I grew up in the mental health system when Prozac was the new craze. Prozac was the second drug I took and within three years there was the new field of psychopharmacology. By that time, getting the right combo became quite the rave. What that meant there was little to no exploration of the role of trauma in my life. Instead of learning about elements of trauma that were related to the eating disorder that threatened my life, I was diagnosed with a personality disorder and told not to research it because it would only make it worse.

My therapist would repeat to me that the only way to deal with a personality disorder was in the context of a psychodynamic relationship. She didn’t let on that she didn’t think I was college material even though my GPA was a 3.9. She told my parents. They concealed this from me.

I stuck with this psychologist for seven years. It was true I didn’t want to look back at my life growing up with privilege. I also didn’t get the feeling that it was mature to blame my parents for the shameful eating disorder that left me dwelling in the inner-city and without a sense of support. My suffering was nurtured in psychotherapy by a rolling of the eyes and waiting for the impact of the next drug combination.

A History of Class Conflict:

I first started to notice not enjoying being around other people in fourth grade. It started by being bullied and teased by my peers for not wearing the latest fashions that my parents refused to buy. For some reason I dealt with this by fighting back and getting nerdier. My parents sought therapy for me. Perhaps, they were embarrassed by hearing about my social problems from their other friends on the private school faculty.

Back then, I could not understand why I stood out so much. My parents and shrink would tell me that my superego was too dominant. The shrink would get my Mom to let me buy more fashionable clothing.

Meanwhile, in the summers I found that I, in fact, did fit in with the welfare family who rented the downstairs of the Lodge, our vacation home in a rugged boon town in the Adirondacks. My family once owned a lumber company and my father inherited many old buildings which we used to vacation and rent out. With the welfare family living downstairs for three summers, I felt totally accepted. I was too innocent to realize that their lives depended on keeping me happy. We didn’t need to bathe and could be wild and have fun.

My welfare brothers would talk about hunting frogs with bb guns. The frogs wouldn’t die. Bbs would lodge themselves under the frog’s thick skin. They could shoot them all day. They loved to hunt frogs all day. One had so many bbs in it, it just floated in the water with a stunned look on its face.

One morning I woke up screaming from terrors. Pigs were being slaughtered in my dreams. My welfare brothers would laugh at me. They would tell me I was screaming, “Don’t you do that . . . Don’t you do that . . . Ah . . . AAAhhhh!” Then, we would go to work for my father who always told me that my welfare brothers were better workers than me.

I guess I lived and worked with that family enough to see the world from their perspective. And, boy, when I did that my family didn’t look too good. In many ways it only reinforced self-hatred.

Misfit:

Of course, even though I dressed better, things would still only get worse for me at the private Quaker school I attended in a Philadelphia suburb. I would break into my French-Canadian northern drawl to confront my peers about their teasing.

I think my social awkwardness really stood out during summer outings away from the Adirondacks. First, it was a two-week backpacking trip with middle-class Albany, NY kids at the adjacent YMCA camp. Next, it was not fitting in with rebellious rich kids who were getting straightened out at a North Carolina Outward Bound Course. And, finally, I attended a work camp in Belize where all the boarding school kids only wanted to drink and be ugly American Tourists. Meanwhile, I stuck to my stated goal, to live and work as though I lived in Belize. I was told it was the wrong reason for making the trip, but I didn’t care.

Starving:

The year before my parent’s divorced I didn’t sleep more than three hours a night for nine months. Then, when my parents got divorced things got tough as I had to keep up with sports, work, extra curriculars, travel between both houses, and the sharp increase in school work. My mom started staying out at all hours of the night and forgetting to check on me while I was up working through learning disabilities at two in the morning. My dad still expected me to do his house chores no matter how many papers I had to write or how hard I worked at my fast food job.

I was a hundred and three pounds when I got admitted to the hospital. My parents packed my bags to drop me off at the hospital and the therapist said, “Wow, these bags are really heavy!” Then, he ordered my family to attend daily family sessions with me.

When I graphically failed to gain weight in that setting, my family had to pay out of pocket for two months of inpatient treatment, so I could gain twenty pounds. My father cried signing over the check and I felt much shame. I presumed the expense depleted my college fund. Because my room was converted to a study and I moved in with a friend upon discharge, I chose the least expensive commuter school.

