Tag: violence

+THESE 1983 – 1984 WRITINGS LED TO TODAY’S EARLIER POST….

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I just spoke with a dear friend I’ve known for 30 years.   She suggested that I think about how the animals and bugs and plants and rocks exist on this earth.  Then think about this:  “Life is empty and meaningless and it doesn’t mean anything that it’s empty and meaningless.”

Then I can think about how humans add meaning because we can think.  That means that it’s all made up.  My friend’s suggestion is about how I might as well make up something I like for a life.  She’ll call me on Sunday to check in with me and see how I am doing in my new meaningless life!

I have to take a break from here until Monday while I try this out!  Have a great weekend!

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Nothing about being raised and abused from birth and for the next 18 years by my incredibly mean, psychotic borderline mother has made my living in this world easy.

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December 28, 1983

“Coming alive is a tenuous, delicate, natural thing.”

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As can be seen in my post from earlier today, I have lost my tolerance for facing myself in my age 31 and 32 year old journals.  I am including the link here for those writings I have transcribed so far.  What follows in those journals are the kinds of desperate questions about myself and my life that led to today’s post +THE POWER OF JOURNALING – ASKING A QUESTION THAT HAS AN ANSWER

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LINK FOR LATEST JOURNALS TRANSCRIBED:

*Ages 31 – 32 – August 13, 1983 through January 22, 1984 Journal

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+THE POWER OF JOURNALING – ASKING A QUESTION THAT HAS AN ANSWER

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I am in a battle with myself over whether or not there is any value to myself or to anyone else in my reading and transcribing my quarter of a century old journals.  Part of me wants to burn them all.  I think about how to contain the fire I could make of them so no smoldering ashes would escape and float away to light some part of this dry high desert landscape around me on fire.

Maybe I could tear them all into tiny pieces and soak them in water and then cook them into papier mache mash and make something beautiful out of them.  Maybe I could tear them up and dig them into the damp earth of my composting pile where I know the hungering masses of worms and slugs there would chew them up gladly and digest them into soil.

Maybe I could box them all up and take them camping when my sister comes next month to visit.  We could burn them more safely in the contained campground fire pit, have a little releasing ceremony and let all the words that record what all the versions of Linda talked about for 25 years vanish as if they had never been.

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What is the value of this journaling process that so many therapists (and others) seem so fond of recommending?  We could just as well write our words on an area of flat dirt and then sweep them away when we are finished.  We could just as well write them with chalk on slate or with grease pencil on a mirror or a piece of glass, and erase them as soon as they no longer hold any meaning to us.

Who are we telling the intimate details of our lives to as we sit alone and tarry over our silent words so studiously copied as if we are creating lessons for ourselves out of nothing but the contents of our minds?

Does journaling help us tolerate our hard times, I would say ‘better’, but I really mean ‘tolerate them at all’?

Or does the writing simply contain the passage of time as we transition through all the changes that happen to us along the way of our lifetime, both outside of us and within?

Does journaling help us to think more clearly?  Do we create a dialog with our self because we are so alone there is no other person alive we can trust enough to pass ourselves on to?

What is it about writing the words our souls tell us in hidden places between two covers of a journal that helps us or heals us?  And in today’s world where keyboards replace ink or lead, our words simply join some cyber network, taking their place in simultaneous land where they enter themselves into an invisible cue, waiting for whom to go back and read them?

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Or do those of us who write do so simply because we are writers?  Could we find a writing gene somewhere in our constitution if we knew where to look for it?  Do we write because we care about certain things in a particular way that non-writers can’t even imagine?

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That would be all fine and worthy if I could SEE what matters about the process of journaling for me in the end.  What I am finding instead is that the same concerns I wrote about 25 years ago are really right here inside of me today if I let them be.  Questions.  I asked thousands of questions on those pages that I had no answers for.

I recorded my inner conflicts and turmoil and suffering.  I recorded how it felt to be so lost from myself and others that I could only ask the questions themselves and could never find any answers, no matter how committed I was to finding them.  The answers were intangible.  They were invisible.

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My journals portray my journey, each word on a line in the order I could see them.  Writing was my way of trying to organize and orient myself in my body in my life.

Time has moved forward.  My children grew up, left home intact, and have orchestrated their own lives free from trauma.  Because I was their mother, far from perfect but ‘good enough’, their journey will always remain connected to mine but not central.

In the meantime my journals reveal all the turbulence, all the missteps and attempts I have made to catch up to a Linda who was living a life that never has been coherent or integrated or cohesive or well planned.  I know now that I was always trying to make sense of myself in my life even though I was missing all the most important pieces.

I mistakenly thought I could create an ordinary life without knowing the extreme, long term abuse I suffered from birth and for the 18 years of my childhood had changed the way my body-brain developed, and had therefore changed me.

Not only was the development of my right and left brain hemispheres changed, and the corpus callosum that connects them and transmits information between the two changed, but also the development of my higher level thinking cortex part of my brain was changed, as well.

I have avoided writing about the development of my ‘executive cortex’.  When I am ready to do so I will have to consider how child abuse deprived me of an ‘ordinary’ ability to process information about the future and affected all my choice and decision making abilities.

