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At the risk of my siphoning off words into this post that could go into the section of book writing I am working on right now, I want to spill out some words here about making conscious choices in childhood – or in adulthood, for that matter.  In light of this topic, I will revise my thinking by refraining my statement:  I CHOOSE to spill out these words here.

I don’t actually have any shortage of words.  It’s not like I have to go out into the hinterlands and hunt up some more because I have consumed them all already.  There are plenty of words to go around, plenty of words to serve my purposes – both on this blog and in my book writing.  So what do I fear?  I fear I am going to miss something important in my thinking, ‘waste’ an insight, miss an opportunity to state something in the middle of my childhood life story by hiding the thought over here instead of putting it clearly and boldly exactly where that insight belongs:  At the point where my inner life changed when I was 10 – yet changed only for a very, very brief period of time.

I will be writing about the single span of perhaps 3 seconds that maybe did change the course of my life from that time when I was 10 forward.  But this part I will ‘save’ for the book section I will move from here to there to write today – after I do my 45 minute walk about, after I spend some time exercising all of me at my keyboard practice, after I summon up a different kind of willingness to move forward in my story for the book that I find is VERY different from the willingness I use to write in circles over here on this blog.

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What I am narrowing my focus on, like a gliding bird of prey with its eyes open, talons adjusted to grab and fly with my newest food for thought, is this question:

“At what point is it a natural growth ability of a human being to CONSCIOUSLY make a choice that then follows into a consciously-inspired action?”

Thanks to this book journey I am, the journey that requires of me that I put all the dissociated single BUBBLE memories of my abusive childhood into the best coherent, linear, this-followed-that format I can manage to accomplish, I am learning new insights about my self.  Learning about one’s self is NOT easy in the midst of a childhood of violence, oppression, terrorism, loneliness, and trauma survival.

The kind of abusive infant-childhood that I had happened because my mother was a mentally ill psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder woman.

I didn’t know that, of course.  Looking back through the filter and lens of my own mind today – using every bit of scientific information I have accumulated in preparation for my task – I realize that my mother probably never once in her life past age five had the ability to clearly and consciously weigh her thoughts, emotions, desires along with those of the children she came to be responsible for raising so that she could exercise true compassion and wisdom in her life.

Making conscious choices is not something we are born able to do.  We have to grow a body and brain that THEN has the physiological abilities to come to consciousness.

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I just mention all of this because in my book writing I am about to cross a threshold in my own human development that would have happened sooner or later in one way or another no matter WHAT the experiences of my childhood had been – benevolent or malevolent:  On May 13, 1962 I made a conscious decision.  I made my first conscious choice.

In my book writing I will (because I can and want to) return directly inside the body of myself at 10 ¾ on that day so that I can re-experience this life-changing moment.

That it happened once, that my choice and decision reaped for me dire consequences, that after this abuse incident that lasted at least three concentrated weeks I have no memory of making such a higher-level conscious choice again until I-don’t-know-when, is another matter.  Degrees of wisdom of the decision doesn’t matter.  The fact that I had physiologically developed the physiological powers to make a decision of my own – FINALLY – matters more than I know right now.  I will know the rest of it when I write it – elsewhere.

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Trauma that passes itself on down the generations in families has great, great power that should NEVER be taken lightly to remove from ‘the contaminated’ victims of repeating traumas the conscious power to recognize these massive trauma-based patterns that continue on down in families.

These patterns appear in trauma drama.

The trauma itself usurps the consciousness of the actors and players in the dramas.

Untangling the icky sticky puppet-string threads that steal people’s free-conscious-choice and decision making away from them is not easily done.

It takes, I believe, a level of conscious choice and dedication to this difficult task for any of us to be able to separate what happened to us through the trauma dramas of our families (and nations) to find OUR OWN CONSCIOUSNESS in the midst of the trauma dramas that seem to run our lives – and often the lives of those we are closest to.

Because my theory for myself states that for every memory of abuse I retained for my self over the span of my lifetime contained something extremely good, and therefore redeeming of ME — as a person separate from all the trauma drama of abuse that was done to me — I am prepared to work toward viewing my age-ten self from this gentle perspective.

No matter how ‘dumb’ my May 13, 1962 decision and choice was, it was an act of creation equal to or surpassing anything else I may have accomplished in my lifetime.  For that moment I WAS ALIVE as a human being!!  And for the very first CONSCIOUS time.

More than anything that fact triggered such an aftermath of horrific abuse perpetration in my mother that I would have dissociated and forgotten that any of this ever happened – EXCEPT FOR THE FACT that there is something embedded within this experience that is of such value to me that I would not be the person I turned out to be without it.

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Well, it took me five days off of the book writing to get myself started back on the job today.  Tomorrow I hope to tackle the really hard memory I am so opposed to invading.  In the meantime I went searching for some neuroscientific information about brain development in children during middle childhood, the age I was at the time I was when my resistant memory was created at the end of my 5^th grade year in school when I was ten.

I found the Cliff Notes web page has a terrific batch of readable information related not only to the age period I am considering right now, but also as it pertains in its expanded presentation to the entire range of infancy and childhood all the way through the human lifespan.

Here is the link to the Cliff Note pages on what they call DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY.

You will find the following at this Cliff Notes link —

Introduction to Developmental Psychology

• What Is Developmental Psychology?
• Issues in Developmental Psychology
• The Biopsychosocial Perspective

Developmental Psychology Research

• Research Concepts
• Research Designs and Methods
• Research Ethics
• Evaluating Developmental Research

Conception, Pregnancy, Birth

• Stages of Pregnancy
• Prenatal Care
• Stages of Childbirth
• Problems During Pregnancy and Childbirth
• Infertility

Physical, Cognitive Development: Age 0–2

• Physical Development: Age 0–2
• Cognitive Development: Age 0–2

Psychosocial Development: Age 0–2

• Personality Development: Age 0–2
• Family Relationships: Age 0–2
• Sexuality: Age 0–2
• Gender Development

Physical, Cognitive Development: Age 2–6

• Physical Development: Age 2–6
• Cognitive Development: Age 2–6

Psychosocial Development: Age 2–6

• Personality Development: Age 2–6
• Family Relationships: Age 2–6
• Friends and Playmates: Age 2–6
• Sexuality: Age 2–6
• Fear and Aggression: Age 2–6

