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I have been thinking back over the 4+ years I have been posting on this blog to see if I can remember ever having recommended any specific book not about what happened (especially) to change the earliest physiological development of severe infant-child abuse and trauma survivors but rather about HOW TO HEAL from what happened to us.  I can’t think of one book, or even of one train of thought or practice that has yet struck me as holding forth the kind of practical hope for healing that I would demand of any particular healing or “therapy” technique.

Not a one.  Not one approach has captivated, intrigued, impressed or ever struck me as being of such vast and truthful importance that I would ever say to myself, “Gee Whiz!  This is a SURE BET for MY healing!”  Certainly if I could not find that book for myself I would not ever recommend or even suggest it to my readers. 

I have two books in my possession that lie near to me at hand right now that I believe FINALLY hold hope for my own progress in healing.  I find that fascinating!  I consider that both of these books, as I mentioned them in my recent post, contain accurate information that lies at the foundational level of what I need for my own healing.  I will turn 62 at the end of this coming August.  It has taken me a long time, I guess, to be ready for these books and therefore to be ready to recommend them to this blog’s readers.

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I am only at the starting line regarding what these books have to teach me.  Both of them deal with the BODY.  The first one – the revised and updated 2010 edition of a book written by Shelley Redford Young and Robert O. Young, The pH Miracle: Balance Your Diet, Reclaim Your Health is the most worthwhile book I have ever read – and read – and read again.  I feel as though I have entered a university course on my own body, and I have a long way to go before I can say I truly understand what this book is truly telling me.

That means I still have a long way to go before I understand how my body operates!  I know as a trauma-changed person that it is most important for me (and for others like me) to understand how the “stress” of the massive amounts of trauma I have experienced are affecting me today.  How I digest the food and liquids I put into my mouth matters no more or less than how I digest my own personal experiences with trauma in all the ways it has made my life hard to live – and harder to love.

I survived advanced aggressive breast cancer (I actually had two of them) through “western” medical means 5 ½ years ago.  I am 100% convinced that if I had known the information in this book and had been able to put it into practice years ago, I would not have gotten the cancer in the first place.  Certainly if I had known and applied this information once my cancer was diagnosed I am certain my body could have healed that cancer all on its own.

I of course can make this statement regarding nobody but myself – but I now fully intend to heal through this information other problems I can no longer outrun, which include osteoporosis that is already destroying my bones, chronic diarrhea (I had to consume 8-10 antiD pills per day of my travels), and my fear that my cancer will return.  Through this process of learning and applying what I am learning I have true hope that trauma-related PTSD, chronic depression, nasty anxiety that plagues me and even my dissociation can begin to heal.  I have never had this hope before, but neither have I ever had the information this book is giving me.

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The other book is in an area I have never considered for myself before now.  I am a serious and very long-term cigarette smoker.  I already have onset of COPD – and I CANNOT FIND THE WAY TO QUIT!!  I did quit once 27 years ago for 3 months.  Something very stressful happened, I had one puff – and that was THAT!

The Yoga of Breath: A Step-by-Step Guide to Pranayama

Richard Rosen

ME?  YOGA?

I have only made it to the third page of the first chapter so far.  This book will take some time!  But – I have hope!  Many times I find myself holding my breath.  Seriously holding my breath, as if in the midst of a terror that makes terror pale.  I feel very small.  Well, we all know how that terror feels when we are very small and our attacker is deadly mean and at us….

BUT…..

I often search for word origins to deepen my comprehension of the meaning of words in English.  I have for many, many years felt a special delight when I find an English word whose origin or word family connects back to Sanskrit.  I have never even known why I feel that way!  It’s a sense of rightness.  A sense of having found my way home.

At the risk of making this a long worded post, I am going to share some of the author’s words in the first three pages of the first chapter (pages 13-15).  They speak to me.  Perhaps they will speak to you, especially if you have been confined for your whole life as I have been under the influence of a body changed by trauma.

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Yoga

“The classical or literary language of India is Sanskrit.  The word itself means “well or completely formed, perfected.”  Sanskrit is indeed a beautiful and highly evocative language.  Many of its words remind me of a Russian doll, which opens up to reveal a smaller doll inside, and which in its turn opens to reveal an even smaller doll, and so on and on until the littlest doll is exposed.  Even though I don’t know the language well, I can find my way around a Sanskrit-English dictionary [I want one of these!].  I like to look up words in the yoga lexicon and pull them apart to see what’s inside.  This often gives me new insights into my practice.  We’ll be unraveling Sanskrit words as we go through this guide.  Your practice will be enriched by the hidden meanings in this perfect language.

