Tag: trauma

+WORD WARRIOR NEWS: “GO IN PEACE, MY MOTHER.”

alchemynow4 Comments

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No reader of the autobiographical writings of my mother, Mildred Ann Cahill Lloyd, is going to be privy to what the readers of this blog already know as the truth about Mildred.  I haven’t quite worked my own self around this new turn of events, my intention to allow my mother to speak to anyone who wishes to hear her words – just in her own words.  But I do suspect that the process I might go through as I prepare her manuscript might be something akin to forgiveness.

I had a strange realization overcome me last week.  That’s exactly how it happened.  I was overcome with a thought that seemed quite unusual and odd to me.  I had no idea how it showed up in my mind.  I tried to track its origins.  I looked backwards at my thinking for the day to see if I could find what this new thought about my mother might have been connected to in my earlier thinking patterns.  Nothing.  I could find not one single lead-in line of thought that put me where I ended up.

Suddenly, out of this nowhere that I could find, I had this thought:  “What if when we get to the other side and meet our Creator, and are faced with the truth of our actions in this lifetime including what we have done that has truly HURT other people – what if our Creator blankets us with forgiveness and washes all our transgressions completely away as if they have never happened — and it’s not enough?”

Suddenly I was crying.  There I was outside with my raggedy dirt covered clothes, wearing mismatched rubber work gloves because each of the other glove in the pair had already disintegrated as I worked in the yard.  There I was, walking across the yard with a 5-gallon dirt smudged plastic bucket full of rocks (I have no wheelbarrow), when this thought hit me like an apple had just fallen from the sky and knocked some unfamiliar new sense into my head.

“What if my mother is on the other side, having been granted complete forgiveness by her God, but is still as sad as a soul can be because, stripped of the physiological changes and sickness of her mortal flesh and bone body, she now understands what she did to me how terribly she hurt me and the rest of her family.  What if she cannot be free, cannot be happy, cannot move on in her new life, without my forgiving her?”

Suddenly at the instant this thought came to me I understood what forgiveness might be for me, what it mean, and what it might be needed for.  The thought was so foreign that I sloughed it off like I might a bug that just appeared on my shoulder.

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But I woke up this morning remembering the trace of something I was dreaming last night that had something to do with thinking very hard about finding exactly the very best thing to do for people I have met in my life that I could never quite stand for something they did – something that I could not stand by them for, something that did not let me stand to have these people in my life.

My sense this morning about this dream is that for all of the people that I have decided I could not stand – not stand what they did, or who they were in my life – I found a way to make what the 12-steppers might call an amend.  Of course in the dream world different rules about who and what is safe or not safe are different.  In the dream I was safe to find my own way to – essentially – forgive them, I guess.

As I awoke this morning I knew I came out of a dream where I was standing with a palette of oil paint colors in my left hand and a 1/2″ paintbrush in my right in front of one of these people’s canvas of a painting they had wanted to complete all of their lives but could not.  In the dream I knew exactly how this person wanted the painting to look, and I was completing it for them – perfectly.

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There is something about this discovery I had last night in conversation with my daughter that contains some element of my forgiveness of my mother.  I guess what struck me hardest on the head last week as the invisible apple clunked me into the realization that God’s forgiveness of our transgressions in this lifetime might NOT BE ENOUGH to remove terrible inner suffering from the people who have hurt others was my awareness of my own understanding that IF this might be true, IF my mother needs my forgiveness to be set free I would find a way to do that for her.

Maybe my act of publishing my mother’s words exactly as she wrote them will not ACTUALLY or REALLY be an act of forgiveness.  Maybe it will not ACTUALLY or REALLY set her free or remove her great sorrow.  I ACTUALLY know nothing about what goes on in the next life.  But for me, in this lifetime, it feels like an act of my forgiveness of her – to me.

It feels like an action on my part related to mercy toward my mother to fulfill a wish of hers she always had to publish her story of her Alaskan homesteading adventures.  Her sickness and her madness stole away from her all of the truest hopes for her lifetime.  Writing and publishing was perhaps, from the outside, one of the least significant of the losses of her life due to her illness.  But I am the one that ended up not only with her writings that survived her death, but with the motivation to transcribe them and to publish them.

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I am still framing in context my relationship both to my mother and to the word she wrote in terms of us both being Word Warriors.  I think about her uncountable acts of aggression toward me while I was powerless, without any weapon, unable to defend myself against her or to escape.

At the same time I think of a conversation I had with a man not too long ago.  I described a scenario to him.  “You are at war with your greatest enemy.  Both of you are expert swordsmen and well armed.  You have both fought your way to the top of a great hill.  Your enemy finally admits defeat, lays his sword at  your feet and stands now powerless against you.  What would you do?”

The man I was talking to replied quite simply, “I would cut off his head.”

I have what could be referred to now as the distinct advantage over my mother.  I am alive in this world with her words at my disposal.  She is dead.  What I do now with my Word Warrior power will determine the fate of my mother’s words.  I  am choosing to set my mother’s story free.

I will not hold my mother’s written words captive.  I will not hold them hostage.  I will not demand a ransom for their freedom.

Because being human involves imagination (that’s the way our brains got made), and because writing is a manifestation of our gifts of imagination, I can say that using the analogy of the image I just presented about the two men in mortal combat, what I will not do is pick up my mother’s Word Warrior sword and chop her head off with it.

In my imagination I am going to use the equivalent of my ‘alchemynow’ powers in regard to my mother’s sword of words.  I am going to transform her sword into a carefully folded elegant rice-paper crane.  All her words are written upon the paper that crane is made from.  I am going to carry that sword across the globe of my mind to the shores of the Ganges River.  I am going to kneel upon the shore, place this crane gently upon the water, say these words, “Mother, I completely and forever forgive you for every hurt you did to me.”

Then I am going to give that little crane a gentle nudge with the tip of my finger to send it out into the current where it can float away.  I will stand to watch it disappear into the distance at the same time I know there is healing for me in letting that crane go free.

Ganges River Dolphin - India’s National Aquatic Animal

This does not mean that I am free of the painful and difficult experience of finishing the process of transcribing these remaining letters.  But this pain is mine, not my mother’s.  For whatever reasons my mother’s body-brain was made in such a way in this lifetime that she could not feel for me what I can feel for her.  The abilities I have are gifts my mother did not have.  I want to use them for good, and I want to use them wisely.

The Ganges is a polluted and wounded river.  My mother was a polluted and wounded woman.  If I think about my mother’s writings as being the river of her words, I am not going to pollute them by adding in my own.   I will simply publish her collection with a blessing:  “Go in peace, my mother.  Go in peace.”

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This comment just in to MY BORDERLINE MOM

chasingfairies

Hi,
It is okay for me if you want to post my comment and also okay if you don’t. Mostly I would like to express my personal feelings about your blog (basically one particular thing).

First, I read your blog on occasion. I am DID and can relate to what you write about. I think you do a wonderful work with your blog and it does help others (at least it helps me).

The thing that bothers me is how you slam your “BORDERLINE” mother. I know everything you went thru was terrible (I have my terrible experiences) but as a BPD mother it really hurts me how you always refer to her as “Borderline Mother” as if all borderline mothers are terrible monsters. I am DID and Borderline and anorexic and . . . . I have 4 outside kids who belong to a 14 yr. old alter who no longer wants them because they are not “babies” any more. I have stepped in and am working really hard to be the best mom I can be. Most of the time my BPD is contained inside (comes with a lot of “inner self-harm” because it does not get released). I do not want that crap released onto these kids.

When other people read your site and are not real familiar with BPD they will assume all BPD moms are out right crazy. Then if they come across my blog and read that I am BPD they will assume I unleash that same crazy stuff onto my kids and I do not. I wish you not refer to your mom as terrible, crazy “Borderline” mom (though I am sure she was). Maybe you could mention she was (is) borderline once or twice and then just refer to her as “crazy, horrible, terrible” instead of slamming the borderline word around when referring to her.

I cringe somewhat when I come to your site, though I like it, because I believe all borderline moms do not behave as such on the outside. I have begged my psychiatrist to remove that label from me but I know I have it. I just hate the way people out there slam it so frequently.