Physical, Cognitive Development: Age 7–11

• Physical Development: Age 7–11
• Cognitive Development: Age 7–11

Psychosocial Development: Age 7–11

• Self‐Concept: Age 7–11
• Social Cognition: Age 7–11
• Family Relationships: Age 7–11
• Friendships: Age 7–11
• Peer Pressure: Age 7–11
• Sexuality: Age 7–11
• Stressors: Age 7–11

Physical, Cognitive Development: Age 12+

• Physical Development: Age 12–19
• Health Issues: Age 12–19
• Cognitive Development: Age 12–19

Psychosocial Development: Age 12–19

• The Search for Identity: Age 12–19
• Sexual Identity, Orientation: Age 12–19
• Sexuality: Age 12–19
• Juvenile Delinquency: Age 12–19

Physical, Cognitive Development: 17–45

• Physical Development: Age 17–45
• Health: Age 17–45
• Intellectual Development: Age 17–45

Psychosocial Development: Age 17–45

• Independence: Age 17–28
• Relationships: Age 17–45
• Establishing a Career: Age 22–33
• Starting a Family: Age 33–45

Physical, Cognitive Development: 45–65

• Physical Development: Age 45–65
• Health: Age 45–65
• Intellectual Development: Age 45–65

Psychosocial Development: Age 45–65

• Crisis in Middle Adulthood: Age 45–65
• Relationships: Age 45–65

Physical, Cognitive Development: 65+

• Physical Development: Age 65+
• Health: Age 65+
• Intelligence and Memory: Age 65+

Psychosocial Development: Age 65+

• Theories of Aging
• Relationships: Age 65+
• Work and Retirement: Age 65+

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This site is worth a gander.

Again, it is important to understand that the entire spectrum of human development can be altered by the onset of severe relational trauma from birth onward.  Once severe unsafe and insecure attachment conditions communicate the presence of trauma in an infant’s environment all future body-nervous system (including brain) development can be altered in important ways that cannot be reversed once certain Critical Window time periods for development have passed.

In extreme cases such as my Borderline Mother’s was, the earliest traumas of her life came to combine themselves into ever-increasing cascading developmental changes that came to include the triggering of a specific combination of her genetic potential that created her terrible Borderline Personality Disorder condition.

For those of us who survived extremely abusive childhoods without intervention or reprieve some degree of Trauma Altered Development changed the patterns that are optimally presented at the above links.  If we simply scan through this information we will be able to detect in our reaction to this information which parts of it have special importance to us — both in terms of the changes that traumas caused in the earliest stages of our abuser’s development and in terms of how our own development changed from the abuse we suffered ourselves.

We cannot learn too much about what happened to us.  The good thing is that the alterations in our development that our body was able to make in the face of overwhelming trauma kept us alive.  What those changes are and how they change the way we live in our body in the world demands that we learn — on our own because no professional is really going to tell us — how we can identify the changes to us so we can learn to live a better life in spite of them.

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I am in need of writing a post about purity and goodness!!  A dear friend sent me a poster about angels in my birthday card yesterday.  It came from this site:  Special-Ideas.

I feel like nearly every single thing a survivor of an abusive Borderline mother (parent) has to say is really nothing more than part of their obituary.  These people suffer, I am coming to believe more and more strongly, from a sickness that obliterates the expression of their soul in the world during their lifetime.

When God tells humans that no soul will ever be burdened beyond its endurance, I am coming to understand that there is a way this happens that would defy belief if we survivors of Borderline mothers didn’t know what we know by being their offspring.

I firmly believe that early trauma so changed the physiological development of these Borderlines that no pathway to the visibility of their SOUL remains – or very, very little of it.  What happens instead is that EVIL takes over the lives of these people BECAUSE the powers of their soul have been obliterated.

The changes their body-brain took in order to survive their early trauma happened because the trauma would have overwhelmed them TO DEATH otherwise.  The changes actually protect their soul – as strange as that might seem — from being overwhelmed at the same time their physical life is protected from ending.

The ONLY redeeming factor to this debilitating and HORRIBLE disease is that the person who has it DOES survive and VERY often has offspring.  But these mothers (parents) ARE NOT CAPABLE of raising their own children.  I don’t believe nature EVER intended that they even try — or be allowed to.  Only in a broken society would these mothers be left to torture their children (and sometimes kill them).  Nature wanted the GENES to endure — but not for these sick mothers to raise their offspring.

In my effort today to bring a little balance to the topic of the evil that really is the life of severely abusive Borderline mothers I want to present some of the information on this angel poster I received yesterday for my 60^th birthday:

Are You an Angel?

There are many theories about the nature of angels.  Bahai’s believe that angels are ordinary souls whose spirits are so aligned with the Will of God that they are allowed to be of service to people here on earth.

The exciting news is that you don’t have to die to become an angel!  All you have to do is practice angelic virtues such as kindness, honesty and perseverance, and you too will be allowed to perform miracles of love for people on earth.

The poster lists virtues and I added some.  The way I understand it, the way this virtue-angel ‘thing’ works is this.

All good comes from the one God who sent Messengers to earth with His lessons all the way through the evolution of the human race.  Humans are creatures of temptations, and our soul is like a mirror.  If our mirror faces only the material/animal part of our existence our soul mirror becomes covered with grime and cannot reflect the goodness that comes from God.

As we apply ourselves to turning our soul mirror toward God (I picture reflective satellite dishes!) and apply ourselves to cleaning and polishing the mirror of our soul, then we can reflect more and more goodness until we become like angels – or in fact become an angel!!

The sad part of the story is that Borderline Personality Disorder takes away from the afflicted the ability to participate in this kind of choice-making!  That is their sickness – and I am not at all convinced that no matter how despicable their behavior that they have choice like the non-sick people do.

