In the Broadway musical 42nd Street, a young dancer named Peggy Sawyer hops a bus for Manhattan to seek fame and fortune. Cast as a chorus girl in a big new show, Peggy is soon plucked out of obscurity and given the leading role. When the show becomes a hit, Peggy magically transforms from a broke nobody into a celebrated star. Her talent and moxie have made her the toast of New York.
As I drove through the Lincoln Tunnel to start my new life in the city, I figured that’s just how things would happen for me.
I wasn’t a dancer, nor did I harbor ambitions to act or sing professionally. But I was a writer with visions of making it on the Great White Way. I was going to be the next Neil Simon, minus the hair loss and the Jewish mother. First stop, Greenwich Village. Next stop, the Tony Awards.
Of course, anyone who’s ever opened the Preppy Handbook knows that my low-brow show-biz ambitions are nowhere to be found on its plaid pages. As the Preppy, I should’ve been headed to Vassar with dreams of winning a tennis tournament, not a Tony. But the Preppy wasn’t in charge anymore. During high school, the identity I call Mooch had taken over as the dominant personality and was now running the show.
In DID, the alternate personality who can best handle a situation is usually the one who is “out.” In high school, as I began to experience personal conflicts, it made sense that the hardened Mooch started to take charge. When a person has multiple personalities, distinct emotions like joy, contentment, or rage are often divvied up among the alters. Mooch holds anger and ambition. She’s the fighter in my personality system. So when it came time to fight my way to the top, she naturally took charge.
Mooch, like Michelle, was a teenager. Like all adolescents, she went through the natural process of defining herself, of asking, Who am I? In Mooch’s case, she was an outgoing, outspoken diva who thrived on drama. So she set her sights on the stage. She defined herself as the Writer—a witty, urbane New Yorker, blunt and street smart, who liked big sweaters with patches on the elbows, used bookstores, and black coffee. Like the Preppy, the Writer was pure stereotype. She was based on writer characters in plays like Deathtrap and Brighton Beach Memoirs and movies like Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters. (My father was a big Woody Allen fan. Hmm.) Never mind that all these characters were middle-aged men. Never mind that their experiences in the city had nothing to do with my rural white-trash life. The Writer didn’t come from white trash. She was a Manhattan sophisticate. At the age of sixteen, she already had a subscription to the New Yorker and scanned the real estate section of the New York Times on a regular basis to ascertain which Upper East Side apartment she would soon buy.
Remembering this now, I can chuckle at my airs and naïveté. As teenagers, we do and think some silly things while figuring out who we will be in life. With DID, though, things get out of hand. Having no core sense of self, I didn’t try on affectations; I became whatever role was necessary to get through life. These roles were cast subconsciously by my psyche to ensure my safety. As I contemplated adulthood, life felt precarious. I had no money and was keenly aware that even a minor crisis could render me homeless. In order to feel safe, I needed money. Idiot that I was, I thought the road to riches was paved with words. (Oh, how I wish my mind had created the Investment Banker instead!)
There’s another reason I felt unsafe. Having been a victim, I believed that people were generally malicious. In my mind, everyone was out to hurt me, and I felt powerless to protect myself against a cruel world. Young people who feel disempowered, as I did, are at a serious disadvantage. In order to alleviate our feelings of weakness, we tend to glom on to others who seem strong. This makes us susceptible to abusive partners, charismatic cult leaders, gangs, even hostile political and religious movements. Those who lack the social skills to team up with stronger individuals—loners—often attempt to take back their power by seeking revenge on whoever they believe stole it. Most school shootings are committed by these types of people. Many serial rapists and murderers are also motivated by a need to exert power over the types of people they once felt powerless against.
I never wanted to hurt anybody, but I couldn’t stand feeling powerless either. In my mind, I was a Nobody, and Nobodies are vulnerable to all manner of ill treatment. In order to be safe, I subconsciously deduced that I needed to become a Somebody. In my teenage world, Somebodies were entertainment types—actors, singers, writers. So my psyche created the Writer, an identity hellbent on acquiring fame and fortune. She was ready for a fresh start, one unencumbered by the baggage of the past.
—
IN THE SITCOM VERSION of the story, that plan might have worked. But in the real world, trauma is not so easily overcome. Violence has psychological consequences for victims. And a whole lot of violence has a whole lot more. When you see the happy faces of people who have just escaped atrocities—kidnapping victims, Holocaust survivors, soldiers returning from war—their smiles are just the start of a long road ahead. Relief before reality sets in.
The reality is this: Violence changes a person in permanent, profound, existential ways. Once you experience the horrible things one human being can do to another, it’s hard to trust anybody ever again. Once you’ve faced death, you never really feel safe. And once you know that atrocity exists, it shatters your faith in God and humanity. As a result of this darkened worldview, people emerge from trauma with predictable symptoms. They are detached from others. They feel that they are in constant danger, and they fear that life has no meaning.
So, despite my desire to magically morph into a carefree college student, I was anything but. The problems started the minute I walked into my dorm room, a ridiculously small space that was not built for the three girls it was going to house. Being the last to arrive, I was forced to take the top of a bunk bed. The normal bed—already claimed by the first girl to move in—was pushed against the only window. I could’ve lived without the view and probably made peace with the bunk. What I couldn’t stand was my roommate’s television. From the minute I walked in the room and heard the blare of amplified voices, my heart sank. My stomach twisted into knots.
