Tag: witness abuse

+WE NEED NEW WORDS TO DIALOG WITH OUR BODY ABOUT TRAUMA

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I am trying to think of another word other than ‘renaissance’, or rebirth, to describe what I wish was happening now among those of us ordinary people who are trying to live the best lives we can without necessarily having the kind of safe and secure attachment background we needed to get along better in life.

I am thinking especially about what little information we really have about our bodies and how they operate.  Sometime in our first year of life people begin to teach infants about their body — and most of us never progress much past that point!  We are taught to point to our eyes, nose, mouth, ears, limbs, etc.

Eventually we learn through our public education and then through osmosis over time about the major organs of our body, and make little progress past that point unless we get sick and then learn the minimum we need to in order to understand what is happening to us.  We seem to prefer to use only one syllable words to think about the only body we will ever have to live in for the rest of our lives.

Yet while we would rather leave anything more complicated than what we consider essential to the ‘experts’, at the same time I do believe our platform of information concerning our bodies is making advancements.  We hear about things through the general media and that information will eventually ‘stick’ if we hear it enough and somehow we begin to understand it is important because it applies to us.

As we are doing this learning, as unintentionally as it might be, we are at the same time expanding our vocabulary.  It’s no different than teaching an infant the word for their nose.  We are learning to name what is going on inside of us.  Yet at the same time we are learning meanings for words like diabetes, hypertension, obesity, allergies, arthritis, osteoporosis, cancer, learning disabilities, addiction, anxiety, depression, serotonin, dopamine, reward system, we less likely to learn how these kinds of ‘events’ are all connected within us to who we are within our own body.

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We all know we are dependent upon and would rather support a medical model that prefers to respond only to symptoms,  prescribe every kind of expensive test to diagnosis illness, dish out every imaginable kind of drug to treat sickness than we are to put forth the effort ourselves to learn any more complicated information about our body than we have to.

Why is that?  When and how did we learn to accept that we don’t need to learn anything more than a 5th grader could learn about how our body operates?  Did someone tell us we are too dumb to learn anything more complicated?  Looking backward, maybe this kind of thinking has worked for all of the generations that have gone before us.

Today there are more of us living longer than ever before in history.  But taking material goods out of the equation, what is our quality of life?  Particularly, what is the quality of our human attachments — our own attachment with our self included?  As a social species, it matters.  We have the desire to live our years better, last longer, and suffer less.  Understanding how our attachment system operates, what has hurt it and what can help it can help us live a better life on every level because it operates on every single level of who we are.

Those of us who suffered from extra-ordinary trauma and abuse during our developmental stages especially need to learn the words that will let us be able to understand how that abuse changed our bodies.  I see it as being no different than any healing process of disclosure. Any improvement we can make to talk about the effects our traumas had on us is empowering.  Trauma changed our bodies, and we don’t even know — on the most vital and profound levels — what that means.

We need the words.  We need them badly.  A  securely-attached-from-birth person has all that good-safe information built right into their body-brain-mind.  They don’t have to think about it.  They don’t even need to talk about it.  They just live it.

Those of us who were so abused that we are the insecurely-attached-from-birth, however, have to learn NOW what these ‘others’ learned when they were supposed to learn it — as infants and young children.  Our communication signals between our body, brain, mind and self are all scrambled up.  We have to learn NOW what those ‘others’ learned from the time they were born.  We cannot efficiently and effectively learn NOW what we have no words to talk about.

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I think at this moment how strange it seems that I, of all people, would be writing about attachment.  Looking back at the strangeness, the unpredictable, escalating, irrational violence and abuse, looking back at the extreme isolation I was forced to endure through my childhood, I can’t help but say that of all the people I can imagine writing about attachment, I can be good at it because I am so bad at it.

Suffering from the long term consequences of an extremely abusive childhood can make us feel so alienated from what ‘ordinary’ people seem to now about living ‘ordinary’ lives that we might be tempted to simply throw in the towel, give up and quit.  Yet as I work my way through the volumes of technical, even molecular research information about our own internal cannabinoid (‘cannabis’)  (and opioid) attachment systems, I realize that by my just being alive I HAVE to know there are things about my attachment system that went right from the beginning or I most simply — would not be here.

I was attached enough to life from the beginning that I was conceived in the first place, implanted onto my mother’s uterine wall, received nourishment from her body, and made it through a difficult birth — just to GET here and to BE here.  Through all the terrible traumas, through all the pain, suffering, sorrows and sadness of my childhood I was still attached enough between my inner, true self and the world to STILL be able to find, recognize, appreciate and value beauty — wherever I found it as a very small child —  even in bubble shadows reflected on the bottom of a toilet bowl, even in the shimmering reflection of water on my bedroom ceiling when I was so punished for doing nothing but being alive.

