Tag: recovery

+APPROACHING MY MOTHER’S 1953 DIARY

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These are both completed now:

*MY INTRODUCTION TO MY MOTHER’S 1953 DIARY

**1953 – MY MOTHER’S DIARY – PART ONE

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I could not complete the transcription of my mother’s 1953 diary without stopping half way through the year.  I had to give myself permission to create a context of safety for myself as I continue to read her words.  The platform that I created for myself as I wrote my introduction to her 1953 diary feels secure enough for me to continue the transcription of her writings.  The transcription is not complete yet, but I will let you know as soon as they are published online as they will be contained within the following pages:

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*MY INTRODUCTION TO MY MOTHER’S 1953 DIARY

**1953 – MY MOTHER’S DIARY – PART ONE

**1953 – MY MOTHER’S DIARY – PART TWO

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+THE ABILITY TO WONDER AND BEING A WITNESS TO MY OWN ABUSE

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I began the page I wrote today (published under My Childhood Stories) in response to a reader’s post on my mother’s letters that I transcribed yesterday.  My writing rapidly led me in the direction of beginning to understand that I am both a witness abuse survivor of my own abuse at the same time I am a survivor of the abuse itself.  I am beginning to understand that these were two separate and different experiences that I had, NEARLY but not exactly at the same time, as I lived in one body, and that each affected me in different ways.  Like two different rivers feeding into one, both experiences are linked in differing ways to dissociation.

Today’s writing pathway also led into the subject of the gift of having the ability to wonder (or not ) and into a clear infant abuse memory that came to me shortly after I wrote the letter disowning my mother.

This entire writing is an important contribution to my growing understanding of a new ‘real reality’ that is separate and different from the reality that was built into my body-brain-mind during 18 years of abuse by my mother.

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+NEWLY TRANSCRIBED LETTERS

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My own story of The Fire Ants has been placed in the section on My Childhood Stories.  It describes my growing reality as it differs from my mother’s version of the event she describes in her letter to my father, June 17, 1957.

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The rest of the new 1957 letters I transcribed today, 060909, including the fire ant letter, can be seen at Take Care of Mothers.

These files are in a temporary location, but can be seen after they are filed on that blog in their permanent location.

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+MARCHING ON TO VICTORY OVER TRAUMA

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I wish I could remember my dreams!  Using the super powers of retrospect, I am learning how to understand and accept that the loss of awareness about my dreams today must be some further manifestation of the aging process.

About two months ago I woke in the middle of the night and sat up in bed with a revelation.  I knew when I woke up that I had been in the midst of a series of dreams that seemed to be moving in fast-forward motion.  At the instant I woke up I heard these words in my mind:  “Of course you don’t remember your dreams any more, Linda!  Look at the dreams you just woke up from.  They are so complicated and contain so much information that it would be impossible for anyone to actually remember them.”

Did I somehow receive a massive addition of a computer’s version of memory processing abilities ‘back there’ a few years ago at the time that I no longer remembered my dreams?  The ‘not knowing’ my dreams started about 10 years ago.  I distinctly remember the last GOOD dream I had.  I was living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota just prior to moving down here to the desert in southeastern Arizona.  I wrote the dream down, though I don’t know at the moment where that piece of paper is.  I remember it, though, and someday I will write it to include in my story.

Oh, that IS what I was going to write about yesterday before my ‘cyber house’ came crashing down around my fingertips.  I was going to write about the origin of the flying dreams I had as a child, and I was going to insert links to other pages on this post.  That is, until I discovered the links were dead and went absolutely no place!  Hence, the house cleaning.

What I will say from my present position of grand mother-dom (even though I have no actual grandchildren), is that for those of you ‘youngsters’ who get to still experience vivid and clear dreams when you wake up, realize that those dreams and the ability to clearly remember them is a gift.  I know that now because my gift has either disappeared or transformed itself into something else that works for me in some other way.

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What I think happened is that at that time in Sioux Falls ten years ago when I could sense that the dreams were changing, if not leaving me, I was physically preparing for the onset of menopause, or parimenopause, though I did not realize it at the time.  By the time I made it through that major female transition period, my dreaming states that had been such a vital part of my life since childhood had disappeared, and I never had a chance to even consciously bid them goodbye.

