Chicago Children's Advocacy Center

When it comes to kids, it's the little things that count. Mainly, rides.

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Treating Bill Zeller

That's Bill Zeller on the front page of  1000 Memories, a collection of memorabilia sure to break your heart.  Great-looking, a brilliant young man, best known as the creator of MyTunes, an enhancement of iTunes, and Zempt, another technical upgrade, this one for movable type.  A computer programmer with more potential than any one person needs, splashed the news  January 5, 2011 with his suicide. 

He left us a note that does a more than adequate job of explaining why he did it. (It might be good to read that before reading on, not sure.)  He could explain why, but he wasn't a therapist, didn't know how to save himself.  Like most people who take their lives, he had to get out of the pain.  It's so hard to read about a case like this (he's now a case), because not only is the story going to be sad, but there's no happy ending. 

Some people blame bad therapy, which he likely suffered.  He describes detached, clinical treatment.  There's a reason doctors detach, there's so much secondary trauma in this work, absorbing the pain of the patient (you have to be infected some) and living, if vicariously, the trauma.

But sometimes it is the patient who is hurt, call it incest redoux (once again), if he pays for a lack of professional attention, for professional indifference.  Bill Zeller made an effort, took the a chance, played the Lotto for professional understanding, desirous to rid himself of the cloud, talking to the likes of us.  Only to find the cloud follow him out the door.

Gizmodo:

Zeller was a victim of sexual and psychological abuse. It's clear from his writing that the abuse left him unable to interface with the world in any way that didn't leave him feeling he was too sullied to have the same experiences that he thought others had. He had a self-described "darkness", which despite his prostration it's clear he handled more ably than perhaps he ever realized.

Programming was a solace, but only temporarily. Zeller never felt he could escape the things that had happened to him because he carried his torment with him everywhere.

Yes, it is that painful. Rape kills.

Body memories, terror, an invasion that is gruesome, hurts, overpowers, shames, confuses and traps, sullies, violates, and won't let go.

How does one recover a sense of separateness, wholeness, integrity, goodness-- when someone else has declared possession?  When someone else has enslaved, degraded, etched memories, sensory memories, physical feelings within one's very body, soul?  The self is no longer one's self, but a shared object, something someone has used, over and over again.  Abused.  That's the word.  The crime, heinous.  Taboo everywhere, all over the world, incest.

We talk about wanting to share our life with others, having a partner, joining, intimacy, making a family, maybe.  Where there is an incest wound this is particularly difficult.  Intimacy is going to be difficult at all levels, all of the intimacies are difficult, but especially sexual intimacy.


Therapy doesn't just work with young adult incest survivors who come to us frustrated with efforts at socialization, more than a few failed relationships, feeling the need to meet sexual expectations, human expectations.  And sex therapy doesn't just work, either.  It is a stretch to have what is considered a a normal, intimate sexual relationship when touch isn't pleasure, but is associated with pain.  Initiating touch, or the very experience of another initiating touch, is packed with terrifying memories and dread, anxiety.

This isn't fun, this isn't goodness, this certainly isn't holy or sanctified. It isn't even pleasure for the sake of mutual pleasure, forget the blessings of commitment.  A survivor of childhood sexual abuse does not usually enjoy sex, not without a head trip.  Libido is confusing, associated with shame.  Therapy must address all of the above, all of the trauma, and more:

Who am I?
Why am I?
Why me?

There are many objectives of such a therapy.  Self-esteem, for one.  A fresh cognitive assessment of one's life, two.  Loving oneself, three.  Becoming a social person, four.  Somehow capturing that self and rewiring it, inhabiting the same place, the one with all the memories, in a different way, being inside a shell that must symbolize a new identity.  This is the goal.

The body memories?  How does one get rid of these?  So complicated, that these will remain, lie side by side, parallel to sensual pleasure, but they can.  In the process of reclaiming, redefining, re-identifying self, they must be ignored, as if they don't belong, don't matter.  Willfully set aside, the focus is on a new relationship, a good, loving relationship that needs love back. All in good time.

