Tag: triggers

+’SHAKE IT UP BABY!’ — MOVEMENT MATTERS

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Yesterday I spent all of the generously given birthday money I received on drip-soaker irrigation supplies.  It just struck me as I decided to write a post that my thoughts FEEL about how that collection of pieces, parts, hoses and tubes looks like in their pile on my kitchen floor:  JUMBLED.

Then I thought, “Well, if one of the key indicators of a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern-disorder is ‘incoherency’ in the narrating (and living) of one’s life, then figuring out how to put together a complicated working irrigation system for my back, side and front yard is actually a similar process to organizing BOTH jumbles — the one on my kitchen floor and the one inside of me.”

OK.  Then, “If it isn’t necessary to put together my irrigation system in a simple straight LINEAR way then it isn’t necessary to put my thoughts together in a linear straight way to make them organized, oriented and coherent, either.”

I will certainly admit that putting that watering system together so that it actually WORKS within the limitations I have both financially and expertise-wise, is intimidating.  Both involve a learning curve, and if I want to get both jobs accomplished, I have to start at one single place:  THE BEGINNING.

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Regarding my jumble of thoughts, I will go back and pick up a little piece of information I found on a website early in the week when my daughter and I were discussing (via email), “How important is it for an infant to crawl before it walks, and how is crawling related to the ability to read?”

From the Minnesota Learning Resource Center I found an article titled, Movement and Brain Development which states:

“Fascinating research informs us that the baby’s brain develops through natural movements of nursing, tummy time, rolling, creeping and crawling. Baby’s most complex senses, vision and hearing, are also organized by doing the same movements.

Developmental movements organize and structure the brain for cognition, attention asset (vs. attention deficit) and emotional regulation, the ability to modulate between calm and excited states. The earliest learning takes place through movement explorations. Baby’s natural movements also provide a baseline of core strength and good coordination.”

(Bold type is mine)

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I had never until the moment my eyes scanned these words heard the term ATTENTION ASSET.  “Well how cool is that?”  I thought to myself.  “Like in so many cases, what we tend to hear about is the negative side of things.”  That’s what I have finally come to understand about all the public hoopla around ‘the stress response’.  We are not likely to hear about the other part of the WHOLE that makes up our body-brain-nervous system responses to life — THE CALM AND CONNECTION SYSTEM which is exactly part of the SAME response system.

In the same way we are likely to hear of ‘attention deficit’ without hearing at the same time about ‘attention asset’.

So, I appreciated LEARNING something new just from these few simple words.  At the same time I know that ALL learning IS MOVEMENT — and also that because I have some particular prior learning, I also understand that the interactions an infant has with its earliest caregivers ALSO are also exactly building these same abilities in the infant body-brain at the same time!

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But what I am particularly thinking about right now is about how MOVEMENT is essential throughout our entire lifespan so that we can both continue to live as we continue to GROW.  We make no significant, meaningful progress on ANYTHING (even staying alive) without movement taking place.

All the so-called ‘anxiety spectrum’ disorders that pile up inside our body-brain due to our having had to grow and develop our body-brain in the first place in horrendously inadequate, traumatic, abusive, malevolent infant-childhoods ALL involve some complication with our attention.  As our body responds continually to our environment, we are often left with a disorganized-disoriented (dissociated) condition that saps our life force and deprives us of the ability to focus our conscious, self-directed desires and will power into the channels that would allow what REALLY MATTERS MOST TO US to manifest in our lives.

I am thinking not only about dissociation, but also about ‘depression’ and ‘posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)’.  If I don’t build my irrigation system exactly right, water is going to leak and spill, overflow itself in its hoses and in its tubes in the wrong direction, overwater, underwater, and basically NOT end up where I want it where it is needed.

That’s very similar to how my thoughts and my energies (ALL of them) end up much of the time if I am not very careful to take care of the JUMBLE inside of me.  The ability to focus ATTENTION and to be resiliently flexible and responsive to our inner and outer environment has been DISRUPTED through the horrific experiences in our infant-childhood that we survived.

As a consequence, I believe we survivors have to build our conscious awareness and power of directed CHOICE every moment we are alive.  We cannot take for granted that either DECISION or CHOICE comes easily to us.  All severe trauma has the power to change our body, and if the stress response end becomes overtaxed — and hence takes over the utilization of our energy and life force on the AUTOMATIC AND UNCONSCIOUS LEVEL, we will have (pardon me) a HELL of a job (if not a battle) getting control of our own energy and life force back again — for our SELF.

The ONLY way I see to improve our well-being and the overall quality of our (survivorship) life is by finding as many ways as possible to NOTICE both what is happening in us that DOES NOT HAVE OUR CONSCIOUS ATTENTION (attention deficit) and to what DOES HAVE OUR CONSCIOUS ATTENTION (attention asset).

If I simply turn on my outside water spigots and let them run, the water will go wherever it wants to because I have not both paid attention to how the water is directed AND found ways to make it go where I want it to according to my conscious CHOICE and intentions.  This jumble of $147 worth of irrigation ‘stuff’ piled in my kitchen has no use or purpose whatsoever until I make the movements — ALL of them — that are required to make something out of them according to my wishes and my intention.

On a personal level, I have to ask myself, “What is your investment, Linda, in directing the flow of your own life today?”  In the same way that I have invested all of my birthday gift money in my hopes for a finished and working irrigation system, I need to FIND, KNOW, VALUE, and INVEST in my hopes for myself in my life regarding every part of it-me that I can wrestle away from my body’s automatic pilot that my trauma-built body-brain runs on — naturally.

Sure, my body has hopes, plans and ways to keep itself alive — but, “Wait a dang minute here?  Where is MY choice in all of this living?  What do I want, need, desire, hope for?”

Staying alive isn’t enough.  Building my irrigation system right isn’t enough to promise me a beautiful yard.  I need the plants.  I need to amend the soil, pull the weeds, chose the right plants, feed them, give them enough water for their needs, make sure they have the right amount of sunshine.

And — I need to enjoy them!

I am making all this yard-related effort and movement for simply THAT reason — it is a part of who I am since my earliest memories that I love flowers.  Along the way I figured out that growing food is also a good thing.  What I love CAN have a ‘lionesses’ share’ of my attention.  No matter how great this struggle, the more I learn how to organize and orient myself according to what my passions can make clear to me, the more I can direct the flow and consequence of my own energy and life force — at the same time I diminish how ‘anxiety’ rules my life.

The physical exercise that gardening (and my addition of adobe into the landscaping) gives to me benefits me in exactly the same way the author referenced above says about little tiny growing babies.  We NEVER leave behind the need to MOVE.  (Contrasted to being miserably STUCK anywhere along our life’s journey!)