[What a concept!  A perfect language!  Perfection is healing, I think.  The idea of it inspires me.  Being in the presence of perfection is healing.  But this is a paradox.  It is not that literal perfection is possible here on earth – but there is the best of the best of the best….  All of life is going in that direction.  One way or the other.]

“Let’s start with a word that may already be familiar to you – the Sanskrit verb yuj, which means to “yoke” or “harness.”  It’s a relic of an age, many thousands of years ago, when Indian warriors rode into battle in chariots.  These wagons typically carried an archer and his driver or charioteer and were drawn by two horses, which had the reputation of being rather ferocious.  “At his deep neigh,” sings one old hymn about the cry of a warhorse, “like the thunder of heaven / the foemen tremble in fear.”  It was the charioteer’s task to hitch these barely tamed beasts to the chariot, no small feat in the days before the invention of the yoke.  He needed both extraordinary braver and skill, and as a consequence, his position was highly esteemed.

“In the everyday language, yuj assumed the sense of “unite, connect, add, bring together,” as well as – since the occupation of yoking or harnessing implied that the charioteer had learned a particular technique that got the chariot up and running – “made ready, prepare, set to work, employ, apply.”  Two notions, then, of a desired end and its means are conveyed by the verb yuj and its several derivatives, including the masculine noun yoga.

The practice of yoga is very old.  There were surely contemporaries of our charioteer who were engaged in some form of yoga, though it probably didn’t exactly resemble what we call yoga today.  In general, yoga has four goals:

1.  Regeneration or health, and the end of suffering

2.  Skillful action

3.  Integration or self-knowledge

4.  Liberation

[All sounding good to me and related/connected to what all of us trauma survivors are doing all of the time just by remaining alive!]

“In much of the sacred literature of India, liberation (moksha) is explained as the yoking or joining of the embodied soul (jiva-atman) to the Great Self (parama-atman).  Both yoke and join, by the way, are cognate with yuj and yoga.  This is a pointed allusion to the charioteer, his horses, and the chariot.  One of the most famous parables in the Upanishads [a collection of philosophical texts which form the theoretical basis for the Hindu religion.] recalls and plays upon this root meaning:

Know thou the soul (atman, self) as riding in a chariot,

The body as the chariot.

Know thou the intellect (buddhi) as the chariot-driver,

And the mind (manas) as the reins.

>>  The senses (indriya), they say, are the horses;

The objects of sense, what they range over….

>>  He who has not understanding,

Whose mind is not constantly held firm –

His senses are uncontrolled,

Like the vicious horses of a chariot-driver.

>>  He, however, who has the understanding of a chariot-driver,

A man who reins in his mind –

He reaches the end of his journey,

The highest place of Vishnu.

…However the supreme attainment is imagined, whether as a blissful merging with the Great Self or the quelling of the vicious horses of consciousness and nature, yogis emphasize both practice and study….

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NOTE:  My mother’s severe psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder mental illness took away from her the ability to DO what this poem is suggesting — she was forced to live this poem’s opposite….  A disaster.

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This idea struck me, the thought of our body being a chariot in need of an expert driver.  A trauma-changed body changes the entirety of a survivor’s life!  What do we have the power to change about the way our body IS in this lifetime – with us being taken along for the ride?

What choices can we make to change – I mean REALLY change – our BODY?  I choose to smoke – for whatever reason.  I choose what I eat and drink.  I choose a lot of things that, according to both of these books, have great influence on HOW I am WHO I am in this lifetime.

None of this is EASY!  Heavens!  No!  But I know for a fact, for example, that even READING this book — The pH Miracle: Balance Your Diet, Reclaim Your Health WILL change a person’s life for the better! 

(I also make a note here briefly that infant abuse survivors have been deprived from ever having built true HEALTH into their body in the first place.  This is true in some way for every early abuse and trauma survivor but ESPECIALLY true for infant abuse, neglect and trauma survivors.  That means for us, when WE heal, we are giving something to ourselves that we have never had before.  This is different for us from “reclaiming” a total health that we were prevented from having from the start of our life.)

Miracle is exactly the correct word – but this is much bigger than the title of this book implies.  The MIRACLE is exactly THE BODY that we live with – no matter how tormented it has been, how trauma-altered its development was – this book explains HOW our body works in relation to what we eat and drink – think and feel – and DO with our life, one moment in time following another one.

