Ironically, the shell of the former Naomi Judd who left Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital was now entering an intensive monthlong program in Scottsdale, Arizona, that implements a method of treatment starting with what’s called the Trauma Egg, followed by other therapies.
Larry, Ashley, Dr. Mona Lisa, and the professional staff at Vanderbilt were well aware I would feel trapped and terrified by my lack of freedom if I had to live in another hospital environment. Any inpatient program was going to make me spiral downward, which is why they recommended the outpatient program in Scottsdale, Psychological Counseling Services. It was agreed that Larry and I would stay in a nearby inn together at night while I attended eight hours of daily therapy at their facility.
The therapists at PCS guided me to take a deep look at, and come to terms with, the curse of mental illness handed down from past generations. My personalized therapy plan was to begin by taking an inventory of past difficult emotional experiences and traumas that had shaped my personal belief system.
I learned that your current beliefs are based on your early life experiences and the memories and perceptions you have formed. On a large sheet of paper they had me draw an egg that represented a clean slate, me at birth. This is called the “Trauma Egg.” Beginning with my very first memories of traumatic experiences, the therapist had me write them down chronologically from my earliest memory, at the bottom of the egg, continuing on to my current life.
My first traumatic memory that I put on the paper was of being sick with chicken pox and being molested by Uncle Charlie at Grandmommy Judd’s house at age three and a half. As I ascended though my childhood years, other memories of molestation attempts by Uncle Charlie came to the surface of my consciousness. I had a difficult time writing them on the egg without my hands trembling. I had never told anyone in fifty-five years.
The next memory that returned to me was of being at my aunt Pauline’s farm, Little Catt, at about age five. This was usually a place I felt safe, because it was in the middle of nowhere. There was no indoor plumbing, only a well in back of the house and a wood-burning stove in the front room used for heat. To bathe, we had to pump water from the well and then warm it on the woodstove. The outhouse was about fifty feet from the house and it sure was a long walk on chilly mornings. Aunt Pauline, a true Appalachian countrywoman, raised chickens, milked her cows, and had a big vegetable garden. She never went to a doctor. She grew herbs to use as medicine and made every meal from scratch. There was no such thing as a boxed cake mix at Aunt Pauline’s.
As a child, my parents would allow me to stay with her for a week, especially during the summer. During those days I would rarely see another human being since Aunt Pauline’s farm was on a rough dirt road. I would roam to my heart’s content on the many acres of Catt Farm, singing to myself and making up fanciful stories, usually accompanied by one or two of Aunt Pauline’s many dogs. I had invented an imaginary playmate named Elizabeth. She was angelic and lived in the dense woods at the edge of Aunt Pauline’s property. She became a very real presence for me, assuring me that I was special and would make it in life. She said everything I wished my mother had said.
The interior of Aunt Pauline’s house was as plain as an Amish homestead. No pictures adorned the walls, not even a single photograph of a family member. One simple calendar, given away free at the feed store every Christmas, hung on a nail. There were no rugs on the bare-wood plank floors. Every pot, pan, brush, and blanket in the house was something that was useful. I never saw a single knickknack, flower vase, or decorative pillow in her house. Even the outside bird feeders were made from hubcaps that had dislodged from occasional passing cars when they hit the potholes on the dirt road in front of the farmhouse. Aunt Pauline would hammer the hubcaps to the top of the fence posts and fill them with suet for the cardinals. She would predict the weather by how much the cardinals were feeding and by what time the grazing animals headed for the barn.
If I heard a car on the road, I would run out of the house to see if it was someone who was going to stop. They would always just drive on by. Aunt Pauline preferred it that way. I didn’t understand until I was well into adulthood that she was gripped by severe agoraphobia, as were three of her sisters: Evelyn, Ramona, and Faith. Only my father’s fourth sister, Aunt Toddie, managed to escape the mentally ill Judd household, get married to a wonderful man, and raise her three kids, somehow bypassing the crippling emotional and mental problems of her sisters.
Aunt Pauline only went into town if absolutely necessary, which was about once a month for supplies. It was almost impossible for her to talk to people she didn’t know very well. One day a truck did pull in at Aunt Pauline’s farm. But it was no one I wanted to see. It was Uncle Charlie. As he approached the house, I ran and hid, lying down between the rows of corn in the garden until he left. Later that week he came back again, but I wasn’t aware of his arrival. I had no time to hide. I couldn’t comprehend why Aunt Pauline wasn’t afraid of him, too. She didn’t seem to worry about having Uncle Charlie around. I couldn’t possibly know that he wasn’t interested in adult women, only tiny girls he could overpower, intimidate, and then threaten.
