Some people will have read some of what I've written about here before.
October 19, 2011
2. Newblog2011: 10/19/11 When you’re writing, nobody can interrupt you.
When you’re writing, nobody can interrupt you. That’s part of why I’m smarter on paper than I often am in my recordings. I’m sure I’m not the only woman who has spent most of her life talking to people who wanted her to be dumber than she is. Eventually, you get used to being about where other people can handle having you be.
I fully admit that I have a lot of problems, which are the result of a number of things. One is that the mental health care system is terrible and has only gotten worse. One thing that’s terrible about it is that you get told to be stupid; I think that women especially get told that. That was also the view of a lot of people who assumed that I had ended up in the hospital as a young woman because I had worked too hard at school or had had expectations of myself that were too high for me. Nobody ever seemed willing to ask a lot of questions about whether or not my parents were emotionally abusive, which they were. They weren’t always abusive to me, but that’s how a lot of abusive situations are. You learn to pay attention to the times when they aren’t abusing you and you ignore the rest, and that’s how you get by. That’s also how you learn to live: as if you don’t deserve better than being abused whenever the people that you care about feel like abusing you.
Being forced to accept the idea that I had to lower my expectations for my own life while also having the entire issue of the fact that my abusive parents had gained control over my life because I’d been in the hospital ignored or minimized, and never being allowed to contradict whatever the opinion was of whatever therapist and/or psychiatrist I had at the time; all of that helped to turn me into someone who can’t quite manage to be smart all the time.
There’s that. Then there’s the fact that, when people are telling you that your problems are a result of a chemical imbalance that needs to be treated with medication, they don’t try to figure out whether or not you know how to form consistently healthy relationships and to help you do that if you don’t know how. Your original problems get worse and worse; most people who are from abusive families end up being abusive if they don’t get help not to end up that way. I tried to get help, but that didn’t help much.
Then there’s the fact that you get put on drugs that repress your feelings so that you can’t feel them enough to sort out what they are and learn to handle them. If there are people who have a lot of problems handling their emotions if they’ve been on medication for a long time and then try to taper off of it, it’s probably because they’re not used to having to do anything themselves, mentally, to handle their feelings. Instead of having built an internal system for regulating their emotions and reactions and having practiced doing that until the regulation is automatic, they’ve had drugs that make them feel or not feel certain things. A lot of doctors and therapists expect you to handle being without the drugs over the course of a couple of weeks or months, and if you can’t handle it, they decide that you need to be back on those drugs, that you “can’t function” without them, or you, yourself, feel so off without them that you get scared and ask to be back on them.
It can take a year or longer just to get used to being off them, and that’s not even talking about the changes in the way that you look at yourself and other people while you stop thinking of yourself as being mentally ill. You can get really angry during that time, when you realize how badly you’ve treated yourself and how badly others have treated you, because you and those who knew you agreed to an inferior status for you. As you do better and better without the drugs, people who have gotten used to treating you as being inferior may not like the increase in your self-esteem. Even if they “always tried to be nice to you, despite or because of your problems,” they may want you and the relationship they had with you to stay the same, and they may fight to keep you from turning into the person that you need to turn into.
Then there’s the fact that some of the drugs can also make you obsessive. Because, for the first few years, I had no idea how to answer the questions that psychiatrists would ask of me, and also because the first time that I was in a hospital I quickly became hysterical about being there, and stayed that way for months, I was put on tranquilizers that are also supposed to bring your thoughts together. If you take someone who is terrified for months in a hospital, and who remains so frightened of the mental health care system that she learns to tell people what they want to hear, and you keep that person on drugs that are supposed to make her thoughts cohere, you can easily get a hyper-obsessive person. My thoughts were together, but nobody wanted to know what those thoughts were, and their constant pushing of me to do what they wanted made me hysterical until I finally gave up and did what they told me to do, for years. My real issues never got addressed, and, like a lot of people who have the same experience, I ended up with more psychological problems than I’d had in the first place.
My understanding of some drugs is that they create pathways in your brain, over time, that may not go away right away.
There’s also the fact that my self-image and feeling of personal identity were almost entirely destroyed by those experiences. When you are young and don’t feel that you have the right to think of yourself as a good or competent person anymore, you are much more susceptible to things such as copying violent attitudes and behaviors that you see glamorous people portraying. That’s part of what happened to me. I tried out yelling, throwing things, hitting people. It’s not as if I hadn’t heard a lot of yelling already growing up, with some spanking that I think was out of control. I don’t know if spanking is right or wrong; I do know that my parents always showed that they were angry while they were spanking me, and made me feel bad. I remember once telling my father after he’d spanked me “It didn’t hurt that much, but the fact that you hit me hurt me.” I was very young when I told him that, I don't even know if I was in kindergarten yet, and all he did was say, in an accusatory way, “You deserved it.”
