Two With One Stone

By Jessica Lake

I stand at the intersection of neurodivergence, gender dysphoria, severe childhood trauma, and a particular temperament.

For most of my life, neither I nor the people around me possessed the language to explain what that combination produced. It took two years of therapy, research, and relentless analysis before the pieces finally fit together.

The result is a story that is complex, extreme, and profoundly sad.

To others I might have appeared to be an intellectual and athletic polymath: an engineer who solved difficult technical problems, a martial artist, dancer, singer, writer, and lifelong student of almost anything that interested me. I seemed disciplined, capable, endlessly curious, and adaptable.

Inside, however, I was the opposite. I felt defective, splintered, and perpetually clueless. I was a man struggling to understand who I was. A man in extremis. Adrift in a tempest of intrusive thoughts—worthlessness, inadequacy, suicide.

Who was I?

Why was I so different?

Why was I so broken?

My twin selves could not have been farther apart.

The good news: I finally understood myself.

The bad news: it took seventy-four years.

My rudest awakening was discovering that what I thought I shared with humankind was, in important ways, a burden of mine alone. I had spent a lifetime assuming that other people experienced themselves as I did.

They did not.

This paper discusses two of my most crippling adaptations: the Pejorative Self and the Surrogate Loop.

They appear very different.

I now think they are siblings.

Pejorative Self

We set our story in 1958, Norwalk, Connecticut. It begins with little Oliver Twist starting first grade. The boy is perhaps a bit too small and skinny.

The teacher begins class.

Oliver speaks out of turn.

Not a problem. Lots of boys get overexcited.

“Oliver, if you need to speak, raise your hand. Then I will call on you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” comes the tidy little reply.

The next day he blurts out another answer.

The teacher smiles patiently.

“Remember, Oliver. Raise your hand first.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Weeks pass.

The interruptions mount.

The teacher changes his seat. She praises him when he remembers. She gently redirects him when he forgets. She speaks with his parents. She tries encouragement. She tries consequences.

Nothing seems to make a difference.

Three months later, the teacher sits at the filter end of a Virginia Slim in the faculty lounge.

“I just can’t get through to this boy. The kid never stops talking. Half of what he says seems to come from another conversation. But other than that, he’s a sweet kid. I don’t know what else to try.”

At home, little Oliver labors to be good.

Bump.

“Just shut up.”

Bump.

“Just shut up.”

Bump.

In the morning there is a circular indentation in the wall.

Just about the size of a little boy’s forehead.

It is a beautiful June day.

The school year has come to an end.

The teacher gathers the last of her things.

“Why couldn’t I reach him? I tried everything I know. Rewards. Patience. Gentle reminders. Consequences. Nothing changed. He’s as disruptive today as he was the day we met. Maybe he’ll mature over the summer. Maybe this is simply who he is.”

Leaving work for a joyful summer, she smiles.

“Thankfully, next year, he will be somebody else’s problem.”

THE END

For years, I assumed my pejorative self-image came from the way other people treated me.

That certainly mattered.

Criticism?

It was emotional and physical abuse. Public shaming and social isolation were the go-to tools of the day. My classmates wanted me gone. My teachers were perpetually disappointed in me. I was smart but lazy. Capable but unwilling. Bright but rebellious.

But I now think something more subtle happened.

I judged myself.

Long before I became my own accuser, I was already trying to change myself.

I knew my behavior was causing everyone problems. I knew I was disappointing my teachers. More than anything, I wanted to become a good boy.

I tried.

I failed.

I promised myself I would do better.

I failed again.

And there was a terrible logic available to me.

A person makes a mistake.

He learns from it.

Then he does better.

But I didn’t.

I knew I had made a mistake.

I knew what I was supposed to do instead.

I sincerely intended to do it differently next time.

Then I did the same thing again.

What do you call a person who doesn’t learn from his mistakes?

Broken.

Nobody had to teach me that conclusion.

I could reach it myself.

The problem wasn’t what I did.

The problem was who I am.

That was the moment misbehavior became identity.

I was no longer a good child who did the wrong things.

I was a bad child.

And something remarkable happened outside the boy at exactly the same time.

Authority reached essentially the same conclusion.

The teacher knew I understood the rule.

The teacher knew I had been corrected.

The teacher knew I had promised to behave.

And yet I did it again.

So they did what authority does when ordinary correction fails.

They escalated.

More consequences.

More punishment.

More shame.

More isolation.

The boy and authority were reasoning from the same evidence.

Neither of us possessed the missing explanation.

I wasn’t refusing to learn.

I had learned.

Knowing the rule simply wasn’t sufficient to curb a behavior outside my control.

But neither the teacher nor the boy knew that.

So our conclusions fell into synchronism.

I concluded that something was wrong with me.

Authority behaved as though something was wrong with me.

My judgment justified their punishment.

Their punishment confirmed my judgment.

The waves reinforced one another.

A rogue wave.

Over time, I exhausted my own armory. Every weapon I possessed—determination, promises, self-control, willpower—had failed to produce the child everyone, including me, wanted me to become.

Therefore I borrowed the weapons of my antagonist.

Not their verdict.

I had already reached that myself.

I borrowed their methods.

