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I fell into a chasm today.  I don’t know when but I probably know how.  Being a bridge between the lived experience of being a being so changed by early caregiver relationship trauma (as “they” call it) means I live with a different kind of geography inside of me.  There are breaks where they shouldn’t be.  There are gaps and losses, wishes and hopes smashed, missing pieces,  lost dreams.

Somewhere in all my neuroscientific study today I encountered a piece that said, “60% of Americans experience at least one severe trauma in their lives and 40% don’t.”

I can’t remember where I read that!  Of all the notes I took today I lost the reference for that one.  The most important one it seems to me as four hours after first trying to sleep tonight I am still awake, still struggling.  How is it possible for any one person to go through their entire life without a trauma?

What world does that happen in?

Am I that out of touch?  60% is still a LOT of people.  And there’s us.  Those of us who knew very little that wasn’t trauma when we were little.  At least that was my world for my first 18 years.  I feel like I life on some skinny jut of land out into some foreign dark water where no other life I can see or hear keeps me knowing I have a void inside of me that will not be filled in this lifetime.

I try to study the actualy facts, the neuroscience research that documents this and that and that and this that goes so wrong in the entire developing brain and body of a baby exposed to severe, chronic, unending, unendurable trauma that – indeed – life makes sure we survive.  Thinking in all those cold hard facts seems to have snapped something inside of me, some little warm connection I seem mostly to keep ahold of — that today I lost.  Completely lost.

I am wondering if that kind for dense close cold reading took me far out to sea and then left me there to live or to die.  Yes.  These things do happen.  But I didn’t see this coming.  I didn’t see myself going out with some invisible tide in the ‘abstract’ direction, so far out now when I try to sleep I can’t seem to find my real self anywhere.  Not that I am certain that I HAVE a real self, but I usually have at least some makeshift version of a real self I at least DON’T FEEL LIKE THIS!

All those researchers, psychotherapists, news people, book writers who so seem to have ALL the answers.  If they don’t they seem to be quite sure of themselves and quite content stating whatever small facts their particular focus of study has given to them.

Then.  Here I am.  A continent of discontent — and I now know why — but I don’t think I belong to the group that can PROVE what I know.

I’ll get past this.  I always have found a way to go UP again after I have gone DOWN again.  I think there’s a kind of lesson in how I feel right now.  I was not cautious.  I did not monitor my emotional reality state as I plowed and plowed through information about the insides of all of us.  What does right.  What goes wrong.  I will have to more carefully consider where I am going to take myself and my mind next in my work on this trauma thing.  Carefully consider.

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I am doing some writing about how trauma changes an infant’s developing brain.  Heavy developmental neuroscience in there.  But, maybe I can keep this in my chapter titled Dry Ice and Fire Ants.  The chapter is specifically about how the heat of the arousal in the brain from a trauma trigger of the  ‘GO’ branch of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) kicks in during trauma only to be frozen out by the ‘STOP’ branch’s energy conservation response.  Both responses can severely damage infant brain and nervous system development in environments of chronic abuse and trauma in early caregiving relationships.

Is this memory accurate?  I have no idea, but it’s always stayed just like this.  I wish I could find a classmate from around 1960 – 1962 that could confirm or deny the validity of this one:

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+DRY ICE AND FIRE ANTS

I have childhood associations to both dry ice and fire ants.  My fire ant memory originated when I was five before our family joined my father in Alaska.  Supposedly, according to my psychotic mother, I “let” my two-year-old sister sit on a fire ant hill because I was so irresponsible when she asked me to watch my sister (I doubt that she had), or maybe because I hated her.  (This story is in the first book of the Mildred’s Mountain series containing Mother’s letters in Suburbia to Alaska.)  Because I was beaten over the remaining years of my childhood for this supposed ‘crime’ I had committed I clearly remember those fire ants. 

Dry ice belongs to an Eagle River Elementary School memory from the day a fireman came to talk to us at one of our many school assemblies.   All the children filed into the auditorium just as he finished setting up his display on the stage.  Dressed in his full fireman outfit this speaker was the most impressive yet.  He got my fullest attention.  Especially when he got to the part of his talk when he waved a carrot slowly through the air in front of him like a magician would brandish a magic wand (although I had never seen either) and then laid it very carefully in the center of a block of dry ice smoking in a pan sitting on a table beside him.  Next he put on his gigantic leather fireman gloves and made a big show of picking up a second block of dry ice that had been smoking away in another pan and set it carefully down on top of the carrot.

I then became very distracted from thinking about the carrot as Mr. Fireman gave a big speech about the importance of having a fire extinguisher in every household.  Although I didn’t really even know what such a thing was, I sure knew we didn’t have one.  But I soon learned that’s why the fireman came.  To teach us about fire extinguishers.  Both the good and the bad of them.

There he was, bellowing across the heads of all we little kids as he made sure we understood that “NEVER NEVER EVER EVER put your finger in the way of a fire extinguisher in use!”   Roar!  Hiss!  SWOOSH!  He aimed white spray into a garbage can while he told us that if he took his gloves off and put his finger into that spray it would FREEZE SOLID. And then if he touched anything it would break into a million pieces. 

A finger?  A million pieces?  Grim.  Very very grim.  I was suitably scared before he even got to the next part of his demonstration.  He put his fire extinguisher down, reached over to lift the top block of dry ice off of the carrot, and put it back in its pan.    Then with his very large glove hands, he managed to pick up the carrot and hold it high in the air over his head.  “Watch this very carefully children,” he said to us with words slow and definite.  Pausing for emphasis and then pausing a little more.  We were hushed.  Silence.  Then CRACK!  He dropped the carrot to the stage floor and yes indeed it disappeared into a million shattered pieces.  “That would be your finger!” 

But actually the words in this title are exactly backwards from the way I should have written them.  I just liked the sound of those words the way I wrote them.  I liked the imagery of the ice smoking and melting followed by tiny ants scrambling off to do whatever fire ants do – assuming they are not under attack from a fire extinguisher.

 As I progress through this chapter I will write about heat before cold.  GO!  Before STOP!  Fire ants before dry ice.   The topic of this chapter is about what is very likely to happen inside the rapidly developing right brain hemisphere and the developing nervous system of an infant in its first and second year of life if it is exposed to repeated patterns of trauma through neglect and abuse.

Most of us probably know more about how Burger King makes French fries than we know about how our brain operates or how our attachment interactions with our primary caregivers during our infancy give our brain the information it needs to build itself in cooperation with our earliest environment. We cannot talk about what goes right and what goes wrong during these most rapid, most critical early brain-building periods of our development without being able to use some basic words to describe these processes.  While many of these words might not be familiar to us, we can learn them – because we must.  We cannot learn about how early traumatic stress damages an infant’s growing brain without this information.

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Programmed cell death (PCD), happens through an orderly pattern of events carried out by cellular machinery intrinsic to cells.  Cell death by suicide is called apoptosis.  (There is no consensus about how to pronounce apoptosis:  some say APE oh TOE sis; some say  uh POP tuh sis.  I prefer A POP TOSIS, like bad popcorn breath.)  This process is as necessary for proper development as mitosis is.  (Cells having a nucleus of genetic material contained in a membrane envelope go through mitosis as part of the cell division.  Mitosis divides chromosomes into two roughly identical sets in two separate nuclei that will end up in duplicate, or sister cells.)

Apoptosis reabsorbs a tadpole’s tail before the frog hops out; removes the tissue between a fetus’ fingers and toes; causes the inner lining of the uterus to slough off at the start of menstruation; eliminates T-cells that might otherwise cause an autoimmune attack on the body.  In this book the apoptosis of interest has to do with how this process enables the formation of the proper connections (synapses) between neurons (nerve cells) in the brain by eliminating surplus cells.  (The human adult brain has approximately 100 billion neurons.)

