The Alisa Valdes Magic Show

Chica-Lit author Alisa Valdes fell in love with four different men in two months, and the year had only just begun! Her love life is magical.

All eyes turn to Facebook as our borderline Bullwinkle steps out on stage.

Watch me pull a boyfriend out of my hat, says the super intelligent, insatiably sexy, hugely beautiful and surpassingly talented actress, adjective-lover, bestselling author, business executive, cougar, diet guru, executive director, fitness instructor, fundy pro, intellectual, journalist, life coach, mother, motivational speaker, moviemaker, musician, office manager, photographer, politician, producer, relationship coach, reporter, selfie model, screen writer, singer, songwriter, tour guide, writing teacher, zumba instructor, whatever. It's a borderline thing.

On 8 January, Alisa pulled her first lover of the new year out of her hat. He's a chemist who is "Super stable, both emotionally and financially. Same job 19 years. Can fix anything. Collects art. Is art... Freaking Hot as hell... Digs me.  I dig him... Sweet and Kind. Next, indeed. Had no idea such a man was out there ... living in my neighborhood. Thank you, universe."

 

She immediately posted his picture to show how handsome he is. If her BF is handsome, than she must be pretty. It's a borderline thing.

 

Poof! The universe shrugged and her new lover dumped her the next day. There was no chemistry. She deleted his photograph and headed out to find her next rabbit.

She pulled soul mate number two out of her hat three weeks later, and immediately posted his picture on Facebook: "Him, *sigh*."

Oh, and I have a new boyfriend," she said with the mock surprise of a seasoned stage magician. "He's a handsome nurse ... with a 150 IQ and the best sense of humor. Compassionate, great communicator, kind. ... a socialist, very cute, trustworthy, sensitive and just easy and fun to hang out with. No issues. This is a good day in so many ways."

"I refuse to say MALE nurse like everyone else because that's sexist," says Alisa, the first politically correct Femme Fatale in the history of magic. He was one of the nurses who worked on her when she tried to commit suicide last year.

Poof! Nurse Hot Hips vanished in 24 hours and so did his picture. Even the smiling emoticon that celebrated their true love was gone without a trace.  Now you see it, now you don't. That's her patter: love, blather, delete.

On Valentine's Day she reported that she was alone and loving it. Then she reached into her tiny hat and pulled out another man.

At 4:20 PM on 14 February, she announced that she was "In a Relationship!" It was her third relationship in forty days. She falls in love instantly, the way a mother bonds with her newborn. She was so excited she posted the new relationship again at 5:20.

The new guy was smart, sexy, and handsome. She had a picture to prove it. "Him!" she said, using the same appellation she used with her last boyfriend. When you fall in love as often as Alisa, you need to recycle your chamuyo. Alisa assured her audience that her new relationship was the real deal.

Pay no attention to the men who just disappeared behind her magic curtain. This new boyfriend is The One. He has all the qualities necessary to be her novio: a pulse, functioning genitalia, and the appearance of someone young enough to be her son. Her audience wasn't buying it.

"It takes about 5 years to really see a person for who he or she is," warned Danielle, a concerned member of her audience and longtime fan. "The desperation isn't ever gonna work."

Magic Alisa did not agree. "I appreciate your concern," she replied. "I am happy with my decision. Hope you can be happy for me in five years."

Poof! Her new beau dumped her in five hours and she immediately washed that man right out of her hair. Her love for him vanished as quickly as it had arrived and so did her Five Year Plan for True Love.

Our magician briefly stepped offstage to celebrate her graduation from a Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) support group. Alisa was diagnosed with BPD four years ago, but her therapist now says she no longer meets the criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder. DBT has rewired her brain. Wow! She's a first class magician if there never was one. She cured herself of an incurable mental illness! Her Facebook audience applauded and Alisa went back to her never ending magic show.

Watch me pull another boyfriend out of my hat.

