IT STARTED OUT like any other day, routine and ordinary, with no ominous hint of what was to come. Nancy got up with her husband, Walter, fixed him breakfast; and saw him off for an early appointment. She stood in the doorway, waving good-bye as he drove away from their sprawling new hillside home in White Plains, New York, dubbed “the Glass House” for its shameless floor-to-ceiling sun-splashed windows on every side. Back in the kitchen she drank her morning coffee, scanned the headlines in the newspaper, and waited for Shawn and Chrissie, her teenage son and daughter, to come down. She fixed them some pancakes, then hurried upstairs to get dressed for work.
When she stepped out of the shower, Nancy could hear that Shawn was up to his usual hijinks, roughhousing with Chrissie before their ride came to take them to school. Their loud whooping and shouting got on her nerves.
“Hey! Cut it out down there!” Nancy called down to them. They were good kids, but she couldn’t stand it when they fought, even if their scuffling was in fun. All that raucous noise and commotion drove her wild, filled her with an apprehension connected to some haunting memory of danger in the distant past. It was only eight o’clock in the morning, and already her head was spinning like the blade of a Cuisinart. “Take it easy,” she muttered to herself. “They’re normal teenagers. Let them do their thing.”
She didn’t have time to fight with the kids this morning anyway. If she didn’t pick up the pace, she’d be late for work and spoil her record as the rehab facility’s most dependable physical therapist, always on time, never missing a day in fifteen years. Her patients—fragile geriatric and volatile brain injury victims—depended on her. The thought of them lined up in the gym, waiting to be put through their paces, made the Cuisinart inside her head morph into a train, a high-speed line. She felt that old familiar locomotive, wind-at-her-back presssure going choochoo-choo-choo-choo-choo-choo-choo, hounding her to hurry up and finish getting dressed.
Nancy quickly slipped into a pair of tan slacks and a chocolate-colored tailored shirt and rummaged through her closet for a blazer to go with them. To set off the outfit, she snatched the perfect scarf from her bureau drawer. After all, she had a reputation to keep up as a woman who could put on a potato sack and make it look like an Armani.
She dashed into the bathroom to find her blow dryer. It wasn’t there—not on the shelf where she usually kept it, not in the cabinet under the vanity either. Could she have left it in the bedroom? She raced back into the bedroom. No, it wasn’t on top of the bureau. Inside the night table drawer maybe? No, not there either. Where the hell was it? She glanced at the clock. Eight-thirty. She’d never get to her patients in time. The train noise in her head got louder and more insistent. Come on, hurry up, let’s go, let’s go. Could she have stuck the hair dryer in her closet? Ducking inside the walk-in closet again, she swept her hand along the top shelf.
The hair dryer came tumbling down, and along with it, her day planner, which she hadn’t been able to find for days. What was wrong with her? Why was she so forgetful lately? She’d always misplaced things, but now she couldn’t find anything she’d put away. She couldn’t remember recipes either. She was from a family of gourmet cooks and could cook with her eyes closed but lately had trouble making brownies from a box. She’d even gotten lost going to her doctor’s. It was a road she’d driven countless times, and yet several times this past month she’d forgotten which exit to take and wound up in some strange place, wondering, Where am I?
She glanced at her day planner, lying open on the floor. It was crammed with scribbled appointments—her work schedule, social engagements, soccer mom stuff, a grocery list with ingredients for a birthday cake she wanted to make for Walter, meetings with cabinetmakers and floor coverers and electricians to finish working on the house. Just looking at the book made her feel dizzy and nauseated. She picked it up and threw it in the trash.
Grabbing her hair dryer, she rushed back into the bathroom. She was standing at the mirror, drying her hair, feeling the heat on her scalp, hearing the whirring of the dryer mingled with the pounding noise in her head when suddenly she felt a thick wave of fatigue—a ponderous, all-encompassing world-weariness—wash over her. Every inch of her ached with physical and emotional exhaustion. She felt too tired to lift a finger, too tired to breathe, too tired to go on.
The dryer fell from Nancy’s hand as she lost consciousness and collapsed on the floor. She felt herself float out of her body to the ceiling and look down on her other self lying there on the bathroom floor. “Get up, you lazy good-for-nothing fool; get up!” she urged her inert body in a mean-spirited, cruel, contemptuous voice that wasn’t hers, but one she knew only too well.
Suddenly Nancy began crying like a child, completely regressed, sobbing and repeating over and over again in a broken, plaintive wail, “I’m a good girl, I’m not a bad girl, I’m a good girl, I’m not a bad girl.”
Shawn went upstairs to say good-bye to his mother before leaving for school. He walked into the bathroom, gasped in shock, and dropped to his knees to help her. “Chrissie, there’s something wrong with Mom! Call Daddy right away!” he yelled to his younger sister, who was already bounding up the stairs to say good-bye, too.
By the time Walter arrived, he found Nancy cowering on the floor in her closet, hiding under a pile of clothes. Sitting with her arms drawn around her chest, she was hugging herself, rocking back and forth. She gave no sign that she recognized him, saying only, “I’m a good girl, I’m not a bad girl, I’m a good girl, I’m not a bad girl,” over and over again in a pitiful childlike voice that he could not believe was his wife’s.
This petite, pixieish, heart shape—faced woman sitting in my office is bright, stylish, and engagingly articulate. She looks a decade younger than her forty-two years. Outwardly she is every bit the “middle-aged white female professional,” as she ironically describes the image she presents to the world. Although clearly frightened and worried, she seems remarkably poised for someone who’d been rushed to the emergency room after collapsing on her bathroom floor in a state of total decompensation two weeks earlier. She was on the verge of being hospitalized when fate intervened. The psychologist who’d been treating Nancy for the attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder she was diagnosed with nine years before called a psychiatrist to admit her. The psychiatrist had recently taken a SCID-D workshop of mine and, suspecting that Nancy was suffering from a dissociative disorder, referred her to me.
“I can’t work at this point,” she tells me. “I don’t have control of my mind. Things frighten me-any kind of conflict. Whenever my children or my husband starts fighting in the house, I have to run away. If I’ve made someone sad or angry, it changes me into a scared little kid. My voice changes, my vocabulary changes, my mannerisms change. I cry like a little girl who’s just lost her dog.” She looks at me helplessly and goes on, “Or when I feel threatened, I turn into a mean, vicious, cursing bitch, yelling and screaming and criticizing my husband and the kids. I feel as if I have different behavior for different situations. The day before I unraveled, my husband got angry at me and was shutting me out big time, and I flew into a rage and almost tore his face off. It’s a very instant kind of thing. I can feel the slide. I know it’s happening, but I can’t control it.”
“Do you think your husband’s anger at you was the trigger?” I ask.
“Yes. It felt like all the stuff I’d heard as a kid,” she says. “My husband was going through a hard time and wasn’t able to make decisions, and I perceived it as he didn’t want to. He got very angry when I told him that he was dumping all the family decisions on me. He said that everything was my fault, and there was nothing wrong with him and to get a grip. That was deeply painful to me. I couldn’t take the hurt. Someone that I trusted so much with my whole life and my whole being was again saying, to save a lot of words, You’re full of shit.’ Instantly I went into a rage. For the past year there’s been this constant struggle in my head, and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“What kind of struggle have you been having?”
“I’d hear a part of me say, You stupid idiot, everybody’s gonna leave you if you don’t get control of yourself’; and then I’d say, ‘I’ll show ‘em. I’ll get better. Nothing’s ever beat me before’; and then I’d come back with, ‘Who’re you kidding? You’re a loser. It’s never gonna change.’ I tried whistling to drown out the thoughts until my lips cracked open and bled. Then I had a radio on all the time to distract me. But the thoughts started increasing and I kept saying inside myself, Please somebody, help me; I’m sinking. And nobody could hear me but me, so I would just get meaner.”
I ask her whether she’s been under any stress lately, and she tells me that her husband, a tall, handsome corporate executive who is deeply committed to her, lost his job six months ago. “We were about to move into our new home, this dream house we were building for our family, and we had no way to pay for it except to use all our savings,” says Nancy. “The insecurity was very high. And then one of the contractors—we’d paid him an enormous amount of money—went bankrupt and disappeared. It was a very stressful period, horrendous.”
When I question her about memory gaps during the SCID-D, she starts to relate an incident that happened when she was sixteen. “I had just failed my drivers test, and I went to my job after school at a Howard Johnson’s. And then something happened, one of those things where I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t know what I was doing.” She pauses and asks, “Does that make sense?”
I nod yes. A perfect description of a state of dissociation.
“I was working behind the ice cream counter at the soda fountain,” she goes on, “and I saw this shiny red Mustang in the parking lot that had the keys in it. I stepped outside in my white apron and hat, and I took the car. Took it. I stole a car.” She leans forward and repeats emphatically, “I stole a car,” as if to say, Can you believe it? “I drove it around for a while, and then I remember kind of like parking it somewhere, maybe back on the parking lot, and saying to myself, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I got out and just went home.”
“Did you ever have any other episodes like that?”
“Another time,” Nancy answers, “was when I was in college in my dorm, an all-women’s dorm. We were allowed to have men in until curfew time. One day the women across the hall who were good friends of mine came to me and said, ‘Why did you do that last night?’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And they said that I opened my door and took off all my clothes and stood in the door when there were lots of men there. At the time I thought they were just being cruel. Later, when I thought about that, I realized that they had no reason to be cruel. But I don’t remember doing that. It was way out of character. The car thing I didn’t know about, but did know about, but this I had no recollection of at all.”
My sense is that the car had been stolen by Nancy in an episode of depersonalization without any loss of awareness, whereas it was possibly an alter personality who had disrobed, accompanied by Nancy’s amnesia for the episode. “Can you recall any other time when you had memory blanks?” I ask.
She tells me this: “Several years ago I woke up about two in the morning and sat bolt upright in bed in a cold sweat and said, ‘Oh, my God.’ There was such a vivid memory of sexual abuse from my paternal grandfather. It was unbelievable. He lived right next door to us when I was growing up, and I thought it was happening all over again, it was that real. I could feel it, not just the physical sensations, but the emotions, too-the fear, the shock, the shame.”
“Was this the first time you had flashbacks like that?”
