Tag: sadness

+CRIMES AGAINST CHILDREN – WHO ARE THEIR PROTECTORS?

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Something so troubles me that I cannot sleep tonight.  Could it be the sound of hurt and scared children crying, if only silently in their wounded hearts?  Who is protecting these children?

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A new page posted along the top of my blog has been added JUST FOR READERS to write any trauma-related thoughts that come to mind — either directly in response to something I have posted — or not!

Please feel free to click on the COMMENT link at the bottom of this new page that will always be at the top of the blog — and write!  Your words are important!

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Your Page – Readers’ Responses

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Remembering what I wrote yesterday about the lack of playfulness and the ability to play being directly connected to the presence of trauma in a child’s environment, reading this new report about our nation’s children’s exposure to violence greatly troubles me.

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Please take some time to look at the report’s information, and also check out the information at the Safe Start Center website!

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The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention published a new report that discusses findings from a survey examining children’s exposure to violence. The survey is the first to attempt to comprehensively measure exposure to violence for nationally representative sample of 4,549 children younger then 18 across major categories. Some of these categories were:

  1. Conventional crime, including robbery, theft, destruction of property, attack with an object or weapon
  2. Child maltreatment, other than spanking on the bottom
  3. Sexual victimization
  4. Witnessing and indirect victimization
  5. Exposure to family violence
  6. School violence and threat
  7. Internet violence and victimization, including Internet threats or harassment and unwanted online sexual solicitation

Results suggest that most children in the U.S. are exposed to violence in their daily lives, with more than 60 percent of the children surveyed having been exposed to violence within the past year. Nearly half of the children surveyed had been assaulted in the previous year, and nearly 1 in 10 witnessed one family member assaulting another.

Safe Start Center is dedicated to teaching about the harmful effects of the exposure of violence on children. Safe Start’s website is packed with information and resources for parents and the community to help our children stay safe. To read the full report of to learn more about the Safe Start Initiative, visit www.safestartcenter.org.

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About the Crimes Against Children Research Center

The mission of the Crimes against Children Research Center (CCRC) is to combat crimes against children by providing high quality research and statistics to the public, policy makers, law enforcement personnel, and other child welfare practitioners. CCRC is concerned with research about the nature of crimes including child abduction, homicide, rape, assault, and physical and sexual abuse as well as their impact.

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Here, also, is some more information on borderline personality disorder put together by —

In the Spotlight | More Topics |
Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD
When we talk about the impact of BPD, we’re not just talking about symptoms; BPD also has a major impact on your quality of life. From work, to relationships, to your physical health, think about the ways that BPD may be interfering for you.
In the Spotlight
Your Life with BPD
What is it like to live with BPD? It’s not easy. Intense emotional pain, and feelings of emptiness, desperation, anger, hopelessness, and loneliness are common. But life with BPD is not hopeless, and you can create a life full of quality and meaning.
More Topics
BPD and Relationships
Many of the symptoms of BPD can have direct impact on relationships, and other symptoms have an indirect (but not necessarily less disruptive) influence.
Physical Health Problems and BPD
People with BPD are more likely to report a variety of physical health problems, and are more likely to need to be hospitalized for medical reasons, than those without BPD

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+PLAY AS AN INDICATOR OF SAFETY AND SECURITY IN A BENEVOLENT WORLD

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Mothers have evolved throughout the millennia to play with their infants.

Having the ability to engage in healthy play has evolved through the millennia to build healthy body-nervous system-brain-mind selves in our species.  Play happens when the world is a friendly place to be.  Play TELLS us that the world is a friendly place to be.

When the environment surrounding mother and infant-child is benevolent, healthy play is most usually present.  This benevolence in the environment is then built into the growing-developing offspring.

When the environment surrounding mother and infant-child is hostile, toxic, lacking in essential survival qualities and therefore is malevolent, a mother’s ability to engage in healthy play with her offspring is interfered with.

Thus, the absence of healthy playfulness between mother and offspring signal the developing infant-child on every physiological level that trauma exists in its world.  The offspring will then be forced to change and adapt to the best of its physiological abilities to prepare itself for a lifetime within a malevolent world.

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Healthy playfulness between a mother and her offspring only happens to the degree that the environment is safe and secure enough to allow this play to happen.

If a mother grew and developed in her own early childhood in a world that signaled her body-nervous system-brain-mind self that the world was malevolent, she is most likely carrying unresolved trauma within herself that then signals to her offspring that the world is malevolent.  Her offspring will then have to change according to the trauma-present-in-the-world message just as its mother did.

Both mother and infant-child will then suffer from a lack of safety and security perceived as permanent and real by their physiological development.  When trauma is present, healthy play is interfered with because our evolution has designed our species so that degree, quality, kinds of, presence of healthy play and playful attitudes directly indicate the degree of either benevolence or malevolence in the world.

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I am not talking about play as we might think about it in today’s world.  This kind of play has nothing to do with toys or ‘stuff’.  Healthy play that signals to offspring the condition of the world is about direct face-to-face interaction between mother and infant-child.  The presence of a world safe and secure enough to allow for this kind of play between early caregivers and offspring has operated throughout our evolution.

It was only when the world because safe and secure enough, adequate and benevolent enough for this level of play to grow and thrive that humans ever achieved powers of speech at all (only about 140,000 years ago).  The physiological systems within our body and brain had to have already evolved sophisticated organizational and orientational abilities to have ever allowed our powers of speech to manifest in the first place because speech uses all those preexisting abilities.

Any time trauma happens it always disrupts ongoing coherent life.  If trauma cannot be resolved, consequences happen.  Dissociation represents one of the fundamental consequences of a being’s inability to resolve trauma.  Dissociation continues to affect a mother because its very existence means that something malevolent occurred that was not able to be resolved.

A dissociating mother thus communicates her state of unresolved trauma to her offspring primarily through an interruption in her ability to engage in healthy play and playful attitudes with her offspring.  The key to healthy playfulness between a mother and her offspring is that it is APPROPRIATE.

Appropriate, and therefore healthy play and playfulness between a mother and her offspring, the kind of play that then signals the offspring to grow an entire body geared for life in a benevolent world, happens when the mother’s entire focus is on fostering the well-being of her infant-child.

Mother’s have evolutionarily evolved to respond appropriately to their offspring so that their play-filled responses do not overwhelm, over stimulate or under stimulate them.  When a mother has experienced enough trauma during her own development that incoherency in the form of dissociation has been built into her entire body, she is not likely to be able to operate from this optimal, benign, benevolent-world-condition state within herself.  She will then communicate her own preexisting, unresolved trauma states directly to her offspring.

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Terror, pain and trauma interrupt play and the ability to play.  This lack of play and the ability to play then acts as a direct signal that communicates malevolence in the world.  When healthy play and playfulness exist, they happen in a safe and secure world, not in the midst of trauma.

A mother who does not carry unresolved trauma into her interactions with her offspring will be able to focus on the well-being of her offspring and demonstrate the benevolence of the world to her developing infant-child through her healthy, appropriate play and playfulness with it.

These interactions operate from birth to form first the right, limbic, emotional, social brain.  As the infant-child continues to grow, the foundation of play or its absence, built within its body-nervous system-brain-mind-self will further influence the development of its later-forming left brain, the connection between the two hemispheres of its brain, and the development of its higher-processing cortical abilities.

A non-dissociating mother is able to have appropriate hopes, dreams, wishes and desires for the well-being of her offspring.  She will automatically be able to orient herself and organize her interactions with her offspring.  Her goal, destination, direction and purpose regarding her offspring will be benevolent.  This benevolence will be communicated through safety and security that manifests itself in healthy play and playfulness toward her offspring.

A dissociating mother will experience breaks in her ongoing interactions with her offspring that will vary in degree according to the changes that had to happen to her during her own development in a malevolent early environment.

In my case, my mother’s dissociation toward me was extreme, fundamental and complete.  In her psychosis she believed that I was evil, that I tried to kill her while I was being born, that I was not human, and that I was sent to be a curse on her life.  Her psychotic dissociation in-formed every interaction she ever had with me from the time I was born.

My mother’s unresolved trauma, manifesting itself in her dissociation, prevented her from ever being able to respond to me with anything like appropriate, healthy play or playfulness.  She was not able to consider my well-being because she could never understand that I was a separate entity from her.  I was merely and continually the recipient of her slit-off projection of her intolerable perception of her own badness.

She not only could not have playful interactions with me that I needed to build a non-trauma centered body-nervous system-brain-mind-self, but her psychosis was so severe that she prevented ME from ever being able to play at all.

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The absolute disturbance in the necessary operation of play in my childhood directly ties into my own dissociation.  The trauma I experienced in the malevolent environment of my childhood could not possibly be integrated into a coherent self.  However, as a mother to my own children I was able to know they were separate beings from me, and I was able to focus as much as I possibly could on them and on the development of their well-being.

In other words, I was able to organize and orient a ‘mothering self’ within me that existed to foster the development of my children.  Because I could do this, I could offer to them enough play and playfulness that it communicated to them a relative lack of trauma in the world and enough of a sense of safety and security in the world that I did not pass my unresolved trauma onto them.

They did not have perfect childhoods because the unresolved trauma and the changes that had to happen to me so that I could survive my childhood affected every other aspect of my being-in-the-world, and therefore DID affect them.  But these problems were MINE and I was able to keep them myself.  I did not force them INTO my children the way my mother forced her unresolved trauma INTO growing and developing me.

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As we return in our thoughts to consider our infancy and childhood through the lens of playfulness and play or its absence, we can become much more clear about how our caregivers’ unresolved trauma — or the absence of it — operated to directly communicate to our growing and developing body on all its levels what the condition of the world was like.

If appropriate and healthy play and playfulness was there for us, it is during those experiences that we were developing in an ‘ordinary’ way.  If it was absent, some degree of trauma was present, and we were forced at those times in our development to try to adapt to that malevolency.

Who we are today and how we are in our bodies in the world is directly connected to play and playfulness because it is only in times of safety and security that play exists at all.

