+CRITICAL – OXYTOCIN – THE RELATIONSHIP GLUE

April 13, 2010April 13, 2010 alchemynowLeave a comment

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Oxytocin is the glue that holds all mammal relationships TOGETHER. Without oxytocin the opposite of ‘together’ happens. Infant-child abuse represents a ‘tearing apart’ and a ‘breaking apart’ of relationships rather than a ‘building up’.

I am posting two chapters today from this book, with more to follow in future posts:

The Oxytocin Factor: Tapping the Hormone of Calm, Love, and Healing by Kerstin Uvnas Moberg, Roberta Francis, Kerstin Uvnäs Moberg, and Translated by Roberta Francis (Hardcover – Sept. 16, 2003)

The information on this blog from Moberg’s book is very important. We cannot think intelligently about infant-child abuse without the ability to think intelligently about attachment, and we cannot think about attachment intelligently without being able to think about oxytocin.

In situations where caregivers abuse and maltreat infants and children under their care – EVERY SINGLE TIME THIS HAPPENS – there is something wrong with the operation of the caregiver’s attachment system. This means that at those times the perpetrator’s oxytocin-related system IS NOT WORKING PROPERLY.

*Oxytocin – Chapter 4: The body’s control centers

*Oxytocin – Chapter 5: How oxytocin works

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There are several posts on this blog that are concerned with oxytocin – FIND THEM HERE.

Of these posts, THESE ARE THE ONES about oxytocin that relate to Dr. Moberg’s work I have posted through today.

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

I am a cognitive behavioral therapist, but not many people know what that means or how cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can be used to address BPD symptoms. This week, learn more about whether CBT could help you.

CBT for Borderline Personality

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a type of psychotherapy that targets the “cognitive” (thinking-related) and “behavioral” (action-related) aspects of a psychological condition.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy – When Change Isn’t Enough

Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is a special kind of cognitive behavioral therapy designed for people with BPD. Dr. Marsha Linehan at the University of Washington noticed that people with BPD need more than just a change-focused therapy, they need better acceptance (by others and of themselves). The solution? DBT.
BPD in the News -Charges Brought in Assisted BPD Suicide

Dr. Lawrence Egbert, the head of the right-to-die group Final Exit Network (FEN) is currently facing charges for allegedly helping a woman with BPD commit suicide.
Life With Borderline Personality Disorder

While BPD can affect many areas of your life, your legal status and physical health, many people with BPD lead normal and fulfilling lives. Learn how BPD might impact you, and how you can improve your quality of life.

Must Reads

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

+WHAT I KNOW ABOUT ‘HATE’ AND ‘WRONG’

April 11, 2010April 11, 2010 alchemynowLeave a comment

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My mother certainly made it undeniably clear that she hated me. On the topic of HATE in regards to how I feel (or have ever felt or will ever feel) about my mother, I went looking this morning for the Webster definition of HATE. The root origins of the word are connected to CARE. Maybe I don’t, and don’t seem able to hate my mother because I just don’t care enough about HER to achieve that level of investment.

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HATE (noun)

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English hete; akin to Old High German haz hate, Greek kēdos care

Date: before 12th century

1 a : intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury b : extreme dislike or antipathy : loathing
2 : an object of hatred

HATE (verb)

Date: before 12th century

transitive verb 1 : to feel extreme enmity toward
2 : to have a strong aversion to : find very distasteful: to express or feel extreme enmity or active hostility

— hat·er noun

— hate one’s guts : to hate someone with great intensity

synonyms hate, detest, abhor, abominate, loathe mean to feel strong aversion or intense dislike for. hate implies an emotional aversion often coupled with enmity or malice <hated the enemy with a passion>. detest suggests violent antipathy <detests cowards>. abhor implies a deep often shuddering repugnance <a crime abhorred by all>. abominate suggests strong detestation and often moral condemnation <abominates all forms of violence>. loathe implies utter disgust and intolerance <loathed the mere sight of them>.

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About a month ago I had a conversation with a young man who was finishing a painting job on the wood-faced mall complex that contains the laundromat café where I go most Saturday’s morning to visit with my friend while she does her weekly washing. This Hispanic young man explained to me that his entire family, including his girl friend and young daughter were still living in San Diego. He had left the area searching for a new place to live and for a better life. He hopes to eventually convince all the people he cares about to join him once he solidly locates employment.

This young man told me that in the two months that had passed since he left San Diego six of his friends had been shot to death. He explained how all the homes where his family lives have barred windows and doors.

“It doesn’t do any good to replace windows once the haters have shot them out,” he told me matter of factly. “Once they see the windows are back, they drive by and shoot them out again. No place is safe there. The haters cannot be stopped. I do not want my family there. I have to find a new place for us all to live in peace and safety. Let the haters have it out there. They already do.”

