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“Thank you, Your Honor,” Arthur said upon hearing the judge’s sentence for his successful prosecution of the most recent creep he proved to be deserving of at least a lifetime prison vacation. He sought death but settled for mortal incarceration in hopes it would be a more exorbitant torture than being liberated from the physical body. Boredom, he imagined, was worse than death.
Arthur was feeling better these days and had no reason to think his job was in jeopardy; he believed the partners at the firm to be sympathetic of his illness. Besides, it seemed the blank times—those spaces where time got lost—were happening less. Now, with a lighter prosecution case-load, life was rather manageable, with one exception: the ‘Ryan file’—Arthur’s six-year-old client, a hazel-eyed, freckled boy from a violently abusive background. Arthur was ferociously going after the boy’s father, named Winston Jacobson, for his ‘alleged’ heinous acts and, before Arthur’s breakdown, the case weighed mightily upon him. He always had a soft heart for kid cases, but Ryan’s was different. Arthur was only beginning to discover why it had the effect on him it did.
Though he resisted at first, and who could blame him, its horrific label, Arthur was now learning to accept his diagnosis of multiple personality disorder. He was finally beginning to understand that his illness had little to do with how he’d seen it depicted on television or that the disorder always meant he couldn’t maintain reasonable levels of functioning and productivity. Arthur hadn’t required hospitalization save for the illness’s on-set and its subsequent diagnosis. It had been a brief stay, just enough time for the medication to reach therapeutic levels in his blood. As one would expect, the discovery of Arthur’s mental disease turned upside down his family’s life. His wife, Jillian, and their three children were, nonetheless, heavily invested in giving to him the support he required. They had had much at stake.
Despite the shock and challenges Arthur’s illness presented, the educational process involved with his treatment program proved to be an overdue affirmation (especially for Jillian) that neither of them had been imagining heretofore disturbing signs and symptoms; it proved that something was really wrong, that the couple indeed wasn’t going crazy over Arthur’s unprecedented behaviors. The MPD diagnosis had given them a sensible framework on which to re-construct the past sixteen months of their lives, when the disease first began to bubble up through the cracks.
Gradually, Jillian and Arthur learned about the mechanisms of dissociation, often called ‘splitting,’ and how they aided, Arthur’s ability to cope with significantly stressful events; by switching into various personality structures, or ‘alters’ as his doctor called them, he was able to tolerate the unresolved and unconscious woundings committed against him as a youngster.
It wasn’t that Arthur was completely ignorant of the hurts in his past—the secret cruelties of his step-grandmother, how she threatened and manipulated him, how she violated the rules his mother taught him about ‘good’ touching and ‘bad’ touching—it was just that he figured he had weathered the worst of it rather successfully, forgotten it, and moved on with his life, though he did recall his relief upon hearing of granny’s death, ala’ a pickled liver. Neither Arthur nor his wife could’ve guessed that the effects that boyhood period would have ever manifested into such a sophisticated system of coping; that it was, in fact, crucial to his mental and emotion survival. It was the same system that no longer held up, the walls of which had crumbled, rendering dysfunctional previously functional foundations.
Because Arthur was unusually intelligent and considered ‘high functioning’ for one carrying such a diagnosis, he rapidly progressed through therapy. Both he and Jillian learned to manage Arthur’s stress levels, typically accomplished by pulling back on his workaholic proclivities (often another defense mechanism) and broadening his array of activities, one being the resumption of his past hobby of writing short works of fiction.
In addition to stress management, Jillian became adept at spotting subtle changes in her husband’s personality that signaled a switch. Brief blank stares were one of them. From here, with the help of the therapist, she was able to identify approximately three distinct personalities, all of which provided specific utilities in managing excessive episodes of tension. However, even though the time-limited efficiency of the alter personalities provided a needful function, they still remained mere fragments of Arthur’s core personality; the lack of fluidity between the switching of personas had invariably intruded upon any attempt at ‘normal’ living. Like the time when, while operating in one alter, Arthur had missed an important meeting with his boss because he had ended up, after eating his bag lunch in a nearby park, meandering around in what seemed a semi-disoriented state. Other park-goers had reported a man approaching them as if he, Arthur, had them before a judge and was conducting cross-examinations of supposed crimes. Reportedly, Arthur, while jabbing a wicked finger at people, kept saying: ‘What about the boy?!’
It was the snow-balling of similar episodes that finally led to his first breakdown.
Rather quickly though, Arthur moved toward the ultimate therapeutic goal of ‘integration,’ the consolidation of those separated parts of himself into a greater unity. This occurred around the same point the unexplainable absences began to diminish and was for Jillian the most significant contribution to the relief she had felt since the symptoms emerged; it was when she was once again able to sleep a kind of sleep only a mother can have if she knows all are safe. And it was the same period when Arthur was able to return to work, to get busy on the Ryan file...
Part 2 of this story is coming next week!
story by Darrell Rohling
email him about this piece at djrohling@aol.com |