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+I WILL NEVER BE ORDINARY. IT IS TIME FOR ME TO KNOW THIS TRUTH.

alchemynow1 Comment

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I try to be as positive as I can about the work I am doing with my writing about the permanent and lifelong trauma-centered changes that plague survivors of severe abuse and trauma that happened during their early infant-child developmental changes.

Today’s transcription of my quarter of a century old letters my friend just returned back to me has left me feeling anything but positive.  The reality of the kinds of childhoods like mine, and like the kind I am talking about and describing, is horrible.  There is no way to pretty up the picture about what was done to us and what happened to us as a result.

I am faced with the tragedy of what my mother’s abuse did to me — not just during my childhood, but throughout my entire life up until this very instant in time.  Primarily I balance my mother’s abuse by the other side of my child abuse history.  No one was there for me to form a safe and secure attachment with.  THIS LACK, I believe, had as much to do with how my body-brain-mind-self had to change in order to survive as did the abuse itself.

I believe that having a safe and secure attachment to at least one other person from birth particularly through age 5 is a critical resiliency factor to balance out the terrible harm of abuse in infancy and childhood.  When I consider the terrible abuse of my childhood, it is ALSO the absence of having any other person I could form at attachment to and with that profoundly harmed me.

It is not JUST the presence of abuse that truly creates a malevolent childhood.  It is also the complete absence of safe and secure attachment to ANYONE else.  That absence, I believe, amplifies the impact of the trauma of abuse nearly beyond belief.  That absence, in particular, coupled with the abuse, so changes a person’s development that trauma becomes the underlying pivotal factor of their ongoing existence.

No matter how benign our adult life may appear from the outside, the reality of this kind of childhood trauma within us manifests itself in every feeling, thought, action, decision and experience that we have.   How to live well in spite of the trauma-centered developmental changes that happened to us is so far past my ability to understand today that I can’t imagine it.

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I am having a transparent moment, as if all the illusions I have ever had about myself being an ‘ordinary’ person in an ‘ordinary’ world have now completely evaporated.  Is this a feeling of complete hopelessness that I am experiencing?  It can’t be.  I won’t let it be.

Having illusions about who and how I am in this body in this lifetime is not the same thing as having hope.  Just because today, finally, all my illusions have vanished because I have challenged them and found that they do not fit me, does not mean that I have no right to find a way to a better life in this world.

At this moment I feel as if I have one foot poised in the air over a threshold I am crossing into a new vision of myself in my life.  I can, for the first time ever, looking backward through the time of my life and see myself being born a pure and innocent child, full of potential, full of life, full of the ability to respond to the world I was born into.

That this world welcomed me with trauma and abuse, which held me firmly within its grasp for the first, formative, 18 years of my life does not mean that I, as a human being, have changed in my essence.  But I do have to work with this body, nervous system, and brain that changed itself to survive the horrors of that ongoing trauma.  It is my mind I am working to change, to the best of my ability, not because it is in any way ill, but because it is mine.

My mind can no longer afford to feed itself on a diet of illusion and false belief that what happened to me did not affect me in ways that I now KNOW it did.  And with this knowledge I now have the most profound hope I have ever had.  It is time for me to learn how to experience life MY way, my CHANGED way, without ever again expecting anything about myself to be — ordinary.

There is an invisible line that is crossed during a severely abused infant-child’s life where the option to develop in an ‘ordinary’ way is removed.  To deny this fact is to suffer from delusion.

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*Ages 29-33 – Eight Letters to a Friend

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*Commentary on the eight letters to a friend – ages 29-33

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SOME OF THE KEY TYPICAL TROUBLESOME WORDS, CONCEPTS AND EXPERIENCES THAT ARE DIFFERENT FOR SEVERE CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORS – SEEN FROM MY NEWLY INFORMED PERSPECTIVE.

These things connect to what continues to ‘trouble’ us because they are all connected to the changes that our body-brain-mind had to make in order to survive early severe abuse during our infant-child developmental stages:

Choice

Feeling guilty – the whole concept of guilty

Concept of procrastination as being a source of our problems

‘shirking’ responsibility – the whole concept of ‘response-ability’ as it applies to us

dealing with things on a self-honesty level

concept of ‘changing’

the concept of feelings, feeling feelings, experiencing feelings

emotional brain not form ‘ordinarily’; emotional dysregulation = chronic problem

feeling lonely, depressed, crying – all different for us than for ‘ordinary’ people

experience of ‘feeling low’ and low on energy is different

‘anger’ has a different meaning to us – both our own and other people’s

being with other people

feeling trapped

our experience of the experience of ‘being sick’ and recuperating is altered

our experience of being kind to ourselves

our experience of giving ourselves ‘permission’

how we experience anticipation of enjoyable experiences

experience of worry different

experience of ‘wishful thinking’ is different

experience of disappointment different

Experience of trust is different

Our experience of the passage of time is VERY different!

Our experience of friendships is different

Being willing to reach for and experience ANY kind of self-help we can find

Finding that it does not REALLY help us at all

blaming-shaming ourselves that it doesn’t

not being able to immediately and completely trust our impressions of people

my ‘who-to-trust/not-trust’ center in my infant brain could not form correctly

making a mess of our own thinking trying to change these first impressions!

Our sense of safety with others is THE number ONE issue – we have to trust it

Intense feelings of isolated-alone, trust them, they are REAL beyond belief

Realize that ‘ordinary’ people do not experience them with the pain we do

Yes, we will do everything possible to ‘protect our feelings’ – naturally

Have to be hyper aware of what feels threatening and scary to us – it’s real

There are memories and feelings we can’t touch because it isn’t good for us to

Repression of trauma is not the same thing as dissociation

we can’t ‘work through issues’ like others if we dissociate

not helpful to feel guilty-shame for what we cannot possible accomplish!

Terrible ambiguity can exist about our abuser(s) – ordinary people can’t imagine

Confused-meshed identity and relationship with abuser

Commonly called ‘defense mechanisms’ don’t begin to describe true insanity

Have to be realistic about ‘recovery’ goals – ours will be different than ‘ordinary’

Be careful of what we believe of what therapists who do truly not know us, tell us

We don’t really know what love is or what it feels like – we weren’t built that way

I strongly suspect that ‘love’ is different from ordinary for us

We will never stop learning about what ‘ordinary’ people automatically know

We did not grow into our thinking abilities like ‘ordinary’ people do

Not helpful to be told by others we are ‘rationalizing’ as a defense when we think

We need help learning about our thinking process because abuse changed it

Our disorganized insecure attachment means that we do not grieve the same

Extremely helpful to understand insecure attachment and love relationships

Our own pain-loneliness puts us at risk for attaching harmfully in relationships

Our sense of ‘time passing’ is different; things do not ‘end’ in time like ordinary

Difficulties with accountability if we don’t know source of our difficulties

Terrible troubles with goals-future plans, our higher cortex formed differently

We have a different version of a selfhood – not the ordinary one formed by age 2

When we feel alone in the world, a lot of it is because we are lonely for our self

(a self-centered-self is cultural and evolutionarily a recent luxury we didn’t get)

We had no say in the matter – we developed a trauma-centered self from birth

12-step program talk about ‘unmanageability’ = not from our ‘planet of origin’

12-step program talk about ‘acceptance’ = not from our ‘planet of origin’

12-step program talk about ‘powerlessness’ = not from our ‘planet of origin’

12-step program talk about ‘resentments’ = not from our ‘planet of origin’

the set-point for our nervous system is not at ‘calm’ like ‘ordinary’ is

(these points are included at the end of the link presented above)

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+SIMPLE MOMENTS OF HUMAN KINDNESS CAN SAVE AN ABUSED CHILD’S SELF-LIFE

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I woke up on this sunny, warm morning thinking about the post I wrote last night, feeling concerned about the darkness in it.  Somehow two topics came into my mind almost like they came to me as a balance weight against that darkness that was the history of the making of Linda.  One topic is about the Brownie scout leader I had when I was eight.  The other topic is my strange cat, Gerri.

I will only know by writing this piece how the darkness and the light within the story of the Brownie scout leader and my cat fit together.  I know attachment lies at the root of this piece of writing.

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I will start with Gerri because she is here with me in the present.  She is (I know nothing about cat breeds so I will do the best I can to describe her) a mostly black tortoise shell calico cat.  She has splashes of white markings and light tan, almost peach legs, with some tan speckles throughout her fur.  Her coat is so thick I can scrunch my fingers into it, but also a little oily and waxy.  It reminds me of a soft version of the undercoat a buffalo might wear.

Her eyes are round and always big, yellow with a pitch black slit in them.  She reminds me of an owl when she looks at me, and her look is always a stare as if she is continually looking for threat and danger.  She often looks worried as if I might eat her.  There is always tension in her small body (she is not a big or heavy cat).  I will never know her whole background or history, but what I do know explains for me why she is such an unusual and strange cat.  I don’t expect her to ever be ‘ordinary’ the way the three now mostly grown kitten-cats I rescued are.  But I am seeing the REAL Gerri emerging within this precious original cat!

Those of you who read my postings on my 1982 journal remember that I reached a point all those years ago when I packed up my spinning and weaving and put it all away when I entered college, and my life changed.  As I transcribed those journal pages I realized how sad it was that I let go one of the few parts of myself that were really an important and positive part of me.  I looked at the beautiful maple loom sitting in the corner of my living room and realized that I can place some important energy in my present life getting that part of myself that loves to work with fleece and yarn back into my life.

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Now the story about the loom and Gerri intertwine.  About four years ago I happened to hear about this loom that someone in a town about 50 miles from where I live had to give away.  I was fortunate to get this woman’s number and called her.  The following weekend the loom was in my house.  The woman who brought it here was a friend of the woman who owned it, whose Alzheimer’s had progressed to the point she had to be placed in a full-care institution.  It turns out this woman who owned the loom (I never met her) also had two cats that needed a home, too.  I offered to take the cats.

The next weekend the cats arrived, Gerri being one of them and a huge fat white cat named Poe being the other one.  The wisdom of my hindsight came very quickly into play as the woman who brought the cats in their cardboard cat carrier boxes brought them into my house, opened them up immediately, and the cats got away.  I should have insisted immediately that the cats be left in their boxes for awhile until I had time to meet and greet them before I let them out.

