Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. This episode contains
Speaker 1: discussion of sexual abuse, substance abuse, and self harm. Listener
Speaker 1: discretion is advised.
Speaker 2: I went to sleep that night, hoping unconsciousness would reverse
Speaker 2: the horrifying depletion that had taken place. But I awoke
Speaker 2: the next morning and fell breathless into a room I
Speaker 2: could barely recognize, a body I could barely feel, and
Speaker 2: a mind I could barely follow into perception. The unmistakable
Speaker 2: arrhythmia of the disconnect, as I had begun to call it,
Speaker 2: that had been disrupting my life was now louder, more insistent,
Speaker 2: A second heart that beat along with my original heart.
Speaker 2: Out of time, out of body.
Speaker 1: That's Alice Carrier, author of the recent memo Are Everything
Speaker 1: Nothing Someone. Alice's is a story of a childhood of
Speaker 1: profound extremes. Her mother, the painter Jennifer Bartlett, was one
Speaker 1: of the most famous and critically acclaimed artists of her time.
Speaker 1: Alice grew up in a world filled with access an
Speaker 1: enormous privilege. But access and privilege mean nothing to a child.
Speaker 1: A child wants only love, safety, boundaries, support, protection. A
Speaker 1: child wants to be seen. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this
Speaker 1: is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
Speaker 1: the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
Speaker 1: keep from ourselves. Tell me about the land of your childhood.
Speaker 1: You have two different landscapes. Do you remember anything about
Speaker 1: Paris before you were four?
Speaker 2: Yes? The Paris apartment is still in my life. It's
Speaker 2: a time capsule. It's been preserved exactly as it was
Speaker 2: when my parents lived there. So I do have a
Speaker 2: lot of memories there, and I get to inhabit those
Speaker 2: memories physically whenever I visit, which is really powerful because
Speaker 2: it was the only location where my parents were truly together.
Speaker 2: I'm grateful to have that place because every time I
Speaker 2: go there, it readheres me to myself in a really
Speaker 2: powerful way. And you know, these places, the houses that
Speaker 2: my mom created, were like characters, were like family members.
Speaker 2: They were just as grandiose and outlandish and sometimes sinister
Speaker 2: as the people who populated them.
Speaker 1: Me about one thirty four Charles Street, which was the
Speaker 1: backdrop to most of your childhood and teenage years.
Speaker 2: So one thirty four Charles Street started out as a
Speaker 2: place not intended to be lived in. It was a
Speaker 2: factory for manufacturing train parts. It was a seventeen thousand
Speaker 2: square foot building in downtown Manhattan in the West Village,
Speaker 2: and my mom purchased it and turned it into a fortress.
Speaker 2: She added an indoor swimming pool next to which she
Speaker 2: put her bed. She loved to sleep next to water.
Speaker 2: She was a California girl, lived by the ocean. She
Speaker 2: added two floors of gardens. She loved to be surrounded
Speaker 2: by things that were growing, because she always felt like
Speaker 2: she was killing things, that anything she touched would die.
Speaker 2: She loved to nurture her spaces. She loved to gardens.
Speaker 2: She loved to create these spectacular spaces. So that's I
Speaker 2: think where a lot of the intimacy that was lacking
Speaker 2: in most of her other aspects of her life. That's
Speaker 2: where it went. This massive building. She had two floors
Speaker 2: of studios where she painted from seven o'clock in the
Speaker 2: morning until seven o'clock at night, with a two hour
Speaker 2: and after day. And that's where we lived from when
Speaker 2: I was about five years old to when I was
Speaker 2: about twenty three. I remember the glowing exit signs, you know,
Speaker 2: all of these remnants from when it was a factory
Speaker 2: and had industrial The toilets would flush with this ferocity
Speaker 2: that would make you jump every time. It had its
Speaker 2: own rhythms and rules. The taps were marked with C
Speaker 2: and F, which is show and fought, which is hot
Speaker 2: and cold and French, so of course people would scald
Speaker 2: themselves when they tried to wash their hands. It was
Speaker 2: an extraordinary extra in a place. I was raised by
Speaker 2: a British nanny named Dennis. Her real name was Eileen
Speaker 2: Dennis Maynard, but we only ever called her nanny, and
Speaker 2: she was my constant. She read to me at night,
Speaker 2: she brought me to school. She was hired before I
Speaker 2: was born for her quote unquote ability to handle unconventional problems,
Speaker 2: which was some impressive self diagnosis and self awareness on
Speaker 2: my parents' part that they identified our problems as unconventional.
Speaker 2: So she lived in Charles Street. I just remember it
Speaker 2: being nanny and I on the second floor, and my
Speaker 2: mom up in the pool room, drinking her white wine,
Speaker 2: smoking her cigarettes and reading her books, and then summoning
Speaker 2: me on the intercom that bodilessly connected us through the
Speaker 2: seventeen thousand square feet so I would be in my
Speaker 2: room and sometimes the only contact I'd had with my
Speaker 2: mom throughout the day would be her disembodied voice calling
Speaker 2: me over the intercom, and then I would go to
Speaker 2: pick it up, and she would sometimes be really impatient
Speaker 2: to hang up, and then I couldn't call her back
Speaker 2: because she'd have her phone on privacy setting. So it
Speaker 2: was this sort of surreal way we moved through each
Speaker 2: other's lives.
Speaker 1: As a girl, as she tried to fall asleep at night,
Speaker 1: Alice would imagine the swimming pool directly above her bed.
