Tanya Secret Story

[Christina Smith]

Mystory begins in the summer of 1994. On the night of June 12th, my sister, Nicole Brown Simpson, was murdered. My pain was indescribable and insurmountable. Because of the notoriety, it became difficult for me to go through the normal grieving process. I stuffed my emotions and remained quiet. I became a master at concealing my feelings.

My life took a detour and was not working out the way I wanted it to. I wanted to go out and speak on Domestic Violence and inspire souls, but I guess God wanted me to heal myself first. I had not known this at the time. Later I came to realize that not only did I lose my sister, I lost myself.

That was confirmed in 2004. I was to be married and shortly before the big day, my ex-fianc cancelled the wedding. I became so clinically depressed that I found it impossible to even get out of bed. My body went into survival mode that I was physically affected and found myself unable to move. Every joint locked up and prevented my body to move. I literally was paralyzed. It was as though every nerve in my body was exposed and the wind was constantly blowing on me. This was the most excruciating pain I have ever felt in my life.

For one month I became self-destructive. I drank heavily and I was horribly angry. I had always been a happy girl who lifted people out of despair. Now, I was in that space. I did not know what to do. I had no coping skills to tap into.

I was more of a student of the program than I was a patient or victim of circumstance. I was attending The University of Life. There was not one class or assignment that I missed. I did all the Self Work.

I learned the necessary cognitive tools to regain life skills and coping strategies to live a productive life. After 10 days of being an inpatient student, I began immediate treatment in the outpatient program. I was so frightened to be discharged but I new I had to learn to survive in the outside world. The center was the only place where I felt safe and most productive. It was a place to cry and divulge the secret anger and pain that was festering inside of me.

The out-patient program was my classroom for the next two months. Everyday I sat as a student absorbing all the information I possibly could. My Occupational Therapist gave us homework assignments every day and every week. Week-by-week we would have to establish daily and weekly goals. One of my goals was to get out of bed. Then my goal was to make my bed. Another goal was to drive myself to the program. When I did drive for the first time, I was so anxious, scared and insecure to be behind the wheel of a car. Remember, I was paralyzed.

I had to re-learn everything. I literally had a clean slate. This all may sound so silly, but when you are so depressed it is impossible to do the simple things. I was given problem solving worksheets that allowed me to see what my successes were for that week and what roadblocks we encountered. In other words, the program gave me tools to create a healthier, safer and more balanced life.

Having the necessary tools prevents relapse on many different levels. This experience gave me the tools, skills and strategies to help me get through the stressers of life. If an event happens, it is our response that determines our outcome. So, I have learned to pause, digest, respond and not react.

Included with domestic violence prevention, I am excited to announce that this experience is another focus in my speaking and life coaching business. I want to prevent others from going through what I went through. Sadly, many people fall into depression and experience anxiety. There are tools for change that can help prevent this distress.

In my ministry I see so many hurting families from such tragedies as you have been through. I know it takes people like you who know what effect this has on everyone to help them work through to a meaningful life and to find some happiness through all the pain. God has a specific place for you and you will be blessed to serve those who go through such tragedies.

I wish you the best in your life plan to serve others.

