Loading summary
Transcript122 lines
- [00:00]
A
The following podcast contains accounts of child sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised. This is Australian True Crime with Michelle Laurie. In 2019, Dr. Jenny Haynes gave evidence in court against her father who was charged with various sex crimes committed against Jenny throughout her childhood. In the history making trial, Dr. Jenny was the first person in the world allowed to present evidence on the stand for from several of her personalities. Dr. Jenny lives with a condition known as dissociative identity disorder or multiple personality disorder. She has over 2000 personalities whom she refers to as alters. She's the subject of a new documentary streaming on SBS called We Are Jenny and she joins us to talk about life as she lives it today. This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung People of the Kulin Nation.
- [01:04]
B
This break is brought to you by Adobe Photoshop. Here to help you make that thing only you could make here for when you've got an amazing idea you can't wait to share and you need it to look exactly as you imagined. Photoshop gives you the ultimate image editing and design tools so you can dial in your creation perfectly down to the last pixel, make epic images for zine covers, posters, brand graphics, social posts or anything else you can imagine. It's your vision. Go all in, get started@photoshop.com
- [01:34]
A
when you popped up on the screen like who's in the, you know, waiting to come into the call? It was symphony.
- [01:40]
C
Yeah, yeah. She's the one that created all of us. So it's us honest, honoring the little girl that made everybody else.
- [01:48]
A
The documentary is so beautiful, isn't it? And the way they've animated your altars, how did that feel to see that?
- [01:57]
C
Oh, that was wonderful. Because in our very first discussions I said, no, we are not using child actors to represent my alters. We are not representing the abuse in any visual way. No. So that was sort of my non negotiable. I wanted no further person traumatized by my dad. So we went for animation and then I got to tell them what everybody looks like and that was fabulous. Yeah.
- [02:37]
A
When you're doing an interview and again you did a lot of interviews in the documentary for the documentary and now you're doing them about it. Who, whose job is it? Who, who's best to do interviews?
- [02:49]
C
Ah, well that's the thing for the lived experience of having did my experience is we have a doorway and whoever is sitting in the doorway is in the body. Okay. Nice and simple. What we do Is we come into a interview having created the entity currently known as Jenny. That's me. And I have all the skills that I need for doing an interview. Right? So the technical side of it, making sure we look good, that side of stuff, that's my job. But when you ask a question, everybody else is literally clustered around behind me. And as soon as you ask a question that belongs to somebody else, they'll just pop in and answer it and then retreat. So you might see a difference or you might not. It's not like we've got one person that does interviews. We could do that. Mr. Flamboyant keeps putting his hands up. I'll do the interviews. I'm good with this shit.
- [03:51]
A
Yeah.
- [03:51]
C
No problems. And I just go, no, no. Because having one consistent Jenny answer questions in every interview cheats people who have DID or MPD who are desperate to see somebody be real and not do the masking. So when I talk to you and a different person comes out, I'm actually validating everybody else that has DID who's sitting there going, yeah, but it's all got to be hidden. No, it doesn't have to be hidden. Not anymore. Not anymore. You can be real. You can actually be whoever you need to be. And you don't have to hide anymore, because we got justice. And NPD DID is a topic of conversation for, in essence, the first time since the 70s. Yeah.
- [04:45]
A
And your doctor, Dr. George Blair west, he says, you know, for so long, DID has been portrayed as the craziest of the crazy. But you're talking about representing in a way that says, I'm living a life here. And the thing about you is what a life. Your academic career is outstanding apart from anything else.
- [05:09]
C
Thank you. But it's so true. People have always seen npd. Now, I will say I prefer the term multiple personality disorder. It fits for my experience. So you'll get from me MPD, slash did. Dissociative identity disorder is the more common modern term for it, but it doesn't quite sit well for me. So for those people listening that have did, I invalidate it is MPD did. I'm just using the term I feel more comfortable with. So now we got that out of the way. When you look at the diagnosis of mpd, MPD is considered a mental illness. We are dysfunctional, apparently. We are having hallucinations and delusions. We're paranoid, allegedly, but we're not. We are small children surviving the worst the world has to offer in the only way we can. I mean, most of the trauma that results in NPD or DID occurs when we are pre verbal. So we don't know that we are making alter personalities. We just have a need, and someone rocks up to fill that need. And it just so happens you've created an alter personality 2,682 times.
