Angel chapter 18

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XVIII.  Toxic empathy

While I cannot remember the first time I heard the origin words of Mother’s abuse litany toward me, while I cannot begin to count how many times I heard those words repeated over the 18 years of my childhood, I remember the last time I let my mother say those words to me.

I presented the origin of Mildred’s creation story about me when I came into this world in Story Without Words.  Looking back now I can see that every time the litany of words about — how I tried to kill Mother while I was being born, about how the devil sent me to kill her, about how since the moment I was born I was “a curse upon” my mother’s life, about how I had never been anything but trouble to her, how she cursed the day I was born, how I caused more trouble than all of her other children “put together,” all came spewing in vile streams of vomit out of Mother’s mouth — this was always a sign that her psychosis was in operation.

Forever left unchecked Mildred’s litany always ran until it exhausted itself.  Fortunately for me as the list of my “crimes” added to this litany grew longer and longer my body correspondingly grew bigger and bigger so I could live through her lengthening beatings.  Mildred’s origin story was itself – a horrifying reality.  Mother was the record keeper.  Mother kept track of time, creating a bizarre, ugly historical account of me in my life that in our family could not be refuted.  I knew no other reality.

Even now I cannot account for my own life without hearing Mother’s words.  They informed me as I was forming into a human being.  I cannot magically make them go away.  I cannot forget them.  I have been forced to battle with my mother’s madness within me all of my life.

Her words were literally pounded into my body.  This body.  The only one I have to live inside over the entire course of my lifespan.  Her words themselves came from the depths of horror that lived and thrived within my mother.  Those words were violence spun through vibrations in the air that never escaped my physical ears.  Yet they were also given physical form with every blow matching the rhythm of those words in beatings to my body.

 Everyone in my family heard those words.  All of my siblings except for John heard them even before they were born.  My father heard them.  And as I grew bigger over time it became more and more difficult for Mother to keep those words inside her mouth so my grandmother would not hear them.  (Mildred owned her own family.  She did not own her mother.  Words she spoke against me were meant to only be heard in the private sphere which was Mildred’s home.)

If you look at the back of your hand and then flip your hand all the way over to look at your palm, that is how complete the switch was inside of Mother in any given split second of ongoing time when her psychosis switched between her upper all-good and her lower all-bad worlds.  Two minds.  Two realities.  Me belonging to the bad side and everyone else belonging to the good side.

If Mother was alive today I would be very tempted to spend enough time with her to see if I could detect the patterns in her mind that led up to the eruption of her dark side.  I have never had any defense inside of me against her creation story about me except through rational logic, and it is now too late to do any experiments of my own to try to identify how Mother’s psychosis actually operated.  The powers of reason are pathetic and ineffectual, anyway.  They are inadequate to change how I essentially feel about myself in the world.

Mildred’s array of abuse to me had nothing to do with reason or logic (except on the biophysical level of her body-brain).  Knowing that Mildred had a severe mental illness can never do more than peripherally help me to understand that the hell I lived in and through had absolutely nothing – NOTHING – to do with me.  Yet, how Mildred felt and thought about me and what she did to me could not have been more personal.  She all but invaded me and my life.

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I was on the telephone with Mother the last day I heard that litany come out of her mouth.  I had spent seven weeks in a Minnesota residential addiction treatment facility as I tried as hard as I could at 29 to find a better, different way to live.  My therapists had, magically to me, identified in ways I could not conceive of that I had been a severely abused child and that I suffered from severe depression.  How did they know that?  It was a mystery.

My treatment aftercare plan included weekly therapy.  For the first time in my entire life I opened my own mouth and began to tell someone about what had happened to me for so many years.  In one session with my therapist in which my husband was present I told about what I began then to refer to as “The Bubblegum Incident,” as I included it at the beginning of this book.

I wasn’t even halfway through speaking about it before both my therapist and my husband melted into tears.  I stopped talking about my experience and spent the rest of the session trying to make those two people comfortable again.  (I never spoke again to that therapist about the real reasons I was in therapy in the first place, nor did I ever disclose anything further about my abuse to my husband.)

Who were those two people crying for?  What inner line of defense did the words I spoke crash through within them?  Was empathy in action?  Compassion?  Sympathy or pity?

This happened during the early summer months of 1980.  Over the thirty-plus years that have passed since that time I do believe our culture has matured in important ways so that our personal bubbles have been expanded a little bit further to allow people who have never known early abusive trauma to listen a little bit better to what those who have experienced it have to say.

Empathy may seem common.  But if we consider that according to estimates regarding degrees of insecure attachment disorders as they exist in nearly half of our population, we must become very clear that for that half the physiological processes in the body and brain that run true empathy processes have been correspondingly damaged.  Without adequate early interactions with caregivers in safe and secure attachment relationships true healthy empathy abilities are compromised because they do not build themselves into the body-brain right in the first place.

Accurate communication and regulation between people requires that each person recognize and express their own emotions, accurately recognize the emotional expressions of other people, and react appropriately to them.  The research of Roberta Kestenbaum, Ellen A. Farber, L. Alan Sroufe, as reported in their article Individual Differences in Empathy Among Preschoolers:  Relation to Attachment History (published in New Directions for Child Development, Vol 44, 1989, 51-64) clearly showed that disruptions of attachment distort empathy reactions even among very young children.  These authors define empathy as “…an emotional and behavioral response to another’s emotional state, which is similar in affective tone and is based on the other’s circumstances rather than one’s own (page 55).”

Living in a society so vaguely aware of what empathy even is, let alone living within a culture where nearly half of our population lost the ability to develop true healthy empathy before age one due to inadequate caregiving, means that for the most wounded segment of our society very few people can hear what early severe trauma survivors need to say.