When I first heard this young man use that word ‘haters’ I wasn’t sure I heard him right. I asked him about it. He told me that there used to be a reason for the haters to hate, but there isn’t anymore. Now they hate simply because that is who they have become. It is who they are.

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I have spent hours thinking about the comment made to yesterday’s post about hate and my mother, trying to find my own truth about the topic. I’m not sure that truth even exists where I will be able to consciously find it in my lifetime.

I cannot find a place within myself to stand on from which I can hate my mother. Maybe that means “I cannot stand to hate my mother.” Maybe it means “I cannot understand hating my mother.” I am not at all sure, thinking about it, that I have the physiological capacity or ability to hate my mother – and I mean this exactly literally.

Differentiation of emotions from birth happens as the brain is built in the earliest caregiver interactions an infant has with its primary caregiver, most often its mother. Because my mother (and her psychosis and mental illness) meant that she began to hate me while she was in labor with me, her hate for me met me at the door when I entered this world.

Obviously, her hatred completely overwhelmed little tiny me, and it influenced every interaction she had with me and (again, obviously) influenced the way my body-brain developed.

Differentiation of emotions happens at the same time and through the same process-interactions that the ‘jelling’ of the self happens. As our earliest caregivers resonate with our infant (and childhood) emotional states, they mirror back to us our self.

My mother was not capable of doing this for me. As a result, I never went through anything like a normal process of developing either a self or of recognizing, discriminating, identifying, discovering, defining or naming my feelings. Because The Monster made me in interaction with her, there is no possible way that I could have even began to form an emotional space within my own physiology (brain-body-nervous system-mind-self) where any hate could have existed – most certainly, not toward her.

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Through all my thinking about my response to the comment made that I just mentioned, I feel like I have turned my inner house upside-down and inside-out, just as I would if I were searching and looking for something necessary, vital and needed. I have combed and sifted, moved things around, hunted for it, and I cannot find even a glimmer inside me – nowhere – of hatred toward my mother for what she did to me.

True, as this commenter pointed out, I was nearly 30 years old before I was even able to recognize that I had been abused. It was only 6 years ago that I began my neurologically-based own research about what damage that abuse TRULY did to me. At that point I began to understand dissociation, disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorders, and I began to understand that the level of abuse, trauma, isolation and deprivation I had experienced from birth until age 18 had changed my physiological development and changed how my genetic potential had manifested itself in my body – and still does.

As I processed what I know about myself and the abuse my mother did to me, I also began to understand that my mother had a different, ‘evolutionarily altered’ body-brain-mind-self herself. I realized that the minimum sentence my mother COULD and SHOULD have received for what she did to me would have to have been a 14,500-year sentence. I realized that what I experienced, what I have to consider in my healing, and what was done to me is so far past normal, so far out of the range of normal or ordinary, that it barely, just barely fits anywhere on the map of modern life’s ‘being a human being’.

Even so, perhaps if my capacity for emotion had not been so pervasively, and evidently permanently altered by my mother, maybe I would have the capacity to hate her. But – reality is reality and it appears that I simply don’t have that ability in the same way that I don’t have brown eyes.

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Even when I reached the point of disowning my mother, there was no emotion involved in that process. As the Webster definition of ‘hate’ mentions, whatever hate is it ‘usually derived from fear, anger, or a sense of injury’. I felt none of those feelings, nor was I in any related state of mind.

What I recognized through my experience of (unintentionally) abusing my own little son was that my mother never felt remorse for anything she ever did to me. If there is anything that might be useful for me to examine and understand, it has nothing to do with hate.

Maybe there is something HERE that I can eventually sink my teeth into in some useful way. What actually WAS it about realizing so profoundly, fundamentally and absolutely that my mother never felt remorse for anything she ever did to me that created such clarity within me at the instant that realization hit me?

If that momentary instant of abusing my son had never happened, I’m not sure I would ever have reached that instant of clarity about my mother and her relationship with me.

At the instant I ‘snapped’ with my son and lashed out at him in blind rage that I NEVER saw coming, that I never knew I was capable of feeling or acting out in such a way, it was like crossing a line where I – for the first time and I think the ONLY time in my life – FELT like I was sharing in the experience of how my mother acted toward me.

As soon as ‘I came to my senses’ and realized what I had done to my son, an entirely new experience consumed me: remorse. I felt so completely shocked at what I had done, and so profoundly SORRY for what I had done to him that I have no words to express it.

What HAD to happen at that point is that ACTION needed to follow the experience.

(1) Fully recognizing the WRONG I had done and that this WRONG was WRONG.

(2) Apologizing to my little son the best that I could in my attempts to REPAIR this horrible and horrifying RUPTURE that I had created in his life.

(3) Vowing from the essence of my being that nothing like this would EVER happen again in my lifetime.

(4) Disowning my mother.

