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35.  The turquoise coat – Part three:  Darker than night

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Commentary

April 18, 2013.  This is the 62^nd time in my life I have lived through a date of the 18^th of April.  I am surrounded by the blooming beauty of the many roses and other perennials in my high desert Arizona garden as the morning light pushes away the shadows left by the last nightfall.  Although I sit outside writing wearing my knitted winter hat and long black down coat I know by the time night shadows are gone I will be warmed again by that magnificent orb we call the sun.

I think about many things including the dreams I had last night about two of my brothers and the bush of pink roses whose blush has never been matched by anything I have seen in my waking life.  I think about the many disadvantages I have because I was given so few opportunities as a child to learn to be a social being among others of my species.  Flowers in my garden take care of themselves as long as I make sure their roots don’t dry out, as long as I trim off old growth and shape them when needed.

People, on the other hand, seem to need perpetual care and mostly I don’t understand what they are asking for.  I think of a chapter I read several years ago, Responding to need in intimate relationships: Normative processes and individual differences, whose lead author was Nancy Collins (Department of Psychology, University of California in Santa Barbara).  (See note below.)  I found information about human relationships in this writing that I needed to know. 

Because we are members of a social species we have built within our body a sophisticated collection of interrelated physiological systems that are all geared toward modulating our attachment to life that includes other people.  Of course, as the Teicher article I mentioned in my previous chapter makes clear, abuse and early relationship trauma changes how our physiology develops so that these systems then operate differently from ordinary.

An ordinarily-built attachment system is designed to turn itself off and on.  Those of us with early relationship trauma have built into our body what can be simply termed an insecure attachment disorder.  One of the consequences of having been built this way is that our on/off switch becomes essentially broken.

In Collin’s description our body also grows within it an interactive caregiving system that is also based upon physiological abilities in our body that come into play ONNLY when the operation of our own attachment system is turned off.  People whose physiological development was changed through chronic exposure to early relationship trauma and deprivations can have an attachment system that never turns itself off.  Those people therefore experience detriments in their ability to genuinely and appropriately “give care” to others.

How all of these systems work together to balance our ability to have our own needs met “good enough” so that our attachment system CAN and periodically DOES turn itself off so our capacities to caregive to someone else is very complex.  Understanding what these systems are supposed to accomplish is part of what we need to know before we can accurately figure out how to make positive changes.  As long as we blindly allow ourselves to follow along the attachment-caregiver routes our physiology dictates for us we lack the capacity to consciously modulate how we are interacting in our relationships.

People who were given the opportunity to grow the best possible body-brain in a resource-adequate predominately safe and secure early attachment relationship environment can trust that the operation of these two main systems is working “good enough” to give them opportunity to both take and give in their relationships in a balanced and healthy way.  Those of us raised in early environments scarce with resources and deprived of safe and secure attachments will spend most of our lives struggling in ways that safe and securely attached people never will.

For us the shadows of nightfall are never fully chased away by a new day’s sunshine.  I could even say that we are walking stress response systems that never had a chance to build the physiological ability to experience the counterbalance state of peaceful calm into our body.  We can easily be in a chronic state of unmet need which means our attachment system cannot turn itself off.

I would suggest that for any “psychological” or “psychiatric” or even sociological approach to be effective (or even rational) it must set its beginning point of thought at the beginning point of human life.  Recent advances in technology now take the guesswork out of what truly makes us the same and what makes us different in terms of how our physiology is forced to accommodate itself to a life of woe versus a life of ease.  The essential changes that happen through adaptation to stressful trauma during the first 33 months of life (conception to age two) determine the trajectory of any individual who experiences them.  NOBODY, for example, can be spared degrees of debilitating change to their physiological development during those first 33 months of life if chronic stress-related biochemical reaches toxic levels in their body-brain.  On the other hand, being spared the flooding of these toxic hormones would benefit anyone.

Taken to extremes it is specifically the difference between the levels of toxic stress (distress) that infants are exposed to through the presence or absence of trauma in their earliest attachment relationships with their caregivers that creates the physiological body-brain that is designed for a lifetime of either plenty or of scarcity.  Degrees of change directly affect all social-emotional interactions a person has with self and with others for the rest of their lives.  The operation of and the balance between their attachment need and their caregiver systems will be impacted.

Rather than getting lost in an abyss of confusion about what I am attempting to describe I will ground my writing in the life experience of my mother whose attachment system had been formed in an early environment of such stressful trauma that only in the strangest ways in the rarest of circumstances could it ever be turned off for even the briefest periods of time.  Mother, as I study what patterns I can see of her life, more than ran on empty.  She ran on a perpetual vacuum that meant not only could she not caregive, but she sucked the life out of anyone she was around if they could not stop her from doing so.  Certainly Mildred’s dependent children had no capacity to protect themselves from her appetites of need except as they were able to preserve the inner integrity of their own mind.

