Tag: witness abuse

+SIMPLE MOMENTS OF HUMAN KINDNESS CAN SAVE AN ABUSED CHILD’S SELF-LIFE

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I woke up on this sunny, warm morning thinking about the post I wrote last night, feeling concerned about the darkness in it.  Somehow two topics came into my mind almost like they came to me as a balance weight against that darkness that was the history of the making of Linda.  One topic is about the Brownie scout leader I had when I was eight.  The other topic is my strange cat, Gerri.

I will only know by writing this piece how the darkness and the light within the story of the Brownie scout leader and my cat fit together.  I know attachment lies at the root of this piece of writing.

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I will start with Gerri because she is here with me in the present.  She is (I know nothing about cat breeds so I will do the best I can to describe her) a mostly black tortoise shell calico cat.  She has splashes of white markings and light tan, almost peach legs, with some tan speckles throughout her fur.  Her coat is so thick I can scrunch my fingers into it, but also a little oily and waxy.  It reminds me of a soft version of the undercoat a buffalo might wear.

Her eyes are round and always big, yellow with a pitch black slit in them.  She reminds me of an owl when she looks at me, and her look is always a stare as if she is continually looking for threat and danger.  She often looks worried as if I might eat her.  There is always tension in her small body (she is not a big or heavy cat).  I will never know her whole background or history, but what I do know explains for me why she is such an unusual and strange cat.  I don’t expect her to ever be ‘ordinary’ the way the three now mostly grown kitten-cats I rescued are.  But I am seeing the REAL Gerri emerging within this precious original cat!

Those of you who read my postings on my 1982 journal remember that I reached a point all those years ago when I packed up my spinning and weaving and put it all away when I entered college, and my life changed.  As I transcribed those journal pages I realized how sad it was that I let go one of the few parts of myself that were really an important and positive part of me.  I looked at the beautiful maple loom sitting in the corner of my living room and realized that I can place some important energy in my present life getting that part of myself that loves to work with fleece and yarn back into my life.

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Now the story about the loom and Gerri intertwine.  About four years ago I happened to hear about this loom that someone in a town about 50 miles from where I live had to give away.  I was fortunate to get this woman’s number and called her.  The following weekend the loom was in my house.  The woman who brought it here was a friend of the woman who owned it, whose Alzheimer’s had progressed to the point she had to be placed in a full-care institution.  It turns out this woman who owned the loom (I never met her) also had two cats that needed a home, too.  I offered to take the cats.

The next weekend the cats arrived, Gerri being one of them and a huge fat white cat named Poe being the other one.  The wisdom of my hindsight came very quickly into play as the woman who brought the cats in their cardboard cat carrier boxes brought them into my house, opened them up immediately, and the cats got away.  I should have insisted immediately that the cats be left in their boxes for awhile until I had time to meet and greet them before I let them out.

Poe only disappeared for a few hours.  The little black one was gone for four months.  I hoped she was still in my house and had not escaped at some sly moment when the door was open, but I didn’t know for sure.  All I could do was keep food, water and litter filled and wait.

Eventually I heard the black one.  I had not written her name down when she had been left at my house, so I called her by the name the little neighbor boy suggested.  Gerri.  After her four months of sneaking out at night and hiding thoroughly during the day, I began to see fleeting shadows of Gerri darting along the outside walls of the house from hiding place to hiding place.  As she became more trusting and daring she would appear here and there away from the walls.  That’s when I began to realize that big fat Poe bullied her.

I ended up finding a home for Poe.  No bullying allowed in my home!  It has taken 3 ½ years for Gerri to transform into my pet.  Gerri is missing her front left paw.  She was stepped on by a horse when she was so tiny she could barely walk, and the woman who owned the loom had taken her to the vet’s and saved her life.  The more I come to know Gerri, the more I realize that she has cat version posttraumatic stress disorder.  I would call her absolutely ‘mentally ill’ and neurotic if I didn’t know better.

Also, the more I have gotten to know Gerri, the more I wonder if her previous owner’s increasing dementia didn’t severely further traumatize this cat.  It makes me worry for pets who are under the care of Alzheimer people before they progress into total near-oblivion.  The hyper startle response this little cat has, her nervousness, her obvious distrust of the world she lives in, her difficulty in forming attachment to me, all make me think that there were many times in her 14-year life that she was threatened not only by a giant horse, and a huge bullying white cat, but also by her increasingly demented owner.

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But Gerri seems to realize more every day of her life that she is now safe from harm and secure in my care and affection.  Nothing will ever take away from her either the background experiences of suffering that she’s had, or her physiological responses to those traumas.  But I am watching her become, a little more every day, more and more of the fine cat, Gerri that she is.

She loves to be brushed, and I don’t mean she’s a little fond of it.  She gets ecstatic!  I keep a brush on the bathroom floor, and every time I use the toilet Gerri gets some profoundly happy moments!  I have even seen her let herself be chased by the sweetest of my three half grown kittens.  Gerri is queen of the house now.  She will never eat while the other three do, but she watches them from the middle of the kitchen floor with interest.  She will even curl up now on a corner of my sheet-covered bed in the sunlight during the day, allowing herself to be present with three other cats on the bed!

But it is what happens at night when I first go to bed that tickles me most.  I don’t know why she just started this a week ago.  It’s like some ancient Gerri-is-a-cat genetic memory has kicked into gear.  She always knows about 15 minutes before I head to bed that it is TIME, and she begins to prance around me, waiting.  As soon as the lights are off and I am snuggled under my covers and stop moving, Gerri rushes into the living room.  It took me a couple of days to put two and two together to figure out what her new routine actually was.

I would here her return to my room as she made the strangest cat deep growling  cat talking sounds.  Then they would stop, she would leave the room, and soon she would be back repeating her verbal display.  After awhile she would jump onto my bed and nestle down somewhere near my feet where she spent the night.  Eventually I noticed the pile of cat toy soft balls piled under my bed near my head.  “Oh!  She’s HUNTING for me!”

In order for this game to repeat itself for the first few nights Gerri had to move all the balls back into the living room during the day so she could hunt for them again at night.  Now I round them all up and hide them for her.  At first I kept the hiding simple and obvious so she would have no trouble finding them.  I didn’t want to discourage her from hunting for them.  Now I can be a little more challenging in where I put them in the morning, because she still finds them all at night and brings them back for me.

Now HERE is the connection to my Brownie scout leader when I was eight.  I am Gerri’s attachment person.  She hunts for me because she loves me and she is taking care of me like a momma cat would hunt and bring her kill to her kittens.  I am like her mother at the same time she is mothering me.

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When I was eight, shortly after my family had left Los Angeles and moved to Alaska, my mother was still practicing the “Let’s be a GOOD (public face) mother so I make an impression on all these new people I am meeting here!” façade.   Eventually, and it only took less than two years, she stopped caring a hoot what anyone thought about her in her new location and became again completely the mean mother she was to me.

In the meantime, I was allowed to attend Brownies for about a year, which culminated in my being allowed to attend Brownie day camp for a week the June we first began homesteading.   Mother drove me to the Eagle River Shopping Center parking lot and the Brownie leader picked me up and drove me to camp and back again.

I am thinking about how the attachment and child development experts tell us that the ability to form secure attachments lies within each individual child.  When insecure attachment happens instead, the ‘fault’ does not lie within the victim-child.  It lies with the inadequate early caregivers.  I have never forgotten the time I spent at that Brownie camp.  It was one of the very, very few times I actually GOT TO BE A CHILD!  I loved the activities, enjoyed being with the other children, and was treated grandly by every one of the adults.