- [06:47]
A
Dr. George Blair West. I gotta go back to him because I think he's brilliant. And he says so many great things in the doco, Right? Yes, he says that part of it, too. Part of the evolution of NPD did is a very young child feeling like no one is coming to help them. That most obviously, the two people they should. They expect should take care of them. Their two parents have made it clear to them that they're not going to come and rescue them. And in fact, they're inflicting the trauma. In your case, your dad was inflicting the trauma. And so you needed to invent people to rescue you.
- [07:26]
C
Yes, we make people to rescue us. Yes. But what I did. Hi, I'm Symphony.
- [07:36]
A
Oh, hello.
- [07:38]
C
This is my question. So I understood that I had to help Daddy. And we're not going to talk about anything, any details. We're just going to talk around it so that I don't traumatize anybody. And if we get tricky, Boris will come and give everybody a trigger warning. If you hear a Russian voice, it's Boris. So I made people to do the job that made it hard for me to deal with Daddy. So Daddy smells. So I made people that could not smell Daddy. And I didn't know I was making alter personalities. I just knew that I needed to not smell Daddy because I couldn't do what Daddy wanted if I had to breathe in his stench.
- [08:33]
A
So is that what you mean, Symphony, by saying that you had to help Daddy?
- [08:38]
C
Okay, we'll need trigger warning. When we talk of helping Daddy, she's talking about being abused. He pitched it as only she could help him, but it turns out that what it was was rape and childhood sexual abuse. And very unpleasant. So we tried to use euphemisms. And so she. What he told her was that she had to help him.
- [09:04]
A
So that's his word, his terminology.
- [09:06]
C
His word.
- [09:06]
A
Okay, I see.
- [09:07]
C
Yep. He never used the appropriate words for anything, but he told her it was her job to help him. Nobody else could help him like she helped him, and it was her job to help him. Okay, I think that's end, trigger, warning.
- [09:23]
A
Thank you.
- [09:24]
C
Thank you, Boris. Yeah. So Daddy called it helping, then he called it games, and then he called it punishment. And so if I'm Helping Daddy. There are things that are going on that are making it hard for me to help Daddy smell, taste, sound, what I could see. Because what I could see was terrifying. So I made people to take away the things that made it hard to talk to and fix Daddy. So in many ways, I guess I'm the one that he harmed, I think is the current term for it. He's the one that he. I'm the one that he harmed every day for 14 years. And my alters are people that came and did everything else. So they went to school, they read books, they played, they did the things that I didn't have that time or energy to do.
- [10:28]
A
Yeah, absolutely. So symphony in a way. You know, you're so young, but you're. You're a leader, aren't you?
- [10:36]
C
Yeah. Yeah. I'm their mummy.
- [10:40]
A
Wow.
- [10:41]
C
I'm their mummy because they all walked out of the back of my head. That makes me their mummy. So if you. If you look at us as having mpd, we. I'm the one that made that. I guess that's the disorder. I'm the response. I'm hoping that eventually people will understand that MPD is turning a perfectly good coping strategy into a mental health disorder. And that's not helpful.
- [11:14]
A
The judge, I think, described your NPD as actually an ingenious, like showing the capacity of the human brain, the brilliance of the human brain.
- [11:26]
C
Yeah. See, Daddy told me that if I didn't do what he wanted me to do, he would kill my mommy, he would kill my brothers and sisters, and he would kill the cats and the guinea pigs. So in a way, he took away everybody who could have helped me, because if he said one word from me and if I told they'd die, and he told me that my mummy would die in a case of spontaneous human combustion. That's terrifying.
- [12:09]
A
Of course.
