Committed to the Sane Asylum: Narratives on Mental Wellness and Healing

7. War and Peace

On September 11th the enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country.… Americans have known casualties of war—but not at the center of a great city on a peaceful morning. Americans have known surprise attacks—but never before on thousands of civilians.… Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It does not end until every terrorist group with global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated. —George W. Bush, speech to the United States Congress, 20 September 20011 Susan Opening the Door to Making Sense Terror, the blind tyrant that had held me captive since childhood, has also prompted me to go for control, to send troops to foreign lands, and to suppress dissent at home. My initial attack on my badness was aimed at living in better accord with the feminine ideals of parents, religion, and culture but in its time the approach created greater inner chaos. The second offensive taught me to feel but with caution.At every journey point, my body’s ecology, like the globe’s, threatened to rebel and collapse if I resisted the needed resolution of my trauma story that would allow my life to thrive. Alice Miller, the Swiss psychologist who has written about childhood’s relationship to the adult body, has an apt description for the kind of conditions I faced: 157 7 War and Peace The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated , our perceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But, someday the body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromise or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.2 Each resting point I reached along the journey offered hard-won insights and the physical and psychological relief that was necessary to my holding on until the end’s least bearable and most frightening truths could be faced. As the nature of outer wars and the struggle to control were changing globally, I entered the door that led to the resolution of my own psychosis core.The door, recovered memories of sexual abuses, opened in 1998. The Recall My recall of sexual abuse by a priest occurred several weeks following the 1998 permanent installation of my Shedding Skins exhibit at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry (now the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health [CAMH]). I was conscious at the time that my work with the Clarke Institute made me feel heard by psychiatrists—a feeling that was missing from my initial psychiatric hospital experience—but I had no idea that the respectful listening and validation I received from the psychiatrists,psychologists,and other Clarke Institute staff on the Shedding Skins planning committee was shaping in me the additional and needed psychic strength to recover the priest’s abuse memory. It was after a morning of art making and following a sitting meditation that my recall of the priest’s abuse occurred. I was not in therapy at the time. Although eight or more dreams of a“faceless priest”in various disguises were attempting to reveal the abuse from the mid-1990s onward, my lack of concrete memory or suspicion of any particular priest only allowed me to interpret the dreams as warnings that I was holding on to outworn Catholic attitudes on women’s inferiority and that I needed to build a more whole sense of self. Before speaking of the abuse to anyone, multiple dreams occurred containing images that included the actual priest sodomizing me as a child,another dream where a dream voice said, “the curate raped you,” and a dream with a voice saying, “He was a pedophile.” In another dream, the voice said, “She [meaning me] has a hard time believing a priest could be sick.” The day following the abuse recall, dreams that related to another forgotten sexual abuse also appeared. Though the recall and its multiple accompanying dreams put me in a highly frightened and anxious state, I believe my psyche worked with who I was able to be at the time. 158 War and Peace Finding a Therapist While my friendship with Rosemary and our collaboration on this book barred me from working in psychotherapy with...