Yet one particular experience that happened on a return trip back to the shopping center that remains a ‘flashbulb’ memory for me (the same as trauma can create flashbulb memories, so also can extremely positive events, especially when a child is immersed in the darkness of trauma on an ongoing basis).  We had left the camp a little early, and the Brownie scout leader asked me on the return trip if I liked flowers.  I trusted this woman completely by now, and I can remember my own ecstasy when I responded back to her with the full life-force and enthusiasm I was capable of, “Oh, YES!  I LOVE flowers.”

“OK,” this woman responded back to me with a smile.  “Just wait.  I am going to show you something very special.”

She turned off of the paved highway and drove down a narrow dirt road and parked near the edge of the great Knik River.  She walked ahead of me on a slippery damp wet packed black mud pathway along the shore until we came to a small open area where she showed me the Chocolate Lilies growing there.

So beautiful, I thought!  I had never before seen a brown flower!  But when I smelled them, the STUNK!  How could something that looked so beautiful smell so bad?

Well, I have NEVER forgotten those shining moments or the kindness of that woman.  Yet I also realize that woman’s attention and generous kindness to me where probably not one single bit out of the ordinary for her.  I had no idea at all that people ordinarily treat children that way, treat each other that way.  For me, that week at day camp, and my ‘commutes’ with this woman remained the safest, most secure, most kind and happiest days of my entire childhood.

Hope from human kindness means the universe to abused children -- budding flowers in spring -- the Chocolate Lily

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Which again takes me back to myself and little traumatized kitty Gerri.  I understand that getting stepped on by a horse and losing your paw can be put in the category of trauma that just happens sometimes.  But neither Gerri nor I ever deserved anything less than perfect kindness.  That we didn’t get it, changed us.  But just as there is a perfect cat Gerri inside that furry body sleeping in the sun at the foot of my bed right now with her three furry companions (the first she has ever let into her life), there always remains a perfect Linda present in this body no matter how difficult it is for me to remain ‘in touch’ with her.

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So, in response to the dark reality of the post I wrote last night, I want to remind all of us that because we are still alive there HAD TO BE shining moments of safe and secure attachment with someone somewhere and some time in our childhood.  I won’t talk here about the unspeakable tragedy it is that abused children have to make a few tiny moments of glowing kindness into enough of a sustaining memory to last them throughout their terrible, dark, dangerous, traumatic childhoods.

But I also believe that I would have had a different life course in the end than I did if I had NOT had those few shining moments with that perfect stranger.  Her kindness sustained me throughout my childhood because those moments with her were the only true Linda being Linda and being accepted, treated kindly and being genuinely and completely happy that I can think of.  But the quality of my attachment experiences with this woman kept the channel of secure attachment open for me within my own body-brain-mind.

I have no doubt that in those few joy-filled moments with that woman who cared enough about me to take a little detour to show me new flowers that I loved, in those few secure attachment moments borrowed from the ‘ordinary’ world, that woman saved my life in the same way I am saving little Gerri’s and she is saving mine.

Hope beats within the heart of these moments.

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+WHEN ABUSIVE PARENTS STEAL THEIR CHILD’S THUNDER

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Experts say that we cannot be truly autonomous and secure adults if we lack the ability to have safe and secure attachments.

I wanted to write today about Dr. Siegel’s next statements about secure-autonomous attachment.  I find, as usual, that I am nearly completely lost in trying to understand what he is saying (see bottom of this post) because I do not come from a childhood of safe and secure attachments.  Instead my 18 years of abuse from birth gave me the opposite – a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder.  To begin to understand what Siegel is saying, I have to turn his words upside down and backwards so that they can make sense to ‘opposite’ extra-ordinary ME.

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In order to keep my thoughts from appearing and flying away in their often random way, I had to find my own internal image to attach them to so that they could have an order I can understand.  What came to me in relation to what Siegel is saying about secure versus insecure attachment was:  “stolen thunder.”  In working with my own internal image I came to understand three basic questions about how parents raise their children.  In fact, I think it might be the simplest ‘test’ possible to determine the quality of the parenting we received and of the parenting we give our own children.

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1.  Does a parent help their child’s own personal power, uniqueness, expression and self to grow?  In other words, do they help their child’s thunder to grow or do they interfere with their child’s growing thunder (self=personal power)?

Yes or No

2.  Does a parent actually steal their child’s thunder away from them so that the child is diminished rather than helped and allowed to grow and thrive?

Yes or No

3.  Does the parent then project their own garbage onto and into their child?

Yes or No

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These questions are, of course, only showing us what the very tip of the iceberg is like about how parents can act toward their children.  But I think the answers give a pretty clear indication about what lies below the surface:

As I thought about my mother’s interactions with me from my birth, I realized that 1. was No; 2. was Yes; 3.  was Yes.  N-Y-Y.  She did not allow my personal thunder to grow, she stole it away from me and projected her garbage onto me.  (This is exactly what I believe my mother’s mother and grandmother did to her in her childhood.)

I thought about my father and 1. was No; 2. was No; 3.  was No.  N-N-N.  He did not help me to grow my own thunder, but he did not steal it away from me, either.  Nor did he project his garbage onto me.  I basically did not seem to exist in his world at all.

I thought about my interactions with my own children and 1. was Yes; 2. was No; and 3. was No.  Y-N-N.  My foremost effort with my children was to allow them and to help them grow into their own self and to grow their personal thunder.  I did not steal their thunder away from them or deny them the opportunity to grow their own strong, clear self.  I did not confuse, overpower or disempower them.  I did not project my own garbage onto them.  I had what the child development attachment experts would call an ‘earned secure’ attachment with my children.  (I think about this from my own perspective as my having built a ‘borrowed secure’ attachment with my children.)

NOTE:  Our patterns of trying to give our thunder away is a topic for some future writing…..

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Out of curiosity I wanted to know where the phrase “steal my thunder” even came from.  At trivia-library.com I found it to be 300 years old:

Origins of Sayings – Steal My Thunder

About the history, origin and story behind the famous saying

STEAL MY THUNDER

Who Said It: John Dennis

When: 1709

The Story behind It: John Dennis, English critic and playwright, invented a new way of simulating the sound of thunder on stage and used the method in one of his plays, Appius and Virginia. Dennis “made” thunder by using “troughs of wood with stops in them” instead of the large mustard bowls usually employed. The thunder was a great success, but Dennis’ play was a dismal failure. The manager at Drury Lane, where the play was performed, canceled its run after only a few performances. A short time later, Dennis returned to Drury Lane to see Shakespeare’s Macbeth. As he sat in the pit, he was horrified to discover that his method of making thunder was being used. Jumping to his feet, Dennis screamed at the audience, “That’s my thunder, by God! The villains will not play my play but they steal my thunder.”

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I have a different association with thunder.  I used to be terrified of electrical storms.  Gradually, after more than 25 years spent in friendships with traditional-believing Native Americans in northern Minnesota, I came to understand another perspective on these storms.

I had a friend who was a lawyer and Chief Magistrate, and not given to ‘flights of fancy’.  One time she told the story of driving a stretch of deserted 2-lane highway after leaving Canada as she headed home.  She glanced in her rear view mirror and saw a massive bird speeding towards her along the line of road.  It shone copper, and when it reached her car it lifted over it and swooped down in front of her and continued down the road.  It was so big its wing tips reached over the shoulders on both sides of the road.  My friend was stunned and shaken, and pulled off the road and stopped as she watched it disappear ahead of her.

