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 Saturday, February 8, 2014.  Very sweet.  Very humble.  Very kind people.  But no drums tonight.  This was a fundraising chili dinner in the basement of a local smallish Lutheran church that is sahred between congretations, used in the evenings by the Tri-City Haitian Church.  A man did play guitar.  Songs he sang that he wrote.  Songs with care.  With a message.

After he sang three songs he commented that sometimes people tell him his songs are too sad.  So he sang one of the upbeat ones he wrote:  Someday I Want to Know What It Feels Like to Be Happy.

I know what a refugee might feel and mean who would write and sing such a perfect song.

All his lyrics and melodies were haunting – and good.  Very thoughtful.  Very heartfelt.

I could not tell from the crowd of all ages who comes to the church versus who was there to support the fundraising with the dinner.  But I asked.  I and my girls are welcome to attend regular services beginning 4 pm on Sundays.  I have no car.  How to get there?

Not sure.  Not sure of too many things except that this venture-adventure was far from a flop or a failure.  It was WONDERFUL doing something with my girls and little grandson.  I am so grateful they took me and enjoyed being there, too.  It was wonderful seeing so many beautiful youth in attendance.  SOMEWHERE there are drums.  They just were not there tonight.

I will go again.  I know I will go there again.  These seem like exactly the kind of people who will not be bothered by what my soul knows:  I have a gift.  The drum beats are in my hands. 

My daughter has offered her house as a place the drums can be played if need be outside of “church times.”  I cannot play in this apartment.

Time will tell.  So far I am pleased with myself that I have followed my simple dream – so far!!  How this will all play itself out – I do not know.  But I am hopeful.  And next time I go in those doors I will probably just experience a little anxiety rather than trepidation as I felt today! 

This is progress!

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

Click here to view or purchase:  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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Saturday, February 8, 2014.  I want to write this post quickly before the words that belong to it vanish like a mirage in the desert.  It is not always easy to FIND the words I need to express myself and it is not always easy to hold onto them long enough to express them, either!

I find myself thinking about a time years ago when I asked a professional waitress how on earth she managed to swing through a crowded room delivering full cups of coffee without spilling a drop.  “Simple,” she replied.  “I never look at what I am carrying.  If I do that – what I am carrying spills itself.”

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My word for today is

trepidation

“a nervous or fearful feeling of uncertain agitation“

This is a word that came into Modern English rather late.  The “early” words arrived before the 12th century.  Usually I search around for the origins of these kinds of newer words looking for the more ancient imagery in their word relationships.  Today – because I am PRESSED to trap my words in a post before they disappear to me – I will settle for this:

Origin of TREPIDATION

Latin trepidation-, trepidatio, from trepidare to tremble, from trepidus agitated; probably akin to Old English thrafian to urge, push, Greek trapein to press grapes

First Known Use: 1605

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As I have written elsewhere on the blog I have learned from the work of neuroscientist Dr. Allan N. Shore (and others like him) that early trauma especially during the first year of life in unsafe and insecure attachment relationship environments CHANGES the set point, the middle balance point of our developing nervous system so that it is NOT (and really never can/will be) resting at peaceful calm.  Our set point is something else – and very, very often it is TERROR that resides there.

Once a person responds to any kind of “challenge” in their environment their nervous system is supposed to return to a set point “of balanced equilibrium” that is at rest.  Not so for us….

Today what I want to say is that the older I get the smaller my world is getting and the less tolerance I have for ANYTHING good or bad that would intensify my emotional state.  I am simply exhausted!  Or so it seems to me.

It is very common for anyone with PTSD related difficulties in their body to increasingly narrow their world to control stimulation.  Quieter world = quieter nervous system/brain.

But what about something positive in my world?  Something I desire, hope for and WANT to do?

Same thing.

As I have written before I LOVE DRUMMING!  I have nobody to drum with!

In Fargo, ND (where I recently established myself) there is a Haitian refugee church that is tonight offering a public performance of their drumming that I imagine follows the style shown in this YouTube video:

BOTH of my beautiful grown daughters are attending this 5:30 pm performance with me today along with my 18-month-old grandson.  And I am TERRIFIED!  Filled to the BRIM with TREPIDATION!!

I don’t have to ask myself WHY????

I can no longer mask my true state of being through expert dissociation that kept me functioning pretty darn smoothly while I raised my children.  I am different now – left vulnerable to experiencing exactly how I am inside!!

I could probably list 100 reasons why I am afraid today — but all I am going to do here is say — “Be determined, Linda and be BRAVE!  GO!!”

I am the wrong age, the wrong gender, the wrong culture, ‘race’. the wrong religion to be able to actually DRUM with ANYONE!!  Yet my heart and the depths of my soul WANT to drum with SOMEONE!!  At least tonight we can go LISTEN!! 