- [12:10]
C
And that meant that there was nobody to come and save me. I couldn't tell because he would. He was very aggressive towards pets and he was aggressive towards me. So it wasn't a line that I could have just gone, oh, yeah, no problems. This was real. He was going to destroy my family. So I made people that he couldn't touch. He also told me that he could read my mind. So I think in song lyrics, it's very entertaining. Yes, yes. So everything is a song lyric. So when we came. And I just jump a little bit ahead to give you an example of this, when we came to write our police victim impact statement for court, it got very difficult because we knew exactly what we wanted to say, if we had been quoting meatloaf lyrics, it would have been so much easier. But we had to speak in proper English. And then we came to trying to describe my daddy, who he'll hit you on Monday because you're crying. He'll hit you on Tuesday because you're not crying. And on Wednesday, he'll hit you to give you something to cry about. And you never knew which of those you were going to get. So we tried to write this. We spent hours and hours trying to write this out. And in the end, we came down to meet meatloafs. When the rubber meets the road. Yes means no means yes means no. When the rubber meets the road. I never, ever thought I would quote a song about a condom in court.
- [13:59]
A
Well, you're a singular person for a person with a lot of personalities. I'm going to use the word singular because there's no one like you. So if anyone was going to do that, it would. It can be you. Yeah. That reminds me, by the way, can I ask, is there an altar? Who's. Who is like the academic? Like who? When. Students. Yeah, yeah.
- [14:22]
C
If you like, she can come talk to you. Hello. Hi.
- [14:26]
A
I asked about a student, a studious altar, I guess, you know, because your. Your academic achievements are fantastic. And I was wondering, is there one altar who's sort of responsible for that?
- [14:38]
C
Yeah. Yeah. Symphony created me in 1990. We'd done our education very poorly, I might add, while we were living with dad. And then we had done better once. My parents got divorced when we were 14, but we still weren't academically inclined. But we wanted to go to university, and in order to do that, we needed an academic. So in 1990, Symphony created me the student, and I took over. And I've done anything that is research or writing, essays, reading. I do the lot. As with all the rest of us, I'm a bit of an overachiever. We got three degrees instead of one.
- [15:31]
A
Yes, you're a doctor, Dr. Jenny. So tell us about your degrees. What do you have degrees in?
- [15:35]
C
Okay, so I did a Bachelor of Arts double major in psychology to find out what was wrong with us, which turned out to be mpd. We worked it out. Yeah. Then, having worked out our problem, we then moved on to a master's of Social science, criminal justice and legal studies to find out if what dad had done was against the law. Then we went on to do the Doctor of philosophy, the PhD, which turned me into Dr. Jenny. And we did that on men's experiences of being victims of Crime so that I could stop being afraid of half the population. These are not good reasons for studying.
- [16:22]
A
Well, they're as good as any, I think. And I also, I have a number of friends who studied psychology and I think they were all wondering what was wrong with them when they did the course.
- [16:31]
C
I hated psychology, I'll be honest with you, I absolutely hated it. Mainly because they talked about what was normal and none of it fit with my experience at all. I mean, we did child development and I'm sitting there going, no, no.
- [16:50]
A
Did you know at that time that the life that you were experiencing, your reality was different to other people's?
- [16:58]
C
Not really, no. We worked out that we had people in the head, as my mother words it, early in the 1980s. Then we had a grand mal epileptic seizure and had to go see a neurologist and he turned our voices in the head into an epileptic aura.
- [17:19]
A
But did you think we were all experiencing that? Did you think I was walking around with different people sitting in the doorway or whatever?
- [17:27]
C
We believed that our life was normal. We believed that everybody was living exactly the same things. In fact, we believed it so much that we thought there was something wrong with us. And this is why we study psychology. But what we thought was that everybody else experienced this growing up and we were the only idiots that actually objected to it. So it's not that we were thinking that we were abnormal because we were abused, we were thinking we were abnormal because our reaction to that abuse was abnormal. And it turns out our reaction was perfectly normal. The problem wasn't that we were, pardon my French, fucked in the head. We were living in a abnormal world, a fucked situation.
- [18:19]
A
Pardon my.
