Martha stout the sociopath next door pdf

•••

MARTHA STOUT

WHAT Is SANITY? Are "normal" people always sane, or could it be said that we experience sanity only at certain times? After witnessing a jarring event, have you ever found yourself in a condition that is not exactly sane: a state of frantic agita­ tion or numbness and distraction? These are just some of the questions explored by Martha Stout in her first book, The Myth ef Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise ef Awareness (2002), from which this selection comes. Stout draws on her nearly 30 years of practice as a clinical psychologist to show that the tendency to dissociate--to withdraw from reality-begins as a life-preserving resource that defends against severe trauma in childhood, but later can develop into a way of life defined by emotional detachment and prolonged disengagement with the world. In the most extreme cases, a dissociative disorder can cause individuals to black out for extended periods or to develop multiple personalities in order to cope with life's challenges. By defirring a continuum that extends from the everyday experience of spacing out or getting lost in thought to conditions like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Stout urges her readers to recognize the com­ plexity of consciousness itsel£ If all of us dissociate to some degree, then a term like "sanity" is simply too crude to capture the real nature of mental health, which requires a proper balance between dissociation and engagement. The patients Stout focuses on in her study have lost this precious balance, but with her help, they come to see the meaning of their lives as something they can recover. In jargon-free prose, Stout tells stories of her patients' struggles for sanity, revealing in each case how buried or missing ,memories disrupt their awareness of the present.

For more than 25 years Stout served on the clinical faculty of the Harvard Medical School through the McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In addition, she has taught on the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research and the psychology faculty of Wellesley College. Since completing The Myth ef Sanity, she has published two other best selling books The Sociopath Next Door (2005) and The Paranoia Switch (2007).

"When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday," from THE MYTH OF SANITY by Martha Stout, copyright

© 2001 by Martha Stout. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

Biographical information comes from and .

413

414 MARTHA STOUT

••• When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning,

It Was Friday

"The horror of that moment," the King went on "I shall forget!" , never, never

"You will, though," the Queen said, "if you don't make a memorandum of it."

-LEWIS CARROLL

Imagine th~t you are in your house--no-you are locked in your house cannot get out. It 1s the dead of winter. The drifted snow is hi"ghe th '. d bl kin h • r an your wm ows

oc g t e light of both moon and sun. Around the house the · d ' night and day. ' wm moans,

N . . tha .c tl ow unagme t even though you have plenty of electric lights, and per- iec y good central heating, you are almost always in the dark d · ld b hin • an quite co

e~ause s?met g 15 wr~ng with the old-fashioned fuse box in the basement'. Inside this cobwebbed, mnocuous-looking box the fu k b ·

d . , ses eep urnmg out an on account of this small malfunction all the power m· th h dl' fail ' e ouse repeate y s. : ou have replaced so many melted fuses that now your little bag of new

ones 15 ~mpty; ~ere are no more. You sigh in frustration, and regard your frozen brea~ m . the light of the flashlight. Your house, which could be so tomblike mstead. cozy, is

In all probabili_ty, there is something quirky in the antiquated fuse box; it has developed some_ kind of needless hair trigger, and is not really reactin to an dangerous electncal overload at all Should you get some pe · g f y P

o k t d h · nmes out o your c e , an use t em to replace the burned-out fuses? That would solve the

po:wer-outage problem. No more shorts, not with copper coins in there. Using coms woul~ scuttle the safeguard function of the fuse box but the need for a safeguard nght now is questionable, and the box is keep~g you cold and · the dark for no good reason. Well, probably for no good reason. m

On the other hand, what if the wiring in the house really is overloaded somehow? A fire could result, probably will result eventually. If you do not find the fire soon eno_ugh, if you cannot manage to put the fire out, the whole h?use could go up, w1tli you trapped inside. you know that deatli by burning is hideous. You know also that your mind is playm· g tricks but thinkin. b fir alrn · · h , g a out e, you ost unagme t ere is smoke in your nostrils right now.

So, do you go back upstairs and sit endlessly in a dark livm· d .c d b fr g room, e1eate num om the ~old, though you have buried yourself under every blariket i~ th_e house~ No ligh~ to read by, no music, just the wail and rattle of the icy wmd outside? Or, m an attempt to feel more hum d ak thin an, o you m e gs

WHEN I WOKE UP TUESDAY MORNING, IT WAS FRIDAY 415

wann and comfortable? Is it wise to gamble with calamity and howling pain? If you turn the power back on, will you not smell nonexistent smoke every moment you are awake? And will you not have far too many of these waking moments, for how will you ever risk going to sleep?

