One day, while driving with my wife, someone new took her place in the passenger seat. She was terrified, frantically trying to open the door so she could jump out of it while we were on the interstate highway (going 70 mph!). Needless to say, this was a scary moment for me. Fortunately, she didn’t seem to understand how to work the door handle, or it could have been disastrous.

Who the hell was that? It turned out her name was Tina—one of my wife’s dissociated parts, and until now, a hidden one. My wife’s other “alters” knew a little about her, but not much. Unlike the rest of them, who all had comfortable rooms within an internal home accessible only to them, apparently Tina had been trapped in a lonely, dark place of their inside world, like a dark, dank basement that everyone avoids using unless absolutely necessary. No one else had access to her, and to make matters worse, she was mute. How do I communicate with a mute voice?

Such were the challenges of meeting and engaging another new voice that emerged after years of building relationships with my wife’s other dissociated parts—whom I often refer to as girls, because their ages were linked to trauma at different episodes in her childhood. In my memoir I’ve described my loving history with all of them, an epic saga in its length and complexity that I’ve done my best to convey through my book excerpts and other writings on Mad in America.

Mute or not, Tina continued to come out from time to time, and every time she did, she acted like a frightened animal desperate to get out of my presence. Now that I knew she was there inside my wife’s mind, I tried to engage her. I lived by our army’s motto of leaving no soldier behind, and even though I had no idea how to engage a mute voice, I began to try. I bought her a pretty Christmas snow globe for her to enjoy when I wasn’t around. And then I bought an oversized coloring book, and I would let K.A.—another part—relate feelings she got from Tina about how Tina would like the various pages to be colored. 

So, again, how do you communicate with someone who is mute? At first, I was stumped. And then we got a tiny miracle. We were in Washington, D.C., for the Cherry Blossom Festival, and I lit a prayer candle at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in desperation for a breakthrough. And that night, Tina revealed that she knew sign language—the ASL alphabet, which my wife had learned as a child. And so, I quickly learned it too, and we began to communicate that way. Eventually, I helped Tina through her overwhelming fear of me. Another part, Sophia, also began to communicate internally with Tina, and at some point, Tina began to talk to me using Sophia’s voice. Those two were naturally drawn together internally and eventually would become inseparable.

Once she was securely attached to me, it helped her to entrust to me the trauma she had held for 45 years (trigger warning): Tina had been the part of my wife to hold the memories of her childhood sexual abuser snapping the neck of a little kitten in front of her eyes, and threatening to do the same to her if she told her parents about what he was doing to her. This man, who had started abusing her at the age of 2, also said she was “his girl,” and no one else would ever want her because she was “ruined.” And he hurt her so badly that he told her that he left his “mark” on her.

Leaving the darkness behind

Little by little, she told her story to me now that she felt safe. I was there to hear her cries for help and protect her in a way her parents never had. I spent many nights with her literally wrapped around my upper body, like a little child does, as I walked around the house—and she buried her face in my neck and cried and wailed and flailed, letting out the horror of what that man threatened her with and had actually done to her. 

I pointed out that he had no right to claim her for his own; she was now free to choose. And that was a life-altering realization to her. And then… she chose me. And thus we began affirming to each other a series of phrases to state our new reality: “I choose you. We belong together. You are my girl, and I’m your guy.” She and I still say those phrases to each other. She typically starts it, saying one phrase at a time, and I repeat each back to her. And I always end every daily email I send to her with it. Moreover, we bought matching pendants to wear on chains around our necks with eternity hearts and the words of those phrases inscribed on them.

Additionally, she was no longer bound to her past and the cold, dark basement room that represented it. That was when we learned the importance of Bowlby’s internal working model, and we began to connect all those disconnected rooms in my wife’s mind in which my wife’s voices had been sequestered. We moved Tina out of the basement and into an adjoining room with Sophia. Eventually they opened a wall between their two rooms and literally became inseparable when they desired to be. We also eventually created an internal common area where all the voices could gather and be together. And we created a hallway that connected all the once-disconnected rooms.

So, after seven years of chaos and bringing six voices outside to engage with me and securely attach to me—which seemed to help them internally connect to each other to varying degrees—I thought I saw the finish line for us. All of them were actively working on their inside “house” to become more and more connected. Tina and my wife Ka’ryn still didn’t have full access to the rest of the house like the other five did, but we were working to open the doors between them all. 

And then the unexpected happened. One day another mute voice showed up outside, and all our hopes for healthy normalcy slowly came crashing down. Unlike all the other voices, this last girl was completely unknown to all the others before she made her entrance outside. This was nearly eight years ago. The first six voices took seven years to connect with me, heal from the trauma and pain and fear and largely connect with each other. They each worked hard and let me help them do so. But this last mute voice was totally different. There have been times over the last seven years, which I have dubbed The Great Impasse, when my wife has begged us to stuff this last voice back inside. All of us are so tired of this impasse, and the last “part” knows it. 

But that damn army motto always rattles in my head that we don’t leave any soldier behind… no matter how painful it may be. And when this latest voice acknowledges how difficult it has been to help her heal and connect to the others, I always say, “Honey, we don’t get rid of someone just because it’s difficult.” So I always affirm that I love her, and I defend her to the others as well.

And I’m fighting tears right now as I type, because it’s been really, really hard. This voice doesn’t let me help her like the others. She’s extremely independent even though she’s just as needy, if not more, than the others. On top of that this new girl only had access to short-term memories, so it was like that movie in which the person had 50 first dates with the same person: Jenny, the name I gave her until she chose her own, couldn’t remember her daily interactions with me at all for a couple of years. And so, each day was like starting fresh with her. How do you build on a relationship when she barely remembers you from one day to the next?

Glimpses of my “greater wife”

For the first year, Jenny was little more than a ghost. The other girls and I would be watching TV. They’d go to the restroom, and then Jenny would return, silently, watching me. She’d sit by me, but never close.

