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“Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. ²³“I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him. ²⁴Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” Mark 11:22-24

Sometimes I comprehend images in my mind that are so clear I cannot deny that I am being faced with a scene that is telling me something important about myself in my life.  In my book writing process I have encountered one of these images.

As I communicated with people dear to me yesterday I verbalized this image I have about my writing as I told them, “I am standing with my nose to a massive mountain cliff side that is so tall and so wide I can see no top or side to it in any direction.  I cannot move forward in my writing, at least not now.”

The next level of my awareness about my writing is that I cannot tolerate the misery I feel now as I write about my miserable stories of the misery I endured from severe child abuse during the first 18 years of my life.  True, I have written the first massive rough draft of the first book, but I cannot now tolerate ‘facing’ its edit.

After yesterday’s conversations I have decided to put down my book writing pen at least until January 1, 2012 at which time this entire topic will be reconsidered.  It might be that I will never be able to tolerate the writing of this book.  It might be that with prayer and with a break-time for healing and increasing my strength and endurance on all levels, something will change during this resting period.  I do not know.  I believe the answer will appear through faith and prayer.  If God wants to remove this mountain I am facing, He will.

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I found some more clear words this morning that I also believe refer to what I am now facing – the entire quote is posted here (bold type is mine):  *SOUL AFTER DEATH (AND STORIES OF THE SOUL):

“And now concerning thy question regarding the soul of man and its survival after death. Know thou of a truth that the soul, after its separation from the body, will continue to progress until it attaineth the presence of God, in a state and condition which neither the revolution of ages and centuries, nor the changes and chances of this world, can alter.  It will endure as long as the Kingdom of God, His sovereignty, His dominion and power will endure. It will manifest the signs of God and His attributes, and will reveal His loving kindness and bounty.”

“Blessed is the soul which, at the hour of its separation from the body, is sanctified from the vain imaginings of the peoples of the world. Such a soul liveth and moveth in accordance with the Will of its Creator, and entereth the all-highest Paradise. The Maids of Heaven, inmates of the loftiest mansions, will circle around it, and the Prophets of God and His chosen ones will seek its companionship. With them that soul will freely converse, and will recount unto them that which it hath been made to endure in the path of God, the Lord of all worlds. If any man be told that which hath been ordained for such a soul in the worlds of God, the Lord of the throne on high and of earth below, his whole being will instantly blaze out in his great longing to attain that most exalted, that sanctified and resplendent station….”

* Author:  Bahá’u’lláh — Source:  Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, US Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1952 revised edition, 1971 5^th printing, pages 155-158

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It seems possible to me that as I attempted in my book writing to begin to express what my soul knew, even during my first terrible beating that I know of from my mother when I was 22 ½ months old (with my father watching), which is where this ‘cliff image’ appeared beyond which I cannot write, that I have encountered what may well be a spiritual truth:  Perhaps what I experienced – what my soul experienced – during my first 18 years of life spent in hell – is something that is NOT meant to be written about or to be disclosed while I live in this body on this earth.  Perhaps my stories are meant to be “recounted” to an entirely different audience:  “With them that soul will freely converse, and will recount unto them that which it hath been made to endure in the path of God, the Lord of all worlds.”

It this IS TRUE I hope to know it by the first of next year.  If I am meant to complete any book, certainly this first one, I have to know that something extremely GOOD is meant to come out of this effort.  In the meantime I am not going to worry about what only faith and God can show me.  I will spend these next weeks strengthening my body and soul.

I do know for a certainty that my story is about what happened to me and how I survived living with a mother so sick in her body-mind that her soul seemed to have been barred from her conscious access – so that terrors of evil pervaded her relationship with me.  I find my answers in pondering the truths I posted at this page:  *DEATH, SICKNESS OF BODY AND THE SOUL

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I am the one you follow.  Locked into my wispy wake we trail through the shallow mists.  I am that arrow launched before you breathed.  I do not tow you.

See the rosy lavenders.  See the deepest darkest bluest green.  Faintly.  Listen.  Prayer air whispering like turtles perched on high dry ground.

You do not need to follow me.  You have tone on one wingtip and color on the other.

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William Ernest Henley. 1849–1903

 Invictus

OUT of the night that covers me,

  Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

  For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

  I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

  My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

  Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

  Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

  How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

  I am the captain of my soul.

