The Flock

by Joan Frances Casey

  “Big boy,” Rusty said dreamily, content. As simply as that, Rusty had absorbed Little Joe. For the first time, Rusty had memory prior to finding himself in the woods with Ray. The memory was a little confused, since the Little Joe personality had felt loved and cherished first by Nancy and later by Lynn. Rusty didn’t care which mother he remembered through his assumption of Little Joe. What was important was his new feeling—love and tenderness for this woman, for women in general.

  Rusty now had a mother as well as a new dad, and he called her Lynn-mom.

  Lynn, Gordon, and I barely had time to marvel at the quick and seamless merging of Rusty and Little Joe when the Jo personality pushed me aside with a great deal more force than usual.

  Jo looked around the room and smiled at Gordon and Lynn in an easy, relaxed way. Her face showed none of its normal tension.

  “I was just thinking that I started off OK,” Jo said. “There wasn’t anything different or wrong with me when I was born. I wasn’t inherently bad or freakish.”

  “That’s right, Jo,” Lynn said.

  “Other people—my mother and father—did things to me that made me feel all wrong about myself,” Jo said, another warm wave of new, sure knowledge washing over her. “Sometimes, early in therapy, I tried so hard to figure out what I was supposed to do that I lost myself in the trying. I won’t do that anymore. I know I’m OK. I’m OK just the way I am.”

  Jo accepted Lynn’s hug, but smiled uncertainly at Lynn’s tears. “Why are you crying?” she asked. “This is just what you’ve been telling me all along.”

  Jo felt that she had reached a new understanding that made her feel at peace with herself. Those outside of Jo’s experience—Lynn, Gordon, and I—realized that another fusion had taken place, a merging even more important than Rusty’s absorption of Little Joe.

  Jo had taken on the personality we called “the Good Infant,” the whole child, healthy and inherently good, as she had been before the first personality splits. Jo had also absorbed the “Jo II” personality, the only personality the Flock had created in reaction to treatment. An unneeded defense from the start, Jo II was never to emerge again.

  DIARY    January 2, 1984

  Having the Flock and Steve here for Christmas was a huge success. The new security that had been forged in October was strengthened and solidified as the Flock saw the warmth flow among us with our adult children and grandchildren. They realized that these feelings were all part of relationships that had existed since birth and had grown and changed as we all grew. The Flock understood that the feeling Gordon and I had for them was the same as the love we have for our other children. The personalities developed a sense of the continuity and stability of our caring. By now we have had several different kinds of meshings and groupings that are harbingers and precursors of what presumably is to come. It’s all growing naturally out of our work together.

  Robin and Reagan were the first personalities to merge. Their sole function was to preserve information, and they were absorbed within the system once they had shared their stories with me. Their legacy to the other personalities was an increased ability to know and to share.

  Renee, Isis, and Kendra banded together in a loose and flowing way to achieve a specific goal—success at Harvard—sometimes sharing only co-consciousness, at other times seeming to become one augmented and fully experiencing personality.

  These new integrations are different. As Jo and Rusty experienced the continuity of Gordon’s and my love with all our children, they were able to accept their own essential rightness as epitomized by Little Joe and the Good Infant. By absorbing and making these little ones’ memories their own, they created their own sense of continuity in our love. In turn, this freed Jo to begin to fulfill the promise of growth through treatment that Jo II had foreshadowed.

  My concern now is how this fuller acceptance of a new family will affect the Flock’s relationship with Nancy. Renee is showing signs of increasing intolerance and seems less capable of pacifying Nancy than she has been in the past. And Jo is less tolerant of Nancy now than ever before. I fear that they may leave it all to the consistently vulnerable and depressed Joan Frances. This issue may come to a head later this month, when they go to Virginia for a visit.

  —

  THE FLOCK RETURNED TO CAMBRIDGE for a week of final exams. Stress from external pressures and from internal growth concentrated in the Flock’s most vulnerable physical spot—the stomach. We did well on the exams and felt relatively calm, but we all experienced abdominal pain.

