Ameri Now at 48 Hours Agin

This is either going to be ultimately good for Ameri to experience all the discomfort and deprivation that she is contending with, or it is going to wear down her physical and mental defenses to the point of no return. Mom, says I am too gloomy about this. It is causing me anguish. I have now had two nights of broken sleep. I take medication just for that. It is being overpowered by the anxiety. I was awake from around two a.m. until first light this morning. I had a headache. I rarely have headaches. Just after first light, I feel off to sleep and had an anxiety dream of being lost on a college campus and in the city streets around the campus. I was walking, then I was driving. I was pulled over by a young arrogant police officer. My anxiety increased because he was charging me with things that I knew that I had not done. When the supervising officer arrived to review things he found some technicality that allowed me to leave without getting citations. Ameri was always delighted when Mom or I would get pulled over by the police. I don't know what she found so amusing but it was always fun for her.

Ameri always seeks out some law enforcement officer when the chips are really down. She is doing it less where she is now because she has strained her welcome. Ameri sees herself as a child of shame. Her birth mother she imagines is either dead or in dire straits. She has no father of record for her first birth certificate. She has seen that birth certificate. She does not respond to shaming language or anything about how grateful she should be. Her life is too full of shame and too many parts are missing. Mom has the ability to talk to her and be a reflective listener. She would have periods of break through. I am best at doing all the no-verbal things. I made sure she had what foods she would eat were prepared and in the refrigerator, ready for the microwave. When she would storm out the door in one of her naughty girl outfits and take off walking, I would follow and shadow her just close enough to keep her in sight. She knew that I was there. If I didn't start out soon enough, she would loiter on her way so that I could catch up. She knew the dangers of the street. She had had enough experience with the leering, wolf whistles and direct request for a little fun some place. She was both appalled and thrilled by that. We would talk about it. Ameri is a very perceptive human being. She is very intelligent. She has almost total recall for details and circumstances. Her interpretation is not always on target but she knows the details. She claims to have memories of her life before her third birthday party. Her descriptions of those memories are too full of detail and timeliness to be fabrications.

The vagaries of mental illness do not always result in taking to the streets for solace. It is in the street, however, where the mentally ill find others like themselves. The only differences are degree, magnitude, and the choice of self medication.

Ameri gets fired, but I have cats

I felt a bit of relief yesterday when I learned that Ameri was working at McDonalds. She worked two days. Today she started some verbal dust-up with a co-worker and both were canned.

Ameri called Mom to tell her the news. She is in her rapid cycling phase now. She is here for a moment and then in a detached angry state. She has lost her shelter spot in the family home where she has been staying. Out of town family are going to be staying over. This should be cause for another crisis episode. It may be that she breaks down and allows us to get her home or she will do something to get back into a hospital. The holidays, starting with Halloween, are usually troublesome. That trouble continues to around Easter. It has always been so. Ameri's birthday is in February but she is not an Aquarian as I am. It is, as if, she is reliving her birth trauma.

I spoke with my older daughter this evening. I still have to create a cover name for her. She is following my posting. When she graduated from college, she left her two cats with me while she traveled for a couple of years. I have grown very fond of those cats. They are sisters, litter mates. They are both around fifteen pounds. They are just great long cats. They are Charlotte and Emily. Charlotte is diabetic and so I must give her daily injections of insulin. Charlotte is very close to me at all times. Usually under my bare feet at the computer. Charlotte competes with the dogs. She is very aggressive at getting to any food bit that hits the floor. Emily is distant and has special times when she seeks out attention. Emily was Ameri's cat. Every night when Ameri was getting ready for bed she would search out Emily from her hiding places. She would take Emily into her bed room, close the door and snuggle with her until she fell asleep. I would always check and let Emily out when Ameri was asleep. There would be some nights when Emily would just come into Ameri's room and get up on the bed. My older daughter likes having a little sister. We have a summer tradition of getting together for a bit of resorting. Even though Ameri has done much to strain that relationship, my older daughter still holds out that Ameri will come around. We were just all together in July.

I have it! We shall call older daughter, Margae. It is just close enough and it has overtones of both her Gaelic and Teutonic ancestry.

If we, my reading public, spend enough time here together, you will get to read the story of "Waiting for Margae."

