Chapter 28 — Finding Julian Lim

Dissociative Amnesia, the permission to leave gaps unresolved, external memory and learning to proceed one step at a time.

Finding Julian

By the time I began working with Dr Julian Lim, I had already spent years trying to understand myself through other people's descriptions.

There had been diagnoses.

There had been counselling.

There had been psychiatric assessments.

There had been records written by people who saw part of my life and then turned that part into a professional description.

Some of those people helped me.

Some did not.

Some documents contained things I recognised immediately.

Others seemed to describe somebody I could not recognise at all.

By then I had also learned something about myself which made ordinary therapy difficult.

My memory was not continuous.

I could remember something clearly at one time and then find it almost inaccessible at another.

An event might exist as a vivid image without a reliable date.

A name might be available while the experience attached to it remained inaccessible.

A memory might return because of a sound, a movement, a place or something somebody said.

Then, just as unexpectedly, access to it could close again.

I did not yet have a useful framework for that.

Julian eventually gave me one.

The Gaps Were Allowed to Be Gaps

For a long time I believed that if something was missing, I had failed to hold it in place.

A name.

A date.

A reason somebody had acted as they did.

A part of my own history.

I had learned to treat absence as evidence against myself.

If I could not remember, then perhaps I had forgotten.

If I had forgotten, perhaps I had not paid enough attention.

If the sequence did not fit together, perhaps the problem was mine.

That is a particularly dangerous way to approach a traumatic history because it creates pressure to close the gaps.

Human beings dislike unfinished stories.

We want beginnings.

We want causes.

We want to know who did what and what happened next.

When the story is our own, the temptation to provide the missing link can be even stronger.

Julian did not require me to do that.

A gap could remain a gap.

If I did not know, I could say:

“I don't know.”

If something was uncertain, it could remain uncertain.

If I remembered an event but could not confidently place its date, the event did not have to disappear simply because the date was missing.

If two parts of the story appeared not to fit together, I did not have to invent something between them.

That sounds simple.

For me it was revolutionary.

It meant that uncertainty was not automatically a defect in my evidence.

Sometimes uncertainty was the most accurate thing I could report.

The gaps were allowed to be gaps.

One Thing a Day

Julian would often bring me back to something very simple:

“One step at a time.”

Those words connected with something another person had said to me earlier.

A policeman standing on my front doorstep had encouraged me to do one thing every day which moved me towards what I needed to understand, say or do.

I am not certain whether he was the first person to express the idea to me in that way.

But I remember him asking me to do one thing.

One thing every day.

It did not have to be dramatic.

It did not have to produce a result.

There were days when the one thing might simply be lying in bed and putting some thought into my life.

Trying to understand one memory.

Trying to understand one reaction.

Writing one thing down.

Finding one document.

Making one telephone call.

Asking one question.

Or simply allowing myself to think about something I had previously been unable to approach.

One thing.

Julian's “one step at a time” strengthened that idea.

Between them, the two approaches became something practical which I could use when life became too complicated to process all at once.

Naming Dissociative Amnesia

Julian eventually diagnosed Dissociative Amnesia.

The words were important, but not because a diagnosis suddenly explained everything.

It did not.

What it did was give me a way to understand something which had been present throughout my life without requiring me to treat every failure of recall as personal incompetence.

There could be memory which was not destroyed but inaccessible.

There could be islands of recollection separated by periods I could not reconstruct.

There could be information I had once spoken about which later became difficult to reach.

There could be sensory or physical fragments without an ordinary narrative wrapped around them.

There could be experiences which returned when something in the present connected unexpectedly with something from the past.

That understanding helped me make sense of things which had previously seemed impossible.

It also allowed me to stop demanding that memory behave like a video recording.

The Memory Did Not Have to Perform

One of the most useful differences in working with Julian was that I did not feel required to produce memory on demand.

If I could not remember something that week, the therapy did not become an interrogation.

He did not need me to prove that an event had occurred by supplying every detail.

Nor did he encourage me to convert uncertainty into certainty.

Sometimes something would emerge.

Sometimes it would not.

Sometimes a memory would be available for a period and then become much more difficult to access again.

That became part of the work rather than evidence that the work had failed.

There was also room to distinguish between different kinds of knowing.

Something I directly remembered.

Something somebody else had told me.

Something written in a document.

Something I had concluded later.

Something which merely seemed possible.

Those were not all the same thing.

Learning to keep them separate eventually became one of the foundations of this book.

