Some might point out that my experiences in therapy couldn’t have been so bad if I chose to go into therapy as a profession. Others might say it was my own damn fault I got hooked on the practice! Still others might point out that I have been privileged with the best help that money could buy and have been able to use it to avoid disability.

Despite what others might say, I am not sure whether to be grateful for the therapy I got. In my therapeutic journey, therapy makes me mad. I don’t think I have experienced a warranted sense of safety with the relationships in which I have been.

This and the next thee posts will span this journey through psychotherapy over the past thirty years. I will evaluate my experience with seven therapeutic relationships. There have been several generations of theoretical trends and changes to consider. There is also an assortment of distinctive conditions to treat even though I am still just a person.

Many argue that without having a therapist who really believes in you, it is hard to have a sense of safety! Ultimately, I share these experiences so that the reader can learn to navigate and advocate for the care they need. I will stop short of drawing conclusions. I am not here to turn off anyone’s light bulb! Just remember, the light bulb has to be ready to change.

Still, I think the conduct of modern-day healers need to be re-evaluated repeatedly regardless of degrees, the quality of training, or the amount of money they make. I persist with therapy because I am still unhappy and because I want to offer quality experiences to the people I serve. I persist because I believe other people who have experienced catastrophic trauma can learn to be healers. Stay tuned and learn more about the reason I have come to promote peer support as a legitimate form of therapy.

Early Intervention:  

I saw my first therapist starting at age thirteen. The first memorable thing we did together was write down what a popular kid looked like and what a nerd looked like. Then he asked me which one I was?

When I explained that my parents wouldn’t buy me popular clothing, he said, “that doesn’t sound right!”

He was right, they were paying him top dollar for these sessions.

When mom lied and said that my claims were inaccurate, I did get to go shopping as a result. Still, I didn’t take advantage of my Mom and wear designer clothing. That was not my style. But I did dress better, and it helped. I started to try to fit in and the bullying decreased.

I was also referred for psychometric testing. I did not have any idea why this was necessary. Indeed, at times in my journey, it has been a significant source of concern as to why this was suggested. I was simply coaxed into it saying that it might be helpful.

I came out of it with one or two pieces of feedback: that I was particularly good at describing and defining things; and I was smart.

I have learned over the years that psychometric testing does not get shared with the recipient accept to highlight a strength or two. I wouldn’t really know if it affected my treatment. In treatment, I was always encouraged to drink and break the rules. I never listened. My father and my shrink shared the theory that my problem was that my superego was too big.

Lesson Number One–Don’t Side with Society Over the Sufferer:

While it’s arguable that these early tactics helped me stop fighting back against the herd in a self-defeating manner, it’s also arguable that I also stopped celebrating myself. The story just wasn’t over with this intervention. I learned to blame myself for getting teased endlessly. My rage was turned inwards. Blaming myself has become quite a thing over the years.

Now with my master’s degree and twenty-five years of experience, I understand neurodevelopmental disorders enough to understand why this tactic was not advisable. I could recite all the disorders back in college, but it took me till age thirty to realize that neurodiversity needs to be celebrated, not punished.

I’d always played with kids who were older or younger. I’d been left back a year in kindergarten and nearly didn’t even get in because I cut paper in a unique manner. It is hard for me to understand why the info from the psychometric testing didn’t pick up the very clear signs of neurodevelopmental disorders. I would later confirm ADD, Dyslexia. Beyond that, I have surmised that I am on the spectrum. Against-the-grain behavior is not simply a choice. However, the road to ending the blaming the victim mentality would be a long one.

Lesson Number Two–Don’t Ignore Problems:

A year later I stopped sleeping for a year. The best I could do was maybe three hours a night. I’d sleep on the floor or in the closet because I had more success sprawled out in strange positions. I was unhappy about a move to a new house and wanted to paint my room black. I could not explain why this mattered to me so direly. The new house was a significant shift in values for my Mom who was coming out of her depression and starting to challenge the way Dad did things.

