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  At home, the sort of frustration Missy felt might have brought forth Sissy, who would try to get through a window, or Josie, who would fling herself against the wall. But the personalities were frightened by the imposing nuns in their black flowing robes and heavy crosses. A new personality was created, a little girl named Veronica, who could express frustration without being noticed. Remembering to use only her right hand, Veronica drew a squiggly border around a sheet of paper, each loop and twist representing the turns she made as she ran away in her mind. She filled the center of the page with the words “run and run and run and run…” until the frustration was spent and another personality could resume control.

  —

  BUT NOT ALL OF the childhood memories were bad. She received an abundance of love from her extended family—Ray’s siblings and their children.

  Two of Ray’s sisters, Marie and Christine, lived nearby with their families. Ray loved his family passionately and took every opportunity to get them all together. While Jo was growing up, weekends meant a Saturday or Sunday visit with her cousins that usually stretched far into the night as the six adults played cards. The cousins were playmates and conspirators. These were the only children that Jo really enjoyed. Of the nine cousins who came to play, she felt particularly close to Christine’s son, Matthew, who was only ten days older than she, and to Marie’s daughter Karen, who was six months older.

  After a long day of closeness with her aunts, uncles, and cousins, Jo sometimes fantasized that a call would come from the hospital where they had all been born. A mistake would be reported and Matthew would be given to her parents, who so badly wanted a boy, and she would be given to Aunt Christine, her real mother, who didn’t mind if kids were messy and noisy.

  Jo and her cousin Karen were together on more occasions than the large family gatherings. When the two girls were five years old, they made a pact to be best friends for life. From then through high school, they talked on the phone two or three times a week and spent many nights and a large part of summer vacation together.

  Sometimes Karen stayed at Jo’s house, but neither of the girls much enjoyed that. Karen felt uncomfortable around Aunt Nancy and Uncle Ray, who insisted on being addressed as “ma’am” and “sir” and who expected perfection from all children. And she didn’t like it when Aunt Nancy held her up as a model for Jo. She thought Jo was just fine the way she was. She particularly hated it when Jo started acting like Karen for Nancy’s benefit. At first it was funny, but then Karen realized that sometimes Jo couldn’t stop pretending after her mother left the room.

  Life was much better at Aunt Marie’s. The cousins were both more relaxed with Karen’s parents. At Aunt Marie and Uncle Jack’s, Jo felt that she was part of a real family. She never felt that at home. Mom and Dad and Carol and she were just four people thrown together by fate. There seemed to be tension whenever more than two of them were in the same room.

  Aunt Marie’s house was different. Even though her cousins Ann, Karen, and Bob sometimes yelled at one another or got mad at their parents, it was clear that they all loved one another.

  All the kids had daily chores at Aunt Marie’s and Jo loved seeing her name and chores on the list right along with the other kids, as if she really belonged with them. Doing chores at Aunt Marie’s was fun. There was sometimes a lot of work—weeding the garden or picking fruit from the trees—but everyone pitched in. And at Aunt Marie’s the kids knew they were done when they had completed the list. At Jo’s house, children were perpetually on call, expected to drop whatever they were doing instantly to meet parental demands.

  Aunt Marie didn’t get mad if things weren’t perfect. Unlike Jo’s mother, Aunt Marie never said, “You will redust every piece of furniture in this house because you missed the table leg.” Aunt Marie never forbade her to read for a week because she had forgotten to take out the trash. Aunt Marie just said, “Let’s make sure this place doesn’t get condemned,” and everyone worked together without fear of punishment.

  Aunt Marie and Uncle Jack didn’t seem to mind her being at their house, no matter how long she stayed, and Jo knew that her mother preferred for her to be gone. But when she asked her father if she could live there all the time, maybe just for a year or so, he shook his head sadly and said, “I’d miss you too much, cookie. I need you with me. How come you want to leave your old man?” After that, Jo’s sadness at the end of every visit to Aunt Marie’s was balanced by the knowledge that she was important to her father.

