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If I am going to spend some time pondering about some of what I was book-writing about yesterday, I might as well do some of that pondering here.  First of all, I believe (because I cannot make this belief go away, or change it in any way, it is obvious to me that I believe it!) that all humans are born good and noble.  That means all children are good and noble.

Being innately good and noble means to me that humans are born knowing right from wrong.  What must happen as we grow older and grow up is that we come to develop our ‘self’ that possesses the ability to make choices — some of the good, some of them not good.

We are born to parents and other caregivers who are not perfect.  While we might be perfect when we are born it seems nature designs us to soon lose track of this perfection simply because we ARE humans — and being human means that in this world we have choice.  Or, are supposed to have choice though I believe changes in physiological development especially due to early severe trauma can create ‘mental illnesses’ that interfere with the human ability to self-choose (the body does most of the choosing instead in its attempts to survive).

“So,” I’ve been asking myself this morning as I wander my garden after last evenings terrific rains, “what is it about the circumstances surrounding the tiny snippets of clear memory I have always retained from shortly after my 9th birthday when I was in 4th grade that emblazoned those memories in my conscious mind?  Why those and not others?”

As I pondered this morning I remembered for myself the ‘rule’ I invented:  There must have been something going on inside of ME that was absolutely GOOD that was immediately smacked up against something very bad in my mother!

Thinking now in this way about these incidents — as I present them simply below — I see that what I witnessed with my little sister being miraculously saved from great harm was ALL GOOD.  What was going on inside of me during the ‘TV memory’ and the ‘ice cream memory’ was equally ALL GOOD.

Perhaps I received a gift through the special circumstances of having been abused since birth — the inability, complete inability, to feel anger toward my mother.  Perhaps that gift not only allowed me to survive her horrible abuse, but also to survive it with access to my own goodness intact.

Not that feeling angry in the face of great injustice is a bad thing in itself, but in my case because I was a captive and had no possible way to escape or to fight back, any anger on my part toward my mother might well have spurred her to kill me.  So NOT feeling angry was a protection.  Why feel ANGER toward someone or something I could do NOTHING about?

Anger is itself one of the stages (I believe) of the trauma survival response cycle.  It is a step around on the circle of the stress response.  When we feel anger we are SUPPOSED to be able to poke around in our proverbial box of survival coping skills so we can find one we can apply in a new and different — and exactly effective way — to get out of a traumatic mess.

My entire body-self well knew by age 9 that I had no way out and nobody to help me get out.  So anger would have been worse than useless.

OK, so knowing that — what next can I discover in my ponderings?  Do I remember these snippets I mention here because I had no wall of inner rage to intervene between me and my true spiritual-soul essential self?  I certainly had no conscious thought of “Mother is so wrong.  I am so right!”

Nope.  Couldn’t have had those thoughts.

But perhaps it was my good and noble self that felt the verbal blows in these memories — I do not remember anything physical being done to me regarding these ‘events’.  Mother’s attacks — did I feel a new sense of humiliation at age 9 that I had never felt before?  After all, I had been abused — and viciously verbally abused — since birth.  What would be different about these words on these occasions?

Maybe I was naturally gathering some mental powers just by the fact that I had managed to stay alive this long — 9 whole years.  Just because these powers had certainly not reached the level of my conscious awareness so that I could self-reflect did not mean these mental powers weren’t there.

Did I remember these things and stuff them in some memory-retaining bottle and toss them into the sea of time so that I could find them yet again, this time in my writing now 50 years later and decipher my own inner meaning in them?

Very possibly……

At this stage of my pondering I haven’t ‘gotten IT yet’.  I haven’t felt an inner sense of “Oh, THAT’S why I remembered them!”  I don’t have the piece of information I suspect is connected to these memories — yet.

What I can say is these memories stand as milestones along the pathway of my child development that let me know clearly that by age 9 my mother had STILL been completely unable to penetrate through the protection I had around my inner, own good and noble self.  I had not really BOUGHT any of the toxic poison she had been dumping on me since I was born.

Certainly Mother hurt me.  But not the INNER me?  I’ll say, “She had not changed me, my essential me.  I was still completely grounded in standing within my own self — knowing the difference between good and bad, right and wrong — though I could not in ANY way articulate that I knew this.”

Part of what is so affirming to me in my struggle now to tell my own coherent life story over the passage of time is that who I know myself to be NOW as a good and noble person is exactly who I innately and instinctively knew I was all the way through my abusive childhood.

I am so grateful!

In essence this means that when we consider ANY situation of child abuse it is critically important to recognize the good that is ALWAYS also present.  For sure, one fundamental FACT is that this goodness will ALWAYS be found in the heart of the child (the survivor)!!

I am reminded of my long ago (1980) 7-week in-patient ‘treatment’ for addiction.  When it came to the step’s words “restore me to sanity” I truthfully told my therapist that would not be possible.  Even though then, I was 30, I had no concept that I was a child abuse survivor, I at least had the first glimmer of light go on about this abuse:  I knew there had never been any sanity in my life to go back to.  I knew that to ‘restore’ something that never existed was impossible.

My therapist very UNHELPFULLY told me I was using the defense ‘mechanism of intellectualizing and rationalizing’.  Now thinking about THIS I feel anger.  But that was all my therapist knew – that was her ignorance and limitations.

Today, for the very first time in my thinking I can clearly see that, yes, I CAN now think in terms of ‘recovery’ — because I now know clearly and exactly what I am ‘going back’ to recover:  My own perfectly pure, noble and good self that was preserved within me as a child — no matter what abuse was done to me.

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I have always had a collection of short memories from this school year.  Our dinner table was placed under a ceiling light that had a large glass globe over the bulb.  I was sitting next to my little sister, Sharon.  One night at the start of dinner the globe came crashing down nearly on my little sister’s head.  Barely missing her and pounded down on the edge of her dinner plate in such a way that the plate tipped away from her and acted like a shield that protected her as it projected the glass pieces so that they fell harmlessly to the floor past her body.  (Someone in the apartment before us had not screwed it back on correctly when a bulb was changed.)

