psychology

stuck

jade, , , , , , 4114 wordsLeave a comment

The second big homework that I had to do for my ongoing psychology treatment was about this thing called “Stuck Points.” I am sure that will be a googleable thing. This one was a bit more difficult, not in terms of the ability to do it but that it meant thinking very carefully and analytically about some of the ways I think and respond to things and while doing all this is ultimately good for me and is helping me to change the parts of me that I don’t want to be burdened by, it is also opening my eyes to the scale of damage that I have been living with for so long.

For a long time, because I have struggled so much to move past the affect of this abuse, I have viewed myself as just being a weak person. Because lots of people have had people or parents that spoke to them harshly or were strict or whatever. And they managed to be ok. So why couldn’t I? While I did understand that what she did was more than strictness and harshness, it was abuse.. I still didn’t quite grasp how truly awful it was and how much damage it did to me and why I have had such a hard time. There is probably an obvious point to be made here, also, that part of the reason why I viewed the abuse and myself this was is that the nature of the abuse made it so that I was conditioned to see myself as the problem, always. She came so close to actually breaking me and erasing all belief I had in myself and my intrinsic value as a human being and the knowledge of how close I was to that is kind of terrifying.

I want to side step a bit here and talk about “intrinsic value.” The words are something that my psychologist mentioned during one of my appointments with the observation that I do tend to struggle with the belief that the concept of intrinsic value applies to me just as much as it does to any other person. And she is right. And it is something I have been trying to make an effort to remind myself of. Every now and then I aggressively mentally shout at myself “intrinsic fucking value!” and it sounds a bit silly but inserting the qualifier into the middle helps to remind me about how important this concept is. And we all know I love a colourful word here and there. I think that I will letter this, as well as some other important bits I don’t want to lose sight of. That way I can put them up somewhere as reminders.

Back to the part about realising that what happened and the damage it did to me being way greater than I have ever realised or acknowledged. I have said before that I really can’t imagine where or if I would be, if Daniel hadn’t come into my life when he did. I was on a downward spiral where I was losing interest in things, I had hit a wall with education that I have since learned many unusually intelligent people hit where all of a sudden your innate intelligence is not enough and you actually have to make effort at understanding and completing new work and you just don’t know how to do it because you didn’t ever develop the skills to do that and so you assume something is wrong with you because everything used to be so easy and now it is so hard. I had a few friends but still felt very much out of place in the world – probably a combination of the way I had come to think about myself because of the abuse and the otherness you can feel as a probably undiagnosed and unsupported neurodivergent person who just feels so different to everyone else. I wasn’t good, really, on the inside but I think I was keeping it fairly well concealed on the outside. I knew I was heading for an implosion of sorts when I screwed up school and didn’t get the magnificent results that everyone naturally assumed I would get. Looking beyond that year was just a big void for me and I didn’t see anything with any kind of light.

I don’t know whether or not I would have actually ceased to be living or if I’d just be moving through existing, functioning barely but not caring about anything. But it wouldn’t have been anything great and I am so glad that he did appear when he did and saw that intrinsic value – and more – in me that I had almost completely ceased to believe that I had. He pulled me back, and has held me back, from that void and it’s hard to state how significant that is. The void scares me. I don’t fear being dead, but I do fear being alive and existing in that void. That is where I was looking a couple of weeks ago and I didn’t like it. The advantage (haha) of having been close to the event horizon a couple of times is that you can recognise it and know you need to take immediate action to prevent getting to a point of no return. And I did, and I’m back at a safe distance. (I am also almost completely past the withdrawal symptoms too. The sweating has stopped and it’s just a minimal amount of spasming that remains.)