- [18:20]
C
Yeah. And when people said, oh, daddy doesn't slap me, we thought they were lying. We didn't think we were abnormal, we thought that they were. And so going to uni and studying was part of our way to make sense of our world. But we, even as we're sitting at university, we're still sitting there going, we're normal. The day we worked out that we weren't normal, we had a psychology lecture and a lady came in to discuss what it was like living with schizophrenia. And at the end of it, I started asking questions and we're like, do your voices ever say anything nice? No. Do your voices guide you? No. Do your voices look out for you and protect you? No. So I was describing my experience and it was utterly alien for her because from what she was saying, her voices were quite aggressive and self damaging, which is not our experience. At all. And we're sitting there listening to this going, this is utterly bizarre for us because the voices that we hear are always, hey, you need to get up now because if you don't, he's going to come. You need to make sure you eat something. Our voices were self protective.
- [19:53]
A
That's such an interesting observation and differentiation because for a long time I think we didn't understand those of us who weren't afflicted with either didn't understand the difference between schizophrenia and did. Is it that schizophrenic's voices are external? They feel as though they're external, whereas you know that yours are internal. Is that fair?
- [20:15]
C
That's right. That's right. But unfortunately, on this particular day, at the end of the lecture, the lecturer asked me to come with him to his office.
- [20:23]
A
Oh.
- [20:24]
C
And he says, do you hear voices? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, of course not. No, definitely not. No. See ya.
- [20:34]
A
Yeah.
- [20:34]
C
You know, that is one moment that if I could have that moment over, I would say to him, yes.
- [20:41]
A
It's a scary question though. It's a scary question because you would have known that the doors, it was gonna open, you would have known there was no going back.
- [20:49]
C
It's massive schizophrenia. I was terrified that I had schizophrenia.
- [20:53]
A
Yeah.
- [20:54]
C
Because we had. I mean, we had so many voices, but they were all protective and supportive. They were telling her all kinds of things that my voices have never said.
- [21:06]
A
Often they're frightening.
- [21:08]
C
So I'm assuming my voice is, don't sit there and say, you're unworthy, you're a mess, you're an idiot. My voices don't say that.
- [21:15]
A
Is that common of did. Do people with DID ever have nasty, cruel voices? Is that possible?
- [21:22]
C
Yeah, we do. But often they are not self generated. They're more an internalization of the things that we're told. My father told me that I was hopeless, helpless and useless. And if I had developed an altar to deal with that, we could have had that altar sitting there telling me for everything I was hopeless, helpless and useless. But my alters don't function that way. My alters are an act of self preservation and an act of self love. Plus, as you mentioned, schizophrenics hear the voices outside of their head. Yeah, I hear the voices inside of my head.
- [22:01]
A
Can I ask if you, during your studies of psychology or post those studies, surely there was a time when you started to wonder about what created your father, about his background. How does a person. He was a baby once and he was a child once. And he grew into this very abusive man. Do you know any of the answers to those questions?
- [22:27]
C
I know some answers that are in the negative.
- [22:30]
A
Yeah.
- [22:30]
C
My father was not abused as a child.
- [22:33]
A
Okay.
- [22:34]
C
My father has no psychiatric mental health condition. He's been evaluated by psychiatrists on and off since 1996. He has no mental health diagnoses.
- [22:53]
A
Most of us would say he's obviously mental. He viciously attacked his baby girl for her entire life. So, yeah, it's hard for us to understand how that can be sane, that person.