Working a therapy like this is hard, and a support group or three, has to be a part of it.  Holding onto that new identity, A Survivor, is experiencing the self as clean, good.  Knowing.  A person with something very important, perhaps, to teach others.

It can be very difficult, very painful, very sad, but then, there is a happy ending.

Except not always.  Most survivors suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or Acute Stress Disorder, and a myriad of accompanying affective disorders, depression and anxiety primarily.  But incest can make some people so sick that they can never get a grip on a therapeutic relationship, can't sustain one, or so it seems.  One of the ways that children survive incest is to split off, disassociate from the assault at the very moment it is happening, become someone else, invent a second, third, a fourth identity.  Fall into a trance, a happy dream. The goal for a person with this disorder is different, demands an integration of the many identities, or exile.  This is Dissociative Identity Disorder and it is unarguably one of our most challenging disorders to treat. 

Mr. Zeller didn't have it, not from what we can tell from his writing.  Brilliant, it seems he stayed Bill, a guy who played tennis and got good grades and fought depression all of his life.  And lost. 

We don't know if he ever confronted the perpetrator.  If he had, and if the perpetrator apologized, if the animal owned his offense, then Mr. Zeller might have had a better chance at beating his darkness.

Chloe Madanes, the spouse of Jay Haley, a father of family therapy, offers a powerful family therapy technique:

(1) The victim holds court.  The perpetrator is literally forced down on his knees (or her knees).

(2) On his knees the perpetrator begs forgiveness, acknowledges wrong-doings, admits everything. This person is more than contrite, he is disgusted with himself, ashamed, moribund, dying inside for having committed an act that is so perverse, so cruel, taboo.

(3) If the apology is sincere, and if it is accepted, the perpetrator proposes amends.   (I don't remember if Madanes' protocol works this way, but mine does-- apology first, amends later).  After the apology, the perpetrator offers to pay for all of the therapy, past and future, or to pay for a college education, a down payment on a house. Something.

Never happened for Bill Zeller, is the guess, raped by someone repeatedly, systematically, he alludes to it being a family member.  Bill was a little boy, the note suggests the rapes first memories.  Had he told a teacher, had he known to tell someone, he may have been spared.

So we clearly have to teach about child abuse in schools, for that is where the children are.

Child abuse education won't be taught at home, not in the homes that are breeding grounds for this barbarity.  For child abuse is often transgenerational, passed down from one generation to another.  It is learned behavior.  Not always, but percentage-wise, learned. Family therapists see all kinds of gradations, variations on a theme, from one generation to the next, each saying, Mine was worse.

The suicide note, in its entirety,  should be read by everyone old enough to understand cause and effect.  Mr. Zeller requested that it be circulated. He knew that he had something to say, something very, very important, more important than whatever he could create as a programmer, an identity he established to distract from his darkness.

Read it and know that people learn to perpetrate sexual violence from people close to them, that sexual violence is usually a family affair, that 48% of all acquaintance rape is right there, it is in the family, and 90% of all rape is acquaintance rape.

Makes a case, to plug the profession, family therapy. At some point, family therapy.

therapydoc

Those Appetites

"I hate it when you're depressed," says FD.

"Me, too. But I hate it more when you're depressed."

He smiles. See, everyone gets this way.

Some of us still assess depression times three. "X 3 or times three" means no appetite for food, sex, or sleep. If a person can't eat, has no interest in sex, and can't sleep, we can safely say, Depressed X 3, unless there's another organic reason for those symptoms, maybe a medication that's responsible.

I know, I know, you're going to say that it's also common to do the opposite, have an increase in an appetite for food and/or sleep. And you're right.