From an informed, compassionate point of view I say that the ability to protect one’s self from pain motivates the general shutdown of listening ability among those trying to listen adequately to trauma survivors.  This is understandable.  Such a self-protective collapse in communications happens when the boundaries that separate people cannot be negotiated in any other way. 

True healthy empathy happens when the distress of another person is not responded to with matching distress in the other one.  The trick to increasing empathy abilities in adults is connected to our willingness to face our OWN pain.  If pain is triggered in the person responding to an abuse survivor’s account of their reality it is always the listener’s own pain that has appeared.  This pain has nothing to do with the words being heard, with the person speaking them or with the “crime report story” being told.  Nothing. 

When the origins of personal pain are not recognized as existing within the person who owns that pain, boundaries separating people are crossed.  From that point forward there will be either a contamination of painful experience between these two people in conversation or the listener has to withdraw, in essence saying, “I have reached my own safe limits.  I have touched my own pain.  I have to stop listening now.  I have just found out something about my own woundedness that I need to pay attention to, explore and heal.”

Looked at objectively I can say that everything Mother thought and felt about me and everything she did to me happened because her own empathy circuits were completely broken.  Mildred had toxic empathy.  She had no ability to recognize or tolerate her own pain so she did everything in her power to give her pain to me.

Not only did she not experience her own pain, she could not process any information about the pain she caused me.  When my therapist and my husband innocently yet ignorantly allowed their pain to flood across the line toward what they thought they perceived of my pain, they too were engaged in a toxic empathy process.  As I described to them just one massive “rupture without repair” abuse incident from my history each of them responded with a “rupture” of their own.  I knew no better than to try to “repair” each of them while I was supposed to be the one receiving therapy.

The writing of Collins and colleagues I mentioned earlier contains a very helpful description about how a person’s need turns on their attachment system.  If this person does not or cannot get their attachment need met, they will not be able to adequately “caregive” to another person.  An attachment system must be turned OFF in a person before their caregiving system can be turned ON.  True healthy empathy is, as I understand it, a caregiving system operation.  It is designed to foster an upward spiral of complementary communication leading to resolution of the causes of human difficulties.  Toxic empathy creates a spiral in the opposite direction.

SEE:  Collins, N. L., Ford, M. B., Guichard, A. C., & Feeney, B. C. (2006). Responding to need in intimate relationships: Normative processes and individual differences. In M. Mikulincer & G. Goodman (Eds.), Dynamics of romantic love: Attachment, caregiving, and sex. New York: Guilford.  (pages 149-189)

While it might seem an inappropriate exaggeration for me to equate how my mentally ill psychotic mother responded to me with how my therapist and husband responded to me, I see that the patterns of toxic empathy were present in both situations although obviously to different degrees.  Some preoccupation with preexisting traumatic pain contaminated these interactions.  Neither the source of personal pain nor the emotional contamination were conscious in either situation.

It is not helpful to blame, shame or guilt one another about our empathy dis-abilities.  It is useful to recognize these failings do exist within everyone to some extent, even among the most safely and securely attached autonomous people.  Everyone has limitations regarding their tolerance for exposure to pain – their own and pain that belongs to other people.  It is within the bigger arena of healing that consideration of how empathy is meant to operate that we might identify changes we wish to make within our self and within our communities. 

What quality of life do we want not only for our self but also for one another?  We cannot get to the root of what unresolved trauma has to teach us as a species until we increase our tolerance for processing the inevitable pain that trauma causes.  Why would we take these lessons seriously if trauma never hurt anyone? 

We are designed to hear the truth of trauma through our empathy processes.  While we can easily recognize and share with one another our happy side of life, it takes a special kind of often untapped “true grit” for people who have not suffered from abusive trauma and great oppression to truly give a damn about the very real, very pain-full suffering of those who have.

Empathy abilities are one of the greatest resources humans develop within a safe and secure attachment-rich, resource-full early environment.  Most people suffering from the lifelong consequences of being neglected and severely abused in their earliest attachment relationships will never receive from other people the empathy they need.  I do not see this situation changing until the human race has significantly advanced spiritually from the level our species is currently at.

This leaves every single early trauma survivor in a position of nearly always needing to heal our own self the best that we can.  In my case, although I had no possible way to know this to be true on that 1980 day when Mother snapped in two on the phone with me and launched yet again into her “Linda is evil” litany against me, the instant my finger moved to press down the button on my telephone to severe our connection I took a quantum leap in my own healing.

While I cannot erase or even silence the impact Mother’s horrible litany words have had on me all of my life, in that one split second as I hung up on her in mid-thought, for the first time in my life I exercised true empathy with myself.  I recognized both my pain and my boundary.  I never heard Mother speak those words to me again.

I severed the umbilical cord between Mother and I through which I had been fed all Mother’s pain.  I physically felt this happen when at that instant my insides became my own.  I had stood before that instant as helpless, powerless, immobile and transfixed as I ever had letting Mother trigger my horror with her words about me from the moment of my birth.  I listened to her passively until she had moved onto the words in her litany segment related to the period of time covered in these letters as she spewed at me:

“Your kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Woodward, taught kindergarten for 35 years and she told me you were the worst child she ever had in her classroom in her whole career.  You made more trouble than all the other children in your class put together.  Never had that poor woman seen a child as bad as you….”

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I wish I could remember what it was like to have Grandmother staying in our small house with us during this time.  I can’t roam around inside of myself and find a single memory or a solitary clue.  I was nearly six years old.  It seems I should be able to remember something.  A glimpse?  The look of Grandmother’s face or the sound of her voice?  The fights between those two women?  Why nothing?

