Tag: trauma

+THREAT OF ATTACK – STAYING NUMB – PTSD AND DISSOCIATION

alchemynow2 Comments

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Something happened inside of me when I reached the end of the post I wrote on November 19, 2009 – +I WILL NEVER BE ORDINARY. IT IS TIME FOR ME TO KNOW THIS TRUTH..  The writing has become so much harder for me to do than it was before.

Do I abandon my efforts?

The ‘transparent moment’ I experienced on November 19 was evidently deeply connected within my body to my present experience of myself in my life.  Evidently transparency does not feel safe to me.  Yet I have courage, stamina and willingness to move forward, though I do not know ahead of time where my writing process is going to take me.

I didn’t know on November 19 that I was writing myself up to that transparent moment.  I didn’t see it coming.  I didn’t predict or anticipate where I was going or where I would end up.  The experience of that transparent moment just happened – but it happened because of the writing.  On some deeper level that I cannot actually SEE within me my instincts say to me – “DON”T WRITE!  STOP!  WRITING IS NOT SAFE.  IT LEADS YOU TO UNKNOW PLACES, AND UNKNOWN IS DANGEROUS TO YOUR WELL-BEING!”

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Because it is my basic premise that I cannot separate any experience I have from the disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment system I have as a direct result of my mother’s abuse of me, I have to allow myself to understand that my current state of NOT WRITING is connected to how this system operates to try to keep me safe and secure in the world.

Hiding is, for me, a trauma related response.  I can translate what is going on for me in the present to:  transparency = dangerous = HIDE NOW!  Hiding means that I am hiding from my own words, which are directly connected in the writing process to who I am – all my memories (even those only my body remembers), how I survived, what I am willing to think about, what I am willing to feel – and to the full consequence of the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that I have along with dissociation that does not allow me to KNOW things in a necessarily ongoing, coherent, integrated fashion.

So, I STOP!

At the same time I am willing to share with you in a somewhat transparent way the following words that are connected to this whole process – as I forced myself to write them across lined sheets of spiral notebook paper —

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Make a difference in someone’s life

I used to believe in this

Is this a different Linda?

This one doesn’t even want to write any more.

Transitions between states of mind

Sometimes they are WIDE and I fall in.

I don’t know where the writing Linda went

I don’t want the sad one here.

Sometimes things cost too much – does caring?

Without the grief, am I just numb to everything?

A Linda-safer-floating around on a raft – but fragile amidst the sharks of chaos I know are all around me.

Don’t tip the raft.  Don’t look down.

Is that state mostly where I spent my childhood in between my mother’s attacks?

Out of nowhere she would attack me.  The raft of numb would disappear from under me.

I’d be in the ocean full of sharks – attacked again.

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Cancer was an attack from within.

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What does that mean

Changing our minds?

Like changing gears?

Or changing jobs?

Or changing our clothes?

Or changing a baby’s diaper?

Making change with money

A change in one’s fortune

A change in the weather

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Paving stones with spaces between them

Grout between tiles

Mortar between stones or bricks

In PTSD-Dissociation our traumatic experiences are separated by fear and confusion

Cracks in a sidewalk

Shifting plates of the earth’s crust

Water surrounding continents

If I go to a place of what seems ‘calm’ to me

I suspect I am really ‘numb’ instead

Because peaceful calmness was never allowed (and did not build itself into my body)

At times I do not wish to disturb this numbness

Once I leave the numbness I don’t know and can’t predict what will get triggered and what state I’ll end up in next

And I don’t know how long I’ll end up in some other ‘changed state’ or if, when or how I can get back to ‘numb’

So it seems best not to disturb or change anything

Like a great game of hop scotch only I can’t control or predict where I’ll end up next

Leave well enough alone

Don’t think

Don’t feel

Just be

Try to leave everything within me alone

Control = control where I am in the environment

I don’t want to be challenged there, either

For all the same

Reasons

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It’s like skating on a deep lake with uneven ice

Places that are thick and solid and I’m safe

Places where the ice is thin and I can crash through

But from the top side I can’t tell which is which

Nobody WANTS to fall through

OPTION?  Stay off of the lake

= do not write

I can’t predict where it will take me

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Please feel free to comment directly at the end of this post or on ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Your Page – Readers’ Responses

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November is National Adoption Month

Posted: 24 Nov 2009 10:14 AM PST

Currently, there are 130,000 children and youth waiting to be adopted. National Adoption Month urges Americans to “Answer the Call” to adopt children and youth from foster care. National Adoption Month intends to raise awareness about the adoption of children and youth from foster care.

The Ad Council’s latest public service “You don’t have to be perfect to be a perfect parent” urges potential parents that perfection is not the goal. Children just need loving, caring environments with stability. This award-winning campaign is a partnership of the Children’s Bureau, the Ad Council, and AdoptUsKids. This year’s ads target the African-American community and finding homes for African-American children in care. The ads feature humorous everyday scenarios illustrating that parents need not be perfect to offer the stability and commitment that a “forever family” provides to a waiting child.

Visit the 2009 National Adoption Month Website for more information: http://www.childwelfare.gov/adoption/nam/

Additionally, The Children’s Bureau Express has a Spotlight on National Adoption Month webpage The CBE has information about how agencies celebrate National Adoption Month, and find out more about the latest adoption resources and research.  They also offer more information and service on:

PSA Campaign Recruits Families for African-American Children
Adoption Month Calendar Features Innovative Activities
National Survey of Adoptive Parents Releases First Data
Post adoption Support Guide
Positive Outcomes for Late-Placed Adoptees
Court Collaboration Expedites Adoptions
Parent-to-Parent Support for Adoptive Families

To view more information please visit their Spotlight on National Adoption Month: http://cbexpress.acf.hhs.gov/index.cfm?event=website.viewSection&issueID=111&subsectionID=8

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+PLAY AS AN INDICATOR OF SAFETY AND SECURITY IN A BENEVOLENT WORLD

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Mothers have evolved throughout the millennia to play with their infants.

Having the ability to engage in healthy play has evolved through the millennia to build healthy body-nervous system-brain-mind selves in our species.  Play happens when the world is a friendly place to be.  Play TELLS us that the world is a friendly place to be.

When the environment surrounding mother and infant-child is benevolent, healthy play is most usually present.  This benevolence in the environment is then built into the growing-developing offspring.

When the environment surrounding mother and infant-child is hostile, toxic, lacking in essential survival qualities and therefore is malevolent, a mother’s ability to engage in healthy play with her offspring is interfered with.

Thus, the absence of healthy playfulness between mother and offspring signal the developing infant-child on every physiological level that trauma exists in its world.  The offspring will then be forced to change and adapt to the best of its physiological abilities to prepare itself for a lifetime within a malevolent world.

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Healthy playfulness between a mother and her offspring only happens to the degree that the environment is safe and secure enough to allow this play to happen.

If a mother grew and developed in her own early childhood in a world that signaled her body-nervous system-brain-mind self that the world was malevolent, she is most likely carrying unresolved trauma within herself that then signals to her offspring that the world is malevolent.  Her offspring will then have to change according to the trauma-present-in-the-world message just as its mother did.

Both mother and infant-child will then suffer from a lack of safety and security perceived as permanent and real by their physiological development.  When trauma is present, healthy play is interfered with because our evolution has designed our species so that degree, quality, kinds of, presence of healthy play and playful attitudes directly indicate the degree of either benevolence or malevolence in the world.

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I am not talking about play as we might think about it in today’s world.  This kind of play has nothing to do with toys or ‘stuff’.  Healthy play that signals to offspring the condition of the world is about direct face-to-face interaction between mother and infant-child.  The presence of a world safe and secure enough to allow for this kind of play between early caregivers and offspring has operated throughout our evolution.

It was only when the world because safe and secure enough, adequate and benevolent enough for this level of play to grow and thrive that humans ever achieved powers of speech at all (only about 140,000 years ago).  The physiological systems within our body and brain had to have already evolved sophisticated organizational and orientational abilities to have ever allowed our powers of speech to manifest in the first place because speech uses all those preexisting abilities.

Any time trauma happens it always disrupts ongoing coherent life.  If trauma cannot be resolved, consequences happen.  Dissociation represents one of the fundamental consequences of a being’s inability to resolve trauma.  Dissociation continues to affect a mother because its very existence means that something malevolent occurred that was not able to be resolved.

A dissociating mother thus communicates her state of unresolved trauma to her offspring primarily through an interruption in her ability to engage in healthy play and playful attitudes with her offspring.  The key to healthy playfulness between a mother and her offspring is that it is APPROPRIATE.