ANYWAY…..  here is a list of some virtues.  The ability to reflect these virtues of goodness on anything like a consistent and genuine level is missing from a severe Borderline:

COURAGE – WISDOM – JUSTICE – STRENGTH – NOBILITY – HOPE – KNOWLEDGE – REVERENCE – PATIENCE – RADIANCE – UNITY – SERENITY – RESPECT – PEACEFULNESS – GENTLENESS – GRATITUDE – MODERATION – HUMOR – OBEDIENCE – IDEALISM – COOPERATION – MODERATION – LOYALTY – DONFIDENCE – COURTESTY – WONDER – CLEANLINESS – IMAGINATION – HUMILITY – TRUST – HONESTY – COMPASSION – FAITH – MODESTY – CHASTITY – KINDNESS – PERSERVERANCE – GRACE – JOYFULNESS – LOVE – MERCY – PURITY – CURIOSOTY – REASON – PRAYERFULNESS – RESPONSIBILITY – SELFLESSNESS – SERVICE – EMPATHY – SINCERITY – FRIENDLINESS – GENEROSITY – ENTHUSIASM – INTEGRITY – WISDOM – DISCERNMENT – RADIANCE – FAIRNESS – HAPPINESS ————

The important point for survivors of severe relationship trauma is that when a human soul is blocked by diseases of the body that interfere with a person’s ability to BE WELL – it is like they are in a coma!!  They are sleep-walking!  That early trauma that happens to an infant-child during their very first HUGELY important growth and developmental stages has the power to change physiological development and create these severe illnesses IS VERY REAL!!  I believe the early trauma actually triggers survival genetic combinations such as Borderline that would NEVER have been triggered if the early traumas had not had to change development so that these people could PHYSICALLY survive.

But I do not believe the SOUL of the person is present and accounted for in this lifetime.  God, of course, is the only One who knows – and who judges, has mercy, and forgives all of us – but a Borderline like my mother was does not have the capacity to even know that something was wrong with her!

The rest of us have full choice what we wish to do with our souls in this lifetime.  Once we realize that even the virtues listed above have to take place THROUGH a person’s body in their lifetime.  If the development of an infant-child’s body, nervous systems-brain, vagus nerve system, immune system, etc. WERE ALL CHANGED due to Trauma Altered Development, then the MEANS to express these listed virtues has been tampered with, altered and damaged.

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Whining, moaning, complaining?  Nope, but it is time for we severe child abuse survivors to admit that there is a realm of special joy the nonabused among us will (thankfully) never know.  Those of us with severe trauma in our earliest life know a very special joy that comes from the experience of identifying those traumas, what they did to us, how we can heal them — and THEN notice especially those very special moments AS THOSE TRAUMA WOUNDS ARE HEALING!

Turning 60 yesterday was something for me to celebrate.  I think having survived two nasty breast cancers gave me a second life — so on my birthday yesterday I celebrated BOTH of my lifetimes as they have been given to me — along with yet ANOTHER kind of new life experience:  Being very aware of a level of healing that I have never been this conscious of before.

Without spending eons of time or galaxies of words (see previous post) to describe all of this — in part because I am ‘writing out of line’ to even mention this right now (because it will all have to be carefully documented in the book being written of my childhood), I will simply present the following.

Although I am only at my age 10 1/2 in the book writing so far, this trauma event from my age 14 1/2 came very much into my arena of focus yesterday on my birthday.

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This description of the ‘event’ was written some time ago and will be re-remembered and rewritten when I get to this point in the book.

But yesterday, as expressions of love and caring flooded into me from all those who know and love me, I remembered another ‘tidbit’ of memory that happened right after this incident recorded at this post (right click title and open in new tab or window):

*Age 14 – DIRTY DIAPER AND PEPPLES IN MY KNEES

Because I am learning and therefore changing all the way through this book writing process, what I knew when I wrote this post (above) and what I know now are different in important ways.  I know MORE now and I know it more deeply.

But what I wanted to mention here has to do with the ‘tidbit’ that hit me yesterday.  That part of the memory, that I understood yesterday to be directly connected to what I had written about before, I had NEVER mentioned to another person.

Yesterday I was preparing for the fun gathering of friends at a local Pizza house.  As I waited I realized that this ‘tidbit’ memory was plaguing me.  I knew it was interfering with my experience of the present moments of my 60th birthday.  This ‘tidbit’ had a grip on me.  I was in TWO places at the same time experiencing TWO separate and conflicting/contrasting experiences at the same time.

When my daughter called me shortly before I was to head up for the party I asked her if she could/would listen to me tell her of the ‘tidbit’ memory.  (I try to be very care-full and considerate when I wish to share something with anyone of this nature.)  My daughter agreed to hear me.

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I want to also mention that during these 96 hours of book-writing pause-break time I am taking I have also been battling with myself about why in tarnation (is there such a place?) I am doing this book-writing of my abusive childhood in the first place — but that’s a different concern!

What it relates to in THIS moment and to YESTERDAY’S moments is that I found myself, in connection to this ‘tidbit’, thinking, “You know, Linda!  This memory belongs to the category of ‘childhood secrets’.  Secrets are secrets for a REASON!  What is WRONG with you that you are telling these secrets?”

HA!  I quickly wrested back the power in THAT discussion!

Anyway……..

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The tidbit:  If you read the ‘story’ as it is currently stored in words at the link above, this tidbit follows it by several days.

In the memory, very REAL memory yesterday, I am sitting on a swing on our family’s swing set.  On the mountain homestead, during a gray and windless day.  Alone.  I am looking down at my knees.

My knees have wounds on them from what Mother had done to me.  Gravel had embedded itself into my skin and cut my flesh.  I had already picked out the tiny stones, but the wounds on my knees were still bleeding and scabbing, still oozing puss as unhealed fresh wounds are apt to do.  (I had similar wounds on the palms of my hands.)

Yesterday I could not sit without seeing THOSE knees of that age-14 girl-me.  Not until I had told my daughter my secret.

Sitting on that swing, all alone, so still, so silent, so wounded, I had no thoughts of anger at my mother.  I had no thoughts or feelings of emotion that I could detect.  No envy that my siblings never were treated as I was.  No self pity.  No concept that something WRONG had been done to me or that there was such a thing as ‘unfairness’ or ‘injustice’.

As I sat staring at the wounds on my knees, staring as if I was not in any way involved with the body with those knees — I watched flies begin to land on my wounds.  They gathered there, lots of flies.