- [23:06]
C
Exactly. Welcome to my world. I've been doing, I've been doing cross eyed trying to work this out for decades. But dad has no mental health conditions. He's not schizophrenic. He's not depressed. He doesn't have anxiety. Other than the normal am I going to get caught? Which he should have. He had spoken to psychiatrists numerous times. Now I have a transcript of a interview he did with a psychiatrist in the lead up to his deportation from Australia in 2005. And he can't even remember my own name. He refers to me as Jennifer Belinda. I'm Jennifer Lynn, Jennifer Margaret Lindo, not Jennifer Belinda. So he can't even. He doesn't even rate me enough to give me my proper name. So, no, my dad has no history of abuse. He has no history of child neglect or beatings. My father isn't ill. He makes choices. And those choices that he makes devastate me. But every day he makes the same choice. And that's the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around. This monster did this every single day for 14 years. We worked out that there's a. I think there's two week in my entire life where my father did not hurt me, at least in some way. Each day now I've got a two week reprieve. And it wasn't two weeks in a row. It was a day here and a half day there. But we totted it up two weeks out of 14 years when he did not attack me. And that's because I wasn't there. My dad is evil. My dad chooses this behavior. He is knowingly choosing to do this. He knew it hurt. I told him Symphony said no a million, million times. She begged him to stop. And he just kept going. So he's. There is nothing in his history that would mitigate his crimes. Nothing at all. There's nothing that he, that he can point to that says I should get lesser charges or lesser time because of this. There's nothing. He just makes really shit Choices and keeps making them. And he enjoyed my distress, he enjoyed my trauma. And he kept doing it because it hurt me, because it freaked me, and because I was crying. He enjoyed that. He is an absolute sadist.
- [26:20]
A
Seeing the photos of you, the documentary is beautiful for the animations, but there are also lots of photos of you as a little girl. And that beautiful little girl is so hard to look at. Is she, she. Is she still there somewhere? Like, I guess what I'm asking is, is there a fundamental Jenny? Is there one person who's Jenny and then all these others as well? Or is Jenny an amalgam?
- [26:48]
C
There's a fundamental person symphony, and then there's the rest of us, right? Wow.
- [26:52]
A
Okay.
- [26:53]
C
There is nobody inside that is a Jenny. Jenny is the label. Like you go shopping and you need to buy a coat. You go and you buy a coat. We. Jenny is like the coat. Okay. And we all wear Jenny. But the actual person, that is the most important person, the one that we all radiate around is symphony. So there is an essential symphony, which is why we put it as Symphony Haynes.
- [27:22]
A
Or when you. When you come onto the phone call. It was lovely actually, to see that. It made me smile because I feel like I know, okay, I know who that is. And you know, and she's lovely. What about, like, he, like getting better? I don't know how else to put it. Like, the idea that you can or would want to be fixed. And I've read the term integration around. Right around did that. The hope is that eventually all the personalities will either go away or they'll all be sort of folded into one and you'll be one personality again one day as a goal. What do you think about that?
- [28:02]
C
Yeah. Yeah. This is a complicated answer. Okay, so when we started therapy in the 1990s, the goal was integration. That's what all therapists wanted to do, was integrate you into one personality. But they didn't understand that there is often no one personality that you can blend back into. So as a sort of a sidestep here, if you have a victim of crime, you can sometimes go through what is called restorative justice. And the aim of restorative justice is to restore you to a time before the criminal act devastated your life. So they're taking you back to a point in time where you didn't have anxiety and claustrophobia or agoraphobia or whatever it is in mpd. You can't do that because there isn't a pre abuse personality that you can restore back into.
- [29:13]
A
Well, I Guess there is. But it's a couple of weeks old or however old you were.
- [29:17]
C
Exactly.
- [29:18]
A
From the first.
- [29:18]
C
Exactly. So it's preverbal. It can't move. It doesn't have a personality of its own. You definitely do not want me to integrate back into Jennifer Margaret Linda, because up until about two years ago, Jennifer Margaret Linda was six months old. So you don't want to be going back to that. So in terms of seeing integration as restoring us to a pre abuse whole personality, it doesn't work. I mean, we tried integration. We integrated all of us down to one person and did that in the early 2000s. So we'd only been in therapy for like three years. And the whole point of therapy was to integrate us, which kind of meant that we didn't talk about what actually caused us to split in the first place. And you can't safely integrate with. While your history is a secret.
- [30:15]
A
Yeah.
- [30:16]
C
So you need to be in a safe enough space to talk about what happened to you, to get therapy on what happened to you and then let your alters know that they are safe. It's not happening now, and you can't do that effectively.
