Heroes in My Head

by Judy Rebick

  It wasn’t until the fall of 1989 and Barbara Dodd, the deaf woman who fought against her boyfriend’s injunction to stop her from getting an abortion, that the memories were let loose.

  After a couple of sessions with psychologist Marcia Weiner, the memories started to emerge more clearly. I remembered my father was taking a shower. Lenny was sleeping in the bed across from mine. Sometimes I didn’t even wake up when he was taking his shower, but this day I was awake.

  He was standing by my bed. He didn’t usually do that. His bathrobe was open and I could see his penis. It was big, much bigger than Lenny’s. It scared me so I turned away.

  “Look at me, Judy,” he whispered.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Don’t be scared, Maydey [little girl]. It’s all right.”

  He patted me on my back, encouraging me to turn over. When I did he took my hand and put it on his penis.

  “No, Daddy, don’t,” I said, pulling my hand back. “I don’t like it.” I felt scared. I pulled the covers over my head. I was cold. “Stop it, Daddy. I don’t like it, I don’t like it,” I said, my voice getting louder.

  “Shh, we don’t want to wake up Mommy, do we?” he said. But I still protested. He went back to his room, leaving me alone. On another day he tried again. “You want to help Daddy feel good, don’t you?”

  Finally, I did what he asked.

  Piecing together the timeline, I figured the abuse started when I was four or five — the same age my mother had said I was when I became distant. It was also around the time when we left my grandmother’s basement. Lenny would have been at school. My mother wasn’t working and would have probably been busy with baby Alvin.

  I spent a lot of time alone with my grandmother. I helped her cook and clean. She would sit at the sink and I would stand on a chair next to her to reach the dish rack. As I wiped the dishes dry, she chatted to me in Yiddish. She didn’t speak much English, but her love came to me like the light through the front windows. There wasn’t much love in the basement.

  When company arrived, my father would lift her out of her wheelchair into an armchair, but I wasn’t strong enough to do that. My job was to help her with her walker. With me next to her for support, she practised walking in the living room.

  My father often got home in the middle of the afternoon. He would stand at the bottom of the stairs and call me:

  “Daddy’s home, Maydey. Are you up there?”

  I went to the top of the stairs.

  “I’m busy, Daddy. I’m helping Grandma.”

  Mostly he accepted this response, but this one time he insisted. Grandma told me to go.

  “Come down here, Judy. Come and sit on Daddy’s lap. Oh, you’re so pretty, such a pretty little girl who loves her Daddy.”

  “No, I’m not pretty. I’m not. I don’t want to come down. I’m staying here. I won’t come.”

  Grandma was getting angry now, insisting that I go downstairs to the basement.

  “Daddy makes me touch him, Grandma, and I don’t want to. Please make him stop.” Instead of helping, she got even angrier.

  “Shmutz [dirt],” she said, and hit me on the ear. I felt like I’d been hit with a sledgehammer. I still feel pain in that ear sometimes. “Don’t say those things! It’s dirty!” Grandma had never hit me before. I wanted to tell her, I don’t wanna do dirty things. I try not to, really I try, but I can’t help it. I’m sorry, Grandma. It’s not my fault. But I was too shocked to say anything. I just hung my head and slowly went downstairs.

  That was the first time I told someone that my father was sexually abusing me, and the last time until forty years later when I recovered the memory in Marcia’s office. It was as if that slap from my grandmother sealed the knowledge of abuse into a part of my brain that I couldn’t access. I think this must have also been the moment that I started to dissociate. If my grandmother wouldn’t help me, no one would. I had to help myself.

  After a few sessions with Marcia, each one revealing more memories, a thought came to me when I was alone in my living room: I am a bad person. Everyone thinks I’m a good person, but now it will come out how bad I am. My adult self knew that whatever had happened wasn’t my fault, but I started feeling that the Judy everyone knew was not real. The real person was not a good person. I would be exposed. I better kill myself now so no one finds out. It seemed so rational, so sensible. I told Marcia how I was feeling.

  “I don’t think I can go through this, Marcia. I can’t stand feeling so helpless. All my life I’ve felt powerful and in control. Now I see all that was a lie.”

  “It wasn’t a lie, Judy. It was part of your reality. You hid the feelings of helplessness and shame so that you could be powerful in your life. That’s how you survived. Now you’re ready to face them. That’s why you’re here. That’s why your memories have revealed themselves. You’re ready and I can help you get through it.”

  “I don’t think so, Marcia. I really don’t think so.”

  “What are you saying, Judy?”

  “I’m thinking about suicide. It’s not that I’m depressed. I just can’t see myself through this. I don’t know who I am anymore. I feel like I’m falling apart, literally. There’s no centre. There is no me. The person I thought I was, who is that? I don’t know anymore.”

  “It’s true that you’ve kept a part of yourself hidden until now. You’ve buried your memories so that you could live the life you wanted to live. I’m not going to tell you it’ll be easy, but you’re a fighter. I’ve seen women with much less strength go through this process. Not only will you survive, you’ll be a fuller person — more yourself, not less. I know it doesn’t feel that way now but I have seen many women go through similar experiences.”