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I think I instinctively realized at this moment that something was terribly, terribly WRONG WITH MY MOTHER that she never once, for all the thousands and thousands and thousands of instances of abuse of one kind or another that she perpetrated against me, not one single time felt remorse.

Looking at this word I find it fascinating that the word is fundamentally tied in its roots to BITING:

REMORSE

Main Entry: re·morse

Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French remors, from Medieval Latin remorsus, from Late Latin, act of biting again, from Latin remordēre to bite again, from re- + mordēre to bite — more at mordant

Date: 14th century

1 : a gnawing distress arising from a sense of guilt for past wrongs : self-reproach
2 obsolete : compassion

synonyms see penitence

On the most profound and REAL level I was my mother’s PREY. She was a predator, and her hate of me gave her full permission to BITE me. She exercised her predator instinct as fully as she could without actually risking consequence from ‘the outside’. She was profoundly self-centered (a physiological brain-based reality) and did not kill me, I believe, because of the consequences she would have had to endure if she had. She was not stupid.

My mother did not feel any guilt for wrongs done against me, no ‘gnawing distress’, no self-reproach, no compassion.

This leads me to the most important word of all, and that word is WRONG, not hate:

WRONG

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English wrang, from *wrang, adjective, wrong

Date: before 12th century

1 a : an injurious, unfair, or unjust act : action or conduct inflicting harm without due provocation or just cause b : a violation or invasion of the legal rights of another; especially : tort
2 : something wrong, immoral, or unethical; especially : principles, practices, or conduct contrary to justice, goodness, equity, or law
3 : the state, position, or fact of being or doing wrong: as a : the state of being mistaken or incorrect b : the state of being guilty

synonyms see injustice

WRONG is just what it is – WRONG.

I knew what I had done to my son was WRONG.

My realization about my mother coincided at the same instant as I realized she felt no remorse and evidently did not (for whatever reason) EVER consider what she did to me was WRONG. Not wrong = no remorse.

At this same instant I realized that I had done WRONG, and realized how WRONG my mother had been, how WRONG what she had done to me was, I in effect came face-to-face with the reality of a VOID within my mother where this ‘knowing I did something WRONG in hurting my child’ did not exist within her. It was at this instant that I realized down to the bottom of my soul that “something was terribly WRONG with my mother.”

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I find it interesting that is the exact word my youngest sister had used on what was the very first time anyone in my family had ever talked with me about the abuse I endured as a child. My sister had come to visit me I believe in 1980, and had said to me, “Linda, if you are not very, very mad for what our mother did to you while you were growing up there is something terrible wrong with you.”

I had nothing inside of me at that time (I was 29) to connect her words to.

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I am left here with the thought that this entire hunt about why I don’t hate my mother reminds me of reducing numbers contained in fractions to their lowest common denominator.

I don’t believe (evidently) that the important point for me has anything whatsoever to do with HATE. Reducing all the terror and trauma, the pain and suffering and torment of my childhood of being hated and abused by my mother reduces down to just that one simple word for me: WRONG.

I have never in my life personally felt so WRONG as I did the instant after I abused my little son. At that instant I not only DID the WRONG, but recognized the WRONG, I knew without any possible room for doubt what WRONG really and actually was.

At that instant I finally knew what my sister had tried to tell me. I finally knew how WRONG my mother was because I finally FELT what WRONG felt like within my own self. That was the end of any denial I might have felt about my childhood and the end of any foggy inability I had up until that instant to know the truth about my mother and her treatment of me.

I could not ‘ignore’ or ‘pretend’ any more. I had, for that instant I abused my son, fully become The Monster my mother had always been toward me. I had become the predator who ‘bit’ my son.

I might not ever really know what HATE is, but I know now what WRONG is. My WRONG was intimately connected to REMORSE. My mother’s wasn’t. Evidently it has never been important for me to hate my mother. It was important that I learn this single fact: WRONG and REMORSE belong together. When they are dissociated from one another it means that something so much bigger is so terribly WRONG that unless some fundamental repair can be made at this level there is no hope for health, wellness or for healing.

I also know in my reality that that none of this has anything to do with HATE toward either of my parents. Perhaps because I spent 18 years being ‘bitten’ and eaten alive by the hatred my mother had toward me, I see hatred as a predatory state of being I wish to avoid in any way that I can. I believe I see hatred as being an attribute of The Monster. I believe it is an endangering state.

Even looking at it physiologically, hate (a stress response) does not promote compassionate operation of our calmness, caring and connection vagus nerve system. I would ask, “Why entertain an unwelcome guest? What goodness does hatred bring to the betterment of life? Who does hate benefit? What grows and what dies as a result of its presence?”

In my thinking, if we care enough about something to hate, we can care enough to care in some other, better way.

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+ARE YOU A ‘SENSITIVE?’

