Story of manipulative therapists

This happened between 1988 or so, and then, over the next three years, and beyond.

I was seeing this psychiatrist named John Merrifield. I don’t think about Merrifield that much anymore. I actually saw him for maybe five years before I finally got rid of him. My dad never liked him and my mom said he was “ineffective” as a doctor.

From the beginning, I noticed he didn’t listen very well. He regularly poked fun at the patients, including me. He used mimicking and belittling and called that “treatment.” Thing way, the guy had a high level position and no one could really touch that.

It was Merrifield’s idea that I should go back to Options, although I don’t even think he would have known about Options unless my parents had told him I’d been there. He convinced me to go back by saying the staff were all new, and none of the people who had been there before were there still.

I did just as I was told. I always did what I was told an rarely questioned. I also believed everything I was told. This was so contradictory to the person I was inside. Now, I love to pick apart and challenge everything, but for many years in the mental health system I had forgotten myself.

So I went to Options. I met my “Administrator,” Liz, and my secondary Administrator, Phil, but I don’t really recall what that secondary title really was. I liked Phil right away, and I recall telling my parents I didn’t like Liz and wished Phil was my main therapist.

Believe it or not, I remember the names of all the therapists there. The director’s name was Ann or Anne, but she left not long after I started. Then the next director was Donna Covino. I think that’s when they made Phil the Assistant Director. But am i remembering wrong? There was another Ann who was the program nurse, but I cannot recall her last name. Liz’s last name was Yorke. There was another guy named Dain, spelled like that. His last name was Stokes. There was a program secretary, too, named Maureen, but they ended up using her as group leader, too. I objected of course, saying if she wasn’t a real therapist, why was she running groups? They seemed to have a different answer each time I asked. You got the impression they were trying to say anyone who wasn’t labeled could run a group. Oh yeah, another guy named Michael, he was a therapist, too.

The people who went there, the “clients,” and staff alike were almost all therapy addicts. Many had been to day programs without a break for decades. They tended to fall apart on weekends since the therapists weren’t around. All of the staff there had rescuer syndrome.

I probably would have left early on, but I had a crush on my Administrator, Liz. She should never have taken advantage of me. But she took it to the hilt, jerking me around constantly, always keeping me wondered if she liked me or “didn’t approve” of some trivial thing about me she admonished. She used that crush to strategically withhold love, constantly dangling it in my face for three long years until I realized what was happening and got out.

Every therapist there had serious boundary problems and shouldn’t have been in the business. After I left, Donna quit being the director, saying she was having a baby. After that, five dependent clients were so torn apart they had to be hospitalized.  Dain married a client and they both took off. Then, one client named Donna, whom I didn’t know very well, killed herself.

I never knew any of that aftermath until many years later, in 1997, when I ran into an ex-client from Options. I’d run into the other clients, too, sometimes. They were still hooked as ever, stuck in the System. Did any get out?

I don’t know of any that did besides myself. I know a few more are dead. Other than that, I am clueless.

Ten Reasons NOT to See a Therapist

These are not in any particular order:

1. You end up with a psych diagnosis. Psych diagnosis is the worst crime of the mental health system.
2. You could get discriminated against if you are known to see one. This means loss of job, loss of school, loss of friends, ruined reputation.
3. You will most likely get coerced into taking harmful psych meds.
4. There is a possibility that you could end up in a hospital against your will.
5. Therapy is an exclusive relationship. You’ll find that you lose your real friends since therapy is zapping your energy.
6. Seeing a therapist won’t increase your chances of having a successful or happy life. While some do benefit, far more end up worse off.
7. It’s rarely short term even if they claim it will be.
8. You will become dependent on the therapist.
9. Many just aren’t that good anyway.
10. It costs money.
11. Most of these mental health problems go away on their own anyway.
12. It’s a myth that everyone needs therapy. Once you start going, though, you’ll be convinced you can’t live without it. And that’s the problem right there.

I’m done with the trauma model…the logic doesn’t seem quite right to me

Okay, so the trauma model tells us that a traumatic event causes “fight or flight.” Yes, true. I agree that “fight or flight” can last a long time, even after the trauma is over.

However, I see a gap in logic. “Stuck in fight or flight” no longer makes sense to me. Yes, a person feels scared, jittery, reacts illogically due to fear, and also ends up snapping at others due to fear of the event repeating or returning. A person who has been traumatized might always be covering her tracks. It’s the “stuck” part I just don’t buy.

I did buy into it and really believed it for a while. But the idea of being stuck in it sounds like a disorder to me, or something implied as lifelong, unless of course the Great Rescuer therapist shows up and saves the day.