Traditional Anishinabeg (Ojibway, Chippewa) and other Tribal teachings tell of how thunder is the sound of the voice of these great Thunderbirds, and lightning is the light flashing from their eyes.  I am no longer afraid of electrical storms.  Finding, claiming and growing my own personal thunder remains a bit more of a challenge!

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My entire recovery from the terrible child abuse I suffered has been about the healing of myself and the claiming of my personal power to be my self, in my power, in my life.  How does having one’s personal thunder — or not — apply to my understanding of the following words by Dr. Daniel Siegel?  I guess my discussion of this information now belongs in tomorrow’s post:

“Moreover, the capacity to reflect on the role of mental states in determining human behavior is associated with the capacity to provide sensitive and nurturing parenting….this reflective function is more than the ability to introspect; it directly influences a self-organizational process within the individual…..the reflective function also enables the parent to facilitate the self-organizational development of the child….the coherent organization of the mind depends upon an integrative process that enables such reflective processes to occur….integrative coherence within the individual may early in life depend upon, and later facilitate, interpersonal connections that foster the development of emotional well-being.  (Siegle/tdm/312)”

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This post follows:

+DISSOCIATION AND THE TRAUMA-SPECIALIZED BRAIN 11-11-09

+SECURE AND INSECURE ATTACHMENT AND THE CHILDHOOD NARRATIVE 11-13-09

+EXPLODING MOTHER, IMPLODING ME: SOME FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN US 11-14-09

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MORE INFORMATION ABOUT BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER

(IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER)

Borderline Personality Disorder

In the Spotlight | More Topics |
from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD
Most people with a diagnosis of BPD have at least one (if not more) co-occurring disorders. Common comorbid conditions include mood and anxiety disorders and substance use problems. But other disorders can occur alongside BPD as well.
In the Spotlight
Eating Disorders and BPD
Recent research is revealing how often BPD and eating disorders co-occur, why they may be related and how to treat these two types of disorders when they do co-occur.
More Topics

Alcoholism and BPD
There is a remarkable overlap between substance abuse disorders and borderline personality disorder. One study found that about 60% of patients in psychiatric hospitals who have been diagnosed with BPD also have a co-occurring substance use disorder such as alcohol dependence.

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+EXPLODING MOTHER, IMPLODING ME: SOME FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN US

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I am revisiting what I see as the core differences between my borderline mother and myself.  I find that nothing has changed in my thinking about these differences in my past five years of research.  My mother’s childhood-onset dissociation became malignant while mine remained benign.

In my first ‘doodle’ I visualized the impact of infant developmental attachment deprivations she suffered from birth until age two.  Born into a family with marital discord and left with her primary care in the hands of a ‘nanny’, I envision that my mother’s developing brain-mind-self was already far off course before she reached the stage of developing a Theory of Mind.

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During the developmental stages from age 2 – 5 conditions in my mother’s childhood so severely impacted her brain-mind that I believe her later mental illness had already centralized the organization of her self.  From the age of 5 it was simply a matter of time before the bomb that was her Borderline Personality Disorder condition would explode – which it did during her terrible delivery of me.

The broader dimensions of the diamond figure that I drew show that in the bottom half powerful interactions with others in her life were feeding her unstable growing self.  She had reached what I call the ‘rage stage’ which was coupled with the following:

My mother was a victim of a lie.  She was told through word and deed by her early caregivers that sometimes she was good enough to be loved.  She was also told that sometimes she was so bad she was un-love-able.  The lie was that she had the power to change herself from being bad to being good, and if she changed into being good (made the bad go away) she would be love-able – and therefore would be loved.

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These conditions presented my mother with an impossible paradox for which there was no answer.  She never knew she was being lied to by her attachment caregivers.  She did not know that there was no solution to this paradox.  She was told she had the power to change herself into being ‘all good’, and she eventually found her solution – me.

The impossible solution to her fundamental betrayal problem was to spit off all her badness and project it onto me.  That left her being all good and me being all bad.  She never had the capacity to know she had believed a lie, found an impossible solution to an impossible riddle, or that she had been tricked and fooled.  Once her child brain-mind wrapped herself around the too-big problem of her early life, her brain-mind continued to grow with this malignant lie within it.

As she moved out of her childhood into her adulthood, and then into the stage of her childbearing years, her childhood dissociation, fueled by childhood rage and a broken Theory of Mind, meant that her children remained her doll-imaginary friends with me as her imaginary enemy (as I have previously described).  By the later years of  my mother’s life she had fewer and fewer people she could influence through her mental illness, and she died as alone and unconsciously troubled as she had been from the time of her birth.

I see this ‘main impact zone’ as being the mass of incoming information that hurt her, followed my the mass of information she later could displace and project onto others to hurt them (primarily me).

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My second doodle page (above) presents the basics of what I believe are the differences between my mother and myself.  Like her, my foundation from birth was in disorganizing, disorienting insecure attachment to early caregivers.  But unlike her, I was never fooled, tricked, or betrayed.  Her projection of her own badness onto me condemned me absolutely and permanently.  I was simply doomed to be hated without hope of reprieve, salvation, or any hope of implementing my own solution to solve any of the ‘problems’ I had with her.

The simplicity of my life saved me.  I was not faced with solving an impossible riddle.  I was not presented with the impossible paradox of “you can change yourself into a good and love-able child and then I will love you.”  My childhood was one continual ‘rupture’ without either repair or hope for repair.  My mother’s childhood contained ‘ruptures’ with faulty and deceiving repairs.

In the final analysis, I was far more fortunate than my mother was.  She was set up to fail at being love-able.  I was simply not love-able.  It was the constancy of my unloved-being hated state that saved me.  It was the inconsistency of her unloved-sometimes loved state that ruined her.

I believe her brain fixated a rigid solution to an unsolvable problem.  Her childhood dissociation organized in her brain-mind-self around this solution – which became her internal and unconscious fulltime goal.  I believe her mental illness was fueled by childhood rage.  Her childhood dissociation became malignant, and I became its operational target.

My childhood dissociation had no goal other than physical enduring survival.  My brain-mind-self was left in a fluid, continually changing and adapting state because I HAD NO GOAL and I had no hope, false or otherwise.  My mother’s treatment of me was made tolerable through what I call benign dissociation and my development occurred in a world of sadness.

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My mother ended up fighting to be love-able, fueled by rage.  Rage is tied to active coping skills, whether we want to admit this or not.  I did not grow up a fighter.  I grew up a sorrow-filled victim stuck in the passive coping skill state.  My mother was told she had the power to change what happened to her, even though it was a lie and it was not within her power to change the dynamics of her caregivers’ treatment of her.

My mother was damned and didn’t know it.  I was damned and I did know it.  I knew I had no power to change what happened to me.   Nobody ever fooled me into thinking otherwise — from the time I was born.  I believe that there are two entirely different trajectories of development set up by the two different childhood scenarios I am describing.  One leads to the development of a dangerous, demonizing mother and the other one does not.

Both my life and my mother’s of course ended up being extremely complicated with devastating consequences stemming from child abuse and neglect in a malevolent environment during critical body-brain-mind-self stages of early development that resulted in a changed brain for both of us.  Yet as I see it, I was never betrayed or set-up with an impossible task to accomplish like my mother was, and being free from these overpowering early forces allowed me to become who I am.

