7.Deborah Grey — Direct (Part 2)

DEBORAH GREY: What I used to think when I was a young social worker was what does it matter if they don't remember? It's the ones who remember who are going to be affected by this. But what I found out over time with developments in brain science is that's far from true. What I found out is you take a baby and you do something that seriously frightens or scares that baby --

DEBORAH GREY: And when that happens to a baby over time, they get sort of frozen in this fight or flight place. Their little switch gets stuck. Fight, flight or freeze is what human beings do in response to that kind of trauma. And that what happens to an infant who's in this kind of traumatic environment from early days on. Dr. Bigler said between the time of birth and three years old, you go from 25 percent of your brain volume to 90 percent of your brain volume. This is what's happening --

DEBORAH GREY: Yes.

DEBORAH GREY: He has an aunt who, at some point, when she had a young baby and needed a place to stay and she came to stay in the house. And within two weeks, she said this is too crazy for my baby, I'm getting out of here. And she left. And Tim, Jr. was still there.

DEBORAH GREY: That was his home, yeah.

DEBORAH GREY: This would be from about age three until about age ten, probably.

DEBORAH GREY: His dad met and married, for the third time, a woman named Carolyn. And eventually, his dad moved in with Carolyn and they had two children, Tyler and Travis, Irish twins, born within about 11 months of each other. When Tim was ten, 11 and 12.

DEBORAH GREY: Yes.

DEBORAH GREY: It's in Illinois, outside of Chicago.

DEBORAH GREY: I think it's in Algonquin.

DEBORAH GREY: Tim had the perception that he wasn't wanted by his stepmother. He presented that to me and he presented it to another counselor that he saw back in 2012, that she told him that she wasn't wanted there. He felt unwanted, regardless of what she told him. She was a young woman with two small children and a budding adolescent for a stepson. Tim became very preoccupied with the idea that he wasn't wanted there. There was domestic violence in this house. In 1995, when Tim was 13 years old, there's a police report that shows that Tim, Sr. choked Carolyn and punched her in the chest. She wanted to sign a complaint saying this was an ongoing thing and once he was placed into custody, he began pleading with her until the complainant stated she wouldn't sign the complaint. But the police said they would press charges and they told him he couldn't go home for three days. And what Carolyn has told me is there were times when things would get violent between the two of them, she would call the police just to have him removed from the home. There was another police report just a year later that said that Tim, Sr. had struck Carolyn on the back of her legs and then choked her. And he was convicted of misdemeanor domestic battery and placed on supervision. So the relationship between Tim, Sr. and Carolyn had become one that had a lot of tension, a lot of fighting, arguing, yelling, threatening.

DEBORAH GREY: He would retreat to his bedroom if he could. Sometimes, he would go over to Roberta's house, but that had some issues. There were times at this point that he had some friends that he skateboarded with who had an opportunity to see Tim with his family and said that it looked to him, the person that told me this, that Tim looked like a scared puppy when he was around his dad. But Tim also got into religion about that period of time after his little brothers were born. He started going on the weekends to a church all-day-type experience that he really, really liked. And what he reported was that he felt lost and abandoned by a mother, but he felt loved and accepted by Jesus Christ. And so he was attending there on a regular basis. His father saw him becoming kind of extreme in his responses, that he was taking the Bible very literally. And came home and said we can't go swimming anymore because women are wearing bathing suits there and I can't be around things that might promote lust. He was critical of his stepmother for wearing shorts or for wearing pants because women should wear dresses and they shouldn't cut their hair and they shouldn't wear makeup. His father continued to tell him that he thought this was kind of warped and, eventually, Tim, Jr. left, stopped going to church.

DEBORAH GREY: Yes.

DEBORAH GREY: One of the things that happened for Tim, Jr. was that he started hearing a voice inside his head that he called an imaginary friend. This was a voice that was there pretty frequently. He would talk to it. It would talk back. Sometimes he would talk out loud, but not if he knew there were people around. He knew on some level that an imaginary friend was something that was normal for little kids. But he wasn't a little kid anymore and so, he knew it wasn't completely normal. And he worried that maybe he was going to turn out like his mother and so he didn't tell anybody and he kept that to himself. The voice offered him comfort, offered him solace, offered him, in a sense, friendship for a kid who didn't have or feel like he had much of that going on on the outside. He got to a place where he started crying a lot, couldn't stop crying. Started ruminating, starting thinking about not having a mother, about how horrible it was to not have a mother. He started thinking that people could look at him and tell that he didn't have a mother, that there was something wrong with him that he didn't have a mother. When his family talked about his mom, they talked about her being crazy and so, he started wondering if maybe he was such a bad child that he had driven his mother crazy, that he had driven her away. This was on his mind a lot. He had reached the point where he thought people could look at him and tell he didn't have a mother because they could read his thoughts, they could know that. Somewhere about this time, he heard a voice. And this wasn't the voice of the imaginary friend, it was a harsh voice, it was a scary voice. It was something that scared him and frightened him and it said just go ahead and kill yourself.

