Tag: triggers

+FINDING THE CRACK IN MY BORDERLINE MOTHER’S REALITY

alchemynow3 Comments

At 5:35 pm on Good Friday, March 27, 1964 I was 12 years old and not yet a woman.

Then the great Alaskan earthquake happened on this day at 5:36 pm — the second strongest earthquake on record anywhere on our planet.

http://images.google.com/images?q=1964+alaska+earthquake&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=Eyz-SfPnA5ectAOtoaDWAQ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title

http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/64quake.htm

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I could tell you my personal story of the earthquake that day when my menarche happened, but all I want to mention now is that by the end of that three minutes of terrible shaking, I was a woman.

What matters most to me right now is that because of the earthquake, because of my mother’s writing about her personal experience during it, because those pieces of paper she wrote her story on survived for over 40 years and then found their way into my hands after her death in 2002, I now have proof of a critical point regarding Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) — most importantly of my mother’s version of this mental adaptation to early traumas and my assessment of her condition.

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I believe that an abusive borderline parent will do everything in their power to keep the ‘outside world’ from seeing or being able to detect both their broken mental condition and the abuse that is a result of it.  This is what makes BPD parents so extremely dangerous to their offspring.  Nobody outside of the family is likely to EVER suspect the existence of either the mental illness or the abuse.  (Knowing the signs to look for in order to notice in the first place and then to be able to see through the crack in the reality of BPDs will be covered in future posts).

I am not saying that my mother’s mental illness or her abuse of me was invisible to the outside.  I am saying that a combination of the fact that nobody cared with the fact that these same people did not know what they were seeing even if they were looking, resulted in a complete absence of intervention for the entire 18 years of my childhood I spent being severely abused by my mother.

It is likely that my father also succumbed to these same factors, although the additional fact of him being my father SHOULD have allowed him the ability to intervene on my behalf in some way.  This is a good part of why I am pursuing my writing based on my personal experience.  I believe that personality disorders are so pervasive, consistent and insidious that until our present ‘enlightened era’ it has been nearly impossible for those who are on the inside to recognize what is going on, either.

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This is why what I found in my mother’s writings about her earthquake experience is so empowering to me because it confirmed what I intuitively know about her condition and affirmed my assessment on many levels both of the cause of BPD and of the consequences of involvement on any level with a person — especially a mother — who has it.

You can read her story as she wrote it at My Mother’s Alaskan Earthquake Journal Entry.

In the months just prior to receiving my cancer diagnosis I was hard at work sorting and copying into my computer all my mother’s letters, notes and journal entries concerning her homesteading experiences.  I will post what I have completed for you to reference, but there remains hundreds of disorganized pages and letters that still need to be included to make the entries complete.

These papers my mother wrote traveled thousands of miles, some of them being stored for up to 30 years in her various storage lockers she kept, and finally found their way to me nearly 50 years after she wrote them.  It was in this collection of her papers that I found the stories that she wrote the winter of her 11th birthday.  (SEE also:   My Mother’s Childhood Stories)

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All the time I was transcribing her writings I was searching for a clue that would show me the truth in her writings that would confirm what I know in my own heart about my mother’s mental illness.  Because my mother’s stated intention in writing any of these letters and journals was to eventually write what she referred to as her “Alaskan book,” they were written from the public side of the border wall that allowed her to write under the ‘spell’ of that BPD persona.  Because this borderline split between public and private is so fundamentally and profoundly crafted into the altered brain of a borderline it is usually impossible to detect it through their own description of their version of reality.

That is why what I found in her earthquake writing created in me a state of elation!  I FOUND it!!  I found the hole in her border wall, the crack in her reality.  I found the chink in the armor that she had developed as her brain grew in childhood to protect herself from unbearable pain.  I found the equivalent of my own Silver Chalice.  If I never read another word she wrote I have still successfully completed my mission and my quest.

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I need to take a related diversion, or detour at this moment to make a connection that I believe is vitally crucial to putting severely abusive mothers’ behavior in the social context of the human mythological imagination.

I encountered this ‘myth’ several years ago at the start of my research, Euripides’ Medea, and would like you to find a way to read it if you can.  It is contained in this book

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1417908971

though I read it in an earlier printing of this one

http://www.amazon.com/Greek-Drama-Bantam-Classics-Moses/dp/0553212214/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1241397818&sr=1-1

Refer to this for historical context surrounding the Trojan War and Jason and Medea:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea

Euripides’ famous retelling of this part of Greek myth in his play about Medea was first performed in 431 B.C., hence this story is a retelling of mythology that is older than 2500 years.  My point is that I believe this story is about a particular form of madness and can be seen as very closely related to aspects of what we now know of as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).  For whatever reasons the authors of the myth ascribe to her, in the end Medea murders her own children.

Had my mother been able to escape any consequence for her actions, I know she would have murdered me. In fact, this is a point of argument that I hold with the experts’ version of what dissociation is and what it does.  I DID NOT dissociate during my mother’s beatings of me.  I felt every single one of them because I had to remain absolutely aware and present during all of them as soon as I was old enough to control my body.  Her rage usually and quickly escalated to the point that she lost control of herself while she was beating me — in rhythm to her recitation of the litany she had created for me — SEE:  Litany from Start to Finish — to avoid the most dangerous falls her beatings caused me or I would have been killed — if possible, killed many times over.

It is evident in Euripides’ play that all the public present knew of Medea’s intent to kill her children because she stated it publicly and yet nobody intervened — not even when they heard the children screaming as she hacked them to death in their home with a massive knife.  Yet while many consider that this play refers to abandonment, one of the key symptoms of BPD, it is the ‘lower layer’ related to a mother’s ‘passion’ to kill her child or children that most fascinates me personally.

Because I understand that extreme childhood trauma can cause an evolutionarily altered brain to form, and because I believe that BPD appears as one of the manifestations possible from these changed brains, I also believe that it is the very, very ancient genetic information about surviving in the worst of all possible worlds that triggers this mother-passion to harm her offspring.  It is no different an instinctual reaction as one pursued by animals when they kill offspring, abandon entire litters, or choose the most ‘fit’ of the offspring to save while abandoning the others.

This is, I believe, the human basis of the killing Medea did of her children and the attempted killing my mother did to me.

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Now back to the earthquake writings:  My proof is contained therein.  If you read her writings at My Mother’s Alaskan Earthquake Journal Entry you will find in her story the following — (Words written in the brackets are mine as is the type bolding.  Eklunds were neighboring homesteaders on the valley floor whose house my sisters, younger brother and I had been staying at while my parents were in Anchorage during the earthquake):

“Finally Eklund’s house was in sight – from outward appearances all seemed fine.  She came running out as we approached.  I could see our children were fine.  I was so thankful!  I hugged and killed [meant kissed no doubt but she wrote killed], each child in turn.  We were all together again.  I can’t emphasize strongly enough – that this was all that was important.  We could always start over again – even though for us, who like so many Alaskans have struggled so long and hard for everything and still have so far to go.  We could and would, if necessary, do it again.  I’m sure there was absolutely no questioning our minds to that.”

BINGO!

Even if we call this a ” Freudian slip, or parapraxis,  an error in speech, memory, or physical action that is believed to be caused by the unconscious mind,” the unmistakable evidence is here in her writings that what I suspect of her mental reality was real.

When I am ready to dig through boxes again, and ready to set up my scanner and do this, I will scan in the actual words as she wrote them with her own hand.  I transcribed them into my computer exactly.  There is no way, once a person sees her writing, that the two middle letters in ‘killed’ could possibly be construed as being the two middle letters in ‘kissed’.