Her words gashed and slashed me – on these occasions that I remember – worse than anything she could have done to hurt my body.  Why do I remember these so clearly?  What was so different or ‘special’ about them that they have always stood out in my mind?

We were all watching Beverly Hillbillies on TV.  I made the mistake of enjoying myself in thinking something on the show was funny.  I laughed.  Big mistake!  Mother immediately seared me with, “You stupid, stupid girl, Linda!  Nobody but you could be so stupid as to think this stupid show is actually funny?  Don’t you know they use canned laughter in this show.  It’s not even real.  Nobody but you would think that was actually funny, let alone laugh at it!  Go to your room!  I can’t stand the sight of you!  I don’t want you anywhere near me.”  Etc., etc…..

One night Mother was sitting in the living room when she asked, “Linda, go check in the freezer and see how much ice cream we have.”  So I did, and reported back to her, “There is a whole half gallon of ice cream.”

She sliced me with, “What?  A whole half gallon?  You stupid girl!  If there is a full half gallon then there is just that – a HALF GALLON of ice cream left!  Don’t you know anything?”  Etc., etc……  I did not mean to be stupid or ‘make her’ mad at me on occasions such as these, but I had no defense inside of myself to NOT let Mother hurt me.  These are just tiny examples of how her hatred of me flew at me out of nowhere – at any time, on any occasion – that I could not anticipate, expect or guard against.

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My only complaint with the WordPress blog theme format I have chosen is that it makes a very poor attempt at making comments made to any of the nearly 1000 posts on Stop the Storm very difficult to find unless a reader happens to catch them as links to incoming comments/replies listed along the right side of the Home page as they come in.  If there are multiple comments/replies coming in on one day the links to them vanish off the bottom of the list very quickly.  The only way readers can access them is if they happen to pursue a particular Google search of terms that lands them on the posts where the comments are listed.

This blog was never designed JUST for discussion about abusive Borderline Personality Disorder parents.  Because my mother DID fit this category the weight of much of the information on Stop the Storm is accumulating about exactly this topic.  But this blog is about stopping the transmission of intergenerational (intragenerational) trauma — no matter what the trauma stems from specifically and no matter how it has been transmitted.  BPD is only one of the possible ‘side effects’ of trauma.

In some important ways I believe Cinderella’s comments provide an important bridge between nonBorderline child abuse and Borderline child abuse.  The writings I am highlighting here shed some light on how these two ‘streams of trauma’ can appear within a trauma-related discussion.

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Therefore on occasion I have to copy important comments/replies into a new post to make them perhaps a little more accessible to readers as time marches forward — and the new links disappear off the side of the blog!

Today I want to highlight new comment/reply on this post:

+THE ORDERED GRID INSIDE AN ABUSIVE BORDERLINE’S WORLD

Comment by Cinderella:

Linda,
Have you studied the “structures” that mind control victims have installed to control them? They are very similar to what you are describing and are an integral part of the dissociation process……

This is sort of a jumping off point if you haven’t studied this before.
http://lynnsart.net/library/government-documents/

Not saying your mother was a victim of MKULTRA, but the mechanisms are similar in my opinion.

My reply:

Well, I bet this all leads in a dark direction!

Thanks, and I forwarded this to my daughter. I cannot examine external thought while I work on this stage of the book writing.

I began my deep investigative research into what was ‘wrong’ with me about 8 years ago now, and started with my long-standing history of reading memoirs of people who had been POWs and/or captives during the communist takeover of China.

When I went back to those readings and followed the thread of my own thoughts I found that Mother used every single mind control tool the ‘professionals’ did.

I came to the conclusion that the ‘playing board’ of the human mind has parameters and patterns of functioning that are common to us all. There would be, therefore, only so many effective ways to manipulate those patterns of functioning.

That my mother instinctively knew all those ways and used them on me didn’t/doesn’t surprise me.

I have to go backwards in my book-writing (I realized yesterday) and put into the text something along these lines because in my linear examination of my childhood I now know where ‘this’ belongs and where ‘this’ started (as far as I know!).

Shortly after an abuse ‘incident’ was added to Mother’s litany when I was 7 that was another ‘proof’ that I didn’t want to grow up and that I wanted to remain a ‘baby’ — Mother began this completely bizarre and extremely effective mind-control technique.

Especially during the months of time our family was dragging ourselves on foot up (and then down in the morning) the horrible mountain road to our homestead, thus contributing to my great exhaustion after a long day at school in between, there were times when my sleep was profoundly deep. If Mother came to ‘examine’ me while I was sleeping (she examined me with her Evil Eye every opportunity she could for 18 years), and found me sleeping on my back with both of my arms raised up beside my head, she would grab my hair and drag me off my bed from this sound sleep as she beat me for ‘sleeping like a baby – (you want to be a baby, etc. which was actually a refrain invented for Mother’s abuse litany when I was 20 months old). She would be fully launched into her pattern of abuse litany recital that brought her verbal abuse rhythm into the pounding of her blows.

As I say, there is something profoundly ‘different’ about the mind of a severe Borderline abusive parent! I won’t read anything anyone has written about anything until my own life story narrative is coherent and complete!

That also includes, by the way, the new book I reserved before print and bought that is still in its box:

The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) [Hardcover]
by Stephen W. Porges

http://www.amazon.com/Polyvagal-Theory-Neurophysiological-Communication-Self-regulation/dp/0393707008/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314114259&sr=1-1

I will get to it when I can — but not now — yet I thank you greatly for the link!!

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I also want to highlight something from today on this post:  +#1 SYMPTOM OF BPD = CANNOT PARENT CORRECTLY

Cinderella’s comment that begins “I don’t know that my mother was BPD. She was never diagnosed, never saw a therapist. I don’t know what she was like with my siblings….not really...” can be found there along with my reply:

“Bad enough that I can’t tell the stories to people because they blanch and tune out. They can’t take it and telling them traumatizes them which is unfair.”

