Tag: sadness

+LINKS FROM THE PAST – MY MOTHER AND HER MOTHER – A LETTER

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All Borderlines, all abusive parents had mothers of one kind or another.  I am always asking the questions in the back of my mind, “What kind of mother was my grandmother to my mother?  What kind of mother was my great grandmother to my grandmother?”

It is of course extremely difficult for me to engage in my forensic autobiographical search to find any answer to my questions.  Yet I do have the written words of both my mother and my grandmother contained in these piles of old letters I am in the process of transcribing.

This is the link to the first of my grandmother’s letters I have transcribed.  Like drawing a single drop from a vast ocean, this single letter remains as only that single drop, yet also contains within it some reflection of the ocean of interactions my mother had over her lifetime with her own mother.

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Follow this link and see what you think!

*Grandmother’s 10-2-1961 Letter to Mother

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I just completed transcription of an earlier letter from my grandmother to my mother.  It contains these words of wisdom:

“Get a hot water bottle and a new diaphragm, Mil.”

*Grandmother’s 3-3-1960 Letter to Mother

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Newest transcriptions:

*Grandmother’s 1-9-1960 Letter to Mother

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*Grandmother’s 3-2-1960 Letter to Mother

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*Grandmother’s 3-19-1960 Letter to Mother

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*Grandmother’s 4-9-1960 Letter to Mother

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*Grandmother’s 4-17-1960 Letter to Mother

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+SOME FANTASTIC LINKS ON CHILD ABUSE AND BRAIN CHANGES!

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Greetings to each and every person who has visited this blog during the seven weeks of absence from writing here.  I am home now after more than 10,000 miles of traveling during the past seven weeks as I visited family and friends whom I love and who love me.

The time I spent in Alaska, the home of my heart, was everything I needed it to be in order for me to move forward with the writing of my book.

I will at this point be dividing my writing clearly between my book (which will not be appearing on this blog) and other assorted writing specifically for the blog.  As my precious Alaskan baby brother (now 44) told me, if it is my desire and my intention to write a book, then I need to do it.  He explained it to me this way:

A person might pick up tools and a block of wood intending to carve an image.  Perhaps they are not quite sure what image lies within the wood so they begin carving in process until that image becomes clear and the carving can then give it form.  If, however, that point never occurs where the image within the wood is found, shaped and born, all that will result from the effort of carving is a pile of wood shavings and dust.

I heard and understand the wisdom contained in my brother’s words, and I recognize that continuing to pour words out into my blog will not accomplish the creation of my book.  I will now separate the words that belong in my book from those that do not.

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As I continue through the process of getting my ‘home legs’ under me, I will at least post a few interesting links here for reader consideration!  Please follow some or all of these links – THEY ARE IMPORTANT!  Please also join me in my gratitude to every single person who is involved with this quality of work to further our understanding about the impact of severe child abuse on human development – and the work of everyone committed to ending child maltreatment around the globe.

Please also remember the abuse being done to the fragile web of life on our glorious planet and the suffering of so many species being caused by the thoughtless harm of all kinds caused by humans.

And, for a load of Alaskan MOOSE FUN….

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Back to School Tips: Parents Should Get Ready, Too!

Posted: 27 Aug 2009 08:21 AM PDT

Tips for parents on helping their kids succeed in school, adapter from information provided by our friends at Prevent Child Abuse New Jersey.

Amid the shopping trips for sharpened #2 pencils, crisp notebooks and new shoes, parents should start thinking about what they can do to become the best possible support system for their child this school year. The beginning of the new academic season is often the most important, as it sets the tone for a meaningful and successful year.  Research shows that students are more equipped to thrive academically and socially when parents are actively involved in their child’s education.

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Emotional Abuse Recovery NOW

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Going Big: Harlem Children’s Zone on This American Life

Posted: 18 Aug 2009 02:17 AM PDT

Hats off to This American Life for shining a spotlight on the solutions to the many problems that plague our nation’s impoverished families. Going Big, this week’s episode, profiles Geoffrey Canada, a pioneer in the fields of child and family support and poverty prevention. His organization, Harlem Children’s Zone, boasts tremendous outcomes for the families and community it serves, including:

  • l00% of students in the Harlem Gems pre-K program were found to be school-ready for the sixth year in a row.
  • 81% of Baby College parents improved the frequency of reading to their children.
  • $4.8 million returned to 2,935 Harlem residents as a result of HCZ’s free tax-preparation service
  • 10,883 number of youth served by HCZ in 2008.

Listen to the This American Life podcast.

Below is a five-minute video of moms talking about the challenges of raising children in Harlem and the difference HCZ is making in their lives.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

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Brain Development Altered by Violence

By Dale Russakoff
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 15, 1999; Page A3

LITTLETON, Colo.—More than a week had passed since Krystie DeHoff felt bullets and bombs explode all around her, since she ran in horror past young, dead bodies to safety. Now she was inching toward normality, shopping at King Soopers grocery, when the most innocent sound–a baby crying in his mother’s arms–set the Columbine High School massacre in motion again, this time in her mind. Her heart raced, her muscles coiled. She heard not a baby, but her classmates, shrieking. “All I could think was: MAKE HIM STOP!” she said.

