This morning I’m listening for a second time to a podcast I’d downloaded weeks ago, and hadn’t gotten around to playing the first time around until just yesterday. This is the broadcast for the habitually brilliant This American Life’s episode #354, “Mistakes Were Made,” which originally aired on April 18th of this year. You can hear the episode in full by selecting the above link. (Your options are to play it for free through streaming audio at the website, download as an mp3 for $.95, or purchase the episode on CD for, gulp, $13.00.)
There’s a prologue, just under eight minutes, that’s interesting enough, but if you’re pressed for time and you want to get to the utterly amazing story at the heart of this broadcast (Act One: You’re as Cold as Ice1), you should feel free to skip ahead; you’ll want to be at about the seven minute, 50 second point. (It’s hard to do this in an exact way with streaming audio, so if you’re doing that, just sit tight.)
This is the story of a man named Bob Nelson, a perhaps unlikely historic figure in the science-fictionesque would-be “field” of cryonics. His story makes for quite the parable on “unintended consequences” and “getting in over one’s head,” and one to which, curiously, I can relate, based on my own past failings (for example, my brief, hilarious-and-yet-truly-awful tenure as the acting President2 of Richmond, Virginia’s chapter of NOW), and the failings I’ve witnessed in others, both strangers and loved ones (although, to be fair, the failings I reference here were, generally speaking, on a far less spectacular and shocking scale than are evident in Nelson’s tale).
But more than exploring the “unintended consequences” and “getting in over one’s head” motifs, Nelson’s story exposes some very fascinating truths about the very nature of truth. In the trainwreck course of Nelson’s involvement in cyronics, this man became a master of the art of rationalization. Soon, his rationalizations had metastasized into a pattern of deceit so profound that, even now, in his attempts to reconcile everything that happened, he seems authentically unclear as to what actually happened. In short, he lied enough that he came to believe his own lies.
This is different, it seems to me, from the variety of deceit that is inherently malicious. In the interviews which comprise this broadcast, Nelson left himself utterly open to having his narrative challenged - and indeed, disproved. Had he been maliciously deceitful, he would have been far more artful in his deceit. He would not have, for example, granted such open interviews. (A wise attorney will not place a defendant she or he knows to be guilty on a witness stand for cross-examination; so too, a liar who means to cause harm with his untruths will be far more dodgy with his or her approaches to narrative.)
I have known a great many otherwise innocent people who have lied themselves into corners from which they could not, subsequently, extricate themselves in any meaningful way. For example: a severely traumatized rape, battering, trafficking, torture, and stalking survivor, who was so afraid of her past abusers that she was willing to file false police reports about continued stalking episodes, on the basis that doing so would give her documentation needed to obtain a current and enforceable protection order, should the need arise. But when I found her an FBI agent who was, without qualification or hesitation, willing to pursue a serious investigation of the criminal organization to which her most dangerous of all her previous abusers had belonged? (Her cooperation with which could have garnered her entrance into the federal Witness Protection program.) She completely shut down, was not at all willing to testify. Needless to say, there were unintended consequences she (and I) faced because of these decisions. (And soon, the window of opportunity, during which the agent in question had promised to be available to her, had shut; he was pulled out of state to investigate the Montana Militia.)
What is more? In the course of trying to advocate for this woman (who was my partner at the time; “Lee,” as discussed tangentially elsewhere), it became clear to me that, even when she changed her story - or her rationalizations for the various versions of her story - she genuinely believed what she was saying, each time she spoke. The traumas she had experienced, both in the past and while I had lived with her, were all too authentic; I became painfully well acquainted with the evidence from same (for example: letters, phone calls, having our apartment broken into, receiving hate literature from the same organization to which one of her abusers had belonged). But she coped with this (continuing) trauma through extremes of dissociation - which is, most plainly, one form of “lying.”
And in my own secondary traumatization3, I coped through my own acts of dissociation, accepting as literal truth whatever my partner said, no matter how frequently her story changed. Further, I did my damnedest to convince others of the veracity of each of Lee’s constantly morphing claims. Sometimes this meant exaggerating a situation, but more frequently, it actually meant minimizing it - because nothing, it turned out, made it more impossible to secure necessary, life-saving services (for example, police protection to go back into our broken-into apartment, so we could get ID and other essentials before leaving the state in the dead of the subsequent night) than conveying, to the fullest extent possible, how much danger she was actually in.
At the time, I had not heard of the phenomenon of folie à deux. One of the most painful aspects of my recovery from that traumatizing experience (in the course of which we led a substantively dangerous existence, the details of which are well beyond what I can address here) has been the effort to comb through everything that happened, and with both the benefits and hindrances of hindsight, separate the real from the unreal; what I’d feared - or hoped - was true versus what actually had been true. (What may be the truest fact of all from that time? That I may never be entirely certain of which things were unambiguously true, and which weren’t.)
