Thankyou for your incredible post.
I'm so sorry that this has happened to you and that you've been feeling like sh*t, I feel for
you but I don't think there is anything wrong with you, I say this only because your words
echoed so many of my own experiences and made me feel like I wasn't alone, and amazingly grateful that someone else was talking real, not colluding with the bulls*ht, with the bullsh*t that
gets so bad it essentially becomes emotional abuse. Even when it was never, ever intended to be
so and when the people doing it find out how badly they are affecting people, often the people they love they feel terrible. I'm talking about colluding with completly messed up and harmful social norms.
I'm talking about how deeply I could relate when I read this quote from your post and how much my life has changed since I decided to find a way to push back:
"I’ve lost my shit basically raised my voice to my dad and said “please stop asking me how my day was the answer is always going to be shit!” Had to apologise straight after, feel guilty for not being happy because that’s all they want from me and I just can’t."
What I see here is a daughter feeling guilty for expressing negative feelings and a father who probably meant no harm and was probably just echoing what he had taught in terms of expectaions of a broken society, not realising just how broken and socially unsustainable that society and its norms were. People need to be able to express negative emotions. When we can' express our emotions they go down to the basement and start lifting weights.
Emotions are there to be expressed and heard, and when there is a build up of horrible negative ones, in my experience at any rate, it usually corresponds to a large number of smaller negative emotions that couldn't be expressed, healed and passed and so they have built up to the point where it feels like they are now at a point where it would be dangerous to release them on the world.
I've also been through the stage where they can't be held in anymore, literally ranting on street corners or driving my car around because I knew I had to let out all that anger and just couldn't stop ranting so the only thing I could do was drive around with the windows rolled up so that nobody had to hear me yell (for long). And then I note how proud of myself I feel - why? proud of myself for 'maintaining condideration to others' as much as was possible under the circumstances and I have to ask myself : why do we live in a society where we are all taught and then teach each other that bottling up our emotions to this point is the healthy and thus "normal" thing to do?
Now that I have so many years worth of built up and unexpressed emotions, wtf am I supposed to do with them all?
And the answer that has increasingly been coming to me is: find a way to push back.
What that means is obviously entirely dependent on everyone and a lot of people will be like 'no way that isn't for me thanks' and fair enough
But for me all those emotions were the wise parts of me saying "WTF is wrong with all of you people??? can't you see there is a problem here?? can't you see there are things that need to change?" in a nutshell the bulk of my "darkness" was pure frustration, and that 'beligerance' or 'conbattiveness' or whatever the label they were going to try and use to call my anger and frustratuion a "personality disorder" to make me the problem the one that needed "fixing", was the best last-ditch-fire-fight weapon that I had to push back against them when backed into a corner - I just needed to learn how to use it effectively and who to use it on.
We are so incredibly against standing up for ourselves in this society and recently I am feeling increasingly like there is a huge pressure to collude with things that we know deep down (and sometimes on the surface too and everything in between) are just plain wrong.
Both the carrot and the stick are used in this endeavour, we are rewarded for meeting social norms and expectations (even when they are really unhealthy or harmful ones) and we are punished when we breach them (even when doing so is actually exactly what is healthy or helpful in resolving an untenable situation or creating positive change) then of course there is always the guilt: many people harm others without intention or conscious awareness, so we feel really guilty to let them know that we are feeling hurt.
I don't know much about the details of your situation, but I don't agree that we should have to "pick our audience" if we are in a situation where it isn't safe for us to express our emotions and we aren't actually hurting people (and I don't mean the pain that we feel when we know someone we love is in pain and we don't immediately know how to help, or need to just let them be in pain & soothe them - it's not hurting people when they feel that pain, that's them sharing ours and in a healthy society it's a healing thing, in my experience at any rate) then we aren't the problem, it might mean that our loved ones or whomever we are talking to might need a bit of help to come around and that we might want to try and reach out to others (trying many within reason and pulling back from those that feel unsafe or abusive) because sometimes, as humans, we just need to be heard. It seems to fulfil a really important function. When the inner being rises up and says "I need to be heard" if it gets silenced for too long it shouts in my experience. That isn't something wrong with it.
