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Post:
+MAKING IT CLEAR: MY SYMPATHIES ARE NOT WITH BORDERLINE PARENTS
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Follow this link to —- all my mother’s writings
which are over on the section of my blog I call Take Care of Mothers.
Once you reach this blog, which is the sister blog to this one, you can pick and choose which of her writings you would like to read for such headings as MOTHER’S CHILDHOOD
, which contains her childhood stories and my analysis of them,
+ her pre-Alaska writings that include her journals,
+ her letters written after she had reached Alaska but before the homesteading had begun,
+ the whole years’ range of letters about homesteading itself,
+ my mother’s article and book writings, though she never was able to publish anything..
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Please also visit my main blog that presents my personal child abuse story – Stop the Storm – and it’s partner blog that contains useful information about the physical changes that happen to the developing brains of severely abused infants and young children – Workspace for Stop the Storm – both blogs being about stopping the intergenerational transmission of unresolved traumas, about stopping child abuse and about healing traumas. Thank you! Linda
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These writings are about my and my sibling’s earliest years and remain on this site:
*MY INTRODUCTION TO MY MOTHER’S 1953 DIARY
**1953 – MY MOTHER’S DIARY – PART ONE
**1953 – MY MOTHER’S DIARY – PART TWO
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This page has the following sub pages.
Hi,
It is okay for me if you want to post my comment and also okay if you don’t. Mostly I would like to express my personal feelings about your blog (basically one particular thing).
First, I read your blog on occasion. I am DID and can relate to what you write about. I think you do a wonderful work with your blog and it does help others (at least it helps me).
The thing that bothers me is how you slam your “BORDERLINE” mother. I know everything you went thru was terrible (I have my terrible experiences) but as a BPD mother it really hurts me how you always refer to her as “Borderline Mother” as if all borderline mothers are terrible monsters. I am DID and Borderline and anorexic and . . . . I have 4 outside kids who belong to a 14 yr. old alter who no longer wants them because they are not “babies” any more. I have stepped in and am working really hard to be the best mom I can be. Most of the time my BPD is contained inside (comes with a lot of “inner self-harm” because it does not get released). I do not want that crap released onto these kids.
When other people read your site and are not real familiar with BPD they will assume all BPD moms are out right crazy. Then if they come across my blog and read that I am BPD they will assume I unleash that same crazy stuff onto my kids and I do not. I wish you not refer to your mom as terrible, crazy “Borderline” mom (though I am sure she was). Maybe you could mention she was (is) borderline once or twice and then just refer to her as “crazy, horrible, terrible” instead of slamming the borderline word around when referring to her.
I cringe somewhat when I come to your site, though I like it, because I believe all borderline moms do not behave as such on the outside. I have begged my psychiatrist to remove that label from me but I know I have it. I just hate the way people out there slam it so frequently.
Thanks for listening to me rant! I only wanted to point it out to you. I will still read your site anyway I just do not need to be reminded about how terrible I am.
Thanks,
Haley
Dear Haley
I just copied your comment over to the end of the post I just wrote: +WORD WARRIOR NEWS: “GO IN PEACE, MY MOTHER.”
at http://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/2010/05/16/word-warrior-news-go-in-peace-my-mother/
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Thank you very much for posting your thoughts and feelings.
When I use these two words in connection to one another, “Borderline mother,” I am always and specifically referring to MY mother. At least that is what I try to do. When I include information on Borderline Personality Disorder I try to do that by referring to expert and professional descriptions and information about the ‘condition’ from the outside.
In reading your response I will make the clearest effort that I can from now on to make even more of an effort to keep these distinctions as clear as I can.
I of course can not tell this for sure, but in reading your words I perceive that you express three things I can see here that my mother never had toward me (and only peripherally demonstrated toward anyone else, including her other 5 children): (1) the ability to self-reflect, (2) the ability to connect consequences with actions, and (3) the ability to experience care, concern and compassion for the well-being of your children.