Not Everything Needed an Immediate Meaning

There were times when something would return and I wanted immediately to understand what it meant.

That could become another trap.

A fragment of memory can be important without yet supplying its own explanation.

An action can survive without the reason for the action being immediately available.

The movement towards a door.

The effort to prevent a latch from clicking.

A particular smell.

A physical sensation.

A place which produces a reaction before I know why.

The temptation is to solve it.

Julian helped me become more comfortable with observing first.

Understanding could come later.

Or it might not come at all.

When There Is No Sensible Answer

That approach has remained useful because some experiences do not arrive in a form which can be rationally unpacked in the moment.

Sometimes the event itself is so unexpected that I have no immediate language for it.

One example occurred while I was in hospital.

I was virtually confined to my bed and dependent upon the people around me for care.

Without anything from me prompting the subject, a nurse challenged me about my lack of religious belief.

As I remember it, the position she placed before me was that I should explain why “they” should allow atheists such as me to be treated in what she described as their Christian country.

Even now I find it difficult to reproduce the wording.

Part of that difficulty is that the idea itself was so foreign to the circumstances.

I was a patient.

I was physically unwell.

I was substantially confined to the bed.

I was dependent upon the hospital and its staff.

And suddenly I was placed in the position of apparently having to justify why somebody who did not share a nurse's religious belief should be entitled to receive treatment.

I had no useful words with which to respond.

Perhaps having no words prevented the situation from escalating.

But my silence also gave her time.

From my position in that bed, what I experienced was fear and anger directed towards my disbelief.

Her words also seemed to make another claim:

that Australia was somehow a Christian country in which my lack of belief placed me outside the normal entitlement to care.

That was not the Australia I understood.

I understood Australia as a secular country in which public health care was not conditional upon accepting somebody else's religion.

But knowing that intellectually did very little to help me while I was lying in the bed.

Brick Walls

The experience was like encountering a succession of brick walls.

There was no obvious clinical problem to solve.

I had not asked for a religious discussion.

I had not challenged the nurse's beliefs.

There was no evidence I could present which seemed capable of altering what she was saying in that moment.

There was no shared proposition from which a rational discussion could begin.

I was confronting somebody else's conviction about what my absence of religious belief meant.

That was particularly difficult for me because religion had not been an abstract philosophical issue in my childhood.

Religious authority had been part of the environment in which I had been sexually abused, punished, threatened and described as wicked.

Decades later, while physically dependent upon a public hospital, I was again being required to deal with another person's religious judgement.

It is difficult to describe how little room that can leave inside the mind.

There was the immediate physical vulnerability.

There was the childhood history.

There was the authority of the nurse.

There was the uncertainty about what might happen next.

And there was the astonishing question of whether my atheism somehow made my presence in the hospital less legitimate.

Trying to solve all of that at once would have been impossible.

One Step

That is where the older advice becomes useful.

I do not have to resolve the whole experience in one sitting.

I can identify what I remember.

I can distinguish the words I heard from the meaning I later placed upon them.

I can write the event down.

I can preserve what remains uncertain.

I can look for whatever documentary evidence exists.

I can ask whether somebody else was present.

I can decide whether the matter needs a complaint, a letter, a chapter or simply a record.

And then I can stop.

That can be the one thing for that day.

Tomorrow there can be another.

“One step at a time” never meant that the difficult things disappeared.

It meant that I no longer had to carry the obligation to solve all of them at once.

External Memory

As my understanding of Dissociative Amnesia developed, another practical question followed.

If memory could become inaccessible, what could I do outside memory to help maintain continuity?

The answer increasingly involved technology.

Notes.

Emails.

Documents.

Photographs.

Audio recordings.

Video where appropriate.

Reminders.

Searchable files.

Later, artificial intelligence became another tool which could help me locate, organise and compare material which I might otherwise struggle to hold together at the same time.

Julian understood the value of those external supports.

That mattered because using them was sometimes interpreted elsewhere as evidence that I was excessively preoccupied with records.

For me, the records served another purpose.

They created continuity when memory could not reliably provide it.

Why Recording Matters

Audio recording became particularly important.

A conversation can disappear surprisingly quickly when memory does not retain it in an ordinary way.

I may remember that a meeting occurred.

I may remember one striking sentence.

I may remember how I felt.

But important detail can become inaccessible.

That is dangerous when the discussion concerns medication, consent, medical treatment, legal decisions, finances, placement or a complaint.

A recording does not have to replace memory.

It can support it.

