Before I post here an important comment and reply made this morning to the post

+FOOLED BY AN ABUSIVE BORDERLINE? – MY MOTHER’S EXPERT DISTORTION OF REALITY

I want to tell you a little story about something that I experienced during the last two weeks I lived in my parents’ abusive home.  I had already experienced 18 years of severe abuse by my psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder mother — with my father’s tacit approval as Mother’s enabler — by the time this incident occurred.  I turned 18 on the 31st of August, 1969.  This story is about what happened during the last weeks of September of that year.  My parents ‘put me in the Navy’ and I left for boot camp October 3, 1969.

By the time this incident happened I had long been formed within the exclusive reality of being the center of Mother’s psychosis that I was the devil’s child sent to kill her while I was being born.  I was never given any alternative version of reality to include in my own thinking about myself in the world.  I therefore COMPLETELY understood what my mother said in this ‘story’ from INSIDE Mother’s psychotic BPD universe.

My thinking about myself in the world had been entirely formed within Mother’s universe.  I had no power, no ability, no resources to think about reality in any other way but hers.  (Yes, Mother took ‘brain washing’ and ‘mind control’ to a whole new level, one that is impossible for anyone not intimately familiar with being raised and abused by a psychotic BPD mother can begin to understand.)

Being the center focus of Mother’s psychosis of evil meant that I lived in a world from which all light, all hope, all goodness, all safety, all reason, had been obliterated.  Imagine a world within which a newborn infant has been placed, confined, captured, and contained in which all oxygen has been continually sucked out by an abusive psychotic mother — for 18 long years.  Eventually the little one must learn to continue to survive without light, without air — or die.

Such is the life of an innocent born to a psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) mother.  Even children who are not the central focus of such a mother’s main psychosis are forced to live in a twisted bizarre universe of neurosis.  In my case my 5 siblings were the witnesses to what my psychosis-infested mother did to me.

++

My parents moved off of our Alaskan mountain homestead in the fall of 1969 into a large rented house on the shore of Lake Wasilla, 60 miles from my father’s place of employment in Anchorage.  Because I was now 18 I was ‘allowed’ by Mother to seek and to gain employment in an entry level word processing job at a bank in town.  I rode back and forth to work each week day with my father.

After two weeks my father and I walked into the house one evening to find two place settings on the dining room table.  Father at the head.  Me on his right hand.  Mother sat directly across from me without a place setting at father’s left hand.

Silence.  Deadly silence once our plate of food had been plopped in that special ‘you know Mildred is most displeased’ way in front of Father and me.

Mother’s deadly stare.  Mother’s deadly silence.  Appetite?  Don’t think so, but fork to mouth, fork to mouth, my father and I ate.  Until……..

Mother, in her voice that made ice seem warm and friendly, began her tirade in a whisper that grew into her special kind of ROAR.

“Well, Bill,” she began.  “It is obvious from the amount of time you spend alone with Linda and NOT with me that you love Linda far more than you love me.  You should have married Linda instead of me.”

++

All of my life until this present moment at my current age of 60 I have been unable to return to this clear memory without viewing it from INSIDE the memory, from inside of myself.

At that inside place, where all light in the universe had not only been shrunken down to a single pinpoint of light — but was forever and continually STILL shrinking — I believed my mother.  I understood not only what she was saying, but also understood that she was PERFECTLY correct in her statement.

I had no choice but to think with my mother’s Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) brain-mind.

I have spent half of my life now trying to get over to the OTHER SIDE of that pinpoint hole of light — into the REAL world, into my OWN world — and to leave my mother’s thinking out of the picture of my life.

This has been not only a most difficult task, but also a nearly impossible one.  I do believe that only someone raised as I was from the moment of my birth through the next 18 years in an environment that makes hell seem pleasant, can understand what I am saying.

With this tiny background story I now share the reply that came in from a reader this morning to

+FOOLED BY AN ABUSIVE BORDERLINE? – MY MOTHER’S EXPERT DISTORTION OF REALITY

along with my reply:

+++++++++++

COMMENT:

Barbara

Whew, I feel such anxiety – tight throat, burning chest, pain in ‘tummy brain’ when I read your mother’s letters! I definitely can ‘see’ the false reality, make-believe
Life and sense the anger. Its all so subtle – like my mother’s emails – I don’t know which type scares me more: when she sounds lucid yet superficial
Or crazy-emotional. Thanks for sharing such important information on this site, its helping me make sense of things. I feel when I read something here that
Its going to shed light and that there will be grief yet understanding.

REPLY:

alchemynow

Good morning, Barbara! Yes, it’s so clear sometimes why dealing with these BPD people makes US feel nuts!! It all IS SO SUBTLE – yet we know ‘it’ is there! I sure didn’t growing up! Not for a LONG time did I know Mother was nuts (tho my siblings did when they were kids).

I went thru therapy off and on all the way through my 30s. Thinking back, it has always been the last therapist who I thought helped me most when she told me, “What your Mother did to you was nothing like ordinary child abuse. What your mother did to you was evil.”

She had me read M. Scott Peck’s book “People of the Lie”

http://www.amazon.com/People-Lie-Hope-Healing-Human/dp/0684848597/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1327762282&sr=1-1

which DID help me begin to understand with a shift in my own perceptions that something was TERRIBLY wrong with Mother

But NOBODY told me she was insane! Nobody told me Mother was psychotic. But then it wasn’t until the 1980s that Borderline Personality Disorder became recognized as its own THING

http://www.bpddemystified.com/index.asp?id=16

I am STILL coming to understand that while all infant and child abuse and maltreatment is harmful, there is something unique about abuse accomplished by BPD people. Beginning to understand the fact that their body-brain does NOT operate in anything like a normal way is finally helping me make more sense out of the ways my abuse experiences are different from nearly ALL other forms of abuse.