READ MORE……

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Using Mental Strategies Can Alter

The Brain’s Reward Circuitry

ScienceDaily (June 30, 2008) — The cognitive strategies humans use to regulate emotions can determine both neurological and physiological responses to potential rewards, a team of New York University and Rutgers University neuroscientists has discovered. The findings, reported in the most recent issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, shed light on how the regulation of emotions may influence decision making.

READ MORE….

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The Neural Self: The Neurobiology of Attachment

By Phil Rich, Ed.D., LICSW

It is its basis in biology that makes attachment theory unique among theories of psychology and child development. From the biological perspective, attachment is simply an evolutionarily-evolved process to ensure species survival, and is thus as much a part our biology as that of any animal.

From this perspective, cognitive schema and the resulting mental map is not merely a psychological phenomenon, but a physical entity, hard-wired into neural circuits and reflected in neurochemical and electrical activity within the central nervous system.

The mental map into which our experiences and memories are imprinted is thus a neurobiological structure, the result of synaptic processes, out of which human cognition and behavior emerges, resulting in LeDoux’s (2002) description of our “synaptic” self.

Siegel (2001) describes the pattern and clusters of synaptic firing as “somehow creat(ing) the experience of mind” (p. 69). He writes that “integration” reflects the manner in which functionally separate neural structures and processes cluster together and interact to form a functional whole – in this case, our selves.

READ MORE…..

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Child abuse marks genes, affects ability to cope: Study

By Margaret Munro , Canwest News Service

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Stress

Your Three Brains

The neurologist Paul MacLean has proposed that our skull holds not one brain, but three, each representing a distinct evolutionary stratum that has formed upon the older layer before it, like an archaeological site – he calls it the “triune brain.” MacLean, now the director of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behaviour in Poolesville, Maryland, says that three brains operate like “three interconnected biological computers, each with its own special intelligence, its own subjectivity, its own sense of time and space and its own memory”.

READ MORE….

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+SIBLING PARTICIPATION IN CHILD ABUSE

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So far none of these stories are getting any easier to write, but fortunately my determination to write them more than matches any reluctance I have to do so.

Each memory that leads to each story seems to be difficult in a unique and unforeseen way.  Some I can write about with more immunity that others.  The one I wrote today has been the most difficult, and having done so I feel a quivering inside my gut because the story STILL scares me.

*Age 14 – Gardening and the Sabotage

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I think again about M. Scott Peck’s book, “People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil” that I referred to in my story about how I abused my little son that was also directly connected to my being able to finally disown my mother.  I wonder about the entire web of my childhood, even as it is presented in the words of my mother’s own writing.  It was all a lie.

Nobody on the outside of our family could have possibly believed the lie– BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T HAVE TO!  This was a fact by default.  Only those of us on the inside of my family had to believe it.  They had no choice.  We were all forced to play our part, one way or the other.

At what point does free will and conscious choice on the part of such a distorted family members enter the picture in any meaningful way?  How can that freedom even be allowed to exist in a family that depends on living the lie for its very existence and survival?  Can we trust that telling the truth always means that we are on the road of healing?

I don’t know that I know the answer, but I wrote this story in spite of that fact.  Did doing so in any way contribute to an increase in my freedom from the hold that my horrendous child abuse history holds over me?  After all, today is the 4th of July, and we are supposed to be celebrating what it means to be free.

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+LINK TO NEW PAGE ADDED TODAY – FIGHTING BACK?

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+Age 14 – SCRUBBED IN THE TUB

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We have to be more careful than words can describe not to either blame others for their victimization or to blame ourselves for the harm that was done to us.  How realistic is it for us to expect that any long term violent, consistent, severe abuse survivor EVER had a chance to fight back?

By suggesting that it is the victim’s fault that abuse ever happened in the first place, let alone continued to happen, creates an unattainable illusion within our social consciousness that we don’t — as outsiders — REALLY need to step in and stop abuse.  We are saying that if only the victim had done THEIR JOB to stop the abuse none of the rest of us would have to be involved at all.

Sound extreme?  Read this page.

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+LINK TO NEWLY ADDED CHILDHOOD STORY

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*Age 10 – NIGHTMARES AND BED WETTING

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This page has just been completed and published under MY CHILDHOOD STORIES.  This page contains a ‘MAY TRIGGER ABUSE MEMORIES’ tag, so please be careful, cautious and considerate of yourself if you have a personal history of sexual abuse.

In this page I also wrote about how factual memory of trauma differs from emotional memory of trauma.  Our emotional memory is processed through the amygdala region of our brain and is ALWAYS stored in our body even though the factual memory might not be.  (When the facts are remembered this is called an ‘explicit‘ memory.  When only the emotions and body memory exist without specific facts, this is called an ‘implicit‘ memory.)

