As I mentioned in my previous entry, as of June 1 I have been discharged from the psych hospital and am now in a group home. This has given me more freedom but much, much crazier roommates and reduced support from staff. I also don’t have a car or money for rideshares so I’ve been severely lonely for the past several weeks in my room. However, today has been a better day because I finally got back into “day treatment” at this place that runs group therapy for like five hours a day, five days a week. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to be walking into at first because I hadn’t been there in over a year, and I was afraid that the people there’s disabilities would be different from mine, kind of like I’ve noticed with the residents of my group home. Thankfully, it was mostly people who I remembered from before and liked very much. I guess sitting through five hours a day of group therapy requires more going on cognitively than just living in a group home, so people with whom I cannot have a meaningful conversation are filtered out. I worried that I talked too much, but after being trapped in my room for over a month, I was the verbal version of a newly-reopened dam.
Anyway. I have therapy tomorrow so I tried to write down everything major that’s going on in my life and there was so much that there’s no way to get through it all in a 45 minute session. This is frustrating because then I have to “prioritize” and more and more things keep being piled up in the backlog and it’s totally overwhelming. So I tend to be hesitant to open up in therapy about my problems because it’s the exact same opening-of-the-dam experience. If I share only superficial things that are easy to talk about, then I don’t get halfway through sharing some major thing about myself only to have time run out. And even at the very beginning of a session, I can feel time ticking and I don’t want to start something that I won’t be able to finish in time. So, since it’s hard for me to talk about what I need to talk about in therapy, I’m going to list here Sixteen Talking Points that I Wish my Therapist Knew About
1) Problematic Staff Member
There is a staff member here who was kind enough to take me to a doctor’s appointment the other day, but he is apparently a horrible driver and almost got us both killed more times than I can count. Then this week he started a fire in the kitchen. There’s a lot to say about him, but basically all the empathy in the world and all the appreciation in the world for his good intentions will not negate the fact that he probably shouldn’t be working in a role as a caretaker.
2) Lonliness
- It’s not like I was expecting staff to be MENSA affiliated but the severity of their impairment came as a surprise. There’s one staff member who I like but most of them are pretty checked out. This one guy hates his job so passionately and unabashedly that I actually find it hilarious but that’s not really the type of support that I was initially hoping to get from staff.
- My turtle is STILL at summer camp due to transportation issues and I miss him and want to bring him home.
- I write to my friends and my cousins but I feel like I’m taking up too much of their time. They all have other people who they rely on for support besides me so when I come to them for support, I feel like a charity case. Compounding the problem is the fact that several of these supports are far away, so I rarely get to see them in person.
- I’ve been talking more to siblings, which is both good and bad. I could write a whole book JUST about my relationships with them.
- I can’t complain too much. The above supports are more good than bad, and I do have other outlets. I have day treatment, as I mentioned, and I’m also really hoping to make connections with other non-traditional students when I take classes at the local community college in the fall. Plus, I have an online support group where I can post things like this:
- “One thing I’ve noticed since getting out of a long-term hospitalization a month ago is how desperately lonely I am. In the hospital I knew the staff and felt like I was part of a community in some sense. Now I’m in a critically underfunded group home and all the other residents are here for things other than what brings me here (I’m here for C-PTSD as a result of being in a cult and just having shitty parents generally; they’re here mostly for schizophrenia). I don’t leave my room much because it’s hard to deal with some of the other residents’ symptoms and besides, it smells bad out there. This has left me alone in my room JUST LIKE WHEN I WAS BEING HOMESCHOOLED and it’s triggering af but I don’t have a vehicle so I can’t go scope out social gatherings in the area. I could walk down to the pizza joint but that’s not social AND I don’t have any money anyway. I have a few friends but I feel like I’ve worn most of them out since discharge because I’m constantly complaining about the group home. I don’t know what to do. Do any of you guys know of other online communities for people born or raised in cults? I love this group and have no plans to leave but it can be a bit quiet. I need a way to escape the isolation that is making me depressed and causing me to isolate more.”
3) Community College
I’m looking forward to classes starting in September so I can interact with someone “at eye level.” However, I’m nervous because in the past I have been triggered by working with kids. I want to give it another try because I never was able to give it a fair shot because I had so much going on with my mental health. I do think that I would find it very rewarding if I could get past the trauma of my own childhood.
4) Money
Money is tight. I forgot that absolutely nobody wants tutoring in the summer. Now I have run up over $200 on my credit card and while I haven’t fallen behind on payments or paid interest, I have absolutely NO discretionary spending money available until September 3 which is an unrealistically long time to go without any expenses. Even if I Instacart food in with food stamps, I have to pay the tip and delivery fee. Rideshares cost money if I have to go anywhere and public transportation is scarce. Forget about most forms of self care or taking a walk to a restaurant just to get out of the house and interact with humans.
5) Food availability
The food in the kitchen is unhealthy to begin with and I can’t eat most of it because I have prediabetes. Then the food gets left out for extended periods of time before being put back in the fridge and people handle it with dirty hands. All of this together means that I don’t get much out of the food in the kitchen, so I buy my own food with food stamps but Instacart and rideshares to the grocery store both cost money. The right solution would be to try to coordinate with the staff member who grocery shops here and get her to buy things for me, but it sometimes takes several weeks before she can get to it.
