WEBVTT - A Virtuosic Patient 0:00:00.200 --> 0:00:04.880 Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. This episode contains 0:00:04.920 --> 0:00:09.520 discussion of sexual abuse, substance abuse, and self harm. Listener 0:00:09.520 --> 0:00:10.720 discretion is advised. 0:00:16.840 --> 0:00:20.720 I went to sleep that night, hoping unconsciousness would reverse 0:00:20.840 --> 0:00:25.200 the horrifying depletion that had taken place. But I awoke 0:00:25.280 --> 0:00:28.720 the next morning and fell breathless into a room I 0:00:28.720 --> 0:00:33.279 could barely recognize, a body I could barely feel, and 0:00:33.320 --> 0:00:38.480 a mind I could barely follow into perception. The unmistakable 0:00:38.640 --> 0:00:42.159 arrhythmia of the disconnect, as I had begun to call it, 0:00:42.520 --> 0:00:47.400 that had been disrupting my life was now louder, more insistent, 0:00:47.880 --> 0:00:51.520 A second heart that beat along with my original heart. 0:00:51.920 --> 0:00:53.960 Out of time, out of body. 0:00:57.200 --> 0:01:01.160 That's Alice Carrier, author of the recent memo Are Everything 0:01:01.400 --> 0:01:05.959 Nothing Someone. Alice's is a story of a childhood of 0:01:06.040 --> 0:01:11.280 profound extremes. Her mother, the painter Jennifer Bartlett, was one 0:01:11.319 --> 0:01:14.479 of the most famous and critically acclaimed artists of her time. 0:01:15.600 --> 0:01:18.520 Alice grew up in a world filled with access an 0:01:18.680 --> 0:01:23.840 enormous privilege. But access and privilege mean nothing to a child. 0:01:24.560 --> 0:01:32.039 A child wants only love, safety, boundaries, support, protection. A 0:01:32.160 --> 0:01:47.800 child wants to be seen. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this 0:01:48.000 --> 0:01:51.080 is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, 0:01:51.320 --> 0:01:54.080 the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we 0:01:54.200 --> 0:02:01.320 keep from ourselves. Tell me about the land of your childhood. 0:02:01.640 --> 0:02:04.520 You have two different landscapes. Do you remember anything about 0:02:04.920 --> 0:02:06.320 Paris before you were four? 0:02:07.760 --> 0:02:11.400 Yes? The Paris apartment is still in my life. It's 0:02:11.400 --> 0:02:15.080 a time capsule. It's been preserved exactly as it was 0:02:15.240 --> 0:02:18.480 when my parents lived there. So I do have a 0:02:18.520 --> 0:02:21.160 lot of memories there, and I get to inhabit those 0:02:21.200 --> 0:02:25.480 memories physically whenever I visit, which is really powerful because 0:02:26.080 --> 0:02:32.440 it was the only location where my parents were truly together. 0:02:33.520 --> 0:02:37.000 I'm grateful to have that place because every time I 0:02:37.080 --> 0:02:40.640 go there, it readheres me to myself in a really 0:02:40.720 --> 0:02:44.920 powerful way. And you know, these places, the houses that 0:02:44.960 --> 0:02:49.000 my mom created, were like characters, were like family members. 0:02:49.400 --> 0:02:56.359 They were just as grandiose and outlandish and sometimes sinister 0:02:57.080 --> 0:02:58.679 as the people who populated them. 0:03:00.120 --> 0:03:02.880 Me about one thirty four Charles Street, which was the 0:03:03.360 --> 0:03:08.000 backdrop to most of your childhood and teenage years. 0:03:08.840 --> 0:03:13.800 So one thirty four Charles Street started out as a 0:03:13.840 --> 0:03:16.560 place not intended to be lived in. It was a 0:03:16.600 --> 0:03:21.120 factory for manufacturing train parts. It was a seventeen thousand 0:03:21.120 --> 0:03:25.720 square foot building in downtown Manhattan in the West Village, 0:03:26.400 --> 0:03:32.200 and my mom purchased it and turned it into a fortress. 0:03:32.720 --> 0:03:36.920 She added an indoor swimming pool next to which she 0:03:37.040 --> 0:03:39.920 put her bed. She loved to sleep next to water. 0:03:40.320 --> 0:03:43.880 She was a California girl, lived by the ocean. She 0:03:44.040 --> 0:03:49.440 added two floors of gardens. She loved to be surrounded 0:03:49.560 --> 0:03:53.240 by things that were growing, because she always felt like 0:03:53.320 --> 0:03:56.640 she was killing things, that anything she touched would die. 0:03:57.680 --> 0:04:03.120 She loved to nurture her spaces. She loved to gardens. 