Speaker 1: She would picture the ceiling caving and tons and tons
Speaker 1: of water crashing over her. It was both a reality
Speaker 1: there really was a massive swimming pool above her, and
Speaker 1: a metaphor for the vast and consuming chaos surrounding her.
Speaker 2: The word I used to describe my mother is the
Speaker 2: process by which mountains are made, origenic, and that four
Speaker 2: that's captured in the threat of tons of water collapsing
Speaker 2: over your head, my head, or the process by which
Speaker 2: mountains are made. That's what I think of when I
Speaker 2: think of my mom. And she was known for the
Speaker 2: scale of her work, the scale of her grandiosity, but
Speaker 2: in equal measure was the scale of her remoteness, of
Speaker 2: her fear, the threat of what she imagined had happened
Speaker 2: to her, loomed so large over her life and of
Speaker 2: course mine. I think of natural forces that are so monumental,
Speaker 2: they change the landscape, they're so massive, and I think
Speaker 2: that metaphor extends to the way she lived her life
Speaker 2: to She was also she was very funny. She was
Speaker 2: a ravenous reader. She had these sort of enormous appetites.
Speaker 2: She loved good food, she loved good boothe she loved
Speaker 2: to smoke, she loved good books, she loved expensive clothing.
Speaker 2: She loved having confrontational conversations. She was very glamorous. My
Speaker 2: father was this German film star and intellectual. He had
Speaker 2: grown up in a mental institution in Germany, so you
Speaker 2: know a very gothic tale. His babysitters were the patients
Speaker 2: of a hospital at which his father, a psychiatrist, worked,
Speaker 2: and one of them had attempted to burn her two
Speaker 2: children alive. One of them believed that God was transforming
Speaker 2: him into a woman so he could have a child
Speaker 2: with him. So my father lived in these mental institutions,
Speaker 2: and dad experience created this porousness of boundaries that extended
Speaker 2: throughout my life. He couldn't really tell who was sick
Speaker 2: and who was saying what the difference between those two
Speaker 2: things was. And after that experience he never really found
Speaker 2: anything in human nature strange. Then he was discovered at
Speaker 2: the age of thirteen by a German film director and
Speaker 2: started making movies, and then he moved to Paris in
Speaker 2: his twenties, where he fell in with the Gille de
Speaker 2: Laus crowd. He was a famous philosopher who was known
Speaker 2: for his rather anarcic thinking, and my father was his potage.
Speaker 2: So he started to espouse these pretty radical theories and
Speaker 2: this approach to life as a grand experiment. And he
Speaker 2: met my mother, I think the first week he moved
Speaker 2: to New York and they were at a dinner party
Speaker 2: together and she was chainsmoking cigarettes and eating smoked salmon,
Speaker 2: and he approached her and she was with another man
Speaker 2: named Matthew. His name is matt and he announced at
Speaker 2: the table, who's it going to be? Which Matthew are
Speaker 2: you going to take home him or me? And she
Speaker 2: picked him, so that's how they met. They moved to
Speaker 2: Paris when I was born, and he spent his time
Speaker 2: making films, playing speed chess and doing cocaine, and my
Speaker 2: mom would just work and drink and to hear him
Speaker 2: categorize it. She was completely in her own world. She
Speaker 2: dictated all the rules, and he felt kind of like
Speaker 2: a puppy dog, and I think he felt rather unmoored. So,
Speaker 2: in keeping with the self mythologizing tactic of my family,
Speaker 2: he made an autobiographical film about a pianist, a German
Speaker 2: pianist married to a successful American architect who is addicted
Speaker 2: to cocaine and speed chess and ruins his life. So
Speaker 2: he kind of used art, I think, as an act
Speaker 2: of defiance, but also as a prophylactic, which I found
Speaker 2: very interesting. And it's exactly how my mom negotiated what
Speaker 2: had happened to her and her life. So they had
Speaker 2: a very intense relationship. It started out as sort of
Speaker 2: always being in crisis in the sense, and then he
Speaker 2: in this movie, he cast the woman he was having
Speaker 2: an affair with as the woman the main character has
Speaker 2: an affair in the film. My mom was doing the
Speaker 2: costumes and she had to dress his mistress in the
Speaker 2: movie and in real life. So this kind of musing
Speaker 2: life in an almost careless, reckless, callous way in the
Speaker 2: service always of art and intellectualizing the softest, most delicate
Speaker 2: parts of ourselves was an established pattern in my family.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. Alice's mother begins to see a
Speaker 1: renowned psychiatrist named doctor Viola Bernard. At first, she discusses
Speaker 1: relatively mundane issues, but doctor Bernard begins introducing other methods,
Speaker 1: including hypnosis, as a way of probing deeper into her
Speaker 1: psyche for what might be buried there. Eventually, Alice's mother
Speaker 1: comes away from therapy with the belief that she has
Speaker 1: recovered memories from her childhood that reveal that she'd been
Speaker 1: used in a Satanic sex cult.
Speaker 2: I discovered her story when I was eleven years old,
Speaker 2: and my father had given me the mission of looking
Speaker 2: through my mom's things to find out who was being
Speaker 2: called as a witness in their very acrimonious divorce that
Speaker 2: lasted seven years. And I was snooping her stuff and
Speaker 2: I found these journals and I read them, and one
Speaker 2: of the entries described how she was giving my father
Speaker 2: a blowjob and had a flashback, and that the flashback
Speaker 2: was of her on a boat having her head held
Speaker 2: underwater while she vomited while a man said, you're feeding
Speaker 2: the fishes. And I confronted her about what I had found.
