Tag: violence

+SEVERE CHILD ABUSE AND SELF ESTEEM

alchemynow2 Comments

On occasion I have heard people say about other people, “They have no self esteem.”  I don’t believe this is ever an accurate statement.  Everyone has self esteem.  If is part of being human.  What matters to me is how positive or how negative a person’s self esteem is.

A sense of esteem for the self grows right along with a growing self from birth.  Researchers believe that the self of a person is formed by the age of two.  It might be hard for us to believe, but by the time a child is that age it already has a strong sense of its own self worth — either positive or negative — built into the brain by every interaction that little person has already had with its early caregivers within its attachment environment.

Because the sense of self esteem, or self worth, is directly formed through attachment relationships, an unsafe and insecure environment will create an unstable connection to the self.  Development within a safe and secure world provides a young child with a sense of confident connection to important others in its life and a sense of competence within itself.  These conditions are directly connected to either a positive or a negative sense of self esteem and are reflected in the connection each person has to their own inner self in relationship to the world it lives in.

Once the self is formed by the age of two, along with the initial sense of safety, security and positive self esteem, or a sense of un-safety, insecurity and negative self esteem, all other ongoing experiences will be connected to this early formation and will be filtered through it.  Only in cases of serious mental illness can a ‘second self’ be formed that will filter and process ongoing experience.  In usual cases a growing child will attach future experience to the original self it formed and connects to for the rest of its life.

We can think of the experiences a child has during the time of its life from conception to age two as being like the time it takes to tune a piano that child will play its music on for the rest of its life.  We can understand that playing on a well tuned piano will allow that child to create a musically harmonious self prepared to play in an equally harmonious world.  On the other hand, a child who has unsafe and insecure attachment experiences will end up with a mistuned piano that cannot make beautiful music no matter how hard that person tries for the rest of its life.

We can, as adults, assess how well tuned our piano was primarily before the age of two in one of two ways.  If we already know that there were serious problems in our very early brain development years we have our answer instantaneously.  If, however, we have either never thought about ourselves back that far or have no available information at our finger tips that comes from our very early years, we can simply just look back at the patterns of our existence and search for what the overriding emotional tone that our self experiences in the present.

I am certainly not the one to say whether or not ‘bad’ versus ‘good’ people exist in the world.  I believe that kind of thinking originated at a time when mythologies and fairy tales were used to explain events that people had no other way of understanding their lives.  Today we know very clearly what the impact of very early mother-infant experiences are on the forming brain, nervous system, body and self that originates as a hopefully conscious interaction between a growing individual and their environment.  We are not talking about magic.  We are talking about cause and effect.

If we look back even at our adult and teen years and detect patterns of disappointments, wrong choices, hurtful relationships, failure to discover our best place in the work world and also detect that our overriding emotional tone is and has been anything other than balanced, competent calm and well being, we will know that we were most likely sent off in a less than safe and secure world in the first place.  From the time of our unstable and probably malevolent beginnings we have been trying our hardest to correct our own behavior as if we are somehow to blame for being inadequate for the job of being a happy, well adjusted member of our society.

Our foundational sense of self esteem is not some ephemeral or nebulous construction.  It is very real and it actually came from a time of our lives when we had pitifully small powers to control our environments — before we were two years old.  I am not talking about some Freudian fantasy of puppet figures from our past related to our own wishful thinking.  I am talking about the formation of our brains as our self and our sense of worth, value and place in the world was told to us by the people who took care of us before age two — or didn’t.

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Lest we think that we are some kind of exception to a natural rule just because we are of a conscious species, let me assure you we are not.  Research has demonstrated, for example, that if a litter of a calm rat mother’s babies are raised with the calm mother they will end up to be calm rat adults.  If a litter of a nervous ‘neurotic’  mother rat are allowed to grow up under her care, the resulting adults will also be nervous and ‘neurotic’.  No surprise and no magic there.

But here is the surprise though still nothing magical.  If you take the calm mother rat’s babies away from her at birth and put them under the care of the nervous ‘neurotic’ mother rat, those same calm mother babies will grow up to be nervous and ‘neurotic’.  Take the nervous ‘neurotic’ mother rat’s babies away at birth and give them to the calm mother to raise and those babies will grow up to be calm adults.

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So what are we left with about hope of positive changes in our lives if our early beginnings were actually a disaster?  Because the human brain is the most complex structure known to exist, we are all at a point of marveling at its potential for change.

Three  fascinating links related to the Dali Lama and the science of the brain are listed below

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/labnotes/archive/2009/02/24/mom-dad-dna-and-suicide.aspx

http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:RKToUsTHIRMJ:www.dana.org/news/cerebrum/detail.aspx%3Fid%3D7384+dali+lama+nueorscience+neurotic+rats&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

http://www.mindandlife.org/conf04.html

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And take a look at author Alice Miller’s site for prevention of child abuse

http://www.alice-miller.com/index_en.php

More than anything else, I am asking that we consider child abuse backgrounds when facing the difficulties of adult life for anybody who has come from such a past.  While it might be difficult for us to consider our own life or the life of others who might be troubled, with respect, dignity and caring compassion, I believe that it will only be under this light of firm but gentle kindness that we can change the patterns that have been ingrained not only in ourselves, but within our cultures around the globe.

We have to take the consequences of infant and child abuse extremely seriously.  I cannot, unfortunately, locate a source for the following, but I believe it is true.

I heard that the Dali Lama was asked at one of the neuroscience sessions related to the deprivations caused by abusive childhoods whether or not he believed that an adult with a severely abusive early upbringing had the same ability to advance spiritually in this world as do people who did not have very early extreme abuse histories.  It is said that the Dali Lama was quiet in thought for some time before he responded, “No, they do not.”

This means to me that we still do not fully know the adult consequences of early malevolent conditions on all aspects of development.  If nobody really yet knows, then we cannot expect ourselves to know the impact that our own early malevolent experiences had on us, either.  We will not gain either the knowledge or the changes we seek by being harsh on ourselves or on one another.  But in cases where adults are passing on the abuse they experienced to their offspring, we have to be ready to do whatever is necessary to intervene on behalf of their children.

At no point is this a journey for the faint of heart  — not for us individually or for us collectively.  It is not a journey that can be taken in an atmosphere of ambiguity.  We must become clear about what we are facing so that the most helpless and innocent members of our species will not be forced to suffer from what we adults have created to harm them.

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Here are some positive self esteem related books from Gallup Press that I recommend though I have not yet had a chance to read them myself:

In 2004, Gallup Press’ first book, How Full Is Your Bucket?, became an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. This led to the publication of several more strengths books, including StrengthsFinder 2.0 (2007) and Strengths Based Leadership (2009). Fueled by the continued demand for its original strengths-based classic, Gallup Press is releasing two new titles based on How Full Is Your Bucket?.

