Please welcome amazing artist, poet, screenwriter and filmmaker (The Scarapist) Jeanne Marie Spicuzza back to my blog. I’m honored to have her here again to update us on her story of how The Scarapist (the scary therapist) came to be, how it affected her personally, and how she’s sharing her story to prevent others from experiencing a similar fate.
To Cut Away
At twenty-nine, I learned that the word “decision” is derived from the Latin, meaning, “to cut away.” To choose one path, to sacrifice another. The losses can bring great gains, but also grieving. Our choices invite an outcome often invisible, hidden, outside of our control. To be sure, one is never the same after the cut, and we cannot go back, only forward.
My life is wrought with such cuts.
And that’s how we begin. We come from a small, warm, embracing place into a cold and open world. We are naked and vulnerable, bearing a soft and throbbing spot atop our heads, seeking closure, seeking wisdom.
I’m not sure when I became so attached to the idea of security. Maybe I was born afraid, looking for something to hold, a thing that could never be taken. It would have to be something mine, something of me… something forever. There are traumas, too, places of empty despair, strange pockets of lost time. I think that’s how I got here.
When I was very young, I wanted to be a boy. My mother was educated, decorous and passive. My father was stout, a controlling Sicilian-American who dominated our family.
One afternoon, while my mother was changing my diaper, I told her that I was actually a boy. I wanted to have power, you see, and not to bend.
“You’re not a boy,” my mother insisted, laughing. “If you’re a boy, where’s your penis?”
I imagined myself in our backyard during the frozen Wisconsin winter, playing on a snow bank below our kitchen window.
“It melted,” I answered.
Winter spun into summer. I persisted in my wishing for a shifted gender identity. I asked for a doctor’s kit for my fifth birthday. I was devastated to receive a white plastic version.
“Boys get doctors’ kits and girls get nurses’ kits,” my older sister chimed.
“No!” I cried. “It doesn’t even have a stethoscope. That’s the best part!” I became livid. I screamed, “I want a stethoscope!”
I later received said stethoscope, but not the doctor’s kit. Fine, now I wanted to be a priest.
That same summer, my mother instructed my friend and neighbor, Tara Peterson, to take me to her mother. It was to be my very first haircut.
Upon arriving, Tara disappeared. Mrs. Peterson sat me in a chair and put a smock over my tiny shoulders.
“Shag or pixie?” she asked.
“Shag,” I answered.
Now I answered “shag” because I was all of five years and I didn’t know the difference. Mrs. Peterson called my parents to see if her instructions were okay. Then proceeded to cut my long locks down to 1/2 inch. The purpose was a parental lesson in shame, to show what happened when I wanted to be powerful and in control. Perhaps it was my mother’s shame, too.
Now, my hair was weird. I grew up in a suburb of German and Polish immigrants. As a Sicilian-American, instead of thick wavy strands, my head was full of frizz and curls. I watched the girls brush each other’s hair. I sat apart. But I wanted to belong.
When I was seven, eight and eleven years old, my mother checked into St. Michael’s Hospital for depression. I broke out in horrible hives. My hair was unbrushed. My mother later had to cut chunks of my hair out, the snarls that formed in my soft, fine locks. Then her cousin took me to get my second hair cut. I got sick and cried. A few years later, I sat at my mother’s friend’s beauty parlor for over an hour while a stylist brushed the snarls from my hair. Her friend later offered me lodging when I became pregnant with my daughter, Stephanie. My mother smiled as she explained that her friend told her I could sleep on the kitchen floor.
When I was twelve, my long, all one-length hair was burned by our outdated kitchen stove. Like our cars, furniture and clothes, our appliances were used until they broke down. The gas pilot was so clogged that the oven was extremely slow to light. One afternoon, I leaned in with a match and waited. When the pilot finally lit, it blasted heat in my face. I went upstairs to the only full bathroom, accommodating our family of seven. I noticed what appeared to me to be burned fragments from the oven all over my head. I washed the pieces out. As years passed I saw a singed hair and realized that the burnt fragments had been my own hair. At thirteen, I had my long hair cut into layers for the first time. My father called me a prostitute. It remained layered throughout my teen years. Stylists always cut it too short.