I already knew I hated the sound of TVs. At home, my mother kept one on nonstop. The incessant noise bothered me, especially when I tried to sleep, and I often begged her to turn the damn thing off. Irritation, though, was not what I was feeling on the first day in that dorm room. The small room, coupled with the noise of the television, made me feel like the walls were closing in. My heart raced; my body shook. I started to feel nauseated. I dumped my bags and got the hell out as fast as I could.
I spent the first few weeks of college avoiding the room as much as possible. I hung in the rec room or the laundry room or the hallways—anywhere I could feel calm. The problem was: The sound of a television wasn’t the only thing that freaked me out. I could be in class, in the cafeteria, out on the street when, seemingly out of nowhere, I’d be crawling out of my skin. My breath would quicken. My vision would narrow. The whole world would turn darker, as if an ominous cloud were about to envelop me.
I didn’t understand what was happening at the time, nor would I for many years. But what I was feeling was anxiety—so severe that it often escalated into full-blown panic attacks. Never knowing why or when these attacks would occur became a terror of its own. I found myself doing anything to avoid them. That meant drastically restricting my life. I couldn’t join clubs. I couldn’t go to parties. Hell, I could barely go to class! My failure to assimilate made me lose hope in the future. I sunk into a cavernous depression.
These are classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, the disorder soldiers bring back from war. I’d been through a war on the domestic front, so PTSD made sense. Except I didn’t know I’d been through a war. I still had traumatic amnesia. So instead of recognizing the effects of abuse, I just thought I was crazy.
Eventually, my inability to live with roommates forced me to give up my bed in NYU’s coveted dorm in the Village and move to a hotel the school was renting nearly thirty blocks from campus. The Hotel Seville was in a dicey neighborhood filled with drug addicts and hookers. But, hey, I got my own room.
I thought living alone would be easier, and in many ways, it was. I didn’t have to deal with the blare of a television or the gum snapping of a roommate. The hotel, which was in the process of being remodeled, was practically vacant, so there were no loud parties and hardly any talking in the halls. As long as I stayed alone in my room, I felt pretty safe.
—
UNFORTUNATELY, IN THE ABSENCE of anxiety, depression took center stage. How could it not with my sitting alone day after day in a dingy hotel room? I had no friends back home to call and no family. There were no more early-morning coffee runs to the dorm cafeteria and no late-night talks with other coeds. I just sat in that room feeling empty and lost and hopeless. Was this the great college experience in New York I had dreamed about? Was this my big escape? All of the drive and determination I had mustered to get away from Gary seemed to disappear. Without his control, I felt like a hollow shell.
I needed something to occupy my time. I needed pleasure. Comfort. I found all of these things in food. There was a twenty-four-hour deli across the street from the hotel. It was filled with cookies, candy, ice cream, cakes. At first, I bought these things because I was hungry. Then I started to buy them because I was lonely and bored. But after voraciously downing an entire bag of Vienna Fingers one day, I found that the old panicky feeling returned. I was worried about gaining weight. So I went to the bathroom, put my head over the toilet, and put my finger down my throat. I threw up the cookies, which made the panic go away.
Almost immediately, this became my daily routine. First once, then twice a day. Pretty soon the entire day felt like a nonstop binge. Go to the deli, pick up the food, bring it back to the privacy of my room, shove it in my mouth fast and methodically, wait for the nauseous feeling to wash over me, go and throw it all up. Exhausted, sleep for a few hours. Repeat. This is how I spent my days during freshman year. It gave me a way to occupy myself and allowed me to hide the deeper hunger inside.
It wasn’t a panacea, though. I was still battling anxiety and depression—although I had no words for what I was feeling at the time. No self-awareness. I only knew that I felt awful and lost. Moreover, I was gaining weight and flunking out of school. Desperate for help, I made an appointment at NYU Mental Health. After a brief assessment, some lady in a tiny room told me I had bulimia. I was vaguely familiar with the term, though I hadn’t realized it applied to me. Again, zero self-awareness. They put me in a group that dealt with eating disorders.
Groups were not my thing, though. People were not my thing at that time—especially girls my own age. I didn’t know how to relate to them and their seemingly white-bread worlds. When they boohooed over Mommy and Daddy’s divorce or the ballet teacher calling them fat, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. I had come from so much violence, so much deprivation, that the problems of normal people were foreign to me.
You’re sad that Daddy doesn’t call you as much since he got a new family? Try not having a father at all, even on your birth certificate. You’re upset that Mommy suffocates you? Try having a mother who throws shoes at your head.
I realize now that I was being terribly callous. My parents had never shown me empathy, so I was incapable of feeling it for others. Instead, all I felt was jealousy, anger, and contempt for these girls and their perfect little lives. I also felt shame because I knew that deep down I was way more fucked up than anyone else in the group. My family, my life experiences, my mental health problems were so extreme that I felt like an alien. The other girls started to make friends with one another and get better. I just got more depressed.
The facilitator of the group noticed. Dr. Taylor was a psychiatry resident at Bellevue who also worked at NYU. I don’t know what, specifically, made him flag me. But one day he pulled me aside and said the group wasn’t a good fit. He offered to see me privately for psychotherapy. Sure. Why not? He seemed like a nice enough guy. A few days later, I found myself walking east on Twenty-ninth Street toward the infamous Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital.
