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It strikes me within minutes of publishing this post that I always feel that I am in so far over my head when writing the truth of what I know that I cannot endure it.  The intensity of my experience when I ‘get close’ to my truth feels to be more than I can humanly bear.

I have no one to talk with on an ongoing basis who will help me downregulate this intensity of my whole-body emotional experience connected to the material both about Mother’s story and about my own.

At this moment I encounter what might be the most difficult aspect of my life:  Why am I here?  How did I survive what was done to me, abuse from birth and continuously forward through the first 18 years of my life?  How did I not come through my infancy and childhood NOT being completely mad?  How am I alive AT ALL?

As I held the most-precious pure body of my newly born grandson my awareness was complete that when I was his age I had already experienced such hatred and brutal, violent abuse from my mother that I SHOULD have – in my thinking – been removed from the realm of the living ALREADY!

My rational self at this moment tells me that in order for me to continue to endure I MUST leave what I can know and do know – ALONE.

From this point another voice within me tells me that it was ONLY possible for me to endure and to survive intact what was done to me through divine, spiritual intervention.

This voice tells me that my being willing to allow this same divine, spiritual assistance to carry me through my writing work is the ONLY way I can publish a book (books) in the same way that this assistance kept me alive and sane in the first place.

Another voice of mine says, “I never wanted that suffering!  I want to keep an impenetrable petition between myself and the truth that I know so that I can remain a person intact and alive even now.”

Another voice says, “Can you trust that there is a greater and a good purpose to ALL OF THIS, that this purpose is far bigger than you are, than your mother was?  Will you accept the job of making sense out of something so awful – and therefore so awesome – that few can as yet comprehend?”

At the same time this me, this woman with fingers on her keyboard writing through tears, cannot comprehend any of this.  What I know, what I can in my own very small way understand and accept, is that I have books to publish that very well have the potential to grant to my beloved children and grandchildren something of value I can understand:  financial well-being through financial freedom.

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This writing work, the BIG writing that I have been avoiding for one full year now, seems to require of me that I step out alone into an arena so vast that I feel like the tiniest speck of breathing life that at any possible millisecond can be snuffed completely out.

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What I WANT, then, is to find some remote, detached, objective armored self that can do this work as if she were a writing robot.  I don’t want to agree to a job that demands of me that I be more wholly present during the writing of these books than I have ever been before in my memory of myself.

This is so intense.  This is so agonizing.  I stand up and pace and pace and pace and pace.  I feel apart from, not a part of this material world that greets me in this body.  The writing – my real writing – seems to exist within a different dimension where time and space and memory hold an entirely different meaning.  Carry a different weight.  Have a different potential to suck me in and never let me out again.

I pace and pace and pace and pace, with my right hand pressed firmly against my solar plexus.  I fear I will bore my blog readers to death as I move forward into this writing direction, into this place where there seems to be no beginning, no end, and only one possible doorway of escape:  The publishing of these books.

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While I was traveling I found and read The Origin Of Humankind by Richard Leakey.  Since the 1994 publication of this book even more ancient human-species bones have been discovered.  I find such information fascinating.

But what’s on my mind this morning – in regard to writing out my abusive mother’s story and in thinking about my own – is that anthropologists can determine from studying a skull of any mammal the age adult teeth erupt.  Given this information they can determine how long that species was SUPPOSED to remain safely within its mother’s womb before it was born (as well as its expected lifespan).

Humans?  We are SUPPOSED to remain unborn until we reach the age of 21 months.

Obviously due to the massive size of our brains and skulls this age range for absolute safety cannot be met.  But this does affirm how fundamentally critical the experiences of our first BORN 12 months of life are to our entire development.  These are the ‘attachment formation’ months — secure vs. insecure.

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As I consider publishing Mother’s writings, as I try my best to form a ‘coherent life story narrative’ of her story, I think today about what Mother was given once she was born.  I KNOW she did not get what she needed, and in fact no doubt (to me) suffered from neglect in massive ways – if not also from direct abusive handling and treatment (as Mother ended up also doing to me).

Birth and earliest caregiving interactions directly communicate to a rapidly developing infant’s body-brain what the conditions of the ‘world’ it is being formed to live within for the rest of its life actually are.  Of course the womb experience also directly communicates this information to a fetus, as well.

Because we are actually born 12 months too early, it is the care we are given by those within our environment that determine — in fact — the bulk of what happens to us the rest of our life.

