Conversations from hell

[Left]

Sounds like Lou had an incredibly incompetent psychiatrist.

He seems to have had mostly incompetent psychiatrists.
He's a heroin addict, trying to quit still
The reason he got on heroin? 

One of his NHS psychiatrists discharged him from therapy, saying "We just can't fix you, you're hopeless."
( WTF!)  This shrink basically seemed to be sending him off to die.

So he was flamingly suicidal, was told he could not be fixed...and out of desperation smoked some heroin.
It made him feel...safe.

For the very first time in his life, he felt safe.

For someone with severe depression with psychosis, and severe PTSD with full hallucination-type flashbacks...the relief it gave him was incredible.
...He didn't want to wind up being a junkie. 
When he tried to quit in 2012,  he tried to kill himself again, and was hospitalized in a psych ICU for 5 months.

It sounds like Lou is awesome, too.

He is awesome. In his own warped way, very awesome.

I should add, I've been in therapy of and on for...8 years now, with the current therapist?
Before that I had a therapist through a state agency, before that through insurance.

Lou's had about 2 years of therapy... TOTAL.
\And they told him he can't be fixed.  I think because they just don't want to take the time to actually fix him, because a lot of them don't care.

[Left]

...It was interesting, the way the memories came back.
You see, I had a very strong suspicion all along that my dad had abused me sexually.
Why?

When mom finally found out about all the affairs he'd been having with women in the neighborhood, when she found out my dad had been a peeping tom to the neighbor girl watching her swim in the pool through the fence, when she found out he'd had sex with my uncle's wife (Yes, THAT uncle), in the car, parked in our driveway...

Well, she finally divorced him.
Cut all the crotches out of his business suits too.
My mom had been too busy caring for my bedridden grandma and working full time to really pay attention to much...and my dad, as far as I can tell, is a sex addict.

So...I was wanting to die through most of high school, but that last year they were arguing constantly...I was made fun of at school and listening to them scream at home...yeah, I really wanted to be dead.

This was found out, and the decision was made to put me on a new drug.  Prozac had only been on the market for 2 years, and I was 16, but they wanted me to try it anyway.  I got a therapist, too.

...And the world began to change.
...Then my mom told me they were divorcing, and my grandma passed in a 2 week period...I couldn't deal.
I asked to be put in the hospital.  They kept me for 6 weeks...something they don't really do anymore.
I learned that a lot of dealing with depression is just...forcing your ass to do things. Even though you feel like you're wearing cement shoes.

Anyway...
After dad was gone, I started wanting to kill him.
...I felt...the most intense hatred imaginable.

The thing is?  I remembered him being a physically abusive, verbally abusive asshole...but what he'd done that I remembered?  It wasn't enough to justify this urge to get all stabby.

So I suspected all along that he'd sexually abused me.  Remembering Joel the Friendly Neighborhood pedo, and my one uncle?
That was a complete surprise to me.  I hadn't even thought about that one guy.

I know my uncle was prone to violence...in retrospect his wife's kids (his stepchildren) were terrified of him.
...I saw that as a young teen and just accepted it as normal, after all I was terrified of my dad.  When he'd hit me I always had the thought "He can kill me."
Eventually I remembered physical violence I'd repressed too, and that surprised me...You see,  he had to be sneaky, not leave marks...

##################################################
1978
He backhanded me. 
I remember falling over, but oddly enough, with the side he hit downwards...so the blow itself must have thrown my balance off.
The next thing I remember was him holding an ice cube to my swollen lip.  There was blood in my mouth.
He didn't look sorry, he looked...nervous.
He was trying to cover up what he'd done, he wasn't icing my lip out of any concern he had for me.
I was silent, after all, he'd keep hitting me if I cried...

That was something I never repressed-the first time he slapped me, then told me to stop crying. And when I couldn't he slapped me again, and again, harder, until I roped it in.
I could not cry in front of others for a long time.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Sounds like Lou had an incredibly incompetent psychiatrist.

He seems to have had mostly incompetent psychiatrists.
He's a heroin addict, trying to quit still
The reason he got on heroin? 

One of his NHS psychiatrists discharged him from therapy, saying "We just can't fix you, you're hopeless."
( WTF!)  This shrink basically seemed to be sending him off to die.

So he was flamingly suicidal, was told he could not be fixed...and out of desperation smoked some heroin.
It made him feel...safe.

For the very first time in his life, he felt safe.

