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I was reminded by Sandy Mitchell this week about this hard to watch but extremely important research on attachment as shown in this video:

What is known as The Tronick “Still Face” Experiment

Watching it makes me profoundly wonder, “How do people survive who had nothing close to the kind of safe and secure attachment with a mother than the infant in this video obviously has?”

How DID we survive?

While everyone who watches this video NEEDS to feel sorrow — those of us who can feel an inner sense of vast, nearly incomprehensible sadness will know instantly that we are miracles of survival because the neglect if not outright horrors of abuse to us from our youngest days, weeks, months of life put this sadness inside of us.

I have a friend in this small town area where I live who absolutely believes that any early severe abuse survivor CHOSE to remain alive.  My friend absolutely believes that if there had ever been a time during the horrible suffering from abuse during the first 18 years of my life that had I asked God to end my suffering, He would have.

Back in the days of my early years (I am 61 now) probably the ONLY way my suffering would have ended is if I had actually died.  It might be the same reality for many of this blog’s readers.

If what my friend so strongly believes is actually the way things work — then there is no reason for any of us to have made it out of the enduring torture and torment of our early years other than we were strong enough not to give up.

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I am also strong enough and stubborn enough not to give up on this writing, either, no matter the struggle I go through.  Here is the link to the version of the book I have been working on if you would like to read it.  Place any comments you might have at this link.  Thanks!

+”STORY WITHOUT WORDS” – manuscript for beta readers

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What does a silent invisible word say?  What does it mean?  What does a silent invisible child do?  What does it say?  Where does invisibility and silence live?

What is the connection between pathological shame and the extremes of hiding behavior that even healthy shame generates in humans?  I know of an expert in the crowd who can wisely address the answer to this question – though his words are silently invisible-invisibly silent at the moment.  I am left with this keyboard and my computer screen all by myself.

If I had the choice right now to ‘make it real’ I would choose to have absolute and complete amnesia about every childhood trauma that happened to me.  Of course for this action to be effective all the development of my body would have to be changed, as well, so that the effects early trauma had on my development would never have happened either.

No choice.

Except that is exactly what my mother’s psychotic BPD did for her.  As far as she knew – all troubles possible just vanished into her lower world mental hell along with real me.

Except that I was not really real.

So even now as I try to write for book publication my words do not want to stick where I put them.  My words belong in invisible silence.  That is their nature.  So if I don’t leave them alone – as I have now sent them to my daughter for her editing of them – on my own I would dismantle my entire manuscript as I let my words do what they wish to do:  disappear.

Me, an invisible writer telling an invisible story with invisible words.  Nobody hears or sees a thing.  Eighteen years of that.  My body-self and much of its corresponding brain-mind cannot escape the effects of that reality that did not simply disappear for me when I left home at 18.  Nope.

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This will need edits – but not today!  This is chapter 17 of “Story Without Words” – and may be the final chapter – don’t know yet!

Requires a reading of Mildred’s childhood stories in this chapter:  +STORY – 9. MILDRED’S CHILDHOOD WRITINGS

Follows my description of Theory of Mind (ToM) here:  +STORY – 16. Visible vs. invisible

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XVII.  Shared story

In my thinking and in my writing I am working out my own Theory of Mind (ToM) about my mother’s mind.  I use what I discover to retrospectively consider how her mind determined her actions at the same time I understand myself better.  I share what I learn with the hopes that my writings can add useful information to the overall study of the BPD mind and its psychosis.  I especially hope something I say helps infant and child abuse survivors at the same time it helps stop these abuses where they are happening now.

How big is the world of a human mind as it spans a person’s lifetime?  How big is a mind split in half by psychosis?  Do two halves of a split mind each grow into the size of two whole minds?  Is a psychotic break like Mildred had an instance of genesis where two individual ‘cell minds’ grow separately in opposite directions?  How do two separate minds operate inside of a single individual?  Is there a ‘place’ where these two separate minds meet one another?  If so, where might we look to find such a ‘place’?

Did Mildred’s BPD psychotic break simply create two separate identities within her mind that lived simultaneously through her one body?  Certainly there was an irrevocable difference between the personality of the woman who attacked me from the one that lived in her upper visible world (as readers see her in her adult writings).  The exception was with her husband who could not avoid experiencing both of his separated wives.

I am certain that young Mildred had seen similar good-bad splitting behavior turned toward her at one time or another in her childhood by her mother and her brother, if not also by her grandmother.  From the beginnings of her life and of her development of her own ToM she could not understand or make any internal sense or peace with the split nature of the ‘personalities’ she was the recipient of in her attachment relationships.

To simply state that the treatment Mildred received dissociated good from bad in many important ways for her tells us very little of real use or value.  If we looked at all the highways in the world and then pointed to one single crossroad in explanation of where all the roads from there then went we would find out nothing about the overall nature of all possible directions of the connecting roads.  When on her journey through her childhood Mildred lost her self-agent at many important crossroads where her mental development required her to make a decision for which she had missing and conflicting information.

A growing little person cannot simply stop moving forward at one difficult crossroad of development to wait for enough of the right information to appear so an informed correct decision about self-in-the-world can be made.  It is the nature of ongoing life (vs. death) that forward motion occurs.  Decisions are forced to be made in the early development of ToM — correctly informed ones or not.

A return to Mildred’s childhood stories (chapter 9) provides an opportunity to actually see the operation of Mildred’s mind in operation as she wrote each word down on paper.  We can correspondingly watch a small part of the development of her ToM as she struggled to resolve conflicts inside her stories as she attempted to resolve them within her mind.

By the end of her last story within the microcosm that her collection of stories provides in the order they were written, we find all we need to know in her final words, “that is the question.”

What happens to a person leaving the most formative years of their life who is left not with answers about self-in-the-world but rather with nothing but questions?  What happens when the most important developmental question — “Where is my mommy and where is my home?” — is not only left unanswered but is so complicated beyond a child’s ability to even begin to resolve the question that the very self-agent asking the question is dissolved in the process of asking it?  I do not believe there is then any hope of moving past this crossroad with an intact self because there is no intact Theory of Mind.

I am not being either presumptuous or grandiose when I say that I believe the existence of Mildred’s childhood story about the search for her lost Mummy and home is the greatest gift ever given not only to the study of BPD as a whole, but to the study of a pre-psychotic BPD mind.

