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Wednesday, September 25, 2013.  Moon of the pomegranate harvest.  In mid-June when I knew I was leaving here to move back up north — a return — after 20 years of cycles much farther south — I knew my leaving date would not take place until the pomegranates on my so-gorgous tree were ready to pick.

Their harvest began today, always heralded by the long-legged beetles that arrive to carefully scour each fruit in search of a luscious crack to feast within.  I chased those harvesters away before their cracks could be found and stole from them what I want as badly as they do.

Harvests.  Focal points around which life has always revolved.  This one — after the equinox — as nights lengthen and earth prepares to sleep — even here in this high Arizona desert.

Breezes change with the light’s longer shadows.  A different whispering.  In between the sighing comes a growing quietude.

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A phone call came today that is sending relief into my cells and between them.  The perfect tenants have let me know of their decision to make this home of mine their home once I leave here.  I saw the love in the fingertips of the woman who came to view this garden over a week ago as she touched these plants.  Its beauty made her cry.  When I hadn’t heard back with an affirmative YES I had given up hope.

They will keep my hens.  They will allow my cats to stay in their garden.  The cats left me what I needed this morning — a great dead packrat lying on a garden pathway — so I could overcome any hesitancy in the new tenants about the rightfulness of the cats’ stay here.

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My friend Cindy from up near the Canadian border will arrive at my home on the Mexican-American line a week from tomorrow.  Without her help I don’t believe I could get out of here.  It is right I should hear today on the pomegranate harvest that the gift of this garden will continue to live — and thrive — through love and tender caring.

I can find the peace now that I need to close all the doors on my 14-year life here.  Such a gift it has been to live in this circle of mountains where each day has felt so gracious to me.

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Monday, September 16, 2013.  My nervous system (including my brain) was formed by abusive trauma not with the state of peaceful calm at its center through safe and secure attachment but rather with the state of frantic panic at its center.  The older I get the more I know about what this means to me – and I suspect also to other severe early trauma survivors.

Given enough pressure over time – no matter how well we survivors put ourselves together so we could endure, survive and continue to function as we moved forward through our lives – if we had no safe and secure early attachment with anyone as infants/children our trauma altered physiology will appear eventually in such clear ways that we cannot avoid being forced to cope not only with the stresses of our adult life but also moment to moment in our conscious felt experience with what happened to us through an early life of trauma.

Whew!  That was one long sentence!  Our state of frantic terror that we knew as infants and young children has never left us!

Call it Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), anxiety, depression, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) – whatever labels and “diagnosis” we use – we know what the disorientation, disorganization, and dysregulation of our entire being FEELS like – frantic panic.  Yes, when these states appear our experience of being alive is not one of well-being.  The worse our current distress/stress is in life the more our body and our entire nervous system will restore itself to this natural state for us.

Infants, young toddlers and very young children rely upon their adult caregivers to help not harm them.  I know that every time I was attacked (frequently) by my psychotically vicious mother when I was little (from birth) my entire reality shattered at that instant as I was forced into frantic panic.  I had no comprehension of what was happening to me and I had no options to prevent, escape or stop these attacks.  My entire physiology followed this trauma survival track.

Nobody protected or soothed me.  Nobody cared how I felt or about the harm being done to me and to my physiological development that has lasted my lifetime.

I did stay alive and I was able to fool everyone including myself for nearly 50 years that “It wasn’t really THAT bad.  I am strong.  I could take it.  Now those 18 years of horrendous abuse are over and I came through it OK.”

I am NOT OK!  I have never been OK!  At 62 I no longer have any inner resources in reserve to convince anyone, certainly not myself, that the lie of OK that formed with me at its center was/is true.  I live at that edge of frantic panic and I always have.  I was not born this way.  Early severe abusive trauma MADE me this way.

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Perhaps it is because of “my condition” that I might need more than most others can comprehend of helpful, soothing, calming, competent, patient, wise people who TRULY love me in a circle around me.  I can no longer pretend or fool anyone that I am OK.  People who love me are willing to listen to me and to learn right along with me how my experience of being alive is sometimes quite difficult to deal with.  People who love me — love me anyway.

These safe and secure attachment relationships are able to externally support, nurture and reinforce me, and even create substitutes for what my own body did not ever have a chance to create within itself as I grew up:  An alternative to my deepest, oldest, truest inner state of frantic frenetic panic.

I was left from birth and throughout my childhood in vast periods where that is all I felt.  This kind of chronic terror eroded me from the inside.  While my essential self was able to endure intact the body my self has to live this life within has nearly reached the end of its coping rope.

It’s really hard to create and sustain a beautiful life under these conditions but I refuse to think it is impossible yet I MUST have an attachment family/village to interact with.  I say “family” but I do not mean these people have to be our genetic relations though I am so fortunate to be able to include my own family as the core of my village.  I must, however, go through this major move to be physically close to at least some of them – my daughters and my little grandsons.

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Frantic panic, the horrible unending result of an over-stressed natural startle response while a young one’s nervous system is developing, is the antithesis of well-being.  These days it is often my overriding chore to hold it at bay – in some way – or I become paralyzed.  When frantic frenetic panic has my body in its grip I cannot think, choose, decide or act.  Being so frozen in hell will not get me where I want to go or be.

