Theme
2:18am
August 4, 2015
it is hard to express…
just how much you can break someone…
…if what you think you’re doing..
..is making them into someone who might someday become a real person worthy of respect…
I had a psychologist once who openly told me that his goal was to kill the person I was, and replace that person, inside me, with a person who was more functional and better adapted to living in the world and less psychotic.
Note that ‘psychotic’, for him, encompassed ‘autistic’. (He was part of a team who had diagnosed me, among other things, as having been ‘psychotic since infancy’. Which can only ever mean autism, because there’s no way to diagnose actual psychosis in an infant. They were taking their ideas straight out of Frances Tustin’s books from the seventies, that differentiated some forms of autism from others, and called some of it autism and some of it childhood schizophrenia or childhood psychosis. I was supposedly psychotic since infancy and schizophrenic since adolescence, although what the difference was, I was never exactly told.)
He did not succeed.
But he did succeed in doing some incredibly scary stuff to the inside of my head. I was unable to defend myself against the things he did, because I was heavily drugged and he was an accomplished manipulator.
I have been told since – by strangers online who know nothing about my life, mind you – that I should’ve known it was impossible for someone to kill who you are and make you into someone else. That if I actually believed him that it was possible, then there was something clearly wrong with me that needed to be fixed, possibly by the very guy who was abusing me in this fashion.
Of all of the abuse I encountered in the psychiatric system, this man’s abuse was the longest-lasting and most damaging in terms of consequences for my mind. I remember going into appointments with him and feeling like I was an entirely different person. Like I’d walk in the door myself, immediately turn into someone else the moment I saw him, and leave the door someone else again. Often I wouldn’t be able to remember our sessions later.
He once let it slip that he’d been trained by a certain school of hypnotherapy. Then he refused to name it again when I and my family asked about it, and got evasive whenever we brought up the subject. I eventually found some stuff by the person, and it was someone who was considered highly unethical by a lot of hypnotherapists, because he believed in lying to patients if he thought lying would bring them around to healing in some manner, and he also believed in involuntary trance induction. When I read about the ‘confusion induction’, it was exactly what this therapist did sometimes.
And being on a very high dose of antipsychotics made it impossible for me to psychologically defend myself. Antipsychotics can have an effect where they basically shatter your cognitive abilities, including your defenses against having your mind invaded. By which I don’t mean like sci-fi telepathy sort of mind invasion, but more like extremely skilled manipulation. If you can’t think straight, you can’t defend yourself well against people who are hell-bent on manipulating you.
But he was incredibly up front about the idea that he was going to kill the person I was inside, and replace that person. He said also that he was going to get inside my mind and never leave. And that if I ever had an original thought, I should bring it to him, because I would probably die if I ever thought for myself for very long.
I remember when a friend first taught me to repeat “I am allowed to think for myself.” She said I needed to repeat it to myself over and over until I really believed it, and that it was very important that I do so. I thought she was trying to kill me. And at first, even beginning to try to repeat it to myself, resulted in this torrent of confusing brain noise that felt like I was drowning. It was like he’d set booby traps all over my mind.
People don’t think this kind of thing is possible.
People are wrong.
I was first able to begin resisting this stuff when I found a book about cults, by a person who had been a cult member and had indoctrinated other people, and he talked in depth about how indoctrination works and how to resist it and remove it from yourself. I had never been in a religious cult, or even in any of the other types of cults in the book, but the residential facility I lived at when all this went down, had a power structure that resembled a cult enough that the book was very useful for me.
I actually confronted him about it once, after I started reading about cults. He told me that anything he did was warranted because if it wasn’t for him I’d have been in a state institution for at minimum the rest of my childhood. Mind you, when given a choice between the residential facility and the state institution, I chose the state institution. I was overruled both because people didn’t believe anyone in their right mind could ever make the choice I made, and because there were no beds open in the state institution.
But having now talked to people who’ve been in similar residential facilities and in the exact state institution I almost ended up in, I have been told that the state institution was definitely better. Not good, not good by a long shot. In fact, terrible. But better. State institutions don’t usually have the money to throw around for intensive one-on-one 24/7 brainwashing. Which is why many actual patients prefer them to private institutions. Not all patients, and not all institutions, but it’s a preference that occurs often enough, and goes against what most people consider common sense, that it’s been explicitly noted a lot in the psychiatric ex-patient movement. Unfortunately, that preference (and, in general, preferences for places seen as “worse” from the outside for reasons that are largely aesthetic) is often seen as evidence that we lack sanity and should not have control over our lives.
Of course, most of us would prefer no institutions, but when given a choice between different types of institutions, we’ll often choose ones considered “more restrictive” or “worse”. Because our definition of what makes a place worse – as patients, who understand certain things instinctively that other people don’t understand – is often very different from what staff or family members consider worse.
