Depression and what it's really like

I know this is crazy, but the people in my family are ridiculously smart and inventive, and are sadistic psychopaths. My mom, who was one of the main engineers here, graduated high school and went to college when she was 14. She was like a former child prodigy or something.

These people treated abusing me like a fun hobby ever since I was a little kid. "Secrets and Lies" they call it through their blood soaked teeth.

There's literally nothing out there designed for this, because it's a new design. I've had to do this on my own, and I'm so fucking close to it, it's just the pain. And the magnitude of it.

The magnitude of realizing you've been living in a fake reality your whole life, a reality that was designed to get you killed, a reality that got me kidnapped, tortured, and almost murdered! And they just laughed in my face, and my brother brought my kidnapper home and he got rewarded for it.

And I got molested, and my brother convinced everyone in high school I was gay, and had to spend my entire high school career with everyone convinced I was gay, and that was compounded by all these intricate details that connects into this complex, brilliantly-engineered act of abuse done to me.

If A fails, B kicks in, and if that fails, C kicks in, and if C succeeds it connects to A and B, and it goes all the way to Z, each piece interlocking and supporting the other pieces, and if some fail, others kick in to support it. It's really hard to describe; I've had to write about 1,000 pages of journal entries to suss out the complexities of this.

I'm only here saying this now because of what I did to survive. I was like my mom, but with a conscience, and I had to wage my own counter campaign against them. Like I taught myself how to read, trained myself in Franciscan Catholic ethics and compassion for about 6 or 7 years to mitigate their influence on me. And so much more.

There are no therapists out there who have any fucking clue about this shit. Being born to my family is a fate worse than death, unless you end up like a psychopath like one of them, which is really common. That condition has to have a genetic component.

I'm not sure there is a real solution that doesn't involve some nebulous sense of coming to terms with yrself but as far as that's concerned I wish you well dude

Thanks. That's what I'm doing now, and that's the hardest part of it all. Throwing out your entire history of memories and emotions, your whole concept of yourself, your behaviors, attitudes, and ideas, realizing they were all some malicious act from your only family, and rebuilding yourself from scratch.

It's not all bad, because I did develop my own life in secret, and that's the one I'm going with (secret here, me being heterosexual and masculine, interested in music and art, all the things I like, etc). If you ever wanted the Rosetta Stone to burt_stanton's hilarity, this is it.

The immensity of this, though, is impossible to describe. It's like ... no words can describe it.

Reminds me of a scene from Caligula 2: The Real Story where the poet whose a witness to Caligula's atrocities gets his tongue ripped out and his fingers removed so he can never communicate his own experiences of it.

I have thoughts about this - not necessarily positive ones - but I' m in the pub and I'll try and churn them out later

I mean, I get the contradiction in this “I wish I had more anxiety” contradiction with also recognizing something like General Anxiety Disorder could be the case. Anxiety, especially the general kind, is a churning monster you feed with new worries or, barring anything wrong in life right now, dwelling on the smallest details or something that happened years ago. PTSD is definitely an enabler for the latter category, since anything could pop something from the past into your mind and send you back into that churn.

I don’t think the self-diagosis is a good plan, although yeah, both ADHD medication and anti-anxiety medication can be prescribed for GAD, which (and I think I’m remembering this correctly) can be very obsessive-compulsive in nature. I’m an anxious guy, and I honestly have read some of your cynical posts as the sort of lashing out I was more prone to in years past. (Pure O, I think, is the OCD that manifests more in a focused obsessive thought that’s not acted out in behaviors). This is where someone who understands these things, like a therapist, can be really useful because they can give you a framework for understanding why and how you’re locking into these thought patterns, and can help differentiate between these types of diagnosis. We’re just people on ilx, we don’t have the ability to talk through these things in depth, even if it seems like it.

The idea that a coworker would think you’re “going with the flow” also lines up with my experiences — I seemed very laid back to some people, but it was because I was anxious every moment of the day. That kind of distant look in my eye wasn’t me just being chill with the current situation, it was my mind going a million directions and not being able to relate to things as just “stuff that’s going on” but as some sort of input to this churn that’d be recycled into a false narrative in my mind later. And I’d have conversations that made no sense to others, because I’d say something, hear what they said, and assume they were speaking from one of the handful of reactions to what I’d said... that I’d already walked through in my head.

