+SOME OF MY THOUGHTS ABOUT ‘ATTACHMENT’

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It is far, far too late for me to personally have warm fuzzy thoughts about what human attachment is, what it means, or about what it is SUPPOSED to accomplish for human beings.

I do not attach – in essence – any remote vague thinking to this term.  I can see quite objectively what it is – and what it does.

Certainly humans are born one year too early.  The massive size of our brains of course does not allow us to remain in the womb as long as we SHOULD be there.  But even though we are born into this big wide world being powerless to make sure our survival needs are met, we are not helpless.  From the moment we are born we apply a wide range of attachment-seeking behaviors designed to elicit help from those into whose care we have been born.

How our attempts to take care of ourselves from birth are received by our mother — first of all and most importantly — signals to our most-rapidly growing body and brain what kind of world we have been born into.

Attentive, appropriate, warm, loving, safe, secure — if we are met with those kinds of benevolent responses we will grow one kind of body-brain.

Inattentive, inappropriate, nasty, hateful, neglectful, hurtful — unsafe, insecure — those responses will signal to our rapidly growing body-brain that we have been born into a world that is malevolent.

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Attachment must happen on some level to meet our basic physiological needs – obviously – or our body will die.

Past those basic needs being met, lack of full safe and secure attachment interactions with our mother and other earliest caregivers will interfere with our physiological development in all kinds of ways.  We will be forced to live the rest of our life in a body, with a brain, that has – in effect – been tampered with by trauma given to us by people who do not have our best interests in mind.  These people – no matter what the reasons are that they did not care for us as we needed to BEST be cared for — were our enemies.

Anything less than near-perfect, near-ideal caregiving to a newborn (not to ignore that the patterns within the womb determine with great power the condition of the newborn) signals from birth that this new tiny human has essentially been born into a world at war.  The unsafely and insecurely attached infant’s physiology will respond to this world at war as if it has to fight for its very life.

We need to think of attachment in terms of communication about the conditions of the world that take place through patterns of interactions between the infant and its caregivers.

Through primarily the signals a mother first gives to an infant every system in the tiny one’s body is alerted to the conditions of the world it has been born into.  Either this world is safe or it is not.

If a mother herself received signals from her early environment that told her body-brain that the world was not safe she very likely has a body-brain of her own that has no choice but to signal to her infant that this world that she has brought her infant into is at war.  Yes, there are mothers that can overcome a great many of these patterns to give her infant signals that the world is ‘good enough’ to survive in, but there is no way that an unsafely and insecurely-built mother can transfer the clear message that this world is entirely safe to her infant.

We thus have generations within families in which insecure attachment within an unsafe world is the norm.

Within these families trauma from the past is simply communicated through signals based on attachment interactions between mother and other caregivers of babies.  Most often there are many other patterns of danger enmeshed with all interactions within these families so that trauma continues to escalate through the generations.  These families have lost the information that the world CAN ever be safe.

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This is the simplest description of how signals from a mother communicate the condition of the world to her offspring who then have no choice but to adapt and adjust their physiological development in accordance with the signals they have been given.

Research with rats translates across the board to conditions within the human body, whether we like this fact or not.

Take two rat mothers.  One is calm calm calm.  The other is anxious anxious anxious.

When the calm mother has babies and is allowed to raise them herself her entire litter has been found by researchers to end up calm calm calm.

When the anxious mother has babies and is allowed to raise them herself her entire litter turns out anxious anxious anxious.

Now, if at birth the offspring of the calm mother rat are immediately given to the anxious mother rat, and if the anxious mother’s offspring are given to the calm mother rat — we KNOW what happens.

All the born-to-calm-mother babies that were given to the anxious mother grow up anxious.

All the born-to-anxious mother babies that were given to the calm mother grow up calm.

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I think the reference for this research is in this book:

The Mind’s Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation by Jon Kabat-Zinn PhD and Richard Davidson PhD (Jan 2, 2012)

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All the interactions between primarily mothers and offspring communicate — in absolute essence — exactly what the conditions of the world are so that the physiological development of the offspring can adjust itself on all possible levels to match the kind of world the mother is ‘telling’ her babies exists.

In the case of rats, calm mothers signal through their every interaction with babies that the world is safe and the little ones are secure in it.  These babies get a body-brain that matches the conditions of the world the mother has communicated to the baby.

An anxious mother signals the opposite and development of her babies goes in the other direction.

Anxious, in human terms, translates as the presence of trauma and the absence of adequate resources for continued survival = malevolent world.

Calm translates as the absence of trauma and the presence of adequate resources = benevolent world.

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The kinds and quality of earliest ATTACHMENT interactions between a mother and her offspring is the tool that nature uses to signal to the offspring about the degrees of safety and security in the world so that the physiological development of the offspring can adjust its development to best ensure continued survival.