“Yes. I think the memories never surfaced before because the Ritalin I was taking for my attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder numbed everything. I was on a pretty heavy dose. The person who evaluated me said, ‘I don’t know how you got through school because you have one of the worst cases of ADHD that we’ve ever seen.’ The clinic started me on Ritalin. Then I had my family physician regulate and manage it until it didn’t work anymore.”
“When was that?”
“About a year and a half ago. I was so edgy that someone could open their purse next to me and it would completely distract me. I couldn’t work and go to the dentist on the same day. It was too confusing, so I’d forget to go to the dentist. I was unable to pay attention at work. At our team meetings I was like, ‘What did you say? I’m sorry, I missed that.’ I was alarmed. I told myself I can’t let this happen, so I sought out a therapist. That’s when I had the flashback.”
“Did your therapist put you on any medication then?”
“No. He thought I didn’t need it. He wanted to work through it without numbing everything again,” Nancy says. “That went well, but—” She stops and shakes her head uncertainly. “Obviously, it didn’t unmask all this other stuff.”
Suddenly Nancy breaks into tears. “I don’t want to be this way,” she sobs. “At home I feel like a robot. I just do chores. There are windows of tenderness where my children are involved, but as soon as I walk in the door, all feelings just stop. When I feel threatened, either I act like a child and run into the closet and hide, or I turn into a raging bitch and say things that hurt people’s soul. When we go to a party, if I can’t hold it together, then I have to leave. I tell Walter, ‘We have to go. Let’s go,’ almost to the point of being nasty. When I’m home and there’s any fighting or arguing going on in the house, I feel that if I stay, I won’t have any brain left, any mind left, that I’ll lose it. Sometimes I’ll just run out of the house and go for a ride, and that works to keep me kind of calm and not crazy.”
Nancy looks at me imploringly. “You don’t think I’m crazy, do you?” She squeezes her eyes shut and shudders, fearing the worst. “Please don’t tell me that. Please.”
A dining-room chair hurtled through the air and landed like a smart bomb on a crystal vase. It was the opening salvo. The nightly war between her parents had begun.
“Stop it, you drunken sonofabitch!” her mother screamed. “Stop it!”
An ashtray and a candy dish flew by in quick succession and struck a lamp.
“Goddamn it, Barb, I know I’m drunk!” her father roared back. “Leave me alone!”
The sickening sound of breaking glass and the screaming and the swearing and the mean fury in her mother’s voice made eight-year-old Nancy grab her younger brother, Keith, and run upstairs to the nearest closet for cover.
From the outside their house looked no different from the others on the quiet, tree-lined street in the quaint, peaceful suburb where Nancy grew up. It was a town where a boutique had a name like “Ye Olde Shoppe” and a drugstore was called the “Apothecary.” The family home was a large stone-and-stucco house with black shutters, two white formal columns at the entrance, and a flower bed under a bay window filled with rose bushes, pink hydrangeas, and thick rhododendrons. A leafy maple tree spread its branches protectively over the front lawn. Someone walking by would have thought it was a home right out of serene tranquil Pleasantville. But inside it was more like The War of the Roses. Night after night the battle raged on.
Tonight it was worse than usual. Huddled together in her bedroom closet, Nancy and Keith hugged each other and waited for it to be over. They knew it wouldn’t stop until her father broke every piece of furniture in the house. Poor Keith, Nancy thought, as she tried to comfort him. He was only thirteen months younger than Nancy, but he was crying so hard that she thought her mother would find them and punish them. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t done anything wrong. Nancy was terrified, too, but she didn’t dare let herself cry. She had to stay alert and protect them.
Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! Oh, God, her father was coming up the steps. His voice sounded like a sonic boom. Her mother’s was shrill as a siren.
“I told you, Barb, leave me the hell alone!”
“No, I won’t, you stinking, sonofabitch drunk!”
More crashes, screaming, and swearing from her parents’ bedroom. The noise howled through the upstairs, coming ever closer. Desperate, Nancy jumped up, pulled her brother to his feet, and ran with him to the attic. They found refuge under an old desk.
Snap! It sounded like a branch crackling in a fire. Snap! Snap! Crash! Nancy stared in horror as a chair smashed though the attic door and her father entered the room, brandishing the chair like a sword. He looked over his shoulder, saw his wife approaching, and bellowed, “For Christ’s sake, Barb, I told you, leave me the hell alone!”
And with that, not knowing that Nancy and Keith were hiding there, her father threw the chair at the desk, splintering it in half.
Open-mouthed, he stared at his children crouching together like two orphans shipwrecked in a turbulent sea. He was instantly remorseful. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, bending down and scooping them up in his arms.
But their mother was only concerned about the desk. She picked up a shard of wood from the floor and waved it at her husband reprovingly. “You drunken bastard,” she said through clenched teeth. “Look what you’ve done.”
Nancy enters the office dressed casually, but the eye-catching lapel pin on her jacket and the scarf folded into the open throat of her Oxford shirt hint at her artistic flair. She says that the antidepressant I prescribed to ease her bleak ruminations has helped but has not stopped the thoughts entirely.
“It’s kind of like those old tapes still playing in my head,” she tells me. “I can’t get the dinner done, and I can’t get the laundry done, and I can’t work, and I can’t look very nice. I can’t hold my end of the bargain up. I must be a loser. I know where it comes from. As a child you were measured by what you could accomplish—the chores and tasks. Feelings and emotions that were negative or didn’t suit my mother’s needs were minimized and invalidated, and you were punished for them. My mother is so bossy and narcissistic, it’s unbelievable. It’s just ridiculous.”
The scene Nancy paints of her childhood is like a Dickensian tale of a waif forced into indentured servitude. “My father came home drunk every night and had a violent temper and terrorized us,” she says, “but he’s been sober for years and has tried to make amends. Even then he was kind and loving and not half as bad as my mother. She just kept ranting and raving at him until she drove him wild, and she would torment and beat the shit out of my brother Keith and me, always finding fault and whiping
us for it. Day and night she never stopped. She was brutal. Six years after Keith was born, my two younger brothers came along. My mom worked, and from three to five every day of my life, I had to hurry and get everything done before she got home. I wasn’t very old, maybe eight or nine. And I’d be like, 5:05, my God, here she comes!’ And if it wasn’t all perfect—if dinner wasn’t made and the table wasn’t set and the boys weren’t ready for dinner, and if I left one spoon in the sink after cooking dinner—she wouldn’t talk to me. And then I’d have to keep trying to do nicer and nicer things so she’d talk to me again. Or she’d make me stand in the dining room with Keith without moving or speaking until she came in and would either beat us to a pulp or leave us alone. We never knew what to expect. The anticipation was awful.”
I know how damaging an atmosphere of such chaotic violence coupled with thankless exploitation and cold, hard cruelty can be to the identity of a young child desperate for parental protection and approval. “Can you see any connection between that abuse and what is going on inside you today?” I ask.
“Yes, I’m on this goddamn rampage, like a tornado inside me,” Nancy says, “a drivenness. I just have to keep moving, preparing for a war. It’s like, ‘Batten down the hatches!’ I feel very tense, very threatened, and fearful. That’s why I have to live in a house with so many big windows all around, so I can see my mother driving up the driveway and clean up and be ready. I never had any idea of what would come next.”
Besides this exhausting hypervigilance, Nancy sees another effect of her mothers abusive treatment of her. She relates it to an uncontrollable part inside herself she calls the “Mean.”
“I picture her kind of trailer park-y,” she says, adding quickly, “I don’t mean any economic slur, but I see her as a really tough, abrasive, tattooed, Harley Davidson kind of person, about my age. She only comes out when other people are around and tears into them viciously. She screams at Walter and the boys, and afterward I’ll say, ‘My God, what did I do? How could I hurt people’s feelings that way?’ And then I’ll turn into this sad, helpless little girl who cries all the time. I don’t know who I am. One minute I’m petrified of my mother, and the next minute I want to kill her. And then there’s a part of me saying, ‘Walter’s such a loser, I told you you couldn’t trust him,’ and another part saying, ‘That’s not true.’ Things feel very confusing. My head feels like an Olympic-size swimming pool with tons of people swimming in it. It’s like a relay race in my head.”
“If the child part of you could speak,” I ask her, “what would she say about how she feels?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Nancy says. Shaking her head in confusion, she starts to cry. And then it happens. Abruptly, as if by sleight-of hand, she changes into an anguished eight-year-old, her voice coarsening into the loud, keening sing-song of a child bawling her eyes out-the Child alter. With a little girl’s exaggerated facial expressions and gestures, she slips into a grade school manner of speech, saying “skeered” for scared and “veery” for very when she answers:
“I’m skeered. I’m veery skeered. My dad’s coming tomorrow. I like my dad, but I’m a-skeered my dad’s gonna tell my mom something. Every time I try to be a good girl, my mom tells me I’m a bad girl. I try and I try and I try to be a good girl, and then I just be a bad girl again. I tell my mom something, and she doesn’t believe it. She calls me a liar.”
“Why does she do that?”
Nancy shrugs helplessly. “I don’t know. She’s not a nice lady. I’m skeered of her a lot. She likes my baby brothers. She doesn’t like me. I don’t know why. I’m just a girl. It makes my heart veery sad.”
“It seems to me you are a good girl. Tell me, what do you like to do?”
“I like to paint. And I like to bake. My grammy made dough with me. I like the boys a lot. I like the house, but I don’t like to fix it up. I don’t like to move things. The Mom likes to do that.” Nancy leans forward and cups her hand around her mouth confidentially. “You know what the Wife just did?” the Child asks.
“No. What?” The Wife, I take it, is another alternate personality inside Nancy besides the Mom and the Child.
“She was here a minute ago and—phhhht!—she went away. She wasn’t gonna tell you anything, no siree bob. She’s so skeered and sad.”
Speaking of another alter, the Child goes on, “The Sister died. I tried so hard to find her, but she’s gone. I feel bad for her the worst. The Sister was a big girl. Veery nice. She’s the only one that knew everything. Everything! She didn’t tell me a lot, not at all. Her heart hurted too much and it breaked all up in a lot of pieces and she just died.”
“And the Wife who went away, what’s she like?”
“She’s a veery nice lady. She’s the one who goes to work. I’m telling her, ‘Come back.‘ But she won’t come back. And I want her so bad, because I know it would make Walter so happy, too.”