Poe only disappeared for a few hours.  The little black one was gone for four months.  I hoped she was still in my house and had not escaped at some sly moment when the door was open, but I didn’t know for sure.  All I could do was keep food, water and litter filled and wait.

Eventually I heard the black one.  I had not written her name down when she had been left at my house, so I called her by the name the little neighbor boy suggested.  Gerri.  After her four months of sneaking out at night and hiding thoroughly during the day, I began to see fleeting shadows of Gerri darting along the outside walls of the house from hiding place to hiding place.  As she became more trusting and daring she would appear here and there away from the walls.  That’s when I began to realize that big fat Poe bullied her.

I ended up finding a home for Poe.  No bullying allowed in my home!  It has taken 3 ½ years for Gerri to transform into my pet.  Gerri is missing her front left paw.  She was stepped on by a horse when she was so tiny she could barely walk, and the woman who owned the loom had taken her to the vet’s and saved her life.  The more I come to know Gerri, the more I realize that she has cat version posttraumatic stress disorder.  I would call her absolutely ‘mentally ill’ and neurotic if I didn’t know better.

Also, the more I have gotten to know Gerri, the more I wonder if her previous owner’s increasing dementia didn’t severely further traumatize this cat.  It makes me worry for pets who are under the care of Alzheimer people before they progress into total near-oblivion.  The hyper startle response this little cat has, her nervousness, her obvious distrust of the world she lives in, her difficulty in forming attachment to me, all make me think that there were many times in her 14-year life that she was threatened not only by a giant horse, and a huge bullying white cat, but also by her increasingly demented owner.

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But Gerri seems to realize more every day of her life that she is now safe from harm and secure in my care and affection.  Nothing will ever take away from her either the background experiences of suffering that she’s had, or her physiological responses to those traumas.  But I am watching her become, a little more every day, more and more of the fine cat, Gerri that she is.

She loves to be brushed, and I don’t mean she’s a little fond of it.  She gets ecstatic!  I keep a brush on the bathroom floor, and every time I use the toilet Gerri gets some profoundly happy moments!  I have even seen her let herself be chased by the sweetest of my three half grown kittens.  Gerri is queen of the house now.  She will never eat while the other three do, but she watches them from the middle of the kitchen floor with interest.  She will even curl up now on a corner of my sheet-covered bed in the sunlight during the day, allowing herself to be present with three other cats on the bed!

But it is what happens at night when I first go to bed that tickles me most.  I don’t know why she just started this a week ago.  It’s like some ancient Gerri-is-a-cat genetic memory has kicked into gear.  She always knows about 15 minutes before I head to bed that it is TIME, and she begins to prance around me, waiting.  As soon as the lights are off and I am snuggled under my covers and stop moving, Gerri rushes into the living room.  It took me a couple of days to put two and two together to figure out what her new routine actually was.

I would here her return to my room as she made the strangest cat deep growling  cat talking sounds.  Then they would stop, she would leave the room, and soon she would be back repeating her verbal display.  After awhile she would jump onto my bed and nestle down somewhere near my feet where she spent the night.  Eventually I noticed the pile of cat toy soft balls piled under my bed near my head.  “Oh!  She’s HUNTING for me!”

In order for this game to repeat itself for the first few nights Gerri had to move all the balls back into the living room during the day so she could hunt for them again at night.  Now I round them all up and hide them for her.  At first I kept the hiding simple and obvious so she would have no trouble finding them.  I didn’t want to discourage her from hunting for them.  Now I can be a little more challenging in where I put them in the morning, because she still finds them all at night and brings them back for me.

Now HERE is the connection to my Brownie scout leader when I was eight.  I am Gerri’s attachment person.  She hunts for me because she loves me and she is taking care of me like a momma cat would hunt and bring her kill to her kittens.  I am like her mother at the same time she is mothering me.

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When I was eight, shortly after my family had left Los Angeles and moved to Alaska, my mother was still practicing the “Let’s be a GOOD (public face) mother so I make an impression on all these new people I am meeting here!” façade.   Eventually, and it only took less than two years, she stopped caring a hoot what anyone thought about her in her new location and became again completely the mean mother she was to me.

In the meantime, I was allowed to attend Brownies for about a year, which culminated in my being allowed to attend Brownie day camp for a week the June we first began homesteading.   Mother drove me to the Eagle River Shopping Center parking lot and the Brownie leader picked me up and drove me to camp and back again.

I am thinking about how the attachment and child development experts tell us that the ability to form secure attachments lies within each individual child.  When insecure attachment happens instead, the ‘fault’ does not lie within the victim-child.  It lies with the inadequate early caregivers.  I have never forgotten the time I spent at that Brownie camp.  It was one of the very, very few times I actually GOT TO BE A CHILD!  I loved the activities, enjoyed being with the other children, and was treated grandly by every one of the adults.

Yet one particular experience that happened on a return trip back to the shopping center that remains a ‘flashbulb’ memory for me (the same as trauma can create flashbulb memories, so also can extremely positive events, especially when a child is immersed in the darkness of trauma on an ongoing basis).  We had left the camp a little early, and the Brownie scout leader asked me on the return trip if I liked flowers.  I trusted this woman completely by now, and I can remember my own ecstasy when I responded back to her with the full life-force and enthusiasm I was capable of, “Oh, YES!  I LOVE flowers.”

“OK,” this woman responded back to me with a smile.  “Just wait.  I am going to show you something very special.”

She turned off of the paved highway and drove down a narrow dirt road and parked near the edge of the great Knik River.  She walked ahead of me on a slippery damp wet packed black mud pathway along the shore until we came to a small open area where she showed me the Chocolate Lilies growing there.

So beautiful, I thought!  I had never before seen a brown flower!  But when I smelled them, the STUNK!  How could something that looked so beautiful smell so bad?

Well, I have NEVER forgotten those shining moments or the kindness of that woman.  Yet I also realize that woman’s attention and generous kindness to me where probably not one single bit out of the ordinary for her.  I had no idea at all that people ordinarily treat children that way, treat each other that way.  For me, that week at day camp, and my ‘commutes’ with this woman remained the safest, most secure, most kind and happiest days of my entire childhood.

Hope from human kindness means the universe to abused children -- budding flowers in spring -- the Chocolate Lily

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Which again takes me back to myself and little traumatized kitty Gerri.  I understand that getting stepped on by a horse and losing your paw can be put in the category of trauma that just happens sometimes.  But neither Gerri nor I ever deserved anything less than perfect kindness.  That we didn’t get it, changed us.  But just as there is a perfect cat Gerri inside that furry body sleeping in the sun at the foot of my bed right now with her three furry companions (the first she has ever let into her life), there always remains a perfect Linda present in this body no matter how difficult it is for me to remain ‘in touch’ with her.

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So, in response to the dark reality of the post I wrote last night, I want to remind all of us that because we are still alive there HAD TO BE shining moments of safe and secure attachment with someone somewhere and some time in our childhood.  I won’t talk here about the unspeakable tragedy it is that abused children have to make a few tiny moments of glowing kindness into enough of a sustaining memory to last them throughout their terrible, dark, dangerous, traumatic childhoods.

But I also believe that I would have had a different life course in the end than I did if I had NOT had those few shining moments with that perfect stranger.  Her kindness sustained me throughout my childhood because those moments with her were the only true Linda being Linda and being accepted, treated kindly and being genuinely and completely happy that I can think of.  But the quality of my attachment experiences with this woman kept the channel of secure attachment open for me within my own body-brain-mind.

I have no doubt that in those few joy-filled moments with that woman who cared enough about me to take a little detour to show me new flowers that I loved, in those few secure attachment moments borrowed from the ‘ordinary’ world, that woman saved my life in the same way I am saving little Gerri’s and she is saving mine.

Hope beats within the heart of these moments.

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+WHEN ABUSIVE PARENTS STEAL THEIR CHILD’S THUNDER

alchemynow2 Comments

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Experts say that we cannot be truly autonomous and secure adults if we lack the ability to have safe and secure attachments.

I wanted to write today about Dr. Siegel’s next statements about secure-autonomous attachment.  I find, as usual, that I am nearly completely lost in trying to understand what he is saying (see bottom of this post) because I do not come from a childhood of safe and secure attachments.  Instead my 18 years of abuse from birth gave me the opposite – a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder.  To begin to understand what Siegel is saying, I have to turn his words upside down and backwards so that they can make sense to ‘opposite’ extra-ordinary ME.

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In order to keep my thoughts from appearing and flying away in their often random way, I had to find my own internal image to attach them to so that they could have an order I can understand.  What came to me in relation to what Siegel is saying about secure versus insecure attachment was:  “stolen thunder.”  In working with my own internal image I came to understand three basic questions about how parents raise their children.  In fact, I think it might be the simplest ‘test’ possible to determine the quality of the parenting we received and of the parenting we give our own children.

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1.  Does a parent help their child’s own personal power, uniqueness, expression and self to grow?  In other words, do they help their child’s thunder to grow or do they interfere with their child’s growing thunder (self=personal power)?

Yes or No

2.  Does a parent actually steal their child’s thunder away from them so that the child is diminished rather than helped and allowed to grow and thrive?

Yes or No

3.  Does the parent then project their own garbage onto and into their child?

Yes or No

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These questions are, of course, only showing us what the very tip of the iceberg is like about how parents can act toward their children.  But I think the answers give a pretty clear indication about what lies below the surface:

As I thought about my mother’s interactions with me from my birth, I realized that 1. was No; 2. was Yes; 3.  was Yes.  N-Y-Y.  She did not allow my personal thunder to grow, she stole it away from me and projected her garbage onto me.  (This is exactly what I believe my mother’s mother and grandmother did to her in her childhood.)

I thought about my father and 1. was No; 2. was No; 3.  was No.  N-N-N.  He did not help me to grow my own thunder, but he did not steal it away from me, either.  Nor did he project his garbage onto me.  I basically did not seem to exist in his world at all.

