I've spent a whole year coming to terms with this. And 2023 I've been even more consumed by my own impotent anger and sadness. I was lied to about so many things by my mother. The baseline for me according to her was that I was useless, I had 'problems' and her fear and insecurities meant she tried to control everything in my life. Even as recently as 2019 she was trying to steal the spare keys to my sharehouse twice, presuming I wasn't able to live alone.
I didn't move out, I fled while she was interstate. Got my friends to get a ute and packed everything and bailed. Had to sleep on a mattress I found in the street cause I couldn't bring my bedding.
I used to trust Mum implicitly, she demanded absolute authority growing up. I thought Mum always knew right. And now at 32 I find what I thought were a few missteps with the keys... it's that Mum literally didn't treat me like a person. At every turn I was just a thing she could control. I was never explained anything. Never shown how to function. Whether something was the truth or a lie didn't matter. If she thought it best for me that was all I was told. My whole life I was controlled by someone who fundamentally didn't care.
I was diagnosed as possibly autistic in grade 3. Mum 'disagreed' and took me elsewhere, to a psychiatrist who told her everything I said in sessions. I stopped opening up very quickly and instead distracted him talking about movies. I had a breakdown in school from a whole grade bullying me for what was clearly looking back autistic traits. But that was never mentioned. Instead, after the breakdown I was diagnosed bipolar 1 and given medication for that. Emotionally numbing medication. I was given medication that furthered what my mother wanted, someone with no thoughts of their own, no emotions. The behavioural issues I was having at home stopped, the psychiatrist solved them all right. If I have no feeling at all, what is there to act out about? I just accepted all the bullying at school, all the neglect at home.
I was so uncomfortable with my psychiatrist (he was a narcissist and had no business being in psychiatry, I remember saying to him once terrified "I'm afraid of being happy, in case I'm manic, and I'm afraid of being sad, in case I'm morbidly depressed" and he laughed in my face like I'd told a great joke, truly a scary bloke) that I tried to stop seeing him as a teenager. I was told by my mother that instead of bulk billing our sessions he would charge me directly for any sessions, a teen in school with no income. I had no choice but to keep seeing him. I saw him for another 10 years until I was 30.
Only now am I putting the story of all this together. 15 years later. I was lied to, by him, by my mother. It was just easier to give me some pills and have me shut up than actually confront any problems. I stopped seeing him in 2021, and with that my bipolar medication stopped cause doctors won't prescribe without the psychiatrist. It's been over a year. My therapist had me do a mood diary and there was no change. If I were bipolar 1, I would've been in mania within a month, maybe psychotic, and in hospital. Over a year and there's been nothing, not even a mood change. I feel more in touch with myself, like I've been asleep for a decade and only now figuring myself out. The sad realisation is I never had bipolar, it was an easy diagnosis to throw out instead of asking why I was misbehaving and emotional, and was made plausible by my school breakdown from stress.
I used to think I had some ridiculously lucky run as a bipolar 1 guy with no manic episodes since diagnosis, in fact no abnormal mood fluctuations at all. Now I've found out that it was all bullshit. Simple lies to give my mother an alternative to a possible autism diagnosis she felt deeply insecure about.
Bipolar disorder is sorta core to a person once diagnosed. Finding out I don't have it...in fact I have the opposite, Alexithymia from years of being socially constipated both in how I'm treated and literally by emotionally numbing medication. I don't know who I even am anymore. My therapist just listens to these stories in shock. What advice is there to give someone who was neglected and lied to by his family and medical professionals to placate his controlling mother?
Whole thing is just a mess.
All I'm left with is a few answers. I don't have bipolar. I have autism level one. My mother was deeply controlling and emotionally neglectful. My discomfort over my psychiatrist growing up was well founded. I didn't get any of the help especially mentally that I needed. I took medication for like 15 years that was pointless and only made me feel emotionally numb.
I guess the worst thing is I can't confront my mother over this. She'd just deny it, or be so unaware of her own issues that she couldn't see where she went wrong in her deep control of pretty much everything about me. Her decisions done not by logic but by an overriding fear and insecurity over (I suspect) her own unresolved question about whether she herself has autism, and her horrible upbringing at the hands of tyrant grandma.
My therapist has given me homework for my diagnosed PTSD from all this. We're starting on what she calls cognitive processing therapy. I have to write on how I feel about these topics --
Trust
Safety
Power or control
Esteem or self-esteem
Intimacy
I just don't know what to say. On trust I could write a novel about being controlled, and lies of omission, by those closest. The rest though? I don't even know who I am anymore, let alone how I feel about the big questions.
I asked her if I could write nothing. She said however you respond is acceptable. So I guess she'll get a bit on trust then a bunch of empty pages next session.
Frumpleton 🦛
Neo