Lynn watched me thoughtfully.
As I opened my mouth to speak, “I” stepped out of the Renee personality, turned, and gathered them all protectively in my arms. I then spoke in a single voice that echoed every one.
“I am Josie,” I said, “banging my head against the wall. It is an expression of my fear, my frustration, my anger. Up until now, that was the only way those feelings could be expressed.”
“You need to experiment with different ways of expressing anger,” Steve said.
“I am Kendra, able to stand up for myself. Those freedoms used to be expressed through a separate personality because I was too confused by what other people wanted to have the energy to figure out what I might want. I didn’t realize that my needs were important.
“I am Rusty, sailing the boat. It is an enjoyment, a feeling of accomplishment, that I, as an entity, enjoy. That part of me has been male because sometimes it wasn’t safe to be a girl. A great deal of strength and confidence grew and stayed safe within the Rusty personality.
“I’ve spent a great deal of my life keeping my strengths separate because the Flock had been so hurt.” I paused. That wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t them; it was me. “The strengths were held separately,” I said, “because I was hurt. I was abused when I was a child.”
“That’s right, that’s right!” Steve said excitedly. “You, you, were abused, and you are finally able to acknowledge that!”
Lynn cautioned, “Just listen. There’s more she wants to say.”
“I am Missy too,” I continued. “It took a while for the Missy part of me to work through all her hurt and feel safe. But now, finally, that’s a fulfilled, though vulnerable, part of me. I’ve held a lot of artistic ability there, a lot of fragile creativity. I guess that doesn’t have to be shielded any longer.
“And I’m Jo as well, finding joy in my analytic abilities and scholarly work. And I’m Joan Frances, still learning how to deal with Mother.” Suddenly I felt too exhausted to keep speaking. There was too much happening inside. They touched and turned and acknowledged until the gestures of support gathered into a single solid hug.
They were me. All of the personalities of the past were now the many aspects of a brand-new me.
I turned back to Steve wearily, but with a faint cockiness. “Are all of your problems solved now?” I knew that he needed to hear his response.
“They have been greatly alleviated,” Steve answered cautiously.
“So,” I asked, “where does that put us in terms of marriage?”
“I think it needs time,” Steve said. “Take it easy. Let’s see where you go from here.”
“How do you feel now?” Lynn asked.
“About that?” I asked, gesturing toward Steve. I just shook my head. I had nothing to say.
Lynn turned to Steve. “What do you think about your response?”
“What I just said makes it look as though there is still one more hurdle to jump. That’s not what I’m implying.”
I stood up and walked from the room. I needed to be alone for a while, away from Steve, who had prodded me into that final step. I even needed to be away from Lynn, who had lovingly nurtured all of the parts of the Flock so that I’d have the strength to become one. I needed to be alone with me, the single, whole me that existed for the first time since infancy.
Who was I now? I was still aware of internal separations, but the external voice, expression, decision, action, was single, reflective of all of me.
I was the Flock, with all of the personalities, flying in formation in some tightly woven instinct to be one. A group mind with a single thought, moving toward a shared destiny.
I was the thought, the voice of all who were, of all that I could be. Evolving, growing. A person.
I returned to Lynn, my eyes filled with tears, no words sufficient to express my love for her or my love for me. “Hello, Whole Self,” Lynn said. “Welcome.”
With the same wonderful sense of understatement that Lynn used as she allowed me to be an emotional infant, as she mothered me through my stormy, long-overdue adolescence, and that had allowed all of the different parts of me the expression needed to heal, Lynn added, “What you have done, what you have been through, is all worth it, sweetie. Don’t ever think otherwise.”
37.
DIARY July 1985
Six months have passed since the Flock began to integrate. I’m still getting used to calling her Joan. Although many of the personalities had names that were close—Jo, Josie, Joan Frances—“Joan” is the name that she says she likes the best. The integration is unfolding like a flower. Joan calls what happened those January evenings the start of her “synthesis” and says that she’s “not-still-multiple/not-yet-single.” She is doing this in her own way. She wrote to me about the experience.
I can’t pretend that I suddenly “became One” on January 23. I couldn’t deny the separate parts of me. But for the first time I couldn’t deny the unity. “I” am all of them and more. That night, for the first time, I spoke for everyone. I was the external voice for the internal multitude. From that moment on, all of the personalities had all of the time, all of the time.
I felt internal nudges who would warn or urge. I’d hear, “Don’t get in over your head,” as I’d begin to agree to take on another project. Or when I began to feel overwhelmed by work, I’d hear, “Time to get out of here and go for a walk.” All of the personalities offered suggestions, made demands, and I felt only a need to accommodate. I felt “well rounded” but not integrated. After a month or so, I decided not to worry about what to call my present existence. Is this integration? I still wasn’t sure. What was going on felt good, but I was still afraid that, if I called myself integrated, parts of me would die.
I got busy with school, and then I realized that I heard my internal voices less and less. Living days, weeks, and months in my synthesized state wore down the distinctions between the parts. All of the interests, skills, and resources had been preserved. I certainly feel the unique traits of each personality, but amplified and polished by the resources of every other one.
