...and The Family Romance
by Patricia Lefave, a Monophrenic
Do you know what it is that the ‘normal’ people can’t manage to add up so that it makes sense?
Their own acting out and my statement that I am aware of their acting out.
That is how simple this really is.
To them, this is two different realities and not two points of view in the same reality. That split premise, right there, changes the meaning of everything that gets said or done after that.
That is, of course, why I said to my adversary and to those listening in on our conversation that “if you pull out the premise, everything I have said or done AFTER that sounds crazy, even I can see that."
They ‘test’ me to see what kind of a reaction they will get and when I give them a reaction to the ‘test,’ that is just a simple statement that I know I am being tested, they don’t know what it means but they DO ‘wonder’, often out loud and right in my presence, how I knew they were baiting me to see if they could get a reaction...
There is an example of this kind of ‘testing’ of the presumed ‘inferior’ in one of R.D. Laing’s books. I will do a piece on it soon. In it two parents of a girl labeled ‘schizophrenic’ test her, then deny they did it right in Laing’s presence. They tell him they deny it because they don’t want to upset her. What is, of course, ‘upsetting’ her, besides the apparently inconsequential fact that she has been labeled insane and locked up for stating the facts, is the knowledge that they are doing it, and then simultaneously denying they are doing it, along with the inability to get even one validating witness to confirm her perception of this reality and get HER out of the psychological trap into which they have put her. Such is life with the duplicitous ‘hidden’ ones. I mentioned this one in Laing’s work to my recovery therapist in 96 as it was relevant to my own case and it still is.
Here is another example of this splitting of the premise out of my own childhood.
This is one of the incidents that set the stage for our future family roles. It is something I was never able to get understood or accepted as I could not fully explain it to anyone and no one was interested in looking at it either; just like now in this case with the psychiatric hospital. I also did not fully understand it myself and remember asking God when I went to bed at night as a little girl what ‘these people thought they were doing’ when they did things like that. I could not see the missing puzzle piece.
Here is the incident.
I can’t remember exactly how old I was but I do know it was before I was five years old because I have a memory of the house we were in then and we moved to another house when I was in kindergarten. So let’s say that I was four. My elder sister would have been about ten and a half and my younger one no more than a baby.
When my mother took care of the baby she put my elder sister in charge of watching me outside and would tell me that I had to do what she said.
So, here is one of the examples of doing what she said.
We were in the back yard and her friend from down the road came over to see her. So my sister told me to sit out on a spot in the back yard and to stay there until she told me I could move. She was in charge so I had to do what she said remember, as I am four years old.
As I sat there in the bright sun, my sister and her friend went to the side of the house and then peeked at me from the corner. They were in plain sight but about what was probably thirty feet away. My sister then began to ‘explain’ me to her friend.
“See how stupid she is. I tell her she has to sit there and so she does. Why would she do that if she wasn’t so stupid.”
“Why are you being so mean to me,” I ask her, also feeling bewildered by what she is doing. I wanted an explanation. I didn’t understand.
Can you HEAR that last statement I made. “I did not understand.” This can be extrapolated into the future psychiatric question, “You‘re having trouble making sense of things are you...?”
“Why are you doing this to me”, most of us ask, just as I did of her.
“I am not being mean to you. You have to do what I say as I am in charge. So you just sit there until I tell you it is OK to move.”
As I sit there in the hot sun, I am aware that no matter what I do, the fault is going to be found to be in me. If I move, I am disobeying my sister who is in charge and if I don’t move she tells her friend I am stupid for not moving. This is called the double bind.
Again she stands at the corner of the house calling me ‘stupid’ for not moving. My sister then leaves me there and disappears around to the front of the house. After awhile I start to cry as I do not know how to change the situation.
My sister comes back from around the front of the house and calls me a big baby, always whining for attention. My mother hears me crying then and looks out the back door asking me what is wrong. I tell her my sister is being mean to me again, so she asks her what she is doing.
“I’m not doing anything, she says. “I don’t know what is wrong with her.”
We take it inside.
My mother asks me again what my sister was doing so I tell her that she is making me sit in one spot and says I can’t move from there until she tells me it is OK.
‘Is that true,’ she asks her.
“Well yes,” she admits, “but I was just going around to the front of the house for a minute with my friend so I wanted to make sure she was OK while I was not there to watch her."
Well, my mother tells me, there is nothing wrong with what your sister is doing and I told you that you have to obey her so stop being so sensitive and stop whining about it. That is your problem; you are just too sensitive.