For someone with severe depression with psychosis, and severe PTSD with full hallucination-type flashbacks...the relief it gave him was incredible.
...He didn't want to wind up being a junkie. 
When he tried to quit in 2012,  he tried to kill himself again, and was hospitalized in a psych ICU for 5 months.

It sounds like Lou is awesome, too.

He is awesome. In his own warped way, very awesome.

I should add, I've been in therapy of and on for...8 years now, with the current therapist?
Before that I had a therapist through a state agency, before that through insurance.

Lou's had about 2 years of therapy... TOTAL.
\And they told him he can't be fixed.  I think because they just don't want to take the time to actually fix him, because a lot of them don't care.

Years ago, I knew a guy who picked up a heroin habit it Vietnam.

He went into treatment for it and he was doing great. Then he found out he had node cancer. He stayed off the pain medication as long as he could knowing what would happen, but he finally couldn't stand it anymore and caved. Then he picked up heroin again.

They kicked him out for "relapsing". The last I heard of him, he was in Club Fed for bank robbery. Non-violently, no gun, just notes saying he had one. I imagine he's dead now.

Support our troops. Yeah, sure.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

hylie...no words.

[Left]

Support our troops. Yeah, sure.

The UK seems to be of the same mindset.

Lou got shot at for the greater glory of NATO, and apparently made a number of other people die for their country...then was honorably discharged, because the cartilage in his knees got torn up.
As the second in command of his unit, he got to carry the .50 cal and ammo for same, so that didn't help.

He actually wasn't terribly traumatized in the military, it was his family that did it.

[Left]

 In 1993 through 1996, I went through the state for meds and therapy...I wanted to just plow through it.
So I tried having EMDR. 
I wanted to do it every week because I wanted to get over it.
That was probably way too often in retrospect.
But EMDR either works or it doesn't. For me, no.

...I ended up just dissociating all the time, and eventually could not remember the EMDR appointment times, so I didn't show up.  I knew my dad had abused me, the feelings of disgust and outrage were all there.
But I couldn't pry out the recall.
...And I wasn't ready to deal with...the fact of the matter.
...He never came and got me. 
I just never stopped when...bad things started happening.
That much I knew...I kept going to him.

[color=]#############################################
1978
I always remembered one night.  I was in a pair of those plastic-footed onesie pajamas that go shloop shloop shloop on the cold hard floor of the house, and it's winter.
I am trailing my blanket.  It is an old white one and smells like me, I feel better with it in my hand.
I am afraid.
I am standing outside dad's bedroom door.  I can see the outdoors light shining under the bedroom door.
I look back.  My bed's there, by the door in my bedroom.
I am terrified to go back to bed.  I will wake up screaming from nightmares.  I do every night now.
I am terrified to go in to dad's room.  I do not know why.
I grab the brass doorknob, the one with splashes of dark paint on it, and turn it.

#################################################

The strange thing?  We had to swap bedrooms at one point.
I got what was supposed to be the master bedroom, because my dad sprayed a nest of hornets that were in the wall of what started as my bedroom.
...Whatever was in that spray set my asthma off, and it wasn't dissipating at all-the chemical scent of the spray.  I don't know what sort of awful crap was in those sprays in 1978, but it wasn't going ANYWHERE.

So I had to get their room...And I don't know when that happened.

I don't know when that happened...from age 6 to age 8, there are empty spaces.
When I was 8 though, my grandma moved in with us.  Ostensibly to keep an eye on me. 
I think it was as much that mom wanted to keep an eye on grandma, because grandma wouldn't eat right and would let her sugar get too high.
Anyway...
When grandma moved in, she found out I was sleeping in dad's bed every night that my mother worked. Five nights a week.
I remember the hard looks as they told me I was too old to be sleeping in the same bed with my daddy.
I promised I'd be a good girl and not do that anymore.

...And somehow I ended up in his bed anyway. 
I would dutifully go to sleep in my own bed, and wake up next to him.
I was told I sleepwalked.

[Left]

Okay...Sorry.
Done.

Could you tell me by PM or in thread what I am doing wrong? 
....Possibly talking at all.
...Sorry.

[Pope Pixie Pickle]

go back to that original quoted post, and go to edit...

then just remove Nigel's post..

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

Okay...Sorry.
Done.

Could you tell me by PM or in thread what I am doing wrong? 
....Possibly talking at all.
...Sorry.

You're not doing anything wrong, Nigel decided that sharing it was probably a bad idea and is now asking for your help erasing it from the board.

