by Naomi Judd
Still, the fans demanded a reunion of the Judds. At their request, Wynonna and I paired up for a North American tour in 2000, called “The Power to Change” tour. The response was overwhelming and the enthusiasm of the sold-out crowds was electrifying.
Then, in 2010, we came together for another widely anticipated tour. The Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) heard about our plans and requested the opportunity to film our “Encore” tour, both behind the scenes and onstage. The resulting footage would be a reality show for the launch of the inaugural season of Oprah’s new network.
My life was filled with interesting people, different scenery, new things to learn, and exhilarating events. I had plenty of reasons to jump out of bed every morning. Never did I expect that only months after the Encore tour ended I would feel I had every reason to jump off a bridge to end my tortured existence.
How could that be possible? I’ve asked myself that question countless times. I had always been an eternal optimist. I was thought of as the caring, wise one with the sympathetic ear, whom everyone else came to for encouragement and answers. Who had time to be depressed? But depression had time for me, stole time from me.
This book is the story of two and a half years of my life, during which I went through the hell of mental illness. It isn’t just about a victorious recovery, but about a wary and humble gratitude for persevering through thirty terrifying months and regaining hope and a purpose for living once more. It’s the account of hitting rock bottom and rising again to be thankful for taking my next breath, for the gift of a clear thought, for wresting from a nightmare a way to find joy in each day.
You might question how someone in my situation, with my financial and educational resources, could have languished for two and a half years without a resolution to my depression and anxiety. Before 2011, I would have asked the same question.
Isn’t America a medically and technically advanced country, where almost everything can be treated? This may be true for many of our physical illnesses, but in the United States, treatment for mental illness lags far behind the advancements made in other countries. According to Dr. Allen Frances, professor emeritus and former chairman of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University, “For people with severe mental illness, there has never been a time and a place worse than now in the United States.” (New York Times, October 20, 2015.)
I learned the hard way that mental health issues cover a wide scope of disorders and can be hard to diagnose. No one can see or easily pinpoint the problem because it’s all in the mind. Unlike a broken arm, there’s nothing to detect in an X-ray. There are 100 billion neurons in the human brain. Christof Koch, the world-renowned neuroscientist who is the chief scientific officer at the renowned Allen Institute in Seattle, has described the brain as “the most complex object in the universe.”
Adding to the difficulty, many types of anxiety and depression have been identified. Dr. Daniel Amen, a double-board-certified psychiatrist and neuroscientist, names seven:
1. Pure anxiety
2. Pure depression
3. Mixed anxiety and depression: This is the case for 75 percent of people who suffer.
4. Overfocused anxiety and depression: when you get stuck on negative thoughts or behavior
5. Unfocused anxiety and depression: low energy, brain fog, lack of attention span
6. Cyclic anxiety and depression: mild to serious mood swings
7. Temporal lobe anxiety and depression: result of a head injury or seizures
Psychiatrists now realize that depression and anxiety are more commonly found together than separately. Only about one-third of sufferers are treated for both.
In my case, I was unaware that I had post-traumatic stress disorder from pathological situations and issues passed down through generations along with the traumatic events of my own life. I felt humiliated and emotionally weak and I deluded myself that I could pull out of it alone because I’ve always been such a strong-willed woman. I denied the problem and it lingered until it became unbearable. Finally, others forced me to get help. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in a good place, emotionally or mentally, to choose the best treatment for myself.
The stigma around mental illness comes with the dangerous and erroneous message that we are weak in character and that we should be able to “snap out of it.” Wrong! It’s a brain disease. Depression and panic attacks are not signs of weakness. The chemical imbalance in the brain is very real and it takes both understanding and courage to live with it until a trained psychiatrist can figure out a course of treatment. The worst thing you can say to a depressed patient is “Just snap out of it!”
Because I survived, I feel a responsibility to share what brought me hope and what’s kept me alive. What carried me toward recovery was the relatively recent discovery by geneticists like Dr. Francis Collins and neuroscientists that only one-third of your genes are actually inherited from your family of origin. The good news is that you can alter about two-thirds of your genes by making good choices, even if you were born into a long line of pathological, depressed, mentally ill, and even suicidal family members, like I was.
I certainly wasn’t alone in my despair. Twenty million people in the United States suffer from one of the forms of depression (350 million worldwide), and two-thirds of us wait too long to seek help. Forty million of us have legitimate anxiety disorders that can shatter our peace of mind. Suicides outnumber homicides every single year. In June 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that suicides among middle-aged people have gone up nearly 50 percent since 1999. Roughly twenty of our brave veterans commit suicide every day. For women over age sixty, the rate rose by 60 percent. With the divorce rate between 40 and 50 percent, nearly nine million people being displaced by downsizing and layoffs (especially for those over age fifty), and the social isolation created by our transient, fractured society, there are millions of people who feel “dumped.” Baby boomers, who number over 76 million, are the largest demographic in the United States and also the most depressed age group. Antidepressants are the third most common medication taken by Americans, according to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, including 23 percent of women over age forty.
