A LESSON LEARNED

Before I entered psychiatry’s hallowed hallways, I would have answered any questions beginning with the words, I’m pretty sure … .
I’ve been under the tutelage of psychiatry for over 36 years. My first day at Psychiatry’school was with my first hospitalization at the young age of 16. Self-confidence and self-reliance were my chief subjects. To learn self-reliance, I had to learn to become dependent. Inside a psychiatric institution, I was taught to announce to everyone what I was going to do, where I was going and why. Then I had to learn how to ask, like how to ask permisssion to go to the bathroom. Eventually I couldn’t do anything without asking for someone’s approval. Lessons learned and I was discharged.
Learning self-confidence was my downfall. My stories of childhood abuse was disbelieved because of one incident, when I applied all that I had learned from psychiatry’s teachers, my therapists. In therapy I had learned to be positive without a doubt and if I had doubts, not to show or voice them. I learned to answer yes with such confidence that I showed I had no room for doubt. I was becoming suspicous when my last therapist, like a marine drill instructor, kept asking me, are you sure you know where the deli is, are you positive, and like a dumb, frightened boot, I answered with such conviction that I showed I was immovable in my beliefs. This solid stance I took was my downfall, for all my “stories” of abuse became that, just stories. Leaving no possibility for a mistake, I showed that I could not and would not accept a mistake in any of my childhood perceptions, that my reality was the only reality I would accept.
For me to heal, I had to free myself of psychiatry. I had to unlearn what psychiatry had taught me and I did it by writing in my journal. I wrote what I thought had happened to me, incorporated the person I am now with my child. I believe my reality but am open to questions to clarify some discrepancies.
I’m no longer a psychiatric patient, haven’t been for almost 3 months now. I trust only myself and a few others, no psychiatrist included. I have become self-reliant. I first had to learn not to trust others as much as I did and learn to trust myself, the only person I did not trust or believe. I had to self-acknowledge the fact that I was abused, and believe that fact before my healing could begin. Psychiatry still does not believe my stories of abuse and would do anything and everything to disprove me. But I no longer need to prove anything to anybody anymore, for I believe myself and I believe that what happened to me really happened. I trust in my reality enough to say this, I could be wrong about some of the things that happened to me, but the majority of what I talk about did happen and that I’m sure of. I have become self-confident.
Lessons learned, unlearned, and retaught and relearned. I am back to who I was before I came under the tutelage of psychiatry, but better for the experience for I know who I am and now believe in myself and trust myself, the only person I did not believe and trust.