Finding this hole through which I could see her reality may well be the only tangible vindication I can ever discover that proves my mother was who she did not say she was, particularly as she terrorized me from the moment of my birth as a result of her psychosis.

The only other related confirmations that I have found in her writings appears in the last of her childhood stories (mentioned above) and in her writing of the dream about the dark rainbow and the storm which can be seen at

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/about-stop-the-stor/

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Drawing the line between the real world and the reality of the world of a borderline becomes nearly impossible particularly for those of us who were abused by one from birth.   Not only the trauma is built into the body-brain, but as a result, the version of the borderline mother’s reality is built into the survivor, as well.  I know my mother’s is built into me.

These three ‘holes’ that appear in my mother’s writings are thus critically important for me to both possess and to consider as I attempt to face the reality of what happened to me on all the levels that my mother damaged me.  I’m not sure that anybody who was not severely abused by a borderline parent can even begin to imagine how important these tangible expressions that illustrate clearly the break in the nearly perfect facade a borderline shows to the public world is — or imagine the terrible confusion such a parent creates in the minds of those she abuses.

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My mother never knew that she meant to write that word KILL, yet there it was where I was able to find it.  What a gift this discovery is to me, and perhaps to someone else who reads this post.  That word is a direct connection to the ancient genetic potential for survival in a traumatic world that mothers who have been abused themselves CAN form even in this very real current day world.  Because the evolutionary throw-back potential can exist in a brain that was traumatized during its development, it is folly for us to remain puzzled on any level when we hear of a mother abusing her children, not even her infants.

We can no longer afford to be puzzled when mothers actually kill their offspring, either.  All the evidence that trauma can turn a mother into a killer is in the 2500 year old play about Medea which I am sure only reflects a reality that has been with our species from the time of our beginnings.  It was present in my mother’s writings and in her abuse of me.

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I also want to note here that the infliction of self harm and self injury that is common to borderlines did not have to be a part of my mother’s spectrum of behaviors because she made no distinction between herself and me.  I was a projection of all that she had been taught to abhor within herself.  I was thus an externalized aspect of her mind — a mind that was, in effect, turned inside out because the burden of containing her own reality within herself was potentially too much to bear.  She could then heap all kinds of punishments and injuries on me and did not have to self-harm her own body.

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As always, thank you for reading — Your comments are welcome and appreciated.  Linda

EARLY TRAUMA BUILDS DISSOCIATION INTO THE BRAIN

alchemynow9 Comments

Sometimes thinking with a dissociated mind is like trying to carry too many groceries in your hands at one time.  It takes an incredible amount of focus and concentration to be able to process information that to others would seem obviously connected and therefore would be easily considered in a fluid, flexible and ‘together’ fashion.

Some of my writing might be difficult for readers to follow because of the disconnected way information presents itself to me in the first place — as well as how it presents itself to me as I try to write coherently.  As I mentioned in previous posts, the inability to tell a coherent life story is directly related to how the early developing brain was fed information back in its beginning.  If that information was disconnected at its source — meaning in the brain-mind of an infant’s early caregiver — that pattern of disconnectedness, I believe, is directly communicated not only TO the infant, but more importantly is built into the infant’s growing brain.

Most of us today are at least vaguely familiar with the concept of downloading and uploading information on computers.  Taken in its most specific and literal meaning, early caregivers are downloading information directly into an infant’s growing brain.  The infant’s brain is forming itself according first to how information is being transmitted to it.  It is only after the ‘how’ aspects are transmitted that an infant’s brain can begin to process the specifics of ‘what’ is being transmitted.

Information that is not appropriate in the context of the caregiver-infant interaction and is inconsistently transmitted to an infant will be overwhelming.  It is in effect not an dissimilar to the way that wrong information being processed wrongly within a computer will crash it.  It is not unlike what happens to a car’s transmission if you were driving down the highway at 50 miles per hour and suddenly moved the gear shift to reverse.

A ‘rupture’ without possibility of ‘repair’ is created when any effective ongoing pattern is drastically — and I mean traumatically — interrupted.  We don’t usually think of it this way, but what causes these ‘ruptures without possibility of repair’ in a growing infant and young child’s brain is the presentation of the wrong information in the wrong way at the wrong time, and happens because these young one’s have had no opportunity to build a brain with capacity to process this incoming information effectively.

I believe that if maltreatment exists (as I’ve said before) during critical brain developmental stages during infancy and childhood, these ruptures without repair are themselves built right into the circuitry of the resulting brains.  Because their we are talking about interactions that occur in interaction with the environment, every single time such a lack of repair happens, after an overwhelming traumatic experience,  a ‘dissociation spot’ is created within the brain’s operational patterns that will be carried within such an individual for the rest of their lives.  This is one of the actual, physiological ways that trauma is built into a brain-body.

Knowing exactly which environmental triggers will cause these dissociation spots to become obvious in later years is nearly impossible because most of us with severe abuse histories have literally millions and millions of them built into our brains and into our bodies.   Every single time one of these dissociation spots were put there, or created in the first place, a physiological body-based response happened with it.   This is one of the ways that trauma is physiologically built into a brain-body’s memory.  It is literally formed into the actual cells themselves and affects the way that ongoing genetic processes operate.

If the trauma happens early enough and is severe enough, we DO end up with different brains and bodies as a result, as I mentioned in my previous post.  We are sensitive to stimuli differently and process information differently.  The vital and necessary ability to appraise and sequence information into usable segments that can then later be used in connection to new information is interfered with.

We are different because we are left with a broken string of pearls and a string that cannot be added onto in a normal useful fashion.  We are thus left with an incoherent life story based on a disorganized-disoriented, incoherent brain formed by the same kind of disordered attachment from birth.  Only some of us can go a good long way down the road of our life before we are faced with the reality of what this means to us.  We are left with an armload of groceries dropped on the floor, and we cannot pick them up.  Who is there that can or will help us?

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I believe that life operates through a pattern of circles and cycles.  Because of this, one can follow any given thought around until it connects to the opposite of itself.  I now wish to make the contrasting point to the one I presented in my May 1, 2009 post, “DOES THE GOOD MAKE THE BAD BETTER?” by asking a related question, “How does the bad help us to make our lives better?”

I do not see that there is ever a straight, obvious, easy road that connects the ‘bad’ of our lives to the ‘good’ of our lives.  I want to present you with an example of what I am saying.  From the earliest times of my life I evidently succeeded relatively well at finding ways to continue on living in spite of not only the abuse I experienced but also in spite of the ways I found to work with what happened to me.  Because the traumas were built into my body and my brain on an ongoing basis, I NEVER noticed the adaptations that my brain made to the traumas.

This is a critical point.  I ‘continued on being’ as Dr. Allan Schore says of abused infants.  I survived, and I have done so through a continuing process that was unrecognized and unknown to me.  Things would have remained the same IF I had not had cancer, or more accurately, if the cancer had never been treated and I had not survived it.  Because I had treatment, particularly chemotherapy, and because I came out the other end to be who I am today, I can now look back through the windows of that process and say that I have learned something I never could have possibly known otherwise.

To put it most simply, I have learned how I adapted to the traumas because those adaptations have mostly been taken away from me.

There are some things, even those as seemingly insignificant as the one I presented in my April 21, 2009 post “EARTH DAY: In Honor of the Grieving Chicken, ” that one might never be able to imagine or believe unless they are actually experienced.  If not for my cancer and its treatment I could never have imagined the adaptative abilities I had actually created in order to survive my abuse that made me believe I had done so ‘normally’.

