Tag: PTSD

+’DIS-ASSOCIATION’ BETWEEN RIGHT-LEFT BRAIN HEMISPHERES AND DISMISSIVE-AVOIDANT INSECURE ATTACHMENT DISORDERS

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Dr. Daniel Siegel, in his book The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2001), describes how “dis-associated hemispheric processing” between our left and right human brain regions each contribute to differently as he describes in what he calls a “laterality-attachment hypothesis.”  This hypothesis seems to be particularly related to what attachment experts refer to as ‘dismissive-avoidant’ insecure attachment disorders (one I suspect my father had and ‘got’ from his depressed mother).

In this post I am presenting some of Siegel’s creative and thought provoking ideas on the subject:

“Patterns of representations differ markedly between the left and right halves of the brain.  An important distinction, often underrecognized within the fields of clinical psychiatry and psychology, is the distinction between the modes of representation within the two hemispheres of the brain.  The left hemisphere has been described as having a logical “interpreter” function that uses syllogistic reasoning to deduce cause-effect relationships from the representational data it has available to it.  The right hemisphere specializes in the representation of context and of mentalizing capacities.  It is therefore uniquely capable of registering and expressing affective facial expressions, developing a “theory of mind,” registering and regulating the state of the body, and having autobiographical representations.

“How are these bilateral processes relevant to relationships?  Communication is crucial in establishing neural connections early in life and involves the sharing of energy and information.  Levels of arousal (energy) and mental representations (information) are very different on each side of the brain.  The sharing of arousal and representations from one brain to another — the essence of connecting minds — will thus differ between the hemispheres.  One can propose, in fact, that the right brain perceives the output of the right brain of another person, whereas the left brain perceives the left brain’s output.

“In intimate, emotional relationships, such as friendship, romance, parent-child pairs, psychotherapy, and teacher-student dyads, what does this look like?  The left brain sends out language-based, logical, sequential interpreting statements that attempt to make sense of things [in a particular way].  The left brain receives these messages, decodes the linguistic representations, and tries to make sense out of these newly arrived digital symbols.  At the same time, the right brain is sending nonverbal messages via facial expressions, gestures, prosody [the music of speech], and tone of voice, which are perceived by the other’s [sic] right brain.  OK.  So what?

“The “what” of it is that the right brain takes this information and uses its social perceptions of nonverbal communication to engage directly in a few very important processes.

— It creates an image of the other’s [sic] mind (“mindsight”).

— It regulates bodily response while at the same time registering the somatic [body-based] markers of shifts in bodily state.

— It creates autobiographical representations within memory.

— It appraises the meaning of these events and directly affects the degree of arousal, thus creating primary emotional responses.  Intense and primary emotional states are therefore likely to be mediated via the right hemisphere.”

“When we examine these findings alongside the independent set of data from attachment research, certain patterns are suggested.  The early affect attunement and alignment of mental states can be seen as a mutually regulated hemisphere-to-hemisphere coordination between child and parent.  In this view, we can propose that avoidant attachment involves a serious lack of this form of communication between the right hemispheres of child and parent.  The extension of this finding to laterality research raises the possibility that the left hemisphere serves as the dominant mediator of communication between an avoidant child and a dismissing parent.

“In support of this perspective, it turns out that in 1989, [attachment experts] Main and Hesse examined exactly this hypothesis in two large-scale samples of Berkeley undergraduates, each of whom were asked about their degree of right (or left) handedness, as a rough approximation of brain dominance….  At the same time, Main and Hesse had devised a set of self-report items that they considered indicative of a “dismissing” state of mind.  Although this type of scale was not ultimately able to predict AAI [Adult Attachment Interview] classifications [of attachment styles] statistically, and therefore these findings were never published, in keeping with the hypothesis both studies found that the degree of right handedness was significantly correlated with elevated scores of the scale for “dismissing” state of mind.

“Further extensions of these ideas to relationships allow us to look more deeply into why certain couples may be “unable to communicate” with any emotional satisfaction.  When we know about the different languages of the right and left hemispheres, it is possible to make hypotheses  about why interactions may be frustrating:  Individuals may not know how to understand the particular language being expressed by their significant others.  If we then integrate past attachment history in understanding the pattern of these difficulties, it is possible to create a framework of understanding that can help the partners in such relationships escape their well-worn ruts.   [My note:  I would think parents, as well, would benefit so that the intergenerational transmission of dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment patterns could be eliminated.]

“If this laterality-attachment hypothesis is correct, then a logical implication would be that any experiences that help to develop the processing abilities of each hemisphere and/or the integrated activities of the two hemispheres may improve certain individuals’ internal and interpersonal lives.  Such movement toward more coordinated interhemispheric functioning would be quite welcomed by many people (especially the lonely and frustrated spouses [and I would say infant-children0 of dismissing individuals).

“The developmental and experiential histories that have led to a lack of integration of the functioning of the two hemispheres may leave individuals vulnerable to emotional and social problems.  Unresolved trauma and grief, histories of emotional neglect, and restrictive adaptations may each represent some form of constriction in the flow of information processing between the hemispheres.  This proposal of the central role of the dis-associated hemispheric processing in emotional disturbances is supported by the finding that insecure attachments in childhood may establish a vulnerability to psychological dysfunction.

“Emotional relationships that enhance the development of each hemisphere and its unrestricted integration with the activity of the other can thus be proposed to be likely to foster the development of psychological well-being.  In this way, a secure attachment can be seen as a developmental relationship that provides for an integration of functioning of the two hemispheres, both between child and caregiver and within the child’s own brain.

“At the most basic level, right-hemisphere-to-right-hemisphere communication can be seen within the affectively attuned communications that allow for primary emotional states to be shared via nonverbal signals. Left-hemisphere-to-left-hemisphere alignment can be seen in shared attention to objects in the world.  Reflective dialogues, in which language is used to focus attention on the mental states of others (including the two members of the dyad), may foster bilateral integration between the two hemispheres of both child and parent.  The resilience of secure attachments can thus be proposed as founded in part in the bilateral integration that these relationships foster.”  (pages 205-207 – all bold type is mine)

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+DISSOCIATION: MEMORY OF ONGOING EXPERIENCE FROM THE PREY’S POINT OF VIEW

alchemynow2 Comments

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I intended today to write a post about dissociation when I went outside to sit with my morning cup of coffee.  What greeted me there was a trauma-drama in full play, and not a pleasant one for me to watch.  Yet I know that life, and nature itself shows us things that often allow our right brain to watch visually as drama and image at the same time our left brain is offered information to THINK about.

I am going to separate my two ‘streams of information’ this morning.  This post is about how a severely abused and traumatized infant-toddler’s body-brain is forced to absorb information about the world, and about itself in the world in relation to its early attachment caregivers.  The information I am going to present in my NEXT post will be the scientific, rational, logical and far more abstract information.  We NEED this more technical information, but as survivors we will not be able to really understand it or make good practical use of the dry information that developmental neuroscientists provide for us if we cannot ASSOCIATE this information with our own ongoing experience.

People often use this term in the English language, “a game of cat and mouse.”  What I watched this morning as one of my cats toyed with a furry little mouse could have looked like a game from her point of view.  But what was this experience like for the little, tiny mouse?  Its life was at stake, and there was anything BUT a game going on from its point of view.

Those of us who were raised especially by extremely hate-filled abusive and traumatizing mothers from the time of our birth were like this little mouse.  Yet we were even more helpless against our giant predator.  At least this mouse was fully developed and could use all its possible defense abilities – not that they would in the end be effective at allowing it to escape and go on living.

I knew how this ongoing drama would end.  Yes, my cat WAS playing with her prey.  She was fully focused and concentrated on her ‘game’.  The mouse was fully focused on trying to avoid being killed.  And there I was, the bystander at the same time I was the only hope that little mouse had for staying alive.

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The mouse was quick, but the cat was quicker.  Every time I tried to sidetrack the cat she out maneuvered me, grabbed her little ‘toy’ and ran off to continue her ‘hunt’ somewhere else.  How could I help to give the mouse a chance to escape – to where?  There’s nowhere in my yard that mouse would be safe and secure.  There was no way I could catch the mouse and move it somewhere out of danger’s way, either.

There are a lot of mice here.  Part of the reason why, I know, is because my east neighbor whose property I just fenced off from my yard visually, continues to heap all his garbage for a family of seven against that fence, thus encouraging rodents to multiply.  Where there are rodents, there are rattlesnakes to eat them in this country.  Elimination of mice is normally a good thing.  I just didn’t want to WATCH the elimination happen.  Not today.  Not as I prepared to write a victimized-survivor post about dissociation!