How Full Is Your Bucket? For Kids (available now)

Because of the overwhelming response from parents and teachers to How Full Is Your Bucket? — many of whom have asked for a “kids’ version” — Gallup Press has created How Full Is Your Bucket? For Kids. Tom Rath coauthored the book with early childhood development expert Mary Reckmeyer, and they partnered with the brilliant children’s book illustrator Maurie Manning.
This new book brings the basic dipper and bucket metaphor to life through the story of a young boy named Felix. In How Full Is Your Bucket? For Kids, Felix begins to see how every interaction he has with others in a day either fills or empties his bucket. Felix then realizes that everything he says or does to other people fills or empties their buckets as well.

Expanded Anniversary Edition of How Full Is Your Bucket?
(available in mid-June)

  This new, expanded hardcover Anniversary Edition of How Full Is Your Bucket? includes updated research and content, with a removable workbook for individual, team, and organizational development.

For more information, or to purchase these new books, visit:

How Full Is Your Bucket? For Kids (available now):

How Full Is Your Bucket? Anniversary Edition (available in mid-June):

+IS THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHILD ABUSE AND OLD STYLE PARENTING TECHNIQUES?

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We live at a time when the world as we know it is changing very fast.  So fast that even what happened 50 years ago can seem ancient history, and certainly what happened 100 years ago is on the other side of the horizon for most of our thoughts.

Prior to the 1960’s few thought about child abuse, let alone about child abuse prevention.  Now we have resources at our finger tips to help us, like the following as it describes the efforts of Child Abuse Prevention America:

http://www.preventchildabuse.org/help/reach_out.shtml

The first federal legislation designed to address the problems of child abuse and prevention wasn’t enacted until 1974:

http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:N33rRidXTnIJ:www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/factsheets/about.cfm+history+child+abuse+prevention&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

The following site describes the history of child abuse prevention in our country:

http://parenthood.library.wisc.edu/Melli/Melli.html

We can go back to the history of the case of the young girl, Mary Ellen Wilson, as her abuser was tried and sentenced in 1874 for an early example of the struggle by the public to protect maltreated children:

http://www.americanhumane.org/about-us/who-we-are/history/mary-ellen.html

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There remains a ripple effect in our country from child abuse that has traveled down the generations and can be traced among people who are alive today.  In our efforts to come to terms with severe abuse that was done to us individually we need to try to understand the history of ‘our people’.

Often time stories remain in families that we have taken for granted.  We need to listen to them in new and different ways.  Even if the people who told us these stories are dead, we can remember what they told us, and then try to add this information to form the context that surrounded our own experiences of child abuse.

I believe that what we will find is that our families’ past histories of abuse contain information about how we are transforming as a society.  Looking backwards prior to the 1960s was a time when the overriding social mind was that children were still seen as having no rights.  These beliefs came from a long human history that believed both women and children were simply objects that could be possessed.

We believed socially that what went on in an individual family’s life was nobody’s business but their own.  Today we still experience those same struggles as we attempt to protect women and children from abuse.  Where do we draw the line between public and private?  More importantly, how do we both define and identify child abuse?

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Any of us who were of the generations that reached adulthood prior to the 1970s are left trying to answer these questions by ourselves.  We are like children of the ‘half light’, raised during a time when society around us was launching their new, enlightened approach to child rearing though it was too soon for these efforts to help us.  We try to take the available new information and attitudes and apply it to our own experiences of severe child abuse.

Meanwhile, because we did survive into our adulthood and are obviously not still children currently experiencing abuse, we find little support for our inner reality of what truly happened to us and how the remaining effects of that severe abuse means that even our brains and our bodies were changed as a consequence — and therefore the quality of our lives — for the rest of our lifespan.

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I want to give you an example from a conversation I had recently with a woman who used to be my work supervisor.  I will call her Joyce, and she is 68 years old.

Joyce’s mother recently died at age 93 after suffering nearly ten years of serious dementia that had been caused by the heavy sedation that was necessary for the major heart surgery she had been given at 83.  The family was never told at the time that the level of anesthesia required for this extensive surgery might mean permanent damage to her brain.

As Joyce’s mother’s mental functioning deteriorated she slipped further and further back into her past until at the end she remained in her childhood, in a continual state of anxiety and concern as she asked over and over again, “Where are the boys?  Where are my brothers?  They need to come right away and get the mules out of the cornfield!  They are ruining the corn!”

Joyce told me what she knows of her mother’s experience growing up with Joyce’s grandmother, Sarah.  Sarah was Cherokee, born in 1867.  She married a German man who owned a small piece of land in Oklahoma and made his living as a blacksmith.  The family raised all their own food.  When her husband died of the flu in 1919 Sarah was pregnant with her twelfth child and left without an income.  She began to farm the land with the team of mules alone, selling produce and eggs to the townspeople for what money the family needed. All of the children grew up working very hard from the earliest possible age they could do so.

She was also a midwife and delivered hundreds of babies during her lifetime, including twins and even triplets, and never lost an infant or a mother.  She not only bore these twelve children, but she kept them healthy and alive.  One time her youngest, a son, suffered a mangled arm in a farm equipment accident.  Sarah successfully amputated her son’s arm.  She used many plants and herbs for remedies, though none of her knowledge of healing was passed down to any of her twelve children.

There were no modern conveniences available to this family.  Sarah and her older children made all of the family’s clothing from flour sacks.  The comforters and mattresses were also made from flour sack remains when the clothing wore out, and were stuffed with goose down from the geese that they raised.  The entire family loaded onto the wagon and went into town for Sunday church and never missed a sermon.

The main thing Joyce remembers about what her mother, her aunts and uncles ever said about their mother other than that she bore and raised them by working extremely hard, was that she was mean, mean, mean, mean.  She yelled at them, she hit them, and she showed them no outward affection.  She did not single out any one of the children for her distemper.  She treated them all the same, and this treatment was mean.

Of the twelve children, six grew up to beat their own children and six did not.  Joyce’s mother showed adequate affection to Joyce and her siblings, though she did force them outside to cut off a thick stick to be switched with on the occasions that they had done something wrong.  Joyce does not, however, feel her mother abused her children.

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In order to understand where child abuse might have occurred as we look  backward at our families’ histories we need to consider the very harsh realities of the contexts those people often lived in.   Where were the luxuries, and what could they have been?  Was having an ‘easy’ life and a relaxed caring mother an exception rather than the rule?  What about how the men treated the mothers?  What can we or do we know about the conditions of their lives?