My first step is to go bravely where I have not gone before accompanied by the two people (well, 3 counting the short one) I trust most in the universe!  I won’t even give space to thoughts about what disaster I think COULD happen tonight!

Just saying — surviving can be an EFFORT!!  CAN BE?  IS!!!!!

Stay tuned.  I will report upon this adventure — after I LIVE IT!!

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++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

Click here to view or purchase:  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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Tuesday, February 4, 2014.  When it comes to considerations of PTSD and the hippocampusthat is a part of our brain’s memory-processing paraphernalia, I suspect we are putting the memory cart before the memory horse if we assume that the risk for developing PTSD in the first place is tied to “something different about” the hippocampus of such people UNLESS we know and consider the presence or absence of early trauma in that person caused by early abuse and neglect (and even of trauma-related distress in the mother while carrying her child).

WHEW!  That was a long sentence which brings me to my morning’s thoughts that my dissociation, as it is connected to my nearly continual sense that NOTHING FEELS REAL to me on an ongoing basis, is probably connected to how my hippocampus was trauma altered in its development even from the time of my birth due to abuse from my psychotically mentally ill mother.

Dissociation is also tied to the sense of “depersonalization” just as it is to “derealization.”  For me this depersonalization aspect applies not only to my own sense of “not feeling real” but also to the sense that other people “don’t feel real” to me, either.

That’s a HELLUVA way to go through one’s life!

These facts are part of what fuels my passion that infant and child abuse MUST STOP!!  In my case I especially believe it was the INFANT abuse I suffered during the very important rapid growth and developmental stages of my RIGHT LIMBIC (emotional-social) brain region – of which the hippocampus is a part – that has resulted in this perpetual sense I have of NOTHING actually FEELING real to me.

Here I am spending at least 10 hours every weekday caring for my perfect, precious little grandson – WHO DOES NOT FEEL REAL TO ME!!  Here I am living near my nearly age-4 grandson, my two precious daughters – and THEY don’t feel real and I don’t feel real WITH THEM.

WHAT IS THIS state, ANYWAY?

Yes, it could be simply called a never-ending state of numbness.  But I am NOT numb on the inside where I fully feel the grief and anger I have about being forced to live my life with this condition that neither I nor anyone else can EVER FIX!  I was BUILT THIS WAY within an early environment of horrendous traumatic neglect and abuse. 

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I am not motivated at this point in my life to spend the hours of my life racing around the internet reading the latest research about nervous system and brain development as I was around the turn of this marvelous century we are now living in.  It would take not only state-of-the-art research but research that is both cutting-edge and “pushing the envelope” to answer the kinds of questions I ask as a survivor of early severe trauma.

I would want to know at what infant developmental stages and by what processes does our brain learn the difference between living beings and inanimate objects.  If an infant is not treated as a human being by someone who is not ACTING like a human being how are we supposed to know that HUMANITY exists with ourselves a part of it?

I want to know exactly WHEN the present moment becomes a PAST moment.  I want to know how fast this exchange happens along with how fast does our brain circuitry work to keep up with it?  I am asking, “When does the present moment become the past IN MEMORY and through what processes?”

I ask because this sense of derealization and of depersonalization is probably happening at that pace.  We are left without there being any time in our present moments to LIVE the felt experience of ourselves and others before our present becomes our past in memory form that is continually being tampered with by the changes trauma created in our brain’s development – and therefore with the way we are left experiencing our lives.

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I do believe that SOUL is involved and that the soul itself has powers of memory that must far surpass anything we will ever discover about the human physiologically-based memory processes.  Our soul will remember everything about our lives when we are in the next world without any physical body at all.  Not only will we (I believe) be held accountable to God for our every thought, feeling and action we accomplished in our physical lifetime but we will also be given spiritual understanding about the entire ball of wax!

That leaves me knowing one thing:  I can only do the best that I can do at every instant of my current life.  I need not feel guilty, ashamed or in any way responsible for the way my experience has been altered through my development under extreme traumatic stress in an unnatural and truly chaotic, bizarre and insane environment for the first 18 years of my life.

I can’t TELL this beautiful baby that I cannot FEEL him when he is laying in my arms or when I hold him close against me in the warmest hug possible!  I don’t even have the words to think about let alone really communicate to anyone else what I am trying to describe!

If the words do not yet exist in neurophysiological language I am certainly not going to be able to find them in the only language that might work – in poetry!

If I were going to try to say what “this is like” for me I would have to say that living in a body that was forced to develop itself within a nightmare world nearly beyond imagination has been left to live in a dream-like world that DOES NOT FEEL real in many important and meaningful ways no matter how I might work to wake up from that dream state.  I will NOT fully wake up – paradoxically – until I am in the next world with no body at all!