My mother’s mental illness prevented her from ever being able to tolerate becoming conscious either of how she behaved or of what had happened to so wound her in childhood.  I am not barred in the same way from consciousness.  As I continue to explore the underlying aspects of safe and secure attachment, I will explore how having the ability to be self-aware and self-reflective makes all the difference in how and who we become in our lives.

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This post follows:

+DISSOCIATION AND THE TRAUMA-SPECIALIZED BRAIN 11-11-09 and

+SECURE AND INSECURE ATTACHMENT AND THE CHILDHOOD NARRATIVE 11-13-09

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THIS INFORMATION COMES TO YOU FROM:

Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog
Improving Children’s Mental Health through Parenting EducationPosted: 13 Nov 2009 03:01 AM PSTGuest post by Michelle Gross, Projects/Public Policy Manager, Prevent Child Abuse New York In today’s difficult times, one of the most important skills one must possess is the ability to form healthy relationships and cope with life’s challenges. Our children are not born with these skills, but rather learn them through their social and emotional development.While providers have traditionally focused on physical development, in 2006, the New York State Legislature passed the Children’s Mental Health Act. The Act required the development of a statewide plan to address issues in children’s social and emotional health, zero to eighteen. As a result of this legislation, the Children’s Plan was developed in collaboration with nine state agencies and led by the New York State Office for Mental Health.The Children’s Plan serves as a blueprint for New York state agencies, providers, and communities to
improve the social and emotional development of children and their families. The Plan focuses on engaging children and their families in services early, ensuring that systems are collaborating to provide effective and efficient services and meeting families’ needs by focusing on their strengths and abilities.

Within the Children’s Plan is a directive for the Office of Mental Health to work with parenting educators to better support parents in raising emotionally healthy children.  The New York State Parenting Education Partnership has been chosen to play this pivotal role in educating providers who work with families and supporting a network of family support and information.

NYSPEP’s efforts to provide professional development sessions for parenting educators will enhance providers’ ability to communicate the importance of social and emotional development with parents, and offer both providers and families tools to facilitate children’s healthy development.

For more information, visit our web site at: http://www.parentingeducationpartnership.org.

Positive Parenting Can have Lasting Impact for Generations

Posted: 12 Nov 2009 07:15 PM PST

A new study that looks at data on three generations of Oregon families shows that “positive parenting” not only has positive impacts on adolescents, but on the way they parent their own children. ” Positive Parenting can include factors such as warmth, monitoring children’s activities, involvement, and consistency of discipline.

Researchers from the Oregon Social Learning Center conducted surveys on 206 boys who were considered “at-risk” for juvenile delinquency. The boys and their parents were interviewed and observed, researchers information about how the boys were parented. Starting in 1984, the boys met with researchers every year from age 9 to 33. As the boys grew up and started their own families, their partners and children began participating in the study. In this way, the researchers learned how the men’s childhood experiences influenced their own parenting.

There is often an assumption that people learn parenting methods from their own parents. In fact, most research shows that a direct link between what a person experiences as a child and what she or he does as a parent is fairly weak. The researchers found that children who had parents who monitored their behavior, were consistent with rules and were warm and affectionate were more likely to have close relationships with their peers, be more engaged in school, and have better self-esteem.

For more information relating to positive parenting techniques, please visit our website http://preventchildabuseny.org/parents.shtml

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+THE HEALING OF DISSOCIATONS – A 50-YEAR MISSING PIECE OF ME HAS RETURNED

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I woke up this morning thinking about all the wounds we received in the war zone of our abusive childhoods.  Often as the war raged on around us we ended up being the targets.  In this battlefield we were the victims.  Some of us received so many wounds they cannot be counted.

My mother’s war with the world began in her own childhood and so wounded her that her war never ended until the day that she died.  I was born a casualty of her war.  I had no choice, no weapon, and I could not escape.  I could not fight back or defend myself against her.  No one was there to tend my wounds when they were inflicted, either.  And yet for all the wounds I suffered both visible and invisible, my strength and resiliency still enabled me to survive and endure.

Like my mother, I carried all my wounds out of my childhood, but unlike my mother I did not carry on the war.  Perhaps that happened in part because she began to attack me on all levels as soon as I was born.  I was too young, too little, to begin to feel anger at her for what she was doing to me.  I continued to grow up through and past the age of rage without knowing what it even was.

But it’s not the rage that fueled my mother’s war against me that I woke up thinking about today.  I woke up thinking about the healing of wounds.

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When severe abuse begins so early it impacts the formation of the regions, circuits, pathways and operation of the brain so that we end up with what Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard Medical Group refer to as “an evolutionarily altered brain” as a result, the wounds that caused these changes to happen are most difficult to heal.  These wounds include dissociation.

I am thinking this morning about how long ago people lived for a much shorter time.  Their experiences were fewer and their universe was so much smaller than ours.  Their lives were centered on the core basics of staying alive in an often threatening and dangerous world throughout their entire life span.  In those worlds the ability to dissociate during or in the aftermath of traumas must have continued to serve a purpose that is difficult for me to define in the world I live in today.

Yet for those of us who endured unimaginable severe trauma during our infant-child developmental stages, the dissociation we were given as a result of our survival makes it more difficult for us to continue living in the ‘ordinary’ world we grow up to enter.  Nature has not evolved a way to ‘put us back together again’ to be like a pre-early trauma exposed person.  We are stuck with dissociational brain patterns and abilities that are directly linked to the hundreds if not thousands of near-mortal wounds from physical and mental injuries that we received many years ago.

Our wounds within can thus remain open, painful and at times extremely difficult for us to live with as we attempt to live an ‘ordinary’ life of well-being in an ordinary world without the kinds of dangers to our existence that we were programmed to survive because they existed in the times of our origins.

Without ‘medical’ care back then when we needed it most, and without access to the kind of help with our wounds and our resulting dissociation that we need now, how do we heal ANY of our wounds?

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The very length and complexity of our modern life experience is working against us now.  We cannot crawl wounded deep into a secluded cave and trust we will be protected and kept safe by our brethren standing guard over us while we receive adequate care and access the kind of quiet, unstimulated time that we need in order to heal.  (Yes, I believe we have these memories within our DNA that tell us what we need for our healing to occur.  These memories are available to us in the same way the memories in our bodies enable us to make adaptations to trauma from conception.)  If we cannot pursue nature’s intended courses of healing for even one of our childhood wounds, how do we carry on with hundreds if not thousands of them within us?

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Nature never planned for our species’ infants and children to be in danger without protection and adequate care.  Only under the most dire circumstances would offspring have been sacrificed.  The continuance of our species required that the most helpless tiny ones survive in the best condition possible.  And yet here we are at the most supposedly sophisticated period in our species’ evolution with harm being perpetrated in wars against offspring as if the little ones no longer matter as our species’ most prized hope for going forward into a better world.

Everything around us is busy and complicated.  Our multiple critical wounds are seldom if ever healed.  And then we are expected to live a ‘good life’ not only in spite of our wounds, but also as if the injuries never happened and the wounds do not exist.

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This again brings me back to healing.  Any wound has to go through a natural process of healing, often to the stage of creating permanent scar tissue at the end.  All healing requires our body’s immune system be involved.  I believe this includes the healing of our inner mental and emotional wounds as well.  On some level it is always some aspect of our physiological immune system’s negotiation on behalf of our increased well-being that accomplishes all of our healing.

I mention this today because last night I felt one of my many, many wounds close itself in healing.  I will never be able to forget how the wound originated in the first place, or how it has felt for these past 50 years to live with the wound open and unhealed.

