Although there were very few pages written in my mother’s 1955 diary, they was enough information there to provide some me with some insights about the year I turned four. No doubt my mother was very busy during this year caring for the 3 children she already had under the age of five while she carried her 4th baby and gave birth on July 20, 1955 to my youngest sister.
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It turns my stomach to read this 1976 letter I wrote to my mother. I have a hard time showing myself mercy, or accepting today how blind I remained for so many, many years. Nobody TOLD me my childhood was abusive. Nobody EVER asked me about my childhood or seemed to care. I had no idea the abuse I suffered for 18 years meant anything to anybody, and it certainly had no bearing that I was aware of on who I was in 1976.
Yet at the same time the abuse was running my life and I did not know it. I was that same confused, hurting, scared, battered, isolated, depressed and lost person I had been throughout all of my life. I was in pieces. I was broken. I was mislead. I was so very courageous as I kept putting one foot in front of the other and marched down the road of my life – from one event to the next – never stopping to look backwards at where I had come from or at what I had endured.
At least if one survives a holocaust or a prisoner of war camp or torture as an adult, they have the advantage of knowing something HAPPENED to them that was traumatic, out of the ordinary, difficult. I had the benefit of no such insight. Just as I never knew what my siblings did, that my mother was NUTS, I also had no idea that what she did to me was WRONG or hurtful.
I needed to know. How I was as an ongoing participant of the lie affected my ability to parent my own children. I was prevented from being present in my own body or in my own life. I was prevented from being a self even though I could pretend I was one, evidently well enough that nobody else ever noticed the truth about Linda, either.
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BE sure to check out the newest 1955 spooky doll story at the bottom of the page with the little poem about my mother and dolls – as she indoctrinates not only me at 3 ½, but my 18 month old sister, Cindy, as well.
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I began the page I wrote today (published under My Childhood Stories) in response to a reader’s post on my mother’s letters that I transcribed yesterday. My writing rapidly led me in the direction of beginning to understand that I am both a witness abuse survivor of my own abuse at the same time I am a survivor of the abuse itself. I am beginning to understand that these were two separate and different experiences that I had, NEARLY but not exactly at the same time, as I lived in one body, and that each affected me in different ways. Like two different rivers feeding into one, both experiences are linked in differing ways to dissociation.
Today’s writing pathway also led into the subject of the gift of having the ability to wonder (or not ) and into a clear infant abuse memory that came to me shortly after I wrote the letter disowning my mother.
This entire writing is an important contribution to my growing understanding of a new ‘real reality’ that is separate and different from the reality that was built into my body-brain-mind during 18 years of abuse by my mother.
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I wish I could remember my dreams! Using the super powers of retrospect, I am learning how to understand and accept that the loss of awareness about my dreams today must be some further manifestation of the aging process.
About two months ago I woke in the middle of the night and sat up in bed with a revelation. I knew when I woke up that I had been in the midst of a series of dreams that seemed to be moving in fast-forward motion. At the instant I woke up I heard these words in my mind: “Of course you don’t remember your dreams any more, Linda! Look at the dreams you just woke up from. They are so complicated and contain so much information that it would be impossible for anyone to actually remember them.”
Did I somehow receive a massive addition of a computer’s version of memory processing abilities ‘back there’ a few years ago at the time that I no longer remembered my dreams? The ‘not knowing’ my dreams started about 10 years ago. I distinctly remember the last GOOD dream I had. I was living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota just prior to moving down here to the desert in southeastern Arizona. I wrote the dream down, though I don’t know at the moment where that piece of paper is. I remember it, though, and someday I will write it to include in my story.
Oh, that IS what I was going to write about yesterday before my ‘cyber house’ came crashing down around my fingertips. I was going to write about the origin of the flying dreams I had as a child, and I was going to insert links to other pages on this post. That is, until I discovered the links were dead and went absolutely no place! Hence, the house cleaning.