And if I can’t get outside due to weather to do what I want to, I can jog, I can dance — I can do SOMETHING.  And I have to because physical movement of the body is absolutely necessary to human well-being.  I am convinced of that fact.  Movement helps cure the ‘jumbles’ — so off I go with my attention focused on my intention to make SOMETHING GOOD happen in my life today!

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+HEALING THE TINIEST DOLL AT THE CENTER

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

All these little dolls fit inside one another

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

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

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

TRAUMA DRAMA = the outside Big Doll

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

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

Inside the doll of a SECRET = another doll  = PAIN

Inside the doll of PAIN = another doll = a WOUND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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+’FREE OF ALL ARCHETYPES’ = ‘DISSOCIATION WITHOUT HAVING AN IDENTITY’

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I have not escaped thinking about some information I posted yesterday in two different posts.  Some of that information was about Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and some was about the human psychological archetypes.  I need to take a minute and tie these two batches of information together from my perspective as a survivor of terrible and long-term infant-child abuse.

Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD says about BPD that ‘splitting’ is ‘very common’ among people with this disorder.   She is talking about my mother.

“Splitting is very common in people with borderline personality disorder (BPD), and it leads people with BPD to view others and themselves in “all or nothing” terms. For example, a person with BPD may view one family member as always “good” and another as always “bad.” Or, a person with BPD may see themselves as “good” one minute, but shift to seeing themselves as all “bad” or even evil the next.”

When Joshua David Stone writes in his book, Soul Psychology: How to Clear Negative Emotions and Spiritualize Your Life that

“The true self-realized being uses this archetype as its main theme but is not identified with it; such a self-realized being lives in a state of consciousness as the Fair Witness or Observer, free of all archetypes.” (page 263)

he is writing about me.

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While the psychologist Carl Jung’s writing about human psychological archetypes is far too complex to describe in this post, it is enough to know that seldom does any human being escape the operation of one or more of these archetypal psychological patterns from operating in their ‘psyche’ at any given moment.

Around the time of our birth is one of ‘those times’ when archetypes are NOT playing their roles across the dramatic expression of our life.  Obviously, we have to grow a body-brain before we can DO much of anything.  It is during the earliest months and years of our lifetime that we grow and develop the physiological circuitry and pathways in our body-brain that we will use to express our self for the rest of our lifetime.

When Stone talks about this Fair Witness-Observer NON-archetype he is describing a state that I believe we are born into.  From that point we develop our body-brain that will eventually be able to express a self along with all the complexities of life that a self is capable of.

Yet, when severe abuse like my mother did to me happens – exactly BECAUSE she had SPLITTING so entrenched within her own physiological body-brain-mind-self – I as her victim did NOT get to develop my own body-brain-mind-self as I would have done had I not been forced to grow up within such an unbelievably toxic environment.

We have all seen film footage from one story or another where someone breaks through a brick wall and finds within it human bones.  Dead or alive?  Yet I KNOW because I have psychologically been there that growing up with a BPD parent who has no choice but to SPLIT their entire world into insane patterns related to GOOD versus BAD results in our own psychology being sealed behind a massive brick wall.

Brick by insane brick my mother severed my own connection with myself in interaction with the world every step throughout my infant-childhood.  As a result I DID NOT get to move off of my born-into condition of being at dead center without any psychological archetypes of my own!  I stayed, as I described yesterday, in that place-of-psychological-origin:  Being an Observer-Fair Witness which by definition MEANS there are no archetypes present.

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The Wickipedia entry for Carl Jung and archetypes lists the following:

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Jung outlined five main archetypes;

  • The Self, the regulating center of the psyche and facilitator of individuation
  • The Shadow, the opposite of the ego image, often containing qualities that the ego does not identify with but possesses nonetheless
  • The Anima, the feminine image in a man’s psyche; or:
  • The Animus, the masculine image in a woman’s psyche
  • The Persona, how we present to the world, usually protects the Ego from negative images (acts like a mask)

Although the number of archetypes is limitless, there are a few particularly notable, recurring archetypal images:

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Yes, there ARE more, and the exist within the human psychological realm like constellations of stars in the sky.  They ‘come into being’ when certain human patterns of  feeling, thought and action repeat themselves TOGETHER within a psychological constellation that is recognizable enough to be named.

OR – they do not.

I bring this up today in part because I had a very bad sleepless night last night.  I could not name exactly what triggered my ‘state of being’ THE ONE WHO CRIES AND DOES NOT SLEEP.  Yet I also know that what was triggered resulted in me tumbling into this one of my ‘nameless identities’ that is part of what is called my Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).

Because my mother had such control over me and my life, I was not allowed to develop ANY identity during the first years of my life.  The physiological circuitry and pathways did not develop within me that would have allowed even ONE solitary LINDA to come forth.  I was always, consistently and overwhelmingly the CONTAINER for my mother’s BAD split-off self.

The first step as I understand it that a human being takes from birth to becoming a self with identity is to have its FEELING states recognized by its caregivers and mirrored back to it.  These early interactions BUILD the circuitry and pathways within the body-brain that allow a fully developed psychologically whole human to develop so that the human archetypal patterns of existence can go out into the world, interact, and form an individual’s life.

When that doesn’t happen, like in my case, something ELSE happens instead – and that something else has at its core the same non-archetype Fair Witness-Observer state that we are born with.  I believe that if ‘experts’ took a good, long look the roots of Dissociative Identity Disorder this alternative pattern of ‘being a person’ would become clear.

How this infant-child abuse pattern leads to DID for people who ACTUALLY have separate, definable identities operating is well beyond me to understand.  That is NOT my condition.  I simply dissolve into a non-identity state that is primarily unnameable EMOTION like I did last night without any clear and definable identity to process it.

My part in the ‘mess’ is to find ways as soon as I can to ‘pull myself out of it’.  Much of the abuse and horror of my childhood happened at night (and this is especially true because during the years we lived in Alaska ‘nighttime’ itself has a different meaning because of the extremes in daylight hour shifts).  But also because my mother’s insane splitting-related abuse of me happened from the time I was born, when laying down was ALL I could do – the laying down trigger is perhaps the most ancient one I suffer from when something happens that causes me to ‘dissolve-dissociate-disorganize-disorient’.

(This state is also tied for me to the thousands upon thousands of hours of being made to lay in my bed, alone, immobilized and unable to escape or to ‘do’ anything throughout my entire childhood — but suffer and usually — not sleep.)

This is all I want to say about this today.  It is not laying down time now, and there are things now that I need to do now in the daylight.

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+GETTING CLEAR ABOUT A DIFFICULT DECISION REGARDING MY WORDS

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If there is one thing that I suspect everyone with the so-called diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is familiar with, it’s the inner sound of what I call ‘the clamoring within’.  What does the word CLAMOR teach me this morning as I contemplate a writing offer that has been given to me – an offer whose aftershocks set off the noisiest inner clamor that I have experienced consciously in my lifetime?