Was there anything besides competition?  Did we children vie for attention from Grandmother?  Certainly we could not have taken her presence among us for granted.  Certainly nobody ignored anyone.

Did  Grandmother surreptitiously try to manipulate our behavior so that Mildred would not notice our actions as they could have caused inevitable eruptions to happen in our mother?  Did Grandmother often speak to us in hurried whispers when our mother wasn’t in the room or was barely watching?

“Quick now, Sharon.  Come over here.  Let me button the back of your dress and brush your pretty hair.”

“Linda.  Leave your sister alone now.  Come on, honey.  Pick up those toys over there so Mommy won’t have to ask you to do it.”

“Johnny, be a gentleman and put the cereal box away.”

“Come, girls.”  Patting the couch beside her what did she say?  “Mommy has so much on her mind.  Come sit here next to me and I’ll read you a little story.”

Did we even have a couch?

Was our life as we tried to live it anything more than a reactive cauldron of chances we had to upset our mother?  Did we know how to be alive at 2, 4, nearly 6 and 7 without attracting attention to ourselves – accidentally?  Did we attract attention – on purpose?  Whose attention?  For doing what?

Was Mother always on the verge of hysteria?  Was Grandmother always trying to smooth everybody’s feathers?  Come.  Go.  Sit.  Stand.  Where was there room for us in the midst of tension and drama and reconstructions from the past as these two women battled between one another to assert themselves continually over the other?

Was there ever a truly calm moment?  A truly safe and happy one?  In the eddies and currents of this river we were swept around in was there ever quiet?  Ever normal?  Did rocks, gravel, even boulders fall from the sky in the midst of us so we turned to flee – as if we could have – under the furniture for cover?

Certainly these two women would not have guarded their speech around us as words became daggers and clubs, hissing and spitting to a roar between them as we stood frozen in place not knowing if we could move in any direction without being seen.

Grandmother.  With her pretense of sweetness.  Mother.  With her continual arousal.  No Daddy to open a door and walk into any room bringing with him his quiet words that could settle these two squawking hens down.

No.  The pecking order.  Always pecking.  Until SQUAWK!  “I told you to leave your sisters alone!”

John.  Looking sheepish.  Looking down at his shoes.  Standing straight as a soldier.  Peeking up again when the last blast of wind had passed him by.

And I?  Where did I stand in this cacophony of madness?  Was I always watching to see where my Grandma was so I could judge whether or not it was safe for me to come or go?  Where was 4-year-old Cindy, little legs stretching below the hem of her gathered skirt?  Was she watching, too?  Did we prance in the air when Grandmother walked in our door, a weight of worry off of our little shoulders onto Grandmother’s bigger ones?

Something.  Always.  On the move between these two women.  Never a rest.  Never any chance to simply be a family all cozy together because everything was simply OK.  Nothing was ever OK.  Nothing.  Ever.  Was OK.

Like water sloshing over the edge of a too-full pail.  Whomever was too close to the top was thrown over with nowhere else to go.  Mommy with her lipstick on, swishing her skirt.  Moving like lightning sideways or forward.  With her big hands, her big feet, her big voice.  Why couldn’t she have taken all her noise and walked out the front door leaving us there with our Grandma to take a breath, sift through the times of our day and our night in something like a reasonable fashion?

But.  No.  It was Grandma who Mommy chased out the front door.  Her legs all stiff like broomsticks.  Her black shoes.  Forward they went with Grandma in them, her head sharply pointing ahead because she had nowhere left to go.

This was Mommy’s house.  Because she said so.

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There must be some kind of rhythm for writing this kind of book.  I will feel more relaxed when I find mine.  I fear I will loose my momentum and wander away from my task.  It is a hard one for me.  If I wander away from it I am not at all sure that I would ever come back.  Everything I am writing will need to be worked through again, and then edited.  But I cannot stop for that now.  Here I will share chapter 7 as I wrote it today about being raised by my very sick psychotic extremely abuse Borderline Personality Disorder mother.

Angel chapter 7

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VII.  Being the child of a broken-in-half mind

If I could walk back over the course of my entire childhood from birth along a straightened road where I could clearly see signposts that marked damage done to me in my development by the madness of my mother it would be so much easier for me to understand how I moved through my childhood past those markers in spite of this damage.  I would want the markers to be color coded so I could look for patterns in all the separate areas that were involved.  How close together would these markers be to one another?  Would there be any open spaces between them where I could have been spared cumulative damage in each area marked as “gone wrong?”

A whole line of these markers traveling at least from birth into my middle teen years would tell me that mother kept an unnatural controlling hate-filled eye on where my body was at any given point in time and space.  Her verbal abuse litany, tied as it was as I describe it in Story Without Words, was the from the energy that sustained the matrix of her broken mind took when it came to me.  There were litany segments of words tied to every signpost marker I would find along the road of my childhood.  No part of who I was in the world was left out of her verbal abuse litany.

The comprehensiveness of her psychotic observations of me operated to keep me confined in her hell.  Her madness could not afford to let me out, to let me escape.  The oppressiveness of her psychotic mental arrangement (derangement) was so consistently bizarre that looking back on it now leaves me nearly without any powers to comprehend or understand it.  So I take this one step at a time.

One segment of her litany existed in words such as this:  “I can never let you out of my sight.  You cause trouble wherever you go.”  The contradictory arm of this pattern existed in words she used to isolate and confine me so often during my childhood in bed or in corners.  This segment sounded like this:  “I can’t stand the sight of you.  You make me sick to my stomach.  Get out of my sight.”  These statements usually ended with something like, “Go to bed without your supper.”

In between these two abusive litany segments, as they manifested Mother’s psychotic thoughts, I rarely had room to even move.  The road of my childhood would be cluttered with markers signifying when, how, where, why I simply disappeared from visibility in my family.

