FORGIVENESS

I cannot forgive someone who claims there is nothing to forgive. I think it’s a bit pompous of me to offer forgiveness if the person has not asked for my forgiveness.
I was told by my psychiatrists I had to learn to forgive my parents. My parents don’t have a clue what they did and never asked me to forgive them. I was the one who had to learn to ask them to forgive me, but I was not in therapy to ask for forgiveness. I told the story of my life as I saw it and experienced it. I am being told by psychiatry that I must accept my parent’s reality of my childhood as the only reality. I kept refusing as this idea is so abusurd. I am expected to accept there is only one way to perceive what happens between two people and my views are always wrong.
I became very depressed. I was being suppressed, my feelings and perceptions were being denied me. I learned that I had to admit I was very sick, that I suffered from delusions and needed to learn to trust the therapist and accept their perceptions as the only truth. Psychiatry was just like father, supressing and oppressing me. It’s no wonder I never got better while I was under psychiatric care.
All the drug treatments and the drug cocktails I was forced to take never helped me. I became confused, belligerent and offensive. My behavior changed for the worse as more and more drugs were forced on me in an effort to calm me into sedateness. It wasn’t until I started to decrease my drug load that my behavior changed for the better.
I went to a Survivor’s Center complaining that I was toxic on these psych drugs, that my behavior was being affected in a bad way and wanted help to taper off these drugs. I knew that the drugs were affecting my behavior and making me act in ways that were strange to me. I was disbelieved. I was subjected to humilation after humiliation. When I was told I could not accuse anyone of sexual misconduct, I knew my “story” of a childhood rape was again being disbelieved. I knew that I was being perceived as a mentally ill woman seeking attention when I was offered services for my psychiatric condition instead of for my physical condition.
I became very angry and enraged, I tried to focus attention on my physical aillments but kept being ignored. Only my emotional state was addressed while I was at that Center. The Director employed techniques to change the way I talked. I had to learn to ask for help in the manner he expected, talk the way he wanted. I protested. If I had to learn how to ask in the manner he wanted, I wanted him to learn to answer me in the manner I wanted. Such an attitude caused me much grief and I left the Center filled with anger and rage.
I cannot forgive any of the Survivors at that center for the way they treated me. I feel they should have known better. Try as they did, these survivors, like psychiatrists and therapists, could not touch the Spirit that lives within.