I thought about my interactions with my own children and 1. was Yes; 2. was No; and 3. was No.  Y-N-N.  My foremost effort with my children was to allow them and to help them grow into their own self and to grow their personal thunder.  I did not steal their thunder away from them or deny them the opportunity to grow their own strong, clear self.  I did not confuse, overpower or disempower them.  I did not project my own garbage onto them.  I had what the child development attachment experts would call an ‘earned secure’ attachment with my children.  (I think about this from my own perspective as my having built a ‘borrowed secure’ attachment with my children.)

NOTE:  Our patterns of trying to give our thunder away is a topic for some future writing…..

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Out of curiosity I wanted to know where the phrase “steal my thunder” even came from.  At trivia-library.com I found it to be 300 years old:

Origins of Sayings – Steal My Thunder

About the history, origin and story behind the famous saying

STEAL MY THUNDER

Who Said It: John Dennis

When: 1709

The Story behind It: John Dennis, English critic and playwright, invented a new way of simulating the sound of thunder on stage and used the method in one of his plays, Appius and Virginia. Dennis “made” thunder by using “troughs of wood with stops in them” instead of the large mustard bowls usually employed. The thunder was a great success, but Dennis’ play was a dismal failure. The manager at Drury Lane, where the play was performed, canceled its run after only a few performances. A short time later, Dennis returned to Drury Lane to see Shakespeare’s Macbeth. As he sat in the pit, he was horrified to discover that his method of making thunder was being used. Jumping to his feet, Dennis screamed at the audience, “That’s my thunder, by God! The villains will not play my play but they steal my thunder.”

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I have a different association with thunder.  I used to be terrified of electrical storms.  Gradually, after more than 25 years spent in friendships with traditional-believing Native Americans in northern Minnesota, I came to understand another perspective on these storms.

I had a friend who was a lawyer and Chief Magistrate, and not given to ‘flights of fancy’.  One time she told the story of driving a stretch of deserted 2-lane highway after leaving Canada as she headed home.  She glanced in her rear view mirror and saw a massive bird speeding towards her along the line of road.  It shone copper, and when it reached her car it lifted over it and swooped down in front of her and continued down the road.  It was so big its wing tips reached over the shoulders on both sides of the road.  My friend was stunned and shaken, and pulled off the road and stopped as she watched it disappear ahead of her.

Traditional Anishinabeg (Ojibway, Chippewa) and other Tribal teachings tell of how thunder is the sound of the voice of these great Thunderbirds, and lightning is the light flashing from their eyes.  I am no longer afraid of electrical storms.  Finding, claiming and growing my own personal thunder remains a bit more of a challenge!

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My entire recovery from the terrible child abuse I suffered has been about the healing of myself and the claiming of my personal power to be my self, in my power, in my life.  How does having one’s personal thunder — or not — apply to my understanding of the following words by Dr. Daniel Siegel?  I guess my discussion of this information now belongs in tomorrow’s post:

“Moreover, the capacity to reflect on the role of mental states in determining human behavior is associated with the capacity to provide sensitive and nurturing parenting….this reflective function is more than the ability to introspect; it directly influences a self-organizational process within the individual…..the reflective function also enables the parent to facilitate the self-organizational development of the child….the coherent organization of the mind depends upon an integrative process that enables such reflective processes to occur….integrative coherence within the individual may early in life depend upon, and later facilitate, interpersonal connections that foster the development of emotional well-being.  (Siegle/tdm/312)”

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This post follows:

+DISSOCIATION AND THE TRAUMA-SPECIALIZED BRAIN 11-11-09

+SECURE AND INSECURE ATTACHMENT AND THE CHILDHOOD NARRATIVE 11-13-09

+EXPLODING MOTHER, IMPLODING ME: SOME FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN US 11-14-09

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MORE INFORMATION ABOUT BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER

(IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER)

Borderline Personality Disorder

In the Spotlight | More Topics |
from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD
Most people with a diagnosis of BPD have at least one (if not more) co-occurring disorders. Common comorbid conditions include mood and anxiety disorders and substance use problems. But other disorders can occur alongside BPD as well.
In the Spotlight
Eating Disorders and BPD
Recent research is revealing how often BPD and eating disorders co-occur, why they may be related and how to treat these two types of disorders when they do co-occur.
More Topics

Alcoholism and BPD
There is a remarkable overlap between substance abuse disorders and borderline personality disorder. One study found that about 60% of patients in psychiatric hospitals who have been diagnosed with BPD also have a co-occurring substance use disorder such as alcohol dependence.

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+EARLY ABUSE AFFECTS OUR REACTION TO ADULT TRAUMA EXPOSURE

alchemynow2 Comments

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My revised list — common reactions to a stressful event can include:

Shock and disbelief

Feeling powerless

(Short and/or long term immune system responses) headaches, back pains, and stomach problems

Sadness and depression (depression is an anxiety response)

Crying

Apathy and emotional numbing (dissociation, depersonalization, derealization)

(Denial – distortion or loss of memory)

Anger

Fear and anxiety about the future

(Over or under reaction to stimuli – hyper- or hypo-startle response)

Sleep difficulties

Nightmares and reoccurring thoughts about the event (left-right brain cannot process trauma information while awake or during dream sleep — ambidextrous  and left handed people at higher risk)

Difficulty concentrating

Difficulty making decisions

(Difficulty assessing meaning and prioritizing)

Loss of appetite (or increase)

(For children – disturbance in play activities)

(Difficulty with social interactions)

(Inability to use words to describe the experience)

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I cannot read information such as what is presented at the end of the post from any ‘ordinary’ perspective.  The list presented as “common reactions to a stressful event” describes the kind of traumatic stress reactions that are built into the growing body-brains of severely abused infants and young children.  On some level, these reactions have become our norm.  When additional traumas occur in our later adult lives all of these pre-existing traumatic reactions become stimulated and activated.  We are, therefore, at highest risk for having serious reactions to later traumas in our lives.

I hate having to write about these things.  I hate having to even think about them.  I hate it that my body knows far more than my conscious mind ever will about the reality of what the challenges of trauma can do to us.

Professionals call a reaction to trauma disordered when these reactions do not dissipate after a reasonable period of time goes by after a trauma has happened.  For those of us whose body-brain was built during trauma, we have never had the luxury of having a body-brain that does not include trauma reactions in its makeup.  We cannot return to a pre-trauma condition because we never had one in the first place.

That makes any childhood trauma survivor more vulnerable to post trauma stress disorders.  Personally, I don’t like the use of the word ‘disorder’ and would prefer a recognition that what happens to us after trauma exposure is as natural a reaction as what happens to us as the trauma occurs.  If our reaction is exaggerated or extended, there is a reason for this happening.  Until this fact, coupled with a complete recognition of how early infant-child abuse and trauma alter the developing body-brain from the start is recognized and respected, I do believe the word ‘disorder’ must be used carefully in trauma response considerations.  What ‘they’ see as ‘disordered’ is a different kind of ordering for the entire body-brain from the ground up, from the beginning of life onward for those who have survived severe infant-childhood traumas

Whatever words are used to describe the continued suffering from ongoing reactions to traumas, the long term effects are very real and can be debilitating in regard to quality of life and general well-being.  Adaptations in the body-brain of early trauma survivors means that we react to trauma differently than ‘ordinary’ people do.  We were ‘reordered’ and our ongoing processing of information reflects that condition in our body-brain.

To call us ‘disordered’ is to call us flawed.  We are different, not flawed.

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INFORMATION FROM:

Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog
Dealing with a Traumatic EventPosted: 14 Nov 2009 01:26 PM PSTIn the wake of the tragic events at Fort Hood November 5, 2009, it’s important to remember that when traumatic incidents occur, the Center for Disease Control’s Injury Center can assist by providing information that can help people cope and recover. Sometimes after experiencing a traumatic event, including personal or environmental disasters, or being threatened with an assault, people have a strong and lingering reaction to stress. When the symptoms of stress last too long, it can cause people to feel overwhelmed and have an effect on their ability to cope.Common reactions to a stressful event can include:
Disbelief and shock
Fear and anxiety about the future
Difficulty making decisions
Apathy and emotional numbing
Loss of appetite
Nightmares and reoccurring thoughts about the event
Anger
Increased use of alcohol and drugs
Sadness and depression
Feeling powerless
Crying
Sleep difficulties
Headaches, back pains, and stomach problems
Difficulty concentratingFor more information, tips on how to handle a traumatic experience, or to read this full article please visit: http://www.cdc.gov/Features/HandlingStress/ or http://www2c.cdc.gov/podcasts/player.asp?f=5256

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+EXPLODING MOTHER, IMPLODING ME: SOME FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN US

alchemynowLeave a comment

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I am revisiting what I see as the core differences between my borderline mother and myself.  I find that nothing has changed in my thinking about these differences in my past five years of research.  My mother’s childhood-onset dissociation became malignant while mine remained benign.

In my first ‘doodle’ I visualized the impact of infant developmental attachment deprivations she suffered from birth until age two.  Born into a family with marital discord and left with her primary care in the hands of a ‘nanny’, I envision that my mother’s developing brain-mind-self was already far off course before she reached the stage of developing a Theory of Mind.

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During the developmental stages from age 2 – 5 conditions in my mother’s childhood so severely impacted her brain-mind that I believe her later mental illness had already centralized the organization of her self.  From the age of 5 it was simply a matter of time before the bomb that was her Borderline Personality Disorder condition would explode – which it did during her terrible delivery of me.

The broader dimensions of the diamond figure that I drew show that in the bottom half powerful interactions with others in her life were feeding her unstable growing self.  She had reached what I call the ‘rage stage’ which was coupled with the following:

My mother was a victim of a lie.  She was told through word and deed by her early caregivers that sometimes she was good enough to be loved.  She was also told that sometimes she was so bad she was un-love-able.  The lie was that she had the power to change herself from being bad to being good, and if she changed into being good (made the bad go away) she would be love-able – and therefore would be loved.

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These conditions presented my mother with an impossible paradox for which there was no answer.  She never knew she was being lied to by her attachment caregivers.  She did not know that there was no solution to this paradox.  She was told she had the power to change herself into being ‘all good’, and she eventually found her solution – me.