I have no doubt that these patterns were not in play in some way from the time I was bor.  Readers of Story Without Words know how I describe this happening on the day of my infant 6-week checkup.  In the words Mildred wrote about having to take her invisible daughter out into the visible world that day, she not only chose to actually write about her dearly loved son Johnny as she made him visible in that piece, but she also described how at the end of that mission newly born me was deposited into invisibility alone on a bed in my grandmother’s bedroom – where my little brother Johnny immediately ran to find me.

While a deeper exploration of how Mildred could vanish baby me from contact with my father and grandmother during my earliest months and years of life belongs in another book not yet written, I mention these patterns here as they would be represented on thousands of markers down the road of my childhood because these isolation events had become so common in Mildred’s treatment of me by my age of nearly 6 when these 1957 letters were written that they formed the nearly unbreachable fence that prevented me from even being a child.

I was the child who wasn’t.  I frequently found my invisible self even within the family’s photographic history.  As an example, Mildred marked the absence of me at play in the wading pool.  Where was I?  Imprisoned in hell.

A very long string of color coded markers from birth would read “No play for Linda.”  I struggle to find my own reality in my childhood because the power of Mildred’s broken mind when it came to my existence spun her reality around me so tightly then that I cannot easily find myself back there now.  Where was I supposed to exist between both not being out of her sight and not being in her sight?  Where was there any space left for me to exist, let alone BE a child – let alone PLAY?

All through my childhood, as my siblings so clearly remember, I was not allowed outside to play with them.  I will have more to say about this fact as I trace myself all the way through Mildred’s letters.  But a big part of the abuse litany segments I heard all the way through the years I lived as the prisoner captive of her psychotic hell originated long before the move to Alaska ever happened. 

Supposedly at some point that must have been even before I turned six years old Mildred said she let me out to play “with other children in the neighborhood” only to find that I “caused so much trouble and commotion” that she could never let me out to play again, never let me out of her sight.  Was I running?  Chasing?  Yelling?  Laughing?  Cops and robbers?

My mind cringes if I try to extricate myself even in thought from Mildred’s reality when it comes to trying to imagine – and here it is – what I could have done as a little girl that so created trouble in the neighborhood that day to deserve (“earn”) the permanent disability to play with other children, even with my own siblings?

Whatever happened (or did not really happen) that day, I was catapulted into a suffocating isolation that lasted throughout the rest of my childhood.  This forced separation from opportunity to play removed from me the greatest social developmental gifts of childhood.  Not only had I been robbed of the chance to learn about being a social creature called human because I was barred from positive adult contact and interactions, I was further prevented from being able to negotiate being human with my peers.

I have thought my way through the profound role play has even from the start of human life.  In a healthy, normal mother-infant safe and secure attachment relationship how vital body-brain building interactions are meant to take place is exactly through play.  I have thought about the fact that when any environment contains severe deprivation and a complete lack of safety and security, when continued existence is massively endangered, there will be no play.

My mother internally lived in that kind of hostile, malevolent world.  This fact created her mental illness and her psychosis regarding me.  There was, therefore, fundamentally no possible way for play to exist either between Mother and me or even anywhere in my own life.  Many of the clear memories I have retained of abuse in my childhood – interestingly – are about how my play was suddenly interrupted by severe abuse.

I remain trapped in her mind within my own mind.  I have no form of reference regarding my inalienable right to be a child.  Even as I write these words I cannot escape the fact that my mind immediately attaches the word “imperfect” to the word “child” every time I try to set myself free.  In fact, it may well be that it is exactly within the space between those two words in combination, “imperfect child,” that the splitting of this atom needs to take place.

I came into this world being the dark half of Mildred.  There was no division, no separation, no split in the atom between her reality and mine.  This was a terrifying fact for me that I had no power to name or to comprehend.  I was stuck there in terror all of the time.

As I wrote in Story Without Words, it may be the complete lack of safety Mildred lived with through the play-years of her own childhood that built this complete lack of safety-to-play into my childhood through her.  In any hostile environment no play will take place until threat-to-life has diminished enough that a renewed sense (fact) of safety returns.

On an intellectual level I marvel at how intricately effective Mildred’s madness was.  As long as she could keep me her captive proxy-bad-self in hell she was safe.  And because she was safe, she shared that arena of safety with all of her other children who then were safe enough to play.

Looking at this entire picture now I see that Mildred’s abuse of me was exactly designed to obliterate me.  I can never describe the blatant horror such a comprehensive brutal madness creates within a little child.  I was powerless to change, or even to recognize these patterns as they were perpetually enforced by Mildred.  If one has never known light does darkness even exist?

Yet being a child saved me.  I had no possible way to know how trapped I was.  Not trapped periodically, or once in a while.  I was born trapped inside the hell of this woman’s mad mind.  I think ahead into this book and see some of my child artwork I will present later.  I DID know in my essence that I was trapped.  In some great chasm of awareness I could not reach I knew what no human being should ever know.  I knew how to exist even though I was not allowed my existence.  (And remember, this began when I was born.  I was not taken as a POW some later time in my adulthood.)

I knew how to live a living death as the unborn born.

As I share with you this writing I am taking you along with me to find truths about my life I have never found before.  I see at this moment how the broken spit-in-half mind of my mother was able to so perfectly combine aspects together into a “one solid thing” related to being human that are meant to exist with a continuum between them.  (A classic Borderline Personality Disorder symptom taken in Mother’s case to its furthest extremes.)

Mildred’s split mind allowed all perfection to be hers in her upper “all-good” universe her mind allowed her to exist within.  All imperfection belonged in hell, hence in me.  My difficulty in splitting apart the atom that is in its essence the “imperfect child” – designated from my birth as being me – may well be the essence of my struggle to free my mind (as Mildred made it) from her mind.

