Hello Luke,
I like a lot of what you have to say! I’ve been walking with my wife on a healing journey the last 16 years, and I realized that to become a good healing companion for her, I had to get as healthy as I could myself because she made it clear she didn’t know what ‘healthy’ meant and she needed me to live it…kind of as a role model. And so I worked really hard the first few years of our journey to transform myself into the kind of healing companion that would help rather than hinder her progress. Fortunately, I had a mostly healthy childhood and had been securely attached to my mom, and so I had and learned the tools I needed to make that transformation.
But that might be my one concern about your article. I think for someone like my wife who was traumatized as a toddler and literally told me she had no idea what ‘healthy’ looks like at the start of our journey and had spent more than 5 decades being shaped by her inner critic, she needed a healing partner who could do what she and her parents never did as a child. I validate the feelings her inner critic espoused, but then I turn her toward my view of her and turn her to her current, safe and healing situation she has with me…and slowly over the last 15 years, in partnership with me, she has been empowered to take on that inner critic, make peace with it and move forward to the present with me.
Sam
Hello, Kent,
I’m so deeply sorry for the hell you and your wife have endured at the hands of the mental health system just pushing drugs. I can’t even imagine your pain and anger.
On a different note, it is so nice to see a fellow husband/caregiver on here. There are so few of us, but it seems more have been speaking up lately and I’m very excited about that and hope some day we might be able to connect and begin to pool our knowledge and really make a difference for our loved ones.
Sincerely,
Sam
Hello Richard,
I find this an incredibly interesting article on so many levels. I was raised a very conservative Christian and then got into some of the branches that seek out these kinds of experiences. I, however, never experienced any of them. It was always kind of weird seeing everyone else dropping like flies being ‘slain in the spirit’ and chattering in tongues…while I stood there wondering what was wrong with me, sigh…
…and then my wife began to show the signs of DID 15 years ago…and so we throw that into the mix…and I have a very pragmatic view of that: trauma and dissociation driving nearly everything we’ve had to face…
…and then I’ve always wondered about philosophical materialism and how that drives so many of the modern sciences (even though many of the founders of the various scientific branches were devout Christians) and blinds them to the possibility of the mind and spirit. I’ve brought up the place that materialism ought to occupy in our discussions on this website, but never got any author to engage me about it…
Anyway, thanks for an extremely thought-provoking and enjoyable article. I don’t know where I personally am nowadays…I’ve moved away from my upbringing some without rejecting it all and yet I’m definitely not a materialist..
Thanks again!
Sam
Dear Michael,
I was nearly in tears as I read this article. I’ve been desperate to meet you since the last time you broached this subject on Mad in America a year or so ago. I left a message on your website, but it always says you won’t be around. I know I’m a nobody, but for the last 15 years I’ve done everything you are talking about as I walked with my wife thru her early childhood trauma and extreme dissociation (ie. DID in dsm speak). I’ve walked with her thru every extreme state she experienced, held her during the worst, and as I calmed her using attachment concepts, we could make meaning of them, and help integrate the source of them so that at this point it’s been years since she’s experienced them…at this point were still working to gather all her dissociated parts and interconnect them, mostly, as she is becoming ‘whole’.
I was asked to write a little book about how I walked with her thru it all. A third of it is how I engaged her in all the things you were talking about and so we found healing and wholeness without the drugs and loss of agency known to most here. I know I’m a nobody, but perhaps you could give me just a little of your time or you would honor me and glance at my little book. When I lost my sponsor, I had to finish it on my own, and I was told to find an editor to help me clean it up, so I’m hoping to do that now. But if you don’t have time to do that, perhaps you could point me in the direction of other family members who, like me, understand we have to walk with our loved ones thru all those things so they can deeply heal. I’m happily astounded you would invite someone like me to contribute to your book as I have yet to find someone like that even after 15 years of searching.
Sincerely,
Sam
Hi Terry,
I enjoyed your article. So much of what you have said resonated true with the healing journey my wife and I have been on, together, thru her trauma and dissociation…as we learned about her parts and embraced them…helping all of them to heal and connect together. And watching and helping her thru that process also taught me about my own parts and learning to embrace them especially coming from a very strict religious background that taught a lot of guilt and shame over natural stuff.
Normally I’m promoting attachment concepts as the foundation of everything we did, but lately people who have read some of my stuff have noted how IFS meshes so well with our methodology as well, and so I appreciate each time I can learn a little more about its tenets.
Sam
Thanks, Miranda and good luck in your new endeavors. And welcome Amy to the Family section…don’t forget us spouses, too! I certainly hope I’m not literally the ONLY spouse on Mad in America….
Hi Hayden Hall,
I’d strongly suggest following the link I gave to Moyu, if you have interest, and downloading Healing Companions, as it combines Engaging Madness and another little booklet I’d written and expands them into a more-flowing narrative style with a lot more personal stories.
if you think you’d really like to read it, but simply can’t see the font, please contact me at my blog email, and I’ll be happy to give you a word document of it, and then you can change it to whatever size works best for you.
As for attachment, Steve is largely correct. However, I would add that attachment theory includes romantic couples and not only those in caretaking roles of basic necessities…and yet, helping my wife feel safe, loved and cared for…were huge parts of helping heal the trauma she suffered as a toddler and the dissociation that developed throughout her life as a result.
Sam
“It is clear to me that all of society, i.e. not just affected persons but also the relatives, other caring persons and psychiatrists need to be willing to work actively and systematically on themselves, to listen and talk to each other as far as possible. Without these joint efforts towards a social co-existence with mutual respect, improvements or (partial) cures for so-called schizophrenia and mental disorders in general will, in my view, hardly be possible.”
Hello Moyu,
I always appreciate these kinds of articles that bring in the absolute essential role family can play in the healing journey if they are willing to listen and engage their loved one how s/he needs it. I always refer to the journey my wife and i are on as ‘our healing journey’ even though she has d.i.d….I had to be willing to do a lot of changing and learning from her so I could become the healing companion she needed…and 15 years later…we are mostly thru her trauma and dissociation…which is what i feel causes the symptoms that many refer to as psychosis, at least for my wife.
It’s not an easy process, but i believe our reliance on attachment concepts have allowed us to see foundational healing for her without the drugs…and transformative change in myself as well.
If you’d ever like to connect, i always relish the chance to share the wonderful things we discovered along the way and even wrote a little book about some of the highlights of it.
Take care,
Sam
yes, I wish so much I could convey how attachment concepts can fundamentally change the entire healing journey for both partners…and it was exactly like ‘bringing to life’ those parts of my wife which had been ‘killed’ by the trauma…truly a beautiful process to be part of and behold…
Sam
As long as a ‘revolution’ depends upon money, then it will always be at the whim of its benefactors. That’s why for as long as I’ve been on Mad in America I’ve called for the training and empowerment of family, spouses and SO’s so they can walk with their loved ones who are hurting and help them heal. We’re the only ones who can really do it, as healing doesn’t occur in the neat confines of a therapist’s office but is a 24/7 endeavor that must take place in every facet of life and one’s relationships, so we have to be the ones to do it.
Sam
Rasx,
the problem is…in our dysfunctional culture where independence and individualism are overprized, no one wants to be told that another’s mental health or mental health healing (as in my wife’s case) is almost 100% on the primary attachment figure…or me (or her parents originally)…but that is the gist of how I read attachment theory even though it is anathema to nearly everyone…even the book I was asked to write…one of the reasons it got canceled was because someone read between the lines and realized that I understood the amount of sacrifice it required of me to help my wife heal 40 years after her parents had abdicated their roles as primary attachment figures….how sad that even the survivors have accepted the tenets of our dysfunctionally, hyper-independent culture.
Sam
Hello Rachel,
like you, I am walking with a loved one (my wife) thru her mental health struggles. It sounds like you are coming to/have come to some similar conclusions as i have. i walk with my wife in her reality and we find healing together. In the past I did a lot of ‘regulating’ her emotions when she was suffering a lot of extreme states, but that was a long time ago. Now we are working on restructuring her trauma paradigm, together. But I just treat her like my wife…even though i’m typically with her little-girl alters most of the time when we are alone. i don’t know what to suggest about the support groups: fortunately my wife never got swept up in the ‘system’ and so she’s always just been able to be herself to others…and I was able to see past the ‘alters’ and other stuff that comes with trauma and dissociation…so she floats in and out of those kind of groups…and mostly just has her friends and stuff at church until covid hit and curtailed that.
Anyway, I wish you and your loved one the best. It’s nice to see someone on MiA in the same boat as me. i wish there were more…
Sam
Hi Jay,
I always appreciate your articles which explain the science in an understandable way for a layperson. I especially appreciate your expertise addressing the twins studies which seemed irrefutable until I read a previous article of yours here on MiA. But I’ll be honest, I haven’t worked my way thru this article completely because I got derailed on your statement in the beginning that your prefer ‘psychosis’ to ‘schizophrenia’.
I have walked with my wife thru her DID, outside the system and without psych drugs for the last 15 years. In the DID world I have read that if the voices a person hears seem ‘outside’ the person, then they “have” schizophrenia, but if they seem ‘internal’ then they “have” DID (don’t know if that is accurate…just saying). So, even though I have zero experience with someone who has ‘schizophrenia’, I’ve always kind of viewed it as the mirror image of what I’ve walked thru with my wife.
Now until I started frequenting MiA, I didn’t even know what ‘psychosis’ was, but it seemed like such a big deal once I got here. Now I’ve never seen my wife as ‘psychotic’ and there are two reasons I still don’t view her that way even after I tried to become more educated about what ‘psychosis’ is. 1) I don’t think ‘psychosis’, accurately describes what is occurring in the person: at least not my wife. I think all her ‘psychosis-like’ symptoms are better understood as natural consequences of extreme dissociation caused by the trauma she suffered as a 2-year old…and once I adjusted my perspective to align with what was happening internally with her, then most of that stuff she experienced made sense to me. And thus, 2) I think using that term makes those of us on the outside lazy because rather than putting the effort into understanding what is really happening internally, we just say ‘she’s psychotic’ and so what would be the point of trying to understand something that’s just ‘crazy’, right?
I also saw another comment mention attachment issues, and yes, that’s what we’ve used, with me as her primary attachment figure, to help her heal and tear down the dissociation which has slowly resolved the ‘psychosis-like’ symptoms. One by one her dissociated ‘parts’ have securely attached to me and then (it seems) that attachment helped each connect to the rest of her greater personality.
There’s so much more I could say, but I won’t bore you unless you have interest.
Sincerely,
Sam
Hello Ekaterina,
it’s good to see you back on Mad in America again.
My wife and I have walked thru her extreme dissociation these last 15 years: I never saw her as ‘psychotic’ even when the other girls (‘alters’) first came out and believed a lot of ‘different’ things. But we gave them as much ‘outside’ time as each wanted and needed to heal. To me a lot of ‘psychosis-like’ symptoms were based on their confusion from being locked up inside 4-5 decades (kind of like RipVan Winkle…a man out of time).
Anyway, I’m with you and not sure why everyone makes a big deal of it. The person just needs a safe person to be an anchor and reference point. When my wife’s different ‘alters’ switch, I just ask the new one outside, “Do you know what’s going on?” If she says ‘no’, then I give her a quick update…and we go on. It’s really not a big deal…but we keep working to tear down the dissociation and hope some day I won’t ever have to ask that (getting closer!).
Anyway, I think ‘psychosis’ is overblown for too many people and just is an excuse for people on the outside to be lazy and not really ‘hear’ what the other person is experiencing or why.
Take care,
Sam
Tammy,
I read with interest your story, especially how it affected your relationship with your family. I’m so sorry it negatively affected it. We Christians have missed the boat and forgotten that we are called to sacrifice ourselves for one another and help those who feel weak. It makes me so sad that family has lost sight of our calling to help our struggling loved ones.
I hope you and your family find healing and someone can help them move past the simplistic caricatures that our culture promotes of those experiencing mental distress.
Sam
For 15 years I have engaged my wife’s voices and I’ve always believed it made all the difference in the world for both of us. I changed to become a safe, healing companion for her. And her voices healed and began to interconnect with my wife. I was asked to write a book about our healing journey with a therapist who planned to explain the science of why the attachment concepts we used work so well, but alas, our sponsor had to pull the support.
But if any are interested, I offer my part of our project for free download on my blog: https://samruck2.wordpress.com/2022/12/04/healing-companions/
Sincerely,
Sam
For 15 years I have engaged my wife’s voices and I’ve always believed it made all the difference in the world for both of us. I changed to become a safe, healing companion for her. And her voices healed and began to interconnect with my wife. I was asked to write a book about our healing journey with a therapist who planned to explain the science of why the attachment concepts we used work so well, but alas, our sponsor had to pull the support.
But if any are interested, I offer my part of our project for free download on my blog: https://samruck2.wordpress.com/2022/12/04/healing-companions/
Sincerely,
Sam
It’s not that difficult, if the hearer desires it so, to engage those voices…just like you would anyone else. Those voices may want/need to be heard and validated as much as the rest of us.
Sam
Hello, Jaakko and James,
I love the idea of Open Dialogue and believe it is on the correct path: one my wife and I, unfortunately, had to take on our own. We walked the path together, sharing our experiences, sharing our struggles and difficulties, leaning on each other, finding meaning and healing from her trauma and extreme states. I also love that this approach recognizes the entire family as a key part of the dialogue. We are all in this together, and the extreme individuality and independence the West has adopted deeply hinders the ability to heal and move forward.
Perhaps, someday, our paths will cross. I’d love a chance to share some of the things we have learned on our healing journey.
Sam
Thanks, Diaphonous Weeping,
I try so hard. It’s really hard being attacked for doing the very thing, I believe, many on this website wishes their own spouses and families had done for them: doing whatever, and I mean whatever, it takes to love them, protect them, respect their agency, keep their dignity, and just treat them like a normal human being despite all the extreme states, dissociation and, at times, even chaos.
I don’t know that my wife is ‘shy’ per se, she just wants to be treated for herself and not some caricature our culture has of DID. This article listed schizophrenia as one of the ‘worst’ impugned mental health issues. DID is right up there with it.
My hope is that this book, if I can get it finished, will normalize mental health struggles from the family, spouse and significant other’s perspective. My wife and I have walked together through almost any extreme state imaginable, and we learned how to help her heal from all of them so that most are a distant memory from the past at this point in our journey. Yes, I’m often called to do more than I would have to for a spouse without these struggles, but I guess that’s part of being in a loving, lifetime relationship.
Sam
As I’ve always told my wife from the start: we deal with the trauma and dissociation: the rest will take care of itself. We don’t have an ‘end-goal’ of how she will be once we are done with the healing journey (should we reach the end). To me, any focus beyond the trauma and dissociation is manipulative.
Sam
hmmm…yeah, I remember when my wife first suggested she might have DID and I immediately wondered if I was living with a psychopathic murderer(thanks, Hollywood!). Fortunately, I realized almost immediately that I had safely lived with her for 20 years and she was unlikely to kill me in my sleep at that point if I hadn’t given her reason before then…
Sadly, the fear of stigma has kept my wife in the shadows, unwilling to give up the appearance of ‘normalcy’ by those in our lives…and though I have discussed with her multiple times how beneficial it would be for us to have more support as well as sharing our mutual healing journey on a larger scale because so many are struggling and it’s only gotten worse since COVID, she just is unwilling to live with the caricature our culture places upon those with a diagnosis…especially since hers is one of the ‘worst’.
But for me, seeing our commonality and learning much from her own struggles helped me become a better, healthier person partially so that I could be a better healing companion with and for her on this journey…
And I have been given the opportunity to share our journey on a larger scale using this pen name as I have begun collaborating with an expert (since I’m just a husband), but also because she brings a lot to this project, to write a book together and one of our goals is to normalize mental health struggles and living with someone even experiencing pretty extreme stuff like my wife did…and perhaps someday we’ll see the fruit of that venture if we make it to the goal.
Sam
Bob,
This article reminds me of a thought I’ve repeatedly had while reading some of the articles on this website: I’ve often wondered if the prevailing philosophical materialism which undergirds most of modern science plays any part in so many of the maladies we see affecting not only psychiatry and Big Pharma, but other branches of science as well. It’s a straight jacket that too many scientists seem unable to break free of..but I’m not enough of a philosophy expert to know if it’s a hunch that is correct or not…I think it would be interesting, if you feel I am correct, to find a true expert on the subject and have him/her do an article for Mad in America sometime.
Sam
Hello Richard,
well, I’ve been walking with my wife for the last 15 years helping her heal from her trauma and extreme dissociation, engaging all of her ‘parts’, learning about my own, and both of us are learning to embrace all of our selves. I think you may be misunderstanding some ‘symptoms’ as ’caused’ by the ‘protectors’ when, at least from our experience, they were caused by the associated mental traits and abilities of the various ‘parts’ that were ‘exiled’ (dissociated)…but it’s hard to see that unless you have complete access…and few do outside the primary attachment figures of each person…but I do see a lot that I agree with you on…and am glad you are having an impact…
Too bad you’ll never read my comment: I think we’d have a lot in common…
Take care and best wishes to you.
Sam
Bob,
don’t forget family like me who have the lived experience of walking thru everything my wife experienced, at times carrying her thru it, until she could make sense of things and heal and integrate it back into her own narrative. You’ve got to expand the circle because there are few ‘peers’, probably, who would be committed day in and day out, 15 years and counting like me and other family members who are in a lifetime commitment…I know there are many family members who fall far short of the ideal and are even part of the problem and abuse…but I still believe there are others out there like me, who if they were supported and trained could learn to do the things I have.
Sam
I would suggest that most DSM ‘disorders’ are actually symptoms of dissociation after 15 years of embracing my wife’s extreme dissociation and walking thru it with her. And as I repeatedly assured her, “focus on the trauma and dissociation and the rest will take care of itself.’ And it has. Her other issues have largely disappeared or become minor.
Attachment is the way I helped heal and dissolve my wife’s dissociation, but it doesn’t ‘cure’ the things caused by dissociation (the so-called dsm ‘disorders’). Those are resolved when the various part of the mind are reconnected (after the dissociation is dissolved) and then balance comes back to the person as the healing/mitigating parts of the mind can ‘balance’ those parts which need it.
I wish you had elucidated your biocognitive model more within the interview…and perhaps I’m obtuse, but why did you include ‘bio’ in the model’s name at all when it appears you wanted to get away from biological explanations of mental disorder?: “The biocognitive model says that there is no physical cause for mental disorder, but a psychological account is possible and it can account for all mental disorder. So mental disorder becomes a psychological phenomenon.”
Thanks,
Sam
In the d.i.d. world, we have to deal with the ‘False Memory Syndrome Foundation” that was largely created by abusive family to gaslight the now-adult children they had abused and say they were remembering ‘false’ memories about their abusive childhood.
There’s no doubt there are plenty of bad-faith families out there: neither of my wife’s nor my immediate family were willing to support and join us on our healing journey, and yet, change is possible. I’m proof of that. When we first started our journey, my wife said she spent more time dealing with my weekly blowups at her counseling sessions than her own stuff. But once I got my issues dealt with, then she told me I was now the greatest factor in her healing.
That is what we need to fight for: teaching family who are willing how to become the healing companions every struggling person needs. It’s not natural or easy. I have to fight my own self interests because I still sacrifice a lot of my own needs to make space for her healing: but I do it because I love her and because I’m seeking a win/win for us. And I just have to believe there are others out there who are like me and who would change if someone showed them the way…and there’s a chance, now, that I may be able to make that happen…(keeping my fingers crossed as it develops)
Sam
Hi Sera,
based upon your response to me, my original comment should be rated a ‘fail’ for conveying what I had hoped to do, sigh. I’ve wondered for the last 4 days if it was even worth a 2nd attempt, but as I continue to see negative comments directed toward the family, perhaps I will try again.
1) I do believe I understand the general purpose of your analysis of the comments section of the NYT article. Having walked with my wife these last 15 years and having followed Mad in America these last 6 or so years, I believe I understand the general perspective you are sharing and agree with much of it.
2) However, I believe your analysis and the generally negative comments directed toward family by others here presupposes a generally negative ‘bad faith’ motive concerning the majority of family. However, I see them as victims of Big Pharma and psychiatry who are manipulated along with the rest of those in our culture to accept the common biomedical narrative of mental health. And NAMI to whom family turns for help, support and training, as you have written here in the past, is just an arm of that coalition and so family go there, thinking they will be helped, only to be corrupted, sigh.
3) Moreover, I believe this analysis forgets the inherent selfishness we ALL have. We all have hopes, dreams, desires and needs. They aren’t necessarily bad, but when something extreme like severe trauma and dissociation is thrown into a relationship, sadly those things can turn a loving relationship into a war campaign to have those needs met.
Sadly the manipulation of Big Pharma and psychiatry; our general culture, as well, and our inherent selfishness all work to create a ‘battle of wills’ even among loved ones and sadly the strongest win and the weaker loses.
My wife inadvertently saved us from this by asking me not to read anything about her ‘condition’ when we first started our healing journey, and I kept that promise for the first 2 or 3 years until we had sufficiently developed a rhythm and methodology that worked for both of us. But I also had to fight my inherent selfishness and tell myself over and over that I was fighting for a win/win for me and my wife, rather than allowing my selfishness to twist my relationship with my wife into a battle of wills.
Have you heard of the Better Angels group? In this ugly culture war in which our country is immersed, this group and others like it are trying to help people stop presupposing the inherent ‘bad faith’ of the ‘other side’ and instead learn to really understand each other and find our overwhelming common ground.
I truly am sorry for each and everyone of you who have been hurt and betrayed by your family and loved ones, but unless we can find that commonality and love that I believe motivates most of us, then those who are struggling will continue to lose.
I’ve been at this 15 years, and I’m more than my wife’s ‘ally’ as the Left uses that term. I’m her foxhole buddy who walked with and at times literally carried her thru every extreme state and everything else she experienced no matter where or when it happened. There is no group in the world that can do what family can do, period. And so we’ve got to move past the larger culture-war milieu that literally believes those on the ‘other side’ are ‘evil’. We’ve got to train and empower our loved ones to be the healing companions those who are hurt need most.
Sam
Sera,
I’m really struggling how to respond to your article. I’m torn in so many different ways. I am obviously sympathetic and empathetic to your perspective as I have literally spent the last 15 years dedicated to helping my wife heal while I kept her completely out of the mental health system and off any drugs…I had to learn to listen to her. Her fears. Her perspective. Her everything…
And yet, as a ‘family member’ we have real fears, real perspectives, real needs, too. I don’t share them much on this site because I understand its perspective and also because I chose to walk with my wife when all her trauma and dissociation exploded into our marriage and family…and so I chose the emotional distress and sacrifices that walking with her through all that stuff would require me to make in order to be a good healing companion for her.
The real problem I see is that everyone wants their own perspectives, needs, fears, etc., validated but I rarely find someone willing to do the same for someone else, even a loved one, especially when that requires validating a perspective antithetical to or in competition with our own. And so then we engage in a battle of wills and the stronger wins…at the sacrifice of the relationship.
What we need are people willing to seek win/win solutions. I believe you and this website are just trying to get ‘this side’s’ perspective out there, but I’ve tried to walk in such a way with my wife that there isn’t ‘her’ side and ‘my’ side. I always refer to this as ‘our healing journey’ because if I other her in any way…it creates space for us to grow apart and this journey is so hard on both of us, even today, that we won’t make it if I don’t own it all as my own because we are in it together.
Sam
I have begun to read Tina’s booklet. Much of what Tina has suggested I have done for my wife these last 15 years, and so, fundamentally, I agree with her, and yet, I am struggling with her desire to see this done on a larger scale than within families as we have done (how many have the commitment level outside of a family to go 15 years and counting???). Yes, I think others who are willing should be taught the things that Tina espouses. Yes, the laws certainly need changed to stop the inhumane treatment and stripping away of fundamental rights of others simply because they are experiencing mental distress.
…But I think you hit the nail on the head when you wrote that others do so because of their fear which I believe is driven by ignorance. Until we can cogently articulate what is going on when a person is experiencing extreme states to demystify them so that others can empathize and realize that they are just like I am, not crazy, mad, dangerous or anything else, then I fear people will continue to demand the right to subdue what they fear rather than embrace it.
Thanks to both of you and I will continue to try and make my way thru her booklet.
Sam
Diaphonous Weeping,
the ancient wisdom says, “See to it…that no root of bitterness, springing up, causes trouble, and by it many become defiled.”
When my wife and I first started this healing journey 15 years ago, I had my fair share of anger and bitterness. This isn’t what anyone signs up for when he says his wedding vows…but I love my wife, and if we were going to make it, and make it well, then I had to let go of the anger and bitterness. I had to learn to ‘breathe’ the disappointment, pain and heartache that would be part of this journey. At first it was like learning to breathe underwater: my being convulsed and fought against the pain and heartache, but my love for my wife and my desperation to find a win/win for us held me until the process was completed.
So, I still hurt, but I know it’s the price to walk with the woman I love, and it doesn’t have the power over me that it used to.
As for ‘fixing.’ Sigh, yes. My older brother’s 2nd wife was a trauma survivor, and about the same time my wife’s trauma exploded into our marriage, his wife’s did, too. But he wanted to ‘fix’ her and drug her all over the country trying to do so…and not long after that, she filed to divorce him. I had tried to invite him to ‘walk’ with his wife, like I was learning to do with mine, but he had no interest…and my family rallied around him when he was ‘free’ of her, sigh. And then my mom tried to give a defense of him to me since she knew I was going thru similar things with my own wife, sigh. I think the rest of my family wishes I had done the same thing to my wife.
…it was their loss. Our healing journey really has been a fantastic (though difficult) voyage…like seeing a star born…as each girl (‘alter’) joined us on the outside…and I got the privilege of helping her heal as I offered her the safety and security of a loving relationship with me: something she had never known before. And once she accepted that safety with me, then she was free to let me hold her pain and trauma…so that she could heal and move on to become the beautiful person she was always intended to be…
My family and my wife’s missed the beautiful journey we have been on. It was their loss, and yet, we lost too by not having their support…but they are all broken people who have fought to pretend that they aren’t, while they shun my wife’s brokenness and think they are better than her, sigh.
Sam
Hello Diaphonous Weeping,
I almost missed your beautiful commentary and analysis of things through your various comments because I kind of zoned out on the comments section until Steve made a comment about how we inherit so much dysfunction thru our parents, and they thru their parents, etc. You have some incredible insights and articulate them so well. So much of what you speak are things I have tried to do for my wife on our healing journey. For us there is no railing against the system or seeking justice from her abuser because the exact knowledge of him is lost to her in the mists of 5 decades ago when she was a toddler. And so we deal with the trauma and dissociation today and how it affects her and us until we can undo it.
I did want to speak to Steve’s comment about our heritage of dysfunction. I remember when my wife and I first started this journey that I made a vow to break that dysfunction so our son didn’t continue in the mold. Unfortunately, he spent so many of his formative years touched by our struggling marriage until I began to deal with my own issues so that I could be a good healing companion for my wife. I wish I could have been a better father for him…but I am getting a 2nd chance this year since he had to move back in with us while he is trying to finish his PhD.
Anyway, DW, you really are beautifully articulate. It’s too bad more people haven’t read and understood some of the critical things you have stated. I do agree with so much of it and our journey has mirrored much of what you have said, but my writing is always more of one who writes those dry instruction manuals for our devices which none of us read unless we absolutely must: it’s probably why there’s been so little interest no matter how I’ve tried to share our amazing journey of love, healing and discovery (blog, booklets, comments across the internet) because I seem unable to write in such a way that draws people in.
Sincerely,
Sam
Hi Bradford,
thank you for the generous comment. I wish you weren’t correct…that our case is just seen as anecdotal, sigh. Even here in the Mad in America, counter cultural movement, I have struggled to find a place to really change the conversation how family can be available 24/7, 365 days a year for their loved ones and so we MUST be the ones taught and empowered to walk with them while respecting their total agency.
But it’s more than that; my wife and I embraced her extreme states, her extreme dissociation and everything else…and we found a way thru them. I’ve tried to shout ‘eureka’ for 15 years, but I just can’t find anyone with a big enough platform to help me spread the word. I so appreciate MiA giving me this chance to do so, but I was heartbroken by the lack of response and even ‘hits’ to this blog and even the free downloadable booklet.
Sam
Hi Miranda,
thank you for writing this insightful review, and also, thank you for sharing some of your story with the rest of us. Personally, I’ve struggled with suicide ideation and depression/despair/despondency most of my adult life, and I do agree with you that hope and strong relationships are some of the best ways I fight against these overwhelming feelings. Hope is also part of the reason I work so hard to be a good healing companion for my wife, since our ‘fortunes’ are inextricably linked to each other’s, and her ‘win’ will be mine, too.
But as for empowerment. I often thought about the categorical difference between my older sister being raped in her 20’s and my wife’s experience of being molested as a 2-year old and her childhood growing up with emotionally distant and at times abusive parents. My sister quickly moved thru the healing process as she fought to get back to healthy and a few years later she was speaking to other women about her experience and how she had healed.
But my wife? When we first started our journey together, she told me repeatedly that she didn’t even know what ‘healthy’ looked like. She had no goal to fight for like my sister because she had never known what it was in the first place. On top of that, we spent 5 years of continuous extreme states, where she was literally, constantly overwhelmed, and I had to be there with her ‘in the emotional hurricane waters”…holding her up from drowning, being the calm in her storm. I was her lifeguard, her ‘savior,’ in a very real sense…until I got her stabilized, and we moved out of that phase.
15 years later she is in a much different place and I rarely have to ‘rescue’ her and yet I still have to help her heal in a way that my sister never needed. It’s been a struggle for me so that I don’t infringe upon her agency in any way, and yet be willing to provide her the support and help that she needs as she still is moving toward the goal of becoming healthy…having never experienced it.
And so each person’s experience of suicide ideation, depression or any other mental distress and what each needs to heal from it and move past it will depend on their own history. Empowerment can feel overwhelming and almost like the same abandonment s/he experienced during childhood to someone who has never known ‘healthy’ like my wife until s/he has healed and stabilized enough. That doesn’t give the helper license to transgress someone’s agency, but it does mean basing the help and depth of involvement according to the needs of the sufferer and realizing much more help may be needed at the start of the healing journey.
Sam
Hi Michael,
thank you for responding. You seem pretty passionate about this subject from what you’ve written here and past articles of yours I’ve read on Mad in America and also on your own website. I don’t know if the terms of your sabbatical would allow you to read a little booklet I wrote about how I engaged my wife’s ‘madness’ these last 15 years without drugs mostly using attachment strategies as I have walked with her thru almost anything you can imagine when it comes to mental distress. it’s 42 pages with lots of stories about our journey. But if that falls outside your sabbatical, I have written myself some notes, and I will try to contact you after you get back.
Here’s a link to the free download. https://samruck2.wordpress.com/2022/02/11/engaging-madness/
Thanks, Sam
Bateson wrote, “Diabasis is one of a very few institutions across the country which carry the responsibility for advancing our understanding of psychiatric phenomenon … problems which are almost as complex as any which the human spirit can present. In just a few places and necessarily on a small scale, this complexity is being faced, I would argue that those places are curiously precious, not only for the few patients who are lucky enough to pass through them, but also precious to the whole psychiatric profession and the wider field of helping skills.”
Michael, do you really believe this? i tried to contact you via your website, but it said you wouldn’t be available until late June. Sadly, I missed you when you visited our support group that Kermit and Louisa lead. I’ve walked with my wife thru her ‘madness’ for the last 15 years: every aspect of it: the extreme states, the ‘psychosis’, the ‘delusions’ and ‘paranoia’ and so much more. If you ever wanted to talk, I’d love the chance to share some of the amazing things I’ve witness as I walked thru it all with her.
Sam
First, let me say how truly sorry I am for Sera, that her ex is stooping this low. Anger makes us capable of such ugly things. My heart goes out to her and her entire family.
As someone who has struggled with suicidal thoughts for 3 decades, after a lot of journaling, I’ve come to see them as a coping mechanism; just one tool in my toolbox that I can say, ‘If things get too bad, I’ve always got an out.’ However, it’s only one tool, and there are other tools I use to keep me from using that one. But I also realized if my agency had ever been removed, I probably would have become even more suicidal.
But I am concerned about the focus on autonomy. “No man(person) is an island.” None of are autonomous. None of us acts in a vacuum. None of us develops and grows as children or adults in a vacuum, and I think to make this a focus plays into the hyper-individualism of our western societies and why too often we don’t care enough about those in our communities. I think a better goal is collaboration realizing that I have personal weaknesses, blindspots and am limited in my experience, knowledge and wisdom and I can benefit from relationships with others. I don’t always, intrinsically know what is best for me, but I can benefit from a safe community of fellow travelers who are willing to share without coercion.
So, I think it’s agency we should focus on, not personal expertise because all of us are limited in our experiences and sometimes we all could do with a little more humility as we accept help from others, but it ought to be our choice to accept that help, not something forced upon us because others are uncomfortable with the ugliness that life can bring to each of us.
Sam
Just in case anyone was wondering, both booklets are free to download: the current one has a hyperlink to the previous one. you can download them from here at Mad in America or from my blog.
Hi Louisa,
I am aware of that line of thinking though only on a superficial level. I can’t really answer for my wife, but from my perspective most of what she experienced seemed to be various dissociative effects of the original trauma, and as I helped her hold and heal the trauma, then we could begin the hard work of reconnecting the various, dissociated parts of her greater self…and then those issues largely resolved themselves.
I think both of us have grown as people having walked thru the hell that we did, but I wouldn’t call it a higher consciousness, just maybe a greater awareness of what really makes us all tick as human beings…but maybe that is one and the same with what you are suggesting…idk…
Sam
Hello Louisa,
yes, I will try to respond to that comment, but I wish you well and hope you find something in the booklet that may help you on your own journey.
Sam
Hi Joshua,
though it doesn’t really come out in this little introduction explicitly, in the booklet I make it clear that I don’t accept the terms ‘mad’, ‘psychosis’, ‘delusional’ or ‘paranoia’ when talking about my wife’s experiences or my attitude toward them and that is why they all appear in quotation marks…unlike voices and extreme states which do not appear in quotation marks in the booklet and yet I still take issue with how our culture views them.
My wife is just my wife, and when I engaged her in all her experiences, things made sense from her perspective and so we found a way thru them TOGETHER.
Sam
Hi Niall,
why do we lock them up? Good question. I have a guess even though I never allowed that to happen to my wife.
We let them be locked up to spare ourselves the scary and discomforting witnessing of extreme states. The first 5 years of the healing journey with my wife, we were inundated by her extreme states and each new one was, honestly, rather scary for me to witness. When she hit the ground in a comatose episode: freak me out. When her eyes rolled into the back of her head and she looked like she was experiencing a mild seizure: Breathe, Sam! When she hid under the table at home or under clothes racks out in public in terror and panic…wth? When she tried to jump out of our car going 70mph on the highway, repeatedly, or wanted store-bought fairy-wings so she could jump and fly off a building top…ahhh!!!!…when she was hitting furniture and falling down our stairs so often she was black and blue for more than a year that I was afraid of being accused of spousal abuse…and all the voices she started to hear which our culture assures us make people dangerous and unpredictable….you know…it’s exhausting…it’s overwhelming…it’s scary…it didn’t make sense at first…and I honestly didn’t know how to protect her from herself…I honestly thought I was going to lose her to one of these episodes!
And so we capitulate to the logical fallacy of ‘appeal to authority’, the experts who claim to have the magic cures with their pills, ECT, and all their indecipherable words and diagnoses and theories of mental ‘illness’ instead of using our love, compassion and brains for the ones we love…It really would have been so much easier (for me) to have drug my wife or passed her off to the ‘experts’ instead of our son and I caring for her 24/7 for 5 years until I walked her thru all the extreme states and figured out how to help her heal from them to the point they are a distant memory at this point.
So I wonder if we do the unthinkable to those who are struggling to save ourselves the stress of having to walk with them thru it all…and I’m not suggesting this to shame any who have done so or elevate myself. I know the family member’s and spouses’ pain. I know their fear. I honestly don’t know why I didn’t do that to my wife other than some part of me just couldn’t do that to the woman I love. I remember the day I told myself I had to grow up and be the adult in our relationship right now because she needed me to do so and couldn’t do it herself at that moment.
idk…just a thought…
Sam
Hmmm…well. this article didn’t go the direction i thought it might. i understand this is the author’s experience and so she’s an expert on her experience. And I think she voiced a lot of truth in it…but some of the things she only mentioned in passing, i think were of vital importance to the subject…as well as some of the comments below.
I think Steve’s comment hits the nail on the head; you don’t stop self harming by focusing on the self harming. So much of what i see described here on Mad in America as the focus of psychiatry today is just symptomatic. Who cares if we stop the self harming if we don’t deal with the root issues?
My wife didn’t cut, but she viciously bit herself…and i sat with her and held her while she did it. I tried to minimize it, but more importantly i held her and talked with her and acknowledged her pain…and as she healed and other parts of her joined us and were able to process the long dissociated trauma, then she gained access to things she had lost in the past…and eventually, she wasn’t overwhelmed by those feelings from the trauma anymore…and once the root issues were dealt with…then the symptomatic issues disappeared.
I’m truly sorry that anyone in the author’s position would ever self harm for attention. I know it didn’t start out that way for her…but it seemed to move that direction as she never got the care and affirmation she needed…and to me, the saddest part of her entire story is that she saw the psychiatrists, psychologists and psychiatric nurses as her ‘carers’ instead of her family…How I wish we family were taught and empowered to stand in the gap for our loved ones when they are struggling…that’s how it ought to be. We are the only ones there, 24/7 when they are in pain and overwhelmed by it…even our children can help the healing…our son has had a huge role in my wife/his mother’s healing…i don’t push it…but let him choose what he wants to do…and he does things for her, I could never replicate…
Sam
The General Theory of Love book sounds like it might be a pretty good book…it also seems to understand a principle that I think is missing in so many of our philosophies of healing trauma: that so much healthy, human functioning on all levels in any of us depends upon the active involvement of the primary attachment figure. We simply can’t heal on our own no matter what our hyper-individualistic culture says. That principle has been borne out in our own healing journey as well.
Sam
I watched the opera this weekend and even though our journey was completely different than the one portrayed here, I found it very evocative, stirring all kinds of emotions and decisions we had made along our own journey…and making me so grateful, somehow, we sidestepped so much that that young man and his mother endured…
Sam
Richard,
thank you for bringing up the issue of ‘logical fallacies.’ That knowledge is missing in most of our educations and has contributed to the decline of our ability to intelligently debate consequential topics.
I sometimes wonder if a study of philosophical materialism might also shed some light on the obsession of the biomedical model of mental health’s attempt to reduce all mental suffering to ‘brain chemistry’ and such. But again, basic philosophy is something our educational system has eschewed, and so most people, even ‘educated’ ones, don’t even understand all the ‘a priori’ assumptions that are made and injected into so many of the debates of today, sigh.
Sam
Hi Chuck,
well apparently I missed your original essay, but I’ll take a stab at this one.
For the last 15 years my wife and I have been walking the healing journey together from her early childhood abuse and extreme dissociation. I do understand your concern. I NEVER treat my wife as if she is disabled or dysfunctional and yet, the simple fact is, right now, she is clearly disabled and dysfunctional, literally. There are MANY basic things she is unable to do right now. Dissociation slices and dices the brain’s ability to access many personality traits and mental functions until those dissociative walls are torn down and the pathways are re-established. It’s not a matter of she could if she just tried hard enough. It’s a matter of those neural pathways have atrophied after 4 decades of disuse and it has taken us 14 years of constant, daily work to begin to reinvigorate them. And though she has come a long way, it’s mind numbingly complex and exhaustively tiring and takes both of us to help her undo the problem.
But that doesn’t mean i treat her as if she is PERMANENTLY disabled or dysfunctional. I look at the goal, her complete healing, as I walk with her and help her heal and re-establish the mental pathways to access the things she lost to the trauma and dissociation. I never belittle her, but I do accept her limitations for now and i help her heal and grow stronger toward our mutual goal.
It’s a complex problem and one our culture and the mental health system gets terribly wrong. I sympathize with your desire NOT to label anyone as disabled or dysfunctional because I have NEVER treated my wife that way…and yet, right now, she would definitely struggle, to put it mildly, if she was on her own and had to hold down any kind of a job.
Sincerely,
Sam
14 years ago my wife’s childhood trauma and dissociation exploded into our 20-year marriage. She is the only woman to whom I have said, ‘I love you” and the only woman with whom I’ve been, and we both say we ‘grew up together’ because we got married when I was barely 21 and she was 22. How do you abandon that?
So I fought for ‘us’ and a win/win solution despite all the adversity her trauma and dissociation brought us. Fortunately, she asked me NOT to read the popular literature out there when we started our healing journey, and so I really didn’t even know what ‘psychosis’ was until much later in our healing journey when I had already found meaning in most things she was experiencing, and so I never saw her as ‘psychotic’ or ‘delusional.’
But one thing I might add from our experience is trauma and dissociation adds the ‘Rip Van Winkle effect’ as I call it to the mix, if you are familiar with that story. All the trauma-fueled dissociation my wife experienced as a child 40-50 years ago, kind of put those parts of her brain/personality ‘asleep’ and as we woke them during the healing process there was a lot of ‘disorientation’ as well as ‘overlapping’ of past experiences with present realities…and it was very disorienting to her (flashbacks, panic attacks, extreme anxiety, etc, etc, etc). We used a lot of attachment concepts, and so I provided her a ‘safe haven’ and ‘affect regulation’ as I helped her sort all those confusing and conflicting things out. I didn’t demand that she work from the present, but instead, I entered into her confusion and provided her a steady, safe person as we came to a healthier place…together.
As a husband and supporter and healing companion of my wife, this breaks my heart: what could have been if her family had responded to her pleas for help, compassion, mercy and understanding. Every time my wife talks about trying sleep medicine or some of the other stuff her friends are on I gently fight that inclination telling her how lucky she is to be so ignorant of all the horrors that stuff can cause.
R.I.P., Kathleen. I’m sorry you and so many others haven’t gotten the family you need and deserve.
Sam
I love much of what Bessel has to say even though I’m still not sure ‘The Body Keeps the Score” after 15 years of walking with my wife thru her trauma and dissociation. I wonder if he, like most therapists, simply can’t go deeply enough like a primary attachment figure can. Our son and I, alone, have complete access to everyone in her system, but not even he is privy to the deepest stuff…which is fine as he has a completely different place in her healing journey as the adult child than I do as the spouse/primary attachment figure.
“C-PTSD is often described as life-altering, but it really goes much, much deeper than that. The absence of these essential ingredients in ones early life in the words of many of my own clients; creates “a void”. Life is certainly altered. But, unlike with those who suffer symptoms of PTSD, whereby there is a noticeable ‘healthy’ before — where the adult was mentally and emotionally well, capable and content in communications and relationships prior to the traumatic event — with C-PTSD there is rarely a ‘healthy’ before. As international activist, Jesse Jackson, wisely observed: “ You can‘t teach what you don’t know”.”
I think this is a tremendously astute quote. I’ve often wondered at the marked difference between how my older sister treated her healing and recovery from being raped in her 20’s. She knew what ‘healthy’ was and she fought to get back there. And yet my wife repeatedly told me when we first started this healing journey 15 years ago, ‘I don’t even know what healthy looks like.” And beyond that, I just don’t see the ‘fight’ in her to get healthy that I saw in my sister. It’s frustrating, and yet, I have to accept it for what it is as I try to walk with her and help gently move her toward ‘healthy.’
And it’s not surprising she never got that as a child because both her parents are fairly, emotionally/relationally dysfunctional. Last year after my father-in-law almost died twice, he talked with his daughter, my wife, about some of those topics that never get discussed in most families, even healthy ones, and he admitted to my wife that his wife, her mother, probably had mpd (multiple personalities disorder) which is the old name for what my wife has. He was apologetic for how his wife had treated her, their daughter, and confessed he never knew how to change things. But that was no revelation to my wife and I since we recognized all the signs in her mother once we started our own journey. And her own father has so many signs of trauma as well. It’s surprising my wife did as well as she did with our son because of all that she lacked in her own upbringing from her parents.
Sadly, besides apparently adhering to the common view of mental health struggles, the article ends on a rather low point in my opinion as it calls for the preeminence of the ‘skilled therapist’ to do what no therapist could possible do, sigh. In my opinion, it would be inappropriate, as well as impossible, for any therapist to do many of the things only the primary attachment figure can do. It’s been a 24/7 x 15 year ‘job’ for me as I walk in all aspects of our relationship with my wife helping her heal the trauma and dissociation…and we still aren’t done. It’s labyrinthine in complexity and overwhelming in scope. If not for my love for her AND my vows, there are many days I would walk away as I feel as broken by this at this point as she conveys to me that she does. But we are in it together; healing, learning, attaching, and hopefully, someday, we’ll make it out on the other side to find the happy, healthy relationship we both so desperately want.
My best friends are a trans couple. My wife and I were the only ones who supported my gay cousin’s marriage. And yet, the religious fervor with which this topic is approached by the Left and Right makes any attempt at meaningful discussion on this topic moot.
This ‘study’ is riddled with assumptions and biases. And the entire ‘science’ of this subject is based more in a priori assumptions on the subject rather than actual testing of how any of us develop as human beings. I’m all for supporting the LGBTQ+ community as human beings. I do so without qualification. But on a website like this, where ‘science’ is supposedly the basis for discussions, this entire topic is fraught from both ends with assumptions and passions that make nuance and real science impossible.
I helped my wife rebuild her personality, block by block, part by part. Some were asexual. Some were gender ambivalent. I never imposed my beliefs upon any, but by loving and affirming each part and helping each to assimilate/integrate into a healthy whole, she has come to her own place without any shame and without all the distress and angst I see surrounding this issue from both sides.
It really is too bad that both sides from my perspective are exacerbating the problem, and neither is willing to listen and examine their own ignorance and assumptions. As a result, this problem is only getting worse for those whom it most affects: the LGTBQ+ members and their loved ones.
Sam
I found this interview disturbing on a number of points.
1) That the one interviewee expressed no concern at all that her patient was abused with ECT to knock him out of his catatonic state. My wife has experienced many of those, and after the first time, when I had to figure out what was going on internally, it never took me more than 30 seconds or so to bring her thru them…certainly nothing barbaric like ECT.
2) That the goal of changing the name is so that people will become more docile to accept their diagnosis and ‘treatment’. Sigh
I’m think Someone Else had some astute observations about various forms of ‘psychosis’. My wife and I never had to deal with any forms Someone Else described except that which is caused by trauma and dissociation, and I simply never saw it as ‘psychosis.’ It was more a ‘time-overlap’ issue (past overlapping with present) because of the dissociation and as we brought back ‘online’ parts of her mind which had been sequestered/dissociated because of the trauma, well those parts were still oriented in the past at the time they got sequestered/dissociated…So to me, it’s by no means ‘psychosis’. When properly understood, it’s just like being Rip Van Winkle and waking up to find everything has changed, and so my part as her healing partner is to walk with her and be her ‘safe haven’ as she slowly acclimates from the past to her new, present-day circumstances and helping those parts to connect with the rest of her so that she’s not at war with herself.
Sam
Thanks, Bob. Sorry I didn’t make it all the way thru, but you are meticulous, fair and accurate as always. I appreciate that you never try to ‘juice’ the facts to prove your point…of course, these facts don’t need any ‘juicing’ to prove how corrupt Big Pharma/Psychiatry are.
As for calls how to beat this thing: until there are more acceptable alternatives that anyone and everyone can avail themselves of, people in distress will continue to avail themselves of whatever is there, even if it ends up destructive in the end. I’m glad MiA continues to push Soteria House and Open Dialogue. And I’m excited for the Soteria House and Peer Respite summit running the entire month of October…but the reach still won’t be enough to be available to everyone for a long time to come.
I hope some day there are more things offered and taught, like what my wife and I have done, to empower families and significant others to walk with their loved ones thru emotional distress. But they will need supported to help them in those efforts, so that literally anyone who chooses can circumvent the corruption and destruction that MiA has so ably revealed.
Sam
Hello, Lisa…
I grew up on the far right, conservative spectrum of things: politically and religiously. But 14 years ago, when my wife’s childhood trauma and extreme dissociation crashed into our 20-year marriage…I was forced to re-evaluate everything…and that also caused a shift in my perspective toward the center. I had to learn to appreciate things from both sides…but then our culture wars here in the States have escalated during the same time in which I was learning to see positives in both perspectives…
Now, when my wife’s trauma and dissociation crashed into our relationship, we were told it was d.i.d.(traditional perspective), but as we were finishing up our son’s senior year of homeschooling him…(and he’s now finishing his doctorate from an elite school in the Boston area), and because we were both from the Right, and in this country/culture that means you don’t expect the government to do everything for you if you can do it yourself…and so I guess we just started ‘home-healing’ her trauma and dissociation. Yes, it was overwhelming. Yes it was a trial by fire in the worst way. But, I’d already lived with my wife for 20 years. I knew she wasn’t ‘crazy’ and I only briefly thought she might be ‘dangerous’ thanks to our cultural caricatures…but I quickly got over that as I’d slept in bed beside her for 20 years and she had yet to hurt me, lol…And there were lots of other factors that went into how I treated her…but in the end I just continued to see her like myself (as I had for our first 20 years together) other than I now understood she was more traumatized and dissociated than I was…in fact, as we walked OUR healing journey together…I learned a lot about myself…and I had to ‘grow up’ so I could be a better healing companion for her…and I had to do my own healing because my triggers were getting triggered by her issues and vise versa…and I learned a lot about mental health issues along the way, including my time on this website even though we are outsiders to the experience of most on this website, having never been touched by psychiatry and its drugs and the loss of agency and the dehumanization so many here were subjected to..
(I’m almost there on this ‘meandering’ comment)…and so, all this to say…I understand that the Left in our country wants to dissect everyone into little groups for some reason while the Right tends to (very) imperfectly view us all the same…which is part of the reason for the BLM movement(which I mostly support) on the Left and the Right’s pushback that ‘All Lives Matter”…(I’m almost there)…
But I guess I believe why my wife and I have made it as far as we have…even though d.i.d. is considered one of the worst things someone can have according to the DSM…is because I fundamentally saw her as no different than myself. I don’t “other” her in any way, even though her trauma and dissociation (or the 7 other ‘alters’ who have joined the relationship) cause both of us a lot of emotional heartache and struggles that we wouldn’t otherwise have…
And so, I’d like to suggest, that until everyone in this entire movement stops ‘othering’ everyone including the rest of us on the ‘outside’ in any way and looks not for ‘allies’ as the Left likes to call people like me, but for those like myself who see you and me as absolutely, fundamentally the same, this movement for radical change concerning mental health/trauma and struggles is going to continue to falter. My wife and I aren’t ‘allies’: this fight is every bit as much mine as hers. This isn’t “her” healing journey. It’s ours!!! If I didn’t see it as ‘ours’ but hers, the pain and heartache we both suffer from her trauma and dissociation would have probably pushed me to look for an easier path and less difficult relationship as we face all kinds of things most marriages don’t and are still struggling today, together, for her full healing.
Don’t know if this makes sense because I know I left a lot out and made logical leaps that I didn’t have space to better define….there’s just so much more I could say, but this is already a longer reply than most are willing to wade thru.
Sincerely,
Sam
Hmmm…the interview isn’t available from the link unless you pay for a subscription…
I have heard of this book for a long time having been connected to the d.i.d. world for the last 14 years. And I have a lot of respect for Bessel in general. And I admit that I have NOT read his book: I’ve only read repeated reviews of it. So I will admit I am ignorant of the intricacies of his argument, but after 14 years of helping my wife heal the trauma she experienced 50 years ago, and as we untangled the dissociation that kept so much of it hidden from her…I just haven’t found our experience to validate Bessel’s core premise that ‘the body keeps the score.’
Yes, we have found the trauma to be more and more deeply hidden: the last 2 girls to join us outside were both mute at first, and I had to help each of them connect to the ability to vocalize themselves. The last girl to join us was very ‘primitive’ even more than the other one. I have often wondered if she controlled the ‘primal fear instinct’ in each of us…but she still was a conscious part of my wife.
The thing I would suggest to readers to remember about the ‘experts’ is their knowledge is very wide but not correspondingly deep. I would love to have the wide knowledge the experts have: to study of the general trends, to be aware of the basics of an issue, but they simply can’t have a corresponding depth.
For example, one of the past presidents of ISSTD stated on her website that she had over 40,000 hours helping people with d.i.d. When I read that statement over 5 years ago, I did a quick tabulation of the time I have spent helping my wife heal, helping her untangle all the dissociation, and I was already way over 40,000 hours at that point. Moreover, I know of no therapists who have complete access to their patients’ system like I do with my wife’s. My wife’s counselor only interacted with 4 or 5 of the girls on a regular basis, one time a week. I interact with all 8 girls on a daily basis. In fact, at this point, I interact with all of my wife, all 8 girls, more than my wife’s host does, the one most people would suggest is ‘my wife.’ I keep her and the other 6 girls informed of what goes on when girl #8 is out with me, as we all desperately try to get the last one connected to the larger group of 7 so they no longer ‘lose’ most of their days to her.
So, my experience is a mile deep, but only one person wide. Whereas Bessel’s experience is probably just the opposite: he has experience a mile wide but not very deep. He, nor the other ‘experts’ simply can’t understand what I or other SO’s/spouses do as we walk with our hurting loved ones in the depths of their pain and dissociation, 24/7 in all aspects of life, not just the safe confines of the therapist’s office.
I’ve ‘argued’ for 14 years all over the internet to bring those in my position into the discussion on a wider basis, but thus far I have found few willing to listen. I do understand many SO’s and spouses are part of the problem rather than part of the solution, but I know many of us aren’t.
Sincerely,
Sam
Hey Someone Else,
here are the links to 2 mental health organizations in Ashland, Ohio. I’m pretty sure both are in line with the basic principles that MiA promotes. They might be able to assist you or at least direct you to others who could. The last link is to a group located in Toledo who are teaching Emotional CPR(Dan Fisher’s group) and trying to establish other similar things in Ohio. I’ve been in contact with various people connected to these groups, and you are welcome to tell them you know me(use my real name).
I finally have an appointment with the director of Appleseed this coming Monday in the hopes of starting the support group I told you about to help survivors and their family/SO’s and anyone interested to walk together on the healing journey like my wife and I have using attachment principles to stay connected and facilitate healing of the deepest trauma and dissociation like my wife had/has. If that ever gets going, I’ll email you.
Also, please add my email to your list if you don’t mind. I don’t know if I can do anything practically to start a Soteria House, but perhaps I’m wrong.
I may copy this and send it to your email, but I wanted to offer these links publicly in case other Ohioans might have interest in visiting their sites and seeing what is happening in our state.
Sam
“By communal mastery, the researchers refer to a community-oriented way of coping where people can manage life difficulties through attachments with family, friends, neighbors, and significant others.”
That’s what we’ve found: attachment theory has given us the tools to go thru the worst of the worst, holding us together, and facilitating the healing process.
Sam
One of the happiest things I have noticed during the 14 years of our healing journey is my wife’s hyper-vigilance is finally waning. For most of our 33-year marriage, if we were in bed asleep together and I got up to go the restroom or go to work, if I made the tiniest of noises, she would gasp and startle awake…but she rarely does that anymore…and many times if I gently touch her to kiss her goodbye as I go to work, she doesn’t gasp or startle either…it’s so gratifying because I know how much work and healing it’s taken to get her to that point…
Sam
Sam,
my wife and I do lots of fun things that engage all the various parts of her mind. I’ve also built her a craftroom and supplied it with everything she wanted, again to engage all of her. We tandem bike together, tandem kayak together, and I’ve always been willing to watch(tv or movies) or do things repeatedly to engage various parts of her to the fullest extent possible during the reconnection process.
Sam
Steve,
thanks for replying. I was pretty sure I understood your perspective, and you have confirmed that I do, and like I said, I largely agree with your perspective.
