Statement?

When you wake up at three o'clock in the morning to a peremptory knock on your bedroom door and an unstoppable entry, it should be upsetting. When a woman in a black, smelly wool cloak sits down by your bed and begins to accuse you of conspiracy to kidnap her with the aid of an array of movie stars by your side, it should be ludicrous, offensive, frightening.

But the blue, stark eyes that hovered fiercely above wildly gesticulating hands were the eyes of my sister, the same with whom I had shared a room, a bed, countless hours of time. The experiences that I was enduring for me, had become normal. More than normal, these were now the good nights. I had not quite accepted, at that time, that my sister's world, my sister's life, had become closed to me. I only knew that she was far away and I didn't know how to reach her.

Like the other human sciences, the 20th century saw a period of blossoming for psychology and its various schools. The developments are clear in the great strides that scientists have made in analyzing physical factors, in the myriad therapies now available, in the many articles published everyday on methods from acupuncture to Freudian psychoanalysis. And yet, despite all of this, to a large degree, mental illness remains a mystery, one that touches on the very nature of what it means to be human. Mental illness, more than any other state, makes us question humanity with its otherness because it challenges the norms of behavior and the range of experiences that society understands to be those of human beings.

Many have tried - and not succeeded - to define what the quality is that 'makes' humans human. No doubt it is a mixture of the legion of cultural, biological and psychological factors that such great minds have proposed. But there is one thing that is very universal to the human experience: the presence of narrative. Saussure, Derrida, Foucault, Geertz, Levi-Strauss; all of these scholars claimed we live in a world delimited by social context and culture's historical webs of meaning, that is, grand and complex social narratives. More recently, theory has emerged strongly in favor of the narrative perspective as a guiding human cognitive trait (cite). In fact, in literature and psychology, narrative-centered practice has been explored by many in the last decades, including psychologists Bruner and White, and literary theorists Cohn and (cite). These developments point to an exciting research direction: narrative as a guiding psychological paradigm in human mentality, and as a route to deeper understanding of marginalized experiences, such as those of the mentally ill.

Through anthropology's focus on particular human experience as related to the universal understanding of people, I want to pursue the guiding theoretical thread of narrative in the fields of psychology and medicine. I hope to research the developmental power of narrative to create meaning and reality, and the ways in which not only individuals, but also societies, define their worlds through contextual histories which become fixed narratives of normative behavior and treatment. Applying evolving literary theory, cognitive research, neurological science, and understandings of perception, I hope to develop a deeper understanding of what it means to be sane and not sane in our modern world, not only through well-defined symptomatic definitions, but through the lived experience of these states. In future, such research could reshape our concepts of mental illness and ultimately, of what it means to be human.

Anthropology's ethnographic focus celebrates and explores the diverse characters of human experience. Now, more than ever, is the moment to explore the nature of humanity, of illness and wellness, of treatment, and of social contexts which shape our understandings of our society and ourselves. More than ever we can push the boundaries of thought about what it means to live on the 'other' side of these concepts.

Standing on the edge of what we call madness, what became most clear to me was the great distance between myself and my sister. It was not frightening to be near her or her psychoses - except in the cases where I feared for her life or mine - but rather it reinforced the very basic distinctions between us. I could never understand her way of being, and she could never understand mine. Our culture calls her illness paranoid schizophrenia, but for her it is simply daily life. Perhaps, someday, if I could hear her history from within, if I could parse her narrative of her life, it would shed light on this great rift between her and me, between what our culture knows as sanity and psychosis, between one entire human experience and another.

*Yawn* Nerves

So nothing much has happened this week. The only thing I've noticed, as I continue on this strange journey, is that I feel nervous about my family coming back together again, which is rather odd. In any case, as I re-connect with my mother, the old haunting feelings I once had resurface in loads and loads of dreams! So many dreams! It's making me tired.

Contortions

It hit me today that our family goes through amazing contortions to acommodate someone who is pretty normally stricken with an illness that is rare, but not terribly odd.
My mother talks to me on the cell phone in her car outside the house not to stir up trouble with those within it.
And I think maybe that's the issue. It's not just the one with the illness, it's the ones who aren't quite 'there' yet in understanding or computing the illness - we're not wholly together on how to go about treating this difference of behavior and life-understanding that is within our family, and so the family contorts strangely, not to acommodate the one with the illness but rather the reactions to it of the rest of us!
Because, honestly, if we all just took an accepting, calm, stable, and reasonable approach of living our lives and loving each other and being around one another and not let anything get in the way of that, while also allowing that she may not want to join in and being ok with it... I think everything would be fine.