I felt their tiny dainty feet walking around on my injured flesh.  So delicate was their touch.  And in that touch I faintly knew these flies were comforting me.  But most of all, the most important words that I needed to say and said to my daughter — the words in the secret, the words that broke the spell that trauma-induced moment had held over me for 46 years were this:

“Being there with those gentle-footed flies on my wounds — I was glad for their company.  I was thankful for their being with me.”

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I can’t name the sadness that this kind of child abuse memory of experience carries within it.  I will deal with that on some level when I have moved forward another 4 years’ of time in my book writing.

But what I needed to know yesterday, as I prepared to join friends for my birthday pizza gathering — is that my inner wound from lack of ‘friendly bonding’ (safe and secure attachment) with anyone in my life — by the time I was 14 — is what directly impacts my lack of true ability to be able to FEEL what it feels like to be loved today.

I can go through the motions with people — but I cannot feel the EMOTIONS that come from having a body-brain built from birth with positive social-emotional experience included.  Most simply put, it is a very real ‘SHAME’ that the 14-year-old girl I was, who was grateful for the gentle non-hurting touch and companionship of a collection of flies on my abuse-created wounds,  NATURALLY cannot truly feel NOW what I could not feel THEN.

By naturally I mean — the ability to experience certain things happens because we can (or cannot) PHYSIOLOGICALLY process the information that is included in and presented by our experience.

Attachment and human bonding are literally PHYSIOLOGICAL experiences.  The ability to experience bonding and attachment is formed into humans before their first birthday.  The self that then can (or cannot) include attachment and bonding experience information, THROUGH THEIR BODY-BRAIN, is formed before the age of two.

If this seems difficult to grasp, just relate it to this:  Researchers know that there is a very narrow and very specific range of developmental opportunity for a mammal to grow the body-brain circuitry to be able to see.

When researchers (yes, horrific!) sew shut the eyes of a kitten and leave them sewed shut through this Critical Window time for vision development, and then ‘unsew ‘ the eyes — the kitten will NEVER be able to see.  These kittens were born fine.  They had the full potential to be able to see — but experience during the Critical Window of growth for vision was interfered with and the potential for vision was erased.

When some human beings, in extreme and hopefully very rare circumstances, are deprived of love and attachment as I was — well the rest of that story is in my story…….  Which includes whatever avenues of discovery and healing I can find along my way as I no longer have to wonder in the darkness why and how my life as a severe child abuse survivor is different in many important ways from the life experience of ‘ordinary’ people.  And every new discovery I make, and all of my new learnings DO give me joy!

(And, no, the flies were not paying me ‘negative attention’ — Theirs was the closest thing to positive attention I knew!  And, yes, my 60th birthday pizza party with friends who love me was a whole lot more fun! (Never lose a sense of humor!))

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Technical note:  I have always remembered the ‘fly tidbit’ memory but only now as I write the book do I have the context of when/where that memory belongs.  I DID NOT remember the main ‘I am a pig!’ incident until in 1983 my sister told it to me over the telephone, at which point the entire memory came back to me.  According to my own theory regarding which memories I have ‘chosen’ to retain, there evidently was nothing redeeming connected to the main memory that would have ‘made’ me keep it, but there was something redeeming about the tidbit:  Companionship in nature even in the face of human-to-human destitution.

(Putting this post together has been extremely ‘disorienting’ and ‘disorganizing’ – in other words, this entire memory of the main incident itself was DISSOCIATED.  It was forgotten in a particular way for a particular reason.  It was ‘coherency’ supporting and life enhancing for me to NOT remember this memory.  This post has had MANY revisions to get it right – I didn’t even have my age or year correct when I wrote the original post about the memory.  I think I have it right now — another reason why those readers who subscribe to this blog should ALWAYS click on the title of the post in their email box and read it on the blog.  The revisions will NOT show up in the first email notification you receive about a new post.)

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I bet music, movement and dance were an essential  human experience from nearly the time of our earliest beginnings.  It’s power to heal humans is probably as powerful as our experience with music is ancient!

And speaking of the passage of time, I finally today photographed this picture my son, who is now 26, created when he was 6 weeks away from his 6th birthday.  I kept an art portfolio of every piece of art my son did until he left home at 18 — but this piece NEVER left my side!

He doesn’t remember this, of course, but I wrote a note on the back of it that lets me remember!  He and I had gone to the high school to listen to my daughter’s concert (she played sax).  The instant my son returned home he ran to the table in the house with the art supplies on it, grabbed this stiff cardboard 11″ x 14″ black background and went to work quickly and passionately expressing his emotions from the music he had just heard.

The music MOVED him.  That he at his young age specifically gifted this work of art, his creation, to his Mom with love — and did not destroy the art piece because it took him all those attempts to get his message to me the way he wanted it — well over the passage of time in this case the music AND the visual art work give me JOY (as has my son FOREVER!)

I am doing a great job of learning to read the music for this song, to PLAY it – and most importantly to HEAR it in my BODY as it comes through my body into existence in the immediate space and TIME of my life:  STARLIGHT WALTZ by C.S. Brainerd (orchestra listen here – piano solo listen here – but I’m not this good yet)!  I am ALMOST crossing the threshold of enjoying the process.

Crossing the threshold to the experience of total JOY is not an easy task for severe child abuse survivors!  No, of course being joy-full is NOT supposed to be a TASK at all!  Therein lies the clue!  Early abuse, especially relationship trauma during the first year and through the second year of life CHANGE the development of the JOY pathways in the developing body and in the brain.

A long, broad and very solidly entrenched highway of fear and sorrow carves itself into the body-brain of an abused infant INSTEAD of all the OTHER expressions of life in the world that a safe, secure and loved infant will build into theirs – INCLUDING the experience of true joy.

Joy, I believe, is an experience that does not ever exist when trauma is present.  Because early abuse implants the experience of trauma into a little one’s growing body-brain, it becomes extremely difficult if not impossible to get that trauma out again.  (Yup, like an impossible laundry stain!)

Therefore, we severe early abuse survivors will find ourselves celebrating ANY MOMENT we experience true joy – or at least what we imagine true joy to feel like.  I don’t think we will EVER take joy for granted the way ‘ordinary’ people can – and are SUPPOSED TO!  Being joy-full is, after all, what human evolution has designed us to experience in the best of all possible worlds – the aim and goal of our healthiest desires.

