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...

Half/Whole/Nothing/Everything

It has been some time since my last post, and in the interim a great deal has transpired. For one, and perhaps this is the most crucial to my journey through these experiences, is my family's quasi-acceptance of the idea of schizophrenia in Tavia. This is not entirely the magical solution I had hoped for, but rather brings up yet more sensations of alternative narratives and realities, shaded in colors of insecurity, ignorance, uncertainty, fear, and hope.

In the vortex of this mixture of multi-valent and diverse experiences of reality, lies the deep, deep dread that I am entirely alone in my understanding of my sister, and to some degree, myself. As we move deeper into the exploration of what it means to be a family in 'admission,' that is, in a state of admitting the culturally-agreed-upon label and solution to this issue, it becomes increasingly clear that others' views, memories, ideas, and generally their interest level in the situation all vary greatly from mine. The fear of being ultimately alone, and therefore truly experiencing the thing which I think I may have feared most through my campaign and my fear 'beard' of being somehow insane myself, is now lurking quietly near me. Sadly, I wonder if the ghost of all of this will haunt me, and me alone.

So to start, I air the questions that wind through my head: Did anyone else know the Tavia I knew? Did anyone else care for her as I did, or see her vulnerability? If I ever knew her, was it truly 'her,' or simply a schizo-affective shade of her? How might I feel differently about myself and my family if she were not ill? What parts of me that she appropriated are truly me, and what parts were her? (that is, how much did we intermingle, and how much were we truly separate?)

The very wary familial agreement to label the thing with which we all are dealing does nothing to lay my anxieties (above) to rest. And I think of all the questions, it is the last which truly bothers me the most. The re-reading and re-writing of my past through the lens of an agreed-upon reality of Tavia's illness has allowed me to also re-evaluate the self I have told myself I am.

A short history is required here. As children, Tavia, being three years my elder, was a great influence on me. Furthermore, we were forced to share a room, to both of our dismay and great disgust. We were always together, but it was a miserable pairing. Tavia was brutal, tyrannical, and controlling, yet I truly believe her intentions were no such thing. She explained to me repeatedly that she simply did not understand instructions to act in a 'normal' manner, or what she was doing wrong. Primarily, her weapon of greatest abuse was the idea that I 'copied' her in everything she did, and this constituted a sort of theft of self, as I tried to become her. There are two sides to this claim: the first, she claimed I copied her for any idea tha seemed good or she liked, that is, if I thought of an idea which she liked or loved, she claimed I had stolen it from her before she could think of it or say it. The other side was that if I were to create a different idea and present it, one she did not like or think suitable, she would deride it cruelly. In fact, any difference of opinion or even of something like a drawing, would draw her venomous criticism, including casting aspersions on my abilities, character, and intelligence. It was awful.

Throughout all of this, it seemed clear to me that Tavia was both a great bully, and terribly vulnerable. Either way, it was my job to make sure she stayed stable and ok, as it was me who would bear the emotional hurt and the abuse if she were to sway too far into a violent rage or depression. Her delusions of copying and stealing crept into me in a way I have a hard time describing. Everything in my life seemed to belong to her, every iota of me. And though others saw this, she never said the things in front of them that she said just to me. Telling on her either made it worse or made her so upset and uncomprehending I would relent just to stop her emotional downturns. And so I played along, and my brightness and energy sort of seeped away under constant stress and derision. I became more and more convinced I had nothing to offer and she everything. There was no way out, and I also loved her. It was a strange combination. As much as she did to me, there were definite moments of bonding, of fun, of love and caring (in her very odd way). There were moments where it seemed we could coexist, and being close and young and very intuitive, we seemed to be almost twins. Two who could do the job of a very good one. Perhaps this was due entirely to her illness. She needed a second who could take her through the vagaries of life, and I was stable and well.

As we go through this collective memory revision, it seems that that memory, and the idea of her as a true 'person,' a true personality and character, are also fading. And it frightens me for two reasons (that I can think of at the moment). On the one hand, it wipes away the memory of who I was as a child, very much defined by her and her actions, and on the other hand, it permits me to finally unfurl my idea of myself to include all the experiences she claimed were hers, but were, in fact, mine and mine alone. Her experience was much more alone than I can imagine, I realize, upon looking back now.

So here I am, waffling about and wondering if anyone shared my experience of her, an experience that is 1. now lost and 2. being revised even in myself. It makes me want to cry and scream. That is my experience at the moment.

Dividing Lines

It seems like in this period there are so many more questions than answers, but I feel it is better to share them, letting in a little ethnographic light to some of my more querilous meanderings.