It is during the earliest most-rapid and critical stages of body-brain development that this signalling happens.  In this way the conditions of the world build the body-brain at the same time they build themselves into the body-brain.  On all the most important levels of development these early attachment signals create permanent adjustments that will last for the lifetime of the offspring.

I call this Trauma Altered Development (TAD), and I believe it is the underlying root of most patterns of difficulties in life that most people face.

Any time an individual displays unusually difficult patterns of existence over the course of their lifetime, it is exactly to these earliest attachment interactions that we MUST look to understand the changes that were made in the very body-brain this individual lives with in response to signals it received during the first 33 months of life (conception to age 2) about the conditions of the world.

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+DANCING THE SUN UP

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A most unusual thing has happened (for me).  I don’t know how long this will last.  I don’t know where this came from or why.  Suddenly – yesterday afternoon – a most unique feeling came over me –

I feel HAPPY!!

HAPPY?

You can bet I am exploring this gift.  To bed last night exhausted at 8:00 p.m. and up this morning at 4:30 a.m. – WAY beyond the sun.  My hopeful condition was matched by pulling up dear ole Pandora radio on my computer as I now vibrate the walls of my house – and beyond – with my favorite music – Latin.  (I figure if my neighbors here my fantastic beats they won’t mind, living as we do exactly on the Mexican-American border line.)  Meanwhile I am blasting away the obnoxious droning sound of those massive generator lights Border Patrol has set up too close to anyone’s house – certainly mine.

What has HAPPENED to me?  Is this temporary, like the passing of a storm before the next one arrives – unexpected, demanding my FULLEST ATTENTION?

I cannot say.

Something about putting two pieces of self-knowledge together – and then – of all things – owned them and accepted them with – what?  GLADNESS?

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Now, to some readers who were not severely abused from birth in a universe of darkest trauma, who were instead loved and cherished and cared for as infants and children are SUPPOSED to be, this might seem a wide stretch from something positive to know and love about one’s self.

But….

Here I am, celebrating these two pieces of information that are at this moment glued together in my conscious awareness – as the acceptance of them has changed how my body is feeling into CONFIDENCE that underlies my JOY.

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One:  I DO NOT NEED PEOPLE LIKE OTHER PEOPLE DO!  The first person who pointed this out to me some 20 years ago was a spiritually gifted Native American medicine man.  So I’m a bit slow.  So it took me these 20 passing years to FEEL the reality and therefore the truth of what he knew.

Two:  EVEN THOUGH I WAS NOT BORN NOT TO NEED PEOPLE (like other people do), THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED TO ME THROUGH NO CHOICE OF MY OWN.  What this means to me today is that I do not have to compromise what I feel in order to make other people happy.

WHAT?

Walk away from people, put distance between myself and them (not everybody, mind you – just those who quite frankly irritate the pe-jabbers out of me!), and let them freely do whatever it is they do to beg attention like so many leeches from somebody else.

I don’t even have to spend my energy, any of it, worrying about ‘explaining myself’ to them.

It is not my job to change people.  It is not my job to fix them or to make them happy or to fill up their lonely places.

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Today I realize how LUCKY I am!!  I can whine — and believe me, I’ve done plenty of that over the years, that I miss things like “knowing what it feels like to be loved” — or I can accept with pleasure the fact that I don’t have to walk down that street – the street where so many strangers are really NOT able to accept the truths about how THEY were made – about what happened to them long ago in their lives that created these big ole empty holes inside of them that they would LOVE to fill — with ATTENTION from anybody who will give it to them.

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Well, perhaps I see this right now because I am fully occupied with my book-writing job that is uniquely mine – that I believe will eventually have power to help other human souls learn something new and helpful — if not just plain fascinating.  I owe nobody anything that does not feel to me like it’s coming directly from my own inner guidance system — that has set a definite course of action for me — that is MINE.

My task does not belong to anyone else.  It’s up to other people to find their own task – and to do it.  This kind of inner direction has the power (I discovered yesterday and still feel with benefit today) to make a person happy!

HAPPY!

Never mind I am waiting for the sun to come up – that special light in the sky that keeps our glorious planet dancing in its great wide orbit.  I am dressed from head to toe in my old work clothes, preparing to don my worn sturdy cowperson boots – going out to crawl around in the high desert dust of my nearly completed chicken vault to staple stucco wire around the rest of the inside of this coop.  My only concern will be how to keep the watered down white barn paint off of the tips of my boots.

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And through every moment of my day I will be writing a book in my mind.  There is nothing more important to demand my energy, my thoughts, the attention of my essence.