Do you sabotage the fuse box? I believe that most of us cannot know what we would do, trapped in a situ-

ation that required such a seemingly no-win decision. But I do know that any- one wanting to recover from psychological trauma must face just this kind of dilemma, made yet. more harrowing because her circumstance is not anything so rescuable as being locked in a house, but rather involves a solitary, unlockable confinement inside the limits of her own mind. The person who suffers from a severe trauma disorder must decide between surviving in a barely sublethal mis- ery of numbness and frustration, and taking a chance that may well bring her a better life, but that feels like stupidly issuing an open invitation to the unspeak- able horror that waits to consume her alive. And in the manner of die true hero, she must choose to take the risk.

For trauma changes the brain itself. Like the outdated fuse box, the psycho- logically traumatized brain houses inscrutable eccentricities tliat cause it to overreact-or more precisely, misreact-to the current realities of life. These neurological misreactions become established because trauma has a profound effect upon· the secretion of stress-responsive neurohormones such as norepi- nephrine, and thus an effect upon various areas of die brain involved in memory, particularly the amygdala and die hippocampus.

The amygdala receives sensory information from the five senses, via the thal- amus, attaches emotional significance to the input, and then passes along this emotional "evaluation" to the hippocarnpus. In accordance with die amygdala's "evaluation" of importance, the hippocampus is activated to a greater or lesser degree, and functions to organize the new input, and to integrate it with already existing information about similar sensory events. Under a normal range of con- ditions, this system works efficiently to consolidate memories according to their emotional priority. However, at the extreme upper end of hormonal stimulation, as in traumatic situations, a breakdown occurs. Overwhelming emotional signifi- cance registered by the amygdala actually leads to a decrease in hippocampal activa- tion, such that some of the traumatic input is not usefully organized by the hippocampus, or integrated witli oilier memories. The result is that portions of traumatic memory are stored not as parts of a unified whole, but as isolated sen- sory images and bodily sensations tliat are not localized in time or even in situa- tion, or integrated with other events.

To make matters still more complex, exposure to trauma may temporarily shut down Broca's area, die region of the left hemisphere of the brain that trans- lates experience into language, die means by which we most often relate our experience to others, and even to .ourselves.

A growing body of research indicates that in these ways the brain lays down traumatic memories differently from the way it records regular memories. Reg- ular memories are formed through adequate hippocampal and cortical input, are integrated as comprehensible wholes, and are subject to meaning-modification

416 MARTHA STOUT

by future events, and through language. In contrast, traumatic memories include chaotic fragments that are sealed off from modulation by subsequent experience. Such memory fragments are wordless, placeless, and eternal, and long after the original trauma has receded into the past, the brain's record of it may consist only of isolated and thoroughly anonymous bits of emotion, image, and sensation that ring through the individual like a broken alarm.

Worse yet, later in the individual's life, in situations that are vaguely similar to the trauma-perhaps merely because they are startling, anxiety-provoking, or emotionally arousing-amygdala-mediated memory traces are accessed more readily than are the more complete, less shrill memories that have been integrated and modified by the hippocampus and the cerebral cortex. Even though unified and updated memories would be more judicious in the present, the amygdala memories are more accessible, and so trauma may be "remembered" at inappro- priate times, when there is no hazard worthy of such alarm. In reaction to rela- tively trivial stresses, the person traumatized long ago may truly feel that danger is imminent again, be assailed full-force by the emotions, bodily sensations, and per- haps even the images, sounds, smells that once accompanied great threat.

Here is an illustration from everyday life. A woman named Beverly reads a morning newspaper while she sits at a quiet suburban depot and waits for a traiIL The article, concerning an outrageous local scandal, intrigues her so much that- for a few minutes she forgets where she is. Suddenly, there is an earsplitting blast from the train as it signals its arrival. Beverly is painfully startled by the noise; her head snaps up, and she catches her breath. She is amazed that she could have been so lacking in vigilance and relaxed in public. Her heart pounds, and in the instant required to fold the newspaper, she is ambushed by bodily feelings and even a smell that have nothing whatever to do with the depot on this uneventful morn- ing. If she could identify the smell, which she never will, she would call it "chlorine." She feels a sudden rigidity in her chest, as if her lungs had just turned to stone, and has an almost overpowering impulse to get out of there, to run.