As soon as Aunt Pauline left the house to pull onions in the garden, Uncle Charlie came looking for me and cornered me in the bedroom. He tried to coax me toward him, like the friendly great-uncle. I remember being so confused, but I knew I couldn’t trust him. I tried to bolt past him for the door, but he grabbed my arm. As soon as his hands were on me he tried to pull my clothes off.
Even though I was now only a kindergartener, I pointed at his face and squinted my eyes the way I had seen dueling cowboys do on the westerns Daddy loved to watch on TV.
“Don’t touch me! I will tell my daddy. He has a gun. My daddy will kill you.”
I have no idea how I had the moxie to make such a bold threat to him, but there was something inside me that knew cowering in fear wasn’t going to help in the long run. I had to save myself, again. And I did. He let me go. I ran to the garden to be with Aunt Pauline. Once again, the adult who should have protected me didn’t even notice I was trembling in fear.
Even my own mother and father never seemed to suspect I was emotionally terrorized every time I was in Uncle Charlie’s presence. I recently found a photograph of me as a small child that brought back a fierce and chilling memory. I had been instructed by Grandmommy Judd to stand next to Uncle Charlie for the photo. He has his arm on my shoulder, pulling me into his waist. My face is scrunched up in disgust and my hands are clasped tightly in front of me, protectively across my lower half.
I later came to suspect that he had abused his own granddaughter. She was my age, but we went to different schools. I never met her until we were teenagers. She approached me at a baseball game, when our schools were playing against each other, and said, “Hi, Naomi, I’m Susan, your cousin.”
She was a beautiful girl with long, shiny black hair and high cheekbones. As pretty as she was, she had the same haunted and hunted look in her eyes that I often saw in my own. I felt, in my heart, that Susan and I shared the same dark and sickening secret. We never had any opportunity to talk, without other ears around, but I would think of her often in the following years. Susan was shot and killed in her home in the 1970s. Her case remains unsolved.
In the 1950s and ’60s, the majority of parents never thought about teaching their children how to protect themselves. No one discussed sexual abuse with kids. We now know the greatest danger to young girls is from an adult they know, not a stranger. I often thought that my mother might have suffered sexual abuse as a girl. If she did, she would never say. Any experience that fell outside the realm of the “all-American family” was “dirty laundry” that should never see the light of day.
The common link among most of the traumatic events I wrote down on the Trauma Egg during this therapy was my relationship with my mother. Each painful memory shared a similar theme: being exposed to a threatening or troubling situation and then having my feelings go unrecognized or be dismissed by Mother.
The more I recalled from my early childhood, the more conscious I became of what formed my strongest and earliest lifelong belief: that I couldn’t trust her.
Another experience I wrote on the Trauma Egg was a full-fledged memory of coming close to being drowned at a city pool when I was six years old. The pool was a place for Mother to relax and have a lifeguard babysitter watch over my siblings and me.
I had been paddling around near the steps leading in and out of the water, minding my own business, when an older and much larger girl decided that it was my day to die. She grabbed my shoulders and plunged me under the water. When my head was near the bottom step, she turned around and sat down on it, grinding my face into the concrete stair. I was helpless. No one could see my arms and legs flailing about underwater. I knew the lifeguard wasn’t watching the shallow end of the pool, where it wasn’t over anyone’s head. I felt the chlorinated water fill my nose, then pour into my throat. My vision began to go black and then I saw a bright white tunnel. My ears were throbbing with the pressure. I was drowning. I was going to die.
Once again, I used the only weapon I had, my fingernails. I dragged the tips of my fingers across the skin of her shins and then pinched her as hard as I could. Angry, the large girl stood up and I floated to the surface. I gasped for air as water poured from my nose and projected from my throat. I crawled up the steps and, on my hands and knees, lay down on the warm concrete until I could stand up. When I went to find Mother, sunning herself on her beach towel, I tried to explain to her what had happened. I wanted her to wrap me in the towel and comfort me. I wanted her to examine the scratches on my face and then be outraged enough to report the bigger girl. She only looked up at me long enough to scold, “Don’t be dramatic.”
Once again, she had failed to see I was in fear for my life. No sympathy or consolation would be coming from my mother. I wrapped myself in a towel and went to sit next to the lifeguard stand. I knew the bigger girl wouldn’t risk picking on me within earshot of his authority. I sat there, a sad observer of other kids calling out to their mothers, “Mom, watch this!” as they did handstands underwater or cannonballs from the diving board. Their mothers watched. Their mothers smiled at them. I could only fantasize about what that would be like.
