psychotherapy

I’m sorry I was born

Posted on by SomatiCat

I used to let a friend stay in my apartment whenever I was away. She was a hoarder, and her own apartment was almost unlivable. I wanted her to have a place where she could simply exist, even if only for a week or so.

When I returned, I always found my apartment exactly as I had left it, as if nobody had ever been there. She erased every trace of her presence, just as I preferred. My apartment was my safe space, and I wasn’t comfortable having anyone else in it. It amazed me because she couldn’t even pick up the trash that had fallen on the floor in her own apartment. She must have made a tremendous effort to leave no trace of herself.

Then I noticed something.

That was exactly what I did whenever I stayed in someone else’s home. I did my best not to leave any trace of myself, as if I were an intruder.

“I’m sorry I was born” is the famous opening line of No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. I related to that line deeply when I was a teenager.

My friend had DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder), caused by severe childhood trauma. One of her alters repeated, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

I am sorry to exist.

That was our common ground.

It wasn’t because we were inherently bad, damaged, or worthless. It was because someone had wounded our psyches so profoundly that we could no longer feel we had the right simply to exist.

My friend has since left this world from natural causes, finally free from her suffering. For her, not existing may have been the only way to feel safe.

I am staying with a friend’s family now, where I feel safe. Even so, I still catch myself trying to be invisible—quietly slipping through the kitchen without being noticed—as if something terrible might happen if I were seen.

In a loving family, that wouldn’t have happened.

The Nervous System Remembers

Posted on by SomatiCat

I always have the urge to go to the bathroom before I leave home, especially if I’ll be in a car for a long drive. It doesn’t matter that I went to the bathroom just twenty minutes ago. If I ignore the urge, I feel anxious.

My father used to ask us, his children, “Did you go to the bathroom?” just before we got into his car. If I didn’t take the cue and go “just to be safe,” he would complain, ridicule, and reprimand me if I needed to use the bathroom before his designated pit stop. I was just a kid.

I didn’t realize that my nervous system had been conditioned by my father’s strict rule.

Years later, I took a self-defense class for women. Men wearing ridiculously thick protective gear pretended to be sexual offenders and simulated attacks. The female participants then practiced kicking and striking strategically assigned target areas, just as we had been taught. We trained for several weeks.

At the end of the course, we shared our experiences. One woman said she always felt the urge to go to the bathroom after the simulated attack and defense exercises. She explained that it was exactly what she had done after she was raped. Her story made a deep impression on me.

Our nervous system doesn’t forget.

No amount of talk therapy would have eliminated my urge to go to the bathroom. The body remembers. The nervous system keeps score.

So how do I convince my nervous system that I don’t actually have to pee—that my bladder isn’t full?

Ironically, I learned the answer when I stopped taking an anti-anxiety medication cold turkey.

The medication had been prescribed on an as-needed basis. Over time, for various reasons, I began taking it every day. I didn’t realize I had developed a dependence on it. After the stressful period was over and I went on vacation, I stopped taking it. It was a very low dose, so I had no idea it could cause such severe withdrawal symptoms.

I woke up every hour from nightmares. Throughout the day, I felt a strong urge to urinate every hour, even though my bladder wasn’t full. After ruling out a urinary tract infection—I happened to be staying with a friend who was an infectious disease specialist—I discovered that urinary urgency is a common withdrawal symptom. Because benzodiazepines depress the central nervous system, withdrawal can manifest as an overactivation of the sympathetic nervous system.

If I couldn’t regulate my autonomic nervous system, I worried that I would reinforce the pattern and end up needing to use the bathroom every hour indefinitely.

So I told my nervous system that it was a phantom urge and that my bladder wasn’t going to burst. I held it for thirty minutes longer, then an hour longer. Each day I gradually extended the time before going to the bathroom. After several days, both my bladder and my sleep returned to normal.

One of my friends teaches nervous system regulation techniques for people with CPTSD. I understood the theory, but I hadn’t truly put it into practice. Now I understand how powerful those techniques can be.

I still have moments of anxiety, moments when I used to reach for a pill automatically. Now I see them as signs that my sympathetic nervous system has become unnecessarily activated. Instead, I calm myself with breathing techniques and wait for the activation to pass.

So far, it’s working.