To varying degrees I believe this is a common link for everyone who has an insecure attachment disorder due to inadequate bonding in safe and secure earliest caregiving relationships. The primary contributing causes to child abuse stem from those earliest interactions before the age of two that determine the physiological direction our body-brain takes in the beginning (hence building insecure attachment to others, self and world right into our nervous system/vagus nerve system — or not). (Google search: stop the storm vagus nerve)

One of the keys to unlocking the door of adult healing is to admit to ourselves there are things that happened to us in our early life that we either cannot remember because we – well, CANNOT remember by fact or by choice. Either physiologically the memories are outside the range of conscious retrieval or we simply cannot EMOTIONALLY afford to remember — just as so many people cannot afford to hear the stories we are able to tell.

I encounter this fine line continually as I work on my book writing about my childhood. How often I allude to trauma and abuse and then turn away immediately without crossing this line. My own line I tell myself is, “Who in their right mind would want to hear this?”

I will probably leave some readers angry at my refusal to recount graphic descriptions of abuse. Those accounts are not what I am after. I am searching for my own self as I followed my own life path anyway, in direct opposition to what Mother would have wanted. But though she profoundly impacted how I felt and what I knew as her abused child, she could not touch ME — my essential self.

Cinderella, my guess is that if your mother had been Borderline you would have known it. How she endured what she did and DID NOT end up with this illness might be a mystery — but to me it’s always a matter of being so limited, in the end, no matter how much we try to understand another person or even our own self — of not having enough of the most important information.

This has to do, most simply, with beginning to understand clearly NOT ONLY the risk factors that early trauma creates but also the RESILIENCY factors that allow life to continue on in the face of overwhelming odds.

Perhaps what can be seen with Borderline is this: When all other possible resources are used for an infant-child to cope with and survive early severe trauma are used up, then the last line of defense is that physiological development will reach for the genetic tools in a survivor’s DNA and use them — sacrificing conscious awareness and creating such an alternative brain functioning that a twisted mind that lives in an alternative reality is the end result.

Borderline Personality Disorder creates an additional level of horror for children being raised by one because of this special kind of twistedness that happens on the level of the MIND itself. Many patterns of abuse and torment done against infant-children can be the same between Borderline and non-Borderline parents, but I believe it is the bizarre and twisted MENTAL level of the abuse — as it is happening in a universe of absolute and true insane MADNESS — that can complicate the healing work for Borderline parent abuse survivors.

This just means that, as you say, the perspective needed to heal just needs to include the right information for the right ‘crimes’.

I am happy to read your words and know that there are others that comprehend the value of looking at the much bigger picture of child abuse and trauma. Doing so in no way ‘excuses’ or ‘justifies’ any abuse of any kind perpetrated against children. But humans are members of a social species and none of us live in a social vacuum. Neither do we miraculously appear on this earth to raise ourselves Scott-free of any parental influence — be it wise or wounded.

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And my second reply today to Cinderella:

I would also like to thank you for the concept you introduced that I am already finding myself using in my thinking: “parental unit.”

Readers of my material, probably flowing all the way forward into the readers of the book my daughter and I are writing, question my lack of ability to begin to address my father.

I don’t foresee myself making much progress on that front. I only have so much energy for my work, and I seem to lack what it would take to apply my investigative curiosity much in his direction.

At least thinking about Mother and Father as a ‘parental unit” allows me to now think in terms of a new level of wholeness about them and about how they BOTH interacted within the social environment of my family of origin TOGETHER so that so much trauma and abuse could occur.

I also realize that exactly where I ended my book-writing work yesterday is where I jumped over and left out a very small — but probably important example of how those two interacted with one another. Today when I go back to that writing I will choose NOW to include a small reference to the small example I skipped yesterday.

My mother wrote in a letter to her mother that she took $50 out of the family budget that could NOT be afforded and bought herself a maternity wardrobe for the unplanned pregnancy of their 5th child. She wrote that her husband ‘freaked out’ (my words, will find her exact words when I go back to the letter).

I have a memory and I am not at all sure this was the exact moment in time that my memory is attached to, of my mother once buying a purple dress. My father hated purple. This man who so RARELY EVER directly expressed his own feelings including anger, took the dress away from her and threw it in the trash.

In light of the insanity and abuse in my childhood this seems like such a tiny event — and it was. But in light of your words ‘parental unit’ it enlightens me. Yet it also interests me that I am so unwilling to invest any more thought than a simple mention into what this kind of a pattern of interaction might have indicated. That was THEIR stuff and I so far can’t make myself care.

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This entire blog is being hosted by a singled-out severe abuse survivor of a severe Borderline Personality Disorder mother.  As that survivor, who lived from the first breath I took until the day 18 years long years later that I was expunged (escaped) my home of origin, Mother targeted her abuse on me of the six children she gave birth to.

I am working on writing my childhood story.  Most  abused children of Borderlines mothers are being given an Insecure Attachment Disorder at the same time they are being abused.  The only way this is prevented is if there is one other primary caregiver that can and does provide safe and secure attachment relationship opportunities during PRIMARILY the first two years of life.  I BARELY had these ‘other’ attachment experiences.  The primary one was with my brother who was 13 1/2 months old when I was born.

Every person — and that’s easily about half of our population — who did not experience safe and secure attachment with their earliest caregivers during their most critical early body-brain developmental stages before the age of two does have some version of an Insecure Attachment Disorder.  (There is a wealth of information on the net and on this blog about ‘attachment’.  Google search “stop the storm” attachment” and “stop the storm trauma altered development” for some background on this topic.)

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In reply to the fantastic comments that are coming in on the topic of child abusing Borderline parents I want to share here the bottom line discovery I was forced to make in order to begin to work my way through my own 18 years of child abuse as the singled-out target of my severe Borderline mother.

