ow.
Helki
talking about schizophrenia, what it means to me. religion some. emotional
and physical abuse.
A few limits, first. My last posting, someone said something about "jealousy
isn't a useful emotion". I'm not interested in judgements about whether
my feelings are useful. All feelings are useful. all feelings are an
expression of the self-in-reality so experiencing them puts self more in
reality. Also, it leaves me neutral for people to say "You are this" or
"You are that". I am in a state of emergency inside and have been for my
whole life. Only in the past few years I have learned something about coming
out of emergency -- by relaxing into it. The reason I post things is, it is
good for me to tell the truth to other people. It strengthens the truth
inside of me to tell it.
And if you want to help what helps is:
feeling love back
feeling like people care
knowing if you relate. If you relate I am not so alone and it feels stronger.
simple hugs.
I swear you can help this tottery person feel stronger inside just by knowing
I'm there and not rejecting me for who I am.
trouble is, posting is kind of like telling the whole world. And I want
something very special: the warmth and understanding that only other
survivors can give, the "Yup, I know how you feel and I care". I do not know
if this is the right place. Reason is, what plagues me is not so much
horrible memories of rape. It is horrible memories of one attempted murder,
and several tons of emotional abuse. The emotional abuse includes all sorts
of psychological rape stuff by my father. He did some very incesty things
when I was a teenager like looking at my crotch and introducing me as his
wife at a party once. But the specifically sexual things are not what haunt
me so much. It's
the hate that I lived with. It was growing up in the fire of my parents'
rage, and I was used both by my mother and my father to dump their rage on.
I was my mother's special victim, she used me to hurt like she used no-one
else. My father was full of rage all the time and screamed at us children
all the time.
Somebody said that "someone" wrote in a metaphorical way and that triggered
them. If that's about me I am kind of bugged by it because it's my
personality to experience emotional things in a very graphic way. I'm kind
of a poet who experiences my poetry directly in my own life. I do not want
to spoiler my entire personality! When I talk about my experience, like
my parents were like clouds of poisonous gas, that is directly my experience
and I am not going to lie about it because it makes anyone uncomfortable.
I am sure what I have gone through is likely to trigger people but that's
because I was abused and they were also. If my way of expressing myself
makes anyone uncomfortable they should just not read my posts.
I am feeling awfully cold inside. I am not sure whether me talking about
having been schizophrenic means people won't want to identify with me because
it's too far out. :( I would like to tell about that some. Maybe a group for
schizophrenics would be good but I dread that because I do not want to meet
a lot of people who just talk about what medications they are taking and are
under the sway of the doctors and are not aware of their own abuse history.
I do not want to meet a lot of people who are a lot more squashed than me.
I spent my teenage years crying a lot. My family would go someplace. I
would stay home, and eat, and cry and cry and cry, flailing about, almost
tearing my hair in PAIN.
and the horrible thing is when a child feels pain like that it is so terribly
real because the truth is the release from pain may be years and years away.
I mean, I felt trapped and desperate, and I WAS, and the truth was it would
be more than a decade before I started to come out of it.
I had a boyfriend when I was a teenager. He reached at me and flipped my
breast once, when he was going out the door. And I spent the next two hours
in a spiral of shame, I was saying to myself, "You are shit, shit, shit",
visualizing my arms and legs turning into blobs of shit. I went through that
until he came back.
I felt there was something terribly wrong with me. It was like I was cursed
by common agreement in my family. But it was also like it wasn't anything
as definite as needing emotional help, or God forbid, having been abused. It
was just some vague curse without a solution that made me go into bursts of
agonized weeping, self-hate, despondency. I didn't think I was worth enough
somehow to do anything dramatic like going insane. It's like THAT would
mean there was something real going on, and I didn't feel that real. Just
cursed.
Then I DID become schizophrenic, and what I want to say is that it was a
*very healing* experience. I realized in a big way that *I* was just fine,
I was wonderful, awesome, gorgeous, my only trouble was a kind of cage that
had been built around me, my trouble was the incredibly intense pain I had
been given by my mother & my father too, the trouble was the perpetrators,
NOT me!
After that, I stayed away from my family. Before that I had been poisoned
by them, I was knocked out by the poison. After that, I knew that *they*
were the poison, and I stayed away. Gradually more and more. I remember
talking to my mother on the phone once after I had been through my
schizophrenic experience, and I could feel the cold marching up my hand and
my arm from the phone, threatening to freeze my whole body. More and more
I have chosen to not have anything at all to do with them because their
victimization of me is just so intense. If I do contact them I know they
will find a way to viciously attack me. It is like walking into a nest of
poisonous snakes. A few years ago early in my recovery I made the mistake of
going to visit my brother and his girlfriend. His girlfriend turned out to
be a non-recovering incest survivor who ripped into me verbally, mocked my
fear in a sort of dance in front of me, while my brother consoled HER,
reassured her that it was just fine, and scolded me. What I am is the person
they chose to punish for the family pain. They have tons of pain all buried
and when they see me they hurt me to release a little of THEIR buried pain.
