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Just need to vent

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Just need to vent

Postby malfif » Sun Jul 07, 2019 7:26 am

So, I've had a major setback.

In January, I saw a doctor in order to get a statement saying that I was unfit to work. I read the statement online a week ago, and it started off by saying that there had previously been suspicions that I had a personality syndrome och autistic spectrum disorder.

These are two of the conditions that my munch father tried for years to get me diagnosed with. I'm in my fourth year of therapy trying to deal with the trauma of MBP.

I asked my therapist this week if she was the one who had had these suspicions. She said no, and that she didn't know where they came from. I said that the statement was unprofessional and that this is just the psychiatry picking up where my dad left off. That's when the session got really tough:

My therapist tried to get me to think that getting a diagnosis that you don't have isn't a big deal, and that it's only a big deal for me because of what I've been through, and that if I wasn't traumatized I'd be fine with it. She asked me why I thought being diagnosed with depression was okay, but not with autism. I said that autism is a disorder, which depression isn't. She said that depression is indeed a disorder, I said "i know" but that she knows what I mean.

She kept trying to convince me that autism isn't actually something wrong, but just what you call people who think differently (it says on every scientific website in the whole world that autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder). She also said that the doctor probably just made this assessment for himself because I was being reserved during the appointment. I started crying uncontrollably and said taht DUH, yeah, if your telling a stranger about your traumatic childhood then your not gonna be full of life, are you?

The therapist kept agreeing with me that I wasnät autistic, but was also lobbying for me to be okay with this. "you need to stop caring about what people think about you". That's what she said. I said that this wasn't some school bully labelling me for no reason, this was a doctor within the psychiatry, and that matters a lot. She just didn't care. She just kept "confronting" me with why I thought that there was a big difference between depressiona and autism.

And then she moved on to the personality syndrome, and said that that's just what you label someone who isn't doing well due to past trauma, and that since I'm not doing well due to past trauma one could say that that's a form of personality syndrome.

I was shattered by this. My therapist, whom I have grown to trust completely, was now doing the exact same thing that my dad did: suggesting that I have a bunch of disorders, and then when I confront them they downplay it and say that diagnoses aren't what I think they are and that being considered schizofenic/schizoid/autistic/alltherestofit is just another way of saying that I'm having a hard time.


The therapist rounded off the session by saying that she personally doesn't think I have any of these diagnoses, and that if there's anything she would contemplate outside of depression it would probably be PTSD because of how strongly I react to this stuff.


I don't know what to do now. All my progress is gone. I was even considering maybe being able to actually have a boyfriend one day and live a normal life, but now I know that no one will ever understand. I will forever be just a symptom, not a person. Nothing I do is normal or right, everything is a sign that there's something wrong.


So anyway, just needed to vent. Have been crying for the whole week and felt this pressure in my body, like I have to disappear and every moment I stay here it gets worse. I'm stuck, I have no money and no family and no friends, and even my therapist has turned out to not support me.
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Re: Just need to vent

Postby TheGangsAllHere » Mon Jul 08, 2019 2:37 am

This sounds like a major empathic rupture with the therapist. How does she usually repair these with you? In 4 years she must have made other mistakes like this where she is misreading what will help you in the moment. Is she good at apologizing for those?

It sounds like she was trying to support you, but the way she chose to do that was NOT helpful. When that happens with my therapist, I let him know as soon as possible (he allows emails and texts), and he apologizes for anything he said or did that caused me distress. At first I used to stay upset for days until I saw him again, and THEN we would work it out, but I've gotten better and better about letting him know. Now I can usually catch it during the session and let him know that I'm upset and what he is saying isn't helping.

Does your therapist have a lot of experience treating people who have had trauma throughout their childhood? It can cause a lot of dissociation as well as difficult attachment issues. I saw in one of your posts that staying in the moment has been an issue for you in the past.

Emotional neglect and/or abuse in childhood causes terrible damage and sets up kids for further abuse and trauma in later years, even if there wasn't any actual physical or sexual abuse. It is very common to develop a dissociative disorder from that kind of experience, and those are often misdiagnosed for many years, and not well understood by most therapists. It's also sometimes called complex PTSD.

I think that since you've had a good relationship with your therapist, if you let her know how her words made you feel, this can probably be repaired. It's possible that at the time she didn't realize the full impact of her words on you. If you ever feel like she is "trying to convince" you of something you don't believe, then that's a problem that needs to be brought up with her. It's YOUR experience and YOUR feelings that count, not what she thinks from her point of view--you've had to deal with that too much in your life, so I would hope she understands that.
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