Hitting Bottom

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That’s what I blurted out between sobs when I broke down in my therapist’s office. A decade ago I was living the life of a desperate, overeducated urban housewife. All I needed was a reality show with gossipy cohorts. I’d moved back to NYC just in time for The Great Recession, slipping into financial dependency on an increasingly abusive partner, who misconstrued my deep-rooted emotional issues around procuring and managing resources, especially in traditional office environments, as a gold-digging scheme against him. 

“I tried being nice.” my partner said, as he moved us from a sunny, centrally-located apartment with a private balcony to the far reaches of town, into a housing project with low ceilings, paper-thin walls, and a ground-floor view of the parking lot. (In case you’re wondering, an upstairs neighbor randomly blasting house music is not a cure for depression.) This moving-on-down came despite his six-figure salary with enviable job security. Under the guise of “tough love” my partner was punishing me with extra vitriol fueled by past painful/turbulent relationships with females. 

I totally get the frustration of being with someone who’s not holding their own financially (I dated a drummer once who wanted me to play mommy for an endless encore.) but the only two emotionally-evolved options are to be kind and supportive until they come around, or to walk away when you’ve had enough. Being emotionally/verbally abusive and humiliating them in front of mutual friends and random people is a sociopathic display of your emotional issues. My partner also exploited my conditioning to be pro-social to a fault, and to assume responsibility for his attacking behavior towards me. I’ve come to realize that our biggest, deepest problem was the fact that my partner did not feel lovable at his core. He was playing a sick game of confirmation bias: testing whether I would stick around in a crappy apartment while he withheld resources from me. Then, if and when I left, he could feel justified for his cruel treatment of me. “See! I told you she was only with me for my money.” For my part, I had been dysfunctional drawn to his brooding nature, way back when we started dating in our twenties. I sensed a hurt little boy in there, just like my mother sensed in my stepfather. My prior trauma, my patriarchal cult, and my ego misguided my nurturing proclivities to think I’d be the one who could and should fix him.  

If you take away one thing from this, make it the fact that caustic, damaged humans who feel unlovable at their core cannot heal until they take the first critical step of looking inward. Unfortunately, there’s a formidable Catch-22 at play, as their visceral sense of unlovability prevents them from doing just that. Furthermore, the widespread ancient archetype of an infallible super-human ruler of the universe compounds this problem. As long as caustic, damaged humans focus on obtaining and hoarding resources, they can usually deflect until their last breath. Too many misguided, nurture-leaning humans believe they are helping such damaged humans in showing them the good in humanity, without ever leveraging their nurturing power to demand that the caustic, damaged ones do the necessary introspection to heal and evolve emotionally. To you folks I say Please, find a way to break away and apply your nurturing energy toward worthy causes. Enabling caustic, damaged humans who cannot look inward due to trauma compounded by cultural norms is an epic waste of two of your most precious resources: time and energy. 

On our way home from a stage performance that I directed as part of an artist-in-residency program in Hoboken, my partner triangulated with my brother for a cheap-shot at me for not having a real job. Earlier that evening I’d been on stage during the Q&A that followed the performance, discussing my approach to directing, and challenges I had overcome in the process. I’d bet that my being in the spotlight, even one that I shared with several other women, really bugged my partner. His insanely competitive brain couldn’t let me bask in the afterglow of a successful evening, so he attacked my achilles heel. My partner’s jab triggered my brother’s protective response. My brother simply laughed off my partner’s cheap-shot, even though it had been framed as a question. 

Ironically enough, during the twenty-five tumultuous years that my brother and I lived under the same roof, it was he who seemed hell-bent to take me down a peg. I wish I could say that he has since outgrown his negative response to me being my best self, but humans are complex creatures, especially those with unaddressed early trauma then raised in a patriarchal cult. The same man who defends you against a verbally abusive partner can call you a “self-righteous bitch” as if it were your given name. My brother was great at protecting me against any threats, with one notable exception: his own hair-trigger temper. He and I had both been subjected to crib trauma, warping our perception of feminine power. Then, to make matters worse, we were practically spoon-fed misogynistic fairy tales and sanctioned toxic masculinity through our patriarchal cult. Sometimes my brother could respond to me in the present like a kind, sane human; other times he’d perceive and respond to our slightest disagreement or any effort on my part to rise above the status of lowly female ascribed by the patriarchy as if I were an existential threat to him, as if his very survival was contingent on controlling and oppressing me.

