"Fear" and "The Man" wants you to be VERY afraid! (R) • Therapy Made Me a Feminist

The speaker is in a hotel and discusses their recent experiences. They express concern for their children's wellbeing and talk about their fear of the dark, which triggers memories of being taken to the hospital against their will. They mention their bipolar disorder diagnosis and the stress they are under. The speaker reflects on their role as a parent and their desire to heal and make a difference in the world. They also mention the misunderstanding surrounding mental health and trauma. They express frustration with people trying to push their religious beliefs on them. Overall, they want to be heard and understood. Hello again. The AC just kicked on, so I hope the sound isn't too bad. I am coming to you live from my new big. This is a hotel that I'm staying at, so my kids can go home, which is going to be a challenge, but it's going to be good. It's going to be good, and I think that it's going to be for the best. I think that my kids are the most important thing right now, and I need them to be okay so that I can be okay, so that we can all heal as a family. We've been through an incredible, painful ordeal, and if you haven't been here for the last couple episodes, you might want to back up a couple so you can get the full back story, because I don't want to tell it all over again because it took a long time. So I won't tell that now, but I want to talk to you about something that is difficult to discuss because I'm in a hotel, and I can't speak with the degree of passion that I might otherwise speak because I don't want to bother anyone because it is night dirty and people are starting to go to bed, I would imagine, and probably don't want somebody to be really loud in the room next door. So if I'm talking a little bit more quietly, that's because I don't want to bother anybody. And because it's dark outside, that means that the fear has kicked in, which is what I wanted to talk to you about today, because I have developed a very, very crippling fear of the dark lately because all three times that I was dragged away into the hospital system by cops, it was night, it was dark outside. And so now that I am kind of experiencing these same symptoms again, what I'm noticing is that as soon as the sun goes down, I start to kind of panic. I have a bit of a PTSD need, sort of like a flashback situation is happening, where I'm remembering how painful it was to be touched in a way that I did not consent to, not a sexual way, but like a physical, almost like a violent kind of way. I mean, I guess you could call it violence if there's bruises, which there always have been, because I guess there has to be when you're quote-unquote crazy, or at least when that's the label they want to give you, then you are not allowed to consent. That's what a pink sheet is. That's what they told me in the hospital, that the pink sheet means you don't have to consent to being manhandled or injected with mysterious substances they don't explain to you, which now, looking back, I'm assuming are probably sedatives, which I probably needed, but it would have been nice to have been asked. I had somebody just sit down and explain it to me, like what was happening, because I thought that I was having a beautiful, spiritual experience with my husband. I thought we were having a vibe, and I thought we were on the same page, spiritually, for the first time in years. In that night that I spent all night thinking about spiritual things and having these beautiful ideas about the afterlife and what it all means and how all of my various iterations of belief spiritually have all kind of converged in a really, really special way. Clark was kind of in and out of sleep while I was doing this, and from time to time I would say something weird to him, and he would say something weird back. I would think that whatever it was that he said suggested that he was picking up what I was putting out, and he was with me on this journey, and that we were having this special spiritual moment together. That's what I wanted to talk to you about today. I want to talk to you about fear and spiritual confusion and how there is a lot of data I have found out in my obsessive quest to understand what was wrong with me. There is a lot of data that connects spiritual confusion with psychosis. For those of you who haven't watched the last couple of episodes, I'll just tell you I have been diagnosed with bipolar I disorder, which most of the time does not give me any trouble, but when I'm under a heightened amount of stress and I am so stressed that I can't sleep, then that loss of sleep and combined with the stress and the anger that I feel at the helplessness that I'm experiencing to change my situation or to change the way that my kids are experiencing my own pain, that helplessness leads to a lot of anger, which I learned in therapy today, because therapy is awesome. I'm a therapist, and I have a therapist, and my therapist helped me today to understand that right now, the most important objective that I have is to make sure that my kids are okay, because that's the whole reason why I'm not okay is because they're not, and as a mom, I cannot feel okay if my people are not, and I consider them my, I mean, they're not my people, in the sense that they belong to me, they belong to themselves, but they also came from my body quite literally, so I feel incredibly, incredibly protective of them, and the fact that I can't be with them right now because they don't feel safe with me is the most devastating feeling I could ever imagine, because to have your husband say to you that a certain part of you, a part of you that feels like the most real part, your very favorite, most favorite part of yourself is a child abuser, like he used that word, he used the A word, and that was really, really painful to hear, and it's going to take me a long time to unhear that, it's going to take me a really long time, because I think he