Tag: trauma

+THE JOY OF SAYING ‘NOPE’ TO OPRAH

alchemynow13 Comments

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“Well, tickle me pink!”  I have no idea what the history of that cliche is, but it comes to mind as I entertain myself with a little humor, Linda style.  I give myself full permission to access anything that I can use to prepare for my next task — and to accomplish it — with great success!

I have (literally) a hell of a story to tell.  I am not alone in this.  Anyone who has suffered abuse in life has the same kind of story to tell, but it is those of us who were raised from birth (and perhaps from conception) within the earliest possible truly malevolent environments that have the worst stories to tell.

Not that there is some sort of new-fangled “GONG” show especially for people who want to march up to some television stage and compete for “Who has the very worst infant-child abuse story to tell” kind of prize.  But there ARE critical differences in the long term consequences of differing kinds of early abuse.

A week or so ago during my conversation with my friend I was having lunch with the topic of Oprah came up.  “Oh,” my friend said.  “I heard that now Oprah passed 50 she has decided to let her abusers go.”

“Well, I’ll be horn swaggled,” I think to myself.  Not THE great and powerful Oprah?  Such a public example of the “should do” for all other infant-child abuse survivors.

I’ve never been an Oprah fan.  That could be because I am not a personal fan of either television or magazines.  But in the last week that I have been sitting in an office taking care of its business so my friend could take her vacation I have honed my anti-Oprah insights.

Now, I can in part thank my daughter for this.  She is a very busy professional woman with a marriage and new baby to tend to.  She hasn’t much time left over for one of her simple pleasures:  Making gorgeous, creative, stunningly artistic switchplate covers out of collage.  So I am taking advantage of the quiet time I have at the office to cut apart magazines and prepare a delicious palette of tiny images for my daughter to work with should she ever find the time to sit down and make some of her designs.

In this process I found a pile of ‘used’ Oprah magazines at our local thrift store.  This is the first time I have ever opened one of those magazines — and quite frankly what I found inside appalled me though it did not surprise me.  For all the rumors in the wind I have heard about the ‘do good’ doings of this most-rich woman in America’s spotlight I found nothing in that magazine but continued promotion of the ‘be gorgeous’ make believe woman image in VERY expensive advertising.

Putting aside what I might think about anyone who devotes an entire magazine to their self, and putting aside what I think of anyone with that kind of money who doesn’t avidly reinvest it on the level of ‘who truly needs what for a better life’ down at the bottom of America’s society, I have to be honest and tell you that my motivation for writing a hell of a book with my hell of a childhood story of abuse in it is entirely (self) motivated by my not being responded to on Oprah’s website when I left two separate emails mentioning my story.

No response then, no response ever as far as I am concerned.  I can’t think of anything more delightful than for me to actually write a bestseller that attracts someone of Oprah’s staff, who then invites me onto the Oprah show — so that I can utter back one word and one word only:  Nope.

Now maybe if they were holding my grandson hostage I MIGHT not say “Nope,” but as that’s unlikely I am quite certain there is nothing, absolutely nothing on this blue and green earth of ours that could drag me anywhere near that woman.

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My point being — I can guarantee that no matter what abuse of what kind Oprah experienced during her childhood years, someone loved her — and someone from the instant she was born provided her with safe and secure attachment.

And I WILL be the one to say this:  That is all that really matters.

Without having safe and secure earliest caregiver interactions nobody’s body-nervous system-brain can grow a safe and secure attachment pattern in it.  Without these patterns, there is nothing EVER to be done about truly leaving one’s abuser(s) in the past.  The changes (the damage) is IN THE BODY of early abuse survivors because it was built in during development.

Now, I honestly don’t care one bit what Oprah’s abuse history is.  But I will bet everything I own (inventory sight unseen for any takers) that someone was there to help Oprah’s body-brain-mind-self form correctly during the first year (ESPECIALLY!) of her life.  Once that happens, every other trauma a person experiences for the rest of their lifetime will be processed in a different way than it will be by those whose earliest experiences were not safe and secure — with SOMEBODY.

On top of conception to birth, birth to age one, we have to consider next what happens to age two, and then through age five.  All of these experiences are building the body-nervous system-brain — step by step, foundation stone upon foundation stone.  I am not saying that childhood sexual abuse is not devastating, but processing the experience (any and ALL experience) is very different between those who had safe and secure earliest caregiver interactions and those who did not.

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Out of curiosity I did try to locate the cost of placing an advertisement in “O” for my book.  As far as I can tell the least expensive ad placement is well over $50,000.  Signed.  Sealed.  Delivered.  The answer to O-Oprah is “Nope.”

My ‘bone to pick’ with the O-Oprah Empire has to do with my concerns that NOT acknowledging the existence of resiliency factors of all kinds during early infant-child development depletes the truth of any claims for so-called ‘recovery’ – no matter who makes them.  All RISK factors are always balanced by RESILIENCY factors — not by magic, not by magical thinking, and not by the power of persuasion or suggestion by anyone who is a member of the Magic Kingdom — and I don’t mean Disney’s.

As long as our society does not acknowledge risk and resiliency factors equally, we will not come to the truth about how early infant-child abuse changes physiological development so that early abuse can create very different kinds of body-brains.  The HAVES don’t have to be grateful for what they DID receive on the resiliency side of their existence at the same time they can maintain and perpetrate the MYTH that ‘everyone can be as I am, do as I do’.

NOPE!

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+WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN GROWING – OR WE WOULDN’T BE HERE NOW

alchemynow1 Comment

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It stuck me this morning that maybe what I have always thought of as ‘healing’ really is something else, and that something else is growth.  Maybe it doesn’t even matter what I call it, just so I continue to experience it!  But if I think in terms of growth rather than healing, an entirely different set of images comes to mind — and a whole different set of metaphors, as well.

I have a little plant growing in a Styrofoam cup that my sister started from its seed and brought over to me a few months ago.  I have it right by my kitchen sink so I can keep my eye on it and notice when it is too dry and begins to wilt so that I can take good care of it.

This is a Mexican Bird of Paradise plant, but we won’t know which variety it is until it lives long enough to bloom.  Is it the hardier (for my altitude and climate) yellow one, or is it the more warmth-oriented red one?  I hope for red, but either way I admire that my sister was able to get this seed to sprout in the first place because doing so requires some special treatment.