“Maybe it would be good to learn how to find her when you need her.”
“Yeah, if I have to keep comin’ here, she has to come here sometimes, too, right? Me and the Mom have to do all the work. That’s not right. We’re gettin’ tired. The Mom failed on the floor in the bathroom, she was so tired. Bless her little heart.”
“How long have you been inside Nancy?”
“I don’t know. Do you know? Prob’ly a long time. I know all about her. She’s a nice girl. She wouldn’t tell anybody how she really feels. She gets a-skeered, so that’s when I come. I gotta tell everybody. I can tell Walter when I don’t like something. The Mom sews and cooks, never thinks she does enough. She’s not like the Mean.”
“She’s not really mean,” I say about Nancy’s angry alter. “I think she’s scared.”
“‘Yeah, but she’ll never, never tell you that. And she’ll never ask for help. She justs gets real nasty and pushes everybody away. She gets mean to me, and you know what she says? She says, ‘You’re a blab baby.‘”
“A blab baby?”
“That means you’re a whiny crybaby.”
“Did your mom call you that?”
“Yeah. She called me a blab baby. I’m not a blab baby. I’m not a liar. I’m not a tattletale. I’m a tattletale, but I’m not a bad tattletale. I don’t tell bad things. I mean—’” The Child succumbs to a fresh burst of sobs.
“Are your memories the same as Nancy’s?”
“No! They’re not the same. They hurt my heart more. They’ll hurt the Wife’s so bad. They’ll hurt the Mom’s. The Mom’s heart’ll hurt for Chrissy and Shawn.” Nancy looks embarrassed as the Child asks, “You know what the Mean just said? ‘I don’t like you, Doctor. I don’t want you, Doctor.’ I told the Mean to take a nap. I don’t want you to talk to the Mean. It’s too hard. She’s a veery strong girl. I’m veery tired of telling her all the time, ‘Stop it! Don’t be mean.’ ‘Cause when she’s mean, then everybody’s mad at me, too, and I don’t like that.’”
“Maybe you’ll be able to help the Mean feel less scared and express herself in a different way. Then it’ll be less tiring for you.”
“I’ll try. Later, not now. I’m too tired now,” the Child sighs. “It was hard for me to get the Mean to take a nap. The Mean wore me out. Can I go?”
Nancy sits very still, draws a deep breath, and wipes her eyes and face with a tissue. She looks stunned. “Oh, God,” she says quietly in her normal voice. “I don’t understand this. I can’t tell you how devastated I feel.”
Her dark secret is out. The facade she so carefully built over many years has finally crumbled from the pressure of walled-in pain, exposing for the first time the separate parts of her that were hiding inside like a clan of noisy, quarrelsome squatters. The Child in control expressed with artless and primitive simplicity the feelings that Nancy had never talked about before. The sadness and deep hurt over her grandfather’s incest and her mother’s repudiation of her as a liar are embodied in the Child. Her rage and the fear of further abuse are carried by the Mean. And the mourning of something in her that died—unquestioning trust, perhaps?—is symbolized by the metaphor of the Sister’s death from a broken heart. Could the Sister, the one who knew everything but would only tell so much, carry other memories of sexual abuse that seem to have disappeared for good? Will they ever come back? It’s too early to tell.
The completed SCID-D shows that Nancy has severe levels of four dissociative symptoms—amnesia, depersonalization, identity confusion, and identity alteration—making the diagnosis of DID a certainty. Particularly telling are the continuous interactive dialogues that Nancy has when she depersonalizes and that her alters have with each other, each of whom is a distinctive personality with her own name, age, feelings, and memories.
The onset of Nancy’s dissociative disorder, I surmise from the SCID-D, occurred when she was in the second or third grade. This was the time of Nancy’s first depersonalization episode that she recalled during the interview. It was a warm day, she remembered, and she was standing naked in the front doorway of her house, completely exposed to passersby, and she could see herself doing that.
When I give Nancy my diagnosis, she says numbly, “I knew what was happening after Walter found me in the closet. I just couldn’t believe it. It’s like those people you see on the news after floods or fires. They know their home is gone, but they don’t want to believe it, because it’s such hard work to rebuild your life. But when an expert tells you, you can’t hide it anymore.”
“You can get better,” I assure her, aware of the dread and hopelessness she feels. “The depth of your pain does not have to continue.” I explain to her why it is so important to end the isolation of the different parts, all living in the same house but divided against each other. “The Child is carrying a huge burden of having to talk about a lot of your feelings. Try to listen to the Child’s feelings and begin to express some of them so that the Child doesn’t have to suffer alone anymore and take control as fully. It also would be helpful if you could try to find out how to calm the Mean because the Mean is still living with the terrors you had when you were a little girl. Right now she only knows how to get her feelings out in uncontrollable rage, sometimes at a person she’s not even rageful at.”
“What’s the next step?” Nancy asks. “Where do we go from here?”
“I’d like you to think about the feelings these parts of you have—the Mean, the Mom, the Wife, the Child—and write down what you can do to comfort yourself when you have those feelings. How can you comfort the Child when she feels sad and deeply hurt by something someone has said or done? How can you calm the Mean’s anger when she feels threatened and redirect her rageful feelings into constructive activities? Try to write it down.”
“When I do some journal writing,” Nancy objects, “I get so angry that it’s really counterproductive.”
“Then wait until you feel up to it,” I encourage her. “You’ll need a list of the different positive things you can use to comfort the Child’s feelings and the Mean’s feelings, so that when they want to come out, you can stay in control. You’ll be able to go down that list and contact the Mom to help you do what needs to be done to calm that part down. Let your different parts know that you respect the feelings they’re carrying. These parts that are inside you came around to help you during very difficult times, and they can help you now in your healing.”
“I have to get better,” Nancy says desperately. “I’m petrified that I’m going to wear my whole family out. They’ve been so good to me, I couldn’t bear that.”
“Once the different parts of you feel accepted and appreciated, they can start working together,” I assure her, “and those outbursts won’t occur so often anymore.”
Nancy stares at the floor, looking downcast. “It’s very lonely; that’s all I know,” she murmurs finally. “But I’ll try.”
The handknit blanket depicting a gorgeous sunset with brilliant bands of orange, red, purple, blue, and green dissolving into each other against a navy background looks professionally made.
“I’m making this for Walter; it’s a present,” Nancy tells me when she comes into our next session and holds the blanket up for me to see. “My grandmother—my mother’s mother—used to make blankets for me. She had a restaurant and was a marvelous cook, too. She let me cook with her in her house, and when she was dying of cancer she came to my house and taught me everything so that I would remember how to do it after she was gone.” Nancy casts a critical eye at her handiwork. “I don’t think it’s that good, do you?” she asks.
“Nancy, it’s beautiful! You’re very talented,” I tell her, genuinely impressed with her craftsmanship. Like many people with a dissociative disorder, Nancy is a creative person who finds in artwork an outlet for self-expression that was ruthlessly stifled in childhood. I wonder what path she would have chosen in life had her artistic talents been supported early on.
She sits down and draws a yellow legal pad out of her handbag. “This is the list you asked me to make,” she says. “Part of me thinks it’s stupid to do this; part of me thinks I have to do this; and part of me thinks I’m not going to do this.” She laughs apologetically. “I hope this is what you want.”
“Let me hear it.”
Not surprisingly, dealing with her mother is the number one item on her list. Her mother was skiing in Montreal when Nancy collapsed on the bathroom floor a month ago and, much to Nancy’s relief, hasn’t visited her yet.
“The most important thing for me to do is to not let my mother hurt me anymore,” she starts off. “The incest that happened is a very small piece of the pie. Having her call me a liar and invalidate my feelings and punish me for them was worse. She still calls me a liar and takes great pleasure in belittling me. She’s turned my two younger brothers against me, and I love them so much. I can’t let my mother hurt me any more than she already has. If my father can’t understand that, then he’ll have to deal with those consequences.”
Moving down the list, she goes on, “I have to learn to stop browbeating myself when I don’t complete what I intended to do or don’t do it perfectly. And I have to let Walter know the triggers that really make me anxious, like having him blow me off, and see if he can help me make a plan together to avoid those things.”
She looks up at me and asks worriedly, “Am I doing this okay?”
“Yes, fine. Please go on.”
“I have to be able to say no when I can’t do something for Walter or the children, and that’s really hard, because I’m afraid that they’ll get angry at me and won’t love me anymore, and they’ll leave. That fear brings out the meanness in me. And when I’m feeling mean, I have to give that part of me compliments and let her know that she’s not really vicious, that she’s okay. Doing yard work or heavy cleaning calms that part down.”
Nancy continues, “When the childlike part comes out, I need to sew and bake and paint. That makes her feel better. I loved to do those things when I was younger, but I wasn’t allowed to make a mess in the house. I had to go outside and play instead. I just get such pleasure out of those things now, because I never did them. So when I’m feeling childlike,” she concludes, looking up at me with a guilty smile, “I let myself have some fun.”
“Does that little girl inside you know that she’s free to have fun as much as she wants now?” I ask her. “Can you experience fun, too, even when you’re not acting like a child?”
Startling me with the suddenness of her transformation, Nancy switches into the Child again, a frightened, agitated little girl. “HELLO!” she hollers in her uncanny eight-year-old voice. “The Mom wants to leave and I have to yell for her to hear me,” she explains. “I have to hold the Mom back. She says she’s only coming here because Walter wants her to, that this is silly and that nothing’s going to get any better.”
Afraid to verbalize her doubts about therapy and her resistance to feeling entitled to have joy in her life, Nancy has let the Child speak out for her again.
I wait for her to return to herself and ask, “Why do you think the Child part of you, the part that feels sad, has to yell to be heard?”
“Because I couldn’t tell anybody when I was sad as a child,” Nancy says, adding quickly, “You couldn’t tell. I don’t remember why. I just know you couldn’t tell. And they didn’t care. So I don’t know how to tell.”
“That’s something you can help this part of you learn how to do,” I answer. “You can let her know it’s safe now for her to tell, and you’ll be listening. She shouldn’t have to scream to make herself heard.” I offer Nancy this hypothetical example: “Suppose you adopted an eight-year-old little girl who had a lot of stress before she came to you and she was sobbing and crying and wouldn’t tell you what was wrong. What would you do?”
