Coping With Crossdressing

Essays & Strategies for dealing with crossdressing issues.

Double Denial

© 1991 by Janet Powers & CDS

He proved to be a contradiction, the first happy one in Janet's tortured existence. Nothing about him suggested he might be a guide, there to lead her out of Hell and into life's better light.
The wall full of degrees said nothing about "guide." The framed documents identified him as a psychiatrist and he looked the part. A shade over six feet, bald with neat gray side hair, an aquiline nose that belonged on a bust in ancient Rome, he lounged in his molded easy chair like Caesar. He was courtly with no visible humor. He treated his pen and notebook as minor adjuncts. One hardly noticed when he scribbled. His three-piece suit belonged in the Harvard Club.
John sat across from him, fiftyish, full of guilt and remorse, sober but puffy from years of quiet but heavy drinking. He was there to be saved, to be straightened out, to be again one of the "normal" people who love to set rules for others. John had accepted those standards slavishly all his life.
Now John sipped coffee with this daunting man, admitting a destructive addiction, happy to have ended at last the denial of his problem, pleased with the reactions of family, friends and colleagues when he said he was going away to get healthy. He was determined to do it but equally sure there was no need to discuss his other denial. One denial is enough, isn't it?
No need? Ha! There was every need. It was the core of the problem, the heart of the matter. And it was out in minutes. John was only half the person; there was also Janet.
It was the second of 10 sessions. Doctor complained John had fenced with him in their first talk, that the patient who doesn't trust the doctor wastes the time of both. "You're hiding something," Doctor said, "Tell me. I am a professional." Out it came. John's lip quivered and he wept. Janet broke through, not her usual gentle self, but more a flood erupting through a weakened dike.
"I like to wear girls' clothes" said John/Janet. "So," said Doctor, "that's not so bad. Let's talk about it. Do you get sexual satisfaction out of it?" "Sometimes,"J/J replied. "But more and more, I just feel complete and real. I feel whole and it's the only time I feel at peace with myself. I can't explain it." "You just did." They were off on a fascinating tour.
When that session ended, it was the physician who said, "Let her out; you have got to let her out. You're killing yourself."
He wanted to know everything. J/J grew increasingly eager to tell.
John could not remember when Janet was not there from the earliest, probably from birth. With a sister and a couple of close girl cousins, there was ample opportunity to dress as one of them. They summered at grandfather's country house and J/J's warmest memories are of role-reversal games in that happy place. It was innocent, but there was a tacit understanding that there was no need to tell the adults, who wouldn't understand.
The teen years were a period of intense emotional turmoil, more so than for most other kids. J/J was heterosexual but cherished an enduring sweet memory of brief freedom for Janet at age 16 at that country house, where John had gone alone to close it for the winter.
John was sensitive about his slight build and the gibes of the bigger kids ("You walk like a girl.") There was a thing called World War II when he finished high school. John joined one of the more macho military outfits and fought with distinction and surprising savagery in the final months of the war. There were no taunts when John came home.
But Janet was always there. John liked to accompany his buddies to female impersonator shows. They would laugh and applaud the more convincing performers. Inside,John fought a raging jealousy.
After the war it was college, then love and marriage. John thought marriage would "cure" him. It didn't, of course. It was his worst deceit.
Janet never really went away. She was a person with her own desire for life, with an instinct for survival as strong as anyone's. She burst out periodically, and inevitably John's spouse caught him. He was dressed in her clothes and she was staggered by the fact itself and by the quality of the transformation. They had it out, J/J still dressed. He promised to quit but could no more stifle that other self than he could murder in cold blood.
He settled for a few pairs of undies hidden in a junk drawer. He also found a way to forget Janet. It was called drink. Alcohol, booze, the sauce, the magic elixir that substitutes oblivion for pain. He was a world class drinker in a few years.
Every alcoholic knows that one piece of advice they receive is sincere but wrong. That's the one that says "It [the booze] doesn't work." Of course it works. It can tinge grim life with a roseate glow, or provide an unconsciousness in which one literally feels no pain. It works. It is, of course, also fatal.
It was some dim sense of that, or perhaps some grace beyond the ken of theologians, that took J/J to that alcoholism program and that psychiatrist. The crushing hangovers and the bitter indescribable frustration were simply the immediate impetus.
If one can call so fateful a confrontation with life "fun" the rest of J/J's time with Doctor was fun. Janet first noticed the warm brown eyes that belied the dignified mien. Doctor encouraged J/J to laugh; he joked about Janet having to put hot towels " ...on that face for a year to unboil it." In J/J's presence he called an anxious spouse and laid it all out.
But he was serious too. Get yourself a wig and proper clothing and agree on times when Janet can exist without guilt or conflict, he counseled. He said he found a more than 60 percent female persona. He said letting her live would permit both to live.
When they parted, he shrugged and said "We don't know anything about these things. You probably should have been a girl."
That was 10 years ago and drink ceased to be a problem when J/J walked out of that office. Neither one spends time on remorse over the wasted years and the bitter frustration. John tries to let more of Janet rub off on his once bristly personality. Thanks to a mystified but patient spouse, Janet appears with increasing frequency, enjoying in the afternoon of life a peace she had never known.
None of this suggests that the cure for alcoholism is to switch clothing. But we know there are others whose second selves, whose feminine natures, are being drowned in booze. Fear, embarrassment, lack of courage, whatever the reason, the result is a far more deadly denial than gainsaying a drinking problem. Double Denial is a ticket to hell or insanity.
To any who struggle with that nightmare, J and J can quote a great human being. "Let her out; you have got to let her out."

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