In a heartbeat, the present is perceptually and emotionally the past. These fragments of sensation and emotion are the amygdala-mediated memories of an afternoon three decades before, in Beverly's tenth summer, when, walking home from the public swimming pool, she saw her younger sister skip into the street and meet an immediate death in front of a speeding car. At this moment, thirty years later, Beverly feels that way again.

Her sensations and feelings are not labeled as belonging to memories of the horrible accident. In fact, they are not labeled as anything at all, because they have always been completely without language. They belong to no narrative, no place or time, no story she can tell about her life; they are free-form and ineffable.

Beverly's brain contains, effectively, a broken warning device in its limbic system, an old fuse box in which the fuses tend to melt for no good reason, emphatically declaring an emergency where none now exists.

Surprisingly, she will probably not wonder about or even remember the intense perceptual and emotional "warnings," because by the next heartbeat, a long-entrenched dissociative reaction to the declared emergency may already have been tripped in her brain, to "protect" her from this "unbear_3:ble"

WHEN I WOKE UP TUESDAY MORNING, IT WAS FRIDAY 417

childhood memory. She may feel strangely angry, or paranoid, or childishly timid. Or instead she may feel that she has begun to move in an uncomfortably hazy dream world, far away and derealized. Or she may completely depart from her "self' for a while, continue to act, but without self-awareness. Should this last occur in a minor way, her total experience may be something such as, "Today when I was going to work, the train pulled into the station-the blasted thing is so loud!-and the next thing I remember, it was stopping at my stop." She may even be mildly amused at herself for her spaciness.

Most of us do not notice these experiences very much. They are more or less invisible to us as we go about daily life, and so we do not understand how much of daily life is effectively spent in the past, in reaction to the darkest hours we have known, nor do we comprehend how swampy and vitality-sucking some of our memories really are. Deepening the mire of our divided awareness, in the course of a lifetime such "protective" mental reactions acquire tremendous habit strength. These over-exercised muscles can take us away even when trau- matic memory fragments have not been evoked. Sometimes dissociation can occur when we are simply confused or :frustrated or nervous, whether we recog- nize our absences or not.

Typically, only those with the most desperate trauma histories are ever driven to discover and perhaps modify their absences from the present. Only the addictions, major depressions, suicide attempts, and general ruination that attend the most severe trauma disorders can sometimes supply motivation suffi- ciently fierce to run the gauntlet thrown down by insight and permanent change. On account of our neurological wiring, confronting past traumas requires one to re-endure all of their terrors mentally, in their original intensity, to feel as if the worst nightmare had come true and the horrors had returned. All the brain's authoritative warnings against staying present for the memories and the painful emotions, all the faulty fuses, have to be deliberately ignored, and in cases of extreme or chronic past trauma, this process is nothing short of heroic.

It helps to have an awfully good reason to try, such as suffocating depression or some other demonic psychological torment. Perhaps this is a part of the rea- son why philosophers and theologians through the centuries have observed such a strong connection between unbearable earthly sorrow and spiritual enlighten- ment, a timeless relationship that psychologists have mysteriously overlooked.

In order: to appreciate what psychological trauma can do to the mind, and to a life, let us consider an extreme case of divided awareness, that of a woman whose psyche was mangled by profound trauma in her past, and who came to me for treatment after several serious suicide attempts. Her story is far grimmer than most of us will ever know, and the consequent suffering in her adult life has been nearly unsurvivable. And yet, should one meet her on the street, or know her only casually, she would seem quite normal. In fact, one might easily view her as enviable. Certainly, when looking on from a distance, nothing at all would appear to be wrong, and much would be conspicuously right.

Julia is brilliant. After the summa cum laude from Stanford, and the full schol- arship at the graduate school in New York, she became an award-winning

418 MARTHA STOUT

producer of documentary films. I met her when she was thirty-two, and an intellectual force to be reckoned with. A conversation with her reminds me of the New York Review of Books, except that she is funnier, and also a living, breath- ing human being who wears amethyst jewelry to contrast with her electric auburn hair. Her ultramarine eyes gleam, even when she is depressed, giving one the impression, immediately upon meeting her, that there is something spe- cial about her. She is, however, soft-spoken and disarming in the extreme. She does not glorify, does not even seem to notice, either her prodigious intelligence or her beauty.