Betty F.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM, HOST: From NPR, this is HIDDEN BRAIN. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When Jessica Langman (ph) was 12, she had a favorite TV show.JESSICA LANGMAN: This is a little embarrassing to admit, but I was crazy about "Star Trek."(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "STAR TREK")UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Space - the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.LANGMAN: One day, several of the actors came to my hometown. So I begged my mother to take me. And I walked up to a table, and there was Leonard Nimoy.(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "STAR TREK")LEONARD NIMOY: (As Mr. Spock) Stand by to beam up.VEDANTAM: It was Mr. Spock, the cerebral star of the show - always calm, ever logical. For years, Jessica had felt a deep kinship with Spock, and now here he was right in front of her.LANGMAN: And of course, I knew every angle of his face. I knew the curve of his ears. I knew everything about him, or so I felt. And when I put my notebook down for him to autograph, he looked at me with complete blank nonrecognition, and I was so confused in that moment. I knew him so well, but he did not know me.VEDANTAM: Danny Martinez (ph) understands what it's like to feel a deep connection to someone who doesn't know you.(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)RODNEY DANGERFIELD: I tell you I get no respect from anyone, you know.DANNY MARTINEZ: Oh, my God - Rodney Dangerfield.(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)DANGERFIELD: I mean, the last week, my wife, she signed me up for a bridge club. I jump off next Tuesday.(LAUGHTER)MARTINEZ: I remember when Rodney Dangerfield died, I cried like I had lost my grandfather, and no one could understand why I would care so much.VEDANTAM: Eric Pallileo (ph) says his connection with a singer named Anohni was transformational. He still remembers the moment he first heard her song "Ghost."(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GHOST")ANTONY AND THE JOHNSONS: (Singing) Leap from my heart and find your way.VEDANTAM: He was 15 at his home in Texas. All of a sudden...ERIC PALLILEO: I remember just sitting on the couch and, like, not really knowing even how to react. It was so overwhelming.VEDANTAM: The ordinary became extraordinary.PALLILEO: Just, like, a dramatic shift in the way that you're seeing the world. And that couch wasn't just the couch, and that room just - wasn't just a room, and this house actually had a meaning to it now.(SOUNDBITE OF ANTONY AND THE JOHNSON'S "GHOST")VEDANTAM: Psychologist sometimes refer to such emotional connections as parasocial relationships, one-way relationships. In some ways, they are akin to the imaginary friends that children have. As we grow up, we're told to set such relationships aside, to tuck our stuffed animals away in a closet. Clinging to imaginary companions can suggest that you are lonely or maladjusted. But what if there is more to these relationships than we realize?(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)VEDANTAM: This week on HIDDEN BRAIN - the thin line between the imaginary and the real.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)VEDANTAM: Growing up, Megan Lincoln was different from other kids. She tried to hide it, but her secret always came out, like when her teacher would make everyone go around the room reading aloud from a book.MEGAN LINCOLN: And then you would read as much as you wanted, and then you would say done, and then you would say someone else's name, and then they would pick up from there. So that would be the worst experience of my life because I didn't know when the person was going to be done and when my name was going to be called. So I would sit there trying to figure out how I could get out of the classroom because I couldn't read.VEDANTAM: It made her feel ashamed. She had workarounds. She would watch the movie instead of doing the reading or choose the book that had the most pictures or simply figure out a way to get out of the classroom. That was her best strategy - just try to escape. When all the other kids were exchanging their homework for another student to grade, she would raise her hand and say she had to go to the bathroom.LINCOLN: Yeah, I would stay there forever. I would slowly walk to the bathroom, and then I would hang out there, wash my hands a lot, look in the mirror - just do whatever I could to waste time.VEDANTAM: But one teacher, Ms. Doyle (ph), noticed Megan getting frustrated when she tried to read.LINCOLN: And so one day, she pulled me aside, and we were just talking about life and talking about how I was not dumb, really defining dyslexia for me and then telling me that there were other people in the world who were dyslexic, just like me. And, you know, she told me Winston Churchill. She told me Walt Disney. She told me Albert Einstein and Tom Cruise and told me Cher.(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, Sonny and Cher.(APPLAUSE)VEDANTAM: Something clicked in Megan's imagination.(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GET READY")CHER: (Singing) Whenever I'm asked who make my dreams real, I say that you do. You're out of sight.LINCOLN: Cher started popping up in my head all the time.VEDANTAM: She didn't know why.