  —

  ALL OF THE PERSONALITIES who experienced bits of childhood added their pieces to the patchwork quilt of childhood memories. Tracy, Veronica, Dear, and many of the others had rich descriptions. But I had nothing to add.

  I could monitor what happened after age fifteen, but could get nothing from before. I learned what early life was like for Jo and the others as the personalities shared their stories with Lynn. Sometimes I felt guilty that I couldn’t provide more information for Lynn, but otherwise I was glad she was there to help.

  I had done really well for ten years, but now I was happy to have Lynn’s observations. She helped me accept the finality of my divorce. When Keith moved to California, I had to give up my hope that we would get back together. She helped me see that Keith’s rejection was attributable to his own problems as much as it was to mine. That was a new idea for me, and for the other personalities as well.

  Neither Nancy nor Ray had ever admitted to having a problem. If they were angry or frustrated or depressed, it was Jo’s fault, or Carol’s fault, or their bosses’ fault. I had never before considered that someone near me might have problems that were not caused by me. I had been created to please people. If the people around me weren’t happy, I must be doing something wrong. Lynn helped me see that I lacked the power to make other people feel anything.

  Though I appreciated the insight and revelations Lynn offered me, I needed to escape from them as well. I was glad to be living with Steve. His denial of the disorder brought freedom. I didn’t want to think about MPD outside Lynn’s office, and I didn’t want Steve to decide that I was crazy. None of the others interfered. The personalities were all used to being treated as a single person.

  We accepted Steve’s conclusion that Jo was just “moody,” and he tacitly accepted periods of amnesia and variations in behavior. Though he called all of us Jo, he liked me best, because I was good socially and attentive to him. But he was a mentor to the Jo personality as she worked her way toward a master’s degree. Steve was even tolerant of Joan Frances when she called her mother and all but crawled to win Mother’s approval.

  14.

  Jo didn’t have more than two or three hours of awareness on any given day. When she wasn’t doing work for her graduate classes, Jo thought about, or wrote about, getting well. Jo’s goal was no amnesia. She wanted all of the time.

  Jo didn’t have my ability to monitor what went on when she was “inside.” Her life was a slide show of fleeting moments. She wasn’t sure what she’d do with twenty-four hours of a day, but she knew she wouldn’t spend an afternoon coloring, as Missy sometimes did. She certainly wouldn’t spend precious minutes playing with a toy dump truck in Lynn’s office, as Little Joe did. She confided to Lynn one day, “I might even quit that teaching job of Renee’s.”

  Jo wanted to be well, didn’t know how to get there, but was sure that it wouldn’t happen without her hard work and focused attention. She was slightly annoyed when Lynn said sympathetically, “I wish I had a magic wand to make things better, but therapy doesn’t work that way.” Jo knew that much, but she couldn’t figure out how therapy did work and was frustrated by her uncharacteristic inability to understand.

  Jo felt let down by her mind, by her extraordinary analytic abilities. She had always thought she was smart and had approached any intellectual challenge with glee. When presented with the philosophical hypothesis that people could be nothing more than minds in a vat, hallucinating reality, Jo wasn’t perturbed or perplexed. Amn
esia and the familiar feeling of “I just got dropped in here somehow” enabled Jo to see how this improbable hypothesis served as an analogy for her life. She figured that she could be a very contented mind-in-a-vat, but Lynn had forced her to accept she wasn’t alone in a vat or in her body. This was a problem that she could not puzzle out.

  Jo’s natural tendency, when faced with her ignorance, was to read everything she could on the problem at hand. Jo’s library included over five thousand books and ranged over a mind-boggling array of topics. “The only thing still catholic in my life is my library,” she sometimes joked. Nevertheless, Jo now avoided literature on mental illness.

