by Naomi Jacobs
I stood proud when the song ended and I wiped away the last of the tears. I felt like I had finally said goodbye to the pain of past relationships that never really stood a chance because they were so unequal in the beginning. I had been hurting for far too long, especially in my relationship with myself.
As I danced the rest of the night away and sung along to even more songs of love and female empowerment, I let go piece by piece, lyric by lyric, note by note, the childhood fantasy of the handsome prince sitting atop a great white horse galloping in to rescue me from a dark and oppressive place. I let go of the need to be married and wear a ring on my finger to feel secure. I let go of the need to have babies to validate my femininity and the desire to mother others to give me a sense of self-worth. I let go of feeling bad about myself if I didn’t look like the women in the fashion magazines and on the billboards. I let go of believing I couldn’t cope with life or a crisis unless I had a drug to help me along the way. I let go of the old and stated to the world I was ready for the new, and I especially let go of thinking that the only thing I ever deserved to feel like was a victim.
And this time, Teen Nay didn’t roll her eyes. She fist-pumped and then mentally high-fived me.
14
The Voice
At the centre of your being
you have the answer.
You know who you are
And you know what you want.
LAO-TZU
It was time to pick up the cerebral shovel and start digging.
When I came back from Paris, I knew that if I truly wanted to heal my mind, I would have to do what Teen Nay had said to Ahmed. I had to get out what had broken my mind in the first place. Therapy hadn’t fully worked for me in the past. Every time I felt as if I’d had a breakthrough, the sessions would end and I would be left to figure things out for myself. It always felt like I was taking two steps forward and five back. But now I knew it was my only way forward and after having ten therapists over the past ten years, I felt like this was going to be my final attempt.
I had seen my therapist Maria before and was glad that my doctor managed to refer me to her again. It took a couple of weeks after I started for me to open up – I mean, really open up – but when I did, it was like the crack in the dam of my mind couldn’t hold and I had to let it break. It all came flooding out. To anyone that would listen – mainly Nat and Marcy and Maria. It took a while for me to trust Maria again so I followed Teen Nay’s example and trusted myself. I wanted to discuss my memory loss with her; I wanted to tell her about the diaries, especially what Teen Nay had written and how I was seeing myself so differently now; I wanted to talk about the breakdown of my relationship – again – with my sister and Eve, but not knowing how she would react, I approached therapy carefully at first, revealing things slowly.
All of this cautiousness went out of the window, however, at my long-awaited assessment with yet another psychiatrist whom I was waiting to see while I was having the therapy with Maria. I knew he wasn’t an expert in memory loss, but I did think he might be able to help me, or at least explain to me what had happened. Having at first been assigned a trainee assistant who asked me the same questions I had been asked over and over again for the past ten years, I stormed into his office, demanding he see me. He informed me, rather condescendingly, that I had been misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder and that I smoked too much weed. I got scared, then angry, and told him his estimation of my mental state was downright unprofessional.
His ‘diagnosis’ didn’t help. If anything, it only served in having me further question my sanity, the split episodes, and the amnesia. I knew that drugs could exacerbate psychosis, even bring on periods of manic depression. I knew that alcohol impaired a mind’s ability to function properly. Any abuse of a substance would eventually affect the mind. But to completely dismiss my issues and attribute them to a joint was, I felt, ignorant and arrogant.
I needed answers. He was no help and even though I asked him whether the sexual, physical and emotional abuse I had been through, my experience of violence in the home during my formative years, having to deal with an alcoholic parent, or my parents abandoning me at crucial developmental ages had had anything to do with it, he couldn’t give me a straight answer. No, the breakdown of my relationships and the crippling sense of failure I had felt for most of my life was all down to ganja!
Anyway, all of this came out in an indignant tirade to Maria one day when I told her in no uncertain terms that I’d ‘bloody well had enough of the mental health services and their inability to properly diagnose me’. After all I’d been through I felt I had more insight and could do a better job than they did.
To my surprise, Maria agreed with me, and this helped stem the flow of anger. We went on to discuss the symptoms and causes of each possible diagnosis, starting with bipolar disorder, moving on to dissociative identity disorder and the ‘fragmentation of a personality’, and ending up at transient global amnesia. We agreed that every gnarled branch of that knotted tree stemmed from the roots of abuse and my mind doing its best to deal with it, to give a name to it, regardless of whether doctors understood this or not.
Maria’s reverence for the power of the mind was passionate and frank.
‘Just because it’s the mind and you can’t see it, feel it or touch it like you can, say, a hand, it doesn’t mean it isn’t real,’ she told me, ‘and it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t get hurt, cut, broken or burnt, or that those wounds are not real and they don’t need healing. They do.’
‘So what about the split episodes?’ I asked her. ‘My mind has split on many occasions, the most powerfully when I was six, fifteen, twenty-nine and last year, when I was thirty-two.’
‘Well, I think maybe we should go back to the house.’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘The house of my mind is still there, but something is different.’
‘Okay, what if you don’t actually go back into it, but sort of revisit the memory of the house and all that you went through in it?’ Maria suggested.