“I would pick her up and hold her and rock her and sing to her. I’d let her know that in our home our children are the most important things to us except our marriage. And that I’ll listen to whatever she has to tell me.”
“What would you tell her if she pushed you away and started sobbing again?”
“I don’t know.” Nancy becomes distraught, repeating, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Through tears she says, “I can tell you what I do with my children. When my children cry, I hug them and let them know that they’re wonderful and please let Mom know whatever you need and I’ll be there for you. We’re always there for you. And there’s no problem too big that we can’t work on it together.”
“You’ve been able to be very comforting to your children,” I point out to her. “Do you think you can apply those same skills to yourself?”
“No, I can’t. No,” she sobs. “How can I do that if I can’t figure out if I’m even worth comforting? It’s like going through the motions.”
“Maybe the first step is to acknowledge that you’re worth it. The part of you that doesn’t feel worthy of being comforted, why does it feel that way? What’s the logic?”
“There’s no logic, I know that,” Nancy admits. “It’s just that I’ve always believed that I’ve not measured up to anybody’s expectations. It’s been beaten into me over so many years. It’s so ingrained, like Monday is Monday. It’s like your curriculum vitae: Nancy L., defective and unworthy. Not nice words, and they’ve always been there.”
“But it sounds to me that there are so many positive strengths that you do have. You just mentioned that you’re able to give your children some things that you perhaps didn’t receive.”
Nancy makes a painful confession: “When I was pregnant I prayed so hard, so hard, you have no idea, that God didn’t give me girls. But when I had Chrissie after Shawn, I was thrilled. And from the moment my children were born till now, the purpose that has kept me going is that the pattern will not repeat itself: they will not experience what I did. They’ll know what love is and what choices are and that they’re wonderful.”
“You have to give yourself that same gift of undoing the pattern.”
“On an objective level I get it. But when I interpret a situation, my emotions rule. I don’t believe that I’m not bad; I believe that I am bad. I take some pride in my accomplishments, but those are not me; they’re things that I did.”
“But they are things you did because of who you are.”
Nancy shrugs dismissively. “I’m so insecure now that I have to have physical proof that I’m not as bad as I think I am,” she reveals. “Walter is so sweet. He said, ‘Let’s look at videos we’ve made of the kids over the years, and you’ll see some of the wonderful things you’ve done.’ At this point, it’s impossible for me to have spontaneous positive thoughts about myself or feel entitled to do fun, comforting things.”
Deep down, what’s really stopping Nancy from committing herself to the work of comfort so crucial to her recovery is a fear of failure: “I don’t want to try and try and get shoved all the way back down again,” she says. “I don’t know how to comfort myself. I don’t even know how to begin.” Nancy shakes her head, bemused by this admission, and asks, “Isn’t it sad to be my age and not know how to do that?”
The parking lot at Valley View High School’s ice hockey arena was filled with cars that night. Parents and children bundled up in hooded ski jackets, mufflers, and thick mittens to ward off the piercing chill in the air were streaming across the lot into the arena. The big game between Valley View’s team and Saint Matthew’s, their archrival, had drawn a sell-out crowd.
Nancy pulled her Jeep Grand Cherokee into the lot and drove slowly up and down the rows of station wagons and SUV’s, looking for a spot. “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up,” the Mean scolded her. “You’re always late. Why can’t you ever get anywhere on time?”
“Oh, shut up,” she mumbled to herself as she finally found a place behind a few other cars parked on the grass bordering the lot. She stepped out of the truck into the cold night air and began striding toward the arena, her breath forming little white clouds of steam as she hurried along. She knew how important it was for her to be here for Shawn-her sixteen-year-old son was one of the team’s stars. Walter was busy with his new job and couldn’t make it, and Chrissie, her daughter, was home with a cold. She was tonight’s cheerleader.
As she approached the arena, Nancy heard a roar from the crowd and assumed that the game had already begun. The Mean started in again. “Damn you, hurry up, hurry up, keep moving, keep moving, keep moving.”
But then another voice stopped her dead in her tracks, shouting, “Don’t go in! Please don’t! Please!” It was the Child, crying out inside her.
Nancy entered the arena and started walking toward her seat, but the Child’s voice held her back. “No! You can’t stay here! You have to leave!” It was too full of anguish to be ignored. Abruptly, Nancy turned on her heel and ran out of the building as fast as she could.
“When you left the arena,” I ask Nancy at our next session, “what were you feeling?”
“I panicked right inside the door and had to get away,” Nancy answers. “I ran back to my Jeep and sat there, shaking and too upset to drive, until I got over it. And then it hit me. I found myself thinking about my two younger brothers. I taught both of them how to ice skate, and they became excellent hockey players when they were Shawn’s age. My son looks just like Rory, my youngest brother. Going to the game reminded me of the horrible wedge my mother has driven between my brothers and me. She told them not to have anything to do with me, because I would just make trouble. They yes her to death, because it’s easier that way, and I never see them anymore.”
“Have you spoken to them about it?”
“No, they won’t talk to me,” she says unhappily.
“Maybe you could write a letter to your brothers, telling them how you feel.”
“I should,” Nancy agrees. “Alienating me from my brothers is one of the cruelest things my mother has done to me. I raised my two younger brothers. They were more my children than my mother’s. And of course she takes all the credit. I think the reason they’re half sane is that I raised them, not her. She raised Keith and me, and both of us are so screwed up. I remember thinking, ‘No one will ever do anything to hurt these two boys’ to the point where I would sleep in Rory’s crib with him until he wasn’t a baby anymore. I wanted to protect him.”
“Do your brothers know that you have DID?”
“No, but my emotional state has interfered terribly with my relationship with them,” Nancy replies. “About two years ago, I was in Arizona with my mother and my kids, and my brothers were down there, too. An incident happened—I can’t even remember what it was—and the meanness in me kicked in and lasted a long time. Rory was appalled by it. In the middle of the night I put the kids in the car and drove back to New York, which is extremely irrational. I had no choice. I had to leave. I had to get out of there, because I was afraid that the Mean would come out again, and I’d say things that would be unforgivable.”
“How did your family react to your leaving like that?”
“Rory wrote to me three weeks later and said, ‘You’re a different person. You are not my sister,’” Nancy answers. “And I was so pissed. I never pursued it, because since then my mother has taken advantage of this rift and has turned it into a massive triangulation between my brothers and me. And it’s like, ‘See, you really are nuts.’”
Nancy begins to sob bitterly. The simmering rage pent up in a childhood of silent suffering finally boils over. Her fury at her mother for inflicting emotional abuse more deeply wounding perhaps than even the incest she has suffered finds words. “I hate her!” Nancy shouts. “I hate her! I want to kill her!”
I tell Nancy that being able to express her feelings in the context of therapy is an important step toward integration of her separate selves. “You won’t need the Mean to express anger for you inappropriately and have it come out at your husband and children,” I explain, “when you reconnect with your rage and learn how to lessen its power.”
“My brother Keith hates my mother, too,” she tells me, “but he’s too far gone to do anything about it.”
“The one closest to you in age?”
“Yes. He’s in a psychiatric hospital. He’s been nonfunctional for years,” Nancy reveals as if reluctantly peeling back the bandage over a raw wound. “Keith was on the Olympic track team, and he was a wonderful athlete and academic success. I was so proud of him! He came home one Christmas, and he had this big psychotic break, and he never recovered. Two weeks ago he jumped off a bridge. He never tried to kill himself before.”
I sympathize with Nancy for this heart-breaking family tragedy and ask, “Were you and your brother close?”
“Very close; we took care of each other,” Nancy replies. “I called him last week, and I’ve never heard him so depressed. I feel I need to go see him, as much for me as for him. He basically just sits in his room and holds his head. He was a senior in college when he had his first breakdown, and he’s never worked. He’s a wonderful person, and he’s so trapped. It just kills me. I should never have lost contact with him. I just want to hug him and let him know how much we love him.”
“Have you shared anything with him about yourself?”
“No, I don’t know if he could handle that,” Nancy answers. “For most of my life I didn’t remember any of these memories of the sexual abuse. I don’t think he knows about that. I don’t think he was abused by my grandfather, but my mother was as awful to him as she was to me. His level of functioning is just too low to talk about the experiences we’ve gone through together, but there are glimpses of it.”
Nancy begins to weep at the thought of how far her once-golden brother has fallen. “He didn’t deserve this,” she says brokenly. “I think I’m the only one who understands him.” She smiles through her tears as she remembers her last time with Keith when he stayed at her home. “One night when we were sitting together in the den he looked at his fingers and said jokingly, ‘Do you really think snakes come out of my hands or is that because I’m crazy?’ We laughed together like two little kids.”
Nancy wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “The sad part of this is that Keith was the only one I could share this nightmare with,” she says, “because my other brothers are so much younger than me. I was their mother, and they had a different childhood. Keith is the only one who knows.”
Almost pleadingly, Nancy asks, “Is it okay if I go see him? I just want to sit with him and hug him.”
“Yes,” I answer, knowing how much it would mean to her to be with her brother at this terrible time in both their lives.
Saturday Nancy awoke brimming with good intentions. This would be a perfect day to visit Keith. She drew back the bedroom drapes and looked out at the brilliant sunlight pouring through the crystalline coating of ice on the trees and grass, the residue of early morning dew. It would all burn off soon. The weather forecast was calling for “an unseasonably warm day with temperatures in the high forties.” Walter was out jogging, and as soon as he got back they’d throw some clothes into an overnight bag and take off on the 150-mile ride to the hospital in northern Massachusetts. The kids had their own plans for the day, and she didn’t think it would be a good idea for them to see Keith in that condition anyway. Her parents weren’t due back from Arizona yet, so there was no likelihood of running into her mother at the hospital.
She was sitting at the kitchen table drinking her morning coffee when Shawn burst into the room and began rummaging through the cabinets. He was already dressed and looking for a quick breakfast before he ran off to be with his friends.
“Mom, don’t we have any cornflakes?” Shawn asked.
It was an innocent question, but to Nancy it sounded like “Jesus Christ, why don’t you ever take care of things in this house!” It stung her like an accusation, a casting of aspersions on her competence. Why didn’t her family appreciate what she did for them? Why try to be nice when nobody cared?