Tinnitus

Posted on by SomatiCat

This essay is about chronic suicidal ideation as a symptom, not an expression of current intent.

I realized that suicidal ideation is like tinnitus for me.

Because of Meniere’s disease, I have tinnitus in one ear. When I was having severe attacks, every morning I woke up hoping the ringing had miraculously disappeared. Every morning, the moment I opened my eyes, it came roaring back. It was a loud, high-pitched sound that was always present. The louder it became, the more likely it was that a severe attack was coming. Even now, I feel anxious whenever I hear the high-pitched sound they use in horror movies to signal that something ominous is about to happen.

Fortunately, my Meniere’s disease went into remission, and I no longer have severe attacks. Some residual symptoms remain. I have lost most of the hearing in one ear. I lose my balance easily. And I still have a constant, low-grade tinnitus in my deaf ear.

Most of the time I am not consciously aware of it, but it is always there. Occasionally it grows louder, and I slap the side of my head with my palm, as if I could reset it. When everything around me is quiet, I hear it.

I have had suicidal ideation since I was very young. The impulse has always been with me. It is just a thought, and I have never seriously acted on it, but I hear a voice saying, “Jump. Jump. Jump.” My mind automatically imagines ways I could kill myself. Sometimes that voice becomes very loud.

After decades of therapy and simply reaching a certain age, I realized that it was never a wish to die.

I once watched a film about an actor who overdosed after a scandal destroyed his career. Did he intentionally kill himself, or was it an accident? The film suggested another possibility: perhaps he simply wanted to sleep deeply, wake up, and reboot his life.

I understood immediately.

What I really wanted was to be free from the roles assigned to me by other people—to stop being a character in someone else’s story. I wanted to begin my own life, free from relational trauma, outside the architecture of my family, free from expectations that had been imposed on me.

When I reached that realization, I proudly told my psychiatrist that my suicidal ideation had disappeared.

But it came back.

Not as loudly as before, but like tinnitus, it is always there. Sometimes it gets a little louder and I notice it. Most of the time it fades into the background and I ignore it. But it is always there.

Perhaps my nervous system developed this pattern because of the life I lived. It is simply following an old neural pathway.

Perhaps what I need now is not to fight it, but to patiently teach my nervous system that I am free.

Help is available

If you’re having thoughts of self-harm or suicide: call, text 988, or start a live chat with Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. It’s free and confidential. You’ll reach someone who is trained to listen and support you.

Just in Case

Posted on by SomatiCat

I’ve always wanted to be one of those rare people who can move at a moment’s notice with just two suitcases.

One of my friends has moved countless times—within New York City, from the East Coast to the West Coast, and even across the Pacific—in pursuit of better opportunities as an actress. Every time she moves, she sheds more of her belongings. Most of the time, she has lived in shared houses or apartments.

“I only keep one nice cup and one plate I love,” she once told me. She has a Tiffany teacup and a Wedgwood plate.

She doesn’t cook.

I have also moved many times, from one apartment to another in the city, as my relationships fell apart. Eventually, I came to live alone in increasingly smaller apartments. I have now lived by myself in the same small apartment for more than fifteen years.

I’ve done my share of shedding, but in general I’ve always had difficulty letting things go. Some things I kept because of their sentimental value, some because I thought I might need them someday, and others because I imagined I might use them for craft projects.

I am not a craft person.

While living in this apartment, I have encountered three cases of hoarding.

My father was a hoarder. Whenever I visited my parents and tried to sort through the belongings I had left behind, I was disgusted to find the room stuffed with toilet paper rolls, tissue boxes, and cheap bars of soap. Why do toilet paper rolls so often trigger scarcity anxiety? I rearranged the piles of toilet paper and other supplies just so I could make enough room to move around. My father complained.

I felt physically sick. It was like looking into his troubled mind. There was clearly something wrong with him. He kept everything and threw away nothing. Sometimes he picked up things other people had discarded and brought them home because they might be useful someday. We thought he was simply thrifty. After he retired, it became much worse.

After he was moved to a nursing home, we were finally able to clear out his belongings. My mother had no attachment to any of them. His better clothes and anything of value were donated to a charity. Without him there to protest, we got rid of the junk he had accumulated over the years. My mother was dumbfounded to discover several broken bicycles in the shed.

