++++

Tuesday, January 7, 2014.  Perhaps it is because of the years I have spent studying my abusive, mentally ill (Borderline Personality Disorder with psychosis) mother’s writings as I worked to sort, organize, transcribe and prepare them for publication that I so strongly believe in the importance of being able to experience the fullest range of human emotions without having to cut them apart to deny some,  to split some off and project them, to bury (“stuff”) some, repress, twist….  Well, the possibilities are many in the ways humans can limit their emotional existence and deny other people the right to express theirs.

Life is complex and I see no reason to believe that the range and intensity of emotions we experience would not directly reflect the life we are living.  Same with the commentary we might wish to express about our experience.  Life is not a “one thing.”  We do not necessarily feel one way at any given point in our ongoing life if we pay attention and notice as we move along with it.

I notice that my 17 month old grandson always wakes from his morning nap full of joy and good cheer and wakes from his afternoon nap often with the opposite emotions.  A pitiful little weeping lost boy often greets me as I hear the first signs of his afternoon waking.  Big sorrow-filled sobs then erupt not long afterwards.

His mommy told me he is “practicing” the full range of his emotions as he is growing his body and self (nervous systems and brain included).  I think she is right.  I am there for the little guy in the whole range of his emotions, often sitting with my arms wrapped tightly around him as he buries his little face under my chin while I rock him especially in the afternoons — for as long as it takes for him to move on in his experience of life into a more freeing set of emotions.

Nothing in particular seems to trigger the afternoon blues for this little one.  He IS practicing!  For all the complex reactions I have to living again in this northern, flat, frigid city of a place (my daughters needing to know how happy I am to be here with them and NOTHING else “to the negative”), holding this little boy is the clearest I can probably ever feel in my life — being anywhere doing anything — that I AM in the right place at the right time doing the right thing.

My extensive emotional reactions to all the rest of my life simply wait for me and do not visit me as I smooth the way for this new little human to live his life with all his emotions for the rest of his life.  I think life is a poignant affair.  It is rich and varied and asks of us the courtesy of replying back to it with all we’ve got.  To watch such a happy child as this little guy is “practice” his expression of sorrow with his entire body and soul is humbling and fills me with awe at the same time it gives me a great sense of honor to be here to share it with him.  

I do not believe that any daycare center can do this for a little child.  There is no time for it.

++++

NOTE:  This is a free blog to readers and I receive no money for its publication.  Any advertisements that appear on my posts have been placed here by WordPress and in no way represent me.

++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Sunday, January 5, 2014.  Even if I had had any role modeling on how to be a healthy mother from my mother I would probably still be forever learning how to apply that information in my own life with my children who are now grown to be ages 28, 37 and 43.  Having now moved to the city where my two oldest girls live for the first time in our lives I am finding it a struggle to establish an equilibrium in the new version of the relationships we have. 

I am finding that at this point in time their needs are not unlike they were when they were three.  Looks — and age — can be deceiving.  It is MY job as their mother to clear the air and to make changes in myself that will support increasing health rather than increasing negative complications as I move forward in my new life here in the northland.

Information I posted several years ago that can be accessed through this link +CAREGIVING IN ADULT ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIPS applies just as much to my relationship with my children as it does to a “mate” relationship.  When needs exist in one person in an attachment relationship the needy person cannot fully caregive until those needs are met — somehow — or be healthily set aside long enough for the necessary caregiving of the other party to be implemented in the current moment.

What happens when BOTH people in an attachment relationship are needy at the same time which is most often the case even between adult caregivers of very young children?  What governs the prioritization of need-meeting?

++

I KNOW I have most greatly complicated my life and my experience of myself in my life by making this giant move north.  No matter how thoroughly I evaluated my inner resources, no matter how clearly I tried to anticipate what this move would entail there is never a way for humans to fully grasp what is actually going to happen when a change is made.  The point of being as healthy as we possibly can be is that flexibility allows us to apply the widest range of adequate solutions to problems that confront us. 