I was given this most amazing epic of tragedy to write about just as I was given my part in enduring, in living through it.  My life.  My life belongs to ME and to nobody else.

So – if you are of a mind to whine, snivel, beg and leech your way to MY attention today — get off of that horse and walk away.  You can leave the horse behind.  I LIKE horses.

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+THE TERRIBLE REALITY OF MY BIRTHING

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A month or so ago one of my sisters told me about a two page section within this book

The Marriage of the Sun and Moon: A Quest for Unity in Consciousness by Andrew Weil (Jul 23, 1998)

in which the writer describes the drug I believe was given to my mother (and therefore in some form also to me) during her very difficult and no doubt terrifying delivery of breech-birth me during the 24-hour period from the morning of August 30, 1957 until I breathed my first breath at 8:31 a.m. on August 31st.

I just read that passage and present it here for information only:

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Weil is describing Datura from the Nightshade family of which scopolamine is derived —

“During much of the twentieth century, scopolamine enjoyed great popularity in obstetrical medicine in the United states.  Under the name “twilight sleep,” it was injected into millions of women in labor to make them amnesic for the experience of childbirth.  Obstetricians thought of it as a drug that simply erased memory for a few hours, and women who did not want to know anything of their labor and delivery liked it in retrospect.  In 1966, as a third-year medical student in Boston, I took several weeks’ training in obstetrics at a prestigious teaching hospital where scopolamine was still in vogue, and I watched many women under its effects.  Anyone interested in altered states of consciousness who sees such cases will realize quickly that scopolamine is not simply an amnesic drug.  Rather, it causes extreme confusion and disorientation, especially to people in pain.  Women in labor who are “scoped” often appear agitated, hostile, even deranged.  They writhe, scream, curse, and groan — hardly behavior that justifies the seductive term “twilight sleep.”

“In my opinion, the amnesia that follows this traumatic experience is not a direct effect of scopolamine but an inability to maintain continuity of awareness through such violent distortions of consciousness.  The “scoped” woman is not unconscious.  Her ordinary waking consciousness is fragmented.  What comes through is primitive material from deep layers of the mind, strongly colored by pain and fear.  People well versed in the repertory of altered states, who are familiar with deep meditations and trances or have trained themselves in the art of conscious dreaming, might be able to retain awareness through a scopolamine-induced delirium and not be amnesic afterward.  People unfamiliar with such states do not have a chance.

“Far from simply erasing a portion of experience, scopolamine releases such intense energies from the unconscious that the experience is later repressed and becomes inaccessible in the ordinary waking state.  I have no doubt that women who deliver under scopolamine would recall their experiences under hypnosis and find them intensely unpleasant.  Neither do I doubt that scopolamine strongly influences the birth experience of the baby, if only because of the state of the mother.  Back in 1966, when obstetricians did not think of babies as conscious entities, no one considered this aspect of procedures in childbirth.  Today, women are more interested in participating consciously in childbirth, and some obstetricians think about the impact of what they do on the newborn.  Scopolamine, not unhappily, has passed out of general use.

“In labor, scopolamine delirium is violent and terrifying, but it is hard to know whether this quality is inherent in the drug or is a result of the drug in a particular situation.  Labor itself produces significant excitement and changes in consciousness.  Also, obstetricians always gave scopolamine in combination with opiates and other psychoactive drugs.

“If we look over accounts of Datura intoxication far from clinical settings, we find the same thing:  It is a violent experience, often characterized by terrifying hallucinations and delusions, and frequently followed by some degree of amnesia.”  (pages 168-170)

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My mother was neglected and abused as a child.  She was probably pre-Borderline from childhood, and may have been fully Borderline by the time she went into labor with me.

As she was giving birth to me she believed ‘the devil’ was coming to get her – that the devil had sent me to kill her.

My mother did not forget this delusion when I was born.  It was entirely real to her.  Because we survived the birth, I was to my mother not human, but the devil’s child ‘sent as a curse upon’ Mother’s life.

I cried when I read Weil’s account of the effect of this drug on women in labor, and he is not even speaking of the effects of the opiates that were used in combination with scopolamine in a ‘twilight sleep’ concoction.  I cannot prove my mother was given this drug, but EVERYTHING points in that direction.  Everything.

I never had a chance.  Not one single solitary chance from the moment I was born of escaping the 18 years of terrible abuse, pain, terror and suffering that I believe this drug caused.

That my grandmother did not save me from my mother, that my father did not save me from my mother, that NOBODY outside our family saw what was happening to me — is beyond my powers to comprehend.

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+THOUGHTS. A LETTER. “THE WORK THAT WE DO”

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Today’s letter to a friend:

Dear Sandy

 

As I begin my day I think about the gift of you arriving on the scenes of my life is to me right now.  I have this image in my mind as I contemplate my work on the chicken vault today, as I gather every old board I can find on the property to use to complete this thing – right.