But what I thought about as I continued to try to dissuade my cat from continuing her mission was how that little mouse, in the midst of the insecurity and lack of safety involved with its ongoing trauma, would NEVER do anything else but focus on its own survival.

These thoughts became entangled and intertwined with the technical information I was thinking about for my post on dissociation.  Because my mother was a predator, and because I was just as much her ongoing prey as this mouse was to my cat, there was NEVER a time in my infant-toddler-childhood that I was assured of enough safety and security to do ANYTHING ELSE other than survive.

At the same time I was more powerless and helpless than a mouse is under the attack of a cat, my brain, my nervous system, my immune system, my entire being was growing and developing in interaction with the experiences I was having in my early environment.  Nothing else but surviving the trauma of my mother’s attacks against me mattered.  Never was there a TIME when trauma wasn’t immediately threatening and impending, happening in the present moment, or just having finished happening – so that it could happen again.

My childhood was spent in a state of heightened trauma alertness from the beginning of my life.  As I watched my cat, she periodically caught the mouse in her mouth and carried him to another ‘play ground’ where she then let it go long enough that it could run a short distance and do what a little mouse will do:  Hide itself in an area that it thinks MIGHT best conceal it.

Of course the cat knew exactly where the mouse went, and right where it was.  She poked her paws into the spaces in the hiding places, batted the little creature, pushed and prodded it, and when it didn’t come out at a full run, she’s simply stick her head in, grab the mouse again, and move it on to another (to her) intriguing hiding playground.  Of course the most obvious places for this game to go on were in amongst my flower beds, a process which of course would have eventually led not only to the death of the mouse but to the destruction of my much-loved plants!

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Yes, watching my cat’s play-filled species determined extermination of this mouse was a trauma trigger for me.  I could not help but try to intervene on behalf of the little one who was going to lose its life if I didn’t.  I couldn’t catch my cat, so I sat out there for a long time chasing her away from the vicinity of the hidden prey.  I opened the back door thinking she would eventually get bored with out-waiting me and venture into the house.  Nope, that didn’t happen.

Instead, two of my other cats wandered out of the house.  They could tell immediately that Goldilocks was after prey, and all I could think of was, “Oh great!  There’s no way out of this.  I’ll take some pictures and then exit the playground so I don’t have to watch what I know is unavoidably going to happen.”

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So here are some pictures.  It’s been about an hour since I stopped watching the trauma-drama outside my door.  I just went outside again to see another one of my cats sitting under the Oleander bush satisfyingly smacking its lips and cleaning its jaw daintily with its paw.  “Mouse gone.  Game over.”

So, now in thinking about dissociation as the experts like to write about it, I have to say that nobody, absolutely nobody actually knows what dissociation is, what it does, what it feels like, how it operates, or where it came from like survivors do – particularly and especially those of us who endured and survived repeated, ongoing predatory attacks in our very early life of infancy and toddlerhood by our mothers.

If we then continued to endure trauma, abuse and attacks into and throughout our childhood, there is (in my thinking) no possible way that so-called dissociation did not build itself into our growing and developing body-brain.

I will never believe that dissociation is a so-called ‘defense mechanism’ for such survivors.  Our dissociation is simply HOW our brain regions, circuitry and networks were forced to grow and develop.

The mouse I watched today was in an ongoing peritraumatic state which was broken up A LITTLE TINY BIT by the moments the cat allowed it to nestle within its hiding places.  But these periodic reprieves from direct terror and assault were not enough to ever allow this mouse to go on about its life in anything like an ordinary (safe and secure) way.

Everything that mouse experienced both during direct assaults upon its life and during its reprieves, demanded that trauma-based body-brain operations continue to happen.  Those experiences are completely different in the midst of trauma and its trauma-based allowances of semi-reprieve than are ongoing experiences where trauma is not present or immediately threatened.  When any creature is forced to adapt to trauma environments during critical growth and developmental stages, both the experiences of trauma and reactions to it build themselves in.  The trauma in effect ‘moves in to stay’.

What this means to an early abused and traumatized human is that the emerging self goes into and remains in hiding as surely as this mouse did.  I don’t believe our parental-predators could ever reach our hidden self.  Yes, they could reach our little bodies with the attack of their words and blows, but our inner own self remained protected simply because of the nature of being human.

Every single person is a separate, individual entity that can only be accessed from the inside.  Even though everything that happens to us from the OUTSIDE profoundly affected our development, and could and did change the way our body that our self lives in, our self – its own self – remains ours and ours only.

The problem became one of us not being able to experience our self in our own life.  Experts refer to alterations in memory capacities (which is what the next post is about).  Dissociation means that we do not remember ourselves as being connected to our own ongoing experience in ordinary ways because our capacity to REMEMBER was affected PHYSIOLOGICALLY during our earliest development.

Enough said at the moment.  As you look at the following pictures think of each one as representing an environmental context for ongoing moments of my cat’s life – but from the point of view of the mouse.  No way was it important for the mouse (forget the cat here) to remember itself in one of these ‘pictures’ in any particular order.  All the mouse could do was attempt to stay alive.  The only way it could do that would be if it could find a safe enough place to hide and remain hidden.

Safe enough.  That is what every living creature needs so it can continue to remain alive.  But growing and developing a human body-brain as time moves on and the trauma continues means that the inner experience of being in the midst of trauma never leaves us.  Trauma is not only what happened to us, but became how we grew a body-brain to remember ourselves with.

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It's only a GAME of hide-and-seek if we play it with equal peers. It's only a GAME of cat-and-mouse if you are the predator.
Where could a victimized-prey hide to escape? Under the blue flax and sage bush?
Is there a tiny little self tucked into hiding within the clover?
Under the poppies among the petunias? Is this a safe place to hide for survival?
Where is it safe for an abused and traumatized mouse -- or infant-child -- to hide?
Is it safe enough to stay alive under the newly blooming rose bush?
When I finally turned away from the trauma drama, the little mouse had hidden itself here among the tiny pansies.
The mouse was hiding in here last I saw of it. Each of these hiding places can be thought of as a momentary segment of the mouse's endangered life -- like victimized tiny children forming their abilities to remember their self in their life -- the separate events are just that -- dissociated experiences linked together only by one thing: Ongoing experiences of individual events of enduring and surviving trauma. Meanwhile, the SELF remains hidden unless we can contact and connect with 'self' within its own world

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+LOVING THE POSSIBILITIES – OUTDOORS WITH THE MUD

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Light cloud cover screened the intensity of the sun today, creating a temperature veil that made it a most perfect day to work outside.  I was out there for hours, digging and hauling dirt, sifting for gravel that’s getting moved to the front of the house’s walkway.  I made 15 grand adobe blocks today and have dirt ready for tomorrow if the temperature stays cooler.  (More ‘modern’ people would be able to ‘make hay’ with a power cement mixer — it is WORK mixing in the 10% cement evenly and the WATER!)

My vision of the back yard is taking form.  I want to tear down what’s left of that old, raggedy shed.  I’ll save the wood, clear the cement pad, and build a little adobe chapel!  There might not be another chapel so close to the Mexican-American border line anywhere in America!  How sweet that will be!

I will dedicate the little place as a prayer chapel for peace and tranquility.  Somehow I will include within it a very simple plaque with my most favorite words in the whole world on it (in English and in Spanish):

“Never sadden anyone, no matter whom, for no matter what.”

by The Bab

(This was on page 31 of the edition – not sure of the year – I found this in when I wrote it into my prayer book nearly 40 years ago – in Release the Sun: An Early History of the Baha’i Faith by William Sears)

I am beginning to see more clearly what isn’t here yet.   Let the fair winds continue to blow, I’ve got work to do!  Give this woman a shovel, a pair of gloves, a plastic bucket — some dirt and water — and WATCH OUT!  There is nothing better for my healing and well-being I could be doing right now – absolutely nothing.

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These only bloom in the spring
The first of many-yet-to-be gravel and adobe mines!
15 today
Lovin' it
Accumulating - continuing to dry and cure
So, this shed's gotta go. This is where all the rusty corrugated steel came from, blew off in 4 separate high winds last winter, Mexico-American border wall behind it - and - a Mesquite tree I believe I can trim and beautify (Can't see it, it's behind the shed)
For many years 'illegals' stayed in this shed, even since I've lived here until the 2nd wall-fence was put up that they can no longer cross behind my yard
Wait 'til you see what's gonna take its place! I can SEE it!

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+TRAUMA AND DISAPPOINTMENT – POINTING TO OUR TRAUMA WOUNDS

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All trauma is upsetting.  That’s what trauma does.  It upsets the status quo.  That’s what trauma is.  It’s an upset.  By its very nature, trauma involves disappointment.

