CC: Certainly, whatever makes you feel comfortable. OK. So, what I’d like to do to begin with is to have a chat about the dissociation, and the range of what you’re experiencing on a daily basis.
EP: OK.
CC: And from there we can move on to having a think about where you’d like me to get you to. Does that sound OK?
EP: Yeah. Yes. That’s fine.
CC: So. A normal day then. How does that start?
EP: OK well, it depends on whether I’ve had a fugue or not.
CC: Tell me about that.
EP: So, um, Siggy sometimes—
CC: Siggy is your alter.
EP: Yeah, sorry yeah my alter, she sometimes kind of takes over. I wake up at night sometimes but I’m not like, actually awake, it’s not me, it’s her. She talks to my mum sometimes, otherwise she’ll just try to go outside, that kind of thing. Sometimes we’ll only know Siggy was up because things will be moved, or lights will be on. Stuff like that. But I always know anyway because I feel her there.
CC: Physically?
EP: Not exactly. I mean, I always feel sick afterwards, sort of achy.
CC: OK, so let’s say you’ve woken up, got up. What happens next?
EP: Well, she’s always there. Just … like I can sort of sense her, whatever’s going on. It’s like she thinks things that I can hear—
CC: Does she speak? Does she have a voice?
EP: Well … no. Not really. But it’s like she’ll get scared or angry or whatever and I know it’s not me feeling those things. Does that make any sense?
CC: Yes, it does. It sounds like what you experience is what I call co-conscious dissociation, which is when a person can feel that they have more than one identity at the same time.
EP: Right. Yes, that’s what it’s like. But the times she gets me up and does stuff with me at night, and … I just have completely no memory of that at all.
CC: OK. I’m getting from the way you’re speaking now that it’s quite distressing.
EP: I just … I don’t know.
[pause: 32 sec]
CC: Would you feel comfortable going into a little more detail about the episodes you have at night?
[pause: 12 sec]
EP: Look, I-I don’t know.
CC: OK: Eleanor—
EP: Ellie.
CC: Ellie. A lot of the people I see, they find it very hard at the beginning. They can feel like … well, they don’t know if they can trust me. Or it might be that they don’t trust that talking is going to help.
[pause: 27 sec]
EP: No. It’s not that. I just know what’s going to happen. We’re going to go through all this, and then you’re going to give up.
CC: Ah, OK. Tell me a bit more about that.
EP: I’m just … like, I’ve tried. You know? I talk to Siggy, I talked to other people, tried medicine and everything. All kinds of stuff. I don’t want to do all of that again. Just tell you all of it and then have you just say that actually you can’t help. Or that you don’t believe me.
CC: Who does believe you, Ellie?
EP: My mum.
CC: She’s always believed you.
EP: Yeah. She’s-she’s seen what happens. The fugues, and – everything.
CC: Anyone else close to you? Other family?
EP: I’m an only child. My dad’s dead.
CC: OK.
[pause: 11 sec]
CC: OK. And was that a long time ago that you lost him?
EP: Yes. Before I was born.
CC: I see. It can be challenging, growing up without—
EP: No. It wasn’t.
CC: You don’t want to talk about your father.
EP: No.
[pause: 31 sec]
CC: OK, Ellie, there’s a couple of things I’d like you to know. Sometimes therapists can be a bit mystifying. They can wait for you to work things out for yourself even if they have a good idea of what’s going on and what needs to shift in order to improve. But that can take a lot of time. In my experience I think it’s best to be up front and tell you what I think is happening, and what we’re going to do to put it right. Seems more honest, that way. Does that sound OK?
EP: Yes. I just want her gone. I want to be better.
CC: I hear you. So the first thing is, the aim of the psychotherapeutic work I’m going to do with you is to understand what’s happened. What I want to do is reduce the conflict between the different parts of your identity, help them cooperate.
EP: OK. I mean, I can’t see that happening, but OK. We can try.
CC: Good. So, the second thing I need you to know is that the kind of issues you’re having with Siggy, they’re something that almost always stem from quite a significant trauma, often something in early childhood.
[pause: 34 sec]
EP: OK.
CC: And so at some point in our sessions we’re going to need to talk about that. What you yourself think is at the bottom of it, how it all started.
[pause: 19 sec]
CC: Would you like us to come back to this at another time?
EP: No.
CC: OK. I understand. The reason I’m—
EP: I just … look, nothing happened, OK? There’s no deep dark secret. She’s just there. I don’t know why. I’m not going to come along here and just suddenly remember some massive, buried … it’s not going to happen. She’s always been there. I just want her gone. OK? I want her to leave me alone.
[pause: 22 sec]
EP: I just want her to leave me alone.
It felt like she was gone forever. I called Matt again and again but there was no answer.
I checked the time on the wall clock – three hours gone – and then saw the streak of pink highlighter on the calendar. I was supposed to be doing a shift that afternoon, volunteering in the children’s ward in the hospital where Mum cleaned, and Matt worked in the imaging lab. He’d set the whole thing up for me, sorting all the stuff out with the permissions, after I told