So....
the masks unravel.
As some of you already know, I'm participating in a performance art piece compiled by Thomas Riccio which will take place in mid- to late-February. The piece is based on the mind of a woman named "Jamie" (though that's not her original name), who has Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), commonly referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder. Each of her personalities will have their own space on the "stage," and the audience will wander through these caverns as if glimpsing into the space of her mind. Local Dallas studio artists will design the "environments" for each of the "alters," as they're called -- some university-based, some more deeply established in the local Dallas art scene.
The alters include (and the order is important):
Patricia -- the young girl who is repeatedly raped by her uncle(s) since the age of 2 1/2
Patty -- The rebellious, drug-addict, suicidal teenager
Misty -- The young stripper she embodied
James -- the "bouncer," who manifested as a protector when Misty's manager tried to pimp her out
Magick -- the older, wiser stripper-prostitute who uses sex magic as a weapon and tool
Rita -- the studious, pious Catholic academic
Marta -- the voice of her mother who plays the nag and the dominatrix all in one
Papi -- her alcoholic father who was never "aware" enough to stop the abuse
Cleopatra -- the Mother Sex Goddess archetype
Jaime -- the integrator
When asked if I would play Magick, I let out a guffaw. "I've been playing Magick for the last seven years now. Her name is Viviane." I resonate with all of these alters, and with the path Jaime has taken in her life... a path not chosen but forged through the pieces of fractured consciousness developed in order to deal with the unspeakable physical and mental trauma she endured for many years. No, I would play Cleopatra... not only did she appeal to my current study of archetypes, but she was ever-enduring... still a defense mechanism -- they all are -- but wise and powerful, Cleopatra... the woman who twice-over almost conquered Rome through her hypnotic sexual wiles and would rather poison herself than let the enemy take her body alive. Cleopatra was slave to no one. Cleopatra had the strength to take care of the others and castrate those who dared step in their way. She's Jaime's manifestation of the Great Mother archetype, manifesting first one of the many nights while Patricia was being molested -- the Elizabeth Taylor film was playing in the other room and she... simply... went... somewhere... else.
Most of you understand emotional pain, and many of you have endured physical/emotional/sexual abuse of some sort. Those of you who have not may have a difficult time understanding the process of dissociation, though each of us experience it at some point in our lives as a healthy adaptive mechanism meant to distract the mind from trauma. I'm currently plowing through
The Stranger in the Mirror by Marlene Steinberg, a Pulitzer prize-nominated account of fourteen years of psychological research. The author was told such a focus would ruin her career -- that most psychologists ignored or disbelieved the complex of "multiple personalities" -- and though those prejudices still remain today, her work is absolutely groundbreaking and a fundamental step toward trying to understand consciousness.
She emphasizes the fact that dissociation happens on a scale or spectrum... the far end of the scale is what we consider full-fledged DID, and individuals in this state have several -- sometimes up to a hundred -- egos living in the claustrophobic space of one confused mind. However, many of us experience dissociation at some point in our life, particularly with response to near-death experiences, physical pain, identity crises, etc. Steinberg insists that many people currently in therapy or on psychotropics have been misdiagnosed as "depressives," "bipolar," "borderline"... that if psychologists could understand the basic aspects of dissociation, they would know the correct questions to ask, for these "disorders" are often merely symptoms of a much deeper problem, that of a fundamentally fragmented psyche.
She identifies five major strands of dissociation -- ranging from mild to severe -- as thus:
1.
amnesia -- loss of time or memory
2.
depersonalization -- the feeling of being disconnected from one's body, feeling the body morph into oblong shapes, out-of-body experiences, not recognizing one's self in the mirror
3.
derealization -- the feeling of being disconnected from one's environment, having "inappropriate" details jump out while others (like the sound of another's voice) fade, surreality, and in extreme cases as sense of fogginess
4.
ego confusion -- all of us go through an ego search through adolescence -- and she uses Erikson extensively in order to explain this phenomenon, much to my approval -- but for some people a steady sense of Ego (i.e. a unified Self that can say "I" with confidence, unaware or the unconscious aspects which make it up) is elusive. These people are usually victims of early childhood abuse -- have been told they are not worthy, are bad, lazy, whores, selfish, fundamentally flawed -- and may have had to take a caregiver role before they were psychologically ready. DID is 90% a female disorder -- because woman are far more likely to be sexually abused, but also because women are expected to look after other needs before their own, and when they are programmed to believe they are worth nothing and owe EVERYTHING they are to their abusers, they find it hard to establish a stable sense of identity.