The more an organism is prepared with resources to ‘cope’ with trauma the better off they are because this means they can ‘get over’ the trauma and get back to a state of status quo faster.  Without enough of the right kind of resources, the slower a return to the state of status quo becomes.  Or, without enough of the right kind of resources, a return to a state of status quo is impossible.

Available resources are directly tied to a very real state of safety and security in the world.  Having enough of the right resources means that we can achieve a return to the desired state of safety and security relatively quickly and easily.

Survivors of severe early infant-childhood abuse trauma had things happen to them in their lives way before they had the inner or outer resources to effect a return to a state of safety and security – because if they’d had an environment filled with the plenty of safety and security in the first place the traumas of abuse would not have happened to them in the first place.

That’s what an insecure attachment ‘disorder’ actually is.  The state not only of trauma but of scarcity and depletion of inner and outer resources, which creates unsafe and insecure status in and to the world, built itself right into the growing body-brain-mind-self from the start.

This means that the necessary status quo state of safety, security and calm connection is missing.  The normal physiological state for early abuse trauma survivors never was a status quo state of well-being.  Because this calm, safe, secure state is missing in our very body itself, survivors of early abuse trauma can struggle the rest of their lives just trying to figure out what this GOOD status quo state even feels like.

From there we have to figure out how to GET THERE from HERE – HERE being our trauma-built state of inner disequilibrium.

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Dr. Diana Fosha is one of the most hopeful and positive experts within the field of trauma, attachment and healing that I have encountered.  Here’s a link to one of her 2002 articles that I highly recommend, written primarily for professionals working with traumatized clients.  Because so few of us have access to any therapy at all, let alone to effective therapy with truly competent trauma experts, what Fosha says in this article is important for we survivors to know on our own:

TRAUMA REVEALS THE ROOTS OF RESILIENCE

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Here is the link to her book:  The Transforming Power of Affect : A Model for Accelerated Change by Diana Fosha (Hardcover – May 5, 2000)

I haven’t had the opportunity to read it myself, but I include it here because it is the feelings related to trauma that tend to trap me in some other place than a calm center of connected well-being.

Sometimes it seems as though all the powerful abuse trauma-related emotions that were going on within my body from the time I was born, that were not identified, recognized, differentiated, named or understood, just sat there within the cells of my body waiting.  Well, not only did they wait for a time they could make their presence known, they expanded and multiplied astronomically until they broke through the numbness and the blankness of all of my dissociation to become the ‘animals’, the rampaging beasts they often seem to me to be within me today because I did not grow up with a body-brain-mind-self that was able to recognize them as friends and allies.

Rather my reactions to life, with all the trauma triggers that are built into me, often disrupt my ongoing equilibrium – what little of it I can manage to find for myself.  My reactions to trauma triggers stimulate emotions that are not integrated together in a modulated, right-limbic-social-emotional brain built with stability, safety and security within it.  This region of my brain along with the rest of my brain and all the nervous system components that it is connected to, was not built with ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’ regulatory abilities within it.

Where my experiences within my environment should have been able to hook themselves together in ongoing ASSOCIATED patterns of being, they were instead created in DISSOCIATIONAL patterns that are often profoundly disorganizing and disorienting to me today.  Often the best I can do is try to identify these patterns so that I can find the ‘willy-nilly’ way things were connected together inside of me and try to piece them together differently in more orderly, organized and oriented ways.

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Here is another book, again one I haven’t yet read but that looks vitally promising:

Sweet Sorrow: Love, Loss and Attachment In Human Life – Paperback (June 2009) by Alan B. Eppel

“In this volume the author proposes that it is the interplay of love and loss that lies at the epicentre of the human story. Support for this proposal is taken from neuroscience, art and psychoanalysis. It will also introduce the reader to important ideas and findings from Attachment Theory. An exploration of the relationship between love and loss can lead us to some understanding of the meaning of our lives. It shows how love and loss are inextricably bound at the centre of human experience, and form the essential dynamic of the human struggle.”

“Alan B. Eppel has been a practicing psychiatrist over the past thirty years and currently is director of Community Psychiatric Services at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Hamilton, Ontario, and an associate clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.”

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I mention this book in connection with the topic of my last post, +MY FOGGY POST ABOUT DISAPPOINTMENT AS A TRAUMA TRIGGER, because the state of feeling disappointed is for me a very real experience of being in a state of disorganization and disorientation in my body in the world.

Expectations are a required ‘food’ for our brain as it works to combine information we have about our self in the world in an integrated way.  Our body-brain-mind-self processes life through ongoing feedforward and feedbackward information loops that take into account everything we know about our self in the world – IN TIME.

I complained in my last post about the invisibility of the root word origins for the word ‘disappointment’ in our English language.  Thinking about it more clearly today, I realize that just as individual people begin very early in their lives (hopefully) to recognize, identify, discriminate between, name and manage all the different emotional experiences we are capable of, so must the words that name these emotional states of being also go through some kind of growth process themselves.

‘Disappoint’ is a word related both to ‘appoint’ and to ‘point’.  Our right brain is our imaginal link to experience and contains within it a veritable ocean of potential meaning.  As we use words the two hemispheres of our brain pass information back and forth between them – sort of like pouring water from one glass to another until a level of balanced equality exists between the two containers – as we seek to gain understanding about our own self in our experience of our life.

I believe that ‘disappointment’ is intimately connected with overwhelming heartbreak.  As our brain-being tries to get along in life, we orient and organize our self IN TIME by using information as reference POINTS.  In fact, without reference points, we cannot orient and organize ourselves at all.

These reference POINTS IN TIME exist in us where associations have been successfully and satisfactorily made.  Those of us whose body-brains were formed within abusive traumatic early environments suffered far more dissociations in our experiences than we did associations, and are therefore suffering from a scarcity of these required reference points in time.

What could our inner self compass possibly find as reference points in a world of madness, abuse and trauma?  How could we establish our self with any stability in a dangerous world of chaos?  What could I point to as a KNOWN, as a dependable GIVEN in the world as I grew up?

I knew really only one thing as a given and one thing only:  I was terribly BAD and not only deserved everything that my mother did to me, not only earned everything she did to me, but I evidently liked and wanted her to do what she did to me because I CHOSE TO REMAIN BAD.  According to my mother, she magnanimously offered to me every possible (saint-given) opportunity to change my ways, and I never made the right choice.  I chose to defy her efforts with every breath I took.

How could I possibly use any information I got from that environment to find a stable inner or outer POINT of reference in the world?  What was the POINT in my even trying, though I DID try as hard as I possibly could to BE GOOD, not knowing I was absolutely and fundamentally and permanently being set up to fail?  After all, according to my mother, being born ‘the devil’s child’ did not even get me started off in life at the starting point of even being a human being in the first place.

Did I ever reach the POINT as a child of not trying?  No.  Did I ever surrender or give up?  No.  I didn’t see that I ever had a choice.  I just formed my entire being around the information I was given and kept on going.

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It is not a stretch of reality to consider ‘disappointment’ within the context of its right-brain meanings.  It involves every aspect of ‘point’ we can think of with our left brain.  We really come into this world as a single one-dimensional POINT in time and space.  From there we are supposed to be able to grow and blossom and bear fruit in our lifetime.  Some of us are born to parents who seem completely intent on stomping the life out of that little tiny point that is us from the moment we are born.  What we do, then, is survive IN SPITE of our parents.

That is the primary POINT of life – to stay alive in it.

When we experience our emotions and reactions in the present, the POINT of origin of our emotions lies in our body as it was formed way back there.  A pinhole-sized point of light continues to expand over distance and time.  The older we get, the more complex life becomes, the wider becomes the range of influence that our emotions can have in our life.

When severe trauma of abuse forms a person, the expanding rays of light from the early origin point of emotions suffers from distortion.  We then live with those distortions unless and until we can bring healing to all the wounded places within us – a job of a lifetime.