The more you tell a person they are stuck in it, the more stuck they will become. Do you guys see this, too? The trauma model is making permanent victims out of people. It’s the model that causes stuckness, not the trauma reaction itself. Time does heal, and trauma isn’t the big exception that won’t heal without therapy…and even pills.

If time heals grief, hurt, pain, and all that stuff, then yes, it’ll heal trauma, too. If your house burns down, you’ll be shocked at first, but as time goes on, less and less so. You will remember that fire for the rest of your life. But I can attest to the fact that memory doesn’t hurt. Even one that sucked to live through.

Or it doesn’t have to. Do you think I’m going through heart-wrenching pain telling you this shit I tell you day after day, stuff that happened on the wards? Of course not! If it was painful, why would I be telling these stories at all? I’d be doing other things or yapping about  how people shouldn’t tell “war stories.” Yes, bring on the war stories, please, more!  It’s a joy for me to retell stories, period. That’s my job. I can only tell you that the wards made great material. I had over 50 hospitalizations, or shall I say, incarcerations. So now, I never ever run out of terrific tales to write.

Another noisy day, but I’m armed with a way to deal with it.

This is yet another update on the noisy neighbor situation. I think I mentioned that my neighbors had left the loud TV on at home and weren’t even home watching it. Last night, they came home at 10, turned the TV up even louder, then at 11pm, suddenly they turned the thing off completely. It was like…well, this is what it was like:

i will tell you that hearing that thing blasting like that was torture for me. I felt like I was gonna crawl right out of my skin. I couldn’t think straight, started to get very dizzy from not eating because I couldn’t stomach food with that horrible noise. I tried leaving the house a few times but was so ill, I couldn’t really stand to be walking around.

Know what else felt like torture? This was in 2012….I had just gotten out of ED “care,” and just fired my abusive therapist, Maria Mellano. Oh, and also, the ED “treatment” place took me off my antidepressant way way way too fast. A three-day taper isn’t okay. I had no clue. I knew I felt crappy, but didn’t understand that antidepressant withdrawal was playing a huge part.

So the whole spring of 2012, I experienced the worst body-hatred I’d ever been through in my entire life. I wanted to cut off the fat. I didn’t, of course, but it felt like awful torture. I wanted to wake up and find myself okay (and with the “fat” gone, too).

That didn’t happen. I didn’t wake up a whole lot thinner, then breathe a sigh of relief and tell myself, “Wow, that torture is over!” But if you can think back to when you really despised living in your body to the point that it felt like torture, imagine if all that just suddenly came to a screaming halt.

Just turn off the TV, or whatever the hell is eating away at you.

Today, I heard nothing next door. I took Puzzle out a bit ago, and came back to find the damn thing is blasting all over again. But I got a weapon.

See, yesterday I was having a big debate. If I am truly crawling out of my skin, should I “sit with the feeling”? I decided I dislike that approach, always have, since I think it’s total bullshit. I was either going to go talk to my neighbor or I was gonna alter myself so that I didn’t hear the stupid TV.

Going out wasn’t an option since I was too sick. I have nothing here that I can put in or over my ears to block out the sound. I’ve tried playing music, but the music or the headset or both drive me nuts. I thought of getting high. Not that I have anything to get high on, but that was a thought that crossed my mind. Unfortunately, I’ve never found a substance that suited me. I can’t stomach booze and I kinda dislike feeling “high” from a substance anyway.

So this morning, I was lying in bed and found something while playing around with my cell phone. This is it:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid.mind

I would recommend this app and I’ll bet mindroid also available for iphone. I don’t think a computer screen will work as you literally put the phone over your eyes. I got high off it. I will tell you that this is a non-invasive, non-chemical way to really alter your mindset. I believe this is using methods from NLP. Flashing lights in a person’s eyes will indeed affect brain activity. If you have ever had an EEG, you may recall that one part of the test tries to detect your brain’s reaction to flashing light.

What comes in my ears is sound, but it’s my brain that processes the sound and decides I’m irritated. Go try it yourself.

And one more thing: I’m done playing the victim. I’m not even going to think in those terms anymore. Fear is fear, anxiety is, according to most, a disease treated by pills. I don’t have any more anxiety than anyone else out there. I am done being angry, too. I think it’s fear I gotta deal with now. Which ain’t no disease, and I’m done believing only a therapist can get a person out of being “stuck in fear.” Since when?

As soon as I realized I’m pretty much back to the drawing board with this insomnia, but also realized that the trauma part isn’t “stuck” at all, but very clearly improving over time. Yes, I was traumatized, and yes, I have horrific insomnia night after night, but no, I am now convinced that it’s totally physical. If only I can figure this out…..