Being early trauma survivors greatly complicates the range of our flexibility, the range of our coping skills and strategies, and the range of our needs.  What I am finding is that either I gain the clarity I need about “what is going on here” or my relationships with my daughters will suffer and I will, too.

++

I scamper for resources as I talk with my savvy friends and think about information I have encountered through my own past searching and researching that can help me now.  I consider the work of Canadian Dr. Gordon Neufeld to contain critically important attachment-healing information.  I am hoping he will soon publish much of his work that is currently only available through costly purchase of dvds.  While I have been trying to learn how his knowledge regarding the attachment needs of the pre-schooler age group applies to my grandsons I had the profound insight last night in a conversation with a very enlightened friend that this information applies just as powerfully to my grown children.

In essence in attachment relationships of any kind during the needy phase one person needs to depend on the other person to be ALPHA so they can safely be dependent.  Now with most adult relationships the parties involved have many kinds of choices they can make about how they will get their needs met.  With very young children those choices DO NOT exist and the adult caregiving attachment person is under moral obligation to meet the needs of the little ones who are under their care.

And of the big ones?

It of course will depend on the workings of the internal gyroscope within a parent of adult children as it helps determine how the attachment patterns are going to play themselves out.  In my case I simply now have figured out why my daughters do NOT want to hear me express any of my FEELINGS, thoughts, observations, perspectives, etc. about how this move north is affecting me.  That puts ME in the position of (my guess) them feeling they need to caregive me at the same time they need me to be their ALPHA so that they can in some way rely upon me..

It is not my task at the moment – or perhaps to ever figure out what their exact specifjc needs are in the present moment.  All I needed to know to begin to balance out the complexity of my life right now with my girls in it is that just as Dr. Neufeld explains that all young children need their adult caregivers to be the core strength and ordering and organizing factor in their lives – to “be the answer to all of their needs and questions” – my grown girls need the same thing from me.  Because I have always taken my mothering very seriously I will respond without any questioning of them.

I simply have to put and keep the spotlight of my attention when I am interacting with them entirely upon THEM and not myself as much as I possibly can.  Just as I tried to do with all of my energy when they were young I need to NOT depend on them for “friendship.”  I need to get my own needs met elsewhere (which is very hard for me right now as I have given up all that is familiar and sustaining to me as I left my “old” life behind) and NOT depend on my girls now any more than I did when I was raising them.

Both of them are extremely caring and generous in giving to me as they can regarding physical, material and tangible needs to help me get THOSE needs met.  The deeper far more complex “emotional” needs that are in play here are the ones I am describing.

So, I have some adjustments to make.  I will need to monitor my entire patterns of interactions with my girls on every level and in every way.  I will make “mistakes,” no doubt, as I figure this out.  I write about this here but I have no intention of talking to either one of my girls about this as THAT would even be me making a bid for something from them.

Just saying….  Being a parent never ends in this lifetime!

++++

NOTE:  This is a free blog to readers and I receive no money for its publication.  Any advertisements that appear on my posts have been placed here by WordPress and in no way represent me.

++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Friday, January 3, 2014.  Readers who have been following this blog for some time are aware that I have ten book manuscripts awaiting my daughter’s time for edit.  TIME?  In her life a most precious and nearly invisible asset.  She made it through a nearly final edit of the first book, Story Without Words, last June and only during her days off of her regular job last week was able to complete her edit so the manuscript could be moved along to two readers who will feed back their comments on this book which is the fulcrum point around which all of my other books swirl.

In the meantime there is a segment I have written within the 10th manuscript that I am frankly too lazy to go look for at this moment that is connected to the topic of this post.  Somehow, in spite of my great care in packing all my techy belongings as I left Arizona, I did not put my wireless mouse anywhere I can find it.  I detest the arrangement for “mousing around” on this old laptop so have my old wired mouse plugged into the only USB port on this machine.  My manuscripts are on one of my flash drives and without easy access to both a port and a mouse I can tolerate — well — this will have to do.