The ‘semantic, autobiographical’ factual part of our memories are processed through a different region of our brain, the hippocampus.  There are times particularly in very early childhood when all memory is preverbal and can only be accessed in our body and not through fact.  These memories will govern our unconscious behavior for the rest of our lives.  There are also times when facts related to memory, particularly of trauma memory, is ‘forgotten’ and invisible to us — sometimes forever, sometimes until it is triggered.

It is also important to realize that the stress hormone cortisol can so heat up our hippocampal memory cells as they try to process trauma-related facts that they are fried to a cinder and the facts of a memory will never be recorded – and therefore will never be available to recall.  When and if this happens — and it can happen both to victims and perpetrators-in-the-act — the emotional memory is ALWAYS stored and retained within the body.

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+REWRITING MY STORY OF PETER THE BLACK RABBIT

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I do not know why today I wanted to rewrite

My Story About My Black Rabbit Peter

Perhaps it was because today has been gray and rainy – a very rare occasion for the high desert, and it reminded me of this story.  I think I need another pet rabbit some day – perhaps in my completely unknown future if I can settle somewhere appropriate.  I also don’t know why I needed to write this comment today about the story, but I did.  So I offer both links to you here – for whatever reasons of mystery!

comment on this writing of My Black Rabbit Peter

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+WE NEED NEW WORDS TO DIALOG WITH OUR BODY ABOUT TRAUMA

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I am trying to think of another word other than ‘renaissance’, or rebirth, to describe what I wish was happening now among those of us ordinary people who are trying to live the best lives we can without necessarily having the kind of safe and secure attachment background we needed to get along better in life.

I am thinking especially about what little information we really have about our bodies and how they operate.  Sometime in our first year of life people begin to teach infants about their body — and most of us never progress much past that point!  We are taught to point to our eyes, nose, mouth, ears, limbs, etc.

Eventually we learn through our public education and then through osmosis over time about the major organs of our body, and make little progress past that point unless we get sick and then learn the minimum we need to in order to understand what is happening to us.  We seem to prefer to use only one syllable words to think about the only body we will ever have to live in for the rest of our lives.

Yet while we would rather leave anything more complicated than what we consider essential to the ‘experts’, at the same time I do believe our platform of information concerning our bodies is making advancements.  We hear about things through the general media and that information will eventually ‘stick’ if we hear it enough and somehow we begin to understand it is important because it applies to us.

As we are doing this learning, as unintentionally as it might be, we are at the same time expanding our vocabulary.  It’s no different than teaching an infant the word for their nose.  We are learning to name what is going on inside of us.  Yet at the same time we are learning meanings for words like diabetes, hypertension, obesity, allergies, arthritis, osteoporosis, cancer, learning disabilities, addiction, anxiety, depression, serotonin, dopamine, reward system, we less likely to learn how these kinds of ‘events’ are all connected within us to who we are within our own body.

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We all know we are dependent upon and would rather support a medical model that prefers to respond only to symptoms,  prescribe every kind of expensive test to diagnosis illness, dish out every imaginable kind of drug to treat sickness than we are to put forth the effort ourselves to learn any more complicated information about our body than we have to.

Why is that?  When and how did we learn to accept that we don’t need to learn anything more than a 5th grader could learn about how our body operates?  Did someone tell us we are too dumb to learn anything more complicated?  Looking backward, maybe this kind of thinking has worked for all of the generations that have gone before us.

Today there are more of us living longer than ever before in history.  But taking material goods out of the equation, what is our quality of life?  Particularly, what is the quality of our human attachments — our own attachment with our self included?  As a social species, it matters.  We have the desire to live our years better, last longer, and suffer less.  Understanding how our attachment system operates, what has hurt it and what can help it can help us live a better life on every level because it operates on every single level of who we are.

Those of us who suffered from extra-ordinary trauma and abuse during our developmental stages especially need to learn the words that will let us be able to understand how that abuse changed our bodies.  I see it as being no different than any healing process of disclosure. Any improvement we can make to talk about the effects our traumas had on us is empowering.  Trauma changed our bodies, and we don’t even know — on the most vital and profound levels — what that means.

We need the words.  We need them badly.  A  securely-attached-from-birth person has all that good-safe information built right into their body-brain-mind.  They don’t have to think about it.  They don’t even need to talk about it.  They just live it.

Those of us who were so abused that we are the insecurely-attached-from-birth, however, have to learn NOW what these ‘others’ learned when they were supposed to learn it — as infants and young children.  Our communication signals between our body, brain, mind and self are all scrambled up.  We have to learn NOW what those ‘others’ learned from the time they were born.  We cannot efficiently and effectively learn NOW what we have no words to talk about.