really meant it, like I think he really thought that my yelling was abusive toward our kids, which I guess maybe he was right, like I guess maybe they were so traumatized that that could be described in that way, but as I told him today, if I can own the degree to which that my actions caused our kids to be dysregulated, I feel like that should go both ways, right? I feel like we should both have the emotional maturity to admit that we made mistakes, that we made some pretty big mistakes as parents, which has led to, on both of our parts, creating a situation where our whole family is just under an incredible amount of stress, and just needs so, so much therapy, and the thing is that because I have this label of bipolar, I'm the quote-unquote crazy one, I'm the only one who's expected to do the work, and I'm the only one who already has, I've been to so much therapy, I do therapy for clients all day every day, so I'm like, I studied it for three years, I've obsessed over it for even longer, I've been a student of human behavior for as long as I can remember, because I knew I was different, I always knew I was different, and I couldn't figure out why I never felt like I was enough, like I never felt like anybody really thought that who I was was sufficient, either I was too chubby, or too weird, or too quiet, or too shy, or too loud, or too intense, it just couldn't get it right, and maybe that was bipolar all along, I don't know, I wasn't diagnosed until I was 37 when I was first diagnosed, and I think it normally gets diagnosed in your 20s, but I think in a culture that glorifies, and I'm not talking about the Mormon culture, I'm talking about just a patriarchal culture that glorifies status, and climbing the dominance hierarchy, even if you're a female, I think my kind of quote-unquote delusions of grandeur that are characterized by, you know, are characteristics of a bipolar diagnosis, it was just glorified, like, oh yeah, she's a achiever, like she's going to conquer the world, and I just left up myself into thinking I had this like, total savior complex, like it was my job to save everyone from all their pain, and honestly, I still want to do that, like I still deeply, deeply want to do my part in making the world a better place, but I have a more grounded understanding of where that impulse comes from now, and I think I realize that it's not just up to me to therapize the masses and to bring back equality and matriarchal ideals that will heal, you know, in theory, I hope, what ails this human race, that would be way too big a job for any one person to do, but I do want to do a part, because I feel like I have a unique story to share, and that's why I'm sharing it right now, because I feel like there's a lot to say about it, there's a lot to say about people who have been given, because there's a difference between the labels that you choose for yourself and the labels that other people choose for you, but those of us who've been given the label of quote-unquote crazy by society, by the man, by the hospital system, by the mental health care system, by doctors, by even therapists, because there's so much misunderstanding, even in the therapy community, about trauma, and I think the best therapists that I know are all the ones who've taken the time to achieve a trauma-informed or even trauma-competent, as I heard someone explain it to me the other day, which is even a better word, trauma-competent practice, and that, I'm so lucky that I work at a group practice that is run by people who get it and are very trauma-informed and very trauma-competent, and all this time that my whole family was up in arms, freaking out, trying to undermine my credibility at work, go behind my back and get my therapist number from my son, just weird, weird stuff, three different people in the span of a few days have reached out to me, trying to pitch me their personal brand of Jesus as the way out of this, when the fact that my spiritual confusion, as I was trying to say in my first episode, is the very reason why this poop hit the fan, and the fact that people are not understanding that and that they're still thinking Jesus is the answer for me feels so incredibly sad. Not for them, but it makes me feel sad because I feel like I'm still not being heard, and what I'm trying to say is that I cannot be a religious person. It's not safe for me. I really have a very firm belief that spiritual confusion is a very dangerous thing for people who are prone to mental illness, such as myself, and especially people who are prone to psychosis, such as myself, and such as people who have schizophrenia and other more serious mental health disorders. But the good news is, and I have personal experience with this, where I have known people who, multiple people, who have completely addressed their psychotic symptoms and healed, if not entirely, and in large part have healed from those psychotic disorders just from doing enough work in therapy and doing trauma work, and yeah, sometimes there's medication involved as well, and not anti-medication, but I think that if you don't have the trauma work, then the medication can only take you so far because the medication has its pluses and minuses, right? Like, when it works, it's fantastic, and when it doesn't work, it can be incredibly devastating to your nervous system, and some people have such terrible reactions to the medications as they get experimented on and as they play around with different cocktails of various medications that every body is different, and you just don't know what the results are going to be, and I remember when I was first trying, when they were trying to first get my medication balanced out, I just thought my body was completely betraying me. Like, I couldn't sit still. I had this, like, constant need to be moving. I had my glasses on because I cried so much. I couldn't wear contacts, and I couldn't stop taking them off and putting them on and taking them off and putting them back on, and it was