I do NOT believe that even the most well-meaning people who work to stop infant and child abuse fully GET IT about what happens to us for the rest of our lives as survivors.  We are condemned to live – DOOMED to live – for our entire life in a body that was CHANGED and made DIFFERENT in response to having to survive what was NOT SURVIVABLE!

As very little people we had to “go on being” in a world that paradoxically did everything possible to prevent us from doing so.  There is a severe price paid for being able to survive that kind of paradox.  It is the researchers who are devoting their entire professional life to trying to determine what that price is that I most admire and respect.

We survivors need to know what those people have to say!!

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

Click here to view or purchase:  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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Sunday, February 2, 2014.  In light of a mention by a commenter to my last post of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder I can only say that I will never live long enough to “recover” from the adaptations my body had to go through to survive the trauma I experienced from birth and for the next 18 years of my life that I suffered from severe abuse.

I instinctively defend against those who suggest that the “self-regulation” that was lost to me due to the trauma I experienced as my early physiological development was altered can ever be restored to me.  It is not possible.  I can gain useful information.  I can learn to gain increasing conscious control over how I experience life in my body.  But I cannot get back again (“re-cover”) what I never was able to acquire in a safe and secure early attachment environment in the first place.

Should I have nothing else to do in this lifetime but backtrack in some attempt to repair what cannot be repaired I would still be doing very little other than chasing my own invisible tail that “professionals” might suggest that I have – which I don’t have – so for me the “point” is a useless one!  I don’t care what “diagnostic label” anyone might wish to use to describe how I ended up living in an entirely different kind of body than I would have if I had not been exposed to the horrific trauma that I was for all those years. 

Yes, I do agree that gaining “understanding” of how a trauma changed body works is helpful.  But to intimate that those trauma changes can be undone is – ridiculous – and therefore dangerous in its misleading deception.

Yes, “PTSD is a radical shift from normal self-regulation to being trapped in a constant state of alarm.”  I might find momentary ways to avert the complete recognition that ALARM is my normal, ordinary state of being, but that is so far a cry from accepting as fact that I can make that ALARM state retreat into near nonexistence that I no longer accept that a state of “non-ALARM” is even a possibility for me to reach. 

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I have not studied Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD).  At this point in my life I consider only what I find of what I need to know as it is written directly within the texts of the neuroscientists themselves.  When I read even a few words about C-PTSD, even on an appearing reputable site, my inner self-defender will not let me continue reading.  I am now personally gifted with knowing what personally relates to me – and therefore APPLIES to me – and what would be helpful versus what would be NOT helpful and in fact would be harmful to me.

I am NOT speaking for or about ANYONE ELSE here.  I am talking about myself, and as I mentioned in my previous post I am very much isolated in the kind of trauma I experienced.  For example, I do not believe these words:  “Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a psychological injury.”

I know myself well enough by now at age 62 to know that what I suffer from is due to PHYSIOLOGICAL changes in the very construction of my nervous system-brain, in my “calm-stress response system,” even in my immune system due to severe trauma during the earliest very rapid stages of my development.  Certainly because the severity of the abuse I suffered never let up and lasted for 18 long years nearly all – if not ALL – of my later development was altered by the trauma in very complex ways.

I do not consider ANY of my difficulties to be “psychological” and I bristle and turn away from ANY so-called “psychologically-minded” professional who would claim to know me better than I know myself.  I have a well-honed inner truth detector that works for me.  I know when words ring true and when they don’t.  I do not compromise myself.  I owe no professional courtesy.  I do not NEED in any way to prove myself “right” nor do I need to prove anyone “wrong.”

I simply know what is true for me.

I absolutely encourage EVERYONE to find out what is true for them.  I speak only for myself — with a few cautions to others if they seem to apply.

Yes, I can agree with the whole list of what can “do this” to a person.  But if there is no rock solid trail of facts available about anyone’s earliest life going all the back to the health of their life in the womb of their mother nobody has enough information to complete the picture of what might CAUSE something called C-PTSD.  They therefore have no real clue how to “fix it” or even if it is possible to “fix it” in most circumstances where it might be found.

When something is put forth by any person or group of people as being THE TRUTH – and there is even ONE exception to that “truth” – no truth AS THE TRUTH exists in such a claim.  Researchers refer to “an acceptable margin of error.”  When I am a member of that margin I don’t buy what’s being touted no matter WHO is selling it.

Psychology as a field of study has, in my thinking, so joined forces both with the Western Medical Model and with the pharmaceutical industries that I remain skeptical of any truth supposedly discovered in the arena within which all of these “schools” operate.  Having a PART of the truth is not the same thing as having THE TRUTH – which by definition would require that ALL of the truth is known.

