**TW for quite a lot of stuff actually...nothing descriptive**
I saw my pdoc today for the third time. I left the office with some anger I didn't enter with. That anger met up with some repressed anger that I had been holding on to and my heads been having a party. Said the pdoc, “I want you to talk to your T, whenever you feel comfortable, about your abuse from your mother. You won't get better till you do.” My immediate thought can't be printed. Either can the second or third. Then anger.
First of all, what on earth am I even doing in a psychiatrists office anyway? I know, I know, everyone needs help sometime. Right. Except me. I am way too smart and aware for this. Yes, I know I just insulted anyone who has ever been to therapy. I'm sorry, I truly am. I don't think any less of anyone going to a therapist or a pdoc. I brought my daughter when she was having problems that I thought could better be handled by an outside party. In fact, I've even promoted mental health check-ups – we go for physical stuff to make sure everything is in working order. Why not mental health? But not me. No, I have hacked my own brain thank you very much.
I am Superman and Buddha all wrapped up in one supremely capable man. IQ of 172, member of Mensa, polylingual speaking five languages, degrees in mathematics and physics, author of two books, recovered addict with twenty-three years clean this month. Decorated combat veteran and abuse survivor. I stood by my wife and supported her through twenty-four years in prison, driving 1400 miles to visit her every week. I am the unshakeable one. I was. Apparently I died.
I fell into depression without realizing it. I can accept that. It mimics this disease I came down with so I dismissed the early signs of depression as elements of my disease, or something not diagnosed yet, or medication side effects, or... and it snuck up on me. Didn't recognize it until the hallucinations kicked in. Then I sought help. I'm not getting it.
I've been through a bit in life. Physically, emotionally and sexually abused as a child by my mother. Fractured my psyche and undiagnosed DID. Sexually abused by the headmaster at a religious school, and a neighbor. Bullied unmercifully throughout school; physically assaulted every day. Drugs, alcohol and three treatment centers before I was thirteen years old. Then the military. Nine months held in the former Soviet Union as an enemy of the state. The former Soviet Union was not pleasant to those it considered its enemies. I'll bear those physical scars forever. But not the mental ones. I fixed those.
I put down the drugs; a $3000/day habit. I found and apologized to my alters and made friends. We became a team, best I'd ever seen. Together we could do anything – and we did. We went back in time, they shared our memories and we looked at them together, examined the past. Forgave myself for everything that I unfairly blamed myself for. Learned to hate 'them' instead of me. Then I learned how to separate them from their deeds and found forgiveness for them. I practiced meditation until I could look at the past from a safe place and put the sporadic and sparse memories of those nine months being tortured and living in a cage back into some sort of order. And I did it.
Life was hard, but good. I was content and had found peace. My wife was in prison – hence the hard part, but the love was easy. And then 2007 came. She was raped by a guard. He represented himself so he got to interrogate her while she sat on the witness stand in handcuffs before her rapist. They wouldn't let me be there for security reasons. The camera that would have incriminated him – wasn't recording that day. All the evidence disappeared. I had to get my rapists permission to see my wife every week. I especially liked when he asked me, “So, how do you think you'll be able to satisfy your wife when she comes home, now that she's had a real man?”
People talk tough. They think they're tougher than they are. He probably didn't think I could kill him. But I was Force Recon and part of one of the baddest group of warriors on the planet...and how I react in the seconds after his comment determines whether I'll ever see my wife again. I am all about peace and love, but I can't not respond. I have to rip his head from his body. I don't know how not to. And then I bow my head and go through the door to see her one more time.
Later that day, I have my first heart attack.
The year passed into 2008 and my daughter came to me. My best friend (not including my wife) has sexually assaulted her. She's eighteen and I've already agreed to let it alone before she told me. It is her choice to press charges or not – and she just got choice ripped from her in the most brutal way possible. He's got to die right? This is my baby girl. I can't not kill him, right? She needs me. My wife needs me. I bow my head.
Later that day, I have my second heart attack.
January 2009, a Supreme Court Justice in the state my wife is in says, on the record and about my wife by name, “If we knew then, what we know now, that young lady wouldn't have done a day in prison. Five months till a parole hearing. It's been twenty-two years. I don't sleep on Fridays or Sundays because I'm either driving 700 miles to see her after work – or I'm driving 700 miles all night to get to work in the morning. The parole board denied her. She can ask again in two more years.
You know what happened later that day already, don't you?
One day in 2010, she simply didn't call. We talked six times a day...but suddenly nothing. It's never good when this happens. I didn't hear from her for four days. When I did, I discovered that we wouldn't be fulfilling our dreams of having a baby when she came home. All the effects of the rape were not immediately known. She had been at the hospital having surgery to repair the damage; they gave her a full hysterectomy instead.
She came home in December, 2011. Finally. She gets sick immediately. That hysterectomy wasn't done right. She's in the hospital, surgeries...into 2012. Then it's my turn. By May, 2012 my doctor had advised me to quit working if I wanted to live to see Christmas. We didn't know what it was but we knew it landed me in the hospital five times in May. I struggled along and in early 2013 was diagnosed. A rare, untreatable, incurable auto-immune disease. And a host of other things.
My wife is finally home and I can't even take a walk with her. Then the pain set in. Then disability got denied. Then the money ran out. Then we moved to a place for the winter with no electricity or running water because it was all we could afford. Then I tell her I've already eaten so that she'll have enough. Because we don't make enough money to qualify for food stamps. Yeah, really. I lose forty pounds in two months. I sit. I've no energy. This disease will do that, I'm told.
Until the hallucinations start. And you want to talk about my mother? Don't think there's been enough in the last few years to cause even me to crack? Yeah, cause if I was good with mom's abuse – this would all be a piece of cake. No worries – I know that I'm at the end of my rope but let me stop and let you play review and catch up. Let me spend the next couple of months with me taking care of what YOU need. I know they mean well, but I don't have the strength.