This IS something we can do!  I have no doubt about it.  Our life is not a competition with anyone else.  We are our own charioteer.

And this charioteer needs to eat RIGHT and learn how to BREATH so that I can LIVE!  Not subsist, but LIVE!

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I tried to create a slide show of the pictures I took while visiting my youngest brother and his wife the first week of June onboard their boat, Room Seven.  Included are the shrimp which were obviously caught and prepared before I ate them!  I don’t know why these uploaded out of order but I don’t dare to try to change a thing.

I have never slept so perfectly in my life as I did during this visit!  My love of Alaska has never faded and if I am fortunate I will be able to return there again to live at some point in the future – just not yet.

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+WHAT WAS OUR FAMILY ALASKA HOMESTEAD FROM THE AIR – REST OF MY ALASKA VISIT PICTURES

June 23, 2013

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June 13, 2013, Thursday.  I have been waiting since my return home from my travels on Tuesday afternoon to write a post until my thoughts cleared and organized themselves.  I might be waiting for quite some time for that to happen, so I will trust that somehow whatever I find myself writing here will make a kind of sense of its own. 

Most simply put, my life is going to change drastically in the upcoming weeks because I changed during my travels.  As my friend so clearly put it today, I have passed through “a spiritual portal.”  He is exactly correct.

Once a person has indeed passed through a life-changing event how possible is it to look backwards to track exactly when the changes took place?  I know the time duration of this portal travel was literally from when the airport shuttle picked me up at my house to take me the 90 miles to where my flight took off on Sunday morning, June 2nd to when it dropped me off when I arrived home.  I was one person at the start of this adventure and a different person when I returned — or so it certainly seems.

In between I was loved and was able to spend a short time with people in my family I love.  It has been too long since I have seen these people.  It has been too long since I have seen Alaska, land that I love as well.  When I arrived home in this hot dusty desert I knew that although I have been happy to call this high desert land home for the past 14 years — it is now time to leave it to travel and live in the northland again.

The first step of this move will land me in Fargo, ND first where my daughters and my preschooler grandsons live.  This place is flat with a Siberian winter — this is not a land that I love.  But there are people there I love very much and for a time, I am not sure for how long a time — at least for a year — I want to share my life with these people who are precious to me.

Then – perhaps – I will make the full circle to return to Eagle River, Alaska where I was raised until I left home in 1969 at age 18.

How will I move?  I do not know.  What will I take?  What will I leave behind?  How will I feel in the darkness of frigid northern winter?  I don’t know.

What I did become very clear about is that love is the most important experience of my lifetime.  I consider love to be a spiritual quality.  It became clear to me that even though I have had a respite – a very nice one – from the north these past 14 years, even climate and yes, even geography is of this material world.  I wish to put the spiritual value of love first — and if that means a sacrifice of some physical comforts – so be it.

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I have had enough times of being homeless in my life to know I HATE that state of survival.  It will take some particular care and planning to orchestrate this move north given the limitations of my financial affairs.  I look around me now and in this home I see there is nothing but a few changes of clothing that I need to take with me.  Anything else – like taking my tools with me especially, will be a luxury.

I did not in any way anticipate having myself change in these few days of being gone from here.  I will feel a loss leaving friends here, leaving my garden, but my mind is made up.  I am moving.

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As far as the book writing process seems to be going – or more accurately, not going – I am done with it for now.  Once I arrive north and can spend time with the grandbabies my daughter will have time freed up to complete the editing of the 10 waiting manuscripts.  She has been hard at work on the edit of the first book while I have been traveling.  I thank her with all my heart, but I still cannot go back and read a single word of what has been written.

Neither can I write a word forward right now.  If I was reading along in a book I would say it was like I turned a page and the next one was entirely blank.  Not a word on it.

I have reached that point in my writing.  I have not a single word to say next for those books.

I am too aware of suffering.  I need some balance of love, peace and laughter.  I need loved ones to play with.  I need to experience my grandsons’ coming into this world, and I need to experience being with them as they take their steps into their new and exciting future.

Meanwhile I need to find boxes.  I need to fill a few.  I need to find homes for many objects around me that will not be traveling forward into the next stages of my life with me.  I hope good tenants can be found to respect this house, to enjoy life here, to care for the gardens – and hopefully even for my hens and my two cats.

In the meantime I am studying the book titled “The pH Miracle” by Robert Young (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED).  I am changing my diet.  I am also studying my first book on yoga as it is concerned with breath – and I am preparing to successfully quit smoking cigarettes.  It hit me on my travels that if I am going to work hard to improve my physical health to prevent cancer from returning and to help my crumbling bones and to inspire my breath in better ways, I need a future that does not leave me aching with all my heart in loneliness.