When you independently obtain the means to get yourself where you need to be, you are in a much better position to decide who is worthy of the ride.

Later in bed the night of my theater directing debut, I was jolted awake by a nightmare in which a snake I’d been walking alongside coiled up to strike my ankle. The dream was so vivid that I had kicked my leg behind me in my sleep as if it had been real. Too shaken to fall back asleep, I found myself in the kitchen staring at the lineup of helpers I’d enlisted to get me through the night: a bowl of Cheerios, a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, and a bottle of Godiva Liquor. The Cheerios were for the recalcitrant inner child in me who’d been preventing me from adulting fully. My partner was the reason I could afford the Godiva Liquor, and also the reason that I needed the Pepto-Bismol. 

Monday morning I was in my therapist’s office for the mental health version of an urgent care visit. In response to my outburst of utter despair, she was professionally and morally obligated to ask if I had been contemplating suicide. 

Thank Gaia I find human behavior endlessly fascinating, and was committed to understanding how my crib trauma and patriarchal cult had affected me. My proclivity toward psychology balanced out the exhausting emotional upheaval that is par for the course of dialectical behavior therapy. If not for my weekly sessions, the gentle guidance of my therapist Kelly, and for the fact that it had been drilled into me since I was a little girl that it would be a cardinal sin for me to leave behind any kind of mess for someone else to clean up, I might not be here today to blog about this dark chapter in my life.

Dissecting my issues around resource procurement and independent adulting has led me to some mind-blowing discoveries, not only about myself and my birth tribe, but about humanity in general. For example, I’ve realized that the modern paradigm for resource procurement, that I call the D.I.M.E. (Dominating Infallible Masculine Entity) Paradigm, in which a great majority of adult humans are separated from natural resources and reduced to a child-like state of dependency on remote resource hoarders, is unnatural and regressive. As you’ll see by reading on, I lived this scenario as an infant and toddler, knowing instinctively that I’d been placed in a precarious position, despite my mother’s nonchalance, entranced as she was by contrived worlds being played out in our intimate space via the television. My distress around being confined away from natural resources including my mother was appropriate and justified, as is the angst of humans who are stuck on the proverbial hamster wheel in big city life, or worse still, out on the streets surrounded by concrete and steel. Collectively as the civilized world, we are losing out on a precious resource: humans’ full potential. The planet is paying dearly for this disconnect as well. Joni Mitchell was right: We’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden.

Below is some of what else I’ve learned, besides the fact that if your partner shows up in your dreams as a coiled snake then it’s time for an exit strategy. Heads up for fans of the scalarious stories of my “yoot” in NYC, this material is heavier and the tone more straight-forward. 

Let me know you’re out there, wontcha? 

Click that blue button on the bottom right to say hello and opt-in to be the first kid on your block to read my next insight or scalariously cringeworthy story, likely quarterly. Don’t worry, I’m not prolific enough to inundate you with emails. MB

When I was in my mid-thirties, I was showing the man I was dating at the time memorabilia that I had brought to Los Angeles from New York City, where I had been raised. Included in the mix were a pair of thirty-five-year-old hospital bracelets: one about the size of my wrist, the other so tiny that I could barely fit two fingers in it. Yellowed with age, I could just make out the matching identifying info “Girl Baccala”. I knew that the tiny bracelet was from when I was born. Odd thing was, I’d never consciously made the connection to the adult-sized bracelet. “That one was for your mother.” he said matter-of-factly. I burst into tears, overwhelmed with a sense of loss, even though my mother was still very much alive, and we kept in touch. The grief was for the maternal bonding she had failed to establish with me once we left the hospital together as mother and daughter. It was for a childhood and young adulthood deprived of the critical nurturing protective energy an emotionally-well mother provides, and for the physical and emotional safety needed for a natural, healthy development into independent adulting.

