‘… as parents we can’t just ignore our children’s pain and just let them be.’
By Judy Wilson
How do you punish your teenage son when he happened to be one of his “other” selves when he broke the rules, and now that personality is gone? How do you introduce him to people when his personality that day won’t let you call him by your son’s name? How do you relax when, on any given day, you have to live with someone who looks almost identical to your child, but who you don’t know very well yet?
When my son Joey was seventeen, we were driving through town one day, headed to an appointment we couldn’t miss. As we drove towards the highway, Joey hesitantly broke the silence. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
I knew that tone of voice. It meant he had something to tell me that I wasn’t going to like. “Is it going to upset me?”
He tilted his head to the side as if he was thinking about how to answer. He looked right at me and said in earnest, “I’m not sure.”
This didn’t sound like a quick fix thing. I answered distractedly, “Well, let’s wait until after our appointment. We’re barely on schedule here.”
Joey accepted that for roughly a whole sixty seconds. Then, with a strange uncomfortable, almost panicky look, he blurted out, “No, I don’t think I can wait. I really need to tell you something.”
I pulled over to the side of the road, and looked at him impatiently.
He put his head down as if trying to hide from me a bit.
I am sure the look on my face was saying Okay, if you need to tell me, then tell me. But the moment he said it, I wished he hadn’t.
In a quiet, sort of shy voice he said, “You keep calling me Joey. People have been doing that all afternoon. I take it he is your son. I don’t know who this Joey is, but my name’s not Joey.”
My son had been battling depression for months. But this…this was like nothing I had ever heard of before. Had the depression become too much to bear and his mind was somehow taking a break? I was grateful he already had a psychiatrist we could turn to for help.
That day was the beginning of the most challenging year of my life. My son spent that year sharing his body with five alternate personalities. It was during those crazy, exhausting months that I learned about DID. Most people know Dissociative Identity Disorder by its former name – Multiple Personality Disorder. What most people don’t know is that it is a defense mechanism used by the brain to protect an individual from trauma. When it appears out of the blue in a teen, it is usually caused by a stressful event that brings back old buried alternate personalities.
Joey had come home from school one day to find our dog, apparently dying, lying in a pool of urine and vomit. He had sat there alone with her, waiting for her to die. That had probably been his trigger. Those old “alters” come back from the teens childhood, where they were formed, usually as a way of mentally surviving repetitive abuse. They are a stress-coping mechanism and resurface when the person is faced with unbearable anxiety.
It was awful to think that my son may have suffered something horrifying and I hadn’t been there for him. For months my mind ran terrible scenes through my head. What type of abuse had he suffered? Had it been at school, while he was with a babysitter, in the playground? God, I wished my brain had an off button.
The key to his full recovery, without risk of his alternate personalities popping up again some year, unexpectedly, was to find that buried trauma and deal with it. I wanted so badly to help my son. He must be so tortured inside for this to have happened. I vowed to do whatever was necessary to find the solution to this horrible mystery. I would walk away from his hospital room for two full months, the whole while desperately wanting to bring him home, to get him away from the stress of the other patient’s attempted suicides and assorted mental illnesses. I would drive him to appointment after appointment, and give our family history to doctor after doctor. I would put aside the fear of what the ominous “hidden memories” were in order to find them and work past them. I wouldn’t give up.
That is…unless I was forced to.
That hadn’t even crossed my mind, giving up. But after a little over a year of therapy, Joey’s DID specialist cut him loose. She hadn’t found the memories of hidden abuse that had caused his alters. She felt Joey had better control over the other personalities and that he would be able to manage. She had done all she could do for him.
I felt deserted. I thought about looking for a new specialized psychiatrist. But Joey was sick of prying appointments. And really, it wasn’t up to me. Joey was eighteen, and it was his life.
I tried to convince myself that maybe it was for the better. Once uncovered, his memories might be horrendous enough to plague him for the rest of his life. Would that be better than learning to deal with stress to prevent a reoccurrence? Probably not.
When I decided to have children, I wanted to protect them from suffering, from all the difficult parts of life. That year I was forced to think of my relationship with my son in a new way. I needed to let him be, and love him that way. I was forced to realize that suffering makes us stronger. Difficult things in life force us to evolve. What my child was going through might be exactly what he needed to experience in order to grow. I needed to trust fate.
But as parents we can’t just ignore our children’s pain and just let them be. I learned however, that if we have done all we can, if we have offered our knowledge, our time, our heart and our help, and nothing works, we must accept that some things aren’t fixable…and love our kids for who they are, exactly the way they are.
Judy Wilson lives in Arnprior, Ontario and is currently looking for representation for the memoir of her experiences with her two very interesting children. This story was originally published in The Globe and Mail on June 5, 2008.
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