Nerve cells or neurons have specialized projections called dendrites and axons, which do not exist as a part of any other cells in the body.  Dendrites bring information to the cell body and axons take information away from it.  Information from one neuron flows to another neuron across a synapse which is a structure in the nervous system (of which the brain is a part) that permits a neuron to pass an electrical or chemical signal to another cell (neural or otherwise) across a small gap separating neurons. 

Neurons can be classified by the direction in which they send information.  (1) Sensory (or afferent) neurons send information from sensory receptors (e.g., in skin, eyes, nose, tongue, ears) TOWARD the central nervous system.  (2) Motor (or efferent) neurons send information AWAY from the central nervous system to muscles or glands.  (3) Interneurons send information between sensory neurons and motor neurons and are mostly located in the central nervous system.  (Please visit this website for a visual about neurons:  http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/synapse.html.)

Apoptosis that is triggered by signals inside of a cell follows what is known as the intrinsic or mitochondrial pathway to destruction.  Mitochondria are a cell’s power producers.  They are tiny organelles with an inner and an outer membrane that act like a digestive system that takes nutrients in, breaks them down, and creates forms of energy that a cell can use.  The fluid inside of the mitochondria is called the matrix. 

In a healthy cell, the outer membranes of its mitochondria display the protein Bcl-2 on their surface.  Bcl-2 is protective and inhibits programmed cell death (apoptosis).  If a cell is hurt on the inside this causes a related protein, Bax, to migrate to the surface of the mitochondrion where it inhibits the protective effect of Bcl-2.  A process is then put into motion that executes this cell.

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This is nowhere near done yet – will be a piece of work……….

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January 23, 2013 (I have no idea why the blog has altered parts of the text formating in this post!)

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+BUILDING A HUMAN BEING:  VERY NARROW MARGIN FOR ERROR

Insane Mother Mildred:  Her Sustained Aggression and Violence Against Me:  I could write a book about this title.  Every word I ever write is really about this title as I ask perpetual questions for which I am forever left searching for answers.

What is it about me that I continue to search for the truth about what happened to my mother that changed her as a human being into a raging abusive monster toward me?

What is it about me that I cannot bury in insignificance the fact that I know that what she did to me when I was a baby is what torments me most?  I read the developmental neuroscience as if my life depended on it to learn about her so I can learn about myself.  I see where changes along similar developmental lines happened to her as they happened through her to me.  Yet, I am so different from her.

Even this morning I clearly know how one part of my damage keeps me from sleep.  I cannot make trite sounds as I am supposed to be able to, a consequence in my brain as it was changed in its development by her out-RAGE-ous screaming abuse.   Sounds do not fade into the background for me that belong there outside the range of my attention.  I cannot sort sounds out.  Even voices, fingernails scraping on chalkboards. 

Sounds hound me, chase me, plague me, torture me.  They jump out at me.  Insignificant sounds I should not hear, should not listen to, that should not capture my attention as if they are wild beasts intent on eating me alive, shredding me into pieces.

These sounds torment me.  Dogs barking angrily in the distance in the middle of the night.  My refrigerator humming peacefully.  To me it’s a roaring freight train intent on obliterating me.  Every sound as I grow older fits a pitch, a range of tone, a rhythm that belonged to the range of sound the monster made when she was going to attack – or was attacking – me.  From the time I was born.  For the next 18 years.  These changes are built into my brain, all the way into my brain.

In my brain sounds can be in more than one place at the same time.  They are always moving.  I am insulted in my senses by anything above the sound of silence.  Sounds intrude into my body and through it as if I don’t even exist.  I am the hearing one.  I am the always listening one.  I am the one under threat.  I am the one attacked.

I cannot tune sound out.  I cannot tone it down.  I cannot ignore it as if it doesn’t exist, as if it belongs somewhere else and to someone else.  All sound I hear is MINE to pay attention to.  I had this knowledge built into me from the start of my life.  There was no safe zone between myself and sound.

  Mother hurt me from the beginning of my life in ways that I am only now discovering.  She hurt my forming brain, my growing body on the INSIDE of me all the way into the formation of my brainstem itself, just as this happened to her.  I need to know this.  I cannot turn and walk away from my search for understanding about how early trauma changed me for my lifetime.  Being alive torments me.  This is not what I deserved.  This is not the way being alive is supposed to be.  It is not what any of us early abuse, neglect and trauma survivors ever deserved.

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We all have a body-brain formed in its essence by the quality of our mother’s attachment system.  All that plagues me where it matters most does so because I am the victim of my mother’s flawed and faulty attachment system.  Faulty.  An understatement bigger than Manhattan.  Disastrous is the better word for me to use to describe how what happened to Mother when she was a baby came down directly to me.  But to say so now, to say that Mother’s treatment of me was psychotically pathological, puts me way ahead of my story.  Just as with each life, each story must begin at the beginning.  Finding where that beginning actually starts seems to me to be the essence of my story itself.

I cannot walk away from any part of my story as long as I remain in a body.  I read developmental neuroscience research as others might read their Bible.  I am looking for my creation story.  I am looking for that story for other people who suffer in ways that I do.  I search for answers as if I am called even from the beyond the beyond to do so.  I am hounded by the echoes of Mother’s abuse of me in every breath I take, in every cell of all my tissue, and I know that every baby who misses out on the right kind of interactions with its mother that it needs ends up with some kind of deepest damage like I have.  The kind of trauma-triggered changes that happened to my body-brain development happen to others.  The difference is only a matter of degrees.

At the same time I know these researchers are speaking to me in their writings of fundamental yet rudimentary facts about what a growing baby’s body and brain need to be right in this world, I know they could not have possibly had the kinds of infant abuse trauma happen to them that happened to Mother.  That happened to me.  That happened and is happening to so many others.  Or they, too, would lie in shambles on their insides, broken from the bottom up and from the inside out struggling to make it – barely – through one day let alone through the rest of their life.

What motivates these brilliant, dedicated thinkers to study and learn and write what they do?  How can they look at the facts they know and be content to realize there is such a massive gap between they and we who suffer from the infant abuse trauma changes they so clearly describe to one another while nobody on the outside of their world has the ability to access or to comprehend what they are saying?

What light keeps burning to keep them going ever further toward the darkness of the truth about such horrible permanent irreversible damage done to babies who will be forced to endure their entire life suffering so tragically from consequences that were so preventable?

All those babies screaming.  All those babies dying inside a little at a time while their bodies live and live and live.  All those babies, over the edge, hanging onto the slippery wet rocks and breaking tiny twigs as they hang on, dangling over the precipice of the greatest cliffs.  About to fall.  Falling, falling while nobody alive stops what happened to them from happening again and again and again from sunrise to sunrise to other babies somewhere else?

I know in my body exactly what these researchers are saying.  I stop my falling by believing I can read their science, eat it up until I am so clear I can transform their words – of course being bound by polite (legal) rules of publishing manners not to plagiarise – not to overwhelm readers, either, from how I say what needs to be heard and understood about molecular changes abuse of infants  and trauma to them creates that can never be undone.

I seem to bear a burden of cognizance,  of being able to exist in a void between the truth in the researchers’ words, within the void where tiny babies die, tumbling into oblivion while they remain alive.  Screaming until they become dulled in silence.  Broken.  Into pieces inside.  Tiny hopeless shards of humanity.  And their ranks are growing.

Yet in this world where the “competitive struggle for existence” has yet to be transformed into patterns of true, heartfelt cooperation between members of our species, it is considered proper etiquette to so speak the unspeakable truth of science while obeying the rules about the ownership of words and the most important truths they contain that I feel I have had the tongue of my soul cut out while I bleed to death for myself, for my dead mother, for my dead father who had the very life and mind sucked out of him by the terrible, devastating mental illness contracted I believe by Mother exactly because she was abused, neglected and traumatized as an infant during the most critical stages of her body-brain’s development. 