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Looking at Webster’s:

POINT

Date 13th century

Etymology: Middle English, partly from Anglo-French, prick, dot, moment, from Latin punctum, from neuter of punctus, past participle of pungere to prick; partly from Anglo-French pointe sharp end, from Vulgar Latin *puncta, from Latin, feminine of punctus, past participle — more at pungent

And tracing connections back through

PUNGENT

Etymology: Latin pungent-, pungens, present participle of pungere to prick, sting; akin to Latin pugnus fist, pugnare to fight, Greek pygmē fist

Date: 1597

1 : sharply painful…..

and through the synonyms to ‘pungent’ to

PUNGENT implies a sharp, stinging, or biting quality especially of odors <a cheese with a pungent odor> POIGNANT suggests something is sharply or piercingly effective in stirring one’s emotions <felt a poignant sense of loss — applies to what keenly or sharply affects one’s sensitivities <a poignant documentary on the homeless>

POIGNANT

Etymology: Middle English poynaunt, from Anglo-French poinant, poignant, present participle of poindre to prick, sting, from Latin pungere — more at pungent

Date: 14th century

1 : pungently pervasive <a poignant perfume>
2 a (1) : painfully affecting the feelings : piercing (2) : deeply affecting : touching b : designed to make an impression : cutting <poignant satire>
3 a : pleasurably stimulating b : being to the point : apt

synonyms see pungent, moving

STING

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English stingan; akin to Old Norse stinga to sting and probably to Greek stachys spike of grain, stochos target, aim

Date: before 12th century

Here I begin to see and feel the ‘image in the word’ as it relates to the origins of disappoint – sticking one’s self with a dry, sharp spike of rustling, life sustaining grain

PRICK

Etymology: Middle English prikke, from Old English prica; akin to Middle Dutch pric prick

Date: before 12th century

1 : a mark or shallow hole made by a pointed instrument
2 a : a pointed instrument or weapon b : a sharp projecting organ or part
3 : an instance of pricking or the sensation of being pricked: as a : a nagging or sharp feeling of remorse, regret, or sorrow

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And of course, looking from the angle of Latin pungere – related to the origins of ‘poignant’ I see this connection:

PUNCTURE

Etymology: Middle English, from Latin punctura, from punctus, past participle of pungere

Date: 14th century

1 : an act of puncturing
2 : a hole, wound, or perforation made by puncturing
3 : a minute depression

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Our abusers punctured us full of holes.  Full of wounds, we continued onward.  Every time we were physically, emotionally, mentally hurt, our chance for building an ongoing safe and secure, organized, oriented attachment with our self in the world was ruptured and not repaired.  Every time we were hurt in any way, deprived, terrorized, terrified, we suffered from a disappointment based on how things are MEANT to be in the world for little ones who are completely dependent on their early caregivers.

How possible would it be to empty the ocean with a sieve?

First we were ‘poked full of holes’, wounded nearly beyond belief by the same people who were supposed to love us, cherish us, protect us, provide for us, defend us, and help us become integrated ‘associated’ people.  Then we are supposed to take our punctured selves out into the world and NOT be disappointed?

Maybe every single time I recognize the state of disappointment in myself I can learn to identify how that disappointment POINTS to my wounds.  From there, maybe I can begin to find ways to exercise my resilience to repair them.

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+MY FOGGY POST ABOUT DISAPPOINTMENT AS A TRAUMA TRIGGER

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I’ve been doing pretty good these past few days.  I think I got spoiled.  Today was a crasher.  My word for my mood, or state of emotional being is FUNK.  I’m trying to sort out how I got here today thinking that maybe it will help me get out of this dark grey-blue-black mood, or feeling state.

So far, I can think of at least ten things that happened today that I reacted to with disappointment.  That’s one sure thing I know about myself:  I do not handle disappointment very well at all.  I also know that disappointment IS a feeling I felt as an abused child – often.  My mother was an expert at setting me up and then knocking me down.  She took sadistic pleasure in my innocent hope knowing she could shatter it in a heartbeat – which she always did.

Because I WAS a child, I could not out-guess her.  I walked blindly into her traps over and over and over again.  I was unsuspecting.  Part of how all this operated, I know, was because of the dissociated states I slipped into between all the violent attacks, that state where time always seemed suspended as if it didn’t exist at all.  My mother’s forced isolation did this to me, also.  Nothing made sense.  I could predict nothing, anticipate nothing.  But, unfortunately for me I still believed my mother when she said something good was going to happen, even though every time she took it away.  (see **FAMILY TIME – by Brother (1965) for my baby brother’s experience with my mother about this.)

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Main Entry: dis·ap·point·ment

Date: 1604

1 : the act or an instance of disappointing : the state or emotion of being disappointed
2 : one that disappoints <he’s a disappointment to his parents>

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Why in 1604 did this word suddenly appear in the English language?  Why does Webster’s not include any reference to this word’s roots?  Elsewhere I found a reference that the root is in ‘appoint’.  Somewhere else I read online it’s in ‘point’.  It all seems very confusing to me.

I think when I experience disappointment in my life it ALWAYS acts as a trauma trigger for me.  ALWAYS.

That means when something disappointments me NOW in my life, all the ick attached to disappointment in my 18 year abusive childhood comes plowing right on through and catches up with me every single time.

I don’t know how to NOT let this happen.

I didn’t catch the warning signs this morning when I encountered my first disappointment.  Looking back, I see that my disappointment was connected FIRST to a feeling of being surprised.  I had hoped to buy 3 (cheap) climbing roses bushes today at our local Alco store.  I looked at my bank balance online.  It was far lower than I had expected, and it ruled out flowers along with just about anything else until the 3rd of next month when my next disability check shows up in the account.

So, I EXPECTED the balance to be higher.  I was SURPRISED when it wasn’t.  Then I was disappointed not only that I’m about broke (again), but also that there will be no roses or anything else.  Then I was disappointed because I couldn’t have lunch today as I usually do with my woman friend.  I NEED that social contact.

I was swept up in the twisting snake of down-the-emotional-drain and didn’t catch it – in time.  On the day went.  No major disaster, just a series of expectations, hopes, surprises, and disappointments.

They pile up, and then knock me down.  Flat.

Now, how exactly do I pick myself up again?

Is there some way I can avoid this crash in the future?

How can I expand my “Window of Tolerance” for disappointment?

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One big disappointment of my life right now is that I’ve been working on this blog for a year now, and I am not one single word closer to being able to put together and publish a book than I was before I started writing here.  I see publishing a worthwhile and SELLING book as my ONLY hope out of my poverty.  It’s a big disappointment.

If I tell myself that it doesn’t matter if there’s ever a book, that it only matters if I can write something that might make sense to someone – and there’s nothing wrong with FREE info – then I’m better, but that has to be processed for me on some kind of ‘spiritual’ level having to do with my ‘purpose in life’ and ‘my mission’ in being alive.  I have no idea, most of the time.  I just TRY…..

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It was too hot today to work outside on my adobe-making project.  That was disappointing.  All-in-all, my disappointment ALWAYS cycles around to my difficulty in not being angry at my self.  GEE, I sure don’t have to wonder how that pattern came to be!  Every single time my mother punished me with intentional disappointment, I was blamed for it.  It was ALWAYS my fault because I was bad, because I wanted to be bad, because I wanted to ruin my mother’s life.

I am going to quit writing – enough said.  I imagine there are plenty of readers who know exactly what I am TRYING to say.  I am going to watch my NetFlix streaming Australian TV series, “McLeod’s Daughters,” which I am enjoying.  I could see myself living that life.  I would have loved it.

Or, as that other great movie puts it”  “Never give up!  Never surrender!”

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+ONE READER’S SEARCH TERMS: ‘HOW TO STOP DISSOCIATION’

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WordPress keeps a running list on my Admin page that shows me the kinds of search terms people are using that lands them on my blog.  Here’s one from yesterday:  “How to stop dissociation.”  Hey, now that’s quite the question?  Do I have any kind of answer at all?

For the most part, I think the truth is that neuroscientists (along with everyone else) is stumped by ‘dissociation’.  The word is thrown around like tumbleweeds in early fall high speed desert wind.  From my point of view, at every point where the brain can perform an action using circuits-regions-pathways-networks TOGETHER yet also perform an entirely different set of activities through a recombination of these areas or in solo operation, a risk for dissociation exists.

Add to this wide open field of possible dissociation factors the complex and sophisticated operation of our body as a whole, which uses all its known abilities to moderate and modulate stress and calmness levels through our many nervous system responses.  The truth of the matter is that those who suffer most from so-called ‘dissociation’ are probably the closest to being experts on the topic of any human on earth.

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My sister is graciously sending me a copy of the book, Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.  There’s certainly nothing either new or original about the topic, but I hear the book contains very useful, practical, and do-able exercises for changing – basically – how our brain and nervous system processes information in the present moment.  I’ll bite.

Until I lay my eyeballs on the printed words in Tolle’s text, I don’t have a single clue how what he says is different than what’s in this book, for example:  Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (P.S.) by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

But after I thought about it for a little while the day my sister told me of her recent experiences implementing some of Tolle’s techniques, I realized that the state of mind, or state of being that she described to me sounded extremely – and eerily – familiar to me.  I KNOW that state, in the deepest regions of my being.  If it is anything like what it sounds to me, it’s the state of what I named for myself of MAJOR DISSOCIATION.