It can be better, I swear. But sometimes the self-guided thing, especially if it’s “making yourself a better person,” is working from a false premise. Because you’re just feeding that new information into a faulty processing mechanism in your head. It takes someone else who understands the tools, whether it’s structured therapy, medication, a combination of both, to help you rewire your ability to self-evaluate.

The thought that no one else is going to get it is also one of those narratives people tell themselves, especially if they’ve been around people (read: family) that screwed up your idea about what normal is. My parents were loving, nurturing people and functional in their own lives, so it took years for it to occur to me that not everyone impulsively checks the locks twice before leaving the office, or being anxious about work to the point where you puke every morning when you get out of bed are things that aren’t just a thing that people do. But those are the kind of things that I saw, and it was just the way things were.

I agree with what k3vin k said upthread.

Also, it sounds like you're saying that much of your historical issue with therapists/doctors is that they either didn't believe you when you told them the horrible the things you've been through ... or ... that you actually didn't tell them these awful things. I can't see how under these circumstances that the relationship would have worked out very well.

cosign

it reminds me of the sub-plot in Mr. Robot with Elliot and his therapist.

If A fails, B kicks in, and if that fails, C kicks in, and if C succeeds it connects to A and B, and it goes all the way to Z, each piece interlocking and supporting the other pieces, and if some fail, others kick in to support it. It's really hard to describe; I've had to write about 1,000 pages of journal entries to suss out the complexities of this.

fwiw this is the churn I’m talking about, the idea there’s a mathematics or grand narrative to things, that you have to make the pieces fit and figure things out

all of these things affected you, and are things no one should have to live through, but that’s what therapy gives you: this is some shit that happened. when your mind locks in on one thing, you don’t solve it by moving on to thinking about the other horrible thing, you get the framework to just stop and dismiss all this shit and concentrate on the now

the hardest part of all of this, is that there's (usually) a brain chemical aspect to the dysfunction as well as a cognitive behavioral one. And you have to fight on both fronts. If you just do one, and not the other, you (at least me) don't end up getting much "better"

Thanks for the words and advice, everyone.

I grew up in a family filled with people like Macaulay Culkin's character in The Good Son. And they're all really smart, and work together,

For example, my older brother raped somebody in high school, and chuckled about it. My other brother helped smear the woman he raped by spreading a rumor that she raped him; he also spread another rumor that a guy who had just graduated also got raped by a woman in college, thereby making the scenario seem normal. It worked, the rumors stuck, and my brother got out of it with his reputation untarnished. The rumor spreading brother's the one who convinced everyone I was gay, naturally.

fwiw this is the churn I’m talking about, the idea there’s a mathematics or grand narrative to things, that you have to make the pieces fit and figure things out

The churning I'm talking about is something different. I'll give you an example. When I was in 3rd grade someone broke into our classroom, stole our daily journals, and also opened up a package of cookies the teacher had and took a whole bunch of them. Throughout the entire day the teacher kept repeating, "he took the cookies!" and she'd hold up the opened package. She just couldn't wrap her head around it.

As I've been figuring this out, I realized it was probably my dad who did that. I used those journals to threaten them about the things they were doing to me. Also, stealing cookies while doing that is totally a signature dad move. A few years ago he told me this story about how he trapped a co-worker in a closet at work over the weekend, got kicked out of the union, and went to prison for it. And he told that story with a twinkle in his eye, like it was one of his best memories ever! 20 years later, he still thinks that's hilarious.

Ya know? One part of the churning is me trying to wrap my head around this, just like my teacher with the cookies. It's just impossible for me to get on the level of how these people think and act, to try and understand how these things could possibly be. My parents, through underhanded means, ended up getting me kidnapped and almost murdered, and they chuckled in my face, my mom told me to hang out with them again, and my brother brings the guy who kidnapped me into the house a few months later!

