Fun with Labels
I’ve always known I was different, but I never knew how or why until a year or so ago. It’s quite a tale how I got to that point and it would almost require writing a novel to explain it. I met a girl, and fell for said girl, and it turned into a disastrous five year involuntary lesson in personality disorders, psychopathic tendencies, and abnormal psychology. Does she have a histrionic disorder, the narcissistic one, or a borderline personality disorder? She might have them all, or she may have simply been a sociopath. Trying to bring her back to reality resulted in me sinking deeper and deeper until I found myself questioning my own sanity. It sucked.
Its amazing what the mind is capable of when it feels the need to keep events from your awareness. It’s amazing how hitting rock bottom can interfere with that. I started recognizing that maybe my childhood wasn’t quite normal and that maybe I didn’t grow up being tougher and smarter for it. In fact I may have been damaged. I didn’t go to the psychiatrist for my own benefit, as it usually goes with personality disorders, but I couldn’t help but ask what might be going on with me. After he described it as being consistent with depression I began filling him in with everything odd about me. Its ironic that I had obsessively invested so many years studying personality disorders and skipped over the one that might apply to me. He started giving me the standard clinical interview from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for a Schizoid personality disorder and I’m fairly certain I didn’t do well on it. Thinking back I can see my childhood dream was to just get away from everybody and apparantly I’ve done a fine job of taking that to an extreme. I think my inner child and I are about to go to war.
Filed Under Personality Disorders, Psychology, Schizoid | 4 Comments
Black dogs and thick fogs
The trauma of my last relationship landed me in a psychiatrist’s office looking for answers to my ex-girlfriends bizarre behavior, but it also led me to answers about myself I wasn’t exactly looking or asking for. He emphasized the word “major” and somewhere else in the sentence he said depression. That’s the point I began arguing with him. “But I’m not sad,” I exclaimed!
It turns out depression isn’t always about being sad. It explains isolation and a lack of energy. It explains the inability to find enjoyment in things you once found enjoyable. It explains the lack of desire to socialize and make new friends. It explains a lot of things, but does it explain me? I wasn’t so sure and after the argument he wasn’t either. Is it possible to be depressed the majority of your life and not even know it? He offered me pills and I offered more arguments. Is that a label, or is it a symptom of something more?
I guess I don’t know a thing about depression, but I do know a thing or two about anhedonia. Anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure from otherwise pleasurable life events, and I seem to have a severe case that I’ve been carrying around for a very long time. Its feels a bit like living in an empty shell watching the world pass you by. Its a key symptom of depression along with a myriad of other mood and schizophrenic disorders, and even some of the personality disorders.
Nothing irks me more than the people who cross my path and tell me to smile or mention that I should be happy and tell me to cheer up. If only I had known it was so simple. If only I had known that mental disorders are a thing that you can simply will yourself out of if only you’d try. To think I could wake from this dream if only I thought to do so. No, overcoming things is neither simple or fast, but I wont let it stop me from finding a way out. Not a day goes by that I don’t remember that on the other side of where I’m at I’ve been promised moonbeams and rainbows. Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I was different or normal. I’m never not thinking about how I got here or why I remain.
A lot of people think its the rainbows I fear, but its not. Its the trail of dark shadows that block my path and stand between me and what I desire. Not many people understand that, and I wouldn’t bother explaining it to them. I’d rather offer cryptic tidbits. I don’t need their judgments or the stigma that comes along with the explanation. Like my ex, I don’t want people turning their heads sideways and looking at me like I’m some kind of psychopath.
Filed Under Depression | 7 Comments
Harm’s Way
I have reluctantly been sucked back into the the psychodrama of my ex-girlfriend’s life. Several years ago I made the decision that I couldn’t help her and I chose to remove myself from her life so that I could take better care of myself. Turning your back on somebody who needs help so badly isn’t easy, but for my own sanity I had to remove all the unhealthy relationships from my life and focus on more rewarding friendships. I’m not a doctor so I’m not qualified to diagnose my ex-girlfriend, but it often seemed as though she had a conglomeration of many traits of many personality disorders. On my more angry days I often think of her as a psychopath that is devoid of empathy and compassion. The relationship was a five year hell in which I gave my all to fight for her recovery and received not one single drop of love in return. I was abused, deceived, manipulated, bullied, and had my reputation tarnished by an onslaught of false accusations.
When people bought into her lies I found it hurtful, and its been haunting me for a long time. It looks like I may finally have a chance for some closure. Her madness didn’t end with me and history is repeating itself. People are now recognizing what I knew to be true long ago and some apologies have come my way. She’s very ill, and its not because I didn’t love her enough. I gave it everything I had.
“No Contact” has served me well, but I’ve taken steps that have brought me once again closer to the chaos. It starts with a statement, but who knows how far I might get pulled in. Its for a good cause, and hopefully to the benefit of those in her life who are the new targets of her grandiose self such as her newborn daughter. It’d be nice to participate in any events that might break one of those cycles of abuse passed on from generation to generation, but I could live without the thought I might be putting myself back in harms way.
Filed Under Abuse, Drama | 2 Comments
Folie à Deux
Folie à Deux means “a madness shared by two,” and Folie à plusieurs means “a madness of many.” It is more commonly known in psychological circles as shared psychotic disorder or induced delusional disorder. These disorders occur when a person has been exposed to the paranoid thoughts, delusional beliefs, or magical thinking of a disordered individual, and begin to accept them into their own belief system. Typically, those involved tend to be isolated with little interaction with the outside world, and spend a great deal of time with the originator of the magical beliefs. After years of narcissistic abuse, I could almost say I was certain that I suffered with a bout of it myself, but I’d prefer to call that by it’s proper term, “brainwashing.” Everyone else calls it “gaslighting.”
Filed Under Abuse, Depression, Psychology | 4 Comments
First Post
Welcome to my blog and my first post, which is really the very last post, since everything is listed in reverse chronological order. I don’t really know my purpose for creating a blog except that it seems like a really good idea for someone in my situation, but the reality is that I spend more time playing with the servers and programming than I do adding content or sharing intimate details of my life. I’m much more interested in computers and programming than relating to or interacting with society. The people who know me in life know that I rarely have anything to say, or more accurately, very little that I care to share. Theses people have their varied assumptions and unique perspectives as to why but are always invariably wrong. The truth is a lot more complicated. This blog may be a further attempt to overcome that truth or at least gain more insight.
Filed Under Blogging | 2 Comments