Part of what fascinates me about learning to read music and to play it is that time takes on a very real and tangibly-intangible meaning through this experience.  I suppose when we read words and write words in the literate literary fashion we are able to experience a relative of what I am talking about here.

I ENJOY reading and have from the time I was very young (reading classics by age 9, having Borderline mother accusing me of ‘pretending to read them’ to ‘show off’ – had she asked me a gosh darn thing about the story I could have told her – but that was the twisted nature of my Borderline Mother’s mental world!)

But I’m not sure reading written words has given me the kind of JOY that music has.

Before now there have been many times I have listened to music that has turned-my-crank and found itself in the middle of my DNA in the middle of the molecules in the middle of my cells – etc! – and FORCED me to MOVE and FORCED me to forgo rational thought!

But now learning to read and to PLAY the music – well, there are all those little notes on the paper, each with its own tiny piece of multitasking purpose!  Pitch!  Got it.  Tone?  Got it.  And TIMING?  GOT IT!

Put them all together, along with all those other little markings all over the pages that I don’t yet know the meaning of, and there is MUSIC which is tracking history in the passage of TIME.

Like the written word, music on paper tracks the inner experience of the person who did the writing.  But there is something SPECIAL to me about music BECAUSE the writer of music is specifically and exactly writing about the passage of time because without doing so – well, there is no music!

Of course any accomplishment in being able to read and actually PLAY the music allows for a totally different translation (within reasonable parameters) by the present-time musician over what the original musician meant to communicate.  That’s pretty marvelous, too!

At my age, I will NEVER take reading and playing music for granted any more than I take joy for granted.  Playing music, even when I get to playing my own inspirations, is a miracle of accomplishment to me.  Healing the musical channels in my badly infant-abused musical-sound brain and in those connections throughout my body is miraculous, also!

And because I believe so much of what lies within the PTSD experience is related to alterations in the passage of time – along with accompanying dissociation – my having discovered an activity that can so directly access, address and begin to physiologically HEAL some of these difficulties is – well – just another miracle in the passage of time!!

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Crossing the threshold into my 60^th year last night was a little bumpier than I anticipated.  Wide awake at 1:00 a.m., I decided to pick up and read the slim book given to me yesterday as a birthday gift by a friend.  For everyone engaged in a struggle to find a way to truthfully and accurately consider what gender might mean in this advancing, maturing stage of human evolution the essay and comments in this book offer some important insights:

Journey to the Father:  New Perspectives on Gender and the Baha’I Revelation by Joell Ann Vanderwagen.

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I have now been engaged in active healing from the first 18 years of my life I spent under the malevolent influence of my severely abusive Borderline Personality Disorder Mother and her accomplice, my father, for half of my lifespan.  During those 30 years I have never been able to begin to grasp on any level that felt true and genuine the nature of my father’s actions while I was growing up.

Nothing I have ever learned or thought about in all this time has ever ‘clicked’ for me in my efforts to ‘know’ my father until I read this small book in the first wee hours of my 60^th year of life last night.  Nothing has seemed right, felt right and therefore nothing has been right in its potential to elucidate for me the role my father chose to take in regard to the terrible treatment my mother forced on me until I read Vanderwagen’s essay and her comments.  It’s like I have been wandering for all these years down a sterile empty hallway, encountering door after door after door upon which I have knocked and found no answer about my father.

I know all kinds of assorted ‘facts’ about Father’s upbringing, about what might have – or did – contribute to the sterile and ineffectual man he grew up to be.  Yes, he was a provider for our family of material support.  Yes, he was evidently professionally capable as a civil engineer.  Yes, he accomplished what needed to be done to homestead 160 acres in Alaska.  Yes, he remained married to Mother and thus had a physical presence during my childhood.  But as I work my way through writing my childhood story for book publication the Father I encounter in every memory where he was present includes him as a cardboard cutout figure, a shadow of a human being, standing – no, really lurking – at the edges of my memories of terrible abuse being perpetrated against me by my mother.

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What I read in this book last night does not surprise me.  The author’s words are new and offer a new take on the entire realm of gender considerations in Western culture if not on gender throughout the past evolution of our human species.  What impresses me is that the new words I found in my reading last night for the FIRST TIME ring with truth about my father and about the ‘parental unit’ of my parents.

I needed NEW to find TRUE, because my inner instinct about healing from child abuse trauma has guided me with a bright light all the way not only through these past 30 years of healing, but also instinctively throughout the first 18 years of my life that were so hurtful to me and has up until last night came up with nothing meaningful about my father.  Zippo.  Zilch.  For this 30 years of searching I have always come up empty handed because I was searching along the wrong path.

I am a part of a culture that is based on wrong beliefs that were built into society as if they were true facts.  Vanderwagen notes simply and clearly how beliefs about gender proposed by Plato and Aristotle fed assumptions that men are superior to women.  Because, in spite of myself, I have searched for answers about my parents within the thinking patterns of my own culture I have encountered essential lies within lies.  I have found no truth and therefore no foundation of understanding because I found no way to think clearly outside my society’s faulty streams of information.

Most simply put, there is a very clear visual graphic on page 21 of Vanderwagen’s book coupled with another one on page 25 that turned the proverbial light on in my thinking about my father, about my mother, and about their interactions as my ‘parental unit’.  According to the author’s presentation humans of both sexes, even with their obvious differences, are completely equal as are the two wings of a bird.  On their essential human level the qualities each gender possesses can be honed, perfected and presented equally by both women and men – or not.

Four distinct qualities are presented for ‘masculine’ and for ‘feminine’ along with what is expressed should these qualities be non-existent.  This picture exactly describes my parents:

Masculine:  existence of qualities – strong, forceful, active, assertive

Masculine:  non-existence of qualities – weak, timid, inert, passive

Feminine:  existence of qualities – gentle, tender, receptive, responsive

Feminine:  non-existence of qualities – rough, brutal, closed, rejecting

While humans grow into maturity by choosing to bring forth not only the best of the qualities that come more naturally to their gender, we are also obligated to develop those qualities within us that belong more easily to our opposite gender.  This balance springs forth into our lives as a flexible wisdom.  This balance brings well-being and goodness into the expressions of our self – our soul (which has no gender) – in our life.

