Scared Selfless

by Michelle Stevens, PhD

  The walk from the parking lot to the hotel entrance was surreal. I was fully aware of everything that was going on because it felt like I had a box seat in my brain. But despite my best efforts to control my body, I couldn’t. The whole thing was very Being John Malkovich.

  In the lobby bar, I spotted the young man. We sat at a table and ordered drinks. He asked about my experiences with S/M. I told him I’d been a sex slave in childhood and that I liked it!

  For the part of me that was watching the show, this sex-slave thing was news. I knew that Gary abused me, but I still didn’t remember anything about S/M. Suddenly, all the dissociative fantasies I’d been playing popped into consciousness. I realized that they all involved bondage and torture. Wait! Could my fantasies actually be memories?

  The man talked about his experience as a master. He said he liked to hurt and humiliate women, but he didn’t know why.

  “I’m guessing you don’t like your mother,” my voice was saying. “She’s probably very stern and controlling.”

  Somehow the Student had jumped into the conversation to offer up a bit of psychology.

  The man was impressed with my accurate description of his mother. He said he wanted to pursue a master/slave relationship. Whoever was controlling my body was ready to get a room. Meanwhile, I sat in the back of the brain screaming in my thought, No, no, no! We’re going to get murdered, or at least catch a disease!

  But as fate would have it, the man was not ready to proceed. He said my training would begin via e-mail, with a series of questions that I had to answer. The person controlling my body was disappointed, but I was relieved. We had dodged a bullet!

  In the following weeks, the man and the southern sex slave who lived inside me corresponded frequently. He asked her to describe her sexual history, and as she did, I started to learn about my past. This identity wrote explicitly about all the bondage, torture, and slave training Gary had subjected her to. But instead of describing these things with horror, she seemed turned on.

  For me, the new knowledge was shocking. I had no idea I’d been abused so extensively, and based on the fantasies I now knew were memories, I suspected there was a lot more to learn. Overwhelmed, I was thrust into a crisis similar to when I’d had my first memories fifteen years before. A whole torrent of emotions swelled up—rage, humiliation, fear, sadness, disgust.

  At some point, the man from the Roosevelt Hotel stopped writing, and the part of me that was a sex slave went on a hunt for a new master. She spoke to a guy in Santa Monica who wanted to meet at Starbucks. I went along for the ride as they talked about vile things like face sitting and penis worship. It wasn’t a match, and the guy disappeared behind a display of mugs. Another bullet dodged. Thank you, God.

  Right away, though, this alter was on to a new master. He was a disgusting old man who demanded she send a set of specific photographs. While Mikey napped in another room, I found myself donning a black bra and panties. Then I wrote the word SLUT in red lipstick across my chest and let the timer snap suggestive shots.

  Liking the pictures, the man set up the first training session. He was quite explicit about what he planned to do to me. Right before our first meeting, though, he had to cancel. Phew! Dodged bullet number three.

  By now, I was hip to the fact that I’d completely lost my marbles. I needed to do something to get myself safe immediately before the sex slave got us killed. I decided I better check myself into a hospital—and fast—as I was finding it hard to maintain any control over the things I did.

  I’d heard of a mental hospital that specifically worked with DID patients. I knew I needed to get there right away. It was the middle of a weekday, Chris’s last week of work. I called her and told her I was taking myself to the hospital.

  Not having any idea what was going on, Chris insisted on accompanying me. She arranged for a babysitter and transportation. On the long trip, she tried to press me for an explanation. Out of my mind, I found it difficult to communicate. I told her I was acting weird and was scared for my safety. I spent the rest of the time rocking back and forth in a dissociative trance.

  —

  AT THE HOSPITAL, my zombielike appearance garnered immediate admission. But I wasn’t placed in the trauma program, as I’d planned. My insurance company needed more information before it would authorize specialized care. So even though the door for DID patients was right in front of me, I was sent down the hall to the general ward.