The question of why nobody recognized what was happening to me continues to be important to me. What is it about the snakey subtlety of this disorder that makes it so hard for everyone to know the truth about what life with a BPD person is like?

It’s almost like the foundation of lies upon which my mother’s BPD reality was based had a power of its own to reach out past my mother and somehow influence EVERYONE she came into contact with — as if being around a BPD person makes EVERYONE somewhat (or a lot) NUTS themselves!

There is a lot of info online about BPD, but I stay away from it. I believe there IS a continuum and a range of damage that exists for those who have this disease. At the same time I know my personal history is with someone who had about the WORST this disease has to offer.

I imagine it’s natural for ‘the helping professions’ to want to ‘protect’ and to ‘help’ BPD people. Yet much of what is said about this disease seems like a lie to me, also, given what I know about how devastatingly serious the psychosis and neurosis this disease OFTEN creates — and the potential for ALL levels of abuse it holds.

So I would rather rely on the words of people like yourself about what it feels like and IS like to have been or to be in any kind of relationship with a BPD person.

There is a blog for daughters of BPD mothers you might like to visit:

http://daughtersofborderlinemoms.wordpress.com/tag/daughters-of-moms-with-borderline/

I am a fan of our gaining ‘informed compassion’ about our experiences with BPD mothers, especially. But I also don’t believe that anyone who has not had very personal experience of harm from such a mother can begin to imagine what we are talking about.

Just as the BPD mother has her own reality and own language, so to speak, so too do we as we try to gain clarity and try to communicate our own experience to anyone else.

Thank you so much for your comment!! I hope to read more from you in the future. All the best with love, Linda – alchemynow

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To add a comment click here:  1 Comment »

Links to some of my childhood stories:

++MY CHILDHOOD STORIES

These ones being most closely related to the ending of my life under my parents’ roof:

• +Age 14 – SCRUBBED IN THE TUB
• +Age 14 – MIRACLE IN THE PARKING LOT – DISSOCIATION
• *Age 14 – SILENT TREATMENT
• *Age 14 – Gardening and the Sabotage
• *Age 15 – MY ‘VISION’ – ALONE NAKED IN THE WOODS SINGING
• *Age 15 – FORCED TO WATCH AN ALASKAN SUNRISE
• *Age 17 – What My Parents Taught Me About Racism
• *Age 18 – LEADING UP TO GONE FROM HOME

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This is one of those posts I don’t have words to write about.  This is one of those posts that people who experience the ’3 Ds’ in this title will understand because they feel in their body what I am going to describe — even though I doubt I have the words I need to do so.

Google searching the words “dissociation depersonalization derealization child abuse” will bring up a host of pages to look at that are probably more clearly written than this post will be!  But a lack of words is not going to stop me from trying to describe what I have been feeling today.

I know where ‘these feelings’ come from for me.  Being a victim of insane psychotic mad woman abuse by my mother from birth until I left home at 18 did ‘this’ to me.  Everyone who experiences the ’3 Ds’ has a story of extreme trauma and abuse to tell.  None of ‘us’ were born this way.  We were MADE this way directly through repeated severe trauma exposure most likely in our earliest developmental years of infancy and childhood.

++

My mother’s abuse continually interrupted my own early experience of myself in my own life.  Today I would describe this as being continually ripped out of my own reality by brutal verbal and physical attacks.  My mother’s own MOVIE continually interrupted my experience.

Because these attacks against me began before I had words, before I even knew how to identify sounds with their sources, before I had a chance to even know what a person was — let alone who I was — the ’3 Ds’ were built into my growing and developing body, nervous system, stress response system and brain.

Today the word MOVIE is very much in the center of the focus of my thoughts.  I — as a person in a body — experienced my life today as if my body and I are separate, as if my body is a vehicle I am ‘driving around in’.

There is a great sense of remoteness to the experience of the ’3 Ds’.  Not only is this sense of distance, numbness and remoteness involved in my sense of being in a body, it is also involved in my sense of others in my world.  Each person I saw today, each snippet of conversation I heard, all seemed to be in MOVIES — other people’s movies that have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with me.

This is not a social connectedness feeling.  True, the people I encountered today were mostly ‘strangers’, but they do share the social species I belong to.  There is, I suspect, a common assumption among people that we share certain common experiences — and being in a body in the middle of one’s own experience as it is happening is probably one of them.

These multiple MOVIES overlap one another.  The sounds of people talking — and often the sounds around me in the environment — often have no meaning to me, either.  My guess is that I could explain this experience in part by saying that when a person hears a sound suddenly in the environment that they do not immediately recognize, often a degree of attention is devoted to the sound until the source and nature of the sound are identified.

I watched a woman today interact with her cell phone that suddenly changed its own ringtone.  When her phone rang with its strange tone the first time she didn’t realize it was her phone.  Eventually this woman took the phone in hand to explore exactly which settings had mysteriously changed themselves so that her familiar ringtone had disappeared and been replaced with a tone completely foreign to its owner.

It is not uncommon for me to have devote energy like this to ‘connecting’ sounds with their sources in my environment (including the sounds of voices to the words that are being spoken).  It would be simple, perhaps, to say that these experiences when I have them are ‘just’ part of my posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

I don’t have an option of jumping into a non-trauma formed body.  I have to live in this body that has experienced so much severe trauma that it will NEVER react to the environment I am in with normal responses.

