When I was in ninth grade, my English class planned a field trip to the theater to see Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Strange how all this detail has endured in memory. My teacher was a grumpy, curmudgeonly guy with a “toothbrush” or Charlie Chaplin style mustache. ChatGPT says he passed away in 2013, but I still don’t feel free to use his name. Most of my teachers have faded from memory, but not him. I have two lingering memories of him. Most notably, he told our class in no uncertain terms, that those of us with talent, ability and/or special strength are vested with the responsibility to do more, simply because we can. These words, and I often quote him, have been very important to me as I move through life.
The other memory was about this field trip. We were all excited to go to the theater. For me live theater of any kind was a rarity and a treat. We spent a couple of class sessions studying the play, which of course I remember nothing about. I do remember getting ready, changing my clothes three or four times before being satisfied about what to wear, like any adolescent will. The plan was that our teacher was to be the driver. I guess not everyone was going.
I was ready to go at the appointed time, waiting for him to pick me up in his minivan with the other kids who were going. On the front step in the dusky light of early evening, I waited, and I waited, and I waited. He did not show. When the play’s curtain time came and passed, I realized he probably was not coming for me. Wistfully I trudged back indoors. Like the proverbial “all dressed up like a circus horse with nowhere to go”, I took off my outfit. We did not have cell phones then of course. I missed the show. The next day I learned (“oops!”) that our teacher had forgotten me.
Later that year when I collapsed from a near lethal anorexia, I was absent from school for a month. Not one student called to find out where I was or how I was. I received one call that month from my drama teacher Mrs. Gordon. She noticed that I was missing and wanted to know if I was OK. Caring, kind, it was a simple gesture, and it meant so much to me to be remembered. I had to wonder, what is it about me, that I am so invisible, forgettable, non-existent? I tell these stories not to invite pity! But rather out of curiosity. The neglect experience leaves its mark in mysterious ways. Does being and feeling unseen and unheard, unimportant and “unfelt” (to use Daniel Siegel’s language) from early in life, make us look, seem, appear (or disappear?) ghostlike, translucent, transparent, I wondered?
And early on, I pondered questions of existence. Did I have a “right” to exist? Especially in light of my parents suffering. Do I need to compensate for my existence? Somehow earn the patch of earth that I occupy? Or do I in fact even exist at all. Heady questions for a skinny young kid.
Although the mystery remains unsolved, I have come to discover that this quality of invisible and unforgettable is sadly a signature or marker of neglect. When I have shamefully forgotten, double booked or somehow overlooked a client, invariably they are neglect survivors, and this is my cue. It has not happened often, but it is unbearably instructive. Another reminder of why we must be exquisitely self-aware in this work.
Parts
Fast forward to my clinical life. Like all of us I have been dutifully learning about dissociative parts for years and decades. Thankfully I have come far since those sorry days of adolescence. And my adolescence and growing whole, was and is a long and slow developmental process. Mysterious how even now, although thankfully not too often, when I am “triggered” (I hate that word!) back into old and miserable trauma material, I can be back in those now distant times and places occupied by different iterations of me. They are wildly visible and audible, tangible at least to me. In florid existence they burst forth. And when I settle, I can contemplate the journey. Indeed, they did all exist in their time.
Only in more recent years did I come to realize that somehow in the legacy of intergenerational transmission, I had inherited a profound ambivalence about existence, a question about whether only dying a martyr or an innocent victim made one worthy of existence. What did it take to be good enough in the material world? Good enough in my father’s eyes? Even exist in his eyes? I think my father was plagued with the questions, perhaps some convoluted version of survivor guilt. It seems he bequeathed them to me, and I had not even suffered enough to be in his league.
The intrusive old parts occasionally make grand appearances into what is now a truly charmed and wonderful life, at least from my point of view. I live indoors in a comparatively diverse and inclusive if not exactly equal town, although who knows how long that will last? I have wonderful, meaningful work, I am relatively safe and relatively able bodied, I have a wealth of wonderful food that I can make and eat, and most of all I have a wealth of love and people who I love and who even see and love me. And so much healing that truly never ends. Can you beat that? I hear songs and read or re-read books that reference or belong to past times in my life, and it is hard to hold them all together. It reminds me of the old game show from the sixties, where the contestants must guess, and at the end the big drum roll and booming moderator voice proclaim “will the real ‘so-and-so’ please step forward…” I have to ask myself, which is it?
Integration
It stuns me to be visible and audible now. Technology has made all the world truly a stage, and I can talk to people and write to people, “meet” people all over the world. And they respond to me. That invisible young girl could have never imagined it, as it is similarly hard to imagine that she was me. And the other seemingly discrete stages, the fearless activist aspiring to be a revolutionary warrior; the conquering, tireless athlete, these seemingly different people may seem to be a collection of others, like a discontinuous thread of beads with knots between them. Or a Picasso face where the features don’t quite fit together into a coherent countenance. What a blessing to have two wonderful sisters, who are local, and who were witness to at least some parts and some aspects of my journey. They have their own renditions of course, but may even have old photos, that help to jog or validate my tattered memory.
My local public radio station has been showcasing a podcast called Not Born Yesterday. On the program they interview a diverse panoply of older people, all doing remarkable and interesting things in their advancing years. They point out how the aging population is often missing, neglected by the DEI dialog, somehow replicating the familiar invisibility, disposable worthlessness of neglect. They remind me of the blessing of the idealism that I had the good fortune to grow up in. I am saddened by the sometimes doomsday backbeat that today’s youth are developing in.
The show has pointed me to some wonderful recent writings. I am currently reading Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America by Robert Reich, which takes me back to pivotal and often inspiring historical moments in my lifetime. Heartening reminders of events of past heroes and heroines that I have not thought about in some time, and in some cases even known about. I am always moved to see those of you who could be my kids and grandkids, taking up the gauntlet of carrying forward the study and practice of trauma, neglect, and sexuality when I can no longer keep up with all that I am trying to do! I won’t tell you who is going to be the rockstar guest on my next All About Nothing video. But I was astonished and delighted to learn that I am old enough to be his granny!
And I continue to learn from and revere those who came ahead of me, some still around and some not, on whose shoulders we still stand. And I still can’t quite believe that I have a platform now to be seen and heard. All of those other fractured parts, and memories were in fact editions of me that were real and existed, as do I.
Perhaps one of the great tasks of reaching more advanced ages is that of integration. I think I am on that path now. Meanwhile, I am trying hard to integrate what Daniel Siegel, another important presence in my development, and also “not born yesterday,” taught. He said “there is a reason why we are called human beings, not human doings!’
Let’s live well!