The impossible solution to her fundamental betrayal problem was to spit off all her badness and project it onto me.  That left her being all good and me being all bad.  She never had the capacity to know she had believed a lie, found an impossible solution to an impossible riddle, or that she had been tricked and fooled.  Once her child brain-mind wrapped herself around the too-big problem of her early life, her brain-mind continued to grow with this malignant lie within it.

As she moved out of her childhood into her adulthood, and then into the stage of her childbearing years, her childhood dissociation, fueled by childhood rage and a broken Theory of Mind, meant that her children remained her doll-imaginary friends with me as her imaginary enemy (as I have previously described).  By the later years of  my mother’s life she had fewer and fewer people she could influence through her mental illness, and she died as alone and unconsciously troubled as she had been from the time of her birth.

I see this ‘main impact zone’ as being the mass of incoming information that hurt her, followed my the mass of information she later could displace and project onto others to hurt them (primarily me).

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My second doodle page (above) presents the basics of what I believe are the differences between my mother and myself.  Like her, my foundation from birth was in disorganizing, disorienting insecure attachment to early caregivers.  But unlike her, I was never fooled, tricked, or betrayed.  Her projection of her own badness onto me condemned me absolutely and permanently.  I was simply doomed to be hated without hope of reprieve, salvation, or any hope of implementing my own solution to solve any of the ‘problems’ I had with her.

The simplicity of my life saved me.  I was not faced with solving an impossible riddle.  I was not presented with the impossible paradox of “you can change yourself into a good and love-able child and then I will love you.”  My childhood was one continual ‘rupture’ without either repair or hope for repair.  My mother’s childhood contained ‘ruptures’ with faulty and deceiving repairs.

In the final analysis, I was far more fortunate than my mother was.  She was set up to fail at being love-able.  I was simply not love-able.  It was the constancy of my unloved-being hated state that saved me.  It was the inconsistency of her unloved-sometimes loved state that ruined her.

I believe her brain fixated a rigid solution to an unsolvable problem.  Her childhood dissociation organized in her brain-mind-self around this solution – which became her internal and unconscious fulltime goal.  I believe her mental illness was fueled by childhood rage.  Her childhood dissociation became malignant, and I became its operational target.

My childhood dissociation had no goal other than physical enduring survival.  My brain-mind-self was left in a fluid, continually changing and adapting state because I HAD NO GOAL and I had no hope, false or otherwise.  My mother’s treatment of me was made tolerable through what I call benign dissociation and my development occurred in a world of sadness.

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My mother ended up fighting to be love-able, fueled by rage.  Rage is tied to active coping skills, whether we want to admit this or not.  I did not grow up a fighter.  I grew up a sorrow-filled victim stuck in the passive coping skill state.  My mother was told she had the power to change what happened to her, even though it was a lie and it was not within her power to change the dynamics of her caregivers’ treatment of her.

My mother was damned and didn’t know it.  I was damned and I did know it.  I knew I had no power to change what happened to me.   Nobody ever fooled me into thinking otherwise — from the time I was born.  I believe that there are two entirely different trajectories of development set up by the two different childhood scenarios I am describing.  One leads to the development of a dangerous, demonizing mother and the other one does not.

Both my life and my mother’s of course ended up being extremely complicated with devastating consequences stemming from child abuse and neglect in a malevolent environment during critical body-brain-mind-self stages of early development that resulted in a changed brain for both of us.  Yet as I see it, I was never betrayed or set-up with an impossible task to accomplish like my mother was, and being free from these overpowering early forces allowed me to become who I am.

My mother’s mental illness prevented her from ever being able to tolerate becoming conscious either of how she behaved or of what had happened to so wound her in childhood.  I am not barred in the same way from consciousness.  As I continue to explore the underlying aspects of safe and secure attachment, I will explore how having the ability to be self-aware and self-reflective makes all the difference in how and who we become in our lives.

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This post follows:

+DISSOCIATION AND THE TRAUMA-SPECIALIZED BRAIN 11-11-09 and

+SECURE AND INSECURE ATTACHMENT AND THE CHILDHOOD NARRATIVE 11-13-09

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THIS INFORMATION COMES TO YOU FROM:

Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog
Improving Children’s Mental Health through Parenting EducationPosted: 13 Nov 2009 03:01 AM PSTGuest post by Michelle Gross, Projects/Public Policy Manager, Prevent Child Abuse New York In today’s difficult times, one of the most important skills one must possess is the ability to form healthy relationships and cope with life’s challenges. Our children are not born with these skills, but rather learn them through their social and emotional development.While providers have traditionally focused on physical development, in 2006, the New York State Legislature passed the Children’s Mental Health Act. The Act required the development of a statewide plan to address issues in children’s social and emotional health, zero to eighteen. As a result of this legislation, the Children’s Plan was developed in collaboration with nine state agencies and led by the New York State Office for Mental Health.The Children’s Plan serves as a blueprint for New York state agencies, providers, and communities to
improve the social and emotional development of children and their families. The Plan focuses on engaging children and their families in services early, ensuring that systems are collaborating to provide effective and efficient services and meeting families’ needs by focusing on their strengths and abilities.

Within the Children’s Plan is a directive for the Office of Mental Health to work with parenting educators to better support parents in raising emotionally healthy children.  The New York State Parenting Education Partnership has been chosen to play this pivotal role in educating providers who work with families and supporting a network of family support and information.

NYSPEP’s efforts to provide professional development sessions for parenting educators will enhance providers’ ability to communicate the importance of social and emotional development with parents, and offer both providers and families tools to facilitate children’s healthy development.

For more information, visit our web site at: http://www.parentingeducationpartnership.org.

Positive Parenting Can have Lasting Impact for Generations

Posted: 12 Nov 2009 07:15 PM PST

A new study that looks at data on three generations of Oregon families shows that “positive parenting” not only has positive impacts on adolescents, but on the way they parent their own children. ” Positive Parenting can include factors such as warmth, monitoring children’s activities, involvement, and consistency of discipline.

Researchers from the Oregon Social Learning Center conducted surveys on 206 boys who were considered “at-risk” for juvenile delinquency. The boys and their parents were interviewed and observed, researchers information about how the boys were parented. Starting in 1984, the boys met with researchers every year from age 9 to 33. As the boys grew up and started their own families, their partners and children began participating in the study. In this way, the researchers learned how the men’s childhood experiences influenced their own parenting.

There is often an assumption that people learn parenting methods from their own parents. In fact, most research shows that a direct link between what a person experiences as a child and what she or he does as a parent is fairly weak. The researchers found that children who had parents who monitored their behavior, were consistent with rules and were warm and affectionate were more likely to have close relationships with their peers, be more engaged in school, and have better self-esteem.

For more information relating to positive parenting techniques, please visit our website http://preventchildabuseny.org/parents.shtml

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+SECURE AND INSECURE ATTACHMENT AND THE CHILDHOOD NARRATIVE

alchemynow2 Comments

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This post follows +DISSOCIATION AND THE TRAUMA-SPECIALIZED BRAIN from November 11, 2009

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I woke today as if in a different world than usual.  The wind is tearing around my house as if it is demanding something from me and I don’t know what it wants.  The wind is angry.  It rips leaves off of trees and chases them madly around the yard.  With its roaring and whistling it has stolen all my peace away.  It is harder to remember who and when and where I am.

If only the wind would stop and the sun would come out so calm would again surround this body I am in.  Then I could be more certain that my past was in the past and I am in the here and now.  I can I not help feeling challenged and disturbed, made uneasy and agitated in this wind.

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I wanted to continue to write this morning about secure-autonomous attachment.  I read Dr. Daniel Siegel’s words again:

“The abilities to reflect upon one’s own childhood history, to conceptualize the mental states of one’s parents, and to describe the impact of these experiences on personal development are the essential elements of coherent adult attachment narratives.  (Siegle/tdm/312)”

I do not understand these words.  I do not have the “abilities” Siegel is describing.  I cannot possibly begin to “conceptualize the mental states” of either one of my parents.  I cannot “describe the impact of these experiences” on my development without consulting complicated information from infant and child brain scientists’ research.

If having the ability to “reflect” on my childhood, to “conceptualize” the minds of my parents, to “describe” the impact my childhood experiences on how I developed “are the essential elements of coherent adult attachment narratives,” then I am forced to admit I am coming up empty and confused as if some drastic, terrible wind ripped any chance I might have to begin to think about myself in my life ‘coherently’ from the beginning of my life away as surely as this morning’s wind is forcing away any semblance of a calm and peaceful day.

I feel angry that I have been robbed.  There is no corner of my childhood I can return to without being engulfed in turbulence and trauma.  I am as incapable of ‘conceptualizing’ particularly the mind of my mother at age 58 as I was the day I was born.  That children and the adults they grow into are SUPPOSED to be able to conceptualize the minds of their parents seems beyond belief to me.  I cannot begin to make an attempt in that direction, any more than I can begin to conceptualize the mind of the wind.

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Can I begin to understand that my lack of ‘abilities’ to convey even to myself a coherent story of myself in this life from the time of my beginnings is NOT because I am personally deprived, but that this lack of abilities comes directly from the kinds of terrible experiences I had to survive in my parents’ home?  It doesn’t FEEL that way.  It feels that somehow there is something wrong with me that I do not possess these essential requirements Siegel lays out for being an ‘ordinary’ safe and securely attached individual.

Do I understand that I cannot control the wind?  Do I understand that the only way I can ensure that the force of the wind is not directly affecting me is by seeking shelter from it?  Was there any possible shelter I could have sought as an infant-child to escape the terrible storm of my childhood?  No, there wasn’t, except as I could isolate myself in my brain-mind because the only hope of remaining apart from the traumas that I endured ONLY existed within the walls of my own skin.

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The words, “There are many rooms in my Father’s mansion” come into my mind.  Because from birth I had no choice but to try to survive within my body as my only protection from insane abuse, it was within me that I had to create these ‘many rooms’ so that the overwhelming traumas I had to endure did not engulf me, swallow me up and destroy me.  My mother’s mind was a cauldron of malevolent chaos.  I am sorry, child development experts, but conceptualizing that kind of mind is not only humanly impossible, it is against all instinct for ongoing survival.

