Scared Selfless

by Michelle Stevens, PhD

  In my case, containment had always been a serious issue. Every time the abuse broke into my consciousness, it erupted like a volcano, burning everything in its path. Flashbacks would play nonstop; I’d get overwhelmed with feelings and completely lose the ability to function in everyday life. This time was no different. When the memories came, they were fast and furious, and brought along all the usual fear, pain, rage, and sadness. In addition, it is the nature of dissociative identity disorder that different memories are “owned” by different alternate personalities. So every time a repressed memory popped into my consciousness, an alter popped in along with it. The rapid switching of my personalities was extremely disconcerting, and I’m sure it made me look even crazier than usual.

  I was thankful that there weren’t a lot of people around to see me during this time. Because of the breakdown, I wasn’t working—again. Meanwhile, Chris was supporting us both by clocking eighty-hour weeks. Isolated from prying eyes, my alters felt safe to come out completely and “take over” my body. This would happen without my conscious knowledge, but the switching left plenty of signs.

  Chris would often come home late at night to find the stereo blaring, the TV playing, and all the lights on. A half-made dinner might be on the counter or a half-potted plant on the patio, but I was nowhere to be found. It was so bizarre and so frequent that Chris started calling these incidents “alien abductions.” It drove her crazy that I would leave the house in such a state. She complained constantly that I was being thoughtless when I didn’t turn off the lights or leave a note. How could I explain that I didn’t know I was leaving the house? How could I explain that I wasn’t even sure where I’d been all day . . . or who I’d been?

  As the weeks wore on, I became more and more disturbed. The flashbacks kept coming, the feelings kept bombarding me, but Javier wasn’t helping to contain them. When a client is in crisis, the first thing a therapist should suggest is more frequent sessions. Once a week is fine for ordinary therapy, but desperate times call for desperate measures. I should’ve been seeing Javier two or three times a week.

  Unfortunately, Javier was no Judd Hirsch. Instead of offering more sessions, he started canceling them. He’d often call just an hour or two before our weekly appointment to say he couldn’t make it because he was too busy with another project. One time, I drove all the way to his office at our scheduled time and sat in the waiting room for the whole hour before realizing he’d neglected to show up!

  When we did have sessions, I made it very clear that my mental state was declining. As in the past, my anxiety eventually morphed into depression, and I became suicidal. I spoke to Javier about my suicidal feelings, and he suggested I go on antidepressants. I met once with a psychiatrist who prescribed a fairly new drug called Effexor.

  In many circumstances, psychotropic drugs are excellent at alleviating symptoms related to trauma. Over the years, they have been an absolute lifesaver for me. Finding the proper medications and dosages, however, can take time. It can also take time to work through a drug’s initial side effects.

  Unfortunately, at this point in my life, I lacked the maturity and patience to follow up with my shrink and manage my medication responsibly. As a result, Effexor was not nearly as effective as it could have been, and I needlessly suffered from a multitude of side effects, including headaches, nonstop yawning, and dry mouth that was so bad I couldn’t speak.

  The worst side effect (which could have been avoided entirely, had I called my doctor), was nightly insomnia. Insomnia is toxic to a disturbed mind. Up all night, I would pace our apartment and battle a voice in my head that was telling me I should “Die! Die! Die!”

  When a client is suicidal, it is customary for a therapist to offer emergency support. In general, that means reminding the client that they can call between sessions if there’s an urgent need. The therapist isn’t trying to encourage overdependence but wants the client to know that in an emergency a trained professional is around to talk her off the ledge. After a session in which I confessed to strong suicidal feelings, Javier followed protocol by reminding me that I could call him in a jam. I’d never called any therapist in an emergency, so the offer seemed pointless. But then I’d tried to commit suicide twice. Maybe this time it might be better to try something different.

  Maybe this time I should ask for help when I need it.

  Maybe this time I should trust someone.

