Month: December 2018

The more I study Attachment and Developmental Theory, the more obvious the centrality of a well adjusted, emotionally self regulated mother becomes.  Everything depends on it.  The beginning becomes the life.  The infant is the father of the child.  Rather, Wordsworth might be corrected and adapted to say:  the infant is the mother of the child, and the mother is the mother of the infant.

There are Rosebud moments in infant lives, moments of before and after, moments which cause that  child, that neurologically sensitive organism, to alter in ways which forever after become the template, and which are forgotten.  They remain until, perhaps, the moment of death, and in the case of preverbal assaults on self, likely never reappear ever in this life.

Psychopaths and narcissists are such people.  They cannot remember a before, even neurologically, even somatically.

In my own case, I was broken around age 5.  Between age 5 and 7 certainly, which is to say within the domain of memory.  I can remember struggles before that.  They are in my body.  I feel them every night.  I fought with every ounce of my infant and toddler being against the dying of the light.  And I lost.  But something survived.  This is my fortune, my luxury.  Not all are granted that.

One last comment: totalitarianism–which is the outcome of an aggregate of work by highly disturbed people–might be seen as a motherless world.  And such motherless worlds are created ONLY by motherless people.  They are created by people who were broken while still in the crib, and the language they use to justify their crimes is irrelevant.

In some more enlightened future we might privilege the role of mother above all others, understanding that the child of the woman is the future of the world.  As mothers go, so go we all.

And ponder, if you will, the status of the role of mother in our present society.  Her primary political claim is her right to destroy her child, to treat it as personal property, to be disposed of as she chooses, for any reason, and at any time.

Feminists, those who claim to speak for women, denigrate the role of mother.  Only the religious still agitate for it, and those who still speak thus are, obviously, under attack.

Motherless children are gaining ground.  We need to stop them.

I think most survivors of child sexual abuse suffer from Developmental Trauma Disorder as well, even if the abuse happened within the realm of their memory, which is to say after age 5 or so.

Child sexual abuse, in my view, likely only happens in already dysfunctional systems.  The protective barriers and safeguards are malfunctioning.  First, the parents may be the abusers themselves.  They may do it together, or more commonly, a father does it, and the mother suspects or knows, but does little or nothing.  Neither parent, in such a situation, can have been nurturing to that infant, to the extent needed to meet the “good enough” standard.

And of course pedophiles nearly always prey on the vulnerable, those who have no one they can trust, those whose bond, particularly, with the mother is absent or weak, because she is absent or weak, emotional, physically, or both.  They become both the trusted person–this is especially true, I think, of man on boy abuse–and the abuser.  This is a mind fuck on several levels, because love and abuse cannot be separated easily; one’s usefulness as a sex object and as a human being are intertwined.  All the feelings are comingled.

I was talking once with a male survivor who was abused by a church elder of some sort, and he commented that it was not all bad.  It felt good to him, but in the abstract he had to call it abuse.  This guy was seriously fucked up, and has since done a number of nasty things to people who trusted him.  He will likely never heal, since he has rationalized his anger at the world.  As I think about it, he is likely at not inconsiderable risk of becoming a pedophile himself, although as far as I know he has nothing to do with children.  I have not seen him in a year or more.

It is, I read, a reasonably well established fact that the rates of rape among sexual trauma survivors is a multiple that of those who grow up in happy homes.  It is not hard to see why.  They lack boundaries of the acceptable.  They feel shame in their very existence.  People willing to treat them as victims find them ready prey.  One trauma leads to another, in one of these sick cycles that cause some of us to feel the need to get drunk when we contemplate them too much.

So I would suggest that when you see someone assert that sexual abuse is their primary problem, I would hazard a guess that the MAIN emotional wound, the one that set the foundation for those following, happened before age 3.  Everything else compounded on an existing superstructure.

You can, as one example, be in a car accident and be lacerated in multiple places.  All those cuts can be sutured and treated, and you can still die from internal bleeding.

When you throw a rock in water, it sinks to the bottom.  The bottom is where the work needs to be done.  Everything else rests on it.  It is dark and difficult there, but it is not impossible.

Guru, I will note in this context, literally means “heavy”.

Social hierarchies are the tribalization of otherwise relatively homogeneous groups, who share a language and broad culture.

Humility is rest.  It is a cessation from pointless battles.

Pride was bred into me.  It was necessary to survive my home, where I was attacked relentlessly by both parents, in different ways.  I have never felt the feeling of safety in my life.  This is the truth.

Much, if not most, if not all, of my output on the internet stems from pride.  I see this, as I calm down.

I fight, where no battle had been needed.  I fight, where no final victory can be obtained.  I fight, witnessed only by the crickets, passing birds, and a pig or two. I fight, in the night, under the stars, immune to my own absurdity.

I fight, therefore I am, is a bad motto for a life.

That last was intended as absurdist humor anchored in ridiculous fact.

Some day we may all see clearly.  It will be a remarkable day, in many ways.

When I am honest, I see that I share much in common with all the fuckups of the world, with all their mistakes, all their errors, all their weaknesses, all their vice. 

I understand evil.  I understand sin.  They float among us, and for many of us, they seem obvious and easy.