In order to ‘reflect’ on another person’s mind so that it might be ‘conceptualized’, one must be able to make some connection between one’s own mind and the other’s.  Do attachment researchers understand how humanly impossible it is to do this when a parent’s mind is ‘on the other side’ of being human?  My mother was the antithesis of being a mother.  I know I am not alone in my experience.  But I take issue with the suggestion that there’s something wrong with me that I lack the abilities necessary to accomplish the impossible!

The only people I can imagine that could possibly ‘conceptualize’ the mind of my mother would be other mothers who had minds nearly exactly like hers.  What a fantastic delight of an experience it would be to put my mother and the other two mothers I know of like her in an observation room and then ask them all the ‘right’ questions!  Now THERE would be an opportunity for learning!

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Short of having this kind of opportunity to explore my mother’s mind – which is, of course impossible because she is dead – I am fighting against having to take on the burden of believing I am at fault in any way for not being able to conceptualize her mind.  Ability is not the right word.  I was born with the ability to accomplish what Siegel is suggesting IF I had been provided with parents whose minds were ‘conceptualizeable’!  Nobody can conceptualize what is impossible to conceptualize!

“The abilities to reflect upon one’s own childhood history” – I have the ability to state today that my mother was insane, that my father supported her madness, that my childhood was chaotic, malevolent, dangerous, traumatic, and only survivable because I had the ability to survive it!  That the thousands of abuse memories I might have are stored in their corresponding ‘many rooms’ in the ‘mansion’ of my body where I cannot get to them does not mean that I am in any way more ‘disabled’ than anyone else would be if they had endured the same experiences.

The mansion of my body DOES coherently remember everything that has ever happened to me.  However, it is also a physiological fact that if there were enough stress hormones present at the time the traumas occurred, they would have fried the brain cells designed to store the facts of my experience so that only the emotional memories remained — in my body.

Coherency, as the developmental brain specialists are using the word, applies to their version of remembering the FACTS that tell the linear (left brain) story in words (narrative) of a person’s childhood.  These researchers neglect to mention that an intact, living, breathing, moving, sustainable body is proof enough that coherency is a much larger concept than they seem willing to conceive of.

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If I am fighting for the right to stand on my square foot of ground upon this earth in dignity without being judged as being somehow deficient or insufficient or unable to tell a coherent life story, if I am making the statement that I was born with the ABILITY to do so, that I still have this ability, and that the problem is in NO WAY because of any fault of mine but rather lies in the fact that my childhood was simply NOT COHERENT – and that nobody could tell a true story of madness and MAKE it coherent – then where do I go for my proof?

I am going to the dictionary.  I want to learn about this word ‘abilities’ (root word being ‘able’) that Siegel has thrown out as his defining qualification for everything else he says about being the kind of parent who can provide safe and secure attachment to their offspring.

What did I find in my exploration about the word and its family of relatives?  When I try to find ‘coherency’ or understanding about words I always try to find how they are connected in the language of English at the time of their appearance into our language as far back as I can find them – which is always ‘before the 12th century’.

I find that ‘able’ is a young word in our language.  So are its relatives ‘habit’ and ‘give’.  I tracked the word back to its older ancestor words ‘have’, ‘heave’, ‘hold’, and ‘take’.  Interestingly, the word ‘heaven’ is connected through its origins to ‘heave’, and by association of opposites, I find ‘hell’ connected to the word ‘conceal’ and from there to ‘hide’.

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I would understand that a dive into the origin and meanings of words might not be something many readers have found to be useful in the past.  Yet we are talking about a BIG subject – our lives and our well-being as it began either in a childhood close to heaven, or in a childhood closer to hell.  If you keep an open mind and meander among the following words, you can see that in our language such subjects as entitlement appear.

Being ‘able’ involves having resources to accomplish a goal.  I was born with and have retained the ability to tell a coherent story about my childhood if I had been given a coherent childhood to tell about.  I have the skill, but I cannot accomplish an impossible task to make madness, chaos and insanity into anything else other than what it was:  incoherent.

I was ‘given’ that childhood’  It was a nasty ‘present’, and I would much rather have had a different one.  The experiences of terrible trauma that I went through were put into my possession and I work as hard as I can to make the best use possible that I can out of what was done to me-given to me.

I cannot make my childhood into anything other than what it was.  It is the childhood that I have.  It is a part of the whole of who I am.  Under the definition of ‘have’ we read:  “to experience especially by submitting to, undergoing, or suffering.”  I performed the best that I could both to endure it and to survive it.

What is the relationship between this subject and ‘heave’ as it relates to ‘heaven’?  ‘Heave’ being related to labor and struggle.  Yet in the origins of this word we can directly see the same origins connected to our word for ‘heaven’.  Both words contain an image of ‘’lifting and heaving something up into the air’.  We are talking old language thinking here.  We are talking about trying to conceive of a ‘place’ beyond comprehension.  Where else would we put our conception of heaven but ‘up there’?

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Children are supposed to have good childhoods.  Good childhoods provide no challenge to telling a coherent story about them.  The reality is that some of us have the opposite kinds of childhoods, and it is through no fault of ours that we cannot make them into coherent childhood stories.  On our end, where hell was the norm, ‘concealing’ and ‘hiding’ from our conscious mind experiences that would have overwhelmed our self to death was our only alternative.  Dissociation allowed us to do this.

We cannot possibly tell a coherent childhood story in words about what is hidden and invisible, which is where most of our childhood realities are stored.  We have to believe ourselves!  We have to trust what we do know about our childhoods, even if we simply reduce what we know to our sense of ourselves when we were little.  We know.  Nothing was ever hidden FROM our body.  What we cannot access directly is hidden WITHIN our body.  There is no other possible place for it to be.  I AM my life story.

That means to me that being here alive today IS my coherent story.  My body IS my coherent story – all of it, every single last minute detail of it.  Seigel and other developmental experts are suggesting that it is in the telling of a coherent VERBAL narrative that all hope of having future and ongoing safe and secure attachment lies, including those with our children and mates.  I have to think bigger, because I know better.

I am not my mother.  My mind is ordered in a very particular trauma-survival-based way, but it is NOT in chaos, even if I cannot detect in words what I most know about having been raised through 18 years of terrible abuse.  ‘Coherent’ is a young 1555 word in our language.  Where did it come from?  What meaning is it connected to?  What are its ancestors?

It is related to the idea of sticking things together.  ‘Stick’ has been in our language from before the 12th century:  “to put or set in a specified place or position.”  I am here to tell all the attachment experts that I am stuck together just fine!  Everything I have been through is stuck somewhere inside of me, as well.  That I don’t have words to neatly spin a tidy heavenly story from my childhood in hell does mean I COULD NOT if I had an entirely different story to tell.

To me, what Siegel is really saying is that most patterns of ongoing intergenerational transmission of safe and secure attachments happen among adults who can put their childhood narrative into words.  OK.  I get it.  I can tell my childhood narrative with a three word statement about my childhood.  “It was hell.”  If I tell someone that and they do not understand what I am saying, there are not enough words in the universe to explain to them what my childhood was like.

Meanwhile, the wind has stopped blowing.  All is calm outside my house now.  I like that.  Peace and quiet now mean the world to me.  The version of hell I endured was a very wild and noisy place!  Those of you who have been there, too, know exactly what I am talking about, and I don’t have to spin a coherent narrative to tell you what I mean!  How cool is that?

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HERE ARE THE WORDS RELATED TO THIS POST’S  SEARCH:

able

Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin habilis apt, from habēre to have — more at habit

Date: 14th century

1 a : having sufficient power, skill, or resources to accomplish an object b : susceptible to action or treatment
2 : marked by intelligence, knowledge, skill, or competence

habit

Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin habitus condition, character, from habēre to have, hold — more at give

Date: 13th century
3 : manner of conducting oneself : bearing
5 : the prevailing disposition or character of a person’s thoughts and feelings : mental makeup
6 : a settled tendency or usual manner of behavior
8 : characteristic mode of growth or occurrence

give

Etymology: Middle English, of Scandinavian origin; akin to Old Swedish giva to give; akin to Old English giefan, gifan to give, and perhaps to Latin habēre to have, hold

Date: 13th century

1 : to make a present of
2 a : to grant or bestow by formal action b : to accord or yield to another

3 a : to put into the possession of another for his or her use

have

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English habban; akin to Old High German habēn to have, and perhaps to hevan to lift — more at heave

Date: before 12th century

transitive verb 1 a : to hold or maintain as a possession, privilege, or entitlement  b : to hold in one’s use, service, regard, or at one’s disposal  c : to hold, include, or contain as a part or whole

3 : to stand in a certain relationship to

4 a : to acquire or get possession of
5 a : to be marked or characterized by (a quality, attribute, or faculty)

6 a : to experience especially by submitting to, undergoing, or suffering b : to make the effort to perform (an action) or engage in (an activity)

heave

Etymology: Middle English heven, from Old English hebban; akin to Old High German hevan to lift, Latin capere to take

Date: before 12th century

intransitive verb 1 : labor, struggle

heaven

Etymology: Middle English heven, from Old English heofon; akin to Old High German himil heaven

Date: before 12th century

1 : the expanse of space that seems to be over the earth like a dome : firmament —usually used in plural
2 a often capitalized : the dwelling place of the Deity and the blessed dead b : a spiritual state of everlasting communion with God
3 capitalized : god 1
4 : a place or condition of utmost happiness

hold

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English healdan; akin to Old High German haltan to hold, and perhaps to Latin celer rapid, Greek klonos agitation

Date: before 12th century

transitive verb 1 a : to have possession or ownership of or have at one’s disposal  b : to have as a privilege or position of responsibility  c : to have as a mark of distinction
4 a : to have or maintain in the grasp
6 a : to enclose and keep in a container or within bounds : contain

take

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English tacan, from Old Norse taka; akin to Middle Dutch taken to take

Date: before 12th century

transitive verb 1 : to get into one’s hands or into one’s possession, power, or control

4 a : to receive into one’s body (as by swallowing, drinking, or inhaling)

hell

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English; akin to Old English helan to conceal, Old High German helan, Latin celare, Greek kalyptein

Date: before 12th century

conceal

Etymology: Middle English concelen, from Anglo-French conceler, from Latin concelare, from com- + celare to hide — more at hell

Date: 14th century

1 : to prevent disclosure or recognition of <conceal the truth>
2 : to place out of sigh

hide

Etymology: Middle English hiden, from Old English hȳdan; akin to Greek keuthein to conceal

Date: before 12th century

transitive verb 1 a : to put out of sight : secrete b : to conceal for shelter or protection : shield
2 : to keep secret
3 : to screen from or as if from view : obscure
4 : to turn (the eyes or face) away in shame or angerintransitive verb 1 : to remain out of sight —often used with out
2 : to seek protection or evade responsibility

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+THE HEALING OF DISSOCIATONS – A 50-YEAR MISSING PIECE OF ME HAS RETURNED

alchemynowLeave a comment

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I woke up this morning thinking about all the wounds we received in the war zone of our abusive childhoods.  Often as the war raged on around us we ended up being the targets.  In this battlefield we were the victims.  Some of us received so many wounds they cannot be counted.