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I think at this moment how strange it seems that I, of all people, would be writing about attachment.  Looking back at the strangeness, the unpredictable, escalating, irrational violence and abuse, looking back at the extreme isolation I was forced to endure through my childhood, I can’t help but say that of all the people I can imagine writing about attachment, I can be good at it because I am so bad at it.

Suffering from the long term consequences of an extremely abusive childhood can make us feel so alienated from what ‘ordinary’ people seem to now about living ‘ordinary’ lives that we might be tempted to simply throw in the towel, give up and quit.  Yet as I work my way through the volumes of technical, even molecular research information about our own internal cannabinoid (‘cannabis’)  (and opioid) attachment systems, I realize that by my just being alive I HAVE to know there are things about my attachment system that went right from the beginning or I most simply — would not be here.

I was attached enough to life from the beginning that I was conceived in the first place, implanted onto my mother’s uterine wall, received nourishment from her body, and made it through a difficult birth — just to GET here and to BE here.  Through all the terrible traumas, through all the pain, suffering, sorrows and sadness of my childhood I was still attached enough between my inner, true self and the world to STILL be able to find, recognize, appreciate and value beauty — wherever I found it as a very small child —  even in bubble shadows reflected on the bottom of a toilet bowl, even in the shimmering reflection of water on my bedroom ceiling when I was so punished for doing nothing but being alive.

I am amazed as I work on the endocannabinoid file regarding human reproduction.  Perhaps because I cannot take any kind of safe and secure attachment either lightly or for granted I marvel at the very essence of the miracle of life that was each of our beginnings.  How can such a perfectly ordered system like our attachment system is, be sent off into such difficult directions through insufficient if not outright malevolent circumstances of traumatic early childhood experiences?

I understand that given the requirements of staying alive — if at all possible, in the very worst of situations –that we could not make the adjustments we had to make to survive THEN and necessarily be ‘ordinary’ NOW.  Yet at the same time I also understand that all of it was and is about signals of communication on the molecular and genetic level between the environment we live in and the self we live in it with.

That is the same process that happened when I was conceived, the same process that is happening in each present moment I am alive, the same process that connects every moment of my life together with me in the center of it.

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If I did not have a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder I doubt that I would have ever been motivated to go looking for the big multiple-syllable words that I know I now need to understand the ‘extra-ordinary’ way my body-brain-mind was forced to adapt, develop, and the way it works now.  It is not by looking at all the ways I am dissociated, fragmented and disconnected that will make me feel more safe and secure in my own body in this world.  It is by looking at the ways I am associated, connected and organized that helps me to know that things can never be all that bad!  After all, I am a participant in some kind of miracle here!  We all call that — LIFE!

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So maybe ‘renaissance’, or rebirth, is the word I need.  Maybe as I go back all the way to my very first beginnings I can bring a new kind of understanding about my own place in my own body in my own life into my present.  I find I need to know new things and I need to know new words to know these new things.  I am sitting in the middle of a tragic relationship breakup, not far into a new future of cancer recovery, completely unsure of who I really am, of what I want, or of what is even possible for my future.

But maybe I do not know because I cannot know.  I have to wait for the signals.  The ones I need are not going to come from anywhere else other than from within my own body.  On the most tiny, minute level of who I am — right where my own molecules are constantly interacting with my genetics — something interesting is ALWAYS occurring.  It is that inner world that guides what happens to me as I interact with this great, big wide outer world.

I want to be amazed.  I want to be more attached.  Safely.  Securely.  Peacefully.  Whatever it takes for me to get there I will try to do.  This isn’t about whatever the Buddhist concept of detachment is.  I have been forced to be detached from my own self in my own body all of my life.  Terrible, terrifying, insane abuse put me in THAT place.  I want something new and different, something I think non-abused ‘ordinary’ people can take for granted all of their lives.

I want to know, without a single shadow of any kind of doubt, that I have a right to be here and do so willingly, if not eventually happily.  That was the destiny of the fertilized egg that was me in my beginnings.  How could it be anything but my destiny today?  I did not become lost to the path of that good journey on purpose (I had a great deal of help through a great deal of harm), and while it is taking the better part of my life to find my way back, it is not a journey I am making alone!

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+WHAT WE DID NOT LEARN ABOUT TRUST WILL HURT US

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I discovered Brainwave.org this morning, an excellent site devoted to infant brain development through the age of three.  Another excellent site, EQ:  Emotional Intelligence Central, covers a broad range of information on the human social brain that, of course, was formed through the nature and quality of early infant caregiver interactions and affects us for the rest of our lives.

My web search this morning also brought me to a page on brain development of young children written at the university in Fargo, North Dakota where my one of my daughters works!  Another site for The Childhood Affirmations Program covers a wide range of information about “How You Can Shape Your Child’s Brain and Change the World.”

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I have had to narrow my search in my attempt to find the specific information I am looking for today.  I want to know more about when and how the very young infant brain begins to be able to know the difference between who is trustworthy and who is not.  The ability to make this distinction is something that most people can take completely for granted because it is built into an infant’s growing and developing brain so early in life we will never have conscious awareness of how we learned to accomplish this critically important task.

