Please follow this link to the story which has been moved into My Childhood Stories section.
Tag: mothering
+FROM FAILED TO FANTASTIC FAMILIES – JUDGMENT WON’T GET US THERE!
Welcome to today’s post that describes what I think hampers many well intentioned efforts to help ‘troubled families’ improve their quality of life.
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First let me offer to you a link that provides access to vital and marvelous resources for improving parenting abilities no matter what our childhood backgrounds were like. Once we know these resources exist, we can begin to find ways to access them within our communities because I realize the videos are expensive.
I can personally recommend the S.T.E.P. program as one that was amazingly helpful to me in raising my children. This site presents other programs, as well, including several designed for parents of infants and very young children.
I believe that everyone can benefit from learning more about becoming a better parent. I also believe that as a society we could improve our entire overall quality of life as a culture by making this kind of information easily accessible to everyone — even before they become parents.
Take a look at this site, The Center for the Improvement of Child Caring. I believe you will be happy that you did!
http://www.ciccparenting.org/catalogitem.asp?ci=39&cid=&c=3
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Now for the rest of the story:
Information is a resource. Having access to resources and being able to use them makes people healthier and happier, and increases their well-being in the world.
Resources exist both inside and outside of our individual bodies. What happens to us from birth determines what resources are available to us within our own brains, and these brain resources determine how we interact with all other available resources surrounding us for the rest of our lives.
As today’s researchers learn more and more about how early infant and child maltreatment and deprivation changes the way the brain develops, they are also learning about how brains develop and operate under the best of conditions. Each of these different brains (and bodies) end up developing according to the resources available to the very young child at the start of its life.
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We cannot expect that a severely maltreated infant’s brain will develop to be the same as a well treated infant’s brain because they are each being built in differing circumstances and being ‘fed’ different information about the world. Both types of brains are alike, however, in that they are designed to keep a person alive in the world they live in.
We have to remember that a developing infant and young child brain only knows the information it is receiving as it builds itself and cannot anticipate a future that is different from its early one. Of course these adaptations occur in interaction between the environment and the particular genetic potential an infant has within itself.
Yet there is no doubt that early severe abuse and maltreatment will cause any developing brain to adjust itself to a malevolent world if it is forced to, no matter what. Nobody would be immune to this adaptive process because it is the only way severe challenges to an infant can be survived. True recognition of this fact humbles us. Once we have this level of humility we can begin to truly help others to live a better life without heaping shame on them in the process.
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The image comes into my mind of a bulldozer and a space shuttle. We could imagine that any given infant has the potential from birth to develop (a brain suited) for the future tasks of either one depending upon the information it receives from its early environment. This information about the conditions of the future, directly communicated to it by the conditions of its early caregiving environment, determines the infant and young child’s final outcome.
Let’s say that harsh, toxic and traumatic environments create in the young one the need to become a bulldozer in order to deal with these malevolent deprivations. At the same time we could say that a benevolent environment of safety, security and plenty allows an infant to prepare itself for a better future and in the end it can become a space shuttle. In both cases mobility would be possible. In both cases the job of remaining alive would have been accomplished.
Yet from this simple image we can tell that beyond the basic similarities between these two, there are vast differences that resulted as consequences of the information about the possibilities of the future that either ‘type’ of infant received and adapted to. In both cases the infants made the best use of information and resources possible. Yet what happens to an infant that was forced through early malevolent conditions to become a bulldozer when it graduates out of childhood into a world built for and by those who had enough resources in their benevolent early environments to become space shuttles?
We are left with a serious, yet I believe unrecognized gap here between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’.
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I mention this now as I introduce some information about improving parenting skills because I believe many attempts to improve the quality of parenting are being made by people who are like our imaginary space shuttles as they try to ‘help’ people who are like our imaginary bulldozers. Too often well intentioned efforts of the ‘haves’ to ‘help’ the ‘have nots’ become ‘better’ fail because the fundamental differences between these two groups are not currently being recognized or acknowledged.
These differences come from the fact that a brain built in a safe and secure early attachment environment is not the same kind of brain that is built in an unsafe and insecure early attachment environment. These two kinds of brains operate in the adult (and childhood) world differently. They process information differently and they respond differently.
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For those readers who might be wondering how to tell which kind of brain they developed and which kind of future their brains were preparing them to live in, I will use one word that, to me, becomes the pivot point (imagine the old fashioned playground teeter tooter here). Movement toward the benevolent end or movement toward the malevolent end can be determined from this pivot point. That one word is TERROR. To the degree that any infant or developing young child experiences terror — a repeated state of complete lack of safety and security — will its brain develop differently from a child’s brain who does not have to experience this state.
From that pivot point, moving toward one end or the other, changes will occur in the individual that is being prepared for a future world that corresponds to similar hostile, dangerous, threatening, traumatic and toxic conditions. Once we realize that these changes are fundamental we can begin to find ways to talk between worlds. In order for this communication to be meaningful the basic facts underlying the differences between the ‘secures’ and the ‘insecures’ have to be recognized, described, understood, respected and honored.
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What possible scenarios can I imagine about what kinds of possibly effective interventions that could have happened to protect me from my mother’s abuse of me? This field of imagination is wide open to me because it NEVER happened. When considering intervention in relationship to my own experience, I think about when I was in eighth grade and had to wear one of those very short, one piece blue gym suits, and had to take group showers every day after class. I remember backing myself into the shower corner, always facing away from the wall feeling so ashamed, humiliated and embarrassed because the entire back of my body from the base of my skull to my heels, including my arms, was covered in every imaginable color of bruises — black, blue, purple, green, yellow.