CLAMOR

Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French clamour, from Latin clamor, from clamare to cry out — more at claim

Date: 14th century

1 a : noisy shouting b : a loud continuous noise
2 : insistent public expression (as of support or protest)

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The ‘public’ nature of this clamor I am experiencing happens because ‘all involved’ in the act of clamoring are making themselves present to me, and therefore conscious.  The ‘public’ IS my conscious awareness.

At age 58, I suffer from no delusion that the multiple voices clamoring within are ever going to so-called ‘integrate’, nor do I even desire that.  Every one of the perspectives I contain as grown-up Linda – the noisy and the silent ones – have a right to exist BECAUSE THEY EXIST.  I do not wish to extinguish them.  I do not wish to disrespect any of them.  I do not wish to bulldoze my way on down the road of my life without listening to and honoring what they know and what they have to say – if I pause long enough to listen.

If I give as many of these inner perspective-takers an equal voice and an equal voice in affairs of my life that matter to them, I already know the answer to a question that has been posed to me.  Without disclosing information that I have been asked to keep confidential regarding the ‘offering agency’, I – on my own – after taking a vote among those perspective-takers within me already have my answer.

The answer to the question as it has been posed to me in the present and as it may very likely be posed to me in the future is simply – “NO!”

I will not give any rights away to my words.  Not to anyone outside of The Lloyd Family, and not even to any single member of The Lloyd Family.  Everything that ever happens with my words belongs within an intimate construct that operates through consensus taking.

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The fantastic ‘thought factory’ of my body, my right brain and my left brain has fed me accurate information about my own inner truth about the reality of my word ownership.

Some clear images have appeared to me this morning from my body-right brain information channels.  The first one comes from the memory of a skinny, beaten and abused, lost and alone little girl of about nine years old.  She is gazing toward the edges of the highest mountain tops define where earth meets the deep blue Alaskan late summer sky.

This little girl, this me-memory person, stands frozen in time and space, listening to the approaching yet still-distant call of hundreds of Canadian geese heading on migration south.  There is no anticipation that I can think of that matches the wordless awe of this waiting.

And there they come!  High, high, high above her comes the very first goose sailing along at the front of this “V” over the dividing line of mountain and sky.  Behind this goose come the two separate wings and the air is filled with the wild goose fall song.

I didn’t know, of course, as a child that the head goose is the strongest and flies to cut the wind for the rest of its flock both to its right and to its left.  When the lead goose tires, it falls all the way back in the line and flies without effort at the final back tips of the “V.”  On up moves the next strongest goose – which is, by the time the other strongest goose tires, is now THE strongest goose.

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In this offer that I was just given, I can see the seeds of a reality as they appeared to me in another image:  The roots of trauma and abuse that are my experience from the time of my laboring with my mother to come into this world, are directly tied to the stout trunk of the tree that is me complete with strong, wide-spreading branches that feed ever-growing twigs.  This tree-of-me is approaching full leaf now, and the manifestations of its hard-worked for health (such as I have been able to accomplish degrees of it) take form in the ‘public world’ IN MY WORDS.

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The next image that came to me this morning is a Sacred one, and I do not write the following words with any disrespect.  What I understand about the Lakota and Dakota women’s participation in the Sacred Sundance is that they peel pieces of their skin from their arms and offer them with prayer in support of their men who are dancing.  The women’s sacrifice adds to the sacrifice of the men, and helps to make both the men and their prayers for help and healing stronger and more powerful.

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The clamoring voices of the perspective-takers within me have let me know that the words that I write, the final messages contained in these pieces of who Linda is, do not belong to any ‘big’ or ‘old’ or ‘single’ or ‘adult’ Linda.  They are part of a whole and they cannot be owned by anyone – not even the Linda that supposedly writes them.

I seriously doubt that any public agency representative or any other version of an outside publisher, is going to understand that the whole of who Linda is owns my/her words collectively.  That my story, in the end, is a strong one that can take a place with the lead geese of great migrating flocks of trauma-healing people, does not mean that it exists as an object, or as a thing that can be bought, sold, bartered or owned in any ordinary way.

My words do, however, BELONG somewhere.  I was deprived of my words for myself in my life (and their accompanying thoughts) throughout the 18-years of my torturous abusive childhood.  As these words are now being born, as my words open their wings and flap their way like butterflies out into the cosmos beyond my computer’s keyboard, they simply become what they are:  A part of Linda and her family’s living story.  These butterflies are sacred and do not wish to be captured in any way at any time along their pathway into existence by anyone else for profit.

My words are, therefore, not actually mine.  There is no single all-knowing, all-powerful Linda person who can ultimately determine the fate of my words.  They belong with and to an entity that does not LEGALLY exist yet – but I am becoming quite clear that the legal entity of The Lloyd Family Publishing Trust needs to be formed in THIS material world before any of my words leave my Stop-the-Storm blog.

How that is going to happen, where, who is going to help me with this next step is at present unknown.

There.  That being decided and said the clamoring settles.  If anyone wishes to publish anything I write in any format they will need to have my permission to do so from The Lloyd Family Publishing Trust – CERTAINLY it cannot happen the other way around, no matter how well-intentioned or enticing any outside publishing offer might be.

I am free to leave this keyboard and go outside to continue making something out of earth-mud.

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

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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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+LINK TO A WHOPPER OF A TALE ABOUT TELLING OUR TALE

alchemynow3 Comments

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I didn’t create the hell of my childhood.  I didn’t create the changes that hell forced upon my growing and developing body-brain.  I might like what happened to me.  Others might not like to hear about it.  But this IS my story – And I’m Sticking To It.  (Play song from Lala.com)

Here is a link for the brave among you readers who have a vested interest in thinking about your own life in terms of the narrative life story you TELL and the one you COULD TELL.  Because the inability to tell (narrate) a coherent life story is considered to be the NUMBER ONE symptom of an insecure attachment (which any of us with severe early abuse in our lives are EXTREMELY likely to have), thinking about the telling of our story has a critically important purpose:

Healing our self will heal the telling of our story (making it more coherent), and improving the coherency of the telling of our life story helps heal us!  (Think infinity sign)

There are a LOT of words at the other end of this link!  But what is telling a life story about if it’s not about WORDS?

The topic is personally important to me because I am stuck with a Catch-22 in that I want to make a book from my experience.  A book is SUPPOSED to be coherent, yet my #1 symptom of having a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern due to early and long term severe infant-childhood abuse took away my ability to tell a coherent life story in the first place!  (That’s sort of a broken infinity sign situation!)