  —

  THE FIRST TIME I called Javier I was in a terrible state. Obsessed with the past, I’d pulled out some old letters from my parents. As I read through them and saw all their lies and half-truths in black-and-white, I got very, very agitated. Feeling I was about to fall into an abyss, I left Javier a message. It took him six hours to call back.

  During those hours, something strange started happening in my head. Instead of “Die! Die! Die!,” I got an urge to flee. I became convinced that I should grab some money, hop on a Greyhound, and go somewhere new. It didn’t matter where; I just had to leave. I had already stuffed a bag and was nearly out the door when Javier finally called me back. He explained that there’s something called a dissociative fugue, a state in which stressed people take off and forget who they are. Javier said he thought I was in danger of a fugue. He recommended that I stop reading the upsetting papers and give them to him at our next appointment.

  I did give the papers to Javier, but it didn’t matter much. My problem wasn’t a few letters. My problem was a childhood of torturous memories and feelings that were trying to break free. They overwhelmed me day and night, and I felt helpless to stop them. My mind was a weapon I couldn’t fight, so I had to flee. Whether it be a Greyhound or a grave, I had to escape. I just couldn’t take the pain anymore.

  —

  SO, ONE FRIDAY AFTERNOON, I got it in my head that it was time to call it quits. I already had the means—a full bottle of Effexor—and I was more than ready to take it. But I’d promised to call Javier before I did anything dangerous. So I did. Then I sat in a dark room and waited for him to call back.

  I waited the rest of Friday and all of Saturday before I finally realized that Javier had no intention of returning my call. He had offered to be available, had basically urged me to trust him. Then he’d let me down just like everyone else in my life. He didn’t really give a shit about me or my feelings or whether I lived or died. In my troubled mind, Javier was no better than my crappy parents.

  This was more than my battered soul could bear. I’d prayed for a therapist who would care enough about me to stick it out through the dark times and pull me back to health. Javier didn’t care enough to return a fucking phone call. It was devastating.

  On Sunday evening, I downed the pills. There wasn’t a lot of thought put into it. I was in a very dark place, and I swallowed whatever was left in the bottle. Chris wasn’t home. No one was scheduled to visit and “accidentally” find me. I had given up on being helped. I had given in.

  Ironically, this was the moment when Javier finally called. The first thing I did was berate him for taking so long. Two days! He got defensive and explained that the timing of phone calls was his prerogative.

  “Well, you should’ve called a little sooner,” I said flippantly. “You might’ve caught me before I took the pills.”

  “Pills? What pills?” Javier asked.

  Oh, yeah, now I had his attention.

  After assessing what, when, and how much I’d taken, Javier asked if anyone else was around. He wanted someone to take me to the hospital. If I couldn’t find someone, he said he’d call the cops. I thought about walking out of the apartment into the night. The cops couldn’t find me if they didn’t know where to look. But ultimately, my good girl kicked in, and I did as I was told to do.

  I called my friend Dan, who lived about a block away.

  When he arrived, Javier told me to hand him the phone.

  “Dan,” Javier said. “Michelle just too
k an alarming number of pills. I need you to drive her to the emergency room.”

  At the emergency room, it was the same old scene. Get assigned to a cubicle, tell the doctor what I took. They made me drink charcoal to soak up the drugs. (Yes, it’s as gross as it sounds.) But there was really nothing to worry about. Turns out Effexor is rarely lethal even in large doses.

  That was small comfort to the people who loved me. Dan called Chris and Steve, and all three stood vigil throughout the ordeal. This was very different than the other times I’d tried to commit suicide—the times my parents had displayed wanton disregard for whether I lived or died. Now there were people in my life who seemed quite upset by what I’d done.

  Realizing that my actions affected other people made me feel guilty and ashamed of a suicide attempt for the first time in my life.

  Another difference this time around was the hospital staff. When I was a kid, all the doctors and nurses felt sorry for me and were kind. When an adult goes to the emergency room after a suicide attempt, I learned that the staff has little sympathy. They believe suicidal patients are histrionic and selfish and wasting their valuable time.

