nervous systems we can work to change, but we must be realistic.  I will never be physiologically the same as I would have been if the terrible abuse had not happened to me — especially so early.  My hope is that those of us with these altered bodies will begin to dialog with one another to improve our understandings of what life is like for us — especially on the level of what we cannot change and must find ways to live with.

Just because we developed in an extra-ordinary world of trauma does not make us ‘wrong’.  We had to adapt in order to survive, and we did.  The consequences are very real.  We need to know how the world is to us, and how we are in the world.  From there we can begin to dialog better within ourselves, with one another as severe child abuse survivors, and with those who were built in, by and for a MUCH nicer world than we were.

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