Looking solely at my parents in terms of their gender represented by them in my life as Father and Mother, during my 18 year abusive childhood this was the picture:

The non-existence of masculine qualities listed above clearly and accurately describes my father:  weak, timid, inert, passive

The non-existence of feminine qualities clearly and accurately describes my mother:  rough, brutal, closed, rejecting

My parents were a mess!  Neither of my parents was self-aware.  Neither possessed a desire or motivation to improve their inner reality.  Using the model I have discovered in this book I can begin to let myself know the shared truth about my parents:  Both of them were spiritually dead (spiritually sound asleep – spiritually bankrupt).   They both lived in a world defined by the absence of goodness and by the absence of any effort toward improvement leading to progress in the direction of goodness.  That kind of world, on the level of our human species, breeds evil.

And that is exactly what happened in my family of origin.

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If I could target this post the way I wish I could I would send it to people who are parenting foster children or adopted children who have a prior history of being abused.  What I say here also applies to many teen and adult survivors of severe child abuse — but it is the young survivors who have found their way into loving, caring and nurturing homes AWAY from abuse — and are therefore on their healing journey — that I am thinking about this morning.

I can’t entirely stop my pondering process right now even though I am taking a break until this coming Friday morning from my book writing.  In some important ways I am finding myself in the midst of a review related to an earlier post and its comments:  +SEVERE CHILD ABUSE AND THE PRESERVED GOOD AND NOBLE SELF

I am also cycling backward and into the present moment about my piano lessons and the multiple levels of effort I am having to put into this new learning.  I continue to struggle with the effects of severe verbal abuse I received from birth (and through the following 18 years) from my Borderline mother.

This is cementing into my thinking what a miracle it is that severely abused children can learn anything at all!  What a miracle it is they can manage to learn anything in school!  What a miracle it is for many of us of all ages as severe child abuse survivors that we find ways to continue to learn throughout the course of our lifetime!

The regions of the human brain that learn semantic, external, objective facts about the world can — and often do — operate without emotion or without any special ‘autobiographical’ involvement of the ‘self’ of a person-child.  By the time I was 9 and in 4th grade, as I discovered in my book writing this week, my ability to learn facts — cold, hard factual information about the world OUTSIDE of me began to escalate and burgeon as an ability that had nothing to do with the development of my ‘self’.

I was and am fortunate that way.  But now as I struggle to learn to read and play music I find my learning is PAINFUL.  Both of my brain hemispheres and the operation of the regions between them that pass information back and forth are being challenged in new ways.  By itself, I would say this is a good thing.  But it is PAINFUL, painful because I as a SELF am in the middle of this process right along with all the pounded-into-me pain, much of it from Mother’s verbal abuse, that has created deep and lasting wounds that are being powerfully touched in this new learning process.

I would say to ALL who are helping to heal and parent abused children that providing the healing opportunity of learning to play PIANO is one of the best things that can be done to help these children!

I would also say that this new learning is MUSIC THERAPY and that all involved must realize this fact.  All must watch the child carefully and be prepared, waiting and ready to help the child on the levels of healing that learning to play piano will create.

In so many ways the younger the child the more flexible and malleable — if not resilient — they are.  But these same factors are also the same ones that have been so trampled on, so crushed, and so wounded that at the same time the piano-playing learning is going on the wounds will be touched and the pain will be triggered.

What I am finding is that as I learn, as I practice piano the SELF that I am is in the MIDDLE between what I want to learn and the ME that wants to learn it.  That SELF — in ways I never have identified until now — is so full of outright terror about making mistakes, about being a slow learner, about being impossibly and irredeemably stupid, about not trying hard enough, about making mistakes ‘deliberately’ and intentionally, about being bad and hopeless and wrong and evil — and on and on and on — that it is nearly beyond belief!

I have recognized and written on this blog before about the extreme damage that verbal abuse causes to an infant-child’s developing language abilities.  I know that this damage, if it begins in infancy, becomes built into changed brain development in the musical regions of the brain because LANGUAGE uses these musical regions.

Learning to play this piano is waking up some of my deepest pain and my worst wounds that were inflicted by my mother from the time of my birth — during my earliest stages of development when I had no possible way of knowing what the words were she screamed at me.  I knew the emotions.  I had emotional reactions of my own.

And from those earliest SOUND related abuses come the great pain I now feel learning how to let my SELF free toward experiencing my own JOY — in learning to let music move THROUGH my body, through my self — as it comes to life.

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The comments at the end of the post I placed at the start of this writing contain reference to other realizations I am having that relate not only to my healing, to adult survivor healing, but to healing for young children who have been removed from abusive environments.

Our body is a WHOLE body that includes all of our senses.  As we grow from birth in environments of unsafe and insecure attachment with violent and hurtful caregivers the development of ALL of our senses is impacted — along with the connections in our body-brain that process this information.

In those comments I mention here, and in that information that will have to be moved into the text of the book, I realize that Mother’s abuse interrupted the development of my own sense of humor.  The abuses she perpetrated having to do with sleep affect me today.  Learning I was doing as a small child about what flavors of food I enjoyed, which ones I didn’t, and how my tastes in food changed as I grew into my older childhood were impacted.

I guess what I am feeling for abused children removed from their environments of abuse is that the adults, teachers included, in their new life need to realize that an abused child needs to heal not only on multiple levels — but on ALL levels.

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As I continue to work through the terrible pain of child abuse that is being awakened in my piano playing-learning I am working to heal damage done to me that I have never until now fully recognized — both in my body-brain and in my SELF.  Please, if you are helping to heal an abused child GET THEM INVOLVED in piano lessons.  At the same time realize that this needs to be done with the most perfect love, encouragement, understanding, acceptance, compassion, healing and hope for healing.

The potential for healing the effects of child abuse through learning piano is, I am coming to realize, probably unparalleled in any other kind of learning a human being can do — especially a child.

THE AMERICAN MUSIC THERAPY ASSOCIATION

NOTE:  I also believe that this learning WILL TRIGGER Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and dissociation.  Caution is needed.  This triggering is NOT a bad thing, but be aware, beware, be wary — be VERY CARE-FUL.  This learning creates and provides for deep and profound levels of healing.  It has to be done in the RIGHT way.  Consult a music therapist if at ALL possible.

