Some 4am thoughts about mental illness and stuff

I've just woken up at 4am with some thoughts which I think might be profound.

I was mulling over what I've been learning about identity, dissociation and psychological trauma, duty and shame, and about the article I wrote for The Guardian a couple of years ago.

The article itself was about my experience, as a man, of my partner's rape. I had a lot of problems with it, because it brought up so many issues that I really didn't know where to go with it.

This morning, I was thinking about mental illness, and how it occurs within families and how one family member sometimes "takes on" the mental illness of the family by trying, as it were, to solve all its problems.

Even as I write this now I feel I won't be able to arrive at any solid conclusion, but I do feel I'm on some track, at least, as these words go down. If it seems a little confused, it's because it is. I haven't quite worked it out, yet.

I've read some extremely interesting stuff about children being able to recognise patterns of incorrect thinking in their parents, and ending up, themselves, parenting their own parents. It's like there's a much clearer objective mind in offspring, and they become able to see emotional dynamics in their parents that others, including the parents themselves, can't. Their love for their parents, which is pure, causes them to be drawn into that dynamic, and they feel responsible, inevitably, for them. This is at the root of emotional incest syndrome. The emotionally incested child feels responsible for the parent, becomes shamed at failiing to play the role expected of him, and ends up "burning out", emotionally, himself. This is why children commonly hate their parents. They've done so much to be what the parent wanted and needed - even beyond what the parent consciously demanded - that they feel devalued and embittered. By dealing with the parents' subconscious issues, the child becomes therapist and counsellor. It's no wonder that the child ends up resenting the parent. Yet at the same time the child has little of no authority. This compounds the rage in the child, the parent can't bear to see that they're responsible, and the child ends up becoming victim from playing rescuer. Finally, the child takes on the role of the mentally ill person. Their role is clearly defined within the group, the parent has a lifelong function and role, too, and that become the way it is.

Duty and role playing are particularly relevant here, because duty and roles cause the objectification of the person. No longer an autonomous individual, the duty bound, role playing person - whether it be rescuer or whaever - ends up so immersed in that role that any sense of self becomes lost. As the sense of self is lost, so goes self esteem, confidence, intrinsic motivation, self respect, and some degree of dissociation occurs, This is the root of the loss of self that accompanies PTSD and many other mental illnesses. The sense of self is so profoundly disrupted, and autonomy is so profoundly lost, that the person loses touch with who they are. Subsequently, they become dependent on the role in order to maintain identity, and the codependent relationship of being overinvolved in the emotional wellbeing of the other is maintained.

I think that a great deal of psychological and emotional trauma can be observed similarly.

The problem I had with writing the article was that writing about the rape alone wasn't enough to explain all this. In some respects, the rape opened up my understanding of the damage that role playing does to a person, so it was impossible to simply write about my experience of the rape in any kind of objective way. Writing about it threw up my confusion about it, certainly, but it led me into understanding something more about the nature of mental illness within society, and how an individual's mental illness is, in fact, quite likely to be a symptom of a group dynamic. It's as if the mentally ill person plays an impossible role, then ends up becoming dependent on the group as a result of that failure.

This is interesting, again, because it brings up the inescapable nature of codependency. The rescuer becomes the vistim, then the victim ends up becoming the rescuer: the back and forth nature of codependency becomes like a dance. I've witnessed this phenomenon myself, in my own relationships. Sometimes, my own despair has led to the apparent reconnection of purpose in the person I was trying to help. It's odd how so many of us seem to play a desperate melodrama, sometimes.

At the core of it all, though, is fear and a corruption and distortion of healthy love. Instead of being taught independence and self love, the shame based society and culture creates unspoken and implied duty, binding individuals to another individual's fear and shame. It's as though the fear has to swallow all, rather than just one.

My experience of my ex's rape sums this up rather well. When she was raped, what I really wanted to do - at least the self protecting part of me - just wanted to run away, and get a thousand miles from her. I didn't want to have to look at reality through her eyes, or look at the complexity of reality, or the possibility of reality that I knew she'd become aware of by being raped.