“Where did he get them?” she asked me.

He must have schlepped them home from neighborhood garbage dumps… just in case. He simply couldn’t resist the urge.

People might call it a depression mentality. Perhaps. He grew up in an era of scarcity, and it was a mindset shared by his generation. To a certain extent, it could even be considered a virtue. I have to admit that I inherited some of that mentality myself.

After he passed away, I helped my mother clear out the closets where he had stored his things. Deep inside, packed away in cardboard boxes, I found his psyche—clinging to mementos from every stage of his life, as if trying to hold mortality at bay.

I found his old clothes, tattered and dusty. Among them were the uniforms he had worn as a bank clerk, at least fifty years earlier. Then I came across a stack of pay slips over his entire career at the bank. I was at a loss for words.

Next I found old newspaper clippings from our hometown. One was a small article with a photograph of a group of young nurses. Slowly it dawned on me that one of them was my mother. Another clipping was about something I had written, with my photograph beside it. I didn’t even remember it. I showed my mother the article about the nurses. She didn’t even look at it before tossing it into the garbage. I threw mine away, too.

He never made an effort to know who I was. I was just another newspaper clipping to him, packed away in a dusty cardboard box with the other mementos of his life.

I still don’t know who he was.

But now I know his fear, his anxiety, and his insecurity.

About fifteen years ago, a friend of mine with Dissociative Identity Disorder asked me to help her clean out her apartment. Since she never let anyone inside, very few people knew how she was living. At the time, I was highly dissociated myself. She probably recognized a similarly traumatized psyche in me, and that may have made her feel safe enough to let me in.

Her apartment was in a state of extreme chaos. Everything that entered the space simply piled up without any sense of order. Letters, papers, and plastic bags fell onto the floor and remained there for years. New clothes, still with their tags attached, were buried beneath empty boxes alongside stained clothes. There was barely enough room to move.

It was a shock to my nervous system, but I didn’t feel it. I compartmentalized my emotions and focused on the task at hand, helping her create a little space with some semblance of normalcy.

It was like an archaeological dig. As I cleared away one layer, I uncovered things from the previous year, then the year before that. It became difficult when I began to recognize pieces of our shared past: handouts from our psychospiritual training program, essays by fellow students that she had reviewed, handmade scarves one of the artist students gave her every year. She was loved and trusted by so many of us, yet throughout those years she lived inside this chaos, building a fortress of possessions to keep the outside world at bay.

For about a year, I helped her carve out enough space for her simply to exist. Then she shut down. Before long, the apartment had returned to its original chaos. Perhaps she couldn’t tolerate even the slightest sense of normalcy.

That apartment embodied her psyche. While I was there, it felt as though multiple voices were speaking at once, without context. I stayed numb because if I had allowed myself to feel, I don’t think I could have survived the overwhelming chaos I was trying to bring into some kind of order.

When she was “allowed”—her word—to go out, she could present herself as a perfectly normal person. Brilliant and intelligent, thoughtful and kind, she was a wonderful woman. She was also a mentor to some of us.

I remember one evening when she treated two of us—both struggling with family trauma—to a Sondheim musical. She was funny, articulate, and sophisticated, dressed in a beautiful Eileen Fisher outfit, her favorite brand.

At the end of the evening, we each returned to our own worlds. I went back to my small, cluttered, but safe apartment. The other woman returned to her apartment in the East Village, where her husband was waiting. My friend returned to her own space, where chaos alone prevailed.

As more and more things accumulated in her apartment, there was less and less of the person we knew.

To me, it became clear that the apartment was her. Her confusion, her shame, her fear, her profound frustration, her madness—they all lived there.

Because of severe childhood trauma and the mental illness that followed, She had never been able to metabolize everyday life.

I saw something of myself in her. From that point on, I began consciously and deliberately letting things go.

I didn’t want to become her.

The third case was my aunt, who passed away at the age of one hundred. I was the executor of her will and had to empty her house before we could sell it. I never imagined she was a hoarder. Her home was always neat and beautifully decorated. I began by burning her photo albums simply because I couldn’t bear the thought of her personal photographs ending up in a garbage dump.

Then I realized she had been a major hoarder.