I believe there is a telling factor that enables those of us today, who are trying to understand the severe abuse of our own childhoods, to know if there was child abuse in our family’s history or not.  The simple fact that we were severely abused by our own parents lets us know that history of abuse is there. Yet hitting and beating children, even severely, was an acceptable child rearing practice in the past.  It is only because we are trying to change these patterns today that these practices concern us.

This means to me that the most important question we can ask in looking back at our own severe childhood abuse histories, and looking back into the past knowing that the abuse flowed forward to us from our ancestors who were also abused, is this:  How receptive would our own parents have been to outside intervention. if it had occurred,  that meant to stop the abuse and to teach our parents new and different parenting skills?  If we ask ourselves this question and answer honestly, we will know whether or not we suffered from intentional abuse or more from old style parenting practices as they operated in our own childhoods.

I believe it is important for us to distinguish this difference because it gives us crucial information about the context of our childhood suffering.  I know from my own experience there would have been absolutely nothing anybody could have done to improve my mother’s parenting skills.  She lived in an altered reality that meant in order for her children, especially me, to have been protected from my mother somebody would have needed to remove us from her care.

True, some of the punishments my mother engaged in toward me had direct ties to the punishments used against her when she was young, particularly the use of isolation, of feeding me soggy crackers in milk for meals when she was enraged, and a tie to her having been held down by her older brother while her mother beat her harshly with a leather razor strap.  But beyond the literal translation of some of her techniques of abuse, her mind was gone.  She was seriously mentally ill.

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This brings me back to a major point of my blog:  Any parent who continues to abuse a child in today’s ‘enlightened’ culture is usually mentally ill.  I understand there is a difference and I distinguish between those parents who lack adequate parenting skills to deal effectively and alternatively with the stresses of raising children who can be identified and taught a better way to parent and those parents whose realities do not include this option.  I automatically include any adult who sexually molests a child in any way under this second category.  I do believe that there are parents who are like zebras and cannot change their stripes.

Knowing which group our own parents fit into allows those of us who experienced severe abuse as children to finally have a rock solid foundation to stand upon as we attempt to define for ourselves exactly what happened to us.  If I came from a family with parents who appeared to be ‘just’ acting out old style parenting patterns that they would have been willing and able to have changed if intervention had occurred, I would not have the additional complication of trying to understand rationally and logically what happened to me.

Because my abuse occurred rather in the context of severe mental illness, and because I now know the difference clearly, I understand how much more difficult it is for me to untangle my own abuse history in any logical or rational way.  There WAS no logic, no reason, no rationality to anything my mother ever did to me.  And because of this fact I lived with chronic anxiety in a constant state of terror where dissociation was my only reprieve.

That fact alone is a huge piece of the puzzle of my childhood, and a critically important one for me to have.  I cannot today go back and try to understand what happened by using any of the ‘known’ information I might have today about how a bad parent could have been a better one.  No kind of intervention could have changed my mother’s psychosis that had ‘destroying the evil that was me’ at its center.  I now also know that there was nothing I could have done as a child to change it either.

My point?  There are parent-child situations without hope of improvement and there are those with hope.  We have to distinguish between them.  While this may not be a distinction that can be easily made, I believe it is critical to a child’s well-being, and is one that becomes of vital importance if we ever hope to effectively prevent abuse to children under the age of two.  It is during these critical brain growth windows of development that severe abuse causes the worst long term damage.

It is during this stage of youngest development that we are going to have the hardest time identifying at risk mothers and infants.  We have to use a laser-like focus of attention to both identify and intervene on behalf of the very young.  That this abuse is most likely to occur behind the ‘sacred closed doors’ behind the walls a family has to keep the public world out that makes our job extremely difficult.

We have to know what we are looking for and looking at.  Who knows this world better than anyone else?  Those of us who have survived severe early abuse and are alive to tell about it.  We need to speak and someone needs to listen to us.  Our adult stories are the voice of the very young severely abused who do not even have the words to speak their stories.

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(Something about writing this post today put me in an heightened anxiety state, perhaps because somehow something was triggered and now I feel like I’m waiting for a bomb to fall out of the sky on my head, destroying me.  What a familiar feeling from my childhood, only the bomb was real, and it was my mother.)

+TRAUMA MATH: THE SORROWS AND HAPPINESS OF “CRAFT SHOW APRIL”

alchemynow2 Comments

I haven’t completely ‘returned’ or recovered from my out-of-town craft show adventure last weekend.  I say returned because my dissociation condition causes me to experience changes as if separate parts of me are ‘out there’ floating around like dandelion fluff in the breeze, drifting around until they eventually land.  I experience a waiting period while this happens, trying to learn every day more of what to do to speed up the process of consolidation of memory as best I can.

Some might call this a grounding process.  I went out and watered all of my plants, most of them looking pretty darn stressed if not dead.  I forgot to have one of the neighbor children come over to water them while I was gone on this 100 degree plus weekend.  Now I’m washing my blankets and clothing.  There’s no place for the washing machine in the house, so it sits out back on the cement rim that lies around the foundation of the house, hooked by an hundred foot extension cord running out my door and to a fifty foot hose.

Taking the small steps of being in my life, in my house, being in my body as I wait for all of the experiences of this past weekend to settle within me in some form of organized fashion.  That’s what the combination of the dissociative disorder and the PTSD do to me now.  They easily give me the feeling of ‘too much to deal with’ and a sense of being easily overwhelmed by any kind of unusual stimulation.

I believe that’s part of the role of the ‘recurring major depression’ that forms the third leg of my emotional and mental ‘disorder’ and ‘disability.’  It gives me the ‘down time’ I need to let things put themselves together after I experience more incoming information than I can handle at one time.

I am so fortunate at this moment in time to have a simple place that is my home.  One has to have the safety and security of some kind of ‘home’ for their body in order that the home of the mind can maintain itself.  I’ve been homeless before, several times, even when I still had young children under my care.  Today more than in several generations having a home or not having a home has come back to the forefront of our concerns — both individually and as a society.

Which leads me to this story I heard from a neighboring vendor, I’ll call her April, at the craft show last weekend.  I always listen with a special interest to stories told by new people I meet.  It’s the only way that I have to test my own theories or ideas, things that I am coming to believe about how our early childhood experiences come to form who we are as adults.

Because April never asked that anything she was telling me be kept confidential, I am not concerned about telling you what she told me.  After all, she had only just met me and spent a few hours in her booth across from mine as she sold kettle corn and ice water as I hoped to sell earrings and mosaics.