What I will say from my present position of grand mother-dom (even though I have no actual grandchildren), is that for those of you ‘youngsters’ who get to still experience vivid and clear dreams when you wake up, realize that those dreams and the ability to clearly remember them is a gift. I know that now because my gift has either disappeared or transformed itself into something else that works for me in some other way.
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What I think happened is that at that time in Sioux Falls ten years ago when I could sense that the dreams were changing, if not leaving me, I was physically preparing for the onset of menopause, or parimenopause, though I did not realize it at the time. By the time I made it through that major female transition period, my dreaming states that had been such a vital part of my life since childhood had disappeared, and I never had a chance to even consciously bid them goodbye.
It seems as if I was ‘supposed’ to be ready for this new phase of my life, and in fact I guess I am ready or I wouldn’t be here experiencing this life in my ‘older self’ at this moment. I can whine all I want to about how much I miss my dreaming abilities — the experiences of dreaming them, the experiences of remembering them — but it will not change the fact that I now seem to be processing an increasingly massive amount of information in my dreams in my present life.
Sometimes when I wake now I just know that ‘something, some how’ seems to have ‘downloaded’ this information into my brain. Because of what I now know about how the right and left brain work out information processing while we sleep, I suspect that this isn’t REALLY new information I am gaining at all. I rather suspect that I am being able now to release from my right brain vast amounts of information that has been stored there, waiting, since the beginning of my life.
As this information is integrated with the knowledge of my left brain while I sleep, I just wake in the morning with no single detail of the dreams I have had the night before. It might be like switching from analog to digital processing. But what I do know is that I am being in-formed in my sleep.
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This morning I woke up knowing that part of what I am accomplishing through this cyber-house cleaning I am undertaking at the moment, is a quarantine of my mother. When I first started my blogging process, I created the other two blogs, Take Care of Mothers and Workspace for Stop the Storm, at the same time as I created this one. I only vaguely knew that as time went on my ‘blog house’ would have to expand. This morning I have a clearer sense of how this is actually working.
When I thought, Take Care of Mothers, I was looking at it from a sort of warm, fuzzy place — like I might should I think about buying one of our commercialized sentiment cards to recognize our culture’s version of Mother’s Day for someone. When I woke up this morning I KNEW in a different way that some huge circle related to the wholeness of the act of caregiving itself had completed itself within me.
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I should not be surprised that one end of the ‘caregiving circle’, or hoop of life has connected itself to the other end today — like plugging two ends of an extension cord into itself. Now I sense from within myself what it means to have the one end of caregiving (seen perhaps from the point of view of being a woman) of bringing a new life into the world and caring for it as it grows into life, to the other end of seeing the necessity for ending something, and thus for the necessity of caring into death.
When looking back at our childhoods, most of my siblings would agree with me that given our particular circumstances, the only way to have resolved our troubles with my mother would have been to kill her. Ideally, she needed to be removed from our lives and placed into quarantine. As we begin to truly understand how early childhood trauma changes an infant and young child’s developing brain-mind-self, we will begin to clearly see that the ‘dis-ease’ of unresolved trauma effects that they carry within themselves will be passed onto these people’s offspring in some way.
In my case, my mother’s trauma was passed on to me in the form of terrible abuse. Now as I work to separate my mother’s writings from my own I am in fact FINALLY experiencing some version of quarantine for my mother as I remove her to the Take Care of Mothers blog space. I am ‘taking care’ of her, not by shooting her like one might shoot a rabid animal or a broken horse, not like one might if they could actually imprison her for 14,500 years, but by beginning an actual physical process of my own where I find ways to extricate her mind OUT OF my own mind.
This kind of caregiving is necessary only for me. She is dead and my actions have nothing to do with her. But in this process of examining what it means to allow myself a full range of action, even in my thoughts, about what taking care of mothers can ACTUALLY mean, I see that there are mothers who have always needed the most extreme kind of caregiving — so that they could be protected from harming innocent others, if not also themselves.
