Lets Faith It

As one who struggles daily......I just want to see if i can accomplish something good by writing a bit of my processing process. because one day, it will be less important for me to feel it and be thinking about it because i will have moved through it and then, then, how will my children know that i ever had any problems to solve.....(well, they lived with me so they know i had problems) but i also want them to know that i accepted the challenge of understanding my problems without taking my problems personally. Ideally, I think of myself as separate from my problems. that is the first helpful thing, but it is not always what I choose. i also find it helpful to remember that i can choose how and when to deal with my problems. that way, when i feel overwhelmed with the problems that my problems cause i can remember that it would be easier to work on the problem if i simply start with awareness. kind of like a baby in the first two years of its life......doing alot of listening and being aware before speaking.

Anyway, at this point in my life I am seeing the effects of the way my brain learned to connect to others from experiencing the parental abuse that I suffered in my teens. In wanting to stop the chain of abuse from filtering on down the line, I have struggled dearly to learn more about healthy parenting and what it means to communicate coherently. Our family is a blended family and we have just begun to attend a 6 week program on what it takes to have a successful step family.

At the same time I am reading a book called insightful parenting. It is a little difficult for me to understand and follow completely but it is providing some light at the end of what feels like a very long and dark tunnel. I am just finishing up a section about how the brain functions as our social processing center. How attachments are made to our primary caregiver and how our brain uses that same pattern to construct future attachments to significant people in our lives......

When the brain makes different attachments it makes for different communication patterns. Here is a table showing the patterns of attachment.

Category of attachment/Parental Interactive pattern

Secure/Emotionally available, perceptive, responsive

Insecure-avoidant/Emotionally unavailable, imperceptive,
unresponsive; and rejecting

Insecure-anxious,ambivalent/Inconsistently available, perceptive, and
responsive; and intrusive

Insecure-disorganized/Frightening, frightened, disorienting,
alarming

Anyway, just trying to be aware. i think my kids and spouses and probably siblings have felt me use various combinations of these attachment models at different times. I know I can be very unpredictable. Add PMS to the mix and you have a nice cocktail for disaster. I am trying to understand the attachment models that my brain learned when i was a kid. There was definitely some of all of this going on between me and my parents and especially during the abuse i attached to my father according to the disorganized model, but with a strong dose of the ambivalent model as well. I attached to my step mother with the ambivalent and avoidant model. My mother attached mostly anxiously/ambivalently with brief windows of the secure model, but then windows of the disorganized model too.

Nice. At least its out there where I can try to understand it.