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Maybe much trauma drama is a side effect of the need to run.

My need to run originated early in my life, probably even before I had the ability to sit up, crawl or walk.  This need to run is tied directly to the fight/flight/freeze response to threat.  My need to escape Mother’s abuse existed long before I had the ability to think about what was happening to me in words.

Once I left home at 18 my urge to flee found fulfillment although I had no words even then to think about what I continued to do all through my adult life.  Even today at 60 as I left my home to drive into town today to sit at a coffee shop outdoor plaza to write this, that is exactly what I did.  I ran.

More than a need for change or drama my urge to flee is tied to difficulties I have in processing information.  These difficulties exist deep in my trauma-altered physiology.  Changes that ongoing abuse trauma from birth created in the way my nervous system/brain formed in response to trauma means that I often lack the natural ability to process certain hardships and stresses in my life.  My active coping mechanisms frequently require that I continually and physically move forward in SPACE at the same simultaneously as I move forward in TIME.

I can clearly track this pattern in the first full-body age-22 1/2 month old beating memory that I so avoid writing right now.

Scientists know that sharks and migrating geese have no need to sleep because no new information is coming into their brain for processing.  When I run, I count on moving through time and space as they do.  It is not new information I am seeking or running toward most of the time.  I run FROM information in the past (often the immediate past) that I lack abilities to process and integrate.

My movements into a continual new future need to be AWAY from trauma rather than into it (if at all possible).  While my continual moving/changing locations was often hard on my children, I never met changes in this process that presented a challenge I could not meet one way or the other.  There were tough times and hardships to face but conquer them I could – and did — again, one way or the other.

It has always been the challenges on the inside of me that I have most found impossible to resolve.  Understanding is a high-priced item.

Even as I contemplate the work I have ahead of me to face the writing of my childhood memories, I have no hope of resolving anything.  I can do no more than travel backward into trauma experiences hoping that good will come out of this book in the future once it has been written.

It is not my nature to move backward in time.  It is in my nature to run into the future.  Any hope for relief I ever had as a child existed in some unknown moment in the future when a beating would finally end, or when I could go to the bathroom or eat or leave confinement in a corner or my bed.  Any hope for resolution of problems I continue to have resides in the infinite possibilities of the future.

These patterns have always been about survival.  Hope for survival is the same thing as survival itself.  No matter which way I turn this book writing task around in my thoughts, continued survival is all that I see.  Anything else that ever happens in my life is a mere ripple in that great ocean of “To be alive means only that I move into my future,” and I do not stop.

I would not sing a song backwards.  One doesn’t put a puzzle together backwards, either, or one would be taking it apart instead.  I have enjoyed ‘making things’ with my hands all of my life since my age two (that I know of), and these acts of creation are also about moving forward into the future, not backward into the past.

Even though this book I am working on is about my past I have to find a way to ‘move it into my future’ — one word at a time — or it will never be written at all.

NOTE:  My force-of-life was focused forward when I was growing up, not backward.   I moved forward in time AWAY from an attack — certainly never did I move forward in time TOWARD an attack — I was nearly ALWAYS surprised when I was attacked again out of nowhere — I could not predict, control, avoid or escape any of them.  Forward memory (future memory) in the brain is about anticipation and prediction — when traumatic chaos builds an infant-child’s brain these processes are changed.

Retrospect is meant to be an ability in the brain that allows us to take what we learn from the past that’s useful for the future.  Early severe infant-abuse trauma does not create the opportunity to learn a single thing from violent, unpredictable, insane chaos (something any sane growing brain-mind is going to run from as soon, as fast and as far as it can).

What I am talking about today is part of what it IS like and FEELS like to have one of the ‘evolutionarily altered brains’ described in this article:

The neurobiological consequences of early stress and childhood maltreatment.

Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 27 (2003) 33-44

Martin H. Teicher, Susan L. Andersen, Ann Polcari, Carl M. Anderson, Carryl P. Navalta, Dennis M. Kim

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What people do not seem to understand, and by people I mean myself also, is that a child being raised by an abusive Borderline mother is NEVER safe.  Although I was the ‘special’ child of our family singled out for the severe abuse, every time Mother attacked me in any way including verbally, all my siblings received witness abuse at the same time.