Whereas folie à deux may be described as “a rare psychiatric syndrome in which a symptom of psychosis (particularly a paranoid or delusional belief) is transmitted from one individual to another,” and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) describes how a person, traumatized in the past, emotionally re-experiences past trauma, and Secondary Traumatic Stress is a kind of “PTSD by proxy,” typically affecting persons in the helping professions, and Acute Traumatic Stress is construed to be PTSD’s precursor (in which the traumatized person is dealing with the events in the present, rather than exclusively past tense), what I was dealing with was the combined elements of all these disorders. As you might imagine, literal, objective truth in all matters (particularly those which were causing my partner and I such profound, visceral, and immediate distress) wasn’t easy to come by. (Although, paradoxically, my basic functioning required that I accept as “literal, objective truth” any number of things I subsequently understood could not have been true.)
Mistakes Were Made. The Women’s Studies scholar, anti-Klan activist and author Mab Segrest, with whom I corresponded in the mid-nineties, and who subsequently met with my partner and me, may have some understanding, looking back, of the “mistakes” to which I refer. (Even when, years later, I met with her again, and still could not articulate the dissonance between some of what I’d said to her in correspondence, and what I subsequently understood could not have been the complete truth.) As might Vednita Carter, who was my advocate when Lee and I were clients of the now-defunct organization WHISPER (she went on to form Breaking Free). As might Claudine O’Leary, whom I did not know at the time (although I’d read some of her underground zines on feminism, poverty, and related issues, published and distributed pseudonymously), but who has, since the late nineties, worked with many severely traumatized youth, from situations not unlike my partner’s in the immediate period before we met (she was nineteen then; I had just turned twenty-two). As might many of my friends and family members with whom I was sometimes in touch between 1993 and 1997. (I remain estranged from many of these loved ones, as a direct consequence of communications I had with them during periods of particularly acute crisis, which they, understandably, found traumatizing; perhaps we might call that “Tertiary Traumatic Stress”?)
The bottom line here is: traumatized people, who may still be in profoundly dangerous situations, develop creative, often dissociative, and thus often fundamentally dishonest ways of surviving on a day-to-day (sometimes on a minute-to-minute) basis, expressed alternately through extremes of passivity and hostility. However, this particular variety of “dishonesty,” in which so many untenable truths may be embedded, is one fundamentally is lacking in malice.
Hearing the broadcast about Bob Nelson a second time around, I remain appalled by the actions of this man, and their consequences for those who became embroiled in his (unintentionally?) twisted narrative. He has, to use the somewhat tired4 analogy, “Drunk the Kool-Aid.” (And to abuse the dubious analogy further, one could say his organs have accommodated themselves to his Kool-Aid’s poisons, such that he is now pathologically convinced of his own lies, and his consciousness could not survive attempts toward integration - which is to say, a substantive reckoning with real truth.)
It’s horrible, and it’s tragic, and it’s shameful.
But I doubt it’s all that unique. There are, I suspect, many more “Bob Nelsons” among us.
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1 The subsequent and final segment, Act Two: You’re Willing to Sacrifice Our Love, concerning spoofed versions of the William Carlos Williams poem, This is Just to Say, is also brilliant.
2 Emphasis on the “acting.” (As my friend Kimmy Certa can, I am afraid, attest.) (And yes, Kimmy, I really will write the whole story of that debacle… at some point.)
3 While there is a growing field of literature on what is called “Secondary Traumatic Stress” (see, for example, this book), it is geared almost entirely to persons in the helping professions, rather than, for example, family members and partners of the directly traumatized individual. In my own situation, my role bridged that of “partner” and “advocate” for reasons of necessity and, unfortunately, isolation. While we did, in fact, consult a range of social service, medical, and law enforcement entities in several states in an effort to get competent help for my partner, none of them were prepared to address the breadth of her situation. (For example, I consulted extensively at one point with The Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, but they finally determined they could not have her as a client, as - I am not kidding - she had been tortured on American rather than on foreign soil, which was beyond the scope of their mission.) In lieu of any of the competent, comprehensive services my partner so desperately needed, from social service organizations, medical services (due to injuries as well as malnutrition related to her past abuse), and law enforcement, we were on our own. And since she was still in some measure of danger from her past abusers, we were both in a constant state of terror, in ways that challenged our ability to so much as function - and left us with profound emotional scars. (I addressed these in my poem, “How the Fugitives - Two Women Lovers - Tried to Love Each Other and Survive,” published in the November 2000 issue of Violence Against Women.)
4 The reference is also problematic for reasons RadGeek (Charles Johnson) has, quite compellingly, explored.