Immediately the Mean sprang into action. “Screw you, Shawn!” she screamed. “Why are you so helpless? Find something else if we don’t have any goddamn cornflakes. I’m not your fucking slave!” Nancy threw her coffee cup across the room and watched it shatter to pieces against the cabinet above Shawn’s head.
“Hey, cut it out!” he yelled back at her, taken by surprise. “All I asked you was, ‘Where’s the cornflakes?’”
Now I’ve done it, she thought. He’ll walk out the door and I’ll never see him again. She felt her anxiety rising like a fever, her heart thumping loudly in her chest. The Child was frightened and didn’t know what to do, and the Mom only wanted to bolt out of there and go someplace where nobody knew her.
Nancy couldn’t wait for Walter to get home; she had to leave that minute. She rushed upstairs, threw on a pair of jeans and a sweater, flew downstairs to the hall closet, grabbed a ski jacket, and blew out of the house like a gust of wind.
She was tooling along Route 14 in White Plains in the Jeep Grand Cherokee when suddenly she noticed a sign that said she was approaching Foster Center. How did that happen? She couldn’t have been on the road more than twenty minutes, and Foster Center was in Rhode Island, over a hundred miles from her home. She looked at the clock on the dashboard and was shocked to read 12:55. Her watch said the same thing. That meant she had to have been driving for at least two hours, and most of that time was a blank!
For the first time since she sped away from her house, Nancy became aware of her surroundings. It was a scenic countryside of fields and farms and orchards lined with curving fieldstone walls and shingled barns that looked centuries old interspersed with a few incongruous modern ranch and split-level homes. Foster Center itself was a bit of postcard Americana. Nestled between fairy tale pine forests, the town was composed of stately buildings dating back to the eighteenth century and a one-room red schoolhouse and bell tower that had been converted into the town library.
Nancy was tired and starting to get hungry, but the Mom didn’t want to stop. She was pestering Nancy to go to Cepachet, an old stagecoach town famous for its antiques. The Mom loved antiques and was hoping she could find something for the house there. Since it was only another twelve miles or so, Nancy gave in and headed north through Rhode Island’s apple orchard country to Cepachet.
All along the route Nancy spotted signs advertising different varieties of apples, apple pies, and cider. The Mom was dying to pick up some of those giant Japanese mutsu apples called Crispins to take home and dip in caramel and chocolate sauce for the kids. She wanted to make it up to them for screaming at them so much when the Mean was out, but all of the farm shops were closed and wouldn’t open until the season started in a few months.
Driving into Cepachet, Nancy felt that she’d entered a sepia-colored town in Montana or Wyoming in the cowboys and Indians days. Famished, she pulled up to Brown and Hopkins Country Store and bought a chunk of cheddar cheese and some crackers to hold her until dinner. Her next stop was Stone Mill Antiques, a former old stone mill now boasting a red, white, and blue flaglike sale sign in front and a nineteenth-century life-size white horse carved out of tree trunks near the entrance.
Browsing through the jumbled collection of furniture from days gone by, Nancy spotted a Shaker writing desk that struck a familiar chord. She felt her whole body tense, a chill rise up her spine. It was just like the desk in the attic that she and Keith were hiding under when they were little and their father burst in and smashed it in half with a chair during one of his drunken rampages.
“Don’t be afraid, don’t give into it, you need to be an adult,” she told herself as she felt the childlike terror and helplessness of an abused and cornered eight-year-old begin to overwhelm her. But the Child wouldn’t listen. “I can’t stay here!” she cried.
Hurrying out of the building, Nancy jumped into her Jeep and drove away in a panic. Twenty minutes later she found herself pulling into the courtyard of a motel in Providence. She had no idea how she got there, but she knew she needed to check in, call Walter, and tell him to meet her there. She was afraid to make the rest of the trip to the hospital in Massachusetts alone. While she was waiting for Walter she could lie down and get some rest, and they could go back there and spend the night after they visited Keith.
It took every ounce of Nancy’s energy to pull herself together and speak to the desk clerk like a reasonable, mature woman. She got a double-occupancy room and told the clerk, when he asked whether she had any luggage, that her husband would be bringing her overnight bag with him when he met her there later that afternoon.
“Nancy, are you all right?” Walter asked anxiously after he picked up the phone on the first ring and heard her say hello.
“I’m fine. I’m at—” She looked at the address on a book of matches and gave it to him. “I’m sorry I couldn’t wait for you, but I got angry at Shawn and—” Feelings of shame for her behavior overcame her, and she dissolved into the Child, tearfully confiding, “I was a bad girl, and Mom’s mad at me, too, ‘cause she wanted to get something nice for the house in a big place with lots of old tables and chairs. I told her it made me skeered in there, so she left. Mom’s a nice girl. She called you to come stay with me and give me a hug and bring my ‘jamas for when I go to bed.”
Walter told her he would pack a bag for her and be there as soon as he could. Relieved, Nancy lay down on the bed and slept until she was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. It was the desk clerk announcing that her husband had arrived, and Nancy said to send him up.
As soon as she saw Walter, Nancy threw her arms around him and embraced him as if they’d been away from each other for months. The Mean didn’t trust him, but Nancy knew in the depths of her soul that Walter would never let her down.
When they pulled into the parking lot of the psychiatric hospital where Keith was a patient, Nancy took a deep breath to steel herself. She fished inside her handbag to make sure that she hadn’t forgotten the little book of spiritual sayings she’d bought as a present for Keith and rubbed it for good luck.
Inside, the brick building looked like any other hospital except for the ominous locked door leading to Keith’s wing. A nurse let Nancy and Walter in. They passed the lounge where a man in jeans and a plaid shirt was staring blankly at a ball game on the TV set and some visitors were talking to a young woman whose arms were covered with tiers of angry scars from self-inflicted cuts.
They found Keith looking more depressed than Nancy had ever seen him. His muscular body seemed shrunken, and the dark stubble on his gaunt face gave him a grungy look. He could barely muster a thin smile when Nancy kissed and hugged him hello and handed him his gift.
“You look wonderful,” she lied. She was about to sit down on a chair next to Keith when she heard a sound that filled her with chilling alarm, like someone walking in the woods who hears the hiss of a rattlesnake. It was her mother’s voice outside the doorway. Oh, my God, Nancy thought, what a cruel trick of fate! Either her parents had cut short their annual Arizona vacation or Nancy had been mistaken about the date of their return. It didn’t matter. There was no way she could remain calm with them, not when she was this fragile.
Nancy wheeled around and screamed at her father as he was about to enter the room with her mother, “Get her out of here! Get her out! Get her OUT!”
Her father looked shocked, but he took his wife gently by the arm and said, “Come on, Barb, let’s wait out here for a minute.”
Nancy saw that she’d scared Keith half to death. She wanted to comfort him, but she knew that she had to flee immediately before she switched into the Child.
“I’m sorry, Keith. I’ve got to go,” she said, bending down to kiss her brother good-bye. He pushed her away, frightened, so she blew him a kiss and left the room quickly. With Walter at her side, she brushed past her parents and strode down the hall to the exit without a backward glance.
“We were driving away from the hospital and Walter said, ‘God did this on purpose so that your mother and father really can see the effect all this stuff has had on you over the years and that you’re not bullshitting,’” Nancy recounts in my office at her next visit. “When we got home, we had a family meeting. We came up with signals for Walter and the kids to let me know that they don’t hate me and won’t leave me when something happens that makes me feel threatened or unappreciated. They’ve been wonderful about it, but the Mean is still coming out two or three times a day. Shawn provokes it the most. When he’s a roughneck, he terrorizes me like my father.”
Like many abuse victims, Nancy has to learn how to desensitize her hyperactive trauma response system so that she doesn’t leap into full-scale protective mode at threats that are actually innocuous. Her trauma response system is stuck on permanent “alert” and will only get unstuck when she is able to access dissociated memories and feelings from the past and connect to them as an adult who is no longer a helpless victim.
Typical of DID patients who depersonalize, Nancy has a hypervigilant observing self that always expects the worst and constantly has to prepare for it. “There’s this part of me, the Watcher, always on the lookout for trouble,” she says. “She thinks my mother’s coming any minute. The Watcher listens to the Mean—they’re always together—but she doesn’t say anything. She’s too scared.”
“You have to help her learn that nobody’s going to hate you or hurt you or break anything or throw something at you if dinner isn’t made or the house isn’t perfect,” I tell her. “She doesn’t know that the house you’re living in now is not the one you grew up in. You need to have the Mom explain that to the Mean and the Watcher and tell the Child that, too. The Child needs to know that she’s no longer in any harm when she’s around adults. She doesn’t have to stoop down and be abused or run away because it’s thirty-five years later now and you can have an independent life of your own. Remind them all of what year this is. I think they need to be oriented.”
Nancy looks puzzled. “The thing that throws me is that I’m not afraid of getting physically hurt by the people I care deeply about; it’s getting emotionally damaged,” she says. “It’s not a safety issue with me. That’s why I could never quite figure out the hiding in the closet thing.”
“A very important part of this phase of treatment is to begin to understand when something in the present triggers you into the past and causes you to have feelings of the past in the present, resulting in your behavior,” I explain. “If you can identify when that’s happening, communication and cooperation among these different sides of you will let you know that now it’s safe. Being able to differentiate between the past, when it was very scary, and the present, when you’re safe, is crucial at this juncture.”
“I can recognize the triggers,” Nancy says, “but my reactions are so automatic that I can’t stop them.”
“Comforting them is what stops them,” I tell her. “If you try to squelch your different parts or drive them away, that will only make them angrier or more frightened and out of control. The idea is to be supportive of them and have these different sides of you begin to share memories and feelings with each other and ultimately work together. The Child can learn from the Mean that she can get angry and not just be scared and sad and hide in the closet anymore. And the Mean can learn from the Child to have sad feelings and also pleasurable feelings so that she just doesn’t have to carry all the angry feelings and come out and be mean. And the Mom can learn from the Child that she needs to express herself honestly and not have to make the Mean or the Child do it for her.”
Nancy nods her assent. “I’ve had it with all this crying,” she sighs. She looks impatient and determined at the same time and says, “I want to go on with my life.”