Moving On
Shortly after my sixteenth birthday, I met him. He was a mean and ornery boy. We dated for four months, and I became pregnant. In the state of Wisconsin in 1985, a minor required parental permission for a legal abortion. The boy wanted me to pay him to sign adoption papers. Instead, I gave him his walking papers. Then I gave my daughter up to my parents, after they presented me with guardianship documents and told me to sign. The alternative, they said, was give up college, go on welfare, and raise Stephanie on my own. How terrified I was! I didn’t know how to survive myself, or so I thought. So with shakes and tears, I made their deal in the children’s court. I felt I had given up the best part of me.
One might question how a woman can give up her child to her abusive parents. I was thinking about airplane crashes. You have to fix the oxygen mask over your own mouth first, learning to breathe in a crisis, before you can turn to help your child. So, at age eighteen, my beautiful baby girl, having toddled up to the rear screen door of my parents’ house, stared at me, my belongings piled into a station wagon, and watched me leave.
From twenty years old on, I longed for long hair. Maybe I wanted to grow some part of myself that I’d given up. And to feel a part of something. I wanted to be beautiful, feminine– alive! I began to grow my hair out, or at least attempt to.
But at twenty-one, my then-boyfriend, an abusive type whom I just discovered was cheating on me, cut off way too much of my hair. I looked in the mirror and saw it crooked, shorter on the right side– right side, father issues. The taking of control. When I broke up with him eighteen months later, I decided to cut my own hair. I wanted to show him, and my father, that I didn’t need them anymore. I had the power. I was twenty-two. Unfortunately, I cut off too much. About six or eight inches. It looked horrible. Crooked on the right side. Father issues. At twenty-three, I fell in love. But he ran off with another woman. I developed Trichotillomania, an obsessive-compulsive hair pulling disorder.
At ages thirty and thirty-five, having finally grown out my hair, two different stylists cut six and eight inches of hair. Always six or eight inches. The first was layers everywhere. The second, at least, was even, a better cut. Still, both more than I’d asked for. Still not in control.
By my wedding in 2005, the second cut had grown out, eighteen inches, perfectly even. I was in balance. Fullness and length… perfect, a blissful time. But five short months later, my day of glory ended, and my happiness was shattered, splitting at the ends.
It was to be the culmination of all cuts.
Meeting The Scarapist
I had met her at a mutual friend’s wedding. She smiled sweetly and hunched slightly, indicating to onlookers a sort of demure, civilized submissiveness, like a fragile little girl trapped in the body of an elderly woman. She beamed with honeyed eyes and the welcoming flesh of fresh and fragile cedars.
She invited me out to lunch, and after several months and three lunches later, I found myself vulnerable, in the midst of a huge life crisis.
I had just purchased my first home. Six weeks later, it flooded. My daughter, now living with me in California and adjusting to my parental influence, had run away from home with my older sister, who refused to bring her back for nearly a week. I was devastated. My family was unsupportive, my boyfriend and future husband, absent.
The mutual friend called. Seemingly concerned, she urged me to call her. I dialed. She said she could help me. She promised I would be freer than I’d ever been.
After two years, I began expressing desire to terminate. I was planning my wedding. It was January 2005.
“I’m the first therapist to let people go when they’re ready,” she cooed, sweetly, “and, dear, you’re not ready.”
She began to tell me what books to read to learn hypnosis process. She instructed me on how to wear my make-up. She told me which plays to see. Hypnosis. It was all good for me, she said. How safe it seemed, tucked inside her nurturing. And she liked to produce such feelings of security, always offering blanket and pillow, speaking calmly, delicately. So safe, I’d thought, that didn’t notice how much it could cut, how much it controlled. I was regressing.
In the summer of 2005, three months after my dream wedding, I had become successful. I had grown my hair to a gorgeous, healthy and feminine all one length, twenty-one inches, three inches from my waist.
She asked me what I wanted to work on. I told her about my hair.
One might question how a woman can give up her deepest secret to an abusive therapist. The simple answer: I didn’t know. She was someone I’d grown to trust, someone who seemed to understand my past, my pain. Someone who acted like a mother I’d never had, someone with a soft and gentle nature who seemed to truly support me. A person who cared and accepted. And she told me so, often. She hugged me. She gave me gifts. She said that she loved me.