I now know that my definition of ‘normally’ has to be expanded.  My adaptions were normal considering what I experienced, but they were not ‘normal’ in comparison to how other people, whose brains were not formed in, by and for trauma, operate.

I evidently was able to teach myself from birth in some amazing ongoing way how to think and act with a brain that had formed a mind that has millions and millions of dissociation spots built into it.  The chemotherapy regime that I underwent disturbed my brain as it interrupted both my memory and how my brain operates in relationship to memory.

I have know of no scientific support for what I know from inside of myself, but I believe what has happened to me post-chemotherapy happened because the part of the brain that processes incoming experience before it is organized for long term memory storage — the hippocampus — the only part of the brain other than the one that processes new smells that continues to build new nerve cells, called neurons — was directly affected by the working aspect of chemotherapy that stops all new cell formation.  That’s the same process that made all my hair fall out and made my fingernails stop growing and stopped the ability of the cancer cells to multiply.

Because the chemo stopped the rapid cells from growing in my hippocampus, I could no longer remember the steps I normally take to put on my makeup in the morning.  My friend, who also underwent the same chemo treatment, forgot to put her blouse on until she noticed it after she was already in her car to go to work.

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It would take a very caring and astute group of people to realize that an extremely dangerous side affect of chemotherapy — for those of us who formed brains containing dissociation spots from early abuse during brain formation stages — is a deterioration of the brain’s ability to utilize the adaptive processes that it found and learned in order to live relatively well in spite of the affects of the trauma on its development.

The wordless image that came to me in relation to this damage is that of a huge steel post being driven into the gears that run the Big Ben clock in the London Tower.

http://www.parliament.uk/about/history/big_ben.cfm

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While someone could remove the post and repair the clock, the rupture that happened to my ongoing memory processes about how to live an ongoing life in spite of the serious affects that trauma had on my developing brain cannot be repaired.  Yes, this sucks!

Yet as a consequence I now know intimately that I DID manage to create incredible patterns to cope with the dissociation of trauma in my brain.  I know it now because I can no longer DO IT!  I forgot what I learned, what I evidently taught myself from birth, how to do.

So is it a good thing I had cancer and chemotherapy so that I can now understand all of this?  Can what I learned as a result be of some valuable use to someone else?  I can only hope that it can, because I now understand how crippling massive dissociation is to any ongoing ability to manage one’s being in the world.

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There is another critical piece of information I now know about the link between having undergone severely stressful life events and the development of breast cancer.  This research is connected to the ongoing problem of women in Israel developing breast cancer at very high rates.

http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSCOL86917620080828?feedType=RSS&feedName=healthNews

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/stress.may.mean.greater.risk.of.breast.cancer.study.suggests/21418.htm

I have been blessed with excellent physical health and stamina all of my life.  I justified the fact that I didn’t need to get a mammogram because I did not fit any of the risk factor categories that I knew of.  Had anyone ever told me that the stress of severe child abuse increases one’s risk of getting cancer, THAT fact I would have heard and understood.  I understand now that early abuse alters the way the immune system develops as well as alters brain development.

In addition, I now understand that anyone who suffered extreme abuse from birth is at an even higher risk of damage to any ongoing well-being they may have carved out of life for themselves because they no doubt have complicating brain factors due to their brains having adjusted to dissociation.  They are at risk because any chemotherapy that stops rapid cell division will affect their hippocampus.  They are at risk of forgetting everything they ever learned and remembered about how to keep themselves out from under the devastating effects that underlying dissociation  would cause them in their ongoing life processes.

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Now it takes very little demand for information processing to “make me drop all the groceries,” and I am now on full disability because of it.  Imagine running first in an important race.  Suddenly you trip and fall, breaking both your legs.  You are hauled by ambulance to the hospital where the legs are set and put in casts.  Your leg bones take time to heal.  It takes time after this repair for you to get full use of them back again.  How likely are you going to be to get back to that same spot on the race track to resume the race and still even be in the running?

None.  So I can now say that the me that existed prior to chemotherapy is dead.  I cannot go back and get her, either.  I had evidently gone through a continuous process throughout my lifetime to adjust to living with the dissociation that trauma had created in my brain.  I can no longer remember how I did it.

I know that I am not alone.  I am among those on life’s battlefield who have been shot and wounded with thousands of bullets of trauma.  Yet we get up again and again and again and struggle forward toward the end of our lives.  Do we ever need to question why we suffer?

I had laid out the equivalent of a fragile and vulnerable bread crumb trail in the children’s story of Hansel and Gretel that had allowed me to move from my first breath forward in some kind of ‘associated’ way.  By the time I was done with that chemo, that bread crumb trail had vanished and it cannot be replaced.  Until chemotherapy I had never known that trail existed in the first place.  I know it now because it is gone.

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Thank you for reading.  Your comments are welcome and appreciated.

 

+BLACK RABBIT

alchemynow1 Comment

Please see:

http://preventchildabuseny.typepad.com/prevent_child_abuse_new_y/2009/04/response-to-apples-baby-shaker-application.html

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Please follow this link to the story. It has been moved into the section on my childhood stories.

WHY NOT TO REMEMBER MY MOTHER

alchemynow4 Comments

PLEASE NOTE THIS WARNING:  This post contains triggering material which may be difficult for anyone with a history of trauma and abuse to read.  Please either do not read this alone without a support person at your side, or stop reading  immediately if you become uncomfortable with yourself as you read it.

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I received the following comment today related to + About this site

“Linda, I did not pick this up in your writing ( which is amazing ). Is your mother still alive and did you ever have an opportunity to confront her or make peace with her.”

My reply was that I would write about this in today’s post.  Not an easy task.

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The first image that presents itself in my awareness (from my right brain’s storehouse of wordless images) is one of being in a store shopping for flower and vegetable seeds.  I see a well stocked large four-sided display rack that I can turn around in circles so that I can see the entire display.

Suddenly I see that all the packages are ripped open and the seeds are dumped in a pile on the floor.  All the seeds are mixed up and it is now my job to sort them all out ‘correctly’ so that they can be resealed in new packages and put back where I found them in the first place.

I know more now about what this image is showing me than I ever could have before.  All my memories regarding my mother are sealed into separate ‘packages’ and stored according to my survival brain’s wisdom.  They are not linked together in any sort of order based on a timeline according to when these experiences happened in the first place.  Never in my childhood was I able to connect them together and it is only with great concentration and effort that I can attempt to do so today.

Every single memory I have of my mother is linked to trauma.  To  continue with my seed package image, it is like every single package and every single seed is contaminated with poison, and if I touch any of them my brain tells me I could die.   In order to “go back there” I have to apply a level of thought that can allow me to do this.

I have to find and put on a ‘safe suit’ of protection that allows me to go back and handle my memories.  That safe suit is barely adequate and consists of a mental effort I must make today to understand that there was and is no reason for what happened to me.  I use this word, reason, on many levels.  My mother’s mind was broken so she had no ability to use reason regarding anything that involved me — ever.  She was mentally ill and therefore everything about her was irrational.

Her psychosis regarding me was complete and indissoluble.  Because I do not have a mind like hers, even though she influenced nearly every thought that was built into my brain until I was 18, I cannot look into my past from a reasonable or rational place so that I can describe my experience from ‘my side of the fence’.  That is probably the final trauma of unresolved trauma.  It cannot be translated, on any level, into the realm of reason.

