Sheppard Pratt will probably have a spot for me by the middle or end of next week.
Part of me says, “Finally!” Another part says, “Already?”
I’m suddenly very scared.
But I found foster care for Winston while I’m gone–the local animal shelter finds temporary foster placement in situations like ours. I took him in today for a behavioral analysis, and he passed. Really his only problem behavior is jumping on people when he gets excited–and he gets excited any time people other than me are around. It’s actually kind of cute how happy he is to meet people. If he were a smaller dog, the jumping would just be annoying, but he’s a 70 lb German shepherd/husky mix. He’s almost knocked me down more than once and could easily knock down a kid. And he gets wound up when he’s around a lot of people and critters, which is pretty much the description of an animal shelter.
So I was really proud of him for passing the test, and relieved they’ll be able to foster him. Means all our training is paying off! When I got him he was a serious biter–I’m talking tearing through my jeans and breaking the skin–and was not house trained. The rescue didn’t tell me any of this, so I was totally unprepared when I brought him home. I can’t afford to get a trainer, so we’ve done all his training on our own. Good boy, Winston!
I just don’t know what I’ll do without him for this long!
Doing better–bank error fixed. Still depressed as hell, but less stressed at least. Still need to fix Part D and Mass Health, but my team can do a lot of that for me. And my SSI back pay came in, so I have nearly $2000, thank the gods.
Finally on the waiting list for Sheppard Pratt. It’s a long wait, but at least I’m on the list.
And my weight is down into the 120’s. The upper 120’s, but still. I know it’s really screwed up to be happy about that…but I am.
Tonight I’m so angry I can’t think straight. I’m angry I can’t get the help I need.
I want to lash out and hurt the people trying to help me. I hate that urge, so instead I want to hurt myself.
I know I need too much. Or I feel that way. I’ve tried so hard to convince myself that I’m not too much, but now pretty much the whole universe tells me I’m too much.
My family. They’re finally cutting me off at the end of the year. My grandfather has paid a ton of money for my treatment, and he wants to retire. I get that. But what do I do about the fact that I’m still in need of treatment?
I’m trying to get treatment on my own. Right now I need residential care for the depression and the trauma issues. And theoretically the eating disorder.
But then there’s Medicare, telling me I need too much. Medicare will cover psychiatric hospitalization, but their definition of “hospital” is so narrow it covers only locked units. It probably sounds silly and overblown to everyone when I insist that I cannot go to a locked unit. Oh, there goes Sara with her manipulative melodrama again; god, we’re all so sick of hearing it.
But I was beaten to a pulp in a psychiatric hospital and then told by the staff to forget about it. Then I was sexually assaulted every night for months. EVERY NIGHT, you bureaucratic bastards. You wouldn’t be able to go to another locked unit if that had happened to you.
But it doesn’t matter what happened to me. I’m crazy. I have no value to anyone. So it doesn’t matter what happened to me.
It doesn’t matter that the help I need is out there because I can’t afford it. It doesn’t matter how badly I need it it doesn’t matter that I’m teetering on the cliff about to fall off. It doesn’t matter if I die because I’m not worth anything anyway.
I can’t stop freaking out. I know I need more than Windhorse can give me, but I’m terrified of being hospitalized. I’m not talking about a little bit of anxiety–I’m talking about can’t quit crying, nose keeps running, shaking, hyperventilating panic. For days.
I try to keep busy. I’ve been playing with Winston and knitting madly. It doesn’t really help, though. Distractions don’t really work.
I haven’t told anyone at Windhorse what happened at the hospital in Iowa. They know I’ve had bad, retraumatizing experiences with hospitals, and they know how bad Menninger was. But that’s nowhere near the whole story.
Locked up, dehumanized, ignored, mistreated. Physically assaulted. Denied medical care and told to let it go. Repeatedly sexually assaulted. Silenced because no one would care anyway.
Different scenario now. Supposedly. Could be exactly the same, though. Stuck. Alone. 1500 miles from anyone who cares. Locked in. Controlled. Hated.
Can’t do it. Can’t. Not again. Can’t.
But I need this, I know. I’m too messed up to be outpatient right now. I just want somewhere that’s not locked and isn’t totally controlling. I want to be allowed to keep my shoelaces, my self-sufficiency, my dignity. But Medicare doesn’t cover that.