Speaker 2: She was on her way from the studio up to
Speaker 2: the pool room where she was going to take her nap,
Speaker 2: and she sat in my room and very matter of
Speaker 2: factly told me the following story. She told me that
Speaker 2: a married couple, Bertie and Russell, who were friends of
Speaker 2: the family, had used her and her one and a
Speaker 2: half year old sibling in a sex cult. That they
Speaker 2: recruited the children of all of the maids in the neighborhood,
Speaker 2: and you then and ritualize sex games. And that she
Speaker 2: had witnessed the murder of a seven year old black
Speaker 2: boy that had murdered him through erotic asphyxiation and had
Speaker 2: made my mother bury the body on the beach and
Speaker 2: told her never to tell or she would go to
Speaker 2: prison forever. And she told me this, I could detect
Speaker 2: no emotion. She didn't tell me how she felt about it.
Speaker 2: She didn't ask me how I felt. It was the
Speaker 2: equivalent of listening to an audiobook, one of the many
Speaker 2: audiobooks that I listened to all of the time. And
Speaker 2: then she left to take her nap, leaving me wondering
Speaker 2: how to spell erotic asshixiation and picturing my dad getting
Speaker 2: a blowjob. I would later find out that she was
Speaker 2: most likely a victim of the Satanic panic, which was
Speaker 2: a moral hysteria that swept the nation in the eighties
Speaker 2: and nineties, where one aspect of it was that overzelle
Speaker 2: therapists and psychiatrists would implant false memories of ritualized sexual
Speaker 2: abuse and murder into their patients. I don't think it
Speaker 2: was nefarious. It was motivated by a genuine desire to
Speaker 2: help people. I think that trauma was starting to be
Speaker 2: understood and credence was starting to be given to let's say,
Speaker 2: trauma beyond the trauma of war or you know, for instance,
Speaker 2: sexual trauma. So I think there was a genuine desire
Speaker 2: to help people and to learn and be curious about
Speaker 2: very real emotion states of being. The way that trauma
Speaker 2: reverberates through a life is very complicated. So I struggle
Speaker 2: with speculating what these doctors were thinking. But maybe it's
Speaker 2: the allure of a story. But until the end of
Speaker 2: her life, she believed with her whole heart that this
Speaker 2: had happened, and because of that, she really felt that
Speaker 2: she would do irreparable harm to me that I think
Speaker 2: if she showed affection or tried to be tender or
Speaker 2: intimate with me, it would somehow damage me as irrevocably
Speaker 2: as she had been damaged. So in a way, her
Speaker 2: remoteness was an act of tremendous love. But that distortion
Speaker 2: came from this imaginary secret that her mind had allegedly
Speaker 2: been keeping from herself. From her I think my mom
Speaker 2: found having this outrageous story it excused the fact that
Speaker 2: she couldn't move beyond it. Once the villain is Satan,
Speaker 2: then you know, I think that can't be topped. She
Speaker 2: also created massive oil paintings in response to these recovered memories.
Speaker 2: Her reaction was to make one hundred and eight versions
Speaker 2: of these scenes of abuse. So in her paintings, there's
Speaker 2: a naked person wielding an axe, and they were hanging
Speaker 2: in the hallways of my home. So as she went
Speaker 2: off to take her nap and she left me behind
Speaker 2: to kind of process everything she had told me, I
Speaker 2: wandered out into the hallway and just stared at these
Speaker 2: scenes of abuse. And I would get very confused because
Speaker 2: I started not knowing where I ended and she began.
Speaker 2: I started getting confused about what had happened to whom,
Speaker 2: and I almost believed that what she had endured had
Speaker 2: also happened to me, which made the confusing things that
Speaker 2: were happening in my life almost secondary, and they kind
Speaker 2: of evaporated and des and were supplanted by these extreme
Speaker 2: scenes that she had fabricated. So it's another example of
Speaker 2: how my parents turned their damage into beautiful stories. And
Speaker 2: I learned at a young age that what we experienced
Speaker 2: and how we felt about those experiences were meant to
Speaker 2: be thought about and spectated.
Speaker 1: Part of the spectacle is the six year custody battle
Speaker 1: that follows Alice's parents divorce. For some of this time,
Speaker 1: Alice's father remains living at one three four Charles Street,
Speaker 1: and eventually he moves out. As Alice moves between her parents'
Speaker 1: two worlds, her own world is fraught and fractured as
Speaker 1: she oscillates between slippery landscapes, one where her relationship with
Speaker 1: her father is exceedingly blurry and without boundaries, and the
Speaker 1: other in the shadowy corners of her mother's presence. With
Speaker 1: the huge and notable exception of Nanny, there isn't an
Speaker 1: adult in Alice's life who isn't somehow spiraling.