Normal, ordinary brains that form without a history of severe abuse and trauma continue to grow all the way through the teen and early adult years.  A normal, ordinary cortex does not finish its development until somewhere between ages 25 and 30.  A severely abused and traumatized child’s cortex atrophies early and never finishes its development to become normal and ordinary.

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Nobody was there to stop me just as I crossed the threshold out of my parents’ home and into my own life when I was 18 to tell me that what I had just endured of a childhood was hell, wrong, and extremely hurtful to me.  Nobody explained to me that the trauma I had suffered from birth had so changed the way I had to grow and develop so I could survive it that it meant I now have a different brain that works fine in terrible, toxic, malevolent, threatening, dangerous and self-obliterating conditions but was not designed like an ordinary brain to work well in an ordinary, benevolent world.

Maybe nobody told me this in 1969 when I left home because nobody knew it.  Certainly if all the infant and child development experts didn’t know these basic facts, if the human brain development neuroscientists and physiologists didn’t know, I need not blame myself for not knowing this critical information about my chances for achieving any quality of well-being in an ‘ordinary’ life, either.

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So what exists in the last 25 years of my journals in their piles on the shelves beside my computer desk is a simple chronicling of one severe child abuse survivor’s disorganized, disoriented incoherent life story about how the changes my body and brain had to make so that I could survive the hell of my childhood could not possibly have prepared me to live any kind of an ordinary life.

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I look up above me right now as I sit here outside my door writing in the high desert gentle sunlight of this early November 2009 morning and watch the wispy tendrils of clouds drifting, white against the distant blue sky, and I know that’s the same sky that caps the lives of everyone living below it.  At the same time I know there are two kinds of people on this planet, plain and simple, no matter where they plant their feet on this grand planet earth.

There are those whose early caregivers loved them and cared for them appropriately when they were an infant-child the way human evolution has dictated in order for an ordinary-functioning brain to grow and develop.  They provided safe and secure attachment for their offspring.

And then there are the rest of us who were not loved, who were treated malevolently by our early caregivers.  The traumatizing circumstances of our early environments demanded of our growing early body-brain that we change and adapt or we die.

There are degrees of change just as there are degrees of trauma, but because I know so clearly what the circumstances of my infancy and childhood were as a result of my mother’s psychotic break when I was born and because of her severe mental illness, I no longer have to ask the thousands of questions I used to ask in my  journals without being able to find any answers.

There remains only one single answer that matters to me now.  It’s the same answer for every one of those questions I have been asking all of my adult life as I tried to make myself into a ‘better’ and a different more ordinary person who could then live a more ordinary life of ordinary well-being.

The reason I cannot become an ‘ordinary’ person is because I have an ‘extra-ordinary’ brain that had to grow, develop and form under the ‘extra-ordinary’ circumstances of severe trauma and abuse that was my infant-child environment.  My trauma-changed-body and brain does not receive ‘ordinary’ information from the environment in ‘ordinary’ ways.  It does not process information in ‘ordinary’ ways, either.  There is very little about severe-abuse-and-trauma-survivor Linda that is ‘ordinary’ or can EVER be ‘ordinary’.  Just because I look ordinary on the outside tells me nothing about how I am different on the inside.

If I continue to ignore what I now know about being a changed-by-severe early abuse and trauma person, I will condemn myself to the continued struggle of asking questions forever that I will never find the answers for.

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I realize now that all my journal writings up until this point in time have created a chronicle of my journey through adulthood with a changed body and brain, and what this has been like for me.  Continued research is now chronicling the life long changes severe abuse creates for its survivors on a much larger scale.  The outcomes appear extremely bleak and grim for survivors.  We have to put the facts together and realize that the very foundation in our body and brain has been changed, and these changes give us a changed life outcome.

It is not possible for us to escape the consequences of what was done to us until we begin to understand how we changed and how those changes continue to affect EVERYTHING about us and our lives.

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For those of us who journal, we will see in our own words how exploring ourselves in our life will change as we begin to include this vital information in our thinking.  Just because everyone else has remained ignorant of the changed body and brain because of early trauma and abuse survival information, does not mean we have to remain ignorant of the facts ourselves.  We owe it to ourselves not to continue archaic patterns of thinking about ourselves in the world.

In fact, those of us who experience this ‘extra-ordinary’ reality are the REAL experts.  We know, down to our last cell in our body, what being changed by child abuse and trauma did to us.  We know our truth.  Now we have to empower ourselves to know what we have known all along.

Together we can define what living in a trauma-changed body is like.  On this planet earth, under this arching blue sky, we have to begin to understand that what humanity’s right arm might know about being ‘ordinary’ is balanced by what humanity’s left arm knows about not ever being allowed to both be ‘ordinary’ and remain alive.  We can no longer afford to let ‘ordinary’ condemn us to a lifetime of suffering because of who we are – different from ordinary.

We can join together to learn how to end the suffering of all of us.  A reality of privilege can no longer remain the standard we measure survival against.  If what happened to us had happened to ‘them’, they would have been changed just as we were or they would have died.  That is the reality of being human in an imperfect world.  What happens – and happened – to infants and children that causes these changes must become the primary concern for all of us.

