Heroes in My Head

by Judy Rebick

  Still, I was surprised that Denis liked the idea of my assisting Barbara Dodd. My pro-choice activism had caused a lot of trouble for him. At the time the issue was very controversial, and anti-abortion staff and board members had tried to get me fired. But he saw the Barbara Dodd case as a way that CHS could legitimately support my pro-choice work. CHS’s mandate was to assist deaf people and Barbara needed my assistance.

  When I met Barbara in Clayton’s office just before the hearing, I immediately felt uneasy. Most deaf people who communicate in ASL are very direct. Despite her friendliness and charm, Barbara seemed guarded. Nevertheless I sat with her in court and answered her questions. After the hearing she asked me to refer her for an abortion should she win her case. I told her what I told any woman: to contact the Women’s Health Referral line.

  On July 13, Clayton convinced the appeal judge to overturn the injunction. The first post–Supreme Court challenge to abortion rights had been successfully defeated. The pro-choice movement had scored another victory. Dodd told the Toronto Star, “This is my decision. I decided what I want and he [her boyfriend] has no right to control my life or my body.”

  The court case ended on a Thursday and on Friday I headed up to Muskoka to spend the weekend at my friends’ cottage along with my sixteen-year-old niece Kael, who was staying with me that summer. Lying on the dock, feeling the sun warm my body, looking out onto the familiar landscape of pine trees almost touching the water, I was awash with a rare feeling of peace.

  Later that evening I checked my answering machine at home. There was an urgent message from Clayton.

  “Have you seen the news?” he asked. Barbara Dodd had turned. She had had the abortion at Morgentaler’s Toronto clinic, but her ex-boyfriend convinced her that she had made a mistake.

  “She’s blaming the women’s movement for pressuring her to have it,” Clayton said. “You have to come back. The Journal wants to do a feature this week. It’s better for you to deal with this.” The Journal was the magazine section of CBC TV News and hosted by famed journalist Barbara Frum.

  When I got back to Toronto, I called Liz Dodd to find out what had happened. She was extremely agitated. “He’s taken control of her mind. It’s not her, Judy. I know my sister and it’s not her. He’s taken over her mind.”

  I tried to calm her. “Sometimes women are vulnerable after a procedure. And Barbara has been under more pressure than most because of the court and the media attention. No doubt the anti-choice people have been pressuring her, too.”

  “No, it’s him. He’s evil. He’s taken control of her,” she insisted. It was a very disturbing conversation. It wasn’t just that Barbara seemed to have changed her mind — that wasn’t so surprising to me. There was something about Liz saying that Barbara’s boyfriend had taken control of her mind. That phrase kept repeating over and over again in my brain: “He’s taken control of her mind.”

  A few hours later, I turned on the news. Dodd and Murphy had held a press conference; the media had also caught the action outside the building: Liz Dodd was yelling at Murphy and was even more agitated than she had been on the phone. An officer was trying to calm her down, but she pushed him away. Then he grabbed her and forced her into the police car.

  A torrent of images suddenly flooded my mind. A well-dressed man. A little girl lying on a bed. He’s touching her, getting her to touch him. I don’t see his face. Not right, not right, not right. Who is he? What’s happening? What is this about? I had once seen this image while in my therapist’s office but it was a brief flash, almost like a waking dream. Now there were multiple images of a little girl and a grown man. I lost touch with my surroundings and started to moan.

  A couple of days later, I made an appointment with Marcia Weiner, a psychologist specializing in treating adults who had experienced sexual abuse. She was in her late fifties, more than ten years older than me. I knew her from the women’s movement and I trusted her.

  Marcia’s office was in a high-rise condo overlooking the Don Valley, with a beautiful view of the Don River. I sat down in the small waiting room in the entrance to the apartment.

  Marcia greeted me with a big smile, then led me into her office, which was calm, comforting, and filled with light. She sat in an easy chair on one side of a coffee table; I sat on the other side. We talked a bit about her practice.

  “I started out being interested in women’s sexual dysfunction,” she explained. “But it soon became apparent that many women who had sexual and relational issues also had a history of childhood sexual abuse.”

  “I don’t have sexual dysfunction,” I insisted. I was convinced my dysfunction was more emotional than sexual. “A few years ago, I was in therapy. I was going through a clinical depression, which is why I was seeing the therapist. It cost me my only long-term relationship. I haven’t had a relationship since then, that’s true, but I’m just too busy. You know how busy I am.

  “It was only at the end of therapy that I had some idea that I’d been abused. Now I have all these memories and I don’t know what they are. A man is touching me, getting me to touch him, but I don’t know who he is.”

  “Okay, let’s not worry about that now. We’ll concentrate on the memory you just had. When was that?”

  “Last week, I called you right away,” I said. “I’ve been trying to figure out who it could be. My aunt got an annulment around that time, so I’m thinking maybe it was her husband and my parents found out so she got rid of him. But why wouldn’t anyone tell me once I was an adult? To tell you the truth, I’m having trouble thinking about anything else.”