How interesting is that?  The problem for me at this moment, not having yet read this book, is that I’m not at all sure I want to intentionally exercise myself to reenter that state.  Supposedly it relates to NOT thinking and NOT feeling.  Sound familiar?

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CAUTION becomes the word for the day for me in regard to anything that non-severe early infant-child trauma and abuse survivors seem to find useful in their own process of achieving increased well-being.  Because I had to develop a very different body-brain, I need to be very careful about which doors I open and leap blindly through.

My inner sense of warning about ‘messing around with’ anything that can alter my state of being in any way comes from the knowledge that there are black holes, abysses and pitfalls within the operation of my bio-chemical makeup that do not exist for a ‘normally built from infancy’ person.

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I just went to my bookshelf to search for something I read about six years ago on this topic and have never been able to find again.  I ‘accidentally’ found this, written by Dr. Jon G. Allen in his book, Traumatic Relationships and Serious Mental Disorders.  Because I couldn’t find what I was looking for in it, I immediately stuffed it back among its multi-colored-spine relatives.

But wait a moment!  Why did these words appear at this moment?  I give up.  I don’t know, but I suspect there is a perfectly good reason.  So, having reclaimed the page, here’s what I ‘accidentally’ read:

“Although we generally admire persistence and deplore giving up, Carver and Scheier argue that being unable to give up unattainable goals is a huge problem:  ‘the person experiences distress (because of an inability to make progress) and is unable to do anything about the distress (because of an inability to give up)….  This situation – commitment to unattainable goals – is a prescription for distress’ (p. 195).  Many clients struggle with this plight in treatment.  They courageously persist in treatment for years in the face of ongoing symptoms and relapses.  In the midst of relapses, they become profoundly demoralized, often feeling as if they no longer have the will to keep trying.  At these junctures, many become suicidal – the ultimate expression of disengagement and giving up.  Working on trauma is a prescription for slow progress toward goals, the guaranteed precipitant of negative affect.  If the client has adopted the completely understandable goal of cure, freedom from symptoms, and freedom from relapses, depression will ensue.

“Particularly in the midst of relapses, clients long for wholesale and dramatic change.  But we must help them go in the opposite direction.  To ensure success and positive emotion that builds confidence in treatment, we must orient clients toward a view of improvement based on small, gradual changes….  Gollwitzer (1999) proposed a two-step strategy for goal attainment that I introduce to clients in the context of self-regulation.  The first step is goal setting, an important challenge.  What are realistic treatment goals?  Over the long term, gradual improvement with ups and downs is realistic – but by no means guaranteed.  But we must focus on the short term, where clients can experience concrete progress.  Gollwitzer emphasized that goals must not only be achievable (within the person’s capacity) but also be specific rather than general (e.g., ‘Say, “No!” when I do not want to do something’ rather than ‘be more assertive’).  Goals should be proximal (near future) rather than distal (distant future).  The combination of specific and proximal goals allows the individual to identify clear feedback that promotes self-monitoring.  It is helpful to formulate learning goals (e.g., learning how to calm oneself or discovering capacities to distract oneself).  Approach goals are preferable to avoidance goals.  For example, rather than setting the goal of not feeling anxious, the client might adopt the goal of calming himself by listening to music at the initial signs of anxiety.  The client must also eliminate distractions and temptations in the environment.  Perhaps most difficult in light of clients’ ambivalence and depression, success requires high motivation to attain the goal and a strong sense of commitment to it.

“Gollwitzer made a convincing case that goal setting must be accompanied by implementation intentions, that is, specifying when, where, and how the goal will be implemented:  when situation x arises, I will perform response y.  This entails forming a clear idea of situation x in advance.  Situation x could be an emotional state in an environmental context.  For example, the client might formulate the implementation intention, when I am afraid and alone at home during the daytime, I am tempted to cut myself, I will take a walk abound the neighborhood.  Mentally rehearsing implementation intentions is helpful, and adhering reliably to plans ensures that intentions become habitual.”  (pages 316-317)

NOTE:  Mental rehearsal makes use of our mirror neuron system, essential for learning anything that involves actions taken by our body.

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Well, I can easily see how this passage from Allen’s book relates to “How to stop dissociation!”  From my personal perspective, stopping dissociation isn’t actually possible for those of us infant-child trauma survivors who actually have a nervous system-brain that was forced to build itself with major dissociation as one of one of our prime operating patterns.

I believe we can set the realistic goal of learning more about what conditions, situations and circumstances in our present-day life contribute to an all out pandemonium of dissociation.  But STOPPING dissociation as if it never built itself into our body-brain in the beginning is not going to be possible.  Finding ways to lessen the trouble that dissociation causes us NOW and lessening the opportunity for it to happen (be triggered) NOW is a possible goal.

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To give you an idea about how oblivious I truly believe the neuroscientific community is about dissociation, in the book, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are by Daniel J. Siegel (Paperback – Oct. 22, 2001) – I so far have added 12 page numbers of references in the text to dissociation that are not mentioned in the index of this book  (only 2 references are actually in the index)!  If I can follow through on a ‘motivational intention’ to do so, I will add the information I have found in Siegel’s book into a future blog post.

This is another great book by this author:

Coping With Trauma: Hope Through Understanding by Jon G. Allen

In fact, what I am looking for is in this book – and I will include this information in my next post.

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+CRITICAL – OXYTOCIN – THE RELATIONSHIP GLUE

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Oxytocin is the glue that holds all mammal relationships TOGETHER.  Without oxytocin the opposite of ‘together’ happens.  Infant-child abuse represents a ‘tearing apart’ and a ‘breaking apart’ of relationships rather than a ‘building up’.

I am posting two chapters today from this book, with more to follow in future posts:

The Oxytocin Factor: Tapping the Hormone of Calm, Love, and Healing by Kerstin Uvnas Moberg, Roberta Francis, Kerstin Uvnäs Moberg, and Translated by Roberta Francis (Hardcover – Sept. 16, 2003)

The information on this blog from Moberg’s book is very important.  We cannot think intelligently about infant-child abuse without the ability to think intelligently about attachment, and we cannot think about attachment intelligently without being able to think about oxytocin.

In situations where caregivers abuse and maltreat infants and children under their care – EVERY SINGLE TIME THIS HAPPENS – there is something wrong with the operation of the caregiver’s attachment system.  This means that at those times the perpetrator’s oxytocin-related system IS NOT WORKING PROPERLY.

*Oxytocin – Chapter 4: The body’s control centers

*Oxytocin – Chapter 5: How oxytocin works

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There are several posts on this blog that are concerned with oxytocin – FIND THEM HERE.

Of these posts, THESE ARE THE ONES about oxytocin that relate to Dr. Moberg’s work I have posted through today.

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From Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD, your Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder

I am a cognitive behavioral therapist, but not many people know what that means or how cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can be used to address BPD symptoms. This week, learn more about whether CBT could help you.

CBT for Borderline Personality

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a type of psychotherapy that targets the “cognitive” (thinking-related) and “behavioral” (action-related) aspects of a psychological condition.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy – When Change Isn’t Enough

Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is a special kind of cognitive behavioral therapy designed for people with BPD. Dr. Marsha Linehan at the University of Washington noticed that people with BPD need more than just a change-focused therapy, they need better acceptance (by others and of themselves). The solution? DBT.
BPD in the News -Charges Brought in Assisted BPD Suicide

Dr. Lawrence Egbert, the head of the right-to-die group Final Exit Network (FEN) is currently facing charges for allegedly helping a woman with BPD commit suicide.
Life With Borderline Personality Disorder

While BPD can affect many areas of your life, your legal status and physical health, many people with BPD lead normal and fulfilling lives. Learn how BPD might impact you, and how you can improve your quality of life.

Must Reads

What is BPD?
Symptoms of BPD
Diagnosis of BPD
Treatment of BPD
Living with BPD

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+WHAT I KNOW ABOUT ‘HATE’ AND ‘WRONG’

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My mother certainly made it undeniably clear that she hated me.  On the topic of HATE in regards to how I feel (or have ever felt or will ever feel) about my mother, I went looking this morning for the Webster definition of HATE.   The root origins of the word are connected to CARE.  Maybe I don’t, and don’t seem able to hate my mother because I just don’t care enough about HER to achieve that level of investment.