I realize how silly that was on one level because certainly those bruises would have been visible simply as I wore that stupid suit throughout the entire class period. Yet it was standing naked and visible in the showers themselves that made me feel this humiliation. Yet nobody — EVER — paid any attention. Not one single time did someone ask me, either classmate or teacher, how I had gotten even one of those bruises. They were visible, ugly, horrible, and obvious indicators of the fact that someone was hurting me terribly. I suspect it was because my mother’s abuse of me had started from my first breath it never entered my thoughts that I could tell anyone or ever expect anyone to either care or to help me.
While we live in a world today that is legally mandated to report physical signs of abuse, those signs are merely the tip of the iceberg. Those of you who know the reality of all the different levels and kinds of abuse, neglect and maltreatment that children can be exposed to know what I am talking about.
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We are still, today, left with the proverbial vicious cycle with continued questions about how we recognize extreme traumatic stress going on in families, how to intervene, and how to improve conditions on all levels for everyone being affected. Yet what I can now say is that even if someone had intervened because of my eighth grade bruises, they would still have missed the most important damage of all — the changes that my brain had already made that allowed me to survive in a malevolent world even before I was two years old.
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What I am going to say next is not meant to offend anyone. I say it because I care that all efforts being made to Stop the Storm of unresolved traumas be as effective as they possibly can be. I offer my own ‘expert’ opinion based on conclusions I have made as a survivor of terrible infant and child abuse myself. I believe a dangerous weapon is often being unconsciously wielded against the very people the ‘haves’ are trying to ‘help’.
That weapon is any degree of an attitude of self righteous superiority and judgment of or against those who were forced through their very early malevolent experiences to become bulldozers rather than space shuttles. Because those of us who formed a body and brain in a worst-case world had to build defense into ourselves from our earliest beginnings, we have an uncanny ability to recognize and to respond defensively against ANY PERCEIVED FORM OF ATTACK.
We detect challenges to the integrity of our being and respond at the speed of light. I don’t mean this metaphorically. The electrical impulses that govern communication within and between the cells of our body and brain move that fast. Once a challenge or a threat is detected, we will protect ourselves at all costs. We do this unconsciously because our bodies learned from the time of our beginnings that consciousness is far too slow to keep us alive.
And we certainly include an ability to detect anyone’s negative judgment of us as being a threat because we were built that way. When we consider the fact that information transmitted brain to brain through facial expressions ALONE moves at the speed of a signal every 1/200th of a second, we can begin to understand that people who are assessing and judging us from any position of supposed self righteous superiority may not even realize that they are doing it.
That does not, to me, make their even unconscious transmission of judgment toward us in any way acceptable. It therefore becomes the job of anyone who thinks they sincerely care about the ‘have nots’ and wish to ‘help’ them to become completely aware and conscious of their own biases and resulting judgments — both of perpetrators and of victims — because nearly 100% of perpetrators were victimized themselves.
This also means that those of us who are survivors of traumatic childhoods need to look within ourselves and detect how we have ‘bought’ or ‘eaten’ the judgments that others may have passed down to us — both in our childhood and our adulthood. We cannot afford to ignore these seeds of doubt because they directly attach themselves anywhere inside of us where the potential for shame exists.
Because our physiological ability to feel shame originates in our body by the time we are one year old, it is guaranteed that anything that has been passed to us by others and has triggered our shame contributes to its further ‘growth and development’. Shame usually operates far below our level of conscious awareness. It is an automatic response that occurs within our nervous system (including our brain) and body.
I understand that humans physically develop the ability to experience shame as our bodies develop from conception. It is not until we are a year old that our bodies have grown enough for this reaction to occur. But once we have passed that developmental stage, all of our social attachment interactions are processed through this filter. It is not helpful for well meaning ‘educators’ to be handing out shame along with whatever new information they are trying to transmit to those that ‘need’ it.
“A spoonful of poison does not make the medicine go down.” Self righteous judgment based on an attitude of superiority causes an unconscious shame defense reaction within the recipient that distorts all the information that might be offered to a threatened individual at the same time.
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Because of the traumatic experiences that formed my brain, I have an almost excruciatingly sensitive ‘input detection system’ that is geared to exquisitely detect danger and threat surrounding me at all times. I have built a corresponding protection and defense system within me. Because I am a member of a social species, any input that I process related to social interactions has to be processed by my ‘shame detection system’.
I now understand that most of my aversion to any supposedly ‘helpful self help’ book I’ve ever read stems from the fact that my advanced ability to detect unbelievably delicate attacks on my level of shame senses judgment in these writings. I can and do read volumes of information ‘between the lines’. I have always known on some level that I have to translate and interpret information contained in these books because I have never found a single one of them that addresses the fundamental fact that I have a very different brain and body as a result of the abuse I experienced from birth.
This process of translation and interpretation is exhausting in itself. It takes an incredible level of focus and energy to do it. In addition we are forced at the same time to defend ourselves from the underlying projections of shame that affect us at very deep levels as we read these books. I suspect that everyone with one of these altered brains experiences the same thing that I do even if they don’t recognize it. Because those like me are already forced to expend so much more energy just getting along in a world we weren’t prepared for and don’t really understand, many of us just can’t make use of the well intentioned information that these books are meant to provide us with.
This makes all the well intended efforts we apply to ourselves or that others might apply to us to inform, transform, reform, conform us to fit a world we were not built in, by or for in the first place remarkably inefficient and ineffective. In some cases, such as would have been true for my mother, the hoped for results are impossible to obtain due to the vast distortions that took place in a vastly altered brain — made so because drastic measures had to be taken early in life in order to adjust and adapt to and survive drastic conditions.
