Tag: triggers

+SITE CLEAN UP – THE ALASKA LETTERS

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I am becoming very frustrated with the limitations of my site.  It is deactivating links to pages that USED to be there, and runs very slowly. There seems little I can do about it because I do not have the financial resources right now to be able to afford better site working conditions.  I am very thankful to WordPress for providing blog space free-of-charge, and need to continue to find ways to work within the resources that are currently available to me.

I am therefore going to work today to move all of my mother’s writings to another blog connected to this one, Taking Care of Mothers.  I will then be able to link to those pages from this Stop the Storm site, and hopefully things will work better.

I will also move all of the more technical brain information over to another section of my blog working space at Workspace for Stop the Storm.  I’m not sure how these 3 blogs operate together, but my guess is they are all sharing the same allocated 3 gb of space.

I’ll just have to work my way through this and hope for improved accessibility to this important information as it all relates to intergenerational transmission of unresolved trauma and insecure attachment disorders.

Thank you very much for your continued interest and support.  Frankly, I am worried that as I work to update and improve my WordPress personal blog I am going to lose the whole thing and have to start over.  I hope this whole process does not blow up in my face!!  I certainly HOPE NOT!! – Wish me luck!  Linda

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Just like any other aspect of ‘healing’ I guess.  I have to try to go back and ‘clean up the wreckage of the past’ as things have become overwhelmingly ‘dysfunctional’ within the workings of this blog IN SPITE of my best efforts to ‘do it right’ from the start.

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PLEASE NOTE:  As a result of some of the changes that I will be making today, active links in some of my previous blog posts will no longer work.  Rest assured,the information still exists and can be found under the most ‘logical’ page heading on one of these 3 related blogs.  For example, I will be sorting the most recent of my mother’s letters into their proper year category, and they will all appear at the Take Care of Mothers blog:  http://takecareofmothers.wordpress.com/

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+NEWEST MOTHER WRITINGS (060609 not filed)

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Here are some more of my mother’s letters that I finished transcribing today 060609.

These 1957 letters, written between my parents as my father was already in Alaska and mother and children waited in Los Angeles for Army orders (he worked for the Army Corp of Engineers as a civilian) that would allow us to join him there.  They present aspects of my mother’s thinking patterns PRIOR to homesteading.

These two 1960 letters were written after homesteading had begun, though we lived mostly in the Eagle River ‘log house’ while my mother carried on her nursery school.

The 1961 letters reflect the stress and turbulence of that troubled year, the year that a 5th child was added to our family.  (Please also note the previous posting of mother’s 1961 diary.)

This is a single 1962 short note from the Mother’s Day card my mother sent her mother, written on the baby’s 1st birthday..

These 1963 letters begin with our family living in the ‘log house’, moving the trailer down from the mountain to be painted, scrubbed and sold to pay for back rent, a move back to the homestead, ending with my mother driving down the Al-Can (Alaskan) Highway alone without my father in August.  Again, turbulent, chaotic, distressful times….

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Well, here’s the ‘special treat’ I discovered among the papers I am sorting my way through.  First I found one sheet of ‘random’ paper with the first half of this poem on it – transcribed it – and went on with the other letters.  Eventually I found a second piece of paper that had the end of this poem on it, and can now begin my grandmother’s pages.

Evidently this recipe for marital bliss either wasn’t or couldn’t be followed.  I find it interesting that the ‘shades of liberated women’ that both my maternal grandmother and great grandmother were, found itself into this poem regarding pay for one’s work at home for the family.  My mother’s parents divorced around 1930 (about unheard of at this time and created an embarrassing sense of shame within my mother) just after the stock market crash.  Grandfather Charles had been a successful stock broker who lost all in the fall of 1929.  After the divorce, my mother’s mother went to work and used her master’s degree in psychology, 1918, to support herself and her children.

