My Scariest Psychological Moment

I was in my twenties. I had a friend – well, more of an acquaintance really – we’d been thrown together due to some intense events and barely knew each other. She knew she’d been sexually abused within the family but was struggling to get to grips with what had actually happened, but let’s put it this way – it was some really dark stuff. She’d warned me that she sometimes lost contact with her surroundings and that if she did this while I was with her then we had to agree something in advance to get her back. She advised me to place into her hands the photo of her fiancé who had fairly recently died of cancer and to keep talking about him, about how much she’d loved him and how he was now dead, and tell her that she’d never see him again, as this was the only emotion/information intense enough to shock her out of ‘it’. This seemed horribly cruel and extreme – but she made me promise to do it.

So here I was, round at her flat – don’t remember why – when she started to talk about some distressing subject matter and then she started to cry and then she suddenly changed. Completely changed. Her eyes opened wide and she looked around the room and asked, “Where am I?”

So I explained. But she just kept asking, “Where’s Mummy?” “Who are you?” “Where’s Eddie?” I finally established that Eddie was a teddy so I gave her a teddy lying on the sofa and she threw it back saying “That’s not Eddie!” She was frightened of me, backing away and telling me to stay away because ‘Mummy had told her not to talk to strangers’. She tried to get out of the door but I had to run and bar the way and lock her in. I just couldn’t let her go out in that state. Seriously – she had no idea where she was or who I was. She was seven, she told me. She was crying for her Mummy. Begging me to let her out of the room to go to Mummy. It was very scary. Standing in front of me was my twenty-six-year-old friend who now had the mind and personality of a seven-year-old whose real lived experience at this moment was of being held hostage by an adult stranger in a strange house. She was, unsurprisingly, terrified, hysterically distressed, beside herself, begging to be released. And I was terrified too. I couldn’t let this seven year child run out onto the street of a city she wouldn’t recognise, looking for parents that no longer existed and for a home that was hundreds of miles away. She’d get run over or something awful. And I couldn’t chase down the street after her or I’d get arrested. She’d scream that I was trying to kidnap her and had been holding her hostage. And I was being made to experience all the real feelings of holding some poor hysterically afraid kid a hostage against their will. What was I to do? Finally she cried so much for her mother that she went into a kind of absent trance-state lying on the settee.

I’ve never rated NLP (neuro linguistic programming) that highly. It is often both presented and used in a highly manipulative and deceitful way. But something I’d read in an NLP book was about tuning into the other person’s breathing, matching it, and then once you were in sync, gradually taking control. So I sat quietly beside her on the settee and breathed along with her. She had her eyes closed and was apparently well out of it, but after a while I slowly speeded my breathing up from the sleep breathing patterns she was in, to waking patterns, and her breathing pattern followed mine and she gradually came to. As I gave a ‘wake-up’ gasp, she jerked awake with a gasp herself. And then I shoved the picture of her fiancé in front of her and began to talk about him until she began to sob. I felt awful doing it. But she was right – it worked and she came back to herself. Then after a bit she ran out of the flat. I let her go as I figured she’d be needing some space. But an hour later she rang me up from the town centre. She had no idea how she’d got there or what had been happening. So I went down on the bus to fetch her. So she must have remained in some sort of halfway state.

I’d never much believed in ‘Multiple Personality Disorder’ (now more commonly known as Dissociative Identity Disorder – ‘DID’), but I had no doubt that this was what had been happening now. I wrote a letter to her psychologist describing neutrally what had happened as I didn’t think it was my place to suggest a diagnosis.

A week later I got a phone call from her psychologist. Please would I come and pick my friend up from the local psychiatric hospital and stay with her all night? If I couldn’t she was going to admit her under section. When I arrived, the psychologist was white as a sheet and still shaking, her hands trembling. Apparently my friend had turned into the same seven-year-old child in a session with her, and stayed in that state all day, with the same terrified behaviour that a real seven-year-old would exhibit if they suddenly found themselves locked in a room with a stranger, and the psychologist hadn’t been able to trigger her out of it. The psychologist had had to cancel all her other appointments and finally tricked my friend into getting into her car by promising to take her home to Mummy, and then taking her to the local psychiatric hospital instead. My friend had come to back to herself, sometime after arriving at the hospital and pleaded to be let out - which was agreed to on the proviso that I came to keep an eye on her. The psychologist said she’d never been so scared in all her life, and that this was the first real case of MPD/DID that she’d ever seen. Which made me feel a bit better about how traumatic I’d found the experience myself!

One of the theories about Dissociative Identity Disorder is that trauma or abuse in childhood can cause the psyche to protect itself by splitting off a part of itself and keeping the memories in that part, to allow the rest of the personality to carry on as normal, protected from having to remember (a vastly simplified way of explaining it!) and then when the current personality can’t cope with something, the ‘split off’ part comes back for a time to take the pain and then disappears off again with the latest bad experiences, so all the trauma is kept compartmentalised.

My friend and I lost contact, so I don't know what the end of the story was, sorry...