++

I write in that book about how I see the stress response system in operation for humans.  Most simply there is a progression from startle-alert through anger, fear and sadness as we try to reestablish equilibrium so that we can continue on with our ordinary life.  I describe the energy and intent of each of these powerful survival-based emotions.  If we CANNOT cope immediately to resolve a “conflict” we leave the train station that sits at the edge of ordinary life and hop onto the trauma drama train.

I am used to thinking of trauma drama as being something we can always do without.  Not so.  It is often the nature of trauma drama reenactments we find ourselves in that contains the information we need to “get it” regarding the lessons that trauma has to teach us.

There is, however, a time when we are “beating a dead horse,” when enough is enough!  When we COULD have learned the lesson and COULD have exited the trauma drama train and instead whirl around endlessly in stuck patterns of refusal-to-deal, what is going on?

Again because my energies are currently rather depleted I am going to take the shortcut through this blog.  I cannot speak for anyone else and am too lazy at the moment to even speak of myself when it comes to patterns of endlessly circling through old trauma.  What I do want to say is that when I listen to another person who is stuck on their own trauma drama train cycling through the cars that correspond to the progression of survival emotions — and I have listened to the story before — and before that — and…..?

Well, I have discovered that I have an inner physical response to my own continued involvement in someone else’s TD!  I feel SLIMED!  Just as though I have been tarred with ICK and am sitting around waiting for the feathers to fall.

NO!!  I do not like this feeling.  When there is no helpful purpose for me in listening I am going to become brave enough to say, “I understand this is very important to you but I no longer wish to hear the same story repeated again.”  (Thanks but no thanks?)

I have some personal issues going on as I have returned to the scene of a failed marriage and after 30 years am now in the presence occasionally of my children’s father.  I never processed one single feeling at the end of that marriage.  I simply walked on with my life and he walked on with his.  The only thing I took with me (other than our wonderful children) was the belief — as I have found since returning here — that I was 100% responsible for the troubles that led to that divorce.

New me?  HOGWASH!  I think it’s fair to say that all difficulties in relationships are split 50-50.

So when I hear someone retreat back to obsolete (seems to me) rehashing of old relationship issues I want to know how that 50-50 is split.  In cases where the OTHER person is given 100% of the fault I wonder where the story teller’s 50% is.  In my case regarding my ex-husband it is the OTHER person’s 50% share that needs to be repositioned.

If it is shame based in self that disturbs the process of ending trauma drama cycles that shame — in my thinking — is attached to one or all of the primary stress response emotions (anger, fear, sadness).  It is not possible for me to work any of this out for another person.  I have a hard enough time managing my own swirling around versus STOP I WANT TO GET OFF patterns regarding drama that has turned into a retraumatizing experience.  Just saying…..

++++

NOTE:  This is a free blog to readers and I receive no money for its publication.  Any advertisements that appear on my posts have been placed here by WordPress and in no way represent me.

++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Friday, January 3, 2014.  At 62 years of age I can truthfully say that never until I read this book have I had any soul-level connection to what anyone has ever told me about FORGIVENESS.  Was I finally just ready to gain some tiny glimmer of understanding about this process now or is there something special in this book I read recently and recommend highly?

The Wind is My Mother by Bear Heart and Molly Larkin

If Bear Heart is still living he would be in his 90s.  What I understand about what he said about forgiveness is that IT IS FOR GIVING!

Well, how simple is that?

I think about how up until the moment I read his words I have always framed my thinking about the insanely (literally) horrible 18 years of abuse I suffered from birth by thinking that I know my mother’s and my father’s sickness of the body interfered with the ability of their soul to make informed choices in their lives.  In such cases I have always encouraged what I call “informed compassion.” rather than forgiveness because I suspect there are human-caused traumas that are so huge that forgiveness may simply not be relevant in any ordinary way.