Mildred’s was as perfect of a madness, I most strongly suspect, as could be found in the mind of any human being.  If I can disengage the essence of this perfect madness – of her perfect psychosis – from myself I find that the “perfect-imperfect” split defined nothing to do with me either as a child or as a human being.

This split between perfect mother and imperfect daughter turned my imperfection into perfection itself.  While it defies an ordinary mind’s ability to conceive of the essential, pervasive horror of my 18 year existence, the truth was (and is) that Mildred’s perfect madness made me into a perfectly imperfect being – which is in itself a perfect form of perfection.  Her psychosis created a vacuum with me living my childhood inside of it that had all goodness sucked out of it.

It is, therefore, simply the truth of existence, and therefore of reality as we live it in a physical world of duality as spiritual beings, that I was able to survive Mother.  Her madness kept her alive by creating a perfect universe for herself that contained perfect hope (again as described in Story Without Words).  This break had happened inside of her by the time she reached age eleven (before puberty).

All the parts and pieces of her perfect madness fell into place and clicked together during her delivery of me.  From that time forward her madness made her perfectly safe in a perfectly safe all good world that was overflowing with hope.  She could live there because she then had me as her proxy trapped in her hell that held not only all imperfection, but at the same time held the anti-thesis of hope which IS perfect hopelessness.

Zero hope.  That was the world she created and sustained for me.  Or did she?

In line with my road marker theme here it then becomes a moot point that I was allowed no safety and hence no play.  Hopeless children do not play.  That’s a rule of this kind of broken madness.

So – there I was.  In hell.  Alone.  Trapped.  Suffering perpetually as I was supposed to be doing.  EXCEPT – I DID EXIST (obviously or I would have been dead – that would not have worked in Mildred’s madness).  The madness required that I both exist and not exist at the same time which, miraculously for me, meant that I got to remain alive by default!

It probably does take a special kind of extraordinary thinking to make such an impeccably perfect madness comprehensive to ordinary minds.  One of my essential arrows in the quiver I was born with that allowed me to endure and survive was my inner determination and resolve to do so.  Because Mother’s madness required that I remain alive, this arrow was allowed to fly, and it flew straight and far.  She would have had to kill me to stop my arrow from arching its way forward down the road of my childhood from the moment of my birth until I was allowed, finally, to escape her.  It is that same arrow of determination and resolve that leads my pen forward word by word through the writing of my story.

Inside of me, separated as I mentioned from my mother by the sacred membrane we are all born with, I did what I was supposed to do.  I lived.  Although everything viewed about me from the outside as I was defined by Mildred’s psychosis as being perfect imperfect determined my essential hopelessness to change the course of my life, that reality could not cross my sacred membrane to contaminate or toxify me on the inside of who I was/am in any way.  Just as the fetus is protected from certain pathogens because they cannot cross the placental barrier, so too I was protected by this sacred barrier from being essentially harmed by Mildred.

The circumstances of my life, of my existence were – to put it most mildly – nearly as hopeless as they were designed by Mildred’s madness to be.  But because hope exists as an inherent characteristic of the soul, my hope – as unnamed as it was until now – never failed me.

I have moved forward through this writing past any need to concern myself with the splitting oof “imperfect” from myself as a child.  The split between Mildred’s own mind’s conception of the lost relationship connections between “perfect and imperfect” created that whole damn mess in the first place.  That mess was never mine.  It hurt me as I lived through it, but it never had a single solitary thing to do with me.

Such a burden as my childhood was possibly had only one purpose.  If there is some reason why it is necessary and therefore important to understand the depths of breakage possible within the mind of an infant-child who survived what they could not endure, this story describes such a madness.  Nothing about the patterns of my childhood ever allowed me to ask any question about what was happening to me or why.  I was thus spared any effort to answer a question for which I could have found no answer. 

I am not sure there even is a split between the impossible question and its impossible answer.  Perhaps they are a “one thing” together that cannot be broken apart.   If some unfortunate child should split apart such a question/answer they are running the risk of “going mad” just as my child mother did.  I know from Mildred’s childhood stories (in Story Without Words) that she did ask questions.  She did search for answers.

The inconsistencies in Mildred’s life created opportunity for questions to appear in her mind that she instinctively and bravely wrestled with for answers that did not exist.  My childhood was consistently horrible.  Nothing was inconsistent, thus sparing me the risk of ending up with a broken mind.

Had the madness that hurt my child mother been as perfect as the madness that hurt me, I would not be writing this story now.  I am tackling the unwinding of my experience at age 62.  Mildred began trying to unravel her misery while she was yet still a young child.  Really.  What chance did she have to come out of her childhood whole?  None.  Obviously.

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As I work on writing my current book this morning I remind myself about how impressed I am with the information contained in this series of blog posts on attachment in adult relationships: 

+CAREGIVING IN ADULT ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIPS

– so here I am recommending a read of this material yet again on this blog!

I no longer hold any hope that I can create a good relationship with a partner in my lifetime.  At age 62, after having been single for nearly 30 years, I still consider this one of the most damaging consequences of my abusive childhood.  Some things are possible, some things are not.  For me, there isn’t enough safe and secure attachment wiring inside of me to cover more than the amazing attachment relationship I have with my three grown children and with a few good friends.

But had anyone given me the kind of information contained in the links this post points to a long, long time ago in my life, I think I could have made a great partner relationship work.  I don’t have the energy or the willingness to try to learn and practice what I would have to at this point in my life.