Last night I asked Daniel a question. I asked him if he ever felt “attacked” or “accused” whenever I react to things in a way that was not appropriate, because I am reacting out of fear and he has never given me reason to have to fear and so surely sometimes it must seem unfair to him that it happens. Because I’m not stupid and I know that having someone (metaphorically) flinch when you move even if you weren’t going to hurt them has to be difficult to deal with sometimes. And he said it is frustrating sometimes. Not that he is frustrated at me, just more of a “here we go again,” thing. I’m glad that he didn’t try to say it never bothered him. Part of what makes me angry about having experienced this and the way that it has left me unable to respond to certain things like a normal person is that it has unfortunately, unavoidably also affected the people around me that I am closest to and care about the most. She didn’t just abuse me, she has indirectly also abused my husband and my children and I would say my mother but it wasn’t always just indirect with her either. Not that I do feel particularly inclined towards forgiveness for everything that she said to me directly, but I feel even less inclined when I think about how it has harmed them too.

There’s another aspect to the “why?” question that I sometimes wonder about, and that is what the motivation for the abuse was. I don’t think it was to make my mum love her more or pull attention away from me on to her. She had plenty of my mum’s attention because I was a kid who was, for the most part, happy in my own company. I don’t think there was ever any conscious thought on her part that she was doing this to achieve any particular goal but I think that ultimately it just came down to the fact that I was there, and I was there all the time because of my dad’s death. I ruined her HEA, and so she reactively set out to ruin me and my opportunities for it. To hurt me as much as possible and destroy my sense of my own humanity so that any and all relationships that I might have would be ruined. But she never “won” anything with this, except maybe satisfaction for hurting me and trying to take from me what I took from her.

Part of this process is realising just how thoroughly she did do that and how it isn’t that I have been weak because I haven’t been able to break free of it, it’s actually been me tenaciously not giving in and not letting it eat me all up. And there have been times when it sometimes just seems SO FUCKING hard, the thought of having to tell myself every fucking day that I am worth something and that I do have a place in my family’s lives and that they do want and need me here. I have wondered if I have to keep doing that all the time then what is the point and maybe I should just give up. Sometimes I have wanted to give up and the only thing that stopped me from giving up was that giving up would prove that everything she said and taught me to believe about myself was right.

But I didn’t. And I’m working on giving myself more credit for that.

And trying to figure out what to do with the anger that I feel that I have suffered this much and the fact that it was essentially, all for nothing. She got nothing out of it. The instant that my mum ended their relationship she just began acting as if I did not exist. I remember having to ask her a question once, after that but before we had moved, and her reaction was such that it was obvious she was wondering why I would ever even conceive of addressing her. She was nothing to me, I was nothing to her and there was no reason for us to ever interact. I was pretty used to that by then, being ignored for days or weeks at a time. It was a relief kind of that the ignoring didn’t have to be preceded by the brutal dismantling of my sense of self. But none of it ever had to be that way. I would have happily co-existed in a loving and welcoming way. I didn’t have any interest in threatening her relationship with my mother. She made me into an enemy when I never had any intention of being one. And I suffered all of those attacks and the subsequent years of mental and emotional struggles .. for nothing. She got nothing from and she suffers no punishment for it. Part of me wants her to know that she didn’t win. Part of me just wants to not know if she’s dead or alive and stay entirely away from that.

But I did survive and I am surviving, even though sometimes I don’t much want to; and now I am hopefully healing somewhat, even though that’s also fucking hard and emotional talking about all of this and exploring it from a different viewpoint and scary when I consider the times I have tried before and not made any positive progress. I think it is different now because I finally have someone asking me the right questions to help me see things in a fair and realistic light. But it is also true that in seeing the light I am seeing how much darkness I have been in and that’s hard to come to grips with.

Another to add to my painting / lettering list: I AM SURVIVING.

Below is a copy of the “Stuck Points” homework I did for my therapy. I just want to make clear that the example stuck points are from a worksheet that the psychologist gave me and not necessarily talking about situations that are relevant to me – it’s the feeling or reaction to them that is what I identified with.

Stuck Points

I have copied a few of the points from the examples that related a little but below each I have expanded on how they are/aren’t relevant to me.