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April is one year younger than me, another child of the early fifties, born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona.  She was second born of six children and spent her childhood with both of her parents and with her grandparents nearby.  Her father was an untreated bi-polar severe alcoholic and was extremely violent and abusive to his wife and all of the children.  Her father beat his wife during every one of her pregnancies, and over the years knocked out all of his wife’s teeth, and sent her to the hospital with concussions and broken bones many times.

April told of one severe attack of violence this man had perpetrated against his family, and her mother took herself and all of the children to her mother’s house for some kind of protection.  It wasn’t long before her father showed up at the door with his rifle, accompanied by three uniformed police officers who were there to make sure the wife and children returned home with the man of their family immediately.

We might think this unbelievable and barbaric, but that happened only 45 years ago.  It tells us about the conditions of life and of our culture that took so much hard work and effort to change — even a little bit so that things might be different and better for women and children in America today.

April appears as a very attractive, perky, positive, happy, kind, hard working, healthy woman.  There’s nothing about her that meets the eye of the public that would indicate the kind of terrible traumas that she has experienced in her life.  And yet it didn’t take long as we sat in her RV after Saturday’s craft show had closed for the day, talking over an ice cold beer and a container of grocery store deli chili that April had microwaved and generously shared with me, that I learned how close to the surface all of her difficult history is to her.  In fact I would say none of it has gone anywhere.  But what fascinates me is what April is doing with herself in relationship to it.

April is married to her third husband, a hard working truck driver who just lost one hundred thousand dollars of his 401K that he spent 32 years building for his retirement.  April has worked for the past 21 years as a massage therapist for a major hotel chain in Phoenix.  She still loves her work but in order, now, to hope for a retirement she decided to go into the business of traveling as a kettle corn vendor on weekends.

Certainly she had the resources of owning a RV and a sturdy steel trailer to haul her equipment.  She had the resources to buy everything she needed to set up her booth and cook that candied popcorn, including a portable generator.  But she also had the invisible inner resources to come up with her plan and the stamina and willingness to work extremely hard toward making her business a paying venture.

Just the physical work alone that it took to drive that rig, haul all that heavy equipment off of it, set up the canopy, stand there in 100 plus heat for two days trying to sell to a pitifully thin crowd at that show, and then pack it all up again and return home to get herself ready for a full week of work at her ‘real’ job — and do all this smiling and caring for and about every single person she saw along her way and mean it — provided me with an incredible experience to learn about, watch and benefit from personally.

April made sure that I had ice cold water to drink all weekend, that I had an iced wet cloth to lay on the back of my neck in that scorching heat, that I had chili and beer in the evening and a place to park my little truck next to her RV to sleep for the night, and that I had her friendship and her compassionate and sensitive encouragement every step of the way.  April offered these kindnesses in different ways to everyone around her.  She never complained, and even as she told me about her childhood there was no anger or blame.  She simply described what happened.

As she talked I of course listened to discover how it was possible that April was the person she turned out to be.  At first it was a mystery to me until I heard what might just be the secret of her ‘salvation’, the blessings caught among the curses.

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April described to me how she had attended a cranial massage training institute and had been blindsided by the insensitive and unprofessional experience that she had by being a chosen volunteer for the  technique without being given any warning about what might happen.  While the instructors demonstrated in front of a large crowd of strangers, April experienced what had happened to her in the womb as her father had beaten her mother while she was carrying April.  During this session she remembered what it felt like when she also, as an unborn infant, had been pummeled by her father’s blows.

The conditions of ongoing violence in her home of origin never improved.  April left home very young, married and began having children of her own.  Of her three children, one is schizophrenic and facing a long prison sentence for attempted manslaughter and arson after he tried to burn down his girl friend’s home with her in it.  Among April’s five siblings, one became schizophrenic and two ended up with severe bi-polar conditions.  One of these, her brother, committed suicide.

April’s father died a few months ago and she admits she never loved him and that her father never loved her.  April’s mother suffers from several serious medical conditions in her later years that doctors suspect are directly connected to the many serious injuries that she suffered while being beaten by her husband.  April has struggled with all of these trauma related conditions in her family all of her life, and is left now still trying to find a way to manage continued contact with her mentally ill siblings.

April’s one healthy sister that she is very close to, was a real estate agent in California and her brother-in-law had a successful construction business.  Both sources of income have vanished, her sister’s family has lost both of the homes they owned.  Stress from these challenges caused the brother-in-law to have a serious heart attack and he is facing surgery.  April is not only very worried about her sister and her family, but she also is suffering from what really is the loss of one of the most important support people of her life.

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So here is April woman-handling a physically and financially difficult new business, and optimistically being happy as she continues to face the challenges of her life.  Because of what I understand about how vital it is that an infant’s growing brain receives happiness stimulation in order for the left brain’s happy center to form in the first place — thus allowing it to be accessed later in life — I had to ask April what her perspective is on the differences between herself and her siblings.

She told me that during her recent physical exam her physician had told her that the reason her three siblings ended up with severe mental illness is probably because they had those specific combination of genetic possibilities in them that were triggered as their bodies were stressed during early childhood.  He further stated that evidently April and her other two siblings did not have these genetic sensitivities so they ended up without the mental illness.  (Even then April was a carrier of the genes because she has a schizophrenic alcoholic drug addicted son.  I did not ask her about her own parenting conditions nor did she tell me.)

This still did not explain to me how April manages to be so optimistically positive and so able to find active ways to cope in her life.  It did not explain that while she had for a period of time become what she termed “an active psychologically dependent alcoholic,” how she managed to extricate herself from her addiction so that it didn’t affect her in the present.

This is the point in the conversation where the secret was unveiled to me.  Part of her current difficulties with her bi-polar sister stem from what happened last January at the death of their father.  April was very clear about her lack of feeling for her father and her sister fell to pieces and became enraged at April for her detachment.  It turns out that the only person their father ever paid any affectionate attention to was this bi-polar sister.  She was his favorite and she was his pet.  (I don’t know whether or not there was sexual abuse occurring in this situation, though it sounds to me like a typical setup for such abuse to happen.)

What April told me next is the most important fact of this story.  While her sister was her very sick, abusive, violent ‘dysfunctional’ father’s pet, April was consistently the favored pet of her father’s mother.  And what is most important about THIS fact is that April describes this grandmother as being a very happy person — able to be happy in her own life and able to be extremely happy in her ongoing relationship with April.

THIS is, to me, a magic key to April’s life today.  The happy center in little April’s developing brain was fed, fostered and able to grow because of this happy, safe and secure relationship she had with her happy grandmother.  Because this happy center was so designed and built in April’s early-developing brain, that collection of neurons was already in her brain in spite of all the other nasty traumatic experiences that April still had to endure.