Appropriate, and therefore healthy play and playfulness between a mother and her offspring, the kind of play that then signals the offspring to grow an entire body geared for life in a benevolent world, happens when the mother’s entire focus is on fostering the well-being of her infant-child.

Mother’s have evolutionarily evolved to respond appropriately to their offspring so that their play-filled responses do not overwhelm, over stimulate or under stimulate them.  When a mother has experienced enough trauma during her own development that incoherency in the form of dissociation has been built into her entire body, she is not likely to be able to operate from this optimal, benign, benevolent-world-condition state within herself.  She will then communicate her own preexisting, unresolved trauma states directly to her offspring.

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Terror, pain and trauma interrupt play and the ability to play.  This lack of play and the ability to play then acts as a direct signal that communicates malevolence in the world.  When healthy play and playfulness exist, they happen in a safe and secure world, not in the midst of trauma.

A mother who does not carry unresolved trauma into her interactions with her offspring will be able to focus on the well-being of her offspring and demonstrate the benevolence of the world to her developing infant-child through her healthy, appropriate play and playfulness with it.

These interactions operate from birth to form first the right, limbic, emotional, social brain.  As the infant-child continues to grow, the foundation of play or its absence, built within its body-nervous system-brain-mind-self will further influence the development of its later-forming left brain, the connection between the two hemispheres of its brain, and the development of its higher-processing cortical abilities.

A non-dissociating mother is able to have appropriate hopes, dreams, wishes and desires for the well-being of her offspring.  She will automatically be able to orient herself and organize her interactions with her offspring.  Her goal, destination, direction and purpose regarding her offspring will be benevolent.  This benevolence will be communicated through safety and security that manifests itself in healthy play and playfulness toward her offspring.

A dissociating mother will experience breaks in her ongoing interactions with her offspring that will vary in degree according to the changes that had to happen to her during her own development in a malevolent early environment.

In my case, my mother’s dissociation toward me was extreme, fundamental and complete.  In her psychosis she believed that I was evil, that I tried to kill her while I was being born, that I was not human, and that I was sent to be a curse on her life.  Her psychotic dissociation in-formed every interaction she ever had with me from the time I was born.

My mother’s unresolved trauma, manifesting itself in her dissociation, prevented her from ever being able to respond to me with anything like appropriate, healthy play or playfulness.  She was not able to consider my well-being because she could never understand that I was a separate entity from her.  I was merely and continually the recipient of her slit-off projection of her intolerable perception of her own badness.

She not only could not have playful interactions with me that I needed to build a non-trauma centered body-nervous system-brain-mind-self, but her psychosis was so severe that she prevented ME from ever being able to play at all.

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The absolute disturbance in the necessary operation of play in my childhood directly ties into my own dissociation.  The trauma I experienced in the malevolent environment of my childhood could not possibly be integrated into a coherent self.  However, as a mother to my own children I was able to know they were separate beings from me, and I was able to focus as much as I possibly could on them and on the development of their well-being.

In other words, I was able to organize and orient a ‘mothering self’ within me that existed to foster the development of my children.  Because I could do this, I could offer to them enough play and playfulness that it communicated to them a relative lack of trauma in the world and enough of a sense of safety and security in the world that I did not pass my unresolved trauma onto them.

They did not have perfect childhoods because the unresolved trauma and the changes that had to happen to me so that I could survive my childhood affected every other aspect of my being-in-the-world, and therefore DID affect them.  But these problems were MINE and I was able to keep them myself.  I did not force them INTO my children the way my mother forced her unresolved trauma INTO growing and developing me.

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As we return in our thoughts to consider our infancy and childhood through the lens of playfulness and play or its absence, we can become much more clear about how our caregivers’ unresolved trauma — or the absence of it — operated to directly communicate to our growing and developing body on all its levels what the condition of the world was like.

If appropriate and healthy play and playfulness was there for us, it is during those experiences that we were developing in an ‘ordinary’ way.  If it was absent, some degree of trauma was present, and we were forced at those times in our development to try to adapt to that malevolency.

Who we are today and how we are in our bodies in the world is directly connected to play and playfulness because it is only in times of safety and security that play exists at all.

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+CONTINUALLY TRYING TO CREATE MYSELF IN TIME AND SPACE

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I tell myself to put my fingers on this keyboard and make them move.  “Speech is silver.  Silence is golden.”  I choose to go for the silver.  I was forced for the first 18 years of my life to be as silent as a child can be.  Silence will not heal me.

Writing is all tangled up today with what I choose to write about.  Having a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment MEANS that having access to one single, integrated, cohesive, coherent Linda is extremely difficult.  I will not admit defeat and say it is impossible.  I am coming to understand, and believe, that using my words – putting them together in lines across the page – will help me become more organized, oriented, integrated, cohesive and coherent.  So here goes…..

I am thinking a jumble of thoughts, all tied into very old and continual thoughts about myself in my body in my life since my beginning.  I was not allowed to be a person.  My mother interfered with my normal, ordinary development every single step of my development.  I have paid a price for her terrible abuse of me.  The biggest one is that I didn’t so much as LOSE my self, I didn’t get one in the first place.

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So I have to imagine what it would be like to have one of those illusive organized, oriented, integrated, cohesive and coherent selves.  How do all these aspects of such a strong, clear, healthy self operate in time and space, which is what I guess being in a body in a life, in the world is all about?

Today, I want to know the difference between having goals, destination and purpose and having hopes, dreams and wishes.

I want to know because it seems to be I wouldn’t have to question these things the way I do now if I HAD any real idea what they mean.

My mother interfered with my development regarding everything, so why wouldn’t I expect that having a clear sense of goals, destination, purpose, hopes, dreams and wishes would be a part of what I am missing?

She never hesitated to control and abuse me in any way that she could.  Her abuse included confining me in space and time beginning when I was very, very small.  She withheld food, prevented me from even going to the bathroom when I got older.  She woke me from sound sleep to beat me, or didn’t let me sleep.  When I got older she forced me to overeat.  I could go on and on, but this isn’t what I want to say right now.  Not being free to be a growing child, not being safe or allowed to play greatly harmed my development in every single way.

What I want to say is that great sense of loss and grief I feel is tied as much to my loss of access to my inner needs, wants, desires, ability to have intentions, and the ability to find ways to know what brought me happiness as a person and what gave me pleasure.  I didn’t grow up knowing much of anything except how to survive my mother’s torture and abuse.

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This thinking is tied to what I believe about people like me with disorganized-disorganized insecure attachment.  I believe I organized and oriented myself around being a mother for the 35 years I had children under 18 in my care.  Today it seems that I used the goal of caring for them as well as I could, the destination I saw for them in the future as leaving home well and happy people, my purpose in life of being their mother, to organize and orient my self in the world.  My hopes, dreams and wishes were tied up in that whole process.

Having them grow up and leave was wonderful.  Yet I was left again being the disorganized-disoriented insecurely attached-to-my-own-self and the world just as I had always been for the first 18 years of my life.

Without the strange and complicated relationship I formed after they left again leaves me feeling inwardly desperate, destitute, lost and confused – again disorganized and disoriented.

I was able to obtain the goals for my education, but the process was extremely confused, and in the end I am still lost.  I can ‘make things’ with my hands, but even being able to use the ‘goal-destination-purpose’ and ‘hopes-dreams-wishes’ thinking only lasts for short periods of time and nothing about me seems connected and tied together.

I want to understand how the brain-mind changes that I have continue to cause me great difficulties in these areas.  Somehow I sense that COMMITMENT has always been a key and central piece of anything I have ever accomplished.  If I say I hope to write, that writing is tied to my dreams and wishes, how do I connect that to my goals, my destination, my purpose?

Because my right brain, left brain, corpus callosum that connects them together, and my higher executive function cortex did not form in an ordinary fashion and instead will suffer from severe trauma influence for the rest of my life, I cannot simply accept that I am going to ‘naturally’ find a solution to my dilemmas.  I have to continue to focus my will toward the goal of better understanding how all these changes – that result in what I am naturally missing – connect to my overall feelings of hopeless sadness in my life.

How does changed me find my self in time and space so that I don’t constantly know that I don’t ‘fit in’, am lost, and want to ‘leave here’?

I don’t know yet, but I wanted to say I am working on these things.  Today.  I continually have to try to learn how to create my self in time and space because this process was completely interrupted for me growing up with such abuse.  I have a trauma bond with myself that makes it hard for me to get through life feeling whole and successful.  There is a rupture between my self and myself and the world I am constantly trying to find ways to repair.

I have to start with the little things, and writing here is one of them.  Now, I will go eat breakfast as I move my self forward in the time and space that is today.