I am amazed as I work on the endocannabinoid file regarding human reproduction.  Perhaps because I cannot take any kind of safe and secure attachment either lightly or for granted I marvel at the very essence of the miracle of life that was each of our beginnings.  How can such a perfectly ordered system like our attachment system is, be sent off into such difficult directions through insufficient if not outright malevolent circumstances of traumatic early childhood experiences?

I understand that given the requirements of staying alive — if at all possible, in the very worst of situations –that we could not make the adjustments we had to make to survive THEN and necessarily be ‘ordinary’ NOW.  Yet at the same time I also understand that all of it was and is about signals of communication on the molecular and genetic level between the environment we live in and the self we live in it with.

That is the same process that happened when I was conceived, the same process that is happening in each present moment I am alive, the same process that connects every moment of my life together with me in the center of it.

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If I did not have a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder I doubt that I would have ever been motivated to go looking for the big multiple-syllable words that I know I now need to understand the ‘extra-ordinary’ way my body-brain-mind was forced to adapt, develop, and the way it works now.  It is not by looking at all the ways I am dissociated, fragmented and disconnected that will make me feel more safe and secure in my own body in this world.  It is by looking at the ways I am associated, connected and organized that helps me to know that things can never be all that bad!  After all, I am a participant in some kind of miracle here!  We all call that — LIFE!

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So maybe ‘renaissance’, or rebirth, is the word I need.  Maybe as I go back all the way to my very first beginnings I can bring a new kind of understanding about my own place in my own body in my own life into my present.  I find I need to know new things and I need to know new words to know these new things.  I am sitting in the middle of a tragic relationship breakup, not far into a new future of cancer recovery, completely unsure of who I really am, of what I want, or of what is even possible for my future.

But maybe I do not know because I cannot know.  I have to wait for the signals.  The ones I need are not going to come from anywhere else other than from within my own body.  On the most tiny, minute level of who I am — right where my own molecules are constantly interacting with my genetics — something interesting is ALWAYS occurring.  It is that inner world that guides what happens to me as I interact with this great, big wide outer world.

I want to be amazed.  I want to be more attached.  Safely.  Securely.  Peacefully.  Whatever it takes for me to get there I will try to do.  This isn’t about whatever the Buddhist concept of detachment is.  I have been forced to be detached from my own self in my own body all of my life.  Terrible, terrifying, insane abuse put me in THAT place.  I want something new and different, something I think non-abused ‘ordinary’ people can take for granted all of their lives.

I want to know, without a single shadow of any kind of doubt, that I have a right to be here and do so willingly, if not eventually happily.  That was the destiny of the fertilized egg that was me in my beginnings.  How could it be anything but my destiny today?  I did not become lost to the path of that good journey on purpose (I had a great deal of help through a great deal of harm), and while it is taking the better part of my life to find my way back, it is not a journey I am making alone!

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+WHAT WE DID NOT LEARN ABOUT TRUST WILL HURT US

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I discovered Brainwave.org this morning, an excellent site devoted to infant brain development through the age of three.  Another excellent site, EQ:  Emotional Intelligence Central, covers a broad range of information on the human social brain that, of course, was formed through the nature and quality of early infant caregiver interactions and affects us for the rest of our lives.

My web search this morning also brought me to a page on brain development of young children written at the university in Fargo, North Dakota where my one of my daughters works!  Another site for The Childhood Affirmations Program covers a wide range of information about “How You Can Shape Your Child’s Brain and Change the World.”

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I have had to narrow my search in my attempt to find the specific information I am looking for today.  I want to know more about when and how the very young infant brain begins to be able to know the difference between who is trustworthy and who is not.  The ability to make this distinction is something that most people can take completely for granted because it is built into an infant’s growing and developing brain so early in life we will never have conscious awareness of how we learned to accomplish this critically important task.

Those of us who were raised in extremely abusive – neglectful, inconsistent, violent, malevolent – early environments could not possibly have developed a ‘trustworthiness meter’ that works in the same way as such a system will for someone who was born into the opposite kind of environment of predictability, benevolence, safety and security.  What our brain never learned as it was built in the first place leaves us with a dis-ability that will make it difficult to recognize critical information from the humans we come into contact with for the rest of our lives.  Who is worthy of our trust and who is not?

Of course humans give and receive signals on many levels that provide us with social-brain information.  If we were formed in, by and for a malevolent world, we will not identify and respond to ANY social signals in the same way as a benevolently-formed person will.  I ask this question today for myself because I know that a person I have trusted for nine years recently ‘flipped sides’ and now appears to be my ‘enemy’.  My mind tells me, “I didn’t see it coming.”

