Killing Buddha - An Account of Surviving Abuse and Therapy

By Dagmar M.

Mother was a paranoid schizophrenic and an abusive parent who told me she wished I’d never been born. She killed herself when I was 15, leaving a message that she still rejected me. My father sent me to several psychiatrists after that but I could trust nobody -- except Dr. Ian Kent. He wasn’t smooth like the others. He didn’t try to finesse me. For years I trusted his guidance but I went to the brink of despair while in his care. Finally I left. Doctors, lawyers, professors and business executives followed him like a guru; I believed the failure was mine. Not until I read his book did I realize that maybe I wasn’t the crazy one. Killing Buddha is about therapy bleeding into cultism, crossing the line unnoticed. It’s about devastation and survival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781291752281

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Killing Buddha - An Account of Surviving Abuse and Therapy

Killing Buddha - An Account of Surviving Abuse and Therapy

Killing Buddha - An Account of Surviving Abuse and Therapy

by Dagmar M.

Copyright © 2014 Dagmar M.

Published 2014 by Dagmar M.

ISBN: 978-1-291-75228-1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This book is about a leader and follower and about cultism. It’s about a psychiatrist who made his own rules, who wanted to bring spiritual enlightenment to people. It’s about a patient who came to him as a child of an abusive parent and who trusted him through half her life. More than once while in his care she fell into suicidal despair. Eventually she saw that the doctor was not curing her despair. He was the cause of it.

The problem is this: we don’t know the depth and the immensity of the mind. You can read about it, you can read the modern psychologists, or the ancient teachers who have talked about it - distrust them because it is you yourself who have to find out, not according to somebody else.

J. Krishnamurti,[1]

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[1]The Awakening of Intelligence, New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London, Harper & Row, Publishers, p. 192.

CHAPTER 1

Conventional therapy deals with problems that incapacitate people from leading a normal life, and doctor and patient are satisfied when the latter can live his life like everyone around him. From the point of view of this book, such normal life is also sickness, and perhaps all the more dangerous sickness because it is not likely to be recognized as such.[2]

My first experience with a psychiatrist was while I was in hospital after a suicide attempt. I was 15 years old. It was May 1969. My mother had killed herself in April. Her mother had killed herself in March. Things just came to a head. Dr. Lupinski strode into my ward and tried to engage me in conversation. In the spirit of being completely honest (what good is psychiatric therapy if you’re not) I told him that he made me feel as though I was on a microscope slide. To my surprise he got huffy. Apparently the rules with a psychiatrist were the same as with anyone else: be polite, be nice.

I didn’t see much of Dr. Lupinski after that. When I was discharged from hospital Daddy sent me to see four or five different psychiatrists, one after the other. I went along with this obediently and indifferently. I would sit in each gentleman’s office and mentally squirm while he tried to pry my head open and peep inside. Each was a grown-up man in a suit (which already put him into the realm of ‘alien species’ for an awkward teenaged girl), and each sat behind a large, expensive desk and interrogated me. It must have been frustrating for them because I replied to every question with, I don’t know. I wasn’t prepared to give them anything. Each doctor gave it his best shot and passed me on to the next.

Then there was Dr. Kent. He had no desk. In fact, he had no office furnishings to speak of. A dozen floors up in a downtown building, his consultation room held only two stackable chairs and a large, industrial wooden spool that served as a table. He dressed casually. I don’t recall ever seeing him in a suit and tie. He had shoulder-length gray hair, a full beard, and thick, black eyebrows that overshadowed his eyes and made him seem to glower. The whole effect was intimidating. He was stout but wiry in build and he had an accent of some kind. He reminded me of an East Indian guru. Dr. Kent looked different and after speaking with him it became clear to me that he was different.

I sat in the chair across from him and hid inside myself as if I’d put a six-foot concrete wall between us. But he didn’t smile at me and try to engage me in conversation. He was a straight shooter. He spoke his mind with no pretense and no artifice. Whatever he said that day I remember feeling that this man was genuine. I felt that he respected me as a fellow human being and didn’t see me as merely a mentally-disturbed child. I don’t remember what I said to him. Did I talk about Mother? Probably not. Talking about Mother used to make me shake uncontrollably and I felt embarrassed when that happened.

Dr. Kent demanded nothing of me. When the appointment ended no follow-up appointment was made. The others had all taken at least three shots at it before giving up. Dr. Kent left it entirely in my hands whether to see him again or not, and at the moment I had no wish to spill my guts to anybody. It would be several more months before I finally asked Daddy to make me another appointment with Dr. Kent.

