Of course, the entire concept of creating alter personalities is by design another form of avoidance. Instead of facing your pain and the worst thing(s) that ever happened to you, you farm it out to self-created “selves.” And this is what Leslie did, first as a brilliant method to survive an unsurvivable childhood, and then to deal with the memories when they began to surface decades later.
Denial, Dissociation, and the Devil
Other times there were attempts to block out the memories and deny that the events had happened. Leslie wanted to call herself crazy or psychotic, two things she wasn’t, but maybe believing herself to be insane would be better than dealing with and feeling these horrible stories. Worse, there were periods of suicidal ideations. “What was my life worth, anyway?” she wandered. There were no kids and no partner, and she didn’t believe that her career had amounted to anything.
“So what’s the point? If all my life is now is a roller-coaster ride through hell, why do I need to do this? And why do I have to remember every little detail? I already get it, I was abused in every possible way: physically, sexually, emotionally, spiritually. I was made to serve devil-worshiping men and carry the seed of the evil one. I had to participate in rituals that professed devotion to Satan and watch as children were tortured and killed. And now I have to relive it and remember all of the details. Why? What did I do to deserve this life? Why don’t I just kill myself and move out of this awful life? Isn’t God supposed to be all-forgiving? Maybe he can forgive me if I say I’ve had enough of this life. Why must I continue living, Dr. Cortman?”
There is a therapeutic answer to her rant, and it goes something like this:
“I’m sorry you hurt so much. I hear your pain, Leslie, and it is so unfair that you’ve had to experience all this abuse. Thank you for trusting me with all of this. We will get through this, one memory at a time. This will eventually be finished, and then maybe, just maybe, you can tell your story to help others. I know you didn’t deserve the abuse. This is not justice for bad things you may have done in this or another lifetime. Know that there are children out there starving to death through no fault of their own. This world isn’t a fair or just place—but I do know a lot of people who have used their suffering and healing to make the world a better place. Maybe someday that will be you, also. I say we keep going one day at a time. Are you okay with that?”
Suicide Attempt
During the time I was treating her, Leslie intentionally overdosed on tranquilizers, antidepressants, and Bud Lights. Since she didn’t make it to the grave or the hospital, I didn’t hear about it until she emailed me and said that she’d survived her suicide attempt, convincing herself, of course, that she couldn’t do anything right. I got her into my office that very same day and steered Leslie toward whatever unprocessed emotion had contributed to her suicide attempt. I also convinced her to agree to a “no suicide contract” (one that holds to this day). We also managed to uncover the specific feelings or “culprit” that had most influenced her decision. Leslie had remembered another experience where several men had sexually abused her simultaneously. But that wasn’t the pain that had made her give up. She had dealt with that before. Here was the problem: when she remembered the story, not once had she seen herself rebel, fight, or protest. Was she therefore complicit with the abuse? Had she wanted to be raped? Was she nothing more than “Daddy’s little whore”?
There was an easy answer. Let me recreate the dialog through which it emerged.
I asked, “What happened to you whenever you did rebel? Dad took that well, didn’t he?”
“Well no, not exactly.”
“Weren’t you tortured every time, from being tied to the bed for over a week to being put in the hospital with broken arms, legs, and ribs (she had a photo of this; Dad had told the hospital staff she’d been mugged and beaten up), with whiskey poured on your burns, including in your private area? I’m not sure the whole rebellion thing worked out for you.”
Impressively, that was all it required to dismiss the “I’m a whore” mindset and the concomitant suicidal ideation and behavior.
But Can You Really Believe Such Improbable Memories?
I’m not a psychological policeman. My job is not to find facts, report crimes, or bring people to justice. I am not a twenty-first century, self-styled cult-buster. My job is to help people heal from their pain in the past, and I’ve learned that they can do so regardless of the degree, intensity, or frequency of the horror. Unfortunately, that can only be done one terrible story at a time, until the closet of memories has been emptied and all of them digested successfully.