5.
ego alteration -- the sense that one's "moods" or different "aspects" of their personality are often at odds, battling within the mind for control. In extreme cases, these identities often adopt names and will actually take complete momentary control of the consciousness of the human being, but all of us have, on some level, a sense of ego alteration. We act differently depending on our audience -- family, work, lovers, friends. We experience ego alteration without recognition of such shifts, as they are natural and necessary to social living. In the case of victims of consistent trauma or abuse, however, these "personalities" -- which are coping mechanisms meant to handle situations of extreme stress -- adopt their own consciousness. Those of you who come from peaceful, "happy" homes may have experienced ego alteration in psychedelic states or otherwise traumatic situations. For the rest of us, ego alteration is as easy as breathing.
The mental breakdown of people with some level of dissociation usually occurs in the late twenties, though it can happen at any confusing crossroads in life. I am 27. I have been roleplaying for over 10 years, which I realize now has been a therapeutic release for my alters, and there have been many, even before... children who experience trauma often live rich fantasy lives in their heads, taking the "imaginary friend" phenomenon much more seriously as a way to displace the hurt and confusion when a loved one purposefully crosses boundaries they should not.
As early as I can remember, I have associated myself with others... at 9 I was obsessed with Whitesnake, but also thought of myself secretly as She-ra -- I had the sword, and would stand on benches outside: "By the power of Greyskull!" Now, imagination itself is common in childhood and is not essentially maladaptive. But when the child CAN'T WAIT to be sent to her room so she can enter her elaborate world of fantasy in which she is the elegant, cultured, beautiful focus of the attention of many famous men, with whom she has various different sorts of relationships, anything to be away from the weight of the constant oppression... the feeling that one's emotions are completely invalid, that one's thoughts dismissable, that one's body is meant to scour the house in order to "pay one's way" for being such a burden on the family.... I'm lucky in that I don't remember any sexual abuse, another form of such "payment"... it may have happened, it may not have. I hold it together as well as I do possibly because the abuse I endured was mild compared to that of others.
(A common feature of children of abuse is to downplay their personal experience as not "really" being abuse -- "Well I didn't have BRUISES, so even if he split my lip it's not abuse" or "Well he didn't rape me, so it's not abuse if he tells me all I'll ever be is a whore, and that I'd better learn how to suck dick well or I will never have a man of worth because I myself am worthless otherwise," etc. In
When Rabbit Howls -- a MUST read for those interested in this stuff -- a woman who ends up uncovering 94 entities within her after years of continual sexual abuse tells her therapist upon their first meeting: "Well my stepfather and my mother weren't actually ever married when he raped me, so it's not abuse." The abused are taught to love and depend on the abuser -- are often threatened with violence or death if they reveal the extent of their trauma. Though I lived in constant fear, I loved my stepfather, and the few times when my mom considered leaving him I said, in my 4/8/12-year old voice, "No, Mommy! What would Brucie do without us?" though every bone in my body must have been screaming to be free. Such is the conflict in the mind of the child, which becomes the mind of the adult and replays these scenarios in one form or another again and again...)
The young mind is not capable of processing the experience of the trauma, so she or he puts it in another place, disconnecting from the reality of the situation. In cases of repeated abuse, the "other place" becomes another person, complete with his/her own handwriting style, tone of voice, sense of style, needs/desires, etc. Each of us struggle to establish ONE sense of stable identity, and the victims of severe abuse develop SEVERAL for use in particularly scary situations. The "original" self therefore becomes displaced, often never to be recovered. The initial moment of trauma banishes her for she is unable to cope with reality. In
When Rabbit Howls, the book is attributed to a woman who is physically known as Trudi Chase, though none of her personalities recognize or go by that name... that girl was obliterated by age two. The alters -- who only become aware of each other and begin to consciously converse in the process of therapy -- feel trapped in the body of a woman they don't recognize, who they often perceive as being a hostile and unwelcome force. They refer to themselves as "The Troops" because there is literally an internal and external battle raging -- new alters develop when the Self experiences new trauma and battles for sanity, and internally those alters battle each other for control of the Body they ambivalently inhabit.
