Good news

Following my last couple of rants about my problematic therapist – good news. In writing about it I realised that actually I do NOT deserve to be treated like sh*t. That might sound obvious, right? But in my case, it hadn’t really occurred to me that I was worth anything. I thought I just had to accept any old crap anybody chose to dole out. Well I don’t! I spent much of yesterday researching, making calls, seeking a better therapist. I have some good leads and I’m being put on the waiting list for a really great therapy service.

My therapist seems to think a baby/infant is sexually pro-active

One thing I’ve found in the year and a half I’ve been having therapy is that my therapist repeatedly says:

“Your mother set you up to have sex with a lot of men when you were a baby.”

and

“You had sex with lots of men during your infancy”

What the therapist is alluding to is the fact that my mother used to invite pedophiles over to the house to rape me, from when I was about 18 months old.

I explained to the therapist that “to have sex with” implies some sort of activity on my part. As a grown woman (I am in my 30s) if I wanted to now, I could go out and “have sex with” a man or with men. As a baby, lying there in my crib too young to have even developed the power of speech yet, how could I possibly “have sex with” anybody? All I could do is be raped. I could not actively have sex. It could only be done to me. I explained all this to the therapist. I told her that by repeatedly claiming I had sex with men when I was only a baby and toddler she is being inaccurate and she is re-traumatizing me. But guess what? She continues to use that phrasing. She REFUSES to call it rape.

Why?

I f*cking hate therapists!

I had a session with my therapist today. Following our session I was so traumatised (by HER) that I immediately drank a whole bottle of alcohol and contemplated suicide. I have now calmed down somewhat and I am left with the following questions:

Is it normal for a therapist to remind me constantly that she is seeing me at a concessionary rate and that I should be grateful? [I pay £25 per session to my therapist. My total weekly income at present is £18.65. I am only able to live by getting into enormous debt at the bank. I am unable to work because I'm in such a state I can't even leave the house regularly]

How am I supposed to display this gratitude and is it even fair for a therapist to expect me to be bowing and scraping? If she feels resentment should she not simply refuse to offer concessions and refuse to treat paupers like me at all?

Is it normal for her to talk about the fact she used to be broke and she is only wealthy now thanks to her husband and that she is not making much money from being a therapist?

Is it normal for her to share with me the “irony” of her having spent thousands on training and yet “not getting the going rate” from her DID clients?

Is it normal that after a therapy session I should feel suicidal and in a state of despair and unable to eat or stop crying for 12 hours afterwards?

Is it normal to come away from a therapy session feeling I’ve been attacked?

Being Sold for Sex

I was sold for sex.

My earliest memory is of a man (a man of about 25 or 30) coming to the house. And raping me. I was about 3 years old. My mother watched. She seemed anxious. When he had finished with me, my mother looked at me with contempt. The rapist looked at me with something like….vague fondness. He showed more affection for me than my mother did. I wound up leaving my own body. I think I sat there playing with the toys the rapist had given me (expensive toys, if I remember correctly) feeling like I was on another planet altogether. I don’t think I cried. I always seem to have this resigned, lost look in my eyes as an infant and child…

I was majorly triggered when I read a recent news story. A 15-year old girl in New Jersey took her 7 year old sister to a party. The 15 year old had sex with a number of teenage boys and grown men, in exchange for cash. Then she took more cash and let them start touching her 7 year old sister. Soon the ‘touching’ escalated to gang rape of the 7 year old. Apparently six or seven grown men raped the 7 year old. I strongly got the impression (just my intuition) that this wasn’t the first such experience for those two girls. (Read their news story here). Any more than my rape at age 3 (my earliest memory) was the first time I was raped. Medical records suggest I’d already been raped by the time I was 18 months, if not earlier. At that time, when I was 3, I was briefly examined by a social worker who noted that I ‘hopefully’ had not been raped as my vagina was not torn. She noted that I did have ‘vulval soreness’, that I seemed detached and that I subsequently developed a virulent urinary tract infection. I wasn’t ‘torn’ though (not on the outside) because at age three, I had not been a virgin. I’d already had that taken away from me.

Happy 2010

Hello and sorry for the long absence. I’ve been busy masquerading as a Normal Person. In terms of my therapy I am feeling pretty let down and there hasn’t been a great deal of progress. My primary therapist is competent but expensive and sometimes unreliable (she seems to be ill a lot and cancels appointments far too often for my liking). The NHS are still proving utterly useless. More soon…..

Complex PTSD

As well as being a loon who has about ten different personalities (MPD), I have what is called Complex PTSD.  Complex PTSD is, I think, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Plus. There’s a quite accurate definition of it here

The main symptoms I have are hyper-startle and an intense but non-specific fear. I see something move suddenly, or the phone rings, and I go into panic and even scream. Somebody knocks on my door unexpectedly and I’m ready to go into full meltdown.