We see both the ascension and the descension’ of Mildred’s mind already present in this story as we journey with child Mildred on the most important search any child raised without safe and secure attachment – primarily with its mother – is forced to make.  We are watching the fundamental break in the development of Mildred’s ToM exactly with her as she wrote her words.  There can be no greater tragedy in a human life than to find no mother-home for self in the world.  In Mildred’s writing we can see that instead of what she most desperately needed and hoped to find, her mother-home, did not exist. “The most glorious bluebells” marked the spot where (and when) recognition of the absolute pivotal futility of the search to meet the most essential need of a child’s life appeared in Mildred’s mind as she wrote her words.

Mildred was forced to move on.  At this instant Mildred was faced with the most significant paradox possible:  How to go on being with an intact self when there is no intact self?

Mildred made the only decision possible at this juncture of her life.  She wandered away from this crossroad lost with nothing with her but an unanswerable question as a guide forward through the rest of her life.

Considering that this happened to her – and through no fault of her own – means that no matter what Mildred did to me I cannot fault her for that, either.

Mildred gave the world an actual picture in the words of her childhood story that describes for us the instant in which an ascending-descending BPD split happened to her at age 10 years old.  She tells both of finding “the most glorious bluebells” where the hope of unification with mother and home was destroyed at the same time this hope was left broken behind her as she moves on in her writing as Mildred remained alive to descend from this point in mental time and space because she had to move forward in her life.

Mildred moved on in her life to make enough unconsciously informed crossroad decisions to eventually find herself a literal home on earth where a plethora of glorious bluebells thrived.  She ascended far up an Alaskan mountain to stake claim to her home as she literally homesteaded 160 acres in the exact spot where her childhood hopes were transformed magically into reality.  However, Mildred reached this peak, this apex point corresponding to her psychotic BPD-matrix mind’s idea of heaven only because she had also grown the descending depths of the lower half of her mind’s hell world (with me in it).

We are not told in Mildred’s story when and how she had discovered that both her Mummy and her home were missing.  This is not the place or time in my writings to explore who the man and the two girls might have referred to in her story.  My concern is how I became sucked into the drama that grew into Mildred’s ongoing life as I was born into it 15 years after her story was written.

Mildred had green eyes.  Beth in her story has blue eyes.  I have blue eyes.  Mildred wrote that Beth and Priscilla shared a home but had different mothers.  From the age of five Mildred had been ‘mothered’ my both her mother and her grandmother.  Had Mildred already developed into two different girls long before this age 10 story was written?  If so, it was blue-eyed Beth who spotted the flowers.

In Mildred’s later-developing psychotically split matrix-mind was it blue eyed me who knew where mother-home was supposed to be?  Was it the part of Mildred she made me into – to replace herself in hell – that actually held this knowledge in this part of her split mind?  Was keeping me as her bad self-replacement along with the part of herself that held her hope invisibly in her invisible lower hell world necessary to free the other ‘upper’ good half of Mildred to search in the visible world for her mother and home?

Both halves of Mildred, the good and the bad,could not be visible at the same time.  This ‘either/or’ pattern had been forced onto Mildred and into her ToM development through the trauma of abuse and neglect that had happened to her from her birth.  At the same time ‘bad’ Mildred had been visible to her attachment people, Mildred as herself was literally made invisible to them.  The only times Mildred herself was visible to her caregivers – and therefore visible at all – was when she was ‘being good’.

What was this little child supposed to do?  Certainly she could not take any kind of mental representation of a safe and secure person or people into her invisibility with her when it was those same people who were wrongly, meanly, deceitfully, capriciously and traumatically forcing her into oblivion in the first place.  (I would add here my suspicion that when ‘bad’ Mildred was made invisible (banished-vanished into invisibility) to and by her caregivers she was accessible for torture by her brother and who knows who else?)

The entire pattern of being manipulated, controlled and tormented by the lie of false ‘love’ to a ‘good’ Mildred by her caregivers gave her what I do call ‘betrayal trauma’.  It is important for me to mention that I had always known I was hated rather than loved.  I was never betrayed in the way that my mother was.

In my childhood I was always the mouse (prey) and Mother was always the cat (predator).  Thus the macabre game Mildred played with me was always ‘cat and mouse’.  In Mildred’s early life sometimes she was clearly the mouse and sometimes she wasn’t.  While she had no ability to control when she was the mouse and when she wasn’t, she was TOLD that these patterns were all her fault.

There can be no greater lie told to a child, or a more destructive one than this.  Mildred was given an impossible paradox to solve and she bravely tried with all the powers of her mind to solve it.  She found the only solution her creativity allowed her as she went searching for her safe and secure attachment person in her mind.

Of course my being told from birth that I was not human but was the child of the devil was a lie.  But I was not given an ‘either/or’ impossible paradox to resolve within my mind.

Mildred stepped into the writing of her story without describing how, when, where or why she knew her mother-home was missing.  She was already lost as her story began.  Although these essential parts of her story are invisibly silent without words, we can use the powers of our own ToM to understand that in Mildred’s perception of herself in her world there had once been a mother and a corresponding home and there had been a time when she knew where they were.  I never had any such invisible-visible story to tell.

I never had a mother and I had never been born into such a home.  Or, to be more specific, it can be understood that I was born to an invisible mother-home.  I was thus spared any need to search to find what I had never had to lose in the first place.

Mildred’s experience of betrayal trauma gave her a ‘reason’ to try to ‘reason’ what the ‘reason’ was that sometimes she was an invisible mouse while at other times she was a visible child.  How else was she to solve the problem if not with reason?  All this reasoning occupied vast amounts of child Mildred’s mental resources during the period of time in her development which demanded of her that she apply resources of her mind to form a ToM with adequate reasoning abilities as she needed it to live with for the rest of her life.

As we can tell in her story all her efforts to find and use all these ‘reasonings’ failed her because she was trying to solve a paradox that the people in her life had given to her that had no solution.  In contrast, my existence in the world was as clear as it was consistent:  Once evil equaled always evil; once invisible equaled always invisible; never visible equaled never visible.  As horrible as Mildred’s abuse of me was for those long 18 years of my childhood, it could not harm me where it mattered most.  My mind remained intact — whole — and unbroken.