I guess I was kind of more interested in your description and understanding of neural atrophy. I’m just a layman, but it seems like that is a physiological/neural issue that complicates healing trauma, but perhaps my understanding of that term is way off. And as my wife and I have worked on restoring those pathways from long-dissociated areas of her mind/brain, the restoration has always been accompanied by debilitating headaches especially when we are changing her inner working model from a trauma paradigm to a securely-attached one, but I do understand correlation doesn’t equal causation, and so maybe they are unrelated.
I was just interested on your take or experience on any of this.
Thanks,
Sam
I’ve read thru everyone’s comments and have appreciated them. It’s too bad David isn’t part of the discussion. I have some comments and questions, if everyone hasn’t already lost interest.
Steve, you seem to state repeatedly, in various discussions on this website, about the lack of a biological component in mental health issues. I guess I’m curious how you would described the neural atrophy that comes after decades of dissociation and lack of access to various parts of one’s mind/brain.
I understand your point is to hammer against the ‘mental illness’ myth, but isn’t neural atrophy a real, physiological outcome in the physical brain from dissociation that comes as the result of any trauma when the trauma isn’t addressed? For my wife and I, that neural atrophy and reinvigorating those pathways between the various parts of her mind/brain, has been some of the most difficult parts of the healing journey. I accept and affirm this is different than the ‘mental illness myth’ and believing one has an unfixable chemical imbalance, but I believe it is a physical aspect of trauma/dissociation that complicates the healing.
As for edmr…as in the other recent thread, my wife and I have always seen this as quackery, snake oil, magic elixir and such…and yet, I do want to state that whether one calls it the ‘placebo effect’ or ‘the power of faith’ from religious traditions, if it weren’t for my wife’s faith, we would have been hard pressed to effect some of the most major changes in her inner working model (attachment theory) that have foundationally changed her trauma perspective to one in which she has become securely attached to me as her primary attachment figure.
I understand her faith is a type of crutch, but crutches have useful purposes when a person is deeply traumatized. They allow a person to do something they either can’t do or don’t believe they can do on their own. And who am I to say, when we pray and ask Jesus to change her inner world, that He really isn’t doing it? In the end, she believes it, the needed changes occur to help her connect to other parts of her mind/brain, and without those prayers, I’m not sure I could EVER convince her that she could do it on her own…
I sent her a link of this article because right now the biggest issue we are having is the fear of reconnecting more deeply to the other parts of her mind, and even if it’s only a placebo/crutch, even with all my focus on attachment (which I would add is simply ‘faith’ in the attachment figure, that the person will be there for you when you need it…), I have struggled to move her past those fears…
Hi Sonus Silentio,
thank you for taking the time to describe your experience with EMDR. I’m glad you’ve had a positive experience with it as we’ve had with attachment theory.
I do wish you the best as you continue on your healing journey.
Sam
Kerry, thank you for responding. I have appreciated reading your views on EMDR.
I understand this article is about that, and not dissociation, and so I won’t belabor the point unless you choose to further engage with me…but unlike most people, my wife and I chose to embrace and live ‘in the dissociation’ for the last 14 years. And thus, we learned how it works and how to tear it down: it’s not something to be avoided at all costs like most people act. In fact, the deepest healing she found was as we embraced it and brought those areas back ‘online’ which takes time and hard work. And so I’d like to suggest that it’s not what you and most people think it is, at least not 40 and 50 years later after the initial trauma, and it is definitely the harder of the two (trauma/dissociation) to undo after all those decades that the neural pathways become accustomed to doing workarounds to large areas of the person’s traits and abilities.
Sincerely,
Sam
Hello Kerry,
my wife is part of the early childhood trauma/extreme dissociation community, so I’ve heard about EMDR for a long time, and I’ll be honest, I’ve always been skeptical as it sounded like ‘snake oil’ and ‘magic elixir’ stuff, but I’ll grant you that I don’t always know why things I do to help my wife heal work, though attachment theory does form the foundation of much that we do.
I am curious how you deal with dissociation. Any unprocessed trauma that isn’t dealt with, eventually becomes ‘sequestered’ or dissociated. For us, the trauma is the relatively easy part to heal using attachment concepts of ‘safe haven’, ‘proximity maintenance’ and ‘affect regulation’. It’s tearing down the dissociative walls and retraining her brain to access all those areas that had been largely unavailable for decades that has been the much bigger issue, and we’ve only found doing repetitive tasks, based on the concepts of neural plasticity, to undo that.
However, beyond the neural plasticity issue, is the fact that the dissociative walls hide so much of the trauma, and at least in our case, the deeper the trauma, the more I’ve been the ONLY person she let into those dark places as her ‘primary attachment figure’ and so I wonder how much access you realistically have. My wife’s counselor didn’t have half the access I do, plus I’m with her every day, 24/7.
I’m just throwing things out. I would love for EMDR to work. It’ seems so wonderful and easy…nothing like the hell we’ve gone thru the last 14 years as I’m still helping her tear down the dissociation and every time I think we have the trauma gone, another bit ‘pops’ up because we tore down more dissociation or for other reasons that are too numerous to delineate here.
I do wish you the best.
Sam
I’ve struggled with this article all week. I’ve watched all the positive comments about it show up. And I keep reading it, trying to see if I’m misunderstanding something, and I freely admit that may be the case. And I truly am deeply sorry for all those on this website who have had their normal, reasonable feelings used against them to take away their humanity and strip them of their agency and dignity.
But this document seems to be guilty of some binary thinking, if I’m reading it right. I unequivocally stand against the biochemical model of mental health, and ‘mental illness’ and ‘chemical imbalances’. I stand against the weaponizing of people’s distress to use against them. I stand against any form of dehumanizing others just because they are struggling…but have none of these cosigners ever dealt with someone who experienced extreme trauma in early childhood? Any unaddressed trauma eventually causes systemic dissociation. ISSTD (international society for the study of trauma and dissociation) with whom I generally disagree because they adhere to the typical model despite dealing with trauma victims, still gets it right when they talk about ‘structural dissociation’ and how a little child’s mind who is subjected to extreme trauma will desperately attempt to sequester(dissociate) the trauma in order to find a way to keep living. But after a time, that coping mechanism becomes ‘structural’ and it causes a host of dysfunctions and dysregulations that are real, not imaginary.
I love my wife. Just yesterday, I told her for the 1000th or more time, “I don’t blame you. NO ONE would ever choose this” but it’s kind of insulting to people in our situation to minimize the extreme damage she’s suffered and which has infiltrated so many parts of our relationship. I’ve spent 14 years helping retrain my wife’s brain so she could access all those areas that she literally had NO access to previously. I work a full time job, often 55 hours a week, and yet I come home and do all the house work, inside and out, and then I spend all my free time, building a relationship with my wife, using our tandem bike, using our tandem kayak, doing everything we possibly can do TOGETHER so that the strength of our relationship enables her to face the past pain and fears and tear down those ‘structurally dissociative walls’. It’s hard on both of us and so exhausting even today, 14 years later, and it still brings me to tears many nights when I wonder if we will ever get thru this.
I don’t know. I hope I’m reading this wrong, but the choice isn’t binary. It’s not the biochemical model of mental health or simply empathizing with a person’s past. When the trauma is early enough, and the dissociation becomes structural, it takes real, daily, concerted effort to undo all the effects as you retrain the person’s brain/mind, and I truly am happy if none of you have ever had to deal with what is still an overwhelming task to me and my wife.
Sam
I’m honestly not sure how these ‘contracts’ work when the examples given seem to focus on the symptom instead of the root issue. Do people self harm in a vacuum, for the fun of it? Then focusing on that issue instead of what is motivating the self-harming seems unhelpful. Moreover, if there is any unaddressed trauma in the past then there will be some form of dissociation, and so these contracts may not be made with the part of the person who is ‘responsible’ for the self harming or the addiction issues. I do think the community part of it could be helpful in an attachment capacity: drawing on one’s connections with others for strength.
I like the end part of this interview, finding the middle ground, finding nuance, living with apparent contradictions (because of our ignorance). The binary, polarizing, black and white thinking of the States is simply making things worse as I have seen so many instances of it spilling over into how we help and see people who are in distress.
Sam
Hello Rebecca,
my wife and I have spent the last 14 years implementing attachment concepts in our marriage to help heal the many attachment wounds she suffered as a little child. Those concepts have been the roadmap for our healing journey and can do things for someone experiencing extreme distress that I wish would get more talk: I’m glad you’ve shared just the tip of what they can provide to any of us.
Thank you for sharing your story. I wish you the best.
Sam
No, Daiphanous Weeping, I wasn’t trying to diagnose the cause of your diagnosis. I was trying to be empathetic and validate your diagnosis and some of the other things you said and suggest a camaraderie, however small, between your situation and ours, but apparently I failed.
I do wish you the best,
Sam
Hello Daiphanous Weeping,
I’ve been following some of your comments here and on other threads. I’m sorry you aren’t feeling validated very well. I wrote a response last night and then deleted it. I try to watch myself since I’m just a husband and neither a ‘survivor’ nor an ‘expert’, but you say a lot of things I can relate to the journey my wife and I have been on the last 14 years. And if I remember correctly, the only difference between your schizophrenia and my wife’s d.i.d. is some ‘expert’ decided if the voices the person hears seem to be external, then voila, ‘you have schizophrenia’ whereas if the voices seem internal, then, poof, ‘you must have d.i.d.’
For us, my wife’s diagnosis of d.i.d 14 years ago was a godsend. For 20 years before that we struggled in our marriage. WTH was wrong? We didn’t know. We loved each other, but so many things were a struggle for us, no matter how hard we tried. We finally started seeing an alternative counselor who suggested she might have d.i.d….and we finally had a name to our unknown assailant.
Now we were fortunate. She didn’t get caught up in the mental health system. Our son and I helped and kept her safe the first 5 years when all the pent up trauma and emotions let loose in a hurricane of extreme states. We slowly found our way, together as a couple and family, as we utilized attachment concepts amongst other things to effect real healing that the drugs only mask.
I’m sorry you feel crazy. My wife felt the same at first. I can’t imagine dealing with all the stuff especially if you don’t have someone in your life to help stabilize and normalize things. When a ship is in a hurricane, stuff gets thrown and tossed and you feel like your life is going to end at any moment, at least that was how it was for her. But I went through those hurricanes by her side as a ‘safe haven’ literally carrying her and wrapping her in my arms at times when it was worst, and little by little the hurricanes diminished as my presence and assurances somehow gave her mind the extra help it needed to process those things from the past and assimilate them which stopped the storms permanently.
I can’t speak for you, but the trauma and subsequent dissociation seemed to be the biggest issues for my wife…and the dissociation seems to have caused most of the extreme states and other stuff she struggled with as the mind desperately wanted to get back in a sort of ‘stasis’ because it wanted access to everywhere. We are still working on dissociation issues, but the extreme-state stuff is mostly in the past.
I do wish you well. I think I understand a lot that you are saying and I agree with much of it, and so I just wanted to speak up and say I hear you.
Sam
I think part of the problem is people confuse symptoms with root causes. I always focused on the trauma and subsequent dissociation that the trauma caused. IMO, these are the root causes of everything else. So much of the dsm is just symptomatic issues which spring from the original trauma and the mind’s subsequent coping mechanism of dissociation that then become systemic when the trauma isn’t dealt with.
However, there is one other issue I see when helping a survivor of early childhood trauma. S/he may have no baseline for ‘recovery.’ During a healthy childhood, the parents serve as role models for the child. But in a traumatic childhood that is often missing. When my wife and I first started our journey, over and over and over she told me, “I don’t know what ‘healthy’ looks like.” I took that as a cue for me to grow up and become a role model that my wife was lacking originally. I don’t dictate the outcome, but I try to model healthy behavior as we walk the journey together.
Sam
Miranda,
I hope Mad in America will really explore the healing power of life-long attachment relationships especially when childhood abuse occurs and the person’s attachment system is deeply traumatized. When understood correctly and lived appropriately, these attachment concepts, as laid out by Bowlby, literally can heal the worst of trauma and dissociation and all the extreme states that come with those. The science is there, but unfortunately, too many of the experts try to do what only family can do as the primary attachment figures in the person’s life.
I’m glad to see Mad in America embracing the larger family system because one never knows which family member will/can step up, and with some training and understanding, fulfill the healing role the person needs. Ideally it would be the parent or spouse, but I’ve got a newphew struggling with attachment issues because he was adopted and from what I’ve been told his older sister is the best at looking past her brother’s issues and loving him despite and through them.
If there is ever anything I could do to assist this section, I’d be happy to do so. I had to learn it all on my own: that’s something I don’t wish on anyone else.
Sam
Fourteen years ago the trauma and subsequent dissociation my wife had experienced during childhood crashed into our 20-year old marriage. We were in our son’s senior year of home schooling him, and I guess it didn’t really occur to me to do anything different with her needs. We did find an alternative counselor, but as anyone suffering extreme mental distress knows, it’s a 24/7 thing, not a once-a-week-at-the-counselor’s-office thing.
But her counselor offered us a lifeline for the first 5 years while I dealt with my own issues and we developed a rhythm between us. Eventually the attachment strategies we had always leaned toward with our son and each other became the foundation of our relationship interactions on the healing journey we found ourselves upon. I always refer to this as OUR healing journey because I had to decide to own all the fallout from her trauma and dissociation lest I ‘other’ her and it become a wedge between us. Moreover, it’s OUR healing journey because I had a lot of healing and changing that I had to do before I was someone she could depend upon at all times. I studied up on attachment theory and then became much more purposeful in implementing it in our relationship, and that is when I really became a healing companion that could facilitate her healing in profound ways.
Before You Call for Help is a tiny synopsis of the highlights of our last 14 years from my perspective and how I learned to be the healing companion she could trust with her deepest fears and pain. It was only when I began to frequent Mad in America 5 years ago that I realized how I had inadvertently spared her and us so much additional trauma at the hands of the mental health system here in the States. At 30 pages it could only scratch the surface, and I’d be happy to discuss anything further if anyone finds something of value in it for their situation.
Sam
Daiphanous Weeping,
though attachment is most easily done during childhood through healthy interaction with a loving, providing parent, the science supports what my wife and I have experienced the last 14 years: that adult couples can provide the same for each other. But the challenge for us is undoing 5 decades of trauma and dissociation that became systemic in her thought patterns. If only I had understood what was going on inside her when we were first married at 21, it would have been so much easier than when we finally started at 40 and now into our mid 50’s, sigh…
Sam
Hello E. Baden,
I see you are from the Midwest. There’s a little group of us in Ohio trying to change things here. I’m just a husband but I’ve walked with my wife thru all her trauma and extreme dissociation and extreme states. For most of the last 14 years I have mostly done it alone and have been blacklisted across the internet by those who don’t want to hear of a better, non-medical/medicated, relational (attachment concepts) way to heal. But just a few months ago I met some others who actually embraced me for the first time…and I’m still struggling to believe I may have finally found a home. I just turned 54 and haven’t given up my hope and dream to share the better way my wife and I found, and happily, Mad in America just posted a little quick-reference guide in their family section that I wrote.
All that to say, don’t give up the fight. I know it’s hard. I hurt so deeply most days, especially the days when I was screamed at (online), called a pedophile, wife abuser and all kinds of other things. But we need people like you. I wish I had the wisdom you do when I was 25. If you’d ever like to talk, shoot me an email at my blog address (samruck2 @ gmail dot com). Finding other like minded people makes all the difference in the world. I don’t know where you are in the Midwest, but perhaps, there are others in your neck of the woods, too.
Sam
Hello Curiousmedia,
I don’t really want to debate economics. I understand there is a ton of inequality in our system, and so many are being left behind, but I don’t think it’s truly a function of capitalism, but of the avarice in our leaders and the 1% hearts. At the same time, the grass isn’t always greener on the other side, and unchecked socialism has a history of failures from last century.
Anyway, I believe Megan’s main point was ‘we don’t have everything we need’ within ourselves, and attachment theory would affirm that. It’s the foundation of everything my wife and I did on our healing journey from her childhood abuse. Attachment theory teaches us as the song says, “We all need somebody to lean on” and that’s not just when we are in crisis, but throughout our lives.
By the way. I’ve been here over 5 years, but thanks for the welcome, but I’m an anomaly here, and so I don’t comment much anymore.
Sam
Hi Megan,
I think your anger toward capitalism as the culprit of all the ills of this society is misplaced at least in regards to the main thesis of this article. I would suggest it is the West’s overemphasis, and especially the United States, on rugged individualism, independence, autonomy, the me-culture and such. I never really bought into all that stuff, and so when my wife and I naturally began following attachment theory from the start of our healing journey, it wasn’t a huge change for us. We just had to learn to become more purposeful as we implemented its main tenets into our relationship.
Sam
Bob,
thank you as always for your thoughtful work and analysis of things.
The very last question you answered in this interview had to do about family. I strongly believe the tipping point for this movement will come when we train and empower the significant others, family and friends to walk with their loved ones who are in distress whether from ‘psychosis’ or any of the many, other, varied extreme states that come from trauma and dissociation. I’m glad you recognized that it doesn’t take a ‘peer’ to be empathetic, and it is usually only family and SO’s who are around long enough to effect true healing for that 30% who weren’t helped in the studies you cited. For me and my wife, it’s year 13 or 14: it’s been so long at this point that I’m losing count, but we are still drug free and moving forward, even if it’s not at the pace we had hoped when we first started.
I wish you the best as you continue to spearhead this movement to treat others as any of us would want to be treated instead of ‘othering’ them. For me it’s just part of the Golden Rule.
Sam
“Participants are encouraged to understand their voice-hearing experience on their own terms, and no one narrative is emphasized over any other. This means the biomedical explanation of voice-hearing is on equal footing with the alien-implanted technology explanation during these meetings. There is a strict rule that participants do not criticize each other’s narrative around voice-hearing.”
Has Mad in America tilted so far to the Left that it can’t see a HUGE issue with this statement? Does validating other people’s experiences mean the total rejection of any kind of baseline for truth or facts at minimum?
I like a lot of what HVG does, but this is NOT one of them, and that Mad in America would uncritically make this statement, a website dedicated to the refutation of the biomedical model of mental health, is a sad statement on the loss of…I don’t know exactly what, but I’m truly flabbergasted.
I validated most of the things my wife told me about her voices, but when she told me they were ‘aliens’ I gently pushed back, and slowly over time, her views changed to something more in line with a perspective that would facilitate her healing. We still have divergent perspectives on her ‘voices’ so it’s not that I think there is only one ‘truth’ but this is a low point in the fight for a better way if one can’t gently help others find a perspective better in line with basic facts.
Sam
Lauren,
I’m sorry this article didn’t get more views or comments. I was in a Zoom meeting last night and this course got mentioned and so I did a search on MiA and found your article today. I recently wrote a 30-page, quick-reference guide of my experiences learning to become a good healing companion for my wife. The others in the meeting represented those who have experienced trauma and the mental health system. But we agreed on our common humanity and the need to move past divisive terms and ways of seeing each other. This course you explain seems like a good, first step, and there’s so much more for those who are in a sustained relationship like I am.
I sent this link to the rest of the members in our little collaboratory group.
Sam
Bippyone,
here is the link to Asylum magazine. If you use the contact form, you probably can contact Helen. She and I have been in contact ever since this article was published here on MiA. They just published their winter magazine last week, I believe.
Sam https://asylummagazine.org/
When dealing with (false) accusations, these were a couple of things that helped me:
1)“Apologizing does not always mean you’re wrong and the other person is right. It just means you value your relationship more than your ego.”
2) Allowing myself to be the ‘scapegoat’ for my wife’s justified anger at her abuser. Sure it hurt, but I saw the end goal when the anger and rage were gone so that they no longer separated us.
3) Asking for complete accusations so I could give FULL apologies, in detail…and never justifying myself in any way. Again, the goal is to diminish the anger and broken trust and validation. Later, there will be time for ‘my side of the story…’
As for psychosis, sigh, I still don’t understand the obsession with this concept. I feel it is completely unhelpful and judgmental. I walked with my wife in her perception of reality, validating it, learning from it, and providing her a ‘safe harbor’ in the midst of the storms that were associated with all the ‘extreme’ states…and so we developed our own reality as we walked together and moved out of the constructs forged from her traumatic past.
Sam
Hello, Lauren,
my wife and I are fellow homeschoolers, though our son is 30 now. I have a lot of happy memories of those days, but I know my wife shouldered most of the burden of the schooling: I supported both of them the best I could so that it was a family effort.
I’m sorry for your experiences and the trauma they have caused. I couldn’t quite tell if you are still struggling with eating issues amongst other things or not. I’m glad it sounds like you’ve got a pretty good support network, too. I’m glad it sounds like you have a good therapist now, but never underestimate the power your husband has to support and carry you through the hard times. Once I learned how to help my wife, it made all the difference in her healing.
Take care,
Sam
I love Ms. Spandler’s willingness to reject binary thinking. It’s so easy in our hyper-polarized society to want acceptance, safety and affirmation over the messiness that finding what works for each of us often entails.
Trishna,
wow. You have found the exact same thing my wife and I have at nearly every point. I’d love to swap stories with you, though you do seem to come at it from my wife’s perspective and not mine…I’m astounded how closely you mirror what’s taken place on our journey.
Sam
Even though I strongly disagree with the FMSF and its disinformation campaign, I think it was disingenuous and unhelpful for the author to completely ignore some of the catastrophes like the satanic ritual abuse and daycare scandals. How can we learn from the past, if we choose to ignore the missteps that caused those scandals?
However, as someone who has helped my wife heal and integrate her dissociated trauma memories, I never found them to be part of some ‘super category’ of memories. They were fragments and snapshots associated with extreme emotions of fear and terror. I’m glad her abuser was long gone, a neighbor from the distant past of whom we had no name to associate with the vague description of him that she could recall, so we never even thought to attempt some kind of reckoning, legal or otherwise. For us, the point was never about the abuser, it was about her coming to terms with those memories and extreme emotions in light of her secure relationship with me today so she could integrate them into her personal narrative and finally be released from their ability to chain her to the past and how they affected her today.
Kermit,
since Open Dialogue is about a collaboration between therapists, family and the person in distress, it would be nice to see the other two legs of that equation brought into these town meetings and not ONLY the experts. I wish we could hear from the family and how their needs were validated, but also how they learned to be better healing companions for the one in distress. And it would be good to hear from the one in distress and how they viewed his/her interaction with family and how it propelled the healing process.
I would also love to see a vision laid out to expand Open Dialogue. There is nothing here in Ohio. When I contact some of the groups you have listed, I’m just ignored because I’m a nobody, sigh. How do we get this available on a larger scale? Why not look into a program to empower families? There are lots of ‘peer programs’ out there, but I have yet to find one that teaches families how to travel with the one in distress and do the kinds of things I had to learn to help my wife, like walk her thru ALL the extreme states she experienced so that she actually healed and not just ‘coped’, like how to implement the attachment concepts of safe haven, affect regulation and proximity maintenance that were so critical to walk my wife thru the worst things she experienced, like how to navigate power dynamics, like how to weigh the needs of various people in the relationship when there simply is NO way that everyone can get what they need, like how to deal with the stress brought on by extreme states and remove the fear of the unknown, like how bringing our adult son into the healing journey added a dimension to her healing that I could NEVER have replicated on my own…and so much more….
I’ve got so many thoughts and questions, and sadly, I probably won’t be able to participate in this even though I signed up for it because it’s our first day of vacation.
Good to see you back here.
Sam
Hi Amy,
well, I was bored today. I’ve seen this article on the website for awhile…and hesitated to read it because I was afraid it was another culture-war piece…and this war is wearing me out from both sides. But honestly, as I read your article, I was caught up in the story arc of the episodes and found myself wishing I could experience the same.
I do understand some of the horror the survivors have expressed in the comments section. I can’t imagine my wife would ever allow herself on the show at this point in her healing journey. And I did cringe when Reddy was ‘attacked’ by the Fab Five as I’m pretty sure how parts of my wife would react to anyone but me or our son doing that. But I’m pretty sure she liked the original series and she likes a lot of these makeover reality series, AND as you and Bob have made clear, it’s ALL consensual even if it’s hard and disruptive to the ‘heroes’.
Thanks for sharing. Maybe I’ll even send my wife a link to it and see if she’d like to watch it with me.
Sam
Hi A.S.!
I always feel a special affinity toward Finland because of the exchange student from there that we had in our family 35 years ago. We still keep in touch with her via Facebook.
I’m so glad your parents rallied to help you. I hope some day there is far more help offered to the families who want to help a loved one in distress but don’t know where to start and don’t want to go the NAMI route.
Sam
Joanna,
Are you talking about people who are using street drugs and alcohol or just people in severe, mental distress? My wife was never the former, but she was definitely the latter, and I never tried to ‘control’ her nor did it really matter if she was ‘reasonable’.
Think of a person in the water during a hurricane. She was flailing, desperate not to drown. Control and reason are irrelevant in that situation. Validation, engagement and attachment were what mattered. She had to know I was right there with her in the water and even though she felt overwhelmed and out of control, I wasn’t, and I wasn’t going to let her drown.
When people are ‘too disturbed’ as you put it, that’s when the attachment concepts of affect regulation, safe haven and proximity maintenance can slowly calm the worst of cases like my wife used to be. She didn’t need drugs and never used them. She needed empowered family who knew how to ride the hurricane out with her…and now our seas are much calmer…
Sam
Joanna,
as a husband who has been doing this very thing for my wife the last 12 years, what you say is correct. It takes way more than kindness and it is exhausting, and yet, we, the family, are simply put in the very best position to do what is needed. It’s a 24/7 ‘job’ especially in the beginning. Our son was attending a local college while at home. He took the night shift, and I took the dayshift (since I worked nights) helping my wife, keeping her safe. We did that for nearly 5 years until he moved out to do his graduate work by which time my wife was in a much better place.
I love what Open Dialogue seems to be, but there is no one like that here in the Midwest states. I would have loved someone to help me learn the ropes, but in the end only I can be her primary attachment figure and do the hard work of helping her heal all the attachment issues she suffered from severe trauma and dissociation 5 decades earlier…and helping her tear down the dissociative walls so she can be whole again.
Sam
There’s a lot of stress in my little family. I like to think of attachment points as the little, individual filaments of a spider web. The more points of connection I can make between my wife and our son, the more we are all held together so that we can bear the stress and turmoil we face.
I email our son and the 8 girls in my wife’s system every single morning. I played PS4 with him over the internet 2-3 times a week. I share a mug of coffee with my wife each day of the weekend. We take tandem bike rides. We always eat together and watch tv together, sitting next to each other. We run our weekly errands together, go to church and bible study together and whatever else we can when I’m home from work.
The more points of contact I have with each of them not only hold them to me when they are facing hard things like his 4th year of his PhD program, or all the stress she has healing from her trauma and dissociation, but they also serve to hold me when I’m struggling with the overwhelming despair and despondency that have plagued my adult life.
Hello Dr. Caplan,
you and I emailed each other early this summer when you wrote about Steve Stone and I live just down the road from him. So I hope it is ok that I sent you an email.
Sam
Hi Paula,
as someone who has struggled with this most of my adult life (I’m 53) the loss of hope that things will get better is the biggest driver of the feelings of despair. I find myself desperately looking for hope, even false hope, that things will get better to keep me going when it’s worse. Sometimes the thought of death itself gives me hope that ‘if things get too bad, I have control, I have an escape…”
The sad things is, I know how I could fix things pretty easily, but it goes against all I believe, and so I’m trapped in a double bind and going thru the problem is the only hope for things to get better, and yet, solving that problem isn’t within my control…it’s truly overwhelming…sigh…
Sam
Steve,
I’m not talking about the comments section, and I don’t want to say more because I only kind of get things 2nd hand, and I don’t really understand the objections as I’ve seen other family members have blogs published, so maybe it’s just me, specifically…
Sam
There is, of course, nothing wrong about people criticizing MIA or me personally. The criticism can open the door to further discussions and debate, which you can hope will lead to a greater understanding of important issues.
Bob,
find a way to enlarge the circle of family members allowed to contribute at MiA. Thus far the only family I’ve seen allowed to contribute are those whose loved ones were caught up in the system. Why are their voices allowed, but those of us who have fought 24/7 for years to keep our loved ones OUT of the system are not allowed to share how we did so? Is the audience at this website, only and solely, composed of those caught in the system other than me? Is there really no interest in empowering families and SO’s to keep their loved ones totally out of the system?
Sam
“There is a radical need for a world where ‘us and them,’ ‘center and margin,’ and ‘normal and crazy’ are no longer needed.”
Perhaps this best describes the path my wife and I have taken. I see her fundamentally as no different than myself. I believe our refusal to embrace the dichotomy between ‘survivors’ and ‘the rest of us’ is why my wife and I sidestepped so many of the issues that have engulfed all parties within the mental health industry/world and most attempts to reform it.
Sam
Hello Dmitriy,
Thank you for sharing your life and experiences.
My wife and I have walked this healing journey together, as equals. I almost always engaged her ‘voices’ first because of the dissociation she experienced. The loving and respectful relationship I developed with each one was instrumental in her overall healing and the eventual tearing down of the dissociative walls so that she could make a new, corporate life with each voice. I did things she absolutely couldn’t do for herself, and yet we learned to how to do it in ways so her agency was never diminished nor did I ever abuse the potentially huge power differentials in our relationship (she is a housewife). We are both richer for the journey and I learned much about myself and my own inner workings as well.
I’ve tried for a day to formulate some kind of response to this study. I guess it’s always good to look for alternative treatments, but I still have major problems even using the word ‘psychotic.’ It prejudges the person’s experience by those on the outside instead of helping the person to find meaning and a way thru it.
I googled psychosis, again, and it’s known to be a symptom: so why are they still taking a symptomatic approach rather than dealing with the real issue? Coping is not healing. Therapists cannot be the main therapeutic instrument in the sufferer’s life.
I understand sometimes symptoms must be reduced so that the real issues can be addressed, but there are so many questions this study didn’t answer or even attempt to address, sigh.
Sam
Hmmm…
Well, I guess I should state first that my wife and I feel fortunate that we really didn’t have to deal with incest issues in her past, but that doesn’t mean many of the issues brought up by this author had no bearing in our healing journey. and her extreme position on many of these issues, imo, hurt the cause of survivors rather than help.
1) Her critique of the FMSF is rather simplistic. The d.i.d. world is extremely familiar with this society and its attempts to discredit survivors while protecting offending family members, and yet that doesn’t mean there is no credibility to the malleability of memories and how therapists of the past blatantly manipulated survivor memories and produced wild claims of satanic ritual abuse and more and paraded d.i.d. patients around talk shows like circus freaks while they stoked their own careers and egos.
Dealing with dissociated memories is a delicate dance of validating the person and what is uncovered while at the same time understanding that these memories can be vague, symbolic at times, trapped in childish understandings, and fragmentary until other pieces of the puzzle are revealed later in the journey, etc.
The FMSF’s disingenuous attempts to discredit survivors doesn’t mean survivors’ memories are infallible. I ALWAYS validated my wife, but I also gave her the space and safety to later alter those declarations of memories as other pieces of the puzzle were added to clarify things, and some pieces may always be lost to the fog and mist of things that happened 4 and 5 decades ago.
2) The author’s definition of incest is so wide as to render it meaningless. If she’s going to expand it to mean family friends, other children, pastors/priests, or ‘anyone who betrayed the child’s innocence and trust’, then it loses power as it alienates thoughtful people who might otherwise affirm the horror of incest. It’s an overreach that does NOT help survivors. Incest is clearly defined as sexual abuse (in all its forms) within the family and relatives, period.
3) Validating and believing the survivor doesn’t automatically transfer into a legal ability to bring justice against the perpetrators and recognizing that reality seems to be a problem for some. It’s a conundrum that is frustrating and upsetting.
Sam
Hi Karin,
this is a very powerful story. I’m very sorry for all you suffered just because others couldn’t handle your grief.
I did much the same for my wife as I walked with her thru the healing journey, though I always told her I was ‘sharing’ and ‘helping to carry’ her fear so that she didn’t have to do it alone. It seems we possibly mean the same but say it differently as your friends appeared to do for you the same as I did for her.
Best of wishes,
Sam
Hmmm…
Well, I guess I should state first that my wife and I feel fortunate that we really didn’t have to deal with incest issues in her past, but that doesn’t mean many of the issues brought up by this author had no bearing in our healing journey. and her extreme position on many of these issues, imo, hurt the cause of survivors rather than help.
1) Her critique of the FMSF is rather simplistic. The d.i.d. world is extremely familiar with this society and its attempts to discredit survivors while protecting offending family members, and yet that doesn’t mean there is no credibility to the malleability of memories and how therapists of the past blatantly manipulated survivor memories and produced wild claims of satanic ritual abuse and more and paraded d.i.d. patients around talk shows like circus freaks while they stoked their own careers and egos.
Dealing with dissociated memories is a delicate dance of validating the person and what is uncovered while at the same time understanding that these memories can be vague, symbolic at times, trapped in childish understandings, and fragmentary until other pieces of the puzzle are revealed later in the journey, etc.
The FMSF’s disingenuous attempts to discredit survivors doesn’t mean survivors’ memories are infallible. I ALWAYS validated my wife, but I also gave her the space and safety to later alter those declarations of memories as other pieces of the puzzle were added to clarify things, and some pieces may always be lost to the fog and mist of things that happened 4 and 5 decades ago.
2) The author’s definition of incest is so wide as to render it meaningless. If she’s going to expand it to mean family friends, other children, pastors/priests, or ‘anyone who betrayed the child’s innocence and trust’, then it loses power as it alienates thoughtful people who might otherwise affirm the horror of incest. It’s an overreach that does NOT help survivors. Incest is clearly defined as sexual abuse (in all its forms) within the family and relatives, period.
3) Validating and believing the survivor doesn’t automatically transfer into a legal ability to bring justice against the perpetrators and recognizing that reality seems to be a problem for some. It’s a conundrum that is frustrating and upsetting.
I would love to see the stigma removed from all topics of abuse, but unfortunately this author seems to fall into the tribalism and culture wars our country is experiencing and thus adds to the confusion and division in general rather than capitalizing on the common views most people have on this topic.
Sam
I’d forgotten about this blog until Sam P. brought it back up. To me, this was kind of a sad day. MiA was presented with a fork-in-the-road decision on a number of levels. It’s become a very different website, imo, since then.
Sam
Hi Caroline,
thank you for sharing your story. I’m so sorry your family didn’t know how to help you when you needed them most. I hope some day that common problem begins to change.
Sam
This ought to be obvious, but I’m glad a few experts are finally getting it. In any relationship ALL voices must be heard and given equal value and weight or the relationship will never have a chance to be healthy, nor the people within it.
Sam
I think it’s important to remember that Dr. Aftab should probably be considered an ally to those of us in the critical psychiatry camp: https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/07/bridging-critical-conceptual-psychiatry-interview-awais-aftab/. His attempts to bring nuance to the debate may be frustrating to those in the anti-psychiatry camp who want to burn it all down, but my reading of that interview was a very careful dance he did, allowing Lucy to have a clear voice on her position while articulating many of the refutations, deflections, and many other spurious arguments the mainstream psychiatrists would suggest to ignore and caricature any who oppose the status quo. He has an audience that many will never have, and if he alienates it with the passionate rhetoric of those in either of our camps, he will lose his chance to continue to move those who are moveable. I know that’s not what the victims of psychiatry want to hear, but it is reality.
Thank you, Lucy, for putting yourself out there especially in light of the ‘refutations’ at the end and the haters on Twitter.
Sam
Mark,
I wish I could give you a ‘big name.’ I started a blog 10 years ago geared toward SO’s and families and to teach them how to be involved in the healing(recovery) journey. My wife and I gravitated toward attachment concepts as the best means to hold all of us (including our now adult son) together as we walk thru the various issues created by her extreme childhood trauma and dissociation. Though we haven’t ‘arrived’, she has recovered to the point she tells me she just doesn’t fit in most survivor/trauma boards online.
But the blog never gained the traction I had hoped for though I met others doing similar things. My best guess is that those of us who are doing this are so involved we just don’t have much time for anything else. And I’m unaware of anyone else advocating for this, but I can’t believe I’m the only one.
Personally, I wish I could team up with Open Dialogue, but there’s no one in Ohio who does that and so we largely continue to walk on our own, outside the mental health system.
Sam
Mark,
the fact that you would leave SO’s and families out of your PowerPoint list of people in your ranks is incredibly dispiriting and indicative of why, I believe, this movement continues to falter. Our son and I single handedly kept his mom/my wife out of the mental health system by giving her 24/7 coverage for 5 years when all hell broke loose as we started our healing journey together. 7 years later I still do all kinds of things to help and support her. I have always had her 100% full recovery in mind and work every day toward that goal doing ‘whatever it takes’ to see all the trauma and dissociation healed and reintegrated into her personal narrative.
There is a small band of us on the frontlines despite the lack of affirmation here and elsewhere. I hope some day that changes and what we have learned and accomplished is recognized as integral to the fight against the dehumanization of those who have suffered mental health trauma/distress.
Sam
Can’t believe these guys are so close to where I live. Their website is pretty amazing and includes links to a number of authors familiar to MiA readers and even a link here. The 3 legs philosophy is pretty amazing, too.
Sam
dfk,
though I don’t accept or use the term ‘psychosis’ because it shows a judgmental ignorance (imo) of what is really happening, I do agree it’s a ‘software’ issue. After walking with my wife for 13 years in this, I think much of non-drug induced ‘pyschosis’ is related to dissociation and overlapping mental realities (past and present). I help her reprogram her software by walking with one foot in her “Matrix” and one foot in the present. I don’t demand that she change, but simply am a safe companion for her, interacting with her where she is and helping her as needed, and slowly she is moving from the past to the present at a rate that she is comfortable changing as she brings those dissociated areas into her general narrative.
Sam
“The fundamental principles that guided the authors’ rights-based approach are participation and empowerment, equality and non-discrimination, quality and diversity of care, social inclusion, autonomy, and dignity. ”
I find most of these principles worthy of recognition, but I do have concerns about autonomy. No one is an island, and the demand for autonomy is just more of excessive western independence rearing its ugly head. It’s almost ironic that they put social inclusion right before autonomy: you can’t have it both ways in my opinion and even less in the intimate relationships of family and SO’s/spouses where a rights-based approach truly needs to be hashed out and everyone must learn and/or be taught how to honor each one’s dignity and agency in the context of relationships…which can’t only be one way…but flow in all directions.
I find it a little telling that the article this was based upon mentioned Open Dialogue and then spent NO time dealing with the issue of family/SO’s. ‘Peers’ are well and good, but it is family that can either be the best or worst partners on a healing journey. We are the only ones who are truly set up to give long-term 24/7 coverage and who are probably willing to make the necessary sacrifices to do so like our son and I did for my wife. I doubt any ‘peer’ would give 13 years of his/her life to commit to walk the healing journey, and despite the bad rap family often gets on this website, I bet many family members/SO’s would be willing to do so if only they were taught and given the tools to help rather than abdicate what ONLY they can do to the ‘experts’ at the urging of NAMI.
Sam
Sera,
I wonder if Bradford meant to capitalize ‘here’ also…meaning your privilege on this website, though the website’s reach is little comparatively.
As for the tone or ‘style’ as you say, yes, this article was a struggle for me to get thru, and I typically enjoy your articles. One of the girls in my wife’s system is a social justice warrior, and she has helped me move to a more -balanced (i.e. center/right) position on most issues, but this kind of read more like something I’d see on Slate. If I used similar, derogatory language coming for my formerly, far-Right perspective, it would never even make it thru the moderators, and it shouldn’t.
The style detracts from your article.
Sam
I’m afraid that having an ‘urge for a social approach to mental health’ will lead to dead ends, at times, just like the biomedical approach has. When any of us force fit mental health/trauma into a preconceived paradigm to fit our proclivities, then it closes us to the things which don’t fit into that paradigm…and not all trauma is socially/culturally based by any means.
This approach by HVM is very concerning, even if it is a little better than the biomedical approach.
Sam
SnowyOwl,
again, thanks, I’ve been to Open Dialogue. I’ve been everywhere I can find. No one seems to want me without my wife or because I’m not a therapist. So it is what it is. Maybe if I get us thru the rest of our healing journey, she will reconsider her unwillingness to join me sharing our story.
Take care,
Sam
Thanks Snowyowl, I just wish MiA would be willing to find a solution like Open Dialogue apparently has (according to Steve) for us to truly partner together. I know I could offer more to this movement to end the dehumanization that so many of you have experienced. I kept my wife from it: I think I could teach others in my position who would have interest to do the same.
Sam
Steve,
my wife and I will have been married 32 years in 4 days. In a relationship of any duration NEITHER voice can be raised above the other. Both have to be heard and given equal weight. Moreover, in a very real sense her issues are my issues. I can’t help but be affected by everything happening within her, and vice versa.
Now I understand that many spouses and partners do NOT take the path I have taken, but I wonder how many who end up at NAMI do so out of good faith. I contacted them once because I was desperate, alone, and needed help. In the beginning of our journey I was absolutely overwhelmed and our son and I gave my wife 24/7 coverage for 4 years while he attended a local university and I worked 2nd shift, and yet she still wasn’t physically safe and for a year or more was covered in bruises, and she had many, nearly-broken bones because the new girls didn’t know how to ‘use’ the body very well. I had new girls trying to jump out of cars going 70mph or running thru moving traffic or wanting to buy fairy wings from the store so they could jump off buildings and fly! And that’s just the tiniest tip of the iceberg! When you all tell people in my position that our voice is 2nd class and we are engulfed in this kind of stuff, how many stick around? I’m not here near as much as I used to be for that very reason.
The way to beat NAMI isn’t by belittling what the family is going thru but by showing them a better, though harder, way, and giving them the support to walk it with the person who is suffering. Again, I learned to wade through all the issues: I’m NOT special. I just refused to give up on my marriage and my wife. If we helped others, they might be willing to do the same!
Sam
Sera,
I believe systemic problems are changed one story at a time until it reaches critical mass like, hopefully, BLM seems to be doing now. None of us change the past: we change today and hopefully that changes the arc for the future like I’m trying to do with my little family. It’s unfortunate you are turning me into an ‘exception’ rather than seeing me as a potential ‘example.’ I may never have ‘othered’ my wife, but it still took me years to learn how to change our relational dynamics, how to fully implement attachment concepts to hold us together as we walked thru hell and help heal her own attachment system, how to see thru ‘extreme states’ so they became understandable, and thus healable, etc. I will never fully understand what my wife experiences but neither will she understand fully what I do on our journey, but that doesn’t stop us from treating each as equals. And if I could learn to do this, others could too. I don’t want to be an ‘exception’ but I do wish I could help others in a way that I never got any help for myself.
Sam
Sera,
I agree with much you have said, but I hope some day you will see that you seem to be judging our situation from YOUR experience. If that isn’t the case, then I apologize. It took me years to learn to see everything my wife was going thru by HER perceptions of it. My wife has never been ‘psychiatrized’ and as for being ‘diagnosed’ well, that was by an alternative counselor and, once I quickly got past the Hollywood caricature, for me it simply meant ‘your wife was deeply traumatized and is dealing with massive dissociation.’ Everything else we learned together, on our own, apart from the system because she even made me promise NOT to read any books on the subject (until years later). So I entered the journey without any preconceived ideas. We just kind of ‘fell into’ attachment strategies as the best thing to help us thru this. Later I became better educated on that subject, so I could help my wife even more, and so I owe much to John Bowlby for the road map he unknowingly provided us!
It took me years to wade thru all the power dynamics of which you speak and learn how to use my strength for her advantage while never, ever, ever using it for my own advantage or even coercing her ‘for her own good.’ I had to learn that when I tried that tactic it never produced true, deep healing, and so I stopped doing it and learned to wait for her to move at her own pace, not at mine
I do continue to wish you all well. I hope some day my wife will be willing ‘validate’ what I say, but if this is only for us, then so be it.
Sincerely,
Sam
Sera,
thank you for your sincere question. I will try to answer it the best I can.
12 years ago when the other girls (alters) started to join my marriage and family and all hell broke loose because of all the extreme states they all went through, I never saw my wife any different than a person with extreme physical trauma. I never ‘othered’ her. I never thought she was crazy. I never thought she was psychotic, delusional, paranoid or any of the other derogatory things that are said of people who find themselves caught in effects of extreme mental trauma and dissociation.
I ‘owned’ all the effects that her trauma and dissociation brought into our relationship. I saw us as ‘foxhole buddies’, in it together, 100%. I understood that a lot more would be required of me as the other girls (alters) joined our relationship, and our marriage today is certainly not typical to say the least. Many times I both physically and figuratively have
carried her through the healing journey: I did whatever it took to help the only woman I have ever loved, and it was only when I found this site that I understood how much our efforts as a family (adult son included) had saved her from all the additional trauma and suffering so many of you have suffered from the drugs, the dehumanization, and the forced incarcerations you were made to endure.
But when I got here I was immediately ‘othered’. It didn’t matter that I was an expert with lived experience on how to keep someone suffering extreme states, extreme dissociation and everything else my wife has experienced out of the system and off the drugs. All that is seen on this site is that I’m NOT a trauma victim. No matter how much I have argued that SO’s, family and friends MUST be part of the solution, it has been made clear to me that I will always be 2nd class unless my wife ‘validates’ my voice, here.
Let’s go back to George Floyd. I’ve read lots of op-ed’s lately. A number of them by black authors have essentially said that until white people ‘own’ the protests, the blacks can only take things so far because white people control the power in this country. George Floyd changed the ‘other’ into a human face that many for the first time could connect to and white America has finally seemed to change the tide of this racist travesty in our country.
I hope some day that Mad in America, Western Mass RLC, HVN and others will understand the same, that people like me must be more than just an ‘ally’ which still feels like a 2nd class ‘othering’ term to me. My wife and I are together on our journey 100%. There is no ‘other’ in our healing journey. There is only ‘us.’ This is not her struggle: this is our struggle. And I believe that it will only be when we help others like myself to ‘own’ this struggle, as the whites are finally doing with BLM, that things will change in the mental health arena as well.
Bob,
I hope some day MiA will find a way to expand its circle to include people like me. I have worked 24/7 for the last 12 years, as you know a little, to keep my wife OUT of the system completely. If people had the knowledge and tools to do the same, so much of the carnage psychiatry causes the majority of your readers would never even have a chance to occur.
Sincerely,
Sam
Kermit,
I’m looking forward to this townhall meeting. I hope I can actually be there while it is taking place this time so I can take part in the chat conversation rather than just watching it afterward.
Sam
Sounds like it was a good meeting with lots of interesting takes on the topic.
“Contacting police should be treated as a very last resort, and true trauma-informed care is built on collaboration and trust”
Until family, friends and carers are taught how to understand ‘non-drug induced extreme states’ so they are de-mystified and the fear factor is removed and then those people are taught how to help the person thru those states, people are naturally going to call in help. Those states definitely can be overwhelming and scary the first time one sees them, even as an outsider, and that just adds to the fear of the person experiencing it. Fear feeds fear, but if the carer can remain calm, then the one in those states can learn to feed off that, as well.
Sam
Kermit,
NAMI elevates the voice of the family over the sufferer of mental distress from what I read on MiA. However, it is my experience that MiA elevates the voice of the sufferer over the family. Until true parity and dialogue occurs and is facilitated between the 2 parties most interested in this entire topic, I wonder how much progress will be made.
It appears Open Dialogue takes that more balanced approach though I have no personal experience with it (wish I did!). I hope some day MiA can move thru (and beyond) the pain and trauma of the sufferers to see that the families are suffering as well (from the fallout of the trauma and distress of the sufferer and not only from the effects of psychiatry) and healing will only come when all parties are brought together and learn how to love and create safety for everyone involved.
Respectfully,
Sam
Dear Louisa,
I’m deeply sorry for your pain and terror. I understand a little as my wife and I walked into hell together…and yet we were able to find our way back out…together. But it still takes a toll as you know. And my brain is also in a scramble. But if you’d ever like to talk, your SO knows how to find me.
Sam
Hi Sam,
I’m sorry for the terrible things you’ve suffered at the hands of the ‘experts’, but I didn’t learn about attachment theory from them. My wife asked me NOT to read any of the literature out there the first couple of years we started our healing journey. And so she and I just kind of developed our own style. A lot of it was based on the Golden Rule, though I always tried to listen to her feedback if she didn’t like something I was doing.
If she was crying or scared, I’d try to comfort her, just like I would want comforted if I were in her position. I spent many nights literally carrying her around the house as she would bury her face in my neck. I tried to be calm, when she couldn’t be. I learned to validate her fears from the past, but after I had done that, I redirected her to her new reality that she was no longer alone: I was with her and I would take care of her and protect her. It helped that the other girls (‘alters’) fronted as little girls because it helped me throw off the terrible maxims so many of us adults have been taught in our hyper-independent, western cultures to be strong, self-reliant and not ‘needy’.
After a few years of us doing things our own way, I thought I ought to read and see why things were going relatively well for us, and that was when I ‘discovered’ attachment theory…but it was just stuff we’d been doing all along since we didn’t have anyone to tell me otherwise (that’s also when I found out I was doing things all ‘wrong’ according to the ‘experts’ despite how well she was doing, lol). After that I became a little more purposeful about some of the best points of that theory, but I in no way changed how we’d been doing things from the start.
As for the ‘navel gazing’, my wife used to get caught up in that, too, and I try to steer her away from it. I tell her, “let’s just focus on the trauma and the dissociation, and the rest of the stuff will take care of itself” and for the most part that has been true.
Sam
Hi Phoebe,
thank you for the affirmation: I’m glad your own life affirmed the effectiveness of attachment techniques for even the most extreme of altered states. My wife went thru the entire gamut, and we never had to resort to drugs or forced interventions.. Maybe some day I will be able to do an article or series here as you suggest. There is such a desperate need to teach non-medical interventions to those who surround someone in distress.
Sam
since you gave me the link to this article of yours in our brief interaction a month ago, I read it, again. I read you and your husband’s recent interview in the Psychiatric Times that MIA gave a link to in their “Around the Web” section and it made me think of you. I tried to track down a contact email for you on the internet, but then wondered if that might feel creepy…sigh.
You said you intended to go thru more of my personal blog, but then my wife and I left for Europe and the holidays hit, and I never heard back from you. Maybe you found nothing of interest there, nothing that might help with even a few of your questions that you throw out in this blog and elsewhere…and if that’s the case, then maybe I really have nothing to offer…I can’t get my wife to join me in my efforts to change the conversation on how to approach extreme mental distress issues, no matter how often I beg her, and nothing I have tried on my own for these last 11 years has been accepted by any corner of the discussion on dissociation, ptsd, attachment concepts, mental health, the SO’s place in the healing journey, or anywhere else I have tried to find a ‘home’ for myself. I just, literally, seem to fit nowhere in this world or its internet…and that’s a really hard reality to have to face…
Our son lives over in Waltham, outside Boston. Sometimes I wish I could stop by your place, even if I had to pay for your time, and just figure out if I really have wasted my life and these last 11 years, especially, as I carried my wife thru all the issues that come from extreme dissociation, thinking I could show the world a better way to approach mental distress. But no one wants to listen…and I’m really running out of hope and strength to keep trying to make a difference.
I know this ‘comment’ really ought to be in private, but I didn’t know how to get it to you, and maybe you won’t even see it now as this is such an old blog of yours. I do wish you well and am glad there are people out there like you who are brutally honest with the truth…even if you found nothing of any value that I had to share…
“Sam”
well, I did qualify my response because Ayurdhi writes in a more clinical style than I am used to reading. That’s why I wrote ‘if I’m reading this correctly.’ It seemed that this blog was a largely positive portrayal of the study designed by Marlowe, Perry and Lee. But I am aware that I was going against the prevailing negative opinion of this blog in the comments section.
So with that said, IF I am reading Ayurdhi correctly, then I stand by what I stated previously. I have tried many times to lay out my understanding of dissociation on this website to little effect. But I do understand my understanding isn’t mainstream but has come after 11 years of walking thru its many aspects with my wife on our healing journey. I would love to do a series on dissociation here like I did on my personal blog, but I won’t hold my breath. I think it would help make sense of the many confounding things that the various authors on this website note, but have no explanation for. And that’s why I tried to interject my understanding into this blog because the original authors seem to understand there is something more going on than they can explain: thus, their call for further study. I see it thru the lens of dissociation and thus, I think their study is a great start and hope they will continue to pursue it.
Sam
Madmom,
I don’t know if you’d be open to my experience as I literally, at times, carried my wife thru her extreme states and PTSD symptoms…
There are 3 concepts from attachment theory that were vital for me to ‘master’ as I helped my wife thru these various experiences, though much of it I would categorize as simply being a good parent or SO.
1) affect regulation. This first concept is most easily understood that the person in distress will mirror your reaction to the situation. If you stay calm and cool when she’s in the midst of an extreme state, that WILL affect her and calm her, too, but if you ‘lose it’, that will cause her to escalate. You’ve probably seen this concept played out in movies and such when all hell breaks loose but the ‘leader’ of the group keeps his cool and thus enables the rest of his/her band of followers to follow that lead.
2) Proximity maintenance. Basically this means that your very presence has a calming effect upon the person in distress. You don’t always have to say something. Sometimes just your presence can be calming, but this is important: don’t minimize the importance of touch if your daughter is in a place to receive it. We humans need non-sexual touch to feel connected, and I have made it a hallmark of how I keep my wife connected to me for these last 11 years. You would almost always see me with my arm around her, or holding her hand or sometimes I’ll simply reach out and touch fingertips or rub noses or stroke her hair or her cheek. All these little things are powerful ways to emphasize that she is NOT alone. She is connected. And that connection, that attachment is what will hold her when the extreme states would otherwise overwhelm her.
3) Safe Haven. To me I always visualize this as protected ship harbor during a hurricane. She would often run away from me when she felt scared and overwhelmed, but I NEVER let her be alone during those times no matter how much she would try to push me away. It was a balancing act, and so I was careful not to force myself upon her, but I would gently envelope her with my presence, with my words, with my affirmation. If she was hiding under a table or something, I would crawl under it with her and wrap her up loosely in my arms and legs and just whisper to her, “it’s ok now, Honey. I’ve got you. You are safe now. You aren’t alone anymore. I hear you. I’m so sorry I couldn’t be there with you before, but I’ve got you now.”
But I think safe haven also means when she thought she was going crazy and all the other derogatory things she’d safe about herself, I’d respond, “No, Honey, you’re just hurt. We’ll get thru this.” I had to learn NOT to overreact to all the things that got thrown my way. It really helped me once I understood what was going on inside of her.
Now you’ve got the additional issue of the drugs, so everything might not ‘make sense’ in time like it did for me, but I’ve had to deal with mini-seizures, her going comatose, panic attacks, extreme anxiety, flashbacks, night terrors, self-injury issues, and more…but at this point, all those things are a distant memory and she hasn’t had anymore for years.
I’d say the main issue was me. Once I got my ‘stuff’ together, my wife began to make much greater progress. Like it or not, we the SO’s and family and friends can make all the difference as the ‘primary attachment figures’ in the lives of our loved ones. Yes, it is exhausting, but we made it, and you can, too. You’re welcome to email me, if you’d ever like to correspond more.
Sam
Ontological insecurity is defined as Quote:
“Vulnerability to psychosis, wherein the self is experienced as lacking in coherence and consistency, precariously separated from the body, others, and the world and on the brink of disintegration into psychosis.”
If I’m reading this correctly, this is just another way of saying ontological insecurity is the result of major, entrenched dissociation caused by trauma. From my understanding of how psychosis is described, I think it can be understood as the mind’s attempt to reintegrate dissociated, traumatic memories but as it attempts to do so, there is an overlap between the past memory and current reality which leaves the person experiencing it disoriented and unable to tell the difference between past and present. If I’m correct, it’s why I really don’t believe in psychosis because I think it would be better explained as experiencing overlapping realities (one past; one present) rather than the more common view that it is a ‘break’ from reality.
Quote:
According to R. D. Laing’s theory, ontological insecurity could lead to full blown psychosis when significant others interact with a person in a confusing, intense, and critical way. At its core it is the lack of a coherent and stable self. It is related to a crippling fear of loss of autonomy, especially the fear of engulfment, implosion, or depersonalization, in relationships with others.