I am posting on a Politics and Current Events site. I have insinuated my MAD (Brit. sense.) bad self into the posting stream in a very cheeky way. I like cheek. Cheek always has a bit of a smile behind it. Arrogance, on the other hand, is one of my least favorite attitudes.

Ameri always had attitude. Sometimes it was abidable, sometimes not. She has a pattern that seems to be a contant outpicturing of all the hurt and deprivation she experienced in the first three months of her life. She plays it out now in the cold and snow.

Ameri has called . . .

Ameri called me from a payphone. I asked if it was cold. She said it was snowing. She had just finished her shift at McDonalds. Hooray! This is her first payroll job with taxes and FICA. It's a landmark. Her other employment has been as a stable hand and trail guide for an equestrian venue. She made great wads of money, but it just evaporated into tack, ferrier (too many choices of spelling) horseshoeing bills, vet bills and entry fees. This may just work out for her but to me it seems to me like blindfold cliff diving after consulting an out-of-date tidal chart.

So it is cold there. Ameri grew up in a southern peninsular state. I have lived in that southern peninsular state for half my life. I do not travel in winter to places where bridges have signs that say, "Bridge Freezes Before Roadway". I will take hurricanes and humidity. I'll have no more truck with snow and ice.

I suppose that I should get back to with Ameri's history. I am soft pedaling on the details and I am being creatively obtuse to protect the "perpetrators". Ameri did not have a pleasant life until she was abandoned by her first adoptive family. It may seem strange to say, but as she remembers, she was both horrified and relieved to have been given away by them. Perhaps, I will pick up the story in the next post.

The silence continues . . .

The silence continues . . .

Ameri has not called for some fifty odd hours now. This evening I will work the cellular contacts that I have. This silence may be prelude to either a partial solution or a further slide into the abyss.

I have tried to get some sales work going but my mind is not in it. I had a visit with a friend today who is having challenges with his youngest. His youngest is forty two. He is quite talented, quite handsome and will soon face either a harsh term of community control or confinement in prison. My friend has four other children. They are all quite unique and radically talented, functional and independent human beings. We have been neighbors and friends for twenty one years.

When Ameri was quite young, she would run away from home. She was cautious and predictable, however. She could always be found at my friend's house having cookies or some other treat with my friend's wife. I would like to think that tonight that she is safe in someone’s house that she can trust and not be afraid to fall asleep.

Ameri is silent again

"Everyone is born, but not everyone is born the same. Some will grow to be butchers, or bakers, or candlestick makers. Some will only be really good at making Jell-O salad. One way or another, though, every human being is unique, for better or for worse."

Opening lines of narration from

Mattilda - 1996

Ameri is thoroughly a child of the microwave, the George Forman grill and Orville Redenbacher’s "Pop-in-Bag". Boiling a pot or rice to achieve loose individual grains is not in her repertoire. For someone to learn to cook one must observe the workings of a capable cook. One must read from a recipe and follow hints and suggestions from an accomplished cook. Yesterday I gave you a list of my talents. I wish to add to them. I cook. I watched my mother. I can butcher but not slaughter. I watched my dad. I can prepare and bake a pie shell. I watched my mother. I can flush, lead and bring down a quail with a small gauge shotgun. I watched my dad. I can tear down to loose bearings and spokes and rebuild a bicycle. I watched Louis the bike guy. Ameri has a natural talent for mechanical things and some cookery skills but she is incapable of taking instruction or following a lead. It is too full of anxiety for her. She had to learn to do for herself early and under threats and pressure so she is hardly receptive to team effort. Even individual mastery of tasks is difficult because she is unable to observe patterns or intuitively follow obvious sequencing. She resists directions, helpful hints or any such typical ways of gaining mastery. Her current drama is being played out in just such a manner. It is not that she feels that she knows everything but rather that anything that anyone tells her is useless. Unless it as a brazen untruth, or an out and out fraud, she refuses to believe it. It is a very strange world that she carries around in her head. She is relatively fearless in approaching strangers. She has panhandled her way around the town she is in. She is unafraid to drop by the police station and ask for a ride somewhere. She is nervy, persistent and unyielding. She is a natural sales geek. If she survives the winter in the Midwest , can rise above the mire of faulty thinking she is in, and she can find a spot. She can sell.