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Whatever the specifics of my history with this man who was so important to me might be, what I think about today are the risk factors that I have carried within my brain from my earliest beginnings.  When I think about all the ‘trauma drama’ that adult child abuse survivors seem doomed to keep repeating, I want to understand more about how my altered social brain knows and does not know about how to recognize in other people what ‘ordinary’ people know so quickly, automatically and unconsciously it would make my conscious mind spin and stagger.

It helps me to realize and begin to know how profoundly my altered brain can affect me at even the most deeply important levels.  I also have to understand that there are degrees of social brain dis-abilities in people that I meet if they come from early abusive environments because their brains did not develop ‘ordinarily’, either!

Unfortunately, the information researchers are providing about how social brain development affects trustworthiness can be complicated and hard to read.  It is important, however, for us to at least know this information is available to us, and that this is a subject that concerns all of us who did not get to develop an ‘ordinary’ social brain in the first place.  Thanks to the internet we can approach the learning of information about our brain’s dis-abilities from either end of the age spectrum.

By looking at information contained in links I provided at the beginning of this post we can learn about how very young infant and child brains learn the important social and emotional information as their brains are forming from the start.  Accessing the information is easier if we look at it from the ‘young’ end.  We can think about our own abuse histories and begin to think about what happened to us, how that affected us, what we might be missing, and how we can begin to change our brains consciously.

We can also look at the information from the adult end.  That information is more complicated.  We CAN understand it with effort, however.  We need to erase that magic, invisible line that we keep in place between what the ‘average’ public can understand and what the ‘brainy experts’ can understand.

We are no longer children.  We have excellent brains, even if their development was altered through our need to adapt to malevolent early experiences.  While we might not consider our need to pay attention to new information about how our social, emotional brain-minds were changed to be of life-saving importance, we can understand that everything about how our brains formed affects the quality of our life and our states of well-being for our entire lifespan!

Even though the study might be difficult, it is worth the effort!  I encourage readers to try it.  Information empowers us on every level.  Even the process of acquiring the information, of learning itself, exercises our brain in positive ways.  Go ahead!  Give it a try!  Follow some of these ‘live links’ I have included in this post.

Even if your studying of this information helps you to better determine safety in ONLY ONE situation, your effort will be worth it!  And have fun with this.  It is not as impossible or difficult as you might think!  Everything and anything that we learn about how our social-emotional brain works will help improve our attachments — to our self, to others, and to the world as a whole.  It will also take the power away from trauma and give it to us.

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+THE QUALITY OF OUR ATTACHMENT SYSTEM DETERMINES HOW WE ARE IN THE WORLD

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My sister recently sent me a link to an article she wanted me to read that was posted on one of the blogs she most frequents.  In two hours of work I have yet to move past the first reference posted within that article because I needed to write my own comment.  In my own mind I cannot separate what I understand about humans as attached social beings from what does or does not adequately attach us to the wider environment of the world we each live in.  I believe it is the same quality of our attachment system that’s been with us from childhood that determines all of the attachments we have in adulthood.

I couldn’t help myself.  I had to write this response to what I have read so far this morning:  *WHEN BEING SELFISH IS TOO SMALL A CONCEPT.

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+FROM OUR DEPTHS WE NEED TO LISTEN

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Fixing things.  That seems to me to be an interesting pattern some people have when faced with another person’s life circumstances.  It makes me wonder if all the fixing work has to do with someone else’s reaction to another person’s pain and discomfort.  Ah, this social network we live in — one way or the other.

Fixing things.  Giving all sorts of helpful advice, as if I haven’t already ‘thought about that’.  It makes me wonder, because I guess I am not naturally a ‘fixer upper person’.  I don’t think I naturally give advice.  I don’t think I know what another person is feeling.  Well, looking at it from my insecure attachment disorder and nearly complete lack of socialization opportunities when I was a child, I guess I would have to pretty much say I only know what another person might be feeling by tuning into my ‘sense’ of feeling what another person feels.

I listen, but not so much with my ears.  I watch, but not so much with my eyes.  This seems to be leading into a story I haven’t written yet — and I mean — yet, because it is probably one I need to write.  So, here goes —–

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Once upon a time this really happened.  I was finishing my art therapy masters degree program’s requirements for internship at an adult out-patient chemical dependency treatment center that specialized in treating people with extremely severe child abuse histories.  I remember this one day clearly that I worked with a wispy woman I’ll call Nora, who seemed more to float across the carpet than walk upon it.

On this day she was silent as she entered the art therapy room for her hour and a half session.  I greeted her gently.  I had two 8 foot tables arranged end to end with four chairs placed evenly, one at the center of each table’s long side.  I could sense her mood when she walked in the door, so after she entered I turned the light dimmer switch down to take the edge off of the room’s brightness.  Then I stood quietly near the counter along one wall where the art supplies were laid out and waited for Nora to pick a chair and sit down.

