To the Psych Community
by the Crisses
To psychology, therapists, counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists or pill-pushers, the guardians of the status-quo, the gatekeepers of saintly sanity: When you find out that you’ve captured the elusive multiple in your office, do your eyes light up with dollar signs as you picture yourself on a talk show proudly explaining how you struggled with the recalcitrant resistant multiple for over 5 years and finally you proved that psychology wins the day because now they’re not a multiple anymore? Do you fantasize that you’ll write the next best-seller and be depicted by Robin Williams on-screen during the movie re-make of How You Conquered the Toughest Nutcase to Crack? Does some part of your ego breathe a sigh of relief that you’ll have one solid regular client week-after-week for years and years? Here’s the latest newsflash, honey: We are not your cash cows.
Shrinks and scientists are so busy theorizing and curing and studying and prescribing and trying to make us into puppets that you never asked us what it’s LIKE to be a multiple. You didn’t ask whether we enjoy it, whether it was as wonderful as it was maddening at times, just like any other deep, rewarding, and lasting relationship that people have to work at. You didn’t ask whether we could look at the bright side, whether we could all get along without needing your meddling fingers in our collective pie. Some of you go straight for the big guns and dive directly into the depths of how each of us was brought to the brink of madness and the very things we chose dividing our memories over. Or was it creating other people, or inviting the spirits in, or retreating into past life memories, or… oh, you forgot to ask, right? You blatantly ignore our ideas and our paradigms and our imagination, because only yours matters. How convenient that your paradigm pushes us into the “insane” cubby, so that you with your bullying and brainwashing — oh, I mean expertise! — are the only ones “qualified” to sanitize us, by which I mean “to make sane.”
Or perhaps a few of you are closet pedophiles and other fallen getting your jollies hearing us recount the sick abuses we’ve been honored with and presumably broken by. But although we’ve broken down from time-to-time, we’re not broken. You just need us to be, so you paint us into a corner of acute insanity, in desperate need of your counsel and you rush off to the telephone booth and don your savior costume.
How many of you asked us — your client for crying out loud — what we wanted from treatment? Even then, if you have us in “a moment” and our answer is that we want everyone else to go away, isn’t that a little like an angry 4-year-old who says they hate their mom and want her to go away? They don’t REALLY want her to go away; they’re just angry. We came to you like a couple seeking out marital counseling, and you turn around and say that the married couple needs 5 years of counseling, to drag up every infraction and relive it, and then at the end you need surgery to become one person. You’ll take the wife’s healthy liver, but leave out the tricky gonads and mammaries, the husband’s brain because he’s the breadwinner in the family. Do you really know that you’re doing the right thing? Really? People have been going through integration and full fusions only since the 1950s at best, right? It takes a whole lot of gall to presume you know what’s right for us.
Oh, but I forget. You were so busy studying us and fucking with our lives that you forgot to ask us what it’s like. So let’s take you on a little fictional journey…
Imagine you live in an apartment, and it’s simply too large to be in every room at the same time. You come home every day to what you think is an empty home, but you hear things. It must be your imagination, after all… or perhaps it’s the neighbors, the walls must be too thin. You don’t remember having finished the milk and cereal that morning, but you must have, and you excuse the bumping noises as the old lady upstairs with the cane. You move to the next room and almost catch something out of the corner of your eye, but you wipe away a wisp of hair, because it must have just gotten in the way. You get a phone call, “Hi, is Pink Petunia there?” “Uh, there’s no one here by that name. Are you sure you have the right number?” “Yeah, I think so — is this 555-1212?” “Uh, yeah, but there’s no Pink Petunia here.” And you hang up. You almost catch a frustrated “Hrumph!” coming from the kitchen, but of course it must be something outside the apartment door.
You go into your living room and there is someone there after all. Their feet are up on your coffee table, they’re watching your TV, eating your food and drinking out of your glass. You swallow hard and gather up your courage to speak: “Uh — excuse me?”
“What the!!?” The person starts bolt upright and cranes their neck to see you. “Who are you?”
Your heart beats in your ear. “I live here.”
Their eyes widen. “Uh, like hell you do. I live here.”
Wait, you’ve seen that face before. They’re the person you saw on the drivers license in your wallet! You pull out your wallet, and there they are, and according to the license, this is their address. If they belong here, then who are you? Perhaps going a bit mad is a perfectly SANE reaction to finding out that you’re not alone at home, and that you’ve technically been a squatter in someone else’s home for years!
After a couple months of this paradigm-shifting insanity, and bumping into everyone under the sun in your house — even that damned hussy Pink Petunia who gives you attitude and still hasn’t forgiven you for messing with her phone call — you all agree it’s time to get some help. After the first visit you find out that you’re fucked, according to the therapist, because YOU AREN’T REAL! Only the person on the license is real, or is it the core personality? Or is it the person born to the body? Or is it the manager? Oh, damn, now even the therapist isn’t really sure who “owns” the privilege of being real. Maybe we should ask Pinocchio and see if his nose grows.
Regardless, you get to come out and play nice with the therapist during sessions, but you’re told you can only come out and have real front-time when it won’t disrupt that person on the driver’s license. And after giving over a minimum of 5 years of potential face-time to this undemocratic limited-fun engagement, they tell you that you’re going to have to become one with the bitch giving you ‘tude, and this jerk who only buys unsweetened Cheerios and skim milk and this other tightwad who only ordered the minimal cable channel package so you’re missing your favorite shows. You get along OK with him, but you really aren’t sure you want to BE him. That’s like twins deciding they want to get back into one body, or like lovers who are literally absolutely inseparable with their lips glued together. Ick! It’s against everything you stand for — literally. Maybe when you’re all fused together you-all-now-as-one will want different cereal and maybe upgrade the cable package to watch the SciFi channel, but you-me-the-person-thinking-right-now won’t really be there anymore — or will you? The therapist isn’t really sure: they just read about it in some books. BOOKS! So based on what some books are telling your therapist that you ought to do, you’re going to become part of the Blob or Invasion of the Body Snatchers or some hive mind creature or…who knows what! All you know is it worked out OK for some other people, but that could just be all the years of brainwashing talking, after all you’ve been in therapy 5 years! Who knows how long all this crap took the people who are happy with it. Are they happy with it or just trying to act happy with it because otherwise the good doctor will want to poke around more and make sure the brainwashing took hold.
So Mr or Mrs Therapist, I really don’t care much for your idea of sanity. Your idea of sanity goes against the inherent multiplicity that has been observed in the founding blocks of modern psychology. Ask Freud, Jung and others whether people are meant to be honestly of one mind on anything. Id, Ego, Super-Ego, Anima, Animus, Archetypes — who are you to say we can’t name all of our “parts”?
I don't care for you telling me what and who I am, and I don't care for you telling me that I'm un-whole, and that I should no longer exist in any way I please. I think it takes a lot of gall for you to push your agenda, or worse yet the agenda of the institutions of the state, on others. I say either help us live lives of fulfillment starting today or get out of the way. Life is much too precious to waste years kowtowing to your proclamation that we're disabled and dysfunctional.
Next: "To Our Detractors"
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