Those of us who were raised in extremely abusive – neglectful, inconsistent, violent, malevolent – early environments could not possibly have developed a ‘trustworthiness meter’ that works in the same way as such a system will for someone who was born into the opposite kind of environment of predictability, benevolence, safety and security.  What our brain never learned as it was built in the first place leaves us with a dis-ability that will make it difficult to recognize critical information from the humans we come into contact with for the rest of our lives.  Who is worthy of our trust and who is not?

Of course humans give and receive signals on many levels that provide us with social-brain information.  If we were formed in, by and for a malevolent world, we will not identify and respond to ANY social signals in the same way as a benevolently-formed person will.  I ask this question today for myself because I know that a person I have trusted for nine years recently ‘flipped sides’ and now appears to be my ‘enemy’.  My mind tells me, “I didn’t see it coming.”

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Whatever the specifics of my history with this man who was so important to me might be, what I think about today are the risk factors that I have carried within my brain from my earliest beginnings.  When I think about all the ‘trauma drama’ that adult child abuse survivors seem doomed to keep repeating, I want to understand more about how my altered social brain knows and does not know about how to recognize in other people what ‘ordinary’ people know so quickly, automatically and unconsciously it would make my conscious mind spin and stagger.

It helps me to realize and begin to know how profoundly my altered brain can affect me at even the most deeply important levels.  I also have to understand that there are degrees of social brain dis-abilities in people that I meet if they come from early abusive environments because their brains did not develop ‘ordinarily’, either!

Unfortunately, the information researchers are providing about how social brain development affects trustworthiness can be complicated and hard to read.  It is important, however, for us to at least know this information is available to us, and that this is a subject that concerns all of us who did not get to develop an ‘ordinary’ social brain in the first place.  Thanks to the internet we can approach the learning of information about our brain’s dis-abilities from either end of the age spectrum.

By looking at information contained in links I provided at the beginning of this post we can learn about how very young infant and child brains learn the important social and emotional information as their brains are forming from the start.  Accessing the information is easier if we look at it from the ‘young’ end.  We can think about our own abuse histories and begin to think about what happened to us, how that affected us, what we might be missing, and how we can begin to change our brains consciously.

We can also look at the information from the adult end.  That information is more complicated.  We CAN understand it with effort, however.  We need to erase that magic, invisible line that we keep in place between what the ‘average’ public can understand and what the ‘brainy experts’ can understand.

We are no longer children.  We have excellent brains, even if their development was altered through our need to adapt to malevolent early experiences.  While we might not consider our need to pay attention to new information about how our social, emotional brain-minds were changed to be of life-saving importance, we can understand that everything about how our brains formed affects the quality of our life and our states of well-being for our entire lifespan!

Even though the study might be difficult, it is worth the effort!  I encourage readers to try it.  Information empowers us on every level.  Even the process of acquiring the information, of learning itself, exercises our brain in positive ways.  Go ahead!  Give it a try!  Follow some of these ‘live links’ I have included in this post.

Even if your studying of this information helps you to better determine safety in ONLY ONE situation, your effort will be worth it!  And have fun with this.  It is not as impossible or difficult as you might think!  Everything and anything that we learn about how our social-emotional brain works will help improve our attachments — to our self, to others, and to the world as a whole.  It will also take the power away from trauma and give it to us.

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+FROM OUR DEPTHS WE NEED TO LISTEN

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Fixing things.  That seems to me to be an interesting pattern some people have when faced with another person’s life circumstances.  It makes me wonder if all the fixing work has to do with someone else’s reaction to another person’s pain and discomfort.  Ah, this social network we live in — one way or the other.

Fixing things.  Giving all sorts of helpful advice, as if I haven’t already ‘thought about that’.  It makes me wonder, because I guess I am not naturally a ‘fixer upper person’.  I don’t think I naturally give advice.  I don’t think I know what another person is feeling.  Well, looking at it from my insecure attachment disorder and nearly complete lack of socialization opportunities when I was a child, I guess I would have to pretty much say I only know what another person might be feeling by tuning into my ‘sense’ of feeling what another person feels.

I listen, but not so much with my ears.  I watch, but not so much with my eyes.  This seems to be leading into a story I haven’t written yet — and I mean — yet, because it is probably one I need to write.  So, here goes —–

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Once upon a time this really happened.  I was finishing my art therapy masters degree program’s requirements for internship at an adult out-patient chemical dependency treatment center that specialized in treating people with extremely severe child abuse histories.  I remember this one day clearly that I worked with a wispy woman I’ll call Nora, who seemed more to float across the carpet than walk upon it.

On this day she was silent as she entered the art therapy room for her hour and a half session.  I greeted her gently.  I had two 8 foot tables arranged end to end with four chairs placed evenly, one at the center of each table’s long side.  I could sense her mood when she walked in the door, so after she entered I turned the light dimmer switch down to take the edge off of the room’s brightness.  Then I stood quietly near the counter along one wall where the art supplies were laid out and waited for Nora to pick a chair and sit down.