Otherwise we will continue to ask all the wrong questions for which there are no answers.  We need to ask the right question, “How does severe early trauma and abuse change developing humans into ‘extra-ordinary’ beings, and how do those changes affect them for the rest of their lives?”  This IS a question we can find the answer to when we are willing to consider the truth – both individually and as a species.

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PS.  What will I do with my old journals?  I still do not know.

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+DISSOCIATION: PRESERVING A SELF IN HIDING

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We are born with the capacity to learn about who we are, and to remember ourselves throughout our many and varied experiences.  This is meant to happen as we grow from birth being cared for by loving caregivers, people who give us care consistently over time.

It is natural that caregivers understand an infant is not them, but is somebody else, a separate unique individual.  They communicate this knowledge by everything they say and do with the infant.

These patterns of interaction are building the infant’s growing brain.  Humans are designed from birth to be able to see their own separate and unique self as it is mirrored back and reflected to them by their caregivers, who are their attachment humans.

If a parent such as my mother was lacks the capacity to understand that her infant is NOT her, she will overwhelm her infant with information from herself that has absolutely no relevance to her infant’s developing connection with itself.  The infant will miss the critical interactions with its caregiver that are meant to feedback to it information about its own self.

If the infant has access to additional caregivers who are themselves of healthy brain-mind-self, the infant can get at least some of the feedback about its own self from them, and this information will be critical to the infant’s brain-mind-self growth and development.

Without access to other appropriate (secure attachment) caregivers, the infant’s brain-mind-self will not develop in an ordinary way.  Its body will of course continue to develop, but the self of the infant-child cannot possibly find its way into being a cohesive, integrated, clear and affirmed self-hood.

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Whatever the break was that happened within my mother’s brain-mind-self, it had consumed her by the time I took my first tiny breath into my body in this world in my lifetime.  She was prevented from ever looking at me and being able to allow my individual self to be born.  She could only see some split-off part of herself in me that she hated and wanted to destroy.

Her mental illness (I believe psychotic borderline) left no room for Linda to be present in my body or in my life.  All I could do was remain buried alive, hidden from her view, protected only by the miracle of life that demands that people remain intact, separate from one another.

In the meantime all the trauma she caused me from birth built my brain, the only one I have to use to get along in this world.  That my brain could not include clear and definable connections to my own selfhood HAD to be the result of my mother being not only my primary caregiver, but with the exception of early contact with my 14-month-old brother and very occasional exposure to my father or grandmother, she was my sole caregiver.

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I can try to describe every resiliency factor I can think of that probably contributed to me being able to survive my childhood with my mother so that I appeared on the adult end of my life to be mostly intact and ‘ordinary’.  At the same time, however, I have to include my dissociational abilities as being the most important resiliency factor I have.

The real me I was born as could remain hidden and protected from my mother where she could not reach me.  At the same time the self of me could not come out into the world to play, grow, learn and live.  My self could not be recognized, could not express myself.  My needs were not met except as they invisibly allowed me to continue to exist without my mother ever being able to stop me except by killing my body (which I helped her not to do).

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Evidently I was born strong.  But who and where and how the essential me is in the world still remains extremely difficult for me to detect.  I can sit here writing on this pad at this moment in time with this pen in my hand and hope I am at this moment able to open a clear, true pathway that allows the real me, the hidden-away-from-my-mean-mother me, to speak these words.

It’s like I have to keep the deep, pure waters within myself perfectly still without a single small ripple in order for the real me to appear in my life.  I do not believe this is the way ordinary people have to engage their self.  Life is busy.  It is full of stimulation and changes.  One’s self is supposed to be able to maintain its integrity in spite of external (distracting) factors.

It is only when the environment I am in is quiet, peaceful, safe and predictable that I can experience my core self.  Once anything hits my inner still pool and causes a ripple, my inner me vanishes and I cannot reach her.

When a disturbance happens, a frantic feeling that translates into anxiety follows, as professionals call this state along with the host of other labels they insist on using to describe what my fragile connection to my own true self looks like or seems like from the inside of me.

I am left having to be so careful – so full of care concerning my self in this world — now at 58, because nobody was there in the beginning to do it for me.  I can think about my connection to my self in today’s world as being like a frequently ‘dropped call’.  When life challenges me, the resulting disturbance inside of me causes a ‘call lost’ reaction.  Then some version of Linda has to keep on going, the best way that it-I can until circumstances change and complete calm around and within me returns.

Believe me, this is a hard, hard way to be in this world.

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This is a duplicate of *Age 58 – November 5, 2009 – A hard way to be in the world

written for my adult story pages on dissociation

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+DISSOCIATION IS ORDINARY AND NORMAL WHEN OUR CHILDHOODS ARE NOT

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Breaking free from denial (magical wishful childhood thinking) about our histories of child abuse is essential at some point for any recovery to be initiated.  In these next journal pages I began my attempt at that process.

This section of my age 31 journal covers my entry into trauma and addiction treatment.  My childhood experience of severe trauma was recognized and validated in this treatment process, but evidently once therapy began in earnest I was expected to turn my journal writing into my therapists and I complied.  I have no record of that treatment process.  The treatment center closed when the owner died about 10 years ago and evidently all records were destroyed.