People with DID or mild forms of dissociation are usually highly intelligent, sensitive, competent people. The Troops they develop are highly effective at "passing" in public, taking control of situations, rising to positions of relative power and success, but always terrified of being "discovered" as being "abnormal"... they find complex ways of hiding themselves, especially from the Integrator -- the Self that the person refers to herself as. They often find an outlet for their condition through art and writing. Now that I have at least a tentative understanding of this phenomenon, I understand artists/musicians far better... particularly people like Tori Amos and Marilyn Manson, who I've always been drawn toward because of their "versatility" at expressing the range of human emotion with virtuosity. Manson literally refers to himself as various names and as being in various states (the worm to the Fallen Angel, etc.) and Tori speaks of the "entities" who come to her and have inspired so many of her songs. Spirits, songs such as "Hey Jupiter" and "Yes, Anastasia" -- songs that came to her in a fog, a dream. She refers to each of her songs as "the girls" and often they battle for who'll take control on one particular night of performance, or which ones will appear on which albums, regardless of what the Integrator -- who, incidentally, refers to herself as Tori even though her original name is Myra Ellen -- desires.
Of course, as a roleplayer, alters become "entertainment" or "diversion." Roleplayers seldom think much about the intricate archetypes they develop from the deep needs of their unconscious minds, but can say with certainty what those individuals feel, think, desire -- thoughts and behaviors which are often quite different than how the Integrator would Self-identify... often in direct OPPOSITION to the Integrator's sense of self. Roleplaying -- and by moderate extension the experience of film, music, art -- allows us to enter these different modes, these alters who we don't necessarily perceive but with whom we profoundly identify, and the result is a release of trauma. Fandom is, in a sense, an obsession with this process -- what Steinberg might call
derealization,
depersonalization or
identity alteration because we learn important lessons from characters and often we find them more attractive than the world of the banal, which can be infinitely more scary in its ambiguity.
The other day I was looking through old photos (a consistent preoccupation as I try to capture moments to burn into my memory as Real and therefore Self). I used to have a Polaroid camera and I took two photos, one which was me simply smiling, and one which had me with a sexy smirk on my face and a black Michael Jackson "Smooth Criminal" -looking hat and beneath it said: "Suzzy." I went by this "nickname" from the ages of 9 though 11, but ended up discarding it. Since then I've gone by many names, while roleplaying or not. Eva Peron. Saema. Liselle. Elayne. Isendre. Ce'Nedra. Xaralee. Viviane Morceau. Geneveve Orseau. Persephone. Many, many more...
Over them all presides The Purple Lady, my version of the Goddess energy, my version of Cleopatra. She came to me while I was on a particularly strong hallucinogenic wavelength and she returns in many forms, many of which don't have names or faces. And she is often displeased at my failures. But she is love even as she combats hate, and her ire is never permanent.
The book talks about how many of the alters are named after religious figures in whom the individual may not necessarily "believe," but these images present convenient models for behavior. In Jungian terms: ARCHETPYES. We delve into the deepest reaches of our brain for schema in order to understand ourselves and make sense of our experience. And to dissociate from ourselves, to be anyone but who we are because who we are can often be too goddamn painful.
The last few weeks have been particularly distressing for me... few years really. If I was upset, I used to simply cry myself silly (The Tide, or the Tsunami as I now refer to her) or I would let Viviane take control, and though her energy can be wild and often destructive, she is IN CONTROL and she always knows where she is and what she wants. She is mistress of NO ONE.
I shy away from her now. I shy away from them all. I inhabit Persephone most of the time. Persephone, stolen in the bloom of her maidenhood by a covetous and disregarding man, the lord of the underworld, Hades... stolen and imprisoned in the coldness and the dark. She could have left, but she ate the fruit. As we know from the Bible, the fruit = knowledge, a rite of passage, sexual and emotional development from maiden to woman. And though she's allowed out to return to her mother Demeter's arms for Spring and Summer, even then she lives with the weight of her impending doom, that time when her autonomy will no longer reign free, when she will have to return to the jealous, indifferent male who's taken from her what she cannot describe but can never, ever, recover.
Persephone is... away. She exists to fight back the Tide, lest I cry and cry for days, an eventuality to which those of you who have spent extensive amounts of time with me can attest, when the Troops break down and I'm only raw pain.