Nora’s quietness led me to select the art medium for her, and I picked up a large glass of water I had ready, a pre-moistened tray of tempera paint cakes, a 2 inch paint brush, and several newsprint sized pieces of paper.  I made no sound as I laid the items on the empty table beside Nora.  She did not look at me or at the art supplies.  I  stepped off to the side, slightly behind her back, to watch what Nora chose to do next.

I did not jump in there, noisy or steer her with questions.  I made no demands and no other intrusions into her ‘space’ other than to lay those art supplies within her easy reach.  I watched to see if it made her uncomfortable that I was behind her.  Would she turn in my direction?  No.  She didn’t show that she recognized I was in the room at all.

Nora picked up the paint brush, moistened it with water, and began moving her arms, free from the shoulder, from paint to paper to water to paint to paper.  Her movements were slow but steady, as if her inner rhythms washed across each page without effort.  Her work was silent, but she paused when a page was filled and I stepped to the table, took each finished image and quietly laid it on the floor to dry while she started another one.

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Nora felt to me to be very young as she painted.  Very quiet, very young, so young that I wasn’t sure she could even talk yet.  Nora was diagnosed with what was then called Multiple Personality Disorder.  It was not my job to do anything other than facilitate her art expression.  I did not need to know what was what, which was which, who was who.  My job was to let her communicate with something other than words or symptoms.  And that’s exactly what I did.

I watched intently as each image was created.  I noticed which colors were placed where on the paper in what order.  There were absolutely no definable, recognizable pictures taking form.  Yet the images that she was creating began to speak to me — not to my eyes, but to my sense of smell.  As Nora swished and washed each page I began to smell the unmistakably sweet flowery smell of bath powder.  Before long I began to see a lavender colored round powder box with a smokey-clear lid with a yellow soft fluffy fuzzy powder puff inside it.

I had absolutely no idea where that smell and the image of that box of powder came from, but after awhile I could see it so clearly that I could nearly have reached out both of my hands and snatched it right out of the air.  I needed to decide whose information this was.  Nora’s?  Mine?  Did it have anything at all to do with what this art therapy session was all about?

I answered my own questions and knew that I next had to find a way to introduce this image to Nora that had come to me so clearly.  How could I introduce words and my speaking voice into this well of silence that Nora seemed to be so comfortable in?  I didn’t want to surprise her or jar her or disorient her.

I walked out in front of the table where Nora was so intently working and into her range of vision.  If I had been a bird I would have flapped my wings a bit to stir up a slight breeze to catch her attention as I settled onto the chair across the table from her.

“Nora,” I began quietly as if that one word was the most important one in the world.  “An image has come to me while you’ve been painting.  It surprised me and I wonder if it has anything to do with what you are painting.  Is it alright if I tell you what it is?”

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Nora agreed and as she listened to me she transformed into an entirely different mind-state person.  What I sensed in that silent room was important, so important that I will never forget it.   Every time I think about this it amazes me even though it happened 20 years ago.

Nora was sexually abused from a very young age by multiple perpetrators.  The only safe person in her child life was her grandmother.  It would make sense, then, that it would only be at this safe person’s house that Nora could finally act out her pain and her rage — one single time.

When I described the powder box and the powder puff to Nora it was as if I had passed it from my hands to hers.  She went instantly to a memory of being five years old when she locked herself in her grandmother’s bathroom and began screaming and shouting and tearing that room apart.  Everything thrown out of the medicine cabinet.  The shower curtain ripped down, objects  smashed on the floor, thrown hard against the walls and the bathroom door.   All this time her grandmother was pounding on the outside of the bathroom door, yelling at Nora to open the door, to let her come in.

Other adults joined her grandmother in pounding on the door.  Someone found a way to open it.  The instant the door banged open and Nora looked up and met her grandmother’s eyes was the instant she was dumping the powder, puff first, into the toilet.

The look of shocked rage and betrayal on her grandmother’s face was enough to let little Nora know that she had just lost the only ally she had in the world, the only person she ever trusted or felt safe with, the person she adored, the one that never hurt her.  She was sure her grandmother hated her as much now as the people did who hurt her.  Zing!  Zap!  Crash, bash, bang!  Done!

That was the end of the trusting girl Nora.  She disappeared to any ongoing Nora at that instant, at that toilet, with that powder box in her hand.  She reappeared at that art therapy table, in that dimly lit and peaceful room, brought back to life through an hour’s work with a paintbrush sliding across pieces of paper.

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Along with all the other difficulties I might experience about how my brain did not form under ordinary conditions and is not, therefore, an ordinary brain, I can appreciate this gift that I seem to have to pay a particular kind of attention to signals that are being communicated on the subtlest of levels.  I was not feeling threatened in that room.  It was my job to be the one providing safety, security, and an appropriate art therapy experience.