Courage, determination, patience, hope and willingness.  I must believe in GOOD possibilities in spite of what my body tells me.  But I cannot create the sense of safety and security I need — alone. 

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Friday, September 13, 2013.  I am in one world.  I am moving to the next one.  That is how I see death of the body and transition of the soul.  But I am not dying, at least not physically.  I am leaving one world of the glorious high desert on the American-Mexican border.  I am heading toward my daughters and my two very young grandsons who live in a city on land so flat a marble cannot roll. 

North.  I am moving very far north where predatory winters lie in wait.  But not for long.  POUNCE and HOLD.  I know those winters.  I left those winters.

I don’t write here currently because all I can do is repeat myself.  There is much about this place here that I deeply love, yet it is all material.  Mountains and plants.  Trees and flowers.  The colors of the soil.  The shape of the rocks.  My home.  My garden.  My physical freedom in the warmth so many months of each year.

What is love?

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I write.  I pause.  I sew.  I ponder.  Or, even while not pondering have thoughts appear and sometimes insights….

In a recent telephone conversation with my oldest brother he commented that of the four of us older siblings who were actively involved in the Alaskan mountain homesteading when we were young children (there are two younger brothers who were not), all four of us not only love to garden, landscape and spend all the time we can out-of-doors, we have a RELATIONSHIP with the earth itself.

Of the six children in our family it was solely me who was the focus of the psychotic, pathological, mentally ill terrible abuse by our mother.  Solitary confinement and forced isolation were a great part of the 18 years of my abusive childhood.  I have always been very clear that it was my relationship with the place of Alaska and our homestead in particular that saved me.  Any moment I could escape Mother’s hell and exist outside on the land I was in heaven.  But that attachment was nothing like ordinary.

This came to me in thoughts as I was just sewing bags to take to sell at Saturday’s local farmers’ market.  It is likely that the attachment I have to this glorious high desert place is not an ordinary one, either.  I and the land have grown together.  It is a surgical process that is separating me from it.

I grieve for Alaska, for our homestead and I will grieve for the incredible beauty of this place.  (I have lived in Fargo and in that area before and I could not find beauty there.  My soul has craved beauty for as long as I can remember.)

If I had the finances I would live a different life.  Certainly I could travel frequently to visit my family.  Destiny and poverty – coupled with my trauma-related disabilities – seem to be determining the direction of my life – yet again.

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These translate into spiritual concerns for me.  I KNOW it is the spirit of life that matters and not its material forms.  PLACE is, as is body itself, a mere practicality for the work of soul in this material life.

The real work for me right now is to let go of my attachment – my deep and abiding attachment – to this place.

Yes I believe humans are designed to have a reciprocal relationship with their environment – even to love it.  But we are a social species.  Given safe and secure early attachment relationships with our caregivers we bond – and forever after CAN bond – with humans FIRST.  When we lack these physiological abilities in our body due to severely traumatic earliest life we struggle all of our lives to find balanced attachment relationships.

My powerful bond with the earth cannot be limited to certain places.  I need to grow bigger than that.  I am still growing up!

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Simply put I have reached a point in my life at 62 where I know if I do not leave here to live near my family I will die of loneliness.  True, the earth here would dispassionately accept my remains.  I can, at this time of my life, have better than that premature sad ending. 

I am fortunate there are people in my life who love and cherish me and WANT me in their lives.  I leave this glorious yet dispassionate place to go offer my love to them and to accept theirs for me.

Yet on the level of my emotions life has never been clear or simple.  I have to FEEL what it FEELS like to be alive and living through all of these changes. 

One month from today I will be in Fargo and all of this leaving-transition process will be history.  A part of me is afraid that I won’t recognize myself when I get there.  In the most important ways – I will.  In the material ways I feel I will be starting my life all over again.  It’s too much to feel most of the time.  Too much to think about.  So – back to the sewing I go!

Yet I cannot help but grieve that I will not be here next spring to watch the tiny praying mantis –  being placed so carefully right now by their mothers in hard cocoons in safe places in the garden – chew their way out to help one another climb the gossamer threads to begin another season’s life here in this place I love.

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Thursday, August 29, 2013.  FOCUS.  Without being able to find my focus right now I am watching myself acting like I have its opposite:  Attention deficit.  I can still concentrate on my sewing most of the time but on little else.  I begin to do something moving related and find myself off on another task and then another one without completing much of anything.

All 6 of us kids (myself and my 5 siblings) seem to have what might be a genetic trait of extreme ability to focus.  (Signs of this are in my two grandsons, as well.)  Did this ability come to the six of us kids in consequence of surviving a childhood in hell with an out-of-control abuse psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder mother and her ineffectual husband?  Were we born this way?

I have never until now so clearly seen that the opposite of focus is certainly within me.  I am most uncomfortable this way – but this way I at least temporarily AM.  All of this is coupled with extremes of restlessness, although THIS I am familiar with in my life.  Now that I am moving perhaps my restlessness has come out of dormancy and is taking its place among the host of “Who is this person?” characteristics that seem to be hounding me right now.

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My garden has always soothed and solaced me.  The opposite of that is happening, as well.  I grieve leaving it and fear for all life it contains and supports.  Efforts so far to locate someone to rent here that will truly care about and for this garden have not been successful.  Now even my garden friend is a source of concern, stress and distress for me.  I cannot care for it, connect with it or interact with it as I have these past 7 years.