So, in working to put my book(s) together I am thinking about words related to this whole process.  How it all got broken and how this might all be repaired is part of what I write about at this link.  Feel free to scan rather than read it, but perhaps there is something in here that you might find of interest:

*THE MEANING OF MENDING OUR LIFE STORY

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+THINKING MORE THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING

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OK, there’s a cloud cover outside today (well, obviously OUTSIDE!), and it’s a perfect temperature for me to be out there making adobe blocks.  I set the 22 I made yesterday on their edges so they can continue to dry evenly.  But I am distracted from mud work because I am very busy still thinking about thinking.

The small section of Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle I read this morning led to another suggested pause, so I am being an obedient reader and now I’m processing what Tolle said while on vacation, or recess.  His suggestion is to try to get to a ‘place’ where we can watch our self that is doing all this THINKING.  I guess this watching self is one step closer to the FREE self who is the BIG self.  This BIG self (as I see it) is somehow itself closer to an ‘enlightened one’.

I’m game.  I’m usually game for learning something new, and something that might be helpful to increasing my internal state of well-being.  But all this thinking about thinking, and the ‘one’ that is doing the thinking and the ‘one’ that watches the ‘one’ doing all the thinking – well, believe it or not, it’s all rather confusing!

So, if I can’t yet pull up anchor on this thinking business, or yet cut the chain that ties me down to all this thinking, or cut the proverbial apron string to my own ‘mind’, or free the inner kite that might be a different sort of ME, I might as well write something.

Writing presents a different kind of thinking for me.  It always seems to be a bit more orderly process, putting all these single letters into words as they string themselves into nice left-brain sentences.  As I write I know that at least on some sort of level my left and my right brain are at the moment in cooperation with one another.

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I continue to tell myself repeatedly that I didn’t think during the first 18 years of my life about myself in any personal way – that I didn’t know I even WAS a self or HAD a self.  In a moment I will include here something from Dr. Daniel Siegel’s book, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2001), about ‘self’ (see link below).  But first I want to say something about memories of my thinking self.

I was given a very nice gold-colored very feminine watch by my grandmother on my 14th birthday.  I loved my grandmother.  I loved the watch.  I loved that she loved me enough to give me a watch.  I loved wearing the watch.  NOW I can say that I loved how wearing the watch made me feel about myself, only I didn’t know THEN that I had a self.  But as I think about thinking I think about this:

I walked to and from high school that winter of my 9th grade year.  The family (minus my father) spent the year in Tucson, an exotic place for a girl from Alaska.  I consciously made the effort every morning and every afternoon during my walk to switch all my school books I was carrying to holding them in my right arm so that I could swing my left arm with my watch on my wrist freely every time I came to a place I had to cross a street.

I remember my thinking:  “Everyone sitting there in their car waiting for me to cross this street notices my beautiful watch.  They will think, “Look at that beautiful watch.  What a special and wonderful girl that is to be wearing such a beautiful watch.””

Looking back I can see that the Theory of Mind I had about the world was – well, ridiculous for a girl of 14.  As a severely abused child, I had been given no experience in forming a Theory of Mind that would have allowed me to grow into a world with other people in it in such a way that I could conceive anything about how their minds worked.  Neither did I have a Theory of Mind that appropriately or adequately let me understand the workings of my own mind.

There is no possible way that even one single person of all those I walked in front of my 9th grade year ever noticed my watch, let alone THOUGHT what I THOUGHT they were THINKING.

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This leads me to thinking about something else I remember thinking this same year.  One morning I had scraped the skin off the entire length of my shin bone while I was hurriedly shaving my legs before school.  That afternoon as I was changing into my little blue (required) gym suit before class, a girl glanced at my leg and simply said, “I see you cut yourself shaving.”

No big deal, except that again I see how pitiful, even nonexistent my Theory of Mind was at 14.  I was stunned by her observation.  How could this girl POSSIBLY know that fact?  I had no concept of clairvoyancy, but that was my feeling.  This girl obviously possessed amazing magical abilities!  There was, to me, no other possible way that she could have known my secret, a secret that was veiled and shrouded in the privacy of my own bathroom at home.  I felt naked and exposed in front of this stranger, and I’ve never forgotten this moment, either.

Partly this is true because this wasn’t the only time in my life I had this exact same reaction to something someone observed about me as a truth.  When I was 29 and was going through my final session with my therapist before exiting my 7-week inpatient alcoholism treatment program, I was stunned in the same way when my therapist said to me, “I have called a local counseling center and made an appointment for you with a therapist there as a part of your aftercare program.  She is a specialist in treating child abuse survivors.”

Child abuse survivor?  ME?  That was the very first time anyone had ever signaled to me in any way that I had been abused in my childhood.  At that time, I wasn’t even remotely, consciously privy to the fact I had been abused.  Yet on another level OF COURSE I knew I had been abused.  I had just NEVER, EVER had any way to think about this fact.

Here was this woman, who even though I had spent hours with her in addiction-related therapy sessions over a 7-week period of time, still considered her a stranger.  I was just as stunned at her words as I was when the magical girl had known the secret of my leg scrape.  How could this woman possibly know I had been abused?  I certainly hadn’t told either one of these people my secrets!  This therapist was, obviously, a magical clairvoyant, too.

I had no place in my warped, distorted, tiny, unsubstantial and uniformed Theory of Mind to understand that other people can EASILY tell all kinds of things about other people.  Again, I felt exposed, vulnerable, and very confused.  Walking around in a world filled with other people, how was I supposed to ever know what they knew about me?

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It wasn’t until about six years ago when I began my own research in an effort to more fully understand what my mother’s 18 years of abuse of me had ACTUALLY done to me that I discovered the very real concept of Theory of Mind.  Even then, it took me another two years after I discovered this concept for me to realize how my trauma-influenced formation of my own (very limited) Theory of Mind meant that not only did I not understand how other people were able to know what they know about me and others, but in return I am equally limited in my understanding of other people’s minds.

Having an adequately formed Theory of Mind built through secure-enough early attachment experiences means that in most human-to-human interactions people do not have to stop and THINK about what is going on.  These patterns of interaction have their roots in the early-forming right, social, limbic, emotional brain.  When trauma and abuse changes the way this part of the brain develops, human interactions and the operation of Theory of Mind will never (in my opinion) be automatic and normal.

This all comes into my thinking about thinking today in regard to Tolle’s writing because I know that our Theory of Mind doesn’t only concern itself with other people.  It also informs all of our thinking about our relationship with the most important person we know:  our own SELF.  Tolle’s writing seems to be in part about discovering a different layer of our self, one that exists in a much bigger way than does our ‘thinking self’.

This is all fine and good, but our physiological construction, I believe, always guides everything in our life as long as we are alive in a body.  The Theory of Mind that we use in our THINKING is directly tied in all of its aspects to our body through our nervous system.  Our early-forming right brain is meant to be the foremost expert at being able to read all the extremely rapid-firing nerve-based expressions other people send about their inner states through the sound of their voice, the extremely rapid signals of their facial muscles, their body language – in essence, all the nonverbal information that is always included in our interactions with other people in real-place, real-time.