7. If I hadn’t been drinking, it would not have happened.

Well, for this one, it’s not “if I hadn’t been drinking,” it’s “if she hadn’t been drinking.” I very rarely drink alcohol and I have never been drunk, probably not even tipsy. Those are not necessarily bad things, since it is actually not good for you; but I avoid it more out of fear than only informed choice. I avoided it even before I became educated about the many and varied health risks. I do generally think that occasional alcohol use is fine, if that’s what people want to do. Sometimes I think I wouldn’t mind it, even. But the primary reason I don’t consume it is because I don’t want to take the risk that under the effect of alcohol, I behave differently and in a potentially harmful and hurtful way to people that I care about.

Overall, not drinking alcohol is not a bad thing and it’s one that I am ok with living with. I classify this as a stuck point because I recognise that there are multiple logical flaws in this belief.

A lot of the time, she was intoxicated and drinking when she was speaking to me and saying horrible things – but not every time. Some of it clearly came from her and not just the alcohol. It’s not reasonable to attribute all of the abuse to the effect alcohol had on her.

I know also that this fear and avoidance of alcohol or drugs among people who have been harmed by addicts isn’t necessarily uncommon; but because the harm often came at the hands of a family member, the fear is linked to a real understanding that because of shared genetic heritage you also likely have traits that could predispose you to the same kind of behaviour. I don’t have any reason to think that but I still have an intense pushback towards the consumption of alcohol, not just in myself but in people around me. I’ve struggled at times with being very uneasy when Daniel consumes alcohol. Though this is mitigated somewhat by his own lack of interest in alcohol, because his mother was also an alcoholic, and she died about 9 years ago from multiple organ failure following many years of over-drinking.

So that’s a bit messy and I recognise that I have some irrational thoughts and beliefs about drinking and alcohol, but in the grand scheme of things they are ones that I am ok with having because the amount of harm they do to me is fairly minimal.

10. Expressing any emotion means I will lose control of myself.

I think it would be more accurate to say “expressing any intense emotion means I will lose control of myself,” and what that means is probably that I do or show some kind of physical manifestation of emotion that other people have taught me to feel is a bad thing. Like crying. I cry at movies, at books, occasionally at toilet paper ads with cute puppies. Those things aren’t so much the problem. I cry when people are angry at me, I cry when people are mean or cruel or unfair to me. But their reactions tell me I shouldn’t be so affected by things that involuntary physical signs of my emotion become apparent. I shouldn’t be so weak that I can’t stop myself from the inevitable tears when I am feeling something intensely. I just shouldn’t be. It has made me hate my emotions sometimes, because it is something else that sets me aside as being different from other people and sometimes that they either ridicule or accuse me of doing in an attempt to manipulate them somehow. When my involuntary tells of emotion offend someone else, they seem to forget that they are involuntary and seem to perceive it as an expression of weakness that I choose to not stop. And people’s criticism of this just compounds the problem and it does become something that becomes too much for me to be able to consciously take control of and stop. I need a break and change of situation to let it all subside. 

Logically I know I shouldn’t be ashamed of feeling things, and people probably get angry at me because my display of emotion has made it obvious that they have caused some hurt in me and that makes them uncomfortable. So it’s easier to blame me for being too sensitive than it is to acknowledge that they behaved in a way that was unkind. The problem is that I have become so conditioned to hearing criticisms about the way that I exist that I just assume that these are just yet more ways in which I am flawed.. and that makes me even more bereft for the person that I am not that I apparently should have been.

14. Mistakes are intolerable and cause serious harm or death.

Mistakes cause anger, derision, frustration. I don’t want to be the subject of anger et al, so I try to not make mistakes. The difficulty is that it’s hard to know what is going to be a mistake before it happens. Even situations that feel like it’s not possible to make a mistake in.  So it becomes a balance between trying to anticipate every possibility in order to choose the one least likely to be the one that causes anger or trying to make yourself as small as possible so that you do not get noticed because if you aren’t noticed then they aren’t noticing that you are making mistakes.

This is a game that can’t be won because there are no rules, and what constitutes a mistake one day might be the right choice the next day. I’m still desperately trying to win the game in fear that the people around me will become my opponents, even though they have never heard of this game and could never in their wildest dreams imagine playing it.

