Reality is Magic: True Tales

By Emily G Brodeur

Synchronicity abounds in this psychotherapist memoir in which personal events and relationships are interwoven with accounts of EMDR sessions and work with Dissociative Identity Disorder. A posh private school, Nashville music venues, psychiatric hospitals, an outpost on the edge of civilization and small-town

• Language: English
• Publisher: Emily G. Brodeur
• Release date: Jun 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781628802078

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This book, though a collection of non-fiction stories, is, I hope, one unified tale of the interweave between the personal and the professional, the magical and the mundane. Some are accounts of experiences with friends and husband (mostly ex); others are transcripts, or nearly so, of psychotherapy sessions; still others are family stories, echoing and elaborating upon certain events described in my first book.

Names have been changed in certain instances: when embarrassment might be caused, when I never knew or couldn’t recall a name, and in every case involving former clients or patients. Though examples from the last category all involve vignettes from twenty years ago or more, with most I was also able to seek and obtain consent. I know that in each case the ardent wish has been to help others to understand and thus avert similar catastrophes in the future.

That is my wish, too.

CLOUDS

I believe it was a book about Wilhelm Reich that inspired my dream in the spring of 1969.

When I awakened I went across the hall in Branscomb Quad and told Priscilla, Last night I dreamed that you and I were dissolving clouds by looking at them.

Let’s do it! she said, without a moment’s hesitation.

And so we did, for the first and only time in either of our lives. We went out to the large green field in front of Rand Hall at Vanderbilt. We would pick out a cloud in the middle of other clouds and concentrate on it. In a minute or two that cloud would disappear, surrounded still by the others, as stable and unchanging as clouds ever are.

We sought witnesses.

Mike Minzer didn’t believe, even when seeing.

Chris Young saw and believed what he saw.

Even Priscilla doesn’t now believe that it ever happened, but I remember.

I had not seen or talked to Chris for twenty-five years. Just now, on May 11, 2020, after I wrote the few paragraphs above, I messaged him to ask if anyone else had been with him on that day. A message from him was already there, saying that he remembered that incident. He was, as best he can recall, alone.

TRUE FABLE

Years ago, I was visited by Mist—whose job it had been to float above the torture, invisible and insubstantial, impossible to apprehend. Thinking herself pale and colorless, she was much taken with the koosh ball on my office table with its brightly colored rubber fringe…so much so that she made one of her own out of strips of colored paper, held together with a rubber band. I have kept it, all these years, in a basket, in case she ever came again.

For weeks now Rachel has been staying her adult self during our psychotherapy sessions, sitting in the green chair from which she can face the door, talking about her job. Today she bemoans the lack of work with the Kids, who only come when she sits on the floor in the corner. And it seems that they really should come today: the fear she feels, as a fledgling clergy person, of performing a service in front of the bishop is entirely out of proportion to any real threat. It terrifies her that he knows her name.

So, what…the Kids are supposed to interrupt and make you get up out of the chair? If you want to work with them, you have to get down on the floor. You know that. Put your money where your mouth is, I tell her.

Her bluff called, she rises ruefully, pleading concern about my back, which I threw out recently. She knows I’ll be joining her on the floor. Are you sure you’ll be able to get back up? she asks.

If I can’t, it will be all your fault. Or all my fault, since I made you get on the floor.

Yeah, that one.

Rachel is ten years my senior. Worry about your own self getting up, I rejoin.

I settle myself on a pillow and begin to issue the invitation: Maybe someone knows about the fear of authority and the fear of being seen, and will be willing to share with us what they know…

She feels a slight headache. Then her facial features slacken, and someone else is there.

They can’t see me. I just drift like a cloud, changing shape. It’s dangerous if they see you.

I know you! You’re ‘Mist’! You’ve been here before.

You can see me? she asks, fearfully. That’s bad! You’re not supposed to! If people see you, they can hurt you.

I can see you, and I’m not going to hurt you. You know, I still have what you made before, over there in that covered basket. Do you want to see it? I want her to know that she’s important enough to be remembered, and for something of hers to be saved. I see a secret pleasure mixing with fear, but she doesn’t want to see her paper koosh ball. It’s enough to know that it’s there.

She gnaws her thumb, then is shocked by that small evidence of embodiment. Am I real?

I think up to now you’ve mostly been Mind. But today you’re in the body.

Why am I here? I’m not meant to be seen.

You decided to come…or maybe the Others decided for you and sent you out. It’s different now. It was long ago and far away that it wasn’t safe to be seen—more than fifty years ago! People don’t hurt you guys like that anymore.

It’s wrong! It’s wrong! The Others depend on me. They’ll be mad. I’m not meant to be seen.

Things change. You know how mist can turn into water?

"It feels like water," she agrees.

And it can even turn into ice, so solid that you can walk on it, or make houses out of it.

I’ve seen ice, she confirms, slowly.

Well, it’s okay for you to be solid, too. It’s not so dangerous now. You can be seen without being hurt.

Then I’ll have to freeze.

Well…not really. It’s different with people. They can be solid without freezing.

But if I’m solid I’ll be real, and it will all be real and I’ll have to see it, I’ll have to know! Terrifying scenes begin to flash before her, and she recoils in horror. It seems she has been there for all of it, for everything bad, at least: the lynching of Mammy, the rape by father, the beatings by mother, the atrocities at the strange camp in New Hampshire. No, no! I don’t want to see it! I want to go away!

