The most important work we can do, individually and globally, is the healing and prevention of traumas so that we don't pass them down to future generations. This blog is a working tool to contribute to this good work.
I just found this written on a single yellowed sheet of folded paper within my mother’s letters. It is my mother’s report of my 6-week newborn checkup. I noticed immediately that she mentioned her childhood play with dolls more than once in her writing here (see link below). Knowing what I know now, the doll play of her childhood ended up being tied in with her psychosis — her dolls as her imaginary friends — her children as her doll friends until they got too old to be baby dolls any longer (so she had another, and another…) and me being the one that ended up being her imaginary enemy.
In this piece I don’t, of course, see her psychosis directly — but its presence is here. It was tied into the comments I found in her letters she wrote when pregnant with her 5th child (see at: *CIRCUMSTANCES OF MY BIRTH) — and what I know from what she told me throughout my childhood. Hidden within any ‘sweet words’ she wrote on this 1951 date are the seeds of disaster.
My mother never understood that her children were people, not objects, not projections from her mind, not her imaginary friends — and she never understood that I wasn’t her imaginary enemy.
I can also sense something — NOW — in reading this piece that I would not be able to pinpoint if I hadn’t just spent all the time I did transcribing the summer and fall 1960 letters my mother wrote, and the spring 1961 letters leading up to the birth of her 5th child in March of 1961. In those writings, and in the ones beyond as he grows through his infancy, her writings are full of ‘her love’ for him (almost nauseatingly so).
In fact, I find it eerie, strange and chilling that on this day that she identifies as a ‘special’ day for me, she chooses not to write about me and her love for me, but rather chooses to place my 16-month old brother at the forefront of her interest. In it she turns away from me, leaving me out in the freezing cold already in this piece, placing her affection on my brother and not on newly born me. She says that HE loves me. She loves him that he loves me. But she cannot bring herself, even here, to indicate any sign of affection for me. This is never a good sign between a mother and her newborn.
I believe this happened because of the tragic circumstances of my breach birth. I believe she lacked the ability, even at my age of 6 weeks, to accept me as her beloved and cherished daughter. There is no sign she is bonded with me in this piece. There is no sign of warmth toward me. She was bonded with my brother — as much as she was capable of. I believe the clock was ticking, the fuse was burning: Her abuse of me was already in the wings because of her psychotic break that happened while she was birthing me.
She told me repeatedly not only during my childhood, but even over the telephone in a conversation I had with her when I was 30 that the devil sent me to kill her while I was being born. She told me all during my childhood, and again in this same telephone conversation when I was 30 that because she survived birthing me, I was sent as a curse upon her life.
The shadow monster, I believe, was already present, already tangible and visible, had already reared its head and threatened to swallow me even at this very, very young age of 6 weeks. In reality, someone should have taken me away from my mother right then, because the twisting of her mind had already begun and I was destined from the moment of my birth to be her chosen victim.
PLEASE NOTE THIS WARNING: This post contains triggering material which may be difficult for anyone with a history of trauma and abuse to read. Please either do not read this alone without a support person at your side, or stop reading immediately if you become uncomfortable with yourself as you read it.
“Linda, I did not pick this up in your writing ( which is amazing ). Is your mother still alive and did you ever have an opportunity to confront her or make peace with her.”
My reply was that I would write about this in today’s post. Not an easy task.
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The first image that presents itself in my awareness (from my right brain’s storehouse of wordless images) is one of being in a store shopping for flower and vegetable seeds. I see a well stocked large four-sided display rack that I can turn around in circles so that I can see the entire display.
Suddenly I see that all the packages are ripped open and the seeds are dumped in a pile on the floor. All the seeds are mixed up and it is now my job to sort them all out ‘correctly’ so that they can be resealed in new packages and put back where I found them in the first place.
I know more now about what this image is showing me than I ever could have before. All my memories regarding my mother are sealed into separate ‘packages’ and stored according to my survival brain’s wisdom. They are not linked together in any sort of order based on a timeline according to when these experiences happened in the first place. Never in my childhood was I able to connect them together and it is only with great concentration and effort that I can attempt to do so today.
Every single memory I have of my mother is linked to trauma. To continue with my seed package image, it is like every single package and every single seed is contaminated with poison, and if I touch any of them my brain tells me I could die. In order to “go back there” I have to apply a level of thought that can allow me to do this.
I have to find and put on a ‘safe suit’ of protection that allows me to go back and handle my memories. That safe suit is barely adequate and consists of a mental effort I must make today to understand that there was and is no reason for what happened to me. I use this word, reason, on many levels. My mother’s mind was broken so she had no ability to use reason regarding anything that involved me — ever. She was mentally ill and therefore everything about her was irrational.
Her psychosis regarding me was complete and indissoluble. Because I do not have a mind like hers, even though she influenced nearly every thought that was built into my brain until I was 18, I cannot look into my past from a reasonable or rational place so that I can describe my experience from ‘my side of the fence’. That is probably the final trauma of unresolved trauma. It cannot be translated, on any level, into the realm of reason.
