Academic trauma and going back to school

[greendreamdays]

This is kind of a long ramble. There is also a part were I talk about side effects of meds I was prescribed, so if you are sensitive to that please read at your own discretion or don't it read at all. I feel reluctant in posting this because I have detailed some negative experiences about medications, doctors and therapists. But please know that I would not dream of scaring anyone away from getting help. But I also want to get these experiences off my chest.

I’ll be going back to school in the fall. This time I am actually studying what I want, not settling for what I think I can do but don’t really want. I feel a lot of hope for the future for the first time in a long time. I have goals and something to look forward to.
I got a lot of negative programming around school. I was always in advanced classes, always pushed to be at the top. I got a lot of pressure at home to perform well. I remember I got yelled at for having the first B in my life in middle school. It was in my math class. My stepdad at the time was furious and told me I wasn’t trying hard enough and that I had chosen to be a failure and that I could have done better.

I remember being in advanced classes when I was young. My dad was a science major himself and had taught science classes and he would help me with my homework. I would cry every night and he would stay up with me to finish it. I was hysterical and burned out and frustrated. He didn’t seem to understand why I couldn’t just focus because he knew I was smart enough to understand these concepts but was for some reason too emotional. I couldn’t detach myself from my emotions like he could just to study.

I was being abused at both my mom’s house by my stepdad and at my dad’s house with my stepmom. Both in different ways, unbeknownst to each other. I rarely acted out at all but was constantly being punished and reprimanded for my “behavior.” But my “behavior” was just having emotions and unmet needs. Being too happy, being too sad, being ungrateful, being messy, being lazy, being selfish. But I wasn’t sad, I was depressed but I couldn’t show it and it takes energy to hide. Being “grateful” meant being hypervigilant, overextending thank yous and pleases about how generous and selfless my stepmom was by letting us live with her as if it were some great luxury she gave out of the goodness of her heart and not a contractual arrangement she and my dad made because he was financially dependent on her as a single dad and had no control over where we lived. Being messy or lazy or thoughtless wasn’t really those things either. I was a child and I made mistakes. These were never tolerated. I was constantly told to grow up, to be more mature, more considerate, that my mistakes could have put me in danger or someone else in danger even when it was very unlikely or simply untrue. I learned to catastrophize, that everything could fall apart at any moment and if I wasn’t always being extremely careful, it would be my fault. I was told I was wrong and bad for making mistakes and if I had only been more thoughtful I could have avoided them and they could all be prevented. My “thoughtlessness” was emotional burnout. I wasn’t lazy because I wasn’t simply trying hard enough. I was constantly overextending myself, constantly hypervigilant, constantly looking to prevent things that might go wrong. I was extremely anxious, and extremely avoidant. I was the perfect student at school. Always restrained, polite, never rude. Good student, not many friends.

I was emotionally exhausted and burned out. And was frequently told I wasn’t trying hard enough. Nobody at school knew what was going on and I had perfected the art of acting like nothing was wrong.

It is frustrating at times telling my parents about these things now. They are both divorced from their abusive exes and have healed a lot since then. But sometimes when I share something that happened at the other house growing up, they say “why didn’t you tell me?” There are only about a million reasons, most of which I have only recently found the language to articulate.
In therapy or groups people often say that I am very self aware and insightful. It’s nice to hear sometimes but these were my tools to survival and have very much been a double-edged sword to question everything relentlessly and to invalidate myself to the point of insanity. I learned how to read between the lines of what people were saying to understand what people were meaning because my stepmom was a liar and a narcissist. When she said “Don’t be so ungrateful” it really meant “Don’t make me feel uncomfortable because of your emotions. That hurts me. Your emotions overwhelm me and I can’t cope with them because I can’t cope with my own.” So I learned not simply to act extremely grateful to have my most basic needs met and not to ever burden her with my pain. I didn’t learn to self soothe, I just learned to stop expressing my needs. Everyone seemed to like that. It made me easy to parent.

It also made it really easy for my stepdad to groom and molest me. I was starving for positive attention. It never set off any alarm bells in my head. I trusted him and it didn’t seem like anything was wrong. And I didn’t even realize it was happening at the time. I can hear him opening the door to my room at night, the silhouette of him standing in my doorway, the light from the hall filling into my room. I can remember which side of the room my bed was on. I can remember the smell of the room. And then nothing. Just black.

I have no idea how he knew I wouldn’t tell anyone or that I wouldn’t even remember. I didn’t resist or try to get away, or if I did it would only have been weak attempts that would have aroused him more.

Back to school. I got the message over and over again that if I wanted to achieve something academically I had to detach from my emotions and just push through it no matter how hard it was and no matter how I was feeling. But I couldn’t. It damaged my relationship to school and my definition of success. I dropped out of the advanced classes the following year, retaking some of the same classes. I felt like such a failure, like a once gifted student had fallen from grace and the other advanced students looked down on me. When I got to college I thought success depended on my ability to push past all of my boundaries and force myself to study just like everyone else did. But that backfired in a big way. I would stay up late with insomnia, consumed by obsessive anxiety and thoughts of self harm and suicide. I had a lot of unprocessed trauma, an untreated eating disorder and a bad psychiatrist. I was emotionally isolated, on medication that gave me severe mood swings that lead to a misdiagnosis of bipolar that lead to other bipolar meds that gave me brain damage and ticks that wouldn’t go away for years.

I had hand tremors, dizzy spells, mood swings, involuntary muscle twitches in my neck that would make me jerk my head to one side, or involuntary jerking movements in my arms or legs. It wasn’t painful but it was a reminder that I was not in control of my own body and a side effect of the medication that would take years to go away. It was sometimes hard to drink without spilling. Sometimes when eating my fork would miss my mouth because of the tremors and coordination issues. My balance was off. I felt emotionally dead. My anxiety was through the roof and untreated. I developed a verbal stutter. Sometimes I would repeat parts of a word, or I couldn’t get it out all the way like my breath would get stuck in my throat. I couldn’t think of the right words to use, or they would come out in the wrong order. And again I was blaming myself for being too sensitive to side effects, that I just had to stay on them until the side effects went away just like everyone else. I hadn’t even reached a therapeutic dose. My psychiatrist at the time didn’t believe all of the side effects I was having and my therapist was very invalidating, not helping me advocate for myself in any way or noticing that anything was wrong or different. I was extremely obsessive about acting like I wasn’t struggling as much as I was. I thought that was just what people did. I was pouring every ounce of my energy into trying to keep myself together. It was like I was living in a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. I felt like I was underwater all the time. I felt dead inside. Nothing felt real. I thought that was what it took to get better and it wasn’t. I was extremely dissociated because of my high untreated anxiety and because of the meds. I had the nightmare symptoms people say you’ll never get. It is pretty rare. I’m not anti-med but I have had a lot of bad experiences with bad doctors that didn’t believe my symptoms who said I needed to stay on the meds longer until I was at a therapeutic dose at which point the side effects would go away and they would start working like they should. But the side effects were tearing me apart from the inside and I didn’t know I could say no.

I want to share this because it weighs heavily on me and the experiences were traumatic and I rarely share this with anyone. I had forgotten about the meds until I started writing. I don’t want to scare other people out of seeking help. Meds can be lifesaving. Some meds that really hurt me saved someone else’s life. For the record I have tried a number of meds since that time and have found some that actually work. Just make sure you find someone you trust who will work with you if you’re struggling.

[Qwerty]

Thank you for sharing.