Scared Selfless

by Michelle Stevens, PhD

  After working with Leah for a while, though, some of my passive personalities grew emboldened. As a result, the domestic Preppy was able to take charge. This was an internal shift in identity, unnoticeable to anyone but me. Still, if you knew me then, you couldn’t miss the effect. Everything in my life began to change.

  First, I gave up writing, the only activity I had ever claimed to give a damn about. Then I started pursuing hobbies that I would’ve previously considered a waste of time, like sewing, knitting, and decorating. The pursuit that really grabbed me, though, was gardening. Back when I was in the throes of suicidality, Javier had once asked what brought me comfort. At first, I could think of nothing. But then I had a vision of Grammy. Even though she’d been dirt poor and deluged with childcare duties, Grammy always managed to have the most beautiful yard. As a young child, I would follow her around for hours as she pulled weeds and deadheaded flowers. The time spent with Grammy among her irises and chrysanthemums was pure joy, and the memory of it brought me peace.

  Desperate for solace, I began my own garden on our rooftop patio and found that it offered serenity.

  It wasn’t long before the sleek, urban penthouse where Chris and I lived—and that was perfect for the Writer—was sold. It was replaced by a charming Cape Cod with a big yard, worthy of the pages of The Official Preppy Handbook.

  I spent so many hours working on the new house—choosing paint colors, sewing curtains, planting lilacs and daffodils—that Chris started calling me Martha. As my goal in life was now to be the quintessential Connecticut housewife, I felt the nickname was a compliment.

  The Writer, though, was out of sorts. I remember sitting in countless therapy sessions complaining about the “fucking Connecticut housewife” that lived inside me. I’d grouse that she was weak and dependent and lacked ambition. Other times, I’d sit on the couch and complain with equal vigor about the Writer, who made me feel like a loser for taking care of my home and always put too much pressure on me to be successful in the outer world.

  Remarkably, despite these frequent conversations with Leah and Chris and Steve, I still didn’t know I had dissociative identity disorder. I knew there were conflicted forces inside me; I’d known that since middle school. But multiple personalities? That was so weird, so supposedly “rare” that it wasn’t even on my radar.

  —

  ENLIGHTENMENT FINALLY CAME IN 2001, when I was thirty-three years old. We’d been in the Cape Cod for more than a year and, like many homeowners, found that our little fixer was breaking the bank. I hadn’t worked since the suicide attempt, a fact both Chris and our checking account seemed to notice. So I started pondering what kind of work I could do that would bring both fulfillment and a living wage.

  By this time, I was taking classes in psychology at UCLA. I’d started with an intro class—fearful I wouldn’t be able to hack the academic rigor. After earning an A, I took the next class and the next until I’d racked up all the undergraduate courses I could, all the while maintaining a 4.0. Despite this boost to my confidence, when it came time to choose a career, I couldn’t even fathom becoming a psychologist. I felt like a crazy person, and I believe very strongly that at the very least a psychotherapist should have their own shit together before they try to help someone else.

  Through a friend, I heard that Los Angeles was in the midst of a teacher shortage. This allowed me, with no training or experience, to secure a position teaching high school English to inner-city kids. While the thought of teaching high school English intrigued me, it terrified me as well. The feeling of terror is, understandably, my biggest trigger. So teaching was bound to stir up anxiety.

  Ultimately, though, it wasn’t fear that helped me finally acknowledge my alternate personalities.

  It was love.

  —

  IT STARTED ONE AFTERNOON as I was crying in Leah’s office. It was the summer before I was to start teaching, and I had just come from an upsetting meeting with the medical director of LA Unified. New teachers had to get physicals before they could start work. On the form, it asked about any “prior conditions” or medications I was taking. My doctor had revealed that I was taking psychiatric meds to treat anxiety.