  Jo knew she was suggestible. Her parents had always told her she was a very impressionable child. And, after all, Jo knew that she had somehow unconsciously created all of these different personalities. If she scoured the medical journals for clinical reports, Jo was afraid that she would contaminate her own treatment. Lynn endorsed Jo’s avoidance of the literature: Lynn said that they needed to do this in their own way. But a year had passed since Jo had made this agreement with Lynn, and now she felt trapped by her ignorance and suspicious that Lynn wouldn’t tell her how to get well. The only suggestion Lynn made was one that Jo couldn’t tolerate. Lynn had been tape-recording the sessions for the last six months, and when Jo appealed to her for help, Lynn gestured toward the growing mound of tapes in her file drawer.

  Jo resisted. She didn’t want to listen to the tapes. Because of remarks casually dropped by family and friends, she suspected that at least one of the personalities sounded like her older sister and that another sounded like her mother. From Lynn, Jo learned that one of the personalities sounded like a little girl, and yet another like a small boy. She couldn’t imagine why Lynn would want to humiliate her by making her listen to those voices.

  Jo thought that, even if she screwed up her courage to try, the experiment would end in disaster. Every time in the past when Jo had tried to watch herself on videotape, tried to look at a photograph of herself, or even listened to her own voice on tape, she had lost time. What would Lynn do when Jo lost time listening to the treatment of the other personalities? If she tried and failed, maybe Lynn would say that she wasn’t trying hard enough. The way Jo figured it, Lynn would stop treating her if she thought that Jo wasn’t working at getting well.

  “Besides,” Jo decided, “Lynn has already told me what the other parts of me have said. Why should I want to hear those lies again?”

  DIARY    March 8, 1982 (A year into treatment)

  I’ve certainly made some progress: I’ve learned a great deal about Jo’s abuse and have met seventeen different personalities (although some of the past-keepers are more fragments than real personalities), and I’ve begun to conceptualize the structure of this particular multiple. But treatment seems to be at a standstill. I think they have all grown to trust me and are unlikely to terminate treatment prematurely; still, I feel a need to push beyond our present plateau.

  Renee clearly values our relationship but is wary of acknowledging this and attempts to stay uninvolved in what she considers “therapy.” The label aside, she has become quite adept at using me to problem-solve about relationships and situations at home and at work.

  Missy, the most complete child personality, has been able to establish an unconflicted relationship with me. She enjoys hours of sitting on the rug, encircled by my arm and talking. She doesn’t care if it is “therapy.” She knows I listen to her and care about her. Missy unabashedly soaks up my nurturing. This may be safe because Missy knows I care about her even though I know that her father molested her. Even at an early age, the personalities had too much guilt to allow this to happen with Nancy.

  Jo, who is the most aware of being involved in “therapy,” is both the most intellectually defended and the most emotionally infantile of the group. She is completely unable to modulate emotion. She has an intense desire to master the process of treatment but can’t let herself get emotionally involved. Not surprisingly, she’s left frustrated, thinking that I have the answers but won’t share them.

  Jo is so bright, so persistent, and in so much pain that both of us are drained by the work I do to evoke emotional response while she defends intellectually. The task of feeding bits of digestible emotion to a being so capable and so guarded is excruciatingly slow. I insist on relaying the tales of abuse that the other personalities have shared, and she refuses to believe that she was hurt. Jo listens politely, flinching only a little when a particularly strong accusation has been made against her father, and then calmly explains why things couldn’t have happened that way. She’d much prefer that I perceive the personalities as lying rather than abused.

  As I write this, I see that it is really with Jo that I am stalemated. We seem to be locked in a circular pattern that must be broken. Although Dr. Wilbur cautioned me that Jo’s fear of reading literature about MPD was justified—because of the extreme suggestibility of any multiple—Wilbur also said that the book Sybil has been successfully used in the treatment process by some therapists.

  My sense of Jo is that she may become troubled by how she is different from Sybil, but reading the book should at least reopen dialogue for us. Listening to tapes of the personalities is far too emotionally laden to be of any use to Jo now; it may be that she can maintain enough distance from Sybil to benefit from it.