As said many times on this blog, the number one symptom of all Insecure Attachment Disorders is the inability of a survivor to tell a coherent narrative of their life story.

While I have written snippets and vignettes of abuse incidents that happened to me, I am actually tackling the impossible by working now to force a linear-based coherency upon my insanely abusive dissociated infant-childhood.

I immediately realized as I began my book-writing that I needed to find the structure under my Borderline mother’s treatment of me — and underneath the entire series of repeating patterns of ‘mad’ behavior that formed her tragic, tragic life (and death in 2002).

I found this structure.  I have been ‘blessed’ with material to work with that is among the worst of the worst — to be ‘bettered’ only by a story in which the Borderline mother butchered her children.  Because those dead offspring can tell no tale at all, what I know is probably the next best thing.

Because I inherited — quite accidentally on my mother’s part but I believe with full intent by ‘destiny’ — all of my mother’s surviving papers and photographs, my book will include my abusive Borderline mother’s words along with my own.  What I am doing is separating myself and my story from my mother — who had only one Borderline when it came to me.

Because I have ordered and carefully transcribed Mother’s own words I have the rare opportunity of being able to track the patterns of her madness not only in what I can remember about what happened to me, but I also have the patterns of Mother’s mind as recorded in her own words going back nearly 70 years with her childhood stories.

Those patterns, when examined with meticulous and compassionate care have revealed to me a very well defined grid upon which her madness was constructed.  I have created my own GPS that allows me to locate myself in space and time on that grid — so I can, in effect, ‘take a look around’.

Yes, her Borderline world was strange, bizarre and foreign, but it was not without order and organization.  What her illness did as it entirely changed the way her body-brain developed during her early critical growth stages in her own environment of malevolent maltreatment, was to find an extremely creative and affective antidote to the most severe form of Insecure Attachment Disorder there is:  Disorganized-Disoriented Insecure Attachment Disorder.

Her trauma altered developmental pathway included the activation (I believe) of a very specific combination of genetic potential for survival that I do not believe would have been activated had she not suffered extreme traumatic stress in her early development birth to two, and then through the age of five.  (Her disorder is fully operational in her age 9 and 10 childhood stories.)

Neuroscientists now have the technological ability to watch a Borderline brain in operation — in fact, I fully believe the disorder can be accurately and immediately diagnosed from these scans.

Any attempt those of us want to make from the outside must understand that we are not able to ‘understand’ a Borderline — especially an abusive one — using any knowledge that does not take into account that their brains and their nervous system DOES NOT OPERATE in an ordinary or normal way.

Not to consider this fact actually makes the rest of us nuts.

To a Borderline such as my mother was, her universe was perfectly ordered and structured.  I now have a solid, though rudimentary understanding, of what her grid looked like and how her universe operated.  If I had not been able to learn this piece of information there is no chance in the known universe that I could begin to orient and organize my OWN SELF as the recipient of continual and severe, chronic abuse I received from Borderline Mother.

I am not sure I want to write much – yet – about what this grid was like and why it was formed the way that it was.  I will say that the visual image of what operated on this grid occurs as pyramid structures that are actually matrices that govern the way Mother’s Borderline realities operated.

Each of the pyramid matrix ‘forms’ have four base points.  The fifth point entailed a verbal litany — verbal abuse — that fed the energy through the matrix systems.

The pyramid matrix that an abusing-one-child Borderline uses, I believe, can be tracked of course to earliest trauma in the Borderline’s childhood.  These matrix pyramidal patterns upon the pattern of the Borderline grid make perfect sense once we on the outside let go of how WE think and begin to understand we are looking at a universe that is of a completely different kind.

A Borderline universe of realities does make perfect sense inside of them.  Their inner structure has its own strictly adhered to rules that govern it.  We can discover what these rules are and then use a GPS with an orientation that allows we survivors of their severe abuse to keep track of our own self in the present as we travel back in time to find the story that ran through our own self in an abusive Borderline’s world.

In my book writing I am now days away from my 9th birthday……

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In response to this post:

+FANTASTIC COMMENTS COMING IN ON ABUSING BORDERLINE PARENTS

which contains the link to comments at the end of this post:

+#1 SYMPTOM OF BPD = CANNOT PARENT CORRECTLY

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Please take a look at the incoming fantastic comments at the end of this post about abusing Borderline parents (look down there at the end of the tag/category listing in green at the end of the post if you don’t see the comments when you first find this page):

+#1 SYMPTOM OF BPD = CANNOT PARENT CORRECTLY

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Dear Friends,

I don’t want to be the person who has this story to tell.  I don’t want to be the person trying this hard to tell it, either.  I don’t want this story.  Period.

I don’t want this sleepless night.  I don’t want these tears.  I don’t want this pain inside that I know will never go away as long as I live.  The best I do on the good days I try so hard to have, one after the other, is to try as hard as I can not to remember, not to remember who I really am.

On the good days I write about courage.  I write about bravery, about being a hero, about enduring, about surviving.  I write about all sorts of things that do not tell my story.  This decision that I made, this commitment I have made in my own heart, this that I pray for every day of my life — “Please God, help me help someone else.”  This prayer, knowing there are millions upon millions of people suffering on this planet.  This prayer, knowing there are human beings all over this globe that suffer.  This prayer, knowing there are, worst of all, parents who have brought children into this world only to reject, abuse and hurt them.

I have hoped somehow that if I can be one of the people who can tell my story of 18 years of suffering child abuse in one coherent line that I can prove against all odds that this impossible task can be done.  I am one that knows that my mother’s story of trauma, neglect and abuse in her own childhood was too much of a story for her.  It broke her.  It broke her in so many pieces that nobody could ever count them all, let alone help her put them all back together again.  Her story was too big.