From my 2009 perspective of today, I suggest that very few, if any severe child abuse survivors made it through their childhood without dissociating.  I now understand that even though I did not dissociate during the incidents of abuse I experienced for 18 years, I did dissociate BETWEEN them.  This means, as I have said before, that my experience of my own childhood is in dissociated fragments.  What I know now is that “as it was in the beginning, so shall it forever be.”

I do not believe there is any way to ‘heal’ myself from this fact.  It is just as important, however,  for me to recognize the dissociation built within me as it is to recognize the horrors and traumas that caused it from the time of my birth.  No therapist I have ever had helped me to understand what dissociation truly is, how it affected my childhood development and how it affects me today.

And as I begin to understand these aspects of myself now, I also am coming to understand that I am NOT BROKEN, I am simply different from ‘ordinary’ people as a result of having survived extraordinarily traumatic childhood experiences that changed me during my critical stages of child development.  In my case, I do not see dissociation as the proverbial and supposed ‘defense mechanism’ professionals seem fond of naming it.

My dissociation is not ‘psychological’ in any Freudian sense.  There is simply more than one way to ‘be’ in the world because there is more than one kind of world to ‘be’ in.  How our body-brain-mind-self gets made in the first place is a result of which kind of world we were living in while our development took place.

My dissociation happened because the separate incidents of horrible trauma that happened to me as an infant-child made no sense.  There was therefore no way for my brain to ‘associate’ them together.  The only pattern present was unpredictable, violent, scary insane chaos and nobody’s brain can build itself in any ‘ordinary’ way under these kinds of malevolent circumstances.

I was not, of course, even remotely aware of my dissociation as I wrote the June pages of my 1983 journal.  I simply recorded what I thought I remembered from my childhood, but even this was a significant step.  I had never done it before.  In the end, it is not the details of the traumas themselves that I may or may not remember (over 90% of them I’m sure I never will remember consciously) that matter.  It is how my growing body had to adapt and change as a result of experiencing these traumas that matters to me now.

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*Age 31 – Journal Starting June 10 to 27, 1983

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I do not wish to leave the information contained in these links behind as I continue with my posting.  Please consider them for your study:

+THE GLIMMER OF BEGINNING TO KNOW WHO I AM

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I was feeling better in this section of my journal that ends on my ‘Golden Birthday’ of turning 31 on the 31st of August, 1982.  I was beginning to take form as a person, becoming less hollow and less like a ghost-girl in my own life.

I think the successful definite steps forward I had made by working through some very difficult school work bolstered me.  My feet might have still been mired in the unknown of my past, my ‘true self’ was still missing in action, but the woman I was becoming had begun to find some sunshine for herself.  The vigorous exercise workout I was doing made me physically strong and began to anchor me into my body.  I was gaining a sense of self-confidence for the first time in my life.

I now had nearly two years ‘clean and sober’ (from nonprescription drugs), had a sponsor and faithfully attended at least one AA meeting every week.  I also attended a weekly woman’s growth and support group through the local mental health center.

Part of my transformation was coming through my ‘discovery’ of so-called ‘feminism’ as I began to understand that women experience their lives very differently than men do.  I believe I was for the first time beginning to collect for myself a sense of my own personal empowerment.

*Age 30 – Journal from May 1982 through August 1982

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May 22, 1982

“Things OK in the water bed – Leo is keeping to himself.  I think he’s afraid to touch me – sometimes I’d like to be touched; not sexually — just touched.”

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We could not get anything larger than a double bed up our little stairs, so the king size water bed was the only solution we could think of.  Well……

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I knew inside on some level there was something ‘wrong’.  I really knew.   I found this in one of my little poems on this date —

“Do I have a personality

When there’s no one here but me?”

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June 9, 1982

“Perhaps calcium now

Will help calm me down

But I don’t feel like myself

My spirit feels larger

Than my body

Like a wad of bread dough

Or play dough

Yellow”

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June 16, 1982

“Decided I may try writing an autobiography –”

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I record a 2009 note with this journal entry about two statements made, on two occasions by two different people — that changed the course of my life — because I heard them and I knew they were true.

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June 26, 1982

“Been cleaning – sorting clothes in closets and dressers all day.  Felt real depressed yesterday – [Doctor] decided to up the Imipramine to the 150 mg.  I was taken off of Desipramine – slow the thoughts down – don’t handle being alone very well.”

I could not handle letting my own inner reality surface — not yet, anyway.  I can sense my insecure attachment disorder here, like an invisible electric current running inside a live wire.

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July 2, 1982

“I’m feeling my wild feeling, and walked down the “trail” to an old grain wagon parked in the grasses.  The sun is still above the horizon, and it is hot.  Clouds below the sun will soon swallow it.

Wind is rustling the trees, and I am reminded of the homestead – the trees on the mountainside and the river on the valley floor.

I’d like to be that wind – free – from thought.”

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“Oceans lie where we can always find them.  Why can’t I?”

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“And as I write, capturing time,

I can reread, and see my past

In my present.”