I hate to say this, I hate to know this, I hate to live with this — but at 60 years old I am finally coming to realize that the wounds I have from the 18 years of abuse I went through ARE NOT GOING TO HEAL IN THIS LIFETIME.

I don’t choose to feel anxious during my days, or choose to be overwhelmed by the madness I see in most human contact, or choose to wake up as I did before dawn today crying with tears soaking my pillow — for NO GOOD REASON — except that these 18 years of unhealed wounds make me SAD!

So why do I feel guilty that I am sad and anxious?  Why do I feel I made that choice to wake in the dark of predawn crying?  Why do I burden myself with feeling so responsible for not being 100% OK if I ‘chose to be’?

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Last night I was happy to accept the invitation of a friend who lives in town on the boulevard that surrounds this small town’s only real park to help her distribute the $150 worth of Halloween candy she bought to the crowds out wandering the streets last evening.  I sat beside my friend on the brick bench on her well-lit wide porch as friend divided the candy ‘donations’ into equal-sized piles while I handed them out as fast as I could to streaming hundreds of people.

I felt as if I were parched nearly to death for the light of pure joy in people’s eyes.  Not only were the joy-filled costumed little people such a great delight to me to see, but also even the teens, and also the parents and older siblings and grandparents that accompanied these little people.

I was very sad not to be with my daughter and 20-month grandson last night as they trailed out to collect the treats where they live nearly 2000 miles away from me.  Some of my inner tears are from that loss.  Yet it was all I could do last night to keep my tears from streaming down my face as I looked into the eyes especially of the children under age 7 that came up to me on that porch with such a bright light shining in their eyes.

If anyone doubts the love of God that created we humans in this world let them donate their time, and maybe some candy, too, and offer to go help someone in one of those ‘fancier’ houses where the hoards like to swarm on Halloween eve.  That is a job, that candy-giving!!  Three hours, non-stop children/families, and what I needed to see for myself last night was that perfection in children that I can so seldom see in grownups.

In that perfection, in the eyes of nearly all of those children (I did see its opposite in the eyes of one boy), is absolute trust.  In that perfection is an innocence that is born by NOT being a continual punching bag for one or more hate-filled parents.  There is, unfortunately, no reason to believe that all of those children I watched last night are safe all of the time from harm done to them by big people.  But at least I could see last night they were safe THEN.

An abusive Borderline’s children are prey.  Prey are never safe if they cannot escape the presence and threat of their own personal predator.  A never-ending viscous circle of never being safe.  If I had been out with my mother like those children were last night I would have had to ALWAYS be alert to where she was, what she was expressing, hyper alert to everything about me in the world!

I was never safe as a child.  If I had been one of those children who forgot to say Trick-or-Treat, or forgot to say thank you, or tripped on the hem of my costume or slipped on a step or stood in the wrong place or walked in the wrong place or looked up when I should have looked down??   An infraction such as that could, with my mother, have nearly cost me my life in violent and complicated punishments that ALWAYS included the evils of verbal abuse.

And certainly Mother cost me my happiness.  It is probably my biggest problem in my life that I hold myself responsible for these unhealed wounds from her that I never asked for, never deserved, could not avoid — these wounds that woke me crying from my sleep this morning.  I DID NOT ASK for this — not THEN — not NOW.

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I so seldom remember my dreams any more, yet I woke this morning with a dream from last night clearly in my mind.  “What,” I wonder to myself, “is the meaning in this dream that it would bring itself into my memory this morning?”

I don’t know what meaning there might be in this dream, so I will write it now to see if something about it makes special sense to me…..

I am looking out a window at a night sky so black there is no light to be seen anywhere.  I watch the darkness.  I see a faint glimmer of light growing behind a massive shape I take at first to be a gigantic thunderhead cloud.  “What a storm must be coming!”  I think to myself, but as I continue to watch, and as the light behind this shape begins to grow I see the shape is that of a pine tree so big I could never have imagined one so tall.

The sky continued to lighten until the wide branches were visible to me of this tree nearly all the way to the ground.  But then fear seized me as I realized this massive tree was tipping, tipping, tipping toward me until it crashed to the earth with its topmost branches brushing up against the window I was behind, though the glass did not break.  I realized I was not crushed to death as I stood there unharmed.