Those of us who were NOT taken care of will NEVER have a body-brain that REALLY knows what ‘taking care of self’ means.  (This topic has been mentioned in recent blog comments.)

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This connects to what is described as a trajectory of development directed by and for either a ‘malevolent’ or a ‘benevolent’ future by an infant-child’s quality of early attachment, as outlined here:

+Dr. Teicher’s ARTICLE ON TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT

*Notes on Teicher

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If I do title the first half of the book about my very mentally ill and severely abusive mother “Born in Shadow,” I understand that I would on the parallel need to title my own early story “Born in Complete Darkness.”

I will give myself permission to mention something here that cannot but fundamentally and most deeply disturb me.  I HATED the intrusion (contamination?) of my own reality into my experience with my perfect grandson.  While I visited my family up north I could not separate the experience of holding my beautiful, most precious new grandson who was 6 weeks old at my arrival and 9 weeks old  at my leaving, from what I know about myself and about my mother.

In my case Mother was already fully within the terrible psychosis that was created in her very sick mind with my birthing, as I have certainly mentioned before.

She absolutely, unequivocally and permanently believed that the devil sent me to kill her while I was being born, that I was not human.  Because we both survived my breech (and evidently very difficult) labor process, she then believed that I was the devil’s child sent “as a curse” upon her life.

Blackness.

Mother, however, was born into an extremely troubled family and into very destructive conditions – but without an accompanying most destructive psychosis to embrace and envelop her from birth.

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Tying these facts in my thoughts to how conditions of the world at birth (and of course before) as reflected by the quality of the attachment caregiving interactions given to an infant ARE about how ‘the self’ is taken care of.  These patterns FROM BIRTH directly become the underlying architecture in our body-brain of how we will later operate to take care of our self.

When I describe how Mother’s abuse of me had a purpose, I can state directly that EVERYTHING my mother thought, felt, understood, believed and DID to me was about how she ‘TOOK CARE OF’ herself.

She HAD no other options.  This is ultimately what true madness is about.

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Telling my abusive Mother’s story, at least what I understand of it and what part of Mother’s story came to me in the collection of her papers after her death, does seem to me at this moment to be an incredibly gutsy thing to do.  At the same time I also feel relief that I doubt the risk to me of having my own full-blown body memories appear out of nowhere to swallow me up — as I know they can do when I work on writing my own story as her victim — does not exist when I ‘just’ work on publishing HER story.

I have the advantage of being clear about a severe disadvantage that I personally have.  All research, including the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study conducted by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) indicates that because I am the survivor of severe infant and childhood abuse, my life expectancy has been greatly shortened.  I do not have any luxury to believe that the writing and publication of the books I hope to write can be postponed.  If it takes all I have left to offer to this world to accomplish this task, I am prepared to spend it.

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I anticipate that in ebook format the two books I intend to epublish before next spring will most likely be titled:

The Demise of Mildred:  A Profile of My Severely Abusive Mother

Book One:  Born In Shadow

Book Two:  Her Alaskan Dream

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In hard copy print these books would be massive.  I will know more about how they might need to be divided into ‘parts’ after their ebook format has been completed.

I currently lack the faith in myself that I can accomplish this task to fruition without help.  But if no help appears to me, I will have to do this all myself — a process that I cannot imagine!!

It is most strange for me to contemplate at this moment the possibility that what may be the destiny of my writing has NEVER been about me writing my own story.  Maybe this is a stance I will need to remain in as I work thoroughly with Mother’s writings so that I can do all possible justice to the power these books will have to help others who live with troubles caused by early abuse.

These books are about a woman who DID grow up to become a monster abuser.  My story is of a woman who DID NOT grow up to be an abuser.  The trajectory of my life took a direction opposite to my mother’s.  At this point it feels most important to me to describe what happened to make an abuser than what happened not to make one.

I am not an objective reader of my mother’s story.  I process everything my mother wrote going back to her childhood stories and everything I know of the stories she told of her childhood through the filter of being the survivor of her horrendous insane abuse.

Yet I KNOW her abuse of me was not random.  It had a desperate purpose, and because I have so thoroughly considered my own story I now know exactly what that purpose was.  My guess is that it is this purpose that will tie Mother’s story and mine together most clearly.

In this way everything I know about Mother is a part of my story.