I don’t know what actions my sister actually took, but I have heard that the seed must be pounded to crack its shell.  It is a desert native, so on its own the species has provided its offspring with some way to make it forward in the world.  I am just glad to have this little plant, and today I am going to move it into a bigger container, but I will still keep it where I won’t be likely to ignore its needs.

As I watch the little stems bud and lengthen I think about this healing vs growth idea of mine.  That plant isn’t healing, at least I wouldn’t name its process that.  I would say it is growing.  And as it grows I certainly cannot predict the shape it takes.  It’s growing in its own way although of course it depends on me to give it what it needs to do so.

Perhaps every single thing I have done in my life, and certainly as I try to ‘heal’ from the terrible trauma of 18 years of severe abuse from my mother as I grew a body-brain, was not and is not about healing.  Maybe it was simply about growing — then and now.

Somehow as I think about this growing angle rather than a healing one I feel less pressure to do ‘it’ right!  Certainly this little plant I am watching doesn’t care if it grows right or not.  It just does what it naturally does — and grows!  If it didn’t grow, it would die.  That’s a simplicity I can understand.

I have intuitively always found today’s emphasis on ‘recovery’ impossible to swallow.  Now I know that due to the circumstances of my early abusive environment that changed how my body-brain-mind-self developed I have nothing to go back and get — nothing to ‘recover’ unless I go all the way back to my body as it grew within my mother’s womb and try to find something back THERE that wasn’t permanently altered by my trauma-influenced development during all the stages after my birth.

I’m not going to be able to ever ‘go back there’ and recover any sense of being a safe and securely attached person in the world.  I didn’t get to grow and develop any safe and secure attachment patterns or circuitry into my body from the start.  As I recognize how my experiences changed my very body forever, I am also recognizing the patterns of my life that happened to the largest extent because my development WAS so changed in a malevolent environment of trauma.

Yes, I survived.  And yes, I have looked at what I do now as ‘healing’.  But I am beginning to think that I might just want to throw that word out completely as ‘not relevant’.  What I am doing is what everyone does who is breathing their way from one past moment, through a present one, and hopefully into a future.  I am growing.  Simply growing.

As I begin to think in this new way I understand that my growth is not always predictable.  I am often surprised by what ‘comes up’.  My new little leaf here, my new little root tip there, my branches extending off in this direction or that one.  Learning how to not only watch my own growth happen, but to begin to understand that I ONLY have to be willing to let it happen frees me to appreciate all the interesting twists and turns I have always taken along the way — throughout my life — from the moment I was born.

Looking at my life in terms of growth rather than healing might also change how I look at ‘surviving’.  Perhaps all that my survival really has been from the beginning is my growth.  I just continued to grow from the time I was born through horrific experiences in a very nasty environment.  Somehow I had and found what I needed to do my growing in spite of all of it!

I am free to anticipate all the interesting and clever ways my growth takes place each day.  And because I am my own little plant, I don’t have to compare myself to anyone else’s growth process, either.  If I can see and appreciate that what I needed for my continued growth was there for me from the start of my life, I can more easily appreciate that whatever I need to continue my growing is also right here, right now for me today.

Some good soil, a little water, just the right amount of sunlight, a little darkness at night, no weeds to crowd me out and nobody to trample on my little sprouting branches and I am all set to go.  If healing happens while I am busy growing, that’s OK with me.

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I suspect I need to pause to notice all this because I am preparing to go back into the past of my horrible childhood to retrieve my own story — so that I can write it.  I need to remember that I am never actually going backwards.  Growth is a forward affair.  No matter what crap I may encounter as I remember myself in my childhood, I know that all it can do is act as good fertilizer for the growth I am doing today.

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+LINK ON ‘KILLER’ BRAINS

alchemynowLeave a comment

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My sister just sent this link to me – check it out!

A Neuroscientist Uncovers A Dark Secret

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

AND

On The Scale Of Evil, Where Do Murderers Rate?

A forensic psychologist has come up with a 22-point scale to rate evil, complete with examples of murderers from the 20th century.

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+ALWAYS LEARNING HOW TO LIVE WITH ‘THIS FEELING’

alchemynow2 Comments

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Sometimes when severe infant-child abuse survivors feel crappy, the reason why we feel the way we do — along with what we are actually feeling — might surprise us.  I have ‘this feeling’ often, and now that I better know where it comes from, why I have it, and what it actually IS I find living my life a little easier.  Sometimes.  The trick for me is to recognize ‘this feeling’ when I am having it — so that I can name it specifically for what it is and not for what it is not.

Humans have potential to experience a wide array of feelings, and MOST of them are actually not entirely pleasant.  Why might this be so?  I figure it’s because our actual survival far more depends on our ability to find ways to take care of ourselves so that these unpleasant feelings either shrink or disappear — at least temporarily — than it does on our being outright giddy with glee (my term of choice at the moment for all we might call our feel-good feelings).

If we happen to get caught with our hand in the flames, our jerking it out doesn’t so much make us immediately giddy with glee as it does STOP the pain.  That’s a good thing.  Much of what I suspect we humans do is geared toward stopping pain (thus enhancing our survival).  Nothing wrong with that, and nothing to surprise us here.  Not really.

If life on this planet had always been a giddy party-for-all free-for-all, full of plenty, full of safety and security, a NICE place to survive in we would no doubt be sharing our current breathing space with members of at least SOME of the other 18-plus other hominid species that vanished trying to do what our species did:  Remain flexible and adaptable enough to stay alive.

So while it must sure be nice to have a big fat left-brain happy center, all full of early-formed happy neurons that can be relied on to add humor and a more pleasant focus on life than severe infant-child abuse survivors managed to hold onto in the midst of the tragedy and terror of their body-brain formative years, it’s not anybody’s happy left-brain neuron center that most guarantees they are going to survive if the time ever comes to put their survival to the absolute test.