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August 3, 1982

“Now

I’m a spider

Expertly spinning

My thoughts

Into miraculous

Flowing webs

When I’m depressed

I’m a fly

Tangled

Frightened

Captured

By these same

Silken

Threads”

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I just had a 2009 thought as I read this.  I wasn’t only unaware of HOW to feel, I did not know HOW to think, either (not about anything personal).  I did not grow up in my insanely abusive childhood being able to think.  ‘Ordinary’ childhoods, without a need for continual and nearly constant dissociation, no doubt allow children to grow up THINKING, and to grow into their thoughts.  I never had that opportunity to get familiar with my own thoughts, to practice being a person WITH thoughts.  No wonder ‘thinking’ felt so foreign, uncomfortable and dangerous to me!

(Also glad to see at least I was still doing some spinning and weaving at this time.)

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AND A GIFT OF INFORMATION FROM:

Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog

 
Making Kids a Priority

 

Posted: 29 Oct 2009 10:57 AM PDT

Guest post by Michelle Gross, Project/Public Policy Manager, Prevent Child Abuse New York

In this recession, working families are struggling to meet their children’s basic needs. Five out of six children in low-income families have at least one adult who works.   These families are struggling to keep a roof over their heads, food on the table, and gas in the car so they can get to work. The stress of these difficult financial times takes the heaviest toll on at-risk families. More than ever before, programs that support families, like home visiting, parenting education, family resource centers, fatherhood and kinship support, and child advocacy centers play a pivotal role in ensuring a stable and more prosperous future.

Yet, these services continue to be in danger of funding cuts. New York’s families’ health and well-being rests on the voices of advocates like you.  As we prepare for the New York State Budget proposal for 2010-11, we must be vigilant in continuing to contact our state government representatives, from the governor to the legislature, and even locally. Regularly updating your elected officials on your program’s successes helps to reinforce the important role it plays in supporting families. Every voice counts, and it is up to us to speak for those who cannot. It can be daunting to contact your representative, but your advocacy can make the difference between a program funding cut and a program funding expansion. Here are a few tips on calling your elected official’s office:

  • When calling, you will likely reach a staff member rather than your representative directly. Staff             members can be just as influential as the legislator themselves.
  • Be sure to tell the staff member your name and where you live. It’s important that they know you are a constituent.
  • Inform the staffer of the reason for your call. It can  be as simple as saying that you’d like to make sure the program does not get cut in the state budget.
  • Tell the staffer why the program is important and what difference it has made in your life or the lives of those around you.
  • Thank the staffer for their time and ask for a follow  up if you feel its necessary.
  • Always follow up a phone call with a letter restating your call.
  • Call again in a month just to check in, and ask others to call on behalf of the program. Persistence is key in advocacy!

Again, remember that what you have to say matters. As Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Children’s needs, long overlooked, should receive the highest priority during critical discussions leading to cuts in the New York State Budget. Far too few services are available at a time when demand is increasing greatly. We encourage our legislators to support programs that work, and to support families through this fiscal crisis.

For more information about Prevent Chils Abuse New York’s Advocacy Programs, please visit our website: http://preventchildabuseny.org/advocacy.shtml
Traumatic Childhood Can Reduce Life Expectancy

 

Posted: 29 Oct 2009 08:27 AM PDT

A difficult childhood reduces life expectancy by up to 20 years according to a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The study found that participants who were exposed to more then five different types of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) were over 50 percent more likely to die during the 10-year period of the study. On the other hand, people who reported fewer than six ACEs did not have a statistically increased risk of death compared with the control group.

Listen to a podcast Adversce Childhood Experiences and the Risk of Premature Mortality.

To explore the effect that childhood trauma could have on life span, Kaiser Permanente mailed questionnaires to adults who were 18 years and older, and who had visited the Kaiser clinic in San Diego from 1995 to 1997. Overall, the study subjects were middle-class and had good health coverage. Of those surveyed, 75 percent were white, 11 percent Latino, 7 percent Asian, and 5 percent African-American. They’re educated: 75 percent attended college and 40 percent have a basic or higher college education. When they filled out the questionnaire, their average age was 57. Most of them had jobs. Half were women, half were men.

The participants were asked about their exposure to eight categories of abuse or dysfunction based on previous Kaiser studies. One third of the 17,337 participants who replied to the questionnaires had an ACE score of zero, meaning they had not been exposed to any of the eight types of abuse or household dysfunction. The majority of the remaining responders registered a score of between one and four, whereas about 8 percent of the scoring participants were rated five, and roughly three percent, six to eight.

During the next decade, the study authors, kept records of which of the 17,337 participants passed away by matching identifying information such as Social Security numbers from the questionnaire with data from the National Death Index. In total 1,539 of the participants died during the follow-up period. When the increased number of deaths in those subjects with an ACE score of six or greater was compared with the control group, their mortality risk was 1.5 times higher than for people whose childhoods had been free of all eight types of abuse. They lost about 20 years from their lives, living to 60.6 years on average, whereas the average age of death for the control group was 79.1.