Sometimes abuse is occurring where it shouldn't be and sometimes it's masquerading as something else. Sometimes a standard practice is an abusive practice. And if someone feels like the label they applied to you is harmful and it isn't safe to say so. Sometimes it's reasonable to recognise that you should be able to make a formal complaint and have that complaint be valued and resolved. Where that can't be done, its reasonable, in my experience, to consider that this is an abusive system that might need to be reported to the Royal Commission into violence, abuse and exploitation of persons with disabilities. eg. If I seek help from a person and they impose a label, framework, model or explanation that I find inherently harmful, refuse to listen to me as I say so and deprive me of access to other support or act in other ways that I find harmful. It might be reasonable to ask if I"m experiencing institutional abuse.
Identifying as a victim of Violence, abuse and exploitation can be a powerful position for a person who is seeking for the harmful behaviour to stop. Because it is framing those things as what they are. Sometimes it can be hard to find the language or support.
When we are working in a system that is still coming to terms with admitting or recognising endemic abuse it can be particularly hard and to identify abuse sometimes we have to borrow from other contexts.
Here is blue knot's definition of emotional abuse for children
https://www.blueknot.org.au/Resources/Information/Understanding-abuse-and-trauma/What-is-child-abuse-/Types-of-child-abuse#emotional
eg
"Emotional abuse includes acts of omission (emotional neglect - what is not done) e.g. not expressing or showing love and affection. It also includes acts of commission (what is done) e.g. rejection, humiliation, insults, setting unreasonable expectations or restricting opportunities for the child to learn, socialise or explore. Both acts of commission and omission can negatively affect a child’s self-esteem and ability to engage with others."
Thisis something I often identify with if I find myself in the situation you described with the doctor at the beginning of yuor post. The person is supposed to be fulfilling the role of providying de-facto emotional support (in my mind, why else would I seek someone out when I'm in emotional distress specifically to resolve it?) instead they don't show any empathy - while "love and affection" might not be appropriate in a clincal setting, I would think it's reasonable to expect that empathy, understanding and appropriate emotional connection necessary to achieve safety and healing are. Coldness, and projecting dogmatic views that the person finds unhelpful are things that I have found personally to be extremely damaging and effectively constitute emotional abuse in the clinical setting.
Another article I found helpful in feeling comfortable with my own feelings and starting to feel more confident to push back or walk away from harmful support where it was a lost cause and find helpful support - and to telll the difference was by borrowng from the "red flags" concepts in domestic violence models. Here is a list of example
https://www.1800respect.org.au/violence-and-abuse/psychological-abuse/
Psychological abuse can include someone regularly:
- Embarrassing you in public or in front of family, friends, support workers or people you work with
- Calling you names
- Threatening to harm you, your pets, children, or other people who are important to you
- Treating you badly because of things you can’t change — for example, your religion, race, past, disability, gender, sexuality, or family
- Ignoring you or pretending you aren’t there
- Doing and saying things that make you feel confused. This might include someone moving or changing things and then denying they have done this.
- Always correcting what you say with the aim of making you look or feel foolish
Many of the practices associated with common behaviour in mental health fields triggered the red flags above for me. And helped me to realise where I wasn't being treated well and needed to escape or get support in changing things (as appropriate to the situation). One of the things that made me feel confused that I would adapt to an institutional setting, were when I tried to make complaints about the way in which I was affected by certain labelling - and being told that it was not a complaint because that was standard procedure: something being standard procedure doesn't mean it can't be psycological abuse. If I (or anyone) personally finds the labels and accompanying ideology unhelpful it shouldn't be forced on them as a pre-condition of support.
It can be really scary to recognise that things aren't right in a support situation, but in my experience it can also be a really important and powerful part of healing. Having to walk away from therapists and reach out to speak out about abuse and find safety from it or get the right support that i needed to speak out about my feelings and things that just weren't right without feeling gulty about it was really hard, but it's also been really important for me and made me feel less and less powerless. The best part is when it starts to feel like what I thought was a terrible quality: that 'beligerance' that 'anger' was actually a part of me that was only loud because it was trying to get m y attention and the attention of my fellow community members, when it starts to be heard by the right people and things start to change, it starts to reveal itself as something taht was actually a postive quality and a very natural and adaptive (NOT maladaptive but genuinely adaptive ) reaction.