0:04:03.160 --> 0:04:07.640 She loved to create these spectacular spaces. So that's I 0:04:07.640 --> 0:04:10.160 think where a lot of the intimacy that was lacking 0:04:10.200 --> 0:04:12.760 in most of her other aspects of her life. That's 0:04:12.800 --> 0:04:16.680 where it went. This massive building. She had two floors 0:04:16.680 --> 0:04:21.159 of studios where she painted from seven o'clock in the 0:04:21.160 --> 0:04:23.320 morning until seven o'clock at night, with a two hour 0:04:23.360 --> 0:04:26.920 and after day. And that's where we lived from when 0:04:26.960 --> 0:04:29.240 I was about five years old to when I was 0:04:29.279 --> 0:04:33.520 about twenty three. I remember the glowing exit signs, you know, 0:04:33.600 --> 0:04:36.000 all of these remnants from when it was a factory 0:04:36.880 --> 0:04:42.400 and had industrial The toilets would flush with this ferocity 0:04:42.480 --> 0:04:46.520 that would make you jump every time. It had its 0:04:46.560 --> 0:04:49.800 own rhythms and rules. The taps were marked with C 0:04:49.960 --> 0:04:52.760 and F, which is show and fought, which is hot 0:04:52.800 --> 0:04:55.680 and cold and French, so of course people would scald 0:04:55.680 --> 0:04:58.719 themselves when they tried to wash their hands. It was 0:04:58.760 --> 0:05:03.720 an extraordinary extra in a place. I was raised by 0:05:04.560 --> 0:05:08.280 a British nanny named Dennis. Her real name was Eileen 0:05:08.360 --> 0:05:12.279 Dennis Maynard, but we only ever called her nanny, and 0:05:12.720 --> 0:05:17.760 she was my constant. She read to me at night, 0:05:17.839 --> 0:05:22.120 she brought me to school. She was hired before I 0:05:22.240 --> 0:05:28.240 was born for her quote unquote ability to handle unconventional problems, 0:05:28.680 --> 0:05:32.760 which was some impressive self diagnosis and self awareness on 0:05:32.800 --> 0:05:36.920 my parents' part that they identified our problems as unconventional. 0:05:37.640 --> 0:05:41.440 So she lived in Charles Street. I just remember it 0:05:41.480 --> 0:05:44.599 being nanny and I on the second floor, and my 0:05:44.760 --> 0:05:48.640 mom up in the pool room, drinking her white wine, 0:05:48.720 --> 0:05:52.240 smoking her cigarettes and reading her books, and then summoning 0:05:52.279 --> 0:05:56.000 me on the intercom that bodilessly connected us through the 0:05:56.000 --> 0:05:58.479 seventeen thousand square feet so I would be in my 0:05:58.600 --> 0:06:02.240 room and sometimes the only contact I'd had with my 0:06:02.320 --> 0:06:06.560 mom throughout the day would be her disembodied voice calling 0:06:06.600 --> 0:06:09.440 me over the intercom, and then I would go to 0:06:09.480 --> 0:06:12.200 pick it up, and she would sometimes be really impatient 0:06:12.200 --> 0:06:14.200 to hang up, and then I couldn't call her back 0:06:14.240 --> 0:06:18.600 because she'd have her phone on privacy setting. So it 0:06:18.680 --> 0:06:22.080 was this sort of surreal way we moved through each 0:06:22.080 --> 0:06:23.279 other's lives. 0:06:26.360 --> 0:06:29.080 As a girl, as she tried to fall asleep at night, 0:06:29.760 --> 0:06:33.479 Alice would imagine the swimming pool directly above her bed. 0:06:34.279 --> 0:06:38.200 She would picture the ceiling caving and tons and tons 0:06:38.200 --> 0:06:41.839 of water crashing over her. It was both a reality 0:06:42.440 --> 0:06:45.599 there really was a massive swimming pool above her, and 0:06:45.760 --> 0:06:51.279 a metaphor for the vast and consuming chaos surrounding her. 0:06:52.080 --> 0:06:55.240 The word I used to describe my mother is the 0:06:55.279 --> 0:06:59.920 process by which mountains are made, origenic, and that four 0:07:00.200 --> 0:07:05.400 that's captured in the threat of tons of water collapsing 0:07:05.400 --> 0:07:09.080 over your head, my head, or the process by which 0:07:09.120 --> 