I am writing this page for two reasons. One, because it is part of our abuse history, and therefore part of our journey through healing. The second reason is to possibly help others avoid some of the pain and misery we have experienced trying to get a correct diagnosis and proper treatment.This story has the potential to be very, very triggering. Please do not read it if you are not in a safe place and cannot deal with references to abuse and rape.
Our journey into the mental health system began when I was 12. We began to see a psychiatrist. My mother also saw the same psychiatrist. At this point it is hard to tell what he thought of us. One day in his office we would play with the dollhouse, the next session we would be sitting quietly holding an intellectual conversation with him. My mother, of course, never displayed anything but the perfect facade of motherhood. I was a terrible child and she was the greatest mom.
A great deal of these sessions were focused on my younger brothers. My first brother was adopted when I was 11, then another adopted when I was twelve, and yet a third one adopted when I was age 13. The first two were adopted as infants, the third adopted at 15 months of age and severely abused already. I was frequently responsible for the care of them as they came, learning to care for an infant from my grandmother because my mother was often too drunk or too hung over. I was a child taking care of babies, and I resented it. My mother thought I was some sort of evil child with a mission to destroy my brothers. In fact, I simply wanted to do the things other children did at my age and not be a mother to three little boys.
My mother put me in the hospital shortly after I turned thirteen, in February of 1981. She told the doctor and psychiatrist that she had walked into the kitchen and saw me backhand my brother Joey right out of his highchair. None of us on the inside remember this ever happening. She also told them I had broken Joey�s arm when he was 1 month old, when in fact we distinctly remember her being the one who broke his arm. Nevertheless, I was blamed, and on March 12, 1981, I was placed into a psychiatric hospital. I will leave the hospital unnamed for legal reasons, although I wish it were legally possible to name this house of horrors for you. It is a prestigious place, and still in operation, so therefore in order to protect myself from being sued, I will refrain from using the name of the place.
I spent a little over a year in this hospital. From day one I was �weird�. I was diagnosed schizophrenic, and given assorted medications, none of which worked. My parents came to family therapy, always putting on the perfect parents masks and always playing up to the doctors that they had no idea how their daughter could be so messed up. It must be in the genes (a convenient excuse, considering that I was adopted). I was so drugged I rarely knew where I was, or how to fight the insanity that had become my life. I was put in restraints for days for minor infractions of the rules, such as leaving my room after bedtime to retrieve an item from someone or for throwing a pen on the table, or for stealing make-up from my roommate.
On one such occasion, where I had been but in restraints for stealing, a staff member who was on �night watch� for me, came and took me out of the restraints, and took me into the treatment room on the outside of unit. There he first hooked me up to the electroshock machine, and gave me electroshock treatment (not ordered by my doctor, not to mention he was not qualified to administer such treatment). Then he raped me. After this incident I completely shut down from the rest of the staff and refused to participate in anything. This resulted in being placed on a hard chair in my room, all alone, put on a talking restriction, meaning I could only talk to staff, given one 20 minute shower break and two three minute bathroom breaks each day. I was not allowed to read or write or watch tv or listen to the radio. I simply had to sit. No activities, no communication with anyone except my doctors and staff members, who I refused to talk to for the most part. I sat in this chair in my room in this condition for five months (excluding the days they would just put me in restraints). I was allowed to do my school work, so I poured myself into it, pulling straight A�s, and trying to occupy my mind in some way so I did not simply go mad.
One of the other things that happened while was in this hospital was that I was introduced to intravenous cocaine. I simply walked into the bathroom one day and there were a bunch of girls in there and my roommate was there too, and I asked her what she was doing. She said, �Hold out your arm.� so I did, and she gave me my first shot. I was 14 years old, and that was the beginning of my addiction to the needle. I had used other drugs already, marijuana, pills, and LSD, but this was better than any of those. I was hooked. I continued using cocaine from that day until I was nearly 25 years old. For more on that story, see My Unofficial NA Page
As I continued using, I still sat upon that hard chair in my room, given untold amounts of medications that I sometimes reacted to badly, and just building a world within that was safe for me. Soon, the insurance ran out, refused to pay for me to sit there day after day not getting better, and I was released. It was March 12, 1982.
