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April
19, 2006
My Goddard story is finally a real story
This email to my friend my friend who doesn't want his name mentioned was the
first chance I've had to write cohesively about going to
Goddard, in one long (long) STORY. Until now the experience
has seemed scattershot. I've read through relevant and irrelevant
texts, taken notes, researched, had conversations, gained insights,
gotten creative, wasted time, felt crazy, read some other stuff
and gotten excited. But writing to my friend who doesn't want his name mentioned showed me I finally
have a story with a beginning and the possibility of an end.
my friend who doesn't want his name mentioned,
I went to grad school to conduct workshops
using writing as therapy. Goddard makes you write a study plan,
and choose a subject and audience to work with, so I decided to
help women overcome body image issues, using myself as a guinea
pig. Before I went to Goddard, I realized dissociation was my core
problem. Dissociation is when you disengage from reality. Mild
dissociation is daydreaming, and severe dissociation is multiple
personality disorder. I was never MPD, but when I was a kid, I'd
check out mentally when things got crazy, and sometimes I'd even
float out of my body and watch it from above. I stopped doing that
in my twenties, but I've always spent more time thinking than paying
attention to my body.
So I'm learning about about body issues and the psychology of dissociation,
and also a little about neurology. There have been some giant leaps
in cognitive science that overturn universally held philosophical, medical
and spiritual beliefs about body and mind.
Descartes was having some problems doing what he wanted without pissing
off the Church, so he said, okay, let's split the mind from the body,
and to this day, unless you're a philosopher or a neurologist, you probably
believe the two are separate, except that in the intervening years, they've
discovered brain cells in every
organ, bone, muscle and inch of your lily white skin. But if you just
think about it, you realize the body
can't exist without the brain, and the brain can't exist without the
body.
Major implications. Because if so, where is the soul, and
does it even exist? If the soul depends on the body for its existence,
what happens when the body dies? That's a drag for every
major religion.
On the other hand, if the body is filled with brain cells, then someone
has some apologizing to do to the body, because it's gotten a terrible
reputation. The Christians and other people like Plato and Augustine
have declared the body unclean, uncontrollable and unreliable thanks
to all those NASTY urges. Christian virgin martyrs strapping chains around
their waists. Muslim martyrs flagellating themselves with whips, people
today who see their bodies as objects in need of control through dieting
and exercise, bingeing and purging, and even starving themselves to death.
The body is vile and impure, and it needs to be disciplined and overcome.
Back to dissociation. All of the
psych literature I read implied that it takes massive trauma to induce
dissociation as severe as mine was. Sexual abuse, physical abuse, psychological
abuse. It was awful to read that, because although my childhood wasn't
perfect, it also wasn't that bad. Certainly not THAT bad. I wracked
my brain to remember what happened to me. I got weird with my mother.
I got scared. I got angry. Nothing.
Until I read a paper by a guy named Liotti who said if
the mother suffers trauma within two years of giving birth, the baby
can experience dissociation. My mother suffered significant
trauma two weeks before my birth when my father died in a plane
crash in Japan. Attachment theory holds that all baby mammals communicate
their needs to their mother and the mother fulfills the need. The baby
communicates hunger and the need for food is answered. Warmth, stroking,
love... It's circular, and with a "good enough mother" a
baby's needs are usually answered...
...except when the mother has suffered trauma, in which case the mother
can be so overcome that she can't sense and respond to her baby's needs.
Instead she responds to the baby's cries with dismay, distractedness,
detachment, sadness, or even anger. A baby detects a mother's emotions
in a third of a second, and if a small baby feels fear
in response to the mother, it assumes it might die. A baby sees life
simply in terms of life and death, and this feels to the baby like
death. The fight or flight response might ensue in an adult, but a
baby can neither fight or fly. So it freezes like a hunted animal.
A couple years ago, I talked to the woman who took care of my mother
and me in Japan when I was born. She said she could hear my mother
screaming from the waiting room while in labor that she never wanted
this fucking goddamn baby in the first place. Screaming. Ann said she
and the fathers waiting with her all heard my mother. She said when
I was born, I wouldn't let my mother near me and Ann had to hire a
nanny to take care of me for the two weeks my mother and I were in
Japan.
So that let my mother off the hook, and answered a lot of questions
for me. It's been unbelievably intense.
Being at Goddard was intense. There were all
these really intense people, and we had intense workshops
from 9 to 9,
and I'm usually confident, but I got incredibly
homesick, and reverted to feeling lonely, self conscious and ashamed.
I was a mess when I got home, but I couldn't explain it to anyone
who hadn't been there.
Everyone told me how intense Goddard residencies
are, but I was unprepared. I went straight
to Bill's house when I got home, and all I did was cry about feeling
like I got chopped up in a blender and put back together wrong. But
my friend who doesn't want his name mentioned, it was great, just like shedding my old skin.
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