It seems as if I was ‘supposed’ to be ready for this new phase of my life, and in fact I guess I am ready or I wouldn’t be here experiencing this life in my ‘older self’ at this moment.  I can whine all I want to about how much I miss my dreaming abilities — the experiences of dreaming them, the experiences of remembering them — but it will not change the fact that I now seem to be processing an increasingly massive amount of information  in my dreams in my present life.

Sometimes when I wake now I just know that ‘something, some how’ seems to have ‘downloaded’ this information into my brain.  Because of what I now know about how the right and left brain work out information processing while we sleep, I suspect that this isn’t REALLY new information I am gaining at all.  I rather suspect that I am being able now to release from my right brain vast amounts of information that has been stored there, waiting, since the beginning of my life.

As this information is integrated with the knowledge of my left brain while I sleep, I just wake in the morning with no single detail of the dreams I have had the night before.  It might be like switching from analog to digital processing.  But what I do know is that I am being in-formed in my sleep.

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This morning I woke up knowing that part of what I am accomplishing through this cyber-house cleaning I am undertaking at the moment, is a quarantine of my mother.  When I first started my blogging process, I created the other two blogs, Take Care of Mothers and Workspace for Stop the Storm, at the same time as I created this one.  I only vaguely knew that as time went on my ‘blog house’ would have to expand.  This morning I have a clearer sense of how this is actually working.

When I thought, Take Care of Mothers, I was looking at it from a sort of warm, fuzzy place — like I might should I think about buying one of our commercialized sentiment cards to recognize our culture’s version of Mother’s Day for someone.  When I woke up this morning I KNEW in a different way that some huge circle related to the wholeness of the act of caregiving itself had completed itself within me.

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I should not be surprised that one end of the ‘caregiving circle’, or hoop of life has connected itself to the other end today — like plugging two ends of an extension cord into itself.  Now I sense from within myself what it means to have the one end of caregiving (seen perhaps from the point of view of being a woman) of bringing a new life into the world and caring for it as it grows into life, to the other end of seeing the necessity for ending something, and thus for the necessity of caring into death.

When looking back at our childhoods, most of my siblings would agree with me that given our particular circumstances, the only way to have resolved our troubles with my mother would have been to kill her.  Ideally, she needed to be removed from our lives and placed into quarantine.  As we begin to truly understand how early childhood trauma changes an infant and young child’s developing brain-mind-self, we will begin to clearly see that the ‘dis-ease’ of unresolved trauma effects that they carry within themselves will be passed onto these people’s offspring in some way.

In my case, my mother’s trauma was passed on to me in the form of terrible abuse.  Now as I work to separate my mother’s writings from my own I am in fact FINALLY experiencing some version of quarantine for my mother as I remove her to the Take Care of Mothers blog space.  I am ‘taking care’ of her, not by shooting her like one might shoot a rabid animal or a broken horse, not like one might if they could actually imprison her for 14,500 years, but by beginning an actual physical process of my own where I find ways to extricate her mind OUT OF my own mind.

This kind of caregiving is necessary only for me.  She is dead and my actions have nothing to do with her.  But in this process of examining what it means to allow myself a full range of action, even in my thoughts, about what taking care of mothers can ACTUALLY mean, I see that there are mothers who have always needed the most extreme kind of caregiving — so that they could be protected from harming innocent others, if not also themselves.

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The extreme forms of isolation my mother was able to affect for me during the 18 years I spent being abused by her meant that she had an almost super human ability to control the development of my mind, including my thoughts and my thinking process itself.  This process that I am working on as I ‘banish’ my mother to the kingdom of my other blog is helping me to further clarify the distinction I make between ‘memory retrieval’ and ‘disclosure’.

As I work to explore and connect all the fragmented pieces of my own history as it relates to the whole person I want to be (more of) today, I realize that as I return for my own memories I am forced to re-member myself with my mother in the picture (in the memory).  Obviously she was there.  She was the one that traumatized me in the first place.

That is where the power of disclosure enters into my process of healing my dissociations.  This is what I was evidently ‘working on’ during my dreaming state last night.  As I work with my own fragmented memories of myself in my life as they affected the formation of who I grew up being, through disclosure I can separate my mother from myself in those memories.  I can place HER in a different place and ME in another, safe one.

