But it's as if everything else about the story is true. They never medicated me - but they certainly shut me out, in every way they could think of. I remember one night with a boyfriend in college, curling up in the cold on the front porch, hoping someone would come pick me up. No one ever came, of course, and I eventually dumped the boyfriend. I've since learned at least to choose ones that could sense my distress and respond to it, even if they didn't stick around long after they realized how much reassurance I really needed...
The basic experience is: Your needs are too great. Your needs are too much. You are too much, in and of yourself. You take up too much space; you're too loud; you're not pretty enough. You're too smart, it's annoying, stop it. And yet somehow do everything we tell you to do without us even having to tell you to do it, let alone telling you how. Just do it. Just know. Just get the hell away from us and leave us alone.
From BE's blog:
I think there’s evidence that much of the therapy to do with traumatic experiences actually makes them worse. Certainly, there’s no way I’d go near therapy these days anyway since it’s part of what got me into this mess, and often it just perpetuates this kind of thing.
There’s a very simple but powerful poem written about the kind of situations you describe, though. The author of the poem, S. Marie (a pseudonym, she wrote a book called CAPTÏV) was writing about child abuse within a family, but this is a very good description of the effects.
They told me:
Don’t be ugly,
Don’t be pretty.
Don’t be stupid,
Don’t be smart.
Don’t be loud,
Don’t be shy.
Don’t be here,
Don’t be there.
Don’t be wrong,
Don’t be right.
Don’t be sad,
Don’t be glad.
Don’t be sick,
Don’t be well.Don’t be.
Within psychiatry the word for the effects of living under that constant level of simultaneous bombardment and helplessness is ‘complex PTSD’, although I have a lot of trouble with psychiatric illness-type metaphors (and I view most psychiatric diagnoses as metaphorical) for awful experiences.
Interestingly, although institutions are a classic environment for developing this ‘complex PTSD’ thing, psychiatry never mentions them. (You can read more about the standard-psychiatry view of this here.
I’m going to do a really long quote from an interview I did with a friend of mine on the subject of institutions, and since the interview is super-long I’ll just quote part of it that has to do with how my responses were altered:
Laura: [The experience of institutionalization] makes me different. I’ve been away from it long enough that I don’t think I currently have any active sort of psych survivor behavior. But I can certainly spot them in other people…
Amanda: What kind of behavior?
Laura: Oh gee. I spotted it in you right away. How do I describe it? You were an obvious case of it. You had a kind of submissiveness that is not so much… it is a kind of submissiveness but it’s not submission in any kind of normal way. Especially since you were oftentimes looking for where the rules were, so you could follow the rules. Without necessarily appreciating the fact that there weren’t necessarily any rules for any particular event or… I don’t know how to describe it. You were waiting or looking for the institution around you, as if, it’s like, “Where is it, it’s hiding here somewhere!” This is not necessarily a very constructive behavior out in the real world, because it is particularly passive in many ways, and because it is sort of like looking around for it. I really got a sense that you were looking around all the time for the rules. And terribly terrified that you were violating all the rules. And meanwhile not necessarily getting what actually should be done, because you were busy looking for the rules. It’s a paradox there.
You had real problems with initiative, and since in the real world initiative is kind of what you actually have to do, the fact that you really had serious problems with initiative, combined with the fact that you were always looking for the rules, made for a really bad combination.
That’s something I see, but I certainly wouldn’t consider it the only thing I’d look for, if that makes any sense. Another thing, certainly, for you, was that you could not deal with the possibility that you’d done anything wrong without total panic. And that, simply telling you, simply correcting you in any way shape or form, created instant and total and absolute panic and terror and whatnot. And this makes perfect sense to me, because if you violate the rules, if you’ve done something wrong, in an institution, to the point where they’d point anything out at you, that means you’re in deep danger. So you may very well find yourself at the end of life-threatening abuse. And therefore it was very difficult to communicate things to you at times because you couldn’t deal with a correction just as a correction, because to you a correction meant a very dangerous situation indeed. Which isn’t normally what it is in the real world, but it certainly is exactly what it is in institution-land.
Amanda: And then there were the apologies…
Laura: Oh yes. The neverending… to properly read the apologies, read them as “Don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me! Please! Don’t beat me up, don’t tie me down, don’t torture me!” Which, I obviously had no plans on doing any of the above, but again you were reacting to the situation as if you were still in the psych hospital. And that obviously wasn’t the case, but again that’s a typical PTSD sort of thing. And I certainly understand it very well, because that kind of an experience really makes an imprint on a person for life. You can’t go through that experience of reaching that absolute bottom level of human experience without being seriously affected by it.
Amanda: As I recall it wasn’t just actions I was afraid of, it was thoughts.
Laura: Oh yes, of course. I didn’t go through that, but then I didn’t go through brainwashing. You did. I fortunately spent most of my time in places where they kind of throw you in there, lock you up, and kind of forget about you. I think the only time I ever saw doctors at state hospitals was when I was being admitted and when I was being released. So there was nobody there playing warp-your-brain with me.
Except for one thing: People had occasionally attempted psychotherapy with me outside of those kind of places, and fortunately I was able to get away from it, because I had no special orders to make me go through it. And my experience is that that stuff really twists your mind around. Given a choice between psychotherapy and getting drugged, I would easily pick getting drugged. It’s one thing to have your brain deadened — of course the third choice do neither of the above is my first choice — but, it’s one thing to suppress one’s thought and it’s another thing to get it all twisted up.
Psychotherapy messes with the brain. It basically tells you up is down and right is left and whatever. And especially when one is experiencing that level of badness, one is very vulnerable. I mean it is precisely the kind of thing that people who try to brainwash other people, the kind of environment they try to generate, because at that point people are very vulnerable, and you’re more likely to get them to do anything. I think it’s not accidental that what’s been happening to prisoners in Iraq, the things that they were doing to break down the prisoners, it makes a lot of sense. Terrorize people and humiliate them and make them feel as vulnerable as possible, and in fact people do tend to become emotionally and mentally vulnerable as well.
And so psychotherapy in that context can really mess one up. I mean all it takes is a therapist who thinks they know everything about you, they know all about your life, they know what you’re thinking, they know what you should think, they know what you’re experiencing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they tell you about what they know, and they tell you what you should know. Whether or not it has anything to do with reality.
They can really badly warp one to the point where, I never got to that point but I could easily picture it going to a stage where you truly did not know who you were. Just completely turning a person inside out and upside-down. And I think you had that experience. I didn’t, but I can certainly see it happening. And that kind of manufacture of an unperson is… is just… very bad. And I think that’s very much what was done to you. And I merely had enough of it to be aware of what could happen. And I’m very happy that I did not have to put up with much of it, courtesy of, hooray, bad insurance!
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