So this idea that he was keeping me out of a state institution doesn’t hold water to me at all.
The idea that he did this for any reason other than his own amusement and power tripping, doesn’t hold water to me at all. He was someone who got off on power and control. Not someone who inadvertently misused power, but someone who craved power and misused it to do harm to people, and often enjoyed doing so.
He also told me that he really enjoyed being able to treat me, because normally people like me were stuck in state institutions and out of his reach, so he didn’t normally get to “work on” anyone like me.
Which was a creepy-ass thing to say.
I learned later that even in psychotherapy that is not deliberately sadistic, there’s a frequent idea that you have to destroy who someone is and replace them with someone more functional.
So I was not imagining that he said this, and the fact that I believed him capable of doing something he kept threatening to do (when he controlled every aspect of my life, too, which can undermine anyone’s sense of reality), does not mean that I “had to have been crazy” and therefore that what he did was somehow okay. (Why is it okay to do that to crazy people but not to sane people, anyway? It shouldn’t be. And why is it okay to imply that I’m crazy – and therefore apparently not worth listening to – because I was horribly abused by a psychologist on a power trip?)
TL;DR: I had a psychologist once who told me that he wanted to kill the person I was and replace me with someone who could function better in the world and generally be a happier and better person or something along those lines. He told me this, explicitly, many times. His abuse did more damage to my mind than the rest of the psychiatric system combined. And the one time I confronted him about the matter, he told me that it was all okay because he was doing it to keep me out of a state institution. Except he was actually doing it because he got off on power and control. Everything else was just an excuse. It was horrible in ways I can’t even describe.
133 notes
10:41pm
April 29, 2015
How (un)ethical is it for a 35 year old psychologist and musician to use his teenage child patient’s poetry as song lyrics for his professional band?
One of my shrinks was a professional musician. And he was always interested in my poetry. Most of it, he said, was crap, but occasionally I’d come out with something amazing. This pretty much agreed with my self-assessment.
But then he found this one poem he really liked. I was still a minor when all this happened, but he wanted to use it for lyrics in his band. So he had me sign some rights over to him.
But it just occurred to me, isn’t there some huge ethical boundary being crossed when you’re a roughly 35-year-old psychotherapist and musician, using material from your teenage child patient?
I mean, at the time I was a little flattered. “Wow, a professional musician thinks my writing’s good enough to use in his band. That means my writing is actually good, someone besides my parents like it (since parents mostly like anything their child does, because it’s not about skill it’s about connecting with their child).“
But now I’m kind of squicked. Is what he did even legal? I was a minor. Yuck.
3:13pm
July 17, 2014
Strong Glial Character: youneedacat: Social skills for autonomous people:…
stripesweatersandwaterbottles:
lexsplosion said:
“In general, if you are convinced that you know better than the person that you’re talking to what their own thoughts, feelings, and motivations must really be—and keep insisting that they’re just too sick or don’t have the insight to understand what their REAL thoughts, feelings and motivations are—you need to go away and stop hurting people who are already having a rough enough time.”
This this this this this. Also pretty terrified the person who abused me wants to be a therapist. :(
realsocialskills said:
It scares me too. I wish this was the first time I’d heard about an abuser wanting to become a therapist.
Therapy is so important for so many vulnerable people. And there are abusers who take advantage of that. It’s terrifying.
One of my long-term abusers, someone who has not seen me since 1996 but has participated in cyberstalking extremely recently to this day? Became a therapist. She was working on her psych degree when I first met her, and even then already believed she had the right to fuck with people’s lives, act like she knew them better than they knew themselves, etc. But it wasn’t even as benign as that. She enjoyed inciting drama and friction and tension between people. If there was not a problem she would create a problem because she got off on people having problems. She would even lie to create problems – she has lied multiple times, blatantly, not misremembered but outright lied, in the course of her cyberstalking and defamation campaign against me. And I’m far from the only person she’s targeted. She’s also set up situations where she’s deliberately triggered people who were fairly psychologically stable to begin with, and induced symptoms of mental illness so that she could take on a long-suffering martyr caretaker role (that is the only explanation I can imagine for some things I’ve seen her do). And she’s a therapist, and that scares me to death. I am afraid for her patients.
12:13pm
July 26, 2013
“
Ray isn’t really your friend. She’s only nice to you because she’s stuck with you, not many people live here. But you don’t have the social skills to be friends with someone like her. She’d never take you out dancing. You’d embarrass her. So don’t believe for a minute that she’d be nice to you if she wasn’t stuck at this residential facility with you.
” —An asshole therapist I spend most of my time trying to forget. I’ve had false friends, mostly bullies pretending to be friends. Ray was not one of them. We weren’t close, but her kindness was genuine.