God, help me save myself from that easy one step down, and perhaps help me save one other person.

God, let my my present self serve as a bad example to my future self, and an object of compassion and forgiveness.

spoke of never entering the same river twice.

But we are in the river, are we not?  We are all drifting to the sea.  There is no entering, because we are in the flow.  It is an abstraction to pretend otherwise, and an abstraction is an effort to leave life.

If I might be only vaguely recondite, given past posts, it is disappointing to me that no one really grasps this large cave I have discovered.  I watch what from my side look like beams of light disappear in the distance.

Still, I am an odd soul.  It is hard to compare me to anyone, certainly anyone most of the people I know might know.  I don’t know anyone like me, and I don’t reveal everything to anyone.

I will figure this out, though.  Today I was thinking perhaps I don’t need to be here at all, and I infected myself with the disease of life to see if I could solve it.  I think I can.  I don’t need much more time, either.

This is perhaps all ludicrous, for a man writing to an unknown and perhaps nonexistent audience.  These are, regardless, the contents of my mind.  I deal equally well, for the most part, with silence, praise, and condemnation. I do my thing.  Join me if you can and feel inclined.  There will be water, the unknown, darkness, and possibly some illumination which makes no sense until it does.

You
Can’t find what
You
Are looking for.
All you can do is
Remember
To set a place at the
Table
Of your life.
And if those tender embers,
Those tiny sparks,
Appear,
Nourish them with kindness
And patience.

And it won’t be what you were
Looking for.
Not at all.
But you will know it
As an old, old friend.

There is warmth.
Even here, even now.

The old wives tale that if you die in your dreams you die for real is not true.  I have died several times.  Most recently, I saw my own dead body.  It didn’t look like me, but it was me.  I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t turn away.

Now, I don’t think this is an omen of anything in my immediate future.  I think it was my unconscious releasing something from my distant past, when I was driven out of my mind by fear and a sense of being unwanted.  I died, in life.  This happens to many.

But my body continues to function, and I am left wondering now what, if I am to “live”, I am supposed to do.  What is a worthy life?  What is the most any God could ask of us?  What is the most we can and should ask of ourselves?  Of each other?

I will likely answer this many times in many ways in coming years, but this morning the phrase that comes to mind is Grace and Gratitude.

If dissociation is death, then life is association, connection.  The essence of grace, it seems to me, is appropriateness.  It is physical balance.  It is a judgement which acts harmoniously with any circumstances or people which present themselves.  It is a ready and flexible connection with mutable circumstances such that one always blends well, interacts in a way which increases the whole, which brings pleasure and satisfaction.

Gratitude is an attitude of open welcoming, of being open to experience, and glad of it.  It is taking pleasure in the sun on your face, or the feeling of rain.  It is feeling the walls around you and the roof when it is cold outside.  It is placing a value on your friends, and feeling joy in their company.  It is welcoming the work in your life.

My personal defaults are relative rigidity and irritability.  I am describing ideals.  When you see them–and I will be looking too–figure out how to emulate them.

I am tempted to say this world is frightening and confusing, but this is not true, is it, for those who find it fascinating, beautiful and engaging?

Grace and gratitude are keys which will unlock a new world within this one. I feel this.

As I look at it, our real national emergency is dissociation.

Think about the BPD kids in Portland and elsewhere: is each and every one a massive parenting failure?  Do not some come from relatively well to do homes, with parents who did their level best to love and care for them?  Yes, this seems likely.

What else is involved?  I would hazard a guess that, if we suppose that BPD is basically two year old behavior in a biological adult–who of course would get overwhelmed by everything when operating with the emotional command and control apparatus of an infant who needs a parent–then perhaps one of the key losses in the culture war as it now stands is a clear pathway to adulthood.

Some combination of media addiction, superficial parenting, and the fact that our society never demands that people individuate and separate from the parental matrix (I would suggest that this word is multifaceted, in that in such a world nothing is truly real, since an immature person cannot see but through the eyes of others, making the whole world a mass illusion; I would further suggest, as I have in the past, that socialism for such people is simply a pathway to being a child, with a directly involved parent, their whole lives), causes perennial childishness.

Antifa, from all rational perspectives, is little more than play acting and public tantrums.  If it is true that white conservatives are the real danger, it can only be because as a group we have individuated, and are capable of effective purposive behavior at the individual level.  We are also a much greater risk for running our own companies, raising successful well adjusted families, going to church to find a higher purpose, and to be capable of giving back to our communities in meaningful and useful ways.

And even where it is not presenting itself in the street in pointless charades, dissociation is everywhere.  Life is supposed to feel meaningful.  It is not supposed to feel like you are in perennial war you cannot escape, which is how it feels I think for many if not most Americans.  The Rat Race is a war, and you cannot feel your natural, relaxed best at wartime.

So this sense of disconnection, this abstraction (which I recall Jacques Barzun among others mentioning as a defining attribute of what he called our declining, or at least decadent, civilization) is everywhere.  It makes all lives beset by it less rich, life less fun.  We should sing more, dance more, relax more.  But we don’t.  A quasi-military mindset underlies everything.