Discriminating taste

I have to confess something, something that catches me by surprise occasionally and frustrates me about me.
I hate being stereotyped and stigmatized. I hate being discriminated against for my ailments. I hate feeling the subtle and not so subtle changes in attitudes and perceptions that some people manifest when they find out that you have a "mental illness" or mental health related issues.
I hate it so very much and it is especially difficult when you have the intelligence to know how you are flawed and the intelligence to pick up on the discrimination, ostracizing, stigmatizing etc.
But the confession... I do the same thing.
I am prejudice against my own disorders, against my kind.
...And I don't like being lumped into the same category as those people.
I know a few people who have bipolar and I don't like some things about them that I know are directly related to the illness they have. I wonder if I am a bad person for feeling these things and even wonder why I feel these things. I am scared of them myself half the time. Or am I disappointed? Disappointed with how they handle or how I do? Or am I disappointed that even with them I can still offend and not fit in?
I wonder if this is normal for all of us that have these problems?
But I also sincerely wonder if maybe I really do not belong in the same category because mine seems to be directly linked to TBI. I wonder if a strictly biological bipolar may be different than a TBI bipolar?
Manic, I fit the definition of. I was manic. But I did not loose touch completely and I was composed well enough to hide it. Or had I just conditioned and trained myself well enough? and that is why I feel some annoyance and frustration with others?
But I also think there is some association to the level of breaking and the age of the breaking. As I have said, prior to this, I think I had not gone much above hypomanic. And I am much older, with much more experience under my belt... I have also chosen to distance myself from those things that can be triggers. I don't embrace a trigger so easily. I'd rather not be in that consent battle. It is something people in my family and many of my local cultures and subcultures really do not understand. It is why I am not so stalwart and involved in the church that I was raised in. Spirituality and religion can be very slippery slopes for a delicately balanced brain... I have found more peace and stability with some distance and yet that makes people very uncomfortable. But my overly spiritual and scriptural associates that have similar issues I feel pain and embarrassment for... and I find myself feeling my own discriminating feelings...
Maybe I am projecting my own insecurities onto them? Maybe it is a fear of what I may actually be or come to be?
My mind and heart want to figure this out and be at peace with them and me. Be at peace with my association.
And yet, I don't really want to think about it right now at all. I just want to be a fun mom again. And I want to have friends again. But I also do not want to be that me again. I want to be more free and more accepting of all that I am. I want to love my perfectly imperfect.
...and truthfully, I want to feel loved, valued and accepted.
I suppose I have some work to do still.
And who is still actually reading this anyway? And why?
Check in now and again if you don't mind. I'd love your feedback

If you want to pull the wool you might destroy the sweater.

"It is all three, isn't it?"

I still talk to that place in my heart that he allowed me to keep him. 

Allowed

there just may be more to that than you (my blog audience) know.

I have tried to kick him out of my heart but he knew how to root himself deep and I was so broken that at times those roots that broke me were somehow the only thing holding me together. It is a strang place that no rational and fully stable person can ever really understand. 

... and I will be made out to be crazy for the things I am not crazy for 

Even after and when they deny the crazy that I was...

November 12, 2018

I made a mistake. I talked about my husband. I explained how what we (Dr. P and I) had been working on had helped me in my relationship with my husband. 

He was not happy about this. He changed on me. The spark in his eyes was gone. He was cold and distant. 

One of two possibilities: 

He had developed feelings and caught him off guard 

Or

It confirmed I was non-compliant with his efforts to subtly turn me into his own personal toy

Either way, he was done with me.

But with a strange plea of "don't disappear on me completely"

to which I pointed out "you are breaking up with me and I am not happy about it"

Then he, "unfortunately there is still a human element to all of this."

and later, "I told you not to try and solve this." 

I was not compliant again. 

and he was scared. 

I could see it in his face. I could see it in the paleness and the picked off scabs of a stress break out. I could hear it in his replies, implied but neither confirmed nor denied. Rehearsed or influenced by some of the same articles I had found and read about transference and countertransference? 