—
BELLEVUE, CIRCA 1986. What can I say? It made the place in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest seem like a resort. Outside, it was an old Gothic building. The grimy windows were covered by metal bars, and there was soot an inch thick on the crumbling stone walls. The place looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since it was built two hundred years ago. No one had bothered to tend the grounds either. The sorry shrubs were either overgrown or dead, and there were more weeds than cement on the sidewalk. Off to the side of the building, I found a nondescript door with a small sign that read OUTPATIENT SERVICES. I entered to find a dimly lit waiting room with flickering fluorescent bulbs, broken plastic chairs, and cracked linoleum floors. It felt like the set of a horror movie. Some nurse-type women were behind bulletproof glass. They gave me a couple of forms to fill out and told me to pay seven dollars. I sat down in one of the plastic chairs. In front of me was a wild-haired old woman yelling at no one. To my right was a twentysomething guy who kept twitching and smelled like urine. For a girl from the sticks, Bellevue was shocking.
Shit, I thought. If I’m here, I must be really nuts.
Eventually, Dr. Taylor came out to fetch me. I followed him through the foul-smelling hallway to his office. I don’t remember much of what we talked about, just that it felt awkward. At some point, he told me I felt “sad.” This was news to me. I mean, I didn’t want to cry or anything. My problem was that I felt nothing at all. But he said I was depressed and gave me a prescription for the antidepressant imipramine. After filling my prescription at the Bellevue pharmacy, I walked back to the Seville, stopping at a deli along the way. I took a bag full of junk food back to my hotel room, downed it, and threw it up.
In the following days, I continued to do the same. The only difference was the little white pills, which I started to take faithfully.
I began seeing Dr. Taylor on a regular basis. Once a week, I’d make the trek over to First Avenue for our fifty-minute session. For the life of me, I can’t remember anything we talked about. School, I guess. The bulimia. We should’ve been talking about the abuse I’d suffered. Unfortunately, I couldn’t talk about something I didn’t remember. I had all the symptoms of abuse—anxiety, depression, self-esteem problems, trust issues, eating disorder—but no clue why. As long as my psyche was committed to self-deception, psychotherapy was pointless. There was nothing to talk about. Nothing real, anyway. And try as he might, Dr. Taylor could never make an in. I couldn’t let him because subconsciously I knew I couldn’t handle what he would find.
Nonetheless, I kept going to the appointments. I kept taking the pills. And little by little things began to change.
Unfortunately, they got worse.
In the fall, I’d been panicky and lost. By spring, I was downright suicidal. I don’t know if it was the pills or therapy or what, but everything careened downhill. I was bingeing and purging constantly. I almost never left my room, causing my GPA to plummet. I had very little social contact and no desire to do or accomplish anything. What was the point? No matter what I tried, it was bound to turn to shit.
Like so many people who have been held captive, I’d spent my time dreaming of escape. In my fantasies, I assumed that freedom would be easy and wonderful and perfect, but that was magical thinking. When we are stuck in prolonged crisis—war, slavery, domestic abuse, kidnappings—we are forced to focus on survival. In order to muster the strength to stay alive and get away, we have to believe that escape will bring unbridled happiness. What we can’t imagine is how hard it will be to adjust to a world of normal people who don’t understand what we’ve been through. Nor can we comprehend how much the crisis has changed and damaged us. When we realize that life after trauma can be just as hard, or harder, than life during trauma, our fantasy of carefree happiness is shattered. That’s when a deep, immutable hopelessness can set in.
—
AT FOURTEEN, I’d been quite dramatic about my suicidality. There were lots of dark drawings and morose poems, lots of moping around the halls. I’d been crying out for help back then, hoping someone would stop and take notice. At eighteen, the experience was different. I was truly and utterly hopeless. I couldn’t delude myself into believing anyone gave a shit whether I lived or died. So I kept my urges to myself. I didn’t even tell Dr. Taylor how bad I really felt. I didn’t tell him how I’d lie in the dark for hours trying to imagine what it would be like to not exist. I didn’t tell him how often I counted out those little white pills he gave me, just to make sure I had enough.
As spring came to a close, I knew my time was running out. The semester would be over soon, and I’d made no living arrangements for the summer. That meant I would have to go home to New Jersey. To my mother. To Gary. Thinking about it made my stomach turn. The only thing that gave me solace was the fact that during my high school years I had gone to great pains to fix up one of the barns in my parents’ backyard. The two-story structure, once storage for hay and equipment, had fallen into disrepair. Wanting some privacy and peace, I had personally taken on the work and expense of remodeling it. With help from some DIYer friends, I’d put up Sheetrock and laid wall-to-wall carpeting. I’d even bought myself a little sofa bed and an air conditioner so I could sleep there at night.
On the day I packed up my belongings and boarded the bus back to New Jersey, I knew it would be a rough summer. I’d barely talked to my mother or Gary since I left for New York, a silence that suited all three of us. The only thing that would make the summer bearable was the fact that I would not actually be living with them. I would be in my little barn. Alone. Safe.