A different light flipped on as I read Bear Heart’s take on forgiveness.  On all but the most HUGE and horrendous hurt-filled levels forgiveness is called for — and the need for it can be simply recognized — when any possibility of giving to the “guilty” person has been nullified.

Well, thinking about my mother I can still say that I cannot scan my being and find any sense that I ever did want to give anything to HER.  She doesn’t live in this world anymore anyway.  (Same with my father.)  What I DO see is that what I learn about her illness and about what she did to me I feel the desire to make something good out of to give out in any way I can.

This all then filters to how I interact with others around me and I am practising being able to notice when I block the feeling of wanting to give to someone because I have not forgiven them for some real or perceived injury.  Bear Heart states that forgiving and loving are part of the same reality.  If one loves they will forgive because one does not exist without the other.  Love is for giving as is life!

 These new insights and thoughts have opened a door for me into a wider and richer, more in-formed consideration of what it means that God, the Creator loves AND forgives me.  Just saying….

++++

NOTE:  This is a free blog to readers and I receive no money for its publication.  Any advertisements that appear on my posts have been placed here by WordPress and in no way represent me.

++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment

++++

++++

Friday, January 3, 2014.  Good morning readers wherever you are!  Some of you have chosen to subscribe to this blog during my absence due to my recent major move.  I am affirming to myself that should you now choose to unsubscribe I can choose not to take this personally as some shame-filled reflection on my flaw-ness as a writer or as a human being!  Thank you for visiting here!

When a person embarks on healing the changes that then follow can be “dysregulating,” disorienting and disorganizing to our sense of ourself in our life because all of us with early relationship traumas during our most-rapid developmental stages of life suffer from some sort of insecure attachment disorder.  I believe it is important for us to define ourselves from our core self point of view when we can as we live our life even though our “symptoms” may make it most difficult to even know who we are — let alone anyone else.

In order to Stop the Storm of intergenerational transmission of trauma we must include a perspective on the degree of health and lack of health that exists within the community we reside in — and that includes ever-increasing circles of culture and society that powerfully influences how all of us see ourselves and the world.

I am going to backup and publish the collection of blog post notes that I have accumulated on my white legal pad of paper so that those words are retained here while the paper itself is recycled through the indoor worm compost containers I am trying to establish in my tiny apartment!  Yes, I can FEEL the wonderful life of those humble and most important creatures within my current living space.  My hope is to create soil to place in buckets on my greatly reduced garden space — and 8′ by 8′ cement slab outside my west-facing sliding glass door.

That soil is also feeding my motley collection of plants in here which include walking onions and grass garlic along with many aloe plants that will find their way into my green vegetable juices.  Flowers?  Well, as space allows.  My gauge on light health in this far northern place is the health of my plants which reflects the health of the environment I am trying to grow myself in along with my grandsons.  (It is again minus 30 degrees outside with windchill this morning.)

I certainly have no answers to the complexity of life that everyone faces.  I am most gratified that I found an apartment complex that is at least 75% full of refugees from around the world.  They have found their way to American sanctuary from Samoa, Sudan, Haiti, and Cambodia.  There is thus a flower garden of humans surrounding me and I hope eventually to meet some of these people personally.  So far they have all been most friendly and considerate when I encounter them around the place. 

In spite of the wickedness of this northern Plains winter they have found hope and safety probably for the first time in their life.  I am reminded of the fact that when I left home at 18 and escaped the psychotic abuse of my mother toward me by entering Navy boot camp I thought and felt as though I had died and gone to heaven!  I recognize that feeling even as I sense it pervading the giant Wal-Mart store where many of these refugees work and shop four blocks from where I live.

I am reminded of the depth and of the breadth of trauma around this world.  I am also now completely savvy to the fact that it is the quality of human attachments that most greatly determines the success of surviving trauma.  Without safe and secure attachments to other humans trauma WILL change our physiology at any age but most definitely during the critical developmental years of infancy and childhood.