0:07:11.360 mountains are made. That's what I think of when I 0:07:11.360 --> 0:07:15.360 think of my mom. And she was known for the 0:07:15.440 --> 0:07:18.760 scale of her work, the scale of her grandiosity, but 0:07:19.080 --> 0:07:23.720 in equal measure was the scale of her remoteness, of 0:07:23.760 --> 0:07:30.040 her fear, the threat of what she imagined had happened 0:07:30.040 --> 0:07:34.520 to her, loomed so large over her life and of 0:07:34.560 --> 0:07:39.360 course mine. I think of natural forces that are so monumental, 0:07:40.240 --> 0:07:45.960 they change the landscape, they're so massive, and I think 0:07:46.280 --> 0:07:50.240 that metaphor extends to the way she lived her life 0:07:50.280 --> 0:07:54.400 to She was also she was very funny. She was 0:07:54.440 --> 0:07:59.240 a ravenous reader. She had these sort of enormous appetites. 0:07:59.520 --> 0:08:02.480 She loved good food, she loved good boothe she loved 0:08:02.480 --> 0:08:06.800 to smoke, she loved good books, she loved expensive clothing. 0:08:07.280 --> 0:08:14.080 She loved having confrontational conversations. She was very glamorous. My 0:08:14.200 --> 0:08:20.160 father was this German film star and intellectual. He had 0:08:20.560 --> 0:08:26.120 grown up in a mental institution in Germany, so you 0:08:26.120 --> 0:08:31.440 know a very gothic tale. His babysitters were the patients 0:08:31.480 --> 0:08:35.200 of a hospital at which his father, a psychiatrist, worked, 0:08:36.080 --> 0:08:39.240 and one of them had attempted to burn her two 0:08:39.360 --> 0:08:44.120 children alive. One of them believed that God was transforming 0:08:44.200 --> 0:08:46.120 him into a woman so he could have a child 0:08:46.200 --> 0:08:50.079 with him. So my father lived in these mental institutions, 0:08:50.320 --> 0:08:57.240 and dad experience created this porousness of boundaries that extended 0:08:57.440 --> 0:09:01.079 throughout my life. He couldn't really tell who was sick 0:09:01.160 --> 0:09:04.320 and who was saying what the difference between those two 0:09:04.360 --> 0:09:08.720 things was. And after that experience he never really found 0:09:08.760 --> 0:09:12.800 anything in human nature strange. Then he was discovered at 0:09:12.800 --> 0:09:16.800 the age of thirteen by a German film director and 0:09:17.200 --> 0:09:20.320 started making movies, and then he moved to Paris in 0:09:20.360 --> 0:09:24.559 his twenties, where he fell in with the Gille de 0:09:24.679 --> 0:09:28.160 Laus crowd. He was a famous philosopher who was known 0:09:28.240 --> 0:09:32.720 for his rather anarcic thinking, and my father was his potage. 0:09:33.200 --> 0:09:38.960 So he started to espouse these pretty radical theories and 0:09:39.240 --> 0:09:43.760 this approach to life as a grand experiment. And he 0:09:43.920 --> 0:09:47.640 met my mother, I think the first week he moved 0:09:47.640 --> 0:09:49.920 to New York and they were at a dinner party 0:09:49.960 --> 0:09:54.319 together and she was chainsmoking cigarettes and eating smoked salmon, 0:09:54.559 --> 0:09:58.800 and he approached her and she was with another man 0:09:58.880 --> 0:10:01.800 named Matthew. His name is matt and he announced at 0:10:01.840 --> 0:10:03.960 the table, who's it going to be? Which Matthew are 0:10:04.040 --> 0:10:05.840 you going to take home him or me? And she 0:10:05.960 --> 0:10:09.000 picked him, so that's how they met. They moved to 0:10:09.040 --> 0:10:15.120 Paris when I was born, and he spent his time 0:10:15.640 --> 0:10:19.000 making films, playing speed chess and doing cocaine, and my 0:10:19.120 --> 0:10:22.120 mom would just work and drink and to hear him 0:10:22.280 --> 0:10:26.520 categorize it. She was completely in her own world. She 0:10:26.679 --> 0:10:30.120 dictated all the rules, and he felt kind of like 0:10:30.120 --> 0:10:34.560 a puppy dog, and I think he felt rather unmoored. So, 0:10:35.480 --> 0:10:40.680 in keeping with the self mythologizing tactic of my family, 0:10:41.120 --> 0:10:47.200 he made an autobiographical film about a pianist, a German 0:10:47.280 --> 