Chapter 52: The Fog - The Nightmare Continues

[Disclaimer: I have used aliases for the names of clients to protect their identity and confidentiality.]

I knew that something was happening to me. This was different than what I had ever experienced previously in my life. So far, I described the impact of what was happening to Lynn and what that did to me.  

I tried to act like things were going to be okay with Lynn. For a while, we might have thought things could return to normal.  

I drove back home on Monday knowing that Lynn was going to be in the hospital for a while.

I tried to return to work thinking I could still do my job. I had an appointment to see a woman and her two children. Both parents were asking me to work with their children because they were going through a difficult divorce. I had been working with both clients, the mother, and father for some time.

Play therapy seemed to be just the thing I needed. I had met with each parent as well. They both expressed concern that the other parent was not competent to be the primary custodian. Play therapy was sufficiently unstructured to avoid anything that either parent told me from affecting the therapy with the children. 

I was curious though to find out if either parent had been abusive. None of my questions seemed to yield anything that indicated abuse. 

Looking back, I wish someone had asked me this question growing up. Anyway, during this time, I was not at my best. The mother would later ask me if I had found anything to help her in the custody hearings. By that time, I was even further gone from the life I had known.

I had a few other clients that didn't seem to present too many challenges. One was an older woman, named Anne, who was dealing with major depression and some addictions - not to alcohol or drugs but to sex. She wasn't really old at fifty-eight.  

Something happened on three separate days in August. I was falling asleep on those days.

This is going to sound strange because I have no factual proof of what was happening, what caused the problems I was having, or why.

Alice just happened to come in during the morning on those three days. Alice had come down from Virginia with that guy John Freifeld. She had declared that she had Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). I mentioned that she had come with Tracy when John had moved to Wilmington.

To this day, I have no recollection of what Alice discussed or what she looked like. 

I am guessing that I would have used a diagnosis of adjustment disorder because that is generic and used when you have no other sense of what diagnosis to use. After learning that she was being referred to me for treatment of DID, I do not recall anything that she ever shared with me. Nothing. I just remember thinking that I had no idea what diagnosis to use.

It was Tuesday, the 8th of August of 2000 when Alice came in during the morning, at 10 AM. I let her go to the office while I used the restroom. I had a big Coca-Cola that I picked up at the convenience store near my office on Chestnut Street in downtown Wilmington. This was the first time that I noticed something unusual happening to me. I had a 32-ounce cup. I remember this because I needed the caffeine that day. 

I was unusually tired from the driving back from Chapel Hill where Lynn was in the hospital. But that was late Sunday and now this was Tuesday.

I found myself struggling to stay awake! That’s all I remember about what happened after Alice came to the office. 

Over time I have found that my mind wanted to fill in details about these sessions with Alice but honestly, there is just a blank spot in my memory around everything related to her other than the sense that I became extremely sleepy after she came to see me.

I have memories of going to the men's room and splashing water on my face during this hour with Alice. I thought pacing or cold water would wake me up, but the feeling lingered for hours.

Rebecca came in at 1 PM and laid down on the couch facing the wall perpendicular to me as she always did. She was tall and attractive. She had been coming to me because she had relationship issues - she had been unfaithful with her husband and she thought she needed help with her sexual addiction. 

Today, again, I had to get up again and use the restroom to try to wake myself up.  

"How could I help anyone if I could not stay awake?" I couldn't think clearly enough to figure out what I should do at this moment.

Vanessa came in the next day. She was one of my clients with DID who had been coming from the Myrtle Beach area. She had just been released from the hospital for treatment related to her condition – DID. Her psychiatrist had made those arrangements. 

She had been suicidal, though, for a person with DID, it manifested as a plan by one personality to harm "the others." Yeah, to her or them, they were a system with different people, and the fact that they all shared the same body could be forgotten by one personality or another.   

Vanessa, after being released from the hospital, now was frightened that something nefarious had happened to her while she was at the hospital.  

She was talking about how some cousins had raped her repeatedly at some point in the past. Sodomized her. Held her down. Again, this was that same day August 8, 2000. It was 3 PM.  

One of her personalities, inside, was a teenage boy who went by the name Victor. He liked to cut the body and now he was threatening to kill the body with a gun. I wondered why she had been released if she was still in this state. I was feeling like I was responsible for finding a solution to prevent her from acting on her plans to end her life. 

She showed me cuts that Victor had made on her arms and legs. She seemed amused as she described this.  

Again, Vanessa spoke about her husband sodomizing her. Ironically, this was what seemed to startle me enough to feel awake finally. The way she described it made it sound like it was a brutal and sadistic form of torture.  

"Sodomized," she had said. It echoed in my mind like a sharp, cutting blow to her motionless body. 

She said she could not move as her husband did this. She froze. But again, her husband did this despite the fact that she had said it triggered reminders of her trauma.  

Yesterday’s session with Patricia came rushing back. Patricia had started therapy at the same time as Sadie had back in 1999 before Jessica had started seeing me. They both had reported that they had known for some time that they had different personalities. She like Sadie had seen the newspaper article describing the workshop in which Louise Coggins had been the presenter.

That seemed like a lifetime ago – about 18 months had passed.

I would think during this time that it was a good thing that she had not come to that therapy/support group for people with DID. Patricia had no contact with any of my other clients and I knew that John Freifeld didn't know about her. None of those from the DID group knew of her existence, as it should be.