My sister, Cindy 1953, will be sending me copies of my mother’s mother’s brief beginnings of her own autobiography that were recently discovered.  I look forward to also adding them to the grandparent pages that are dedicated to our understanding of how patterns transmit themselves through parenting practices down the generations..

+LINKS TO TODAY’S PAGES ON DISSOCIATION AND DISCLOSURE

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How some abused children grow up to be dangerous parents:

*FURTHER UNDERSTANDINGS ABOUT DISSOCIATION

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Memory retrieval of traumatic experiences can feed dissociation.

Disclosure, on the other hand, allows us to  find words to define, limit, create boundaries for, and verbally express (including being able to THINK about) our traumas.

Disclosure leads to healing through closure:

*THE ADVANTAGES OF DISCLOSURE

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+HOT OFF THE PRESS

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Link to new Brother 1965 story:

*RED ROBIN

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MY RESPONSE TO MY BROTHER’S STORY:

This reminds me of a time maybe 25 years ago when I was shopping in a small local grocery store in the northern Minnesota town I then lived in.  I had intuitively noticed something happening like a drama between a man, a woman and a small boy of about 4 years old. I had seen the three of them in the store together earlier, only now as I passed through the checkout line I noticed the mother was against the store wall to my right, the father was standing near the exit door to my left, and the little boy was walking around alone with his little arms wrapped around a large blue plastic ball.

At first as I watched him I thought he had ‘lost’ his parents as he moved back and forth between the ends of the isles and end of the lines of people at the check out.  But as I watched I soon understood I was watching an entirely different kind of story unfold.

I moved through the line, paid for my groceries and was leaving when I noticed the mother still inside the store, the father holding the door open, the mother was giving hand signals to the little boy.  At the perfect moment he ran out the door, the mother slowly followed him after a count of 5 seconds, and the family reunited and meandered across the parking lot to their car.

I swear I stood inside that store with my mouth open dumbly, not believing what I had just witnessed.  Those parents had brought their child into that store for the direct purpose of teaching him how to steal.  I awoke from my trance and yelled at the cashier closest to me, “Those people just stole that ball,” as I pointed out the front window.

No, they knew that ball hadn’t been paid for, and out the door after them raced the store manager.  I don’t know what happened next but those people didn’t get away with their ball this time.  How many times previously had those parents given that boy their lessons?  How many times afterward?  Did the ‘getting caught’ part create any break or intervention that might help that little boy understand there’s nothing good about stealing?  Or did they all become just that more determined to learn to steal better?

I don’t know, but it was an eye opener for me.  I wondered what chance of a good life does a child like that have if that is how his life is at the beginning?

I know that if I were faced today with a scene such as you are describing I would at least take down that man’s license plate number and call 911, describing to the police exactly what I had witnessed.  Unfortunately the system itself is not what it could be, but it is the best that we have.

Very disturbingly research is now showing that for all the efforts being made to stop physical assault against children, the effects of a child’s exposure to VERBAL abuse alone can cause more long term harm to a child than does any other single form of abuse — and the physical marks don’t show.

We need to know what we are looking at when we see these wounded children. There might be times that we can look into their eyes, times when we might be able to say a word to them, spend time getting to know them in some safe way, some way to let them know as soon as they are old enough that they can report to adults themselves what is hurting them out of sight of others.

Of course there is controversy about the ‘correctness’ and stringency of laws against abusing children.  But if we think about it logically, would we ever say it would be OK not to have any laws against killing other people because, who knows, sometimes the dead person deserved to die?

+SIBLING LINKS

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**Cindy’s Letter to Mother 1994

**CINDY’S BLOG POST on Mother (060409)

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**FAMILY TIME – by Brother (1965)

**SELLING THE HOMESTEAD

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Please refer back to this section of the blog as time goes on for future writings by my siblings:

MY SIBLINGS’ COMMENT PAGES

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+INNOCENT TARGETS FOR MY MOTHER’S RAGE

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Trying to write the story of my childhood in a logical, chronological, coherent way is an almost overwhelming task.  As I’ve said before an inability to tell a coherent life story is perhaps the MAIN symptom of an insecure attachment.  This dis-ability to either live a coherent life or to tell the story of one’s own life in a coherent fashion manifests itself by degrees of damage in accordance with how insecurely attached a person is.

