I called Connie Wilbur, who didn’t seem particularly concerned about the situation. She suggested contracting with all of the personalities to attain cooperation with one another at Harvard. I wish I could do that, but cannot imagine how. The only ones who really want to go now are Renee and Joan Frances. Jo tells me she’s not ready; others in the Flock would have no idea about the decision and what it means. I can just see myself peeling Josie off Gordon’s shoulder and saying, “Ignore your abreactive hallucinations for a minute, dear, and talk with me about going to Harvard.”
But, even if I can’t imagine how it will work right now, in many ways it’s too late to worry about that. It must work. I have a sense that they are going to go, or die trying. But it’s also possible that my analysis of the strength of their desire is partly wishful thinking. Gordon and I have committed ourselves to making the Flock our priority for the next several weeks. This is emotionally draining work and possible only because there is a foreseeable end to the intense time and effort.
Steve returns from Cornell tomorrow. I have no idea what will happen. Steve and the Flock (mostly Renee) managed a relationship because they both were willing to deny the disorder most of the time. Now I think that this is impossible for Renee. If she had to choose right now between her relationship with Gordon and me and her relationship with Steve, she’d walk away from him without a backward glance.
I think Renee understands now that the only way to deal with the pathology is to face it squarely. If Steve continues to fight treatment, as he did before his departure in January or, even more subtly, in his phone calls, the Flock will, self-protectively, withdraw from him further. There may be no relationship left by the time the Flock and Steve are willing to deal with one another honestly, but her personal growth is more important now than a relationship based on the pathology of both partners.
—
I COULDN’T IMAGINE HOW Steve would make sense of it all. When he left, Lynn was my therapist, a therapist who saw me far too often for his liking. Now Lynn and Gordon were my Flock’s surrogate parents.
I cared about Steve, maybe even loved him, and I knew that others in the Flock cared about him too. Before Steve left, I thought of the multiplicity as a nuisance, something I tolerated out of lack of choice. Now I knew the other personalities as people, struggling for fulfillment. I wouldn’t deny their existence or need for time, even if that’s what was necessary to make Steve happy. If Steve loved me as much as he claimed, he was going to have to learn to love the other personalities as well.
As I waited those final hours for Steve’s return, my resolve weakened. I’d give him a nice homecoming and not get into any discussions about the Flock for a few days. Maybe I’d let him see the others for short periods of time over the next few weeks. And I had better ease off on the long hours the Flock spent with Gordon and Lynn. Steve had to know that he was important too.
All was well until Steve and I went to bed. We hadn’t made love in months, and I anticipated that this might be difficult. Josie was distressingly close to the surface. I reminded myself that Josie had never actually appeared outside Lynn’s office.
For a while, everything was fine. I relaxed. Steve was tender, protective. I felt loved and safe and honestly responsive. Then, suddenly, without warning, Josie dived for the wall.
Terrified by the bizarre behavior, Steve pulled Josie to him. Tense muscles melted, and, just as suddenly, he had Missy in his arms. She pulled from him and petulantly curled up with her pillow. That was too much for Steve. He reached for the phone on the night table, found and dialed Lynn’s number. “What should I do? I can’t ‘just calm down,’ ” he yelled into the phone.
Jo slowly gained consciousness and looked around in bewilderment. She was glad to see Steve home, but he seemed terribly upset about something; she didn’t want any part of that. She pulled on jeans and shirt and left the room. Steve had witnessed three obvious personality switches—me to Josie to Missy to Jo—in less than five minutes. With a vengeance, Steve was finding out that things had changed.
—
STEVE, NO LONGER ABLE to call the diagnosis “clinical bullshit,” told Lynn that he was willing to help. He wanted to be involved.
As impressed as I was with Steve’s change of heart, I was uncertain. I was protective of the Flock’s relationship with Gordon and Lynn. I didn’t want that to change or them to pull away because Steve was back in town. There was a big difference between Steve’s saying he wanted to be involved and his getting used to sharing his house with personalities of varying ages, dispositions, and sexual identities.
