The mind works in mysterious ways

Reed College (part two)

“Larry and I would talk about how amazing the mind is; how omnipotent the mind is. As a child, my mind had split in two to protect me. Then, as an adult, it brought me down into physical paralysis as the feelings were trying to break into consciousness. Amazing. Now I knew why. That knowledge made it easier to endure.”                                                 -Marilyn Van Derbur (sexually abused by her paternal parent; recalled the abuse when she was 24), from her memoir, Miss America By Day

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My second semester at Reed College was a mix of successes and failures. The depression never became severe. I was always able to get out of bed and go about my life. It repeatedly cleared, then returned. But other issues developed. I’d always had difficulty speaking up in discussion classes; now I was mostly silent. I also began to have difficulty writing papers.

No doubt, it was that trip home at Christmas break that switched me into intermittent emotional pain and blocks. Even then it crossed my mind—how could it not?—that the visit was somehow the cause, and I struggled to make sense of it.

It was the last day or two I remembered best and seemed most significant—that trick of memory where the end of events lingers longest and takes on disproportionate weight. I had stayed the whole time at Rrg’s house and expected him to drive me the two hours to the airport—my flight was on a Saturday—but when the time came he said he wouldn’t, he had a cold. His wife wouldn’t either, and Billie, Cindy, and Susan weren’t in town.

He told me to ask my grandparents. Reluctantly, I walked to my grandparents’ two houses—why didn’t I call? I never called—and asked. But they were irritated; they were too old; my dad should take me. I felt they were right. Also it felt like I was caught in some ugly drama I didn’t understand. (My dissociation was extensive enough that not only did I not recall the sexual abuse, I couldn’t understand the family dynamics or, for the most part, realize that I didn’t understand.)

Finally, Mike took the morning off work and drove me.

This episode pained me, confirming that I didn’t have a very supportive or loving family. Yet it didn’t seem in any way hurtful enough to have caused my abrupt descent into depression and blocks. Besides, Mike had come through for me, so, if anything, I should have felt more supported than I had before.

No, that trouble getting a ride couldn’t be it. But something.

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More insights came in late March when I decided to hitchhike with a fellow student to San Francisco during spring break. I was nervous about it—naturally—but then I noticed an odd thing:

March, 1978

Tomorrow Jill and I are going to try to hitchhike to San Francisco. Notice that I say try. I want to go to San Francisco more than anything right now but we couldn't get a ride. So now I'm scared nervous uncertain that I'm doing the right thing and very excited. . . . It seems that I am not so much worried about getting hurt as I am worried about people thinking that I am doing a really dumb and dangerous thing. I am especially worried about being reprimanded by Cindy or Susan or Michael. . . . So I am worried not so much about getting raped murdered or robbed but about getting reprimanded, about getting scolded by my big sisters and remaining family. That is pretty rotten. Don't I have any, any . . . any what? I need a ramrod tied to my back that will make me stand straight and haughty and then I will say, "I am I and you are you and why don't you just shove it?"

I’m getting as close as I can to the source, as close as I’ll get for three decades. I use the words “reprimanded” and “scolded” when the words “verbally, physically, and sexually abused” would be more accurate, but at least I see it’s my siblings I fear.

(Notice I don’t mention Billie. It may be I was no longer afraid of her because I had felt my hate, and because she, unlike my siblings and Rrg, never threatened to kill me. I also don’t mention Rrg, but for a different, opposite, reason.)

I continue:

Anyway, why am I going [to San Francisco] and what am I feeling and what has this got to do with anything? It's got something to do with my crying problem which has something to do with my insecurity which I have recently figured has something to do with Dad's and Mother's fighting and how it affected me and the headaches I used to get. I figured that out Christmas when Marian and Dad were fighting and I almost started crying.

When Susan yelled at me over buying the wrong food at the store I cried just as I know if she yells at me over hitching I will cry. And feel awful and inferior and humiliated and guilty and as miserable as I can imagine feeling. . . .

Just in those two paragraphs, many of the building blocks of depression are laid out.

The crying, for instance. This collapse into crying at the merest scolding or criticism—even just observing two people bickering—was what I called my crying problem, and it was indeed a serious disability, a humiliating collapse that is nothing like crying in grief. Grief is respectable.

Crying, insecurity, headaches, and—most baldly—feeling “awful and inferior and humiliated and guilty and as miserable as I can imagine feeling.”

How many times did I feel that way throughout my childhood? It’s impossible to know. Even for those who remember events, the emotions tend to fade with time. It is only because I wrote this down and can read it today that I know what I felt. What memory I retain is extremely vague, the merest sliver.

Also notable is what I didn’t mention—I said nothing about Susan, that anything was wrong with how she was treating me. I use the word “yelled” which is certainly not positive, but I am not blaming her—I’m blaming myself. I am the one who is ‘inferior and humiliated and guilty’ because I can’t stand up to a little criticism. This tolerant opinion of her, and others, was one of the survival mechanisms of my childhood, and like amnesia it extended far into my adult life.

Here were some of the elements of my depression and writing blocks, written down for me to ponder, but instead of sinking in or providing evidence for further understanding, they just sat there in my journal. For decades I would struggle to understand, stymied by amnesia and also, at first, by the books I read and by therapists. My struggle mirrored that of these professional psychologists who also failed—and many still fail—to put the pieces together, bouncing from one idea to another, unable to see the pattern. That trauma—small or large, single or chronic, early or late—is the nucleus of many—if not all—psychological conditions.

