Scared Selfless

by Michelle Stevens, PhD

  This does not imply that the abuse has to be sexual. DID can also develop as a result of physical abuse, severe neglect, emotional abuse, or being in an unpredictable, frightening family. What matters is that the situation is “severe, sustained, and repetitive,” causing the child victim to repeatedly cope through dissociation. The victim’s mind repeatedly “goes away” while the body stays present and functioning—just as happens during highway hypnosis.

  In this process, consciousness splits, dividing its attention between the daydreaming “normal” child and the body that is being terrified and hurt. If this happens often enough, the part of consciousness that is being abused begins to develop a tragic personal history—one that is very different than the supposed life of the “normal” child. Identity is nothing more than the sum of our memories. So, in time, the part of consciousness (or parts, as consciousness usually splits multiple times to deal with multiple types of abuse and abusers) that has memories of abuse begins to develop a sense of its own identity—one with thoughts and beliefs and intentions apropos of its traumatic existence. Meanwhile, the “normal” child who “goes away” during the abuse has no awareness that she is being abused or that a dissociative identity is forming. Lost in daydreams whenever bad things happens, she maintains the illusion of the white picket fence.

  Dissociation explains why abused children develop multiple personalities. What it can’t explain is why those personalities have different names, speak with different accents, claim to be various ages, and may even claim to be different genders than the bodies housing them. To understand this, one must remember that DID always develops in childhood, and children have wonderful imaginations!

  According to Rita Carter, author of Multiplicity, more than two-thirds of all children use those imaginations to create imaginary companions. These ICs come in a wide array of forms (girls, boys, adults, animals) and display a dizzying array of characteristics (angry, sad, hyper, picky). It’s probable the same mechanism that allows children to so brilliantly create imaginary friends who are quite different from themselves also allows children to fashion colorful alternate personalities.

  Children are also clearly aware of archetypal figures. For, despite the fact that each child develops multiple personalities on her own, the types of personalities that develop in all people with DID are remarkably similar. Nearly every multiple, for instance, has what is known as a “host” personality. This is the personality that is “out” most of the time and identifies with the information on the person’s birth certificate—name, birthday, place of origin, etc. Generally, this host personality has no knowledge of the abuse or the other alters that exist inside. She is dedicated to the delusion that her life is normal. As such, she is most often a traditional, reserved, submissive, “good” girl (or boy, as DID affects both genders in about equal proportions).

  On the flip side, nearly every person with DID also has at least one “bad” alter. This bad alter (or alters) is usually the part of consciousness that was present for the abuse, so she knows all about the person’s sordid history. Having lived through horrible abuse, this bad alter typically shows the scars. She (or they) is often angry, cynical, suspicious, hard, and promiscuous. In short, she is the absolute opposite of the host personality, whom she usually despises.

  In addition to these black-and-white personality types, most personality systems also include child alters of varying ages and genders. There are persecutor types, who rage against the others and are often responsible for suicide attempts. There are helper types, who do everything in their power to help the whole personality system heal. There are also administrator types—emotionless drones who do schoolwork, hold down jobs, and get all the boring business of life accomplished.

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  DURING MY CHILDHOOD of horrendous abuse, I survived by developing all these types of alters. By scripting a cast of characters who could deal with the abuse, I was able to keep moving forward. I could go to school and make friends unencumbered by the knowledge that I’d be raped and tortured later that night.

  This kind of repression, though, comes at a cost. I soon developed some serious physical symptoms. The first notable symptom was headaches—headaches so severe I sometimes thought my head would explode. They started during puberty, right around the time Gary rejected me. I would feel a terrible pressure building up in my head. The pressure made my head feel fuller and fuller until it was an overstretched balloon. Eventually, the balloon grew so big that it popped. At this point, the pressure would dissipate, but portions of my face would become numb. As these headaches worsened over time, they often left one whole side of my face paralyzed, sometimes for a few hours. My parents knew about these headaches; they witnessed my paralyzed face. But despite the seriousness, they never sought medical help.

  Another symptom I developed was nosebleeds. I’m not talking about the manageable little nosebleeds kids get once in a while. I’m talking gushers—gushers with so much blood that I would easily go through an entire box of Kleenex. These nosebleeds, which happened nearly every day and often more than once a day, went on well into my teens. In elementary and middle school, I was frequently sent to the nurse, who would try to stop the bleeding with cold compresses. In high school, I became so embarrassed by these unpredictable and unmanageable nosebleeds that I often avoided public events.

  Other physical symptoms that I frequently experienced were light-headedness and dizziness. While I can’t say for certain what caused all these problems, my best guess is stress. Just living in a house with my cruel parents generated enough stress to cause symptoms. But I think the real stress came from having to hide the sexual abuse and the alternate personalities—even from myself.

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  IRONICALLY, AT THE SAME TIME that my mind was trying to shield me from the truth, it was simultaneously telling me about it. One way it did this was in the form of daydreams. Daydreams, of course, are a normal occurrence; every child indulges in them. But my daydreams went on for hours unabated, usually for days on end. They were so engrossing that I often lost track of time, forgot where I was, couldn’t remember anything that happened to me while I was daydreaming. I’d suddenly find myself going home on the school bus, for instance, and have no recollection of how I’d gotten there. I might not even remember being at school that day at all.

