Page Content (OCR)
same time. 168 II THE SESSIONS was one such volunteer whose incompletely expressed and felt emotions from past trauma hindered her current life. Cassandra was twenty-two years old, the next-to-youngest volunteer, when she signed on for the DMT project. Her manner and appearance brought out conflicting feelings in most people she met, and I was no exception. She dressed and carried herself in a somewhat masculine way, and she was bisexual. Both men and women found her pleasing face and lithe, androgynous body type attractive. Her studiously casual attitude toward appearance and self-care made her seem somewhat waiflike, and it was easy to feel caring and maternal toward her—the older nurses on the re- search ward wanted to feed her and give her a bath. She also possessed sharp intelligence, laconic humor, and a direct manner. Cassandra was a complicated young woman, and it took some effort to see with whom you were really dealing. Cassandra suffered in relationships. Her parents divorced before she was a year old, and her mother raised her neglectfully. This came to a head at the age of sixteen, when her mother left her alone with her step- father for a week. He raped her repeatedly during that time, and this cemented her stark ambivalence toward men and women: distrusting and hating them on one hand, but needing their love and protection at the After this, she developed symptoms of a post-traumatic stress disor- der, experiencing flashbacks of the rape during sexual relations in her first long-term relationship. When she was twenty, she decided that she never wanted to have children and had a tubal ligation. Cassandra had been in and out of many short-term therapeutic and romantic relationships. At first she would idealize and romanticize the therapist or lover. Then she experienced disappointment and contempt in his or her inability to provide the empathy she needed so badly. She was friends with one of our male volunteers, and they became sexually in- volved after they completed the tolerance study. Soon after that she left the country, leaving no forwarding address.