I said recently, before I started thinking about this stuff, before I read this book... I said, "I don't really think there IS such a thing as Sarah. I think there are characteristics which everyone defines as 'me' -- intelligence, sexiness, empathy, etc. - both those aspects are simply ways in which I've attempted to hide from or hear the base... the base is sheer, raw pain." There must have been something there before that initial moment, but that's where I end up if I let my guard down, if I leave myself alone for too long. I used to NEVER be alone, even if I was "alone" with my music or in my private fantasy universe. The thought of me -- just me -- sends me into a state of derealization... all I feel is alienation, removal, distance, and unending mourning. When Persephone lowers her funeral shroud that we might see beyond it , the tears come and come and don't stop.
The book talks about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and how people short-circuit -- their brain is in a constant state of fear even though their world is ostensibly safe. What was a healthy, adaptive mechanism becomes a repetition compulsion and the danger signal always sounds even when the world is safe. And the individual realizes this -- realizes his/her own dysfunction -- and it sends her spiraling down into a dark depression and alienation, punctuated by moments or paranoia and anxiety.
Lately, I've been afraid to go anywhere. Afraid to drive, afraid to walk. Afraid to love, afraid to share. Afraid to the point of letting Persephone take hold and simply being half-there and half in Hades, resigned to whatever terrible fate may befall me. My heart wants -- and has always only wanted -- to love and share and be intimate, but Persephone simply shakes her head. "That was taken from us, remember?" And Viviane laughs her throaty, sultry condescending laugh, and she tells me how I must make the best out of the situation, that we're all simply fools, that nothing ever lasts, that trust is a naive illusion. It feels so good when she takes control, because I can channel my power completely -- I have nothing holding me back, no illusions of some knight in shining armor on his way to rescue me, no pathetic dreams of redemption. Manipulation of the body, of words, of energy.... that's all there is. Viviane reminds me that every moment is an opportunity and the road forks -- you can be a victim or you can be indifferent, or you can be IN CHARGE. And if people are irrevocably fucked up, then wouldn't it be better to be IN CHARGE than to be trampled on by their incompetence, even when it's in the guise of trying to "help" or to "love?"
"In the end, they always go away. They may want to, they may not. They may get distracted. They may be taken by forces none of us can control. But they will GO AWAY. And there's not a goddamn thing you or your machinations can do about it," she reminds me. And then she shrugs and tells me to find pleasure now, because soon, I too will GO AWAY, to whence none of us knows.
I hate her. And I shouldn't, because she's one of the Troops, possibly the most important one at this latest phase in my life. But I cannot and will not live in her. I would rather live in Persephone's funeral shroud and withdraw completely than to let her immorality rule me, for she cares only about herself. She is me in negative. "Me," that is... "me," whatever that means. She twists all of my virtues into failures and forces her will on others, as others' will had been forced upon me when I was too weak to fight back. Fortunately, she's not precisely malevolent, just self-interested. I hate her, but I love her because I wouldn't have been able to survive without her. I simply wouldn't be here. Physically? Mentally? What's the difference when you dissociate by nature?
Those of you who love me. I mean not to hurt you with these words. But what is it that you love? WHO is it? Do you even know? Is what you've seen of me simply a well-articulated construction or a "person" in the classical sense? Can you truly love and want to share with someone who deep deep down knows that pain is the essence of her existence? You think I can offer you solace? You think I can offer you peace? I AM NOTHING. I channel energy through my alters but they go away... they "go to sleep" as Genevieve says.
Genevieve.... she is Purple Lady's avatar. She is the mournful Mother, she's the unconditional lover. She understands that life is pain but believes that integrity is the way to see your way to the other side. No matter what the pain... people being blown up in Third World countries, tortured in inhuman cells, hurt, taken from, denied, split, fundamentally severed... she still loves. And she knows that she has to love the abuser as much as the abused. She knows that one has to love unconditionally, that no event happens in a vacuum, that the sickness is cultural, it's global, far beyond the individual, and we're simply acting out our parts, mostly unaware.
But I'm not there yet, Mother. I cannot love them. I have not forgiven. And forgiveness will not be arriving soon.
I'm a weak vessel for the Lady, in truth, and I've always known this. I touch on the transcendent, on the divine, but ultimately the Pain defeats me, the Tide overwhelms me. I give what I can in my moments of lucidity and grace... but how can I ever be intimate with someone when I know that the core of me is pain? How can I TRULY love someone and wish that upon them?
There is no magic wand. Nothing will come and BLAST make it all better. I've seen too much in the other people in my life who also dissociate to know better. The best I can hope for is that Genevieve or one of my more stable alters, maybe ones not yet formed, will put Persephone to sleep, smooth her forehead, and take control.
Such is me.
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