It can allow me to listen again when I am no longer under the pressure of the original conversation.

It can allow me to check whether the words I remember were actually used.

It can stop uncertainty becoming another argument with myself.

That is one reason I increasingly came to regard recording as an accessibility and safeguarding tool rather than simply a method of collecting evidence.

The Record Outside My Head

Over time I accumulated an extraordinary quantity of material.

Medical records.

Emails.

Legal correspondence.

Earlier website pages.

Counselling reports.

Recorded conversations.

Personal notes.

Documents written years apart which sometimes described the same event differently.

At first the quantity of information itself became another problem.

A record is not useful merely because it exists.

It has to be findable.

It has to be connected with other relevant material.

It has to be possible to tell when it was created and whose account it contains.

That eventually contributed to the Evidence Map and to the broader way I now work with my own history.

The memory inside my head and the record outside it could support one another without either being treated as infallible.

A Different Kind of Therapy

The relationship with Julian was also different in a less technical way.

I did not feel that he was attempting to win an argument with me.

He could disagree.

He could question.

He could ask me to consider another explanation.

But there was room for me to reach my own understanding.

That distinction became important after experiences in which authority had so often meant somebody else deciding what my experience was supposed to mean.

Julian guided.

He did not take ownership of my history.

That may be one reason the work lasted.

Not Making Me Choose Between Memory and Evidence

Another useful difference was that documents did not have to defeat memory and memory did not have to defeat documents.

They could disagree.

If a record said one thing and I remembered another, the difference could be examined.

Perhaps the record was wrong.

Perhaps my recollection was wrong.

Perhaps both were incomplete.

Perhaps they were describing different parts of the same event.

Perhaps the contradiction itself told us something about how the event had been recorded.

That approach eventually became fundamental to A Life Between the Layers.

I did not need one perfect source.

I could place the sources beside each other.

More Than Ten Years

By the time Julian later provided a formal psychological opinion about my mental health, he had worked with me for more than ten years.

That gave his observations a quality which a one-off assessment could not have.

He had seen me when memories were accessible and when they were not.

He had seen me distressed.

He had seen me calm.

He had seen me dealing with physical illness, family issues, legal questions and institutional conflict.

He had also seen the consistency of the things which were not present.

He did not observe the hallucinations, delusions, formal thought disorder or other psychotic features which would support the old schizophrenia label.

His eventual opinion did not arrive because of one conversation in which I persuaded him of something.

It arose from years of observation.

Recognition

There are moments when somebody says something about your experience and you recognise yourself in it.

Not because every word is flattering.

Not because it creates a tidy story.

Sometimes the recognition comes precisely because the flaws are still there.

The uncertainty is still there.

The missing pieces remain missing.

The person being described is recognisably human rather than reconstructed into somebody more convenient.

That is what the work with Julian eventually gave me.

Recognition.

Assurance.

Not assurance that every memory must be correct.

Not assurance that every conclusion I reached must be accepted.

Something more useful:

the assurance that I could examine my own life without having to destroy the uncertainty in order to make it legitimate.

The Imperfect Story

I am not trying to produce a flawless autobiography.

That would probably be the least truthful thing I could do.

My memory has gaps.

I have made mistakes.

I have misunderstood things.

I have changed my mind.

I have remembered names incorrectly and later corrected them.

I have carried dates which documents later showed could not be quite right.

There are experiences which I can describe vividly and others which remain almost inaccessible.

Julian did not require those flaws to disappear before the story could be taken seriously.

That changed the way I approached myself.

Grounded

The combination of the policeman's instruction and Julian's approach has continued to help keep me grounded.

When something strange or disturbing happens, I can feel the pressure to solve it immediately.

Why did that person say that?

What does it mean?

What should I do?

Who should I tell?

What if I have misunderstood?

What if I forget?

Those questions can multiply very quickly.

The answer is not to forbid the questions.

It is to reduce the task.

What is the one thing I can do now?

Write it down.

Save the document.

Ask the question.

Make the call.

Rest.

Think.

Leave the rest until tomorrow.

One Step at a Time

There is no dramatic ending to this chapter because the process did not end.

I am still using it.

There are still records I have not read.

There are still emails which may change chronology.

There are memories which may return.

There are gaps which may remain gaps for the rest of my life.

There are institutional experiences I still struggle to understand.

There are things which can still leave me lying awake trying to work out how they could possibly have happened.

I no longer have to solve all of them tonight.

That may be one of the most useful things I learned.

One thing.

One step.

Then another.