It is unclear why the authors saw more death ages during the 10-year period only for the group with an ACE score of six or greater. Previous studies by these authors found that the risk of chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, lung disease and cancer, was greater only for people with these high ACE scores. In contrast, the risk of substance abuse and suicide increased stepwise from low to high scores. The authors found that ACE-related health risks, namely mental illness, social problems and prescription medication use, accounted for about 30 percent of the 50 percent greater risk of death seen in this population. “As would be expected, the documented ACE-related conditions among participants appear to account for some, although not all, of the increased risk of premature death observed in the current study,” wrote David Brown, an epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and lead author of the study.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

+HOW DO WE BUILD A LIFE WHEN WE DO NOT KNOW WHO WE ARE?

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Sometimes we can go back and pick up the pieces of ourselves we left behind back somewhere in our lives.  In my journal entries right before my 30th birthday I can see one of those clear threads — and threads is an appropriate word!   As a child of a severely abusive Borderline mother, I have found myself a clue about who I am from my own writings half a lifetime ago……

I used to spin and weave back then.  I love it, but I made a decision to pack it all up and walk away.  Today I realized I want very badly to let that part of ME back into my life — and 29 years later I am going to find a way to do it.  I deserve it.

People who do not have to become dissociated from their own self through severe child abuse have, in my thinking, a chance to build a life that reflects who they truly are.  Those of us who were so severely abused that our selves never got to grow in the first place, can have an unbelievably difficult time living a life that is connected to our SELF.  Weaving and spinning was directly connected to ME, and I know that because, even looking back ‘then’, I can FEEL it.

How is it for others who have come from childhoods similar to mine?  Do we all need to pay very close attention on a physical, feeling level to those little clues we might come across that let us know which things in our life truly matter to us?  I tried to ‘reason’ my way through life.  From the time I went into ‘recovery’ onward I have worked to understand that my feelings not only matter, they are critical to letting me know WHO I am.

It can be hard to give ourselves permission to follow up on those clues.  If others are at all like me, I created a whole life of responsibility without knowing who the person was (ME) that was actually creating that life.  It was like I was living in a dream life I had built the best I knew how to, but it was not a healthy one for ME, and it was not built from the center of who I am because I had no idea who I was.  Does that make any sense to anyone out there?

*Age 29 – Journal Entries – Trying to Orient and Organize A Lost Self

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Try this for fun:

Myer Briggs personality type

http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp

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Borderline Personality Disorder

“…[they] often engage in destructive behaviors not because they intend to hurt you, but because their suffering is so intense they feel they have no other way to survive.”
In the Spotlight | More Topics |
from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD
I’ve gotten quite a few questions about the connection between lying and BPD. Lying is not one of the symptom criteria for BPD, but loved ones report that they see a connection between lying and BPD and that this is one of the most difficult behaviors to deal with.
In the Spotlight
Lying and BPD – Is There a Connection?
There isn’t a lot of good research on a possible connection between BPD and lying. However, the fact that BPD is associated with shame and impulsivity may set you up for a tendency to tell lies.
More Topics
Readers Respond: Do You Tell Lies?
This is probably a silly question, because of course everyone lies sometimes. But do you find you tell lies more than other people? What triggers your lying? What do you lie about? Do you agree that there is a connection between BPD and lying, or do you think this is just part of the stigma of BPD?
Will I Have BPD Forever?
At one time, experts did believe that BPD was a life sentence; they thought that BPD was not likely to respond to treatment and that BPD was always chronic and lifelong. Turns out the experts were wrong!

About.com

Borderline Personality Disorder

In the Spotlight | More Topics |

from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD
I’ve gotten quite a few questions about the connection between lying and BPD. Lying is not one of the symptom criteria for BPD, but loved ones report that they see a connection between lying and BPD and that this is one of the most difficult behaviors to deal with.

In the Spotlight

Lying and BPD – Is There a Connection?
There isn’t a lot of good research on a possible connection between BPD and lying. However, the fact that BPD is associated with shame and impulsivity may set you up for a tendency to tell lies.

More Topics

Readers Respond: Do You Tell Lies?
This is probably a silly question, because of course everyone lies sometimes. But do you find you tell lies more than other people? What triggers your lying? What do you lie about? Do you agree that there is a connection between BPD and lying, or do you think this is just part of the stigma of BPD?

Will I Have BPD Forever?
At one time, experts did believe that BPD was a life sentence; they thought that BPD was not likely to respond to treatment and that BPD was always chronic and lifelong. Turns out the experts were wrong!

+SUBSTANCE P – IT’S OUR BODY’S BIOLOGICAL LINK TO FEELING EMOTIONAL AND PHYSICAL PAIN

alchemynow2 Comments

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What do we know about pain?  What do we know about the connection between physical and emotional pain responses in the body and brain?

It took me many months of online research before I finally came up with what links our physical and emotional pain responses (and our pain thresholds) together.  I found it in

SUBSTANCE P — a small peptide (protein) released upon stimulation in the nervous system and involved in regulation of the pain threshold.  Substance P (P = pain) works the same in our body whether we have a broken bone or a broken heart.

I’m not sure it helps when we HURT from any pain to say to ourselves, “Oh, that pain is just me feeling Substance P.”  But it might help to realize more clearly that there is a direct and definable link between our ability to experience emotional and/or physical pain in our body-brain.  Emotional distress, including sadness, loneliness and anxiety,  is as real a pain in our body as is any physical pain we can ever experience.