I could hear it in his struggle to regain the balance of power.

I could hear it in his over compensating when he looked me straight in the eye and declared, "I am not scared of you." said the way every person does when they have decided to confront their fear and have to lie to themselves until they start to believe their lie. 

I could hear it is his chastising, "that's not funny," when I laughed about the insanity of a bipolar personal contact that once, while in a manic state, believed one companion to be God and the other to be the devil. 

I could hear it in his direct, loud and firm command to "stop emailing me" and in his back peddling softened reply of "they are too deep and they can get me into trouble" when I reacted in a way he may not have expected -a way that suggested I have dealt with that kind of forcefulness plenty and I may not be so inclined to respond the way he'd hoped since I knew those types of bold threatening tactics too well. 

I could hear it especially loud and clear in his final statement, "so we can agree to a clean break?"

And yet, still he could not resist testing those boundaries, checking to see if maybe I might be more compliant or more interested, and maybe just maybe, after the confessions of the depth and complexity to my transference and the the suggestion of mania, maybe just maybe, he hoped that I might manifest those with the paradoxically desired but condemned sexual advance by the patient.
I could see these.
I picked up on this.
As childish and naive as I was in those moments of managed manic magnificence I picked up on the manipulations in his playfulness,  the moments when he forgot he was scared, and could not resit playing with the child that I was, mistaking me for an adult themed toy. Tempting. It was far too tempting

and it worked to his advantage (it always does, he knows these games well and plays them regularly, I have seen it more than with just me) 

Control, he regained by playing, turning me into a game again.  Because I trusted and loved. 

But my instinct was awake and bold. It took liberties and spoke for me at times, long before I knew what I meant. 

And my will to survive, my fight and flight responses heightened by the risks and threats that the mania was immune to, they picked up on so many things. My heightened senses and rapid processing working at superhuman levels picked up on every subtlety, nuance, inflection, movement, energy... the entirety of the situation would replay in my brain for months and months to follow, not missing anything in my brains quest to solve what was happening to itself and why. The mysteries had to be solved. His "I'm okay with being wrong" was not okay in his misdiagnosis. 

Was the missing of the mania intentional? Did he break me? Or was I already broken and breaking? Had he developed feelings of reciprocated magnitude and intensity or was it the mania (that he had overlooked) suggesting this to my desperately-trying-to-settle brain? ...Or was he really and truly a diabolical grooming therapist that dropped me when he saw that I was not compliant and I broke because of it? Did I break because, even though I was not physically compliant, the grooming had worked on an emotional level and suddenly grieving the loss of him was too much for the physiology of my brain since it was coinciding with  PTS (post traumatic stress), TBI realities, and a flooding of returning memories?  

"I told you not to try and solve this"

"I don't need more friends"

"I don't believe in forever anymore"

"my life is very complex right now"

"I could lose my license because of you"

"...I will never have anything to do with you outside of therapy."

"I would have to agree to it"

"You only see what I allow you to see" 

"I don't do well with blurred boundaries"

"why? are you a stalker?"

"what we have had is a beautiful thing and I would not want to fuck that up." (really, who says that?)

"I connect easily with people"

"I am okay with being wrong"

"I am going to let it burn out and I suggest you do the same"

... And I feel like, in his cryptic way, he may have been trying to warn me, that he would do whatever he had to, to hide and cover anything that would reveal who he really was and what he really was up to... or was it just that he would cover anything that could potentially threaten his livelihood...

I would love for clarification- I am not afraid of the conversation and I am not the one hiding or trying to hide the truth.

But... I will repeat, the best liars hide their lies in the truth. 

Which makes me think

"It is all three, isn't it"

Grooming, countertransference and the breaking of me and then denying it (mania). ... maybe it is more like 4 or 5 things, 4 and 5 being a whole lot of mischief. 

"You only see what I allow you to see" 

Oh, but I see so much more and I see through you- And he knows it. He makes the command in hopes that his statement will pull the wool curtain over my manic heightened perceptiveness. 

