1958 to present, Butler, New Jersey and Everett, Washington

By Sandra Crystal

Some mental disorders are at least partially genetic: schizophrenia, autism, Asperger’s Syndrome and depression, for instance. Many more are created. Panic disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder, dissociative disorders need to be cultivated. It’s difficult for people to admit that millions are walking around out there with the diminished ability to live a good life and find success and happiness because of things that were deliberately done to them. It’s easier to make fun of them or shun them, to blame the victim. Or the survivor. Whichever tag fits.

Though you may not want to know how some of these disorders happen, you sorta do. It’s pretty much general knowledge that soldiers who witness death and destruction may experience the intrusive, repetitive memories and flashbacks to horrific events that’s called post-traumatic stress.

I’m not going to talk about that today, though. I’m going to talk about dissociative identity disorder. A disorder that is created through long-term abuse, usually generated by the people who are supposed to care the most: the family. Though society has evolved past the point of believing that children and women are the “property” of their husbands and fathers, it’s still hard to hear the depths of the atrocities that it takes to create a dissociative mindset.

But that’s the mindset that I’ve got and that’s the story I have to tell.

Picture a three-month-old baby. Lying in a crib. Crying. She’s hungry and wet. Most of you good people would immediately think of changing, feeding and comforting her. But a small percentage of sicko, parents like mine, blame the baby for daring to disturb them. Mommy ignores the cries, moaning, “This brat is gonna kill me!” as she holds her pounding head.

The baby lies in her filth with her empty stomach until Daddy comes home. Daddy yells at Mommy for ignoring the baby. But Mommy isn’t there. She’s at the neighbor’s, gossiping. Daddy changes the diapers. Then wonders. What if?

He rubs his infant daughter’s clitoris, chuckling at his cleverness as his hunch is proven right and the baby’s body jerks out of control. Mommy catches him and calls him a sick jerk. He gets mad and rips the cabinet door off its hinges, whipping it at Mommy. The corner of the cabinet door knocks out Mommy’s front teeth.

The baby is left alone again the next morning while Mommy visits the dentist. No one ever speaks of the reason for Mommy’s missing teeth.

Picture a 2-year-old, sitting on the floor, playing with building blocks. Alone. Mommy’s at the neighbor’s again. Mommy rushes in, excited that the neighbors have accepted her invitation to play cards after dinner. She pushes the toddler out of the way as she whips out the canister vacuum. The blocks disappear down the long tube.

The 2-year-old screams for her blocks. Mommy’s hand flashes out, leaving a welt on the toddler’s cheek. “You don’t have anything to cry about!” Mommy snaps.

The 2-year-old believes that her sorrow is somehow unreal. She never sees her blocks again. She begins to disconnect her thoughts form her feelings and her body.

Daddy’s sexual experiments and Mommy’s neglect and physical abuse have been a constant reality for the toddler. She’s been told that she doesn’t need food when her stomach rumbles, that she isn’t uncomfortable when her bottom and thighs are covered with diaper rash. Mommy says she isn’t sad when she cries after Mommy hits her. Daddy says she isn’t scared when Daddy’s fingers make her body jerk.

She’s seen Daddy throw cabinet doors at Mommy. She’s been taught fear through neglect, corporal punishment, abuse and experiments, like when Mommy filled her bottle with ginger ale and invited the neighbors to see the funny faces she makes as she tried again and again to drink, only to cry each time the soda bubbles hit her face. She’s learned that there’s no safe place for her except in her mind.

She exists in a world of paradoxes. The bread board so brightly painted with the slogan, “Bless this House,” is the same board Mommy uses to smack her bare bottom. The flowers that struggle to bloom in the garden out front sit in a neglected bed.

The toddler uses her mind to go deep, where no one can see. When the pain of Mommy’s beatings or the hunger or diaper rash gets too much, she fractures a little more. She tucks away the hurting part and renames herself. Sometimes she hides parts of herself in her stuffed animals. But when her favorite teddy bear is lost down Grandma’s toilet, she learns that hiding parts of herself in toys isn’t safe.

By the time the little girl is 4, she has developed separate personalities to handle different circumstances. When Mommy makes her scrub the floor or wash the dishes or iron Daddy’s shirts, she’s George, the tough boy with the big muscles who isn’t afraid to reach into the murky water where the steak knives are hiding. When Daddy calls her a “nice girl” and pets her body, she’s Tina, the tough, smart-mouthed rebellious one.

When she’s alone with her cat, Tabby, she’s the animal lover Kitty. She’s never all of herself at once.

When she starts school she discovers that while being only one part of herself at a time helps her focus on tasks like schoolwork, that habit leaves her at a huge disadvantage when she plays with her classmates. Their shifts in energy are bewildering. They laugh one moment and shout angrily the next. Her dissociative parts that protect her from the constant abuses of her parents use one sense at a time. She must shift quickly if she’s using her eyes, to use her ears. Shifting takes a lot of energy.