I am fading away as a part of that small ecosystem that is a part of all life on this planet.  My attachment relationship with my garden is failing me.

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Quilts start with pieces.  Never in the years I have had this blog have I not been able to write.  Never have I had to take the time to collect in handwriting a collection of my thoughts before writing a post.  Like the bags I am sewing — cutting pieces to create a whole other whole — something useful — hopefully appealing to people so they buy those bags (I need moving money) — all of my thoughts are in bits as pieces themselves.

I am planning to step out of my discomfort zone this coming Saturday — my 62nd birthday — to take these bags to our local farmers’ market to see if some of them will sell.

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Dissociation.  It came up this week in conversation with a friend this week that taking public speaking classes can be unsurpassingly difficult.  I was reminded of myself at 17.  Our family moved into Anchorage my senior year.  I was forced to attend a large school full of strangers. 

We were required to take a speech class to graduate.  I received a D+ on my first speech.  I quickly learned what the teacher wanted and that is exactly what I gave her.  Shy, abused, timid, terrified me in front of a class of 30+ students out performed them all.

Of the 400 students that teacher had this year only four As were given for the year.  I received one of those As.  My teacher highly complimented me.  ME? 

I simply dissociated myself from myself and created a different version of me while I put away the other real me — somewhere else where I couldn’t be bothered by her bothering me.

I lived my entire adult life like that as long as I had one of my children (I have 3) under the age of 18 and needing my care.  I gave 100%+ to being a mother just as I had to being a speaker.

But those pieces of me!!  They used to be bigger dissociated pieces.  Now they seem to be so much smaller and the dissociation happens so much more often.  These fragments only clumsily seem to fit together.  But not really.  They only do so because I am the one person in this one body having all these experiences.

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Of course strangers traipsing around my garden and house have no idea of my current struggles as they respond to the poster I put up about a garden for rent with a two bedroom house.  (I went into town yesterday and found that some jerk has been removing my posters.)  Nor would I want a stranger to have a clue about me personally, although this very messy house here is a sign of some distress — if anyone could tell that — which I know they cannot.

I cannot pack more than one small box before my anxiety sends me off to do something else somewhere.  Anywhere.  I certainly do not care about decor or dusting.  I just have to go through and get through all of this happening right now — on so many levels.

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I just finished sewing the most difficult bag I have created yet.  In a large part it is because I sewed together such vastly different kinds of fabrics which all acted so differently as if they did not want to be sewn together.  (Oh no!  Fabric bias!)

One was corduroy, one a faux suede and one was a thin rayon.  The bag was sewn with strong quilting thread on the machine.  All fall colors.  Very sturdy.  This bag will last a long time.

There is great satisfaction for me when I make things knowing they are all one-of-a-kind originals.  Never has there been one like it.  Never will there be another one like it.

It is the artist and the art therapist in me that created my adobe peace garden (link is on a tab at top of this page to pictures of it) and sews my way through the ending of a 14-year stage of my life.  Dirt and mud and seeds — or — repurposed fabric and thread.  Makes little difference to me in the end.  It is the living process of creating that fascinates, captivates and heals me.

Life is such a quilt!

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Thank you for caring enough to read this.  I have nothing fluent or gracious to say.  I have made a decision to radically change my life.  Making that happen has some anguish involved.

I think about myself as an abused child escaping Mother occasionally.  I had to disappear into some invisible nook of silence.  I often made wallets and purses out of cut and folded paper.  I became a kind of wizard in my lonely play.

It is these same hands that sews these bags now.  And in their final creation stages they are turned completely inside-out.  It strikes me as a kind of birthing each time a bag reaches that point of unfolding its desired and desirable form.  All rough seams disappear to be sealed away inside the bag and lining never to be seen again.  Only something lovely remains.

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I slide toward the small hole of a very large funnel.  I am being pared down in my old life to take the final steps into being born into a new and vastly different one 1,800 miles northeast of here.

There is a very large part of me that is a mother.  I am moving toward my children — and my two little grandsons — with every passing nanosecond.

Many parts of who I am are “organized” (sewn together) that have to do with those attachment relationships I am missing here.  I need that vitality.  I need and want this change which may end up feeling just that much more important to me because it’s taking some genuine struggle and sacrifice to get there.

I will endure this fire.  I will emerge from ashes.  At this instant I see that I believe in myself.  I believe in the future.  I will do what it takes to help make it a good one.  I will.

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Tuesday, August 20, 2013.  i highly recommend an online search for — “Dr. Gordon Neufeld – attachment” — to locate information on the author of the talk on preschooler attachment that the following text comes from.  There are excellent videos that appear with this search, as well.

Here is a place to start: 

Transformative Parenting and Dr. Gordon Neufeld

Many thanks to my friend Sandy who is transcribing the words  of Neufeld’s preschooler talks for us!  The following is presented here for information only – the purchase link is here: 

This is the first part of Dr. Gordon Neufeld’s Making Sense of Preschoolers talk:

The Making Sense of Preschoolers is the third item down at this link for purchase:

http://neufeldinstitute.com/products/dvds

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Preschooler Personality Profile

1.         A PURITY of emotion and an innocent belief in MAGIC.

2.         CERTAINTY in their thinking, no room for shades of grey.

3.         IMPULSIVE and given to displaced ‘return of the pendulum’ swings.

4.         SHORTSIGHTED – unable to make sacrifices towards a goal.

5.         UNRELIABLE – know better than they behave and their good intentions are easily eclipsed by the impulse of the moment. (they often have no clue why they do what they do)

6.         TERRIBLE at PROBLEM SOLVING – unable to take more than one factor into consideration at a time.

What’s missing and why

Preschoolers cannot do dissonance. They register only one feeling or impulse at a time. All conflicting impulses and thoughts are momentarily eclipsed.