These most important nonverbal signals are received by our brain on its fundamental levels, and the regions of our brain that receive them are directly tied to our autonomic nervous system and vagus nerve responses.  In fact, our vagus nerve system and our facial signaling processes are connected in their earliest evolution to the nerve structures of primitive jawless fish and are connected to both our stress and our calm and connection response systems.

I don’t believe that we can disconnect, or dis-associate our THINKING that Tolle is suggesting we begin to watch from these very ancient and very real present-day physiological structures within our body.  Thinking that we can witness above the surface, or consciously pay attention to, is the tip of our physiological iceberg that happens BECAUSE we have some version of a Theory of Mind.

The ‘place’ where our Theory of Mind operates within us is, to me, like a Ground Zero for what we actually can know consciously both about our self and about others:  Our Theory of Mind in-forms our thinking.  While we are not perhaps used to thinking about our thinking this way, I believe that our entire being thinks.  We think with our body because we live within our body.

Certainly what we actually know is much larger that what reaches our conscious awareness at any given instant of time.  I suspect that our Theory of Mind acts like a two-way filtering system.  It not only influences and in-forms both our unconscious (implicit) and our conscious (explicit) reactions, it also determines which is which, and colors our self-reflective abilities and processes!

I believe that as long as we are alive we experience a changing Theory of Mind, and that we have the power to influence these changes.  This is what I THINK Tolle is talking about when he states:

“The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind.  This is the only true liberation.  You can take the first step right now.  Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can.  Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patters, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years.  This is what I mean by “watching the thinker,” which is another way of saying:  listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence.

“When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially.  That is to say, do not judge.  Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door.  You’ll soon realize:  there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it.  This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought.  It arises from beyond the mind.”  (pages 18-19)

Perhaps I simply have a differing definitions of ‘thought’, ‘mind’ and ‘self’ than Tolle might.  In My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey author Jill Bolte Taylor describes a very similar pattern as Tolle does, one based on her stroke experience of ‘losing’ access to her left-brain hemisphere action, Taylor describes this ‘thoughtless state’ in terms of being able to access our right-brain hemisphere’s reality without words.

Our ‘thinking self’ is not the enemy.  Having the ability to think is a gift.  Having a mind is a gift to be thankful for (see word family-definitions below).  Having a flexible, adaptive, resilient, changeable Theory of Mind allows us to make the best use possible of both of these gifts – and more.  If I accept that Tolle is using his own thinking about thinking in his particular way, and that what he is trying to say is that he found a way to improve upon the experience of being a conscious non-word-based thinker, I am curious enough about his thoughts to read more about what he has to say.

Perhaps my own Theory of Mind will change in positive ways as a result of this process of learning.  I always appreciate learning how to bring new ways of being myself into the playing field of my Theory of Mind.  Meanwhile, now that this post is completed I will go outdoors before today’s big winds show up and ‘think with my body-mind’ as I play with the mud making more adobes!

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For some thought provoking information from Dr. Siegel’s writings about states of mind (and states of being) in regard to the organization of the SELF, follow this link (might be a little slow on the page loading!):

**Dr. Siegel on organization-reorganization of the SELF

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THINK

Inflected Form(s): thought \ˈthȯt\; think·ing

Etymology: Middle English thenken, from Old English thencan; akin to Old High German denken to think, Latin tongēre to know — more at thanks

Date: before 12th century

transitive verb 1 : to form or have in the mind
2 : to have as an intention <thought to return early>
3 a : to have as an opinion <think it’s so> b : to regard as : consider <think the rule unfair>
4 a : to reflect on : ponder <think the matter over> b : to determine by reflecting <think what to do next>
5 : to call to mind : remember <he never thinks to ask how we do>
6 : to devise by thinking —usually used with up <thought up a plan to escape>
7 : to have as an expectation : anticipate <we didn’t think we’d have any trouble>
8 a : to center one’s thoughts on <talks and thinks business> b : to form a mental picture of
9 : to subject to the processes of logical thought <think things out>intransitive verb 1 a : to exercise the powers of judgment, conception, or inference : reason b : to have in the mind or call to mind a thought
2 a : to have the mind engaged in reflection : meditate b : to consider the suitability <thought of her for president>
3 : to have a view or opinion <thinks of himself as a poet>
4 : to have concern —usually used with of <a man must think first of his family>
5 : to consider something likely : suspect <may happen sooner than you think>

— think·er noun

— think better of : to reconsider and make a wiser decision

— think much of : to view with satisfaction : approve —usually used in negative constructions <I didn’t think much of the new car>

synonyms think, conceive, imagine, fancy, realize, envisage, envision mean to form an idea of. think implies the entrance of an idea into one’s mind with or without deliberate consideration or reflection <I just thought of a good joke>. conceive suggests the forming and bringing forth and usually developing of an idea, plan, or design <conceived of a new marketing approach>. imagine stresses a visualization <imagine you’re at the beach>. fancy suggests an imagining often unrestrained by reality but spurred by desires <fancied himself a super athlete>. realize stresses a grasping of the significance of what is conceived or imagined <realized the enormity of the task ahead>. envisage and envision imply a conceiving or imagining that is especially clear or detailed <envisaged a totally computerized operation> <envisioned a cure for the disease>.

synonyms think, cogitate, reflect, reason, speculate, deliberate mean to use one’s powers of conception, judgment, or inference. think is general and may apply to any mental activity, but used alone often suggests attainment of clear ideas or conclusions <teaches students how to think>. cogitate implies deep or intent thinking <cogitated on the mysteries of nature>. reflect suggests unhurried consideration of something recalled to the mind <reflecting on fifty years of married life>. reason stresses consecutive logical thinking <able to reason brilliantly in debate>. speculate implies reasoning about things theoretical or problematic <speculated on the fate of the lost explorers>. deliberate suggests slow or careful reasoning before forming an opinion or reaching a conclusion or decision <the jury deliberated for five hours>.