I find it interesting that within my own mind I have created the third blog of Workspace for Stop the Storm in the MIDDLE between the blog where my mother has been banished to and the one where I am knowing-through-telling my own story.  This workspace is a buffer zone between us.  Perhaps because I am trying to heal particularly from the abuse against me perpetrated by a Borderline Personality Disorder mother, creating this definite boundary zone between us is of utmost importance in my process.

Only in the most physically literal way was the umbilical cord connecting my mother to me ever severed.  On every other level — except for what I believe to be the spiritual one where she could not touch my essential self — that connection between the two of us remained intact.  Not only was that true for the 18 years I was continually exposed to her maliciousness, but it has also been true as she has infiltrated my mind to this day.

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I am going to divide and conquer, all right.  She ruled my life during all of my formative years, yet she could never completely rule me.  This is a war of wills as I continue to empower myself to rule my own body-brain-mind and soul.  She trampled where she had no business being.  She trampled on me, she trampled me.  But she did not conquer me and I aim to prove it.

“March on, oh wounded ones, march on!”

I am in fact reclaiming the soil of my own selfdom!  When I am done cleaning my own house, my mother will not be in it.

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As always, thank you for reading.  Your comments are welcome and appreciated!  Linda

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+I’M NOT KIDDING! It’s A MESS HERE!

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HELP!!  I am in blogger’s hell!!  In trying to clean up, rearrange, reassign pages, move some, delete some, etc. I think all the pages and posts have staged a mutiny!  A revolt!  They are on the lose, running the show, I’m helpless!  I’m drowning!!

I hope things get better soon so I can get back to writing!!  I was all ready to write a super post today, and then found out there were dead links all over this site, and I didn’t put them there!  I hope I can remember what I was going to write, after this house gets cleaned!

Thanks for your patience!

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Here are some links on attachment disorders and mothers for you to check out while you wait!

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I’m working on:

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Take Care of Mothers, where all my own mother’s writings have been moved to.  I am also in the processing of moving all the information on secure and insecure attachment patterns over there.

and

Workspace for Stop the Storm – both blogs being about stopping the intergenerational transmission of unresolved traumas, about stopping child abuse and about healing traumas.  Thank you!  Linda

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+HOW DO I KNOW MY MOTHER WAS NUTS?

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060709

+DO I KNOW MY MOTHER WAS CRAZY?

Some part of me wants to write about this topic while another part of me wants to say, “Don’t ask me.  I don’t have a CLUE!”

Even thinking about this question causes me to feel disturbed inside.  Knowing what I knew from birth was forbidden to me by my mother.  As I begin to gain new understandings about myself I am also gaining a glimmer of new understanding about how life was for my siblings as they were raised by my mother.  It’s as if the more I learn about how they experienced life in our family the more I can understand both what was similar about our experiences and what was far different.

Sometimes these new understandings go through me like shock waves when I ‘get them’.  As the shock waves go through me they change me on so many levels that I still do not understand.  The first time I had this experience was when I learned that my siblings always knew that something was wrong with my mother and that she was nuts.  From my side of the equation, I could not understand how they knew this.

This discrepancy might seem odd to anyone else who might look from the outside and see that such a mean, hateful, unpredictable, controlling violent mother was OF COURSE nuts.  But I NEVER had this thought growing up.  Not one single time.  I didn’t because I couldn’t.

It’s a strange feeling knowing that my siblings had this massive piece of important information within their own heads while I did not.  I feel cheated, just by this one fact alone.  But if it isn’t enough just to know that to me everything that went on between my mother and I was the ‘truth’ and ‘inevitable’ and therefore correct, there’s another piece that’s even harder to know than it is to verbally admit.

I REALLY still don’t KNOW IT.  That is, to me, what the personal work of going through my mother’s letters is all about for me right now.  I find that on some deep level it is even hard for me to give myself permission to even read her letters, let alone to transcribe them and, heaven forbid, actually PUBLISH them, even online!  The words that scream themselves out inside my head as I do this work with her writings are her words, “HOW DARE YOU!”

Who do I think I am?

Well, that is the trillion dollar question, isn’t it mother.  Who is Linda?