Thanks for listening to me rant! I only wanted to point it out to you. I will still read your site anyway I just do not need to be reminded about how terrible I am.

Thanks,
Haley

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My response:

alchemynow

Dear Haley

I just copied your comment over to the end of the post I just wrote: +WORD WARRIOR NEWS: “GO IN PEACE, MY MOTHER.”

at https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/2010/05/16/word-warrior-news-go-in-peace-my-mother/

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Thank you very much for posting your thoughts and feelings.

When I use these two words in connection to one another, “Borderline mother,” I am always and specifically referring to MY mother. At least that is what I try to do. When I include information on Borderline Personality Disorder I try to do that by referring to expert and professional descriptions and information about the ‘condition’ from the outside.

In reading your response I will make the clearest effort that I can from now on to make even more of an effort to keep these distinctions as clear as I can.

I of course can not tell this for sure, but in reading your words I perceive that you express three things I can see here that my mother never had toward me (and only peripherally demonstrated toward anyone else, including her other 5 children): (1) the ability to self-reflect, (2) the ability to connect consequences with actions, and (3) the ability to experience care, concern and compassion for the well-being of your children.

Without having these three abilities, my mother was a lethal weapon and an extremely dangerous mother.

The shortcomings related to diagnosis of so-called ‘mental health categories’ and the cultural stigmas connected to them is a problem within our society at large: http://www.jwoodphd.com/borderline_personality_disorder.htm and http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/b/borderline_personality_disorder/wiki.htm#wiki_Origin_of_the_term

There is enough neuroscientific research appearing to suggest that before much more time passes, it will be possible to diagnose something akin to what is now called Borderline Personality Disorder far more accurately by watching scans of a person’s brain operating while performing certain specific tasks.

When this time comes, I see that the diagnostic process will be very similar to the ones used now to find and diagnose something as problematic, life threatening and difficult to treat as are breast cancers discovered through mammogram procedures today.

It was not that long ago in the past that ‘having cancer’ was considered as a shameful thing. We are socially removing that stigma.

It was not that long ago in the past that child abuse was also a taboo topic for public discussion.

I make every effort to connect what my mother did to me to the suffering my mother experienced during her formative years that changed her into the terribly abusive mother she became. Nowhere do I EVER say that my mother was a bad or an evil person.

The point you make today is not only an extremely important one, but is one that is appearing at a critically important time in my own writing process. I thank you for this. I will enlist everyone on my end that is involved in the process of preparing my book on the experiences of my childhood to help me consider how best to approach the legitimate and important point you are heart-fully making making here.

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I consider my mother (who was never diagnosed with this disorder first named in 1984) to have been at the severe end of the Borderline Personality Disorder spectrum. My concern so far has been that if a mother as severely abusive as mine was could so completely hide her abuse and so completely manipulate her home environment that nobody on the outside ever suspected the abuse was occurring, how does anyone even today have a chance to intervene and rescue any child living with this kind of abuse?

I consider the entire matter of child abuse to be a life-and-death concern. I would rather not be an inconsiderate ‘bull in a China shop’ and trample all over other people who have been given this diagnosis or help create a stampede of others who would do the same. Yet because I believe that severe Borderline mothers have the physiological constitution that makes them about the most dangerous abusive parents possible, I have as yet not chosen to back off from assigning ‘Borderline’ as a prefix to the term ‘my mother’.

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I make no pretense (at least that I know of) to tell anyone else’s story other than my own. In my most recent process within the past 24 hours, I have even realized that my mother’s own words need to be published without my side of the story being presented at all in connection with my mother’s writings. That is a HUGE step for me because I have always believed that if I could somehow bring the light of the true reality of my mother’s violent, dangerous and consistently abusive nature into the telling of my mother’s story that it might be able to help someone in ‘the public’ rescue a child preyed upon as abusively as I was.

Yet if nobody can ‘read the mind’ of a Borderline, as this article suggests

http://profs.bpdworld.org/articles/The%20Borderline%20Empathy%20Effect.pdf

I will not be able to accomplish what I hoped for, anyway.

I am not yet able to think fully about what you are saying. I obviously retain my own bias in regard to my mother. I know fully that there are readers of this blog who DO have something to say about this topic. Please respond. Put within your comment, as this reader did, your feelings about having your comment published or not – I will of course honor your request. But, your opinion IS NEEDED here! And I thank you again, Haley as I thank other readers for their comments even before they are received.

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+WORD WARRIOR NEWS: SETTING FREE MY MOTHER’S WORDS

alchemynowLeave a comment

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I shared a long telephone conversation tonight with my daughter about the writing work I am doing, and between us something has become clear for me regarding the ebook I will soon be ready to publish that will contain my mother’s writings.

I have decided to remove any editorializing I might be tempted to do with my abusive Borderline Mother’s writings and let them hit the road of publishdom intact as she wrote them.  That isn’t an easy thing for me to do.  Yet, given the truth that virtually no one can really understand the mind of a Borderline, I understand that at this point it really does me no good to try to convince anyone about what was really going on between the lines of the words my mother wrote in her diaries and letters.  I am not even going to try.

I know what went on between the lines of her writing.  But if I were to try to tell that truth along with her words, nothing good can come out of that.  A book published with what’s between the lines of her writing would literally have nothing to say.  The words between her lines are invisible, and for now I need to leave things that way.  I need to just let my mother’s voice speak from the grave – 8 years now since the day of her passing – in her own words as she wrote them.

Perhaps by opening my hands and letting go of my efforts to convince anyone of the truth about my mother, and about her life the best of what might come out of my efforts might come about in surprising ways.  If I can’t show anyone, can’t tell anyone, if her madness really was unspeakable (to her!), then I give up.  I simply give up and let go.

It seems strange to me that I can say at this moment that my mother has a right to be heard exactly in her own words with none of mine added except for the smallest amount of clarification concerning physical details of her story that might not be clear to readers.  I am making this choice.  I want to publish all of her writings first time around intact.  That means, as those who have read her letters on the blog know, that the text will be bulky.  This makes ebook (kindle, ipad, etc.) the perfect medium for her work.

The pages can ramble and flow.  Readers can scan and scroll in the ebook format.  No tree will give its life.  I can live with that.

Readers will be able to read her version of her life.  Then I will publish my life.  These two versions of reality will not match, as my readers here certainly know.  I will give no clue to readers of mother’s writings about her Borderline condition or about her abusive nature.  Only at the very end, in an epilogue will I introduce the truth and steer readers toward ‘the rest of the story’.

As I prepare to set my mother’s writings free of me, I prepare to set myself free from her.  She had her story, her version of reality within her Borderline world.  I am free to have my own.  There is no way to build a bridge between her world and mine.  There is no way to translate her words or her reality.  I am not going to try.

I do hope to publish a final volume to these letters.  In that volume I will describe and discuss how divided my mother’s reality was from mine – and from others.  But for now I am OK with this.  In fact, I don’t see that her writings can be published in any other way.

Readers will come to their own conclusions.  My mother’s story, and our family’s story is unique all by itself.  I will let it stand, and do my own writing my way.  (Of course I don’t have any idea now what title mother’s writings will be published under, but that will come).  I just need to finish this transcription job, and get her words off of my table.

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+UNSPEAKABLE MADNESS: INSIDE A CHILD ABUSING BORDERLINE MOTHER’S MIND

alchemynowLeave a comment

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Oh, lordy, I see that the entire article Dr. Bruce Perry refers to about Borderline Personality Disorder — in his new book, Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential–and Endangered by Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz  — is available for public viewing online at this link:

The borderline empathy effect: Do high BPD individuals have greater empathic ability? Or are they just more difficult to ‘‘read’’?

By Judith M. Flury, William Ickes, William Schweinle

While I haven’t begun yet to read Perry’s book, I have begun to thumb through it, beginning with a search of his index for information specifically about the Borderline condition as it might relate to my understanding of my abusive mother and what she did to me.

As Perry succinctly summarizes this article he mentions, this study found that Borderlines are very likely to have enough of a ‘social’ right brain to be able to read other peoples social cues-minds, but nobody else can read the Borderline’s – because a Borderline brain is JUST TOO DIFFERENT from normal for anyone with an ordinary mind to comprehend.