I know that my experience over 4 years ago with heavy chemotherapy for advanced, aggressive breast cancer reawakened my childhood body’s response patterns to much of my life.  Most fortunately as I grew older within my severely abusive home of origin I LEARNED ways to get along in the world that kept the ’3 Ds’ from overly interfering with my ability to get along in a ‘normal’ world.

Unfortunately there was something about how the chemotherapy drugs affected by body-brain that seemed to have erased most of what I LEARNED about these ways to get along.  It is very unsettling, and at times so discouraging and disheartening – and scary – to be in my body TODAY as I now understand this is how I felt ALL of the time in my earliest years of life (probably before age 11).

Between age 11 and age 18 I found/learned/invented/developed ‘detours’ around the major impact of the ’3 Ds’.  I was very fortunate.  Most of those detours seem to be gone.  I am left today feeling very strange in a world that exists as overlapping remote movies – my own included – that do not feel as if they have a single thing to do with me.

I can get along being a stranger in my own body in my own life and in the world around me, but I feel fragile and vulnerable as if the slightest SURPRISE could literally startle/scare me out of my own skin (my “body suit” as in the movie “Men in Black”).  All the TERROR I felt from the horrors of 18 years of traumatic abuse has gone NOWHERE.  It is ALL remembered in my body.  I again lack adequate filters to screen out what my body knows about being in the world — without me really being in it.

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More than 60%?   Yes, according to research findings from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), more than half of American adults – a MAJORITY of adults – report that they suffered from what the CDC calls Adverse Childhood Experiences.

Majority of U.S. Adults Had Troubled Childhoods: CDC

Study finds nearly 60 percent lived with abuse or other difficult family situations

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, Dec. 16, 2010 (HealthDay News) – “Almost 60 percent of American adults say they had difficult childhoods featuring abusive or troubled family members or parents who were absent due to separation or divorce, federal health officials report.

In fact, nearly 9 percent said that while growing up they underwent five or more “adverse childhood experiences” ranging from verbal, physical or sexual abuse to family dysfunction such as domestic violence, drug or alcohol abuse, or the absence of a parent, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“Adverse childhood experiences are common,” said study coauthor Valerie J. Edwards, team lead for the Adverse Childhood Experiences Team at CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. “We need to do a lot more to protect children and help families,” she said.”

“Adverse childhood experiences included in the report included verbal abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, incarceration of a family member, family mental illness, family substance abuse, domestic violence and divorce.

According to the report, about 7.2 percent had had a family member in prison during their childhood and 16.3 percent had witnessed domestic violence in the family home. In addition, about 29 percent grew up in a home where someone abused alcohol or drugs. “These cases occur across all racial groups and ethnicities,” Edwards noted.

Almost one in five respondents (19.4 percent) had lived as a child with someone who was depressed, mentally ill or suicidal, the report noted.”  Click HERE to read full article

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I also found another current report that states at LEAST 1 in 5 American adults suffer from some form of ‘mental illness’:

1 In 5 U.S. Adults Had Mental Illness Last Year: Report –The Huffington Post   Amanda L. Chan Posted: 01/19/2012 2:41 pm

Follow this link to more information about this study, conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA):

National report finds one-in-five Americans experienced mental illness in the past year

++

It is reasonable to expect that the statistics in both of these reports are low, and that there are far more difficulties related to child abuse and to ‘mental illness’ than is reported.

Our nation HAS a national health crisis as reflected in these research findings.  Knowing these facts means that as we stand in line at a grocery store or sit in a movie theater or wait at a stop light we can look around us and know that over half the people around us have suffered from insecure attachment in their earliest years and are suffering consequences in their adulthood.

We can pretend that early troubles, early insecure attachment environments don’t matter.  They do.

Some of us have suffered from far WORSE trauma in our early years than most other people do, but if we look seriously and honestly around us in our social environments we know that MANY people are suffering – not just us.

There is no dependable, easy-to-use measurement tool available for research (or otherwise) to assess insecure attachment disorders so that we can connect ‘problems’ with their source.  But the ‘symptoms’ abounding around us in our culture easily let us know that what infants and children need to feel truly safe and secure in their earliest environment – in loving homes with safe and secure relationships with those adults infants and children are dependent upon in every way to take care of them – is NOT being provided for them.

Very often these insecurely attached children reach adulthood having no clue about HOW to go about majorly improving conditions of the lives of their own children.  Many people believe that, for example, adult-to-adult verbal and physical violence in the home, troubled and broken adult relationships, criminal activity and incarceration of adults important to children, drug and alcohol addiction, can’t REALLY affect little people.  These kinds of stresses/distresses in children’s homes IS traumatic to kids – right along with verbal and physical abuse that is directed at the little people of our nation.

These statistics are not even mentioning little people’s exposure to inadequate child daycare, homelessness and unstable housing conditions for families, poverty/unemployment/underemployment, lack of adequate nutrition, lack of healthy play or adequate adult supervision or loving and relaxed family play and story time, or even lack of parental involvement in children’s schooling.

All of these stressors affect the way infants and children build their body, their brain, their nervous system, their stress response system and their immune system.  We might think humans are an extremely tough lot who can survive ‘just fine’ no matter what the quality of signals a little person receives/received during their most critical physiological stages of development.