  Voluntarily admitting myself to the hospital felt different than being committed. For one thing, I knew I could sign myself out at any time. For another, I knew I needed to be there. I felt safer knowing I was locked in a place where I couldn’t access perverted men. Well, theoretically. As it turned out, the hospital housed a program for sex addicts and sex offenders on the same floor. Every time I went onto the patio, they offered me smokes.

  Despite this, my initial feeling upon entering the ward was relief. After weeks of watching helplessly as some other identity put me in danger, I was finally safe! I settled into a four-bed room that housed a bipolar woman and two schizophrenics. Unlike my first hospital stay, when I felt like I didn’t belong in the looney bin, this time around I knew I fit right in.

  My first day there, I mostly slept. I was exhausted after all those late nights spent trolling for men. The second day, I ate meals, played cards with a bunch of detoxing alcoholics, and waited for my transfer to the trauma program. I was impatient to move on because, honestly, the general wards of mental hospitals aren’t set up to offer much help.

  They’re mostly warehouses to keep extremely unstable people off the street for a few days. The only “help” given is in the form of pills, which can work wonders on schizophrenics and bipolars. Medication alone doesn’t do much for dissociation, though. The primary treatment for DID is talk therapy. I needed to be in a place that understood trauma. That’s why I’d traveled a long distance to this particular hospital in the first place.

  My third day, still no transfer, and I was getting frustrated. I flagged down the head nurse and demanded an explanation. She said we were waiting on the director of the trauma program to deal with the insurance company and that I should be patient. A lackadaisical attitude works if one’s stay is being paid for by Medicare (true of many mental hospital patients), which pays for long stays. But I had private insurance, which only pays for a few paltry days. I didn’t want to waste mine just playing blackjack. I was in the hospital to get help. Instead, I was getting the runaround. It made me irate.

  That afternoon, I took a nap. I awoke to the sound of orderlies yelling next to my bed. As I opened my eyes, I saw one of my schizophrenic roommates rushing out the door.

  “Are you okay?” asked one of the orderlies. “Do you feel any pain?”

  Apparently, my roomie had grabbed some heavy object and tried to smash it across my sleeping head. Thankfully, she had bad aim.

  So much for feeling safe.

  I marched into the psychiatrist’s office and demanded to be released. He advised against it, saying I should wait. Wait? Wait for what? For the trauma director who worked down the hall? For someone to crush my skull? No, thanks. I checked myself out against medical advice and arranged for transport home.

  —

  FILLED WITH FIGHTER ENERGY, I felt like myself again. I told Chris I thought my insanity was over, but she was not convinced. To tell the truth, she seemed really weird. More cautious and careful than usual. I assumed she was shaken by my hospital visit, so I acquiesced when she insisted I see Leah the next day.

  At Leah’s office, I felt totally fine. I gave her a brief rundown of my breakdown, conveniently glossing over the strange men and weird-sex parts. I thought I was putting on a good show of mental health until Leah mentioned the photos I’d been e-mailing to dirty old men. Apparently, Chris had been searching for pictures of Baby Mikey to brighten my hospital room when she came across my unglamou
r shots. She’d shown them to Leah. The ones with SLUT written across my chest. Oh, God.

  Whatever semblance of sanity I’d managed to piece together was blown away by this humiliation. Both Chris and Leah knew about the degrading, dangerous things I’d been doing at night. I felt so mortified and guilty that I wanted to die.

  At home later that day, I avoided Chris by locking myself in the guest room. I wasn’t listening to country music and drinking beers anymore. Whoever that person was, she was long gone. All that was left was me—reserved and conservative—remembering the dirty, awful things I’d done. Even though I’d had no control over my body, the shame I felt was crushing. I paced back and forth like a madwoman, asking myself how, how, how I could’ve done such dangerous, disgusting things.

  Then all of a sudden, I had an epiphany. The epiphany I’d been wanting all my life. I saw a curtain rise across my mind, and in an instant, I remembered everything. Gary’s basement. Being trained as his sex slave. Being prostituted to other men and forced into pornography. I understood that all my so-called fantasies and daydreams were really memories. People, places, concrete details all came pouring back. Every goddamn thing in my life made sense.