  Now, as a psychologist, I can tell you that more than 20 percent of Americans take at least one type of psychiatric drug. Nonetheless, the stigma of mental illness runs rampant, and seeing my history, the LA Unified doctor demanded to know more about my “mental health problems.” Specifically, he requested the notes from all of my therapy sessions, which meant a total stranger with power over my employment was about to read the intimate details of my sexual abuse and suicide attempts.

  I was shattered. I mean, here I was, trying to get a job, be a contributing member of society, move on with my life. It had taken me six months to pass all the necessary tests and fulfill the other requirements to become a teacher. Now all of a sudden, my history as a victim was about to victimize me again. The injustice of it was overwhelming. I cried with despair, convinced I would never be able to break free from my past and move on to a satisfying life.

  Leah, though, remained calm. Despite my insistence that she fax over my therapy notes, she refused. She said it was wrong for the school district to be demanding her personal files. Then, very kindly, she said, “I know you don’t understand all this stuff, but I do. And it’s my job to protect you.”

  Right then and there, she whipped out a piece of stationery. I watched in awe as she wrote a letter to the medical director chastising him for the inappropriate request. She went on to explain that she’d been my therapist for the past four years and assured the doctor that I was perfectly capable of teaching a bunch of high school students.

  In short, Leah went out on a limb for me. Not only did she protect my sensitive personal information, but she vouched for me—putting her own reputation at risk. It was a watershed moment; no therapist had ever gone out of her way for me before.

  As I sat on Leah’s couch watching her fax the letter, I could feel something inside my psyche shift. Suddenly, it felt as if I were floating in space while some other part of me watched Leah intensely, thinking, Wow! We can actually trust her!

  —

  IN THAT MOMENT, everything changed. All my life, I’d been searching for someone who could help me. Considering how fucked up I was, I knew I needed an extraordinarily strong and faithful person who would stand by my side no matter what. With Leah’s simple act of writing the letter (after four years of unwavering kindness and reliability), I finally had proof that she cared about me and would protect me—from the world and from myself. For the first time since I was a very young child, I felt safe.

  I felt loved.

  When children are abused, especially by caregivers, one of the fundamental things they lose is the ability to trust. This is a devastating setback, as trust is a prerequisite for establishing normal, healthy relationships.

  I hadn’t trusted anyone since I was eight years old. As a result, I had lost the ability to love. I didn’t realize it, of course. I thought what I felt for Chris and Steve was love, but it really wasn’t. Love requires the heart to be open. My heart had been frozen by the abuse, and I’d lost the ability to feel warmth or gratitude or empathy toward anyone.

  Truth be told, I’d lost the ability to feel most anything except rage and fear.

  Now, suddenly, my heart melted. In an instant, I felt a rush of warm feelings for Leah as my heart expanded within my chest. It was that dramatic and that simple. I felt Leah’s love for me and instantaneously felt my love for her. And just like that, my heart started working again. My ability to feel was restored.

  I wish I could say, I felt nothing but unbridled joy from that point on. Unfortunately, that’s not the way trauma works. When a person is hurt but doesn’t feel safe to vent their emotions, those unexpressed feelings stay frozen in the body, waiting for a chance to be released.

  I had twenty
-five years of pain stored within me. When I began to feel again, that pain was the first thing to come out. For the first time since childhood, I started crying—for the loss of my childhood and the rape of my innocence, for a lifetime of loneliness and never feeling loved, for all the things that had been stolen from me and all the wasted years I had lost. I cried for all of it. Then I cried some more.

  In order to truly heal from any kind of trauma, the victim must eventually recognize and grieve all that she has lost. Mourning is essential to moving on. Yet I find it is the thing my clients most fear. They say, “I don’t want to start crying. If I start, I’ll never stop.” Or they say, “I don’t want to cry. What’s the point in that?”

  I get it. For a long time, I didn’t see the point in crying either. As a child, I had cried. What did it get me? A slap on the face usually, as some monster said, “Shut up, or I’ll really give you something to cry about!”