Never once until I was 29 and gone from home nine years did I EVER — not one single time — ever wonder about what had happened to me.  I never questioned or had any curiosity about myself as my parents’ daughter.  Nobody had ever presented me with a paradox I could solve or introduced any ambiguity into my mind about myself in the circumstances of my existence.

This fact was the greatest blessing Mildred’s psychotic split-world break gave to me.  I had simply existed as my own self because I had never been given a choice to do anything else.  Because I had never been given this kind of choice I had never made a decision at any crossroad of my life that would have appeared at the same time an opportunity to choose had appeared.

Because such a choice opportunity remained invisible to me, I can best say I was enabled, then, to make invisible decisions at invisible crossroads.  My mind was thus spared any challenge to ‘reason’ in any way about what happened to me.  As odd as it might seem, this realization at this moment makes me chuckle.  At the same time I am stunned by the beauty of how what happened to me as a result of Mildred’s perfect psychosis saved me.

I am impressed as I realize I was able to do exactly what Mildred’s psychotic split-world matrix mind wanted me to do.  In effect I was left being the blue-eyed Beth standing exactly where Mildred left her hope when she wrote her age-10 story.  There I simply stood enduring all 18 years of my childhood knowing essentially where the most glorious bluebells stood at the spot where Mother and home used to be.  I marked that spot as I was being born with my full capacity of pure and perfect hope for life that every human being is born with.

That I was born to an invisible mother-home did not mean I didn’t have a mother-home.  Because I see how I was born to mark the exact spot where my mother’s hope had shifted into invisibility as her hope broke in half, I see that who could have been my visible mother was the hope-less part of Mildred who left “the most glorious bluebells” behind her under the gaze of her hope-full half of herself — at that fixed spot at the fixed time Mildred wrote her story words.

This understanding about my life with Mildred is coming to me exactly as I write these words of my story.  This understanding coming to me is happening as I consider Mother as she wrote her words.  It is through my mind in my words that I am meeting the mind of Mildred in her childhood words.

These are the first moments of my life in which I finally understand that all the horror and violence and terror and immeasurable suffering, all the darkest darkness, all invisibly captured and kept within the lower matrix hell Mother kept me in within her mind contained at heart all the true hope my child mother lost as she left it behind  as described in her story.

In a most paradoxical way, because I have worked these past 30 years of the second half of my life free of blame or anger born of hatred for Mother because of what she did to me, I have been able to find myself within everything that ever happened to me in my childhood.

I came to the moments of this writing with full knowledge of myself as I existed without emotion at my core and without question in my mind as I endured every single thing Mother ever did to me.  I know that all I ever did was stand perfectly clear and calm in my mind concerning what I knew of my own experience.  Nothing psychotic Mildred ever said or did to me changed what I knew.

As I write these words I can finally give a word to what I have always had — of what nobody ever took away from me.  That word is — REASON.

In my state of perfect reason that came from there being no reason at all for what happened to me, I never reasoned about anything.  Nothing was ever given to me to reason about.  There had never been a reason for what happened to me that had anything to do with me.  I never thought about this except in the single sentence that came into my mind as I described it at the beginning of this book.  At that point of my life I simply needed to consciously have those words that told me it was not HUMANLY possible to be as bad as Mildred said I was.

Therefore, I was both human and not bad.  I made no argument in my mind to either of those facts.

Even at times as a human child I had actually done something wrong, what Mildred did to me in consequence on those occasions was so far past ‘reasonable’ as to defy anyone’s efforts to reason about her (Nobody ever tried.).  Her attacks on me were always without reason as ordinary minds comprehend reason.  There was no possibility of finding reason to reason about where none existed — and I wasn’t motivated to spend any time trying to do the impossible.

Before I turned 29 mine was never any kind of esoteric choice not to think about my abuse history.  My history had, prior to this age, simply existed as I existed.  While I had spent 18 years thus existing in near perfect traumatic turmoil, that turmoil was always Mildred’s and never mine.  That’s just the way reality was.  I knew this innately when I was born and I consistently kept this knowledge in my mind.

Most importantly I never lost access to the truth of my own mind.  The overwhelming vastness of the lie I was unequivocally born into allowed me to both keep reason at the same time no trace of this huge lie could erase my pathway to my own mind.

Over my past 30 years of so-called ‘recovery work’ I have at times considered myself to have ‘lost myself’ as I found much contemporary recovery lingo suggested to me.  I never lost myself so I have never needed to find myself.  If indeed I had lost myself – as Mildred did when she began to split in two long before she wrote her stories – by definition I would have lost the way back to myself.

What I needed to do was to go through a forensic discovery process that has enabled me to separate the words of Mother’s story from the words of my own story.  As I do this, even at this moment, I choose one word, then, and only one word to place at the exact spot where my story and my mother’s meet.

I make visible in my story the single-most important and therefore meaningful invisible word of Mildred’s story.  That word, born of silence, is hope.  In the darkest darkness of Mildred’s lower hell world she kept me in I did what I was supposed to do:  I kept hope alive and I have never lost it.

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I feel in some ways like I am running the race of a lifetime writing this book.  Both I and the horse I race upon are at the peak of our abilities.  I was awakened at 2 am this morning by sentences pouring out of my mind.  They would not stop – so in these past eleven hours I have concluded two chapters that I skipped until now:

• +STORY – 5. Fox
• +STORY – 6. Bubblegum

They will need an edit by me before they go to my daughter for the final edit – but I have no objectivity right now about that material – abuse memories from when I was 5 years old – combined with my psychotic BPD-mother’s diary entries corresponding to my memories.  My edit has to wait.

Read if you dare.  My conclusion is that what I would say about these two chapters could hardly be used for promoting my book!  “Anyone who reads these chapters and does not feel sickened in their heart and sick to their stomach has something very, very wrong with them.”

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment » to this post

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If you wish to comment on the above chapters, please do so at the end of those – and thanks!

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I remember that I reached one chapter in one of the previous manuscripts I am working of for “The Demise of Mildred” series during which I struggled – really struggled – to get through it.  I did get through it.  I will need to face that chapter and its contents again as I move through editing stages.  But right now I am more concerned with finishing another chapter for the manuscript I am working on now that I found to be equally as difficult as that other one.