Parenting after Mania and the Psychology of role reversals

What is most bothersome to me right now is how this wild ride has affected my kids and my ability to parent them...

It has been so hard on them. To watch their mom first break and become emotionally unstable, tired, foggy, forgetful, etc from a car accident and the PTSD* that followed then to watch her break a thousand times worse from a therapist.
...

"It is not normal for people to fall in love with their therapists," my son expresses to me about a month ago when I am trying to get to the bottom of what is really going on with him. Why he is failing all of his classes, impossible to get out of bed in the morning and other things...

Chastise me if you want, for not keeping this hidden from my children, but when you break as big as I did, it is handled the way that it was by the providers that should be helping you, you are as openly honest about things as I am, and it lasts as long as it did, things like that will not stay hidden from your teen kids or anyone. And it might also be worth noting that the area of my brain that is specifically built for keeping things in is actually broken and the space for this kind of storage is now smaller which means I can retain and refrain less... I wonder if that has also contributed. 

But I also think it likely could have been even worse if I had kept it hidden. 

I think this because I know what I was experiencing and it was hard to keep from blowing up completely even with letting out some of the steam as it built. But I also say this because I know of too many people on both the parent and child side that have experienced a lot of emotional distress from keeping hidden what was really going on. Often they are referred to as "skeletons in the closet" or "swept under the rug" and from what I have witnessed hiding the truths and realities is not constructive or healthy and often leads to far worse as people bury more and more, and hide the truly heinous acts that are happening. Unwillingness to face and talk about issues has not ever proven constructive or healthy to me.

AND besides all that, that is exactly what they Neuroscience Institute was doing with me, why on earth would I then repeat the same neglect and abuse with my children? 

They had lost there mom. I may have been physically present but I was too often lost in the madness and unavailable because of how hard I had to work simply to stay ahead of the death sentence I was given. 

They deserved to know and they deserved to know why. 

It has been so hard on them. 

And still they are such amazing kids and so much more compassionate, understanding and even practical than the adults and professionals that were supposed to be. 

When my son said this, what do I say?

Caught off guard and heart broken for him I was not sure how to respond, but two things I remember doing. I explained that it actually is normal for people to fall in love with their therapists and it is very common. What is not normal is their therapist falling in love with them or implying that they had and then dropping them and refusing to ever have anything to do with them...that and I apologized, because I am sorry for all that has happened and for how hard it has been on him. To which he replies, "It's okay, I know it's not your fault." And I try to make sure, I hope and I pray, he is not now burdening himself with guilt for his feelings and frustrations. He is entitled to them and they are not unjustified. But his loving forgiveness and understanding, regardless of his pain, lets know how lucky I am.  

He and my daughter have both said this to me, more than once... They are such sweet, good kids. And I am grateful that even though they have frustrations with me, and they have this pain and cross to bare, they know when things have been very much out of my control and they were stalwart and strong when I was so very broken. They carried me so many times.

I love and am so grateful for them.

But there is a flip side to that coin; this type of role reversal (even though it was not a complete role reversal) makes it very difficult to return to more normal parenting and having parental expectations. 

It is confusing and hard for all of us -the psychology of it I don't want to delve into right now because it exhausts my brain. But I do know that it is another way that I now feel incredibly insecure. I almost feel like I no longer have the right to parent them...

...At a times when they are unravelling and when the fall apart some themselves because of this, as I improve and become more stable. 

* note: The PTSD that followed was linked to a TBI I was hospitalized for at age 12 -this put me reprocessing from both an adult and childlike state.
** this article is being published with my son and daughters permission. When I asked them if they think it has been a good or bad thing that I have been as open and honest with them about this as I have my daughter plainly and confidently says, "I think it has been good" while my son points out that he thinks it has "probably" been good because, "you know that I hear things that I am not supposed to hear and don't hear things that I am supposed to hear. So if you had tried to keep it hidden I probably would know even more about it but it would be a very different version." He would  not have really understood or had a clear picture of what was going on in addition to feeling like he could not talk about it.