Nora’s quietness led me to select the art medium for her, and I picked up a large glass of water I had ready, a pre-moistened tray of tempera paint cakes, a 2 inch paint brush, and several newsprint sized pieces of paper.  I made no sound as I laid the items on the empty table beside Nora.  She did not look at me or at the art supplies.  I  stepped off to the side, slightly behind her back, to watch what Nora chose to do next.

I did not jump in there, noisy or steer her with questions.  I made no demands and no other intrusions into her ‘space’ other than to lay those art supplies within her easy reach.  I watched to see if it made her uncomfortable that I was behind her.  Would she turn in my direction?  No.  She didn’t show that she recognized I was in the room at all.

Nora picked up the paint brush, moistened it with water, and began moving her arms, free from the shoulder, from paint to paper to water to paint to paper.  Her movements were slow but steady, as if her inner rhythms washed across each page without effort.  Her work was silent, but she paused when a page was filled and I stepped to the table, took each finished image and quietly laid it on the floor to dry while she started another one.

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Nora felt to me to be very young as she painted.  Very quiet, very young, so young that I wasn’t sure she could even talk yet.  Nora was diagnosed with what was then called Multiple Personality Disorder.  It was not my job to do anything other than facilitate her art expression.  I did not need to know what was what, which was which, who was who.  My job was to let her communicate with something other than words or symptoms.  And that’s exactly what I did.

I watched intently as each image was created.  I noticed which colors were placed where on the paper in what order.  There were absolutely no definable, recognizable pictures taking form.  Yet the images that she was creating began to speak to me — not to my eyes, but to my sense of smell.  As Nora swished and washed each page I began to smell the unmistakably sweet flowery smell of bath powder.  Before long I began to see a lavender colored round powder box with a smokey-clear lid with a yellow soft fluffy fuzzy powder puff inside it.

I had absolutely no idea where that smell and the image of that box of powder came from, but after awhile I could see it so clearly that I could nearly have reached out both of my hands and snatched it right out of the air.  I needed to decide whose information this was.  Nora’s?  Mine?  Did it have anything at all to do with what this art therapy session was all about?

I answered my own questions and knew that I next had to find a way to introduce this image to Nora that had come to me so clearly.  How could I introduce words and my speaking voice into this well of silence that Nora seemed to be so comfortable in?  I didn’t want to surprise her or jar her or disorient her.

I walked out in front of the table where Nora was so intently working and into her range of vision.  If I had been a bird I would have flapped my wings a bit to stir up a slight breeze to catch her attention as I settled onto the chair across the table from her.

“Nora,” I began quietly as if that one word was the most important one in the world.  “An image has come to me while you’ve been painting.  It surprised me and I wonder if it has anything to do with what you are painting.  Is it alright if I tell you what it is?”

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Nora agreed and as she listened to me she transformed into an entirely different mind-state person.  What I sensed in that silent room was important, so important that I will never forget it.   Every time I think about this it amazes me even though it happened 20 years ago.

Nora was sexually abused from a very young age by multiple perpetrators.  The only safe person in her child life was her grandmother.  It would make sense, then, that it would only be at this safe person’s house that Nora could finally act out her pain and her rage — one single time.

When I described the powder box and the powder puff to Nora it was as if I had passed it from my hands to hers.  She went instantly to a memory of being five years old when she locked herself in her grandmother’s bathroom and began screaming and shouting and tearing that room apart.  Everything thrown out of the medicine cabinet.  The shower curtain ripped down, objects  smashed on the floor, thrown hard against the walls and the bathroom door.   All this time her grandmother was pounding on the outside of the bathroom door, yelling at Nora to open the door, to let her come in.

Other adults joined her grandmother in pounding on the door.  Someone found a way to open it.  The instant the door banged open and Nora looked up and met her grandmother’s eyes was the instant she was dumping the powder, puff first, into the toilet.

The look of shocked rage and betrayal on her grandmother’s face was enough to let little Nora know that she had just lost the only ally she had in the world, the only person she ever trusted or felt safe with, the person she adored, the one that never hurt her.  She was sure her grandmother hated her as much now as the people did who hurt her.  Zing!  Zap!  Crash, bash, bang!  Done!

That was the end of the trusting girl Nora.  She disappeared to any ongoing Nora at that instant, at that toilet, with that powder box in her hand.  She reappeared at that art therapy table, in that dimly lit and peaceful room, brought back to life through an hour’s work with a paintbrush sliding across pieces of paper.

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Along with all the other difficulties I might experience about how my brain did not form under ordinary conditions and is not, therefore, an ordinary brain, I can appreciate this gift that I seem to have to pay a particular kind of attention to signals that are being communicated on the subtlest of levels.  I was not feeling threatened in that room.  It was my job to be the one providing safety, security, and an appropriate art therapy experience.