I doubt there is any greater potential for child abuse than that which exists in a mother who is left alone with her children to suck their experience of childhood out of them by creating such an environment of continual trauma that any safe and secure attachments are prevented from forming.

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Life is in me and life surrounds me.  Life itself is a “one thing.”  It is tenacious in all of its variety of expression in form.  Life has a voracious, insatiable appetite essentially for one thing:  More life.

As I sat perched alone that night on the metal kitchen stool I had what all life yearns for.  I was alive.  I was carried through that night by the same processes that carried me in their current all the way through my life with mother.  I had my life.  I had the greatest powers on my side in existence.  Life itself carried me forward in its grip and it did not let go of me.

That level of attachment cannot be questioned, but it was not an attachment to humans on any but the most basic level of my having received what I needed to sustain my body that my parents “took care” of me.  Mother fed off of me as her (psycho-projected) all-bad child because the cord of her connection to being alive was contorted and twisted.  In very real and profoundly disturbed ways Mother robbed enough from me to stay alive herself and to have enough to give to her other “adored” children to sustain them.

She left me alone in the darkness on that stool all night because she needed to.  How she turned my suffering into cheerfulness to give to her other children is a mystery of psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder that needs to be solved.  Mother’s broken attachment system required that her needs be met through reverse-caregiving me. 

That is exactly, in my thinking, what all adult abuse of children is meant to accomplish:  Take away from a child everything but its very life to get what’s needed to take care of the unmet needs of self.  Additionally in Mother’s case she also took from me enough to minimally take care of her other “adored” children.  What is left over when these patterns are in operation is the great suffering of one that achieves some form of benefit for others.

These are excessively primitive, evolutionarily altered patterns of survival.  It was never Mother’s direct intention to kill me.  I was, so to speak, the perpetual fountain of her “youth” (life).  Her madness needed me alive.  It did not need me happy.

I do not believe any other species has the ability to create and sustain such a distortion of natural systems’ operation.  Because of our innate complexity humans have more to give, more to get and more to spare than other creatures do.  Mental, psychological, emotional and even spiritual abuse happens to children because it can.  Children are alive in each of these areas.  They have within them mines of resources that a deranged needy abuser will simply go after – because they need to and because they can.  (Society lets them.)

It is only to the extent that an infant or child who is under such attack can sustain itself and continue to replenish its inner resources that it will survive.  Without access to protective factors nobody can remain alive.  Certainly not young infants and children.

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I hung onto life because life hung onto me.  I was not uprooted.  Yet seldom in my life have I ever been able to experience true rest.  Perhaps such survivors as I am were forced to stretch a tap root so deeply into ongoing life itself that our continued existence was guaranteed simply because we were able to do so.

But on this my 62^nd experience of the 18^th of April I consider a body of information provided by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) through their Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study research.  This research has shown clearly that the more of these ACEs a person experienced the more likely it will be that they will suffer from difficulties throughout their lifespan that those with a low ACE count will not.  Long-term (longitudinal) research that attempted to follow high ACE count survivors became difficult to pursue because these survivors die on the average of twenty years earlier than low ACE people do.  (Again, basic information on this research and its findings can be found through using “CDC ACE study pyramid” in an online search.)

As a high ACE count survivor who has already survived advanced aggressive breast cancer I do not take for granted that I will have dozens more of these dates to account for.   Between this April 18^th and the next one I am committed to completing the writing of what parts of my story I feel have something useful to offer to others.  I realized this morning that hope itself can so fade into the background as a motivating force that it can seem to vanish altogether.  It is no longer hope that keeps me writing.  It is the extent of my caring.

I realize today that hope is connected to an attachment need that seeks fulfillment.  Caring comes from the quieting of attachment needs that allows for that system to turn itself off.  In all but the most pathological cases when the human attachment system has turned itself off the caregiving system is activated.  This happens when there is an excess of resources one can then release and give away.

The fact that we know there are over three million infants and children suffering abuse in our American nation each year, with millions more suffering under conditions of deprivation, tells me that on the whole there must not be enough Americans living here who have the ability to turn their own attachment system off so that they can begin to take care of these suffering millions of our nation’s offspring.  Perhaps the reason we have not yet stopped their suffering is because we are still too needy as adults to do so.  I have a small suggestion that might be of some assistance.

The more we educate ourselves about the lifelong benefits given to those whose bodies were formed in a safe and secure attachment relationship environment the more we will identify the riches those people have always had in comparison to others who experienced an early life under the opposite conditions.  With this recognition can come the realization that where it matters most there is probably not enough need present in a safe and securely attached person’s life to prevent them from NOT letting their attachment system turn itself off so that their caregiving system can turn itself all the way on.