You see throughout my infancy my mother dissociated from me. Instead of maintaining fairly consistent physical and/or visual contact with me, she routinely left me in my crib in another room of our basement apartment for hours on end, following an extreme interpretation of the cry-it-out method adopted by our culture after my great-grandmother lost four children in two days during a plague in Sicily. More on this in my short story “Rose the Jew”. As a general rule, my mother tended to me only if it was time for my bottle (Breast feeding is for sissies.) or if I needed a change of diapers. Instead of coming to me and hugging me when I cried for her in distress, she turned up the television or radio to drown me out. To soothe her own crippling anxiety, my mother chose a habit that she’d picked up at the tender age of twelve to rebel against her own dissociated mother: smoking cigarettes. Interestingly enough, it’s a habit that provides oral stimulation similar to sucking on mother’s nipple.  

Since my mother had been subjected to crib abandonment herself, I suspect that my distress was a trigger for her. Likely the more that I cried from the other room, the more I dredged up her own early trauma from being ignored when distressed and crying for comfort. Instead of realizing that as an adult and a mother, she had the power to change the outcome— and heal herself in the process— she blocked me out, never stopping to think about the devastating damage she was causing to my developing brain and nervous system. Infants and toddlers are not designed to be separated from their mothers for extended periods and then ignored when they cry out in distress. How is it that our chimp cousins know better than we do? I understand that primary caregivers who are busy as heck need to put baby down sometimes. The last thing I want to do is chastise my fellow females juggling work and motherhood. In fact, I could write a book on the double-victimizing of mothers. If anything I hope that my story drives home the point that collectively as a civilized society we have an obligation to provide caregivers with the emotional and tangible resources to fulfill their responsibilities to their dependents unencumbered by the overwhelming stress of feeling inept and being dependent themselves on damaged, aggros and/or callous half-bot humans.

Also, I understand that the weaning process includes self-soothing training. However, it is critical to the development of the infant that the process be done gradually and at the right stages of development, otherwise it completely backfires from the supposed intent to build resiliency and the infant grows up to be yet another angst-ridden human unable to self-soothe in a healthy way, ergo susceptible to a whole host of unhealthy ways to cope: cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, dominating and exploiting other humans from afar, just to name a few.

When I managed to escape my crib as a toddler and crawl across two rooms to be with my mother, she promptly returned me to my crib, eventually confining me in it with a carriage strap. As a result, my resting mode became one of existential dread as I was separated from my lifeline, confined in an unnatural environment, alone and helpless. 

As far as my little brain could tell, I’d been left for dead. 

My mother’s rejection and maltreatment of me thwarted my emotional development beyond words. For starters, my relationship with my mother was fubar, make that FUBAR. Without my mother physically and emotionally bonding with me or perceiving me as a lovable, valuable, investible extension of herself, I was little more than a burden to her, especially in a patriarchal culture that reduces females to a lower tribal status straight out of the gate, so to speak. I touch on my mother’s lack of empathy in Pee & Circumstance. Without my mother’s protection I was an easy target for males desperate to prove their manliness by controlling tribal resources, females included. By the time I entered first grade I had been subjected to emotional, spiritual and physical abuse. As I grew, not only would my mother condone my abuse at the hands of damaged aggro members of our tribe, double-victimizing me for their inability to control their rage and aggression, on more than one occasion she actually aided in the abuse. When I was a fifteen, my mother helped lock me out of the house and then mocked me as I attempted to get back in, triggering my crib trauma by separating herself from me in my state of distress and responding callously to my appeal to her humanity. This type of abuse and worse would continue throughout my adolescence and beyond, until I moved out in my twenties. 

I was burdened with a deep-rooted misperception that I was inherently repulsive at my core. I carried a visceral sense of self-loathing that was compounded by the abuse by those close to me who were supposed to support me. Scapegoating exists because aggros often excel at “making a killing” and desperate enablers are conditioned to admire this trait so much that they turn a blind eye when aggros show off their predatory prowess on their unfortunate targets. Damaged humans in general need someone to dump their ugly on. 