Because I am nowhere near ready yet to approach the reading of this article, I will take Perry at his word that both he and these researchers know what they are talking about.  Perry also mentions in his two paragraph presentation of this Borderline mental condition that the “character in the film Fatal Attraction, a movie I don’t intend to ever see, was a Borderline.

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While this ‘weird brain-mind’ information is affirming and confirming to me about what I have experienced, learned and know about my mother and the 18 years of abuse I went through thanks to her advanced Borderline condition, it doesn’t improve how I feel at this moment.

My return to complete the transcription of my mother’s remaining letters has put me on trauma-trigger overload.  I could say I’m like a space shuttle with damaged heat tiles trying to approach reentry back to earth.  At the same time I know that reading my mother’s 1957 (from the time right before my 6th birthday), I also know that I have vowed to myself to complete this job.

Perry’s reference to the ‘different mind’ of the Borderline that ordinary people cannot comprehend (I’d have to read the article above to see if they mention whether or not Borderlines are better equipped to read EACH OTHERS minds) does give credence to my sense as I read my mother’s letters that NOBODY CAN SEE HER MADNESS IN THEM.  “It’s NOT just me,” I can tell myself.  “NOBODY could see the madness of her mind.”

This also confirms that I have found exactly the right title to stick onto the front end of her writings when I publish them:  UNSPEAKABLE MADNESS.  If nobody can comprehend the Borderline mind, then OF COURSE we then correspondingly lack any ability to speak about it.  That’s true for those of us who were raised from birth by an abusive Borderline, and it’s true also for those on the outside who could not see what was happening THEN and are inexplicably (to us) prevented from understanding the depth of our stories when we try to speak about them NOW.

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My mother’s letters are triggering implicit, or body memories that are so impacting my body that I cannot eat or sleep right now.  I have to talk to myself when I step into the shower (I don’t have a bath tub) about being able to tolerate the feel of the water hitting my skin.  The water seems to POUND on the surface of my body.  All the thousands of blows I received as a child are in my body in memory that is very close to the surface right now – way too close.

Until I have finished transcribing these 50 or so remaining letters, I will be in some risky and very uncomfortable limbo danger zone – like out in space without the ability to protect myself completely from the consequences of this work.  My ‘heat tiles’ that will allow me reentry back into my present time and space of my life will be repaired when this job is done, though I will remain bruised and ICKY for some time afterward.

I know this.  I also know that I cannot afford an editor to prepare ALL of her letters for print and publication.  This last job has to be done by ME, even before a single one of her words can be uploaded through Kindle publishing.

But by the time I reach the final reading of her letters for editing I will be able to know that her ACTUAL words I am encountering now in her handwriting, in these envelopes, in these physical, material paper forms that she touched as she created this written record I have to face in the transcription process, will be buried outside in my compost pile for the worms to eat.  I will then be working ‘with a memory outside of a memory’ because her digitalized words on my computer screen are one step more remote to me than are these physical remnants of her life I am confronting right now.

Right now I am unwrapping my mummified mommy in every envelope I touch, every piece of paper I pull out, unfold and begin to read.  The contaminated dust of her mind is still here, preserved in her writings.  The implications for good with this collection as they provide this comprehensive view of a child abusing Borderline mother is profound.

I can do this job, I can complete it because I WILL it so.  My greatest hope is that someone will pay attention to her words as they reflect the mysterious and nearly unknowable-from-the-outside view of am abusive  Borderline brain-mind.

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I am reminded of the well-chosen title of this book about Borderline Personality Disorder:  Lost in the Mirror, 2nd Edition: An Inside Look at Borderline Personality Disorder by Richard A. Moskovitz

Although I haven’t read this book because I do not want to ‘contaminate’ my own thinking, sensing and knowing about my mother and her condition, I recognize the truth in this book’s title.  I think about the value that the collection of my mother’s writings will offer to anyone interested in understanding this ‘unknowable, unseeable, incomprehensible, invisible, undetectable’ kind of human brain-mind we now call Borderline Personality Disorder.

It is my opinion that because most people who suffer from so-called mental illness DID suffer from unsafe and insecure early attachments to their caregivers — and Perry’s book on empathy goes into great detail about how our current society is creating a national condition of ‘relational poverty’ that I see as nearing a national crisis of insecure attachment disorders —  suffered from neglect, maltreatment and abuse on some level.  Those deprivations along with direct malice change the developing body-brain.  They directly change the physiological ability to utilize human empathic abilities.

Our growing national ‘relational poverty’ is creating an increased risk for Borderline conditions within our population.

Any professional who works with ‘mental illness’ (as well as infant-child abuse survivors themselves) must be able to recognize patterns within their infant-child abuse survivor clients that mirror or mimic  Borderline.

My mother’s letters and diaries, I still believe, will provide the most comprehensive published opportunity to actually experience the reality of the Borderline condition as a Borderline sees it within ONE set of their brain-mind mirrors – in my Borderline mother’s words.

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In today’s modern world of electronic communication and cell phone connections, I believe it would be nearly impossible for any survivor of Borderline madness in their childhood to put together the kind of comprehensive, serial pattern of Borderline thinking that my mother’s letter contain.

Although her letters after she arrived in Alaska, written to her own mother who HAD to be one of the main contaminating influences that impacted my mother’s development, it is particularly within this batch of 1957 letters that my mother’s and father’s patterns of relational insecure attachment disorder becomes most clear and apparent.  Facing this picture of my parents in these 1957 letters is the most difficult part of the entire letter transcription process, and is the reason I know I put this part of my job off until the end.

Although Perry’s work and the work of all the attachment experts and developmental neuroscientists are providing valuable and necessary steps in the right direction, naming what is going on within our culture as ‘relational poverty’ still lets us avoid the extremely painful reality of what insecure attachment disorders and their corresponding empathy disorders are DOING to us as human beings:  They are making us suffer in nearly inconceivable and unmentionable ways.  They are HURTING US!  This hurt is rocking ‘n rolling itself right on down the generations.

When the day finally arrives that the experts at last agree, and the public finally understands, that nearly every single malaise that humans experience with other humans is because of INSECURE ATTACHMENT DISORDERS – and that nearly every known so-called ‘mental illness’ comes about directly through the influence of ‘relational poverty’ in early body-brain forming stages of development in INSECURE ATTACHMENT ENVIRONMENTS that builds the insecure attachment right into the body-brain — well, I fully expect to have left this world far behind.

That does not mean that as many people as possible can’t join me way out in front of ‘the envelope’ (of air, like a jet pushes through) and begin to understand NOW, way ahead of the pack, that we all suffer from insecure attachment disorders.

As I work my way through these paper edifices that contain what was wrong with my mother’s body-brain-mind, I know that first SHE made this great contribution by writing her words down and by holding onto these papers for the rest of her life, that I made a contribution in my commitment to paying her words serious attention no matter what the cost is to me personally, and that someone somewhere at sometime is going to read her words and my introduction to them and BEGIN to comprehend how extremely damaging insecure attachment patterns are in the very months and years of a human being’s growth and development as they determine the developmental trajectory of a person’s body and brain.

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The genesis of a Borderline is reflected in my mother’s writings.  Because of this fact, the genesis of an extremely violent infant-child abusing parent is ALSO contained in her writings.  That those of us on the outside – with me being still on the outside, fortunately, because I did not end up with a Borderline condition – are being given the chance to share an insider’s view of a Borderline brain-mind along with my mother by carefully reading her written words as they unfold this large section of her life, is really a miracle with great potential for helping us all understand what can happen when safe and secure infant-child attachment goes so very, very wrong.

Meanwhile, I am going into town to pick up some needed supplies as I take a short recess from hell, and then I will return to my work.

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+WORD WARRIOR NEWS: PRESENTING MY CURRENT 8 WORKING BOOK TITLES

alchemynow2 Comments

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This post includes a copy of the working paper about the 8 books I am currently preparing for publication (you asked for them, here they come – to the best of my ability).  It lists their working titles along with a list of information to include in my BIG BANG BOOK that everything else I ever write is pointing toward.  (I just sent this paper off to my family and friends as fyi.)