There were thousands of photographs of her. Everything was about her. It was as if she were the center of every party she attended, every trip she took, every occasion she was part of. Thousands of photographs documented the life she presented to the outside world.

Like my father, she kept everything. I found old tickets, postcards, and little souvenirs from her extensive travels tucked away in drawers. I kept feeding them into the fire.

Then I moved on to the closets. They were meticulously organized, filled with hundreds of boxes, most of them carefully labeled in her own handwriting. Inside were the leftover supplies from every craft she had ever taken up. She was extraordinarily talented and threw herself into one craft after another. For several years she would immerse herself in it, creating beautiful things, and then she would move on to the next one. The remnants of each passion were carefully packed away and preserved. Some of the boxes had remained unopened for decades.

She kept everything.

She built an armor out of her creations and achievements.

I don’t know who she was. It was as if someone had cut the figure out of a photograph. The background remained perfectly intact, but where she should have been, there was only a blank white space.

We digest food. We also digest life’s experiences—if they are fully lived, they become part of us. If they are not, they remain outside us as unfinished business. Sometimes they become objects we cannot throw away.

Now I look around my apartment and ask myself what I can let go of. I don’t need mementos of my life once I’ve metabolized it.

The One Who Stayed in the Garden

Posted on by SomatiCat

There were three girls, Nana, Kiki, and Zuzu, living together in a small house with a large backyard. Nana was the smart one. Kiki was the pretty one and Zuzu was the dumb one.

Every day Nana went to school with books and pencils and erasers and rulers neatly packed in her backpack. Nana loved to visit the computer room, where she could sit by herself and punch in numbers and formulae. Kiki also went to school, but she didn’t read books. She liked to chat and hang out with friends.

Zuzu always stayed home and played by herself in the large backyard. Zuzu couldn’t read. Zuzu couldn’t write. Zuzu couldn’t talk. She buried things in the backyard, things that had once been alive. She buried things from Mama’s kitchen: carrots, turnips, shells, chicken bones, eggs, fish bones, ox tails, potato peels, grapes, seeds of fruits. She buried things from their living room: goldfish, plants, birds, when they stopped moving. She did not bury Kiki’s socks or her ribbons. She did not bury Nana’s books or papers. So nobody minded what she buried in the backyard. No one asked why she chose the things she did.

In spring many plants broke ground in the backyard. In summer it got crazy. Next to pumpkin vines crawling on the ground, sunflowers stood high above. Papaya and avocado turned the garden into a tropical island and died away when the first autumn wind touched the frail leaves. Baby trees were everywhere. Flowers had no sense of order. You could bump into huge watermelons with cute green stripes. Grasshoppers were jumping around and ants were marching from one place to another. Mama never bought any herbs from the store. She just had to step outside into Zuzu’s garden. Things came back in other forms. And they grew and grew like kudzu in the South. The girls ate watermelons for lunch. Mama baked pumpkin pies. Grape vines crawled up a pine tree. Everything was sweet and rich and nobody cared why. Spiders and caterpillars, which Nana did not like, were everywhere. When something stopped growing, Zuzu buried it in the garden.

One day, Zuzu buried Kiki’s white rabbit fur coat. Zuzu never buried Nana’s stuffed animals. Zuzu never buried Kiki’s dolls. Mama had to tell her not to bury fur coats. But nobody knew if she understood or not.

Nana went to the upper school. Kiki ceased to go to school. All day long Nana wrote and read and calculated. All day long Kiki chatted and chatted. All day long Zuzu stayed in her garden. At night, they ate supper together with Mama.

A peach tree Zuzu had planted long ago became very big. Birds came to the tree and made a nest. Mama bird laid eggs and the eggs became small, tiny baby birds. One day Kiki found a dead baby bird on the ground. There was no storm, no rain, no wicked bird. The baby had just dropped. Zuzu buried the dead bird near the sunflowers as usual.

Grandmother got sick and Mama left to see her. The three girls stayed home by themselves. Kiki got sick and moaned and cried. Nana was worried. Zuzu didn’t say anything. In the morning Kiki had a baby, and it was dead, with blood all over its tiny body. There was no storm, no tornado. Just warm white sunlight shining through the leaves in the garden.

Nana gave the dead baby to Zuzu. She buried it next to the kitten that had died three years ago. Then they forgot about the baby. Zuzu did not forget.