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Working with my mother’s actual words brings me about as close physically to her presence as I can get at this point in time.  They remain as external presentations both of her having been in a body at some point in time so that she could hold a pen in her hand and stream those words across pieces of paper, and about the process of her thinking as it is reflected within her words.  Because I existed in her world as a target rather than as a person, the basic fight that goes on inside of me right now is about ‘turning the tables’ so that she now becomes my target instead of it being the way it ALWAYS was, and in many ways STILL is that even within my own mind I am still the target of her.

It’s my turn now.  On many levels that scares the pajabbers out of me.  I write about this today because I intend to move forward, not backward.  I intend to empower myself to be ever more increasingly aware of what I feel on the inside of me as I read her words.  I am going to give myself permission to insert my [Linda notes:  ] within the context of her letters as I transcribe them.

Who?  Linda?  Linda have permission to DARE assume she has any rights at all?  A right to my own opinion?  Any right to know what I know?  I feel like I have to defend myself TO my mother while I transcribe these letters.  Might that be because I never had the ability to defend myself AGAINST my mother when I needed it most?

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I have no doubt that my mother believed that she owned me like she would own a possession. She most certainly owned me as a target for any abuse of any kind that she might choose at any time to attack me with.  Right now I have hundreds of her letters and other writings here in my home.  Does that mean I now ‘possess’ and own them the way she once owned me?

Does that mean that I own some part of who she once was?  She’s dead.  She can’t even roll over in her grave because she was turned to ashes and spread over the homestead.  She isn’t here.

Or is she?  I believe that because of the kind of abuse she was able to perpetrate against me, because of the way she had nearly constant access to me, the way she controlled every aspect of my being in the world when she wanted to (even my freedom to use the bathroom, depriving me of food, of sleep, waking me from sound sleep and beating me randomly when she felt like it, depriving me of my freedom of movement by making me sit on a stool all night, stand in corners, lie in bed, even lock me in the car or in a shed when I was older, preventing me from playing, from playing or talking to my siblings, from seeing my grandmother even when I was very young, by intervening to prevent my father from ‘noticing’ I was alive, on and on and on) that she particularly formed herself so far within who I am that her thoughts have, on deep and profound levels of my being, become my thoughts.

If in some strange yet generous way the circumstances of life not only imprisoned me in the first place but also designed that I have these letters in my possession because they contain a key to my release from the prison my mother created for me, a prison I am still in if I cannot find my own way to my own thoughts so that I CAN KNOW WHAT I KNOW because what I know is mine.  It is not my mother’s.  It is not my mother!  I am not my mother.  I am not who my mother thought I was, and it’s time for me to find a way to give myself permission to know this – from within myself in the same way that my siblings were able to know it themselves from the time they were old enough to think – MY MOTHER WAS NUTS.

I can mouth the words.  I can speak them.  I can run them through my mind.  But I do not YET know the truth of them.  My mother was crazy.

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Be sure not to miss Blog Carnival’s newest monthly edition on healing traumas and abuse, including this great article on raising a highly sensitive child!

+LINKS TO TODAY’S PAGES ON DISSOCIATION AND DISCLOSURE

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How some abused children grow up to be dangerous parents:

*FURTHER UNDERSTANDINGS ABOUT DISSOCIATION

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Memory retrieval of traumatic experiences can feed dissociation.

Disclosure, on the other hand, allows us to  find words to define, limit, create boundaries for, and verbally express (including being able to THINK about) our traumas.

Disclosure leads to healing through closure:

*THE ADVANTAGES OF DISCLOSURE

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+HOT OFF THE PRESS

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Link to new Brother 1965 story:

*RED ROBIN

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MY RESPONSE TO MY BROTHER’S STORY:

This reminds me of a time maybe 25 years ago when I was shopping in a small local grocery store in the northern Minnesota town I then lived in.  I had intuitively noticed something happening like a drama between a man, a woman and a small boy of about 4 years old. I had seen the three of them in the store together earlier, only now as I passed through the checkout line I noticed the mother was against the store wall to my right, the father was standing near the exit door to my left, and the little boy was walking around alone with his little arms wrapped around a large blue plastic ball.

At first as I watched him I thought he had ‘lost’ his parents as he moved back and forth between the ends of the isles and end of the lines of people at the check out.  But as I watched I soon understood I was watching an entirely different kind of story unfold.