As my childhood progressed, one experience followed another that cemented the thought in my young mind that I was no more than an unimportant inconvenience to Mother. After taking a few years of piano lessons, which my daddy paid for, I played well enough to participate in the annual recital. I put on my favorite Sunday school dress and fixed my hair as best I could. I was certain that Mother would be pleased with my progress. I should have wondered if she would attend. She didn’t, even though where I took lessons was only one block from our house. I was heartbroken.
On another occasion, the day of the grade school talent contest, I was brimming with enthusiastic energy about performing in the tap dance number I had learned in class. We waited for our music cue and then the curtain rose and the lights came up. My eyes scanned the faces in the audience, looking for Mother, as I tapped out the choreography the other kids and I had practiced many times. I guess I wandered too far near the edge of the stage in my attempt to locate my mother because when the curtain dropped at the end of the number, I was the only dancer left out in front of it. The audience broke into gentle laughter and I heard a few of the parents give me a sweet verbal encouragement as I turned up the charm, smiled, and waved, and “shuffled off to Buffalo” to the side of the stage where I could exit. After the show, some of the audience members gave me a hug and told me that it was their favorite moment of the talent show. I’m now convinced this was a turning point in my young life, that it set my destiny. I couldn’t get Mother’s personal attention, but I could get approval from an entire audience.
I couldn’t believe Mother would miss something this important to me. My eight-year-old mind conjured a dramatic plot that she must have been kidnapped. I started to run home, imagining my mother being held hostage by some robbers, When I arrived home, Mother was where she could always be found, in the kitchen. I was crushed and confused. It wasn’t that my mother had forgotten; it wasn’t her priority. My mother didn’t need saving, but my tender emotions did.
The junior high school I attended was more than a mile and a half from our house. During the winter months this became a problem. I didn’t have a pair of boots, only one pair of low-heeled pumps that I had to wear every day. I would slip and slide through several inches of snow, which would seep over the edges of my pumps, freezing my feet. Some days would get so bad that I would stop at a friend’s house along the way just to thaw my toes.
One morning there was a thunder and lightning storm that was blowing the rain almost sideways. Our old blue station wagon was always in front of the house, so I begged Mother to drive me to school. She refused. She never offered to drive me, even in the worst weather. I often arrived at school soaking wet or icy cold and would stand in the girl’s bathroom trying to blot my wet hair with paper towels or warm my feet by the radiator.
As I continued to process each experience that was traumatic for me as a young girl, I uncovered an incredible amount of suppressed rage I had for the way Mother treated me. I wasn’t aware that so much built-up anger lay under the surface of my psyche, but it now seemed to be erupting. One memory followed another. Each one contained the similar theme of being disregarded by my mother. My opinions, passions, personal taste, and emotions were all ignored with a shrug and her cliché answer of “That’s just the way it is.” I felt invisible and powerless.
One day I came home to find that Mother had decided to redecorate my bedroom. She had never mentioned her plan to me or asked my opinion about what I would like. For a girl who adored all things feminine and did my best to add flair to anything I owned, my new bedroom was like a slap in the face. Mother had picked out solid brown for everything: rug, bedspread, hideous plastic curtains, and a fake-wood laminated dresser. It looked like a cheap, generic truckers’ motel room. Everything was practical without an ounce of style or personality. In contrast, my younger brothers’ bedroom had a floral rug and bright-colored bedspreads that matched. It didn’t make sense to me, but no one cared if I understood her reasoning. I had a good cry about it and then decided I just had to live with it.
Mother seemed to go out of her way to invalidate any effort I made at self-expression. When I was allowed to attend my first school dance, I spent hours getting ready. I was enjoying my popularity among my peers and I had looked forward to this social event for weeks. It was the sixties and a flipped-up bouffant, teased to a towering height, was all the rage. Of course, it wasn’t a practical everyday style, but I wanted to make a good impression at my first dance. I layered and teased my hair to what I thought was perfection. I went into the kitchen to say goodbye to Mother as the boy I was going to the dance with arrived at the front door. Mother was canning pickles and turned from the counter to look at me. Silently, she picked up a mason jar full of sticky pickle juice and dumped it unceremoniously over my head. It was her way of disapproving of my grown-up style. I guess she thought words couldn’t express her feelings. I sent Jimmy Keeton on his way and went upstairs to wash my hair. My first school dance would have to wait.
