The Church Bathroom Was Not About the Funeral - The Split

Dissociation Theme: The Formation of Mutual Protection, Billy and Chuck, Part 1

Chuck and Bllly 1

3:52

It was about two boys who had learned how to leave their bodies and what happened when they stopped.

After a funeral we weren't supposed to be at, Chuck was crying in a church bathroom. We were nine. Death had been given to us like a job, and in the middle of the incense and the eulogy of a little girl telling a room full of adults that her grandpa had taught her to believe in things she couldn't see, Chuck's body gave him the only honest answer a child who had been carrying too much for too long could give.

He broke down.

I sat on the floor of the bathroom with my back against the door and didn't try to fix it. I didn't have a plan. I didn't know what grief was supposed to look like or how long it was okay to last. I just stayed.

That staying—just staying in the room—was the first time either of us felt what dissociation is like. We'd both lived apart for years by then. Chuck learned how to rise above his life when his brother wasn't there to keep the family safe. Since the first winter storm shook our house and something changed in the air that I couldn't name, I had been watching myself from somewhere just outside my body.

Dissociation is the smartest thing your nervous system can do when it thinks the world is too dangerous to live in fully. You quickly master the skill of splitting your responses efficiently. You still must do things like serve at funerals, finish your homework, nod at the right times, and make adults feel at ease. The other part stays still. Watches. Waits for the world to become safe to live in.

Chuck's brother's disappearance was the cause of the split. Older siblings who have run out of kindness can be very cruel, and they told him that he was the reason. His foot. His need. His disability. The message set itself up below the level of the argument: I am what makes people leave. So, he learned to be less present, less demanding, and less real. He learned to hover above his own needs in case having needs was the last thing that made someone leave.

The split had a different cause for me but the same structure. A mother whose love came with conditions I couldn't figure out. A gate in the backyard that broke and never got fixed. A room that kept getting smaller. The message was the same: being too much is bad. Being completely alive, completely there, and completely yours is what gets you punished. So you learn to look at things from a different angle. To look at. To stay alive.

We saw each other for the first time in the church bathroom, not fixed, not coached back to working order, but from inside it. I didn't flinch when Chuck showed me his real face. I told him I would stay, and he didn't use that against me. And in that conversation, something happened that no amount of prescribed healing could have caused: we became proof to each other that being present was possible.

We didn't have words for it at the time. We made up a language that only we could understand. It was a system of small gestures, a secret handshake, and a shorthand that said, "I know what you are, and I am choosing you anyway." This is the best way to say what heals dissociation. Not understanding. Not a plan. Not the right type of therapy. A person. A certain person who knows about the split and stays in the room.

Chuck called us the death squad. The serious boys. Given grief before we had a chance to deal with our own. But what we were really doing—what neither of us could put into words until much later—was practicing the thing that would eventually let us get back into our own bodies. We were getting used to being seen. Two boys were in a bathroom after a funeral. One was crying, and the other was staying. They both learned for the first time that you could be in the room and not be hurt by it.

You know what it feels like to hover above your own life and do well while something important waits behind the glass if you've ever lived in the split. That's what Chuck and Billy found in that bathroom. It's not a cure. It's a start. The first thing the nervous system records is that I was fully present once, in a moment that asked everything, and the world didn't end.

That's where the return starts. Not with a big step forward. Staying with one person in one bathroom on a normal afternoon after a funeral.

Sincerely,

Bill Bistak