Speaker 2: So my father treated parenthood as a radical experiment in
Speaker 2: the annihilation of boundaries. He was also during the divorce
Speaker 2: very lonely, very desperate, So that combination resulted in this
Speaker 2: erosion of boundaries and this confusion of roles where I
Speaker 2: didn't know what or who I was to him. I
Speaker 2: didn't know if I was his daughter, his wife, his mother,
Speaker 2: his confidant, his collaborator, and I'm just going back to
Speaker 2: Charles Street. There were no locks on the doors. There
Speaker 2: were no locks emotionally either. When I'm seven years old,
Speaker 2: he told that one of his girlfriends could only orgasm
Speaker 2: on her own with a showerhead. And later on he
Speaker 2: would take my underwear with him on trips to remember
Speaker 2: me by he would ask the premiere pimp of Hamburg
Speaker 2: how much he would charge for me. He had this
Speaker 2: idea to revolutionize the world of cinema by starring in
Speaker 2: the first film to star a father and daughter in
Speaker 2: the role of the lovers and have them have a
Speaker 2: sex scene. And he presented this idea to me as
Speaker 2: if we were going to do that together. So there
Speaker 2: was repeatedly this sense that the things that should have
Speaker 2: remained secret, or at least the things that should have
Speaker 2: been treated with the delicacy or the apprehension, or the
Speaker 2: reverence or the protectiveness of a secret, not they were shared.
Speaker 2: So it was this diffusion of roles and boundaries that
Speaker 2: led to this profound diffusion of identity for me. My
Speaker 2: father was also He loved to play games. He taught
Speaker 2: me about philosophy, he taught me about history, He made
Speaker 2: up stories, he told me about Greek mythology. He was
Speaker 2: very interactive, and that contrasted with my mother, who couldn't
Speaker 2: play games with me because, according to her, she was
Speaker 2: too competitive. So my father rushed in to fill this vacuum.
Speaker 2: So this sense of excitement and almost titillation from parental
Speaker 2: engagement got very confused and tumbled around with the salacious
Speaker 2: tamera of the information he was sharing with me. So
Speaker 2: it was hard to differentiate or to even notice that
Speaker 2: some that shouldn't be shared, something that should have been
Speaker 2: kept to himself, was being shared. There was a transmission
Speaker 2: that was happening that shouldn't have happened, but I didn't notice.
Speaker 2: I thought it was normal. And I also thought that
Speaker 2: it was almost like a calling that I had to
Speaker 2: be the perfect confidant. I had to be someone who
Speaker 2: could be the receptacle for my mother's story about burying
Speaker 2: a child on the beach, or the sexual exploits of
Speaker 2: my father.
Speaker 1: Herein we have the difference between secrecy and privacy between
Speaker 1: parents and children. There certainly can be secrets that are destructive,
Speaker 1: and we spend a lot of time on this show
Speaker 1: talking about those kinds of secrets. But here are matters
Speaker 1: that have to do with two adults, internal lives. No
Speaker 1: one's business, most certainly not their child. What happens when
Speaker 1: there are no boundaries, no can, no edges. Secrets are
Speaker 1: about borders and edges, but in Alice's family there are none.
Speaker 2: So where is a secret when you need one? This
Speaker 2: undifferentiated quality was unbelievably destructive, and I think also another
Speaker 2: thing that was obscured or concealed were the basic sort
Speaker 2: of physics of living. There was this one incident where
Speaker 2: I had seven pet rats. My father gave me a
Speaker 2: pet rat and it was pregnant and it had a
Speaker 2: bunch of babies. So I had seven pet rats, and
Speaker 2: he sat on one accidentally and it died. But he
Speaker 2: assured me he could bring it back to life by
Speaker 2: putting it in the freezer next to the pop tarts,
Speaker 2: and then when it didn't come back to life, he
Speaker 2: promised me that it would reanimate if you just put
Speaker 2: it on the heater. And that's what it was like
Speaker 2: being the child of my parents, This denial of reality,
Speaker 2: this belief that the power of our minds could shape
Speaker 2: reality and could defy even the laws of death. So
Speaker 2: it's sort of this obfuscation of the rules and the
Speaker 2: borders define reality, and it's almost like reality was its
Speaker 2: own secret that we were all trying to We didn't
Speaker 2: want to know. That's the secret we were keeping from ourselves,
Speaker 2: that we were just a couple of human beings moving
Speaker 2: through the world and moving through time, but we wanted
Speaker 2: to deny that as long as we could.
Speaker 1: Alice's behavior begins to feed into this notion of defying
Speaker 1: the laws of death. She finds herself exiting reality, secreting herself,
Speaker 1: as it were, by cutting and self harming at a
Speaker 1: very young age. Such practices reinforce the fragmentation she feels
Speaker 1: up against the backdrop of her fragmented family life. At
Speaker 1: some point, reality is obstructed even further when Alice begins
Speaker 1: to believe that surely everyone must live like this with
Speaker 1: so much pain, and secrecy. How could they not? And
Speaker 1: yet not all families do. Not all seven year old
Speaker 1: girls cut themselves while also trying to fulfill all the
Speaker 1: basic milestones of growing up. And even when Alice tries
Speaker 1: to unsecret herself and show her mom how she's been
Speaker 1: hurting herself, her mom's reply is not one of distress,
Speaker 1: but one of unsettling advice to use makeup to cover
Speaker 1: the scars.
Speaker 2: So in one three fourth trial street, my mom upstairs
Speaker 2: drinking and reading her downstairs painting. I'm by myself, listening
Speaker 2: to audiobooks constantly, NonStop stories, other people's stories, and I'm
Speaker 2: also thinking about myself and the third person. So I
Speaker 2: would walk down the street and I would say, she
Speaker 2: is walking down the street, the rainfalls on her jacket,
Speaker 2: turning myself into a story, narrating myself into existence, turning
Speaker 2: myself into a character. And those were the first signs
Speaker 2: of me distancing from myself, this sort of abstraction that
Speaker 2: would get more and more visceral. And then I started
Speaker 2: cutting when I was seven years old, and I don't
Speaker 2: know how I knew to do it. It was in
Speaker 2: a moment where I was unbelievably overwhelmed I couldn't tell
Speaker 2: the difference between anger and sadness. I couldn't safely fit
Speaker 2: any of those emotions inside of me, so I cut.