These degrees of damage move down the scale from being slightly insecurely attached to extremely insecurely attached.  For those of us like my mother and myself, the most severe insecure attachment pattern, that of disorganized-disoriented, means that we are not even securely attached in our fundamental relationship between our self and our self.  As a result, we cannot possibly either live a coherent life or tell a coherent story of our life.  That is what the disorganization and disorientation of our insecure attachment pattern, formed into our early developing brain, did and does to us.

Our condition is a direct result and manifestation of living through traumas at a very early age that built themselves into our developing brain, body and mind.  I understood very early in my own research about the reality of my condition that what is known as ‘peritrauma’ is key and central to my understanding of a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern.  Peritrauma is what happens in the middle of the experience of a traumatic event during what the experts call the Acute Trauma stage.

I suspect that we will gain far more information about how the experience of trauma affects us when we begin to connect what the medical profession knows about how trauma affects the physical body with what the psychiatric profession knows about how it affects us psychologically.  At this point in time I find that descriptions of peritrauma are mostly contained within the Acute Trauma medial realm as it relates to the physical body as if our physical body can be separated from what happens within the brain and mind.

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I always use the online Websters dictionary to find definitions for words I require so that my findings can always be consistently tracked back to this one main source of information for the Modern English I use in my thinking.  Yet not even Websters seems to contain the word ‘peritrauma’ or ‘peri-trauma’ within its data banks.  I see this as further indication that we have not yet as a culture put the most important information about what truly creates disaster in our lives into the collective data banks of our own thinking.

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Dictionary: trau·ma   (trô‘mə, trou‘-)

n., pl. -mas or -ma·ta (-mə-tə).

  1. A serious injury or shock to the body, as from violence or an accident.
  2. An emotional wound or shock that creates substantial, lasting damage to the psychological development of a person, often leading to neurosis.
  3. An event or situation that causes great distress and disruption.

[Greek.]

traumatic trau·mat’ic (-măt‘ĭk) adj.
traumatically trau·mat’i·cal·ly adv.

From : http://www.answers.com/topic/psychological-trauma

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I discovered this link through my efforts to connect physical trauma to mental trauma.  I can think of no more of an accurate place to begin to think about the effects of peritrauma as it relates to child abuse than this one:

[PDF]  Psychology of Terrorism

File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
pressure to define terrorist behavior in terms of psychopathology, and he clearly suggests …… peritrauma and posttrauma risk factors, are central …… Webster’s New Collegiate Dic- tionary. Springfield, MA: G & C Merriam Company. …
bourbonandlawndarts.googlepages.com/Psychology.of.Terrorism-0195172493.pdf –

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Acute trauma is the physiological stage we are in while we experience any trauma.  Acute trauma affects every possible aspect of who we are as human beings with bodies — including our brain-mind.  Peritrauma is the ongoing experience of being in an acute trauma experience as we are enduring it.  Post traumatic stages are the result of not completing the acute trauma stage adequately so that it can be ‘passed through’ rather than NOT ‘passed through’.

In my thinking, it’s that simple.  Either we experience the acute trauma stage and come out the other end having completed the trauma cycle, or we don’t.  If we do not complete the trauma cycle this means that aspects of the peritrauma we experienced AT THE CENTER of the acute trauma stage are carried within us in our bodies, brains and minds.  We have not, therefore, re-stored ourselves to the state we were in before the trauma happened.  We have not re-covered our previous state.  We have not re-membered the being that we were before the trauma occurred.