So I could have my senses open in ways that I rarely can when out in the ordinary world.  Most of the time my heightened sensitivities create clash and conflict for me in that ordinary world.  But on that particular day, in that particular setting, the gifts could fly — both Nora’s in being able to transmit that image-message and in mine for being able to receive it.

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I do believe that as severe child abuse survivors we have some amazing and particular gifts that have come to us through enduring our traumas.  Yet in this ordinary world filled with mostly ordinary people, we can feel out of step in time and place, not able to modulate, moderate, or regulate how these gifts affect us — not when, where, or why.

In spite of my best intentions, and lots and lots of work to perfect my skills in my chose profession, I cannot pursue it.  Over time more of the reality of what was done to me and how I was affected by that severe and long term trauma, settled into my awareness.  It moved from an intellectual level into a very real emotional place connected to my body.  During this process of healing, the more I realized what a risk it was for me to be working with troubled people — both for them and for myself.

I would have to be in a more perfect world to do that kind of work as employment, not in an ordinary one.  My gifts were honed in trauma and do not translate into the mundane world on a regular basis.  This treatment center I served this part of my internship in could not hire me anyway, because I was not a licensed addiction counselor (which required a high school education and special training and could then be billed at $90 per hour) so insurance would not cover my services.   But finances, in the end, have nothing to do with the work itself.

This kind of work happens in a sacred space. If we want to talk about this kind of sacred in terms of ‘religion’ it needs to be connected to the root of that word:  ‘Religio’ means to tie and bind together.  What we can truly hear if we can allow ourselves to listen to one another can amaze us, and it has NOTHING to do with fixing anything or giving advice, no matter how well intentioned it might be.

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+PLEASE DON’T TELL ME TO LEAVE MY ABUSE IN THE PAST – IT’S NOT POSSIBLE!

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Someone recently made this so familiar comment to me:  …”in our life somehow things do happen but we need 2 let the past be the past in our life….”

When someone tells me something like this now, I know that they either have no clue what severe early child abuse is, they had at least one strong attachment that acted as a powerful resiliency factor in childhood even if they were abused, or they are trying to apply an inaccurate, worn out, unhelpful adage from the past to their own situation as they try to live a good life in spite of what they have been through.

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I continue to ‘fight back’ against the pressure and force that these kinds of comments create for me as they present impossible ‘as if’ fantasy solutions.  While I know these comments are meant to be ‘helpful’, they still bring out more and more of my fierce fight-for-life spirit because they do NOT fully address the situations of people like me and I am being asked to do the impossible.

The most important point I have learned in the past 5 years I have spent researching my own situation is that because the abuse I suffered started so early, was so pervasive, chronic and devastating, I do NOT have the choice to ‘let the past be the past’.  The adaptive changes that my developing brain, body, nervous system and immune system had to make in the hostile, dangerous and malevolent world of my childhood CHANGED me in permanent ways that cannot be altered.

I now know that I have very real, clear and definable disabilities within me as a result of my being so abused from the time I was born.  My disabilities are no less real or devastating than would be any other kind of serious disability.  Just because the scars of the abuse do not show on the outside, just because my body grew from that of an infant and child into an adult one, does not mean in any way that I do not have permanent, irreversible and serious consequences of that abuse within me — as I will until the day that I die.

Now I know that expecting myself to be able to ‘leave the past behind’ is at best a silly expectation, and at worst an erosive thought that corrodes my own hard-worked-for progress toward living the best life I can live IN SPITE of the damage done to me by the abuse I suffered.

We are not all alike in terms of the resiliency factors that were present for us as children.  Our experiences were not all alike in terms of the quality of attachments with caregivers within our early worlds.  Our genetics are not alike.  We cannot support one another the way we wish to if we ever believe that we simply KNOW what another person can accomplish.

I see the wordless image of a person waking in the middle of the night with their house on fire.  They grab a blanket from their bed and wrap it around themselves as they race out the door.  Just because they may have escaped the inferno within the house itself (our childhood) does not mean we are safe if our clothing and our blanket, even the skin of our body is still engulfed in flames even AFTER we get out alive.

In severe child abuse cases, we do not have the luxury of ever being able to ‘get away’ from the raging fire of destruction that our home of origin was.  We carry the burning flames right out the door with us.  Pretending that we got away unscathed, and pretending that we were not seriously damaged as a consequence of our abuse, will never give us the ability to realistically evaluate and assess what happened to us.

Pretending we are completely whole and safe once we leave our abusive childhood situations will never help us heal from the continuing woundedness within ourselves.  We need to learn as much as we can about the ‘exact nature’ of the damage so that we can be supremely realistic about what we can, as adults, expect of ourselves.  Having the specific FACTS will allow us to gain more and more conscious awareness and thus more and more POWER for good over ourselves and our lives.