Eventually I learned to communicate with her. I always tried to engage her like the others. I’d buy her little gifts. I added her to my ‘daily email’ list. I’d chatter along with her about life and point out things that I thought might interest her. But she never seemed to respond much until we finally connected via the sign-language alphabet I had learned for Tina. Then, as she healed, she eventually accessed Sophia’s speaking voice for her own. 

Little by little we clawed our way into a relationship. Little by little I clawed my way with her into a secure attachment in which she finally asked me to “marry her into the family.” Yet, even then, she struggled to find release in the safety of that relationship as the others had because of her memory issues and the ambient fear, for lack of a better description, that has flooded all the girls since she came outside with us.

Moreover, as I have poured myself into Jenny, and she has started to heal these last eight years, her memory has gotten better. It’s still spotty even today, but I can tell she can access general memories many times. Sometimes I’m astounded by things she can recall now. And, happily, we no longer have to start fresh each day in our relationship.

Jenny was also trapped in the “basement” of my wife’s internal house but far more deeply than even Tina had been. She’s shared with me how lonely and scared she was those nearly five decades she was trapped there. But I hurt and ache every single day, and I know my wife and all the other girls do as well. It never gets easier, and some days I can barely breathe because I have needs, too. But I just shove them down and keep hoping that, if we don’t quit, we will find our happily ever after ending as we find a way to help Jenny connect to the others fully—and we can all be together again.

So, engaging voices. I could write so much more. Sometimes, it’s hard not to be discouraged, especially these last eight years. I vowed I would help my wife 100% recover from her early childhood trauma: but I had no idea the scope it would cover. 

Again, there have been many happy things, even with Jenny. She has come such a long way despite how painfully slow it has been. And despite her slow progress, I have seen my “greater wife,” all eight voices, begin to morph and integrate and connect on deeper levels that give me hope and make me so proud of all the work they have done to achieve it. All eight of them, even though Jenny isn’t fully connected with the others on the inside, are learning to move and act “in sync” as one group, as one person. It truly is remarkable to see the eight disparate, broken, and traumatized voices that once inhabited my wife’s internal house become healthy, happier, and inseparably connected as a group, as one person.

One of my greatest joys, every time it happens (like yesterday), is when they are all outside with me, and each will raucously sing, slightly off key, with the radio. It always brings a smile to my face as I remember what scared, broken and even angry voices each had once been when she first joined me on this healing journey. Jenny, who was once mute and terrified of everything, has been singing with her Spotify playlist lately, calling herself my “rocker girl.”

It makes all the pain and deprivation and tears worth it. 

The post Engaging Voices, Part 2: Working Our Way Toward Connection appeared first on Mad In America.

T

he  summer after my wife started counseling sessions, she began to hear voices. When she first told me about them, I asked her what they said. She learned to listen to them, and then repeat what they said to me. And then I would respond in a way to engage and validate the voices. It was kind of like having a conversation with someone on the phone, but someone else was holding the phone and relating the other person’s responses back to me.

This was 16 years ago. Since then, a group of seven other voices have emerged, each of them a dissociated “part” of my wife that sprang from an aspect or incidence of abuse she suffered long ago. They all have different personalities, ages, abilities, and names: Amy, Tina, Jenny, Sophia, K.A., Allie, Shellie, and Ka’ryn, my wife’s host. Over the years I’ve worked to welcome them into the family one by one, understanding and loving them as best I can, and making them feel more at ease in this outer world rather than the inner construct they built to protect themselves. As I’ve written in past excerpts for Mad in America, in the process I’ve also worked to understand my wife’s “delusions” and “paranoia”; I’ve listened to her and come to see the term “psychosis” as problematic; and I’ve shared my insights with others striving to help their loved ones.

The first voice that emerged, all those years ago, seemed to be young. Since I was trying to engage this voice, I decided to do things that might interest a little girl. I began to play some of the childhood games we still had at our house from our son’s childhood with my wife. Sometimes our son would join us. I also watched a number of children’s shows with my wife, like My Little Pony and Jem and the Holograms. 

But I think I really connected with this voice when I suggested she put makeup on my face. I remember seeing my wife’s own face transform as the little girl inside her came out and delightedly glammed me up.

It wasn’t long after that party, after months of validating and engaging that voice and near the end of that first summer on our healing journey together, when the voice in my wife’s head decided to come out and engage me directly. I had heard about various “parts” when a person has Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), but this voice didn’t feel safe to tell me her name when she introduced herself. For my part I refused to say “hey, you,” and so I gave her a name based on my incorrect understanding of my wife’s DID. But she loved the name I’d given her and embraced it as her own even later, when she told me her original name: Amy.

When Amy first came out, however, my wife, Ka’ryn, “disappeared.” Amy took over with a voice and demeanor change, but more than that, Ka’ryn lost all track of time. She went “inside,” and that was when we began to learn about dissociation. We had unknowingly “uncorked the genie,” and once out, Amy didn’t ever want to go back inside and be trapped there again! She had never had the love of her own parents, and she quickly asked me if I would be for her that loving daddy figure she had never known. We had opened Pandora’s Box, and the chaos was about to begin!

The Concept of Voices, and How To Engage Them

If you notice, unlike “paranoia,” “delusions,” and “psychosis,” I have not put this aspect of my wife’s experiences in quotes. The concept of voices is  the first thing in our common wisdom about mental health distress that I have found to be helpful. And yet, our common wisdom belittles this phenomenon and often pathologizes it. Instead of embracing voices as something many of us naturally experience when properly understood, too many in our culture twist and shroud hearing voices in shame, fear, and ignorance.

So, what are voices and how does one engage them in a way that is helpful and healing in our loved ones? What do you believe about the voices that some people hear? I remember wrestling with that question when my wife and I first started the journey. How I answered that question would determine how I engaged them—or whether I engaged them at all.