I have to remember all of this on days that often come to me when I feel far from giddily gleeful.  It’s not ONLY that my early forming left-brain happy center had only sporadic Kodak Moment opportunities for happiness that contributes to my difficulties in staying buoyant today.  It’s not ONLY that fear and sorrow, terror and confusion — and all the rest of my survival-connected emotions got an Olympic sized workout from the time I was born that increases my difficulties in experiencing joy.

What did the most damage was the fact that the malevolent, dangerous, abusive, unsafe and insecure world that I spent the first 18 years of my life trying to grow up in was the fact that all the abuse I experienced happened because both my mother and my father ALSO grew up in unsafe and insecure worlds.  This gave them — and in turn gave me — an ‘insecure attachment disorder’.

What that means to me now is that severe abuse, tied into severe attachment disorders (for both the perpetrators and then for their offspring), left me with an attachment system that CANNOT TURN ITSELF OFF!

THAT is what I am actually feeling on most days that I might otherwise be tempted to describe what I feel in some other survival-based emotional terms.  It isn’t anger or resentment or bitterness or despair or hopelessness or helplessness or fear of the future that gets to those of us who suffered in and survived the kinds of infant-childhoods this blog is dedicated to.  It isn’t boredom or loneliness or even often hunger or thirst or some other physical depletion that we feel.  It isn’t grief or sorrow or depression.  It isn’t isolation or confusion or longing we feel.

What we most often feel does not even have any more of a name in our culture than what I call it here.  What we feel when we do not feel ‘happy’ and can’t seem to find our way even to peaceful calmness (which as I have said is SUPPOSED to be the middle set point for our nervous system and for severe early abuse survivors is NOT) — is the very real physiological body-based FEELING of having an active insecure attachment system THAT CAN’T BE TURNED OFF.

Certainly sometimes we know what it feels like not to have this feeling.  Some use addictions or chemicals from the drug store or addictions to everything from gambling to work to sex to over spending or over eating or relationships (or even as my mother did by abusing someone else and by her constant moving).  What I am describing ACTUALLY is that LOST feeling I mentioned several posts back.  It is the feeling we are born with that motivates us to express our needs in such a way that someone comes and takes care of us (or does not).

Our feel-good and feel-bad chemicals in our body are all tied into this attachment system we have been either fortunate enough to have had built right in safe enough infant-childhoods — or unfortunate enough not to.  It is those of us in the latter group — way way way way over in this latter group — who are left with the same insecure attachment patterns that built our entire body-nervous system-brain-immune system-mind-self from the start back in those truly malevolent earliest years.

Early abuse survivors are left with circuitry in our body that operates differently than does the attachment circuitry built into people who had safe and secure-enough infant-childhoods.  There’s no way around this fact.  What nobody ever told me, what nobody ever tells ANY of us is that THEY have a secure attachment system that can be turned off.  Our insecure attachment system was built to KNOW we will never be safe — and ON is (to our trauma-formed body) BEST.

There are times as a severe abuse survivor that I have been distracted from the experience of having to FEEL my forever turned on insecure attachment system.  Fortunately.  Those distractions include the 35 years I spent mothering children in my home before they reached their own adulthood.  Those distractions really are the story of my adult life.  But the older I have gotten the more difficult it has become for me to find ways to distract myself from feeling WHAT I FEEL LIKE — really feel like — feels like!!  This is all a direct consequence not only of the hell of abuse I was formed in and by throughout my infant-childhood — but is also a direct consequence of the fact that I survived it so that I am still alive to have feelings today (and to write about them).

Typing into the search box on this blog ‘insecure attachment’ will bring up many, many pages on the topic.  I am mentioning it again today because I periodically have to remind myself of how real my insecure attachment ‘disorder’ is — because there are days when I feel it in my body so strongly it is difficult to feel anything else.  Then I have to remind myself it isn’t because I am a flawed person, that there’s something wrong with me, that I ‘should’ be doing something better or differently than I already am.

On days like today I am just face-to-face with myself as a trauma-formed person with a body who will feel that reality for the rest of my life.  At the same time I know that has to be just fine with me because the only escape from it will be my death — that’s a reality.  But I have survived this far and will keep on keepin’ on because that, after all, is what every living member of our species does best.

But I am always in the market to find new tricks for backing off this unpleasant survival-based feeling so that it doesn’t overwhelm me.  Some days that becomes my nearly full-time job.  At the same time I wonder if it isn’t those of us who survived intolerable infant-childhoods of abuse and deprivation — and pay the price for our survival every day that we have to live with ‘this feeling’ that our insecure attachment ‘disorder’ creates in our body — who really have the greatest right to celebrate that we are — in fact — that we are still here and we are AMAZING!

*NOTE:  In dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment disorders (which I believe was the kind my father had) the brain actually creates its own distractions against emotions so that the brain keeps the person from even being aware that they are having a feeling in the first place.

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+DISSOCIATION: MY MOTHER’S AND MY OWN STORY SHARE IT

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Dissociation.  Without spending time digging around in my back stockpile of previous research I have done on the brain to detail this information, I will simply say that various regions of the brain are usually involved in every brain action in cooperation with each other.  Most regions are designed to be involved in multiple and differing kinds of actions and are not confined to do just a ‘one thing’.  Many of these variable patterns of connections and possible purposes for these regions introduce ‘places’ where dissociation can happen.

Now, I am going to mention a dissociated experience I had about a year ago that I wrote about on this blog.  But before I do so, I want to add that my current difficulties with dissociation happened after my chemotherapy disrupted my brain’s ability to make good use of all the ADULT LEARNED ways I had evidently come up with to diminish the ability my brain has had to dissociate from nearly the time I was born.  Dissociation was not only built into my earliest forming, growing and developing brain, in some profound ways IT BUILT IT.

I will bypass here all the various arguments presented about who dissociates and under what circumstances.  All I want to do is present this example of dissociation in slow motion:

I went out for my daily exercise and walked along the stretch of old rail bed that had its rails and ties recently removed as  part of the national ‘Rails to Trails’ project.  The rocky bed of black chips dumped there from the copper smelter many years ago is still there.

About a mile out there’s a bridge that takes the rail’s bed across a fairly deep desert wash.  Under that bridge lives a good size rattlesnake.  I had seen the snake out there in various spots around the bridge as it came up to warm itself on the sun-heated bed.  Now, what I am going to say next defies reason.