The broken woman that she was hurt me very badly.  I have never been able to say that she knew what she did to me.  Do parents who do more than the occasional WRONG act of violence on any level of any kind to a child know what they are doing?  Is what they are doing forgotten even as the act is being committed?   Neuroscience can say this can be true.

But if I am going to move forward now in my book writing into what I know is a new era in my development when I passed my 9th birthday I will not be able to count on, depend on or really even use any single piece of outside information from any source anywhere to help me.  Other than God.

And I am afraid.

Tonight, not being able to sleep, all the sleepless nights filled with tears of my childhood are roaring around outside my house.  Those nights scream in the silence I have forced upon them.  I don’t want to remember that, “Yes, Linda.  There were entire nights you were forced to stand in a corner.  All night.  All night long while the rest of the family was asleep in their beds.  All night you stood there alone in the darkness, terrified to move, terrified to sit down, aching in body from blow after blow after blow – too many to be counted — upon your small thin body.”

I don’t want to know my own story.  As I continue to write for the book I am progressing in age to encounter ‘the one who remembers to forget’.

Dare I bother her, tap her on the shoulder where she stands alone in a corner in the darkness to ask for her story?  Will she tell me, as my body memory is telling me tonight, how tired I was!  How tired past endurance I was standing there all night, and yet I did endure — but tonight that fact gives me no glory.  There is no applause at the end of such a night.  No fame, glory or fortune.

There is suffering, the kind that never goes away, never gets shared and if we are lucky, never appears in any memories with words.

Where are you tonight around this globe, suffering children?  Who is hurting you?  How can I help you?  How can those of us with compassion in our cells awaken a caring in enough others that maltreatment of children will end?

I have vowed to tell my story because somehow I hope somehow it will help others who suffer.  But I am afraid.  I am afraid I will disappear again into that void I knew so well with my mother as my mother.

Yet I see today that I will not always be able to count on the light of insight to guide my way through this book writing.  There are times back then that were so wrong and so dark that I’m not sure any light on earth would have been powerful enough to illuminate what my mother held in her heart against me — so sick was she.

“I grew up.  I escaped.  Isn’t that enough?”  I ask.  “But the ‘me’ that made it through, doesn’t she have something to offer to help someone else?”

What do I have to lose by trying as hard as I can to remember myself in my own life other than sleep and kleenex?

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The context for my Borderline Mother’s letters will be clear in the book being written, but I couldn’t pass up posting this one that Mother wrote to her mother just before my 9th birthday.  The context — well — it’s so staggeringly BORDERLINE it nearly defies belief.  No, it DOES defy belief!!

This letter provides a tiny, tiny snippet of the kind of self-eroding verbal, emotional, and psychological abuse that was so much a constant part of the fabric of my family of origin that NOBODY questioned it.  It had been there from the moment I was born.

Having just left our mountain homestead for the winter, we moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Anchorage (the 6 of us, with no furniture).  Mother had just found out she was pregnant with her 5th child.  Youngest sister was 5, next sister 7, me turning 9, brother had just turned 10.  I added the bold type face, italicized words are Mother’s:

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August 25, 1960 Thursday

          Bill had to go on a two day trip suddenly for his work – so I had to come in to the apartment on the 23^rd.  (We only have one cot and three sleeping bags here!)  I was so sick when we left I forgot the fourth bag for John and the girls had to sleep in two with one across the bottom – on the hard floor!  Bill will gradually bring couch and chair down and will buy another set of Army bunk beds.  They’re only $20.00 for two.  It’s cheaper than $20.00 per month for furniture here all winter!! 

          But then we will need a double bed on the homestead and we sold two double beds at the beginning of summer when we moved from the log house for $20.00 each!  I was so sure we’d remain somehow at the homestead this winter and anyways had no place to store them and I was mad at everything and everybody when Bill announced he was going on a trip I accused him of asking to go.  He says he didn’t.

          I said I wish I were a man.  He had left Wednesday at 6:00 P.M. and got home at 8:00 – trying to find a home for the goat, rabbits, etc. and no luck yet!  I was terribly sick all day and just lay in bed in that hut all day – felt horrible, useless, and mean for first time.  [Yeah, right, “mean for the first time!”  My GOD, how deluded she was!]

          Well, we had to come in to the apartment and I was sick from the ride and lay here on an Army cot all day!  Oh-h I was sick and Mom I’m enormous already and only two months along. 

          Well, next day – yesterday I felt better and did a month’s wash and hung it in basement and all over to dry.  That’s done now!!

           Bill got home late last night from his trip and we decided he should go home [to the homestead] with John and bring a load back.  No money.  For the first time broke – no gas money at all.  This month as I wrote you has been murder!!

          Oh Mom you encourage me and lately I’ve been so discouraged!!  I’ve wondered if we did right in bringing children to Alaska.  With baby coming I feel so different and yearn so for a home.  I hate our children sleeping on the floor – ever!!  Oh, how I pray our dreams will come true.

          Well, to get back to last night!  (Bill hates me to wind in and out like this) but you understand.  Well, he and John left for the homestead and I went to bed.  Later, in they came – Jeep wouldn’t start so Bill had to sleep on the bare floor.

          Oh Mom.  I’m so worried over Smokey.  We fed them well when we left (her with ten pups) and she’s so thin now – how I adore her – oh Mom, it’s been over forty eight hours.  I feel awful.  Bill is at the garage now.  I must get dressed too.  He says it’s the battery.  I didn’t use it at all (it hardly runs and we drive 20 MPH and it kills both of us).  We hardly make the hills and have to put it in four-wheel low range to get home.  It needs an engine – it’s gone!  Damn!

          I’ve been so blue and can’t get excited over baby – feel awful, but can’t.

          Kindergarten will be $20.00 a month and Sharon is going!  It is 9:00 to 11:30 and a teacher with twenty years’ experience – only two blocks away.  It will get me up and out and I’ll write from 9:00 to 11:00 – two hours every day – come hell or high water!!  Then we’ll see what comes of that!

