Terminally Misunderstood?

Well, I’m home. Re-entry hasn’t been going great. It could be a lot worse, but it’s been hard. I would have hoped that since I was inpatient for almost a month, that they could have gotten outpatient supports more nailed down by the time that I left. One thing that I had been pinning my hopes on was the idea that I could do an outpatient trauma group. Unfortunately, it turns out that it’s 100% impossible to get into an trauma-focused outpatient services at McLean without going through the Hill Center first. So, let me share with you what happened there:

How I Got Banned From the McLean Hill Center

It was 2023, and I had just moved out of the group home. Right at the time that I moved, I’d been out of work with a kidney stone, so money was awful. Food stamps take time to get set up, and I didn’t have a pantry because I had just gotten my own place, so I was only eating about two meals a week. This made it very hard to think clearly.

Meanwhile, I still was under the care of Dr V, who was one of the many clinicians I’d had in my life who felt that the absolute worst thing I could possibly do was go to the emergency room. For years at that point, I’d had clinicians insist that going inpatient went against the treatment plans they had for me. If I did go to the ER and was admitted and went inpatient, I would have hell to pay with the clinician after discharge, because I wasn’t supposed to go to the hospital. Now, in 2026, people do want me to go to the ER in an emergency, which is why I haven’t had any suicide attempts in several years. But at that point in my life, the providers I was working with felt very differently.

So I got signed up for the Hill Center. I was terrified of being “not good enough” for the program or being a failure. I told them that I didn’t have food and was basically starving, but they just said they’d discuss it in their meeting and never got back to me. So I would do better in the mornings, but when lunch came around, all the other people in the program would go to the cafeteria and buy lunch, and I would stay back and cry. I also was struggling to the point where I really should have been inpatient, but years of indoctrination had taught me that it was wrong to ask for that. Also, one thing about me is that whatever I’m able to communicate is the tip of the iceberg. From my perspective, I was screaming for help and didn’t understand why they wouldn’t take me seriously. I thought they knew that I wasn’t “safe.” So the program really wasn’t going very well for me and I was afraid I was going to fail it. Then, one day, we had a group on “assault.” Now, we as patients would have been forbidden from using specific words like “assault,” so I was surprised that the program was allowed to talk about it. I also knew that I was really upset about an event that had happened a few months prior, but I had never put the label “assault” on it. However, looking at the definition, I realized that that was exactly what had happened.

I got really triggered and freaked out and discharged from the program. I just fled. Back in the safety of home, and not knowing that it would be morally acceptable for me to go to the ER, I sent the Hill Center an email. I don’t remember the exact content of the email, but it was something along the lines of, “…and like I told you, I’m NOT safe, and I don’t know what you want me to do about it.”

Now, if they had just called me and told me to go to the ER, I would have gone. Instead, they called 911. They took me to the ER, but by that time, I had calmed down and they let me go home. I didn’t know that sending an email was a violation of the safety contract. However, I apparently was banned for life from the Hill Center for sending it. I’m so unclean that they won’t even tell me directly that I’m banned… they go through third parties and have them tell me. This is apparently pretty unusual, as I only know of one other person who’s been banned for life, and she made an actual suicide attempt while she was in the program. Which, that I would be able to understand, because obviously that would have been in violation of the safety policy. But I didn’t actually do anything in terms of self harm or preparing to kill myself. I just was starving and sent an emotional email saying things that I thought they’d already known. There’s no way I could have known that I wasn’t allowed to do that.

All I can surmise is that they must have thought that I would have attempted suicide if they hadn’t called 911. But I didn’t take any steps in that direction, I asked for help, and the ER didn’t even think it was serious enough to admit me. But the result is that I’m banned for life not only from the PHP, but even from outpatient trauma groups at McLean. Meaning, there are things at McLean that are available, such as Ketamine and TMS. But those supports may or may not turn me away because they don’t specialize in trauma. And the people who do specialize in trauma think I’m evil and untreatable. I mean, the inpatient trauma unit thinks I’m fine, but I’m banned for life from any outpatient trauma supports. So I just get the runaround because the part of the hospital that specializes in my diagnosis won’t take me. And I’m terrified that I’ll be turned away from TMS because it usually isn’t specifically geared toward trauma.