Yes, most of us do survive – like tough weeds.  Survival is NOT the same thing as being the BEST we can be in every way on every level of our existence.  Early trauma most likely changes the body-brain-mind-self of those who survive it.  A high price is paid, and most importantly that high price is passed right on to our offspring who CONTINUE to suffer from trauma-changed development that in turn affects the development of MORE offspring on down the generations.

In many ways these large portions of our American population suffer crippling in one important way or another.  We can say it is perfectly OK for adult relationships to disintegrate and fall apart – and maybe it is OK for the adults who think they prefer massive amounts of trauma drama in their lives.

But disintegrated relationships are NOT good for infants and children!  None of the patterns of social decay that these statistics are reporting are OK!   That we can limp like a bunch of emotional-social sick cripples through life ANYWAY just tells me that we have nearly lost sight of what true health and well-being even is!

Who cares?

++++++++++++++

I was asked a few days ago — again — if I have forgiven my mother for her terrible abuse of me from birth until I left home when I was 18.  Every time I am asked that question I find myself rethinking myself.  “Have I forgiven my mother?”  I always find myself confused not only by the question, but more so about what people are even asking me when the question pops up — yet again.

I examine my reaction to this repeating forgiveness question.  I examine my feelings of confusion — and yes, of fear and of guilt that, “Who do I think I am that I dare not forgive my mother?”

I think about the words recorded and kept throughout hundreds and hundreds of years in the only prayer that Jesus left for humans upon this earth, that clearly tells us, “Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

I work my way through this question I was asked yet again.  I work my way through my feelings.  Then I get to my own truth, to what I know to be true inside of myself.

++

Sometimes I find myself thinking with what I refer to as my “Dr. Spockonian” mind.  Whenever I find myself thinking, “This isn’t logical” I know my Spockonian logical mind is busy thinking about something that my emotions cannot find answers for.

The truth is, as far as I can tell, NO I have not forgiven my mother.

My lack of forgiveness has nothing to do with whether or not I am willing to forgive my severely psychotic mentally ill violently abusive mother or not.  My lack of forgiveness has to do with what I see as FACTS.

(1)  My mother was psychotic.  A person does not CHOOSE to become psychotic.  My mother’s psychosis came to her as a part of a serious mental illness over which Mother had no control.

(2)  The psychosis of my mother’s mind was based upon (I believe) particular patterns of abuse and trauma in Mother’s earliest childhood that evidently included a threat that IF — probably IF she told anyone what someone had done to her — the DEVIL would come to get her.

(3) During the distress of Mother’s terrible birthing of breech-me something inside Mother’s mind broke so that she PERMANENTLY believed (as I have said on this blog so many times before) that the devil had finally come to get her — as promised.  The devil, in Mother’s psychosis, had sent trying-to-be-born ME to kill her in childbirth.  Because she and I both survived, Mother’s psychosis then believed forever after that I was not human but was the devil’s child who had been sent not only to kill her — but to be “a curse upon” Mother’s life (because I survived).

(4) The thing about a psychotic break such as Mother had — a component I believe of her severe Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) — is that it exists as a foundational LIE that is perceived as TRUTH and therefore cannot be challenged, examined, or changed by the person who suffers the psychosis.  When the illness of BPD was first named in the medical profession it was balanced upon the perceived fact that people with this BPD disease continually walk a ‘borderline’ between neurosis and psychosis.

As it happened in Mother’s case her psychosis took very real and definite form around ME which left the massive amounts of neurosis that defined everything else anyone else knew or saw about Mother OUTSIDE the very real inner core of hell that she formed with ME captured for 18 long years at the center of.

(5) The kind of psychotic relationship Mother had with me was, as I continue to see it, a fact of NATURE.  This psychosis was rooted in Mother’s physiology — in her body and in her brain and in her mind.  In this way Mother’s severe abuse against me happened because of the FORCE OF NATURE that was the end result of Mother’s continued ability to act her psychosis out upon me.

(6) So, logically to me, I can no more forgive Mother for being so terribly, terribly SICK than I could blame a grizzly bear for ‘catching’ rabies.  I can no more blame mother for what she did to me than I could blame a tornado for damage, or a tsunami or an earthquake or a great tree falling upon my house.

++

In some strange way it strikes me that I have not only been robbed of a safe and secure infancy and childhood, but I have also been robbed of the CHANCE to forgive my mother.  She had no choice.  She acted out what her psychosis created for her in her body/brain.

I therefore have never forgiven Mother because it is not possible for me to do so.  Forgiveness would only apply IF Mother consciously CHOSE to so terribly, brutally and consistently harm me.

She HAD NO CHOICE.  What she did to me was a consequence of her disease which was, itself, a force of nature.

I feel informed compassion and pity and sorrow for the tragedy of the disease my mother suffered from.  I pray for her soul.  I am not angry at her (although I can feel angry about what HAPPENED to me).  I do not blame Mother.  I wish her no harm.

But I do not forgive her because in a rational world rational thought excludes even this possibility.

++

This entire picture does beg questions about my ability to forgive my father who enabled Mother, who often watched her brutal attacks of me and did nothing on my behalf — etc.  I don’t really CARE, nor do I invest much of my precious life energy in trying to figure my father out.  Any answer about him or about what he did or did not do has not come to me so far in my own healing.  My conclusion is that this whole matter is not of that much consequence to me.  I simply pray for his soul in the next world along with Mother’s and leave what matters to God.

This entire picture always makes me think about every other adult who COULD have noticed what was happening to me — and done something to help me.  This is all a different matter requiring different thought on my part — and not thought I am engaging in today.