Her fourth relationship in two months was proclaimed on 2 March. This six-two, kind, gentle, smart, and talented young man fell in love with her, just like the last three guys, and she is madly in love with him, just like she was with every man who came before. Sure, she's old enough to be his mother; that's why they hooked up in the first place. She's a "cougar." ¿No sabes? 

"Just when I'd resigned myself to being happy alone, there he was," says our modest magician. She's already forgotten her three previous novios of 2016. Out of her hat, out of her mind.

"Brilliant, gentle, funny, patient, talented, self-aware, sexy, courageous, available, and ... in love with me. ... Right time, right man. Right now. True love." She sounds like Ekert Tolle.

Poof!

I have not published the names or photographs of any of her vanishing soul mates. These men did what they needed to do. They deserve sympathy, compassion, and privacy.

If you want to keep up with Alisa's boyfriends, keep your eyes glued to her Facebook Magic Show.

Now you see 'em, soon you won't.

(If you have something to add to the story, please share in the comments section below.)

Creativity and Borderline Personality Disorder

by James C Johnson

Hospitalized as a teenager for extreme suicidal behavior, a woman went on to earn a Ph.D. in Psychology, developed a theory explaining the cause of her mental illness, and createed a successful treatment that is now in use throughout the world.  The woman's mental illness: borderline personality disorder.

Borderline disordered people are intelligent and creative, and this is the right time to talk about it.  May is BPD Awareness Month and Santa Fe’s annual “Creativity and Madness Conference” is scheduled for the week bridging July and August. 

“Borderline individuals are the psychological equivalent of third-degree-burn patients,” says University of Washington Psychology Professor Marsha Linehan.  “They simply have, so to speak, no emotional skin.” Their perceptions of themselves and others are inconsistent; they worship romantic partners one day and hate them the next. They are impulsive and prone to explosive displays of anger toward themselves and others.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet near Stockholm have reported that “patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and their relatives are overrepresented in creative occupations.” According to a study of more than a million people, writers are at higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, depression, substance abuse, and suicide. 

The study did not specifically look at borderline personality, but it is reasonable to assume that BPD is also a catalyst for creativity. Creativity is often defined as the use of primary process thinking to generate new ideas. Primary process thinking is typical in the thinking of small children and  schizophrenics. We all use it when we dream.  Brief regression to primary process thinking often occurs in borderline patients.  Borderline affect storms are often compared to the tantrums of small children.

Schizophrenia and BPD are distinct disorders, but they do share some symptoms.  Identity diffusion (the absence of a coherent sense of self) is common to both.  Borderline disordered patients have brief psychotic episodes in times of stress and when under the influence of alcohol or drugs..

Bipolar disorder is unrelated to BPD.  Marsha Linehan says bipolar moods swing between mania and major depression, with each mood remaining stable for many months.  Borderline mood swings, on the other hand, occur much more rapidly, often several times a day.  “You have fear going up and down, sadness up and down, anger up and down, disgust up and down, and love up and down,” Linehan says.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have reported that people with borderline personality disorder often have above average IQs and possess a special giftedness. “Many borderline patients have a cognitive giftedness in the area of self- and other-perceptiveness.’”  These areas of giftedness are called inter- and intra-personal intelligences in Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. Intra-personal intelligence is a common characteristic of novelists, researchers, and entrepreneurs. 

Children who develop borderline personality disorder grow up in an invalidating environment of constant emotional abuse.  Physical and sexual abuse may also occur.  The Johns Hopkins researchers speculate that the interaction of a child’s giftedness with early childhood abuse “creates a tragic drama that is the etiology of BPD.”

Borderline Artists in Santa Fe

While therapists describe borderline disordered people as highly intelligent and creative, few creative artists with the disorder have been willing to reveal their borderline diagnosis. This is certainly true in the Santa Fe art community.