I have other homes.  I am going to take actions to enjoy them.  All this is happening before my 62nd birthday this coming August 31st.  There are so many things I cannot change in this crazy world.  But then again, there are also many that I CAN work to change.  It is to those that I currently look.

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June 1, 2013.  Today is my last day at home before I travel.  I was finally able to fall asleep last night shortly before dawn.  The intensity of my anxiety (that’s all I knew to name it) gripped me and seemed to be building toward a crescendo that never appeared.  It included a growing paralysis that literally took my breath away.

“Who am I if I cannot even breath?”

It seemed as though that was all there was left of me — a focused concentration on finding a way to let breath into and then out of my body.

“This will not do!  What is the matter with me?”

Finally, left in a state of panic, I forced myself to put into thoughts in words everything I could imagine that could be tied to this state of such heightened distress.  I tracked all my thoughts carefully, meticulously, one by one, until they led to one feeling:  sadness created by great loss.

Because of the severe abuse I suffered from birth until I left home at 18 I know that sadness has been as much a part of my physical body all of my life as terror, feelings of foreboding and panic have been.  But I know I carved out space within which I could experience a gamut of other feelings anyway.  That’s a complicated, intense and difficult way to live — never being free of trauma emotions while trying to make myself bigger than they are.

Why now is my universe seeming to collapse with me in the center of it?

I write this now because I have figured it out — how I am being affected by the loss of the love of my life and of my greatest friendship.

I cannot write of this love.  Its details lie in a circle around me sparkling against darkness in moving circles of ripples wherever I look.  All of this rests in mystery like life itself.  Like death.  Like change.

Thirteen years ago I met this man eye to eye at my gate on the property I used to live on then.  Literally as our eyes met it was love at first sight.  In an imperfect world, or at least in a world too complex to understand.

What I learned last night about myself is that in the past five months since a great change in his life removed him physically from my life I have been left without our conversations which meant more to me (and to my well-being) than I have yet allowed myself to realize.  I have left untended the millions of ways that the unavailability of this friendship has affected me.

When the hurt comes from this loss I have turned away in a different direction refusing to face what I cannot change and can no longer deny:  The loss of the marvel of this man has made everything about me in my life harder to endure.  Not only is he not present to help smooth my way but the loss of him is amplifying every difficulty as it sustains great difficulty of its own.  Trouble does not diminish as it used to.  It has grown in these five months until — as I found last night — it has nearly buried me alive.

I am suffocating from the loss of this relationship.

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It is not only that I cannot share what confuses and perplexes me with my friend that has gridlocked me.  I also cannot share with him my hopes, my joys or my enthusiasms.  (I find myself so many times a day holding my breath.  Just now as I wrote those words — a deep SIGH!)  As I prepare to launch into the experiences of this coming trip I begin tomorrow I feel such a loss in not being able to share this adventure with my best friend.  He is sick, in pain, suffering and closed within the circle of his family who — for reasons so far beyond me — despise me.  (I am 61; he is 75 and is making his own choices.)

Time does not evaporate such mutual affections as my friend and I share — and will hold dear far beyond either of our last breaths in THIS world.  But time brings with it obstacles that cannot be altered by sheer will or hope or desire.  These changes are very real.  They must be accepted.  Must be included in some way in both of our lives.

But what way is that?

All I know is that for myself I must FEEL my way along a road I have not chosen but that has been chosen for me, nonetheless.  Against all odds this man and I found one another but neither of us were free to leave what remains of our destiny in this lifetime.  Our two destinies run parallel at a distance from one another — and that distance is growing.

Ours is a mysterious love that is complicated by life but not destroyed by it.  Of this I am certain.

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The rest of the sentence?  Don’t call me easy-going!

There are places in my mother’s letters during the years of my young childhood where she wrote to her mother that I was “easy-going.”  Nope!  I was beaten and beaten down by abuse and lived in a world reined in by intolerable sadness – except for the inner sanctum of my self held so near to me in my heart – because I had never had a chance to get out!

What options did I have but to not resist?  I did what I had to survive – and showing NOTHING of myself as a person to Mother was a big part of what my survival demanded of me.

I am not easy-going now.  “Self soothing” is something I work to accomplish, and when events loom within and without that make demands on my resources, I do not respond to them in an easy-going way.  I am an INTENSE person.