After I'd been in the hospital a few times, and had gone to counseling for years, I was in my 20's. I left college after my junior year, and that was when I discovered that yelling, throwing things, and hitting people gave me back a feeling of power. To be honest, the fact that I was fighting back did work somewhat, in terms of getting some respect from people who weren’t nice to me, or who were nice to me only when they felt like it and who were abusive to me when they felt like it. However, being abusive is not the way that I prefer to do things, and if I get abusive now, I consider those behaviors to be bad habits, things I picked up along the way when the things that I tried that I had hoped would be healthy ways to grow into adulthood failed me.
As far as my partial competence at various things goes; I have two more things to say about that. One is that, eventually, it got too painful to try my best and get nowhere because of being stigmatized as having a mental illness. That was true from the first day that I was in the hospital and realized that the identity of mental illness was going to take precedence in people’s minds over all of my prior achievements. Those prior achievements took a lot of work, work which I did in the belief that it would get me somewhere. I think that’s something that a lot of people in the entertainment industry who have dedicated the last year and a half to trying to ruin my life don’t know anything about; I’m not smart out of nowhere. I really worked at school. I didn’t work as much at school when I was in college, but I’d already developed good enough habits from grade school to get mostly A’s and B’s without as much work. I never got below a C in any college course, even the ones that I sometimes missed for a couple of weeks at a time because the tranquilizers I was on made me sleep through class. There were days when I couldn’t get out of bed; usually, if someone knocked on the door of my dorm room any year that I was in college, I was asleep or at least lying down.
Really educated people can see where the breaks in my education have been. For example, I know enough about history to have a feeling for what’s going on, but that’s more or less it. If my observations are sometimes astute, that’s a combination of having been through experiences that showed me what the risk is of what people can turn into under certain conditions and the fact that people who grow up with a lawyer and a former high school English teacher for parents can put a sentence together about politics without always sounding like an imbecile.
The combination of the total despair that I felt at being held back from going to college at the usual time and all of the years of being told that, essentially, I wasn’t as smart as I used to be, was emotionally weak and also shouldn’t take myself too seriously resulted in my now having to tell myself, every day, “Try to do the best you can.” It used to be a given that I would do the best I could at everything; now I have to tell myself to do it, and even when I do tell myself that, I don’t always manage it.
However, whatever my emotional, mental or social problems are, I don’t know how anyone expects them to get better while I continue to be persecuted.
Copyright L. Kochman, October 19, 2011 @ 12:50 p.m.
October 19, 2011
2. Newblog2011: 10/19/11 When you’re writing, nobody can interrupt you.
When you’re writing, nobody can interrupt you. That’s part of why I’m smarter on paper than I often am in my recordings. I’m sure I’m not the only woman who has spent most of her life talking to people who wanted her to be dumber than she is. Eventually, you get used to being about where other people can handle having you be.
I fully admit that I have a lot of problems, which are the result of a number of things. One is that the mental health care system is terrible and has only gotten worse. One thing that’s terrible about it is that you get told to be stupid; I think that women especially get told that. That was also the view of a lot of people who assumed that I had ended up in the hospital as a young woman because I had worked too hard at school or had had expectations of myself that were too high for me. Nobody ever seemed willing to ask a lot of questions about whether or not my parents were emotionally abusive, which they were. They weren’t always abusive to me, but that’s how a lot of abusive situations are. You learn to pay attention to the times when they aren’t abusing you and you ignore the rest, and that’s how you get by. That’s also how you learn to live: as if you don’t deserve better than being abused whenever the people that you care about feel like abusing you.
Being forced to accept the idea that I had to lower my expectations for my own life while also having the entire issue of the fact that my abusive parents had gained control over my life because I’d been in the hospital ignored or minimized, and never being allowed to contradict whatever the opinion was of whatever therapist and/or psychiatrist I had at the time; all of that helped to turn me into someone who can’t quite manage to be smart all the time.
There’s that. Then there’s the fact that, when people are telling you that your problems are a result of a chemical imbalance that needs to be treated with medication, they don’t try to figure out whether or not you know how to form consistently healthy relationships and to help you do that if you don’t know how. Your original problems get worse and worse; most people who are from abusive families end up being abusive if they don’t get help not to end up that way. I tried to get help, but that didn’t help much.
Then there’s the fact that you get put on drugs that repress your feelings so that you can’t feel them enough to sort out what they are and learn to handle them. If there are people who have a lot of problems handling their emotions if they’ve been on medication for a long time and then try to taper off of it, it’s probably because they’re not used to having to do anything themselves, mentally, to handle their feelings. Instead of having built an internal system for regulating their emotions and reactions and having practiced doing that until the regulation is automatic, they’ve had drugs that make them feel or not feel certain things. A lot of doctors and therapists expect you to handle being without the drugs over the course of a couple of weeks or months, and if you can’t handle it, they decide that you need to be back on those drugs, that you “can’t function” without them, or you, yourself, feel so off without them that you get scared and ask to be back on them.
