By Anne C. Woodlen

I am propped upright in a hospital bed on the psychiatric unit, bright red tulips from the Easter Sunday worship service on the windowsill, laptop on the tray table over my bed, and the water bottle ever-present.

The light is on over my bed but off over my roommate’s bed. At 8:00 p.m., she is tucked in and sleeping. The Mental Health Counselor sitting Constant with Roomie is in a chair by the door doing her charting. Roomie lost it sometime during the night and they moved her down to the Fishbowl, so called because it is a four-sided, nonrectangular room that has windows from waist to ceiling on three sides.

My roommate has been on Constant all day. That means that wherever she goes, whatever she does, some staff person is constantly at her side. It is better than putting a person in isolation and posting a Security Guard at the door so the patient can’t leave the room. All of Roomies’ belongings except her contact lenses have been taken from her, leaving her in hospital gowns and socks, and she has not been permitted to come into the room all day except to use the toilet.

Roomie has dissociative identity disorder, commonly called multiple personalities, professionally and contemporarily referred to as “alters,” i.e., alter egos. This is not some kind of bad pop culture joke. What I have learned and seen, intimately and intensely, is that this is an agonizing illness resulting from the most perverted violation of innocence. This is my second roommate with dissociative identity disorder. Both women are in their late thirties, have professional degrees, are articulate, funny and sophisticated. Both were repeatedly raped as very young children.

With Roomie No. 1, her great-uncle threatened her into silence and made her take off her clothes and assume sick sexual poses for pornographic photographs. She was three years old when it started. Then his son took over and began raping her. I do not know the details of Roomie No. 2’s experience but as a small child, several men raped her at once. She fought—fought hard—then, as with Roomie No. 1, she left her body and mind and went away. She was incapable of remaining present during what was happening to her.

Imagine the girl-child you love and put into the bathtub every night, her soapy, squirmy little body, nipples on a flat chest, hairless pubic area, rubber duck in hand, splashing her little brother and giggling. Look at her and wonder if your husband or brother, or his brother or cousin, is raping her and keeping her silent by telling her that he will kill her little brother if she tells anyone. Come to the psychiatric unit and I will introduce you to the many women who have experienced this kind of rape. “My stepfather and all my older brothers . . . mother knew.”

“They said they would never feed me and I would starve to death if I told; I was four.”

“I want to kill myself but God would not take me into heaven because I am guilty. I was five when they started doing it to me.”

Your daughter, the one who wraps her thin, smooth, warm arms around your neck when you read to her at night—what would she do if your brother was raping her? Again and again, her small sweet body being violated by a big hard man. She whimpers and cries. He clamps a hand over her mouth. She writhes in pain and terror and confusion. It happens again and again. She is threatened so effectively that she tells no one.

Your daughter, completely unable to cope with what is happening, leaves her body and mind. In the earliest years of her personality development, she is split off from herself. The growing wholeness of her self is shattered. The characters in her world no longer are Elmo, Big Bird and Kermit. Now they are different egos who develop ways of coping.

Perhaps one is a caretaker who tries to appease people. Another is a slut, apparently reveling in sex. One of these alter egos—who are born in your daughter’s head from the desperate need of a small child to survive as a human being—one of the alters is trying to kill her. There is always one who is trying to commit suicide. There are others, some are speechless, some are too young to have learned to talk, some are older.

They change relationships and affiliations, and then one day your daughter, 27 years old now, comes to a conscious state and finds she is standing on the edge of a building, ready to jump. She does not have knowledge of how she came to be on the ledge. Her psychiatrist—she has been seeing one for a long time, though she doesn’t quite know what’s wrong with her—admits her to the hospital for acute care. Several of her alternative egos have ganged up on her and are forcing her to kill herself.

Roomie No. 1 is spending decades working with an excellent team of psychologist and psychiatrist. To describe the process with misleading simplicity, the doctors first begin to identify the alters, then try to gain their trust. At some point, various alters begin to be introduced to the patient, who has little awareness that she is carrying more than one personality. Only one is present at a time, and they don’t go out to lunch together.

Gradually the doctors’ help the patient meet some of her alters, slowly sort them out, and resolve some of their conflicts. Meanwhile, this intelligent, high-functioning professional woman goes to work every day and supervises twenty people and a half-million-dollar budget. This is particularly difficult when she has just “had a breakthrough” and come to the conscious awareness that one of her alters—soon to be absorbed as a part of herself—is a slut whom Uncle Phil sold to his friends for sadistic sex.

One year she finally tells her parents some of what happened. They deny the possibility that this is real, despite the confirmable facts she supplies. When Uncle Phil comes to the house at Christmas, they welcome him and she goes to her room, shuts the door and barricades it with her bed and dresser. She has moved out of Phil’s town, has hidden her address, and keeps changing her phone number.

Her beloved but dotty grandmother has the phone number but, despite continuing requests not to, Gram gives it to her nephew when he asks. Uncle Phil is an evil predator who stalks Roomie. When Gram got sick, Roomie went to care for her. Roomie was walking up the cement cellar stairs with an armful of mason jars when she looked up and saw Uncle Phil at the top of the stairs. He grinned, put his arms out and pushed her backward down the stairs, causing her to break her ribs and skull, and nearly die of pneumonia.

Roomie No. 2, due to lack of money, is working with an excellent therapist and the idiot du jour for a psychiatrist. Her current psychiatrist has known her a week. Roomie, talking about being stripped of her clothes and put in a hospital gown, and having all her belongings taken away from her, calls it rape—things being taken from her by force. The night staff did it. Her doctor does not know it yet. He said she should be treated with dignity. Tomorrow he will come and we will see what stuff he is made of. Meanwhile Roomie No. 2 will sleep with anguish and anger, if at all.

My tulips were placed on the altar to God to celebrate Jesus being raised after being put to death by evil men. My roommate’s alters resulted from the actions of evil men, but who will raise her? A watchful mother and father? A skilled therapist and psychiatrist? You and I? An act of God? Or will she carry this cross for the rest of her life?