Nobody at this point in the evolution of humanity can claim to know all of the truth.  We only know what has been discovered thus far, and even those discoveries are colored by the societal belief system of those making their claims.  There are biases in “science.”  Those biases create blind-spots that those of us who have been physiologically changed in our development by severe early trauma need to work to pay attention to.

In my universe any time someone uses the term “psychological” to describe the great difficulties we work with as we continue to survive given all that has happened to us even within our very body we live in I heed my own inner alert warning system that tells me I am being judged as being somehow “damaged” and inferior to the person(s) using that term “against me.”

My truth is that I am DIFFERENT than those people are.  The changes that happened in our development make perfect sense.  Without them we would be dead.  It’s that simple.  It is the MISMATCH that we experience as survivors physiologically formed in a malevolent environment between HOW we are in a more benevolent world versus how those who were physiologically formed in a benign environment are in this world that creates the complications we live with.

Any “psychological” information that we may discover on our own or that is given to us by anyone else that does not begin with a thorough presentation of these facts is not honoring us with the truth of what we most need to know.

As one blog reader has so clearly put it, “We fly with a different flock.”  We are not (for the most part and I do recognize some exceptions, my mother being one of them) sick people.  We are changed.  We are different.  We are complicated beyond ordinary due to what we have lived through and continue to live with. 

Our lives have been very difficult and they continue to be very difficult.  We have the right to receive factual information that will help us understand ourselves and one another better.  But more than anything we have to trust our own inner guidance system.  If anything we encounter along our healing journey makes us feel in ANY WAY bad about ourselves there is truth missing.

Honor yourself.  Listen to yourself.  Trust yourself.  Never stop asking questions!  Never give your inner power to anyone!

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

Click here to view or purchase:  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment

++++

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Friday, January 31, 2014.  I don’t know how my younger sister spells the term she coined for ‘it is finished’.  It’s either ‘tute fini’ or ‘toot fini’.  Hard to tell but my guess is it’s the latter.  It’s funnier that way even though many times events that can be lumped into that ‘toot fini’ category are not necessarily remotely funny.  Today is a ‘toot fini’ day for me.  I could say “fine with that” if I even knew why on earth THIS day and its events – that are TOTALLY unrelated to me – are bothering me at all!

I am a great one for saying that trauma repeats itself until the lessons contained within it are learned so that ‘mistakes’ related to it don’t happen again.

It’s not necessarily that the exact same trauma will repeat itself.  It doesn’t even mean that a ‘like’ trauma will repeat itself.  It can ‘just’ mean that inside of a person the FEELING STATES directly tied to the first trauma are repeating.  Sometimes that happens when a ‘trauma trigger’ arrives upon the scene of our lives that sets things deep within us to jumping around – or even those that lie close to the surface – because feelings are awakened so that patterns related to the trauma resonate – again.

Like a tuning fork the ‘sound’ of another woman today becoming my ex-husband’s 2nd ex-wife are reverberating inside of me.  This is ENTIRELY illogical and as far as I can tell are entirely unproductive!  Why should his 2nd ‘toot fini’ and HER 1st ‘toot fini’ awaken MY old ‘toot fini’ with this man?

It was 29 years ago this week that Joe ‘toot finied’ me so he could ‘formally’ date the woman he had been chasing after (and she chasing him) for 3 years prior without my knowledge.  A helpful neighbor in the small town I was living in at the time was kind enough (!!??) to telephone me the day before Joe’s 1st divorce went through as he ‘toot finied’ me to tell me of the 3-year history between those two.  “In case you don’t know….” she had said.  No, I did not know.

How I feel right now has nothing to do with a desire to pile up mistakes he made to see how his pile matches up with mistakes I made.  Or does it?

A part of me is asking Joe in my mind, “Was it worth it?”

I have realized since I happened to return to this area after all these years to reside here while this pair’s ‘toot fini’ occurred today that I never thought about any of that past at the time enough to figure out that those 3 revolving-door years directly coincided with the time I sought intensive and very difficult treatment for the first time to try to recover from the horrific abuse I had experienced as a child.  I was literally fighting for my life at that time.

Joe came to joint therapy sessions with me.  WHY?  He was at that time already hot after another woman – or hot with her.  The DECEPTION is what is getting me now!  I trusted Joe at that time and during those hard, hard months of treatment.  He was my husband.  Who else beside my therapists at that out-patient clinic was I supposed to trust?

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It is way easier said than done to discover the lessons that trauma needs to teach us.  I have no desire or any intention of ever getting involved with another man again.  I am learning that although I never spent any time thinking about it over these past years I did assume all of the ‘badness’ upon myself that led to that divorce.  At least I now carry only my 50% share as I mentioned in a post a few weeks back.