I closed my eyes. I looked for the house. It had become almost like a faint outline, an old imprint of itself. Teen Nay was still there, still in her room. But she was waiting, watching, silent and calm, as the walls around her started to fade. She had been growing increasingly quiet since Paris.
‘I don’t feel like I need to go inside,’ I said.
‘You don’t have to, Naomi, but I want you to look at it and tell me what that house means to you.’ Maria’s voice was soft, hypnotic almost.
I looked at the house for a while. I felt scared at first, but sitting there with Maria by my side, I was suddenly overcome by a feeling that everything was going to be all right. I remembered it was my house and nobody could get in without my permission.
‘Security,’ I said. ‘Safety. Yes, this is my safe house.’
‘A safe house,’ Maria repeated.
‘I suppose it is. I always felt safe when I put myself in this house, even though I was scared of what I would find in the rooms. But,’ I said, ‘it always in some way seemed to turn out okay. Once I found the room, the answer, I eventually turned it around and redecorated.’ I laughed and opened one eye. Maria was smiling,
‘So it was a safe house?’ she repeated.
‘Definitely.’
‘Safe from what?’ Maria’s mellifluous voice seemed to urge me to look further, deeper.
I stopped focusing on the house for a moment and it all went dark. ‘Safe from the people that could hurt me – no, that did hurt me. Safe from the pain of what they did, safe from the world, safe from the enemy.’ I opened my eyes again. I hadn’t meant to say ‘the enemy’, but it had come out of my mouth nonetheless.
‘Enemy?’ she echoed.
‘Yeah, I suppose so, like a war. It’s like I’ve been fighting a war for years, in my mind, and those that hurt me have been the enemy and the house that I built was the safe house – no, a hospital, or a safe house with a medical room in it – where
I would retreat and try and deal with the wounds. I always thought my mind was the place of problems, but it’s actually been a sanctuary.’
‘It’s interesting you use these particular words, war, enemy, sanctuary,’ she remarked. ‘Some people who have fought in wars, physical wars, can suffer some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.’
‘Oh, Jeez! Another disorder; how many can a woman have?’ I joked.
She smiled. ‘Well, from what you have been through in your life and what you have told me so far, I think the reason that you have been unable to pin a diagnosis down and define your symptoms accordingly is because you may have experienced some form of late-onset post-traumatic stress disorder.’
I was intrigued.
‘When you were attacked as a child, your mind dealt with it by splitting from your body, and you relived that memory, that whole incidence, twenty-three years later and you split again,’ she continued. ‘And then, three years later, you split to being fifteen again, at a time when feelings of stability and safety had disappeared, and then . . .’ She paused. ‘You said earlier that the cause of all of this splitting was stress?’
‘Stress?’ I was starting to see where she was going with this.
‘So maybe what’s been happening to your mind is that it has found its own unique way of dealing with the stress of trauma, and any added stress from life or people in your life has caused a pressure so great it’s resulted in disorder. It doesn’t matter what type essentially because each diagnosis is framed by disorder.’
‘I mean, yeah, that makes sense . . . disorder literally means lack of order.’ I stopped and digested what Maria had said. It was beginning to make sense to me. ‘Lack of order in my mind.’ I suddenly saw all these words for disorder: confusion, disturbance, a mess; as Teen Nay would say, a majorly mentally bogus smegfest. It was falling into place. ‘Stress.’ I uttered the word, such a harmless word, six letters, so small and yet so powerfully harmful.
Stress, the reason my brain had lost the plot and started to perform some form of mentacide, as Teen Nay would say.
‘Well, stress can cause physical problems: heart attacks, strokes, et cetera. If it affects your physical health, why not the mind?’ Maria reasoned.
‘So why don’t people take it as seriously when it’s your mental health? Why the shame, the taboo?’
‘The debate rages on with that one.’ Maria gave a small smile. ‘But the question now is what can you, if anything, do about it so that it doesn’t happen again?’
‘Well . . .’ I thought for a moment, and then remembered my newly adopted theory that the answer to my problem was in the problem itself.
‘Well, if it is post-traumatic stress disorder, then there’s not much I can do about the trauma, and right now it’s the “post” part, but I can do something about the stress and the disorderly conduct in my mind.’
‘Okay.’
‘Well, I first need to understand what post-traumatic stress disorder is exactly and then figure out what I can do to counteract the effects of it, if I can.’
Maria explained to me that post-traumatic stress disorder could be seen as a mental illness caused by extreme trauma. The symptoms could range from depression to flashbacks. The flashbacks could manifest in the form of vivid and distressing nightmares or the unexpected onslaught of painful memories so powerful that a person can actually feel like they are going through the traumatic event again. More often than not the mind gets confused (that’ll be the disorderly conduct then) and separates itself from the memory in order to make sense of it. Sometimes, this can manifest as splitting, which if not understood causes further distress, which in turn affects a person’s whole life.
I totally got it; mine had been affected because I hadn’t understood what was going on. I had no positive way to deal with the flashbacks and the consequent splitting and this pushed me further into crisis.