  This ailment wasn’t personality-specific. Sometimes, if I had a headache, another personality could take over the awareness and not feel the pain I experienced. I tested whether or not our stomach problem was organic by checking to see if all the personalities experienced the same symptom as they each came out. They did. I wondered if we had finally developed an ulcer. I made an appointment at the Harvard Health Service.

  “Your upper GI is perfectly normal,” the internist informed me.

  “Now what?” I thought. “No matter what the tests show, I hurt and can’t eat.” I sighed and stood to leave. “Thanks anyway,” I said.

  “Sit down, Joan,” the doctor said in a firm voice, and Joan Frances was the personality who obediently placed the body back in the chair.

  “I know there’s nothing wrong with me,” Joan Frances said, “there’s never anything really wrong with me.” Her mother’s words—“You’re wasting the doctor’s time”—echoed through her mind.

  “You suddenly seem anxious, upset,” the internist now said. “You might feel better if you talked with a psychiatrist.” Seeing Joan Frances’s stricken look, she quickly added, “It’s OK. Nobody at Harvard will know. The doctor I was going to recommend does some work for our service and takes Harvard Health Insurance, but he’s part of a group practice on the edge of campus.”

  A psychiatrist. No. Joan Frances certainly couldn’t do that. Lynn was like a psychiatrist, and she had tried to turn her against her mother. Lynn had said she was a multiple. Joan Frances knew that was wrong; Nancy said it was ridiculous. A psychiatrist would only try to turn her against her mother. A psychiatrist might try to lock her up. She had to get out of here.

  “I can’t see a psychiatrist,” Joan Frances told the internist calmly. “My mother would be very angry.”

  “Your mother?” the internist said unbelievingly as she shuffled through the medical record. “You’re over eighteen. What does your mother have to do with this? Don’t tell her!”

  Joan Frances flinched at the suggestion that she conceal something from Mother. “You don’t understand,” she said. She got up and edged toward the door.

  “Well, take this,” the doctor said, and handed her a slip of paper with a name and phone number. “I really think you should give Dr. Tate a call. He’s very nice; you’d like him.”

  Joan Frances took the slip of paper back to the dorm and placed it in a desk drawer. She didn’t need a psychiatrist. She was going home to Mother in a few days. Her mother would take care of everything.

  —

  NANCY MET HER DAUGHTER at the airport. “You look like hell,” Nancy said. “You need a haircut, and you look skinny and tired. Why did you wear that dress? It hangs on you like an old rag.”

  Joan Frances had gotten up an hour early to make sure that she was dressed and groomed properly for Mother. But she had failed.

  “I…I’ve been having some trouble with my stomach,” Joan Frances confessed.

  “That anxiety crap again? What do you have to be anxious about?” Nancy said.

  She tried again. “Hey, Mom, guess what? I got all A’s for my first semester!”

  “Have you been so busy studying that you haven’t bothered to take care of yourself?” Nancy inquired. “You’ve got to eat something,” she said as they walked in the door.

  “Yes, Mother,” Joan Frances said meekly. Joan Frances may have been feeling compliant, but I was mad as hell.

  “Wai
t, wait,” I said, taking over. “If I’m going to eat something, it will be what I decide I can tolerate.”

  Nancy backed off, and headed upstairs to her collection of pharmaceutical samples. “Let me see if I can find you something to settle your stomach,” she said. As Joan Frances had predicted, Nancy did find some medication that stopped the cramping and pain; indeed, she found enough sample bottles so that we’d be able to medicate ourselves for years.

  A few days later, I borrowed Nancy’s car and drove to Aunt Christine’s house. She was Ray’s sister and one of my favorite relatives. When I had visited in the fall, Christine had told me she was proud of me. She had said that she had worried a great deal about me when I was a child. I was intrigued by her remark, by the possibility that someone in the family might have noticed something amiss when the Flock was young. I wanted to talk to somebody in the family about the Flock’s memories.

