LIFE BEFORE DR. GUTERSON:

My story

I was a determined six-year-old, dangling precariously over the edge of a garbage dumpster behind my elementary school. I drooled, staring at the feast that lay just beyond my grasp. There was pudding, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, peas, hamburgers, and brownies all laid out in front of me. All I needed was another foot of reach and the delicacies would be all mine. I had stopped feeling the hunger pangs in my stomach, but I couldn't get my brain to stop thinking about food. As I squirmed upside-down for a better reach, I heard a shout.

'Tova! What are you doing? Get out of there, you dirty girl!'

But I didn't want to get out of there.

I wanted pudding, but Mrs. Cooper was a frightening first-grade teacher. I tried to right myself as I pulled out of the dumpster, but instead I fell to the ground, my threadbare green plaid dress raised and exposing the previous night's shame. Mrs. Cooper glared at me and ordered me to stand up and turn around. Terrified, I tried to pull down my dress but the fabric got stuck in my underwear.

'Turn around, Tova, NOW!' the desiccated old woman bellowed.

I had no choice. I turned around, bare legs and buttocks exposed. Mrs. Cooper abruptly stopped screaming at me. As I quaked before her, she asked, 'How did you get hurt like that?'

I was truly baffled and said, 'I'm not hurt.'

Mrs. Cooper was incredulous. 'You are lying. Your legs and your bum are covered in welts and bruises. So, how did you get hurt?'

Rooting around for my courage, I turned and screamed, 'I'm not hurt! I don't get hurt, ever!'

The recess bell rang. I gave my dress one last yank, pulled up my stained knee socks, and ran to stand in line with the other children. Mrs. Cooper stared in disbelief as I whizzed past her, desperate to avoid her scrutiny.

* * *

As a child, I subsisted on a diet of trauma and terror, washing the bitter mixture down with my daily tears. My very existence depended on the decisions my stable of caregivers made for me, but that sacred trust was routinely violated. In the battle against their own psychological demons, they left me without protection, nurturance, and safety. The chaos of a childhood dominated by other people's untreated mental illnesses left me defenseless.

In the kaleidoscope world where reality was contorted by the psychoses of others – and where there was no safe space to find refuge – I clung to my only two childhood assets: my intellect and my innate certainty that G-d protected little girls. I used my intellect to create, in the safety of my own mind, a protected inner world to dwell in. That world was made up of the families I watched, with rapt attention, on the television programs that dominated the 1960s and 1970s. I relied on G-d for comfort when the brutality of the adult world intruded on my sanctuary. Early in my life, the Sabbath candle was my bridge to G-d.

I remember very vividly my first Shabbos, and the lifelong impact it would have on me. Stella, frail and world weary, stood before her silver candlesticks that Friday evening, waiting for 6.18pm. That time was just before the sun tucked below the horizon, and it signaled the beginning of Shabbos.

She struck a match at the sacred moment and, with an aura of reverence, lit all seven of her candles, one for every one of her children, living and deceased. The room flooded with light. The sweeping, circular motion of her gnarled hands mesmerized me as I leaned my bruised body into her fragile one. I listened in rapt attention as she sang a blessing in a language I did not understand but felt connected to somehow. The old woman took my tiny hand and whispered tenderly, 'Come sit with me, Tova.'

Battered but obedient, I cuddled up next to her. I stared at the flames rising up from the candles. Even at such a young age, I believed they were reaching for somewhere, some place mystical and sublime. The warmth emanating from the glow of the burning wicks was a holy warmth that melted away my suffering, at least in that moment, and beckoned me to snuggle, all the more, into Stella's frame. The woman turned to me, kissed my forehead, and softly said, 'Tova, G-d protects little girls.'

As I soaked in the holiness of the light, there was absolutely no doubt in my spiritually awakening mind that G-d did – and would indeed – protect me. I was a terrorized child with no human to turn to, but I found, in the light of Shabbos, a protector greater than any human guardian.

And I was right. G-d did come through for me. He gave me academic gifts and my inner safe space.

* * *

Years ago, I found this teacher's note while I was rummaging through a storage shed looking for a book to pack for college. It read:

To Whom It May Concern,

Tova is an extremely bright child. However, she has become quite a disruption in class. She stares out the window for long periods of time, totally unaware of where she is or what she is supposed to be learning. She has become the target of other students' nonstop teasing and yet shows no reaction to it. She is in danger of failing all her subjects if this behavior isn't addressed.

Mrs. Woolsey, Canton Elementary School, 3rd grade

Mrs. Woolsey's note perfectly summed up my childhood. She addressed it, "To Whom It May Concern" because she had no idea who would take on the responsibility for dealing with my "disruptive behavior". Then she assumed there would be someone who cared about me enough to talk to me about her concerns, when, in fact, there was no one. What my 3rd grade teacher was observing from the outside was the fact that I was encapsulated in my bubble on the inside. She was right.

