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Three years ago I began a long and arduous journey to save my life. Shaken by the suicide of a close friend, I decided it was time to confront what I had come to understand as a lifetime of severe mental illness. I began to see a new therapist who administered an MMPI. The test is designed to diagnose mental illness. As anyone who has ever tried to navigate the mental health landscape, a form diagnosis is not an easy thing to come by. A patient need to say the right words to the right doctor to get the right diagnosis. Articulating the nuance of what is happening in your thoughts is incredibly difficult for many reasons. One of the biggest hurdles is we have only lived inside our own brain so everything, even profound problems, seem normal. So an objective test to determine what is “wrong with us” is like being thrown a life preserver while you are drowning.
The test results came back. My father and I heard the following sentence “Your depression is so bad we should be worried about suicide, your anxiety is worse and you have been abusing drugs and alcohol for decades as a coping mechanism.” He made it very clear that in order to assess me properly and if i was serious about treating the illnesses I would have to stop using the only coping mechanisms I had known and begin a long process of healing. I did that. I checked myself into a rehab facility and have been sober for almost three years. Since then I’ve come to understand that what I had understood as mental illness was actually Complex PTSD that was a result of the chaos, abuse and neglect of my childhood and adolescence. It’s been the first real step towards healing. We cannot heal what we don’t understand.
I’m asking for help because I have nowhere else to turn. Getting sober proved to be the easiest part. My family largely abandoned me as I uncovered systems of trauma and abuse. I have spent the last year in therapy, unable to work and holding on to the will to live by a thread. The answers that came to me in sobriety were overwhelming. Changing the negative thought patterns and self hatred and doubt that comes with a lifetime of psychological abuse is a slow process. I have come to an understanding of how early life trauma reverberates through our lives and sits within children like a ticking time bomb. I am working through it, I am almost there. But I need help to get to the life I deserve and not settle for a life defined by abuse, trauma and disappointment.
The test results came back. My father and I heard the following sentence “Your depression is so bad we should be worried about suicide, your anxiety is worse and you have been abusing drugs and alcohol for decades as a coping mechanism.” He made it very clear that in order to assess me properly and if i was serious about treating the illnesses I would have to stop using the only coping mechanisms I had known and begin a long process of healing. I did that. I checked myself into a rehab facility and have been sober for almost three years. Since then I’ve come to understand that what I had understood as mental illness was actually Complex PTSD that was a result of the chaos, abuse and neglect of my childhood and adolescence. It’s been the first real step towards healing. We cannot heal what we don’t understand.
I’m asking for help because I have nowhere else to turn. Getting sober proved to be the easiest part. My family largely abandoned me as I uncovered systems of trauma and abuse. I have spent the last year in therapy, unable to work and holding on to the will to live by a thread. The answers that came to me in sobriety were overwhelming. Changing the negative thought patterns and self hatred and doubt that comes with a lifetime of psychological abuse is a slow process. I have come to an understanding of how early life trauma reverberates through our lives and sits within children like a ticking time bomb. I am working through it, I am almost there. But I need help to get to the life I deserve and not settle for a life defined by abuse, trauma and disappointment.
Organizer
Christian Van Linda
Organizer
Milwaukee, WI