And when terrible physical and emotional pain was forced upon us from early child abuse and neglect experiences, I believe the entire balance of how all these complex pain response systems in our body is altered for the rest of our lifetime.

And I also find it fascinating that Substance P is connected to our ‘puke center’.  In our early evolving brain-mind, what was toxic needed to be vomited out ASAP for our continued survival.  As we became increasingly complex beings, we eventually could not puke out mental, emotional and psychological toxins, poisons and traumas.  We had to find ways to endure in spite of them.

(Epigenetic changes are one of the ways we do this – see yesterday’s post.  These changes have a lot to do with where so-called ‘mental illness’ comes from.)

Substance P is connected to our immune system.  That doesn’t surprise me one single bit.  It is intimately involved with maintenance of our well-being – including the healing of all of our wounds.  Once we truly accept the fact that emotional wounds ARE physical wounds, I believe we can better get on with the business of healing.

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Substance P has effects on mood, memory and sleep, and has been implicated in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

It is involved with depression and the actions of antidepressant drugs.

Substance P is involved with sadness.

Substance P is also involved with anxiety and stress responses and disorders.

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FULL ARTICLE (abstract below) CAN BE PURCHASED ONLINE OR ORDERED IN FROM A LIBRARY:

Psychol Bull. 2007 Nov;133(6):1007-37

Substance P at the nexus of mind and body in chronic inflammation and affective disorders.

Rosenkranz MA.

Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI 53705, USA. marosenk@wisc.edu

For decades, research has demonstrated that chronic diseases characterized by dysregulation of inflammation are particularly susceptible to exacerbation by stress and emotion. Likewise, rates of depression and anxiety are overrepresented in individuals suffering from chronic inflammatory disease. In recent years, substance P has been implicated in both the pathophysiology of inflammatory disease and the pathophysiology of depression and anxiety by 2 parallel fields of study.

This review integrates the literature from these 2 parallel fields and examines the possibility that substance P dysregulation may be a point of convergence underlying the overlap of chronic inflammatory disease and mood and anxiety disorders.

First, the involvement of substance P in peripheral inflammation and in the immune events associated with chronic inflammatory disease is discussed, with a focus on inflammatory bowel disease and asthma.

Next, the function of substance P in the communication of peripheral inflammation to the brain is considered.

Finally, to complete the bidirectional loop of brain-immune interactions, substance P expression in anxiety and depression as well as its potential role in the neural regulation of peripheral inflammation is reviewed.

PMID: 17967092 [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]

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From Wickipedia:

In the field of neuroscience, substance P (SP) is a neuropeptide….that functions as a neurotransmitter and as a neuromodulator.[1][2] It belongs to the tachykinin neuropeptide family. Substance P and its closely related neuropeptide neurokinin A (NKA) ….Substance P is released from the terminals of specific sensory nerves, it is found in the brain and spinal cord, and is associated with inflammatory processes and pain.

Function

Substance P is an important element in pain perception. The sensory function of substance P is thought to be related to the transmission of pain information into the central nervous system. Substance P coexists with the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate in primary afferents that respond to painful stimulation.[11] SP has been associated with the regulation of mood disorders, anxiety, stress,[12] reinforcement,[13] neurogenesis,[14] respiratory rhythm,[15] neurotoxicity, nausea/emesis,[16] pain and nociception.[17] Substance P and other sensory neuropeptides can be released from the peripheral terminals of sensory nerve fibers in the skin, muscle and joints. It is proposed that this release is involved in neurogenic inflammation which is a local inflammatory response to certain types of infection or injury.[18] …. Substance P receptor antagonists may have important therapeutic applications in the treatment of a variety of stress-related illnesses, in addition to their potential as analgesics.

Vomiting

The vomiting center in the brainstem contains high concentrations of substance P and its receptor, in addition to other neurotransmitters such as choline, histamine, dopamine, serotonin, and opioids. Their activation stimulates the vomiting reflex. Different emetic pathways exist, and substance P/NK1R appears to be within the final common pathway to regulate vomiting.[19] Substance P antagonist (SPA) aprepitant is available in the market in the treatment of chemotherapy-induced nausea / emesis.

Pain

Substance P is involved in nociception, transmitting information about tissue damage from peripheral receptors to the central nervous system to be converted to the sensation of pain. It has been theorized that it plays a part in fibromyalgia.

Cell growth

Substance P has been known to stimulate cell growth in culture,[20] and it was shown that Substance P could promote wound healing of non-healing ulcers in humans.[21] It has also been shown to reverse diabetes in mice.[22][23]

Vasodilation

Substance P also has effects as a potent vasodilator. ….As is typical with many vasodilators, it also has bronchoconstrictive properties, administered through the non-adrenergic, non-cholinergic nervous system (branch of the vagal system)

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+FIGHTING MY MOTHER’S DARKNESS – BEING AFRAID OF MY OWN YOUNG ADULTHOOD LETTERS?

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For as long as this part of my project will take me, I am going to do something that is extremely difficult for me to face.  I have a collection here of a few of the letters my mother saved that I wrote to her in my adulthood before I disowned her.