Yet I have to think about reason because it is the only ‘safety suit’ I have.  Everything about my relationship with my mother was, from my first breath, about the reason I needed to be hated and continually punished.  I was the devil’s child and therefore absolutely evil.  My ‘poor’ mother was given the curse of having to be my mother, and therefore she must do the best that she could to ‘deal with me’ and try to accomplish the given, hopeless task of making be ‘better’.  She applied herself to her task with vengeance.

In her mind, she had failed miserably in her mission by the time I left home at 18.  In her mind that failure was absolute and her belief in that lasted to her final breath.

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In order to ‘stack the deck’ in favor of reason I will mention a few concepts used by experts as they work with people who have posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  (This is a diagnosis which I ‘have’, along with dissociative identity disorder — without the identities, which I will discuss later) and major reoccurring depression.)  The term ‘flashbacks’ is used in relation to the unresolved traumas in PTSD.  Another term used is ‘flashbulb memories’.  What this means is that the experiences of trauma have not been integrated into the ongoing experience of the person who endured them.

This lack of integration happens for many reasons, including the fact that nothing has useful, that can lead to an increased ability to survive future related terrors — by the individual or by the species, has yet been learned as a result of these experiences.  When abuse begins from birth, before the infant has any possible capacity to ‘process’ its experiences, the very foundation of memory formation is altered within the forming and developing structure of the brain.  Having the traumatic memories ‘stuck together’ in any meaningful fashion is therefore the exception, not the rule.

Memories of the individual experiences are therefore like millions of seeds in a pile on the floor.  To even have some of them organized and sorted out into a small group of related experiences — so that they can at least be stored in separate packages — requires extremes of applied effort.  To assign them meaning is nearly impossible because they happened in and belong to a malevolent world without cause and effect and without reason or rationality.

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I believe that it takes an extremely creative and intelligent mind to survive experiences like mine and be able to come out on the other end being able to even remotely ‘act normal’.  This intelligent mind has to have had opportunities to form some active coping skills that allow this eventual ‘gluing together of the pieces’ in any meaningful way to happen at all.  I describe some of the assets that existed for me in my post THE RESILIENCY MYTH.

While the following might be a controversial statement, it is my current assessment of the relationship of ‘mental illness’ to survival.  Had I received the potential genetic combination that could have resulted in a mental illness such as my mother had, and if my body could have taken that detour in order to have survived without the self reflective abilities of a mind that was not given this detour, I would have turned out like my mother did.  I do not believe that she had a choice because whatever neglect and maltreatment she received during her brain developmental stages triggered the manifestation of her mental illness and there was nothing she could do about it, either.

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Please make no mistake here.  I was born in 1951 and raised during an era when child abuse was still not recognized and addressed by our society at large in any meaningful way.  In today’s ‘enlightened’ era, there is absolutely NO EXCUSE for outsiders of the family not to know and understand the symptoms a terribly abused child will manifest openly, and no excuse for them not intervening on behalf of the child.  Information on this topic will be presented in future posts.

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Because my writing is always a process connected to me and to my life as I write the words, and because I am always learning about myself and how I process information related to my personal experiences, I will share with you what is happening in my mind as I attempt to get closer to telling the truth about the question posed in the reader’s comment:  “Is your mother still alive and did you ever have an opportunity to confront her or make peace with her.”

In my brain of brains and mind of minds, yes, my mother IS still alive.  I do not have a basis for placing anything to do with my mother on a logical timeline and for keeping it there.  The reasonable fact is that she ceased to exist in her body in the spring of 2002.  I did not shed a single tear.  I’m not sure if any of my five siblings shed one, either.

I lack the ability to accomplish the action of finding every single separate ‘seed’ memory that involves her, facing them face to face, and making any of the equally dissociated Linda’s understand unequivocally that THEIR mother is dead.  The image that is in my mind now is that each seed has turned into a dandelion seed, that a powerful wind has come up so that each seed with its attached bit of fluff is now dashing away from me into the blue sky — and yes, to a place of safety for themselves — also leaving me in a place of safety as I sit here and write these words.

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I will make the effort of trying to grab perhaps one of those seeds or a handful of them before they vanish from me today. (By the way, future posts on attachment disorders, particularly about disorganized-disoriented attachment disorders, will describe how the lack of the ability to tell a coherent life story is one of the clearest marker that indicates these attachment disorders exist for a person.)

Moving on in my writing as I work to answer this commenter’s question, I see that I actually have a fistful of seeds grasped in each of my hands.  I guess fortunately for me I only confronted my mother once (seeds in my left hand) and disowned her once years later (seeds in my right hand).

Now I tell myself, “It’s OK Linda.”  I slowly open my left hand and protect those seeds from being whisked away before I can write the following:

(“Organize your thoughts, Linda.  Let the seeds put themselves in order.  Believe that there is a beginning and an end to this group of thoughts.  Now begin writing.”)

As I mention elsewhere on this blog, I completed 7 weeks of inpatient alcoholism treatment in 1980 and was then sent to ongoing therapy and given antidepressants.  I followed every piece of advice anyone gave me about how to ‘recover’ as avidly as a starving bird would hunt for seeds.  About a year after my exit from treatment, following the advice of my therapist, I DID call my mother to confront her.

All I knew at that time was that she had not been nice to me while she raised me, and that there was some discrepancy between her treatment of be back then and her treatment of me as a married adult mother of 2, as she sent me cute little cards with lovey-dovey I love yous enclosed.  I can return to that phone call with difficulty.  Like two powerfully opposing magnets the me in this chair writing attempts to move closer to the me I see standing in the dining room, sunlight streaming in the windows, cream colored phone in my hand, long twisted coiled cord draped around my feet as I stand there talking to my mother.

What happened?  I courageously told her that I was not willing to have a phony (no pun intended) loving relationship with her in the present (“Let me try to think here.  I got the first part out…  Catch that seed, Linda.  Hold onto it, look at it….”) — if — (“Come on, Linda, you can do this.  I know there’s all kinds of pain here, but you can find the words and not let the pain appear now.  Separate them out.  Let the words come but not the pain.”) — (“Is that possible?”)  (“Yes, trust me it is possible.”)  (Here comes the wind.  Stop this argument now.)  (“Who are you that I should trust a damn thing you are saying”)  (Stop this argument NOW.)

IF.  Getting back to the IF.  IF we can’t talk about the things you did to me while I was growing up.  That’s what I said to her.

She instantly switched to her ugly screaming rage filled voice and attacked me as she launched into the litany she had been building for me from birth.  SEE: *Litany from Start to Finish.  “You were a horrible, terrible, vile child!  You tried to kill me when you were born!  You deserved everything I ever gave you and even that was not enough!  Even your kindergarten teacher agreed with me.  She had been teaching for 35 years before you showed up in her class, and she told me you were more trouble and a worse child than any she had ever had in her class.”

Now, this is the GOOD part.  As she streamed and screamed through her litany of abuse I moved the phone receiver away from my ear, lifted up right finger and moved it to the telephone and dropped it with a sense of accomplishment, empowerment, finality and pride onto the disconnect button and I hung the receiver up on her in mid word.

I stood stunned for a split second and then experienced a flood of joy.  I started hopping up and down, and then began to skip around the house yelling in song, “I did it!  I did it!  I hung UP ON HER!”

Now the tears are here pushing against my eyes.  No, that wasn’t the end of it.  I wasn’t ready.  It wasn’t time.  Within a matter of days she called back with her sweet voice and I apologized, and the phony loving relationship was reinstated and maintained until the spring of 1989.  That is when I had a realization (too much for me to write about right now) that allowed me to write her a simple letter thanking her for being the mother that brought me into the world and telling her directly that because of the abusive things she did to me as a child I could no longer have a relationship with her in my lifetime.