I knew that Daddy very much wanted me to see Dr. Kent. He had met him through some workshops and had come to think very highly of him. Daddy was desperate to find the right help for his troubled daughter. But I know Dr. Kent would have told him to back off, that the request for help had to come from me and no one else. Daddy didn’t send me to any other psychiatrists after that.

By the time I met Dr. Kent I was 16 years old. I think that I would have been getting professional help at a much younger age if I’d grown up in the 1990s instead of the ‘50s and ‘60s. So much was either tolerated or ignored in those days. And there was such a stigma against seeing a psychiatrist. Daddy once suggested to Mother that she might want professional help. Hiding in my room, I listened as Mother, usually so meticulous about her grammar, screamed, I ain’t seeing no shrink. That was the last word in that argument. I must have been about 13. ‘I ain’t seeing no shrink.’ It would mean you were crazy - a fate worse than death. Eventually she did see a psychiatrist for a while, at least long enough to be diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic for whatever the label is worth.

Mother never had a chance. In 1922, in Helsinki, Finland, a couple who were incapable of love produced a daughter, Sylvia Marta Sjoholm, my mother. She never had any siblings; I don’t know how these people got together long enough to have her. I met my grandparents only once. I was too young to remember them, but there are photos of them in an album Marta brought with her when she married.

The two or three pictures of her father show a sharp-featured man with a face for which I could feel no affection. He looks somehow cold and cunning. He never seemed to figure strongly in Marta’s life. All I know about him is that he ended his days in the care of the Salvation Army. I was in my thirties when one day I unraveled several feet of thread from around a ring that had belonged to Marta. She’d used the thread to make the ring fit her finger. Underneath I found an inscription: 12.25.19 Alphonse. I called my father to ask who this was. It was my grandfather.

There are about a half dozen photos of the woman we simply called ‘Granny’. I never knew her name. She doesn’t smile in any of the photos. Her mouth seemed permanently set into an expression of contempt. Her eyes bored into the camera lens without life or emotion. She would wear a long, dark, square-shouldered overcoat and a dark, brimmed hat that sat squarely atop her head. Formidable.

Marta is with her in some photos and she showed all the humanity and emotion that her mother seemed to lack. She told me once that her friends called her Dolly when she was young. Dolly. Hardly seems to fit the woman I called Mother. But she was different when she was young. If old photos can reveal the girl she was, she was fragile and vulnerable.

As she was reaching adulthood and independence at last, World War II began and swept her along with its terrors. She was living in Belgium when the war started. I know little of what happened to her during those years. I know she and another woman entertained the troops with accordions. I have only clues about her life during this period. For as long as I knew her, she lived in horror of starving. She refused to waste anything. After the war she didn’t seem to maintain contact with anyone other than Granny. Were her friends dead? I was named after a friend about whom I know nothing beyond that her sister stole the pearl necklace given to her by their father. The sister fled with the pearls when war broke out.

All I know of Marta’s childhood is a few episodes that she revealed in odd moments. I was about ten years old and staying out of the way one day while I listened to one of the anguished exchanges that took place between my mother and father. Between sobs, Marta was relating a story from her childhood. She had performed at some event - singing, I think, and afterwards she was led to a table to choose a reward from among various trinkets. There was an item she would have liked, but there was another item she knew her mother would like. So she chose the latter item. When she proudly presented it to her mother, the woman said: What is this you’ve brought me! I listened to Marta repeat these words with all the scorn she’d remembered in her mother’s voice and with all the pain she’d harboured for so many years. Marta was, emotionally, an open wound by the time I was born.

Daddy was a complete opposite to Marta. He was easygoing, slow to anger and generally a happy and optimistic person. He grew up in the small English village of Oxton with his parents and older brother. It was, I believe, an unremarkable childhood. His mother, Marjorie, was a flighty woman who loved to have fun, and his father, David Sr., was a quiet, introspective man who preferred to closet himself in his workshop. These very different people worked out a lifestyle that seemed satisfactory to both of them. For instance, Nana vacationed alone. Throughout my childhood we received her cheerful postcards from such exotic locales as Morocco and Majorca. Their two sons were also different from each other. David Jr., my father, was bookish and intellectual while his older brother was a jovial, hands-on type. They were ‘the Brains’ and ‘the Brawn’.