I plan to dedicate as high a portion of the profits (above what’s needed to moderately improve my own well-being and my children’s) to the non-profits I mentioned in my earlier post, +WHAT WORD WARRIORS SAY – A BOOK BEING BORN.

I know that money needs to be generated in creative ways to build up the required capitol to afford to pay for at least the first 500 softcover copies (about $3330-$3600).

I am eager to get these projects completed – thank you again to each and every one of this blog’s readers who have affirmed my writing, my work, and my potential.  I am becoming increasingly concerned about not having done what I bet I came into this life to do before (if/when) the advanced-aggressive breast cancer comes back to snatch me.

Along with formalizing information categories into book-size sections so that I can apply for a block of 10 ISBNs (same price for ten as for one), I am forcing myself to finish transcribing my mother’s writings.  I intend to publish them with the titles listed below (barring anyone’s title-changing input) ASAP on Kindle.  I am not sure they will ever appear in hard copy.  They are voluminous and I want them accessible to people without having to cut them apart.

As I can afford it – with money from the Kindle sales if they show up – I will be able to afford a simple and efficient website that will allow for people to pay, download and print their own pdf copy of my mother’s writings if they want to.

I believe that if anyone is truly interested in how a severe Borderline’s brain might work from the outside looking in, especially a severely abusive one, my mother’s writings are a gift to the world toward this end.  Because the Borderline parent can be extremely dangerous to her offspring, and because the Borderline condition even by definition can be extremely difficult for ANYONE to detect, gaining insight into the workings of the Borderline mind has great potential for helping to understand how severe child abuse can happen as it improves all of our potential to both prevent child abuse and to intervene effectively in cases where the abusing parent is a Borderline like my mother.

I believe interested readers of my mother’s words will have to make a commitment to follow her life’s trajectory over time as it unfolds itself in her writing.  Perhaps one of the reasons the abusive Borderline is so difficult to detect is that they are the masters of illusion-delusion.  Magic happens for professionals when they can create the perfect distraction for their audience.  I believe my mother also created so many distractions within herself over time with her constant MOVING in particular, that her magic show simply spilled itself out her front door, into the street, and across the parking lot (like the ‘Porridge Pot’ overflowing in a children’s book).

If conditional so-called love and the withholding of affection, approval along with manipulations of give-and-take ‘mercy’ – in other words, deception, lies and betrayal contribute to Borderline Personality Disorder, maybe the deception builds itself into the BPD changed brain in such a way that it just grows and grows and grows……  (like a cancer).

Someone would have had to notice from a distance, and would have had to care enough to follow the porridge path of my mother’s mad illusions all the way back – inside our home – to the pot itself:  how my mother’s trauma-changed Borderline brain was working inside her skull to produce such masses of bizarre thoughts, behaviors and dangerous actions toward her offspring – that nobody – EVER – noticed.

Well, I better get back to work!! tyl

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The Devil’s Child: How 18 years of abuse by my mother did not make me like her

(I don’t like “at the hands of “) ———  need your take on this?

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360 Degrees of Change for Survivors of Difficult Childhoods


(with or without subtitle?)

This title is meant to include degrees related to the range of abuse that can happen, the range of resiliency and risk factors as they work to balance reactions to trauma, the range of dis-ability resulting, as well as the degrees of healing possible.

This book breaks down the scientific information (including attachment) in terms of a Native American format (told to readers or not?) – a circle of 360 degrees – idea that simply reading the book will create changes in people whether they actually realize what those changes are or not.

I do not want to use a calendar based concept – want this to be familiar enough from the 12-step recovery inspiration and daily reminder books – but different without ANY religious intonations.

I don’t want any ‘brain’ disruptions to happen due to ‘OH NO!  I missed March 3rd!  NOW what do I do?”  They need implicit permission to read as slowly or quickly as is comfortable, and to skip around.

Also, don’t want to identify the ‘age patterns’ below specifically, this is to organize my thinking – living with consequences of abuse WILL last a life time.  Either we recognize how abuse might have changed our physiological development or we don’t.

I am creating the subject area breaks (as per below) like they might happen over a natural lifespan, but the idea of this book is that healing happens in its own time and major healing can happen in an instant.  Every time ‘the circle’ is completed (like moving in a spiral) new perspectives are gained, new insights.  The Native elders talk about how we go through these cycles daily – and also go through them every time we are dealing with any particular problem –

I believe that even if ONE significant point (degree? – how do I connect these two ideas?  ‘degree’ and ‘point of fact’?) happens for one person, not only will their life be changed for the better but the changes in one can and probably WILL affect the many.

The Medicine Wheel actually follows ‘natural’ patterns of seasonal change as well as our human developmental life ‘segments’.  (large type underlined below is my ‘section name’)

(1) EAST (air – color yellow – spring – mind) – birth, new beginnings, childhood = ATTACHMENT (0-20)

(2) SOUTH (earth – color red – summer – body) – young adulthood, learning and practicing by ‘doing the work’ – BIOCHANGES (20-40)

(3) WEST (water – color black – fall – emotions) – our more maturing years includes introspection, self-reflection, pondering- SURVIVORSHIP (40-60)

(4)NORTH (fire – color white – winter – healing and wisdom) – our grandparent years, helping the younger generations with our wisdom – DISCLOSURE (60-80 — completes the circle so that 80 is right there with death and birth, oldest and youngest together)

My ‘sorting’ of thoughts related to these – I have around 400 points-degrees-separate pieces of information – haven’t tried sorting into these categories yet – might need to adjust my thinking, certainly need to work it through (after I have mother’s writings on Kindle) – if I keep these categories, need to NOT contaminate one with info too related specifically to a different one, need to keep them as clear as 4-seasons in Fargo are

PROCESS OF MAKING THE UNKNOWN AND THE INVISIBLE – KNOWN AND VISIBLE – THESE THINGS DON’T BENEFIT US BY REMAINING MYSTERIES!  ALL the other writings must point to this one – it’s the peak of the fireworks display!  I will need to be greatly in-spired to do this right, each of the 360 degrees need two paragraphs with a catchy title!  (just made me smile – the first one that popped into my mind as I wrote this was “the mom and pop store’ for the sperm and the egg process!)

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1st half of the book is more distant, objective and ‘technical’ – inoculate readers to get them ready for the emotional reactions they will have 2nd half

(1) – ATTACHMENT – beginning at the beginning with the involvement of our ‘feel good’ body chemicals as they orchestrate attachment of sperm and egg, zygote attachment to uterus, in placenta and breast milk, connecting attachment with food and social contact in our approach/avoid patterns of life – rupture/repair– etc – all about attachment – what it is, how it forms, clearly and without ‘malice’ describe the possible attachment disorders as they are ‘given’ by parents to children, etc. – and the growing brain – origin of self firm by two – brain tracks to consciousness and conscience – introducing terminology of development:  critical windows of development, windows of tolerance, mirroring, hemisphere growth, feeling felt, theory of mind, magical thinking (tied to denial later on) – being sent off-trajectory – built by good or bad world to represent the conditions of that world to others of our species (starts in womb) – ‘hatching’ and foundation of exploration connected to shame and dissociation in nervous-system and brain –

(2) – BIOCHANGES – all the known possible ‘invisible’ changes that can happen – nervous system, vagus system, stress-calm response system, immune system – clear description of environment-genetic interactions – phenotypes and genotypes – epigenetics – how these forces affect what our cells are going every millisecond of our life time – placing our self in context of evolution, genetic memory in our DNA – changes for a malevolent world –  how we COULD have been different – stuck with memories we cannot even recall that influence our entire lifetime (explain developmental process of memory ability) – what dissociation might be caused by – how stess fries memory region (hippocampus) brain cells for both victim and perp – describing ‘limbic kindling’, emotional dysregulation, inability to self-sooth, no trust region of brain – itty bitty left brain happy center – what brain plasticity really means – describing, say, how completely different from normal a borderline’s brain is – what’s coming down the road in terms of brain research, how that will change ‘mental illness’ categories – resting brain state, consciousness and involvement of the self in brain – how many of these changes (I believe science will show) mimic (and shown to cause in some) emotional limbic kinding/seizures, autistic-symptoms, bi-polar etc – changes in social brain at same time in emotional brain connected to stress-calm response – involvement of internal steroid system – cannabinoid and opioid systems – substance P (pain hormone) – (provide a brain term word glossary – cluster the tech brain terms together – some might skip them or come back) – book has to increase vocabulary so we can include new info in our thinking) –