  “I don’t think I can do it, Marcia. I don’t think I can.”

  “Okay, let’s try something. I have an agreement here.” She pulled out a piece of paper from her file. “It says you won’t try to kill yourself before our next appointment. I’m asking you to sign this agreement, just for a week. It’s a way for both of us to make sure you survive until we see each other again.”

  She held the paper out for me to take. As I looked down at the floor, my stomach tightened. I shook my head no. “I can’t, Marcia. I can’t sign it.”

  For some reason I wasn’t willing to lie to Marcia the way I sometimes did with Mark.

  Her brow furrowed. She frowned and after a pause said, “You know that my ethics require me to report this. If I do, you might be hospitalized.”

  “Please don’t do that. Being hospitalized is the worst thing I can imagine right now, but I just can’t sign that agreement. I know I have to be honest with you if this is going to work. How about if I take it home and think about signing it?”

  “Okay, Judy. I’m going to trust that you’ll be here next week. Please don’t let me down.”

  I’m lucky she didn’t commit me. I’m also lucky that I had a good job and a cheap apartment, so I could afford private therapy. If I had to rely on the public health care system, I’m not sure I would have been able to stay out of the hospital.

  It wasn’t the agreement that stopped me from killing myself; it was my friend Gord Cleveland.

  “Think of the children,” he said. He meant his daughters, but it made me think about my nieces, Kael and Terra, and how it would affect them. At sixteen, Kael was the eldest. Terra was fourteen, and Gord’s kids, Tara and Julia, were thirteen and eleven. All of them would have been devastated by my death.

  The next week I signed Marcia’s agreement.

  It was September 1989 when I began the journey into my childhood, discovering hidden memories and extraordinary defences both fantastic and terrible.

  * * *

  As Simon said, there were others. Every session, more and more of the personalities emerged, different ages, different genders. After a few months, I drew a
chart with Simon, HIM, and Sophie, who were older children, on one level and Mary, Pricilla, Lila, and Lobo, who were clearly little children, on another. Marcia called them “alters.” They protected me, the core of me, from becoming even more damaged.

  I thought about moments in the past that could have been experiences of dissociation. One occurred in the early 1970s when I came back to Toronto after travelling around the world. I was living in a commune on Cowan Avenue in Parkdale with mostly men, one of whom was Gary Penner, Steve’s brother. He was younger than I was and a musician. He became a good friend whom I connected with again in the 1980s. Soon after we reconnected, I suggested that we have sex. Gary responded, “We tried that before, Judy, and it didn’t work out too well.”

  “Oh yeah,” I responded but I had no memory of it. That troubled me at the time, but like everything else I just forgot about it. We remained friends and later I asked him about that night, admitting that I didn’t remember having a sexual experience with him.

  “We went to see the Downchild Blues Band play at Grossman’s,” he began. I remembered that. Gary used to play with them and I was astonished when they invited him onstage.

  “It was a great night and when we got home, we started kissing in a way we had never kissed before. Then we went upstairs to my room.” I didn’t remember the kissing but I did remember going upstairs with him and opening the door … and then nothing. There was no memory. That is the nature of dissociation. There’s not even a glimmer of memory, just a concrete wall. The wall separated me not only from the abuse but from other memories that threatened the alters, even if my conscious self did not feel threatened. What I realized was that having sex with a close friend reminded them of the sexual abuse. Even though I was unaware of their existence until therapy with Marcia, they did seem to be affecting my memory and to some degree my behaviour.

  Multiple personality disorder, or what is now called dissociative identity disorder, is an extreme version of normal dissociation. “Dissociation is the essence of trauma,” wrote Bessel van der Kolk, in his brilliant book on trauma The Body Keeps the Score. We all dissociate sometimes.

  In my case, my ability to dissociate, which continued without my knowledge into middle age, permitted me tremendous courage even in the face of physical threats like the Morgentaler attack; endurance and an uncanny ability to work long hours, almost never resting despite how tired I was; and detachment, usually emotional detachment from implications of relationship and events. If anything got too painful, I just stopped thinking about it; I sometimes forgot that it ever happened. Only occasionally did I feel anything strongly other than anger. I never missed anyone or anything after my grandma died in 1955.

  The American Psychiatric Association defines it this way:

  Dissociative identity disorder is associated with overwhelming experiences, traumatic events and/or abuse that occurred in childhood. Dissociative identity disorder was previously referred to as multiple personality disorder.

  Symptoms of dissociative identity disorder (criteria for diagnosis) include:

  The existence of two or more distinct identities (or “personality states”). The distinct identities are accompanied by changes in behavior, memory and thinking. The signs and symptoms may be observed by others or reported by the individual.

  Ongoing gaps in memory about everyday events, personal information and/or past traumatic events.

  The symptoms cause significant distress or problems in social, occupational or other areas of functioning.

  The purpose of therapy now, Marcia explained, would be to integrate the personalities so I wouldn’t split off anymore. Therapy with Mark had put me back in touch with my feelings, to a point. Now I would meet and assemble all the fragmented parts of myself.

