About Face

The implication of a lot of therapy type books, especially 12 step based ones, is that those of us with problems have something innately wrong with our brain, that we are somehow wired to think in a detrimental way.

I have discovered that this is bollocks!

For most of my life I believed there was something wrong with me, something abnormal about my brain or just me in general. Unfortunately, this was reinforced by most of the people I came across.

There are many people out there playing with the minds of vulnerable people, such as I was, and damaging them further. There are many people who think they know it all when they know f**k all. They compound the damage already suffered by the damaged.

I was an easy target. I believed I was wrong. I believed I was bad. I believed most of what I was told because I was wired to. It was easy for me to look up to people and consider them by betters. I was in so much pain and was so desperate, I listened to them when they told me they could help me. Their help consisted of compounding the belief that I was defective.

One such person, frorm many years ago, had a profound effect on me. I looked up to her. She always sounded so well and confident. She had the answers. She said she did.

She led me up the garden path. She also hurt me deeply. One day she suddenly, with no explanation, stopped our friendship. This of course hurt me but more compounded my feelings of worthlessness. She had also seriously f***ed with my mind by that point. She had me believing I had all sorts of problems I didn't have and that I was the cause of my family discord and dismissed the abuse. This set me back so many years.

Of course my brain is perfectly normal and I learn well. Very well. I learned precisely what I was taught. That I was worthless, stupid, evil, incapable, would never amount to anything and had only illness and death to look forward to with eternal damnation after that. How was i supposed to feel good about anything with that as my 'program'?

Thank fully, I have overcome this now. I understand what I was taught and how it was reinforced . Reinforced by the abuse, the lack of love and later by mental health professionals who knew not what they were doing. Honestly, I have not met one mental health professional who was helpful to me, many who were abusive, some who were useless but nice.These people just compounded the damage. Just a small example, being in an Anorexic Unit where the regime for getting us well was a punishment / reward one. As if we were rats. Needless to say it helped no one and just convinced us further how worthless and bad we were if even the medical staff meant to care for us abused us. Of course, at the time, the word abuse was not thought of because we didn't know that is what was happening. we were treated the way we deserved to be treated bot abused!

On the one hand I feel so lucky to be where I am now, have the life I have now. On the other, in my 50th year, I feel terribly sad and bereft at all those lost years. All because I believed what I was taught to believe - that it was all my fault. That I was treated thus because of who I was. That my family rejected me because of who I was.

NO. All that happened because of who they were.