Today I reluctantly departed the Great Smoky Mountains...so green and cool and simple...and people with accents that remind of the Blue Ridge, the only place that ever felt like home to me, a little coal town near the West virginia border: a hotel, a garage, a car wash, a dime store and soda fountain)...
We could walk half a mile to the service station for a Cheerwine, ice cold and frosty from the cooler rack. There were benches out front in the shade of some maple trees where old men in loose gray work trousers with suspenders and T-shirts would sit to chaw tobacco or smoke in the bright early mornings or at sunset.
At dusk the neon signs lit up. A few places stayed open, like John's Motel and Restaurant or the little burger stand at the top of a hill two miles northwest of town on the winding road to Bluefield. At dust, we could sit on the porch swing to watch fireflies drift up into the maples and elms, where soft winds sighed as the warm came down upon the hills and valleys.
Some mornings, en route the service station for Cheerwine, my cousin and I would take trail up a steep grade, sit down in the shade of apple trees and survey with pleasure a rare vista...the houses and businesses of the valley, tidy and snug, spread out below us and framed by snow-capped mountains barely visible in the blue mist and clouds of a near distance.
Ah, hell, it's all gone now, the wonder and hope of youth, the rhythms of simple life in a small mountain town. I grew up and learned people can be mean and unforgiving, no one can be trusted, kindness is a precious rare occurrence and one's most implacable enemies and betrayers can be members of the family.
In my child's world, life held surprises, mountain views and iced tea at Britt's Hotel on a sweltering July afternoon, spring water spilling clear and cold out of mountain shale, creeks tumbling over their lichened rocks into still, deep pools in the valley bottoms, cattle browsing the green hills among the salt licks and sheaved hay.
My parents left those pleasant hills and valleys in the early 1940s, intent on upward mobility. The coal towns for them represented the stigma of poverty and want, not simplicity and rustic beauty. They moved to South Carolina meaning to make better, more prosperous life for themselves, eventually, their children.
And so they did, at least for themselves and probably for my brother, who now has a wife, a bright 5-year-old son and a heavy mortgage plus car and insurance payments. My brother achieved relative normality and stability after 30 years tied to our mother's apron strings. I am delighted he was able to escape, and I am often enraged by my own failure to do the same...a failure much complicated by 24 years of entanglement with South Carolina's mental health system.
My cousin who used to take walks with me in an impoverished coal town in the 1950s and 1960s is well-married, well-employed and living in the prosperous environs of Woodbridge, Va. He asks me to visit, to look for opportunities there, but my opportunities have been cut off by circumstances I couldn't even grasp as a child and am only beginning to process clearly as an adult who was emotionally battered by both parents.
At age 47 with a
lengthy psychiatric history that became «snip» I cannot
hope to resume the career I chose for myself. «snip» I am
destitute, unemployed, unable to find support that will allow me to
live in society, residing at a homeless shelter without prospects of
any open doors in my future.
So I wake up shaking with anger some mornings, and I go to sleep each night enraged, battering vainly at this state-created glass prison of discrimination to which I have finally, inescapably been confined by the gods of psychiatry, who punished me with terrible, soul-destroying, personality-changing drugs because I dared to challenge their authority.
I remember being a bright, open, intelligent child with hopes and a vivid imagination. Then I remember being an insecure adolescent and a struggling college student who idealized childhood because remembering the abuses was too painful. The memories finally caught up with me when I stopped taking psychiatric drugs at therapeutic levels and began to examine the dynamics of my family and early childhood experience.
It's all gone now, the sense of adventure, anticipating a future, sitting in a porch swing delighted by the blink-blink of lightning bugs in the deep June dusk and feeling everything would turn out O.K., wondering what further adventures and delights, what other respites from strife and emotional assault, life might have in store.
When I was 20, life became a nightmare of being held down and cuffed in leather restraints because I cried and pleaded to be put to sleep, a welterworld of mental wards and drugs that made me nauseous, made me piss, made me tremble and shake, made me hallucinate, made me stutter and stammer and drool. Life became a barrage of cursory mental evaluations, subjective judgments by unctuous and bored authorities who required me to play ping pong in bleary dayrooms as a condition for being released from their tyrannical control. Life became a systemic assault on my personality, my choices, my rights, my privacy, my credibility, my perception of reality, my insights, my thoughts, my gestures, my intellectual pursuits, my career goals, my hopes, my desires, my potential for leadership, my personal interests, my successes and my faults.
