Angel chapter 33

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XXXIII.  Between two worlds

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The Great Mismatch Divide

It may be as I write my way through my story that I will rediscover my real voice because I rediscover my real self.  Am I prepared to experience my own experience of myself?  I don’t ask this question esoterically.  I am beginning to understand that when I left home at 18 I didn’t only walk away from abuse.  I also walked away from myself as the person who experienced that abuse.

I left home having a kind of amnesia about all I experienced because what I knew in my life prior to 18 had absolutely nothing to do with the world I walked into.  I crossed no bridge between worlds.  I stepped onto a jet place in Anchorage, Alaska and stepped off of it in Baltimore, Maryland (on my way to Navy boot camp).  Once my feet stepped onto that new land there was no going back and no part of the life I had known before came off that plane with me.  I had simply disappeared from one world and appeared in an entirely different one.

The only possible connection between my past and my new present would have had to have existed inside of me, and I knew nothing.  I was a tabula rasa, a blank slate of a human being.  I was a refugee, but I didn’t know that.  I was an immigrant into a new and completely foreign world.  Nobody knew me.  I knew no one.  One zippered flowered cloth suitcase containing a few toiletry items and a change of clothing – and my body.  I was my parents’ abused child when I left Anchorage and an adult when I arrived in Maryland.  That was that.

Now I am writing to put my whole story together.  I am returning to my early world having lived through all of my intervening years being someone I hardly recognize.  My amnesia, though not literal in the usual sense of the word, has been handy to me.  As long as I didn’t know who I was I could be somebody else.

Who I was in my first 18 years of life was who my parents allowed me to be.  Who I have been since then is who everyone else I have ever been in the presence of allowed me to be.  Where is my in-between-me?

When I see someone, I don’t know who they are.  When someone sees me, they don’t know who I am.  It seems to me that everyone simply lives in between who people see and who they don’t know.  In between supposedly people communicate.  Certainly they look at one another, make expressions in their faces and movements and talk a lot.

How is this different from what birds and dogs and cats and horses do minus the words?  Humans make no more real sense to me than any other kind of creature does.  I don’t think I’m supposed to feel this way.  I’m supposed to know something I don’t.  Something I am beginning to see at age 62 that I can never learn.  It is far, far too late.

Before I left home at 18 I did not feel lonely.  Mildred’s abusive illness had forced me into lengths of isolation all of my life until that point so I well knew what being alone WAS.  But I had no frame of reference, no alternative perspectives, nobody had ever talked to me or enabled me to talk about my experiences.  I had no words and no conscious self-reflecting thoughts about anything that I had ever experienced that truly mattered beyond basic facts as I had learned them.  I simply continued to live, only in an entirely different world where I experienced different things than other people did.

Teicher’s research group concluded in their 2003 article I mentioned earlier in this book, The neurobiological consequences of early stress and childhood maltreatment, that there is a “mismatch” between those people (1) who were severely abused and traumatized in their earliest life within a malevolent environment who had their physiological body-brain development changed as a result, and those people (2) who were raised in a benevolent environment and did not experience trauma-altered development.  What does this mismatch mean?  I am not a scientist.  I can say nothing about what this “mismatch” between these two populations of people is like for anyone except me.  Because what I experience even now through the body the trauma my parents caused me changed during my early years, I have been forced through default to do my best to explore and to understand what dynamics within my parents were in operation within them as they traumatized me.  There is nobody else to do this work for me but me.

Those of us whose physiological body-brain-self-development was altered by trauma have been left all of our lives without the facts we need to understand our experience of being alive.  I care very little at this point in my life (or in my writing) about the so-called clinical words the benevolently-formed people have invented to describe what they may see of the “problems” we malevolently-formed survivors of extreme early neglect, abuse and trauma may appear to suffer with.  All of us on both sides of the Great Mismatch Divide can benefit from accepting the truth that while the realities on both sides of this Divide are very, very different from one another they are both equally valid.  Both sides are constructed of features distinct from one another in critically important ways.  We each live in different inner geographical territories that are essentially and profoundly unique to our own population.

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Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD)

Children grow into verbal language.  Those of us raised within and formed by the worst malevolent environments from birth (and/or before) most often existed in our world with verbal abuse present.  (An online search using these words together, “stop the storm verbal abuse,” will lead you to some of my Stop the Storm blog posts on verbal abuse including +SOME PRIMARY LINKS ON INFANT VERBAL ABUSE that describe the devastating effects verbal abuse has on young infants and children.) 

Along with the terrible brain-mind-self developmental changes that the horrors of verbal abuse cause, its survivors correspondingly suffer from the absence of the “nutrition” we desperately needed that benevolent-world children receive through positive, nurturing, encouraging, affirming, supportive and accurate caring words.  We received nothing in the way of verbal exchange that would have allowed us to REALLY match words to our own ongoing experience of being our own self as a child alive in the world.  Through these patterns of neglect and abuse we grew up vastly misinformed and uniformed in our thoughts – as human thoughts are designed to advance into the realms of higher cognition through words – about our self in the world.

The best was I can think of to describe what my own experience was and is like as a trauma-altered person who has survived to age 62 as I live on the “benevolent” side of the Great Mismatch Divide is to use the word amnesia.  My transition from the malevolent world I was raised in to the benevolent world I entered next took place across the more than 4,000 miles I traversed via jet plane on that October 3, 1969 day I crossed the Divide from one world into the other one.  While I know now that I did not forget all I had been through pre-age 18 I did not remember it in words, either.  I did not remember what I did not forget.