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It strikes me after putting the above words into their order that the most important word in the whole piece is PLAY.  I was not allowed to play, and as many of my childhood memories show, my mother had an uncanny ability to turn whatever childhood play thoughts or actions I had into something painful for me.

Beginning with playful interactions between infants and their early caregivers, and moving all the way through childhood, play is nature’s way of building an organized and oriented self in the world.  I suffered terribly from the lack of play and from interruption of play every step of my development because of my mother’s abuse.

My sister just gave me a simple example of how play interacts with a growing brain-mind-self regarding hopes, desires and wishes on the one hand, and goals, direction toward a destination and purpose on the other.

She took her granddaughters to a fund raiser bake sale today.  The seven year old bought muffins and a specially formed little bundt cake with a hole in its center.  On the way home she ate the muffins but carefully protected and saved the cake.  At the urging of grandma and her 10 year old sister she finally, shyly told them her PLANS for her special cake.

She wanted to take it home, fill the center with pudding, put a candle on it, and have a birthday party with her Barbie dolls.  This, of course, is what she was allowed to go home and immediately accomplish.  Even her sister, who thinks she’s too grown up to play Barbies, came to the party.  Through each step in her process she was building another healthy, happy aspect of her brain-mind-self.  Severely abused children are very often deprived SO MANY or ALL TIMES of this kind of experience — and this kind of loss is big part of what happened to change us.

I see that everything I am thinking about this morning is simply contained in that pattern of child play.  Play is how children learn to be social (after their infant brain forms through early mirroring caregiving).  Play can involve rules, or not.  Child play does allow the brain not only to build its happy-joy center, but also all the other brain patterns and circuits I am beginning to understand as they in-form our lives.

The arenas of damage my mother orchestrated against me were many and devastating, but today it is particularly the damage done to me by her abuse of my play drive and abilities that has harmed me immeasurably in my adulthood.

Today I also realize that the absence of my sadness that being with my boyfriend gave me was directly tied into play.  He was my playmate.  That is a big part of the joy and happiness I felt when I was with him.  I didn’t know this until today.  I have no built-in experience of play-joy from childhood.  I didn’t even recognize my happy feelings with him were directly connected to play.  My playmate doesn’t want to play any more.  Certainly that gives me great sadness.

What can I learn about play at 58?  How can I begin to understand that a lot of the sadness I feel stems from never having play in my childhood?  My siblings played together, and they all remember my part in their play – by my absence from all of it!

That especially the lack of play in my childhood (coupled with the rest of the terrible abuse) directly created my adult brain-mind-self’s great difficulty with the ability to dream, wish, hope or to plan, have a goal, a sense of direction, a destination for myself in my life, or a sense of purpose — in-forms my sense of grief, loss, and feeling lost like I don’t belong ‘here’ — is not a small piece of information.

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+I WILL NEVER BE ORDINARY. IT IS TIME FOR ME TO KNOW THIS TRUTH.

alchemynow1 Comment

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I try to be as positive as I can about the work I am doing with my writing about the permanent and lifelong trauma-centered changes that plague survivors of severe abuse and trauma that happened during their early infant-child developmental changes.

Today’s transcription of my quarter of a century old letters my friend just returned back to me has left me feeling anything but positive.  The reality of the kinds of childhoods like mine, and like the kind I am talking about and describing, is horrible.  There is no way to pretty up the picture about what was done to us and what happened to us as a result.

I am faced with the tragedy of what my mother’s abuse did to me — not just during my childhood, but throughout my entire life up until this very instant in time.  Primarily I balance my mother’s abuse by the other side of my child abuse history.  No one was there for me to form a safe and secure attachment with.  THIS LACK, I believe, had as much to do with how my body-brain-mind-self had to change in order to survive as did the abuse itself.

I believe that having a safe and secure attachment to at least one other person from birth particularly through age 5 is a critical resiliency factor to balance out the terrible harm of abuse in infancy and childhood.  When I consider the terrible abuse of my childhood, it is ALSO the absence of having any other person I could form at attachment to and with that profoundly harmed me.

It is not JUST the presence of abuse that truly creates a malevolent childhood.  It is also the complete absence of safe and secure attachment to ANYONE else.  That absence, I believe, amplifies the impact of the trauma of abuse nearly beyond belief.  That absence, in particular, coupled with the abuse, so changes a person’s development that trauma becomes the underlying pivotal factor of their ongoing existence.

No matter how benign our adult life may appear from the outside, the reality of this kind of childhood trauma within us manifests itself in every feeling, thought, action, decision and experience that we have.   How to live well in spite of the trauma-centered developmental changes that happened to us is so far past my ability to understand today that I can’t imagine it.

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I am having a transparent moment, as if all the illusions I have ever had about myself being an ‘ordinary’ person in an ‘ordinary’ world have now completely evaporated.  Is this a feeling of complete hopelessness that I am experiencing?  It can’t be.  I won’t let it be.

Having illusions about who and how I am in this body in this lifetime is not the same thing as having hope.  Just because today, finally, all my illusions have vanished because I have challenged them and found that they do not fit me, does not mean that I have no right to find a way to a better life in this world.

At this moment I feel as if I have one foot poised in the air over a threshold I am crossing into a new vision of myself in my life.  I can, for the first time ever, looking backward through the time of my life and see myself being born a pure and innocent child, full of potential, full of life, full of the ability to respond to the world I was born into.

That this world welcomed me with trauma and abuse, which held me firmly within its grasp for the first, formative, 18 years of my life does not mean that I, as a human being, have changed in my essence.  But I do have to work with this body, nervous system, and brain that changed itself to survive the horrors of that ongoing trauma.  It is my mind I am working to change, to the best of my ability, not because it is in any way ill, but because it is mine.

My mind can no longer afford to feed itself on a diet of illusion and false belief that what happened to me did not affect me in ways that I now KNOW it did.  And with this knowledge I now have the most profound hope I have ever had.  It is time for me to learn how to experience life MY way, my CHANGED way, without ever again expecting anything about myself to be — ordinary.

There is an invisible line that is crossed during a severely abused infant-child’s life where the option to develop in an ‘ordinary’ way is removed.  To deny this fact is to suffer from delusion.

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*Ages 29-33 – Eight Letters to a Friend

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*Commentary on the eight letters to a friend – ages 29-33

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SOME OF THE KEY TYPICAL TROUBLESOME WORDS, CONCEPTS AND EXPERIENCES THAT ARE DIFFERENT FOR SEVERE CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORS – SEEN FROM MY NEWLY INFORMED PERSPECTIVE.

These things connect to what continues to ‘trouble’ us because they are all connected to the changes that our body-brain-mind had to make in order to survive early severe abuse during our infant-child developmental stages:

Choice

Feeling guilty – the whole concept of guilty

Concept of procrastination as being a source of our problems

‘shirking’ responsibility – the whole concept of ‘response-ability’ as it applies to us

dealing with things on a self-honesty level

concept of ‘changing’

the concept of feelings, feeling feelings, experiencing feelings

emotional brain not form ‘ordinarily’; emotional dysregulation = chronic problem

feeling lonely, depressed, crying – all different for us than for ‘ordinary’ people

experience of ‘feeling low’ and low on energy is different

‘anger’ has a different meaning to us – both our own and other people’s

being with other people

feeling trapped

our experience of the experience of ‘being sick’ and recuperating is altered

our experience of being kind to ourselves

our experience of giving ourselves ‘permission’

how we experience anticipation of enjoyable experiences

experience of worry different

experience of ‘wishful thinking’ is different

experience of disappointment different

Experience of trust is different

Our experience of the passage of time is VERY different!

Our experience of friendships is different

Being willing to reach for and experience ANY kind of self-help we can find

Finding that it does not REALLY help us at all

blaming-shaming ourselves that it doesn’t

not being able to immediately and completely trust our impressions of people

my ‘who-to-trust/not-trust’ center in my infant brain could not form correctly

making a mess of our own thinking trying to change these first impressions!

Our sense of safety with others is THE number ONE issue – we have to trust it

Intense feelings of isolated-alone, trust them, they are REAL beyond belief

Realize that ‘ordinary’ people do not experience them with the pain we do

Yes, we will do everything possible to ‘protect our feelings’ – naturally

Have to be hyper aware of what feels threatening and scary to us – it’s real

There are memories and feelings we can’t touch because it isn’t good for us to

Repression of trauma is not the same thing as dissociation

we can’t ‘work through issues’ like others if we dissociate

not helpful to feel guilty-shame for what we cannot possible accomplish!