I know three artists in Santa Fe who struggle with borderline personality disorder, whom I call Ann, Cathy, and Sally. None of these artists has publicly revealed their borderline disorder.  Ann has displayed in several Santa Fe galleries and Cathy is a part-owner of a small gallery on Canyon Road. Neither woman earns enough from her art to survive in the current economy.  Ann receives a monthly retirement check as part of her divorce settlement and works a part time job.  Cathy works as a substitute teacher and her father pays her monthly house payment.  Sally is the most skillful painter of the three (her finished paintings are gorgeous), but she cannot sustain an interest in any project for very long.  Most of her paintings remain unfinished and she has never shown in a gallery.  She survives on money from a divorce settlement.

Creative People with BPD

In recent years, a handful of creative people have self-identified after receiving a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder.  Other creative people with symptoms have been identified by others, but these identifications are speculative and often disputed. The stigma of BPD remains high. 

New Mexico author Alisa Valdes (The Dirty Girls Social Club, The Feminist and the Cowboy) says she received a diagnosis of  borderline personality disorder two years ago. Much of her creative work is inspired by personal behaviors that would justify such a diagnosis. Many of her professional failures result from the kind of self-sabotage that is common in borderline disordered individuals.

Authors Susanna Kaysen (Girl Interrupted), Stacy Pershall (Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl), and Rachel Reiland (Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder) have all written about their struggles with BPD. Kaysen’s story was made into a movie starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie .

Singer-songwriter Kayla Kavanaugh readily admits that she has BPD.  Her website says her struggles with borderline personality disorder lie “hidden behind the music.”

The tumultuous lives of Tom Wolfe, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin have been attributed to personal struggles with BPD. Marilyn Monroe, Demi Moore, and Angelina Jolie are also often identified as borderline disordered.  Alisa Valdes recently published an open letter to Demi Moore, in which she compares Moore’s personal problems to Valdes’ own struggles with BPD.

Six foot five inch comedian Doug Farrari (“Dougzilla“) demonstrates clearly that borderline personality disorder is not just a woman’s disease.  He says he gets his biggest laughs when he talks about the dark side of his borderline disorder—the ugly combination of uncontrollable rage and chronic impulsivity that are hallmarks of the disease.

Zelda Fitzgerald, who died in 1948, is often identified as borderline disordered. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia at a time when BPD was sometimes called ambulatory schizophrenia, pseudoneurotic schizophrenia, or borderline insanity. 

Perhaps the most creative person with borderline personality disorder is the therapist and researcher Marsha Linehan, Ph.D. She developed the “invalidating environment theory” to explain the cause of the disorder and created dialectical behavioral therapy, a treatment specifically designed for patients at high risk of suicide.  The suicide rate of borderline disordered people is 400 times higher than that of the general population. Author Stacy Pershall credits her recovery to the therapy Linehan created.   

Linehan’s patients could not help but notice that her arms are covered with faded scars, burns, and welts. After decades of denial, Linehan revealed in 2011 that she struggled with the BPD as a young woman and had been hospitalized in 1961 for extreme suicidal behavior. At that time, the BPD diagnosis did not exist and she was diagnosed with Schizophrenia.

What could be more creative than to identify the cause and find the cure of your own mental illness?

 

 

 

 

Alisa Valdes and Borderline Personality Disorder

Alisa Valdes spoke at Collected Works Bookstore the other night about her new book, “The Feminist and the Cowboy.”  A few days later, her blog post, “Shit Borderline Moms Say,” popped up in a Google Alert.  Her borderline mom lives in Santa Fe, naturally.

New Post: The Alisa Valdes Magic Show

At least 3,000 people struggle with borderline personality here in Santa Fe, according to epidemiological surveys of mental illness across the United States.  I would argue that the borderline population in Santa Fe is much larger, because Santa Fe has become a Mecca for people struggling with the identity issues.  Lacking a stable personal identity, some borderlines try to create an identity by linking themselves to a specific location.
Research suggests that a major cause of personality disorders is having a parent who is psychotic or borderline.  The specific disorder a child will develop is dependent on how the child was used by his or her toxic mother.  Some mothers use their children to give themselves an identity—“I am a perfect mother and this is my perfect child.”  Such children grow up self absorbed and narcissistic.