My sister looked right at me, eyes glowing with amusement and a little smirk of satisfaction on her face. It is at that moment that I understand why she is doing this. We both then know what she wants and why she does it. She feels powerful. She has gained domination over me and that is the payoff for doing what she is doing. Only she and I know the truth and no one believes me; they believe her. The two of us then understand it and no one else does. She knows that I know that. I have been made powerless to stop her.
But she continues to delude herself that I don't 'really' understand her as I am too stupid. It is important for the bullies to believe that as this is a good part of their justification for what they do. The victim has to ‘deserve’ it so that the bully need not feel guilt. This interaction set the bar for the group dynamic for decades to come. Nothing I could say or do has changed it. I was made ‘invisible’ as a human being in early childhood and I have remained that way to them. I have no real relationship with them and I gave up trying for one many years ago.
What HAS changed though is my understanding of it and of the roles played by the other people involved, who were judging my reality based on what they believed I knew, understood and felt, which was incorrect. They too were misled.
It is not about what I perceive incorrectly. It is about what she (and then the group of followers by extension) does NOT perceive correctly but ‘thinks’ that she (they) does. That is why it is so hard to see and understand. I was MORE aware of both her and myself than she, despite the difference in ages.
One of the things I always assumed was that my sister knew that I knew what she was doing and why, on the same level of understanding that I knew. In fact, if anything I thought she knew MORE about what she was doing than I did which is why I asked her WHY she was doing it and not WHAT she was doing. Of course, she would not tell me in any case as the ‘why’ was to prove her superiority to herself and others with the exception of me. This was not a case of looking for resolution but rather of keeping me ‘mystified’ and avoiding it. It was a psychological ‘game’ to her.
I was looking for some reason for her behaviour and was asking her for one, but ‘reason’ had nothing to do with her little head games. What she was doing was emotion based, and not reason based, and it was also done with a ‘hidden agenda.’
At other times after this she would do repeat performances of this double bind stuff and eventually I would cry in frustration and distress or try to go silent, not react emotionally and say nothing at all so she would just ignore me. Sometimes if I asked her ‘why are you doing this to me?’ she would look at a friend or my younger sister as she got older and say, eyes amused, “she wants to know why...” and they would laugh. Years later I knew she did not really understand the question.
When bullies, young or old, cast their victim in the role of being stupid and the treat them ‘as if’ they were, they can’t hear the questions they are being asked unless you spell it out to them in pedantic detail. That is because of something I did not recognize for decades, that this whole act is based upon a delusional reversal the source of which is in the bully, not in the bullied. Everyone else though sees it as the opposite.
Now I will explain what was going on in my sister’s head when she was ‘testing’ me to see what I would do.
When I asked ‘why are you doing this to me?’ she believed that ‘this’ meant telling me to sit on one spot and not move.
What I was actually asking her though, without SAYING all of that, was, “Why are you telling me to sit on one spot and not move and then calling me stupid from thirty feet away to your friend if I don’t move. We both know that I have to do what you say so I have no choice with you in charge. How does that make me stupid?
(see what it really is, is the ever popular abuse of power. That’s what bullies do, young or old, amateur or professional: they abuse power for the feeling of superiority and control that it gives them.)
She also used to tease me, with the family joining in the amusement, until I broke down crying. Again, If I said, “why do you do this to me and why won’t you stop...”
she might smile and look to her buddy for support saying, ‘she wants to know why we do it.."
The ‘it’ to her and the ‘it’ to me are not the same thing.
To me ‘it’ meant harassing and teasing until they could manage to cause me enough distress to have me crying.’ I was asking WHY they wanted to try to make me cry and feel distress.
She thought I was asking why they were teasing and harassing me, not knowing that they were doing it to try to make me react with distress. In her mind I was ‘stupid’ because I did not know why she was doing it. I knew why she was doing it on that level. I wanted to know why she NEEDED to cause me emotional distress; what was motivating that? (Later on in life she actually TOLD me!) I did not have the language at that age though to express that. I was also not aware that there was a difference in the perception of what was happening. How could a child know that and why would anyone, including psychiatrists expect that level of psychological insight from children? This though is the type of question psychiatrists ask us; to explain WHY someone would want to harm us and if we can’t explain that to THEM that supposedly ‘proves’ such things could not be real and that average, normal people could not behave that way!