My soul cries, “Where is the soul in science?”

At the same time I know I endured for 18 years such a hell as few can begin to imagine.  I reach for the knowledge that if I could find a way to stay alive and keep myself HERE – I can use all that strength, all that determination and excess of deep inner personal power to reach inside the pages of this icy cold book I study, whose pages are increasingly cluttered at their edges with Dollar Store sticky tags marking every important passage I must digest and somehow make my own. 

I must retrieve truth for the good of every cliff-hanging baby alive but screaming or dulled into near oblivion.  I must tear those words apart to find out and then explain in common language how trauma turned our very body and brain into our perpetual enemy – because that’s the best our early life could do for us:  Keep us alive.

I must take the sterilized, so-owned words of these scientists across a great divide between what they know and what early trauma survivors know so I can put these two worlds together.  I must pull the truth out as it exists in the facts.  I must use my mental forceps to bring those words through a kind of birth canal so they can come to life where we live it, can contribute to life, no matter how agonizing and bloody this birthing process may be.

“How can they own all these words?”  I want to know, “when they are genesis words?  When they belong to life itself?”

I am perfectly free to use a word like “spoonful” in my writings and nobody can bash and batter me for stealing a word.  Or for using (How dare I?) a word my readers do not comprehend.  I could write about smut and pulp, about rise and fall, but dare I write about the actual patterns of interactions required absolutely by nature between a mother and her infant for an entire human being to be formed correctly and undamaged without falling victim to the academic clutchings of,  “THOSE WORDS ARE MINE!  I and I alone – well, in tandem with my publisher – discovered through science what those words contain and we own them (like Monsanto owns the worlds’ seeds).  Leave my words alone”  – or – What?

Those words.  Cathedrals to science.  These books appear to have been written upside down and backwards.  Words scrunched so densely together all crunched up with no spaces between them either side to side or up and down.  I swear even the punctuation in these books is written in a foreign, unintelligible script nobody but those in the Great Labs and Ivory Towers can understand!

I fight.  I fight for the right to access this information and to share it with others who need to know it.  I NEED to know it.  I NEED to understand what happened to me where it matters most.  I don’t care if I am generations ahead of the crowds.  I need to understand.  If I have to read even this one book by Schore – Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self– over and over and over and over again as many times as there are grains of sand in the hourglass that is running out for what days are left in my lifetime, I will do so. 

I will write this.  I will find my images and they will find me.  And then, if heaven will help me, I will use my own words because they “belong” to me to convey these obtuse weighty so-dense developmental neuroscientific facts to make sense out of a special kind of world we do not currently have words to talk about.

Words about how a baby gets made by its mother’s interactions with it either in the right, good way so it can grow a body-brain unbroken inside by distressful stress in its first year of life – or not.

I am captive to this work by choice, or am I?  I spent the first 18 years of my life being the captive of an incomprehensible mad woman’s torments.  I will take these words out of the pristine pages of this one book, at least, that I am studying so I can pull the facts about this madness through from the academic world into the world I live in – So help me God.

And when I am done I hope I will be able to say something people can understand.  “Take your hands and interlock your fingers.  Tip your right elbow up and your left one down.  You have just created an image of your right brain hemisphere’s limbic system.  Your top hand represents the higher order executive functions of your orbitofrontal cortex.  This is the part of the human brain that, grown right, makes us the best humans we can be.

This high part of your brain is interlocked with and interconnected to every other process in your body in one way or another all the way down to your brainstem.  If its development is altered due to stressful trauma?  There will be shades of hell to pay for a lifetime and beyond.  Without intervention these trauma changes pass themselves down the generations.

As a newborn baby, these brain regions and all of their connections form themselves directly through interaction with the patterns that happen most significantly between the infant and its mother.  If these interactions are flawed and faulty, the infant will develop in response a faulty, flawed body and brain.

Mis-information about safety and well-being for the self in a body in this world is communicated through mother-infant interactions directly into the ‘fabric’ of the infant’s forming body-brain.  If a mother cannot give her infant what it needs, the infant’s entire brain top to bottom including all its connections will be damaged and changed through trauma-induced stress reactions to this harm-filled environment.  Possibilities for safety, security and goodness in life will correspondingly be omitted from such a developing brain.  This infant will spend the rest of its life continuing to struggle and suffer from the effects that trauma had on its so-rapidly developing body and brain. 

These trauma-induced changes impact the development and operation of the Central Nervous System of which the brain is a part, of the Autonomic Nervous System connected to the stress-calm response system.  The immune system is affected, how genes manifest themselves, the biochemical actions and interactions in the body will be altered to the negative, and all these seemingly invisible changes will leave the infant forever gasping, grasping to create a better life somehow that is continually out of reach.”

Who is telling survivors the facts about what happened, why that happened and what that means?  And what about the other half of the brain and its development in inadequate mother-infant attachment interactions?  Dare I find out?

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It is my greatly growing concern that increasing damage is being done to increasing numbers of babies in America directly due to social changes in our culture.  Stress is stress.  Distress of a chronic nature creates trauma in people’s lives.  This trauma directly impacts the quality of care infants receive in families.

As economic conditions continue to deteriorate certainly for at least half of our population, increasing burdens for working mothers will mean an overall degeneration of the very quality of our population now and into the future.  We cannot afford to continue to blind ourselves to the fact that stressed mothers, no matter how pure their intent may be to “do right” for their babies through the second year of their infant’s life, are at EXTREMELY HIGH RISK for unintentionally creating harmful trauma-triggered stress related changes in the development of their baby’s body and brain.

Now more than at any time in the history of our species we need to know, understand and put into meticulous practice what the developmental neuroscientists now know about the essential nature of the mother-infant and father-infant attachment system as it is designed to regulate the development of an infant.  These patterns of attachment interaction literally build a human being from the ground up to match the patterns as they exist in infant caregivers.  Any mistake outside the range of “good enough” mothering creates harm in an infant.  We need to be very clear what “good enough” is and why that matters.

Due to the speed of early development “critical periods” of specific growth are open and then are closed in rapid order.  Once traumatic stress changes begin to happen in an infant’s development they cannot be undone.  It doesn’t take the special abilities my psychotic abusive mentally ill mother had to harm an infant where it matters most during its earliest development.  Believe me, anyone can do it.  Knowing that fact terrifies me.

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I am working with information found in Dr. Allan N. Schore’s 2003 book published by W.W. Norton & Co., pages 252-255 —  Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self

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+INFANT ABUSE THROUGH ATTACHMENT TRAUMA:  PART ONE

It is a mother’s job (or a replacement early primary caregiver who can never replace the mother completely) to care if her infant is upset or not.  She is supposed to help her infant return to a state of peaceful calm if it is upset.  In neuroscientific attachment lingo a mother is supposed to “attune” to her upset infant and help it by “repairing” a “rupture” created when something too intensely troubling happens to her baby.  A mother is most certainly NOT supposed to be the cause of her infant’s “rupture.”  She is not supposed to traumatize/abuse or neglect her baby. 

Severely negative emotional states hurt how a baby develops.  The right limbic brain region grows very fast during the first year of life.  Repeated patterns of traumatic interactions between a baby and its mother (or other primary caregiver) create intense biochemical reactions in the baby that have great power to damage infant nervous system and especially right brain development.

Neuroscientists know that every time trauma causes an “intensely dysregulated” state in an infant, potential harm is done.  When the mother does not respond to her infant appropriately to calm it down, is the cause of the infant’s distress, and when these patterns continue over time, this “massive misattunement” between infant and caregiver cause biochemical changes in the infant’s body and brain that begin to accumulate and do not diminish their harmful impact on the baby’s brain and nervous system development. 