One day I was on my return from my usual turn-a-round spot, having marveled at the beauty of the landscape, the quiet serenity that spread itself around me across the high desert to the distant mountains in all directions .  Suddenly my eyes scanned something on the ground at the end of the rail bed.  My thoughts were, “Oh, my!  Look at that beautiful piece of paper.  How did it get there?  It looks like parchment, like oiled parchment, light weight, almost transparent, and what a beautiful pattern it has on it, and look at those beautiful colors.”

At the same time these thoughts were following one another in my mind my body was in motion without my conscious attention.  I had approached the spot and had my right arm extended with my hand only about two feet away from touching and picking up this ‘beautiful paper’ before my OTHER brain regions kicked in.  First my brain began to recognize that this was not paper, it was a snakeskin.  My brain then followed a series of thoughts about how intact the skin was, and when did the snake leave behind that skin, probably recently because it hadn’t blown away.  I was still reaching NOW for the skin before the next transition in my brain’s activity took place.  Fortunately I next watched that paper swell itself up, get fat and plump, gain dimension, and grow before my eyes into that good sized very live rattlesnake coiled to strike.

Just in time I froze.  Then I retracted my body every so slowly from the space surrounding the rattler.  But even then I did not have a stress response reaction.  I was completely calm, as if I was in another world.  I backed quietly and slowly to the opposite side of the rail bed and continued my walk home.  I have not taken a walk on that rail bed since, and don’t expect to.

Suddenly something CLICKED and I stopped just as my brain said, “Look.  See.  That is a coiled rattler.”

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I don’t believe that prior to my experience with how chemotherapy changed my brain that this kind of dissociational experience would have happened to me — as an adult.  I also believe that it was not the chemotherapy that ‘gave’ my brain the ability to dissociate its operations in this way.  It was the unimaginable trauma, terror and abuse of my infant-childhood that put these patterns into play.  As the circuitry, pathways, and region-to-region operation of my brain was built in the beginning the dissociation was built into me at the same time.

Had I not had to build a brain in the midst of such trauma from birth, dissociation would have been the exception rather than the rule — or it would not have built itself into my brain in the beginning.  Because there WAS enough trauma to build the dissociational information processing patterns into my brain, I needed to learn as I grew up to function in the world in spite of it.

Chemotherapy interrupted my memory of those learnings to the point that my brain’s operation NOW is far more similar to how it was actually created than I have ever known before as an adult.  I am very careful of what I do, where I go, and the situations I expose myself to now.  I live a very simple life, as simple as I can make it.  I no longer trust my brain to give me information in the order I need it, or trust what my possible reactions might be.

I cannot view my present condition as being anything less than a terrible loss of the potential life I COULD have been living if I had not been built in trauma the way that I was.  This topic of dissociation is important for me to keep close in my thoughts as I enter these next stages of my writing.  There is no possible way that my mother could have done what she did, lived the way she did, had the story of a life that she did without dissociational patterns being the entire undercurrent of how she was in the world.

As I work closely now on finding out both how my mother’s story became my story and how it did not, I need to be able to spot the dissociation in both of us.  At the same time, I have to fight my own dissociation every step of the way.  The process I am and will go through to write the story of my childhood is an important one — and will appear as topics within future blog posts.

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+INSIGHTS ON MY MOTHER FROM HER LONG TIME ‘FRIEND’

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From the second telephone interview with Joe Anne Vanover, by Linda Ann Lloyd Danielson, August 7, 2010

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“Did you hear about how your mother died?  At the end of Mildred’s life she was living in a miserable, miserable place off of Cordova in Anchorage in one unpleasant room with a bed, a curtain over the window, a little shelving and cabinets to put stuff in, I think a chair, with a shared bathroom and kitchen – cheap room.

I am remembering why I had gone in there.  She wanted something.  I had seen her a month before and had agreed to meet her to go someplace to eat.  She needed to go to the store, and when I got there she was on the floor and couldn’t get up.  I called 911 that time but when they got there they said they could not take her as long as she was coherent and clean even if she couldn’t get up.

So I had seen her on the floor before, and I helped her up and went and got her some stuff.  I went back the day after to check on her and she wasn’t there.  I asked others who lived there where she was and they said she had knocked on her door and asked for someone to help her get up.  When they opened the door and found her another boarder called the paramedics who took her.  Her room was a mess.  She had been using newspaper for toilet paper and there were feces all over.

She had a strangulated bowel so that feces was backing out of her mouth.  I went over to the hospital and found her in one of the emergency room’s cubicles.  She would not agree to surgery.  She WOULD NOT let the hospital call her sons and had kept telling the hospital personnel that Joe Anne would be there to see her.  She was glad to see me.  I left the cubicle and called your brothers anyway and the boys came right over.  They were very kind.  They asked me if I would back them for institutionalizing your mother after surgery and I said yes.

With her boys there she agreed to surgery, but she died under the prep.  The anesthesiologist was devastated.  He had never lost anyone before, but Mildred had so abused her body for so long it was not his fault, and I told him so.  The boys went to collect her stuff.”  Died January 28, 2003

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I have no idea where Mildred’s money went.  [Bill’s retirement gave her $3000 per month to live on.]

Years before she started starving herself for four days at a time.  Mildred said she needed to practice so she would know if something happened she could live that far, for that long and survive for four days without food.  I would find out and then take her out to eat and she would overeat, gorge herself because she would be starved.

She had no idea – she loved her kids but not you, obviously, but the others until they got old enough they could question her.  She had no idea how to go about being a family or a mother.

[I asked her what she thought about Mildred’s mother.]  My impressions on your grandmother was that she was very businesslike.  One year when she came up to Alaska she did testing on both of my boys [related to their schoolwork].  She was not unfriendly, but not real friendly.  I think she was a very weird lady.  What she did to Mildred was horrid because Mildred did not know how to love.

[During the homesteading years] Mildred would work out these fantasies.  One time she told me she had built a fire down by the creek [where Bill filled our water cans for our drinking water] and pretended she was an Indian princess, washing clothes. [My thoughts are growing about early infant-child damage to my mother as it involved her imagination, ‘pretend play’ that never moved through the Theory of Mind developmental stages required to differentiate ‘true reality’ from ‘pretend reality’.  Remember that I include the operation of DENIAL past the childhood stage of pretend play as being a reversion back to that stage of childhood thinking.]