Speaker 2: It was sort of this orienting horizon that kind of
Speaker 2: folded me into these clean origami lines. Just made me
Speaker 2: feel better, and it worked, and I continued to do
Speaker 2: that through adolescence, and in adolescence I developed what I'd
Speaker 2: later learned was a dissociative just order called depersonalization derealization.
Speaker 2: I couldn't recognize my face in the mirror. I didn't
Speaker 2: know where my voice was coming from. I felt no
Speaker 2: connection to my body, my feelings, my history. I was
Speaker 2: convinced I didn't exist. It was like my identity was
Speaker 2: an alka seltzer tab dipped in water and it had
Speaker 2: sort of dissolved into the unnameable, unending nothingness. It was
Speaker 2: the most terrifying thing I'd ever experienced, and I would
Speaker 2: cut and then later burn, first of all to mark
Speaker 2: time because time stopped making sense, because every single moment
Speaker 2: felt like the first moment in history. But also there
Speaker 2: was this perpetual sense of deja vu. So I had
Speaker 2: no sense of consequences or like I was a body
Speaker 2: moving through time, So every time I cut, it reinstated causality.
Speaker 2: I would cut, and the next day I would heal,
Speaker 2: and then the next day I would heal more. So
Speaker 2: it gave me this sense that one I had a body,
Speaker 2: because I really didn't think I had a body. I
Speaker 2: was outside of myself watching myself, but that thing that
Speaker 2: was outside was also outside of itself, watching itself. So
Speaker 2: cutting made me feel like time existed and that I existed.
Speaker 2: And I also used it to punish myself. I used
Speaker 2: it to reward myself, so I never kept it a secret.
Speaker 2: I would even intentionally wear a short sleeve shirt with
Speaker 2: a huge gash down my arm to see how long
Speaker 2: it would take for my mom to notice or comment
Speaker 2: on it. And the cutting really felt like a communication
Speaker 2: with my body.
Speaker 1: And your mother doesn't notice, your mother doesn't comment on
Speaker 1: it only reinforces your feeling of not being real because
Speaker 1: you're not being seen right exactly.
Speaker 2: And also I think the cutting was also a way
Speaker 2: to try and get my body to reveal its secrets
Speaker 2: to me. And as I said before, the things that
Speaker 2: were kept secret from us were reality consequences, and that
Speaker 2: was obscured by dissociation. Dissociation was like I was being
Speaker 2: kept secret from myself because I could no longer access
Speaker 2: who I was, how I felt that view of myself
Speaker 2: was completely obscured. So by cutting, it was a revelatory act,
Speaker 2: or an attempt at revelation, an attempt to sort of
Speaker 2: dig myself out of myself.
Speaker 1: It works until it doesn't. Alice valiantly tries to hit
Speaker 1: all the marks, check all the boxes. She goes on
Speaker 1: college tours. She begins college at Vassar, but once there
Speaker 1: she falls apart in a deeper way. The unreality really
Speaker 1: takes hold, and she reaches a point where she can't
Speaker 1: stop cutting.
Speaker 2: I admitted myself to the hospital, and I was there
Speaker 2: for one week, and I would have these terrifying dissociative episodes.
Speaker 2: One of them found me hiding under the sink, banging
Speaker 2: my head against the wall, screaming my name and address
Speaker 2: over and over again, trying to remind myself at least
Speaker 2: of the semantic information of who I was. And it
Speaker 2: ended by me just screaming my own name over and
Speaker 2: over again. So the nurse comes in or the tech
Speaker 2: comes in and says, what's happening or frightening on the
Speaker 2: other patients, and I told her what I was experiencing,
Speaker 2: and dissociation is notoriously difficult to describe, which is also
Speaker 2: why it felt so alienating, Because I had been seeing
Speaker 2: a therapist, and the more I described what I was experiencing,
Speaker 2: the more she thought I was schizophrenic. The more ineffective
Speaker 2: the treatment became, the therapy became. So I tell this
Speaker 2: nurse what I'm experiencing, and she very casually says, oh,
Speaker 2: it sounds like you're associating. And I had never heard
Speaker 2: that word before, and I immediately did all the research
Speaker 2: I could, and I started reading the scant literature about it,
Speaker 2: which was The Passion according to gh by Clarice the Specter.
Speaker 2: Many people call it a mystical book, but it's actually
Speaker 2: a very realistic rendering of the dissociative experience. It's just
Speaker 2: this woman thinking about her own thinking, thinking about killing
Speaker 2: a cockroach, and then Saltla's Nausea, Octavia Butler's short story
Speaker 2: about a dissociative disorder in the context of speculative fiction.
Speaker 2: So I read everything I could, and having that word
Speaker 2: for one second made me feel like I wasn't falling
Speaker 2: through infinite space.
Speaker 1: So that was a turning point for me, and he
Speaker 1: was essentially had to diagnose yourself, the nurse said the word.
Speaker 1: But then there you are valiantly trying to like, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of do your research, and you know, name what's
Speaker 1: going on with you, because the people who are treating
Speaker 1: you aren't getting it right.