Why had I had to suffer all those experiences of ascetic deprivations only to end up living in a new house like everyone else? Money was never talked about and I couldn’t understand that my mother had just come into some. Plus, we were evicting the welfare family, my summertime friends, out of our summer home, “The Lodge” and selling it. Plus, our dog died. Plus, my Dad Quit his job. Oddly, the horrific fighting had halted. But I did not trust the move.

Because I was unlike other teens who were lazy and slept in, my therapist did not consider this to be a depression. My struggle went unacknowledged except by my mother who I woke up every night in tears. I fixed this at the end of my ninth grade year during an Outward Bound course during which we hiked late into each night. This got me back to sleeping after a tough year.

Lesson Number Three–Don’t Engage in Dual Relationships that May Interpreted as Exploitative:

When my parents divorced the next year, the advice my therapist had given them after years of working with them was to “Shit or get of the pot.”

When I finally found these things out, I felt as though I had intuitively predicted the fallout.

Now, as a professional, I have learned that working with three members of the same family individually and adding on couples, group, and family counseling is a bit of a set up. This may make you money, but it may cause conflict and fallout for the trusting relationships.

Unfortunately, this was only one aspect of the way dual relationships didn’t work on my behalf. Meanwhile I had a yard business. One might say the business was impaired by my fear of asking for payment. My father had always gone into rages when I asked to be paid for work that I did. He approved of me working hard for him all summer in return for a modest donation into my bank account at the end.

Meanwhile, my father convinced me to buy a used three-cycle lawnmower engine that didn’t work. Perhaps he wanted to teach me a lesson about business. Or maybe he just didn’t want the wear and tear afflicting his own cheap-ass lawn mower. It was totally his idea. I didn’t understand why a three-cycle motor was important. But I was dutiful and invested in a used three-cycle mower.

When the therapist heard of my angst about the lawn mower that kept breaking down, he said he had a lawnmower for me. He sold it to me for about eighty dollars, almost the same price I paid for the used three-cycle lawnmower. I of course was afraid to tell him no.

Not only couldn’t I get my customers to pay me, I didn’t invest wisely in a good lawnmower. I tired of not getting paid. My therapist’s lawnmower was not much to my liking. I told myself another hundred dollars I could have bought a brand new three cycle engine. I threw in the towel and got a job at McDonald’s my junior year. It was a year I was exceptionally busy, starving, and working on homework into the wee hours of the night.

Then, I had to pay out of pocket for many missed appointments with the therapist that year. My Mom insisted that I make my appointment whether they helped or not. Perhaps it seems like I should have respected this, but she was out late partying every night. I was working hard and had lost all respect for her over this.

When I was put in a hospital, my therapist called and had the staff wish me well from him. Staff were all impressed with his follow through. “He seems to really care about you,” they said. I didn’t know how to feel about that. I still didn’t consider all the ways I felt exploited in the relationship.

The post In Psychotherapy We Trust: Part One– Decline appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Finding a relationship when you struggle with mental health challenges can be hard for a host of different reasons. Depression, anxiety, addiction, and interpersonal struggles can make relationships very challenging. There is stigma attached to each of these conditions and many avoid contact and fail to see other great qualities that the sufferer brings to a relationship.  For years I struggled with relationships in ways that may sound familiar to this; however, it wasn’t until I caught a “schizophrenia” that I was able to get the emotional intelligence I needed to find and maintain a soul mate. Thank god for “schizophrenia!”

Like many of us who struggle with mental health challenges, I was starting out the game with some disadvantages. My family relations were strained. I moved away from home before I graduated high school and my room was converted to a study.

I transitioned into college when a twenty-five-year-old daughter of an alcoholic rescued me from the eating disorder unit upon which I spent a significant portion of my senior year. I started living with her in the inner-city; but was on a tight leash. I was not even able to have male friends. I survived the relationship for two years and then was in mourning. I lived alone in a roach infested inner-city apartment to hide excessive binging and purging. I did not develop standard dating skills in college.

I was lucky to use a good GPA to land a job out of college that could pay my bills. Even with a professional job, my initial efforts to date were awkward and lacked discretion. Into each date I’d burst, willing to commit for an eternity with unconditional love.