WHY?

This is Nature’s way, making it as easy as possible for youngsters to find their dominant feeling by removing any confusing elements or complicating signals.

(eyesight analogy goes here)

As soon as both feelings are present, you have a fundamentally different psychology and person…

We would never get to both of our cerebral hemispheres operating at the same time if we didn’t start off with one at at time.

We will never get to being able to experience all of our emotions simultaneously and to have self-control, and have integrative functioning, and to be well-tempered, as a husband, a wife, an adult, unless we went through this phase and were able to experience one emotion at a time…

so rather than fighting it and trying to get them to hurry up, the problem is, if we try to get them to hurry up, we’re actually sabotaging that time (development). We’re busy trying to make little adults out of  preschoolers. We’re busy trying to figure out how to make them like us, and that is not Nature’s plan. Nature’s plan is that they need to be preschoolers, we need to be adults, and we need to allow them to have that time.

Nature’s solution to being untempered

ADDING the tempering elements by 5 – 7 years of age.

–   once a child can easily find his or her dominant feeling

–           this takes longer with sensitive and intense children, because their feelings are bigger and there are more incoming signals to complicate things

–           children who do not feel their emotions or do not practice their mixed feelings will not develop this capacity

We’re giving rise to very sensitive and intense children, for a number of reasons. Probably there is a genetic drift towards sensitivity that is happening in our society, but also because one of the primary results of any kind of birth trauma is hypersensitivity. And our children are surviving birth like never before; premature babies, etc. And so we’re giving rise to probably the most sensitive preschoolers that ever walked this Earth.

And this means that their feelings are highly affected and are very intense, and it’s pushing the time of transformation further and further back, so that for many intense children doesn’t actually happen until 8 or 9 years of age.

This means they’re fundamentally different from us, and this has HUGE implications for how we’re dealing with them. We’re trying to get them to be nice, and to get along…we’re trying to get them to have self-control; in some cases we’re trying to teach all kinds of reflective and meditative exercises to children who are just 4 or 5 years of age, and we’re getting this all wrong…

Because we have to find a way to work around this, we need to find a way of being able to include preschoolers in our society [as they are, not as we would have them be!].

This is Nature’s solution. But children who do not feel their emotions, who do not practice their mixed-feelings, will not fully develop this capacity.

If a child starts losing his feelings – and many, because of the wounding environment they’re in, and because of their precocious sensitivity, begin to start losing their feelings by 3 or 4 years of age…so we have many children who no longer say “I’m scared.” Children who are losing these feelings. And they are not developing their prefrontal cortex, which is the mixing-bowl of  the brain.

This is where the solution [adaptation & maturation] occurs. What is it that as humans have – that is, mature humans have – that preschoolers do not have? A functional prefrontal cortex.

What is it that humans have that no other mammals have? A functional prefrontal cortex. [I suspect elephants have this]

But the prefrontal cortex isn’t even wired up, the blood isn’t even going to the prefrontal cortex until 5 – 7 years of age. Just like with the eyes, there’s two shunts coming from the Limbic System, the emotional brain…and just like it is with the eyes, it’s only feeding one set of signals – one emotion – at a time. There may be other emotions there, sitting in the Amygdala, but only one emotion is fed to the prefrontal cortex.

So you have a child that’s only operating out of one (emotion). The child may be very afraid, but very frustrated – alarmed, frustrated, and insecure – but you only see one thing.

He’ll either be in pursuit, or he’ll be moved to caution, or that frustration will be there as aggression – but only one thing at a time.

This [the mixing bowl of maturation] is what needs to be exercised. This is the key to our being able to relate to each other in a civilized way.

What our preschoolers need from us

to COMPENSATE for what is missing in them.

–           to assume responsibility for keeping them out of trouble and for not pushing their buttons needlessly.

We’re all to frequently pushing preschoolers’ buttons. If we scare them we get alarm out of them.

If they face separation, we get pursuit out of them. But wait – we’re also getting frustration and alarm – but that doesn’t come until bedtime, when now they can’t sleep.

We’re pushing their buttons to try to get different behavior. But this doesn’t mean that their behavior is changing; it simply means that we’re playing them, emotionally, and that we ought not to be doing that…

–           to refrain from approaches that work because of substituting one emotion for another in the untempered child, as these set the stage for a return swing of the pendulum reactions (eg, ‘consequences’ and ‘time-outs’)

Consequences are a typical example of this. When we use consequences we’re typically using what a child cares about against them. So when we threaten separation from something they care about, we’re pushing a child’s face into separation. And when we push a child’s face into separation, the first emotion you always get is pursuit.

If you have a preschooler and you need to leave, and you give them the warning: “I’m leaving in 5 minutes” and it doesn’t work, so you say “It’s time to go,” and the preschooler is saying: “I don’t want to go! I don’t want to go!”

