Doubt And Self-Blame After Leaving Emotional Abuse

Yesterday, after I made the decision to leave mental health services, I felt like a weight had been lifted. Despite still being in a psychiatric ward under section and therefore not being free in a literal sense, I felt free emotionally. Like I’d taken back control of my own life and my own story, ready to carve out a more hopeful future.

Today I’m riddled with anxiety. Am I making the right choice? What if they’re right and without mental health services I crumble and fall even more than I have been with them? Am I being unfair and overly critical? Maybe there’s still a way to get them to understand, maybe if I try harder to be a good patient they’ll treat me better…

Once again, I’ve been here before. When leaving my emotionally abusive childhood friend, the months immediately after were lonely and painful. With no group of friends around me, and most people seemingly agreeing that I’d made an irrational decision, all I could do was get through the days and hope college would be better. Partly because it would be a new start, and partly just so I would no longer have to share classes with the person I was trying to go no contact with. And in those lonely months, I questioned myself over and over again, trying desperately to find a way in which I could go back to how things were, but better this time. And time and time again, I came back to the same realisation that things had just gotten worse over the years and would only continue to do so if I allowed them to.

I’m in a similar situation now. While there’s no obvious ‘fresh start’ to look forward to, I am still currently stuck in the very thing I’m trying to avoid, and while I want to say I’ll be rid of it as soon as my section is lifted I know that may be easier said than done. I keep going over and over the things that have happened, the lies that have been written about me and the way I’ve been treated, as if maybe thinking about it hard enough will allow me to come up with a solution in which all of the harms can be rectified. All I need to do is tell the truth! And I will be believed, and they will fix my notes and apologise for handling my ‘care’ so poorly. But… I’ve spent weeks telling the truth, and it’s been documented as hostility and manipulation. So clearly that hasn’t worked, and won’t work going forward. And so we come back to the only way out of this is to cut contact and move on, even though they’ll get away with it, even though there’ll be no justice, and even though the system will not change.

I will be okay. And I will move on. But I will probably also always feel a little bit hard done by at the lack of fairness in all this. I have a voice, and I’m using it in writing this post, but I’ll probably always feel somewhat sad that it was never heard by the people who should have been listening.

From One Abuser To Another: Emotional Abuse From The Mental Health System

I want to share some things I’ve experienced recently, and I’d like you to have a think about what kind of relationship this behaviour suggests.

– In conversations with others, they leave out any information which could show them in a less than perfect way while painting me in the worst light possible.

– They spread lies behind my back and gaslight me into believing things happened that didn’t, or believing things didn’t happen that did.

– If I object or question this, they claim that I am mentally unwell, aggressive and manipulative and therefore cannot be trusted, even by myself.

– At the same time as this, they tell me that I will not be able to cope without them and my life will fall apart.

– They’re very unpredictable, at times being caring and other times being cold and hostile, and blame me for these sudden shifts in their behaviour.

– I feel like I’m walking on eggshells around them, forever scared of saying the wrong thing and being punished for it while desperately trying to hold on to the occasional times when things are okay.

– Any small mistake I make is blown up to become a massive issue and used as further reasoning of why I’m to blame for their cold and hostile behaviour.

– They restrict me from seeing my friends and family, once making me move far away in order to limit my contact with a friend they believed I was getting ‘too close’ to.

– When I tried to leave, they locked me inside the building, using physical force to keep me there.

What does this sound like to you? An emotionally abusive relationship perhaps? A toxic friendship? Or does this sound like the mental health system, which supposedly helps people during their time of need and distress?

A few days ago, I gained access to the care notes written over the last year during my inpatient stays at two different psychiatric hospitals, and they were… interesting. It’s been a difficult couple of months, with important decisions being made without me and without explanation, and my wishes being completely ignored. Professionals have repeatedly criticised me for not taking responsibility for my own care and then when I have tried to, used it as evidence that I’m ‘difficult’ and as I discovered in my care notes, sneakily diagnosed me with EUPD. This weekend has been rough, to say the least. And if I was not currently sitting in a psychiatric ward under section, perhaps this weekend would have even been the straw that broke the camel’s back, the final push that caused me to end my own life. Instead, I spent it ruminating and googling and eventually stumbled upon a blog (psychiatryisdrivingmemad).

