Dear Ed:

“Your mother… she would also use her mask/ persona to seem loving to you (good food, caring when you were sick) and then crush your hopes to enjoy your pain… I guess one could see that as a push-pull dynamic?“-

– Her persona (kind, generous, loving) is about hiding the anima (repressed anger/ hate) by pretending to be the opposite. But not all of her behaviors are either anger/ hate or pretense. Sometimes she genuinely felt affection towards me and towards other.

My mother started like any other child: honest and eager to please, trusting and loving. Then she experienced a series of traumas: physical violence by her father, the death of her mother, severe physical and emotional abuse by her older sister, to name three major sources of trauma.

Emotional trauma causes a fragmentation of a person’s mental-emotional self. Definition of fragmentation: the process or state of breaking or being broken into small or separate parts.

When a piece of fragile glass falls to the floor, upon hitting the floor, a physical internal stress within the glass is created, and that stress causes the glass to break. Similarly, when a person experiences severe emotional trauma, an emotional- physical internal stress within the person’s brain causes parts of the brain to break.

For example, because of trauma I experienced as a child, the part of my brain that connected words to definitions and remembered the connections broke or froze and did not develop further. This is why I have to keep looking up definition of words that I read and used hundreds or thousands of times. Also, parts of my brain that are responsible for paying attention broke or froze and did not develop further, and therefore, I’ve suffered from Attention Deficit Disorder since I was a young child. You can think of these as micro-breaks or micro-tears in the brain because these micro-tears are too small to be made visible by a medical diagnostic imaging technique.

There is a famous disorder called Multiple Personality Disorder, renamed by the DSM-4, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), colloquially known as split personality disorder. A synonyms of split: broken.

The Dana Foundation (dana. org) on DID: “the problem is not that they have more than one personality, but rather that they have less than one—a fragmentation of self rather than a proliferation of selves…. (a) difficulty integrating their memories, their sense of identity and aspects of their consciousness into a continuous whole. They find many parts of their experience alien, as if belonging to someone else…

“Evidence is accumulating that trauma, especially early in life, repeated, and inflicted by relatives or caretakers, produces dissociative disorders. DID can be thought of as a chronic, severe form of post-traumatic stress disorder…  involving fragmentation of identity, memory and consciousness”

“Another plausible neurobiological mechanism linking childhood trauma to dissociative difficulties with the integration of memory is smaller hippocampal volume…  This research indicates that chronically elevated cortisol levels may damage the hippocampus, leading to smaller size and poorer function…  a smaller hippocampus would likely limit a person’s ability to encode, store and retrieve memories and manage the emotions associated with them…. Limitations on hippocampal size and function hinder memory processing and the ability to comprehend context”.

The hippocampus is a major part of the brain, and cortisol is a stress hormone that is released in great amounts during and as a result of trauma. What the source I quoted from above says, I am paraphrasing (and greatly simplifying, I am sure) is that emotional trauma causes such internal stress within the hippocampus that the hippocampus breaks/ fragments (like the breaking of glass when it hits the floor, resulting in smaller pieces of the glass), or that it freezes and does not continue to grow, resulting  in a smaller hippocampus.

The reason why I am talking about DID is that it is an extreme result of trauma, but less extreme results exist in everyone who suffered repeated trauma, particularly in childhood.

Back to my mother: sometimes she was affectionate and loving, but you couldn’t trust or rely on that part because it was not integrated into a whole cohesive mental-emotional self, and the angry/ hateful part, being as strong, loud and vicious as it was ,made my life hell. What I wrote about here can help you, Ed, understand the complexity in fragmented people.

“Regarding therapists..  If you have general advice I’d like to hear your most important pieces” –  you mentioned two negative experiences with therapists: one blamed you and the other wanted you to get off medications (something you didn’t want to do). To prevent being blamed by yet another therapist after starting therapy, you can ask a candidate therapist (one that you are considering) if she thinks that some of the people who experience depression (or another mental condition) are at fault. You can also ask a candidate therapist what she/ he feels about psychiatric medications.

“I used to value my ability to be empathetic and to be brave enough to accept criticism and grow with it. I don’t know if these were ‘good’ values, but I was proud of them because I worked hard to achieve them… I chose to explore my understanding of emotions to be a better friend for those who wanted to connect on a deeper level” –

– I see these things as good values, very much so. You worked hard at (1) being able to be empathetic, (2) being brave,  (3) exploring your understanding of emotions and (4) being a better friend for those who want to connect on a deeper level.  Well, your hard work is very much evident in your posts, and your genuine empathy and kindness are much appreciated.

It is because of you that I further explored my understanding of emotions, as I did in this post, and it is because of you that today, I understand more than I ever did. Thank you for working hard and for putting your good values into practice as well as you do!

anita