Scared Selfless

by Michelle Stevens, PhD

  I grabbed the bottle and counted out the remains. Still six left. I went to the kitchen to refill my glass of orange juice. It was already midmorning by then. Gary had left hours earlier for his store. In all the time he was home, he’d never bothered to check on me or say hello. Had the pills been more potent, my suicidal gesture would have become a completed suicide out of sheer neglect. I quickly downed the remaining pills. The fifty-count bottle was now empty. Pale and clammy, I felt like my heart would bust through my skin. It was scary. I picked up the phone and called my friend Pete. He got his mom.

  Calmly, Pete’s mom asked to speak with my parents. I told her they weren’t around, so she promised to come right over. When she arrived, the look on her face was pure kindness. I didn’t know this woman well, but from everything I’d seen, she was a nice, normal mom. She asked how I was feeling, then wiped my sweaty face with a washcloth. At first, I was embarrassed, but within a few minutes, I was basking in the unfamiliar warmth of maternal attention.

  I would’ve liked Pete’s mom to stay with me. Instead, she insisted on calling my father. His store didn’t have a phone, so the operator had to give her the number for a hot-dog stand nearby. The hot-dog guy fetched Gary and put him on the line. Pete’s mom (who didn’t really know my father) was very brief. She simply said I’d swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills but seemed to be all right. Then she asked if he would please come home and take care of me.

  About forty-five minutes later, my father burst through the front door in a panic. He grabbed me by the chin, lifted up my head, and scoured my face for information. I’m sure Pete’s mom assumed he was a scared father concerned for my health. I knew different. Gary’s fear had nothing to do with my well-being. He didn’t give a shit if I lived or died. He was panicked to have a stranger at home with his unstable daughter. God only knows what I might tell her.

  My father ordered me to grab the empty bottle and get in the car. As I reluctantly crawled into his Pacer, I noticed him shaking hands with Pete’s mom as she got into her car. Oh, how I wished she would get into mine! I was terrified to be alone with Gary, terrified of what he would do to me for embarrassing him. The drugs hadn’t killed me, but he just might!

  I don’t remember anything about that car ride, but I do remember arriving at the emergency room. My father herded me through the automatic doors and pointed to a plastic chair with the unspoken order to sit down and keep my mouth shut. He went to the nurses’ station to check me in, handing them the empty plastic bottle.

  Within a few minutes, I was lying on a gurney in a room with sheets for walls, terrified the doctors were going to pump my stomach. My father said they would; he also said it would hurt. A lot. But then a handsome young doctor arrived to appease my fears. He was very kind and gentle, and made me feel safe. Better yet, he said no pumping was required.

  Instead, I was held for a few hours of observation. After that, I was released back into my father’s care. There was no social worker, no psych intern, no one to ask me why I took the pills. Apparently, the person they asked was my father. He said my suicide attempt was a juvenile bid to gain Pete’s affection. The hospital suggested I see an outpatient therapist, and an appointment was made for the following week.

  —

  AT FOURTEEN, I didn’t know much about therapists. The only time I even heard the word therapist was from my neighbor Maria, a foster child with anorexia. Her social worker made her see a therapist—some fat lady, according to Maria, who sat on the floor of her office and burned incense. Maria pointed her out to me once when we were walking down Main Street. The woman had long brown hair, baggy clothes, and seemed, well, weird. Still, before my suicide attempt, the thought of having a therapist to share my feelings with had been intriguing.

  By the time Gary drove me to the appointment, however, all that had changed. I had staged my suicide attempt in the hope of getting my parents to notice me—and Gary sure did. But not in the way I intended. Instead of evoking his sympathy, my cry for help only raised his ire. He made it very clear that if I chose to attempt suicide in the future, I had better fucking succeed. So much for the adolescent delusion that I could scare my parents into caring about me.

  When I showed up for my first therapy session a few days later, the whole idea of talking about my feelings seemed pointless. Nevertheless, the appointment had been made, so Gary and I sat side by side in the waiting room staring silently at the clock. I don’t know what Gary was thinking during that wait, but I have to imagine he was pretty damned nervous. It can’t be fun dragging your child sex slave to a shrink. Even though I had been well trained, there was no telling what I might say. Still, to his credit, Gary did all he could to control the situation. Before I went into the session, he insisted on speaking to the therapist privately. He also made it clear that he expected a debriefing from the therapist after every session.

  As the parent of a minor—and the guy footing the bill—Gary was entitled to this. That’s one of the problems with treating kids; there’s no confidentiality.

  So, before I ever stepped foot in my first psychotherapy office, it was obvious that I shouldn’t tell the therapist shit. Not that it mattered. I didn’t want to talk anymore.

  The guy who came to get me was a short middle-aged man. I can’t remember his name anymore, but I vividly remember his office. It was smaller than a walk-in closet, with the decorative panache of a storage shed. I don’t recall much of what transpired during that first session. I do remember that we talked about the suicide attempt. He asked me point-blank why I wanted to die.

  “I don’t want to die,” I told him. “I just did it ’cause I wanted attention.”

  “Oh, c’mon,” he said. “That’s a cop-out.”