And so you say, “All right then,  bye bye, see you…” and you walk out of their sight, what you do is trigger off in them high pursuit, because preschoolers can’t do separation.

And so they say, “All right mommy! I’m coming, I’m coming!” And so they come. But what we don’t realize is how impactful it was for the child. We see the pursuit, and so they move towards us –  when we use what they care about [connection] against them, their behavior is to pursue whatever it is that we’re taking away [in this case, connection with us], their behavior is to pursue whatever it is that we’re taking away: “I’ll be good! I’ll be good!”

But what we don’t see is that we’ve triggered other emotions. And the other emotions will include frustration, because something didn’t work for them, and so we’re going to get aggression a little bit later out of the system – and we’ve also triggered alarm…because whenever they’re facing separation they get a little bit scared.

And so now we’ve got problems going into nighttime, at bedtime, in terms of insecurity…and we don’t see that.

So we’re doing things that are very immediate, and pushing their buttons, and we’re not realizing: these are emotional creatures. They have no ability within them to say “on the one hand, and then the other…”

They can’t get it that if you’re frustrated with them, you also love them. You can tell them that until you’re blue in the face – they can’t get it.

They’re not going to get it until 6 or 7 years of age (if they’re lucky), or even 9 years of age. They’re not going to get it because they CAN’T – it doesn’t matter how well you say it. So we need to…

to SET the STAGE for Nature’s ultimate resolution

–           to help them find ALL their feelings and impulses so that Nature has the raw material to work with.

The ultimate resolution is for their feelings to mix; for the prefrontal cortex to work. This is the main difference between them and us: and it’s a biological difference, and it makes a different creature out of them. They simply do not have brain that we have. They simply do not have the capacity to handle the world the way we can.

They are one at a time creatures, and we need to go with them. We need to help them find all their feelings: “Right now you feel this way, right now you want this…” We have to make room for all of their feelings. We have to make room for them to name their feelings, because until they name them, they can’t mix them…

You need to come alongside of them, and move into their feelings [and help them name them]: “Right now you didn’t like my bossy voice…”

It doesn’t mean that you need to indulge all of their feelings, it doesn’t mean that there’s no room for structure or order in their life.

What it does mean is that we have to cut them some slack emotionally.

They only experience ONE feeling at a time; the answer to most of life’s situation is to have two or three feelings simultaneously.

They can only consider one factor at a time. They do not do ‘cognitive dissonance’ –  they cannot disagree with themselves. And the answer, of course, is to be able to do more.

We need a LOT of patience to work around their deficits. They need to start where they are to get to where they need to go.

Discipline is NOT the answer to untempered nature: ‘consequences’ and ‘time-outs’ ONLY work because they push buttons; and when they push buttons, they cycle…

That’s why they never work over the long-run, why you have to start using them a lot – ‘1, 2, 3 Magic’ is just just another way of putting their face into separation. Because the greatest fear of any preschooler is separation.

So when you say: “1, 2, 3… what they fantasize next is some form of separation. It’s the same as saying “Bye, bye then – I’m disappearing…”

Or, all the other ways we do it: “No, you’re going to have to go to your room; I’m going to withdraw the invitation to exist in my presence…”

We push buttons [with those strategies]. We don’t change behavior. Or, we change behavior only because we push buttons; and it doesn’t last.

[Behavior] is not the issue: it’s the character that needs to be changed.

[And because they simply don’t have the prefrontal cortex that is required to do the problem solving with, we’ve simply made things worse for them and us.]

You will know adults with an untempered prefrontal cortex. They’re impulsive and untempered in experience and expression, and that is because they did not grow out of this stage.

In our next sessions we’re going to look at what is required to grow out of this. We’ll be looking at what we call the requisite needs, the irreducible needs of the preschooler to grow out of this period.

But in this session we want to know the character [of preschoolers] and understand them from inside out. And so our next session is also related to the prefrontal cortex…

–           to refrain from cut-it-out approaches as this will sabotage Nature’s ultimate solution

You’ll notice that Nature’s solution to their emotions

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The Making Sense of Preschoolers is the third item down at this link

http://neufeldinstitute.com/products/dvds

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Tuesday, August 20, 2013.  I certainly have turned into a fierce sewer!  I have completed nine more of my cloth bags since the post full of photographs of my first batch.  I have started another one at 2 in the morning.  I slept four hours, woke and cannot sleep again.

I realized that in the difficulties of removing myself from my life down here in the gorgeous high desert so that I can start another life 1800 miles north of here I am actually undergoing a significant amputation – of important parts of myself from myself.  Destiny demands of me that this happens.  I will never look back at this move and say it was easy.  For the hundreds of moves (I could probably count that many) in my lifetime this is by FAR the most difficult one.

I had the “fiddling while Rome burns” verbal image appear to me a few days ago as I sewed and sewed.  I am sewing while my life as I know it burns to ashes around me.  Since childhood I have thought that fiddling (or sewing) one’s way through tumultuous and destructive conditions was a sign of negligence and unfeeling uncaring – but I know differently now.  I care TOO MUCH!  Sewing is my meditation, my therapy – while the universe flings itself around – it seems – me at its emotional center.

Most untrue, of course.  But given the intensity of this experience how could I FEEL any other way being, as I am,  stone cold sober, unmedicated, very much alive and in the full experience of the inner and outer expression of the passion of being alive in my life?