How can a baby defend itself against the massive over-stimulation caused by traumatic interactions with its caregiver?  Much of its defense must occur on the level of chemicals that are designed to internally take care of the infant’s body.  As trauma continue to happen over time both the overstimulation and the biochemical changes to the developing right brain they create become embedded in the rapidly developing brain, especially in the right hemisphere.  Any defenses a baby’s little body can use to survive these traumas become a part of the right brain, as well.  In addition, as Dr. Allan Schore states, these effects which include the defenses are also built into “the core structure of the evolving personality.” (p. 252)

Well, I’m not a scientist but this sounds like a whole lot of “Uh-Oh!” to me.  Because I have a personal history of being the recipient of 18 years of terrible abuse from the time I was born at the hands of my psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) mother, I want to understand what Schore means when he mentions “core structures” and “personality” being changed through early traumatic attachment interactions with primary caregivers especially a mother.  I know my mother acted “fine” in public.  I know she was fully capable of acting the opposite when nobody was around to see or to hear what she did to me.  I have no reason to believe that the same kind of overwhelming chronic kind of overstimulation from trauma didn’t happen to my mother when she was a baby.  The same kind of biochemical distress reactions that Schore describes probably began to negatively impact Mother’s personality, brain and nervous system development from the time she was a very small baby (as I describe in my upcoming book, Story Without Words).

That trauma changes do impact the early rapid forming right brain in the “core structure of the evolving personality” in extremely damaging ways is exactly what I need to know in order to begin to make sense out of what harmed my mother so much she could end up doing what she did to me.  Why would I want to begin my search for understanding of my mother’s mental illness anywhere else than at the very beginning?

In a “good enough” or “best possible” early caregiver-infant environment, what most could consider as a “typical” environment, I imagine that an infant’s developmental trajectory would head off in its best possible direction.  Because the stages of development build upon what has already been built first, one good change could follow another.  We can call a traumatic infant-caregiver environment “atypical.”  One harm-triggered developmental change would then change the trajectory of further development in a trauma-related direction.

While most experts claim that such changes due to trauma survival are diversions from an “adaptive course,” I disagree with the assumptions contained in that term.  While these changes might be maladaptive to continued survival in a benign, benevolent world, if they are necessary to continued survival in a malevolent world I see them as bordering on miraculous.  That these adaptations to trauma do cause difficulties themselves cannot diminish the power they can have to keep a baby alive in a malevolent world.  The traumatized infant’s body has no other choice.

Schore refers to trauma-triggered developmental changes as being “deflections of normal structural development.”  (p. 252) How could they not be, I would ask?  An infant immersed in the horrors of a traumatic early world is not trying to stay alive and grow its body and brain in anything like a normal environment.  Trauma changes are normal in its world.

Yet Schore points out that it is exactly during its earliest stages of rapid brain growth that an infant is “maximally vulnerable” to any kind of stress at all, or to what Schore calls “nonoptimal environmental events.”  (p. 252)   I interpret this to mean that being an infant who MUST rapidly grow a brain means that at this stage of our life we are at highest risk for the greatest harm from even minimal traumas – let alone from massive ones.  During these critical periods of brain growth we are extremely sensitive to our environment. 

What we experience shapes the way the synapses in our brain behave as our growing brain is shaped, and stress-filled early environments are “growth-inhibiting” when they “negatively influence the critical period organization of limbic cortical and subcortical connections that mediate homestatic self-regulatory and attachment systems.”  (Schore, p. 252)  Critical periods of growth happen once.  The changes created during these periods are permanent.  These are not minor developmental milestones that Schore is describing as he states that caregiver-infant trauma “leads to a regulatory failure” that impairs the homeostasis (balance) of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), disturbs function of the limbic system, and creates dysfunction in the hypothalamus portion and in the reticular formation of the brain.

(One of the most important functions of the hypothalamus, which has several functions, is to link the nervous system to the endocrine (hormone) system via the pituitary gland.  I find it very interesting that this brain region is also connected to important aspects of parenting and attachment behaviors.  I would wonder how the damage that Schore is describing from infant abuse trauma to this portion of the brain could not help but end up impacting parenting and attachment behaviors in infant trauma survivors.

The reticular formation, a region of the brainstem, is one of the oldest portions of the brain.  It is involved in multiple important tasks, including the filtering of incoming stimuli to discriminate between what are irrelevant background stimuli and what stimuli is relevant.  I wonder if early trauma changes to this brain region can show up in symptoms that are connected to adult anxiety and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.  This area of the brain is also involved in motor control and body movements, cardiovascular control, pain modulation, and sleep-wake cycles.)

Schore also states that “transcriptional regulation of gene expression” (p. 252) in the growing infant brain is modulated by intense stress.  Distressful infant-caregiver interactions that create hyperarousal (heightened arousal due to stress) cause the release of powerful chemicals in the infant’s brain designed to regulate arousal.  These chemicals can damage sensitive brain areas in the baby.

An abused infant’s right brain development is also significantly altered by the release of major stress-regulating neurochemicals that influence energy available to vital organs in the body and help contain or stop activation of the sympathetic (“GO!”) branch of the ANS.  These Big Gun stress hormones are directly regulated by the kinds of interactions an infant has with its mother and other early primary caregivers – or severely dysregulated when these interactions are abusive and traumatic. 

Too much for too long for too often of these Big Gun stress hormones directly harms infant brain and nervous system development during the most critical periods of growth.  It is up to an infant’s caregiver to “repair” over stimulation that happens to an infant (this can also happen through too much excitement due to play), thus reestablishing homeostasis – or what I call a balanced state of peaceful calm, or equilibrium.  When this does not happen – and often an abusive adult is likely to escalate the infant’s distress rather than down-regulate the infant’s stressful state – the prolonging of the infant’s stress response and the physiological dysequilibrium it creates in the infant’s body and brain begin to cause toxic harm. 

This harm is especially centered in the infant’s right limbic brain region exactly during its most important, most rapid stage of development.  Researchers are discovering that these kinds of interactions between high-powered, stress-related chemicals in the brain may be directly linked to the “primary etiological mechanism for the pathophysiology of neuropsychiatric disorders.”  (Schore, p. 252)  I have a strong suspicion that these patterns are exactly what sent my mother off in that direction from the time she was an infant.  (I also think about this information when I hear of adults who suddenly and supposedly “out-of-the-blue” are struck by some kind of mysterious “psychological” malady – that I believe originated in exactly these same kinds of traumatic earliest relationships.)

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Well, here it is Monday, January 21, 2013.  I began the work of sorting and organizing, and then transcribing into digital form all of my mother’s papers in 2005.  I just finished.  This current work I completed today includes the final organization of the family collection of photographs which also arrived in my hands undated and in a shambles.  Tomorrow I will ship the hard copies of the pictures to my son in Seattle who is most generously going to scan and size them as he inserts them into their spot within the text of 7 books of my mother’s writings.

This is a small example of the kind of information he will be working with.  This comes from the ‘picture insert info’ document for voume 4 of the Mildred’s Mountain series, The Up Down Mountain Waltz.

