Sometimes I’ll put myself in a position of, “Oh, if that person left this party without saying bye to me, would it bother me?” No, not at all, so why would I think they would care if I did the same thing?
So in a relationship, all this energy will be devoted to spending time worrying about making sure others are happy that aren’t as important as the girlfriend should be to me.
I’ll go out of my way to do favors for people that I don’t know very well. Somebody will say, “Oh, will you send a poster to my brother?” I spent a half hour, maybe an hour dealing with getting the tube for the poster, this and that. I have this script I’ve had to write forever, then I’m behind on that. Eventually, that’s going to come out of time that I would spend with my family at Christmas.
MARIA BAMFORD
I had Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome where I had dark thoughts of things like unwanted sexual violence. It sort of started when I was about nine or ten years old. That’s a real syndrome. It is a real type of OCD. A lot of people have it.
You have one weird thought. This is a common one: people with a postpartum depression thing sometimes think of hitting or killing the baby. Then they go, “Oh my God. I can’t believe that. Oh, Jesus! That’s a crazy thought.” And then they move on to something else. Somebody who’s more sensitive or more agitated would go, “Oh my God. I can never think of that again. Maybe that means something. Am I going to kill my baby?” Then they can’t stop thinking about it, and the obsession is, “I’m going to kill my baby.” The compulsion is whatever you’re doing to make yourself not think about of it, or, like, starting to avoid your baby.
I would think of whatever the taboo thing for me was, which could be killing my family, killing my friends, sexually assaulting people, kids, animals, that type of thing, and then I would start avoiding and avoiding and avoiding. I would be just by myself, which is the safest place to be so I don’t hurt anybody. I realized I was not having close friendships.
WILL FORTE
People would tell me before, “Oh, you’re kind of OCD.” I’d say, “No, whatever.” The moment that I actually said, “Yeah, I am,” was such a relief. Part of the burden was lifted.
I went to therapy once. I hadn’t gone in years. I went through this breakup several years ago, and I finally went to therapy for the first time. It wasn’t even the talking to somebody about stuff. It was the act of giving up part of myself to say, “Oh, yeah. I need somebody else to help me with this. I can’t do everything myself,” that was a freeing thing.
MARIA BAMFORD
I love twelve-step groups because there was a rigid structure where you talk to people, there’s certain ways you share, there’s certain ways you talk, it was just like Dale Carnegie. Then you have fellowship and it ends. It’s not like an unending sort of “Oh, we’re just going to hang out” thing.
SIR PATRICK STEWART—ACTOR
I had an idyllic first four and a half, five years of my life. Born in 1940, I was probably conceived on my father’s last night in England, or last night as a civilian.
For the first four years, I lived with my mother and my brother and we had a happy, idyllic life. This big man suddenly showed up when I was going on five and changed everything for us. I have talked publicly for a number of years now about the violence in my home. My father proved to be a weekend alcoholic. The weekends were dangerous times. Not always. Sometimes he would come back from the pub or the club or wherever he had been in a good mood and that was lovely. We could all have a good night’s sleep. Sometimes he would be ill-tempered and it could lead to blows and police. He never struck me or my brother. Just my mother.
When I became active in the world of domestic violence issues, I became aware that in fact my father had been severely “shell-shocked” in 1940, during the retreat from France, and returned home clearly a victim of PTSD, which was never treated. In fact there was no treatment for it. “Be a man. Pull yourself together and be a man.” That’s all the help he would’ve been given. When I talked to an expert on PTSD and I told him about my father’s behavior, he said, “All these are classic symptoms of PTSD.” I resolved then to do for the memory of my father what I’ve been doing for the memory of my mother, and I joined another organization called Combat Stress, which specializes in providing care for veterans who suffer from PTSD.
Marc
I can’t imagine the unburdening to let go of some of that anger.
Patrick
Yes, and that was most important because anger is a bad thing to hold on to but yet it also left me feeling that I should find some way of making it up to him. I told these public stories about what he did and how he behaved for many years. I can now put it in context. My father was sick. He was ill and didn’t know what he was doing. Had no control over what he was doing. That doesn’t mean to say that I condone the violence. Violence is never the solution to anything. This is why a fairly recent movement in this area is saying domestic violence is not a woman’s issue, it’s a man’s issue.
Marc
Also, it’s weird with domestic violence because there’s this weird stigma around it that other people aren’t supposed to get involved.
Patrick
Exactly. It’s humiliating and embarrassing for everyone. That was one of the things I struggled with as a child, was the sense of shame I carried with me because when fights arose in my house and there would be yelling and so forth, things being thrown. We lived in a community where people were cheek by jowl. Everyone would hear that. In fact, we had a wonderful neighbor. Her name was Lizzy Dixon. Lizzy worked in a weaving shed all her life. She was a big, powerful woman. I do quite clearly remember one night, her throwing our front door open. We never locked our doors.
My father was in one of his rages and she stood in front of him, raising her fist in his face and saying, “Come on now, Alf Stewart. You try it on me. Let’s see how far you get with that. Come on! Have a go at me.” She would’ve flattened him. There’s no doubt about that. Great, great woman. I wish I could meet her again to say thank you to her, because she often stepped in and stopped things from getting worse.
BARRY CRIMMINS—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTIVIST
I had PTSD because when I was very young, the babysitter’s father was coming over and raping me for a few months. It took me until I was about thirty-eight to really deal with that and face it and whatever. I was in shock most of my life. To protect myself. If people got too close to me, I wouldn’t give them anything.