Sometimes simple or silly posts on social media will prompt me to understand myself better. A goofy little Threads post about Capricorns being insulted by being called a liar made me laugh and then say “Hmm?”
One of the surest ways to get me to leave you alone in every capacity (romantic, platonic, professional, etc) is to accuse me of lying. It is a literal trigger for me. I don’t just feel insulted. My body responds as if I’m in danger. After thinking about that Threads post, I know it stems from early childhood. Then it became cemented into my nervous system by years of navigating the mental health system, voluntary and involuntary commitments, and medical gaslighting.
Let me walk you through what I mean.
Back when I was in elementary school, my parents dropped me off at the home of the neighborhood babysitter before school and would pick me up after they got off work in the afternoons/evenings. I don’t remember how old I was but one day, like many others, I was the last kid to be picked up and my parents wouldn’t be there for me until a while later.
Since my parents wouldn’t be there for some time, my babysitter told me to lock the door into the house. Her locks looked different than the ones in my own home and I rarely had to do the locking of doors in my home anyway. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out that you had to turn the knob one way and the lock the opposite way. So I did my best to figure it out without being shown how to.
Apparently, I was fumbling with the lock for too long because I remember she was rushing me to sit back down. I tried to let her know that I didn’t think that I was doing it correctly. While I can’t remember exactly what was said, I do remember that I felt like my intelligence was being called into question and I was embarrassed. I moved away from the door, unsure whether it was locked or not and too scared to check. She went into another room and told me not to open the door for anyone. Not even my parents.
Later on, the door swings open and my mom (or dad. I can’t fully recall) is there to take me home. Parents never really knocked and waited to be let in. They would typically just walk inside- and that’s just what mine had done. I went home with a nagging anxiety about having messed up locking the door.
The next morning I was dropped off at this sitter’s house as per usual. I can’t recall if I was the first child there or not- but once my parent left she yoked me up and started whooping/ beating (whatever you wanna call it) me. This is one of the more difficult things for me to talk openly about because I still grapple with much of my childhood experiences fitting into the framework of childhood abuse. I’m also hard-pressed to get any adult from that time in my life to admit that child abuse was part and parcel of childrearing because, of course, no one wants to admit to being an abuser or being complicit in it. But I can’t heal from what I don’t acknowledge, so I accept the fact that I’m a survivor of child abuse, even if no one else will.
While beating me she kept stating that she told me not to open the door for anyone. Not even my parents. At first, I cried while pleading that I hadn’t opened the door. I was told I was lying and beat harder. I kept trying to tell her the truth- that I hadn’t opened the door, I had been unable to lock it correctly. However, eventually, I relented and became tearfully apologetic. Confirming to her that I was the liar she accused me of being.
This is just one memory that has been etched into my brain despite so much memory loss. I remember the green yardstick that was never used to measure anything. It was her tool of choice when her hands weren’t enough for whatever infraction we made. There are more memories of being beaten by her or watching my peers and friends be beaten by her to count.
The beatings and being yelled at and degraded were so common that my childhood best friend (still friends to this day) and I would daydream about how to run away and carry the other kids with us. How one day our parents would finally take our complaints and pleas seriously and not make us return there. We risked being attacked by the neighborhood dogs so that we could take the long way home after we got off our respective school buses. (There’s a funny story about that).
The feeling of absolute hopelessness and helplessness always loomed over me though. I told my parents, but either I wasn’t believed or the cost savings of her watching me trumped whatever I was being put through. So I learned early on that no one was coming to save me, I couldn’t trust adults, and speaking up for myself was useless.
Thankfully, once I moved up to middle school I could stay home by myself. Those memories never left though. Nor did the impact those years had on me. Sadly, I didn’t get a very long reprieve, because soon after starting middle school, symptoms of a mental illness sprung up and I was on the road to more trauma and being treated as a liar as standard practice.
It kind of sucks that my memory loss seems to mainly have impacted positive memories. Far too many bad memories are readily available for recall at the drop of a dime, but the good ones are just fragments and blank spaces. There are so many times I can recall being treated as though I was a manipulative, liar, looking for special treatment by mental health professionals, but very few of them truly seeing and hearing me. I will tell you all one of the more egregious examples.