That said, one of the reasons I selected Leslie’s story is the compelling corroboration that she found in her efforts to prove or disprove her memories: her mother confirmed the stories of abuse, offering at least two memorable explanations for her own behavior at the time, followed by a heartfelt apology and a year of sobriety before her death. Her mother’s explanation: “If he was on you, he wasn’t on me.” In other words, it was a relief to be left alone. Secondly, “If I ever tried to leave him, we would have been brought back to the compound, tortured, and killed in front of the whole group. I may have been a bad mother, but I wasn’t going to let that happen.”
Leslie’s older brother, Tim, a true hero of hers, had rescued Leslie more than once from her father’s torture treatment. Tim also remembers that when he got a little older and was about 6 feet tall with 200 pounds of muscle on him and a favorite hobby of hunting, he warned his father, “You will never bring me to that place again, or I will kill you.”
But the biggest clincher for Leslie was her return to the scene of the compound where the cult activity had taken place. Long since abandoned, the outdoor altar where all the human and animal sacrifices had happened was still erect amidst the forsaken grounds, a testament to her tortured childhood and a priceless source of validation that her memories were real and she was not crazy.
Moreover, recovery of repressed memory, a long debated issue in therapeutic circles, has been experienced time and again by dozens of my clients, comprising at least fifty people over thirty-two years. Invariably, the clients were normal, nonpsychotic adults who benefited from finally remembering what was at one time too painful to hold onto when it occurred. (For more reading on this, I suggest Lenore Terr’s Unchained Memories: True Stories of Traumatic Memories, Lost and Found36.)
Back to Leslie
As the cult story progressed, the memories reached new levels of horrors as recollections emerged of adults willingly sacrificing their children to improve their standing in the cult, Leslie being sold to a man for an entire summer, and plans to make her a high priestess that were thwarted when she could not produce a child for the group to sacrifice.
She called upon her aforementioned trio of alters and several other personalities that played smaller parts in her recovery. She even had an alter named Avedon who cursed me, called me a “know-it-all bastard,” and promised he would win in the end. He also took out his wrath on a stranger one night at a gay bar when he “picked up a wimpy guy, beat him up, and then hit him over the head with a beer bottle.” This was all unbeknownst to Leslie, of course, until Rachel shared the story with me. But as alters are fueled by the emotions contained in the memories, Avedon was quieted and healed after a memory in which the sixteen-year-old boy in the group that Leslie had liked was killed for not whipping her as instructed. Leslie showed me a photograph of the two of them arm in arm together before he was killed.
Eric ended up collecting snowmen of his own until Leslie complained (while smiling), “I keep finding little snowmen all over my house, I don’t know what I’ll do with these if Eric ever integrates.” Eric told his last story and said goodbye to us almost four full years to the day from when Leslie had begun therapy, leaving a big void in Leslie’s heart and a house full of stuffed snowmen. Maria also finished her work two months after Eric did, but not before s
he helped Leslie process over 150 different memories from a nine- to ten-year period of her childhood.
Rachel made sure she was the very last alter to go, as if she were shutting the lights off and locking up. She felt responsible for ensuring that Leslie was not only finished with all of the years of her painful past, but also that she was prepared to take on life on her own going forward. Her last mission was to assist Leslie in recovering a relationship with her mother before tearfully saying farewell to her blue-eyed psychologist.
Leslie’s mother’s sobriety began three years into our treatment. Because of her healing, Leslie managed to forgive her mother, and Leslie was able to spend the best year of their relationship together with her mother before her mother died, leaving behind a very sad daughter who legitimately missed her “mommy” for the first time. Two years after her mother’s death, Leslie is at peace with her many pains in the past and is functioning as an employed caregiver for dependent seniors.
I have chosen Leslie’s story even though most of you will probably not have one past trauma like hers, let alone more than 150 of them. But because of her courage, her perseverance, and a plan of attack that afforded her the opportunity to remember, feel, express, and release her horrors, Leslie has reframed her complex trauma with a very positive picture for her life.