Nana left home to go to college. Kiki left home to be a movie star. Zuzu stayed home with Mama.

Nana earned a lot of degrees and went to work in the big city. She had lots of money in the bank. She invested her money everywhere. She traded bonds and stocks, and bought and sold real estate. Mama did not understand what Nana was talking about, so Nana stopped talking to Mama. Nana got married to a rich man with a boring tie and had three girls. One day she killed them all with a butcher knife. They were buried somewhere. Since Nana was rich and could hire a famous lawyer, they had her sent to a hospital. After a couple of years Nana came back to Mama’s house. She did not read or write anymore. She died without saying a word to anybody. Zuzu buried her in the backyard, next to the kitten.

Kiki earned a lot of admirers and bought jewelry, fur coats, dresses, and cars. She won a trip to Europe. She made a lot of friends there. She went to parties with her jewelry and her admirers. Kiki got married three or four times and had babies, all of which were stillborn. They were buried somewhere. After her last husband left for a young girl who looked like Kiki when she was pretty in white, Kiki got sick and came back to Mama’s house with jewelry and fur coats and dresses and cars, but without health insurance. Kiki did not look pretty anymore. Kiki did not chat anymore. She lay in her room and got sicker and sicker, and one day died without saying a word. Zuzu buried Kiki in the backyard next to the baby.

Mama was very sad. She could not eat any of the things that grew in the backyard. Mama said, “I lost the smart one, then I lost the pretty one.” Zuzu turned to Mama and opened her mouth and said, “Take it easy, Mama. I survived.”

Then Mama realized that she had never had triplets, but only one daughter.

Zuzu and Mama lived together, and the garden kept growing. Mama began to recognize what had been there all along.

Author’s note

This story comes from a time when my inner world lived in fragments. The figures are not separate people, but parts of a psyche shaped by survival. Zuzu, in her own way, held what could still grow.

On Father’s Day

Posted on by SomatiCat

My mom called and told me to come home to see my father. I was in my twenties, living by myself in a big city. My father was hospitalized and scheduled for surgery.

It was surgery for suspected lung cancer, and my mom, who was a nurse, expected him to die soon.

“Don’t tell him. Just pretend you’re home for the holiday.”

At that time, in my home country, it was common not to tell patients they had cancer, especially if it might be terminal.

I didn’t feel sadness, anxiety, or any of the emotions considered appropriate in such a situation.

“OK,” I said, and I went home to see him in his hospital bed.

It turned out that the tumor was benign. He lost one-third of his left lung, but he would live.

My mom spent most of the day with him at the hospital. When I came home, she wanted a break and asked me to stay with him for a couple of hours. He didn’t need twenty-four-hour nursing care, and I was not the nurturing type. Still, I stayed with him to give my mom a break.

Every thirty minutes or so, he would ask, “Is Mom back yet?”

This guy is like a kid, I thought.

We didn’t have any emotional connection. I had never felt loved by him. Actually, I didn’t know what being loved felt like. I had never felt seen by him. I didn’t love him. I didn’t even care about him.

I was told to play a role, so I played it.

While we were alone in the hospital room, he said, probably more to himself than to me, “This time I thought I was gonna die.”

He had Type 2 diabetes and often had health scares. His father died from diabetes when he was very young. His older sister died, leaving behind a young son whom he helped raise. Then, when his wife was pregnant with a boy, he himself was diagnosed with diabetes.

He was afraid to die.

His entire life seemed devoted to avoiding the fate he believed awaited him.

That was the first time I saw him—not as a father, but as a frightened man facing his own mortality.

The second and last time I felt an emotional connection with him came much later.

He was in his eighties and had Alzheimer’s disease, along with complications from diabetes. Whenever I visited my mother, I went to see him in the nursing home every day, sometimes twice a day.

He no longer recognized me as his daughter.

I was simply a nice lady who visited him and gave him massages.

Oddly enough, that made it much easier for me to be with him.

He was just a frail old man.

One day, I sat beside him and told him about the dog I had recently lost.

Suddenly, he said, “Don’t tell that story. It makes me so sad…”

I saw him.

He loved dogs.

He had never expressed his feelings openly, but he was the only person in my family who truly took care of our dogs. When a dog died, the rest of us moved on without much sentiment, but he was the one who mourned.