One Trouble of Memory

One problem of memory is that it is entirely picked, inexact, and narrative in format. Which is the same thing that makes it so powerful. And in my case, nightmarish. There is a memory that lives in the fibers of what I am (not just who I am, but WHAT I am), one of those that go back to the nerve-center of what has defined me, that bases my thought-in world. It is one of my earliest memories, entirely cogent, thought-through. No doubt, the reason it is so well-worded with memory vocabulary is the number of times I've gone over it, at various ages and in various states, always seeking the details, hoping to flush out some truth from the frustration and loss I felt. Memories are so fluid, so shape-able; they are like lived-in dreams, hard to separate from the emotions we felt, the ideas we thought at the time, or after, that inhabit them, reinhabit them, sometimes the ideas in fact can re-shape them entirely and create fissures - or seal them - in the emotional landscape.
In my case, my memory (not surprisingly) is of my sister, and the day I decided to kill her.
It is surprising, due to the fact that I have had to say so many times as an adult that I had no wish to kill her (and certainly then I did not), that I have ever wished her dead. But there was a moment, in fact two distinct moments I remember, where I very much wished her dead and gone, dead by my hand, a knife plunged in her by ME. And I wanted her to know it was ME.
Why, and how, could I have possibly wanted such a thing?! And at the tender age of four or five?

My sister is three and a half years older than me. When I arrived, she was already an almost hyperactive and extremely stubborn three and a half year old. She told me later her penchant for talking was something she had always had; even at that age she was terrified and confused by our older siblings calling her a 'jabberwokee' something she associated with nightmares. Already, it seemed, her difference, and her fear of that difference, had arisen in our family through the painfully frank observations and reactions of little children.

By the time I reached the age of three, I was almost fully cognizant of my world. I remember breaking my tibia, the emotions of anger at me for doing so; I remember being dressed up by Tavia and then posed like a doll, told 'not to complain' and feeling awful about it. I remember the fights over me when both my sisters wanted to dress me up, and feeling frightened to choose the older over the younger, for fear of the younger's inevitable reaction, tantrum, and her almost certain desire to take it out on my later. I remember being bored of movies my parents were watching, and going to find my mothers high heels so that I could try them on.

So when I was four-ish (I assume this through some archaeology of memory, which is of course shifting. She couldn't have been 11 because she was not yet terribly depressed, I was not three, because my leg had healed), there came a great moment of shift for us, for me, our relationship.
Always a frightening one, honestly, things came to a head when she proposed we wrestle.

Tavia liked to wrestle, and she was tall and strong. So strong! She was a fighter and stubborn, extremely good at tactics, especially physical ones. I did not have these traits or any desire to learn them. My life was filled with wanting to read, dancing, singing, helping with chores, taking naps, uncertainty over kindergarten, going into my mother's closet and standing between the layers of her hanging clothes, smelling the scent of clean fabric and Ysatis.
I said no.

She taunted me with this. She was bored, I was there, no doubt it seemed logical that she should try to 'get' me to wrestle. But she told me I had to. I said I did not. She told me if I didn't, she'd already won, and I had to do what she wanted, say what she wanted. I was a coward. Any number of horrible things (no doubt). In any case, I said yes, and I was very unhappy about it... but maybe also (I remember vaguely) a little bit hopeful that somehow, someway, I could win. Somehow maybe I could beat her and she would respect me and that would be fun! It would be so fun to finally be told that I could actually do something right.

She beat me. That was not surprising. But she beat me and she made me say it before she would get off me. And so I would say it, and that would be that. But then it got worse, and worse. I'd have to say other things, too. Things like "You won, and I lost" but then also "You're smart and I'm stupid" or she'd say put other definitions on win and lose so they really meant good/bad, able/incapable, or other horrible dichotomies. And she liked to taunt me when she was sitting on me, as I refused to give up, as I got angrier and angrier. I remember that she was enjoying it, and I remember that it was hurting me. And I remember also that when I finally flatly refused to say she had won, or whatever else it was she wanted, she ground her hands down on my wrists so that the circulation was stopping and she sat down on me hard so that I couldn't breathe. I stuck to my guns, but it was obvious I was going to suffocate, so eventually I gave up. Kind of. That was it. It was one of those times. I don't remember how many times we wrestled at night, I just remember the snapping point. And she got off me, and I leapt off the bed (because we shared a huge queen bed, huge for two little girls, anyways), and I stood there and I pent up my anger into a ball, a huge fire ball and I screamed at her "Fuck you!" "FUCK you!!!" I yelled, and she looked at me, shocked, and then said "I'm going to tell Mom and Dad you said that."

That was it. It was the unfairness. I knew at that age my parents would take her side - they would say I had gotten myself into the wrestling match, that Tavia had done nothing wrong, and I would be spanked for saying that word. The emotional depth of it all was breathtaking. She had taken away my very belief in myself, she had forced me to call myself a failure and admit I was never going to be the person I wanted to be. She had waxed long (long to a four-year-old) about what all this meant, how stupid this made me. And I was going to be spanked. I'd been shamed, I would be punished. It was unjust and it was killing me. So I would kill her.