  “It’s very common to forget, especially if sexual abuse is severe or by someone close to you,” Marcia explained. “Forgetting is a way of surviving.”

  Not me, I don’t forget difficult things. I face them squarely, I thought. Yet I was more forgetful than most people. There were whole periods of my life that I couldn’t remember.

  “Trying to remember probably won’t work, but one of the ways that is often helpful is through hypnosis. I suggest we try it at the next session.”

  As soon as I arrived for my next session, Marcia confirmed that I still wanted to proceed and then began. She asked me to lie down on the sofa and then to slowly breathe in and out. Once I was relaxed she said, “Think of a place you feel safe.”

  I imagined I was on a small beach looking out at calm blue lake water. It was quiet except for the gentle lapping of the waves.

  “Now count down from one hundred.”

  As I counted down, my voice was becoming more distant and I started to feel like I was outside my body.

  When I got to eighty-five, Marcia said, “I want you to imagine you’re looking at the image you saw in your memory but on a TV screen. It’s a little blurred. Adjust the image to make it clearer. What do you see?”

  At first the screen was very blurry, even blurrier than the actual memory. I reached over to the imaginary TV and fiddled with the dial. “We’re in the apartment in the basement of Grandma’s house. It’s very dark. There’s only one window and it’s high, too high for me to reach even when I stand on the bed. I’m in my bed and he is standing over me … Oh my god, it’s my father … That can’t be. How can that be?” Oddly, I wasn’t feeling anything; I was calm, almost numb.

  “Take a breath,” she said. “Just tell me what you see. You are looking at it on TV. He can’t hurt you now.”

  “He’s standing over me. He’s putting my hand on his penis. I’m pulling my hand away.” I shook my head. I was starting to shake. I turned my head away.

  “That’s good, Judy. Let’s leave it there. You’ve done a great job.” She had me count up to get out of the hypnotic state. “Most people don’t get this far in the first session. How are you feeling?”

  “I don’t know how I’m feeling. I can’t believe it’s my father. Why wouldn’t I remember that? My father? He was violent and domi
neering. I remember that. But why wouldn’t I remember being abused? Are you sure this is right?”

  I knew the location though, the basement of my grandmother’s house in Brooklyn, where we lived before I was five years old. I was young, so young. No adult male except my father came into the room when I was in bed. My uncle Sol would always see me upstairs at my grandma’s house. My grandfather never came down either.

  “We’ll see as we go along. This was just the first session. It’s unlikely you would see your father if it wasn’t your father, but time will tell.”

  * * *

  The next week, we went back to the TV screen, and over several sessions the picture and the story became clearer.

  At first it was more feelings than memories that were emerging. But as the memories emerged, I was beginning to experience emotions that were overwhelming. Marcia explained that for a child these emotions were unbearable, but for an adult, with help and at a certain distance from the events, it was possible to bear them.

  Shortly after my first few sessions with Marcia, I went to see Kristi Magraw, a massage therapist who had been treating me for years. Kristi had developed her own style of massage, the Magraw Method, which was designed to release emotions through bodywork. Her work helped get me to the point where I was starting to uncover some of the feelings that my physical and emotional armour had been keeping from me.

  I remember feeling a green slime slithering like a snake out of my body. It moved up from my lower bowel into my intestines, my stomach, and then out of my mouth.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” I told Kristi in a panic. I started to get off the table.

  “You’re safe here. I’ve got a bucket,” she said.

  She continued to gently massage me.

  “What is this?” I asked her. “What’s going on?”

  “What does it feel like?”

  “Like my body is full of green slime. My whole digestive tract is full of green slime; it’s coming up into my mouth. It’s horrible.”

  “Can you identify a feeling?

  After a moment, a word came into my head: “Shame.”

  It was shame. I was sick with shame.

  Two

  Where’s Jack?

  “Where’s Jack?” the voice asked. The words came from my mouth, but I, Judy, did not speak them.

  “Jack’s not here,” Marcia responded calmly. “Who is asking?”

  To my great surprise, the voice answered, “My name is Simon.”

  “Hello, Simon, welcome,” Marcia said. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “I’m glad Judy came to see you. I think you can help her. But I’ve been thinking … you should know about us.”

  “Thank you, Simon. I appreciate that. There are others?”

  “Yes. But they’re still afraid. Not sure it’s safe. They worry about Jack, Judy’s father. We haven’t seen him in a while but the little ones are still worried about him. And some of them don’t trust you, either. But I do. You seem kind. I think you’re trying your best to help.”

  “Thanks for trusting me, Simon. I want to help Judy. That’s why she came here. You’re right that I’ll be able to help her better if I know more about you and the others.”

  I could hear them but I couldn’t speak. It was like Simon was occupying my body and part of my psyche, and I was somewhere in a corner of my mind where I could hear and see but not speak or act.

  “Can I talk to Judy now, please?” Marcia asked. Simon quietly disappeared, like a vivid dream that vanishes the instant you wake up.

  “Judy?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Can you tell it’s me?”

  “Yes, I can. Do you understand what just happened?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Have you ever heard voices in your head that seemed different from your own?”