The writing I am doing now requires that I work with as much of the unforgotten non-remembered information I can find within myself.  Writing requires that I now find words to describe what my self-amnesia lacks.  Because I am not a scientist I am free to borrow words from the benevolent world to describe what I know of myself as a native of a malevolent world.

I apply the fluid metaphoric content within the poetry of language to the description of my experience.  My favorite borrowed and reapplied words come from the fields of attachment study.  I do not find the cold, remote harshness of so-called clinical words to be accurate or useful to me.  They originated on their side of the Divide and as far as I am concerned most of them can stay there.  I do use Borderline Personality Disorder and psychosis as support pillars for the verbal bridge I am creating because from my point of view they describe constellations of patterns within my mother as they caused her to overwhelm my experience during the first 18 years of my life in profoundly damaging ways.

I also borrow attachment study terms such as safe/unsafe, secure/insecure attachment as well as the more specific words “disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder.”  I understand that this term closely matches the experience of being alive in a trauma-changed body, as does this next term I wish to introduce:  Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD).  I see the experience of “disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder” and RAD as being inextricably related to one another.

Although I believe that Reactive Attachment Disorder is a term that most accurately describes malevolent world development and experience, I recognize that I have to define how I use the term differently than do benevolent world people.  Language is useless in conveyance of information if there is no shared comprehension of what any word signifies (points to).  Because nobody owns the words in the Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) combination, they are fair use words that are not owned by anyone, not protected by copyright or patent.  I am free to use them to form the basis of my communications about life within a malevolent world.

In their formal use these words are applied by “experts” only to describe patterns seen in extremely insecurely attached children who have suffered from severe neglect, abuse and trauma in their earliest years.  Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) includes both “inhibited” and “disinhibited” patterns of behavior.  A simple online search using the word combination “child abuse reactive attachment disorder” will provide readers with benevolent-world generated meaning for the popular use of this term.

The fact that benevolent-world “experts” consider Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) a disorder ONLY of childhood does not stop me from using this term as the primo cable capable of carrying the most accurate information between worlds across the Great Mismatch Divide.  Those of us in adulthood who were “evolutionarily” altered from exposure to severe trauma during our early developmental stages (as Teicher’s research group describes) know what this term means as it most accurately describes our reality.  I believe that the term Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) defines the common ground of our inner geography as trauma-changed people.

Reactive Attachment Disorder does not mysteriously, magically or miraculously disappear at some age point as those children cross into adulthood.  As far as I am concerned that term describes the patterns of physiological changes that trauma made in our development that last inside our bodies for our entire life.  When I throw a bucket of words into the air that might be used to describe survivors’ reality it is those words, Reactive Attachment Disorder, that fall back to earth where we live.  I do not say that RAD is a “diagnosis.”  It describes physiological facts about being a trauma altered person.

Benevolent world experts use a vast array of technical, clinical and diagnostic words to describe an equally vast array of manifestations of how trauma altered development plays itself out across the lifespan of survivors.  Their words are no more or less real to me, however, than is my own term the Great Mismatch Divide.  The Divide can seem to be a heap of earth and stone raised in the center to create great heights that separate the malevolent from the benevolent world experience.  My term also represents a wide, seemingly bottomless chasm of separation between our two worlds.  The only verbal cable strong enough to cross this Divide no matter how we visualize it is the term Reactive Attachment Disorder as it spans the human experiences within both worlds.

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Order and Disorder

The malevolent world I was born into, the world my physiology had to react to, respond to and adapt to, the world I lived in for the very long 18 years of my childhood, challenged me in ways that only fellow early trauma survivors can begin to comprehend.  My world was rampant with disagreeable, disordering, disorienting, disastrous experiences.  If I had not been able to find ways to create order inside of my body-brain-self-mind I would be dead.  I therefore do not apply the term Reactive Attachment Disorder to myself to suggest or imply that I am flawed in any way.  I was trauma-changed and therefore I am different from those people who were formed within their benevolent world across the Great Mismatch Divide.

There is no possible way for anyone to stay alive and NOT react continually within their environment.  There is also no possible way to be alive and NOT be engaged in attachment processes.  These first two words of the RAD term describe nothing out of the ordinary.  This leaves me considering the third word, DISORDER.  It is only within this word that anyone could intimate a value-ridden belief that there must be something “wrong” with early trauma survivors.  Any thinking by benevolent world-formed people that misconstrues the meaning of the word disorder in the term RAD is missing the point that in our material world of duality, order and disorder exist exactly where life itself takes place.

Life is a series of changes that occupy the time in space where living beings exist.  If humans do not react appropriately to the continually disordering effects of ongoing change life does not continue.  It is the process of restoring order after disorder – or, to use attachment studies lingo, the process of creating “repair” after “ruptures” that allows us to remain alive.

No matter how grandiose our perception of being human might be, none of us escapes the molecular processes that sustain our existence.  Within the matrix of our physiological self, our body, we generate our response to life as we continuously react to disorders in our attachment to life in the best way that we can.  The patterns of order and disorder within a malevolent world contrast sharply in distinct ways from the patterns of order and disorder within a benevolent world.  It is the mismatch between these patterns – as our species allows them to continue – that needs to most concern us.

My personal sense of amnesia about myself in my life exists because I was fortunate enough to cross the Great Mismatch Divide into a different far more benevolent world that was the world I was formed within.  This benevolent world cannot actually help me to remember myself because this world shares no parallel “matching” experience of trauma.  In fact natives of these two worlds share entirely different histories right down to our most essential molecular levels.

I am not going to waste any energy in assuaging the ego of benevolent world people as they excuse their lack of understanding about what I say exactly as I intend it to be said.  Yes, the species I am a member of has reacted to restore order throughout our long history of surviving trauma – much of it created by members of our species against one another (which is what infant-child neglect and abuse is).

