The curse.

Just when I thought it was all over.

I honestly don't know what to do about what is happening. But this madness has to stop. Psychosis is understandable, it is human, it's fierce and terrifying, but it is immediate and alive. This - the thing I'm trying to deal with here and now is way worse...and I don't know how to deal with it. I fought one round with it, and left my home burning (!) no, nothing was burning. I simply let him have everything, didn't ask for a penny. I gave my first husband a narrative that side-stepped his lethal victimhood and desire to blame everyone except his abuser. I kept my daughters alive, I managed to create another life, and on we went.

People were amazed at what a happy family we were. Three children home-ed, my eldest stayed at school. Everyone got into university doing a course they loved...

Then my youngest, the 'service user' in this blog, broke all his personal rules, took cocaine and anything else going. Stressed out, ashamed. He tried to put things right, everything went wrong...he couldn't finish his degree, he'd got the wrong information and it was too late to catch up. Working until 3 am in a bar, living in a flat with mould and rats. Scared of the tumour in his throat (real) scared of his symptoms (of severe stress) scared of what the drugs had done to him and seeing that he'd taken stuff that could kill him. It was all way too much, and he just fell apart.

Trust me, this is how psychosis starts. Nothing difficult to understand, here, Just the whirlpool of self-attack, chronic stress and no money, no sense of a future...it leads to panic and processing errors that become recursive and terrible feed back loops.

So why now is this awful thing from my first marriage, back?

And back with a vengeance.

By Lockerbie, Winter solstice 1988 it was already too late, way, way too late...Don't get me wrong, my first husband was a good man. But he had zero tolerance for any emotional pain. You might think that's a good thing, right? Wrong. I wont go into details - or perhaps I should???

I think I have to now, because I've avoided telling this story for obvious reasons. Not for my confidentiality, because I don't need it. I believe that being open and honest is strength, not vulnerability. But this is a horrible story, and so, so sad...

So, without going into too many details...

My first husband kept a family secret because he knew it would devastate his parents. Do my daughters know this? I don't know, but I doubt it. He justified protecting the secret by saying to himself - see, I'm fine, what happened didn't do any harm'. 

And because it was harmless, he did the same harm to me...

I said, 'we need to see a therapist'...

He would only see a therapist who was a friend of his family...

I couldn't ever be open and honest with her because this family secret was pretty tough to take...but mostly it was the therapy contract ' if you tell me that someone you know is suicidal'. My blood runs cold as I remember how it used to make me feel when he'd talk about it. If I'd told her, what would have happened? 

I was caught up in his shame and secrecy...but what else stopped me?

The therapy...I told her what he had done to me, and she minimized it and left me believing that what he did was fine, because we were married and marriage isn't always going to be sweetness and light, and besides which, perhaps he hadn't understood why I was crying.

As he did it.

And because I was unable to speak, no wonder he had thought doing to me what had been done to him was fine! His abuser hadn't listened to him, and that was OK.

Hearing this, seeing this, experiencing it, I felt that I was in a hall of distorting mirrors

And, dear reader, things were to get a thousand times worse. 

In retrospect I think now the therapist was a psychologist - does that make a difference? Think Skinner boxes, think 'The kitten carousel'. A kind of soulless disregard for the right to autonomy, and a devaluing of the individuals perspective? 

Elsewhere I talk about Fanita's English's description of 'The Hot Potato'. 

The Therapist picked up my husband's worst fears about me, and amplified them. She told him not to tell me - knowing that he wouldn't be able to resist...and in this way she successfully managed to do what he could not. She (as a powerful, truthful voice) created the power dynamic required for me to have to take what he'd told me seriously. She had told a man who had threatened to kill his children, that I might be a danger to our children...

And because the accusation was so insubstantial, made no sense, I couldn't challenge it!

My dangerous activity had so far been confined to letting my daughters stand on the front of the shopping trolley, he had thought that to be very dangerous! But mainly it was the fact that I'd let a man into the home...who had followed me, blocked my car on the drive and walked into the house behind me. The fact that I was terrified, kept my head, and I was prepared to throw boiling water over him if I felt even more threat, counted for nothing. When I told my husband? He said I must have invited the man to follow me, I must have wanted it? Incidentally I received a similar response from a friend when I told her how I had been stalked by a man on the bus. "You should walk like a panther" she said...Victim blaming is alive and well.

In our last, individual session, the therapist apologised to me. She said she had done it to shock me into seeing him as an ally, so I'd stop being apparently wilful and wayward. Instead she fed his fear, his sense of entitlement and amplified my self doubt, my insecurities and devastated my capacity to trust myself, even to function. 

I could not challenge it.

I could not challenge something for which there is no evidence.

This is the same catastrophic bind people find themselves in as a reaction to shock and grief following the sudden unexpected death of someone integral to their lives. The voices start, the intrusive thoughts begin to dictate OCD behaviours. The sufferer watches, powerless to break the irrational belief that unless they 'do it right' another loved one will die...

And now the core misogyny at the root of my first husbands shame and guilt is back. And no, it never faces me, it only ever meets me through the agency of others.