She can’t cry if a classmate accidentally hits her, then smile when the classmate apologizes. She becomes emotionally stuck. She marks her classmates as bad after one mistake.

When she reaches high school, she has many named parts. Sandra writes for her. George does hard work and math. Julia sings. Tina protects her by using vile words - the only defense she knows.

Her home life continues to be chaotic and violent. Mommy has stopped hitting her in favor of tearing her down with words and psychological manipulation. Daddy has started hitting her after joining a fundamentalist cult that teaches that fathers are the head of the household and that children are to obey instantly and without question.

She doesn’t know how she feels because whenever she expresses herself, her parents say she couldn’t possibly feel as she claims. When her first boyfriend reaches under her shirt, she doesn’t have a name for the sensation. She doesn’t know how to say, “No!”

A terrible dizziness makes her head feel like it’s swelling and shrinking. Her vision dims. Her hearing shuts down. Her parts are in turmoil. The necking session brings her back to the times when Daddy fondled her. She’s lost. No part can handle this. These experiences caused her to black out as a child.

She sorta does that now, going limp. Her boyfriend thinks she’s having a good time.

Nearly 18 years have passed. She has survived. But she hasn’t really lived. When she leaves her parents’ home at 18, Daddy has a nervous breakdown. Mommy’s immune system collapses into non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She’s pulled back to nursemaid Mommy - really just a matter of cleaning up the blood and filth since the cult Mommy still attends says that trusting doctors for healing is a lack of faith.

She’s numb and dizzy the whole time she watches Mommy die.

No one cares what she feels, or if she feels.

Daddy is sleeping in his car, seducing 18-year-old girls.

George knows how to do things. He performs the horrible tasks like emptying the bedpan and cleaning up the bloody cotton balls Mommy scatters over the floor each night. He closes the window when Mommy shrieks that flies are laying eggs in her rotting flesh.

Visions of undeveloped countries flash through the girl’s mind. Places with no running water or electricity, no medical attention. She flicks on the light. The scene remains primitive.

Daddy isn’t there when Mommy takes her last breath. But he’s there, fuming and smacking his fist into his other hand when the county coroner has to break Mommy’s bones to fit her into the body bag. He’s there to rip up the rug beneath her bed to dispose of the masses of wriggling maggots.

The girl has survived. Again.

She lives the best she can on her own. She sees people, life, passing. She’s entombed in acrylic, an unbreakable barrier of her own making. She keeps the horror, fear and pain inside. Until at last she crashes.

First she’s told she has post-traumatic stress syndrome. Which is true. Intrusive memories of Daddy’s fondlings and Mommy and Daddy’s beatings ravage her mind. She has flashbacks of Mommy’s pain-wreathed face and festering sores. Her body remembers every blow, though her mind has forgotten.

She becomes unable to drive and is told she has panic disorder. Which is also true. Her sense of reality has been warped by 20 years of extreme and continuous abuse. She’s afraid of everything. And nothing. Especially nothing.

Someone says she has Asperger’s Syndrome. She’s unable to discern others’ emotions or react spontaneously. She’s conditioned to tell the truth and unable to use all her senses at once. But she didn’t have these difficulties at birth.

She finally finds a counselor who channels her dissociated parts. She’s reminded of how she tucked parts of herself away when the fear and pain was too great. She’s finally given the correct diagnosis: dissociative identity disorder.

The counselor hears and sees parts of the girl, now a woman. Energies that have become disconnected. The counselor uncovers each devastating memory with the delicacy and patience of a brain surgeon. It doesn’t matter how long this process takes. It doesn’t matter how much it costs. The woman is feeling for the first time in her life.

Feeling her own emotions. Rediscovering her own memories. Thinking her own thoughts. Piecing together her mind and body.

The woman realizes that for the first 48 years of her life, she hasn’t lived.

She sees clearly enough to forgive many of the people who misjudged and took advantage of her. Many. Not all. Not Mommy and Daddy.

They never asked forgiveness. Or took responsibility for their actions.

As George, Tina, Sandra, Kitty, Julia, and the other parts become strong enough to release their pain and rejoin the woman’s core self, they realize that there are some things that shouldn’t be forgiven.

The woman wonders. How many others are like her, out there? How many others are too wounded to seek help? How many others are as depraved as her parents? How many are too steeped in darkness to admit their atrocities?

She determines to use her growing strength to find those whose lives have been so shattered that their minds and emotions are scattered puzzle pieces. She determines to find every piece. And put each in just the right place.

Sandra Crystal has been a freelance writer for more than 20 years. She has written extensively about her childhood experiences but, this is the first time she has openly described her dissociative identity disorder. She is using a pseudonym.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 | Email This Post

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 12:02 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.