This is where the SO’s understanding of the attachment concepts of ‘safe haven’ and ‘affect regulation’ and ‘proximity maintenance’ are key. It really didn’t matter which attachment style my wife was currently experiencing when she was in an ‘extreme state.’ What mattered was that I satisfied her need for a safe haven and affect regulation by remaining calm, cool and anchoring her to the present and that I was physically present. A few times I let her pull me into her fear/anguish from the extreme state, and then I just elevated her distress, but when I stayed grounded, I was able to ground her and she would more quickly come out of those states, and, happily, that is what her mind seemed to need to begin the process of integrating those traumatic memories into her personal narrative to the point now that she rarely experiences ‘extreme states’ and they are rather mild when she does.
I believe attachment concepts provided me a way to ‘hold’ my wife during psychotic-like events, gently cocooning her while she herself felt ‘ontologically’ fractured and insecure, and by me doing so, it gave her time to heal and gain that sense of self-security that she had previously lacked.
Every time I read one of these heartbreaking stories, it makes me so glad my family and I side stepped all the pain and misery caused by the mental health system and its drugs despite our path not being an easy one. Maybe some day we’ll find a mutually amenable way that I can share how we did it here on MIA.
But I can certainly empathize with Zel: I have struggled with similar thoughts for decades though for completely different reasons. It really is too bad that so many people in this world are too blind and self-absorbed to see those who are suffering alone, and how it strengthens both people when they learn to ‘attach’ to each other.
Sam
As someone with 11 years of lived experience, that is living with someone (my wife) who would be considered to have a ‘severe mental illness” I 1) don’t consider her dangerous, 2) don’t consider her crazy, 3) and don’t consider her biologically, mentally ill and in need of drugs to ‘control’ her. I am truly horrified by this push of Trump and Dr. Drew in the wrong direction.
Sam
Sandra,
I’m honored that you gave my little blog a chance: thank you. If you do find anything of value that you’d like to discuss further, my wife and I are leaving for Europe tomorrow for 3 1/2 weeks, and so I’ll be unavailable until after that. But if not, I really do appreciate the time you took to read anyway.
Sam
Sam Plover,
I looked back over my response just to make sure, but I never said I was ‘fixing’ my wife. I do NOT see that as the case. I have an older brother who tried to ‘fix’ his 2nd wife, and it didn’t end well.
As for me and my wife, we live together, we interact together, I love her, I support her where she needs it. Yes, I do a lot of things intentionally to create a loving and safe environment for her to heal, but I never see myself as ‘fixing’ her despite her many dissociative issues. We are in this healing journey together. I have had to change in many, many ways to be a good healing companion for her. It’s not all about her: it’s about us.
Hey Bob,
I’m glad to hear that MIA is growing and expanding and from your opinion, you seem to think the tide is turning: that’s very different from many other writers on this site who bemoan the lack of progress. I hope you are correct!
I’ve been frequenting this website for nearly 5 years. Philosophically, I thought I’d finally found a ‘home’ here, but then I learned I’m not really part of the in group because I’m not a survivor or a therapist and I didn’t stick my loved one in the system with horrible results. I’m just a husband who has spent the last 11 years, 24/7 doing everything and anything it takes to keep my wife’s story from being the same as most on this website. And for the most part we are thru it, together and better, both of us changed from the experience of walking it as a couple and family.
I’ve argued without effect that people in my role, the SO’s, family members and friends are the front lines in the battle. When people in mental distress begin to experience ‘extreme states’ as this site calls them, what’s a person going to do? Do they call the cops or experts? I haven’t seen anyone here teach others in my place how to deal with panic attacks, flashbacks, mini-seizures, going comatose, extreme anxiety, PTSD issues, dissociation, self-injury, hearing ‘voices’ and all the other things that typically drive them to call for help, for backup, even if it’s bad help and backup in the form of the mental health ‘experts.’ There’s not a single Open Dialogue practitioner here in Ohio: so who are people in my position going to turn to?
Maybe MIA has decided people in my position are not their core focus group, and that’s your right to do so. But I don’t see the tide truly turning until people learn how to deal with these issues on their own or have good help concretely available.
I always appreciate your articles. You are always so careful with the facts and try so hard not to over or understate things. You are willing to live with difficult, messy realities when surrounded by so many ideologues.
I got thrown into this world of mental distress because the woman I love finally opened her own Pandora’s box after 20 years of marriage and we got sucked into it together as we tried to make sense of the hurt, pain and dysfunction and find a healing path forward, together, as a couple and as a family. Eleven years later we are still together on the journey, and I hope coming to the conclusion of this phase, though that may be wishful thinking.
I’ve always wished I could find someone like you who would be willing to sit down and listen to the things we learned about fully implementing attachment concepts in a way that even the attachment theorists simply don’t understand because they limit themselves. And I wish I could share with someone like you about the true scope and nature of dissociation and how it underlies so much of what you would see in people’s signs of mental distress. My wife and I chose to live in her dissociation. We embraced it, breathed it, walked in it, and conquered it. I’ve helped her integrate most of those dissociated areas of her mind, and though we aren’t completely done, we know what needs to be done.
I wish someone like you would be willing to read my feeble attempt to share what we learned about attachment concepts and dissociation. I tried to share them in my little blog, but I know they would never withstand critical scrutiny, as I just tried to share my observations about what worked and then tried to find a theoretical basis for why they worked, and so I’m sure I got a lot of it wrong even though what we did, did work.
I’m glad you like Open Dialogue. Someone who practices it here in the States out West said what I do with my wife would be a good fit with their philosophy, but there’s no one here in Ohio for me to connect with.
Anyway, I do wish you well and hope you find what you are looking for like my wife and I did.
Sincerely,
Sam https://samruck2.wordpress.com/
The article was extremely brief and really didn’t get into much and appears to be gearing toward a promotional for the attachment ‘interventions’ that the author offers thru his clinic. I’m afraid that it will promote therapists as a legitimate source to heal attachment issues, and though I do think they can be a resource for healing/changing one’s attachment issues, I really don’t think someone whose relationship is based on the flow of money is a good person to model to the ‘patient’ how to securely attach in a healthy relationship.
Sam
apparently we are fellow Buckeyes. I will definitely contact the email you gave, though at this point, I’m hoping my wife and I are on the far end our healing journey, though that could be wishful thinking, lol, as the last girl to join our family has taken longer to get connected to the others than all the rest combined, sigh.
I have walked with my wife thru her d.i.d. for the last 11 years, without the use of medications and outside the mental health industry. I accepted where she was and then we walked together from there to create our own reality as we both have healed and changed and grown. I never treated her as if she was crazy, but validated all the experiences that come along with extreme dissociation, such as voice hearing and a host more.
Hello Itay,
I admit I struggled with your use of ‘anarchy’ in this article: I think your use of ‘egalitarian’ and some of your other word choices, at least to me, better represent what I believe is the intent of your message.
I love Open Dialogue from ‘afar’ having never had the change to experience it on the healing journey that my wife and I have been on, but I was told by one of it’s practitioners that what I do with my wife fits very well with their philosophy.
And I’m not sure why the swipe at marriage in the book you referenced: when my wife and I first began our journey together, over and over, she wanted to be reassured of my absolute commitment to her if she was going to visit the deepest, darkest corners of her childhood and it was ONLY within those safe confines of our marriage that she felt able to go where she had ignored for so long.
But our egalitarian relationship and the contribution it engenders to our journey together most definitely fits with the spirit that seems to undergird your article. I have made attachment concepts the bedrock of everything we do to create a strong, cohesive relationship that can withstand the extreme pressure her many dissociative issues have brought our way…and thus far that has meant the difference of us not only staying together but growing stronger as a couple and family as she has healed in ways that many say is impossible without the use of any drugs or being connected to the mental health system at all.
I wish you all the best. We are excited to visit your country very soon!
Sam
Boans,
I never realized until years later that one of the most important things my wife ever asked me when we first started our healing journey was for me NOT to read anything about her issues, and I honored that request. That gave us about 2 or 3 years to develop a system of me helping her that truly worked for her and us.
Later I started to read the literature out there, and only then did I realize how radically differently we were doing things, but by then I was unaffected because I’d already seen the extremely positive results we were getting.
It is too bad that so many families that want to help are instead ‘turned to the dark side’ so to speak and become agents of more pain and suffering instead of the healing agents they could be.
Sam
I think this movement has struggled, in my opinion, because it doesn’t know how to get past its fundamental refutation of the biomedical model of mental health and heart breaking stories by those harmed by the mental health system. Yes, those things are important, but when loved ones are experiencing ‘extreme states’ which are NOT drug induced, then how do the people around them help without knee-jerk calling the police or authorities? How do families raise children who aren’t even enticed by drugs and so many of the other things that people use to dull their overwhelming pain? How do people navigate the overwhelming stress that 21st-century life places on all of us, not just the poor and people of color, though it may be exacerbated within those groups?
Until the movement empowers and teaches those around the person in distress how to help AND how not to freak out, I think the default is going to be to bring in the ‘authorities’, never realizing they themselves are actually the only people who can walk someone thru ‘psychosis’, extreme anxiety, paralyzing fears, ‘paranoia’, mini-seizures, dissociative issues, becoming comatose, flashbacks, panic attacks, and more.
I contacted Open Dialogue a few weeks ago to see if there was anyone in Ohio that I could team up with, and there’s not a single practitioner here. That’s really sad. Until we start giving real, practical alternatives to people, they are going to go to the ONLY help there is, even if it’s terrible help.
I’m not thrilled with the amoral and unfettered capitalism that we are seeing today as Wall Street cares ONLY about padding the profits of the 1%, but I think this struggle is so much bigger than the Left/Right divide. Maybe this review is misleading.
Anyway, I think this movement has struggled, in my opinion, because it doesn’t know how to get past its fundamental refutation of the biomedical model of mental health and heart breaking stories by those harmed by the mental health system. Yes, those things are important, but when loved ones are experiencing ‘extreme states’ which are NOT drug induced, then how do the people around them help without knee-jerk calling the police or authorities? How do families raise children who aren’t even enticed by drugs and so many of the other things that people use to dull their overwhelming pain? How do people navigate the overwhelming stress that 21st-century life places on all of us, not just the poor and people of color, though it may be exacerbated within those groups?
Until the movement empowers and teaches those around the person in distress how to help AND how not to freak out, I think the default is going to be to bring in the ‘authorities’, never realizing they themselves are actually the only people who can walk someone thru ‘psychosis’, extreme anxiety, paralyzing fears, ‘paranoia’, mini-seizures, dissociative issues, becoming comatose, flashbacks, panic attacks, and more.
I contacted Open Dialogue a few weeks ago to see if there was anyone in Ohio that I could team up with, and there’s not a single practitioner here. That’s really sad. Until we start giving real, practical alternatives to people, they are going to go to the ONLY help there is, even if it’s terrible help.
I would even suggest that faith is a VERY powerful force for healing. My wife’s faith, her belief in a higher power, has been instrumental as I’ve helped her move past the lies of the past, but even more importantly, as I’ve helped her ‘restructure’ her internal working model from that of a trauma victim to a more healthy, securely attached person. Without her faith, I honestly don’t know how she would have been able to tear down the dissociation between the various girls. And whether critics want to argue it was a placebo effect or proponents say it truly is Jesus answering those prayers, in the end, without her faith that He was doing it, I’m not sure it would have happened.
Lawrence,
I spent most of my life as a born again evangelical. I have a ministry degree with a biblical studies major. But in the course of the healing journey my wife and I have been on the past 11 years, I reevaluated everything, including my faith. The cognitive dissonance that had always screamed inside my head on some points between my faith and ‘the real world’ no longer could be ignored. I just didn’t have emotional strength to support anything that wasn’t pragmatically helpful in my desperation to keep me, my wife and our son together and moving forward in our journey.
And so I will give you that there are many, obvious areas to me in which most Christians engage in cognitive dissonance to uphold their faith and still function in this world. But it’s no different than the cognitive dissonance and blind faith that I see in the mental health experts or the macro evolutionists whom you seem to think are above such human foibles. Come to Ohio, and I’ll share some of my library that reduces many of the materialistic-evolutionary tenets down to what they really are: blind faith of its adherents. I’ve got an especially funny book, just of quotes, of the biggest names in the movement that shows their candor about their faith’s inherent unscientific basis within their own priesthood and yet they still promote it zealously to the public thru their willing conspirators in the media. I’ve often thought of suggesting MIA create a similar book of quotes of the priesthood of psychiatry and big pharma.
I’ll be honest. I don’t really know what I am anymore. I don’t really fit much in the traditional sense of Christianity, but I do tire of people who clearly don’t understand the bible but love to wrench a few proof texts out to prove this or that point. I just don’t understand MIA’s willingness to promote these facile attacks on Christianity, other than it seems to be politically correct and acceptable nowadays. If they want an honest critique of Christianity, I could give them an insider’s view as someone who has dealt with the problems, but also still sees value in some of the over arching themes and narratives that have helped me and my family stick together and witness her healing in a way that the mental health experts tell me is impossible. It would be a lot more honest evaluation than this critique has been.
Sam
there is so much in your article that is positive, but it’s just a start. I do hope this vein of thinking will be pursued further as our family has validated many of the concepts and findings you bring up.
I’ve never really cared for the term psychosis as I find it to be an judgmental term, almost a pejorative, by those on the outside to absolve them from entering the experience of another. If my wife is ‘psychotic’ then I have no responsibility to try to understand what she is experiencing. But I never took that route, and instead deeply entered her experience, and once there, I found that so much of her experience made sense. And from that point, she and I could walk together to find a way out of the things that were dysfunctional and yet we also found many new ways of seeing things that added to our relationship and life. It really wasn’t all bad, though it was very difficult.
I might point you to attachment theory and its concepts of proximity maintenance, affect regulation and safe haven. They were absolutely critical in helping me steady my wife thru her ‘extreme states’. Once I learned to be the ‘calm in her storms’, her storms began to calm as well, and then that was the place at which real and deep healing began for her.
Thankyou, Kindredspirit, for expressing many of my exact thoughts, but I thought this website is so far to the Left that it would shut me down and sensor me for saying so. This entire debate from both sides misses the point and it saddens me that the issue has only been further muddied and made worse by the current state of war between the two tribes…
Sam
Hello Ruth,
I am a fellow caregiver. I’m sorry for the terrible experiences you and your daughter have had. I’m very intrigued by the Open Dialogue Champions group and will try to check it out. My wife, son and I have mostly gone on this healing journey on our own, and I’ve always wished we had more support, so I can definitely empathize with you. We were just very fortunate/lucky that she never got caught up in the mental health system.
I’m glad you are finally getting some support. Maybe some day we will, too, though I’ve about got her thru things at this point.
Sam
Hello Susannah,
well, I’ve taken a very pragmatic, humanistic approach, but I would never demean anyone’s perspective that takes a more supernatural or spiritual approach as you seem to have suggested. I just don’t seem to have access to those kind of things no matter how hard I tried to gain access to that realm for most of my life…
Anyway, when my wife first started hearing voices I remember telling myself they could be A) part of herself, or B) something supernatural that only she had access. And even though I couldn’t disprove B, I thought A was the easier to believe and work with. And so I’ve always followed that course, believing the voices were part of my wife’s larger self.
Over the course of the last 11 years, my understanding of voices has definitely expanded beyond that very elementary understanding, but I’ve never seen anything in her personal experience that contradicted that understanding. Today I would add the voices are ‘dissociated parts’ of herself caused from the initial trauma. I was also, always careful NEVER to play favorites with the voices: some were kind, loving and easy to get along with, one hated me, others were scared of me…but if they were all part of my wife’s larger whole, then as a husband I felt called upon to love ALL my wife and not just the easy parts.
I would also add that because of the wonders of the mind, those dissociated parts take upon themselves their own, distinct personalities, and I always honored that part of the ‘phenomenon.’ All but one ‘voice’ had a personal name she had chosen and so I saw/see each by her name and interact with her based on her desire even though philosophically I view them as ‘part’ of my ‘greater’ wife, if that makes sense.
And so I never wavered from my respectful, gentle and hopefully loving interaction with each of the ‘voices’ and over the course of the last 11 years, the fearful ones became stronger and less afraid. The angry one realized she wasn’t alone anymore and could trust me to help keep the others safe (and eventually she even asked to start dating me). And all of them began to mature and interconnect with each other to the point that they are more a heterogenous group of ‘friends’ than the disconnected group of ‘voices’ that they started as.
My wife as a ‘whole’ person has expanded as she incorporates each voice into her larger collective self and so we validate the voices rather than having their ‘annihilation’ as a goal which so many experts pointedly express.
There’s so much more, but that’s some of the highlights…
Sam
Steve,
since you put your comment under mine, am I correct to assume it’s directed toward my comment? If so, I think we may be talking about completely different issues. My comment has to do with the question, ‘what fundamentally is a ‘voice’?’ Your reply seems to have more to do with ‘how to handle voice hearing’ on an individual basis.
How one answers my question will fundamentally affect one’s approach to voice hearing no matter how it is applied on an individual level.
Sam
This approach is a good start, but there really is so much more to it. The thing I observe from the article is that talking about ‘voices’ in the abstract creates for a fuzzy base upon which to act. It’s no wonder there is such wide spread disagreement on whether and how to engage the ‘voices’ when I’m not sure most people, experts and hearers alike, even have a good answer for ‘what are the voices, fundamentally?’ Once you answer that question, the whether and how kind of take care of themselves.
I didn’t realize this was such an old blog already, but I’ve never forgotten it and the unsatisfying way that the experts have defined dissociation. I finally got around to writing a 3-part discussion of dissociation after my wife and I have lived and breathed it for the last 11 years. This is what our experience has taught us about dissociation if anyone cares. https://samruck2.wordpress.com/2019/07/17/the-nature-of-dissociation-part-3/
Sam
People in my position are desperate for help and support: NAMI offers it. I contacted them a long time ago and met with the leader of our local group, but I never ended up going to the meetings. It was only later that I started to frequent this website and realized they had been co-opted by big pharma and psychiatry.
It’s too bad MIA doesn’t have a vision to offer a counter balance to NAMI: it’s a huge need, learning how to deal with all the things that manifest in a distressed loved one and also cope with the hurt and pain those things cause in the relationship. Maybe some day my wife will be in a position to allow me to start something…
Sam
In the spirit of scientific inquiry, I’m sure this is a good thing, and those who struggle with ‘voices’ probably would love to ‘control’ them, but I’m afraid this may not really help move the person toward ‘healing.’ This would seem to be a way for people to put another layer of ‘lids’ over the original trauma. My wife and I embraced the voices: the good, the ‘bad’ the vitriolic, all of them. We didn’t control them; we unleashed them, so to speak, and it made all the difference.
Sam
Kindred Spirit,
since I specifically mentioned Open Dialogue, why would you bring in NAMI which we all know is generally disrespected on this website as a tool of Big Pharma and Psychiatry. Furthermore, since you just posted a positive comment about Open Dialogue on that thread, why would you try to twist what I say here?
I’m sorry for the things you have shared in the past about your abusive ex, but I am NOT him, and there are a lot of us spouses out there who are in it with our loved ones whether you choose to believe that or not. And until this website can come to some kind of accommodation for both sides, those with abusive families and those with supportive families, I think this movement will continue to falter.
Sam
“We are like a little gnat buzzing around a great big elephant that can be swatted away with a quick flap of the ear. But our new 10-session course will at least explore this landscape of “systems change,” with the presenters bringing to this topic a diversity of experience and perspectives. The presenters include psychiatrists, leaders in peer services, former directors of state mental health programs, and trainers experienced in helping providers implement trauma-informed care.”
Respectfully, Bob,
but for as long as I have frequented this website, I have tried to get people to expand your collective vision past those whom the system has wronged. I don’t ever want to demean the experience of those who were caught in the system and abused by it, but the overwhelming majority of Americans haven’t had that experience, and yet they are still touched by this issue. Additionally, no matter how many times I remind this website that the first line of defense in keeping people out of the system is to train people like me, the primary attachment figures, how to help someone in distress, my call seems to be ignored. I had to learn it on my own, but it is possible. What my wife and I went thru, most therapists won’t even touch, but we got thru it together and without any contact with ‘the system.’
But when I look at your list of contributors, there is no one on it who represents my group, those of us in the trenches, 24/7, who deal with the hell that our loved ones are experiencing. Some of us have even figured out how to help them thru it: I’m not the only spouse out there who has walked his loved one thru all the crap that we’ve gone thru.
I like Open Dialogue so much, even though we never had access to it, because it understands the families must be brought into collaboration for the healing journey because we are the ones who get awakened throughout the nights, on the weekends, on vacation, during intimate times and every other situation in life. And so we have to help walk the person thru the night terrors, the panic attacks, the dissociative issues, and so many other issues no matter where they hit life and the relationship that I won’t belabor the point here.
RR,
I’ve done this for the last 11 years with my wife, and I’ve publicly shared the journey and what I/we’ve learned on my blog. You are welcome to come and see what you think. I welcome dialogue and even debate on it.
But our experience is so completely different than what I read on this website that we aren’t even in the same universe when I read experiences, understandings and solutions on here. And so I’ve had to realize I will always be an outsider here and seen skeptically rather than embraced as someone able to point the way to the very things this website seems to desire…
Sam
“It is a significant, life-changing, restrictive, challenging and potentially dangerous choice to make, to help someone severely mentally ill, without the resources and legal protections of a governmentally-sanctioned system.”
It can be done, but I agree there are few out there doing it, and I find it extremely sad that no one on any side of the debate seems to care about our perspective and what we’ve had to learn and do to make it thru this journey with our loved ones.
Sam
Bippyone,
thank you, but I don’t feel very amazing, especially as we’ve been stuck trying to help girl #8 connect to the other 7 for the last 4 years. If you really have interest, you could visit my blog on WordPress. I lay out much of my application of attachment theory and other things I’ve done to help my wife heal there.
Sam
Hi Bippyone,
hmm….written responses are so difficult to convey meaning…and none of what I say is meant to criticize what you did…so I just want to say that up front…
But when I talk about understanding what was going on with my wife, I kind of meant it in a more technical way, though still in laymen’s terms. For example, when my wife went catatonic, I had to learn that what actually happened was one personality left executive control, but no one else came out to take control… so the “lights were on, but (literally) no one was home’ or out front. Once I figured that out, it just became a matter of me calling or pulling another girl out, and the catatonic issues were largely resolved.
When my wife suffered ‘mini-seizures’, well that was a different issue. That was more like a computer program that had glitched while changing programs…and my wife had ‘glitched’ when switching from one girl to the next. And so I learned to ‘help’ her thru the switching and the seizures ended.
The flashbacks and panic attacks were another issue. That was caused by the overlapping of past, dissociated, traumatic memories that were controlled by one girl breaking thru to another girl who was in executive control on the outside. And so I had a number of ways, mostly based on attachment theory’s understanding of safe haven and affect regulation, to calm her and help her integrate those new memories in the ‘overall narrative.’
I also had to learn that some part of my wife was ALWAYS accessible, even when it appeared otherwise on the outside. And so even if she didn’t respond, I would still speak to her, using my attachment points to remind her she was no longer alone, she was safe now, etc, etc, etc… And so I learned to effect healing even when she didn’t appear to respond to me.
So it was a matter of becoming able to diagnosis what was going on internally with her, and tailoring my response to her current reality…and little by little as I provided her that safe haven, affect regulation and proximity maintenance, the trauma memories no longer overwhelmed her because she had the additional support of my presence, and so she could slowly integrate those memories into her overall narrative…and thus they were no longer able to overwhelm her from a dissociated area previously inaccessible to her.
Clearly, I can’t tell you what was going on with your husband or son, or make any judgments about you or them, but by walking this journey WITH my wife and learning to listen and become ‘in tune’ with her, I was able to facilitate some pretty dramatic healing to the point that most of the ‘extreme stuff’ is a distant memory and we are only dealing with tearing down the vestiges of the dissociation between the various girls, and that requires another, different approach based on attachment theory’s understanding of the inner working model.
Sam
I don’t like those terms (and I would include psychosis with them) because had I perceived my wife in any of those ways, it would have absolved me from any need (and more correctly, any ability) to understand what she was experiencing…and it was only once I really understood things from her perspective that I was able to help her heal and move forward and be a good healing companion. Once I understood what she was experiencing during panic attacks and flashbacks, her going catatonic, etc, I was able to help her thru them and permanently heal the underlying causes such that she hasn’t experienced that stuff in years at this point.
Sam
Hi Bippyone,
you are correct that it takes a lot more than a nebulous ‘loving someone’ to help them thru extreme forms of mental distress and trauma, and I’m sorry if I watered down my reply to the point that it looked simplistic to you. I wish there was time and space here to tell you all the ways I have systematically and intentionally helped my wife heal thru some of the worst ‘extreme states’ you could imagine, but my doing so required no medication and though I would have been happy for additional help, as her primary attachment figure, the majority of responsibility was always going to be on me anyway, though our son was a huge help in the beginning.
Sam
I do understand what you are saying and absolutely agree with your statement, but I think my use of ‘wrong’ had a different intention.
Today’s biochemical model of mental health posits that some people are fundamentally flawed, in their dna, and they are ‘broken’ without any hope of ‘repair.’ Whereas the paradigm I use is the trauma model. I believe that what is ‘wrong’ with my wife is the result of trauma, and with love, help, and strong attachments she can heal.
Restated: the biochemical model says there is a category of people broken, ill and fundamentally flawed. The trauma model just believes the mental distress and other issues like my wife’s d.i.d. are not ‘inherent’ in the person but the natural cause of pain and fear from life’s traumas and those CAN be healed.
So the best I can tell you is we are using the same words but they have radically different meanings.
I hope that helps!
Sam
I’m honestly not sure why I NEVER saw my wife as ‘crazy’ or ‘mad’ or ‘ill.’ I don’t like any of those terms, and I really don’t even care for the attempts to take back ‘mad’ and turn it into some kind of badge of honor or ‘in your face’ retort.
I see my wife as traumatized, no more or less than someone who suffered a severe body trauma like my brother-in-law who fell 30 feet in a hurricane and crushed one side of his body and spent years in rehab and surgeries and still struggles with issues caused from that. My sister and he still have to deal with those issues, but no one looks at him like something is wrong with him because of his injuries. The entire family accepts his struggles and limitations. My sisters tells about the period where she had to ‘wipe’ him after he’d go to the restroom because he couldn’t do it himself. They are ‘in it’ together just like my wife and I are in her issues together, and yet I’m told ‘something is wrong’ with my wife because of her struggles, and they wonder why I don’t feel like being around them much…sigh.
I’ve often wondered about the various reactions of people to other’s struggles, but I typically assume it tells me more about them than the person struggling.
Sam
Quote: “I am, to put it quite plainly, a true schizophrenic, and that means I’m schizophrenic all the time. It doesn’t change. It’s all day, every day — no exceptions. I will put my “crazy” up against your “crazy” any time, no matter who you might be, and I’m pretty sure I’ll win. I hear voices that talk about God, the aliens, and about secret government programs all day long and sometimes even all night long, and I believe in practically all of it. Its sheer logical consistency has me convinced.”
Eric. I know this was more of an aside, but I just can’t seem to get away from your statement here. It breaks my heart to hear you say this, even though you put ‘crazy’ in quotes. I never saw my wife that way even though she could easily match you in every way.
I hope someday our culture radically changes it perspective on hearing voices. I’m very sorry for how you have been treated because of our cultural and scientific ignorance.
Sam
At the start of our journey 11 years ago, my wife tried to hide the other girls from our son (then 17) because all the experts said to do so. But it only divided our family. So I worked with him and the first girl to bridge the gap, and she finally couldn’t contain herself and outted herself to him on a family vacation. He’s been invaluable on this healing journey we’ve taken as a family ever since.
I didn’t want him to see the effects of her mental trauma as something strange or scary like the rest of the culture does, and so I set the tone and he just kind of followed my lead. I wanted him to be a young man who understands that ‘sh!t happens’ and not be scared or turned off by it when it happens to a loved one, but instead learn that we rally around and help someone who has been traumatized.
My wife and I have shielded him from some of the darker stuff, but that was more by his choice of disinterest than because we ‘hid’ it from him.
Hello Sera,
thank you for entrusting us with your experiences, your pain and your rage. I hear you. I’m sorry you had to go through those things alone. I hope some day your husband can learn to be a safe haven for you and help you hold those lost memories when you are ready.
I’m so glad you’ve taken such a nuanced position here and in the PTMF. And I’m glad that ‘carers’ are recognized as a group worthy of being heard. I’ve given the last 11 years to my wife’s healing and we’ve seen amazing things using attachment theory and other things we’ve learned along the way.
I’m working my way thru the PTMF. It seems like you welcome responses and reactions to the document, but I don’t see any where to send them.
Wishing you the best.
Sam
Steven,
as someone with a theology degree, I’ve got to admit I’ve never seen or heard exorcism explained that way. Now on a practical level, I can see how exorcism was abused by those in authority to become what you have stated, but certainly on a theological level I think most scholars would strongly disagree with your statement.
Sam
Wow, Steve, Rachel and Julie, the cynicism is pretty thick here. I’m truly sorry if that’s the only kind of people you know. Maybe that’s why I’ll always be an outsider on this site, but, there are actually families out there who protect and care for their own. But when things get going extreme in a loved one, it is a little scary, overwhelming and/or bewildering.
The following things never got covered in my “Being a Good Husband: 101 class” like my wife falling multiple times down the stairs, nearly breaking multiple limbs and being black and blue from head to toe for the first few years because the littles who joined us didn’t know how to use ‘the body’ very well; hiding in stores for fun or because various ones were terrified, almost getting run down by cars or trying to jump out of a car moving at 70mph (multiple times), going comatose (multiple, multiple times), looking like she was experiencing some kind of seizures, feeling like I was in an exorcist movie the first time I met one of the most angry girls, going comatose in a standing position so that I had to lunge to catch her before she hit the floor (for more than a year), and these were just A FEW(!!!!!!!) of the highlights of our first 5 years the others joined us (oh forgot coming home to our house being flooded while one of the new girls serenely read her book in an adjacent bedroom). And that didn’t include the task of simply winning the hearts of 7 disparate girls who were scared, traumatized and/or angry into my marriage and family so we didn’t turn out like the United States of Tara scenario.
Somehow I muddled thru it all with the help of our college-aged son who helped me provide literal 24/7 coverage those 5 years, and in time I actually figured out how to help her/them heal so none of that happens anymore, but it was still overwhelming and scary at times.
I’m sure it’s the same feeling for others, and so many of the SO’s and families turn to get help and instead get something worse than being all on their own thru it like we were.
Sam
“I think you’re right, it’s not very well understood, generally speaking.”
I’m just sad how poorly understood it is on this site but even more by the ‘experts’ of trauma and dissociation like over on ISSTD. But I do understand they only see it in clinical settings. They’ve never seen it 24/7 for 11 years like I have in every aspect of my relationship with my wife, and having to make every aspect not only safe, but healing as well. And seeing it laid plainly out between the 8 girls in my wife’s system, and how they each have strengths, but also gaps in their abilities and personalities, has really helped me understand how all of us function on a foundational level as I have helped them slowly become an integrated, cohesive, collaborative group.
Sam
Hi Eric,
you know, my wife’s d.i.d. has taught me so much about myself, to the point that I talk about myself being a ‘non-dissociated multiple’ on my blog. And as I have helped all the girls in her network learn to live together in harmony, I have learned to harmonize all the various, disparate parts of my own personality, especially the uglier parts of myself that I used to try to suppress, now I channel them instead, kind of the ‘benevolent monster’ like we see in Kong: Skull Island or even Tom Cruise’s Mummy.
Anyway, I appreciate your attempts to expand how people are seen, away from the simplistic, narrow lenses that most psychological frameworks espouse.
Sam
Hi Lenora,
dealing with my wife’s dissociation is actually kind of easy: because it’s out there on full display and she knows it’s happening and I know it’s happening and so we can deal with it appropriately.
I actually find it much more difficult to deal with other people who don’t understand what is going on because there’s no way I can just say, “Hey, do your realize your showing signs of dissociation?” And so many, many people dissociate various things. Like you said, it’s on a spectrum and most of us do far more than just ‘daydream.’
Sam
I do understand that for those who have taken any number of psychiatric drugs, or for that matter, all kinds of mind-altering substances, your statement would be correct.
But there is a real phenomenon of hearing voices, like my wife experienced, and she was NEVER on any kind of drugs psychiatric or otherwise. My best guest is these ‘voices’ come from dissociated parts of the brain/mind and so they seem foreign to the person at first, but with time and work and help, those voices can be welcomed into the person’s narrative and eventually take part in the overall personality.
PacificDawn,
perhaps if you have no interest in discussing anything except activism, you should approach the MIA staff and see if they would start a corner for those with similar feelings, and also to keep track of national rallies and other events of that nature. I say this genuinely because you seem to have no interest in discussing anything else and label all other topics as means of controlling people.
Wishing you well.
Sam
Ron,
thank you for the link. I will definitely check out this group as my wife and I have been living with her ‘voices’ for the last 11 years, engaging them respectfully, lovingly, helping them heal first and then integrate into a community with each other. There’s so much that SO’s and family and friends can do. My wife’s angriest voice that despised me is now deeply attached to me and engaged with me. The hurt and traumatized ones have healed and are now full of life.
People are afraid of legitimizing voices, but that’s exactly what we did and it made all the difference. Instead of the United States of Tara scenario, all the voices are fiercely loyal and thoughtful at this point to our family and relationship.
I have learned so much about the horrors of the mh industry from you and others here, and I try never to belittle that, but that’s also why it’s so hard for me to communicate here because my wife’s and my experience is like a polar opposite where I always honored her and her desires; she never had any contact with the mh industry or its drugs, and where I never, ever, ever treated her as ‘crazy’ or any other kind of belittling way.
At first she would quip that I was the crazy one for NOT seeing her like the rest of the culture, but I simply never did, and the more I understood her world, the more it truly made sense to me as I walked/walk with her in it as we find a way out of it together.
Sam
But it’s so, so , so much more than that…but I just seem at a loss to describe it and as the general tone seems hostile instead of inquisitive around the issue, I think this might be a good time for me to bow out from hijacking your blog.
Wishing you the best, Julie,
Sam
No Rachel, I don’t even know what you are talking about, sigh.
Like I said dissociation is a huge issue and how it affects mental health as well as a person’s ability to fight mental distress, and if I hadn’t had to help my wife literally put all the disparate pieces of her self back together again, I would have never understood it either. That’s probably why I lack the words to convey it because our experience has been in a completely different universe than most here and elsewhere, and everyone tries to interpret what I say thru their experience, and I just can’t seem to figure out how to overcome that barrier. 🙁
LavenderSage,
I’ll be honest: I never read the book. I read it’s premise and the intro and never got past that. So maybe you are correct, but neural atrophy is not what I understood him to be talking about. Maybe I am wrong: forgive me if I am.
Sam
But since there is no KNOWN link to brain problems how can psychiatrists fix it? How can random acts of brain damage help anyone?
Rachel,
I wish it were that simple. On the side of the biochemical model you’ve got people spewing ‘chemical imbalance’ foolishness, but in reaction to that provably wrong belief, many on the anti-psychiatry side want to say there are NO brain factors in mental health distress, and I disagree with that, as well. But since I’m ‘just a husband’ neither side will listen to me. The former think I’m a moron since I can’t put little letters after my name (though I do have an unrelated BA), and the latter think I’m ‘speaking for’ my wife and so they won’t listen either.
I’ve had the privilege and responsibility to help my wife literally rebuild her personality from the ground up these last 11 years. And I’ve seen what dissociation which causes neural atrophy can do and how it most certainly affects mental health and the ability to fight mental distress. I’ve tried to discuss it a little here in the comments sections, but it’s such a huge issue, and since no one ever ‘bites’ when I try to throw out nuggets I’ve learned, I typically drop it.
It’s too bad. It’s not the only issue in mental distress, but dissociation is a huge one, and neither side gets it. Even books that are touted here like The Body Keeps the Score, are incorrect, but because he’s never gone as deep as my wife and I have with dissociation or seen it as laid out as we have 24/7 for 11 years, he (van der Kolk) doesn’t understand it’s the dissociation and NOT the body that is the issue.
Respectfully,
Sam
Julie,
I have no intention of minimizing the harm done to the 1 in 6 or whatever the number (that’s just the number who are specifically taking psychiatric ‘meds’). But I take issue with those who want to see EVERYTHING thru a social/class warfare lens and blame the whole of mental distress on that.
Sam
sadly I see more and more comments that seem to take that view and want to turn all mental distress into a motivation for class warfare on this site. Some act as if all mental distress, illness, trauma, dysfunction, or whatever one wants to call it is completely fabricated by the mental health industry and society in general as a means of social control.
I don’t believe that the Big Brother of the mh industry, big pharma, and gov’t shills really has his hands on the majority of society, at least not yet. Only 1 in 6 Americans are even on psych drugs or connected to the mh industry. That means the overwhelming majority like my wife and I are ‘untainted’ and yet I see a TON of distress and dysfunction that reaches throughout ALL classes of Americans. Hell, the 1% are some of the most dysfunctional of us all: just read the news to see that money and power do NOT make one impervious to such things.
So it really is too bad for the simplistic assessments that often pass and go unchallenged on this website.
I’m with you, LittleTurtle and critical psychiatry. There have to be others, but it is too bad they don’t take the time to comment more often.
Sam
Is there any miracle of events, any set of circumstances that would now be presently unfathomable, that could leave us in a place of looking at each other across “the table” and even mustering up forgiveness, acceptance and a path forward? Any?
What would it take to at least begin a path in that direction? Or the the toast too burnt to even consider recovery?
Maybe it is that just a pipe dream, an event that only can live in imagination and nowhere else? Or maybe, just maybe….. ?
Fred,
I can’t speak for the others on this website, but when my wife and I first down the path of healing, I had to deal with the anger that kept her and I separated. I realized that some of her anger toward me was completely justified, but also some of her anger was truly because of the abuse she had suffered as a child and I was simply a convenient object for her to vent upon.
It took me about 6 months of asking forgiveness for anything and everything she accused me of. I NEVER defended myself because I took the position that IF she felt this, then I would value our relationship over who was right, or trying to give my side of the story.
About 6 months later her anger was extinguished. A couple years later she even came back and apologized a little for her part in things…but until I had extinguished the anger, she simply couldn’t see past it.
I understand your commitment level is probably a lot lower here than mine was to my wife, but that’s what it took to bring her and I completely back in harmony with each other.
Sam
I’m sorry no one understood how to enter into your world and walk it with you. One of the first things I had to learn was to ‘get out of myself’ so I could enter my wife’s world. Too many people try to ‘drag’ people out of their worlds into ‘the real world.’ If you look at Jesus, that’s not what He did. He incarnated Himself into our world so He could understand us in ALL our weaknesses, and then He made a way out…thru Him. That’s kind of what I’ve done with my wife. I don’t demand she join ‘the real world’. Instead I walk with her, on her terms, in her reality, and slowly we are finding our way out TOGETHER.
Sam
Do you mean physically or mentally? It took me awhile to learn how to ‘reach’ my wife when she was going thru some of her more ‘extreme’ things like flash backs, panic attacks, etc. Attachment theory has the concept of a ‘safe haven’. Think of it like a boat in a hurricane that finds a sheltered harbor during the storm. That’s what I had to learn to become. I realized she could still hear me even if she couldn’t respond to me. And so I would literally wrap her up in my arms, gently and loosely, so it didn’t feel suffocating or constricting, and then I would speak gently and softly to her, pulling her out of her mental storms and confusion. Things like, “It’s ok, Honey. I’ve got you now. You aren’t alone anymore. You are my girl and I take care of my girl…” The warmth and safety of my enveloping presence and the calming of my voice would slowly stabilize her and blow out her mental/emotional hurricanes. And after a time, those hurricanes became less and less volatile…until at this point, they are mostly a distant memory.
Sam
The concept of “mental health”/”mental illness” is the primary lie/fraud.
I can’t speak for Ron, but at least for me, I don’t agree with this assertion.
I might word it slightly different because ‘mental illness’ has been corrupted by the biomedical model of mental health with which I 100% disagree, but I do think there is such a thing as mental health/mental dysfunction that is often trauma based. Moreover, I think there is a biological component because the brain/mind is biologically based, even if we don’t understand how.
The most obvious biological component of mental health/dysfunction that I am aware of, because of our personal experience, is trauma-based dissociation which ends up re-mapping the neural pathways of the brain. And undoing that dissociation has caused my wife massive, debilitating headaches. I don’t understand it, but for every step forward as we tear down the dissociation, the headaches are so excruciating she can barely function.
Moreover, we’ve spent the last decade retraining her mind to access those previously dissociated areas of her brain where the neural pathways had atrophied. And as she has gained access to those areas previously walled off to her, she has begun to display new personality traits and mental abilities she never had during the first 20 years of our marriage.
I don’t understand the biological component of my wife’s mental trauma or healing on a technical level, but I mostly definitely understand it and have had to develop strategies to overcome it and work with it on a practical level.
Sam
my wife used to experience a lot of dissociation. From the ‘official diagnosis’ one would expect her to experience a lot of psychosis as well. But as she and I have walked the healing path together, I’ve wondered if psychosis (that isn’t caused by drugs or medications) is just a result of the mind trying to bring those dissociated, trauma memories back to the front so they can be processed and entered into the person’s current narrative.
I never really thought of my wife as psychotic. In the beginning she felt it was scary and disorienting, but slowly, as I learned to stayed calm and acted as an anchor for her to the present, her fear subsided, and we were able to help her brain/mind integrate those old memories into a way that she could deal with in the present.
I can’t tell you what you are experiencing, but I don’t really believe psychosis is a helpful word or concept: it just has too much baggage because of how it gets portrayed in the media and by mental health ‘experts.’ This is what worked best for me/us: viewing this phenomenon as ‘overlapping realities’, one past and one present, and my ‘job’ as my wife’s healing companion was keeping her grounded and safely helping her sort things until at this point most of the dissociation is gone, and thus, so is the psychosis.
“If we have people promoting Therapy, Life Coaching, Recovery, or Salvation Seeking, then that means that survivors are being abused. It amounts to second rape.”
I don’t expect PacificDawn to listen, but for others, I want to state that, imo, this is so over the top, I wish it were addressed. I’m not even sure where I would begin to address all the generalizations, slander, black and white fallacies, and so forth. I’m guessing(?) this comes from her own traumatic experiences, and for those I am truly sorry, but it doesn’t help to throw around accusations at huge swaths of people who have found these things to truly help. Though I don’t consider myself an evangelical Christian anymore, the caricatures that routinely are hurled from the Left toward Evangelicals are simplistic and insulting. Sure there are abuses, just like there are in any and every large enough group that one looks at, but there are also a lot of people who sacrificially give of themselves to try to help others the best they can. My own life and how I try to help my wife is still governed by many of those principles that were hammered into me from my Christian upbringing, and I get tired of others flippantly making accusations and the majority on the Left approving whole heartedly. Honestly, this website ought to do better, imo.
And as for the wide swath of other accusations and caricatures she is lobbing at Life Coaches, therapy, recovery, and whatelse, I’m glad my wife decided she DID want to address the trauma and pain in her life. Her decision has taken both of us on a wonderful healing journey of discovery and growth and healing for both of us. It’s been hard as hell in many ways, and yet I’m so glad we made that decision 11 years ago. I’m glad I’m NOT the same man that I was when we first started, nor is she. Hopefully we are both much better versions of ourselves.
Respectfully,
Sam
Hi Fiachra,
in some ways the brain is just like a muscle that atrophies with disuse but can be strengthened with use. Think if a person who has been bedridden for 4 decades suddenly finds a new medical procedure that allows the person to regain control of his/her limbs. Well 40 years of disuse can’t simply be undone overnight. It would take years of pointed exercise and physical therapy to regain full use of those limbs.
That’s kind of similar to what happens with people who have experienced extreme dissociation. Those areas of the brain/mind can’t just naturally reconnect and be fully utilized by the rest of the brain/mind. And when the ‘experts’ add their ‘medications’ it only makes things worse and zombifies the person at best and wreaks havoc at worst and actually hinders the person from accessing and strengthening those affected areas. And so we’ve found it just takes hard, repetitious work that engages all affected areas of the brain/mind as they are incorporated into the whole of the person.
We’ve found it can be done, and done with minimal secondary trauma when drugs aren’t introduced into the mix. But it’s just a slow, tedious, day-by-day process. No miracles cures, and definitely no magic pills!
Sam
Steve,
could you fix my original statement? It’s really bothering me where I typed, “Many on this website think that anything less than being ‘anti-critical’ is being a sellout”. I meant to say “anything less than being “anti-psychiatry” is being a sellout…”
Thanks,
Sam
Bob, I meant no offense! I just don’t see you in the comments section much. That’s all I meant. I do understand you are involved behind the scenes.
I apologize for that poorly worded statement. I hesitated to even bring you up and say something incorrect, but since Bruce did, I did, and then I blew it anyways…Sorry
Sam
Bruce,
perhaps you should define your terms. Many on this website think that anything less than being ‘anti-psychiatry’ is being a sellout and being a ‘middle grounder’ and yet you hold up Bob Whittaker as someone who isn’t a sellout and yet on the rare times he visits this website, he has professed to be ‘critical psychiatry.’
As this culture continues to fracture and both sides become more and more extreme, I sit firmly in the middle. But to me that doesn’t mean I take a ‘middle point’ on all the issues. No, what that means is I give a fair and thorough hearing to each side and then I eclectically pick and choose where I believe each side has gotten issues correct. I firmly stand against the biomedical model of mental health, and yet, after 11 years of helping my wife heal from extreme dissociation, I understand how the dissociation structurally alters the brain…yet not permanently, and not because of genetics, but because neural plasticity teaches us that if we don’t use it, we lose it. And yet, that same principle gives us hope, as I purposefully help my wife bring back to health those atrophied neural pathways.
This isn’t the only place I part pathways with the anti-psychiatry crowd, and yet for you to call ‘the middle grounders’ “dangerous”, to me is a sad statement on our fracturing culture. I’m guessing you don’t consider Bob a middle grounder, but I know his critical psychiatry position grates on many commenters on this website. Maybe he’s not dangerous to you, but this kind of talk is NOT helpful. It just further divides us.
Eleven years ago I had no clue about any issues concerning mental health; now I’ve had to become an expert on dissociation to help my wife heal from things even ISSTD hasn’t figured out yet. I prefer not to have litmus tests because we are all on a journey, and yes this is life and death in some respects, and yet not everyone gets it as quickly as others. My own wife still believes all the biomedical mental health garbage, and I just tell her, “you are lucky that I don’t.”
Fred,
respectfully, the diagnosis was critical. If you’ve never lived with someone who dissociates and yet is a master at hiding it(like many are), you may not understand how confusing it can be to both people. Neither of us understood what was happening. Once we got the diagnosis that was my ‘aha’ moment, and things began to make sense and I could then reorient my thinking to include something I had never before considered and then begin to grow in that understanding.
Yes, the relationship was key to staying at this and walking this TOGETHER, but one can’t fight and overcome something if one has no concept of what is going on like the first 20 years of our marriage.
Sam
Rachel,
at the most basic, neural plasticity, I believe, can be summed up as ‘the brain rewards what we use, and punishes what we don’t.” It’s really the same with the rest of our bodies. Muscles that we use a lot become stronger; muscles that we don’t atrophy.
The brain is essentially the same: when we exercise parts of the brain, those pathways are strengthened and fine tuned, for example creating the skill needed to play a piano thru years of practice. But when parts of the brain are ignored, or worse dissociated from trauma, then those pathways are neglected and atrophy.
And to un-do years of extreme dissociation, it’s no simple process to just ‘flip the switch’ and start accessing those areas of the brain again. It’s been a far, far, far more difficult process to help her gain access to those dissociated areas, than helping my wife deal with the actual issues surrounding the trauma.
As for other people’s experiences on this website, my statement was not intended to belittle anyone’s experiences or victim blame them for being caught up in the system. We were fortunate, but not because we were so smart and wise. It just was outside our natural bent to go for help, and it was only later that I realized how fortunate we were to have missed the horrors that so many describe on this website. But sometimes when I read comments, the reaction toward the abuses of the mh system are so focused on just that, that the original issues get lost in the context. I understand why that is so, but I wanted to clarify that our case may be considered a ‘control group’ in that we have not been tainted by the system at all and yet we are still struggling 11 years later to undo the real issues caused from her childhood despite her tremendous healing and progress.
for 20 years my wife and I struggled in our marriage. We loved each other but things just weren’t right, and when she finally agreed to get some counseling after I led the way by working on my own issues, it was suggested she might be experiencing some severe dissociation as a result of her early childhood trauma…and that was the key that finally unlocked our confusion and the impasse of 20 years.
Now we didn’t go the typical route to deal with said trauma and dissociation. She never had ANY contact with any professional ‘mental health experts.’ But we kind of fell into attachment principles and when I learned more about that, I became more intentional about some of the key concepts from that theory that helped address her attachment issues, dissociation issues and other things. But it did start with that ‘possible’ diagnosis.
As much as I firmly stand against the bio-chemical narrative of mental health, that doesn’t mean there aren’t real issues like dissociation, neural plasticity, trauma, ptsd symptoms, etc that have to be addressed. Neither my wife nor I ‘wear’ her diagnosis as a badge. Other than me, our son and her non-traditional counselor she refuses to tell anyone else and most would be surprised, to say the least, that she is dealing with anything. She tells me she’s one of the few in her group of friends and acquaintances who doesn’t take any kind of medicines for stress, anxiety, etc.
I know we are an anomaly; I’ve been told that repeatedly on this website. But this website is strongly tilted by those who have had HORRIBLE experiences within the mh system. And I’m not belittling that at all, but I do take issue when people try to blame ALL their mental health distress upon the system as if nothing really drove them into the lion’s den at first and all their problems came as a result of the mh system. People suffer from real mental health issues, and when I finally took those seriously in my wife, that’s when I became effective in helping her heal and move forward.
it doesn’t seem like you respond much to comments, but I’ll put it out here anyway. Much of this blog is spot on, and maybe you’ll clarify in a future blog, but it’s REALLY important that one understands the difference between trauma and dissociation. Though trauma causes dissociation, trauma and dissociation have very different effects upon one’s personality. Dissociation has been the much more difficult issue to undo in my wife’s life than the original trauma, though the two get intertwined at points.
If you had interest, I could discuss it further.
Yours,
Sam
I am truly sorry you believe that, Rachel. There is nothing wrong with you, and though it might take a bit for a good man to get past the cultural tropes about people with SMI labels, it really didn’t take me long to figure out that I was still safe to sleep in the same bed at nights with my wife! 🙂
Maybe I should add Reagan’s axiomatic statement that so many on the Right adhere to:government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.
the superficial analysis you state about the Right isn’t anymore helpful than when the Right spews the same about the Left. I may have moved to the center, but my wife’s and my upbringing on the Right, its focus on individualism, independence and pulling oneself up by the bootstraps is what gave us the fortitude to homeschool our son through his graduation when our family all thought we were crazy. We produced a world-class scholar who is in his PhD residency at one of the elite schools in the Boston area.
And so when my wife began to show signs of distress from her childhood abuse, I may have felt overwhelmed at first, but I never felt out of my league to figure out how best to help my wife as we walked thru the healing process together. And as we both healed and grew and learned, I realized the elitist experts who openly sneered at me were full of crap for the most part.
I’ve learned a lot from the Left, especially since it isn’t my default position, but to suggest that all our ails regarding this subject are from the ‘authoritarian’ Right and the ‘state-corporatist rulers’ is a simplistic misreading of that position in my opinion. There are anti-authoritarian tendencies on both sides of the spectrum just as there is the tendency to mindlessly follow authorities: they simply come from different perspectives and beliefs.
I’m sorry for all the pain you and your family are in. I wish there was some place for families to heal. Soteria and Open Dialogue seem appealing to me from afar, but they aren’t available in small-town Midwest where I live, and so we’ve had to find our own way to healing individually and as a family. It wasn’t easy, for sure, but I refused to let my family fall apart or continue the dysfunction on both sides of our families for the sake of our son. For us attachment theory gave us the roadmap.
I’m sorry for the many ways you and others here have been invalidated. I wish I could say it was better on the outside of the survivor’s community, but I haven’t found it so. People have a herd mentality, and if one doesn’t submit to the group-think, then one is ostracized and marginalized. And beyond that the power structures and gate keepers always look to retain their power and influence no matter what group or movement one is part. I wish it were otherwise, but I’ve spent a lifetime screaming in a vacuum for change on various issues and no one giving a d@mn. Like lemmings people happily follow everyone else over the cliff…
Megan,
I’m truly sorry your side of the story was invalidated. It’s not the church: it’s just people in general, but sadly the Church was supposed to be something different, and I, too, have found it one of the most destructive things in my family’s life even though my wife and I still attend as it’s our only decent source of companionship in a little town.
I’m sorry most that your husband turned on you instead of uniting with you.
Sam
I’m honestly not sure what you mean by ‘investigating.’ The most beneficial thing I’ve ever discovered is attachment theory. Thanks to John Bowlby and those who followed, it gave me the keys to help unlock my wife from her traumatic childhood. No therapist could possibly do what I have done. What our son has done. But a therapist could have been a great facilitator and taught us the ropes instead of me having to figure it out on my own while I was also dealing with my own issues that hindered my ability to help my wife.
A paid therapist lacks the credibility that most people need: trauma victim or otherwise. We need to know that person is ‘in it’ for more than just the money, and when all hell breaks loose and the money dries up, his/her help won’t vanish.
Respectfully, you can never do what the SO’s, family and friends can do: and that’s ok. It’s not your place. But the breadth of knowledge an ‘expert’ can have is something I simply don’t have time or energy to replicate, and that is a place that I feel can be served by those in your position to help those of us in our position.
No, Rachel, neither of us have taken an medications for any distress or anything else. I don’t know…maybe it was the way we were both raised, but I don’t think either of us have ever really considered doing so. At least I haven’t. Can’t really speak for my wife on that issue, though sometimes I do know she wishes she had sleeping meds…
Sam
Alex,
When Lawrence wrote this article it spoke to me as a coach might speak to his football players while giving them a pep talk before a big game. It spoke to that part of me that seeks an easy way out, that wants to find a short cut and reminds me that there is no gain without a willingness to endure some pain.
I never suffered severe childhood trauma, and I never have had any of my rights taken away as an adult. And I’ve always been fortunate to have been in the middle class of America even if it’s not to the level in which I was raised. And so to me, Lawrence isn’t accusing me of anything: he’s sounding the alarm that we are suffering ‘first world’ issues because we’ve forgotten all the sacrifices that those who came before us made so we could live how we do in the 21st century.
I really and truly do think I understand why the majority of the comments are the way they have been. I found your and KS’s comments especially powerful and moving, and it reminds me that there are others who have been thru even worse hell, in some ways, than my wife and I have been. I understand as much as I can, why you would see Lawrence’s words to be harmful and maybe even arrogant and definitely victim blaming and continuing harmful stereotypes.
And so to address your second comment: whose truth is right? Whose life experiences get to dictate how Lawrence’s blog is received’? My son once wrote a paper to argue that there are ‘levels’ of truths, and not ALL truths necessarily apply across all peoples, times and situations. I think that might be applicable in this situation. I think, maybe, Lawrence could have addressed this blog to people who comfortably live in middle and upper class situations and try to wake them up from their desires to live ‘distress free.’ But when he addresses it to a website in which the majority of commenters are survivors of extreme trauma and/or the mental health system, his comments sound accusatory and victim blaming.
Most of the time I don’t even look at Lawrence’s blogs. They usually don’t speak to me even though I know he’s fairly popular on this website. But this one spoke to me and MY life experiences, and yet I can accept why the majority on here found it otherwise.
Lawrence,
as I read this, I thought your message really resonated with me, of course, I already believe it and have put it into practice for the most part. Then as I read the majority of comments, it was a reminder to me of another, valid perspective. Perhaps the best I could suggest is: right message, wrong audience.
Sam
As much as KS has taken on an adversarial relationship to everything I say, I would completely agree with her assessment of how to help someone thru their traumatic memories. It’s very similar to what I have espoused upon my blog and was one of my more popular entries, trending #3 on google’s search for a while about lying and dissociative identity disorder.