I remember some of the options I considered. As I already said, the usual attitude  typically views voices as inherently pathological. They are a sign of mental illness. They are a sign that the person is crazy or going mad. They are a sign of delusion, and not real in any sense. And, supposedly, they can make people do scary and dangerous things that are uncontrollable. Because this is the prevailing “wisdom,” so much of our mental health industry is centered on stamping out or controlling those voices. They are seen as forces to be actively opposed at worst or begrudgingly tolerated at best.

Another option is that these voices are real, but they are coming from an outside source. As someone with a deeply Christian background, the idea that God or angels or even demons could be communicating with a person is something I can’t dismiss out of hand. Neither can I dismiss the possibility that beings from outer space or other dimensions could be communicating with a person. Universal negatives are simply unprovable.

Though I sought those kinds of experiences my entire life because of my religious background, I never experienced them. I often watched people around me in charismatic and Pentecostal churches seeming to have supernatural experiences with God and angels and wondering what was wrong with me that I never did, too. If the outside sources of voices are real, more power to the hearer, but based on my complete lack of success in that regard after decades of trying, I decided it was unlikely the voices my wife was experiencing fell into this category.

So I landed with the last option that I thought was most viable: that voices, no matter how they express themselves internally or seemingly externally, are just a part of that person’s mind. And if these voices my wife started to hear were part of her own mind, then they were a part of my greater wife that I wanted to engage, especially as she urged me to do so. Much later in our journey, I believe this option was fully vindicated as we learned about dissociation and how it works in all our minds.

Parts in Search of a Safe ‘Space’

In my memoir, I tried to paint a picture of mental dissociation and the voices that easily fit into it. All trauma that causes overwhelming pain and fear is sequestered (i.e., dissociated) by our mind no matter the nature of said trauma. If the person continues to experience trauma, then the mind continues to try and find “space” to sequester the trauma within its framework. And when the trauma is not quickly resolved with the help of someone trusted, preferably the primary attachment figure, then the dissociation becomes systemic and permanent unless someone comes along to later help undo it.

Now imagine a house that is filled with disconnected rooms, and in each room an occupant is trapped. If one occupant makes noises or speaks, another occupant in another room might be able to hear it, but that sound or voice might feel frightening, scary, foreign, friendly, etc., depending on each one involved in that limited interaction. In fact, if the occupants are put in these rooms at a young enough age, children have fertile imaginations, and the sky is the limit for what these noises and voices could represent to others trapped within the house—but with no way to discover the other occupants.

This image of the house is a very, very basic analogy of what my wife and I have found extreme mental dissociation to be like. We have found that those voices were just lost parts and pieces of her greater self which were forced to sequester because of the unbearable pain and fear each held from the trauma she suffered as a little girl, and the lack of a loving and affirming relationship with her own parents. And because of how early she experienced the trauma, the “doors” in her internal house were nailed shut, unlike the more mild and moderate forms of dissociation most of us ignore in our own lives.

At the very beginning of our journey together, my wife declared: “I might have DID, honey…” She and I began to engage the voice she started to hear—even though we were told we would make things worse by engaging my wife’s voices. Engagement is not what our culture believes should be done, and yet these voices were desperate for engagement with me, whether for love or security or to validate anger. One was so heartbroken when she read an article about getting rid of “smaller alters” (called splinters) like herself, her desperate plea was: “I don’t want to die. Please don’t make me go away!” I replied to her, “Honey, I have fought too hard to find you and make a life with you. I love you, and I would never let anyone get rid of you!”

From the perspective of each of these voices they are real, and they are distinct from the one I had always recognized as my wife, Ka’ryn, because they are part of my “greater wife,” Ka’ryn Marie. Ka’ryn is my wife’s ‘host’, the public personna most people know. But in reality, Jenny, Sophia, Tina, Shellie, Amy, K.A. Allie + Ka’ryn = Ka’ryn Marie, the woman I married 35 years ago. Each one wanted to be valued and validated for herself. Each one was desperate for the loving, safe relationship with me and our son of the type that she had never known because of her childhood trauma. 

The General’s Arrival

Amy and Sophia were the first two “alters” to join my marriage and family. Then, in the second year of our healing journey, Ka’ryn and Amy began to tell me about “the General,” an angry voice of the sort that drives so much of our cultural fear of this phenomenon. 

This voice was still inside, and it was enraged! It hated me for some reason. It said vile things about me that neither my wife nor Amy would relay to me. So, what do you do when someone hates you? I asked my wife why I was hated so much by this voice, and right away my wife produced a list of a number of offenses this voice accused me of. Now, I had a choice: would I defend myself or would I accept these accusations as valid even if I didn’t fully agree with them?

I was reminded of a quote that “apologizing doesn’t always mean you’re wrong and the other person is right. It means you value your relationship more than your ego.” Moreover, to be honest, many of the accusations had merit.

We’d had a stressful marriage for 20 years. I wasn’t perfect no matter how hard I had tried to be a good husband. I had failed many times to live up to the Christian ideal of sacrificial love. And so, I began the process of repairing my relationship with this angry voice. Whatever “the General” accused me of, I would first make sure I understood the extent of my offense in her opinion, so that I could make full and unpatronizing apologies. I never gave “my side of the story.” The first time I apologized to “the General,” my wife said the angry voice got quiet and didn’t know what to do with my apology.

For the next six months I worked through “the General’s” grievances she had against me. With each sincere apology from me, her anger began to lessen. I never defended myself. And sometimes she accused me of things I knew I had never done, but I realized that the voice was expressing anger from past trauma, too, and it had no access to confront her abuser as he was long gone in the past without name or location. So I allowed myself to hold the anger she had for him as well (and just in case any are wondering, a few years later, when this part was in a better place, she came to me and apologized to me for accusing me of things she knew I wasn’t responsible for during this time). Little by little her anger was extinguished. No lie, this was an emotionally painful and draining process for me, as I’m sure it was for her, too.