Then I told her. I said that if anyone were to cut up my hair, six or eight inches of length, create layers, crooked on the right side, leaving holes where hair should be, thinning it out, it would destroy me.
I thought I’d be free of my dangers at last, my fear of cuts! The truth, my disclosure, would liberate me! And she would save me! Yes, she would. She said so. And I believed her. Only later would learn that such salvations are never what they seem. Often, these places of solace turn out to be toxic, even poisonous… prisons of our worst nightmares.
I told her I’d been having problems saying no as of late, problems with boundaries. I hated the word “should.” I was becoming very anxious. I had just returned from a visit from my hometown. It was fun. She told me I wouldn’t go back there until my father was on his deathbed, and maybe not even then. I said I had friends there to visit. I said I had a stylist there, the only one who could cut my hair properly. My hair therapist, I called her.
“That’s silly,” she uttered. “You need someone here, in Los Angeles.”
And I didn’t know how to defend myself. I didn’t even know I didn’t have to! I hadn’t yet learned to win by walking away.
“But she’s the only one… Everyone I go to cuts off too much of my hair.”
She called it “an excuse” and, for the first time of several to follow, suggested that I see her stylist. I said no. She assured me that her stylist was safe and sensitive. Would only cut what I asked. Several times. At least once for every inch.
“I’ve heard that before,” I answered politely. “No, thanks.”
After weeks of insistence, she did what I had told her I’d had no defense against. The method my parents applied when presenting me with guardianship papers. She’d remembered it. She had planned it. She’d counted upon it. Her triumph! She rose from her chair, stood up in front of me and, looking down as authority to novice, placed the stylist’s phone number in my hand.
“Do this. Call Brenda,” she said firmly, but kindly. “I want you to do this,” she added, cooing. “This will be good for you.”
And I did it! I was so excited! It was good for me! I wanted to make her, and myself, proud. I would be healed, healed at last! Or so I’d thought. And I called. I made an appointment.
The next session, she led me to the bedroom fashioned as her office and showed me how her cat had been attacked by an animal, possibly a coyote. She pointed to a spot underneath, on his belly, where a large gash had torn his flesh.
“Look. Where the hair is gone. But it’s growing back.” She smiled. “See, we can heal from old wounds.”
She sat down and commented that I hadn’t gone to her stylist yet. Strange, I wanted so little trimmed off, how would she know… ? But I was trusting, not at all suspicious.
She asked me what frightened me about haircuts.
“Layers,” I answered. ” Layers. Five or six inch layers. Too much off the right side. An inch too crooked. A hole on that side, a place where the hair is too short inside on the right. A thinning of my hair. Bangs. The one thing that could potentially destroy me,” I reiterated.
Then she asked me what frightened me most about haircuts.
“Layers,” I said.
“What are layers for?” she inquired, with trained innocence.
“They’re supposed to give hair bounce,” I explained, “but I have very fine hair. It took me years to grow out. They just make my hair look thin.”
Then she put me under. But she never called it that. It was spiritual work, inner work. When I still assumed spiritual meant benevolent.
“I’m going to do something with you that I rarely do with my other patients. I’m going to take you on a high spiritual meditation.”
Wow. I was worthy of that? I was so flattered, so honored. I only later I remembered this:
“Layers,” she said, calmly. “I want you to remember the word ‘layers’ and that layers give hair bounce. Nod your head if you can hear me. Good.”
To Cut Away…Again
I went to my hair appointment that week. Three times I’d asked her stylist to trim 1/8 inch off the ends. I told her I’d had “hair issues,” that if I lost more than an inch, I’d have a massive trauma. Shorter on the right side. I used to suffer from Trichotillomania. Control issues.
“Is that a nerve disorder?” she asked.
I explained that it was. Just like the scarapist had instructed me. The stylist nodded.
“Do you have a husband? I don’t have a husband. Do you have a house? I don’t have a house. Do you have children? I don’t have children,” she recited. I wish I would have known what destruction envy, the most deadly manifestation of shame, can do.
She said my hair was split. But I knew that it wasn’t. Then she began stroking the back of my head.