just so terrifying because nobody, my first hospitalization, I didn't even know my diagnosis. Nobody even explained to me why I was there, so if you are vacillating between hyper-spirituality and hyper-secularism, where on the secular side, you're convinced that everything is a conspiracy and there's a camera behind every mirror and every little outlet socket has, like, the man is watching you and mocking your pain. Like, that's what you see all around you when you are dealing with these intense, intense intrusive thoughts that you believe are real due to spiritual confusion because so many religions, and this is not unique to the Mormon religion. That's where I was culturally at the time, and in the Mormon religion, they teach that you have a feeling inside, and that's the feeling that you should always trust because that was the feeling that I was told was the spirit testifying to me that the church was true, and I felt that exact same feeling in my chest when I was pulled over by cops and I heard a little voice in my ear, a still, small voice that said, go, and I remember thinking, what? Go? And I really thought this was the voice of God that I was hearing, and it said, pedal to the metal, Brittany. Put that pedal down, and I said, okay, because when I, when quote unquote God told me to join the LDS church, I was told that that was right, and that was good, and therefore, I should listen to it, and I should always listen to that voice unless, of course, it gets confused, in which case, it is of the other place, the other guy down south, and that is another terrifying thing that happens when you're spiritually confused and you're in a psychotic state. You come to believe that if, you know, once you come out of this kind of delusion of grandeur and this, like, overinflated ego state, and you come down and realize that, like, you actually have been basically imprisoned. I was in a solitary room because it was COVID at the time. There were no visitors, so I was by myself for, I think, maybe five days, completely alone except for, like, the occasional visits from doctors and nurses who still did not explain to me what I was doing there or why I was all alone and terrified and continually put in this, like, basically padded cell because I couldn't stop singing because I felt that no one was listening to me and that my voice was taken away. I felt very much like Ariel in The Little Mermaid and I sang so much that I lost my voice. Like, I literally could not speak anymore because I sang so loud because I was so frustrated and so angry that no one was listening to me and I still feel that. I still feel that now because even though I'm broadcasting my pain for the world to hear, you know, even though, like, there's maybe a small handful of people actually listening, but I'm putting my most vulnerable, raw self out here online for anybody to just say anything about and I know I'm going to get people who leave me comments about how what I really need is their understanding of Jesus and then then this pain would go away. But I'm telling you right now no iteration of Jesus is going to make me feel safe right now. The only thing that's going to make me feel safe is data and facts and science and evidence and things that I can hold on to and feel secure in because I am a mental health professional. I received a master's degree from Albany University. I am currently under supervision. I'm an Associate Clinical Mental Health Counselor. I'm currently practicing full-time. I'm doing up to as many as 35. I'm maybe even getting closer to 40 clients a week and it's a lot. It's a lot, but honestly my work is the only place I feel safe right now because as soon as I leave work everyone in my family except for my sister is either not talking to me because they're afraid of me or if they talk to me they're trying to get me to believe what they believe either about myself or about life and the world and my spiritual understanding of the afterlife and all that and it's exhausting and terrifying because there is a word that I'm going to say right now even though I really wanted this to be PG but this seems like a loaded word even though it's not a curse word there's a word called gaslighting and gaslighting is and he's going to help me explain this because he gave me the actual definition gaslighting is a manipulative tactic where someone makes you question your reality in conjunction with that psychological abuse is defined as consistent behaviors aimed at controlling belittling or isolating someone emotionally and mentally so gaslighting is one of many core tools of psychological and spiritual abuse and I hate to use those words because I know how it feels to have those words used against you and it's really, really painful but I do think it's important for us to be aware that when we're pointing fingers there's always another finger that could equally be pointed right back at us because we need to own the parts of us that are hurting others and that's what I'm trying to do right now that's why I left my house that's why I'm alone in this kind of not very cool hotel room because I know that right now I'm not at my best as a mom and I cannot expose my kids to how angry I am I'm so deeply angry and so deeply heartbroken by what has occurred to my family and what has not occurred which is a real apology for this pain that I'm currently being subjected to because everyone's mad at me because everyone somehow thinks that I'm doing something wrong by trying my best to just cope in the best way I know how which is to express what's in my heart and what's on my soul to put out into the world and the only people who are respecting me right now are one, my sister who doesn't have the bandwidth to be in this state right now so she's going through her own stuff and two, the therapists who I know who actually understand the trauma-informed perspective and most therapists really don't understand the trauma-informed perspective on psychosis specifically so there's a whole