Other mothers ignore and devalue, blaming their child for everything that goes wrong.  These mother project their own bad feelings onto their child.  When a child’s own feelings and emotions are constantly invalidated, the child fails to develop a cohesive identity and remains emotionally stuck in childhood, which is why borderline women often act like two-year-olds. 

Alisa Valdes says she was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder in 2011.  The blogasphere is now filled with stories about her borderline love affair with a Texas cowboy.  It turns out her Rambo was in fact a rapist.  Or was he?  She loved him.  Or she hated him.  It’s a borderline thing. 

Borderline women are sometimes drawn to men with caretaker personalities.  Virtually all the women who have been sexually abused by their psychiatrists have been borderline.  Caretakers, like therapists, are willing to tolerate the roller coaster emotions of borderline women.

Alisa hates caretaker personalities.  She loved them once, but not anymore.  Now she says they are weak and emasculated and calls them “icky liberal men.” 

In her book talk at Collected Works, she said she now rejects liberal Marxist feminism and embraces female submission to a perfect macho man.  Her book describes her brief borderline love affair with her middle-aged Republican cowboy.  He was her perfect macho soul mate.

Alisa’s father is an outstanding scholar and emeritus professor at UNM.  Years ago, I took his graduate level course on the history and sociology of Cuba, the country of his birth.  He was certainly idiosyncratic, and his clothes were obviously not his priority.  He once came to class for an entire week with trouser legs of different lengths. 

He has an encyclopedic knowledge of Cuba and expects his students to master the assigned readings and do independent research.  His lectures included everything from a discussion of mob influence in pre-revolutionary Cuba to stories of how mothers living near the Bay of Pigs began naming their newborns “Usnavy” after witnessing the failed invasion. 

I loved his class, but many students did not.  Fifty percent of the student evaluations on “Rate the Professor” label him a poor teacher.  These students complain that he did not lecture from the textbook and that he did not teach to the test.  These complaints are childish, in my view.  Adult students should not expect spoon-feeding in a graduate level course. 

The Professor had a reputation for being a ladies' man.  One fellow student said he “is just another macho Cuban, like Desi Arnaz.”  Indeed, the Professor himself alluded to Cuban machismo when he told us how the CIA found it impossible to maintain security at the mercenary training camp they set up in Mexico for Cuban exiles preparing for the invasion.  Despite a camp lockdown, Cuban trainees would sneak into town every night to hook up with women of easy virtue.  Cuban machismo was all about courage and sex.

Another classmate did not know much about economics, so I loaned her “Elementary Price Theory” by Peter Dooley.  One day she told me she had a crush on our professor, and was delighted when he began inviting her out for coffee and more.  

I wonder if Alisa’s search for the perfect macho man is a search for somebody just like dear old dad.

Alisa describes her relationship with her cowboy in typical “I hate you, don’t leave me” borderline style.  She loved him.  He was her master.  Then she hated him.  He was her monster. 

Finally, she imagined that her cowboy was planning to murder her.  She literally runs away, fleeing into the arms of the next perfect lover.  She sounds just like Sally, my borderline fiancée in Santa Fe.  Every borderline’s story is completely different, but their pathological behavior is exactly the same. 

The borderline relationship Alisa describes in her book was just another failed relationship.  Every partner was perfect until he was not.  Each man was her hero.  Then he was zero.  It is of course not her fault.  Nothing is ever her fault.  It’s a borderline thing.

Alisa complains that her publisher is not supportive now that she has told her truth about her cowboy.  Like all borderlines, she feels empty and unloved.  Any failure to give unconditional support is experienced by her as total betrayal and rejection.  She feels just like she did when her mother failed to support her when she was a little girl.  Whenever she feels traumatized, she must act out.  She has no other coping skills. 