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Tick.  Tock.  The pomegranates are ripening.  That is my chosen departure time.  “Moon of the pomegranate harvest.”  I am hoping the 2nd week of October is exactly that time because that is what the target time for leaving here is.  Meanwhile, I created a handwritten poster – bright yellow – and put it up in choice locations around town last week for the rental of the garden here – with house.

I put my email on there – I hate being interrupted by telephones.  So far – a complete irritating FLOP with the people who have responded!!  i will avoid all the negative I could say about my experience of wasting time giving a tour of this place to idiots and just report that a couple who seems perhaps hopeful for being gardeners is due to show up here 11 am in the morning – today.  At least the woman obviously LOVES EARTHWORMS!  My kind of gardener!

There needs to be a changing of the guard here on this property.  Someone needs to show up who understands that between earth and sky humans are equipped to be caretakers and caregivers of the earth wherever they live.  This place has a history of being loved and tended and I need that history to move on into the future through somebody else.  (see: LINDA’S ADOBE PEACE GARDEN)

I am looking for someone to rent this place who knows what it means to have a RELATIONSHIP with the land — THIS little piece of land.

I must be excited at the possibility of this couple being the right one – enough so that sleep is no longer an option for tonight.  So, back to sewing I go!!

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Thursday, August 15, 2013.  This post follows my previous post:

+BLANK MIND – THOUGHTS WITHOUT WORDS – A HARD WAY TO GATHER IMPORTANT INFORMATION

Certainly what I described from my experience with extreme anxiety today leaves me wondering if I AM actually fighting for my life at those times words have no meaning to me and I cannot think in words.  Am I disappearing as a person as that state takes over me?  Is this experience at the core of having the diagnosis the title to this post describes?

When I applied for my social security disability after my cancer and its treatment I was sent to one of the government’s “shrinks” for assessment.  He and I discussed this, and I was assured unequivocably that it is possible to have DID without having separate identities.  I actually joked with the woman whose help I received today and so desperately needed that I was not even lucky enough to get separate identities along with my dissociation!  She complimented me on my sense of humor.

Only, truly — none of this is one bit funny.

Because of the intense and difficult work I have done to create the 10 book manuscripts that are currently awaiting edit I have come to understand my mother’s mental illness as it harmed me.

It was a unique aspect of her particular Borderline Pesonality Disorder (BPD) psychosis that not only was I the “all bad” child – a projective dysfunction not uncommon to BPD people who severely abuse one of their children and not the others – but in Mother’s case her psychosis did not even let her understand that I was a human being.

I was not “a human child” to her.  I was the devil’s child (not human) sent to kill her while I was being born.

Mother’s special psychosis demanded that I remain entirely within her personal hell in place of herself.

I could not get out.  I could not escape.  This is why I could never play.  This is why she forced me into severe and lengthy solitary confinements as she kept me as much as she could exactly where she knew not only where I was – but what I was doing – which was exactly NOTHING except suffering as her proxy self in hell.

I could not HAVE an identity.  Any time some tiny bit of Linda escaped and became visible to her I was horrendously abused.

This all began when I was born.

Tiny newborn Linda could not BE a human baby.  Neither could Linda be a human being with any identity during the 18 years I was so abused.  I learned to exist and to continue to exist this way.  The only other choice would have been death and I did not choose to die.  I chose to live.   And live.  And live.

I have one horrendous history of abuse that is – I really believe – beyond the range of what “ordinary” people can begin to conceive of no matter how kind they are, no matter how much they try to understand or try to convince me they do understand.

That social security shrink did understand.  But nobody helps me access the kind of quality therapy I could perhaps make some use of although I know perfectly well that the worst of the trauma I endured built itself and my physiological reactions to it permanently into my body.

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I am going to a local doctor on Monday.  Today’s anxiety experiences gave me more information I can use as I try to convey to this doctor my “condition” and what I want:  some kind of anti-anxiety medication that will assist me with two critically important things I need to do ASAP:  (1) stop smoking, and (2) get through this relocation and resettlement.

If I don’t feel this doctor comprehends what I tell him I will stop him mid-sentence (whether I am understanding his actual words or not) and request that he refer me to a shrink who will understand and help me.  I cannot wait forever for that appointment.  I need that help now.

I take no prescription medication for any of my difficulties.  I know myself and I know that my trauma-altered physiological changes from those 18 years of horrendous abuse and torture from birth are too complicated for any medication to “fix.”  I am very clear about what I need right now, want right now and am asking for.  Once I am through this tunnel of changes I will stop taking whatever I am prescribed.

Will this tact work?  Beta-blockers are sometimes used off-label to treat PTSD.  I have PTSD.  Will a regular doctor be able to admit if he does not know how to respond to my requests?  If not, I will have to catch him in the act of doing what doctors often do not like to admit – admit their ignorance on a subject.

After all, I was not born yesterday even though there are certainly anxiety-filled days within which I feel that way.

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I hate it when I disappear to myself and as I think back about my experiences today that is what happened to me.  No language = no identity.  I could not think and I could not respond – and it was hell.

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Thursday, August 15, 2013.  As far as I am concerned I am not an ordinary person.  I have found that if a person is not super-rich or famous in some way on some level other ordinary people are not prepared through their socialization history to process the information that would let them know every other person around them who they come into contact with might not be – well – ordinary like people evidently like to recognize themselves (and others) as being.