Sorry I haven't posted any responses. I am listening, just, you know, damn.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Okay...Sorry.
Done.

Could you tell me by PM or in thread what I am doing wrong? 
....Possibly talking at all.
...Sorry.

Thank you, I appreciate it!

You aren't doing anything wrong.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Yeah. This whole thread. It's happening now, in those houses where you think nothing happens.

hylie, neverending red pound signs. I want to give her a pass on EVERYTHING, but a friend tells a friend when something is fucked up. So when/if I do that at some point (NOT now), that's why I'm doing it OK?

This shit is entirely too much.

[Left]

So...
...Things got a little scrambled after the mayday flashback...

...When one of these things is about to surface, these old memories, there's this feeling of dread? Just dread.   Then it starts surfacing in little scrambled chunks.
...So I remembered my dad raping me.
Was this the first rape by him?  I don't know.
I later remembered him frotteurizing himself between my legs, so I gather he worked up to actual penetration.

Then, I think it became a regular thing.  It was the price I paid to not be alone with my nightmares.
...I got back a handful more memories...then they stopped.

They stopped because it was no longer me  that paid that price.
Some other little girl took over...someone who just loved her daddy and wanted to please him.
She still hasn't shared a whole lot with me. 

I wanted to die really badly.  Lou got to talk me out of offing myself that night.
(I've since returned the favor)
I remembered something I had blocked out for a long time-that I had ever loved dad. 
It's like, one of those things that you just don't think about.  It wasn't safe to remember I had ever loved him, you see, so I just didn't.

The emotions were canned along with the memory.
I just felt this horrible white blankness for the next 2 weeks.

...In the meantime, my wife had gotten a job, which was a huge weight off my shoulders...but she was working nights.
She proposed IM talks...but then when I started to tell her what I was going through, she said, "I can't talk about this stuff at work!"
...So I was going through hell and she wanted me to send funny pictures.
...If I had not had Lou I'd be dead, I'm pretty damn sure.
...I was generally spending a couple hours a day not just crying.   
Lou calls this keening...In my case this involved a couple hours a day, at least, curled up and wailing...
Grief was just pouring out of me.

I had said before I felt like I was mourning my own death.  Some part of me was lost.

...But she wasn't quite dead after all.  Not exactly in an unrevivable state.
...This next part is where it gets really weird, and the experiences are all a bit subjective.

...But a little less depressing.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Damn, Hylie. I feel like it's a dick move posting this after reading that but, hey, it's my thread and I just spent over an hour on it plus, well, I am a dick so fuck it...

Belial and the Death of Belief

So I know I've told you this before. Some of you. The ones who've been here a while but, for the benefit of anyone who just got here, I'll reiterate - I do not believe. In anything. The ones who've heard this from me before, the ones who maybe think I'm wrong (everyone believes something, right?) The ones who probably think I'm engaging in semantic fuckery. Maybe think I'm just deluding myself? I've said it before but I never really explained why. Allow me to explain before you go telling me I'm being ridiculous. You see, I know what the human brain is capable of. I don't mean, intellectually, I mean, I've experienced it, directly. This one time I invoked Belial.

Belial is a demon. The demon of lies. You don't believe in demons, right? Me neither (see above) but that's not important. All that's important is that, at the time, three quarters of the way to the dizzy heights of full blown psychosis, high as a kite on tequila, hash and sleep deprivation, I believed it. Just a little bit, maybe, but that little bit was enough. That's how he got in or, to be more precise, that's how I made him up.

Little bit of belief was all it took, my imagination did the rest. By the time it was done I was, to all intents and purposes, possessed. A malevolent mind had taken charge of my controls. I ( the identity I refer to as me) had no conscious control, because I believed this to be so. For about an hour I was aware of everything, like a passenger, looking out my own eyes. Staring into a mirror, into your own eyes and knowing that you are trapped in there, somewhere, while your face talks to you in your own voice is unnerving but this is how the demon communicated his message.

After what I can only estimate was about an hour, he'd finished and he told me he was leaving. Demon of lies, remember? After a  couple of days I knew he was still there. I could feel him. He never did take control again but I knew he could at any time. It terrified me. The stuff he'd told me in the mirror was a smokescreen. A clever web of lies and half truths. This was his real lesson. The lesson that took me years to fully understand - "Look what can happen inside your head with nothing but imagination and a little bit of belief."