Why can’t I get what I need? How fucked up is it that, to get the help I need around the trauma, I have to go back into the same situation that caused a big chunk of the trauma?
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how much more terror I can survive. Will the terror of being in the hospital fix the terror of the trauma, or will it just make the terror worse?
Please, someone tell me that it’s going to be okay.
I’m having a very hard time not killing myself tonight.
I can’t find a program that fits my needs and takes my insurance. I’m terrified of ending up locked in where people will hurt me again—I was abused in a psych hospital.
I’m do scared I can’t stop crying.
There has to be an answer, right? There must be something. I just don’t know where else to look.
I had a long phone conversation with my friend D tonight. D and I have been friends for 7 or 8 years, and he also has DID. He kept insisting that I’m not okay and I need to acknowledge that so I can deal with it.
Is D right? Am I really not okay? Am I really ignoring my own distress, or not registering it? Does being unwilling or unable to do things like calling therapists or getting food stamps mean I’m “not functioning”? Am I telling myself I’m just unwilling to hide from myself the reality that I’m unable? Is my Windhorse team hopelessly inept at dealing with my traumas, missing all the signs and neglecting to offer help? Am I not even myself anymore, but some part, some Denial-Sara?
I don’t know right now, I honestly don’t. (D said I never say “I don’t know” this much.)
Most of the time, I don’t feel distressed; when I do it’s mild. Today I felt happy, watching the snow fall for the first time this season. I enjoy kung fu and my work with the attorney.
But…then why ami starving myself? Not getting food stamps? Hiding it all from my team? Insisting to myself that maybe I just don’t need a therapist anymore?
Then again, aside from the self-starvation, these could be healthy choices. Moving toward independence.
He kept pressing me about what changed, what happened. I kept saying I don’t know, but then it occurred to me that it could be hospital/treatment/therapy issues. I haven’t dealt with the retraumatization at Menninger. Hell, I’ve barely touched on the issues from the state hospital in Iowa. Then the situation for dredged up after the incident with NT. I did start the starvation shortly after that.
But correlation doesn’t equal causation. I’m not depressed. I’m not having flashbacks or nightmares. I’m not losing more time than usual. That doesn’t sound like a PTSD flare triggering my ED to me.
I don’t know. I just don’t know.
What I keep coming back to is, if everything is as bad as D thinks, then why do I feel okay? He says I don’t feel okay; I’m just in a milder depression. I don’t think that’s right. I know what milder depression feels like–that’s what summer and fall were. This, where I am now, this feels okay.
He also objects to me saying if my life goes downhill and there’s not much chance of fixing it, I’ll kill myself while things are still mostly okay so I don’t have to live the downhill tumble. I think this is reasonable. I think it is my right as a person to choose my life and death, and I think owning that right lets me value my life more. D says I wasn’t always like this. I think I always was, I just wasn’t able to articulate it so clearly. But he thinks I’m different and it means I’m somebody else.
I don’t think that’s even possible. I feel like myself, like Sara. If I was someone else, I wouldn’t still think I was Sara, would I? I’d think I was Kat or Corey or Alison or whoever. I wouldn’t still think I was Sara.
I’m exhausted, and I think I’m bordering on another respiratory infection. I need to rest, but I’m avoiding sleep. I had this nightmare last night so bad I want to shove a knitting needle up my nose to lobotomize myself.
I’m not a fan of trigger warnings, generally, but this one is really bad. Graphic sexual abuse and complicity. Be careful.
*
I was in a mental hospital. There was another patient there, a man in the bed next to mine. He raped me repeatedly, and I let him. I even let him think it was a relationship.
Then patients did something wrong–I can’t remember what. There was a woman in charge, like Nurse Ratched but worse. To punish us, she was going to rape us all with forks. We had to go get one ourselves and set it on the end of our beds. She told us to pray to her, and I did it without hesitation. She made me hold down a girl, and I did that too. I would’ve done anything to escape getting hurt. I would’ve let anyone else get hurt for the chance of sparing myself.
*
Just a dream, I know. But I still feel like the worst person on earth. I keep thinking I should be dead. It doesn’t matter that it’s only real in my head–that’s way too real for me.