Mildred had never been loved.  She had been told her dad was dead when he was alive all those years.   Her mother did her such disservice.  All of your family is very smart – but her mother drained out of her everything that would have let her know how to be happy.

Her mother didn’t want her to be happy.

When your father had his stroke, Mildred was extremely concerned he get the best of treatment.  [This was long after their divorce.]  I never heard her say a hateful word about Bill.

Your mother had the most fascinating ability to take any place and fix it up and make it look homey and nice.  That’s why it was such a shocker at the end.  It was terrible!  I knew she was sick, it was terrible, just terrible.  She wouldn’t take help from your brothers, from anyone, I am one of the few people.  [Joe Anne expressed regret repeatedly that she didn’t force someone to intervene on Mildred’s behalf.  I believe Joe Anne did all that was humanly possible considering my mother’s insistent and belligerent refusal to have contact with family, or with anyone else other than Joe Anne at the end of her life.]

I have great compassion for Mildred because I have had wonderful life, loving parents, a great family, a good life.  I have been in the same house since 1951.

The year before she died I knew she hadn’t been anywhere for a long time and I took her to Hatcher Pass.  She loved it and it gave me much pleasure.  Your brothers were so kind as to give us the pictures we took that day.

Underneath she felt really sorry for herself.  She expected more of everything, wanted more of everything, yet had no idea how to achieve it, how to have a family.

Her brother Charles was mean to her.  Underneath I don’t think Mildred was sure about anything .

One time [long after I had left home and after their divorce, when my youngest son was a teenager] Mildred got $20,000 from some relative.  She bought a horse, hired guy to do stuff on homestead, didn’t know how to manage money.

Your mother was probably attracted to Bill because he was kind, quiet and gentle and a heck of a worker – times he worked away from home because it saved his sanity.

I think she was afraid all of her life.  For years she had a set of pearl suitcases, and kept her things in them and took them everywhere with her.

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I remember when I first met your mother, when your family first came to Alaska.  I would go over to see her right after you older ones got on the school bus in the morning.  The house would be perfect, too perfect, that always amazed me.  I never understood that.  And when I would go over your little sister [Sharon, just turned two] would always climb up in my lap and just sit there.  I never understood why she did that, either.

Your mother used to tell me that she would have you girls and nightgowns and she’d have your father brush you girls’ hair.  She never said Bill did anything, but I took it she was setting him up to do something.  The way she told the story about having him do it and how much he enjoyed it, she was wanting to see what would happen, what he would do.  Took it, even then, she was trying to provoke something.  [No matter what our mother said about our father molesting his daughters from the time we were very young, even babies, Joe Anne adamantly said, “It was not true.  Your father never, never, never could have done such a thing.  He didn’t.]

I knew your dad had a temper, but I never saw it.

I remember one time when your family was homesteading your mother told me she had taken dirty clothes down by the creek where your father got water.  She said she had built herself a camp fire, and had pretended she was an Indian princess living there in a camp, washing her clothes.  [Joe Anne expressed amazement and puzzlement at this, that she never understood this, but I didn’t write down her exact words.  I will ask her again later.]

Toward the end Bill could hardly stand her.  Their divorce?  She egged him on.  I think she wanted the divorce.  When everything went down in the 80s she had the money. she could have bought a condo.  Back before your brother started his bookstore, when he was selling real estate, your mother had money and he tried to get Mildred to buy something, like a condo.  She would not consider it.  Your brothers used to invite her for holidays, to dinners, but at the last minute she would say she couldn’t go, say it’s too difficult.

But Mildred used to really worry about your brother Steve that he would never make it.  She really enjoyed you brother Dave’s two girls.

Mildred used to tell me that the only time remember happy when she was growing up was when she was walking out in the woods.  She told me how much time she spent walking – that’s where she found her comfort.  [I think that’s why she liked Alaska so much, it reminded her of that.]

She told me she was very uncomfortable in high school, but after, when she went to work in a hospital, she really enjoyed it and had a good time.  [I mentioned to Joe Anne my memories from my mother’s stories that she wanted to study theatre and go on stage, and her Bostonian mother and grandmother told her, “NO!  Only whores and harlots are in the theater.”  Nursing was THEIR choice, not my mother’s though Joe Anne said that Mildred enjoyed the nursing.]

All her life she was thwarted on what she wanted.  She didn’t know how to get it.  She had a terrible, terrible crush on her shrink, such a crush on him, it was pitiful, pitiful.  {I asked Joe Anne if she believed the ‘shrink’ ever responded back to my mother inappropriately and Joe Anne said, “No.”

Much later, when she was living on Government Hill she invited me over.  At first it was empty and she slept on a mat on floor.  I called paramedics but they wouldn’t’ take her.  The she got the bug and fixed it up like a doll house and asked me to come over to meet this Guatemalan she liked.  He wanted to marry her.  I went up there, and met them.  He had worked on a crab fishing boat but he was getting too old.  I couldn’t believe it.  Her actions were wanton –  I don’t know if she was aware of how sitting, posturing, what she was saying.  I talked to her afterward.  I told her he won’t marry you, unless he thinks you have money or he wants to bring a family into the country.  I was totally amazed, aghast, it was so out of character for her.  She was like a teenager trying to entice a boy she wants and would do anything to get.

After the divorce she used to go to dances.

[Now this statement for difficult for Joe Anne to tell me, and I am glad she felt ‘safe’ enough with me to do so.  It is an important one.]  I felt sorry for her.  She was so squirrelly.  I had never met anyone like your mother.  I never knew what to make of her.  She fascinated me, but to me she was like a bug I had on in a pin.  I have felt guilty for feeling this way.  But she was beyond anything you could imagine.  I liked to watch her.  I felt terribly sorry for what she was doing to herself.