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September 30, 2012

To my dear siblings:

Hello with love to each of you.  I am writing this morning regarding my plans to epublish Mother’s writings this winter with a print-on-demand option.  If I were to choose a title today it would be, “The Demise of Mildred:  A Profile of My Severely Abusive Mother.”

Due to the massive bulk of the material I have transcribed and because of the complexity of this epic tale I anticipate a minimum of two volumes will be needed.  One volume will obviously be devoted to Mother’s Alaskan experiences as she described them in her diaries and letters to her mother.  The other volume will contain what exists of her childhood stories, her age-19 diary, short pieces written by her mother, and my memories of the stories Mother often repeated of her childhood, as well as whatever is provided to me about the circumstances of her life and mental illness as she approached the end of her life.

I welcome any writings in the form of support from my siblings for the legitimacy of this writing work.  I don’t believe that emotional forays into the past are necessary, although such would certainly be included if written.

I am especially in need of information about what happened in the family after I left home October 3, 1969.  Thanks to the detailed telephone interviews that Jo Ann V. has so generously provided I do have access to some of this information from her point of view.  I also have a series of memories and observations that Dorothy P. has provided, as well.

I need the dates of Mother and Father’s separation and the history of their divorce.  A description as anyone would care to provide about continued patterns of interactions with Mother up unto her death would also be useful, as would a description of what is known about the conditions Mother created for herself as she neared the end of her life.

Ramona has offered to do the final professional editing of these books.  Any editing she suggests of whatever you write will, of course, be sent to you at that time for your approval.

My suggestion would be that any of you who care to respond to this request simply open an email to me — and write.  Please trust that whatever comes to you while doing so is exactly what needs to be said.  I have learned over the many years now that I have been working on my ‘story project’ that I can absolutely trust the words that appear while I am in the mode of addressing this vast topic of what happened to Mother to make her do what she did to me.

It is my intention to include in these initial publications as little of my personal assessments and observations about my personal story as I possibly can.  I have — almost mysteriously so — the greatest compassion for our Mother.  I hope to describe in these volumes what happened to her early in her life to turn her into the very sick monster she became.  At this point I believe I know very, very clearly how Mother’s earliest experiences conspired in a very particular way to contribute to the very particular patterns of her severe abuse of me.  I wish to reserve  my expression of this information for inclusion in my own telling of my own story.

I desire that every single possible detail about Mother be printed before I publish my own writings.  This will free me from every having to answer a single question from readers about the contributions of Mother’s past to my story.  Mother could not identify during her entire lifespan that I was actually a human person separate from her, separate from her madness.  It is therefore an essential part of my being able to tell my own story freely that I — NOW — delineate myself clearly from her.

Steve, I thank you for the writings you have already provided to me.  Any further detailed specifics about the time-line history of events post 1969 would be very helpful.

I also want to mention here for general knowledge that I would prefer that Mother’s brother be dead before I publish anything.  From what I can tell he is just as likely to outlive me as not.  I have very strong suspicions about what happened to him in his earliest months and years of life (and afterwards) that created in him a pattern of abusing his sister.  How much of this part of the story I will be able to write remains at this moment a great unknown to me.  I welcome any insights from anyone.  Ideally I would be able to contact him for his ‘side of the story’, but such contact does not appear remotely wise.

Which reminds me — Dave, I would very much appreciate receiving from you an email attachment of the photographs you were able to take of Mother’s houses she lived in growing up in Boston, along with their addresses.

I remain stifled in my publishing efforts by the inadequacies of my computer and software.  I have currently no possible way to repair photographs of the homesteading era.  If push should come to shove, I will publish the pictures as they exist, flaws and all.  This is certainly an overall epistle of ‘flawed’ if ever there was one.  (A mention:  I have sorted the ‘family slide collection’, keeping about one-third of them.  The remainder are in Sharon’s safe keeping.)

Because I know you all have very full and busy lives I will not be making this request again.  If you have questions, please email me!  I thank you all!

With great love, your big sis Linda

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Everything I have been going through for the past month has been processed by me with clear awareness of how my disabilities caused by the way infant-child abuse changed my development impacts on a continual basis how I can – and cannot – live my life.  In a nutshell — this sucks!

Other than the big obvious, that I am completely exhausted by my travels north and back again, I was met with a nasty complication once I reached my home – my sanctuary.  The woman who so kindly and competently took care of my home, my garden and my animals had to sadly report to me that the second night after I left my neighbors’ dogs scrambled over the fence and brutally mangled and killed 3 of my 5 hens.