It has happened before.  In 2000, Valdes accused her employer, The St. Petersburg Times, of racism and discrimination.  Her accusations were contained in the snotty tirade that was her letter of resignation.  She claimed that the paper’s use of the word “Latino” is a form of genocide.  The word “Latino” was bad. 

Alisa now runs a Latina Book Club and is Latina Magazine’s Woman of the Year.  Latina is empowering.  Latina is good.  Black is white and white is black.  It’s a borderline thing.

The trauma that a borderline mother inflicts on her daughter is devastating to the child’s emotional development.  Unless someone comes to the child’s aid, the victimized little girl remains emotionally stuck in the earliest years of childhood, reacting for the rest of her life as if she was a defenseless little girl.  Borderline women never overcome the damage their mothers have inflicted on them.  With proper therapy, however, they can learn how to cope.

My heart goes out to Alisa and I wish her well, even if that makes me another emasculated icky liberal man.

Alisa's "borderline thing" continues in the comments section below...

 

 

Listen to Borderline Personality Disorder

At any given moment Sally thinks I am either her perfect lover or her worst enemy, so I never know what to expect when she sends me a voicemail.  Is she sending a message of radiant love or of raging hatred?   Life has always been an emotional roller-coaster for the woman I call Sally.  She has struggled all her adult life with  borderline personality disorder.   [To listen to her messages, left click on the highlighted filename below.]

 

 VOICEMAILS.mp3

 
She either loved me or she hated me, and I never knew when or why her emotions would change.  In the course of our relationship, she broke up with me a dozen times.  One way to understand her mood swings is to listen to her voicemails.  In the first message she asked for her ring back just hours after she broke up with me.  Each message is a reflection of how she felt at a moment in time.  The messages are in the order I received them.  Her obscene messages are expressions of her uncontrollable rage.  She wanted to get rid of her feelings of hatred so she shared them with me.

Here is a summary of the nine voicemails:

“Hi Sweetie.  I want (my ring) back. ... Give me a call.  You know my number.”

“You are a fucking son of a bitch!  Don't ever darken my doorway..."

“You have a wife.  I am your wife.  I’ll be there for you. ...”

“If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?”

“That was beautiful.  Shana Tova. ...”

“My Christmas message for you...  You are a piece of shit! ...”

“Good morning. ... I love you.”

(screaming) “Screw you!  Screw you!"

“I want to apologize for all the nasty stuff.   I'm sorry. ...”

She had the same emotional dichotomy with everybody from her past: her  parents, brothers, sisters, neighbors, friends, lovers, husbands, and children.   She is a lifelong injustice collector.  She remembers everything her birth family ever did that upset her.  She experiences these memories as evidence of total betrayal.  She hates her mother, her father, and all her siblings.  At the same time she desperately wants to be loved and in times of crisis Sally will cry hysterically, sobbing “I want my Mommy, I wamt my Mommy.”

At no time has she ever given any indication that she can visualize another person as a three-dimensional human being.  She can talk about someone from her past for hours without ever actually describing them in a coherent way.  She doesn’t seem to understand that everyone she has ever known has a shadow.  Every person is a mixture of the good and the not-so-good.  In her mind, a lover is perfect but his shadow is evil incarnate.  She experiences each lover as if he were two separate people.

At times, she can reflect on a former lover, remember a good time, and begin to speak about him as if she was still in love.  But then she will suddenly remember his shadow and fly into a rage.  She once reflected on how much she loved her first husband.  Then she remembered their first date. Now in a rage, she recounted how he got her drunk and raped her, married her to get his green card, and plotted her murder after they were married.   I have no doubt that their first sexual intimacy was consensual because that has been her pattern throughout her life.  She falls in love immediately.  Every new sexual partner is “love at first sight.”

