This is Janet’s abuse story that she wrote for the Newspaper of First Centenary United Methodist Church.
Luke 8:28-33
So they arrived at the other side, in the Gerasene country across the lake from Galilee. As he was coming out of the boat a man from the city of Gadara came to meet him, a man who had been demon-possessed for a long time. Homeless and naked, he lived in a cemetery among the tombs. As soon as he saw Jesus he shrieked and fell to the ground before him, screaming. “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of God Most High? Please, I beg you, oh, don’t torment me!” For Jesus was already commanding the demon to leave him. This demon had often taken control of the man so that even when shackled with chains he simply broke them and rushed out into the desert, completely under the demon’s power. “What is your name?” Jesus asked the demon. “Legion,” they replied for the man was filled with thousands of them! They kept begging Jesus not to order them into the Bottomless Pit. A herd of pigs was feeding on the mountainside nearby, and the demons pled with him to let them enter into the pigs. And Jesus said they could. So they left the man and went into the pigs, and immediately the whole herd rushed down the mountainside and fell over a cliff into the lake below, where they drowned.
My story begins three years ago one weekend in May 1995. I was hiking in Desoto State Park with several friends from Alabama. Prior to that weekend, I had always thought of myself as a normal person with a normal childhood. To be truthful, I thought of myself as a ‘better than normal person’ with a ‘better than normal’ childhood. In retrospect, I had devoted 24 hours a day for over half a century seeking one accomplishment after another in order to maintain that illusion. I was successful professionally…the highest ranked woman at UTC. I was successful socially…always ready to hostess a party. I was profiled on a PBS documentary and routinely participated in local TV interviews. I was a wife, mother, and grandmother. My list of ‘doings’ could go on and on.
About midway through that hike, I had a powerful experience. I felt dizzy and my ears were ringing. Blips of my forgotten childhood flashed before my eyes like someone rapidly flipping pictures from a photograph album. It was not that all of the pictures which flashed before me were entirely forgotten. It was more like I saw those pictures from a different perspective. I remembered that my father was always drunk and was violent. I remembered always watching through the window with dread to see if the good daddy or the bad daddy would get off the bus. I remembered him holding me against the wall with a gun. I remembered him trying to kill himself by bashing his head against the wall while my mother screamed “Jerry, Jerry’, you’ll kill yourself.” I remembered his reckless drunken driving…driving as fast as he could and deliberating hitting dogs and running people off of the road while my sister and I crouched in terror on the floor of the car and my mother screamed “Jerry, Jerry, you’ll kill us.” I didn’t exactly remember the sexual abuse. I did know that I had always remembered having dreams of him raping me when I was little. In those dreams he would call me “Janet, Darling” and tell me that this would make a woman out of me and he did it to my sister too. I always thought it was a dream and I was always so ashamed that I had such dreams about my own father. What was different about my perspective is that I always thought that this didn’t effect me…that all the kids had families like mine. That instant on that day in May on that hike I knew that I did not have a normal childhood; that it had affected me profoundly; and something terrible was wrong with me.
I did not tell my husband or any of my friends about the craziness in my mind that May weekend. As usual, I was the life of the party. I did, however, notice something else about me. I was watching me as if I were not me. I saw myself being real flamboyant while, at the same time, buckets of tears were running down my cheeks. I noticed that nobody noticed the buckets of tears running down my cheeks because I was distracting them so with my funny stories, my exaggerated arm gestures, and my general outrageousness. The me that was outside of me and watching all of this was pointing out I had been doing stuff like this all my life. I had this ability to distract people from what was really happening inside myself so I could hide.
During the next few days, I slept very little. The insights kept coming and so did the tears. I went to work and tried to hide as best I could. I even thought about the feasibility of getting my computer set up in the third stall of the ladies restroom in UTC’s Hunter Hall so I could do my work and nobody could see my face. Maybe I could pull it off…I was the boss.
One week later, I did an amazing thing. I ran away. I just got in my car and drove off heading west. In retrospect, I was a little child who finally, after 50 years, had enough courage to run away from an abusive home. I was gone for five weeks. I drove 5000 miles sometimes sleeping in the car; I spent a lot of time hiking and backpacking the canyons of Arizona; I went to see my sister whom I had been estranged from for 15 years; and I lived in a floating place where I could not figure out what was real and what were dreams and imagination. All the while, hot tears flowed and I prayed unceasing for help in understanding what was happening to me while answers came from flowering yellow columbine bushes and the moonlight reflected from the eyes of prairie dogs.
Help! But Talk Is Not Cheap
Five weeks later, I came back to Chattanooga. I got a recommendation from a friend for a therapist and started seeing her and…I started visiting First Centenary United Methodist Church. Twice a day, I would leave my job to sit in the pew in the sanctuary. I thought of it as spiritual therapy and I imagined angels in the rafters singing to me.