After several months in therapy Nancy proudly reports that she was able to get through an entire week and the Mean had not come out once. “Shawn complained to me about my not coming to his hockey games,” she relates, “and instead of turning into a screaming bitch, I recognized that he wasn’t going to hate me or leave me. I just said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t do that, Shawn, but we can be together other times, and I can show how much I love you in other ways.’ I’m more determined that this viciousness inside me has to end. I never felt so strong-willed about it before.”
“Are you able to comfort yourself actively now?”
“I still feel that I’m not worth anything if I’m not productive all the time,” Nancy replies, “so I approach comforting myself from the standpoint of doing what I enjoy. The Mean loves to paint, so I’ve been painting up a storm. The Mom likes to draw, and the Child loves it when I bake the honey buns my grandmother taught me how to make. For the first time I’ve started to believe that I didn’t do anything wrong and that I don’t have to be ashamed of the way I feel or behave.”
I’m delighted with Nancy’s progress and insights into her symptoms. She now understands that her symptoms previously attributed to ADHD—her difficulty sitting still or waiting, her distractibility, the trouble she has sustaining attention, her forgetfulness—have a dissociative core. She feels calmer and more hopeful about the future now that she is learning how to accept and nurture the different parts of herself underlying those symptoms. She realizes that she had tried to anesthetize her different parts with drugs like Ritalin that made her feel better short-term but delayed her recovery by not dealing with the root cause of her symptoms.
Nancy tells me that she has finally gotten around to writing a “respectful” letter to her two younger brothers and proceeds to read it:
One morning last January, I seemed to run out of gas and could not maintain the cover that I have hidden behind for many years. I just unraveled, and there I was lying on the bathroom floor and behaving like a scared little kid. I lost recognition of time, and Walter found me hiding in the closet underneath my clothes, talking like a kid and not understanding any big words. I guess I still am partly a scared little kid. I ended up in Westchester Community Hospital’s emergency room, but in the blink of an eye I was back to being a well-poised, middle-aged professional and fooled them quick enough to be able to go home.
On the way home I turned into a mean, vicious, cursing bitch, yelling and screaming and criticizing Walter and Shawn and poor little Chrissie. It was pretty much surreal, and I was terrified that Walter and the kids would now think that they lived with a freak. Or worse, they would call me a liar and think that I was making all of this up. I’ve been called a liar all my life.
I’m writing this letter for myself, because if I ever want to be healthy and happy again I must be honest about myself and my feelings and about the things that have happened to me. I will not go into any details with you about the incest nor do I ever intend to. It’s a private, painful, and very sad affair. But I’ve confronted the truth and don’t have to feel or be told that I’m a troublemaker and a liar anymore. Now I just have to learn to believe that I’m not.
I have what they call dissociative identity disorder. I knew what was wrong with me years ago, but I was ashamed to tell anybody what was going on. Somehow I still held out the faint hope that I was a liar because at that time it was easier to be called a liar than dredge up all these awful memories.
Now maybe that Arizona incident will make sense to you. I had to get out of that apartment, because if I had stayed in that situation I would have switched, and then all of you would’ve known the secret that I’ve kept for so, so long.
I’m keenly aware of the hard work that I have ahead of me and afraid that it may eventually exhaust Walter and the children. I’m very angry that I didn’t do anything to cause this, yet I have to deal with all the consequences and all the very, very painful and gut-wrenching losses, one of them being the closeness we had. That was one of my true joys.
Two months ago I thought I lost everything as well as my mind. But now things are looking up. I’m gaining a little bit of control and I’m not going to quit this time. I will never have the same view of life or the world again, but at last I know that there’s no need for me to hate myself. I am going to try my hardest to feel hope and joy again.
Nancy loved being in Grammy’s house, even on a hot, sticky day like this one. She didn’t want to play outside and get all sweaty and thirsty when she could be with Grammy in her kitchen, baking dough and helping her make crab cakes for her big nightclub and restaurant downstairs. Grammy’s nightclub was famous. People came there from all over, even movie stars who were in town on their way to somewhere else. Nancy would go into the dining room and hide behind the curtains on the stage and watch Dizzy Gillespie and Buddy Rich play. Sometimes Grammy let Nancy sit under the piano and listen to the music while the grownups danced. At home her mom kept the piano in the cellar and told Nancy, “Go to the basement if you want to practice.” That wasn’t very nice.
Grammy wasn’t like her mom at all. She wouldn’t let you get away with anything, but she was always fair. There wasn’t one person Nancy ever knew who didn’t think highly of her grandmom. The thing is, she never put on any airs. It didn’t bother Grammy if she was a little fat. Even though she had good manners, she didn’t always use ‘em. She wore long pants like Katherine Hepburn in the movies. Grammy was very rich and could’ve had any fancy thing she wanted, but she gave away more than she ever kept. She didn’t care about things; she cared about people.
That’s what Nancy could never figure out. Her mom always had to have lots of things even when she was a little girl. Nancy saw a picture of her mom when she was eight or nine in a cute little skating suit that Grammy got her. It had a little white mink ruffle all around her skirt. And her mom’s wedding, oh, my God! That was the biggest thing the town ever saw. Her mom didn’t go without anything. So what happened to her along the way?
Her mom wasn’t nice to people the way Grammy was. One Thanksgiving, when Nancy was in second grade, there was a table at the restaurant set for maybe fifty people. It was so much fun to get ready. Nancy sat down at the table and smelled something bad. She looked at the lady next to her, jumped up from the table, ran over to her grandmother, and whispered in her ear, “Grandmom, that lady over there smells.” And Grammy said, “Be thankful you don’t. That person has nowhere to spend Thanksgiving.” Nancy found out later that the lady was somebody Grammy saw in church who looked very sad Thanksgiving morning, and she took her home with her. That was just the way she was. But it drove her mom nuts to think that she had to have someone at the table who wore smelly old clothes and didn’t have anywhere else to go. “Oh, pshaw, pshaw!” she said. Nancy thought Grammy was right. What difference did it make as long as the lady was a nice person?
Grammy had ten brothers and sisters, and they all just loved her to death. She married a man who drank too much and was a pain in the butt. He barked at people and cursed all the time. Nancy’s grandpa used to be a friend of Legs Diamond, the gangster, and run whiskey from Canada under the lumber trucks—bootleg whiskey, he called it. That’s how he made all his money. He would never lay a hand on anyone, but one time he kicked Nancy’s grandma in front of her. Nancy went right over to him and kicked him in the knee. She had a frying pan in her hand, and she said, “If you ever kick my grandma again, I’m gonna hit you with this pan!” He never kicked Grammy in front of Nancy anymore.
Nancy was never afraid of her grandpa. He drank too much and had a mean mouth, but he wasn’t scary like her dad. He wasn’t a break-everything-in-the-house kind of drunk. And he thought Nancy was the best little girl in the world. Nancy could chop someone’s head off with an ax, and he’d say, “There must’ve been a reason.” Her grandma was the same way.
Grammy’s kitchen had a great big fan in it, bigger and taller than Nancy. It had fat gray blades that whirred and whirred and whirred and made a breeze that kept them cool. The honey buns they’d made from Grammy’s own secret recipe were already baking in the oven. That sweet, buttery, cinnamon smell was so good that it made Nancy close her eyes and draw it up her nose when she breathed it in. Now Grammy was cooking chopped onions on the stove and pouring egg yolks from the mixer into a great big bowl of crab meat for the crab cakes. She called over her shoulder, “Nancy, bring me that bowl of mayonnaise, will you, sweetie?”
“Sure, Grammy.” It made Nancy feel good when Grammy called her names like “Sweetie” and “Dear” and “Honey,” not like the “Blab Baby” and “Liar” names her mom called her at home.
Nancy started carrying the bowl of mayonnaise toward Grammy when she lost her balance. She tried as hard as she could to hold on to the bowl, but it dropped out of her hands and hit the table. The mayonnaise flew up in the air and went right into the fan. Splat! Splat! Splat! It went everywhere.
“Oh, you naughty girl, you naughty girl,” Grammy scolded.
But Nancy wasn’t a naughty girl. She didn’t do it on purpose. She bit her lip, trying not to cry.
Then Grammy wiped her hands on her apron and got a block of ice cream out of the freezer and cut it with a big knife. Whack!
Nancy was so scared. She’d never seen a knife that big.
“Now you go eat some ice cream,” Grammy said. “You’re not a naughty girl. The mayonnaise was too heavy for you.” And she gave Nancy a hug.
Nancy ran off to eat her ice cream, knowing that Grammy still loved her a lot even when she did something bad. She knew that when her dad got mad at her, he still loved her a lot, too. But with her mom, it was different. Her mom didn’t like her. Never liked her. Why was that?
Something must have happened for her mother not to like her own daughter. It never made any sense to Nancy at all. How do you match her mom up with a grandmom who was loved by everyone who knew her, who was looked up to by the whole town, who was good and fair to Nancy and loved her with all her heart? It was sort of like a jigsaw puzzle.
We reach a point at which Nancy is talking about going back to work. Her ability to comfort the different parts of herself when she feels threatened has improved dramatically, and the Mean hardly comes out anymore.
“I found a little coffeehouse that I would just love to work in parttime,” Nancy tells me. “I’d be making the honey buns and some of the pastries my grandmother taught me how to make. It would give me a focus and get me out of the house. You can’t sit in the house every day when you’ve never done that. What do you think?”
“I think it’s great for you to do things that you enjoy and get pleasure from,” I tell her enthusiastically, “as long as you don’t allow it to become too stressful.”
“Oh, not like a steamroller; I’ll never do that again,” Nancy assures me. “And I don’t want to go back to being a physical therapist again; it just isn’t me,” she says, expressing a newfound sense of her personal identity and her right to express it in her chosen work. “Therapy has given me my life back. Every day I keep asking, ‘What do I need to give myself pleasure and joy?’”
Nancy’s return to the workplace in her newly chosen field is like one of those meteoric success stories you read about in entrepreneurial magazines. In a short time her signature honey buns and other baked goods doubled her employer’s business, and she began to think about striking out on her own. She decided to open a trendy little coffeehouse where she could serve and sell the pastries her grandmother taught her how to make, embellished with her own artistic designs. Always resourceful, she found space in a rundown vacant building virtually rent-free in exchange for rehabbing it. Nancy painted and decorated it herself and turned the shabby storefront into a warm and inviting little restaurant. She named it Grammy’s.