This chapter will also need editing in the future, but for now I leave it behind and move forward.  It was at the point toward the end of it as I struggled through my commentary about what my mother wrote about my 6-week checkup that I fell down.  I know I fell down.  I am not at all happy with what I have written there.  So I have to remind myself it’s OK to not be able to find words sometimes, especially when the title of this book is (as it has morphed again), “Story Without Words:  The invisible silence of Mildred’s abuse of me.”

Why would I think that it would be easy for me to give words to a story about my severely abusive mother as I write about me being a newborn?  Feel free to read this if you like, adding any comments you might care to make directly at the end of this link:

+STORY – 12. My newborn checkup and the BPD-matrix of Mildred’s mind

In this chapter I do my best – again not good enough as far as I am concerned – at describing how I now see the operation of my Borderline Personality Disorder Mother’s psychotically abusive mind.

I look forward to the future.  My professional editing daughter is going to take the week off work after Christmas to edit toward epublishing this manuscript and “The Up Down Mountain Waltz” manuscript.  We still need to get the photographs worked out for these books, which will hopefully also be done by this week my daughter will do her end of this job.

I wish us all well!!  At this moment I just feel sad.  So very very very very SAD!!!  I pulled myself back today from another piece I was writing because my sense of helplessness and powerless during what was done to me so MANY times over so MANY years was more than I could bear to have touch me – today.  Will I go back to the writing of that part of my story later?  I do not know.  I am clear that there are parts of my invisible silent story that will always have to stay that way.  I am clear about what degree of suffering from my abuse history I am willing to experience today – and believe me – it isn’t much.

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CONTACT INFO

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You are also welcome to read the chapter I mentioned in my last post as I worked on it last night, +STORY- 11. Baby Dearest, although all chapters are still in editing stage.  (Preceding chapter as it mentions ‘Twilight Sleep’:  +STORY – 10. My Beginnings)  In this chapter eleven, for the first time in my book-writing process, I hit readers square in the face with my primary concerns.  At the same time I want to delete those words.  How much courage do I really have?  How much do I trust myself and my voice?  How afraid am I of alienating book readers?

I face my own bias that book reading is supposed to be a pleasurable experience.  I can see my own childish thinking here.  Who would pick up a book titled (as it stands at this moment) –

Story Without Words:  The Invisible Silence of Infant and Child Abuse

to read it for pleasure?  Come on now, Linda!  If anything, restraint of my voice thus far about what concerns me MOST surprises me!

I could not sleep past 3:30 this morning.  My writing mind was very busy forming within itself words like ‘silent’ and ‘silence’ to determine the difference between how they felt rolling around in my mouth.  My sleeping mind-mouth?

I gave up the sleeping and went back to the writing…….

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I need to take a pause from my book writing to clear my thinking palette – oh, that’s palate?  This is nothing that chewing a bit of parsley will fix, that’s all I know.

I am ready to begin writing chapter – 11. Baby Dearest – of the book I am working on now.  I am in, first of all, a rather odd quandary about the title of this book – so I might as well begin my clearing efforts here.

In some ways this must seem like a six-of-one half-a-dozen of the other kind of quandary.  Title?

Story Without Words:  The Invisible Silence of Infant and Child Abuse

or

Story Beyond Words:  The Invisible Silence of Infant and Child Abuse

I go back and forth, forth and back – changing the ‘middle name’ of this book’s title.

I am momentarily at this crossroads as I begin a chapter that is essentially about infant abuse – my own abuse experiences in my infanthood.

Childhood.  There is no spell check warning if I type that word.  There is one if I write infanthood.  Have I invented a word?  I add my word to my ‘dictionary’.  Did I resolve the problem?

I think about the many months I spent reading books and research articles on developmental neuroscience as I discovered with every page I read more and more truth about MY situation as it had existed in me – in my body – in my brain – since I was born.

For all the truth I discovered I still became increasingly aggravated as I went along!  A given researcher would be describing how early attachment relationships build an infant’s brain and nervous system – OK.  Fine.  Fascinating!

All of a sudden the infant was not being spoken of as existing any more.  All of a sudden the author would be writing about child abuse, childhood – while I was left with one of those (Sandy, you know what I mean) terribly queasy feelings that the very expert I was relying upon to give me desperately needed vital information about the truth of what happened to me – was LETTING ME DOWN exactly at the moment I had almost GOTTEN IT!  Gotten the magic gem of truth!

I wore out my pens adding words into texts where they were missing.  (I also wore out pens adding things into index pages that I was stunned to find had not been mentioned.)

I have concluded that there is a cultural taboo in America against even TALKING ABOUT infant abuse.  There’s a taboo against committing infant abuse that has taken away our power to use words to TALK about infant abuse – even to write about infant abuse!

Many of the developmental neuroscientific writers describe what goes wrong at the start of life in earliest attachment relationships – and then – BINGO – all of a sudden they are writing about psychopathologies in adulthood – without admitting the fact that these pathologies are directly connected to INFANT abuse – and are PREVENTABLE in nearly ALL SITUATIONS!

These writers describe infants and then change these infants magically in nearly mid-sentence into children!  It seems to me that not even THEY can tolerate what they know, what they are saying – or what they NEED to say. If developmental neuroscientists and attachment experts can’t even use the words ‘infant abuse’ – what does this say to our culture at large?  Infant abuse does not exist – because we don’t WANT to know it does?

Shaking a baby to death – warnings now given as parents depart hospitals post-birthing:  DON’T SHAKE YOUR BABY!

Well, I could be wrong but all the shaken-to-death baby news I’ve ever heard involves a MAN who has committed this murder.

Of course I am against shaking babies (DUH!).  Of course I am pro informing adults (I guess usually thick headed men) not to shake a baby.

Of course I realize some mothers shake babies, too.  Bad on them, too!

BUT we are culturally missing what I see as a MOST important truth!

Infant abuse happens.  It really, really happens – and very rarely does that abuse KILL the infant.  No, most infant abuse HURTS infants.  It terrorizes them, it tortures them, it makes them suffer in ways that adults don’t (evidently) want to even imagine – though we have evidently made it far enough to be able to imagine SHAKING a baby.

Good for us.

What about the rest of the story?

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Speaking of story – WITHOUT or BEYOND?