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HATE (noun)

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English hete; akin to Old High German haz hate, Greek kēdos care

Date: before 12th century

1 a : intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury b : extreme dislike or antipathy : loathing
2 : an object of hatred

HATE (verb)

Date: before 12th century

transitive verb 1 : to feel extreme enmity toward
2 : to have a strong aversion to : find very distasteful: to express or feel extreme enmity or active hostility

— hat·er noun

— hate one’s guts : to hate someone with great intensity

synonyms hate, detest, abhor, abominate, loathe mean to feel strong aversion or intense dislike for. hate implies an emotional aversion often coupled with enmity or malice <hated the enemy with a passion>. detest suggests violent antipathy <detests cowards>. abhor implies a deep often shuddering repugnance <a crime abhorred by all>. abominate suggests strong detestation and often moral condemnation <abominates all forms of violence>. loathe implies utter disgust and intolerance <loathed the mere sight of them>.

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About a month ago I had a conversation with a young man who was finishing a painting job on the wood-faced mall complex that contains the laundromat café where I go most Saturday’s morning to visit with my friend while she does her weekly washing.  This Hispanic young man explained to me that his entire family, including his girl friend and young daughter were still living in San Diego.  He had left the area searching for a new place to live and for a better life.  He hopes to eventually convince all the people he cares about to join him once he solidly locates employment.

This young man told me that in the two months that had passed since he left San Diego six of his friends had been shot to death.  He explained how all the homes where his family lives have barred windows and doors.

“It doesn’t do any good to replace windows once the haters have shot them out,” he told me matter of factly.  “Once they see the windows are back, they drive by and shoot them out again.  No place is safe there.  The haters cannot be stopped.  I do not want my family there.  I have to find a new place for us all to live in peace and safety.  Let the haters have it out there.  They already do.”

When I first heard this young man use that word ‘haters’ I wasn’t sure I heard him right.  I asked him about it.  He told me that there used to be a reason for the haters to hate, but there isn’t anymore.  Now they hate simply because that is who they have become.  It is who they are.

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I have spent hours thinking about the comment made to yesterday’s post about hate and my mother, trying to find my own truth about the topic.  I’m not sure that truth even exists where I will be able to consciously find it in my lifetime.

I cannot find a place within myself to stand on from which I can hate my mother.  Maybe that means “I cannot stand to hate my mother.”  Maybe it means “I cannot understand hating my mother.”  I am not at all sure, thinking about it, that I have the physiological capacity or ability to hate my mother – and I mean this exactly literally.

Differentiation of emotions from birth happens as the brain is built in the earliest caregiver interactions an infant has with its primary caregiver, most often its mother.  Because my mother (and her psychosis and mental illness) meant that she began to hate me while she was in labor with me, her hate for me met me at the door when I entered this world.

Obviously, her hatred completely overwhelmed little tiny me, and it influenced every interaction she had with me and (again, obviously) influenced the way my body-brain developed.

Differentiation of emotions happens at the same time and through the same process-interactions that the ‘jelling’ of the self happens.  As our earliest caregivers resonate with our infant (and childhood) emotional states, they mirror back to us our self.

My mother was not capable of doing this for me.  As a result, I never went through anything like a normal process of developing either a self or of recognizing, discriminating, identifying, discovering, defining or naming my feelings.  Because The Monster made me in interaction with her, there is no possible way that I could have even began to form an emotional space within my own physiology (brain-body-nervous system-mind-self) where any hate could have existed – most certainly, not toward her.

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Through all my thinking about my response to the comment made that I just mentioned, I feel like I have turned my inner house upside-down and inside-out, just as I would if I were searching and looking for something necessary, vital and needed.  I have combed and sifted, moved things around, hunted for it, and I cannot find even a glimmer inside me – nowhere – of hatred toward my mother for what she did to me.

True, as this commenter pointed out, I was nearly 30 years old before I was even able to recognize that I had been abused.  It was only 6 years ago that I began my neurologically-based own research about what damage that abuse TRULY did to me.  At that point I began to understand dissociation, disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorders, and I began to understand that the level of abuse, trauma, isolation and deprivation I had experienced from birth until age 18 had changed my physiological development and changed how my genetic potential had manifested itself in my body – and still does.

As I processed what I know about myself and the abuse my mother did to me, I also began to understand that my mother had a different, ‘evolutionarily altered’ body-brain-mind-self herself.  I realized that the minimum sentence my mother COULD and SHOULD have received for what she did to me would have to have been a 14,500-year sentence.  I realized that what I experienced, what I have to consider in my healing, and what was done to me is so far past normal, so far out of the range of normal or ordinary, that it barely, just barely fits anywhere on the map of modern life’s ‘being a human being’.

Even so, perhaps if my capacity for emotion had not been so pervasively, and evidently permanently altered by my mother, maybe I would have the capacity to hate her.  But – reality is reality and it appears that I simply don’t have that ability in the same way that I don’t have brown eyes.

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Even when I reached the point of disowning my mother, there was no emotion involved in that process.  As the Webster definition of ‘hate’ mentions, whatever hate is it ‘usually derived from fear, anger, or a sense of injury’.  I felt none of those feelings, nor was I in any related state of mind.

What I recognized through my experience of (unintentionally) abusing my own little son was that my mother never felt remorse for anything she ever did to me.  If there is anything that might be useful for me to examine and understand, it has nothing to do with hate.

Maybe there is something HERE that I can eventually sink my teeth into in some useful way.  What actually WAS it about realizing so profoundly, fundamentally and absolutely that my mother never felt remorse for anything she ever did to me that created such clarity within me at the instant that realization hit me?

If that momentary instant of abusing my son had never happened, I’m not sure I would ever have reached that instant of clarity about my mother and her relationship with me.

At the instant I ‘snapped’ with my son and lashed out at him in blind rage that I NEVER saw coming, that I never knew I was capable of feeling or acting out in such a way, it was like crossing a line where I – for the first time and I think the ONLY time in my life – FELT like I was sharing in the experience of how my mother acted toward me.

As soon as ‘I came to my senses’ and realized what I had done to my son, an entirely new experience consumed me:  remorse.  I felt so completely shocked at what I had done, and so profoundly SORRY for what I had done to him that I have no words to express it.

What HAD to happen at that point is that ACTION needed to follow the experience.

(1) Fully recognizing the WRONG I had done and that this WRONG was WRONG.

(2) Apologizing to my little son the best that I could in my attempts to REPAIR this horrible and horrifying RUPTURE that I had created in his life.

(3) Vowing from the essence of my being that nothing like this would EVER happen again in my lifetime.

(4) Disowning my mother.

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I think I instinctively realized at this moment that something was terribly, terribly WRONG WITH MY MOTHER that she never once, for all the thousands and thousands and thousands of instances of abuse of one kind or another that she perpetrated against me, not one single time felt remorse.

Looking at this word I find it fascinating that the word is fundamentally tied in its roots to BITING:

REMORSE

Main Entry: re·morse

Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French remors, from Medieval Latin remorsus, from Late Latin, act of biting again, from Latin remordēre to bite again, from re- + mordēre to bite — more at mordant

Date: 14th century

1 : a gnawing distress arising from a sense of guilt for past wrongs : self-reproach
2 obsolete : compassion

synonyms see penitence

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On the most profound and REAL level I was my mother’s PREY.  She was a predator, and her hate of me gave her full permission to BITE me.  She exercised her predator instinct as fully as she could without actually risking consequence from ‘the outside’.  She was profoundly self-centered (a physiological brain-based reality) and did not kill me, I believe, because of the consequences she would have had to endure if she had.  She was not stupid.

My mother did not feel any guilt for wrongs done against me, no ‘gnawing distress’, no self-reproach, no compassion.

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This leads me to the most important word of all, and that word is WRONG, not hate:

WRONG

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English wrang, from *wrang, adjective, wrong

Date: before 12th century

1 a : an injurious, unfair, or unjust act : action or conduct inflicting harm without due provocation or just cause b : a violation or invasion of the legal rights of another; especially : tort
2 : something wrong, immoral, or unethical; especially : principles, practices, or conduct contrary to justice, goodness, equity, or law
3 : the state, position, or fact of being or doing wrong: as a : the state of being mistaken or incorrect b : the state of being guilty

synonyms see injustice

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WRONG is just what it is – WRONG.

I knew what I had done to my son was WRONG.

My realization about my mother coincided at the same instant as I realized she felt no remorse and evidently did not (for whatever reason) EVER consider what she did to me was WRONG.  Not wrong = no remorse.

At this same instant I realized that I had done WRONG, and realized how WRONG my mother had been, how WRONG what she had done to me was, I in effect came face-to-face with the reality of a VOID within my mother where this ‘knowing I did something WRONG in hurting my child’ did not exist within her.  It was at this instant that I realized down to the bottom of my soul that “something was terribly WRONG with my mother.”