  I told Christine that I had been a multiple, rather than confusing the issue by telling her that I was currently multiple. I felt uncomfortable about the lie, but didn’t want the conversation diverted by interest in my fragmented existence. “And besides,” I rationalized, “this is probably good practice. If I ever really do become a past multiple, I’ll have to talk about the childhood as though it were something that I experienced.”

  I told Christine that I wanted to make sure that my therapeutically evoked memories of childhood were accurate. “Do you think I was abused?” I asked.

  Christine paused as that simple question helped her make sense of fears she had not been able to name twenty years before. She looked at me through tears of sadness and guilt. “Yes, I think you were abused,” she said wearily. “You were so quiet, such a frightened little rabbit, with no energy. Your childhood was beaten out of you. You were humiliated for being a child.”

  “My parents really wanted a boy, didn’t they?” I asked.

  “It was your father who wanted a boy,” she said. “I never understood why they didn’t just adopt a son.

  “I wish I had done something to help you,” Christine said, “but I was raising my own family. Is there anything I can do for you now?”

  “You did more for me than you know,” I said. “You gave me a safe place to be when I was little. And now you’re helping me believe my own memories.”

  “Tell me more about multiple personality,” Christine urged.

  “Well, it always begins with childhood trauma,” I said. My conversations with Bethany and Lillian had helped me organize a mini-lecture on the development of MPD.

  “Multiples are almost always victims of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse,” I said. “Not all abused children become multiples, but all multiples were abused or suffered other overwhelming and sustained trauma. Some of the clinical articles I’ve read suggest that kids who become multiples are in homes where there’s no one to make things better—it’s not possible for the child to have a nonconflicted relationship with either parent. Kids become multiples by being good at autohypnotism. They psychically remove themselves when life’s too rough on the outside.”

  Aunt Christine looked pained and puzzled. “I don’t understand,” she said slowly. “Who abused you sexually?”

  I hesitated, now regretting my blithe description. I looked at her and made a calculated decision to be honest about what had happened to the Flock. But I took a deep breath first. It was going to be hard saying this as though it had happened to me.

  I looked away from her before I spoke, not wanting to see her angry denial. “Aunt Christine, my father began molesting me when I was very young. He raped me when I was twelve.”

  Christine began to sob softly.

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry,” I said, moving close and putting my arm around her. “You’ve got to understand that I loved my father and love him still. He was sick, but he gave me so very much that I’m thankful for.” I realized with a start that I was paraphrasing Gordon’s words of reassurance to Rusty.

  Christine shook me away. “No,” she said, reaching for a tissue, “it’s you who don’t understand.”

  Suddenly I did. Christine was crying for her own pain, not mine. I paused, needing to hear, yet terrified of what she might say.

  “My father abused me too,” she said, “and in thirty-eight years I’ve told no one.”

  “Oh, Aunt Christine,” I murmured, “what a terrible secret to keep for so long.”

  “I was twelve too,” she continued. “My mother and sisters were out, and a horrible thunderstorm came up. I was afraid all alone in the girls’ bedroom, so I went to my father’s room and told him I was scared. He invited me into bed, and when I was not quite asleep, he put his fingers inside me. I lay still until I heard him snore. I slipped from his bed and ran to my own, terrified but knowing I could never tell.”

  I remembered reading that child abuse was a chain, linked through generations, but had never given much thought about how that applied to the Flock. Nancy had said that her stepfather had abused her, and now I had reason to wonder about Ray’s childhood as well.

  “How about your brothers and sisters?” I asked Christine. “Were they also abused by your father?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never told anyone about this. I was afraid that they wouldn’t believe me.”

  “I understand,” I said, and held the abused child buried deep within her.

  “Two more days at Nancy’s house,” I thought as I drove away from Christine’s. “How am I going to stand it?” I was furious with Nancy and longed to confront her.