A spiteful part of myself with cute little horns and a pointy tail is “tee-heeing” at both of those two.  Do I normally rejoice in other people’s suffering?  “Not I.” 

So this must not be a normal time for me!

Once this day passes and takes its ‘toot fini’ with it I expect that I will move on — again — just as surely as those two are doing. 

I do strongly suspect that if I did not happen to know that ‘her’ mental illness of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) made that marriage an impossible affair in the end that I would not have the share of reverberations within me that are hearing the echoes of what happened between my father (another ‘nice guy’) and my mother that I do.  Was Joe swooped off his feet by her charms the way Father was by Mother’s — all to DISASTROUS ends – ESPECIALLY for me?

In other words….  As I write these words I hear my own question:   “Was I painfully struck again in my life by BPD where I was vulnerable through the impact this disease had on another man important to me?”

It seems that I was.

So while I was all snotty-nosed on the floor in therapy sessions pounding the depths of my pain out on pillows from my horrendous abusive childhood BPD was smoothly eating the entrails out of my marriage without my awareness just as it ate the entrails out of my infancy and childhood?

It seems that it was.

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I guess I am rather dismayed at myself that never once in the past 29 years since that neighbor woman called me the day before Joe’s divorce of me went through did I ever do the simple 3-year math to easily figure out what I see now.  No matter if BPD was involved or not in that charmed pair I was still being majorly betrayed at a time when I could not have been more vulnerable.  I know what that time in therapy was like for me — and so did Joe.  The fact that he said NOTHING and kept pretending he was on my side through that time — well…..

How did I MISS THAT piece of math?

Is this only coming clear to me now because I happen to know she is BPD?  I wish that I didn’t know — but families tend to garner information that sooner or later appears whether you want it to or not.

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Tick tick tock your way past me ole toot fini day!!   Be toot finied with me!!  I want nothing to do with ANY OF THIS!  So let go of me and be off with you!!!  That damage was done to me a long, long time ago.  I have not carried anger over any of this for all of these years and I do not want it now.

What is it I need to be learning here?

I will possibly be the last one to know.

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

Click here to view or purchase:  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment

++++

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Wednesday, January 29, 2014.  I search for answers and solutions in every direction I can think of as I try to make it through this life.  While I don’t especially recommend an astrological angle for anyone else on their journey I have found that when I have come to the most difficult junctures of my adult life some kind of astrological investigation of my chart – which I consider to be “an energy map” of my life – offers me some solace because it gives me WORDS and CONCEPTS I can use to inform my conscious thinking.

Years ago a very knowledgeable astrologer, Zane, pointed out the great “hole” in my chart that exists in the 4^th house of my chart.  In astrological terms this whole exists in the form of a T-square with a missing piece in Capricorn in my 4^th house. 

It is considered that such a missing piece in such a placement can dominate one’s experience of life as it motivates great effort to constructively and positively resolve the conflicts and problems existing in this kind of “energy map.”  Some of the most powerful contributions to the world have been made by people who have found a way to free their life force from this kind of restraint.

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This morning I found this:

The Imum Coeli and the Fourth House

The fourth house represents the most private, hidden area of your psyche, the opposite of your public image and the face you show the world. It is also concerned with all the things that you bring with you from your past; your roots, your family history and your home. Here, the search for knowledge which began in the third house ends and we come home to ourselves, settle down and reconnect with the well-springs of our being. The IC, or Imum Coeli, which lies opposite the chart’s Midheaven, is also often found here. Whatever Zodiac sign you may have here in your personal chart, the fourth house always corresponds to Cancer and the Moon as well.

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I have never tried to understand that term, “Imum Coeli” before today.  I still don’t understand it but I do understand that I am struggling greatly at this point in my life as the harshness of winter seems to be pushing against the essence of who I am with great force.  Due to the frigid conditions outside of my door I am LITERALLY “locked” within my apartment.  Having left my home far behind me this apartment feels no more home to me than a parking spot.

Yet I KNEW I CHOSE to make this move and that upon doing so I was going to face head-on every aspect of this difficult and complicated placement situation in my being.  It lies so near my core I cannot separate how I FEEL from who I am.

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The words Zane gave me years ago about this situation underlying myself in my life were:

“Capricorn, especially in a conflict within, is about REASONS TO KEEP THE SEED ALIVE.”

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I have been forced to live with great sadness, grief and “depression” all of my life directly due to the 18 years of severe abuse I suffered from birth.  I have stopped working on my books as I place my child history within the context of my psychotic abusive mother’s words because I COULD NOT at this time of my life pull myself through her description of me in her letters to my grandmother because I can SEE the depression – the great overwhelming SADNESS in myself as a child her treatment of me directly CAUSED!!!

