A patient teaches me how to trust Jesus

I just finished a week working on the trauma floor of the psychiatric hospital. On this floor, patients who have been abused or undergone some other traumatic experience undergo intensive therapy so that they can return to normal functioning. The hospital I am working at is one of the top in the nation for this, so patients come in from out of state to live on this floor and work through their pasts. If ever I went into psychiatry, it would be for this. It has been the most fascinating, intense, and beautiful week of the rotation so far.

There are several patients on this floor with dissociative identity disorder (DID, which used to be called "multiple personality disorder") because of their trauma. I am following three of them. One of them, an older woman named "Bernice," is unforgettable. She underwent a very difficult childhood and has several "alters," all of whom are children.

Bernice is a petite, white-haired woman who uses a walker for stability. I rounded on her the first two days of my week in trauma and learned about her past, her course of treatment, her marriage, her neighbors, her houseplants, and her alters. She was in the hospital now because she was beginning to dissociate again after being integrated for over ten years. She was not co-conscious with two of the alters who had recently appeared, and they had made frank or angry comments Bernice would never have made to others.

"Bernice, how many alters do you have?"

"I don't know," she said. "Before I came in, my therapist was trying to help me meet them. She suggested that, every night before I go to sleep, I ask them to come around a table, and we'd talk about how the next day would work."

My work with other DID patients reveals they often have an inner landscape, so that they can exile alters to islands, meet with alters, put child alters in safe places, and be co-conscious and supervise alters who come out. They describe their alters as "fronting" when they take executive control of the body; they can be "co-conscious" if one is in control and another is standing just behind or listening and thinking about the goings-on of the alter current in front.

"But," Bernice said, reflecting on the meeting strategy, "I would come to the table, but the children would never come." I found it striking that the personalities are different enough to seem to have their own wills. "So," Bernice went on, "my therapist suggested that I find a safe place for them, so that they wouldn't be afraid to meet with me. She had me read the Narnia books. So now we go to Narnia. Have you read the Narnia books?"

I told her I had. Bernice nodded and went on, "so now I go to Narnia, and I start at the lamppost. And Jesus follows me. He's always behind me. Even when I first started therapy, the very first time someone hypnotized me, Jesus was the first thing I saw. My doctor asked me, 'What do you see?' And I said, 'Jesus!' And when the session was over I saw he [the doctor] had tears in his eyes, and I asked him what was wrong and he said, 'Nothing, I just never heard anything so beautiful.'"

Parenthetically, I don't think Jesus is one of Bernice's alters, nor is she hallucinating. He is just such a strong part of her waking life that when she descends into her soul, she finds Him, real and vibrant, waiting to help her. She described her most recent meeting with her alters.

Src

"So Jesus follows me, and we go to look for Aslan. I think we have to find a different place, though, because Aslan represents Jesus and if I have Jesus...well, you see the point. Anyway, this time we went into Aslan's mane and there was a rocking chair and a baby. I sat in the rocking chair and rocked and nursed the baby, and then the children [her alters] began coming out of the shadows. I saw little Bernice [the first alter who ever appeared] and Lucy [an alter she had named after one of Lewis' characters], and about five or six others far off, beyond where I could see their faces. They looked like a paper doll chain, all holding hands. I didn't see Mattie, the one who was so angry. But Lucy I saw clearly for the first time. She had straight brown hair a little past her shoulders."

"And I think," Bernice mused, "Jesus gave me a gift, with the rocking chair and being able to nurse the baby. Because those children have never had a mother, that's the problem. And so when they saw a mother in me, they weren't afraid to come meet me."

I was struck completely speechless. She said more about Jesus: "He's so gentle," she said. "I'm never afraid. Sometimes he disciplines, but He's never unkind."

Another day I went to see her, I found her just as she was leaving group therapy early (which you're not supposed to do; the trauma program is very disciplined, and she apparently had poor group attendance). I softly called out her name.

"Bernice!"

"I hafta go take a nap--" she began, and then she saw me and her face lit up. "Oh, it's you!" she said girlishly. "Okay, I'll come. I thought you were going to be angry that I was leaving."

"No," I said. "Can I talk to you?"

"Sure," she said brightly. "But I have to get a ser'quel first." Seroquel is a drug that the patients are allowed to take as needed for sleep. She said "seroquel" in such a strange way, though. Bernice was an articulate woman and the way she skipped the second syllable was a little too...childlike.

When Bernice and I went into the little office and I closed the door, I asked, "so, who do I get to talk to today?"

And to my amazement, the person in front of me replied, in a pleased but bashful tone, "My name's Mariana."

Emily McGee

And for the next half hour, I talked with Mariana, a seven-year-old girl. Mariana's voice was a higher pitch, her sentence structure was simpler, and she sat like a little girl in the chair, legs drawn up like a little ballerina (whereas Bernice sat like any other older woman with osteoporosis). And Mariana used "we" instead of "I."

"We were thinking about you last night," she said, for instance. "We were thinking about how you have such pretty skin and thought you'd look good in pink, and now you're wearing pink!" And she beamed. She also related to me how pretty her therapist was and what beautiful skin she had.

"Mariana, is this the first time you've come out?"