A drizzle of caregiving done by only a few people will not accomplish what needs to be done to improve the life of the suffering millions of abused and deprived infants and children alive in our nation.  A recognition of the privilege that safe and securely attached people have always known might stimulate an increase in their personal experience of caring – and I mean as in GIVING a meaningful DAMN – about suffering caused to other people’s children.

If caring does not follow into actions of meaningful caregiving it is not really caring at all any more than an empty promise is a promise.

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Note:  Collins, N. L., Ford, M. B., Guichard, A. C., & Feeney, B. C. (2006). Responding to need in intimate relationships: Normative processes and individual differences. In M. Mikulincer & G. Goodman (Eds.), Dynamics of romantic love: Attachment, caregiving, and sex. New York: Guilford.  (pages 149-189)

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The first part of this chapter is in the previous post

+The turquoise coat – Part three: Darker than night (dark side, book 2, chapter 35)

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The Dark Side of Mildred’s Mountain series – Angel book 2 beginning with the POP!  Goes Alaska letters – chapter 35

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35.  The turquoise coat – Part three:  Darker than night

In Mildred’s November 13, 1957 letter she wrote of me 2½ months past my sixth birthday as she had forced me to wear such a coat as this was through long first grade days at school and on filthy bus rides in the mucky gray filth of a rainy Alaskan late fall as it moved into a still snowless winter:

Her beautiful turquoise jacket and white fur is filthy.  First day she ruined it, I washed it heartbroken (it’s a beauty and expensive) and made her wear old jacket for one week.  Then let her wear it again – same thing – and always blames other children!  I gave up.

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It was this day Mildred referred to when she took my coat away that she tore it off me as she attacked me when I walked in the log house door after school.  I was very small compared to her largeness and could not protect myself as she swung me around in circles by my arm so thin she could easily close her hand around it while she beat me with her wooden jelly making spoon in the kitchen.  As hard as she could.  With the spoon in her other hand.  The sounds of my wailing and of her screaming must have terrified my sisters (age 2 and 4) and my brother (age 7).

“Stand in the corner until your father gets home.  He’ll deal with you then!”  Shoved face into the wall beside the back door.  SLAM went the lid of the washing machine with my “washable” coat in it.  The water runs.

Standing still.  My forehead against the wall.  I did not mean to get my coat dirty.  I didn’t know how that happened.

Daddy came home from work.  He walked in the front door.  She screamed and shouted at him about what I had done.  “Take off your belt and give it to me.  I’ll show that girl of mine I mean business.”

I could not get away when she came at me.  Stomping fast across the kitchen floor.  She brought the metal kitchen stool with her and smashed it down on the laundry room floor in front of the drier screaming at me to pull my panties down.  “I’m going to give you want you deserve.  I will give you something you will remember.  Now bend over that stool right now!”

I wasn’t tall enough but I tried to hold onto it but I couldn’t.  Both of her hands holding onto the snaking arc of Daddy’s leather belt slashing against my back, my arms, my bottom, my legs.

Knocked down.  Dragged up.  Slammed against the edge of the doorway.  Both hands.  I tried to hold on. 

Into the kitchen.  Banged against the cold white edge of the stove.  Against the other side of the doorway and again into the back hall.  Beating.  Beating.

No scene such as this one was could ever be shown in any movie.  Never.  No thing should ever be done to a child that can’t be seen in the light of day by other people.  In view of strangers.

I crumpled.  She let go of me then.  All tired out from screaming and beating.  “Get up off the floor and sit on that stool.  Stay there and don’t get off of it.  I can’t stand the sight of you.  You’ll have no supper tonight!”

The stool must have been placed very near to the trapdoor John remembers in the back hall over the well.  I faced the drier but I could not reach out to touch it to keep from falling.  I had to do that part by myself.

So hard was the stool.  My bottom hurt very badly.  I dared not move.  Crying.  Breathing.  Gasping.  Crying.  As quietly as I possibly could so she wouldn’t hear me.

Mother’s voice changed.  She was cheerful as she made the sounds that went with making supper.  Pots and pans.  Metal cupboard doors open and close.  Dishes onto the table.  “Everyone come eat.  It’s time for supper.”

She didn’t mean me.

The food smelled so good.  I was so very hungry.  I heard them all talking together.  Eating their supper.  Then they were done.

Clearing off the table now.  She washes all the dishes.  She turns off the light as she walked away.  There is no light on where I am.  They are all in the living room.  They are all happy.  The television set is on.  Then it is off.  “Time to put your pajamas on.  Time for bed!”

The house grew quieter and quieter.  Daddy pulled open the couch into their bed in the living room.  The light went out everywhere.  No more distant murmuring.  Everyone asleep but me.