“Give him a chance,” Lynn counseled. “We’re not going to desert you. We’ll be your parents and therapists, but it won’t hurt the Flock to have a loving friend.”
I tried. For a few weeks, the personalities cycled out at will, as they had before Steve’s return. Jo worked on her master’s thesis; Charlene did the cooking; Rusty changed the oil in the car; Missy played in the yard with the dogs. Each, in his or her own way, tried to make friends.
Steve tried, but couldn’t believe enough to make it work. And he could make no sense whatsoever of Missy’s attempts at conversation.
“You like it here,” Missy said, trying to let Steve know that she felt at ease.
“Yes, I like it here,” Steve responded gently. “Do you?”
“Yes, you do,” Missy said.
“What about you?” Steve asked again, a little more sharply.
Now Missy was uncertain. This man was getting angry. She enjoyed living in his house and was trying to tell him that. Lynn never got angry at her because of the way she talked, so Missy slipped inside to the safety of memories of her time with her friend Lynn.
I patted Missy’s shoulder reassuringly on my way out to talk to Steve. Poor kid. Maybe I could mediate between them. “Steve, I know you’re really trying,” I said. “You’re compassionate and accepting of the different parts now, but I’m afraid that you’re just going to have to translate for Missy. She says ‘you’ when she means ‘I.’ She’s terrified still of being self-referential. Lynn says she’ll grow out of it.”
“Well, then, why do you act that way?” Steve asked. “I like you a lot better when you’re normal, like now.”
I gave up.
—
I DEVELOPED AN INFORMAL schedule that lasted through the summer. On most weekdays, while Lynn was at work, the Flock spent a couple of daytime hours with Gordon. I had dinner with Steve and spent time with him when he got home from work, but left for Lynn’s as soon as I had cleaned up the kitchen. I knew Steve was hurt by my absence, but I had no choice. Steve wanted to be with me at the only time Lynn was available to be with the Flock.
Steve and I had gone around often enough about the disorder for me to know that he thought he was doing just fine with the other personalities. I tried other tactics to explain my time away from him.
“Flock-work has to be a priority this summer,” I said. “I’m not going to be able to be functional at Harvard unless the Flock works some stuff out pretty quickly.”
“You did pretty well before you got into therapy with Lynn,” he responded.
I knew that was true, but my new difficulties were not based on some pathological tie with Lynn. I had managed before because all of the memories of abuse and pain had been hidden, festering below the surface. Now they were all coming out. There was no way I could stop the flow, no way I could hide it all again. I had no choice but to see it through.
“Steve, I love you,” I said. “But I can’t really be an adult, I can’t be the woman you want me to be, until the Flock works through the past abuse and our emotional dependency on Gordon and Lynn.”
“That’s another thing that bothers me,” Steve said. “Why do you have to spend so much time with Gordon? He’s not a therapist.”
“Let’s be accurate here,” I shot back, losing my patience. “I don’t spend that much time with him. Rusty is the personality who is usually with Gordon, and
he’s thriving on the healthy fathering that Gordon provides. In that sense, he’s as much a therapist as Lynn. Besides, Rusty is learning to sail. Sailing is an important part of therapy right now.”
Rusty began to sail the first weekend we spent at Lynn and Gordon’s cottage. As soon as we arrived at the cottage, Gordon took Rusty to the dock. For Rusty, it was love at first sight. The eighteen-foot centerboard sailboat was rigged to be sailed by one person or by two. She purred contentedly as the waves rubbed her against the berth’s rubber padding.
“Let’s try it,” Gordon said. He said to Rusty, “Do this. Now grab that.” Rusty followed his lead so intently that they were out into the lake with sail furled before Rusty realized that he had done it all alone.
