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12:14am June 11, 2014

soilrockslove:

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That’s what happened in my family.  According to them, they simply had no blueprint for how to handle me so they fell back on how the psych system was treating me as a guide.  They’ve apologized more times than I can count.  I’ve come to accept that.  But many of the things that happened as a result of this were really horrific from my perspective.  The worst was having pills shoved down my throat with water poured into my mouth and my face while they clamped my nose shut, to try to force me to take pills.  I actually resisted them as long as I did one night when that happened, because I’d reasoned that if I got put in a psych ward for refusing my meds, it would be safer, physically, than home.

I really do believe that they meant well and that we were all caught up in the violence of the system, and that the violence of the system did a number on our entire family:  Every one of us was affected, as if someone threw a bomb into the center of our family.  I still don’t think anyone has ever been the same since the psych system got hold of us.  But that doesn’t change how it felt to me at the time, which was that going home was just as bad as being in a psych ward, and that I couldn’t measure my “time in” vs. “time out” in any experiential sense because the same things were happening at home that happened in psych wards.  A lot of that was engineered by the psych system itself, to make my home an extension of the system, and I think that happens to a lot of families.  I can’t blame my family anymore for not knowing how to get out of that or avoid it… it was just a horrible mess, for everyone.  And it felt like violence was just rocketing around the family in all directions, from all directions.