The ways that I have had to adapt myself to living in this “benevolent” world have not, in MANY, MANY ways, been good for me.  In essence I have been forced to retain my amnesia, to not remember what I will never forget about the hardships and horrors of growing up within such a malevolent world, because this benevolent world wants to ignore the truth of the existence of a world of which they want no part.

Where is the line between “ignore” and “ignorance?”  Why shake up one’s perception of a comfortable reality if such a breach can be avoided?  Once a change in the order of ongoing experience is detected anywhere a reaction inevitably takes place.  As we are challenged so shall we respond.  If we can avoid knowing a problem exists we are spared having to attend to it.  All negative judgments levied by benevolent world-formed people against malevolent world-formed people are ultimately intended to shut out the truth about neglect, abuse and trauma done to infants and children.

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Dissociation

I will no longer pretend I am a native of the world built on ignorance about the other world that formed me.  I didn’t ask for what happened to me.  I didn’t ask to be pushed so far away from the ordinary experiences of ordinary people during my childhood that I don’t even know what a person really is by ordinary definition.  When I was a very young child I fought back in reaction to the trauma being done to me in every single way I possibly could.  Mother fought back harder.  As time went on and as no help for me arrived, my range of adaptive reactive options became increasingly limited until they hardly existed at all.

I write these words today at this point in the writing of my story to create an opening for me to increasingly speak in my own voice about myself in my childhood during the years covered in Mildred’s writings.  I have to create a way to find myself in my own amnesia.  Except for a few glimpses into my own reality within the malevolent world of my childhood I have preserved my own amnesia as it enveloped me the instant I boarded that jet liner to leave Anchorage so long ago.

The act of breaking through the enclosure of my amnesia requires that I reattach to myself without reacting with negative judgments against myself as a child.  I find I cannot proceed forward unless I exactly have a cable to grab ahold of to guide me between my childhood world and this current world I reside in at this moment.  That cable exists in the verbal construct of Reactive Attachment Disorder.  This cable, this concept, directly connects how I was in the world as a severely abused child to how I have always been in the world even as an adult.  That cable stretches taunt and true through the vagaries of my amnesia.

I feel my body chilled and shivering from blasts of hostile wind.  Muscles tighten.  Teeth clench.  I summon my determination.  I understand that my own experience of being a self in my life was brutally challenged every time Mother attacked me in any way from the time I was born.  The only hope I had of survival existed inside my own skin.  Every single attack created a rupture in my ongoing experience of being my own self as a child in my life.  Benevolent-world terminology would most likely apply the world “dissociation” to my experience of these frequent repeating abrupt changes Mildred’s attacks created in my ongoing-self-in-the-world experience.

Dissociation is another word I use as carefully as I do the word evil.  Please take a moment to read again the words above I underlined.  I mean exactly what I say.  Dissociation had NOTHING to do with how I experienced the attacks themselves.  Dissociation happened at the junctures where traumatic change took place – in between my ongoing-self-in-the-world experiences – as repeating traumas interrupted my life.

I had to endure the overwhelming stimulation of all the senses inside of me during Mother’s attacks.  My attention went nowhere except into hyper-drive.  I am very certain that if I had “dissociated” during most of Mother’s beatings she would have killed me.  I had to actively “participate” in her physical attacks to protect my body in any way that I could.

While attacks were underway and during the time it took for me to physiologically recuperate after them, I lost that same amount of time I needed to simply BE a child doing what children need to do.  I had massive segments of my childhood stolen from me.  Nothing can return to me what I lost of myself in my own life during those stolen times – and there were MANY.  What I can only refer to as my amnesia began to take place across the span of time Mother’s attacks captured my own experience of myself in my OWN life separate from my mother.

I claim use and meaning of the word dissociation as I take the word across the Great Mismatch Divide into the world I knew.  From as far back as I can remember I was entirely present, fully awake and aware during every attack.  I believe it is fundamentally an inaccurate assumption that dissociation automatically takes place during active abuse.  Again, I have no memory of sexual abuse and make no claims regarding surviving those traumas.

If this word dissociation describes any aspect of my childhood life it only relates to the great, virtually impossible action of connecting these brutalizing patterns together with my own ongoing self experiences when abuse was not directly happening to me.  So great were the ruptures that Mother’s attacks caused me that I could not “hook” the end of one abuse experience to the beginning of my own ongoing self experience.  The ends of these totally different realms of experience did not match up with one another.  They would not have done so for anyone.

I see this as being simply a microcosm example of the profound differences between a malevolent world experience and a benevolent world experience.  My sense of myself in my own ongoing life was by definition benevolent.  My other set of experiences through abuse attacks were of a malevolent world. 

There was a Great Mismatch Divide created in my life to one extent or another nearly all of the time due to the comprehensive psychotic abuse Mildred did to me.  It would take a special kind of stupid ignorance to ever suggest that anyone, especially an infant or a child, could put together these kinds of contrasting experiences into a coherent whole.  By essential design these two world experiences do NOT belong together!  They do not connect to one another.  They do not attach to one another.  They do not associate with one another.  They are fire and water.

Developmental neuroscientists describe what happens to infant physiology when STOP and GO – patterns of stimulation and of tampering down of stimulation – take place in the nervous system-brain at the same time.  Simply put, when this happens “there’s hell to pay.”  If you floor your moving car’s gas and brake pedals at the same time you will get a little idea of what this experience does to a human body, especially to the small developing body of an infant or a young child.