  I hesitated but I figured I had to tell her everything.

  “At a certain point in my therapy with Mark, an angry male voice emerged from deep inside me. I didn’t seem to be controlling it but I could hear it. Mark explained that it was quite common in people who were burying a part of themselves.”

  We started talking more about the history of my sexual relationships. My sexual relationships weren’t something I thought about a lot, which I knew made me different from most women. I remembered that I didn’t date as a teenager after my father humiliated the first boy to take me out on a date. By the time I was eighteen, I gained a lot of weight and put my lack of a love life down to my weight gain. When I was in university, I got involved with Roger, an older man who had an important impact on my life even though the relationship lasted only a year. After that, I always had a boyfriend until my breakup with Ken Theobald, with whom I had lived for more than five years. I hadn’t had a serious relationship since then. That was seven years ago, the same time I got intensely involved in the women’s movement and wasn’t meeting as many men. I did have a number of sexual liaisons, but I didn’t think much about them. I had completely forgotten about some of them.

  “These memory losses, especially around relationships, are a form of dissociation. For example, if a young child is continually abused at home or in school one of the ways of dealing with this is to ‘forget,’ (i.e., dissociate). The forgetting enables the child to function day to day without fear, shame, grief, or anger. The child looks ‘normal’ to the outside world. If the abuse were to stay in the memory, the child might not be able to deal with the feelings and knowledge, becoming so overwhelmed that she could attempt to end her life or she could become so totally disorganized in her thinking that she’d be seen as ‘psychotic,’ ” Marcia explained. “You dissociated as a way of surviving the abuse and then you developed a habit of doing it when something threatened you. What often happens is that little Judy forgets the abuse when she awakes and goes to breakfast with her family. But she may start to ‘remember’ late at night when she hears footsteps approaching her bed. However, the part that ‘remembers’ isn’t daytime Judy but another ‘part’ or ‘alter’ personality which experiences the abuse and only comes out when she is similarly threatened.”

  “But I remember having sex with some men but not with others. I don’t get it.”

  “For now the details aren’t important. I just want you to understand the process. You realized in therapy with Mark that you had buried your feelings over time. That’s often because of dissociation. Dissociation is really very common. Think about a long drive when you are alone, and suddenly you realize you’re not sure where you are or how you got there. You dissociated, departed from yourself out of boredom. Or a moment of trauma where you feel you’re outside your body, observing yourself and the situation. This is another kind of dissociation.

  “Now it seems that you have alter personalities, another more extreme form of dissociation. Usually when the alter personality emerges, you won’t remember what happens. Have you heard about multiple personality disorder?”

  “Sure, The Three Faces of Eve, Sybil. I’ve heard about it. But I doubt I have multiple personalities. I’m not crazy. No one has ever said anything about erratic behaviour or anything like that.”

  “MPD is not ‘crazy’ at all. It’s actually a way of avoiding ‘going crazy,’” Marcia replied. “Simon says there are others. They should start coming out now; we shall see. Multiple personality disorder presents differently in each person. As therapy continues, we’ll have a better idea of how it has affected you. How are you feeling about it?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s kind of weird but somehow I feel relieved. Does that make sense?”

  “Sure it does. You’ve had some inkling of other voices in your conscious mind from time to time.”

  “The Voice was always angry. This one seems quite nice … Simon, I wonder if that comes from Simon Says. That’s funny.”

  “He’s probably the guardian personality. Ther
e is usually a guardian personality who takes care of all the alters. Simon knows about the others. Some of the alters know about the others and some don’t. It makes sense that he would come out first and decide if it’s safe for the others.”

  Part of me was fascinated and part of me was horrified. Ever since the depression I’d known I was damaged by something, but multiple personalities? I wasn’t crazy. I was one of the most functional people I knew. I trusted Marcia, but still, I should have challenged her. I should have gone to the library and read everything there was on multiple personalities to arm myself with arguments.

  Yet I didn’t do any of that. I went home and continued my life as if nothing had changed. I didn’t even tell anyone about it. How could I? What would I say? I put it aside, as I had put so many things aside.

  But I did start thinking about my childhood, about what I remembered that could reinforce or contradict these memories that were emerging.

  II

  Memories Are Made of This

  1945–1970

  Three

  Family Ties

  I have two tiny black-and-white framed photos on my bookshelf. Both pictures have the same background: my maternal grandmother’s house in Brooklyn, where everything began. The first one used to sit on my grandma’s mantelpiece. Grandma Bessie Schutter was a stout woman with a Russian peasant’s body, buxom with ample hips. Her wide, kind face was surrounded by curly grey hair. I can see in this photo that she was quite small and round, but in my child’s eye she was a big woman. She had a powerful personality and was the dominant person in our extended family. Here she is standing, holding me as a baby against her chest. Her beautiful smile shows her warmth and her love for me.

  The other photo is of me at five years old with my little brother, Alvin, who was two at the time. We’re sitting on the steps of that same house on East 91st Street in Brooklyn. My arm is around him and we’re both grinning, happy to be there.