This healing involves how I feel in relation to animals, especially to pets.  My healing came from a few simple words a trusted friend recently wrote to me about grieving the loss of both our human and our animal loved ones.  My friend was talking about her love and grief for a pet she lost years ago when she said to me, “Yes, pets are family and more.”

It was her last two words that healed me — “and more.”  Suddenly I understand that I can give myself permission to look into the eyes of not only my pets, but of all animals and SEE and FEEL and be connected with the life within them that is their SELF, and I can love them wholly – “and more.”

It feels like a channel of love and healing that has been blocked for the last 50 years has been opened so that the healing light and love that opened this channel can now flow through it unimpeded.  What I knew and felt when I was a little girl and my heart broke when my pet black rabbit, Peter, died has come back to me.

I have not asked my friend what her two simple words “and more” mean to her.  I needed to know what they mean to me.  It wasn’t the loss of Peter himself that most wounded me.  It was my reaction of dissociating myself from ever being able to feel again the loving connection I felt for that little animal.  Since that dark and rain soaked night he died, the part of myself that knows animals are not remote and distant objects that continue their own existence in a world separated from me has been missing.

My mother told me that night when Peter died that he was a bad rabbit who got what he deserved.  He was dead because that’s what is supposed to happen to all bad animals and bad children like me.  In the midst of the terrible depth of my grieving over the loss of my beloved pet through a violent death, she told me she wished I was dead just like Peter was because that is what I deserved.

The wound of this experience caused me to dissociate my ability to experience love, appreciation, and connection to and with animals (exception noted at the end of this post).  That part of me was removed from my existence until last night when I was in conversation with my sister about those two words, “and more” in relationship to animals in our lives.

Like my friend, my sister has never lost her ability to love animals, especially dogs.  I see this morning that the other side of this unhealed wound I have carried all these years has also prevented me from receiving the love that animals freely give to me.

I can understand today that the trusting innocence of who I was as a young child is reflected and mirrored back to me in the eyes of animals.  I have not been able to tolerate that kind of powerful experience with my own vulnerabilities for 50 years.  I have not been able to reclaim my own portion of passion regarding a deep love, valuing and sustaining friendship with animals until now.  Healing has touched that dissociated wound inside of me and – lo and behold – I can feel this fragmented piece of myself is back.

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I know every person alive has been wounded in some way at some time.  The healing of our wounds gives us an added dimension of awareness on an emotional and mental level about the better side of being alive.  Any healing that includes an improvement of connection between myself, myself and the living world I live in is especially significant for me.

Any healing gives me hope that more healing is possible.  Scar tissue might not be especially pretty to look at from the outside, but its presence means that a wound has healed, and I’m not sure there is anything I can experience that is better than that.  Yet at the same time that today I feel this wound has healed I can feel the blackness of overwhelming sadness that created this dissociational wound in the first place.

It helps me to know that I will not go backward in this healing process.  The sense of invading danger will leave me.  It will dissipate in the light of this new day.  (I will be extra tender to myself until this has happened as if I just went through surgery — because I did!)

Life can now pulse again for me where no pulse has been for 50 years.  I am different today as a result of this healing.  I know I am one step closer to being a more complete, integrated and whole ME because of it.  I have to practice being this bit-more-whole me now.  I feel different.  I see my animals around me differently.  They are back in the circle of my life and I am back in their world for the first time since before my black rabbit died.

I am reminded today that miracles of healing do happen – because they can.

This was a missing piece of myself I could recover, and that could be restored to me because it was one that was once an integral part of who I am.  I remembered my self before my rabbit died and my mother was so mean to me about his death.  I re-membered this part of myself so it can be joined with who I am today.  That’s exciting!

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NOTE:  Last summer when I visited my brother in Alaska I felt my love and connection with moose when one came to graze under my brother’s deck.  I was close enough to that glorious animal to have reached out and touched him if I had wanted to.  I realized then that my ability to love moose had never been removed from me.  Maybe having this August experience was a necessary step toward my healing so that I could again reclaim that same love and connection I felt as a child with all animals.  Now I also understand fully the “and more.”  It is my responsibility (ability to respond) to care for them at the same time that they take care of me.

1959 JUST homestead birthday - Copy
Holding that warm, fuzzy, whisker-wiggling little black rabbit, Peter, in my arms -- MY pet rabbit -- had made this sad little child happy.

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+DISSOCIATION AND THE TRAUMA-SPECIALIZED BRAIN

alchemynow4 Comments

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Because of my traumatic experiences with my mentally ill mother from birth, I did not form an ordinary brain.  My thought processes while writing this post reflect some of the difficulties I have always experienced because my brain formed differently.  Similar to the way an air flight might experience turbulence, I have turbulence in my thinking whenever I try to follow an ‘ordinary’ brain’s train of thought.

This does not mean that I am wrong or broken.  Yes, I was wounded, but the resiliency within me coupled with my determination to endure and survive allowed me in the end to become a very special sort of person.  I will just always think in my special way, and I will always struggle to bridge the chasm that can exist between the way my extra-ordinary brain works and the way ordinary-formed brains work in an ordinary world.

I will continue over time to process the secure and insecure attachment information as I try to understand what the experts know and match it in some way with what I know from within myself about, in particular, dissociation.

Here are my thoughts for today on the brain science concept of ‘coherence’.  I am not going to try to edit them or to give them any other organization or orientation than they had when they lined themselves up on this page as a result of my thinking process.

Yes, these thoughts feel turbulent to me.  That would not be my choice, but then I had no choice about how my brain-mind had to form itself in the beginning of my life.  Nor do I have much choice about how my brain-mind regards and processes information today.  This is what happens for me when I try to even begin to understand what forms the basis of a safe and secure organized attachment system.

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The advantage of my writing about the topic of secure-autonomous adult attachment is that I can take what ‘ordinary’ brained researchers say about the subject and translate it for myself though my ‘extra-ordinary’ brain.  I have the powerful advantage now of knowing absolutely that my childhood was just about as devoid and empty of secure attachment people as it could possibly have been.  I no longer even try to find out who exactly might have been there for me to give me what I needed to form secure attachments.  I know there was nobody.

Whatever attachment I had with my mother’s mother was contrived.  It was set up by my mother according to her rules so that it could fit within her reality, or should I say, fit her ‘dis-reality’ and ‘un-reality’.  My mother’s mind was nothing less than bizarre and distorted when it came to her thinking about me.  I can’t say it was ‘disorganized’ because her psychosis gave her the most rigid organization possible without possibility of rearrangement – ever.

When I read what the experts tell us about safe and secure infant-child attachment I have to stretch my thinking as far as I can manage in order to try to begin to understand on a deep and honest level within myself what it is these people are saying.  I am coming from the position of being raised in a world just about as far away from what researches consider ‘optimal’ early conditions as it might be possible.  Just as I do not believe those researchers can stretch their minds far enough to begin to comprehend my reality, I am not sure that I can stretch mine far enough to begin to understand theirs.

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Dr. Daniel J. Siegel makes this statement, “…the way adults can flexibly access information about childhood and reflect upon such information in a coherent manner determines their likelihood of raising securely attached children.”  (siegle/tdm/312)

Taking the meat of the nut out of its shell, I read this as if it is a directive not only about how to be an adequate parent, but also how to get along in the ‘ordinary’ world in an ‘ordinary’ way:  “flexibly access information about childhood and reflect upon such information in a coherent manner.”