During this process of apologizing, “the General” decided to come out and directly deal with me one night. The first time she did, I freaked out. I thought I was in the Exorcist movie as this sullen, gravelly-sounding, venom-filled voice suddenly sat in our bed. I said, “Who is this?” She spat, “It’s Me!” Once I calmed down and realized what was going on, I began to engage her. She had come out to inform me that a meltdown I was having at that moment was not helping Ka’ryn and Amy feel safe. Sigh. And so, my feelings be damned (because my overarching goal was for us to make it through this journey together), I tried to pull myself together and get back in control of myself.

The Defender, ‘The General,’ Becomes Alexandra

That began the engagement I had with “the General.” But another rule I had was: I never, ever talked with these voices without a personal name. “The General” refused to tell me her name, and so I gave her one. I made it clear that if she didn’t like the name, she could change it at any time, but I refused to call her “hey you” or “the General,” which was a derogatory name my wife and Amy called her. I knew how important it had been to Amy and Sophia, the first two voices, for me to engage them as real and develop a personal relationship with each one. So I named “the General” Alexandra, and we began an alliance in which I helped her protect and keep the others safe.

She is my wife’s “warrior” voice or “defender” voice, as it is called in the DID community. I would regularly ask Alexandra how I could protect and care for the others better. I let Alexandra know, “I will help you, if you let me. You aren’t alone anymore.” Slowly, Alexandra, who saw me as an adversary, begrudgingly accepted me as an ally and continued to let go of her anger. And then I remember the day she accepted a little Webkinz “love froggy” (stuffed animal) from me just like a delighted 8-year-old girl would do, wrapping it up in her arms and looking at me with absolute love and adoration in her eyes. It’s a moment that still brings tears to my own eyes, because that transformation was so hard for both of us to achieve.

But that was just the beginning of her transformation. When she accepted that gift from me, she wanted to change her name to something she preferred to express her newfound freedom to be the little girl she truly was. See, she had been forced to be the lonely warrior, desperately trying to protect the others inside my wife since her own parents had been too self-absorbed and broken to protect their daughter from her neighborhood abuser and other threats during her childhood. Alexandra had no hope of winning against any adult abuser in the future other than to puff herself up like those little lizards that inflate their necks to appear larger than life to scare off would-be predators. 

And so “the General” was a combination of bravado and desperation as she attempted to do an impossible job she simply couldn’t do on her own. As I saw past her projection of bravado and engaged her on her terms, but with an eye toward a better relationship, slowly she was released from her past and wanted to join me in that better relationship.

The post Engaging Voices, Part 1: Validating The Arrival of My Wife’s First ‘Alters’ appeared first on Mad In America.

So many words get thrown around these days—words which define extreme states, or try to, in a way that diminishes the human beings who live through them. Such words don’t factor in the impact of traumatic experiences and the new, internal realities they create for people, sometimes for decades. 

I’ve repeatedly seen this with my wife. More than that, I’ve lived through it, doing my best to help her navigate such states and move beyond them. It hasn’t been easy, but I’ve learned a few lessons along the way that I’d like to share. One is that such commonly used words don’t come close to conveying the lived experience I’ve witnessed firsthand.

For instance, what are “delusions”? 

Here’s a basic definition from the internet: “a persistent false psychotic belief regarding the self or persons or objects outside the self that is maintained despite indisputable evidence to the contrary.” 

To me, this kind of sounds like a more specific way to define “psychosis,” and hence the quotation marks around the word, as I have issues with that one as well. I never thought my wife was “delusional” even after I became aware of the word’s popular use, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t at times struggle with some of the things various parts of my wife believed as they left their forced isolation and began to live outside with me. So let me share some experiences and see where I failed and where I succeeded in helping my wife through her more challenging perspectives.

Perhaps the most reality-challenged belief that a part of my wife named Amy shared with me was her insistence that she had been a spy in Europe. What do I do with that kind of statement? Well, like most of us, I disputed it, over and over and over. But the more I disputed her claim, the more adamant she became about it! This was not working. And so, I finally came to the point at which I changed tactics. The next time she brought up her claim, I said honestly and without patronizing, ‘Honey, will you please tell me about it sometime?’ And that was the last she ever mentioned it.

I still don’t know what to make of that interaction and her insistence on the validity of that memory until the moment I validated her. Perhaps she just needed to be heard and validated. I honestly don’t know, but what I do know is when I argued and disputed with her, it only escalated her claim, but when I validated her and her belief, it released her in some way that she has never brought it up again. You be the judge.

But there were lots of other “delusions” my wife had, and most of those didn’t resolve themselves so easily. In the beginning of our journey, I tended to dispute them like most of us would. When she first emerged, that same part of my wife, claimed that her inside world was more real than the outside world. This seems to be common in the Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) community. For some reason I thought I could argue her out of that belief, but it only seemed to solidify it for her. 

So I had to learn to shut my mouth when she made these claims. Instead of arguing, I simply decided to live with her and enrich her life on the outside with me. I spent a couple of years doing all kinds of fun things with each part of my wife who joined us on the outside those first five years. It was almost, I imagine, like having grandchildren. If I’d do it for a grandchild, why not my wife?

And you know what? I remember the day when Amy decided she liked the outside world with me and our son better than her inside world. In fact, she told me she now wanted to stay outside permanently. And one by one, each part of my wife who joined us outside came to that same conclusion. They no longer wanted to be “insiders,” as they are called in the DID world. They wanted to make a life with me and our son on the outside. I had won the argument by not arguing but by simply living with each part of my wife and making life with me and our son far more attractive than anything on the inside.

But what do I make of that belief that the inside world my wife experienced is more real than the outside? I see it as another example of the Rip Van Winkle effect, which I described in my recent piece for Mad in America. Imagine if you had been trapped inside your mind for four decades, and only rarely did you get glimpses of the outside world. Which place would you think feels more real? Wouldn’t that inside place feel more real to you if you suddenly found yourself on the outside? First you were forced inside because of the trauma. Now your brain has kicked you back outside. You didn’t really get a choice in either decision, so coming to terms with the outside is just a prolonged orientation process—and I, as my wife’s primary attachment figure, am the one called to do it.