When I got to the barn, however, there was a rude surprise. My mother, a bit of a hoarder, had filled the entire place with junk. Old furniture and dusty boxes were piled floor to ceiling. It was so packed that I could barely open the door, much less live there. My mother knew what the barn meant to me; she knew how much time and money I had poured into it. She knew I planned to live there. Yet she gave me no warning about its condition. This was my mother being her typical immature self. The crap in the barn was a game—her way of saying she was glad to be rid of me and didn’t want me back.
But I had nowhere else to go. I felt trapped and frantic—not a good combo when one is depressed. I ran into the house and demanded that my mother move her things. With smug satisfaction, she refused. Desperate for sanctuary, I begged and pleaded. Tears streamed down my face as I implored my mother to show mercy. The scene was reminiscent of ten years earlier when at the age of eight I had begged my mom not to move in with Gary. She ignored me this time as she had before, with a contemptuous countenance that screamed, How dare you presume to inconvenience me!
Distraught and enraged, I went crazy, impetuously grabbing my purse and pulling out the imipramine inside. In a nanosecond, I popped off the cap and swallowed the entire bottle in front of my mother.
I suppose there are a lot of emotions a mother can have when watching her daughter down a lethal dose of pills. Shock. Panic. Horror. Disbelief. Distress.
My mother was pissed. She demanded I throw up the pills, adding in some snide comment about my bulimia. I refused to throw up. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to live. Frustrated, she turned to Gary, who’d been ignoring the scene silently from his La-Z-Boy, and told him to drive me to the emergency room. Gary refused, saying, “If a person wants to kill themselves, we should let ’em.”
Still raging, my mother picked up her keys and told me get in the car. I was already feeling groggy and lacked the energy to resist. The car ride is a blank; I guess I was already blacking out by the time I got to the emergency room.
That’s when I slipped into cardiac arrest and died.
Unlike the mild over-the-counter sleeping pills I’d taken five years earlier, imipramine is an old-school powerful antidepressant quite capable of causing fatality. Had I not been in the emergency room when its effects kicked in, I doubt I’d be around to tell this tale. I’m grateful to the doctors who resuscitated me. But at the time, not so much. When I woke up in the CCU, in fact, the first thing I did was yank the IV out of my arm.
I wanted to die all over again.
—
ON FEBRUARY 21, 1944, a twenty-four-year-old chemist was sent to Auschwitz along with 650 other Italian Jews. Eleven months later, when the camp was liberated, 620 of those people were dead. By a stroke of luck, the chemist survived and, within a few months, resumed his former life. Neither his family nor his property had been lost, allowing the young man to quickly proceed with life. He married, had children, and enjoyed a thirty-year career in chemistry. By all external measures, Primo Levi not only survived but also thrived.
Despite all this, the chemist, who would eventually become a world-renowned author, did not walk away from Auschwitz unscathed. He brought back a darkness that stayed with him throughout his life—and may have eventually ended it.
In his memoirs, Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening, Levi expressed that darkness while describing the horrors of the Holocaust and its aftermath. For the next forty years, nearly everything Levi wrote was about his relatively brief time in the camp. Clearly, he remained preoccupied and troubled by the trauma he’d endured as a young man, and by middle age, he began to suffer serious depression. He was suffering from depression even forty years after the war and was certainly suffering on the day he took his own life. While there are myriad reasons for one to commit suicide, Levi’s family and friends feel he was never able to shake the darkness of the Holocaust. As fellow survivor Elie Wiesel noted, “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later.”
It seems contradictory that someone would struggle to survive a death camp only to take their own life after escaping. Nonetheless, it’s a common phenomenon. Among the elderly, Holocaust survivors have been three times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers, and there’s a long list of notable Holocaust survivors who have taken their own lives. Art Spiegelman, creator of the graphic novel Maus, lost his survivor mother to suicide. Later, in attempting to understand her death, Spiegelman visited psychiatrist survivor Paul Pavel, who told him, “The only thing a survivor can do is to kill himself . . . After the optimism of liberation all the optimisms fail.”
While I disagree with the notion that the only thing survivors of horror can do is kill themselves, I know firsthand the pull of suicidality. We who go through trauma, especially long-term trauma, come out the other side with a host of symptoms that can make liberation its own living hell. That’s mostly because our bodies don’t get the memo to calm down after the peril has passed. Instead, we remain in a state of hypervigilance, always ready for the next attack.
We startle easily, especially at things that remind us of the original trauma (e.g., vets who duck and cover when a car backfires), and suffer insomnia in our misguided efforts to stay alert. Always on edge, it’s no wonder we become emotionally exhausted, making us irritable, detached from others, and disinterested in things that used to be fun. In addition, our minds seem unable to let go of the terrible things that have happened, causing us to experience distressing recollections, nightmares about the trauma, and terrifying flashbacks in which the event seems to actually reoccur. Naturally, we try to block out these upsetting memories, leading us to avoid talking or thinking about the experience, but avoidance only makes symptoms worse.
Of course, not everyone responds to trauma the same way. Some people can endure a traumatic event and come out the other side only mildly affected; others become psychologically crippled for life.
Why does trauma cause long-term problems for some people and little or no symptoms for others? The age, background, and coping skills of the victim have something to do with it. Not surprising, the type of trauma a person suffers also seems to make a difference. While there’s no magic formula to measure this stuff, in general, the more severe a trauma, the more severe its effects. Natural disasters are usually easier to cope with than violence, and a single violent event (e.g., a rape) tends to be less damaging than something long-term (e.g., sexual slavery).
