I Asked my Therapist if I had Multiple Personality Disorder. Or Schizophrenia.

If not, how come there were voices in my head.

Photo by Ksenia Chernaya

It was 2016, a month or two into post-religion therapy.

I had recently taken a 12-week mental illness class at our local hospital after a loved one was diagnosed with Bipolar 2. I was 49, but didn’t yet know of the studies about how childhood trauma can derail the human nervous system. I only knew what I’d learned in high school psychology and what I heard in that hospital class—that a mental illness diagnosis meant something was very, very wrong with an individual.

For as long as I could remember, there were voices.

They alerted me to the sense of impending doom that lurked around every corner because of my wrongness. If I read a person wrong, said something wrong, thought something wrong, or God forbid did something wrong, the voices were there. They reminded me that I wasn’t smart enough, good enough, pretty enough, and never, ever righteous enough.

Every once in a while, a different voice spoke up. This voice was furious. It wanted me to scream, Fuck this! It wanted me to punch someone. Then it would disappear as quickly as it came.

The voices weren’t like in the movies. This wasn’t Sybil. My personality didn’t change. Other than the veiled suggestion to punch, the voices didn’t tell me what to do. They told me who I was. Who I wasn’t.

Yet, there was also a quiet, hesitant voice that was kind, but afraid. It originated deep down inside me. It nudged me to go after what I wanted.

That’s the voice I began listening for in 2016 when I turned 49. It’s the one that led me to therapy.

Get this: the quiet voice and the furious voice were one and the same.

Initially, my therapist laughed when I asked. Then she saw that I was serious.

“No, you don’t have multiple personality disorder,” she said. “Or schizophrenia. Why would you think that?”

I looked past her, out the tall window in her high-ceilinged, brick-walled office. From the third floor of the old, refurbished mill, the deep, blue Androscoggin river wound past white clapboard houses tucked among maple trees aflame with fall color. So much beauty around me, but my insides were filled with a colorless gloom.

I took a deep breath. I had just began to trust her. So I told her about the voices.

As a child, teen, and young adult, the voices all sounded like my mother. As I grew into my twenties, they became more nebulous. Not the messages—those were clear—but who was speaking. Sometimes, strangely, they sounded like me.

When I began seriously studying the Bible, there were generally two voices: God and Satan. God sounded like my angry mother, and occasionally he morphed into a friendly youth group leader I remembered from middle school. Satan’s voice was an impertinent whisper. He said I should ignore God’s stupid rules. He said I should do what I wanted.

God told me who I wasn’t.

Satan told me what was possible.

It took a long time for me to admit that Satan’s voice was my voice. The gentle one and the furious one.

Deprogramming from that complicated bullshit felt impossible.

Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

For decades, I had tried to erase my own wants and needs, and tried to fill my consciousness with God’s voice alone. I became blinded by my own confusion. I became sad and angry. I became filled, at the cellular level, with an overpowering desire to flee.

And to punch someone.

It’s hard to find your authentic self when all along you’re the one who wielded the gigantic pencil eraser, obliterating yourself out of existence on the daily. Where do you start?

That needle of truth could be in any one of a million haystacks you fly over from east coast to west while going to visit your mother, so she can yank you back into the rich, fertile trauma of your childhood.

Finally, in therapy, I did find the real me.

But complex trauma is such that I lost her and kept having to start over. I lost her to panic, to the need to flee, to the voices.

I worked hard. I regrouped, reset, reprogrammed.

Eight years have passed. The voices have quieted. But they are still there. They formed my brain grooves for nearly fifty years. They’re who I am.

They’re also not.

The real me was always with me, locked in a tiny prison.

She’s out now. She’s free. But she remembers the cage. She understands its rules. The tingling chill of panic it evokes is comfortably familiar.

Is that mental illness?

Does it need a name?

I now understand mental illness to mean many things, not the least of which is this: instead of there simply being something wrong with an individual, maybe something is very wrong with how that individual has been treated by others.

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xoxo