In a very strange way my entire childhood and my entire life pattern is reflected in my astrological chart – the map of me is as specific as would be a GPS guidance system of travel in the material plane on this planet.

WHY???

I do NOT believe in reincarnation or in karma.

I do believe that God has reasons why our life exists in certain  ways and that the answers our soul needs about things that have happened to us – especially as very little people who hurt us – will be revealed to us in our future life of eternity that DOES NOT include our returning to this physical world.

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In the home of my body where I live severe abuse has left me living in emotional agony most of the time.  This is the truth.  I live my life not only WITH this legacy built into my body but IN SPITE of it – the best that I can.

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To discover a scientific background for what I am describing to two online simple searches and take a look at what comes up:  (1) genes child abuse depression, and (2) genes child abuse suicide.

In both cases research has shown that severe early abuse can trigger genes for these problems that would not have been triggered if the early trauma had not happened.  Even more significantly the research shows that having ANY SAFE AND SECURE ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIP WITH A CONSISTENTLY AVAILABLE ADULT is the main modulating factor for the interplay between early severe trauma and genetic potentials.

There is much more information available – on this blog and elsewhere on the internet about these facts.  Without the warmth of the southeastern Arizona desert, its glorious blue skies, the multicolored hues of its landscape, the sculptural structure of mountains and unique vegetation I have chosen to place myself within a physical environment that is the antithesis of what my increased well-being required except for one overwhelmingly powerful factor:  I AM IN THE PRESENCE OF FAMILY and able to make a positive impact in the early life of the developmental stages of my two young grandsons.

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A few days ago I followed my astrological-related investigations into words that can help me structure my experience in ways that I can relate to right now into a site that gave me the following regarding a hole in a chart concerning a T-square in Capricorn.  This is greatly connected for me to concerns related to –

“accomplishments and tangible, material expressions of identity.”

The abuse I suffered left me struggling with Dissociation Identity Disorder – without IDENTITIES.

Had I not found a way to give into the horrendous force Mother put upon me through abuse to disappear as an individual person with my own self, my own identity – I have absolutely no doubt that she would have killed me in her psychotic will to keep me NOTHING BUT a projection of her own perceived “evil” self.

Nobody was there to help me – but me.

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I do not like to write about these deeper concerns of my survival that I live with daily.  I don’t like to experience them, either!

I have “made things” all of my life.  It wasn’t until I found and read those words about identity itself being connected to this process that I realized this is a “To be or not to be” concern for me – very literally.

I MAKE therefore I am.

I am therefore I MAKE.

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Some of the making processes I have undertaken have been very large and involved moving the earth itself – by hand – in buckets.  I built an adobe addition on my landlady’s house in Taos and walked away.  I built a massive gorgeous adobe garden in Arizona and walked away from it.  I make – I give away – I share – and I do not make money because THAT part of the making process has so far eluded me (except for the brief time I sold my sewn bags in Arizona last summer which was very fun and positive for me – and SO RARE an opportunity).

Once upon a time I even traveled far to achieve a master’s degree in art therapy specifically because it is the PROCESS of making that matters most to me, not any product per se.

I have had times when all I could do was beg bags of rags from thrift stores for free so I could crochet heavy rugs which I used or gave away.  95% of what I hauled the 2000 miles on this move north – thanks to the greatest generosity of my family who covered the costs – was STUFF to MAKE STUFF out of.

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I would not consider publishing any book that does not have my daughter’s name clearly involved to reflect her work.  I do not want the money, either, unless there turns out to be quite a lot of it down the road – which I doubt considering the difficulty of the subject I write about.  (Meanwhile I struggle along in poverty on disability fixed income.)

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It is scary to live on the edge of this precipice.  It is humbling to write a post such as this one about my experience.  I do not desire “the moon.”  I just want to feel OK!  It is vital for me to know that it is not “my fault” that I achieve that OK status so very very VERY seldom.  The reasons for my struggles are due to trauma changes to my developing physiology from the time I was born.

What kind of SENSE can I MAKE out of this kind of suffering that severe early abuse and neglect survivors cope with all of their lives?

It was ALL unnecessary and it was ALL preventable!  Stop the abuse and neglect of infants and children and this suffering will stop!  Not for those of us whose body has already been trauma changed but for the FUTURE of those destined for this kind of suffering if nobody intervenes to prevent it.

Yes, it appears from any reading of my astrological mapping that I was destined for exactly what I have and do experience in this lifetime.  The inner pressure that is contained in “the reasons to keep the seed” of ME alive is about making something out of all of this!  I have to focus on my hopes that something I know and attempt to express can help someone else.