0:10:52.040 pianist married to a successful American architect who is addicted 0:10:52.080 --> 0:10:55.880 to cocaine and speed chess and ruins his life. So 0:10:55.920 --> 0:10:58.760 he kind of used art, I think, as an act 0:10:58.800 --> 0:11:02.080 of defiance, but also as a prophylactic, which I found 0:11:02.200 --> 0:11:06.600 very interesting. And it's exactly how my mom negotiated what 0:11:06.679 --> 0:11:09.280 had happened to her and her life. So they had 0:11:09.320 --> 0:11:13.199 a very intense relationship. It started out as sort of 0:11:13.240 --> 0:11:15.840 always being in crisis in the sense, and then he 0:11:16.240 --> 0:11:20.320 in this movie, he cast the woman he was having 0:11:20.400 --> 0:11:23.160 an affair with as the woman the main character has 0:11:23.200 --> 0:11:25.920 an affair in the film. My mom was doing the 0:11:25.920 --> 0:11:29.840 costumes and she had to dress his mistress in the 0:11:29.880 --> 0:11:34.120 movie and in real life. So this kind of musing 0:11:34.360 --> 0:11:40.840 life in an almost careless, reckless, callous way in the 0:11:40.960 --> 0:11:48.320 service always of art and intellectualizing the softest, most delicate 0:11:48.400 --> 0:11:53.160 parts of ourselves was an established pattern in my family. 0:11:58.000 --> 0:12:13.800 We'll be right back. Alice's mother begins to see a 0:12:13.840 --> 0:12:18.880 renowned psychiatrist named doctor Viola Bernard. At first, she discusses 0:12:18.960 --> 0:12:23.560 relatively mundane issues, but doctor Bernard begins introducing other methods, 0:12:23.920 --> 0:12:27.440 including hypnosis, as a way of probing deeper into her 0:12:27.480 --> 0:12:32.040 psyche for what might be buried there. Eventually, Alice's mother 0:12:32.160 --> 0:12:34.800 comes away from therapy with the belief that she has 0:12:34.880 --> 0:12:38.120 recovered memories from her childhood that reveal that she'd been 0:12:38.200 --> 0:12:40.479 used in a Satanic sex cult. 0:12:42.000 --> 0:12:46.679 I discovered her story when I was eleven years old, 0:12:47.280 --> 0:12:52.520 and my father had given me the mission of looking 0:12:52.559 --> 0:12:55.840 through my mom's things to find out who was being 0:12:55.880 --> 0:12:59.319 called as a witness in their very acrimonious divorce that 0:12:59.400 --> 0:13:03.320 lasted seven years. And I was snooping her stuff and 0:13:03.360 --> 0:13:08.360 I found these journals and I read them, and one 0:13:08.360 --> 0:13:11.840 of the entries described how she was giving my father 0:13:11.920 --> 0:13:16.040 a blowjob and had a flashback, and that the flashback 0:13:16.200 --> 0:13:20.680 was of her on a boat having her head held 0:13:20.760 --> 0:13:23.880 underwater while she vomited while a man said, you're feeding 0:13:23.920 --> 0:13:28.320 the fishes. And I confronted her about what I had found. 0:13:28.840 --> 0:13:31.520 She was on her way from the studio up to 0:13:31.559 --> 0:13:33.760 the pool room where she was going to take her nap, 0:13:34.840 --> 0:13:38.360 and she sat in my room and very matter of 0:13:38.400 --> 0:13:43.320 factly told me the following story. She told me that 0:13:44.200 --> 0:13:46.680 a married couple, Bertie and Russell, who were friends of 0:13:46.679 --> 0:13:50.120 the family, had used her and her one and a 0:13:50.120 --> 0:13:54.240 half year old sibling in a sex cult. That they 0:13:55.200 --> 0:13:59.520 recruited the children of all of the maids in the neighborhood, 0:13:59.600 --> 0:14:04.120 and you then and ritualize sex games. And that she 0:14:04.200 --> 0:14:07.640 had witnessed the murder of a seven year old black 0:14:07.679 --> 0:14:11.560 boy that had murdered him through erotic asphyxiation and had 0:14:11.600 --> 0:14:14.400 made my mother bury the body on the beach and 0:14:14.440 --> 0:14:16.880 told her never to tell or she would go to 0:14:16.880 --> 0:14:22.480 prison forever. And she told me this, I could detect 0:14:23.040 --> 0:14:26.360 no emotion. She didn't tell me how she felt about it. 0:14:26.400 --> 0:14:28.800 She didn't ask me how I felt. It was the 0:14:28.880 --> 