It is time for her to go away. Only twenty-five minutes remain before Rachel has to get up and walk out the door, and I know from experience that it will take all that time to fully bring her back to herself. It’s sufficient that Mist has begun the process of rejoining the whole self; of realizing that Then is not the full template for Now.

I want to see something good!

Do you know Sasha? Sasha is the white dog that Rachel owns in the present. It seems that all the Kids, no matter how long locked away, have some awareness of her.

Yes.

Can you imagine yourself playing with her?

She smiles and relaxes. We’re in a field of tall grass, so high no one can see us. This is a positive shift from her previous safe place of floating like a cloud. She’s playing with me.

Good. You can stay there with her now. I count down from ten to one, inviting grown-up Rachel to begin the journey back into the body. The face contorts in anger.

I don’t know who I am, but I’m pissed at you! You have no right! You’re making her solid, and we need her. She’s the…she’s the…

Last resort?

Yeah. Now they’ll get us. They’ll get all of us. It’s Rocky the Angry Boy.

Those people are dead. I thought you knew that.

But what if we need her? What if more bad people come?

Then she can be Mist again, if she needs to, to keep something they can’t touch. Look, water can be steam or ice, depending on the conditions. And medicine can make you well if you’re sick, but it can make you sick if you don’t need it. Rachel doesn’t need to be so afraid of people now. It doesn’t help. If you get pneumonia you take antibiotics, and when you’re well you don’t. If you get it again, you can take antibiotics again. People see her all the time at work and they don’t hurt her. They like her. She does a good job. The worst thing the bishop might do is make her stay in the same job. And she likes it!

He agrees that all this is true. Thank you, he says.

Thank you for coming and for paying such close attention. People don’t have to stay the same. You used to be angry all the time, but now you can be confused, or thoughtful, or appreciative. I’ve seen it.

It’s time for him to go, and I ask him to name his pleasure: the tree house? Staying with the big Stag? The Bear?

The Bear. The Angry Boy always chooses the Bear.

I count down from ten to one, and then Rachel is there, smiling. He changed his mind. The Stag offered to tickle him with his antlers, and he went with the Stag instead.

What do you know? It looks like people can change, and can change their minds, I say teasingly, hoisting myself up from the corner where we’ve been sitting.

She’s been crouching for almost an hour and now has trouble stretching out her legs. I wish you’d make these Kids unwind before I have to get up! She creaks and cracks and I laugh.

And you worried about me!

We set our next appointment. She zips her small teddy bear, which she brings whenever there’s a chance the Kids might come, inside her jacket. ‘Isn’t imagination something? Isn’t Mind amazing? Is it the same thing as God?"

Frankly, I don’t know the difference between Mind and God.

Ah, you’re like Descartes! she observes, clearly pleased at having pinned me down.

She exits.

Alice is on the couch in the waiting room. She asks me if I need a bathroom break, then gets up and comes in.

TORTURED SOULS

I’ve got a lot of nerve trying to treat these people, these multiple selves contained in one body that war and bicker and save each other endlessly from fates worse than death. They come to me both by chance and referral—women, almost without exception—terrified, suicidal, prone to nightmares and sudden panic. I can often catch glimpses, even in the first meeting, of the Others behind the eyes: the young children who were raped; the tough, anesthetized prostitutes; the reporters with no emotion; the ones who think they’re demons.

It’s my job to help dismantle their defense systems so that they’ll be healthier; fewer episodes of suddenly finding themselves hundreds of miles from home or with strange clothes in their closet they can’t remember purchasing, or waking up screaming to see a shadowy face disappearing again into the dark. I’m supposed to help break down the barriers between the separate senses of self so that the Kid parts feel protected by the Grownup and the Grownup no longer has to live in terror of finding out what happened to the Kid. Because she’ll know. And she’ll be able to handle it, and they will all be one.

Sometimes I imagine what it must be like to be a nurse on a burn unit—to have the job of helping to abrade dead skin so that healing can take place. I’ve always heard that it’s horrifically painful. And I feel not unlike that as I bring my clients face to face with their demons, and the pain that has been locked for decades in the disavowed subalterns of the psyche comes roaring and wailing its way back out. I feel like a sadist, like some kind of Nazi torturer. Or maybe a demolition expert who has the job of taking down a huge, outdated edifice without any harm coming to the bystanders—or even the naked, quivering self inside.

I know that Laura likes me. I like her, too. She’s a stylish, fox-haired woman in her fifties with a wry, gamin’s face and green eyes from which humor and intelligence dance forth. She came in basically looking for exorcism, only knowing at the time about the one Little Girl, whose name turned out to be Janine It seems that that was her name before a pair of malevolent child torturers adopted her and her twin brother John at age three. Laura had not wanted to acknowledge that Janine frequently took over her body and said and did embarrassing things which she would never have believed had not her husband taped some of his conversations with the Little Girl. Laura just wanted her gone.

Over the months a whole cast of players revealed themselves: Heather, who had done the prostitution; Kiki, who was a thief; the Mother who punished. They all tried to caution me about Cry. Even Laura’s husband, a semi-retired machinist, called to warn me about her belligerence, saying that she had professed hatred of both him and me. I insisted I wanted to meet them all.