But what does Siegel mean by ‘coherent’?  My guess he knows what it means because he has it.  Very few, if any people who lack his version of coherency in their brain-minds make it to the top levels of any professions – for all kinds of reasons I won’t go into at this moment.  I still want to know what this key to secure attachment means because from my own experiences, and in my world, coherency as Siegel describes it does not exist.

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Siegel states:  “Integration establishes a sense of congruity and unity of the mind as it emerges within the flexible patterns in the flow of information and energy processes of the brain, both within itself and in interaction with others.  This is coherence. “

Wow.  Those words are a mouthful.  I cannot comprehend what he is saying without applying an incredible amount of effort.  I will try to break this apart as I hunt for some meaning that I can make sense out of from inside MY version of an abuse-formed extra-ordinary brain-mind.

Integration

Sense of congruity

Unity of the mind

Well, right here I get lost because I cannot break apart the next group of words:  unity of mind as it emerges within the flexible patterns

But then it goes further:  mind as it emerges, not just any mind, but a unified mind – and this living unified mind emerges, but does not emerge in any old way, does not emerge in a disorganized, disoriented, inflexible-rigid way.  This ‘sense of congruity’ and this ‘unity of the mind’ emerges continually along with every breath of life.  This happens (or not) through flexible patterns that were built into the brain by – yup! – by our experiences with our early caregivers from birth.

When the mind has this sense of congruity, and has its unity, it can continually engage flexibly within all interactions a person has in life.  These flexible patterns are, according to Siegel, “in the flow of information and energy processes of the brain.”  Well, it should not surprise us that under varying degrees of reverse conditions this entire process suffers from some degree of break down, or deviation from what Siegel is not only describing as optimal, but also as what is supposed to be ordinary.

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I am rapidly finding out as I try to make sense of Siegel’s description of ‘coherence’ is that I cannot understand what he is saying because I have a brain built in the opposite way from what he is describing.

I see an image of me being dropped from an airplane from a mile up in the air with a parachute attached to me.  I land in a fresh, hot wad of bubble gum the size of an average Wal-Mart.  That’s how I feel trying to grasp what he is saying.

It is hard to imagine that this finely working brain Siegel is describing would have been built entirely by appropriate early infant-child interactions with safely and securely attachment autonomous early caregivers!  But that is exactly what he is saying.

And the problem here for me is that Siegel knows exactly what he is talking about and says what he means PERFECTLY in these few words in this single sentence – that I cannot possibly begin to understand!  Believe it or not!

So, I will write my version of a statement about what having a brain built by my disorganized and disoriented insecurely attached, unsafe psychotic borderline mother gave me!  I have the opposite of a ‘coherency’ built brain, so OK, here goes —

SIEGEL’S VERSION OF AN ORDINARY BRAIN’S OPERATION:  Integration establishes a sense of congruity and unity of the mind as it emerges within the flexible patterns in the flow of information and energy processes of the brain, both within itself and in interaction with others.  This is coherence.

MY VERSION OF AN EXTRA-ORDINARY TRAUMA FORMED BRAIN’S OPERATION:  Disintegration establishes a (non)sense incongruity and disunity of mind as it attempts to emerge within the inflexible (rigid, disorganized and disoriented) patterns in the (disorganized and disoriented, interrupted and often chaotic) flow of misinformation and disturbed energy processes of the brain, and all of these disturbances exist and are experienced both within this brain itself and in all its interactions with others.  This is incoherence.

BUT, I would have to add from my own experience, that this ‘incoherence’ is experienced as DISSOCIATION.

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OK, great.  How exactly are we supposed to get along in the ‘ordinary’ person’s world of coherence when our brains were built under opposite conditions so that we have changed brains that will NEVER work the same as these ‘ordinary’ brains do?  We cannot return to our early infant-child body-brain-mind developmental stages so that the foundation and formation of our brain can be done over again!  Never.  Never.  Never.

The first step to improving our chances for experiencing anything like well-being in the world is to begin to understand what these researchers know about ordinary brain development and combining it with what we know about our own early experiences and what happened to our forming brains as a consequence.  We need to learn how our brains process life with a different kind of logic.

Because my personal experiences happened to me under the care of a mad woman, I am nearly completely on the opposite end of the brain-formation spectrum that Siegel is describing.  BUT, I AM STILL HERE!  I might be completely stuck in a bubble gum mess trying to understand Siegel’s description of an ordinary, healthy brain-mind, but I can also at the same time understand that the way my brain formed, even though it is very different in many fundamental ways from the one Siegel describes, DOES WORK.  It kept me alive throughout my childhood and it keeps me alive today.

But, my brain IS DIFFERENT!  It is NOT BROKEN.  Now, to all reasonable description, my mother’s brain was broken.  The changes her growing and developing brain had to make did not allow her to possess even temporary or sporadic flexibility in her thinking.  I can think flexibly, but not in a continual, ongoing ‘mind emerging in the moment’ way.

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Dr. Temple Grandin, autistic author of many books and world renowned expert on communicating with animals, talks about how she sees the world in pictures.  I believe I feel the world in pictures and think about it in dissociated pieces, or ‘packets’ of information.  Access to and transition between these dissociated packets of information is not frequently either smooth or predictable.

I am most fortunate that depending on the day and on the topic, my brain can link some or many of these pieces together at one time or another.  But never will I have a continuous, feeling, integrated, coherent story to tell myself or anybody else about myself in the world.

Any version of a continuous story I might form will be contrived, artificial and primarily constructed by my ‘logical’ left brain that has learned some things about how others make sense of their lives – and therefore how I OUGHT to be able to do the same.  Some days I can do this better than others by consciously pretending that I know all the experiences that happened to this BODY that Linda is attached to belong to the thinking, feeling, remembering person that Linda is supposed to be.

Yet the Linda that I MOST am feels like a bird might that soared over some particular piece of geography ten years ago, or 30 years ago, or 2 days ago without picking up the actual place and carrying it along.  I pass through ‘things’, pass by them, pass over them – or they pass through me.  But I feel very transparent, like the true form of who I am has never become embodied in my life in this world.  I absolutely and fundamentally do not process myself in  ‘time and space’ experience in ordinary ways.

Thanks to my mother, my body-brain-mind-self didn’t grown ‘down into the world’ as Dr. James Hillman calls it.  Whatever pieces of me made it into myself in my body in my life in this world are not completely integrated in the ordinary brain that Dr. Siegel has described.

I actually do not believe that neuroscientists or infant-child brain development specialists have ANY IDEA how big a deal dissociation can be!  I don’t think they can understand this kind of a reality any more than I can understand theirs.  I suffer today from a similar problem I had with my mother in the beginning.  There is nobody around to help me make sense of a sensible world, so I have to figure it all out by myself.

There is no retreat, no seminar, no self-help book, no religious text, no university class, no philosophical approach, no kind of meditative practice, no psychological theory that will ever ACTUALLY be able to help me understand how my changed brain operates in this world.  I was forced to grow a specialized brain, a very well-adapted-to-ongoing-trauma body-brain-mind.  I can take what developmental neuroscientists say about how things work when early brain formation experiences go RIGHT and try to translate that information into what happens when early brain formation experiences go terribly WRONG.

I am somewhat of an expert about that field of study!  In a more perfect world, or in a more advanced one (silly thought because in THAT world the kind of abuse that changes an infant-child’s developing brain would not be happening) I would be able to easily access information that would tell me how ordinary brains work, how extra-ordinary brains work, and how I can better experience well-being BECAUSE of how special my brain-mind is.  Well, evidently in THIS world, I will try until my dying breath to figure this out for myself.