All I will say in conclusion is that there is still much ignorance in the world about what truly matters.  I am just extremely grateful that I know and believe that a different human world IS coming — and that this new world will be heaven on earth.

It is words like the following that I trust in and try to understand, not words of my own or of any other human being –

++

CXXX:  “Be generous in prosperity, and thankful in adversity. Be worthy of the trust of thy neighbor, and look upon him with a bright and friendly face. Be a treasure to the poor, an admonisher to the rich, an answerer of the cry of the needy, a preserver of the sanctity of thy pledge. Be fair in thy judgment, and guarded in thy speech. Be unjust to no man, and show all meekness to all men. Be as a lamp unto them that walk in darkness, a joy to the sorrowful, a sea for the thirsty, a haven for the distressed, an upholder and defender of the victim of oppression. Let integrity and uprightness distinguish all thine acts. Be a home for the stranger, a balm to the suffering, a tower of strength for the fugitive. Be eyes to the blind, and a guiding light unto the feet of the erring. Be an ornament to the countenance of truth, a crown to the brow of fidelity, a pillar of the temple of righteousness, a breath of life to the body of mankind, an ensign of the hosts of justice, a luminary above the horizon of virtue, a dew to the soil of the human heart, an ark on the ocean of knowledge, a sun in the heaven of bounty, a gem on the diadem of wisdom, a shining light in the firmament of thy generation, a fruit upon the tree of humility. “ by Bahá’u’lláh in ‘Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh’, page 285

Posted on this blog at

GOD LOVE

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I will soon be running around the web to find what the United Nations is reporting on about children in the rich countries for 2011.  In the meantime, here are some links to previous blog posts about the status of America’s kids:

+THE U.N. ON GLOBAL REPORTING — CHILD RIGHTS VIOLATIONS

+HOW CAN OUR NATION BE SO OUT-OF-TOUCH? 2010 (CDF) REPORT ON OUR KIDS

+PLANNED SUFFERING FOR CHILDREN IN OUR UNBALANCED NATION

+UNITED NATIONS CIVIL SOCIETY NETWORK LINKS

+UNITED NATIONS: 2011 MEETING ON RIGHTS OF THE CHILD

+NO MONEY FOR OUR NATION’S NEEDY KIDS? OUR DEBT DEBT DEBT

+AMERICAN CHILD WELL-BEING: SOME ‘IN-HOUSE’ GAPS

+WE MAY SAY WE ARE A FAIR NATION – BUT LOTS OF KIDS WOULD SAY OTHERWISE

+CONTINUED HUMAN EVOLUTION: WE MUST LOSE THE BAD AND IMPROVE ON THE GOOD

+HERE’S A TAKE ON THE RICH RICH RICH RICH AND THE POOR POOR POOR POOR

+OUR NATION’S GAP IN CHILD WELL-BEING: A LOOK AT STATE RANKED #5

+THE UNITED NATION’S REPORT CARD ON AMERICA’S CHILD WELL-BEING – THE WIDE GULF BETWEEN THE HAVES AND THE HAVE-NOTS: AM I IMPASSIONED OR EMBITTERED?

+U.N. REPORT CARD ON CHILD WELL-BEING AMONG GLOBE’S 24 RICHEST COUNTRIES: AMERICA FLUNKS!

+HAVING THE COURAGE TO LOOK FOR THE TRUTH

+21 RICH NATIONS COMPARED ON CHILD WELL-BEING – U.S. AND U.K. AT THE BOTTOM

+AMERICANS MUST NOT BELIEVE THAT CHILDREN ARE HUMAN BEINGS — THUS, NO HUMAN RIGHTS

+ALIGNING OUR NATION WITH UNITED NATIONS CHILD RIGHTS IS AGAINST OUR OWN LAWS

+VIOLATING THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS OF CHILDREN

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The State of the World’s Children 2011: Executive Summary

Report on physical punishment in the United States

Child Abuse: Statistics, Research, and Resources for Recovery

Child Poverty in Rich Nations:

http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/repcard1e.pdf

STATE OF THE WORLD’S POPULATION 2011

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In case readers run out of things to ponder on these winter days, here are some links to research on how child abuse affects how DNA manifests and operates — called EPIGENETICS.

*GENETICS OF DISORGANIZED ATTACHMENT

Early Brain development and Human Development

Epigenetics and the Human Brain

The epigenetics of child abuse : Article : Nature Reviews …

Child Abuse Causes Lifelong Changes To DNA Expression And Brain

Epigenetics? – Abuse affects genes – Epigenome NOE

Epigenetics and the Human Brain

Child Abuse Epigenetics | Channel N

News: Childhood trauma has life-long effect on genes and the brain

Child Abuse May ‘Mark’ Genes In Brains Of Suicide Victims

Epigenetics | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine

epigenetics « Inside the Brain

EpigeneticsBegin Before Birth | Begin Before Birth

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For anyone interested in some winter reading on important research about how trauma in early attachment relationships affects infant-child development, and about developmental neuroscience ‘in general’ here is a list of the notes I have taken from some of the research and writing on the subject by various doctors working in these fields of studies.

This information has been stored on my Workspace blog on trauma.