PREPARING READERS TO LOOK (PERHAPS WITH SORROW, SHOCK AND DISMAY – ALONG WITH DAWNING INSIGHT) at what happens in our survivorship when we don’t have the info already presented in this first half of book as we ACTUALLY entered into our life past childhood) –

2nd half of the book is up close and personal – heading toward transformation – ‘break the bone and set it right’ – opening up realizations (and closed pussy wounds) for new healing

(3) – SURVIVORSHIP – entering our adult life with wrong information, no information – unprepared and wounded and not knowing it – making major decisions while our cortex is completing growth – having no clue what is really wrong, trying to ‘recover’ and gain understanding while most critical info we need is missing – what it’s like to live in a ‘good’ world while we were formed in a ‘bad’ world – trauma drama, etc – looking around and comparing how we are doing with others – measurements of success in our culture, impossible standards, not knowing why we fail, make mistakes, can’t keep up, can’t plan for the future – asking the questions = introspection, preparing for getting the answers – how attachment works ‘invisibly’ in our relationships and parenting – what it’s LIKE living with dissociation – contamination of present with intergenerational unresolved trauma – passing on abuse and attachment disorders and can’t control, don’t understand – stuck in bad relationships – nothing but rocky road if we try to look backwards – no tools (no road grader) to smooth things out – spiritual issues (stemming from attachment disorders) – having no words even to think about what happened (no info) – oh, and NO CHILD WITHIN or ADULT CHILD! – struggle with sensory overload and don’t know why – going to war already ‘broken’ – stuck in peritrauma – too hot, too cold – buying ‘diagnosis’ – drugs – nobody talks about what REALLY happened, taboos, conspiracy of silence – feeling isolated and alone – screwed up feel good feel bad reward system biochem – tracing all back to attachment-designed physiology in the body – trying to hatch into adulthood without secure outer or inner foundation – shutting off attachment needs to experience caregiving system correctly – taking some of what we can find (AA, parenting classes, etc) and using it best we can, always feeling something is missing
(4) –DISCLOSURE – getting real about how what was done to us changed us – need the right information and get it (of course MUCH from this little book) – disclosure is about letting our own self know what happened and about ‘telling’ someone else – gaining the WORDS – knowing how to keep our self safe – not hunting for memories, etc. – comes full circle to growth in infancy, learning to TALK about our story – understanding emotional dysregulation personally – clearing the pathway of obstacles, increasing the ‘coherency’ of our vision of our life, etc – passing our healing changes on to others – being able to clear ‘the wreckage of the past’ (as 12-steppers say) about how our changes hurt others – making new, better, healed connections all the way around in self, body, relationships – gaining informed compassion and coming to terms with what was done to us (and our version of forgiveness) – turning our dis-abilities into gifts by recognizing how changes saved us – recognizing how they affected our choices and decisions so we can LEARN to do it differently while living ‘within our means’ (what is truly POSSIBLE for us considering the changes – knowing our weaknesses and strengths, knowing how to get help, where, limitations within our CULTURE on getting what we need versus NOT and not taking that lack personally – pushing for social change – connecting the circle from victim to survivor to helping victims (prevent, intercede) – reach out and connect to others – discuss healing of attachment (‘earned secure’ versus my term ‘borrowed’) – breaking taboos in breaking the silence that binds (just found a book title for my collection of essays!) –

HAS TO include reading list and resource links along with complete (I wish LEGAL disclaimer – maybe I can find one to copy)

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I could do

360 Degrees of Change for Survivors of Difficult Survivors:

Study Guide, Workbook and Exercises

Maybe will be generated at same time I am pulling the book together, that would be good – could apply for the ISBN for it

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For Mother’s writings:

Unspeakable Madness:  No Word in Our Borderline Mother’s Writings about Her Reign of Terror

Book One: Pre-Alaska diaries and letters

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Unspeakable Madness:  No Word in Our Borderline Mother’s Writings about Her Reign of Terror

Book Two: Alaskan homesteading era diaries and letters

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Unspeakable Madness:  The Making of an Abusive Borderline Mother –

Her Childhood Stories and Background with Commentary

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My adult survivor book:

Disowning Mother:

Travels of a Child Abuse Survivor from Empty Wraith to Empowered Warrior

This works for me – I know what I mean here!

And, I HAVE traveled, all of my life – and my process is directly mirrored in my travels – could organize the material, even, by geographical settings

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and last, if I ever pull this together:

Breaking the Silence that Binds:

A Collection of Essays by a Severe Infant-Child Abuse Survivor

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+PAYING SOME ATTENTION TO MY MOTHER’S ‘DARK RAINBOW’ DREAM

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As the book heads into editing, I am finding myself wondering about my mother’s dream (posted at above page link for “About This Site”).  It troubles me that for all my thinking, research and writing, I have no more of a clue what this dream might ‘mean’ than I did the day I discovered it written in her long ago journal.

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MY MOTHER’S DREAM as recorded in her journal on March 29, 1960 during the early months of Alaskan mountain homesteading:

“The whole family was out walking and suddenly we looked up to see a dark rainbow appear – then it got bright and behind it a skyline appeared outlining massive dormed buildings such as I’ve never seen and skyscraper buildings – then it all disappeared and a big wind came.

We realized it was a hurricane. We could hardly stand up against the wind. We saw big apartment buildings on the sides of the streets but the entrances faced another street and we were on the wrong side. The wind grew stronger – finally a door appeared and we went in the building and the person asked us what was wrong? We told her of the great wind but as we pointed outside – all was silent and the wind was gone … and I awoke.”

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Making the connection between the work I hoped this blog would promote and this dream led to my naming this site Stop the Storm (of intergenerational trauma).

I of course had advance notice well before I discovered her dream record about the fact that she was a very disturbed woman (like from the  moment I was born).  Yet if I were to ever have a ‘wind in my sail’ about her treatment of me being intentional, or something that she ever REALLY had any control over or choice about, this dream would deaden that wind.

I didn’t wake up one morning and discover that I am a Word Warrior.  I am a member of a family with a history of word-warrioring.  There were professors on both sides of my family.  My mother’s mother was a Word Warrior.  I have Word Warrior brothers and sisters and children.  We are a family who loves literacy and books.  This is not the same thing as being a family of gifted story tellers within the oral tradition, although I recognize that I have such a yen – if not a gift.

I have spent hundreds of hours (as you readers know) transcribing my mother’s letters and journals that found their way into my hands after her death.  It is very clear throughout them that my mother WAS a writer, although her words never found their way into publication.

I have the advantage of digital equipment and information access that my ancestors never dreamed of.  No matter what has happened to me in my lifetime, having this advantage gives me a power that they never had.

In looking again at my mother’s dream, and as I think about if I am going to include it in my ‘Devil’s Child’ book, I continue to notice that when I read it I feel worms snaking their way around in my gut.  Part of this is because of the insider information I have about my mother being so out-of-control in her violence and in the patterning of her life.

Part of my reaction comes from a suspicion I have that I don’t often name:  My mother was as powerless over who she was, what she did, and what happened in her life as I was powerless over her actions toward me when I was a child.

My mother suffered enough trauma in her early life to turn her into the equivalent of a disastrous storm in our family home.  In this dream I get the sense that she was as helpless to understand or to change the course of what happened to her or how she felt and acted as she was powerless to stop this storm in her dream.

In the dream she was innocently out walking with her family.  First there was the dark rainbow, it changed into light temporarily, and then the big wind came.  She sought shelter along with her family that was denied to her along with everyone else.

I thought about how profound this truth is all afternoon as I worked making adobes outside.  When trauma is passed down in a family through the generations, EVERYONE is its victim.  The storm that is created by the existence of the unresolved trauma remains mostly unseen by outsiders who are not a part of a family’s inner circle.

“The wind grew stronger – finally a door appeared and we went in the building and the person asked us what was wrong? We told her of the great wind but as we pointed outside – all was silent and the wind was gone….”