She feels the same love-hate dichotomy toward every man she has ever slept with.  Sometimes she says her Santa Fe lawyer and a man she hired in Argentina took advantage of her naïveté to seduce and rape her.  But at other times she says her affairs with these men were based on unbridled sexual passion.  I do not know if what she remembers in the moment creates her mood, or if her mood determines which memories she is able to recall.   She had the same emotional dichotomy with me. At various times I have been her best friend, lover, fiancé, husband, kidnapper, rapist, and murderer.
 
In a similar way, her religious feelings are passionate but temporary.  For a few months she is a devoute Roman Catholic saying her rosary and attending daily mass.  At other times she is an Orthodox Jew, keeping a Kosher kitchen and referring to her Roman Catholic family as papists. 

In Santa Fe she sometimes recites Hindu prayers and goes to worship Ama at the Ashram.  When we first became engaged she was a passionate astrologer; making sure that our marriage was in alignment with the stars was far more important than anything in the Tanach. 

One of her telephone messages to me is a “Shana Tova” greeting for the Jewish New Year.  Her emotion was very loving.  Three months later, she was a Catholic sending me an obscene Christmas message.  Her emotion was pure rage. 
 
She has a great fear of abandonment, and has always been particularly terrified that her husband would die before she did, leaving her alone and abandoned.  She once told me the voice of God had promised her that we were destined to die at the same time, which is why she wanted to marry me right away.
 
In all the years I have known her, she never once said she wanted to marry me because she loved me. She said she loved me, of course, but her reasons for wanting to marry me were always practical.   I was good for her (“You were sent to teach me things”).  I was good company (“Now I have someone to go to the movies with”).  I was a nice guy (“You make me happy”).  God sent me to her (“You are in answer to my prayers”).  She once assured the Greek neighbor that I would make a good husband because I like to pull the weeds.

With many of the ordinary people she meets in daily life she is emotionally cold and detached. Such people are little more than a means to an end.   I think she does this to avoid the oscillating love-hate emotions that rule all of her intimate relationships.  She told me once that the voice of God assured her that she is under no obligation to the people who help her.  God sends people to assist her, and when she is done with them she may discard them without a second thought. 
 
Her rage attacks are always transient and they usually vanish as quickly as they arrive.  This can be seen clearly in her last telephone message to me, in which she apologizes for her earlier obscene voicemails, for stalking me and an acquaintance of mine, and for vandalizing my house. 
 
“Hi, it’s me, and I want to apologize for the nasty stuff.  (um)  I’m sorry.  (and um)  Well, when I met you, you were a happy, sweet, cheerful person; and I just hope you can go back to being that happy, sweet, cheerful person again; with whomever you choose to be that way.  And I wish you a lot of luck finding a good person to be with.  I do.  And I really mean that.  So please forgive all the crap.  (and um )  Well, if I see you around I’ll say ‘Hi.’  Sorry.  Goodnight.”

She wanted us to get back together again, and we did, but her pattern of loving me one moment and hating me the next has never stopped. 
 
Do you think it ever will? 

Dating Madness DOT Com

Driving down San Francisco Street one December morning, I saw a friend on her way to work.  She prefers to walk, but on this bitterly cold morning she readily accepted a ride to her store on the Plaza.  I will call her Alice  because she has the same views as the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.  She thinks Santa Fe is Wonderland and everyone who lives here is completely Mad.  If we were sane we would live somewhere else.

I told her I had met a woman online and thanked Alice for telling me about her brother's success with internet dating.

She was horrified.

"But all the woman on the internet are crazy," she said.  "I never meant for you to do it."  She was serious.  Alice said her brother had met, married and divorced three different women on the internet.  All of them had been crazy.

"I've met several of those," I agreed, without mentioning that such women are my cup of tea.  One of my early love objects suffered from a personality disorder.  Put me in a room with a dozen women and I will zero in on the one with the most prominent symptoms of borderline personality organization.

At the local community college I was immediately attracted to a woman who said she had moved here from Massachusetts.  For our first date, she asked me to pick her up at her therapist's office.  I immediately recognized her therapist as a national authority on the treatment of Borderline Personality because I had read her book.  Santa Fe is Mecca for women with BPD.  They are everywhere in this city.  No wonder Santa Fe has more therapists per capita than any other city in the world, Buenos Aires included.