I moved through the line, paid for my groceries and was leaving when I noticed the mother still inside the store, the father holding the door open, the mother was giving hand signals to the little boy.  At the perfect moment he ran out the door, the mother slowly followed him after a count of 5 seconds, and the family reunited and meandered across the parking lot to their car.

I swear I stood inside that store with my mouth open dumbly, not believing what I had just witnessed.  Those parents had brought their child into that store for the direct purpose of teaching him how to steal.  I awoke from my trance and yelled at the cashier closest to me, “Those people just stole that ball,” as I pointed out the front window.

No, they knew that ball hadn’t been paid for, and out the door after them raced the store manager.  I don’t know what happened next but those people didn’t get away with their ball this time.  How many times previously had those parents given that boy their lessons?  How many times afterward?  Did the ‘getting caught’ part create any break or intervention that might help that little boy understand there’s nothing good about stealing?  Or did they all become just that more determined to learn to steal better?

I don’t know, but it was an eye opener for me.  I wondered what chance of a good life does a child like that have if that is how his life is at the beginning?

I know that if I were faced today with a scene such as you are describing I would at least take down that man’s license plate number and call 911, describing to the police exactly what I had witnessed.  Unfortunately the system itself is not what it could be, but it is the best that we have.

Very disturbingly research is now showing that for all the efforts being made to stop physical assault against children, the effects of a child’s exposure to VERBAL abuse alone can cause more long term harm to a child than does any other single form of abuse — and the physical marks don’t show.

We need to know what we are looking at when we see these wounded children. There might be times that we can look into their eyes, times when we might be able to say a word to them, spend time getting to know them in some safe way, some way to let them know as soon as they are old enough that they can report to adults themselves what is hurting them out of sight of others.

Of course there is controversy about the ‘correctness’ and stringency of laws against abusing children.  But if we think about it logically, would we ever say it would be OK not to have any laws against killing other people because, who knows, sometimes the dead person deserved to die?

+SIBLING LINKS

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**Cindy’s Letter to Mother 1994

**CINDY’S BLOG POST on Mother (060409)

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**FAMILY TIME – by Brother (1965)

**SELLING THE HOMESTEAD

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Please refer back to this section of the blog as time goes on for future writings by my siblings:

MY SIBLINGS’ COMMENT PAGES

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+INNOCENT TARGETS FOR MY MOTHER’S RAGE

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Trying to write the story of my childhood in a logical, chronological, coherent way is an almost overwhelming task.  As I’ve said before an inability to tell a coherent life story is perhaps the MAIN symptom of an insecure attachment.  This dis-ability to either live a coherent life or to tell the story of one’s own life in a coherent fashion manifests itself by degrees of damage in accordance with how insecurely attached a person is.

These degrees of damage move down the scale from being slightly insecurely attached to extremely insecurely attached.  For those of us like my mother and myself, the most severe insecure attachment pattern, that of disorganized-disoriented, means that we are not even securely attached in our fundamental relationship between our self and our self.  As a result, we cannot possibly either live a coherent life or tell a coherent story of our life.  That is what the disorganization and disorientation of our insecure attachment pattern, formed into our early developing brain, did and does to us.

Our condition is a direct result and manifestation of living through traumas at a very early age that built themselves into our developing brain, body and mind.  I understood very early in my own research about the reality of my condition that what is known as ‘peritrauma’ is key and central to my understanding of a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern.  Peritrauma is what happens in the middle of the experience of a traumatic event during what the experts call the Acute Trauma stage.

I suspect that we will gain far more information about how the experience of trauma affects us when we begin to connect what the medical profession knows about how trauma affects the physical body with what the psychiatric profession knows about how it affects us psychologically.  At this point in time I find that descriptions of peritrauma are mostly contained within the Acute Trauma medial realm as it relates to the physical body as if our physical body can be separated from what happens within the brain and mind.

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I always use the online Websters dictionary to find definitions for words I require so that my findings can always be consistently tracked back to this one main source of information for the Modern English I use in my thinking.  Yet not even Websters seems to contain the word ‘peritrauma’ or ‘peri-trauma’ within its data banks.  I see this as further indication that we have not yet as a culture put the most important information about what truly creates disaster in our lives into the collective data banks of our own thinking.

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Dictionary: trau·ma   (trô‘mə, trou‘-)

n., pl. -mas or -ma·ta (-mə-tə).