Long-term repeated trauma—the kind that happens in wars, imprisonments, kidnappings, cults, domestic abuse, child abuse, and ongoing sexual abuse—is generally the most psychologically damaging. For, unlike single episodes of violence, captive victims are assaulted again and again and again. The person who gets mugged may be terrified, but he has the ability to get away, connect with loved ones, and eventually reestablish a feeling of safety. For the person enduring long-term trauma, there is no safety. There is only the constant threat of more injury and possibly death. As a result, these victims and soldiers are always on alert. Fear becomes the new normal, and that fear rarely dissipates once the danger has passed. It subconsciously stays with the survivor, making her feel that she is constantly in danger. In an effort to feel safe, the survivor restricts her environment, relationships, and activities. She grows more introverted, more neurotic, less open to new experiences, and less agreeable. Basically, long-term trauma can actually change a victim’s personality.
—
SINCE MY ABUSE STARTED at such a young age, it’s hard to know how it may or may not have changed my inherent personality. What I do know is that by the time I reached puberty, I was already exhibiting classic symptoms of long-term sexual abuse. The severe depression that began to plague me at the age of thirteen, for instance, is quite common among adolescents and adults with a history of sexual abuse. Likewise, suicidal ideation and suicide attempts happen far more frequently in those who have been molested versus those who have not. Bulimia, while not specifically listed as an effect of trauma, has been highly correlated with sexual abuse. And I certainly doubt I’d have developed dissociative identity disorder and dissociative amnesia if I hadn’t had awful memories to block out.
Anxiety, on the other hand, is not so easily blamed on trauma. About 18 percent of the U.S. population has a diagnosable anxiety disorder, making it the biggest mental health issue by far. The reason for this is simple; we are genetically predisposed to fear things. It was our neurotic caveman ancestors, after all, who probably noticed the saber-toothed tiger in time to run! Our brains have remained hardwired to constantly look out for danger. It is so automated, in fact, that our bodies will instantly jump back from a snake on the ground before our cerebral cortex realizes it’s just a rope. Whew! And we are not only preprogrammed to look for every potential danger but also to remember those dangers forever. That’s why we can’t drink peach schnapps ever again after that time it made us sick in college! (Perhaps I’m divulging too much.)
Fearful mammals that we are, it’s no wonder we’re prone to anxiety. For many, many people, neuroticism is a birthright. For others, though, anxiety disorders are a direct result of trauma via classical conditioning. Most people know of classical conditioning through the work of Ivan Pavlov, the guy who discovered he could get dogs to salivate on cue. Salivation is the body’s automatic response to the sight and smell of food—just as fear is the body’s automatic response to danger. Pavlov found that when he made a specific sound at dinnertime the dogs learned to associate the sound with food. Eventually, the dogs’ bodies would react to the sound by salivating even if the food wasn’t there.
The same thing happens during trauma. While terrified, our minds tend to take in not only the danger but also everything else associated with the moment. Our brains remember the “everything else” as dangerous and tell our bodies to react in similar situations. If a person is shot while walking alone down a dark alley, for instance, he will almost certainly be afraid of being shot again. He will fear the sight and sound of a gun as well as anything that looks or sounds like a gun. What’s more, he may generalize his fear to include everything else that reminds him of the assault—alleys, being alone, the dark. He may even become fearful of seemingly innocuous things such as brick walls (like the one in the alley) and neon signs (like the one he saw in the distance just as he was losing consciousness).
Obviously, one act of violence can create a lot of fear triggers for a victim, triggers that will cause anxiety and phobias down the road. In cases of long-term trauma, there are multiple acts of violence, often in multiple settings. Unfortunately for the victim, this means there are exponentially more fear triggers to contend with.
The chronic anxiety that I began to notice in college was a direct result of such triggers. Having been abused by so many different people in different ways in different places for such a prolonged period of time, my brain had learned to fear just about everything.
The sound of a TV made me panic, for instance, because johns often used them to drown out sounds while they raped me in motel rooms. I was similarly panicked when I heard highway traffic (which could be heard in motel rooms) and stereo music (which played during sex parties). I felt anxious every time I entered a motel room or a shopping mall. Worst of all, I suffered a panic attack every single day at dusk because that’s the time of day Gary usually molested me.
With so many subconscious fear triggers in my head, it’s no wonder I was in a constant state of panic. Having complete amnesia for the abuse, though, meant I didn’t realize the anxiety was being triggered by external stimuli. On the contrary, I had no idea why I felt so jumpy all the time, nor did I have any idea how to control it. My solution was to block out every stimuli I possibly could by having complete control over my environment. This is why I chose to live alone off campus. It’s also why I needed so badly to live alone in my barn that summer.
What I am describing—distress at exposure to traumatic stimuli followed by frantic attempts to avoid such stimuli—is the very definition of post-traumatic stress disorder. Having no conscious memory of being traumatized, however, I had no way of connecting my anxiety to the abuse I had suffered. Instead, I attributed my trauma symptoms to inherent character flaws. I thought of myself as high-strung, overly sensitive, and a control freak. These negative assessments were also used by my family to describe me. Because I had frequent emotional outbursts that were triggered by trauma stimuli that appeared innocuous to others, I was also labeled as “moody.” My desperate attempts to regulate my affect through external change, such as demanding to sleep in the barn or insisting that a TV be turned off, got me branded as “manipulative.” Believing myself to have all of these innate negative qualities, it’s no surprise I suffered from feelings of shame, guilt, and deep self-loathing.
