A few months ago, ABC announced a reboot of their 1990’s sitcom, Roseanne. It was a controversial decision made by ABC (the home of a progressive show on the other end of the spectrum: Blackish) to give airtime to a woman who had repeatedly shown herself through the years to be overtly, unapologetically, disturbingly hateful, paranoid, and flagrantly racist.

Immediately following the announcement, a photo taken a few years ago re-emerged on Twitter of Roseanne Barr dressed as a Nazi putting people-shaped cookies into an oven. It was both horrifying and mind-boggling.  Seeing such a disgusting lack of empathy on full display by a Jewish woman in modern day America to conceive of, pose for, and circulate that photo seemed both outrageous and utterly inconceivable.

With the onset of and regular use of social media to express opinions, ideas, and beliefs, not surprisingly, Roseanne Barr has also emerged as an outspoken Trump supporter who stokes destructive, ugly, even outdated and disproved conspiracy theories, continuing to tout them as facts. She has regularly used social media to promote divisive, contradictory ideologies that are shockingly sadistic. Because of Roseanne’s outspoken support of Trump, the objective of her reboot seemed to be an attempt by ABC to mirror the divisiveness in our country by juxtaposing her real-world politics with the other half of the country who abhors the ideologies espoused by the Trump Administration. The 2018 version of her sitcom seemed to be an attempt to “bridge” the divide in our country.

But, in late May, a tweet appeared in her account about a former Obama aide, Valerie Jarret, which said “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.” This tweet is so overtly racist, even ABC could no longer ignore the hatefulness Roseanne displayed and pulled the plug on season two.

Later, after the Valerie Jarrett tweet surfaced, there were at least two prominent comedians, who despite their liberal leanings, were  going out of their way to express concern and compassion for Roseanne. They explained to the public that her racist tweet was the result of her history of “Multiple Personality Disorder.” Other prominent performers and fellow cast members also came to her defense stating that despite evidence to the contrary, she is not racist, a contradictory and perplexing stance to take under the circumstances.

As a clinical psychologist who has worked extensively with patients diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) in a variety of settings, that Valerie Jarrett tweet seemed so simultaneously childish, sadistic and bizarrely cryptic that it could not possibly have come from a sane or healthy mind.

Any standard Google search will yield several interviews done with Roseanne through the years in which she details what her childhood and adolescence were like – how ugly and disturbing her experience had been. Roseanne is the eldest of four siblings born to Jewish parents in 1952 in Salt Lake City, Utah, not an area of the United States known for its ethnic diversity. The Holocaust had ended only seven years earlier, and the scars were still fresh in the minds of many. Roseanne’s father’s family had immigrated to the United States from Russia, her mother’s from Austria-Hungary and Lithuania, which means that prior to their departure from Europe, her parents and grandparents had to survive horror, atrocity, and pervasive, sadistic fear, due to being Jewish during World War II. Like many Jews during that era, the desperation to avoid drawing attention to their Jewish identities and risk stoking further prejudice compelled her paternal grandfather to change his surname from “Borisofsky” to “Barr” upon entering the United States.

As the daughter of Jewish Immigrants, Roseanne’s upbringing was influenced by her devoutly Orthodox Jewish maternal grandmother. The pressure, paranoia, mixed messages, identity confusion, and inevitable traumatic stress that must have existed within her family was palpable. Her family’s attempts to blend included being partially involved in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Barr’s father made his living as a door-to-door bible salesman, compelling Roseanne and her family to keep their Jewish heritage a secret from their community. In her book Roseanne: My Life as a Woman, she writes, “Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning I was a Jew; Sunday afternoon, Tuesday afternoon, and Wednesday afternoon we were Mormons.”

One person who wasn’t fooled by their attempts to keep their Jewish identities a secret was a man who lived down the street. “Our neighbor on the corner was a German. He’d come straight over from Nazi Germany after the war,” Roseanne told Esquire in 2001. “He used to torture me every day. I’d come home and tell my mother, `He’s hitting me; he locked me in his garage and called me a Jew bitch and said Hitler was right!’ And my mother would go, `You’re making this up!’” The fact that there was no safe place for Roseanne to go, no one in her life willing to protect her from being repeatedly and ritualistically terrorized by a Nazi living down the street is reason enough to seek ways to escape the abuse any way she could, which for a child in that position often means seeking shelter in one’s mind since removing self physically isn’t an option.