All of us as early severe trauma survivors — and many with later severe trauma experiences — live daily with the reverberations of terror and threat in our physical body.  We have plenty of opportunities during any given day to work toward stopping the inner storm that our trauma survivorship has left us with.  Each encounter matters.  Each moment we can congratulate our self on still being here with our good intentions in life counts toward making the world a better place for all life now and in the future.

++++

NOTE:  This is a free blog to readers and I receive no money for its publication.  Any advertisements that appear on my posts have been placed here by WordPress and in no way represent me.

++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Thursday, January 2, 2014.  “Limbic kindling.”  I think of this as “limbic irritability” as it is literally a consequence (most of the time) of early child abuse during early brain/nervous system formative stages that results in injury and wounding.  I often think of skin irritation after a burn.  An extreme sensitivity to events in the environment that touch it or send reverberations that escalate like resounding trauma echoes into areas that we have no way NOT to feel if we are on a healing journey.

A few years ago I learned that “depression” is an “anxiety disorder.”  Depression is known to be complemented with irritability.  Anxiety, at least for me, certainly follows those same pathways.  I believe these are both directly tied to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), as well.  Add to this pot of horrors a big dose of dissociation and its complements of depersonalization and derealization, and – well – those who KNOW know the patterns that result.

For 14 years I limited my life to a small town rural area where the climate and the culture suited me like a comfortable second skin.  Like a comfortable outfit of clothing that place only chafed me when the wind blew dirt into my house and when my poverty made it difficult for me to adequately heat my uninsulated house.  People there were easy-going.  Nobody in all the time I lived there ever breathed the words “low income” although many residents certainly were.

No, the place was not perfect but within that arena I knew clearly what my limits were and could live a life that avoided conflicts with the world-at-large.  I may soon write of some of the bizarre encounters I have met here in Fargo in situations that could not possibly appear where I just moved from.  I have NO PATIENCE with ….  well, if I were to begin writing of those scenarios and situations now this post would move to another level I don’t intend for this one.

Enough to say that my limbic irritability has not won me friends in the arenas I am referring to — nor does my irritability contribute to me caring.  How the irritability interacts with the stress within my family is another matter and one of great complexity that I DO care about.  Although the physiological connections to all my irritability — and I know this because I remember myself very well as a different far calmer and nicer person throughout most of my adulthood until my Reactive Attachment Disorder was triggered in the past ten years — resides in my nervous system itself, it is far from only anger that rebounds within me when it comes to family and that history. 

I was thinking yesterday that humans did not evolve to for a life that moves this fast!!  I find it impossible to keep up with the pace of interactions that people have with one another.  In this light I know that once my life settles down, and my home is put back together as much as it can be here, I hope some inner peace returns to me in place of much of this irritability that leaves me with a heart pleading for forgiveness for my emotional state from the universe that did allow the injuries to happen to me in the first place!  So many mysteries.

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment

++++

++++

Monday, November 25, 2013.  Time seems to stretch out behind and in front of me – slowly – as if these recent huge changes in my life have shifted the way things appear in my own rear-view mirror of life and in front of me as I anticipate horizons I move along toward.  I have been in Fargo, North Dakota at my daughter’s house since October 12.  The skies hang heavy and gray above this flat landscape nearly all of the time.  As winter approaches the winds often slice at life harshly.  Much to adjust to.  Much that is wonderful.  Much that is hard.  Just plain MUCH sometimes!

It is wonderful beyond words to be with my two grown daughters and with my little grandsons (ages 17 months and 3 1/2 years).  I have been staying where the babies live but have finally secured a one bedroom apartment beginning December 1st.  I am a country (wilderness) woman, not a city dweller by nature.  Neither do I do well in apartments but that’s where I have placed myself — by choice.  Careful choice.

I often think now about the complexities of life lived as a human being — which is of course all I know.  I think about the range of the complex emotions I feel.  If I give myself permission to just LIVE with and through them I understand that ALL emotions are life.  There are not “good” ones and “bad” ones.  Not even “positive” emotions versus “negative” emotions.  I watch my young grandsons LIVE their emotions — and at their ages, at their stages of development, living only ONE emotion at a time is what they do.