Psychologist John Briere calls these unwarranted negative perceptions “cognitive distortions.” They are nearly universal in those who have been abused as children and, because they form our subconscious belief system, are notoriously intractable. In addition to having cognitive distortions about myself, I entered college with cognitive distortions about others and the world.
Due to my repeated victimizations at the hands of men, I assumed all men were dangerous and generally felt threatened every time I was in contact with them. My view of women was not much better. Based on my experience with my mother, as well as the female teachers at school, I believed women were, at best, heartless and, at worst, backstabbing bitches just waiting to throw me to the wolves.
Needless to say, I entered adult life with a severe distrust of all people. I was incredibly sensitive to the slightest sign of aggression, betrayal, manipulation, criticism, or judgment. I assumed the world was a dark and threatening place where human beings existed only to hurt and exploit one another. This made it impossible for me to form intimate relationships, be they with friends, sexual partners, or therapists.
Perhaps most damaging, the abuse altered my perception of God. Before meeting Gary, I’d been raised in a Christian church that was warm and inviting. In Sunday school, I’d been taught that Jesus loved me and would always protect me. I took these lessons to heart and had held an unflinching faith in God. But when Gary came along, we stopped going to church. He mocked Christianity and said it was for idiots. I didn’t believe him.
I still prayed to God every day. First, I prayed that my mother wouldn’t move in with Gary. Then I prayed that we would move out. I prayed for the abuse to stop. I prayed for my mother to be nice to me. I prayed for all kinds of things, but none of my prayers were ever answered. Surprisingly enough, this did not shake my faith in God. It just made me think He had it in for me. For some reason, I’d been forsaken. This led to a deep and lasting belief that no matter what I attempted to do in life my plans would ultimately be doomed.
Psychologists refer to this perception of impending doom as a “sense of foreshortened future.” But words cannot really describe the insidiousness of this particular symptom, this deep-seated belief that one’s life will never work out. When one truly feels that their life will end in ruin, every relationship, every career move, every endeavor is tainted before it starts. The worst part for me was an enduring belief that I would never achieve happiness—that happiness was simply not in God’s plan for me. Because this belief was so ingrained, anytime happiness approached, I would start to panic. I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting, though, was uncomfortable and felt too much like being a victim. So I would usually find some way to sabotage my happiness before God could do it for me. This made me feel less helpless. But it also made it impossible for me to build any kind of satisfying life.
—
MY LIFE FORCE, though, remained inexplicably strong. I survived my suicide attempt, and while still in the CCU, I had an epiphany. It came to me as I was lying in the hospital bed—a strong, clear thought that I knew was not my own. I didn’t know if it was God speaking to me or what. All I know is: The message was very authoritative and very wise. It said, “You keep trying to get your parents to love you, but they will never give you what you need.” That’s all the message said. But in that moment, I understood. It was absolute truth. A great shift immediately took place in my psyche. Everything seemed clearer. A giant weight lifted off my soul.
In all the days I was in the CCU, my parents never came to visit. But after the epiphany, I didn’t care. As I’d done five years earlier after my last suicide attempt, I made a decision to block out everything negative in my life and focus on moving forward. Suddenly, I forgot all about my crappy family, depression, and anxiety. Even the bulimia that had dominated my life magically disappeared. This was not a gradual remission of symptoms as a result of therapy. I’m saying that I went into the hospital a total wreck and came out a changed person. All the doom and gloom wafted away, and suddenly, I could enjoy people and activities in a way I never had before. My motivation and ambition returned in spades. My head and life path were instantly crystal clear.
A miracle? Yes. Absolutely. A miracle of the human mind.
Once again, in the face of grave danger, my psyche used dissociation to help me survive. This time, of course, the “danger” came from within; I had nearly killed myself. So my mind did what it was wont to do. It kept me safe by blocking out all the icky thoughts and feelings that were making me suicidal.
In order to do this, a new personality emerged. The Student was a responsible, even-tempered adult who was driven by duty. Utterly sensible, she didn’t succumb to self-pity or indulge in fanciful daydreams. She is what is commonly referred to as an “administrator” alter, an emotionless identity who can cross off the to-do list, stick to the schedule, and get the job done.
The job, at that time, was getting through college. My heroic feats of truancy had nearly tanked freshman year. The Student decided she would never miss another class no matter what. She also resolved to earn outstanding grades. A survey of my past academic performance, though, suggested that the Student was nuts. I mean, I’d rarely taken school seriously and had the piss-poor grades to prove it. In high school, I’d stopped taking science and math as soon as I could, opting for easy classes like choir. (This was in the days before weighted grades.) My SATs pronounced me painfully average. Even my guidance counselor, in attempting to sell me to colleges, could say only that I had the “ability to work hard” if I felt like it.
Exactly where this straight-A-seeking student came from, I don’t know. I can’t recall a popular image that grabbed my psyche the way the Preppy or the Writer did. The Student seemed to spring forth from my subconscious with an edict to get real and get on with it.