Sam
I really do wish you could see me, Kindred Spirit. Instead you only see some twisted caricature of me based upon your own traumatic experiences.
For the record, when I talk about the two Millenial girls (alters) Wikipedia says that generation started in 1980 and ended in 1994. So the VERY youngest that would mean is 24 years old, NOT teenagers!
Kindred Spirit,
I am truly sorry that you find my position as if it’s a personal attack on you. I don’t see your opinion for your life as a threat to me and my wife.
HOW did I ‘ask for it?” My original comment had absolutely nothing to do with Lee’s statements about d.i.d. and a ‘holocaust’ of those falsely accused or his understanding of d.i.d. My original post was about how people’s fears of ‘extreme states’ is part of what gives this entire issue any power, and I still stand by that assertion even if I concede it’s not the whole issue. WHY do people call the authorities when someone is in a distressing or ‘psychotic’ state, if there is such a thing???? I would never even dream of doing that because at this point I know that I am the person with the most power to stop any kind of mental distress in my wife and NOTHING we have gone thru makes me ‘fearful’ anymore. Those 3 examples were just a tiny sample of the hell she and I have gone thru, and yet one by one, we faced all those fears and overcame them together.
I’ve been thinking about this all night and your statement kind of encapsulated some of my concerns: how Lee jumped to completely discount my wife’s experience and the validity of dissociation, and his apparently blind deference to the ‘holocaust that has come to the thousands of persons falsely accused.”
I tried to figure out where he stood from his website. It’s a weird format to read his stuff: probably did that in the hope people would buy it, and some/much of it is older, like from the 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s, but he seems to hold on to the fantasy of an epidemic of falsely accused people while ignoring the true pandemic of those who have been abused emotionally, physically and sexually and then are discredited and shamed by our culture’s power structures if they do speak out. Is he against the #MeToo movement as well?
I’d love for him to clarify, but he seems to be ignoring anything I actually say because of his apparent distaste for d.i.d..
Sam
Julie,
I’m not refuting the idea of false memories. The science is pretty solid that shows how easily our memories can be manipulated and changed and even ‘created.’ But the FMSF takes it to an entirely new level to discount any and all memories that might be recovered during the process of healing. I won’t get into the politics of the group, but they had a lot riding on their vehemence to mpd/did and sadly, the excesses of the so-called trauma experts lead right into the FMSF’s hand to try to discredit mpd/did.
But like I said, that was decades ago, and yet some still hold onto the hype and excesses when therapists used to parade d.i.d. patients around like a circus freak show on the various talk shows, and so the critics point to that as their reason to discount EVERTYHING about d.i.d. Happily, ISSTD learned their lesson on that front, even if they haven’t made a lot of progress imo about how to best help people like my wife.
Ok, Lee, well, I was able to get the previous comments by you to work this morning…and you’ve only made 13 in total on this website. None of them was directed to me. Now if you are referencing the ‘spirited’ dialogue between me and Kindred Spirit about d.i.d., at least I have a reference point.
It would appear from your comments about the ‘holocaust’ of falsely accused persons that you are trapped in some kind of time warp back at the beginning of the mpd movement and the hype and excesses that went on. Are you a member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation as well? If so, there’s really nothing I can say to open your eyes that even the so-called trauma experts have left those excesses behind decades ago.
And if you don’t believe in dissociation, there really is little basis on which to have a discussion when that concept is about as accepted as gravity. But again, I’m sure you can point to the ignorance of ISSTD and make your case from strawmen about something that doesn’t really exist.
I’m sorry if ISSTD is driving your understanding of trauma and dissociation. It certainly doesn’t drive our understanding of things, or my wife would never have made the progress she has.
Hi Steve,
well, just as you and I agreed on the other thread that attachment theory isn’t a ‘cure all’, I would suggest that this subject is complex and multi-layered, and I don’t think any one perspective will ever do it justice. But what I’m suggesting is that Big Pharma and the APA are the modern-day equivalent of those selling ‘magic elixirs’ and ‘snake oil’ cures a few centuries ago. They prey on people’s fears of whatever was/is ailing them at the time.
Steve, this problem affects EVERY class despite the suggestions of the Marxists on this site, and though it may hit the lower classes the hardest, neither my wife nor I grew up there. What I see is fear driving this and Big Pharma and the APA simply capitalizing on that fear. Take away the fear and people would have no need to turn to them. Teach them the things my wife and I learned, and mental health issues move from the category of fear of the incomprehensible that only the APA priesthood can divine, to mostly the same hardships and annoyances of a severely broken leg until it is healed.
As for Big Pharma and the APA, of course they are going to fight this: I completely agree for them this is all about money and power. But they can’t force any of this on us despite the laws suggesting to the contrary if it weren’t for fear. I overcame my fears and never even considered committing my wife despite how hard things have been, and so they had no ability to touch my wife despite all the laws out there used to incarcerate so many on this site.
Sam
Lee,
hmmm…I tried to go back and find the discussion between you and me, but either something is wrong with my browser or this website. So I’m sorry if I don’t remember it.
I’m not sure why you would characterize me as “so strongly dedicated to the label of d.i.d.” We’ve had this debate ad nauseum on this website of whether or not to use the common vernacular or do we start from scratch every time for the benefit of newcomers? I do understand that to those who have had those diagnoses weaponized by the mental health system have a far more adverse reaction to being diagnosed than either I or my wife does since the ‘diagnosis’ simply gave us a starting point and then we pretty much went our own way from there.
As for your dislike of the ‘trauma experts’, take a number. I downloaded the guidelines from ISSTD and did a line by line critique of them: pretty much if you take their guidelines and do the EXACT OPPOSITE, it would give you a pretty good idea of how my wife and I have approached her healing. So if you are going to judge me by their ignorance and excesses, you would be greatly amiss, but whatever…
Since you feel you have nothing to learn from our experience, I will try to remember THIS discussion and not bother you again.
Sincerely wishing you the best,
Sam
“If it were recognized by our people that science is irrelevant to the debate over whether society’s fears should trump individual rights to liberty, then we could begin what will be the long struggle to win such a debate.”
Lee,
I wonder if you and so many on this website are kind of missing what I see as the key issue because of the hatred of psychiatry. Psychiatry really is nothing more than a tool despite some giving it anthropomorphic qualities on this site. I agree with most here that it’s a terrible tool and it’s based on misinformation and it is anti-scientific in many ways. But in the end, it’s just a tool.
But I think so many of these debates miss the real point. Psychiatry is a horrible tool that people feel compelled to use because of their fears of mental health issues based on their lack of understanding what is going on. Even on this website, people use the term ‘extreme states’ but outside of drug-induced states, I’ve always wondered why the survivors would be wiling to use this designation as it seems to lend credence to the fears others have of these manifestations.
My wife has d.i.d., Lee. The first time she dropped to the floor in what I thought was a catatonic state, I kind of freaked out. But then the next time it happened, I kept my brain working, and I tried something. I went thru the current list of alters and lo and behold, Ally the defender popped out. I learned a lesson that day: she wasn’t really catatonic: I just had to find out to whom the baton had been passed. A fear is vanquished.
The first time my wife went into what looked like a series of mini-seizures, I about freaked out again, as her eyes rolled back into her sockets and they fluttered in rapid motion. But the next time, my brain was working again, and I realized, “Oh, this is kind of like a computer that is glitching when it tries to switch programs but gets stuck.” So then I learned to help her thru those switches that get hung up for some reason. Another fear gone.
One of the original times my wife went into a flash back, I was back in freak out mode, her fear driving mine, and then midstream, I chilled out, and I began to speak calmly to her, remind her she’s not alone, I’ve got her now, she’s safe now, and I pulled her out of that flash back. Another fear gone.
One by one the issues that we had to confront because of her d.i.d. lost their ability to induce fear in either of us as we came to an understanding of what was going on and how I could help her thru each issue the best. If you were to go on WordPress and read the blogs of other people with d.i.d., they are full of fear and hatred of things that my wife and I have come to learn are just part of the healing experience. Some are more annoying than others, but none of them cause either of us any ‘fear’ any more.
It is fear that drives people to use horrible tools like psychiatry. Fear shuts down our brains and makes otherwise intelligent people into mindless caricatures of themselves. And yet when we were first starting our journey 11 years ago, most of the professional literature was as ignorant of the mechanics of her manifestations as we were originally. So we had to learn the ropes pretty much on our own.
And I will posit that if others were simply taught what is going on, that these NON-drug induced manifestations really aren’t ‘extreme’ but simply stronger versions of many things I have experienced myself as a non-trauma victim, their fears would dissipate like mine did. Once I learned to see so many of her experiences as just reflective of my own, the last vestiges of ‘non-normalcy’ fled, and so at this point, we live a rather humdrum life that happens to have 8 girls (alters) part of our marriage rather than one.
This isn’t about class warfare like my Leftist friends believe. This isn’t about social control. This isn’t about an anthropomorphic psychiatry preying upon victims. In my opinion, the real issue is simply about people, both the victims and those around them, being overwhelmed by fear because they don’t understand the very natural things that are going on in the brain/mind when trauma isn’t properly processed. I argued in another thread on MIA, that if we simply would learn to see mental trauma the same as physical trauma, then all these mental manifestations would be seen no different than what occurs during the convalescent period of, say, a severely broken leg. There’s no stigma in a broken leg. We all know what to expect, and we don’t expect that person to be back up to full speed until the healing is done and any physical therapy that may be required afterwards.
…” But if it is at our own sacrifice, then what have we gained? Is there a way we can support ourselves and others, without feeling we are sacrificing our own lives and well-being to do so? That just seems like a hamster wheel to me.”
Alex, I want to preface what follows by stating up front, I believe two people can believe very different things, and neither person is inherently ‘wrong.’ I wish more people understood that very few things are black and white. If more people understood that, we wouldn’t have the pointless tribal wars going on in America right now. We would be able to find the good in each side’s arguments, and the rest…we could learn to chalk it up to ‘live and let live.’ Instead we take differences as if they are a threat to our very existence and survival, and that is detrimental to us all because then, rather than becoming enriched by someone else’s perspective we simply see it as a threat.
Anyway, attachment theory teaches us that in the beginning of our lives we are wholly dependent upon our ‘primary attachment figure’ and others to lesser degrees. But over the course of time that singular dependency slowly changes until, in a healthy relationship, parent and the now-adult child will become equals in interdependency, but then, eventually, the roles will reverse and the parent will become dependent upon the adult child late in life.
However, when severe childhood trauma occurs, it typically screws up that natural progression. When my wife and I first started this healing journey together 11 years ago, she told me over and over and over, “I don’t know what healthy looks like.” And I took her seriously. Meanwhile the other little girls began to crash our world. At one point ALL 6 of the girls (alters) currently out fronted as 8-years old or younger: the youngest 3 all started out fronting as 2-year olds.
This is kind of where attachment theory and my Christian upbringing that emphasized sacrificial love and the golden rule meshed so well. I had been naturally raised to believe that sacrifice is a good thing…but pragmatically speaking, well that was a very different thing. We struggled the first 20 years of our marriage because I expected the marriage to be mutually beneficial, mutually giving, and it simply wasn’t. And I am not implying that my wife was completely at fault: I was selfish and immature in so many ways which complicated her issues. On top of that, I was simply ignorant about how early childhood trauma was affecting the woman I love because my own childhood was rather idyllic in comparison.
But over the course of the first 3 or so years of our healing journey, I was transforming: her issues were so massive that I had to grow up and make many changes myself or I knew we wouldn’t make it. All that to state that I had to become willing to sacrifice my needs to help her heal, but I don’t want to come off like I think I’m some saint: I’m NOT. But I had to learn to take the long view to our marriage. I sought a win/win solution, and that meant I had to be willing to do the work that her parents failed to do and help each girl become securely attached to me, help each girl then begin to connect to the others (the personality development that naturally occurs during childhood), and anything else they needed. It’s meant for much of the last 11 years, my life companion hasn’t been an adult woman, but 7 traumatized and very needy little girls in various states of dysfunctional attachment.
But eleven years later, we are slowly moving toward the healthy, adult interdependence that I often speak. Two of the girls have grown and now front as Millenials. I got engaged to one in December and I’m pre-engaged to the other. And all the other ‘littles’ (alters who view themselves as little children) truly do the activities of adults (other than in the bedroom), even if they still interact with me as a daddy figure who they want to take care of each of them. Edit: and let me state at this point that ALL of the girls are almost wholly healed. They are vivacious, vibrant and full of life in a way that my ‘first girl’ (the only one who sees me as her husband) never was.
My goal is still a fully healthy, adult interdependence with all of the girls who make up my wife, but we aren’t there yet. I had to be willing to start where each of them was and walk with her, at her pace and at whatever stage of dependence she started until she was able to move forward.
…Sigh, this reply is already too long…
And yes, you are correct that this topic of attachment is massive. I naturally used the principles to help my wife. I think we are all ‘wired’ that way, but the Western cultures seem to want to beat those principles out of us for some reason even though most of us want treated the way the theory espouses. Once I discovered the theory proper, I studied up on it so I could become more purposeful in it. I even did quite a long series of articles on my personal blog to address some of the main concepts that were critical to our journey.
Let me simply state that using the attachment concepts of affect regulation, safe haven and proximity maintenance I was able to not only walk my wife thru EVERY extreme state that she manifested (and trust me with d.i.d. you essentially get the entire spectrum rolled up into one journey), but I learned to pull her out of them more quickly and help her heal to the point that she rarely experiences them anymore. And when she does get triggered nowadays, her reactions aren’t much more severe than my reactions to things that trigger me. And the theory helped me with all the ‘lesser’ issues, too, like depression, anxiety, and anything else you can think of.
Beyond that is the theory’s concept of the inner working model. The littlest girls and I figured this one out together. It can make the difference between the healing one experiences being temporary or being permanent. I’ve been trying to follow the debate over on the CBT blog on this website, and I haven’t quite figured out if CBT takes into account one’s inner working model or just tries to force the change without realizing that the inner working model is like the operating system in a computer. EVERYTHING else is founded upon that, and so unless you change the inner working model from the trauma paradigm that most childhood trauma victims have to a more healthy one like someone who was securely attached, a lot of healing work will have limited effect.
But for Steve’s sake, I will sincerely add that the theory is NOT a cure all: we’ve had to use other principles for various issues, but it definitely can help in so many, many situations.
I guess I’ll finish. I’m sorry not to do this topic better here. Like you said, this website just is not set up for that kind of a multi-layer discussion. I wish the attachment series on my blog had gained more traction: it’s one of the things I’m most proud of, but it takes a lot of work for the SO or support person, and it required so much change on my own part before I was able to implement some of it to the fullest extent that I wonder if most people wouldn’t rather those little magic pills…
Sam
Alex,
I agree with everything you are saying…and yet, attachment theory is so much more…as I started out this entire discussion, attachment theory cuts against the Western cultures’ over-valuation of independence. It is not only about instilling that secure sense of self internally during childhood, it is about developing at network around our loved ones who will have each other’s back when things go wrong. And it’s about learning to go thru life developing a ‘buddy system’; learning how to help regulate each other when life hits us with trauma or storms.
I love John Bowlby and the work he began, but I also had to learn how the concepts of safe haven, proximity maintenance and affect regulation could be practically implemented to help my wife heal…but beyond that, how those concepts just help each and everyone of us walk thru this life that can be so difficult at times. Those are concepts that my wife and I now each use with each other AND our 28-year old son even though he lives 12 hours away.
Sam
Steve,
I don’t have the breadth of experience that you do, so this isn’t meant to refute or argue with your statement, but in our personal experience until each of the girls (alters) were securely attached to me, they seemed unable to go past the original trauma. But once they had that foundation of being securely attached, it seemed to propel their ability to connect to each other (by tearing down the dissociation) and allow them to mature and discover latent abilities/traits that had otherwise been absent in my wife as a whole.
That doesn’t mean I think attachment issues are everything, as much as I may talk about them, but they seemed to be foundational in my wife’s healing experience.
Alex,
I’m sure you, as Steve noted, would agree that often times the dysfunction is inadvertent, like it was mostly in my family, and even in my wife’s as messed up as her mom was/is. But the dysfunction is still painful even if it is inadvertent and I’ve ended up kind of being the black sheep of the family because my mom wasn’t properly attached to my dad as she blamed him for them ‘having to get married’ and so she waged a 56-year war against him as she jumped from child to child to child looking for that emotional attachment she refused to give to her husband. And yet, if I were to call her out on it, she would be dumbfounded and defensive as she feels she is the model Christian wife.
It’s rather sad how we humans can live with so much cognitive dissonance, sigh. But I really don’t think she is, or most of us are, intentional about it. I would chalk it up to dissociation. And though I feel it’s a much milder form than what my wife experienced, I still think it’s what causes so many incongruent words and actions in most of us. Kind of like the murderous mafioso who is kind and loving to those within his own circle. He has compartmentalized, ie dissociated, the incongruence between his various spheres of life.
Alex, this was a VERY, VERY basic video, and I do agree that it came off kind of as if things are cookie-cutterish. But the basic concepts of attachment theory have been validated over a host of situations especially the ‘strange situation’ test that the video mentioned. But how those concepts play out…I would agree with you that they will be as varied as there are people on this earth.
Sam
Well, it’s a very basic video and only deals with one’s childhood. But it lays out a few of the basic concepts of attachment theory. However, it completely ignores the key concepts of safe haven, affect regulation, and glosses over proximity maintenance.
The good news is someone who grew up with one of the 3 dysfunctional attachment systems (avoidant, ambivalent or disorganized) CAN learn a new way. However, at least in our case, it has meant rejecting the prevailing, pathological foundation of hyper-independence and hyper-individualism that our culture pushes, and it has meant that I had to understand my proper role of the primary attachment figure…something the ‘experts’ are only now beginning to study in romantic adult relationships. But the healing process isn’t easy: there’s no magic pill. I had to be willing to accept my wife’s ‘neediness’, something that this culture finds ‘toxic’. But as I filled her ‘neediness’ each day, slowly those attachment dysfunctions were healed, repaired and now for the most part, she displays all the signs of secure attachment.
Sam
I never knew much about this, but the little I did always made me wonder. This critique resonates with some of the reservations I had from my very limited exposure to the practice.
I know you rarely, if ever, respond to the comments section, but I wish that you would make a place in your new institute for those of us ‘in the trenches’ who are laymen and not scientist by degree but scientists by necessity. I’ve had to figure out how to help my wife heal from d.i.d. using attachment concepts and anything else that I could. I took a pragmatic approaching, using what worked, discarding what didn’t, always relying on the feedback that she gave as we walked the journey together. She and I have learned so many things; things that I believe have wider application, but it’s hard to get a hearing when western culture only seems to care how many letters one can put behind his/her name. I learned how to take her thru all the ‘extreme’ states without any medicines, as they are called on this website, but am still combating the residual dissociation…but we are getting there…
There are so many things that occur 24/7 ‘in the trenches’ that you experts simply will never experience in the safety and confines of the office: we, the SO’s, family members and even involved friends have so much to offer, if only someone would take us seriously.
Yours,
Sam
Hi Krista,
I am again so impressed that you were able to do all this on your own: that shouldn’t have been necessary, but for your sake, I’m glad you were able to do so.
I still hope for the day when SO’s, family members and friends are taught how to be the natural allies they ought to be. It took me a couple of years to figure out it myself after wading thru my own issues, to boot, but I see so many places in your article that good allies could have helped, especially in affect regulation, and not ‘facing the enemy’ on one’s own.
I want to honestly explain my struggles to you IF I were to do what you and everyone else suggests and “take care of YOURSELF if you want to be effective support.”
After journaling for more than 10,000 pages these last 11 years during this journey, to help me deal with my own issues, to deal with the inherent stress of this journey, and to help me figure out how best to help and support my girls (as I phrase it on my blog), I’ve got a pretty good handle on what makes me tick.
IF I were to take care of myself first as this culture suggests there are two things I would do: 1) I would have a healthy, intimate adult relationship, and 2) I would enter the field in which my college degree is, mainly ministering to others…these are the two things that rip at my heart every single day of my life: the void in my life of these two things is overwhelming…and yet to do so, would probably mean leaving my wife since she and I have NEVER had a healthy or especially intimate relationship (emotionally, physically, or otherwise) even though we both love each other. Her past trauma has simply truncated so many of those desires in her: so if it’s ‘me first’ do I leave?
And the same about my vocational desires. She married me knowing exactly who I am, what my chosen vocation in life was, and within a few years, she made it clear that she would never allow me to follow that desire because it struck at her ‘safety needs.’ Again, if it’s ‘me first’ do I leave her?
I’m really not trying to be dismissive or argumentative, but one’s marriage vows are there for a reason despite our culture’s infatuation with rewriting them to say not much of anything nowadays. I love my wife: no this isn’t the life I would have chosen or the vocation of my dreams (being in a factory), but I’m trying to make lemonade out of the lemons that we were both dealt. She certainly didn’t choose this. No one says, “please rape me repeatedly when I’m two until I break and fracture and never know what it means to be healthy” (her words not mine). But I love her, and I choose US even though I know it means I’m choosing heartache and stress each and everyday until we get thru this…
But trust me…that heartache and stress is a great motivator. It pushes me every single day to help her in every and any way that I can. It teaches me to be in tune with her so that I have learned never to coerce her, but how best to create an environment that feels safe and loving to her so that she can heal, truly, deeply and fully as I believe is still possible.
Again, I am not trying to be dismissive, but what you have shared, which many, many other people have shared to me as well…I just don’t know how to do that AND be true to some other core values in myself and be true to my one and only love. It’s one of the things I truly think the new testament in the Christian bible got right: the idea of sacrificial love and giving up oneself and one’s life for another as the true sign of love and friendship.
Yours,
Sam
No, it’s not soppy, concerned carer. That’s what I’ve learned from attachment theory. For us, it’s mostly been a repudiation of the Western independence that is beaten into all of us from the time of birth when parents are foolishly taught to let their children cry themselves to sleep…and the myriad of ways we are told to let others suffer on their own and ‘tough it out’ or ‘pull ourselves up by our OWN bootstraps”. We are all systematically shamed by this culture of deranged independence, and my wife and I simply reject it.
I make a concerted effort to, essentially, weave a ‘cocoon’ of attachment points between her and myself throughout as many aspects of our lives as I possibly can. And each of those attachment connections strengthens BOTH of us. Just because I don’t have any massive trauma in my past, doesn’t mean I don’t need the deep connection to another human, and even if she can’t give me what I most deeply need at the moment, I’ve still learned to soak up the connections that she is able to give me.
I really do love the song, “Lean on Me” because it’s so true. Don’t ever feel it’s soppy. Interdependence is what we were all ‘wired’ for: it’s far more healthy than this independence garbage we are all force fed our entire lives.
Sam
Alex,
I almost missed your longer explanation that you added after your initial post. When I googled transmediumship I only saw stuff in there about, essentially, being a medium. I certainly could use ‘energy’ if it were for real. I don’t have time for pie-in-the-sky beliefs like so many I grew up with. I ONLY care about what practically helps me and my wife…especially because her last ‘alter’ has almost exhausted ALL of us, trying to help her heal and connect because she’s different than ALL the others. She has very little long term memory, and so even though we’ve made progress securely attaching her to me, it’s like that movie of the 50 First Dates, and I have to start from scratch over and over and over, and so it’s hard for her to feel safe, which means it’s been monumentally hard for us to get her connected to the rest of the group, and she was/is so terrified as long as she disconnected from the others that ALL intimacy, emotional, physical and otherwise has ceased for more than 3 years, and we’re all really struggling right now…and I’m just so overwhelmingly tired, and hoping I/we are going to make it especially when we’ve all come so far..and yet I just don’t know how to help her past this…I’ve never had a conundrum like her lack of long-term memory has presented to us on this healing journey…sigh…oh, well, enough of the online therapy session, you didn’t ask for it…I just don’t have any one to talk to about this kind of stuff…we are so far past anything you would read from ISSTD or the popular lit…and I feel like I’m going to break if we don’t get a breakthru… 🙁
Hi Alex,
you are welcome to tell me, but I’ll be honest, this journey my wife and I have taken the last 11 years has pretty much knocked out ALL of my ‘practical’ beliefs of the supernatural. I grew up a very devout evangelical Christian and got deeply into the charismatic movements and such during my young adulthood, but there was a part of me that always wondered what was wrong with me when “God” seemed to move in people all around me, and nothing happened to me…
And then when my wife and I started this healing journey, I just didn’t have the emotional strength for anything that wasn’t ‘real’ or didn’t work, and so many of my Christian beliefs simply didn’t work out into real life, especially my expectations of some kind of supernatural intervention to help me and my wife get thru the hell we were going thru…
And so I’ve kind of ended up with a humanistic Christianity, which my evangelical friends would call a heresy. I have a theistic worldview, but I don’t expect any help. I personally call it a Narnian Christianity: all those times that Aslan was absent for ages and ages which aren’t in the books by Lewis. I believe the moral codes, I believe there is more, BUT practically speaking, it’s up to me to help my wife heal, not some awol deity that I was never good enough to earn favors for answered prayers.
I do understand that I’ve said a number of things in this response with which you would strongly disagree, but it’s where I’m at, and so far it’s been pragmatically useful in helping my wife and me survive the trenches we’ve traveled together. I’m sure this is far more than you expected, or wanted, especially as I can tell that for you, your journey seems to have taken you in the opposite direction toward more openness to ‘spiritual’ things.
Yours,
Sam
(edit: and I guess I’ll add I’ve become a lot more socially, religiously and politically moderate from how I was raised…I’m kind of a pariah now to all of my family who are ardent Trump supporters, lol)
I apologize for making the generalization. I try to read and re-read my responses so I get them ‘right’. I try to not make over-generalizations because, of course, not everyone fits in a neat category. So I apologize to you and any others who felt my response mis-represented them: that was not my intention.
Sam
Concerned Carer,
I see that no one ever addressed your concerns. Perhaps I can try.
I think you can see the resistance that the survivors have on this site to suggesting that anything is ‘wrong’ because our culture weaponizes that admission. For my own wife it took 20 years before she felt safe to do so with me and only AFTER I made it clear to her that I loved her unconditionally. Until that point, anytime I would make the suggestion, she would spit back that I was the one with a problem. And so I don’t expect any less of the survivors on this site.
And I think that’s why talking about mental health ‘trauma’ in the same way we talk about bodily trauma is so valuable. If we see someone with a cast on her/his leg, typically we think ‘oh s/he broke it’ but there’s also an assumption in there that with time to heal, and maybe some physical therapy if it was a really bad break, the person will be back 100% when the process is over.
But there’s another assumption that while the person is in that cast, there will naturally be things s/he can’t do until the healing has been completed. Most of us don’t assign value judgments to those things that can’t be done, we just accept them as part of the trauma and convalescence period. And if we love the person, we don’t take umbrage that we have to ‘pick up the slack’ while our loved one is healing.
I feel all those points can be seamlessly transferred to our loved ones who have suffered mental trauma. And the manifestations that occur from that trauma, whether it be ‘extreme states’, excessive triggers, ptsd symptoms or anything else, should just be viewed the same as in the list of ‘currently can’t’ when a person has a broken leg.
I rarely talk about my wife’s list of ‘currently can’ts’ even though there are a lot of them and some of them cause me extreme stress. And when she begins to berate herself over that list of ‘currently cant’s’, I tend to just say, ‘that’s the d.i.d. and it will get better once we get thru it.’ I tend to focus her and myself on the positives, like a good coach. We both know the negatives are there and we don’t pretend like they aren’t there, but we try to stay forward focused, knowing that what ‘currently can’t be done’ is not our final destination.
Hi Sera,
thank you for sharing your experience, especially how you were reported to the authorities. As much as I’ve kept my wife out of the system, your story is a cautionary tale to me because this journey she and I are on is so hard many days that my personal journal is filled with the sigh that I’m so tired of life and the wish that I’d never been born. To me that feeling is always there, ebbing and flowing, but it’s kind of freeing, knowing that if things ever get too bad, I have an out, and with that ‘out’ it gives me power over those feelings…
…And yet on my blog I wrote about how to help someone feeling suicidal from my personal experience, and fortunately none of my immediate family who read it called anyone on me. And when my wife and I take our daily walks together, we walk past a counseling service and part of me loves the idea of just getting some help and support on the days when it’s so hard helping her on my own…but your experience shows to me that my wife’s insistence on our anonymity is probably for the best, even though it means we can’t help others, because it protects me as well as her, sigh…
I’m glad nothing worse than a phone call and a little embarrassment happened to you. Thank you for being willing to share for those of us who can’t yet…
Anechidna,
I think you are going to find different opinions about ‘psychological injury’ on this site. To me it’s a perfectly good analogy between a severe broken leg and a severe traumatic injury suffered to the mind. With proper care both injuries can be healed and the sufferer can go on with life relatively none the worse. But if either injury is ignored, it is likely it will never ‘self-heal’ and then that injury will stress the greater system and if that stress is enough in the future, at some point it could begin to cause other issues.
To me dissociation is the biggest physiological result that comes from mental trauma, though that may simply be because of my wife and my experience. I’m not an expert, but I wonder if the dissociation is what causes all the differences in brain mapping (though I take all the hoopla over those mappings with a grain of salt!) Anyway, I believe dissociation in the mind is similar to what happens to the body when a broken leg is never healed. From that point on the body will do all kinds of things to get around the natural use of that leg. Sure, some body parts may even grow stronger as a result of having to take over for the leg’s function, but doing so will also stress parts of the body that simply were never made to walk. In the end, the person may even learn to be relatively mobile, but that doesn’t mean that was the way the body was intended to function: it’s just a testament to our ability to adapt.
But even decades later, as in my wife’s case, once the mental trauma is addressed and with a lot of help (kind of like physical therapy to strengthen the atrophied body parts), her brain/mind is healing. It’s just a lot more work to undo all those ‘workarounds’ caused by the dissociation than if we had know about it in our 20’s.
I have tried to teach other SO’s on my blog but simply never got much traction: I have more than 100 articles explaining various things that I/we faced helping my wife heal from severe dissociation: things I struggled with, things I learned while I helped her, practical things and more theoretical issues, but I would guess most people really do want magic pills to give to the ‘problem person’ rather than do the hard work of helping someone heal from severe trauma. It’s really not all that complicated, but it is hard for both: there’s no way around that, and sadly our culture doesn’t do ‘hard’.
The staff here know I would be happy to do so, but I think our story, because we are such an anomaly, causes some issues with those who have been ‘spoken for/over’ by SO’s and family members since my wife refuses to come here and affirm what I say and affirm that I’m not secretly keeping her in chains! 🙂
So until they can find a way for me to share without it causing undo distress to some of the survivors, I try to content myself with the comments section and the camaraderie of finding other people like me who don’t think the effects of trauma make one crazy or weird.
Sam
“Family & friends often look to the ostensible authority for the quickest, ‘cleanest’ fix possible…usually some form of sedation.”
I guess I’ll add the longer version:
1) I’ve always had ‘authority’ issues and never really cared much for going along with the crowd. Plus I was school valedictorian and graduated from college with a 4.0 and my wife is literally a genius, and so I never really saw the ‘authorities’ as having anything over us.
2) And we homeschooled our son the entire way: another X against authority. Our son told my wife that she was his hardest teacher until he got into his master’s program in a Boston-area university. And then, even though he didn’t have the pedigree of his classmates, he was the only one that his university recruited for their PhD program; so eh, who needs authorities?
3) And even though I’ve moved to the political/religious/social center as I’ve helped my wife heal, I grew up pretty far Right, and so we didn’t expect the ‘experts’ to do for us what we could do for ourselves. Moreover, I quickly found out as she and I traveled this journey and as I read up on her issues, that the so-called experts were full of it and didn’t know half of what they thought they did.
…so I guess all those things kind of made both of us never really look for that ‘quick fix’ like most of our culture does.
Sam
How did I come to that wisdom? The short version is indeed that she is literally the one and only woman to whom I have ever said “I love you” or been with, so I never considered any solution except a win/win for the both of us no matter how hard it’s been for both of us. But the longer version to that question is much more complicated and convoluted, and I deal with many of those issues over on my wordpress blog, but for now, I’ve found a philosophical home in many ways over here.
Sam
I’m kind of an anomaly here. My fight in this battle is about keeping people OUT of the system before they ever get entangled in it.
Our son and I kept my wife/his mother completely out of the system when she started dealing with all kinds of ‘extreme states’ as they like to call it on this website. I hope some day that I can share with other interested SO’s and family members how they can do the same. That’s why I find it so discouraging that all of your family distanced themselves from your own fight…but my wife does tell me I’m the ‘weird’ one for not seeing her issues like the rest of humanity, lol.
But if I have anything to offer from my perspective, I’ll be happy to do so.
Wishing you well,
Sam
Hi Krista,
Congratulations for getting yourself out of the system! I hope your subsequent articles give others who read them hope and a plan how to do the same. It’s too bad you had to do it yourself.
I did a search for the psychological injury model and didn’t find anything other than this article on MIA. We’ve had some other articles in the past about collaborations to move to a more trauma-based model, and I wish you well. I appreciate much of what you said. I think things will change only when their reaches a critical mass of enough people who no longer accept the various cognitive dissonances that you described. Our understanding that people heal people, not drugs. The understanding that trauma is at the heart to so much mental distress, not some mythical biochemical imbalance. And more.
Sam
I honestly hear you. I really do understand your concerns: you aren’t the first person to voice these same exact issues. And I accept that you are honestly sharing this with me out of concern for me and my wife.
I just don’t know how to convey to you that your concerns and misgivings really are based on a strawman. I don’t know where these tropes began since I’ve heard them elsewhere, but our experience is completely different than you and others are imagining it.
First, if this is your opinion of dissociation, it is NOT our experience of it. For us/her, dissociation is like discovering a long-lost castle in the woods. it’s always been there, but the path is overgrown because no one has used it in decades. But neural plasticity teaches us that once we start to use that path, it will become worn and more and more accessible.
When the trauma happened in the past, the mind sequesters that pain and anguish from the rest of the mind so that it doesn’t engulf the entire person and a complete breakdown of ALL functioning occurs. The only reason ‘alters’ occur is because of that sequestering. So they kind of take on a life of their own.
Now I could demand, as you say, that I will only talk to ‘my wife’. But that’s not how each of them sees it. In her mind, she is a real, live entity with her own thoughts and feelings. Each girl has repeatedly voiced this to me when she first began to join us outside.
And so I accepted this starting place. My validation made her feel safe and accepted. And as we walked together, I helped each girl release the lies she had accepted from the trauma. And as I won each one’s trust, they each wanted to be ‘adopted’ into our family: the colloquial term we use for becoming securely attached to me.
As that began to happen, the trauma being healed, the lies being resolved, and the secure attachment to me giving her a safe base, we began the process of tearing down the last of the dissociation between each girl. Little by little each girl began to wear a footpath from her own, little, forgotten castle to the main pathways that all of them could access…and once we got to that phase, slowly, they each began to interconnect with the others.
At first it was extremely important to each that she was a distinct individual, but slowly as they continue to make more and more and more connections with each other, they are less concerned with being individualistic and are acting as a group. And from what I have read, more and more experts realize that we ALL act like ‘groups’ and not monolithic personalities.
But they still want me to recognize their individuality even as they shed more and more and more of their need to act on their own. Maybe some day none of them will care about herself as an individual, but what I did was give each the time and space she needed to heal and feel safe to integrate with the others. I didn’t demand any of them act like my wife even though I personally feel they are all my wife.
And at this point I just got engaged to one girl in December: she wants to be my wife. I’m pre-engaged to another. And a third has mentioned it. So one by one, each is CHOOSING to become my wife, but it’s always her choice. I make clear that I will never withhold my love or affection if she doesn’t do what I wish.
I’m just not sure how you object to me allowing my wife the space and time she needs to heal in the manner that feels the safest to each of them: that seems to be what most of the survivors here want: validated and loved unconditionally, even while I shepherd each girl gently toward the goal of healing and integration within the larger group.
Sam
some of what you have said I agree with. As well, I am aware of the various controversies around this issue. And yes, I personally operate on the premise of this being about trauma and dissociation and you can see that all over this site when I discuss particulars of how I help my wife. I agree that the various ‘girls’ are simply different aspects of my wife’s unified personality, but if I were to call her experience of things a ‘fairy tale’ all of you survivors would burn me at the stake for invalidating her experience. Instead I walk with her, where each of the girls are at, and yet I’m upfront with them that they are all part of my unified wife, but I don’t make that the basis of my interactions with them.
The problem seems to be that you want me to be the exact opposite of what most survivors on this site cry for: someone willing to walk in my wife’s reality rather than dictate to her that she follow my reality And yet, if I did that, then you would simply pillory me for being like everyone else.
Lastly, I DO get what you are saying: you’re not saying anything I haven’t heard before. I simply disagree.
Respectfully,
Sam
(edit: I guess I’ll add that even though I walk in my wife’s reality which is based on her past trauma during childhood, I model a new one without fear and trauma for all the girls, and as they live with me and our son, they are ALL moving toward this one. But I give them the time to do this of their own volition and not because I mandate it as the price to have a relationship with me.)
Like it or not, the SO’s, family members and friends have a real stake in this fight, AND we are the first line of defense against more people becoming psychiatric survivors. My wife couldn’t have done it on her own without me and our son when all hell broke loose with her ‘extreme states.’
But if some want to treat us like second-class citizens based on their own experiences of bad SO’s and family members, that’s rather short sighted. We ought to be reaching out to those who are open to a new way of thinking, and helping them and teaching them, but also recognizing so many of them are dealing with their own demons, too. We should draw the circle large enough by understanding we are ALL in this together against a system that is truly larger than psychiatry or even amoral capitalism, but the culture at large that tries to sweep trauma and abuse under the rug at any cost: psychiatry is just a tool to help them do so.
My heart is sad every time an SO or family member comes on this site and decries the trauma their loved one has suffered at the hands of the system: we have a number of authors who have done so recently. But to myself I think, “This didn’t have to happen.” And every time I read a story in the news of a cop killing someone in mental distress, I think the same thing. But until the SO’s and family members are viewed as potential allies and given a real voice for their perspective while recognizing their own distresses and issues, this movement will continue to struggle, I believe.
I think an Open Dialogue kind of model is the way to go the little I know of it because it seems to bring all 3 stakeholders into the equation: sufferers, SO/family members/friends and ‘experts’; not this ‘survivors’ first and foremost mentality.
Sam
Sorry, Rachel, I did NOT mean you as in you personally. I guess I should have used ‘one’ third, person, general, rather than you, 2nd, person, ‘specific.’
As for d.i.d. being a psych label and rejecting it. Well once again are we ALL going to start from scratch every time we discuss everything? Or are we going to use the common vernacular and go from there?
I do understand that for those who have had those diagnoses weaponized against them, then they/you see them VERY differently, than my wife and I who see those diagnoses as an ‘aha’ moment. For us it simply told us what we were dealing with, and then we learned, together, how to deal with it from there.
Sam
I’m sorry you can’t see past your own experience Kindredspirit, and clearing NOTHING is going to convince you otherwise. I have no need for my wife’s diagnosis: I’d much prefer a healthy wife, not spending 95% of our private time with ‘littles’ who are starved for the love and attention and affection they never got from their parents the first time around.
Rachel, my wife refuses to come on these sites because when we first started this journey, she did the whole survivor sites stuff, but they kicked one of the little girls off even though she broke none of the rules and ever since they have all refused to go back. Plus you add to the mix the toxic notions about d.i.d. currently going on in this culture like the movie Switch and its sequel Mr. Glass that just opened in the theaters, and a host of other books that now love to portray people with d.i.d. as some sociopathic, super killer and even cannibal. And there still is the past excesses of the so called experts(!) of the satanic crap that is still in the minds of some like Kindredspirit as if those abuses somehow discredit the entire issue.
So instead she/they spends her/their time on other sites. We homeschooled our son, and so the two millennials (my fiancée and girlfriend) have an online personality that fits that profile and they spend it trying to help younger wives and single women trapped in pseudo-Christian, patriarchal situations. And from time to time when they can clearly see the signs of d.i.d. in people, they’ll privately reveal their own to them and help shepherd the women, if possible, to more healthy situations.
Lavendersage, yes, you know that I HATE the language that is in the common vernacular. We’ve had this conversation in the past. If you went on my blog, you’d almost never find it, but here, I realize my story is only partially known, and so we are ALL handicapped by the decision of whether to use the common language that everyone knows even if we disagree with it or go into a long explanation of what I mean. If someone new came on this website and simply heard me talking about my wife, and then in another place I was talking about my fiancée, and then in another my girlfriend, what would they think? That I’m in some kind of open marriage? So we are all constrained to some degree by the common vernacular. And you have to notice my struggle as I’ll often say both, or put alters in quotes, but sometimes my time and space is limited and so I do the best I can. The writers on MIA often express the same struggle. I’m sorry you don’t like it: I really don’t either.
Sam
But the inner circle consists of survivors only. End of story.
I’ve been thinking about this comment ever since Kindredspirit made it. I know this is the attitude of some on this website, but to see it so bluntly is still painful.
I’m glad that’s not my wife’s attitude. It’s not mine either. On my blog I likened how her d.i.d. affects our relationship to a prison. She and I are BOTH in that prison room. But she is chained inside the room. For me, the door is open, and I’m free to leave if I want. So many people do leave in this culture. My one brother left his ‘broken’ wife. But there are others who choose every day to stay in that prison room right there with our loved ones, and vow never to leave until we BOTH can leave.
She and I have been thru hell together. Even our son had to learn to help care for his mother when the others started to join our family. There were panic attacks, night terrors, hypervigilance, flashbacks, ‘alters’ running off for fun and running and hiding in fear, paralyzing fear, triggers galore. My son and I were with her 24/7 for the first couple of years because things were so bad. I had the day ‘shift’ while he was in college at the local branch, and then when I was at work at nights, he took the night shift. But my wife and I did try to shield him from the worst of it, and never asked him to do more than he freely did. We couldn’t have done it without him.
On top of that things wrecked havoc in our marriage. Many times I wasn’t even allowed to hold my wife’s hand because the new girls were so traumatized and scared of everyone and everything. Real intimacy, emotional, physical and otherwise, were largely gone. But little by little we got thru it. I learned how to help each of them. The newcomers learned they were safe in our house and with me and our son, and slowly each was ‘adopted’ into the family. The lies associated with the trauma began to be undone and slowly we began to dismantle the worst of the dissociation.
I’m not unusual. I don’t think I’m a martyr or saint: just someone honoring the woman I love and the vows I made and looking for a win/win solution for both of us.
Your comments are extremely invalidating to those of us who are in this WITH our loved ones. We don’t get paid. And we certainly don’t get validated in this culture of the me-first attitude where many tell me I ought to just leave or take care of myself first as if that’s really an option.
I’m truly sorry for your personal experience. The little you’ve described elsewhere on this website sounds truly horrible, but not all SO’s are selfish and manipulative. Not all families are of the NAMI kind looking for an excuse to get rid of the ‘problem’ member. And thus the ‘survivors’ are NOT the sum total of those suffering, and until this movement enlarges the circle and recognizes there are others who have just as much of a stake in a solution as the ‘survivors’, I wonder if this movement will ever really gain traction.
Sam
It’s kind of ironic, but in our experience, it’s been my voice that is overridden at EVERY point by my wife’s healing needs, sigh. Her needs ALWAYS trump my needs and I have the choice to acquiesce or move on, but she’s my one and only…so I stay and fight for a better ending than either of us have had so far. Even our son has become a ‘big brother’ to all the 7 littler girls who joined the family, but at least they do defer to the mother figure when he wants/needs one: I rarely get to have a ‘wife’ anymore…
Sam
Hi Lee,
my wife has d.i.d. but we were fortunate that she never got sucked up into the system and so her, my and our experience is so radically different than most in her position. We’ve walked the healing journey together the last 11 years, using attachment concepts as the foundation of her healing, but using other things as well like neural plasticity.
If you are familiar with the show, United States of Tara, our experience is just the opposite of that. ALL the girls (alters) are securely attached to me (got engaged to the first one in December!). Sure there was some chaos in the beginning, but there was a lot of trauma to heal at that point. Now we are dealing mostly with the dissociation, and it’s a lot more difficult to undo, but we are getting there. I have a little blog over on wordpress under this name/Loving My DID Girl(s), but it never gained much traction, and so I’ve kind of let it go dormant for now. Philosophically I agree with much that is on this website, though it’s hard simply because our experience is so different than most here.
Take care,
Sam
Hi Sara,
no nothing is wrong with you or anyone who experiences these kinds of things. The picture of the little bunny and fox says so much. I believe many early childhood abuse survivors view themselves thru that kind of a picture, even if their adults selves don’t realize it.
The ‘nice’ thing about my wife’s d.i.d. is it makes so many things extremely clear. And I still remember the various little girls (alters) telling me how scared each was and how little she felt, and my repeated reply to each was always, “I know you are scared, Honey. But you’re not alone anymore. I’m a big man. I’ve got you now because I take care of my little girls.” And that’s one aspect of how I helped walk my wife thru her paralyzing fear because I inserted myself into her picture of the little bunny and fox until she could see herself with me holding her, and that fox didn’t seem so scary with me in the picture.
In attachment terms they call it proximity maintenance. Mary Ainsworth had a lot to teach all of us in her strange situation protocols. The experts are (finally) beginning to study how attachment concepts apply throughout our lives and not just when we are little children, but pretty much I applied the majority of those concepts that they have identified, that are necessary to produce securely attached, healthy children, to my wife’s healing, and it’s been a godsend for us. Holding her thru that paralyzing fear that she experienced was just one thing attachment theory taught us.
I know each of us likes to view these issues thru various prisms like classes, ‘races’ economic structures, etc, but for me I see so much more relevance in the breakdown of family and social structures. There will always be a ruling, oppressive class to some extent: there always has been throughout the history of humankind, but when the family units and social structures are strong, they enable us to faces those adversities because we know that we are never truly alone in them like that little bunny facing the fox: someone actually is holding us and keeping us safe.
Capitalism is NOT the problem, nor is socialism the answer. The black and white fallacy going around this website gets tiring. You want socialism and to see how destructive it can be, just look south to Venezuela. And the Scandinavian states that everyone on the Left likes to point to are NOT socialist. They simply have a much bigger social, safety net than we do, but most of their industries are privately owned.
I would argue that Wall Street is much of the problem. It’s completely out of control. I read an interesting op-ed from the Left this past week that explained why OAC’s call for the 70% tax rate on the 1% is based in the history of this country, and has some good reasons for it. If I remember my history correctly, CEO’s in the 70’s made something like 60x’s the average worker, now it’s more like 400+. That’s immoral. But it’s just as immoral when I went to St. Martinique last Fall, a socialist paradise under the rule of France, and more than 40% of the populace doesn’t work because of their brand of socialism.
So, no, I don’t agree that capitalism is the problem. I believe an a-moral and unfettered capitalism is the problem. But on a similar note, I believe socialism could work under the right conditions, too, but certainly not one like we see in Venezuela or even more benignly in St. Martinique were laziness and sloth are tolerated.
Let’s talk about social nets. Let’s also discuss the value of work, even if it’s not one’s dream job. I have a college education but have worked in a factory for 25 years. I never would have chosen this, and I still hope to leave and do what is in my heart when my wife is in a better position, but this job has enabled me to raise our son and take care of my family, and for that I’m thankful.
Sam
Sera,
I’m sorry the real point of my comment got lost in a poor attempt at a joke, of sorts. But as I re-read that first sentence, I can see why you took it the way you did.
Sorry,
Sam
Hi Sera,
are you just venting or looking for solutions? Not blaming you if you are just venting. I know Will Hall vents here sometimes, too, on the lack of progress.
I’ve often wondered what it would take to change things. My own failed attempt on my little blog to connect with other SO’s only left me with wondering what I did wrong, wondering if my wife had simply been willing to join me, would others have listened then? Wondering if I had just found the right ‘benefactor’ would that have enlarged my voice and audience? Wondering if I could get out the ‘love-story’ between me and all my wife’s ‘alters’ (I just got engaged to the first new girl. I’m pre-engaged to another. A third has expressed interest in doing so, and all the other little ones are deeply in love with me as a daddy figure: and it’s mutual on my side), would that bypass people’s defenses and apathy and make them willing to listen?
But, alas, I have no answers; just sadness that I failed and no matter how many times I’ve begged my wife (all of them) to join me and see if that changed the dynamics, she is terrified of the stigma this culture has about d.i.d. (thank you, Switch, et al, sigh).
Sam 🙁
“They were pointing out the contradictions in your posts for others’ benefit.”
You have framed that negatively. I choose to see it as Shaun F. struggling with new concepts within his old framework. And this website can give him the space and friendly people to help him as he grasps these new ideas and how to work them out practically in his life, or we can be pissy with him for ‘contradicting himself.” He has already shown himself open to new ideas and being ‘nudged’ in a direction that most of us would agree is better, but it’s a BIG deal to him. His way of life is on the line, and for anyone to act like it’s not a big deal is showing a total lack of empathy. I’d rather see him struggle with ideas and concepts and really embrace things as ‘his’ rather that people just bully him into something or put him down for ‘contradicting himself’…
Hi Shaun F,
I know you take a lot of flak on this website, but I think you are asking some of the right questions, and realizing there’s more to things than simply rebelling against ‘the system’. I’m sorry I don’t seem able to convey what my wife and I have learned. It seems you get hung up on her ‘extreme dissociation’ rather than understanding that we are ALL in the same boat; she just happens to be further along the spectrum than most, but NOT by any means the worst.
Her experience has taught me so much about how I function because I don’t view her in a different category from me. When we first started this journey, she repeatedly told me, “I don’t know what ‘healthy’ looks like, and so it forced me to become as healthy as I could so I could be a good example for her., and yet having distinct ‘alters’ allowed me/us to dissect the issues of trauma and dissociation and neural atrophy and attachment systems, etc in a way that would have been otherwise impossible if I’d had to figure it out using my own experience or others not so far along on the spectrum.
Sam
Shaun F,
I had hoped to build some dialogue with you up above, so maybe that means you aren’t interested in my experience with my wife and I’ll stay out if you want me to do so.
Yes, it is about ‘brain wiring’. The trauma causes dissociation. Dissociation over time then causes neural atrophy. But even once the trauma is addressed and ‘healed’, the neural atrophy is still there. THAT is why I consider the dissociation worse than the trauma because it has taken me years to help my wife thru her various alters reinvigorate all those neural pathways that had atrophied to nearly non-existence. I promote lots of tasks that help them learn to work ‘together’.
But beyond that the dissociation also splits up the brain/mind’s traits/abilities and one alter may control the trait/ability that another needs to address other aspects of an issue she is struggling with. Say for instance eating issues (‘disorders’). One girl struggles greatly with her poor body image even though my wife has a 5’6″ frame and only weighs 127lbs. Well the other girls have a really GOOD body image. One girl told me, “I look damn good for 50!” But connecting her good self image to the girl with the bad self image takes time and reinvigorating those neural pathways and teaching them how to do it.
Trauma and dissociation and neural wiring and all that are all interwoven but they are not the same and they effect issues differently…
Sam
Dissassociation isn’t the real damage to the brain…it is trauma and will always be trauma. The interesting thing is that we all react differently to trauma.
Hi Shaun F.
I do understand why you would feel that way. In the d.i.d. world, most people do everything they possibly can to avoid dissociating. They treat it like the plague and as a result only 6% of the cases are ‘florid’ where you could actually meet the individual alters. So most of the common and expert literature view things like you do and don’t really understand that the trauma and the resultant dissociation have VERY different roles and effects upon a person’s brain/mind.
But my wife and I have welcomed and lived in ‘the dissociation’ for the last 11 years. We’ve embraced it, and it helped me see that the two really are different and cause different issues even though the trauma causes the dissociation initially.
The dissociation is far more destructive and difficult to undo than the original trauma and causes so many things that most people simply don’t understand because they never get to see it close up AND differentiated from the trauma. I realize I can’t possibly relay all I’ve learned in the confines of the comment section here, but maybe some day I’ll have the chance to do it more publicly.
Sam
Shaun F,
now you’re talking my language, but I’m not sure I would say one’s dissociated brain/mind is ‘damaged’ unless you qualify it to mean fundamentally a different kind of damage than what the biochemical people mean.
If you want to assert that the ‘damage’ is similar as when one breaks one’s leg or other part of the body, then I think the analogy can be useful as I just used that analogy on another thread on MIA to try to explain how dissociation works in ‘psychosis’.
Dissociation does ‘damage’ the brain/mind in that just like a broken bone, we will stop using that appendage until it is healed. And just like broken bones that don’t heal, then other parts of the body are stressed because they try to take over for the part that isn’t healed, and so there becomes stress throughout the system and everything begins to break down some especially if the environment is hostile.
In a similar manner, when trauma, that is not healed and assimilated into one’s narrative, causes dissociation, the brain/mind begins to do ‘work-arounds’ in the neural pathways that it must take to maintain general functioning, but it also begins to lose access to traits and abilities where the dissociated memories are stored (I mentioned that to you personally in another thread but can’t remember where right now).
But thanks to what we know about neural plasticity, that damage is NOT permanent. Heal the trauma, and then, with help, the dissociation can start to be dismantled, but it’s a lot more work than those in ISSTD understand since they never get full access to the person’s system like a primary attachment figure/SO can have if s/he works to have it. Two of my wife’s littles helped me understand the key to undoing the dissociation when we began to redraw their inner working model (attachment theory).
So like you, I do believe in ‘damage’ if one qualifies it and differentiates it from the unchangeable, organic damage that the biochemical model espouses. And we shouldn’t get hung up on my wife’s ‘extreme’ dissociation. We all fall on that spectrum somewhere and learning to help her taught me how to deal with my own: my issues just weren’t as complicated.
Sam
Hello Luke,
I like a lot of what you have to say! I’ve been walking with my wife on a healing journey the last 16 years, and I realized that to become a good healing companion for her, I had to get as healthy as I could myself because she made it clear she didn’t know what ‘healthy’ meant and she needed me to live it…kind of as a role model. And so I worked really hard the first few years of our journey to transform myself into the kind of healing companion that would help rather than hinder her progress. Fortunately, I had a mostly healthy childhood and had been securely attached to my mom, and so I had and learned the tools I needed to make that transformation.
But that might be my one concern about your article. I think for someone like my wife who was traumatized as a toddler and literally told me she had no idea what ‘healthy’ looks like at the start of our journey and had spent more than 5 decades being shaped by her inner critic, she needed a healing partner who could do what she and her parents never did as a child. I validate the feelings her inner critic espoused, but then I turn her toward my view of her and turn her to her current, safe and healing situation she has with me…and slowly over the last 15 years, in partnership with me, she has been empowered to take on that inner critic, make peace with it and move forward to the present with me.
Sam
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Hello, Kent,
I’m so deeply sorry for the hell you and your wife have endured at the hands of the mental health system just pushing drugs. I can’t even imagine your pain and anger.
On a different note, it is so nice to see a fellow husband/caregiver on here. There are so few of us, but it seems more have been speaking up lately and I’m very excited about that and hope some day we might be able to connect and begin to pool our knowledge and really make a difference for our loved ones.
Sincerely,
Sam
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Hello Richard,
I find this an incredibly interesting article on so many levels. I was raised a very conservative Christian and then got into some of the branches that seek out these kinds of experiences. I, however, never experienced any of them. It was always kind of weird seeing everyone else dropping like flies being ‘slain in the spirit’ and chattering in tongues…while I stood there wondering what was wrong with me, sigh…
…and then my wife began to show the signs of DID 15 years ago…and so we throw that into the mix…and I have a very pragmatic view of that: trauma and dissociation driving nearly everything we’ve had to face…
…and then I’ve always wondered about philosophical materialism and how that drives so many of the modern sciences (even though many of the founders of the various scientific branches were devout Christians) and blinds them to the possibility of the mind and spirit. I’ve brought up the place that materialism ought to occupy in our discussions on this website, but never got any author to engage me about it…
Anyway, thanks for an extremely thought-provoking and enjoyable article. I don’t know where I personally am nowadays…I’ve moved away from my upbringing some without rejecting it all and yet I’m definitely not a materialist..
Thanks again!