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In this post I am trying to comprehend and make use of the information contained here:  *Attachment Simplified – Secure Attachment (Organized)

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+I’M HAVING AN IRRITABLE DAY! AND SOME BPD INFO….

alchemynow2 Comments

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If I were going to anything today, I would apologize — because I am the most irritable and irritated that I can remember being.  Between the 3 hour wait with ‘the group of poor people’ last week (part of the hoop-jumping process as all they did was tell us to come back a week later and wait again), and the 5 hour wait today — outside, fortunately in beautiful weather — waiting for some winter help with fuel assistance.

When it was my turn to go inside, finally, I was told they ran out of money for the program over an hour earlier only nobody bothered to poke their head out the door and tell those of us out there still waiting — well, I am more than a bit crabby!

I didn’t realize I could GET this crabby.  It turns out there was money for anyone with an overdue utility bill through a completely different program than the one I thought I was jumping through all the hoops to participate in.  Fortunately I did have a $20 light bill that was due last Friday, so I SHOULD feel grateful that one got paid.  They told us we can come back in early December, although they don’t know exactly when yet, and go through the double-wait all over again.

But at the moment I am so irritated and irritable I can only be grateful I can return home where there is nobody to bother — and work to calm myself down.

Now at 58 it seems I have an entire lifetime of irritable-crabby that has been sitting here inside me all these years!  I know intellectually that irritability is tied to ‘depression’ and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but I think this is just another one of those emotional-dysregulated-right-brain experiences that today has taken over my body!

This is a part of my disability, but fortunately my contact with others can be very limited right now.  This was way too much stimulation for one day!  I am very much reminded of what the child diagnosis of Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) can feel like as an adult.  Where do the professionals think RAD vanishes to once our body gets bigger?  There are just some times I can no longer find the ‘nice Linda’, today — right now — being one of those times.

I mean, even the song of the Mexican ice cream truck running down the street behind my house on the other side of the Border Wall is jangling my nerves!

If I had a horse, I’d go riding.  But then if I could afford a horse, I wouldn’t be standing in line to try to get help paying my utility bills this winter.  Just more of the same:  History of Childhood Maltreatment Linked to Higher Rates of Poverty

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THIS FROM:

Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog
Child Abuse Prevention Programs at Risk: Call Your Legislators Today!Posted: 09 Nov 2009 09:53 AM PST

Special Session of the Legislature Tomorrow: Home Visitation, Trust Fund, Child Advocacy Centers, Kinship Care at Risk

Call Your State Legislators Today!

Governor David Paterson has called for a special session of the New York State Legislature to commence tomorrow, November 10th, to address the growing state deficit. While we are not certain what will take place during the special session, we know that the Governor’s proposed Deficit Reduction Plan is the wrong choice for children and families and the wrong choice for New York’s economy.

The Deficit Reduction Plan will cost New York millions in federal funding for home visitation and Community-based Child Abuse Prevention dollars, in addition to the short and long-term cost of maltreatment to our social welfare, law enforcement, education, and healthcare systems.

A champion for New York’s children is Senator John Sampson, who has committed his vote against the Governor’s Deficit Reduction Plan. Today, we ask all advocates to:

  • Call Senator Sampson at 518-455-2788 and thank him for making the right choice for kids and protecting New York’s economy.
  • Call your local Senator and Assemblymember and encourage them to follow Senator Sampson’s lead and vote against any reduction in necessary services for children and families. The script can be as simple as follows: “Hello, my name is _____ and I’m a constituent of Senator/Assemblymember _____ and I’d like to ask my legislator to vote against any cuts to services for children and families.”

If you don’t know who your elected representatives are, you can simply call the New York State Legislative Switchboards at: 518-455-2800 (Senate) and 518-455-4100 (Assembly), or look them up online.

Remember when calling to be polite, leave your name, address, and phone number, and follow up your call by encouraging another friend or colleague to make one of their own.

Read Prevent Child Abuse New York’s testimony against the Governor’s DRP (PDF).

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So, I am not going to write today.  There isn’t one single productive thing I can think of to say!!  Just to offer the following information — in memory of my mean Borderline mother.

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Borderline Personality Disorder

In the Spotlight   |  More Topics   |

from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD

BPD isn’t just about how you feel emotionally. It can affect everything in your life, from your job to your friendships to how you feel physically. Knowing what to expect can help you prepare for what may be to come.

In the Spotlight

What is Life with BPD Like?
Living with borderline personality disorder is not easy. Intense emotional pain, and feelings of emptiness, desperation, anger, hopelessness, and loneliness are common. These symptoms can affect every part of your life. However, despite the suffering that borderline personality disorder (BPD) can cause, many people learn ways to cope with the symptoms and lead normal, fulfilling lives.

BPD and Your Physical Health
BPD does not only have an impact on your mental health. People with BPD are more likely to report a variety of physical health problems, and are more likely to need to be hospitalized for medical reasons, than those without BPD.

BPD and Your Relationships
Many of the symptoms of BPD can have direct impact on relationships, and other symptoms have an indirect (but not necessarily less disruptive) influence.

More Topics

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

alchemynowLeave a comment

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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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+History of Childhood Maltreatment Linked to Higher Rates of Poverty

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The following study confirms what common sense would tell us:

“Adults who were physically abused, sexually abused, or severely neglected as children were significantly more likely to be unemployed, living below the poverty line, and using social services than people without a history of childhood maltreatment.”

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IMPORTANT INFORMATION FROM:

Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog

 
History of Childhood Maltreatment Linked to Higher Rates of Poverty

Posted: 05 Nov 2009 02:18 PM PST

 

The long-term impacts of childhood maltreatment include higher rates of unemployment, poverty, and use of social services in adulthood, according to a new study by David Zielinski, Ph.D., of the National Institute for Mental Health. Research has shown that negative early life experiences can adversely affect a person’s physical and mental health in adulthood. Zielinski evaluated data on childhood maltreatment and socioeconomic well-being from the National Comorbidity Survey.

Adults who were physically abused, sexually abused, or severely neglected as children were significantly more likely to be unemployed, living below the poverty line, and using social services than people without a history of childhood maltreatment. Having experienced more than one type of maltreatment increased these risks further. Maltreatment was also linked to lower rates of health care coverage and greater use of social services such as Medicaid, especially among adults who had experienced childhood sexual abuse.

In the first comprehensive study of the long-term socioeconomic effects of abuse and neglect, Zielinski shows that childhood maltreatment carries significant costs to the individual and to society. Not only does the public share the burden in supporting maltreatment-related social services, but also those related to unemployment insurance, poverty-based public assistance, and publicly funded health insurance. Other societal impacts include the loss in employment productivity and tax revenues, from federal and state income taxes as well as state and local sales taxes.

Previous research has shown low socioeconomic status to be a risk factor for the perpetration of child abuse and neglect. Additional research has found that parents who were maltreated as children are more likely to abuse and neglect their own children than those without a history of maltreatment. Targeted assistance for maltreatment victims may help break this cycle. For example, Zielinski suggests that enhanced access to job training and job counseling programs may be especially helpful for victims of physical abuse or multiple types of maltreatment, who were most likely to be unemployed among those who had experienced maltreatment.