So I could have my senses open in ways that I rarely can when out in the ordinary world.  Most of the time my heightened sensitivities create clash and conflict for me in that ordinary world.  But on that particular day, in that particular setting, the gifts could fly — both Nora’s in being able to transmit that image-message and in mine for being able to receive it.

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I do believe that as severe child abuse survivors we have some amazing and particular gifts that have come to us through enduring our traumas.  Yet in this ordinary world filled with mostly ordinary people, we can feel out of step in time and place, not able to modulate, moderate, or regulate how these gifts affect us — not when, where, or why.

In spite of my best intentions, and lots and lots of work to perfect my skills in my chose profession, I cannot pursue it.  Over time more of the reality of what was done to me and how I was affected by that severe and long term trauma, settled into my awareness.  It moved from an intellectual level into a very real emotional place connected to my body.  During this process of healing, the more I realized what a risk it was for me to be working with troubled people — both for them and for myself.

I would have to be in a more perfect world to do that kind of work as employment, not in an ordinary one.  My gifts were honed in trauma and do not translate into the mundane world on a regular basis.  This treatment center I served this part of my internship in could not hire me anyway, because I was not a licensed addiction counselor (which required a high school education and special training and could then be billed at $90 per hour) so insurance would not cover my services.   But finances, in the end, have nothing to do with the work itself.

This kind of work happens in a sacred space. If we want to talk about this kind of sacred in terms of ‘religion’ it needs to be connected to the root of that word:  ‘Religio’ means to tie and bind together.  What we can truly hear if we can allow ourselves to listen to one another can amaze us, and it has NOTHING to do with fixing anything or giving advice, no matter how well intentioned it might be.

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+LEARNING TODAY FROM YESTERDAY’S SORROW

alchemynow2 Comments

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So far, what did I learn about my falling into the abyss of sorrow yesterday?  That is one of the strongest assets I have going for me:  I always want to try to learn something new, like a tool, that I can use to ‘be better’ and ‘do better’ in the future.  Days like yesterday was, I cannot learn anything.  I was too much in the thicket of the bramble bushes and in too much pain.  It took all the resources and certainly the strength of my sister to get out of it.

Today I have a day to try to do something different.  Because I have no idea what triggered such depth of my sorrow yesterday, it is hard to know how to walk through today differently so I can lower my risk for that happening to me again.  Yet even that realization is important — how fragile and vulnerable to upset I am right now.  Because I live with an inner mine field and an inner fire swamp, the very quality of my life — if not my very life itself – means I have to learn as much as I can about my disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder and how it operates.

Today I am being as careful as I can be to consciously orchestrate not only my actions, but the exact condition of both my inner mind’s environment and the external environment I am spending my day in.

I am not strong right now.  Thankfully I have some income from social security disability because of how the added stress of cancer and the complications of chemotherapy impacted me, so that I can remain within the safe and secure boundaries of my house.  Yet because my breakup with the man who owns this house now threatens my home, my inner base of safety and security is additionally threatened by the circumstances I am surrounded by.

But for today I will do everything I can to control what might potentially trigger that sorrow that nearly overwhelmed me yesterday.

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The essence of what I learned so far today from what I went through yesterday is that I cannot handle surprises.  Because I am experiencing so much attachment-related stress right now, anything that might be a minor surprise for an ‘ordinary’ (safely and securely attached-from-birth person) translates into a total shock to my entire being for me.

What would stress an ‘ordinary’ person distresses me.  What would distress an ‘ordinary’ person — like an abrupt, unforeseen major breakup and threat of losing my home with no resources to move and no idea where I’d go, etc. — translates into my dissociated PTSD inner world as nearly a state of panic.

An ‘ordinary’ person has gradually built within themselves from the time of their birth an inner platform of safety and security that ALSO means they have built a cohesive SELF that they can count on to be with them ALWAYS.  If a person’s early world was chaotic, brutal and malevolent, the basis that they were forced to build from includes an entirely different ‘operating system’.  This means, as I now know, that I do not have the same inner resources that an ‘ordinary’ person has so that I can use them in ‘ordinary’ times, let alone threatening ones.

So, again, I ask how I would have walked through my life differently starting at age 18 when I left home, if I had know that for me life would often be like walking over a bottomless abyss of pain and sorrow with nothing to stand on but a gossamer thread of spider web silk?  Given what I see NOW, but only now, and knowing about my disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder — and all the difficulties of being in the world that come with it — what can I do to make my life better?

At least spider web silk is extremely strong, “five times stronger, on a weight-to-strength basis, than steel,” so I have that going for me.  But I can never take for granted that I have the kind of inner balance that I need in order to make it through what an ‘ordinary’ person can with seeming ease.  I have to be careful, ever so careful.  I cannot take for granted what I always have before — that I can go on being no matter what difficulties I might encounter.