Anyway, Patricia, on Monday, had described how her father had done something disgusting for reasons that were hard to understand it was so offensive. She described an abusive scenario in which he had defecated into the toilet and then pushed her face into the toilet bowl.  

This event which she was describing had occurred years ago.

On Monday, August 14th, after spending the weekend with Lynn in the hospital, I was back in the office and Alice came in at 11 AM and Rebecca came in at 1 PM.  

I began to wonder if I was somehow experiencing the symptoms of my clients. Was I trying to escape in my mind from the reality of what was happening to Lynn? I mean at the time I was wondering if there was a purpose to what I was experiencing. It was one of those existential questions about suffering. 

During the rest of this past week, I was so stressed about what was happening to Lynn. I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t sleep. I was tossing and turning. My heart was racing. My stomach was upset almost all the time. 

I knew about dissociative disorders. If I was going to zone out in response to something there would have to be a trigger of some sort. 

Nothing stood out about last Tuesday and now today, Monday. 

This was just nothing like I had ever experienced. There was nothing to which I could compare this experience.

Anyway, the day dragged on and I couldn’t shake the feeling.

My thinking and my perceptions were foggy, like looking at the world through a fog. What is strange is that I described that sensation earlier but at that time I was agitated, anxious, my heart was racing, and I would not have been able to fall asleep.

Now, today, Monday, I was struggling to stay awake all day. 

I had not discussed this with Lynn because I felt she had enough to deal with.

For months and years after this, I would have a powerful sensation where I would see myself walking down a hallway and I would be thinking that the observing me wanted to shout at the vision of myself during this time, “wake up, wake up.”

“What are you doing?” 

I found myself in the men's room several times trying to wake up and squeezing my hands against my forehead and my face trying to figure out what is happening and to stay awake. I couldn’t even focus on a plan as to what I should do about these experiences. 

I just walked about like some zombie or a robot. How was it that no one was noticing anything?

Yeah, looking back, I would think I should have stayed home or called someone to get myself “grounded” … just as I had helped others. My mind wasn’t clear enough to do even that when it was happening.

Then the next day would come and I would be so confused about events the prior day. I wasn’t sure I had dreamed what happened or if it really happened.

On Thursday, August 17, beginning late in the day it started to happen again. The fog hung over me into Friday. I wanted to say that I couldn’t sleep that night, but I actually got home at 6 PM and fell onto the bed asleep. 

I had vivid dreams that night. I remembered that snakes were appearing in the dreams. Sinister looking. A diamondback rattlesnake with an expression that seemed to embody evil itself. That’s just what was going through my mind. It was like I was in the presence of something evil because while the face of the snake was not distorted in any way, it had a human expression. I remembered thinking this is what evil would look like. 

This was the third incident when my mind was not acting like it normally does.

As I write this, I have a mixture of clarity, but it is still foggy. There are some things that I cannot recall. 

As an aside, I did write a collection of poems called “Puncture Wounds” with another poet friend of mine in the late 2000s. It was inspired by my experiences with Freifeld and a few others. 

My poet friend Jean had said, “maybe you did find yourself in the presence of evil.” He was Episcopalian like Celta had been – it’s very much like the Catholic faith. He invited me to receive some blessing at Church one day years ago.

I remember Jean had said, “if you believe in one you have to believe in the other.” He meant belief in God, who is good implies a belief in Satan and evil itself. Yeah, Freifeld seemed soulless. Like a vampire. The collection “Puncture Wounds” is partially based on the themes and symbolism that go along with the vampire legend.

Reflections

These events, whatever they were, and my behavior during this time have never been explained. I have to live with that knowledge. I wanted to know like everyone else who is in an emotional crisis wants to know what happened and why. These experiences seemed to happen after I had met with Alice but I cannot be certain.

I have NEVER had experiences like this previously or since then. More than two decades have passed and I have no answers.

It wasn’t a dissociative disorder because in those cases the experiences must last longer than one month. I had never heard of someone saying that they had a dissociative disorder just one time in their life.

It wasn’t a psychotic break because I have never heard of anyone saying that it happened once during a brief period of their life and never again. Usually, a psychotic break is the first of a series of episodes and medication is required. 

I’ve never been on medications for either of these conditions nor have I been diagnosed with a psychotic disorder or a dissociative disorder. Actually, there was one exception when someone speculated that I might have impaired reality testing. I’ll get to that later but what he was really saying is that I should be examined to get more information.

We always have to rule out the influence of mind-altering substances. I am going to qualify my statements in this regard by saying that I have never knowingly used mind-altering illicit drugs or street drugs. I also have no evidence to support the belief that I had been drugged. I cannot say why it would have been done. 

At times I have declared this, and some people have accepted it as if it were a fact. I merely stated that Alice had the opportunity to put something into my open soda cup.

The limited nature of these episodes also would have been something I would ask clients about to rule out the influence of a mind-altering drug.

There were other ways in which I was acting irrational and confused… making bad decisions. Some of this happened later.

This is all I can offer in terms of what I remember and what is lacking from my memory. The lack of any memory of Alice, what she looked like, or what she discussed is also strange and inconsistent with the rest of my experiences.

The only other person I cannot form an image of is Tracy. I recall her sessions with me as I described earlier. She had come to Wilmington with John Freifeld. I only met with her on two occasions.