16. If I let myself think about what has happened, I will never get it out of my mind.

This one relates pretty strongly to #10 about the emotions becoming too much and me losing control. Thinking in too much detail about people and events that have hurt me do make me feel bad and that seems like a pretty good reason to not think about them and start that descent into the loss of emotional control. On the other hand, not thinking about them means that I have been stuck in the peak effect of like.. grief right in the very immediate after someone has died, and I have been there for nearly 30 years, and it’s not just the bad things that I can’t think about but also even happy, normal or neutral memories from my childhood that just happen to have her in them because she was there.

20. Other people should not trust me.

Other people should not expect to receive input of value from me to their lives because I always manage to do the wrong thing. I might do some right things for a while but eventually I will screwup and they will realise that I am not worth the time and effort.

25. I am damaged forever because of the rape.

I am damaged forever. Sometimes the rest of the sentence is “because I am just a fundamentally useless human being” and sometimes it is “because of the abuse.” It probably depends on how my general mood is. If I’m just feeling really, really down on myself it will be the former. I do think this is a less of the time thing than the latter ending, that I am and will be damaged forever because of the abuse and the behaviour/adaptations/coping mechanisms I have developed as a result of it. I do think it’s relevant that part of why I sometimes think or fear that I will be damaged forever is because thus far, every attempt I have made to engage with mental health professionals so that I might learn not to be “damaged” forever has always been a failure because they always seem to tell me that I don’t actually have the problem that I am telling them I have. That if I can identify that it is a problem then fixing it is as simple as just deciding to not have that problem. Whereas for my part, if it was that simple then I wouldn’t be seeking them out in the first place. As a result, it has reinforced the ideas that I’m just a not-right, flawed, broken person and I will probably always be that way.

I am, for the most part, not “stuck” in this point at the moment. There are moments of doubt but I am mostly able to push them away and tell myself that things are different now and I am finally working with someone who knows the right way to manage the things that I am dealing with. I don’t think I’ll necessarily be the most zen, chill, go-with-the-flow mentally healthy person on the planet following this treatment but I can see, finally, hope that I can learn to not be always burdened by this. Some of that has already started, some ways of looking at things and even simple reminders to myself. Intrinsic value. I have been repeating it to myself and reminding myself that it applies to everyone, even me. Even with flaws. And just existing is not a flaw.

28. I deserve to have bad things happen to me.

It’s more of “I don’t deserve good things to happen to me” than I deserve bad things to happen. Which is now an interesting thought to me because it suggests that somewhere deep inside my mind I do (and have) held onto the belief in my own intrinsic value, because if I didn’t then I don’t think I would believe that I don’t deserve bad things. Somehow having that realisation makes me feel a little better, and like there is a little bit less distance to go before I can truly break free of this stuck point and natively believe it rather than just having to tell myself it.

When I think about what “good things” are, it is very varied, it ranges from something as significant as my husband loving me to things as mundane as buying a tube of paint that I like the look of. In terms of whether or not I deserve for Daniel to love me, a lot of the time I am telling myself that at the moment he does, so even if I can’t understand why, just go with it and make the most of it for as long as it is going to take for him to realise that he’s misjudged. But actually.. even that is contradictory because at other times I reassure myself by reminding myself that even if I don’t feel like I am worth anything, he (and other people) do, and I trust their judgement even if I don’t trust my own. For the paint, or any other material type stuff, I don’t think all of this comes from inside me, some of it is fairly obviously the influence of a society that tells us our worth is directly linked to the ability we have to generate income, and if you are limited in that then you do not deserve to have nice things, ever – the “avocado toast” premise. This all borders into some societal issues that are much bigger than just me, and I know that they affect millions of other people too. When I think rationally about this it is easier to see that it isn’t true because there are so many other people pointing it out, both people in situations like me/us and people who are more fiscally fortunate. I can believe that I don’t know what I am talking/thinking about but it’s a lot less easy to believe that all of these people are also sharing the same delusion.

