The Cruelty Of Mental Illness: An Invitation To Walk In My Shoes.
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I imagine being born with an illness.
There are no overt signs, no overt symptomatology, you just appear to have different behaviors than the other children around you.
Imagine your home life as a child is horrific, your sense of self and self-worth nonexistent and never nurtured; you are the child of mentally ill and abusive parents; an only child at that. You have little to no social skills, coping skills, or a sense of self.
Yet then you are thrust into public school, and not only rejected by fellow students, but targeted by teachers and vilified before your peers, for being different. Imagine you are told from the time you are small and being abused, You are the problem.
What are you going to do; who will you become or not become?
I suspect you would believe you have no value, focus on yourself as the problem, and become somewhat like an infected ingrown toenail — always examining yourself for flaws and potential remedies to transform yourself from the selfish, self-absorbed person you are told you are into the normal person you are told you must strive to become, to be liked, tolerated and or functional.
You would essentially suffer from an acute hyperawareness of your own failings, which leads to a deeply entrenched pattern of self-loathing and thus a self-fulfilling prophecy. You would never trust you, you would merely try to mimic behaviors that others told you would make you more likeable.
Further imagine that somewhere in your life journey your condition is described as an illness, and this illness has a label which carries stigma and shame.
Imagine being a cripple without the benefit of having a wheelchair or crutches to identify you, and then when you went to get help, hearing, “We don’t help cripples like you; your disease makes you untreatable.” Your disease makes you a bad person, difficult at best to be around.
Your disease is so bad that even trained professionals cringe at the designation of your diagnosis and approach the therapeutic environment with a secret disdain and hopelessness before even beginning your treatment — all due to the diagnosis.
Imagine being intelligent just made your disease worse. Wouldn’t this just solidify the underlying causation for the disease by validating an individual’s unworthiness? A vicious circle, so to speak? Imagine you turn to self-help, therapy, new treatments, drugs, and nothing helps.
The information you find about your illness in books or online quite often reinforces how horrible you are, how impossible it will be for anyone attempting a relationship with you to be happy or have success. What would you do if you were the person with that illness? Would you feel hopeful?
Would you keep trying for decades to heal and have success in your life on a personal and professional level, or would you kill yourself to spare your family and yourself such profound pain and disappointment?
If you couldn’t kill yourself, would you loathe yourself more, feel like a burden, withdraw and isolate to protect the people you care about from you? Would you turn to drugs or alcohol use to avoid the intense pain of such total rejection and isolation of being such a monster?
Would your life be a revolving door of therapy, hospitalizations, and failed attempts at love and work? What if every relationship proved to be another abuser, another alcoholic or drug addict that merely saw your kindness and people-pleasing as a convenient ends to their means?
Would this facilitate your healing or would it once again merely reinforce the message you have heard all of your life — that you are the problem and broken beyond repair; damaged goods.
Could you extricate yourself from the abuse and see it for what it is, or would you just assume once again that it was all your fault; if you were just better, smarter, prettier, healthier, then you would become likeable and lovable? If you just… tried… harder… you must deserve it.
What would you do if you were a mother with this illness? Would you seek nonstop help and try to learn and change and grow beyond the limitations of such a cruel illness to raise healthy children or would you lose hope? What if you were a single parent with no money or resources? How would you cope?
What would you do if you felt like the worst mother in the world, doing your best with no money, no resources, and no family support? Would you not be doomed from the outset to fail according to the observations and findings of the medical community?
I am curious what these professionals would have people do in such circumstances? Mental illness, the generational gift which keeps on giving, as one generation of sufferers creates a new generation and lacks the requisite skills and treatment to break the cycle.
Unlike other illnesses, the illness is either denied as not legitimate — merely attention seeking, whining, deliberate manipulation — and/or learned helplessness. You are advised to get over it, walk it off, or medicate yourself into numbness.
You cannot retain a job despite any plethora of talents and skills, as you either are incapable of functioning with consistency or playing well with others, thus your skills are not worth the inconvenience of dealing with your mental illness.
Imagine that you might have a genius IQ but be incapable of holding a job at Goodwill. Now imagine you are the sole wage-earner and parent for your family. Imagine you’ve been homeless, dependent upon the good graces of strangers because you are incapable in the most literal sense.
How frightened would you be related to your ability to care for yourself and provide for yourself in the most basic way? Would the world appear fair or like a friendly place? Would you ever feel safe? Now imagine one of your children kills someone. What shame would you carry?
You tried to break the cycle with all your effort and heart, but you failed. What fault and blame would you point at yourself?
Imagine your mother, your other children, family, friends, none of them want anything to do with you because the behaviors your illness in part contributes to manifesting drive everyone away from you. Would you love them enough to accept it?
Would you accept you were defective, deficient, tell them you loved them and respect their choices as logical consequences of your own poor conduct despite an illness that essentially was all about lacking a core sense of self or emotional constancy? Would you grieve in silent shame?
Would you accept and be the scapegoat for every failing, every event which goes awry, and every relationship which fails because after all, you are the one with the illness? How painful would this be to live with daily?
What would it be like to have an illness where you had to spend more time proving to people you were ill than you ever could healing? What if the time you had to take to heal, your chemotherapy so to speak, was construed as self-indulgent and selfish?