  All I remembered was the content of my daydreams—epic fantasies in which I was an unwilling princess forced into an arranged marriage with a cruel prince or a kidnapped prisoner forced to live in a cage while a mad scientist performed horrifying experiments on me. There were several plots, but the theme was always the same: I was physically enslaved by an evil man who used me for his voracious, sadistic whims.

  I have since come to understand that these fantasies were my version of “post-traumatic play,” a morbid, unchanging type of make-believe in which children repetitively act out traumatic events. Unlike normal play, posttraumatic play goes on for years—well past the time when a child’s chronological age suggests it should end.

  While an ordinary, untraumatized child probably plays make-believe until the age of twelve, a traumatized child may “pretend” far longer. Personally, my fantasy stories of enslavement, rape, and torture dominated my mental life well into my twenties. Even now, in my forties, I can get lost in these mental plays from time to time.

  I also spent much of my life remembering the terrible things that happened to me through “post-traumatic reenactment,” a phenomenon familiar to clinicians who work with survivors of trauma. A posttraumatic reenactment involves the compulsion to physically re-create parts of the original horror—as when a war veteran repeatedly roams the streets of a violent neighborhood or a girl with a physically abusive father marries a physically abusive man. In cases like this, the reenactment is completely involuntary; it is beyond the survivor’s conscious control or understanding.

  From about the age of twelve, I started to do strange things
that I didn’t understand. I would go to the refrigerator, for instance, in search of large phallic vegetables then stab them into my vagina even though it caused me discomfort. I tied bandannas around my mouth, effectively gagging myself for hours on end. I would take ropes or scarves and tie my ankles and wrists together as best I could, then sit in a dark closet. I would strip naked, lie on my bed, and hold my hands to a headboard, imagining they were tied there.

  None of these actions brought me any kind of pleasure—sexual or otherwise. I was reenacting rape. But because of dissociative amnesia, I had no clue what I was doing or why I was doing it. Clearly, my bad girl was trying to send me a message, trying to hint at the abuse. This happened constantly for more than twenty years. My alters, or subconscious mind, habitually left clues about the abuse and dissociation in the form of reenactments, flashbacks, dreams, drawings, and writings. It’s as if my mind was slowly and repeatedly feeding me information until, little by little, I was able to accept the whole truth about my life.

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  MORE SUBTLE PERSONALITY CHANGES were also taking place. Sometime in the seventh grade, as I became more socially aware, I came to the troubling realization that I wasn’t very popular. As the host personality, Michelle, I was a shy, quiet, submissive girl. I didn’t bring attention to myself and certainly didn’t want to be noticed. Then, seemingly overnight, all of that changed. A completely different personality emerged. Suddenly, I was loud, outgoing, and assertive. I stole every opportunity to announce myself to the world. The girl who once hid in corners was suddenly singing on tabletops in the cafeteria. In short, the personality I call Mooch showed up exhibiting traits and characteristics that were completely the opposite of the person I thought of as Michelle.

  Later in life, as I learned more about my personality system, I realized that Michelle and Mooch are my two main personalities. They are like twins—of the Arnold Schwarzenegger/Danny DeVito variety! I say this because, in just about every way, they are polar opposites. Michelle is an introverted, submissive homebody who yearns for domestic bliss, whereas Mooch is an extroverted, dominant artist who wants bright lights and big cities. How did these two very different identities develop inside me? My best guess is that when I was a child Gary required me to be different people at different times. At home, he demanded I be quiet and submissive so he could dominate me. Out in the world, though, he insisted I transform into an outgoing, witty performer who could be the star of his drama club. In time, these two ways of being cemented into two different identities who behaved as complete opposites.

  The drastic changes in behavior that accompanied the switch in these personalities went unnoticed by my teachers, but they didn’t go unnoticed by me. I started to get a sense that there was something very wrong with my personality. I started to get the sense that I had more than one. This was not an explicit thing, mind you. I was only twelve at the time, not old enough to know about dissociation or multiple personalities. I did, however, have a real sense that there were two people living inside of me—an introvert and an extrovert. And, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out which one was really me. I was deeply troubled by this identity crisis and wrote lengthy poems in which I pondered my inauthenticity. One line read:

  I wish I could bring myself together, but the two of me divide

  Another snippet read:

  I was wrong; it was only the beginning

  Of a tug-of-war I can never be winning.

  One side wants Mooch, happy and gay

  The other wants a slave with nothing to say . . .

  I can’t find myself, and I probably never will.

  Another:

  I’ve lost my true identity

  It’s a big price to pay, I know now.

  I’d like to find my real self back, but

  How do I do it?

  How?

  “This isn’t me!”

  I’ve shouted time and time in vain.

  There are times—frequently now—when I wonder if I’m . . . insane?