And get on with it she did. Just days after being released from the hospital, I found myself a full-time summer job, earning enough to return for sophomore year. I chose to live back in my original dorm and was blessed with a roommate who hated TV as much as I did. Naomi and I became good friends, and I made lots of other friends too, many of whom remain friends thirty years later.
I kept my promise to never miss another class or assignment—sticking to the straight and narrow for the remaining three years of undergrad as well as all eleven years of my various grad schools. For the first time in my life, I actually read the novels and plays and textbooks that my instructors assigned and found that I liked studying. It was a pleasant surprise to learn that doing homework and showing up for class could improve one’s grades. Before the Student came along, I had no idea that hard work and effort were directly related to success. The realization was empowering.
The Student opened me up intellectually the way the Writer had opened my creativity. But the Student, built only to complete day-to-day tasks, didn’t feel like a full identity. She had no image of herself, so she didn’t prefer certain clothes or have an elaborate backstory. She didn’t have interests or hobbies or long-term goals, feelings or memories. The Student lived entirely in the present moment, ever ready to accomplish the work at hand. She was more like a robot than a person.
—
BEING A ROBOT has its advantages. Mostly free of depression, anxiety, or any other negative emotions, I truly began to flourish. My work at school was such that NYU gave me a special scholarship and award for academic achievement. One of my plays was chosen for a run off-off-Broadway. I was offered a job as assistant editor of a theater-themed newspaper where I churned out countless articles and reviews. Within two short years, I’d not only conquered the school thing but also seemed well on my way to a career as a writer.
My personal life was also flourishing. Sophomore year, I began dating a film student who lived in my dorm. By senior year, Steve and I were sharing a studio on Jones Street. It was right in the heart of the Village and had hardwood floors and a fireplace. I absolutely adored waking up in the morning and going for coffee at Patisserie Claude. Steve and I took long walks around the park and explored every inch of the neighborhood. In the evenings, I spent hours writing at the Washington Square Diner.
By the time I turned twenty-one, I felt like life was right on track. Good job. Good boyfriend. Good apartment. My old life in New Jersey seemed a million miles away.
Gary? My mother? My past? I hardly ever thought about any of it.
That all changed in the fall of 1989 when my past suddenly came back to haunt me via a medical crisis called AIDS.
—
IN 1989, THE AIDS EPIDEMIC was still in its infancy. The disease had first been identified in 1981, and by 1983, researchers figured out it was caused by HIV. Both Rock Hudson and Liberace made big headlines when they died of the disease in the mid-1980s. So I, like everyone else, was aware of it. But despite a lot of press, AIDS remained a niche issue. Most of the reported cases involved gay men, drugs users, and hemophiliacs. For a straight woman who didn’t do drugs and didn’t sleep around—even a straight woman in Greenwich Village—AIDS didn’t seem like a threat.
That is: I was oblivious until I heard that a childhood friend had contracted it. It was Madeline, the girl Gary had courted after me. When I heard the news, I took it hard. That old sense of impending doom returned with a vengeance, and I became gripped by a panic so thick I could hardly breathe. The anxiety continued unabated for weeks. Suddenly, I was imprisoned in a soggy dark cloud. The thought running through my head night and day was I must have AIDS too. I must have AIDS too.
On the surface, this made no logical sense. As far as my conscious mind knew, neither Madeline nor I had been abused. I’d only slept with a few boys in college, most of whom were virgins. This meant my chances of contracting HIV were practically nil. But my subconscious mind knew better. It knew about all the various men I’d been forced to have sex with in the late ’70s and early ’80s when AIDS was silently breeding.
The life-and-death nature of the AIDS threat put so much pressure on my psyche that my rock-hard denial system began to fissure. The truth of my past was oozing through the cracks. It told my conscious mind that I must get tested.
Back in those days, the HIV test was fairly new and available only via a blood sample. Appointments had to be made weeks in advance, giving me plenty of extra time to panic. When the day of the test finally came, I was so terrified that I fainted as the nurse thrust the needle into my arm. When I came to, the nurse informed me it would take several weeks to get the results.
Those weeks were some of the darkest of my life. I was sure that, like Madeline, I had AIDS and was destined to die a horrible death. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t sleep. I could barely speak. Believing my risk was nonexistent, my faithful and trusting boyfriend tried to reason with me. But I couldn’t be reasoned with because my subconscious knew my risk factors were through the roof.
Once again, my justifiable anxiety appeared to be completely unjustified. Once again, I looked and felt nuts.
Finally, I was called in to receive the results of the test. To my great surprise, I was HIV negative. Miraculously, I had dodged death. (Although at the time, I didn’t yet realize what a true miracle it was.) At first, I was immensely relieved, but the cloud of doom soon reemerged. AIDS or not, something felt terribly wrong. Bad things were going to happen to me. I could feel it in my gut. I walked around in a constant state of terror. But terror of what? Everything was the same as before. Same job. Same boyfriend. Same apartment. Underneath, though, a great change had occurred.
—
AIDS MAY HAVE SPARED my immune system, but my denial system was now compromised. The Cloak of Invincibility I’d been wearing since the last suicide attempt suddenly had holes in it. Through those holes, tiny bits of feeling and memory started to escape.