Terrible ambiguity can exist about our abuser(s) – ordinary people can’t imagine

Confused-meshed identity and relationship with abuser

Commonly called ‘defense mechanisms’ don’t begin to describe true insanity

Have to be realistic about ‘recovery’ goals – ours will be different than ‘ordinary’

Be careful of what we believe of what therapists who do truly not know us, tell us

We don’t really know what love is or what it feels like – we weren’t built that way

I strongly suspect that ‘love’ is different from ordinary for us

We will never stop learning about what ‘ordinary’ people automatically know

We did not grow into our thinking abilities like ‘ordinary’ people do

Not helpful to be told by others we are ‘rationalizing’ as a defense when we think

We need help learning about our thinking process because abuse changed it

Our disorganized insecure attachment means that we do not grieve the same

Extremely helpful to understand insecure attachment and love relationships

Our own pain-loneliness puts us at risk for attaching harmfully in relationships

Our sense of ‘time passing’ is different; things do not ‘end’ in time like ordinary

Difficulties with accountability if we don’t know source of our difficulties

Terrible troubles with goals-future plans, our higher cortex formed differently

We have a different version of a selfhood – not the ordinary one formed by age 2

When we feel alone in the world, a lot of it is because we are lonely for our self

(a self-centered-self is cultural and evolutionarily a recent luxury we didn’t get)

We had no say in the matter – we developed a trauma-centered self from birth

12-step program talk about ‘unmanageability’ = not from our ‘planet of origin’

12-step program talk about ‘acceptance’ = not from our ‘planet of origin’

12-step program talk about ‘powerlessness’ = not from our ‘planet of origin’

12-step program talk about ‘resentments’ = not from our ‘planet of origin’

the set-point for our nervous system is not at ‘calm’ like ‘ordinary’ is

(these points are included at the end of the link presented above)

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+WHEN ABUSIVE PARENTS STEAL THEIR CHILD’S THUNDER

alchemynow2 Comments

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Experts say that we cannot be truly autonomous and secure adults if we lack the ability to have safe and secure attachments.

I wanted to write today about Dr. Siegel’s next statements about secure-autonomous attachment.  I find, as usual, that I am nearly completely lost in trying to understand what he is saying (see bottom of this post) because I do not come from a childhood of safe and secure attachments.  Instead my 18 years of abuse from birth gave me the opposite – a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder.  To begin to understand what Siegel is saying, I have to turn his words upside down and backwards so that they can make sense to ‘opposite’ extra-ordinary ME.

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In order to keep my thoughts from appearing and flying away in their often random way, I had to find my own internal image to attach them to so that they could have an order I can understand.  What came to me in relation to what Siegel is saying about secure versus insecure attachment was:  “stolen thunder.”  In working with my own internal image I came to understand three basic questions about how parents raise their children.  In fact, I think it might be the simplest ‘test’ possible to determine the quality of the parenting we received and of the parenting we give our own children.

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1.  Does a parent help their child’s own personal power, uniqueness, expression and self to grow?  In other words, do they help their child’s thunder to grow or do they interfere with their child’s growing thunder (self=personal power)?

Yes or No

2.  Does a parent actually steal their child’s thunder away from them so that the child is diminished rather than helped and allowed to grow and thrive?

Yes or No

3.  Does the parent then project their own garbage onto and into their child?

Yes or No

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These questions are, of course, only showing us what the very tip of the iceberg is like about how parents can act toward their children.  But I think the answers give a pretty clear indication about what lies below the surface:

As I thought about my mother’s interactions with me from my birth, I realized that 1. was No; 2. was Yes; 3.  was Yes.  N-Y-Y.  She did not allow my personal thunder to grow, she stole it away from me and projected her garbage onto me.  (This is exactly what I believe my mother’s mother and grandmother did to her in her childhood.)

I thought about my father and 1. was No; 2. was No; 3.  was No.  N-N-N.  He did not help me to grow my own thunder, but he did not steal it away from me, either.  Nor did he project his garbage onto me.  I basically did not seem to exist in his world at all.

I thought about my interactions with my own children and 1. was Yes; 2. was No; and 3. was No.  Y-N-N.  My foremost effort with my children was to allow them and to help them grow into their own self and to grow their personal thunder.  I did not steal their thunder away from them or deny them the opportunity to grow their own strong, clear self.  I did not confuse, overpower or disempower them.  I did not project my own garbage onto them.  I had what the child development attachment experts would call an ‘earned secure’ attachment with my children.  (I think about this from my own perspective as my having built a ‘borrowed secure’ attachment with my children.)

NOTE:  Our patterns of trying to give our thunder away is a topic for some future writing…..

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Out of curiosity I wanted to know where the phrase “steal my thunder” even came from.  At trivia-library.com I found it to be 300 years old:

Origins of Sayings – Steal My Thunder

About the history, origin and story behind the famous saying

STEAL MY THUNDER

Who Said It: John Dennis

When: 1709

The Story behind It: John Dennis, English critic and playwright, invented a new way of simulating the sound of thunder on stage and used the method in one of his plays, Appius and Virginia. Dennis “made” thunder by using “troughs of wood with stops in them” instead of the large mustard bowls usually employed. The thunder was a great success, but Dennis’ play was a dismal failure. The manager at Drury Lane, where the play was performed, canceled its run after only a few performances. A short time later, Dennis returned to Drury Lane to see Shakespeare’s Macbeth. As he sat in the pit, he was horrified to discover that his method of making thunder was being used. Jumping to his feet, Dennis screamed at the audience, “That’s my thunder, by God! The villains will not play my play but they steal my thunder.”

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I have a different association with thunder.  I used to be terrified of electrical storms.  Gradually, after more than 25 years spent in friendships with traditional-believing Native Americans in northern Minnesota, I came to understand another perspective on these storms.

I had a friend who was a lawyer and Chief Magistrate, and not given to ‘flights of fancy’.  One time she told the story of driving a stretch of deserted 2-lane highway after leaving Canada as she headed home.  She glanced in her rear view mirror and saw a massive bird speeding towards her along the line of road.  It shone copper, and when it reached her car it lifted over it and swooped down in front of her and continued down the road.  It was so big its wing tips reached over the shoulders on both sides of the road.  My friend was stunned and shaken, and pulled off the road and stopped as she watched it disappear ahead of her.

Traditional Anishinabeg (Ojibway, Chippewa) and other Tribal teachings tell of how thunder is the sound of the voice of these great Thunderbirds, and lightning is the light flashing from their eyes.  I am no longer afraid of electrical storms.  Finding, claiming and growing my own personal thunder remains a bit more of a challenge!

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My entire recovery from the terrible child abuse I suffered has been about the healing of myself and the claiming of my personal power to be my self, in my power, in my life.  How does having one’s personal thunder — or not — apply to my understanding of the following words by Dr. Daniel Siegel?  I guess my discussion of this information now belongs in tomorrow’s post:

“Moreover, the capacity to reflect on the role of mental states in determining human behavior is associated with the capacity to provide sensitive and nurturing parenting….this reflective function is more than the ability to introspect; it directly influences a self-organizational process within the individual…..the reflective function also enables the parent to facilitate the self-organizational development of the child….the coherent organization of the mind depends upon an integrative process that enables such reflective processes to occur….integrative coherence within the individual may early in life depend upon, and later facilitate, interpersonal connections that foster the development of emotional well-being.  (Siegle/tdm/312)”

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This post follows:

+DISSOCIATION AND THE TRAUMA-SPECIALIZED BRAIN 11-11-09

+SECURE AND INSECURE ATTACHMENT AND THE CHILDHOOD NARRATIVE 11-13-09

+EXPLODING MOTHER, IMPLODING ME: SOME FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN US 11-14-09

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MORE INFORMATION ABOUT BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER

(IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER)

Borderline Personality Disorder

In the Spotlight | More Topics |
from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD
Most people with a diagnosis of BPD have at least one (if not more) co-occurring disorders. Common comorbid conditions include mood and anxiety disorders and substance use problems. But other disorders can occur alongside BPD as well.
In the Spotlight
Eating Disorders and BPD
Recent research is revealing how often BPD and eating disorders co-occur, why they may be related and how to treat these two types of disorders when they do co-occur.
More Topics

Alcoholism and BPD
There is a remarkable overlap between substance abuse disorders and borderline personality disorder. One study found that about 60% of patients in psychiatric hospitals who have been diagnosed with BPD also have a co-occurring substance use disorder such as alcohol dependence.

