I have been thinking a bit about the last time I tried to get help from a mental health professional. We had gone to the Adult Mental Health place at Cleveland again and they asked me so many, many questions, hard ones – not hard because I didn’t know the answers but hard because sometimes to articulate something you have to feel it again and those are not nice feelings. It takes effort.
They make it seem like they care and are listening to you and taking notes so that they can help you. It seems like it’s getting to the end of this “please explain all of the ways you are broken so we can see if we can help you” and then they ask two more questions, so casually, like it’s an afterthought more for curiosity than anything else.
But in reality it’s your answer to those two questions that determine whether or they think you’re worth helping. If you say no, you aren’t thinking about harming yourself, and no, you aren’t thinking about harming anyone else.. then the assesment determines that there is little risk in returning you to society and telling you to get your help somewhere else.
Actually, that was wrong. As long as you’re not considering harming yourself or someone else, you are “fine.” I made the mistake one time (apparently) of saying that I did sometimes think about that, harming myself, and then got interrogated about what I planned to do. I said I wasn’t going to do anything. I think about it, in an academic sense, not in a scheduling sense. I think about lots of things I have no intention of doing. But apparently I’m the first person in the history of the world to ever think about hurting myself or ending things for science instead of for practise. For people meant to be helping and reassuring you that you’re not actually crazy, they certainly dropped the ball there.
My cynical part says it’s just because they need to be absolutely sure you aren’t going to leave and go on a killing spree, whether or yourself or others or both, because if that happened they’d be in big trouble. People don’t like it when they read in the news that a crazy person did something bad after trying to get help for being crazy and getting sent away.
So, anyway. They decide you’re not a harm risk and therefore there isn’t room for them to help you but they have this really helpful list of psychologists and if you go to your GP and ask for a Mental Health Care Plan, you can take that to one of these psychologists and you can have 5 sessions and it won’t cost you anything.
They believe that.
In reality, the list of psychologists hasn’t been updated in fuck knows how long, three quarters of them are no longer working at the practises listed, three eights of them are not accepting new patients at the moment or charge a huge fee on top of the MHCP.. and if you’re lucky you might find one who will give you an appointment.
Luck is relative.
Turns out, this psychologist is actually really retired, but was kind of bored, so decided to see people one day a week on MHCPs as a two-birds, one-stone way to pass some time and do a good deed as well.
I don’t know if the problem was me or if maybe this person hadn’t done any professional development in a very long time, and had some outdated information about how people work.
Because I tried to explain that because of my past experiences and things I was taught to believe about myself, I struggle with trying to overrule those thoughts.
I have irrational, fear based reactions when people I care about express irritation towards me, or in proximity to me – even when I’m relatively sure I haven’t done anything wrong – because whether or not I did something wrong isn’t really relevant in whether or not they might be angry at me…
I try so hard to squish it down, literally bite my tongue and hold my breath and use all of my brain power trying to make my eyes not give away that this is happening. Because I know it’s irrational and it’s not fair because the people it happens with now have never given me any reason to start fearing what is going to happen next. That it’s going to turn into several hours of just being berated and told, over and over, all of the ways in which I am just a poor imitation of a proper human being; selfish; abnormal; a disappointment. Don’t I think that if my mother knew how horrible I really was, she’d be heartbroken and disappointed? And I’m lucky that she is such a good person that it never even occurs to her that I am so bad. And of course the person telling me this isn’t going to tell her, and do that to her, because they are not like me.
More than twenty-five years, now, and every time he is a little bit snippy because he has a headache or he’s hangry or just because he is a human being and every fucking time I have to
there was a two day gap here, because I got too worked up trying to write it. let’s see if I can keep going.