  Back when I was a victim, crying made me feel desperate and alone. But as a survivor, with a loving therapist to comfort me, I learned that crying could feel good! For more than twenty years, I’d been carrying around the weight of horrible feelings with no ability to release them. Now, suddenly, I was letting it all out. What exquisite catharsis. What freedom!

  As I finally let out all the buried grief, I found that my dark worldview naturally lightened. Without effort, the giant chip fell off my shoulder. I became less angry, less resentful, less guarded. More open to people, I started seeing them differently. Where I’d once thought everyone was out to get me, I could now see that most people were kind and good.

  For the first time, I could see and feel that I was surrounded by loving people who wanted to help me. I felt grateful and humbled by their presence in my life.

  I also felt deeply grateful to God for all the blessings He’d sent to me. In the past, I’d only been able to see the ways I’d been wronged, and I blamed God for all of them! Now I could see the countless ways Spirit had intervened on my behalf over the years—the suicide attempts I’d been saved from, the epiphanies I’d experienced, the wonderful helpers I’d been sent. I began to see that God really does have a plan. Take, for instance, the time I lost my job when the Los Angeles Theatre Center closed. If not for that loss, I wouldn’t have moved to Center Theatre Group, which led to meeting Chris and, eventually, Leah. Suddenly, it was obvious that God had been protecting me all along.

  —

  ALL THIS HEALING HAPPENED very quickly. In a few short weeks, I changed from an angry, resentful, suspicious victim into an openhearted, grateful, hopeful survivor. From the outside, it might seem like Leah’s letter was a magic bullet. But the truth is that there are no magic bullets in therapy. There is only showing up for the work week after week and hoping once in a while for a breakthrough.

  In my case, and the cases of many other victims of trauma, the hard work I had to do was learn how to trust. My ability to attach to another person, to bond, to love had been completely destroyed by the abuse. More than anything, that’s what I needed to heal in therapy.

  This is true for nearly every victim of trauma, and it is especially true for victims of child abuse. More than working through bad memories or troubling symptoms, victims need to learn that it is safe to trust another human being again.

  For this reason, I do not generally believe that it is possible for people to heal from trauma on their own; it must be accomplished within the context of a healthy, healing relationship. The bond that develops between a competent therapist and a client is obviously ideal for healing, but any relationship in which two human beings share mutual warmth, honesty, empathy, and trust can be therapeutic.

  Medication and adjunctive therapies such as eye movement desensitization and processing (EMDR), neurofeedback, and somatic experiencing can be very helpful in relieving certain symptoms of PTSD. However, I do not believe such methods alone can sufficiently heal the wounds of trauma because they do nothing to heal a broken heart.

  Only love can do that.

  The Many Faces of Me

  Ultimately, it was Leah’s love that finally gave me the courage to face my multiple personalities. It’s a basic tenet of DID therapy that alternate identities must feel safe before they will fully reveal themselves. In going out of her way to protect me, Leah had proven her mettle. Now my personalities felt free to fully come out—both in therapy and in the world!

  It started that day in Leah’s office as she was faxing the letter. I felt as if I were floating away as some other part took over my body for a moment. After that, it often felt as if I were watching from a distance as my body said and did things that made no sense. Sometimes I’d find myself at a toy store buying dolls and finger paints and coloring books, which I would later play with at home. Other times I would find myself singing and dancing in front of a mirror to songs I hadn’t played since I was twelve. One day, as I was singing in front of the mirror, I became disturbed because I didn’t think I looked like myself. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d grabbed a pair of scissors and chopped away at my hair until I had the bangs I’d worn as a little girl.

  Although I’d been in treatment with Leah for four years, my feelings for her suddenly and inexplicably grew intense. Seeing her in therapy became the highlight of my week, and I often spent hours thinking about what I would say and wear to each session. When I wasn’t in her office, I thought of her constantly. I fantasized that she was in the audience for the opening night of one of my plays or at my wedding or at some party to celebrate my accomplishments. In these fantasies, Leah was proud of me, beaming—just the way a good mother should.