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+EARLY ABUSE AFFECTS OUR REACTION TO ADULT TRAUMA EXPOSURE

alchemynow2 Comments

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My revised list — common reactions to a stressful event can include:

Shock and disbelief

Feeling powerless

(Short and/or long term immune system responses) headaches, back pains, and stomach problems

Sadness and depression (depression is an anxiety response)

Crying

Apathy and emotional numbing (dissociation, depersonalization, derealization)

(Denial – distortion or loss of memory)

Anger

Fear and anxiety about the future

(Over or under reaction to stimuli – hyper- or hypo-startle response)

Sleep difficulties

Nightmares and reoccurring thoughts about the event (left-right brain cannot process trauma information while awake or during dream sleep — ambidextrous  and left handed people at higher risk)

Difficulty concentrating

Difficulty making decisions

(Difficulty assessing meaning and prioritizing)

Loss of appetite (or increase)

(For children – disturbance in play activities)

(Difficulty with social interactions)

(Inability to use words to describe the experience)

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I cannot read information such as what is presented at the end of the post from any ‘ordinary’ perspective.  The list presented as “common reactions to a stressful event” describes the kind of traumatic stress reactions that are built into the growing body-brains of severely abused infants and young children.  On some level, these reactions have become our norm.  When additional traumas occur in our later adult lives all of these pre-existing traumatic reactions become stimulated and activated.  We are, therefore, at highest risk for having serious reactions to later traumas in our lives.

I hate having to write about these things.  I hate having to even think about them.  I hate it that my body knows far more than my conscious mind ever will about the reality of what the challenges of trauma can do to us.

Professionals call a reaction to trauma disordered when these reactions do not dissipate after a reasonable period of time goes by after a trauma has happened.  For those of us whose body-brain was built during trauma, we have never had the luxury of having a body-brain that does not include trauma reactions in its makeup.  We cannot return to a pre-trauma condition because we never had one in the first place.

That makes any childhood trauma survivor more vulnerable to post trauma stress disorders.  Personally, I don’t like the use of the word ‘disorder’ and would prefer a recognition that what happens to us after trauma exposure is as natural a reaction as what happens to us as the trauma occurs.  If our reaction is exaggerated or extended, there is a reason for this happening.  Until this fact, coupled with a complete recognition of how early infant-child abuse and trauma alter the developing body-brain from the start is recognized and respected, I do believe the word ‘disorder’ must be used carefully in trauma response considerations.  What ‘they’ see as ‘disordered’ is a different kind of ordering for the entire body-brain from the ground up, from the beginning of life onward for those who have survived severe infant-childhood traumas

Whatever words are used to describe the continued suffering from ongoing reactions to traumas, the long term effects are very real and can be debilitating in regard to quality of life and general well-being.  Adaptations in the body-brain of early trauma survivors means that we react to trauma differently than ‘ordinary’ people do.  We were ‘reordered’ and our ongoing processing of information reflects that condition in our body-brain.

To call us ‘disordered’ is to call us flawed.  We are different, not flawed.

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INFORMATION FROM:

Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog
Dealing with a Traumatic EventPosted: 14 Nov 2009 01:26 PM PSTIn the wake of the tragic events at Fort Hood November 5, 2009, it’s important to remember that when traumatic incidents occur, the Center for Disease Control’s Injury Center can assist by providing information that can help people cope and recover. Sometimes after experiencing a traumatic event, including personal or environmental disasters, or being threatened with an assault, people have a strong and lingering reaction to stress. When the symptoms of stress last too long, it can cause people to feel overwhelmed and have an effect on their ability to cope.Common reactions to a stressful event can include:
Disbelief and shock
Fear and anxiety about the future
Difficulty making decisions
Apathy and emotional numbing
Loss of appetite
Nightmares and reoccurring thoughts about the event
Anger
Increased use of alcohol and drugs
Sadness and depression
Feeling powerless
Crying
Sleep difficulties
Headaches, back pains, and stomach problems
Difficulty concentratingFor more information, tips on how to handle a traumatic experience, or to read this full article please visit: http://www.cdc.gov/Features/HandlingStress/ or http://www2c.cdc.gov/podcasts/player.asp?f=5256

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+THE HEALING OF DISSOCIATONS – A 50-YEAR MISSING PIECE OF ME HAS RETURNED

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I woke up this morning thinking about all the wounds we received in the war zone of our abusive childhoods.  Often as the war raged on around us we ended up being the targets.  In this battlefield we were the victims.  Some of us received so many wounds they cannot be counted.

My mother’s war with the world began in her own childhood and so wounded her that her war never ended until the day that she died.  I was born a casualty of her war.  I had no choice, no weapon, and I could not escape.  I could not fight back or defend myself against her.  No one was there to tend my wounds when they were inflicted, either.  And yet for all the wounds I suffered both visible and invisible, my strength and resiliency still enabled me to survive and endure.

Like my mother, I carried all my wounds out of my childhood, but unlike my mother I did not carry on the war.  Perhaps that happened in part because she began to attack me on all levels as soon as I was born.  I was too young, too little, to begin to feel anger at her for what she was doing to me.  I continued to grow up through and past the age of rage without knowing what it even was.

But it’s not the rage that fueled my mother’s war against me that I woke up thinking about today.  I woke up thinking about the healing of wounds.

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When severe abuse begins so early it impacts the formation of the regions, circuits, pathways and operation of the brain so that we end up with what Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard Medical Group refer to as “an evolutionarily altered brain” as a result, the wounds that caused these changes to happen are most difficult to heal.  These wounds include dissociation.

I am thinking this morning about how long ago people lived for a much shorter time.  Their experiences were fewer and their universe was so much smaller than ours.  Their lives were centered on the core basics of staying alive in an often threatening and dangerous world throughout their entire life span.  In those worlds the ability to dissociate during or in the aftermath of traumas must have continued to serve a purpose that is difficult for me to define in the world I live in today.

Yet for those of us who endured unimaginable severe trauma during our infant-child developmental stages, the dissociation we were given as a result of our survival makes it more difficult for us to continue living in the ‘ordinary’ world we grow up to enter.  Nature has not evolved a way to ‘put us back together again’ to be like a pre-early trauma exposed person.  We are stuck with dissociational brain patterns and abilities that are directly linked to the hundreds if not thousands of near-mortal wounds from physical and mental injuries that we received many years ago.

Our wounds within can thus remain open, painful and at times extremely difficult for us to live with as we attempt to live an ‘ordinary’ life of well-being in an ordinary world without the kinds of dangers to our existence that we were programmed to survive because they existed in the times of our origins.

Without ‘medical’ care back then when we needed it most, and without access to the kind of help with our wounds and our resulting dissociation that we need now, how do we heal ANY of our wounds?

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The very length and complexity of our modern life experience is working against us now.  We cannot crawl wounded deep into a secluded cave and trust we will be protected and kept safe by our brethren standing guard over us while we receive adequate care and access the kind of quiet, unstimulated time that we need in order to heal.  (Yes, I believe we have these memories within our DNA that tell us what we need for our healing to occur.  These memories are available to us in the same way the memories in our bodies enable us to make adaptations to trauma from conception.)  If we cannot pursue nature’s intended courses of healing for even one of our childhood wounds, how do we carry on with hundreds if not thousands of them within us?

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Nature never planned for our species’ infants and children to be in danger without protection and adequate care.  Only under the most dire circumstances would offspring have been sacrificed.  The continuance of our species required that the most helpless tiny ones survive in the best condition possible.  And yet here we are at the most supposedly sophisticated period in our species’ evolution with harm being perpetrated in wars against offspring as if the little ones no longer matter as our species’ most prized hope for going forward into a better world.

Everything around us is busy and complicated.  Our multiple critical wounds are seldom if ever healed.  And then we are expected to live a ‘good life’ not only in spite of our wounds, but also as if the injuries never happened and the wounds do not exist.

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This again brings me back to healing.  Any wound has to go through a natural process of healing, often to the stage of creating permanent scar tissue at the end.  All healing requires our body’s immune system be involved.  I believe this includes the healing of our inner mental and emotional wounds as well.  On some level it is always some aspect of our physiological immune system’s negotiation on behalf of our increased well-being that accomplishes all of our healing.

I mention this today because last night I felt one of my many, many wounds close itself in healing.  I will never be able to forget how the wound originated in the first place, or how it has felt for these past 50 years to live with the wound open and unhealed.

This healing involves how I feel in relation to animals, especially to pets.  My healing came from a few simple words a trusted friend recently wrote to me about grieving the loss of both our human and our animal loved ones.  My friend was talking about her love and grief for a pet she lost years ago when she said to me, “Yes, pets are family and more.”

It was her last two words that healed me — “and more.”  Suddenly I understand that I can give myself permission to look into the eyes of not only my pets, but of all animals and SEE and FEEL and be connected with the life within them that is their SELF, and I can love them wholly – “and more.”

It feels like a channel of love and healing that has been blocked for the last 50 years has been opened so that the healing light and love that opened this channel can now flow through it unimpeded.  What I knew and felt when I was a little girl and my heart broke when my pet black rabbit, Peter, died has come back to me.