0:14:32.240 equivalent of listening to an audiobook, one of the many 0:14:32.280 --> 0:14:35.800 audiobooks that I listened to all of the time. And 0:14:36.600 --> 0:14:40.640 then she left to take her nap, leaving me wondering 0:14:40.640 --> 0:14:44.000 how to spell erotic asshixiation and picturing my dad getting 0:14:44.000 --> 0:14:48.800 a blowjob. I would later find out that she was 0:14:49.000 --> 0:14:52.160 most likely a victim of the Satanic panic, which was 0:14:52.400 --> 0:14:56.120 a moral hysteria that swept the nation in the eighties 0:14:56.160 --> 0:14:59.960 and nineties, where one aspect of it was that overzelle 0:15:01.080 --> 0:15:08.560 therapists and psychiatrists would implant false memories of ritualized sexual 0:15:08.560 --> 0:15:12.200 abuse and murder into their patients. I don't think it 0:15:12.240 --> 0:15:16.680 was nefarious. It was motivated by a genuine desire to 0:15:16.760 --> 0:15:20.280 help people. I think that trauma was starting to be 0:15:20.400 --> 0:15:26.160 understood and credence was starting to be given to let's say, 0:15:26.200 --> 0:15:29.560 trauma beyond the trauma of war or you know, for instance, 0:15:29.600 --> 0:15:33.400 sexual trauma. So I think there was a genuine desire 0:15:34.160 --> 0:15:38.440 to help people and to learn and be curious about 0:15:39.400 --> 0:15:44.200 very real emotion states of being. The way that trauma 0:15:44.240 --> 0:15:50.160 reverberates through a life is very complicated. So I struggle 0:15:50.320 --> 0:15:55.200 with speculating what these doctors were thinking. But maybe it's 0:15:55.360 --> 0:15:59.720 the allure of a story. But until the end of 0:15:59.760 --> 0:16:03.800 her life, she believed with her whole heart that this 0:16:03.840 --> 0:16:09.200 had happened, and because of that, she really felt that 0:16:09.280 --> 0:16:14.280 she would do irreparable harm to me that I think 0:16:14.600 --> 0:16:19.240 if she showed affection or tried to be tender or 0:16:19.240 --> 0:16:23.520 intimate with me, it would somehow damage me as irrevocably 0:16:23.640 --> 0:16:26.760 as she had been damaged. So in a way, her 0:16:26.840 --> 0:16:31.000 remoteness was an act of tremendous love. But that distortion 0:16:31.240 --> 0:16:37.520 came from this imaginary secret that her mind had allegedly 0:16:37.560 --> 0:16:41.920 been keeping from herself. From her I think my mom 0:16:42.280 --> 0:16:48.800 found having this outrageous story it excused the fact that 0:16:48.840 --> 0:16:52.880 she couldn't move beyond it. Once the villain is Satan, 0:16:53.880 --> 0:16:58.160 then you know, I think that can't be topped. She 0:16:58.400 --> 0:17:05.600 also created massive oil paintings in response to these recovered memories. 0:17:05.840 --> 0:17:10.960 Her reaction was to make one hundred and eight versions 0:17:11.440 --> 0:17:14.840 of these scenes of abuse. So in her paintings, there's 0:17:14.960 --> 0:17:18.320 a naked person wielding an axe, and they were hanging 0:17:18.480 --> 0:17:21.920 in the hallways of my home. So as she went 0:17:21.960 --> 0:17:25.199 off to take her nap and she left me behind 0:17:25.280 --> 0:17:27.560 to kind of process everything she had told me, I 0:17:27.720 --> 0:17:33.080 wandered out into the hallway and just stared at these 0:17:33.119 --> 0:17:38.480 scenes of abuse. And I would get very confused because 0:17:38.880 --> 0:17:41.520 I started not knowing where I ended and she began. 0:17:42.000 --> 0:17:45.399 I started getting confused about what had happened to whom, 0:17:45.560 --> 0:17:49.000 and I almost believed that what she had endured had 0:17:49.040 --> 0:17:53.040 also happened to me, which made the confusing things that 0:17:53.040 --> 0:17:58.080 were happening in my life almost secondary, and they kind 0:17:58.119 --> 0:18:03.440 of evaporated and des and were supplanted by these extreme 0:18:03.880 --> 0:18:09.199 scenes that she had fabricated. So it's another example of 0:18:09.280 --> 0:18:18.600 how my parents turned their damage into beautiful stories. And 0:18:18.680 --> 0:18:22.880 I learned at a young age that what we experienced 0:18:22.920 --> 0:18:27.040 and how we felt about those experiences were meant to 0:18:27.080 --> 0:18:28.800 be thought about and spectated. 