Sometimes it is Daniel and occasionally it is one of our children. But every fucking time I feel that flood.. of something, in my chest. It’s probably cortisol and adrenaline coming out of my adrenal glands and I feel it first around my heart and lungs. I feel it starting and I desperately try to tell myself no, this is not that, you don’t need to do this, we don’t need those hormones and the shaking and the tears and the burning face. I tell myself it’s a minor irritation about a single thing which is really normal and it doesn’t mean they’re blaming me. I try to. But that nervous system reaction happens so quickly that it is beyond my control to stop. And the more I try to hold it at bay and the more I fail, the more guilty I feel for being broken and stupid and reacting that way to someone who has never hurt me like that.
Daniel obviously knows why this happens but I think sometimes he (and everyone else) doesn’t really understand how intense it is for me, how much effort I make inside to try to have it not happen and how little it can take sometimes to make it happen. When it happens sometimes he will ask me why I am crying, because he actually has no idea, because to him the exchange was of such little import and intensity that it has already passed from his mind. And most of the time he will remind me he was just irritated, but not at me and give me some tissues and give me a hug. Sometimes when I take a bit longer to calm down he says all sorts of things to try to distract me, to help break me out of it, to make me laugh, to make me feel less powerless.
“What do you call a one eyed dinosaur?”
“If I ever see her, I am going to fuck her up.” It’s the sentiment that counts, because I doubt he could even pick her from a line-up. Sometimes I wonder if I could, even, after all this time. In my dreams (should I call them nightmares? I kind of think of those as having non-human monsters,) I recognise her, of course, but it’s an odd kind of fuzzy older version of the face I remember.
“You just got to let things not bother you, like I do. Let it go in one ear and out the other.”
“What’s the difference between sand and period blood?”
And, I very much appreciate him doing this and it does help to break me out of this heightened state, but the thing is that the whole time he is trying to make me feel better, the broken part inside me is pushing back just as hard, telling me that I’m just still lucky that he hasn’t yet realised and understood that he has married a dud, that one day he will realise how stupid and useless I am, that maybe next time this happens it will be the time that he decides, fuck it, I don’t need to deal with being insulted like this all the time as if I’m doing something wrong when I’m not. Or sometimes, just for a bit of variety, that he already knows all of that and he is just here because he is a good person, not like me, and he feels sorry for me and how pathetic I am so he puts up with me because he is a good and a kind person, not because he actually loves me because of course he doesn’t because what is there to love?
I think sometimes that is why my mind is so active, has so many threads going at once.. because it needs to, in order to make more noise than the broken part in the subconscious that keeps sending out those thoughts that do their best to convince me that I am the person that someone I was supposed to be able to trust, a long time ago, told me I was.
The trust part is the part that made the difference. I can remember kids being mean to me at school, really fucking cruel sometimes even, and it upset me but it hasn’t left parts of my mind broken and brainwashed into believing that what they said about me was true. Because they didn’t have authority, they didn’t have a position of trust. And also, it was a lot less intense. Lunch time ended, school ended, and it might happen again on a different day but there was just as much chance that they would be mean to someone else that day or have forgotten they ever said anything nasty to me. She always disclaimed herself by saying, “I’m not your parent, I’m not anything, I’m nobody, I just live here.” And I’m intelligent enough to recognise that those words contain part of the story about why all of this happened. To everyone else outside of our home, she wasn’t my parent, she was just some person that happened to live with my mother and I; perhaps they realised that it was roommates and not just roommates, perhaps not. But I accepted her as my parent almost immediately and now in reflection I don’t think she knew what to do with that. I’m fairly sure she never had a child in her life plan, and even when she met a woman who had one it was ok because the child lived with her father and they’d only have to deal with her every two weeks and sometimes in school holidays. Then the child’s father had the selfish audacity to die (fucking MEN amirite /s) and everything was fucked. I assume she told herself, and maybe even believed, that she could tolerate me if it meant getting to keep my mother. I think at first I was a novelty. I was probably the perfect age for being tolerable without being difficult. Past the messy baby and toddler stage, able to do shit by myself some of the time and reasonably agreeable. Wasn’t until a few years later that I got a bit older and became more of my own person with my own ideas and personality that I became a problem. I’m fairly sure she had two very rigid ideas about who and what a young girl could be: she could either be a proper little girl who did little girl things like sewing and cooking and was ready to grow up and be a good wife and mother; or she could be an active, sociable, sporty tomboy who pushed all the rules to stay out late doing undignified unladylike activities but ultimately knew she would still have to be a secretary one day. I was not either of those, because it was the 1980s not the 1950s and people were a lot less uptight about gender roles, and I think that is what led to her forming the opinion that I was flawed as a person, because I wasn’t the perfect little girl she had not been, nor was I a reckless rule breaker disappointing and scandalising adults everywhere. I don’t think she had any other template for what to expect from me so logically it made sense that I was broken, and as an adult in my proximity but who was certainly not my parent, it was her responsibility to tell me just how very wrong I was. Whether or not it was supposed to make me change who I was so that I was not a misfit or just supposed to make me feel terrible about being one, I’m not sure. Maybe a bit of both.