I just feel so alone. I hate that there’s no one in real life I can talk to. It leaves me feeling so hopeless. NT was my last hope for dealing with all the trauma shit. But, god, part of the reason I’m having the hospital nightmares is what she did. And I don’t have the balls to tell her just how badly she hurt me, so there’s no chance at rebuilding trust. I ruin everything. How fucked up is it that I even ruin therapy?
I try to believe it’s not my fault…but it isn’t working. I feel like it’s my fault, everything is my fault, I ruin everything. It has to be my fault because I don’t want to face the betrayal, don’t want to face the fact that she failed me. If it was her failure instead of mine, it leaves me with no hope–the person I needed to help me failed. It’s better if it’s my fault.
I’m bingeing to avoid sleep. I have $35 to last me the rest of the month, and I’m bingeing. Probably gonna purge. Keeps me awake and turns off the feelings. I can’t bear to feel this right now. I have caffeine pills, too–used them during the last week of the campaign. A few of those would keep me awake. But being awake is intolerable too. So binge/purge it is. There’s a 24-hour Cumberland Farms about a 15-minute walk from here.
I’d mostly gotten over the intense suicidality, but I was still having a really hard time.
I had an appointment with NT this afternoon (usually it’s on Monday, but I’d had to reschedule because of the hurricane) and told her how awful I was feeling. The last thing I remember was telling her my family hates me and wishes it was me who had died.
The next thing I know, I’m in the hospital ER and it’s 4 hours later. From what I could piece together, I dissociated and NT called an ambulance. But judging from the time I was admitted to the ER, NT didn’t even spend the rest of the session trying to ground me before calling the ambulance. For that matter, I don’t even know if she tried to ground me at all! Even my Windhorse fake therapist manages to get me grounded when I dissociate, so if NT did try, she must not have tried very hard.
When I finally “woke up” at the hospital, I was alone in a hallway. I kept trying to call my Windhorse team, but the calls wouldn’t go through because I had no cell signal. Finally I texted my nurse, who talked to the ER people and got Fake Therapist to come get me and bring me home.
I’m really, REALLY upset with NT. She knows I’ve been traumatized in hospitals, and I remember specifically telling her today that I didn’t need to be inpatient. She knew I have a whole team at Windhorse, but she apparently didn’t call any of them. Just called the ambulance. I cannot BELIEVE this.
Oh, and for added fun, the ER called my grandparents because they were listed as emergency contacts. They bothered my grandmother the day after she lost her sister, and now my grandfather is going to throw a tantrum about me. He might cut off my treatment because he’ll say this incident proves I’m not making any progress.
And now I’ve got to start all over again looking for a new therapist. Took me months just to find this one.
This is a great post from Beyond Meds. It says what I’ve tried to say in some of my other posts, but I’ve never been able to say it as clearly or as elegantly. I guess it’s because I still haven’t processed a lot of the trauma inflicted on me by mainstream psychiatry, so I get all tangled up in my emotions.
I’m lucky. Windhorse, the program I’ve been in for the last year, is not mainstream. While they do utilize medication, it’s not forced down your throat, literally or figuratively. In fact, my psychiatrist has been very on-board with tapering me off my meds, though it’s been rocky enough I had to go back up on some. They’ve never even mentioned sticking me in the hospital. They’ve been very proactive in treating me as a whole person (physical and mental) and helping me rebuild a life without making me feel like I’m being pushed too fast. They care about me as a person, and I never got that from mainstream psychiatric treatment.
But most people aren’t that lucky. Windhorse and other similar programs are expensive, and insurance doesn’t cover them. What’s covered is the impersonal, coercive, dehumanizing, traumatizing mainstream system. People can’t get what they need to get better.
I know I’m lucky to have this program. I just wish I’d been able to find something like this first, when I was a hurting kid. But I didn’t, and now I have years of trauma inflicted on me by mainstream psychiatry that I have to excavate. This is the time of year my father had me committed to a state hospital–right before Halloween. Most of it I don’t remember. I was there until after New Year. The parts I do remember make me wish I could forget. I have been having nightmares about hospitals every night, sometimes more than once a night. I should probably talk about it in therapy, but I know I probably won’t. I have trouble bringing up trauma stuff–I feel like NT wants me to stick with the present. That’s probably all in my head, because if I’m not pushed to talk about the trauma stuff, I feel like I’ll be over-burdening people with it if I bring it up. So I’m feeling all this and remembering it all by myself.
The Life You Save May Be Your Own 