Healing is not about being in a competition.  It is NOT about seeing who can forget their past traumas and ‘get on with living in the present’ the fastest.  It is not about shaming ourselves and one another because we can’t accomplish this impossible goal.  The reality is that the foundational attachment processes of being able to live as a self in the world have been damaged.  We need to know what that means, and we need to REALISTICALLY know what we can do about healing these attachment wounds as they manifest themselves in all kinds of later problems in our lives.

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As I described in yesterday’s post, my mother insanely demanded the impossible of me and then abused me for 18 years because I could not comply with her demands.  I could not let her invade and devour the essence of who I was.  Nature’s rules do not allow for this to happen.  When someone tells me to leave my abuse in my past and get on with living, they are asking me to accomplish an EQUALLY impossible task.

One can never leave their child abuse in the past if it was severe enough to change they way their entire being (and body) developed during those early critical growth windows of developmental opportunity.  Both these ‘demands’ are thus similar to me — whether it was my mother demanding that I allow her to invade and devour my soul — or whether it is a well-meaning person today who tells me to leave my childhood in the past.  Both of these demands could only be accomplished by the death of my body.  Otherwise, they are impossible.

We need to rethink and think clearly what we mean when we tell ourselves and others  to ‘get over it’.  Obviously I cannot live without a body — and that body is the same one that all my traumatic abuse is built into.  It is far more useful and possible for me to find out what that MEANS and what I can learn about living well in spite of the facts.

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As long as we pretend that we can leave our abusive childhoods behind us ‘in the past’, we will at the same time be allowing all the unconscious, unrecognized, unknown difficulties that our childhoods created in our bodies and minds to run rampant – uncontrolled, unchecked, not dealt with, and UNRESOLVED – to wreck havoc with our lives, our health, our futures, our relationships, and our offspring.

Denial is NOT what we need to solve our problems!  Denial allows trauma to rule our lives and spread out around us through our actions like the contaminating, destructive, contagious virus that it is.  We have no chance of living well with our woundedness or of finding a cure for trauma unless we open our hearts, minds and eyes to the TRUTH about the damage that abuse, neglect and malicious actions causes anyone — ESPECIALLY to infants and young children.

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A much more helpful response to make to a person who is suffering from long term, lifelong changes due to having survived severe abuse from childhood — or trauma of any kind at any time — is simply to communicate that we are aware of the trauma, that we care, and that we are willing to offer ongoing encouraging (appropriate) support.  I believe it’s that simple, and that’s what building safe and secure attachment patterns at any stage of our life is all about!

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+IN MY MOTHER’S WORDS: WHY SHE HAD TO ABUSE ME

alchemynow1 Comment

I just surprising discovered in my mother’s 1957 diary her own written account of her version of reality related to one of the most long term and vicious child abuse memories of my young childhood.

I am stunned by her words, by the fact that she EVER allowed herself to write them, that this diary has survived these 52 years, that I have them in my possession, and that I found them last night.

I have done my best to describe my present day reaction to these writings, though I feel I have very nearly failed completely in my efforts to understand their true value or meaning.

I wish I knew more.  I wish I understood better, could see more clearly, and comprehend more objectively how twisted my mother was and how much I suffered as a result of her insidious, malicious mental illness.

It is a bizarre and strangely bizarre experience to actually have the words of a perpetrator in the hands of the victim.  However inadequate my efforts may be, all I can offer today is my presentation of

my mother’s version of what happened to me about the bubble gum

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+NOT AN EASY PAGE TO WRITE

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This is (follow this link) not an easy page for me to write –  through my tears and with my nose all drippy and goopy.  I do not wish to limit what I write about because of shame, or because of being too proud.  Yet at the same time it is not yet time to write about the specifics of this 9-year relationship that has brought me so much joy, multiplied ten thousand times by sadness, grief and sorrow.

It is not apologies or words in my own defense that I offer here.  I simply state what I know about what is going on right now, the same thing that has been going on for these 9 years as the inevitable ending of this relationship approaches.

Through my work to understand how my pain in the present connects directly to the pain from my childhood, I am coming to understand how vulnerable I have always been to end up loving a man such as the one I love now.  There has never been a simple cure for the harm that was caused to me by 18 years of severe abuse.  Yet I know more and more clearly what I want now.

I want peace.  Simple, pure peace.  I am not there yet.  I am not there.