Only in retrospect did it occur to me that I am as normal as anyone except for a stress-related sleep disorder easily prevented by a mild tranquilizer without dire side effects. Only in retrospect did I come to understand that my mother, who is regarded by others as a saint putting up with a defective daughter, has used the mental health system's depredations to keep me helpless, disempowered and dependent on her for material sustenance. My getting access to Limbitrol after 14 years of struggle scared her because she knew the preventive would entail a reduction of her power to have me incarcerated, her means of gaining for herself the attention and sympathy of family and friends. While she had power to sign away entire chunks of my life, she enjoyed watching me reduced to the status of a social leper, shut out of life's mainstream, stigmatized and outcast. The more socially isolated I was forced to be, the more control she was able to exert in the forms of shelter, food, money and emotional domination.
What sort of mother would exult in cooperating with a dehumanizing system to isolate, disempower and denigrate her own daughter?
We cling to our illusions, but after 47 years of her domination and control, I am able to say she is twisted and has been so for many years, although her friends and other family members have not surrendered the illusions she built up for us all over time.
She has always been insecure, without a sense of adventure, without capacity for joy, without spontaneity or a center of identity of her own. And she has been envious of me...first of my relationship with my father, which lasted the first seven years of my life, until the birth of my brother, the son my father wanted.
Although my father was dead to me for all practical purposes when my brother arrived, the seeds of jealousy were planted early, and my mother continued in a subtle, devious program to make me feel inadequate, incompetent and inferior in every possible way, issuing streams of abuse, criticism instead of praise, judgments instead of encouragement, doubts instead of confidence. Because she was powerless and insecure, she needed to practice this insidious emotional battering on an innocent child to make herself feel superior, capable and in control. It was so insidious, so subtle, she disguised it from all observers...and from me, too, until I realized scathing abuse, absolute moral judgments, continuous sabotage of a person's confidence, emotional extortion and high-handed domination combined with arbitrary expectations and punishments are not normal or acceptable. They are abuse, and they must be recognized as such before the human mind can grapple with their occurrences or their consequences.
And because she was mother I clung to my illusions until I was 44, always making excuses for her, always trying to understand her point of view, always trying to tolerate her and perceive her as an ally although she was my worst enemy. Finally I woke up to realization that she devoted her life before my father died to denigrating me with emotional battery and after he died to keeping both her children emotionally and materially dependent on her.
She feared being alone. She feared my brother and I would abandon her completely if we made lives of our own apart from her direct and immediate influence. So she aided the psychiatrists who pronounced me mentally ill because I could not sleep. She signed my life away to mental hospitals 10 times. She never asked a question, issued a challenge or make any effort to help me obtain access to what I needed, although she has known since 1984 about the preventive that would have enabled me to escape the clutches of the system and become emotionally and materially independent of her, as well.
My life has essentially been made 1) a disease imposed by psychiatrists who were threatened by my noncompliance with coercions and debilitating treatments and 2) a sacrifice to my mother's emptiness, her insecurity and lack of a central identity, her fear of change and growth and her need to gain approval by exhibiting caretaking behavior.
All her inconsistencies, instabilities and abuses - even her envy - are attributable to a childhood in which she was deprived of positive attention from her own parents and of social status, too, for she came from extreme poverty and learned early to ascribe more value to things than to people and relationships. Watching me become financially desperate and socially isolated became my mother's assurance that was superior to me, able to gain approval for her caretaking abilities and in control of her environment and circumstances.
How could she have been otherwise? She was the oldest daughter in a family of 12 children, two of whom died before outgrowing toddlerhood. She received no encouragement and little praise from her overburdened mother, and only abusive jibes from her emotionally stunted father. So she learned early that life is a competition for attention and that positive attention came only when she assumed the role of caretaker for her brothers and sisters. She ensured continued positive attention for herself as a wife and mother by infantilizing her children and keeping them dependent while appearing in public to be a generous, self-sacrificing martyr with a defective daughter and an ungrateful son.
My brother, unhindered by a psychiatric history and the social consequences of two decades of system and familial abuse, made his getaway when he was 30, leaving our mother's house and marrying in secret because he was determined to make his own life apart from mother and to do it without enduring a barrage of carping, complaining and counterarguments from same.
Other family members reject the truth about her because they have built up their own illusions over the years, preventing all of us from dealing with pertinent realities. As a result, I have become the scapegoat for my mother's arrested growth and development.