I have not asked my friend what her two simple words “and more” mean to her.  I needed to know what they mean to me.  It wasn’t the loss of Peter himself that most wounded me.  It was my reaction of dissociating myself from ever being able to feel again the loving connection I felt for that little animal.  Since that dark and rain soaked night he died, the part of myself that knows animals are not remote and distant objects that continue their own existence in a world separated from me has been missing.

My mother told me that night when Peter died that he was a bad rabbit who got what he deserved.  He was dead because that’s what is supposed to happen to all bad animals and bad children like me.  In the midst of the terrible depth of my grieving over the loss of my beloved pet through a violent death, she told me she wished I was dead just like Peter was because that is what I deserved.

The wound of this experience caused me to dissociate my ability to experience love, appreciation, and connection to and with animals (exception noted at the end of this post).  That part of me was removed from my existence until last night when I was in conversation with my sister about those two words, “and more” in relationship to animals in our lives.

Like my friend, my sister has never lost her ability to love animals, especially dogs.  I see this morning that the other side of this unhealed wound I have carried all these years has also prevented me from receiving the love that animals freely give to me.

I can understand today that the trusting innocence of who I was as a young child is reflected and mirrored back to me in the eyes of animals.  I have not been able to tolerate that kind of powerful experience with my own vulnerabilities for 50 years.  I have not been able to reclaim my own portion of passion regarding a deep love, valuing and sustaining friendship with animals until now.  Healing has touched that dissociated wound inside of me and – lo and behold – I can feel this fragmented piece of myself is back.

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I know every person alive has been wounded in some way at some time.  The healing of our wounds gives us an added dimension of awareness on an emotional and mental level about the better side of being alive.  Any healing that includes an improvement of connection between myself, myself and the living world I live in is especially significant for me.

Any healing gives me hope that more healing is possible.  Scar tissue might not be especially pretty to look at from the outside, but its presence means that a wound has healed, and I’m not sure there is anything I can experience that is better than that.  Yet at the same time that today I feel this wound has healed I can feel the blackness of overwhelming sadness that created this dissociational wound in the first place.

It helps me to know that I will not go backward in this healing process.  The sense of invading danger will leave me.  It will dissipate in the light of this new day.  (I will be extra tender to myself until this has happened as if I just went through surgery — because I did!)

Life can now pulse again for me where no pulse has been for 50 years.  I am different today as a result of this healing.  I know I am one step closer to being a more complete, integrated and whole ME because of it.  I have to practice being this bit-more-whole me now.  I feel different.  I see my animals around me differently.  They are back in the circle of my life and I am back in their world for the first time since before my black rabbit died.

I am reminded today that miracles of healing do happen – because they can.

This was a missing piece of myself I could recover, and that could be restored to me because it was one that was once an integral part of who I am.  I remembered my self before my rabbit died and my mother was so mean to me about his death.  I re-membered this part of myself so it can be joined with who I am today.  That’s exciting!

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NOTE:  Last summer when I visited my brother in Alaska I felt my love and connection with moose when one came to graze under my brother’s deck.  I was close enough to that glorious animal to have reached out and touched him if I had wanted to.  I realized then that my ability to love moose had never been removed from me.  Maybe having this August experience was a necessary step toward my healing so that I could again reclaim that same love and connection I felt as a child with all animals.  Now I also understand fully the “and more.”  It is my responsibility (ability to respond) to care for them at the same time that they take care of me.

1959 JUST homestead birthday - Copy
Holding that warm, fuzzy, whisker-wiggling little black rabbit, Peter, in my arms -- MY pet rabbit -- had made this sad little child happy.

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+DISSOCIATION AND THE TRAUMA-SPECIALIZED BRAIN

alchemynow4 Comments

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Because of my traumatic experiences with my mentally ill mother from birth, I did not form an ordinary brain.  My thought processes while writing this post reflect some of the difficulties I have always experienced because my brain formed differently.  Similar to the way an air flight might experience turbulence, I have turbulence in my thinking whenever I try to follow an ‘ordinary’ brain’s train of thought.

This does not mean that I am wrong or broken.  Yes, I was wounded, but the resiliency within me coupled with my determination to endure and survive allowed me in the end to become a very special sort of person.  I will just always think in my special way, and I will always struggle to bridge the chasm that can exist between the way my extra-ordinary brain works and the way ordinary-formed brains work in an ordinary world.

I will continue over time to process the secure and insecure attachment information as I try to understand what the experts know and match it in some way with what I know from within myself about, in particular, dissociation.

Here are my thoughts for today on the brain science concept of ‘coherence’.  I am not going to try to edit them or to give them any other organization or orientation than they had when they lined themselves up on this page as a result of my thinking process.

Yes, these thoughts feel turbulent to me.  That would not be my choice, but then I had no choice about how my brain-mind had to form itself in the beginning of my life.  Nor do I have much choice about how my brain-mind regards and processes information today.  This is what happens for me when I try to even begin to understand what forms the basis of a safe and secure organized attachment system.

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The advantage of my writing about the topic of secure-autonomous adult attachment is that I can take what ‘ordinary’ brained researchers say about the subject and translate it for myself though my ‘extra-ordinary’ brain.  I have the powerful advantage now of knowing absolutely that my childhood was just about as devoid and empty of secure attachment people as it could possibly have been.  I no longer even try to find out who exactly might have been there for me to give me what I needed to form secure attachments.  I know there was nobody.

Whatever attachment I had with my mother’s mother was contrived.  It was set up by my mother according to her rules so that it could fit within her reality, or should I say, fit her ‘dis-reality’ and ‘un-reality’.  My mother’s mind was nothing less than bizarre and distorted when it came to her thinking about me.  I can’t say it was ‘disorganized’ because her psychosis gave her the most rigid organization possible without possibility of rearrangement – ever.

When I read what the experts tell us about safe and secure infant-child attachment I have to stretch my thinking as far as I can manage in order to try to begin to understand on a deep and honest level within myself what it is these people are saying.  I am coming from the position of being raised in a world just about as far away from what researches consider ‘optimal’ early conditions as it might be possible.  Just as I do not believe those researchers can stretch their minds far enough to begin to comprehend my reality, I am not sure that I can stretch mine far enough to begin to understand theirs.

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Dr. Daniel J. Siegel makes this statement, “…the way adults can flexibly access information about childhood and reflect upon such information in a coherent manner determines their likelihood of raising securely attached children.”  (siegle/tdm/312)

Taking the meat of the nut out of its shell, I read this as if it is a directive not only about how to be an adequate parent, but also how to get along in the ‘ordinary’ world in an ‘ordinary’ way:  “flexibly access information about childhood and reflect upon such information in a coherent manner.”

But what does Siegel mean by ‘coherent’?  My guess he knows what it means because he has it.  Very few, if any people who lack his version of coherency in their brain-minds make it to the top levels of any professions – for all kinds of reasons I won’t go into at this moment.  I still want to know what this key to secure attachment means because from my own experiences, and in my world, coherency as Siegel describes it does not exist.

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Siegel states:  “Integration establishes a sense of congruity and unity of the mind as it emerges within the flexible patterns in the flow of information and energy processes of the brain, both within itself and in interaction with others.  This is coherence. “

Wow.  Those words are a mouthful.  I cannot comprehend what he is saying without applying an incredible amount of effort.  I will try to break this apart as I hunt for some meaning that I can make sense out of from inside MY version of an abuse-formed extra-ordinary brain-mind.

Integration

Sense of congruity

Unity of the mind

Well, right here I get lost because I cannot break apart the next group of words:  unity of mind as it emerges within the flexible patterns

But then it goes further:  mind as it emerges, not just any mind, but a unified mind – and this living unified mind emerges, but does not emerge in any old way, does not emerge in a disorganized, disoriented, inflexible-rigid way.  This ‘sense of congruity’ and this ‘unity of the mind’ emerges continually along with every breath of life.  This happens (or not) through flexible patterns that were built into the brain by – yup! – by our experiences with our early caregivers from birth.

When the mind has this sense of congruity, and has its unity, it can continually engage flexibly within all interactions a person has in life.  These flexible patterns are, according to Siegel, “in the flow of information and energy processes of the brain.”  Well, it should not surprise us that under varying degrees of reverse conditions this entire process suffers from some degree of break down, or deviation from what Siegel is not only describing as optimal, but also as what is supposed to be ordinary.

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I am rapidly finding out as I try to make sense of Siegel’s description of ‘coherence’ is that I cannot understand what he is saying because I have a brain built in the opposite way from what he is describing.