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4 3 051859DadKidsSideRoad   …. (3) – 5/18/1959 – great pic dad and kids on side of road – end parag — KEY:  up the mountain he trudged

4 4 051859AlderForest   …. (4) – 5/18/1959 – alder forest – after parag —  KEY:  which is so witchy

4 5 051859MudRoadKids   …. (5) – 5/18/1959 – SLIDE – mud on road with kids (I think me in there) – needs darkening/contrast – end parag —  KEY:  twisted alder tree forest all swampy

4 6 051859RoadScene   …. (6) – 5/18/1959 – one of my all-time favorite pictures – scenery showing road – at end of parag — KEY:  suddenly you come to the high land

4 7 051859WalkRoadDadKids   ….   4 8 051859WalkRoadDadKids   ….   4 9 051859WalkRoadDadKids   ……..   4 10 051859WalkRoadDadKids   …. (7 – 10) – 5/18/1959 – FOUR PICTURES – walking the road, kids and dad – I love these pics – so hope they can be repaired – use what you want but I hope all of them, crop if absolutely necessary – after parag — KEY:  steep area we can look below us

4 11 051859CaAltadenaFam1953    …. (11) – 5/18/1959 – mil bill kids 1953 in front of the Altadena house on Calavaras st outside of LA – end of letter, KEY:  We got papers from lawyer on

4 12 051859PileDirtSnow    …. (12) – 5/18/1959 – pile of dirt with snow in the middle we used for our water – after parag — KEY:  in back of the hut are several

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The underlined parts are the file names he will copy and then paste into the file for each picture he creates.  The keys are the phrases that he can use to find exactly where in the text of 500,000 words each picture gets inserted.  There are probably around 400 images he will be working with.  I thank him for his help on this task with all my heart.

All of this needs to be done before I can go through each book to see what pictures next need captions.  From there the entire body will go to my professional editing daughter for that task — which it turns out she will have no time to tackle until June at the earliest.

Now, with my disappointment at the overall slowness of this process locked away somewhere, I will begin the next stage of my writing.

I seem to be finding that it is my particular passion to discover how healing one’s family story and one’s own story can help heal insecure attachment disorders.  Because insecure attachments BREAK people’s stories, my guess is that healing the story itself must have some positive influence on healing families — individuals — and eventually as a planet, healing the story of all of us together might help heal us all.

In order to move forward with my next writing efforts I will be studying all that Dr. Paul Renn has collected in his book about the workings of human memory — as those workings are directly affected by insecure attachment trauma from the beginning of life — or not, for the lucky people.

I will be taking a very critical look at a concept that gets thrown around a lot:  Dissociation.  My current guess is that dissociation itself changes the way memory processes operate in human beings (thus of course changing how we remember our own self in the story of our life).  When dissociation begins very early in an infant’s life through neglect, abuse and trauma, it is my guess that dissociation itself becomes the key factor that influences how memory operates in many important ways.

Well — time will tell.  All I know right now is that I have finished the bulk of work on an eight-year project that directly has improved my own ability to remember myself in my abusive childhood.  Our family story has been at least partly retrieved from chaos.  That the words of Mother only tell the half of the story (or less) that her mental illness allowed her to tell leaves me with my next-self assigned task of finding a way to tell the other half of the story.

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January 20, 2013

What in the world are we talking about?

What does it mean to us and for the quality of our life when we are deprived – because we were deprived from the start of our life – of the ability to “safely” regulate our emotions?  We are most certainly not born with this ability.  It comes with the growth, development and advancement of our body. 

When we were tiniest, when we were born, we could do very little of anything by ourselves.  We could breath.  We could swallow.  We could do what a newborn mammal can do.  But given the complexity of being human we were meant for so much more.  But without being given what we needed to move toward our potential for advancement, we suffered then and will suffer in ways invisible to our comprehension for the rest of our life.

Time passes by.  We stay alive.  We appear to have made it through all of the common developmental milestones.  We grow and grow as we pass one milestone after another until we’re all grown up.

Here we are in adulthood.  We’ve made it!  Nobody ever tells us what we might have missed out on during our development.  Nobody tells us what mattered most.  Nobody told us what shortages of inner supplies plagued us from the beginning of our lives – and thus – always will.

If anything goes wrong as we make it through our life we are told that we’re to blame.  We are expected to be autonomous.  We are expected to be self-sufficient, self-reliant, self-motivated, self-contained.  If we need something, go get it.  If we want something, go get it.  If we fall flat on the ground with our face in the dust, it’s our own fault.  Pick yourself up.  Don’t expect anyone to be there to help you.  Don’t expect anyone to care.  You are on your own.

Don’t you dare complain, either.  Don’t look around you and notice that there seems to be some kind of invisible inner difference between people who seem to fall naturally into the confident, competent and therefore successful category while there are others who seem to never make it ‘there’ no matter how hard they try.

It’s like some people know something we don’t know, have something we don’t have.  They seem to live in one kind of world while the rest of us live in a different one.  Some people just seem somehow blessed.  They “get it” and we don’t.  Whatever “it” is, “it” seems vague to us and impossible to understand or define.  We move through our life being nagged with a feeling that we missed something somewhere but we don’t know what.  There’s a secret ingredient that is absent for some and present for others.  We don’t know what that ingredient is and we sure don’t know where to get it.

We don’t even know where to look for what’s different between us and so many others who seem to feel, yes, a different rhythm than we do as they live their lives.  If we turn and look within we know there’s a kind of emptiness in us.  Somehow we have a hollow space inside our body.  Some of us know this.  Others have found a way to walk around believing it’s not possible to fill this place of void, so it’s best to find any way possible to ignore that it exists.

Don’t look inward!  Look outward!  If we’re missing something then, by golly, there must be a way to find it.  We believe this because if we didn’t we know there’s a certain time coming when we will fall down and we will not be able to get back up.

What if someone told us that what we are missing, what we have lost, what has been stolen from us lies not inside of us because it was never put there in the first place?  How is it possible to go all the way back, back before we could walk or crawl or sit up or even roll over to look for what got left out of the story of our lives?  To even try to imagine what happened to us when we were so small seems to make our mind go blank.  Blank without words.  How can we think?  Yet I ask you, “What did you know before you could first think in thoughts about yourself in the world that you have never forgotten and can’t quite remember?”

Sending a part of our self back there from this present moment to that distant past requires only one ability.  Simply trust what you know.  Don’t read your life in words.  Read it in feelings.  There is no part of our body that doesn’t remember all it has been through.  All the way backwards we remember the sound of the voices of who welcomed us into this world – or did not.  We know the feeling of our small self, vulnerable, fragile in the hands of giants.  What did they do with us and to us when we needed them most? 

We haven’t forgotten.  We remember and we know in every fiber of our being if we started from our beginning being loved and feeling completely safe and secure in the world at all times, or if we did not.  Our body, if we pay attention to what it can tell us – if we ask and we listen – will never lie to us.

This process of being able to hear what our body tells us might seem to be mysterious because it is so foreign in our culture to believe that which our physical self can tell us about everything else we think we know.  We take up space.  We move around.  We think in noisy thoughts with words.  If we find something is wrong we look for solutions.  If something is broken we either fix it or throw it away.

After all, being in a body is no different than being tuna in a can or jelly in a jar.  It’s what’s inside the container we place the value on.  That we ARE our container-body with a self all put together inseparably until the moment of our death has to matter to us.  Once it does we will then be able to grow to understand that both how our body grew along with our self cannot be taken apart from one another.  Each exists as a whole entity whose patterns of being in the world were set into place long before we knew we had a name.

For those of us who have always known there was something terribly wrong with how we were raised, and for those who listen to the memory that is in their body itself and discover this very same thing, chances are that what happened so long ago has always directly caused difficulties in our lives we have never been able to describe.  We can’t expect anyone to appear, either, who will say to us, “Oops!  So sorry!  Please excuse the mess.  We never meant for this to happen.  Let me fix this for you.”  Nope.  Not going to happen.

So what is the point of searching backwards for the missing ingredient in our life if nobody is going to be able to fix now what went wrong for us way back then?  How are we supposed to change the past, anyway?  Are those who stand on one end of the tug-o-war rope having all they need within them to win the game equal with those on the other end who were born missing out on what they needed most to find a smoother way through life?