  The doctor was cold, the nurses were curt, and the social worker who was sent in to talk with me displayed outright contempt.

  “Why’d you do it?” she asked.

  “I’m in pain,” I said. “I just can’t take life anymore.”

  “Well, that’s just dramatic,” she countered. “Things always seem better in the morning.”

  The person I really wanted to see in the emergency room was Javier. Even though I was angry at him for not returning my phone call in a timely manner, I was still desperate to believe he cared about me. I was experiencing a lot of transference, which is a fancy shrink way of saying I saw Javier as a parent. Transference happens a lot in therapy. When a client has been neglected or abused by their own parents, it’s a force to be reckoned with!

  That force can be used to great advantage if the therapist is caring, dependable, and trustworthy, like a good parent. In this type of healthy relationship, the client gets to experience what it feels like to be nurtured and loved—often for the first time. And just like a child who is nurtured and loved by their parents, the client begins to heal and grow.

  I did my part; I put my faith in Javier. After seven years together, I trusted him. Unfortunately, Javier was not the kind of therapist who cared about honoring that trust. He couldn’t bother to show up for scheduled sessions; he couldn’t bother to return urgent phone calls; and he sure as hell couldn’t bother to visit me in the emergency room after I attempted suicide even though Chris got on the phone and begged him.

  Javier’s apathy was devastating, but it was also a wake-up call.

  For the first time, I saw him for who he really was and realized his brand of “therapy” did more harm than good. I vowed never to see him again.

  Instead, all I wanted to do was get back to my apartment, hug my dog, and crawl into bed next to my girlfriend. With my nonemergency emergency winding down, I got off the gurney, turned to Chris, and said, “I’m really tired. Let’s go home.”

  She nodded, opened the privacy curtain, and scanned the hall for a nurse who could sign us out.

  Just then the social worker accosted me. “Where do you think you’re going?” she asked.

  “We’re trying to find someone to release me,” I explained. “I’m ready to go home.”

  “Home?” she snickered. “Oh, you’re not going home. You’re being transferred to a locked-down mental facility. You’ve been committed.”

  All You Need Is Love

  I have to go to the bathroom. I don’t think I can hold it much longer. A pint of heavy charcoal has worked its way through my body, and it wants out. Now.

  The bathroom is just a few steps away. I can see the toilet. It’s just sitting there. But in order to get to it, I have to get out of this bed. That means acknowledging to the nurses that I’m awake. More upsetting, it means acknowledging to myself that I’m here, locked in a fucking looney bin.

  They brought me by ambulance the previous night. Everything about it was humiliating. The way the social worker pronounced my sentence with hardened glee, the way the nineteen-year-old EMTs got dramatic when Chris asked to ride along. “No way. Uh-uh. You can’t go where she’s goin’.” The way the admitting nurse handed me a cheap toothbrush and cheaper socks while reminding me that it was my right to wear my own clothes on the ward, but I couldn’t go on outings with the patients because my stay was “involuntary.”

  The most humiliating part of all was the cause of this involuntary stay. It was all Javier’s doing, as it turned out. While he’d ignored me at the ER and pretty much blew off Chris, he did talk to the social worker long enough to tell her I should be committed. Now I’m not saying this was a baseless recommendation. I did try to kill myself. But committing someone—taking away their power and their freedom—is a very harsh move and terribly traumatic, especially for someone who spent their childhood enslaved.

  Now that I’m a therapist, I take my power to commit someone very seriously and would never use it unless absolutely necessary, which it never has been. Anytime I’ve had a patient who needed to be hospitalized, I’ve spoken with her and suggested she voluntarily admit herself. Taking this approach allows a wounded patient to maintain her dignity and sense of control during a dark time. It also works to strengthen, rather than destroy, our therapeutic relationship.