I see an image of me being dropped from an airplane from a mile up in the air with a parachute attached to me.  I land in a fresh, hot wad of bubble gum the size of an average Wal-Mart.  That’s how I feel trying to grasp what he is saying.

It is hard to imagine that this finely working brain Siegel is describing would have been built entirely by appropriate early infant-child interactions with safely and securely attachment autonomous early caregivers!  But that is exactly what he is saying.

And the problem here for me is that Siegel knows exactly what he is talking about and says what he means PERFECTLY in these few words in this single sentence – that I cannot possibly begin to understand!  Believe it or not!

So, I will write my version of a statement about what having a brain built by my disorganized and disoriented insecurely attached, unsafe psychotic borderline mother gave me!  I have the opposite of a ‘coherency’ built brain, so OK, here goes —

SIEGEL’S VERSION OF AN ORDINARY BRAIN’S OPERATION:  Integration establishes a sense of congruity and unity of the mind as it emerges within the flexible patterns in the flow of information and energy processes of the brain, both within itself and in interaction with others.  This is coherence.

MY VERSION OF AN EXTRA-ORDINARY TRAUMA FORMED BRAIN’S OPERATION:  Disintegration establishes a (non)sense incongruity and disunity of mind as it attempts to emerge within the inflexible (rigid, disorganized and disoriented) patterns in the (disorganized and disoriented, interrupted and often chaotic) flow of misinformation and disturbed energy processes of the brain, and all of these disturbances exist and are experienced both within this brain itself and in all its interactions with others.  This is incoherence.

BUT, I would have to add from my own experience, that this ‘incoherence’ is experienced as DISSOCIATION.

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OK, great.  How exactly are we supposed to get along in the ‘ordinary’ person’s world of coherence when our brains were built under opposite conditions so that we have changed brains that will NEVER work the same as these ‘ordinary’ brains do?  We cannot return to our early infant-child body-brain-mind developmental stages so that the foundation and formation of our brain can be done over again!  Never.  Never.  Never.

The first step to improving our chances for experiencing anything like well-being in the world is to begin to understand what these researchers know about ordinary brain development and combining it with what we know about our own early experiences and what happened to our forming brains as a consequence.  We need to learn how our brains process life with a different kind of logic.

Because my personal experiences happened to me under the care of a mad woman, I am nearly completely on the opposite end of the brain-formation spectrum that Siegel is describing.  BUT, I AM STILL HERE!  I might be completely stuck in a bubble gum mess trying to understand Siegel’s description of an ordinary, healthy brain-mind, but I can also at the same time understand that the way my brain formed, even though it is very different in many fundamental ways from the one Siegel describes, DOES WORK.  It kept me alive throughout my childhood and it keeps me alive today.

But, my brain IS DIFFERENT!  It is NOT BROKEN.  Now, to all reasonable description, my mother’s brain was broken.  The changes her growing and developing brain had to make did not allow her to possess even temporary or sporadic flexibility in her thinking.  I can think flexibly, but not in a continual, ongoing ‘mind emerging in the moment’ way.

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Dr. Temple Grandin, autistic author of many books and world renowned expert on communicating with animals, talks about how she sees the world in pictures.  I believe I feel the world in pictures and think about it in dissociated pieces, or ‘packets’ of information.  Access to and transition between these dissociated packets of information is not frequently either smooth or predictable.

I am most fortunate that depending on the day and on the topic, my brain can link some or many of these pieces together at one time or another.  But never will I have a continuous, feeling, integrated, coherent story to tell myself or anybody else about myself in the world.

Any version of a continuous story I might form will be contrived, artificial and primarily constructed by my ‘logical’ left brain that has learned some things about how others make sense of their lives – and therefore how I OUGHT to be able to do the same.  Some days I can do this better than others by consciously pretending that I know all the experiences that happened to this BODY that Linda is attached to belong to the thinking, feeling, remembering person that Linda is supposed to be.

Yet the Linda that I MOST am feels like a bird might that soared over some particular piece of geography ten years ago, or 30 years ago, or 2 days ago without picking up the actual place and carrying it along.  I pass through ‘things’, pass by them, pass over them – or they pass through me.  But I feel very transparent, like the true form of who I am has never become embodied in my life in this world.  I absolutely and fundamentally do not process myself in  ‘time and space’ experience in ordinary ways.

Thanks to my mother, my body-brain-mind-self didn’t grown ‘down into the world’ as Dr. James Hillman calls it.  Whatever pieces of me made it into myself in my body in my life in this world are not completely integrated in the ordinary brain that Dr. Siegel has described.

I actually do not believe that neuroscientists or infant-child brain development specialists have ANY IDEA how big a deal dissociation can be!  I don’t think they can understand this kind of a reality any more than I can understand theirs.  I suffer today from a similar problem I had with my mother in the beginning.  There is nobody around to help me make sense of a sensible world, so I have to figure it all out by myself.

There is no retreat, no seminar, no self-help book, no religious text, no university class, no philosophical approach, no kind of meditative practice, no psychological theory that will ever ACTUALLY be able to help me understand how my changed brain operates in this world.  I was forced to grow a specialized brain, a very well-adapted-to-ongoing-trauma body-brain-mind.  I can take what developmental neuroscientists say about how things work when early brain formation experiences go RIGHT and try to translate that information into what happens when early brain formation experiences go terribly WRONG.

I am somewhat of an expert about that field of study!  In a more perfect world, or in a more advanced one (silly thought because in THAT world the kind of abuse that changes an infant-child’s developing brain would not be happening) I would be able to easily access information that would tell me how ordinary brains work, how extra-ordinary brains work, and how I can better experience well-being BECAUSE of how special my brain-mind is.  Well, evidently in THIS world, I will try until my dying breath to figure this out for myself.

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In this post I am trying to comprehend and make use of the information contained here:  *Attachment Simplified – Secure Attachment (Organized)

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+ANSWERS THAT ARE NOT A PHONE CALL AWAY

alchemynow2 Comments

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I woke this morning with too many thoughts, each one appearing in a rush, demanding my attention, shooting through my mind in its own direction, not connected to the next thought that flashes into my inner sight.  I can’t follow them all.  Each one is chased away by the next one.  I cannot see their beginning, their intention, or their ending.

I am bombarded by thoughts as if there is a fireworks show going on within me, without being orchestrated, and it frightens me.

After my strange and stressful day yesterday, I picked up my mail at the post office on my way home.  Our mail does not get delivered to our houses in this little town.  My bank statement was there, which would have been the correct proof of my disability income that I needed yesterday in my hunt for winter utility bill assistance.  The substitute printout confirming my income from the food stamp office was not what those people wanted.

Along with the bank statement there was a letter from the social security office telling me I am to receive a ‘special one-time payment of $775 in December 2009’, and that this amount will disqualify me from receiving any disability – and the letter stopped there – “Forever?” I want to know.  “What does this mean?  What’s going on here?”

There were pages and pages to this form letter of gobbelty-goop I do not understand.  Do humans actually write these words of confusion?  I fight shock and panic as I wonder if my sole source of income is about to vanish forever.  There are telephone numbers to call, and I anticipate long waits, leaving messages without return calls, bizarre conversations with mechanical telephone voices as I try to find the answers I need.

Meanwhile my body and mind are in distress overload mode.  So I sit outside in my fleece, writing in the dappled morning sunshine as the leaves still on the trees shake and shiver in a gentle breeze.  They make a higher pitched sound now as they brittle and age with frost at night.

I scribble words in lines across these pages because it helps me to see them here.  I can focus on them one by one so the noise of cascading of thoughts and emotions within me can dim.  I organize and orient myself in this moment as I feel the paper held against my knee and watch this pen, gripped between my fingers, glide along these neat straight lines like parallel rails into the future.  I am comforted.

I sit here with my cell phone waiting for the closest SSI office to open.  Will I end up consuming all my free day minutes and get no answer at all?  I will myself not to follow my thoughts up into the air or down, down, sucked down where there is no air at all.  All I have to do is wait and try not to panic.

I do not want to think about the grief, guilt, anger and sadness churning within me because I am no longer able to feel competent, tough and strong like I managed to be while my children were growing up under my care.  I was more like a Sherman tank then, forging always forward.  Now I am dependent for all of my living needs on forces I cannot see, comprehend, control or change.  Will this ever change?

I do not want to follow all the thoughts and feelings within me about the over crowding of our planet or about the diminishment and mismanagement of its resources.  I don’t want to think about the growing masses of people, so many of them suffering and terrified.  I do not want to think about the nearly 20% unemployment rate some estimate for our nation.  I do not want to think about the money that is not being spent to help those in need, about the jobs that have vanished because of technology, foreign placement of industry, and the out-going channels of money that once belonged within the boundaries of our own country.