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II.  A dimly browning memory

One part of Mildred’s bizarre psychosis involving me as her chosen child in hell had to do with the fact that in her mind I was a failure at getting and being sick.  It takes a special kind of mental illness for a mother to rage against a child for not getting sick often enough or bad enough as if I evilly intended that these patterns occur.  Mildred had that kind of an illness.

The chronic message given to me in every way she could possibly convey it (and hence to my siblings) was that I was supposed to suffer because I deserved ONLY to suffer (a component of being the devil’s child in hell) while her other upper world all-good children were NEVER supposed to suffer because they did not deserve to.  It certainly never broke Mother’s heart to see me sick. 

I have always held a vague sense of memory that seems to be connected to my having chicken pox.  I am in bed around age 3 to 4 I believe in the Altadena house.  The fact that I “only had six pox” while poor darling Cindy (she never asked for this distinction any more than I asked for mine) later suffered greatly with many chicken pox was brought up to me in Mother’s verbal abuse litany against me throughout the rest of my childhood. 

Mildred was always marching against me with her army of abuse possibilities.  The most important point regarding my health as a child is that no matter what Mildred thought, wished for or said it was a powerful protective factor for me that I was tough, strong, healthy with great stamina and physical resilience.  Had I not been born this way I would not have remained alive.  When it comes to the balance between severe abusive physical trauma in my childhood and frequent periods of forced confinement and isolation, I now understand that those ‘down times’ after Mildred had exhausted herself physically by beating me allowed my body to crash and recuperate.  (The isolation was, of course, far more frequent and prolonged than what I needed for this physical restoration.)

When it comes to the varieties of abuses Mildred had in her arsenal to attack me with, her verbal abuse in regard to my ‘refusal’ to get sick often or badly enough had very minor impact compared to all else I endured.  Because I had never been loved by Mother, and because nobody ever betrayed me by pretending they loved me ‘sometimes’ if I was good enough (as happened to Mildred when she was a child), I was not psychologically damaged by this abuse approach.  I carried such a burden of terror and grief all of the time that no matter how often Mildred used this particular weapon it held no power to make me feel worse than I always did related to my reactions to her abuse of me.

This fact was not a sign of my invulnerability to pain.  It was a sign that there was only so much suffering I could bear.  I had far worse things to worry about and deal with when it came to what Mildred did to me.  It will be seen in Mildred’s future letters and in photographs that I am often outside the family close-closed structure (as in the picture on the cover of this book) and missing entirely from many pictures of happy events. 

It was Mildred’s psychotic permanent and pervasive separation between her adored, cherished, darling other (upper world all-good) children and me as the devil’s child in hell that hurt me.  All these ‘minor’ ways Mildred conveyed her feelings about me were simply facets of a many-sided weapon of Linda destruction.  I was caught with Mildred in a perpetual struggle between her wanting me dead and needing me alive at the same time.   I suffered and endured because I had no choice, yet I was still a child who had to pass through developmental stages over the course of my childhood that I could neither skip nor resist.

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At least five hours have passed since I wrote about my vague sense of a memory that I suspect is connected to my being sick with chicken pox.  My mind keeps returning to this sense.  To this unseen scene.  I am aware that I feel sick.  My body is sick.  I cannot see anything specific or clearly, yet it is as if I have my eyes open in that time and place that were left seeing something then that only appears now as if my own eyes are mirroring back to me a vision of a brownish cast of dimming light in the room connected to two other brown dim rooms.  I am small.  My body is small.

I can see the outline of a window close to where I lay.  A tall window.  A low sill.  Lit with a brighter soft light.  I know the window is at the front of the house to the right of the door if you were coming in.  There are trees out there, grass, a sidewalk, a street.  I have a sense I want my Daddy.  I want him to walk up the sidewalk, come up the sidewalk right now and in the front door.  He does not come.  He isn’t there.

I have a sense something happened suddenly.  Unexpectedly when I was lying in this bed.  Mommy is very mad at me.  She is very big.  She wears an apron.  Her sudden rage hit me like a shock wave rolling all the way through my body but it stuck there and stayed there and has never left that spot I cannot see at all clearly now. 

I was startled.  The startled did not stop.  A shiver on my insides that didn’t stop even when it froze there.  Her attack came screaming at me out of nowhere.  I did not understand.  Something froze in me.  A part of me is stuck there in a world that no longer exists.  Made of thickening browness like almost solid smoke.  A part of me waits.  Nothing moves anymore but my eyes.  My eyes stayed there seeing and my ears hearing – something – where there is nothing left to hear.  Something is scaring me.

My being was invaded with fear and a sense of guilt for something I could not comprehend.  I was paralyzed.  Part of me there now in that brownish dim room memory.  I know where my head was on a pillow.  I know where my feet were and what direction in the room they were facing.  In a bed.  With blankets.  By a window.  Near the front door.  First I was sick and safe and then I was sick and not safe.

A vague sensing memory that makes no sense and probably never will that has something to do with my sister Cindy.  Something to do with me being sick but not sick enough and it is all my fault and all my fault that Cindy gets sick.  Sicker than I do.

I was so deeply confused.  Words.  Her angry words at me that tell no sense to me.  My world.  Turned into nonsense.   I know I am supposed to do something because I did something wrong.  But I don’t know what I did.  I don’t know what I am supposed to do.  This part of me stuck back there in time will probably stay there until I die.

Circumambulating this memory from within as it feels like from without as I write I have an awareness that because I WAS sick, probably with a fever, I felt very strange in my body and thus the world felt strange.  Sickness must have been such an unfamiliar experience for me.  To have my body in a state of weakness.  Of decreased strength and stamina.  I probably knew instinctively even at three or four years old that this increased vulnerability put me even more at risk and in danger.