What’s this? Another person who feels not only let down by, but actively harmed by mental health services? This opened up a whole new line of thinking for me. One in which the outcome wasn’t just ‘doing my time’ in the psych ward and inevitably ending my life as soon as I’m discharged. One in which it’s okay for me to be angry at the way I’ve been treated by mental health services. One in which I am not the problem.

See, when I was a teenager, I had a friend – my best friend, who with hindsight, I believe was emotionally abusive. She belittled me and called me names, spread lies and rumours behind my back to our mutual friends, manipulated me and constructed wild stories and lies, was hot and cold with me, frequently giving me the silent treatment or shouting at me without giving any indication of why, and blaming me for her behaviour. It seemed like she would take any opportunity to hurt me and I spent much of my teen years in fear, desperately trying (and failing) to avoid the next mood swing that would cause her to get angry or go cold, fully believing it was not only in my control, but actually my fault when I failed to avoid it. I would often apologise to her for the way she treated me and she would accept those apologies, encouraging me to ‘not do it again’ (whatever ‘it’ was). I tried so hard to figure out what I was doing wrong and avoid doing it, until one day I snapped. I think deep down, I always knew that I could never win in this friendship, and after many years, I cut contact completely. We shared a friendship group, which I also lost in this process as they all felt I was being irrational in ending such a close and long-term friendship. Even our teachers, who really shouldn’t have gotten involved, told me I was being oversensitive and ridiculous.

But you know what? A few months later I left school and attended college in a new town, far away from any of my old peers. I made a new group of friends who seemed to genuinely like and care about me. They didn’t talk behind my back, they weren’t unkind to my face, I didn’t feel the need to walk on eggshells around them and I felt respected and wanted in a friendship group for the first time in my life. Their kindness and willingness to accept me made me feel confident in my decision to cut contact with my old friends and showed me that no, I wasn’t being irrational or expecting too much, and there are actually people out there who will treat me fairly.

When reading my care notes, I began to notice a lot of the same patterns and dynamics going on between the mental health system and me as I had previously suffered with my childhood friend. Only this time, it’s an entire system instead of just one person, and that system is made up of respected professionals whose word is always believed over mine and who have the power to make legal decisions and get the police involved in my care against my will, restricting my freedom and rights. I am deemed to ‘have capacity’ to make the unwise decision of killing myself, yet ‘lack insight’ to mindlessly accept their opinions and diagnosis of me. When I am sarcastic or rude, I am ‘verbally abusive’, and with seemingly no trigger (because the situations I react to don’t paint staff in the best light so are conveniently left out of my notes) I am ‘impulsive’ and ‘unpredictable’ as well. When placed in a mostly male ward, it was documented that I am overly fond of my ‘male peers’ because I was seen smiling and laughing with them, and heavily insinuated that I am manipulative because I was later seen ‘putting on a tearful persona’ in front of staff.

These are the notes that guide professionals in handling my care. With that in mind, I can’t say that I’m surprised at the sneaky EUPD diagnosis – the person described in my notes seems to hit the criteria in a pretty textbook way. However, that is not me. In fact, this version of me has only existed for the last month or so. Before that, I was consistently ‘polite and respectful’, but ‘quiet’ and ‘flat in mood’. A lot of the work I had been doing in therapy was around standing up for myself, expressing myself and feeling my emotions, anger in particular. Yet the second I started to do just that, it was interpreted as unreasonable hostility, even ‘verbal abuse’, with no reflection on how the ward staff could have been partly (or entirely) in the wrong. No, that’s not possible. It must just be that my personality is disordered, and despite being documented as consistently ‘flat and low in mood’ for months, I must be emotionally unstable. Not only that, but me disagreeing with this diagnosis shows that I ‘lack insight into my condition’.

What I want to do next is shout. I want to complain, I want to fix the situation, prove that I’m not the person they’ve conjured up in my care notes. But I’ve been here before. Stuck in that never ending cycle of trying to be a ‘better friend’ to avoid the manipulation and abuse, but it never works. The only thing that worked was leaving, and that’s exactly what I intend to do with the mental health system. Just as soon as they legally allow me to.