Without having these three abilities, my mother was a lethal weapon and an extremely dangerous mother.
The shortcomings related to diagnosis of so-called ‘mental health categories’ and the cultural stigmas connected to them is a problem within our society at large: http://www.jwoodphd.com/borderline_personality_disorder.htm and http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/b/borderline_personality_disorder/wiki.htm#wiki_Origin_of_the_term
There is enough neuroscientific research appearing to suggest that before much more time passes, it will be possible to diagnose something akin to what is now called Borderline Personality Disorder far more accurately by watching scans of a person’s brain operating while performing certain specific tasks.
When this time comes, I see that the diagnostic process will be very similar to the ones used now to find and diagnose something as problematic, life threatening and difficult to treat as are breast cancers discovered through mammogram procedures today.
It was not that long ago in the past that ‘having cancer’ was considered as a shameful thing. We are socially removing that stigma.
It was not that long ago in the past that child abuse was also a taboo topic for public discussion.
I make every effort to connect what my mother did to me to the suffering my mother experienced during her formative years that changed her into the terribly abusive mother she became. Nowhere do I EVER say that my mother was a bad or an evil person.
The point you make today is not only an extremely important one, but is one that is appearing at a critically important time in my own writing process. I thank you for this. I will enlist everyone on my end that is involved in the process of preparing my book on the experiences of my childhood to help me consider how best to approach the legitimate and important point you are heart-fully making making here.
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I consider my mother (who was never diagnosed with this disorder first named in 1984) to have been at the severe end of the Borderline Personality Disorder spectrum. My concern so far has been that if a mother as severely abusive as mine was could so completely hide her abuse and so completely manipulate her home environment that nobody on the outside ever suspected the abuse was occurring, how does anyone even today have a chance to intervene and rescue any child living with this kind of abuse?
I consider the entire matter of child abuse to be a life-and-death concern. I would rather not be an inconsiderate ‘bull in a China shop’ and trample all over other people who have been given this diagnosis or help create a stampede of others who would do the same. Yet because I believe that severe Borderline mothers have the physiological constitution that makes them about the most dangerous abusive parents possible, I have as yet not chosen to back off from assigning ‘Borderline’ as a prefix to the term ‘my mother’.
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I make no pretense (at least that I know of) to tell anyone else’s story other than my own. In my most recent process within the past 24 hours, I have even realized that my mother’s own words need to be published without my side of the story being presented at all in connection with my mother’s writings. That is a HUGE step for me because I have always believed that if I could somehow bring the light of the true reality of my mother’s violent, dangerous and consistently abusive nature into the telling of my mother’s story that it might be able to help someone in ‘the public’ rescue a child preyed upon as abusively as I was.
Yet if nobody can ‘read the mind’ of a Borderline, as this article suggests
http://profs.bpdworld.org/articles/The%20Borderline%20Empathy%20Effect.pdf
I will not be able to accomplish what I hoped for, anyway.
I am not yet able to think fully about what you are saying. I obviously retain my own bias in regard to my mother. I know fully that there are readers of this blog who DO have something to say about this topic. Please respond. Put within your comment, as this reader did, your feelings about having your comment published or not – I will of course honor your request. But, your opinion IS NEEDED here! And I thank you again, Haley as I thank other readers for their comments even before they are received.
Please also see this post: +IT MIGHT BE JUST FINE TO RIP THE JUGULAR VEIN OUT OF ‘BORDERLINE’
at
http://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/2010/05/16/it-might-be-just-fine-to-rip-the-jugular-vein-out-of-borderline/
Help! Your site made me very curious. The linke above under “my mother’s writings” does not work for me.
I will die out of curiousity if you do not correct it. Please.
I’ll try to figure out what’s going on
but all her writings can be reached here!
http://takecareofmothers.wordpress.com/
let me know if this doesn’t work! The site seems really slow today!
Yes, thanks, I could reach it there.