That seems a kind of oxymoron to me or perhaps even a paradox.  In a culture that seems to pride its national-self on being one-of-a-kind, uniquely as different as they are “independent,” and somehow unlike one another in their originality, at the same time our strangled sense of uniqueness does not allow us to be “so much” like someone else.  How can we have it both ways?  How can we be “alike” at the same time we wish to consider ourselves so uniquely special?

How does that work in our cultural mind that we can be uniquely and independently the same – at the same time we view ourselves as being identically EQUAL?

Equality does not mean the same!  Do we understand this fact?

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I ponder these questions after having spent several extremely distressful hours today tracking down some very important information that I need to know before I move from one state to another.  I need to know how my $104 per month medicare premium is being paid, by whom, and if “someone” will pay it once I leave Arizona and move to North Dakota.  I need to know if this change process is automatic or if it is something I will have to stimulate – and if I do need to “do something” exactly what do I do – where – with whom – to make this changeover happen (assuming it is possible).

I telephoned an agency on Monday that as far as I could tell has something to do with how my $104 is being paid currently.  Of course I am very grateful that there is some program somewhere that somehow pays it now.  But once I move?  I left a polite and detailed telephone message with “the right person” on Monday requesting a return call — which of course I never received.

Fortunately I live in a small enough town’s area that it was possible to drive hither and yon today trying to track down the woman I left that message with.  Offices have moved and splintered.  She was certainly not sitting at her big desk where I anticipated finding her.  But i DID find her.

I so needed the information I – well – needed from her that I did not bring up the point that insult was added to extreme anxiety disorder insult (to my body, nervous system, emotions and brain) by her neglect in doing the right professional thing in returning my call and saving me this ridiculous tale-chasing.  When I found her she did not look particularly busy.  Of course she assured me she was “just in the next moment” going to pick up the receiver of her office telephone and call me.

Right.

As time went by I discovered that this woman was at least very patient, very kind and very eager to help me solve my problem.  She did not at first know the answers to my questions but she figured it out.  I am grateful.

The rest of what happened was in no way her fault.  Was it the fault of my psychotic abusive Borderline Personality Disordered mother who hated and severely traumatized me from the moment I was born?  Was it the fault of her terrible disease?  Was it the fault of people who did not see what she was doing to me and the harm she caused?  It certainly is not MY fault that the longer I sat there listening to this woman try to explain to me the convoluted process that are required to change all that relates to my disability payments and to my insurance by stress shifted to extreme distress – to terror at “threat to life” and to sheer panic that I could not regulate or down-regulate or re-regulate.

I could not understand language.  Words fled until either nothing but sheer force of emotional distress overcame me – or a deadly inner silence within which not one thought in words could come in or go out of my mouth — or stay in my mind in the middle.

My stomach churned and then it ached and then the pain in my gut took nearly all of my attention as I became dizzy and nauseous.  What fun!  When did I approach the threshold of panic?

A long long LONG time ago.  As I sat there my body remembered that infant terror and panic and would not let me forget.  It didn’t matter that my actual life was not under any threat at all.  It mattered that my “anxiety disorder” chooses its own time and place for taking over the helm of my life.  I am my body’s captive.  It is the captain of my life – any time when something of dire importance demands my mental acuity.  Acuity?  That is a stretch of the word!

There are many “adult” technicalities to moving that nobody can take care of but me.  I need an advocate!  I need another mind, a calm hearted person to be there with and for me as I try to wend my way through the complexities – as they seem to me – of moving myself from here to 1,800 miles away there.  This is why I gave myself 2 1/2 months to get through this move.  I need time to come home to my place of safety, quiet and sanctuary to calm down and regroup — before I have to tackle some other small part of this moving process.

I am forever grateful, as I have written about on the blog several times, that the worst of my anxiety difficulties did not appear until after the cancer battle I fought 5 1/2 years ago.  But I often think that if I had known what that stress and those drugs were going to do to me in the long run I would never have fought that cancer — to end up — what?

I cannot process information in verbal form in ordinary ways.  My mother’s screaming, raging, violent and violating abuse began against me long long before verbal language had become a part of my reality.  Her abuse interfered with and interrupted all normal, natural, ordinary language gaining processes an infant is supposed to go through.  Sound and words are separated in my brain.  If I am under stress/duress and anxiety ensues I cannot hear or understand words that are being spoken to me.  My mind goes – yes – blank.  At those times my own body seems to be my enemy, not my protector.

I am challenging myself with this move probably past what is reasonable.  It is necessary for me in my life to not be here anymore past mid-October – because I need to be THERE 1.800 miles away where my daughters and my grandbabies are.  I know I am tough.  I know I am able to marshal great determination to succeed over great odds.  I also know that I am no longer able to ignore what I must have ignored all of my adulthood until the cancer found me.

I must think without words.  Ordinary people are not accustomed to being in communication with a person like me.  This is not easy!

If I were to stay here I would die of isolation, loneliness and boredom.  I know I won’t die through making myself go through what has to happen to make this move happen.  I know what lies ahead of me at the other end of this process will be very good for me.  Meanwhile – if I can’t think in words when I need to – I will just have to suffer through that.  Notes are written – folders are filled with facts – and sooner or later this information will find its way into my life changes – with or without me.  I WILL find people who care enough to help me.  I will.