As an adult, looking back more than fifty years, each of these interactions with Mother felt like a purposeful attack on my growing sense of self. It was as if my mother was unconsciously, or perhaps very consciously, making certain that I knew that she was a depressed person and she was determined that I would be one, too. Recently, my youngest brother remarked to me: “I never understood why Mother treated you so differently than the rest of us.”
It was the first time I had validation for my personal truth.
* * *
The competent therapists and staff at Psychological Counseling Services spent the first week helping me process the tumultuous emotions I had suppressed in my childhood. I was still having panic attacks almost every night. Vanderbilt may have detoxed my body from an overload of antidepressants and antipsychotics, but they left behind the depression and anxiety.
I finally learned about what was causing my panic attacks. My central nervous system had gone on overdrive from repressing bad memories for so many years. For me, the worst memories were of my childhood, feeling unheard and unloved.
One of the therapists explained that panic attacks are often based on lack of attachments. This was new information for me, but it didn’t surprise me in the least. At one point, I was given two large poster boards to use to make a genogram, which is a family map. I was instructed to draw both sides of my family tree and write out significant personality traits of each family member and how I interacted with them. A genogram is used to identify unhealthy relationship patterns in the family and helps reveal where dysfunctional behavior and beliefs germinate.
As the clarity of who my relatives really were became visible on the boards, I was also faced with my immediate anger over how the abuse and trauma of decades of untreated mental illness was destroying the next generation. As small children with little experience, each of us probably surmises that the way our family members behave is the way all adults are normally. In my circumstance, I didn’t have one single family role model who reflected a mentally healthy attitude through the stages of life.
The therapist worked with a professional who specialized in genealogical signs of mental illness. When he looked over my genogram, he couldn’t believe it. He called in another expert to help him study my history. My grandparents, aunts, and uncles on both sides were all deeply peculiar and ran the gamut of emotional disorders from agoraphobia to obsessive-compulsive, from extreme narcissism to pathological issues that rendered them unable to function in any regular social circumstance.
On my mother’s side, my great-grandmother and all of her adult children lived in a closed-up, dark, cigarette-smoke-filled house. They were rarely seen in public, outside of working at the Hamburger Inn, the restaurant managed by Grandma Burton. No one ever smiled or laughed in that house. Daddy’s sisters, except for my aunt Toddie, all had their dysfunctional quirks, superstitions, and paranoia that kept them isolated from society. They were reclusive and compelled to follow their established routines, never extending themselves beyond their comfort zones. I tried to charm them into smiling and coax them into the daylight or out for an adventure, anything I could think of to bring them joy, but they never responded. Not one of them ever gave me a gift, played a game with me, or even took me to the city park across the street from where I grew up.
When I was out on tour, I would send my aunts letters and postcards from various cities. I would stop by to see them in Kentucky if I was anywhere in the region. Daddy always appreciated that they seemed to lighten up a bit when I was around. I put a lot of energy into making them feel I cared about them. But it was rarely returned. They would stiffly hug me hello and goodbye, but that was it. No one ever told me they missed seeing me or made any inquiry about how I was doing. Filling out the information for these family boards with some of the counselors helped reveal to me what my aunts truly were: profoundly depressed and self-absorbed agoraphobics, with obsessive-compulsive disorders.
Aunt Pauline never married. She never went to see a doctor or dentist. Her hair went completely gray in high school. Once Granddaddy Judd bought her the farm property, she moved there and never left or traveled anywhere else her whole life.
Aunt Evelyn could not function socially at all. She never went on a date and had no friends. She stayed inside, by herself, compulsively cleaning the house all day long.
Aunt Ramona had a possible chance at a normal life when she found employment on an army base. There she met a man and got married. But she never extended her life beyond that. She had to stick to a specific routine and not waver, such as only going to the grocery store at 5 p.m. on Fridays. None of them would even go to church.
When each one of them, Pauline, Evelyn, Ramona, and Faith, died, she had no one to attend her funeral. Not one of them had a single friend. The love I felt for them was futile because they couldn’t access their own emotions. I was surprised when a long-repressed truth rose to the surface. I had hateful feelings for my aunts when they were all dead. My memories of being subject to their mental illnesses made me furious at my own parents. But what could I expect? My parents were cut from the same cloth and made little effort to change the way they were treated as children in how they treated their own kids. Daddy was never spontaneously affectionate to any of us, although I longed for his attention even more than Mother’s. As a child, I knew the exact sound of his pickup truck coming down the street and would run to the front gate to meet him. I’d attempt to throw my arms around him, but that would usually result in a fast hug as he brushed by and headed inside for his dinner. Every Friday night I would watch boxing on TV with Daddy, even though the sight of the fighters’ swollen faces made me wince.