In my teen years I developed intense anger toward my mother for failing to nurture and protect me. One of my biggest regrets is being verbally abusive to her then. I had yet to understand the complexity of the situation, or how my mother had been a pawn to the patriarchy and subjected to crib trauma herself.

Also burdened with a deep-rooted sense of futility and neediness, I was susceptible to abuse by anyone who held power over me, especially males. The archaic gender roles and repeated teachings throughout my childhood that a rage-prone, über-masculine entity rules the universe and is righteously above criticism conditioned me for easy exploitation by manipulative, callous males driven by an insatiable need to dominate. I tended to shrink around forceful, adversarial, intimidating energy, especially in enclosed environments in which survival is at stake, such as office environments. Throughout my career, I’ve found that way more often than not corporate cultures are woefully lacking in protective, nurturing energy. Attempting to obtain resources while removed from Nature triggered both the distressed mindset of a helpless infant in a basement apartment, and the submissive position I was expected to maintain in my cult’s house of worship, where decorated males run the show from an elevated platform while the rest of us sit or kneel down below, repeating what we are told or vocalizing only in agreement until we are rewarded for our submissiveness with a taste of food and drink, followed by permission to leave. In my desperate, reparative quest for mother’s love, I was even more responsive to herd mentality than the average child. Expressing my disagreements with my cult’s misogynistic fairy tales would’ve left me ostracized and removed from tribal resources. Already considered lowly because of my gender and lineage (born to the daughter of our misogynistic matriarch, as opposed to the prized son of her prized son) I had been brainwashed to equate challenging the status quo with putting my very existence at stake with food insecurity and expulsion. Who wants to end up even worse than Eve: expelled from Eden ALONE? 

Despite being an excellent student with an IQ in the top two percentile, I struggled to initiate and complete even relatively simple tasks in non-academic environments, due to crippling performance anxiety and claustrophobia from my crib trauma. After all, my first attempt to fix a dire situation shattered my whole perception of myself navigating my immediate surroundings. Initiating and successfully completing my part of the single most critical task of my life: connecting with and appealing to mother to share her resources with me, resulted in solitary confinement separated from food, Nature and my lifeline. I deeply and subconsciously associated conceiving and implementing a plan to reach a goal, especially under pressure, with courting death. I had a hyperactive response to stimuli, and difficulty discerning what stimuli around me was safe and necessary, and what could be ignored, aka sensory disinhibition.

As I grew into a young woman, my mother viewed me as competition. Instead of being proud of my abilities and achievements, she was threatened by them. Likewise by my independent streak and critical thinking. It’s as though she could only tolerate me if I were perfectly aligned with her worldview and unable to leave. No longer able to strap me in the crib, she now resorted to emotional manipulation such as guilt. In my late twenties when I decided to relocate across the country for post-graduate studies, she boycotted the family send-off from the airport and spoke derisively about the top university I would be attending. This was her very un-evolved way of saying that she didn’t want me to leave. That’s the most heart-wrenching thing about damaged people in our lives, isn’t it? They are incapable of treating us well even though they desperately want us to stick around. 

It wasn’t until I enlisted the gentle and informed guidance of a licensed psychotherapist that I was able to begin the healing process. It’s taken over a dozen years of regular dialectical behavior therapy sessions just to be here now, writing about among other things, my mother’s maltreatment of me and how it affected me. I needed to clearly, fully, and deeply understand that it was unnatural and wrong, and that my successful attempt as a toddler to connect with my mother face-to-face IRL should’ve resulted in the reward of comfort, security, and adoration, as Nature intended.   

I needed to explore the vast array of emotional issues and cultural forces that drove my mother to suppress her Gaia-given maternal instinct toward her own daughter who, of all of her children, physically resembled her the most. My mother was very much a product of her environment, severely compromised after being subjected to crib abandonment as an infant, and then raised in a toxic, patriarchal culture that idolizes male rage and tyranny. After three generations of damaged mothers dissociating from their infant children in distress, the vital nurturing component of our culture had been decimated. Enter co-dependent capitalism and broader culture influences. Thousands of humans alive and long dead, near and far, regularly influenced my mother’s behavior as they reduced her to worshipper, or viewer, or consumer. They exploited her indiscriminate friendliness (a common residual side-effect to crib abandonment) and sense of trust she felt because either they manipulated her when she was just a child, or she felt as though via television that characters and company spokespeople were in her living room with her. They used sophisticated means with sizable resources to get into her head and influence her behavior. Yet not one human in all of this was incentivized to guide my mother back to her innate maternal state of caring for her young. No one helped her understand that she had the power to make a positive impact on my life, and that it was her priority and responsibility to do just that. Neither co-dependent capitalism or our Dominating Infallible Masculine Entity (DIME) adoring cult is designed for that.  