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Monday, August 12, 2013.  I woke this morning from a clear and wonderful dream that I know was inspired by a combination of inputs.  One came from pictures a dear blogging friend sent me yesterday of her flat in Africa that showed a low table between the couch and chairs of her light-filled spacious room.  Another came for the 25 years I was blessed to spend among Native Americans in the northern area of the United States and southern Canada and the sacred living heartbeats of their drums. 

Another most important inspiration comes from my own soul who knows clearly I have loved rhythm from the time I was 10 years old and was able to experience the most amazing classroom event of my childhood school career.  As I prepare to move to an entirely different culture I am keeping myself upright through the stress of all this change by letting myself think as I work on my sewing projects about what would make me happy!

Drumming would make me happy.  Percussion fun among all kinds of people of all ages done without ego, drugs, alcohol or ill-will would make me happy.

In my dream I was around a collection of young men ages, I suppose, 13-22.  They were experts at rhythm.  When they took a pause from their “play” I tipped their main instrument that seemed to be created out of a form very similar to the low table in the pictures my friend sent to me.  Most any kind of long coffee table would probably due – especially the kind with the spaces cut out for large plate glass sections.  The open space in this instrument was covered by some kind of a resonating material.

I could stand and tip this instrument against my body lengthwise, or sit and play it as it sat on the ground.  Funny thing was I was having such a good time playing fantastic beats that I broke the darn thing!  Uh-Oh!  I awoke knowing I had a lot to share toward improving the percussion experience of LOTS of different people – which would include the improvement (and creation) of the instruments used to play upon.

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I tried to find a group to play percussion with here in the area where I currently live and was extremely disappointed to find the 3 things present in the gathering of 20 adults that I must drum without:  Ego, drugs and booze.  This disappointment is definitely one of the important reasons to leave here – to search for my musical percussion flock elsewhere.

Yet I also worry that given the very low state of my financial situation that I will end up living in an apartment within which drumming silently – well – isn’t going to be possible!

My thoughts as I sew lead me to think about possible options to find community people – of all ages – and a gathering spot where we can play our hearts and souls out and be welcomed while doing so.

I did a quick online search this morning for “make percussion instruments” and the possibilities are endless!  It fascinated me!  Over the past months of listening to internet radio (Pandora and now Jango) I have a collection of hundreds of appropriate drum-along song titles that I can use to pull up songs on YouTube to drum with.  I have had in mind a “learning” group that can play together without the added weight of an ego-driven lead drummer.  This will be an independent group free of any direction that takes us down a road I personally do not choose to go.

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The summer I was 12 my grandmother came to visit us on our Alaskan homestead.  She received her master’s degree in psychology with a specialization in career counseling in 1918.  Testing for vocational placement and for academic rankings along with tutoring and career counseling formed her business that she practiced for over 40 years.  On this summer she administered to me and to my older brother the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory.  Some months later she sent the very detailed typed report she so sweetly and seriously created for me.

Of course my mother used everything about this intersection of interest by her mother with her hated daughter against me.  “So you think you are going to be a DOCTOR?  You are the stupidest child any mother could ever have!  You don’t even have a lick of common sense and would forget your head if it wasn’t screwed on!  So you think you are so smart!  You think you are smarter than the rest of us put together?”

On an on her verbal abuse went (of course).  But I kept that report safe in the envelope it was sent to me in.  After working at it for 10 years I achieved my BA degree in psychology in 1980.  Afterwards (all before computers) I went to the college library and researched art therapy master’s programs around the nation and sent for corresponding catalogs.

Like my dimly remembered career direction report from my grandmother I stored all these catalogs in a box and hauled it through my moves until one New Year’s Eve eight years later a bell went off inside my soul.  Out from under my bed the box of art therapy information was dragged.  Sitting alone that night as a new year began I opened and read them one by one and made my decision.  Even though I was “a welfare mom” I was going to find a way to get that master’s degree.

I did.

It also fascinated me that after I had spent many months getting myself and my children moved from northern Minnesota to Albuquerque, New Mexico to begin my program of study I found and read my grandmother’s report.  In it she had put together what she had discovered about me at age 12 into the suggestion that I pursue a profession which in 1963 did not even exist in the United States yet.  Grandmother told me my best profession would be ART THERAPY!  This was a combination she found of my medical, scientific and artistic interests.

All these years later after I realized that my traumatic childhood has destroyed my own ability to practice my profession I have still paid the $100 per year fee to keep my Nationally Registered Art Therapist credentials intact.  It strikes me today that my drum-making, drum-playing ideas fall right along these lines.  There is hope I can do this!  Not for money – but for the soul of it.

I can PICTURE my future with the percussion and The Percussion People in it. 

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My thinking, my heart’s desires and my dream were all further confirmed by the automatic email I received today of the Baha’i Quote for the Day.  Today it read in part:

“Exert your utmost endeavour that ye may develop such crafts and undertakings that everyone, whether young or old, may benefit therefrom.”  –

From – Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh Revealed After the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, Author: Bahá’u’lláh, Source: US Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1988 pocket-size edition Pages: 269,  Excerpt from LAWḤ-I-HIKMAT (Tablet of Wisdom)

How perfect! 

We can MAKE whatever instruments we want and need, we can play, practice and perform!  What possibilities!

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