Speaker 2: And all of the research that I'm turning to is fiction, right,
Speaker 2: you know, it's not even a medical text. It's just
Speaker 2: the art based on the pathology.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 1: Alice stays on the psych word for a week, but
Speaker 1: when she returns home, the cutting resumes and only grows worse.
Speaker 1: One night, Nanny walks in on her cutting. Nanny witnesses
Speaker 1: Alice in a way she's never been witnessed before, in
Speaker 1: a way that she's wanted for her pain to be seen, known, understood.
Speaker 2: She refuses to leave me alone, and she sits with
Speaker 2: me all night. And by the time I wake up,
Speaker 2: my cutting kit the razor blades that i'd pried, you know,
Speaker 2: the blades i'd pried out of shaving razors, my lighter,
Speaker 2: my Swiss army knife. My dad had given me. The
Speaker 2: blades of exact ownives from my mom's studio. All of
Speaker 2: that had been removed. And after that experience, I'm floating
Speaker 2: around one through before Charles Street, I have no purpose
Speaker 2: I'm writing. I had known since I was five years
Speaker 2: old that I wanted to be a writer, and I
Speaker 2: was writing all the time. But the two jobs I
Speaker 2: looked up were stripping jobs or writing death row convicts.
Speaker 2: And for some reason, I thought the only things I
Speaker 2: was qualified to do was to essentially entertain dying men,
Speaker 2: whether you know, on a semen's like sofa or in
Speaker 2: a prison cell. So I was looking for this specialness
Speaker 2: that I could only access through it seemed pathology. And
Speaker 2: this was the beginning of kind of my career as
Speaker 2: a patient, as a professional sick person, as a virtuosic
Speaker 2: infirm mentally infirmed like a virtuosic patient. So this was
Speaker 2: really the beginning where I started constructing what little identity
Speaker 2: I had around my madness. I was reading all of
Speaker 2: this fiction about my disorder, and I ended up taking
Speaker 2: my dead uncle's hydromorphone pills, drinking vodka, and cutting a
Speaker 2: in my arm four times, and I almost killed myself
Speaker 2: in three different ways, and my psychiatrist at the time,
Speaker 2: said that she would convince them to release me if
Speaker 2: I agreed to admit myself to a residential treatment center
Speaker 2: called Austin Riggs in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. And Austin Riggs had
Speaker 2: this illustrious pedigree. Judy Garland had had installed a pink
Speaker 2: sink in her room. James Taylor had written fire and
Speaker 2: rain while he was there, so I agreed. I showed
Speaker 2: up there with my mom and it was this bizarre place.
Speaker 2: It was this white mansion in the middle of Stockbridge,
Speaker 2: Massachusetts that was sort of its glory was faded, and
Speaker 2: it was a bunch of really rich people. The recommended
Speaker 2: stay was indefinite, or at least until your money ran out,
Speaker 2: and there were no rules. There was a bridge full
Speaker 2: of smoothies and yogurts, and we had fireplaces in our room,
Speaker 2: and there were no consequences. The only requirement, which was
Speaker 2: not even a requirement, was to sit in community meeting
Speaker 2: and talk about whatever conflicts or whatever, even illegal behavior happened.
Speaker 2: And while I was there, I one evening was in
Speaker 2: the bathroom and I was wiping myself and I thought, wait,
Speaker 2: what's happening down there? And I pulled my hand away
Speaker 2: to reveal a very long, still alive worm. And I
Speaker 2: walked to the sink and I very neatly folded it
Speaker 2: into a paper towel and put it into my pocket.
Speaker 2: I checked my reflection in the mirror, and I walked
Speaker 2: to the nurses station. They didn't believe me, so I
Speaker 2: withdrew it from my pocket and laid it on the
Speaker 2: partition between us and unwrapped it and presented them with
Speaker 2: my worm and asked to go to the hospital. And
Speaker 2: they said, we've never seen anything like this before, but
Speaker 2: this is not an emergency. And it was this extraordinary
Speaker 2: moment where it was like being told a secret. It
Speaker 2: was a secret my body was keeping for me, and
Speaker 2: that secret was that I had a body, that there
Speaker 2: was something alive in me still, even though I thought
Speaker 2: I was dead or I thought there was no difference
Speaker 2: between me and name any inanimate object around you. And
Speaker 2: it was this moment of corporeal physical crisis that for
Speaker 2: a second made me feel alive and made me feel
Speaker 2: more sane than I had ever felt. So that was
Speaker 2: the stand up moment at Riggs, where, amongst all of
Speaker 2: this kind of just hanging out, this introspective luxury, this
Speaker 2: kind of glorious, gluttonous psychological lethargy. Suddenly my body is
Speaker 2: doing these very real things. Secrets are coming out of it,
Speaker 2: provable secrets that I can literally say, Look, something isn't right. Look,
Speaker 2: and it just happened to be in the shape of
Speaker 2: a six inch worm.
Speaker 1: It's at RIGS where you first encounter the term depersonalization. Yes,
Speaker 1: and again you look it up and one of the
Speaker 1: things that you learn is that it's a condition brought
Speaker 1: on by trauma.