How My Mother Started the Rumor That I Hate Prayer

And it’s like, this isn’t the first time this has happened. As we all know, my family thinks I’m evil, too. My mother started a rumor that I hate God and all that is holy based off of this text message:

The context there was that I was in the hospital, and my care team thought that it was important for me to reach out to my parents. Ultimately, the hospital wanted to do a “family session,” which my parents were extremely opposed to because they were babysitting my sister’s kids at the time and didn’t want to trouble my brother-in-law. Ultimately they acquiesced to have the meeting if my niece happened to be taking a nap at the time of the call. Which she was, so they did the call, and given how it played out, the doctors on my care team came away realizing that I wasn’t kidding when I said that my parents genuinely did not care about me or my situation at all.

However, Mom couldn’t help but take the opportunity to start a rumor that I hated God and all that is holy. Now, I did explain to her later in painstaking detail that I never had a problem with her praying for me, but she didn’t care because I sent the text message and she was going to interpret it the way she was going to interpret it. So I’ve repeated the conversation thousands of times in my head in the years since. Basically, the text message wasn’t primarily about prayer. I was saying that there was no point in contacting them because it’s not like they were going to do anything that I needed from them. I used quotation marks around “pray for me” because I didn’t think they were actually praying. They just claim they’re praying for me and use it as an excuse to get out of doing anything more tangible. Which, in my vast experience, sincere prayer is a catalyst to action, never an excuse for inaction. You don’t see Nehemiah getting the opportunity to rebuild the temple and turning it down because it would invalidate how hard he was working as a prayer warrior. So I used quotation marks because nothing about my parents’ behavior made me think that they were actually praying for me; they just said they were so they’d be off the hook to do anything else. However, that was six years ago and Mom is hellbent on standing by her rumor that I used quotation marks in order to ridicule the concept of prayer (which would be a much less common interpretation of quotation marks), and I didn’t tell them that I was in the hospital because I didn’t want them to pray for me because I think prayer has cooties. NO BACKSIES.

My Conclusions

So I’m left replaying these things over and over in my head, especially at night. Like, I didn’t know that I couldn’t send the Hill Center an email. I’m sorry I sent it, because I can see why it would come off as a liability. But why would they ban me for life with zero possibility of discussion? And I never told my mom not to pray for me!! But I’m permanently banned from the Hill Center, and my mom excommunicated me from the family. NO BACKSIES.

The thing I can’t get over is that these seem like really strange reasons to permanently shun someone for life. However, I’m the common denominator. It’s really unusual to get disowned by your parents; usually, your family sticks by you for life. But if my own family couldn’t love me, surely the top-rated trauma center in the country would have some compassion, right? And if I’m shunned by both, then there has to be something intrinsic in me that is making people respond so strongly to what feel like minute slights. What do they see in me that I don’t see in me? The inpatient unit insisted that the people at the Hill Center just didn’t know the real me, etc. But if these really were such petty infractions, this wouldn’t keep happening.

So, I’m trying to move on and find other supports. But it’s just hard because it’s hard for me not to think of myself as a monster. My True Love came to visit and I had them video chat with my siblings, who I hadn’t seen in literal years. This was definitely a terrible idea. If I weren’t a monster, why would they have cut me out of their lives like they did? I just don’t know how to reconcile the evidence with the idea of me being an okay human.

I mean, some people like me. The cat adores me. My True Love is, by every metric that I’m aware of, a phenomenal human. They could have had any partner they wanted, and they chose me. Community supports at VF like me. The inpatient trauma unit at McLean likes me, as did the people at Emerson. But this is the problem with CBT is that I try so hard to reason with myself, and somehow I always end up back at, if I were a valid human, I would have been able to make my mother love me.