Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ has undergone rapid analysis alongside an exponential growth in known cases. Women with MPD outnumber men by at least four to one.⁶⁸

      Fragmentation of the self into dissociated alters (inner characters created to carry overwhelming emotions) is the central feature of MPD. The array of personality fragments usually carries shattered aspects of the self, as in Haddock’s case. She has a compulsive cleaner named “Priscilla” and an extremely sensitive alter named “little Priscilla” who “carried my pain.” Often personality fragments include at least one “hateful” or “evil” alter, as well as one who is an impeccable performer along status quo lines.

      While helping professionals should honor the survival techniques employed by each survivor—for they enabled her survival—they must be wary of crossing over into pathologizing or valorizing such symptoms (such as MPD or dissociation). These symptoms emerge as a result of the violence, and because these dissociative devices succeed, a terribly unjust distribution of the emotional burden is carried by the survivor.⁶⁹ In Melinda’s words, “[A multiple personality disorder] is a survival mechanism and has nothing to do with your creativity and intelligence.” Multiple personalities cause the survivor rather than the society or family to bear the burden of her victimization.

       Borderline Personality Disorder

      Some MPD symptoms are also found among people who have been diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder. People with borderline personalities, unlike people with multiple personalities, are thought to lack the dissociative capacity to form fragmented alters, but they have similar difficulty developing an integrated identity.⁷⁰ For the borderline patient, inner images of the self are split into extremes of good and bad. An unstable sense of self is one of the major diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder, and the “splitting” of inner representations of self and others is considered by some theorists to be the central underlying problem of the disorder.⁷¹

      The common denominator of the two disorders is their origin in a history of childhood trauma. In the case of MPD the etiological role of severe childhood trauma is at this point firmly established. In a study of one hundred patients with the disorder, ninety-seven had histories of major childhood trauma, most commonly sexual abuse, physical abuse, or both.⁷² Extreme sadism and murderous violence were the rule rather than the exception in these harrowing histories. Almost half the patients had actually witnessed the violent death of someone close to them, as in the case of Haddock, who not only saw her parents mutilate animals but also saw her relatives, who were part of the same religious cult, take the life of a young black boy and a white teenage girl. In Haddock’s words,

      My inner kids tell me they saw a little black boy hung—I have reason to believe that the cult members had ties to racial superiority. Another time, I woke up crying one day, I had a memory of a white girl—I was supposed to die but they took her instead. Her eyes were just so sad. And she was maybe fourteen when I was eight. I have memories of my cousin Davey bringing in a dagger—and his hands in my hands bringing a dagger down. I have a personality named Little Priscilla. In the ceremony they had done something to this horse—they killed it. But the head was sort of okay and the body was all bloody and icky and sticky. And it wasn’t dead yet, and Little Priscilla went up to it, and it looked at her with its eyes and she just petted its little head until it died. And the fact is, up until I uncovered a personality who carried my pain, I never felt any pain in my life.

      Seeing a black child and a young white girl being murdered are early lessons writ large that have the intention of indoctrinating, through terror, young participants to respect and observe the gendered and racist hierarchy of their culture. Many cults, besides the Ku Klux Klan, are caricaturing wider cultural values. Melinda also saw animals being killed by her perpetrators and was forced to kill animals herself by the teenage boys who gang-raped her. Her offenders warned her: “If you talk, we’ll do the same to you.”

      Another study found that 81 percent of borderline personality patients have histories of severe childhood trauma. The abuse generally began early in life and was severe and prolonged, though it rarely reached the lethal extremes described by patients with multiple personality disorder.⁷³ A well-integrated self based upon a whole, stable experience becomes extremely elusive for a woman who has been sexually assaulted and objectified. Instead, her own viewpoint is splintered. She may see herself from the perpetrator’s perspective. Her “good” self is an innocent memory (herself prior to the trauma). Her “evil” self is the introjected perpetrator. This splintered experience or divided self-construction is inscribed into her sexuality and is central to the psychological “disorders” to which many survivors are prone, including multiple-personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, depression, and eating disorders.⁷⁴

       Broken Narrative

      Many survivors have difficulty not only remembering their history but coherently assessing their past. Thus, under the conditions of chronic abuse, fragmentation becomes the central principle of personality organization. Fragmentation in consciousness prevents the ordinary integration of knowledge, memory, emotional states, and bodily experience. Though all the survivors interviewed were able to graduate from college, most felt that their ability to be fully attentive in school was severely hindered by their preoccupation with trying to solve double-binds: “If he loves me, why does he abuse me,” or “My family looks normal from the outside, what’s wrong with me on the inside?”

      A pastiche of inner representations of the self prevents the unification of identity. Such a shattered consciousness is discerned through listening to the survivor’s attempt to recall her history. Natalie offers an example of how difficult it is to have full memory regarding an intolerable betrayal by both parents.

      One cognitive memory I have—I think this is kind of where my memory is cut—I remember being in bed with my dad, and I think my mom was on the other side of me, I was between my mom and my dad. And—and I’m not sure that my mom was there, but I know that my dad and I were in my dad’s bed, in my dad’s room—[they had separate bedrooms]—and I remember his hand being on my stomach, and it was—it was not right on my tummy, what—I called my tummy then, it was too far down. And I remember thinking, “Oh, my God, he’s just an inch from my vagina,” you know. I remember feeling that, you know, that—that—kind of terror. Then the memory cuts off.

      I use the term broken narrative⁷⁵ to describe this phenomenon. A broken narrative is a sense of being able to summon only parts of a scene from one’s past, like having access to only a single frame or two rather than access to an entire film.

      Melinda reveals a kind of psychic amnesia⁷⁶ when she talks about living with her family: “I don’t have many memories of being with my family. I don’t remember sitting at a table. I don’t remember eating with my family until high school. I have no memory. I was really like a walking skeleton. Our house was like Dickens’ Bleak House. Ironically, that was one of three books we had in our house.” When trust is lost, traumatized people feel that they belong more to the dead than to the living.⁷⁷ Especially when abuse is chronic, the person may find the notion of death (severing from their lived reality) comforting.

      Recurring Trauma

       “How did the abuse affect you even when it wasn’t happening in the moment?”

      According to Melinda,

      At age four, I started having this recurring sort of night trauma. Whenever I would be trying to fall asleep, everything would start flipping and spinning, it was very internal. And it was this terrible thing—and it was СКАЧАТЬ