- [30:33]
A
Well, I guess the question is, now that it's out there, you've spoken about it, you're very, very open about it. Is it something you want? Do you want?
- [30:42]
C
That's the question.
- [30:43]
A
One person.
- [30:44]
C
So for me, we tried integration. It didn't work. We unintegrated. We didn't disintegrate, because that sounds terrible, but we stepped out of integration in 2009. So integration is not a permanent thing. And I think that there's a lot of people out there with DID and MPD who desperately need to hear this. If your alters are needed, they can step out of integration as easily as turning from looking inside to looking outside. That's how my guys did it. They literally turned around. That was all it took. And they came back and they do their jobs. But integration is something that needs to be agreed upon with the participant, with the person who actually has did. Because a lot of times therapists will go, oh, well, you've got DID we need to integrate you. But that isn't always everybody's goal. And when I integrated, I was less than the sum of my parts. I am a better, more well rounded, more mentally healthy person as a multiple than I ever was as a singleton.
- [32:00]
A
Yeah. I've never got the impression from you that you want to be different.
- [32:05]
C
No, I wanted my alters to stop doing some of their jobs. There are people that Gave up their jobs because they're no longer needed. And this is brilliant. But after we testified and we got him into court, people were saying, okay, well, your alters can stop now. They can all integrate. And Symphony says, well, hang on a minute. They were there for the bad times. Surely they get a chance to be there for the good times. So no, we're not integrating anybody until they tell me that they're done. And so everybody who works with me internally is all on a go find something fun to do. If you want to integrate and we respect that, that's perfectly fine. But in the meantime, while you're preparing for that, what do you want to do that is fun? There's all manner of fun stuff going on in our world now. The interviews, doing the documentary, doing the filming, all of this is what I see as healthy development since the trial. So not integrating doesn't mean that I'm failing. It means that I'm honoring my alters and saying, what do you need? What do you need before you want to stop? And you've been talking to me for a while now and I'm getting the. You have not introduced yourself. You are in trouble Deep. So I am actually Muscles and I am pre beeping my swear words.
- [33:36]
A
You can swear Muscles. And can I say I did think. I thought. I don't think we've got the student anymore. So that's why I spoke about the student as in the third person. But I didn't wanna sort of stop. I felt rude stopping and saying, who is this?
- [33:50]
C
Yeah, no, that's okay. You can always ask who am I speaking to?
- [33:54]
A
And I love Muscles because in the documentary Muscles, you are described as the ultimate big brother. And I'm the eldest in my family. I've got a baby brother. But I was always so jealous of the girls who had a big brother. I thought it was so cool.
- [34:08]
C
Yeah, my brother is two and a half years younger than me, so we've always been big sister to him.
- [34:14]
A
Yeah, ye, but you've got muscles.
- [34:18]
C
Yeah, we got me. They were like, what does muscles look like? And I'm like, well, got bleached blonde hair and I'm a bit. Isn't the surfer dude. And I like black leather. And I've got a sneer because, well, gee, why not? And look, just go and find Billy idol from the 80s. That's me.
- [34:36]
A
Now listen, that to me, being another child of the 80s is a very sexy vibe. Are there some alters and are you one? Muscles who is kind of good looking and attractive and Charismatic and.
- [34:53]
C
Oh, yeah. Yeah, we got a whole lot of that.
- [34:55]
A
I understand that sex is a very difficult subject to think about, to broach, to talk about. When your childhood. When you've been sexualised as a child, it's very confusing, and
- [35:10]
C
we've really struggled with that because we've never had a chance to actually define who and what we are, because it's been defined for us by the acts of the father, the monster in our house. Yeah.
- [35:33]
A
Do you have crushes on people, Muscles? Do some of the other alters have crushes?
- [35:37]
C
Yeah, we've had. The girls have had a couple of crushes, mostly from Doctor who. Yep. Big fan of Doctor who. So any. Any aspect of the girls, and this is not really my topic, so you'll probably find the girls come in for this. Anything that was feminine or female was handed to Gabrielle and she kept it safe.