OK.

At least we had something in common.

I didn’t visit him because I cared about him or because I loved him. I visited him and took care of him because it was the role I was expected to play: the good, caring daughter who flew all the way from the United States to see her father and visited him every day.

A loving daughter for a loving father.

I didn’t feel any love.

I didn’t know what love felt like.

After I returned to the United States, my mom called one day to tell me that he was dying.

It was clear that I wouldn’t make it back in time, and I didn’t care.

What was the point?

We had never had an emotional connection.

He died in the nursing home after my mother went home to rest.

I flew back for his funeral.

I didn’t feel grief.

I felt relief.

Finally, he was gone.

I was free.

I don’t feel guilty for not loving him.

If I don’t know what being loved feels like, how could I have loved him?

I still don’t feel love toward him, but I have learned compassion.

He did the best he could.

He simply didn’t have the emotional capacity to be present with me.

©2026 JU

Three Way Mirror Vanity

Posted on by SomatiCat

I had three mothers.

There’s a photo of them together, sitting in a living room. Every time I look at it, I think of the witches—not the ones from Hocus Pocus, but the ones from Macbeth. Together, they conjured me: a daughter with a fragmented identity.

When we are young, we come to understand ourselves through interaction with our parents. We need to feel loved and accepted—especially by our mothers. Our survival depends on them. They become the foundation of who we are.

In my early childhood, my parents, grandmother, and aunt all lived under the same roof. My real mother was a nurse and gone during the day. My grandmother took care of me. She was a woman of few words, rarely expressive. She fed me, probably changed my diapers, and otherwise left me to my own devices. I was a free-range kid. She was always busy—tending to our small rice paddies, vegetable garden, and housework.

I followed her around, watching her do everything by hand or with simple tools. I saw her harvest soybeans, shell them, sort them, boil and mash them, and finally turn them into homemade miso paste. Everything was made from scratch. That’s just how small farmers lived.

She also took me on her regular visits—to the neighborhood Shinto shrine, and to my grandfather’s grave. From her, I learned ritual manners. She was more superstitious than religious. To this day, I still visit that same shrine when I go home. It’s deeply rooted in me. As long as I physically survived and followed her instructions, I was allowed to exist.

Sometimes, when my mother worked night shifts, my grandmother “let her rest” by handing me off to my single, childless aunt. I often slept beside her. Only much later—nearly half a century on—I learned that my aunt had once had a child out of wedlock, a daughter she gave up for adoption.

To her, I was a baby doll. She adored me and constantly told me I was cute. Whatever I did, I was “cute” to her. Naturally, I loved her. Looking back, I see now that I was her emotional support animal. A doll she could pour her love into. I was a blank screen, an empty vessel for her to project her longing and affection onto. As long as I accepted her version of “love,” I had a place in her world.

My actual mother? She’s almost completely absent from my childhood memories—except when I was sick. As a nurse, she took care of my body when it broke down. But emotionally, there was no connection. With her, I felt like a utility animal—fed and maintained for function, not love.

Her “love” was always conditional. I was a “good enough” daughter only when I served some purpose for her. Most of the time, that purpose was to be strong-willed, fearless, and short-tempered—a stand-in, a surrogate warrior she used to push back against her verbally and psychologically abusive husband. I was her avatar, not her child.

As I grew up, I developed three distinct clusters of identity traits—not like someone with dissociative identity disorder, but more like someone sitting in front of a three-way mirror vanity, where each angled mirror is distorted and reflects a different version of her. And those warped reflections bounce back and forth endlessly, deepening the distortion.

It was deeply confusing, to say the least.

It took me decades—more than half a lifetime—to even begin to feel the original me. I spent so many hours trying to reconcile those mirrored fragments. Now, I no longer need the mirror.

As for my father—he hated that I was a girl. The only time he acknowledged me as his child was when I got good grades. Otherwise, I was worthless.

Touch: Your Brain’s Interpretation

Posted on by SomatiCat

Even though the sensory receptors in the skin are mechanoreceptors, it is your brain that interprets the signals they send. Since the brain remembers past experiences and the emotions associated with them, touch is never merely a  touch. Even the same mechanical touch can be felt differently—it can be loving, caring, comforting, or healing; sensual or sexual; cold, abusive or invasive. Even when you think your touch is neutral, it’s up to the receiver’s brain to interpret it.