          The principal at Government Hill School was ever so pleased we were returning.  The school is lovely and I’m so glad for all but especially for dear Cindy after her hectic first year and she did so well.  She’s so mature – but needs love and attention but never asks for it or seeks it out.  But she and Linda will go to Brownies.

          LATER – Bill got the Jeep running and left – so will write while girls eat and then I’ll get dressed. I’ve enrolled Sharon in kindergarten.  It will be $20.00 a month.  She’s ready but still is babyish and I guess somewhat spoiled (certainly not by Daddy!)  He’s just the opposite with her than he was with Linda.  Critical, never plays with her and how she adores him.  Of course his mind is on other things!!  Well, she’s a living doll – a real lovely!!  And so affectionate and smart!

          John to Scouts but he doesn’t do his achievements.  Still lacks three for his Bear badge – of course with me sick I’ve given little encouragement to any.

          Linda – oh, what can I say?  She’s her own selfish self when it comes to sharing or getting along with others.  Loves to help me and is a help and I tell her so.  She’s very unlike me and lacks the warmth of Cindy and Sharon and must be shown the way inch by inch (but then so does Bill.)  Of course, she’s a smart girl in school – all A’s and loves it.  I can see her as a woman engineer and she’ll never mind leaving her kids with a sitter.  While it would break Cindy’s heart.  She’s a homebody.

Oh, yes, her hate-full, spite-full, loathing, scathing, despising, cold, heartless words I KNOW were full of such cruelty to me set my blood to BOILING!  If my face were any more puckered up in any tighter of a frown right now I would not be able to see out of my squinting eyes.  I always struggle with my own disbelief.  How was it possible for a mother to hate a child as much as she hated me?  All of the intelligent logic I apply to understanding the dynamics between Mother and me never really helps me.  I was too small and her hatred of me was too big.

Yes, to keep her Borderline world functioning at all she had to keep me in that hate-filled corner of her inner core matrix.  She HAD to hate me.  She NEEDED to hate me.  Her survival and the good of her family depended on her continued hatred of me – no matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried to ‘be good’.

I had no choice but to ‘help’ my mother, and only in those actions was there any possible hope of pleasing her even a little, tiny bit.  Her chores for me:  An entire universe of madness in itself!  Mother confined me to captivity with the chores, with keeping me as close to her as she possibly could – in the house – without play – without contact with anybody else.

Knowing how she adored her other children doesn’t help.  Her rejection of me at the same time she worshiped her other children, that ALONE escalated my despairing sadness.  Today it just plain pisses me off!

Mother never hesitated to fill her days and the days and evenings of her family with the kind of talk she wrote in those few words in this letter to my grandma just six days before my ninth birthday.

How could my siblings not, as the little children that they were, bask in the warmth of our crazy mother’s affections for them?  I see the picture now.  I see that I paid for every little tiny bit of goodness they received from her with my life – with nearly all of myself that she could not manage to find a way to bash into oblivion.  Only because Mother could keep me in the hell she created just for me at the special center of her inner Borderline hell could she function at all.

I would have to approach this reality, my reality so closely NOW to be able to find the words I need to express what that reality was.  I don’t want to go that close!  Nobody in their right mind would want to go that close!  I affirm and compliment myself, then, in my dissatisfaction with how I write about myself in my childhood.  NOT doing this writing NOW – perfectly – happens because I wisely – in my right mind — keep myself safe.

          Sharon is a darling butterfly and ever so social.  John is still so shy!  Sharon isn’t – she loves other children, people and clothes!!

          All so different.  John is OK – he is at a growing age and really he’s closer to Bill at this age.  He’s so pleased about baby and hopes still for a brother!!  — After all these years.  He was most understanding while I was sick.  The girls were –?  He would say, “How can you giggle and laugh so loud when Mom is so sick?”  He’s dear!!

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Every person passes through the gates of childhood.  All of us experienced a beginning, a long middle of one sort or another, and then an end to this block of passing time.  Some people exit childhood smoothly as they graduate into a new world where their decisions are their own and there is nobody left to blame either for what goes right or for what goes wrong.  Others never quite cross that bridge as we are left in an unclear place of confusion and tangled perceptions that leave us forever standing at one gate unable to enter completely through the next one.

Because the early experiences of our life build the body-brain we will spend our entire lifetime existing in, the nature and quality of those experiences affect all of us profoundly.  The differences between us happen not only through our individual genetics and innate personality.  Our differences are also greatly impacted by the quality of the earliest relationships that told our genetics and our personality what kind of a world it was that we were born into and hence likely to live the rest of our lifetime residing in.  It was the nature of our early relationships that formed who we were as we exited — or tried to exit — the end gate of our childhood.

Those of us who were raised by people who didn’t know what they were doing — like I was — can spend the rest of our lifetime struggling to overcome the obstacles that were put in our way to living in a state of happy, calm well-being.  Our ability to make wise and therefore healthy choices was hampered by the exorbitant amount of stress chemicals dumped into our growing body during our most critical stages of early development.  This process of reacting to trauma in early life changes how the body-brain develops.

Humans, as members of a social species, are designed to respond on every possible level to the signals our attachment relationships to other people give us from the time we are conceived.  Access to healthy human attachment relationships builds healthy (and therefore happy) people.  Access to troubled, toxic and scary terrorist people gives us — in our BODY — fewer choice options throughout our lifetime.

Those of us, and we all know who we are, who were presented with stumbling blocks rather than with helpful boosts forward in our early years enter a second arena of growth that ordinary people do not.  We enter another stage in our lifetime — if we are most fortunate — that is a stage of healing.  Minimizing and ignoring the truth about how the most important people in our early life treated us is not helpful to our healing process.  Neither is hating them.  Healing is about learning, willingness to grapple with harsh realities, and about allowing the process of positive change to unfold in all possible areas of our life.