I remember when I was in art therapy graduate school a classmate noted that “intense” is being “in tense.”  She meant IN THE PRESENT TENSE – in the moment – deeply engaged in experiencing my life.

Well, on Sunday morning I will be participating in a wonderfully generous gift from my youngest (baby!) brother.  I am leaving Arizona to spend five days with him where he lives in Alaska.  This will probably include three days with him on his 60′ yacht-trawler somewhere in Alaska waters. 

Yet traveling is anxiety producing to me.  I am working toward preparing myself in every way to actually ENJOY myself!  I will be stopping in Seattle for a few days to visit family there before I return home on the 11th of June.

I have a friend who loves to come stay in my home when I am gone to keep an eye on things and to relax in this quiet little neighborhood. 

I am very fortunate and grateful!  Away from the seriousness of my writing work I hope to reacquaint  myself with a quieter side of me.  I am thrilled to spend some time with my brother and family.  “Bon Voyage!”  I hope my going (and coming home again) is easy!!

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Destiny has evidently arranged that the planned editing of this book is going to happen during the first week of June as I am being treated to a visit with my youngest brother in Alaska.  We will spend the bulk of the visit somewhere out aboard his boat!  I have spent time these last 48 hours making sure the collection of past notes intended for my daughter to have as she edits are all in line for her where she can find them.  It looks like this brilliant capable daughter of mine will spare me the agony of having to do anything more on that book before it is published.  I will not be available for questions during the days she will have available for editing.

However, I know from comments my daughter made months ago when she read the manuscript that my final chapter of this book does not sit well with her AT ALL.  I refuse to have a single word of it changed.  I have finally decided that a brief epilogue might take care of ‘this problem’.  If my daughter questions that final chapter – really, the final WORD of the book – many other readers are likely to have the same response.

This is my compromise for Story Without Words:

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Epilogue:  Being Mother’s hope

Boiling down all the trauma of the first 18 years of my life to my mother’s desperate need to carve out a kind of hope for herself that she could hold onto by brutalizing me can make little sense to an ordinary mind.  Mother did not have an ordinary mind.  She had a desperate one.

Because she felt from her earliest life that love would only come to her when she was perfect the obvious solution was to become exactly that – perfect.  I was therefore born into Mother’s life to be all that was not perfect in her.  This was an inviolable arrangement that could not be tampered with or changed in any way.  As long as I was alive to stay all-bad Mother could be all-good which ensured that her hope for love would remain alive within the dynamics operating between us.

Mother never wavered in her need for love nor did she waver in how her mind had determined that it could be made available to her in unending supply.  As long as I remained alive as the personification of all of her badness – and not as a person in my own right – she had only that single need for hope – me.  Her mind’s design eliminated all risk that her hope could be disappointed because love could not be withheld or withdrawn from her as long as she could keep me in my (her) place.  She had all power.  I was imprisoned in her madness from the moment I was born with no chance of escape offered to me.

That I received enough love to be able to retain access to my own self in the midst of Mother’s madness is the miracle of my life.  It was the one exception to the fact that all love during the years of my childhood belonged to Mother that allowed me to live.  That my brother loved me was a fact in my life.  I did not hope for his love.  I had it.  His love for me was guaranteed and unchangeable.

There had been no such love available to Mother in her earliest life.  All she had been left with was the hope that she could find a way to earn love by deserving it.  I became that hope so that Mother could find her way to be loved.

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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I remind myself that I am not some kind of a Bobo doll designed with weight at the bottom of my being so that when I receive a PUNCH I will instantly and automatically stay righted to pop back up unchanged.

Life does change me as I move along through it.  I am not unique in this fact.  No matter how much trauma has altered my physiology brain and all, I AM human!  Humans are designed to learn and to change, to adapt and to return to a state of peaceful calm from which enthusiasm, interest, exploration, a sense of triumph and joy can flow.

Some of us just have more of a fight to fight!  Perhaps that means when we win we have more to gain.

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Thinking about how the best of minds, the best of scholars, the best of students will face a time if they write a dissertation that they will be asked to defend it.  I am today at the point where I am looking deep within myself – and I am coming up with entirely new ideas in defense of my book cover’s image. 

Challenge to our status quo is not a bad thing.  Reacting to that challenge and resolving it is not a negative process, either.  I had to turn all the way over several times, over and over, intensely struggling to find my own right way through the challenges that creating a MARKETABLE book cover creates!