Not asleep.  So hungry.  So tired.  Dead dizzy tired.  In pain.  My stomach hurts, too.  I am getting colder.  I am weak and shaky.  Arms wrapped tight around my middle.  Feet hang down.  I dare not move.  I have to go to the bathroom.  I cannot.  I am scared.  I cannot move.

Alone in the darkness shivering.  I am a chill inside my skin.  Barely.  I rock myself forward and back.  Forward and back.

Coat.  In the washing machine.  She did not come to take it out.  She did not come get me.

I thought without thinking about everyone else eating supper in the dining room.  With their eating supper voices.  Sometimes they had laughed.   Rising.  Falling.  Happy voices eating smell-good supper.  Daddy’s smiling voice.  Mommy’s smiling voice.

Now they are all sleeping.  Sleeping.  All in their beds sleeping.  I am not sleeping.  I make no sound.  Tears.  Sliding down my cheeks.  Dripping.  Dripping down my neck.  Cold.

Long night.  Long silent night.  I am tired.  I am scared.  I am alone.  I am forgotten.

No lights anywhere.  Woods outside.  The refrigerator hums.  It stops.

So quiet.  So still.  So still.  Still.

There is nothing but me.  I am still waiting.

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32.  (under construction – intro only)

April 15, 2013.  On the Tuesday morning of September 11, 2001 Boston was brought into national attention because of the horror wrecked from the actions of those inside two jetliners that lifted off from Logan Airport.  Boston is in the news again today for two explosions that sounded like booming claps of thunder that came seconds apart at 2:50 P.M. near the finish line of the prestigious Boston Marathon.  According to the latest ABC news report at least three people were killed, one of them an eight-year-old boy.  Over 140 others were injured including children; at least ten of these people suffer from “amputated” limbs. 

Federal law enforcement officials confirmed that the blasts were caused by explosive devices.  As night falls authorities know nothing about “who was behind this act of terror,” or if this was a domestic or a foreign attack.  Horror and acts of terror shock.  They belong in the news, deserve and get attention, cause concern and outrage.  They stimulate compassion for the victims.  Everyone wants to know who is responsible and who will be held accountable.

Yet what about infants and children suffering from traumas behind the closed doors of the homes they live in?  Who cares about them?  Who notices?  Who identifies their attackers?  Who responds?  Who asks questions, rescues these little ones, treats their wounds, listens to their stories, keeps them safe and holds their attackers accountable?  Who speaks for these hidden silent fallen little ones? 

According to the most current statistics from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 3.3 million children were abused in America in 2010.  These were REPORTED cases of abuse.  There is no reason to believe this is not a gross understatement.  Who cares about all of these terrorized little ones?  How do we define a crisis?

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At the start of this chapter before I write about what happened to me during the span of time Mildred’s letters cover here, I want to mention a blog called Crosstalk that one of my Stop the Storm blog’s commenters posted the link to last week in response to my posting of chapter 20 of this book, A durable, endurable child.  The title of the post I visited on Crosstalk, written 96 weeks before I arrived on the site to read it, is Mothers Who Dislike Their Children Are Disturbed, Not Normal.  (It can be found via an online search using the title as the search term if the article does not get deleted!)

The post is well worth a read for anyone concerned especially with a split-mind (all-good/all-bad) abusive Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) psychotic mother.  The author of this post who goes by the online moniker of LessThanZero on the Crosstalk blog wrote “… my mother stripped me of all my clothes in December in Buffalo, New York, and locked me out of the house, telling me to stand outside naked for the night if I wanted to run to my friend’s house without a coat on….” 

When I visited the site this morning there were many comments listed at the end of this post yet when I went back to look at them this evening they have all been erased!  In response to one of the commenters to her post LessThanZero added further information about the fact that she and her sister had both run to the friend’s house without their coats on.  While the author, the all-bad child, received horrendous abuse her all-good sister was coddled, given a warm bath and then wrapped in blankets by their abusive BPD split-mind mother who was, I believe, psychotic like my mother was or more so.

Another commenter to this post on Crosstalk wrote that when she was four her mother decided to teach her to swim.  The little girl didn’t learn well enough, quickly enough, so her (psychotic) BPD mother cast her out alone into the middle of a fast-flowing river.  I want to know how this child made it back to shore by herself so that she could stay alive – and no doubt suffer continued horrendous abuse by her mentally ill mother.

I have a lot of questions!  I can ask, “How did these children survive?”  At the same time I ask that question of myself even though the abuse I suffered did not match in horror that spoken of within the two accounts mentioned here.  I want to know the “crime report” stories that belong to such survivors.  I want to know the context, the bigger picture, details of who could have and did not step in to STOP this kind of insane abuse!  All I have to work with is what I can discover of my own story with my own psychotic BPD abusive mother.

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