  “How could you have let Ray get away with that?” I wanted to ask Nancy. “How could you not have known what was going on?” But I was afraid that Nancy would only deny it all. So I kept silent. I gave up the time with Nancy to any personality who could tolerate her.

  Unfortunately, the only personality interested in being with Nancy was Joan Frances. This personality had blocked out the talk with Aunt Christine, yet she knew vaguely that she had done something very wrong, something sure to compromise her mother’s love. She waited anxiously for her mother to discover this huge shadowy sin but heard only the same litany of how she had better start taking care of herself.

  29.

  Joan Frances returned to Cambridge feeling tremendous guilt and wanting to die. She unpacked from her trip, fingering the bottles of pills her mother had provided to help with her nervous stomach. “If I took all hundred and fifty of these pills, I would probably die,” she thought. “I’m never going to be what my mother wants.”

  Then she found the slip of paper given to her before the trip by the internist. She had the name and phone number of Dr. Barry Tate. Joan Frances thought it might be futile to talk to a psychiatrist, but then considered the finality of death. “Maybe I’ll give it one more try,” she thought. “I’ll call this psychiatrist, and I won’t lie to him. I won’t pretend. I won’t let him think I’m a multiple personality. I’ll just be honest and tell him that I want to die because I can’t please my mother. Maybe this doctor can help me become the daughter my mother wants.”

  Joan Frances called Dr. Tate and set up an appointment.

  I called Lynn. “I’m not sure how I feel about Joan Frances seeing this psychiatrist, but it’s better than an overdose,” I said. “I’m really worried about her depression.”

  “Why don’t you take the Flock to see Dr. Matthews?” Lynn asked. “He said he’d be available to you in emergencies.”

  “I don’t think that would work,” I said. “Joan Frances doesn’t trust him, because he knows we’re multiple. She still thinks that if she denies the rest of us her mother might love her. I think that if I take her to Dr. Matthews she will just feel more trapped and confused by her lack of control.”

  I pointed out that, despite Joan Frances’s depression, she was moving forward. “This may actually be a breakthrough for Joan Frances. It’s the first time that she, as a separate personality, has ever decided to seek anyone’s help. I think she feels more desperate than
ever about not being able to please Nancy. Maybe she’s really ready to hear that her survival doesn’t depend on Mother. The fact that she decided to see this doctor may make her more willing to listen.”

  “So are the rest of you going to stay in the background while Joan Frances sees the doctor?” Lynn asked. “Are you all going to try to hide your being multiple from Dr. Tate?”

  “No,” I said, after a pause, “I don’t think that will work. Joan Frances has never had enough strength to stay out on her own for very long unless her mother is around. My guess is that the doctor’s questions will make her feel so uncomfortable that she’ll lose time to another personality.”

  Then I had an idea. “Lynn, would you call Dr. Tate before we go in to see him and explain the situation? That way you can check him out. If you think Dr. Tate won’t be able to help Joan Frances with her mother obsession knowing that we’re multiple, I’ll just cancel the appointment.”

  Lynn wasn’t sure. “You know, Renee, Dr. Tate may see my call as interference.”

  “Well, if he does, then we’ll know that he’s not the kind of doctor Joan Frances should see,” I said.

  DIARY    January 24, 1984

  I had to be careful in approaching Dr. Tate. I knew nothing about him, but knew that he might well resent the implication that I was telling him what to do, particularly since I was not an M.D. Therefore, I began by telling him that I was approaching him only because Multiple Personality Disorder was relatively rare and I didn’t know if he had had experience with it. Knowing the Flock as well as I did, I might be able to help.

  Dr. Tate seemed warm and accepting. I was encouraged and described Joan Frances’s most recent trauma with her mother. I told him that, although the Flock as a whole was not suicidal, Joan Frances was feeling very depressed. The rest of the Flock would work against any of Joan Frances’s suicidal impulses, but that personality’s depression needed to be addressed.