April lost touch with her happy self for many, many years.  But when she was ready to take a good hard look at herself and her life, and wanted to make it so much better, she had this precious resource within her brain of a well-built happy center to fall back on and to rely on as she sought to make happier changes for a happier life.  Still, today, it was and is April’s decision to exercise the heck out of these happy center neurons that is making the difference not only for her in her life, but also for all others that come into contact with her.

April described to me that she works at being happy all of the time.  She WORKS HARD at it.  But she is the one doing the work.  The fact that she was blessed with the conditions in her early brain developmental life, through a safe, secure and happy attachment relationship with at least one other person, her grandmother, does not take away the importance that April is still doing this good work herself.  She made the decision and is applying her own life force to  continue to make these positive changes.  Nobody else could do this for her.  Yet I believe that her early secure attachment with her grandmother helped to give her both the inner resources to do this work and the ability to want to try.

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I could sense the very old competition for affection and resources that still exists between April and her sister regarding their father.  It was like, “She had our father but I had my grandmother.”  The unspoken pain was still there caused by a father who could not love his daughters — in fact could probably not really love anyone including himself.

There’s no way a child cannot crave a father’s affection and not notice when another sibling seems to be receiving it.  Yet in this situation the love from a terrible father could in no way compare to the seemingly healthy love from a happy, adoring grandmother.  April got the better end of the deal, and her sister is a deteriorating bi-polar in large part, I believe, because of these inequities.

(This creates another whole set of questions in my mind.  What happened in April’s father’s early life in relationship with his own mother, this happy grandmother, that set him up for a disastrous life?  It is not at all uncommon for grandmother’s to be able to love and attach securely to grandchildren when they could not do this for their own children.  And why did was this grandmother unable to intervene on behalf of all of her grandchildren?  Why did she single out only one as her ‘pet’?  But all this will be food and fodder for future writings.)

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I understand that everyone who has even only a tiny happy center can still exercise that center through hard work to make it stronger.  But the original nerve cells/neurons that were present at birth — designated for this happy center but NOT used while this center built itself through early attachment relationships and therefore were lost — can NEVER be replaced.

What happy center neurons we DO have can increase their dendrites and the interactions between these dendrites through exercise.  That April is so clearly applying hard work to become more happy, even though she had a better happy center built in the beginning than her sister did, still lets us know that the effects of severe abuse continue for the lifespan.  If they didn’t, April would not have to work so hard to become more happy herself.

People who were raised from birth in safety and security that encompassed and enveloped them as it SHOULD have, have so much more to work with on every level as they face the ongoing challenges of life.  Being happy will always be easier for securely attached from birth people, just as it is for April who only had partial childhood experiences of secure attachment in the midst of trauma compared to her mentally ill siblings.

I describe this today in part as a gesture of support for everyone who has become even more challenged in their lives as a result of the economic difficulties the world is facing.  If you or anyone you know is being additionally challenged right now, please do not judge them harshly if they cannot be as optimistically happy as someone else might be able to be as they struggle to get through their hard times — ANY kind of hard times.

We need to support and encourage ourselves and one another in the work of trying to live a more happy and positive life with kindness to the best of our abilities.  We must be realistic and informed about the context of happiness and active coping just as we need to be about the actual traumas we have experienced.

Those who have suffered early developmental-stage traumas are always the most at risk when new traumas come along.  We can do the math — the aftermath of trauma — to find what is upsetting the balance of well-being in our lives and to find what helps to create a better state of balance every step of the way.

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Thank you for reading this post — your comments are welcome and appreciated.  Linda

+FROM FAILED TO FANTASTIC FAMILIES – JUDGMENT WON’T GET US THERE!

alchemynowLeave a comment

Welcome to today’s post that describes what I think hampers many well intentioned efforts to help ‘troubled families’ improve their quality of life.

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First let me offer to you a link that provides access to vital and marvelous resources for improving parenting abilities no matter what our childhood backgrounds were like.  Once we know these resources exist, we can begin to find ways to access them within our communities because I realize the videos are expensive.

I can personally recommend the S.T.E.P. program as one that was amazingly helpful to me in raising my children.  This site presents other programs, as well, including several designed for parents of infants and very young children.

I believe that everyone can benefit from learning more about becoming a better parent.  I also believe that as a society we could improve our entire overall quality of life as a culture by making this kind of information easily accessible to everyone — even before they become parents.

Take a look at this site, The Center for the Improvement of Child Caring.  I believe you will be happy that you did!

http://www.ciccparenting.org/catalogitem.asp?ci=39&cid=&c=3

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Now for the rest of the story:

Information is a resource.  Having access to resources and being able to use them makes people healthier and happier, and increases their well-being in the world.

Resources exist both inside and outside of our individual bodies.  What happens to us from birth determines what resources are available to us within our own brains, and these brain resources determine how we interact with all other available resources surrounding us for the rest of our lives.

As today’s researchers learn more and more about how early infant and child maltreatment and deprivation changes the way the brain develops, they are also learning about how brains develop and operate under the best of conditions.  Each of these different brains (and bodies) end up developing according to the resources available to the very young child at the start of its life.

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We cannot expect that a severely maltreated infant’s brain will develop to be the same as a well treated infant’s brain because they are each being built in differing circumstances and being ‘fed’ different information about the world.  Both types of brains are alike, however, in that they are designed to keep a person alive in the world they live in.

We have to remember that a developing infant and young child brain only knows the information it is receiving as it builds itself and cannot anticipate a future that is different from its early one.  Of course these adaptations occur in interaction between the environment and the particular genetic potential an infant has within itself.

Yet there is no doubt that early severe abuse and maltreatment will cause any developing brain to adjust itself to a malevolent world if it is forced to, no matter what.  Nobody would be immune to this adaptive process because it is the only way severe challenges to an infant can be survived.  True recognition of this fact humbles us.  Once we have this level of humility we can begin to truly help others to live a better life without heaping shame on them in the process.

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The image comes into my mind of a bulldozer and a space shuttle.  We could imagine that any given infant has the potential from birth to develop (a brain suited) for the future tasks of either one depending upon the information it receives from its early environment.   This information about the conditions of the future,  directly communicated to it by the conditions of its early caregiving environment, determines the infant and young child’s final outcome.

Let’s say that harsh, toxic and traumatic environments create in the young one the need to become a bulldozer in order to deal with these malevolent deprivations.  At the same time we could say that a benevolent environment of safety, security and plenty allows an infant to prepare itself for a better future and in the end it can become a space shuttle.  In both cases mobility would be possible.  In both cases the job of remaining alive would have been accomplished.