 

I see a mountain so tall and wide that separates ‘the world’ from being able to see the real picture of what you and I KNOW exists – instinctively – in our soul, our gut, in our mind.

 

You and I are blasting a tunnel through this mountain.  Each of us in our own way has discovered parts of the truth – and we use each piece as we move forward – you and I – with our determination, with our unerring sense that there is more to ‘this picture’ of how early trauma changes people from the start of our life in our physiological body – and as a result in the way we live our lives.

 

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The links I sent you last night about the 2011 BPD empathy study – researchers (and all others who use their findings as guides, as little lights on their helmets as they peer into the darkness of the unknown looking for ‘answers’) – find pieces of the truth – and then they put them together in the wrong way – coming to wrong conclusions – or at best partially correct conclusions that are still wrong because they are not complete, do not account for the mismatches

 

because, in part, the are always building toward ‘new’ conclusions by taking what has been ‘discovered’ in the past as they assume these earlier findings are correct.  Never mind, also, that all the fields of study are limiting themselves in their field’s proprietary areas of study – looking forever into the reality of the tiny piece of the puzzle they have found – refusing to link these separate pieces together…..

 

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In that BPD empathy study – ignoring the fact that even very young preschoolers are already demonstrating difficulties in their empathy abilities based on the degrees of safe/unsafe and secure/insecure attachment patterns that they already have built within their body-mind

 

The researchers are still saying BPDs have ‘immature empathy’??

 

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What I know – confirmed after I read Dr. Allan Schore’s meticulously documented books as he described piece by piece all the changes – the ‘damage’ – that is done to a little person growing a body-brain in the midst of trauma (insecure attachments) — and then I found Dr. Martin Teicher’s work in which he AT LAST and AT LEAST was able to realize that all these kinds of physiological changes result in ‘an evolutionarily altered’ individual

 

that let me know all these changes that Schore describes ARE NOT RANDOM, they are not accidental, they are not coincidental, they are not MEANINGLESS — that the resulting evolutionarily altered person is DIFFERENT

 

and I know it’s for a reason.  Nature is not stupid.  Nature knows exactly what it is doing.  All these changes are for a PURPOSE

 

but not even Teicher talks (that I know of) that these changes (as Schore suggests) happen in the CNS, in the ANS, in the stress-calm response system, in our immune system — in our entire BODY — so that the resulting evolutionarily altered people are different IN ALL THE SYSTEMS of their body, which includes the resulting phenotype we arrive out the gate of our earliest developmental months and years of life with — as these trauma changes occur epigentically — and even in this way can pass the results of the trauma on down through the generations even if no abuse has been obvious through several of them

 

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I am writing about my severely BPD mother ‘assuming’ with everything I sense and intuitively know — that she was not BROKEN, she was CHANGED — and that the entire resulting phenotype of who/how she was happened by specific challenges that her physiological development accepted – as she was changed

 

I am looking for the patterns I can find in what I can see of my mother that supports my belief that AGAIN – her BPD was formed with specific structures that accomplished specific things to keep her alive

 

Her patterns were not random, accidental — or even ‘mysterious’ if we could understand what we see of who/how she was

 

I am getting lots of feedback from Helen in comments on the blog – she is BPD – she relates to everything Mother ‘is doing’ in her letters.  But Helen has no recognition that these are not random displays from some confused mess of a disease —

 

Yes, BPD can so change a person that we cannot recognize that there is anything other than ‘rampant’ insanity at the end — I believe if we could look at this ‘madness’ using the right information to inform our study – we would find an exquisite natural-reasoning about how all the pieces and patterns fit together.

 

NEVER can a BPD person be made to be ‘normal’.  I checked with Helen yesterday, who is herself a mother – though her children did not end up BPD — they are NOT healthy.  I asked her if she thought any BPD could raise their children healthily – her answer was a firm NO (this is important to me)

 

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Anyway – I don’t search and research assuming that I am looking at ‘madness’ that makes no sense by definition

 

I search and research assuming that there is a clear pattern that makes perfect sense – as nasty and sad and as unfortunate as the result can be – and usually is.

 

I give nature full credit for knowing exactly what it is doing.

 

It is not different than what I am doing to finish my coop – not having money to hire anyone to do this perfectly, not having $ resources to run out and purchase all kinds of MORE new materials — I will finish this job using every salvaged piece of anything I can find to accomplish the END RESULT of creating a safe coop for my birds.

 

Nature does exactly the same thing.  Given appearingly insurmountable obstacles, nature searches for every possible piece of supply/resource – on every level – to build for a little person a body-brain that will do the job of keeping them alive until they reach reproductive age.

