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Today’s letter to a friend:
| Dear Sandy
As I begin my day I think about the gift of you arriving on the scenes of my life is to me right now. I have this image in my mind as I contemplate my work on the chicken vault today, as I gather every old board I can find on the property to use to complete this thing – right.
I see a mountain so tall and wide that separates ‘the world’ from being able to see the real picture of what you and I KNOW exists – instinctively – in our soul, our gut, in our mind.
You and I are blasting a tunnel through this mountain. Each of us in our own way has discovered parts of the truth – and we use each piece as we move forward – you and I – with our determination, with our unerring sense that there is more to ‘this picture’ of how early trauma changes people from the start of our life in our physiological body – and as a result in the way we live our lives.
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The links I sent you last night about the 2011 BPD empathy study – researchers (and all others who use their findings as guides, as little lights on their helmets as they peer into the darkness of the unknown looking for ‘answers’) – find pieces of the truth – and then they put them together in the wrong way – coming to wrong conclusions – or at best partially correct conclusions that are still wrong because they are not complete, do not account for the mismatches
because, in part, the are always building toward ‘new’ conclusions by taking what has been ‘discovered’ in the past as they assume these earlier findings are correct. Never mind, also, that all the fields of study are limiting themselves in their field’s proprietary areas of study – looking forever into the reality of the tiny piece of the puzzle they have found – refusing to link these separate pieces together…..
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In that BPD empathy study – ignoring the fact that even very young preschoolers are already demonstrating difficulties in their empathy abilities based on the degrees of safe/unsafe and secure/insecure attachment patterns that they already have built within their body-mind
The researchers are still saying BPDs have ‘immature empathy’??
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What I know – confirmed after I read Dr. Allan Schore’s meticulously documented books as he described piece by piece all the changes – the ‘damage’ – that is done to a little person growing a body-brain in the midst of trauma (insecure attachments) — and then I found Dr. Martin Teicher’s work in which he AT LAST and AT LEAST was able to realize that all these kinds of physiological changes result in ‘an evolutionarily altered’ individual
that let me know all these changes that Schore describes ARE NOT RANDOM, they are not accidental, they are not coincidental, they are not MEANINGLESS — that the resulting evolutionarily altered person is DIFFERENT
and I know it’s for a reason. Nature is not stupid. Nature knows exactly what it is doing. All these changes are for a PURPOSE
but not even Teicher talks (that I know of) that these changes (as Schore suggests) happen in the CNS, in the ANS, in the stress-calm response system, in our immune system — in our entire BODY — so that the resulting evolutionarily altered people are different IN ALL THE SYSTEMS of their body, which includes the resulting phenotype we arrive out the gate of our earliest developmental months and years of life with — as these trauma changes occur epigentically — and even in this way can pass the results of the trauma on down through the generations even if no abuse has been obvious through several of them
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I am writing about my severely BPD mother ‘assuming’ with everything I sense and intuitively know — that she was not BROKEN, she was CHANGED — and that the entire resulting phenotype of who/how she was happened by specific challenges that her physiological development accepted – as she was changed
I am looking for the patterns I can find in what I can see of my mother that supports my belief that AGAIN – her BPD was formed with specific structures that accomplished specific things to keep her alive
Her patterns were not random, accidental — or even ‘mysterious’ if we could understand what we see of who/how she was
I am getting lots of feedback from Helen in comments on the blog – she is BPD – she relates to everything Mother ‘is doing’ in her letters. But Helen has no recognition that these are not random displays from some confused mess of a disease —
Yes, BPD can so change a person that we cannot recognize that there is anything other than ‘rampant’ insanity at the end — I believe if we could look at this ‘madness’ using the right information to inform our study – we would find an exquisite natural-reasoning about how all the pieces and patterns fit together.
NEVER can a BPD person be made to be ‘normal’. I checked with Helen yesterday, who is herself a mother – though her children did not end up BPD — they are NOT healthy. I asked her if she thought any BPD could raise their children healthily – her answer was a firm NO (this is important to me)
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Anyway – I don’t search and research assuming that I am looking at ‘madness’ that makes no sense by definition
I search and research assuming that there is a clear pattern that makes perfect sense – as nasty and sad and as unfortunate as the result can be – and usually is.
I give nature full credit for knowing exactly what it is doing.
It is not different than what I am doing to finish my coop – not having money to hire anyone to do this perfectly, not having $ resources to run out and purchase all kinds of MORE new materials — I will finish this job using every salvaged piece of anything I can find to accomplish the END RESULT of creating a safe coop for my birds.
Nature does exactly the same thing. Given appearingly insurmountable obstacles, nature searches for every possible piece of supply/resource – on every level – to build for a little person a body-brain that will do the job of keeping them alive until they reach reproductive age.
Nature carries this process no further than that – and this is where we need to agree to look at the facts and then accept the truth. Our species has the capacity to do what nature intended – to take the offspring of these changed people away from the mothers at birth — and raise them correctly.
Nature cannot design these severe trauma survivors to make them adequate to care for their own young.
This is where we each isolate ourselves from the facts of the true and bigger picture. Nature KNOWS, of course, that others COULD accept their end of the bargain — basically THANK the survivor, such as my mother – and nature for its part – in keeping her alive long enough to bear young.
And we would do this as nature intended — by then making sure the offspring were raised in a completely safe and secure, appropriate environment.
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All this said, Sandy – I am clarifying for myself the pathway I take in my thinking and writing. I do not intend to add to the pile of used toilet paper-writings a single word that supports the idea that “Oh, well. Your mother was a broken mess. Too bad. We simply cannot understand her – she was crazy.”
We CAN understand my mother. At least I am doing my best to discover the underlying architecture, the structure, the purpose the patterns in her life had in the much bigger picture of how nature is REAL — has great POWER — and knows what it is doing. |
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Borderline Personality Disorder – empathy study – background letter:
just read a blog article related to this new research on BPD and empathy —
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811911004939
—here’s the blog link
http://downwardspiralintothevortex.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-brain-sees-empathy-in-borderline_30.html
—in essence found what you and I talk about – the ‘something missing’ – they call the BPD empathy ‘immature’ – or anyone who doesn’t ‘do’ empathy ‘correctly’ – as per this preschooler empathy study, the differences were obvious when kids were very young – way too young for any of them to have ‘mature’ empathy
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