"Dating women on the internet is like picking up prostitutes on the street,” Alice said.  There was some truth to this as well.  Promiscuity can be a symptom of borderline personality.  The first woman my dating service matched me up with said she had hooked up with ninety-two partners online. She kept all their photographs and E-mails in a folder on her computer. She also liked to pick up men at Whole Foods.  Another early match was a state employee who said she had gone online to meet a better class of men than the ones she had been picking up at the Tin Star.   Going to bed with her was two-for-one, because she would pass your number on to her a young coworkerl at the state finance office who liked to date older men.  She had abandoned her young children in Dallas and moved to Santa Fe to discover who she really was.  In my experience, borderline women who are sexually promiscuous have all suffered horrendous childhood abuse.

I told Alice I met a local artist on the internet, whom I will call Ann. I said Ann and I were moving in together.  Naturally, I did not mention that Ann had been a victim of childhood sexual abuse or that she struggled with borderline personality organization.

We arrived at her store and I asked how she was doing.  She said the economy was not good and she had not made any new pieces, but she hoped to start a new project in the spring.  She said her partner, a carpenter, was working at a job in Artesia.  He came home every weekend.  She talked about a few of her artist friends.  Then she returned to her concerns about online dating.

“You have to be very careful with people on the internet,” she said with genuine concern in her voice. "People online really are crazy, especially if they live in Santa Fe."  

"Like you and me?" I asked.

 "Yes, just like you and me."  Alice had to move out of her family home when she was still a teenager after her schizophrenic brother literally chased her around the house with an ax.  Her mother wanted to keep her son at home and out of an institution, so she put her daughter’s things out on the front porch.  Alice definitely was on the spectrum, but she was already in a committed relationship.

 "Please be careful," Alice said, as she leaned across the center console and gave me a kiss.


Shame and Anguish



Sally (not her real name) was overwhelmed with shame whenever she became depressed.  Sometimes she was suicidal.  At other times, she felt compelled to share her shame with me and beg me to accept her as she was.
 

Laocoon, Vatican Museum, Rome, Italy

She wore a mask of unbearable anguish whenever she begged for acceptance. Her anguished face reminded me of the statue of Laocoon in the Vatican Museum. Laocoon had a right to feel anguish. Giant serpents were killing him and his children. Sally’s anguish was just as unbearable. She believed she was a whore and a prostitute, and she feared that I would leave her as soon as I realized what she really was.


Her first plea for acceptance was delivered in my living room a few months after I gave her the engagement ring.  She came over in a trance-like state and perched on the edge of my leather chair.  She presented a face of heartbreaking anguish, which remained unchanged throughout her thirty-minute soliloquy.  Her eyes were fixed.   She did not respond to anything I said or did, except to shrink away from my touch.  I don’t think she could hear me voice.  It was as if she was delivering a prepared speech from inside a dark soundproof room.

"I  am a whore and a prostitute,” she screamed in anguish.  “If you marry me you will marry a whore and a prostitute.  Can you do that?  Do you want to do that?  Can you marry a whore--a prostitute?"  She itemized all the reasons why she was a whore and a prostitute.  Did I still want to marry her? 

After she finished,  she sank back into the chair, exhausted.  I told her she had nothing to be ashamed of and that I loved her and wanted to marry her for who she really is.  The past is just the past.  I was not sure whether the affect storm itself had calmed her, or if it was my words of unconditional love and acceptance.  After ten minutes she returned to her daughters at her own home.