Maria explained that when a person suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, they tend to stay away from close emotional relationships with their family and friends. They find difficulty in expressing themselves in these relationships and this frustration can cause anger and grief, which in turn affects their behaviour. This again explained my relationship breakdowns with those close to me, especially my sister, Eve and my friends.
‘There is always a sense of being constantly under threat, seeing danger everywhere, even when there isn’t any, and this causes paranoia,’ Maria added.
‘I never felt truly safe around others,’ I confessed. ‘I used to take razor blades on dates with me and sleep with a bat under my bed.’
‘Well, talking of sleep, when you have post-traumatic stress disorder, you can sleep all the time and then not sleep for days. You have trouble concentrating.’
‘That explains why I struggled with the work load from university.’
‘Yes, in order to cope you become detached, removed from a life that plays out like a movie where you are the spectator, watching yourself, numb to your needs.’
‘This started to happen with my holistic therapy business, especially when I was teaching others how to heal. I wasn’t a part of what was happening in those classrooms, so it wasn’t real to me.’ This was all starting to make sense.
‘In the end,’ Maria continued, ‘because of the sheer stress, a person can end up self-medicating a lot, anything from alcohol or drugs to prescription drugs. They have low impulse control and struggle to remain grounded.’
This explained the weed and the cocaine and the Keith Richards lifestyle. I mean, a rolling stone gathers no moss, but wow, not even a bit of soil? As I moved through my life I hadn’t taken responsibility for my drug taking, blaming others instead.
‘When it reaches this point, you find yourself trapped in a cycle where you are doing things to yourself that you know you shouldn’t be doing, only you can’t help yourself, even though it’s harming you and then, if it gets really bad, you end up wanting to kill yourself.’
‘That would explain the suicidal tendencies, then?’ I asked.
‘Or kill other people.’
‘That would explain my violent thoughts.’
‘Or get someone to kill you,’ she added.
‘Well, I didn’t quite get there, but may have pissed someone off enough along the way at some point in time if I had carried on,’ I joked.
‘Which is not because you want to die as such,’ Maria continued. ‘It’s usually because you can no longer live with the pain.’
I sat in silence, absorbing everything she had told me. It was like someone had finally given me a manual for my disordered mind and the key points of the content were spelled clearly, concisely and in order.
‘I think I understand this more,’ I told Maria. ‘Every time I tried to break free, establish my own identity, I was pushed back and then I would split.’ I thought back to when I was young. ‘I was a precocious child; I liked attention. If there was a room full of people, I wanted their eyes on me. I would perform, sing songs and dance. And then he attacked me, abused me; like he wanted to possess me, have what I had. And then when I was a teenager, my stepdad paid for me to go to dance classes, and my confidence grew again. I was in productions and plays, I went to auditions . . .’ I could feel myself welling up. ‘And then all of that stopped when he left and my friends were sexually assaulted in school and my mum’s life was threatened, and well, then I tried to commit suicide because I couldn’t control what was happening. As much as I told myself that I hated her, my mum was really the only stability I knew.’
‘What happened after that?’ Maria asked gently.
‘Well, I blamed myself for what had happened to my friends. I thought it was somehow my fault. We were never the same after that; they had been my safety net and that was taken away. I did so many things to try and keep us together, but in the end we drifted apart.’
A single tear fell and rolled down my cheek. I wiped it away. ‘Do you know how many women I have known in my short lifetime that have
been raped or sexually abused? Too many. Far, far too many.’
‘What happened after you tried to take your own life, Naomi?’ she asked carefully.
‘Well, I lived with Art, but it didn’t work out. My stepmum Marlene had left, disappeared, didn’t even say goodbye.’
‘How did that make you feel?’
‘At the time, I was shocked, stunned even, but didn’t really process it, you know? I think I split again, and then when I went to Greece, I realized I was angry with her for leaving. I felt abandoned; she had been part of me growing up. She was part of me trying to find my identity. Growing up, I felt like she had accepted me more.’
‘And then?’
It was all clicking into place.
‘Well, then I, you know, had Leo and set up my own business and became a teacher. I started to perform again. Once more, I had a stage; people would listen to me, and come back again and again to be taught by me. I was carving out a niche, finding my own identity.’
‘And then what happened?’
‘Well, I was about to set up my own school and then, well, my world came crashing down again. In her drunken state, Eve told me she didn’t know whether Art was my real dad and that my father could possibly be another man.’
The tears spilled thick and fast. Maria leaned forward and passed me a box of tissues.
‘Again,’ I sobbed through my tears, ‘my identity fragmented. It was attached to my father, to his name, to his family, the one constant in my world. And then he became unreliable because of stuff he was going through, which made me question whether I really was his, made me question whether I really mattered, so I split again.’
‘Made you question your place in this world? Who you were?’
‘Yeah.’ I looked Maria in the eye. ‘God, I have never really known myself, never really known who I truly am, or even what I am capable of. Every time I have tried, from when I was a little girl, someone or something has always come in and blown me off track, knocked me down, and I’ve laid there feeling like I can’t get up again and the only way I can cope is to split.’