  1. A serious injury or shock to the body, as from violence or an accident.
  2. An emotional wound or shock that creates substantial, lasting damage to the psychological development of a person, often leading to neurosis.
  3. An event or situation that causes great distress and disruption.

[Greek.]

traumatic trau·mat’ic (-măt‘ĭk) adj.
traumatically trau·mat’i·cal·ly adv.

From : http://www.answers.com/topic/psychological-trauma

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I discovered this link through my efforts to connect physical trauma to mental trauma.  I can think of no more of an accurate place to begin to think about the effects of peritrauma as it relates to child abuse than this one:

[PDF]  Psychology of Terrorism

File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
pressure to define terrorist behavior in terms of psychopathology, and he clearly suggests …… peritrauma and posttrauma risk factors, are central …… Webster’s New Collegiate Dic- tionary. Springfield, MA: G & C Merriam Company. …
bourbonandlawndarts.googlepages.com/Psychology.of.Terrorism-0195172493.pdf –

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Acute trauma is the physiological stage we are in while we experience any trauma.  Acute trauma affects every possible aspect of who we are as human beings with bodies — including our brain-mind.  Peritrauma is the ongoing experience of being in an acute trauma experience as we are enduring it.  Post traumatic stages are the result of not completing the acute trauma stage adequately so that it can be ‘passed through’ rather than NOT ‘passed through’.

In my thinking, it’s that simple.  Either we experience the acute trauma stage and come out the other end having completed the trauma cycle, or we don’t.  If we do not complete the trauma cycle this means that aspects of the peritrauma we experienced AT THE CENTER of the acute trauma stage are carried within us in our bodies, brains and minds.  We have not, therefore, re-stored ourselves to the state we were in before the trauma happened.  We have not re-covered our previous state.  We have not re-membered the being that we were before the trauma occurred.

We are left fragmented within ourselves and will not be able to tell a truly coherent story — not even to ourselves — of what the experience was like for us because we are actually still in it.  When we are left with unresolved, uncompleted traumatic experiences within us — in the form of continued and ongoing peritraumatic reactions that originated during the acute trauma experience — trauma will continue to live itself through us.  We are therefore correspondingly robbed of our own ability to live our own lives free from trauma.  It owns us.  It possesses us.  And it can consume us.

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If severe traumatic experiences happen to very young infants and children, the traumas so build themselves into the fabric and structure of the early developing brain-mind that the peritraumatic spectrum of these experiences can never be later extricated.  They instead determine how the survivor will process information about being in the world for the rest of their lives.  Dissociation, I believe, becomes the operating system of these brain-minds because the ongoing peritraumatic experience of the traumas were integrated into the brain-mind itself.

This is how a brain-mind built in, by and for a malevolent world continues to operate as it knows and is forced to always remember that the world is not only unsafe, but is also a disorganized and disorienting place to have to survive in.  It will never be able to re-member itself as having lived before in any state other than a peritraumatic one.  This kind of malevolently-formed brain, created in a severely traumatic early world, can never re-store to or re-cover back to a state it never knew in the first place.

As a result, the disorganization, disorientation, incongruity, and incoherence (and dysregulation) that is by definition a part of the peritraumatic experience during acute trauma will continue to operate through an insecure attachment system within the body and brain-mind of such a survivor for the rest of their life.  Organization, orientation, congruity and coherence, if they exist within such a brain-mind at all, will be limited to certain sections of a person’s life.  These separate sections might contain large fields of related experiences, but these fields of experience will not themselves be healthily connected to the survivor’s ongoing coherent experience of life.

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Trauma triggers create a shift in the ongoing experience of such a person’s life.  This shift is automatic and unconscious, and happens at the speed of light because the electrical communications between the cells of our bodies, including our brain-mind, happen that fast.  For severe childhood trauma survivors, both the trigger as stimulus and the automatic reaction to the trigger, directly stimulate their disorganized-disoriented dissociative core foundation of who they are in interaction with life.  We should not be surprised, therefore, that these people continue to surprise us.  If they COULD become conscious of their patterns, they would even surprise themselves.