My mother’s use of the words ‘the person’ here fascinates me.  Why didn’t she say “a woman?”  What inner unknown and desperate need do trauma survivors have to find ‘the person’ to whom they can SHOW the storm to that they know in their own lives?

‘The person’ never appeared in my mother’s life that could truly understand who she was.  The mystery person who did not have to endure the storm, and who could have offered safety and security to my mother along with the rest of her family remained missing – not only for the 18 years I suffered the worst of her madness, but also for the rest of my mother’s life.

Peering into what my Word Warrior mother wrote about her dream today ended up helping me to realize what a terrible, terrible tragedy my mother’s life was.  She COULD NOT find ‘the person’ to rescue her – or us.  She could not even find ‘the person’ she was inside of herself.  Like a missing word we can’t remember or find when we know we know it, my mother on some level might have known how desperate her condition really was, and her family’s as a result of her condition.

But she could not do anything about it in her lifetime, nothing to ever make anything better.

Which makes me think about the power of my words, what I hope for them, that in some small way some of them might be ‘the person’ someone else needs so that they might experience some version of this for themselves if they need it:  “finally a door appeared and we went in the building and the person asked us what was wrong?“

How can we be ‘the person’ and better ask this question, “What was wrong,” both of ourselves and of one another in a caring and compassionate way?  Is it this question that when asked by ‘the person’ (if we ever find one) that can Stop the Storm of unresolved trauma?

“We told her of the great wind but as we pointed outside – all was silent and the wind was gone….”

I don’t believe it was a ‘bad mother’ that had or wrote down this dream.  I believe ‘the person’ who had and wrote this dream had suffered greatly very early in her life while her body-brain was forming and developing.  As a result of the changes that early trauma forced her body to make, many abilities that we consider most vital to being human were taken from her.

This dream might be the closest she ever got to knowing the truth about herself, her life and the life of her family.  It might be the closest she ever got to understanding what was needed for the storm to stop.  Fifty years later her Word Warrior’s dream can still sound an echo about what being powerless in the face of danger is like.  It also shows the power one open door and one person can have to help Stop the Storm for others.

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My first experience with my editor as she does what editors do – morph things!

First morph – the title!

She Believed I was the Devil’s Child:

18 Years Of Abuse By My Mother Didn’t Make Me Like Her

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+WHAT WORD WARRIORS SAY – A BOOK BEING BORN

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Because I was born into an extremely hate-filled, insanely abusive home, and my universal human rights all but obliterated, I am NOT willing to sell or give away any of my rights to my story!  I am, however, more than willing to give a sizable (yet to be determined) percentage of the profits of my book’s sales to the programs I mention in this letter (below).

See related posts:

+ALIGNING OUR NATION WITH UNITED NATIONS CHILD RIGHTS IS AGAINST OUR OWN LAWS

+AMERICANS MUST NOT BELIEVE THAT CHILDREN ARE HUMAN BEINGS — THUS, NO HUMAN RIGHTS

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From here on out, any post with WORD WARRIORS in the title will have information about the progress being made to get the first book about the abuse of my childhood (in stories) into publication.

A Word document was created last night of everything I have already written at +DEVIL’S CHILD – My Childhood plus related background information posts, and emailed in attachments to Amy Elaine Long, my writing assistant and editor.

I know just as certainly as I know I am alive that this book will not be born without Amy’s assistance.  I am grateful to her for being the amazing woman she is, for her talents, and for her efforts well beyond the power of words to describe.

I am including here the letter I just emailed to her and family involved in helping this process along.  This is a low budget (actually zero budget) operation to start off with, but I have high hopes.  This letter also makes mention of the nonprofit funding support channels I want to build into the financial structure of support this book has the potential for creating.

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Hi again

LOTS OF INFO HERE BUT VERY IMPORTANT!!

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I sent this link previously:

http://www.sfwa.org/for-authors/writer-beware/pod/

but it’s worth a good read

“Booksellers don’t like dealing with POD services. E-commerce currently accounts for about 20% of book sales. But brick-and-mortar bookstores, especially the large chains, still represent the most significant single sales source. For volume sales, most books require a balance of online and offline presence.”

Makes me think about a ‘business plan’ even if sketchy

If the book goes onto Kindle, and if it generates any ‘buzz’ at all – and if people want to recommend it to others they know who do not have Kindles – the book HAS to be available via some kind of hard copy edition

From a biz plan point of view, I would count on low priced Kindle edition as marketing and advertising.  Book would then pay its own way.  (If the book cannot sell enough copies via kindle to do this, then there might be something wrong-missing with the whole deal)

Availability of hard copy and source has to be included in the Kindle edition.

Part of the issue for me is to avoid ‘used copy selling’ of the book before I/we have it settled firmly into its sale’s source.

I think print on demand could accomplish this – but would it list on Amazon?  (will have an ISBN and protected rights)  I suppose it could be listed the way our family lists any book on Amazon.

A print on demand limited signed edition would only work if orders for the book were made through me – the book would first have to come to me for signing and I would ship to customer.  If Amy Long is listed as a ‘with’ author, the book would also have to travel to her for signing – so obviously shipping would be slow and ridiculous!

But actually paying to print a limited run of 100 books would cost more than the book would sell for.  So, that’s probably out.

At double the profit for run of $500 (cost to print around $7, sale at $12.95) would need initial investment of around $3300.  The first 250 books sold would have to go toward covering the $3300 first investment.  (again question as before if another printing of 500 would have to be listed as ‘2nd printing’)

All money made from book for some time would have to go toward cost of printing more copies.  But the print on demand option would allow this to happen simultaneously – no huge initial investment, no books sitting around unsold.

I have to know if there is a contract required for POD – I will not give away or sell ANY rights to this book

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Another point:  I want the percentage of profit that’s going to nonprofit clear from first.

How is ‘profit’ determined when just getting started, don’t want to be deceptive – needs to be clear, right and up front from beginning.

I think I know what I want to do on this – is easy, solid, practical:

I want to send the first completed copy of the book to Dr. Bruce Perry (“Boy who was raised as a dog, with new book out on empathy”) – I want his, and only his ‘blurb’ on the book if it’s going to have one.

He has a nonprofit organization called The Child Trauma Academy see educational products

We could set up some kind of a ‘scholarship – grant’ process to help disseminate their information.  I particularly want to reach teens!!  I guess I’m thinking some kind of ‘small’ partnership with their organization and their work to channel my book’s $ contribution to helping prevent child abuse and provide healing for survivors.

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If the timing is right and the book takes off, another thing I would support is to get copies of Siegel’s book on parenting, Parenting From the Inside Out, out into the hands of people nationwide who are teaching and/or taking part in the STEP parenting programs .  SEE:  Center for the improvement of child caring, their site.

I just called them, they also are a nonprofit.  AND, they have a mailing list of over 30,000 – if we send a copy of the book to their director, Dr. Alby, and approved, they will add it to their list of recommended readings and market it!  How sweet is that!

Leonard and I were most fortunate to be able to take a STEP parenting class right after we went through treatment and began to recover.  I do not believe there is a more worth while channel for investing $.

I can ear mark the ‘donation’ – and if the book is very successful, they need $50,000 to put together the arm of their curriculum that is specifically geared for Native American communities.  (they lost the funding they had for this a few years ago).  They have targeted programs currently for African American and Latin American parents.  Absolutely WONDERFUL work they do – and they also have programs targeted specifically for ‘high risk for abuse’ parents!

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All feedback, input, ideas, suggestions, inspirations welcome.  Blog readers, send comments – thanks!

AND, for your information:

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11 May 2010 – Child Rights at the Human Rights Council 62

___________________________________________________________
– Human Rights Council: Session 14 [event]

– UNIVERSAL PERIODIC REVIEW: Reports and analysis of child rights references [reports]

– ELECTIONS:  Membership to the Human Rights Council [event]

– SPECIAL PROCEDURES: Upcoming Vacancies [news]

– MIGRATION: Consultation in the context of children’s rights [event]

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IN MEMORY OF MY BORDERLINE MOTHER:

From Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD, your Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder

It’s no secret that many people with BPD have difficulty controlling anger. But you may be surprised to learn that much of the “common sense” advice that you may get about ways to manage anger are actually flawed. This week, learn healthier ways to manage your anger.
The Myth of “Letting Off Steam”

Have you ever been told to punch or scream into a pillow when you’re angry in order to “let off steam?” Before you take that advice, read this article.
10 Healthier Ways to Manage Anger

Instead of venting your anger, try these 10 healthier anger management strategies.
New Research: How Does An Active Life Lift Your Mood?