April 8, 2010April 8, 2010 alchemynowLeave a comment

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I appreciate this link on information about sensitivity being sent to ‘my attention’. It reminds me of the description of the ends of a ‘personality’ spectrum being like ‘hawks’ on one end and ‘doves’ on another — SEE: *Allostasis and Allostatic Load for more information, including a presentation about even the differences in the immune system between these two types of people.

(Also this link to articles by Bruce McEwen on the subject)

Throughout human history, there have always been ‘sensitives’ that were specifically geared to gathering plants. Even their immune system response is specifically geared to fight the kind of pathogens that are more likely to appear within this kind of environment. These ‘dove’ people’s immune system is different than the ‘hawk’ people’s immune system as the ‘hawks’ are more likely to receive wounds in combat and the hunt for large game that required a different immune system response.

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I am a ‘dove’ person as is my oldest brother. When ‘sensitives’ are exposed to severely traumatic, unstable and unpredictable early home circumstances, I believe we follow a different kind of ‘suffering’ pathway than do those who are less sensitive and ‘hawkish’ (like my mother). (Perhaps some are naturally easier prey and others predators?)

This article posted here is interesting, to say the least!

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http://www.livescie nce.com/health/ shy-brain- process-informat ion-differently- 100405.html

Study Sheds Light on What Makes People Shy

By LiveScience Staff

posted: 06 April 2010 08:07 am ET

The brains of shy or introverted individuals might actually process the world differently than their more extroverted counterparts, a new study suggests.

About 20 percent of people are born with a personality trait called sensory perception sensitivity (SPS) that can manifest itself as the tendency to be inhibited, or even neuroticism. The trait can be seen in some children who are “slow to warm up” in a situation but eventually join in, need little punishment, cry easily, ask unusual questions or have especially deep thoughts, the study researchers say.

The new results show that these highly sensitive individuals also pay more attention to detail, and have more activity in certain regions of their brains when trying to process visual information than those who are not classified as highly sensitive.

The study was conducted by researchers at Stony Brook University in New York, and Southwest University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, both in China. The results were published March 4 in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

The sensitive type

Individuals with this highly sensitive trait prefer to take longer to make decisions, are more conscientious, need more time to themselves in order to reflect, and are more easily bored with small talk, research suggests.

Previous work has also shown that compared with others those with a highly sensitive temperament are more bothered by noise and crowds, more affected by caffeine, and more easily startled. That is, the trait seems to confer sensitivity all around.

The researchers in the current study propose the simple sensory sensitivity to noise, pain, or caffeine is a side effect of an inborn preference to pay more attention to experiences.

They first used an established questionnaire to separate the sensitive from the non-sensitive participants. Then, the 16 participants compared a photograph of a visual scene with a preceding scene, indicating whether or not the scene had changed. Scenes differed in whether the changes were obvious or subtle, and in how quickly they were presented. Meanwhile, the researchers scanned each participant’ s brain with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Sensitive persons looked at the scenes with subtle differences for a longer time than did non-sensitive persons, and showed significantly greater activation in brain areas involved in associating visual input with other input to the brain and with visual attention. These brain areas are not simply used for vision itself, but for a deeper processing of input.

Role in evolution

The sensitivity trait is found in over 100 other species, from fruit flies and fish to canines and primates, indicating this personality type could sometimes provide an evolutionary advantage.

Biologists are beginning to agree that within one species there can be two equally successful “personalities. ” The sensitive type, always a minority, chooses to observe longer before acting, as if doing their exploring with their brains rather than their limbs. The other type “boldly goes where no one has gone before,” the scientists say.

The sensitive individual’s strategy is not so advantageous when resources are plentiful or quick, aggressive action is required. But it comes in handy when danger is present, opportunities are similar and hard to choose between, or a clever approach is needed.

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http://www.livescie nce.com/health/ shy-brain- process-informat ion-differently- 100405.html

Study Sheds Light on What Makes People Shy

By LiveScience Staff

posted: 06 April 2010 08:07 am ET

The brains of shy or introverted individuals might actually process the world differently than their more extroverted counterparts, a new study suggests.

The sensitive type

Previous work has also shown that compared with others those with a highly sensitive temperament are more bothered by noise and crowds,more affected by caffeine, and more easily startled. That is, the trait seems to confer sensitivity all around.

The researchers in the current study propose the simple sensory sensitivity to noise, pain, or caffeine is a side effect of an inborn preference to pay more attention to experiences.

Role in evolution

The sensitivity trait is found in over 100 other species, from fruit flies and fish to canines and primates, indicating this personality type could sometimes provide an evolutionary advantage.