This is how the same experience can be perceived as two different realities whenever it is in relationship with one person who is playing at superior/inferior with another who is operating as equals in inherent worth.
We may be using the same words but not meaning the same thing at all.
In such relationships, there is no real communication taking place at all and one of the party’s isn’t interested in doing so either. This is often why one person will feel invisible as a human being to the other, more so when a group gets involved in the ‘fun.’ It is an accurate sense of reality, as I was, and still am, ‘invisible’ to such
people since they are busy projecting their own perception problems onto me in their contestant style ‘game’ of life.
The domination types are in a contest with us which we don’t understand we are even IN, let alone what the rules and the goal might be.
They don’t know that we can see much more of their ‘hidden’ agenda than they expect us to see and we believe they are fully aware that we can see it. Both sides of the experience have perception problems but the one that starts it with the ‘hidden’ agenda has the biggest one. That one also believes that she (or he) is 'normal’ and has no problem at all. That switch in identities is how our more accurate perception of the shared reality becomes our ‘delusions.’ Otherwise the ‘contestants’ would not be able to delude themselves they are the ‘winners’ in the ‘game’ they are playing and that is the whole point of the game..
One of my psychiatrized Internet friends told me about what had happened to her at the hands of a group of women who had psychologically assaulted her. The result was that she was driven into psychosis. The leader of the assault, all wide eyed and mystified, then took her to the hospital while feigning ignorance.
When my friend told hospital staff what had happened to her in concrete terms (she 'thought' she had been harmed by a group of people) they nodded, feigning sympathy and then stepping a few feet away, they discussed how they were going to distract her from that. As they looked at her one of them said, "we don't want to encourage her."
She had first contacted me because she read an essay I wrote that showed similar experience. So now she asked me, "Why would they say such a thing? Why would they NOT want to encourage me? Don't they WANT me to get well?"
I tried to explain to her that this was like operating in two different 'realities' and that we really were not communicating with our ‘saviours’ at all even though it SOUNDS like we are. It is more like speaking English and German with no one knowing that is what we are doing.
The difference is this:
The staff did not believe her experience was real. They assigned it the value of delusions. They then treated her 'as if' that was not her reality. In keeping with their own judgements, they then knew they must not 'encourage her' in her ‘delusional’ beliefs that she had been harmed by a group of others, (who would no doubt be assessed as having no 'reason' to do so.)
What my friend heard though was based on her real experience of group abuse which did not stop until she was driven into a psychosis. Once she was in a psychosis, which she feely admits was true, just as it was true for me, this was assessed as a psychotic episode inside the parameters of a 'disease' process which of course, has nothing at all to do with external reality; trauma, events or relationships, in the opinion of bio-psych. My friend got the schizophrenia label. After that, everything she says is heard in pathological terms and with 'interpretations' supplied by others who genuinely believe they know better. Since she knew that what happened to her was real, and she did not deny it as the staff did, she heard them saying they 'did not want to encourage her,' connected to the premise of HER understanding and not to their denial of her experience. That is how the same words can mean opposite things and why this can be so totally confusing for the ‘patient.’
The label we get depends upon who we happen to get in the crap shoot at the time of our mental collapse.
I have talked to many people with experiences very similar to mine who received a variety of labels. In my own case, I also heard the staff had bandied about several of them including schizophrenic, (an early favourite) bi -polar, alcoholic/drug addicted, (I don't drink except on rare occasions, nor do I use drugs) and the one I got which was ultimately chosen as the definition of me; “delusional disorder.” I think that some of the other psychiatrists wanted to get it back on me and heavily criticized the one who accepted at least part of my experience as reality, and took it off. Still neither he nor my recovery therapist would cross the street to tell the hospital administration that this is what I had been saying all along. Reason given; job loss; their own of course, and not mine. My losses are apparently also not as real as theirs. That psychiatrist who removed the delusional disorder label, ‘covertly’ anyway, without informing all the people who were involved in it up until then, is no longer working there. He resigned right after I left the post breakdown recovery therapy for the second time, so I think that if this happened today, the Eleven Minute Wonder would have me well under control and drugged to the eyeballs for my 'lack of insight.'
You see I do this because I KNOW and know beyond any doubt that I am escaping this system by the skin of my teeth (no I don’t ‘think’ I have skin on my teeth...) but many others having experiences just like mine are not. I fight for them as well as for me and I fight to wake up the yet to be psychiatrized to the reality that is happening all around them, which is going unnoticed until it happens to them.
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