hsphaven

My OCD is bad this evening, and there is nothing I can do to satisfy the compulsion. Instead of taking a bunch of pills and going to bed, I thought I’d try and squeeze in the post I was going to make before my OCD hijacked everything.

We’ve just had a violent heatwave here (I actually just typed heatache by mistake just then, shows where I’m at!). I don’t mind the heat. I missed a lot of summer as I was in hospital, so was glad I could still squeeze in some beach days before the colder weather sets in. Now the weather has changed dramatically, reminding me of the way emotional abusers suddenly turn. Many people start to get Seasonal Affective Disorder during autumn, and with the added loss of my psychologist, the season feels particularly cold and melancholic. “Beware of shapeshifters”, “Trust no one”, “Run away”, “The end is near” are phrases Linkin Park has put in his music video for his song “Final Masquerade”. A masquerade is an event where people wear masks. My psychologist wore a mask. Sometimes I caught glimmers of the cold, heartless person she is behind the mask, such as the day her face for some reason morphed into my old teacher’s. I don’t know whether it was her make up or what it was. This teacher had a nasty side as well. She spread a lot of misinformation about mental health and I don’t believe she had any lived experience perspective. When I started speaking out against the things she was teaching, I was expelled. I was still struggling with depression and was often late to class. One time the staff found me in the bathroom holding a pin which I felt like injuring myself with. The staff used my mental health against me as a reason to stop me doing placement and ultimately remove me from the course. Yes, I was discriminated against, but because I hadn’t openly disclosed my disability to them, I suppose they thought they could get away with it. Similarly my psychologist used my mental health against me to end our relationship. I didn’t think it was possible, but the levels people will sink to continues to amaze me. “Too unstable”, “too much”. Those words haunt me, stinging me like shards of glass stuck in my skin. I feel like I walk around with a sign on my back saying “get rid of me”. But I came across a quote by C.Olavasdaughter yesterday which brought me comfort: “Darling, you’re magic, and people are afraid of magic. 400 years ago they would have called your wildness and beauty witchcraft and burned you on a stake. They don’t burn the magical ones anymore. They just leave them out in the cold and make them feel like freaks.” This is how people with BPD are treated nowadays. We are discriminated against. We are stigmatised. We turn to hospitals suicidal and are not given a bed, dumped on the floor of the waiting room crying with not a single soul stopping to ask if they can help us. Or we are told we will only be given 48 hours in hospital, and if we protest, the staff threaten to use their security to force us out. The private system is only marginally better. We are allowed to stay longer, but if we play up, the hospital can blacklist us and refuse to give us another admission. In the final meeting with my psychologist she brought up all the times I’ve played up in private hospitals and how they struggle to manage me there. She said she is part of the private system as well, and she is siding with the hospitals, agreeing that I am too difficult to manage.

Geoff Brown wrote a quote about the power of sight. “I see you”, he reflects, are the most important words we can utter to another. Seeing someone in all of their humanity, in their vulnerability, and in their beautiful imperfections, yet still loving them. There are three other words though that I think are just as important to hear, especially for people who have been abused by a narcissist or psychopath. These are “I believe you”. Just like “I see you”, a key turns inside of our hearts when we hear these words, feeing us from our isolation. Being abused by a narcissist or psychopath is a particularly isolating experience because they often leave no visible scars and they wear masks. To the rest of the world they present themselves as charming, nice, trustworthy characters. They are shapeshifters. They often hold positions of great status and prestige. A previous psychologist, who was also a narcissist, ran her own clinic as well and even named the clinic after herself. Narcissists play people until they are bored, find a better source of narcissistic supply, or sustain narcissistic injury where they feel their self-image has come under threat. Sometimes there is no reason why they abandon you. If they are psychopathic, they do it because they actually enjoy hurting you, even when you have done nothing to them. These are incredibly sick people. They can string us along for years, as my psychologist did, before I really saw her true colours. All those years I was recommending the clinic to people and thinking I’d struck gold. When I went to leave a Google review after my psychologist decided to discard me, I was the only one to give the clinic one star. This hurt me, and made me feel very alone in what I had experienced. So, to have someone tell me “I believe you” when I say I have been abused is so important to me. Today I saw another therapist and he bought into my psychologist’s excuse that we weren’t getting anywhere together. He thought maybe she didn’t think about the impact ending the relationship would have on me. He had no idea. My psychologist should know that complex trauma doesn’t happen over night, so is not going to be fixed over night. She knew all too well the damage she was inflicting on me by ending our relationship, giving me no say over it, and leaving me with nothing. A person who cared would never put someone through this. I don’t know if I can continue with my new therapist if he doesn’t believe my psychologist is an abuser. I think I will just find support in my “Clients Harmed by Therapy” Facebook group. There is actually a whole lot of people, mostly women who have been slapped with the BPD label, out there who have gone through exactly what I have gone through. It is actually a whole phenomenon.

Life feels incredibly empty and meaningless now.  I began equine therapy, but it’s not really for me. The horse just chomped on their hay while I brushed them. They got annoyed when the other horses came too close to the hay. When I left, one of the horses came chasing after me. It wasn’t because they missed me; all they were interested in was the food in my bag. I had a bit of an existential crisis after the therapy. I wondered whether genuine care really exists or whether everyone is inherently selfish. Nihilism, according to Wikipedia, is a family of views within philosophy that rejects generally accepted or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as knowledge, morality, or meaning. That is the way I’m leaning nowadays. I believe the care my psychologist showed me all these years was a performance. At least the horses didn’t pretend to be interested in me. That’s something at least. But they are still inherently selfish, only interested in their hay and getting angry when another horse wants some.