How My Ex-Husband Used My Mental Health Struggles as Revenge Porn

In the last days of our marriage, I opened a YouTube link sent via text from my ex-husband with the title “Dealing with Someone who Dissociates.” That someone in the video was me—more accurately, my 9-year-old part who exists as a key member of our dissociative system. Yes, we are a person with dissociative identities and we move through life as a collective of various selves who developed in response to earlier traumas.

As our marriage began to disintegrate over the course of the previous year, my younger parts, specifically Nine and her tendency to self-injure, began getting loud again. I/we (my internal system) reengaged our intensive therapy, which also featured the blow of Donald Trump, a stark reminder of our main abuser, being elected as President of the United States. Yet even under the care of the best therapist, an unhappy home where one does not feel safe to be themselves can be torture on the mental health of a dissociative system.

So after 11 years of not self-harming, we progressively found ourselves self-injuring a great deal. We were in a full self-injury relapse and these episodes were largely triggered by bitter arguments with our ex-husband, primarily when he criticized our independent identity, our bisexuality, and our profession. Yes, I am/we are a mental health therapist specializing in the treatment of trauma, addiction and dissociation. And not just any mental health therapist. By 2017 when he posted the video, we’d already written five books in the field of trauma and addiction recovery with another book in production. We were Dr. Jamie Marich, highly respected in our field, the director of an EMDR Therapy training program (one of the main therapies being used to treat trauma in the modern era), and our own successful YouTube presence as an EMDR Therapy expert. And yes, our ex-husband made sure to note that in the short description on his YouTube video.

As the video showed, we were also just Jamie, still feeling the pain of not being safe at home, still desperate for someone—anyone—to love all of us. Even though by that point we’d developed the reputation as a very personable teacher, the people who followed my work would have been surprised to learn just how much suffering and shame we still carried. The video also showed, as my therapist helped me to see, that a bully was using my pain against me.

“He looks like the ass, that’s so clear from the video,” my therapist assured, “You have nothing to worry about, even if this video gets out wider.”

I was able to frame this experience for what it really was—revenge porn, albeit of the mental health variety. He knew that posting a video showing the symptom about which we carried the most shame—self-injury—could hurt us more than any naked pictures or sex tapes. This episode represented my worst fear and the worst fear of so many mental health therapists who want to be more open and candid about their own humanity—being discredited or exposed for how bad we can really get. Yet when we got the video removed and the episode passed, I became newly emboldened. Not one shred of fear remained in speaking about the truth of my diagnosis and recovery path.

Sadly, it is still rather novel and even controversial in the psychological professions for a mental health therapist to be “out” about their diagnosis that involves dissociative identities or a dissociative disorder. Thanks in part to horrid misrepresentations of dissociative identities in media, our diagnoses still have the reputation as being the worst and definitely the hardest to treat. Yet the mental health field itself promotes so much misinformation about dissociative disorders, with many professionals even denying that dissociative disorder are a real condition.

Plenty of professionals believe that dissociative disorders are real. And they operate with so much caution that their trepidation often communicates that they don’t trust us. Sometimes that caution comes from a genuine place of not wanting to cause more harm to a traumatized person. It often plays that they just can’t handle us. Moreover, there is a long history in the psychological professions of groups like the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) attempting to silence survivors and scare off the professionals who would treat them in a trauma and dissociation-informed manner.

Much of the answer promoted by advocates of trauma and dissociation-informed care is to research all of this with more vigor and tighten professional standards so that the treatment of trauma and dissociation are taken more seriously by the medical establishment. Yet as we came up as a professional in the field having been formally diagnosed with our own dissociative disorder during our graduate training in 2004, we experienced strong messaging—sometimes subtle and other times not-so-subtle—that sharing from our lived experience was not welcome.

That it was not enough to have lived experience with a dissociative disorder or any other mental illness, you had to be able to back it up with scholarship. And we even got the Ph.D. to do that, graduating in 2009 after finding a place to do it where our inquisitive mind that was already set on challenging the status quo would be celebrated instead of tolerated. When we started going to mental health conferences, even the major one that promotes the study of dissociation, we were met with such a sense of coldness and academic distancing from the realness of the human experience. And we knew there had to be another way to be ourselves in our profession.

We forged ahead gradually dipping our toe into the water of coming out about our own diagnosis and lived experience. In our first book, published in 2011, we mentioned that we struggled with dissociation as part of our complex trauma, and in 2014 we started feeling out whether audiences we spoke to during courses felt safe enough to come out with about being dissociative. At one of these talks a person came up to me over break and said, “I can’t believe that a professional presenter was so public about having a dissociative disorder.” We couldn’t tell if she was complimenting us or insulting us! Ultimately it played as a gratitude which helped her, and many others that have come after her, to say “me too” about being professionals with dissociative identities.

We truly make some of the best therapists as we actively address our own healing and embrace the nature of our multi-dimensional and non-linear minds. Yet much terror still exists about coming out. What saddens us most is how many professionals are actively discouraging other professionals with dissociative identities or related diagnoses to come out, fanning the flames of fear about being discredited or not taken seriously. How can we stand a chance of eradicating discrimination about dissociation or any mental health problem in society unless professionals can support each other in being real and living out loud?

I am grateful to my ex-husband for doing what he did with the video. Although the experience was hell and we’d never want to go through it again, surviving it removed any remaining cares we had about how people would judge us for our dissociative mind. There are colleagues of mine who are no doubt judging me for
telling this story in a major publication, and the existence of that judgment is exactly why we need to tell our stories.