I want to tear them up, throw them away, burn them to ashes.  I want to do anything but read them or to face them head on.  Yet, I think now about what my daughter told me the other night about my struggle in facing my mother’s letters she wrote in the years that I was in my teens.  She told me  that just because my struggle is so great there is probably something important I can learn by going ahead with my project.  Well, the struggle seems greatest when I am faced with myself in my own adult letters.

Am I this afraid of actually seeing the lies of my childhood continued into my adulthood?

Yes, I am.  I feel as I might should I be standing outside of a burning building ready to race inside to try to save myself, no matter what the cost.  I feel sick inside.  I fear there is sickness in these letters, and I will not only see it there, I will feel it here today in my own body as I re-read my own words.

It is one thing to take a hard, close look at my mother’s writing because they are ‘out there’, outside of me.  But my own words?  Do I have the courage to examine the extent that I bought the lies about Linda, the extent that I ate them, swallowed them, internalized them until I could not tell the difference between where my mother left off and I began?

What are my hopes?  What goodness do I think I might be able to gain by spending time with past self?  How much of my past self remains with me today?  Can I see what I hate and change it?  Is it an absolute, stupid and complete waste of time working with my own letters?  How do I see the process as being different from examining my mother, and my grandmother, through their letters?

What am I afraid to learn?  Do I have the courage, willingness and perseverance to find out?

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I suspect at this moment, before I step into this next unknown contained within my own letters, I am afraid that I will face within myself something that tells me that everything that happened to me in my childhood was all my fault and that I deserved it.  This fear is not reasonable.  This statement is not reasonable.  There was no REASON in my childhood.  That is what my mother’s severe mental illness was all about.

I fear I will see from my vantage point today how completely rotten and faulty the foundation of my self was, and therefore of my life was,  as I passed out from under the shadow of the roof of my parents’ home into my own dim adulthood future.  I bought the lies of my childhood because they were present with the first breath I ever took and I had no way of knowing this.  I was raised without being loved.  I was raised being told that I was evil, not human.  I was raised to believe that everything about me was wrong.  I did not leave those lies behind me.  They were built into me.  They became a part of me.

It was bad enough that what happened to me for 18 years at the hands of my mother ever happened to me at all.  But what feels worse to me is knowing that I carried it all within my body-brain-mind right out of my childhood with me — and I didn’t even know it.

It comes down to being raised and ‘built’ in a world of darkness.  My mother’s darkness was not my own, yet I had to find for myself a light that allowed me to survive her.  Her darkness was put onto me and into me, it surrounded me and permeated every aspect of my childhood from the time of my birth.  But from my side of the story it was a false darkness to me.  I didn’t know this.   I didn’t know the darkness came from my mother and not from me.

I didn’t know that in the insanity and abuse of my childhood I came to find and create my own false light to endure in false darkness.  I know this now because I can see that if someone had removed me from my mother’s care when I was born, there would have been no darkness for me to adjust to.  I wouldn’t have had to deal with any of it.  I would be a different person.

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I can’t explain this right now, I guess.  I can’t explain how the darkness of my mother’s mental illness robbed me of the light of love, hope, trust, safety and security that I needed in order to grow into my own strong, healthy, happy self.  Being robbed of this light forced me to come up with my own light, but it was a false a light because it was designed to fight my mother’s darkness, not my own.

I could not simply step out of my childhood and into my adulthood, into the ‘ordinary’ light of a benevolent world as if I had lived in it my entire life.  I had been formed in and by an entirely different, dark and malevolent world.  I did not have eyes that were designed to see in the bright light of ‘ordinary’ day.  My eyes were designed to see in a world of my mother’s pitch darkness.

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What will I see when I step into the world of my own early adulthood letters?  With whose eyes will I look at the world, in and with what light?  Whose darkness might be hiding in them?  Or, better yet, whose light?

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+SHORT AND SWEET — ALL THE MISSING 1966 LETTERS! HERE’S ALL I HAVE….

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Can’t beat this — this is all there is of:

*1966 Mother’s Letters

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+DIFFICULTIES WORKING WITH MY PARENTS’ 1965 LETTERS

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I just want to record here how difficult it is for me to move forward in transcribing my mother’s and my father’s 1965 letters.  I would rather burn them.  I spoke with my daughter about this, and she encouraged me, saying that there is no reason to expect these letters to be any less significant or important to the work I am doing and to the story of my childhood that were any of the previous letters I have worked with.  She also suggested that this part of the work is probably especially important because it is so difficult — there must be something here and in this process that I need to know within myself.

I seem to feel something like a wild animal might who gets a foot caught in a trap and cannot escape without gnawing its own leg off.  I was 14 years old when these October through December 1965 letters were written.  I was at the age when all the following occurred, and I’m sure many others that I do not remember:

I have for some reason I do not yet understand found it more difficult to work with correspondence between my mother and father than I do with correspondence between my mother and my grandmother.  It’s like I am faced with two realities, mine and the one that BOTH of my parents shared.  In their reality, I was all but obliterated.  When I work with their letters, that obliteration seems to threaten to swallow me whole, or to snap me up in a trap some part of me fears I can never get out of.

So, it all continues to be an experience of facing myself as I was and as I am.  It takes courage.  It takes hope, that somehow I am changing myself now for the better, and hope that something I discover — and then write about — can help someone else.  I am going in where angels fear to tread…..

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