College:

Okay, my choice of College was not quite that simple. In the all-female inpatient unit where I’d be forced to revisit for an additional three months (this time insurance paid for it,) even a repressed fellow such as myself managed to learn to how to kiss. I started a sexual relationship with a twenty-five-year-old newspaper photographer who was schooling at the affordable commuter campus. After I graduated and worked at a summer camp, I moved in with her. Because she wouldn’t allow me to have friends, the relationship only lasted two years.

The latter two years, I hid the fact I was binging and purging by keeping to myself. I never learned to hang out and fit in. I didn’t make it to as much as a single college party. Instead, I worked with the neighbourhood kids at a local Korean gangster’s deli. Community relationships and the associated sociological learning was the thing that kept me going.

I’d do a little better with my socialization in grad school when I was medicated and under psychodynamic treatment. However, when I tried to breakaway and make a comeback on the west coast, it wouldn’t end well. I found myself compelled to uncover murder and mayhem in a local section 8 housing facility. I’d end up in a state hospital and believing I was under surveillance for two years.

One-to-One Hundred:

 It’s true with complex trauma, I am sensitive and overwhelmed by the regular issues that come up between people and in families. My emotions are based on a social justice narrative and I go from one to a hundred when I am getting teased, causing me to be further targeted. I may not get the joke right away, roll with it and have a good comeback. The insult may cut at my core when I think about it later.

During my twenty-something years, when people drank (or drugged,) I generally responded the same way I do when I get teased. I’d get a numb look on my face, withdraw, look at my watch and long to be somewhere else. Then, I notice when people talk to each other as if I’m not there and I don’t know what to do about it.

Disassociation:

Of course, despite all the years of treatment I received, nobody noticed or asked about my experiences with disassociation. It wasn’t until I wrote a memoir about surviving the schizophrenia diagnosis that I recaptured a memory of molestation the summer of my third-grade year. In fact, I don’t disassociate regularly, but it can happen in times of excessive stress.

Of course, my response to the molestation incident was so extreme, I wonder if that was my only experience. I have many traipsed memories that feel like dreams and mystery. Are they also disassociated memories? Are they Dreams? I have always had them, and I have always wondered. Additionally, having many hypervigilant memories means, I have lost trust for people without understanding why.

Post-Partum Depression:

I never really understood how devastating the experience of post-partum depression can be for a mother. Then I heard a severely-traumatized patient I work with say that her post-par-tum depression was the lowest point of her life. Think of a traumatized person. Think of years and years of homelessness, rape, physical abuse, family suicide, substance abuse. And think that all this does not compare to the pain endured during a post-par-tum depression when a woman just can’t connect with her child. This really made me think . . .

Up until recently, my mother made yearly visits to visit family in the area during which she would spend a day at my house. One year I drove out a couple of hours away to meet her at a park local to her other relatives to see her an extra day. Out walking in a flat, marshy California park amid Spring flocks of birds, my mother finally gave me a feel for what she went through after my birth. Her mother refused to support her in her most difficult hours. I knew she had been depressed when her mother died, but I hadn’t known this. I knew she only told me this because she wanted me to stop processing depressing stuff and I listened to her.

In my family two-generations back, lobotomies and institutionalization were the cure for family mental problems. There was no support available to my mother when it came to having depression. She had to buck it up. She still expects me to do the same.

Still the Pariah:

I find no comfortable around people. I avoid social engagements because I feel stigmatized, patronized or outclassed by the comments of others.

For example, while it’s true I do not know exactly what all my relatives really think about me, I think that in observing a slew of collective behaviour, most would conclude that something is going on that is not positive.

It is true I bear the stigma of having schizophrenia because I choose to live out of the closet. Additionally, my memoir was honest and not always flattering toward the family support I received going through the experience.

My grandmother with dementia could not remember who I was, but when she found out I was the author of the book, she declared, “It made the family look bad!”

My mother has said, “I could have written a book about all we did to try to help you and about how difficult you were!”

My uncle, a career professor at Princeton University, demurred in his response for a while and then said only, “the last chapter was positive.”