 

Nature carries this process no further than that – and this is where we need to agree to look at the facts and then accept the truth.  Our species has the capacity to do what nature intended – to take the offspring of these changed people away from the mothers at birth — and raise them correctly.

 

Nature cannot design these severe trauma survivors to make them adequate to care for their own young.

 

This is where we each isolate ourselves from the facts of the true and bigger picture.  Nature KNOWS, of course, that others COULD accept their end of the bargain — basically THANK the survivor, such as my mother – and nature for its part – in keeping her alive long enough to bear young.

 

And we would do this as nature intended — by then making sure the offspring were raised in a completely safe and secure, appropriate environment.

 

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All this said, Sandy – I am clarifying for myself the pathway I take in my thinking and writing.  I do not intend to add to the pile of used toilet paper-writings a single word that supports the idea that “Oh, well.  Your mother was a broken mess.  Too bad.  We simply cannot understand her – she was crazy.”

 

We CAN understand my mother.  At least I am doing my best to discover the underlying architecture, the structure, the purpose the patterns in her life had in the much bigger picture of how nature is REAL — has great POWER — and knows what it is doing.

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Borderline Personality Disorder – empathy study – background letter:

just read a blog article related to this new research on BPD and empathy —

 

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811911004939

 

—here’s the blog link

 

http://downwardspiralintothevortex.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-brain-sees-empathy-in-borderline_30.html

 

—in essence found what you and I talk about – the ‘something missing’ – they call the BPD empathy ‘immature’ – or anyone who doesn’t ‘do’ empathy ‘correctly’ – as per this preschooler empathy study, the differences were obvious when kids were very young – way too young for any of them to have ‘mature’ empathy

 

http://workspacestopthestorm.wordpress.com/book-beating-trauma/chapter-8-empathy/preschooler-empathy/

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+SCARING THE SUN UP

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I awoke way too early today.  Up at 2:30 I am pacing, trying to scare the sun up so I can get to work building my chicken vault.  This project has taken a lot of money and a lot of time as I try to build a safe structure for my little flock of new baby chicks that no animal can get into to destroy them.

I live on the Mexican-American line with the two tall border fences at the back edge of my property.  It’s a police state down here.  Two years ago Border Patrol aimed their stadium lights at our line of trailers and houses here, right on our trees, on our houses, into our windows.  That’s not bad enough.  They also have portable massive generator lights that roar with a metallic drone that sounds like a helicopter hovering over my house.  Two days ago they moved those lights even closer to my house and with my exquisite hearing – I cannot sleep.

Border Patrol has plenty of money.  They could put those lights on the grid.  They could sound proof those generators.  They do not care.  They will not return calls with my concerns.  I need to go over the head of the local bunch of bounty hunters to their Tucson sector chief.  So far, I don’t feel civilized enough to talk to them nicely.

Especially without sleep.

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I have other concerns, of course.  I am panicking inside as I approach ever more closely the publication of my first book.  A friend of me who lives a long ways from me called last night after the class she took about epublishing on Amazon.com.  I didn’t understand a word she said about formatting – about any of it – except for one thing.

Once I upload and publish a manuscript there the public begins to give the book STARS.  Good stars?  Bad stars?

Am I ready to have my work judged by a reading public who I doubt will have any idea about what I am hoping to accomplish with my work?

Oh, I don’t do well with criticism?  I got so much of that the first 18 years of my life I have no tolerance left for being judged.

I think of a book a friend of mine read me passages from so many years ago:

Drawing on the Artist Within: An Inspirational and Practical Guide to Increasing Your Creative Powers by Betty Edwards (Apr 6, 1987)

My friend read to me about ‘the crazy makers’.  Edwards wrote that no matter what our dream is, at the exact moment that we are ready to accomplish it a crazy maker will come.  Someone or something will be there to stop us right at the moment we are taxiing down the runway about to take off and soar.  If the crazy maker doesn’t appear from outside of us, then we can be sure it will appear within us.

I am scared of crazy making.  How could I not be?  My books will contain the words of my main crazy maker herself!  Trying to find my own voice to insert my own truth in the midst of my severely abusive mother’s own words is a challenge to me like none I have ever faced before.

And then my friend called last night with news about epublishing.  Can’t use BOLD type?  It won’t be formatted correctly when you upload your manuscript?  You have to use – WHAT?  ‘H3 header’ she said.  Do I have any clue in the known or unknown universe about what a HEADER possibly IS?

No.  I do not.

What I don’t know scares me.  I cannot write this book without being able to highlight in BOLD type the sections of Mother’s letters that I need readers to pay close attention to as they read her words.  Those BOLDED words are the ones that I write comments about at the end of Mother’s (and in this book, my father’s, as well) letters.