  Ever since I realized I had amnesia fifteen years earlier, I’d wanted to know the true story of my life. Now here it was, and it was awful. Worse than I ever imagined. S/M? Prostitution? Pornography? I had done heinous, filthy things. Filled with self-loathing, I wanted to erase myself from the planet. I deserved to be dead. Where the fuck could I get a gun?

  Suicide, though, was no longer an answer. Even in my fevered state, I still understood that I had a responsibility to Mikey. I was his mom. I beckoned Chris and told her I had to get back to the hospital. Immediately! I was shaking and pale, sure I would pass out from shock.

  As I sat on the couch in a stupor, Chris got on the phone. Next thing I knew, we were being transported back to the hospital. I silently rocked back and forth like a crazy person the whole way.

  —

  AT THE HOSPITAL, I was immediately sent to the DID wing. (Don’t mess with Chris!) Right away, it felt very different than the other wards I’d encountered. For one thing, it was filled almost exclusively with middle-aged women. Also, unlike other wards I’d been on, where heavily medicated patients walked around like zombies, the ladies in the DID unit were loud and lively. They played games, chatted in the common areas, and raced Matchbox cars in the halls.

  One of the first patients I befriended was Suzy, a woman in her midfifties. Suzy’s story was similar to a lot of the ladies’ stories on the ward. As a young woman, she’d been a single mother with a decent apartment and a full-time job. Life was going well for Suzy until she reached her early thirties and started having flashbacks of previously repressed child sexual abuse. Unable to cope, Suzy became emotionally unstable and eventually went bonkers in the Piggly Wiggly. Police were called, and Suzy was committed to a mental institution, where she stayed for many months while her kids lived in foster care.

  At the hospital, Suzy was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. Despite being highly functional before her breakdown, Suzy was informed that her prognosis was not good. Doctors explained that MPD was a very serious mental illness and that Suzy should expect intermittent breakdowns and hospitalizations for years to come. Social workers at the hospital signed her up for federal disability insurance, as she’d surely never be able to work again.

  Having no reason to question the experts at the hospital, Suzy proceeded to live down to their expectations. When she got out of the hospital, she didn’t apply for jobs or try to get her kids back. What was the point if she was just going to break down again? Instead, she collected her measly disability check each month, lived in a studio apartment, and spent her time going to outpatient therapy at low-cost clinics, where she was assigned a new student therapist every six months.

  As Suzy had a lot of time on her hands, her diagnosis soon became the center of her life. She read books on DID, joined groups for survivors of childhood sexual abuse, and spent a great deal of time getting to know everything she could about her alters. In essence, having DID became Suzy’s job. She was a professional patient.

  Every summer, Suzy spent a month at an inpatient trauma program, which was paid for by Medicare. This wasn’t because she was unstable and needed hospitalization. It was because she genuinely believed that in order to heal she had to shut out the world and focus solely on her illness. But after two decades of obsessive “healing,” Suzy had made little progress. Stuck in the role of “patient,” she could no longer conceive of a life beyond mental illness—one with a job and a family and a future.

  After hearing Suzy’s story, I could see that taking one’s diagnosis too seriously is a trap. Yes, I was mentally ill. No doubt about it! But even in the midst of a breakdown, I had to believe wholeheartedly that I could heal and go on to lead a normal, successful life.

  When I met with the hospital therapist (#8!), however, she had bad news. Without hesitation (or knowing much about me), she told Chris and me that dissociative identity disorder was a chronic debilitating illness that would render me unable to do much. She suggested I apply for disability insurance and even expressed concerns about my ability to raise my own son!

  Chris was devastated. When Leah heard about it, she was outraged. Personally, it didn’t faze me much. I knew me. So I knew this so-called therapist was full of shit.

