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I would like to recommend (with the following reservations) the book

Surviving a Borderline Parent: How to Heal Your Childhood Wounds & Build Trust, Boundaries, and Self-Esteem by Kimberlee Roth, Freda B. Friedman, and Randi Kreger.

The authors have created a recovery tool for anyone exposed in childhood to the whims and rages of a parent with this form of mental illness.  The book is clearly divided into sections which cover NEARLY every topic of interest for those of us who had to endure childhoods under the care (or more likely the lack of care) of a parent whose mind never worked correctly.

Yet while the book carries within its pages hundreds of tips for working out our adult ‘issues’ created within this malevolent kind of childhood, it does not, in my opinion, speak to the single most important FACT that those of us who were raised from birth by parents – particularly mothers – who manifested the most severe ‘style’ of Borderline Personality Disorder known within the human species know instinctively about ourselves.

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This book, like most others except The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook–What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing by Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz, does not discuss or present the very real brain development changes that occur as a result of an infant being raised in a truly malevolent environment.

I find that altered brain development is a completely ignored consequence of being raised by a severe Borderline parent.  I remain disappointed that the experts in the topic of working to recover a healthy self and a healthy life post-malevolent childhoods do not consider that for every word of their expert writing those of us who HAVE one of these altered brains read, we are still left ‘starving and alone’, bereft of the most important information we need in order to make use of the information all the experts are giving us.

No matter how helpful, how accurate, how comprehensive, how informed or how ‘scientifically based’ any Borderline Personality Disorder recovery book may intend to be, either for the BPD person or for their offspring, if altered brain development is not presented as THE SINGLE most significant consequence of a malevolent childhood, then the authors’ words are missing the point.

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Even though Roth, Friedman and Kreger at least mention insecure attachment disorders in their book, they do not develop the potential that exists within this one crucial sphere of thought to its REAL conclusion.  Insecure attachment patterns from birth, if they are not altered and improved by secure attachment patterns with other adequate early infant and childhood caregivers, result in the development of a changed brain.

These changed brains will NEVER process incoming information in the same way as a securely attached, benevolently formed brain will.  When this fact is ignored in any ‘self help’ book — which I might add currently includes ALL of them – the foundational brain of the person trying to make sense of the ‘help’ and apply it to themselves is left floating around without the information most needed in order to make improvements in their lives.

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This, to me, amounts to a situation similar to one in which instruction is given in how to drive a car safely without anyone ever acknowledging or addressing the single most important aspect of the task – one must not be completely sightless.  It’s like being instructed to build a modern day wood frame house while at the same time NOT being told that one must have something to measure with, cut the wood with, and drive the nails with.

In other words, every ‘self help’ book I have ever read, with the exception of those who specifically begin from the start by identifying the fundamental brain changes that result from infant and child development in a malevolent world, make major assumptions about their readership that leaves those of us with these changed brains flailing around in the dark.  We know from our insides that something is missing.  I am here to say the missing information is not due to any fault of ours.  The missing information is in the writing and work of the ‘experts’ who are presenting THEIR information while ignoring what some of us know absolutely to be true.

‘Un-ordinary’ infancies and childhoods create ‘un-ordinary’ brain-mind-bodies.  Those with severe Borderline Personality Disorder are among such people, and it is likely that without outside assistance during our childhoods that those of us raised by these BPD parents end up with ‘un-ordinary’ brains, as well.

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The tricky part of trying to locate, access and use information helpful to improving the quality of our lives is that those people with an ‘ordinary brain’ and those with an ‘un-ordinary’ brain might both be left needing to build the proverbial modern wood frame house.  The first have the box of tools, the second do not – and may well NEVER have them because the brain that was built inside their skulls from birth was simply not made to be an ‘ordinary brain’.

Yes, the brain is plastic and can accomplish incredible feats of adjustment.  But the fundamental brain regions, circuits, pathways and patterns of operation are built into the brain’s structure before the age of two.   These most fundamental aspects of a brain, once it has been built, cannot be changed in any fundamental way.  It would seem far more helpful to me to have experts tell me what these brain changes are, how to recognize how they affect me, and how to work most constructively in order to try to create a quality life in spite of them.

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Without information about my changed brain, I am left alone deep within a pitch dark cave without a source of light.  The ‘self help’ books can tell me what it’s like up there on the earth’s surface, but they do not describe where I am to start with, nor do they give me a single solitary clue how to find my way to the surface so that I can try to begin the journey they so helpfully describe for those who are already there.

Yet even if I do somehow miraculously make my way to the ‘ordinary surface’, my journey there would STILL be a far different one than ‘ordinary’ because of my brain-mind-body changes.  I would STILL be left trying to translate their helpful instructions about how to ‘drive safely’ even though I lack the sightedness these authors take completely for granted.  Where DOES this quandary leave me?  Let me ‘count the ways’ I know there’s a field on the surface that is not covered with daisies.

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I was raised from birth by a Narcissistic Psychotic Borderline.  At the same time I can say that my experiences were obviously an exception to the RULE, I can also say that this proves to me that what is considered to be the RULE is fallible.  Therefore in my thinking the RULE is not a RULE at all.  It is simply an assumption about brain formation based on what optimal caregiving environments produce.