About 15 months into therapy, I got my diagnosis. Just prior to this time, my therapist was pushing me to accept the reality of my childhood. She urged me to make a list of the events that I knew happened to me and those that might have happened as suggested by my present phobias, dreams, and behaviors. One weekend I started on that project. I got a piece of butcher paper, drew a time line, and started making notes. That paper went all the way around the bathroom and I was only up to twelve years old. All of a sudden I got so sick, I couldn’t finish. I felt nauseous and headachy. I went to bed and slept for 36 hours. I knew my diagnosis. I knew without my therapist telling me. At some level I had always known what was wrong with me…. And what was wrong with me was the biggest secret of all. I decided to face it and so I asked her at my next therapy appointment.
I have Multiple Personality Disorder (recently renamed Disassociative Identity Disorder). My Disciples II text says that is what Legion had (read Luke 8: 26-33). I am an intelligent person and fairly well informed. I knew full well the ramifications of that diagnosis and it made me bad sick. However, the one thought that nourished and sustained me in the days that followed was from now on my healing from my twice-daily spiritual therapy would escalate. You see I intrinsically met the criteria of “Wherever two or more are gathered in My Name, I am with you also”.
Facing, Accepting and Talking
Facing, accepting, and talking about this seems to me to be comparable to climbing Mt. Everest. There are so many things I have to understand and learn in order for my life to make sense to me. For example, it is very difficult for me to ask for some things that I need because of the underlying sense of worthlessness, common to children of trauma.
Toxic shame prevented me from looking anybody in the eye. Is there any greater shame in this world then incest? I work hard to unravel my confusion about blaming myself for the incest. Doesn’t the story about Adam and Eve teach me that the incest is my fault because women tempt men through their sexuality? Come to think about it, maybe incest is part of God’s plan and His will because if we are all descended from Adam and Eve, how else did we get here but through incest? I know there are two stories of creation in the bible but I can only recall learning as a child the one about Adam and Eve. That story and its interpretation had powerful effects on my view of what was happening.
Didn’t the bible teach me always to honor and obey my father, to do my Father’s will, and not to question too deeply? Didn’t I learn that father knows best and Father knows best even though the meaning is sometime beyond our understanding? The bible teaches that not obeying the Father’s will (the wages of sin) is death. My father taught me that not obeying his will was death because he would just hold my nose closed and my mouth shut until I passed out from suffocation. I try to focus on the difference between ‘father and Father’ but sometimes I think the little girls inside me get ‘em mixed up.
Child abuse causes brain damage and I have brain damage. Excessive doses of the flight/fight (fear) hormone burns up the hippocampus. The hippocampus is the bridge between the left side and the right side of the brain. Verbalization is primarily a left brain activity and feelings are primarily a right brain activity. When I experience strong feeling, I cannot speak and that frightens people and I panic because I can’t tell anyone what is happening (they don’t know about the brain damage). I fear they might think I am full of demons and will shun me or worse. Therefore, when I speak of the abuse the only way I can verbalize is to do so in a rather detached manner. Talking about such horrible things while showing little feeling makes me appear unbelievable to some people. Not being believed was one of my worst fears as a child and helped to seal my lips shut. It is what keeps up the walls of silence and causes the abuse to perpetuate itself from generation to generation. So you can see I am in a terrible bind when it comes to communicating about all of this. Part of me screams “tell, tell” while other parts scream “hide, hide”. Being able to share my stories and be accepted is important to my healing.
Healing
One Wednesday night at church, the Stephen Ministers made a presentation. During this presentation the call was given to anybody in the group to come and pray with one of the ministers present. I got up my courage and participated in this. Oh how I wished I had a Stephen’s Minister who would pray for me and with me on a regular basis; someone with whom I could talk and feel safe, who would believe me and not judge.
It took me another whole year of healing to get the courage to ask to be a care receiver of First Centenary Stephen’s Ministry program. I had completed Disciples I. That experience gave me practice in asking for help and the prayers received facilitated my healing. I have had my Stephen’s Minister for a year now. We lunch together regularly and pray for each other.
I am much better now although I anticipate I have at least three years of therapy left. There are still many blank spots in my memory and many days I experience a lot of psychological pain. It seems like I have a big wad of fear and sadness inside me. I think of it as a psychological abscess that is finally coming to the surface. This article is proof of how much better I am. It is like ‘coming out of the closet’. This is who I am and this is how I survived and the toxic shame I have lived with for over half a century is not about me…it is about what happened to me. I pray (and please pray for me) my personal holocaust will not be in vain and that, with God’s help, I will find a way to use my experience to contribute to our evolution toward “Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be Done, on Earth as it is in Heaven”.
I dedicate this series of articles to the Stephen Ministers of First Centenary United Methodist Church; to the tremendous power of prayer; and to our Father and Lord Jesus Christ who has always been with all of me’s and helped me find a way to survive through Multiple Personality Miracle.
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What a powerful article and a testament to not only the power of prayer, but of Janet’s will to overcome and understand in so much as anyone ever could. I hope this article reaches others who may be helped by it.