  On some level, I understood that such fantasies were normal. I’d read enough psychology books to know that clients with attachment problems often turn their therapists into surrogate parents; it’s part of the transference process. Still, that didn’t explain why I would walk into Leah’s office and start talking in the voice of a little girl. It didn’t explain why I showed up sometimes with a McDonald’s Happy Meal, plopped down on Leah’s office floor, and spent the hour drawing with the crayons she provided. Hell, sometimes I would just walk in the door, curl up on her couch, and take a nap!

  If I, grown-up Michelle, had been in charge of my body during these times, none of this would’ve happened. I tend to be rather uptight and reserved, so I found the things I was doing mortifying. Nonetheless, I was powerless to stop any of it. While I could see it going on, I had no control. It was as if I were watching my own life take place from the backseat of a movie theater.

  I couldn’t believe it the day I brazenly asked Leah to buy me a gift. The next week, she handed me a giant stuffed teddy bear, which I held with delight. Without understanding why, it was suddenly imperative that the teddy bear be with me at all times—on the couch, in the bed, riding shotgun in my car. The teddy, which made me feel safe and warm, was a stand-in for Leah, just like any child’s beloved stuffed animal or safety blanket. Except I was thirty-three years old—a fact airport security rudely noted when I tried to take my teddy on a plane to London just a few weeks after 9/11. Imagine: grown woman clutching giant teddy bear as jumpy police try to pull it out of her arms, assuming it’s a bomb.

  Yeah, that’s right. My insanity nearly caused an international incident!

  Insanity aptly describes this period in my life, for I was constantly thinking and feeling and doing outrageous things. As my obsession with Leah grew, for instance, I found myself frequently driving to her office and sitting outside her building just to be near her. Later, through sheer psycho persistence, I managed to get her home address so I could park outside her house in the middle of the night. One time, for reasons I can’t fathom, I packed a bag, grabbed a stack of cash, and went to the Greyhound bus station. My plan was to just take off, but it was thwarted when Leah unexpectedly called and somehow convinced me to return home.

  Why was I doing these things? I had no idea! I just had weird compulsions t
hat I couldn’t stop or understand. I’d often find myself at different places but not quite remember how I got there. Sometimes I would find drawings and writings about the abuse I’d suffered but not remember creating them.

  In therapy, which I sometimes remembered and sometimes didn’t, I kept telling Leah that I felt like my psyche was trying to tell me something, like it was giving me some kind of test. “It wants me to figure something out,” I told her time and time again.

  But what?

  What?

  Then one afternoon I inexplicably found myself in the lobby of Leah’s office building, but I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there. Suddenly, Leah was standing in front of me. Apparently, I’d called her, but I didn’t remember that either. As I walked into her office, I felt disturbed and disoriented, like I was waking from some crazy dream. All the shenanigans of the past few months started flashing through my mind—the weird voices, the strange behaviors, the memory loss. Suddenly, it all made sense.

  “Leah,” I said tentatively. “I think I have multiple personalities.”

  She smiled knowingly, almost like she was relieved, and asked, “What makes you think that?”

  “Well, I always feel like there are different people inside of me, different people controlling me . . . and I don’t remember how I got here.”

  “So you think you have multiple personalities,” she stated plainly. “Are you okay with that?”

  It was a good question. The answer was no! No, I wasn’t okay with that! I’d learned enough about psychology to know that multiple personality disorder was a very serious diagnosis, maybe the most serious diagnosis in the whole damned diagnostic book. The knowledge that I had a serious mental illness was devastating. As far as I knew, sick people couldn’t be ambitious. They couldn’t become successful writers or doctors. They couldn’t become anything because they were handicapped. So having multiple personalities meant my life was over. It felt like a death sentence.