Even though it won awards in four contests, my aunt gave my book four stars on Amazon and wrote, “it is a difficult book, as the author, a trained mental health professional, dumps the reader into his own experience with precarious mental health . . .”

Many relatives refuse to look at me and only speak to my wife or each other when I am around.

When I had to miss a reunion because of a severe back injury that had me out of work for several months, I was told by my mother and cousin that my relatives said: “well, why couldn’t Barbara (my wife) have come!” It seems it was a joke that was tossed around so much at the reunion, some felt I should get to enjoy it as well. I still don’t know what to make of it. Do you?

It is true not all the responses of family members are necessarily negative. For example, the judicious comment of my uncle may not have been as negative as it had seemed. He later told me he liked my book when he saw I was upset. But it is much easier to withdraw and avoid my family. If my uncle really supported me, would he tolerate the jokes about me that are at my expense? I often wonder.

I perceive similar acts of hostility from other groups of people and choose to withdraw and write when I am not working.

Recovering from Psychiatric Treatment:

Being a psychiatric survivor means that I along with other marginalized groups in America like many veterans, homeless, felons, inner-city children and other abuse victims can relate to the symptoms of complex trauma. While it’s true there is the potential history of emotional neglect, the disassociation, the molestation, the hypervigilance, the psychic numbing, the emotional dysregulation, the avoidance of related things, the shame, the people-pleasing, there’s also a history of privilege.

It’s true, I didn’t have it that bad until I entered the twisted system of care that is based on a schizophrenia diagnosis.

While it’s true I continue to be dependent on medication, I do so because it helps me manage the oppression that surrounds me working in an inner-city outpatient psychiatric unit. I have learned with the help of the medications to have a public relationship with consensus reality that enables me to have meaning and purpose. I am liked and helpful to people on the unit where I work.

I suppose when I was coming up no one could get it right because a complex trauma disorder didn’t exist back then. Instead there was disorder after disorder after disorder. Nurses on the eating disorder unit suggested I was an adult child of an alcoholic. Now there’s another disorder or two to add of the epigenetic sort. What can I say, I am an easy person for whom to ring up a bill!

When I was in state hospital they couldn’t shut me up about how much trauma I was enduring locked up for being a whistle-blower. I circled the day room I was confined to for two weeks and got on the phone and yelled to my family and friends that the mafia was following me.

Meanwhile, I negotiated unwanted relationships with a red-state-Mexican-mafia-female and resisted the offers to run away with her. Then, I resisted the opportunity to join an outlaw gang for protection against her.

Also, there was a short, illiterate thief with severe scoliosis who said he was there to recruit me into the Navy Seals. He said I had what it took to be a great assassin.  He said I passed all his tests. However, for my last test, he said I had to say that Ronald Reagan was a great president. I failed that one! As a result, I was sentenced to stay in the hospital against my will for three months.

Six months later, after two moves, the only job I could find and maintain was a job at an upscale Italian Deli. So, all gaslighting, taunting and teasing aside, maybe I had a point!

Believe me, still taking medication for complex trauma is not the worst thing that can happen to those of us who are coming from an era of misinformation! But if I had been treated for trauma and experienced more compassion, I wonder if I would continue to need the medication?

The post Growing Up with Complex Trauma in an Era of Misinformation: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

We all know that ending a secreted abuse and getting public support is an important element of healing. Indeed, it is nice when society comes to the rescue as they did to victims when the world trade towers fell. When victims sense they are supported there is more opportunity for resilience, heroism, and healing.

But alas, many of the people I work with on an Outpatient Psychiatric Unit do not enjoy such support. Many lead lives of poverty and neglect due to what is presumed to be the medical illness of the mind. Many have done stints standing on the corner with a cardboard sign and are used to be seen in a negative light. Imagine the constant digs or exclusionary put-downs they may receive from their community of origin. Many choose to withdraw from the world. It is as if society has managed their crisis by tying them down to their beds like African-American, male Katrina-victims. Progress toward healing is slow.

As a worker in the system, I have come to feel that many of our clients get dehumanized when we focus on behavioural control rather than freedom from abuse. Focusing on behaviour can point out what is wrong with the person and make it unsafe to talk about the ways they have been hurt. I feel weeding through hurts helps a person gain acceptance and healing.