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My call to SSI the moment they opened their doors put me on the other end of the line with a real person.  I am grateful and amazed.  I am told it will all be OK, that an adjustment is being made to my case because of past earnings I had that weren’t in their system when my benefits were first figured, but are there now.  I am told that I won’t have medical coverage for the month of December, but by January my income should be reestablished as ongoing, and I will not have a medical review of my disability until 2015.

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Now I will process a de-escalation of my – fortunately temporary – distressed escalation caused by my concerns about my basic well-being in the world.  With the current economic crisis the numbers of people applying for disability has escalated drastically.  I know I am fortunate my cancer and resulting descent into internal fragmentation happened before the woes of this economic downturn hit our nation so hard.

I also think about how throwing crumbs to starving people can create gratitude in them, while the conditions that created the starvation in the first place have not been considered.  How about the others who remain content to gorge themselves on excesses of plenty?  Are the cracks Americans can fall through getting wider now?  Are people that have barely managed to be OK thus far, many of them from less-than-perfect childhoods, now creating a landslide of suffering people falling through those cracks that none of us can seem to get fat enough to be safe from?

I cannot begin to understand how I would be now in the world if the 18 years of severe child abuse I endured had not been allowed to happen.  I cannot easily disentangle the consequences of that abuse as it has impacted me all of my life from how it is impacting me now.  I was fortunate to make it through my mothering years without this degree of disintegration of my coping abilities hitting me like it has now.  I was able to keep moving forward before the armored tank of myself disintegrated and vanished.

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Perhaps I will always struggle between guilt and gratitude that I am receiving help to stay alive and in a home with food to eat.  On many levels I believe that when my cancer hit me it was my time to leave here.  For whatever reasons, I chose to fight it and others chose to help me with my battle.

Yet at the same time I know there are millions of people of all ages suffering who do not have access to what they need.  Am I accountable and responsible for this fact?  Is it like the co-dependency theorists suggest, I didn’t cause this problem, I cannot cure or control it?  What happens in this world that disables so many of its inhabitants from having the basics of safety and security that would alleviate so much of their sufferings?

Will it only be when those higher up on the food chain begin to grow skinny — because the rest of us down here below them can no longer consume enough to give them money to grow fatter on — that they will perhaps only then turn around and suddenly, finally sprout wings of compassion and generosity toward the rest of their kind?

How do we define poverty and disability, anyway?  Who am I to be taken care of when so many others are not?  Is there any way that I, even with my own disabilities, can find some way to be part of a solution?  How can I work each moment of my life to stabilize my body-brain-mind and emotions?  How do any of us — and all of us — turn tragedy into triumph?

Who cares enough to make sure this process ever happens?  How and where do we begin?  I know I won’t find answers to all these questions in my speed dial.  I don’t even know how to use it.

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I just received this from a dear friend in an email about:

A Personal Message from Mary Robinson Reynolds, M.S.

Do you feel like somehow, inadvertently you made a vow of poverty
because of some pivotal, if not painful, moment in your life?  Did you
make a deal with God that you thought you had to make, to keep
something bad from happening?

I remember when I did.  After my first full-term baby boy died during
labor, I was devastated.  A year later during my second pregnancy, I
had five early labor scares that landed me in the hospital for bed
rest.  I remember promising God that I would never again ask for
anything more important than having this child in my life alive and
well …ever again!  This, I would discover, had been my vow of
poverty:   I promise not to ever ask for anything ever again …
including money!

From that point forward, I would fight myself over every single need,
want and desire I had, until I began to expand my knowledge about God
and about the wealth of all good things available to me…..

SEE MORE AT:
www.MakeADifference.com/MasterMinding

www.GodWantsYouToBeRichMovie.com

www.GodWantsYoutobeRichmovie.com/FlashBook.html

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+I’M HAVING AN IRRITABLE DAY! AND SOME BPD INFO….

alchemynow2 Comments

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If I were going to anything today, I would apologize — because I am the most irritable and irritated that I can remember being.  Between the 3 hour wait with ‘the group of poor people’ last week (part of the hoop-jumping process as all they did was tell us to come back a week later and wait again), and the 5 hour wait today — outside, fortunately in beautiful weather — waiting for some winter help with fuel assistance.

When it was my turn to go inside, finally, I was told they ran out of money for the program over an hour earlier only nobody bothered to poke their head out the door and tell those of us out there still waiting — well, I am more than a bit crabby!

I didn’t realize I could GET this crabby.  It turns out there was money for anyone with an overdue utility bill through a completely different program than the one I thought I was jumping through all the hoops to participate in.  Fortunately I did have a $20 light bill that was due last Friday, so I SHOULD feel grateful that one got paid.  They told us we can come back in early December, although they don’t know exactly when yet, and go through the double-wait all over again.

But at the moment I am so irritated and irritable I can only be grateful I can return home where there is nobody to bother — and work to calm myself down.

Now at 58 it seems I have an entire lifetime of irritable-crabby that has been sitting here inside me all these years!  I know intellectually that irritability is tied to ‘depression’ and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but I think this is just another one of those emotional-dysregulated-right-brain experiences that today has taken over my body!

This is a part of my disability, but fortunately my contact with others can be very limited right now.  This was way too much stimulation for one day!  I am very much reminded of what the child diagnosis of Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) can feel like as an adult.  Where do the professionals think RAD vanishes to once our body gets bigger?  There are just some times I can no longer find the ‘nice Linda’, today — right now — being one of those times.

I mean, even the song of the Mexican ice cream truck running down the street behind my house on the other side of the Border Wall is jangling my nerves!

If I had a horse, I’d go riding.  But then if I could afford a horse, I wouldn’t be standing in line to try to get help paying my utility bills this winter.  Just more of the same:  History of Childhood Maltreatment Linked to Higher Rates of Poverty

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THIS FROM:

Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog
Child Abuse Prevention Programs at Risk: Call Your Legislators Today!Posted: 09 Nov 2009 09:53 AM PST

Special Session of the Legislature Tomorrow: Home Visitation, Trust Fund, Child Advocacy Centers, Kinship Care at Risk

Call Your State Legislators Today!

Governor David Paterson has called for a special session of the New York State Legislature to commence tomorrow, November 10th, to address the growing state deficit. While we are not certain what will take place during the special session, we know that the Governor’s proposed Deficit Reduction Plan is the wrong choice for children and families and the wrong choice for New York’s economy.

The Deficit Reduction Plan will cost New York millions in federal funding for home visitation and Community-based Child Abuse Prevention dollars, in addition to the short and long-term cost of maltreatment to our social welfare, law enforcement, education, and healthcare systems.

A champion for New York’s children is Senator John Sampson, who has committed his vote against the Governor’s Deficit Reduction Plan. Today, we ask all advocates to:

  • Call Senator Sampson at 518-455-2788 and thank him for making the right choice for kids and protecting New York’s economy.
  • Call your local Senator and Assemblymember and encourage them to follow Senator Sampson’s lead and vote against any reduction in necessary services for children and families. The script can be as simple as follows: “Hello, my name is _____ and I’m a constituent of Senator/Assemblymember _____ and I’d like to ask my legislator to vote against any cuts to services for children and families.”

If you don’t know who your elected representatives are, you can simply call the New York State Legislative Switchboards at: 518-455-2800 (Senate) and 518-455-4100 (Assembly), or look them up online.

Remember when calling to be polite, leave your name, address, and phone number, and follow up your call by encouraging another friend or colleague to make one of their own.

Read Prevent Child Abuse New York’s testimony against the Governor’s DRP (PDF).

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So, I am not going to write today.  There isn’t one single productive thing I can think of to say!!  Just to offer the following information — in memory of my mean Borderline mother.

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Borderline Personality Disorder

In the Spotlight   |  More Topics   |

from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD

BPD isn’t just about how you feel emotionally. It can affect everything in your life, from your job to your friendships to how you feel physically. Knowing what to expect can help you prepare for what may be to come.

In the Spotlight

What is Life with BPD Like?
Living with borderline personality disorder is not easy. Intense emotional pain, and feelings of emptiness, desperation, anger, hopelessness, and loneliness are common. These symptoms can affect every part of your life. However, despite the suffering that borderline personality disorder (BPD) can cause, many people learn ways to cope with the symptoms and lead normal, fulfilling lives.

BPD and Your Physical Health
BPD does not only have an impact on your mental health. People with BPD are more likely to report a variety of physical health problems, and are more likely to need to be hospitalized for medical reasons, than those without BPD.

BPD and Your Relationships
Many of the symptoms of BPD can have direct impact on relationships, and other symptoms have an indirect (but not necessarily less disruptive) influence.

More Topics