The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times(43)

Jane told me about a young woman who wrote her a letter that enclosed a police notice asking for information that would help them locate a missing person.

“I’ll call her Anne,” said Jane. “The missing woman was Anne’s adored older sister, who had last been seen as a teenager getting into a car with a man in a gas station during a terrible storm. That was thirty-two years ago.”

Jane said Anne worshiped her older sister, who had been one of the few stabilizing influences during her troubled childhood.

“When I met Anne,” Jane continued, “she was not very coherent, but in the letter that she handed me, and I later read, she asked if I could sign a petition for getting her sister’s case reopened. Her writing was so tiny that I almost needed a magnifying glass. I wrote back to her, and she told me she’d given a similar letter to maybe forty people. ‘But you’re the only one who’s written back to me,’ she said.”

They began a correspondence and eventually Jane gave Anne her phone number.

“She would call me three or four times in a row, and she was always crying at the start of a conversation. Each time her voice was quite different. I’d read a good deal about the strange disorders of the mind, and I realized that she had developed multiple personalities, which is a recognized way of dealing with extreme trauma.”

Jane went on to explain the horrific trauma Anne had experienced. When she was two years old, her father returned from the Vietnam War and began physically abusing his wife, who became chronically depressed and had to be put into treatment. Anne and her sister then went to live with their father, who had remarried. For the next ten years or so, Anne was horrendously sexually abused by her father and physically abused by both him and his new wife. Her sister, for some reason, escaped this treatment. When, eventually, Anne’s mother was discharged, she made a home for Anne, who was twelve years old, and her sister. And then, just after Anne got a taste of normal family life, came the horrible disappearance of her sister when she was on her way home to celebrate Thanksgiving. No wonder Anne was in such a terrible state.

“It was quite incredible,” Jane told me. “She had twenty-two distinct identities—as she came to trust me, she actually wrote out the three family trees of the various personalities who ranged from small children to adults. And, as I said, when she called me—which was very often—Anne spoke in different voices. Sometimes she would hang up—then call back speaking in a quite different voice—perhaps the voice of a small child. I’d ask her, ‘So who are you this time, Anne?’ Finally, I encouraged her to write the details of the horrible abuse she had suffered.”

Then, concerned that she’d offered advice she wasn’t qualified to give, Jane wrote to Dr. Oliver Sacks, the eminent neurologist who specialized in disorders of the mind.

“I explained Anne’s strange case to him and that I’d told her she should write down some of her terrible experiences. ‘But I don’t know if I’ve done the right thing.’ And he said, ‘Absolutely. I tell all my patients to take a notebook with them and write down everything that they suddenly think of that’s bad. Face up to it.’ He also told me he’d never heard of anyone with so many different personalities.”

Anne did what Jane suggested. “And now I don’t need a magnifying glass to read her writing,” Jane said. “She no longer rings me all the time. She’s living with her mother and works at a school for young children from disadvantaged families. They love her. And she gets great comfort from her two cats. She got her sister’s case reopened and even braced herself to make public appearances on behalf of those who know the pain of a missing loved one.”

I felt moved and inspired by how this young woman had been healing the trauma of her past and how Jane had found time to help her even as she was traveling nonstop around the world.

“It wasn’t only wanting to help her,” Jane said, as though to dispel any impression that she was a Mother Teresa. “It was also being utterly fascinated by her story. I’ve always been captivated by the mind and its problems.”

“Sounds like it was the naturalist in you,” I said. “What did you learn from working with her?”

“Well, she was a wonderful example of how our indomitable spirit can fight the worst abuse and pain and create a whole person again.”

Jane had said that hope was a survival trait, and now I was starting to understand why. Somehow Jane was able to give Anne hope, and that set her on the path to recovery. When we face adversity, it is hope that gives us the confidence to rally our indomitable spirit to overcome it.

It seemed like we were returning to our earliest conversations about hope—how resilience is linked to the belief that we can make a difference in our lives and the lives of others, how hope really gives us the will to not only heal ourselves but to make the world a better place.

“You know,” Jane said suddenly, after a companionable silence, “I think one of the most important things in all of this is having a support network—which can, by the way, include animals. Remember Anne’s cats.”





We Need Each Other



“Yes, that’s clearly true,” I said. “My research on resilience has shown me the importance of social support in times of trouble—how important it is in helping people overcome depression and despair and finding hope again.”