aliceinwonderlandsyndrome

One thing I know for sure is that I was raised in a very abnormal home. My parents are very countercultural (no shade thrown on counterculture, *at all*, but this was extreme), and my brother literally grew up to be so extremely countercultural in his adulthood that he actually does not use electric lighting, even in the bathroom, will not allow a AAA battery to be placed on his kitchen counter, is trying to live in the 16th century (no joke), and will starve himself completely if every single ingredient in everything he puts in his body is not certified organic, non-GMO, local. He does not work and my father supports him.

That said, I have a diagnosis of Complex PTSD that for over 10 years was thought to be a psychotic disorder (I told the doctors I thought I was psychotic because I was so dissociative that I had #aliceinwonderlandsyndrome and other visual disturbances, but I have never once heard voices and my “paranoia” was about very real things.) My parents would rather think that I am delusional than accept that they ever once put me in harm’s way or ever harmed me themselves. Sometimes I think they are right.

There was and still is such a powerful family narrative, fed to us by our parents, that we are a great and superior family and my parents and brother are some kind of modern day secular saints and I am a f*** up and mentally ill and a manipulative liar and am out to destroy the family. That narrative which I think sounds pretty narcissistic was fed to us so early and so completely that it took a therapist in my early 30s to say “a functional family doesn’t need a narrative that they are a functional family” and to compare my mothers relationship to me as #MunchausenSyndrome by proxy, before it started to dawn on me that my family and childhood were not perfect. Sure there was a good deal of bullying from kindergarten through 8th grade, but I didn’t consider that to be that big of a deal.

That same therapist and her husband who I also saw for therapy groomed me for a few years and then started systematically breaking me, and caused me to have so much anxiety about even not seeing them for one weekday, that I was so scared to leave. I tried to leave once and the male one actually sat in my seat and had me sit in his seat and tell him (who was mockingly pretending to be me) why I should not leave him and why no other therapist in the area was competent to know my “manipulativeness” and “deceitfulness” and my “tricks”. I stayed another couple of years, and finally left their care substantially more broken than I was when I started seeing him or his wife and still struggling with “psychosis”. They systematically denied all of the trauma (sexual, emotional, psychological) that was coming to the surface from childhood and said I was faking everything from my preexisting eating disorder to the flashbacks and nightmares of being molested by my childhood therapist etc. Their words play in my head every day and sometimes I still believe them.