I was in constant pursuit! Even so, I managed quit binging and purging. I landed a second job and put myself through graduate school in the evenings and weekends. During that time, I had two stormy six-month relationships. Both left me because of my mood. I’d get depressed and need a lot of support. When the support wasn’t there the depression would get worse until they left. Getting dumped in this way was extremely painful.

In another sense, I was battling what had been labeled schizotypal personality disorder, depression, ADD, and Dyslexia and was forever trying to be well enough to marry a chronically normal woman and overcome these conditions. I listened to my Ph.D. therapist without discretion. I didn’t know she told my parents she didn’t think I was college material. She set my personal relationship goals for me as if she was a controlling parent. The depressions just meant it was time to change medications. And I was not to question the wisdom of the psychopharmacology professional.

Even with this mentality as guidance, “schizophrenia” did not take over my life right away. A year post graduate school, I decided to break away. I believed I could start over again and use the skills I built on the East Coast to have success. I didn’t want to be attached to the stigma of the anorexic boy that haunted the halls of my private high school persistently tormenting me the way it did. I wanted to divorce all the six degrees of separation people who whispered about me behind my back.

These hopes and dreams went swimmingly well in Seattle. I fell into a wonderful circle of support in the Quaker meeting and in the Seattle Mountaineers I learned to snowshoe and bag off-trail peaks. I was constantly active, and I built much stronger sense of support than I had on the east coast.

I immediately fell into relationships. I met a Thai Woman. It was the start of something powerful, but she was a survivor of domestic violence and I wasn’t passing her safety tests. I reacted to the confusion by finding the rat-race love of my life. Her parents paid for her graduate school and she even had money to go to the car wash. The relationship only lasted six months until she found out I took medication. Before she found out, it looked like my hopes and dreams were going to work out fine. Then depression set in.

That girlfriend left me the same time I took a risky job amid the downtown politics of the local drug war. I started to work at a section eight housing authority where I thought I could make the most of my need for social change. There were, after all, many things that mattered to me apart from relationships. Three months later I entered a temporary relationship with a woman who was politically positioned to help me blow the roof off the power-brokers house. And that’s what we did! Two months after I left town, the housing authority lost control of the project and money was raised to improve services.

However, these risks took a toll that caused “schizophrenia: to take hold. In fact, I found the relationship scary. I found I needed to experiment going off my psychiatric medication. I was learning that my intuition was a better teacher than that therapist on the east coast. My intuition might save me from getting shanked. I had thought that college in the inner-city had prepared me for this kind of reality; but, now I was invested in this lifestyle in a different way. Now, I could do something about the violence and chaos. Now, I did things like leak news stories that made violence a real possibility if the wrong person found out.

When I was personally threatened and warned not to run, I split. So, began my two-year period of “schizophrenia” during which I barely managed to stay housed and employed. Before I could make it to the Canadian border, I was accosted by police. Three days later, I got committed to a State Hospital for three months.

You see, I’d come to believe that the mafia was following me and that my family, who were relieved to have me hospitalized were part of the conspiracy. I had evidence from my interactions with people in the hospital that supported a real conspiracy. Maybe my family was safer to blame. And they didn’t seem to care about the appalling conditions to which I was subjected.

Discharged to the streets, I took a greyhound and landed a job and got an apartment until I ran out of medication.

When the medication wore off, I lost the job and found myself on a vision quest to avoid the control of the mafia. Everywhere I went I could see signs that I was getting followed. I was not able find able to find work. I filled out thousands of applications. Professional work was out of the question. Ironically, the only non-professional job I could find was arranged by an aunt at an Italian Delicatessen in the Bay Area.

After yet another move, I had to ride my bike ten miles and take BART for an hour to get to work. I would work an eight-and-a-half-hour shift and BART and bike home. It took me six months to get my mother to give me money for a car and another four months to establish enough rapport and safety at the Deli to find another job. I couldn’t foresee that the process of having “schizophrenia” in this way was going to do me any good. So, I began to develop emotional regulation skills.