Infants don’t have words.  Big DUH on that one, too!  The neglect and abuse of infants, the traumatizing of infants – the suffering of infants – the unsafe and insecure attachment relationship traumas that infants endure far more often than anyone wants to imagine, think about or MENTION – will not be able to be put into words by these suffering infants.  Not even when they grow up.

Are those ‘stories’ that are happening behind the doors of silence, hidden, out of sight out of mind – BEYOND the reach of words?  Or are they WITHOUT words because nobody has given them words yet?

Is use of ‘beyond’ in this context an admission of hopelessness on my part – that it is impossible to every speak of or write of abuse because the actual experience of it FOR ANYONE at ANY AGE lies in a world of ‘being alone’ that cannot be penetrated either from the inside or from the outside?

Does ‘without’ introduce possibility?  Possibility that though horrendous survivor stories of abuse, even from birth, COULD someday be put into words – conveyed in words – comprehended in words?

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Empathy.  True empathy does not happen if the empathic person feels their own pain (say) when in the presence of a suffering person.  True empathy is not designed to make MORE people suffer – not even one more person suffer.  True empathy – healthy empathy – is meant to help the person who is suffering.  True empathy is meant to trigger caregiving behavior in the witness.

Suffering people need people to HELP them.  If the suffering person could help their own self stop the suffering, well, DUH!!  They would do so!

Suffering people need someone to assist them OUT of their suffering in ways they cannot help their self.

So, along with this idea, if I say an abuse experience by a little person exists BEYOND words – that is probably saying that the little person ITSELF does not have the power, the ability, to TELL IN WORDS what is happening to them – or has happened to them.

Assuming there do exist people who CARE – part of that truly empathic caring could be to help a sufferer put words to their experience.  That would mean that a story of an abuse experience (yes, a crime report) – COULD be told if the survivor had assistance in doing so.

Compassion would be the generating IMPULSE for a person who can feel true empathy – to get to work to caregive-HELP!

So – maybe BEYOND words refers to the experience of abuse – suffering -from the inside.  WITHOUT words would refer to the experience of someone else’s abuse – suffering – from the outside.

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I don’t think I like ‘beyond’.  I can recognize that there are things nobody can really describe.  I think about how our species was before we even had spoken language abilities.  Everything anyone experienced THEN would have been beyond words.

But we DID evolve far enough to develop verbal language.  It’s an add-on to drama, pantomime, gesturing, dance, music, art forms of all kinds that don’t involve words themselves.

But our species’ experience was not BEYOND words during the millions of years of our evolution when we simply did not HAVE words.  Those early experiences back then were WITHOUT words, not BEYOND words.

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Which leads me back to my issue with cultural taboos against harming infants – which I have long suspected interferes with our culture’s ability to OWN the fact that YES infant abuse DOES happen – and it is a LOT MORE than shaking a baby to death.  Abusing an infant – changes the way its brain and entire body develop – the way its genetic codes operate and express themselves – the way the nervous systems, the immune system – the way the MIND works — changes that last a lifetime and cause a universe of trouble and problems for survivors – that NOBODY wants to recognize, acknowledge OR talk about!

Thinking about the BPD-good-bad split patterns – certainly on the level of psychosis with my mother.  Culturally so?  Loving infants is GOOD – TRUE.  Abusing/neglecting infants is BAD – TRUE.  But we cannot split our thinking in BPD-ways — so that we deny the bad exists, don’t give it words, don’t stare it in the face, don’t make it stop and go away.

Taboos are against ACTIONS first and foremost.  These taboos – like don’t hurt the baby dearest – are meant to keep everyone safer.

Taboos are not against TALKING and THINKING about problems.  They are not about ignoring truth and therefore taking the stand of supporters of the continuance of abuse.

If we continue to NOT think and talk about things like infant abuse and child abuse – we are WITHOUT words by choice.  And the suffering of the tiny helpless ones will go on and on and on……

We concern ourselves with assaults that don’t kill people, car accidents that don’t kill people, dangers of fires that don’t burn the whole town down.  We have to start giving words to INFANT abuse that does not kill babies.

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A blog comment last night caught my attention.  I have been doing a lot of thinking about the fact that YES I believe my abusive mother suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder.  And, YES, she was psychotic.  Did her psychotic break make her a special kind of Borderline?  Do I have to specify some kind of distinction when I publish between ‘ordinary’ BPD and ‘psychotic’ BPD?

What might the research say?  Here are a few samples…

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From Germany:

It seems that BPD people can suffer from psychotic symptoms without having a psychotic disorder.

I cannot access the full article of this study online, but here is the abstract for –

Borderline personality disorder and psychosis: a review.

By Barnow S, Arens EA, Sieswerda S, Dinu-Biringer R, Spitzer C, Lang S.

Published in – Curr Psychiatry Rep. 2010 Jun;12(3):186-95.

Early views of borderline personality disorder (BPD) were based on the idea that patients with this pathology were “on the border” of psychosis. However, more recent studies have not supported this view, although they have found evidence of a malevolent interpersonal evaluation and a significant proportion of BPD patients showing psychotic symptoms. For example, in one study, 24% of BPD patients reported severe psychotic symptoms and about 75% had dissociative experiences and paranoid ideation.

Thus, we start with an overview regarding the prevalence of psychotic symptoms in BPD patients. Furthermore, we report findings of studies investigating the role of comorbidity (eg, post-traumatic stress disorder) in the severity and frequency of psychotic symptoms in BPD patients. We then present results of genetic and neurobiological studies comparing BPD patients with patients with schizophrenia or nonschizophrenic psychotic disorders. In conclusion, this review reveals that psychotic symptoms in BPD patients may not predict the development of a psychotic disorder but are often permanent and severe and need careful consideration by clinicians. Therefore, adequate diagnosis and treatment of psychotic symptoms in BPD patients is emphasized.

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From the Netherlands:

Psychotic reactivity in borderline personality disorder.

By Glaser JP, Van Os J, Thewissen V, Myin-Germeys I. (The Netherlands)

Published in – Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2010 Feb;121(2):125-34. Epub 2009 Jun 25.

Abstract

OBJECTIVE:

To investigate the stress relatedness and paranoia specificity of psychosis in borderline personality disorder (BPD).

METHOD:

Fifty-six borderline patients, 38 patients with cluster C personality disorder, 81 patients with psychotic disorder and 49 healthy controls were studied with the experience sampling method (a structured diary technique) to assess: i) appraised subjective stress and ii) intensity of psychotic experiences.