At the same time, our life expectancy in the United States has risen to an all-time high. What are we to do with the last twenty or thirty years of our lives? Who can serve as examples of living with purpose and happiness, if so few have ever lived as long as many of us likely will? When the children are grown and gone, the source of your livelihood has come to an end, and the busyness of a daily full schedule has diminished, what is left to give you a sense of purpose?
I wasn’t prepared for this new chapter in my life. It opened the gateway to severe loneliness, depression, and anxiety. I had never identified or processed the hidden trauma of my past, the pathology of my family of origin, and it moved into my open calendar to demand my full attention every agonizing day and night.
As you will read in this book, I have had to excavate long-buried feelings about my family ties. Because I grew up in a household where the mottos were “That’s just the way it is” and “Don’t talk about it,” anger and resentment had a lifelong grip on me that I wasn’t fully able to accept until I was willing to open up and get treatment for my depression and anxiety.
I was stunned by how many of my adult reactions were in response to my early programming by my parents and older relatives. As a typical firstborn child, trying to satisfy my relatives’ expectations and create happiness for them became my daily and ultimately my lifetime goal. I set unreasonable benchmarks of perfection for myself. Any dip below those standards created another layer of unresolved guilt.
I know that our perceptions are always subjective and that what is true for one may not be at all true for another. Each of us has a perception of how another person treats us. That person has their perception of us, as well. The two realities are rarely the same. Although my siblings were born of the same parents an
d raised in the same household, we have very different perceptions of reality and, as a result, have become very different adults.
However, to help myself heal I had to accept that my feelings were true for me. I had always pushed my negative feelings far down in my psyche and labeled them as odd or self-indulgent because I was told, as a child, that they were. I know there are reasons each of us becomes who we are and why we do what we do. By the time a child is three years old her self-image is formed.
My own daughters have each spoken publicly and written about how their childhood experiences and growing up with me as their mother had both a positive and a negative effect on the adults they have become. The good memories they have of the three of us make me smile. For any sad or angry memory they have, I can truthfully declare, “If I had known better, I would have done better.” I think that is true of most people, but not all. For example, people with a narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder may know better, but are often too self-absorbed to be able to do better.
The unarguable fact is that we are responsible for our actions and our reactions, too. You can be inactive, reactive, or proactive. As an adult, understanding this helped me to uncover and directly face what I experienced as a child. There were so many buried feelings that I couldn’t develop healthy emotions. It’s not my intention to incriminate my relatives. What I want is to identify, accept, and heal my own long-held pain from these unprocessed experiences. For me, it’s a matter of life and death.
Long before recorded history, storytelling was the way one generation passed along news, gossip, insight, and humor. Often the stories carried hard-earned wisdom, meant to spare the next generation the heartache the elders had been through. The stories also connect us to the range of human experience.
I am giving you my unvarnished story, to encourage you to look at every past and current aspect of who you are today, whether you suffer depression or simply want to lead a more fulfilling life. I hope my story will encourage you to begin your own voyage of self-discovery leading to wholeness of body, mind and spirit.
Change is the true nature of this world. Change will happen for all of us. We can find our way out of self-punishment, anger, and depression. My case is extreme, so if I can make lifesaving changes, I know you can, too.
Chapter 1
Shhh… Don’t Tell a Soul
It’s not a bad dream or even a horror movie nightmare, though it has become the most harrowing aspect of what is now my constant personal torment.
It’s three in the morning and I go from a deep sleep to standing bolt upright on my bed, the covers draped around my feet like the Statue of Liberty, but I am not free. I am imprisoned in my body; my mind has taken me hostage in ways that are unbelievably terrifying. I reach up to my throat, expecting to find a pair of hands belonging to an intruder who is out to kill me with a grip that is slowly closing down on my windpipe. I am hyperventilating. My heart is beating so rapidly that my eardrums are throbbing. I am in danger, but I don’t know the reason why. My vision blurs. The room spins. My face, neck, chest, and palms are covered with sweat.
My terror, which seems to send lightning bolts of energy through our perfectly quiet bedroom, awakens my husband abruptly. My dog Bijou, who has been snuggled next to me, jumps from the bed yelping wildly, which brings the other two dogs, Maudie and Lulu, racing into the room. All three dogs are in protective mode, looking for a dangerous intruder. They sniff at the doors and scamper down the hallways, fur on their backs raised, ready to attack.
The intruder is here in the panic, which is rising up with a vicious force inside me, breaking through six decades of suppression. The intruder has had enough of living in a stifled memory far below my optimistic consciousness and is here to follow through with what he started. He’s here for the lonely toddler who never trusted that she could tell anyone her truth, not even her mother. He has come for Naomi Ellen Judd, the sweet Appalachian child, and he’s not going away this time, no matter how hard I’ve tried to forget about what happened long before my first day of kindergarten.