We are left fragmented within ourselves and will not be able to tell a truly coherent story — not even to ourselves — of what the experience was like for us because we are actually still in it.  When we are left with unresolved, uncompleted traumatic experiences within us — in the form of continued and ongoing peritraumatic reactions that originated during the acute trauma experience — trauma will continue to live itself through us.  We are therefore correspondingly robbed of our own ability to live our own lives free from trauma.  It owns us.  It possesses us.  And it can consume us.

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If severe traumatic experiences happen to very young infants and children, the traumas so build themselves into the fabric and structure of the early developing brain-mind that the peritraumatic spectrum of these experiences can never be later extricated.  They instead determine how the survivor will process information about being in the world for the rest of their lives.  Dissociation, I believe, becomes the operating system of these brain-minds because the ongoing peritraumatic experience of the traumas were integrated into the brain-mind itself.

This is how a brain-mind built in, by and for a malevolent world continues to operate as it knows and is forced to always remember that the world is not only unsafe, but is also a disorganized and disorienting place to have to survive in.  It will never be able to re-member itself as having lived before in any state other than a peritraumatic one.  This kind of malevolently-formed brain, created in a severely traumatic early world, can never re-store to or re-cover back to a state it never knew in the first place.

As a result, the disorganization, disorientation, incongruity, and incoherence (and dysregulation) that is by definition a part of the peritraumatic experience during acute trauma will continue to operate through an insecure attachment system within the body and brain-mind of such a survivor for the rest of their life.  Organization, orientation, congruity and coherence, if they exist within such a brain-mind at all, will be limited to certain sections of a person’s life.  These separate sections might contain large fields of related experiences, but these fields of experience will not themselves be healthily connected to the survivor’s ongoing coherent experience of life.

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Trauma triggers create a shift in the ongoing experience of such a person’s life.  This shift is automatic and unconscious, and happens at the speed of light because the electrical communications between the cells of our bodies, including our brain-mind, happen that fast.  For severe childhood trauma survivors, both the trigger as stimulus and the automatic reaction to the trigger, directly stimulate their disorganized-disoriented dissociative core foundation of who they are in interaction with life.  We should not be surprised, therefore, that these people continue to surprise us.  If they COULD become conscious of their patterns, they would even surprise themselves.

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I want to give you a simple and seemingly innocuous example of how my mother’s self was so easily disconnected both from her self as a self and also from the reality of those around her.  My sister, Cindy, pointed this out to me after she read this part of my mother’s June 5, 1959 letter ( *1959 Alaska Letters transcribed 060309 (not filed)):

“Oh, we looked funny when we got to town – me with boots, levis etc and all of us looking – well just like homesteaders!!  I hadn’t been ‘out’ for a week and hadn’t had a real bath since then!  We took showers at the women’s dormitory on the base – and all got dressed up in summer cottons!  My, we felt good!!!

I had packed our things in a suit case but had forgotten soap, shower cap and bobby pins and comb!  I couldn’t do a thing until I had them and even refused to go to breakfast until we were cleaned up.  I went over to the shopping center on Govt Hill and he opened up the store early (he was cleaning it) and I purchased the things.  Oh, I hated to be seen that way.  Once you’re in the city it’s just like Pasadena or any city and you feel out of place not dressed up—

Anyways later I found my shower cap and wanted a refund of 39 cents on one I’d bought so returned it and I was sure he’d never recognize me BUT he did!”

As Cindy points out, my mother often described her country-woman self by using her first name, Mildred.  She described her town-woman self by using her middle name, Ann.  Were it not for the inside information that we have about the condition of my mother’s brain-mind, we could believe that these designations were merely playful.  Yet the words of her letter indicate that she honestly and genuinely was completely amazed if not shocked and stunned that an outsider who had seen ‘Mildred’ would recognize her as being the same person when she later met him as ‘Ann’.