It is going through these stages of early development being loved and safe and securely attached that will allow these boys to grow to increasingly more advanced stages of being able to feel MANY EMOTIONS AT THE SAME TIME!!  Feel them, live them, live with them — be alive to each moment whatever it brings.

The little ones cannot make the kinds of choices an adult or an older child can make about how to name feelings, change them, act upon them, let them go, rearrange them — and all the other kinds of more mature things humans can do with their emotions.  Of course for people like me and for many of this blog’s readers, we never had ANYTHING we needed to move through those early emotional-developmental stages in “ordinary” ways.  That certainly doesn’t stop us from FEELING!

Fargo is kind of known as a STOIC region of the country.  Well, that ain’t me, babe!!  I am working on toning down my comments and complaints tied to how much I detest cold winters (!!!) — but I will not deny my reality on the one hand in favor of a fancier, more “user-friendly” reality on the other hand!

Physical life on the material plane is temporary.  Transitory.  At 62 I suppose I think a lot more about that then I did when I was considerably younger.  I am going for the bigger gold now!  I wish to have a positive impact in the lives of my grandsons that might — should they ever have children — travel into the future along with shared DNA.  At the least I hope to help them in some ways to have a better life that will positively impact everyone they are ever in contact with.  I couldn’t do that sitting down there on the Mexican border in that place of mountains and so much milder climate!

I do worry about myself living in a 702 square foot apartment that has one small west window in the bedroom and one sliding glass door facing west in the living room — and the rest is just plain a CAVE in my universe!  I have much I am adjusting to, and complexities of PTSD, anxiety, well – all the rest of it – don’t make these kinds of adjustments “a walk in the park.”  But I needed this change.  I needed to grow stronger again not just more complacent.

My girls and I love one another – and have missed one another for YEARS.  They help me in every way that they can.  I am working to be balanced in what I expect of myself as these changes continue — but I will not settle for STUCK!!

This is the first blog post I have written for what seems like years (in that odd time-stretching sort of way).  I am NOT USED TO these kinds of heavy blanketing gray cloudy days!  Where is the brilliant Arizona blue splashed with the brilliance of sunlight?  Left behind me.  Left far, far behind me as I reach for a different, inner sort of warmth and light.  There is MUCH to be had of ALL of it!  That which is hard.  That which is easier.

Everything IS OK!  Everything WILL BE OK!!  I reassure myself nearly continually.  I CAN do this!  I AM doing this!  (The 17-month-old is no longer in daycare and is in my care.  He’s fussing about afternoon nap.  My anxiety level goes up like a thermometer!  I assure myself, “This is NOT a big deal!”  And – in such small ways – I am being useful!)

++++

++++

Sunday, September 29, 2013.  I don’t expect this post to come out especially coherently.  Lack of coherence.  Remember?  That state is directly tied to adult insecure attachment disorders and the inability of severe early trauma survivors to NOT ONLY tell a coherent life story narrative but ALSO to the inability when under extreme stress/distress/duress in the present moment to even LIVE one’s life in what feels like a coherent fashion.

Trauma survivorship does not, in my opinion, lend itself in any way to leading a coherent (linear) life.

I also think about the brain (and nervous system) developmental changes that early trauma survivorship creates for us.  (Yet again, please read this article! +Dr. Teicher’s ARTICLE ON TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT)

Our brain hemispheres do not develop to process information within themselves and between one another in anything like an ordinary way.  Coherence is often one hard-worked-for result of paying very close conscious attention to what information is coming into us, what it triggers, what associations are created, etc.

++

I fortunately was able to talk on the telephone several times today with my friend Cindy (I mentioned in my previous post) who is coming down this coming Thursday to boss me around (lol!) to get this move literally ON THE ROAD!  She is perfectly coherent!  I will literally borrow her coherency and as the long-time, close and dear friend that she is she does/will not mind one bit!