Yet from this simple image we can tell that beyond the basic similarities between these two, there are vast differences that resulted as consequences of the information about the possibilities of the future that either ‘type’ of infant received and adapted to.  In both cases the infants made the best use of information and resources possible.  Yet what happens to an infant that was forced through early malevolent conditions to become a bulldozer when it graduates out of childhood into a world built for and by those who had enough resources in their benevolent early environments to become space shuttles?

We are left with a serious, yet I believe unrecognized gap here between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’.

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I mention this now as I introduce some information about improving parenting skills because I believe many attempts to improve the quality of parenting are being made by people who are like our imaginary space shuttles as they try to ‘help’ people who are like our imaginary bulldozers.  Too often well intentioned efforts of the ‘haves’ to ‘help’ the ‘have nots’ become ‘better’ fail because the fundamental differences between these two groups are not currently being recognized or acknowledged.

These differences come from the fact that a brain built in a safe and secure early attachment environment is not the same kind of brain that is built in an unsafe and insecure early attachment environment.  These two kinds of brains operate in the adult (and childhood) world differently.  They process information differently and they respond differently.

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For those readers who might be wondering how to tell which kind of brain they developed and which kind of future their brains were preparing them to live in, I will use one word that, to me, becomes the pivot point (imagine the old fashioned playground teeter tooter here).  Movement toward the benevolent end or movement toward the malevolent end can be determined from this pivot point.  That one word is TERROR.  To the degree that any infant or developing young child experiences terror — a repeated state of complete lack of safety and security — will its brain develop differently from a child’s brain who does not have to experience this state.

From that pivot point, moving toward one end or the other, changes will occur in the individual that is being prepared for a future world that corresponds to similar hostile, dangerous, threatening, traumatic and toxic conditions.  Once we realize that these changes are fundamental we can begin to find ways to talk between worlds.  In order for this communication to be meaningful the basic facts underlying the differences between the ‘secures’ and the ‘insecures’ have to be recognized, described, understood, respected and honored.

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What possible scenarios can I imagine about what kinds of possibly effective interventions that could have happened to protect me from my mother’s abuse of me?  This field of imagination is wide open to me because it NEVER happened.  When considering intervention in relationship to my own experience, I think about when I was in eighth grade and had to wear one of those very short, one piece blue gym suits, and had to take group showers every day after class.  I remember backing myself into the shower corner, always facing away from the wall feeling so ashamed, humiliated and embarrassed because the entire back of my body from the base of my skull to my heels, including my arms, was covered in every imaginable color of bruises — black, blue, purple, green, yellow.

I realize how silly that was on one level because certainly those bruises would have been visible simply as I wore that stupid suit throughout the entire class period.  Yet it was standing naked and visible in the showers themselves that made me feel this humiliation.  Yet nobody — EVER — paid any attention.  Not one single time did someone ask me, either classmate or teacher, how I had gotten even one of those bruises.  They were visible, ugly, horrible, and obvious indicators of the fact that someone was hurting me terribly.  I suspect it was because my mother’s abuse of me had started from my first breath it never entered my thoughts that I could tell anyone or ever expect anyone to either care or to help me.

While we live in a world today that is legally mandated to report physical signs of abuse, those signs are merely the tip of the iceberg.  Those of you who know the reality of all the different levels and kinds of abuse, neglect and maltreatment that children can be exposed to know what I am talking about.

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We are still, today, left with the proverbial vicious cycle with continued questions about how we recognize extreme traumatic stress going on in families, how to intervene, and how to improve conditions on all levels for everyone being affected.  Yet what I can now say is that even if someone had intervened because of my eighth grade bruises, they would still have missed the most important damage of all — the changes that my brain had already made that allowed me to survive in a malevolent world even before I was two years old.

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What I am going to say next is not meant to offend anyone.  I say it because I care that all efforts being made to Stop the Storm of unresolved traumas be as effective as they possibly can be.  I offer my own ‘expert’ opinion based on conclusions I have made as a survivor of terrible infant and child abuse myself.  I believe a dangerous weapon is often being unconsciously wielded against the very people the ‘haves’ are trying to ‘help’.

That weapon is any degree of an attitude of self righteous superiority and judgment of or against those who were forced through their very early malevolent experiences to become bulldozers rather than space shuttles.  Because those of us who formed a body and brain in a worst-case world had to build defense into ourselves from our earliest beginnings, we have an uncanny ability to recognize and to respond defensively against ANY PERCEIVED FORM OF ATTACK.

We detect challenges to the integrity of our being and respond at the speed of light.  I don’t mean this metaphorically.  The electrical impulses that govern communication within and between the cells of our body and brain move that fast.  Once a challenge or a threat is detected, we will protect ourselves at all costs.  We do this unconsciously because our bodies learned from the time of our beginnings that consciousness is far too slow to keep us alive.

And we certainly include an ability to detect anyone’s negative judgment of us as being a threat because we were built that way.  When we consider the fact that information transmitted brain to brain through facial expressions ALONE moves at the speed of a signal every 1/200th of a second, we can begin to understand that people who are assessing and judging us from any position of supposed self righteous superiority may not even realize that they are doing it.

That does not, to me, make their even unconscious transmission of judgment toward us in any way acceptable.  It therefore becomes the job of anyone who thinks they sincerely care about the ‘have nots’ and wish to ‘help’ them to become completely aware and conscious of their own biases and resulting judgments — both of perpetrators and of victims — because nearly 100% of perpetrators were victimized themselves.

This also means that those of us who are survivors of traumatic childhoods need to look within ourselves and detect how we have ‘bought’ or ‘eaten’ the judgments that others may have passed down to us — both in our childhood and our adulthood.  We cannot afford to ignore these seeds of doubt because they directly attach themselves anywhere inside of us where the potential for shame exists.

Because our physiological ability to feel shame originates in our body by the time we are one year old, it is guaranteed that anything that has been passed to us by others and has triggered our shame contributes to its further ‘growth and development’.  Shame usually operates far below our level of conscious awareness.   It is an automatic response that occurs within our nervous system (including our brain) and body.

I understand that humans physically develop the ability to experience shame as our bodies develop from conception.  It is not until we are a year old that our bodies have grown enough for this reaction to occur.  But once we have passed that developmental stage, all of our social attachment interactions are processed through this filter.  It is not helpful for well meaning ‘educators’ to be handing out shame along with whatever new information they are trying to transmit to those that ‘need’ it.

“A spoonful of poison does not make the medicine go down.”  Self righteous judgment based on an attitude of superiority causes an unconscious shame defense reaction within the recipient that distorts all the information that might be offered to a threatened individual at the same time.

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Because of the traumatic experiences that formed my brain, I have an almost excruciatingly sensitive ‘input detection system’ that is geared to exquisitely detect danger and threat surrounding me at all times.  I have built a corresponding protection and defense system within me.  Because I am a member of a social species, any input that I process related to social interactions has to be processed by my ‘shame detection system’.