Sam
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Michael,
is there any way to get access to these articles? I went onto their website, but I wasn’t sure how to navigate it.
Thanks,
Sam
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Dear Michael,
I was nearly in tears as I read this article. I’ve been desperate to meet you since the last time you broached this subject on Mad in America a year or so ago. I left a message on your website, but it always says you won’t be around. I know I’m a nobody, but for the last 15 years I’ve done everything you are talking about as I walked with my wife thru her early childhood trauma and extreme dissociation (ie. DID in dsm speak). I’ve walked with her thru every extreme state she experienced, held her during the worst, and as I calmed her using attachment concepts, we could make meaning of them, and help integrate the source of them so that at this point it’s been years since she’s experienced them…at this point were still working to gather all her dissociated parts and interconnect them, mostly, as she is becoming ‘whole’.
I was asked to write a little book about how I walked with her thru it all. A third of it is how I engaged her in all the things you were talking about and so we found healing and wholeness without the drugs and loss of agency known to most here. I know I’m a nobody, but perhaps you could give me just a little of your time or you would honor me and glance at my little book. When I lost my sponsor, I had to finish it on my own, and I was told to find an editor to help me clean it up, so I’m hoping to do that now. But if you don’t have time to do that, perhaps you could point me in the direction of other family members who, like me, understand we have to walk with our loved ones thru all those things so they can deeply heal. I’m happily astounded you would invite someone like me to contribute to your book as I have yet to find someone like that even after 15 years of searching.
Sincerely,
Sam
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Hi Terry,
I enjoyed your article. So much of what you have said resonated true with the healing journey my wife and I have been on, together, thru her trauma and dissociation…as we learned about her parts and embraced them…helping all of them to heal and connect together. And watching and helping her thru that process also taught me about my own parts and learning to embrace them especially coming from a very strict religious background that taught a lot of guilt and shame over natural stuff.
Normally I’m promoting attachment concepts as the foundation of everything we did, but lately people who have read some of my stuff have noted how IFS meshes so well with our methodology as well, and so I appreciate each time I can learn a little more about its tenets.
Sam
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Thanks, Miranda and good luck in your new endeavors. And welcome Amy to the Family section…don’t forget us spouses, too! I certainly hope I’m not literally the ONLY spouse on Mad in America….
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Hi Hayden Hall,
I’d strongly suggest following the link I gave to Moyu, if you have interest, and downloading Healing Companions, as it combines Engaging Madness and another little booklet I’d written and expands them into a more-flowing narrative style with a lot more personal stories.
if you think you’d really like to read it, but simply can’t see the font, please contact me at my blog email, and I’ll be happy to give you a word document of it, and then you can change it to whatever size works best for you.
As for attachment, Steve is largely correct. However, I would add that attachment theory includes romantic couples and not only those in caretaking roles of basic necessities…and yet, helping my wife feel safe, loved and cared for…were huge parts of helping heal the trauma she suffered as a toddler and the dissociation that developed throughout her life as a result.
Sam
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It’s a free download I have on my blog: https://samruck2.wordpress.com/2022/12/04/healing-companions/
Wishing you and your husband the best.
Sam
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“It is clear to me that all of society, i.e. not just affected persons but also the relatives, other caring persons and psychiatrists need to be willing to work actively and systematically on themselves, to listen and talk to each other as far as possible. Without these joint efforts towards a social co-existence with mutual respect, improvements or (partial) cures for so-called schizophrenia and mental disorders in general will, in my view, hardly be possible.”
Hello Moyu,
I always appreciate these kinds of articles that bring in the absolute essential role family can play in the healing journey if they are willing to listen and engage their loved one how s/he needs it. I always refer to the journey my wife and i are on as ‘our healing journey’ even though she has d.i.d….I had to be willing to do a lot of changing and learning from her so I could become the healing companion she needed…and 15 years later…we are mostly thru her trauma and dissociation…which is what i feel causes the symptoms that many refer to as psychosis, at least for my wife.
It’s not an easy process, but i believe our reliance on attachment concepts have allowed us to see foundational healing for her without the drugs…and transformative change in myself as well.
If you’d ever like to connect, i always relish the chance to share the wonderful things we discovered along the way and even wrote a little book about some of the highlights of it.
Take care,
Sam
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yes, I wish so much I could convey how attachment concepts can fundamentally change the entire healing journey for both partners…and it was exactly like ‘bringing to life’ those parts of my wife which had been ‘killed’ by the trauma…truly a beautiful process to be part of and behold…
Sam
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As long as a ‘revolution’ depends upon money, then it will always be at the whim of its benefactors. That’s why for as long as I’ve been on Mad in America I’ve called for the training and empowerment of family, spouses and SO’s so they can walk with their loved ones who are hurting and help them heal. We’re the only ones who can really do it, as healing doesn’t occur in the neat confines of a therapist’s office but is a 24/7 endeavor that must take place in every facet of life and one’s relationships, so we have to be the ones to do it.
Sam
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This was an interesting article. I didn’t agree with all of it, and yet, it confirms why I don’t fit very well in the West…
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Rasx,
the problem is…in our dysfunctional culture where independence and individualism are overprized, no one wants to be told that another’s mental health or mental health healing (as in my wife’s case) is almost 100% on the primary attachment figure…or me (or her parents originally)…but that is the gist of how I read attachment theory even though it is anathema to nearly everyone…even the book I was asked to write…one of the reasons it got canceled was because someone read between the lines and realized that I understood the amount of sacrifice it required of me to help my wife heal 40 years after her parents had abdicated their roles as primary attachment figures….how sad that even the survivors have accepted the tenets of our dysfunctionally, hyper-independent culture.
Sam
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Hello Rachel,
like you, I am walking with a loved one (my wife) thru her mental health struggles. It sounds like you are coming to/have come to some similar conclusions as i have. i walk with my wife in her reality and we find healing together. In the past I did a lot of ‘regulating’ her emotions when she was suffering a lot of extreme states, but that was a long time ago. Now we are working on restructuring her trauma paradigm, together. But I just treat her like my wife…even though i’m typically with her little-girl alters most of the time when we are alone. i don’t know what to suggest about the support groups: fortunately my wife never got swept up in the ‘system’ and so she’s always just been able to be herself to others…and I was able to see past the ‘alters’ and other stuff that comes with trauma and dissociation…so she floats in and out of those kind of groups…and mostly just has her friends and stuff at church until covid hit and curtailed that.
Anyway, I wish you and your loved one the best. It’s nice to see someone on MiA in the same boat as me. i wish there were more…
Sam
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Hi Jay,
I always appreciate your articles which explain the science in an understandable way for a layperson. I especially appreciate your expertise addressing the twins studies which seemed irrefutable until I read a previous article of yours here on MiA. But I’ll be honest, I haven’t worked my way thru this article completely because I got derailed on your statement in the beginning that your prefer ‘psychosis’ to ‘schizophrenia’.
I have walked with my wife thru her DID, outside the system and without psych drugs for the last 15 years. In the DID world I have read that if the voices a person hears seem ‘outside’ the person, then they “have” schizophrenia, but if they seem ‘internal’ then they “have” DID (don’t know if that is accurate…just saying). So, even though I have zero experience with someone who has ‘schizophrenia’, I’ve always kind of viewed it as the mirror image of what I’ve walked thru with my wife.
Now until I started frequenting MiA, I didn’t even know what ‘psychosis’ was, but it seemed like such a big deal once I got here. Now I’ve never seen my wife as ‘psychotic’ and there are two reasons I still don’t view her that way even after I tried to become more educated about what ‘psychosis’ is. 1) I don’t think ‘psychosis’, accurately describes what is occurring in the person: at least not my wife. I think all her ‘psychosis-like’ symptoms are better understood as natural consequences of extreme dissociation caused by the trauma she suffered as a 2-year old…and once I adjusted my perspective to align with what was happening internally with her, then most of that stuff she experienced made sense to me. And thus, 2) I think using that term makes those of us on the outside lazy because rather than putting the effort into understanding what is really happening internally, we just say ‘she’s psychotic’ and so what would be the point of trying to understand something that’s just ‘crazy’, right?
I also saw another comment mention attachment issues, and yes, that’s what we’ve used, with me as her primary attachment figure, to help her heal and tear down the dissociation which has slowly resolved the ‘psychosis-like’ symptoms. One by one her dissociated ‘parts’ have securely attached to me and then (it seems) that attachment helped each connect to the rest of her greater personality.
There’s so much more I could say, but I won’t bore you unless you have interest.
Sincerely,
Sam
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Hello Ekaterina,
it’s good to see you back on Mad in America again.
My wife and I have walked thru her extreme dissociation these last 15 years: I never saw her as ‘psychotic’ even when the other girls (‘alters’) first came out and believed a lot of ‘different’ things. But we gave them as much ‘outside’ time as each wanted and needed to heal. To me a lot of ‘psychosis-like’ symptoms were based on their confusion from being locked up inside 4-5 decades (kind of like RipVan Winkle…a man out of time).
Anyway, I’m with you and not sure why everyone makes a big deal of it. The person just needs a safe person to be an anchor and reference point. When my wife’s different ‘alters’ switch, I just ask the new one outside, “Do you know what’s going on?” If she says ‘no’, then I give her a quick update…and we go on. It’s really not a big deal…but we keep working to tear down the dissociation and hope some day I won’t ever have to ask that (getting closer!).
Anyway, I think ‘psychosis’ is overblown for too many people and just is an excuse for people on the outside to be lazy and not really ‘hear’ what the other person is experiencing or why.
Take care,
Sam
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Tammy,
I read with interest your story, especially how it affected your relationship with your family. I’m so sorry it negatively affected it. We Christians have missed the boat and forgotten that we are called to sacrifice ourselves for one another and help those who feel weak. It makes me so sad that family has lost sight of our calling to help our struggling loved ones.
I hope you and your family find healing and someone can help them move past the simplistic caricatures that our culture promotes of those experiencing mental distress.
Sam
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For 15 years I have engaged my wife’s voices and I’ve always believed it made all the difference in the world for both of us. I changed to become a safe, healing companion for her. And her voices healed and began to interconnect with my wife. I was asked to write a book about our healing journey with a therapist who planned to explain the science of why the attachment concepts we used work so well, but alas, our sponsor had to pull the support.
But if any are interested, I offer my part of our project for free download on my blog:
https://samruck2.wordpress.com/2022/12/04/healing-companions/
Sincerely,
Sam
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For 15 years I have engaged my wife’s voices and I’ve always believed it made all the difference in the world for both of us. I changed to become a safe, healing companion for her. And her voices healed and began to interconnect with my wife. I was asked to write a book about our healing journey with a therapist who planned to explain the science of why the attachment concepts we used work so well, but alas, our sponsor had to pull the support.
But if any are interested, I offer my part of our project for free download on my blog:
https://samruck2.wordpress.com/2022/12/04/healing-companions/
Sincerely,
Sam
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my wife and I have been doing this for 15 years…it’s sad that this isn’t a normal, human response…
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It’s not that difficult, if the hearer desires it so, to engage those voices…just like you would anyone else. Those voices may want/need to be heard and validated as much as the rest of us.
Sam
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Hello, Jaakko and James,
I love the idea of Open Dialogue and believe it is on the correct path: one my wife and I, unfortunately, had to take on our own. We walked the path together, sharing our experiences, sharing our struggles and difficulties, leaning on each other, finding meaning and healing from her trauma and extreme states. I also love that this approach recognizes the entire family as a key part of the dialogue. We are all in this together, and the extreme individuality and independence the West has adopted deeply hinders the ability to heal and move forward.
Perhaps, someday, our paths will cross. I’d love a chance to share some of the things we have learned on our healing journey.
Sam
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Thanks, Diaphonous Weeping,
I try so hard. It’s really hard being attacked for doing the very thing, I believe, many on this website wishes their own spouses and families had done for them: doing whatever, and I mean whatever, it takes to love them, protect them, respect their agency, keep their dignity, and just treat them like a normal human being despite all the extreme states, dissociation and, at times, even chaos.
I don’t know that my wife is ‘shy’ per se, she just wants to be treated for herself and not some caricature our culture has of DID. This article listed schizophrenia as one of the ‘worst’ impugned mental health issues. DID is right up there with it.
My hope is that this book, if I can get it finished, will normalize mental health struggles from the family, spouse and significant other’s perspective. My wife and I have walked together through almost any extreme state imaginable, and we learned how to help her heal from all of them so that most are a distant memory from the past at this point in our journey. Yes, I’m often called to do more than I would have to for a spouse without these struggles, but I guess that’s part of being in a loving, lifetime relationship.
Sam
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As I’ve always told my wife from the start: we deal with the trauma and dissociation: the rest will take care of itself. We don’t have an ‘end-goal’ of how she will be once we are done with the healing journey (should we reach the end). To me, any focus beyond the trauma and dissociation is manipulative.
Sam
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hmmm…yeah, I remember when my wife first suggested she might have DID and I immediately wondered if I was living with a psychopathic murderer(thanks, Hollywood!). Fortunately, I realized almost immediately that I had safely lived with her for 20 years and she was unlikely to kill me in my sleep at that point if I hadn’t given her reason before then…
Sadly, the fear of stigma has kept my wife in the shadows, unwilling to give up the appearance of ‘normalcy’ by those in our lives…and though I have discussed with her multiple times how beneficial it would be for us to have more support as well as sharing our mutual healing journey on a larger scale because so many are struggling and it’s only gotten worse since COVID, she just is unwilling to live with the caricature our culture places upon those with a diagnosis…especially since hers is one of the ‘worst’.
But for me, seeing our commonality and learning much from her own struggles helped me become a better, healthier person partially so that I could be a better healing companion with and for her on this journey…
And I have been given the opportunity to share our journey on a larger scale using this pen name as I have begun collaborating with an expert (since I’m just a husband), but also because she brings a lot to this project, to write a book together and one of our goals is to normalize mental health struggles and living with someone even experiencing pretty extreme stuff like my wife did…and perhaps someday we’ll see the fruit of that venture if we make it to the goal.
Sam
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Bob,
This article reminds me of a thought I’ve repeatedly had while reading some of the articles on this website: I’ve often wondered if the prevailing philosophical materialism which undergirds most of modern science plays any part in so many of the maladies we see affecting not only psychiatry and Big Pharma, but other branches of science as well. It’s a straight jacket that too many scientists seem unable to break free of..but I’m not enough of a philosophy expert to know if it’s a hunch that is correct or not…I think it would be interesting, if you feel I am correct, to find a true expert on the subject and have him/her do an article for Mad in America sometime.
Sam
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Hello Richard,
well, I’ve been walking with my wife for the last 15 years helping her heal from her trauma and extreme dissociation, engaging all of her ‘parts’, learning about my own, and both of us are learning to embrace all of our selves. I think you may be misunderstanding some ‘symptoms’ as ’caused’ by the ‘protectors’ when, at least from our experience, they were caused by the associated mental traits and abilities of the various ‘parts’ that were ‘exiled’ (dissociated)…but it’s hard to see that unless you have complete access…and few do outside the primary attachment figures of each person…but I do see a lot that I agree with you on…and am glad you are having an impact…
Too bad you’ll never read my comment: I think we’d have a lot in common…
Take care and best wishes to you.
Sam
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Bob,
don’t forget family like me who have the lived experience of walking thru everything my wife experienced, at times carrying her thru it, until she could make sense of things and heal and integrate it back into her own narrative. You’ve got to expand the circle because there are few ‘peers’, probably, who would be committed day in and day out, 15 years and counting like me and other family members who are in a lifetime commitment…I know there are many family members who fall far short of the ideal and are even part of the problem and abuse…but I still believe there are others out there like me, who if they were supported and trained could learn to do the things I have.
Sam
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I would suggest that most DSM ‘disorders’ are actually symptoms of dissociation after 15 years of embracing my wife’s extreme dissociation and walking thru it with her. And as I repeatedly assured her, “focus on the trauma and dissociation and the rest will take care of itself.’ And it has. Her other issues have largely disappeared or become minor.
Attachment is the way I helped heal and dissolve my wife’s dissociation, but it doesn’t ‘cure’ the things caused by dissociation (the so-called dsm ‘disorders’). Those are resolved when the various part of the mind are reconnected (after the dissociation is dissolved) and then balance comes back to the person as the healing/mitigating parts of the mind can ‘balance’ those parts which need it.
Sam
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Hi Jock,
thank you for an interesting interview.
I wish you had elucidated your biocognitive model more within the interview…and perhaps I’m obtuse, but why did you include ‘bio’ in the model’s name at all when it appears you wanted to get away from biological explanations of mental disorder?: “The biocognitive model says that there is no physical cause for mental disorder, but a psychological account is possible and it can account for all mental disorder. So mental disorder becomes a psychological phenomenon.”
Thanks,
Sam
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In the d.i.d. world, we have to deal with the ‘False Memory Syndrome Foundation” that was largely created by abusive family to gaslight the now-adult children they had abused and say they were remembering ‘false’ memories about their abusive childhood.
There’s no doubt there are plenty of bad-faith families out there: neither of my wife’s nor my immediate family were willing to support and join us on our healing journey, and yet, change is possible. I’m proof of that. When we first started our journey, my wife said she spent more time dealing with my weekly blowups at her counseling sessions than her own stuff. But once I got my issues dealt with, then she told me I was now the greatest factor in her healing.
That is what we need to fight for: teaching family who are willing how to become the healing companions every struggling person needs. It’s not natural or easy. I have to fight my own self interests because I still sacrifice a lot of my own needs to make space for her healing: but I do it because I love her and because I’m seeking a win/win for us. And I just have to believe there are others out there who are like me and who would change if someone showed them the way…and there’s a chance, now, that I may be able to make that happen…(keeping my fingers crossed as it develops)
Sam
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Hi Diaphonous Weeping,
You so often say things well.
I wish you the best.
Sam
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Hi Sera,
based upon your response to me, my original comment should be rated a ‘fail’ for conveying what I had hoped to do, sigh. I’ve wondered for the last 4 days if it was even worth a 2nd attempt, but as I continue to see negative comments directed toward the family, perhaps I will try again.
1) I do believe I understand the general purpose of your analysis of the comments section of the NYT article. Having walked with my wife these last 15 years and having followed Mad in America these last 6 or so years, I believe I understand the general perspective you are sharing and agree with much of it.
2) However, I believe your analysis and the generally negative comments directed toward family by others here presupposes a generally negative ‘bad faith’ motive concerning the majority of family. However, I see them as victims of Big Pharma and psychiatry who are manipulated along with the rest of those in our culture to accept the common biomedical narrative of mental health. And NAMI to whom family turns for help, support and training, as you have written here in the past, is just an arm of that coalition and so family go there, thinking they will be helped, only to be corrupted, sigh.
3) Moreover, I believe this analysis forgets the inherent selfishness we ALL have. We all have hopes, dreams, desires and needs. They aren’t necessarily bad, but when something extreme like severe trauma and dissociation is thrown into a relationship, sadly those things can turn a loving relationship into a war campaign to have those needs met.
Sadly the manipulation of Big Pharma and psychiatry; our general culture, as well, and our inherent selfishness all work to create a ‘battle of wills’ even among loved ones and sadly the strongest win and the weaker loses.
My wife inadvertently saved us from this by asking me not to read anything about her ‘condition’ when we first started our healing journey, and I kept that promise for the first 2 or 3 years until we had sufficiently developed a rhythm and methodology that worked for both of us. But I also had to fight my inherent selfishness and tell myself over and over that I was fighting for a win/win for me and my wife, rather than allowing my selfishness to twist my relationship with my wife into a battle of wills.
Have you heard of the Better Angels group? In this ugly culture war in which our country is immersed, this group and others like it are trying to help people stop presupposing the inherent ‘bad faith’ of the ‘other side’ and instead learn to really understand each other and find our overwhelming common ground.
I truly am sorry for each and everyone of you who have been hurt and betrayed by your family and loved ones, but unless we can find that commonality and love that I believe motivates most of us, then those who are struggling will continue to lose.
I’ve been at this 15 years, and I’m more than my wife’s ‘ally’ as the Left uses that term. I’m her foxhole buddy who walked with and at times literally carried her thru every extreme state and everything else she experienced no matter where or when it happened. There is no group in the world that can do what family can do, period. And so we’ve got to move past the larger culture-war milieu that literally believes those on the ‘other side’ are ‘evil’. We’ve got to train and empower our loved ones to be the healing companions those who are hurt need most.
Sam
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Sera,
I’m really struggling how to respond to your article. I’m torn in so many different ways. I am obviously sympathetic and empathetic to your perspective as I have literally spent the last 15 years dedicated to helping my wife heal while I kept her completely out of the mental health system and off any drugs…I had to learn to listen to her. Her fears. Her perspective. Her everything…
And yet, as a ‘family member’ we have real fears, real perspectives, real needs, too. I don’t share them much on this site because I understand its perspective and also because I chose to walk with my wife when all her trauma and dissociation exploded into our marriage and family…and so I chose the emotional distress and sacrifices that walking with her through all that stuff would require me to make in order to be a good healing companion for her.
The real problem I see is that everyone wants their own perspectives, needs, fears, etc., validated but I rarely find someone willing to do the same for someone else, even a loved one, especially when that requires validating a perspective antithetical to or in competition with our own. And so then we engage in a battle of wills and the stronger wins…at the sacrifice of the relationship.
What we need are people willing to seek win/win solutions. I believe you and this website are just trying to get ‘this side’s’ perspective out there, but I’ve tried to walk in such a way with my wife that there isn’t ‘her’ side and ‘my’ side. I always refer to this as ‘our healing journey’ because if I other her in any way…it creates space for us to grow apart and this journey is so hard on both of us, even today, that we won’t make it if I don’t own it all as my own because we are in it together.
Sam
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Hello Irit,
thank you for this review.
I have begun to read Tina’s booklet. Much of what Tina has suggested I have done for my wife these last 15 years, and so, fundamentally, I agree with her, and yet, I am struggling with her desire to see this done on a larger scale than within families as we have done (how many have the commitment level outside of a family to go 15 years and counting???). Yes, I think others who are willing should be taught the things that Tina espouses. Yes, the laws certainly need changed to stop the inhumane treatment and stripping away of fundamental rights of others simply because they are experiencing mental distress.
…But I think you hit the nail on the head when you wrote that others do so because of their fear which I believe is driven by ignorance. Until we can cogently articulate what is going on when a person is experiencing extreme states to demystify them so that others can empathize and realize that they are just like I am, not crazy, mad, dangerous or anything else, then I fear people will continue to demand the right to subdue what they fear rather than embrace it.
Thanks to both of you and I will continue to try and make my way thru her booklet.
Sam
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Diaphonous Weeping,
the ancient wisdom says, “See to it…that no root of bitterness, springing up, causes trouble, and by it many become defiled.”
When my wife and I first started this healing journey 15 years ago, I had my fair share of anger and bitterness. This isn’t what anyone signs up for when he says his wedding vows…but I love my wife, and if we were going to make it, and make it well, then I had to let go of the anger and bitterness. I had to learn to ‘breathe’ the disappointment, pain and heartache that would be part of this journey. At first it was like learning to breathe underwater: my being convulsed and fought against the pain and heartache, but my love for my wife and my desperation to find a win/win for us held me until the process was completed.
So, I still hurt, but I know it’s the price to walk with the woman I love, and it doesn’t have the power over me that it used to.
As for ‘fixing.’ Sigh, yes. My older brother’s 2nd wife was a trauma survivor, and about the same time my wife’s trauma exploded into our marriage, his wife’s did, too. But he wanted to ‘fix’ her and drug her all over the country trying to do so…and not long after that, she filed to divorce him. I had tried to invite him to ‘walk’ with his wife, like I was learning to do with mine, but he had no interest…and my family rallied around him when he was ‘free’ of her, sigh. And then my mom tried to give a defense of him to me since she knew I was going thru similar things with my own wife, sigh. I think the rest of my family wishes I had done the same thing to my wife.
…it was their loss. Our healing journey really has been a fantastic (though difficult) voyage…like seeing a star born…as each girl (‘alter’) joined us on the outside…and I got the privilege of helping her heal as I offered her the safety and security of a loving relationship with me: something she had never known before. And once she accepted that safety with me, then she was free to let me hold her pain and trauma…so that she could heal and move on to become the beautiful person she was always intended to be…
My family and my wife’s missed the beautiful journey we have been on. It was their loss, and yet, we lost too by not having their support…but they are all broken people who have fought to pretend that they aren’t, while they shun my wife’s brokenness and think they are better than her, sigh.
Sam
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Hello Diaphonous Weeping,
I almost missed your beautiful commentary and analysis of things through your various comments because I kind of zoned out on the comments section until Steve made a comment about how we inherit so much dysfunction thru our parents, and they thru their parents, etc. You have some incredible insights and articulate them so well. So much of what you speak are things I have tried to do for my wife on our healing journey. For us there is no railing against the system or seeking justice from her abuser because the exact knowledge of him is lost to her in the mists of 5 decades ago when she was a toddler. And so we deal with the trauma and dissociation today and how it affects her and us until we can undo it.
I did want to speak to Steve’s comment about our heritage of dysfunction. I remember when my wife and I first started this journey that I made a vow to break that dysfunction so our son didn’t continue in the mold. Unfortunately, he spent so many of his formative years touched by our struggling marriage until I began to deal with my own issues so that I could be a good healing companion for my wife. I wish I could have been a better father for him…but I am getting a 2nd chance this year since he had to move back in with us while he is trying to finish his PhD.
Anyway, DW, you really are beautifully articulate. It’s too bad more people haven’t read and understood some of the critical things you have stated. I do agree with so much of it and our journey has mirrored much of what you have said, but my writing is always more of one who writes those dry instruction manuals for our devices which none of us read unless we absolutely must: it’s probably why there’s been so little interest no matter how I’ve tried to share our amazing journey of love, healing and discovery (blog, booklets, comments across the internet) because I seem unable to write in such a way that draws people in.
Sincerely,
Sam
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Hi Bradford,
thank you for the generous comment. I wish you weren’t correct…that our case is just seen as anecdotal, sigh. Even here in the Mad in America, counter cultural movement, I have struggled to find a place to really change the conversation how family can be available 24/7, 365 days a year for their loved ones and so we MUST be the ones taught and empowered to walk with them while respecting their total agency.
But it’s more than that; my wife and I embraced her extreme states, her extreme dissociation and everything else…and we found a way thru them. I’ve tried to shout ‘eureka’ for 15 years, but I just can’t find anyone with a big enough platform to help me spread the word. I so appreciate MiA giving me this chance to do so, but I was heartbroken by the lack of response and even ‘hits’ to this blog and even the free downloadable booklet.
Sam
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Hi Miranda,
thank you for writing this insightful review, and also, thank you for sharing some of your story with the rest of us. Personally, I’ve struggled with suicide ideation and depression/despair/despondency most of my adult life, and I do agree with you that hope and strong relationships are some of the best ways I fight against these overwhelming feelings. Hope is also part of the reason I work so hard to be a good healing companion for my wife, since our ‘fortunes’ are inextricably linked to each other’s, and her ‘win’ will be mine, too.
But as for empowerment. I often thought about the categorical difference between my older sister being raped in her 20’s and my wife’s experience of being molested as a 2-year old and her childhood growing up with emotionally distant and at times abusive parents. My sister quickly moved thru the healing process as she fought to get back to healthy and a few years later she was speaking to other women about her experience and how she had healed.
But my wife? When we first started our journey together, she told me repeatedly that she didn’t even know what ‘healthy’ looked like. She had no goal to fight for like my sister because she had never known what it was in the first place. On top of that, we spent 5 years of continuous extreme states, where she was literally, constantly overwhelmed, and I had to be there with her ‘in the emotional hurricane waters”…holding her up from drowning, being the calm in her storm. I was her lifeguard, her ‘savior,’ in a very real sense…until I got her stabilized, and we moved out of that phase.
15 years later she is in a much different place and I rarely have to ‘rescue’ her and yet I still have to help her heal in a way that my sister never needed. It’s been a struggle for me so that I don’t infringe upon her agency in any way, and yet be willing to provide her the support and help that she needs as she still is moving toward the goal of becoming healthy…having never experienced it.
And so each person’s experience of suicide ideation, depression or any other mental distress and what each needs to heal from it and move past it will depend on their own history. Empowerment can feel overwhelming and almost like the same abandonment s/he experienced during childhood to someone who has never known ‘healthy’ like my wife until s/he has healed and stabilized enough. That doesn’t give the helper license to transgress someone’s agency, but it does mean basing the help and depth of involvement according to the needs of the sufferer and realizing much more help may be needed at the start of the healing journey.
Sam
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Hi Michael,
thank you for responding. You seem pretty passionate about this subject from what you’ve written here and past articles of yours I’ve read on Mad in America and also on your own website. I don’t know if the terms of your sabbatical would allow you to read a little booklet I wrote about how I engaged my wife’s ‘madness’ these last 15 years without drugs mostly using attachment strategies as I have walked with her thru almost anything you can imagine when it comes to mental distress. it’s 42 pages with lots of stories about our journey. But if that falls outside your sabbatical, I have written myself some notes, and I will try to contact you after you get back.
Here’s a link to the free download.
https://samruck2.wordpress.com/2022/02/11/engaging-madness/
Thanks, Sam
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Bateson wrote, “Diabasis is one of a very few institutions across the country which carry the responsibility for advancing our understanding of psychiatric phenomenon … problems which are almost as complex as any which the human spirit can present. In just a few places and necessarily on a small scale, this complexity is being faced, I would argue that those places are curiously precious, not only for the few patients who are lucky enough to pass through them, but also precious to the whole psychiatric profession and the wider field of helping skills.”
Michael, do you really believe this? i tried to contact you via your website, but it said you wouldn’t be available until late June. Sadly, I missed you when you visited our support group that Kermit and Louisa lead. I’ve walked with my wife thru her ‘madness’ for the last 15 years: every aspect of it: the extreme states, the ‘psychosis’, the ‘delusions’ and ‘paranoia’ and so much more. If you ever wanted to talk, I’d love the chance to share some of the amazing things I’ve witness as I walked thru it all with her.
Sam
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First, let me say how truly sorry I am for Sera, that her ex is stooping this low. Anger makes us capable of such ugly things. My heart goes out to her and her entire family.
As someone who has struggled with suicidal thoughts for 3 decades, after a lot of journaling, I’ve come to see them as a coping mechanism; just one tool in my toolbox that I can say, ‘If things get too bad, I’ve always got an out.’ However, it’s only one tool, and there are other tools I use to keep me from using that one. But I also realized if my agency had ever been removed, I probably would have become even more suicidal.
But I am concerned about the focus on autonomy. “No man(person) is an island.” None of are autonomous. None of us acts in a vacuum. None of us develops and grows as children or adults in a vacuum, and I think to make this a focus plays into the hyper-individualism of our western societies and why too often we don’t care enough about those in our communities. I think a better goal is collaboration realizing that I have personal weaknesses, blindspots and am limited in my experience, knowledge and wisdom and I can benefit from relationships with others. I don’t always, intrinsically know what is best for me, but I can benefit from a safe community of fellow travelers who are willing to share without coercion.
So, I think it’s agency we should focus on, not personal expertise because all of us are limited in our experiences and sometimes we all could do with a little more humility as we accept help from others, but it ought to be our choice to accept that help, not something forced upon us because others are uncomfortable with the ugliness that life can bring to each of us.
Sam
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Hi Someone Else,
You’re welcome. I wish she was, but not yet. She and I have that talk from time to time, but I just can’t get her to budge on it.
Sam
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Just in case anyone was wondering, both booklets are free to download: the current one has a hyperlink to the previous one. you can download them from here at Mad in America or from my blog.
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Hi Louisa,
I am aware of that line of thinking though only on a superficial level. I can’t really answer for my wife, but from my perspective most of what she experienced seemed to be various dissociative effects of the original trauma, and as I helped her hold and heal the trauma, then we could begin the hard work of reconnecting the various, dissociated parts of her greater self…and then those issues largely resolved themselves.
I think both of us have grown as people having walked thru the hell that we did, but I wouldn’t call it a higher consciousness, just maybe a greater awareness of what really makes us all tick as human beings…but maybe that is one and the same with what you are suggesting…idk…
Sam
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Hello Louisa,
yes, I will try to respond to that comment, but I wish you well and hope you find something in the booklet that may help you on your own journey.
Sam
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Hi Joshua,
though it doesn’t really come out in this little introduction explicitly, in the booklet I make it clear that I don’t accept the terms ‘mad’, ‘psychosis’, ‘delusional’ or ‘paranoia’ when talking about my wife’s experiences or my attitude toward them and that is why they all appear in quotation marks…unlike voices and extreme states which do not appear in quotation marks in the booklet and yet I still take issue with how our culture views them.
My wife is just my wife, and when I engaged her in all her experiences, things made sense from her perspective and so we found a way thru them TOGETHER.
Sam
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Hi Niall,
why do we lock them up? Good question. I have a guess even though I never allowed that to happen to my wife.
We let them be locked up to spare ourselves the scary and discomforting witnessing of extreme states. The first 5 years of the healing journey with my wife, we were inundated by her extreme states and each new one was, honestly, rather scary for me to witness. When she hit the ground in a comatose episode: freak me out. When her eyes rolled into the back of her head and she looked like she was experiencing a mild seizure: Breathe, Sam! When she hid under the table at home or under clothes racks out in public in terror and panic…wth? When she tried to jump out of our car going 70mph on the highway, repeatedly, or wanted store-bought fairy-wings so she could jump and fly off a building top…ahhh!!!!…when she was hitting furniture and falling down our stairs so often she was black and blue for more than a year that I was afraid of being accused of spousal abuse…and all the voices she started to hear which our culture assures us make people dangerous and unpredictable….you know…it’s exhausting…it’s overwhelming…it’s scary…it didn’t make sense at first…and I honestly didn’t know how to protect her from herself…I honestly thought I was going to lose her to one of these episodes!
And so we capitulate to the logical fallacy of ‘appeal to authority’, the experts who claim to have the magic cures with their pills, ECT, and all their indecipherable words and diagnoses and theories of mental ‘illness’ instead of using our love, compassion and brains for the ones we love…It really would have been so much easier (for me) to have drug my wife or passed her off to the ‘experts’ instead of our son and I caring for her 24/7 for 5 years until I walked her thru all the extreme states and figured out how to help her heal from them to the point they are a distant memory at this point.
So I wonder if we do the unthinkable to those who are struggling to save ourselves the stress of having to walk with them thru it all…and I’m not suggesting this to shame any who have done so or elevate myself. I know the family member’s and spouses’ pain. I know their fear. I honestly don’t know why I didn’t do that to my wife other than some part of me just couldn’t do that to the woman I love. I remember the day I told myself I had to grow up and be the adult in our relationship right now because she needed me to do so and couldn’t do it herself at that moment.
idk…just a thought…
Sam
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Hmmm…well. this article didn’t go the direction i thought it might. i understand this is the author’s experience and so she’s an expert on her experience. And I think she voiced a lot of truth in it…but some of the things she only mentioned in passing, i think were of vital importance to the subject…as well as some of the comments below.
I think Steve’s comment hits the nail on the head; you don’t stop self harming by focusing on the self harming. So much of what i see described here on Mad in America as the focus of psychiatry today is just symptomatic. Who cares if we stop the self harming if we don’t deal with the root issues?
My wife didn’t cut, but she viciously bit herself…and i sat with her and held her while she did it. I tried to minimize it, but more importantly i held her and talked with her and acknowledged her pain…and as she healed and other parts of her joined us and were able to process the long dissociated trauma, then she gained access to things she had lost in the past…and eventually, she wasn’t overwhelmed by those feelings from the trauma anymore…and once the root issues were dealt with…then the symptomatic issues disappeared.
I’m truly sorry that anyone in the author’s position would ever self harm for attention. I know it didn’t start out that way for her…but it seemed to move that direction as she never got the care and affirmation she needed…and to me, the saddest part of her entire story is that she saw the psychiatrists, psychologists and psychiatric nurses as her ‘carers’ instead of her family…How I wish we family were taught and empowered to stand in the gap for our loved ones when they are struggling…that’s how it ought to be. We are the only ones there, 24/7 when they are in pain and overwhelmed by it…even our children can help the healing…our son has had a huge role in my wife/his mother’s healing…i don’t push it…but let him choose what he wants to do…and he does things for her, I could never replicate…
Sam
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The General Theory of Love book sounds like it might be a pretty good book…it also seems to understand a principle that I think is missing in so many of our philosophies of healing trauma: that so much healthy, human functioning on all levels in any of us depends upon the active involvement of the primary attachment figure. We simply can’t heal on our own no matter what our hyper-individualistic culture says. That principle has been borne out in our own healing journey as well.
Sam
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I watched the opera this weekend and even though our journey was completely different than the one portrayed here, I found it very evocative, stirring all kinds of emotions and decisions we had made along our own journey…and making me so grateful, somehow, we sidestepped so much that that young man and his mother endured…
Sam
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good talk. I do a lot of similar things to help my wife heal. It’s too bad her parents couldn’t have done this for her when she was little…
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Richard,
thank you for bringing up the issue of ‘logical fallacies.’ That knowledge is missing in most of our educations and has contributed to the decline of our ability to intelligently debate consequential topics.
I sometimes wonder if a study of philosophical materialism might also shed some light on the obsession of the biomedical model of mental health’s attempt to reduce all mental suffering to ‘brain chemistry’ and such. But again, basic philosophy is something our educational system has eschewed, and so most people, even ‘educated’ ones, don’t even understand all the ‘a priori’ assumptions that are made and injected into so many of the debates of today, sigh.
Sam
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Hi Chuck,
well apparently I missed your original essay, but I’ll take a stab at this one.
For the last 15 years my wife and I have been walking the healing journey together from her early childhood abuse and extreme dissociation. I do understand your concern. I NEVER treat my wife as if she is disabled or dysfunctional and yet, the simple fact is, right now, she is clearly disabled and dysfunctional, literally. There are MANY basic things she is unable to do right now. Dissociation slices and dices the brain’s ability to access many personality traits and mental functions until those dissociative walls are torn down and the pathways are re-established. It’s not a matter of she could if she just tried hard enough. It’s a matter of those neural pathways have atrophied after 4 decades of disuse and it has taken us 14 years of constant, daily work to begin to reinvigorate them. And though she has come a long way, it’s mind numbingly complex and exhaustively tiring and takes both of us to help her undo the problem.
But that doesn’t mean i treat her as if she is PERMANENTLY disabled or dysfunctional. I look at the goal, her complete healing, as I walk with her and help her heal and re-establish the mental pathways to access the things she lost to the trauma and dissociation. I never belittle her, but I do accept her limitations for now and i help her heal and grow stronger toward our mutual goal.
It’s a complex problem and one our culture and the mental health system gets terribly wrong. I sympathize with your desire NOT to label anyone as disabled or dysfunctional because I have NEVER treated my wife that way…and yet, right now, she would definitely struggle, to put it mildly, if she was on her own and had to hold down any kind of a job.
Sincerely,
Sam
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14 years ago my wife’s childhood trauma and dissociation exploded into our 20-year marriage. She is the only woman to whom I have said, ‘I love you” and the only woman with whom I’ve been, and we both say we ‘grew up together’ because we got married when I was barely 21 and she was 22. How do you abandon that?
So I fought for ‘us’ and a win/win solution despite all the adversity her trauma and dissociation brought us. Fortunately, she asked me NOT to read the popular literature out there when we started our healing journey, and so I really didn’t even know what ‘psychosis’ was until much later in our healing journey when I had already found meaning in most things she was experiencing, and so I never saw her as ‘psychotic’ or ‘delusional.’
But one thing I might add from our experience is trauma and dissociation adds the ‘Rip Van Winkle effect’ as I call it to the mix, if you are familiar with that story. All the trauma-fueled dissociation my wife experienced as a child 40-50 years ago, kind of put those parts of her brain/personality ‘asleep’ and as we woke them during the healing process there was a lot of ‘disorientation’ as well as ‘overlapping’ of past experiences with present realities…and it was very disorienting to her (flashbacks, panic attacks, extreme anxiety, etc, etc, etc). We used a lot of attachment concepts, and so I provided her a ‘safe haven’ and ‘affect regulation’ as I helped her sort all those confusing and conflicting things out. I didn’t demand that she work from the present, but instead, I entered into her confusion and provided her a steady, safe person as we came to a healthier place…together.
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As a husband and supporter and healing companion of my wife, this breaks my heart: what could have been if her family had responded to her pleas for help, compassion, mercy and understanding. Every time my wife talks about trying sleep medicine or some of the other stuff her friends are on I gently fight that inclination telling her how lucky she is to be so ignorant of all the horrors that stuff can cause.
R.I.P., Kathleen. I’m sorry you and so many others haven’t gotten the family you need and deserve.
Sam
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I love much of what Bessel has to say even though I’m still not sure ‘The Body Keeps the Score” after 15 years of walking with my wife thru her trauma and dissociation. I wonder if he, like most therapists, simply can’t go deeply enough like a primary attachment figure can. Our son and I, alone, have complete access to everyone in her system, but not even he is privy to the deepest stuff…which is fine as he has a completely different place in her healing journey as the adult child than I do as the spouse/primary attachment figure.
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“C-PTSD is often described as life-altering, but it really goes much, much deeper than that. The absence of these essential ingredients in ones early life in the words of many of my own clients; creates “a void”. Life is certainly altered. But, unlike with those who suffer symptoms of PTSD, whereby there is a noticeable ‘healthy’ before — where the adult was mentally and emotionally well, capable and content in communications and relationships prior to the traumatic event — with C-PTSD there is rarely a ‘healthy’ before. As international activist, Jesse Jackson, wisely observed: “ You can‘t teach what you don’t know”.”
I think this is a tremendously astute quote. I’ve often wondered at the marked difference between how my older sister treated her healing and recovery from being raped in her 20’s. She knew what ‘healthy’ was and she fought to get back there. And yet my wife repeatedly told me when we first started this healing journey 15 years ago, ‘I don’t even know what healthy looks like.” And beyond that, I just don’t see the ‘fight’ in her to get healthy that I saw in my sister. It’s frustrating, and yet, I have to accept it for what it is as I try to walk with her and help gently move her toward ‘healthy.’
And it’s not surprising she never got that as a child because both her parents are fairly, emotionally/relationally dysfunctional. Last year after my father-in-law almost died twice, he talked with his daughter, my wife, about some of those topics that never get discussed in most families, even healthy ones, and he admitted to my wife that his wife, her mother, probably had mpd (multiple personalities disorder) which is the old name for what my wife has. He was apologetic for how his wife had treated her, their daughter, and confessed he never knew how to change things. But that was no revelation to my wife and I since we recognized all the signs in her mother once we started our own journey. And her own father has so many signs of trauma as well. It’s surprising my wife did as well as she did with our son because of all that she lacked in her own upbringing from her parents.
Sadly, besides apparently adhering to the common view of mental health struggles, the article ends on a rather low point in my opinion as it calls for the preeminence of the ‘skilled therapist’ to do what no therapist could possible do, sigh. In my opinion, it would be inappropriate, as well as impossible, for any therapist to do many of the things only the primary attachment figure can do. It’s been a 24/7 x 15 year ‘job’ for me as I walk in all aspects of our relationship with my wife helping her heal the trauma and dissociation…and we still aren’t done. It’s labyrinthine in complexity and overwhelming in scope. If not for my love for her AND my vows, there are many days I would walk away as I feel as broken by this at this point as she conveys to me that she does. But we are in it together; healing, learning, attaching, and hopefully, someday, we’ll make it out on the other side to find the happy, healthy relationship we both so desperately want.
Sam
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Congrats, Kermit! I hope this is well received and can make an impact on the greater conversation.
Sam
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My best friends are a trans couple. My wife and I were the only ones who supported my gay cousin’s marriage. And yet, the religious fervor with which this topic is approached by the Left and Right makes any attempt at meaningful discussion on this topic moot.
This ‘study’ is riddled with assumptions and biases. And the entire ‘science’ of this subject is based more in a priori assumptions on the subject rather than actual testing of how any of us develop as human beings. I’m all for supporting the LGBTQ+ community as human beings. I do so without qualification. But on a website like this, where ‘science’ is supposedly the basis for discussions, this entire topic is fraught from both ends with assumptions and passions that make nuance and real science impossible.
I helped my wife rebuild her personality, block by block, part by part. Some were asexual. Some were gender ambivalent. I never imposed my beliefs upon any, but by loving and affirming each part and helping each to assimilate/integrate into a healthy whole, she has come to her own place without any shame and without all the distress and angst I see surrounding this issue from both sides.
It really is too bad that both sides from my perspective are exacerbating the problem, and neither is willing to listen and examine their own ignorance and assumptions. As a result, this problem is only getting worse for those whom it most affects: the LGTBQ+ members and their loved ones.
Sam
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I found this interview disturbing on a number of points.
1) That the one interviewee expressed no concern at all that her patient was abused with ECT to knock him out of his catatonic state. My wife has experienced many of those, and after the first time, when I had to figure out what was going on internally, it never took me more than 30 seconds or so to bring her thru them…certainly nothing barbaric like ECT.
2) That the goal of changing the name is so that people will become more docile to accept their diagnosis and ‘treatment’. Sigh
I’m think Someone Else had some astute observations about various forms of ‘psychosis’. My wife and I never had to deal with any forms Someone Else described except that which is caused by trauma and dissociation, and I simply never saw it as ‘psychosis.’ It was more a ‘time-overlap’ issue (past overlapping with present) because of the dissociation and as we brought back ‘online’ parts of her mind which had been sequestered/dissociated because of the trauma, well those parts were still oriented in the past at the time they got sequestered/dissociated…So to me, it’s by no means ‘psychosis’. When properly understood, it’s just like being Rip Van Winkle and waking up to find everything has changed, and so my part as her healing partner is to walk with her and be her ‘safe haven’ as she slowly acclimates from the past to her new, present-day circumstances and helping those parts to connect with the rest of her so that she’s not at war with herself.
Sam
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Thanks, Berta. I tried again this morning, and this time it worked for me.
Sam
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I tried to sign up, but it didn’t work. Maybe I did something wrong, but I normally don’t have problems. Guess I’ll try again later.
Sam
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Thanks, Bob. Sorry I didn’t make it all the way thru, but you are meticulous, fair and accurate as always. I appreciate that you never try to ‘juice’ the facts to prove your point…of course, these facts don’t need any ‘juicing’ to prove how corrupt Big Pharma/Psychiatry are.
As for calls how to beat this thing: until there are more acceptable alternatives that anyone and everyone can avail themselves of, people in distress will continue to avail themselves of whatever is there, even if it ends up destructive in the end. I’m glad MiA continues to push Soteria House and Open Dialogue. And I’m excited for the Soteria House and Peer Respite summit running the entire month of October…but the reach still won’t be enough to be available to everyone for a long time to come.
I hope some day there are more things offered and taught, like what my wife and I have done, to empower families and significant others to walk with their loved ones thru emotional distress. But they will need supported to help them in those efforts, so that literally anyone who chooses can circumvent the corruption and destruction that MiA has so ably revealed.
Sam
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Hello, Lisa…
I grew up on the far right, conservative spectrum of things: politically and religiously. But 14 years ago, when my wife’s childhood trauma and extreme dissociation crashed into our 20-year marriage…I was forced to re-evaluate everything…and that also caused a shift in my perspective toward the center. I had to learn to appreciate things from both sides…but then our culture wars here in the States have escalated during the same time in which I was learning to see positives in both perspectives…
Now, when my wife’s trauma and dissociation crashed into our relationship, we were told it was d.i.d.(traditional perspective), but as we were finishing up our son’s senior year of homeschooling him…(and he’s now finishing his doctorate from an elite school in the Boston area), and because we were both from the Right, and in this country/culture that means you don’t expect the government to do everything for you if you can do it yourself…and so I guess we just started ‘home-healing’ her trauma and dissociation. Yes, it was overwhelming. Yes it was a trial by fire in the worst way. But, I’d already lived with my wife for 20 years. I knew she wasn’t ‘crazy’ and I only briefly thought she might be ‘dangerous’ thanks to our cultural caricatures…but I quickly got over that as I’d slept in bed beside her for 20 years and she had yet to hurt me, lol…And there were lots of other factors that went into how I treated her…but in the end I just continued to see her like myself (as I had for our first 20 years together) other than I now understood she was more traumatized and dissociated than I was…in fact, as we walked OUR healing journey together…I learned a lot about myself…and I had to ‘grow up’ so I could be a better healing companion for her…and I had to do my own healing because my triggers were getting triggered by her issues and vise versa…and I learned a lot about mental health issues along the way, including my time on this website even though we are outsiders to the experience of most on this website, having never been touched by psychiatry and its drugs and the loss of agency and the dehumanization so many here were subjected to..
(I’m almost there on this ‘meandering’ comment)…and so, all this to say…I understand that the Left in our country wants to dissect everyone into little groups for some reason while the Right tends to (very) imperfectly view us all the same…which is part of the reason for the BLM movement(which I mostly support) on the Left and the Right’s pushback that ‘All Lives Matter”…(I’m almost there)…
But I guess I believe why my wife and I have made it as far as we have…even though d.i.d. is considered one of the worst things someone can have according to the DSM…is because I fundamentally saw her as no different than myself. I don’t “other” her in any way, even though her trauma and dissociation (or the 7 other ‘alters’ who have joined the relationship) cause both of us a lot of emotional heartache and struggles that we wouldn’t otherwise have…
And so, I’d like to suggest, that until everyone in this entire movement stops ‘othering’ everyone including the rest of us on the ‘outside’ in any way and looks not for ‘allies’ as the Left likes to call people like me, but for those like myself who see you and me as absolutely, fundamentally the same, this movement for radical change concerning mental health/trauma and struggles is going to continue to falter. My wife and I aren’t ‘allies’: this fight is every bit as much mine as hers. This isn’t “her” healing journey. It’s ours!!! If I didn’t see it as ‘ours’ but hers, the pain and heartache we both suffer from her trauma and dissociation would have probably pushed me to look for an easier path and less difficult relationship as we face all kinds of things most marriages don’t and are still struggling today, together, for her full healing.
Don’t know if this makes sense because I know I left a lot out and made logical leaps that I didn’t have space to better define….there’s just so much more I could say, but this is already a longer reply than most are willing to wade thru.
Sincerely,
Sam
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I so wish we had something like this available in Ohio….sigh…it truly sounds wonderful.
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Hmmm…the interview isn’t available from the link unless you pay for a subscription…
I have heard of this book for a long time having been connected to the d.i.d. world for the last 14 years. And I have a lot of respect for Bessel in general. And I admit that I have NOT read his book: I’ve only read repeated reviews of it. So I will admit I am ignorant of the intricacies of his argument, but after 14 years of helping my wife heal the trauma she experienced 50 years ago, and as we untangled the dissociation that kept so much of it hidden from her…I just haven’t found our experience to validate Bessel’s core premise that ‘the body keeps the score.’
Yes, we have found the trauma to be more and more deeply hidden: the last 2 girls to join us outside were both mute at first, and I had to help each of them connect to the ability to vocalize themselves. The last girl to join us was very ‘primitive’ even more than the other one. I have often wondered if she controlled the ‘primal fear instinct’ in each of us…but she still was a conscious part of my wife.
The thing I would suggest to readers to remember about the ‘experts’ is their knowledge is very wide but not correspondingly deep. I would love to have the wide knowledge the experts have: to study of the general trends, to be aware of the basics of an issue, but they simply can’t have a corresponding depth.
For example, one of the past presidents of ISSTD stated on her website that she had over 40,000 hours helping people with d.i.d. When I read that statement over 5 years ago, I did a quick tabulation of the time I have spent helping my wife heal, helping her untangle all the dissociation, and I was already way over 40,000 hours at that point. Moreover, I know of no therapists who have complete access to their patients’ system like I do with my wife’s. My wife’s counselor only interacted with 4 or 5 of the girls on a regular basis, one time a week. I interact with all 8 girls on a daily basis. In fact, at this point, I interact with all of my wife, all 8 girls, more than my wife’s host does, the one most people would suggest is ‘my wife.’ I keep her and the other 6 girls informed of what goes on when girl #8 is out with me, as we all desperately try to get the last one connected to the larger group of 7 so they no longer ‘lose’ most of their days to her.
So, my experience is a mile deep, but only one person wide. Whereas Bessel’s experience is probably just the opposite: he has experience a mile wide but not very deep. He, nor the other ‘experts’ simply can’t understand what I or other SO’s/spouses do as we walk with our hurting loved ones in the depths of their pain and dissociation, 24/7 in all aspects of life, not just the safe confines of the therapist’s office.
I’ve ‘argued’ for 14 years all over the internet to bring those in my position into the discussion on a wider basis, but thus far I have found few willing to listen. I do understand many SO’s and spouses are part of the problem rather than part of the solution, but I know many of us aren’t.
Sincerely,
Sam
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Hey Someone Else,
here are the links to 2 mental health organizations in Ashland, Ohio. I’m pretty sure both are in line with the basic principles that MiA promotes. They might be able to assist you or at least direct you to others who could. The last link is to a group located in Toledo who are teaching Emotional CPR(Dan Fisher’s group) and trying to establish other similar things in Ohio. I’ve been in contact with various people connected to these groups, and you are welcome to tell them you know me(use my real name).
I finally have an appointment with the director of Appleseed this coming Monday in the hopes of starting the support group I told you about to help survivors and their family/SO’s and anyone interested to walk together on the healing journey like my wife and I have using attachment principles to stay connected and facilitate healing of the deepest trauma and dissociation like my wife had/has. If that ever gets going, I’ll email you.
Also, please add my email to your list if you don’t mind. I don’t know if I can do anything practically to start a Soteria House, but perhaps I’m wrong.
I may copy this and send it to your email, but I wanted to offer these links publicly in case other Ohioans might have interest in visiting their sites and seeing what is happening in our state.
Sam
https://www.appleseedmentalhealth.com/
https://www.ashlandmhrb.org/
https://beliefactory.com/
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“By communal mastery, the researchers refer to a community-oriented way of coping where people can manage life difficulties through attachments with family, friends, neighbors, and significant others.”
That’s what we’ve found: attachment theory has given us the tools to go thru the worst of the worst, holding us together, and facilitating the healing process.
Sam
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One of the happiest things I have noticed during the 14 years of our healing journey is my wife’s hyper-vigilance is finally waning. For most of our 33-year marriage, if we were in bed asleep together and I got up to go the restroom or go to work, if I made the tiniest of noises, she would gasp and startle awake…but she rarely does that anymore…and many times if I gently touch her to kiss her goodbye as I go to work, she doesn’t gasp or startle either…it’s so gratifying because I know how much work and healing it’s taken to get her to that point…
Sam
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Sam,
my wife and I do lots of fun things that engage all the various parts of her mind. I’ve also built her a craftroom and supplied it with everything she wanted, again to engage all of her. We tandem bike together, tandem kayak together, and I’ve always been willing to watch(tv or movies) or do things repeatedly to engage various parts of her to the fullest extent possible during the reconnection process.
Sam
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Steve,
thanks for replying. I was pretty sure I understood your perspective, and you have confirmed that I do, and like I said, I largely agree with your perspective.
I guess I was kind of more interested in your description and understanding of neural atrophy. I’m just a layman, but it seems like that is a physiological/neural issue that complicates healing trauma, but perhaps my understanding of that term is way off. And as my wife and I have worked on restoring those pathways from long-dissociated areas of her mind/brain, the restoration has always been accompanied by debilitating headaches especially when we are changing her inner working model from a trauma paradigm to a securely-attached one, but I do understand correlation doesn’t equal causation, and so maybe they are unrelated.
I was just interested on your take or experience on any of this.
Thanks,
Sam
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I’ve read thru everyone’s comments and have appreciated them. It’s too bad David isn’t part of the discussion. I have some comments and questions, if everyone hasn’t already lost interest.
Steve, you seem to state repeatedly, in various discussions on this website, about the lack of a biological component in mental health issues. I guess I’m curious how you would described the neural atrophy that comes after decades of dissociation and lack of access to various parts of one’s mind/brain.
