PHP (Not the Language)
CW: discussion of assault, self-harm, suicidal ideation, wacko childhood
I had my first PHP session a couple days ago. This is a process that's entirely new to me. There are actual people! With faces! And they have problems I can relate to! But at the same time: Waaaagh! I'm in a Zoom call full of strangers and I need to talk about myself! Waaaaagh! I've found that my roommate's plague doctor Squishmallow has been a useful companion so far. I also bought a tiny Jiji from Kiki's Delivery Service while at home over break. Not only is he my favorite Ghibli sidekick by far, he's perfectly stress-ball sized and has a little bean bag inside of him, which is great for anxious moments.
An emergency Jiji for your viewing pleasure before shit gets real. Don't you want to squish him? Yes you do, and don't bother denying it.
Honestly, PHP has been more boring than anything; it largely seems to consist of psych education lecturing. Being in it also kind of makes me feel even more like an ill person than I already did. There isn't anything wrong with needing mental health treatment, of course, but I very much grew up in a household that did not see mental health as a legitimate concern, so I carry some fairly strong internalized prejudices against being in such an intensive program because I simply can't function normally.
Another thing I've been coming to terms with is the fact that for a good chunk of the future—maybe for the rest of my life—my normal is going to be a lot harder and sadder than what most non-traumatized, non-depressed people have to deal with. And all of it is invisible. That's one of the hardest things to deal with. Everything I'm going through is in my head, and there are very few ways to translate into something that others can see and understand. How do you explain to people who don't live with trauma that seeing certain things and people that are benign to them can cause a debilitating and uncontrollable reaction? How do you explain to people who don't live with anxiety that the mere act of going outside is sometimes too terrifying to handle? How do you explain to people who don't live with depression that even basic tasks like changing or brushing your teeth can feel impossible to do? The simple answer is that unless the person you're talking to has experienced similar things, there is no way to express the full extent and feeling of your symptoms. It comes down to telling them that things are really bad and hoping they take your word for it, though, oftentimes, it's impossible to get those words out of your mouth even when you really need to.
This is what makes communicating to my friends and family so hard. In particular, it's very difficult to communicate how hurt I am due to the actions of the person who assaulted me to people I know. I've lost a couple friends who chose to keep associating with him after the incident. In my mind, it's a baffling choice: you're choosing someone who has clearly proven himself to be violent and dangerous to people in his close proximity. And more than that, you're choosing someone who has deeply injured one of your other friends. But something I've realized is that some people are just spineless assholes—the ethicality of their actions means nothing to them so long as they get to remain content and happy. Meanwhile, the onus remains on me to be the bigger person—to heal, forgive, and move on—despite my obvious innocence, and despite my clear position as the victim of senseless violence. Some people just don't want their perfect little worlds to be disturbed.
Vis-Ă -vis communication, my struggles with suicidal ideation and self-harm make some degree of sense. There's some interesting if untestable evolutionary psychology literature on these kinds of self-destructive behaviors as costly and therefore highly credible and urgent signals of distress. If you're going through it, these are obvious ways to make people take notice and help you! Unfortunately, there are strong societal and personal pressures to not tell people about your mental health problems, including these behaviors, so does this post-hoc evolutionary psych explanation hold water? I'm not convinced.
Either way, it's been pretty clear to the people around me that I've needed urgent help for quite a while now, thanks in part to my deeply unhealthy behavior in the past few months. And I'm finally getting it; yay! Unfortunately, the suicidal ideation and self-harm haven't gone away, and I sometimes think they're getting worse. Additionally, they're not really things that non-professionals can reasonably expect to fix because depressed people tend to not want to fix self-destructive behavior—they think suffering is something they deserve. I think the only thing that's really going to help at this point is medication, and frustratingly, it's been so fucking hard to get my hands on it. I've gotten handed multiple prescriptions at this point, only to then be told I can't actually take them because of various obtuse licensing and insurance rules. The U.S. healthcare system strikes again.
I still have so much to heal from. I'm starting to realize that my childhood and adolescence were actually pretty fucked up, and the family I grew up in was at least somewhat dysfunctional in subtle but also glaringly obvious ways. It's a delayed reaction, I guess, but it does explain why I'm having such a hard time right now. The kicker is that for the immigrant community I grew up in, a lot of my family's unhealthy behaviors were just normal. I knew and witnessed firsthand parents who were even worse than mine. That's terrifying. And in many ways my parents' upbringings were qualitatively much harder (e.g. my mom's father was an alcoholic and my dad's parents were eye-wateringly violent, not to mention they were both dirt poor), so why am I the only one who can't be normal in spite of life generally being awful for everyone? Dunno, maybe I do just suck and I should be ashamed for not getting into Yale or whatever. It's complicated because I don't think they're bad parents. They've done everything they can for me and more, and I know they love me deeply. But they are flawed parents, who, like their parents before them, have inadvertently left their child with lots of debris to pick up in their wake.
I don't know where to go from here; I still feel stuck. Even though I'm in intensive therapy and I thought things were going to get better, I've been having some pretty dark moments lately. I'm a small, sensitive person, and sometimes the world feels like it was built for big, mean people. I guess things will get better eventually. But it's agonizingly slow, and I don't want to wait for a future where things will just be normal again. I just want things to be normal now. But sometimes things are shit and you just have to deal with it.