She did not respond though she continued to bemoan the curse of being my mother to my siblings for years after that until they one by one quit listening to her.  I only saw her once — out of the corner of my eye as if she were a fleeting mirage of the shadow of a ghost — after that in 1990 as she passed through my desperately ill father’s hospital room.  (He had finally divorced her by then).

My father died in 2001.  I never confronted him.  I ignored and avoided him in my adulthood just like he did me in my childhood.  I believe that both of my parents had to make internal adjustments that allowed them to ‘go on being’ while having unbearable, overwhelming pain and sadness at their core.  I would also say that both of my parents died of a broken heart.

This is all I can write today.  I have to do my ‘Linda in today” things.  I cannot describe to you right now how she died, either.

++

I want to say here that the reason I do this writing is not in hopes of healing myself.  I am nearly 58 years old, and things will not get much better for me than they are now.  I accept that fact.  I write because I now there is value in sharing my experience so that others ‘out there’ with histories related to mine can perhaps see in my words a reflection of their own experience so that they can become empowered to own the fullness of their own traumatic lives.  I trust this is possible because I do not write from the top down — not from a place of put-together security based on secure attachment patterns that would create all kinds of benefits those that have them probably don’t recognize.

I write from the bottom up.  I write from a place of humiliation, terror, confusion and trauma.  I write from an incredible place called ‘the miracle of survival’.  I write from what Dr. Teicher of Harvard calls “an evolutionarily altered brain” formed in, by and for existence in a malevolent world.

++

But for now I am going to watch my blue parakeet bathe itself in its small dish of drinking water as I think about and then DO the act of finding it a better bathtub.  I am going to work on the little hand made paper cross earrings I am figuring out how to make so that I can add them to my inventory of crafts to display and sell at this Saturday’s farmers market in town.  They will be pure white with silver glitter.  I will eat the last of my homemade banana bread muffins, made from my grandmother’s recipe.  I added grated apple, dried currants and lots of walnuts.  That’s good for me.  That’s where I am going next.

But first, I am going to stand in the wind with my fists open and my palms facing the sky and let all the bits of dandelion fluff, memories of myself and my mother, blow away.

++

As always, thank you for visiting this site and for reading this post.  Your comments are welcome and appreciated.

+PATTERNS OF RESPONSE TO THREAT

alchemynowLeave a comment

This is how the cycle of life best works from my point of view:

Draw a simple plus sign — ‘+’

Place

— ‘HAPPY’ on the left tip

— ‘ANGER’ at the top tip

— ‘FEAR’ at the right tip

— ‘SAD’ at the bottom tip

Draw a small circle at the center and place ‘COMPETENCE’ there

Draw another circle around the outside of this ‘COMPETENCE’ circle and place ‘PROTECTION’ there

(Please note that I will not be presenting information on the happy state in this post because I consider it a bonus that we can access directly from our safe, secure, calm, optimal state of competence.  This post is about the survival process that results from a threat to our state of competence.  Very few of us experience happy as a result of having our life threatened — though for some the exuberance of challenge is stimulating and a positive experience because they feel absolutely confident that they can meet the challenge successfully.)

++++

We can complicate things all we want to, but even though this is a two dimensional  simple image , I believe that it  can be used to describe and visualize the operational pattern of life.

One thing missing from this simple image is something we have to visualize in our minds.  Picture this little ‘+’ you have drawn in the center of a bubble, surrounded and encased in the ongoing processes of life itself which I believe  can best be described  with one word — ‘CHANGE’.

What connects the ideal optimal state of perfect competence — or calm equilibrium — to all other life factors represented by the word change, is something that we can recognize in ourselves as the ‘STARTLE RESPONSE’.  This response ALERTS us on some level (I believe through interactions that occur within our immune system) that a challenge to competent equilibrium has occurred (as I described in yesterday’s post).  Startle can vary from low level surprise to extremes of traumatic shock.  However a life form detects this challenge, it matters as a central factor of existence.

++++

Now because I am writing as a human being to other human beings about our unique experiences of life, I have to add another bubble that contains the patterns I just described — ‘SENTIENT’

……………..

Main Entry:

sen·tient Listen to the pronunciation of sentient

Pronunciation:

\ˈsen(t)-sh(ē-)ənt, ˈsen-tē-ənt\

Function:

adjective

Etymology:

Latin sentient-, sentiens, present participle of sentire to perceive, feel

Date:

1632

1 : responsive to or conscious of sense impressions <sentient beings> 2 : aware 3 : finely sensitive in perception or feeling

– sen·tient·ly adverb

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentient

…………………………

Because I am limited to writing from my own point of view, I will direct you to two pieces of my previous writings so that I can place what I am going to say in context:

ALONE NAKED IN THE WOODS SINGING

This post describes an experience I had when I was 14 that allows me to entertain a certain degree of mystery regarding the possibility that all life has a conscious awareness of its own.  In my ‘vision’ was I sharing with a blade of grass what its own experience of its existence is like, or was I simply experiencing a human version of what a blade of grass experiences?  In other words, which ‘bubble’ was I in?

EARTH DAY: In Honor of the Grieving Chicken

In this post I describe a chicken behavior that defied my explanation of it, and again introduces the possibility that humans have no real idea what other species’ experiences are like to them.

++

With those qualifying concepts out of the way, I will write about what I think humans know about how to endure as our experience operates on the sentient level of being as we include both emotions and thoughts into our survival patterns.

Please go back to your ‘+’ image.  I want to describe how I believe this simple pattern operates.

I consider ‘AVOIDANCE’ of harm to be a part of the inner defense and protection circle.  If something happens in the environment that penetrates a life form’s defense circle of protection, it is experienced as a challenge and an adjustment involving resources has to occur to reinstate the equilibrium.

I must now introduce another word — ‘COPING’.  Coping can occur along a continuum from active to passive coping.  What it involves is the resource access and utilization process.  If everything is optimal, the transition process from challenge to adequate adjustment back to a state of harmonious competence happens so fast we hardly need to consider it on any level — except to witness it in our minds with awe and appreciation.

If, however, the transition stage of adaptation requires some more noticeable action for adjustment to occur, we move far enough away from the competent center to notice what might happen next as a life form responds to a challenge.

The startle response always requires an ability to accurately assess threat.  Once that assessment happens, resources have to be accessed in balance with the assessed risk and applied.  Coping skills are resources, and they require available resources.

I believe all of our most effective human coping abilities lie first of all within what we usually might think of as the anger arena and relate to the ‘GO’ (sympathetic) arm of the autonomic nervous system.  A threat to life or well being does not first elicit a lazy response.  A first response will involve the application of enough energy to meet the demands of a challenge.

Our most constructive responses originate, I believe, within this anger arena because it is here that we have stored all of our effective learning about how to actively defend ourselves against harm.  Our species very often experiences this as an instantaneous adrenaline response that we recognize as the ‘FIGHT’ response.

Good!  Recognize the threat, identify it, assess it, and respond appropriately and adequately to get rid of it as quickly, efficiently and effectively as possible using known and proven active coping skills so that calm equilibrium of optimal competence can be restored as quickly as possible.

++

OK.  But what if that doesn’t work?  What if the immediate response based on past learning experience (and remember that all genetic survival knowledge is contained in our active coping skill category) still leaves us at risk and under threat?  Now comes the move from the anger place to the fear place on our ‘+’ drawing.

I believe that for humans fear is always about the threat of being overwhelmed so that our life might be extinguished.  Our initial anger response is not related to fear because we first use resources that we are confident will do the job based on our competence abilities.  Only when those coping responses fail and our confidence becomes shaken do we move to the fear place. This movement only takes place if our active coping responses were ineffective and/or overwhelmed.

