Читать книгу Faith Born of Seduction - Jennifer L Manlowe - Страница 26

Some MPD symptoms are also found among people who have been diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder. People with borderline personalities, unlike people with multiple personalities, are thought to lack the dissociative capacity to form fragmented alters, but they have similar difficulty developing an integrated identity.⁷⁰ For the borderline patient, inner images of the self are split into extremes of good and bad. An unstable sense of self is one of the major diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder, and the “splitting” of inner representations of self and others is considered by some theorists to be the central underlying problem of the disorder.⁷¹

The common denominator of the two disorders is their origin in a history of childhood trauma. In the case of MPD the etiological role of severe childhood trauma is at this point firmly established. In a study of one hundred patients with the disorder, ninety-seven had histories of major childhood trauma, most commonly sexual abuse, physical abuse, or both.⁷² Extreme sadism and murderous violence were the rule rather than the exception in these harrowing histories. Almost half the patients had actually witnessed the violent death of someone close to them, as in the case of Haddock, who not only saw her parents mutilate animals but also saw her relatives, who were part of the same religious cult, take the life of a young black boy and a white teenage girl. In Haddock’s words,

My inner kids tell me they saw a little black boy hung—I have reason to believe that the cult members had ties to racial superiority. Another time, I woke up crying one day, I had a memory of a white girl—I was supposed to die but they took her instead. Her eyes were just so sad. And she was maybe fourteen when I was eight. I have memories of my cousin Davey bringing in a dagger—and his hands in my hands bringing a dagger down. I have a personality named Little Priscilla. In the ceremony they had done something to this horse—they killed it. But the head was sort of okay and the body was all bloody and icky and sticky. And it wasn’t dead yet, and Little Priscilla went up to it, and it looked at her with its eyes and she just petted its little head until it died. And the fact is, up until I uncovered a personality who carried my pain, I never felt any pain in my life.

Seeing a black child and a young white girl being murdered are early lessons writ large that have the intention of indoctrinating, through terror, young participants to respect and observe the gendered and racist hierarchy of their culture. Many cults, besides the Ku Klux Klan, are caricaturing wider cultural values. Melinda also saw animals being killed by her perpetrators and was forced to kill animals herself by the teenage boys who gang-raped her. Her offenders warned her: “If you talk, we’ll do the same to you.”

Another study found that 81 percent of borderline personality patients have histories of severe childhood trauma. The abuse generally began early in life and was severe and prolonged, though it rarely reached the lethal extremes described by patients with multiple personality disorder.⁷³ A well-integrated self based upon a whole, stable experience becomes extremely elusive for a woman who has been sexually assaulted and objectified. Instead, her own viewpoint is splintered. She may see herself from the perpetrator’s perspective. Her “good” self is an innocent memory (herself prior to the trauma). Her “evil” self is the introjected perpetrator. This splintered experience or divided self-construction is inscribed into her sexuality and is central to the psychological “disorders” to which many survivors are prone, including multiple-personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, depression, and eating disorders.⁷⁴