The Flock

by Joan Frances Casey

  “But what happens when Rusty gets a little older?” Steve asked. “Won’t he become sexually active then?”

  “I told you what happened with Rusty last night,” I said angrily. “Why are you making a big thing about Rusty, when I think he’s been ‘absorbed’ by the group? Instead of being proud of my progress, you’re ignoring it.”

  “First you tell me that they’re all separate people,” Steve said, “and then, when I react to them that way, you get mad. I don’t know how I’m supposed to think or act about this.”

  “Look, you’re a single entity with a lot of parts too,” I said. “There are some parts of you that I don’t like very much, but I love you and want to marry you as an entity. I’m willing to take those less-than-desirable parts in the bargain.”

  “That’s different,” Steve said. “I’m one person, not many.”

  Steve and I had arrived at an impasse. He said he wanted to marry me and he’d probably take Jo and a few of the others thrown in, but he wanted nothing to do with Josie, Rusty, Missy, or many of the rest.

  I let Steve know that I loved the entire Flock. He took either all or nothing. I would not deny that they were all permanent parts of the entity. Lynn said that this was the “silver lining in this whole mess.”

  “How could Steve change like this?” I sobbed to Lynn. “I haven’t lied to him. I even stopped trying to hide my being a multiple from him. He was the first person besides you and Gordon that I trusted with the rest of the personalities.”

  “That’s all true,” Lynn said, “but remember how Steve has responded to your being a multiple over the years. He denied it for a long time because that was more comfortable for him.”

  “I know,” I said, “but then I really let him see and get to know some of the others. I wanted him to appreciate them the way that you, Gordon, and I have learned to. He went from one extreme to another,” I told Lynn. “At first he wouldn’t accept me as separate. Now he won’t see that we’re really all together.”

  I returned to Harvard after Thanksgiving and wondered how to cope with Steve’s refusal to understand. I knew that the Flock was in increasingly better shape. My therapeutic goal of comfort and productivity for all seemed within reach. How could I retain who I knew myself to be and, at the same time, reconcile a relationship with Steve?

  I put the question aside for my studies. I talked with Steve every week, but the problem with him was hundreds of miles away. I was always pleased to turn my attention back to papers, reading, and exams.

  But Christmas was fast approaching, and the Flock was going to Virginia to spend the holiday this year with Nancy. Steve was meeting us there.

  After Christmas, we would have only a few weeks to finish out the school term, and I had no doubt that those weeks would be rough. The Flock was always a mess after a visit with Nancy. In order to be sure that I had a lifeline when I returned, I called Dr. Matthews and scheduled an appointment for January 10.

  Steve was attentive, caring, and supportive when we were around other people that Christmas and, when we were alone, firm that he would not marry a multiple.

  Nancy sulked through the holiday. When the Flock was around, she criticized our hair, clothes, and “Ph.D. attitude.” When we left her to visit other family and friends, she complained that we were ignoring her. I couldn’t help comparing this Christmas with the last, which I had spent secure in Lynn and Gordon’s family.

  Finally, in frustration, Joan Frances turned to her. “Mom, why do you hate me?” she yelled.

  Nancy looked sincerely puzzled. “What do you mean?” she asked. “You know I love you. You know how proud I am of you and everything you do.”

  Joan Frances said no more. Her mother loved her. Of course her mother loved her. How could she have ever doubted that? She must be crazy.

  34.

  I felt depressed and disoriented by the time I returned to Cambridge. I wanted to get away from Nancy, and from Steve, and nestle into my cozy little flat, where I’d feel more centered and in control.

  Instead, the disorientation worsened upon my return. Suddenly I began losing large gaps of time. Like Jo, I was amnestic for several hours every day. I could no longer monitor what the various personalities were doing. I would find myself, four or five hours after my last awareness, surveying the work completed by some other personality.

  I was relieved that someone was keeping up with the schoolwork, but concerned that I had no direct knowledge of how the time was spent. There were no internal tapes for me to play to catch the gist of what had gone on in my absence. When I called for Kendra, Missy, or any of the others who had talked with me internally in the past, I was greeted only with silence. If it weren’t for the handiwork of my unseen companions, I would have sworn that, for the first time in memory, I was alone.

  I wasn’t alone, but I had lost touch with my Flock. And the pounding in my head and the marks on the walls indicated that Josie had been cycling out as well as the others.

  I rejoiced that I had had the foresight before my trip to Virginia to make an appointment with Dr. Matthews. I hadn’t envisaged that the Flock would be this bad, but I had certainly been right in my guess that we’d need some support. As my appointment neared, however, I began to worry. Despite the Flock’s agreement in November that everybody would cooperate in seeing Dr. Matthews, the Flock seemed seriously disorganized to me. There were no intra-Flock conferences, although I awoke each morning hoping to find a transcript that would shed some light on the current problem.

  Dr. Matthews had met Jo, Joan Frances, Missy, and Rusty during previous visits, but I had always stayed close enough to step out in a flash if someone began to panic. Now I no longer had that control.