This kind of reaction to stressful changes in the environment is certainly not the most helpful one, but sometimes a body has no other choice.  How can we fight against or flee from an attack we cannot fight against or flee from?  How can order be preserved within a body that is suffering the massively disordering effects of ongoing attack?

A traumatized little person’s body-brain will choose to “dissociate” activation of the gas pedal from activation of the brake pedal if at all possible to preserve life.  If so-called disorders end up being physiologically built into a developing person they were put there because life was preserved in the midst of conditions that never should have existed in the first place.  Ever.

That human caused trauma exists in the life of infants and children being raised within a malevolent world is a tragedy beyond description.  That we endure and survive these conditions is the epitome of a miracle.  That we made it out of our malevolent childhoods should be heralded as the greatest feat our species can accomplish. 

There is nothing defective about us.  We are trauma changed and we are different.  That we are met upon our exit out of hell by an ignorant, uninformed and uncaring population of fortunate benevolent world-formed people is just another traumatic tragedy in our lives.  That the world we knew doesn’t match the world ordinary people know creates more of the same patterns of discomfort that we have lived with all of our lives.  Although we cannot change the past we can change the present and the future.  It is in the best interests of all of us to do so. 

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Alone

So where does this leave us, those of us whose very bodies were built by suffering and those whose bodies were not?  I am left only able to speak for myself.

I must find my own common thread.  The combined forces of my childhood created me to be alone.  Within a world so unpeopled I was barred from sharing anything more than the simplest expressions of humanity to humanity.  The same abilities I used all of my childhood to remain visible as a body while remaining in isolation as a self let me leave one world to enter a different one that I have never been a part of.  I watch.  From a great distance, I watch.

Like a pendulum set into motion and left alone long enough I stop inside.  I stop.  I watch again.  This is a very lonely way to live, a loneliness that cannot be fixed.  An enduring aloneness that cannot be more than temporarily altered.  No one should have to live this way.  Between two worlds in a permanent state of belonging to neither one.  Being a person between two worlds.  Watching.  Hearing.  Suspended in life like a leaf on a tree by nothing but life itself.

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Angel chapter 29

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XXIX.  Mirroring self

What would happen to you if the next time you looked into a mirror you did not see yourself reflected back to you?  How would you feel?  What would you think?  What would you do?  Something would happen to you.  I guarantee it.

“Impossible,” you say?  Unlikely?  Perhaps.  But for some of us this kind of invisibility is what we were born to.

When an infant comes into the world it relies from its first breath and its first cry upon those who give it care to be guided into the world.  A newborn has no other way to begin to know it has a self because it IS a self.  Newborns are biologically designed to seek their self in the mirror of their mother’s eyes.

A mother who is to one degree or another preoccupied with unresolved trauma in her own life will show an emptiness back to her infant where the infant is supposed to see itself shining.  A mother’s preoccupation with anything other than her infant’s complete well-being can literally starve the self of her infant to death before it has ever had a chance to recognize itself in her eyes.

We can use words like “missing love” or even describe this vacancy as “preexisting distress” in a mother, but the physiological facts of early infant body-brain-self-development are that if a mother cannot mirror her infant back to itself in what is termed “good enough” ways, such a fundamentally deprived infant cannot develop properly no matter how well its other basic biological needs might seem to be met.

An infant’s need for its mother (and other earliest caregivers) to attune to it is a body-brain-self essential developmental requirement.  Any infant who is deprived of the chance to have itself attuned to and mirrored not only in the eyes of its mother but also in her voice and movements toward her infant will have its earliest development altered by the trauma these missing interactions cause in the infant.

Under ordinary conditions the patterns within safe and secure infant-mother attachment interactions happen naturally.  Under unordinary conditions parts and pieces of what an infant needs to have to build a healthy body-brain-self are missing.  Over time such a deprived infant will suffer from disturbances in its patterns of being alive that few of us are prepared to recognize.

Unsafe, insecure and inadequate responses by early caregivers to infants cause insecure attachment disorders that underlie disturbances on every level of being alive as a self in a body.  HOW such an early trauma survivor will be in its lifetime will inevitably be far different than it would have been if its first 33 months of life (conception to age 2) had gone correctly.

Missing parts and pieces of safe and secure attachment patterns change the way a self develops from the start of life.  These changes are complicated because all aspects of early development are interconnected and dependent upon one another.  Given enough of the wrong kind of experience an infant will simply come down a different chute prepared in every way to live a life in a world that is a malevolent rather than a benevolent one.

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My mother was devastatingly altered in her development from the time she was born (see Story Without Words.)  By the time she grew to an age of beginning cognizance the patterns of her young life followed a theme best described in a childhood ditty often repeated to her:  “There was a little girl, who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead.  When she was good she was very very good, and when she was bad she was horrid.”  For all its purported innocence, the patterns contained in those words became very real in a mantra that clinched the inevitable destruction of my mother.

By the time I had completed the process that birthed me into the world, Mildred’s mind had suffered a psychotic break along the fissure within her caused by very real enactments of that child’s poem during her childhood.  Long before Mildred was old enough to understand the meaning of those words neglect, abuse and trauma had interfered so much with the development of her body-brain-self that she had no healthy defense ability to coalesce into one whole self once she was further attacked by the influence of the disastrous split-child mantra that ran the world Mildred continued to grow up in.

“Very very good” Mildred seemed to be loved.  “Horrid” Mildred was hated, “punished” and ignored.

After her psychotic mental break there were two literalized sides to Mildred.  The all-good Mildred was her husband’s wife and her all-good children’s mother.  “Horrid” Mildred was my mother.  As a result I was not recognized by her as myself.  She had no ability to attune to me or to mirror me back to myself.