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The extreme forms of isolation my mother was able to affect for me during the 18 years I spent being abused by her meant that she had an almost super human ability to control the development of my mind, including my thoughts and my thinking process itself. This process that I am working on as I ‘banish’ my mother to the kingdom of my other blog is helping me to further clarify the distinction I make between ‘memory retrieval’ and ‘disclosure’.
As I work to explore and connect all the fragmented pieces of my own history as it relates to the whole person I want to be (more of) today, I realize that as I return for my own memories I am forced to re-member myself with my mother in the picture (in the memory). Obviously she was there. She was the one that traumatized me in the first place.
That is where the power of disclosure enters into my process of healing my dissociations. This is what I was evidently ‘working on’ during my dreaming state last night. As I work with my own fragmented memories of myself in my life as they affected the formation of who I grew up being, through disclosure I can separate my mother from myself in those memories. I can place HER in a different place and ME in another, safe one.
I find it interesting that within my own mind I have created the third blog of Workspace for Stop the Storm in the MIDDLE between the blog where my mother has been banished to and the one where I am knowing-through-telling my own story. This workspace is a buffer zone between us. Perhaps because I am trying to heal particularly from the abuse against me perpetrated by a Borderline Personality Disorder mother, creating this definite boundary zone between us is of utmost importance in my process.
Only in the most physically literal way was the umbilical cord connecting my mother to me ever severed. On every other level — except for what I believe to be the spiritual one where she could not touch my essential self — that connection between the two of us remained intact. Not only was that true for the 18 years I was continually exposed to her maliciousness, but it has also been true as she has infiltrated my mind to this day.
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I am going to divide and conquer, all right. She ruled my life during all of my formative years, yet she could never completely rule me. This is a war of wills as I continue to empower myself to rule my own body-brain-mind and soul. She trampled where she had no business being. She trampled on me, she trampled me. But she did not conquer me and I aim to prove it.
“March on, oh wounded ones, march on!”
I am in fact reclaiming the soil of my own selfdom! When I am done cleaning my own house, my mother will not be in it.
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As always, thank you for reading. Your comments are welcome and appreciated! Linda
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HELP!! I am in blogger’s hell!! In trying to clean up, rearrange, reassign pages, move some, delete some, etc. I think all the pages and posts have staged a mutiny! A revolt! They are on the lose, running the show, I’m helpless! I’m drowning!!
I hope things get better soon so I can get back to writing!! I was all ready to write a super post today, and then found out there were dead links all over this site, and I didn’t put them there! I hope I can remember what I was going to write, after this house gets cleaned!
Thanks for your patience!
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Here are some links on attachment disorders and mothers for you to check out while you wait!
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I’m working on:
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Take Care of Mothers, where all my own mother’s writings have been moved to. I am also in the processing of moving all the information on secure and insecure attachment patterns over there.
and
Workspace for Stop the Storm – both blogs being about stopping the intergenerational transmission of unresolved traumas, about stopping child abuse and about healing traumas. Thank you! Linda
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Here are some more of my mother’s letters that I finished transcribing today 060609.
These 1957 letters, written between my parents as my father was already in Alaska and mother and children waited in Los Angeles for Army orders (he worked for the Army Corp of Engineers as a civilian) that would allow us to join him there. They present aspects of my mother’s thinking patterns PRIOR to homesteading.
These two 1960 letters were written after homesteading had begun, though we lived mostly in the Eagle River ‘log house’ while my mother carried on her nursery school.
The 1961 letters reflect the stress and turbulence of that troubled year, the year that a 5th child was added to our family. (Please also note the previous posting of mother’s 1961 diary.)
This is a single 1962 short note from the Mother’s Day card my mother sent her mother, written on the baby’s 1st birthday..
These 1963 letters begin with our family living in the ‘log house’, moving the trailer down from the mountain to be painted, scrubbed and sold to pay for back rent, a move back to the homestead, ending with my mother driving down the Al-Can (Alaskan) Highway alone without my father in August. Again, turbulent, chaotic, distressful times….