Here’s another “delusion”: when Amy first came out, she would longingly look at all the delightful toys and little girl dresses and clothing which are available today. But nothing fit her. She would look at her hands and body and tell me, “These aren’t mine.” She would tell me she hoped in heaven to get a body of her own. It broke my heart to see her pine for the childhood experiences she had lost because of the dissociation. Her parents were not wealthy most of her childhood, and so she rarely got big Christmases.

And so, for the first three or four years, I lavished her with Barbie dolls and all the exquisite clothing that is made for them. We also bought Barbie’s little sister doll, Kelly, and Ken’s little brother, Tommy, and all the delightful things for them. For a couple years I played dolls with her. We amassed a huge cache of dolls and clothing, and we would spend a couple hours, a few times a month, changing all of them and setting them up in our bedroom so she could see them and be delighted by them. 

And even though I couldn’t buy her the beautiful little dresses she saw for little children, I found her a gorgeous ‘princess’ dress that I bought for her to wear on a cruise so she could satisfy the longing in her heart. I came to view these childish longings as a result of the dissociation. This part of my wife had been trapped inside and missed all the experiences she associated with a happy childhood. 

Quenching Her Childhood Longings

Now, I had a choice. I could either ignore her longings or tell her to grow up, treating her like she was delusional: seriously, this is her body and her life, not the one she missed during the dissociation! But I decided the best way to deal with her disappointments was to satisfy them the best I could.

And as I validated the various longings each part of my wife confided with me, little by little she was released from them. At this point it’s been years since I’ve played dolls or done some of the delightful, childish things those parts of my wife longed for. Today all of them happily busy themselves with adult activities, games and friends, and I firmly believe it is because I engaged the disorientation that left her feeling like an unhappy little girl that had lost her childhood in forced dissociation.

I came to view those deep longings like the proverbial monkey caught with its hand in the cookie jar, its obsession with the cookies stronger than its instinct for self-preservation. So  I decided to indulge my wife’s deep longings for her unfulfilled childhood wishes. I decided to satisfy her desires to overflowing, until they were satiated and quenched, and she could happily release those proverbial cookies and be released from the death grip of her own cookie jar—her missed childhood. 

Today she has moved on from so many of those longings created by the disorienting Rip Van Winkle effect. I almost miss some of them, as we have yet to be blessed with any grandchildren, and I miss the delights that satisfying those dreams brought to me as well. It gave me joy to bring her joy.

But some “delusions” can be dangerous. That same part of my wife, Amy, once  told me and our son that she wanted to buy some store-bought children’s fairy wings so that she could jump off a building and fly! Our son and I freaked out! I believe this was a different aspect of the Rip Van Winkle effect. After discussing the “age of alters” on my blog one time, it was suggested by one of my readers that the age at which the dissociation occurs—due to trauma—is the age that becomes associated with that part of the trauma sufferer. But these splits also “freeze in time” childish perspectives, including the inability to separate fantasy from reality. And so, to this part of my wife, she thought store-bought fairy wings would enable her to fly. Happily, as she spent more time outside with me and our son, she learned to differentiate between fantasy and reality as the normal maturation process was restarted.

The last “delusion” I want to share illustrates how the various parts of my wife relate to me. I believe the Rip Van Winkle effect cannot be overstated when dealing with the long-term effects of childhood trauma and dissociation. As the dissociation is broken, the newly released parts of my wife still operated from the perspective in which they were “frozen” internally for over four to five decades; therefore, all seven voices-turned-”alters” that joined us on the outside originally viewed themselves as little girls, since the overwhelming majority of my wife’s trauma occurred during her early childhood.

And so, as each part was released from her mental imprisonment over the course of our healing journey, each one brought to life her perspective at the time the dissociation occurred with her—that of a little child. None of them had any interest in being a wife to me. So I chose to relate to each part in a manner that felt most comfortable to her. I didn’t demand that she accept my reality, i.e., that she was part of my wife. Instead, I entered her reality and chose to relate to her accordingly. Most of the parts wanted to relate to me as the daddy figure they didn’t have with their absentee, emotionally broken father and their emotionally abusive mother, but others were ambivalent, and so we simply interacted as friends until she was ready for something more. 

I didn’t force what wasn’t desired. Instead, as I related to each one, met her where she was, and helped her release the pain, lies, and fears she had carried from the trauma—including the lack of healthy parental figures during her childhood—each girl was released from the death grip in which she was caught. And each one began to move forward. In fact, two of them quickly moved forward and matured until they wanted to relate with me as girlfriends. One part later wanted to become engaged as my fiancée.

Engaging “Paranoia,” and the Reasons Behind It 

Next up: Another word that gets tossed around. How does the internet define paranoid? “Paranoia is thinking and feeling like you are being threatened in some way, even if there is no evidence, or very little evidence, that you are.” 

As I said in my recent piece addressing “psychosis,” it’s all a matter of perspective, and when I took the time to understand why my wife was constantly afraid, she no longer seemed unreasonable. On the contrary, I would argue she was quite reasonable. However, the reasons were based upon her past trauma, making her “paranoia,” I believe, another instance of the Rip Van Winkle effect.

It’s important to put ourselves in the place of our loved one when the trauma was happening. For my wife, she was a toddler who was at the mercy of her neighborhood abuser. She had no ability to stop the abuse on her own, and in her mind, he kept her from the only source of relief from the abuse that her parents represented—because he threatened to kill them all if she told them what he was doing.

So, she did the only thing her brain could conceive to mitigate the abuse: she became “hypervigilant” as she tried to decode all the sounds and events in her immediate environment. Thus, every unexpected noise was a potential sign her abuser might be returning. Every unexpected event could be a prelude to more abuse. She tried to control her surroundings and the people in them in her desperation to minimize her abuser’s ability to hurt her, which, of course, was impossible and exhausting.