0:18:32.840 --> 0:18:35.879 Part of the spectacle is the six year custody battle 0:18:35.960 --> 0:18:39.920 that follows Alice's parents divorce. For some of this time, 0:18:40.040 --> 0:18:43.639 Alice's father remains living at one three four Charles Street, 0:18:44.160 --> 0:18:48.560 and eventually he moves out. As Alice moves between her parents' 0:18:48.600 --> 0:18:52.520 two worlds, her own world is fraught and fractured as 0:18:52.520 --> 0:18:56.919 she oscillates between slippery landscapes, one where her relationship with 0:18:56.960 --> 0:19:00.879 her father is exceedingly blurry and without boundaries, and the 0:19:00.960 --> 0:19:05.159 other in the shadowy corners of her mother's presence. With 0:19:05.240 --> 0:19:08.840 the huge and notable exception of Nanny, there isn't an 0:19:08.880 --> 0:19:12.359 adult in Alice's life who isn't somehow spiraling. 0:19:13.680 --> 0:19:18.760 So my father treated parenthood as a radical experiment in 0:19:18.800 --> 0:19:23.480 the annihilation of boundaries. He was also during the divorce 0:19:24.040 --> 0:19:33.600 very lonely, very desperate, So that combination resulted in this 0:19:33.680 --> 0:19:39.479 erosion of boundaries and this confusion of roles where I 0:19:39.560 --> 0:19:43.000 didn't know what or who I was to him. I 0:19:43.040 --> 0:19:46.320 didn't know if I was his daughter, his wife, his mother, 0:19:46.800 --> 0:19:51.040 his confidant, his collaborator, and I'm just going back to 0:19:51.160 --> 0:19:54.920 Charles Street. There were no locks on the doors. There 0:19:55.000 --> 0:19:59.359 were no locks emotionally either. When I'm seven years old, 0:19:59.560 --> 0:20:02.960 he told that one of his girlfriends could only orgasm 0:20:03.000 --> 0:20:07.080 on her own with a showerhead. And later on he 0:20:07.119 --> 0:20:11.720 would take my underwear with him on trips to remember 0:20:11.760 --> 0:20:14.880 me by he would ask the premiere pimp of Hamburg 0:20:14.960 --> 0:20:18.159 how much he would charge for me. He had this 0:20:18.320 --> 0:20:24.600 idea to revolutionize the world of cinema by starring in 0:20:24.880 --> 0:20:28.919 the first film to star a father and daughter in 0:20:28.960 --> 0:20:31.959 the role of the lovers and have them have a 0:20:32.000 --> 0:20:35.720 sex scene. And he presented this idea to me as 0:20:35.760 --> 0:20:38.680 if we were going to do that together. So there 0:20:38.800 --> 0:20:44.679 was repeatedly this sense that the things that should have 0:20:44.800 --> 0:20:48.080 remained secret, or at least the things that should have 0:20:48.160 --> 0:20:56.119 been treated with the delicacy or the apprehension, or the 0:20:56.160 --> 0:21:02.760 reverence or the protectiveness of a secret, not they were shared. 0:21:03.680 --> 0:21:09.679 So it was this diffusion of roles and boundaries that 0:21:09.840 --> 0:21:14.280 led to this profound diffusion of identity for me. My 0:21:14.359 --> 0:21:18.000 father was also He loved to play games. He taught 0:21:18.080 --> 0:21:21.240 me about philosophy, he taught me about history, He made 0:21:21.320 --> 0:21:24.679 up stories, he told me about Greek mythology. He was 0:21:24.840 --> 0:21:32.000 very interactive, and that contrasted with my mother, who couldn't 0:21:32.000 --> 0:21:34.159 play games with me because, according to her, she was 0:21:34.200 --> 0:21:38.879 too competitive. So my father rushed in to fill this vacuum. 0:21:39.160 --> 0:21:44.680 So this sense of excitement and almost titillation from parental 0:21:44.720 --> 0:21:51.919 engagement got very confused and tumbled around with the salacious 0:21:52.440 --> 0:21:55.399 tamera of the information he was sharing with me. So 0:21:56.200 --> 0:21:59.679 it was hard to differentiate or to even notice that 0:21:59.800 --> 0:22:02.360 some that shouldn't be shared, something that should have been 0:22:02.960 --> 0:22:06.719 kept to himself, was being shared. There was a transmission 0:22:06.760 --> 0:22:10.720 that was happening that shouldn't have happened, but I didn't notice. 