If we feel anger on any level that means we are in a state of using or hoping to use everything we know with success.  When we feel fear we can know instantaneously that we need to learn something new and find/use additional resources to meet a challenge, but we have to find a way to stay alive long enough to do this.

The fear state also involves active coping responses, most usually what we think of as the flight response.  I consider the freeze response to be a version of flight because it is also designed to remove one at risk from threat.  Both involve trying to be ‘out of sight’ from the threat and invisible (and therefore immune) to it.  They are retreat coping mechanisms designed to escape to a place of safety and security.

If one survives threat by using fear state resources and then is able to return to a state of competent equilibrium, most usually something new was learned in the process.  This ‘something new’ may then be available as a resource during the anger-fight stage next time this or a similar threat occurs.

If we continue to live but the fear state actions do not result in a return to the center state of competence, it is possible that the sad state may be the final resting point.  If we do not acquire knowledge of a new coping skill as a resource, we can end up completely stuck in this sadness state on our ‘+’ drawing until we do learn.  I believe this state is where depression manifests itself.  It is where helplessness, hopelessness, discouragement and demoralization feed into an incompetence cycle and the optimal state of calm and safe competence is never reached.

I believe that the state of sadness is a place of hiding….

Because we do not get to the sad state without first passing through the fear state, fear is literally carried through and combined with sadness.  When sadness from, for example, a ‘legitimate’ grief stemming from any kind of loss, becomes contaminated with fear, all sight of learning a way out can be lost.  This can result in giving up the fight, and only through teasing apart fear from sadness and examining each of them separately can we begin to see how to overcome both.

I believe that some of us are born naturally closer to the sensitive end of the human continuum, and that this puts us at greater risk of experiencing anxiety states that do not result either in effective and appropriate survival responses or in the learning of new adaptive actions.  In addition, what we identify as posttraumatic stress disorder also involves a failure to learn new responses to apply to future threats.

I believe this can happen to anyone if the actual experience of the trauma was more than any single member of our species could ever surmount alone.  Because we are a social species, we have been designed throughout our evolution to advance the survival potential of our species by sharing new learning about how to both avoid harm and to respond to it adequately once it occurs.  This is part of the reason that social support following a traumatic event is such a critical factor in recovery.

++

It is crucial to understand that our brain is a part of our nervous system, and that all these described reactions to a challenge from the environment that threatens our optimal state of calm well-being of competence involve reactions that occur in our bodies, including our experience of the emotions themselves.  A central point in my writings is that abuse and trauma during early fetal, infant and toddler stages of development prevent this state of competent well-being at the center from ever developing in the first place.

If the stresses of trauma become built into a body from the start, their corresponding threat reactions will NEVER be the same as they are for a body that developed in an optimal environment.  We need to know this for a fact because every interaction a person has is connected to whatever state lies at the center of their body. If overwhelming threat occurs before a possibility of active, competent response exists, this incompetence will be built into the body from the start.

This fact makes anyone who experienced severe abuse, deprivation and trauma early in their development at the highest risk for inadequate or inappropriate responses to additional traumas and threat for the rest of their lives.  I speak from personal experience on this one.  My trauma reaction bucket was filled to over flowing from the first breath I ever took, and there is no possible way to empty it out because the trauma built itself into my body from the beginning.

Everyone has a threshold of tolerance for traumas.  Compared to my mother, I was not genetically given the option of breaking under the burden of my traumas as she did.  I believe that what we call ‘mental illness’ exists in our genetic heritage to ensure that the human body can survive in the worst possible conditions so that there remains a hope that offspring will find their way to a better world in the future.  The cost of this survival can mean that the distortions required of a developing child in order that it CAN survive result in a broken relationship between the child and the self, and the adult person and the world around them.

What lies at the center of a person severely maltreated from birth is an overwhelming sadness.   (Because males are destined to develop differently from females, their sadness can very easily be replaced with rage.)   When conditions become humanly unbearable, alternatives for survival have to be found or death will be the result.  Suicide is being tied through research very clearly to a genetic base.  If actual death does not become the outcome, then we have to expect a natural reaction that results in dire future consequences for those whose bodies do continue to endure.  Having a balanced calm competent center of equilibrium will be a nearly impossible state to achieve.

Believe me, severe infant and child abuse can cause one to ‘go insane’ and/or die of a broken heart.  The toughest survivors usually have to continue to endure the experience of ongoing, overwhelming,  unbearable sadness for the rest of their lives while all the time being pressured to wonder why they cannot either catch up or keep up will all the others who have built into their bodies competence, calm and balanced well-being from their developmental experiences in an adequate if not optimal world.

For some of us life continues like one of those nightmares where you are falling and falling and never hit bottom.  We just grieve for the love we desperately needed from our birth that would have let our brains and bodies develop based on benevolence rather than malevolence.  Our hearts continue breaking and breaking until we die.  This is OUR natural state.

Because we are members of a social species we know fundamentally that our survival and well-being depends upon our acceptance into our species.  This information is gleaned initially from the mother and all other early caregivers.  Misinformation becomes mis-formation as a body adapts to the crisis of remaining alive while being rejected (ejected) from one’s species.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Let me take for instance the present threat of a very serious spread from swine flu.  If we as people could have done something to avoid this threat in the first place, obviously the threat would have been prevented.  Once the threat exists, can we contain it?  Can we adequately address the threat through taking steps based on preexisting knowledge we already have so that we can eliminate the threat and restore for ourselves a competent state without threat?  If we don’t already have adequate resources to do these things, then the faster we learn something new to apply to our solution so that containment, elimination and restoration can occur, the better.

Avoid-prevent, contain, eliminate-destroy and restore.  These actions might be motivated by anger and fear, but not by sadness.  Sadness exists in the giving up-overwhelmed state.  Sadness is NEVER a desired stopping place.  If we ever find ourselves stuck in sadness, we need to know that this is both the most vulnerable state we can be in at the same time that it is most valuable because it contains within it the greatest potential for learning something new that is vitally important.

An escape from sadness back to optimal calm competence only happens a most important characteristic is accessed and applied — that of resolve.  Resolve, to me, is a direct reconnection back to the competent experience of the anger state because it involves an awareness that competency is possible.

The problem for many people who are stuck in the sadness state is that they lack the resource of hope that would allow them to experience resolve in the first place.  Hope is something that is built into our being through secure attachment experiences in our environments from the start.  Hope happens because we learn that someone will be there to respond adequately to our needs, and is built into our foundation through these foundational experiences.

Hope is thus intimately and inexorably intertwined with the experience of growing and developing competence literally into our bodies. It stems from connections and linkages that exist (or don’t exist) between ourselves and others.  If we were deprived of the development of hope through early abuse and trauma, it IS something we can learn to acquire later because the potential for experiencing hope appears to be hard wired into our brains before we are born.

In the case of the swine flu, I might feel completely powerless to defend and protect myself and others from its threat (short of disappearing somewhere?), but I have hope that there are people out there with the competence and resources to take adequate care of the threat for us.  These others are thus a part of my immune system resources, and I am dependent upon these others for a solution.

This last statement would lead me in the direction of a discussion of dominance and submission, of ordinate and subordinate conditions — but I will address this in a future post.

++

As always, thank you for reading — your comments are welcome and appreciated.

+SUFFER IN SILENCE

alchemynow2 Comments

Why did I sleep so poorly and wake before dawn today?  What do I do with the millions of thoughts, swarming around like gnats, each untouchable?  I try to swat them away.  I do not want to hear them.  I don’t want them to be a part of me.