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Well, here’s the ‘special treat’ I discovered among the papers I am sorting my way through. First I found one sheet of ‘random’ paper with the first half of this poem on it – transcribed it – and went on with the other letters. Eventually I found a second piece of paper that had the end of this poem on it, and can now begin my grandmother’s pages.
Evidently this recipe for marital bliss either wasn’t or couldn’t be followed. I find it interesting that the ‘shades of liberated women’ that both my maternal grandmother and great grandmother were, found itself into this poem regarding pay for one’s work at home for the family. My mother’s parents divorced around 1930 (about unheard of at this time and created an embarrassing sense of shame within my mother) just after the stock market crash. Grandfather Charles had been a successful stock broker who lost all in the fall of 1929. After the divorce, my mother’s mother went to work and used her master’s degree in psychology, 1918, to support herself and her children.
My sister, Cindy 1953, will be sending me copies of my mother’s mother’s brief beginnings of her own autobiography that were recently discovered. I look forward to also adding them to the grandparent pages that are dedicated to our understanding of how patterns transmit themselves through parenting practices down the generations..
Link to new Brother 1965 story:
I swear I stood inside that store with my mouth open dumbly, not believing what I had just witnessed. Those parents had brought their child into that store for the direct purpose of teaching him how to steal. I awoke from my trance and yelled at the cashier closest to me, “Those people just stole that ball,” as I pointed out the front window.
No, they knew that ball hadn’t been paid for, and out the door after them raced the store manager. I don’t know what happened next but those people didn’t get away with their ball this time. How many times previously had those parents given that boy their lessons? How many times afterward? Did the ‘getting caught’ part create any break or intervention that might help that little boy understand there’s nothing good about stealing? Or did they all become just that more determined to learn to steal better?
I don’t know, but it was an eye opener for me. I wondered what chance of a good life does a child like that have if that is how his life is at the beginning?
I know that if I were faced today with a scene such as you are describing I would at least take down that man’s license plate number and call 911, describing to the police exactly what I had witnessed. Unfortunately the system itself is not what it could be, but it is the best that we have.
Very disturbingly research is now showing that for all the efforts being made to stop physical assault against children, the effects of a child’s exposure to VERBAL abuse alone can cause more long term harm to a child than does any other single form of abuse — and the physical marks don’t show.
We need to know what we are looking at when we see these wounded children. There might be times that we can look into their eyes, times when we might be able to say a word to them, spend time getting to know them in some safe way, some way to let them know as soon as they are old enough that they can report to adults themselves what is hurting them out of sight of others.
Of course there is controversy about the ‘correctness’ and stringency of laws against abusing children. But if we think about it logically, would we ever say it would be OK not to have any laws against killing other people because, who knows, sometimes the dead person deserved to die?
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Please refer back to this section of the blog as time goes on for future writings by my siblings:
It came to me today while I was again working on transcribing more of my mother’s letters that after my 1980 treatment program for alcoholism, the one that identified that I was a victim and depressed (first time news to me in my world), when I called and tried to talk to her about how she treated me in my childhood — before she became so defensive and I hung up on her and whopped and jumped for joy at my own audacity — I also had asked her if I could help her write her homesteading book.
She said to me, “That’s my book. Bill and I were the homesteaders, not you. I don’t want your help. If you want to write a book, write you own.”
She never wrote hers. I can’t write it for her, either, but I can put in the hours and hours and hours it takes to transcribe these letters. I am emailing parts of them to my siblings, and through my one sister to her granddaughters — not about the abuse, but just about some of our childhood experiences that are interesting, that are a part of our family history and herstory.
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I still struggle with my own position in my mother’s reality, knowing it was running consistently behind the scenes and between the lines within many of her letters. I know that in the 1959 early days of first arriving on the mountain homestead life was a special kind of good, a magical kind of good. Hope abounded as did the thrill of this new adventure. Life there had not had enough time to sour yet.
I also know that my mother experienced a lot of happiness if not actual bliss during those early months. I know that some of her happiness meant I was spared trauma during that time. I have clear memories of trying to please her. I remember rolling up all of our sleeping bags every morning and being thanked. I remember being a part of the family in the newness of this new life.