Now I guess I’m close to being fully integrated, but I can’t say that without hesitation. I feel as though I can only hold it together if I don’t worry too much about its falling apart.
I talked with Joan often on the phone during her first “integrated” semester at Harvard. I noticed during that time that her voice became richer and truly lovely, reflecting the range of timbre and tone of the separate personalities. But even with that, I have to admit I was startled by how she looked after that six-month absence.
When I look at the new postsynthesis Joan, I feel some of the marvel I felt in seeing my first grandchild, Hilary, as a newborn. I was spellbound by the many people I saw reflected in Hilary’s being. I saw her parents, Neal and Marianne, but I saw aunts and uncles and great-grandparents as well. Not knowing Hilary as her own person, I loved her first because of all of those I saw in her.
I feel as though I hardly know Joan, as her own integrated being, but I see the Flock in her. I see Rusty’s shrug of shoulders, Missy’s grin. I watch Jo’s forehead wrinkle in concentration and watch Renee’s eyes sparkle as Joan reaches some conclusion or prepares to tease.
I respect Joan’s need to hedge a bit about her state, but I guess I’d be surprised to see her separate out again. I’m also surprised at how comfortable I am with seeing “only” Joan. I don’t miss the separate personalities. Joan’s right. In some miraculous way, they are all there.
JANUARY 1986
A year later, Joan finally calls herself integrated. She’s solid and whole, and no less productive. She seems to like my teasing her about her fears of what she’d lose through integration, and I know she takes pride in her accomplishments. She’s finishing her dissertation, and is quite a sailor.
I like seeing the change in her. She’s working as hard as she ever did, but seems less compulsive. I brought this up last week, during a walk, and she ref
lected for a moment on my observation. She told me that she worked now from a basis of joy rather than fear. Fear, Joan said, is the only thing she has lost through integration.
“I was always afraid before,” she said. “I was afraid of not being able to hide the disorder, afraid of something triggering inappropriate behavior. I was afraid that I couldn’t control the personalities, but even more afraid that I couldn’t handle my own feelings. My life was ruled by the fear that someday I’d get so depressed or so dysfunctional that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back. Now I’m not scared. I get sad, depressed, but even in my worst moments I trust that life will get better. I trust myself.”
Not much has changed between Joan and Steve. She shares his house, but it seems to me that they are beginning to separate. They continue to be a couple socially, but seem less dependent on each other. Joan is building strength as an individual, and Steve seems willing to let her go.
JULY 1986
Joan has graduated from Harvard and is teaching and consulting part-time here in Chicago. She gets consistently excellent feedback, but I can tell that she’s restless. She wants a full-time, tenure-track position as an assistant professor, and she’s told me that she’s purposefully looking for a job outside Illinois. Joan has a three-month consulting job lined up in D.C. beginning in January, and she says that she expects to leave Chicago permanently for the start of the 1987–88 school year.
Joan says that she’s not willing to stay with Steve unless he’ll marry her, and he won’t. I think that they both have made the right decision. Joan needs to get away and be her independent whole self for the first time in her life. Marrying Steve would just be a way of putting off her need to leave until she felt stronger. I’m sure that there is no future for a marriage between the two of them.
JANUARY 1987
Joan is now in Washington. I can tell from her letters and phone calls that she feels good about her work and integration. She’s negotiating for a professorship at a college in the Southwest that will begin in the fall.
I am moving in new directions as well. When I started treating Joan, I was alone. Now I’m part of a national network of clinicians called the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality Disorder. The group does far more than “study” MPD, as I discovered when I attended the professional conference last fall. We share ideas for treatment with one another, and that’s certainly good for my patients. I’ve got three multiples on my caseload now, and one more that I suspect is multiple. I take one of them home occasionally, but everyone else is being treated in the office. Gordon continues to work with me as cotherapist. Reparenting is a treatment style that can happen successfully in the office as well as out. The essential factor is that Gordon and I use our relationships with the multiples as models for how the personalities ought to parent and love one another. I will never regret “adopting” Joan as my sixth child, but I am pleased to find that I can give multiples what they need without leaving the office.
38.
No real life has a happily-ever-after. I was integrated, but far from “healthy.” Leaving Steve because the relationship had no future was the last good decision I made about partnerships for years.
I left the safety of Steve and found that I was vulnerable to men who were seeking a victim. First Gary, then Sam, then Adam, each more dangerous than the last, sensed the abused child waiting to be hurt again.
Gary was a drug addict—recovered, he claimed. It took me almost a year to realize that he was still using drugs and using my money to support his habit and his mistress.
“A con man,” I thought. “Anyone could have been taken in.”
But then there was Sam. I let Sam move into my house, and he violated my soul. Nothing was safe from his prying hands and accusations. Once, while I was away on a business trip, he discovered and read the Flock journals and correspondence that I had hidden away in a back closet. He questioned colleagues about my sexual history and recent involvements. He revealed to some of my students that I had been a multiple.