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I find it interesting that is the exact word my youngest sister had used on what was the very first time anyone in my family had ever talked with me about the abuse I endured as a child.  My sister had come to visit me I believe in 1980, and had said to me, “Linda, if you are not very, very mad for what our mother did to you while you were growing up there is something terrible wrong with you.”

I had nothing inside of me at that time (I was 29) to connect her words to.

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I am left here with the thought that this entire hunt about why I don’t hate my mother reminds me of reducing numbers contained in fractions to their lowest common denominator.

I don’t believe (evidently) that the important point for me has anything whatsoever to do with HATE.  Reducing all the terror and trauma, the pain and suffering and torment of my childhood of being hated and abused by my mother reduces down to just that one simple word for me:  WRONG.

I have never in my life personally felt so WRONG as I did the instant after I abused my little son.  At that instant I not only DID the WRONG, but recognized the WRONG, I knew without any possible room for doubt what WRONG really and actually was.

At that instant I finally knew what my sister had tried to tell me.  I finally knew how WRONG my mother was because I finally FELT what WRONG felt like within my own self.  That was the end of any denial I might have felt about my childhood and the end of any foggy inability I had up until that instant to know the truth about my mother and her treatment of me.

I could not ‘ignore’ or ‘pretend’ any more.  I had, for that instant I abused my son, fully become The Monster my mother had always been toward me.  I had become the predator who ‘bit’ my son.

I might not ever really know what HATE is, but I know now what WRONG is.  My WRONG was intimately connected to REMORSE.  My mother’s wasn’t.  Evidently it has never been important for me to hate my mother.  It was important that I learn this single fact:  WRONG and REMORSE belong together.  When they are dissociated from one another it means that something so much bigger is so terribly WRONG that unless some fundamental repair can be made at this level there is no hope for health, wellness or for healing.

I also know in my reality that that none of this has anything to do with HATE toward either of my parents.  Perhaps because I spent 18 years being ‘bitten’ and eaten alive by the hatred my mother had toward me, I see hatred as a predatory state of being I wish to avoid in any way that I can.  I believe I see hatred as being an attribute of The Monster.  I believe it is an endangering state.

Even looking at it physiologically, hate (a stress response)  does not promote compassionate operation of our calmness, caring and connection vagus nerve system.  I would ask, “Why entertain an unwelcome guest?  What goodness does hatred bring to the betterment of life?  Who does hate benefit?  What grows and what dies as a result of its presence?”

In my thinking, if we care enough about something to hate, we can care enough to care in some other, better way.

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+ARE WE SUPPOSED TO HATE THE PARENTS OF ‘PRECIOUS’?

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OK.  OK I found exactly what I was looking for.

All afternoon I’ve had the nagging thought that I need to write a post about what I think about Precious’ mother, Mary.  By the end of the film, Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, Mary is left as a despicable monster, literally an untouchable.

No matter what, wasn’t Precious’ mother still a human being?  Why would she not be worthy of compassion?  Where is the line we draw that determines who we feel sorry for, who we empathize with, who we have pity or sympathy for, who we hate and who we love?

I have referred to my own mother as ‘a monster’.  I know what she was like, especially when she was in the throes of one of her maniacal rages.  Does this mean that my mother ‘deserved’ to be hated?

Did Precious’ mother deserve to be hated?  Did her father?

The key to this movie’s final, finished finesse lies in the barely perceptible yet still obvious twist of the shoulder of social worker, Ms. Weiss away from her when Mary reaches out a pleading hand and touches her as Weiss walks out of the interview.  Weiss didn’t say to Mary, “You are a sick woman.  You need help.  Here’s a card with a number on it.  Call and there will be someone there who will care about you.”

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Wanting to rescue an abused child does not require hate for the abuser.  Watching this film, wanting Precious to escape the horrors of her home did not require that I hate her mother, either.  My personal passion as a viewer of this film was focused on waiting for the moment when Precious could separate herself from her mother, from that twisted, hate-filled environment, from danger, from darkness into a place of safety and security.  Had that moment never arrived in this film I would not be writing this post.  Had that moment never come, I would hate this movie, but I would still not hate the mother.

Yet the mother was left in the film as a vulnerable target for us to despise with disgust.  The rapist father?  I consider myself extremely fortunate to not be the victim of rape, incest or of any form of overt sexual abuse.  I cannot possibly know what it would be like to view this film if I did have such a history.

I do have a history of having a parent in the home, my father, who knew my mother’s terrible abuse of me continually happened and did nothing to intervene, protect me or stop it.  In one of the final scenes of this movie, Precious’ mother discloses the details of the first time her boyfriend sexually assaulted her three-year-old daughter and how she did nothing to intervene.  We are told in nearly point-blank terms that Mary suffered from a severe insecure attachment disorder:  “Who would love me?”

Precious’ mother did not protect her daughter.  Instead, her own brokenness demanded of her that she HATE her daughter for ‘stealing’ her boyfriend’s attention away from her.  How are we to forgive a woman who could participate IN ANY OF THIS?  How are we supposed to not HATE her?

It is the power of art – the writing of this story, the directing of this film, the talent of the actresses portraying the characters that designates that we hate this girl’s mother.  If we DO NOT hate her, we have not participated as willing audience members in the intention of this art form.

That’s quite all right with me.  I personally don’t want to be on the side of darkness where hatred breeds and seeds itself into the lives of its victims.  I would rather be able to loosen my mental and emotional grip enough to allow something other than hostile hatred, disgust and a feeling of “She is despicable” to envelope me.

I know that darkness.  I spent the first 18 years of my life in that darkness.  What makes this movie shine is the fact that Precious did not allow the darkness present in her life to consume her.  Never in the film are we shown that Precious swallowed any portion of the force-fed poison of hatred.  That, to me, is the power of being able to turn around finally and walk away into a different world where the abuser is not physically in it.

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I was fortunate as I plowed my way through web pages about this movie tonight, and found this year-old post:

Mo’Nique, PUSH Interview, Sundance 2009

By Eric Kohn

The film was evidently still known by it’s literary title, Push, at the 2009 Sundance showing:   Read the entire interview HERE.  What I was looking for appears part way down the interview’s script, as entertainer (comedian, now Oscar winner) Mo’Nique, who played the part of Precious’ mother, responds to the questions posed by Kohn:

You deliver a fairly intense monologue at the end of the movie that really ties it together. Do you see Mary as a sympathetic character?

Yes, I think that all of us know Mary.  I had to put her shoes on.  If I were that person, I would want forgiveness.  You do feel sorry for her because you begin to understand she’s mentally ill.  She ain’t just being a bitch.  She’s sick, and the society that we’re in, they threw her away.  Nobody asked any questions, nobody got involved.  That illness doesn’t just start.  People know for years.  We wanted to bring that world and put it right in your face.  To say, they exist; they’re your neighbor.  It might be your mother; it might be your sister.  It might be you.  What we were trying to do is not make it an action-and-cut Hollywood movie.  I think Mr. Daniels did a great job.

What guidance did he provide?

He said, “I need you to be a monster,” and that was it:  “Be a monster.  I need people to hate that character.”  Then he asked me before we started filming,  “Do you think that everybody gets redemption?”  I said,  “No, especially if you don’t ask for forgiveness and mean it.”  The moment he said action, the monster she was.

You brought to the table what you understood about the character.

Well, I was molested.  The person who molested me was a monster.  So I had to go to that person, because I know what it was like for me.  [Daniels] said action, and be that monster.

There has been talk that the movie is a tough sell. How do you see it working in the marketplace?

It’s honest.  You can’t be afraid, and you have to go and work at being fearless.  If you go into it saying, well, if I don’t believe it, then you won’t believe it.  As long as I believe it, you will believe it.  This is a universal film.  Do you know what I mean?

That’s what I wrote in my review.

It’s all over the world – molestation and abuse, mental and verbal.  It’s all over.  It’s not just black.  It’s not just white.  It’s every color, every walk.  It’s everywhere.  I haven’t met any Martians, but I promise if we have some, it is going on with them, too.

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SHARE A PRAYER

O God, refresh and gladden my spirit.  Purify my heart.  Illumine my powers.  I lay all my affairs in Thy Hand.  Thou art my Guide and my Refuge.  I will no longer be sorrowful and grieved, I will be a happy and joyful being.  O God, I will no longer be full of anxiety, nor will I let trouble harass me.  I will not dwell on the unpleasant things of life.

O God, Thou art more friend to me than I am to myself.  I dedicate myself to Thee, O Lord.