As a result, for the first 20 years of our marriage, my wife would wake me at least once a night and tell me she heard a “noise” downstairs, and she wanted me to verify it wasn’t a break-in. I would sigh. There was no point in arguing: if I didn’t do it, she would fret the rest of the night. So I trudged downstairs and checked things to satisfy her and then came back to bed with the “all clear” message to her. And anytime I got out of bed to go to the restroom or got up early to go to work, no matter how quietly I tried to sneak out of the room, I would hear her gasp as she startled awake at the barely audible sounds I would make as I left the room. She never slept soundly, because her brain was on “red alert” to detect any noise that could signal the next abusive episode.

But over the course of the last 15 years, as the traumatized parts of my wife were released from the dissociation and came outside to be with me, I was able to help each one deal with the past trauma and then accept her newfound safety with me. (I call this validate and turn: In chapter 5 of my book, I fully explain this concept. Here is a short synopsis: I learned to validate her feelings and perceptions that she shared with me, which were based upon her trauma of sexual abuse and not being heard or protected by her parents in the past. Then I slowly began to turn her to her new reality of safety and love with me today:). And as I did so, the hypervigilance has slowly diminished until, today, I rarely make a trek downstairs to check for noises, and I can quietly sneak out of the room without hearing the familiar “gasp.” It makes me smile with happiness, as she is slowly lowering her defense-alert level.

Just like other so-called “delusions,” if I argued or minimized her perspective and feelings, it only escalated her fears. She needed to be heard! She needed to have me care for her in a way her parents never could because of their own trauma issues. And as I did so, it released her slowly from the death-grip the past had on her. Then she felt safe to have me hold the truth of her abuse so that she could rest in her newfound relationship with me and move into the present.

So if your loved one is “paranoid,” ask her (or him, or them) about it. Don’t be distracted by “outlandish” claims of aliens, secret societies, the CIA, or anything else.

Remember, childhood is full of fantasy and dreams and childish perspectives, and sometimes the mist of past events can make memories fuzzy. Focus on the immediate fear. Ask what would help her feel safer. Remind her that she isn’t alone anymore, and you will help her be safe. Be careful not to do things that might escalate the fear, but honest engagement probably won’t—because now your loved one will know she has an ally and someone to watch her back in a way that probably never happened during the original abuse. . . and that is when real healing can begin.

So, is my wife “delusional”? I would argue not. Instead, I would argue that she is disoriented and suffering from large parts of her personality having been trapped in a forced dissociation caused by her trauma. Just like Rip Van Winkle, her perspective is from another time, and as her primary attachment figure I am tasked with the duty and pleasure of orienting her to current circumstances today. 

I chose to walk with her where she was during the orientation process, and then grow with her as we found our way together rather than forcibly demanding that she accept today’s reality before she was ready.

I’m still walking with her, and we’re still finding our way.

The post ‘Delusions’ and ‘Paranoia’: What Are They, Really, and How Can We Engage Them in a Loved One?  appeared first on Mad In America.

My wife and I had been married for 20 years when she started to experience some extreme stuff, to put it mildly: panic attacks, flashbacks, comatose episodes, extreme dissociation, hearing voices, mini-seizures, and more. And beyond that, seven dissociated parts of my wife, often called ‘alters,’ slowly began to join our relationship and family over the next six years.

At first, each one was completely separated from the others, and this exponentially complicated the healing journey for us—because I initially had to help them feel safe, and then I had to help them reconnect to the others so they could begin to work toward a healthy life of wholeness. 

But those things didn’t change my opinion of my wife: she wasn’t “crazy” or “mad” as those terms are used in reference to this subject. And, so, what about “psychosis?” I hear that word thrown all around. It was ignorantly thrown at my wife by a pastor with whom I shared just a little of our situation at the beginning of our journey. But until I began to frequent the Mad in America website, I didn’t realize just how big of a concern psychosis is to most people.

Again, what is “psychosis,” and why do I object to it so casually being used to describe people experiencing various mental health struggles? (Caveat: I’m not talking about physiologically or chemically induced psychosis, but that which is associated with mental trauma and dissociation.) If you do a quick search on the internet, it becomes readily apparent that the most basic understanding is that psychosis is when people lose some contact with reality.

My first issue with the relative ease with which “psychosis” is used and thrown around is: losing contact with reality according to whom? Who gets to decide what is real and what isn’t? Often perspective is a key ingredient to this question that is ignored. Our entire culture is wrapped up in a culture war that breaks my heart as I see both sides ripping our nation apart. Accusations by one side about the other side spewing misinformation and disinformation and believing conspiracy theories about COVID, the elections, BLM, critical race theory, this, that and the other abound. And yet as I watch this war, it is apparent that so few people really quiet their internal arguments long enough to hear what the other side is saying and experiencing. 

Instead, we judge what another is saying according to our perspective and diminish their take on “reality.” We are right back to the analogy of the six blind men and the elephant as each of us fights and argues about our perception of reality and disputes with anyone who would disagree.

Fortunately, I was so desperate not to abandon the one and only woman I ever have loved and to keep our marriage intact that I listened to her! And as I did, all those things she was saying and experiencing slowly began to make sense to me. It was a matter of perspective and of my learning to see things from her perspective and not judge them according to my own.

Let’s begin with a few basics. For a start, trauma: my wife’s was extreme, rooted in her early childhood. It occurred when she was barely 2 years old at the hands of a neighborhood boy. Sadly, her own parents were also trauma victims, and so, they not only didn’t protect their daughter, but they exacerbated the problem because her mom was emotionally abusive and her dad was emotionally distant. Thus, her parents never had the personal resources to help their daughter heal from that early abuse. Even decades later, when I asked them to help my wife—their daughter—at the start of our healing journey, they were at a loss how to help as they had never healed from their own trauma.

Now, any trauma that causes significant fear or pain is sequestered (i.e., dissociated, like an infectious COVID patient) by the human mind, whether its source is physical, emotional, mental, or otherwise. If the person has the ability to self-heal and cope with the associated pain and/or fear from that trauma, then the sequester ends. 