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THANKS

Etymology: plural of Middle English thank, from Old English thanc thought, gratitude; akin to Old High German dank gratitude, Latin tongēre to know

Date: before 12th century

1 : kindly or grateful thoughts : gratitude
2 : an expression of gratitude <return thanks before the meal> —often used in an utterance containing no verb and serving as a courteous and somewhat informal expression of gratitude <many thanks>

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MIND

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English gemynd; akin to Old High German gimunt memory, Latin ment-, mens mind, monēre to remind, warn, Greek menos spirit, mnasthai, mimnēskesthai to remember

Date: before 12th century

1 : recollection, memory <keep that in mind> <time out of mind>
2 a : the element or complex of elements in an individual that feels, perceives, thinks, wills, and especially reasons b : the conscious mental events and capabilities in an organism c : the organized conscious and unconscious adaptive mental activity of an organism
3 : intention, desire <I changed my mind>
4 : the normal or healthy condition of the mental faculties
5 : opinion, view
6 : disposition, mood
7 a : a person or group embodying mental qualities <the public mind> b : intellectual ability
8 capitalized Christian Science : god 1b
9 : a conscious substratum or factor in the universe
10 : attention <pay him no mind>

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+DISSOCIATION RISK FACTORS IN UNEXPECTED PLACES

alchemynow3 Comments

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Well, here I am back again in my writing about – “how to stop” —  dissociation in regard to the book, Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle my sister is sending me.  Because I spent all of the 18 years of my abusive childhood in a dissociated state between the frequent, random and extremely traumatizing events of trauma my abusive mother rained on me from my birth, I have an inner need to be careful in using any so-called meditative or relaxation technique — and here’s why.

I am still not exactly sure that what I am going to post here is the exact form of the information I first encountered over six years ago that I have been trying to re-find ever since, but it’s close enough to what I was looking for that I will post it here.

It comes from Dr. Jon G. Allen’s book, Coping With Trauma: Hope Through Understanding, as I mentioned in my last post, +ONE READER’S SEARCH TERMS: ‘HOW TO STOP DISSOCIATION’.
This information comes from Allen’s chapter, ‘Emotion Regulation’ in a subsection titled, “Self-regulation Strategies’.  He says things here of specific relevance and importance to severe trauma survivors – especially to severe early relational trauma survivors – that is very affirming to me.  Remember that early attachment-related traumas alter the way the limbic, right, very ancient emotional brain develops and thus alters our abilities to moderate and regulate ALL of our emotions.  I keep Allen’s words in mind as I prepare to read Tolle’s book my sister is sending me.

Allen states:

“Trauma and stress aren’t new.  Techniques of self-regulation are ancient.  You may not have studied them, but you have used them.  Most methods of self-regulation, such as exercise and relaxation, are simple.  In relation to meditation, Jon Kabat-Zinn uses the phrase, “simple but not easy,”….  For persons struggling with traumas, I put it more strongly:  simple but difficult.  If it weren’t difficult, you’d already be using these strategies successfully rather than reading this chapter.  Three sources of this difficulty are worth thinking about:  methods of self-regulation require practice; they can be fraught with complications for persons with a history of trauma; and they require caring for yourself.

“The first source of difficulty:  learning to regulate your emotions is like any other skill – it requires practice and persistence….  Developing competence in emotion regulation is a lifetime task…..  To become proficient and to maintain your proficiency requires determination and commitment.  Such a major effort is no short-term project.  If you’re dealing with trauma, you’re in for the long haul….

“The second source of difficulty:  trauma-related problems can complicate the use of these techniques.  Techniques designed to enhance self-control may instead trigger anxiety, flashbacks, or dissociation.  Persons with a trauma history can easily be demoralized when the very things offered as helpful prove instead to be unusable or retraumatizing.  Fortunately, because of such a wide range of techniques there’s bound to be something for everyone.  But finding what works for you may be difficult.  It may take time and effort.  You may be in for a period of trial and error.  Caution is in order.  Many self-regulation techniques …have been studied extensively in the context of stress management, but they’ve just begun to be researched in the context of trauma, although they’re routinely employed in conjunction with other facets of trauma treatment….

“The third and often most serious difficulty:  techniques of self-regulation are intended to help you feel better – to even feel good.  This means taking care of yourself.  How can taking care of yourself be a seemingly insurmountable obstacle?  Taking care of yourself implies valuing yourself.  To the degree that the aftermath of trauma entails self-blame or self-hatred, taking care of yourself will go against the grain.  “Why should I do anything good for myself when I don’t deserve it?”  Your self-concept has a steering function, and this train of thought can lead to a self-perpetuating stalemate.  If you hate yourself, you won’t take care of yourself, then you’ll feel bad, hate yourself, ad infinitum.  You might believe that you must feel better about yourself first, then you’ll be able to use these techniques to take care of yourself.  Logical, but maybe self-defeating.  A good way to start feeling better about yourself is to take better care of yourself.  Working on self-regulation could come first.  It’s difficult, but some of the rewards start occurring right away, and they can enhance your motivation to continue.”  (pages 228-229)

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RELAXATION

“Relaxation is the simplest of the simple techniques, and it’s the direct antidote to the fight-or-flight response….

“It’s hard to imagine anything more innocuous than relaxation.  But relaxation can be problematic for persons who have been traumatized.  This paradoxical response has been observed frequently enough to acquire a name:  relaxation-induced anxiety….  With this anxiety, you might associate relaxation with letting your guard down; thus, in a relaxed state, you may feel vulnerable to attack.  You may feel that you need to be alert at all times.  Therefore, before letting yourself relax, you may need to do whatever is necessary to assure yourself that you’re in a safe place, protected from any intrusion.

“Relaxation entails focusing inward, on your breathing and on your muscles.  Your attention is directed away from outer reality onto you body.  When you let go of focus on outer reality, you might be prone to dissociate….  Rather than feeling relaxed, you might begin to feel spaced out or unreal.  Dissociation is the opposite of feeling grounded in outer reality.  Relaxation exercises tend to remove this sensory scaffolding.

“Fortunately, it’s not necessary to do body awareness exercises to relax.  Sitting quietly may be enough…..  (pages 231-232)

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IMAGERY

“Picture a field of wildflowers.  Hear the sound of a waterfall.  You’ve been using imagery all your life.  For most persons, visual imagery is especially vivid and powerful.  Interestingly, creating visual images activates the same parts of the brain involved in visual perception….  As traumatized persons know best, the power of imagery is a double-edged sword.  Imagery is tied to memory and to emotion.  Intrusive images of traumatic experience are common symptoms of PTSD [posttraumatic stress disorder].  Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and body sensations all can be associated with reexperiencing trauma.

“Think of yourself as having a library of images.  Picture a section of the library devoted to traumatic images – but don’t open any of the books in that section now!  You have a section for imagery associated with positive experiences.  This is a section worth browsing in.  Spend lots of time there.  You may not have checked out some of the volumes for a long time.  Put them back in circulation.  Check them out regularly in your spare moments.

[My note:  Even an additional word of caution is needed here for severe infant-child abuse and trauma survivors:  Our positive experiences were very often as entangled with trauma as any other ones.  Our insecure attachment disorders in adulthood also can completely entangle positive emotion in negative and hurtful relationship histories.  See:  *Age 9 – BLOODY NOSE for an example of how trauma and abuse can contaminate the experience of positive emotion to create ‘trauma triggers’ where we might not expect them to exist.]