What if therapy and or antidepressant medications in and of themselves were shameful, limiting in the arena of insurance, employment, and resource acquisition? What if they did not work? What if your inability to hold a job could not be seen as serious and you could not get social security or disability?
How would you live and provide for yourself and your family? What would You do, if you had an illness such as this? Would you want love, acceptance, understanding, compassion and help? Would you want to be told it was hopeless but be expected to continue trying and desiring to live?
Would you hide in your home and fear people and the world at large, or would you try — year after year, decade after decade — to get well?
Imagine if you will, that even seeking help for an illness such as the one I describe has a stigma attached to it such as mental health hospitalizations, even when they are voluntary. Would you even have the courage to seek help? Would you have the courage to even admit you were ill?
Imagine you turned to religion and they merely told you, you were demonically possessed and performed rituals and such which fed into your childhood legacy of ritual abuse and post traumatic amnesia and feelings of self-loathing? Would you feel comfortable turning to religion?
Would you believe god cared for you when your life was nothing but rape, physical and emotional assault and being seen as demonic? I don’t have to imagine any of these questions or scenarios, they have been my reality since birth. I saw my first therapist at the age of 14; I am now 52.
What have I heard repeatedly from the professionals I have seen?
“Most of the folks who have lived through what you have lived through, Ms. White, would either be dead or living in a padded cell; you have amazing coping skills. You have a very clear sense of reality; you have an emotion regulation disorder.
In other words, Ms. White, people who have severe Borderline Personality Disorder are generally suffering from what is more accurately termed, severe post-traumatic stress syndrome. Severe abuse to children creates serious protracted emotional harm long into adult life.”
Yes, I am angry; I am full of rage. I am angry I was abused and that that abuse created an illness which set me up to invite more abuse into my life. I am angry that I am deemed to be responsible for my illness when my illness was created due to being harmed, rejected, and told I was worthless.
I am angry that there were, and are, so little options for wellness. I am angry that I asked for help and worked so hard all of my life and the credit I receive is more vilification for failing to get well. I feel ripped off, misunderstood and falsely accused, set up to fail from Day One.
The one thing that I have found which helps… medical marijuana. Viewed by many as just another form of addiction, in many places still illegal, and once again attached to a host of shame.
Meanwhile, I have to this day neuropathy and health issues from being the guinea pig for antidepressant cocktails and opiates liberally prescribed by doctors — doctors who later shamed me as being an addict from dependency upon the very drugs they prescribed so liberally.
I am angry that many would prefer to see me numbed to a state of walking death on antidepressants and addictive benzodiazepines with horrific side effects.
Others still would wish to see me simply live with unbearable emotional pain they have never experienced nor could they withstand for a protracted period.
I am angry that as a creature that society created, I am then ignored and rejected. I am angry that I have spent a lifetime being the scapegoat for everyone who did not want to take a look in the mirror themselves; finding it easier to blame me while I looked in the mirror and blamed myself.
I am angry that so many of the people who abused me appear to be well-loved with full lives, not caring about the impact they have had on me or others, while the rest of us live with the guilt, pain, and shame of their conduct. They simply did not care what other people thought.
I am angry that my illness can be used against me as a convenient excuse for the people who are unkind to me, using it to create confusion in my mind by blame shifting and using my illness as the justification and proof of my guilt.
Now I have people advising me to care less about the opinions of others as I wonder if those same folks might not do well to care more about the thoughts and feelings of others.
Opinions are really judgments — conclusions we arrive at based upon our experiences and the information, data, and understanding we have at that time.
Without knowing the story behind the behaviors of the person, I think it can be very harmful to draw conclusions; which is essentially attempting to determine causation and correlation without totality of the underlying factual basis. What if mental illness was actually treated like other illnesses?
What if we took the attachment of good or bad away from mental illness and addiction, and instead treaded the holistic human with love and compassion for the outcome of overall quality of life?
Our prisons and hospitals are full with the damaged and abused of our planet. They cry to us for compassion and empathy, they receive in response, “We have no funds; pull yourself up by the bootstraps, or we will throw you in a mental hospital, a jail, or a prison.”
What other disease do we incarcerate people for as a form of treatment? I’m angry that my attempts to describe this reality to others are viewed all too often as some narcissistic acting-out or cry for attention, rather than the sincere attempt to educate others… they really are.
I have turned all the rage at my injustice into efforts to help others when I am not turning it against myself, depressed or unable to cope. Many others lack the intelligence and or coping skills to channel their rage through creative expression.
The world is adding more and more stress to the equation; more and more rage is spiraling out of control and repression is not the answer.
Repression is merely the individual who manages to remain controlled until they lose control; then they become the headline at 6 pm having killed themselves and/or others as we once again look for someone to cast the blame and shame onto.
I suspect it is our collective guilt and shame that makes us turn away. I watch professionals and talking heads pontificate for hours, clinically dissecting symptoms and formulating strategies, forgetful that these are people.
Quite often they are people who are far from lazy, far from self-pitying; they are legitimately ill people in profound pain and some of the hardest working and most rational lucid people you will ever meet.
They are people who could teach us much about ourselves and our planet at large if we would only reframe their illness in terms of differently sighted.
I ask you now to imagine life in my shoes, then when you have walked a mile or so… then perhaps you will be ready to ask how you can help pave a path towards prevention, and thus a cure.
*****
{In Your Shoes}
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