—

To try to sum all of these partial related pieces into a grand unified stuck point:

If I try hard enough, I can manage to never do anything that will cause someone I care about to see me in a negative light and that will prevent the possibility of them ceasing to love me or wanting to be around me.

stuck

why did it happen to me?

jade, , , , , 2671 wordsLeave a comment

I mentioned that I had found myself a psychologist, one that I hoped would actually be able to help me make some meaningful and permanent improvement in the state of inside my head by using the correct, evidence-based therapy models with me. The thing I am doing is called CPT – cognitive processing therapy. I don’t know all of the details about how it works but part of it does involve “homework” sometimes – writing down thoughts with regards to specific prompts. This is my first such homework task.

Am I worrying that I did it wrong? That’s a trick question, no-one who has ever met me would even bother asking that. I did ask what volume of words was expected, and the answer was basically: whatever you want. In whatever format you want. Can be full prose, dot points, freeform notes, whatever. It might have been better for me to ask if there was a word limit. Oh well.

Short answer: some people are just cruel, selfish assholes that don’t care about others.

Long answer: it’s a whole lot of psycho-social buzzwords and catch phrases, including but not limited to: hurt people hurt people; generational trauma; generational abuse; systemic and internalised misogyny, especially as relates to expected gender roles; systemic and internalised homophobia; perhaps some ableism.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that many of the things she criticised in me were likely things she herself was criticised for. I broke many of the same rules that she did, but often in quite different ways – some of that just because of my personality and some probably because my personality likely includes neurodivergent attributes.

I think if I am going to expand on the list of things in the first paragraph I probably need to explain a little about her and who she was. She was the youngest child, a surprise, born right at the very beginning of the baby boom in 1946. I know she had at least two older sisters, who were already adults when she was born and maybe even already married themselves. It was a significant age gap, and her parents were relatively old when she was born. (By the standards of the time.) From what I understand they were otherwise a fairly traditional family with traditional values. She… was not a traditional little girl. What would have been called a tomboy. I got the impression that some of the interests she had were grudgingly tolerated, like participating in certain sports (women only teams of course) but other things like her complete lack of interest in being properly feminine and delicate and learning appropriate skills to grow up and be a good housewife were more of a sore point.

Obviously she didn’t want to get married because the only acceptable person for her to marry would have been a man. So I think she chose one of the few other options available to young single women and became an office worker, secretary type thing, and made a decent career of it. When she and my mum bought a house near Ballarat and we moved there, a few months after my dad died, she got given a really fancy clock as a leaving gift and I think it was because she worked for the company for like 20+ years or something. I think probably a mostly typical existence for a person that had to hide a large part of themselves from society.

I don’t really know whether she had any significant relationships before my mother. I believe that she was somewhat out, with her family, but it was uneasy and they weren’t really cool with it. So she then met my mum and there was the small complication that this fantastic woman had a child but that was, I guess, tolerable, because the kid lived with her father and only had to be endured at weekends and maybe a bit during school holidays. Then that selfish bastard of a man went and died and the child became a 24/7 problem.

I think this is probably the point when her relationship with my mum should have ended. Not explosively, or antagonistic, or anything like that, but with the honest admission that a child in her life was not what she wanted. Of course, it didn’t. And I kind of get that – I understand how deep both the social conditioning towards motherhood as well as the biological can go, and even if you never expected or wanted to have a child, whatever is left of those probably lets you convince yourself that you can adapt to having one there if it means not losing this amazing new relationship you found.