– ‘Abudu’l-Baha

in Baha’i Prayers, Baha’i Publishing Trust, 1969

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+MY REACTION TO THE MOVIE, ‘PRECIOUS’

alchemynowLeave a comment

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I started watching the movie, Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire last night and finished it today.  This post is not about the movie itself although there’s plenty TO say about it – and plenty that HAS been said.  This post is about my personal reaction to it.

My horrendous infant-child abuse history does not include incest or any other overt sexual abuse that I know of.  My history does include an insanely abusive mother.

I make no effort to alter my reactions to this movie from the way I first wrote them down.  They appear in three parts:  Comment, Description and Comment.

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COMMENT:

Precious:  “Someday I’m going to be normal.”

I had zero concept or normal, no idea how strange I was because my life was so strange.  I had no idea of how strange my life was.

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Brutal

Brutality

A world no one outside can imagine

There is nowhere to go but forward through it all – one instant at a time.

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No point of reference outside of the home.  No possible reality check

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Twisted mentality

No way to know what is true.  No possible way.

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Hate

Being hated

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Being brave

Not the same thing as courage

It’s trying, continuing on

Trying

Because there’s no other option and no other choice

Brave

When things are hard

Being strong and tough

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Precious:  “Sometimes I wish I were dead.”

I never got to that point.  I never knew it existed.

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I had advantages.  Being white.  A working Dad.  Good health.  No sexual abuse.

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No possibility of fighting back.

Zero.  A reality.  A fact of the situation.

Not the same thing as being a “victim”

When we react as a part of the reality of our environment, that’s not US – our self travels with us through all kinds of situations.

A situation can be victimizing – that does not make us a victim or mean we are one.

We can’t invent the wheel all by ourselves growing up.  We need help from someone for comparison –in this way, we are born as a blank slate.  If we’re isolated enough we can’t somehow magically know there are alternatives.

That’s what deprivation does.  It limits what we can conceive of.

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Who gives us a chance?

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Who can we tell our truth to?

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So many obstacles.

I never imagined.  No ability to fantasize.  That’s a pretty big thing to have stolen from me.  Even being powerless otherwise, the power to imagine is something.

I was forced into a literal world.  One time in 2nd grade mother left us with a baby sitter at the apartment building in Anchorage that we had recently moved out of.  I actually took the liberty – naturally – to involve myself with play with my siblings and with the other children present.

We made a hospital with a blanket draped over a card table.  I was sick.  I was drinking water from a soda bottle in the pretend hospital when my mother arrived back from her plastic-selling party.

Twisted my reality.  Why was I pretending to be a baby and why was I drinking from a baby bottle?

“No mother.  It was a soda bottle.  It was pretend medicine.”

No.  It was a baby bottle and for the next eleven years this incident, added to my mother’s abuse litany, proved that I did not want to grow up.  That I wanted to remain a baby.  And, of course, that I was a liar.

This is my only memory of myself DARING to imagine, to fantasize.  It is one of thousands of incidents where my mother distorted, overwhelmed and devoured my reality and then used her distortions to brutalize me over and over and over and over……. Again.

She distorted everything – hurt me (damaged me) that she distorted the reality I lived in and hence MY reality.

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I never wanted anything different.

I didn’t know it was even possible.

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DESCRIPTION:

Before the break came in the wall that confined this girl in her world of hell, her entire life was ‘small’ and it had made her ‘small’.

A severely abusive home-life removes nearly all opportunities for discovery about the self and the world.

A confinement box.

A cage.

Captured.

Captivated by the madness.

A captive of it.

A prisoner of war.

It makes self-based reactions and actions all but impossible.

The ability to fantasize and imagine is a sign a self exists, but it’s not enough.  It doesn’t indicate a self is present as a whole entity.  The fact that I lacked even this rudimentary skill simply means that during my childhood I never even ‘made it that far’.  Not even in my imagination could I escape ‘the box’.  The ability to fantasize and imagine is tied to an early ‘play stage’ of pretend – a stage of HATCHING related to exploration.

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Simple human kindness has to be present somehow, somewhere, in order for a self to recognize that it is human – that the self even exists at all, let alone that the self is a human being.

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If one can imagine-fantasize from within the barely cracked ‘egg’, this ability, because it exists, can be exercised once escape happens.

But nothing is ever going to be able to let all the blank places fill in where early development was missed, interfered with and aborted.

These blank spots are missing links in the chain of development.  A loved and properly parented child will express itself through an integration of self and the world in ongoing, continuous action and interaction.  When this chain is missing (and in pieces), when it is broken, those unintegrated fragments exist as dissociations in the continuity of a self in the world.

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I think of a wooden plank boardwalk.  Experiences that come from a developing child-self being able to interact successfully with the world (with power) create solid planks.

As these planks are naturally created and laid in place, an entire continuous (and contiguous)  walk way is built in an ongoing way.

When an abuser introjects their madness (and meanness) into a child’s life – which is always inappropriate – the child misses out on laying a solid plank down.

Even when a child does the very best that they can do to ‘handle’ these abusive encounters, the board they are forced to add onto their continuously expanding (lengthening) boardwalk will still be in effect a rotten one.  It will be faulty and unsubstantial because the ratio of their own self influence in the encounter compared to the overwhelming influence that the abuser contributed makes it so.

In extremely abusive childhoods when no adequate early caregiver is present that helps the child to lay substantial solid boards into their growing boardwalk, there can be sections that are empty.

These gaps create problems that are permanent and last for a lifetime.  When attachment experts state that the inability to follow Grice’s Maxims in the telling of a coherent life story is the primary symptom of an insecure attachment disorder, they are describing what is missing.   They are pointing to the broken sections of a person’s life-experience boardwalk where past opportunities to connect one’s own self to the world have been ruptured and never repaired.

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Because most extremely abusive parents traveled through their own infant-childhoods and into their adulthood with one of these completely faulty boardwalks themselves, one way or the other they are stealing the life force of their children and are, in effect, robbing boards from their children’s boardwalk and adding them in some fashion to their own.  Every time a caregiver abusively overwhelms an infant-child they are preventing that child from being able to lay down their own self-motivated and self-involved (appropriately) next step in development.  Every time these abusive transactions occur some variation away from healthy, normal and substantial is taking place.

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Now, to get a truer picture of how severe early abuse affects the ongoing life of an infant-child, we need to comprehend that survivors are at the same time being given such a challenging walk through life that their boardwalk will never lay upon anything like level ground.

The world underneath them is being mined away by the abuse.  They, and their ability to live a happy life of appropriate well-being is being undermined.  What should have been their boardwalk becomes a suspension bridge spanning dangerous ravines and abysses.  Their walk through life has always been dangerous.  Their connection to stable ground and to a sense of safety and security has always been inadequate, faulty, and precarious.

What could have become ‘a walk in the park’ has been changed into a blindfolded awkward stumbling waltz over completely unseen and unprepared for hostile territory on a flimsy, shaky, faultily tethered fragile bridge constructed of rotten boards and wide gaping holes.

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All the while this reality is happening for infant-child severe abuse and trauma survivors, those we encounter anticipate that we are just the same as they are.  We are expected to be the same; act the same, feel the same, think the same, know the same information about the world and about ourselves in it – in the same way – that non-early traumatized people do.  “Ain’t possible.”

If we pay attention to how we feel, we know we are aliens in an alien world.  We are like Precious, sitting like an alien stone in the back of her beloved math class, wishing she was animated and normal while having no real clue about how different she is or why.

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On the far extreme, unlike this movie girl, I was incapable of even conceiving of what normal was – or even that it existed.  I had no way of comparing either myself or my experience to anyone or anything.  The ability to have that awareness was a missing board in my boardwalk.

In fact, given what we are shown in this film about the inside of Precious’ life, I would guess that even this glimmer of awareness about normal only happened because the writer of this story took the literary option of giving it to this character.

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COMMENT:

Hope.

Precious:  “I think them was in a tunnel.  And in that tunnel maybe the only light they had was inside of them.  And then long after they escape that tunnel they still shining for everybody else.”

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Encountering our past in our present

Can be like falling into dark holes of the soul

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Finally, she cries.  Finally she shows the pain.  Finally, she feels her pain.  Finally she cannot separate herself from it.  And right here when the doubt for surviving breaks through comes, “I’m too tired……”

A crisis of the soul:  What is love?  Who loves me?

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Sick sick sick mothers

In a sick world where murky is too good a word.

Where right and wrong have to come from the outside

Because there is no hope of any REASON on the inside – where hate remains insanely justified.

The ONLY reason-able thing to do is to turn and walk away

To claim our OWN life

Separate from the madness (like separating an egg yolk from its white)

We are fortunate when things finally get this clear and normal no longer matters –

WE DO!

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See also:  “Precious” and the Oscars

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