I ran to the kitchen. I pulled the chair to the counter, I climbed up to it, I got the knife down. I got down off the counter (we weren't allowed to get on the counter). I held the knife in my hand. It was big. I'd gotten the bigger knife. I thought. I thought a lot. COULD I do it? I wanted to do it, my blood boiled, literally, I was SO angry, I was SO hurt and I knew, absolutely and incontrovertably that if I did not do it, I would be closeted with this same person taunting me, holding my failures over my head, telling me, proving to me I never would be what I wanted to be, for another 12 years at least. I had to end it. I could not go on. It was time for a decision, because obviously it was me or her. And I chose myself. For a second. I would kill her. I would stab her very hard, and she would die. And the family would be torn apart, because I would go to jail, or juvenile hall or something, and eventually be executed, and my family would go through all of that. And they would miss her. I couldn't do it. I was terrible for thinking it. But I couldn't live with her, it was worse than death. I couldn't go back to the room and apologize and beg her not to say anything. I couldn't! I decided to kill myself at that moment. How did they do it in the movies?

The idea of wrist slitting had not been come across by that age. I held the knife to my breast. I would have to push it really hard. Really hard. Between my ribs, maybe? I couldn't. I imagined the pain, but also how my family would feel. They wouldn't understand, they'd be heartbroken, they wouldn't get that it was happier for me to go now. They would be so devastated, at my funeral, crying... the mourning wouldn't end for years and years, they would have to live with it. I would go to heaven, and just leave them, and they would have to suffer. It was too selfish. I watched my hope of myself, the self I wanted to be, walk away from me down the hallway, a slim, lithe and happy figure, tall and self-assured, they walked down the stairs into the hallway and disappeared from me. I put the knife back, my hands shaking. No one could see me holding it. I had hoped for a wild moment someone would see me with it to my chest, they would cry out "no!" and take it away. But if I told anyone, really, I'd just be punished I thought. I put it back quickly. I walked away.

It happened a second time, the same decision, same thought process.

The third time, I realized something had to be done. I took the knife with me to the room and told Tavia I had it, told her I wouldn't say those things anymore, that she should be careful because I might always have a knife. She laughed, said it was against the rules. As if that somehow trumped everything. I wilted. The wrestling stopped but I never came back to myself. The figure that disappeared down the hall never returned.

They say that rapists put their shame on others. I think that that may have been what happened at that moment. I think she was trying to put her shame and hurt and discomfort with the world on me. She felt rejected, a misfit, shameful. She had to take it out on someone else, and I happened to be there. Who knows. My narrative memory ends there, but the reality of it all continued for a long time.

Daddy Issues and Death by 'Crazy'

It turns out that the worst thing about having a Dad is actually the lack of one. I have more than ever been discovering the endless waves of effect that have rippled through my psyche after my break, five years ago, with my parents, most especially my father. I've noticed, finally, that it's the emptiness of wanting a 'Dad' again that's the worst. Because, of course, noone can fill that place satisfactorily but him, and he can't fill it satisfactorily. But all this doesn't keep me from instinctually seeking a reparative person, someone who could function in the role of Dad without actually being MY Dad. Someone who might, in fact, have something better to say about my desires and dynamism than that they are uppity and I am continuously and unwittingly 'too big for my britches.' Though those ideas echo from almost 20 years ago, they still echo loudly and sometimes almost deafen me. They are strongest because those memories are the last ones I have of a relationship with my father - the relationship when I still listened to the words he had to say, and took them to heart. Soon after he said these things I realized that he had missed me entirely, that I didn't really exist as a presence or a person to him; I understood the version of me he spoke to when we talked was not really any reaction to me, but to a series of cluttered memories, which crowded around me and obscured me when we interacted. But our relationship, though tenuous and brumous, was still extant. Then it came suddenly clear exactly how much crazy/insane is the opposite of 'valid human being,' because I was stabbed with the point of that word, and distinctly refused as a person. That was where our relationship stopped. He killed me to him (think, 'you're dead to me') but not in the way one might expect. My father separated our universes: mine where I was sane, and his where I was crazy. And there was nothing I could do about that. This separation came about through a discussion of schizophrenia in our family, one in which I took a more modern approach to the idea of mental illness which had little or nothing to do with craziness/madness/insanity and other words that conjure up fear and dehumanization. But through the conversation, becoming ever more heated on his end, in my attempts to define what it was I was trying to say in words that he would understand, I stooped to the word I thought would make the most sense - and now I know, stir the most fear - crazy. I said she was crazy (right now) and she needed help. And he said I was crazy and thus I needed help. He said it so loudly that the car rang with it. This moment was confusing and upsetting for many reasons: 1. I felt the full dismissal of his old-school Foucaultian take on insanity (purposefully insane, harmful to others, nefarious, evil, refusing to be part of the greater community of understanding and their take on reality). 2. I was made to be the object of my own concern in the conversation (I was crazy, and needed help, and I should take care of that and stop trying to blame others). 3. I was a meddling bitch. The crazy comment also dismissed my two years of intense relationship with my schizophrenic sister, wherein I had swung from being sure that something was very wrong with her but feeling that there was nothing I could do but 'be' with her, to truly believing her psychoses...because it seemed the least disruptive and kept her the most stable. The dismissal of self was like death. It certainly was an epic 'casting out' of the family center, and I felt it completely as such. I could live outside it and be an 'acquaintance,' but I would never be a part of the family again. It was death by crazy.