  Needless to say, I wasn’t going to get much out of individual therapy at the hospital. So I decided to focus on group therapy instead. The program had a twelve-step-type women’s group that met frequently. But when I tried to join, I was told it was full. Instead, I was placed in the group next door—a group for male sex addicts. As it turned out, two of the men were in the hospital under court order because they’d been convicted of owning kiddie porn. While it was wrong of the hospital to place me in a group with such men, I was amazed when my child identity emerged to tell them exactly how it felt to be forced into pornography.

  There were some good things about the program. It was excellent at educating me about DID. I learned that in order to better function I had to “map my system.” This meant getting to know all the identities that lived inside of me.

  The Preppy (aka the Housewife or Martha) and the Writer were already well-known to me. What I didn’t know was that the Writer had a name, Chelsey, and was a teenager, which explained a lot about her anger and grandiose thinking and impulsiveness.

  My sweet child alter, who I already knew about, also had a name, Sarah. I was shocked to learn that my self-destructive alter—the one who called me mean names and told me to die—was also a child! He was a ten-year-old boy named Viscous. (This is one of the funny quirks of DID, for his name was pronounced like vicious. But when I made him up in my mind as a child, I probably didn’t know how to spell it. So, frozen in time, he continued to misspell his name.)

  And then there was the one who got me into all the trouble in the first place. My sexed-up southern girl didn’t have a name. When I drew her, though, she revealed a naked body with huge boobs and peroxide blond hair. She looked just like a Hee Haw Honey, and I understood immediately how my child mind had used an image from television to create an identity that was well built for sex.

  At the hospital, I learned that all of these parts had been invented for a purpose. And that purpose was always, always protection. The Hee Haw Honey protected an innocent child from the pain and humiliation of sexual encounters. Little Sarah, who remained unscathed by the abuse, protected my ability to love. Even Viscous’s taunts to kill myself were a form of protection, however misguided. His job was to keep me from remembering the abuse.

  At the hospital, I was taught techniques for communicating with my alters. I learned that in order to stop feeling torn apart I had to listen to what each and every identity wanted and try to find ways to make them all happy. This is extremely difficult because they often
have conflicting needs. Still, I learned that I had to love and respect and appreciate all of them—even the ones I vehemently disagreed with.

  One of the best things about my stay was getting to know other people with multiple personalities, all of whom had more knowledge of the disorder than I did. While I had always been ashamed of my parts, the other patients accepted and embraced theirs and taught me how to do the same. I learned that it was okay for my child alters to play games and color. It was okay for my teenager to get a little wild. It was okay for Hee Haw Honey to listen to country music. But it was also okay to put limits on their behavior—nothing illegal, nothing immoral, nothing that could ruin our life!

  —

  I ONLY STAYED at the program about ten days before my insurance company cut me off. Sadly, private insurance companies rarely allow patients to stay in mental hospitals for the length of time they truly need. When I returned home, I resumed therapy with Leah. Finally able to talk about all my memories and identities, I made tremendous progress. It was amazing how different things felt now that I remembered the true details of my life.

  The biggest breakthrough came when I spoke of the prostitution. It was hard for me to accept how readily I partnered with Gary and went along with it. It took a while to understand that my lack of resistance was due to fear, brainwashing, and dissociation, not a desire to sell my body. When I finally realized I was not to blame for all the sexual things I had done in my youth, I broke down in tears. “I always thought it was my fault,” I wept to Leah.

  All my life, I felt ashamed and unbearably guilty for my actions during the abuse. I hated myself for the things I had done. Now for the first time, I felt freed of responsibility. None of it was my fault. Not Gary’s attraction to me nor my mother’s feelings of betrayal. Not the sexual acts I’d performed nor the bad behaviors I developed as a result of it. I didn’t have to feel guilty for lying and stealing as a teenager. I didn’t have to feel guilty for all the crazy shit I’d done as an adult. I didn’t have to feel ashamed of my suicide attempts or hospitalizations or alternate identities. I didn’t have to feel bad about myself because it wasn’t my fault.