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I ran away from home today, which is what I call it when I hop in my old ’78 el Camino and wander into Bisbee, wasting gas just to see some friendly faces, grab a cup of java, see a change of scenery, decompress and make decisions.  So.  I decided that to plow ahead on the book writing right now would be the emotional equivalent of going over Niagara Falls in a paper cup — so it’s break time.

Because I am spending A LOT of time writing in response to my daughter’s book question #6, which now has four parts and is moving into a fifth, I only get to take my 96-hour down times when I know I need them now rather than being able to pause in between questions.  I don’t know what’s going to happen to the other 13 questions my daughter has lined up for me, but #6 seems to fit the bulk of my tell-the-story-like-it-was format.  When I reach a tough stumble and fall down time I know it — and it’s time for one of those breaks.

Dissociation exists for a health-promoting reason.  Trying to push too hard to make this story I am telling coherent at this point is not healthy for me.  There’s too much there!

What I do know is that I did something when I was 10 — right at the point I will write about after my break — that I never had done before and never did afterward:  I stood up to my abusive mother the best that I could.  With what seems to have been my first truly conscious self-aware thinking I decided ‘on the spot’ that if I stood up to her things couldn’t get any worse than they had always been.

I was wrong.  Nearly dead wrong.

This ‘abuse incident’ also led to me running away for home for the first and only time in my 18 year childhood.

To do myself justice, to do this story justice, I have to build into myself what I need in the next four days to hopefully be ready to get back to my task and to do it well.

Meanwhile, I turn 60 on Wednesday — and that earns me a break all by itself!

NOTE – this post is related to this morning’s post:  +WHOSE STORY IS THIS ANYWAY?

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I mean, who really does want to wake up at 3:00 a.m. on the 3rd day before their 60th birthday caught in a spider web of forgetting and remembering while writing the story of their severely abusive childhood?  Which is the web and which are the spaces between those thinnest strands of so-strong nearly invisible thread that make up my own life of childhood?  How does forgetting form this web even far more than remembering?

What have I forgotten?  Why have I forgotten it?  Everyone forgets most or nearly all of their childhood, don’t they?  Then doesn’t that just level the playing ground, then, so that my childhood remains just as mediocre as anyone else’s?

So why am I trying to write a book about my abusive childhood, anyway?  Isn’t this job worse than hopeless — being stupid?

What do I remember?  What CAN I remember?  What could I remember that I don’t remember if WANTED to badly enough?  Do I WANT to remember?

And WHY would I want to remember?  Why does it grow so to bother me that there are months and months of my childhood at the age I am writing about now — having turned 10 — where I can’t-don’t-won’t remember anything at all?  Could I remember if I tried harder — hard enough — or EVER no matter what I ‘tried’ to remember?

I seem to be all tangled up in this web of forgetting and remembering and of not wanting to do either one.  “Who is doing this remembering?  Who did/is doing this forgetting?”  Is it better to let the sleeping dogs that guard the gates of hell alone, just let them lie?

Or is that exactly the problem?  They’ve been lying long enough?

If I can’t remember — “It didn’t happen.”

If I don’t remember, can’t remember — “It didn’t matter.  It wasn’t that bad.  I made it all up.”

Am I chasing my memories or are they chasing me?

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I have spent the last four or five days of my book writing following the nutty track of where I lived during months and now years of my childhood as recorded in my abusive Borderline Mother’s letters.  If her letters had not found their way into my hands, if I had not spent many hundreds of hours sorting and ordering and transcribing them I would NEVER have been able to even begin to think about my experience growing up with her in anything like a coherent, linear order.

I woke at 3:00 a.m. this morning knowing that even with that track to follow, that bread crumb trail of history covering these years of my childhood, I have managed to do exactly what she would have wanted me to do (not that she would have EVER wanted me to have these letters in the first place).  I have let myself become mesmerized by her words until I hit a brick wall last evening when I quit my task for the night.  I am believing her lie.

In my later efforts I have been amalgamating her words.  I have been taking parts of one letter and combining it with parts of the next letter to cut down on repetitions in my attempts to find the ‘picture’ of how her continually shifting thinking — as presented in these letters she wrote to her mother — dragged her family hither and yon through one move after another in so crazy a pattern that NOBODY could have remembered it all if it wasn’t written down — finally — in the fashion that it is.

The moves themselves, as tied to her Borderline Personality Disorder as they were, being the nightmare that they were, I see now created such a fabric of uncertainty, unpredictability, and continual trauma of change that the abuse I suffered as her singled-out target for abuse simply fades into the background.

If I let it…….

During this past year I have been covering, from the end of my 4th grade year of school when the 5th of the Lloyd children was born all the way through my 5th grade year, what ACTUALLY happened was that we lived not in ONE place at any ONE time during this year — but in TWO places at ONE time.  Like a string being continually folded back on itself so that the beginning, middle and end of it are lost in some big resulting tangled mess, this year of my life was probably one continuous thing and one thing only:  HELL.

Not only did we spend the better part of my age 9-10 year living in two places at one time, but one of the places we lived in — the canvas Jamesway Quonset hut on our Alaskan mountain homestead was itself undergoing continual change at the same time.  But these changes are not accurately or specifically recorded in Mother’s letters.  They are only alluded to.  When were the additional 4-foot wide additional ribbed sections added onto that hut, making it grow longer on both ends like some monstrous dark caterpillar within which we walked around, slept — and me, the abused one?

When did my father cut into the sides of this hut, lift up parts of its wall, cover them with wood and add in the windows?  When did he lay the flooring on top of the rough Army green plywood sections of floor boxes?  When did he put in a wall partition that separated the front end from the back bedroom end?

This is what the hut looked like when we first began our journeys living in — and out — of it on this isolated Alaskan mountain:

THIS ‘house’, this Army surplus portable housing tent, was a tunnel with two very small plastic windows on either end, each made of two sheets of worn plastic with wire mesh in the panes.  They were dimmed with years of encrusted dirt sandwiched between them that could not be removed.  Neither could we see out of them and they let in very little light.  And by my 5th grade year we were a family of seven living on again-off again on this mountain.

Alaska, known for its frequent heavy clouded days, was even darker for us as this level on the mountain was in the ‘cloud path’ so that we were often captured within thick fog.