After only a year in business Nancy happily reports that Grammy’s is turning a profit and is moving to a location twice the size of the first place. Now the rehabbing has started all over again with an anticipated opening date in May, a month away.
“Forgive me for the way I look,” Nancy apologizes, pointing to her paint-spattered jeans, when she comes in for her appointment. “I came straight from Grammy’s and didn’t have time to change.”
“You look fine,” I assure her. “How’s it going?”
“Great!” Nancy says excitedly. “The invitations for the opening came today. I have to tell you that while I was designing them I kept writing out different styles of print in longhand first. The third time I wrote out ‘Sunday, May 9,’ and looked at it, I suddenly realized for the first time, That’s my grandmother’s birthday! It’s so symbolic. Everything I am and know how to do I learned from my grandmom. I called Walter to tell him, and he said, ‘See that? Your grandma is right there, helping you along the way.’”
Nancy is very worried. It seems that her fears of wearing her family out might be coming to pass. Shawn has tired of “walking on eggshells” around her and has moved out of the house to live in an apartment with two friends. And Walter is depressed. Although he’s happy for her success,
he feels neglected and makes snide remarks about her cooking for everyone else except him and not entertaining their friends at home anymore. She almost thinks he’d like her to go back to being a martyr again now that the Mom is stronger.
“He’s withdrawn and sits by himself in the dark a lot after he comes home from work,” Nancy says. “I won’t go with him to anyplace where people are drinking heavily, so he’s been going out with his friends a couple of nights a week and coming home late with beer on his breath. I hate that smell!”
“Maybe there are other fun things you can do together that don’t involve drinking. Have you suggested any?”
“He’d like to go to the movies, but I won’t do that,” Nancy says emphatically. “I can’t go to the movies. It’s too dark in there. I can’t see if anybody’s coming.”
The panicky note in her voice catches me by surprise. “When you’re with Walter next to you, do you realize you’re safe?”
Nancy fidgets in her chair and feels her forehead. “My face is hot,” she murmurs. She seems agitated. “My face is hot. Does my face look red to you?” She reaches for a glass of water and gulps it down.
“What are you feeling?” I ask.
“I don’t know. My face is hot,” she repeats. She cringes and looks terrified.
“Nancy, why are you frightened? Who’s feeling frightened at the movies?”
“Me,” the Child says, speaking out as Nancy is caught in the grip of uncontrollable fear. “I don’t like to be in the dark. I’m telling you right now. Nossir.”
“What are you afraid might happen?”
“Somebody might get me in the dark. I can’t see them coming in the movies. They’re coming from the back.”
“Did anyone ever get you in the movies before?”
“I don’t think so, but in the dark—” The Child’s voice trails off. Then she says, “That’s why you can’t sleep with your back to a door. You can’t ever do that. And you have to sleep on the edge of the bed. And you can’t sleep without a blanket tucked inside the bed.” Nancy feels her forehead again. “I don’t like it when my face is hot.”
“What is that related to when your face gets hot?”
“I had a bad thing that I remembered this week, something I never remembered before, and I had a really, really hard time but I didn’t get—I mean, I didn’t tell anybody, and I think that could be some of what’s wrong.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” “I don’t want to talk about it, but I think I have to.” “You can talk about it as much or as little as you want, and you can stop at any time. You can realize that talking about your memories isn’t the same as being there.”
“I know that,” the Child says, sounding like a precocious elementary school student. “Once I talk about it and say it out loud, then I don’t have to ball it up in my head.”
She starts to tell me what happened. “The other night I went to bed before Walter, and I was in my bed, and all of a sudden I was crawling way down to the bottom of the bed. I used to hide at the bottom of the bed a lot. I sleep on the side of the bed closest to the door with my face to the door so I can always see who’s coming. But that night I got in the other way. I don’t know why—I never do that—and I got so skeered and my heart started going da-dum, da-dum, da-dum because I knew I couldn’t see who was coming. I knew something bad was starting to come up in my head, and I didn’t like it. Usually I say, ‘Go back down!‘ and I didn’t say that. I don’t know why. And I was very sad for a long time. And I remembered when I was—”
The Child hesitates. “I don’t know if I should—” She pauses, possibly to confer with the other alters or to get her own nerve up. “Okay, I remembered when we were in our old house,” she goes on, “and we had pink bedspreads and I was a little girl. I had feet on my ‘jamas, and I was in kindergarten or first or second grade. My dad was a drinking man—I told you about that, I believe, maybe not—and—and”-it’s obvious how hard this is for her to say—“lots of times he would come up in my room and he would do naughty things. And I didn’t remember that until the other day, and that was very hard on my heart to remember that.”
“What kind of things did he do?”
“Not very nice things. I turned over the other way real quick.” “And then what happened?”
“I remembered those things that happened, and that was enough for my head. I just pushed everything back to that dresser drawer in my head and closed the drawer because it was too much for my head all at one time.” “And were you able to go to sleep?”
“Yeah. I said that I know I’m in the house that we made ourselves and that Walter was downstairs watching TV and nobody could get in the house and hurt me now. What happened was a long time ago. I almost called you; that’s how scared I was. But it was late. I never called you in the nighttime before. The Mean was saying, ‘You better call that doctor. You better call that doctor. ‘”
“So the Mean was trying to be helpful?”
“I think so, yeah. She came out to protect me. And then the Mom said, ‘If I don’t feel any better and I can’t calm myself down, then I’ll call the doctor. I’m not gonna jump the gun.’ The Mom was worried. She wasn’t sure that any of us could take care of ourselves, but she wasn’t going to give up. She just kept telling me nobody could hurt me, and she made me go away quick. She wasn’t mean or pushy or bossy about it. She just said, ‘I’m coming here, so you don’t have to worry about being by yourself.’”
“That’s good that she protected you like that,” I tell her. “Now you know that you can reach out to her the next time you have anything worrisome and ask for comfort from within yourself again. The more experience you get with this, the more it will become like second nature.”
“It scared me that the next day I forgot all about it—I didn’t even remember that I remembered,” the Child says, describing how frightening amnesia can be. “That’s never happened before. It scared me when it came back into my head today because even though I didn’t remember it happening, I really did remember it happening.”
“And what makes you think you remembered it even though you didn’t?”
The Child explains the delayed recall of a traumatic memory in this simple, affecting way: “It’s like maybe you went to Disney World when you were a little tiny girl, and maybe you didn’t go back for twenty years. You didn’t remember going as a tiny little girl, but you somehow knew about it.”
“Something about it felt familiar. Was the feeling of sadness familiar, too?”
“The sad part was remembering that my dad did that,” the Child answers. “I felt that somebody else did me dirty and then lied to me for a long time. That’s the bad part. Not even what happened. It’s the lie.” Nancy’s face contorts, and she begins to cry. “Anybody can do almost anything, and I’ll forgive them, but don’t lie to me,” she sobs. “Everyone always lied to me. That’s what was wrong more than anything else.”
In the stillness of the room punctuated only by the sounds of traffic and an occasional ambulance siren coming from outside, Nancy slowly returns to herself. I tell her how proud I am of her that she was able to comfort herself so effectively when the memory of her fathers incest returned after so many years.
“The Sister came back, too,” she tells me. “Isn’t that amazing? I thought she was dead for sure. She’s only come out twice in the whole time I’ve known her. The first time was when I had the flashback of my grandfather’s sexual abuse, and she was like a wild animal, very scary. This time she spoke in a robotic voice without any inflection. She wouldn’ttalk to me or any of the others inside, only to Walter. She kept saying, ‘I know you. I’ve seen you before.’ She’s the one who knows everything, but she won’t talk to anyone, and nobody talks to her. It’s like there’s a wall.”
As I earlier thought she might, the Sister represents the part of Nancy where all of the sexual abuse memories are buried. The wall is there to protect Nancy from total decompensation should more memories come back at a given time than she can handle.
“It’s very significant that you were able to put the memories of your father’s sexual abuse back in the ‘drawer’ in your mind when you felt that they were becoming overwhelming,” I tell Nancy. “The fact that they’re surfacing now is a sign that you’re getting stronger and are better able to deal with them. When you feel up to it, try to communicate more with the Sister and help relieve her from bearing all of those memories alone. Communication and sharing will help bring that wall down so that you can integrate the memories and feelings from the past that are still hidden.”
Nancy recalls how much worse it was when she had the first flashbacks of her paternal grandfather’s sexual abuse. “I freaked out so badly that Walter called my parents. They believed me right away. My mother even told me that my dad’s father tried to attack her once when my dad was away, and she had to run out the back door. She admitted to me that he had a reputation for molesting young women.” Nancy frowns uncomprehendingly. “So why didn’t my mother believe me when I first told her? Why did she say I was lying? Why did she deny it about my father, too?”
“I’ve found that a parent who has a blind spot toward a child’s sexual abuse may have had her own problems growing up,” I tell her, “and is unconsciously allowing other problems to reoccur. If she has dissociated her own traumas, she has to block out her child’s, too, and is unable to hear about it. There are many different reasons people have trouble believing children.”
Nancy continues, “There was never any physical or sexual abuse of the children in my grandma’s house. She would never tolerate that.”
“Then what was your mother’s relationship with her own mother like?”
“My mom worshiped her mother, loved her dearly,” Nancy replies. “And my grandmom doted on my mother—she was her only daughter. My mom was a figure skater. She was beautiful, absolutely gorgeous. She was the prom queen, and my dad was the prom king. He was the handsome quarterback on the football team. My mom went to college and quit after two months and came home and told my grandmother she was getting married. And that was it.”
“But your mother seems to have tremendous unresolved anger from her own childhood,” I remark. “Something must have angered her.”
Nancy tells me that she has thought about this a lot, and this is her supposition: “When I was born, my grandma shifted all of the attention that she gave my mother to me and never stopped. My mom couldn’t stand it. I had much more in common with my grandmother than my mother did, and my mom was very jealous. The other thing was that my mom’s family was very wealthy and powerful, and my dad was a roofer’s son who didn’t have a dime. He made money later, but he was just starting out then. So my mom went from being a privileged only daughter adored by the town to a roofer’s way of life and a marriage to a raging alcoholic. She felt that everything had been snatched away from her, and she took it out on me.”