+FOOLED BY AN ABUSIVE BORDERLINE? – MY MOTHER’S EXPERT DISTORTION OF REALITY

April 2, 2010September 23, 2011 alchemynow20 Comments

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+MY ABUSIVE BPD MOTHER LOST HER WINGS – AND NEVER GREW UP

How expert are you at being able to detect the twisted reality presented by a severely abusive Borderline? The clues to the truth do not lie with the Borderline, they exist within the empathic abilities of outside observers to know the truth from a lie. This ability to know true reality from the lies of a deceptive reality so marginally exits within an abusive Borderline that I would say it does not exist at all.

For example:

Brain Scans Clarify Borderline Personality Disorder

By Rick Nauert PhD

Using real-time brain imaging, a team of researchers have discovered that patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) are physically unable to regulate emotion.

The findings, by Harold W. Koenigsberg, MD, professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine suggest individuals with BPD are unable to activate neurological networks that would help to control feelings. READ ARTICLE HERE

(NOTE: In later posts I will write about my father’s participation in my mother’s distorted reality. I believe he had an avoidant-dismissive insecure attachment that meant his brain could regulate emotion to the extreme — but not in a normal way. His brain, which could overly activate ‘neurological networks’ that helped him overly control his feelings, was the perfect compliment to my mother’s Borderline brain.)

WHAT HAPPENS WITHIN THE BORDERLINE BRAIN?

Perhaps the most important piece of information those of us who were severely abused and traumatized by a Borderline Personality Disordered mother need to understand is that our mothers had/have a completely different kind of brain. These severe Borderline brains are expertly created through completely natural (and possible) processes of distortions in early childhood that in the end make the brain differences most difficult to detect unless and until we know what we are looking at when we consider the Borderline behaviors that manifest themselves as a result of early brain developmental changes.

We also need to understand that as a consequence of early traumatizing experiences a Borderline’s entire nervous system development (the brain is ‘just’ one component of the Central Nervous System) were changed and altered as well. This means that my mothers Autonomic Nervous System, which regulates both stress-defense responses through its ‘GO’ sympathetic arm and the connecting, compassionate, caregiving and seeking responses through the calming arm of the ‘STOP’ parasympathetic branch (think ‘pair-a-brakes’) were changes, as well.

I now understand that everything about who and how my severe Borderline mother was in the world was different from ‘normal’. What is harder to understand is why it took me so long to figure this out, and why nobody – not one single person including my father and grandmother – was able to detect the incredibly severe, consistent, perpetual, and horrible trauma and abuse my mother perpetrated against me for 18 long years.

What makes an abusive Borderline mother’s violence and horrible treatment of her offspring (most often, I suspect, of a ‘chosen child’) so nearly impossible to detect?

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I am presenting here a letter my mother wrote to her mother just prior to the first visit to Alaska to see us that my grandmother made after we left Alaska in August 1957 a month before my sixth birthday.

The distortion in my mother’s thinking about me that really shows how subtle and pervasive her psychosis was is present in this letter as I describe it in my comments within the text. My mother’s Borderline reality, and her psychosis regarding me (age six at the time this letter was written) would be impossible for an outside reader to detect.

The same processes that make her psychosis (and the abuse it engendered toward me) impossible to detect are the same ones, I suggest, that made her abuse of me undetectable to others all during the 18 years of terrible suffering my mother caused me. If readers think ‘undetectable deadly toxins’ as they read this, perhaps they will be able to twist their own thinking back to a normal-reality perspective as the proceed through the following words.

The biggest problem contact with a severe Borderline psychosis creates is that people with Borderline brains are so complete in their distortions of reality. They spin such a believable story, weave such a believable lie, that nobody but the most trained observers can possibly begin to detect the deceptions the psychosis contains. When a person encounters a Borderline such as my mother was, all rules of human decency are suspended, and the outsider does not have a clue – not a single solitary clue – that these rules have been changed. Everyone outside of the Borderline’s skin becomes instantaneously consumed within the distorted reality.

I can say here that I don’t give a solitary damn myself about anything I write here. My concern is for those poor, pitiful, unbelievably tortured other people who grew up being the victim of a twisted Borderline’s reality – and with all those helpless, powerless suffering children who are trying to endure a Borderline parent’s torture at this present moment in time.

I know what I am talking about here. My mother was probably among the best of the best of the best of abusive Borderlines. Her web of deceptions was as impeccable as it was sinister and destructive. And it was invisible, evidently, to all but her single chosen prey – me – and my poor siblings who had to live within the darkened home she controlled and ruined.

Because I was born into my mother’s hate-filled psychosis – and I mean this literally because the core of the psychosis formed during her labor with me – I had no possible way to begin to understand that my mother’s reality was not real. The discoveries of REAL reality I uncover as I work with her 50-year-old-letters only come to me because I have found a way to take a safe stance as I read them. That safe stance is ONLY possible now because I have enough information, finally, about Borderline brain changes to detect the clues that show me the presence of my mother’s invisible psychosis when I encounter them.