Roseanne’s history of being tortured and abused wasn’t just limited to sources outside the family. There are numerous accounts of abuse at the hands of her parents, with her father demonstrating severely disturbing behaviors toward her and her siblings, and her mother, likely shell-shocked, passive or unwilling to intervene. The details of the abuse she endured are deeply disturbing and point to how and why she developed “multiple personalities.”  In a 1991 interview with People magazine, she reported, “My father molested me until I left home at age 17. He constantly put his hands all over me. He forced me to sit on his lap, to cuddle with him, to play with his penis in the bathtub. He did grotesque and disgusting things: He used to chase me with his excrement and try to put it on my head. He’d lie on the floor playing with himself. It was the most disgusting thing you can ever imagine.”

Roseanne’s existence must have been so wretched, her life so miserable, her sense of self so fragmented, her self-loathing so severe that at 16 years old, she attempted to suicide in an extremely violent way: by jumping in front of a car. Her suicide attempt resulted in a traumatic brain injury (TBI). As a result, she spent nine months in an inpatient psychiatric hospital. To add further insult to injury, while admitted, she gave birth to a child, which she put up for adoption. It is alarming to consider what must have transpired for her to become pregnant either right before or right after being hit by a car and having to spend the duration of the pregnancy as an inpatient in a psychiatric hospital.

Being a survivor of ritualistic abuse – physical, sexual, psychological, and incurring a traumatic brain injury – makes it extraordinarily difficult to feel as if you are in control of your mind or your body. There’s very little description of Roseanne’s TBI, except for a few short mentions in interviews such as THIS from the Boston Herald in which she describes “auditory hallucinations” after her accident. Still, from the few available sources, it seems clear that her brain was fractured inside her head. Of note, the brains of people who have endured abuse in childhood can lack connectivity, as if their brains have been severed into different compartments, according to MRI studies.

Depending on the magnitude and repetitive nature of the abuse, survivors have to survive by developing internal coping strategies to mentally “leave the scene of the crime,” because they can’t leave physically. These strategies of dissociation can range from “spacing out” while being abused, to escaping the horror, guilt, pain, and shame by adopting, believing in, possessing and acting out different identities. In its most extreme form, a survivor may develop a slew of different identities or personalities to cope with what is happening to them, which is why the MRI of the brain of a person who survived childhood abuse looks like it’s severed into compartments.

Furthermore, Roseanne’s description of her TBI implies damage to the frontal lobe, which is home to the brain’s skills of executive function, including planning, predicting the consequences of actions, and impulse control, all of which help to explain why she could lapse into sadistic, racist identities and not understand why those actions and accompanying identities are so horrific.  If we think about someone who has severe DID and has endured TBI, you’re likely going to see some inconsistent outlandish, even self-sabotaging behaviors. In DID, during a dissociative episode, alters (alternate identities) might take over and wreak havoc.

Before social media, we had no way of knowing when Roseanne’s alters took control. But now, it seems clear that her Twitter account was taken over by an alter who identifies as a sadistic, authoritarian figure, like the people who surrounded her growing up. That photo of her dressed as a Nazi, I now realize, is not Roseanne. It is an alter who identifies as or with the Nazi who lived down the street from her, who got off on torturing a young Jewish girl.

In his avid defense of her, the comedian, Bill Maher refers to her multiple personalities as a way to explain the expressions of her deviance. Multiple Personality Disorder is now known as Dissociative identity disorder (DID) in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual – 5th Edition which is known as “the bible” of psychiatric diagnoses. DID is the most extreme end of the spectrum of dissociative disorders and is characterized by not having a reliable understanding or concept of self. Depending on the unique characteristics of each survivor’s biological, emotional, intellectual, historical, and situational makeup, DID can manifest as if the person has one other identity, or twenty. Long after the abuse stops, as is the case with any form of PTSD, a trigger, whether it is a thought that occurs, an image that flashes through the brain, or someone or something familiar from the past, can evoke a shift in identity. People who have endured abuse, especially at the level Roseanne did, are often haunted by self-loathing, and feeling undeserving. Given access and opportunity, there may be at least one identity intent on sabotaging any success the survivor might have. On top of that, a TBI which has likely impacted awareness of consequence and impulse control makes it even harder to manage the manifestation and expression of alternative identities.

What Roseanne has said, done, and what she professes to stand for are appalling, but what must be added to the dialogue is that she did not come to be this way randomly. There are understandable reasons she got this way. Given her history, this is a woman who has functioned remarkably successfully, which is a testament to her resilience and her resourcefulness. While we may not be ready to forgive her, we must stop being so hard on her. The identities that have emerged that are racist, anti-Semitic or otherwise hateful, are not core to her. She was poisoned by the people who abused her.