[I reminded Joe Anne that if she ever directly confronted Mildred on what she saw and M didn’t like it, M would not only ignore here, but would disappear – sometimes for years.  As far as the ‘bug on a pin’ image, I realized last night as I talked to my daughter that it really was my mother’s mental illness that Joe Anne nailed on the head of a pin — which is what I wish COULD happen to the icky, nasty, invasive, consuming kind of mental illness my mother had!  I think inside herself Joe Anne DID care for the WOMAN, the individual person my mother was.  It is no small testimonial to the importance that Joe Anne played in my mother’s life that it was Joe Anne she knew was coming at the end of her life, was Joe Anne that my mother was glad to see.]

[I noted another comment I will ask her about again:  When Mildred, her mother and grandmother were driving across country from Boston to Los Angeles in 1945 when she was 19, they ran out of money for gas in Nevada and had to sell Mildred’s pink record player which made my mother very sad.  Joe Anne said my mother never got over this.  Considering that the family sold or left behind them many ‘nice’ possessions for this move, this record player (I seem to remember when Joe Anne mentioned this that it was a gramophone) would have been one of only a very few most important and prized possessions that they were able to fit into the car as they traveled.  I suspect even this experience fits into my mother’s ‘psychosis’ and continual moving, and is tied to her losing any sense of a safe and secure attachment connection with her entire childhood life ‘back East’.  I believe as I carefully examine the words that survived about my mother’s story, that this move was just about the worst thing that could have happened to her in her ‘condition’.  In insecure attachment disorder terms, Mildred’s record player was probably a ‘transitional object’ connecting her with her past attachments – not in itself a ‘bad’ thing.  But according to Joe Anne, my mother never got over losing this object.]

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I didn’t stay glued to my computer during this interview when it seemed to slip into conversation, so much of what Joe Anne said over the span of these two hours did not get recorded.  I am not worried because I know there will more interview-conversations in the future.  Joe Anne (widowed) is about as opposite from my mother as she could be.  She is in her mid-80s, busy, active, involved with family, entertains guests, has lots of friends, has a large and beautifully kept home she cares for herself, lots of lush plants and flowers both inside and out, travels, is close to her children, and is healthy and very, very happy.

She believes that part of what kept my mother in touch with Joe Anne for 45 years was that Mildred believed that Joe Anne the kind of ‘family’ and ‘home’ that Mildred imagined for herself, yet never had any idea how to ‘get’.

+URGING INFORMED COMPASSION FOR OUR ABUSERS – AND LINK TO MY BABY BOOK

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There.  I did it.  I scanned my baby book, and now knowing that task needed to be done will not be keeping sleep away from me tonight.  But ahead of the link to it that I will post below I want to say something extremely important.

I have mentioned JV here on this blog before.  She knew my mother for 45 years and now in her mid 80s this life long Alaskan is giving information in telephone interviews about what her experiences were with Mildred over all those years.  Today I called JV to check in with her about the four volumes of my mother’s writings in ‘Hope for a Mountain’.  The first two volumes have been printed by an also mid 80s homesteading neighbor named Dorothy, who DID NOT end up wanting to read them.  She sent them on to JV.

How ‘up close and personal’ does any severe infant-child abuse survivor feel they want to be with their abuser?  Personally, my entire process of healing now involves getting as close as I can to understanding my mother.  I want to share something here that is part of the interview information Joann gave me today.  In fact, as soon as she picked up her phone and found out it was me calling, this is what she told me:

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“Did you hear about how your mother died?  At the end of Mildred’s life she was living in a miserable, miserable place off of Cordova in Anchorage in one unpleasant room with a bed, a curtain over the window, a little shelving and cabinets to put stuff in, I think a chair, with a shared bathroom and kitchen – cheap room.

I am remembering why I had gone in there.  She wanted something.  I had seen her a month before and had agreed to meet her to go someplace to eat.  She needed to go to the store, and when I got there she was on the floor and couldn’t get up.  I called 911 that time but when they got there they said they could not take her as long as she was coherent and clean even if she couldn’t get up.

So I had seen her on the floor before, and I helped her up and went and got her some stuff.  I went back the day after to check on her and she wasn’t there.  I asked others who lived there where she was and they said she had knocked on her door and asked for someone to help her get up.  When they opened the door and found her another boarder called the paramedics who took her.  Her room was a mess.  She had been using newspaper for toilet paper and there were feces all over.

She had a strangulated bowel so that feces was backing out of her mouth.  I went over to the hospital and found her in one of the emergency room’s cubicles.  She would not agree to surgery.  She WOULD NOT let the hospital call her sons and had kept telling the hospital personnel that Joann would be there to see her.  She was glad to see me.  I left the cubicle and called your brothers anyway and the boys came right over.  They were very kind.  They asked me if I would back them for institutionalizing your mother after surgery and I said yes.

With her boys there she agreed to surgery, but she died under the prep.  The anesthesiologist was devastated.  He had never lost anyone before, but Mildred had so abused her body for so long it was not his fault, and I told him so.  The boys went to collect her stuff.

I have no idea where Mildred’s money went.”  [Bill’s retirement gave her $3000 per month to live on.]  I just had my mother’s death date confirmed.  She did not die in 2002, but rather died January 27, 2003.

from an August 7, 2010 telephone interview with Joann Vanover

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So here in this post I am including information about the beginning of my life of 18 years of suffering at the hands of my mentally ill, disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disordered mother — at the same time I tell you of my mother’s ending.

What matters to me is that nowhere within me, not in the tiniest molecular corner of a single cell in my body, not in any corner of my heart or mind that I know of, did I hear this first detailed description of the end of Mildred’s life in January 2003 and feel, “The monster got what she deserved.”

She did not.  Her life, her mothering, her death was a horrific tragedy.  No human being deserves the life she had.  No, no child deserves to be unwanted, unloved, neglected, abused, mistreated or traumatized — but that not only includes ME, it included my mother.

NOTE:  My mother’s twisted intestines, an extremely painful condition, would have been corrected through a surgical procedure had Mildred sought medical attention when the problem originated.  My mother’s words to the medical staff attending her in the emergency room were, “I just want to be left alone,” repeated over and over again.  Those are the same words she had told the other boarders who had called 911 for her against her wishes, but she was too weak  to get her way.