For some time, we’ve known that increasing your activity level (through exercise, social activities, hobbies, etc.) can lift your mood, but we haven’t known exactly how this effect happens.
Borderline Personality Disorder Frequently Asked Questions

Answers to the most frequently asked questions about borderline personality disorder.

Must Reads

What is BPD?
Symptoms of BPD
Diagnosis of BPD
Treatment of BPD
Living with BPD

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+LIVING ON EARTH – HOW MUCH ARE WE MISSING?

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Everyday we are alive is an Earth Day, yet it seems now we have chosen a particular day once a year in our culture to recognize Earth.  I suppose that’s in part so we might focus our thoughts on the source of our existence.

I’m on my way into town today to spend a few hours working on a little project – my town day.  But before I leave home I just wanted to post a link to the story I wrote a year ago that I will probably always remember especially on Earth Day because on the day I wrote about I saw something so different from the ordinary that it’s impossible for me to forget it.

In a lifetime of being a human being, at least in this culture, it is easy to assume superiority over the rest of life’s manifestations, I suppose.  But on this day I felt humbled, extremely humbled.  I just want to again share this story for any readers who might not have encountered it last year as I wish everyone the best of days on this amazing planet we all share life on together.

*In Honor of the Grieving Chicken (2003)

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+DISSOCIATION: MEMORY OF ONGOING EXPERIENCE FROM THE PREY’S POINT OF VIEW

alchemynow2 Comments

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I intended today to write a post about dissociation when I went outside to sit with my morning cup of coffee.  What greeted me there was a trauma-drama in full play, and not a pleasant one for me to watch.  Yet I know that life, and nature itself shows us things that often allow our right brain to watch visually as drama and image at the same time our left brain is offered information to THINK about.

I am going to separate my two ‘streams of information’ this morning.  This post is about how a severely abused and traumatized infant-toddler’s body-brain is forced to absorb information about the world, and about itself in the world in relation to its early attachment caregivers.  The information I am going to present in my NEXT post will be the scientific, rational, logical and far more abstract information.  We NEED this more technical information, but as survivors we will not be able to really understand it or make good practical use of the dry information that developmental neuroscientists provide for us if we cannot ASSOCIATE this information with our own ongoing experience.

People often use this term in the English language, “a game of cat and mouse.”  What I watched this morning as one of my cats toyed with a furry little mouse could have looked like a game from her point of view.  But what was this experience like for the little, tiny mouse?  Its life was at stake, and there was anything BUT a game going on from its point of view.

Those of us who were raised especially by extremely hate-filled abusive and traumatizing mothers from the time of our birth were like this little mouse.  Yet we were even more helpless against our giant predator.  At least this mouse was fully developed and could use all its possible defense abilities – not that they would in the end be effective at allowing it to escape and go on living.

I knew how this ongoing drama would end.  Yes, my cat WAS playing with her prey.  She was fully focused and concentrated on her ‘game’.  The mouse was fully focused on trying to avoid being killed.  And there I was, the bystander at the same time I was the only hope that little mouse had for staying alive.

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The mouse was quick, but the cat was quicker.  Every time I tried to sidetrack the cat she out maneuvered me, grabbed her little ‘toy’ and ran off to continue her ‘hunt’ somewhere else.  How could I help to give the mouse a chance to escape – to where?  There’s nowhere in my yard that mouse would be safe and secure.  There was no way I could catch the mouse and move it somewhere out of danger’s way, either.

There are a lot of mice here.  Part of the reason why, I know, is because my east neighbor whose property I just fenced off from my yard visually, continues to heap all his garbage for a family of seven against that fence, thus encouraging rodents to multiply.  Where there are rodents, there are rattlesnakes to eat them in this country.  Elimination of mice is normally a good thing.  I just didn’t want to WATCH the elimination happen.  Not today.  Not as I prepared to write a victimized-survivor post about dissociation!

But what I thought about as I continued to try to dissuade my cat from continuing her mission was how that little mouse, in the midst of the insecurity and lack of safety involved with its ongoing trauma, would NEVER do anything else but focus on its own survival.

These thoughts became entangled and intertwined with the technical information I was thinking about for my post on dissociation.  Because my mother was a predator, and because I was just as much her ongoing prey as this mouse was to my cat, there was NEVER a time in my infant-toddler-childhood that I was assured of enough safety and security to do ANYTHING ELSE other than survive.

At the same time I was more powerless and helpless than a mouse is under the attack of a cat, my brain, my nervous system, my immune system, my entire being was growing and developing in interaction with the experiences I was having in my early environment.  Nothing else but surviving the trauma of my mother’s attacks against me mattered.  Never was there a TIME when trauma wasn’t immediately threatening and impending, happening in the present moment, or just having finished happening – so that it could happen again.

My childhood was spent in a state of heightened trauma alertness from the beginning of my life.  As I watched my cat, she periodically caught the mouse in her mouth and carried him to another ‘play ground’ where she then let it go long enough that it could run a short distance and do what a little mouse will do:  Hide itself in an area that it thinks MIGHT best conceal it.

Of course the cat knew exactly where the mouse went, and right where it was.  She poked her paws into the spaces in the hiding places, batted the little creature, pushed and prodded it, and when it didn’t come out at a full run, she’s simply stick her head in, grab the mouse again, and move it on to another (to her) intriguing hiding playground.  Of course the most obvious places for this game to go on were in amongst my flower beds, a process which of course would have eventually led not only to the death of the mouse but to the destruction of my much-loved plants!

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Yes, watching my cat’s play-filled species determined extermination of this mouse was a trauma trigger for me.  I could not help but try to intervene on behalf of the little one who was going to lose its life if I didn’t.  I couldn’t catch my cat, so I sat out there for a long time chasing her away from the vicinity of the hidden prey.  I opened the back door thinking she would eventually get bored with out-waiting me and venture into the house.  Nope, that didn’t happen.

Instead, two of my other cats wandered out of the house.  They could tell immediately that Goldilocks was after prey, and all I could think of was, “Oh great!  There’s no way out of this.  I’ll take some pictures and then exit the playground so I don’t have to watch what I know is unavoidably going to happen.”

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So here are some pictures.  It’s been about an hour since I stopped watching the trauma-drama outside my door.  I just went outside again to see another one of my cats sitting under the Oleander bush satisfyingly smacking its lips and cleaning its jaw daintily with its paw.  “Mouse gone.  Game over.”

So, now in thinking about dissociation as the experts like to write about it, I have to say that nobody, absolutely nobody actually knows what dissociation is, what it does, what it feels like, how it operates, or where it came from like survivors do – particularly and especially those of us who endured and survived repeated, ongoing predatory attacks in our very early life of infancy and toddlerhood by our mothers.

If we then continued to endure trauma, abuse and attacks into and throughout our childhood, there is (in my thinking) no possible way that so-called dissociation did not build itself into our growing and developing body-brain.

I will never believe that dissociation is a so-called ‘defense mechanism’ for such survivors.  Our dissociation is simply HOW our brain regions, circuitry and networks were forced to grow and develop.

The mouse I watched today was in an ongoing peritraumatic state which was broken up A LITTLE TINY BIT by the moments the cat allowed it to nestle within its hiding places.  But these periodic reprieves from direct terror and assault were not enough to ever allow this mouse to go on about its life in anything like an ordinary (safe and secure) way.

Everything that mouse experienced both during direct assaults upon its life and during its reprieves, demanded that trauma-based body-brain operations continue to happen.  Those experiences are completely different in the midst of trauma and its trauma-based allowances of semi-reprieve than are ongoing experiences where trauma is not present or immediately threatened.  When any creature is forced to adapt to trauma environments during critical growth and developmental stages, both the experiences of trauma and reactions to it build themselves in.  The trauma in effect ‘moves in to stay’.