I know not what else to do and know no other way to be.  For all of my struggles I still AM ME.  The seed of me IS still alive.  I intend to keep it that way.  Will I ever sprout into a world of well-being?  Will I ever put roots down in the soil of just being OK?  I don’t know.  That future still awaits me.

What I do know is that every moment I can spend with my family right now is worth more to me at present than anything else I can think of.  That does not mean that right here at home in the center of me that there isn’t a whole lot of other stuff going on that is far from pleasant.  I never stop trying to learn what that means.

Thank you for reading!

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

Click here to view or purchase:  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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Tuesday, January 28, 2014.  Given the nature of my life and work it isn’t hard for me to find metaphors around me that give me pause to think.  The idea that our life is like a tapestry is a common image.  Yet because I now have a loom to warp I begin any thoughts I might have about that tapestry right at the beginning. 

Not only do I have to warp my loom if I want to weave a single thing upon it but I am working from that point forward with yarn I have spun from the stinky mess of raw sheep fleece.  From that point, in the drab place I have landed myself in, I now weave simply to bring more color into my life.

All seemed to be going relaxingly well this past weekend as I again measured off my warp –

And went through the careful process of threading each thread in order through the rigid heddle and winding this warp onto my loom.  Suddenly right at the very end I discovered a very near disaster!  I had threaded my heddle upside-down!

True, I am one of the few who can tell what I mean to show in this picture!  Clue:  What you see on the right side is my work to correct all that is wrong on the left side of the heddle here!

That little notch at the bottom of the heddle was at the TOP when I carefully threaded this thing.  WRONG!  With no possibility of actually weaving a thing on this loom without correcting my error I set to work….

carefully pulling each thread out and threading it in again correctly!

All fine and good but yes, irritating!  I will not be making that mistake again!

Of course this whole process gave me time to think about what happens to the lives of infants and children who suffer from trauma in their earliest attachment caregiver relationships so that the “warp” of their nervous system and brain is set WAY off track from optimal in development from the start of their lives!

How are we supposed to weave a great super-duper tapestry of life on a warp that was all messed up from the very beginning?

I could straighten my mess out here.  But straightening out my life from the mess my psychotically abusive mother made of me for the first 18 years of my life?

NOT EAZY-PEAZY, I assure you!  And in many significant ways – IMPOSSIBLE!

Our nervous system and brain have a very particular exacting process of development that does not sit well with the interruptions early trauma creates!  An extremely high price is paid by the survivor of early infant and child abuse and neglect.  The developmental neuroscientists can now name the changes our development endures one step at a time in early trauma environments.

I can think of no simpler way to put it than — OUR WARP IS MESSED UP!

I mean — MESSED UP!  And in ways that cannot simply be corrected.  The best many of us can hope to achieve is a thorough understanding of what traumas we endured, at what age going all the way back, often to our womb life and the health of our mother.  Who hurt us?  Who was NOT there to help us, who WAS there to help us, and most importantly — How did the trauma we experienced change our development all the way down to how our genes manifest themselves?

Then we look at the raw material — what GOOD things, what resiliency factors were inside of us and available to us that let us weave the very best tapestry of ourselves in our lives that we possibly could?

Most importantly — we have NOT GIVEN UP!!  Not once!  Not ever!

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I thought I had achieved a great stage of progress in my healing years back when I was able to know inside of myself that my entire infancy-childhood was life in a holocaust environment.  These last few days I have “revised my forecast.” 

I was a Prisoner of War.  A POW.  Whatever horrors my mother carried within her from her own traumatic childhood turned her inside out so that her hell was externalized in such a way she could PUT ME IN THERE instead of herself.  Yes, that was not only mentally ill of her but psychotically so!

18 years from birth forward – a POW of Mother’s war.  No wonder I hate trauma that runs down the generations and lands on the innocent and helpless little ones!

Just saying….

I came out of all that doing the best I can to make my life beautiful in any way I can — from the inside out — messed up warp and all.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

Click here to view or purchase:  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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Tuesday, January 28, 2014.  I tried an experiment this morning.  I laid two small art books out on the wrought iron glider bench in my apartment today to see if my grandson B (age 18 months) would notice them and if so, what he would think of them.  He discovered them within minutes of his arrival this morning.  Over the course of our day together I was given cause to wonder about the capacities of little children and of the human race as a whole.

B picked up both books and sat down on the floor to look at them.  At his first glance at the cover of the Cezanne one (see photo below) he said UH-OH!! with the full force of his adamant expressive abilities when using that word.  (He learned it among his very first words when he was at daycare.  Evidently it is a common daycare provider expression for the MANY events of a day with a room full of babies where lots of things can “go wrong.”)