0:22:10.880 --> 0:22:13.679 I thought it was normal. And I also thought that 0:22:14.440 --> 0:22:17.280 it was almost like a calling that I had to 0:22:17.480 --> 0:22:20.920 be the perfect confidant. I had to be someone who 0:22:21.040 --> 0:22:27.359 could be the receptacle for my mother's story about burying 0:22:27.400 --> 0:22:31.560 a child on the beach, or the sexual exploits of 0:22:31.600 --> 0:22:32.040 my father. 0:22:34.160 --> 0:22:39.640 Herein we have the difference between secrecy and privacy between 0:22:39.640 --> 0:22:43.200 parents and children. There certainly can be secrets that are destructive, 0:22:43.720 --> 0:22:45.879 and we spend a lot of time on this show 0:22:45.920 --> 0:22:50.160 talking about those kinds of secrets. But here are matters 0:22:50.160 --> 0:22:53.240 that have to do with two adults, internal lives. No 0:22:53.320 --> 0:22:58.439 one's business, most certainly not their child. What happens when 0:22:58.480 --> 0:23:02.760 there are no boundaries, no can, no edges. Secrets are 0:23:02.760 --> 0:23:07.639 about borders and edges, but in Alice's family there are none. 0:23:08.680 --> 0:23:11.560 So where is a secret when you need one? This 0:23:11.760 --> 0:23:17.440 undifferentiated quality was unbelievably destructive, and I think also another 0:23:18.080 --> 0:23:22.920 thing that was obscured or concealed were the basic sort 0:23:22.920 --> 0:23:26.720 of physics of living. There was this one incident where 0:23:26.720 --> 0:23:30.840 I had seven pet rats. My father gave me a 0:23:30.880 --> 0:23:32.879 pet rat and it was pregnant and it had a 0:23:32.880 --> 0:23:36.320 bunch of babies. So I had seven pet rats, and 0:23:36.480 --> 0:23:39.879 he sat on one accidentally and it died. But he 0:23:40.600 --> 0:23:43.720 assured me he could bring it back to life by 0:23:44.280 --> 0:23:46.840 putting it in the freezer next to the pop tarts, 0:23:47.000 --> 0:23:49.399 and then when it didn't come back to life, he 0:23:49.600 --> 0:23:53.800 promised me that it would reanimate if you just put 0:23:53.800 --> 0:23:57.399 it on the heater. And that's what it was like 0:23:57.600 --> 0:24:02.119 being the child of my parents, This denial of reality, 0:24:02.720 --> 0:24:05.840 this belief that the power of our minds could shape 0:24:05.880 --> 0:24:09.840 reality and could defy even the laws of death. So 0:24:10.160 --> 0:24:14.000 it's sort of this obfuscation of the rules and the 0:24:14.000 --> 0:24:18.360 borders define reality, and it's almost like reality was its 0:24:18.359 --> 0:24:22.399 own secret that we were all trying to We didn't 0:24:22.440 --> 0:24:25.000 want to know. That's the secret we were keeping from ourselves, 0:24:25.040 --> 0:24:30.560 that we were just a couple of human beings moving 0:24:30.600 --> 0:24:34.000 through the world and moving through time, but we wanted 0:24:34.000 --> 0:24:35.399 to deny that as long as we could. 0:24:37.720 --> 0:24:40.840 Alice's behavior begins to feed into this notion of defying 0:24:40.880 --> 0:24:46.800 the laws of death. She finds herself exiting reality, secreting herself, 0:24:46.880 --> 0:24:50.040 as it were, by cutting and self harming at a 0:24:50.160 --> 0:24:54.960 very young age. Such practices reinforce the fragmentation she feels 0:24:55.400 --> 0:24:59.280 up against the backdrop of her fragmented family life. At 0:24:59.320 --> 0:25:03.479 some point, reality is obstructed even further when Alice begins 0:25:03.480 --> 0:25:07.040 to believe that surely everyone must live like this with 0:25:07.160 --> 0:25:10.960 so much pain, and secrecy. How could they not? And 0:25:11.080 --> 0:25:14.760 yet not all families do. Not all seven year old 0:25:14.760 --> 0:25:18.359 girls cut themselves while also trying to fulfill all the 0:25:18.400 --> 0:25:22.639 basic milestones of growing up. And even when Alice tries 0:25:22.680 --> 0:25:26.439 to unsecret herself and show her mom how she's been 0:25:26.520 --> 0:25:30.280 hurting herself, her mom's reply is not one of distress, 0:25:30.960 --> 0:25:35.080 but one of unsettling advice to use makeup to cover 0:25:35.119 --> 0:25:35.680 the scars. 