I don't know if any of this has been helpful at all, but I guess what I am trying to say is that you don't have to accept a support person that doesn't feel helpful. Or an ideolgy - if 'borderline personality disorder' is not a label or concept you find helpful then you should be allowed to work to a model or framework you do find helpful, or even just work with your own inate understanding of yourself: the right therapist or support person will do that and if they won't they aren't the right one.
I hope that helps, our society is in a place where it does need to change, I feel. We have been labelling everyone who expresses this, and trying to make them the problem, they aren't. And sometimes, in my experience, what others called my 'disorder' was actually my conscience and good sense - it's hard and it's really, really raw sometimes. But speaking out - even just the post you made - can make a huge difference, hearing others we can relate to, for me anyway, is what builds strength and confidence to push back against a society that needs to change.
Not everyone is going to agree - but that doesn't mean its about "picking one's audience" for me that phrase is a silencing phrase, for me it's more about speaking out anyway - and trusting that it's going to be raw and messy at first and maybe for quite a while but it is going to get better with time. Because it's far better that the truth comes out, and sometimes it's been buried under a lot of different layers.
Wishing you all the very, very best and thanks for your amazing honest post
There are increasingly many people from all walks of life all over the world who are becoming more able to call out the parallels between many standard psychiatric practices and practices of abuse. Bearing in mind if a person finds some particular framework helpful, and they knowingly chose it it may not be absue, but sometimes these frameworks are delivered in a way that matches coercive control. Again many of the things on this list, presented in a domestic violence context had parallels for me with aspects of "care" that I found incredibly harmful. The tropes of "you needed it" or "it was for your own good" or "its to prevent harm to self or others" didn't ring true for me in my case, and was just another aspect of the abuse (like "you deserved it" or "you need me" commonly are in an abusive domestic situation)
https://www.womensaid.org.uk/information-support/what-is-domestic-abuse/coercive-control/
- Isolating you from friends and family
- Depriving you of basic needs, such as food
- Monitoring your time
- Monitoring you via online communication tools or spyware
- Taking control over aspects of your everyday life, such as where you can go, who you can see, what you can wear and when you can sleep
- Depriving you access to support services, such as medical services
- Repeatedly putting you down, such as saying you’re worthless
- Humiliating, degrading or dehumanising you
- Controlling your finances
- Making threats or intimidating you
Sometimes for me, I was being deprived access to support services by the people providing the support services: because they were providing services that were not supportive to me, but supportive of their belief system/ideology (eg "borderline personality disorder") that I actually found humiliating, degrading or dehumanising. All the other things on the list, I experienced with very little or no adjustment needed from what was listed.
I don't know if you and I are on the same page but I found this article really helpful, exactly because I didn't have to adapt it. It's one of increadingly many articles that spell out the problems with the power imbalances and coercive control in mainstream psychiatry explictly. Ironically it'sone of the facets of the framework presented that criticism of the paradigm or "sacred science", are not permitted. It has become so bad in some institutions, unfortunately psychiatry being one, that some people even think that science is dogmatic. Which is really sad because true science is the exact opposite of dogma. I found this article actually helped me feel a bit safer, because its one of increasingly many that actually speak out openly and highlight that for some of us we have been in an oppressive system, and those of us who have experienced it as brainwashing or coersive control rather than help and support are not alone.
http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar_url?url=https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a339/affa25f47eab218ba1b2adb45eadfa8b6c2c.pdf&hl=en&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm0Exi58qoI48g5SNpUKXt4R20HzUg&nossl=1&oi=scholarr
I found frameworks like this really helpful when I was going through domestic violence, to start to understand how to identify how to be safe, and I"m starting to realise that we might need to start working to put together resources that help with red flags and achieving safety in institutional settings too.