Tentatively, then more forcefully, Rusty moved his strength with the boat’s, using rudder and ropes to nose the boat into the wind. His visual memory served him well. As Rusty learned to control the sails, he memorized the horizon, the taut pull of sails and ropes when the boat was well directed, the angle the boat made with the sky and the lake when she slipped along in harmony.
Rusty forgot nothing Gordon taught him. It was undeniable. Rusty could sail a boat. He glowed when Gordon said that he was learning faster than most students he had taught.
Rusty learned to trust as well as to sail.
Gordon offered Rusty the freedom that comes from doing something well. He sat quietly, watching patiently while Rusty sailed. Gordon encouraged Rusty to practice maneuvers over and over until he got them just right. And Rusty’s confidence in himself grew. This was not a false confidence that he could do no wrong, but one based on the sureness that he could correct mistakes.
Ray hadn’t tolerated mistakes. When something went wrong, he told his kid, “You don’t think. You’re stupid. You have no common sense.” Rusty, as well as the other personalities, felt devastated when they made mistakes. Even a grade of A− indicated that something was lacking.
Gordon, on the other hand, treated mistakes as opportunities for learning. A mistake was something to be fixed. He taught Rusty that fixing things could be even more fun than getting them right the first time.
On the face of it, taking a multiple out in a sailboat seemed dangerous. The little boat sometimes skimmed the water at precarious angles. What if Josie found herself there and panicked? How could Gordon calm her and keep the boat from capsizing?
Gordon and Lynn recognized within the Flock a sense of internal coordination that none of the individual personalities could see. No matter how often I worried about losing control in the classroom, it never happened. Lynn and Gordon were confident that there was some internal harmony and logic as to which personality surfaced when. Lynn used this understanding to help me accept what had happened on Steve’s first night home.
“If you had been able to pretend that everything was all right that first night, both you and Steve would have continued to deny the reality of the Flock, just as you did before he left,” Lynn said. “Somewhere, down deeper than you know, the entity made it impossible for you to make the Flock’s needs secondary.”
Lynn said that the same force made it possible for Rusty to have all of the sailing time without pathological intervention from the others. “You’ll see more and more evidence of ‘entity’ understanding as time goes on,” she said. “You’ve got to put some trust in the ‘group’ mind.”
With no thought that it might be otherwise, Rusty had the sailing to himself. Alone with Gordon on the water, Rusty talked in detail about his memories of his father. Rusty had never liked what Ray did in the woods, and he was relieved to hear Gordon say that Ray’s behavior was wrong.
One day, the subject of Ray’s mysterious disappearance arose. “I know my dad’s gonna come back from the sea and get me someday,” Rusty confided with an equal mix of hope and dread as they were bringing Mantra in from a sail.
“No, Rusty, I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Gordon said, handing him the rope to cast to a piling. “Those girls that you don’t want to know about told me that your father got very sick and died.”
Rusty smiled at Gordon’s oblique reference to the taboo subject of girls. He didn’t want to talk about that, and Gordon was apparently willing to wait until he was ready. Rusty focused instead on his father’s disappearance.
“I guess you’re right, Gordon,” Rusty said. “I guess my dad ain’t ever comin’ back.”
Gordon nodded and waited while Rusty looped the rope and patted the boat on her stern as he vaulted ashore. “If my dad ain’t ever gonna come back,” Rusty fretted, “then I ain’t got no dad. A boy needs his dad.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that, Rusty,” Gordon said, and walked from the dock, his arm around Rusty’s shoulders.
Rusty asked hesitantly, “Will you be my new dad?”
“I guess I am, Rusty.”
25.
DIARY July 30, 1983
The summer continues to be an intense time for all of us. Gordon and I spend an average of four hours a day with the Flock, not much of it in anything that looks like in-office psychotherapy. But it is therapeutic nevertheless.
Individual personalities are working through pathology. More important, they are beginning to emulate Gordon’s and my parenting internally. They are taking better care of one another. Although Renee and Jo, in particular, often express frustration about the others, they both seem eager to listen to ideas of how to make life more comfortable for everyone, not just for their individual selves. That, I think, is a significant change.