As my mother wrote in one of her childhood stories when she was nine, “I don’t think you would like to hear what happened in the cave that night but I will tell you….”  Yes.  We are equal.  We are also very, very different.

Just because we look around and see other people whose containers seem so alike in all the essential ways does not mean if we looked a little deeper we wouldn’t find that in the ways that matter most – as they hold the greatest power to influence how we live a life in this world – we wouldn’t find exactly that same dividing line we already really know exists.  There are those of us who were loved and cherished into this world and there are those of us who were not.  And between these two groups of people, according to degrees of deprivation from birth, lies the greatest chasm we could imagine.

We either grew a body-brain-self that knew it was safe and secure in this world or we didn’t.  It is exactly within this difference between us that we must search for what we have always known and cannot name.

There is one word we can use to begin to explore the differences I am describing.  That word is “attachment.”

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Post following: +THE LIGHT READING FLEW OUT THE WINDOW – LOOKING AT THIS NEXT

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January 19, 2013

Having never traveled there I have no idea what London is like, or Britain, or anywhere outside of the U.S.A.  I do think at age 61 that it is telling that I contemplate this morning these ideas not in response to some tantalizing leisure vacation but rather in response to an internet search serendipity  through which I discovered something about the work of Dr. Paul Renn.  “Oh, Gee!”  We severe infant and child abuse and trauma survivors might say, “I want to travel to London to access some high quality therapy for what nobody I have ever found in my country in my lifetime has ever even spoken to me about.”

Well, somewhere between “Oh, JOY” and “Oh, SHIT” there is another part of reality that really matters most to me.  The truth is that nobody alive could begin to turn me into an ordinary person no matter how much skill, care, effort and expertise was applied to “my case.”  The most anyone could do – can do – is to explain to me how the severe traumas of my early life vastly altered the way my entire body developed.  No quality therapist would ever begin to assume or suggest they could FIX me or that (if I wanted to, if I try hard enough) I could fix myself.  They would not dig around searching for sealed-off trauma memories. 

An excellent therapist would establish a trust relationship with me ASAP, but they would never try to change the level of trust I am capable of achieving inside my own self.  The only card that would be in play in the trust game for me would be the one that shows how worthy of my trust would the therapist be?

 I’ve never met a therapist yet who didn’t have a power play of some kind in play.  I have no time for this, nor would I ever again choose to continue to participate when such a power play was in play. 

I’ve never met a therapist yet who wasn’t human.  Humans are not perfect.  They do not have all the answers and most often for trauma-development changed survivors, therapists don’t even vaguely have the answers we need because they’ve never been inwardly motivated (as we are) to ask the right questions that could lead to – asking the right questions.

I don’t think I am bitter.  I think I am realistic.  I woke up this morning thinking there’s not enough time in my lifetime – if I had multiple high quality therapy for the rest of my life – to FIX what is different about me.  There wouldn’t have been enough time – or enough ‘good’ therapy to turn me from a trauma-changed person into an ordinary person if high quality therapy had started when I first sought help in my 20s.

So what would I want therapy-wise if I could access the best therapy on earth – which all of us deserve?  Best would of course first mean that the therapist be trustworthy.  This means to me that such an individual would first be able to listen and HEAR me.  The little ‘theory and technique’ wheels and gears  in their own mind would have to be absolutely SILENT until I asked a question for which I seek an answer.

I would know where I get my information.  I would want to know where the therapist got theirs.  My hope with someone like Dr. Paul Renn would lie in the fact he has combined the BIG THREE areas of study in his thinking and therapy work:  Attachment, developmental neuroscience and trauma.  However, even though I am thousands of miles away from London, through the powers of the internet I have already found a RED FLAG concerning the work this man does.  I scanned the reference pages of his 2012 book — The Silent Past and the Invisible Present: Memory, Trauma, and Representation in Psychotherapy – and did not find the one name there that I know I most needed to see.  There is no mention of Dr. Martin Teicher.

If I were to consider (ha!) being able to work with (rather than ‘have therapy with’) such a dedicated, knowledgeable, skilled and experienced capable practitioner such as Dr. Paul Renn is, I would next need to know if he would honestly and truthfully be willing and able to listen to me about why I believe the work of Dr. Teicher and those he works with is so vitally important to severe early trauma survivors.

I look at the still photograph of Renn’s face on his website.  He does look like an open-minded compassionate man.  But it would only take one question from me about what Teicher’s group knows about how we survivors have been changed through early trauma and abuse into “evolutionarily altered” people for me to know the truth about this man’s work – where it matters most to me.

No truth = No go.

I suppose I could imagine scenarios where I could access therapy through Mclean’s Hospital where Teicher’s ‘Harvard research group’ studies.  They should know what I need to know.  They coined that phrase “evolutionarily altered,” but so what?

How could anyone actually determine what I most need to know?  I don’t want to be compared to anyone else.  I want to be compared to someone who does not exist – because that person was not given what they needed at the start of their life to ever grow into this world in the first place.

THAT person I most need to have information about in every possible way would be my OWN sole self that had never been exposed to any horrific debilitating trauma in my development in the first place.

The question would never be “Who would that person be?”  The only question that matters is, “HOW would that person be in her body in her lifetime?”  Me is Me.  I have always been me since the instant I was conceived and my soul was made and attached to this body I live in.

Well – once this correct question is asked in therapy or out of it the pathway to exploration is presented that would bear fruit.

I am left answering the correct question on my own.  I do believe Renn’s book has some of the answers I seek because he does apparently concern himself with a study of what is currently known about memory processes.  I am a huge fan of the idea that if we could understand the bigger picture of how early trauma changes every aspect of our physiological development on every level of our body, this (it seems to me) is exactly where to look for the correct answer to every correct question we as a species are learning to ask.

If we were raised in a dangerous malevolently harmful early attachment world, natural processes made sure not only that we remember absolutely everything we experienced so our body could continually prepare itself to survive in that kind of a world.  Natural processes at the same time made equally sure that the only way to improve our personal condition would be that other people in the world learn to listen to everything we survivors have to say about trauma.

The very processes that built our body built trauma right into us.  We are living testimonies that all is NOT well in this world.  We will never be able to forget this fact.  Our very body on every level keeps this memory.  What trauma wants us to do as a species is to learn what traumas are so we can prevent them from happening again.

It is on the level of learning all that trauma has to say so it can be prevented that all therapy must first begin.  Yes, as individuals we suffer.  We suffer from a CAUSE – and therefore we suffer for a reason.

We need to be heard.  We have within us information — vast bodies of critically important, relevant information — about what trauma is, about what it took for us to survive it, about what surviving trauma does to people, and about what needs to be done to prevent the same kind of traumas from happening to somebody else.

All of this is, from my point of view, about memory.  Trauma changed our body so that we could survive long enough to – yes – reproduce.  But for most trauma-changed people the best we can expect to do is to pass trauma-related information (in memory form) down to succeeding generations as life itself continues to put it into the BODY of survivors – like a message is put into a bottle – to be carried along within the current of the life of our species until someone – someday – can decode the trauma messages, understand what ongoing trauma has to say about conditions in the world – so that those conditions can be FIXED so that these traumas will never happen to anyone else again – EVER.

This is why at this point in the advancement of the civilizations of our species that I believe Teicher’s work presents the correct imperative for all efforts toward healing change.  The difficulties severe early trauma survivors live with exist because of changes our body-brain made to keep us alive long enough for someone to ‘catch the signals’ that can give our species information about preventing trauma.  Not so anyone continues to suffer in the ways that we do.  NO!  The truth lies in the opposite direction.

