This essay is vivid, wrenching, and fiercely intelligent -- thank you for sharing it. I found myself deeply moved by the story, and also full of questions I’m still sitting with. There’s a raw honesty here about what didn’t work, what harmed, and what helped, especially the elemental things: being treated as normal, being outside, being useful, being loved.
At the same time, I felt pulled toward some of the contradictions in the narrative. Not as critiques, exactly. More as tensions that feel meaningful to explore.
For example, the author beautifully articulates her longing to be treated as “normally capable,” yet this sits alongside a strong insistence on being seen as different, misjudged, uniquely harmed, and not responsible for her behavior. (It’s a tension that exists in all of us, of course, and perhaps it’s youth that keeps this difficult life task just on the edge of her awareness.) She also intimately portrays her desire for community and mutuality, yet this is expressed mostly through what others gave, rather than what she offered in return. I loved how she described what it means to be held by community, yet found myself eager for some self-reflection on what it takes from each of us to build or contribute to that kind of mutual care.
The author's wish for systemic alternatives is also vivid, but the rejection of every available intervention sometimes feels totalizing. While her critique of psychiatric and family systems is important, there’s little acknowledgment that the options available in the wake of real harm can really only be -- like life itself -- messy, imperfect, and painful. And sometimes, rejecting every flawed option can become its own kind of trap. And while I appreciated her sharp insight into the failures of family and psychiatry, I was left wondering: what would it have looked like to name not just what others did wrong, but also what the author herself eventually did differently, what different choices she decided to make or narratives she decided to claim, and how she is carrying her values and practical actions forward into the world she wants for her future self and for others.
I don’t mean this as a dismissal of her pain or her truth. Instead, I hope this reads as more of an invitation to wonder. To perhaps go deeper. To think through questions like: What does accountability and self-determination look like when you’ve been blamed for too much, too young? What do mutuality and contribution look like when your earliest experiences of others were unsafe? What would healing look like if it allowed for both grief and growth?
There’s something haunting and true in the idea that much of what we call “mental illness” might be better understood as a lack of ordinary human nourishment. Of stability, of belonging, of being seen without distortion. And yet I’m also left wondering: how do we grow into agency without collapsing into blame, claim our difference without disowning our responsibilities, and seek healing in a world where the available paths are often partial and flawed?
I look forward to another reflection from the author in five or ten years, to hear how she views these tensions with the gift of more time, more healing, more agency, and further growth in this imperfect world.
Thank you again for this. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.
thank you for engaging so deeply. the contradictions you see are accurate, and only having written this essay do I see them clearly—hence the need to write and share!
I'm from a pretty different background and with a different kind of psych history, but this:
" This made me hypervigilant for any trace of weirdness in my behavior. Believe it or not, obsessively checking your behavior to make sure it’s normal does not make you seem very normal. ... I just felt crippling shame anytime I realized I had done something out of the ordinary, and I still felt the niggling paranoia that I was probably acting weird all the time and just couldn’t tell" - was SO relatable.
That you for sharing your story with such candor and insight. What I really appreciated is that how your story rejects simple explanations for complex phenomena. As you said, people want to know what you think ‘caused’ your distress and what ‘fixed’ it. I love how to so beautifully describe the reality that it is never one thing that explains all things: multiple factors led to your admissions to rich girl rehab, and multiple factors led to you finding your feet and building a life worth living afterwards. I think you’ve done a great job of parsing out the ways your childhood and early ‘treatment’ experiences contributed to your difficulties, but also identified the ways in which they helped; imperfectly and insufficiently, but helped nevertheless. I love how you describe the way you found what worked for you: through trying out different things, thinking and reflecting deeply, trying again: it was never just one thing, but a collection of many things working together to undo the hurts and build new patterns. It would be so easy for someone to take your story and make it: ‘rehab and meds are bad and make people worse: the cure for mental distress is to move to a cute rural town and get back to nature!!!’ - but your don’t haven’t let your story become a click-bait headline. It takes a lot of wisdom and maturity (is that ok for me to say? If it comes across as patronizing I apologize, it’s not my intent) : to keep ambiguity and contradictions in a story, to not force it into a ‘three arc’ structure with easily identifiable villains and heroes.