Those same blue eyes notice everything, instantly, photographically. The first time she walked into my office, she said, "Oh how nice. Did you get that little statue in Haiti? I did a kind of project there once. What a spellbinding place!"

She was referring to a small soapstone figurine, the rounded abstraction of a kneeling man, that I had indeed purchased in Port-au-Prince, and that sat on a shelf parallel to my office door. She had not glanced back in that direction as she came in, and must have captured and processed the image in a microsecond of peripheral perception.

"That's very observant," I said, whereupon she directed at me a smile so sparkling and so warm that, for just the barest moment, her lifelong depression cracked and vanished from the air around her, as if it had been nothing but a bubble. The radiance of her momentary smile caused me to blink, and I knew exactly then, even before the first session began, that if she would let me, I would do everything I could to keep this particular light from going out.

At a moment's notice, Julia can speak entertainingly and at length about film, music, multicultural psychology, African politics, theories of literary criti- cism, and any number of other subjects. Her memory for detail is beyond excep- tional, and she has the sto1yteller's gift. When she is recounting information, or a story, her own intellectual fascination with it gives her voice the poised and expertly modulated quality of the narrator of a high-budget documentary about some especially wondrous endangered animals, perhaps Tibetan snow leopards. She speaks a few astutely inflected sentences, and then pauses, almost as if she is listening-and expects you to be listening-for the stealthy crunch-crunch of paws on the snow's crust.

Curious about this, I once asked her whether she were an actress as well as a filmmaker. She laughed, and replied that she could do first-rate narrative voice- overs, if she did say so herself, but had not a smidgen of real theatrical ability. In fact, she said, sometimes the people she worked with teased her good-naturedly about this minor chink in her armor.

At my first session with her, when I asked her why she had come to therapy, she spent thirty minutes telling me in cinematic detail about her recent attempt to kill herself, by driving to an isolated Massachusetts beach at three A.M. on a Tuesday in late January, and lying down by the sur£ By so doing, she sincerely expected not to be found until well after she had frozen to death. Taking her omniscient narrator tone, intellectually intrigued by the memory, she described the circumstances of her unlikely accidental rescue by a group of drunken

WHEN I WOKE UP TUESDAY MORNING, IT WAS FRIDAY 419

college students, and then spent the second thirty minutes of our hour together likening this near-death experience to the strangely impersonal distance from a story one can achieve on film with certain authorial camera moves.

"By then, I was floating above myself, looking down, sort of waiting. And I know I couldn't actually have seen those kids, but I felt that I did. Over the sound of the waves, I don't think you can really hear footsteps in the sand, but still .... "

And I strained to hear the crunch-crunch. Therapy is a :frightening thing, and people do not often seek it out because

they are only mildly unhappy. In my work, and because of the high-risk indivi- duals who are referred to me, it is not unusual for me to hear stories of attempted suicide from people I have only just met. I have come almost to expect such accounts, in fact.

At our second session, and in exactly the same tone she had used to describe her suicide attempt, Julia began by giving me an interesting account of her new project on the life of a promising writer who had died young, reportedly of a rare blood disease he had contracted in western China. After about fifteen min- utes of this, I stopped her, and explained that I wanted to know something about her, about Julia herself, rather than about Julia's work. Seeing the blank expres- sion come over her face, I tried to provide her with some nonthreatening guid- ance. I asked her some general, factual questions about her childhood.

And at that second session, this is what the articulate, intellectually gifted Julia remembered about her own childhood: an only child, she knew that she had been born in Los Angeles, but she did not know in which hospital. She vaguely remembered that when she was about ten, her parents had moved with her to another neighborhood; but she did not remember anything about the first neighborhood, or even where it was. Though she did not know for sure, she assumed that the move must have taken place because her parents had become more prosperous. She remembered that she had a :friend in high school named Barbara (with whom "I must have spent a lot of time"), but she could not remember Barbara's last name, or where Barbara had gone after high school. I asked Julia about her teachers, and she could not remember a single one of them, not from grade school, not from middle school, not from high school. She could not remember whether or not she had gone to her high school prom or her high school graduation. The only thing she seemed to remember vividly from childhood was that when she was about twelve, she had a little ter- rier dog naµied Grin, and that her mother had Grin put to sleep when he needed an expensive stomach operation.