Now that the personalities (aside from Joan Frances) have accepted the incredible dependency they feel toward Gordon and me, they are both enjoying it and working their way out of it. It’s hard being “on call” twenty-four hours a day. Gordon and I need breaks and we take them—a weekend away by ourselves, an evening out for dinner and a movie—but we know that we can’t stay unavailable to the Flock for long. It’s hard, and perhaps only tolerable because we know the Flock will be leaving for school in September.
Renee is eager to talk with me about the dependency, partly because she wants me to appreciate all the times the Flock deals with crises internally rather than calling Gordon or me, and partly because the dependency is newly recognized. Renee needs to press at her new feeling as though it were a sore tooth. She describes her feeling as a “deep, overwhelming hunger” that never is totally satisfied. “Why don’t you say ‘enough already’ and get it over with?” she asks.
I reassure her that neither Gordon nor I will reject the Flock. I know that they’d almost prefer it if we did. It would be easier for them than having really to feel the dependency and work it through. At the same time, they recognize that they must limit their own desire for us. “You can’t make up for a lost childhood,” Jo said to me. I told her that she was right—I couldn’t—but that Gordon and the Flock and I could do it together.
The Flock’s basic need for unconditional love from all three of us must be accepted before they can grow emotionally. It’s clear that the personalities’ history of abusiveness toward one another reflected the parenting they received from Nancy and Ray. It’s up to Gordon and me to fill them with healthy parenting so that they have new messages to take in and use internally.
Some of that parenting is noninvasive. The Flock, Jo and Renee in particular, like being at our house without involvement from Gordon or from me. Renee works on a project or Jo reads, but the time is really spent finding out that it’s safe simply to be here. They can observe how Gordon and I are, moving in our own rhythms, without the Flock’s being the center of attention. They can know that they are loved without being in crisis or needing attention.
Weekends at the cottage reinforce these learnings in ways we could not otherwise.
—
LIKE ANY INFREQUENTLY USED weekend cottage, Lynn and Gordon’s house always offered chores. Rusty helped Gordon repair screens and plumbing. Jo and I had a hand in running the lawn mowers over the cleared three acres ne
ar the house. Missy decided that she loved Gordon as much as Rusty did the day that Gordon called her name and then tossed her two spotted frogs.
Rusty and Gordon sailed the O-Day to the marshy end of the lake and surveyed the progress on a large beaver lodge. Rusty also spent time with Lynn, since Gordon included her in most of their plans.
Josie found beauty that counterbalanced the horror of her memories. She felt the roughness of tree bark, heard ducks quacking and frogs croaking; she lay flat on the grass and watched leaves shimmer silver in the wind against a background of blue sky. She felt peace. No longer simply a keeper of panic and violence, Josie began to awaken to the present.
Jo loved being at the cottage. Her time with Gordon and Lynn was unhurried. She felt no pressure to “do therapy,” felt no fear of losing time to another personality. Jo trusted that if she cycled in she would eventually cycle back out to consciousness again. She enjoyed her theoretical conversations with Gordon and felt comfortable with Lynn as they stretched out side by side reading in the sun, close without needing to talk.
I watched Lynn and Gordon in wonder as they related to each other. “So, this is what marriage is supposed to be,” I thought, “and this is what it means to be part of a family.”
We had fun together—Gordon, Lynn, and the Flock. They were both so accepting of the Flock’s reality of many minds in a single body that we all sometimes forgot the limitations of this existence. One Saturday, Lynn said to Gordon, “Maybe Renee and I will run into town while you and Rusty finish patching the screen door.” Then Lynn caught herself and went off by herself, chuckling at the absurdity of her suggestion.
Later Lynn said, “You know, Renee, at the beginning I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to remember that the personalities saw themselves as separate. Now I am embarrassed to say that I sometimes have trouble remembering that you are all in the same body.”
The Flock Page 23