“You can use imagery flexibly and creatively.  You can piece together images from memory to imagine something that you’ve not actually experienced, like floating on a cloud.  Much of your anxiety and worry revolves around imagery, anticipating the worst.  Your images are also accompanied by changes in your physiological state, so anticipating the worst tends to promote it.  But you can create library shelves devoted to imagined scenes that are pleasurable and calming.  {my note:  I would add, safe and secure as a first requirement!]

“Many therapies use guided imagery…which simply means that you’re provided with suggestions for images that will evoke certain ideas and emotions [hypnotherapy].  You may be told to picture yourself lying on a beach on a beautiful sunny day, watching puffy clouds float by, hearing the sound of waves gently lapping at the shore, feeling the warmth of sand against your skin.  Many persons benefit particularly from imagining themselves in a safe place, for example, a secluded and protected place….

“In managing anxiety we use imagery in a virtually instinctive way, and mental escape through imagery is one way of coping with trauma.  Some persons in the midst of traumatic experience can dissociate themselves from the trauma by imagining themselves to be elsewhere….  [my note:  This presentation of one single aspect of ‘dissociation’ is NOT what dissociation IS, any more than a single leave of a gigantic tree IS the whole of the tree.]  But comforting imagery developed in situations of desperation may be problematic.  Some soothing images will be so closely linked to traumatic experience that bringing them to mind will also tend to revoke the traumatic memories.  These well-worn images may be haunted by trauma.  This section of your imagery library may be adjacent to the traumatic images section.  You might be better off moving to a new area and creating new volumes of fresh imagery.”  (pages 323-233)

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MEDITATION

“Of all the techniques described here, meditation probably has the most venerably history…having evolved in the context of early Eastern religions.  Meditation and prayer have much in common, and for many, the spiritual dimension forms the foundation of meditation.  But meditation can be separated from religion and spirituality.  Meditation overlaps with relaxation….

[I am skipping a great deal of what Allen is saying here about meditation – get this book, it’s a good one!]

“Mindfulness can be the antithesis of dissociation – the opposite end of the spectrum.  Dissociation is associated with a sense of unreality, mindfulness is a state of being highly aware of reality, not spaced out but tuned in.  This attunement is why meditation may be helpful in relation to dissociation.  Mindfulness could enhance grounding techniques that focus attention on current sensory experience.

“Like every other technique of self-regulation, meditation is not without risks….  Meditation can be used as an escape from living….  Mindfulness is the ideal antidote to dissociation, because it entails heightened awareness of reality, a sense of being fully grounded.  Yet sitting motionless for prolonged periods can have a trance-inducing effect.  For persons who are prone to dissociation, meditation can lead to a sense of loss of control rather than to enhanced control.  Like relaxation and guided imagery, meditation is conducive to opening up the inner world of thoughts and feelings.  For this reason, it can evoke anxiety, painful memories, or distressing images and ideas.  Although the intent may be to foster your ability to concentrate on one thing (your breathing), the actual effect may be that you get stuck in painful experience.  If you become emotionally overwhelmed, you may not be able to gently bring your attention back to the focus of awareness.  When coping with trauma, you might best be cautious, starting gradually and seeking the support of a therapist, a teacher, or a meditation group.”  (pages 233-235)

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BIOFEEDBACK

“Compared with most of the age-old methods of self-regulation described thus far, biofeedback is a recent innovation – only several decades old.  And, unlike the rest, biofeedback requires some technology.  The basic idea behind biofeedback isn’t complicated.  You can change what goes on in your body by your behavior and by what you imagine and think about.  Sid down, breathe deeply, imagine being in a pleasant spot, and you’ll relax – your heart rate will slow, and your muscles will relax.  [my note:  You will initialize the “STOP” arm of your autonomic nervous system (ANS) and activate your vagus nerve system – or the opposite with the following].  Start imagining your traumatic experience or anything else frightening, and your level of physiological arousal will zoom back up.

[I am leaving much of this information out here….]

“Fortunately, there’s a simple and inexpensive window into the physiology of one important aspect of the relaxation response – a little thermometer that measures finger temperature.  Finger temperature is a sensitive gauge of autonomic nervous system arousal.  With sympathetic nervous system arousal [the “GO” arm], blood flow is diverted into the large muscles in preparation for vigorous action.  With parasympathetic activation [the “STOP” arm], blood flows into the periphery – the tips of your fingers and toes.  When you’re nervous, your hands get cold; when you can warm your hands, you become calm.  You can tape a little thermometer designed for that purpose to a finger and have an excellent barometer of autonomic nervous system activity.  If you can get your finger temperature above 95 [degrees F] and hold it here for several minutes, you can rest assured that you’ve lowered your sympathetic nervous system arousal [my note:  and activated your calm and connection vagus nerve system], resulting in a pleasant, emotionally relaxed state….

“Once you become aware of how this relaxed state feels, and you’ve discovered how to get yourself there, you can do it without the little thermometer.  You can do it anywhere in the midst of any activity, to remain or restore calm.  Although we often think of relaxation in connection with slowing down and resting, it’s possible to be relaxed and active….

“Like any other technique that enhances relaxation, biofeedback can backfire.  It can contribute to a sense of vulnerability as you release tension and let down your guard.  And the inward focus may also open up traumatic memories and imagery.  This openness to inner experience can be productive and healing in the presence of a competent therapist; otherwise it might lead to overwhelming emotion and retraumatization.  When carefully prescribed and monitored, biofeedback has the specific advantages of bolstering awareness of the body and providing a sense of control and mastery.  Feedback is ideal for providing tangible evidence of self-regulation and mastery.”  (pages 235-237)

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See also online search for terms:  NEUROFEEDBACK and NEUROFEEDBACK ATTACHMENT DISORDER

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Well, this is a lot of information, I know.  Hopefully there will be something contained in this post that can help severe trauma survivors approach some potential helpful-healing techniques that we may have been intentionally avoiding because we knew on some level that there are very real risks involved for us because of our trauma history.  We need to ALWAYS trust what our body-brain-mind-self tells us, even if we can’t explain what we know in words – either to our own self or to anybody else.

We have to be very careful with anything that creates a sense of disequilibrium, disorganization, disorientation and/or dissociation within our self!  We have to always trust what we instinctively and intuitively KNOW about our self in the world.  When my sister described the book she is sending me, I immediately knew I had to refresh myself on this information I first read over six years ago — because I know I am different from my sister.  In fact, I am different from just about everybody else EXCEPT other severe early abuse and trauma survivors.  I really do know what is best for me just as I can tell when I have a sneeze coming on.

What Dr. Allen writes in his book is a ‘must read’ for all of us who come from truly malevolent backgrounds — or as adults have suffered from severe trauma.

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+ONE READER’S SEARCH TERMS: ‘HOW TO STOP DISSOCIATION’

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WordPress keeps a running list on my Admin page that shows me the kinds of search terms people are using that lands them on my blog.  Here’s one from yesterday:  “How to stop dissociation.”  Hey, now that’s quite the question?  Do I have any kind of answer at all?