So seeing my family is like petting a poisonous snake. These days I want
*no* contact with them. I do not even want contact enough with my mother to
tell her to stay away because expressing anger at her is exposing myself to
her. None of that is safe. I just don't read the letters she sends, and she
does not know where I live :) :) :) !!!
Hmm. It occurs to me this is the role that Jesus has been assigned. Perhaps
not by himself but by the later Christian religion. I mean, as the carrier
of the sins of humanity. I wonder if Jesus after his death was turned into
the perfect scapegoat for the viciousness of humanity, the one who would
take humanity's "sins" (pain) away by being hurt. I wonder if so many
schizophrenics imagine themselves as an avatar of Jesus because they were
victimized, just as Jesus was. I wonder if the idea about Jesus "dying for
our sins" is a distorted thing that was done to his memory after his death.
It certainly doesn't seem to have much to do with his life: his life was
about healing people, teaching them. And he was killed because those around
him couldn't tolerate anybody that clean. Not because of some strange idea
that he would win forgiveness for humanity by being hurt by humans, *that*
just sounds like a very sick distortion.
I had an eating disorder my entire adolescence. I would go on a diet every
morning and break it in the afternoon, binging uncontrollably. I was
obsessed by my weight and by feeling fat. I weighed my food in some diets.
After my schizophrenic experience I stopped the compulsive eating. I didn't
need it any more. Somehow I had gotten the strength to know that my sexuality
was not going to be what men had constructed it to be. I was not going to
be a sexual display, or conform to what was considered sexy, or have sex in
order to feel that I was OK. I didn't need that any more. I stopped
plucking my eyebrows and shaving my legs because I felt OK like I am. I
started eating just exactly when I was hungry, I still do, I do not worry
about food, hardly at all. I just eat.
After I went schizophrenic I never again was so at the mercy of my shame and
my fear, as the time I called myself "shit" so much after my boyfriend
flipped my breast. I got angry at nasty people rather than hurting myself
so much.
There is so much *stuff* about schizophrenia, I am afraid I am labelling myself
in a bad way by saying it. There is so much mythology that is just nuts. A
woman in a recovery program told me that what I had been through was *not*
schizophrenia but a visionary experience, that "real" schizophrenics were
different and "we" were not like those "sick" people. Well, *that* is bullshit!
There is a division that gets erected between people who are abused and
people who are "just crazy". This is something psychologists do. Because
child abuse has come out from the cloak of denial somewhat. Only not all the
way, and some are still considered to be prey to a mysterious illness,
"schizophrenia". A century ago or so *all* abuse survivors would have been
considered mysteriously ill, hysterical, or whatever. And being on the
other side of that abused/just crazy division is hell. If you are "just crazy"
it means that your parents and society have located the trouble in YOU, it's
no-one else's fault and your genes or your brain are messed up somehow.
Which is pseudo-science actually, it's in the service of society's denial
of abuse. I think psychiatric survivors, those who have been labelled mentally
ill and have gone through the grinder of the mental health establishment, are
maybe 50 years behind other abuse survivors in terms of society's attitudes.
We're STILL being told there is something wrong with our brains. Actually
that is very fashionable.
My experience with schizophrenia is that it was essential, the very backbone
of my life. It happened at a time when the abuse had left no room for me
to *be* in the world. My whole personality was colonized by the perpetrators.
To this day my mother twists and re-interprets what I say by mail to others,
so it will
be more acceptable to her. So I stepped *outside* of the colonized personality,
and had a lot of visions about who I *really* was -- quite wonderful, loving,
gorgeous -- and who my family *really* was -- perpetrators of abuse. This
maybe sounds self-serving but it is a very accurate reflection of reality. I
do not mean who they were perhaps deep down inside, I mean the victimizers
that they were to me, and still are when they get the chance. When I went
schizophrenic was when I stopped inhaling my victimization, when I started to
push it out of the very center of my being. It was about repressed truth
emerging inside me.
We abuse survivors often think of ourselves as sick, far-gone. We may be
somewhat that way but the ones who are REALLY out of it are the non-recovering
people out there. The people you meet who have been stewing in their emotional
juices for 20 or 50 years, they feel like bags of rottenness to me, they have
not honestly dealt with anything for decades. Those are the REALLY sick ones.
Now and then they dump a little repressed pain on another human and that is
about the only emotionally meaningful thing they do. They are so far gone that
I am taken aback by the sheer weight of the rotting squashed emotions they
carry around with them. And one way to go a long way down *that* road is to
become a perpetrator. As soon as an abuse survivor starts perpetrating they
make it 10 or 100 times more difficult to find recovery. Being a perpetrator
is one way to become very very alienated from one's inner child. Sometimes I
think I was *fortunate* to be the scapegoat in my family; I have very little
real guilt, my conscience is clean, I was not a hurter in my family. And I
found recovery! The people who are sane, the ones who make sense, I have
found in recovery programs (and also some in the rest of the world. Gracious
old ladies)
Helki
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