ptsd

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

hah, suck it

jade, 1452 wordsLeave a comment

That’s what Daniel said to tell the voice. The one that keeps trying to make me doubt myself. Isn’t it kind if interesting, in a psychology type of way, how it is always about doubting my value to him, my worthiness of him, my competence as a wife and mother. It’s never “does he really love me?” but more like “why does he love you when you are obviously rubbish? what have you done to make him think that you are not?” Sometimes it is more like.. “one day he will realise that you are not actually any good and will find someone who really does have all of the qualities he thinks you have.”

As ridiculous as saying “hah, suck it” to this inner part of myself is, I have actually been trying to do it. The levity of the words actually kind of helps, as well as of course the deeper meaning of what he was actually saying when he began with that. It’s almost a kind of… hmmm, juvenile comeback and the incongruity of that to the heaviness of those thoughts and feelings is great enough that it helps to break the hold.

I think I have probably specified before, but I’m not certain, so.. there is no actual voice that exists as an entity that I perceive as separate to myself. It is a hard concept to translate into words. Although I have an inner voice (and mind’s eye), I am aware that not all of my thinking happens on a verbal level. Some things seem to exist also as a kind of hybrid of a thought and a feeling, or they are thoughts that have such intense attached feelings so as to be essentially inseparable for the purposes of trying to describe and define them. Generally, I think that you don’t really consider where your thoughts come from when they make their way from the subconscious part of your mind into the conscious part. I don’t always. But when I do, I can tell the difference between thoughts that have come from the part of my mind that is entirely me, versus the part of my mind that exists in a permanently brainwashed state of self-doubt, self-hate, self-loathing. If this was a physical wound it would be a scar, a large, rough, discoloured and unsightly one that frequently pulses with pain despite the original thing that caused the injury being long gone, because the nerves and tissues are damaged. So when I talk about ‘the voice,’ this is what I mean. If I don’t pay close attention, it sounds and feels enough like my own natural, unadulterated self that it is essentially indistinguishable. Only when I take the time to consider the detail and content of these thoughts and feelings that come to the surface via the medium of my inner voice can I tell that some of them come from something else, some part of my mind that isn’t working properly and isn’t genuinely reflective of me.

The hard part of that is that it is really exhausting all the time to have to question if my thoughts and feelings can be trusted, and if the answer is no, to try to convince the rest of my mind that even though they look and feel native in so many ways, these are very much actually an invasive species and should not be given any room to grow. I devote so much mental energy and bandwidth to trying to stop the invasive thoughts from taking over, and sometimes I wonder what else I could be achieving with my mind and thoughts if I was not using so much of my capacity to do that.

Those can be dangerous thoughts to have, too, though. Like what could I be doing, what would our situation be if I didn’t have fibromyalgia and hadn’t lost so much ability to be productive? What if I hadn’t spent the last fuck-knows how many years slowly losing my ability to sleep – would I ever even have been diagnosed with fibro? Would it have been as hard as it is to manage the thoughts and feelings? It’s an interesting thought experiment but it is both too tempting to consider that I could have been “completely fine” and too difficult to imagine what that actually would have looked like. Despite the limitations that these states have necessitated that I live with, I have tried to carry on like they weren’t there and sometimes probably to my own detriment. So I don’t know that I would have actually done that much more, I just would be a lot less decrepit for it.

Something that often seemed odd to me was that if I forgot to have my medicine for some reason, the next day I would be fully unable to stay awake. Like, falling asleep with a cup halfway to my mouth kind of absolute inability to do stuff. Even worse than what I ended up like the last few months where I frequently fall asleep, just never literally in the middle of having a drink. And this did not make sense because when I first started taking Efexor, it made me drowsy like that within an hour or two of having it, which is why I switched from having it in the morning, as is usually recommended, to having it at night instead. So I didn’t understand how a drug that made me sleepy could also make me sleepy by it’s absence.

I think I have a kind of theory about that now. On Sunday, I made the second dose reduction in my initial phase of this plan to improve my sleep. For four weeks I was taking 262.5mg a day, and now I have begun four weeks that will be at 225mg. Then there will be a 187.5mg period before going to 150mg. At that stage I want to assess how things are going both mentally and sleep-ishly before I decide how to proceed further. Over the last month I haven’t really noticed any lessening of the day time sleepiness, but I also haven’t had any of the incredibly unpleasant side-effects of SNRI dose-reduction, which is a big positive. I have noticed a difference between the days where I’ve had some valium before bed and the ones where I haven’t. Even though I’m only doing that at the weekend, the effects on my day time state last a day or two longer – it is usually Tuesday or Wednesday before I am struggling markedly more with staying awake. Yesterday and today, though, there has been a small but noticeable difference in how sleepy I am, which I wasn’t really expecting. But that brings me back to my theory. So for whatever reason I had a side-effect of essentially immediate onset sleepiness when taking the medicine. And over time, it’s also had a more subtle side-effect of cumulatively interrupting my ability to go to Stage 3 and REM sleep phases up until I got to this point where I was like, come on there’s seriously something wrong. I think the reason why I feel such overwhelming sleepiness when I have missed a dose or even the subtly increased sleepiness yesterday and today when I’ve had just a little bit less of the drug is that something in my body and/or brain is recognising that the substance that stops it from reaching those stages of sleep is absent/reduced and the response is, well then, let’s go to fucking sleep finally! Because the lack of those types of sleep have become such a dire need that it’s almost like my body is constantly attempting to begin that process instead of just restricting it to night time like a person with a normal circadian cycle and undamaged sleep ability would do.

That makes me a bit mad about all of the times when I was fucking exhausted and even had a headache or something and I forced myself to not have a nap, because all of the doctors told me that if I napped in the day time it would just make it that much harder to sleep at night. Yeah, maybe if those naps ever had the potential to provide me with sleep of adequate quality and quantity, they might interrupt me sleeping at night, but they never fucking did. So in denying myself those, I felt shit physically, I felt shit emotionally and mentally because I felt guilty about wanting a nap I was being told I shouldn’t have, and I was even in small ways contributing to the worsening of this problem by exacerbating the sleep deprivation when I didn’t have to.

hah, suck it