When I was in my late thirties, I went through infertility treatment. To check if my fallopian tubes were open, I underwent a very uncomfortable test. The pressure I felt inside my body was so invasive that I instinctively contracted my entire body, bracing myself. Then the technician’s assistant gently placed her hand on my arm. I melted. Her touch was neutral, and I don’t think she was consciously trying to comfort me. I felt it came from her spontaneous empathy. 

I have Meniere’s disease. One day, I had a Meniere’s attack in a gross anatomy lab and had to lie on a cold linoleum floor for some time, clutching a barf bag. I told everybody that nothing could be done to relieve my suffering and asked them to keep me safe and leave me alone until the symptoms resolved. I threw up in the bag and was hyperventilating in a fetal position. Some people can’t tolerate witnessing suffering without doing anything; it might make them feel powerless. A few of them placed their hands on me, perhaps to soothe or heal. I just had to endure the unwanted touch. They were mechanically the same kind of touch, but my brain interpreted them differently. One was comforting and the other was annoying.

As a child, I experienced improper touches, which were a violation of boundaries. This experience made me sensitive to the intent behind a touch. I don’t remember receiving loving touches from adults in my family during my childhood. My nervous system used to react to every touch as if it were a danger. Sometimes, a touch triggered tremendous rage, while other times, it made me feel nauseous. It took me a long time to learn to discern a safe touch from an unwanted one. I’ve learned to set boundaries and to choose how to respond, not just to react. 

copyright 2024

Split

Posted on by SomatiCat

I watched Split and Glass on Netflix, where a fictional character with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) develops a personality with superhuman strength. James McAvoy was phenomenal, shifting seamlessly from one persona to another on screen. The story is a textbook case of severe childhood trauma: the psyche fractures to protect the vulnerable self. One of his identities, “The Beast,” punishes the undamaged—those who haven’t suffered.
[Spoiler Alert] The Beast sees the damaged as pure.

That’s what drew me in.

I have a friend with DID. Sarah is brilliant, cultured, well-read, and funny. She took many younger, “damaged” women under her wing. She was the one who introduced me to Broadway, gifting me tickets to Sondheim. We’d sit in cafes, visit restaurants, and talk about arthouse films and everything else. Her life sounded like a novel. She told me she was one of the first female TV producers—or something close. I’m not sure if Sarah is the original. I met two of her other selves: Tommy, a boy who constantly said, “Sorry,” and another, terrifying one—probably her internalized mother.

The switches weren’t as clean as in the movies. She once said she had a “Flat Earth Committee” in her head, which decided what she could or couldn’t do. That committee often said she wasn’t allowed to leave her apartment.

Before her DID diagnosis, she’d been given a charcuterie board of mental health labels: agoraphobia, depression, anxiety disorder. She’d been prescribed all kinds of medications. None of them helped.

Many friends tried to help her. After all, when she showed up as “Sarah,” she was wonderful. But over time, that became rarer.

I was the last one who tried hard. I had this urge to rescue someone else—maybe instead of rescuing myself. Her disorders were inflated versions of mine, so I could speak her language to a certain extent.

I don’t have DID. I’ve been dissociated, but not to that degree. I had dysthymia and episodes of major depression. Sometimes I wasn’t “allowed” to get out of bed. I had extremely low self-esteem and poor communication skills—unless I was in a professional setting. Then I became articulate, competent, impressive. I still have a voice inside that occasionally whispers, “Jump” or “Kill yourself.”

Over time, I realized that some of Sarah’s other personalities were sabotaging anything that might make her better. Whenever she admitted to feeling improvement, they lashed back—as if healing would erase them. As if their survival depended on her staying damaged. Ironically, their original role had been to protect her.

They exhausted me, as they had exhausted many before me.

I haven’t seen Sarah in years. She reaches out once in a blue moon—only in moments of desperation. The last time, it wasn’t even her. A mutual friend contacted me because no one had heard from her. Turned out she’d fallen and been hospitalized. She didn’t have her phone in the hospital room, so she couldn’t reach anyone. But she came up with an ingenious solution: she befriended the woman in the next bed and asked her husband to deliver a handwritten note to my building.