I am very clear when something in a conversation right now triggers my Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) lack of coherency.  There are several ways to name this state (besides frantic panic as I referred to it in a recent post.)  Dysregulation, disorganization-disorientation, dissociation — all are signposts for we survivors when a state of extreme demands of current life overtax our nervous system/brain.

I simply tell the people who love me “I cannot discuss this right now.”  I CANNOT because my brain goes blank, words disappear, high anxiety takes over my reality — etc.!!

My terminology with my friend today included “That is ahead of the curve.  I cannot think about that or talk about it right now.  I can only put one foot, one thought, in front of another until this move is completed.”

I found in talking with my friend that this “NO ZONE” includes all that is POSITIVE as it MIGHT arrive in my future life chapter as well as anything scary or troubling.

This left me (right before I sat down to write this post) thinking about the insanity (and brutality) of my entire childhood.  I could not predict ANYTHING about myself in my life.  Therefore — and this is a new thought/awareness for me — I could not look forward to the future with any kind of pleasant assurances.  I HAD no future!

I have known for a long time that even by the time I reached my older teen years I had no capacity to think about my own future.  I see right now that was because in the way my nervous system/brain formed during my 18 years of insane, psychotic, brutalizing abuse I had never been able to form the brain connections that would have attached myself not only in my own immediate life — but also prevented me from thinking my way into my own future.

Because my Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) mother’s reality was psychotic, disorganized, disoriented and entirely reactive SHE kept me — as her captive in hell in place of herself — forever in exactly that same state from the moment I was born.

At this point in my life nearly everything coming at me from the future is entirely unknown.  Yes, I have been to Fargo before.  I am mostly familiar with the place and with the climate.  But where will I end up living?  Will I have transportation?  How will I manage in my so-scrambled state to take care of all the grownup details such as finding a program to pick up my medicare premium costs each month, apply for secondary insurance with the state, deal with the HUD rental assistance voucher transfer details, find an apartment — etc.?

MANGO.  My code word I am training my brain to use when overwhelming feelings tied to thoughts I do not have to think in the present moment so i can refocus immediately only on the tasks at hand that will get me and my stuff out of here!

++

Speaking of MANGO.  I was on the phone with someone this morning who said something to me that triggered my reactivity.  I spoke up and faced the conflict immediately – which was good for me.  However, whatever that conflict was about vanished from my conscious thought sphere so quickly — even without a MANGO moment intervening so that I could DECIDE to let the concern go away.  That was dissociation.  An unsettling and always scary process for me.

That means that I cannot CHOOSE to consider that episode in my conscious mind.  It was taken care of so automatically that I — as a conscious self — completely lost my right to choose and decide how I wanted to handle the related feelings and thoughts.  Whatever that episode was about is NOT necessary gone forever.  It can reappear with a trigger anytime — to take me unprepared.

Well, this was not a big deal by itself.  However being left with the knowledge that yet again dissociation enabled me to get through and past a difficult moment so fast and so automatically and so unconsciously alerts me yet again to the very real understanding of how this moving/life change stress has me very near the limits of what I can cope with.  “Be ultimately careful of yourself, Linda!” are words I cannot afford to let get very far away from me right now!

++

No matter how careful I tried to be as a child to make mother happy — which meant it made her not dangerous to me at the moment, although I didn’t know that as a child — I could NEVER prevent one of her frequent horrible attacks on me.  Even though I have only in this past year really come to understand (at age 62) that it was Mother’s PSYCHOTIC BREAKS that created this permeating and pervasive instability in my life (and hers) — I can look back at my entire childhood now and see those patterns for what they really were.

I will never be able to “let go” or “forgive” those episodes as someone suggested to me recently.  The problems for me are built into my nervous system, into my brain, my stress response system.  Given unusually high pressure such as this monster move is creating for me I have nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, no escape — just as I did not all the way through my so-abusive, insane childhood.