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Dr. Allan N. Schore

http://workspacestopthestorm.wordpress.com/?s=schore

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Dr. Antonio Damasio

http://workspacestopthestorm.wordpress.com/?s=damasio

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Dr. Bessel A. van der Kolk

ADAPTATIONS TO TRAUMA

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Writings of Dr. Joseph LeDoux

http://workspacestopthestorm.wordpress.com/about-this-site/dr-joseph-ledoux/

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Dr. Daniel J. Siegel

http://workspacestopthestorm.wordpress.com/dr-daniel-j-siegel/

LOTS OF GREAT INFO HERE ON ATTACHMENT AND DEVELOPMENT!  (These are ‘working files’ for my writing with my notes included)

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and of course, Dr. Teicher again about how child abuse changes development and crates ‘evolutionarily’ altered people — scan of article here:

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/attachment/symtpoms-120909-scan-of-teichers-research-trauma-altered-development-paper/

A whole collection of my previous thoughts on research about “Beating Trauma”

BOOK – BEATING TRAUMA

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It has taken me 60 years to begin to be comfortable using the four letter word ‘evil’ as I am beginning to personally understand what I mean when I use that word.  It’s not that I don’t have a very solid background of experience with what the presence of evil can do to self and others in a lifetime.  In fact, it is no doubt because I do have an extensive personal history with evil that I have avoided using the word at all — until I gained some personal confidence that I know what evil is to me.

I wasn’t supposed to SEE the evil that surrounded me during the 18 years I lived through severe abuse from my severely ill mother.  I wasn’t supposed to know it was there, that it existed, that what was being done to me had a name.  I wasn’t supposed to have words to talk about the evil that so existed in my universe as a child that barely nothing else happened at all.

And for nearly 60 years I have remained evil-blind.  Being evil-blind leaves me at risk for being blindsided by evil.  Not any more!  I see the enemy now!  This enemy has nothing to do with some fake red devil running around with a pitchfork and goat feet.  Nope.  Evil comes from one source — and one source only:  HUMANS.

Now how humans actually end up DOING evil seems to be through processes that are far too complex for me to understand.  I am comfortably able to accept the words presented here about the difference between humans DOING evil versus BEING evil:

*NO MATTER WHAT – HAVE NO ENEMY

It makes sense to me that evil is committed by humans because of the three difficulties mentioned in the words at that link:

(1) ignorance

(2) sickness

(3) immaturity

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I had some face-to-face conversations today as well as some online ones with people who were unbelievably hurt and wounded by adults in their childhoods.  Today I can finally, and fortunately, think about what I hear in stories of the suffering of innocents that what was done to them (as well as to me) was ABSOLUTELY EVIL.

I have no more confusion.

I know what evil is.

I know what it is when I hear descriptions about actions that are one thing and one thing only — EVIL.

Evil is the absence of goodness.  All goodness comes from God (there is only one God, who sent the great Beings to humanity over time that created every religion on earth).

Reality is the light of God’s love.  The darkness of evil is, yes, very real — but it is not GOD’S reality.  It is humanity’s.

My mother had a terrible disease that prevented the goodness of her soul from operating through her body/brain in her lifetime.  There was great sickness, ignorance and immaturity (and therefore evil) in all adults  I ever met during my 18 years of suffering as a child who did not SEE what was happening to me.

For every story of child abuse and tragedy I heard today — each of them a clear description of the operation of evil — I felt great compassion for the huge amount of suffering that unbridled, unchecked evil creates in life on this planet.  This suffering is needless!

But humanity has yet to take the turn it needs to take at accepting that the One God (however people relate to God) wants only the happiness and well-being of His creation.  Humanity does have a choice.  So far it appears to me that evil will be increasingly darkening the planet until humans choose to reach for, ask for, and accept the infinite supply of GRACE that God has made available to us.

All goodness comes from God.  Evil comes from human inability for whatever reasons to live in goodness and to recognize its Source.

One way or another the day is coming when our species is going to make the choice to leave evil out of our lives – personally and collectively.  The entire combined society of humanity will eventually forbid its presence in any of our affairs.  No, not in my lifetime — but without any doubt that day is coming.

I personally believe it is a great stride in the right direction for us to notice and to name evil for what it is every single time we encounter it — anywhere.  Goodness is infinitely more powerful than the shadow of the absence of goodness – which is what evil is.  Why do we allow this poison to exist?

Of course the most important place for me to spot evil — and the hardest place for me to spot evil — is within my own self.  Do I always do the right thing?  I can pray for help and I can pray for forgiveness — however I choose to do that — and I know both will be given to me.

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A dream came to me, as best as I can place it, around twenty years ago.  Given some specific events of these past few days I know it is not only time to write this dream but most hopefully to live now through its most important elements.

Last Friday evening I enjoyed a pizza dinner out with a new friend.  As we were parting in the parking lot he handed me a brochure about the work of a new therapist in a town about 30 miles away from this rural area where I live.

Yesterday I began to investigate if there might be some healing options open to me through this woman’s work.  I am on very low fixed disability income without any insurance that will cover the healing work that this woman provides.

Although this woman, who is a Holistic Healer named Jacquelyn Brenner, used to practice in a northern region of Arizona she is now close enough to where I live to be accessible to me.

Here is a link to her website:

Hollow Reed

While I suspect that I would benefit from more orthodox ‘talk therapy’ at this point in my life I very truly cannot afford that avenue to healing.

More importantly, I have reached a point at my age of 60 — after having spent half of my life pursuing healing for the consequences of the 18 long years I spent being severely abused by a VERY sick psychotic (probably Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)) mother — what I see appearing within the circle of my life is an option for healing that I suspect is far, far more necessary for me than any healing work with words could possibly offer to me.

