Sixth Grade Summer
By the summer after sixth grade, I had been obeying Sergeant for a few years. He did help me in many ways. When I was feeling lonely, he was there for me. He helped me do things the right way, and not the wrong way, which was very important. Mostly, I think, he was a good friend. He kept me occupied and away from boredom. He was my only ticket to calm. When I began to feel uncomfortable with people, myself, and my surroundings, he always showed up and was always on time with something for me to do.
I started “reporting” to the Sergeant on a regular basis. The more I performed for him, the more powerful he became.
Famed psychologist Robert Cialdini likes to call this phenomenon “directed deference.” If a doctor diagnoses you with an illness and prescribes a concoction of medications, you're unlikely to dispute him because he's the authority on the subject. According to Cialdini, we're susceptible to directed deference because we're conditioned to respect and follow the edicts of an authority figure. We've learned that defying an authority figure can lead to punishment, while compliance often leads to rewards.
—BEN PARR, CAPTIVOLOGY
On those rare times that I tried to defy him or, worse yet, disobey him and not do as he demanded, this resulted in my immediate punishment. I was instantly overcome with unbridled anxiety, nausea, and panic, my face flushed with rashes; my head pounded; and my heart raced. I learned early on that it was just easier to do all the tasks and achieve his approval and not have to deal with the alternative—those unbearable and overwhelming feelings of pure discomfort. The tasks just became a part of the mix of my daily life, what I had to do in an effort to maintain some kind of stability and—even bigger than that—my important contribution to universal order; there was almost a magical and transcendent quality about me doing things right.
Sergeant frequently gave me mandatory sporadic drills that involved repetition like tapping, staring, cleaning, swallowing, blinking, and now checking. In a weird way, these drills were almost soothing, like rocking in a chair. But now, there was more at stake and tied to the tasks than my overall comfort. He warned me about all the bad things that would happen and pointed out all the potential threats and doom that would come if I did not do what I was told to do! Sergeant had a direct route into my mind and would fill it with terrifying thoughts and images. It was as though he could project a stream of horrific movies in my head and use my creativity against me.
If I didn't perform and complete a task, he told me that I would be responsible for fires, deaths, and that was just the beginning. It's like we had an agreement: If I did everything right, the way he instructed, no matter how seemingly odd, then everything would be okay. I would temporarily feel right in myself, and this is what I intrinsically craved. Just to feel okay was a rare luxury, and Sergeant knew this.
On this day we were in the kitchen. “If you don't check the dials on the stove again, your cats will die!” My brain filled with lightning. I didn't want my cats to die! Sergeant had both my full attention and emotional buy-in. Of course, I would do anything to save my cats, my loving and furry friends, from death. I did what Sergeant told me to do in a brave attempt to stop the inevitable future suffering of those I loved.
I quickly learned that Sergeant was an authority figure and the epicenter for dishing out punishment and doling out rewards. He had a certain sort of power because he was coming from inside my own head sort of, which made him seem much more convincing.
It's clear that we pay attention to authority figures and direct our attention toward what they deem important out of either fear or respect, depending on the type of authority they wield.
—BEN PARR, CAPTIVOLOGY
“No, no, I checked the stove,” I tried to reassure Sergeant.
“How do you know that you really checked it? You might just think that you did, and you know your track record. You've done stupid things before. You make stupid mistakes all the time!”
“Okay, I'll check it again.”
“Your cats are going to die if you don't!”
After a perfect performance, I felt so good, sort of like a superhero. I saved my cats from impending doom, and momentarily I felt that I had a little power myself, saving them and all.
Pretty soon, checking the burners on the stove, in a perfect and precise way, was just one of those things I had to do every night before going to bed and every time I left the house. It was just the way it was and just way too weird to tell anyone. It never once dawned on me that I had an illness with a name. I chalked it all up to being a weird kid: me, Sergeant, my games, my drills, my tasks, my performances. It's just the way we were, and I accepted it. Okay, maybe I knew I was a little broken way deep down inside, but what could I do?
My brother Brian called me Kirsten Weirdsten, sometimes with a teasing tone. He found my creativity an undesirable character flaw. That was the Weirdsten part. We had different dads and our minds worked differently. He, like my oldest brother, has the mind of an engineer, and I have the mind of a sensitive poet; we just come at things differently. I also felt like he was always trying to control me, and I wanted none of it. I already had one Sergeant to report to, thank you. I knew that letting anyone know about Sergeant would make me even more Kirsten Weirdsten. I knew that if I told anyone about Sergeant, he would yell in my face until the end of time and I'd be forced into a straitjacket and taken to a mental hospital where people get locked up for life.
Sergeant Style
Perfecting, tapping, staring, checking, cleaning, transferring, dieting, blinking, swallowing—the challenge was to do all of these things with no one noticing. Sergeant and I had numerous covert operations.
It was a new school year: 1978. Feathered hair was still a big trend. My brown hair was short, feathered in layers, and swooshed back. I had the Kristy McNichol cut, and I loved it. (She played the youngest daughter on a hit TV show called Family.)
By now, Sergeant and I were a highly functional and exacting team; after all, he demanded perfection. I was an A student and was ready for any challenge. In my back pocket, resting on my rear and sometimes poking me in the butt, were my perfectly sharpened—like surgical tools—number-two pencils. I was ready for any test by any teacher at any given time. I was focused on doing well.
I didn't like the lead residue left on my hands after sharpening my pencils; but I couldn't always go wash my hands immediately after. By not washing, I felt as though I was not finishing my task to full completion, and this bothered me. I would think about the “transfer of residue” to other things that I touched. This could lead to an infinite amount of “transfer.” I would be responsible for adding invisible grime to the universe. This made me feel guilty that I wasn't cleaner—not to mention the terrible stink of a sawmill that I had with me. In class I would think about my stinky hands over and over again, and I couldn't seem to get them out of my mind and stop worrying about them. If I only could have washed my hands!
This inability to forget unfinished tasks is known as the Zeigarnik effect [who knew!].
—BEN PARR, CAPTIVOLOGY
Boobs
My boobs looked different in the bathtub and when I was changing my top. I looked down. “Yikes! These are weird.” I poked at one of them to see what it would do. My boobs didn't really look very booby-ish; they looked like tiny, pointy, stretched-out white balloons with light pink-colored tips. Yuck! They looked like they had started growing and abruptly stopped. I could really see why my mom thought I should cover mine up with a training