I would take any opportunity to spend time with him. I was a “daddy’s girl,” which, looking back, didn’t mean that much, except in my own mind. He never gave me any special attention or privileges. The only time I had physical contact with him was when I got a whipping, which would happen with the slightest misbehavior, anything he considered a public humiliation.
I always had honor roll grades on every report card. It was expected, but luckily I’ve always been an enthusiastic learner. One year, in junior high, a teacher wrote “whispers in class” on everyone’s report card in the comment section, even though I had an A in her class, too. Daddy was furious that I received any unfavorable comment and got his belt ready.
At a very young age I found a pain-free way to receive my punishments. My mother had a very thick rubber girdle with plastic stays sewn into it. It was so sturdy it could stand up on its own. I would tell Daddy that I had to use the bathroom. Then I’d sneak into Mother’s dresser drawer and pull the girdle armor on under whatever I was wearing. I never felt one lash of the belt, but I certainly hollered and carried on as if I did. Since Mother always thought I was “being dramatic” about everything, I figured I might as well live up to her description. Following the whipping, I’d return the girdle to the drawer and go on my merry way.
The last whipping I got was at age seventeen. I had gone on a double date to a movie at the local theater. We missed the start time of the first movie and waited for the second show, which caused me to be late for my curfew. I was only hoping the boy who dropped me at my front door couldn’t hear Daddy telling me to get ready for a whipping. It’s the last time the girdle came to the rescue. But the damage to my self-esteem was far more painful than any stripe his leather belt would have made.
In hindsight, I only had two ways of knowing that my father loved me or was proud of me: He paid for me to have piano lessons and he taped my school picture to the cash register at his gas station for all of his customers to see. Every time I went to his gas station, I would check to make sure my picture was still there. I think I didn’t take my father’s lack of affection personally because I never saw him display any affection to my mother, either. Daddy only once took Mother out to a movie, The Bad Seed. They never invited other adults over, even though Mother’s cooking would have left them wanting to return.
I’m not sure that any of the three generations of mothers on my mom’s side ever produced a drop of oxytocin, which is the chemical messenger produced in the brain when a mother is bonding with a newborn baby. Not surprisingly, my lack of attachment to my mother stems from her lack of love and connection to her own mother, Edie Mae.
In Scottsdale I learned that the first attachment to a child’s primary caregiver is the most important relationship in life. By the time the child is age three, the brain is already 85 percent developed. This early relationship with the mother and father sets up a person’s emotional patterns and even biological foundation. Holding, kissing, smiling, and laughing all create specific neurochemical activity in the child’s brain. This leads to healthy brain systems and gives a child a solid foundation for future relationships and attachment. Lack of attachment or bonding with a parent can have long-term repercussions for the child. It can take years to repair the emotional damage from early neglect. Sometimes the damage can’t be undone. Many who lack that early bonding grow up to be adults who rarely feel secure in their relationships and can suffer depression and panic disorders. It became clear to me that my own strong attachment to my daughters came from my determination that they feel loved and treasured for who they are.
There were times I failed as a mother when they were young, but I have to accept that I had had no support system on a day-to-day basis, no partner who was active in their lives, and had not learned good parenting skills from my own mother and father. However, my motivation was always to give them a good future with many opportunities.
Each session with the therapists uncovered new damaging evidence that I had never had a family who loved, encouraged, or protected me. I had toughened up at a very young age and found my own way, but even success won’t fill the deep hole left in the psyche when a child grows up in an unsafe atmosphere, rarely being affirmed or even acknowledged by the adults in her life.
When Larry would return to the center to pick me up at dinnertime, I would be emotionally drained. He was gentle and didn’t ask many questions. He would figure out some type of food for us to carry out and take back to the inn. I still didn’t want to be seen in public. I didn’t want anyone finding out about my severe depression and anxiety. “Look, Harold. There’s that crazy Naomi Judd. What a shame!”
On a couple of evenings, Larry and I went for a long drive in the car and sang along with the radio. I would look out the window at a landscape that was endlessly the same: parched brown desert, dotted with sharp-edged succulent plants or cacti that could pierce one’s skin. It seemed like a reflection of my internal landscape, barren and colorless, with painful, knife-sharp memories. Would the search for my mental well-being ever end?