My mother’s war with the world began in her own childhood and so wounded her that her war never ended until the day that she died.  I was born a casualty of her war.  I had no choice, no weapon, and I could not escape.  I could not fight back or defend myself against her.  No one was there to tend my wounds when they were inflicted, either.  And yet for all the wounds I suffered both visible and invisible, my strength and resiliency still enabled me to survive and endure.

Like my mother, I carried all my wounds out of my childhood, but unlike my mother I did not carry on the war.  Perhaps that happened in part because she began to attack me on all levels as soon as I was born.  I was too young, too little, to begin to feel anger at her for what she was doing to me.  I continued to grow up through and past the age of rage without knowing what it even was.

But it’s not the rage that fueled my mother’s war against me that I woke up thinking about today.  I woke up thinking about the healing of wounds.

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When severe abuse begins so early it impacts the formation of the regions, circuits, pathways and operation of the brain so that we end up with what Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard Medical Group refer to as “an evolutionarily altered brain” as a result, the wounds that caused these changes to happen are most difficult to heal.  These wounds include dissociation.

I am thinking this morning about how long ago people lived for a much shorter time.  Their experiences were fewer and their universe was so much smaller than ours.  Their lives were centered on the core basics of staying alive in an often threatening and dangerous world throughout their entire life span.  In those worlds the ability to dissociate during or in the aftermath of traumas must have continued to serve a purpose that is difficult for me to define in the world I live in today.

Yet for those of us who endured unimaginable severe trauma during our infant-child developmental stages, the dissociation we were given as a result of our survival makes it more difficult for us to continue living in the ‘ordinary’ world we grow up to enter.  Nature has not evolved a way to ‘put us back together again’ to be like a pre-early trauma exposed person.  We are stuck with dissociational brain patterns and abilities that are directly linked to the hundreds if not thousands of near-mortal wounds from physical and mental injuries that we received many years ago.

Our wounds within can thus remain open, painful and at times extremely difficult for us to live with as we attempt to live an ‘ordinary’ life of well-being in an ordinary world without the kinds of dangers to our existence that we were programmed to survive because they existed in the times of our origins.

Without ‘medical’ care back then when we needed it most, and without access to the kind of help with our wounds and our resulting dissociation that we need now, how do we heal ANY of our wounds?

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The very length and complexity of our modern life experience is working against us now.  We cannot crawl wounded deep into a secluded cave and trust we will be protected and kept safe by our brethren standing guard over us while we receive adequate care and access the kind of quiet, unstimulated time that we need in order to heal.  (Yes, I believe we have these memories within our DNA that tell us what we need for our healing to occur.  These memories are available to us in the same way the memories in our bodies enable us to make adaptations to trauma from conception.)  If we cannot pursue nature’s intended courses of healing for even one of our childhood wounds, how do we carry on with hundreds if not thousands of them within us?

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Nature never planned for our species’ infants and children to be in danger without protection and adequate care.  Only under the most dire circumstances would offspring have been sacrificed.  The continuance of our species required that the most helpless tiny ones survive in the best condition possible.  And yet here we are at the most supposedly sophisticated period in our species’ evolution with harm being perpetrated in wars against offspring as if the little ones no longer matter as our species’ most prized hope for going forward into a better world.

Everything around us is busy and complicated.  Our multiple critical wounds are seldom if ever healed.  And then we are expected to live a ‘good life’ not only in spite of our wounds, but also as if the injuries never happened and the wounds do not exist.

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This again brings me back to healing.  Any wound has to go through a natural process of healing, often to the stage of creating permanent scar tissue at the end.  All healing requires our body’s immune system be involved.  I believe this includes the healing of our inner mental and emotional wounds as well.  On some level it is always some aspect of our physiological immune system’s negotiation on behalf of our increased well-being that accomplishes all of our healing.

I mention this today because last night I felt one of my many, many wounds close itself in healing.  I will never be able to forget how the wound originated in the first place, or how it has felt for these past 50 years to live with the wound open and unhealed.

This healing involves how I feel in relation to animals, especially to pets.  My healing came from a few simple words a trusted friend recently wrote to me about grieving the loss of both our human and our animal loved ones.  My friend was talking about her love and grief for a pet she lost years ago when she said to me, “Yes, pets are family and more.”

It was her last two words that healed me — “and more.”  Suddenly I understand that I can give myself permission to look into the eyes of not only my pets, but of all animals and SEE and FEEL and be connected with the life within them that is their SELF, and I can love them wholly – “and more.”

It feels like a channel of love and healing that has been blocked for the last 50 years has been opened so that the healing light and love that opened this channel can now flow through it unimpeded.  What I knew and felt when I was a little girl and my heart broke when my pet black rabbit, Peter, died has come back to me.

I have not asked my friend what her two simple words “and more” mean to her.  I needed to know what they mean to me.  It wasn’t the loss of Peter himself that most wounded me.  It was my reaction of dissociating myself from ever being able to feel again the loving connection I felt for that little animal.  Since that dark and rain soaked night he died, the part of myself that knows animals are not remote and distant objects that continue their own existence in a world separated from me has been missing.

My mother told me that night when Peter died that he was a bad rabbit who got what he deserved.  He was dead because that’s what is supposed to happen to all bad animals and bad children like me.  In the midst of the terrible depth of my grieving over the loss of my beloved pet through a violent death, she told me she wished I was dead just like Peter was because that is what I deserved.

The wound of this experience caused me to dissociate my ability to experience love, appreciation, and connection to and with animals (exception noted at the end of this post).  That part of me was removed from my existence until last night when I was in conversation with my sister about those two words, “and more” in relationship to animals in our lives.

Like my friend, my sister has never lost her ability to love animals, especially dogs.  I see this morning that the other side of this unhealed wound I have carried all these years has also prevented me from receiving the love that animals freely give to me.

I can understand today that the trusting innocence of who I was as a young child is reflected and mirrored back to me in the eyes of animals.  I have not been able to tolerate that kind of powerful experience with my own vulnerabilities for 50 years.  I have not been able to reclaim my own portion of passion regarding a deep love, valuing and sustaining friendship with animals until now.  Healing has touched that dissociated wound inside of me and – lo and behold – I can feel this fragmented piece of myself is back.

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I know every person alive has been wounded in some way at some time.  The healing of our wounds gives us an added dimension of awareness on an emotional and mental level about the better side of being alive.  Any healing that includes an improvement of connection between myself, myself and the living world I live in is especially significant for me.

Any healing gives me hope that more healing is possible.  Scar tissue might not be especially pretty to look at from the outside, but its presence means that a wound has healed, and I’m not sure there is anything I can experience that is better than that.  Yet at the same time that today I feel this wound has healed I can feel the blackness of overwhelming sadness that created this dissociational wound in the first place.

It helps me to know that I will not go backward in this healing process.  The sense of invading danger will leave me.  It will dissipate in the light of this new day.  (I will be extra tender to myself until this has happened as if I just went through surgery — because I did!)

Life can now pulse again for me where no pulse has been for 50 years.  I am different today as a result of this healing.  I know I am one step closer to being a more complete, integrated and whole ME because of it.  I have to practice being this bit-more-whole me now.  I feel different.  I see my animals around me differently.  They are back in the circle of my life and I am back in their world for the first time since before my black rabbit died.

I am reminded today that miracles of healing do happen – because they can.

This was a missing piece of myself I could recover, and that could be restored to me because it was one that was once an integral part of who I am.  I remembered my self before my rabbit died and my mother was so mean to me about his death.  I re-membered this part of myself so it can be joined with who I am today.  That’s exciting!

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NOTE:  Last summer when I visited my brother in Alaska I felt my love and connection with moose when one came to graze under my brother’s deck.  I was close enough to that glorious animal to have reached out and touched him if I had wanted to.  I realized then that my ability to love moose had never been removed from me.  Maybe having this August experience was a necessary step toward my healing so that I could again reclaim that same love and connection I felt as a child with all animals.  Now I also understand fully the “and more.”  It is my responsibility (ability to respond) to care for them at the same time that they take care of me.

1959 JUST homestead birthday - Copy
Holding that warm, fuzzy, whisker-wiggling little black rabbit, Peter, in my arms -- MY pet rabbit -- had made this sad little child happy.

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+DISSOCIATION AND THE TRAUMA-SPECIALIZED BRAIN

alchemynow4 Comments

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Because of my traumatic experiences with my mentally ill mother from birth, I did not form an ordinary brain.  My thought processes while writing this post reflect some of the difficulties I have always experienced because my brain formed differently.  Similar to the way an air flight might experience turbulence, I have turbulence in my thinking whenever I try to follow an ‘ordinary’ brain’s train of thought.

This does not mean that I am wrong or broken.  Yes, I was wounded, but the resiliency within me coupled with my determination to endure and survive allowed me in the end to become a very special sort of person.  I will just always think in my special way, and I will always struggle to bridge the chasm that can exist between the way my extra-ordinary brain works and the way ordinary-formed brains work in an ordinary world.