Through some miracle that I may never be able to comprehend in this lifetime, the love in my 13 ½ month older brother, John, enabled him to attune to me as he mirrored enough of me back to me that I was able to grow my own self far enough into the world to survive.  However, I suspect there is more to that part of my story.

It seems possible to me that because my mother was ONLY Horrid Mildred, and because Good Mildred had an all-good child to mother, and because my brother and I were so close in age that she could not be Good Mother to John at the same time she was Horrid Mother to me, during much of my first two years of life a safe zone was created for me by accident.  Because Mildred could find no way to be Horrid Mother to me at the same time she was Good Mother to John, the worst of her interactions with me were eliminated from much of my ongoing early experience.

It was therefore the combination of John’s adoring attentiveness to me during this time as well as the particular patterns of Mildred’s psychotic mind I am describing that saved me.  Although I am certain that never, not one single time was my Horrid Mother able to look at me, speak to me, or touch me with anything like genuine affection during this time (or ever), in the interest of preserving the entire sanctity of her Good Mothering of her little adored Johnny she did not openly harm me when I was in his presence.

It can best be said that in Mildred’s broken mind it was as if I was my brother’s doll baby.  She allowed this because she could not be Johnny’s Good Mother and prevent it.  I know that as a baby if I ever winced he was instantly at my side with the fullest intention to “repair” whatever “rupture” I was experiencing.  I also know that the “borderline” that preserved the silence between Mildred’s two minds could not actually be crossed when my brother was with me.

Did her illness allow her to be aware of the seething hatred Horrid Mother had for all-bad Linda during these times?  Did that hatred erupt any possible time she could get to me without John being present?

These early years as the patterns of Mildred’s split mind processes were in play let me experience enough safety and security that I could survive all that came next as Horrid Mother was increasingly able to separate me from John as we grew older.  In the meantime it is important for me to describe another protective factor that I believe was available to me from birth because of the exact way Mildred’s psychosis operated.

It is my belief and understanding that all humans are born with the essential characteristic of being good.  Because of the complete good-bad split in Mother’s mind, because I only had Horrid Mother, because all she ever felt for me was the hatred the all-bad mind enabled her to feel for me, that is all I ever saw reflected back to me in my mother’s eyes any time she looked into mine.  To varying degrees – depending on who was present with us – I would have heard hatred in her voice and felt it in her hands, as well.  She never fooled me because true goodness cannot be faked.  No pretending can mimic true goodness.  I knew the difference.

(I recommend three books related to essential human goodness:  (1) Born for Love:  Why Empathy Is Essential – and Endangered, by Maia Szalavitz and Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D, William Morrow, NY, 2010; and (2) Born to Be Good:  The Science of a Meaningful Life, by Dacher Keltner, W.W. Norton and Company, NY, 2009; and (3) The Oxytocin Factor:  Tapping the Hormone of Calm, Love, and Healing by Kerstin Uvnas Moberg (translated from the Swedish by Roberta W. Francis), DE CAPO PRESS, MA, 2003)

Because all the patterns of Mildred’s broken mind were in operation from the time I was born, I was simply constitutionally incapable of ever accepting the hate in Horrid Mother’s eyes as being any reflection of me back to myself.  What I saw in her eyes was not mirroring me.  It was there.  It was something fierce.  But it was never a reflection of me.

Having such hate in her eyes meant that this entire attachment mirroring process that is so essential for forming a growing infant’s brain-body-self never happened between Horrid Mother and me.  When it came to Mildred’s interactions with me, her mirror turned toward me was wrought iron black.  No part of me could possibly be reflected back to me in those eyes. 

Because I had NEVER seen myself in her eyes I never knew what I was missing.  More importantly, because I had never seen myself mirrored back to me in her eyes I did not ever look for what had never been there.  I do not minimize the pain Horrid Mother caused me.  I understand the vast impact that the trauma she caused me had on my physiological development.  But my environment did not damage me in the ways that Mother’s had damaged her.

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My entire piece of writing this morning, as inadequate as it is to address the complexities of the processes I have alluded to, has been intended to take me in the direction of an important point I want to make about one of the central reasons why I write this book.  Humans not only require attunement and mirroring with others at the start of our life, we need these processes all of our life.

If I had not experienced any positive early infant contact with my father, grandmother and most significantly with my brother, I could not have grown into my body-brain the connections, pathways and circuits required to experience attunement and mirroring between self-and-self and self-and-others.  No matter how minimal, even pitiful, the opportunities I had might seem to be if compared to nearly everyone else, they were enough for me to use all the way through my horrific childhood and through the rest of my life.

Because humans are designed by nature to look for the mirroring of their own inner self reality wherever they can find it, that’s exactly what I did.

Most tragically child Mildred heard her own experience accurately reflected back to her in the good versus horrid child nursery rhyme.  Her patterns of attachment to her caregivers were broken along the lines those words describe.  As I grew to an age I can clearly remember I found myself and my experience reflected back to me of course in the story of Cinderella, very importantly in the book of Heidi by Johanna Spyri, and as I grew past middle childhood in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.

These are just a few examples of how important I believe it is for those of us who live very unusual lives because of the early trauma we survived to be able to see our reality reflected back to us in any way we can!  Right now I wish to say that as I make my way forward in the writing of this book (and any others that may follow this one) I am aware that there may be readers who see the reality of their own childhood reflected in the mirror of my writings.   These readers will resonate with my words because they will recognize themselves as they were also forced to endure in a psychotically abusive early world.