It has been thirty six hours since I last heard from her. Forty eight to seventy two hours is about the limit. She will call tomorrow.

Ameri Has not Called Tonight

Ameri has not called. The law enforcement dispatcher that has had contact with her called to check up. They have not seen her to day. They obviously have had not street calls or contact with patrol officers either.

Mom wants to know what we should do if she calls. I have to bow out on tactical decisions. While I am usually at my best in small unit tactics, in this case I don't seem to be able to get the logistics and the movement of personnel just right. Give me an emergency situation with lots of movement, lots of bases to cover, people wanting help, then I am your guy. With Ameri, try as I might there is no way to meet her either head on or by attempting to flank her. She has the wits of a Jedi when she is confronted. I find that being the tough love heavy with Ameri is useless. Mom has the artistry needed to close a deal with Ameri. I am only a goof who says the wrong thing at the wrong time and I miss the close. I know the names of stars and constellations. I can identify most commercial aircraft down to production model. I can identify 99% of all classic rock and roll songs in the first bar. I read and write in ancient Greek. I can not get a handle on Ameri.

Further components of Borderline Personality Disorder

To expand on Ameri's condition that we will now call BPD, we find other references to a like condition that is called Dysphoria.

Dr. Leland Heller calls this condition Broken Happiness or Biological Unhappiness.

A serious component of Ameri's condition is that of Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

All of which may arise out of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

For me, this all adds up to this -

Human's are delicate creatures. Even though our species has been in existence for millions of years, we have either failed to work out all the design kinks or our design is growing ever more faulty. For sure our systems for coping with these conditions are growing ever more faulty. The prisons are full. The mental hospital hospitals are full and the Pharmacological Giants are growing ever richer from their patent medicines.

Ameri has come unseated from her horse on several occasions. She has had trips to the emergency room on a backboard with a neck collar on. Once she was unconscious briefly and had a saline line in her arm for the ambulance trip. None of this has caused me as much anxiety as having her on the street in a cold climate with no real intention of getting help until something dread happens.

Ameri's condition Further Defined

This is an accademic description of Ameri's condition.

Ameri is, today, in the antenuated, or weakened, cycle of this condition. She may seek to get a tattoo or a body piercing. She may thwart attempts to provide shelter or travel home by finding a puppy with which she will not part. In the opposite phase of this cycle, which emerges under stress, are to be found the extreme acts of self inflicted wounds even unto death.

Abstract: Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a diagnostic category that has been used with increasing frequency in the United States over the last decade. The attention given to the disorder, the adherence to the construct in the face of significant problems with reliability, the emotional salience with which the term is used, and the culturally specific assumptions upon which it rests, point to cultural aspects of this clinical disorder. This study begins to examine the disorder from an anthropological perspective by exploring by means of a life history method the experience of ten patients diagnosed with BPD. The techniques of grounded theory were used to identify common themes and issues in the narratives that resulted. While the clinical description of this disorder emphasizes an instability of identity, the study participants conveyed a coherent and stable identity. Also, contrary to reports of emotional instability, they had a stable dysphoria and their behavior was less impulsive than it might appear to others. Recurrent references were made to feelings of estrangement, the importance of social validation, and the wish for asylum. They had an ever-present wish to be dead, since death offered asylum, but they distinguished this from active suicidality. The depth of their despair and the constancy of their thoughts of self-harm were kept hidden from their clinicians to avoid involuntary hspitalization. Other conflicts in the therapeutic relationship were also identified. The experience described by the study participants is more congruent with other descriptions of despair than with the clinical description of BPD. Similarly, the grouping of behaviors recognized as BPD can also be found outside of the clinical domain - as a pejorative description of those economically marginal. It is suggested that the professional description reflects tensions felt by most within U.S. culture, but experienced more acutely by those who are marginal, and reflects a strong reaction that emerges from a fear of succumbing to these tensions. Like most culturally specific disorders, or disorders reflecting the distress of those who feel powerless, there are elements of rebellion in BPD and the response to it may be to render the actors powerless by declaring them mentally troubled. With BPD, as with other culturally specific disorders, the cultural expectations are not directly challenged, only the individual failure in meeting them.

Miller, Sharon Glick, April 1993 - BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

The author is now a PHd in a clinical practice.