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Truthfulness is the key to healing and the key to good living. Truthfulness is NOT what anyone could have found in my family of origin. NOBODY knew the truth within our walls, and I believe this is directly tied to the Borderline Personality Disorder my mother suffered from. If a person doesn’t know something is lost they will not find it. Truthfulness simply did not exist because my mother had lost sight of her truth from the time she was a very tiny child.
I think about what the developmental neuroscientists say about the absolute importance of putting experience into words — that other people who care listen to us speak the truth of our experience — for the healthy growth and well-being of children from their earliest ages and stages of development in the world. But it isn’t just the telling of one’s personal experiences of life that creates healthy patterns in a little one’s body-brain. It is the telling of TRUTHFUL stories of our experiences that makes us well.
So it stands to reason in my thinking that part of the reason nobody listened to how I and my 5 siblings felt about ourselves in the world had to do with this missing and completely absent quality of truthfulness. In fact, the entire environment of our very abusive and very sick home (and the people in it) was fed and sustained by the absence of truth. Truth was never let inside our door.
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I suspect that this missing truth is what contributes to the incoherency that is a part of insecurely attached adult life-story telling. Our narratives become lost in time and space without truth as our anchor point. Our stories swirl around without having a focus. Our words become scrambled. Our tale becomes lost in a vortex of unreality because the one single factor that would most give us stability and structure in our life does not exist. Truthfulness, knowing THE truth, knowing OUR truth allows us to orient and organize our SELF in the world. Without it being present no story can truly make sense.
There is much said and written about how SECRETS and ISOLATION foster infant-child abuse in families and facilitate the passing-down of ongoing unresolved traumatic patterns of being (and relationship) within families. As I think about Karpman’s article that I mentioned in yesterday’s post (+OVERWHELMED BY TRAUMA, OVERWHELMED BY WORDS: LINK TO AN ARTICLE ABOUT TRAUMA DRAMA THAT CAN HELP US) I can think about secrets in terms of their existence in CLOSED PRIVATE spaces.
Closed and private is what we can usually say about what goes on within a person’s mind. That is supposed to be the most closed and private domain a person possesses. It is within our mind that we contain aspects of our truth that we can choose to speak about — or not to speak about.
It is within our mind that we hold our most sacred personal secrets within which we can cherish (for good or for ill) our own truths.
Yet within the mind of my Borderline mother there were no clear boundaries between the internal workings of her mind and the external projections of her mind. My mother’s brain had not formed during the early traumatic stresses of her life to know the difference between what was supposed to stay inside her mind as a part of who SHE was and what was ‘appropriate’ to share with others.
My mother’s truth was trauma. She acted out trauma for her entire life. She had no words and no way to THINK about the truth of her trauma. It simply existed in patterns of mostly horrible drama that she acted-enacted throughout her life.
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NOBODY listened to my mother when she was little. She was left within the privacy of her own developing brain-mind to figure out what was what in the world — and why.
NOBODY cared what my mother’s truth was. Nobody spoke the truth in her home of origin. Nobody helped my mother to sort out the truth from lies or to understand the family secrets that were acted out through the drama her family acted out all of the time.
Leaving a child alone to figure out the complexities of life in an environment of neglect and maltreatment is a recipe for disaster. My mother was very much a part of the generations who believed that keeping the family skeletons in the closet had to be done at all costs, and that ‘airing one’s dirty laundry’ in public was the worst of crimes. The public image of perfection based on pretense was just the way many people lived out their lives.
It was EXPECTED that EVERYONE kept their secrets within their family. Better yet, it was even better to keep secrets FROM your family. “See, speak, hear no evil” fostered lies disguised as secrets, a perfect environment to grow the nasty moldy infectious and toxic patterns of lies, silence and abuse that so often ends up as family trauma and abuse.
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As I search for and describe today in my healing what I know as truth I realize that the inner and outer circumstances of my mother’s particular universe from birth had acted to create for her an actual cult of mistruths and lies. She had been so brainwashed from birth by the people who held all the power in her world to believe what they told her (in word, action and lack of action) that her powers to know truth from fiction was stolen from her for her lifetime.