Then they used the trauma for that as a tool to do all sorts of really creative types of abuse to me. And since they isolated me in a complex set of ways (causing trauma, exacerbating trauma, using that trauma as developmental weapon, setting me up with "friends" who tortured me, giving me really bad advice, convincing everyone I was gay so I couldn't have a normal social life...)

And on and on and on. The churning is both the complexity of what they did, the unthinkable ways they behave, act and think, and the next level is their coordinated con artistry. They have fake personas they use to get by in the world: fun, funny, charming, I have everything in common with you, humanitarians, etc. Despite the fact that they think raping people is awesome.

Growing up, people would tell me how lucky I was to have such an awesome and loving family, and I was always like, "!?!!?"

I grew up in a very, very demented world, and I'm still trying to figure it out.

The issue with the therapists is that 1) because of my upbringing, I chose really scary therapists, 2) the sheer complexity and mind-bending nature of this stuff makes it really hard for me to function at all, let alone communicate it, because it's taken about 1,000 pages of journal entries to cover the basics of it, and 3) when I tried again and shared my story, most of them said they couldn't help me. It'd take a few months to just lay the groundwork for treatment.

I grew up with people who treated me as their little torture pet, playing a game with my life they amusingly call "Secrets and Lies" (from an obscure Simpsons episode, they're really funny people). Their favorite thing is psychological abuse, basically driving people insane or getting them hurt through underhanded means. My girlfriend in college dropped out of her PhD program and ended up in a mental hospital because of my mom; she got preyed on, and before we broke up, my girlfriend said, "I think your mom's fucking me up." Oh yeah. This is the same mom who dragged a tree onto the highway to watch cars crash into it.

So yeah. I have no idea how I made it out of that. I have no idea how I survived. But I didn't survive well, and I'm about to not survive for good this time. My life's a disaster. I can't afford therapy, I have to find a new job, fast, and I'm in royally shit condition to do it. After I graduated from law school they reappeared and tortured the living shit out of me, and they were able to do it because my brother's "change of heart" was a years-long scam that I fell for. "HUHUUHUHUH you thought we were bonding?" when the curtain dropped. Years of acting like a changed person. What a piece of shit. Yup. That's what they're like.

I think they finally did it this time.

Woah, that was way longer than I thought it'd be.

get some help, man

you can figure out the causes and course of recovery later, but your recent posts sound a lot like the equivalent of someone with heart disease saying “I am having a heart attack, right now”

there are people to help those people figure out if they need more medical intervention, set up healthier ways of living, and regular check-ups. but a mental health crisis can be just as bad for your health as a heart attack. feel like we’re standing around asking if you ate some donuts lately while you’re falling over

Damn. My friends who have totally cut ties with their families (I have a bunch of them, where I live is one of those places people go to get away from shitty families) -- have really sad, awful stories involving physical abuse, sexual abuse, drug use, intolerant religious backgrounds ... but this really takes the cake!

Is your feeling that "this is the end" mostly an emotional one, or is it mainly due to logistical circumstances (money, housing, etc.)?

I'll get some help when I'm in the position. The biggest barrier, beyond money, is being able to communicate it properly. It's like trying to communicate the contents of a dictionary in a single word, but in some weird 4 dimensional way. Even thinking about it is making my eyes daze over, it's almost Zen like.

My main issue in feeling hopeless is logistical. I'm working for an awful company right now; got tricked into taking a marketing job for a failing product, so it's not stable at all, and the work I'm doing is total dogshit stuff I can't even use in my portfolio. I'm not even getting paid enough to eat. I'm holding onto a rope that's about to break.

So I have to find a new, better paying job fast, and I haven't had a full-time one in a year and a half, and I'm in bad health. I've got no support or family out here.

This really feels like it's it this time.

Ya know? They finally got me.

Like, how the hell am I going to do this? If I become homeless, then I'm going to kill myself, because I just don't have it in me to deal with that. And I'll become a sitting duck for predators due to my uprbinging.

I did my best, and I made it way further than I should have. Even though my life's been a pile of shit, I fought a good fight.

I'm probably going to have to do my patented crazy bullshit again, aren't I. I'm sick of this fucking shit.

