Mick’s process of reconstructing a history and an identity was by no means completed by recovering this memory, but the memory was a key piece in a large jigsaw.
Splitting ourselves in two, making one part the person who lives an ordinary life and the other part the person who suffers horrible experiences
Sometimes, the lies we tell ourselves like, ‘I’m not upset,’ That didn’t happen,’ are not enough because the horrible things that happened to us happen not just once or twice but over and over again. Then we might have to resort to a lie which aims to split our self into pieces. This lie is, This is not happening to me. It is happening to someone else.’ Sylvia Fraser found that this was the only way she could deal with the sexual abuse she suffered as a child.
‘When the conflict caused by my sexual relationship with my father became too acute to bear, I created a secret accomplice for my daddy by splitting my personality in two. Thus, somewhere around the age of seven, I acquired another self with memories and experiences separate from mine, whose existence was unknown to me. My loss of memory was retroactive. I did not remember ever seeing my daddy naked. I did not remember my daddy ever seeing me naked. In future, whenever my daddy approached me sexually I turned into my other self, and afterwards I did not remember anything that had happened.
‘Even now, I don’t know the full truth of that other little girl I created to do the things I was too frightened, too ashamed, too repelled to do, the things my father made me do, the things I did to please him, but which paid off with a precocious and dangerous power. She loved my father, freeing me to hate him. She became his guilty sexual partner and my mother’s jealous rival, allowing me to lead a more normal life. She knew everything about me. I knew nothing about her, yet some connection always remained. Like estranged but fatal lovers, we were psychically attuned. She telegraphed messages to me through the dreams we shared. She leaked emotions to me through the body we shared. Because of her, I was always drawn to other children whom I sensed knew more than they should about adult ways. Hers was the guilty face I sometimes glimpsed in my mirror, mocking my daytime accomplishments, forcing me to reach for a counter illusion: I was special in a good way. I was a fairytale princess.
‘Who was my other self?
‘Though we split one personality between us, I was the major shareholder. I went to school, made friends, gained experience, developing my part of the personality, while she remained morally and emotionally a child, functioning on instinct rather than on intelligence. She began as my creature, forced to do what I refused to do, yet because I blotted out her existence, she passed out of my control completely as a figure in a dream.’20
Of course we cannot actually split ourselves into different selves, dividing like a cell divides into many cells. Such splitting is always as if. All we are doing is not acknowledging all the various aspects of ourselves and their interconnections. We can think of ourselves as being made up of ‘father’s sexual partner’ and ‘me’, or of ‘my dutiful and obedient self’ and ‘my wicked self’, or of ‘mind’ and ‘body’, or of ‘emotions’, ‘thoughts’, and ‘desires’, but indeed every part of us is in continuous and continual relationship with all other parts, and in continuous and continual relationship with our surroundings. If we could remember this we would find it so much easier to experience ourselves as a whole person in close and satisfactory contact with other people.
Defining ourselves as bad and deserving the terrible things that are done to us
(D 6)By telling ourselves the lie, ‘I am bad, evil, unacceptable to myself and other people’, we lay down the cornerstone of the prison of depression.
The business of life is to live, and so all these ways of preserving ourselves are wise and practical things to do in order to survive when we are living under the most terrible threats. If our ancestors had not used such methods of preserving themselves, not just against the devastating things done to them by other people but against the devastating things done to them by floods, droughts, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, plagues, illnesses, accidents and death, then we would not be here today. The human race would not have survived.
What is unwise and impractical is to go on using these ways of preserving ourselves when we are actually not in danger.
Where we get ourselves into a tangle as adults is when we continue using unnecessarily in adult life the self-preserving defences which were so necessary in childhood. We fail to go back and check whether the conclusions we drew as a child still apply in our adult life.
Why do we fail to check our conclusion that ‘I am bad’? After all, believing that you are bad makes you feel guilty, and guilt is a most horrible feeling. It is the fear of retribution, the punishment which you are sure you deserve.
Becoming an Expert in Feeling Guilty
Believing that you are bad makes you an expert in feeling guilty. There is no situation about which you cannot feel guilty once you put your mind to it. The starving children of Africa? ‘I ought to do something about them and I haven’t.’ The hole in the ozone layer? ‘I’ve used aerosols and I drive a car, so it’s my fault.’
Closer to home you as the expert in guilt feel responsible for ensuring the total happiness of all of your family, or for the total success of the organization for which you work. Thus, when your adult child has an unhappy love affair, or your cousin twice removed fails to send you a Christmas card, you feel guilty. Or when your organization does not reach the over-optimistic targets the directors set, or your colleague has a drink problem, you feel guilty.
As an expert in guilt you cannot live in the present. You are constantly worrying about the past and fearing the future. As an expert in guilt you cannot enjoy happiness when it comes, for you believe that as night follows day, suffering will follow joy. When good fortune does come your way, you know it will not stay, for you are the guilty one and you will be punished.
Why do we go on feeling guilty? Why do we inflict such pain upon ourselves?
Because by feeling guilty we are declaring that we are not helpless.
By feeling guilty we are declaring, ‘In the past I could have acted differently. I had the power to act one way or another, and I chose the wrong way.’
By feeling guilty we are declaring that we had the situation organized and under control, or could have done, and that we had the power to relate to and care for other people.
Feeling guilty is a denial of helplessness.
Feeling helpless can take you back to the time when you were weak and helpless and in the power of dangerous adults. Rather than experience again that most terrible terror, you prefer to feel guilty.
Alas, because you will not risk the terror to reappraise your conclusion that you are bad, you prevent yourself from discovering that your situation has changed. Your situation now, as an adult, is that your self is secure and cannot be threatened by other people unless you let them.
If you insist on saying to yourself, ‘I’d be finished if my husband left me’, you have given your husband the power to threaten your self. If you insist on saying to yourself, ‘I just fall apart whenever my boss criticizes my work’, you have given your boss the power to threaten your self.
However, if you say to yourself, ‘It would be tough going if my husband left me but I’d survive’, your husband cannot then threaten your self. If you say to yourself, ‘I’ll take account of reasonable and constructive criticism of my work, but I’ll reject criticism from people who are fools or are being malicious, and I’ll remember to distinguish criticisms of my work from criticisms of me’, then you are no longer helpless and in the power of other people.
If