I used to have an inner directive about my research and writing that I could in the end say things about the consequences of severe abuse from birth that I knew no therapist would ever tell a client — because they didn’t know them.  Now I laugh a macabre laugh.  Nobody can afford any therapy any more.  There is no access.  How do those of us who had such a terrible mess made of the first 18 years of our life get help for anything that happened to us, let alone for the difficulties those experiences back then cause for us now?

Or is none of it supposed to matter?  Do we just need to do what my sister calls it, “Put on your big girl panties,” and get on with our lives, moment by moment, the best that we can?

I get the feeling that I have so much information buried, hidden just below the surface — but I am supposed to leave it there?  Leave it untouched, waiting for future generations to discover in their own time, because we have too much on our plates in the world right now and it is all too much for anyone to hear?

++

I have a very clear idea at this moment about how this all can work.  I walked away from my research and my computer and my writing and remembering 5 months ago.  I simply pushed back my chair, got up, walked away and didn’t turn back — until now.  It happened the instant I knew I had found what I was looking for:  ‘substance p’.

SEE search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=substance+p&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307

Substance P is a neurotransmitter related to the sensation of pain.  It works the same way if we are feeling something as physically wrong for us as it does if we feel something as emotionally wrong with us.  That means to me that our sadness is not something to spurn and discard.  It is a part of us we need to cherish and learn from.

 

++

 

Partly my mission up until that point was to show that our nation’s reliance on pharmaceuticals to treat ‘depression’ and ‘anxiety’ was no different than a reliance on anything that we use to take away our perception of pain.  I knew there really was no difference between psychological pain and physical pain because both are indications to the body that there is something hazardous affecting an individual within their environment, and both elicit an immune system response.

 

I knew that we run the risk of basically saying to one another and to ourselves, “That’s OK.  Go ahead and keep your hand in the flame.  Take these pills.  You will not feel it.  But by all means don’t take the pain seriously as a signal to you that there’s something wrong with your life.  Don’t try to find out what it is, what caused it, how it affects you.  Don’t change anything.  Just ‘remain productive,’ get on with your life, quit whining and complaining.  Nobody cares and neither should you.”

 

++

 

So in my own life I turned away from my studies and from my writing, and tried to create a sanctuary for myself, tried to forget everything I am and everything I’ve become as a result of early, chronic, consistent, terrible abuse.  After all, our society tells us, “That’s all in the past now.”  That’s a lie.  It is NOT in the past.  Everything that has happened to us remains right here in the present instant, accumulated in our body, in our body’s memory, and affects every interaction that occurs all the way down to the molecules in our body and how our genetic code is continually manifesting in our bodies.

 

So what?

 

We are not supposed to ask the questions.  We are not supposed to know the answers.  Thinking is supposed to be carefully modulated so that we avoid knowing the truth.  Be a nation of smiley faces, plugging along, separating the good from the bad, letting people ‘get what they deserve’.  Don’t pity ourselves?  Don’t ever think you had it worse than anyone else because we all know how much worse other people have it?

 

The more we don’t know our own reality the more we separate ourselves from ourselves, and hence from one another.  Are we simply a glamor culture founded upon the powers of distraction and the pursuit of not knowing the truth?  Every time an important question bubbles to the surface of our awareness we are supposed to turn away and forget it.  If we can’t do this by ourselves, then we better go get some kind of pill to help us.

 

Where’s the salvation in that?  Where’s the learning?  Where’s the connection to reality and to what is really going on?  Where is the taking of new information and using it to create a better world?  Are questions and wondering forbidden?

 

++

 

For example, what if I were to ask important questions like, “What is the difference between the experience of abuse for the child that is singled out in a family as the chronically abused one, and the siblings who are the witness abuse survivors? What is the difference between them in regards to the long term brain and body changes they each receive as a result?  Is there a possibility and risk that by our unwillingness to ask these questions and to look for the answers on the bigger level that we are saying there is no difference between them, and that a witness and a victim are in effect ‘the same thing’?  Where, in this picture, do the perpetrators fit in?”

By being willing to pay close attention  to the lessons of trauma we can become  crystal clear about cause and effect, culpability and accountability.  Both witnesses to abuse and victims of abuse have their shared portion of experiences related to peril.  In addition, they each also have their own experiences that are distinctly different.

 

Is there in effect a forbidden zone, a boundary in our thinking and learning that says, “STOP here, beyond this point there is no passing?”  Is that part of what continually keeps the after effects of trauma alive and well, running just under the surface of our culture like a poisoned and toxic ground water that remains so close to the surface that the well being of at least half or our citizens is being jeopardized on some level daily — and nobody is really supposed to care?  Does the adage, ‘pay lip service’ apply here as we all like to decry violence and abuse but will not do anything individually to stop either the actions or the effects — not even within ourselves?

 

++

 

“Chin up.  Suffer in silence.  Don’t admit the truth.  What you don’t know can’t hurt you.  Don’t make such a big deal of it.”

 

Is this really all about not wanting to separate the victims from the not victims because somehow the not victims carry some sense of guilt, shame and responsibility for what victimized the ‘others’ in the first place?  Or is it that we live embedded within a culture that insists it is right in saying that “People get what they deserve?”

 

That leaves the not victims exonerated from whatever guilt they might be carrying so that they never have to dig down and take the guilt out and look at it.  It leaves the victims holding the bad bag feeling as if somehow they deserved what happened to them and they have no right to complain.  Not ever.  “Don’t rock the sinking boat?”

 

++

 

That leaves us with a vast gray area where people who really do suffer somehow just have ‘bad genes.”  When all else fails and there is no other logical explanation, blame genetics.  Who cares that research is showing how nasty early experiences trigger most of these genes to misbehave as they had to and continue to adjust for a person’s survival in a hostile, toxic and malevolent world?

 

We make choices as a society just like we make them individually.  If nobody calls anybody on their behavior, where is the balance, reason and health in that?  Pharmaceutical companies who make billions off of the results are the monster engines powering health research — physical and mental-emotional health.  We don’t question this.  We literally BUY their results as if they came straight from the God of the universe.  The power is in the pills?

 

The word ‘pharmaceutical” stems from the Greek word ‘pharamkos’, which was the chosen sacrifice that was killed after all the ills of a people were projected onto it.  Kill the pharmakos, all troubles of the people are vanquished.  Blame the victim, ‘de-capacitate’ the victim, shut them up, make them go away and all will be well for everyone else.

 

What if the sacrifice doesn’t want to BE the sacrifice?  What power do they have to resist?  True mental health and well being is being treated like an obsolete technology itself.  Who cares if vinyl records disappear off the market as they are being continually replaced by newer and better recording technologies?  All that matters is that we have access to the music itself.  Well being for the masses?  Who cares if it has been replaced with tiny pills in throw away (well, maybe in some places recyclable) bottles?

 

Shouldn’t we all just be so grateful?  We don’t have to suffer.  We don’t have to work at well being.  We don’t have to ask the tough questions and find the tougher answers.  Access to well being has been equalized and guaranteed to all?  And if we refuse to take the pills?  If we dare to question Big Brother’s machine?  Well, who first asked “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody there to hear it does it make a sound?”

 

I have always thought that question was ludicrous.  A tree falling and hitting the ground makes vibrations, dislodges and upsets all manner of life that exists within its branches, etc.  Only egocentric humans would assume that the world revolves around us.  I can personally say anything I want to about how the abuse I suffered was preventable, that I would rather it had never happened in the first place, that it changed the development of my brain and body into being one geared for the most efficient survival in a life-and-death threat world, and that this childhood created a lack of well being in me that operates on my molecular level.  Who wants to hear this noise?

