5:05pm June 9, 2014

Something I wanted to note, about “bad enough to complain about.”

This was something that occurred to me last night, after reading various posts where people said they had been abused or did consider themselves trauma-split but were reluctant to talk about it because they worried other people would consider the abuse “not bad enough to complain about.” And then I read this post about the Judge Rotenberg Center, and it basically coalesced into this.

There are some people who do experience psychiatry, or say they experience it, as being better than the abusive background they came from. I’m not saying that none of them are telling the truth. I know there are times and places when a social worker or a therapist really does step in for someone at the right time to get them out of a bad situation, or provides them with something helpful later on, some kind of medication that happens to work on them, the permission to think of themselves as having been abused, things like that.

What I cannot deal with is people declaring to others that having had therapy or psychiatry of any kind in childhood or adolescence is a privilege. That if you had any kind of therapy or psychiatry, that if your parents ever sent you there, you cannot say you were abused and cannot say you came from an abusive family. That it is always the sign of loving, caring parents who want to help their obviously troubled children. That an abusive parent would never send their child to a therapist, because after all they would talk about the abuse. (Ironically, our own mother *was* resistant to us seeing therapists for exactly this reason, but then changed her tune when we threatened suicide in high school. She continually remained suspicious that “the therapist is trying to encourage you to make up and exaggerate things,” though. Actually, that therapist didn’t, as far as memories of abuse went, but she did encourage us to show stock “types of alters” which didn’t actually exist in our system, or rather tried to distort existing people to fit, and then fucked up our communication so badly by trying to integrate us that we didn’t learn to communicate properly with each other again until we were in our 20s.)

Sometimes abuse is not about the most obvious, visible things, but sometimes even when it *is*, people send their children to therapists for talking about their memories of it, saying that they’re delusional, doing psychiatrist shopping until they can find one who will agree that you’re delusional or experiencing false memories, and continue to exert control over you, ensuring that you keep taking the meds you were prescribed for your “delusions,” etc. (Which is not to say some therapists *don’t* use suggestion, hypnosis, medication, etc, to induce memories of things that didn’t happen— this was what a lot of the therapy scandals in the 80s and 90s revolved around— but there are also people who misuse this fact to accuse anyone who talks about abuse of this.)

Some abusive parents collaborate with psychiatrists and therapists in what I can only describe as what youneedacat called “community institutionalization” in her blog post. Which is incredibly hard to define, and all we can say is that we’ve seen it too and experienced some of it, and seen other family members experience even more of it, and it’s incredibly hard to define. It seems to go hand in hand with making the child into the designated patient of the family, infantilizing them, refusing to let them have any role other than A Mental Patient or A DD Patient. Some people who believe all therapists and psychiatrists are wonderful, caring, perceptive people find it unbelievable that patients can describe blatant verbal, physical and psychological abuse in these situations, and have it ignored or blown off with “I’m sure your parents know what’s best” or “I’m sure your teacher knows what’s best.” When we were growing up, there was a therapist whom all the kids in special ed or counseling in our local school district seemed to be referred to, by teachers and staff. You could describe all kinds of abuse and this person would just blow it off, especially if it came from a teacher. We once had a therapist blow off our reports of being sexually assaulted and encourage us to think of them as something positive that we should have enjoyed, and be flattered that the boy who did it was interested in us. This happens. Don’t believe it doesn’t happen just because you’ve never personally experienced or heard of it.

Some abusive parents simply find their children inconvenient, can’t deal with the fact that their children are acting like children or their teenagers are acting like teenagers, and find drugging their kids into a stupor to be a convenient way of dealing with that. This is basically what happened in the Rebecca Riley case— Rebecca and all her siblings were on high doses of neuroleptics that many doctors don’t believe are even safe to use on children at all. Rebecca died of an overdose; her mother claimed she thought it was okay to give her a few more pills one night to keep her quiet, and others thought it was deliberate murder. Either way, the drugs that had been legally prescribed for her were used to kill her. This happens much more than the mainstream media tends to report on.

Some parents ship their kids off to institutions or abusive “teen boot camps”— the latter being another form of institutionalization that, like the JRC, is abusive in very flashy, obvious ways that leave marks, and many of them have been closed down because of that— which isn’t to say they aren’t horrible and abusive or that they shouldn’t be eliminated, but once again, it often results in the “pretty” institutions being overlooked and judged to be okay. Some parents ship their children off to the abusive pretty institutions to get rid of them, and find they can be lauded as wonderful people and martyrs for doing so, especially if they can cough up stories on demand of how terrible and painful it was to live with their child.