I was admitted into the ICU after a suicide attempt by overdose and then moved to the psychiatric unit once I was physically stable. This particular hospital wasn’t unfamiliar to me, but it had been many years since I was last there, and for good reason. Sometimes you get lucky and your hospital of choice for a commitment has an open bed. This time, I didn’t get lucky so I ended up here.
The first instance during this hospitalization where I was not just called a liar, but punished for it was when they refused to believe me about my medication list. Mind you, I was depressed, I was not in an active state of delusion or psychosis. I knew what medicine I was taking. On my first day there, it was time for everyone to line up and take their medications. When they handed me the little cup with multiple pills in it, something looked off. So I asked the nurse what medications they were giving me. She rattled off a list of medicines that I hadn’t taken in years. I had stopped taking them because they caused awful side effects.
So I told the nurse that these are not the medications I take. In fact, these weren’t medications I had taken for quite a long time. I asked where they got the list from and all they would say was that was what was in my chart. I refused to take them because A. they weren’t the medications I was on B. I wanted what I had been taking so that I didn’t experience withdrawal symptoms.
From my time in the ICU to admittance to the psych ward, there had been no orders input to change my medications. Advocating for myself led me to be labeled as “non-compliant.” Excuse me for not wanting to take a medication that caused me to have seizures. The next day I got a different nurse and she showed me where it was listed in my chart. I, the supposed “non-compliant” and mentally unsound person, pointed out the dates on the chart (this was way back when they still mainly used actual paper for documentation) that were indeed from many years prior. They finally contacted my primary psychiatrist and got my updated list of medications. But the traumatic shit didn’t stop there.
On the day I was to be released, I found out that they diagnosed me as a drug addict. Like, my primary diagnosis being addiction, due to deliberately trying to kill myself using benzodiazepines. I spent over a week in the hospital discussing why I tried to kill myself. What I struggle with. What my stressors were. Discussing my long history of having bipolar disorder and more recently a PTSD diagnosis. Hell, the chart they were taking as law for what my medications were, even listed bipolar disorder as my diagnosis. But somehow, now I was an addict too. And the kicker here? I wouldn’t be released until I signed off on a paper that said that I admitted to having an addiction and would seek outpatient treatment.
I tried and tried to explain to the social worker that this was a gross mischaracterization. That I felt coerced into signing the paperwork. I brought up how they messed up my medication when I first arrived and now this. The humiliation and dehumanization were almost too much to bear. I signed the paper because I wouldn’t be released otherwise. However, I always have it in the back of my head that somewhere there is a medical form with my signature attesting to the fact that I am an addict. I fear the day that this comes back to bite me.
This was an example from just ONE hospitalization. I’ve been hospitalized dozens of times. I’ve also been in group therapy, individual therapy, intensive outpatient treatment, and other mental health programs. That one experience wasn’t an outlier. I can guarantee you that most people who have had to deal with the mental health system have had similar experiences.
So when I say not being believed is a trigger for me, I mean it in the clinical sense. I start to tremble, my stomach tightens, my heartbeat quickens, and every worst-case scenario starts playing in my head. Not being believed has led to me being beaten, humiliated, detained in pysch units, school punishments, and all manner of indignities. Not being believed puts me back in that house with the green yardstick. Crying out for my mommy, knowing she was nowhere around, and that no one was going to rescue me.
I have lived my life “keeping receipts”, trying to fly under the radar, not speaking up for myself, and forgoing seeking justice for harm that has been caused to me, all because I have learned that not only will I not be believed, I will be inviting harm upon myself for even trying to be believed. It’s made me a people pleaser. It’s caused me to communicate in a way that can be seen as calculated because I choose my words and sentence structures carefully. It’s made me pull back from sharing as much on social media since there is always someone waiting to try and downplay or discredit my experiences. It’s made me conflict-avoidant.
While I could have just written this in my journal or talked about it with my therapist, I chose to put it here. Partially because I hope it will help others who have gone through similar but never connected it to how they feel today. Partially to show the impact of childhood abuse. Totally because I’m done keeping this to myself. I’m an honest person. I’m a good person. I didn’t deserve what happened to me, and neither did anyone else these things have happened to.
Let me know what you think