The imagination I never found a way to kill but the belief? That was optional. So I learned how to turn it off. It's not so much a matter of denying things that seem apparent. Like the sky being blue or gravity sucks. Many things are apparent. Questioning them seems pointless but there really is nothing to gain from believing those things. Maybe it'll change at some point. Means nothing to me but believing? Having a part of me that will, either with or without a sufficiently convincing argument, just latch on to a mental model and all the baggage that comes along? Something with the potential to take over my body and mind utterly?

Fuck that noise. It's dangerous. maybe not to you, the reader, maybe not to anyone in the world other than me but to me? But I've seen what can happen. I've no reason to believe I'm not "fixed" now. By the same token, I've no compelling reason to believe I am. So I don't believe either scenario. I just don't believe, period. I consider it a risk with no discernible benefit. Like gambling all my worldly possessions on the toss of a coin only to have them returned if it's heads.

For all I know, Belial is still there, in my head, waiting for me to change my mind. Waiting for me to believe. He'll be waiting a good long fucking while if I have any say in it. So far it seems I have. If I didn't know better I could almost believe that.

[Left]

Someone I was friends with at one point managed to fracture his skull.
He is what I used to jokingly call a "recovered Muslim," as in he rejected that religion because it was really, personally bad for him...
But when he fractured his skull, apparently he started reciting Koran verses.  He has no memory of this.

The brain's a strange place.

I don't think what I have measures up to full Dissociative Identity Disorder, the compartments aren't watertight.
I don't "lose time"
We share feelings.
The others call me The Front.
...Still figuring out what they mean by that.

Shawn I talked about earlier...He's become what multiple peeps call a protector.
My protector is 5.
This doesn't mean he doesn't know how to drive a car, but we kinda don't want him to, and I don't think anyone around us does either.

Finding him explains an earlier incident that...I'm very un-proud of us for.

I'm currently living in my mom's old house.  When she moved out of here to a much nicer house, I freaked out, I was afraid I would have no money for food or meds...
And when mom was out my wife wanted to re-arrange the house, of course.  I begged her to do it SLOWLY, because I get really discombobulated when stuff gets moved around a lot.

So I woke up Saturday night and the whole house had been totally re-arranged while I slept.
I flipped out.
...Someone in my head decided to write this psychotic-ass looking note in red crayon, then decided it would be really emphatic if I stuck it to my desk with knives.

That's what my wife came home to.
...I didn't recall doing it until she reminded me what the hell I did before I left to go to work.
...She almost moved out on me, and I think that's what Shawn was trying to achieve. 
He'd figured out she was a threat.

...He was right.  Not a threat in the direct physical sense, but she torpedoed my self esteem, and kept on doing it, even when told not to.

The kids function as shock absorbers, is how I put it.
My therapist tells me the kids are there to be aware of things I was not able to be aware of.
They were aware of the damage she was doing, I wasn't.

Another instance:
I was trying to learn to ride a motorcycle.
I accidentally rode it into the ditch at low speed.
I don't remember being in the ditch.
...I was just standing on the side of the road.
Later my leg was all bruised up though.

[Left]

So...
Lou suggested inner child work.
He told me it had really helped his suicidality (Well, for a while)
At first I thought "This stuff sounds ridiculous."

What happened next...I became obsessed with this image of an undead child climbing out of a pool of water, water gushing from her eyesockets and mouth.
...I never could draw or paint this-I may try in the future, but I couldn't capture the look, much less the feel of it.
So my inner child was an undead corpse.

I began to get her dried up and cleaned up...and then, I'm wanting to say it was a day in June...she woke up.

It was like a nuclear explosion of LOVE went off in my chest.  I felt like I was glowing with this love and just radiating it at EVERYONE...then about 6 hours later, I got the image of a little girl getting in bed, pulling the covers over, and I felt...normal again.
She decided her name is Joy recently.

Fisher came along before that.
...He' seems to be the onboard comedian...and 14.

Then Shawn, who initially appeared in my mind's eye as a mafia hitman...then I realized he was a little boy in a sort of elaborate disguise. 
Then there was the one who thought if I killed myself, she could take over...
She still resents me.  She's a warped copy of my abusive mom at that age.

The one who came out and took the sexual abuse, she's 8, the age I was when the abuse stopped.  She's only given me one of her memories so far.
One more who doesn't want to be mentioned.

I don't know if they are the products of a really intense imagination, or more.
They are voices in my head though...
and they seem to do internal things without my awareness.

I can tell you now though, when my wife was shouting at me? I could not understand the words...if someone I care about starts shouting, I stop being able to comprehend the noise coming at me