  The guy was right, of course. But at that moment in time, I couldn’t see it. I wasn’t capable of seeing much of anything. And since successful therapy requires a willing patient, this go-round was doomed from the start.

  I don’t know if this fellow was a good therapist or not. Right away, though, I didn’t like him. He asked me a question then questioned my answer.

  Who the hell was he to tell me how I felt?

  Later in the session, the guy’s tone changed. He lightened up and tried to act chummy in that lame way adults sometimes talk to kids. He was trying to connect with a difficult teenager, which is nearly impossible and certainly can’t be done in fifty minutes. There was something about his tone and his phony teenage demeanor that felt like he was making fun of me.

  There were a lot of presumptions going on—the presumption that he knew how I felt, that it was okay to joke with me, that we shared some kind of instant intimacy. This is all standard operating procedure for a therapist, but it won’t work on a patient who doesn’t want help. Nothing does.

  After the session, Gary went in for his debriefing. The same scene replayed for a few more weeks. At the end of the fourth session, I told my father I wasn’t depressed anymore and didn’t need a shrink. He gladly agreed.

  Thus ended my first go at psychotherapy.

  But it wouldn’t be my last.

  Not. Even. Close.

  Rebel Without a Core

  While my cry for help didn’t make Gary any nicer, it still had a big effect. It brought my mother back from Maryland. Life changed markedly for me after that. Since my mom had quit her job when she left, upon her return she was unemployed and home 24/7. Her presence made it impossible for Gary to whisk me off to motels. So, after nearly six years, my involvement with the ring finally ended.

  As for the depression, I abruptly decided after my suicide attempt that there was no point in having feelings. So I boxed up my sadness, my anger, my loneliness, my angst and filed them away deep inside my psyche—right next to the box marked BAD MEMORIES. This was not a process. It didn’t happen gradually over time. After two years of ever-darkening depression, one day I simply said to myself, “I’m not going to be depressed
anymore.” And I wasn’t. Just like that.

  If this sounds fishy, it is. It’s a classic example of the denial of feelings. Harmful pathological stuff in most cases. During prolonged trauma, however, denying one’s feelings can be beneficial and adaptive. What’s the point of focusing on how rotten life is if you can’t do anything to change it?

  I was stuck with Gary and my mother. By way of youth, I was held captive in a house of physical, emotional, and verbal cruelty. Sometimes I thought about running away. But I’d met enough runaways during my time in the ring to know that was a dead end.

  At the tender age of fourteen, I already knew I wanted more from life. I wanted a rewarding career with decent pay, a nice house in a pleasant neighborhood, interesting friends, some kind of family. Most of all, I wanted to be happy. From my perspective, that meant being normal. Kids from normal families went away to prestigious four-year colleges. So I set my sights on achieving that goal. Instinctively, I understood that college was not only the best way to escape my parents, it was also the only means to rise above my circumstances. I didn’t just want out; I wanted out and up.

  It was with this mind-set that I started high school.

  —

  FINALLY AWAY FROM Gary’s omnipresent gaze and surrounded by several thousand new faces, I seized the opportunity to reinvent myself. Every adolescent does this to some extent. Teenagers are biologically wired to ask, Who am I? In response, most will try on several different identities—the Jock, the Stoner, the Nerd—before settling on how they see themselves. The identity that the teen eventually settles on is usually a blend of both internal and external influences.

  A seventeen-year-old may describe himself, for instance, as an “outgoing, funny nerd who’s good at math.” Once that identity has been formed in adolescence, the brain rewires itself accordingly, allowing the person to have a stable sense of himself for the rest of his life.

  Having multiple personalities, though, screws all of this up. As a teenager, when I asked Who am I? confusing answers came back. I was outgoing or introverted, funny or serious, a good student or a bad student. I was polar opposites on just about everything, depending on which of my personalities was “out” at the time.

  This is the nature of dissociative identity disorder. Because alternate personalities are basically fragments of one whole personality, they tend to develop extreme all-or-nothing traits. An angry alter, for instance, is always angry. She will appear when hostility is called for. When the situation changes, my angry alter doesn’t grow calm. She simply goes away. Instantaneously, another alter emerges—one with the feelings, skills, and background necessary for the situation at hand.

  Being a multiple feels a lot like being an actor who is always on stage. Depending on the needs of the scene, my psyche casts me in various roles. Frequently, this makes me seem moody and unstable. In the morning, when one personality is out, I’m shy. By lunch, when another comes out, I’m the life of the party. Yes, yes, I know. Everyone feels more or less outgoing at times. But I’m not talking about gradations here. I never feel more or less of anything. If I’m shy, it feels like I’ve always been and will always be shy. Two hours later, when I’m outgoing, I can’t conceive of what being shy might feel like.

  Everything about me—my feelings, traits, behaviors, goals, memories, preferences—can change completely with each personality. One morning I’ll crave scrambled eggs. The next morning I’ll hate eggs and claim that I have hated them all my life. (This drives my wife nuts, as she does most of the cooking.) Nowadays, since I don’t black out when my personalities switch, I can remember that I ate eggs the day before. Still, my mind-set tells me I hate eggs, and it’s inconceivable that I ever stomached them.