  —

  WHEN LYNN RAISED THE possibility of Jo’s reading Sybil, many of the personalities were intrigued by the idea. Years ago, Carol had recommended Sybil as an interesting book and I had tried to read it. But it didn’t engage me at the time. I got bored and finally put it aside. The book made me uncomfortable.

  I also managed to avoid seeing the movie based on the book. When I was student-teaching, the year before I met Lynn, Sybil was a movie often shown to high-school psychology students. I hadn’t taught psychology, but my office had adjoined the school’s viewing room. The haunting music and bits of dialogue that seeped through the walls bothered me. As with all my phobias and “uncaused” fears, I avoided the movie. Since I couldn’t tune it out, I found other places to work whenever Sybil was being shown.

  Now Jo was taking up the challenge. She decided to approach Sybil analytically and not get caught up in the story. She would read it with a purpose. She would abstract useful treatment techniques from the book. Finding out how another multiple had been treated would give her some clue as to how she herself could get better.

  Every evening, Jo pounced on the book as she would upon any intellectual puzzle. She skimmed the pages she had read the night before so that there was no chance of misinterpretation, no chance that she might forget some aspect of the treatment process. And, every evening, Jo put the book aside, choked by her own feelings of hurt, anger, and despair. The book made her feel empty and aching; Jo longed for something she could not name. She decided not to mention to Lynn how she felt; Jo didn’t know how to talk about feelings.

  Instead, during her sessions with Lynn, Jo concentrated on how she and Sybil were alike and how they were different. “I guess I’m like the Sybil personality,” Jo said, “the core personality of my group. My Renee is like Sybil’s Vicky—the personality who knows everything about everybody.”

  Lynn didn’t think the comparison quite fit and told Jo that she found it difficult to think in terms of a core personality who had more centrality than the others. “And Renee certainly doesn’t know everything about everybody in your group, Jo,” Lynn said, “although she does play a very important part in getting you through each day.

  “I have real relationships with many of your personalities,” Lynn concluded, “and I can’t place importance on only one part of the totality. I think it’s better to help every part become stronger and healthier than it is for me to play favorites.”

  Jo didn’t like what she was hearing, so she changed the topic. “Hypnosis was an important part of Dr. Wilbur’s treatment of Sybil,” she began again. “Are you still planning to take c
ourses in that?”

  Yes, Lynn was now learning to be a hypnotherapist, although her instructor didn’t know anything about using the technique with a multiple. “I don’t think we’ll use hypnosis for a while yet,” Lynn said.

  Jo was pleased to hear it. She was secretly terrified of hypnosis and believed that Lynn would interpret her fear as a sign that Jo didn’t want to get well.

  Jo finally ran out of ancillary issues to discuss and tried to tell Lynn what was really on her mind after reading Sybil. “Sybil and Dr. Wilbur seemed to care about each other as friends,” Jo said.

  “I care about you very much,” Lynn quickly reassured Jo.

  Jo sighed and tried again. “I know you care more about me, in a way that’s different from what you feel for your other patients,” Jo said. “You let me call you at home; you see me five days a week; it usually doesn’t matter if we run over the hour.” Lynn nodded: all of this was true. Jo hesitated and looked down at her hands. “But Dr. Wilbur saw Sybil outside their office time. Their relationship wasn’t…It wasn’t just professional.”

  DIARY    May 1, 1982

  Jo’s reading of Sybil certainly has borne out my theory that her problem would be not fitting into that model. What I failed to foresee was her concern about my not fitting the model of Dr. Wilbur as therapist. She clearly wants me to see her outside the office, as Dr. Wilbur did Sybil.

  I specifically asked Connie Wilbur about this when I saw her on consultation, and she told me that that aspect had been overplayed in the book. There had actually been little contact outside the office. Telling this to Jo, however, made her feel that I was being manipulative, using the book selectively.