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I am not saying that it is a waste of time to try to provide information that helps those that could use it to live better lives. What I am saying is that we often do not consider the full context of the problems themselves and are thus hindering our efforts to address them. What do we really know about the full context of all the things we are trying to prevent, either? I don’t care if we look at preventing or addressing child abuse, domestic abuse, war, poverty, crime, sexual predation, ignorance or terrorism. Humans are contextual beings. We develop in context. We live in context. Everything we do and everything done to us happens in a context.
The contexts that cause some to mature into the equivalent of bulldozers or into space shuttles were very different in the first place. If we refuse to realize the ramifications of these differences and continue to unconsciously judge people for having them, we might as well be taking our hardest efforts to make the world a better place and throw them like tiny pieces of confetti into a strong wind.
If we continue to self righteously judge one another from our supposed positions of superiority we will continue to offend others in the depths of their being, and they will continue to defend themselves against us. Not helpful. They will not be able to hear or apply a single useful thing we are telling them. Is changing this pattern of judgment between all of us truly what loving ourselves and one another — no matter what — is all about?
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Thank you for reading this long post. Your comments are welcome and appreciated.
+THE DAY I ABUSED MY OWN LITTLE SON
Please follow this link the this story which has been moved over to my Adulthood Stories section of this blog.
+FINDING THE CRACK IN MY BORDERLINE MOTHER’S REALITY
At 5:35 pm on Good Friday, March 27, 1964 I was 12 years old and not yet a woman.
Then the great Alaskan earthquake happened on this day at 5:36 pm — the second strongest earthquake on record anywhere on our planet.
http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/64quake.htm
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I could tell you my personal story of the earthquake that day when my menarche happened, but all I want to mention now is that by the end of that three minutes of terrible shaking, I was a woman.
What matters most to me right now is that because of the earthquake, because of my mother’s writing about her personal experience during it, because those pieces of paper she wrote her story on survived for over 40 years and then found their way into my hands after her death in 2002, I now have proof of a critical point regarding Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) — most importantly of my mother’s version of this mental adaptation to early traumas and my assessment of her condition.
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I believe that an abusive borderline parent will do everything in their power to keep the ‘outside world’ from seeing or being able to detect both their broken mental condition and the abuse that is a result of it. This is what makes BPD parents so extremely dangerous to their offspring. Nobody outside of the family is likely to EVER suspect the existence of either the mental illness or the abuse. (Knowing the signs to look for in order to notice in the first place and then to be able to see through the crack in the reality of BPDs will be covered in future posts).
I am not saying that my mother’s mental illness or her abuse of me was invisible to the outside. I am saying that a combination of the fact that nobody cared with the fact that these same people did not know what they were seeing even if they were looking, resulted in a complete absence of intervention for the entire 18 years of my childhood I spent being severely abused by my mother.
It is likely that my father also succumbed to these same factors, although the additional fact of him being my father SHOULD have allowed him the ability to intervene on my behalf in some way. This is a good part of why I am pursuing my writing based on my personal experience. I believe that personality disorders are so pervasive, consistent and insidious that until our present ‘enlightened era’ it has been nearly impossible for those who are on the inside to recognize what is going on, either.
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This is why what I found in my mother’s writings about her earthquake experience is so empowering to me because it confirmed what I intuitively know about her condition and affirmed my assessment on many levels both of the cause of BPD and of the consequences of involvement on any level with a person — especially a mother — who has it.
You can read her story as she wrote it at My Mother’s Alaskan Earthquake Journal Entry.
In the months just prior to receiving my cancer diagnosis I was hard at work sorting and copying into my computer all my mother’s letters, notes and journal entries concerning her homesteading experiences. I will post what I have completed for you to reference, but there remains hundreds of disorganized pages and letters that still need to be included to make the entries complete.
These papers my mother wrote traveled thousands of miles, some of them being stored for up to 30 years in her various storage lockers she kept, and finally found their way to me nearly 50 years after she wrote them. It was in this collection of her papers that I found the stories that she wrote the winter of her 11th birthday. (SEE also: My Mother’s Childhood Stories)
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All the time I was transcribing her writings I was searching for a clue that would show me the truth in her writings that would confirm what I know in my own heart about my mother’s mental illness. Because my mother’s stated intention in writing any of these letters and journals was to eventually write what she referred to as her “Alaskan book,” they were written from the public side of the border wall that allowed her to write under the ‘spell’ of that BPD persona. Because this borderline split between public and private is so fundamentally and profoundly crafted into the altered brain of a borderline it is usually impossible to detect it through their own description of their version of reality.
That is why what I found in her earthquake writing created in me a state of elation! I FOUND it!! I found the hole in her border wall, the crack in her reality. I found the chink in the armor that she had developed as her brain grew in childhood to protect herself from unbearable pain. I found the equivalent of my own Silver Chalice. If I never read another word she wrote I have still successfully completed my mission and my quest.
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I need to take a related diversion, or detour at this moment to make a connection that I believe is vitally crucial to putting severely abusive mothers’ behavior in the social context of the human mythological imagination.
I encountered this ‘myth’ several years ago at the start of my research, Euripides’ Medea, and would like you to find a way to read it if you can. It is contained in this book
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1417908971
though I read it in an earlier printing of this one
Refer to this for historical context surrounding the Trojan War and Jason and Medea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea
Euripides’ famous retelling of this part of Greek myth in his play about Medea was first performed in 431 B.C., hence this story is a retelling of mythology that is older than 2500 years. My point is that I believe this story is about a particular form of madness and can be seen as very closely related to aspects of what we now know of as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). For whatever reasons the authors of the myth ascribe to her, in the end Medea murders her own children.