It also strikes me as I write that perhaps this memory belongs to what I would call a ‘genesis incident’ and is, therefore, a genesis memory.  I remember very clearly and always have even very early experiences that Mildred took as crimes I committed that each proved my guilt around some fatal flaw.  These genesis incidents became segments of repeated memory as they were chanted over and over again, brought up during beatings throughout my childhood.

It may well be that my not being sick enough or often enough, etc. crimes were added to Mildred’s litany exactly at the time my dimming brownish room experience took place.  This may well be the origination point of this litany segment.  Perhaps I am not clear to myself in my memory related to this experience because I was in my sickened, weakened body at that time.

In addition, I would have been fully aware by this age of Mother’s doting on her darling children when they were sick.  It may be that this incident was the first time it was made very clear to me that it was impossible for me to receive the attention and affection my siblings received from Mother when I was sick.  Maybe that is exactly what Mildred’s psychosis wanted me to learn.

While it was impossible for me to feel resentment, jealousy, envy, anger, self-pity, curiosity or wonder connected to my experiences in the world, or to even question what happened to me or why all the way through my childhood, this fact would not have prevented this experience from having a profound impact on me – one I was helpless to understand and one that I have never forgotten.

Any time Mildred’s psychosis was triggered toward me I would instantly be disconnected from any contact with my siblings (a state that often lasted for days or weeks at a time).  At these times I was completely deprived of the nurturance I received by being with them in any way.  By the time I crossed into the ages above three and my brother, John, into his ages above four I know that Mother was increasingly able to corrupt his ability to reach me when I needed him most – and when he needed most to respond to me when I was in greatest need.

Although Mother had absolutely no power to change John’s love for me, she was able to begin to corrupt the sustenance within our relationship.  Because his love had sustained me since my birth, the loss of contact with him when Mildred attacked me (which was frequently) meant that I was separated from the only love and attachment I had ever known.  When I needed him most and he could not come to me, and I know he knew when this was, my brother was in hell.  He has remembered his powerlessness to help or to rescue me with a sense of guilt all of his life.

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It was one of John’s most important protective factors that he had been born the first child, doted upon and nearly worshiped as a son, until he was nearly 14 months old when I was born.  Importantly he was not exposed in the womb to Mother’s super-heightened stress hormones as she attacked me.  Neither, of course, was I.  (Mildred’s ‘problems with me’ didn’t begin until the time of her difficult labor with me, as explained in Story Without Words).  All of my younger siblings experienced Mother’s insane levels of abuse of me in some way from the time they were conceived and from the time they were born.

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Here I am the next morning, sitting outside as the high Arizona desert sun rises.  February 2, 2013.  Pen in hand.  My Family Dollar Store $2 spiral notebook.  Out in my long black down jacket with my morning cup of dark brown coffee lightened with vanilla flavored powdered cream as a treat.  Gift from my daughter who lives 1700 miles away from me.

And with my brown tobacco cigarette.  I know clearly when I smoked my first.  Age 16.  Money dropped into the machine in the Westward Hotel in Anchorage.  Pack of Kools in my hand.  Firm.  Smooth.  Square edges.  Richness.  Open it.  Smoke my first.  This story will grow into my story later in my writings.

I have not been able to walk away and leave behind my need for comfort from this addiction that at age 62 I know is killing me.  I look inside.  I know.  I realize.  Last night when I returned to visit little girl.  Memory related to me.  Frozen with words.  Without comprehension.  Mother raging at me all confused.  Never having fully left that dimly browning room.

I look around as the sunlight creeps among the shadows now.  Bright dashes here and there across the dampened desert soil of my garden.  Brown.  So many shades of brown.  Darkened dead leaves shuffled under climbing rose bushes.  Rotting.  Enrichment of the soil from worm digested compost.

And here sits I.  Alone.  Of course.  Listening to chirping morning birds, soft cooing inner chuckles of doves who seem to know secrets.

Shadows of leaves brown against the light tan paint of this old house I live in.  That plant seems to be a magic plant I’ve never seen elsewhere.  It is growing a trunk below the roofline where the water runs and drips.  A wise plant.  Chose its perfect spot.  It keeps its leaves.  Keeps them green.  Grows up to peek its newest twigs inside my bedroom window.

Smoking comforts me.  So many forces.  Growing up.  Against me.  Memories from childhood.  Yes.  All connected running through tangles of contact between ‘then’ and ‘now’.  Smoke traveling in air.  I set it free from my browning lungs.  Smoke.  Travels.

I think of the pipe of my father.  In the Jeep’s own womb.  Traveling.  Interminably repeated long hours of travel home and out of the valley again.  Crowded, encapsulated.  A family traveling at the speed of Jeep on rough, rough roads.  Together.  Alone.  Through the ever changing wilderness.  Inside with Velvet pipe tobacco smoke.  Outside.  A world so vast.  Free.  Remote and distant.

We.  The pack.  The Lloyd family.  Above question.  Beyond reach.  Linda.  Always threatened.  Always at the center.  At the bottom.  Always there.  There in a world of dimming brown shadows while the light, the natural light, belonged in other people’s lives.

Such a message given to me as a child.  No right to joy or health or even to my life.  “Shame on you for rejecting sickness!”  What power did I have to wish sickness of my siblings and make it happen?  “Set them free, Linda!  Set us all free!  Damn you anyway, you unsick child!”  Yes.  I remember.  I remember well perhaps with every puff I have ever taken from a cigarette.  The single stupid regret of my life.  That I ever started smoking in the first place.  I don’t love myself enough to stop.  I can’t see far enough ahead of me to know if I ever will.

Smoking draws a line between those moments of life when I as the creator of smoke am involved in also creating its freedom and those moments when I see and smell and watch no smoke at all.  As if in an arctic winter cold I open my mouth, exhale, and see no vapor to comfort me because I am alive.  Simply alive.