We suffer so in the bigger picture nobody else will ever have to suffer what we did and do – EVER AGAIN!

Therapies that begin from this point of understanding can do two important things at the same time:  (1) They can inform us about how trauma changed us so that we can hopefully find ways in our personal lives to identify how those trauma change patterns operate within us.  This allows us to make conscious efforts to diminish the negative impacts these changes create in our lives.  (2) At the same time the information contained in the ‘messages’ we convey in our body and hence in our life will be heard.  Because we are living memory of trauma the information our shared traumas contain will be used – TO END IT.

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In important ways my way of thinking about trauma tells me that those of us who have survived the un-survivable are the smartest members of our species.  What we know about in our very body matters.  What we know (as our body reminds us with every breath we take) has great power to change the world.  But we are left with a continuing problem.

Nobody is willing to listen to us.  We are members of a social species.  The truth is that what concerns one of us in reality concerns all of us.  The suffering of one is the suffering of all.  The lesson learned by one improves the life of all.

It seems to me that humanity has not yet matured far enough past the selfish conditions of our own collective childhood to yet grasp this fact.  We therefore are missing the most important point.  We are designed physiologically to respond to our environment.  We are designed to remember and display in our body and life what the conditions of our environment are.  We all pass through this life carrying messages about what these conditions are truthfully like.  Who is paying attention to these messages?

Trauma survivors – we are.

We have not been given any other choice.  We know and we remember the truth.

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Something special in the writings of Dr. Paul Renn has captured my attention.  I posted a section of his writings in an earlier post this week:  +WHAT IN THE WORLD IS ADULT ATTACHMENT?

I contacted the webpage that hosted Renn’s  article I discovered as presented at the above link and received a nearly immediate response.  Dr. Renn has since emailed me personally and I have emailed him in return with a hopeful request that he might assist me by reading my manuscript for Story Without Words.  I need a clinical opinion about my mentally ill mother.  I hope he will consider providing that for me.  (I am relying on crossed fingers and prayers at the moment that this might be so.)  My second email to him on this subject read as follows as I tried to narrow done my request:

Hello Paul,

I welcome your suggestion.  My parents filed their claim in 1958 on some of the last land available within commuting distance from Anchorage.  We were NOT in remote Alaska, but rather up the mountain on the far end of Eagle River Valley above where the park is now.

My first book, Story Without Words is not about the Alaska experience (the other 7 books are).  Story is about the invisible silence of psychotic child abuse by a woman who I believe suffered from severe Borderline Personality Disorder (never diagnosed or treated).

My purpose in writing Story is to introduce the invisible silence of the story without words that I believe led to Mildred’s ‘contracting’ this severe illness due very possibly to trauma triggers in her earliest development.  I want readers to have the opportunity to understand the invisible side of Mildred’s story as it most definitely does not appear in her ‘upper good world’ story.

The 7 volumes present her story in her own words – which I see as being like an opportunity to view a movie before watching it with the director’s commentary.  My next writing ventures now that I have (as of today) completed the manuscripts (missing now their rich photo illustration) will be to shred apart Mildred’s writings to expose what I see as the patterns of her madness hidden even in the words she did use to tell her version of her story.

I believe BPD mother’s are very possibly the most dangerous kind of mentally ill parent — especially when there is psychosis present.  The fact that nearly all naive readers will read the entire 7 volumes of Mildred’s writings without EVER being able to detect either her severe mental illness and its psychosis or her abuse of me motivates me to find an interested, invested, and extremely credible reader to explain how BPD can be so undetectable to others — including family members.

It is on this level of concern that I make the request to you for this kind of assistance.  The 7 volumes of Mildred’s story will read without anything more than proofing.

When I do have my forensic biographical work done with M’s writings an entirely different editorial and review process will need to be implemented — but this is a ways down the road.

Well, I tried to be succinct!!  Thank you for reading.  I understand that you must be extremely busy in your professional life but I thought I’d ask you for this clinical assistance for Story Without Words.  I will never be able to assess Mildred’s patterns clinically.  I have created what I call ‘an intellectual foray’ in Story Without Words to present my own observations about BPD/psychosis based on my 18 years of terrible abuse that was orchestrated by a disease that I believe needs all the help anyone can give it toward an understanding of it.

Mildred’s writings, I believe, will probably be the most comprehensive self-report ‘case study/history’ ever published.  That her story includes homesteading in Alaska matters only as it contrasts the extreme patterns of the operation of her ‘upper good world’ split of her psychosis (search for the perfect home/kingdom on earth/and what it took to ‘get there’) with her ‘lower evil world’ half of her psychosis that she trapped me within as the replacement for herself in hell. 

So, more than anything else I need help from an interested professional who has extensive experience with BPD clients.  I believe, even from what little of your writing I have read, from the title of your book, and from what was covered in the book review, that your unique and well-honed approach to the human mind could best assist me.

Thank you again – so much!  Linda

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In the meantime I have hunted up a brilliant online piece about his clinical work.  Given that this doctor resides in London, there’s not much of a chance I could ever go to him for therapy – but in a MOST rare lean toward the impossible, I find myself wishing I could move to London to receive therapy with this man.  I DESERVE this kind of quality therapy.  It would help me.  It’s not possible.  Nor is it any more likely that any of the millions of suffering Americans who need this kind of therapy could ever ever ever access it or afford it.

This fact does not prevent me from posting here the link to Dr. Paul Renn’s page.  Scrolling down through the information he presents here led me to the discovery of these articles he has written.  I thought some of them might be interesting to this blog’s readers.

Published Articles

• The Link Between Childhood Trauma and Later Violent Offending
• Attachment, Security, Separation and Psychological Differentiation: Developmental Implications
• Psychoanalysis, Attachment Theory and the Inner World: How Different Theories Understand the Concept of Mind and the Implications for Clinical Work
• Security, Separation, Recognition and Power
• Stop Thief! But What Has Been Stolen and By Whom?
• Effective, Ineffective and Iatrogenic Treatment
• The Development of Attachment Theory
• Commentary and Critique of Mann, D. (1997). “The Psychotherapist’s Erotic Subjectivity”.
• Brief verbatim extracts from: Solomon, J., George, C. and De Jong, A. Children classified as controlling at age six: Evidence of disorganized representational strategies and aggression at home and at school. IN Development and Psychopathology, 7 (1995),
• Summary of The War Neuroses – Their Nature and Significance (1943), in Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1996). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, 256-288. London: Routledge, with Comments from an Attachment and Trauma Perspective.
• Infant Observation and Adult Psychotherapy: How Developmental Studies are Informing Clinical Work with Adults
• Summary and Critique of Klein, M. (1945). The Oedipus complex in the light of early anxieties. In The Oedipus Complex Today, (1989). J. Steiner, (Ed). London: Karnac Books.
• Notes on Dissociation and Dissociative Identity Disorder
• Notes on Sexuality, Perversion and Neosexuality
• May Ethical Codes Be Unethical?
• Introduction to Attachment Theory
• The Intergenerational Transmission of Affect
• Four Patterns of Adult Discourse Observed in the Adult Attachment Interview
• The Therapeutic Process Using an Attachment-based Approach
• Summary of Home Office and NSPCC Statistics Relating to Violence and Abuse
• Violence as Attachment Gone Wrong – Three Case Vignettes
• Serious Violence, Trauma and Disorganised Attachment
• Violence and Gender – Similarities and Differences
• Understanding the links between adult attachment styles and violence in intimate relationships: when should couple therapy be the choice of intervention?
• Summary and Comment from a Contemporary Relational Perspective on ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (‘Dora’)’ by Sigmund Freud
• ‘The Mirror Transference in the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy of Alcoholism: A Case Report’
• Contemporary Views of Psychological Trauma
• Relational Psychoanalytic Perspectives On Psychosis

VERY impressive.  The above article on dissociation caught my attention immediately.