An oddly funny thing is, I’m actually very much like my mother. Someone she supposedly loved so much she wanted to spend her life with her. Just about every thing she ever criticised about me is a trait or interest I share with my mother. I don’t know why it was good on her, but a mistake on me.
The insidious part of what she did was the part where she convinced me that I was so fucking fortunate that none of the other people in my life had yet realised that I was a badly formed, pathetic excuse for a human. That’s the part that made me ashamed of myself and ashamed that she “had” to point all this out to me and ensured that I would never actually properly express to anyone the extent of how absolutely cruel to me she was. A lot of people knew that there was friction sometimes, disagreements or differences of opinion. Even my mum. But I never wanted to tell anyone just how big it all was because to do that would mean having to reveal the extent of how bad of a person I was, and I desperately didn’t want people to realise that and abandon me because of it.
The fact that I had accepted her into a parental role, and I know she knew that despite what she said out loud, meant that I trusted and believed her when she told me those things.
And children are programmed, wired, primed, however you want to describe it, to trust and believe the people that they rely on to meet their needs. Even when they are also doing unimaginable amounts of damage to your developing mind, sense of self, sense of worth. It has caused a whole bunch of my neurons to be programmed to repeat that message to myself, so that I don’t ever forget it, even when the person who put that programming in place has been absent from my life for longer than she was ever in it. ‘Cause that’s how brains work, and most especially children’s brains. “Learning sponges” that soak up whatever they are taught, regardless of whether or not it is actually good for you or correct.
So that brings me back to this last psychologist I saw a few years back. I had managed to express some measure of what my issues were, that I had these overly intense and inappropriate reactions to what should be innocuous interactions, and I don’t want to. I want to find a way to make that stop happening. Because it fucking sucks, and it is painful to me and sometimes even to those around me who have to wonder why I am reacting that way when they didn’t do anything worthy of it.
And this guy said to me, “but if you know it’s irrational and incorrect, then it’s not really a problem, is it? You just tell yourself that and the fact of you knowing intellectually that it is wrong overcomes the issue.”
And I was like, “Um, no it fucking doesn’t.” And it didn’t seem possible to make him understand that simply knowing the reason for my reactions and knowing that it’s not normal isn’t enough. It really made me question whether he was the idiot or I am; because apparently he has professional qualifications and education on how to help people with this stuff and he was absolutely certain that simply knowing the problem exists and is abnormal is equivalent to having solved it.
But I think to myself, someone having blackouts or seizures or something like that doesn’t go to the doctor and explain all their symptoms for the doctor to say, “Good news! It’s just epilepsy. You can stop worrying now,” with absolutely no other treatment, medication, warnings about things that could be dangerous, etc. No, of course not. People try to reduce the chance they will have episodes like that as well as making sure they can be as safe as possible when they do still happen. They don’t just start to feel their consciousness fading while cooking at the stove and think to themselves, “Oh, it’s just that pesky POTS,” and stay completely still and collapse over onto the hot burning stove because as long as you know what’s happening it’s all fucking fine.
Would be nice if I could get a dog who would tell me when I was about to have an existential crisis and help me prevent it from happening. Of course that would require the dog to be actually precognitive instead of just having senses far superior to our own.