And that was all she remembered of her childhood, this successful thirty- two-year-old woman with the cinematic mind. And it took forty-five minutes for her to pull out that much from the dark, silent place that housed her early memories. She could not remember a single holiday or a single birthday. At thirty-two, she could swim, read, drive a car, and play a few songs on the piano. But she could not remember learning any of these skills.

Insufficient memory in the context of an adequate intellect, let alone a gifted one, is the next observation-right after the extraordinary understatement and humor-that causes me to become suspicious about a patient's past.

420 MARTHA STOUT

At our third session, she asked me an astonishing question, but also, really, the obvious question: "Do other people remember those things, about their tea- chers, and going to their graduation, and learning to drive, and so on?" When I told her that, yes, they usually do remember, at least to a much greater degree than she did, she reverently said, "Wow," and then she was quiet for a few min- utes. Finally, she leaned forward a little and asked, "So what's wrong with me?"

Cautiously, because I knew what I had to say might at first sound preposter- ous or worse to Julia, I said, 'Tm wondering about early traumatic experiences in your life. Even when someone's cognitive memory is perfectly good, as yours is, trauma can disrupt the memory in emotional ways."

Julia thought I was way off base; or at least the part of her that collected amethyst jewelry, made award-winning films, and talked about camera angles thought I was way off base. Another part of Julia, the part that kept trying to commit suicide, the part that prevented her from moving back to Los Angeles as her career demanded, the part that sometimes made her so sleepy during the middle of an ordinary day that she had to be driven home, that part kept her coming back to therapy for the next six years. During those six years, step by step, Julia and I cast some light on what had happened to her. She agreed to be hypnotized; she began to remember her dreams; she acknowledged her faint suspicions. She even traveled back to Los Angeles, to talk with distant relatives and old neighbors.

What we eventually discovered was that, when she was a child, Julia had lived in a house of horrors, with monsters jumping out at her without warning and for no apparent reason, except that Julia had come to assume, as abused chil- dren do, that she must be a horrible person who deserved these punishments. By the time she was school age, she had learned not to cry, because tears only encouraged her parents to abuse her further. Also, she had lost any inclination whatsoever to let anyone know what was going on. Telling someone and asking for help were concepts foreign to her despairing little soul. The thought that her life might be different had simply stopped occurring to her.

And soon, in a sense, she had stopped telling even hersel£ When the abuse began, she would "go somewhere else"; she would "not be there." By this, she meant that her mind had learned how to dissociate Julia's self :from what was going on around her, how to transport her awareness to a place far enough away that, at most, she felt she was watching the life of a little girl named Julia from a very great distance. A sad little girl named Julia was helpless and could not escape; but psychologically, Julia's self could go "somewhere else," could be psy- chologically absent.

Simply put, Julia did not remember her childhood because she was not pres- ent for it.

All human beings have the capacity to dissociate psychologically, though most of us are unaware of this, and consider "out-of-body" episodes to be far beyond the boundaries of our normal experience. In fact, dissociative experi- ences happen to everyone, and most of these events are quite ordinary.

Consider a perfectly ordinary person as he walks into a perfectly ordinary movie theater to see a popular movie. He is awake, alert, and oriented to his

WHEN I WOKE UP TUESDAY MORNING, IT WAS FRIDAY 421

surroundings. He is aware that his wife is with him and that as they si·t d • . . . ' own1n t~err aisle seats, she 1s to his right. He is aware that he has a box of popcorn on his l~p. He ~ows ~hat the movie he has come t~ see is entitled The Fugitive, and that its star 1s Harnson Ford, an actor. As he waits for the movie to begin, per- haps he worries about a problem he is having at work.

Then the lights in the theater are lowered, and the movie starts. And within twenty-five minutes, he has utterly lost his grasp on reality. Not only is he no longer worried about work, he no longer realizes that he has a job. If one could read his thoughts,. one would discover that he no longer believes he is sitting in a theater, though in reality, he is. He cannot smell his popcorn; some of it tumbles out of the box he now holds slightly askew, because he has forgotten about his own hands. His wife has vanished, though any observer would see that she is still seated four inches to his right.