Yet I have to think about reason because it is the only ‘safety suit’ I have. Everything about my relationship with my mother was, from my first breath, about the reason I needed to be hated and continually punished. I was the devil’s child and therefore absolutely evil. My ‘poor’ mother was given the curse of having to be my mother, and therefore she must do the best that she could to ‘deal with me’ and try to accomplish the given, hopeless task of making be ‘better’. She applied herself to her task with vengeance.
In her mind, she had failed miserably in her mission by the time I left home at 18. In her mind that failure was absolute and her belief in that lasted to her final breath.
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In order to ‘stack the deck’ in favor of reason I will mention a few concepts used by experts as they work with people who have posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). (This is a diagnosis which I ‘have’, along with dissociative identity disorder — without the identities, which I will discuss later) and major reoccurring depression.) The term ‘flashbacks’ is used in relation to the unresolved traumas in PTSD. Another term used is ‘flashbulb memories’. What this means is that the experiences of trauma have not been integrated into the ongoing experience of the person who endured them.
This lack of integration happens for many reasons, including the fact that nothing has useful, that can lead to an increased ability to survive future related terrors — by the individual or by the species, has yet been learned as a result of these experiences. When abuse begins from birth, before the infant has any possible capacity to ‘process’ its experiences, the very foundation of memory formation is altered within the forming and developing structure of the brain. Having the traumatic memories ‘stuck together’ in any meaningful fashion is therefore the exception, not the rule.
Memories of the individual experiences are therefore like millions of seeds in a pile on the floor. To even have some of them organized and sorted out into a small group of related experiences — so that they can at least be stored in separate packages — requires extremes of applied effort. To assign them meaning is nearly impossible because they happened in and belong to a malevolent world without cause and effect and without reason or rationality.
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I believe that it takes an extremely creative and intelligent mind to survive experiences like mine and be able to come out on the other end being able to even remotely ‘act normal’. This intelligent mind has to have had opportunities to form some active coping skills that allow this eventual ‘gluing together of the pieces’ in any meaningful way to happen at all. I describe some of the assets that existed for me in my post THE RESILIENCY MYTH.
While the following might be a controversial statement, it is my current assessment of the relationship of ‘mental illness’ to survival. Had I received the potential genetic combination that could have resulted in a mental illness such as my mother had, and if my body could have taken that detour in order to have survived without the self reflective abilities of a mind that was not given this detour, I would have turned out like my mother did. I do not believe that she had a choice because whatever neglect and maltreatment she received during her brain developmental stages triggered the manifestation of her mental illness and there was nothing she could do about it, either.
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Please make no mistake here. I was born in 1951 and raised during an era when child abuse was still not recognized and addressed by our society at large in any meaningful way. In today’s ‘enlightened’ era, there is absolutely NO EXCUSE for outsiders of the family not to know and understand the symptoms a terribly abused child will manifest openly, and no excuse for them not intervening on behalf of the child. Information on this topic will be presented in future posts.
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Because my writing is always a process connected to me and to my life as I write the words, and because I am always learning about myself and how I process information related to my personal experiences, I will share with you what is happening in my mind as I attempt to get closer to telling the truth about the question posed in the reader’s comment: “Is your mother still alive and did you ever have an opportunity to confront her or make peace with her.”
In my brain of brains and mind of minds, yes, my mother IS still alive. I do not have a basis for placing anything to do with my mother on a logical timeline and for keeping it there. The reasonable fact is that she ceased to exist in her body in the spring of 2002. I did not shed a single tear. I’m not sure if any of my five siblings shed one, either.
I lack the ability to accomplish the action of finding every single separate ‘seed’ memory that involves her, facing them face to face, and making any of the equally dissociated Linda’s understand unequivocally that THEIR mother is dead. The image that is in my mind now is that each seed has turned into a dandelion seed, that a powerful wind has come up so that each seed with its attached bit of fluff is now dashing away from me into the blue sky — and yes, to a place of safety for themselves — also leaving me in a place of safety as I sit here and write these words.
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I will make the effort of trying to grab perhaps one of those seeds or a handful of them before they vanish from me today. (By the way, future posts on attachment disorders, particularly about disorganized-disoriented attachment disorders, will describe how the lack of the ability to tell a coherent life story is one of the clearest marker that indicates these attachment disorders exist for a person.)
Moving on in my writing as I work to answer this commenter’s question, I see that I actually have a fistful of seeds grasped in each of my hands. I guess fortunately for me I only confronted my mother once (seeds in my left hand) and disowned her once years later (seeds in my right hand).
Now I tell myself, “It’s OK Linda.” I slowly open my left hand and protect those seeds from being whisked away before I can write the following:
(“Organize your thoughts, Linda. Let the seeds put themselves in order. Believe that there is a beginning and an end to this group of thoughts. Now begin writing.”)