I was totally oblivious to the world around me. It was deliberate. No amount of adult criticism would have had any effect on me. I was inside my safe zone and I wasn't going to engage the world unless I absolutely had to. She was also right that I was constantly on the receiving end of some pretty vicious bullying. However, she was wrong when she wrote that I had no reaction to it. I cared deeply. But my response was to burrow deeper inside my make-believe world, so that there would be no pain.

I did find a way to balance my love for academia with my need for safety as I got a bit older. I had such a thirst for learning that I was willing to emerge from my bubble long enough to soak in as much information as I could. I read constantly and studied intensely. In 8th grade I won an all-expenses-paid scholarship to a summer college program for advanced middle school students. I lived on a college campus for an entire summer, with no caretakers, no trauma, and no terror. I made friends (okay, two friends) and studied college classes like human physiology and psychology. It was at this program that I decided I wanted to go to medical school and become a psychiatrist. I wanted to cure psychosis. I decided someone had to take on the disease that had ravaged my childhood. Suddenly, at 13 years old, I found myself with a goal and a plan for the future.

What I also discovered during that summer was that I didn't need my inner world so much when I wasn't mired in chaos. I wasn't self-aware enough to understand that my bubble was my cloak of protection. I could wear it if I needed it and hang it up when in safety. Nothing threatened me that summer in 1974 and I matured, without my cloak, in huge strides and in just a few months.

* * *

With faith in G-d and the intellect He blessed me with, I endured and survived a dark childhood. But I had no way of knowing, as I made my exodus from the Egypt that was my childhood into the desert of my adulthood, what a battle I would have to fight to reach the promised land of true emancipation.

I entered my young adulthood a tumbleweed, blowing from university to university, graduate school to graduate school, even flirting with a medical school admission, without ever finishing anything more than my bachelor's degree and a graduate school degree I never planned to finish.

My undergrad experience was tumultuous. I attended two colleges, one of which I was driven out of by campus gossip. I was assaulted in my dorm room by a young man with religious delusions. Just when I thought I would never again be the victim of someone else's psychosis, there I was – at 3am one morning in 1979 – face-to-face with an assailant who called me Jezebel and compared me to a Moabite woman.

My assault became fodder for campus rumormongering, and so I fled the blather factory for a religious school half-way across the country. The dorms had bed checks, curfews, and a ban on men. I felt sheltered, and from within that cocoon I finished my bachelor's degree in chemistry. I applied to medical school and received an invitation for an interview.

However, simultaneously, I was drowning in my first deep and profound bipolar depression. I was carried through my senior year by one of my chemistry professors and my rabbi. My medical school interview was a disaster. In the middle of being questioned, I burst into involuntary sobs and found myself rocking, with my head buried in my hands. I walked out, never completing the interview. I was humiliated. My descent into bipolar disorder destroyed my 8th grade dream of becoming a physician. I was now directionless.

I belonged nowhere, to no one, least of all to myself. I was 23 years old – with no human ties I would admit to – and facing a future I couldn't find a place in.

I tumbled into Chicago one year and took a job as a research assistant, taking grad classes at the same time. The job and classes held my attention long enough that I stayed in one spot for over a year. One day, as I puzzled out my future in the graduate student lounge, a poster caught my eye. It said, "Join the Peace Corps, Make a Difference in People's Lives, Change Your Own."

All the neurons in my brain fired simultaneously. This was my answer. This was a giant neon postcard and on it was my destiny. Eight months later, I was on a plane to East Africa with 70 other volunteers for a two-year commitment, with no clue as to what I had undertaken. All I knew was that 10,000 miles would separate me from Boston, my childhood residence. For the first time in 24 years, I could breathe.

But I was grossly ill-prepared; not for my work or the culture, but for the changes that would take place inside my own psyche. I joined the Peace Corps to flee my tangled past, but all I managed to do was bunch those threads into one big jumbled knot.

It started innocently enough. We were a group of Peace Corps volunteers, swapping stories about home while in training – for four months – to live and work in a complex and ancient culture. As I sat in one of the mud-walled training huts one day, listening to the group reminisce about childhood escapades, a panic swelled in my gut. What was I going to say?

Should I sit silent? Should I leave?

I was in mid-alarm. I had no time to flee; I was next in the circle. So, from somewhere deep inside my inner childhood world came a story about a family vacation that was idyllic, adventurous, and pulled straight from a Brady Bunch episode. I regaled everyone with a tale of a trip to the Grand Canyon when I was eight. I talked about taking a burro down to the base of the canyon and how my dad rode protectively by my side for the entire descent. I described the panoramic view, the exquisite rock formations, and the sound of the Colorado River splashing with almost the echo of a giggle.