 

Better that I either suffer in silence — which is what I am doing if nobody hears a sound I am making — or shut up, pop my pills, and get to work fitting in here.  I mean, how productive is the truth?

 

++

 

 

+ISOLATION AND BEATINGS

alchemynowLeave a comment

I am moving very slowly through the article I cited in yesterday’s post.  The realization that I am better off as a result of my mother’s beatings than I would have been without them is a tough fact to understand.  I’ve heard that before, that abuse is not as bad as neglect, but only right now do I begin to realize why that is so.  This article I am reading documents research about what brain and nervous system changes occur due to isolation of rats after they are weaned — and the effects being seen parallel schizophrenia and depression, consequences that would not have occurred to these rats if the isolation had not occurred.

Beatings at least stimulate the brain, I guess.  Isolation has an entirely different effect.  In actuality, I had both……  these are not things any therapist has ever explained to me –unfortunately, I have to figure this out for myself….

I have been able at times in the past to read research articles and process the information intellectually while remaining detached from my feelings, from my memories, from what particularly my body knows about what I have experienced.  We are not trained in our culture to be able to process the information we hold personally about ourselves in our lives.  How do I combine the two ways of knowing?  Right now I cannot dissociate the two….

++

+TRAUMA TRIGGERS and REACTIONS

alchemynow2 Comments

I wanted to write for a moment about trauma triggers from my point of view.  Part of what makes unresolved trauma such a problem in our lives is that not only do the triggers seem to have a life of their own, but our internal processing of these trauma triggers also seems to have a life of its own.

During my research I often encountered ‘helpful’ information on PTSD

(SEE: http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=22491)

that suggests one method of resolving the recurring problems of unresolved trauma is to work on the fear conditioning that traumas can create. From my own point of view, this suggestion seemed not only ludicrous but almost humorous.  This is an example of how vital it is that we  know our own experience and reality and honor this for ourselves.

In my case, my mother’s abuse of me was so chronic and pervasive that it INVADED nearly every corner of my brain and its operation from the time I was born.  Nearly every single USUAL ordinary experience was tied to my mother’s psychotic intervention within my reality.  The result is that nearly every single aspect of being alive in a body has a pathway and a track in my brain and nervous system back to a traumatic experience.  The only way that I can begin to separate the trauma from myself and from my life in the present is to be absolutely as conscious as possible of myself and my responses to these millions (yes millions) of triggers.

Nobody who grew up from birth (and before) in a safe and secure environment can really imagine what life in the world for the rest of us who were born and raised in a DANGEROUS world of constant terrorism was like.  Nor can they imagine what it’s like to live within our bodies with these brains.  I am hard pressed to think of one object or one daily activity that I participate in that doesn’t have a trauma memory attached to it like a gigantic monster fish at the end of every fishing line I throw out as I live my life.  This obviously means I am connected within myself not to a safe and secure platform of being in my body in this world, but rather that the platform of my being rests on terror, threat, and the threat of threat of danger.

I mean what I am saying literally.  I can’t touch a hairbrush or put on a belt (sometimes the trigger is noticing somebody else’s belt!), use a coat hangar, wash my hair, do the dishes, eat food, be in a car, put on my clothes, go to bed, wake up from a deep sleep, read a book, watch TV  — and on and on and on — without some part of my being having the job of blocking the traumatic reactions so that I can be here in the present having experiences without being caught in some version of a dissociative, trauma reaction  experience.

We are meant from birth to connect all of our experiences together both in terms of the feelings these experiences create in us (with their correspondingly crucial information about ourselves in the world – these being our immune system responses), and how we connect all of our experiences together in our memory systems — which are connected to our reactions.

Traumatic reactions to triggers in our environment are memory reactions.  My memories did not get linked together in a ‘normal’ way.  There was no order in my world from birth, only chaotic, unpredictable violence (with a few moments here and there of my mother being ‘nice’ to me, usually as they happened in some public situation).

When was my world rational and ordered?  Never.  Therefore most of my memories have a life of their own as if they swim randomly around in a gigantic guppy tank until one of them is caught in the moment by some experience that seems related to the information about life they hold within them.

I imagine it that the people who were raised from birth in predictable, safe and secure environments really had the opportunity to form a brain where all the separate experiences of their early lives became linked together HELPFULLY so that they just grew up with a whale of a body — one connected, competent system that lets them get around in the world pretty much just fine.

For those of us who formed brains while living in hell, we ended up with the guppy tank.  It is NOT that our way of being in the world isn’t HELPFUL, but it’s only helpful, really, if we live in a world today that matches the one our brain was built in, by and for in the first place.  Perhaps that’s part of the reason we survivors often find ourselves in all kinds of extraordinarily stressful and traumatic situations in our adulthoods.  Those really are the only kinds of experiences our brains were prepared to survive in.

But this is another example of how knowing our own pasts is our greatest asset.  The understandings of why and how I live in a state of constant foreboding makes perfect sense to me now.  My mission now is to make every choice I can to separate my reactions from what has been built into me so that I can try to live a different way today.

But it takes SO MUCH ENERGY, and so much attention.  It requires of people like me a constant monitoring of ourselves in the world that ‘normal’ people NEVER have to do.  That’s part of why their lives seem to be so much better than ours.

The human brain is an instrument of almost unlimited capacity for growth and change.  Knowing that fact allows me to focus my efforts not so I can ‘be like everybody else,’ but so I can use as much of my own potential for positive change as I can discover and use in the span of each day (and night).

Believe me, for all the thousands and thousands and thousands of hours I was made to stand like a statue in some corner — put there by my mother before everyone else got out of bed and made to stay there until everyone but her was sound asleep at night — some few times being allowed to leave it to go to the bathroom or eat or go to school…..

Or being made to lie in bed from the time I was very young as if I was in a coffin (SEE, for example, THE BUBBLE GUM), and when I was in a deep sleep in the middle of the night being yanked out of bed by my hair as I came awake in the middle of some violent beating because I had been sleeping on my back with both arms raised beside my head, which to my mother meant I was pretending to be a baby……..or just experiencing this kind of violent awakening just because she was in a rage and wanted to beat me…….  How do I overcome this ‘phobia’ or change lying in my bed so it’s NOT connected to these memories?  I tell you, lying in bed during chemo for my cancer had this horrible triggering attached to it!

These experiences and memories do not have any value to me today as some form of ‘sob story’, I assure you.  These kind of experiences do not belong in that kind of category for any one who have been in some way where I’ve been.  What is crucially important is that we recognize the pervasiveness of trauma triggers and recognize that they will follow us for the rest of our lives.  We will do battle with both the reality of what happened to us and the reality of what it did to our brains and our body reactions forever in this lifetime.

We cannot minimize this kind of impact.  We can never be ‘deprogrammed’ completely, not even for one single one of these triggers.  If abuse happens to children BEGINNING particularly after the age of one, and also importantly after another crucial brain-growing period that happens from age one to two, at least that older child has a platform within their bodies to stand on to fight back.  Very early abuse interferes with the development of our very essential self as it exists in our forming brain and body.  Do not underestimate the impact of infant and toddler abuse if you suspect you were its victim.  Please.

And the younger we are when we understand the platform within us that is the basis of our experience throughout our lifespan, the better chance we have of taking control of our trauma reactions and freeing ourselves to live a more positive life freer from our instinctive trauma reactions.