If punishment was the teacher’s preferred instrument, perhaps punishment was what I needed.

If shame corrected behavior, perhaps I needed more shame.

If humiliation produced obedience, perhaps I had not yet humiliated myself enough.

I did not become my own teacher because I had given up.

I became my own teacher because I still believed I could succeed.

The goal was correction.

Again, that singular memory fragment has been with me always. I remember standing at my grandmother’s house, repeatedly striking my head against a wall while saying:

“Why can’t you just shut up?”

I was both the child and the teacher.

I was both the accused and the judge.

I believed that if I punished myself severely enough, I might finally become the good boy everyone expected me to be.

And from that came another rule:

Nothing for you until you’ve learned to behave.

That is not self-hatred.

Not yet.

It would come in time.

It is discipline.

Good boys receive rewards.

Bad boys do not deserve them.

So I denied myself pleasure. I refused to burden other people. I learned to live with less than I required. I held myself to standards I would never have imposed upon another human being.

Every failure demanded another rule.

Every disappointment required another restriction.

Nothing good for you.

Not yet.

First learn to behave.

But I never did.

The sentence never reached its end.

Over time, discipline became something else.

If punishment is reserved for the bad child and rewards are reserved for the good child, then repeated self-punishment carries an implicit lesson.

I was teaching myself, day after day, which kind of child I was.

I did not merely believe I had done bad things.

I gradually came to believe I was the kind of person who did not deserve the things good people deserved.

If that is true, then unworthiness was not the beginning of the process.

It was its conclusion.

And the evidence fades to black.

I had spent years acting as my own teacher, my own judge, and my own executioner.

Eventually I accepted the verdict.

This is, of course, an inference. I have no episodic memories that allow me to watch this process unfold.

What I have are its artifacts.

The rules I lived by.

The punishments I imposed upon myself.

And the person I eventually became.

The tragedy is not merely that a child was punished.

The tragedy is that the child joined in.

Surrogate Loop

But the Pejorative Self created another problem.

Nothing good for you until you learn to behave.

What happens to all the good things?

Before going further, I should point out that the basic ingredients of this model are not whole cloth. Developmental trauma, attachment theory, and related fields have long recognized that children can develop powerful adaptations under duress. Dependence can become associated with danger. Receiving can become dangerous while giving remains safe. People can become caregivers, protectors, or compulsive providers because occupying the dependent position feels threatening.

My contribution, if there is one, is not the discovery of these individual pieces.

It is the way they are stitched together.

I have come to think of human beings as possessing powerful social imperatives: love, attachment, belonging, acceptance, identity, agency, affection, meaning, beauty.

Duress did not create my underlying architecture.

It supplied constraints.

Most were trying to keep me safe.

And constraints do not necessarily eliminate an objective.

They can eliminate the admissible paths to it.

My rules became something like these:

Don’t depend.

Don’t ask.

Don’t receive.

Stay in control.

Survive.

And now another conflict appeared.

The social human still existed.

Love still existed.

Attachment still existed.

Belonging still existed.

Pleasure still existed.

But some of the ordinary routes toward them had become inadmissible.

Close connection carried danger.

Dependence carried danger.

Receiving carried danger.

Wanting something from another person placed me in their hands.

For years I thought the Servant Child was telling me:

“You are not allowed.”

I now think the rule was more specific.

Nothing good for you.

Not until you have learned to behave.

The engine had a problem.

It needed another route.

And eventually it found one.

A surrogate.

Rather than satisfying those needs directly, I could satisfy them through someone else.

I could provide love instead of receiving it.

I could create happiness instead of pursuing it.

I could give pleasure instead of asking for it.

Through empathy, another person’s fulfillment became available to me vicariously.

The good things had not disappeared.

I had reversed the direction of flow.

And that reversal satisfied the duress rules.

I did not have to ask.

I did not have to depend.

I did not have to receive.

Most importantly, I remained in control.

I was never the vulnerable one.

I was the one generating the love, the attachment, the recognition, the pleasure, and the belonging.

The other person could receive everything that I could not safely claim for myself.

And through them, I could experience it from the safe side of the transaction.

Vicariously.

The two adaptations now look very different from where they began.

The Pejorative Self turned authority inward.

I became my own teacher.

My own judge.

My own disciplinarian.

The Surrogate Loop turned fulfillment outward.

Another person became the safe recipient of what I could not give myself.

One adaptation internalized the antagonist.

The other externalized the beneficiary.

Both obeyed the same underlying constraints.

Neither required a broken engine.

Quite the opposite.

The engine kept finding solutions.

That single strategy appears to explain far more than I first imagined. It explains my relationships, my sexuality, the structure of my fantasies, the way I masturbated, and, perhaps most importantly, how I survived.

Whether this model ultimately proves correct is for others to decide.

I cannot replay the process and watch it happen.

I have only the surviving architecture and its rules.

But for the first time in seventy-four years, I have an explanation that accounts for the evidence as a system rather than as isolated pieces.

The boy was trying to become good.

He never stopped trying.

When he could not change himself, he punished himself.

When he could not safely receive, he learned to give.

And when the good things could not belong to him—

he found someone else to give them to.