I want to be able to hear people express something negative, which is completely normal for people to do, and not automatically assume that it’s my fault and start that frantic internal process of trying to pretend it isn’t happening and stopping it from happening at the same time. By the time I get the chance to try to logic myself out of it, it’s way too fucking late. That faulty neural and limbic avalanche has already started and there isn’t any logic or intellect in the world that can neutralise all of those chemical and electrical signals until they’re just spent. It is painful and exhausting. I want to teach my brain and my body to not do that, not just ineffectually tell myself afterwards that everything will be ok.
I want to be a person who feels ok about myself more often than I don’t, rather than one whose default mode of existence is believing that I suck and one who has to exert constant effort to ignore and counter that inner voice. I want to be a person who is occasionally insecure rather than a person who is occasionally sort of not entirely unconfident. I don’t want being conscious to mean I am in a constant battle to anti-brainwash myself, which clearly doesn’t work anyway.
I don’t want every good or nice thing that Daniel does that would make Green Flag Guy get excited to make a mean voice in the low, dark part of my mind to say, “Don’t get used to it. Ever. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. One day he WILL realise you don’t deserve him.” I don’t want to have to argue back every time I feel proud or impressed with something one of our children does and it says “that’s nothing to do with you, that’s in spite of you. All the times you felt like you weren’t good enough of a parent, you were right. They’re just lucky they had another parent who isn’t a disaster.”
I don’t want to feel guilty every time I feel pain or exhaustion and hear the inner voice say “see!? Everything about you is badly designed and malfunctioning. You are a bad person, in a bad body, with a bad mind.” Though that is the one nastiness from the broken part of me that I feel like I am sort of able to semi-successfully rebut. Because there’s lots of studies and evidence to suggest that a big part of the reason bodies don’t work well is due to the stresses and trauma of the past. There’s even a checklist to see how many Bad Shit you have experienced in your childhood and how much risk that puts you at for experiencing other Bad Shit as an adult. (Adverse Childhood Experiences.)
I want to make that horrible voice be silent, not just constantly try to refute what it says, with varying levels of success.
Supposedly it is possible to recover from the effects of abuse and learn to be normal again. I just don’t know how to do it on my own. And that’s why I’ve asked for help, so many fucking times by now. But the constant agony of living inside a mind convinced that you are a terrible, horrible, pathetic failure of a person isn’t enough to make me worth any of the help the public health system is able to give, because their measure of success is “physically alive and likely to remain that way.” And the private mental health system is not any better; there is SO much demand and so little availability and the costs of that kind of treatment are considerable. Especially if you are the kind of fucked up where it’s obviously going to take a shitton on sessions to get anywhere.. if you even find someone that is able to help you and doesn’t just try to convince you that understanding the reasoning and the background behind your mental health woes is the same as curing them.
So that’s why I have accepted, a long time ago, that I’m probably going to need to take medication for the rest of my life to keep me at this level, that while it isn’t optimal, is just vaguely manageable. And I honestly don’t have a problem with it if I do need medication, I’m not anti-drug in the slightest. It does bother me that I just have to settle for this place right here with little likely chance of ever being able to explore whether or not my mind can actually be healed at all.
Medications rarely only do the thing you want them to do and nothing else, though.
Stephanie suggested to me a while back that maybe it was the anti-depressant medication affecting my sleep, because she noticed her sleep go a bit shit when she first started taking it too. But when I first started taking it, it actually made me crazily sleepy, so much so that I had to move to taking it at night instead of in the morning. And that way the sleepiness hit when I actually wanted to be sleepy.
Then I had the sleep test in February and the doctor was like, see, you totally do have sleep apnoea except a barely there form of it that is hard to detect. Do a CPAP, it will definitely fix you.
As I previously established, that has not been the case, and because I want fucking answers and to go to sleep and wake up feeling refreshed, which I understand as a concept but actually truly cannot remember what it feels like anymore, I have been doing so much research and looking over the sleep tests and looking over the data produced by the CPAP machine each night and just trying to find anything that might explain why it wasn’t doing what it was supposed to and how to fix that.