So that’s the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle: not nearly as monstrous as sexual abuse, but a precipitous fall from grace that left a gaping hole in her sense of self. “She lost her place in the sun,” I remark, “and by shaming you, she tried to make herself feel better.”
“But if you ask my mother, she’ll tell you that she never did anything wrong,” Nancy says bitterly. “She thinks she’s been a marvelous Better Homes and Gardens mother because she always had a better home and garden. She has no insights.”
“Obsessing about her home was her way of coping with issues she didn’t want to face,” I tell Nancy, “an ineffective way of trying to maintain control. Here was a woman who was emotionally incapable of dealing with her husband’s drinking or taking care of her children or protecting her daughter from sexual abuse. By focusing on something superficial and relatively benign, like keeping the house spotless, she was able to distract herself from her deeper problems and appear high-functioning to the rest of the world. Acquiring things was a substitute for the emptiness she may have felt inside.”
“Isn’t that sad?” Nancy says wistfully. “The nicest thing anyone will ever be able to say about my mother is, ‘She had a beautiful home.’”
Nancy has obtained financing for a factory, she tells me proudly, and her baked goods are about to be distributed nationwide. Her star continues to rise now that she has found the perfect outlet for her artistic talents and business acumen inherited from her beloved grandmother. Her relationship with Walter has improved, too. She has faithfully stuck to the plan we worked out for her to take off at least two days a week for pure rest and relaxation and has become more available to Walter for fun they can have together. Even though Shawn has moved out of the house, he still calls her every day, and their relationship is better than ever.
“You’ve made a tremendous amount of progress in the three years that you’ve been in treatment,” I tell her. “Not only that, you’ve done wonderful things.”
“I’ve done a lot in a little amount of time,” Nancy concedes modestly, “but emotionally charged situations are still difficult for me. If I ran into my mother at a trade show somewhere, I’d be okay—I’d just blow her off. But seeing her at Shawn’s graduation from high school this summer might be something I won’t be able to handle.”
“When the professional side of you—the Wife—is in control, that part has the skills not to let your mother hurt you,” I point out. “But in emotionally charged situations another part of you—the Child—is in control and doesn’t have those skills. She’s just a bundle of emotional memories and is still frightened.”
“The Wife has those memories, too,” Nancy says, “but they don’t weigh her down so much. The professional side of me is able to be more objective, logical, and rational when I react to things.”
“So it’s not that you can’t acquire those skills; it’s that you need to have the side of you that has them teach them to the side that doesn’t. Then you’ll be aware that you don’t have to be frightened of your mother in any situation.”
Nancy agrees to have further communication and cooperation between the Wife and the Child. Then she tells me about another problem she’s been having with a part of herself she calls the Heckler. “It makes fun of me and frightens me, and it’s coming more often now that I’m getting better. It’s different from the Mean. It’s this inner voice saying to me all the time, ‘Well, you think you’re so wonderful. I’ll fix you.’ It punishes me with flashbacks of the sexual abuse. I hear that voice, ‘I’ll fix your ass,’ and—bam!—there’s a flashback. They’re more frequent, more vivid, more clear. It’s like watching a rerun. Why is there a part of me that wants to punish me?”
“But you’re stronger now and can handle the flashbacks, right?”
“Yes, I have enough control over them not to let them push me over the edge again, the way the first one did. They’re not comfortable, but they’re not frightening anymore. Even the Sister’s not frightened of them. It’s a brief intrusion in my day, over in seconds or minutes. But I still can’t understand why some part of me has to kick me back down a step. It’s a demeaning, degrading kind of feeling.”
“You’ve always had that part, haven’t you?”
“I have,” Nancy admits. “Anything I ever did that I felt was pretty spectacular, I was convinced that I didn’t do it. Now I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can own the good things about myself, so then the derogatory part comes in. I know it’s very much like my mother, but why would I develop an alter like that if a dissociative disorder is a protective device?”
“This part of you is there to maintain the misperception that you’re no good and don’t deserve to be happy because that’s something you learned,” I answer. “That part of you is identified with what you were taught.”
“My mother literally hit me in the head with hairbrushes all the time,” Nancy reveals. “Now the Heckler is doing that in a way, too.”
“That’s what you’re familiar with. You learned that people who are supposed to love you punish and demean you.”
“And that there was always an ulterior motive and that they really didn’t love you,” Nancy adds.
“How much longer do you have to allow that part of you to maintain these misperceptions that you’ve been taught?” I ask. “Perhaps the Heckler could talk to me about why she’s always giving you a hard time. Is that the only way she knows how to express herself?”
“There’s no other way. All that part knows how to say to me is that I’m a lazy good-for-nothing and full of shit.” Nancy’s becoming vehement. “I’m sick of it! I want it to stop! I want it to go!”
“Try having conversations with that part or writing a letter to her or having some of the other parts of you counter these negative things that you were always told and let that part know that they’re wrong.”
Suddenly a voice I have never before heard from Nancy speaks up. It’s the Heckler, a sullen adolescent girl with a truculent “show me” attitude.
“How do you know they were wrong?” she scoffs. “You weren’t there. You don’t know.”
“Because I’ve heard what Nancy told me,” I reply, “and I know that as a child she was trying her hardest and her best to please her mom. You were told things that are untrue. You’re not a bad person, and you no longer have to make Nancy feel as if she’s bad.”
“Why?” the Heckler demands to know. “Why? Why?”
“Because she’s worked really hard to be good, but her mom wasn’t able to appreciate her because of her own problems. But now you can begin to acknowledge how good and how talented Nancy is and what a good person she was back then even though her mom couldn’t appreciate her.”
“I know Nancy’s not a liar, but that’s the only thing I know that’s not true,” the Heckler allows, sounding less confrontational but not entirely convinced. “Nancy got punished a lot. She would stand in the dining room, and her mom would scream at her, ‘You lazy good-for-nothing little bitch’ and slap her face hard over and over, and that’s when I would come.”
“Nancy did nothing to deserve that. It’s time to correct—”
A loud, distraught voice interrupts me, shouting, “I want to go home now! I’m uncomfortable now!” It’s the Child calling out in fear. “That girl never talks. She never talks to anybody but me. I don’t know why she talked to you. She just left.”
“Maybe she’s trying to get therapy,” I suggest. “It’s okay. It’s fine.”
“Was she nice to you? Did she swear at you?” the Child asks anxiously. Since amnesia in DID functions to separate or distinguish the personalities, the Child is aware only that the Heckler spoke, but has no memory of what she said. “She didn’t swear at you, right? She swears at me.”
“No, she didn’t swear at me.”
“I only heard her talk inside my head. I never heard her talk outside. That was a scary thing. I feel like I’m sweating now.” Nancy holds her head, overwhelmed by the fright and shame of having an alter known only to oneself come out publicly for the first time. “Oooh, oooh, it’s like vacuuming in my head.”
“Take some nice deep breaths.”
In a moment Nancy is back to herself. She looks at me questioningly. “What happened?”
I fill Nancy in on what took place during the time gap that often occurs while an alter is out. “You should continue to have conversations with the Heckler alone or in therapy,” I tell her, “and try to have all the parts of you work together to give you positive feedback so that you won’t accept these critical thoughts any longer.”
“That takes a lot of energy.”
“I know, but you’ve made solid progress, and you’re not going to go backward,” I assure her. “It’s like learning to swim. First you learn how to breathe with your head in the water, then you learn how to move your arms, then you learn how to move your legs, and then suddenly one day it all comes together.”
Nancy’s proficiency at comforting her separate parts and having them work together has reached a desirable point. No curve ball that gets thrown at her in life is likely to shove her all the way down to that place on the bathroom floor where she lost control completely The skills she has acquired will continue to propel her forward, but rapid progress in therapy is not without its speed bumps.
“I got angry at Walter and Chris last week because they still hadn’t taken the Christmas tree lights off out front, but I was not mean,” she reports proudly. “I was just, ‘Hello, it’s March, I’m not doing it, and I don’t want to be looking at those lights a week from now.’” She goes on, “That punitive voice inside me still goes full tilt sometimes, but the rational part of me refutes it, so it doesn’t get me down as much as before. The only time I get panicky now, ever, is when I go to Shawn’s hockey games. I can’t stay longer than a period. I have to run out of that building. It’s overwhelming.”
“That started when your brother Rory stopped talking to you,” I observe, “but you’re on speaking terms with him now, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but when I go to a game, it’s Shawn I keep thinking about,” Nancy replies, “and how he left home too soon.” Her voice breaking, she says, “It wasn’t supposed to end this way. We miss him terribly.”
“But he hasn’t really left; he keeps in touch every day,” I remind her. “Maybe he felt he needed to do this for his own independence.”
“He’s doing very well on his own, working part-time to support himself, but he gets terrible marks in school, and I feel responsible for that.”
“You shouldn’t,” I counter. “Living with someone who has DID can be difficult, but you have a tendency to personalize things. I think you’re blaming yourself for Shawn’s academic difficulties more than you should.”
“Last weekend I couldn’t bring myself to go to his hockey game, and I was disappointed that I didn’t have more control,” Nancy recounts. “Shawn was supposed to receive a trophy for most valuable player, and Walter said, ‘Would you just come for me? I don’t want to go alone.’ And I still couldn’t do it. Then I thought, I have to do this for Shawn. It took enormous physical energy, but I just put one foot in front of the other and got myself there. And I’m so glad I did.”
“It went well?”
Nancy smiles, remembering the event. “All of the moms recognized me when I walked in and presented me with a lovely bouquet of roses for Shawn. After the game he gave me a big hug and said, ‘Mom, I love youwith all my heart.’ And I said, ‘I know you do, Shawn.’ It was very important for both of us.”
“That was a big step for you to get yourself there and stay in control of your memories and emotions so well.”
“It was,” Nancy agrees. “I went to bed that night bone tired, and I thought, Why did I have to go through such an exhausting struggle to do something that should have been a pleasure for me? It didn’t seem fair. But getting through that struggle also showed me that I’ve made a lot of progress.” Tears well up in Nancy’s eyes—tears of gratitude. “I’m traveling a hard road,” she says softly, “but look how far I’ve come.”
