7:48am November 15, 2014

Watch out for this, really closely, in your own life and your friends’ lives. It may save someone a lot of heartache.

I knew someone. I’m not going to give his name, or any other identifying informatioin, because that’s not important and I don’t want to embarrass him publicly. But I will call him Zeke for the time being. This happened a long time ago.

He was very emotionally stable. I mean, he had his problems, some of which may have even been clinically diagnosable as as a mental illness. But he was never suicidal. Events in his life had led him to value life so much that regardless of how depressed he got – and it was severe at times – he never thought of killing himself. Ever.

Then he started dating this woman. I will call her Lucy, after the Peanuts character with the uncredentialed psychiatry booth that she charged money for. I knew her, and she was highly manipulative. If she couldn’t find drama that already existed, she’d create drama. Even if it meant lying or manipulating people to do sol As such, not a lot of people trusted her.. But this guy was new to her, and had no idea what she was capable of.

She was one of those psych majors who runs around diagnosing their friends. Worse, she was one of those psych majors who tried to practice therapy on her friends without a license. She also loved the martyr role, the role of the long-suffering caregiver to a hopelessly mentally ill person.

So she took this guy who was rock-solid stable than most people I’ve met. So much so that even in severe depression he never wanted to kill himself. And he wasn’t even always depressed, by a long shot. The period this takes place in was a stresful period in his life, for sure. But… yeah, the things Lucy described do not match up with anything I know of Zeke, and I was extremely close to him for much longer than Lucy had even known him.

So Lucy and Zeke started dating. Lucy’s first move was to create mistrust between Zeke and his family. She took concerns he had about his pareints, and amplified them by making up stories that seemed to support them. She even involved his siblings, none of whom were aware how dangerous she could be. Then they moved far away from the family, so at that point Lucy was the only person Zeke had much contact with.

And then the letters started coming back, posted on her blog and the like. They were all about how she had to spend every waking hour watching Zeke so he wouldn’t try and kill himself. That already struck me as false or exaggerated, because Zeke and I had had long discussions about suicide. I was the one who gave in too easily to suicidal urges. Zeke was the one who tried to persuade me that life was an amazing thing that you didn’t want to just give up, and that if I’d been through what he’d been through, I’d never think of killing myself no matter how bad it got, I’d value life too much. And I believe him. I won’t post the circumstances (they are too identifying), but they are absolutely compelling.

So first off she acted like she spent every waking moment keeping him on suicide watch (yet never called a mental institution to have him committed, even though she had no problem with mental institutions… my guess is the reason she didn’t do that is because there was no actual case for him being a danger to himself). Second off, she started trying to recover abuse memories from him, which became incapacitating. I could totally believe the memories were real, but in situations like that, you don’t just go playing with someone’s head.

I’ve seen way too many situations that all look stunningly similar: A friend or significant other or therapist (yes, being professional doesn’t make it better) “helps” a person by recovering memories of abuse. Then they systematically teach them the proper ways to respond to that abuse. By which I don’t mean they provide solutions to the abuse memories. I mean they teach them to become totally incapacitated by them, to find triggers everywhere, and to go into flashbacks at the drop of a hat All of this works whether the memories are true or false.

So you’ll get someone who a month ago was more or less functional. And now they’re incapacitated. Now they curl up in a ball and cry every time anyone so much as mentions a word that could be remotely tied to the abuse. Now they also curl up in a ball and cry at random moments, at which point their “caregiver” rushes over to them and asks them “Are you having a memory?” and they say “yes” and then the “caregiver” coaches them through deep breathing while trying to get as much detail out of the person as they can.

In the case of Zeke, I’d known him almost my whole life, we grew up on the same street, and I knew something was going badly wrong. I didn’t know how badly wrong until he got out of that relationship for good and started telling horror stories about Lucy.

But if you, or someone you know, gets into a relationship with someone – friend, significant other, therapist – and they start trying to give you psychiatric help, with or without a license, and you seem to be getting worse and worse rather than better and better, then run, run far away, and never speak to this person again. Anything you say will probably be repeated anyway. Lucy liked to describe her S.O.’s sexual practices online without their knowledge or consent. People who cross boundaries in one way are likely to cross them in others. But people who exploit your emotions in the name of helping you are not your friends no matter what they call themselves. And while there are sometimes where you have to feel a little worse before you get better, it shouldn’t become an ongoing thing that creates more and more dependency on the person who is making you feel this way.

This is a form of abuse, I don’t know if it has a name, but it’s a definite, specific form of abuse and I have seen it turn very ugly on more than one occasion. I’ve had it done to me as well. (Beware of anyone who deliberately triggers you until you start crying, and then is right there to “comfort” you and tell you “it’s okay you’re safe now” and stuff. Then claims to have made an emotional breakthrough where they have connected with you over these experiences. No, just no.)