  I finally called Dr. Matthews an hour before my appointment. “I think I might have to cancel,” I said. “I’m afraid of what is going to happen if I come to see you.” I explained as best I could about the disorganization and amnesia, and Dr. Matthews said that he thought he should talk to Lynn before I came in. By late afternoon, he had not been able to reach her, and called me back.

  “What are you afraid of?” the psychiatrist asked.

  “I just don’t have much control right now,” I said. “I don’t know what would happen if Josie came out and threw herself at a wall. I know that if I come I’ve got to figure out what’s going on, and I’m afraid that my search might bring Josie to the surface.”

  Dr. Matthews listened quietly and then said, “I won’t permit self-destructive behavior in my office.”

  “I can understand that,” I replied. “I’m not into permitting it myself. But, unfortunately, I don’t seem to have that kind of freedom of choice at the moment.

  “No one in the Flock is purposely destructive of any person or property. Josie isn’t even intentionally destructive of herself. Knocking herself out is the only way she knows how to cope, and actually she’s rarely gotten that far. She feels the panic and hits the wall once, and then another personality comes out.”

  “I won’t permit that,” Dr. Matthews said again.

  I decided that I’d better get down to specifics. “I need to know what you mean by that,” I said. “What would you do if it happened?”

  “I’d call Security,” he said.

  “No,” I said. This wouldn’t work. Security officers would restrain Josie. The physical restraint would send more panic through the system, and no other personality would be able to surface. The scene would end with the Flock strapped down and medicated. “I guess we better not come in,” I said to Dr. Matthews. “I’ll call you back when I’m in better control.”

  DIARY    January 14, 1985

  At first I didn’t take Renee’s complaints seriously about the lost time and lack of control. By then, with Unity coordinating intra-Flock conferences, I thought more in terms of the entity and “system control” than the fears of a single personality. So, even though Renee was worried, I chalked that up to one personality’s overreaction and trusted the Flock as a whole
.

  Even Renee’s description of what seemed to be occurring when Josie came out in the apartment offered evidence that the system was in control in some way. Any real damage by Josie had been avoided. The Flock continued to do what had to be done in terms of writing papers and grading students’ exams, and they were making plans for the trip home. I saw my main task as trying to reassure Renee that Gordon and I would deal with all of this when she returned home. I was confident that whatever was surfacing was manageable.

  When I got the call after Renee’s fiasco with Dr. Matthews, I realized that her fears were extreme and that it was important for her to know that I heard this. I trusted that I could work out some kind of support plan with Dr. Matthews.

  I think that Renee must have caught him off guard when she called him prior to her appointment, and he must have responded to what sounded like threats and manipulation. I even speculated briefly that forbidding Josie to come out might have the same effect that Dr. Tate’s threats had had—it might keep them going until they got home. When Dr. Matthews finally reached me, I assured him that Renee was genuinely terrified and not being manipulative.

  I told him that, once I had watched Gordon respond to Josie, I had relaxed enough to be able to keep Josie from doing any damage. “I don’t know how big you are,” I added, suddenly wondering whether this doctor was physically capable of controlling Josie, “but I found that I could handle it better when I stopped being afraid of her.”

  Later, in one of the brief lighter moments of this stressful period, Renee roared with laughter when she told me that Dr. Matthews was built like a football player. He himself had not responded to my implied question about his physical capacity, saying only that he thought he could manage on his own and that he would tell Renee to come in if she called again. Unfortunately, Renee was by then too untrusting of both herself and the doctor to call.

  For the next couple of days, I talked to Renee two or three times a day, something I had not found necessary in all the time she had been away at school. I began to wonder if I had been wrong in believing that we could preserve the Flock’s functionality throughout the whole treatment process. I knew that many multiples, including Sybil, had become nonfunctional. I also knew that often a total loss of the ability to function had occurred as the multiple drew close to integration. More and more cooperation and total group decision-making had seemed to be occurring in the Flock. Was this the other side of the coin—the total entity giving in to panic?

  —

  SUNDAY NIGHT, ONLY TWO days before I was to fly to Chicago for semester break, I found myself curled on the sofa, phone clutched in my hand. Lynn was on the other end of the line, talking in soothing tones. She had been talking to Jo. Loathing my amnesia and helplessness, I listened while she filled me in. Then I realized that I felt terrified, but could find no reason for my terror. Quivering, I tried to respond to Lynn’s attempts to help me relax and lost time again.

  Missy took over then, and Lynn finally found someone in the Flock who could explain the current problems. “It’s because of the girl who wants her mommy to love her,” Missy said. “She knows now that her mommy won’t love her no matter what. She could be the best girl in the whole world and her mommy still won’t love her. She says Mommy thinks she’s crazy, so now she’s just going to be crazy.”

  Joan Frances, the only personality who still denied the existence of the other personalities, was the cause of the Flock’s disorganization. During the recent trip, she had finally given up on ever being able to please her mother. And, typically, Joan Frances had accepted the problem as her own. “It’s me,” she decided, “I’m all wrong. My mother has always loved and accepted me. I must be crazy.” Rather than resorting to suicidal gestures, this time she chose insanity.

  Insanity was worse than death, both for Joan Frances and for her mother. A daughter who was a suicide could be forgotten. A daughter who was insane could not be ignored.