Aftermath of noisy day

By the end of the day, I was so physically ill from that TV noise that I really couldn’t do a thing. I wanted so badly to get away from that horrific television. I couldn’t, though. For a second, I thought, “I need a quiet room.” Yeah, someplace quiet all right. At that moment, I craved the thought of “padded room” only because the padding might provide soundproofing. I considered what types of materials I could put on my wall, such as cork…can such a thing be found here? I did see noise-canceling headphones in the store, these most likely for lawnmowers, blasting, drilling, etc.

I figured out my next door neighbors weren’t home all day. Maybe they left the TV on unintentionally. As soon as they got home, at 10pm, they turned it up even louder. I’m not kidding! It felt like I was being tortured.  Then, at 11, they switched it off. Oh my god what a shock. Silence. Now, I hear the rain, which is certainly a more pleasant thing to listen to.

Puzzle has had trouble sleeping because the thunder scares her. I think I’ll go cuddle with her and we’ll both get some rest. I’m starting to get a bad headache, too.

Update to my fundraiser

I posted this a few days ago. My fundraising site is here:

https://www.youcaring.com/julie-greene-433556

Dear Contributors and anyone else interested,

When I was 21 years old, I learned about the Assertiveness Bill of Rights. Like most other girls who had grown up in the 1960’s, I had not been told that I had such rights. I wasn’t particularly good at being obedient, but I thought this was some kind of deficiency I had, an aversion to blindly following orders. In the fourth grade, I protested homework. In seventh grade, I wore pants to school in protest of the girls’ dress code. And at 19, I was fired from McDonald’s because I insisted that the fast food establishment donate its leftovers to those who were disadvantaged.

However, I must have forgotten the valuable lessons of the Assertiveness Bill of Rights when I entered the Mental Health System. I never realized I could say “no” to psychiatry and everything is offered. I didn’t ask about alternatives. Instead, I blindly followed, assuming someone else was the expert on my body and soul. It took me three decades until I began to question what I had been told.

Today, I ask everyone to look over the Assertiveness Bill of Rights. Did you realize that you have the right to change your mind? To say no? To be imperfect and make mistakes? Have you taken the time to question authority today?

In 2006, I took time off from graduate school. My boyfriend had died in 2003, and I realized I hadn’t taken the time to grieve. Unfortunately, I ended up in a mental ward. There, I was told that I was a mental patient and didn’t belong in graduate school. I was told again and again that my place was in a “program” for mental patients. There, I would be trapped, living a marginalized life, with no chance of improving my circumstances. When I objected, I was told that if I didn’t follow the advice of the “experts,” I would only end up back in the hospital. I recall seeing the social workers shaking their heads, acting as if I were stupid.

I am lucky that I didn’t believe them. I returned to graduate school and finished. I certainly didn’t have the difficulties they claimed I had, nor was I “stupid.”

Today, I ask everyone to question the expectations that other people have for you. What are your own hopes and dreams? How can you take action right now, to make these dreams come true? Did you know that no matter who you are, you are just as valid a human being as anyone else?

I leave you with the Assertiveness Bill of Rights:

1. You have the right to judge your own behaviors, thoughts and emotions, and to responsibility for their initiation and consequences upon yourself.
2. You have the right to offer no reasons or excuses for justifying your behavior.
3. You have the right to judge if you are responsible for finding solutions to other people’s problems.
4. You have the right to change your mind.
5. You have the right to make mistakes and be responsible for them.
6. You have the right to say “I don’t know.”
7. You have the right to be independent of the goodwill of others before coping with them.
8. You have the right to be illogical in making decisions.
9. You have the right to say “I don’t understand.”
10. You have the right to say “I don’t care.”
11. You have the right to say “no.”
12. You have the right to do less then you are humanly capable of doing.
13. You have the right to take the time you need to respond.
14. You have the right to disagree with others regardless of their position or numbers.
15. You have the right to feel all of your emotions (including anger) and express them appropriately.
16. You have the right to ask questions.
17. You have the right to be treated with respect.
18. You have the right to ask for what you want.
19. You have the right to feel good about yourself, your actions and your life.
20. You have the right to exercise any and all of these rights, without feeling guilty.

From: Your Perfect Right: A Guide to Assertive Behavior(1970) by Robert E. Alberti, and When I Say No, I Feel Guilty: How To Cope Using the Skills of Systematic Assertiveness Therapy(1975) by Manuel J. Smith.

Please don’t forget to spread the word and share this fundraiser!

Till next time, Julie and Puzzle