(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GET READY")CHER: (Singing) Look out, baby.LINCOLN: I mean, I loved Sonny and Cher. I loved their variety show. They were funny.(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE SONNY & CHER COMEDY HOUR")SONNY BONO: I have a photographic mind.CHER: Sonny, you know the only thing wrong with your photographic mind?BONO: What's that?CHER: It never developed.(LAUGHTER)LINCOLN: If you look at Cher and she goes on stage, she's not, quote-unquote, your stereotypical normal person.(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "60TH ACADEMY AWARDS")PAUL NEWMAN: The winner is Cher in "Moonstruck."(CHEERING)LINCOLN: She doesn't care if she's wearing this weird, old black outfit with, like - you know, where her thighs are showing, and she's got these crazy tights on. She doesn't care what people think about her.(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "60TH ACADEMY AWARDS")CHER: I want to thank my mom because when I was really young, my mom said, you're not going to be the smartest. You're not going to be the prettiest. You're not going to be the most talented, but you're going to be special.(CHEERING)LINCOLN: And I think as a young girl, not feeling confident of who I was, having someone who was so strong really made me feel that - why should I care what people are saying about me in the classroom?(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)VEDANTAM: One day, the Cher in her mind did something she hadn't done before - she talked to Megan.LINCOLN: It was Cher. It was her voice. It was her recognizable Cher voice.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)LINCOLN: She was as real to me as my friend next to me. I couldn't see her. I could just hear her. And it was real. It was her.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)VEDANTAM: After this happened a few times, Megan got used to it. She said, OK, it's Cher; she's talking to me.LINCOLN: She would only talk to me when I was feeling dumb or insecure. And if I was feeling, like, insecure for something that was not school- or reading- or writing-specific, her voice wouldn't appear.VEDANTAM: Now when Megan's anxiety swirled in, Cher would offer encouragement.LINCOLN: The one thing I always remembered her saying to me is, if you think you are dumb, then you think I am dumb, and I am not dumb. And then she would tell me to go back to reading or go back to trying to write something.VEDANTAM: And when she tried to hide out in the bathroom, Cher wouldn't let her.LINCOLN: I remember her telling me that it was smelly in the bathroom. Why are you sitting in a smelly bathroom? She's like, you're better than this. Go back and take that test. Confront the test. It'll be much better than sitting here in this smelly bathroom. And I would take my deep breath, and I would walk out, and I would smile, you know, and I'd probably curse her out a little bit, and I'd go back into that classroom and take that test. I never felt dumb after that.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)VEDANTAM: After her secret friend helped her for a few years, Megan started to feel more confident, and that's when Cher's voice disappeared.LINCOLN: It's kind of like Mary Poppins - the kids no longer needed her. Something in my head just told me I didn't need her, and she left. Maybe she went to someone other person's head who needed her. I don't know.VEDANTAM: Today, Megan has multiple degrees - a successful career. She's figured out how to manage her dyslexia. But she's been reluctant to tell people how Cher helped her. It sounds kind of strange.LINCOLN: You know, who has an inner voice that sounds like some celebrity? Only crazies do. I just tell people I love her.(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I GOT YOU BABE")SONNY AND CHER: (Singing) I got you, babe. I got you, babe. They say our love...VEDANTAM: Megan misses the comfort of Cher's voice. Every now and then, she tries to recreate it.LINCOLN: But it's me making her voice. It's different. You know what I'm saying? It was an inner voice. Yes, it was myself. I knew it really wasn't her. But I also didn't feel I was wise enough to be as wise as she was to me.(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I GOT YOU BABE")SONNY AND CHER: (Singing) I got you, babe. I got you, babe.VEDANTAM: The voices we hear, the secret friends we have, they often don't seem like mere extensions of ourselves. Megan said Cher seemed to be braver than she was, wiser than she was. The Cher in Megan's head knew things that Megan didn't know. How is this possible? How can one part of the mind know something that another part of the same mind does not know?When we come back, we explore this question in another domain. We look at people who hear not the voice of a singer or a celebrity but the voice of something much bigger.TANYA LUHRMANN: I mean, fundamentally, the story of God is a story about the human imagination. The human capacity to take seriously the sense that the world that we see before us is not all there is of the world.