  As to multiple personalities, all I knew was from seeing the movie The Three Faces of Eve. The movie about Eve White, a mousy, middle-aged housewife who went into therapy because she was acting strangely, had had an impact on me, along with everyone else in the late 1950s when we didn’t know anything about mental illness. In therapy, her other personality, Eve Black, who was sexy, outgoing, and adventurous, emerged flirting with the doctor and sashaying around the office. Her husband called it her “moods,” but the doctor realized there was something deeper at work.

  My experience wasn’t anything like that. I was not aware of behaving differently or even being particularly moody. The only thing I noticed was that I had huge blanks in my memory. Important parts of my childhood were not accessible to me. I remembered summer camp but very little about what happened at home. Over time, I realized that I had few memories of being at home with my father in Toronto, where my family had moved when I was ten. I had memories of being there alone, with my brothers, with a babysitter, but almost never with my father. I also forgot some important moments in my adult life. I have too much to think about, I would tell myself. Lots of people can’t remember things.

  The day of Simon’s first appearance, he continued talking to me after we left Marcia’s office. His voice wasn’t like my own interior voice. His words appeared in my mind with a distinct quality — stronger, more forceful, addressing me as though I were a different person.

  “Judy,” he said. “We need you to stop communicating with Jack. We’re all afraid of him and I think you might freak out if you see him or talk to him.”

  This seemed reasonable to me. Since beginning therapy with Marcia, I could not envision having an ordinary conversation with my father. Luckily, my parents were living in Florida. I called them once a week and usually talked to my mother, but it was always possible that my father might answer the phone. Simon said I had to cut off all contact.

  “I don’t think I can control the others if they hear Jack’s voice,” he explained. “No Jack.”

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  Cutting off contact with Jack made sense to me, but it meant cutting off contact with my mother, too. That was hard. I was not ready to tell her what I was going through. I usually visited my parents in February but it had only been a couple of months since the memories emerged, so I knew it was too soon to see them. I asked Alvin, whom I had told about the abuse and the personalities over Christmas, to explain that I would be out of touch for a while. We agreed he would say I was going through some tough psychological stuff and needed to be on my own. My mother’s tendency toward denial meant she wouldn’t ask too many questions. It was a lot to ask of him, but I didn’t see an alternative. I thought I would be out of touch for a few weeks, but it turned out to be for two years.

  I just couldn’t face Jack.

  Fourteen

  The Political Becomes the Personal

  I functioned by compartmentalizing. In therapy, I was willing to explore my hidden mind, but in my life I was still avoiding the memories. So much so, that as an active feminist for more than a decade, I had never gotten involved in issues that addressed violence against women; I hadn’t even attended the Take Back the Night marches. Subconsciously, I feared they would bring up my own history of abuse.

  All that changed on December 6, 1989. It is a day I will never forget. I was driving home from work when I heard the news on the radio: a gunman was shooting students at the École Polytechnique, an engineering school affiliated with the Université de Montréal. I slowed down and turned up the volume. Who was he killing? How many? Why?

  I parked my car in front of my apartment and listened to the radio. Then I heard it: the man had separated the men from the women, then shot twenty-eight students, killing fourteen women. While he was on his rampage, he said, “You’re all a bunch of feminists and I hate feminists.”

  I could hardly breathe. A man had targeted the female students at a school where the vast majority were male. He killed them because he believed that feminists had ruined his life. He killed them because they were training for a man’s job. He killed them because they were women.

  I felt
sick. I ran up to my apartment. The minute I got in I turned on the radio and the TV. I started feeling cold, really cold. I looked at the thermostat; it was at 21 degrees. The apartment wasn’t cold. I was cold. A deep sorrow started to build in my belly. It grew and spread until I started to cry; the cry became a sob and the sob became a scream. I ran into the bedroom to get a pillow to stifle my screams.

  Violence against women was epidemic but it wasn’t until December 6, 1989, that the veil covering misogyny was lifted through this act of fury and hatred. The media were saying this was the act of a madman but most feminists recognized that rage. We had been talking about it for decades. We knew that it was an extreme act of misogyny we had spent our lives fighting. It was a profound public moment that had a deep impact on anyone who had ever experienced male violence.

  I was only just beginning to understand how my father’s rage and abuse had affected my life. The depth of grief I felt at the massacre was also personal grief. My father had not taken my life, but he had taken my innocence, my ability to love and be loved. He had taken my memory, my history. Up until that moment, my wounds were private. I had never consciously connected them to my politics. But now I was starting to make that link.

  I called a friend to find out if there was a vigil or a rally. I needed to be with other women. A spontaneous memorial was planned for the next day. When I arrived at the location I saw about a hundred women bundled up in winter coats, quietly talking in front of Crucified Woman, a statue at the University of Toronto’s Emmanuel College. It was late afternoon on a cold grey day. I hardly knew anyone. The first person I saw was Marilou McPhedran, a feminist lawyer whom I had debated recently on constitutional issues. Her usual confidence and energy were gone. It seemed as if the muscles in her face had collapsed. She was grief-stricken. I put my arms around her, not knowing what else to do. Neither one of us had ever cried in public. We came from the generation that believed tears showed weakness and we were strong women.