Anyway, I'm done thread sitting about this. Thanks everyone for listening to my way out there issues and giving advice.

Please don't kill yourself is all I can say right now

I'm not going to kill myself now. I'm going to try and pull my shit together and find a new job. If I can't do that, and I lose this job, then I'm going to do it. But that hasn't happened yet.

Man, most people in my situation would've done it long ago. My will to survive is too strong for whatever reason, so it's not going to happen until I've finally lost it all. I'm holding on for dear life, and I hope to god I can pull this off.

i have faith in you man

c_k, where do you live? Surely there is a facility nearby that can provide some sort of intensive outpatient, or maybe even inpatient (I know this is probably not preferred), services. If properly diagnosed, you may qualify for some sort of government funded financial assistance. I know all that takes a lot of time, but it's worth looking into. You said you've been to law school, so you obviously are qualified enough to find decent work.

I know when you're feeling as defeated as you are right now, putting yourself out there in such ways that those actions require is next to impossible. That's why I would really see about getting into some sort of program or facility that could at least get a preliminary diagnosis in the works and start seeing if you could have any positive interactions with some sort of medication. It won't solve your problems instantly, or maybe ever, but it will possibly put them into a more manageable perspective.

________________________________________________________
As for me, the last few days have brought with them some really intense migraines and equally as intense episodes of psychosis. With money dwindling down to nothing very quickly, I've been cancelling my doctor appointments for the past three months, in favor of using that money towards groceries and gas. After I realized I was having an unspoken conflict with a person in line at Starbucks who was not actually there, I decided to ask my mother for some money so I could afford the co-pay and whatever possible new/different meds would be prescribed. Luckily, she did not ask any detailed questions, so I was able to get in to see my doc yesterday. I told her everything that had been going on and she had some productive feedback and reassurance, in addition to a change in meds (back up to maximum dosage on quetiapine).

Other stuff happened and I may be returning to work fairly soon, actually. This has made me really nervous and fearful, compounding my already unstable state. It's best to just play music during these times, I've found. Not quite sure why this is so, but whenever my brain is really going haywire, I seem to become really productive musically. I mean, I guess I should say that I feel really proud of what I play during these times. And it gets me distracted for at least a little while. Here is the fruit of this afternoon's labor.

c_k, where do you live? Surely there is a facility nearby that can provide some sort of intensive outpatient, or maybe even inpatient (I know this is probably not preferred), services. If properly diagnosed, you may qualify for some sort of government funded financial assistance. I know all that takes a lot of time, but it's worth looking into. You said you've been to law school, so you obviously are qualified enough to find decent work.

If they can provide it for free, I'm all for it. But I can't do that right now: 100% of my time needs to be spent looking for work, because the owner's talking about shutting down this product (which he told me was doing great when I took the job), and if that happens, I'm living in a dumpster, which would be better than a shelter.

I don't have the luxury of any net underneath me, nor any family or friends out there to help. This is all me, 100% completely alone. A month is too long to wait in this situation.

Anyway, back to regularly scheduled programming.

i have faith in you man

― Week of Wonders (Ross), Saturday, August 26, 2017 11:06 PM (nineteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh yeah, and thanks for this. I'm not giving up without a fight.

:-)

I had an outraged phone call from a self righteous sibling of my partner earlier, moaning that I didn't call them immediately, when she tried to top herself last week. These same people that never give gave much of a fuck about visiting her when she was diagnosed with MS. nor visited her when she had a very problematic premature birth 15 years ago. Or have never given a 2nd thought about not inviting our "embarrassing" ASC kid to any family events. Not that I've ever given a flying fuck myself, tbh. But I know enough to know that when you are already at a very low ebb, the last thing you need is hypocritical arsehole family with fake concern and judgemental eyes, to deliver a coup de grace death blow to your already shattered confidence.

Fuck em

seconded

maybe they feel guilty and want to apologize?

for what is worth, Andrea said I would have been in the doghouse if I'd have told her family without consulting her. I can completely understand it as well.

Sounds like they're more pissed off about missing out on gossip/being the first to know, than being actually concerned.