I now understand that most of my aversion to any supposedly ‘helpful self help’ book I’ve ever read stems from the fact that my advanced ability to detect unbelievably delicate attacks on my level of shame senses judgment in these writings.  I can and do read volumes of information ‘between the lines’.  I have always known on some level that I have to translate and interpret information contained in these books because I have never found a single one of them that addresses the fundamental fact that I have a very different brain and body as a result of the abuse I experienced from birth.

This process of translation and interpretation is exhausting in itself.   It takes an incredible level of focus and energy to do it.  In addition we are forced at the same time to defend ourselves from the underlying projections of shame that affect us at very deep levels as we read these books.  I suspect that everyone with one of these altered brains experiences the same thing that I do even if they don’t recognize it.  Because those like me are already forced to expend so much more energy just getting along in a world we weren’t prepared for and don’t really understand, many of us just can’t make use of the well intentioned information that these books are meant to provide us with.

This makes all the well intended efforts we apply to ourselves or that others might apply to us to inform, transform, reform, conform us to fit a world we were not built in, by or for in the first place remarkably inefficient and ineffective.  In some cases, such as would have been true for my mother, the hoped for results are impossible to obtain due to the vast distortions that took place in a vastly altered brain — made so because drastic measures had to be taken early in life in order to adjust and adapt to and survive drastic conditions.

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I am not saying that it is a waste of time to try to provide information that helps those that could use it to live better lives.  What I am saying is that we often do not consider the full context of the problems themselves and are thus hindering our efforts to address them.  What do we really know about the full context of all the things we are trying to prevent, either?  I don’t care if we look at preventing or addressing child abuse, domestic abuse, war, poverty, crime, sexual predation, ignorance or terrorism.  Humans are contextual beings.  We develop in context.  We live in context.  Everything we do and everything done to us happens in a context.

The contexts that cause some to mature into the equivalent of bulldozers or into space shuttles were very different in the first place.  If we refuse to realize the ramifications of these differences and continue to unconsciously judge people for having them, we might as well be taking our hardest efforts to make the world a better place and throw them like tiny pieces of confetti into a strong wind.

If we continue to self righteously judge one another from our supposed positions of superiority we will continue to offend others in the depths of their being, and they will continue to defend themselves against us.  Not helpful.  They will not be able to hear or apply a single useful thing we are telling them.  Is changing this pattern of judgment between all of us truly what loving ourselves and one another — no matter what — is all about?

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Thank you for reading this long post.  Your comments are welcome and appreciated.

+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

+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.

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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.

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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.

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

+FORGETTING TO REMEMBER WHAT TO AVOID

alchemynowLeave a comment

Everything about being alive is about having control over one’s environment.  I believe that it is essentially our immune systems that direct our ability to maintain our lives by using all aspects of our body’s operation to ensure that our lives continue.  If we were a much more primitive species, we would only be able to count on what this immunity provided to protect our cells for us.  Because we are an advanced species, we also can use what resources our advanced brains provide.

We are not taught to consider that our nervous system, including our brain, is directly connected to our immune system.  From my point of view, with emotions being direct indicators to us of how our conscious experiences are affecting us through immune system reactions, we can learn to recognize what these emotions are telling us.  Because we are a complicated species, boiling down what we feel to the core emotions they are connected to, can be hard for us to do.  We more often get stuck cycling the emotions and not accomplishing much of anything related to what they are telling us needs to be done to make our life better — and to give us more control over our environment and our interactions with it.

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I found my way into ‘recovery’ through a 7 week inpatient alcoholism treatment program in 1980, and from there found my way through 12 step programs.  I am aware of the controversy that continues about potential problems related to CONTROL.    OOOHHH!  The big bad “C” word, control.  AND, the big bad “M” word, MANIPULATE.

Well, let me give you some important insider information.  Without the ability to utilize both control and manipulation for our own self preservation we would, quite simply, be dead.  It is not possible for us to delete these two words from our vocabulary and still be able to consider how we not only stay alive, but how we can be alive more efficiently and effectively.  These are not peripheral or abstract concepts.  They are at the core of everything about us.

I see the problems we might have with control and manipulation being related not to these fundamental operations themselves, but with our own degrees of denial of their essential existence and our resulting lack of conscious awareness of their life sustaining (well-being) or life obliterating (ill-being) powers.  Because I am in my thinking always looking for the lowest possible common denominator, I can say that what we are really talking about when we consider both control and manipulation is a simple process of addition or subtraction.

If our bodies detect that we are under some form of threat they are essentially telling us through our immune system reactions that an imbalance is present in the form of a subtraction of resources, and that this depletion needs to be addressed.  Something needs to be added to the equation to balance out the threat so that we can continue living, and to live more abundantly if at all possible.

If we have become so ‘advanced’ that we cannot recognize the signals our immune system gives us, cannot decipher what they mean, cannot take responsible self action to change the triggering situation and make things better, then we are at continual risk of keeping ourselves in environments of escalating threat and danger.  In other words, we are forgetting what being a being in a body is all about.

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We need to stop thinking of our immune system reactions as being handy but nonessential components of our existence.  We cannot continue to separate and divide one part of our being from other parts of our being, and think we are somehow sophisticated because we can conquer our basic nature as living beings.  Our bodies, brains, emotions, needs, wants, desires, illnesses, etc are not all separate parts of who we are.  We are not worms.  These parts we have divided from ourselves cannot go off and live satisfying lives on their own.  Nor can we think we are disconnected from the entirety of the living environment.  Such perspectives are not wise.  Rather, they are destructive fantasies of childish minds.

Infancy and childhood are not states we are designed to remain in.  We are designed to mature into reproductively fit adults so that we can proginate and then take adequate care of our progeny so that our species will endure.  I believe that what is at the center of this wheel-of-life and what is at the hub, is simply — COMPETENCE.  We are either competent members of our species or we are not.  Dead center is dead center.  It is the optimal state for any species, and there are no degrees of gray there.

If we are NOT at the dead center of competence so that we can live the best life possible, then everything we need to do is about making adjustments to get there so that we can become more competent.  Control and manipulation are simply tools we use to get to center and to try to stay there and maintain that state.  Because the living environment is constantly changing and being alive is not a static state, this moving toward (or away from?) dead center of optimal competence is the continual work of every organism.

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The dead center of optimal experience, of being optimally competent, does not exist in a vacuum.  Nor are we supposed to be navigating in pitch darkness, guessing randomly how close or how far we might be from this center.  Reproductive fitness indicators of any species are the clear and definitive signs regarding the relationship an organism has to this center, and these indicators never lie.