- [36:03]
A
Does Gabrielle choose the dresses? Because there's someone very feminine in there all the time. When you get dressed, it's stunning. She loves a beautiful frock and beautiful shoes and.
- [36:14]
C
Yeah, I know, I know. She put me in a fricking frock for the.
- [36:18]
A
I was gonna say for muscles that can't be comfortable all the time.
- [36:22]
C
No, no. So we. We negotiated. Yes. You can have that frock, and we've got shorts on underneath.
- [36:31]
A
That's brilliant.
- [36:33]
C
We will find a negotiation. So, yeah, we went for. I mean, even today, they were wearing pants because I knew there was a chance the boys would rock up. So I'm like, I don't care what you wear up top as long as you got pants on.
- [36:47]
A
And that goes back to what you were saying before. I think about how helpful everyone is to each other, how caring, how like for Gabrielle to say, I tell you what, we're gonna be on telly. So I'm gonna pick some really beautiful frocks for this, but I'll put shorts on as well for the boys.
- [37:03]
C
Yeah, yeah. We lived in jeans until we got the colostomy. And unfortunately, the position of the colostomy is such that you can't wear jeans anymore. So that's okay. So we've discovered all kinds of different clothing, different kinds of pants. The girls have discovered bell bottoms.
- [37:20]
A
Heaven. Can we. I don't know if Muscles. I don't know if you're the man to speak to this issue, but having raised the idea of the colostomy bag, I wanted to ask somebody about the physical repercussions of the childhood abuse. So if you want to hand me over to somebody else, if you're happy to do that.
- [37:40]
C
Let's see how we go. Okay.
- [37:43]
A
I have a friend who unfortunately had a similar childhood to yours in terms of her father and her mother, for that matter. And she explained to me that a number of physical things resulted from that. One of them was that her body went into puberty and menopause very early. And also that she's had to have a number of surgeries and procedures. And I'm assuming the colostomy bag is related to that. Yeah.
- [38:14]
C
So. Excuse me, Trigger warning, please. Okay, so let's talk about this.
- [38:23]
A
Who are we talking to now, by the way?
- [38:25]
C
I'm Muscles. I'm the one that ends up doing gynecology, which I think is absolutely hilarious because I am not equipped to do gynecology.
- [38:34]
A
No, but you must be the bravest.
- [38:36]
C
Yeah, yeah, I'm the one that they go, can you? Yeah, no problems. So let's talk about consequences. Okay, so let's get something out of the way first. Abuse can draw your body into puberty really early. And the first time you have a period is the first time that you didn't get pregnant. Yes, puberty is. And puberty on the first period is. You didn't. You were ready, your body was ready, but you didn't get pregnant. So when we were talking about what happened to us, we talked about getting pregnant. Massive trigger. Warning pig, flashing lights. He got us pregnant nine times in 14 years. We never got to keep any of the babies. So this is a major trauma for us. But we've actually told people this and they go, oh, but when did you start your period? You can't actually get pregnant until you start your period. No, mate. The first period is the first time you failed to get pregnant. So we got pregnant nine times before we were 14. Boris, can you take Gemma to the beach, please? Thank you. Self protective measure. Gemma is. Gemma's the one that had the babies. So we've just sent her to the beach. She'll cry all afternoon otherwise. So we. She can go make tsunamis at the beach. So we had gynecological issues. I've got a colostomy and my butt stitched up because of what he did. I've got no way to have a baby because he devastated my body. I was not given any medical assistance at all as a child. I was not given any assistance with dentistry. I have the worst dental hygiene because it replicates the abuse. We learned nothing about self care and it's just impossible. I mean, I have to have support workers from the ndis support me and help me with self care and going to the doctor and knowing when to go to the doctor because I'm oblivious. Because we can do it for you. If you were sitting here coughing and hacking up a lung, we'd send you to the doctor. But if I'm sitting here hacking up a lung, I'll just have a sore throat sucky, and that'll be the end of it. There's no sense in us that we take care of ourselves. We actually have to be helped quite substantially through the ndis with everything. I can't bend, I can't lift. I mean, you want to be the lift it, shift it guy and you've got a five kilo weight carrying limit. It's disgusting. I mean, talk about cutting me off at the knees. So, you know, we've, we've actually had to beg the ndis for help. And of course that means we have to disclose huge amounts of information just to be helped. It's not fun. And abuse doesn't end the minute your abuser leaves where you are. It just keeps going because I can still hear him saying the things to me that he said when I was a child. And he said it all the way through. I don't work. I'm not able to work, which is crazy.