Xps If they felt guilty or wanted to apologize they wouldn't have called with a tone of outrage or self righteousness.

Sounds like they're more pissed off about missing out on gossip/being the first to know, than being actually concerned.

Usually the case with these types. The reckless malice with which these people operate knows no bounds. Sorry to pass judgement on complete strangers, but that kind of behavior has done enough damage to me in my life and it's completely harmful to everyone involved.

you owe them nothing. i tend to give out asshole passes very liberally in situations like the one you're facing, but it sounds like they used up theirs long ago.

feeling pretty hopeless at the moment. Last time I was genuinely happy was 3 years ago, and that was for one day. Miss my ex partner who is still my friend, which is probably doing more harm than good. Family loves me, especially the nephews who are so loving. Friends love me, doesn't matter much when you're wracked with depression though. I don't love myself

we love you, Ross

that means a lot, right back at ya as well.

co-sign

you too veg :)

Family loves me, especially the nephews who are so loving. Friends love me, doesn't matter much when you're wracked with depression though. I don't love myself

otm

I have been dishonest with nearly everyone I know. And if people don't understand who I really am, it is mainly because I didn't present myself honestly. It's been that way since my first memory. I have been lying my entire life and mad at the world for not being able to see through it

God help us all. No one deserves it. It's so painful to read this thread. Why do these things happen to good people, not even good people, ehy do these things happen to anyone? Hardly anyone deserves it.

I have these real moments of clarity where i just want to throw it all up in the air, I'm already most of the way there already. But I think, oh it's 2 am and I'm very drunk. I shouldn't do that. Wait until morning and see if it's still a great idea. And of course it isn't in the morning. But then the whole day passes in one long big fat sack of nothing, absolutely nothing, and weeks and months and entire DECADES in the same way. God, you have to do something. It can't just keep happening this way all the way up to the end. Put aside the absurdity of contemporary life and the opposite of meaning, when you walk in the woods and you're totally alone, are you on with yourself? Because I used to be, and I remember tracing the paths of the electrical lines and wandering into someone else's property, and then hearing a gunshot and being too naive to realize it was intended to scare me off. But I headed back home like a frightened deer. Who the fuck fires a warning shot at a person in the woods?

You guys are fundamentally good and very real people. Lots of others feel similar but just crush it down into a dead spot at their core, which is basically wasting life. And Ross, even if you don't feel it, these people who love you are not wrong, and nobody is making them do it, so you just have to accept that you're worth that much, and grit it out until you begin to feel it for yourself again.
Ugh so trite, but you guys are pushing some heavy rocks here and it makes me wish I could help.

Xp: a special kind of someone

you're so right about that helpless sludgy drift of time, irrecoverably wasted, tho part of me is sure that it's just bad perspective, the dark glasses of depression showing us our world in the worst way. sometimes tho it's your only perspective, and even when I want to tell myself it's distorted I wonder how much of depression, especially as you get older, is justified regret, genuine failure and wrong paths taken.

But still - there's some tiny possibility in there I think, something in the woods and power lines and other people's property, some narrow existential wriggle room to go forward into. Nothing as grand as potential but I guess just enough reason to keep trying to find a connection to the cosmos, or my own space in it.

But that's just me, on a grey Tuesday morning, sad and slightly anxious but just about feeling like I could, maybe, keep going

Does anyone here know anything about coping with hypomania? I'm revved up in ways I haven't been in ages, and I don't know what to do about it.

Diana, I had some very similar symptoms some years ago after my issues first started to materialize. I was put on fluoxetine (prozac) and alprazolam (xanax) with pretty decent results, but that went by the wayside when I ended up in hospital a second time. It was good at calming me down without making me totally zonked out.

I've been on fluoxetine for ages. I was talking with my doctors about phasing off, but then I went through all sorts of stress with my mother. Plus my gynecologist said that Prozac seems to help women in perimenopause and menopause.

One element is that suddenly I've come back to life sexually, after being dead inside for ages. It might be frightening if it wasn't so annoying. Apart from everything else, there's no one in my life and I've forgotten how to meet people.