RESULTS:

All patient groups experienced significantly more increases in psychotic experiences in relation to daily life stress than healthy controls, borderline patients displaying the strongest reactivity. Borderline patients, moreover, reported significantly more hallucinatory reactivity than healthy controls and subjects with cluster C personality disorder. Paranoid reactivity to daily life stress did not differ between the patient groups.

CONCLUSION:

These results are the first to ecologically validate stress-related psychosis in BPD. However, psychotic reactivity was not limited to expression of paranoia but involved a broader range of psychotic experiences including hallucinations.

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From the United Kingdom:

Experiences of psychosis in borderline personality disorder: A qualitative analysis

By Bob Adams and Teri Sanders

Published in – Journal of Mental Health, August 2011, Vol. 20, No. 4 : Pages 381-391

Background. From clinical work and research it is clear that people suffering from borderline personality disorder (BPD) often complain of psychotic symptoms including hallucinations, yet little is known about how service users experience these symptoms.

Aims. The aim of this study was to examine the experience of psychotic symptoms in people with BPD and to establish how mental health professionals responded to reports of psychotic symptoms.

Method. Seven semi-structured interviews were carried out with service users with BPD who had been known to present with psychotic symptoms. In parallel, medical case notes of these service users were analysed. Results were subjected to qualitative analysis using techniques of grounded theory.

Results. Psychotic symptoms were often long standing and interfered with physical and emotional functioning. There were no clear distinctions from psychotic symptoms described by patients suffering from schizophrenia. Treating doctors had no common language to describe these symptoms. Furthermore, the language that was used had the implication that the symptoms were not real or true and could therefore be perceived as pejorative. [with negative connotations]

Conclusions. It is suggested that the diagnostic category of BPD requires revision to include psychotic symptoms. Terminology such as pseudo- and quasi-psychotic symptoms are confusing and use of these terms should be revised.

Read More: http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/09638237.2011.577846

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Psychotic symptoms in patients with borderline personality disorder: prevalence and clinical management.

By Schroeder K, Fisher HL, Schäfer I.

Curr Opin Psychiatry. 2012 Nov 20. [Epub ahead of print]

Source – Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany bMRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London, UK.

Abstract

PURPOSE OF REVIEW:

The aim of this article is to review findings on the prevalence, phenomenology and treatment of psychotic features in borderline personality disorder (BPD), and to discuss factors that might be related to their occurrence.

RECENT FINDINGS:

Of patients with BPD about 20-50% report psychotic symptoms. Hallucinations can be similar to those in patients with psychotic disorders in terms of phenomenology, emotional impact, and their persistence over time. Although more research is needed on the exact nature of psychotic phenomena in patients with BPD, terms like pseudo-psychotic or quasi-psychotic are misleading and should be avoided. Childhood trauma might play an important role in the development of psychotic symptoms in patients with BPD, as in other populations. More research is necessary on the role of comorbid disorders, especially posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Atypical antipsychotics seem to be beneficial in some patients; evidence on psychotherapy of psychotic symptoms is sparse.

SUMMARY:

Psychotic symptoms, especially hallucinations, seem to be an important feature of BPD. More research on potential mediators and adequate treatment approaches for psychotic symptoms in BPD is needed, and current diagnostic systems might require revision to emphasise psychotic symptoms.

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Very interesting – USA:

Etiological features of borderline personality related characteristics in a birth cohort of 12-year-old children.

By Belsky DW, Caspi A, Arseneault L, Bleidorn W, Fonagy P, Goodman M, Houts R, Moffitt TE.

Published in – Dev Psychopathol. 2012 Feb;24(1):251-65.

Abstract

It has been reported that borderline personality related characteristics can be observed in children, and that these characteristics are associated with increased risk for the development of borderline personality disorder. It is not clear whether borderline personality related characteristics in children share etiological features with adult borderline personality disorder. We investigated the etiology of borderline personality related characteristics in a longitudinal cohort study of 1,116 pairs of same-sex twins followed from birth through age 12 years.

Borderline personality related characteristics measured at age 12 years were highly heritable, were more common in children who had exhibited poor cognitive function, impulsivity, and more behavioral and emotional problems at age 5 years, and co-occurred with symptoms of conduct disorder, depression, anxiety, and psychosis.

Exposure to harsh treatment in the family environment through age 10 years predicted borderline personality related characteristics at age 12 years. This association showed evidence of environmental mediation and was stronger among children with a family history of psychiatric illness, consistent with diathesis-stress models of borderline etiology. Results indicate that borderline personality related characteristics in children share etiological features with borderline personality disorder in adults and suggest that inherited and environmental risk factors make independent and interactive contributions to borderline etiology.

SUMMARY:

Psychotic symptoms, especially hallucinations, seem to be an important feature of BPD. More research on potential mediators and adequate treatment approaches for psychotic symptoms in BPD is needed, and current diagnostic systems might require revision to emphasise psychotic symptoms.

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From Germany:

Psychotic-like cognitive biases in borderline personality disorder.

By Moritz S, Schilling L, Wingenfeld K, Köther U, Wittekind C, Terfehr K, Spitzer C.

Published in – J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry. 2011 Sep;42(3):349-54. Epub 2011 Mar 23.

Abstract

Whereas a large body of research has linked borderline personality disorder (BPD) with affective rather than psychotic disorders, BPD patients frequently display psychotic and psychosis-prone symptoms, respectively. The present study investigated whether cognitive biases implicated in the pathogenesis of psychotic symptoms, especially delusions, are also evident in BPD.

A total of 20 patients diagnosed with BPD and 20 healthy controls were administered tasks measuring neuropsychological deficits (psychomotor speed, executive functioning) and cognitive biases (e.g., one-sided reasoning, jumping to conclusions, problems with intentionalizing). Whereas BPD patients performed similar to controls on standard neuropsychological tests, they showed markedly increased scores on four out of five subscales of the Cognitive Biases Questionnaire for Psychosis (CBQp) and displayed a one-sided attributional style on the revised Internal, Personal and Situational Attributions Questionnaire (IPSAQ-R) with a marked tendency to attribute events to themselves.

The study awaits replication with larger samples, but we tentatively suggest that the investigation of psychosis-related cognitive biases may prove useful for the understanding and treatment of BPD.