Basically what I want to say is: these are the stories that give me and my patients hope: the messy and real ones, not the ones where someone discovers the ‘one thing’ that magically cures them and transforms them. I can’t relate to those magically transformations stories, and neither can many of my patients, who have had their hopes build up and shattered again and again. I try to as gently and compassionately as I can tell them “healing/recovery is rarely one thing that happens one time, it’s multiple helpful things that happen over and over again over a long period of time, while harmful and unhelpful things continue to happen because that’s life and we can’t avoid them - but healing is when eventually the helpful things start to outweigh to unhelpful things.”
What honest, compelling writing. I strongly agree that being embedded in matrices of caring, stable relationships is so crucial to good mental health. I know that some of my clients would benefit more from a web of good relationships than from our therapy sessions. You hint at the chaos in your parent's relationship, which transferred to you, and your subsequent difficulties in navigating your emotions, relationships, and identity.
thanks so much for reading. I definitely believe that many of my problems began as relational problems; and to that extent, the attachment framing offered by RGR was accurate.
Wow, Sorbie. So much of this speaks to my own early adult experience with what was labeled bipolar disorder at one point. Fortunately (in my opinion, looking back), my family was working class, and beyond making a special trip to the city to take me to a psychiatrist (who I was able to bs with like a peer and pass with flying colors (my diagnosis came later)), there was not much they could do. So I was on my own from the beginning, which was a good thing. And when I was still in high school, we lived on a farm-ish property and I spent a lot of time with grass and trees, so that sustained me.
But I share the deeper sense of things being really messed up in our society. The shift in how your family and others treated you based on a shift in diagnosis from BPD to autism, to me, demonstrates a very toxic stance held by many people about how people "should" behave and what it means when they don't conform. My own family was dominated by my father the cop, and his police mentality infused everything, with blame and punishment spewing toward any evidence of malicious intent, incompetence (or whatever). Different social sphere from your own, similar effects. Probably based on a shared metaphysics of personhood in which behavior straying from established norms is taken as indication that there is "something wrong with you," with different strategies for addressing that.
Ugh. Thank you for writing, thank you for being on the journey, good luck in continuing to find your own way.
This essay is vivid, wrenching, and fiercely intelligent -- thank you for sharing it. I found myself deeply moved by the story, and also full of questions I’m still sitting with. There’s a raw honesty here about what didn’t work, what harmed, and what helped, especially the elemental things: being treated as normal, being outside, being useful, being loved.
At the same time, I felt pulled toward some of the contradictions in the narrative. Not as critiques, exactly. More as tensions that feel meaningful to explore.
For example, the author beautifully articulates her longing to be treated as “normally capable,” yet this sits alongside a strong insistence on being seen as different, misjudged, uniquely harmed, and not responsible for her behavior. (It’s a tension that exists in all of us, of course, and perhaps it’s youth that keeps this difficult life task just on the edge of her awareness.) She also intimately portrays her desire for community and mutuality, yet this is expressed mostly through what others gave, rather than what she offered in return. I loved how she described what it means to be held by community, yet found myself eager for some self-reflection on what it takes from each of us to build or contribute to that kind of mutual care.
The author's wish for systemic alternatives is also vivid, but the rejection of every available intervention sometimes feels totalizing. While her critique of psychiatric and family systems is important, there’s little acknowledgment that the options available in the wake of real harm can really only be -- like life itself -- messy, imperfect, and painful. And sometimes, rejecting every flawed option can become its own kind of trap. And while I appreciated her sharp insight into the failures of family and psychiatry, I was left wondering: what would it have looked like to name not just what others did wrong, but also what the author herself eventually did differently, what different choices she decided to make or narratives she decided to claim, and how she is carrying her values and practical actions forward into the world she wants for her future self and for others.
I don’t mean this as a dismissal of her pain or her truth. Instead, I hope this reads as more of an invitation to wonder. To perhaps go deeper. To think through questions like: What does accountability and self-determination look like when you’ve been blamed for too much, too young? What do mutuality and contribution look like when your earliest experiences of others were unsafe? What would healing look like if it allowed for both grief and growth?
There’s something haunting and true in the idea that much of what we call “mental illness” might be better understood as a lack of ordinary human nourishment. Of stability, of belonging, of being seen without distortion. And yet I’m also left wondering: how do we grow into agency without collapsing into blame, claim our difference without disowning our responsibilities, and seek healing in a world where the available paths are often partial and flawed?