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Those readers who follow this blog know that over this past year especially I have devoted the majority of my efforts toward writing my story of abuse for book publication.  I finished the first rough draft that will cover this abuse history up to nearly my 11th birthday.

My goal was to complete this first rough draft by last October.  I did.  Then when I began to work my way back through what I have written in that draft I reached a point beyond which I could not pass.  I have been at a dead-still in my book writing work ever since.

Most simply put what I know about how I feel right now is that VERY WISELY my own self is not and will not allow me to return to my book writing BECAUSE IT WOULD NOT BE WISE OR GOOD FOR ME TO DO SO.

It is the impact of how the severe abuse I suffered from the moment of my birth resides in MY BODY that has me stopped dead in my writing tracks.

Most simply put I can say it is my very wise fear of body memories returning to me in the present during a process of returning to my abuse history’s stories that is preventing me from moving forward.  I had one occasion happen to me already with the body memory overwhelming me in reawakened memory of a severe beating my mother did to me when I was 22 months old.  (It was when I reached my 2nd writing through this memory that the book writing stopped.)

I cannot now wisely open any door of memory right now that will enable any more of those kinds of severe beating body memories to awaken into my conscious experience in my present.  In addition I feel sick in my body right now, and it is scary to me not to feel myself getting any better.  My life force seems to be depleted — depleting — every day.  This is NOT a good sign or a good way to be in my body in my lifetime!!!!

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So, I have been waiting and I have been praying.  The brochure that was given to me last Friday does, I believe, offer to me the help and the healing I need RIGHT NOW.

In the listing of services this brochure describes is one I was (until I looked it up online yesterday) completely ignorant of in this ‘real time’ of my life:

Jin Shin Jyutsu

I don’t even know how to pronounce those words, but as soon as I found the first information online that is included if you click on those words, I KNEW I know — and have known since I was given the dream I am going to write here now — exactly what this form of healing bodywork IS.  Exactly.

At the same time I also knew yesterday that my prayers have been answered.  I telephoned Hollow Reed this morning and have an appointment this evening for a discussion with Jacquelyn Brenner about possibilities regarding my being able to work with her.

I am more than hopeful.  I am awed and extremely grateful that this healing avenue has appeared in my life.  SOME WAY will be made for me to access this healing.  The fact that this would be an issue for me was a very clear part of the dream I had 20 years ago.

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The Healing Dream

I was in full moving stride with one foot in the air as it was coming down upon the floor just under a wide arched doorway when I experienced a startled shock of awakening into this dream.  I knew I had just walked down a long (what I would now call) enclosed veranda that ran down the side of a very large ancient building constructed of massive chunks of cut stone.

I stopped walking as I stood gazing around me with an unsettled feeling that I had always known this place and myself in it — but that I had suddenly and inexplicably forgotten.

On my right along the wide tiled floor of this light filled passage I saw a line of great tubs filled with what I knew was hot mineral water.  The tubs and the walls around them were covered with deep indigo tiles, some of them painted with fine delicate yellow flowers with white leaves.

Many beautiful bottles filled with herbs in liquid solutions stood around the edges of each tub.  I knew I was here to soak in one of these tubs.  I knew I would know exactly which of those herb bottles I needed to use to add medicine to my water.

On my left was a wall of massive glass windows.  The window ledges were deep, the walls being very thick.  I gazed out at a forest of lush, beautiful perfectly healthy ancient trees.  My vision followed the flowing sight of them down the gently sloping curves of the mountainside far down to the edge of a brilliantly sparkling turquoise sea.  My eyes followed the sea to a distant horizon.

I turned toward a woman preparing to enter one of the tubs and as I spoke to her I felt distressed that I was speaking fluidly to her in a language that I knew I could no longer recognize.  “Where am I?”  I asked her.  “What place is this?”  Feeling foolish and conspicuous in my confused ignorance I also had to ask her what language were we speaking!

I do not remember what she spoke back to me but whatever it was, it was what I needed to hear to instantly feel completely comfortable in all I was experiencing.  After I soaked in my bath I dressed in clothing that had been laid for me at the outside corner of the tub’s edge.  Having (in this current life of mine) hand woven many fabrics I recognized the high quality cotton and the deep pure colors of the dyes used to create this tunic I put on.  It’s colors were of a range of deep indigo, sky blues, radiant aqua tones, emerald and light green — in other words of plant life, of water and of moonlight — laced periodically with very thin fine threads of sparkling silver.

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I then left this area  through tall wide heavy wooden carved swinging doors and entered a wide hallway very brightly lit and filled with streaming groups of many people.  I stood for a few moments once I passed through the doors gazing in wonderment at what I was seeing.

There were groups of people walking together who were wearing the same colors of woven cloth garments that I was.  There were ALSO other people moving both ways in this wide hallway that were dressed in garments of the hot fire range of orange, scarlet, deep reds, yellows laced with threads of gold.

These people were VERY tall and very thin and moved in a very straight line as they stared with stern faces straight in front as the walked.  Or, I should say, glided ABOVE the floor.  These tall stern intense serious people floated with their feet about eight inches above any firm surface.

The blue-green people were very much ‘on the ground’!  They moved like wind moves the leaves and grasses, like the moon moves the tides, like water tumbles over ledges and logs and stones.  They laughed as they chatted with one another, even stopping at times in the middle of the passageway, blocking traffic so that the stern people gave them invisible frowns as they had to alter their forward straight line glides a little bit to avoid crashes, as the blue-green people gazed at the expressions in one another’s animated faces as they talked.