Perhaps this focus on behaviour happens because of the way our institutions define human suffering as being part of a medical mental illness. Thinking you have an illness may feel good at first but often make problems worse down the line. Some who suffer may feel, they have been born with a diseased mind all along. They may feel this way, for example, with a label of schizophrenia because many people with a disease model mentality may treat them that way.

I believe that when trauma is hard to detect or complex, the mental health system assigns blame inside the scientific sanctity of the individual. This can result in things like multiple diagnostic labels, use of forced medication as a punishment, restraints, solitary confinement, psychiatric incarceration, and, eventually, permanent warehousing.

As a psychotherapist, I have found that understanding these problems as signs of micro abuse that accelerate with stigma and exclusion to be vital to being able to connect with participants in our program.

Understanding the Role of Sexual Trauma in my own Life:

Like many psychotherapists, my first client has been myself. I admittedly have lived experience with a long list of psychiatric labels including recurrent depression, anorexia, bulimia, ADD, dyslexia, schizophrenia, and now that I have recovered, schizoaffective disorder.

I have spent decades in therapy and received care that emphasized the illness narrative. I have taken pharmacies of detrimental pills even though I have come to a place where I believe I get some help from small doses. I have even been referred to as permanent warehousing in a state hospital in Montana.

I am writing to demystify the role that complex trauma has beneath the surface for so many of our most defamed, dehumanized, and marginalized people.

How Controlling Behavior May Lead to Re-traumatization Instead of Help:

It is true I have had an ongoing suspicion that I was sexually abused. Particularly when locked up for extended periods of time for an eating disorder, and most recently for schizophrenia, my suspicion that my suffering had sexual abuse behind it escalated. I went through a phase of clothing myself while bathing post-latency that was always hard to understand. My sense of shame associated with my body was suggestive to me.

Yet, I once had a female therapist confront me about secreted accusations I had made against my mother on an inpatient unit. At the time I was confronted, I could not remember the real incidents of sexual abuse that I experienced. I just stopped confiding in the therapist in any meaningful way. This really added to my sense of shame. It’s true I recovered, but I lead a limited life of work and torment.

Without knowing that I once was abused, it becomes that much harder to discern triggered re-traumatization, from abuse. People who don’t realize that their suffering is due to trauma are often unable to do this. They may repeatedly feel abused a gazillion times and it becomes hard to see how the community might come to the rescue. Instead, we get cast as not taking responsibility for our own problems that are generated by our defective genes.

The Importance of Vigilantly Assessing for Disassociation:

I have always been aware that I disassociate. I think it is a good idea for therapists and mental health workers to assess for disassociation. It is a simple question but may need to be teased out a bit to accurately assess for it.

Though I had been in therapy my whole life, I only had one therapist take note and get suspicious about the disassociation I described. What I have come to realize by listening to others is that if a person has experiences of disassociation, there is the possibility of incidents of distressing events that they may have forgotten.

An example of a disassociation I experienced was when I was alone scouting a trail. I stepped within six inches of a rattlesnake, a childhood obsession of mine. The rattle made me run even though I knew better. Then I became aware that I lost track of time. Finally, one of my peers on the Outward-Bound course came and found me staring off into space and I grounded myself.

Another time, my best high school friend made a pass at me after communicating in metaphoric manners that were suggestive that he might have been tripping on acid. I came to at several points to find myself hiding in the house. At one point I heard him talking to my mother when she returned to the house. He was talking about gay marriage and, somehow, I had gotten down into the basement again.

And, finally, after being teargassed at the WTO Protest in 1999, and pepper-sprayed directly in the eye, I took a walk and lost track of where I was and what I was doing. Suddenly, I realized I walked past my destination and had been out.

I am now at the point of arguing that these seemingly inconsequential incidents are faint traces that there is a need to explore more. I emphasize that I advocate doing this to help understand oneself instead of vilifying others. For example, my best friend does not deserve to be vilified, and yet the disassociation was real. Though disassociation experience may not seem significant to the daily suffering that gets experienced, I think it is an important indicator of trauma that may accelerate over time if it goes unaddressed.