“Layers,” she said. “You should have layers. I’ll put layers in your hair. Layers give hair bounce.”
And I wanted to scream. I found that I couldn’t. And the stylist began. I forgot most of it, until two months later. Here is what I remembered:
Starting with the right side. Six inches fell to the floor. She moved to the back.
“Not in the back, please, not in the back,” I screamed to myself, but it still wouldn’t come out.
She raked the scissors up the shaft and broke my hair. She cut it crooked, too much off the right side. My voice wouldn’t work. “Please stop,” I thought. It didn’t matter. It was too late.
It turned out, she had hacked out over 65 percent of my hair, causing root and shaft damage, even hair loss.
I left for Europe four days later for a scheduled appearance at a film festival. Upon arriving, the reality of what had happened was beginning to land, and I had a massive breakdown. I couldn’t walk on my own. I called the scarapist from a pay phone across from Victoria Station. I told her I was remembering.
“You should have said something, dear,” she cooed.
I returned home. I went to see the scarapist, shaking, sobbing uncontrollably. She clasped her hands together, excitedly.
“You’ve had an abreaction!” she exclaimed, victoriously. “You’ll see one day that this is a gift of grace.”
And I had trusted her. I had thought that by telling her my history, in great detail, she would protect me from harm. But I had thought wrongly. I had been betrayed.
She wouldn’t let me go. She kept calling me, wanting me to come back to her.
“I’m the first therapist to let people go when they’re ready,” she cooed, as before. This time, her words held new meaning. “And, dear, you’re not ready.”
I phoned my former psychiatrist from my hometown, a wonderful woman who’d helped me obtain my high school equivalency. She advised me to leave a message, canceling all appointments until further notice.
The scarapist actually phoned me back, shocked to receive what she called “such a curt and angry message.”
I was not angry. I was asserting my boundaries.
She continued, how she’d wanted a voice on the phone. I called her again and told her I was releasing her.
“See, now that’s nice,” she purred. I was horrified.
“Whatever it is,” I chimed in, “I’m letting you go.”
I called suicide hotline over twenty-three times in nine months following our last conversation. I felt folded into pieces, broken, seemingly beyond repair. I beat my own body. I didn’t want to live with the shame. My husband found me, naked in the dark.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Just leave me here,” I cried.
“No,” he said. Then he carried me to bed.
“I’m a horse that can’t run. Leave me by the side of the road. I’m ugly.”
“Shhh… ” he whispered. “No, you’re not. You’re beautiful.”
I asked, prayerfully, how I would ever get through it. A voice, seemingly entering my ear and embracing me while simultaneously coming from within my heart, sang, “I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you, and you are mine.”
Finding Boundaries
It was a new beginning.
I visited my hair therapist in my hometown. She told me it that would take three and a half years for my hair to grow back, forty-two months from the day it was cut. I sobbed. And in fact it never grew the same. She would later tell me, “I didn’t want to say it then, you were traumatized enough. I’ve never seen anything like it. It looked burned. She hacked the shit out of your hair.”
It seemed like all my labors, crawling from a deep hole, had disappeared. Shattering and devastation, my pain, grinding on my mind and bones everyday. I was often dizzy, and had to catch myself from falling. I was diagnosed with chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, and was told it would be years before I would recover. The sorrow sat on top of my head everyday, a constant reminder of the scarapist’s betrayal. The ugliness and anguish of other people’s shame.
I was determined to take legal action, to report the scarapist to her licensing board. I kept thinking of our last appointment.
“I’ve taken people there before, but this just happened!” she uttered, proudly. “I have patients I’ve been seeing for years and years. I have one patient, and I’m all she has… ”
She had to be stopped! She was making people sick. She was implanting memories. She was destroying lives.
I hired an attorney. I contacted the California Board of Behavioral Sciences. I wrote to the scarapist, requesting full copy of my records. She left three voice messages. The third was the most telling.
“I don’t know what’s come over you. I have done nothing to harm you,” she recited, hypnotically. “And you know that in your heart.”
I sat down. My hand covered my face. I couldn’t move for twenty minutes, all the forced innocence and false empathy and lies and manipulations, rushing over me like a sandstorm. And then I knew.