DEBORAH GREY: He was. He was sexually assaulted by someone in the neighborhood, a gentleman who coerced him into performing oral sex on him, something that he felt ashamed of, that he felt was dirty. And with everything else in his life, he kept it a secret.

DEBORAH GREY: In 1995, Tim's younger sister, Elaine, Roberta's second child, died of cancer. She had had serious problems with drugs prior to that. She didn't realize until fairly late stage that she was ill and so she died quickly. And that loss was terrible for this family, terrible for Tim, Sr. and Roberta. Tim, Sr., who had been having problems with alcohol and violence in the home, his drinking increased. And, in fact, the second one of those police reports that I told you about came after his sister, Elaine, died. It was hard for Tim, too. He was very close to his Aunt Elaine.

DEBORAH GREY: It did. Tim's relationship with his dad up to this point has been described as increasingly angry. That when Tim, Sr. would drink, he would become verbally abusive to Tim, calling him names, calling him a little MF'er. He would yell. He would say things like you think you're an F'ing man and would start throwing things around the house. One of the police reports we got reflects that he was throwing things around the house. And Tim kept a very low profile while that was happening. He tried to keep a low profile. He knew there wasn't anything he could do to stop it or to make it better. If he could get to his room, he would get to his room. But, frequently, his dad didn't want him to leave while this was going on. So after Elaine's death, Tim started drinking more. He drank Crown Royal. And the family knew if he showed up with Crown that it could be a difficult night, that he'd be drinking. Sometimes when he drank, he would get sad and just sob. Other times when he would drink, he would get angry and he would get violent. So it got worse for both Carolyn and for Tim.

DEBORAH GREY: Not at all. If you think about it, this is a family that has learned to self-medicate the pain that they have as a result of what they've been through in their lives. So he's drinking alcohol and he is violent, as his mom was violent, as his dad was violent. He is not dealing with his emotions in a way that is healthy. He's dealing with them by acting out, by fighting, by taking it out on other people.

DEBORAH GREY: He went to live with Roberta, I believe -- because the family moved from Roberta's neighborhood to a neighborhood one town over. And staying there with Roberta allowed him to continue in the same school for a year. So he stayed with Roberta during the course of that year. And subsequently, he went to live in another town and changed schools.

DEBORAH GREY: Tim had historically always done well in school, very well in school, 70th, 80th percentile in yearend testing. His grades were good. He was especially good in science and in math. And as he went on into high school, he was taking a lot of advanced placement classes, sometimes at the local junior college. So school was a place where he knew that he could excel. And also one of the things that I should add that the family has said is that Tim had always placed a very high importance on being right, on being the authority and on attention. And that is something that the family had noted from the time that he was a little boy. I look at that and I think about the fact that Tim was compromised socially, from the family's description. He didn't have friends. He didn't socialize. His currency, if you will, was his cognitive currency, his intellect. That was the way that he felt like maybe he could get respect, maybe he could interact with people. That was important to him.

DEBORAH GREY: In Tim's family, his grandmother had come out in fifth grade and his dad pretty much stopped attending after the eighth grade and his mom came out in ninth grade. His family was so tied up in their own struggles that they had not been able to focus on education.

DEBORAH GREY: Tim had two car accidents, each within a year of each other. In the first one, he injured his leg severely enough that he missed a lot of school, which is significant. He also had a head injury that subsequently was seen to be an old injury because it was caving in. If you're close to Tim, what you can see is he has this dent in his head and stitches run across it like a little zipper almost from the second injury. So the second one, same place, bashed the head once again and then he had multiple stitches there. What's significant is that nobody saw this as something that was needing treatment at that point. And there may not have been anything that could have been done at that point. What it caused in terms of changes for him over the course of his lifetime from then on is unknown. What the family says is that they haven't observed changes, that he just became a teenager. As he just became a teenager, he was somewhat different from how he had been before.