Jill and I hitchhiked to San Francisco. Nothing terrible happened. The two of us got along fine. In fact:

I was surprised by how much we had in common and how we differ and how I was able to be with a person nonstop for five days and not feel desperate.

The city was amazing, I saw the ocean for the first time, even the hitchhiking was interesting—a wholly worthwhile trip. I had faced my fears as best I could, like so many have done or tried to do, hoping it would make me a stronger person. Maybe it did, but only a little, and only for a moment.

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I took four classes each semester at Reed: Humanities, Introduction to Psychology, German, and a class in the department of Religion. I have no aptitude for languages—because I have no aptitude for listening or speaking—so I struggled with German, but the rest was deeply interesting. Psychology was a natural fit given its goal of understanding humanity through science and reasoning.

In Humanities we studied Ancient Greece the first semester, and the Renaissance the second. Told to write a paper connecting Othello with Machiavelli’s The Prince, I was drawn to the subject: malevolence, deceit, and manipulation! But it must have been too close to my own reality. I couldn’t think of what to write. My mind was sterile. I had been writing papers for several years, had loved to write, had felt it was my talent, but now I couldn’t come up with anything decent. I saw how dependent our conscious intentions are on a cooperative unconscious. Like most everyone, I became aware of my unconscious only when it stopped cooperating.

I managed to come up with something for that paper and presumably for others I don’t remember, but my papers were inadequate. I got a D for the second semester of Humanities after having gotten an A for the first semester.

I continued to do well, however, in Introduction to Psychology. I suspect I could manage it because there were no papers to write, and partly because psychology as a discipline is, ironically, distant from actual experience—an abstraction. If the memory of our experience is like a blazing fire we can only get so close to, psychology is more like an interesting building with displays we can walk through. And literature—especially the literature of trauma like Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, and Dostoevsky—is somewhere in between.

The last quarter, we were required to design and carry out an experiment and write it up as a formal paper. I decided to study memory. My partner and I had subjects (fellow classmates) look at an image, then count backwards, then look at two similar images, one of which was the original, and see if they could remember which one they had seen. Something like that. Trying to find out whether doing something to block the formation of memory would actually block the formation of memory.

This kind of research was common then, but that doesn’t explain why I chose it. The unconscious works in mysterious ways. Jennifer Freyd (author of Betrayal Trauma) also chose to study memory before she had recovered her memories of abuse. She, far less damaged than I, recovered her memories early and made a successful career.

I received a letter from the Psychology Department at the end of the year, suggesting I had a talent for research and might want to change my major to psychology. Like all commendation from teachers, their words remain as both a support and a grief. I never became a researcher, never graduated from college or had a career.

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There was another demonstration of my dissociated traumatic memories during that second semester at Reed. I took the class Psychology and Religion where we read and discussed Freud, Jung and Erickson and what they had to say about religion. For the final, the teacher decided to interview us individually—an oral exam.

I anxiously, but still rather confidently, came to his office. I loved this stuff, after all; I had read the assignments, attended the classes. To begin, he asked me to name and describe Freud’s defense mechanisms. The request stymied me. Freud’s defense mechanisms are famous but we hadn’t discussed them in class. How could he ask a question on an exam that hadn’t been discussed in class? But I knew them, right? I must have read about them somewhere, the term “defense mechanisms” was familiar. Still, I couldn’t remember what they were.

The professor went on to a different question, but I was too flustered to think. He took pity on me, probably assuming I was just nervous, and gave me a decent grade. (Or did he have some understanding of my condition?)

Freud’s defense mechanisms include repression, denial, and rationalization.

For decades I believed that stupid teacher had asked a question he hadn’t prepared us for, when the truth was that he probably had and that I had, temporarily, repressed the concept of repression. And denial and rationalization and . . . just everything I was doing. Showing that I not only had amnesia for trauma but for any insights that might have led me to knowledge of my trauma. Though this amnesia was much less solid—knowledge of Freud’s defense mechanisms returned to me.

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At the end of the school year I applied for a leave of absence, believing that I couldn’t rack up loans at Reed if I wasn’t able to do the work and get what I paid for. I would go back and attend the much cheaper, nearly-free-to-residents, state university, returning to Reed when I had solved my problems. I figured I had only had writing blocks for a short time, so there must be some fix. The depression was intermittent; I could imagine it just disappearing. Neither seemed like my norm. I would surely return to my norm.

That’s what I thought. Did I notice that I was capitulating to my family, none of whom had wanted me to go to Reed? My attempt to “stand straight and haughty” and say “I am I and you are you and why don’t you just shove it?” was brief.

In spite of my difficulties I had done well enough, and most of my tuition was paid with grants. But to spend money on myself has always been—and still is—an effortful push against my ingrained tendency to submit to the will of others and accept my low position. Reed College itself—its elite status, its beauty—was a defiance of my family, an override of my traumatized self’s belief in her degradation. Without personal support like I’d had in high school, I couldn’t sustain this override.

That’s part of it.

In August, Mike—vacationing with a friend—came for me in Portland and drove us back to our hometown by way of Yellowstone National Park.

(If the thought passes through your mind: “Well, sounds like a nice brother, but why is she mentioning this? It doesn’t seem relevant or important,” I would ask you to consider why I might mention it, why it might be important.)

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See my Resources page for links to more information about dissociative amnesia.