I understand your point is to hammer against the ‘mental illness’ myth, but isn’t neural atrophy a real, physiological outcome in the physical brain from dissociation that comes as the result of any trauma when the trauma isn’t addressed? For my wife and I, that neural atrophy and reinvigorating those pathways between the various parts of her mind/brain, has been some of the most difficult parts of the healing journey. I accept and affirm this is different than the ‘mental illness myth’ and believing one has an unfixable chemical imbalance, but I believe it is a physical aspect of trauma/dissociation that complicates the healing.
As for edmr…as in the other recent thread, my wife and I have always seen this as quackery, snake oil, magic elixir and such…and yet, I do want to state that whether one calls it the ‘placebo effect’ or ‘the power of faith’ from religious traditions, if it weren’t for my wife’s faith, we would have been hard pressed to effect some of the most major changes in her inner working model (attachment theory) that have foundationally changed her trauma perspective to one in which she has become securely attached to me as her primary attachment figure.
I understand her faith is a type of crutch, but crutches have useful purposes when a person is deeply traumatized. They allow a person to do something they either can’t do or don’t believe they can do on their own. And who am I to say, when we pray and ask Jesus to change her inner world, that He really isn’t doing it? In the end, she believes it, the needed changes occur to help her connect to other parts of her mind/brain, and without those prayers, I’m not sure I could EVER convince her that she could do it on her own…
I sent her a link of this article because right now the biggest issue we are having is the fear of reconnecting more deeply to the other parts of her mind, and even if it’s only a placebo/crutch, even with all my focus on attachment (which I would add is simply ‘faith’ in the attachment figure, that the person will be there for you when you need it…), I have struggled to move her past those fears…
Sam
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Hi Sonus Silentio,
thank you for taking the time to describe your experience with EMDR. I’m glad you’ve had a positive experience with it as we’ve had with attachment theory.
I do wish you the best as you continue on your healing journey.
Sam
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Kerry, thank you for responding. I have appreciated reading your views on EMDR.
I understand this article is about that, and not dissociation, and so I won’t belabor the point unless you choose to further engage with me…but unlike most people, my wife and I chose to embrace and live ‘in the dissociation’ for the last 14 years. And thus, we learned how it works and how to tear it down: it’s not something to be avoided at all costs like most people act. In fact, the deepest healing she found was as we embraced it and brought those areas back ‘online’ which takes time and hard work. And so I’d like to suggest that it’s not what you and most people think it is, at least not 40 and 50 years later after the initial trauma, and it is definitely the harder of the two (trauma/dissociation) to undo after all those decades that the neural pathways become accustomed to doing workarounds to large areas of the person’s traits and abilities.
Sincerely,
Sam
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Hello Kerry,
my wife is part of the early childhood trauma/extreme dissociation community, so I’ve heard about EMDR for a long time, and I’ll be honest, I’ve always been skeptical as it sounded like ‘snake oil’ and ‘magic elixir’ stuff, but I’ll grant you that I don’t always know why things I do to help my wife heal work, though attachment theory does form the foundation of much that we do.
I am curious how you deal with dissociation. Any unprocessed trauma that isn’t dealt with, eventually becomes ‘sequestered’ or dissociated. For us, the trauma is the relatively easy part to heal using attachment concepts of ‘safe haven’, ‘proximity maintenance’ and ‘affect regulation’. It’s tearing down the dissociative walls and retraining her brain to access all those areas that had been largely unavailable for decades that has been the much bigger issue, and we’ve only found doing repetitive tasks, based on the concepts of neural plasticity, to undo that.
However, beyond the neural plasticity issue, is the fact that the dissociative walls hide so much of the trauma, and at least in our case, the deeper the trauma, the more I’ve been the ONLY person she let into those dark places as her ‘primary attachment figure’ and so I wonder how much access you realistically have. My wife’s counselor didn’t have half the access I do, plus I’m with her every day, 24/7.
I’m just throwing things out. I would love for EMDR to work. It’ seems so wonderful and easy…nothing like the hell we’ve gone thru the last 14 years as I’m still helping her tear down the dissociation and every time I think we have the trauma gone, another bit ‘pops’ up because we tore down more dissociation or for other reasons that are too numerous to delineate here.
I do wish you the best.
Sam
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I’ve struggled with this article all week. I’ve watched all the positive comments about it show up. And I keep reading it, trying to see if I’m misunderstanding something, and I freely admit that may be the case. And I truly am deeply sorry for all those on this website who have had their normal, reasonable feelings used against them to take away their humanity and strip them of their agency and dignity.
But this document seems to be guilty of some binary thinking, if I’m reading it right. I unequivocally stand against the biochemical model of mental health, and ‘mental illness’ and ‘chemical imbalances’. I stand against the weaponizing of people’s distress to use against them. I stand against any form of dehumanizing others just because they are struggling…but have none of these cosigners ever dealt with someone who experienced extreme trauma in early childhood? Any unaddressed trauma eventually causes systemic dissociation. ISSTD (international society for the study of trauma and dissociation) with whom I generally disagree because they adhere to the typical model despite dealing with trauma victims, still gets it right when they talk about ‘structural dissociation’ and how a little child’s mind who is subjected to extreme trauma will desperately attempt to sequester(dissociate) the trauma in order to find a way to keep living. But after a time, that coping mechanism becomes ‘structural’ and it causes a host of dysfunctions and dysregulations that are real, not imaginary.
I love my wife. Just yesterday, I told her for the 1000th or more time, “I don’t blame you. NO ONE would ever choose this” but it’s kind of insulting to people in our situation to minimize the extreme damage she’s suffered and which has infiltrated so many parts of our relationship. I’ve spent 14 years helping retrain my wife’s brain so she could access all those areas that she literally had NO access to previously. I work a full time job, often 55 hours a week, and yet I come home and do all the house work, inside and out, and then I spend all my free time, building a relationship with my wife, using our tandem bike, using our tandem kayak, doing everything we possibly can do TOGETHER so that the strength of our relationship enables her to face the past pain and fears and tear down those ‘structurally dissociative walls’. It’s hard on both of us and so exhausting even today, 14 years later, and it still brings me to tears many nights when I wonder if we will ever get thru this.
I don’t know. I hope I’m reading this wrong, but the choice isn’t binary. It’s not the biochemical model of mental health or simply empathizing with a person’s past. When the trauma is early enough, and the dissociation becomes structural, it takes real, daily, concerted effort to undo all the effects as you retrain the person’s brain/mind, and I truly am happy if none of you have ever had to deal with what is still an overwhelming task to me and my wife.
Sam
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I’m honestly not sure how these ‘contracts’ work when the examples given seem to focus on the symptom instead of the root issue. Do people self harm in a vacuum, for the fun of it? Then focusing on that issue instead of what is motivating the self-harming seems unhelpful. Moreover, if there is any unaddressed trauma in the past then there will be some form of dissociation, and so these contracts may not be made with the part of the person who is ‘responsible’ for the self harming or the addiction issues. I do think the community part of it could be helpful in an attachment capacity: drawing on one’s connections with others for strength.
I like the end part of this interview, finding the middle ground, finding nuance, living with apparent contradictions (because of our ignorance). The binary, polarizing, black and white thinking of the States is simply making things worse as I have seen so many instances of it spilling over into how we help and see people who are in distress.
Sam
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Hello Rebecca,
my wife and I have spent the last 14 years implementing attachment concepts in our marriage to help heal the many attachment wounds she suffered as a little child. Those concepts have been the roadmap for our healing journey and can do things for someone experiencing extreme distress that I wish would get more talk: I’m glad you’ve shared just the tip of what they can provide to any of us.
Thank you for sharing your story. I wish you the best.
Sam
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No problem, Daiphanous Weeping. We are fine.
Sam
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No, Daiphanous Weeping, I wasn’t trying to diagnose the cause of your diagnosis. I was trying to be empathetic and validate your diagnosis and some of the other things you said and suggest a camaraderie, however small, between your situation and ours, but apparently I failed.
I do wish you the best,
Sam
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Hello Daiphanous Weeping,
I’ve been following some of your comments here and on other threads. I’m sorry you aren’t feeling validated very well. I wrote a response last night and then deleted it. I try to watch myself since I’m just a husband and neither a ‘survivor’ nor an ‘expert’, but you say a lot of things I can relate to the journey my wife and I have been on the last 14 years. And if I remember correctly, the only difference between your schizophrenia and my wife’s d.i.d. is some ‘expert’ decided if the voices the person hears seem to be external, then voila, ‘you have schizophrenia’ whereas if the voices seem internal, then, poof, ‘you must have d.i.d.’
For us, my wife’s diagnosis of d.i.d 14 years ago was a godsend. For 20 years before that we struggled in our marriage. WTH was wrong? We didn’t know. We loved each other, but so many things were a struggle for us, no matter how hard we tried. We finally started seeing an alternative counselor who suggested she might have d.i.d….and we finally had a name to our unknown assailant.
Now we were fortunate. She didn’t get caught up in the mental health system. Our son and I helped and kept her safe the first 5 years when all the pent up trauma and emotions let loose in a hurricane of extreme states. We slowly found our way, together as a couple and family, as we utilized attachment concepts amongst other things to effect real healing that the drugs only mask.
I’m sorry you feel crazy. My wife felt the same at first. I can’t imagine dealing with all the stuff especially if you don’t have someone in your life to help stabilize and normalize things. When a ship is in a hurricane, stuff gets thrown and tossed and you feel like your life is going to end at any moment, at least that was how it was for her. But I went through those hurricanes by her side as a ‘safe haven’ literally carrying her and wrapping her in my arms at times when it was worst, and little by little the hurricanes diminished as my presence and assurances somehow gave her mind the extra help it needed to process those things from the past and assimilate them which stopped the storms permanently.
I can’t speak for you, but the trauma and subsequent dissociation seemed to be the biggest issues for my wife…and the dissociation seems to have caused most of the extreme states and other stuff she struggled with as the mind desperately wanted to get back in a sort of ‘stasis’ because it wanted access to everywhere. We are still working on dissociation issues, but the extreme-state stuff is mostly in the past.
I do wish you well. I think I understand a lot that you are saying and I agree with much of it, and so I just wanted to speak up and say I hear you.
Sam
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I think part of the problem is people confuse symptoms with root causes. I always focused on the trauma and subsequent dissociation that the trauma caused. IMO, these are the root causes of everything else. So much of the dsm is just symptomatic issues which spring from the original trauma and the mind’s subsequent coping mechanism of dissociation that then become systemic when the trauma isn’t dealt with.
However, there is one other issue I see when helping a survivor of early childhood trauma. S/he may have no baseline for ‘recovery.’ During a healthy childhood, the parents serve as role models for the child. But in a traumatic childhood that is often missing. When my wife and I first started our journey, over and over and over she told me, “I don’t know what ‘healthy’ looks like.” I took that as a cue for me to grow up and become a role model that my wife was lacking originally. I don’t dictate the outcome, but I try to model healthy behavior as we walk the journey together.
Sam
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What a wonderful community, and especially one that is able to show radical acceptance. I wish we could get something like that going here in Ohio.
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Miranda,
I hope Mad in America will really explore the healing power of life-long attachment relationships especially when childhood abuse occurs and the person’s attachment system is deeply traumatized. When understood correctly and lived appropriately, these attachment concepts, as laid out by Bowlby, literally can heal the worst of trauma and dissociation and all the extreme states that come with those. The science is there, but unfortunately, too many of the experts try to do what only family can do as the primary attachment figures in the person’s life.
I’m glad to see Mad in America embracing the larger family system because one never knows which family member will/can step up, and with some training and understanding, fulfill the healing role the person needs. Ideally it would be the parent or spouse, but I’ve got a newphew struggling with attachment issues because he was adopted and from what I’ve been told his older sister is the best at looking past her brother’s issues and loving him despite and through them.
If there is ever anything I could do to assist this section, I’d be happy to do so. I had to learn it all on my own: that’s something I don’t wish on anyone else.
Sam
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Fourteen years ago the trauma and subsequent dissociation my wife had experienced during childhood crashed into our 20-year old marriage. We were in our son’s senior year of home schooling him, and I guess it didn’t really occur to me to do anything different with her needs. We did find an alternative counselor, but as anyone suffering extreme mental distress knows, it’s a 24/7 thing, not a once-a-week-at-the-counselor’s-office thing.
But her counselor offered us a lifeline for the first 5 years while I dealt with my own issues and we developed a rhythm between us. Eventually the attachment strategies we had always leaned toward with our son and each other became the foundation of our relationship interactions on the healing journey we found ourselves upon. I always refer to this as OUR healing journey because I had to decide to own all the fallout from her trauma and dissociation lest I ‘other’ her and it become a wedge between us. Moreover, it’s OUR healing journey because I had a lot of healing and changing that I had to do before I was someone she could depend upon at all times. I studied up on attachment theory and then became much more purposeful in implementing it in our relationship, and that is when I really became a healing companion that could facilitate her healing in profound ways.
Before You Call for Help is a tiny synopsis of the highlights of our last 14 years from my perspective and how I learned to be the healing companion she could trust with her deepest fears and pain. It was only when I began to frequent Mad in America 5 years ago that I realized how I had inadvertently spared her and us so much additional trauma at the hands of the mental health system here in the States. At 30 pages it could only scratch the surface, and I’d be happy to discuss anything further if anyone finds something of value in it for their situation.
Sam
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Daiphanous Weeping,
though attachment is most easily done during childhood through healthy interaction with a loving, providing parent, the science supports what my wife and I have experienced the last 14 years: that adult couples can provide the same for each other. But the challenge for us is undoing 5 decades of trauma and dissociation that became systemic in her thought patterns. If only I had understood what was going on inside her when we were first married at 21, it would have been so much easier than when we finally started at 40 and now into our mid 50’s, sigh…
Sam
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Hello E. Baden,
I see you are from the Midwest. There’s a little group of us in Ohio trying to change things here. I’m just a husband but I’ve walked with my wife thru all her trauma and extreme dissociation and extreme states. For most of the last 14 years I have mostly done it alone and have been blacklisted across the internet by those who don’t want to hear of a better, non-medical/medicated, relational (attachment concepts) way to heal. But just a few months ago I met some others who actually embraced me for the first time…and I’m still struggling to believe I may have finally found a home. I just turned 54 and haven’t given up my hope and dream to share the better way my wife and I found, and happily, Mad in America just posted a little quick-reference guide in their family section that I wrote.
All that to say, don’t give up the fight. I know it’s hard. I hurt so deeply most days, especially the days when I was screamed at (online), called a pedophile, wife abuser and all kinds of other things. But we need people like you. I wish I had the wisdom you do when I was 25. If you’d ever like to talk, shoot me an email at my blog address (samruck2 @ gmail dot com). Finding other like minded people makes all the difference in the world. I don’t know where you are in the Midwest, but perhaps, there are others in your neck of the woods, too.
Sam
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Hello Curiousmedia,
I don’t really want to debate economics. I understand there is a ton of inequality in our system, and so many are being left behind, but I don’t think it’s truly a function of capitalism, but of the avarice in our leaders and the 1% hearts. At the same time, the grass isn’t always greener on the other side, and unchecked socialism has a history of failures from last century.
Anyway, I believe Megan’s main point was ‘we don’t have everything we need’ within ourselves, and attachment theory would affirm that. It’s the foundation of everything my wife and I did on our healing journey from her childhood abuse. Attachment theory teaches us as the song says, “We all need somebody to lean on” and that’s not just when we are in crisis, but throughout our lives.
By the way. I’ve been here over 5 years, but thanks for the welcome, but I’m an anomaly here, and so I don’t comment much anymore.
Sam
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Hi Megan,
I think your anger toward capitalism as the culprit of all the ills of this society is misplaced at least in regards to the main thesis of this article. I would suggest it is the West’s overemphasis, and especially the United States, on rugged individualism, independence, autonomy, the me-culture and such. I never really bought into all that stuff, and so when my wife and I naturally began following attachment theory from the start of our healing journey, it wasn’t a huge change for us. We just had to learn to become more purposeful as we implemented its main tenets into our relationship.
Sam
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Bob,
thank you as always for your thoughtful work and analysis of things.
The very last question you answered in this interview had to do about family. I strongly believe the tipping point for this movement will come when we train and empower the significant others, family and friends to walk with their loved ones who are in distress whether from ‘psychosis’ or any of the many, other, varied extreme states that come from trauma and dissociation. I’m glad you recognized that it doesn’t take a ‘peer’ to be empathetic, and it is usually only family and SO’s who are around long enough to effect true healing for that 30% who weren’t helped in the studies you cited. For me and my wife, it’s year 13 or 14: it’s been so long at this point that I’m losing count, but we are still drug free and moving forward, even if it’s not at the pace we had hoped when we first started.
I wish you the best as you continue to spearhead this movement to treat others as any of us would want to be treated instead of ‘othering’ them. For me it’s just part of the Golden Rule.
Sam
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“Participants are encouraged to understand their voice-hearing experience on their own terms, and no one narrative is emphasized over any other. This means the biomedical explanation of voice-hearing is on equal footing with the alien-implanted technology explanation during these meetings. There is a strict rule that participants do not criticize each other’s narrative around voice-hearing.”
Has Mad in America tilted so far to the Left that it can’t see a HUGE issue with this statement? Does validating other people’s experiences mean the total rejection of any kind of baseline for truth or facts at minimum?
I like a lot of what HVG does, but this is NOT one of them, and that Mad in America would uncritically make this statement, a website dedicated to the refutation of the biomedical model of mental health, is a sad statement on the loss of…I don’t know exactly what, but I’m truly flabbergasted.
I validated most of the things my wife told me about her voices, but when she told me they were ‘aliens’ I gently pushed back, and slowly over time, her views changed to something more in line with a perspective that would facilitate her healing. We still have divergent perspectives on her ‘voices’ so it’s not that I think there is only one ‘truth’ but this is a low point in the fight for a better way if one can’t gently help others find a perspective better in line with basic facts.
Sam
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Lauren,
I’m sorry this article didn’t get more views or comments. I was in a Zoom meeting last night and this course got mentioned and so I did a search on MiA and found your article today. I recently wrote a 30-page, quick-reference guide of my experiences learning to become a good healing companion for my wife. The others in the meeting represented those who have experienced trauma and the mental health system. But we agreed on our common humanity and the need to move past divisive terms and ways of seeing each other. This course you explain seems like a good, first step, and there’s so much more for those who are in a sustained relationship like I am.
I sent this link to the rest of the members in our little collaboratory group.
Sam
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Bippyone,
here is the link to Asylum magazine. If you use the contact form, you probably can contact Helen. She and I have been in contact ever since this article was published here on MiA. They just published their winter magazine last week, I believe.
Sam
https://asylummagazine.org/
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When dealing with (false) accusations, these were a couple of things that helped me:
1)“Apologizing does not always mean you’re wrong and the other person is right. It just means you value your relationship more than your ego.”
2) Allowing myself to be the ‘scapegoat’ for my wife’s justified anger at her abuser. Sure it hurt, but I saw the end goal when the anger and rage were gone so that they no longer separated us.
3) Asking for complete accusations so I could give FULL apologies, in detail…and never justifying myself in any way. Again, the goal is to diminish the anger and broken trust and validation. Later, there will be time for ‘my side of the story…’
As for psychosis, sigh, I still don’t understand the obsession with this concept. I feel it is completely unhelpful and judgmental. I walked with my wife in her perception of reality, validating it, learning from it, and providing her a ‘safe harbor’ in the midst of the storms that were associated with all the ‘extreme’ states…and so we developed our own reality as we walked together and moved out of the constructs forged from her traumatic past.
Sam
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Hello, Lauren,
my wife and I are fellow homeschoolers, though our son is 30 now. I have a lot of happy memories of those days, but I know my wife shouldered most of the burden of the schooling: I supported both of them the best I could so that it was a family effort.
I’m sorry for your experiences and the trauma they have caused. I couldn’t quite tell if you are still struggling with eating issues amongst other things or not. I’m glad it sounds like you’ve got a pretty good support network, too. I’m glad it sounds like you have a good therapist now, but never underestimate the power your husband has to support and carry you through the hard times. Once I learned how to help my wife, it made all the difference in her healing.
Take care,
Sam
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I love Ms. Spandler’s willingness to reject binary thinking. It’s so easy in our hyper-polarized society to want acceptance, safety and affirmation over the messiness that finding what works for each of us often entails.
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Trishna,
wow. You have found the exact same thing my wife and I have at nearly every point. I’d love to swap stories with you, though you do seem to come at it from my wife’s perspective and not mine…I’m astounded how closely you mirror what’s taken place on our journey.
Sam
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Even though I strongly disagree with the FMSF and its disinformation campaign, I think it was disingenuous and unhelpful for the author to completely ignore some of the catastrophes like the satanic ritual abuse and daycare scandals. How can we learn from the past, if we choose to ignore the missteps that caused those scandals?
However, as someone who has helped my wife heal and integrate her dissociated trauma memories, I never found them to be part of some ‘super category’ of memories. They were fragments and snapshots associated with extreme emotions of fear and terror. I’m glad her abuser was long gone, a neighbor from the distant past of whom we had no name to associate with the vague description of him that she could recall, so we never even thought to attempt some kind of reckoning, legal or otherwise. For us, the point was never about the abuser, it was about her coming to terms with those memories and extreme emotions in light of her secure relationship with me today so she could integrate them into her personal narrative and finally be released from their ability to chain her to the past and how they affected her today.
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“No one has been willing or able to go there with me.”
Beatrix, I’m sorry you have no one who can go there with you. I ‘get it.’
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Kermit,
since Open Dialogue is about a collaboration between therapists, family and the person in distress, it would be nice to see the other two legs of that equation brought into these town meetings and not ONLY the experts. I wish we could hear from the family and how their needs were validated, but also how they learned to be better healing companions for the one in distress. And it would be good to hear from the one in distress and how they viewed his/her interaction with family and how it propelled the healing process.
I would also love to see a vision laid out to expand Open Dialogue. There is nothing here in Ohio. When I contact some of the groups you have listed, I’m just ignored because I’m a nobody, sigh. How do we get this available on a larger scale? Why not look into a program to empower families? There are lots of ‘peer programs’ out there, but I have yet to find one that teaches families how to travel with the one in distress and do the kinds of things I had to learn to help my wife, like walk her thru ALL the extreme states she experienced so that she actually healed and not just ‘coped’, like how to implement the attachment concepts of safe haven, affect regulation and proximity maintenance that were so critical to walk my wife thru the worst things she experienced, like how to navigate power dynamics, like how to weigh the needs of various people in the relationship when there simply is NO way that everyone can get what they need, like how to deal with the stress brought on by extreme states and remove the fear of the unknown, like how bringing our adult son into the healing journey added a dimension to her healing that I could NEVER have replicated on my own…and so much more….
I’ve got so many thoughts and questions, and sadly, I probably won’t be able to participate in this even though I signed up for it because it’s our first day of vacation.
Good to see you back here.
Sam
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Hi Amy,
well, I was bored today. I’ve seen this article on the website for awhile…and hesitated to read it because I was afraid it was another culture-war piece…and this war is wearing me out from both sides. But honestly, as I read your article, I was caught up in the story arc of the episodes and found myself wishing I could experience the same.
I do understand some of the horror the survivors have expressed in the comments section. I can’t imagine my wife would ever allow herself on the show at this point in her healing journey. And I did cringe when Reddy was ‘attacked’ by the Fab Five as I’m pretty sure how parts of my wife would react to anyone but me or our son doing that. But I’m pretty sure she liked the original series and she likes a lot of these makeover reality series, AND as you and Bob have made clear, it’s ALL consensual even if it’s hard and disruptive to the ‘heroes’.
Thanks for sharing. Maybe I’ll even send my wife a link to it and see if she’d like to watch it with me.
Sam
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Hi A.S.!
I always feel a special affinity toward Finland because of the exchange student from there that we had in our family 35 years ago. We still keep in touch with her via Facebook.
I’m so glad your parents rallied to help you. I hope some day there is far more help offered to the families who want to help a loved one in distress but don’t know where to start and don’t want to go the NAMI route.
Sam
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Joanna,
Are you talking about people who are using street drugs and alcohol or just people in severe, mental distress? My wife was never the former, but she was definitely the latter, and I never tried to ‘control’ her nor did it really matter if she was ‘reasonable’.
Think of a person in the water during a hurricane. She was flailing, desperate not to drown. Control and reason are irrelevant in that situation. Validation, engagement and attachment were what mattered. She had to know I was right there with her in the water and even though she felt overwhelmed and out of control, I wasn’t, and I wasn’t going to let her drown.
When people are ‘too disturbed’ as you put it, that’s when the attachment concepts of affect regulation, safe haven and proximity maintenance can slowly calm the worst of cases like my wife used to be. She didn’t need drugs and never used them. She needed empowered family who knew how to ride the hurricane out with her…and now our seas are much calmer…
Sam
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Joanna,
as a husband who has been doing this very thing for my wife the last 12 years, what you say is correct. It takes way more than kindness and it is exhausting, and yet, we, the family, are simply put in the very best position to do what is needed. It’s a 24/7 ‘job’ especially in the beginning. Our son was attending a local college while at home. He took the night shift, and I took the dayshift (since I worked nights) helping my wife, keeping her safe. We did that for nearly 5 years until he moved out to do his graduate work by which time my wife was in a much better place.
I love what Open Dialogue seems to be, but there is no one like that here in the Midwest states. I would have loved someone to help me learn the ropes, but in the end only I can be her primary attachment figure and do the hard work of helping her heal all the attachment issues she suffered from severe trauma and dissociation 5 decades earlier…and helping her tear down the dissociative walls so she can be whole again.
Sam
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There’s a lot of stress in my little family. I like to think of attachment points as the little, individual filaments of a spider web. The more points of connection I can make between my wife and our son, the more we are all held together so that we can bear the stress and turmoil we face.
I email our son and the 8 girls in my wife’s system every single morning. I played PS4 with him over the internet 2-3 times a week. I share a mug of coffee with my wife each day of the weekend. We take tandem bike rides. We always eat together and watch tv together, sitting next to each other. We run our weekly errands together, go to church and bible study together and whatever else we can when I’m home from work.
The more points of contact I have with each of them not only hold them to me when they are facing hard things like his 4th year of his PhD program, or all the stress she has healing from her trauma and dissociation, but they also serve to hold me when I’m struggling with the overwhelming despair and despondency that have plagued my adult life.
Sam
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Hello Dr. Caplan,
you and I emailed each other early this summer when you wrote about Steve Stone and I live just down the road from him. So I hope it is ok that I sent you an email.
Sam
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Hi Paula,
as someone who has struggled with this most of my adult life (I’m 53) the loss of hope that things will get better is the biggest driver of the feelings of despair. I find myself desperately looking for hope, even false hope, that things will get better to keep me going when it’s worse. Sometimes the thought of death itself gives me hope that ‘if things get too bad, I have control, I have an escape…”
The sad things is, I know how I could fix things pretty easily, but it goes against all I believe, and so I’m trapped in a double bind and going thru the problem is the only hope for things to get better, and yet, solving that problem isn’t within my control…it’s truly overwhelming…sigh…
Sam
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Steve,
I’m not talking about the comments section, and I don’t want to say more because I only kind of get things 2nd hand, and I don’t really understand the objections as I’ve seen other family members have blogs published, so maybe it’s just me, specifically…
Sam
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There is, of course, nothing wrong about people criticizing MIA or me personally. The criticism can open the door to further discussions and debate, which you can hope will lead to a greater understanding of important issues.
Bob,
find a way to enlarge the circle of family members allowed to contribute at MiA. Thus far the only family I’ve seen allowed to contribute are those whose loved ones were caught up in the system. Why are their voices allowed, but those of us who have fought 24/7 for years to keep our loved ones OUT of the system are not allowed to share how we did so? Is the audience at this website, only and solely, composed of those caught in the system other than me? Is there really no interest in empowering families and SO’s to keep their loved ones totally out of the system?
Sam
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“There is a radical need for a world where ‘us and them,’ ‘center and margin,’ and ‘normal and crazy’ are no longer needed.”
Perhaps this best describes the path my wife and I have taken. I see her fundamentally as no different than myself. I believe our refusal to embrace the dichotomy between ‘survivors’ and ‘the rest of us’ is why my wife and I sidestepped so many of the issues that have engulfed all parties within the mental health industry/world and most attempts to reform it.
Sam
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Hello Dmitriy,
Thank you for sharing your life and experiences.
My wife and I have walked this healing journey together, as equals. I almost always engaged her ‘voices’ first because of the dissociation she experienced. The loving and respectful relationship I developed with each one was instrumental in her overall healing and the eventual tearing down of the dissociative walls so that she could make a new, corporate life with each voice. I did things she absolutely couldn’t do for herself, and yet we learned to how to do it in ways so her agency was never diminished nor did I ever abuse the potentially huge power differentials in our relationship (she is a housewife). We are both richer for the journey and I learned much about myself and my own inner workings as well.
Sam
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I’ve tried for a day to formulate some kind of response to this study. I guess it’s always good to look for alternative treatments, but I still have major problems even using the word ‘psychotic.’ It prejudges the person’s experience by those on the outside instead of helping the person to find meaning and a way thru it.
I googled psychosis, again, and it’s known to be a symptom: so why are they still taking a symptomatic approach rather than dealing with the real issue? Coping is not healing. Therapists cannot be the main therapeutic instrument in the sufferer’s life.
I understand sometimes symptoms must be reduced so that the real issues can be addressed, but there are so many questions this study didn’t answer or even attempt to address, sigh.
Sam
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Hmmm…
Well, I guess I should state first that my wife and I feel fortunate that we really didn’t have to deal with incest issues in her past, but that doesn’t mean many of the issues brought up by this author had no bearing in our healing journey. and her extreme position on many of these issues, imo, hurt the cause of survivors rather than help.
1) Her critique of the FMSF is rather simplistic. The d.i.d. world is extremely familiar with this society and its attempts to discredit survivors while protecting offending family members, and yet that doesn’t mean there is no credibility to the malleability of memories and how therapists of the past blatantly manipulated survivor memories and produced wild claims of satanic ritual abuse and more and paraded d.i.d. patients around talk shows like circus freaks while they stoked their own careers and egos.
Dealing with dissociated memories is a delicate dance of validating the person and what is uncovered while at the same time understanding that these memories can be vague, symbolic at times, trapped in childish understandings, and fragmentary until other pieces of the puzzle are revealed later in the journey, etc.
The FMSF’s disingenuous attempts to discredit survivors doesn’t mean survivors’ memories are infallible. I ALWAYS validated my wife, but I also gave her the space and safety to later alter those declarations of memories as other pieces of the puzzle were added to clarify things, and some pieces may always be lost to the fog and mist of things that happened 4 and 5 decades ago.
2) The author’s definition of incest is so wide as to render it meaningless. If she’s going to expand it to mean family friends, other children, pastors/priests, or ‘anyone who betrayed the child’s innocence and trust’, then it loses power as it alienates thoughtful people who might otherwise affirm the horror of incest. It’s an overreach that does NOT help survivors. Incest is clearly defined as sexual abuse (in all its forms) within the family and relatives, period.
3) Validating and believing the survivor doesn’t automatically transfer into a legal ability to bring justice against the perpetrators and recognizing that reality seems to be a problem for some. It’s a conundrum that is frustrating and upsetting.
Sam
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Hi Karin,
this is a very powerful story. I’m very sorry for all you suffered just because others couldn’t handle your grief.
I did much the same for my wife as I walked with her thru the healing journey, though I always told her I was ‘sharing’ and ‘helping to carry’ her fear so that she didn’t have to do it alone. It seems we possibly mean the same but say it differently as your friends appeared to do for you the same as I did for her.
Best of wishes,
Sam
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Hmmm…
Well, I guess I should state first that my wife and I feel fortunate that we really didn’t have to deal with incest issues in her past, but that doesn’t mean many of the issues brought up by this author had no bearing in our healing journey. and her extreme position on many of these issues, imo, hurt the cause of survivors rather than help.
1) Her critique of the FMSF is rather simplistic. The d.i.d. world is extremely familiar with this society and its attempts to discredit survivors while protecting offending family members, and yet that doesn’t mean there is no credibility to the malleability of memories and how therapists of the past blatantly manipulated survivor memories and produced wild claims of satanic ritual abuse and more and paraded d.i.d. patients around talk shows like circus freaks while they stoked their own careers and egos.
Dealing with dissociated memories is a delicate dance of validating the person and what is uncovered while at the same time understanding that these memories can be vague, symbolic at times, trapped in childish understandings, and fragmentary until other pieces of the puzzle are revealed later in the journey, etc.
The FMSF’s disingenuous attempts to discredit survivors doesn’t mean survivors’ memories are infallible. I ALWAYS validated my wife, but I also gave her the space and safety to later alter those declarations of memories as other pieces of the puzzle were added to clarify things, and some pieces may always be lost to the fog and mist of things that happened 4 and 5 decades ago.
2) The author’s definition of incest is so wide as to render it meaningless. If she’s going to expand it to mean family friends, other children, pastors/priests, or ‘anyone who betrayed the child’s innocence and trust’, then it loses power as it alienates thoughtful people who might otherwise affirm the horror of incest. It’s an overreach that does NOT help survivors. Incest is clearly defined as sexual abuse (in all its forms) within the family and relatives, period.
3) Validating and believing the survivor doesn’t automatically transfer into a legal ability to bring justice against the perpetrators and recognizing that reality seems to be a problem for some. It’s a conundrum that is frustrating and upsetting.
I would love to see the stigma removed from all topics of abuse, but unfortunately this author seems to fall into the tribalism and culture wars our country is experiencing and thus adds to the confusion and division in general rather than capitalizing on the common views most people have on this topic.
Sam
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I’d forgotten about this blog until Sam P. brought it back up. To me, this was kind of a sad day. MiA was presented with a fork-in-the-road decision on a number of levels. It’s become a very different website, imo, since then.
Sam
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Hi Caroline,
thank you for sharing your story. I’m so sorry your family didn’t know how to help you when you needed them most. I hope some day that common problem begins to change.
Sam
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This ought to be obvious, but I’m glad a few experts are finally getting it. In any relationship ALL voices must be heard and given equal value and weight or the relationship will never have a chance to be healthy, nor the people within it.
Sam
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I think it’s important to remember that Dr. Aftab should probably be considered an ally to those of us in the critical psychiatry camp: https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/07/bridging-critical-conceptual-psychiatry-interview-awais-aftab/. His attempts to bring nuance to the debate may be frustrating to those in the anti-psychiatry camp who want to burn it all down, but my reading of that interview was a very careful dance he did, allowing Lucy to have a clear voice on her position while articulating many of the refutations, deflections, and many other spurious arguments the mainstream psychiatrists would suggest to ignore and caricature any who oppose the status quo. He has an audience that many will never have, and if he alienates it with the passionate rhetoric of those in either of our camps, he will lose his chance to continue to move those who are moveable. I know that’s not what the victims of psychiatry want to hear, but it is reality.
Thank you, Lucy, for putting yourself out there especially in light of the ‘refutations’ at the end and the haters on Twitter.
Sam
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Mark,
I wish I could give you a ‘big name.’ I started a blog 10 years ago geared toward SO’s and families and to teach them how to be involved in the healing(recovery) journey. My wife and I gravitated toward attachment concepts as the best means to hold all of us (including our now adult son) together as we walk thru the various issues created by her extreme childhood trauma and dissociation. Though we haven’t ‘arrived’, she has recovered to the point she tells me she just doesn’t fit in most survivor/trauma boards online.
But the blog never gained the traction I had hoped for though I met others doing similar things. My best guess is that those of us who are doing this are so involved we just don’t have much time for anything else. And I’m unaware of anyone else advocating for this, but I can’t believe I’m the only one.
Personally, I wish I could team up with Open Dialogue, but there’s no one in Ohio who does that and so we largely continue to walk on our own, outside the mental health system.
Sam
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Mark,
the fact that you would leave SO’s and families out of your PowerPoint list of people in your ranks is incredibly dispiriting and indicative of why, I believe, this movement continues to falter. Our son and I single handedly kept his mom/my wife out of the mental health system by giving her 24/7 coverage for 5 years when all hell broke loose as we started our healing journey together. 7 years later I still do all kinds of things to help and support her. I have always had her 100% full recovery in mind and work every day toward that goal doing ‘whatever it takes’ to see all the trauma and dissociation healed and reintegrated into her personal narrative.
There is a small band of us on the frontlines despite the lack of affirmation here and elsewhere. I hope some day that changes and what we have learned and accomplished is recognized as integral to the fight against the dehumanization of those who have suffered mental health trauma/distress.
Sam
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Can’t believe these guys are so close to where I live. Their website is pretty amazing and includes links to a number of authors familiar to MiA readers and even a link here. The 3 legs philosophy is pretty amazing, too.
Sam
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dfk,
though I don’t accept or use the term ‘psychosis’ because it shows a judgmental ignorance (imo) of what is really happening, I do agree it’s a ‘software’ issue. After walking with my wife for 13 years in this, I think much of non-drug induced ‘pyschosis’ is related to dissociation and overlapping mental realities (past and present). I help her reprogram her software by walking with one foot in her “Matrix” and one foot in the present. I don’t demand that she change, but simply am a safe companion for her, interacting with her where she is and helping her as needed, and slowly she is moving from the past to the present at a rate that she is comfortable changing as she brings those dissociated areas into her general narrative.
Sam
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“The fundamental principles that guided the authors’ rights-based approach are participation and empowerment, equality and non-discrimination, quality and diversity of care, social inclusion, autonomy, and dignity. ”
I find most of these principles worthy of recognition, but I do have concerns about autonomy. No one is an island, and the demand for autonomy is just more of excessive western independence rearing its ugly head. It’s almost ironic that they put social inclusion right before autonomy: you can’t have it both ways in my opinion and even less in the intimate relationships of family and SO’s/spouses where a rights-based approach truly needs to be hashed out and everyone must learn and/or be taught how to honor each one’s dignity and agency in the context of relationships…which can’t only be one way…but flow in all directions.
I find it a little telling that the article this was based upon mentioned Open Dialogue and then spent NO time dealing with the issue of family/SO’s. ‘Peers’ are well and good, but it is family that can either be the best or worst partners on a healing journey. We are the only ones who are truly set up to give long-term 24/7 coverage and who are probably willing to make the necessary sacrifices to do so like our son and I did for my wife. I doubt any ‘peer’ would give 13 years of his/her life to commit to walk the healing journey, and despite the bad rap family often gets on this website, I bet many family members/SO’s would be willing to do so if only they were taught and given the tools to help rather than abdicate what ONLY they can do to the ‘experts’ at the urging of NAMI.
Sam
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Sera,
I wonder if Bradford meant to capitalize ‘here’ also…meaning your privilege on this website, though the website’s reach is little comparatively.
As for the tone or ‘style’ as you say, yes, this article was a struggle for me to get thru, and I typically enjoy your articles. One of the girls in my wife’s system is a social justice warrior, and she has helped me move to a more -balanced (i.e. center/right) position on most issues, but this kind of read more like something I’d see on Slate. If I used similar, derogatory language coming for my formerly, far-Right perspective, it would never even make it thru the moderators, and it shouldn’t.
The style detracts from your article.
Sam
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I’m afraid that having an ‘urge for a social approach to mental health’ will lead to dead ends, at times, just like the biomedical approach has. When any of us force fit mental health/trauma into a preconceived paradigm to fit our proclivities, then it closes us to the things which don’t fit into that paradigm…and not all trauma is socially/culturally based by any means.
This approach by HVM is very concerning, even if it is a little better than the biomedical approach.
Sam
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SnowyOwl,
again, thanks, I’ve been to Open Dialogue. I’ve been everywhere I can find. No one seems to want me without my wife or because I’m not a therapist. So it is what it is. Maybe if I get us thru the rest of our healing journey, she will reconsider her unwillingness to join me sharing our story.
Take care,
Sam
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Thanks Snowyowl, I just wish MiA would be willing to find a solution like Open Dialogue apparently has (according to Steve) for us to truly partner together. I know I could offer more to this movement to end the dehumanization that so many of you have experienced. I kept my wife from it: I think I could teach others in my position who would have interest to do the same.
Sam
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Steve,
if you see the problem and Open Dialogue has figured out how to bridge it, it’s too bad MiA doesn’t get with them and try to do the same…
Sam
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Steve,
my wife and I will have been married 32 years in 4 days. In a relationship of any duration NEITHER voice can be raised above the other. Both have to be heard and given equal weight. Moreover, in a very real sense her issues are my issues. I can’t help but be affected by everything happening within her, and vice versa.
Now I understand that many spouses and partners do NOT take the path I have taken, but I wonder how many who end up at NAMI do so out of good faith. I contacted them once because I was desperate, alone, and needed help. In the beginning of our journey I was absolutely overwhelmed and our son and I gave my wife 24/7 coverage for 4 years while he attended a local university and I worked 2nd shift, and yet she still wasn’t physically safe and for a year or more was covered in bruises, and she had many, nearly-broken bones because the new girls didn’t know how to ‘use’ the body very well. I had new girls trying to jump out of cars going 70mph or running thru moving traffic or wanting to buy fairy wings from the store so they could jump off buildings and fly! And that’s just the tiniest tip of the iceberg! When you all tell people in my position that our voice is 2nd class and we are engulfed in this kind of stuff, how many stick around? I’m not here near as much as I used to be for that very reason.
The way to beat NAMI isn’t by belittling what the family is going thru but by showing them a better, though harder, way, and giving them the support to walk it with the person who is suffering. Again, I learned to wade through all the issues: I’m NOT special. I just refused to give up on my marriage and my wife. If we helped others, they might be willing to do the same!
Sam
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Sera,
I believe systemic problems are changed one story at a time until it reaches critical mass like, hopefully, BLM seems to be doing now. None of us change the past: we change today and hopefully that changes the arc for the future like I’m trying to do with my little family. It’s unfortunate you are turning me into an ‘exception’ rather than seeing me as a potential ‘example.’ I may never have ‘othered’ my wife, but it still took me years to learn how to change our relational dynamics, how to fully implement attachment concepts to hold us together as we walked thru hell and help heal her own attachment system, how to see thru ‘extreme states’ so they became understandable, and thus healable, etc. I will never fully understand what my wife experiences but neither will she understand fully what I do on our journey, but that doesn’t stop us from treating each as equals. And if I could learn to do this, others could too. I don’t want to be an ‘exception’ but I do wish I could help others in a way that I never got any help for myself.
Sam
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Sera,
I agree with much you have said, but I hope some day you will see that you seem to be judging our situation from YOUR experience. If that isn’t the case, then I apologize. It took me years to learn to see everything my wife was going thru by HER perceptions of it. My wife has never been ‘psychiatrized’ and as for being ‘diagnosed’ well, that was by an alternative counselor and, once I quickly got past the Hollywood caricature, for me it simply meant ‘your wife was deeply traumatized and is dealing with massive dissociation.’ Everything else we learned together, on our own, apart from the system because she even made me promise NOT to read any books on the subject (until years later). So I entered the journey without any preconceived ideas. We just kind of ‘fell into’ attachment strategies as the best thing to help us thru this. Later I became better educated on that subject, so I could help my wife even more, and so I owe much to John Bowlby for the road map he unknowingly provided us!
It took me years to wade thru all the power dynamics of which you speak and learn how to use my strength for her advantage while never, ever, ever using it for my own advantage or even coercing her ‘for her own good.’ I had to learn that when I tried that tactic it never produced true, deep healing, and so I stopped doing it and learned to wait for her to move at her own pace, not at mine
I do continue to wish you all well. I hope some day my wife will be willing ‘validate’ what I say, but if this is only for us, then so be it.
Sincerely,
Sam
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Sera,
thank you for your sincere question. I will try to answer it the best I can.
12 years ago when the other girls (alters) started to join my marriage and family and all hell broke loose because of all the extreme states they all went through, I never saw my wife any different than a person with extreme physical trauma. I never ‘othered’ her. I never thought she was crazy. I never thought she was psychotic, delusional, paranoid or any of the other derogatory things that are said of people who find themselves caught in effects of extreme mental trauma and dissociation.
I ‘owned’ all the effects that her trauma and dissociation brought into our relationship. I saw us as ‘foxhole buddies’, in it together, 100%. I understood that a lot more would be required of me as the other girls (alters) joined our relationship, and our marriage today is certainly not typical to say the least. Many times I both physically and figuratively have
carried her through the healing journey: I did whatever it took to help the only woman I have ever loved, and it was only when I found this site that I understood how much our efforts as a family (adult son included) had saved her from all the additional trauma and suffering so many of you have suffered from the drugs, the dehumanization, and the forced incarcerations you were made to endure.
But when I got here I was immediately ‘othered’. It didn’t matter that I was an expert with lived experience on how to keep someone suffering extreme states, extreme dissociation and everything else my wife has experienced out of the system and off the drugs. All that is seen on this site is that I’m NOT a trauma victim. No matter how much I have argued that SO’s, family and friends MUST be part of the solution, it has been made clear to me that I will always be 2nd class unless my wife ‘validates’ my voice, here.
Let’s go back to George Floyd. I’ve read lots of op-ed’s lately. A number of them by black authors have essentially said that until white people ‘own’ the protests, the blacks can only take things so far because white people control the power in this country. George Floyd changed the ‘other’ into a human face that many for the first time could connect to and white America has finally seemed to change the tide of this racist travesty in our country.
I hope some day that Mad in America, Western Mass RLC, HVN and others will understand the same, that people like me must be more than just an ‘ally’ which still feels like a 2nd class ‘othering’ term to me. My wife and I are together on our journey 100%. There is no ‘other’ in our healing journey. There is only ‘us.’ This is not her struggle: this is our struggle. And I believe that it will only be when we help others like myself to ‘own’ this struggle, as the whites are finally doing with BLM, that things will change in the mental health arena as well.
Sam
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Bob,
I hope some day MiA will find a way to expand its circle to include people like me. I have worked 24/7 for the last 12 years, as you know a little, to keep my wife OUT of the system completely. If people had the knowledge and tools to do the same, so much of the carnage psychiatry causes the majority of your readers would never even have a chance to occur.
Sincerely,
Sam
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Kermit,
I’m looking forward to this townhall meeting. I hope I can actually be there while it is taking place this time so I can take part in the chat conversation rather than just watching it afterward.
Sam
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Sounds like it was a good meeting with lots of interesting takes on the topic.
“Contacting police should be treated as a very last resort, and true trauma-informed care is built on collaboration and trust”
Until family, friends and carers are taught how to understand ‘non-drug induced extreme states’ so they are de-mystified and the fear factor is removed and then those people are taught how to help the person thru those states, people are naturally going to call in help. Those states definitely can be overwhelming and scary the first time one sees them, even as an outsider, and that just adds to the fear of the person experiencing it. Fear feeds fear, but if the carer can remain calm, then the one in those states can learn to feed off that, as well.
Sam
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Kermit,
NAMI elevates the voice of the family over the sufferer of mental distress from what I read on MiA. However, it is my experience that MiA elevates the voice of the sufferer over the family. Until true parity and dialogue occurs and is facilitated between the 2 parties most interested in this entire topic, I wonder how much progress will be made.
It appears Open Dialogue takes that more balanced approach though I have no personal experience with it (wish I did!). I hope some day MiA can move thru (and beyond) the pain and trauma of the sufferers to see that the families are suffering as well (from the fallout of the trauma and distress of the sufferer and not only from the effects of psychiatry) and healing will only come when all parties are brought together and learn how to love and create safety for everyone involved.
Respectfully,
Sam
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Dear Louisa,
I’m deeply sorry for your pain and terror. I understand a little as my wife and I walked into hell together…and yet we were able to find our way back out…together. But it still takes a toll as you know. And my brain is also in a scramble. But if you’d ever like to talk, your SO knows how to find me.
Sam
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Hi Sam,
I’m sorry for the terrible things you’ve suffered at the hands of the ‘experts’, but I didn’t learn about attachment theory from them. My wife asked me NOT to read any of the literature out there the first couple of years we started our healing journey. And so she and I just kind of developed our own style. A lot of it was based on the Golden Rule, though I always tried to listen to her feedback if she didn’t like something I was doing.
If she was crying or scared, I’d try to comfort her, just like I would want comforted if I were in her position. I spent many nights literally carrying her around the house as she would bury her face in my neck. I tried to be calm, when she couldn’t be. I learned to validate her fears from the past, but after I had done that, I redirected her to her new reality that she was no longer alone: I was with her and I would take care of her and protect her. It helped that the other girls (‘alters’) fronted as little girls because it helped me throw off the terrible maxims so many of us adults have been taught in our hyper-independent, western cultures to be strong, self-reliant and not ‘needy’.
After a few years of us doing things our own way, I thought I ought to read and see why things were going relatively well for us, and that was when I ‘discovered’ attachment theory…but it was just stuff we’d been doing all along since we didn’t have anyone to tell me otherwise (that’s also when I found out I was doing things all ‘wrong’ according to the ‘experts’ despite how well she was doing, lol). After that I became a little more purposeful about some of the best points of that theory, but I in no way changed how we’d been doing things from the start.
As for the ‘navel gazing’, my wife used to get caught up in that, too, and I try to steer her away from it. I tell her, “let’s just focus on the trauma and the dissociation, and the rest of the stuff will take care of itself” and for the most part that has been true.
Sam
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Hi Phoebe,
thank you for the affirmation: I’m glad your own life affirmed the effectiveness of attachment techniques for even the most extreme of altered states. My wife went thru the entire gamut, and we never had to resort to drugs or forced interventions.. Maybe some day I will be able to do an article or series here as you suggest. There is such a desperate need to teach non-medical interventions to those who surround someone in distress.
Sam
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Hi Sandra,
since you gave me the link to this article of yours in our brief interaction a month ago, I read it, again. I read you and your husband’s recent interview in the Psychiatric Times that MIA gave a link to in their “Around the Web” section and it made me think of you. I tried to track down a contact email for you on the internet, but then wondered if that might feel creepy…sigh.
You said you intended to go thru more of my personal blog, but then my wife and I left for Europe and the holidays hit, and I never heard back from you. Maybe you found nothing of interest there, nothing that might help with even a few of your questions that you throw out in this blog and elsewhere…and if that’s the case, then maybe I really have nothing to offer…I can’t get my wife to join me in my efforts to change the conversation on how to approach extreme mental distress issues, no matter how often I beg her, and nothing I have tried on my own for these last 11 years has been accepted by any corner of the discussion on dissociation, ptsd, attachment concepts, mental health, the SO’s place in the healing journey, or anywhere else I have tried to find a ‘home’ for myself. I just, literally, seem to fit nowhere in this world or its internet…and that’s a really hard reality to have to face…
Our son lives over in Waltham, outside Boston. Sometimes I wish I could stop by your place, even if I had to pay for your time, and just figure out if I really have wasted my life and these last 11 years, especially, as I carried my wife thru all the issues that come from extreme dissociation, thinking I could show the world a better way to approach mental distress. But no one wants to listen…and I’m really running out of hope and strength to keep trying to make a difference.
I know this ‘comment’ really ought to be in private, but I didn’t know how to get it to you, and maybe you won’t even see it now as this is such an old blog of yours. I do wish you well and am glad there are people out there like you who are brutally honest with the truth…even if you found nothing of any value that I had to share…
“Sam”
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Hi Steve,
well, I did qualify my response because Ayurdhi writes in a more clinical style than I am used to reading. That’s why I wrote ‘if I’m reading this correctly.’ It seemed that this blog was a largely positive portrayal of the study designed by Marlowe, Perry and Lee. But I am aware that I was going against the prevailing negative opinion of this blog in the comments section.
So with that said, IF I am reading Ayurdhi correctly, then I stand by what I stated previously. I have tried many times to lay out my understanding of dissociation on this website to little effect. But I do understand my understanding isn’t mainstream but has come after 11 years of walking thru its many aspects with my wife on our healing journey. I would love to do a series on dissociation here like I did on my personal blog, but I won’t hold my breath. I think it would help make sense of the many confounding things that the various authors on this website note, but have no explanation for. And that’s why I tried to interject my understanding into this blog because the original authors seem to understand there is something more going on than they can explain: thus, their call for further study. I see it thru the lens of dissociation and thus, I think their study is a great start and hope they will continue to pursue it.
Sam
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Madmom,
I don’t know if you’d be open to my experience as I literally, at times, carried my wife thru her extreme states and PTSD symptoms…
There are 3 concepts from attachment theory that were vital for me to ‘master’ as I helped my wife thru these various experiences, though much of it I would categorize as simply being a good parent or SO.
1) affect regulation. This first concept is most easily understood that the person in distress will mirror your reaction to the situation. If you stay calm and cool when she’s in the midst of an extreme state, that WILL affect her and calm her, too, but if you ‘lose it’, that will cause her to escalate. You’ve probably seen this concept played out in movies and such when all hell breaks loose but the ‘leader’ of the group keeps his cool and thus enables the rest of his/her band of followers to follow that lead.
2) Proximity maintenance. Basically this means that your very presence has a calming effect upon the person in distress. You don’t always have to say something. Sometimes just your presence can be calming, but this is important: don’t minimize the importance of touch if your daughter is in a place to receive it. We humans need non-sexual touch to feel connected, and I have made it a hallmark of how I keep my wife connected to me for these last 11 years. You would almost always see me with my arm around her, or holding her hand or sometimes I’ll simply reach out and touch fingertips or rub noses or stroke her hair or her cheek. All these little things are powerful ways to emphasize that she is NOT alone. She is connected. And that connection, that attachment is what will hold her when the extreme states would otherwise overwhelm her.
3) Safe Haven. To me I always visualize this as protected ship harbor during a hurricane. She would often run away from me when she felt scared and overwhelmed, but I NEVER let her be alone during those times no matter how much she would try to push me away. It was a balancing act, and so I was careful not to force myself upon her, but I would gently envelope her with my presence, with my words, with my affirmation. If she was hiding under a table or something, I would crawl under it with her and wrap her up loosely in my arms and legs and just whisper to her, “it’s ok now, Honey. I’ve got you. You are safe now. You aren’t alone anymore. I hear you. I’m so sorry I couldn’t be there with you before, but I’ve got you now.”
But I think safe haven also means when she thought she was going crazy and all the other derogatory things she’d safe about herself, I’d respond, “No, Honey, you’re just hurt. We’ll get thru this.” I had to learn NOT to overreact to all the things that got thrown my way. It really helped me once I understood what was going on inside of her.
Now you’ve got the additional issue of the drugs, so everything might not ‘make sense’ in time like it did for me, but I’ve had to deal with mini-seizures, her going comatose, panic attacks, extreme anxiety, flashbacks, night terrors, self-injury issues, and more…but at this point, all those things are a distant memory and she hasn’t had anymore for years.
I’d say the main issue was me. Once I got my ‘stuff’ together, my wife began to make much greater progress. Like it or not, we the SO’s and family and friends can make all the difference as the ‘primary attachment figures’ in the lives of our loved ones. Yes, it is exhausting, but we made it, and you can, too. You’re welcome to email me, if you’d ever like to correspond more.
Sam
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Ontological insecurity is defined as Quote:
“Vulnerability to psychosis, wherein the self is experienced as lacking in coherence and consistency, precariously separated from the body, others, and the world and on the brink of disintegration into psychosis.”
If I’m reading this correctly, this is just another way of saying ontological insecurity is the result of major, entrenched dissociation caused by trauma. From my understanding of how psychosis is described, I think it can be understood as the mind’s attempt to reintegrate dissociated, traumatic memories but as it attempts to do so, there is an overlap between the past memory and current reality which leaves the person experiencing it disoriented and unable to tell the difference between past and present. If I’m correct, it’s why I really don’t believe in psychosis because I think it would be better explained as experiencing overlapping realities (one past; one present) rather than the more common view that it is a ‘break’ from reality.
Quote:
According to R. D. Laing’s theory, ontological insecurity could lead to full blown psychosis when significant others interact with a person in a confusing, intense, and critical way. At its core it is the lack of a coherent and stable self. It is related to a crippling fear of loss of autonomy, especially the fear of engulfment, implosion, or depersonalization, in relationships with others.