If we have, as a supposedly wise species, so confused ourselves about what our reproductive fitness indicators are, what they mean, what they tell us, and what adjustments we are supposed to make regarding the information they tell us and our corresponding relationship to optimal, then we have little choice but to either inform ourselves and make required changes, or suffer — individually and as a species.  Unfortunately, because we have such advanced powers to control and manipulate, we also cause the whole of the world to suffer right along with us.

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Fortunately, we don’t have to twist ourselves into a never ending tangle of knots trying to figure out how to attack any problem that we might identify as keeping us from the optimal state of competence.  We only have to look at the one thing that can tell us about the quality and condition of our reproductive fitness indicators:  ATTACHMENT.  Floundering around lost on any level will affect the quality of the attachments that we have to ourselves, our body, to one another as members of a social species, and to the world we are a part of.  Degrees of incompetence manifest as corresponding impediments in the strength, quality and state of being attached — or not.

I do not make this argument metaphorically.  The fact of the matter is that even before our conception the chemical interactions occurring within our mother’s body affect whether or not a sperm becomes fertile, whether it finds any particular egg and becomes attached with it, whether or not attachment occurs within the uterus, the quality of attachment the fetus experiences to the mother as it grows, and the nature of attachment to ‘what kind of world’ every step of the journey that individual experiences until its death.

The quality of attachment manifests itself in reproductive fitness indicators, which are themselves signs pointing to the quality of competence any organism experiences within the environment of its own body and within the corresponding environment of life itself.

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Life is an interchange of resources occurring as a part of the particular context of the limitations and possibilities that exist in relationship with one another as a part of our planet.  In this way we could say that all life that has been a part of this planet are its reproductive fitness indicators, each particular form sharing in the process of exchanging available resources.

Trauma is a part of life on our planet that occurs when any event causes a disruption in the ‘usual’ pattern of resource exchange among life forms.  Any life form that has living cells will manifest an immune system response to the challenge of trauma.   This response is an indication both that its preexisting competency state has been disturbed within its environment and that a competent adjustment to the challenge is required.

Because life occurs within the context of resources, either a life form has access to resources to adjust to changes within the context of their environment or they suffer — and/or die.  Obviously resources are, well, resources themselves.  Having the right resources to access the right resources is itself a resource.  Having the ability to use the existing resources competently is also a resource.  If the needed resources don’t exit, or if they aren’t available to you, or even if they are there but you don’t have the resources yourself to access and use them, the results are the same — a big “Uh Oh!”

This sounds like a circular process because it is one.  Life forms can advance due to utilization of adequate resources as they have the resource of being able to competently utilize those resources, or they retreat in the opposite direction if the opposite situation exists.  If a retreat is possible until conditions improve, life may continue.  If not?  You know the answer to that question.

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Life is a DOING process.  Life is sustained through what any life form does with resources.  Competency is about controlling and manipulating resources for a life form’s best survival purposes.  This process has been ongoing in balance because life’s corresponding interconnections through a mutual attachment to continued life has not been interrupted on a level that deprives ongoing life of its necessary resources.

Now enters the development of our human species.  It is to the degree that we detach ourselves and unattach ourselves from life promoting processes that we upset ourselves and all of life that our actions thus affect.  Pardon me, but I think we are rapidly approaching a point where our supposed advancement as a species is indicating that our incompetency is showing!

If we pay attention we will notice that all manner of our reproductive fitness indicators are telling us that we are mismanaging resources.  Our incompetent mismanagement of resources is being reflected around us in the deterioration of reproductive fitness indicators within the context of life on this planet on ever increasingly levels and in ever more serious ways.  We can try to remain children engaging in the wistful magical fantasy thinking of ignorance and denial, but that will not change the fact that all of us are being affected personally, as well.

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If we pay attention on the personal level, our immune systems are telling us what this imbalance and mismanagement of available resources feels like.  Yet we seem to be using what has evolved as one of our best resources against ourselves rather than for ourselves.  Every evolving species has stored a capacity to remember how to survive in its genetic code so that ongoing members do not have to relearn the important big things every time a new generation comes along.  As a result each generation can then avoid many sources of trauma and harm by acting according to the learnings remembered in their genes.  The operational term here is AVOID.

Avoiding trauma, harm,  distress and destruction is a very efficient way of manifesting competence.  It seems to work well on every level of life except the highest one.  Humans possess the most advanced brain on the planet.  Yet its evolution has provided us with the most dangerous tool of all.  We now have the ability to FORGET that which we have already learned by using the life sustaining ability to avoid remembering in new and creative ways.

This, to me, means that we have taken ourselves just about as far down the detachment road as we can safely go.  Because we have this ability to ignore and avoid remembering (and competently acting upon) all the information we have gained during our entire evolution about what to avoid so that we can continue living, we are destroying whatever degrees of well being based on wise management of resources to sustain life that we worked so hard to get in the first place.  We are so busy making ourselves stupid with forgetting that we are rapidly diminishing our powers to discover better ways of being in the world.

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I started out writing today thinking that I was going to present the topic of courage, discouragement and encouragement.  As I headed off into my woods of words the writing led me off in another direction.  Yes, I am always surprised when this happens and never sure where exactly I made an alternative turn.  But here I am, and here, too, are you if you have read this far.  Did I forget where I was going?

I intended to say that saddened, despondent and rage filled people are having a difficult time accessing and using resources.  I was going to say that feeling discouraged is meant only to be a short stopping place on our road of life.  I was going to say that from there we can reconsider our goals, desires and intentions and then find new and creative ways to access and use available resources to forge ahead.  I was planning to write about how we can encourage ourselves and one another in this process.

Now I see that I didn’t start out in the first place headed into a simple little wooded glen, nicely packed picnic basket in hand, to enjoy a sunny breezy spring day of meandering.  I found myself on a wide road of stripped forests and polluted waters with garbage thrown, spread and littered all the way into space.  I found death and deprivation and depletion along the sides of the road.  True, there are little places of pretty glens of woods where portions of our world’s populations are able to tarry.

But on the larger scale I see that our species in in danger because we are using the available resources of our highly evolved brains to circumvent our ancient wisdom by forgetting to remember to avoid what will harm us.  By abusing our most precious resource that is meant to sustain us, by incompetently mismanaging ourselves, we are at risk of creating a situation where we will have to learn what we are forgetting all over again.

It is important to remember that the best resource humans have to protect ourselves from the harmful wake of trauma is to avoid it in the first place.  The next most important protective factor is the support of others close to us.  As we alienate ourselves from the first we begin to deprive ourselves of the second.  Unfortunately, we are well on our way to doing both.

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