At first I think it was fine. It took several years for the resentment to build. Ironically, some of what I think are great things about me are things that provoked her to become critical and hateful towards me. My mum has always been a very accepting person, welcoming to differences and intolerant of bigotry or hate. This is something I learned and inherited from her easily. So I adapted very easily to the fact of my mother having a new partner who was a woman and accepted her as part of our life, as another parent even. I don’t think she believed it could be that simple. Perhaps she had never experienced it as such from anyone who wasn’t gay themselves. I don’t know. There were times when it seemed like she was determined to make me admit that I didn’t really accept or like her. I had a diary when I was a child. I only wrote in it occasionally but I did consider it to be private. For me only. I hid it accordingly. Not very well, apparently, because she took it; but she didn’t ever admit to having taken it. Then in one of these sessions where she yelled and ranted and criticised and I cried, she accused me of hating her and having written in my diary that I hated her and hated that she was a woman and that my mum was a lesbian and various other things. I denied that, because I hadn’t written anything like that, because it wasn’t true; and so she challenged me to prove it. Of course, I couldn’t prove it, because I was not in possession of my diary. So my ‘refusal’ or ‘inability’ to prove my innocence beyond pathetically saying “no, I didn’t do it” just proved that I was guilty, by her standards.

So this is the “internalised homophobia” part of it. But some part of her must not have been satisfied in having proved that I really did hate her and everything about her relationship with my mother, probably because it was all based on farce and gaslighting. So the next attempt to catch me out and make me admit that I hated her and all gay people was to tell me that my father had been bisexual. At the time I hadn’t really known whether that was true or not, turns out it is, but that’s neither here nor there. Maybe this was the thing to tip me over the edge into admitting my hatred because being bi is worse than being simply gay or lesbian? (I don’t think that but I am aware that there are apparently a subset of people that do.) Her telling me this did upset me. Not because of the content. I don’t care who either of my parents fuck as long as it’s all consensual, just like any other person. It upset me because for the first time I realised that she believed beforehand that this would be upsetting information to me and said it to me anyway. It was hurt she intentionally chose to inflict on me for her own “gain.” Even though she was wrong about why this upset me, it was still, in her mind, evidence that she was correct.

As for “internalised misogyny?” Well, I wasn’t a typically feminine girly girl either, by 1950s standards. I don’t think I was particularly odd by 1980s standards, but probably leaned towards being less interested in classically girly stuff than average. I read a lot, and I don’t think that is particularly coded for girly or boyish, I think the problem with that is that I preferred to read than to go and interact with other children. I had a variety of toys, dolls and bears as well as lego and slinkies and large wooden dice and playing cards. Now I know the lego was definitely somewhat boy coded (at that time) and therefore “worthy of criticism” for not being a normal little girl, if you have fucked up ideas about what any particular person should or shouldn’t be because you were also not allowed to just be. I am also not at all sporty, I could give or take fishing (I participated because most of my extended family did too, not because I had any particular passion for it myself); so I also failed at failing to be a girl by not really being a tomboy either.

Ableism: well. I don’t know that anyone would have identified it as such at the time and I think it’s really subtle, but certainly I can see that some of what was “wrong” with me is very likely attributable to autistic traits. My preference for my own company over that of other children. Some of what I mentioned as my favourite toys to play with, for example the wooden dice and the playing cards. I played normal solo card games and I built things out of stacked cards but I also arranged and sorted and dealt the cards in lots of various ways based on number and suit. I rolled the dice over and over and took notes about how many of each result I got. Sometimes I would intentionally influence the rolls, putting more or less effort into the throws. I had a travel Yahtzee game which had 5 standard d6 contained within a holder that allowed for each to be either rolled against the palm or fixed in place. I played with the combinations of results you would get on that. I experimented with how much movement against the palm was actually necessary to make the dice move to a degree where the result would be considered sufficiently randomised or not. Even with my lego – when I was not building something, I separated them out into parts organised by shape, size and colour. It bothered me to have them all just loose in the bucket. All of these things that I did which were completely innocuous, not at all harmful to myself or other people, but very much “not normal” by the standards of someone raised in a time when social and intellectual conformity were very important. So, yes, her criticism of those parts of me and those behaviours would I think definitely come under the scope of ableism, but only in retrospect based on knowledge I have gained since. Back then I just thought it was yet another thing wrong with me, because I could obviously see that I was different in many ways to other children, and being different was bad. And that’s why I got “in trouble” for it.