I couldn’t tell him to leave. Instead, I became obsessed with convincing him that I wasn’t the bitch, the whore, that he claimed me to be.
I was determined to be sexually normal, never wondering if his demands that I feed his sadistic fantasies constituted normality. He told me that I was lucky to have him, and I believed him. He told me that he would destroy every personal and professional relationship of mine if I dared to extricate myself from the relationship. He made good on his threat.
I whirled out of Sam’s mayhem into Adam’s arms. Adam beat me. A victim of childhood abuse and a survivor of a bad marriage, he said that I was his only hope. We maintained separate homes, but we often had dinner and spent the evening together at his apartment. About once a week, those evenings became nightmares.
Adam liked that I came to his house, made him dinner, and listened to his stories of the day. He praised my deep compassion, my sensitivity to the pain of his past.
Adam didn’t like that I left to return to my own house at night. As the time came closer for me to leave, sometimes he’d drink, call me by his ex-wife’s name, and taunt me.
“You think you’re so smart, don’t you?” he’d ask. “I’ll slap that Harvard smugness off your face.”
My protests that he was smart, that being a stockbroker required a kind of intelligence that I certainly didn’t have, failed to calm him. I told him that my going to Harvard was a matter of luck, not brains, and he became infuriated with what he called my false humility.
Again and again, I saw the scene develop but could find no way to escape. No matter what I said, no matter how I tried to withdraw, Adam would grow more angry. “You think you’re so clever,” he’d say, “you think you’re so sly.” I silently countered that if that were true I would have found a way to leave before this began.
When I made my first move toward the door, he’d attack. Sometimes a slap, other times a push, or he’d hold me and laugh as I struggled to get away. Finally, defeated, as I huddled hurt and crying, Adam would apologize, begging me to give him another chance: he had interpreted my departure as rejection, but he was getting over it. I felt a certain obligation to tolerate his transference. I was sure that he’d get better. After all, I had.
Then, one night, I returned home after midnight and stared in the mirror at my black eye and bruised cheek, too weary to think of how I would explain it to my students and colleagues. “This is supposed to be better than being a multiple?” I wondered in fury. I called Lynn.
I winced as the phone brushed my cheek and demanded to know why she had taken my defense away from me. “Why did I survive all of that for this?” I asked. I finally told her the details of my tumultuous love affairs. I had hidden much of it from her for the year and a half I had lived away from Chicago, not wanting her disapproval to compound my guilt.
Lynn listened sympathetically. “Oh, sweetie, I wish I had known. I was being so careful not to ask, wanting you to feel that you had a right to an adult life. I was so careful not to invade your privacy.”
Anger spent, I felt safe. Lynn would help me figure it out.
“Do you want the silver lining?” Lynn asked tentatively.
My anxiety exploded into laughter. Lynn would point out the “silver lining” in a nuclear explosion. “What?” I asked.
“You’re still in one piece.”
“That’s certainly true,” I said. “There were times when Adam was beating me that I wished I could lose time, but I didn’t.
“I’m going to work this through,” I added, “but I need help.”
“Yes, my dear,” Lynn replied, “you have my permission to do therapy without me, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
A year more of psychotherapy—traditional treatment this time—and I found security in my sense of self. The doctor helped me see my part in these disastrous relationships. I found abusers and provoked them, baiting them with sarcasm, intuitively finding their weak spots, making my
self a deserving victim.
Now I didn’t need to provoke abuse, nor did I need to abuse in return. I allowed myself to let go of the past and for a time concentrated on making friends rather than latching on to lovers. This psychiatrist hadn’t had much experience with multiples, but he was intrigued with what I had worked through.
He shook his head in amazement as he read old journal entries that I shared with him, and had long telephone conversations with Lynn. “More people should know your story,” he said to us both, “and if you write it out, Joan, you might have a better sense of where you are now.
“And give yourself some time, Joan,” he counseled. “You have the social guile of a little girl—and a little girl who’s had a rough time, at that. You don’t need to rush into a relationship. You’ll build your own nest once you’ve had a chance to grow up yourself. You’re just beginning to stretch your wings.”
Then, in finding myself, I found the strength to face my mother. I had rehearsed my speech to her for months, but had trouble saying the words as we sat together late one night at her dining-room table. “He raped me, Mom,” I said. “For years he molested me, and then he raped me.”
I held back my tears, steeling myself for her angry denial. And I watched in wonder as a woman accepted a truth that she had carried unseen for years.
“It makes sense,” she finally said, and then pulled out of her own flood of memories to offer me the comfort I so desperately sought.
“You have to understand that I didn’t know,” she said. “I knew that your father had sexual problems, but I never suspected that he hurt you.”
No more about my father’s incest was ever discussed between the two of us. No more needed to be. My mother put my need for affirmation ahead of the comfort she could have found through denial. I watched the struggle in her face that concluded in her expression of love and acceptance of me. For the first time, she knew me. For the first time, I could see her clearly, without the fog of anger and guilt. Our mutual honesty formed the basis for a relationship.
The Flock Page 34