A few things that have become clear about the situation with my sister and her illness, is the way it reflects/refracts/amplifies/externalizes bigger, older, or hidden issues that lie within the family. The primary issue that we have been faced with is the way in which we have divided over her illness, and our differing ideas of how it should be treated. For many years I have thought this was simply due to a strange dis-reality that my parents lived in, especially my Dad, when it came to issues with which he had trouble. And I think he does disassociate himself from others and the possible opinions of others when it comes to issues over which he feel sensitive, uncertain, and most importantly, wrong!

However, what I am coming to realize more and more is that my sister's behavior, and her own anti-socialism, her own psychotic dreams of escape and desire to simply 'have everyone be at peace' (without each other) in fact reflects our own family's biggest trouble: we have been told since childhood that too many people, too much family, too much society, (in the the end, too much support) is poisonous, it has been modeled to us from our father to break apart and become solitary in times of trouble. And that is what this illness is highlighting. It is casting into high relief the struggle we are all going through to unite, as we truly desire to as a family, despite the since-childhood message of divide and scatter in hardship. Even my father seems to be turning his views, slowly - ever so slowly - toward a more whole family.

Furthermore, it is this divide, not so much the still-extant (as it has always been extant) illness of my sister that seems to cause us the most pain. It is the running blood of family history, and all our growth as adults to turn around the rejection we felt I think first from our father, and then perhaps from each other, as we were taught and followed the path of silence, cutting-off, non-communication. As adults, though, we are slowly shifting the system; today I think there is some hope.

Folie en famille

There is something that happens in cases of delusion called folie a deux. It is defined by wikipedia as:

"Folie à deux (English pronunciation: /fɒˈli ə ˈduː/, from the French for "a madness shared by two") is a rare psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief are transmitted from one individual to another. The same syndrome shared by more than two people may be called folie à trois, folie à quatre, folie en famille or even folie à plusieurs ("madness of many"). Recent psychiatric classifications refer to the syndrome as dependency psychotic disorder (DSM-IV) (297.3) and induced delusional disorder (F.24) in the ICD-10, although the research literature largely uses the original name. The disorder was first conceptualized in 19th century French psychiatry."

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follie_a_deux)

What is more interesting is that it can be imposed, simultaneous, and even contagious. In my family, it seems like it has been contagious, amplified, and worsened by the psychotic disorder of schizophrenia.

A little background history is required here. My family during my childhood (and my parents still today) believed in a set of very strange spiritual beliefs, headed and led by my father. These strange beliefs stretched from a belief in the inhabitation of demons in everything (including ourselves), and the need to 'cleanse' these from our houses, our things and ourselves, on a constant basis, to the belief that one can change the world through faith. Just before and during my adolescence, my parents became great believers in the evangelical faith movement, the main belief of which is that the physical world can be changed through faith and belief that it is not how it appears, but how one would like it to be. Practices surrounding this belief include 'confessing' how one would like things to be (saying things are what they currently are not in order to bring about change), and acting as if things are as they are not, but as one would like them to be (in order to live more entirely in the spiritual world in which one believes wholeheartedly). As well, my parents habitually isolate themselves from others psychologically and physically, having no real close friends, and often shrouding their beliefs in secrecy from the 'world.' The fact that these practices smack mightily of psychosis and delusion has clearly interwoven with my sister's schizophrenic delusions to create a situation that is at once frustrating and poisonous for her, as well as for my mother, and the remaining siblings who are endeavoring to help our parents toward a sound medical solution.

The current state of things is that my father, unwilling to truly admit to the problem of schizophrenia, and wanting desperately to heal my sister through 'faith healing' (a miracle), constrains my mother to not speak about my sister negatively; that is, to not discuss her symptoms or problems with others outside the house, and not often within it. As all the children have left (fled?) the house and chosen to live sane lives, my mother is left within the situation to slowly be convinced, even as I was during my 2 and 1/2 year period with my schizophrenic sister, that my mother herself is the one who is mad. She is left to slowly drift into a folie a deux (or a trois, if you include my father's less-involved, yet definitely delusional state), with my sister. And that is certainly the case at the moment. She is feeling the dark pull toward madness, even as she is trapped in the situation with little recourse.

When I finally left my parents' house and my sister when I was 20, it took me some months to fully extricate myself from the strangest of my sister's beliefs. Unfortunately, I am still working toward a place of balance and reality in the more intimate areas of my life which my sister violated: my self-esteem, my belief that I have a firm grasp on reality, and more than anything, a supportive relationship with my parents and my other siblings. This last is the most difficult for me, because it is out of my control. And because I am the one not enabling la folie, and furthermore, the one most feared by my sister, it is I who live with the brunt of familial coldness, and betrayal, as my mother clings to a husband who is hurting her, and my siblings endeavor to not allow this process to rule their lives. In my life, it is not a question of ruling, but of healing. And if I don't work to heal, then I will live in a sort of folie myself: the delusion that it is I who am to blame.