When I mention “generational trauma” what I am getting at is that I have an understanding that most people default to parenting the way they were parented. Even when they never intended to be a parent and denied that they were one. So if the way they were parented included abusive behaviours, they’re more likely to do the same with their children – sometimes not even realising that it is so because of the social and biological instinct to trust in our parents and believe that they are always acting in our best interest. Therefore I’m able to understand based on the knowledge I have of past generations parenting in general and her in particular that the approach she took to pointing out my perceived flaws was quite possibly done with the belief that it was necessary for someone to do that so that I could learn to correct myself and become a proper decent member of the human race. That fact that pointing out all of these “hard truths” to me clearly upset me wasn’t relevant. Someone has to do it and you just have to learn to suck it up and get over it and be normal. Or something.

That’s kind of where all of this becomes a problem for me. I assume that the point of this exercise, answering the question of why this all happened, is to make sure I know that it wasn’t “my fault.” I didn’t do anything to cause it, simply by existing as I naturally do. And I do understand that. I also understand that people are the product of both their experiences and their genes. I am intelligent enough to identify all of these common areas that I know, or can infer, were things that she herself was criticised or derided for and see that that’s why she then did the same to me, even if the way I “broke the rules” wasn’t exactly the same. I know that this is a story that has been repeated thousands, if not millions of times, all over the word, and that’s why it has been termed “generational.” It’s not unique to me.

And yet..

Lots of people who were abused manage to not abuse their own children. Being a victim of abuse does NOT guarantee that you will be a perpetrator of it. And if some people have the ability to not fall into that trap, then theoretically anybody has that ability. When you are doing something, and the person that is the subject of your actions or words is expressing that they are pained, distressed, heartbroken, devastated, crying uncontrollably, sobbing and hiccupping, that kind of intense sadness that leaves you suddenly shuddering and gasping on and off for hours after the actual tears have stopped.. it shouldn’t be a difficult step to realise that you are causing harm and that you should stop because this is not how we should treat other people. People who abuse demonstrate that they know they are hurting their victims, and that they want to hurt them despite knowing that it is wrong when they take steps to ensure that their abuse is not discovered by others. When they do things like restricting the places they hit so that bruises do not show in places not ordinarily covered by clothes, when they tell victims that “this should be our secret only because X wouldn’t understand and would be jealous” or when they tell you things that twist your perception and exploit your innate desire to please your parents by making you believe that they are helping you to hide all of your flaws and inadequacies from your mother because it would just devastate her to realise that you are such a broken, wretched and wrong excuse for a human being; so you somehow believe that their abuse is actually protecting you instead of damaging you.

They know. And they do it anyway.

So then, that just comes back to: some people don’t care enough about other people to make the effort to be better than they have learned to be. They may be the product of a complex web of factors spanning various social, political, familial, generational issues; but very few people have had experiences such that they would develop entirely without empathy. They are choosing to ignore the empathy and the conscience that tells them what they are doing is wrong. Choosing to be cruel and selfish by passing the harm onto someone else instead of figuring out how to excise that from themselves. You might not always be able to be perfect but you can try to be better, and they choose not to. Some people just suck. That’s why.

why did it happen to me?

hope and fear

jade, , , 1163 wordsLeave a comment

I’m hopeful that it’s more hope than fear.

I have found myself a psychologist. Not just any random one – theoretically one who is actually qualified to give me the type of therapy I need to have some of the kind of recovery that I want.

Although it hasn’t ever been specifically diagnosed by anyone, I think I have PTSD, or if not fully qualifying for the diagnostic criteria of that, then I certainly have disorder caused by traumatic stress :D And I discovered recently that “bulk standard” therapy, i.e. CBT, is not the right way to treat this kind of mental health problem. Who could have fucking guessed? I think someone higher looked out for me and a few weeks ago a reddit post popped up on my feed that was an AMA by a psychiatrist talking about treating PTSD and other trauma related things and what the current evidence based standards are and things like that. It was just the information that I needed right when I needed it. Ok, well, I could actually have done with it like 15 years ago but…