6) Ozempic
There’s been this whole situation where, for reasons that are not my fault, I’ve had to go six weeks without functioning Ozempic and consequently my A1c has skyrocketed. I was in the prediabetic range and now I’m just barely not quite in the full-blown diabetic range. This is all because Ozempic doesn’t work if it has ever been frozen and they kept putting mine in a minifridge that had been set to freezing and it froze and no longer works. They’re claiming that they adjusted the temperature on the minifridge, but they still won’t give me the new Ozempic until the old supply runs out. I get really angry because I need this medication for the sake of my physical health and I don’t like being forced to take medication that has been ruined and no longer does what it’s supposed to do.
7) Depression, lack of productivity
I’ve been having trouble getting myself up and moving lately and my best guess is that I’m depressed from being alone so much.
8) Disgust
Most of my roommates are extremely unhygienic and the common areas are filthy. I spend a lot of time in my room because much of the rest of the house smells bad, depending on who has been hanging out in what area lately. Some people leave a trail of smell behind them.
9) Denial
I WANT to be doing well so badly that for a long time I convinced myself that I was.
10) Questioning Why I’m Here
I honestly don’t see THAT much advantage to being in a group home as opposed to living with roommates. I guess it would have been impossible to find roommates who would want to live with someone fresh from the mental hospital so it is what it is. It’s definitely nice to have the background noise of other living beings but normal roommates would be a huge improvement. Dr. X from my inpatient stay told me that he was concerned that I would at some point impulsively discharge from the group home and I’m hoping not to make that concern a reality. So far, I’m just trusting him that he knew best by sending me here.
11) Trauma History
It really feels hard for me to find peers. The closest I come to feeling like I belong is when I’m with a group of other people who were born or raised in cults, but even then it doesn’t totally feel right because I don’t think my mom ever believed the cult’s doctrine. I feel like other cult survivors’ parents were brainwashed, but in my case my dad was brainwashed by my mom who found a religious group that was convenient for her purposes. She would have found another way to brainwash him if this particular cult had not been available. I guess people who followed a guru could say that their guru must have known that it was all a lie the whole time, too. The biggest problem with groups for second generation cult survivors is that they are, as you can imagine, few and far between. I feel like if I could find social connection with other people with the same diagnosis as me (C-PTSD), that would be helpful and I actually have found some people like that at day treatment. When people have other sorts of issues, I feel like a person with kidney failure at a support group for people with congestive heart failure. When the only bond connecting me to other people is that we all have “mental illness,” it’s harder for me to feel like the people I’m interacting with are genuinely peers. Their issues are no better or worse, just different. It’s actually easier for me to relate to people on the basis of our common humanity than on the basis of us both being “mentally ill.” The only thing that every person with mental illness has in common is that we all face an enormous amount of misunderstanding and stigma. Other than that, it’s an umbrella term that tries to unnaturally put a lot of miscellaneous people into a single category.
12) Book
When I was in the hospital, I was so looking forward to getting out and getting my laptop and writing my book. Since I’ve been out, I’ve been depressed and have made ZERO progress on said book. Instead, it’s hard enough for me to maintain personal hygiene, keep my room clean, and make social connections. Which really frustrates me because it would be incredibly healing if I could make better use of my time and use it writing instead of lying around being depressed.
13) Therapy
One problem with therapy, aside from the fact that I feel too rushed to actually talk about anything important, is that I’m afraid to be too symptomatic. Other therapists have decided that I was too messed up to work with them and they abruptly terminated with me, with no transitional sessions and no referral. My takeaway is that it’s not safe to let a therapist know how bad things really are because they could disappear and then I’m left with NO therapist. But my risk management comes with a cost because I’m so afraid of being left with no therapist that I don’t make full use of the therapist that I have.
14) Greatest Aspiration in Life
People familiar with my blog will know this but my therapist will not: my greatest aspiration in life is to have children. Relatedly, my greatest source of pain in life is that I haven’t had my life together enough to be able to do that yet. The last thing I’m willing to do is have a child while I still haven’t worked out my trauma disorder and dissociation, because that would perpetuate the cycle of dysfunction. What I want more than anything is to break that cycle and become the mother who I always wished my mother could have been. Otherwise, all the therapy and whatever feels like a waste because I was never able to pass what I learned on to anyone.
15) This Blog
I wish my therapist would read this blog, but everything I’ve written up to this point is probably quite lengthy.
16) Continuity of Care
I wish my new therapist could talk to Dr. X from when I was inpatient, and maybe even my social worker from when I was inpatient. The social worker no longer even works for that hospital but I feel like they could communicate my story a lot faster and more efficiently than me, and it’s also easier for mental health professionals to believe other mental health professionals than it is for them to believe me.
Conclusion
So I guess that’s most of what I wish I could communicate to my therapist in a 45 minute session. Whenever I print out something like this and hand it to a therapist, they read the first point and want to spend half the session talking about it. I want them to speed read the whole thing even if it takes the whole session, and if it doesn’t take the whole session, we can go back and cover the most important parts. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.