I have read and transcribed millions of my mother’s words that were ‘accidentally’ left to me after her death. Of all those words I can feel the ring of truth in only a few handfuls of letters combined into coherency. When I look at her writing now in the order I have placed them in time and space-place I realize that the only time in her writings that she was free enough to try to express her reality was in the stories she wrote around age ten: +MY MOTHER’S CHILDHOOD STORIES
Because I know a lot about my mother I know that nothing in my mother’s life ever truly made any more sense to her than it did when she wrote her childhood stories. My mother needed someone to TALK to her, to tell her the truth, to ask her how she felt, to let her ask questions, and to help her understand how the truth of the people who controlled her life was hurting, scaring and confusing her.
But, no, none of that happened for her. Whatever the truth actually was did not exist in her infant-childhood world any more than it existed in mine.
For whatever reasons I did not leave my earliest years having lost the three most important qualities I have: The ability to know there is such a thing as the truth, the ability to search for it (which includes desire and willingness) and the ability to know the truth when I encounter it.
That retaining these abilities — or losing them — actually happens on a physiological level might seem so fantastic as to be unbelievable. But this is exactly where the ability to negotiate a life with truth IN IT actually resides.
Did the grownups in my mother’s life have the ability to know a lie from the truth? Did they have the ability to CHOOSE whether or not they included the truth in their lives? Or were they like my mother was having been built from the time of their own birth so that their innate ability to include the truth in their lives had been physiologically robbed from them, as well?
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I don’t have access at the moment to the 12th step Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book, but the topic of the truth (of honesty) is addressed in the ‘how it works’ section that is read at the start of their meetings that contains reference to those ‘unfortunates’ who ‘are incapable’ of being honest with themselves. The reading says something like ‘They seem to have been born that way.’
People ARE NOT BORN to leave the truth out of their version of reality. They are MADE that way 99%+ of the time.
As an infant-child’s body-brain is growing and developing what is fed to it during those critical stages actually forms the wiring and the patterns for processing information about the self and others in the world. If the truth is completely left out of the picture during these critical stages, it is entirely possible that the trauma that ALSO simultaneously exists in the earliest environment will remove from a person the ability to negotiate a life that has the truth in it.
Of course the truth can be permanently missing from a person’s life if they were formed in environments that did not allow the truth to be present (recognized, spoken of and talked about). In fact, the truth can be missing within entire families. It can be missing down generations. It can even be missing from entire civilizations, cultures and societies.
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What we survivors of severe early trauma and abuse actually do as we heal is to flip the chalkboard over and begin again on the other blank side. Those of us who managed to escape the atrocities of trauma and abuse that happened to us during our infant-childhoods with our ability to know the truth intact have this ability on the PHYSIOLOGICAL level. We can FEEL the truth — in our body — and we can THEN process this information within our brain-mind — and express it in images and words.
There is nothing magical about having this ability at the same time it can seem pretty mysterious that some people have it and some people do not have it.
I believe this is a FACT.
For some reason the patterns of Alcoholics Anonymous spring to my mind again. Just as that program states, ANYONE who has the desire and the willingness to begin to allow truth into their life CAN DO IT, no matter how difficult the process might be.
But again, for people like my mother was (and my father by proximity to her) who have no way of knowing the truth is MISSING are not likely to value the truth enough to go seeking after it.
If we come from families that were infested with and infected by intergenerational patterns of trauma (drama) that happened within environments of the ABSENCE of truth, it is NOT to them that we can turn to (obviously) locate the truth. With one exception: If we educate and inform ourselves about trauma and the dramas that living-trauma creates we can learn to recognize the truth by deciphering the ACTS and ACTIONS of other people’s lives.
But ‘the truth’ is not a ‘thing’ that we can find and then try to pass over to anyone else. The ability to know truth exists within the privacy of a person’s body-brain-mind — or it doesn’t. If a person’s ‘truth switch’ was turned off during their earliest stages of development in an environment of trauma — like my mother’s was — such a person will be left with their own constructed-in-childhood version of the truth that is NOT PHYSIOLOGICALLY open to negotiation except in the rarest of circumstances.
Sadly, I suspect that it is along the spectrum of so-called ‘personality disorders’ that this inability to negotiate the truth is most often found. To be able to accurately understand the factors that ACTUALLY contribute to the formation of ‘personality disorders’ we would have to expand the tiny island of what is currently known about these disorders into a land mass the size of a continent.
In other words, we do not currently know the truth about what happens during the early stages of development to remove from some people the ability to process the information that ‘the truth’ contains.