I also should not have to be the one figuring out what treatment I need. I understand the importance of people being involved in their own healthcare decisions but this is beyond that. GPs refer to any psychologist they know of that seems ok. Psychologists will take anybody, regardless of what mental health condition they actually have and whether or not they have the right skills to treat it. The worst part of this is that THEY DON’T KNOW that they are doing it wrong, that they are potentially harming people with this approach. Because, yes, one of the things I learned in that enlightening AMA was that normal therapy can actually worsen the issues when a mental health problem is trauma related. And I see that. I have sought help so many times and got nowhere and essentially come to the conclusion that it was just me. I can so easily see how someone else in a similar situation, who maybe didn’t have the same family support and love that I do, would see their failures in therapy as evidence that they are just broken beyond repair and decide to fix it by ending their life. I’m almost certain that has to have happened, because if I’ve had this problem then it’s almost certain others have too. That thought makes my chest hurt for real.

Obviously there are some huge flaws in the way mental health is handled. I already know that although they are the people you get referred to for help with autism things, many psychologists don’t know shit about autism. I don’t believe that autism/ADHD/neurodivergence should be classified with and managed by mental health professionals anyway, because it reinforces the idea that having one of those things is a flaw or a disorder, and I’m not certain that is really is because of the number of people that are affected. Being left-handed used to be a correctable flaw, then they realised it actually doesn’t affect anyone else at all and chilled the fuck out about it and learned a bit about how to make things easier for left-dominant people and all of a sudden there were gajillions more left-handed people. I think that maybe diverging neurotypes will come to be seen the same way in the future, that it’s not the people that are the problem, it’s society. But anyway. So psychologists don’t know stuff about autism unless they’ve made an intentional choice to go and learn, they don’t know about the proper way to treat basically anything except general anxiety and depression; but worst of all they don’t know that they don’t know. And in a healthcare provider, that is unacceptable. A GP is a good example of this – a fundamental part of their job and their training is to be able to identify when someone’s complaint is within the scope of their practice or whether it is something that is better dealt with a specialist in the area, and if that is the case they will refer the patient to the appropriate person. It seems like something similar needs to exist in psychology and mental health care so that the exact needs of the patient can be identified and they can be matched with someone who can actually help them rather than potentially causing more harm by applying the wrong approach to the therapy.

Seeing and understanding all this, knowing that mental health care was very deliberately excluded from Medicare and our public health system, it’s hardly any wonder why there is a crisis state existing now in the mental health care industry. Because fuck them crazy people from up here in our privileged perch. I’m sure that many actual scientists have understood that there is no real difference between mental health and physical health for a long time, but the stigma about having a mental health condition and the tendency to view it as a character flaw rather than a medical issue has prevented that information from becoming widely known. Mental health isn’t an entirely separate entity, it is a sub-category of healthcare, and I think most people understand that now but not necessarily that there’s no fundamental difference between it and conditions that have entirely physical symptoms. It is something malfunctioning in a part of your body, it just happens to be the part that controls your perception of self and self-expression, not the part that filters toxins or pumps blood or senses optical information.

Anyway. I am really hopeful that I can actually get somewhere this time. But also scared. Because my previous experiences tell me to not be too hopeful because it didn’t work all those times. Then there’s the worry about how much it will hurt to actually do this thing, the right kind of therapy for dealing with my issues. And wondering what and who to expect afterwards, assuming some level of success? I have been like this for so long that I find it hard to imagine functioning any other way. Like, I can imagine it, but it seems like a fantasy story where suspension of disbelief is an essential part of being able to enjoy the story. It is so different to anything else I have experienced that I actually do not know how to picture myself in a real life setting, just less burdened by these ghosts. I don’t want to make the mistake of aiming too high and imagining myself as suddenly being the most zen, laidback, unflappable person on the planet – lol, like that would ever be me – but I don’t know how much change and relief to expect or hope for in a realistic sense.

That’s enough rambling for today. Need to get dressed to go and get myself a mental health care plan so that I can start this new therapeutic adventure on Friday.

hope and fear

psych

jade, , , 4869 wordsLeave a comment

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.

psych