Similar breaches of this RULE, as I experienced them, produced my mother’s changed brain during her own early development, as well.  Therefore, in my thinking, obviously the RULE cannot apply to my experience as all ‘self help’ authors seem to assume.

My mother and I, as exceptions to the RULE, must therefore exist in a world that operates under completely different rules, and we ended up with a brain-mind-body that resulted from our adaptations to this altered ‘un-ordinary’ world.  Because nobody tells me what these changes really ARE, I am left trying to figure them out for myself.

Most simply put, I do not receive ‘ordinary’ information in an ‘ordinary’ way.  From those beginnings, I do not process the ‘un-ordinary’ information I receive or act on it in an ‘ordinary’ way, either.  Just taking these simple facts into account, I cannot read any ‘self help’ book and make any ‘ordinary’ sense out of it unless I understand that those books are not addressing the altered reality that I was forced to grow up adjusting to.

Let me give you a few examples.  Because from the time I was born I had no way to count on a ‘good mother’ appearing in response to my infant needs, my brain’s processing systems had to expand themselves to accept that incoherent malevolent chaos was just as equally likely to respond to ME as was coherent benevolent niceness.   Well before the age of three months my brain would already have changed from ‘ordinary optimal’ development as a consequence.

When an infant ordinarily needs something and that something is out-of-sight, it can ordinarily begin to form brain circuits that allow it to WAIT HOPEFULLY because it can TRUST that its caregiver is going to return to take care of it.  If incoherent malevolent chaos is just as likely to appear as the alternative, it seems perfectly obvious to me that this tiny forming brain is not going to have the ‘ordinary’ experiences required to build an ‘ordinary’ brain – from the start.

Most simply put, because my mother lacked the capacity to respond to me as my own self, nothing inside of me was able to respond back to her from my own internal ‘self place’.  I simply have what I can most clearly describe as blank spots in my brain where ‘ordinary’ patterns and circuits were supposed to develop.  As a consequence I am NOT an ‘ordinary’ person and never will be, no matter what good use I try to make out of information contained in expert self help books.

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As a result of my development within the malevolent conditions my mother was just as likely to provide for me as her periodic – and undependable – benevolent conditions, my brain did not build within itself any ‘ordinary’ potential to process human interactions.  This is a complicated condition that I will not cover in detail here.  But I will say here that as a consequence, my right brain did not grow to include ‘ordinary’ processing of social or emotional information.  Its connection with information in my body is different.

Once the major development of the right brain is completed before the age of one, it is time for the left brain to begin going through its major developmental stages.  Under extreme malevolent conditions, there is no way that the left brain can develop ‘ordinarily’, either.  It is not possible for the corpus coliseum, the region of the brain that transfers information between the right and left brain for processing, to develop ‘ordinarily’, either.

That’s just the very earliest beginnings of what I know about changes in my own (and my mother’s) brain development.  We could move on in our understanding of how the development of an infant’s left brain ‘happy’ center’s neurons are affected, how the ability to process social cues is affected, how the brain’s ability to form understandings about trust and hope is affected, how the brain’s neurological information processing about the self is affected, and about how all aspects of communication from the molecular to the verbal are affected as a result of a brain’s ability to adapt a human being’s development to and under malevolent environmental conditions.

There is absolutely no way that the higher functioning cortical areas develop in any ‘ordinary’ fashion, either.  As a result, future planning, decision making, and the ability to understand consequences with cognitive flexibility are affected.

I personally know that my brain does not even process the fundamental concept of TIME in an ordinary way.  Yet I am even here only describing the proverbial ‘tip of the iceberg’ of how extreme early infant and child abuse changes the fundamental ways a survivor’s brain-mind-body changes.

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In other words, even if we take every single expert self help book and put them together in one volume, the OTHER volume that some of us most need to read simply does not exist – yet.  We are left trying to find a fit for ourselves as we attempt to understand ourselves in relation to the more ‘ordinary’ world we were hatched into as adults.

I’m not saying that we can’t make good use of information found in books that do not recognize our ‘un-ordinary’ reality or what our changed brains are really like.  I’m simply making a point that no matter how hard these self help books might try to help us a create a more ‘ordinary’ life, they are evidently unable to address the specifics of what actually happened to some of us.

For any of us who have ever had the attempted-recovery-based feeling of “YES, but……..  “ when we try to apply what seems to make sense to everyone else but not QUITE to us, we are absolutely correct!!  There IS something missing – but the trouble is NOT with us.  The trouble is that what happened to us has yet to be truly recognized for what it is – the creation of ‘un-ordinary’ individuals who were able to adapt physiologically on our most fundamental levels to endure unimaginably malevolent early developmental conditions.

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We are truly extraordinary people, and it evidently remains for us to identify and describe exactly what that means!!  Nobody else seems able to do that for us!

We don’t have to look beyond ourselves to know what living with a changed brain is like.  We’ve made that quantum leap in understanding.  We were forced to, or we would not have survived the malevolent world we developed in.

The rest of the ‘expert’ world just has to catch up with us.  We know what we are talking about.  We are our own living proof!

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