This is where the SO’s understanding of the attachment concepts of ‘safe haven’ and ‘affect regulation’ and ‘proximity maintenance’ are key. It really didn’t matter which attachment style my wife was currently experiencing when she was in an ‘extreme state.’ What mattered was that I satisfied her need for a safe haven and affect regulation by remaining calm, cool and anchoring her to the present and that I was physically present. A few times I let her pull me into her fear/anguish from the extreme state, and then I just elevated her distress, but when I stayed grounded, I was able to ground her and she would more quickly come out of those states, and, happily, that is what her mind seemed to need to begin the process of integrating those traumatic memories into her personal narrative to the point now that she rarely experiences ‘extreme states’ and they are rather mild when she does.
I believe attachment concepts provided me a way to ‘hold’ my wife during psychotic-like events, gently cocooning her while she herself felt ‘ontologically’ fractured and insecure, and by me doing so, it gave her time to heal and gain that sense of self-security that she had previously lacked.
Sam
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Thanks for sharing, Bob.
Every time I read one of these heartbreaking stories, it makes me so glad my family and I side stepped all the pain and misery caused by the mental health system and its drugs despite our path not being an easy one. Maybe some day we’ll find a mutually amenable way that I can share how we did it here on MIA.
But I can certainly empathize with Zel: I have struggled with similar thoughts for decades though for completely different reasons. It really is too bad that so many people in this world are too blind and self-absorbed to see those who are suffering alone, and how it strengthens both people when they learn to ‘attach’ to each other.
Sam
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As someone with 11 years of lived experience, that is living with someone (my wife) who would be considered to have a ‘severe mental illness” I 1) don’t consider her dangerous, 2) don’t consider her crazy, 3) and don’t consider her biologically, mentally ill and in need of drugs to ‘control’ her. I am truly horrified by this push of Trump and Dr. Drew in the wrong direction.
Sam
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Sandra,
I’m honored that you gave my little blog a chance: thank you. If you do find anything of value that you’d like to discuss further, my wife and I are leaving for Europe tomorrow for 3 1/2 weeks, and so I’ll be unavailable until after that. But if not, I really do appreciate the time you took to read anyway.
Sam
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Sam Plover,
I looked back over my response just to make sure, but I never said I was ‘fixing’ my wife. I do NOT see that as the case. I have an older brother who tried to ‘fix’ his 2nd wife, and it didn’t end well.
As for me and my wife, we live together, we interact together, I love her, I support her where she needs it. Yes, I do a lot of things intentionally to create a loving and safe environment for her to heal, but I never see myself as ‘fixing’ her despite her many dissociative issues. We are in this healing journey together. I have had to change in many, many ways to be a good healing companion for her. It’s not all about her: it’s about us.
Yours,
Sam
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Hey Bob,
I’m glad to hear that MIA is growing and expanding and from your opinion, you seem to think the tide is turning: that’s very different from many other writers on this site who bemoan the lack of progress. I hope you are correct!
I’ve been frequenting this website for nearly 5 years. Philosophically, I thought I’d finally found a ‘home’ here, but then I learned I’m not really part of the in group because I’m not a survivor or a therapist and I didn’t stick my loved one in the system with horrible results. I’m just a husband who has spent the last 11 years, 24/7 doing everything and anything it takes to keep my wife’s story from being the same as most on this website. And for the most part we are thru it, together and better, both of us changed from the experience of walking it as a couple and family.
I’ve argued without effect that people in my role, the SO’s, family members and friends are the front lines in the battle. When people in mental distress begin to experience ‘extreme states’ as this site calls them, what’s a person going to do? Do they call the cops or experts? I haven’t seen anyone here teach others in my place how to deal with panic attacks, flashbacks, mini-seizures, going comatose, extreme anxiety, PTSD issues, dissociation, self-injury, hearing ‘voices’ and all the other things that typically drive them to call for help, for backup, even if it’s bad help and backup in the form of the mental health ‘experts.’ There’s not a single Open Dialogue practitioner here in Ohio: so who are people in my position going to turn to?
Maybe MIA has decided people in my position are not their core focus group, and that’s your right to do so. But I don’t see the tide truly turning until people learn how to deal with these issues on their own or have good help concretely available.
I do wish you and MIA the best,
Sam
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Dear Sandra,
I always appreciate your articles. You are always so careful with the facts and try so hard not to over or understate things. You are willing to live with difficult, messy realities when surrounded by so many ideologues.
I got thrown into this world of mental distress because the woman I love finally opened her own Pandora’s box after 20 years of marriage and we got sucked into it together as we tried to make sense of the hurt, pain and dysfunction and find a healing path forward, together, as a couple and as a family. Eleven years later we are still together on the journey, and I hope coming to the conclusion of this phase, though that may be wishful thinking.
I’ve always wished I could find someone like you who would be willing to sit down and listen to the things we learned about fully implementing attachment concepts in a way that even the attachment theorists simply don’t understand because they limit themselves. And I wish I could share with someone like you about the true scope and nature of dissociation and how it underlies so much of what you would see in people’s signs of mental distress. My wife and I chose to live in her dissociation. We embraced it, breathed it, walked in it, and conquered it. I’ve helped her integrate most of those dissociated areas of her mind, and though we aren’t completely done, we know what needs to be done.
I wish someone like you would be willing to read my feeble attempt to share what we learned about attachment concepts and dissociation. I tried to share them in my little blog, but I know they would never withstand critical scrutiny, as I just tried to share my observations about what worked and then tried to find a theoretical basis for why they worked, and so I’m sure I got a lot of it wrong even though what we did, did work.
I’m glad you like Open Dialogue. Someone who practices it here in the States out West said what I do with my wife would be a good fit with their philosophy, but there’s no one here in Ohio for me to connect with.
Anyway, I do wish you well and hope you find what you are looking for like my wife and I did.
Sincerely,
Sam
https://samruck2.wordpress.com/
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The article was extremely brief and really didn’t get into much and appears to be gearing toward a promotional for the attachment ‘interventions’ that the author offers thru his clinic. I’m afraid that it will promote therapists as a legitimate source to heal attachment issues, and though I do think they can be a resource for healing/changing one’s attachment issues, I really don’t think someone whose relationship is based on the flow of money is a good person to model to the ‘patient’ how to securely attach in a healthy relationship.
Sam
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Well, hello David,
apparently we are fellow Buckeyes. I will definitely contact the email you gave, though at this point, I’m hoping my wife and I are on the far end our healing journey, though that could be wishful thinking, lol, as the last girl to join our family has taken longer to get connected to the others than all the rest combined, sigh.
I have walked with my wife thru her d.i.d. for the last 11 years, without the use of medications and outside the mental health industry. I accepted where she was and then we walked together from there to create our own reality as we both have healed and changed and grown. I never treated her as if she was crazy, but validated all the experiences that come along with extreme dissociation, such as voice hearing and a host more.
Take care.
Sam
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Hello Itay,
I admit I struggled with your use of ‘anarchy’ in this article: I think your use of ‘egalitarian’ and some of your other word choices, at least to me, better represent what I believe is the intent of your message.
I love Open Dialogue from ‘afar’ having never had the change to experience it on the healing journey that my wife and I have been on, but I was told by one of it’s practitioners that what I do with my wife fits very well with their philosophy.
And I’m not sure why the swipe at marriage in the book you referenced: when my wife and I first began our journey together, over and over, she wanted to be reassured of my absolute commitment to her if she was going to visit the deepest, darkest corners of her childhood and it was ONLY within those safe confines of our marriage that she felt able to go where she had ignored for so long.
But our egalitarian relationship and the contribution it engenders to our journey together most definitely fits with the spirit that seems to undergird your article. I have made attachment concepts the bedrock of everything we do to create a strong, cohesive relationship that can withstand the extreme pressure her many dissociative issues have brought our way…and thus far that has meant the difference of us not only staying together but growing stronger as a couple and family as she has healed in ways that many say is impossible without the use of any drugs or being connected to the mental health system at all.
I wish you all the best. We are excited to visit your country very soon!
Sam
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Boans,
I never realized until years later that one of the most important things my wife ever asked me when we first started our healing journey was for me NOT to read anything about her issues, and I honored that request. That gave us about 2 or 3 years to develop a system of me helping her that truly worked for her and us.
Later I started to read the literature out there, and only then did I realize how radically differently we were doing things, but by then I was unaffected because I’d already seen the extremely positive results we were getting.
It is too bad that so many families that want to help are instead ‘turned to the dark side’ so to speak and become agents of more pain and suffering instead of the healing agents they could be.
Sam
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I think this movement has struggled, in my opinion, because it doesn’t know how to get past its fundamental refutation of the biomedical model of mental health and heart breaking stories by those harmed by the mental health system. Yes, those things are important, but when loved ones are experiencing ‘extreme states’ which are NOT drug induced, then how do the people around them help without knee-jerk calling the police or authorities? How do families raise children who aren’t even enticed by drugs and so many of the other things that people use to dull their overwhelming pain? How do people navigate the overwhelming stress that 21st-century life places on all of us, not just the poor and people of color, though it may be exacerbated within those groups?
Until the movement empowers and teaches those around the person in distress how to help AND how not to freak out, I think the default is going to be to bring in the ‘authorities’, never realizing they themselves are actually the only people who can walk someone thru ‘psychosis’, extreme anxiety, paralyzing fears, ‘paranoia’, mini-seizures, dissociative issues, becoming comatose, flashbacks, panic attacks, and more.
I contacted Open Dialogue a few weeks ago to see if there was anyone in Ohio that I could team up with, and there’s not a single practitioner here. That’s really sad. Until we start giving real, practical alternatives to people, they are going to go to the ONLY help there is, even if it’s terrible help.
Sam
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I’m not thrilled with the amoral and unfettered capitalism that we are seeing today as Wall Street cares ONLY about padding the profits of the 1%, but I think this struggle is so much bigger than the Left/Right divide. Maybe this review is misleading.
Anyway, I think this movement has struggled, in my opinion, because it doesn’t know how to get past its fundamental refutation of the biomedical model of mental health and heart breaking stories by those harmed by the mental health system. Yes, those things are important, but when loved ones are experiencing ‘extreme states’ which are NOT drug induced, then how do the people around them help without knee-jerk calling the police or authorities? How do families raise children who aren’t even enticed by drugs and so many of the other things that people use to dull their overwhelming pain? How do people navigate the overwhelming stress that 21st-century life places on all of us, not just the poor and people of color, though it may be exacerbated within those groups?
Until the movement empowers and teaches those around the person in distress how to help AND how not to freak out, I think the default is going to be to bring in the ‘authorities’, never realizing they themselves are actually the only people who can walk someone thru ‘psychosis’, extreme anxiety, paralyzing fears, ‘paranoia’, mini-seizures, dissociative issues, becoming comatose, flashbacks, panic attacks, and more.
I contacted Open Dialogue a few weeks ago to see if there was anyone in Ohio that I could team up with, and there’s not a single practitioner here. That’s really sad. Until we start giving real, practical alternatives to people, they are going to go to the ONLY help there is, even if it’s terrible help.
Sam
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KindRegards,
I would even suggest that faith is a VERY powerful force for healing. My wife’s faith, her belief in a higher power, has been instrumental as I’ve helped her move past the lies of the past, but even more importantly, as I’ve helped her ‘restructure’ her internal working model from that of a trauma victim to a more healthy, securely attached person. Without her faith, I honestly don’t know how she would have been able to tear down the dissociation between the various girls. And whether critics want to argue it was a placebo effect or proponents say it truly is Jesus answering those prayers, in the end, without her faith that He was doing it, I’m not sure it would have happened.
Sam
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Lawrence,
I spent most of my life as a born again evangelical. I have a ministry degree with a biblical studies major. But in the course of the healing journey my wife and I have been on the past 11 years, I reevaluated everything, including my faith. The cognitive dissonance that had always screamed inside my head on some points between my faith and ‘the real world’ no longer could be ignored. I just didn’t have emotional strength to support anything that wasn’t pragmatically helpful in my desperation to keep me, my wife and our son together and moving forward in our journey.
And so I will give you that there are many, obvious areas to me in which most Christians engage in cognitive dissonance to uphold their faith and still function in this world. But it’s no different than the cognitive dissonance and blind faith that I see in the mental health experts or the macro evolutionists whom you seem to think are above such human foibles. Come to Ohio, and I’ll share some of my library that reduces many of the materialistic-evolutionary tenets down to what they really are: blind faith of its adherents. I’ve got an especially funny book, just of quotes, of the biggest names in the movement that shows their candor about their faith’s inherent unscientific basis within their own priesthood and yet they still promote it zealously to the public thru their willing conspirators in the media. I’ve often thought of suggesting MIA create a similar book of quotes of the priesthood of psychiatry and big pharma.
I’ll be honest. I don’t really know what I am anymore. I don’t really fit much in the traditional sense of Christianity, but I do tire of people who clearly don’t understand the bible but love to wrench a few proof texts out to prove this or that point. I just don’t understand MIA’s willingness to promote these facile attacks on Christianity, other than it seems to be politically correct and acceptable nowadays. If they want an honest critique of Christianity, I could give them an insider’s view as someone who has dealt with the problems, but also still sees value in some of the over arching themes and narratives that have helped me and my family stick together and witness her healing in a way that the mental health experts tell me is impossible. It would be a lot more honest evaluation than this critique has been.
Sam
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Hello Ayurdhi,
there is so much in your article that is positive, but it’s just a start. I do hope this vein of thinking will be pursued further as our family has validated many of the concepts and findings you bring up.
I’ve never really cared for the term psychosis as I find it to be an judgmental term, almost a pejorative, by those on the outside to absolve them from entering the experience of another. If my wife is ‘psychotic’ then I have no responsibility to try to understand what she is experiencing. But I never took that route, and instead deeply entered her experience, and once there, I found that so much of her experience made sense. And from that point, she and I could walk together to find a way out of the things that were dysfunctional and yet we also found many new ways of seeing things that added to our relationship and life. It really wasn’t all bad, though it was very difficult.
I might point you to attachment theory and its concepts of proximity maintenance, affect regulation and safe haven. They were absolutely critical in helping me steady my wife thru her ‘extreme states’. Once I learned to be the ‘calm in her storms’, her storms began to calm as well, and then that was the place at which real and deep healing began for her.
I wish you well,
Sam
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Thankyou, Kindredspirit, for expressing many of my exact thoughts, but I thought this website is so far to the Left that it would shut me down and sensor me for saying so. This entire debate from both sides misses the point and it saddens me that the issue has only been further muddied and made worse by the current state of war between the two tribes…
Sam
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Good article. Happily attachment patterns can be healed and relearned even in adulthood.
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Hello Ruth,
I am a fellow caregiver. I’m sorry for the terrible experiences you and your daughter have had. I’m very intrigued by the Open Dialogue Champions group and will try to check it out. My wife, son and I have mostly gone on this healing journey on our own, and I’ve always wished we had more support, so I can definitely empathize with you. We were just very fortunate/lucky that she never got caught up in the mental health system.
I’m glad you are finally getting some support. Maybe some day we will, too, though I’ve about got her thru things at this point.
Sam
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Hello Susannah,
well, I’ve taken a very pragmatic, humanistic approach, but I would never demean anyone’s perspective that takes a more supernatural or spiritual approach as you seem to have suggested. I just don’t seem to have access to those kind of things no matter how hard I tried to gain access to that realm for most of my life…
Anyway, when my wife first started hearing voices I remember telling myself they could be A) part of herself, or B) something supernatural that only she had access. And even though I couldn’t disprove B, I thought A was the easier to believe and work with. And so I’ve always followed that course, believing the voices were part of my wife’s larger self.
Over the course of the last 11 years, my understanding of voices has definitely expanded beyond that very elementary understanding, but I’ve never seen anything in her personal experience that contradicted that understanding. Today I would add the voices are ‘dissociated parts’ of herself caused from the initial trauma. I was also, always careful NEVER to play favorites with the voices: some were kind, loving and easy to get along with, one hated me, others were scared of me…but if they were all part of my wife’s larger whole, then as a husband I felt called upon to love ALL my wife and not just the easy parts.
I would also add that because of the wonders of the mind, those dissociated parts take upon themselves their own, distinct personalities, and I always honored that part of the ‘phenomenon.’ All but one ‘voice’ had a personal name she had chosen and so I saw/see each by her name and interact with her based on her desire even though philosophically I view them as ‘part’ of my ‘greater’ wife, if that makes sense.
And so I never wavered from my respectful, gentle and hopefully loving interaction with each of the ‘voices’ and over the course of the last 11 years, the fearful ones became stronger and less afraid. The angry one realized she wasn’t alone anymore and could trust me to help keep the others safe (and eventually she even asked to start dating me). And all of them began to mature and interconnect with each other to the point that they are more a heterogenous group of ‘friends’ than the disconnected group of ‘voices’ that they started as.
My wife as a ‘whole’ person has expanded as she incorporates each voice into her larger collective self and so we validate the voices rather than having their ‘annihilation’ as a goal which so many experts pointedly express.
There’s so much more, but that’s some of the highlights…
Sam
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Steve,
since you put your comment under mine, am I correct to assume it’s directed toward my comment? If so, I think we may be talking about completely different issues. My comment has to do with the question, ‘what fundamentally is a ‘voice’?’ Your reply seems to have more to do with ‘how to handle voice hearing’ on an individual basis.
How one answers my question will fundamentally affect one’s approach to voice hearing no matter how it is applied on an individual level.
Sam
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This approach is a good start, but there really is so much more to it. The thing I observe from the article is that talking about ‘voices’ in the abstract creates for a fuzzy base upon which to act. It’s no wonder there is such wide spread disagreement on whether and how to engage the ‘voices’ when I’m not sure most people, experts and hearers alike, even have a good answer for ‘what are the voices, fundamentally?’ Once you answer that question, the whether and how kind of take care of themselves.
Sam
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I didn’t realize this was such an old blog already, but I’ve never forgotten it and the unsatisfying way that the experts have defined dissociation. I finally got around to writing a 3-part discussion of dissociation after my wife and I have lived and breathed it for the last 11 years. This is what our experience has taught us about dissociation if anyone cares.
https://samruck2.wordpress.com/2019/07/17/the-nature-of-dissociation-part-3/
Sam
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People in my position are desperate for help and support: NAMI offers it. I contacted them a long time ago and met with the leader of our local group, but I never ended up going to the meetings. It was only later that I started to frequent this website and realized they had been co-opted by big pharma and psychiatry.
It’s too bad MIA doesn’t have a vision to offer a counter balance to NAMI: it’s a huge need, learning how to deal with all the things that manifest in a distressed loved one and also cope with the hurt and pain those things cause in the relationship. Maybe some day my wife will be in a position to allow me to start something…
Sam
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In the spirit of scientific inquiry, I’m sure this is a good thing, and those who struggle with ‘voices’ probably would love to ‘control’ them, but I’m afraid this may not really help move the person toward ‘healing.’ This would seem to be a way for people to put another layer of ‘lids’ over the original trauma. My wife and I embraced the voices: the good, the ‘bad’ the vitriolic, all of them. We didn’t control them; we unleashed them, so to speak, and it made all the difference.
Sam
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Kindred Spirit,
since I specifically mentioned Open Dialogue, why would you bring in NAMI which we all know is generally disrespected on this website as a tool of Big Pharma and Psychiatry. Furthermore, since you just posted a positive comment about Open Dialogue on that thread, why would you try to twist what I say here?
I’m sorry for the things you have shared in the past about your abusive ex, but I am NOT him, and there are a lot of us spouses out there who are in it with our loved ones whether you choose to believe that or not. And until this website can come to some kind of accommodation for both sides, those with abusive families and those with supportive families, I think this movement will continue to falter.
Sam
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“We are like a little gnat buzzing around a great big elephant that can be swatted away with a quick flap of the ear. But our new 10-session course will at least explore this landscape of “systems change,” with the presenters bringing to this topic a diversity of experience and perspectives. The presenters include psychiatrists, leaders in peer services, former directors of state mental health programs, and trainers experienced in helping providers implement trauma-informed care.”
Respectfully, Bob,
but for as long as I have frequented this website, I have tried to get people to expand your collective vision past those whom the system has wronged. I don’t ever want to demean the experience of those who were caught in the system and abused by it, but the overwhelming majority of Americans haven’t had that experience, and yet they are still touched by this issue. Additionally, no matter how many times I remind this website that the first line of defense in keeping people out of the system is to train people like me, the primary attachment figures, how to help someone in distress, my call seems to be ignored. I had to learn it on my own, but it is possible. What my wife and I went thru, most therapists won’t even touch, but we got thru it together and without any contact with ‘the system.’
But when I look at your list of contributors, there is no one on it who represents my group, those of us in the trenches, 24/7, who deal with the hell that our loved ones are experiencing. Some of us have even figured out how to help them thru it: I’m not the only spouse out there who has walked his loved one thru all the crap that we’ve gone thru.
I like Open Dialogue so much, even though we never had access to it, because it understands the families must be brought into collaboration for the healing journey because we are the ones who get awakened throughout the nights, on the weekends, on vacation, during intimate times and every other situation in life. And so we have to help walk the person thru the night terrors, the panic attacks, the dissociative issues, and so many other issues no matter where they hit life and the relationship that I won’t belabor the point here.
Yours,
Sam
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Would have loved to have had access to something like this rather than me having to figure most of it out by myself… 🙁
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Good article. I do much of this with/for my wife. The only thing I’d suggest is that the disturbed core self is because of dissociation…
Sam
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https://samruck2.wordpress.com/
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RR,
I’ve done this for the last 11 years with my wife, and I’ve publicly shared the journey and what I/we’ve learned on my blog. You are welcome to come and see what you think. I welcome dialogue and even debate on it.
But our experience is so completely different than what I read on this website that we aren’t even in the same universe when I read experiences, understandings and solutions on here. And so I’ve had to realize I will always be an outsider here and seen skeptically rather than embraced as someone able to point the way to the very things this website seems to desire…
Sam
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rasselas.redux,
“It is a significant, life-changing, restrictive, challenging and potentially dangerous choice to make, to help someone severely mentally ill, without the resources and legal protections of a governmentally-sanctioned system.”
It can be done, but I agree there are few out there doing it, and I find it extremely sad that no one on any side of the debate seems to care about our perspective and what we’ve had to learn and do to make it thru this journey with our loved ones.
Sam
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Bippyone,
thank you, but I don’t feel very amazing, especially as we’ve been stuck trying to help girl #8 connect to the other 7 for the last 4 years. If you really have interest, you could visit my blog on WordPress. I lay out much of my application of attachment theory and other things I’ve done to help my wife heal there.
Sam
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Hi Bippyone,
hmm….written responses are so difficult to convey meaning…and none of what I say is meant to criticize what you did…so I just want to say that up front…
But when I talk about understanding what was going on with my wife, I kind of meant it in a more technical way, though still in laymen’s terms. For example, when my wife went catatonic, I had to learn that what actually happened was one personality left executive control, but no one else came out to take control… so the “lights were on, but (literally) no one was home’ or out front. Once I figured that out, it just became a matter of me calling or pulling another girl out, and the catatonic issues were largely resolved.
When my wife suffered ‘mini-seizures’, well that was a different issue. That was more like a computer program that had glitched while changing programs…and my wife had ‘glitched’ when switching from one girl to the next. And so I learned to ‘help’ her thru the switching and the seizures ended.
The flashbacks and panic attacks were another issue. That was caused by the overlapping of past, dissociated, traumatic memories that were controlled by one girl breaking thru to another girl who was in executive control on the outside. And so I had a number of ways, mostly based on attachment theory’s understanding of safe haven and affect regulation, to calm her and help her integrate those new memories in the ‘overall narrative.’
I also had to learn that some part of my wife was ALWAYS accessible, even when it appeared otherwise on the outside. And so even if she didn’t respond, I would still speak to her, using my attachment points to remind her she was no longer alone, she was safe now, etc, etc, etc… And so I learned to effect healing even when she didn’t appear to respond to me.
So it was a matter of becoming able to diagnosis what was going on internally with her, and tailoring my response to her current reality…and little by little as I provided her that safe haven, affect regulation and proximity maintenance, the trauma memories no longer overwhelmed her because she had the additional support of my presence, and so she could slowly integrate those memories into her overall narrative…and thus they were no longer able to overwhelm her from a dissociated area previously inaccessible to her.
Clearly, I can’t tell you what was going on with your husband or son, or make any judgments about you or them, but by walking this journey WITH my wife and learning to listen and become ‘in tune’ with her, I was able to facilitate some pretty dramatic healing to the point that most of the ‘extreme stuff’ is a distant memory and we are only dealing with tearing down the vestiges of the dissociation between the various girls, and that requires another, different approach based on attachment theory’s understanding of the inner working model.
Sam
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Rachel,
I don’t like those terms (and I would include psychosis with them) because had I perceived my wife in any of those ways, it would have absolved me from any need (and more correctly, any ability) to understand what she was experiencing…and it was only once I really understood things from her perspective that I was able to help her heal and move forward and be a good healing companion. Once I understood what she was experiencing during panic attacks and flashbacks, her going catatonic, etc, I was able to help her thru them and permanently heal the underlying causes such that she hasn’t experienced that stuff in years at this point.
Sam
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Hi Bippyone,
you are correct that it takes a lot more than a nebulous ‘loving someone’ to help them thru extreme forms of mental distress and trauma, and I’m sorry if I watered down my reply to the point that it looked simplistic to you. I wish there was time and space here to tell you all the ways I have systematically and intentionally helped my wife heal thru some of the worst ‘extreme states’ you could imagine, but my doing so required no medication and though I would have been happy for additional help, as her primary attachment figure, the majority of responsibility was always going to be on me anyway, though our son was a huge help in the beginning.
Sam
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oops, “natural result” NOT ‘natural cause’ of pain and fear from life’s traumas…
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Hello Bippyone,
I do understand what you are saying and absolutely agree with your statement, but I think my use of ‘wrong’ had a different intention.
Today’s biochemical model of mental health posits that some people are fundamentally flawed, in their dna, and they are ‘broken’ without any hope of ‘repair.’ Whereas the paradigm I use is the trauma model. I believe that what is ‘wrong’ with my wife is the result of trauma, and with love, help, and strong attachments she can heal.
Restated: the biochemical model says there is a category of people broken, ill and fundamentally flawed. The trauma model just believes the mental distress and other issues like my wife’s d.i.d. are not ‘inherent’ in the person but the natural cause of pain and fear from life’s traumas and those CAN be healed.
So the best I can tell you is we are using the same words but they have radically different meanings.
I hope that helps!
Sam
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Ekaterina,
I’m honestly not sure why I NEVER saw my wife as ‘crazy’ or ‘mad’ or ‘ill.’ I don’t like any of those terms, and I really don’t even care for the attempts to take back ‘mad’ and turn it into some kind of badge of honor or ‘in your face’ retort.
I see my wife as traumatized, no more or less than someone who suffered a severe body trauma like my brother-in-law who fell 30 feet in a hurricane and crushed one side of his body and spent years in rehab and surgeries and still struggles with issues caused from that. My sister and he still have to deal with those issues, but no one looks at him like something is wrong with him because of his injuries. The entire family accepts his struggles and limitations. My sisters tells about the period where she had to ‘wipe’ him after he’d go to the restroom because he couldn’t do it himself. They are ‘in it’ together just like my wife and I are in her issues together, and yet I’m told ‘something is wrong’ with my wife because of her struggles, and they wonder why I don’t feel like being around them much…sigh.
I’ve often wondered about the various reactions of people to other’s struggles, but I typically assume it tells me more about them than the person struggling.
Sam
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Quote: “I am, to put it quite plainly, a true schizophrenic, and that means I’m schizophrenic all the time. It doesn’t change. It’s all day, every day — no exceptions. I will put my “crazy” up against your “crazy” any time, no matter who you might be, and I’m pretty sure I’ll win. I hear voices that talk about God, the aliens, and about secret government programs all day long and sometimes even all night long, and I believe in practically all of it. Its sheer logical consistency has me convinced.”
Eric. I know this was more of an aside, but I just can’t seem to get away from your statement here. It breaks my heart to hear you say this, even though you put ‘crazy’ in quotes. I never saw my wife that way even though she could easily match you in every way.
I hope someday our culture radically changes it perspective on hearing voices. I’m very sorry for how you have been treated because of our cultural and scientific ignorance.
Sam
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At the start of our journey 11 years ago, my wife tried to hide the other girls from our son (then 17) because all the experts said to do so. But it only divided our family. So I worked with him and the first girl to bridge the gap, and she finally couldn’t contain herself and outted herself to him on a family vacation. He’s been invaluable on this healing journey we’ve taken as a family ever since.
I didn’t want him to see the effects of her mental trauma as something strange or scary like the rest of the culture does, and so I set the tone and he just kind of followed my lead. I wanted him to be a young man who understands that ‘sh!t happens’ and not be scared or turned off by it when it happens to a loved one, but instead learn that we rally around and help someone who has been traumatized.
My wife and I have shielded him from some of the darker stuff, but that was more by his choice of disinterest than because we ‘hid’ it from him.
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Hello Sera,
thank you for entrusting us with your experiences, your pain and your rage. I hear you. I’m sorry you had to go through those things alone. I hope some day your husband can learn to be a safe haven for you and help you hold those lost memories when you are ready.
I wish you deep healing and all the best.
Sam
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Hi Lucy,
I’m so glad you’ve taken such a nuanced position here and in the PTMF. And I’m glad that ‘carers’ are recognized as a group worthy of being heard. I’ve given the last 11 years to my wife’s healing and we’ve seen amazing things using attachment theory and other things we’ve learned along the way.
I’m working my way thru the PTMF. It seems like you welcome responses and reactions to the document, but I don’t see any where to send them.
Wishing you the best.
Sam
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Steven,
as someone with a theology degree, I’ve got to admit I’ve never seen or heard exorcism explained that way. Now on a practical level, I can see how exorcism was abused by those in authority to become what you have stated, but certainly on a theological level I think most scholars would strongly disagree with your statement.
Sam
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Wow, Steve, Rachel and Julie, the cynicism is pretty thick here. I’m truly sorry if that’s the only kind of people you know. Maybe that’s why I’ll always be an outsider on this site, but, there are actually families out there who protect and care for their own. But when things get going extreme in a loved one, it is a little scary, overwhelming and/or bewildering.
The following things never got covered in my “Being a Good Husband: 101 class” like my wife falling multiple times down the stairs, nearly breaking multiple limbs and being black and blue from head to toe for the first few years because the littles who joined us didn’t know how to use ‘the body’ very well; hiding in stores for fun or because various ones were terrified, almost getting run down by cars or trying to jump out of a car moving at 70mph (multiple times), going comatose (multiple, multiple times), looking like she was experiencing some kind of seizures, feeling like I was in an exorcist movie the first time I met one of the most angry girls, going comatose in a standing position so that I had to lunge to catch her before she hit the floor (for more than a year), and these were just A FEW(!!!!!!!) of the highlights of our first 5 years the others joined us (oh forgot coming home to our house being flooded while one of the new girls serenely read her book in an adjacent bedroom). And that didn’t include the task of simply winning the hearts of 7 disparate girls who were scared, traumatized and/or angry into my marriage and family so we didn’t turn out like the United States of Tara scenario.
Somehow I muddled thru it all with the help of our college-aged son who helped me provide literal 24/7 coverage those 5 years, and in time I actually figured out how to help her/them heal so none of that happens anymore, but it was still overwhelming and scary at times.
I’m sure it’s the same feeling for others, and so many of the SO’s and families turn to get help and instead get something worse than being all on their own thru it like we were.
Sam
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“I think you’re right, it’s not very well understood, generally speaking.”
I’m just sad how poorly understood it is on this site but even more by the ‘experts’ of trauma and dissociation like over on ISSTD. But I do understand they only see it in clinical settings. They’ve never seen it 24/7 for 11 years like I have in every aspect of my relationship with my wife, and having to make every aspect not only safe, but healing as well. And seeing it laid plainly out between the 8 girls in my wife’s system, and how they each have strengths, but also gaps in their abilities and personalities, has really helped me understand how all of us function on a foundational level as I have helped them slowly become an integrated, cohesive, collaborative group.
Sam
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Hi Eric,
you know, my wife’s d.i.d. has taught me so much about myself, to the point that I talk about myself being a ‘non-dissociated multiple’ on my blog. And as I have helped all the girls in her network learn to live together in harmony, I have learned to harmonize all the various, disparate parts of my own personality, especially the uglier parts of myself that I used to try to suppress, now I channel them instead, kind of the ‘benevolent monster’ like we see in Kong: Skull Island or even Tom Cruise’s Mummy.
Anyway, I appreciate your attempts to expand how people are seen, away from the simplistic, narrow lenses that most psychological frameworks espouse.
Sam
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Hi Lenora,
dealing with my wife’s dissociation is actually kind of easy: because it’s out there on full display and she knows it’s happening and I know it’s happening and so we can deal with it appropriately.
I actually find it much more difficult to deal with other people who don’t understand what is going on because there’s no way I can just say, “Hey, do your realize your showing signs of dissociation?” And so many, many people dissociate various things. Like you said, it’s on a spectrum and most of us do far more than just ‘daydream.’
Sam
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Someone else,
I do understand that for those who have taken any number of psychiatric drugs, or for that matter, all kinds of mind-altering substances, your statement would be correct.
But there is a real phenomenon of hearing voices, like my wife experienced, and she was NEVER on any kind of drugs psychiatric or otherwise. My best guest is these ‘voices’ come from dissociated parts of the brain/mind and so they seem foreign to the person at first, but with time and work and help, those voices can be welcomed into the person’s narrative and eventually take part in the overall personality.
At least that has been our experience.
Sam
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PacificDawn,
perhaps if you have no interest in discussing anything except activism, you should approach the MIA staff and see if they would start a corner for those with similar feelings, and also to keep track of national rallies and other events of that nature. I say this genuinely because you seem to have no interest in discussing anything else and label all other topics as means of controlling people.
Wishing you well.
Sam
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Ron,
this is a thoughtful and nuanced reply that I really appreciate.
Sam
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Ron,
thank you for the link. I will definitely check out this group as my wife and I have been living with her ‘voices’ for the last 11 years, engaging them respectfully, lovingly, helping them heal first and then integrate into a community with each other. There’s so much that SO’s and family and friends can do. My wife’s angriest voice that despised me is now deeply attached to me and engaged with me. The hurt and traumatized ones have healed and are now full of life.
People are afraid of legitimizing voices, but that’s exactly what we did and it made all the difference. Instead of the United States of Tara scenario, all the voices are fiercely loyal and thoughtful at this point to our family and relationship.
Sam
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Rachel,
I have learned so much about the horrors of the mh industry from you and others here, and I try never to belittle that, but that’s also why it’s so hard for me to communicate here because my wife’s and my experience is like a polar opposite where I always honored her and her desires; she never had any contact with the mh industry or its drugs, and where I never, ever, ever treated her as ‘crazy’ or any other kind of belittling way.
At first she would quip that I was the crazy one for NOT seeing her like the rest of the culture, but I simply never did, and the more I understood her world, the more it truly made sense to me as I walked/walk with her in it as we find a way out of it together.
Sam
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But it’s so, so , so much more than that…but I just seem at a loss to describe it and as the general tone seems hostile instead of inquisitive around the issue, I think this might be a good time for me to bow out from hijacking your blog.
Wishing you the best, Julie,
Sam
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No Rachel, I don’t even know what you are talking about, sigh.
Like I said dissociation is a huge issue and how it affects mental health as well as a person’s ability to fight mental distress, and if I hadn’t had to help my wife literally put all the disparate pieces of her self back together again, I would have never understood it either. That’s probably why I lack the words to convey it because our experience has been in a completely different universe than most here and elsewhere, and everyone tries to interpret what I say thru their experience, and I just can’t seem to figure out how to overcome that barrier. 🙁
Sincerely,
Sam
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LavenderSage,
I’ll be honest: I never read the book. I read it’s premise and the intro and never got past that. So maybe you are correct, but neural atrophy is not what I understood him to be talking about. Maybe I am wrong: forgive me if I am.
Sam
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But since there is no KNOWN link to brain problems how can psychiatrists fix it? How can random acts of brain damage help anyone?
Rachel,
I wish it were that simple. On the side of the biochemical model you’ve got people spewing ‘chemical imbalance’ foolishness, but in reaction to that provably wrong belief, many on the anti-psychiatry side want to say there are NO brain factors in mental health distress, and I disagree with that, as well. But since I’m ‘just a husband’ neither side will listen to me. The former think I’m a moron since I can’t put little letters after my name (though I do have an unrelated BA), and the latter think I’m ‘speaking for’ my wife and so they won’t listen either.
I’ve had the privilege and responsibility to help my wife literally rebuild her personality from the ground up these last 11 years. And I’ve seen what dissociation which causes neural atrophy can do and how it most certainly affects mental health and the ability to fight mental distress. I’ve tried to discuss it a little here in the comments sections, but it’s such a huge issue, and since no one ever ‘bites’ when I try to throw out nuggets I’ve learned, I typically drop it.
It’s too bad. It’s not the only issue in mental distress, but dissociation is a huge one, and neither side gets it. Even books that are touted here like The Body Keeps the Score, are incorrect, but because he’s never gone as deep as my wife and I have with dissociation or seen it as laid out as we have 24/7 for 11 years, he (van der Kolk) doesn’t understand it’s the dissociation and NOT the body that is the issue.
Respectfully,
Sam
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Julie,
I have no intention of minimizing the harm done to the 1 in 6 or whatever the number (that’s just the number who are specifically taking psychiatric ‘meds’). But I take issue with those who want to see EVERYTHING thru a social/class warfare lens and blame the whole of mental distress on that.
Sam
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LittleTurtle,
sadly I see more and more comments that seem to take that view and want to turn all mental distress into a motivation for class warfare on this site. Some act as if all mental distress, illness, trauma, dysfunction, or whatever one wants to call it is completely fabricated by the mental health industry and society in general as a means of social control.
I don’t believe that the Big Brother of the mh industry, big pharma, and gov’t shills really has his hands on the majority of society, at least not yet. Only 1 in 6 Americans are even on psych drugs or connected to the mh industry. That means the overwhelming majority like my wife and I are ‘untainted’ and yet I see a TON of distress and dysfunction that reaches throughout ALL classes of Americans. Hell, the 1% are some of the most dysfunctional of us all: just read the news to see that money and power do NOT make one impervious to such things.
So it really is too bad for the simplistic assessments that often pass and go unchallenged on this website.
I’m with you, LittleTurtle and critical psychiatry. There have to be others, but it is too bad they don’t take the time to comment more often.
Sam
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Is there any miracle of events, any set of circumstances that would now be presently unfathomable, that could leave us in a place of looking at each other across “the table” and even mustering up forgiveness, acceptance and a path forward? Any?
What would it take to at least begin a path in that direction? Or the the toast too burnt to even consider recovery?
Maybe it is that just a pipe dream, an event that only can live in imagination and nowhere else? Or maybe, just maybe….. ?
Fred,
I can’t speak for the others on this website, but when my wife and I first down the path of healing, I had to deal with the anger that kept her and I separated. I realized that some of her anger toward me was completely justified, but also some of her anger was truly because of the abuse she had suffered as a child and I was simply a convenient object for her to vent upon.
It took me about 6 months of asking forgiveness for anything and everything she accused me of. I NEVER defended myself because I took the position that IF she felt this, then I would value our relationship over who was right, or trying to give my side of the story.
About 6 months later her anger was extinguished. A couple years later she even came back and apologized a little for her part in things…but until I had extinguished the anger, she simply couldn’t see past it.
I understand your commitment level is probably a lot lower here than mine was to my wife, but that’s what it took to bring her and I completely back in harmony with each other.
Sam
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I’m sorry no one understood how to enter into your world and walk it with you. One of the first things I had to learn was to ‘get out of myself’ so I could enter my wife’s world. Too many people try to ‘drag’ people out of their worlds into ‘the real world.’ If you look at Jesus, that’s not what He did. He incarnated Himself into our world so He could understand us in ALL our weaknesses, and then He made a way out…thru Him. That’s kind of what I’ve done with my wife. I don’t demand she join ‘the real world’. Instead I walk with her, on her terms, in her reality, and slowly we are finding our way out TOGETHER.
Sam
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“They couldn’t reach me anymore.”
Do you mean physically or mentally? It took me awhile to learn how to ‘reach’ my wife when she was going thru some of her more ‘extreme’ things like flash backs, panic attacks, etc. Attachment theory has the concept of a ‘safe haven’. Think of it like a boat in a hurricane that finds a sheltered harbor during the storm. That’s what I had to learn to become. I realized she could still hear me even if she couldn’t respond to me. And so I would literally wrap her up in my arms, gently and loosely, so it didn’t feel suffocating or constricting, and then I would speak gently and softly to her, pulling her out of her mental storms and confusion. Things like, “It’s ok, Honey. I’ve got you now. You aren’t alone anymore. You are my girl and I take care of my girl…” The warmth and safety of my enveloping presence and the calming of my voice would slowly stabilize her and blow out her mental/emotional hurricanes. And after a time, those hurricanes became less and less volatile…until at this point, they are mostly a distant memory.
Sam
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The concept of “mental health”/”mental illness” is the primary lie/fraud.
I can’t speak for Ron, but at least for me, I don’t agree with this assertion.
I might word it slightly different because ‘mental illness’ has been corrupted by the biomedical model of mental health with which I 100% disagree, but I do think there is such a thing as mental health/mental dysfunction that is often trauma based. Moreover, I think there is a biological component because the brain/mind is biologically based, even if we don’t understand how.
The most obvious biological component of mental health/dysfunction that I am aware of, because of our personal experience, is trauma-based dissociation which ends up re-mapping the neural pathways of the brain. And undoing that dissociation has caused my wife massive, debilitating headaches. I don’t understand it, but for every step forward as we tear down the dissociation, the headaches are so excruciating she can barely function.
Moreover, we’ve spent the last decade retraining her mind to access those previously dissociated areas of her brain where the neural pathways had atrophied. And as she has gained access to those areas previously walled off to her, she has begun to display new personality traits and mental abilities she never had during the first 20 years of our marriage.
I don’t understand the biological component of my wife’s mental trauma or healing on a technical level, but I mostly definitely understand it and have had to develop strategies to overcome it and work with it on a practical level.
Sam
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Hello May-May,
my wife used to experience a lot of dissociation. From the ‘official diagnosis’ one would expect her to experience a lot of psychosis as well. But as she and I have walked the healing path together, I’ve wondered if psychosis (that isn’t caused by drugs or medications) is just a result of the mind trying to bring those dissociated, trauma memories back to the front so they can be processed and entered into the person’s current narrative.
I never really thought of my wife as psychotic. In the beginning she felt it was scary and disorienting, but slowly, as I learned to stayed calm and acted as an anchor for her to the present, her fear subsided, and we were able to help her brain/mind integrate those old memories into a way that she could deal with in the present.
I can’t tell you what you are experiencing, but I don’t really believe psychosis is a helpful word or concept: it just has too much baggage because of how it gets portrayed in the media and by mental health ‘experts.’ This is what worked best for me/us: viewing this phenomenon as ‘overlapping realities’, one past and one present, and my ‘job’ as my wife’s healing companion was keeping her grounded and safely helping her sort things until at this point most of the dissociation is gone, and thus, so is the psychosis.
Wishing you well.
Sam
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“If we have people promoting Therapy, Life Coaching, Recovery, or Salvation Seeking, then that means that survivors are being abused. It amounts to second rape.”
I don’t expect PacificDawn to listen, but for others, I want to state that, imo, this is so over the top, I wish it were addressed. I’m not even sure where I would begin to address all the generalizations, slander, black and white fallacies, and so forth. I’m guessing(?) this comes from her own traumatic experiences, and for those I am truly sorry, but it doesn’t help to throw around accusations at huge swaths of people who have found these things to truly help. Though I don’t consider myself an evangelical Christian anymore, the caricatures that routinely are hurled from the Left toward Evangelicals are simplistic and insulting. Sure there are abuses, just like there are in any and every large enough group that one looks at, but there are also a lot of people who sacrificially give of themselves to try to help others the best they can. My own life and how I try to help my wife is still governed by many of those principles that were hammered into me from my Christian upbringing, and I get tired of others flippantly making accusations and the majority on the Left approving whole heartedly. Honestly, this website ought to do better, imo.
And as for the wide swath of other accusations and caricatures she is lobbing at Life Coaches, therapy, recovery, and whatelse, I’m glad my wife decided she DID want to address the trauma and pain in her life. Her decision has taken both of us on a wonderful healing journey of discovery and growth and healing for both of us. It’s been hard as hell in many ways, and yet I’m so glad we made that decision 11 years ago. I’m glad I’m NOT the same man that I was when we first started, nor is she. Hopefully we are both much better versions of ourselves.
Respectfully,
Sam
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Hi Fiachra,
in some ways the brain is just like a muscle that atrophies with disuse but can be strengthened with use. Think if a person who has been bedridden for 4 decades suddenly finds a new medical procedure that allows the person to regain control of his/her limbs. Well 40 years of disuse can’t simply be undone overnight. It would take years of pointed exercise and physical therapy to regain full use of those limbs.
That’s kind of similar to what happens with people who have experienced extreme dissociation. Those areas of the brain/mind can’t just naturally reconnect and be fully utilized by the rest of the brain/mind. And when the ‘experts’ add their ‘medications’ it only makes things worse and zombifies the person at best and wreaks havoc at worst and actually hinders the person from accessing and strengthening those affected areas. And so we’ve found it just takes hard, repetitious work that engages all affected areas of the brain/mind as they are incorporated into the whole of the person.
We’ve found it can be done, and done with minimal secondary trauma when drugs aren’t introduced into the mix. But it’s just a slow, tedious, day-by-day process. No miracles cures, and definitely no magic pills!
Sam
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Steve,
could you fix my original statement? It’s really bothering me where I typed, “Many on this website think that anything less than being ‘anti-critical’ is being a sellout”. I meant to say “anything less than being “anti-psychiatry” is being a sellout…”
Thanks,
Sam
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Bob, I meant no offense! I just don’t see you in the comments section much. That’s all I meant. I do understand you are involved behind the scenes.
I apologize for that poorly worded statement. I hesitated to even bring you up and say something incorrect, but since Bruce did, I did, and then I blew it anyways…Sorry
Sam
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Bruce,
perhaps you should define your terms. Many on this website think that anything less than being ‘anti-psychiatry’ is being a sellout and being a ‘middle grounder’ and yet you hold up Bob Whittaker as someone who isn’t a sellout and yet on the rare times he visits this website, he has professed to be ‘critical psychiatry.’
As this culture continues to fracture and both sides become more and more extreme, I sit firmly in the middle. But to me that doesn’t mean I take a ‘middle point’ on all the issues. No, what that means is I give a fair and thorough hearing to each side and then I eclectically pick and choose where I believe each side has gotten issues correct. I firmly stand against the biomedical model of mental health, and yet, after 11 years of helping my wife heal from extreme dissociation, I understand how the dissociation structurally alters the brain…yet not permanently, and not because of genetics, but because neural plasticity teaches us that if we don’t use it, we lose it. And yet, that same principle gives us hope, as I purposefully help my wife bring back to health those atrophied neural pathways.
This isn’t the only place I part pathways with the anti-psychiatry crowd, and yet for you to call ‘the middle grounders’ “dangerous”, to me is a sad statement on our fracturing culture. I’m guessing you don’t consider Bob a middle grounder, but I know his critical psychiatry position grates on many commenters on this website. Maybe he’s not dangerous to you, but this kind of talk is NOT helpful. It just further divides us.
Eleven years ago I had no clue about any issues concerning mental health; now I’ve had to become an expert on dissociation to help my wife heal from things even ISSTD hasn’t figured out yet. I prefer not to have litmus tests because we are all on a journey, and yes this is life and death in some respects, and yet not everyone gets it as quickly as others. My own wife still believes all the biomedical mental health garbage, and I just tell her, “you are lucky that I don’t.”
Wishing you well,
Sam
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Fred,
respectfully, the diagnosis was critical. If you’ve never lived with someone who dissociates and yet is a master at hiding it(like many are), you may not understand how confusing it can be to both people. Neither of us understood what was happening. Once we got the diagnosis that was my ‘aha’ moment, and things began to make sense and I could then reorient my thinking to include something I had never before considered and then begin to grow in that understanding.
Yes, the relationship was key to staying at this and walking this TOGETHER, but one can’t fight and overcome something if one has no concept of what is going on like the first 20 years of our marriage.
Sam
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Rachel,
at the most basic, neural plasticity, I believe, can be summed up as ‘the brain rewards what we use, and punishes what we don’t.” It’s really the same with the rest of our bodies. Muscles that we use a lot become stronger; muscles that we don’t atrophy.
The brain is essentially the same: when we exercise parts of the brain, those pathways are strengthened and fine tuned, for example creating the skill needed to play a piano thru years of practice. But when parts of the brain are ignored, or worse dissociated from trauma, then those pathways are neglected and atrophy.
And to un-do years of extreme dissociation, it’s no simple process to just ‘flip the switch’ and start accessing those areas of the brain again. It’s been a far, far, far more difficult process to help her gain access to those dissociated areas, than helping my wife deal with the actual issues surrounding the trauma.
As for other people’s experiences on this website, my statement was not intended to belittle anyone’s experiences or victim blame them for being caught up in the system. We were fortunate, but not because we were so smart and wise. It just was outside our natural bent to go for help, and it was only later that I realized how fortunate we were to have missed the horrors that so many describe on this website. But sometimes when I read comments, the reaction toward the abuses of the mh system are so focused on just that, that the original issues get lost in the context. I understand why that is so, but I wanted to clarify that our case may be considered a ‘control group’ in that we have not been tainted by the system at all and yet we are still struggling 11 years later to undo the real issues caused from her childhood despite her tremendous healing and progress.
Sam
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Hi Fred,
for 20 years my wife and I struggled in our marriage. We loved each other but things just weren’t right, and when she finally agreed to get some counseling after I led the way by working on my own issues, it was suggested she might be experiencing some severe dissociation as a result of her early childhood trauma…and that was the key that finally unlocked our confusion and the impasse of 20 years.
Now we didn’t go the typical route to deal with said trauma and dissociation. She never had ANY contact with any professional ‘mental health experts.’ But we kind of fell into attachment principles and when I learned more about that, I became more intentional about some of the key concepts from that theory that helped address her attachment issues, dissociation issues and other things. But it did start with that ‘possible’ diagnosis.
As much as I firmly stand against the bio-chemical narrative of mental health, that doesn’t mean there aren’t real issues like dissociation, neural plasticity, trauma, ptsd symptoms, etc that have to be addressed. Neither my wife nor I ‘wear’ her diagnosis as a badge. Other than me, our son and her non-traditional counselor she refuses to tell anyone else and most would be surprised, to say the least, that she is dealing with anything. She tells me she’s one of the few in her group of friends and acquaintances who doesn’t take any kind of medicines for stress, anxiety, etc.
I know we are an anomaly; I’ve been told that repeatedly on this website. But this website is strongly tilted by those who have had HORRIBLE experiences within the mh system. And I’m not belittling that at all, but I do take issue when people try to blame ALL their mental health distress upon the system as if nothing really drove them into the lion’s den at first and all their problems came as a result of the mh system. People suffer from real mental health issues, and when I finally took those seriously in my wife, that’s when I became effective in helping her heal and move forward.
Wishing you well.
Sam
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Hi Eric,
it doesn’t seem like you respond much to comments, but I’ll put it out here anyway. Much of this blog is spot on, and maybe you’ll clarify in a future blog, but it’s REALLY important that one understands the difference between trauma and dissociation. Though trauma causes dissociation, trauma and dissociation have very different effects upon one’s personality. Dissociation has been the much more difficult issue to undo in my wife’s life than the original trauma, though the two get intertwined at points.
If you had interest, I could discuss it further.
Yours,
Sam
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I am truly sorry you believe that, Rachel. There is nothing wrong with you, and though it might take a bit for a good man to get past the cultural tropes about people with SMI labels, it really didn’t take me long to figure out that I was still safe to sleep in the same bed at nights with my wife! 🙂
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Maybe I should add Reagan’s axiomatic statement that so many on the Right adhere to:government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.
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Bruce,
the superficial analysis you state about the Right isn’t anymore helpful than when the Right spews the same about the Left. I may have moved to the center, but my wife’s and my upbringing on the Right, its focus on individualism, independence and pulling oneself up by the bootstraps is what gave us the fortitude to homeschool our son through his graduation when our family all thought we were crazy. We produced a world-class scholar who is in his PhD residency at one of the elite schools in the Boston area.
And so when my wife began to show signs of distress from her childhood abuse, I may have felt overwhelmed at first, but I never felt out of my league to figure out how best to help my wife as we walked thru the healing process together. And as we both healed and grew and learned, I realized the elitist experts who openly sneered at me were full of crap for the most part.
I’ve learned a lot from the Left, especially since it isn’t my default position, but to suggest that all our ails regarding this subject are from the ‘authoritarian’ Right and the ‘state-corporatist rulers’ is a simplistic misreading of that position in my opinion. There are anti-authoritarian tendencies on both sides of the spectrum just as there is the tendency to mindlessly follow authorities: they simply come from different perspectives and beliefs.
Sam
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Hi Teresa,
I’m sorry for all the pain you and your family are in. I wish there was some place for families to heal. Soteria and Open Dialogue seem appealing to me from afar, but they aren’t available in small-town Midwest where I live, and so we’ve had to find our own way to healing individually and as a family. It wasn’t easy, for sure, but I refused to let my family fall apart or continue the dysfunction on both sides of our families for the sake of our son. For us attachment theory gave us the roadmap.
I wish you well.
Sam
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Excellent article on so many levels.
Sam
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Hi Sera,
I’m sorry for the many ways you and others here have been invalidated. I wish I could say it was better on the outside of the survivor’s community, but I haven’t found it so. People have a herd mentality, and if one doesn’t submit to the group-think, then one is ostracized and marginalized. And beyond that the power structures and gate keepers always look to retain their power and influence no matter what group or movement one is part. I wish it were otherwise, but I’ve spent a lifetime screaming in a vacuum for change on various issues and no one giving a d@mn. Like lemmings people happily follow everyone else over the cliff…
Wishing you the best.
Sam
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Megan,
I’m truly sorry your side of the story was invalidated. It’s not the church: it’s just people in general, but sadly the Church was supposed to be something different, and I, too, have found it one of the most destructive things in my family’s life even though my wife and I still attend as it’s our only decent source of companionship in a little town.
I’m sorry most that your husband turned on you instead of uniting with you.
Sam
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Eric,
I’m honestly not sure what you mean by ‘investigating.’ The most beneficial thing I’ve ever discovered is attachment theory. Thanks to John Bowlby and those who followed, it gave me the keys to help unlock my wife from her traumatic childhood. No therapist could possibly do what I have done. What our son has done. But a therapist could have been a great facilitator and taught us the ropes instead of me having to figure it out on my own while I was also dealing with my own issues that hindered my ability to help my wife.
A paid therapist lacks the credibility that most people need: trauma victim or otherwise. We need to know that person is ‘in it’ for more than just the money, and when all hell breaks loose and the money dries up, his/her help won’t vanish.
Respectfully, you can never do what the SO’s, family and friends can do: and that’s ok. It’s not your place. But the breadth of knowledge an ‘expert’ can have is something I simply don’t have time or energy to replicate, and that is a place that I feel can be served by those in your position to help those of us in our position.
Wishing you well.
Sam
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No, Rachel, neither of us have taken an medications for any distress or anything else. I don’t know…maybe it was the way we were both raised, but I don’t think either of us have ever really considered doing so. At least I haven’t. Can’t really speak for my wife on that issue, though sometimes I do know she wishes she had sleeping meds…
Sam
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Alex,
When Lawrence wrote this article it spoke to me as a coach might speak to his football players while giving them a pep talk before a big game. It spoke to that part of me that seeks an easy way out, that wants to find a short cut and reminds me that there is no gain without a willingness to endure some pain.
I never suffered severe childhood trauma, and I never have had any of my rights taken away as an adult. And I’ve always been fortunate to have been in the middle class of America even if it’s not to the level in which I was raised. And so to me, Lawrence isn’t accusing me of anything: he’s sounding the alarm that we are suffering ‘first world’ issues because we’ve forgotten all the sacrifices that those who came before us made so we could live how we do in the 21st century.