The family had a hardware store in Oxton and also ran a petrol station in town. David Sr. - Gramps - was a well-known master saddler. He made exquisite hand-crafted riding gear for the aristocracy. Nana delighted in dropping names of people with whom Gramps had done business. The family also sold farming equipment. It seemed they had a small business empire in Oxton.

David met Marta in Stockholm after the war when he stopped her to ask for directions to an art gallery. They were married in a small civil ceremony in Oxton and lived above the family shop for the first year of their marriage. By the time I was born in September of ‘53 they had bought a house close to the shopping district. Two and a half years later Kirsten was born and the family was complete.

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[2]Kent, Ian, and William Nicholls, I AMness The Discovery of The Self Beyond The Ego, New York, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1972, p. 130.

CHAPTER 2

We lived in England until I was nearly four years old. During this time David worked hard to get the family business running at peak efficiency so he could leave his parents with it and emigrate to Canada. His brother, sister-in-law and their two children had made their home in Australia. Those first years of my life in Oxton were good for me in that I had Nana who, perhaps, cared for me as Marta could not. I read my Nursery School report cards many years later and was surprised to see myself praised with enthusiastic warmth. My reports would be less than glowing for the rest of my school career.

I was unhappy about going to Canada and leaving my grandmother and my home. I remember I was sick in the waiting area of the airport on our last day in England. I wasn’t ill, I was scared. I was being taken away, and my primary caregiver would be someone to whom I had not developed any attachment: my mother. She’d had some sort of breakdown while I was an infant and she’d gone away to recover. I had burned my finger to the bone at the age of one and had been hospitalized for three months. All this served to interrupt the crucial attachment process between mother and child which I was to learn about in university.

Looking back, I can see that Marta and I were always distant. There was no real cuddling, there were no intimate chats. We never seemed to be more than acquaintances who lived grudgingly under the same roof. Years later when I visited Nana in England, she recalled that Marta seemed to cry all the time. Nana’s brows furrowed at the memory. Clearly Nana had also been at a loss to understand her.

Marta probably had good reason to cry. She was high-strung and fragile. But she was also artistically gifted and extremely intelligent. She could play five or six different instruments and she drew and painted beautifully. Before the war, she had belonged to an orchestra in which she played the violin. But the war changed everything. By the time it was over and the dust had settled, she found herself married and living in a different country.

She was a fish out of water in parochial little Oxton. And in the ‘50s women were expected to be homemakers and raise children. Marta either wasn’t strong enough to buck the expectations or went along with them hoping to find her happily-ever-after in hearth, home and family. I think her first taste of motherhood was a shock to her. However, when she gave birth to her second daughter she did manage to forge an affectionate relationship with this baby. Perhaps by the time Kirsten was born Marta felt more relaxed about motherhood. Perhaps she and Kirsten had more compatible personalities. Whatever the reason, she seemed to bond with her younger daughter while she couldn’t bond with me.

We arrived in Canada in 1957. Vancouver was a small town then compared to the metropolis it’s become. There’s a six-lane freeway on the spot in North Vancouver where I used to play on a swing. We lived for a while in an apartment that still stands beside that freeway. Within a year we’d bought a house in a new development called Lynn Valley. We joined the local United Church. I was registered in Play School. We had settled in.

This was home now but I still thought longingly of England. For years I would ask when we were going back. The reply was always, Someday. From the time we arrived in Canada until I was about 13, Nana arranged for us to receive some children’s magazines from England with serialized comics and stories. In the early days our magazines would be saved for us to read in bed on Sunday morning. My happiest times were those Sunday mornings when I immersed myself in the comforting world of those English characters.

I have some fond memories of those days. The church provided a support group for all of us. Marta became the choir leader and David sang bass in the choir. Our friends were people from the church. In my mind, the annual church picnic at Belcarra ranked with Christmas and my birthday as a major holiday. Unfortunately, this source of social support would be cut off a few years later. Marta was asked to step down as choir leader. She took this very badly and we stopped attending the church. I can only assume that her temperamental nature made her too difficult for them to deal with.

She had an offensive way of handling issues. For example, Kirsten’s Play School teachers once asked Marta to help supervise a field trip. Marta apparently was not willing to do so. Her response was to send me in her place. I tried hard to behave as a proper supervising adult so I was mortified when on the way home I fell asleep along with the younger children. Of course, I was only five years old myself. I had wondered at the time why Kirsten’s teachers stared at me with disapproval and resentment all day.