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Due to be published 2013 – the new DSM-V

from Wickipedia:

Personality disorders

Major changes have been proposed in the assessment and diagnosis of personality disorders.^[30] These include a revamped definition of personality disorder and a dimensional rather than a categorical approach based on the severity of dysfunctional personality trait domains (negative emotionality,introversion, antagonism, disinhibition, compulsivity, and schizotypy). In addition, patients would be assessed on how much they match each of six prototypic personality disorder types: antisocial/psychopathic, avoidant,borderline, narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive, and schizotypal with their criteria being derived directly from the dimensional personality trait domains. Some former personality disorders, like histrionic personality disorder, will be submerged under facets of various personality type domains (in this case, the narcissism and histrionism facets of antagonism).

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I wrote this October 2011.  This is an example of the kind of writing I have done for my own book that I cannot force myself to go back to read – let alone edit.  Any comments welcome to this post.  Thanks!

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ONE:  PIG

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“He who puts his trust in God, God will suffice him.  He who fears God, God will send him relief.”

 

~H.M. Balyuzi, in his book:
Bahá’u’lláh – The King of Glory, p. 138  [amazon.com:  Bahá’u’lláh: The King of Glory by H. M. Balyuzi (Apr 30, 2000)]

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Toes in my tennis shoes.  Tipping harmlessly down into the soft earth pushing my weight a little forward and backward on the swing.  I face the valley far below.  Steep mountainside rises behind my back.  I am sad.  Not because I know I am sad but because it is the state of my existence.  It is July 1966, one month before my 15^th birthday.

This swing set used to be in our yard in southern California.  It was dismantled and shipped to Alaska when I was five, assembled again in our yard under the birch trees beside the creek where we first lived in Eagle River, was taken apart again, moved up to our mountain homestead, assembled again.  Once we had a pet goat tied to this swing set.  Mother wrote in a letter to her mother late on Thursday, October 18, 1962:

Went to market and got home 7:00 P.M. – Bill got home with the kids before me – and met me at the car with – Oh Mom – it’s terrible!
Wolf got off and killed the goat!  He was over it when they got home.  Bill broke down – awful!  Got it by the neck!  Kids upset.  Bill had to bury it and now we get rid of those two dogs!
Enough said – terrible and ruined tonight.

          Felt good today until home and upset over that – now tummy hurts!

I sit on the swing next to where the goat died gushing blood into the earth.  I am staring at the lacerations on my knees.  Bleeding and oozing, pussy, raw and scabbing, I do not feel pain.  I watch the flies, feeling their tiny feet walking around on my open sores.  Faint and delicate, it feels nice, this gentle touch.  I like the company of the flies, more and more flies.  I sit still now, unmoving as the flies gather.

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A few days earlier:

I am in my pajamas lying in bed.  I have been here more than one day.  Gray cloud light seeps around curtains closed across windows Father made after he straightened the curved Jamesway walls.  I am curled up on my right side facing the wall.  My knees hurt.  The palms of my hands hurt.  My body aches with bruises and welts.  Curved slashes in the flesh of my thin wrists and upper arms the shape of Mother’s gouging fingernails are done bleeding.  I have cried so hard for so long my lids are swollen nearly shut.  My cheek, rouged from hard slaps across my face, rests on a pillow sodden with tears.

I am in a top bunk in this room Father built for him and Mother.  Erected stud walls partition this small area for privacy.  In this ever-transforming half-canvas half-wooden strange tent-house we live in I am shut behind its only inside door.  This is my bed.  This is not my room.  Why is my bed in this room?  It happened before that Mother, during one of her longterm punishing rages at me, rearranged furniture of our sleeping areas so she could imprison me alone away from contact with my siblings.

I am isolated now in a leaden body lying motionless except for my eyes that wander over wood grain patterns on the smooth shiny golden plywood wall Mother took such pains to sand and stain and varnish for her room.   Curving trails travel between shapes randomly spaced in the boards.  Empty meaningless questions slide through my soggy mind over and over and over again.  “Are those lips?  Are those eyes?  Why did someone put them there?”  (I had no way of knowing those football shapes were plugs replacing knotholes in the surface of the board.)

At this moment I can all but open the door of that little room, step inside, and turn to reach out my fingertips to tenderly touch the dark brown hair of that wretched girl I was laying in that twilight at nearly 15 years of age.  Today I recognize I was fading away from all hope of my own life.  Yes, my heart tapped in strong and rhythmic beating.  Yes, I was breathing, but so little more.   I had disengaged from struggle.

All the will I had naturally used to stay alive no matter what Mother said or did to me from the moment I was born had been used up.  On this day there was nothing left inside of me I could use to fight for my own life.  I slipped.  I fell.  And then, remote, I floated away without time or shape or form and without desire.

And then I heard words spoken to me as clearly as any I have ever heard by a voice that had no earthly sound.  As these words appeared evenly, calmly with the power of a deathless antidote against the deadly poison that was finally consuming me, I was revived.  These words of my salvation were spoken directly to my soul:  “Linda, it is humanly impossible for you to be as bad as your mother says you are.”

I saw no flashy lights, no apparition, was brushed by no wisp of air left by fluttering wings.  Yet the gift of these few specific words formed a factual platform within my mind upon which I could stand and live.  Had they not come to me in this perfect timing I would now be dead.

I had crossed an invisible threshold before these words came to me that meant I could no longer continue to survive by sheer inbuilt trust in God alone — as I had done from the instant He created my soul when I was conceived.  Blind black inky fear had, of its own bidding, arrived within me at this stage of my development to rupture my ability to continue to endure as an innocent in a state of grace.  Nobody had ever given me any information up to this point that I could have used to make sense out of what Mother had always done to me.  My absolute deficiency of consciousness was no longer sufficient to keep me alive.

What relief I needed at this time was provided in those simple words of truth.  Not only did I need some drop of understanding that it was not possible to be as bad as Mother said I was, but I also desperately needed to know that I was even human at all.  I had been told from my birth that I was NOT human because I was the devil’s child.  That I completely consciously FORGOT that I was human and not the child of the devil by the time I was a senior in high school belongs to the stories within my next book which will cover the years of abuse I experienced past the age of middle childhood.