(It seemed that many were going to ‘classes’, and while it might not be polite to speak ill of dream people, I could say that although perhaps the tall people were regal, it seemed to me also that they were intimidating in their rigidity, if not downright haughty and disdainful of those dressed as I was!)

Having come to some kind of peace with myself that it was OK that even though I had known these people and this place all of my life at this moment everything was entirely NEW to me, I felt inside of myself and noticed that what I wanted to do was to SKIP with abandon and joy down this hallway toward a door I knew I needed to enter.

But SKIP??  Could I DO THAT HERE?  What would the red-orange people think?  What would they do to me?  What would happen to me if I SKIPPED?  I didn’t care.  With the gleeful abandon of a happy, happy child I held to the wall edges of the hall and skipped through the next set of tall swinging doors.

Immediately after I had passed through them I made a left turn into another narrower hallway, and then an immediate right through a set of shorter, narrower doors into the room that was my goal.

The ceilings in this room were low.  The light was warm but quite dim.  This large room was filled with what I would now call healing stations, each with a narrow bed with a folded white sheet at the foot and a bodywork healer standing at the head.  I walked to one of these beds, shed my woven garment, laid down on my stomach and pulled my unfolded sheet over the lower half of my body.

The bodywork healer went to work.

I payed close attention to how it felt to have this healer work over my body without touching me with hands.  I could feel the work happening on the inside of my body.  I felt good.  Nothing hurt.  Until the very end when, having moved what I remember the healer telling me were my “27 points of darkness” to one centralized point on my lower back above my left hip bone, I was told that this would hurt as these points of darkness were removed from me.

And DID THEY HURT!  For a matter of perhaps 45 seconds I felt the most intense, excruciating pain I had ever known in my lifetime in this body.  The pain stopped.  I felt better than I could ever remember feeling.

I sat up on the edge of the bed, sheet wrapped around my torso, as I reached for my woven clothes that were folded on a low stool beside the bed.  I remember clearly thinking to myself, “This has been a fantastic, wonderful experience — but how am I going to PAY FOR ALL OF THIS?”

At the end of that thought I again ‘forgot’ about myself in that place — in other words I did the opposite of waking up into that place as I had at the start of the dream as I again was made ‘unconscious’ and asleep to it.

When I awoke to my regular life in the morning I remembered also that in the dream I had been very aware that I had been given a great gift in being allowed to ‘remember’ this place and this healing.  I was aware that there were what I might call guardian angels or spirit guides present with me as I was shown this experience.

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Yesterday as my eyes scanned the verbal information I found on that webpage about Jin Shin Jyutsu I knew exactly what is going on right now.  Why in my dream there were clearly “27 points of darkness” in my body instead of the “26″ that this JSJ site mentions, I do not know.  Other than that tiny detail, JSJ is evidently the name for what it was that healed me in that dream (although I doubt the physical pain is a literal part of the experience).

A point on the side about this dream is that I mentioned the dream to someone I knew briefly those 20 years ago — I do not remember who it was — but I remember what she said back to me after listening to me describe my dream experiences.  “I know that place,” she stated matter-of-factly to me.  “I have been in those tubs.  I have seen those tiles.  I looked out those windows.  That place was Atlantis.   Did you know it was destroyed because those ‘intellectual’ orange-red people acquired the power to use the technologies they discovered in harmful ways and did not listen to the knowledge the green-blue people had about how to use the technology wisely?  You are not alone.  I and many others have dreamed this place.”

I could say, “No, I didn’t know that,” but I honestly do not know what I know — what I remember, what I have forgotten.

But I do sure know that I am THRILLED to have found this bodywork healing available to me now!  And there has to be a way for me to ‘pay for’ what I need in my lifetime – now!

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I received the gift the other day of meeting Laura at my piano teacher’s place.  She is a trained classical pianist who has played over 40 years by sight reading.  Now she is taking lessons to learn how to play by ear and to FEEL the music.  She so far has considered herself not as a musician but as a technician.

Sure enough Laura could play some of songs I wrote perfectly – technically – but I know what she is describing.  When I met this woman, who lives in Seattle with her husband but spends months in SE Arizona here every year playing golf at our tiny town’s impressive golf course (the oldest in our state).  When I met Laura I felt as if I have known her all of my life.

So the next day a song came to me titled “Laura’s Song.”  I am taking it to an office supply store to Xerox it today, and will leave her copy with our teacher.  Again, this is a song that is still quite above my pay grade – I cannot yet TECHNICALLY play it.  I have not written into the song all the musical signs and symbols that would tell another pianist how to FEEL the song – and I don’t wish to even hear Laura play the song note by note with mechanical perfection.

I would like to wait until Laura’s playing of it – perhaps – happens exactly as the last words of the song suggest.  I had the song completed last night, so I thought, until I woke this morning and knew those musical notes in the last measures were not meant to stand alone.

I awoke knowing the last line.

I have only been learning music since I began lessons last October.  What an amazing process!  I love it – and once I do have Laura’s technical skills honed a bit better for my own self – I can’t WAIT to hear what I will be able to play (as I write the music) THEN!

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Laura’s Song

I left my arrows with their feathers

At the back side of the sun.

I left my quiver with its beauty

At the bottom of the sea.

My bowstring is wrapped

Around the moon

My bow lies in the heart

Of a tree.

I planted my feet firm

And sent my breath out around the world

Out around the world.

My breath echoed back to me

Back to me

In sound.

I gather my arrows

My quiver

My bow.

I shoot straight.

I am setting my songs free

Free

Free

So now I play

Moon strings

As my songs play me.

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