How I Broke through the Wall:

I took it upon myself to write about starting to disassociate in front of my nephew when he was a bathing cherub in a tub in front of me. I did not fully disassociate and I considered the experience a flashback. I was going outside my body but didn’t leave all the way. This had been happening to me on a few occasions when I was working seven days a week trying to get back on my feet financially after my post-state-hospital period of homelessness.

As I was editing the scene suddenly I got a vague flash of being molested in a bathtub. The girl, my best friend’s sister, was only one year older. I would later remember that she ordered me to take my clothes of and get in the tub with her while our parents were out walking on the railroad grade.

I still don’t remember my response. There is a story that I ate a mothball thinking it was a marshmallow necessitating poison control to be contacted. I was a little old to make such a silly mistake. It’s true I could be wrong, but I connect that action to my response to the tub incident. I do believe that that was the summer I started bathing in my trunks.

When I took this story to my mother, I got an additional answer. “No, you are thinking of the time we caught the babysitter touching you,” she said.

While I continue to have no memory of this incident I remember several occasions when I was around this babysitter later in life. Before I hadn’t been able to understand my piercing feelings, behaviour and memory of those occasions.

“Thank you for telling me,” I stated to my Mom.

“I probably shouldn’t have told you,” she said, “Now you are going to think you have been abused a gazillion times!”

When Hypervigilance and Numbing Seem Like They Are Normal:

Just like the bath with my step-sister might not have been distressing to many untraumatized young boys, there is the possibility that memories of intense hypervigilance may not always be indications of sex abuse. Not all intense memories I have led to recovered memories.

Before I broke through the wall disassociation I could never understand why I got such strong intuition and suspicions. I didn’t realize that I was doing this for a good reason. I often presumed there was something wrong with me. I had to learn to numb out to prevent embarrassing myself worse socially.

I also have a hard time defending myself when I get attacked. When I do defend hypervigilance, I come off too strong and the results never go well. Then, when I am called on to defend myself during a test, I often fail to act because I think it may be hypervigilance.

People who prey on others can see these signs and chose people they can hurt without getting in trouble. This can open a body up to bullying that can become institutional when labels get attached. Powerful mental health administrators have done this to me and I remain marginalized in the county in which I work.

More Meaningful Memories:

When I found out that her brother had sexually abused a childhood friend, I suddenly had a flash and an image. I saw him rape her, became paralyzed with fear and fled. Had I really behaved like that? It seemed like more of an intuitive dream, that a solid reality.

Typical, I thought, for a schizophrenic to hear about sex abuse and think it is all about him. Perhaps some of the readers may think so as well.

However, I do remember visiting the two of them alone in a vacation cabin along the Chatooga River in the Adirondacks. They were skinny-dipping, she with just a shirt on, he in the nude, and me, very attached to my bathing suit. My last memory of the evening involves him standing behind her wrestling her around.

The distinctive flash of a rape and an overwhelming feeling of cowardice and helplessness that overtook me when I should have protected the victim is unconnected to any other part of the evening.

The brother has only admitted to inappropriate touching. So, I acknowledge that even saying the word rape may be inappropriate and unfair. If I considered these flashes reality, there are several other incidents in my life to talk about with other adult men.

Years later I had rescue fantasies and psyched myself up to respond to rape scenes. This happened at a time when I took a job in a lawless section eight housing project; and used community activists and the press to fight the management company, the police and the black market dealers against all odds. This is an action that caused the police and my parents to attempt to institutionalize me in a state hospital.

Is it possible that my objectionable behaviour of using the press to out real murder and mayhem was simply an unconscious expression of ongoing existential guilt from unrealized events? Is it possible that some of my schizophrenia was exacerbated by real government monitoring? For a year the only job I could maintain was an arranged job at an Italian Deli through which I thought I was being persecuted by the Italian Mafia. When I stopped acting persecuted and started being thankful for a nine-dollar an hour job, I was able to return to professional job opportunities.

“The first question that gets asked shouldn’t be what is wrong with you, it should be what happened to you?”—Jackie Dillion

I think therapists have a responsibility to assess for incidents of abuse. This is not about potentially wrongly vilifying people like the brother above, it is about healing and changing behaviour. For healing, even heinous acts need to be emotionally accepted, yet never forgot. It involves constant intuitive listening and questioning and remembrance of patterns on the part of a psychotherapist. What is far more common in psychiatry these days is the focus only on symptoms and behaviours associated with mental illnesses. It becomes easy to become part of the problem for many when blame is assigned within the genetic codes and neurotransmitter cocktails of the individuals.