I am not all the way through this process yet.  In defense of my image I understand this morning that it can do exactly what I wanted it to do:  challenge potential readers – and readers – in new ways.  Why not begin to do this before anyone ever considers the words of a book titled Story Without Words?

As I have emailed to my sister today, this is a daring book about a daring subject that I dare daring readers to read!

This is already a reverse-marketing book.

I also told her that by the time I got to the 9th manuscript in this double series I wrote into its pages that any reader – by the time they reached this point in my books – that was siding with my abusive mother against me — should back out of the book and quit reading.  I don’t want those people inside my books!

In all fairness I would rather inaccurate readers not buy these books in the first place!  After all, paying money for a book that eventually tells you to get the hell out of it could seem to smack of unfairness.

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We do not live in a culture that encourages individuals to express their own stories without words through art.  I know as an art therapist that every human being around the world is designed to pass through specific sequential artistic stages of development just as we pass from lying to rolling to sitting to crawling to walking to running.  Artistic developmental stages are just as clear – just as necessary – and certainly in our culture – are aborted.

My book cover tells a story without words.

How much more clear could that book’s cover be?

The current proposition to my son who can and will do the photoshopping of that image is that the brilliant light green of the bedspread be sampled, spread entirely over the area within the pink at the top of the image, and that the biggest, boldest, blackest and clearest lettering be used to redo the title – STORY WITHOUT WORDS.

I want to see THAT version before any other decision is made regarding cover work.  Yes, we also need to see that whole thing in black and white next – but if all ereaders but one display in color – I am not concerned with how a black and white cover looks to anyone.

If that doesn’t work – well, then, perhaps further compromises will march over the far book marketing horizon to land on my book’s cover.  Meanwhile, I will not participate in artistic rape.  I have integrity.  My book has integrity.  My cover art has integrity.  And these three integrities belong together intact if at all possible.

I am fine with presenting a postage stamp (thumbnail) image with bold clear readable type at that size that dares (challenges) reader to click on enough links until they see what the heck that complex maze of intense colors is actually about.

People can be so easily lulled into taking the easiest possible pathway toward dopamine release and a flash of satisfaction.  I don’t mind challenging (daring) them in such a way that they are motivated to take a tiny action outside their comfort-box, a tiny step off of their boring pathway, into a possible new world of discovery.

If we are going to consider the realities of infant-child abuse and trauma we are going to have to venture into untrodden territory anyway.  Why not do it with a first click?

If readers can’t be inspired to be curious by a postage stamp with a title, they probably aren’t the right readers for the book.  Story Without Words is written to be a prelude that leads into two separate series of books for an eventual total of probably 15 books. 

People don’t go to hear an orchestra play just to hear the prelude.  They are there for the whole shebang.  I want to market to shebangers!  Stopping infant and child abuse is going to require a reverse of current attitudes and inactions.  My contribution to the literature might as well begin with reverse marketing.

Maybe all we need to do is make the title clear and bold – and we are good to go.  I would like that to be true very much.

I can visualize the changes to this I mentioned above.  I like what I see – but actually seeing it changed will be better.  My son would have to sample the pink to erase the small circle overlaps as he changed the central color – but this may be doable….

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It only made my day harder when a friend suggested that there’s something wrong with me for caring about child abuse, for caring so much about my writing work, for – basically – not knowing HOW to live a trite life.

What’s WRONG with me, then, that leads me to give a damn about things like EPIGENETICS as it is being discovered in cutting-edge science – that our EPIGENOME is a whole greater level to what makes us who we are – and is harmfully and DIRECTLY affected by infant and child abuse that changes our DNA coding to affect GENERATIONS?

My friend tells me he loves me in spite of my continual concerns about the well-being of our specie’s little people.  Well, I’ll be jiggered!  I don’t understand him any better than he doesn’t understand me.

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This is a short, extremely informative and vitally IMPORTANT article!

  Epigenetics: How our experiences affect our offspring – New research suggests that people’s experiences, not just their genes, can affect the biological legacy of their offspring

 By The Week Staff | January 20, 2013

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Abused Children May Get Unique Form of PTSD

May 02, 2013

Child abuse scars not just the brain and body, but, according to the latest research, but may leave its mark on genes as well.

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Childhood maltreatment is associated with distinct genomic and epigenetic profiles in posttraumatic stress disorder

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Why Your DNA Isn’t Your Destiny

By John Cloud Wednesday, Jan. 06, 2010

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Scientists Discover How Epigenetic Information Could Be Inherited: Mechanism of Epigenetic Reprogramming Revealed

Jan. 24, 2013 — New research reveals a potential way for how parents’ experiences could be passed to their offspring’s genes. The research was published January, 25 in the journal Science.