And yet I know the shadow of trauma was not far from me even then. I am just blessed to not know about it specifically during those early homesteading times. I am grateful for that. Yet I also feel today like a page torn out of a story book, that sometimes can get stuck into the story and the rest of the time is removed and just plain missing.
My page was stuck in the story at the time of our early homesteading beginnings. I got to be one of the birthday candles on the cake of our new life. Everyone was thrilled and excited. No other party could have been that grand.
If I was placed in my outcast scapegoat role during these times, I do not remember it, nor do I want to. I want this happy, included time. It remains most precious to me, no matter what happened after the party was over and the sorrows began again.
I remember my father clearing the land. I remember crawling through tunnels and into caves the tree trunks and roots made as my father scraped the land and piled them in the sweet, damp, soft earth windrows. I have never smelled anything else that good in my life — but I smelled it then.
I would not trade those memories for anything. I would not even have given my suffering away willingly if that would have meant I could not be with that land. But this is for my future stories.
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This is an example of how my mother talks about the homestead in her letters to her mother in 1959:
“We had one rainy day this week & I couldn’t let the children out all day – nothing seemed nice then – but oh, today – how I wish you were here to share it with me.
I’m writing this letter to you while sitting on the cot outside in the sun. There’s a very slight wind & the leaves & trees are rustling & the sound of it & the creek & the river sounds [like] the waves of an ocean!
Oh Mom, I hardly dare to love this place so & love it I do. I am in love with it – just as Bill was. It’s Shangri-la & I must share it with you each & every summer – now Mom, if we get title this winter & we must & I’ll never rest until we do!! THEN now, I am serious – plan your summers here!! Or at least 1 entire month every summer – but there’s so much room here you could have a little place all your own! Now you write & answer me!! No fancy trailer idea – no, no, no – a small log house or a tiny 26-ft trailer like ours – because after all, you live outdoors all summer here!!
Every time I look around I wish to run & shout with glee – oh, such beauty – I’ll never want again for anything — I’ll wait & wait & wait only this land, only this land!!! I love it, I love it, I love it – our homestead & we’ll live here for ever & ever & ever!!
…. I sound love sick & I am!”
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I read in today’s letters as I transcribed them over and over again my mother begged her mother to come up and visit. Over and over again, and YES it got BORING transcribing those parts. Yet I did, and I’ll leave her words of pleading to her mother alone for now though they will probably be edited out of any later published collection.
Right now I am just plowing through these papers and recording what my eyes see. I imagine I’m like an earthworm as it digests garbage and craps out something better than what went into it in the first place. For there will be crap within these pages, even if I can only sense it between the lines. But these letters are still a story of lives lived, if only from my mother’s very filtered point of view.
But we were there. We were her children and we were there. For good or for bad (as my mother might say in a letter), how many people actually have this kind of a record of their childhood on paper? And how strange it seems to me to be the one doing this work, the invisible one, the one mostly torn out of the book of the ongoing fabric of my family’s life except during these early homesteading months.
The one that was frozen on her childhood bed for days and days and days, standing frozen in corners for what seemed like eternity. The one beaten and shamed and blamed and hated is the one with the ‘pen’ now. And I still have stories of my own to tell. But for now, I will let the time line of my childhood unfold itself as I sort out and order these letters while time remains — both for them and for me. (Neither of us are getting any younger.)
What remains of the stories of our childhoods? Who holds those stories, both the visible and the invisible? Capture them. Write them. Tell them. Share them.
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In the end, is there anything left BUT the mystery of it all?
In my reply to the comment on yesterday’s post I described why I do not believe that my mother had the ability to distinguish right from wrong.
In my reply I referred to my mother’s childhood stories because I believe they include her own description of the break that happened within her own mind and the point where she became not only lost to herself but also lost her ability to connect with the ‘reality’ that most others remain in contact with throughout their lives.