Once B moved on to the book of Picasso’s work the UH-OH!! became so disturbed in its expression that I moved to sit with him to assure him of — What?  That the world was not about to break into pieces around us both in the immediate future?  That he was not alone while in the presence of — What?

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After snacks and play and bottle and rocking and nap time.  After up-again and lunch and more baby frenzy I centered him at his child-sized table with his tin of large primary crayons and a taped-down piece of white printer paper.  He went to work on his picture and I went to work on my weaving — until another vehemently expressed UH-OH!! caught my attention.

As I turned to see what was going on in B’s world I saw him turning again to the wrought iron glider where I had placed the art books after our morning adventure with them.  He picked them up and placed them on the table next to his scribble drawing.  He repeatedly pointed at his drawing and at the covers of the books repeating UH-OH!!! many times as he did so.

Now Uh-Oh in babyville has been used on many occasions, for sure.  But never have I heard B inject such passion into that expression.  What was he SAYING??

What was he identifying?  In himself?  In his art?  In the works in those books?  Within our WORLD?

I knew I was witnessing the power of art.  The power of those great painters even as their work was presented to this baby in age-dulled and pitiful rendition on the covers and in the pages of these old books.  Even as this baby made his own….

Art.  Making it.  Seeing it.  Art and its power to MOVE US, to ROCK US and to ROCK our world.  Art.  Just knowing it exists….

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I was reminded of something I witnessed in my 28-year-old son when he was only 4 hours old.  His little bassinet was at the foot of my hospital bed.  He lay there with his face turned toward the door with his eyes shut sucking his thumb until the song “Danny Boy” came on the TV suspended high above in the corner of the room opposite the door at which point I watched him open his eyes and take his thumb out of his mouth as he turned his head toward the sound of the TV.  He listened to the entire song.  When it ended into his mouth went his thumb as he turned his head again toward the door and closed his eyes.

I think about how every infant around the globe is born being able to make the same kinds of sounds.  Over the course of the first two or so years of life that range of sounds will narrow until only those spoken by people around the little one will remain within its capacity to vocalize.

When I witnessed my 18-month-old grandson respond so clearly and powerfully to art today I wondered, “What IS the true capacity of humanity?  What are we removing from our children by what we focus on — for them — in their environment?  What are we all losing?”

This little boy says very few words.  I hope I can continue to keep him connected to his own and others’ creativity long enough to hear what he will have to say once words can accompany him on his life journey past the power of his most used expression – UH-OH!!!

Hearing this today, witnessing this, left me mystified at the same time it awed me and even troubled me.  What do our little ones actually perceive of the world around them?  Evidently a whole lot more than what I would have guessed possible.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

Click here to view or purchase:  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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Monday, January 27, 2014.  Someone passed this quote along to me and when I read it I thought, “Gee!  THIS is the world I want to live in!”

Then I thought about days when I don’t feel too friendly toward the human race.  Maybe I can do better about that by paying more attention to when those negative thoughts appear so I can nullify them at the very least — and replace them with happier thoughts if I can be THAT preemptive!!

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“They that are endued with sincerity and faithfulness should associate with all the peoples and kindreds of the earth with joy and radiance, inasmuch as consorting with people hath promoted and will continue to promote unity and concord, which in turn are conducive to the maintenance of order in the world and to the regeneration of nations. Blessed are such as hold fast to the cord of kindliness and tender mercy and are free from animosity and hatred.“

Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh Revealed After the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, Author:  Bahá’u’lláh, Source:  US Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1988 pocket-size edition, Pages:  33-44, excerpt from TARAZÁT (Ornaments)

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It is certainly one of the characteristics of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that we tend to turn down the volume on stimulation in our environment by closing ourselves off from the world to increasing degrees.  It can be absolutely exhausting for me to be around the “noise” of human contact for long periods of time (and a lot of times even for short times!).

This seems to be more true the older I get as if my “human contact circuitry” is becoming obsolete or worn out!

However, I tell myself, I CAN try to pay more attention to my THOUGHTS!!  It’s not that I wish anyone ill.  That is not my nature.  In my isolation that my nervous system and brain requires for me to remain more calm I tend to disconnect myself from awareness that I AM connected to “all the peoples and kindreds of the earth.”

I am not all that unique!  I share far more in common with other people than I often let myself realize.  At least I can monitor my thoughts so that I can radiate out from my heart good wishes that might somehow help illuminate dark places on this globe. 

I certainly would rather be aligned with forces of love and healing rather than those of gloom and oppression.  I do have that choice even though these frigid winter days in this northern clime keep me within the walls of my apartment most of the time.  The walls of my thoughts and feelings need not be so constrained!  There is certainly more to life than what might greet my physical senses on any given day.

I want to become more aware of that fact and at least make some small effort toward the betterment of us all.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

Click here to view or buy:  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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