But this healing stage takes time, just as did our period of life we call our childhood.  True, all adults can encounter hardships in the later stages of life.  But those who were hampered by trauma and abuse in their earliest developmental stages of infancy and childhood will NEVER process future difficulties in life the same way that they would have if their childhood had not been one of ATTACK rather than one of ASSIST.

My current take on all of this is that the essential nature of who a person is actually comes out of any kind of childhood — good or bad — on equal ground — at the center of who we are.

HOW that center self (I call our soul that was called into being by God at the moment of our conception) can learn and express itself throughout a lifetime is GREATLY — and often permanently — changed through harm in childhood.  Being able to distinguish the center core self from the trauma-changed-in-its-development BODY is critical to our healing and well-being if we came from an early relationship environment that hurt us greatly.

I left the gate of my first 18 years of life not a little bit hurt, but massively wounded.  If I had not been so strong and tough — and so curious and willing and able to MOVE FORWARD in my life NO MATTER WHAT — I would not be alive today.  Of that I am certain.

I was both lucky and blessed when I entered my adult life.  But I was ALSO completely LOST!  I had it to my advantage that I instinctively knew I had to learn how to play-act my way through a life that evidently was full of people.  I knew NOTHING about who people were, truly.  My childhood had not taught me that.  In fact, it had taught me the opposite.

So more like an autistic person than an ordinary one, I learned to watch, to mimic and to pretend I was like everyone else.  I didn’t know what I was missing.  And it is far more comforting and comfortable for members of a social species to ‘fit in’ and be ‘the same as’ others of our species than it is to appear as a ‘different’ outsider.  This is true no matter how a culture claims to value individuality and uniqueness.

But saying we are like other people does not make this sameness true.  The quantum leaps in my healing in my ‘later years’ as I approach my 60th birthday happen because I am now able to stare straight into my own eyes and see how the bizarre, trauma-filled confusion of my first 18 years of life made me a very unusual person who is simply NOT like most other people and never will be.

Infant and child abuse survivors are extremely unique people!  Hiding our uniqueness from ourselves and from others does not make us well — it makes us sicker.  We are rare gems of all kinds of human intelligence all the way down to our molecular DNA level.  We became extremely special people in order to survive the unsurvivable during the time we spent preparing for the rest of our life between the two gates of our childhood.

We have gifts ordinary people can’t imagine.  Most of us don’t begin to imagine them either because we have been so misguidedly busy trying to fit in, hide our uniqueness, denying what really happened to us and how we were able to adapt ourselves to make it through horrendous infancies and childhoods not only INTACT — but also being extremely SPECIAL.

As far as I know the so-called mental health profession spends all of its time looking for what is ‘wrong’ so that early severe trauma survivors can be changed to be more and more like ‘ordinary’ people.  Who among those professionals spends any serious time helping survivors examine what makes them unique and extraordinary people who endured what only a miracle of resiliency — us — could endure?

Survivors’ journey through the adult stages of their lifetime will be as unique (I am not saying harmful!) as was their journey through the first stage of life.  I say it’s time to dig our own gems out of the mucky silt, wash them off and find out how they glisten!  If our more ordinary non-traumatized fellow citizens then drool over our brilliance, we can show them the loving compassion that nobody — or so very few — showed us when we needed it most.

But nobody is going to find our gifts for us.  That is our own task of healing.

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I am discovering something important as I take my first piano lessons as I near my 60th birthday:  The mountain of my mother’s verbal abuse of me is still here inside of me.  Never in all my adult life have I heard my Borderline Mother’s verbal condemnations against me so clearly as I have been during my first stages of working my way through my piano practice.  If I list any of what I am ‘hearing’ it will be in the pages of the book I am writing, not here.  In fact, I don’t want to face them at all — but I do want to learn to read music and play music.

I am noting this experience here because I am now suspecting that those words have been working against me all of my life in ways that I have never even guessed at.  I also have new concerns that they are working against me through all of my writing efforts, as well.  I am humbled to realize that her words are still a part of my body-brain-mind.  They come to me as clearly as they would if I were still a child and my mother was beside me, or more likely, towering behind me every time I sit with my fingers on those keys.

In order to learn to read music, to play, really PLAY with this music I am finding ways to erase those words at least from my conscious awareness.  But I am not at all sure her words are actually gone from me.  After all, they have must have always been there somewhere or they wouldn’t be showing up now.  They are horrible.  They are appalling.  They are wicked and mean and evil words against me.  They are words I heard in some version or form every single day of the first 18 years of my life (perhaps with the one two-month exception noted in my most recent posts).

Her words were (and are) life-stopping words.  They are well-being stopping words.  They are happiness stopping words.  THEY ARE HER WORDS, and I need to tell myself that continually every time they appear.  Her words are music killing words.  They are joy deadening words.  Her words are thieves that steal me, my passion, my desire, my hope and my belief in my own potential and right to be happy away from my self.

It might be easy for me to mouth some simplistic rhetoric about how they are ‘lies’, about how I replace them with positive rhetoric of my own, how I can ignore them, etc. ad infinitum.  The fact of the matter is that my mother’s words must still be so much of how I know myself in the world that I must barely recognize and know my true own self at all.

That is tragic.  That is heartbreaking.  And, that astounds me!

After all this time, after all these years have passed in my life, how could it be that my mother’s VOICE — and yes, I don’t hear just her words, I hear her VOICE (How sad is that?) — HER VOICE saying those abuse litany words as I move my eyes over these sheets of simple music before me, as I stumble my fingers over these keys.

Her words were always meant to stop me from being happy at the same time they were meant to keep me from knowing myself.  There is nobody who I can hire to come teach me to erase Mother’s words from my brain-mind like I can hire someone to come to my home and teach me how to learn music.  I have to learn this part for myself, and I am learning it.