I really and truly do think I understand why the majority of the comments are the way they have been. I found your and KS’s comments especially powerful and moving, and it reminds me that there are others who have been thru even worse hell, in some ways, than my wife and I have been. I understand as much as I can, why you would see Lawrence’s words to be harmful and maybe even arrogant and definitely victim blaming and continuing harmful stereotypes.
And so to address your second comment: whose truth is right? Whose life experiences get to dictate how Lawrence’s blog is received’? My son once wrote a paper to argue that there are ‘levels’ of truths, and not ALL truths necessarily apply across all peoples, times and situations. I think that might be applicable in this situation. I think, maybe, Lawrence could have addressed this blog to people who comfortably live in middle and upper class situations and try to wake them up from their desires to live ‘distress free.’ But when he addresses it to a website in which the majority of commenters are survivors of extreme trauma and/or the mental health system, his comments sound accusatory and victim blaming.
Most of the time I don’t even look at Lawrence’s blogs. They usually don’t speak to me even though I know he’s fairly popular on this website. But this one spoke to me and MY life experiences, and yet I can accept why the majority on here found it otherwise.
Sam
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Lawrence,
as I read this, I thought your message really resonated with me, of course, I already believe it and have put it into practice for the most part. Then as I read the majority of comments, it was a reminder to me of another, valid perspective. Perhaps the best I could suggest is: right message, wrong audience.
Sam
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Alex,
I re-read KS’s comment very carefully, and I will once again state there is absolutely nothing with which I disagree.
Sam
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As much as KS has taken on an adversarial relationship to everything I say, I would completely agree with her assessment of how to help someone thru their traumatic memories. It’s very similar to what I have espoused upon my blog and was one of my more popular entries, trending #3 on google’s search for a while about lying and dissociative identity disorder.
Sam
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I really do wish you could see me, Kindred Spirit. Instead you only see some twisted caricature of me based upon your own traumatic experiences.
For the record, when I talk about the two Millenial girls (alters) Wikipedia says that generation started in 1980 and ended in 1994. So the VERY youngest that would mean is 24 years old, NOT teenagers!
I really do wish you the best.
Sam
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Kindred Spirit,
I am truly sorry that you find my position as if it’s a personal attack on you. I don’t see your opinion for your life as a threat to me and my wife.
HOW did I ‘ask for it?” My original comment had absolutely nothing to do with Lee’s statements about d.i.d. and a ‘holocaust’ of those falsely accused or his understanding of d.i.d. My original post was about how people’s fears of ‘extreme states’ is part of what gives this entire issue any power, and I still stand by that assertion even if I concede it’s not the whole issue. WHY do people call the authorities when someone is in a distressing or ‘psychotic’ state, if there is such a thing???? I would never even dream of doing that because at this point I know that I am the person with the most power to stop any kind of mental distress in my wife and NOTHING we have gone thru makes me ‘fearful’ anymore. Those 3 examples were just a tiny sample of the hell she and I have gone thru, and yet one by one, we faced all those fears and overcame them together.
Sam
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Steve,
I’ve been thinking about this all night and your statement kind of encapsulated some of my concerns: how Lee jumped to completely discount my wife’s experience and the validity of dissociation, and his apparently blind deference to the ‘holocaust that has come to the thousands of persons falsely accused.”
I tried to figure out where he stood from his website. It’s a weird format to read his stuff: probably did that in the hope people would buy it, and some/much of it is older, like from the 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s, but he seems to hold on to the fantasy of an epidemic of falsely accused people while ignoring the true pandemic of those who have been abused emotionally, physically and sexually and then are discredited and shamed by our culture’s power structures if they do speak out. Is he against the #MeToo movement as well?
I’d love for him to clarify, but he seems to be ignoring anything I actually say because of his apparent distaste for d.i.d..
Sam
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Julie,
I’m not refuting the idea of false memories. The science is pretty solid that shows how easily our memories can be manipulated and changed and even ‘created.’ But the FMSF takes it to an entirely new level to discount any and all memories that might be recovered during the process of healing. I won’t get into the politics of the group, but they had a lot riding on their vehemence to mpd/did and sadly, the excesses of the so-called trauma experts lead right into the FMSF’s hand to try to discredit mpd/did.
But like I said, that was decades ago, and yet some still hold onto the hype and excesses when therapists used to parade d.i.d. patients around like a circus freak show on the various talk shows, and so the critics point to that as their reason to discount EVERTYHING about d.i.d. Happily, ISSTD learned their lesson on that front, even if they haven’t made a lot of progress imo about how to best help people like my wife.
Sam
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Ok, Lee, well, I was able to get the previous comments by you to work this morning…and you’ve only made 13 in total on this website. None of them was directed to me. Now if you are referencing the ‘spirited’ dialogue between me and Kindred Spirit about d.i.d., at least I have a reference point.
It would appear from your comments about the ‘holocaust’ of falsely accused persons that you are trapped in some kind of time warp back at the beginning of the mpd movement and the hype and excesses that went on. Are you a member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation as well? If so, there’s really nothing I can say to open your eyes that even the so-called trauma experts have left those excesses behind decades ago.
And if you don’t believe in dissociation, there really is little basis on which to have a discussion when that concept is about as accepted as gravity. But again, I’m sure you can point to the ignorance of ISSTD and make your case from strawmen about something that doesn’t really exist.
I’m sorry if ISSTD is driving your understanding of trauma and dissociation. It certainly doesn’t drive our understanding of things, or my wife would never have made the progress she has.
Sam
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Hi Steve,
well, just as you and I agreed on the other thread that attachment theory isn’t a ‘cure all’, I would suggest that this subject is complex and multi-layered, and I don’t think any one perspective will ever do it justice. But what I’m suggesting is that Big Pharma and the APA are the modern-day equivalent of those selling ‘magic elixirs’ and ‘snake oil’ cures a few centuries ago. They prey on people’s fears of whatever was/is ailing them at the time.
Steve, this problem affects EVERY class despite the suggestions of the Marxists on this site, and though it may hit the lower classes the hardest, neither my wife nor I grew up there. What I see is fear driving this and Big Pharma and the APA simply capitalizing on that fear. Take away the fear and people would have no need to turn to them. Teach them the things my wife and I learned, and mental health issues move from the category of fear of the incomprehensible that only the APA priesthood can divine, to mostly the same hardships and annoyances of a severely broken leg until it is healed.
As for Big Pharma and the APA, of course they are going to fight this: I completely agree for them this is all about money and power. But they can’t force any of this on us despite the laws suggesting to the contrary if it weren’t for fear. I overcame my fears and never even considered committing my wife despite how hard things have been, and so they had no ability to touch my wife despite all the laws out there used to incarcerate so many on this site.
Sam
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Lee,
hmmm…I tried to go back and find the discussion between you and me, but either something is wrong with my browser or this website. So I’m sorry if I don’t remember it.
I’m not sure why you would characterize me as “so strongly dedicated to the label of d.i.d.” We’ve had this debate ad nauseum on this website of whether or not to use the common vernacular or do we start from scratch every time for the benefit of newcomers? I do understand that to those who have had those diagnoses weaponized by the mental health system have a far more adverse reaction to being diagnosed than either I or my wife does since the ‘diagnosis’ simply gave us a starting point and then we pretty much went our own way from there.
As for your dislike of the ‘trauma experts’, take a number. I downloaded the guidelines from ISSTD and did a line by line critique of them: pretty much if you take their guidelines and do the EXACT OPPOSITE, it would give you a pretty good idea of how my wife and I have approached her healing. So if you are going to judge me by their ignorance and excesses, you would be greatly amiss, but whatever…
Since you feel you have nothing to learn from our experience, I will try to remember THIS discussion and not bother you again.
Sincerely wishing you the best,
Sam
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“If it were recognized by our people that science is irrelevant to the debate over whether society’s fears should trump individual rights to liberty, then we could begin what will be the long struggle to win such a debate.”
Lee,
I wonder if you and so many on this website are kind of missing what I see as the key issue because of the hatred of psychiatry. Psychiatry really is nothing more than a tool despite some giving it anthropomorphic qualities on this site. I agree with most here that it’s a terrible tool and it’s based on misinformation and it is anti-scientific in many ways. But in the end, it’s just a tool.
But I think so many of these debates miss the real point. Psychiatry is a horrible tool that people feel compelled to use because of their fears of mental health issues based on their lack of understanding what is going on. Even on this website, people use the term ‘extreme states’ but outside of drug-induced states, I’ve always wondered why the survivors would be wiling to use this designation as it seems to lend credence to the fears others have of these manifestations.
My wife has d.i.d., Lee. The first time she dropped to the floor in what I thought was a catatonic state, I kind of freaked out. But then the next time it happened, I kept my brain working, and I tried something. I went thru the current list of alters and lo and behold, Ally the defender popped out. I learned a lesson that day: she wasn’t really catatonic: I just had to find out to whom the baton had been passed. A fear is vanquished.
The first time my wife went into what looked like a series of mini-seizures, I about freaked out again, as her eyes rolled back into her sockets and they fluttered in rapid motion. But the next time, my brain was working again, and I realized, “Oh, this is kind of like a computer that is glitching when it tries to switch programs but gets stuck.” So then I learned to help her thru those switches that get hung up for some reason. Another fear gone.
One of the original times my wife went into a flash back, I was back in freak out mode, her fear driving mine, and then midstream, I chilled out, and I began to speak calmly to her, remind her she’s not alone, I’ve got her now, she’s safe now, and I pulled her out of that flash back. Another fear gone.
One by one the issues that we had to confront because of her d.i.d. lost their ability to induce fear in either of us as we came to an understanding of what was going on and how I could help her thru each issue the best. If you were to go on WordPress and read the blogs of other people with d.i.d., they are full of fear and hatred of things that my wife and I have come to learn are just part of the healing experience. Some are more annoying than others, but none of them cause either of us any ‘fear’ any more.
It is fear that drives people to use horrible tools like psychiatry. Fear shuts down our brains and makes otherwise intelligent people into mindless caricatures of themselves. And yet when we were first starting our journey 11 years ago, most of the professional literature was as ignorant of the mechanics of her manifestations as we were originally. So we had to learn the ropes pretty much on our own.
And I will posit that if others were simply taught what is going on, that these NON-drug induced manifestations really aren’t ‘extreme’ but simply stronger versions of many things I have experienced myself as a non-trauma victim, their fears would dissipate like mine did. Once I learned to see so many of her experiences as just reflective of my own, the last vestiges of ‘non-normalcy’ fled, and so at this point, we live a rather humdrum life that happens to have 8 girls (alters) part of our marriage rather than one.
This isn’t about class warfare like my Leftist friends believe. This isn’t about social control. This isn’t about an anthropomorphic psychiatry preying upon victims. In my opinion, the real issue is simply about people, both the victims and those around them, being overwhelmed by fear because they don’t understand the very natural things that are going on in the brain/mind when trauma isn’t properly processed. I argued in another thread on MIA, that if we simply would learn to see mental trauma the same as physical trauma, then all these mental manifestations would be seen no different than what occurs during the convalescent period of, say, a severely broken leg. There’s no stigma in a broken leg. We all know what to expect, and we don’t expect that person to be back up to full speed until the healing is done and any physical therapy that may be required afterwards.
Yours,
Sam
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…” But if it is at our own sacrifice, then what have we gained? Is there a way we can support ourselves and others, without feeling we are sacrificing our own lives and well-being to do so? That just seems like a hamster wheel to me.”
Alex, I want to preface what follows by stating up front, I believe two people can believe very different things, and neither person is inherently ‘wrong.’ I wish more people understood that very few things are black and white. If more people understood that, we wouldn’t have the pointless tribal wars going on in America right now. We would be able to find the good in each side’s arguments, and the rest…we could learn to chalk it up to ‘live and let live.’ Instead we take differences as if they are a threat to our very existence and survival, and that is detrimental to us all because then, rather than becoming enriched by someone else’s perspective we simply see it as a threat.
Anyway, attachment theory teaches us that in the beginning of our lives we are wholly dependent upon our ‘primary attachment figure’ and others to lesser degrees. But over the course of time that singular dependency slowly changes until, in a healthy relationship, parent and the now-adult child will become equals in interdependency, but then, eventually, the roles will reverse and the parent will become dependent upon the adult child late in life.
However, when severe childhood trauma occurs, it typically screws up that natural progression. When my wife and I first started this healing journey together 11 years ago, she told me over and over and over, “I don’t know what healthy looks like.” And I took her seriously. Meanwhile the other little girls began to crash our world. At one point ALL 6 of the girls (alters) currently out fronted as 8-years old or younger: the youngest 3 all started out fronting as 2-year olds.
This is kind of where attachment theory and my Christian upbringing that emphasized sacrificial love and the golden rule meshed so well. I had been naturally raised to believe that sacrifice is a good thing…but pragmatically speaking, well that was a very different thing. We struggled the first 20 years of our marriage because I expected the marriage to be mutually beneficial, mutually giving, and it simply wasn’t. And I am not implying that my wife was completely at fault: I was selfish and immature in so many ways which complicated her issues. On top of that, I was simply ignorant about how early childhood trauma was affecting the woman I love because my own childhood was rather idyllic in comparison.
But over the course of the first 3 or so years of our healing journey, I was transforming: her issues were so massive that I had to grow up and make many changes myself or I knew we wouldn’t make it. All that to state that I had to become willing to sacrifice my needs to help her heal, but I don’t want to come off like I think I’m some saint: I’m NOT. But I had to learn to take the long view to our marriage. I sought a win/win solution, and that meant I had to be willing to do the work that her parents failed to do and help each girl become securely attached to me, help each girl then begin to connect to the others (the personality development that naturally occurs during childhood), and anything else they needed. It’s meant for much of the last 11 years, my life companion hasn’t been an adult woman, but 7 traumatized and very needy little girls in various states of dysfunctional attachment.
But eleven years later, we are slowly moving toward the healthy, adult interdependence that I often speak. Two of the girls have grown and now front as Millenials. I got engaged to one in December and I’m pre-engaged to the other. And all the other ‘littles’ (alters who view themselves as little children) truly do the activities of adults (other than in the bedroom), even if they still interact with me as a daddy figure who they want to take care of each of them. Edit: and let me state at this point that ALL of the girls are almost wholly healed. They are vivacious, vibrant and full of life in a way that my ‘first girl’ (the only one who sees me as her husband) never was.
My goal is still a fully healthy, adult interdependence with all of the girls who make up my wife, but we aren’t there yet. I had to be willing to start where each of them was and walk with her, at her pace and at whatever stage of dependence she started until she was able to move forward.
…Sigh, this reply is already too long…
And yes, you are correct that this topic of attachment is massive. I naturally used the principles to help my wife. I think we are all ‘wired’ that way, but the Western cultures seem to want to beat those principles out of us for some reason even though most of us want treated the way the theory espouses. Once I discovered the theory proper, I studied up on it so I could become more purposeful in it. I even did quite a long series of articles on my personal blog to address some of the main concepts that were critical to our journey.
Let me simply state that using the attachment concepts of affect regulation, safe haven and proximity maintenance I was able to not only walk my wife thru EVERY extreme state that she manifested (and trust me with d.i.d. you essentially get the entire spectrum rolled up into one journey), but I learned to pull her out of them more quickly and help her heal to the point that she rarely experiences them anymore. And when she does get triggered nowadays, her reactions aren’t much more severe than my reactions to things that trigger me. And the theory helped me with all the ‘lesser’ issues, too, like depression, anxiety, and anything else you can think of.
Beyond that is the theory’s concept of the inner working model. The littlest girls and I figured this one out together. It can make the difference between the healing one experiences being temporary or being permanent. I’ve been trying to follow the debate over on the CBT blog on this website, and I haven’t quite figured out if CBT takes into account one’s inner working model or just tries to force the change without realizing that the inner working model is like the operating system in a computer. EVERYTHING else is founded upon that, and so unless you change the inner working model from the trauma paradigm that most childhood trauma victims have to a more healthy one like someone who was securely attached, a lot of healing work will have limited effect.
But for Steve’s sake, I will sincerely add that the theory is NOT a cure all: we’ve had to use other principles for various issues, but it definitely can help in so many, many situations.
I guess I’ll finish. I’m sorry not to do this topic better here. Like you said, this website just is not set up for that kind of a multi-layer discussion. I wish the attachment series on my blog had gained more traction: it’s one of the things I’m most proud of, but it takes a lot of work for the SO or support person, and it required so much change on my own part before I was able to implement some of it to the fullest extent that I wonder if most people wouldn’t rather those little magic pills…
Sam
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Alex,
I agree with everything you are saying…and yet, attachment theory is so much more…as I started out this entire discussion, attachment theory cuts against the Western cultures’ over-valuation of independence. It is not only about instilling that secure sense of self internally during childhood, it is about developing at network around our loved ones who will have each other’s back when things go wrong. And it’s about learning to go thru life developing a ‘buddy system’; learning how to help regulate each other when life hits us with trauma or storms.
I love John Bowlby and the work he began, but I also had to learn how the concepts of safe haven, proximity maintenance and affect regulation could be practically implemented to help my wife heal…but beyond that, how those concepts just help each and everyone of us walk thru this life that can be so difficult at times. Those are concepts that my wife and I now each use with each other AND our 28-year old son even though he lives 12 hours away.
Sam
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Steve,
I don’t have the breadth of experience that you do, so this isn’t meant to refute or argue with your statement, but in our personal experience until each of the girls (alters) were securely attached to me, they seemed unable to go past the original trauma. But once they had that foundation of being securely attached, it seemed to propel their ability to connect to each other (by tearing down the dissociation) and allow them to mature and discover latent abilities/traits that had otherwise been absent in my wife as a whole.
That doesn’t mean I think attachment issues are everything, as much as I may talk about them, but they seemed to be foundational in my wife’s healing experience.
Alex,
I’m sure you, as Steve noted, would agree that often times the dysfunction is inadvertent, like it was mostly in my family, and even in my wife’s as messed up as her mom was/is. But the dysfunction is still painful even if it is inadvertent and I’ve ended up kind of being the black sheep of the family because my mom wasn’t properly attached to my dad as she blamed him for them ‘having to get married’ and so she waged a 56-year war against him as she jumped from child to child to child looking for that emotional attachment she refused to give to her husband. And yet, if I were to call her out on it, she would be dumbfounded and defensive as she feels she is the model Christian wife.
It’s rather sad how we humans can live with so much cognitive dissonance, sigh. But I really don’t think she is, or most of us are, intentional about it. I would chalk it up to dissociation. And though I feel it’s a much milder form than what my wife experienced, I still think it’s what causes so many incongruent words and actions in most of us. Kind of like the murderous mafioso who is kind and loving to those within his own circle. He has compartmentalized, ie dissociated, the incongruence between his various spheres of life.
Sam
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Alex, this was a VERY, VERY basic video, and I do agree that it came off kind of as if things are cookie-cutterish. But the basic concepts of attachment theory have been validated over a host of situations especially the ‘strange situation’ test that the video mentioned. But how those concepts play out…I would agree with you that they will be as varied as there are people on this earth.
Sam
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Well, it’s a very basic video and only deals with one’s childhood. But it lays out a few of the basic concepts of attachment theory. However, it completely ignores the key concepts of safe haven, affect regulation, and glosses over proximity maintenance.
The good news is someone who grew up with one of the 3 dysfunctional attachment systems (avoidant, ambivalent or disorganized) CAN learn a new way. However, at least in our case, it has meant rejecting the prevailing, pathological foundation of hyper-independence and hyper-individualism that our culture pushes, and it has meant that I had to understand my proper role of the primary attachment figure…something the ‘experts’ are only now beginning to study in romantic adult relationships. But the healing process isn’t easy: there’s no magic pill. I had to be willing to accept my wife’s ‘neediness’, something that this culture finds ‘toxic’. But as I filled her ‘neediness’ each day, slowly those attachment dysfunctions were healed, repaired and now for the most part, she displays all the signs of secure attachment.
Sam
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Vicki,
thank you for a thoughtful and what ought to be a common-sense discussion of this subject.
Sam
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I never knew much about this, but the little I did always made me wonder. This critique resonates with some of the reservations I had from my very limited exposure to the practice.
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Peter,
I know you rarely, if ever, respond to the comments section, but I wish that you would make a place in your new institute for those of us ‘in the trenches’ who are laymen and not scientist by degree but scientists by necessity. I’ve had to figure out how to help my wife heal from d.i.d. using attachment concepts and anything else that I could. I took a pragmatic approaching, using what worked, discarding what didn’t, always relying on the feedback that she gave as we walked the journey together. She and I have learned so many things; things that I believe have wider application, but it’s hard to get a hearing when western culture only seems to care how many letters one can put behind his/her name. I learned how to take her thru all the ‘extreme’ states without any medicines, as they are called on this website, but am still combating the residual dissociation…but we are getting there…
There are so many things that occur 24/7 ‘in the trenches’ that you experts simply will never experience in the safety and confines of the office: we, the SO’s, family members and even involved friends have so much to offer, if only someone would take us seriously.
Yours,
Sam
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Hi Krista,
I am again so impressed that you were able to do all this on your own: that shouldn’t have been necessary, but for your sake, I’m glad you were able to do so.
I still hope for the day when SO’s, family members and friends are taught how to be the natural allies they ought to be. It took me a couple of years to figure out it myself after wading thru my own issues, to boot, but I see so many places in your article that good allies could have helped, especially in affect regulation, and not ‘facing the enemy’ on one’s own.
Wishing you the best.
Sam
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Thank you, Alex. I wish you and your partner the best as well.
Sam
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Ok Alex,
I want to honestly explain my struggles to you IF I were to do what you and everyone else suggests and “take care of YOURSELF if you want to be effective support.”
After journaling for more than 10,000 pages these last 11 years during this journey, to help me deal with my own issues, to deal with the inherent stress of this journey, and to help me figure out how best to help and support my girls (as I phrase it on my blog), I’ve got a pretty good handle on what makes me tick.
IF I were to take care of myself first as this culture suggests there are two things I would do: 1) I would have a healthy, intimate adult relationship, and 2) I would enter the field in which my college degree is, mainly ministering to others…these are the two things that rip at my heart every single day of my life: the void in my life of these two things is overwhelming…and yet to do so, would probably mean leaving my wife since she and I have NEVER had a healthy or especially intimate relationship (emotionally, physically, or otherwise) even though we both love each other. Her past trauma has simply truncated so many of those desires in her: so if it’s ‘me first’ do I leave?
And the same about my vocational desires. She married me knowing exactly who I am, what my chosen vocation in life was, and within a few years, she made it clear that she would never allow me to follow that desire because it struck at her ‘safety needs.’ Again, if it’s ‘me first’ do I leave her?
I’m really not trying to be dismissive or argumentative, but one’s marriage vows are there for a reason despite our culture’s infatuation with rewriting them to say not much of anything nowadays. I love my wife: no this isn’t the life I would have chosen or the vocation of my dreams (being in a factory), but I’m trying to make lemonade out of the lemons that we were both dealt. She certainly didn’t choose this. No one says, “please rape me repeatedly when I’m two until I break and fracture and never know what it means to be healthy” (her words not mine). But I love her, and I choose US even though I know it means I’m choosing heartache and stress each and everyday until we get thru this…
But trust me…that heartache and stress is a great motivator. It pushes me every single day to help her in every and any way that I can. It teaches me to be in tune with her so that I have learned never to coerce her, but how best to create an environment that feels safe and loving to her so that she can heal, truly, deeply and fully as I believe is still possible.
Again, I am not trying to be dismissive, but what you have shared, which many, many other people have shared to me as well…I just don’t know how to do that AND be true to some other core values in myself and be true to my one and only love. It’s one of the things I truly think the new testament in the Christian bible got right: the idea of sacrificial love and giving up oneself and one’s life for another as the true sign of love and friendship.
Yours,
Sam
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“Sorry that sounds soppy.”
No, it’s not soppy, concerned carer. That’s what I’ve learned from attachment theory. For us, it’s mostly been a repudiation of the Western independence that is beaten into all of us from the time of birth when parents are foolishly taught to let their children cry themselves to sleep…and the myriad of ways we are told to let others suffer on their own and ‘tough it out’ or ‘pull ourselves up by our OWN bootstraps”. We are all systematically shamed by this culture of deranged independence, and my wife and I simply reject it.
I make a concerted effort to, essentially, weave a ‘cocoon’ of attachment points between her and myself throughout as many aspects of our lives as I possibly can. And each of those attachment connections strengthens BOTH of us. Just because I don’t have any massive trauma in my past, doesn’t mean I don’t need the deep connection to another human, and even if she can’t give me what I most deeply need at the moment, I’ve still learned to soak up the connections that she is able to give me.
I really do love the song, “Lean on Me” because it’s so true. Don’t ever feel it’s soppy. Interdependence is what we were all ‘wired’ for: it’s far more healthy than this independence garbage we are all force fed our entire lives.
Sam
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Alex,
I almost missed your longer explanation that you added after your initial post. When I googled transmediumship I only saw stuff in there about, essentially, being a medium. I certainly could use ‘energy’ if it were for real. I don’t have time for pie-in-the-sky beliefs like so many I grew up with. I ONLY care about what practically helps me and my wife…especially because her last ‘alter’ has almost exhausted ALL of us, trying to help her heal and connect because she’s different than ALL the others. She has very little long term memory, and so even though we’ve made progress securely attaching her to me, it’s like that movie of the 50 First Dates, and I have to start from scratch over and over and over, and so it’s hard for her to feel safe, which means it’s been monumentally hard for us to get her connected to the rest of the group, and she was/is so terrified as long as she disconnected from the others that ALL intimacy, emotional, physical and otherwise has ceased for more than 3 years, and we’re all really struggling right now…and I’m just so overwhelmingly tired, and hoping I/we are going to make it especially when we’ve all come so far..and yet I just don’t know how to help her past this…I’ve never had a conundrum like her lack of long-term memory has presented to us on this healing journey…sigh…oh, well, enough of the online therapy session, you didn’t ask for it…I just don’t have any one to talk to about this kind of stuff…we are so far past anything you would read from ISSTD or the popular lit…and I feel like I’m going to break if we don’t get a breakthru… 🙁
Sam
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Hi Alex,
you are welcome to tell me, but I’ll be honest, this journey my wife and I have taken the last 11 years has pretty much knocked out ALL of my ‘practical’ beliefs of the supernatural. I grew up a very devout evangelical Christian and got deeply into the charismatic movements and such during my young adulthood, but there was a part of me that always wondered what was wrong with me when “God” seemed to move in people all around me, and nothing happened to me…
And then when my wife and I started this healing journey, I just didn’t have the emotional strength for anything that wasn’t ‘real’ or didn’t work, and so many of my Christian beliefs simply didn’t work out into real life, especially my expectations of some kind of supernatural intervention to help me and my wife get thru the hell we were going thru…
And so I’ve kind of ended up with a humanistic Christianity, which my evangelical friends would call a heresy. I have a theistic worldview, but I don’t expect any help. I personally call it a Narnian Christianity: all those times that Aslan was absent for ages and ages which aren’t in the books by Lewis. I believe the moral codes, I believe there is more, BUT practically speaking, it’s up to me to help my wife heal, not some awol deity that I was never good enough to earn favors for answered prayers.
I do understand that I’ve said a number of things in this response with which you would strongly disagree, but it’s where I’m at, and so far it’s been pragmatically useful in helping my wife and me survive the trenches we’ve traveled together. I’m sure this is far more than you expected, or wanted, especially as I can tell that for you, your journey seems to have taken you in the opposite direction toward more openness to ‘spiritual’ things.
Yours,
Sam
(edit: and I guess I’ll add I’ve become a lot more socially, religiously and politically moderate from how I was raised…I’m kind of a pariah now to all of my family who are ardent Trump supporters, lol)
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Alex,
I apologize for making the generalization. I try to read and re-read my responses so I get them ‘right’. I try to not make over-generalizations because, of course, not everyone fits in a neat category. So I apologize to you and any others who felt my response mis-represented them: that was not my intention.
Sam
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Concerned Carer,
I see that no one ever addressed your concerns. Perhaps I can try.
I think you can see the resistance that the survivors have on this site to suggesting that anything is ‘wrong’ because our culture weaponizes that admission. For my own wife it took 20 years before she felt safe to do so with me and only AFTER I made it clear to her that I loved her unconditionally. Until that point, anytime I would make the suggestion, she would spit back that I was the one with a problem. And so I don’t expect any less of the survivors on this site.
And I think that’s why talking about mental health ‘trauma’ in the same way we talk about bodily trauma is so valuable. If we see someone with a cast on her/his leg, typically we think ‘oh s/he broke it’ but there’s also an assumption in there that with time to heal, and maybe some physical therapy if it was a really bad break, the person will be back 100% when the process is over.
But there’s another assumption that while the person is in that cast, there will naturally be things s/he can’t do until the healing has been completed. Most of us don’t assign value judgments to those things that can’t be done, we just accept them as part of the trauma and convalescence period. And if we love the person, we don’t take umbrage that we have to ‘pick up the slack’ while our loved one is healing.
I feel all those points can be seamlessly transferred to our loved ones who have suffered mental trauma. And the manifestations that occur from that trauma, whether it be ‘extreme states’, excessive triggers, ptsd symptoms or anything else, should just be viewed the same as in the list of ‘currently can’t’ when a person has a broken leg.
I rarely talk about my wife’s list of ‘currently can’ts’ even though there are a lot of them and some of them cause me extreme stress. And when she begins to berate herself over that list of ‘currently cant’s’, I tend to just say, ‘that’s the d.i.d. and it will get better once we get thru it.’ I tend to focus her and myself on the positives, like a good coach. We both know the negatives are there and we don’t pretend like they aren’t there, but we try to stay forward focused, knowing that what ‘currently can’t be done’ is not our final destination.
Sam
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Hi Sera,
thank you for sharing your experience, especially how you were reported to the authorities. As much as I’ve kept my wife out of the system, your story is a cautionary tale to me because this journey she and I are on is so hard many days that my personal journal is filled with the sigh that I’m so tired of life and the wish that I’d never been born. To me that feeling is always there, ebbing and flowing, but it’s kind of freeing, knowing that if things ever get too bad, I have an out, and with that ‘out’ it gives me power over those feelings…
…And yet on my blog I wrote about how to help someone feeling suicidal from my personal experience, and fortunately none of my immediate family who read it called anyone on me. And when my wife and I take our daily walks together, we walk past a counseling service and part of me loves the idea of just getting some help and support on the days when it’s so hard helping her on my own…but your experience shows to me that my wife’s insistence on our anonymity is probably for the best, even though it means we can’t help others, because it protects me as well as her, sigh…
I’m glad nothing worse than a phone call and a little embarrassment happened to you. Thank you for being willing to share for those of us who can’t yet…
Sam
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Anechidna,
I think you are going to find different opinions about ‘psychological injury’ on this site. To me it’s a perfectly good analogy between a severe broken leg and a severe traumatic injury suffered to the mind. With proper care both injuries can be healed and the sufferer can go on with life relatively none the worse. But if either injury is ignored, it is likely it will never ‘self-heal’ and then that injury will stress the greater system and if that stress is enough in the future, at some point it could begin to cause other issues.
To me dissociation is the biggest physiological result that comes from mental trauma, though that may simply be because of my wife and my experience. I’m not an expert, but I wonder if the dissociation is what causes all the differences in brain mapping (though I take all the hoopla over those mappings with a grain of salt!) Anyway, I believe dissociation in the mind is similar to what happens to the body when a broken leg is never healed. From that point on the body will do all kinds of things to get around the natural use of that leg. Sure, some body parts may even grow stronger as a result of having to take over for the leg’s function, but doing so will also stress parts of the body that simply were never made to walk. In the end, the person may even learn to be relatively mobile, but that doesn’t mean that was the way the body was intended to function: it’s just a testament to our ability to adapt.
But even decades later, as in my wife’s case, once the mental trauma is addressed and with a lot of help (kind of like physical therapy to strengthen the atrophied body parts), her brain/mind is healing. It’s just a lot more work to undo all those ‘workarounds’ caused by the dissociation than if we had know about it in our 20’s.
Sam
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zmenard,
I have tried to teach other SO’s on my blog but simply never got much traction: I have more than 100 articles explaining various things that I/we faced helping my wife heal from severe dissociation: things I struggled with, things I learned while I helped her, practical things and more theoretical issues, but I would guess most people really do want magic pills to give to the ‘problem person’ rather than do the hard work of helping someone heal from severe trauma. It’s really not all that complicated, but it is hard for both: there’s no way around that, and sadly our culture doesn’t do ‘hard’.
The staff here know I would be happy to do so, but I think our story, because we are such an anomaly, causes some issues with those who have been ‘spoken for/over’ by SO’s and family members since my wife refuses to come here and affirm what I say and affirm that I’m not secretly keeping her in chains! 🙂
So until they can find a way for me to share without it causing undo distress to some of the survivors, I try to content myself with the comments section and the camaraderie of finding other people like me who don’t think the effects of trauma make one crazy or weird.
Sam
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Loving My DID Girl(s) or the address is samruck2.wordpress.com
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“Family & friends often look to the ostensible authority for the quickest, ‘cleanest’ fix possible…usually some form of sedation.”
I guess I’ll add the longer version:
1) I’ve always had ‘authority’ issues and never really cared much for going along with the crowd. Plus I was school valedictorian and graduated from college with a 4.0 and my wife is literally a genius, and so I never really saw the ‘authorities’ as having anything over us.
2) And we homeschooled our son the entire way: another X against authority. Our son told my wife that she was his hardest teacher until he got into his master’s program in a Boston-area university. And then, even though he didn’t have the pedigree of his classmates, he was the only one that his university recruited for their PhD program; so eh, who needs authorities?
3) And even though I’ve moved to the political/religious/social center as I’ve helped my wife heal, I grew up pretty far Right, and so we didn’t expect the ‘experts’ to do for us what we could do for ourselves. Moreover, I quickly found out as she and I traveled this journey and as I read up on her issues, that the so-called experts were full of it and didn’t know half of what they thought they did.
…so I guess all those things kind of made both of us never really look for that ‘quick fix’ like most of our culture does.
Sam
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How did I come to that wisdom? The short version is indeed that she is literally the one and only woman to whom I have ever said “I love you” or been with, so I never considered any solution except a win/win for the both of us no matter how hard it’s been for both of us. But the longer version to that question is much more complicated and convoluted, and I deal with many of those issues over on my wordpress blog, but for now, I’ve found a philosophical home in many ways over here.
Sam
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Well Krista,
I’m kind of an anomaly here. My fight in this battle is about keeping people OUT of the system before they ever get entangled in it.
Our son and I kept my wife/his mother completely out of the system when she started dealing with all kinds of ‘extreme states’ as they like to call it on this website. I hope some day that I can share with other interested SO’s and family members how they can do the same. That’s why I find it so discouraging that all of your family distanced themselves from your own fight…but my wife does tell me I’m the ‘weird’ one for not seeing her issues like the rest of humanity, lol.
But if I have anything to offer from my perspective, I’ll be happy to do so.
Wishing you well,
Sam
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Hi Krista,
Congratulations for getting yourself out of the system! I hope your subsequent articles give others who read them hope and a plan how to do the same. It’s too bad you had to do it yourself.
I wish you well.
Sam
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Richard, I’m sure that was my fault because I distracted her talking about something we are both passionate about.
Sam
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Hi Eric,
I did a search for the psychological injury model and didn’t find anything other than this article on MIA. We’ve had some other articles in the past about collaborations to move to a more trauma-based model, and I wish you well. I appreciate much of what you said. I think things will change only when their reaches a critical mass of enough people who no longer accept the various cognitive dissonances that you described. Our understanding that people heal people, not drugs. The understanding that trauma is at the heart to so much mental distress, not some mythical biochemical imbalance. And more.
Sam
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Kindredspirit,
I honestly hear you. I really do understand your concerns: you aren’t the first person to voice these same exact issues. And I accept that you are honestly sharing this with me out of concern for me and my wife.
I just don’t know how to convey to you that your concerns and misgivings really are based on a strawman. I don’t know where these tropes began since I’ve heard them elsewhere, but our experience is completely different than you and others are imagining it.
First, if this is your opinion of dissociation, it is NOT our experience of it. For us/her, dissociation is like discovering a long-lost castle in the woods. it’s always been there, but the path is overgrown because no one has used it in decades. But neural plasticity teaches us that once we start to use that path, it will become worn and more and more accessible.
When the trauma happened in the past, the mind sequesters that pain and anguish from the rest of the mind so that it doesn’t engulf the entire person and a complete breakdown of ALL functioning occurs. The only reason ‘alters’ occur is because of that sequestering. So they kind of take on a life of their own.
Now I could demand, as you say, that I will only talk to ‘my wife’. But that’s not how each of them sees it. In her mind, she is a real, live entity with her own thoughts and feelings. Each girl has repeatedly voiced this to me when she first began to join us outside.
And so I accepted this starting place. My validation made her feel safe and accepted. And as we walked together, I helped each girl release the lies she had accepted from the trauma. And as I won each one’s trust, they each wanted to be ‘adopted’ into our family: the colloquial term we use for becoming securely attached to me.
As that began to happen, the trauma being healed, the lies being resolved, and the secure attachment to me giving her a safe base, we began the process of tearing down the last of the dissociation between each girl. Little by little each girl began to wear a footpath from her own, little, forgotten castle to the main pathways that all of them could access…and once we got to that phase, slowly, they each began to interconnect with the others.
At first it was extremely important to each that she was a distinct individual, but slowly as they continue to make more and more and more connections with each other, they are less concerned with being individualistic and are acting as a group. And from what I have read, more and more experts realize that we ALL act like ‘groups’ and not monolithic personalities.
But they still want me to recognize their individuality even as they shed more and more and more of their need to act on their own. Maybe some day none of them will care about herself as an individual, but what I did was give each the time and space she needed to heal and feel safe to integrate with the others. I didn’t demand any of them act like my wife even though I personally feel they are all my wife.
And at this point I just got engaged to one girl in December: she wants to be my wife. I’m pre-engaged to another. And a third has mentioned it. So one by one, each is CHOOSING to become my wife, but it’s always her choice. I make clear that I will never withhold my love or affection if she doesn’t do what I wish.
I’m just not sure how you object to me allowing my wife the space and time she needs to heal in the manner that feels the safest to each of them: that seems to be what most of the survivors here want: validated and loved unconditionally, even while I shepherd each girl gently toward the goal of healing and integration within the larger group.
Sam
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Kindredspirit,
some of what you have said I agree with. As well, I am aware of the various controversies around this issue. And yes, I personally operate on the premise of this being about trauma and dissociation and you can see that all over this site when I discuss particulars of how I help my wife. I agree that the various ‘girls’ are simply different aspects of my wife’s unified personality, but if I were to call her experience of things a ‘fairy tale’ all of you survivors would burn me at the stake for invalidating her experience. Instead I walk with her, where each of the girls are at, and yet I’m upfront with them that they are all part of my unified wife, but I don’t make that the basis of my interactions with them.
The problem seems to be that you want me to be the exact opposite of what most survivors on this site cry for: someone willing to walk in my wife’s reality rather than dictate to her that she follow my reality And yet, if I did that, then you would simply pillory me for being like everyone else.
Lastly, I DO get what you are saying: you’re not saying anything I haven’t heard before. I simply disagree.
Respectfully,
Sam
(edit: I guess I’ll add that even though I walk in my wife’s reality which is based on her past trauma during childhood, I model a new one without fear and trauma for all the girls, and as they live with me and our son, they are ALL moving toward this one. But I give them the time to do this of their own volition and not because I mandate it as the price to have a relationship with me.)
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Like it or not, the SO’s, family members and friends have a real stake in this fight, AND we are the first line of defense against more people becoming psychiatric survivors. My wife couldn’t have done it on her own without me and our son when all hell broke loose with her ‘extreme states.’
But if some want to treat us like second-class citizens based on their own experiences of bad SO’s and family members, that’s rather short sighted. We ought to be reaching out to those who are open to a new way of thinking, and helping them and teaching them, but also recognizing so many of them are dealing with their own demons, too. We should draw the circle large enough by understanding we are ALL in this together against a system that is truly larger than psychiatry or even amoral capitalism, but the culture at large that tries to sweep trauma and abuse under the rug at any cost: psychiatry is just a tool to help them do so.
My heart is sad every time an SO or family member comes on this site and decries the trauma their loved one has suffered at the hands of the system: we have a number of authors who have done so recently. But to myself I think, “This didn’t have to happen.” And every time I read a story in the news of a cop killing someone in mental distress, I think the same thing. But until the SO’s and family members are viewed as potential allies and given a real voice for their perspective while recognizing their own distresses and issues, this movement will continue to struggle, I believe.
I think an Open Dialogue kind of model is the way to go the little I know of it because it seems to bring all 3 stakeholders into the equation: sufferers, SO/family members/friends and ‘experts’; not this ‘survivors’ first and foremost mentality.
Sam
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Sorry, Rachel, I did NOT mean you as in you personally. I guess I should have used ‘one’ third, person, general, rather than you, 2nd, person, ‘specific.’
As for d.i.d. being a psych label and rejecting it. Well once again are we ALL going to start from scratch every time we discuss everything? Or are we going to use the common vernacular and go from there?
I do understand that for those who have had those diagnoses weaponized against them, then they/you see them VERY differently, than my wife and I who see those diagnoses as an ‘aha’ moment. For us it simply told us what we were dealing with, and then we learned, together, how to deal with it from there.
Sam
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I’m sorry you can’t see past your own experience Kindredspirit, and clearing NOTHING is going to convince you otherwise. I have no need for my wife’s diagnosis: I’d much prefer a healthy wife, not spending 95% of our private time with ‘littles’ who are starved for the love and attention and affection they never got from their parents the first time around.
Rachel, my wife refuses to come on these sites because when we first started this journey, she did the whole survivor sites stuff, but they kicked one of the little girls off even though she broke none of the rules and ever since they have all refused to go back. Plus you add to the mix the toxic notions about d.i.d. currently going on in this culture like the movie Switch and its sequel Mr. Glass that just opened in the theaters, and a host of other books that now love to portray people with d.i.d. as some sociopathic, super killer and even cannibal. And there still is the past excesses of the so called experts(!) of the satanic crap that is still in the minds of some like Kindredspirit as if those abuses somehow discredit the entire issue.
So instead she/they spends her/their time on other sites. We homeschooled our son, and so the two millennials (my fiancée and girlfriend) have an online personality that fits that profile and they spend it trying to help younger wives and single women trapped in pseudo-Christian, patriarchal situations. And from time to time when they can clearly see the signs of d.i.d. in people, they’ll privately reveal their own to them and help shepherd the women, if possible, to more healthy situations.
Lavendersage, yes, you know that I HATE the language that is in the common vernacular. We’ve had this conversation in the past. If you went on my blog, you’d almost never find it, but here, I realize my story is only partially known, and so we are ALL handicapped by the decision of whether to use the common language that everyone knows even if we disagree with it or go into a long explanation of what I mean. If someone new came on this website and simply heard me talking about my wife, and then in another place I was talking about my fiancée, and then in another my girlfriend, what would they think? That I’m in some kind of open marriage? So we are all constrained to some degree by the common vernacular. And you have to notice my struggle as I’ll often say both, or put alters in quotes, but sometimes my time and space is limited and so I do the best I can. The writers on MIA often express the same struggle. I’m sorry you don’t like it: I really don’t either.
Sam
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But the inner circle consists of survivors only. End of story.
I’ve been thinking about this comment ever since Kindredspirit made it. I know this is the attitude of some on this website, but to see it so bluntly is still painful.
I’m glad that’s not my wife’s attitude. It’s not mine either. On my blog I likened how her d.i.d. affects our relationship to a prison. She and I are BOTH in that prison room. But she is chained inside the room. For me, the door is open, and I’m free to leave if I want. So many people do leave in this culture. My one brother left his ‘broken’ wife. But there are others who choose every day to stay in that prison room right there with our loved ones, and vow never to leave until we BOTH can leave.
She and I have been thru hell together. Even our son had to learn to help care for his mother when the others started to join our family. There were panic attacks, night terrors, hypervigilance, flashbacks, ‘alters’ running off for fun and running and hiding in fear, paralyzing fear, triggers galore. My son and I were with her 24/7 for the first couple of years because things were so bad. I had the day ‘shift’ while he was in college at the local branch, and then when I was at work at nights, he took the night shift. But my wife and I did try to shield him from the worst of it, and never asked him to do more than he freely did. We couldn’t have done it without him.
On top of that things wrecked havoc in our marriage. Many times I wasn’t even allowed to hold my wife’s hand because the new girls were so traumatized and scared of everyone and everything. Real intimacy, emotional, physical and otherwise, were largely gone. But little by little we got thru it. I learned how to help each of them. The newcomers learned they were safe in our house and with me and our son, and slowly each was ‘adopted’ into the family. The lies associated with the trauma began to be undone and slowly we began to dismantle the worst of the dissociation.
I’m not unusual. I don’t think I’m a martyr or saint: just someone honoring the woman I love and the vows I made and looking for a win/win solution for both of us.
Your comments are extremely invalidating to those of us who are in this WITH our loved ones. We don’t get paid. And we certainly don’t get validated in this culture of the me-first attitude where many tell me I ought to just leave or take care of myself first as if that’s really an option.
I’m truly sorry for your personal experience. The little you’ve described elsewhere on this website sounds truly horrible, but not all SO’s are selfish and manipulative. Not all families are of the NAMI kind looking for an excuse to get rid of the ‘problem’ member. And thus the ‘survivors’ are NOT the sum total of those suffering, and until this movement enlarges the circle and recognizes there are others who have just as much of a stake in a solution as the ‘survivors’, I wonder if this movement will ever really gain traction.
Sam
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“Nothing about us without us.”
It’s kind of ironic, but in our experience, it’s been my voice that is overridden at EVERY point by my wife’s healing needs, sigh. Her needs ALWAYS trump my needs and I have the choice to acquiesce or move on, but she’s my one and only…so I stay and fight for a better ending than either of us have had so far. Even our son has become a ‘big brother’ to all the 7 littler girls who joined the family, but at least they do defer to the mother figure when he wants/needs one: I rarely get to have a ‘wife’ anymore…
Sam
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Hi Lee,
my wife has d.i.d. but we were fortunate that she never got sucked up into the system and so her, my and our experience is so radically different than most in her position. We’ve walked the healing journey together the last 11 years, using attachment concepts as the foundation of her healing, but using other things as well like neural plasticity.
If you are familiar with the show, United States of Tara, our experience is just the opposite of that. ALL the girls (alters) are securely attached to me (got engaged to the first one in December!). Sure there was some chaos in the beginning, but there was a lot of trauma to heal at that point. Now we are dealing mostly with the dissociation, and it’s a lot more difficult to undo, but we are getting there. I have a little blog over on wordpress under this name/Loving My DID Girl(s), but it never gained much traction, and so I’ve kind of let it go dormant for now. Philosophically I agree with much that is on this website, though it’s hard simply because our experience is so different than most here.
Take care,
Sam
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Hi Sara,
no nothing is wrong with you or anyone who experiences these kinds of things. The picture of the little bunny and fox says so much. I believe many early childhood abuse survivors view themselves thru that kind of a picture, even if their adults selves don’t realize it.
The ‘nice’ thing about my wife’s d.i.d. is it makes so many things extremely clear. And I still remember the various little girls (alters) telling me how scared each was and how little she felt, and my repeated reply to each was always, “I know you are scared, Honey. But you’re not alone anymore. I’m a big man. I’ve got you now because I take care of my little girls.” And that’s one aspect of how I helped walk my wife thru her paralyzing fear because I inserted myself into her picture of the little bunny and fox until she could see herself with me holding her, and that fox didn’t seem so scary with me in the picture.
In attachment terms they call it proximity maintenance. Mary Ainsworth had a lot to teach all of us in her strange situation protocols. The experts are (finally) beginning to study how attachment concepts apply throughout our lives and not just when we are little children, but pretty much I applied the majority of those concepts that they have identified, that are necessary to produce securely attached, healthy children, to my wife’s healing, and it’s been a godsend for us. Holding her thru that paralyzing fear that she experienced was just one thing attachment theory taught us.
I know each of us likes to view these issues thru various prisms like classes, ‘races’ economic structures, etc, but for me I see so much more relevance in the breakdown of family and social structures. There will always be a ruling, oppressive class to some extent: there always has been throughout the history of humankind, but when the family units and social structures are strong, they enable us to faces those adversities because we know that we are never truly alone in them like that little bunny facing the fox: someone actually is holding us and keeping us safe.
Sam
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Capitalism is NOT the problem, nor is socialism the answer. The black and white fallacy going around this website gets tiring. You want socialism and to see how destructive it can be, just look south to Venezuela. And the Scandinavian states that everyone on the Left likes to point to are NOT socialist. They simply have a much bigger social, safety net than we do, but most of their industries are privately owned.
I would argue that Wall Street is much of the problem. It’s completely out of control. I read an interesting op-ed from the Left this past week that explained why OAC’s call for the 70% tax rate on the 1% is based in the history of this country, and has some good reasons for it. If I remember my history correctly, CEO’s in the 70’s made something like 60x’s the average worker, now it’s more like 400+. That’s immoral. But it’s just as immoral when I went to St. Martinique last Fall, a socialist paradise under the rule of France, and more than 40% of the populace doesn’t work because of their brand of socialism.
So, no, I don’t agree that capitalism is the problem. I believe an a-moral and unfettered capitalism is the problem. But on a similar note, I believe socialism could work under the right conditions, too, but certainly not one like we see in Venezuela or even more benignly in St. Martinique were laziness and sloth are tolerated.
Let’s talk about social nets. Let’s also discuss the value of work, even if it’s not one’s dream job. I have a college education but have worked in a factory for 25 years. I never would have chosen this, and I still hope to leave and do what is in my heart when my wife is in a better position, but this job has enabled me to raise our son and take care of my family, and for that I’m thankful.
Sam
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Sera,
I’m sorry the real point of my comment got lost in a poor attempt at a joke, of sorts. But as I re-read that first sentence, I can see why you took it the way you did.
Sorry,
Sam
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Hi Sera,
are you just venting or looking for solutions? Not blaming you if you are just venting. I know Will Hall vents here sometimes, too, on the lack of progress.
I’ve often wondered what it would take to change things. My own failed attempt on my little blog to connect with other SO’s only left me with wondering what I did wrong, wondering if my wife had simply been willing to join me, would others have listened then? Wondering if I had just found the right ‘benefactor’ would that have enlarged my voice and audience? Wondering if I could get out the ‘love-story’ between me and all my wife’s ‘alters’ (I just got engaged to the first new girl. I’m pre-engaged to another. A third has expressed interest in doing so, and all the other little ones are deeply in love with me as a daddy figure: and it’s mutual on my side), would that bypass people’s defenses and apathy and make them willing to listen?
But, alas, I have no answers; just sadness that I failed and no matter how many times I’ve begged my wife (all of them) to join me and see if that changed the dynamics, she is terrified of the stigma this culture has about d.i.d. (thank you, Switch, et al, sigh).
Sam 🙁
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“They were pointing out the contradictions in your posts for others’ benefit.”
You have framed that negatively. I choose to see it as Shaun F. struggling with new concepts within his old framework. And this website can give him the space and friendly people to help him as he grasps these new ideas and how to work them out practically in his life, or we can be pissy with him for ‘contradicting himself.” He has already shown himself open to new ideas and being ‘nudged’ in a direction that most of us would agree is better, but it’s a BIG deal to him. His way of life is on the line, and for anyone to act like it’s not a big deal is showing a total lack of empathy. I’d rather see him struggle with ideas and concepts and really embrace things as ‘his’ rather that people just bully him into something or put him down for ‘contradicting himself’…
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Hi Shaun F,
I know you take a lot of flak on this website, but I think you are asking some of the right questions, and realizing there’s more to things than simply rebelling against ‘the system’. I’m sorry I don’t seem able to convey what my wife and I have learned. It seems you get hung up on her ‘extreme dissociation’ rather than understanding that we are ALL in the same boat; she just happens to be further along the spectrum than most, but NOT by any means the worst.
Her experience has taught me so much about how I function because I don’t view her in a different category from me. When we first started this journey, she repeatedly told me, “I don’t know what ‘healthy’ looks like, and so it forced me to become as healthy as I could so I could be a good example for her., and yet having distinct ‘alters’ allowed me/us to dissect the issues of trauma and dissociation and neural atrophy and attachment systems, etc in a way that would have been otherwise impossible if I’d had to figure it out using my own experience or others not so far along on the spectrum.
Sam
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Shaun F,
I had hoped to build some dialogue with you up above, so maybe that means you aren’t interested in my experience with my wife and I’ll stay out if you want me to do so.
Yes, it is about ‘brain wiring’. The trauma causes dissociation. Dissociation over time then causes neural atrophy. But even once the trauma is addressed and ‘healed’, the neural atrophy is still there. THAT is why I consider the dissociation worse than the trauma because it has taken me years to help my wife thru her various alters reinvigorate all those neural pathways that had atrophied to nearly non-existence. I promote lots of tasks that help them learn to work ‘together’.
But beyond that the dissociation also splits up the brain/mind’s traits/abilities and one alter may control the trait/ability that another needs to address other aspects of an issue she is struggling with. Say for instance eating issues (‘disorders’). One girl struggles greatly with her poor body image even though my wife has a 5’6″ frame and only weighs 127lbs. Well the other girls have a really GOOD body image. One girl told me, “I look damn good for 50!” But connecting her good self image to the girl with the bad self image takes time and reinvigorating those neural pathways and teaching them how to do it.
Trauma and dissociation and neural wiring and all that are all interwoven but they are not the same and they effect issues differently…
Sam
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Dissassociation isn’t the real damage to the brain…it is trauma and will always be trauma. The interesting thing is that we all react differently to trauma.
Hi Shaun F.
I do understand why you would feel that way. In the d.i.d. world, most people do everything they possibly can to avoid dissociating. They treat it like the plague and as a result only 6% of the cases are ‘florid’ where you could actually meet the individual alters. So most of the common and expert literature view things like you do and don’t really understand that the trauma and the resultant dissociation have VERY different roles and effects upon a person’s brain/mind.
But my wife and I have welcomed and lived in ‘the dissociation’ for the last 11 years. We’ve embraced it, and it helped me see that the two really are different and cause different issues even though the trauma causes the dissociation initially.
The dissociation is far more destructive and difficult to undo than the original trauma and causes so many things that most people simply don’t understand because they never get to see it close up AND differentiated from the trauma. I realize I can’t possibly relay all I’ve learned in the confines of the comment section here, but maybe some day I’ll have the chance to do it more publicly.
Sam
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Shaun F,
now you’re talking my language, but I’m not sure I would say one’s dissociated brain/mind is ‘damaged’ unless you qualify it to mean fundamentally a different kind of damage than what the biochemical people mean.
If you want to assert that the ‘damage’ is similar as when one breaks one’s leg or other part of the body, then I think the analogy can be useful as I just used that analogy on another thread on MIA to try to explain how dissociation works in ‘psychosis’.
Dissociation does ‘damage’ the brain/mind in that just like a broken bone, we will stop using that appendage until it is healed. And just like broken bones that don’t heal, then other parts of the body are stressed because they try to take over for the part that isn’t healed, and so there becomes stress throughout the system and everything begins to break down some especially if the environment is hostile.
In a similar manner, when trauma, that is not healed and assimilated into one’s narrative, causes dissociation, the brain/mind begins to do ‘work-arounds’ in the neural pathways that it must take to maintain general functioning, but it also begins to lose access to traits and abilities where the dissociated memories are stored (I mentioned that to you personally in another thread but can’t remember where right now).
But thanks to what we know about neural plasticity, that damage is NOT permanent. Heal the trauma, and then, with help, the dissociation can start to be dismantled, but it’s a lot more work than those in ISSTD understand since they never get full access to the person’s system like a primary attachment figure/SO can have if s/he works to have it. Two of my wife’s littles helped me understand the key to undoing the dissociation when we began to redraw their inner working model (attachment theory).
So like you, I do believe in ‘damage’ if one qualifies it and differentiates it from the unchangeable, organic damage that the biochemical model espouses. And we shouldn’t get hung up on my wife’s ‘extreme’ dissociation. We all fall on that spectrum somewhere and learning to help her taught me how to deal with my own: my issues just weren’t as complicated.
Sam
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