Had my mother been able to escape any consequence for her actions, I know she would have murdered me. In fact, this is a point of argument that I hold with the experts’ version of what dissociation is and what it does. I DID NOT dissociate during my mother’s beatings of me. I felt every single one of them because I had to remain absolutely aware and present during all of them as soon as I was old enough to control my body. Her rage usually and quickly escalated to the point that she lost control of herself while she was beating me — in rhythm to her recitation of the litany she had created for me — SEE: Litany from Start to Finish — to avoid the most dangerous falls her beatings caused me or I would have been killed — if possible, killed many times over.
It is evident in Euripides’ play that all the public present knew of Medea’s intent to kill her children because she stated it publicly and yet nobody intervened — not even when they heard the children screaming as she hacked them to death in their home with a massive knife. Yet while many consider that this play refers to abandonment, one of the key symptoms of BPD, it is the ‘lower layer’ related to a mother’s ‘passion’ to kill her child or children that most fascinates me personally.
Because I understand that extreme childhood trauma can cause an evolutionarily altered brain to form, and because I believe that BPD appears as one of the manifestations possible from these changed brains, I also believe that it is the very, very ancient genetic information about surviving in the worst of all possible worlds that triggers this mother-passion to harm her offspring. It is no different an instinctual reaction as one pursued by animals when they kill offspring, abandon entire litters, or choose the most ‘fit’ of the offspring to save while abandoning the others.
This is, I believe, the human basis of the killing Medea did of her children and the attempted killing my mother did to me.
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Now back to the earthquake writings: My proof is contained therein. If you read her writings at My Mother’s Alaskan Earthquake Journal Entry you will find in her story the following — (Words written in the brackets are mine as is the type bolding. Eklunds were neighboring homesteaders on the valley floor whose house my sisters, younger brother and I had been staying at while my parents were in Anchorage during the earthquake):
“Finally Eklund’s house was in sight – from outward appearances all seemed fine. She came running out as we approached. I could see our children were fine. I was so thankful! I hugged and killed [meant kissed no doubt but she wrote killed], each child in turn. We were all together again. I can’t emphasize strongly enough – that this was all that was important. We could always start over again – even though for us, who like so many Alaskans have struggled so long and hard for everything and still have so far to go. We could and would, if necessary, do it again. I’m sure there was absolutely no questioning our minds to that.”
BINGO!
Even if we call this a ” Freudian slip, or parapraxis, an error in speech, memory, or physical action that is believed to be caused by the unconscious mind,” the unmistakable evidence is here in her writings that what I suspect of her mental reality was real.
When I am ready to dig through boxes again, and ready to set up my scanner and do this, I will scan in the actual words as she wrote them with her own hand. I transcribed them into my computer exactly. There is no way, once a person sees her writing, that the two middle letters in ‘killed’ could possibly be construed as being the two middle letters in ‘kissed’.
Finding this hole through which I could see her reality may well be the only tangible vindication I can ever discover that proves my mother was who she did not say she was, particularly as she terrorized me from the moment of my birth as a result of her psychosis.
The only other related confirmations that I have found in her writings appears in the last of her childhood stories (mentioned above) and in her writing of the dream about the dark rainbow and the storm which can be seen at
https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/about-stop-the-stor/
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Drawing the line between the real world and the reality of the world of a borderline becomes nearly impossible particularly for those of us who were abused by one from birth. Not only the trauma is built into the body-brain, but as a result, the version of the borderline mother’s reality is built into the survivor, as well. I know my mother’s is built into me.
These three ‘holes’ that appear in my mother’s writings are thus critically important for me to both possess and to consider as I attempt to face the reality of what happened to me on all the levels that my mother damaged me. I’m not sure that anybody who was not severely abused by a borderline parent can even begin to imagine how important these tangible expressions that illustrate clearly the break in the nearly perfect facade a borderline shows to the public world is — or imagine the terrible confusion such a parent creates in the minds of those she abuses.
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My mother never knew that she meant to write that word KILL, yet there it was where I was able to find it. What a gift this discovery is to me, and perhaps to someone else who reads this post. That word is a direct connection to the ancient genetic potential for survival in a traumatic world that mothers who have been abused themselves CAN form even in this very real current day world. Because the evolutionary throw-back potential can exist in a brain that was traumatized during its development, it is folly for us to remain puzzled on any level when we hear of a mother abusing her children, not even her infants.
We can no longer afford to be puzzled when mothers actually kill their offspring, either. All the evidence that trauma can turn a mother into a killer is in the 2500 year old play about Medea which I am sure only reflects a reality that has been with our species from the time of our beginnings. It was present in my mother’s writings and in her abuse of me.
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I also want to note here that the infliction of self harm and self injury that is common to borderlines did not have to be a part of my mother’s spectrum of behaviors because she made no distinction between herself and me. I was a projection of all that she had been taught to abhor within herself. I was thus an externalized aspect of her mind — a mind that was, in effect, turned inside out because the burden of containing her own reality within herself was potentially too much to bear. She could then heap all kinds of punishments and injuries on me and did not have to self-harm her own body.
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As always, thank you for reading — Your comments are welcome and appreciated. Linda
+BLACK RABBIT
Please see:
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Please follow this link to the story. It has been moved into the section on my childhood stories.
WHY NOT TO REMEMBER MY MOTHER
PLEASE NOTE THIS WARNING: This post contains triggering material which may be difficult for anyone with a history of trauma and abuse to read. Please either do not read this alone without a support person at your side, or stop reading immediately if you become uncomfortable with yourself as you read it.
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I received the following comment today related to + About this site
“Linda, I did not pick this up in your writing ( which is amazing ). Is your mother still alive and did you ever have an opportunity to confront her or make peace with her.”
My reply was that I would write about this in today’s post. Not an easy task.