Recoleta Cemetery,
Buenos Aires, Argentina

She is neither a whore nor a prostitute.  She is not responsible for anything that happened to her when she was a child.  All of her adult sexual relationships have been based on her feelings of love.  Her relationships may only lasts for a few months,  but in each relationship her love is real  She doesn't pick up strangers for casual sex.  Each new love affair is genuine and meaningful for her.  But the love never lasts long, and the man who was her best friend and lover for a month or two will inevitably became her newest worst enemy.  I believe she loved her two former husbands when she married them, and they loved her.  Both men were devastated when she divorced them.  I do not know anything about the intentions of her former partners, except for one man, whose sister-in-law told me he refused to marry Sally because of his family’s opposition to his marrying a woman who had been in a mental hospital.

A second storm occurred about a month later in her kitchen.  Her daughters were at school.  This time she remained standing, facing me, with the same anguished facial expression.  She feared I would reject her because she cannot have an orgasm during sexual intercourse.   She raged about her being “cold and stiff” and was terrified that I would reject her because of it.  

In actuality, she is not frigid.  She has extraordinary clitoral orgasms.  Indeed, her orgasms are one of her few genuine pleasures.  She masturbates daily, with or without a partner, and never travels without her vibrator.  The intensity of her orgasms is the reason I call her Sally in this blog.  
 

She cannot have an orgasm during intercourse because of a medical condition that is beyond her control.   Her vaginal wall is lined with a dozen cysts.  Sexual intercourse is painful.  She sometimes talks about the pain afterwards, but struggled mightily not to show her discomfort when we made love.  When she is depressed, she views the pain as divine punishment for her sexual misbehavior.

About a month later she returned to my living room to deliver another plea for unconditional love and acceptance.  She arrived as if she was walking in her sleep and again perched on the edge of my chair with the exact same anguished expression.  This time she was terrified that  I would become so disgusted with her after we were married that I would leave her forever.  



Folk Art Museum, Guangzhou, China

“If you leave me after we are married it will kill me,” she screamed.  “I couldn’t survive being abandoned again.”   It was not clear what she meant by this, since it every one of her previous relationships the breakups were initiated by Sally.  Most people understand that we have to take people as they are, but Sally can only love someone who is perfect.  As soon as her partner disapoints her and she recognizes that her partner is less than perfect, her love is instantly  transformed into hate.  She completely abandoned her parents and all her brothers and sisters.  She ended both her marriages, carefully planning each divorce months in advance, and taking each husband for everything she could get.  They deserved it.  They were evil.  Sally is proud of the fact that she has never been dumped by a man.  Perhaps this was the reason for her overwhelming fear that I would leave her.

In a sense, she holds herself to the same impossible standard  she uses to judge other people.  When she realized that she herself was not perfect, she became terrified that I would treat her in the same way she has treated all of her former lovers.  She does not understand that I do not see the world the way she does.  I am not perfect and I do not expect perfection in her.
 

But I could not ask questions or say anything during this new affect storm.  She was delivering a prepared speech and my only job was to listen.   She went on to itemize her faults.  She screamed “Are you going to kill me?”  Again, she told me she was a whore and a prostitute.  She talked about her promiscuity, her rage, her cruelty, her frigidity.   She said she would kill herself if I left her.  She screamed “Do you want to kill me?” with such ferocity I feared the neighbors might call the police.  When she calmed down and sat back in the chair, I promised that I would never leave her.  She seemed greatly relieved.  It was very late.  After drinking a glass of water, she returned to her daughters at home.

When she was happy she talked about her previous affect storms with insight.  She said they were just another effect of her post traumatic stress disorder, which is a term she prefers to her actual diagnosis of borderline personality disorder.  Twenty-five years ago, when she was overwhelmed with shame and guilt, she would secretly destroy phone books with a hammer, or shake the headboard and beat the mattress with her fists.  When her husband bought her a dildo she took it to the basement and smashed it with a sledge hammer.   Later, after her commitment to a mental hospital in Houston, she learned how to vocalize her anguish with a living person.  She talked with psychiatrists and other therapists.  Before we met, she paid a local therapist to come to her house and listen to her affect storms.

I thought her willingness to share her deepest fears with me was a sign that our relationship was working. 

I was wrong.