  Now that I’m aware of my DID and have had considerable therapy, I’m able to notice when my personalities change, and to a certain extent, I can control them. My condition is greatly exacerbated by stress, which I try to monitor. As a teenager, though, I had no awareness of my dissociation or alternate personalities, and my home life kept me in a relentless state of anxiety. As a result, my personalities switched constantly, leaving classmates baffled. In first period, I might profess my undying allegiance to a friend. By fourth period, I’d stare at her coldly in the hallway as if she were my worst enemy. Two hours later, on the school bus, I’d be chummy again—and wonder why my friend was mad at me.

  Despite all the craziness, my host personality, Michelle, attempted to define herself in adolescence. Holding traditional values, she reinvented herself as the Preppy—an identity gleaned almost entirely from The Official Preppy Handbook, a best seller at the time. It was a joke book poking fun at WASPs, but Michelle didn’t know that. She thought it was a how-to manual for achieving all the things she wanted—happiness; prosperity; a traditional, normal life. Suddenly, as Michelle, I donned headbands, kilts, and crocodile shirts. Not unusual. Everybody at my school was doing that in the early ’80s. But I also donned an upper-crust East Coast accent and started calling my mother Mummy. Instead of being from my Podunk town, I started thinking I was from the posher Princeton, which was about fifteen miles away. If a person didn’t know better, I would actually claim to live in Princeton. And just as my mind could deceive itself into believing that my parents were actually married and Gary was my biological father, it accepted this lie as well.

  Embodying this personality required blatant fronting and deplorable social climbing. So what? The Preppy personality was beneficial for me. As I pored over the pages of the Preppy Handbook, I got an education in how to dress, act, and think like a higher-class person—a person who seemed normal to me. It was the Preppy who decided she must go to a good college. It was the Preppy who pooh-poohed would-be downfalls like drugs and promiscuity. The Preppy believed one must secure a good profession and a good marriage. I was taught none of these values through my family, which goes to show the importance of a teenager’s milieu. Had I grown up in an urban environment like Queens, I probably would’ve become the Punk, embraced antiestablishment values, dropped out of school, and gotten into drugs, which would have led to a very different life.

  Aside from suicidality, I never fell prey to overtly self-destructive behaviors. I didn’t sleep around, never did drugs, wasn’t a cutter, or anything like that. This was largely due to DID, which protected me from excesses. When naughty alters came out to smoke, drink, troll for men, or get into other mischief, my psyche quickly switched to a goody-two-shoes personality like the Preppy. Most of the time, this kept me out of serious trouble.

  My feelings, though, had to come out somewhere. As I was unable to express my unhappiness in obvious ways, my emotional outbursts became more subversive in high school. For one thing, I started stealing. Not big stuff. Small stuff like sheet music, books, pens. One time I found a nice new backpack sitting on the curb. Inside were gym clothes and a pair of pristine Nikes. I didn’t need these things. I already had a backpack and sneakers. Still, I took the bag home. What’s more, in my clueless state, I wore the stuff to school the next day. A girl on the bus spotted me; she asked if I’d found the items. “No,” I lied. “This stuff’s mine.”

  The girl got flustered and explained that she’d lost the bag the day before. “That exact backpack with those exact sneakers inside,” she insisted.

  “Well, I don’t know what to tell you.” I shrugged. “My parents bought me this stuff.”

  The girl complained to the bus driver, who also questioned me. I stuck to my story with blasé conviction. The bus driver frowned and told the girl that without proof there was nothing she could do. The girl started to cry. She was frustrated, I guess, but I didn’t mind. I mean, if she cared about her shit so much, she should’ve put her name on it.

  I know that sounds callous, but that’s how I was back then. I’d lie or cheat or steal without conscience if I thought I could get away with it. When I got caught—as I did after cheating on an assignment or stealing from various em
ployers—I didn’t feel guilty. I felt persecuted. To me, stealing and cheating were justified. I had a right to even the playing field by screwing the world over just the same as it screwed me.

  Here’s a warning about little kids from messed-up families: One day they grow up. And all that shit they seemed impervious to, all that crap that supposedly rolled off their backs, is gonna come back with a vengeance. Parents who put their kids through messy divorces or complicated stepfamilies or alcoholic spouses or any manner of upheaval love to be in denial about this. “It was a horrible custody battle,” a mother will say. “But little Timmy’s just fine. It hasn’t affected him. Kids are so resilient!”

  To these delusional statements, I always have the same response: “Just wait till the kid turns thirteen.” I’ve seen it time and time again; children seem to weather divorces, new stepfamilies, alcoholic parents, and abuse with little reaction. Then in middle school all hell breaks loose, and every bad parenting decision comes back to bite Mom and Dad in the ass. This is when the acting out starts. Drinking. Drugs. Promiscuity. Formerly good students start flunking out of school. Formerly docile kids grow moody.

  On the other end of the spectrum, some kids become hyper-responsible, turning into rigid, perfectionistic control freaks. Cutting, eating disorders, and kleptomania all generally begin in these years, as does a proclivity for violence.