My ruse worked. My "memory" was met with head nods and "wows". From that moment on, I reinvented where I came from and how I grew up, based on the adventures from my beloved childhood television programs. I couldn't verbalize the truth about my life, so fantasy became reality as a substitute. I had found a new way to escape.

Peace Corps had – and still has – a persnickety attitude toward volunteers staying in-country indefinitely, so I stayed as long as I could, which was for three years. My future husband, Joe, left a year earlier. Joe had been my nearest Peace Corps neighbor and we'd begun a romance in our very remote corner of the Rift Valley.

It was now my turn to leave the volatile but protective cocoon of Africa. I had to go back to the U.S., and that meant going back to Boston. I couldn't travel there and bring my television family memories with me. I needed those "memories" to be unchallenged so that I could draw on them again if I ever needed them. I grieved at the cruelty of having to say goodbye to all those comforting "reminiscences".

I did stop in one country on my way back to the States, though: Israel. I hung out in Jerusalem for six weeks. I was desperate to reconnect with the G-d who had shepherded me through the abyss of my childhood. In Peace Corps, by living a lie, I had traded my principles for the illusion of safety. That reality shamed me. I needed redemption so I could reclaim my soul. I had lost it somewhere between tales of the Grand Canyon and a mother–daughter banquet.

There, at the Western Wall – just like with those Shabbos candles so long ago – G-d and I talked. I spent the next several evenings sobbing in my cot at the youth hostel. In the depth of my depression and shame, I was forced to cough up my ugly childhood memories like phlegm. Their return was a torment I didn't remember how to bear.

As my EL AL flight touched down in the U.S. in December of 1986, I instantly felt sick. Did I really have to go to Boston? But where else was I going to go?

I flew in and then flew back out days later, but this time I dragged more baggage with me than just my beat-up old duffle bag. Ultimately, I blew into Joe's backyard in the Midwest in January of 1987. I started yet another graduate school program, and Joe and I married in the fall of 1988.

I was no more capable of navigating the stresses of marriage than I was the stresses of life in Peace Corps. The three years I spent appropriating the plots of television programs to escape truth should have been a wake-up call to me that I was struggling with traumas too big for me to conquer alone. It took motherhood to roust me out of my delusion that I was just fine.

In October of 1990, I turned 30 years old. If you looked at me from afar, you would have seen a young woman who had absolutely everything she could possibly want. I was married to my best friend from my Peace Corps years, we were blessed with a precious newborn baby daughter, and we were buying our first home. Joe's career as a healthcare professional was taking off. My career as an analytical environmental chemist was on the fast track. We appeared to be the quintessential young professional couple.

However, if you looked just a little closer, you would have witnessed a woman coming apart at the seams. My marriage was not a holy union. We were each consumed by our own personal infernos. I was sinking into severe mental illness and he was ravaged by a prescription drug addiction that he confessed to me only after suddenly losing his job.

As Peace Corps buddies and traveling companions, we were completely in sync. As a married couple, we were the source of each other's destruction. Our daughter was the one blessing to emerge from a partnership that should never have formed. Katie was a miracle baby, born to a mother who had been permanently physically injured from years of early sexual abuse and a father consumed by his addiction.

After my daughter's birth, I fell into a cavernous depression that I could not find my way out of. I was in a psychic freefall. I remember looking into Katie's big, brown Bambi eyes and telling her that I was so sorry she got stuck with me as a mommy. Every time I held her, I found myself tearfully apologizing for not being good enough for her. As I rocked her in her baby carrier to soothe her colicky wails, I would repeat, 'I'm sorry, sweetie' over and over again. As she cried in pain, I cried in despair.

My husband, the healthcare professional, was battling his own demons and neither noticed nor cared about the suffering in his midst. In desperation, I turned to my daughter's pediatrician. He said it sounded like postpartum depression and he referred me to a psychotherapist.

At first, I resisted his recommendation. I knew what delving into my past and my psyche would lay bare. But I was losing everything. My marriage was in shambles and there was a tiny, helpless person who looked up at me with total need. If I didn't come through for Katie, she would become me in 30 years. Therapy wasn't about me. It was about saving my daughter. The choice to undergo treatment was a supreme act of motherly love. It certainly wasn't an act of self-love.

* * *

My relationship with Sue, the psychotherapist, was not your typical client–therapist relationship. It started out fairly traditional, but then morphed into a tangled, intense, dual relationship. Sue and I had two incompatible ties.

There was our relationship in her basement office, where for the first time I made efforts to tentatively unburden myself. I had been mute about my torture for three decades, but in the safety of her office I reached out, desperate for solace. Miraculously, she reached back. Sometimes during therapy I would lie, curled up on her couch with my head in her lap, sobbing in anguish over a childhood memory or a current life trauma. Sue would stroke my hair, tell me she loved me, and promise me she could make it better. I clung to her every word.