The possibility that I can create such a mirror for others who endured what I did motivates me to forge ahead as honestly as I can as I leave a trail of words behind that fellow sufferers call follow as they will.  For all the difficulties in my life that Horrid Mother Mildred created for me, it was the very complete break in her mind that saved me coupled with the existence of my baby brother – exactly how and who he was (and still is!).  Mildred’s caregivers mixed her up completely.  They reflected two different Mildred’s back to her.

My early life was horrible but it was completely clear.  That clarity preserved me.  It also enables me and obligates me to write my story.

 

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Angel chapter 28

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XXVIII.  What cannot be spoken

“Linda would have fussed all over the place.”  It matters to me even now at age 62 as I write these words that I am still struggling to learn the truth about what Mildred in her illness was doing to me even as she wrote her words.  I am learning how to free myself from the power her words still have over me.

When I read “fussed all over the place” the deepest parts of who I am BELIEVE HER!  I feel shame.  I feel guilt.  And as I do I lose any sense of my own reality as if Mother, as long dead as she is, still owns the essence of me.

I hear all of Mother’s words about what a horrible child I was as a cascading torrential tumult of truth.  She was big.  She was powerful.  She was right.

Where am I?  Where is my foothold?  My perspective?  Some deep part of me is grappling with what her psychosis even was.  How can I learn to know that nothing Mother ever felt, thought or said about me was TRUE – because it was not real?

How can I free myself from the horror, the death grip, the condemnation of ME – everything about ME – that her sick psychotic mind told her WAS real, that she told others was real, that she told me was real?

There was a tormented man at the hospital where I did my art therapy graduate degree internship who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.  I often saw him lunge through midair, fists flying in defense as he fought back against invisible assailants nobody else could see.  Mother’s psychosis was equally real.  But because her psychosis created a reality centered on me from the time I was born, she made her reality real to me.  Her assailant was me.

But I wasn’t invisible!  I had a body that occupied space.  I was real.  How could I know she placed her own invisible demons exactly where I was?

I try a different mental tact.  I try to imagine how I would feel in the presence of any sick child.  My own children when they were small.  My own young grandchild.  I would never perceive – never possibly perceive – that anything they said or did was fussing “all over the place!”  Why do I believe it about myself?  What power had her madness that it still has me?

These words.  As I write them.  Bring tears to my eyes.  I have always been in the face of such a tragedy.  I had no other childhood.  No mercy shown to me.  Such conflict between a mother and child.

Can it ever be retrieved from within?  Is there any rescuing?  Will what was so broken ever be made right again?

Who do I cry for as I write?  What do I still remember?  Usually, of course, I do not ever entrance myself with my own reality.  I do not come this close to what I know.  What my body remembers.  Those claws of hers.  Inside of me.  Clawing away my own rational thoughts.

Thoughts fail me now.  There are places inside where only tears reside.  They cannot fight back against psychosis.  They cannot turn the knob on a different door I can choose to walk through.

Instead I do what I’ve always done.  I leave the pain alone.  I walk away, but not far enough.  Never far enough as my stomach now tightens as tears obliterate my words.

Because there were no words then inside of me to fight back against the words of my mother.  A kind of grinding silence overcomes a child’s powers because.

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What a strange road this book writing takes me down.  Some part of me seems always to be watching me, asking, “What moves you to do this?”

I won’t be done until I am done.  There IS something inside of me that moves me to keep at this writing as if there are words all lined up inside of me waiting to be put into place, in order, a process of discovery I actually DETEST.  I don’t want to know this story.  At the same time I feel remote as if this story has nothing to do with me.  I am the carrier of this story.

I hope that once the last word has been written that somehow I will be born anew.  This is a kind of surgery, as I find a place for everything I remember and for everything I know about myself and my mother.  I cannot predict — ever — what will be written when along the way.  I cannot look ahead or I will lose my place — my exact place — where every word I write for this book appears exactly (so it seems) where it belongs.

Maybe a part of me demands the impossible, wants to know what good might these books bring into the life — of whom?  I cannot tell.  I do not know.  On some level it seems I am creating some kind of a template about a nightmare that only seems so dark because I have not yet placed my own SELF into the story.  What parts of what I will say, am saying, will resonate with someone else?

I cannot pay attention to my wandering thoughts.  This is a “nose to the grindstone” kind of job if ever there was one.  I hear a voice within telling me, “You write this book because you have EARNED the right to!”

I wasn’t aware as such a traumatized child that I was earning the right to anything.  But this is a “more will be revealed” kind of job.  I will only know what I have to say as I say it.  I will know what I said when I am done.

Or will I?

I have the strange sensation that even though I can involve myself for an entire day writing a chapter, like the one I wrote yesterday (last post), and at the end my self and my mind move forward in such a way that it doesn’t matter to me one bit what I wrote.  I just wrote what I had to write, and it all really has nothing to do with me.

Pieces of some distant puzzle, a picture that lives inside of me.  I write because I want to be free of the story.  If I finish this writing, publish it — will I give it away then so that it is gone?  How trivial it all seems to me sometimes in light of the fact that there are billions and billions of stories “out there.”  Why would mine be of import?

Am I OK with not knowing my own future?  I cannot predict or determine what happens with these books.  This all is tied to my deepest need.  I just NEED to do this work.  This is a patient work.  Not rushing ahead.  Not taking shortcuts.  Not short changing the bigger story.  Not leaving anything out.  Putting all the pieces of a broken trauma story together for the first time in my life.

Knowing somewhere up north the Pussy Willows will soon open, such a delight to the tips of the fingers of a little girl.  Soft upon the cheek.  Miracles.