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)VEDANTAM: This is HIDDEN BRAIN. I'm Shankar Vedantam. As a young person, Tanya Luhrmann did not believe in God.LUHRMANN: I couldn't understand how people could believe in an omnipotent, omniscient maker who would allow people to suffer so much. It seemed logically incoherent to me.VEDANTAM: She was known among her peers as an atheist. She even wrote about it in an op-ed for her school newspaper. Her friends came up with their own version of the headline.LUHRMANN: The tagline in among my friends was that Luhr person (ph) does not believe in God. And I mean, I was called Luhr person because I was also a feminist and Luhrmann - anyway, that was the way my friends referred to me.VEDANTAM: Tanya's parents were also actively questioning the idea of religious faith. They had grown up in devout homes. Her mother's father was a Baptist minister. Her father's father was a Christian Scientist. But her father had become a determined atheist.LUHRMANN: At one point in college, he actually ceremoniously burnt his membership card to The Mother Church in Boston.VEDANTAM: Her mother kept going to church but loved to read books by Sam Harris, the atheist neuroscientist.LUHRMANN: You know, my mother also was torn. She just kind of wanted to believe, but it was - she found it logically tough.VEDANTAM: Although her dad disapproved, Tanya's mom took her to church every Sunday. Tanya found herself fascinated by how smart, good people could reach very different conclusions about God and religion.LUHRMANN: And I wanted to understand more about how things became real to people and how people came to decide that God was real, how they came to feel that the world was organized in a particular way.VEDANTAM: As Tanya grew up, she thought briefly about becoming a psychiatrist. Her dad was a psychiatrist but eventually settled on a different profession - anthropology. If psychiatrists have a set of descriptions about what constitutes normal behavior and assess when and how much people deviate from those norms, anthropology demands that you suspend judgment, that you try to understand people on their own terms from the inside out, rather than from the outside in.LUHRMANN: Anthropologists are, in some ways, little amoebas. We're trying to ask what it feels like to live in somebody else's world. And there's an anthropologist called Clifford Geertz who said that before you judge, you need to understand - and that that was the - kind of the moral impulse of our field. I think the people who become anthropologists want - they're curious about what it's like to walk in someone else's shoes. And I think that you don't do that well if you have a pretty clear view from the outside of what that other world is like.VEDANTAM: Tanya realized she was drawn to this approach. She wanted to immerse herself deeply with people whose frames and norms were different from her own.LUHRMANN: I mean, at some point, you need to come to a kind of moral reckoning with the world that you are looking at and your sense of who you are in your own world. But I do think that when you - to the extent that you can, when you let go of who you are and you try to become different, you see and feel things differently.VEDANTAM: In the spring of 1983, when she was 23 years old, Tanya decided to put this idea into practice. She was in England, doing her PhD in anthropology. She focused her field research on a group of people who believed they could cast spells and perform magic rituals. Tanya the rationalist was personally skeptical of these claims, but she had made a commitment to listen openly without judgment. She attended a retreat with about 50 practitioners at a beautiful remote manor house. The leader of the group was Gareth Knight. To Tanya, he looked like Merlin the Wizard.LUHRMANN: And he had the big shock of white hair. And he had flowing robes. I mean, you know, this was "Harry Potter" long before "Harry Potter."VEDANTAM: The goal of the weekend was to encounter what Gareth called contacts. He said contacts were highly evolved human beings no longer tethered to their bodies who could offer guidance. They were like wise, invisible people.LUHRMANN: And so he would just talk about them as if they were friends. He would, you know, stride up and down before the group of 50 people and talk about, you know, how we're going to do a big ritual event.VEDANTAM: Gareth explained that he would guide them through a spiritual exercise using a mystical set of pictures - a temple, a priestess, a hermit. He lit four candles and told everyone to close their eyes. They were now aboard a ship, he told them. And they were going to accompany him to another world.LUHRMANN: And what this man did during the weekend was to, in effect, tell story after story about these pictures in a way that he wanted us to experience these pictures as if we were living in a dream, as if we were going down a river or on a boat together. And we would get out of the boat. And we would look up, and we would see a temple. And there was the priestess. And this is what the priestess looked like. And he wanted us to experience those stories as if they were happening.