"Yes," she replied. "It gets so noisy in that group and big Bernice goes away, so I came out. We don't like that group. We hafta talk about our bodies and," she said, looking down at the body of an older woman, "big Bernice used to be really pretty but thirty years of psych meds....so I don't like that group."

"How many girls are there?" I asked.

"There's seven of us," Mariana answered matter-of-factly. "Lucy and little Bernice and--oh! And the one that gets us into trouble when she comes out OOoh!" Mariana made a very exaggerated face of displeasure.

"Mattie?" I asked.

"Yes!" exclaimed Mariana with some surprise. "Did big Bernice tell you?"

"Yes," I said. I wanted to ask more about Mattie, but we ended up talking about the meeting in Narnia, and I got the story from another perspective. "Big Bernice was telling me she rocked the baby, and then she saw little Bernice and Lucy," I said. "And she saw some children holding hands like paper dolls. Were you one of those?"

Mariana was puzzled. I shouldn't have been surprised--after all, it was Bernice who saw the children in the shadows and was reminded of paper dolls. If Mariana was one of those, she wouldn't have that mental image. "I guess so," Mariana said eventually. "But we came because big Bernice looked so motherly. How were we supposed to come to a table if we didn't even know her?"

I learned a lot about Mariana. She told me a little about everyone's history, and how Bernice had to deal with her alters when they first started coming out. Mariana giggled as she recounted some of the troubles that little Bernice caused when she first came out.

"And she was only two! So of course, she di'n't know how to drive. So when big Bernice went somewhere and then we switched, little Bernice didn't want to drive and so we was stuck. And then once little Bernice finally had to drive once, so she got behind the wheel and drove probably twelve miles and hour all the way home. We were so scared! But then she grew up to five, and now we're all seven."

One of the most interesting comments she made was about the group dynamic. Early in the conversation, she saw the blank Progress Note form by my elbow and asked, "Are you going to ask me questions?"

"No," I said, pushing the form away. "I just want to find out more about you. Mostly I just write how people are doing and if they're having a big problem."

Mariana looked worried. "Do you call switching a big problem?"

I shrugged. "No."

She looked visibly relieved. "Some people do," she said secretively. "But it's not fair for only one to be out all the time. We should all get our chance."

Soon, Mariana began to look tired. "We want to go sleep," she said. "And when we wake up, big Bernice will come back."

"Okay, go get some sleep," I said, and sent her on her way. That was yesterday. Today I went to talk with her again (even though I wasn't supposed to round on her) and expected to see Bernice, herself, again.

But Mariana was still out. She looked very tired, even though it was just after breakfast. "I like your chair," she mused sweetly. "It's got a high back, like a queen's chair."

"A queen of Narnia," I said smilingly.

Her face lit up. "You read those books?" she exclaimed. I nodded, and she almost clapped her hands with glee. Just a few days ago, I had told Bernice (big Bernice) the same thing and got a very different reaction.

We talked briefly. "It's hard to look at all those people out there," she said, speaking of the other patients on the trauma unit. "We look at them and see that three-fourths of them will never be well. They will get better, but then they will go back to the hospital. Just like us: we thought we were well, but we weren't. Now we're back in the hospital. We will never be well. We won't."

I gazed at the person speaking to me who had the body of an old woman, the mind of a little girl, and a disease so terrible it ripped her identity into pieces. What an incapacitating condition! (She has trouble with adult friendships and jobs because children come out! Once so functional, she's now in a mental hospital, stuck with problems most people never imagine because they're one whole personality.) I wondered whether I should comfort or reassure her. I didn't, and I am so glad I held my tongue, because she said something I will never forget.

Src

"But you know Jesus? He only gives you what's good. One of the letters that Paul wrote, I can't remember what he says but he asked Jesus to take away something, I don't know what, he asked him three times but Jesus didn't take it away. And that's how it is with us. We think we're at our very worst but we're not. That's when we're giving him the greatest glory. We don't think we can do anything but we can and we do."

I was struck speechless again, this time completely overawed.

What trust! I decided that I have no idea what trust in Jesus really is. I recently read Consoling the Heart of Jesus and thought, "aha, now I know how to trust Jesus!" Formation has been focusing heavily on one simple concept: "God loves me immensely." And so I thought, "aha, I live like a beloved daughter of God so vividly now!"

Nope. I have no idea what trust is. I have no idea what living on divine love is.

Bernice and Mariana do. They walk with Jesus in total simplicity, attached to nothing in this world, not even the hope of being integrated or having a life back. With no vengeance, anger, entitlement, or greed, they walk like children, relying on Him for everything and thanking Him even if nothing seems to come.

At that moment, my attending poked his head in the room. "I'm in here talking with Mariana," I explained, so that he wouldn't address her by the wrong name.

(This is old hat to him; he's been in psychiatry so long that he still has a copy of the DSM-II (we're now in the DSM-5) and he's worked psychoanalysis and trauma for so long that he's apparently legendary. "People come from all over the country to be here," he said shuffingly to me one day, "and part of it's to see me.")

So my attending looked at Mariana and said nonchalantly, "so how long are you all planning to stick around?" He was asking about when she wanted to be discharged. I don't remember what Mariana answered; I was still struck dumb by what she had just said. My attending charted "young alter Mariana out" and we left, but I will never forget that conversation.

Therefore, that I might not become too elated, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to beat me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I begged the Lord about this, that it might leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me. Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.