My youngest daughter was a true believer in the authority and righteousness of psychiatry. And, I would have agreed with her, if I hadn't seen psychiatry in action. At this time service user was in hospital after his suicide attempt, he was pleading to God to protect him from the Devil, pleading with us to prevent him being locked away (sectioned) and I found prayers for him, trusting that at least he now believed in goodness and had hope in something more than destruction. The mental health nurses who watched over him every night, prayed with him, and I wrote a letter to the Catholic priest who lives in our street to request prayers. 

My daughter told me that this was making his madness worse. 

On this day we had arrived to have an interview with the psychiatrist. We wanted 'service user' to be sectioned at the hospital he was now in. We didn't want him returned to the other one. Unfortunately my daughter also wanted to be at this meeting - no, she hadn't told us this.

Before we could begin to explain why service user would be better off staying in this hospital, my daughter said to the psychiatrist, "Will you tell my mother that her behaviour..." and my blood froze. She spoke with my first husband's tone of voice and the same phrase he had used. The floor fell out from under my feet and I was back with her father screaming at me to do what he said or he'd put the children into the car and drive into a wall...

You might call this coercive control?

You would not be wrong...

The horror of that evening is seared into my mind....

And how he used to tell professionals such as teachers that they should "Tell her...how to behave".

OK, so that was then. This is now. How has it come back? To be honest I've no idea why it came back with such force and venom through my daughter. She had wanted to protect service user, to get a friend to put him on a train so he could journey the 290 miles (with a change of trains!) to her home where she would make sure that he got the mental health care he so needed, being as I was lying to the mental health team about his SSRIs. 

I wanted him to take the bloody tablets.

But I didn't know that he was still using. 

He was being sensible.

Regardless of my wish for him to take the meds, I sided with him. My daughter knew this, and so she asked service user to come and stay with her..

When service user spoke to her on the phone he sounded sane, only very upset, and only a little bit mad.

She did not see the full repertoire...

I prevented him going. I was not going to let him anywhere near a train....especially not alone. And after that, she came to the hospital. I get it, it makes sense, her concern for him was love. But...he was in hospital because we don't have any rail tracks close by....I'm serious. His attempted suicide would have been successful otherwise.

And at the hospital, she used the phrase, that phrase.

It was a direct link to my first husband's coercive control.

I didn't respond well. I haven't seen or spoken to my daughter since. I went to look for her...she has a daughter now, too...and yes, my heart is breaking as I write this.

But, this isn't the worst of it.

My elder son has allowed the coercive control narrative - that I am dangerous and harmful to my children - as his rationale for his brother's psychosis. He is allowing it to organise his own fears, his own pain, to eclipse all that is good in him. And he wants me to agree that yes, I am responsible for all his sadness and suffering. In short that I must be responsible for service user getting overwhelmed by life and a lifestyle that includes drugs. But there doesn't seem to be anything beyond his need for me to agree?

I have apologised, I have agreed tentatively, but it feels like my first husband's thing. That the pain is a self-fulfilling, self-sustaining black hole monster that can't be satisfied. I fear that like my husband, nothing I could say or do will be enough...My husband wanted more and more, more apology, then to strip me of all control over anything, until I reached a point where I had to stop his process. It was bullying, it certainly was coercive, it was absolutely crushing and shattering for me. I stopped it by saying that we had to go see the 'trusted' therapist, because enough is enough. I'd moved out. I had left my children with him because he said he'd kill himself if I didn't. I was going there every morning before they woke up, and leaving when he came home in the evening...He had my car, my house, my kids. I didn't fight for anything...I just kept on, kept on, kept on showing up. 

But I needed my car, hang on it was my mom's car...my mom had died, and he had her car...which doesn't make sense to me now. How was that possible? Did my sister give it to him? Oh, I remember, he'd gone round to my mom and sister and told them exactly how terrible I am and they had agreed with him (because in my family you never play victim - especially if you are one!) and perhaps that accounted for the car. He was a fine, upstanding citizen, and me? I was now on the verge of going mad myself. I remember how the summer solstice felt like a force intensifying everything...I could feel the universe spin. I was no longer in my right mind. I was living as a refugee in a Buddhist centre.

My mom and sister thought I was out of order, driven him to it? And no way could I find my way back to my previous professional career, I was broken. absolutely broken. But no way would I tell my mom what had really happened - which is really sad isn't it. Especially as I'd told my sister...and she had said something like, 'it's your own fault'.

OK...what am I not seeing?

I'd seen, take it or get out - and I'd got out.

No doubt the therapist thought that I'd brought all this on myself? My fault because? She had a point. If a person wont blame the other, I had not told her any details about the driving into the wall, and other awful things. But I'd tried telling her and that hadn't gone well. 

I remember sitting on her sofa and forcing myself to use his strategy, I cried. And eventually I managed to say "tell my husband (!) this has to stop...this isn't fair". I was by this point almost hysterical as I described how I had to give him more and more and.. And because of the therapy contract - about harm to self or others - I could not say...because if I don't he threatens to kill himself, and my children! 

Because if I'd said that, in therapy, he'd have done it...

That's the truth I couldn't gamble with.

And now it is back.