I am able to make the invisible visible. There is no action more empowering for a severe early infant-child abuse survivor than this. As you read the following you will be a part of experiencing this process in action. Turn up the volume of your sensitivities here – turn it WAY up. The truth contained in the deceptions of an abusive Borderline’s lies – that create the reality they BELIEVE – are so subtle as to actually exist exactly at that BORDERLINE the name of their disorder suggests.

The BORDERLINE appears, like a line drawn in invisible ink, exactly at the place where the observer can detect THEIR OWN INTERNAL EMOTIONAL CLUES that a deception of such grand proportions actually exists that it seems beyond belief. It is at this BORDERLINE where what does not possibly seem believable is in fact BELIEVABLE that the expert Borderline brain’s creation of distorted reality becomes no longer invisible.

A Borderline such as my mother was does not possess within the operation of their brain or entire nervous system-body the capacity to detect the deceptions that form their reality.

The detection of the deceptions can ONLY come from those aware observers from the outside who have the capacity to – actually – experience the near outer-limits of EMPATHIC ability. Observers have to know their own self, be able to sense with exquisite, accurate sensitivity what they are themselves feeling – within their own body – as they interact with an expert, professional Borderline like my mother was.

My mother’s Borderline deception-reality was NOT ACCURATE, but it was profoundly presented as such, as it is in this letter. The clues to the truth do not lie here within my mother’s words. They lie within the body-brain-mind of the outsiders who read them.

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An example of the pervasively subtle psychosis my mother had about me — along with my comments. My grandmother was soon to come for her first visit since we had left Los Angeles and moved to Alaska in August of 1957 a month before my sixth birthday:

June 4, 1958

Dear Mother,

Imagine – 10 more days and you’ll be here!! Does it seem possible? Yesterday morning I looked at the calendar and was amazed to see that the happy day falls one week from this Saturday. But then I became concerned. It’s the best day for you to come but also the day I planned John’s party for the boys.

This is going to be a business letter as I’ll see you to chat in no time at all now. I do feel he needs a party. I wrote you about his shyness and Jo Anne’s remarks etc. and I’ve had quite a time overcoming this.

Then this summer I knew he had to have boys to play with and yet he didn’t want to go to Vanovers. They’re big boys for their age, bossy and dominating – like her and he’s too young to understand their talk and sarcasm – and far too sweet and sensitive. I knew he needed self-confidence this summer.

Well, I encouraged him to go to Headlows who I found out that they have 3 girls and one boy – perfect match? He’s a darling boy6 and John and he hit it off from the first.

Then another boy Johnny Johnson moved to the hill. His Mom owns the Department store at the shopping center. She’s nice and so is he – I like the Headlow boy better but they’re both nice.

Now yesterday Gerry Vanover came over but he’s loud, bossy etc. but I was nice and John was happy but still prefers others.

Now his party will be perfect. He needs it and I’ve promised. I want it late afternoon and a BBQ – hot dogs and rolls so it won’t interfere with your arriving except this: it will be an all boy party out doors and I don’t want the girls here. [She drew a little sketch for invitations that ‘John can draw’ showing person at BBQ.]

So last nite Bill and I talked it over and arrived at the conclusion if it suits you. At first I was afraid it would be too much for you to arrive midst a child’s party but you could rest indoors. Your plane is due to arrive around noon – give or take one hour! We’ll take girls over to Le Verne’s house. Her mom takes care of children anyway and I adore Le Verne. I’ll talk it up to girls – give them new color books and some ‘party food’. They’ve never been to her house and they’ll enjoy it.

I’d rather we all met you but plane could be one hour late or early so this way Bill and John will meet you – OK? And I’ll wait home. We’ll take you sight seeing Sunday and have family party Sunday too.

You’ll be here for that and meet boys too! Then after party we’ll all go get girls!!

Oh Mom, I get so excited! I’ve missed you so! Won’t it be wonderful? I’m working like mad to get house all clean, waxed and fixed so we won’t have a thing to do.

Bible School starts 9^th through 20^th and 3 older ones will go so you can rest and we’ll visit first week – only Sharon will be home. Even she knows you’re coming and talks about it constantly.

Now does this plan meet with your approval. I could go too if I was sure plane wouldn’t be late – we’ll see. I’ll have his party at 3:00 – 7:00 or could be 4:00 – 7:00. I’ll have house clean and food ready, potato salad, cake, etc. He’ll be in 7^th heaven and deserves it. Will give him our gifts on Sunday.

Now I haven’t asked Le Verne yet. Let me know your reaction right away!!

We’re planning lots of things to do on week-ends and Bill is going to buy a jeep truck today – good buy, only $600 and he needs it to get back to homestead – then I’ll have the car!!

First week relax. 2^nd week-end trip to Girdwood Road and Portage Glacier and visit gold mines and pan for gold!!! This is road will connect with our Eagle River Road when put through. [Linda note: 2010, the road was never ‘put through’.] We’ve never been to these places but have saved them for when you get here!!