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Angel chapter 24

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XXIV.  One mind in two bodies

Is there an antithesis to shame?  I have never yet written about shame in Mother or directly about how her broken shame hurt me.  The topic of shame is too important for me to butcher it with my ignorance about its true nature and purpose.  It is also too central to life to ignore.

Developmental neuroscientists are the people who have given us the starter kit we need to have in order to even begin to use the word shame correctly because humans are not born with the physiological capacity to experience it.  As we grow from conception to age one we form the required body, nervous system and brain patterns, circuits and pathways as physiological channels that we need to have built within us before shame can come online within a human being.

In the same way that our empathy abilities are directly tied in their development to the way our earliest caregivers interact with us, so also are our shame abilities.  I am not even sure it is possible to think about shame without also thinking about empathy as they share much of the same physiological structures. 

In the absence of “good enough” earliest infant-caregiver interactions – most centrally between an infant and its mother – faulty patterns created by unsafe and insecure attachment will change the development of our shame abilities just as they change the development and operation of empathy. If approximately half of our population leaves their first year of life with some degree of insecure attachment disorder built into their body-brain, this means to me that this same group of little people also have both an empathy and a shame disorder to one degree or another.  These two disordered patterns within the body-brain are directly connected to one another in the way our body-brain was built in the first place through our unsafe and insecure inadequate earliest attachment relationships.

Both the empathy and shame patterns within our earliest caregivers impacted how our self developed, how we relate to our own self and how we relate to other people and to the world we live in.  Both empathy and shame are words that can only be fully and accurately understood when the processes these words represent are grounded in an understanding of their physiological operations within us as they govern our empathy and shame abilities. 

Most simply put, shame abilities have been built into an infant’s body-brain by the time the infant can release itself from very close physical nearness to its caregiver.  As an infant begins to travel into the bigger world on its own away from its attachment person to explore with excitement all the possibilities it can now discover on its own, the biologically driven attachment it has with its caregiver will come into play in new, expanded ways.  A safely and securely attached infant will be able to govern its actions in response to communication signals it receives from its caregiver who tells the infant through facial expressions, tones of voice and through actions if what the infant is doing is safe = OK or unsafe = not OK.

Because the thrill of exploration in a naturally interested, curious, exuberant young infant-toddler has no brakes of its own, it is through high quality attachment patterns of communication long since developed between the infant and caregiver that regulate the infant’s actions and reactions.  Patterns of “rupture” and “repair” help the young one come to understand what is safe and what is not safe as it moves out into the world within a social environment.

A smile with warm words of affirmation from a caregiver encourage further movement in a given direction.  A frown accompanied by a quality of words from the caregiver that do not encourage the infant to pursue its current explorations tell the infant to STOP.  These patterns rely upon nervous system (calm-stress response system) and brain development at the same time they further build these systems within the growing infant-toddler.

In a little person who has safe and secure attachment built into its body-brain, the STOP signals it receives from its caregivers create an instantaneous degree of rupture, or CRASH in its ongoing experience.  This is normal and reflects the biological shame reaction.  It is up to the caregiver to repair this shame/rupture/STOP reaction appropriately through warm, loving, firm and clear responses to the infant-toddler so that based on this repair in the ongoing relationship between the infant and its caregiver the little person can GO on again into its safe and secure interactions between self and the world.  If the young one experiences distress during its explorations it can also trust that its caregiver will be there to help repair whatever conditions have caused this rupture.

This process is not unlike learning to drive a car.  The infant begins to move itself around in the bigger world being completely blind.  It must rely on the insights provided to it by its caregiver through the patterns of attachment to find its way around safely.  It is not, however, merely our physical safety that mattered to us when we were so new and small. 

Because we are members of a social species we are designed to operate both in a physical world and within a social-emotional world filled with other people.  Healthy safe and secure early attachment experiences accomplish ongoing safe and secure internal relationships with self, with others and with all aspects of being a self in relationship with the world in general.  These patterns build our body-brain and build themselves into us before we are two years old.

It is far beyond the scope of this book to present the kind of detailed information needed to understand how all these attachment-related processes work to build our body-brain in the first place.  A reading list on this topic is included in the back of this book for readers who would like to explore more accurate ways to think about humans in the world.  We are all living in a new era in which the scientific facts about how the most important aspects of being human are designed and built in response to our earliest attachment experiences on all levels of our physiological development are being discovered.  HOW we are WHO we are as a self in a body is fundamentally shaped by the patterns within our first relationships.   Nobody escapes the impact of these forces. 

On the personal level of my writing about my abusive mother and myself, I am left trying to disentangle Mildred’s completely broken shame system from how I was forced to experience HER broken shame.  This is an entirely new area of exploration for me.  Because I use the word “shame” as carefully as I use the word “evil” I find myself slowing down to a crawl in my thinking.  I have to take apart the pieces of the picture I have in my mind formed by what I think I know about Mildred so that I will be able to reform a new picture based on what I might learn about how Mildred’s broken shame system operated as it hurt me.

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Mildred’s psychotic break happened inside her mind as her mind manifested the operation of her brain and nervous system.  It is through my poetic metaphor that I can say Mildred’s mind split in two as it created two entirely separate conflicting realities for her.  From the instant her psychotic break established her all-good and her all-bad worlds, every aspect of her experience was then correspondingly filtered, sorted, sifted and assigned to one of these worlds or to the other one.  These processes took place in Mildred’s physiology completely outside the reach of her conscious awareness or conscious control.

Words are poetic metaphors that point to what we believe they signify.  Can a mind that has broken in two then break words – that we usually think of as representing a one unbreakable concept – in two, as well?