I think the only reason so many people can hear descriptions of things like parents bodyslamming their kids into walls and shaking them and screaming “take your meds, take your goddamn meds or I’ll shove them down your throat” and say with a straight face that isn’t abuse, is because at least in the US, people live in a culture where people are told that psychiatrists are authorities who know exactly what they’re doing, and because of bullshit propaganda from people like E. Fuller Torrey talking about how unmedicated mentally ill people are likely to become violent criminals (which is about as valid in our experience as the idea that autistics are likely to become violent criminals and that autism is some kind of “nice” form of sociopathy). So they’re not abusing the kid, see, they’re *saving* them from becoming something that’s supposedly unimaginably worse, and even if they have to use violence to do it, it’s better than what they’ve been told the kid will become otherwise. (And whatever they were diagnosed with is assumed to be perfectly accurate in the first place, too.)

And in some cases, psychiatrists and institutions succeed in convincing parents who *genuinely do* want the best for their kids and thought they were helping them, that the child has no future if they don’t do this to them, don’t keep them in the institution and force them to take all their meds, creating an abusive situation where one previously didn’t exist.

(Also, before anyone says anything about this: At least one of the people in our family who abused us would probably have benefitted from a therapist who genuinely cared about them, if they had ever been able to find one, and maybe from some specific kinds of medication too. So this is not about “you’ve just never been abused by an untreated mentally ill person,” because we were. The thing was that this person’s problems were far, far more complex than “they were a good person but they had delusions that made them do bad things to others and if they had the right meds it would have made them a good person again,” or similarly simplistic excuses. It goes back to the thing youneedacat also mentioned (can’t find the exact post now, sorry) about locking up people who are mentally and emotionally vulnerable together with people who simply have no sense of conscience, and conflating them together, and acting like the former group are as dangerous as the latter, when locking them up together is likely to result in the former being hurt by the latter. We experienced some of the same things this person in our family did, like being so severely depressed you actually become delusional, and we didn’t hurt anyone because of it, except ourselves. People can and do have both a sense of ethics and an understanding that something is wrong with them, even if they don’t know exactly what it is, at that place in human experience.)

There’s another thing I’m also tired of hearing, as far as “if you experienced X, you can’t say your family was abusive,” and it has to do with children living with their parents after they reach adulthood.

There are some parents who abuse their children by kicking them out with no money and no resources as soon as they turn 18, or refuse to let them live at home no matter how badly off they are. There are also parents who keep their grown children in the house for abusive reasons. Having a grown child live in your house is not always about “being nice enough to let them live there.” Some people are forced to live in abusive families in adulthood against their will, told they’ll never be able to survive without their family, that they’re too incapable, and if they try to run away or live somewhere else and it doesn’t work out, they’re told this is just more proof that they can’t survive on their own, and that wanting to get out is a sign of whatever their problem has been declared to be in the first place.

We’ve known people whose parents basically barged into college dormitories or apartments and began forcing them to pack up all their stuff and telling them it was time to come home, that whatever was happening to them now meant that they needed to come home and couldn’t survive without their family. I remember sitting up on IM one night with one of them, trying to help them figure out if there was some way they could get out of their parents’ impending threat to drive out and move them home, and suggested a domestic violence shelter as a last ditch resort. They said they were afraid if they went into one, the workers would turn them away if they didn’t have any bruises on them.

So don’t think you “haven’t been abused enough to complain about it” if you don’t have bruises to show. Or if the bruises came from people holding you down to force you to take medication or putting you into restraints. Or even if they didn’t, if they kept you under control by gouging pathways into your mind instead, pathways that would make it easier for other controlling, abusive people and situations to get into your mind and use all the ideas they planted in your head against you. Don’t think you “must be grateful for it” if you were ever sent to a therapist or psychiatrist or an institution or given psych meds even if it did more harm than good because “they at least wanted to help me.” Even if they did, it doesn’t mean you weren’t hurt anyway. This kind of thinking is exactly what keeps lots of people stuck in those “pretty institution” situations, or situations where a family is being run like an institution, while everyone else tells them that their parents and doctors surely must know best, and beats in the helplessness and the infantilized view of themselves they’ve been taught— even if you don’t physically lift a finger.

-Julian