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)VEDANTAM: Tanya had only planned to record the experiences of the group. But as she imagined the stories along with them at that initial retreat and subsequent meetings, she found that her own impressions were becoming a vital source of data.LUHRMANN: Over the first three or four months, it occurred to me that my mental images were becoming sharper, that they were becoming richer.VEDANTAM: She started attending the group's weekly dream interpretation class. And she began to keep a dream diary.LUHRMANN: And my dreams were becoming vivid and dripping with symbolism. I remember having this dream at one point in which what I knew was my soul was swimming across a river in a thunderstorm to scramble up the other side on this bank of mud. And I kept falling back, and then I'd go forward. And I remember waking up and thinking, oh, my goodness. I'm having different kinds of dreams. And that was a dream about my soul.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)VEDANTAM: It was like the work she was doing was changing the way her own mind worked. It was changing what she saw in the world, how she experienced the world.LUHRMANN: The world felt as if it was becoming more connected. It felt like I was having these synchronicities. Things would - you know, I'd walk to the greengrocer. And the greengrocer would say something that I had been thinking about. And so I would have these experiences. And then over the course of the year, you know, I really saw myself change, felt myself change.VEDANTAM: When I spoke to her, Tanya thought back to another moment when the line between the real and the imaginary became blurred - it was early during her field research, and she was on a train to meet Gareth Knight for the first time. She was reading a book about magic and mysticism. It was called "Experience Of The Inner Worlds."LUHRMANN: And it was about the experience of power and this idea of a power outside of me that was present and kind of there in the world. It was kind of new to me.VEDANTAM: The book was esoteric and complex. And she strained her mind to understand it.(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: On the cabalistic Tree of Life framework, we see a method of theosophical classification that's able to take in the concept of both creator and the creation. This is not so evident...LUHRMANN: And he was talking about Tibetan this and cabalistic that and white light that. And I remember kind of just trying to understand the sentences and concentrating so hard. And there are people around me talking. And I was trying to really focus on the book.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)VEDANTAM: Right then, she started to feel hot.LUHRMANN: I began to feel power, like an electrical charge that seemed to move through me starting above me and moving through my body and going into the floor. And it was strong. And it was vivid. And I felt fantastic. I felt more alive. I felt completely alert, seeing - like, all of my senses were incredibly sharp.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)LUHRMANN: And as I was feeling this way and trying to figure out what on Earth was going on, I looked over, and there were wisps of smoke coming out of my bag.VEDANTAM: A battery-powered bike lamp she had stored in her bag was melting.LUHRMANN: (Laughter) It's like, the battery was melting in these bicycle lights.VEDANTAM: Now, there are two ways to think of this. You can say Tanya's thoughts about power melted the battery. Or you can say, huh, interesting coincidence. But the point is if you put yourself in a frame of mind where you expect unusual things to happen, you're more likely to see unusual things happen. The time she spent with Gareth and the others taught Tanya something very important about the imagination. It's a skill. You can improve it, make it sharper. You can practice it. And when you do, remarkable things follow.LUHRMANN: There's all kinds of things that people experience. But what I can say is that the more time you spend doing what I would call inner sense cultivation, the more likely you are to report these events, that people have these moments in which, in effect, what they're imagining breaks forth into the world.VEDANTAM: As she did more research, Tanya realized there was a profound disconnect in the way people think about the imagination today and the way they used to think about it in earlier times.LUHRMANN: I think the emphasis on the imagination as something that is obviously not material emerges with the secular world, with a sense that there - that what is real is the stuff that we walk on and the things that we see that everybody else can see. And that what is other is not that real stuff.