The tobacco farmer in Kentucky, for example, was too busy providing for his own family the only way he knew how. I can’t begrudge him for that. It is the normalized cannibalistic and greed-driven mentality of the top feeders, as well as the breakdown of community and a cult that exploited my mother’s crib trauma that failed my mother and I both. As a human without deep pockets in my diapers, I was collateral damage. What enrages me the most about my cult is the fact that my mother had been deliberately blinded to her own intrinsic nurturing power, including the fact that she could make a long-lasting positive impact on the precious little human that she had carried inside of her for nine months. All she had to do was pull herself away from frivolous distractions and make her breasts available, as nature intended, an act didn’t even require pure altruism since physical contact between a mother and child is a symbiotic pleasure, providing a natural high for both of them. It would’ve been a much healthier choice for her than cigarettes or being a passive observer to fictional worlds on a screen in her living room. I calculated that by the time I was born, our cult had roughly eleven thousand hours of my mother’s undivided attention in ceremonial rituals in our house of worship, not to mention at informal tribal gatherings. Why was it that at no point did she learn that birthing a healthy, intelligent daughter was a miracle of Nature and cause for celebration and reverence, and that her daughter was a valuable asset as a stand-alone, not only as means to attract males aligned with cult teachings?

Only through taking a deep dive into such influencing factors was I able to forgive my mother for her cruelty and neglect. Her emotional development was dealt a devastating blow during her own infancy, and then her brain was hijacked by other factors way before I was born. Humans who operated remotely, who never witnessed how their efforts affected her daily behavior or enabled her to ignore her infant were granted access to her intimate space via electronics and technology. My mother dissociated from the most beautiful, precious part of herself: the phenomenal power of a mother’s love for her child, and the power of nurturing energy in general, including its capacity to heal the broken inner-child of one’s own psyche. 

Through dehumanizing me, my mother dehumanized herself. 

Being in the presence of a mother and infant daughter disturbed her. My mother once slammed the door on the face of a neighbor who’d brought her infant daughter over for the first time. Decades later she responded in a similarly anti-social way toward a relative who popped in with her infant daughter. Ok, maybe they could’ve called first (This was long before texting.) but still.

Forgiveness has made space for perspective and gratitude. The problem that my mother and I faced is timeless and universal. Had I been born in China when it was a one-child nation, for example, I’d bet my mother would’ve completely abandoned me like so many desperate, disenfranchised Chinese mothers did with their infant daughters when they felt that their own survival hinged on raising a son. Had I been born in a region where female genital mutilation is practiced… Let’s just say I’m lucky to be alive with my entire vagina intact. I’m grateful that I possessed the tenacity and whatever else it took to survive such a precarious infancy, childhood and adolescence with Nature’s intended nurturer and protector incapacitated and dissociated from me. That is no small feat, especially in NYC during one of its most dangerous eras. 

The bond between mother and her children, like that of Gaia and us humans, is a sacred one that should be treated as such. Unnatural interference from desperate, damaged and depraved dominators whose co-dependent parasitic existence is contingent on exploiting their fellow humans’ weaknesses is driving humans to dehumanize one another, dehumanizing the entire species in the process. We need as many humans as possible to be emotionally evolved and properly socialized. Those who have been damaged by trauma, especially during their early development owe it to themselves, their fellow humans, and all living creatures to look inward and do the work involved in healing themselves, getting back in touch with their empathy, and reconnecting to Nature. The future of humanity and the Planet depends on it. MB

Thank you Attachment Parenting International for sharing this article with your subscribers.