At first I thought I had to get my OWN critical self out of the way so I can learn piano.  Now I realize I have to get my very ill and long dead mother out of my way.  I feel like every cell in my body was branded with those words, and no matter how many times those cells have died and reproduced themselves over these years, brain cells do not do that.  They remember remember remember remember……..

Verbal abuse is deadly.  Researchers are discovering that verbal abuse is worse for a child than any other single form of child abuse.  (Google search:  “stop the storm verbal abuse” for some of the posts on this blog on this subject.)

These researchers are not lying.  This experience I am having as I learn to play music is excruciatingly real, as well.  I am glad I have finally seen how those words are still a part of me — but I don’t know that I can find a way to keep them from creating the same toxic interference with my writing that they showed the power to do with my music.

I suspect that perhaps learning keyboard has awakened the voice of the sleeping Mother Monster that was beaten into me because it so thoroughly invokes, awakes, and involves BOTH left and right brain hemispheres.  Learning is a vastly stimulating experience.  It shakes things up.  It re-forms people.  Learning rearranges people.  It changes them.  Learning makes us grow.  And some of us have to fight our way through and past such condemnation programmed into us from such an early age that it actually seems a miracle we can learn anything new at all!

I no longer wonder why I waited until I was this old to decide to learn something I have thought about wanting to learn all of my adult life.  I couldn’t let myself know how much I really wanted to learn music before now because I believe it is ONLY now that I am strong enough to battle my way through this learning PAST the horrible words that have attacked me in this piano/music learning process.

But I am happy to report that at the time of last evening’s practice I heard fewer of those hate filled words.  I felt less of a depth in the gashes of the lashes those words have always carved so close to my soul and so far from the range of my conscious awareness that they were even there.  I am not that mute and dumb to them  now.  They have forced their way right up to the surface perhaps in their programmed intention to STOP LINDA FROM BEING TRULY HAPPY!

Perhaps there has never been any better way for me to overcome the power Mother’s words have had over my entire life than to do and accomplish this one thing:  To be able to read and play and find great great joy in making music.

No longer does the black ink on white on music-filled pages look like chicken scratch to me.  I want to HEAR the sound that came from the minds of the people who wrote that music.  I personally can’t imagine any way to more closely KNOW a tiny piece of another person than to hear their music — as my own.  Maybe it will finally be the power THAT sound has that will finally erase for me the sound of my insanely abusive mom.

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I’m not sure I could be more thrilled!  I can almost play this on my keyboard, my very first song!  I’m Gonna Build a Mountain!  For me, nearing my 60^th birthday on the 31^st of this month, this is a REALLY BIG THRILL!  I am DOING IT!  I am learning to read music and play piano!

This has NOT been easy.  I am learning lots about myself, combined with what I am learning in my book writing.  When I found my 8 ½ year old self high on that Alaskan winter mountain with my Borderline mother in reprieve from her illness, I found a gem for my own crown.  That little girl, sad as she was, crushed as I was in so many ways, had a heart so pure it could shine back in fullness the pristine beauty of that wilderness.  And it is to my heart then, my pure, pure soul that I now look for my teacher who can love me enough to learn to play this instrument.

Once I understood the other full moon lit night that “I am not a self with a soul, I am a soul with a self” I got my most important priority straight.  My self, who had just barely begun to form itself by 8 ½ — less so than a normal child’s self would have formed by age two – did manage to grow itself as I have lived through my adulthood.  But that self is too well connected with the horrible verbal abuse I grew up under to help me learn something this new, this complex and this brain challenging.

My SOUL-heart, on the other hand, that heart I have had all of my life and that shone so brightly when I found myself on that mountain at age 8 ½, is full of natural love.  It is not harsh.  It is not condemning.  It is not judgmental.  It knows how to reward me with smiles.  It knows how to complement and encourage me through a difficult learning experience.  Yet as this love begins to flow like a dam has finally been unblocked, the learning itself is beginning to bring me true joy.

My self, who tried so hard to please a mother that could not be pleased – though I didn’t know it – was bewildered with rejection on a continual basis.  Except during those marvelous two months I wrote about in my previous post.  Now I see that I was, in effect, on a runway of my own, taxiing down it throughout my childhood so I could take off flying when I became an adult.

Only that just barely happened.  Somewhere along my way, and I will know more when and how this happened inside of myself as I move forward in the book writing, I found myself on a different runway taxiing of in a different direction.  It’s pretty hard to live through a literal HELL of a childhood and come into adulthood not having lost one’s way.

I could call what I am experiencing now healing, or change, or transformation – but it really is SHIFTING!  I am shifting my conscious center of my SELF from my wounded self that struggled so hard to come into existence at all over to my SOUL who is full of wisdom, love and pure kindness.  This SOUL-self of mine now can have true conversations with my other confused and struggling self – and together you can bet WE are going to learn to make music on piano keys!

I can feel both hemispheres of my brain, left and right, now cooperating with one another toward a shared common goal-for-good instead of my self working and battling my way toward a goal that – ironically – cannot be won without letting off the pressure that my learned self so well incorporated into me.  My LEARNING self now says, “Play your way through this, Linda.  With joy, play your way through this!  You can do it!  You will do it!”

I want these piano keys to be an extension of my entire self.  I am learning (and yes I have been blessed with the perfect piano teacher) exactly correctly as best I can the techniques that I can build and build and build on.  I know ‘the music’ is in me.  It has been in me all along.  My mother, though she didn’t even know it and could not stop herself, almost beat the music out of me, but because BOTH of me, my SOUL-heart self and my learned-self actually have a helluva beat shared together, there is nothing in me that will stop me now!

I am back on my own runway now — and if it took living all the way to this upcoming 60th birthday for me to find my own runway again, so be it.  I am grateful.  I value this learning now probably more than I ever could have as my my soul-heart-self puts itself/me back together again, had I been raised in a normal fashion.  I would have taken this miracle for granted.  Perhaps I am gaining what people my age are SUPPOSED to have — wisdom!

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