Chapter Ten
Jim Meets Fritz
•
“Memories can be beautiful and yet, what’s too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget.”
—Barbara Streisand
Putting It All Together
Remember: Tell the tale in detail.
Feel: No feel, no heal.
Express: Let the water flow.
Release: Release for peace.
Reframe: Reclaim your present life.
By now you should have a good grasp of the Fritz five-step process, but you may have questions about putting all the steps together to produce the outcome you desire. Since I’ve often talked about the steps individually in order to explain them clearly, you may be wondering how they all flow together. For that reason, I’d like to show you how Jim used the five steps to achieve the healing he desired.
Remember: Tell the Tale In Detail
Jim, like most people who have experienced trauma, tried both actively (by drinking) and passively (by excessive working) to forget what had happened to him. And why not? Who would want to remember the drowning of his two sons? He spoke of “trying to move on and forget,” but of course, he could not.
Jim was overwhelmed by sadness, anger, guilt, shame, the intrusive recollections, the nightmares, and the pitying faces of those who felt sorry for him. It felt never-ending. To cope, he sometimes acted out by getting drunk and “racing the motorcycle” at 100 miles per hour. When asked about this, he replied, “I didn’t care if I died.” To Jim at the time, death was preferable to remembering.
Jim was pulled over by local police several times—the loud revving of the engine was sure to attract attention. But the police always drove him home or called his wife Ruth to get him because, “They couldn’t send me to jail knowing what happened.”
Other aspects of his life began to show cracks. Jim, who had been raised a Catholic, fell out of touch with his church. “How can I go to church when I’m angry at God? God took my two boys. I’m supposed to go to church and pray to an all-loving, all-powerful God who allowed my children to drown in front of me. I don’t think so.” Soon thereafter, their marriage, which had been very strong, hit a rough patch. The death of children can challenge even the best of marriages. Difficulties with communication, anger, guilt, and a general lack of emotional intimacy contributed to the strain on their marriage. Ruth sought individual counseling following the tragedy, while Jim suffered alone. Jim began to experience difficulties at work. He became short-tempered with customers and coworkers as well as overly cautious in his business ventures and had a propensity to “work [himself] half to death.” Sadly, most of these habits continued throughout much of his remaining life.
Jim and Ruth eventually moved to Florida to retire. But with nothing to occupy his attention, Jim’s mind wandered back to the pain in the past. He still worked part-time as a barber and “wished [he] could work more.” But one afternoon while sharpening his razor, Jim looked up to see that a mother had brought in two blond-haired boys. “They looked just like my boys. I had to go sit in the back and cry.” Part of him was hopeless and ready to accept that this was “the best” he would ever feel. But this was also what convinced him to try therapy again. That moment had been preceded by forty-four years of suffering and a rock-solid skepticism that nothing would ever change.
Remembering and Mr. Avoidance
Jim’s problem with remembering wasn’t that he couldn’t remember, it was the opposite: he couldn’t stop remembering. The daily memory intrusions and the nightly dreams were followed by guilt, shame, and relentless self-flagellation for “letting them down.” Remembering wasn’t necessarily the problem; Jim would argue that an inability to forget and move on was the problem. Our old friend Mr. Avoidance was running amok again.
Mr. Avoidance was at the helm in many of Jim’s choices and operated in some obvious ways. For instance, while Ruth went to seek psychological treatment, Jim, despite encouragement from his wife’s doctor, did not seek counseling because he “didn’t want to talk about it.” Jim did try psychiatric medications several times but noted no benefit. Instead, he preferred the comfort of Jack Daniels and Johnny Walker. If he drank until he blacked out, Jim didn’t have nightmares; not a long-term solution, but it brought him temporary relief. Jim had always been a hard worker, but after losing his two boys, it was as if he could not stop working. Working excessively was another attempt at avoidance. For Jim, overworking kept his mind busy and helped him to push the thoughts of the trauma out of his conscious mind.