And without moving from his own seat, he is running, running, running- not with Harrison Ford, the actor-but with the beleaguered fugitive in the movie, with, in other words, a person who does not exist at all, in this movie- goer's real world or anyone else's. His heart races as he dodges a runaway train that does not exist, either.

This perfectly ordinary man is dissociated from reality. Effectively, he is in a trance. We might label his perceptions as psychotic, except for the fact diat when the movie is over, he will return to his usual mental status almost instantly. He will see the credits. He will notice that he has spilled some popcorn, aldiough he will not remember doing so. He will look to his right and speak to his wife.· More than likely, he will tell her that he liked the movie, as we all tend to enjoy entertainments in which we can become lost. All that really happened is that, for a little while, he took the part of himself that worries about work prob- lems and other "real" things, and separated it from the imaginative part of him- self, so that the imaginative part could have dominance. He dissodated one part of his consciousness from another part.

When dissociation is illustrated in this way, most people can acknowledge that they have had such interludes from time to time, at a movie or a play, read- ing a book or hearing a speech, or even just daydreaming. And then the out- of-body may sound a little closer to home. Plainly stated, it is the case that under certain circumstances, ranging from pleasant or unpleasant distraction to fascination to fear to pain to horror, a human being can be psychologically absent from his qr her own direct experience. We can go somewhere else. The part of consciousness that we nearly always conceive of as the "self' can be not there for a few moments, for a few hours, and in heinous circumstances, for much longer.

As the result of a daydream, this mental compartmentalization is called dis- traction. As the result of an involving movie, it is often called escape. As the result of trauma, physical or psychological, it is called a dissociative state. When a hypnotist induces dissociation, by monotony, distraction, relaxation, or any number of other methods, die temporary result is called an hypnotic state, or a trance. The physiological patterns and the primary behavioral results of distrac- tion, escape, dissociative state, and trance are virtually identical, regardless of method. The differences among diem seem to result not so much from how

422 MARTHA STOUT

consciousness gets divided as from how often and how long one is forced to keep it divided.

Another recognizable example of how consciousness can be split into pieces has to do with the perception of physical pain. On the morning after seeing The Fugitive, our moviegoer's wife is working frenetically to pack her briefcase, eat her breakfast, get the kids off to school, and listen to a news report on television all at the same time. She is very distracted. In the process of all this, she bashe; her leg soundly against the comer of a low shel£ Yet the woman is not seem- ingly aware that she has injured hersel£ That night, as she is getting ready for bed, she notices that she has a large colorful bruise on her right thigh. She thinks "Well, now, I wonder how I did that." '

In this case, a person was distracted, and the part of her consciousness that would normally have perceived pain was split apart from, and subjugated to, the part of her consciousness that was goal-directed. She was not there for the direct experience of her pain. She was somewhere else (the briefcase, the breakfast, the kids, the news). And because she was not there, she does not remember the accident.

The direct experience of physical pain can be split off in cases of much more serious injury as well. Most of us have heard stories along the lines of the parent who, with a broken leg, goes back to the scene of an accident and wrenches open a mangled car door with her bare hands in order to rescue her child. Less valorous, I myself remember my car being demolished by a speeding limousine. My knee was injured, but I felt no pain just after the crash, was more or less unaware of my body at all. My first thought before being dragged out of my car was to peer into the rearview mirror and inspect rny teeth, and to decide that everything must be okay because there were no chips in them. And then there are the war stories about maimed infantrymen who have had to flee from the front line. All such circumstances affect memory in fascinating ways. Note, for example, that when veterans get together, they often laugh and tell war stor- ies as though those times had been the best of their lives.

Agony that is psychological can be dissociated, too. While she was being abused, Julia developed the reaction of standing apart from herself and her situa- tion. She stopped being there. Certainly, some parts of her consciousness must have been there right along. She could watch her parents, even predict their moods. She could run and hide. She could cover her injuries. She could keep her parents' secrets. But the part of her consciousness that she thinks of as her self was not there; it was split off, put aside, and therefore in some sense pro- tected. And because her self had not been there, her self could not remember what had happened to her during much of her childhood.