Overemphasizing these concepts without acknowledging the role of trauma promotes stigmas and generalizations. This not only orients us towards not considering traumatic occurrences, it makes it highly likely that we will re-traumatize sufferers and further marginalize them.

I believe that when therapy is governed with an illness narrative mentality, money gets made, and many of the recipients lose support and wind up deprived, impoverished and defeated. The mental health system becomes much more a system of control and ongoing abuse when things are as such.

I would advise someone who is suffering and receiving psychiatric care not to underestimate the role that trauma may have in their suffering. Learning about this and honouring it yourself can help you make meaning of your suffering. Unfortunately, if our communities don’t understand or teach us about trauma, we need to do this for ourselves. I believe this is when psychotherapy can be helpful. However, when psychotherapists maintain the psychiatric illness mentality, therapy can go on for years without understanding underlying complex trauma.

The post Demystifying Complex Trauma for Therapists appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Warning: Graphic Content

“I have heard real stories,” said my female therapist, “of men doing graphic and horrible things to women. I don’t think based on what you just told me, there is any justification for any accusation whatsoever. I think you have been saying a lot of hurtful things.”

I figured my mother who was paying for these forced sessions put the shrink up to this confrontation. I never did bring the issue of sexual abuse up.

It is true I have had an ongoing suspicion that I was sexually abused. Particularly when locked up for extended periods of time for an eating disorder, and most recently for schizophrenia, my suspicion that my suffering had sexual abuse behind it escalated.

It was also true that in the state hospital I had just gotten out of, I had made rash accusations.

I can only recall making the accusation against my mother to my best college friend who had a nefarious past of drug dealing and a grandiose mafioso mentality while manic. When I confided in him that I had alerted the press in a section eight housing authority complex, he threatened me. With this feeling I had been led into this role I was playing as a whistle-blower all along, I’d fled towards Canada until the police intercepted me.

From the phone in the State Hospital, without knowing his level of responsibility for the fact that I was there, I told him what had transpired between myself and my mother in a provocative manner.  I told him he was lucky to have a family who cared about him when he had faced going to a state hospital for bipolar disorder. I’d also said, “Friends don’t threaten each other!”

“I think it is time for me to visit your mother,” my friend said.

Scared for my mother, I called to warn her.

“You shouldn’t make such accusations about Joe being in the mafia,” my mother said, “He really does care about you!”

When I later asked my Mom where she had heard about my provocative accusation, she told me she forgot.

At the time the female therapist confronted me, I could not remember the real incidents of sexual abuse that I experienced. I just stopped confiding in her.

Initially, shit just happened when I was a teen, built up and I just distracted from the pain through starvation. The incident with my Mom was just one of many. People like me who don’t realize that their suffering is due to trauma are often unable to discern abuse from re-traumatization. They may attract a long list of psychiatric diagnoses. They may feel abused a gazillion times and it becomes hard to see how any community might come to the rescue.

What I have come to believe is that if a person has experiences of disassociation, there is the possibility of incidents of forgotten events.

An example of a disassociation I experienced was when I was alone scouting a trail. I stepped within six inches of a rattlesnake, a childhood obsession of mine. The rattle made me run even though I knew better. Then I became aware that I lost track of time. Finally, one of my peers on the Outward-Bound course came and found me staring off into space and I grounded myself.

Also, after being teargassed at the WTO Protest in 1999, and pepper sprayed directly in the eye, I took a walk and lost track of where I was and what I was doing. Suddenly, I realized I walked past my destination and had been out.

Much later, after the state hospital incident, I disassociated in front of my nephew when he was a bathing cherub in a tub in front of me, I was going outside my body but didn’t leave all the way. This had been happening to me on a few occasions when I was working seven days a week trying to get back on my feet financially.

In fact, when I did write about this occasion, during an editing session I suddenly I got a vague flash of being molested in a bathtub. The girl, my best friend’s sister, was only one year older. I would later remember that she ordered me to take my clothes of and get in the tub with her while our parents were out walking.