Mr. Avoidance also works in more subtle ways. Jim’s half-smile and canned “I’m fine” response when friends and family would ask how he was doing pushed away the caring efforts of those who loved him. He managed to swallow his pain inside himself; when prompted by his wife, he said he was “okay” but demonstrated little affection to her. Eventually, Jim isolated himself from friends and family because “the look of their faces [and] their sad expressions just reminded me over and over again of what happened.” He refused church despite the pastor’s best efforts to reach out. He withdrew into himself and avoided everything and everyone that reminded him of the tragedy.
Of course, Jim could no more forget the tragedy than he could forget his name. Much like with the splinter in my middle toe in Chapter 2, until the pain of the trauma he was avoiding was removed, every step was a painful reminder of what happened to him. Jim’s difficulty was that he remembered the trauma all the time. By definition, the drowning intruded into his daily mindset. Removing that splinter required exposure to the trauma: recalling all the details of the tragedy until the story was told in complete detail, including the entire context of their loss and the search party.
But to heal, Jim had to complete all the steps of the Fritz, not just remember. Sure, he had to remember, but then he needed to feel, express, release, and reframe until the healing process was complete. Until then, the intrusions recollections, flashbacks, and nightmares continued. Jim completed what was prescribed in the Remember chapter—I had him write it all out with as much detail as he could, from the day they fell through the ice to three days later when the boys were finally found.
Feel: No Feel, No Heal
Jim’s biggest difficultly was the feeling step, not because of an inability to feel, but rather difficulty with what he felt. The tag team of depression and anxiety followed him throughout his life. Anger toward everything and everyone was common. Jim was angry at his wife, angry at his customers, angry at the police (who had taken “too long” to find his sons), and angry at God for allowing his sons to die, but most of all, he was angry at
himself. What kind of father—what kind of man—lets this occur “on [his] watch”?
The most insidious emotions, the ones that gnawed at Jim’s soul, were guilt and shame. The feelings of guilt (I “should have” done something differently) and shame (I “am bad” and “deserve bad things to happen”) functioned as the anchor that kept him trapped in the past with an inability to release his pain. At times, Jim felt so guilty that he hated himself to the point of self-destruction. This self-contempt inspired those 100 mph motorcycle rides with Johnny Walker Red. And while Jim could at times experience joy, like when his third son was born, he could never shake the ever-present guilt and shame. The guilt manifested itself in overprotective parenting with Michael to ensure that the youngest child would avoid the fate that had ensnared his older brothers.
Shame was directly related to Jim’s continued avoidance. As explained in the section on moral injury (see Chapter 8), guilt can morph into shame. The thought process includes “because I did something bad, I am bad.” When you are ashamed, you tend to hide your secrets and never allow them to surface. Jim was convinced that he was a bad person who had allowed his sons to drown and therefore must never speak of this with others. And even though it was evident to his physicians that Jim was depressed for years, he never followed up on recommendations to seek counseling. He tried antidepressants but would not “dare to talk about it, it made it too real.” The shame fueled Mr. Avoidance’s power in Jim’s life and even prevented Jim from becoming emotionally close with Michael, because his son was “better off not having a father than having a bad one.” Guilt and shame never left Jim. They worked nonstop, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year to destroy any semblance of self-respect.
Though guilt and shame are arguably two of the worst emotions a person can feel, they were purposeful. When I asked Jim if he was aware of why he felt guilt and shame, he said, “No, I want to stop feeling this way, that’s why I’m in your office.” I explained to him that despite how horrible he felt, he was embracing them for a reason. There is always a payoff. In fact, guilt and shame were employed to avoid sadness. Guilt and shame needed to be reframed and released. Then he could feel the sadness, grieve the loss of his boys, accept having lost them, and finally let go.
Keep Pain in the Past Page 16