Epigenetics is a system that turns our genes on and off. The process works by chemical tags, known as epigenetic marks, attaching to DNA and telling a cell to either use or ignore a particular gene.

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Stress can affect future generations’ genes

15:21 25 January 2013 by Andy Coghlan

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Sorry, but this nonsense matters.  It matters A LOT!  And it especially matters to people who were – and to little ones who are currently being – exposed to infant and child abuse, neglect, and trauma!  Somebody better care.  Somebody better pay attention.  One of those some-bodies might as well be me.

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I had no plans and certainly no intention of sucking my own trauma drama into the making of the cover art for the book Story Without Words as I have been posting about its process and progress recently.  I am comforted by knowing that loyal readers of this blog know exactly what I am talking about when I say what I say about myself in my life.  Yes, this book is about the trauma of intergenerational trauma from infant-child abuse and neglect.  Yes, I did intentionally plan for the cover art work to exactly reflect the nature of the stories (crime reports) that make up the backbone of this book.

So how did THAT trauma come to be present NOW in its own sidling, intrusive and bothersome way?

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I received further vital expertise in feedback today about Kindle publishing (and while the cheaper versions of this ereader are still in black and white, the Kindle Fire and many other ereading devices from which any ebook can be accessed and read are publishing in color).  Any of this blog’s readers who are considering epublishing can benefit from what I am learning – in my own very hard way – about this process.

No, I did not envision the cover art I created so carefully, honestly, thoughtfully and hopefully for this book in its THUMBNAIL size.  Nor do I know anything about marketing – and I assure you the person who wrote me the following words is an expert in the book business!  The following came to me in response to a tantrum sent via email that closely paralleled my previous post on this subject – and no, I have not personally used an ebook reader.

“Okay, now that you got THAT off your chest…

Have you ever purchased (or even downloaded a free or 99c) Kindle e-book? Do you or anyone you know have a Kindle, or have you put a Kindle app on your PC? That experience will/would help you see how things look in the environment where your work is going to be viewed. The cover of ANY book is not about art, it is about marketing. If those two often-competing elements manage to compliment each other, so much the better.

There is a “cover” in Kindle-land, but unlike a conventional book it is not always the first thing a reader sees. In fact, often the reader will never see the Kindle book’s cover on the reader itself. This is because the author/editor selects the place in the book that is the “beginning”, and when someone “opens” the book, that is where they land. It can be the Title Page, TOC, the Intro, Chapter One, or whatever. It is hardly ever the copyright page, and rarely is it the cover. If the author does mark the e-book to begin at the cover, the reader is forced to page ahead to wherever it is they think is important enough to begin reading. Unlike a traditional book, an ebook reader will never finish a chapter, lay in a bookmark, close the cover, and gaze thoughtfully at the book’s colorful, intricate, and symbolic cover while the contemplate the author’s words.

BTW, how does your cover look in B&W? Do the shapes/words/designs still pop when the color is not there? This is important because the Kindle family is still B&W until you get to tablets (Kindle, iPad and others).

Final note: I’m fairly sure Amazon does not require that you use the SAME image for the itty-bitty cover thumbnail as you do for the book (i.e. the image in the ebook file that is marked “cover”). You can keep your gorgeous work of art for the book (although I think you’ll be disappointed with it in B&W, and 250 hours of works for something most readers will never see until/unless you do a print version is a shame) and just do a smaller, simpler, uglier (if you insist) version that is ONLY used for marketing on Amazon. What I think you CAN’T do is have one thumbnail image that displays on this page:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/digital-text/ref=pd_dp_ts_kstore_1

And when someone clicks the cover thumbnail to “Look Inside” they see a larger (but slightly/drastically different) cover:

http://www.amazon.com/Inferno-Novel-Robert-Langdon-ebook/dp/B00AXIZ4TQ/ref=zg_bs_digital-text_1

Then when they click THAT image they finally see your full-color work of art in this format:

http://www.amazon.com/Inferno-Novel-Robert-Langdon-ebook/dp/B00AXIZ4TQ/ref=zg_bs_digital-text_1#reader_B00AXIZ4TQ

You can see where it would be very confusing if the cover kept changing in each of these steps; the reader would think they accidentally got switched to a different book. That’s why I recommend a single cover version that “works” in all sizes and all environments where it is to be used.