That’s Sarah—resourceful and fiercely capable when it matters. She once told me she’d made a deal with the “committee” to keep her alive. One of her friends with DID had died by suicide. Sarah wasn’t going to be one of them.

Eventually, I accepted Sarah as she is. There’s no “original” Sarah waiting to be recovered. She was already many when I met her. I just didn’t know it. She contains multitudes. Every piece of her is my friend. And I’ve let go of the childish fantasy that I could save her—or anyone else.

Everyone splits, to some degree.

There are incidents I don’t remember, but my body seems to. I don’t have a single, monstrous trauma, just layers: a verbally and emotionally—possibly sexually—abusive father; a manipulative, passive-aggressive mother; a narcissistic aunt; a silent, possibly borderline grandmother. Add to that a culture soaked in misogyny, inappropriate touches, and the absence of loving contact—and I was left scarred.

I didn’t split, but I did build personas: a tough bitch and an abrasive man—my internalized father—to protect the vulnerable child inside me.

I’ve spent decades re-parenting that little girl. I wanted her to grow up into who she could have been if she had been loved and left alone: a happy, loving, beautiful girl. A confident, capable woman who could love and be loved.

I didn’t become exactly what I hoped—but I like who I’ve become. I’m happy with this version of myself.

You can’t restore the original child. But you can hold your scars with tenderness. You can carry your pain gently, like something sacred. And in doing so, you become who you were always meant to be:

Clean and pure, with old scars.
Survive. Then thrive.

Giant Anteater

Posted on by SomatiCat

My high school best friend recommended me to watch a Japanese drama series, titled Brush Up Life. It is a story of a young woman, who suddenly died in a freak accident. She arrived at the reception desk of the “upstairs” office. A clerk at the desk told her she was assigned to re-incarnate as a giant anteater. She refused to be reborn as a giant anteater and asked the alternative option. The clerk told her that she could redo her life from the birth with her current knowledge and consciousness. The woman chose to start over and changed her life as she went. To make a long story short, every time she started over, something didn’t work and she died. So she kept going back to the start. Eventually she got the result she wanted (she saved her friends’ life).

My friend asked me if I could start over with current consciousness intact, what would I do. I thought about changing this and that. I would be on SSRI as soon as it’s available–I wasn’t diagnosed until in late 30s and I had developed a basketful of disorders. I would focus on physical fitness –I had eating disorder and was out of shape, a heavy smoker with alcohol dependency. I would move to the U.S. as soon as possible–I moved here in my late 20s and didn’t know my old country’s restrictive culture had traumatized me. I would study harder to get in a medical school –I applied for but wasn’t accepted and instead went to study liberal arts.

Then I realized I would be born into the same family and would have to do it all over again. The heroine of the drama has a “normal enough” and functional enough family. She tries to change things to save others. I can’t change my dysfunctional family. I can’t change how my parents deal with me. I would be born into the same family with all the pain, fear, shame, and anger. No. I would rather be a Giant Anteater. It would be much better.

My friend said she wanted to change one event, which traumatized and defined her life. Her parents moved from a metropolitan area to a rural city due to her father’s job and she was transferred from a private school in a large city to a local public middle school in a pretty tough district, where she was bullied as an outsider. She still can’t get over the trauma. She is now a professor of psychiatry at a local medical school, established and lives in a large house. She is married, has two sons, and they both are well-respected medical doctors. She has grandchildren, who live in the same city. I am freelancing, living in a small apartment with an old dog. I’m divorced with no children. From outside, she seems to have a good enough life. Still, she wanted to change.

I’ve been thinking about starting over, but every time I think of it, I end up choosing a giant anteater. I had a volatile life and I wish I could choose differently here and there, but if I changed any event I wouldn’t be able to be here. Every mistake I made, every bad choice I made, it was a ferry to carry me here and now. I have realized I am very content and happy with who I am now.

I just spend much of my life in constant stormy weather, hanging onto whatever I could to survive. And the deadly wind and current pushed the boats, ferry, or sometimes just a wooden lifesaver to where I am now.

So it’s possible to make peace with your life. I never expected to have this calm ordinary days at the end. (Of course, I spent large sum of money and time on this and that therapy.)