Not knowing what I need to know makes me feel powerless.  I am as powerless in my current state of limited knowledge about how to accomplish what I want to as I am powerless over whatever the massive bounty-hunting Border Patrol conglomerate chooses to do in our neighborhood.

How do I move forward?  How do I silence my own internal crazy maker who tells me I cannot publish a book — for what reasons?

Mostly – I feel very alone.  This is my project.  I am the one that holds this 100-year saga inside of me.  I am the one that knows what this story is really about.

Dare I speak?

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Fortunately it won’t be too long from now before the sun scares its own self up over that eastern horizon to give me LIGHT so I can go work on my chicken vault.  No matter how hard the struggle is for me to build that structure of safety for my little animal friends to live in — that I know I CAN do.  And because I want to do it and because I CAN do it — I WILL soon have that structure completed.

But what about this book?  What about this whole series of books?

Sometimes anxiety just plain SUCKS.  Anxiety coupled with roaring droning generator sounds that threaten my tranquility because my anxiety will NEVER let me screen those sounds out.  Anxiety that does nothing but scare my own personal sun DOWN — when I so want to send myself upward!

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+ARTICLE LINK – “Attachment Security and Disorganization in Maltreating Families and Orphanages”

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I found this article today while I was searching online for “unsolvable paradox” as it relates to my mother’s early life – and mine – when a little one has no choice but to go on living in the midst of situations through which NOBODY should be able to survive.

Please give this a read:

Attachment Security and Disorganization in Maltreating  Families and Orphanages

By MARINUS H. VAN IJZENDOORN, PhD  and MARIAN J. BAKERMANS-KRANENBURG. PhD

Centre for Child and Family Studies,

Leiden University, NETHERLANDS

(Published online November 2009)

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+THIS ‘SAFETY’ PROJECT IS A WHOLE LOT OF WORK

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After I returned home from my travels north to see my family I hit a definite slump after learning the neighbors’ dogs had jumped over the yard fence, crashed through the roof of my chickens’ pen and slaughtered most of them.  Slowly, gradually, I am pulling my inner and my outer resources together to see what I can do to make absolutely certain no unwanted critter can ever again get into my animal yard.

I still do want to have a miniature goat or two, or possibly one big retired sweet nanny.  My 12 baby chicks are very soon outgrowing their box in my bathroom.  What if I decide I’d like to have a rabbit?  A pheasant or two?

What a JOB it is trying to remodel my original lovely goat pen area so I can keep ALL dogs, ALL cats, and ALL sparrows out of this area (sparrows consume massive amounts of expensive chicken feed!)

A HUGE job, a great investment of money and time.  I was too naive, I realize now, as I finished what I thought was a corral complete with small barn and shade shelter.  Now that I am in the middle of improving safety — I see how terribly far off in my assumption that what I had made last spring was ‘good enough’.

Not by a wicked long shot!

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And of course I am always thinking of the upcoming books to be published next year as I work outside.  I want pain to stop.  I want infant and child abuse to stop.  I want the world to be NICE!  But – if this teensy experience I am having in my own yard is any indication, it will take a LOT of work to make the world safe for babies and children!  A HUGE investment of capitol and human energy input!

Safety doesn’t seem to be automatic.  Safety is not a given in this world, no matter how ‘modern’ we might like to pretend we are in our society.  What, exactly, will it take to create a world safe for little people so that they can get their needs met – to grow up happy and healthy in every single way?

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I remain disappointed that I didn’t know last spring what it would actually take to do this job of mine right.  Remodeling is very unpleasant business as far as I can tell.  Having done this job right in the first place would have been such a better deal!

But I didn’t do my job right.  I still want little animal-people in my life.  I do not want them exposed to ANY chance of being harmed.  That is my responsibility once I choose to bring them into my life.  Nothing like raising children, of course — but safety and a life free from harm is just that!

Last spring I enjoyed every single moment of making the corrals and fences, barn, shade shelters.  I was making a work of art, which it was.  Which it is.  But this work of art is an absolute ZERO at accomplishing what it needs to!

Now I am at the stage of repair – a nightmarish job in my opinion – but one I choose to complete.  Having the little animals in my life is worth it to me.  And today I realized a little bit more about why this is so.

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I cannot return to the wilderness of my Alaskan childhood.  I am HOMESICK for the wilderness, my first true love, my only attachment, my friend.  Having small animals (I don’t have land or finances for big ones) allows me to have a tiny bit of ‘the wilderness’ near me.

So tomorrow – back into the hot dusty yard I go like a miner after hopes in the future, a treasure of small life — as I re-create this place of safety.