The first week I was five minutes late to work and they threatened to fire me. My immediate supervisors were nineteen and had cars and homes. I was the last to go on break. Co-working kids would goof off leaving the work for me and tease me because I bought my sneakers at Walmart or didn’t have a plush new car like they did. Customers would complain that my shirt was wrinkly because I had to bike through the rainy season.

Now, this was a lot like my personal experience of junior high, but really it was the least of my worries. At the end of a long day I would find my apartment broken into, police search style. I would find my mailed work-correspondence returned and opened despite complaints I left at the post office. I found residents I knew from the section eight housing complex in Seattle turning up at the BART station on my way to work with handcuffs and handmade “CIA” signs. I would find bike thieves at my bike lock. I would regularly find things moved around in my apartment and of course there were the many other signs of being followed on my way to work and back.

At work I paid for my food as I was supposed to, even though I barely made my rent. There were many incriminating thefts for which I was not responsible. There were lies made up and threats to fire me if I ever got angry like that again. And my parents constantly repeated that if I lost my job they could not afford to help me.

Thank goodness that there were sandwiches to be made, counters to be washed, garbage to be taken out, and excellent customer service to provide! I constantly strove to improve in these areas of job performance and this forced me to control my emotions. I was living on prayers with uncertainty that this would ever end. I learned to accept abuse that I hadn’t previously imagined to be possible in America.

Ten months in, I agreed to meet with a psychiatrist. When I finally admitted to him that I thought my co-workers at the Deli were working for the CIA, he prescribed me 16 mg of Trilifon. I took half of that dose and slowly things got easier.

Two months later I got hired out of that little world of the Italian Deli, but relationships were the farthest thing from my mind. I had a no money, no honey mentality. I worked seventy-hour weeks to make ends meet to maintain financial independence from my parents who, throughout, had used my dependence to force me to see an Italian therapist I did not trust.

It took me three years to find someone to date. Money was not the only obstacle. I admit that dating someone when you have a history of “schizophrenia” is very hard. I figured if people left me for common-cold depression, that anyone hearing my story of psychosis would give me an immediate boot.

I didn’t fit in with all the other therapists I worked around because of what I’d been through. Then, because I didn’t have any time, I dated a transient roommate without a job. Because I was amazed she would give me a chance, I put up with abuse. The relationship lasted almost a year, but the break up was mutual for the first time in my life.

When I was ready to date again, I knew better than to rush into things. I had established a steady job at an outpatient psychiatric unit with weekends off. With a sense of perspective, I reflected on relevant experiences. I learned with hindsight that there were some connections, like the connection I had with the Thai woman in Seattle, that were worth persistence. I learned to listen to my heart not the social judgement of an upper-class psychotherapist. I sought simultaneous surface relationships to keep my hope going so that I wouldn’t crush on anyone. I talked to myself so as not react to rejection. Likewise, I would not instantly attach. And, most importantly, I wanted to find opportunities to bring mental health into the equation.

When I met my wife at a meet-up camping trip, I carefully heeded all my rules, but found that she was a lot like me. When we hiked together on that first day, I learned that she too struggled with learning disabilities. On the second date when she talked about having OCD, I trusted her more. Having mental health be part of the discussion was refreshing. I decided to reciprocate by sharing my struggles.

On our next contact, when she admitted she had told her therapist about my “schizophrenia,” I did not get mad. I peacefully finished her sentence.

I was right, her therapist had urged her to break up with me.

“I am not going to listen,” cried my wife.

It was true I had been scared when I started to sense those familiar sentiments, but I was confident. I had grown to believe that I could accept a possible rejection in stride. I had other options lined up. I now think this is a small example of emotional intelligence skills that are necessary for good relationships to flourish. Thirteen years later we are both graced with those emotional intelligence skills in our daily interactions.

Me, I learned those emotional intelligence skills working through my “psychosis” at the Italian Deli. I think what is important about my story! It is not that I have been successful despite my experience with “psychosis,” it is that I have been successful because of what I learned during my “schizophrenia” journey.

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