In a recurring dream, for instance, I stood naked on a busy street corner. Then Gary came to me, and we had sex in the gutter as people watched. For my senior thesis, I wrote a play about an adult daughter who returns home to seduce her father, oust her mother, and claim her rightful place as the family wife. Pretty on the nose, I know.
But the crazy thing is: I didn’t realize my play was autobiographical! My subconscious memory was feeding my conscious mind lots of sick and twisted plot ideas and characters and dialogue that I thought were coming from my imagination. God only knows what my professors thought of me!
Senior year, I also experienced my first body hijacking. For people with DID, body hijackings are a common occurrence as one identity takes over the body from another. If a person is in complete denial about their DID, this switch happens outside of the person’s conscious awareness. But when the mind can’t or won’t hide DID, the hijackings sometimes feel like out-of-body experiences.
My first one happened while Steve and I were having dinner at a restaurant. We were having a mundane conversation when I suddenly felt light-headed. It was as if I were floating up to the ceiling. Steve seemed far away, and all the restaurant noise hushed. Then I heard someone say, in a barely audible voice, “I think my father molested me.” I was aware that the voice was coming out of my mouth; I could even sort of feel my lips moving. But I had no connection to being the source of the information or even having the intention to speak. It was crazy body-snatcher stuff.
It was the first time I had ever acknowledged being sexually abused. Steve, who had spent time with my parents and disliked them, did not seem surprised by the revelation. But for me—a person who believed a fictional version of my childhood—the admission was shocking.
Why would I say such a thing? Why did I feel so weird when I said it?
Disturbed and confused, I thought it might be a good idea to get help. Dr. Taylor, now in private practice, was out of my price range. So I went back to Bellevue and played shrink lotto, the fun game where poor people are forced to go to clinics and bare their souls to whatever trainee flies out of the machine.
This go-round, I got a fat, balding psychiatrist who was doing his residency. Unlike Dr. Taylor or the first guy I’d seen in New Jersey, this one didn’t have a soft, empathetic, Free to Be . . . You and Me vibe. Instead, Dr. A. Hole reeked of old-school psychoanalysis: aloof, judgmental, chauvinistic, arrogant.
I can give this assessment now because I’ve been around the mental health block and know what makes for a good or bad therapist. At the time, though, I was just a mixed-up girl looking for some direction. On the surface, I was confused about what to do after college. I had always planned to stay in Manhattan, but Steve was from Los Angeles and wanted to move home. When he left, rent would become a burden, but that wasn’t the real problem. The dilemma between New York and LA came down to a fear of being alone.
I had no siblings, hardly any relationship with my parents, and no other family to rely on. Steve was the only person I could count on in the whole wide world. If I lost him, I’d have no one to call in an emergency, and any tiny crisis was sure to leave me shaking a can on Sixth Avenue. Most people, thank God, don’t ever know what it’s like to be that alone. Most people have some family somewhere who will bail them out in a pinch. Former foster kids, runaways, and others estranged from family because of abuse or homophobia, though, are at terrible risk because they live with no safety net. That’s why so many end up living on the streets.
Of course, I didn’t have any of this perspective at the time. When I talked with Dr. A. Hole, I’m sure I sounded more like “Blah-blah-blah LOVE New York, blah-blah-blah La-La Land has no seasons.” To tell the truth, I don’t really remember much about these sessions except that it was difficult to talk with Dr. A. Hole. He made me feel like a bug.
Nonetheless, in one session, I experienced my second body hijacking. I was sitting in a hard plastic chair babbling on about the lack of theater in LA when I drifted away and heard a voice speaking.
“My father molested me,” it said. I knew it must be me talking, but I had no idea how I was doing it.
I can’t really remember what happened after that. But I doubt it was very enlightening as I stopped seeing the doctor after only seven sessions.
—
AFTER MUCH ANGST AND DEBATE, I decided I must leave New York. It killed me to give up my job, my contacts, my perfect apartment, theater, seasons, decent bagels. But what choice did I have? Being alone in the world terrified me. It was a matter of survival.
So a few months after graduation, Steve and I packed all of our belongings into my new used car. We ordered a set of TripTiks from Triple A and headed west. For my sacrifice, Steve promised we’d rent a huge two-bedroom apartment so I could have a dedicated writing room. He also promised I’d learn to love sunny, seasonless, theater-challenged LA. I tried to be optimistic about the future. But it was hard losing my school, my home, and my dreams all in one day.
What I didn’t yet realize was that I was bringing all sorts of things with me: buried memories, toxic feelings, psychopathology, and a whole host of ready-for-prime-time inner characters. If Steve had known what he was in for, I doubt he would’ve been so keen to stay together. I suspect he would’ve hopped a yellow cab, bought a one-way ticket to LAX, and ripped out his home phone.
Instead, we drove across the country, past picturesque farms and the St. Louis arch. Through flat cornfields in Kansas and Technicolor rocks in New Mexico. We visited the “Home of the 72 ounce Steak” in Amarillo and the Grand Canyon in Flagstaff. We had an adventure. The good kind.
After traveling through Las Vegas and Death Valley, we stopped in Barstow for the night. When I woke in the morning for my first day in California, I was so excited that I ran to the motel window and threw open the curtains. The sun that poured in was the brightest and strongest I’d ever seen. It was blinding.
Little did I know that the California sun would soon be shining a light on my very dark past and finally set me on the long road to healing.