For the most part, I think the truth is that neuroscientists (along with everyone else) is stumped by ‘dissociation’.  The word is thrown around like tumbleweeds in early fall high speed desert wind.  From my point of view, at every point where the brain can perform an action using circuits-regions-pathways-networks TOGETHER yet also perform an entirely different set of activities through a recombination of these areas or in solo operation, a risk for dissociation exists.

Add to this wide open field of possible dissociation factors the complex and sophisticated operation of our body as a whole, which uses all its known abilities to moderate and modulate stress and calmness levels through our many nervous system responses.  The truth of the matter is that those who suffer most from so-called ‘dissociation’ are probably the closest to being experts on the topic of any human on earth.

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My sister is graciously sending me a copy of the book, Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.  There’s certainly nothing either new or original about the topic, but I hear the book contains very useful, practical, and do-able exercises for changing – basically – how our brain and nervous system processes information in the present moment.  I’ll bite.

Until I lay my eyeballs on the printed words in Tolle’s text, I don’t have a single clue how what he says is different than what’s in this book, for example:  Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (P.S.) by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

But after I thought about it for a little while the day my sister told me of her recent experiences implementing some of Tolle’s techniques, I realized that the state of mind, or state of being that she described to me sounded extremely – and eerily – familiar to me.  I KNOW that state, in the deepest regions of my being.  If it is anything like what it sounds to me, it’s the state of what I named for myself of MAJOR DISSOCIATION.

How interesting is that?  The problem for me at this moment, not having yet read this book, is that I’m not at all sure I want to intentionally exercise myself to reenter that state.  Supposedly it relates to NOT thinking and NOT feeling.  Sound familiar?

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CAUTION becomes the word for the day for me in regard to anything that non-severe early infant-child trauma and abuse survivors seem to find useful in their own process of achieving increased well-being.  Because I had to develop a very different body-brain, I need to be very careful about which doors I open and leap blindly through.

My inner sense of warning about ‘messing around with’ anything that can alter my state of being in any way comes from the knowledge that there are black holes, abysses and pitfalls within the operation of my bio-chemical makeup that do not exist for a ‘normally built from infancy’ person.

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I just went to my bookshelf to search for something I read about six years ago on this topic and have never been able to find again.  I ‘accidentally’ found this, written by Dr. Jon G. Allen in his book, Traumatic Relationships and Serious Mental Disorders.  Because I couldn’t find what I was looking for in it, I immediately stuffed it back among its multi-colored-spine relatives.

But wait a moment!  Why did these words appear at this moment?  I give up.  I don’t know, but I suspect there is a perfectly good reason.  So, having reclaimed the page, here’s what I ‘accidentally’ read:

“Although we generally admire persistence and deplore giving up, Carver and Scheier argue that being unable to give up unattainable goals is a huge problem:  ‘the person experiences distress (because of an inability to make progress) and is unable to do anything about the distress (because of an inability to give up)….  This situation – commitment to unattainable goals – is a prescription for distress’ (p. 195).  Many clients struggle with this plight in treatment.  They courageously persist in treatment for years in the face of ongoing symptoms and relapses.  In the midst of relapses, they become profoundly demoralized, often feeling as if they no longer have the will to keep trying.  At these junctures, many become suicidal – the ultimate expression of disengagement and giving up.  Working on trauma is a prescription for slow progress toward goals, the guaranteed precipitant of negative affect.  If the client has adopted the completely understandable goal of cure, freedom from symptoms, and freedom from relapses, depression will ensue.

“Particularly in the midst of relapses, clients long for wholesale and dramatic change.  But we must help them go in the opposite direction.  To ensure success and positive emotion that builds confidence in treatment, we must orient clients toward a view of improvement based on small, gradual changes….  Gollwitzer (1999) proposed a two-step strategy for goal attainment that I introduce to clients in the context of self-regulation.  The first step is goal setting, an important challenge.  What are realistic treatment goals?  Over the long term, gradual improvement with ups and downs is realistic – but by no means guaranteed.  But we must focus on the short term, where clients can experience concrete progress.  Gollwitzer emphasized that goals must not only be achievable (within the person’s capacity) but also be specific rather than general (e.g., ‘Say, “No!” when I do not want to do something’ rather than ‘be more assertive’).  Goals should be proximal (near future) rather than distal (distant future).  The combination of specific and proximal goals allows the individual to identify clear feedback that promotes self-monitoring.  It is helpful to formulate learning goals (e.g., learning how to calm oneself or discovering capacities to distract oneself).  Approach goals are preferable to avoidance goals.  For example, rather than setting the goal of not feeling anxious, the client might adopt the goal of calming himself by listening to music at the initial signs of anxiety.  The client must also eliminate distractions and temptations in the environment.  Perhaps most difficult in light of clients’ ambivalence and depression, success requires high motivation to attain the goal and a strong sense of commitment to it.

“Gollwitzer made a convincing case that goal setting must be accompanied by implementation intentions, that is, specifying when, where, and how the goal will be implemented:  when situation x arises, I will perform response y.  This entails forming a clear idea of situation x in advance.  Situation x could be an emotional state in an environmental context.  For example, the client might formulate the implementation intention, when I am afraid and alone at home during the daytime, I am tempted to cut myself, I will take a walk abound the neighborhood.  Mentally rehearsing implementation intentions is helpful, and adhering reliably to plans ensures that intentions become habitual.”  (pages 316-317)

NOTE:  Mental rehearsal makes use of our mirror neuron system, essential for learning anything that involves actions taken by our body.

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Well, I can easily see how this passage from Allen’s book relates to “How to stop dissociation!”  From my personal perspective, stopping dissociation isn’t actually possible for those of us infant-child trauma survivors who actually have a nervous system-brain that was forced to build itself with major dissociation as one of one of our prime operating patterns.

I believe we can set the realistic goal of learning more about what conditions, situations and circumstances in our present-day life contribute to an all out pandemonium of dissociation.  But STOPPING dissociation as if it never built itself into our body-brain in the beginning is not going to be possible.  Finding ways to lessen the trouble that dissociation causes us NOW and lessening the opportunity for it to happen (be triggered) NOW is a possible goal.

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To give you an idea about how oblivious I truly believe the neuroscientific community is about dissociation, in the book, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are by Daniel J. Siegel (Paperback – Oct. 22, 2001) – I so far have added 12 page numbers of references in the text to dissociation that are not mentioned in the index of this book  (only 2 references are actually in the index)!  If I can follow through on a ‘motivational intention’ to do so, I will add the information I have found in Siegel’s book into a future blog post.

This is another great book by this author:

Coping With Trauma: Hope Through Understanding by Jon G. Allen

In fact, what I am looking for is in this book – and I will include this information in my next post.

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