So often – no, more accurately nearly 100%  of the time in America those of us who have suffered from the effects of severe traumas are left along the wayside of the mainstream to wither up and die.  We can pretend all we want to that we are a compassionate nation.  I don’t believe it.  If we cared as a nation about the suffering of survivors of severe trauma – especially the suffering of those of us who paid the price to stay alive while being under threat our entire infant-childhoods — we would make available to everyone wherever possible the quality of therapeutic care Dr. Paul Renn provides.

My friend and fellow lay scholar, Sandy, immediately located a copy of Renn’s new book, purchased it for me and made sure it was in the mail to me ASAP. 

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The Silent Past and the Invisible Present: Memory, Trauma, and Representation in Psychotherapy (Relational Perspectives Book Series) [Hardcover]  

Paul Renn (Author)

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I will have some thick and fascinating reading ahead of me once this book arrives.  I have completed my work on one branch of my book writing as those books move on to others to complete the photograph process for them, and then their edit and proof.  Meanwhile, I have full confidence that what Renn has to say in this book will direct me correctly toward my next writing goals.

(For those readers who remember this, my first choice for my book’s title was, Story Without Words:  The invisible silence of Mother’s abuse of me.

My editor daughter forbid me to use that subtitle — partly, it seems, because she did not like the feel of it as she read those words.  It intrigued me to see the title of Dr. Renn’s book.  On some level I believe he will understand what I say in my book perhaps more clearly than can anyone else on earth.)

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As I reach the end of my self-assigned task of presenting the collection of my mother Mildred’s papers I see myself facing the transparency of time.  As I struggle to recreate the history of the homestead dwelling I also find myself left with this part of history as it has been preserved not in Mildred’s letters but rather in this small surviving pile of photographs such as they show me where my parents created within ever-changing walls a version of home as it was meant to separate the lives of those who lived within them from the wilderness that surrounded and encapsulated our family.  There is also a transparency that has appeared as the story told by Mother fades into what is left of her story as it survives within me.

There is a certain quietness that surrounds the ending of a story as the words belonging to it vanish with an inevitable certainty into the vastness of the future.  I am left thinking about the very language of homesteading itself, homesteading as the law defined it, homesteading as my father’s one word snatched our family’s history from the legal parameters of fulfilling specified requirements to obtain ownership of a tract of land equalling 160 acres.  “Entrymen” is what the government called those who pushed past a boundary of civilization into an area whose natural history did not include humans.

As Father was the entryman of our family, Mother was the entrywoman and we six were the entrychildren.  From what I know of myself it was the wilderness that entered me.  I resided for only a short period of time within the final homestead dwelling that had been built from the beginning only upon poplar tree posts set upon that land high on a mountainside a short distance below timberline.  Because it was my experience to be the chosen child for Mildred’s mentally ill psychotic abuse, the walls of the shelter that protected us from the elements of nature at the same time trapped me inside of them with Mother.

I therefore have many sets of memories connected not only to the passage of time covered in Mildred’s words, but also to every one of the physical structures our family lived inside with her, especially the homestead dwelling.  It was there that she could do whatever she wanted to do outside of the range of human comprehension.  At the end of the literal road that led to the door of our home I have finally found my way to the end of my task to set to order the shambled record of all that can be known of the Lloyd family’s Alaska homesteading saga except as that history continues to exist in my memory and within the memories of my five siblings.

At this point I pass through the invisible transparent portal of time past into time present.  Any step forward I might now take leads me into my own story and out of my mother’s.  I welcome that transmission.  I have, in reality, worked in some way all of my life to reach exactly this point in time. 

A few chosen pieces of Mildred’s writings have been passed into the hands of my youngest daughter who asked for them.  All of the rest of Mildred’s papers are gone.  I buried them in the earth, watered the dirt, introduced garden worms that I received through the mail from my sister to the east of me and from my sister to the west of me, and then I waited for nature to take its course.  After a few short months there was nothing left but some twisted rusted wire spirals left behind from Mildred’s journals.  Everything else was consumed to become rich, palatable soil that supports new life.  I cannot imagine a better ending for Mildred’s story as she recorded it in her own words.

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Having just finished my last post – +THERE I AM – SKINNY 16-YEAR-OLD ME – there is more I need to say about me and the story that is not going into these seven books of my mother’s writings I have nearly completed.  It matters to me today to discover I am cooking on a hot plate – rather than on a full size stove with an oven that I KNOW was in that spot – at SOME TIME – because I have a memory – I will only mention now – that I have never written about – that I have not known WHEN it exactly happened – that involved in my memory a STOVE in THAT spot.

In the very lowest corner on the right of the picture in my last post where I am so sweetly smiling as I make candied apples (carmel?) you can see the raw end of a painted 2’x4′ board.  That was the edge/top of a little wall that gave just enough room behind it to turn around and sit down at the table you see there in the bottom picture.

In my memory Mother had flown into one of her deadly rages at me.  I have never yet written about the tortures of doing the family’s dishes.  I always washed all of them.  Only me.  I had been doing so since I was 9, in 4th grade.  It is marked in Mother’s letters where that began.  I found it.

Dishes.  100 rules to doing the dishes.  Perfectly.  100 steps.  All of them had to be done in order and done perfectly.  I am not ready to write about the beatings I suffered because I could not do the impossible.  Even when I tried my absolute hardest — then I didn’t do them FAST enough.  When I tried to do these dishes by all 100 steps, never forgetting ONE of them, never doing one of them out of order — when I did this all faster, then I MADE TOO MUCH NOISE.  Hundreds of times I had to write the 100 steps.  Over and over and over again.  Beginning when I was 9.

But that’s not what I think of as I look at this picture of me at 16.  What I want to know is WHERE IS THE STOVE as I feel a strange kind of shock at seeing a hotplate where the stove should be – because I have a crystal clear memory of my two sisters standing behind that little wall as Mother Mildred was in one of her abusive rages at me – because I had not cleaned the top of the stove well enough after doing the dishes (one of the 100 steps).  At the instant Mildred grabbed my right hand and forced my pointer finger into the exposed pilot light of the STOVE – I see the instantaneous look of ABSOLUTE HORROR on the faces of my beautiful sisters.

When I look at this hotplate picture, and realize the date this was taken – Halloween 1967 has to be it — which leaves this horrible memory belonging to the following year when I was 17, my sisters 15 and 13.  I do not discount the details of my memory even though there’s a hotplate instead of a stove.  This just informs me that the stove must not have appeared in that spot until after this Halloween age-16 picture was taken.

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This leads me around in a circle to another post recently published here – +WHAT IN THE WORLD IS ADULT ATTACHMENT?.  In the second paragraph of the article mentioned in this post the author states this:  Such conflict and inconsistencies indicate the operation of parallel memory systems and the dissociation of painful affect. The AAI is designed to detect conflict and inconsistencies in the discourse and narrative style of the interviewee.

Parallel memory.  Nearly every single memory from the 18 years of my abusive childhood exists as ‘parallel memory’.  I know this WAS me sweetly smiling making sweet treats.  I also know there was another time I was forced to stand in nearly that exact spot while another kind of memory was being formed.  Parallel memory.  How well I know what THAT kind of memory is.

I stay away from those memories, most of my memories.  I write what I need to — when I need to — for very specific reasons.  There’s another kind of memory I have.  I remember why I LET my mother hold my finger in the pilot light.  Yes.  There was something I could have done to stop her.  One thing.  Only one thing.

I could have killed her.

That is the ONLY action I could possibly have taken to stop my mother from doing what she did to me.  This is the truth.  I remember this truth along with everything else.

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