That I made the CHOICE to make this life change does not ameliorate the difficulties living through the experience of it creates.  I can rely on the rock-solid stability of my friend to get me through the very hard steps that are approaching.  This is an appreciated miracle I do not take for granted!

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Saturday, September 28, 2013. I am in the process of going through a most unpleasant experience of trauma drama that is fortunately connected to someone I “only” tried to be a friend with, someone is was only peripherally a part of my life.  There is NOTHING enjoyable about being caught in ANYONE’S trauma drama, but if such a pattern shows up it can be a very good thing to learn something important and useful from the experience.

I know an adult who was hated and therefore never loved by his mother.  From my point of view this gay man does not appear to have any male “friends” but does have a collection of women in his life that I think he does consider “friends.” 

Looking at anyone’s life from the outside leaves of course an inaccurate perception of “what is going on” inside that person.  But when that “going on” forces itself into my life I believe I have the right to pay attention at any edges where the other’s experience overlaps my own, ESPECIALLY when that spill-over is negative.

This person wrote me an email several weeks ago in which I was told I was “too much work” to be in this man’s life.  So be it.  I know a line when I encounter one.

Once I or anyone else draws that kind of line involving mutual interactions I consider the breach final, permanent, irreversible and – well – ugly but evidently necessary.  I began to figure out once I received that email that I was “too real” of a person insisting on equality of personhood in that “friendship” relationship.  Being a real person for someone with very ancient, deep, and unhealed/unrecognized “mommy concerns” DOES NOT WORK.

I simply refused to be “good mommy” as I believe the other women in this man’s life are.  I also – and more importantly – refused to be the “bad mommy” because I was not playing the “good mommy” role.  Either extreme or any pattern involving a good/bad mommy split is only one thing:  TRAUMA DRAMA.  In this case – mommy drama!

Because I know and know of some of these other women I suspect that my being alone in this area particularly without family left me in a position none of these other women are in.  I had “attachment village” needs that I have worked to fill through friendships.  Legitimate friendships!

Having such needs is not criminal, sick or wrong!  Attempting to grow and sustain one’s attachment village is a very good thing — among equals.

Twice in three weeks this person has arrived at our local farmers’ market while I was busily engaged with customers and attempted to engage me in his momma trauma drama again.  The first time I tried to be diplomatic.  When this person appeared today and interrupted sales and conversations with a group of customers I made clear that the line that man drew is a line he cannot cross in MY life.

I am done.  I am so done and I consider this man’s actions today harassment.  It was an ugly intrusion into my most pleasant bag-selling day.  I was upset.  I am still upset.  My customers were shocked and upset.  This better not happen again!

I have one more weekend to sell my bags at market – next weekend.  My friend from near the Canadian border will arrive here this coming Thursday and the serious packing will take place as the U-Haul is loaded the following Tuesday, my old el Camino will be rolled up its trailer on Wednesday the 9th and off we go into the next chapter of my life.

(After showing my gardens and this rental house 10 times the PERFECT next tenants have appeared who will make their home here and not only keep this garden alive – but deeply appreciate it and make it thrive.  They will keep my hens and my cats, as well!  WHAT A RELIEF!)

My friend is sturdy.  If this man appears again I will sick her on him!  What kind of dog breed is it that bites and does not let go?  Oh.  Yeah.  A bulldog.  That’s one very certain talent of my friend!

Meanwhile I see that “bad mommy” projections are always part of a “mommy complex” that require serious good therapy to resolve.  I have gifts related to doing therapy – but I am NOT a therapist and I do NOT earn $120+ an hour to take transference crap from anyone!

I was BORN to a psychotic abusive Borderline Personality Disorder mother who tortured me for 18 years.  All that went wrong between her mother and my mother was forced upon me.  I WILL NOT be anyone’s bad mommy – and if not playing the role of someone’s good mommy turns me into a bad mommy in someone’s trauma drama — well, my walls are sealed.

Ain’t gonna happen! 

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++