Next week = you and I and children to Palmer and Valley. Nice ride, paved road and we’ll take picnic and visit Rusty Dow – a character and painter. I want to get some for art shop. Fun? Bill’s been to Palmer so we’ll go during week.

Week-end trip and stay over night – to Homer, Alaska. Colorful, interesting beautiful scenery but rough, dirt road and long trip but FUN. Another week-end to Seward. A long day trip and picnic!!

Evening – Fire Lake Lodge and Spring Creek Lodge for dinner at nearby places. Chart Room in town at Hotel. Music Festival in Anchorage. We’re going first Monday to visit gift shops with Alaska Woodcrafts – Mr. Bockstahler’s new wife – you’ll like her. We want ideas and you’ll enjoy it.

So much to do and see. Weather is coolish in 60s and 70s – I think you’ll need sweaters and blouses with sleeves. Nights are light and cool!

We have beds all planned. Children go to bed as usual and when we all turn in – we transfer Cindy to cot in John’s and Linda’s room and you sleep in Sharon’s room on folding bed. It’s full size and comfortable – roll-a-way OK? There that’s settled!

I’m not planning on having neighbors over – you and I will visit them! I want to enjoy your visit and not plan parties OK?

One Saturday or Sunday we’ll drive in to see country back in but no need to hike

Remember, I wrote you I was to be Brownie Leader’s Assistant – sounds funny. I hate not to keep my promises (like a Good Brownie) and had hoped to do it with Linda but I got so worried. Kathy P. was to watch children. She’s nice but just turned 14 and a flitter budget. I got worried and this morning wrote a note saying I couldn’t help. I feel terrible but better!! Creek has risen so it’s not recognizable as same gentle stream. It’s overflowed and is fast, dangerous and deep. They never go there without us but might. At night you can hear water rushing even in house. The rapids and current is so strong – a child could never stand up and would be washed to river immediately. Makes me shudder!! I couldn’t leave Cindy and Sharon with her. I told her I could help after 14^th. She’s expecting and wanted me to take troop while she had baby in July. Also I’d be gone 4 hours and that adds up in baby sitting $ and I don’t trust neighbors. What a worrier I am!!

[Linda note 2010: Doesn’t surprise me she would find major reasons not to do something with me – and not to admit that she hated doing anything with me. I am really surprised she let me go – but having there would NOT have been good for me at all, either, of course. Her tone here is completely different than when she just wrote about doing a birthday party for John, even though at least here she is not ‘slamming’ me directly (at least).

My mother very rarely writes such a single long paragraph, either – confirming my suspicion that her unconscious would in no way allow her to participate as a loving mother in anything that had to do with me. Very cunning, sounds so legitimate.

Another side to this is that no doubt it SEEMED like something a GOOD mother would do, help with a Brownie troop. I putting together her Borderline public façade, her public persona, being seen as THIS KIND of mother would have been a good thing – like a prop in her pretend mother play.

Yet at the same time my mother lacked the capacity to ever concern herself, truly, with someone else’s needs. It became apparent to my mother that this would not have been a pretend activity. She would REALLY have had to take over this troop, REALLY and actually HELP, do something real outside of her own kingdom, her own range of control and influence. She knew she would not have been allowed to be her own true controlling self in this outside environment. The light of day would have shown up both her true intentions (that she did not see or comprehend) and her actions.

In addition, she certainly would not have been allowed to act toward me as she always did. She would not have been able to control and overrun me in the public setting of a Brownie troop group. At the same time, if she were away from her home, she could not have controlled what happened there, either. That faintly, perhaps, her precious doll-baby-children MIGHT have gone too near the creek and MIGHT have been endangered was NOT a concern for her children’s safety. It was a concern based on her obsession that her children were not only her possessions; they were extended parts of her self – her mind, her psyche and her sickness.

It is never the sign of a healthy, normal safe and secure parent-child attachment when the truth that lies within the attachment is that the parent’s deep psychological needs are involved in ‘getting met’ in the relationship. When this happens it is an activated parental insecure attachment disorder that is operating. When this happens, true caregiving for others is not possible. My mother was, as my sister recently noted, her children’s and her husband’s ‘puppet master’. She could not be in true relationship with anyone, not even with her own self.

These altered patterns of relationship are so subtle, at least within a very disturbed Borderline, that they are nearly impossible to detect unless the observer KNOWS what they are looking at. Because I have spent the past six years carefully observing my mother’s thinking and behavior as it appeared in her letters, all constructed with few exceptions for an outside ‘public’ audience that I can begin to notice where the deceptions in her thinking appear.