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)VEDANTAM: Tanya went on to become a professor of anthropology at Stanford University. In 2002, she began some new fieldwork focused on another group of people - evangelical Christians who wanted to develop an intense personal relationship with God. They were practicing what she calls inner sense cultivation.LUHRMANN: And I was interviewing some young, blonde Southern Californian who's kind of like - her hair would swing back and forth. She looked like she belonged at the beach. And I was asking her all these pedantic questions, and at one point, she said, you know, if you want to understand God, just have a cup of coffee with him.VEDANTAM: Other people told her similar things. The way to make an abstract, invisible entity real in your life was to do things with that entity that you would do with a spouse or a co-worker.LUHRMANN: But, I mean, what people would say is that you needed to get to know God the way you would get to know somebody when you went out for coffee with them. You became a friend of the person. You asked about their life; they asked about your life. You had a back-and-forth. You learn to know each other. You learn to trust each other. And that that's how you should get to know God.VEDANTAM: It was like what she had learned in London during the dream sessions some 20 years earlier.LUHRMANN: They're using very similar kinds of what I would call spiritual practices. They were inviting people to use external symbols, props, and internal images, stories, in order to allow the person to enter a world which is not the world of the day-to-day and to come to experience that world as if it is present, as if it's real.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)VEDANTAM: Tanya met people who said they had practiced these techniques so often that they could interact with God as if God was a living, breathing person. Ever the skeptical scientist, Tanya decided to see if the things she was hearing from evangelical Christians were reproducible in a scientific experiment. She randomly assigned some Christians to practice prayer that involved imagining a very intense personal relationship with God.She had them read a story from the Bible in which Jesus was represented in different forms - for example, as a baby, a shepherd or on the cross. Then she asked subjects to interact with Jesus in their minds using all of their senses - sight, sound, smell, touch. Here's an example of one set of instructions related to the Bible's 23rd psalm, which says, the Lord is my shepherd.UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Reading) See the shepherd before you. See his face, his eyes, the light that streams from him. He turns to walk, and you follow him. Notice his gait. See the heel over which he leads you. Feel the breeze over the grass. Smell its sweetness. Listen to the birds as they sing. Notice what you feel as you followed the shepherd.VEDANTAM: Tanya invited the volunteers back after a month. She asked them what had happened in their minds in the intervening weeks. People in the imaginative prayer group responded very differently than people in the control group.LUHRMANN: So I found that people in the prayer group were more likely to say that their mental images were vivid. They were more likely to say that God felt more like a person to them, that they were more likely to have gotten angry at God or become playful with God. They were also more likely to say they'd had a moment, when they had heard God speak in a way they could hear with their ears, or they had seen something that wasn't materially real in the world, or they'd had some vivid sense of God's presence.They were more likely to say that they'd had an experience as if what had to be experienced in the mind had somehow broken free, and it was experienced with the senses, as if it sort of jumped out side of the mind-world barrier and was felt by them in the world.VEDANTAM: It was like what happened to Megan. The Cher she imagined in her mind became Cher.LINCOLN: It was Cher. It was her voice. It was her recognizable Cher voice.VEDANTAM: As people consciously exercised their imaginations, their imaginations stopped feeling like imagination.LUHRMANN: I would ask people whether God was like an imaginary friend, and people would always correct me. People would say, oh, no, he's not imaginary. Then they'd talk about him as if he was kind of like an invisible being who walked by their side and who, you know, put his arm around their shoulders. People would tell me about sitting next to God on a park bench, and they were talking to him about their life, and they were asking him about his life. And people - they did that.VEDANTAM: People told Tanya that they experienced the same curious sensation that Megan experienced with Cher. The voice of God inside their heads may have sprung from an exercise of the imagination, but it somehow seemed to stand apart from their own minds. It seemed to know more than they did. It seemed to know them better than they knew themselves. It became a source of comfort, of guidance.LUHRMANN: People would, in effect, take bits and pieces of the best parts of their relationships with other people and they'd kind of weave them together so that in this what you might almost call play therapy, they are interacting with these different parts of God and then kind of changing their understanding of God and then talking about God. And so they're always working on their God concept.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)VEDANTAM: What does it look and sound like to work on your God concept? How do believers distinguish the voice of God from their own hopes and dreams and desires? And what lessons can these imaginings hold for all people, religious and nonreligious? When we come back, we go to California to meet one o