Finally, I noticed a small detail on both of my sleep tests, both the 2018 and 2025 one. Each of them recorded a lot more arousals than respiratory irregularities. So that suggested to me that the respiratory stuff, the “very slight” reduction in air flow as the sleep doctor described it, is not the main cause for me flitting between sleep stages like a directionless butterfly, because more than half of the arousals apparently happen when my air flow is just fucking fine.
So if it wasn’t the breathing, what is it? That bought us back to the medication, and I looked up the research and well, there’s a fucking lot of it that says that in some people venlafaxine heavily interferes with acquisition of both Stage 3 and REM sleep states. My test in February didn’t detect me ever entering either of those states, it was just a constant bounce between S1 and S2. My 2018 test did detect some S3 and REM but much less of them than there should be and more of the other two than there should be. So it appeared that both of the tests support the theory that the medication is what is fucking with my sleep, and it was bad 7 years ago and has been progressively getting worse..
It’s not like I never told anyone what medications I take. I am honestly incredulous that all of these doctors, sleep specialists and GPs alike, had that information right in front of them, as well as extensive data on how damaging venlafaxine can be to sleep quality and none of them ever thought “hmm, that’s something we should look into.” I LITERALLY HAD TO BUILD MY OWN COMPETENT PERSON TO FIGURE THIS OUT, and she hasn’t even had a fraction of all the magnificent education they supposedly have. Perhaps there is something to be said for that adage about wanting something done right.
That brings me to why I have made a huge and difficult effort to go into a level of depth I don’t think I ever have before about what the inside of my mind is like. This is what I am like, damaged, but at the best I have managed to be with both the counselling I have had in the past (and sometimes in spite of it) and the medication. But if I continue on this path of extreme sleep deprivation I will lose all ability to function and it will probably eventually kill me. Not next week, it could still be another 10 years, I don’t know, it’s hard to find concrete data on the long term effects of sleep deprivation which I think I mentioned before, but I have been able to feel that it was a real possibility that it was becoming a direct threat to my health, not just a melodramatic “oh I’m so tired I could die.” That is actually terrifying because sleeping is meant to be the easiest thing in the world and to not be able to do it properly and know that it is affecting you more and more is .. scary. Proper horror movie scary.
I need to try to start reducing the amount of venlafaxine that I take. Unfortunately, venlafaxine is somewhat well known for having a fucking shit show of discontinuation symptoms, even among other similar anti-depressants. I have even had some of them myself one of the times we sought help and the guy said that if I reduced my dose we could add in another medication so the combination of them would work better and then after I spent a month in misery with a constant headache and nausea he said actually, yeah, nah, I think you should just have some vitamins instead. So I’m doing this but doing it really slowly. I’ve been on 300mg, the lowest size the pills come in are 37.5mg, so I’m going to reduce by that much and try maybe a month at a time, to hopefully avoid symptoms and give my mind time to adjust and hopefully not slip back into the abyss. I say that somewhat casually but it is a real concern. I don’t want to go back there, where I was unable to keep a lid on all of the negative thoughts. My hope, for a best outcome, is that I manage to slowly taper at this rate so that I’m only on 150mg instead of 300 and that is enough to restore my ability to sleep without being too much that it erodes my ability to stay out of Tartarus. In reality I have no idea how this is going to go. There’s a reasonable chance that I am going to start falling back in there. And in the absence of proper psycho treatment of some variety, I am hoping that by having taken the time to lay out the full detail of the dark nooks and crannies of my mind, and then asking them to read it.. and then hopefully no one proving the cranny-voices right.. I will have a better position inside myself to fight back from. If I have intentionally made all of the people I care about aware of all of the broken pieces in my mind then the fear of them one day realising shouldn’t be something that can harm me anymore. Maybe. Eventually.
I am throwing myself at the ground and I really, really hope I manage to miss it.