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I am beginning to see that everything and anything that I do is actually something I have far more of an investment in than should be ordinarily so.  This holds true for the people in my life, the places in my life and for all of my chosen activities.  A person is supposed to be organized (from birth) around a safe and secure cohesive self that they can access and count on to carry them through all the variations that life might throw at them.

I don’t have one of those cohesive selves, nor do I have guaranteed access to any particularly dependable patterns of reactions — ever.  Neither do I have a being that is organized around a personality disorder, such as my mother did (and probably my ex boyfriend).  At least the personality disorders, as I see it, have a sort of second self that was locked into place so early in development — through a combination of trauma and abuse interacting with genetic potential — that all the patterns of their ongoing lives are oriented and organized by and because of their disorder.

I also believe that because of the nature of the construction and operation of personality disorders, these people are confined and defined by the structure that the disorder provides for them.  In some important ways, they are prevented from becoming consciously aware of the depths of their own pain.  I do not believe they were born this way.  They were born with the potential to take that detour should they suffer enough during their early development.

For me and others like me, who suffered from terribly abusive and malevolent early-formative experiences and did not have the genetic combination for forming personality disorders, we are most vulnerable and fragile to disruption, disorganization and disorientation BECAUSE we did not have this option available to us during our development.

I suffer from dissociation, lack of a cohesive self, posttraumatic stress disorder and reoccurring major depression along with anxiety that works to trigger all of the above.  I do not, however, have a ‘disordered personality’ that can organize all these manifestations of childhood trauma consequences for me.

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I cannot walk my tightrope blindly through life.  I cannot count on any ‘secondary personality’ to carry the weight of my actions and reactions.  I am forced TO BE HERE, right in this body, one way or the other, all of the time.  My mother no doubt suffered throughout her life, but she had no way, no possible way,  of consciously knowing why.  I fell in love with a man who is in a very similar boat.  While all of us have a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder, I do not have a personality disorder that could have jumped in and taken over control by organizing my being.  My resulting trauma reaction difficulties are consciously mine.

Do I celebrate that I have an option they do not have, to learn, to recognize, to grow?  Only at this moment for the very first time in my life I question that the ‘prize’ I got in my Cracker Jack box is anything worthy of envy.  My single qualifier at this moment is that I cannot blithely, automatically, unconsciously and devastatingly hurt and injure other people.

If given the choice, would I then choose to personally experience the full impact of my disorder over having a personality disorder that could shield me from my own inner experience of devastation?  Yes.  I have to say yes.  Because I would not want to be able to hurt other people — and not even realize it or be able to change my patterns.  I would never wish to overcome other people with my pain, unconsciously or not!  Through it all, I would rather have access to a conscience.

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In the beginning, the middle and the end of it all, all of it is about surviving unmentionable early traumas that continue to affect us one way or another for the rest of our lives.  Because I had enough people around me that wanted me to continue as a part of their lives, I went through my year of treatments for double breast cancer and am still alive to talk about it.

Some powerful inner awareness knew that nobody on the outside could possibly know what that decision to stay alive cost me.  I have no access to resources — magical though they would need to be — to change how my brain-mind and entire body developed in an intolerably traumatic, malevolent world.  While, yes, my body is still alive I still suffer from invisible-to-others damage that I am just beginning to be able to describe for myself.

Major inner collateral damage that is the consequence of severe, chronic child abuse can never be erased.  It cannot be vanquished because it lies within the very body that hosted the experience of the abuse in the first place.  Those of us so affected must continue to try to understand in real-time how our disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder operates.

If it is cloaked within a personality disorder the symptoms will be more clear if we know what to look for.  For the rest of us, we know on our insides what has made our lives so difficult to live.  We cannot afford to underestimate the power that everyone and everything we organize and orient ourselves around has in our lives.  We are using external sources and resources to do what an ‘ordinary’ securely attached — or even an organized-oriented insecurely attached — person can do within their own minds and bodies.

Knowing this, today I will be as careful of myself in my world and in my life as I can possibly be.  My hope for today is that even if I cannot achieve a state of being happy, at least I must achieve a state of not being overwhelmed with unbearable sorrow, pain and sadness.  I will organize and orient myself the best I can and hope that more and more I can learn to do this — better.

At the same time I must realize and accept that the entirety of the pain of my childhood is completely stored within my body and this body will not let go of it until it is dead.  That is a fact as I experience my life.  I can find ways to circumvent triggering it, but I cannot make the pain go away.  That is part of what bothered me most yesterday.

I know it is not possible in my lifetime to cry enough tears to make anything better.  It is terrifying when the tears start and I cannot make them stop.  I know there are readers who know what I mean.  But I believe we each have enough courage, hope and faith — no matter how much the pain hurts us — to keep going through each present moment into our future or we would not still be here contemplating that fact.

We have to know that the pain is there.  It is very real.  But we have a right to build a life that is MORE THAN THE PAIN, even if we can only do that one baby step at a time.

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