As I mention elsewhere on this blog, I completed 7 weeks of inpatient alcoholism treatment in 1980 and was then sent to ongoing therapy and given antidepressants. I followed every piece of advice anyone gave me about how to ‘recover’ as avidly as a starving bird would hunt for seeds. About a year after my exit from treatment, following the advice of my therapist, I DID call my mother to confront her.
All I knew at that time was that she had not been nice to me while she raised me, and that there was some discrepancy between her treatment of be back then and her treatment of me as a married adult mother of 2, as she sent me cute little cards with lovey-dovey I love yous enclosed. I can return to that phone call with difficulty. Like two powerfully opposing magnets the me in this chair writing attempts to move closer to the me I see standing in the dining room, sunlight streaming in the windows, cream colored phone in my hand, long twisted coiled cord draped around my feet as I stand there talking to my mother.
What happened? I courageously told her that I was not willing to have a phony (no pun intended) loving relationship with her in the present (“Let me try to think here. I got the first part out… Catch that seed, Linda. Hold onto it, look at it….”) — if — (“Come on, Linda, you can do this. I know there’s all kinds of pain here, but you can find the words and not let the pain appear now. Separate them out. Let the words come but not the pain.”) — (“Is that possible?”) (“Yes, trust me it is possible.”) (Here comes the wind. Stop this argument now.) (“Who are you that I should trust a damn thing you are saying”) (Stop this argument NOW.)
IF. Getting back to the IF. IF we can’t talk about the things you did to me while I was growing up. That’s what I said to her.
She instantly switched to her ugly screaming rage filled voice and attacked me as she launched into the litany she had been building for me from birth. SEE: *Litany from Start to Finish. “You were a horrible, terrible, vile child! You tried to kill me when you were born! You deserved everything I ever gave you and even that was not enough! Even your kindergarten teacher agreed with me. She had been teaching for 35 years before you showed up in her class, and she told me you were more trouble and a worse child than any she had ever had in her class.”
Now, this is the GOOD part. As she streamed and screamed through her litany of abuse I moved the phone receiver away from my ear, lifted up right finger and moved it to the telephone and dropped it with a sense of accomplishment, empowerment, finality and pride onto the disconnect button and I hung the receiver up on her in mid word.
I stood stunned for a split second and then experienced a flood of joy. I started hopping up and down, and then began to skip around the house yelling in song, “I did it! I did it! I hung UP ON HER!”
Now the tears are here pushing against my eyes. No, that wasn’t the end of it. I wasn’t ready. It wasn’t time. Within a matter of days she called back with her sweet voice and I apologized, and the phony loving relationship was reinstated and maintained until the spring of 1989. That is when I had a realization (too much for me to write about right now) that allowed me to write her a simple letter thanking her for being the mother that brought me into the world and telling her directly that because of the abusive things she did to me as a child I could no longer have a relationship with her in my lifetime.
She did not respond though she continued to bemoan the curse of being my mother to my siblings for years after that until they one by one quit listening to her. I only saw her once — out of the corner of my eye as if she were a fleeting mirage of the shadow of a ghost — after that in 1990 as she passed through my desperately ill father’s hospital room. (He had finally divorced her by then).
My father died in 2001. I never confronted him. I ignored and avoided him in my adulthood just like he did me in my childhood. I believe that both of my parents had to make internal adjustments that allowed them to ‘go on being’ while having unbearable, overwhelming pain and sadness at their core. I would also say that both of my parents died of a broken heart.
This is all I can write today. I have to do my ‘Linda in today” things. I cannot describe to you right now how she died, either.
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I want to say here that the reason I do this writing is not in hopes of healing myself. I am nearly 58 years old, and things will not get much better for me than they are now. I accept that fact. I write because I now there is value in sharing my experience so that others ‘out there’ with histories related to mine can perhaps see in my words a reflection of their own experience so that they can become empowered to own the fullness of their own traumatic lives. I trust this is possible because I do not write from the top down — not from a place of put-together security based on secure attachment patterns that would create all kinds of benefits those that have them probably don’t recognize.
I write from the bottom up. I write from a place of humiliation, terror, confusion and trauma. I write from an incredible place called ‘the miracle of survival’. I write from what Dr. Teicher of Harvard calls “an evolutionarily altered brain” formed in, by and for existence in a malevolent world.
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But for now I am going to watch my blue parakeet bathe itself in its small dish of drinking water as I think about and then DO the act of finding it a better bathtub. I am going to work on the little hand made paper cross earrings I am figuring out how to make so that I can add them to my inventory of crafts to display and sell at this Saturday’s farmers market in town. They will be pure white with silver glitter. I will eat the last of my homemade banana bread muffins, made from my grandmother’s recipe. I added grated apple, dried currants and lots of walnuts. That’s good for me. That’s where I am going next.
But first, I am going to stand in the wind with my fists open and my palms facing the sky and let all the bits of dandelion fluff, memories of myself and my mother, blow away.
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As always, thank you for visiting this site and for reading this post. Your comments are welcome and appreciated.
Stop the Storm 
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