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*SCAN OF MY ‘NONEXISTENT’ BABY BOOK

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+HEALING THE TINIEST DOLL AT THE CENTER

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Have you ever seen a Russian nesting doll?   All the various doll sets I have ever seen were hand painted — and most I saw in Alaska as a child were hand carved as well.  Here’s an example of a set!

All these little dolls fit inside one another

When I finished my morning’s post I headed into town to have lunch with my friend.  On the way I had some thoughts come to me that might actually be my ‘working hypothesis’ for this next stage of my writing.  As my thoughts played themselves out in my mind, this image of the Russian nesting dolls followed.

The process I am going to describe here might be the same for everyone, but for those with severe trauma and abuse histories we might have what seems like a perpetual series of nesting dolls within us!  (Well, once we begin our healing journey we will certainly never lack for something to do!)

OK.  Here’s how it might go.  Humans experience their lives in patterns.  Patterns are what I am now looking for in my mother’s writings.  Her patterns of life, as they appeared in her trauma dramas, I believe hold a key to something I WANT TO KNOW.

TRAUMA DRAMA = the outside Big Doll

Inside the doll of TRAUMA DRAMA  = another doll = a PATTERN

Inside the doll of a PATTERN = another doll = a SECRET

Inside the doll of a SECRET = another doll  = PAIN

Inside the doll of PAIN = another doll = a WOUND

Inside the doll of a WOUND = another doll = a LIE

When I look right now at everything I know, everything I think I know, everything I guess about my child abuse story and everything I wonder about and guess about my mother (and my father, and my grandmother, etc.) I at this moment feel like I can only SEE the outside Big Doll.

I will be looking for the patterns, within the patterns for the secrets, within the secrets for the pain, inside the pain for the wound, and inside the wound, the LIE.  It is the lie acted out in trauma and abuse, especially for the tiniest growing humans that cause the most severe wounds.

What will lead me through this journey is the truth as I can literally, physically feel it in my body.  We, as human beings living in our bodies for our lifespan FEEL all of what I just described.  And yet detecting where the injury is so that we can truly begin to heal the core of our wound PROBABLY means that at the heart of every trauma drama that acts out abuse and trauma lies — a LIE.

So as I spot the trauma drama, the patterns within them, the secrets that are at the heart of the patterns, the pain at the heart of the secrets, the wounds at the heart of the pain, and the lies at the center of the wounds, I will be simply taking apart stories that were the human drama of the humans that lived them, using whatever information I can find, just like I would take apart a Russian nesting doll.

I believe that there are some lies that are absolutely toxic to infants and children.  They cause a distress reaction within the actual immune system in the body that then makes adjustments to little developing body-brains so that at the end what is left are repeating trauma drama patterns that hold within them all that we cannot DIRECTLY see or know — until we dismantle and gently go after the lies that lie within.

If I am even close to accurate with my Russian nesting doll hypothesis, I should be able to spot the kill-joy lies at the heart of the stories that I am working with — including my own.  After all that dedication, willingness, prayer, and work — perhaps I will have some idea about what it takes to heal that little tiniest wounded perfect doll at the center — so he/she can get well.

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+AS THAT BEAST COWERS, KILL IT

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Here I am this morning at my computer viewing a blank blog page upon which I will dump out words.  I don’t know which words, so the only thing I can do is keep on typing until the words appear here.

I feel alone in this job I am doing with my book’s writing right now.  I feel alone because I am alone.  Mine is a lonely story.

The fact that I wish to write my lonely story so well that it captures the attention, the imagination, the hearts and thoughts of as wide a public as possible reminds me of the word ‘hubris’, a word that came into English in 1884 from the Greek and means ‘exaggerated pride or self-confidence’.

I am afraid of hubris.  Right now this fear stands exactly in front of me and in my way.  It stops me ‘dead in my tracks’, removes my words from me, and will in itself guarantee hubris is exactly where my writing will end up unless I can give myself permission to know that I have value, my story has value, my words have value, and that this work that I am doing is blessed in ways I cannot mortally comprehend.

Somewhere between hubris and my fear of it lies a wide open pathway that is mine to follow.  This pathway is as clearly laid out before me, free of weeds and obstacles and as easy to stroll along, skip over or run along as is the adobe walkway I have been constructing in my own backyard.  Yes, there are a few hardy weeds that have popped their new tiny leaves out of the adobe bricks to appear where I don’t want them now that our monsoon rains have come.

But I can simply snip them off with my fingernails and they will all disappear never to trouble me again.  And it is only I who can make my fears about my work, what I am writing, and what the end result is going to be go away just as easily.

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It is the ‘nature of the beast’ of severe infant-child abuse and the mental illness that spawns and perpetrates it that silence reign.  This beast requires a particular kind of silence.  I believe that the only way this beast remains alive, and carries itself in the dis-eased form it manifests itself in down through the generations is because the silence it needs to duplicate itself is extremely difficult to break.

Difficult and impossible are not the same thing.  It is as if the beast itself is challenging me at this moment, daring me to break the silence that maintains its very existence.  It thunders.  It roars.  It bares its gigantic and terrifying fangs at me.  It shakes its shaggy mammoth-sized head at me in rage.  But thanks to the author, L. Frank Baum, I have the pitiful antihero, The Wizard of Oz, to remember as I meet my own fear of hubris, vanquish it and move on.

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I could end my morning’s verbal sputterings right here, but I am not going to.  I am going to turn around right now and stare that beast right in its eyes.  “Don’t you threaten ME with extinction, you horrible, putrefying, nasty, deceitful LIAR!  I have seen your kind before, and you mean NOTHING to me.  DO YOU HEAR ME?  Are you PAYING ATTENTION?  You STINK!  You are forever rotting, forever condemned to exist in the darkness where human fear feeds you three meals a day and lots of snacks.  Well, I don’t care if you starve to DEATH yourself!  I will no longer heed YOUR lies!  In fact, I will no longer heed you AT ALL!  You are nothing to me.  Nothing.  Because that IS what you are, like it or not.  NOTHING!”

My, that felt good!  Not only has the flimsy immaterial curtain vaporized behind which this invisible beast lurks and groans, but the beast itself has disappeared, though I am not fooled into believing its going is forever.