  Javier, unfortunately, was not the kind of therapist who understood the emotional and psychological sway he held over his patients, nor do I think he wanted to be that involved. Javier was a by-the-book kind of therapist. And the book says: If someone is a danger to herself, best to lock her up.

  So there I was, a certified crazy person. A ward of the state. This new status was shocking and mortifying. How the hell had I sunk so low?

  Freaked out, I refused to get out of bed, which seemed to piss off the nurses. Several times already they’d been in to rouse me, saying it was time for breakfast, time for group, time for lunch. But the thought of getting up, walking the halls in my dirty clothes, and eating with a bunch of mental patients was too much for me.

  I wasn’t some mental patient. I didn’t belong.

  Adding insult to injury, the charcoal couldn’t wait any longer. Feeling I was about to have an accident, I was forced to rush to the toilet, which soon looked like a campfire grill. I don’t mean to be disgusting, but I need to convey the utter degradation of writhing in pain on some mental-ward toilet while shitting briquettes.

  In some ways, I know I deserved these indignities. I had tried to kill myself, after all, which legally deemed me incompetent to make my own choices. But being locked in a hospital wasn’t going to help. If anything, it made me feel more desperate.

  —

  THE SOUND OF FLUSHING brought a nurse into the room. She was standing in front of me before I could pull up my pants. “Lunch is ending,” she said, a bit snippy. “You better go get something. It’s a long time till dinner.”

  I was hungry, but I just couldn’t bring myself to leave the room. Being locked up and abased and treated unkindly by people who were supposed to care all felt way too much like my childhood. And just as in childhood, the only thing I wanted to do was hide. Spotting the narrow space between the side of the bed and the wall, I did what I’d done countless times in motel rooms: I plopped myself down on the floor, drew my knees into my chest, and began to rock back and forth.

  Hidden from view by the mattresses, I felt safely invisible, and the rocking had a soothing effect. While I didn’t realize it at the time, this rocking motion is one of the ways I put myself into a dissociative trance.

  I don’t know how long I sat rocking on the floor, but I’m sure I looked like a total whack job to the nurses and patients who walked in.

  The funny thing is: Had anyone asked me, I woul
d’ve vehemently denied the need to be in a mental hospital. Yet to the outside observer, I probably looked like the most disturbed patient on the ward!

  Hours passed by, the light through the window changed, but I never moved—not to eat, not to stretch, not for anything. It’s hard to say what was going on internally during those many hours. I was a zombie. But underneath all that, I suppose I felt terrified—of being in the hospital, of course. But I was also terrified of being totally alone.

  Now that Javier had betrayed me I had no one to help me.

  Who the hell could I find at this point? And how the hell would I ever be able to trust that person?

  —

  A NURSE CAME IN, followed by Chris. I suppose it was visiting hours, not that I noticed or cared. Chris seemed shocked to see me on the floor in my zombie state. “Hey, Mooch,” she said quietly. “I brought someone to see you. It’s Leah. Can she come in?”

  Leah was Chris’s therapist, someone I’d heard about but never met. Chris always had great things to say about her. But then I’d always said great things about Javier.

  Leah came in and sat gently on the bed. Even in my hypnotized state, I was aware of her presence. She had a slight build, a kind face, and long curly blond hair that made her look like a goddess. She had an aura about her that was all love and goodness. Meeting her for the first time was how I imagine it must be to meet the Dalai Lama.

  “Michelle,” she said, in a calm, reassuring voice. “Chris asked me to come and visit with you today. I want to be here with you, but I’ll go if you want. You just let me know.”

  It’s such a simple thing—to ask someone what he or she wants and genuinely care about the answer. Yet it’s remarkably rare within the mental health system.

  Still out of it, I somehow managed to nod, letting Leah know she should stay. I wanted her there. Her very presence was already calming me, making me feel safer. We didn’t talk much. She just sat on the edge of the bed and smiled at me, the essence of compassion and kindness.