My Mother’s Childhood Stories
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I believe that one of the clearest indicators that unresolved trauma from childhood continues to exist in a person can be found by looking at the ‘trauma dramas’ that repeat themselves in adulthood. This happens because the nature of unresolved trauma is that it cannot be integrated into the body-brain of a person who has been overwhelmed by it.
John J. Ratey, who authored the book “A User’s Guide To the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain”
(Vintage Books, 2002 —
wrote the following:
“The confusing terminology that neuroscience applies to the brain and its functions will itself eventually need to change – and it will as our understanding of the brain deepens. Scientists looking at pathology are still caught up in the unitary hunt for the broken neural component they imagine to be at fault, and are doing their best to match up specific brain functions with specific neurogeographical locations. The sooner we replace our mechanistic model of the brain with an ecologically centered, systems-based view, the better off we will be, for such a model better accounts for much of human experience. (Ratey, p.4)”
“…the brain is largely composed of maps, arrays of neurons that apparently represent entire objects of perception or cognition, or at least entire sensory or cognitive qualities of those objects, such as color, texture, credibility, or speed. Most cognitive functions involve the interaction of maps from many different part [sic] of the brain at once… The brain assembles perceptions by the simultaneous interaction of whole concepts, whole images….the brain is an analog processor, meaning, essentially, that it works by analogy and metaphor. It relates whole concepts to one another and looks for similarities, differences, or relationships between them [bolding is mine]. It does not assemble thoughts and feelings from bits of data. (Ratey, p.5)”
“Although metaphor and analogy are unconventional in scientific circles, I am firmly convinced that a more nonlinear kind of thought will eventually supplant much of the logical reasoning we use today [bolding is mine]. Chris Langton, one of the primary researchers in the field of complexity theory, has speculated that in the future science will become more poetic…..real trust, when emotions are running high, is based on analogy, not calculation. (Ratey, p.5)”
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I firmly believe in the truth of what Ratey is saying, and I also believe that as we move further ahead in the development of our understanding about how the brain actually works — in contrast to how we assume it works — we will know more about what the experience of mental illness actually is for people who have it. We will also know more about what creates the experience of severe child abuse for the offspring of people with mental illness such as my mother had.
As I prepare myself to write +What I Suspect of My Mother’s Early Childhood (Please read this page, it is important!), I also think about another very important piece necessary to the understanding of my mother’s abuse of me. Please follow this link to one of the important writings of Dr. Stephen B. Karpman titled, “Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis.”
http://www.itaa-net.org/tajnet/articles/karpman01.html
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Having the ability to use language means that we can assign words to bits and pieces of our experiences. It is a commonly recognized fact that one of the symptoms of PTSD and unresolved trauma is that the language centers of the brain cannot actively participate in the integration process through verbal articulation of the traumatic experience. I believe that leaves the right brain’s ability to process information in wordless images responsible for attempting to heal the traumas. It does so most actively through reenactment.
Communication through bodily movements is a far, far older means of expression than words or even hand signals are, and directly links to the emotional brain through activation of the amygdala brain region. SEE:
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I believe that the ‘cognitive map’ interactions that Ratey talks about become disturbed as a result of overwhelming trauma. This matters MOST when we are talking about severe early chronic child abuse and maltreatment because the child is building its brain during these experiences that will establish what these maps are and how the brain will process information contained in the maps for the rest of their lives. As my mother’s childhood stories indicate, she wrote these stories as her brain was actively trying to form a working Theory of Mind, SEE Google search:
Because the traumas of her early life had overwhelmed her abilities to resolve them, she was forever left in this unresolved state with her right brain’s dramatic, metaphoric processes trying to resolve these traumas by itself without the assistance of the left brain or higher cortical thinking. This, to me, reflects the overriding purpose of repeated trauma dramas in adulthood. The person is acting out and communicating with the BODY what the mind does not have the ability to process within itself.