Certainly the minds of people suffering from the mental illness of Borderline Personality Disorder are known to struggle with ambiguity and paradox.  Certainly these minds seem to utilize alternative pathways in the brain to process how polar extremes relate to one another – or don’t.  I provided my metaphoric description of how I think my mother’s brain-mind broke and reformed itself in my book, Story Without Words.  Her psychotic break cemented together the widest possible array of opposites into a matrix mind that no longer had to put forth any effort to decide what belonged where.  One half of her matrix mind held all that was blamelessly perfect while the other half held the opposite.

At this point I am beginning to examine (metaphoric) particles that are far too small to see with any ordinary tools we may have to study the human mind.  Just as we know now that an atom can be split apart, we can also know that a psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder mind can break apart words and the concepts they point to – that we ordinarily think of as being impossible to break.

The two most significant words that I can identify as having been broken when Mother’s mind broke are HOPE and SHAME.  In ordinary minds broken hope becomes hopeless and broken shame becomes shameless.  In both of these cases the relationship of one polar opposite to the other one is preserved through the root word held in common as they relate to both ends of the spectrum involved.  This only works, however, if the main reference word has remained intact within a person’s mind.  As I see it, Mildred’s mind broke apart within the main word HOPE and within the main word SHAME.

An ordinary mind is not capable of breaking these two words apart.  A Borderline Personality Disorder psychotic mind is.

I do not see this to be any kind of “chicken before the egg before the chicken” kind of circular paradoxical reality.  Because both hope and shame stem from physiological operations in the body-brain that were formed during very early rapid developmental stages through the quality of infant-caregiver interactions, it was the actual breakage of physiological “connections” that govern the operation of hope and shame in Mildred’s young body that eventually manifested in the psychotic breaking of her mind.

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I am not likely to find myself participating in easy verbal banter with anyone else about the experience of being born to and raised for 18 years by a severely abusive psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder mother.  I am left alone with my own metaphoric thinking processes to try to find words I can use to describe what happened to Mother to cause what happened to me.

The process of nuclear fission splits the nucleus of an atom thus releasing massive amounts of energy as two nuclei are created:  One becomes two.  When Mildred’s psychotic break happened her one mind split into two minds.  She identified herself with the all-good part (nuclei) and me with the all-bad part (nuclei).  She had no way to know anything about this split (or about a smaller third one that was created in her mind when she gave birth to my sister, Mildred’s “God’s child.”). 

What triggered my diversion into this topic at this point in my writing was the appearance of the world “only” in Mother’s letters in the previous chapter.  As I finished that chapter I was faced with my own inability to understand the significance of the appearance of that word as I know she used it repeatedly in her writings.  I was not satisfied with my lack of clarity and decided to turn toward an exploration of that word.

Webster’s online dictionary gives straightforward meaning to this word:

ONLY –

1: unquestionably the best : peerless

2a : alone in a class or category : sole <the only one left> <the only known species> b : having no brother or sister <an only child>

3: few <one of the only areas not yet explored>

Origin of ONLY

Middle English, from Old English ānlīc, from ān one — more at one

First Known Use: before 12th century

The word “one,” whose first known use was before 12th century, is directly implicated in my current study.  Its origin can be traced to a relationship with the Sanskrit word, eka.  This is where I needed my thinking to take me so that I am again in verbally familiar territory so that I can reassemble my picture of Mother.

One person, a mother, becomes two people, a mother and her infant.  It is evident to me that much went terribly wrong for Mother from that point forward ending in the disastrous breaking of her one mind into two minds during her birthing of me.  In Mother’s mental illness goodness could ONLY exist if BADNESS did not exist in the same place at the same time.

The splitting of her mind simply created a place ONLY for goodness in the “place” of Mildred’s body as it created a place ONLY for badness in the “place” of my body.

It was within this malevolently-based universe that I resided as the bad half of all-good Mother.  Although the operation of the matrix of her broken mind required that I remain alive as a “place” for all badness to exist, my existence could not include my existence as my own self (person) separate from her.  I was ONLY the manifestation of “only badness” so that Mildred could exist as the ONLY manifestation of “only goodness.”

How is it possible for one mind to occupy two bodies?  The “how” in this question defined all of my childhood as far as Mother could manage to “own” me.  Only one of us could exist as a “good” person.  That one was Mother.

In her broken mind some part of her was continually filtering her ongoing experience as broken pieces of both hope and shame were assigned to one of her minds or to the other one.  Even the most trivial, ordinary and insignificant of events such as taking a nap or watching TV were forced through her psychotic filtering process.  When Mildred used the word “only” she was either exonerating herself from any shame or she was injecting me with all shame.

The continual message given to me by Mother and reinforced by Father’s complicity with her was that the world (our family) would be perfect if I wasn’t in it.  The only reason the world wasn’t perfect was because there was always something wrong/bad with me.  My being alive and my being wrong/bad were synonymous.  I could not be alive without being wrong/bad because I had no way to NOT be wrong/bad – because I WAS alive.  Such is a perfect madness.

I was born into this reality.  I was told I could change my reality if I wanted to and if I tried hard enough.  That nothing ever got any better for me was, therefore, my own fault and my own choice.  I did not know it was the design of Mother’s broken mind that dictated I was permanently doomed.

I was given impossible hope that I could improve the impossible conditions of my life at the same time I was continually berated and “punished” for the impossible shame of existing as the impossibly all-bad child that Mildred believed (and as she convinced her husband) that I was.

Were my parents “only” doing the best that they could do?  While I think the answer is “yes,” I know that what I think doesn’t matter.  In my belief their eternal fate lies where all of our fates lie – only with God.

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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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