Anyway. I had an exhausting day, including a meeting with a new advisory council in the community. It's an advisory council for an agency that educates educators and administrators in the community about a topic that tends to be depressing in general, childhood sexual abuse.

I'm new here (thanks so much, RZ) although not altogether new. When the community zeroed in on a childhood sexual predator several years ago, I helped break down the collective community denial. But I had to quit. When the going got tough, the tired got out.

But RZ got me back in as of a few weeks ago, and I went to my first meeting of dynamic, incredible people who are teaching safety to school and camp administrators, a first step. Teaching the kids, obviously, is the second.

I learned something new, too, about a website for mandated reporters in Chicagoland. It's online training for mandated reporters Virtually everyone working with kids is required to know this stuff in Illinois.

The meeting in the afternoon sort of drains me, as it might drain anyone, but I zip back to work afterwards (I have the car, these things do come in handy now and then) and see a bunch of people.

Home late, feel fine until the phone rings. The call is about an old issue I still haven't resolved, preferring conflict avoidance (who doesn't!). But now someone wants it resolved. It has to be resolved, and it has to be resolved soon. By me. The story, the players, the whole thing is full of spleen and basically knocks me out of the ring for the night. And unfortunately, I can't tell it.

I hang up feeling the worst I've felt in months psychologically, go to bed by nine, something out of the ordinary, with a Robert B. Parker book, Hundred Dollar Baby.

If you know Robert B. Parker, he writes page after page with dialog on the order of this:

"How can you eat tongue," Corsetti said.
"You know how intrepid I am."
"Oh, yeah, I forgot that for a minute."
"You make first yet?" I said.
"Detective First Grade?" Corsetti said. "You got a better chance of making it than I have."
"And I'm not even a cop anymore," I said.
"Exactly," Corsetti said.
The coffee came. Corsetti put about six spoonfuls of sugar in his and stirred noisily.
"Is it because you annoy a lot of people?" I said.

How hard is it to concentrate on this? (One Hundred Dollar Baby is about prostitution, by the way, or is it better to say Escort Services or even Sex Workers).

FD comes home late and I tell him about the new old issue and he tries to help me work it out, but he can't. Not really. None of his thoughts on the problem work for me, and my thoughts don't work, either. But it's comforting knowing he's got my back.

Sometimes when you're problem solving you have to accept that there may not be a good imminent solution. Sometimes the answer has to be to accept the problem for what it is, something annoying and stuck.

Except that I never really accept things as unresolvable. I'm in the profession of resolving.

Death I get. That I can accept. Illness, too, but not always. Other stuff? There has to be a way.

But, no matter how many heads you put together, just because you want to solve something doesn't mean it's going to happen. Like the problem of sexual abuse in a community. There we are, twenty-some smart people, no where near solving the problem. But we're closer to something of an answer now than we were ten years ago.

So I sleep on it, wait awhile, brainstorm again, mostly in my own head. Until something's right you're in no man's land, just feeling badly. But you rock on anyway.

Morning comes and FD's pushing breakfast on me and I'm gently saying No since it's only been a few hours since that feeling of probably never eating again. That's when he says, "I hate when you're depressed."

Technically the crisis is only 10 hours old. And it's not like I'm grousing or complaining or anything, either.

He lets it go, warms up a muffin, splits it, takes half, leaves the other for me. I snub it, go upstairs, do a little paper work, take a nap. I didn't sleep well the night before.

Before I blink it's 11:00 and I've got to go to work. I'm staring in the mirror wondering how to improve what I see when I hit upon a solution to the crisis. A quick and dirty, perfect solution, if only temporary. I feel a little better, jump into my biking clothes and pack up to leave.

But first I stop in the kitchen, wrap up the muffin. FD sees me. He's scavenging in the cupboard.

"I'm thinking PBJ, on rye. Not toasted. Marmalade." I say, "To Go."

"A fine choice," he agrees.

therapydoc

P.S. Now if we could only think up something for those guys on Wall Street, right?