For now, I can only offer this:  not an easy page for me to write

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Please access these pages on Domestic Violence and Abuse for important additional information —

From the Mayo Clinic on:  Domestic violence against women: Recognize patterns, seek help

The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence

Domestic Violence Awareness Handbook

Domestic Abuse Project

Psychological Abuse

More links to information about Psychological Abuse

The Silent Treatment

Abusive Relationships

Mental and Emotional Abuse in Relationships

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+OPENING OUR OWN HEARTS AND MINDS TO THE REALITIES OF CHILD ABUSE

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There are too many new letters being transcribed to include them all on the temporary page.  I am spending time right now working on the 1960 letters and am currently working on April and May of that year – with more to follow as they are filed within the months of 1960.

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I especially would like to recommend to readers the important comments made today on this blog by Paul M. McLaughlin.

Please visit the two comment pages he posted to:  Stop the Storm’s Contact Information Page and to the post HOW DID THE ABUSE CHANGE US?  Valuable links to his website, to the record of his work to prevent child abuse, and to his personal story are contained in his comments.

I am honored that Paul has shared the heroic story of his life as a survivor of 20 years of terrible childhood abuse with me and with my readers.  Thank you, Paul!

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I have benefited over the years from the efforts of many therapists that I was able to access on my pathway of healing.  Some of the words that I heard them tell me have returned when I have needed to remember them.  I would like to say a heartfelt “THANK YOU” to all the professionals working in a wide variety of fields to help not only prevent child abuse, but to help those of us who survived it, to heal.

After my work on the ‘writings’ yesterday I had great difficulty in sleeping last night.  It is now 9:30 at night and I am only now feeling ‘strong enough’ to approach any writing for today.

The words of two separate therapists from my past echoed in my mind today.  One of them said to me, over and over again, “Linda, always do what YOU need to do to take care of yourself.”  When I look back at the sessions I had with this woman, I remember that I had to take a tape recorder with me to record every session.  Without these recordings I could never remember one single thing we talked about together.

I didn’t understand dissociation at that time.  Nor did this therapist ‘waste’ any time explaining it to me.  We simply together found a way around the problem as it related to our sessions.  I would play the tapes over again several times between sessions, and doing so helped me to ‘grow into’ the topics we discussed.  But the single most important gift I received from this woman are the words I just mentioned.  “Always do what YOU need to do to take care of yourself.”

Those simple words contain within them a universe of healing potential.  They will never be words I will outgrow, or afford to ignore.  Today has been a day when I had to take special good care of myself.  Survivors need to learn how to do this for ourselves, always.

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The other set of words a therapist of my past told me that came into my mind today are about the process of healing itself.  She told me that this process is like a finely crocheted, beautiful doily.  What makes them attractive is the balance between tight and wide open spaces within the pattern.  She told me that when we sometimes work very hard on an ‘issue’ we are making the tight, close together, denser part of the pattern of our healing.  But we need the loose times, as well.  There are times we have to leave all of it completely alone, take a break, do whatever we need to do to give ourselves a rest from the ‘work’ itself.

I thought about these words today and am so grateful for the opportunities I have been given in the past to access quality therapy.  Each time of contact I have had with each ‘specialist’ gave me what I needed at that point in time.  Today I carry so much within me of what these people gave me – as well as the work I did for myself each step of the journey along the way.

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Reading Paul McLaughlin’s words echoed with the sadness inside of me about how hurtful ANY abuse is, but particularly the abuse of infants and young children.  I believe that we have a social taboo against truly allowing ourselves to look severe abuse of the tiniest of people straight in the eye.  No species endures if their most helpless offspring are not cared for and cherished.

While the taboos against harming infants and children exist for a wide purpose, I want to encourage all of us to build up our tolerance – like building and strengthening muscles – so that we can allow ourselves to know in our minds and in our feelings what the reality of early terrible abuse of young ones really is – that it exists, that it happens, that it has severe and lifelong consequences.

I am not suggesting that we pursue a morbid approach – just an educational one for ourselves as members of a culture that continues to need to ‘raise consciousness’ about child abuse and neglect.  Paul’s writings contribute to this denial-smashing.  True, Paul was born in 1948 and I was born in 1950, both of us in a time when public awareness and consciousness about child abuse was still in the stone ages.

But what touched me most today when I visited his website is that there were no doubt many, many, many people surrounding this boy and his twin sister who SHOULD have used common sense to intervene to protect these children.  I’m not going to be the one here to point the finger, but read his story and look at it yourself.  If we were all actors and actresses in a stage play of his childhood, what would each of us have been able to do differently from what the people actually did who were there?

Where and how in today’s world, where we each live our lives, can we apply new insights and new information so that if history ever repeats itself within the sphere of our individual influence we can do something BETTER to help a child – to help many children – that so desperately need someone to notice, pay attention, and care enough to help them?

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As always, thank you for reading – your comments are welcome and appreciated!

+LOOKING FOR MY STORY IN THE CHAOS OF MADNESS

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This is the link to one of the ‘article’ pieces I have found among my mother’s papers.  It was with August 1960 letters, but had no date on the paper it was written on.