In three months after being released from the hospital, I went on a drug spree. I stole as much money as I could, took my parents cars, ran away, sold my body to my father's friends, anything to earn money for cocaine. I was a true mess. One afternoon my brother, who was about 2 at the time, wound up with a burn on his leg and rear. I was blamed. I don't remember burning him, but my parents said I put him on the stove and burned him, and they were going to commit me to the State Hospital. I was terrified. In the other hospital we were always told if we signed out AMA we would go to the State Hospital where they chained you to trees and stuff. I decided it was much better to sign myself in voluntarily, rather than be committed. So on June 17th, 1982, I signed myself into the State Hospital.
Needless to say, they did not chain people to trees there. In fact, it was a much nicer and safer place than the private hospital had been. I know we did a great deal of switching there, because some of it is just a blank, but I do remember feeling safe there. No one hurt me there, and the year and five months I was there, I was never put in restraints. I did have to go to seclusion once, but only for an hour and a half, and that is because I truly was out of control. They tried some medication that finally seemed to help, and they didn't screw around trying a bunch of others.
However, the time came when I had to return home. It was November 16, 1983, almost a month before my 16th birthday. I was discharged home to my parents, and the nightmare began again.
The very first night I was home my father came into my room talking about how much he missed me. He did his usual abuse, and when he left I plotted and planned to get myself back in the hospital. I just didn't know how at that time.
Eventually I will write more about what happened on my birthday that year, my sweet sixteen. For now, let me just say that my father took me to his bed for the first time (my mother was in the hospital again) and he actually made me have my first orgasm. I was so ashamed. He made me stay with him all night, and when his alarm went off the next morning, I ran upstairs and scrubbed my body until it was raw and bleeding. Then I took every pill in the house, all that I could find while my Dad was at work. For some reason he came home early, found me, and took me to the hospital. I spend two 2 weeks in a place that was supposed to specialize in diagnoses and treatment referrals. All they told my father was that I needed to live somewhere else, no diagnoses made. So my parents signed over guardianship to my grandmother, and this was a good thing, for I was pregnant with my father's child.
Again, that is another story, for another time. I gave that child up for adoption however. I went for years after that with no mental health treatment at all. I left home, got married, had kids. I was still using drugs. Eventually, in 1992, I decided to get clean and sober. I entered a long-term residential treatment program in April of 1993 for mothers and their children. My children were 5, 3, and 6 months old at the time.
Therapy in this program was intense, and my counselor had some suspicions about me. I had to see a psychologist before I came in, and I was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, and was on medication for that, but she saw there was something else. One day she had me carry around bubbles all day long, and blow bubbles everywhere I went. That did it, and a little child alter emerged. Her name was Leslie, and then my counselor suspected I was DID and referred me to another therapist.
My first encounter with this therapist was not good. She told me I had lesbian alters, and we should meet after work for dinner to discuss this. I ran out, and reported her for it. It took me months to get back into treatment, this time in MHMR. My formal diagnosis was still bi-polar, and I was still being medicated for that. I spent three years in treatment at MHMR. Some of that was very good, I really began to understand the depth of the abuse I suffered as a child. On the other hand, MHMR did not recognize me as being DID, they kept treating me for bi-polar disorder, then recurrent depression, and then dissociative disorder, then bi-polar again, and so it went. During this time my therapist called Leslie "an inner child" and encouraged dialogue between her and I, but tried to put the others in a "box" to avoid dealing with them altogether. I don't completely blame the therapist in this, I was just as reluctant to accept being DID as he was to diagnose me with it.
During my years at MHMR, I got married, an event I do not remember, and after 6 months of marriage my husband molested one of my daughters. This happened during one of my many hospitalizations. I am creating a separate web site about this story, and will update this with a link when I am finished with it. I lost my kids to the State of Texas over this, and MPD was one of the reasons. I had been in the hospital so much. I kept going to hospital after hospital, trying to get help. I kept waking up in strange places, with cuts all over my arms, and I couldn't remember anything. I was so scared. I didn't understand why MHMR kept changing my diagnoses and why they couldn't help me make this craziness stop. Finally, in November 1996, my therapist of 3 years decided he wasn't helping me (what a revelation there) and stopped seeing me. Now I had no therapy, no psychiatrist, nothing. I was left on my own, with deep gashes covering my arms, and other parts of my body, I was finding myself behind dumpsters and in stranger's homes, with no idea how I got there. My friends thought I was off the deep end. Only one person at that time actually told me I was a multiple, and it wasn't a professional. It was a friend, one who had done many nights with me on the phone, hours and hours that I didn't remember. I refused to accept what he was telling me, but he was really the only one making sense.