Yet I was bound by duty. I knew I'd have been too ashamed of myself to abandon her, and so I entered her world, and her fears and problems became mine. As such, I becaome the "victim" of the rape as well. Yet I knew that my role was less understood, and less definable. I wasn't, after all, the "victim"in the traditional sense. I was entering the drama of my own accord. In this respect I was my own abuser, and this is a significant point.

In this respect, I was angry with myself for putting myself in the position of losing my own simple happiness and autonomy. And this is where dissociation occurred for me. Because the primary nature of the internal self IS a selfish child that carves simplicity and joy; that needs attention and love and a sense of reality and nurtuting. That part of me had already been overextended, having been squashed and put on hold during my childhood and adolescence, when I had no properly functioning parents to instill a real sense of self esteem in me. My "self love" wasn't fully developed, so I wasn't really able to continue to nurture myself emotionally, let alone nurture another through her ordeal. And so, I became ashamed at feeling good. I felt guilty for her, and ashamed of my own happiness, freedom, and masculinity. My shame bound me to her, and I was drawn into her drama and misery.

What I realise now, though, is that she was most deeply affected - like many rape victims are - by her own sense of shame at being a victim. This is the compounding, most cruel thing about victimhood: that the last kick in the face comes from the self. Her own sense of duty to others prevented her from feeling OK about accepting help. She felt worthless about heing needy: this is common for people, as they lose self esteem from being rescued. This added to my own problems. Bound to her shame, I was now angry for her, too. The whole thing became more and more complex, as I was drawn into the bottomless pit of powerless duty.

So, in this way, many of us hang on an attachment to a conditional self esteem. Only be feeling worthy and not needy do we feel justified in being happy. The shame game is played, and someone inevitably falls into the hole, where the rest of the people want him to remain so that they don't have to fall into the hole themselves.

This is the role that the "mentally ill" person often plays in a famiiy or society, and it's why Judith Herman (trauma therapist and psychologist) talks about the politics of mental illness. There is a politics to mental illness, because it's rooted in role playing, mask wearing, and the kinds of shame-shuffling, role playing, role demanding and the grand human drama that's the politics of human relationships. Interestingly, in some societies the mentally ill are treated with a certain reverance, as if blessed. I believe that in the West we're aware on some level that the mentally ill are in some ways pioneers into some different realm. We just like to devalue them, so that we can feel less guilty about them when we walk by them.

Only by refusing to step into unwanted roles can we avoid mental illness. But sometimes, that just seems impossible, because of the shame within the group/family/society. The expectations we have of one another bind us to our duty, rather than to our own well being. And so, the soldier who goes to war, proud to serve his country and defend his loved ones, beomes confused and embittered when he realises that they can't bear to see his own loss of self when he returns with PTSD, his mind traumatised by the brutal realities of war compared to the pure fantasy role he'd invisaged. His mental illness is a symptom of society's ills, rather than a simple dysfuntion within his own mind. The doctor, the nurse, the social worker each become burned out and embittered, driking themelves to an early grave because their own sense of shame at being unable to help everyone causes vicarious trauma within them. These, too, are examples of people being drawn into the shame of society, playing duty bound roles that overextend them.

Personally, I'm 100% certain that criminals and the mentally ill are a symptom of society's ills in just the same way, and not simply dysfunctional individuals.

People stop functioning properly for a reason, and there are always several factors involved. Sanity is a very difficultthing to define.

. We all stand on the edge of a precipice, in my opinion.


That was all a bit confused, wasn't it? Well, I'm not pretending it isn't. But I know I made some good points somewhere along the line. Actually, I think there's something to be said in not making something too slick, whether it's an article or whatever it is, and I'll explore that later.

Adding to this a couple of hours later, there was an odd synchronicity to this piece. Just as a finished it, I flicked on the TV and there was a TV movie about a woman who'd been looking after her autistic son. But it had been pointed out to her that she was too close to him: in fact, his illness became her life. She needed to be needed by him, and by so doing she was never allowing him to grow. She perpetuated his mental state by enabling him. I think this is a common thing. I really believe that even therapists do this to their clients. Rather than actually nurturing them till they can "fly off", they keep them needing them, for their own sake. Many humans do that to other humans, I think.