But if the trauma and subsequent fear and pain is of such magnitude that outside help is required for healing to occur, the sequester will continue until such help is attained. A broken limb usually requires a doctor to set it and then physical therapy to restore full use of the limb once the break itself has healed. If the trauma includes severe mental or emotional fear/pain associated with it, then attachment theory suggests that the person best equipped to help the victim is a stable and secure attachment figure using the tools of proximity maintenance, safe haven, and affect regulation to help the person through the pain and fear.

If that is not done, the sequester (i.e., dissociation) will continue indefinitely as the human system tries to continue functioning as normally as possible. Unfortunately, each time a sequester occurs, personality traits and mental abilities seem to get scooped up in that sequestration as well. And thus, the person is left with diminishing capacity to deal with any future trauma.

Now, all that is to say, as my wife began to heal, the various mental sequestrations she had experienced during her childhood were slowly lifted. But it was a process. And it took time, as I had to work with each of her parts one by one with compassion to help each one feel the safety and love she had never known.

The Rip Van Winkle Effect

For example: A couple years into our healing journey,  I was engaged with Shellie, one part of my wife, while we were out on our weekly errands. Shellie is an utterly delightful part who presents as a 5-year old with zero self-confidence and blames herself for every ill that befalls the family, and yet I always think of her as a magical zephyr that can instantly calm me and our son if we are agitated. 

On our errand run, I had found her hidden under a clothing rack at our local Macy’s because she had become overwhelmed by her new surroundings. She remarked how different everything looked than the last time she had been out. 

See, from her perspective, she was like Rip VanWinkle. When the trauma happened during her early childhood, she was put into a deep sleep (sequestered to minimize the pain and terror to the rest of my wife). And when she awoke, it was 40 years later! A lot had happened and changed in America from the late 1960’s/early 1970’s, when this part of my wife had been put to “sleep,” until she awoke in the 2010’s.

She was disoriented! And it was scary to her, as she had lost everything familiar to her: her house, her parents, her toys, and now she was living with some strange man (me!). So, she hadn’t lost touch with reality. Her reality had completely changed according to her perspective, and nothing looked familiar to her. She wasn’t the only part of my wife to describe the dissociation in a similar manner. Once I proved myself to be a safe person for her and willing to respond to the needs she expressed, then I was positioned to help her reorient to the current circumstances in which she found herself.

As my wife and I continued on the journey, I realized that other things she experienced also fell into this category that I call the Rip Van Winkle effect: the natural disorientation that occurs after decades of deep sleep because of the dissociation various parts of my wife had experienced. Flashbacks seemed to be her mind’s attempt to bring these long-dissociated memories of pain and fear back “online,” so to speak. But the process is messy at best. It is disorienting to the person as past trauma memories flood the overall person and overwhelm the current experiences.

Again, my wife wasn’t psychotic per se. These other parts of her were in a time warp, essentially, so it was always a little bit confusing. And then to make it worse, when she experienced flashbacks and other “extreme states,” her past memories and present circumstances were mixing and clashing and overwhelming her. But as I learned to apply the attachment concepts I mentioned above, I could help her and calm her and sometimes literally carry her through the chaos until her mind could make sense of these renewed memories and put them in an acceptable position within her current, personal narrative.

My second issue with us using the term “psychosis” is it makes us lazy. If I say that my wife is psychotic, i.e. she isn’t living in commonly-accepted reality, then what would be the point of making any attempt at understanding what she is experiencing? I can guilt-free call her crazy, mad, or “reality challenged” if I want to be charitable. If she’s psychotic, I don’t have to do any of the hard work to get inside her experience and figure out what’s going on internally so that I can help her calm the chaos. It pains me anytime I hear someone use the term. I know most of us family, spouses and significant others aren’t trying to be mean or cruel. We are just parroting our culture and the experts who ought to know better.

I’m not going to whitewash this. Walking with my wife on this healing journey is the most exhausting thing I have ever done. I don’t consider myself a saint or “wonderful,” as some have suggested. Part of me wants to quit! Part of me wants to be lazy! Part of me just wants to go and have a normal, healthy, easy relationship! I hate Valentine’s Day and all the damn cards which speak of an easy, satisfying love that I’ve never known! But as I desperately wrote in my daily journal, 10,000 pages later, I know that the only way I can live with myself and be true to myself is to walk with the only woman I still love toward our happily-ever-after ending…no matter how hard it is.

So, I truly do understand why we choose the easy path. I long for it myself. I have found so few companions to walk the one I’m on with me. It’s lonely, and I’m treated like an ignorant buffoon everywhere I go, but I try to be true to myself no matter how much it hurts.

But lastly, lest I end this on a down note, it’s not all bad. No, I don’t find the term “psychosis” to be very helpful. I know my wife isn’t crazy or mad. She never had a “break from reality.” More correctly, I believe she was experiencing a reality caused by the messy chaos of integrating her past dissociated trauma into her personal narrative today. And because I chose to walk with her through the exhaustion of constant extreme states those first five years of our journey, we got to see some amazing things happen. I got to witness parts of her wake from their deep, forced sleep to a new life. I got to be there with each of them and help breathe life and stability into them. 

Despite the fear and trauma many of them had been forced to hold all those decades, they still had a magical perspective, a childlike innocence toward life. As I helped each one release the fear and pain she had held for decades, I got to see each grow and connect to the others and lend the traits and abilities she controlled to my greater wife’s personality as she became enriched and whole in a way neither of us had witnessed before.

And I learned about myself along the way, too. Her experience taught me how to become healthier and integrated, as well.

A complete copy of  Healing Companions can be downloaded from Ruck’s website.

The post Reality According to Whom? Listening to My Wife—and The Problems with ‘Psychosis’ appeared first on Mad In America.

Instead, from the start, my wife was my teacher on how best to walk with her on this healing journey. She asked me not to read any of the popular information available about extreme dissociation because I’d already begun a process of fully engaging with her and she didn’t want me to stop doing so because some book or expert said otherwise. I honored that request for a couple of years until we had firmly established a methodology that felt comfortable and in which we saw a lot of healing take place.