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Before I continue here I need to tell what I know about what I remember from my severely abusive childhood because there is something very different about what I am going to write next.  On October 3, 1980 I entered a 7-week inpatient treatment program for alcoholism and drug dependency in Minnesota.  A detailed account of those days also belongs to another book.  In spite of the sobriety I had achieved as a result of my first ‘recovery’ efforts, and in spite of following therapy and antidepressant medications, by June 1983 I found myself desperately depressed.

I searched until I found a treatment program designed to specifically address the needs of people with severe child abuse histories.  I left my two girls with their father and moved into a small trailer in the town 130 miles away from my home to enter this three month out-patient program.  Although I had many memories of the abuse I had suffered I knew there were more that I could not recall.  I telephoned my sister two years younger than me, told her that I was working hard in the perfect setting to ‘deal with’ my childhood of abuse and begged her to disclose to me any incidents she remembered that I had forgotten.

What follows is the only memory my sister shared with me.  As she described what happened on this day, as she had witnessed it (she had just had her 13^th birthday) standing in front of the rail on the small landing outside our front door, my own memory of this entire experience flooded back to me with the force of an emotional tidal wave.  Never would I have believed it was possible to so completely NOT remember something this horrible had I not had this experience of remembering exactly such a memory.

Once my sister realized how completely I had forgotten what she had remembered she vowed to never again release to me any other information about our childhood that I had ‘blocked’.  Now, nearly 30 years later, she says she has forgotten anything else herself.  None of my other siblings seem to remember any other details than what I remember on my own, either.

Later in these pages I will discuss what I now know about why I kept only certain memories while forgetting literally thousands of abuse incidents that happened to me.  In this memory I was given back as my sister began to tell me what she remembered is a clear clue to me about how my memory process operates about my abuse history.  While I have always remembered what I call a ‘bubble’ memory about the flies and another separate ‘bubble’ memory about the words I heard in bed that day, it has only been as I write this book that I have come to comprehend that both of those memories are connected to what happened to me that I forgot until I was not-so-subtly reminded.

This memory I am going to recount therefore belongs to a different category of my memory capacity.  This next memory probably resides with those memories of abuse that I might access through a process like hypnosis.  On my own, I believe I forgot this memory (did not choose to remember it as an ongoing part of my current reality) because it holds nothing beautiful or redeeming in it.

Of course ‘beauty’ and ‘redemption’ are relative to one’s reality.  My memory of the flies held the beauty and redemption in how I felt being so gently touched and visited by a company of nature’s tiny creatures who wished me no harm.  Remembering hearing those words of redemption speaks for itself.

There is nothing in this forgotten memory other than the sick evil darkness of unimaginable brutality.  There was nothing newly useful I could gather from that experience.  I knew Mother’s brutality well from the time of my birth.  Brutality I could not escape.  Brutality I could survive.  Yet the full return of my own memory of this experience and the way that return happened for me does hold information of vital value to me now.  I needed to understand that I have chosen — no doubt in my soul – what I remember of my 18 years in hell and what I do not.  I find great power in this knowledge.

I will also take this opportunity to mention I believe strongly that:  (1) Nobody in their right mind would re-enter a brutal memory to re-experience trauma without good reason.  (2)  I have no good reason to ever do this.  (3)  Nobody in their right mind would want to read what it feels like to experience the kind of brutality that infant and child abuse survivors know first hand.

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Here is the now-remembered un-remembered memory to which the previous two memories I have written about belong:

The baby is 19 months old.  His diaper was dirty.  Mother told me to change it, so I did.  Because the diaper was so stinky, before I finished dressing the baby I rolled it up, took it outside and placed it on the wooden pallet to the right of the steps that came down from the front door.  We kept our metal water cans on this pallet.   I had planned to go back to rinse the diaper out.  I forgot about the diaper.  It is very probable that Mother had assigned me other chores.

Sometime later Mother saw the diaper on the pallet on her way to the outhouse.  She bellowed.  She screamed.  She screeched.  “LINDA GET OUT HERE!”  I am sure I had no thought not to obey her.  I went out the door.  Evidently my sister followed me to witness all that happened next.

Once one of Mother’s rages at me was triggered she showed no control or mercy.  She simply became something worse than a wild, rabid, powerful beast.  At this age I was my full height of 5’ 8 ½” and weighed around 110 pounds.  At 5’6” Mother weighed around 170.  I know now that because from my earliest memories I always held my ability to reason intact, though necessary to preserve the integrity of who I was as a self, my reason-ability put me at a terrible disadvantage against the forces of Mother’s irrationality she wielded so forcefully against me.

Screaming at me what a dirty girl I was, how irresponsible and lazy I was, how determined I was to make her life miserable, how I could not be trusted to do the simplest thing, how I defied her, how hard she tried to raise such a difficult daughter, how I could do nothing right – and on and on and on – I was dragged by my hair, by my wrist and arms with the claws of her fingernails dug deeply into my skin, pummeled and slapped and punched and pushed to the edge of a mud puddle in the driveway made wide and deep by this summer’s incessant rains.  I was shoved hard and knocked down into it.

I tried to stand up.  Out came her foot, kicking me back down again hard.

“I’ll tell you when you can stand up!  I’ll tell you when you can get out of that puddle!  You are a PIG!  I want you to crawl around in the middle of that puddle on your hands and knees!  I want to hear you say over and over again “I am a PIG!  I am a PIG!  I am a PIG!” because that is EXACTLY what you are!  A PIG.  A filthy dirty PIG!”

I was wearing shorts.  My palms were imbedded with gravel, cut and bleeding as were my knees.  I kept trying to stand.  She kept punching and kicking me back down.  I kept trying to reach the edge of the puddle to crawl out and away even if she would not let me stand.  (This is very hard, trying now to breathe and write and not cry at the same time.)

While she did not let me stand I did withstand her.  I did NOT recite her evil words!  And I paid a high price for my resistance for as long as she had any strength left in her she kept up her vicious attack.  Eventually she had to wear out.  I knew that always happened sooner or later, though many times her beatings resumed again once she had rested.  This meant that sometimes this pattern went on for days, and even into nights if she felt like dragging me out of my bed by my hair, waking me up with a beating all over again.  In between she banished me alone in silence either into corners or into my bed where I was forced through evil and strange circumstances to rest myself from the terrible trauma of her beatings.

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