So many days and days that could never be counted.  Punished.  In bed.  I was not sick.  I was helpless.  I could not rise and say with shouts and screaming, “I am done with you Mother! I am done with you.  I want no more of you forever!”

There would have been a look of shock upon HER face.  I could have watched her.  Startled.  If I could have persisted she would have turned into vaporous tendrils of drifting smoke herself.  Disappearing.  Leaving us behind.  Together.  It would have been so quiet then, a kind of peace we never knew as long as she stayed.  An invader.  The culprit.  The source of turmoil and strange behaviors that most certainly troubled me.

But no.  She remained.  She didn’t even shrink as I grew older.  No bad genie returning to her bottle.  If she would have would have I found the family shovel and buried her then in the browning blackness of Alaska soil?

She is there now.  Ashes.  Gone.  Do I wish her unhappiness?  I hope not.  She came.  She went.  No differently than I, at the end.  It is our own sense of inner peace we’re after.  High or lowly.  Long or short.  In the end.  All a teensy wisp of smoke.  Gone.  Off to some other world where all that’s come before and hangs around with memory traces in our body, in our mind, things that trap and chase.  All gone, too.  From this world.  While the greenish yellow fluffy birds of winter twitter amongst the gray twigs and branches.  Free.  Watching our life and then our disappearance while the sun of a clear day rises.

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Mountain Bound Angel

if i took on the task of surviving my childhood

if i took on the task of telling this tale

i could not have survived without that mountain

i was bound for that mountain from the time i was born

once i reached that mountain it became my mother and my father

i walked upon that mountain as if i had found home

i found love

i found that which ONLY had the power to save me

across the valley was the other

mountain bound angel

made of stone snow and ice

alive to me

she kept me alive

like an infant sees in its mother’s face

the image of itself reflected back

each time i looked at the mountain bound angel

across from me

I saw reflected back to me

myself

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Mildred truly was a madwoman.  I mean her no disrespect (long dead as she is) by saying this.  I am continually astounded as I work toward writing my entire life story by how truly, absolutely and incredibly brilliantly MAD that woman was!

Some part of me fears that if I state the truth as I understand it about the reality of my 18-year childhood of abuse from that woman I will cross a line beyond which no ordinary human mind can follow.  I would not be surprised if that turns out to be the case.  There are madnesses, and then there are MADNESSES that appear upon a million efforts of study to be so vast as to defy human comprehension.

Isn’t that where true madness lies?  Beyond comprehension?

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I am yet again clearing my thinking, writing mental pallet (not palate) – and I mean this skid packed to the moon with tidbits and shards as they existed in Mother’s broken mind — and contaminated this woman’s children’s childhood.  Certainly mine.

I thought I began writing my next book yesterday.  Today I admit I am completely lost, so lost there is no way OUT going forward.  No way at all.  I was going to write the story of my own childhood for the first time in my life, making use of the time line created through the completion of the seven volumes of Mother’s writing to be published in a series titled Mildred’s Mountain.

I thought this would be at least a possible task, given that I have finally laid out the basic history of my childhood in Alaska.  But I made the mistake of peeking backward toward my life from birth to nearly my 6th birthday when the family’s move to Alaska took place.  I thought I could track and find which houses we lived in during those first 5 years of my life.  WRONG!

I could say I have never felt so desperately lost in my life as I have in these past 48 hours, but that’s not true.  I spent the first 18 years of my life under the influence of Mildred’s extensive, nearly perfect madness.

I have found that it is currently a complete impossibility to track where we lived for how long with the moves in between from the time of my birth August 31, 1951 to the day my father left for Alaska June 9, 1957.  I have records in baby books, records of photographs, records written by Mother to correspond to photographs taken during those years.

Why am I surprised to find that NOTHING MAKES SENSE?

There is no order in the record of those years whatsoever!

It astounds me to find that the evidence of the psychotic broken-in-half split mind of Borderline Personality Disorder Mildred consistently inconsistently identifies nearly every house we moved in and out of during those years by two different names?  Sometimes by the corner avenue and sometimes by the same corner’s street – even the two houses have split personalities as does her record of any life we may have managed to live within.

Mildred’s lost mind evidently did not accurately track when they bought which house, either.  I have given up.  All I know is that there were at least five residences during the first five years of my life.  There are missing moves, missing addresses, missing missing missing as if they were sucked into a variety of vortexes (of course not just one) — as if the houses both existed and did not, we lived in them and did not, we moved and we did not.

Adding mayhem to madness, I cannot write this way.  I have long known that even though there are 500,000 words of Mildred’s story approaching publication, I have reserved for the future the body of her diaries written from 1945 up to the Alaska move.  I have always known at some point I will return to these first years of my existence in a body on this earth to write that part of my story based upon the history in that era of Mildred’s diaries.

That time is not now.  Even though I wrote a first shambled chapter for my next book/s Angel on the Mountain yesterday, that I could not finish because the history I was trying to identify of residences and moves prior to Alaska is in such a state of perhaps permanent disarray that this story cannot be repaired (?), and even though I have completed a second chapter — I realize those chapters belong to that OTHER book before the Alaska move took place.

I will save that work, of course, but I must begin again and a different, revised beginning for my next book.  The moving of Mildred was – as I am ever more clearly comprehending – as much a manifestation of her deep, deep mental illness as was her psychotic abuse of me.  I cannot think my way through the history of those pre-Alaska moves because that history was lived but was never accurately written.  I thought I could write it.  At present I accept that I cannot.

I begin again on Angel on the Mountain as I begin for the first time in my life to tell my own self the story of my childhood at the same time I write it for publication.  Unless I get lost yet again….

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