I went back to school to complete my degree back in 2013 or so. I choose WGU because it was the most economical and feasible considering my circumstances. They have a great program for teaching. One thing I liked is they assign you a mentor that you check in with and that checks up on you every so often to help keep you going. I loved my mentor with WGU. At one point they assigned me a new mentor because the other mentor was only meant to be a startup kind of mentor. But new mentor's lack of life experiences and possibly her rigid "professionalism" made it hard for me to connect with her thus rendering her useless as a mentor to me and the check ins became kind of annoying to me, which did not help me with my schooling. Fortunately my old mentor was able to pull some strings and I got to keep him throughout the rest of my schooling with WGU.
And that is the back story to this very simple comment that my WGU mentor would say to me; often he would tell me I needed to take care of myself to which I would reply, "part of how I take care of myself is by taking care of other people." And now, obviously I was at least somewhat balanced in my taking care of others and myself because I allowed myself to request my old mentor and not worry too much about how that might make the new mentor feel.
It can be tricky finding that balance and I imagine therapists often see people who are unbalanced in how they define themselves with this very same trait. I bet they see many people who are trying to fix themselves and quite often repeat patterns of loving other people too much or neglecting themselves for the sake of others and they will repeat that mistake in therapy also by caring for their therapist when it is the therapists job to care for them. I would think this may be especially prevalent in my part of the world where my religious upbringing teaches girls heavily that their value lies in being a wife and mother and what they are doing to serve others.
Their is merit to this and it is important, however, I do feel we may be a bit too far to one side on this issue and I feel like it has got to be a huge challenge for a therapist not to get attached and find themselves getting some of their emotional needs met by their clients. They are human after all.
So this further confuses my brain on how the hell the APA and people in the field think it is a good idea to just shut a person out cold turkey if a therapist develops feelings. It is kind of disgusting how negatively stigmatized a therapist will be for that and how negatively this stigmatizes the client/patient with the slew of false and negative misconceptions and stereotypes this brands them with. I see that grooming can be an easy game for a therapist to play if their are no rules but the shutting out only protects the therapist and so hugely at the expense of the person on my side of the couch.
... And It has been fed, this stupid idea of "forbidden love" that my manic mind latched onto, by everyone denying me conversation about this and about what was going on with me. It has been fed by my husband trusting them and me trusting them and them refusing to call mania and misdiagnosis what it was. It has been fed by his refusal to apologize and by my husbands uncertainty of how to proceed with me. It has been fed by my broken heart again and again. It has been fed by Dr. Concussion's unwillingness to talk about what happened and her being swayed by whatever she was being told by people who had never even talked with me or had talked with me very little. It has been fed by the grapevine communication with the patient advocate and her acting as though she was helping me but then not even asking the questions I asked her to ask. It has been fed by the scarlet letter they branded me with.
It has been fed by them making it all about him and not about me. When it was supposed to be about me.
It has been fed by their bullshit that "he felt threatened" by me, because the only threat that was known to me was that he didn't want anything to do with me because he could possibly love me, and because, they said, I used the word "but" in an email. In trying to have a conversation about what was going on with my head, and in, once again. trying to tell him that he was missing something that I needed him to see and that we needed to talk about (mania), I said I didn't want to go the route of filing a complaint "but" if that is what I had to do then I that was what I would do... It has been fed while he peacefully and easily burns out knowing he does not have to face me or talk about any possible countertransference or misunderstandings. I am angry again. I am hurt again. I am angry and hurt and all of it still just feeds the damn creature Perri Cheri that is eating my brain and my heart.
Please admit your mistakes IHC. PLEASE END THIS CYCLE. I have begged and followed your rules. If I am to continue to follow the rules you claim to follow, if I am to be a good citizen and if I am ever going to recover from this then I have to fight harder and you need to be held accountable. If you insist the fight is against me and with me and not for me and with me from what is going on with my damn head and the stigma's and misconceptions than the fight is with you... and I fight... to the death. To the death of my bills and the bad policies of the Neuroscience Institute and APA, or to the death of me. And if you keep winning so easily, so then my blood really will be on your hands if this continues until I am all burned up and burnt out completely.
...This is not at all where I thought I would go with this blog entry.. but there it is. I am tired. I am sad. I want to believe that is was simply a comedy of errors. I want to be able to be proud of my magnificent managed mania because it was damn hard but I managed to stayed out of complete psychosis and loosing complete touch with reality. I broke big and yet still managed. I begged for it to be seen when I wasn't even sure that was what it was, I kept trying and I want to be able to be proud of that, but instead I was shunned, shamed, lied to and lied about, I was slandered, stigmatized, denied treatment and exiled. And I am stuck in limbo not wanting to do anything because it could potentially hurt people I loved and trusted even though they were neglecting, gaslighting and abusing. When I was fighting for my rational brain they were fighting against it, insisting that I was fighting for the irrational, and this fed the irrational. It does not make sense. They would only listen when there was talk of lawyers or when I used appropriate legal jargon, but as soon as I told them I was not interested in going that route they would continue with disregarding me and feeding the wild fantasy that may not have been my own in the first place. I hate that legal action feels like my only option. I know I can continue to just work on "letting it go" but "letting it go" just seems to fuel the damn fire that is supposed to have burned out months ago and "just letting it go" still seems to tie my brain to just letting me go, letting me burn out. I don't want to burn out. I want to improve again and I want to live again.
I don't think, at this point in my life, it is entirely wise to continue to define myself by how I can benefit others and what I can do for them. I think now, maybe, as I had said long ago in a previous post, I need to follow my damn guru's example and simply do whatever I feel I need to to protect and take care of myself, no matter how it might affect someone else. Look out for number one and number one only... No conversation, no negotiation, not trying to protect or care, just stigmatize and use against him all that I can to protect myself and make sure my ass is being taken care of financially because "I am okay with being wrong" at the expense of others... so where am I wrong? Please somebody tell me? I was wrong in trusting a person who had lost objectivity, acknowledged he broke me ["you broke me" "I did not mean to"], but would not address that and then openly told me "I am okay with being wrong."
I'd rather love you and be your friend, I'd rather work with you on my behalf and even help you to benefit my people you claim to be helping, but if that is not possible then I'll fight you to the bitter end, because you broke me, and then trashed me and I will not die for you no matter how you want me to!
...sigh... I'll leave this crazy shit here and post, because this shit needs to be talked about, this shit needs to be addressed, this shit needs to be washed out of the laundry it is dirtying and then hung up to air out.
Good night. sleep tight...
we ain't out of the woods yet.
But I sure as hell would rather talk about it than burn down the whole damn forest. I wish we (the Neuroscience Institute, IHC, Dr. He, Dr. Concussion and I) were on the same page... I am still willing to get there...
but my words are likely in vain.
No comments:
Post a Comment