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Her interaction with the shopkeeper was not a significantly traumatic experience for my mother, yet her experience of the interaction demonstrates a key and central aspect of her brain-mind’s organization, or more accurately, of its disorganization.  At the instant she realized that this man actually DID recognize her, some aspect of her inner disorientation affected her.  This illustrates only a tiny drop in the sea of my mother’s ongoing disorganized, disoriented, incongruous, incoherent interactions within her own life.

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I believe that my mother’s deepest taproot of being-a-self-in-the-world was embedded in unresolved early peritrauma.  On this day, today, I would add Dissociative Identity Disorder to the long list of suspected diagnosis I might attach to her.  This list would, in my thinking, run the range from paranoid psychotic, to manic depressive, through Borderline Personality Disorder, some form of schizoid personality disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  She was a very dangerous ‘piece of work’.

Yet all of these patterns nicely fit within a framework of disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment.  As untrue as it might be, and as hard as it might be to accept if it IS true, I would say that just as my mother did not choose the malevolent conditions that formed her early brain-mind including her connection to her own self or her connection to the world around her, I do not believe she had the conscious ability to choose her later reactions to anyone or anything that happened in her life, either.   That includes even her reactions to a shopkeeper’s reaction to her.

She was therefore no more capable of responding appropriately to the world around her, which included her mate and children, that would be a rapid dog.  Anything about her that might have ‘appeared normal’ was simply a part of one ‘larger field of related experience’ or another.  These ‘related fields’ were glued together, organized and oriented around particular patterns and themes such as ‘looking good in public’, ‘taking care of the house’, ‘having well behaved children’, and/or ‘homesteading in Alaska’.

These ‘fields’ were only tenuously and fragily connected to the taproot of one version of her self or another that had managed to form in her early childhood and to survive into her adulthood.  These fields were not solidly and coherently either bound to one another or to her ongoing self-in-the-world.  This allowed ongoing triggers of early traumas to evaporate, on any given occasion, any semblance of ongoing order (or of reasonality) that her fragile psych might periodically be able to construct and maintain.

I imagine these fields as they might exist on floating islands, separated from one another and from the self that creates them.  They are incomplete dissociative realities, but in most cases they are the best that a survivor manage to create in their lifetime.

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Life with our mother occurred in the same active peritraumatic mine field that existed within her own self.  None of us were able to know ahead of time exactly what would trip the wire that resulted in one of her mines exploding.  Her various states of mind and states of being were dis-organized around the ongoing peritrauma that filled her.  There was no healing of these toxic-filled gaps and no way to predict their explosions or to protect ourselves from them.

What I do know is that whatever happened to my mother during her early childhood, she came out of it mad as hell, full of uncontrollable hatred and rage, mean and fighting.  In some cases, ‘hell has no fury like a scorned child’.  Unfortunately my mother’s children were targets of her madness.

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+OH, I REMEMBER THE SMELL OF THAT CLEARED EARTH

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It came to me today while I was again working on transcribing more of my mother’s letters that after my 1980 treatment program for alcoholism, the one that identified that I was a victim and depressed (first time news to me in my world), when I called and tried to talk to her about how she treated me in my childhood — before she became so defensive and I hung up on her and whopped and jumped for joy at my own audacity — I also had asked her if I could help her write her homesteading book.

She said to me, “That’s my book.  Bill and I were the homesteaders, not you.  I don’t want your help.  If you want to write a book, write you own.”

She never wrote hers.  I can’t write it for her, either, but I can put in the hours and hours and hours it takes to transcribe these letters.  I am emailing parts of them to my siblings, and through my one sister to her granddaughters — not about the abuse, but just about some of our childhood experiences that are interesting, that are a part of our family history and herstory.

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I still struggle with my own position in my mother’s reality, knowing it was running consistently behind the scenes and between the lines within many of her letters.  I know that in the 1959 early days of first arriving on the mountain homestead life was a special kind of good, a magical kind of good.  Hope abounded as did the thrill of this new adventure.  Life there had not had enough time to sour yet.