Speaker 2: Right, But at that point I was convinced that I
Speaker 2: was having a reaction to my mom's traumatic history, and
Speaker 2: I sort of denied the idea that anything traumatic had
Speaker 2: ever happened to me. So basically, I get out of
Speaker 2: BRIGS and they refer me to a psychopharmacologist, who, upon
Speaker 2: meeting me for forty five minutes, sends me home with
Speaker 2: ninety adderall, which is a stimulant for add and ninety klonipin,
Speaker 2: which is a highly addictive anti anxiety medication similar to
Speaker 2: xanax vallium, And the only instruction he gives me is
Speaker 2: adderall wears off every four hours and take the clonipin
Speaker 2: whenever you're feeling anxious. Or to go to sleep. I
Speaker 2: take this adderall and within forty five minutes, my heart
Speaker 2: is pounding, I'm sweating through my shirt, telling stories about
Speaker 2: my childhood and chain smoking cigarettes. And then you know,
Speaker 2: a bit anxious too. So I'm taking the klonipin, which
Speaker 2: I can't even feel because I'm on so much adderall
Speaker 2: because I was instructed. It wears off every four hours.
Speaker 2: So this medication completely hijacks my personality, and the combination
Speaker 2: of this medication is causing these side effects that mimic
Speaker 2: other disorders. So I gradually get diagnosed with new disorders
Speaker 2: that require more medication. So in the span of three years,
Speaker 2: I'm on eight different medications, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, axiolytics, stimulants,
Speaker 2: and of course other medication who treat the side effects
Speaker 2: of all of the medication, So whether it's a thyroid medication,
Speaker 2: whether it's a weight loss medication, because the side effects
Speaker 2: are extreme. And I'm also starting to learn that feelings
Speaker 2: are pathologies that need to be medicated away. There is
Speaker 2: no such thing as joy, there is only hypomania. There
Speaker 2: is no such thing as sadness, there is only clinical depression.
Speaker 2: And I had switched psychopharmacologists, and I had found another
Speaker 2: one who had just read my file and continued to
Speaker 2: prescribe more and more medications. And this psychopharmacologist assured me
Speaker 2: that this trial and error was how it was supposed
Speaker 2: to go, and that I'd need to be on medication
Speaker 2: the rest of my life. And it was so casual,
Speaker 2: this prescribing that I even would be able to leave
Speaker 2: a message on his voicemail requesting, let's say lithium, and
Speaker 2: the next day a prescription would be called in for me.
Speaker 2: So I truly believe that I was basically like an
Speaker 2: appliance or a machine that ran on pharmaceuticals, and any
Speaker 2: discomfort I had, I thought was just my stupid, dumb body,
Speaker 2: and not this barrage of medication. So it was again
Speaker 2: this kind of secret. The medication obscured who I was,
Speaker 2: and who I was sort of became very like a
Speaker 2: secret that I would only hear whispers of because I
Speaker 2: was so hostile. I was the completely different person than
Speaker 2: I had been before on these medications. In two thousand
Speaker 2: and nine, the medications trigger a psychotic break, and I
Speaker 2: believed I had delusions of persecution. I had delusions of surveillance.
Speaker 2: I thought people were following me. I thought I had
Speaker 2: been hacked. I thought people were breaking into my apartment,
Speaker 2: chloroforming me and gang raping me. In my sleep, I
Speaker 2: would tape bed sheets to my windows so people couldn't
Speaker 2: surveil me. I would get in a cab and then
Speaker 2: realize that that cab had been put there by these invisible,
Speaker 2: unknowable assailants to track me, and I would just get
Speaker 2: out of the cab and run through the streets.
Speaker 1: So this is sounding awfully like your mother's quote unquote
Speaker 1: recovered memories.
Speaker 2: Exactly right. So basically, my life became this war. I
Speaker 2: was having to defend myself against these invisible forces, and
Speaker 2: as horrifying as it was, it gave me this bizarre
Speaker 2: sense of purpose and significance, because if I'm someone who's
Speaker 2: being followed and being persecuted in this way, I must
Speaker 2: be important, I must be special, and I have a calling.
Speaker 2: That calling is to defend myself. So, in this strange way,
Speaker 2: this delusion became the only true thing in my life,
Speaker 2: and no one else believed for me. The psychosis lasted
Speaker 2: a year.
Speaker 1: How old were you?
Speaker 2: I was twenty three, and I finally went to my psychopharmacologist,
Speaker 2: and he said, take these three extra medications or I'm
Speaker 2: going to send you to a lockdoord. But he kept
Speaker 2: me on all the other medications too, and the new
Speaker 2: medications made my hair fall out, they made my hands
Speaker 2: go numb. I gained forty or fifty pounds in a
Speaker 2: couple of months, and again I thought it was just
Speaker 2: my stupid mind and body. So I agreed to go
Speaker 2: to a treatment center, but I was admitted into a
Speaker 2: trauma group, where, on the one hand, I could accurately
Speaker 2: identify the transgressions that had been taken place, but it
Speaker 2: went too far. I had this over zealous counselor who
Speaker 2: convinced me that my mind was keeping secrets from me
Speaker 2: and that much more had happened and I just wasn't remembering.
Speaker 2: And she told me that she took a long time
Speaker 2: to get me to say the words I was molested
Speaker 2: by my father, So she convinced me never to talk
Speaker 2: to him again and never to see him again. And
Speaker 2: I was so desperate, like my mother, for something big
Speaker 2: and dramatic, to explain everything, to exonerate me, to make
Speaker 2: me not feel like such a fuck up, that I
Speaker 2: welcomed the simplicity and the straightforwardness of that story, and
Speaker 2: I made it my new identity. And I didn't talk
Speaker 2: to my father for twelve years.
Speaker 1: Twelve years. A lot happens in those twelve years. Alice
Speaker 1: reconnects with a man named Gregory, who she had met earlier.