The early years spent within our church community were idyllic for me. I remember garden parties at the manse and at the Phillips’ who became good friends of ours. The minister and his family would come to our house for Christmas Eve. In my memory, these events were lavish and joyous affairs. Even after our family left the congregation, we stayed in touch with a few friends from the church. My parents had named Fred and Lillian Phillips as godparents for Kirsten and me, and the two of us maintained contact with them until they died.

That was the ‘up’ side of life. The ‘down’ side was what Kirsten and I referred to as Marta’s Bad Mood Days. If you spoke to her on these days she would be impatient or angry. All we could do was stay out of her way and hope we did nothing to displease her. Marta was completely arbitrary about what displeased her. Of course some things were always verboten. If you made a mess you would hear about it. But some days she could completely lose control over any trivial thing.

Those were hellish days when order and reason ceased to exist. Something would happen and she would explode, seeming to fill the room with her fury. If I was the object of her rage, she’d curse me in German and launch into an unrestrained evaluation of my character and general worth. Then she would lash out with her fist or whatever she might be holding. I recall her throwing things. I recall her kicking. Occasionally she was controlled enough to fetch the strap from the closet. This she wielded like a lion tamer, aiming for any body part she could hit. All this time I would be on the floor where she’d sent me flying, scrambling to get away until her anger had run its course. But I couldn’t run away then. That made her angry all over again. I waited until I was dismissed. Often she had more to say regarding her opinion of me. Eventually she would dismiss me with something like, Fie on you or Get out of my sight.

The diabolical thing was that none of her rants were delivered as her opinion, they were given as statements of fact. If she noticed that I looked pained at the things she was saying about me she would nod and say, The truth hurts, doesn’t it? thus driving nails into the coffin for my self image.

There was just one surreal episode in which her anger resolved differently. I was about five. I remember coming to the door of the kitchen where she was peeling potatoes and I saw that familiar glint in her eye when she looked up. She was in a mood. She chased me down to the bathroom and thrashed me there. When she stopped I was lying on the floor gazing in wonder at blood on the walls. Marta, too, was looking around in wonder. Then she sat on the side of the bathtub, pulled me into her lap and began rocking back and forth and moaning. I sat motionless, crushed in her grasp, amazed by her sudden change of heart. Never again was she fazed by the power of her own anger. Never again did she hold me afterward.

Kirsten came in for her share of grief with Marta, but Kirsten had a savvy that I did not. She quickly learned to provide what Marta wanted. She was contrite when that was required and sympathetic when that was required. I, on the other hand, would blunder into the same old errors over and over, provoking Marta’s wrath every time. I either could not or would not learn to accommodate her.

The only savvy I had was in avoiding Marta altogether. In the car, I always sat behind David because that seat was a bit farther out of her reach. If she was upstairs I would go out by the basement door, if she was downstairs I’d use the front door. My avoidance of her hurt her, so she would berate me in blind anger. This only reinforced my wish to avoid her.

When David was home he was usually able to defuse Marta’s anger. From wherever I had taken refuge I would hear him murmuring in a reasonable voice while she seethed and fretted. On occasions when he was unable to placate her it was just a matter of taking cover, him along with Kirsten and me. Sometimes there was no stopping her. But her most violent rages took place when he was at work and she was alone all day to brood.

She wasn’t inhuman though. She was unable to control her rages, yes, but she tried to show love the only way she knew how to show it. Kirsten and I had every material possession a child could want as we grew up. At Christmas the gifts around the tree were mounded high. Marta sewed beautifully, and Kirsten and I had Barbie dolls that were better dressed than most people. She would sit up late at night sewing tiny clothes with sequins, piping, frills, and pleats until she was nearly blind with the effort.

This effort, she described to me in her rages. She demanded to know why I was an ungrateful, disobedient child when this was the length to which she had gone for me. I felt ashamed. But I was only a child. I didn’t see, and she didn’t see, that I could not avoid mistakes. In demanding gratitude and love by screaming accusations at me, she killed any spark of love in me.

I sought tenderness from a more promising source. Five or six houses up the street lived a family called the MacKenzies. Mrs. MacKenzie was a gentle person, and she listened to whatever I said with a supportive and encouraging ear. I spent as much time with her as I could. Her own children were of school age so, as a preschooler, I had her to myself during the day. Eventually her children became jealous of me. They once got hold of me and threatened to throw me downstairs.

I also sensed that Marta was