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+TRACKING THE SCENT OF MY RAGE

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Some part of myself is assuring me that I will not be able to publish books that contain my TRUTH without having to find – for the first time in my entire life — what my rage feels like.  This involves me becoming absolutely clear about WHO/WHAT am I REALLY ANGRY at?

Last week I thought for awhile that the beginning of my preface on this upcoming book to be published would be about the day around the 4th of July, 1977 that my baby sister (she was 21, I was 25) rode a bus from Edmonton, Alberta to my home in northern Minnesota (2 weeks before her delivery date for her firstborn).  I was going to mention at the start that when she said to me, “If you are not very, very angry at Mother for the things she did to you when you were growing up there is something REALLY REALLY wrong with you!” – I had absolutely no reaction.

I did not respond to her — etc — but I was most certainly NOT angry with Mother – so therefore I guessed there indeed MUST be something wrong with me.

During all the years of therapy, recovery, research, etc etc etc that I have gone through since that day – I have NEVER felt angry at Mother.

That’s all part of my story – whereas TODAY – and yesterday – and the day before that I am feeling the rising of my rage as if it were a Tsunami coming.

I HATE RAGE – but so what.  In the interest of finally finding my own truth – so I can get this business done of publishing books – I am saying, “BRING IT ON!!”

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As of TODAY – I am quite singularly ENRAGED at the entire HUMAN RACE – well, at least those of my culture – which are the only ones I have ever been in interaction with.

Yesterday – as this rage-finding mission moves forward – I realized that because no human being ever took an interest in me or in my well-being during the first 18 years of my life in hell — NO WONDER I loved the Alaskan wilderness.

Humans were the LAST thing I needed.  My life taught me that!

Humans are the LAST thing the wilderness needs.

No wonder the wilderness and I were such friends, had so much in common, shared implicit understanding of what LIFE was really about.

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Humans.  Pitiful social connection seeking pandering pitiful (did I mention that?) – selfish persuadable useless parasites upon the earth?

What do I know?

But it is illogical to me that I will continue to track the scent of my rage without entering parts of my being that have NOTHING good to say about humans.

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+MY MOTHER WAS NOT BORN BROKEN

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People broke my mother:

On her emotions –

—– in my story, with that of Mother – and Father however that played out, still remaining in mystery for me –
—– emotions became weapons of war – held in the toxic arsenal of Mother’s mental illness mind and in her body
—– so that nowhere was anyone in her universe, her family, enabled to experience any emotion but hers – ours were extensions of hers and in direct reaction to hers
—– Her own social bonding abilities were removed from her – everything that actually went on in our home was about her being continually torn apart, rent asunder.
—– All she did was, at the same time, about patterns of hopelessly trying to create repair – the bond with self can be broken, at which point it might literally be that all emotions are a sign of the damage, coming from the wound
—– all we knew, certainly all I knew, came from her mortal wounds to self and between self and world
—– as if she said with her emotions, “All I know is broken, constantly, continually breaking am I with no way to stop it though I will give all that I have inside of my body toward remaining alive though in my essence all I had to give to the world from my own self has been taken from me.   Although I try forever in this body to repair my own self in relation to this world nothing I can ever do is able to help me.”
—– As far as I can tell nothing Mother did or felt came from a place of health, nor could it restore her to a place of health — she had never known since the moment of her birth.

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Please note:  I am not making any kind of blanket statement about people who suffer with Borderline Personality Disorder.  Mother’s illness was extremely severe!  She was, I believe, quite a rare case on the far, far end of a continuum of how BPD affects people.  It took a lot of people making very big mistakes, people harming her most greatly, to make her this sick.

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+MY THOUGHTS ON ‘PSYCHOLOGY’ – THE HOGWASH THAT HURTS US

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I need to get outside today to work on vicious-dog-proofing my chicken pen – but before I do I am going to post here a series of short emails I wrote today to a friend and fellow collaborator on researching the truth about what early insecure and unsafe attachment interactions do to change our early physiological development – and hence our body-brain’s development – and our lives.