Even though my mother was purportedly writing to her mother privately, these letters, preserved as they have been for over 50 years, were written by my mother with the intention that someday they would be used to write ‘an Alaskan book’. On those very few occasions where I can see, touch, taste, smell my mother’s distorted thinking within these letters, I cannot ignore what I know. This small description of why my mother suddenly could concoct a completely believable (to her or to anyone else) reason why she could not assist as a Brownie scout leader in a troop with her daughter in it is one of those times I can see how pervasive her psychosis truly was.

My mother mentioned the creek to her mother in a letter written the day before this letter was, and she mentions nothing risky or sinister about it: “The creek is full and deep now as glacier and snow melts.” But the presence of too much water in the creek gave her the perfect alibi when she needed it. I don’t for one instant believe any of her children, especially Cindy who was extremely responsible as she approached 5 years of age, especially with John in the house when my mother was gone as he approached 9 years of age, would ever have gone near this creek alone – nor let sister Sharon approaching age 3. That my mother is saying she could not trust a 14-year-old sitter to watch her children safely is hog wash. Just plain Borderline-psychosis-constructed nonsense.

A Borderline does not have the capacity to conceive either of self or of others in a normal way. Everyone outside of my mother was an extension of herself, a living prop in her drama-play at life. That she – and everyone else – did not see or know what was going on in our home, in her life, or in her psyche did not take away from the fact that her psychosis touched and influenced everything she ever did.

My mother evidently somehow decided for this one year of my young life that it served her purposes to let me participate in Brownies. I have no reason to believe that this one experience would have been her single exception to her rule of making Linda’s life perpetually miserable. Somehow my being a Brownie made my mother look good in the public eye. This was my only childhood experience that let me get away from her influence and be around something meaningful and positive, and to interact as a child (age 6 here) with adults who treated me as the child I was.

For anyone reading these words who doubts the accuracy of what I am describing here in regard to my mother’s sickness, let me mention that one of the hallmarks of the Borderline mother is that NOBODY is supposed to ever detect the presence of the abuse these mothers so expertly enact upon a child. A Borderline like my mother was is an absolute professional at deception.

Part of the reason why deception like is being presented her in my mother’s account is so effective is that it comes from a completely constructed invisible, unconscious reality that exists BECAUSE the ‘owner’s’ psyche is completely contaminated by their disease. This pervasive contamination is like a highly effective contagion. It contaminates the growing mind’s of such a parent’s children, and it contaminates the psyche (unconsciously) of everyone who comes in contact with a professional-psychotic Borderline.

I encourage any reader who disagrees with my hard-earned ability to decipher my mother’s mental mess to take a look at how this kind of deception, so carefully constructed that it legitimizes whatever the Borderline mother turns her thinking toward no matter how insane, how out-of-touch with actual reality it might be. If you doubt me here, you believe my mother’s version of reality.

It is for the same reason you might doubt me (and my reality) while believing my mother’s lies that nobody ever detected the 18 years of severe abuse my mother perpetrated against me. My mother was very, very, very good at what she did – creating an alternate reality based upon her distorted brain’s operation that seemed to make sense to everyone, her own self included.

I am the only one alive who knows the truth about how this Linda-being-a-Brownie scout chapter of this story progressed, and more importantly, how it ended. Our family moved out of the Log House by the end of the summer of 1958, eventually into an apartment in Anchorage for the winter, and back to the Log House in 1959 by which time the homesteading saga consumed our lives in earnest. By fall 1959 I was back in Brownies, and had sold the essential Brownie Scout Cookies.

The afternoon I collected the money for the cookie sales, put it into a Milk Dud box, and then had it all fall out through the faulty bottom of the box without my noticing this was happening, before I returned home, marked the ending of this story with unspeakable, and unbelievable distortion and violence. My mother accused me of stealing the money, and because after hours in the evening twilight of retracing my every step through the neighborhood of Eagle River searching for the fallen coins I could not find them, I was accused of being a thief and a liar and was beaten afterwards severely – not once, but every time my mother brought up my ‘crime’ until I left home at 18. ]

Now John for first time is old enough to come and go and is so good about coming back in one hour – etc.

Children need me at home and I can spread myself too thin.

I trust you and Bill in day time and Le Verne at night and 3^rd choice days.

Golly so much to write. I only earned 1.75 imagine – Sunday! People looked but didn’t buy. Tell you more later!!

Children still asleep. I’ve been writing this in bed. Got Bill’s breakfast and got back in. They sleep late mornings til 9:00 or 10:00! So you’ll rest too – of course Bible School starts at 9:30 so will have to get them up early.

Guess what? Methodist bought Briggs new 30,000 house for the new parson for the new full time Methodist Chugiak Minister. Now what do you think of that and new church to be built!!

Mrs. Pottle wants me to help with tea for him Sunday? Probably will take children here if improves as never get to [words washed out here] visit both while you’re here. Must close! Love, Mildred. PS. Can hardly wait – you know me.