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The first image that presents itself in my awareness (from my right brain’s storehouse of wordless images) is one of being in a store shopping for flower and vegetable seeds. I see a well stocked large four-sided display rack that I can turn around in circles so that I can see the entire display.
Suddenly I see that all the packages are ripped open and the seeds are dumped in a pile on the floor. All the seeds are mixed up and it is now my job to sort them all out ‘correctly’ so that they can be resealed in new packages and put back where I found them in the first place.
I know more now about what this image is showing me than I ever could have before. All my memories regarding my mother are sealed into separate ‘packages’ and stored according to my survival brain’s wisdom. They are not linked together in any sort of order based on a timeline according to when these experiences happened in the first place. Never in my childhood was I able to connect them together and it is only with great concentration and effort that I can attempt to do so today.
Every single memory I have of my mother is linked to trauma. To continue with my seed package image, it is like every single package and every single seed is contaminated with poison, and if I touch any of them my brain tells me I could die. In order to “go back there” I have to apply a level of thought that can allow me to do this.
I have to find and put on a ‘safe suit’ of protection that allows me to go back and handle my memories. That safe suit is barely adequate and consists of a mental effort I must make today to understand that there was and is no reason for what happened to me. I use this word, reason, on many levels. My mother’s mind was broken so she had no ability to use reason regarding anything that involved me — ever. She was mentally ill and therefore everything about her was irrational.
Her psychosis regarding me was complete and indissoluble. Because I do not have a mind like hers, even though she influenced nearly every thought that was built into my brain until I was 18, I cannot look into my past from a reasonable or rational place so that I can describe my experience from ‘my side of the fence’. That is probably the final trauma of unresolved trauma. It cannot be translated, on any level, into the realm of reason.
Yet I have to think about reason because it is the only ‘safety suit’ I have. Everything about my relationship with my mother was, from my first breath, about the reason I needed to be hated and continually punished. I was the devil’s child and therefore absolutely evil. My ‘poor’ mother was given the curse of having to be my mother, and therefore she must do the best that she could to ‘deal with me’ and try to accomplish the given, hopeless task of making be ‘better’. She applied herself to her task with vengeance.
In her mind, she had failed miserably in her mission by the time I left home at 18. In her mind that failure was absolute and her belief in that lasted to her final breath.
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In order to ‘stack the deck’ in favor of reason I will mention a few concepts used by experts as they work with people who have posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). (This is a diagnosis which I ‘have’, along with dissociative identity disorder — without the identities, which I will discuss later) and major reoccurring depression.) The term ‘flashbacks’ is used in relation to the unresolved traumas in PTSD. Another term used is ‘flashbulb memories’. What this means is that the experiences of trauma have not been integrated into the ongoing experience of the person who endured them.
This lack of integration happens for many reasons, including the fact that nothing has useful, that can lead to an increased ability to survive future related terrors — by the individual or by the species, has yet been learned as a result of these experiences. When abuse begins from birth, before the infant has any possible capacity to ‘process’ its experiences, the very foundation of memory formation is altered within the forming and developing structure of the brain. Having the traumatic memories ‘stuck together’ in any meaningful fashion is therefore the exception, not the rule.
Memories of the individual experiences are therefore like millions of seeds in a pile on the floor. To even have some of them organized and sorted out into a small group of related experiences — so that they can at least be stored in separate packages — requires extremes of applied effort. To assign them meaning is nearly impossible because they happened in and belong to a malevolent world without cause and effect and without reason or rationality.
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I believe that it takes an extremely creative and intelligent mind to survive experiences like mine and be able to come out on the other end being able to even remotely ‘act normal’. This intelligent mind has to have had opportunities to form some active coping skills that allow this eventual ‘gluing together of the pieces’ in any meaningful way to happen at all. I describe some of the assets that existed for me in my post THE RESILIENCY MYTH.
While the following might be a controversial statement, it is my current assessment of the relationship of ‘mental illness’ to survival. Had I received the potential genetic combination that could have resulted in a mental illness such as my mother had, and if my body could have taken that detour in order to have survived without the self reflective abilities of a mind that was not given this detour, I would have turned out like my mother did. I do not believe that she had a choice because whatever neglect and maltreatment she received during her brain developmental stages triggered the manifestation of her mental illness and there was nothing she could do about it, either.
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Please make no mistake here. I was born in 1951 and raised during an era when child abuse was still not recognized and addressed by our society at large in any meaningful way. In today’s ‘enlightened’ era, there is absolutely NO EXCUSE for outsiders of the family not to know and understand the symptoms a terribly abused child will manifest openly, and no excuse for them not intervening on behalf of the child. Information on this topic will be presented in future posts.
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Because my writing is always a process connected to me and to my life as I write the words, and because I am always learning about myself and how I process information related to my personal experiences, I will share with you what is happening in my mind as I attempt to get closer to telling the truth about the question posed in the reader’s comment: “Is your mother still alive and did you ever have an opportunity to confront her or make peace with her.”
In my brain of brains and mind of minds, yes, my mother IS still alive. I do not have a basis for placing anything to do with my mother on a logical timeline and for keeping it there. The reasonable fact is that she ceased to exist in her body in the spring of 2002. I did not shed a single tear. I’m not sure if any of my five siblings shed one, either.
I lack the ability to accomplish the action of finding every single separate ‘seed’ memory that involves her, facing them face to face, and making any of the equally dissociated Linda’s understand unequivocally that THEIR mother is dead. The image that is in my mind now is that each seed has turned into a dandelion seed, that a powerful wind has come up so that each seed with its attached bit of fluff is now dashing away from me into the blue sky — and yes, to a place of safety for themselves — also leaving me in a place of safety as I sit here and write these words.
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I will make the effort of trying to grab perhaps one of those seeds or a handful of them before they vanish from me today. (By the way, future posts on attachment disorders, particularly about disorganized-disoriented attachment disorders, will describe how the lack of the ability to tell a coherent life story is one of the clearest marker that indicates these attachment disorders exist for a person.)
Moving on in my writing as I work to answer this commenter’s question, I see that I actually have a fistful of seeds grasped in each of my hands. I guess fortunately for me I only confronted my mother once (seeds in my left hand) and disowned her once years later (seeds in my right hand).
Now I tell myself, “It’s OK Linda.” I slowly open my left hand and protect those seeds from being whisked away before I can write the following:
(“Organize your thoughts, Linda. Let the seeds put themselves in order. Believe that there is a beginning and an end to this group of thoughts. Now begin writing.”)
As I mention elsewhere on this blog, I completed 7 weeks of inpatient alcoholism treatment in 1980 and was then sent to ongoing therapy and given antidepressants. I followed every piece of advice anyone gave me about how to ‘recover’ as avidly as a starving bird would hunt for seeds. About a year after my exit from treatment, following the advice of my therapist, I DID call my mother to confront her.
All I knew at that time was that she had not been nice to me while she raised me, and that there was some discrepancy between her treatment of be back then and her treatment of me as a married adult mother of 2, as she sent me cute little cards with lovey-dovey I love yous enclosed. I can return to that phone call with difficulty. Like two powerfully opposing magnets the me in this chair writing attempts to move closer to the me I see standing in the dining room, sunlight streaming in the windows, cream colored phone in my hand, long twisted coiled cord draped around my feet as I stand there talking to my mother.
What happened? I courageously told her that I was not willing to have a phony (no pun intended) loving relationship with her in the present (“Let me try to think here. I got the first part out… Catch that seed, Linda. Hold onto it, look at it….”) — if — (“Come on, Linda, you can do this. I know there’s all kinds of pain here, but you can find the words and not let the pain appear now. Separate them out. Let the words come but not the pain.”) — (“Is that possible?”) (“Yes, trust me it is possible.”) (Here comes the wind. Stop this argument now.) (“Who are you that I should trust a damn thing you are saying”) (Stop this argument NOW.)
IF. Getting back to the IF. IF we can’t talk about the things you did to me while I was growing up. That’s what I said to her.
She instantly switched to her ugly screaming rage filled voice and attacked me as she launched into the litany she had been building for me from birth. SEE: *Litany from Start to Finish. “You were a horrible, terrible, vile child! You tried to kill me when you were born! You deserved everything I ever gave you and even that was not enough! Even your kindergarten teacher agreed with me. She had been teaching for 35 years before you showed up in her class, and she told me you were more trouble and a worse child than any she had ever had in her class.”
Now, this is the GOOD part. As she streamed and screamed through her litany of abuse I moved the phone receiver away from my ear, lifted up right finger and moved it to the telephone and dropped it with a sense of accomplishment, empowerment, finality and pride onto the disconnect button and I hung the receiver up on her in mid word.
I stood stunned for a split second and then experienced a flood of joy. I started hopping up and down, and then began to skip around the house yelling in song, “I did it! I did it! I hung UP ON HER!”
Now the tears are here pushing against my eyes. No, that wasn’t the end of it. I wasn’t ready. It wasn’t time. Within a matter of days she called back with her sweet voice and I apologized, and the phony loving relationship was reinstated and maintained until the spring of 1989. That is when I had a realization (too much for me to write about right now) that allowed me to write her a simple letter thanking her for being the mother that brought me into the world and telling her directly that because of the abusive things she did to me as a child I could no longer have a relationship with her in my lifetime.
She did not respond though she continued to bemoan the curse of being my mother to my siblings for years after that until they one by one quit listening to her. I only saw her once — out of the corner of my eye as if she were a fleeting mirage of the shadow of a ghost — after that in 1990 as she passed through my desperately ill father’s hospital room. (He had finally divorced her by then).
My father died in 2001. I never confronted him. I ignored and avoided him in my adulthood just like he did me in my childhood. I believe that both of my parents had to make internal adjustments that allowed them to ‘go on being’ while having unbearable, overwhelming pain and sadness at their core. I would also say that both of my parents died of a broken heart.
This is all I can write today. I have to do my ‘Linda in today” things. I cannot describe to you right now how she died, either.
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I want to say here that the reason I do this writing is not in hopes of healing myself. I am nearly 58 years old, and things will not get much better for me than they are now. I accept that fact. I write because I now there is value in sharing my experience so that others ‘out there’ with histories related to mine can perhaps see in my words a reflection of their own experience so that they can become empowered to own the fullness of their own traumatic lives. I trust this is possible because I do not write from the top down — not from a place of put-together security based on secure attachment patterns that would create all kinds of benefits those that have them probably don’t recognize.
I write from the bottom up. I write from a place of humiliation, terror, confusion and trauma. I write from an incredible place called ‘the miracle of survival’. I write from what Dr. Teicher of Harvard calls “an evolutionarily altered brain” formed in, by and for existence in a malevolent world.
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But for now I am going to watch my blue parakeet bathe itself in its small dish of drinking water as I think about and then DO the act of finding it a better bathtub. I am going to work on the little hand made paper cross earrings I am figuring out how to make so that I can add them to my inventory of crafts to display and sell at this Saturday’s farmers market in town. They will be pure white with silver glitter. I will eat the last of my homemade banana bread muffins, made from my grandmother’s recipe. I added grated apple, dried currants and lots of walnuts. That’s good for me. That’s where I am going next.
But first, I am going to stand in the wind with my fists open and my palms facing the sky and let all the bits of dandelion fluff, memories of myself and my mother, blow away.
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As always, thank you for visiting this site and for reading this post. Your comments are welcome and appreciated.
+SUFFER IN SILENCE
Why did I sleep so poorly and wake before dawn today? What do I do with the millions of thoughts, swarming around like gnats, each untouchable? I try to swat them away. I do not want to hear them. I don’t want them to be a part of me.
I used to have an inner directive about my research and writing that I could in the end say things about the consequences of severe abuse from birth that I knew no therapist would ever tell a client — because they didn’t know them. Now I laugh a macabre laugh. Nobody can afford any therapy any more. There is no access. How do those of us who had such a terrible mess made of the first 18 years of our life get help for anything that happened to us, let alone for the difficulties those experiences back then cause for us now?
Or is none of it supposed to matter? Do we just need to do what my sister calls it, “Put on your big girl panties,” and get on with our lives, moment by moment, the best that we can?
I get the feeling that I have so much information buried, hidden just below the surface — but I am supposed to leave it there? Leave it untouched, waiting for future generations to discover in their own time, because we have too much on our plates in the world right now and it is all too much for anyone to hear?
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I have a very clear idea at this moment about how this all can work. I walked away from my research and my computer and my writing and remembering 5 months ago. I simply pushed back my chair, got up, walked away and didn’t turn back — until now. It happened the instant I knew I had found what I was looking for: ‘substance p’.
SEE search:
http://www.google.com/search?q=substance+p&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307
Substance P is a neurotransmitter related to the sensation of pain. It works the same way if we are feeling something as physically wrong for us as it does if we feel something as emotionally wrong with us. That means to me that our sadness is not something to spurn and discard. It is a part of us we need to cherish and learn from.
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Partly my mission up until that point was to show that our nation’s reliance on pharmaceuticals to treat ‘depression’ and ‘anxiety’ was no different than a reliance on anything that we use to take away our perception of pain. I knew there really was no difference between psychological pain and physical pain because both are indications to the body that there is something hazardous affecting an individual within their environment, and both elicit an immune system response.
I knew that we run the risk of basically saying to one another and to ourselves, “That’s OK. Go ahead and keep your hand in the flame. Take these pills. You will not feel it. But by all means don’t take the pain seriously as a signal to you that there’s something wrong with your life. Don’t try to find out what it is, what caused it, how it affects you. Don’t change anything. Just ‘remain productive,’ get on with your life, quit whining and complaining. Nobody cares and neither should you.”
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So in my own life I turned away from my studies and from my writing, and tried to create a sanctuary for myself, tried to forget everything I am and everything I’ve become as a result of early, chronic, consistent, terrible abuse. After all, our society tells us, “That’s all in the past now.” That’s a lie. It is NOT in the past. Everything that has happened to us remains right here in the present instant, accumulated in our body, in our body’s memory, and affects every interaction that occurs all the way down to the molecules in our body and how our genetic code is continually manifesting in our bodies.
So what?
We are not supposed to ask the questions. We are not supposed to know the answers. Thinking is supposed to be carefully modulated so that we avoid knowing the truth. Be a nation of smiley faces, plugging along, separating the good from the bad, letting people ‘get what they deserve’. Don’t pity ourselves? Don’t ever think you had it worse than anyone else because we all know how much worse other people have it?
The more we don’t know our own reality the more we separate ourselves from ourselves, and hence from one another. Are we simply a glamor culture founded upon the powers of distraction and the pursuit of not knowing the truth? Every time an important question bubbles to the surface of our awareness we are supposed to turn away and forget it. If we can’t do this by ourselves, then we better go get some kind of pill to help us.
Where’s the salvation in that? Where’s the learning? Where’s the connection to reality and to what is really going on? Where is the taking of new information and using it to create a better world? Are questions and wondering forbidden?
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For example, what if I were to ask important questions like, “What is the difference between the experience of abuse for the child that is singled out in a family as the chronically abused one, and the siblings who are the witness abuse survivors? What is the difference between them in regards to the long term brain and body changes they each receive as a result? Is there a possibility and risk that by our unwillingness to ask these questions and to look for the answers on the bigger level that we are saying there is no difference between them, and that a witness and a victim are in effect ‘the same thing’? Where, in this picture, do the perpetrators fit in?”
By being willing to pay close attention to the lessons of trauma we can become crystal clear about cause and effect, culpability and accountability. Both witnesses to abuse and victims of abuse have their shared portion of experiences related to peril. In addition, they each also have their own experiences that are distinctly different.
Is there in effect a forbidden zone, a boundary in our thinking and learning that says, “STOP here, beyond this point there is no passing?” Is that part of what continually keeps the after effects of trauma alive and well, running just under the surface of our culture like a poisoned and toxic ground water that remains so close to the surface that the well being of at least half or our citizens is being jeopardized on some level daily — and nobody is really supposed to care? Does the adage, ‘pay lip service’ apply here as we all like to decry violence and abuse but will not do anything individually to stop either the actions or the effects — not even within ourselves?
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“Chin up. Suffer in silence. Don’t admit the truth. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. Don’t make such a big deal of it.”
Is this really all about not wanting to separate the victims from the not victims because somehow the not victims carry some sense of guilt, shame and responsibility for what victimized the ‘others’ in the first place? Or is it that we live embedded within a culture that insists it is right in saying that “People get what they deserve?”
That leaves the not victims exonerated from whatever guilt they might be carrying so that they never have to dig down and take the guilt out and look at it. It leaves the victims holding the bad bag feeling as if somehow they deserved what happened to them and they have no right to complain. Not ever. “Don’t rock the sinking boat?”
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That leaves us with a vast gray area where people who really do suffer somehow just have ‘bad genes.” When all else fails and there is no other logical explanation, blame genetics. Who cares that research is showing how nasty early experiences trigger most of these genes to misbehave as they had to and continue to adjust for a person’s survival in a hostile, toxic and malevolent world?
We make choices as a society just like we make them individually. If nobody calls anybody on their behavior, where is the balance, reason and health in that? Pharmaceutical companies who make billions off of the results are the monster engines powering health research — physical and mental-emotional health. We don’t question this. We literally BUY their results as if they came straight from the God of the universe. The power is in the pills?
The word ‘pharmaceutical” stems from the Greek word ‘pharamkos’, which was the chosen sacrifice that was killed after all the ills of a people were projected onto it. Kill the pharmakos, all troubles of the people are vanquished. Blame the victim, ‘de-capacitate’ the victim, shut them up, make them go away and all will be well for everyone else.
What if the sacrifice doesn’t want to BE the sacrifice? What power do they have to resist? True mental health and well being is being treated like an obsolete technology itself. Who cares if vinyl records disappear off the market as they are being continually replaced by newer and better recording technologies? All that matters is that we have access to the music itself. Well being for the masses? Who cares if it has been replaced with tiny pills in throw away (well, maybe in some places recyclable) bottles?
Shouldn’t we all just be so grateful? We don’t have to suffer. We don’t have to work at well being. We don’t have to ask the tough questions and find the tougher answers. Access to well being has been equalized and guaranteed to all? And if we refuse to take the pills? If we dare to question Big Brother’s machine? Well, who first asked “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody there to hear it does it make a sound?”
I have always thought that question was ludicrous. A tree falling and hitting the ground makes vibrations, dislodges and upsets all manner of life that exists within its branches, etc. Only egocentric humans would assume that the world revolves around us. I can personally say anything I want to about how the abuse I suffered was preventable, that I would rather it had never happened in the first place, that it changed the development of my brain and body into being one geared for the most efficient survival in a life-and-death threat world, and that this childhood created a lack of well being in me that operates on my molecular level. Who wants to hear this noise?
Better that I either suffer in silence — which is what I am doing if nobody hears a sound I am making — or shut up, pop my pills, and get to work fitting in here. I mean, how productive is the truth?
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ALONE NAKED IN THE WOODS SINGING
This entire post has been moved to the section on my childhood stories. Please follow this link to read it from this location:
*MY ‘VISON’: ALONE NAKED IN THE WOODS SINGING
+THE RESILIENCY MYTH
If you weighed one hundred pounds and someone placed you on one end of a teeter totter facing a thousand pound gorilla on the other end, and then told you to get both of your feet on the ground, how exactly would you do that?
Our expectations of recovery for our selves and for others after exposure to major traumatic events can be this ridiculous. Just saying or thinking, “Oh well, they should have been more resilient,” does more harm than good. It only shows that we are talking to the wrong end of the horse.
Read the rest of the story here.
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+TAKE CARE OF MOTHERS
In the end the final and greatest belief that I have, and the greatest area of focus for my work, would be to reintroduce into public awareness something our species has ALWAYS known. To the degree that we lose sight today of what still needs to be the greatest focus for our species, taking care of mothers, our species will decline.
Over the millions of years that we have been evolving and enduring, we have beat out probably at least 17 other hominid species. Climatic changes, being in the right place at the right time, perhaps (some would say) the assistance of destiny all played a part.
But in the end I believe that why we have our amazing mental abilities, our ability to use words, to continue to develop tools, technologies included, is because as a species we always FIRST took care of mothers.
In a world of increasing billions of people we can lose sight of this fact. But when it comes to the individual quality of life for our species’ members, having mothers that have the resources to take care of us still really means the difference between life and death, even if that happens mostly on a mental and psychological level.
It is, to me, the surest sign that any society is being stressed to nearly its capacity when infants are not receiving the kind of mothering care, essentially during pregnancy and an infant’s first 2 years of life, that our species has prepared us throughout evolution to receive. The topic gets hot and bothered, with lots of controversy, but nature knows what is best and always has. At the point humans did the mothering to near perfection, nature allowed us to go on and improvise for ourselves. This happened because we reached a point as a species where we could make improvements on what nature could provide for us.
At the point that we begin to make choices that are more detrimental for us than what nature has provided for other species, we will have to become accountable for our wrong choices and mistakes. I think we are at, or are very nearly at, that point.
When I consider the horrific abuse I received daily for 18 years, I can trace the genesis of it back to my mother’s childhood. She was born to a ‘professional’ woman of means who had her masters in 1918 and probably NEVER wanted children. A nanny raised my mother from birth thanks in part to the availability of bottles for feeding. My mother was not mothered. She did not have her developmental needs met, she was not protected, and in the end the adjustments she had to make activated mental illness genes that I don’t believe would have ever bothered her if her first 5 years had been right.
She should probably never have had children, either. Once she did, there was nobody there to take care of her as she mothered. Intervention did not happen. Abuse, terrible abuse, was the consequence.
As a society we can first of all overcome our social taboos against realizing that infants have very specific needs and sometimes these needs are not met and that infant, if it survives, will suffer from corresponding detriments for the rest of their lives. Infants ARE abused. Our minds do not want to consider this possibility, and we do not want to think that we are ‘accidentally’ participating in this crime.
Ignorance, denial and wishful thinking are not going to solve the problem. We need forums for considering the facts, the problems and the solutions. Because of our newly implemented technologies we are now able to extend the forces of our mind out into a big, broad world. And in this process we can help make positive changes, no matter what we are doing that brings in our paychecks.
Stop the Storm 
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