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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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+RETURNING WITH AGE TO HOW I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AND DIDN’T KNOW IT: DISSOCIATED

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1 t-shirt mat
From the time we are conceived life in this world it is full of stimulation and changes. In a mostly safe and secure world we can accept them all and our experiences of transition and change moves smoothly along as we grow into a person with a self that can connect all our experiences together into some kind of fabric that is the whole of our life. This image reminds me of a safe and secure organized attachment!
2 t-shirt mat
The reverse side of my little crocheted T-shirt rug reminds me of organized insecure attachment. The transitions between 'events' has been made, but on the inside some vestiges of lack of smooth transtions between experiences remains like little loose ends that most organized insecurely attached people remain completely unaware of.
3 t-shirt mat
This would be an extreme illustration of a disorganized and disoriented insecure attachment disorder. Life has been too traumatic, and without safety and security to make transitions between traumatic and nontraumatic early experiences, the body-nervous system including the brain, the mind and the self of someone raised in a malevolent world will not be able to put things together to make a solid, coherent 'story' of their self in their life.

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This is me at 11 months old, all dressed up with curls in my hair. This is me looking 'happy' during a picture taking event.
11 month old 'happy' me - mother allowed it at this moment -- it was 'be happy, picture taking time' -- which had nothing to do with my 'other' ongoing realities
1952 closeup - 11 mos baby pic
Yes, 'happy' for this instant, but I now know this is a dissociated state. It was not part of any ongoing safe and secure organization of my baby brain as it had formed itself through chaotic, unstable and dangerous early caregiver interactions. (I can't get the scratch damage off of the photo at present)

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When I first found this photograph of me two years ago in MY BABY BOOK I was pleased to see that I could ‘still be happy’ when I was eleven months old.  It gave me hope that at least some of my developing baby brain’s left hemisphere happy center neurons had been activated, and gave me hope that I can find them today and build on them.

Then the more I considered my baby picture, the more I realized that this happy picture was not showing me ‘sun and roses’.  I have come to understand that this was a dissociated state that baby me was not going to be able to transition  smoothly in my baby brain to any other kind of state that was likely to follow. What I first saw as an expression in my baby eyes close to ecstatic I have come to see as over-stimulated, too intense, and most likely a sign of my dysregulated right limbic brain development due to my mother’s psychotic abuse of me.

The early and ongoing environment I formed in was chaotic, unstable, unpredictable, often terrorizing, terrifying, violent and painful.  Safe, secure peaceful serenity and calmness did not form itself at the center of my body-nervous system-brain-mind self as it was supposed to.

My set point of balanced equilibrium is not at calm.    Patterns of adjustment and adaptation to my infant-child malevolent environment, which happened to a large extent through dissociation,  had to build themselves into me so that I could survive and ‘go on being’ — and now I clearly know they are still there.

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I had an experience last night that gave me a clear insight about how I am in the world.

Around the time of my 1980 – 1983 journals I am transcribing from around my age of 30, I could function in the world in a relatively ‘ordinary’ way.  Now, through circumstances of my life, I have returned to who-how I have always been in the world and didn’t, until now, have to know about.  Just using the experience I had last night as an example, I can see that

(1) first I learned how to get along in both of the worlds of my childhood, the chaotic, malevolent, insanely abuse world of my home life with my mother, and in the ‘ordinary’ world outside my home such as school.

(2) Once I left my childhood abusive home, I found myself living entirely in an ‘ordinary’ world.  I could fake it by then so that only those in my most intimate circle of friends could have known that things were not all right with me on my insides.

(3)  I continued down that trying-to-be-ordinary road all of my life until two things happened to me that brought into focus in the forefront how ‘unordinary’ I really am.

(4) After 35 years of having a child under the age of 18 in my care, my baby left home nearly six years ago.  I didn’t know what was happening to me at the time, but looking back the disorganization and disorientation of my insecure attachment disorder reared its head.  Breast cancer manifested itself in my body immediately, although I was not to discover its presence for another 3 years.  It seemed that the entire world of my life dropped out from under me and I tumbled down Alice’s not so wonderful rabbit hole, disoriented and disorganized and not having a clue what that was.  Then

(5) happened.  Finding out I had cancer so completely threatened the only true source of safety and security I had ever known, my body itself, and coupled with the terrors of treatment and the consequences that chemotherapy had on my brain, left me where I am today — on mental and emotional disability with an extremely limited arena of activities that I can tolerate with any degree of comfort.

I have lost any way I developed (learned) to transition into an inner feeling state of calm, serene, safety within my body no matter where I am in the world.  This ability never developed at my core as it was supposed to from infancy.  For me, a state of calm equilibrium has evidently always been a dissociative state, and seems to be one that I now have lost access to — unless I can ‘get there’ through remaining in a very controlled, calm and quiet external environment which then ‘soothes my soul’.

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This leads me to last night’s adventure.  A close friend of mine encouraged me to attend the local Fiber Arts Guild meeting that was preceded by a fantastic presentation on African textiles.  Of course I am not presently comfortable with people at all, certainly not with groups of people, certainly not with strangers.  I am not comfortable in small closed environments.  I am not comfortable with ‘noise.’  But, in light of my recent journal transcribing realization about how important weaving and spinning and related textile arts are to me, and considering that I want to TRY to ‘get better’, I went to this meeting.

Nothing disastrous happened, which is great.  But what I felt on the inside, and can still feel today is both intensely disappointing and creatively illuminating.  We cannot work with trying to change or improve what we cannot see about ourselves — so now I have some clearer information.

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In light of what I now understand about how insecure attachment disorders exist in the brain as a result of changes that happen when we are very young and our brains are growing and developing in the first place, I can FEEL and begin to understand the damage done by these changes.  My right, social, limbic, emotional brain does not receive or process ordinary information in ordinary ways.  For all the years that I was able to ‘function’ in the ordinary world in a ‘good enough’ fashion, I was able to work around and hide what my brain was really doing.  I can’t do that any more.

Too much stimulation.  My brain does not regulate input or experience correctly.  I cannot do what experts call switch states, or move smoothly and comfortably through what is called transition states.  In that group of around 40 women last night, the walls began to close in, sound became a noisy roar.  Faces became super animated, and people began to get larger and larger in relation to me.  Noise and more noise as I lost the ability to focus on one single pattern of sound or conversation.  I tolerated nearly three hours of this mayhem and madness (to me), and began to crave silence, calmness, peace and simplicity.

Because my internal self cannot provide these things for me, I am nearly completely at the mercy of where I am and what is going on around me physically and externally on the outside of my body.  It is not supposed to work this way — not in ordinary situations.  Our right brain, in balance with our reasonable left brain and our rational cortex, is supposed to be able to navigate throughout life with the peace and calm on the INSIDE of us.

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I feel I am failing at a description of what I am trying to explain and describe, so I added some visuals here that might be able to convey an image on the OUTSIDE that relates to what I know on my INSIDE.  Part of what I did to self-soothe my ‘anxiety’ level from too much stimulation last night that continued to reverberate in my brain and body, was to pick up the closest thing I could find and begin working with my hands which always calms me, focuses my attention, and provides a transition space for me to deescalate.

(My condition makes me think about the increase in ADHD and autism and about how little researchers know or are willing to admit about what they know about what is causing this condition among today’s children.  I suspect it will eventually be tracked back to inadequate conception to age one brain development — because we are losing our ancient wisdom about taking care of our babies right during early critical brain and body developmental stages.)

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Those women last night were ordinary women who meant me no harm.  They were not threatening.  They were not dangerous.  I was not in danger of being further traumatized.  But the oldest part of who I am and how I operate in this body in this world does not seem able to any longer put on the town dress, put curls in my hair, walk out into the world and be able to smoothly handle multiple stimuli from the environment and the required transitions that would enable me to be comfortable.

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