I felt great sorrow for this great tree’s death as I left the window frantically trying to find someone to tell, someone to care that the tallest, oldest tree on earth had fallen over this night — and had fallen right here on this spot.

I could find no one to listen to me.  Time passed in the dream.  Later I happened by another window in this house I was inside and through this window I could see the tree from a different perspective.  That tree was just an ordinary tree!  There was nothing especially huge about it.  Now I could see its whole body laying there on the ground, being maybe 40 feet long from root to tip.

I woke up hearing the Beatles’ song, ‘Let it Be’ repeating in my mind.  All very puzzling to me.

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I traveled to a meeting out of town yesterday with some friends.  I met a woman there for the first time and rode home with her as we each talked about our histories of extreme child abuse.  This woman knows with no doubt and with great faith that she was not killed in her infancy by abuse from her schizophrenic mother and bipolar father because she was saved by the grace of God.  (She was eventually removed from her parents and raised by other loving family members, but her entire childhood was still chaotic and very difficult.)

This woman and I both know what it felt like to be abused when we were little.  And yet this woman’s other clear statement about her childhood was this:  “Pain is pain.  Hurt is hurt.  It is all the same.  Anyone who ever feels pain and hurt is feeling the same thing.”

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As I left my house yesterday to attend this meeting I walked away from my book writing at the point I need to pick up at today.  I am working on my final draft of a chapter about the first beating I remember that happened when I was 22 1/2 months old.

No doubt at that time I did feel like a tiny person with a monster tree falling on top of me to crush me to death.  What is my perspective today at 60 years old as I return to my memory of being so little?  Do I stop my own writing with questions like this:  “Why do I bother to write about something from so long ago when I had no other perspective about something that matters so little to anyone else?”

My problem is that my body still remembers NOW exactly what it felt like to have that abuse happen to me.  I did NOT remember the abuse for much of my adulthood because I could manage to never THINK about it.  It seemed I could outrun my own history.  I had simply walked away from it when I was 18 without any perspective or understanding of what had happened to me.

I got away with this ‘not remembering’ for the years I raised my children, but I am finding that as I age it has become impossible for me to ‘not remember’ anymore, though I wish that I could.   All I can do now is to continue to move forward each moment of my life the best that I can, trying to keep a perspective as I write for this book that basically lets me know both the big tree and the little tree, the little me and the big me, coexist now together in a unique way especially until this book writing is done.

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For those readers who suffered infant-child abuse at the hands of a Borderline mother, please take a scan through the information at this link.  There is a synopsis of research along with my commentary:

*MENTALIZATION

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I would like to encourage readers to take a look through the research on the effects of child abuse on physiological development included in my earlier post at this link:

+EARLY CHILDHOOD ADVERSE EXPERIENCES

SEE ALSO:  ++IMMUNE RESPONSE TO MATERNAL SEPARATION

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What is this book going to be?  Is it possible to address its main text to a very wide audience?  This has not been defined in my mind yet, or in my daughter’s either.  How many men would read a book on my topic compared to women?  Mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, people of all reading levels, many levels of education, some with their own trauma and child abuse histories, some with no trauma or child abuse history, some with ‘recovery’, some with none at all?

I was thinking today how the ‘me’ that has this story to tell is not the ‘me’ that lives in my day-to-day world.  The ‘me’ that has this story to tell lives behind a veil.  It is I today with the words, not that other ‘me’.

The ‘me’ that I am today, the ‘me’ that I have gradually become since the day I left home at 18, practiced to fit into other people’s world, those that I have encountered along my way, at any rate.  The ‘me’ with the story never fit in anywhere.  I share that with ‘her’ — the not fitting in.  I STILL don’t fit in anywhere.  I don’t belong.  My history of 18 years of severe abuse did that to me — that I have not ever really been able to change.

So I am not sure I can write to any audience, really.  I can guess.  I can try to tell a story that has interest and meaning to other people.  But I wonder, “Why would my story mean anything more to anyone than the girl did that I was while I lived through that hell?”

How does a single, singular story stop being exactly that?  Where and how does a story cross that veil, cross that barrier between self and other?  How do our stories achieve meaning to anyone else besides our own self?