Speaker 1: They'd had a tenuous but beautiful relationship early on, but
Speaker 1: neither had been to put it mildly ready. Each had
Speaker 1: been in the throes of their own addiction and despair.
Speaker 1: But when they find each other again, they're each in
Speaker 1: a very different place. Gregory is extraordinarily optimistic and compassionate.
Speaker 1: He supports Alice through myriad stages of pain and self discovery.
Speaker 1: He's there for her when her mother develops dementia, then
Speaker 1: Nanny starts to decline, then Nanny dies. Alice and Gregory
Speaker 1: moved to Nashville, far from one three to four Charles Street,
Speaker 1: far from the city that held so many difficult memories
Speaker 1: for them both. But Alice can't outrun her history. She
Speaker 1: still struggles with all the medication she's on, and at
Speaker 1: one point, the clinical flux, paired with all that's gone
Speaker 1: on in her life, leads to a massive dissociative break
Speaker 1: as Alice calls it the most gone she's ever been.
Speaker 2: The touchstones of my life are not there anymore. My
Speaker 2: mother has dementia. She no longer houses our history. Nanny
Speaker 2: is dead. She was the holder of all of our memories.
Speaker 2: She was the witness. The only person left is my father.
Speaker 2: So in order to build myself from the raw materials
Speaker 2: of my life, I decide I'm going to confront him,
Speaker 2: and Gregory and I decide to go to Paris. We
Speaker 2: have no idea what to expect. Is he going to
Speaker 2: be furious at me? Is he going to deny everything
Speaker 2: I couldn't live with no one inside? And we arrive,
Speaker 2: Gregory announces rules no drinking, which is directed at my dad.
Speaker 2: If anybody wants to stop at any time, you can.
Speaker 2: The first person presents their version of events for half
Speaker 2: an hour with no interruption, then the other person can respond.
Speaker 2: And then he said, I will be outside monitoring for
Speaker 2: signs of distress, and I will come in if I
Speaker 2: hear yelling. So I tell my dad every single incident
Speaker 2: where I felt violated, whether it was him organizing naked
Speaker 2: photos of me on a horse galloping through the Germany toplet, Yes,
Speaker 2: while I was quote unquote still a lolida before I
Speaker 2: turned eighteen, or whether it was the pimp. I told
Speaker 2: him everything, and he responded with such humility, with such shame.
Speaker 2: He didn't deny any of it, he didn't remember some
Speaker 2: of it, but he believed me. He apologized. He not
Speaker 2: only apologized, but I watched him embody my experiences and
Speaker 2: what I was telling him in a way that was
Speaker 2: so powerful. He understood and he felt totally awful, and
Speaker 2: he embraced, for lack of a better word, my reality.
Speaker 2: And that was a plot twist I was not expecting,
Speaker 2: and I allowed him to share his version of events,
Speaker 2: and I conceded places where maybe I had misunderstood, or
Speaker 2: maybe it was a collaborative effort to construct this new
Speaker 2: reality that we could both inhabit, both being wholly ourselves
Speaker 2: and belonging wholly to ourselves. And what was so special
Speaker 2: was that it was exactly because we could say anything
Speaker 2: to each other, that we could say everything we needed to.
Speaker 2: It was exactly the oversharing, the intellectualizing that had caused
Speaker 2: so much harm was exactly what allowed us to heal together.
Speaker 1: That's really beautiful. I'm very touched by your incredible eloquence
Speaker 1: about things that can have the opposite effect on people.
Speaker 2: What I realized was, you know, the dissociation, the thing
Speaker 2: that had almost killed me, was what allowed me to
Speaker 2: embody his truth and understand that so many things could
Speaker 2: be true at the same time. And that's what inevitably
Speaker 2: gave me back my family and gave me back to myself.
Speaker 2: And I think, you know, maybe things he did were
Speaker 2: some of them were inexcusable, but I think that it's
Speaker 2: not a zero sum game. Exercising empathy for him only
Speaker 2: fortifies the empathy I feel for myself. So believing in
Speaker 2: him and believing that he was a damaged person who
Speaker 2: tried his best doesn't diminish what I experienced. It was
Speaker 2: just a powerful, a powerful exchange.
Speaker 1: Here's Alice reading one last passage from her magnificent memoir
Speaker 1: Everything Nothing Someone. In this scene, Alice is in effect
Speaker 1: saying goodbye to her brilliant, complicated force of a mother,
Speaker 1: scattering her ashes in the Atlantic Ocean.
Speaker 2: The clouds split open, the gaudy guts of a shamelessly
Speaker 2: showy sunset, spilling across the horizon. A thick golden light
Speaker 2: spread over our faces, which were all turned toward the
Speaker 2: sun's extravagance sinking. It looked exactly like an endless, excessive
Speaker 2: oil painting. It looked, in its extreme, bragging beauty, almost insolent.
Speaker 2: I recognized it. Gregory tears and light in his eyes, said,
Speaker 2: Jennifer looks good up there. We laughed. I stripped down
Speaker 2: to my swimsuit and I lowered myself into the Atlantic.
Speaker 2: I swam out, holding my mother's ashes aloft. We were
Speaker 2: as far out as we could go. I didn't want
Speaker 2: to leave her, but she needed to be alone.
Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zaccur is
Speaker 1: the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
Speaker 1: If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
Speaker 1: please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
Speaker 1: on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
Speaker 1: eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
Speaker 1: find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
Speaker 1: like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
Speaker 1: check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio.