Eucatastrophe Reader

"conversion put me in a complicated and comprehensive chaos."

The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Butterflied REVIEW

“I write these days as a drowning person gulps air. I steal time here and there, and in the backdrop of my theft you will find children, friends of children, and a husband whose government job and its constant din of stress and competition organize our days. We have a mini-van that Kent has christened the Traveling Garbage Can. I have been known to clean out this van by sending in my trusty Golden Retriever, Sally, to fetch old PB& J sandwiches, juice boxes, and pizza crusts. Sally is the same age as my youngest daughter; it was like having twins separated by species.” – Rosaria Butterfeild, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert

In the Bruce Beresford’s 1991 film, Blackrobe, we encounter the story of European cultural and religious colonization of North America. In one poignant scene, an Algonquin chief by the name of Chomina has a dream of a raven plucking out one of his [Chomina’s] eyes. Upon awaking and discussing the dream with his wife, Chomina comes to the conclusion that the black raven is a symbol of “blackrobe” – the nickname given to the Jesuit priest who has come to evangelize and convert him. The picture of the raven plucking out this Native American’s eyeball is a striking and thought provoking one for as we see in the film, this is precisely what the Jesuits had come to do to Native North American ways of seeing the world. They intended to change the filters through which their world was observed.

Ironically, in the course of the film, Blackrobe, we see that Native American ways of seeing the world could just as easily take away a young Frenchman’s way of “making sense” of experience as well. Indeed, at points in time in the film, even the devout Jesuit, father Laforgue, begins to experience “worldview vertigo.” He sees his young disciple’s mindset about morality, about heaven, about community, and about sexuality being changed.  There is a scene where Father Laforgue finds himself lost in the woods and he begins to see the trees look like cathedral pillars and you get the sense that Native American perceptions of sacred space are intruding on his French Catholic perceptions, against his will as it were.

What the film reveals is that other people’s world views often will have a more powerful impact on us than we may think they can. And the more committed we are to our own way of seeing the world - the more “totalitarian” we are about our world view, the more powerful that impact can be when we meet a similarly “totalitarian” worldview. (Here, I use the word totalitarian not in the sense of Stalin or Hitler but in describing a world view that orders and informs every aspect of your life.)

Clearly, Rosaria Champagne Butterfeild finds this to be the case when, as a tenured professor of Women’s Studies and an advocate and spokesperson of  radical feminist lesbian ideology, she steps into the world of conservative Christianity in order to do “oppositional research” on it and finds herself, much against her will, converted. Her account of that conversion process can be set in a long history of autobiographical resistant-conversions stories that begins with Paul the Apostle, continues through the Confessions of Augustine, and carries into modern classics like C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy, Sheldon Van Auken’s A Severe Mercy, Josh McDowell’s autobiographical story in Evidence that Demands a Verdict, or Carolyn Weber’s Surprised by Oxford. “When I was 28 years old,” Rosario Champagne Butterfeild begins her account,

“I boldly declared myself lesbian. I was at the finish of a PhD in English Literature and Cultural Studies. I was a teaching associate in one of the first and strongest Women’s Studies Departments in the nation. I was being recruited by universities to take on faculty and administrative roles in advancing radical leftist ideologies. I genuinely believed that I was helping to make the world a better place.”

Her story is something of a modern counterpart to that of Paul, the persecutor of Christians, being confronted with a vision of the risen Christ on the Damascus Road.  “Christians always seemed like bad thinkers to me” she confesses and though she sums up her former creed with the dictum ”there [were] no truths, only truth claims” it is clear that in that previous life, she was every bit the dogmatist about feminism that she asserted Christians were about their religion.

There are interesting paradoxes to be explored here. “Good teachers make it possible for people to change their positions without shame,” she writes. But note well the regimentation that she enforced on her Syracuse University Women’s Studies 101 students. The following passage from The Secret Thoughts is instructive:

"Critical perspective asserts that we make meaning out of our lives not by personal experience but by the frames through which we filter that experience. On my Women’s Studies 101 syllabus, I wrote this about critical perspective:

‘NB (nota bene, or, “note well”): Students are expected to write all papers and examination essay questions from a feminist worldview or critical perspective. In Spanish class you speak and think in Spanish. In Women’s Studies you speak and think in feminist paradigms. Examination essay questions written from critical perspectives outside of feminism will receive an automatic grade of F. Papers written from critical perspectives outside of feminism will be allowed one revision. Any student who is unable to write and think from a feminist critical perspective or worldview with a clear conscious should drop the class now.’

In other words, she believed in the importance of immersing oneself into a worldview as a prerequisite to understanding it and thereby ultimately converting to it. In short, she was a secular feminist missionary working at Syracuse University. When she converts to Chrsitianity, she will insist upon a similar internally imposed totalitarianism of that new world view. She refuses to allow herself the option of picking and choosing portions of the Bible to integrate or not integrate. For her, to be converted is to be given new eyes and to have the old eyes taken away. “The Prodigal Son didn’t repent of his sin because he got tired of living like and with the pigs,” she writes,

“He repented because God gave him eyes to see. Until this happens, no personal experience can topple his critical perspective. That’s the thing about the frame that we use to look at the world. It is actually stronger than life experience because it is mindful, positioned, owned, established, and deeply held. Personal experience can seem fickle. Worldview (the end result of the critical perspective we choose) is always intimate and claimed.”

Worldviews cannot then, be chosen piecemeal. And they cannot be subjected to experience based revisions. One does not start thinking somewhat different. One becomes a new species of seer. And this applies to the way that she thinks as a member of a particular denomination.

“The question, then, for me, was: how do we in the Reformed Presbyterian church assemble our worldview? What goes first, my personal experience as a believer or the church’s doctrines?”

Again there is an interesting commitment that she seems to make to a shared communal ideology that individuals are not necessarily free to modify. Ideology has overtones of group loyalty. There is a sense that, as in an Amish community, if one person is to change their minds about something, they must have the whole group do so as well. Thus, the author in several instances looks at the process of private “mind changing” as “betrayal.” A few examples follow.

Rosaria speaks of her decision to give a “coming out” speech to her university’s freshman class - A speech in which she practically deserts her former feminist and lesbian loyalties. She regards this decision as a “betrayal” of her former “group.” “What was different this time was that in giving this lecture, I betrayed my friends,” she writes. And later, she adds, “Each Lord’s Supper makes me experience my traitorship to my gay friends and to the person that I once was.”

She speaks of her decision to commit herself to her church as a similar “betrayal” of her old ideology and friends. “Once I had said these vows with my lips and held them in my heart, therein truly lay my treason from the gay community.”

Ideologies are things that groups of people ascribe to and demand that others ascribe to in order to “belong.” They are things that one has to conform to, though that may entail time, struggle, and at times, deference. She cannot accept her Christianity in any piecemeal way. “During this time of struggle, others tried to help,” she writes of her decision to convert to Christianity as a practicing lesbian,

“A Methodist pastor and the Dean of the Chapel at Syracuse University believed that I did not have to give up everything to honor God. Indeed, he told me, since God made me a lesbian, I gave God honor by living an honorable lesbian life. He told me that I could have Jesus and my lesbian lover. This was a very appealing prospect. But I had been reading and rereading scripture, and there are no such marks of postmodern “both/ and” in the Bible.

And thus, the lesbianism had to go. “When Christ gave me the strength to follow him, I didn’t stop feeling like a lesbian,” she writes,

“I’ve discovered that the Lord doesn’t change my feelings until I obey him.  . . . Ah ha! Here it was! Obedience comes before understanding.”

She is a believer in the maxim that it is in continuously acting as though we believe that we convince ourselves of what we wish to believe. “One doesn’t repent for a sin of identity in one session,” she writes, inferring that a sexual orientation is a sin. It is not hard to see why she would write of this time in her life that “conversion put me in a complicated and comprehensive chaos.” One might argue that someone who grew up believing in orthodox Christian ideas about sexuality and then reversed them would also experience the same sort of “complicated comprehensive chaos.” She has decided to rewire herself (or to put it in words that she might use, “She has decided to allow herself to be rewired.”)  “I didn’t choose Christ,” she insists,

“Nobody chooses Christ. Christ chooses you or you’re dead. After Christ chooses you, you respond because you must. Period. It’s not a pretty story.”

Ironically, this is probably how she would have once portrayed her sexual orientation; as a thing, “not-chosen.” One cannot help as they read this to see how her life will be used by some as a piece of evidence that sexual orientation is malleable and sexual “misorientation” is thus potentially dysfunctional, or maybe even “criminal.”

But let’s not speak of that here.

I want to return to her narrative and contradict myself. For indeed, what analysis of any person’s life will not lead an author or reviewer to contradict themselves – for lives are contradictory. Along with being a totalitarian, Rosaria Champagne Butterfeild remains a “liberal;” a person who resents being put into an ideological straight jacket. She wants the comfort of communal coherence but not too much. “I believed then and I believe now that where everybody thinks the same nobody thinks very much” she says of her early life experiences with Christians. Indeed, she defines the whole reason for her late exposure to Christianity to be a result of Christian inflexibility.  “Too often the church does not know how to interface with university culture because it comes to the table only ready to moralize and not dialogue.”

“Here is what I think,” she avers in her concluding chapter on homeschooling and culture, “I believe that there is no greater enemy to vital life-breathing faith than insisting on cultural sameness.”

And yet, forgive me reader for I am merely following the internal conflicts of this person’s report of herself, we must again return to the former position. In her discussion of Christian worship, Rosaria makes it clear that she thinks that church worship should restrict itself to the singing of Psalms. She is not a fan of human creativity in worship.

“Is God pleased with our creativity in the context of worship? How much creativity does God want? Yes, interpretation matters, yes, interpretation is messy, but is there a biblical warrant for worshiping God in specific ways? If so, how tightly does God draw in the boundaries?

"And the more that I study, the more I believe that God commands us to sing Psalms in worship to the exclusion of man-made hymns.”

Are we not all full of these paradoxes? Do we not all want to belong to communities that give us precicely the same measure of uniformity and tolerance that we want to extend? As we look for shoes in the right length, right width, right style, right color do we not also look for ideological family in life? In the end, we are all left with questions if we are believers or if we are members of ideological communities of any kind. What decisions should be left to me? What decisions should not? For Rosaria, worship is too important to be left to a human to decide. Sexuality is too important for an individual to decide. The roles of men and women in marriage is too important a matter for mere mortals to decide.

“For if marriage exists merely by human authority then men and women may do with it or conduct themselves in it as they please. They may redefine it, or they may abandon it altogether. But if marriage is a divine institution, then it is governed by a higher authority. It becomes, then, a matter of obedience, and the conduct of husbands and wives within marriage is a conduct for which they must give their account to God.”

Questions of education, child-rearing, adoption, occupation, and mate selection however are, for her, not to be delegated to any group. “And never again will I confuse other people’s hopes and dreams for me as proof of God’s will,” she writes of a failed engagement that was aided by her church’s encouragement. Perhaps this unending internal debate about what it means to “convert” is something that she still has to deal with? As I suspect does anyone who converts to or from anything.  “Real learning depends on our quest for real knowledge, not its perpetual deferment in the form of endless doubt,” she concludes in one place. And yet in another,

 “My conversion still felt like a train wreck, and I am adverse to clichés on any level.”

I might just say that a “de-conversion” is often a train-wreck as well.

And that I too am adverse to clichés on any level.

In the end, something happened to Rosaria Champagne that cannot be reduced to words or explanations. It cannot be conveyed to someone else who was not there or who has not had an experience of a like nature. “That night, I prayed, and asked God if the gospel message was for someone like me, too,” she writes of that night of her conversion, “I viscerally felt the living presence of God as I prayed. Jesus seemed present and alive.”

And for hundreds of millions and billions of people throughout history, that has been the beginning of their new life and the end of their old one.

And no one can really explain that.  Which is why we keep finding stories like Rosaria’s intriguing.

Question for Comment: How important to you is it that you have one way of seeing the world and that it be the way that you see all of it? What groups do you intentionally not belong to because they will not let you see something “your way” or because they allow people to see things in too many ways?

"that man is not truly one"

The Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Lewis Stevenson REVIEW

People who have Dissociative Identity Disorders and Multiple Personality Disorders, unlike Dr. Jekyll, are often not aware of what they do and experience when they are functioning out of their present “self.” And yet there is good reason to read Robert Lewis Stevenson’s story with a view to better understanding the struggles that people with these disorders have. But first, let’s be clear. These disorders are not disorders when they are initiated. They are coping mechanisms and sometimes even survival skills. Generally they are the product of a dysfunctional violent circumstance where a child cannot survive without splitting up the duties of personhood. In a way, the ability to put the personality into subfiles is an amazing feat for a human brain. What is perhaps more amazing and perhaps more difficult, is the process of re-integration once the need for dissociating is no longer present. In a way, it is like a magical cutting someone in half but never figuring out how to get them back together.  

In Stevenson’s story, the main character, Dr. Jekyll, dissociates his personality to avoid tension. One might argue that people with dissosiative identity disorder have done the same. The personality cannot contain the oppositional forces of the person and thus delegates – it may delegate traits or memories or duties or abilities or responsibilities. Usually, I am given to understand, at least one of these “inner people” will be given the task of bearing the lion’s share of the suffering and thus, perhaps, the anger at the injustice of that responsibility. For Dr. Jekyll, his Mr. Hyde is “given” all the animal instincts and for that reason, “dehumanized” (as though these traits are not entirely human). Listen to Stevenson describe Hyde:

“Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation.:

“God bless me, the man seems hardly human!”

“My poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend."

In the case of Dr. Jekyll, he has elected to split his personality in order that he might experience both sides of his humanity without interference. “His past was fairly blameless,” says Stevenson of Jekyll’s decision,

“few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into a sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing yet avoided.”

In short, Jekyll has always been Jekyll and Hyde. He has always just had social pressures to support his Jekyllness. For Jekyll, it all begins with the need to have a public self and a private self. “And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition,” he says in his explanation,

“such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public.  Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of me. Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature.

In short, he is arguing that he was no different than other men but that he desired to be, at least publically, better. For Jekyll, the desire to reap the benefits of his altruism and kindness are equal to his desire to reap the benefits of his self-centeredness and instinct. He continues in his explanation,

“In this case, I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most plentiful springs of distress. Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering. And it chanced that the direction of my scientific studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light on this consciousness of the perennial war among my members.

Jekyll concludes that since he is two people, he might as well stop trying to be one. And that he envisions a future where people conclude, he thinks perhaps rightly, that they are more than two.

“With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.”

At first, he simply tried to rid himself of that disapproved element of the personality. HE summarizes his failure to do so by noting that he only made things worse. “And when the attempt is made to cast it off,” he notes of the “dark side,” “it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.” It is thus this desire to separate the conjoined twin of his own personality that leads him to figure out a way to do it chemically.

“I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; and from an early date, even before the course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together—that in the agonised womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling.”

“How, then were they dissociated?” he asks. That secret he will take to his grave.

But here is what it felt like at first to do it.

 “I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul."

At first, there is still an element of control to his liberation. That aspect of his nature that could and would simply take what he wanted and kill what stood in the way was anemic from disuse. It is only with the freedom to exercise its will that it grows stronger. Eventually stronger than Jekyll. “I must here speak by theory alone, saying not that which I know, but that which I suppose to be most probable,” Jekyll explains,

“The evil side of my nature, to which I had now transferred the stamping efficacy, was less robust and less developed than the good which I had just deposed. Again, in the course of my life, which had been, after all, nine tenths a life of effort, virtue and control, it had been much less exercised and much less exhausted. And hence, as I think, it came about that Edward Hyde was so much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll. Even as good shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and plainly on the face of the other.”

Jekyll accepts the humanity of his “Hyde” and it does not scare him to transition back and forth. In neither state does he feel “out of his body.” “This, too, was myself,” he says,

“It seemed natural and human. . . . This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.”

Once given permission to pursue his separate impulses at will, Hyde begins to overwhelm his creator. “Thus fortified, as I supposed, on every side, I began to profit by the strange immunities of my position,” recalls Dr. Jekyll in his last letter,

“Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did so for his pleasures. I was the first that could plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. . . .

It was on this side that my new power tempted me until I fell in slavery. I had but to drink the cup, to doff at once the body of the noted professor, and to assume, like a thick cloak, that of Edward Hyde.

Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience slumbered. . . .

“My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring. I was conscious, even when I took the draught, of a more unbridled, a more furious propensity to ill.”

It should be noted that the story of Jekyll and Hyde does not explain why all people with dissociative identity disorder format their brains to handle multiple personalities. Indeed, I suspect that most do it simply because they will not survive if they cannot isolate and neutralize aspects of themselves that their tormentors will kill them for having. The problem is that once created, these personalities will take on the same tenacious will to survive that their creator had when manufacturing them. And in time, the personality created can gain control of the person creating. This happens to Jekyll when he begins to discover that sometimes, he cannot easily return to his Jekyll state when he wants. And then, he begins to turn into Hyde involuntarily. “Yes,” he informs us, “I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde. How was this to be explained?”

“I had voluntarily stripped myself of all those balancing instincts by which even the worst of us continues to walk with some degree of steadiness among temptations; and in my case, to be tempted, however slightly, was to fall.”

He had not understood the power of created things. (Reminds me of the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica.) Too late, he discovers that the “chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.” “This inexplicable incident, this reversal of my previous experience,” he says,

“seemed, like the Babylonian finger on the wall, to be spelling out the letters of my judgment; and I began to reflect more seriously than ever before on the issues and possibilities of my double existence. . . . and I began to spy a danger that, if this were much prolonged, the balance of my nature might be permanently overthrown, the power of voluntary change be forfeited, and the character of Edward Hyde become irrevocably mine.

“I was led to remark that whereas, in the beginning, the difficulty had been to throw off the body of Jekyll, it had of late gradually but decidedly transferred itself to the other side. All things therefore seemed to point to this; that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.
Between these two, I now felt I had to choose.”

He realizes that Jekyll is still capable of caring about Hyde’s behavior but Hyde cares nothing about Jekyll’s.

"My two natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared between them. Jekyll (who was composite) now with the most sensitive apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll, or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyll had more than a father's interest; Hyde had more than a son's indifference. To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and forever, despised and friendless.”

Jekyll realizes, albeit too late, that the pleasures of civil society … of friendship, respect, admiration, companionship, etc. will all be denied him if the trajectory of his “Hydification” continues. And this, he decides, is an unacceptable outcome, not worth whatever gains in pleasure his “Hydification” might bring. He begins to conspire against his own creation, realizing that he (Jekyll) may now be at a disadvantage in that fight. He tries to stop taking his Hyde drink. But,

“I was still cursed with my duality of purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for license.

I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.”

Now is when the “disorder” part of Dissociative Identity Disorder begins to manifest itself. It is no longer his to control.

“I was stepping leisurely across the court after breakfast, drinking the chill of the air with pleasure, when I was seized again with those indescribable sensations that heralded the change; and I had but the time to gain the shelter of my cabinet, before I was once again raging and freezing with the passions of Hyde. It took on this occasion a double dose to recall me to myself; and alas! six hours after, as I sat looking sadly in the fire, the pangs returned, and the drug had to be re-administered. In short, from that day forth it seemed only by a great effort as of gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the drug, that I was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At all hours of the day and night, I would be taken with the premonitory shudder; above all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was always as Hyde that I awakened.”

What was once a tag team, becomes a competition. Hyde begins to resent any restraint. Any reversion to balance. He wants everything, now, always.

“The hatred of Hyde for Jekyll was of a different order. His terror of the gallows drove him continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed the necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was now fallen, and he resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded. Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father; and indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin.”

This is the problem. Hyde could care less about Jekyll. Sampson-like, he is perfectly willing to pull the pillars of the temple down upon himself in his fury over Jekyll’s desire to restrain him. Likewise, Jekyll begins to believe that the only way to defeat Hyde is to take advantage of those few moment of independent life that he has left to him to end them both.

“When I know how he fears my power to cut him off by suicide,” says Jekyll, “I find it in my heart to pity him.”

I won’t spoil the ending for you.

Questions for Comment: It is difficult to know just how a human brain creates entire personalities within itself. Are they all always observing though not observing consciously? What keeps them from merging when they “meet”? And what does “meeting and merging look like on a CAT scan or MRI? If we divide our private and public selves, who are we really? Should one ever compromise with the “publically approved” self? Is there a danger of driving that other self into the shadows where it can only do us more harm, living as it does, in the dark?

Do you ever dissociate to survive?