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I want to give you a simple and seemingly innocuous example of how my mother’s self was so easily disconnected both from her self as a self and also from the reality of those around her.  My sister, Cindy, pointed this out to me after she read this part of my mother’s June 5, 1959 letter ( *1959 Alaska Letters transcribed 060309 (not filed)):

“Oh, we looked funny when we got to town – me with boots, levis etc and all of us looking – well just like homesteaders!!  I hadn’t been ‘out’ for a week and hadn’t had a real bath since then!  We took showers at the women’s dormitory on the base – and all got dressed up in summer cottons!  My, we felt good!!!

I had packed our things in a suit case but had forgotten soap, shower cap and bobby pins and comb!  I couldn’t do a thing until I had them and even refused to go to breakfast until we were cleaned up.  I went over to the shopping center on Govt Hill and he opened up the store early (he was cleaning it) and I purchased the things.  Oh, I hated to be seen that way.  Once you’re in the city it’s just like Pasadena or any city and you feel out of place not dressed up—

Anyways later I found my shower cap and wanted a refund of 39 cents on one I’d bought so returned it and I was sure he’d never recognize me BUT he did!”

As Cindy points out, my mother often described her country-woman self by using her first name, Mildred.  She described her town-woman self by using her middle name, Ann.  Were it not for the inside information that we have about the condition of my mother’s brain-mind, we could believe that these designations were merely playful.  Yet the words of her letter indicate that she honestly and genuinely was completely amazed if not shocked and stunned that an outsider who had seen ‘Mildred’ would recognize her as being the same person when she later met him as ‘Ann’.

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Her interaction with the shopkeeper was not a significantly traumatic experience for my mother, yet her experience of the interaction demonstrates a key and central aspect of her brain-mind’s organization, or more accurately, of its disorganization.  At the instant she realized that this man actually DID recognize her, some aspect of her inner disorientation affected her.  This illustrates only a tiny drop in the sea of my mother’s ongoing disorganized, disoriented, incongruous, incoherent interactions within her own life.

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I believe that my mother’s deepest taproot of being-a-self-in-the-world was embedded in unresolved early peritrauma.  On this day, today, I would add Dissociative Identity Disorder to the long list of suspected diagnosis I might attach to her.  This list would, in my thinking, run the range from paranoid psychotic, to manic depressive, through Borderline Personality Disorder, some form of schizoid personality disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  She was a very dangerous ‘piece of work’.

Yet all of these patterns nicely fit within a framework of disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment.  As untrue as it might be, and as hard as it might be to accept if it IS true, I would say that just as my mother did not choose the malevolent conditions that formed her early brain-mind including her connection to her own self or her connection to the world around her, I do not believe she had the conscious ability to choose her later reactions to anyone or anything that happened in her life, either.   That includes even her reactions to a shopkeeper’s reaction to her.

She was therefore no more capable of responding appropriately to the world around her, which included her mate and children, that would be a rapid dog.  Anything about her that might have ‘appeared normal’ was simply a part of one ‘larger field of related experience’ or another.  These ‘related fields’ were glued together, organized and oriented around particular patterns and themes such as ‘looking good in public’, ‘taking care of the house’, ‘having well behaved children’, and/or ‘homesteading in Alaska’.

These ‘fields’ were only tenuously and fragily connected to the taproot of one version of her self or another that had managed to form in her early childhood and to survive into her adulthood.  These fields were not solidly and coherently either bound to one another or to her ongoing self-in-the-world.  This allowed ongoing triggers of early traumas to evaporate, on any given occasion, any semblance of ongoing order (or of reasonality) that her fragile psych might periodically be able to construct and maintain.

I imagine these fields as they might exist on floating islands, separated from one another and from the self that creates them.  They are incomplete dissociative realities, but in most cases they are the best that a survivor manage to create in their lifetime.

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Life with our mother occurred in the same active peritraumatic mine field that existed within her own self.  None of us were able to know ahead of time exactly what would trip the wire that resulted in one of her mines exploding.  Her various states of mind and states of being were dis-organized around the ongoing peritrauma that filled her.  There was no healing of these toxic-filled gaps and no way to predict their explosions or to protect ourselves from them.

What I do know is that whatever happened to my mother during her early childhood, she came out of it mad as hell, full of uncontrollable hatred and rage, mean and fighting.  In some cases, ‘hell has no fury like a scorned child’.  Unfortunately my mother’s children were targets of her madness.

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