Blog 3806 – 04.24.2026
The Fractured Psyche
Childhood trauma can result in DID, disassociative identity disorder. I just read a piece about actress Anne Heche and a book she wrote about her life called Call Me Crazy. Her story reminded me of a movie made in 1957 starring Joanne Woodward and Lee J. Cobb called The Three Faces of Eve, that dealt with what was diagnosed then as multiple personality disorder.
If not in childhood perhaps later in life most all of us at one time or another experience things that shake us to our core that may sometimes fracture our psyches. I have been fortunate in life to have never broken a bone (at least not yet.) Be mindful on that roof, Poppa, but I have experienced heart break an disappointments that brought me perilously close to a precipice that I might have easily fallen off and shattered my mind and body into many pieces.
I do not believe in demons, but understand the expression “battling their demons” to mean dealing with the drama and trauma in one’s life. I believe we are all of at least two minds – our higher and best self, what Lincoln called, “our better angels” and our lower and worst self so easily tempted to take the easy way no matter who it cheats or hurts.
A warning attributed to Jesus comes to mind, “Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you man’s prove what is that good and perfect will of God (your higher Self.)
Bi-polar disease, schizophrenia, and PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder, and dementia in all its debilitating forms are all diagnoses that deal to some degree with the splintering or fracturing of the mind. Being of at least two minds and pulled in at least two directions most of the time we can if we are honest with ourselves see how someone viewing our behavior from outside might judge us and call us crazy. I can hear wiseman Forest Gump saying, “Mama says, ‘Crazy is as crazy does’.” Describing the Confederate General he was named for, Nathan Bedford Forest, who after the wars founded the Klu Klux Klan, KKK, Forest’s mom also said: “Sometimes people do things that just don’t make any sense.”
We are all I think a bit broken or crazy in this time and space jungle in which we find ourselves, a place of tremendous possibilities but also dangers as well.
We should endeavor to be kind not just to family and friends but to strangers also for we are all dealing with our own dramas and traumas. And, folks, Christian and otherwise, we are none of us going to get out of this unscathed so we should follow the advice of a young man thought to be himself by at least some of his own family for saying things like the five verses attributed to him by the writer of Matthew.
Your friend, fellow traveler, and lover of the moon (sometimes lunatic),
David James White
theencouragingword 