  Missy didn’t have the vocabulary to describe Joan Frances’s importance except by analogy. “That girl held Rusty and Renee and Jo and all the other girls in her hand like a puzzle, then she threw them all down. All the pieces fell in different places.”

  “But, Missy, where’s Unity?” Lynn asked.

  “Oh, that Unity girl is the glue,” Missy said. “There’s nothing to stick together now.”

  “No wonder you all are feeling scattered,” Lynn said. “You go back inside now, and let me see if I can help Renee.”

  I listened while Lynn explained Missy’s analogy. “We’ll get the pieces back together when you are home,” she promised.

  Now I understood my feelings of being alone and had a reason for the unexplained terror. Joan Frances had become psychotic. She experienced terrifying hallucinations—blood dripped through cracks in the plaster walls; spiders crawled from people’s mouths when they spoke. No other personality experienced her hallucinations directly, but her fear oozed throughout the system. The terror and confusion didn’t stop, but I could make some sense of it. Now I could hold on.

  The next morning, as I worked to finish grading my students’ papers, I felt too shaky to concentrate. I finally set aside the grading to get a handle on the situation. I felt out of sync with reality. Some incipient mental flashing affected me like an internal strobe light. I felt a step ahead of my thoughts, a step behind the world outside my head. Very, very frightened, I called Lynn.

  She was with a patient, but it made me feel a little better just to know that she would call back. While I waited, I made a list of what I had to do before leaving Harvard for the term. Time seemed to be running out. Functioning was becoming more difficult. I prioritized my tasks in case I couldn’t make it through the last day and a half. First priority was to finish grading my students’ work. If I missed my own exams, the Flock would suffer, and I was prepared for that. But my students wouldn’t suffer because of the Flock’s problems.

  Lynn called back. I explained the new symptoms and asked her the question that had been forming since the night before. “Am I experiencing a psychotic break?” Lynn agreed that some of my experiences seemed psychotic, but my awareness that I was experiencing them didn’t fit in with psychosis. I hung up, comforted by the irony that, since I was aware that my perceptions were crazy, I wasn’t as crazy as I thought. I was determined to make it.

  —

  LYNN MET ME AT the airport and drove me back to her house. I had done it—not only made it through the work for my students, but also finished my own exams. I was safe and felt less distracted by the Flock’s disorganization. Rather than simply letting go, I struggled to get from Lynn the reassurance that I seemed to need every trip home. Yes, Lynn and Gordon were willing to see me through the crisis. Yes, they’d help me find a way to patch things up so that I could return to school.

  That left only Steve to fret about. I had delayed telling him how bad things were with the Flock because the crazier we seemed, the less he’d want to marry me. Finally, the night before I flew home, I called Steve and told him about the disorganization. As afraid as I was of losing him, I wasn’t in any shape to pretend to be what he wanted me to be. Steve offered support and understanding.

  Nevertheless, after I had been at Lynn’s for a couple of hours, Steve called. “I’ve been calling you at home all morning,” he said, sounding a little wounded.

  “Steve, I’ve been with Lynn since I got here. I told you that things are really bad right now.”

  “You mean you haven’t been home yet?” he asked, the anger and hurt apparent in his voice. “I cleaned the house and even baked a pie. I thought you’d like to offer Lynn something to eat when she brought you home from the airport.”

  I hung up the phone, feeling depressed and misunderstood. “I’m going through hell,” I cried, “and Steve wants me to be thankful that he baked a pie.”

  Lynn tried to explain that denial had always been Steve’s defense, and I got more frustrated. Why didn’t anyone hear me? Steve didn’t hear me when I
told him how bad things were. Lynn didn’t hear me when I told her that I wanted support for me, not excuses for him.

  I knew I was being irrational, but couldn’t contain my frustration. Nobody understood. I had to get out of there.

  Lynn was talking on the phone with Steve as I picked up my suitcase and headed for the door. “I’m not going after her,” she said.

  35.

  DIARY    January 18, 1985

  After Missy told me what was happening with the Flock during that late-night call from Cambridge, I knew I had to talk with Joan Frances. If she had truly given up on her pathological notion of what it would mean to be acceptable to her mother, she might finally be able and willing to listen to me. I knew, even if the Flock didn’t, that the unresolved guilt produced through incest precluded any real relationship with Nancy. The entity had to accept herself as a survivor of her father’s abuse before she could deal with her mother in a nonconflicted way.

  I wasn’t too worried about the symptoms Renee described. I knew her well enough to know that she would worry about loss of control even if someone else in the Flock was clearly taking care of things. I also knew that, though disorganized, the Flock was not dysfunctional. The student papers did get graded; the Flock’s exams were written.

  I thought that Renee agreed with me about what needed to be done, and I took the day off from work to meet them at the airport. I was eager for this opportunity to do some intensive work with Joan Frances.

  But Renee was terrified. She didn’t show that terror openly, but reacted to her fears by complaining about Steve’s lack of understanding and a lack of support from me. After a few hours of being what I thought was very supportive, I lost patience and didn’t try to stop her when she walked out the door.