This is why I believe Karpman’s writings are so critically important in our attempts to understand what our abusive childhood experiences were linked to. While we might rather believe that some cut-and-dried scientific explanation will eventually appear that will allow us to place our experiences of trauma and abuse in some clinically sterile container, all sealed off and logically explained away, I do not believe such a solution will ever be possible to attain.
Life can be extremely messy, especially when unresolved traumas have to repeat themselves through trauma dramas that nobody, either inside the situation or outside of it, seem to be able to understand. This is why I do not believe that forgiveness has anything to do with healing from the 18 years of severe abuse I suffered from under my mother. She was simply a very big, very mean, dangerous psychotic body trying to actively resolve her experiences of early trauma through the communicative actions of the trauma drama that was her life.
We expect play among children to be their age appropriate means of coming to terms with their lives. Yet we do not realize that when a brain-mind is forced in childhood through malevolent interactions with early environments to take a detour in its development, as adults we still continue to play in a similar way. Where is that magic line where acting something out in childhood becomes dangerous in adulthood? I don’t think we know exactly where that line really is, do we? When does this tendency of the human being to act out dramas become a deadly serious game, where playing for keeps means disaster and the cost is the lack of well being for human lives?
That is why a childhood such as mine was seems like a nightmare and is as illogical and unreasonable as dreams can be. In either case the brain is trying to process information through a left brain-right brain integration effort. In situations where a child’s ability to process trauma is overwhelmed, there is nothing they can do the rest of their lives to resolve it. THAT is only one part of the tragedy.
Other parts of the tragedy include the facts that we do not necessarily recognize when such traumas are overwhelming a young child, we do not actively intervene or prevent these traumas from occurring, and we sure do not make adequate and appropriate therapy available universally to those who suffered from these overwhelming traumas in the first place.
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Any time I see repeating patterns indicating a lack of well being in an adult’s life, my own included, I can now easily see the trauma drama actions of the right brain trying to resolve traumas through action of the body. Those of us caught in these repeating trauma reenactment cycles never learned that life could be about anything other than suffering in an unsafe and insecure world. We were never told that we would act out in our lifetime the traumas that were impossible for our brains to process and integrate in any other way, including through the natural process of sleep and dreaming. It doesn’t take long for the very real consequences of our actual choices and actions in the real world to so encapsulate us in our lives that we have little or no hope of escape.
This is so far past judgment that I cannot even see that it applies. If we ever encounter someone with a severed artery we don’t stop and first ponder how this accident happened before we offer life saving assistance. Yet when it comes to recognizing repeated trauma dramas in our own and in one another’s lives we are rapidly coming to a point when these dramas are occurring so often among us that we think they are normal. This, to me, is creating a nearly overwhelming burden for those who were and are safely and securely attached in the world. Who else is there to show us there is a different and a better way to live other than bleeding to death?
The further we wander away from our meaningful and adequate social attachment relationships with one another as members of a social species, the more at risk we become for suffering from isolation loneliness, depression, addictions, harmful conspicuous consumption, obesity and all manner of neglect of our offspring, ourselves and our environment. We are more and more often spending our lives in a state of lack of well being trying desperately to repair what was never built right in the first place.
People such as my mother was are like the warning canaries the miners used to assess the safety of their working environments. The demise of my mother’s mind happened because nobody was paying attention. My own suffering in my childhood happened for the same reason. The environment of trauma that both of us grew up in happened because we were cut off from life saving assistance from others of our species. Isolation breeds dis-ease in a social species.
And because we are members of a social species we are innately destined to attempt to communicate within ourselves and to others the state of our reality. Trauma drama reenactments, as unconscious attempts to communicate the reality of malevolent experience both within our own brain and to others of our species, are seldom heard and seldom understood. The nature of the traumas simply keep passing themselves down the generations until someone at some time listens to these communications, GETS IT and offers the life saving means to resolving the traumas so that they can finally STOP repeating themselves.
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Repeated trauma dramas always indicate not only that a lack of safety and security existed in the first place, but that this same condition continues to exist in the present. They tell us about our insecure attachments within the world we live in.
Stop the Storm 
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