Today, the day started pretty well. I woke up feeling reasonably calm. Perhaps the fact I gave up caffeine earlier this week is starting to kick in and calm me down. But then I had a phone call from one of my “secondary abusers.” I will most likely refer to secondary abusers quite a bit in this blog. They are the adults who stood by and did nothing while I was being abused. I’m in the middle of very drawn-out legal action against some of the actual abusers and I need affidavits etc from some of the secondary abusers. To my surprise they are actually co-operating and, finally, acknowledging that yes, the abuse did happen and yes, they did nothing to stop it. So I had a quick chat with one of the secondary abusers. We disagreed over a particular, minor, point. She says a certain fairly innocuous thing didn’t happen. I know that it did. She left me a voicemail to that effect. She wasn’t raising her voice or being aggressive in her voicemail message but she was being very adamant. Just listening to that voicemail was enough to make me feel COMPLETELY INSANE. My delightfully calm mood completely dissolved and I found myself shaking, terrified, angry. Stomach cramps, blood pressure racing, terror sweeping through my body. WTF, right? All because of one relatively reasonable voicemail.

Since my doctors are refusing to give me Valium to help me calm down in moments like these (when I was briefly given Valium it worked a treat for such situations) I was left to try to calm down without medication. I tried deep breathing and all those ‘grounding’ techniques my therapist is so keen on. It didn’t do shit. I considered going to the grocery store, buying a bottle of wine and knocking that back. But it’s a pity to let Complex PTSD turn me into an out and out alcoholic, right? So I raided my cabinet of herbal remedies and I downed the following:

3 tablets of Passionflower
A lot of liquid Valerian
2 ml of a herbal liquid called “Nervetone” containing Wood Betony, Linden and Hops

the result: I feel almost sane again.

How long will it last?

Why am I so terrified of conflict?

My alter personalities embarrass the shit out of me

My alters  - some of them at least, are embarrassing as hell.  One of them is calling herself Satin C*nt and she is, you guessed it, whorish in her actions.  This is the one that has gotten me into the most trouble.  I cannot bring myself to go into too much detail but to give you an idea of things, that particular alter has – on at least two occasions – gone to job interviews and had sex with the interviewer during the interview.  Unprotected sex no less.  Then one of the anti-sex alters comes out later and invariably tries to overdose on painkillers to kill the shame of what S.C. has done.

I don’t even mention this stuff to the Men In White Coats (psychiatric professionals) because they’d lock me up in a psychiatric unit for sure if the knew, right?

Abuse memories can be erased…………?

Worst day I’ve had in months, maybe in years.  I felt this utter, utter despair that would just not go away along with such anxiety that my hands are actually shaking.  I am so tired of my life being made smaller by the abuse that happened in the past.  Why can’t I just wake up one day and all that abuse stuff has been cleaned away?  Is there a pill that will do that for me?

Darkness

I feel like I absorbed the darkness and evil and filth of the abusers, when I was a child.  I’ve lived for decades with this overwhelming feeling of being chased by darkness.  I feel that my life is doomed; that happiness is impossible.  That I am dirty and unloveable and disgusting and that I, in some way, asked for it – even though I was about 18 months old when the sexual abuse first started.  At night, I feel I’m being chased by filthy dark unspeakable things and individuals and I wake at least twice every night, out of breath and terrified.  Pretty much every morning I wake up with a cloud of dread hanging over me and it takes me a good half hour or so to convince myself that nothing life-threatening or violent is (hopefully) going to happen to me that day.

I don’t want to live like this anymore but I don’t know how to live differently.  It is all I have ever known.

How can you feel alone when you have 10 different personalities??

I’m feeling really isolated, terrified and lonely.  This week’s meeting with the evil bitch from hell (aka the NHS psychiatrist) has really upset my system and disrupted the relatively balanced, calm state I’d achieved.   The panic has set in again.  The little ones inside are terrified and afraid.

To give some background: despite being relatively nuts, at the same time I am relatively functional.  I am currently studying for my Master’s degree at university and I am making good grades.  I am also working on a freelance basis.  The bitch from hell from the NHS has advised me that DID cannot be “contained” by any of their doctors and that I am too traumatised to be suitable for any form of therapy from then.  Further, she’s said that I’m not suitable to be treated as an outpatient and that I must attend a three-day-a-week, 9 to 5 centre for serious nutcases where I will learn “basic living skills, how to apply for welfare benefits, how to cook, how to interact socially with others and how to take basic care of myself.”   I pointed out to her that I have a job, I have a great apartment and a circle of friends and I’ve been working – successfully – in the same industry for 11 years now.  She told me that if I am serious about ‘getting well’ I need to give up my Master’s degree and my work and go to this three-day-a-week centre where people sit there drooling and shaking.  I would need to attend this shitty centre for 10 months and then she would ‘review’ my situation and see if I was now ready for therapy.

Thankfully, behind this bitch from hell’s back, I’ve managed to find a highly qualified and experienced DID psychotherapist who works in the private sector.  This therapist says that for someone with DID I am actually high-functioning and most certainly suitable for therapy.

The NHS frickin SUCKS