I didn’t remember my disassociated response, I only remembered the hands disappearing beneath the suds. There is a story that I ate a moth ball thinking it was a marshmallow necessitating poison control to be contacted. I was a little old to make such a silly mistake. It’s true I could be wrong, but I connect that action to my response to the tub incident. I do believe that around that time I started bathing in my trunks.

I do recall becoming very angry at my best friends’ sister for not choosing the kind of ice cream I wanted when it came to selecting ice cream for her birthday celebration. I recall experiencing a lot of disapproval for that strange show of selfishness.

When I took this story to my mother, I got an additional answer. “No, you are thinking of the time we caught the babysitter touching you,” she said.

While I continue to have no memory of this incident I remember several occasions when I was around this babysitter later in life. Before I hadn’t been able to understand my piercing feelings, behavior and memory of those occasions.

“Thank you for telling me,” I stated to my Mom.

“I probably shouldn’t have told you,” she said, “Now you are going to think you have been abused a gazillion times!”

It’s true that the bath with my step-sister might not have been distressing to many untraumatized young boys. Now, however, I have some explanation for my suffering.

Before I broke through the wall disassociation I could never understand why I got such strong intuition and suspicions. I didn’t realize that I was doing this for a good reason. I often presumed there was something wrong with me.

Perhaps now I can better understand and accept why I get uncomfortable in bars and socially withdraw. Maybe now I can understand why I withdraw in trauma trainings with other therapists. When we are all learning emotional freedom techniques, for example, I am unable to benefit from them. Now, I know I am on my way to disassociating in these contexts.

Now I understand why I always have a hard time defending myself when I get attacked. I am numbing out! Now I know why when I do defend myself, I come off too strong and the results never go well. It is ongoing hypervigilance!

People who prey on others can see these signs and chose people they can hurt without getting in trouble. This can open a body up to bullying that can become institutional when labels get attached. People who appear to be victimized end up being soft targets.

And, so, I understand better how I got in some other hard-to-deal with situations and other disassociated memories. And, so, one day, while hiking with my father on a visit back east, I finally got up the courage to ask what had happened to our family friend who was a few years older than me and had dissociative identity disorder.

When I found out that her brother had sexually abused her, I suddenly I had a flash and an image. I saw him over top of her, became paralyzed with fear and fled. Had I really behaved like that? It seemed like more of an intuitive dream, that a solid reality.

Typical, I thought, for a schizophrenic to hear about sex abuse and think it is all about him. Perhaps some of the readers may think so as well.

However, I do remember visiting the two of them alone in a vacation cabin along the Chatooga River in the Adirondacks. They were skinny-dipping, she with just a shirt on, he in the nude, and me, very attached to my bathing suit. My last memory of the evening involves him standing behind her wrestling her around.

The distinctive flash of what I saw and an overwhelming feeling of cowardice and helplessness that overtook me is unconnected to any other part of the evening.

The brother has only admitted to inappropriate touching. So, I acknowledge that even suggesting the word rape may be inappropriate and unfair. I have taken myself closer to this flash and tried to remember visual details. I realize in doing this there were sleeping bags on the floor and that I saw no direct flesh. And yet I felt a sense of penetration internally. But the sense that I could only flee in cowardice connects to other times I acted in similar manners and the shame is enormous.

If I considered these flashes of disassociated memories to be true, there are several other incidents I had with adult men who were significant in my life that were suspicious.

These events help explain why all those years later when I was working in the section eight housing project, I used to walk in the evenings around a lake having rescue fantasies in which I physically psyched myself up to respond to rape scenes. I took these walks to relieve stress while I was using community activists and the press to fight the management company, the police and the black-market dealers against all odds. This is action that caused the police to attempt to institutionalize me in Montana.

I have come to understand that if I am to heal from my psychiatric labels of depression, anorexia, bulimia, schizotypal personality disorder, dyslexia, ADD, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder (now that I am in “recovery”) and perhaps dissaociative disorder I am going to have to accept that I will not know if all my conglomerate sex abuse incidents are true but accept that they may be part of my journey and are possible in the world. I, personally, cannot vilify people who are hurt and use it to perpetrate. To move past these types of incidents, I must forgive so many deeds that seem so strikingly wrong to me. I see them in a variety of things on a regular basis.

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