0:25:36.920 --> 0:25:40.760 So in one three fourth trial street, my mom upstairs 0:25:41.240 --> 0:25:46.560 drinking and reading her downstairs painting. I'm by myself, listening 0:25:46.880 --> 0:25:53.160 to audiobooks constantly, NonStop stories, other people's stories, and I'm 0:25:53.200 --> 0:25:57.840 also thinking about myself and the third person. So I 0:25:57.880 --> 0:26:00.399 would walk down the street and I would say, she 0:26:00.480 --> 0:26:02.800 is walking down the street, the rainfalls on her jacket, 0:26:03.520 --> 0:26:08.280 turning myself into a story, narrating myself into existence, turning 0:26:08.320 --> 0:26:12.480 myself into a character. And those were the first signs 0:26:12.840 --> 0:26:17.720 of me distancing from myself, this sort of abstraction that 0:26:17.800 --> 0:26:20.879 would get more and more visceral. And then I started 0:26:20.920 --> 0:26:23.480 cutting when I was seven years old, and I don't 0:26:23.480 --> 0:26:25.520 know how I knew to do it. It was in 0:26:25.520 --> 0:26:29.240 a moment where I was unbelievably overwhelmed I couldn't tell 0:26:29.280 --> 0:26:34.480 the difference between anger and sadness. I couldn't safely fit 0:26:35.720 --> 0:26:39.440 any of those emotions inside of me, so I cut. 0:26:39.640 --> 0:26:43.440 It was sort of this orienting horizon that kind of 0:26:43.520 --> 0:26:48.040 folded me into these clean origami lines. Just made me 0:26:48.040 --> 0:26:51.800 feel better, and it worked, and I continued to do 0:26:51.840 --> 0:26:57.360 that through adolescence, and in adolescence I developed what I'd 0:26:57.440 --> 0:27:02.680 later learned was a dissociative just order called depersonalization derealization. 0:27:03.880 --> 0:27:07.480 I couldn't recognize my face in the mirror. I didn't 0:27:07.480 --> 0:27:10.199 know where my voice was coming from. I felt no 0:27:10.320 --> 0:27:15.040 connection to my body, my feelings, my history. I was 0:27:15.119 --> 0:27:20.280 convinced I didn't exist. It was like my identity was 0:27:20.280 --> 0:27:23.600 an alka seltzer tab dipped in water and it had 0:27:23.640 --> 0:27:29.760 sort of dissolved into the unnameable, unending nothingness. It was 0:27:29.800 --> 0:27:33.520 the most terrifying thing I'd ever experienced, and I would 0:27:33.560 --> 0:27:37.960 cut and then later burn, first of all to mark 0:27:38.040 --> 0:27:42.919 time because time stopped making sense, because every single moment 0:27:43.000 --> 0:27:45.840 felt like the first moment in history. But also there 0:27:45.920 --> 0:27:49.840 was this perpetual sense of deja vu. So I had 0:27:50.800 --> 0:27:53.840 no sense of consequences or like I was a body 0:27:53.880 --> 0:27:58.400 moving through time, So every time I cut, it reinstated causality. 0:27:59.119 --> 0:28:01.800 I would cut, and the next day I would heal, 0:28:01.960 --> 0:28:04.600 and then the next day I would heal more. So 0:28:04.680 --> 0:28:07.320 it gave me this sense that one I had a body, 0:28:07.800 --> 0:28:09.959 because I really didn't think I had a body. I 0:28:10.040 --> 0:28:13.439 was outside of myself watching myself, but that thing that 0:28:13.560 --> 0:28:16.679 was outside was also outside of itself, watching itself. So 0:28:16.920 --> 0:28:20.280 cutting made me feel like time existed and that I existed. 0:28:20.840 --> 0:28:25.000 And I also used it to punish myself. I used 0:28:25.040 --> 0:28:30.000 it to reward myself, so I never kept it a secret. 0:28:30.240 --> 0:28:35.719 I would even intentionally wear a short sleeve shirt with 0:28:36.119 --> 0:28:38.360 a huge gash down my arm to see how long 0:28:38.400 --> 0:28:40.479 it would take for my mom to notice or comment 0:28:40.560 --> 0:28:45.000 on it. And the cutting really felt like a communication 0:28:45.200 --> 0:28:45.920 with my body. 0:28:46.640 --> 0:28:49.520 And your mother doesn't notice, your mother doesn't comment on 0:28:49.600 --> 0:28:55.080