After 20 Years Of Thinking I Was A Sociopath, I Finally Saw My Mental Illness Represented In A TV Show
Aleshyn_Andrei | Shutterstock For 20 years, I thought I was a sociopath.
I couldn’t feel much of anything, physically or emotionally. My pain tolerance was freakishly high. My empathy levels were shockingly low. Sure, I was a rock in any difficult situation (my brother’s bipolar outbursts, my parents’ divorce, my best friend’s suicide), but I also struggled to feel anything more than a whisper of love, attachment, safety, or joy.
Apparently, emotions are an all-or-nothing kind of thing. Needless to say, I wasn’t the best person — but I had no idea how to fix it. And trust me, I tried.
I tried counseling. I tried standard talk therapy. I tried thyroid medication. I tried yoga and mindfulness and hypnotherapy and Reiki. Nothing could put me back in my body or make the world around me feel real.
And then, when I was 26 years old, I saw the term “dissociation” for the first time. In her book Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha, author and psychologist Tara Brach writes:
“When pain is traumatic, the trance can become full-blown and sustained. The victim pulls away from pain in the body with such fearful intensity that the conscious connection between body and mind is severed. This is called dissociation. […] In order to make it through this severe pain, victims of trauma dissociate from their bodies, numbing their sensitivity to physical sensations. Some people feel ‘unreal,’ as if they have left their body and are experiencing life from a great distance.”
I went down a rabbit hole of dissociation research
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How hadn’t I heard this term before? I read self-help books for fun. I took Neuroscience and Psychology courses in college. I was fascinated by the human brain, and the things it did to protect itself, but I had no clue what was wrong with me until I saw that definition.
Dissociative disorders, it turns out, are rarely considered and extremely underdiagnosed.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) classifies three major types of dissociative disorders:
- Dissociative identity disorder (DID): Formerly called multiple personality disorder, DID involves having two or more distinct personalities/identities, called “alters,” which emerge at different times to help the person cope with reality.
- Dissociative amnesia: The inability to recall essential information about your life, including traumatic events, important memories, or details about your identity.
- Depersonalization-derealization disorder (DPDR): A condition in which you feel an extreme detachment from your thoughts, feelings, body, reality, and environment.
Two years later, I was diagnosed with that last one (depersonalization-derealization disorder), and I started EMDR therapy to help me heal.
EMDR — which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — is a scientifically proven form of therapy that uses bilateral stimulation (the back-and-forth movement of the eyes) to heal trauma. This method bypassed my logical brain and survival response, dislodging my trauma on a somatic level so I could finally process it.
In other words, it cracked me wide open. Suddenly, I was a living, feeling human being again. And yet when I spoke about my diagnosis or raved about the therapy that saved my life, no one knew what I was talking about.
Eventually, I wrote my memoir, Numb, Party of One: A Memoir of Healing From Dissociation, to spread the word. And now, six months ahead of my book launch, for the first time ever, I finally saw my dissociative disorder represented in pop culture.
How Hulu’s ‘Furious’ explores dissociative disorders
I just finished Hulu’s new show Furious. As I wrote in my recent article about the growing popularity of women’s revenge fantasies, it was easily one of the best shows I’ve seen in years — and not just because it realistically portrayed dissociation.
The show has a score of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, and it racked up over 6 million views in five weeks, making it a massive breakout success.
A young woman (Lola Petticrew) was trafficked as a teenager, so now she’s drugging and murdering all the men who were involved. Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) is the FBI agent who’s hunting her — but as both seek justice in their own ways, the line between right and wrong starts to blur.
The rest of this article contains spoilers, so if you haven’t watched this show yet and you plan to, bookmark this and come back later.
We eventually learn that the female serial killer’s real name is Catherine Grace, and she has the same dissociative condition I had: depersonalization-derealization.
I had my suspicions when I heard what Catherine said to one of her victims, right before she killed him: “You know what I used to do when I was scared? Look down at your feet. Say, ‘Those aren’t my feet.’ Now look at your legs. Say, ‘Those aren’t my legs. I’m not here.’”
Dissociation is a survival mechanism. The brain detaches from reality when reality becomes too painful to bear, and those who endure abuse regularly report disconnecting from their bodies to cope.
But Catherine’s disorder is confirmed in episode six, when she returns to the support shelter where she lived as a teenager. Now, she’s barely conscious, swaying as she walks, and her eyes look empty.
The manager at the shelter recognizes Catherine right away, clocks her dissociative episode, and says:
“You know what this is. Depersonalization-derealization. You know what to do, right? You gotta bring yourself back. Breathe. You’re safe, right? And you’re in the present moment. You feel that? It’s you. It’s your body. Think about the soles of your stanky feet on the ground. Breathe.”
In EMDR, when the traumatic memories would get too intense and I’d dissociate mid-session, my therapist would use a similar grounding technique to bring me back.
Now, do I find it a tad concerning that the only character I’ve ever seen with DPDR is going around murdering men? Yeah, a little. But DPDR is extremely common among women who have experienced childhood abuse, and I’m grateful for the representation regardless.
And when I thought about it, I realized something important: Every woman in this show dissociates in some way
Full-blown dissociative disorders usually have severe symptoms that make it difficult to work, socialize, or care for yourself. But high-functioning dissociation is often much subtler in its presentation — and most women learn how to dissociate from a very young age.
We’re taught to disconnect from our own needs to nurture everyone around us. We learn to block out discomfort to endure menstruation, childbirth, and menopause. We ignore bodily cues like hunger in pursuit of the perfect body, and we’re taught that beauty is pain, so we should just grin and bear it.
Finally, since one in three women will endure physical violence, we’re conditioned to believe that surviving trauma is merely a fact of womanhood.
In Furious, Alice Black dissociates by throwing herself into work to avoid confronting the residual effects of her physically abusive relationship.
Nora Washington dissociates by drinking around the clock, numbing herself to the years of horrendous crimes she had to witness.
Elena Luna dissociates by reframing her abuse as romance, convincing herself that she’s in love with her pimp.
And Emma Easton dissociates by gardening, making everything around her “pretty,” and convincing herself that she wasn’t as bad as her father, because she did what she could to make the trafficked girls as comfortable as possible.
One way or another, every woman in Furious finds some way to leave herself behind, because when reality becomes too painful to endure, the self finds somewhere else to go.
Maria Cassano is a writer, editor, and journalist whose work has appeared in HuffPost, NBC, Bustle, CNN, The Daily Beast, Food & Wine, and USA Today, among others.