I am no longer Naomi Judd, the mother of two daughters, the mom half of the Judds, the most documented act and successful singing duo in the history of country music. I haven’t yet won a Grammy or Country Music Association award or had platinum albums and number one singles. I haven’t had sold out concerts at the London Palladium, Madison Square Garden, or the Houston Astrodome. I’m no longer married to my life partner and true love of thirty-seven years, gospel singer and former backup singer for Elvis Presley, Larry Strickland. I’m not in the warm, comfortable bed we share in our beautiful home in the lush countryside of Franklin, Tennessee.
No, I have been emotionally transported back, to my very first memory, as a toddler, in my dreary, gray, and somber hometown of Ashland, Kentucky.
The eruptive memory of this unwelcome life-altering experience has overtaken my mind, in the much the same way the Ohio River can rise and overflow into Ashland with muddy swirling water whenever there is a significant storm. Positioned on the border of West Virginia and Ohio, Ashland often suffers severe weather that lingers, brought to a standstill between the Appalachian Mountains. During my childhood, the sun also had to compete with the layer of fine black particles that always settled to the ground after hanging in the damp air.
Three major industrial plants based their production in Ashland, taking advantage of the fierce Ohio River. The majority of Ashland men worked at one of these plants, many spending their workdays filling large ovens with tons of coal, baking it into the fuel called coke. As a result, the community had to live with heavy pollutants and a constant noxious odor. A layer of black soot, which coated our windowsills and most likely our lungs, was ever-present. Even sitting on a park bench was out of the question, unless you took the time to wipe off the grime.
I learned at a young age to be a polite child with a sweet disposition, despite the dark secret that was crushing my sense of safety.
Grandmommy Judd forced me to stand next to the man who had molested me months before this photo. I am, obviously, terrified of Uncle Charlie.
In the 1950s, doctors were still unaware of the causes of lung cancer and other diseases toxins create in the body. Living with this pollution was just the way things were. For me, my hometown was not only a place of darkened skies and a stagnant stench; it was also a sealed vault of fetid family secrets.
On this winter night in Franklin, Tennessee, decades after I left Ashland, my subconscious has figured out the combination to unlock the vault and drag the heavy door open. The secrets have escaped to destroy my sleep. They play across my mind’s eye like a virtual reality video game. It feels so real that I could reach out and touch it. My mind had been proficient at keeping the shameful secrets suppressed, so why are they emerging now as a nocturnal panic attack, surfacing from my slumbering subconscious as if past events were happening in my own bedroom? I can hear the whisper, “Shhh… don’t tell a soul.”
I am three and a half years old and running a high fever. My small toddler body is aflame with fire-red chicken pox. My pregnant mother has deposited me with her Judd in-laws to prevent me from infecting my two-year-old brother, Brian, at home. She can’t stand her in-laws or anyone on Daddy’s side of the family, something I am well aware of. However, they live only two blocks away and are the only nearby solution to her problem, me. I have been sent to stay with Grandmommy Judd in my flannel nightgown, which is torture against my feverish, itchy skin. Grandmommy sternly warns me to not scratch as she points the way to the tall feather bed in the small attic room at the end of squeaky, wood-planked hallway, and instructs me to stay in it. I have to figure out a way to climb in, by myself, though the mattress top is at my eye level.
I grab the iron bedpost and dig my toes into the edge of the frame until I boost myself high enough to get my knees on top of the mattress. I crawl to the center and under the covers. I rest my head on a fat feather pillow and listen to the domestic sounds
coming from the house. I can tell that my four eccentric adult aunts, all of whom still live with Grandmommy and Granddaddy, are bustling about doing their chores. I feel like my face is burning, yet I’m shivering at the same time. I’m tempted to scratch the red bumps that have banished me to my grandmother’s bed, alone and sick, but I won’t. I’m already an exceptionally well-behaved child, doing whatever she’s told, searching for a sign of approval.
While everyone is wrapped up in housework, I am feeling abandoned and restless with fever. Then, I hear the squeak of the floorboards in the hallway. I have a trace of hope that it’s Mother, coming back to get me. I want her to comfort me, to lift me up in her arms, and take me home. But I know that is highly unlikely. She hasn’t held me on her lap since the day I learned to walk. She never reads me bedtime stories or tucks me in. Everything my mother does for me is done with practicality. The only time she touches me is to run a brush through my wavy hair in the morning, tugging at the tangles, or to yank up the zipper of my jacket before she shoos me outside.
I know it’s not Mother coming to see me. Instead, I start to imagine that the person coming down the hallway will be Daddy. He’s heard that I’m sick and has come to take me home. I want the footsteps to be Daddy’s work boots. I always felt my Daddy loved me. But I know he is working at his small gas station and it would be too much for him to close his business, our livelihood, to look in on a lonely, sick little girl.