Such a Time Has Passed

This month has seen the coming and going of so many ideas and half-written mental histories; histories that have been scratched out, rewritten, re-glossed, re-contextualized in new ways, I hardly know how to begin in cataloging this great editorial process. However, what I want to discuss is something that is currently going on, as I research the history of American psychology (in service of another project). I have discovered, I think, the major reason that all of my encounters with counseling and psychology on the West Coast have been so very very unhelpful, and why, here overseas, interacting with psychologists trained to be A) straightforward and efficient and B) versed in theories related to PTSD and C) more open-minded and universal in their methodologies, I have found some actual aid and healing.

The main reason, I am starting to realize, is that the entire American psychological tradition is based in two movements: the sanitary psychology/moral health movement, and the mesmerism/spiritualism movement. The first, wherein psychological health, physical health, and morality/moral philosophy are all parts of the same pudding, so to speak (see Amariah Brigham, George Miller Beard, Upham, et al), lays the groundwork, really, for Cognitive Behavioral therapy, which is one of the most widely practiced in the Seattle area. Cognitive Behavioral therapy is the practice of training oneself mentally and physically to get better. This technique is good when treating depression brought on by bad habits or a situation that can be affected by the client; however, it falls very short when brought into cases of heavy trauma or ongoing psychological habits with roots other than personal life-choices which have lead to a downturn into depression. The second movement, the mesmerism/spiritualism movement which spread in America during the mid-1800s,
"...became part of a much broader American cultural movement away from established religion and toward an esthetic religiosity that stressed the achievement of inner harmony through self development, exploration of the heretofore hidden powers of the human mind, and transcendental contact with higher spiritual planes and powers (God, the ether, magnetic fluid, cosmic vibrations)" (Brynmawr University, Serendip. "Psychology in America." http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/Mind/before.html)
The spiritualism also informs much of Cognitive Behavioral therapy in a very American way, influencing it to focus on the spiritual health of clients through their ability to access their own inner power through the exercise of physical habits and mental will power. For example, the Cognitive Behavioral practices of changing physical habits and mental repetition and thought-intervention (thought-stopping), seem to draw directly on these interlocking ideals of health/sanity/morality/transcendence.

Unfortunately for me, the American tradition could not address my very un-individualistic, one might even say thus "UnAMERICAN," trauma, as my trauma and history are particularly founded in inter-relational pain and the construction of a warped shared reality. However, I have found a great deal of help in the practice of psychotherapy at the US Naval Hospital, a strange reversal, but perhaps related to the fact that inter-relational pain is often the problem at issue for soldiers, sailors, and others going through traumas of separation and stress disorders. The past and people (two p's of great importance), must be highlighted in treatment of these clients.

Loving What Was and Is

I am coming to this realization: I still love the person whom I lost through this illness. So thus, are they not lost or really lost, or more lost, or less lost... I don't know. However, I know the love continues, and so I believe there is a congruency of plot through the life of the ill person. There is something that holds it all together, that makes sense of it, that makes it less dissonant, or at least explains the dissonance of the break between who was and who is and how I relate to them. Now I am not certain of that plot, but I believe it may lay as follows:
The person whom I knew, who convinced me of what was, was in fact a sort of construction of the person already uncertain of themselves during a very difficult upbringing.
I was a sort of anchor of meaning and personality during this difficult psychological time for her.
There was a lot of borrowing of self between me and her; she borrowed a great deal from me, claiming ownership of it.
Despite all of this, we loved each other as sisters and siblings; however, she was disturbed and unhappy in the extreme.
Through her break, which she seemed to somewhat anticipate as her fear that she was going to 'disappear' and her congruent desire to do so, she didn't really change, but each splinter of self she had unsuredly developed was magnified and refracted back on itself until it was unbearable to live in a world that was not absolutely static and supported a fragile and constructed truth of never-ending sameness.
My presence is painful because it was most loved and trusted. Now it is most abhorred because it fractures a fragile reality. But I believe she loves me still, as I love her, because we are family, we were close sisters, and friends. We cared for one another - we care still.
Thoughts for the day...