This woman did not actually witness these dogs – a German shepherd and a pit-bull — kill the chickens.  Neither she nor I will lie so that charges could be brought against the owners of these two dogs.  However, on another day these two dogs were in the yard again.  The shepherd was intent on killing my small dog.  Both dogs came tearing around the corner of the house.  My caretaker was knocked down by the big dog – yet she managed to scream at the dog loud enough it turned tail and ran, jumping back over the five foot chain link fence in the back that my yard shares with its owner.

The wire of my coop is also mangled in two places.  I spoke with both owners.  The immediate neighbor to my west, owner of the shepherd, laughed.  The next neighbor over, owner of the pit bull, at least sincerely apologized.  My caretaker had also watched the pit bull snatch a cat on the street out of the air as it tried to escape over a brick wall and tear it to pieces.

Neither dog was in its owner’s yard on Wednesday when I got home, and neither dog has been seen since.  Nobody has offered restitution to me.  All of this has been very very upsetting to me.

But what bothers me most is that because of the disabilities I in consequence of having been severely abused from my birth until I left home at age 18, I don’t have the ability to stick up for myself.  I really, really don’t.

I have no idea what the ‘right’ thing to do is.  I spoke with the county dog catcher who assured me that because the dogs were witnessed being in my yard that charges could be pressed for this, for the shepherd knocking my caretaker over and for that dog trying to kill my dog.

I can’t press charges.  My anxiety will not allow me to do this.  I could NEVER guarantee that my troubles with dissociation would not completely sabotage any effort I could make to be ‘reasonable’ while enduring the stress of dealing with a court situation.

I have nobody to do this for me.  I can’t follow through and stick up for myself.  I have NO IDEA how to do so, and NO ABILITY to do so even with an option such as pressing charges.

I miss my chickens.  I imagine the horror of their undeserved vicious death.  The two hens left are still stunned.  They are not happy.  My sanctuary has been violated.  I did not need this, not one bit.

And I DO expect people to be NICE!  I don’t understand myself why this is so.  How could I, a person who experienced the horrors of such intense and constant abuse for the first 18 years of my life EVER believe that people are supposed to be nice?

I blame and shame myself for being angry at my neighbors.  “How could you, Linda?  You are never supposed to be angry!!  You are supposed to be NICE!  You are supposed to forgive.”  I guess I think I am supposed to excuse the behavior of mean people.

Obviously, I am all tangled up.  I do believe that people who were raised in good-enough infant-childhoods have the inner resources to deal with such things in far better ways than I can even imagine.  All I can really do is suffer through whatever my reactive reactions are until enough time eventually goes by that this entire experience becomes history.

This sucks.  But at least the dogs appear to have permanently gone away.  I have not seen them since my return.  My guess is that they ran out to the desert and became dinner themselves for some coyote gang.  Or terrorized a ranch and got themselves shot.  “YAY” for small blessings!

I can barely give myself permission to be angry at these blood thirsty dogs!  There are just too many things to think about, too many angles — and I can’t even get ONE OF THEM RIGHT!

My neighbors have always let these dogs run.  I knew that.  I just didn’t ever guess things would get this bad.

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I have had my need to respond to a commenter (at this link:  EARLY TRAUMA BUILDS DISSOCIATION INTO THE BRAIN) who wrote while I was up north visiting my children, and realize that I do not have the motivation or the inclination to go into great depth in my response even though I am now back home in Arizona.  I am exhausted in MANY significant ways.

So for now this information will have to do because it has appeared over and over again in my thoughts since I read the blog comment.

First, there is this link on ‘Remembering the Self’.  It contains information and my working notes on —

Remembering the self

Includes mirror neurons

Dissociation

Empathy

Theory of Mind

Rules

Self

*Chapter 1-Remb self

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A series of other previous posts related to my personal research also comes up.  I am hoping blog readers will find some interesting and useful information here to think about today in these working notes:

*Siegel – early left brain development

*Chapter 2 – on neurological consequences of early trauma

*Chapter 5 – Attachment cannabinoid system

*Siegel – Emotions and states of mind (attachment)

+SIEGEL ON MINDS CREATE MINDS

+RISK, STRESS AND DISTRESS

*Chapter 4 child adverse experience

*Chapter 2 Learning

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In essence the thoughtful information that is in the back of my mind regarding the questions the blog commenter asked me about center on research that may or may not actually be referenced in these post links.