I do not believe that the truth is ‘relative’ as many people claim. Whatever might exist of ‘relative truth’ lies within the private realm of individual minds.
The actual truth, I believe, lies within the public domain. While it can be accessed on the private, personal level it exists outside the private sphere within the public domain.
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This post leaves me with the suspicion that there is a direct connection between the ability to negotiate truth and the ability to practice true empathy. It would be through true empathy that the truth is discovered and processed.
Because the quality of earliest infant-caregiver attachment interactions — be they safe and secure or the opposite — in interaction with genetic potential combinations — directly impacts the physiological development of the human ability to experience true empathy, the quality of these earliest interactions with the infant’s environment ALSO and at the SAME TIME affects a person’s forming abilities to know the truth.
For members of our human species both of these connected abilities — being able to know the truth and to experience true empathy — are directly connected to WORDS. In our primitive beginnings back to about 140,000 years ago our species did not have the ability to use words. But we evolved this ability, and now our verbal abilities are a necessary and required component of both our ability to negotiate a life based on truth and true empathy.
Our highest brain-functioning abilities are based on the ability to consciously THINK and communicate to our self and to others in words. But having the ability to use words is not enough to guarantee that a person has the physiological ability for either ‘truth’ or ’empathy’. True, preverbal humans no doubt had finely tuned abilities to communicate with one another through empathic abilities just as infants (and even many animals) do. But until words came into human’s existence the ability to live a life based on false-truth probably did not exist.
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My mother’s entire life from start to finish was a life constructed from false-truth. Any life story my mother would have narrated would have been incoherent because without the REAL TRUTH there was nothing to glue her story into a coherent whole.
Gaps and holes and missing pieces, skipped passages, circular thinking, redundancies and repetitions, misdirections, inaccuracies, strange twists and turns, denials, warped distortion of facts, mis-attributions, discrepancies, avoidances, dismissiveness, exaggerations, projections, obsessions — all of these appear in the patterns of words used in life story narratives where the truth is missing.
For ALL of us who have survived our early years in hell — the first step is to admit this FIRST FACT. My mother could NEVER do this!! The fact that I can, that this blog’s readers can admit the truth about the hurt and trauma in our earliest life (along with all that has followed) means to me that we are the ones that have the chance to heal in ways that in her illness my unfortunate mother never could.
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Stop the Storm 
So much TRUTH in this writing. Makes me think of my poor brother who was abused by my BPD mother. From the onset,she made it known that she did not want a “boy”. My brother was diagnosed AS A RESULT of all of the abuse with Personality disorders. One being,anti-socialHe is also and bi polar. The doctor has told me, his primary one being anti social. While he can be very sweet and childlike in many ways, I always noticed that he did not have any friends. After spending time with him, I realized that he lacks the social and emotional skills needed to form and maintain relationships.He is fine on the superficial levels but is unable to take it beyond that.
As I have been learning about the impact that trauma leaves on the abused infant and child I see that as a result of being shaped in such an abusive environment, his own mother was unable to provide the empathy and nurturance which left him like a vacum,or an empty shell inside.
How can he possibly display empathy and compassion on others when he himself does not have any frame of reference from which to draw? His well was not only empty, it is filled with disturbance ,disruption,chaos,terror violence. Thus, we have so called personality disorder.
And he has had only two episodes of bi polar and he became very ill right after the passing away of our father 3 years ago. He was so out of touch with his feelings that he became SICK and had to be hospitalized. While I was displaying normal grief he did not have the words, the feelings, the connections to be able to grieve because he had never developed emotionally. His behavior became so out of control ,and even dilussional.. He felt pain but had no outlet . Having had so many losses, so much abuse and pain and never having the emotional eqipment of a normal brain. How was he suppose to deal with it? And so I would have to agree with your post ,that we are NOT born this way. The disruption comes I think from the wires” becoming tangled and disconnected .”
I always thought of my BPD mother as just that. Disturbed and an empty shell. A very frightening empty shell I might add but none the less, empty. She had nothing to hold onto but her own mixed up unresolved traumas which she replayed for us.
I see my brother as a victim. Society gets upset with the anti socials of the world and expects them to just “act and behave as the rest of us.” but I know from experience of being with him you can;t just make a person become socially appropriate when their brain has been affected.
I think society needs to learn much much more about the long lasting effects on the brain of childhood abuse so we can begin to DEMYSTIFY mental illness and personality disorders and see them for what they really are.