- [42:24]
A
You are, as I say, you're so accomplished academically, you're so intelligent, you're so personable, you are able to cope with the most extreme situations in life.
- [42:34]
C
But it can't work. Yeah, can't work because we can't guarantee that the right altar will show up. Can't work because I can't stand for long periods. I can't sit for long periods. I can only do research that I can do when my body is capable. I am completely and utterly immobilized. I'm living on the dsp. We've had to document everything for the ndis. It's been vile. You end up feeling like you're the worst, most incapacitated human. And it's hard. And the things I can do aren't the things that I can be paid to do, right? So I'm jobless. I will always be jobless. I mean, I'm living, thank goodness, I'm living now in a house by the Department of Housing, which is wonderful. But up until then I was living in houses and couldn't afford the rent and I lived in terror of being homeless. So it's been very difficult. And if I got that $840,000, I could have bought myself a house. I could have my own home modified to meet my own needs as opposed to being in a house that's been modified for a generalized person with a disability. I'm not the only one. There's a lot of us out there struggling with working and dealing with did I mean, people talk. You've heard me give trigger warnings all the way through this. But I am triggered by mothers, by babies, by children. And I can't be in a workspace where somebody wants to share photos of the ultrasound or talk about pregnancy. I just completely freak. And Gemma, Gemma is immediately triggered, and that leads to Amber having to go to the beach. And so if Amber's my work person, Amber's at the beach, she can't come and do her job because she's too busy dealing with the fact that we've been triggered around mothers and babies. I've actually had to say to my support workers, rule, when you come in, tell me about you. Do not tell me about you in terms of your partner, your pregnancy, your children, because they all trigger me. And then of course, I'm terrified of half the population.
- [45:11]
A
Tell me before we go, if someone listening to this thinks they might have NPD DID or knows that they do, like, can you save them some time and some trouble? Where can they go for help? What do we do?
- [45:26]
C
Okay, we don't have a list of therapists, but we do have a list of what you need when going to find a therapist. If you think you have NPD DID or you know you have NPD did, you want a psychiatrist that works with trauma, that is trauma informed. You need a therapist, and it can be any therapist as long as they are trained. And so you want someone that knows something about the treatment through inner family systems or through emdr. You want someone who is able to look after themselves and, and demonstrate to you that you don't need to look after them, which is really important. And you need somebody who has capacity because some doctors know about DID but they can only give you one appointment a month or whatever. That's not enough. So think about making a team of people to work with, maybe a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and maybe a, a day to day counselor or therapist. So that you have three supports and if one falls off the cliff, you've still got two supports in your back pocket. If after people have watched we are Jenny, they come away with an understanding that a person who has multiple personality disorder, dissociative identity disorder, we are not crazy, we are victims of crime. My job here is done because if people start looking at people with DID as victims of crime, then we can actually help how people are treated. Because we are not oddities, we're not bizarre, and we're not mentally ill. But we are humans who have experienced the worst kinds of trauma, the worst kinds of abuse at the hands of people who were supposed to protect us. And if I can get everybody to understand that, then the world is a different place.
- [48:06]
A
If you need support after listening to this podcast, you can call Lifeline on 131114 or contact 1-800-Respect on 1-800-737-732 or 1-800-Respect. Org AU. Indigenous Australians can contact 13 Yarn on 139276 or 13yarn.org AU.
- [48:37]
C
The producers of this podcast recognise the
- [48:41]
A
traditional owners of the land on which it's recorded. They pay respect to the Aboriginal elders
- [48:49]
C
past, present and those emerging.