For some reason I still don't quite understand, everything began to calm down. The cutting stopped, the wanderings lessened, and things became more stable. I think that getting out of MHMR where they were trying to put the alters in boxes and assist me in denying that they were there was key to this calming of the internal waters. I did get another therapist and psychiatrist, but we barely scratched the surface of things when the office I was seeing them at moved to Dallas, and I could no longer get there. I left therapy altogether for awhile.
In 1998, I met another man who moved in with me. He was young, only 24 to my 30, and very immature. He was using me, and the insiders knew this I suppose, because suddenly everything went haywire again. Things got fairly ugly when he decided he and a couple of his friends were going to rape me. Crystal wound up coming out and taking that. Also, there were many other things that were bad about this relationship, and we got out of it within 6 months. Soon after we met a person online who claimed to be a therapist and knew a lot about DID/MPD. We started talking to this person, and eventually wound up going to his house, on two occasions. The more involved we got with this person, the more abusive he became. At first, he was everything we always wanted in a therapist. He was caring and really helped us get things organized internally, and some of the things you see on this website are directly a result of his work with us. Much like our MHMR therapist, he did much good, but the good does not take away from the harm. This person had my littles calling him daddy, and we were so very vulnerable at the time we just believed almost anything this person told us. As this relationship was going downhill, I was also getting pressure from the State to find a psychiatrist and a therapist again. So I began hunting for that, and finally found both in February, 1999. After another trip to the online therapist's house and a subsequent trip to the hospital for 11 days, we decided to end our relationship with the online therapist. This was no easy task, and when we finally just said no more, he attacked with such venom and hatred that he bore no resemblance to the person I had met the year before. The wolf came out of the sheep's clothing, and the fighting that came of that was intense and damaging, not only for us, but for others around us, because they were continually pulled in both directions, when none of it had anything to do with them. In this process, we learned that this person was not a therapist, and had never received the degrees and education he claimed. I don't know that it would have mattered to us at the time, but the fact was he built this whole thing on a stack of lies, and that is what we felt most betrayed by. The lies continue, and I hide most of the time now on the internet to avoid this person or those who are still blindly following him. Much like a cult leader, his followers are true blue until he attacks them. Once that happens, this whole thing starts over again, and he gets new followers, those that are the most vulnerable and the most needy. We have seen someone finally do something about this type of person. A person not involved in this and whom I did not know before made an entire online organization for people such as this, and has done an excellent job of helping to protect others. The site is called Hazards on the Internet & Prevention, or HIP for short.
Now I have been with this new therapist and psychiatrist since February. Without them, I would have not survived this fight with this online supposed therapist. For the first time in all my years of dealing with mental health "professionals", I have finally found a psychiatrist who actually listens to me, and a therapist who does not have his own agenda. Things are slow in this area, because we are so afraid to trust anyone anymore, but the more we see of this team the happier we are with our choices.
Some might think seeking therapy is not a good idea, look how much pain is caused. That is not what we want to convey. Finding a good, qualified therapist is hard work, and sometimes you have to go through a few before finding the right one. Part of that process is outlined on my Therapy page. Another thing we want to convey is that all of our experiences with mental health professionals and organizations have taught us important lessons. Some of those were not good lessons, as with the private hospital when we were 13, but mostly there has been more good than bad. Even through those misguided attempts by MHMR and this online person to help us, we have learned valuable things about ourselves and our abuse, and also about therapy in general. We are not experiments or puppets, we are human beings, and no therapist has to live our life for us. Therefore a therapist should be there to help you attain YOUR goals, not his or hers goals for you. We also believe that in telling our story, we not only heal the wounds from the abuse by the mental health system, we also give others tools to avoid the same pitfalls, and perhaps we also take that first step in changing a sometimes incompetent, corrupt system into one that actually promotes healing.
The Village
Copyright � 1999 The Village