It can take a year or longer just to get used to being off them, and that’s not even talking about the changes in the way that you look at yourself and other people while you stop thinking of yourself as being mentally ill. You can get really angry during that time, when you realize how badly you’ve treated yourself and how badly others have treated you, because you and those who knew you agreed to an inferior status for you. As you do better and better without the drugs, people who have gotten used to treating you as being inferior may not like the increase in your self-esteem. Even if they “always tried to be nice to you, despite or because of your problems,” they may want you and the relationship they had with you to stay the same, and they may fight to keep you from turning into the person that you need to turn into.
Then there’s the fact that some of the drugs can also make you obsessive. Because, for the first few years, I had no idea how to answer the questions that psychiatrists would ask of me, and also because the first time that I was in a hospital I quickly became hysterical about being there, and stayed that way for months, I was put on tranquilizers that are also supposed to bring your thoughts together. If you take someone who is terrified for months in a hospital, and who remains so frightened of the mental health care system that she learns to tell people what they want to hear, and you keep that person on drugs that are supposed to make her thoughts cohere, you can easily get a hyper-obsessive person. My thoughts were together, but nobody wanted to know what those thoughts were, and their constant pushing of me to do what they wanted made me hysterical until I finally gave up and did what they told me to do, for years. My real issues never got addressed, and, like a lot of people who have the same experience, I ended up with more psychological problems than I’d had in the first place.
My understanding of some drugs is that they create pathways in your brain, over time, that may not go away right away.
There’s also the fact that my self-image and feeling of personal identity were almost entirely destroyed by those experiences. When you are young and don’t feel that you have the right to think of yourself as a good or competent person anymore, you are much more susceptible to things such as copying violent attitudes and behaviors that you see glamorous people portraying. That’s part of what happened to me. I tried out yelling, throwing things, hitting people. It’s not as if I hadn’t heard a lot of yelling already growing up, with some spanking that I think was out of control. I don’t know if spanking is right or wrong; I do know that my parents always showed that they were angry while they were spanking me, and made me feel bad. I remember once telling my father after he’d spanked me “It didn’t hurt that much, but the fact that you hit me hurt me.” I was very young when I told him that, I don't even know if I was in kindergarten yet, and all he did was say, in an accusatory way, “You deserved it.”
After I'd been in the hospital a few times, and had gone to counseling for years, I was in my 20's. I left college after my junior year, and that was when I discovered that yelling, throwing things, and hitting people gave me back a feeling of power. To be honest, the fact that I was fighting back did work somewhat, in terms of getting some respect from people who weren’t nice to me, or who were nice to me only when they felt like it and who were abusive to me when they felt like it. However, being abusive is not the way that I prefer to do things, and if I get abusive now, I consider those behaviors to be bad habits, things I picked up along the way when the things that I tried that I had hoped would be healthy ways to grow into adulthood failed me.
As far as my partial competence at various things goes; I have two more things to say about that. One is that, eventually, it got too painful to try my best and get nowhere because of being stigmatized as having a mental illness. That was true from the first day that I was in the hospital and realized that the identity of mental illness was going to take precedence in people’s minds over all of my prior achievements. Those prior achievements took a lot of work, work which I did in the belief that it would get me somewhere. I think that’s something that a lot of people in the entertainment industry who have dedicated the last year and a half to trying to ruin my life don’t know anything about; I’m not smart out of nowhere. I really worked at school. I didn’t work as much at school when I was in college, but I’d already developed good enough habits from grade school to get mostly A’s and B’s without as much work. I never got below a C in any college course, even the ones that I sometimes missed for a couple of weeks at a time because the tranquilizers I was on made me sleep through class. There were days when I couldn’t get out of bed; usually, if someone knocked on the door of my dorm room any year that I was in college, I was asleep or at least lying down.
Really educated people can see where the breaks in my education have been. For example, I know enough about history to have a feeling for what’s going on, but that’s more or less it. If my observations are sometimes astute, that’s a combination of having been through experiences that showed me what the risk is of what people can turn into under certain conditions and the fact that people who grow up with a lawyer and a former high school English teacher for parents can put a sentence together about politics without always sounding like an imbecile.
The combination of the total despair that I felt at being held back from going to college at the usual time and all of the years of being told that, essentially, I wasn’t as smart as I used to be, was emotionally weak and also shouldn’t take myself too seriously resulted in my now having to tell myself, every day, “Try to do the best you can.” It used to be a given that I would do the best I could at everything; now I have to tell myself to do it, and even when I do tell myself that, I don’t always manage it.
However, whatever my emotional, mental or social problems are, I don’t know how anyone expects them to get better while I continue to be persecuted.
Copyright L. Kochman, October 19, 2011 @ 12:50 p.m.