That beast has resided itself, all tucked in, warm and cozy, amidst every one of my mother’s words I have confronted, do confront, and will confront as I shred apart the lie that fed her life and so harmed me not only as an infant-child, but harmed the me that writes these words, that breathes this air, that has determination to finish a job I began in this world before I left my mother’s belly.

“I WILL NAME YOU!”  I shout out with my soul in the directions that beast has fled to.  “And if I am going to HATE, it is YOUR existence I will shoot my hatred after.  And hear me, oh Beast of Human Misery!  You have stolen away the joy from enough lives in my ancestral pool!  You will no longer chaw your carnivorous teeth upon my family’s generations.  Me thinks you have already stolen more than your fill, and guess what?  Not only am I going to vanquish you, not only am I going to do my best to take back from you the joy, health and well-being that you have raked from my family and carried away into your darkness, I am going to make you pay with your life!  I am going to break this very silence you require for your survival.  And if you happen to be so stupid that you don’t believe me — well — just cower away in your hidden cracks and WATCH ME DO IT — while you still can!”

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+MILDRED’S WRITINGS – WHAT ‘STUDY GROUP’ QUESTIONS DO THEY PRESENT?

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I do want to add one thing here before I lose this little piece of pink-pad paper that I scrawled these notes down on last night after I completed the major edit-proof of the second volume of Mildred’s writings I just posted links to.  I know there are some important levels to my mother’s story – some that are obvious and some that are not.  Each of these levels can contribute something to the overall study of human nature, and I believe each of them is worthy of ‘book study group’ investigation.

The history of the roles of women is a big theme behind all womens’ lives, but especially so for my mother who was born (1925) into a family with a professional (and soon divorced – 1930) mother.  My mother was the product of one of the first kinds of ‘broken homes’ that have since swept America.

What were the limitations imposed on my mother as a result of her choice to be a ‘housewife’ and ‘homemaker’ rather than a ‘career woman’?  What does it mean to ‘have a home’ and ‘to make a home’?

Mildred’s story also contains a powerful example of America’s obsession with WEIGHT as well as with America’s obsession with MONEY (including the consequence of sickness and the costs of medical attention).  I can write a series of ‘study group’ questions about these concerns, as well.  Another important thread is the topic of parenting and the developmental stages of children (and their rights) — which I believe is closely tied to the topic of love for the land itself:  What is our personal feeling relationship with this glorious planet we live on?  (Yes, my mother could love that mountain and its valley at the same time she could commit terrible acts of harm against a child.  What went so wrong?)

What ‘used to happen’ to womens’ talents and gifts – and now?  What did it mean to be a brilliant woman?  An educated one?  What about choices for women to marry or not, bear children or not, ‘wear the pants in the family’ or not?  What has it always meant to girls and women when the ‘boys’ in the family were so cherished – spoiled – favored – and not the girls?  How do male relations influence the development of girls?

Of course the history of American pioneer women relates to this story.  Although my mother asserts that her husband ‘was behind’ the move to Alaska and the homesteading itself, I don’t believe he was.  How many women actually were behind their family’s immigrations and pioneering efforts — rather than the men?  And thus changed the course of history?

What do we value?  What do we want?  What do we hope and dream for?  What are the obstacles we face, and what do we do about them?  What are ALL our resources – how do we identify them, expand them, control them and use them?   How do we plan for the future?  How do we learn from our mistakes — and what do we learn?  How do we incorporate the changes that ‘growing through a lifespan’ gives to us – no matter what?

What is the truth, the REAL truth about our closest relationships?  What is the truth about how we were raised as children and about how our parents treat us as adults?  What do we, particularly as women, believe about friendships with women?  Who supports us in our greatest hours of need?

What have we learned from our ‘culture’ – particularly from the culture of our families ‘back then’ as immigrants to this great nation who brought with them their cultures-of-origin?  How does our ‘social standing’ affect how we see ourselves and others?  How does our culture, including our stereotypes and prejudices limit us?  How do we OUTGROW ideas and beliefs that are not helpful to well-being?

What do we disclose about our ‘personal’ and ‘intimate’ life?  How do we decide what to ‘expose’ and what to bury away and keep hidden at all costs?  This invisible ‘boundary’ and ‘borderline’ dividing the two has changed rapidly in recent American history.  What do these changes mean to us all?  (My mother would have died of rage and mortification and  made sure I left this world with her if she had ever known what I (her despised daughter, especially) was going to do with her ‘private’ words!  Yet the law states when a person dies (and she IS dead 2002) their rights to any words they leave behind dies with them.)

The unrecognized mental illness, of course, completely taints my mother’s story at the same time that her severe child abusing actions are omitted.  After I completed my efforts last night these ‘study group’ questions immediately popped into my mind and then out onto this little piece of pink paper:

What is mental illness?

Where does it come from?

Who gets it?

How do we recognize it?

What can be done about it?

Is it a doomsday sentence?

Does it make a person ‘flawed’ or ‘bad’?

Will it get better?

How does it affect the people we love and who love us?

Is there hope for new choice, change and healing?

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Once I have completed all four of these volumes, the bigger picture of my mother, Mildred, and of her life’s many different patterns will emerge.  Those intermixing threads will then be identified and examined individually and as they intermingle with one another.

I do not believe that what we so blithely refer to as ‘bad genes’ that ’cause mental illness’ operate in a vacuum.  A combination of powerful early developmental forces combine their influence to send a tiny growing child off on a trajectory that can END UP being extremely problematic.  My mother’s Alaskan homesteading story is a case study as well as an historical document about one single women — who, yes, dared to go where only a small handful of ‘modern women’ chose to go.

What, on all its multiple levels, can we learn from her story?  I personally have yet to find out.

AND most importantly, how do we recognize child abusing parents and protect their children?

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NOTE:  Any blog readers that wish to, please post comments including ‘study group’ topic suggestions (and questions for them) at the end of the volumes of my mother’s writings at these links I present (or at the end of this post):

*HOPE FOR A MOUNTAIN: MILDRED’S ALASKAN HOMESTEADING TALE – VOLUME ONE – BEGINNING A DREAM

*HOPE FOR A MOUNTAIN: MILDRED’S ALASKAN HOMESTEADING TALE – VOLUME TWO – LIVING FOR THE LAND


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