The Nine-Headed Serpent for Hercules
by Sylvia Maltzman

EXCERPT

Introduction

I am not a psychologist, nor am I a scholar in the behavioral science field. As a child, I had wanted to be a novelist, but discovered as an adult that I hadn’t the attention span to write something longer than a long short story. You might call me a poet—I have written many poems—but I’m not writing poetry anymore, and have not for several years.

So what right do I have to write a book about steamy psychological topics? Because I’ve lived through this, and I have tried to get help in overcoming these problems, often unsuccessfully. Science was not able to help me because the scientists in charge of my therapy were not willing or able to deal with the realities of my life. A lifetime of abuse and neglect does not vanish into thin air under the influence of even the finest-crafted antidepressants; and cognitive or conventional therapy has little or no power to heal it.

The psychological condition that most victims of chronic, severe abuse and neglect are left in is called Borderline Personality Disorder, and most mental health practitioners are unwilling or ill-equipped to take on such a patient. The borderline this diagnosis refers to is the borderline between neurosis and psychosis, though this is now considered to be an inaccurate way to describe this overwhelming, life-crushing disorder.

What makes chronic abuse so difficult to overcome? Why do we describe the offspring of abusers as “Adult Children?” Because these survivors of unimaginable pain and lack never had a chance to develop as most other children do. We remain locked into our childhood anguish and pain, while being kept ignorant of life skills and experiences that would give us the tools to dig ourselves out of the hole our parents buried us in. We are left as incomplete and full of gaps in our psyches as a package of Swiss cheese. We are full of terror; we are full of shame. We are crippled by our crushing emotions; we are hobbled by our numbness when the pain grew too much. We don’t understand how the world works, but we are overwhelmed and terrified by the little we have been able to grasp. Memories are hideously painful, but so are the things we cannot seem to recall.

For my entire life, 46 years at this writing, I felt that I was drowning almost every part of every day. I felt that I was being overwhelmed and crushed, being washed away and unable to save myself or to find a rescuer. Any little bits of humor or beauty I could create or revel in were and are, candles against the darkness. This is my reality. What didn’t kill me really did make me stronger, but this is not the way to do it if you have a choice.

I never had that choice.

* * * *

It was not medicine, not science, that gave me my first taste of empowerment. Rather it was philosophy, spirituality, a sense of being aware of the Divine... and more importantly, that the Divine was aware of me. I never found this experience in church or synagogue, by the way. What put the light at the end of my tunnel was not the belief that I was the passive victim of a capricious and whimsical God, that that God was in control of everything that happened in my life, including the hideous and disgusting crimes committed against me... rather, it was the discovery that I was a vital being, the child of a Deity that had absolutely nothing to do with rape, violence, or insanity; the discovery that I was no less a creature of God than the trees and the animals, that I could connect to nature and be validated as a living thing, and respect the life that is in me... unlike the way I had been treated up until then. To become liberated was to learn to think and behave differently than the way I had been taught, and to not replicate the actions and beliefs of my abusers.

So you may call me a philosopher if you like, especially since this book is a collection of essays. This is what I have experienced; this is what I think. I hope that you may find my words helpful.

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