I am not going to edit these or formalize these thoughts of mine on the subject of ‘psychology’ – I don’t have the time.  Yet I have never written on this top before – so here are this morning’s notes posted in the order the emails were sent off:

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(talking about my take on ‘psychology’)

to me this is the value of the AAI – and a recognition of earliest infant attachment that can also be SEEN and assessed by its patterns and how these patterns manifest in one’s life

these patterns ARE physiological – to me there – from where I stand as a trauma altered individual – there is no possible benefit to me of studying any single line of BS that lies under the umbrella of psychology
I would most closely fall under an umbrella of ‘physiological alterations in development’ that affect every aspect of my being alive in a body
the psych stuff comes from another place – where I do not live
even for my mother – yes, she was severely mentally ill – but in the end I do not believe there is anything psych could offer in explanation
her body changed including her brain – from trauma as a child – and VOILA!  look what came out of THAT
pscyh is to me nothing more than philosophy
even when it studies science – it remains philosophy unless the factual science takes central roles in conveying anything of value to us about ‘what’s going on’ 

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for the roughly 50% of our pop that come up to age 2 with safe and secure attachment body-brains (and nervous system, etc) – I have no pity for those who might benefit from the fairy tales of psychology – and CHOOSE to live neuroticallly

My concern is with the other half that have body-brain built from patterns of (and degrees of) unsafe and insecure attachment
this is entirely physiological – whatever neurosis these people might display (along with those who display ‘psychopathology’) must first be recognized as it exists in their trauma-affected physiological development during their most critical stages of growth
neurosis is a luxury safe and securely built people participate in.  Whomever wishes to spend their time being deeply concerned with those people’s problems – well, educate them, teach them to GROW UP and recognize the CHOICES that they make – because they CAN
For the rest of us – we need to know what unsafe and insecurely attached physiology has DONE to us – including how that physiology robs us of the ability to CHOOSE on many important levels – critical levels – such as Dr. Teicher’s article describes
because we have a very differently-built body-brain the old rules, made by the safe and securely attached people who run the ivory towers – do not apply to us the way we are being told that they do
hence our instinctive recognition that the true info we need is not being made available to us.  In effect, we are being lied to and misguided by those who do not YET know what they are doing.
In the smallest of nutshells – and I mean molecularly — when we are born, even before we are born, opioid systems in our body are regulating how we develop – and they guide all attachment-related responses/changes our body-brain makes
for a newborn, for example.  when infant’s needs are met opioid receptors are full.  As infant experiences a need that tips the balance in an uncomfortable shift from a state of homeostatic equilibrium, the opioid receptors empty.
in a healthy environment no matter what the infant’s immediate need is, it is met by its caregivers.  infant returns to homeostatic equilibrium because its opioid receptors are full again.
the opioid system is designed to keep us all HAPPY – if things go right.  If they don’t go right, this is the level, the molecular level, where the trauma altered development changes direction in adaptation to an ENVIRONMENT that is less than benevolent –
we anthropomorphize humanity.  Nature is concerned firstly with the survival of the BODY to ensure a person reaches reproductive age.  No longer, in the worst cases of adaptation to the most traumatic early unsafe and insecure environment
it is a communication through chemical signals between a human being from conception that is telling this body what kind of world then are IN, so the body can develop in interaction to prepare for the SAME KIND of world to reproductive age
this has nothing to do with psychology.

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the Dalai Lama periodically holds those ‘conferences’ where he gets groups of monks together with the world’s top scientists who present their research findings

I never remember what these meetings are called
but I suppose it’s been about 8-10 years ago – he called in neuroscientists studying early development
who described research in essence:
a calm mother rat has a litter.  she raises them.  the babies all grow up calm
a neurotic mother rat has a litter, raises them, the babies all grow up neurotic (super anxious, etc.)
switch the babies at birth, take the calm babies, give them to the neurotic mother, babies all grow up neurotic
take the neurotic mother’s babies, give them to the calm rat, they all grow up calm
in the ensuing discussion someone asked the Dalai Lama if with humans neurotically-raised humans (in essence unsafe and insecurely attached-built) had an equal chance to reach enlightenment with the ‘calm folks’ in this lifetime.  The Dalai Lama fell silent – and finally responded, “No.”
In my universe this has nothing to do with psychology

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this is clarifying for me this morning – if these books generate enough $ that I can channel toward nonprofit – even though all I would hope to encourage toward getting this info to the lay public – parenting classes, early developmental charts of brain development through attachment interactions with mother – etc

in the end the single most important piece of work we could support would be to get a version of the AAI OUT into the public – if parents do not understand their own attachment patterns they will be stopped BY THEM in some way for every effort they make to change
same with ‘neurotic behaviors’ – the underlying attachment has to be assessed clearly and easily –
yeah, like I am going to have enough $ and power to argue this out with Berkeley?

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As far as I know Berkeley developed the adult attachment assessment tool, the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI).  The AAI remains to this day ‘held hostage’ in the Ivory Tower and has never been worked on in order to come up with a lay-friendly tool that can be used by all of us to begin to understand our own degrees of safe and secure versus unsafe and insecure attachment.

Just as our entire underlying attachment physiology determines how our body-brain develops in the first place, it seems that an accurate assessment of our attachment patterns is the very first place we have to start in understanding our self in our life.

Having this very accurate and very specific information is essential to us defining the truth about everything we know about being a human being.

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