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Up and down the mountain we traveled with my father on school mornings as we had ‘left’ the rented rambler log house for the last months of my 5th grade year.  Back and forth down the Eagle River valley on the Jeep road.  Hours and hours we spent commuting.  I was following all of this in Mother’s letters, doing my combining of her words, following, following — and then suddenly BAM!

In a letter dated Monday, May 14, 1962 there is a description of events that I entirely missed until I had traveled a few letters forward in time — and then, last night at ‘closing time’ as I folded up my computer files and ‘called it a day’, I realized I had moved right on past Mother’s description of the beginning stages of what was one of the worst of her abuse ‘episodes’ of my childhood.

I sit on that cusp.  I am on that threshold in my book writing now.  I have to go back, back, not very far back as it turns out — because I WOKE UP out of my mesmerized following-Mother’s-account-of-the-years-of-my-childhood stupor in full recognition:  “What time is it?”  It’s the time Mother attacked me with a two-by-four board, the time I barely escaped with my life.

“Oh, THAT time!”

Did Mother breath a single word in her May 14th letter, or in the letters that followed it about what was REALLY going on as she spewed out her trivial spatterings about ‘our life’ as she wanted her mother to know about them?

Not a word.  Not a clue.  Not a sign.

THIS IS MY JOB!   The truth-telling is MY JOB!

I’ve written before about ‘the shampoo incident’ and about my running away.  Am I going to rewrite my version of what happened all over again?  Dare I enter that memory — which I know I can do — and relive that special horror all over again?

Can I?  Will I?  Dare I?

Mother chased me through the Jamesway, finally catching up to knock me off balance.  As I fell I remember rolling wildly around on the double bed in the little bedroom in the little old trailer attached to the Jamesway trying desperately to avoid the full force of Mother’s two-by-four poundings as she hysterically raged.  On this day she would have killed me.  I got away from her.  I dodged under the worst of her blows, snaked my way out from under her crashing arm.  I bashed my way past her out the back door of the trailer and took off running through the field grasses toward the woods with banshee screaming, club-wielding Mother in mad pursuit.  Father stood at the edge of the field cutting firewood — watching.  I was 10 years old.

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I ALMOST missed this!  I have now found the EXACT day this ‘incident’ began — because I recognize it in Mother’s invisible version, her left-out version.  I know the other version of what happened — the real version — that Mother DID NOT tell my grandmother.  It started on Mother’s Day, May 13, 1962, but it did not end for a long, long time.

I might not be able to write about it today.  I might wait a few days until after my 60th birthday on Wednesday to write it.  I first need to have some serious conversations with myself about why I am working on this book at all……….

For now I have a fence built against remembering.  I know it’s my fence, and I know I’ll sit on it as long as I want to — or need to.

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I woke this morning thinking about a dream I had last night, or rather, thinking about the remnants of a dream.  These pieces, like leftover scraps of fabric from a dress all sewn together, left me thinking also about how strange it is that I found among my mother’s surviving papers a copy of one of her dreams that I wrote about on this blog several times before:

MY MOTHER’S DREAM – March 29, 1960
The whole family was out walking and suddenly we looked up to see a dark rainbow appear – then it got bright and behind it a skyline appeared outlining massive dormed buildings such as I’ve never seen and skyscraper bldgs – then it all disappeared and a big wind came.

We realized it was a hurricane. We could hardly stand up against the wind. We saw big apt bldgs on the sides of the streets but the entrances faced another street and we were on the wrong side. The wind grew stronger – finally a door appeared and we went in the bldg and the person asked us what was wrong? We told her of the great wind but as we pointed outside – all was silent and the wind was gone … and I awoke.

Putting together what I read in Mother’s dream (I was 8 when she recorded this) and what I remember of the scraps of mine last night, I can’t help but think that way down in those dusky depths beyond consciousness Mother really knew that something was terribly wrong not only for her but also for her entire family.  But my dream was not about a raging storm.  My dream was about healing.

Alaska has that kind of soil that turns into charcoal gray mucky mud when it gets wet.  Along the lower Jeep roads back in Eagle River valley when enough people drove over some of the sections of that mud enough times it packed down smoothly and though it remained damp and moist it didn’t create deep ruts.  It was on a section of a neighbor’s road like this that I used to ride my sister’s friend’s bicycle around the time Mother recorded her dream.

Last night in my dream I found myself living on soil like I found on this section of Jeep road.  Standing in the center I found that if I put enough effort into jumping and stomping in one place I could pack it down and it would harden into a firm platform that meant I was no longer in danger of sinking past my knees in soppy, sticky, icky muck.

Not being content to only have that one small circle in the center I soon realized if I kept one foot planted firmly in the center and then turned my body from that pivot point in circles I could stomp stomp stomp with my other foot and widen the center circle of stable firmness.

So, around in circles I went, first in one direction, then in the other.  I succeeded in widening my circle of firmness enough that I could then scoot my firmly planted foot farther and farther out from the center of the circle.  My platform center of firm stability reached further and further out until I could then walk in a stomping ever-widening circle.  My life of healing was growing!

So entranced — and very busy working my way toward healing was I that it took some time before I looked up to see there were other people all around me doing exactly the same thing!  As their circles of firm, healed stability widened around those other people these circles eventually touched one another — and even began to overlap.

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My mother lacked the ability to work toward healing in her lifetime.  But something I received during mine has created such a desire to heal and to assist others to heal in any small way that I can that I have not lived anything like the same life that my mother did.  I am eternally grateful for the gifts I have been given that also include being born in an era that includes a Major Movement of the healing work others are doing in their own circles — and sharing with me.

I believe that not only can individual people stomp their way out in ever-increasing circles of increased well-being, but families can do this, too.  Neighborhoods can do it.  Communities can do it.  Nations can do it, and eventually this planet we live on will be covered the world over with little circles of healing that have grown together to include everyone in genuine creative effective — and amazing healing!

It might seem on any given day that what goodness we try to bring into our personal life, the life of our family, our neighborhood — and on up is trivial and lacks impact or importance.  That’s certainly not what my dream last night was about!  When everyone that has the capacity to heal begins that muck stomping journey we will all be incredulously amazed at the progress we can make.  YAY US!!!

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