What is significant about my story?  There are so many other things I would rather be doing right now.  The kind of things I used to do without thought or question — just meandering down the road of my life.  Why now do I believe I have this JOB to do?  Why do I believe that it matters to anyone else if I write my story from behind the veil or not?

There is no glitz or glamor in my story.  There will be nothing spectacular in this story.  Only truth.

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Worth a look:  Combating child abuse and its effects

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I am obviously breaking my own vow of silence not to write on this blog until I have finished the second rough draft of my book.  Oh well, as some say, vows are made to be broken.  I am paying attention to the sentence related to yesterday’s post that must have something to teach me in this process or it would never have appeared in the first place, and certainly would not have stuck around.

What, I ask myself, do I need to know that is contained in this statement?   I tell myself I want readers of my book to close its covers afterward and think, “My!  My!  That was the nicest book about child abuse I have ever read.”

I sent my chapter four I worked hard on yesterday via email to someone last night.  This guinea pig messaged back to me that it needs to be rewritten because the wording is redundant and makes the brain tired in its reading.  They next messaged that they immediately went to find their snippers to trim their nose hair, a task that had been long overdue.

OK.  THAT worked!

Hum……..

Better I have this information now — than later.

Now what?

“Frogs in pots of boiling water,” I think to myself.  I doubt it’s true that if one throws a frog into a pot of lukewarm water and turns the heat up under it slowly that the frog won’t ever notice it was boiled to death.  Is it true that if one instead drops a frog into an already boiling pot of water it will be able to immediately leap out to safety?

But I do understand by my guinea pig’s response to my chapter four that I can make some very real efforts in my book writing about horrendous infant-child abuse to not only make a reader’s experience NICE, but to make their reading of the story possible at all.

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Next I think about losing something important that we need to find.  Do we need to dump a purse out and rummage through its contents?  Do we need to dump out our tool box and do the same?  Our kitchen junk drawer?  (I realize as I write this that I have lived in this house for five years, and for the first time in my adult life I have NO kitchen junk drawer!)  What are we looking for?  We will never know until we first ask a question.

Then I next think about something therapists call ‘transference’ and ‘counter transference”.  All abused children experience transference when the big people in their life dump their junk onto their children — brutally.

There is acceptable transference between a client and a therapist as a client begins to rummage around in the accumulated, pain-filled junk in their life.  It is common for clients to temporarily dump parts of their junk onto their therapist’s desktop.  The therapist needs to know how to handle this transference for the betterment of their client’s well-being.

Then there is counter transference that happens as a therapist ‘picks up’ information from their client that comes through as feelings, thoughts, ideas and attitudes in the therapist that invisibly belong to the client.  This can also happen dangerously when a therapist dumps their own junk back onto a poor client!

The important thing is that counter transference contains vital information needed in a therapy process.  Therapists are trained to recognize and to handle this entire process on both sides skillfully and well.  How much of this process will go on between what I say in my book and how readers experience my story?  How do I be responsible for this process when I will not be able to see it happening?

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My book is a story about horrendous piles of junk.  The junk is mine.  And yet I would be stupid not to recognize that there will be readers with abusive and traumatic histories of their own who get their own junk mixed up with what they are reading about mine.  I need to be as NICE as I can to my readers by choosing carefully how this process unfolds.

Many readers will have trauma histories of their own that have not been resolved.  They therefore probably have questions about what happened to them, either consciously or not.  As my story unfolds before their eyes these questions will awaken.  Some of them might clamor loudly for answers.  Some questions might whisper.  Some questions might silently sneak around in the corners of readers’ mind as uncomfortable feelings that can lead readers to abandon the story I am trying to tell them.

But I do know from froggie reader #1 that no reader will tolerate being given answers for questions before the reader has had the questions awakened within them.

Nor will readers be able to tolerate the reading of my book about child abuse until they have gained some comfort in the boiling waters of hell this story is about.  If readers have traumatic abuse histories of their own they need to be able to recognize gradually that what they are thinking and feeling as they read my book is not about me.  Their reactions will have a whole lot to do with what lies unhealed in their self.  I do not want my readers to abandon ship before the ship has even been unmoored or left port.

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