Then, I began to read some expert literature online, and realized we had naturally inclined toward implementing the principles psychoanalyst John Bowlby had delineated decades earlier: safe haven, proximity maintenance, affect regulation, and others. Without our having formal knowledge of them, they had already helped us. So I studied them more thoroughly so that I could better integrate them into my interactions with my wife, performing the role of her primary attachment figure. We both benefitted from that adjustment, and today we purposefully embrace attachment principles with each other and even with our adult son.

We didn’t do it all by ourselves. During the first five years of our journey, my wife saw an alternative counselor (completely outside the system) who, happily, had prior experience with trauma and dissociation. Her help gave me the time to deal with my own issues, ranging from anger to disillusionment over our relationship, and to develop a working philosophy and methodology that would both hold our relationship together and enable my wife and me to heal as individuals. The counselor also gave me time to learn how best to be a companion for my wife. By the time the two of them amicably parted ways years later, I was already bearing the bulk of this responsibility. I’d learned to become comfortable in that role as we walked together and as I became more in tune with her needs and my own.

Things were going relatively well for us during years six and seven of our journey. We had learned to tear down the dissociative walls separating various parts of my wife’s greater self. The extreme states were beginning to fade into the rear-view mirror, and our relationship was becoming healthier than either of us had experienced in 25 years together. I thought that we would soon move into a new phase of satisfaction and enjoyment in our marriage…until an unexpected fork in the road sent us down a difficult path we are still navigating today.

And yet, the healing continues, just at a much slower pace. My wife is connecting and “syncing” with all of the dissociated parts of herself that were once lost in her traumatic childhood, and I continue to fulfill my role as her primary attachment figure. This part of the journey has required a lot of sacrifices from both of us. But now we know what we must do to see healing and reconnection with this latest part of her greater self, even though this stage has taken longer to complete than all the previous stages combined.

Sharing a Road Map

Through discovering Mad in America,  I realized that compared with so many of our fellow sojourners, our healing journey through extreme states has been truly different. Yes, it’s been incredibly difficult, but thankfully my wife didn’t suffer the loss of agency and social status, forced drugging, or any of the other indignities psychiatry and our culture at large have foisted on those experiencing mental distress, treating the crisis as a problem rather than an opportunity to showcase the best of our humanity.  To make it this far, we’ve had to learn to attach strongly to each other. That bond has held us together through the pain and sacrifices we’ve each had to make, creating something positive rather than adding trauma on top of trauma.

So, in an attempt to bridge the gulf between our collective experiences and traditional mental health system approaches, last year I wrote a booklet titled Before You Call for Help, which covered some of the foundational lessons I learned on our 14-year healing journey. Mad in America graciously agreed to put the booklet in their Family Resources section, here. But when I began to attend one of MIA’s online support groups a few months ago, I realized this booklet was just too cerebral and didn’t paint a clear enough picture of what an alternative healing journey outside the biomedical paradigm can look like.

And so I recently wrote another booklet, Engaging “Madness.” In it, I attempt to paint a clearer picture of our experience by using lots of personal stories from our healing journey. I still outline some basic presuppositions that allowed us to take this different pathway, but this time I make my personal experiences as her healing companion the foundation of the booklet.

There are five short sections comprising 42 pages. Toward a Working Philosophy talks about some of the important life experiences that prepared me to take this healing journey with my wife and how they formed the way I walk with her.

Engaging “Psychosis” discusses how I learned to see her experiences from her perspective, and thus why don’t view them as “psychotic.” The Rip Van Winkle effect, as I call it, helps explain so many of our loved one’s experiences, which our culture dismissively labels as psychosis.

Engaging “Delusions” (and “Paranoia”) discusses my failed attempts to argue my wife out of her delusions. Once I learned to engage her perceptions on their own merits, then healing was possible.

In the Engaging Voices section, I briefly relay my experiences connecting with three of the eight voices my wife heard on this journey. When my wife first began to hear voices, she wanted me to engage them. And so we proceeded with a trial-and-error approach of learning to listen to rather than shun the voices. I recall how my wife’s angry voice and I slowly moved from an adversarial relationship to one of mutual assistance to one of loving friendship and more. I also recount engaging two “mute” voices, the last of which couldn’t remember our interactions from day to day because she seemed able to access only short-term memories.

In the last section, Engaging Extreme States, I share how the attachment principles of safe haven, proximity maintenance, and affect regulation gave me the tools to not only walk through those extreme states with my wife but also help her find real healing so that it has been years since she has suffered from them.

As I say, I learned to help my wife heal by becoming that stable presence in the midst of her flashbacks, panic attacks, and more. We also found our way through eating “disorder” issues and body “dysmorphia” as we untangled the dissociation and reconnected her to parts of herself that were able to counteract these tendencies. As well, we went through years of comatose episodes and discovered how to easily navigate them until we were able to effect a complete cessation by changing her “internal working model” as described by Bowlby.

A Call to Action

There are many promising, alternative efforts out there including Soteria House, peer respite, and Open Dialogue. But in the end, we—the family, the spouses, the significant others—are the ones who must stand in the gap for our loved ones when they fall into extreme distress. It’s never convenient. It doesn’t just happen at the therapist’s office or when they are staying at a specialized sanctuary or incarcerated during a forced hospitalization. They need our love and healing support 24/7, whenever the extreme states and more overtake them. But I believe that if we are empowered to understand the basic principles John Bowlby laid out, we will have many of the tools we need to walk through our loved ones’ mental hurricanes and turn them from fear-inducing events for everyone involved to healing and bonding events for both sufferer and companion.

So I encourage you to read my booklet. And I’d also like to hear from people interested in creating a network of family, spouses, significant others, and anyone else interested in supporting each other as we walk with our loved ones on a mutual healing journey. It’s not easy. It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, but I love my wife and she is worth it, and I believe there are others reading this who would agree their loved one is worth it, too.

Booklet →

The post Engaging “Madness”: A Guide for Significant Others and Families appeared first on Mad In America.