I look forward to another reflection from the author in five or ten years, to hear how she views these tensions with the gift of more time, more healing, more agency, and further growth in this imperfect world.
Thank you again for this. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.
thank you for engaging so deeply. the contradictions you see are accurate, and only having written this essay do I see them clearly—hence the need to write and share!
"clearly" actually I don't know how clearly! as you say, time will tell.
Love your thoughts on this! I was drawn to many of these contradictions as well.
Thanks so much for this.
I'm from a pretty different background and with a different kind of psych history, but this:
" This made me hypervigilant for any trace of weirdness in my behavior. Believe it or not, obsessively checking your behavior to make sure it’s normal does not make you seem very normal. ... I just felt crippling shame anytime I realized I had done something out of the ordinary, and I still felt the niggling paranoia that I was probably acting weird all the time and just couldn’t tell" - was SO relatable.
<3
That you for sharing your story with such candor and insight. What I really appreciated is that how your story rejects simple explanations for complex phenomena. As you said, people want to know what you think ‘caused’ your distress and what ‘fixed’ it. I love how to so beautifully describe the reality that it is never one thing that explains all things: multiple factors led to your admissions to rich girl rehab, and multiple factors led to you finding your feet and building a life worth living afterwards. I think you’ve done a great job of parsing out the ways your childhood and early ‘treatment’ experiences contributed to your difficulties, but also identified the ways in which they helped; imperfectly and insufficiently, but helped nevertheless. I love how you describe the way you found what worked for you: through trying out different things, thinking and reflecting deeply, trying again: it was never just one thing, but a collection of many things working together to undo the hurts and build new patterns. It would be so easy for someone to take your story and make it: ‘rehab and meds are bad and make people worse: the cure for mental distress is to move to a cute rural town and get back to nature!!!’ - but your don’t haven’t let your story become a click-bait headline. It takes a lot of wisdom and maturity (is that ok for me to say? If it comes across as patronizing I apologize, it’s not my intent) : to keep ambiguity and contradictions in a story, to not force it into a ‘three arc’ structure with easily identifiable villains and heroes.
Basically what I want to say is: these are the stories that give me and my patients hope: the messy and real ones, not the ones where someone discovers the ‘one thing’ that magically cures them and transforms them. I can’t relate to those magically transformations stories, and neither can many of my patients, who have had their hopes build up and shattered again and again. I try to as gently and compassionately as I can tell them “healing/recovery is rarely one thing that happens one time, it’s multiple helpful things that happen over and over again over a long period of time, while harmful and unhelpful things continue to happen because that’s life and we can’t avoid them - but healing is when eventually the helpful things start to outweigh to unhelpful things.”
Thank you again, Emily.
What honest, compelling writing. I strongly agree that being embedded in matrices of caring, stable relationships is so crucial to good mental health. I know that some of my clients would benefit more from a web of good relationships than from our therapy sessions. You hint at the chaos in your parent's relationship, which transferred to you, and your subsequent difficulties in navigating your emotions, relationships, and identity.
thanks so much for reading. I definitely believe that many of my problems began as relational problems; and to that extent, the attachment framing offered by RGR was accurate.
Wow, Sorbie. So much of this speaks to my own early adult experience with what was labeled bipolar disorder at one point. Fortunately (in my opinion, looking back), my family was working class, and beyond making a special trip to the city to take me to a psychiatrist (who I was able to bs with like a peer and pass with flying colors (my diagnosis came later)), there was not much they could do. So I was on my own from the beginning, which was a good thing. And when I was still in high school, we lived on a farm-ish property and I spent a lot of time with grass and trees, so that sustained me.
But I share the deeper sense of things being really messed up in our society. The shift in how your family and others treated you based on a shift in diagnosis from BPD to autism, to me, demonstrates a very toxic stance held by many people about how people "should" behave and what it means when they don't conform. My own family was dominated by my father the cop, and his police mentality infused everything, with blame and punishment spewing toward any evidence of malicious intent, incompetence (or whatever). Different social sphere from your own, similar effects. Probably based on a shared metaphysics of personhood in which behavior straying from established norms is taken as indication that there is "something wrong with you," with different strategies for addressing that.
Ugh. Thank you for writing, thank you for being on the journey, good luck in continuing to find your own way.
thanks Joe, and thanks for sharing some of your experience!
Wonderful essay. Thank you!
Fantastic!
thanks Kathleen!