Maybe your present image deserves a place inside the book as an illustration, if not as the cover. COVER = MARKETING, plain and simple.”

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I also received this response from someone who knows my story and the story of my family of origin very well:

“It really depends on the viewing device. The Kindle (which is black and white) is not a good vehicle for photos, drawings, charts, etc. And yes, the cover is not promoted in any way. When you begin reading a book on the Kindle, you start on the first page. The Kindle Fire, on the other hand, is great for viewing artwork. And, if you decide, moving forward, to move to paper books, the cover becomes obviously important. 
 
And, there are other ebook readers that might provide a different viewing experience; I have seen only the Kindle and Kindle Fire, so I’m not sure.
 
At any rate, it’s a beautiful, intensely personal, piece of art — heartrending, emotionally difficult, horrendous — but it came from you, from your experiences, and can be also used on your blog as a main piece.”

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Well, I have been flying around through intense experience of all the stress response survival-based emotions today – big time.

I have so little resources in my physical world – period.  Every loss – and this realistic useful information today STILL feels like a huge CRASH and a huge LOSS to me — hits me much harder than it would ‘ordinary’ kinds of people who have not been forced by circumstances of severe, chronic and horrible long-term early abuse and trauma to live such a constricted life as I have and do.

I don’t mean to whine about my life.  My current conflicts are simply very real.  I reacted in distress to the loss of my hoped for sense of triumph and success toward publication.

Instead – I returned to my friend’s with the super megapixel camera today (who did not remotely comprehend why my work is important to me, why I am so invested in it, or remotely why I would be distressed by the failure of the project that he so kindly helped me complete (I thought) yesterday.  This photograph today is the only one of those taken of the ‘new and unimproved’ version of the suitable-for-thumbnail cover that runs in landscape (horizontal) rather than in portrait (vertical).  As I have mentioned before, I have no way to crop images – they have been sent to my son and daughter for their very kind assistance in that department.

The cloth visible in this image simply runs UP and UP and UP — boringly, irritatingly, necessarily UP – so that legible lettering that can be read in a thumbnail image can be implanted upon it (This necessary version of an image can be lined up, cropped, whatever):

That’s it.  That’s all I can think of.  I tried my best (see last evening’s post: +BOOK COVER: WE DID IT!!!!) and it wasn’t good enough.  Oh, do I know THAT feeling!  I suspect most if not ALL of this post’s readers know what I don’t even have to say here about that feeling!

I also greatly struggle with affirming for myself that I have a right to have ANY of the feelings I am having today!

Yes, the cover I intended to use was made as an image meant to be “a beautiful, intensely personal, piece of art — heartrending, emotionally difficult, horrendous.” That image was created to match with integrity every word of the book itself.  The cover was supposed to honor the story and vice versa.

Yet I do want to MARKET this book.  This ebook.

Yet I also know that because of severe trauma during the first 18 years of my life – my brain did not develop in ordinary ways – and that includes my LEFT brain hemisphere which cannot comprehend – really – what the FACTS of marketing even are!  (see: +Dr. Teicher’s ARTICLE ON TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT)

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I cannot explain to or describe to those who have no clue from their own personal experience of being a trauma-changed person what my state of dysregulatory REACTIVITY – of ‘disorganization’ and of ‘disorientation’ of my internal relationship with myself and with the world FEELS like in response to this massive disappointment.  This IS a big deal to me.  I NEED to publish. 

Evidently I do NOT need to publish with my own art image on the cover of any ebook.

Health of a human being is greatly measured by our ability to flexibly and successfully cope with changes and upsets that appear in our lives — to positive resolution.  Trauma altered development steals from us the ability to respond to upsetting/distressing challenges in ordinary ways.  This is a very personal upset to me – of course it is!  But my difficulty in COPING with it was built into me by trauma.  THAT is what I hate!

I found strength for myself today by thinking that it might matter to some blog reader/s that I move forward IN SPITE of this upset – and do so successfully.  So what if I feel as though I was just drop-kicked across the Grand Canyon – half way – to crash into a fall – still falling — ?  Why let that feeling state stop me? 

I have been truly amazed at the difficulty of my emotions today – and at their intensity!!!  I wrote a piece in the 10th book manuscript that I just completed (needing edit) – that today’s experience has shown me needs one more critically important thought added to it.  I would NEVER have known that piece was missing — let alone how important it is — if I had not gone through (still going through it!) exactly what happened INSIDE of me today in reaction to — well — you dear readers know exactly what I am reacting to.

Thank you for being here!!  With all my heart!

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