I will continue over time to process the secure and insecure attachment information as I try to understand what the experts know and match it in some way with what I know from within myself about, in particular, dissociation.

Here are my thoughts for today on the brain science concept of ‘coherence’.  I am not going to try to edit them or to give them any other organization or orientation than they had when they lined themselves up on this page as a result of my thinking process.

Yes, these thoughts feel turbulent to me.  That would not be my choice, but then I had no choice about how my brain-mind had to form itself in the beginning of my life.  Nor do I have much choice about how my brain-mind regards and processes information today.  This is what happens for me when I try to even begin to understand what forms the basis of a safe and secure organized attachment system.

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The advantage of my writing about the topic of secure-autonomous adult attachment is that I can take what ‘ordinary’ brained researchers say about the subject and translate it for myself though my ‘extra-ordinary’ brain.  I have the powerful advantage now of knowing absolutely that my childhood was just about as devoid and empty of secure attachment people as it could possibly have been.  I no longer even try to find out who exactly might have been there for me to give me what I needed to form secure attachments.  I know there was nobody.

Whatever attachment I had with my mother’s mother was contrived.  It was set up by my mother according to her rules so that it could fit within her reality, or should I say, fit her ‘dis-reality’ and ‘un-reality’.  My mother’s mind was nothing less than bizarre and distorted when it came to her thinking about me.  I can’t say it was ‘disorganized’ because her psychosis gave her the most rigid organization possible without possibility of rearrangement – ever.

When I read what the experts tell us about safe and secure infant-child attachment I have to stretch my thinking as far as I can manage in order to try to begin to understand on a deep and honest level within myself what it is these people are saying.  I am coming from the position of being raised in a world just about as far away from what researches consider ‘optimal’ early conditions as it might be possible.  Just as I do not believe those researchers can stretch their minds far enough to begin to comprehend my reality, I am not sure that I can stretch mine far enough to begin to understand theirs.

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Dr. Daniel J. Siegel makes this statement, “…the way adults can flexibly access information about childhood and reflect upon such information in a coherent manner determines their likelihood of raising securely attached children.”  (siegle/tdm/312)

Taking the meat of the nut out of its shell, I read this as if it is a directive not only about how to be an adequate parent, but also how to get along in the ‘ordinary’ world in an ‘ordinary’ way:  “flexibly access information about childhood and reflect upon such information in a coherent manner.”

But what does Siegel mean by ‘coherent’?  My guess he knows what it means because he has it.  Very few, if any people who lack his version of coherency in their brain-minds make it to the top levels of any professions – for all kinds of reasons I won’t go into at this moment.  I still want to know what this key to secure attachment means because from my own experiences, and in my world, coherency as Siegel describes it does not exist.

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Siegel states:  “Integration establishes a sense of congruity and unity of the mind as it emerges within the flexible patterns in the flow of information and energy processes of the brain, both within itself and in interaction with others.  This is coherence. “

Wow.  Those words are a mouthful.  I cannot comprehend what he is saying without applying an incredible amount of effort.  I will try to break this apart as I hunt for some meaning that I can make sense out of from inside MY version of an abuse-formed extra-ordinary brain-mind.

Integration

Sense of congruity

Unity of the mind

Well, right here I get lost because I cannot break apart the next group of words:  unity of mind as it emerges within the flexible patterns

But then it goes further:  mind as it emerges, not just any mind, but a unified mind – and this living unified mind emerges, but does not emerge in any old way, does not emerge in a disorganized, disoriented, inflexible-rigid way.  This ‘sense of congruity’ and this ‘unity of the mind’ emerges continually along with every breath of life.  This happens (or not) through flexible patterns that were built into the brain by – yup! – by our experiences with our early caregivers from birth.

When the mind has this sense of congruity, and has its unity, it can continually engage flexibly within all interactions a person has in life.  These flexible patterns are, according to Siegel, “in the flow of information and energy processes of the brain.”  Well, it should not surprise us that under varying degrees of reverse conditions this entire process suffers from some degree of break down, or deviation from what Siegel is not only describing as optimal, but also as what is supposed to be ordinary.

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I am rapidly finding out as I try to make sense of Siegel’s description of ‘coherence’ is that I cannot understand what he is saying because I have a brain built in the opposite way from what he is describing.

I see an image of me being dropped from an airplane from a mile up in the air with a parachute attached to me.  I land in a fresh, hot wad of bubble gum the size of an average Wal-Mart.  That’s how I feel trying to grasp what he is saying.

It is hard to imagine that this finely working brain Siegel is describing would have been built entirely by appropriate early infant-child interactions with safely and securely attachment autonomous early caregivers!  But that is exactly what he is saying.

And the problem here for me is that Siegel knows exactly what he is talking about and says what he means PERFECTLY in these few words in this single sentence – that I cannot possibly begin to understand!  Believe it or not!

So, I will write my version of a statement about what having a brain built by my disorganized and disoriented insecurely attached, unsafe psychotic borderline mother gave me!  I have the opposite of a ‘coherency’ built brain, so OK, here goes —

SIEGEL’S VERSION OF AN ORDINARY BRAIN’S OPERATION:  Integration establishes a sense of congruity and unity of the mind as it emerges within the flexible patterns in the flow of information and energy processes of the brain, both within itself and in interaction with others.  This is coherence.

MY VERSION OF AN EXTRA-ORDINARY TRAUMA FORMED BRAIN’S OPERATION:  Disintegration establishes a (non)sense incongruity and disunity of mind as it attempts to emerge within the inflexible (rigid, disorganized and disoriented) patterns in the (disorganized and disoriented, interrupted and often chaotic) flow of misinformation and disturbed energy processes of the brain, and all of these disturbances exist and are experienced both within this brain itself and in all its interactions with others.  This is incoherence.

BUT, I would have to add from my own experience, that this ‘incoherence’ is experienced as DISSOCIATION.

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OK, great.  How exactly are we supposed to get along in the ‘ordinary’ person’s world of coherence when our brains were built under opposite conditions so that we have changed brains that will NEVER work the same as these ‘ordinary’ brains do?  We cannot return to our early infant-child body-brain-mind developmental stages so that the foundation and formation of our brain can be done over again!  Never.  Never.  Never.

The first step to improving our chances for experiencing anything like well-being in the world is to begin to understand what these researchers know about ordinary brain development and combining it with what we know about our own early experiences and what happened to our forming brains as a consequence.  We need to learn how our brains process life with a different kind of logic.

Because my personal experiences happened to me under the care of a mad woman, I am nearly completely on the opposite end of the brain-formation spectrum that Siegel is describing.  BUT, I AM STILL HERE!  I might be completely stuck in a bubble gum mess trying to understand Siegel’s description of an ordinary, healthy brain-mind, but I can also at the same time understand that the way my brain formed, even though it is very different in many fundamental ways from the one Siegel describes, DOES WORK.  It kept me alive throughout my childhood and it keeps me alive today.

But, my brain IS DIFFERENT!  It is NOT BROKEN.  Now, to all reasonable description, my mother’s brain was broken.  The changes her growing and developing brain had to make did not allow her to possess even temporary or sporadic flexibility in her thinking.  I can think flexibly, but not in a continual, ongoing ‘mind emerging in the moment’ way.

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Dr. Temple Grandin, autistic author of many books and world renowned expert on communicating with animals, talks about how she sees the world in pictures.  I believe I feel the world in pictures and think about it in dissociated pieces, or ‘packets’ of information.  Access to and transition between these dissociated packets of information is not frequently either smooth or predictable.

I am most fortunate that depending on the day and on the topic, my brain can link some or many of these pieces together at one time or another.  But never will I have a continuous, feeling, integrated, coherent story to tell myself or anybody else about myself in the world.

Any version of a continuous story I might form will be contrived, artificial and primarily constructed by my ‘logical’ left brain that has learned some things about how others make sense of their lives – and therefore how I OUGHT to be able to do the same.  Some days I can do this better than others by consciously pretending that I know all the experiences that happened to this BODY that Linda is attached to belong to the thinking, feeling, remembering person that Linda is supposed to be.

Yet the Linda that I MOST am feels like a bird might that soared over some particular piece of geography ten years ago, or 30 years ago, or 2 days ago without picking up the actual place and carrying it along.  I pass through ‘things’, pass by them, pass over them – or they pass through me.  But I feel very transparent, like the true form of who I am has never become embodied in my life in this world.  I absolutely and fundamentally do not process myself in  ‘time and space’ experience in ordinary ways.

Thanks to my mother, my body-brain-mind-self didn’t grown ‘down into the world’ as Dr. James Hillman calls it.  Whatever pieces of me made it into myself in my body in my life in this world are not completely integrated in the ordinary brain that Dr. Siegel has described.

I actually do not believe that neuroscientists or infant-child brain development specialists have ANY IDEA how big a deal dissociation can be!  I don’t think they can understand this kind of a reality any more than I can understand theirs.  I suffer today from a similar problem I had with my mother in the beginning.  There is nobody around to help me make sense of a sensible world, so I have to figure it all out by myself.

There is no retreat, no seminar, no self-help book, no religious text, no university class, no philosophical approach, no kind of meditative practice, no psychological theory that will ever ACTUALLY be able to help me understand how my changed brain operates in this world.  I was forced to grow a specialized brain, a very well-adapted-to-ongoing-trauma body-brain-mind.  I can take what developmental neuroscientists say about how things work when early brain formation experiences go RIGHT and try to translate that information into what happens when early brain formation experiences go terribly WRONG.

I am somewhat of an expert about that field of study!  In a more perfect world, or in a more advanced one (silly thought because in THAT world the kind of abuse that changes an infant-child’s developing brain would not be happening) I would be able to easily access information that would tell me how ordinary brains work, how extra-ordinary brains work, and how I can better experience well-being BECAUSE of how special my brain-mind is.  Well, evidently in THIS world, I will try until my dying breath to figure this out for myself.

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In this post I am trying to comprehend and make use of the information contained here:  *Attachment Simplified – Secure Attachment (Organized)

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