She has perceived our relationship as a competition for attention and approval. She has perceived my success in every endeavor as a threat to her shaky sense of self, and her envy of my education, my strength and my pleasant friendliness has motivated her to work with mental health authorities who punished me with harsh drugs and many imprisonments for refusing to submit to the mental illness label or to the learned helplessness imposed on victims of coercive psychiatry.
The mental health system with its "blame the victim" mentality and spurious scientific knowledge about human behavior does society a huge disservice by focusing attention on the scapegoats of dysfunctional families. According to the medical or disease model adopted by mainstream psychiatry, problems in living and distorted family dynamics are actually brain diseases originating in the genetic and neurochemical constitutions of people who fall into the mental health system's clutches.
*****Research suggesting that 50 percent of people who get enmeshed in the system were subjected to early severe physical and sexual abuse is discounted as an explanation for the traumas that inexplicably manifest in the teenage years or early adulthoods of mental patients. So human beings experiencing normal responses to abnormal circumstances are labeled mentally ill and shut away from society while their abusers continue to live free lives unimpeded by social stigma, discrimination or exclusion from the mainstream of life.*****
It is not unreasonable to postulate that if 50 percent of mental ward inmates are sexual and physical assault victims, another 50 percent are victims of familial emotional abuse and overcontrol, ****which leaves no abrasions, lesions, bruises or physical scars but manifests in various forms of emotional crisis, including what psychiatrists call "psychotic breaks."
Children exposed to emotional or physical abuse early have no adequate mechanism for understand what is happening to them. Their brains are still developing and are not completely grown until they are around 7. So they have no way to process the family dynamics, which they internalize and turn on themselves or society as they mature with the spectres of crazy-making strife and hideous violent outbreaks half-hidden in the shadows of their consciousnesses. Trauma takes its toll as memories start returning, as understandings begin to dawn, as concealed truths emerge from the shadows with a frightening clarity.
The clarity may come in glimpses, resulting in activation of defense mechanisms or replays of the original trauma...voices that say bad things, the internalized tapes of a childhood filled with shouting, screeching, imprecations, accusations and harsh unmerited judgments. Or voices may say good things that give the victim a sense of being important and significant, a way of compensating for all the early negative stimulus and inventing an imaginary friend who becomes real to the hearer or experiencer. The glimpses, pleasant or unpleasant, are not illnesses but signals of an emerging awareness, a readiness to process the family dynamics that warped the delicate of a child's self-esteem. Or the defense mechanism may even be formation of alternate personalities at varying stages of development to buffer the reality of depraved abuses visited upon an innocent child in the most impressionable stages of growth.
These are not diseases. These are consequences of gross abuses perpetrated by the very people children are taught to trust and rely upon for emotional and spiritual support...their parents, the first representations of godlike authority in their precious lives.
Thus, society's walking wounded are not only blamed for their own understandable if behaviorally odd responses to the emotional and physical climates to which they were subjected as children, they are also persecuted by the mental health system for their differences, assaulted again with dehumanizing judgments, dominations, violations of their physical being and encroachments upon their emotional fragilities and rendered expressionless by drugs, promiscuously administered, commonly used to tranquilize livestock in slaughterhouses.
Mainstream psychiatry then claims that sequestering, over drugging, restraining, isolating and stigmatizing individuals in crisis is legitimate therapy for "diseases" originating in the matrix of a brutally inhumane human condition. The brutal mistreatments "consumers" experience at the hands of controlling families is ignored, as are other social factors contributing to emotional crises and problems in living. The "clients" are blamed for circumstances beyond their control...and often beyond their immediate grasp: for being born into dysfunctional families, for being emotionally battered or parked and neglected by self-absorbed mothers, for responding later in life with confusion and grief psychiatrists label mental illness.
The true mentally ill are the perpetrators who go free, unexamined, unremarked and largely undetected in society...the mothers who hammer at the self-esteem of their daughters, the fathers who molest children while wives look the other way and pretend what is happening is not happening, the brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles who say and do nothing about the abuses to protect a "family image" grounded in acceptance of denigration and battering, strife and violence, envies and screechings and insults and hurled accusations and arbitrary punishments and even gender discrimination as "normal."
So psychiatry's medical model places blame squarely on the victims of a social nightmare of abuse and sick patriarchal views about female subjection to male authority, distracting needed attention from the family dynamics, rife with control and power issues, that harm and disempower the individuals said to be mentally ill.
In this way, the perpetrators of child abuse are absolved and declared normal while the victims bear the brunt of blame for what was done to them - early and late - without their consent, their complicity, their understanding or their cooperation.
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