I also know that my mother experienced a lot of happiness if not actual bliss during those early months.  I know that some of her happiness meant I was spared trauma during that time.  I have clear memories of trying to please her.  I remember rolling up all of our sleeping bags every morning and being thanked.  I remember being a part of the family in the newness of this new life.

And yet I know the shadow of trauma was not far from me even then.  I am just blessed to not know about it specifically during those early homesteading times.  I am grateful for that.  Yet I also feel today like a page torn out of a story book, that sometimes can get stuck into the story and the rest of the time is removed and just plain missing.

My page was stuck in the story at the time of our early homesteading beginnings. I got to be one of the birthday candles on the cake of our new life.  Everyone was thrilled and excited.  No other party could have been that grand.

If I was placed in my outcast scapegoat role during these times, I do not remember it, nor do I want to.  I want this happy, included time.   It remains most precious to me, no matter what happened after the party was over and the sorrows began again.

I remember my father clearing the land.  I remember crawling through tunnels and into caves the tree trunks and roots made as my father scraped the land and piled them in the sweet, damp, soft earth windrows.  I have never smelled anything else that good in my life — but I smelled it then.

I would not trade those memories for anything.  I would not even have given my suffering away willingly if that would have meant I could not be with that land.  But this is for my future stories.

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This is an example of how my mother talks about the homestead in her letters to her mother in 1959:

“We had one rainy day this week & I couldn’t let the children out all day – nothing seemed nice then – but oh, today – how I wish you were here to share it with me.

I’m writing this letter to you while sitting on the cot outside in the sun.  There’s a very slight wind & the leaves & trees are rustling & the sound of it & the creek & the river sounds [like] the waves of an ocean!

Oh Mom, I hardly dare to love this place so & love it I do.  I am in love with it – just as Bill was.  It’s Shangri-la & I must share it with you each & every summer – now Mom, if we get title this winter & we must & I’ll never rest until we do!!  THEN now, I am serious – plan your summers here!!  Or at least 1 entire month every summer – but there’s so much room here you could have a little place all your own!  Now you write & answer me!!  No fancy trailer idea – no, no, no – a small log house or a tiny 26-ft trailer like ours – because after all, you live outdoors all summer here!!

Every time I look around I wish to run & shout with glee – oh, such beauty – I’ll never want again for anything —  I’ll wait & wait & wait only this land, only this land!!!  I love it, I love it, I love it – our homestead & we’ll live here for ever & ever & ever!!

…. I sound love sick & I am!”

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I read in today’s letters as I transcribed them over and over again my mother begged her mother to come up and visit.  Over and over again, and YES it got BORING transcribing those parts.  Yet I did, and I’ll leave her words of pleading to her mother alone for now though they will probably be edited out of any later published collection.

Right now I am just plowing through these papers and recording what my eyes see.  I imagine I’m like an earthworm as it digests garbage and craps out something better than what went into it in the first place.  For there will be crap within these pages, even if I can only sense it between the lines.  But these letters are still a story of lives lived, if only from my mother’s very filtered point of view.

But we were there.  We were her children and we were there.  For good or for bad (as my mother might say in a letter), how many people actually have this kind of a record of their childhood on paper?  And how strange it seems to me to be the one doing this work, the invisible one, the one mostly torn out of the book of the ongoing fabric of my family’s life except during these early homesteading months.

The one that was frozen on her childhood bed for days and days and days, standing frozen in corners for what seemed like eternity.  The one beaten and shamed and blamed and hated is the one with the ‘pen’ now.  And I still have stories of my own to tell.  But for now, I will let the time line of my childhood unfold itself as I sort out and order these letters while time remains — both for them and for me.  (Neither of us are getting any younger.)

What remains of the stories of our childhoods?  Who holds those stories, both the visible and the invisible?  Capture them.  Write them.  Tell them.  Share them.

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In the end, is there anything left BUT the mystery of it all?