What this means to an early abused and traumatized human is that the emerging self goes into and remains in hiding as surely as this mouse did.  I don’t believe our parental-predators could ever reach our hidden self.  Yes, they could reach our little bodies with the attack of their words and blows, but our inner own self remained protected simply because of the nature of being human.

Every single person is a separate, individual entity that can only be accessed from the inside.  Even though everything that happens to us from the OUTSIDE profoundly affected our development, and could and did change the way our body that our self lives in, our self – its own self – remains ours and ours only.

The problem became one of us not being able to experience our self in our own life.  Experts refer to alterations in memory capacities (which is what the next post is about).  Dissociation means that we do not remember ourselves as being connected to our own ongoing experience in ordinary ways because our capacity to REMEMBER was affected PHYSIOLOGICALLY during our earliest development.

Enough said at the moment.  As you look at the following pictures think of each one as representing an environmental context for ongoing moments of my cat’s life – but from the point of view of the mouse.  No way was it important for the mouse (forget the cat here) to remember itself in one of these ‘pictures’ in any particular order.  All the mouse could do was attempt to stay alive.  The only way it could do that would be if it could find a safe enough place to hide and remain hidden.

Safe enough.  That is what every living creature needs so it can continue to remain alive.  But growing and developing a human body-brain as time moves on and the trauma continues means that the inner experience of being in the midst of trauma never leaves us.  Trauma is not only what happened to us, but became how we grew a body-brain to remember ourselves with.

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It's only a GAME of hide-and-seek if we play it with equal peers. It's only a GAME of cat-and-mouse if you are the predator.
Where could a victimized-prey hide to escape? Under the blue flax and sage bush?
Is there a tiny little self tucked into hiding within the clover?
Under the poppies among the petunias? Is this a safe place to hide for survival?
Where is it safe for an abused and traumatized mouse -- or infant-child -- to hide?
Is it safe enough to stay alive under the newly blooming rose bush?
When I finally turned away from the trauma drama, the little mouse had hidden itself here among the tiny pansies.
The mouse was hiding in here last I saw of it. Each of these hiding places can be thought of as a momentary segment of the mouse's endangered life -- like victimized tiny children forming their abilities to remember their self in their life -- the separate events are just that -- dissociated experiences linked together only by one thing: Ongoing experiences of individual events of enduring and surviving trauma. Meanwhile, the SELF remains hidden unless we can contact and connect with 'self' within its own world

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+LINK TO MY MOTHER’S 1958 LETTERS

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It is not a fun process to be back at the job of transcribing my mother’s letters.  I finally finished doing these letters:

+1958 MOTHER’S LETTERS – FINDING LAND

For some reason I skipped this year months ago when I transcribed many, many of my mother’s other letters for other years.  The first day of 1958 coincided with the start of our 6th month in Alaska.  We lived in the rented log house whose lease was up on July 1.

During April and May my father hiked back into the Eagle River Valley and found the land he staked claim to as our 160 acre homestead.  In June my grandmother arrived for her first visit (a month) to the territory.

The cabin (shack) we moved into July 1958 and left October

By the end of July we had moved into a primitive rented cabin.  By mid-October we moved into an apartment in Anchorage.

The Jeep truck my parents named "The Monster" and the apartments we moved into in 1958 for my 2nd grade year

If you read little else of these letters, read the one written December 29, 1958 — it’s a classic mother letter!  It describes what happened – from my mother’s point of view – when my mother took the only outside job with a boss that I ever knew her to have during my childhood.  It was a part-time evening job that she held for a little over a month.  My guess is that her true Borderline colors were flying, and others reacted to her (heaven forbid!).  She could not control her work environment the way she controlled her home and children.  The result was a natural disaster.

After working many hours today on transcription, I am tired and sick of my mother!  Now, I have to decide what I am going to do about the rest of the 1957 letters that I have left until the very last.

I feel like I have spent the day in a place without any light at all, in the complete darkness of my scrambled, devastating childhood — little of which, of course, shows up in my mother’s bizarrely surreal letters.

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Borderline Personality Disorder People with BPD, and their family members, sometimes wonder why certain people get the disorder and others don’t. Sometimes there is a clear environmental cause (e.g., a history of psychological trauma), but research suggest that there are also biological factors.
Genetic Links to BPD
Studies of BPD in families show that first degree relatives (siblings, children, parents) of people treated for BPD are 10 times more likely to have been treated for BPD themselves than the relatives of people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
Will My Kids Get BPD Too?
If you have BPD, your kids are at greater risk of having BPD themselves. But, there is also a good chance that they will not have BPD. And, there are things you can do to reduce their risk.
Can BPD Be Prevented?
If the causes of BPD are in part biological, is there anything that can be done to decrease your risk for BPD?
BPD Family Resources
Sometimes it may seem like there is help available for the person with BPD, but not for his or her loved ones. Fortunately, there is a growing appreciation for the need of BPD families to have their own sources of information, treatment, and support.

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April is Child Abuse Prevention Month

Posted: 05 Apr 2010 07:54 AM PDT

All children in New York deserve a healthy, happy and safe childhood. This April, it’s your turn to make a difference for the kids in your neighborhood!

To raise awareness of April as Child Abuse Prevention Month, Prevent Chid Abuse New York (PCANY) and its sister chapters around the nation mobilize Pinwheels for Prevention campaigns. As part of these campaigns, New Yorkers make a promise to prevention by distributing pinwheels and hosting educational events throughout the state. Pinwheels are a symbol of a happy, carefree childhood and the belief that getting it right for kids early on is less costly than trying to fix problems after things have gone wrong. Doesn’t every child deserve this opportunity?

Everyone has a role to play in preventing child abuse and supporting families. You can get involved by planting pinwheel gardens in a public place, wearing pinwheel label pins, displaying car and storefront window clings, hosting events for families, and signing a promise to prevention. Businesses, schools, community-based organizations, civic groups, educators, volunteers, decision-makers and families participate.

PCANY offers you the tools to be an active part of Child Abuse Prevention Month. Please contact us to learn more about how to mobilize a campaign in your community. It’s your turn to make a difference for a child!

For more information about mobilizing a Pinwheels for Prevention campaign event near you, please visit our web site or call 1-800-CHILDREN.

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+SPRING DREAM

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Although I know I had dreamed what had happened first, it is only the end of the dream I had last night that I can remember now.

I knew who the visitors were when I heard them coming down the road from the distance.  I lifted my head at the first sound of them, and plugged the tip of my shovel into the earth.  It stood there as I left the work I was doing preparing an irrigation ditch for the upcoming planting.

Dressed in flowing garb of every color, texture and fabric I could imagine, this group of men and women angled off across the wide field.  Laughing, talking to one another gaily, they stepped so lightly in all the right places as they moved they nearly danced their way toward me.  Tiny puffs of dust lifted from their footsteps, but never once did one of the twenty trample in what would soon be a planted row.

Some wore straw hats.  Some wore dark amber gilded turbans, and some wore lavender and sea green veils.  Some wore boots.  Some dainty slippers.  And some wore plain old shoes.

“We have come for her today,” their lilting voices sang.  “We have come for the one who sees today.  We have come for the Seer today.”

I next remember the banquet in the farm house.  Platters heaped with sumptuous food in all its true color filled the long table.  In the seats of honor, side-by-side sat the young woman and the man the Troupe had brought with them, for he had been found and brought forth some time ago.

It was this Seeker who now sat beside the radiant Seer, who had finally found her.  Both of them together had more patience than the stars.

I observed what was happening here as some passed plates, some sipped soup, others were teaching the Seer and the Seeker how to remember the stories of the generations.

I watched their hand motions that looked to me like a secret and specialized sign language.  I especially remember one particular gesture.  With palm of the left hand raised and held facing the face, the fingertips very lightly tap back and forth,  quickly and gently, along a line of forehead just higher than the eyebrows.

This Troupe, these Troubadours, intended only to instruct the Chosen two.  Once taught, these two would become the intermediaries between those who have no formal corporeal form and those that do.

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This post is dedicated to the creator of the SeerSeeker Yahoo Group

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