Humans were finally able to access and develop our verbal language skills and abilities at some very recent time point in our evolution BECAUSE language could ‘borrow’ the massive left brain abilities we had ALREADY strongly and competently evolved to accomplish our actions through a sequence of activities.

I believe ‘dissociation’ is greatly about a breach in the sequencing patterns related to altered formation of our left brain through early and severe abuse and trauma.

I picture a little one going down the road of their own life – desperately trying to develop into an individual person — in an environment rampant with insanity and abuse.  Every time an inappropriate traumatic response from adults in its earliest attachment environment sideswipe a child, dissociation HAS to occur.  The ongoing development of self-related experience in SEQUENCE is interrupted – which affects a little one in all areas related to ongoing experience of self in the world.

I am not going to take time to search around today in my own study notes or in anyone else’s research to document this next strong suspicion I have about dissociation, either.  I have too many things currently that I need to attend to.

Our brain DOES NOT actually allow for multitasking.  There is a bottleneck in our brain’s operation that allows for one thing and ONLY one thing to be processed at a time.

This bottleneck region/operation is supposed to be supremely fast and exquisitely efficient in its ability to get information through the bottleneck so the next action/activity can move through for us.

I strongly suspect that severe trauma and abuse during critical stages of early body-brain development detrimentally impact how this bottleneck operates.  Perhaps it is something like, “What’s in the cue gets interrupted and cannot be processed in cue as it is supposed to.”

I don’t know.

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Dissociation for someone like me, traumatically abused from birth, is a CONTINUAL threat to my ongoing experience of myself in the world.  That I DO know!

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It would be impossible to say that throwing out the Spanish dancers – and their related compatriots – is anything like a pleasant part of my trip up north here to see my children and grandchildren.  Nope!  NOTHING enjoyable about what occupies me this morning except for my hope and expectation that once THIS job is completed, I will feel better (somehow).

“Direct thy busy movements toward God…”

Now that I discovered this statement I can use it as a tool to help myself carve out a better life as I move around in time and space.  Believe me when I say, “I have a LOT of busy movements!”

I would otherwise feel entirely disheartened and condemning of myself this morning.

Four-plus years ago as I was coming along in my healing out of the terrible sickness in every cell of my body from having participated in a heavy-duty chemotherapy regime that DID eradicate the aggressive breast cancer cells that were taking charge of my body so that I am still here to notice all of this five years later……

I kept myself busy with small glimmerings of hope for the future by experimenting with making things out of laminated cloth.  I made earrings, tree ornaments (including the many, many Spanish dancers and an impressive collection of cats), wall plaque (thingies) – etc. – which I sent up north to my daughter to sell at some craft shows she attends.

I am now dealing with the aftermath — and as I tear apart each and every carefully created and bagged and priced little emblem of my busy movements — I try to remember it IS NOT MY FAULT my crafty creative attempts failed.  I was not responsible for the fact that the materials available for me to work with did NOT, well, WORK!

Layering fabric together with double-sided iron-on interfacing, then sealing surfaces with Modge Podge and/or varnish to make then stiff and durable (so I could carefully cut, clip and shape the individual separate images) – well, it ALL remained essentially sticky – so everything now has bonded with its paper label, with parts of itself, etc.  A disappointing, frustrating, aggravating FAILURE!!

It accomplishes nothing for me to continue to burden my daughter with these failed items – now I am removing and trashing everything but the little plastic bags the items were so carefully placed into with high hopes of — selling — and making at least a little bit of money — which we ALL need more of in this family!!

I am left, it seems, back exactly where I started all those years ago — and what do I have to show for this??

OK.  So if directing my busy movements toward God matters — then it is my effort, and most of all my INTENTIONS toward goodness that I offer as some kind of gift back to the One Who made me that truly matters, and not the material results no matter how successful OR how flawed these turned out to be.

What a concept!!!  I need this concept right now because there are literally HUNDREDS of various little material objects created as a result of my busy movements that I am still dismantling this morning.  I could throw the entire hopeless mess into the trash — but NOPE!  By golly, I am going to rescue these clear little bags — why?

No doubt so I can make something else in the future with my busy movements — and — Tell me again, how and when does this process end?

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