I’ve since discovered that the type of sexual abuse I’d thought I’d suffered was implanted. Encouraged by the scarapist to alienate everyone around me– save her, of course– I would have to rebuild my life.
I won the lawsuit. I felt like I was winning my soul.
I saw the scarapist one last time. We were walking towards each other in a long, slender hallway, following the court hearing. She wore a precious powder blue dress. She approached with glazed eyes and a wide smile. All I could think was, “You’re a liar, you’re a liar… ” I felt a force propelling me forward, like a hand at my back. As soon as she noticed me, her smile fell into a frown. She began spinning around, her hand reaching for a door. She searched the wall for something to stare at. She kept turning that way. That’s how I remember her: her own shame exposed, betraying herself. She knew what she had done.
The most painful thing I had to do was to find pardon. I was otherwise in danger of becoming like the ones who hurt me. Like the scarapist and her hypnostylist. It is an ongoing process, and a struggle.
I vowed find my place of safety in the healing work I created. I would labor my own salvation, “with fear and trembling,” as Kierkegaard so aptly put it. The path as narrow as the razor’s edge, so the Vedas say. Because sharp moments cut deep impressions and so determine our life’s directions.
In her notes, the scarapist called my daughter “illegitimate” and my movies pipe dreams. In fact, my daughter’s presence in my life is the most incredible and authentic joy I have ever known. And my first motion picture, based upon this experience, will be completed later next month. So the scarapist was wrong on both counts.
I have learned. And I will trust again. I promised myself I would forgive, and even grow to love, however deep, wide, agonizing, receding, or glorifying, my decisions.
Because they are mine. I had found it. It’s these cuts that help shape who I am.
Honey, Delicious.
I have manifested such an abundance of disgust
for my former therapist
it’s almost a spiritual experience.
She was a narcissistic sociopath.
I gave up hating her for Lent.
Needless to say, the results
of my analysis were tragic.
I haven’t felt so violated
since Tim Tuttle tried to grab me
in the wilderness section of my Appalachian Trail.
It was in the sixth grade.
After little league practice.
He lied and told everybody we made out,
behind the science building,
which really messed things up
with my intended, Jim Glynn.
I watched him kiss my fourth cousin
on the mouth. It played out
like a Shakespearean tragedy.
After lunch, which consisted of
Doritos and smoking pot
in the back of the Citgo station,
I watched in total awe
as a soccer ball spun towards me,
going about 6 miles an hour.
I kicked with all my Zen and missed.
Jody Lundgren laughed so hard
she spit out chewed up gas station cravings
and cotton mouth.
We were in the moment,
but we were not constructive
members of the community.
My mom was apocalyptic.
She stocked canned goods
in our basement cellar.
My dad didn’t play favorites.
He was mean to everybody.
He made me eat the cream-style corn.
Needless to say,
I kept my Star Wars figures good and packed.
I knew the limitations of my religious upbringing.
Now, I am wary of metaphysical peddlers,
who try to sell unmitigated certainty.
They are pimps and panderers.
The absence of unknowing
is the dangerous result
of cult and fascism.
It is the path to Kool-Aid and other processed foods.
Any psychology that tells you
you can figure yourself out
is inherently flawed.
Understanding your own mind
only goes so far.
Eating with other people is much more fun.
The sweet taste
of honey delicious
is the Great Mystery.
It’s a sex-shaped Popsicle
that pours into the cosmos
like liquor made by monks.
My former scarapist is a demon granny.
She doesn’t feel the Flavor.
If she did, she’d quit giving advice.
She’d be all Cool Hand Luke.
Then she’d know,
and she’d be as quiet as God.
Jeanne Marie Spicuzza is an actress, writer, producer, director, model, philosopher, activist, watercolor painter and illustrator, composer and Master Herbalist. She is the founder and CEO of Seasons & a Muse, Inc..
The Scarapist official website
berni says
March 9, 2016 at 10:25 amthank you for this wonderful, heart wrenching, life affirming, brave and honest blog
Jeanne Marie Spicuzza says
March 10, 2016 at 11:46 pmThank you, berni, thank you so much. It’s such a joy to share. I’m grateful to Rachel Thompson for her generosity and courage.