  Aside from demonstrating what a terrible poet I was (and am), the personal writings of twelve-year-old me strongly suggest I was already suffering the effects of DID. This is very important evidence, for it flies in the face of skeptics who claim there’s no such thing as dissociative identity disorder.

  Yeah, that’s right. Despite nearly two hundred years of anecdotal and empirical evidence to support the fact that some people develop multiple identities, there’s a movement that claims dissociative identity disorder is a bogus diagnosis. The basis for this assertion is the fact that during the ’80s—a time when stories of child sexual abuse were all over the news—the number of reported cases of DID shot up exponentially. What was once considered to be an extremely rare condition was suddenly believed to affect tens of thousands of people. (This is very similar to what happened in the ’70s and ’80s when reported cases of child sexual abuse—the one-in-a-million phenomenon—rose twenty-two-fold.) Rather than accept the simple fact that increased media attention to any disorder increases awareness among clinicians and patients and, thus, increases diagnosis, skeptics cried, “Bullshit!” They said the rise in the number of people being diagnosed with DID was the result of overzealous therapists who were implanting the idea of alternate personalities into their unsuspecting patients’ heads. (Sound familiar, Dr. Freud?) We patients then supposedly gobbled it up because we’re prone to fantasy and highly suggestible (and terribly stupid).

  I have no doubt that media stories about multiple personalities contributed to a rise in the diagnosis of DID. It’s also safe to assume that the condition may have been overdiagnosed to some extent. But how, exactly, does overdiagnosis suddenly mean the condition itself isn’t real? If we accept this logic, then we must also question the validity of every other condition that has seen an exponential increase in diagnosis in the past few decades, including ADHD, autism, bipolar disorder, and erectile dysfunction.

  The truth is: Dissociative identity disorder does exist. In recent years, neuroimaging has provided fairly irrefutable evidence. Despite this, a quick Google search of the terms multiple personalities and dissociative identity disorder will reveal that it is still considered an extremely controversial diagnosis. I believe the reason for this has nothing to do with media reports or rising diagnoses. Instead, skepticism of DID is just another way certain people in our society try to discredit, and ultimately silence, victims of child sexual abuse.

  A perfect example of this type of hater is “Dr. Fischer” from UrbanDictionary.com, who defines DID as a “dubious diagnosis” in which multiple personality “creation usually involves the suggestion of a sympathetic and charismatic therapist, but it can also occur within groups of ‘survivors’ on the internet or in self-help groups.”

  The bad doctor sounds convincing. Except, when I was writing those poems at twelve years old, I hadn’t gone to any therapists or self-help groups yet. And in 1980, there was no Internet. I was just a kid expressing how disturbing it felt to be split, to have no sense of a core. This wasn’t due to fantasy or suggestion or a desire for “sympathy/attention associated with the victim role,” as Dr. Fischer claims.

  This was due to Gary Lundquist and his pervert cronies.

  This was due to their “severe, sustained, and repetitive” child sexual abuse.

  This was due to years of terror and torture.

  It scared the self out of me.

  Tommy, Can You Hear Me?

  Needless to say, being an eighth-grade sex slave with a pathological identity crisis does not make for a happy kid. Despite being fairly successful in school and extracurriculars, I felt unlikable, stupid, worthless. Good grades and compliments from teachers didn’t register. How could they? In every situation, I felt like I was playing a role—the good girl, the extrovert, the student. Anytime I received positive feedback, it felt like the kudos were directed at my performance, not me. There was no me. A
nd you can’t build self-esteem or self-confidence if you have no sense of self.

  Meanwhile things were unbearable at home. If I wasn’t neglected, I was treated with utter contempt. When I was on the phone with a friend, Gary ridiculed my laugh and the sound of my voice, saying it resembled a “high-pitched chipmunk.” I was regularly called “stupid . . . retarded . . . lazy . . . liar . . . slut.” Feeling hurt and unjustly treated, I often broke down sobbing and wailing in desperation. I wanted comfort and kind words to soothe my hysteria. Instead, I was accused of being “overly emotional” and “manipulative.” Gary said I was just trying to “get attention,” so he ignored me. He also frequently said I had a difficult personality and that no one would ever love me.

  Over the years, when I’ve shared my story, it’s often met with disbelief. To some extent, I can understand that the sexual abuse I suffered is inconceivable. What shocks me, though, is people’s reaction to verbal and emotional abuse. I once wrote a play that featured everyday conversations from my childhood. There was nothing about sexual abuse; the play featured a run-of-the-mill dysfunctional family. I was disturbed and angered when theater after theater told me the dialogue was “unbelievable” and “over the top.” Many of the scenes were taken from my life verbatim!

  Anna Karenina opens with the line “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” With all due respect to Tolstoy, I don’t think that’s true. I’ve counseled many people from toxic families and find that verbal and emotional abuse is almost always the same. There’s lots of anger, contempt, and ridicule. Unbridled name-calling. Character assassination. The bullies in unhappy families have a total disregard for anyone’s feelings, and they’re in continuous competition to see who can use words and actions to inflict the most pain. Think Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with 2.5 miserable kids, the living room a minefield of injurious words.