My mother was certain that she was going to ‘someday’ write a book on homesteading, She specifically planned that her letters to my grandmother, written during this time were saved, and returned back to her.  Yet very, very few of the letters had any date placed on them at all.

I can estimate letter dates by the envelope postmarks, but many letters are NOT in envelopes and without dates it makes it extremely hard to know where to place the letters along the ‘timeline’ of my childhood years that I am trying to create!

My grandmother, an educated and astute woman, obviously knew of my mother’s plan because she was a participant in it.  Yet she did not make sure on her end, once she had received a letter, that she wrote at least the date the letter came into her hands if there was no clear postmark on the envelope – which happened often!

The inability to ‘tell a coherent life story’ in adulthood – or even during an abusive childhood – is a prime hallmark symptom of an insecure attachment-disordered pattern formed by ‘inadequate’ early infant and childhood interactions with caregivers.

My mother had such an insecure attachment pattern, which she GOT in her childhood from her interactions with her mother (and others).   It looks to me as I work with the writings — that went back and forth between these women for years — as if this total lack of organization or coherent ordering of all these carefully written and preserved letters about the story of homesteading, are themselves in a state that is a clear indication of the MESS that the insecure attachment patterns created in my mother’s life as well as in my own childhood.

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It is almost as if these letters, journal pages, pieces of articles my mother wrote, my grandmother’s response letters to my mother’s letters – all of them, in the tattered, confused, disorganized, often undated, never been sorted, hauled around in this box or that over thousands of miles and many, many moves, stored in assorted storage lockers for decades – are themselves all remnants of once-lived lives that were lived in a very similar fashion.  Yet they also reflect a certain value shared in common – they endured and they survived.  They are still here, as I am.

It seems to be my life’s work right now to find the stories in the stories.  I have amazing advantages that my mother and my grandmother never had in their lifetimes.  I have the very real gift of a computer, the gift of the internet, and the gift of this free blog space so generously provided by WordPress.com.   My sister gave me this computer for my writing.  My brother gave me this printer.  My children pay for my internet.  I am grateful to all of them.

My mother and grandmother cared enough about one another to write all these letters.  They cared enough to hold onto them, to keep them, to preserve them.  In the same strange way that I can never ‘blame’ my mother for her abuse of me because I understand how sick she was, I cannot ‘blame’ her for never, in her entire lifetime, being able to accomplish with them what she had hoped to do.  She could never write her own book.  She could never publish.  She could never tell her own coherent life story for the same reason she could not adequately mother her own children.

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These papers are in their own form of chaos, and within their words they tell stories of the chaos that was my childhood.  It would take an almost super human effort to actually create the coherent story now.  I would be very surprised if I can do it in my lifetime.  My process does not feel like ‘blogging’ to me.  It feel like ‘plogging’ as I spend hundreds and hundreds of tedious hours trying to find and create order out of this madness.

For every step I take I hope that if I can’t actually finish bringing this whole story together, maybe at least the work I am doing now will be picked up by another generation so it can be ‘finished’ in the future.  We are a family of writers.  Perhaps that is our curse.  Yet I feel as if all my ancestors’ words are being placed in safe keeping as I enter them into this clean white screen of my computer.  I feel honored to be able to share them with you., including this article piece that my mother wrote 49 years ago.

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+UNBELIEVABLE DELUSIONS – MY POOR BROTHER

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I am going to share this

November 9, 1960 letter

that I transcribed today. It is one my mother wrote to her mother, and is placed in the section on My Childhood Stories, and referred to as “The Troubles of John.”

(It will also be filed in the collection of other 1960 letters my mother wrote, which will include the February 2, 1960 letter that I also transcribed today.)

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While I have nearly 30 years’ of experience in coming to terms with what my mother did to me, I am almost ashamed to say that it is only now, right now, in the process of pulling all the various writings together that have to do with my family of origin, that I am beginning to develop enough of a tolerance for what my mother ALSO did to my siblings to actually be able to FEEL my feelings about what my mother did to THEM.

I cannot possibly tell my siblings’ stories.  Yet in the instance of this particular November 9, 1960 letter, mostly about my brother John nearly 50 years ago, my mother is writing his story for him when he is 10 years old.  I am reading her words and reacting to them as I feel my own terrible sorrow and tender sadness for the pain she had already caused my brother by that age.

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As far as I am concerned whomever it was that coined the phrase, “Read ‘em and weep,” could have been talking about this

November 9, 1960 letter.

I am experiencing a whole new level to my own healing —  being able to expand my emotional awareness of the harm that was done to me by the harm that was done to my siblings.  I cannot heal them.  But I can publish this letter and my comments to it today in honor of my dearly beloved Big Brother John. I love you!  Linda

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