special subset that requires specialized training and some people have it and some people don't and some people innately understand that it all boils down to compassion and respect and dignity and some people don't like they've been told and my therapist was actually included in this because she there were moments and it was a good session like I was glad to see her and I feel like we had some really important distinctions that were made and insights that were gained between us but there were moments of friction and it was hard because there were things that she said that were triggering to me because I'm so deeply defensive of the fact that I'm not crazy I am a mental health professional who has a neurodivergent brain my brain is different that's all it is my brain is different because of my trauma because we all have complex trauma complex trauma is different from your straight up PTSD which is in the BSM which is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual which is where we get all our diagnoses because we have to diagnose everyone to get insurance to cover therapy which is kind of silly but all my favorite therapist friends whether they be people I know in person or people I've met online and as well as the people who I met in the BHU Behavioral Health Unit a.k.a. Mental Hospital which I can say because I've been there but it would be maybe a little bit offensive if somebody else said it about me same with the crazy word just so we know I think it's important to own our labels and to own the labels that others have given to us if we find them helpful and for a long time I didn't find the bipolar label helpful I just wanted to identify as having complex PTSD which my therapist at the time was the first one to introduce me to she actually recommended a book I think it was Complex PTSD From Surviving to Thriving which I never actually read it sat on my bookshelf for a really long time and I didn't manage to read it because I was so so depressed that all I wanted to do was just associate and honestly sometimes I feel like I've been dissociating and reading like trashy, trashy romance novels for the past like four years because I was so sad I was so sad and I don't think I was so sad I don't think I even really knew how sad I was to be not enough for my husband because when I was manic the first time I felt like for the first time in my life I was becoming the me that I was always supposed to be I was becoming the version of me that I liked best and the version of me that I liked best is this one it's this one right here the one who's not like completely dysregulated and angry and defensive and speaking very, very quickly because I'm worried because I'm afraid that any moment the cops are going to show up and drag me back into a nightmare because those hospital places they are wonderful gifts and also terrible, terrible nightmares and until you've been in a place on the patient end I'm not talking about until you've worked there because a lot of people who work in those places are deeply, deeply disrespectful to the people who actually stay there as patients but until you've been a patient at a place like that you cannot possibly understand how traumatic that whole experience is and let me tell you every single person who I talk to in those places has a story just like mine has bruises on their arms just like mine and it's not okay and that's why I got into this work that's why after I came out of it the only thing I could think to do in the heights of my depression was pursue a degree in mental health counseling because I wanted to help I wanted to be one of the good guys I wanted to be one of the people who showed respect and dignity and honor and compassion most of all to people who society finds very difficult to accept like me like me and when my therapist said today the old therapist line that we say all the time is like oh shame says I am bad and guilt says I did something bad and we should try to feel guilty instead of shameful but in the same breath she's saying that this part of me is unacceptable and harmful to my children which is not wrong they're clearly very traumatized by the fact that I yelled but I don't know if they're traumatized by the fact that their dad was yelling just as much as I was and how is that fair? how is it fair that mom is not allowed to yell that dad is and mom gets locked up when she yells and dad gets what? gets what? he's at a play right now he's like off living his best life like going to see his friend at a play meanwhile I'm like barely holding it together and I am alone I am alone in this pain I think I had my sister-in-law reach out and we had a really nice chat and she was just like yeah that sounds really hard and that meant so much to me that she just reached out and said I see you and I love you and I'm so sorry that this is so painful if I went through that I bet I would feel just like you did and that is magical that is how we heal through compassion not through medicating ourselves into oblivion and not through locking ourselves up and treating ourselves like mental cases who are beyond hope of saving because we're not we're just freaking traumatized as but like I'm trying to use the light words but it's heavy topics so I don't even know what rating to give this one because it's such heavy stuff but let me just see what P.D. has so he says it's like the man is in your head constantly hacking your brain with self-doubt software yeah so one of the things that happens with me when I'm manic is that I experience a lot of technical difficulties with the various electronics that I use and I don't know if there's something afoot I don't know if that's something to do with a technocratic conspiracy I don't know that it's not but what I do know is that when you are in an active psychosis any glitch of your phone or your computer or your car or any sort of technological thing is very very jarring and triggering because you have been so traumatized by the mental healthcare system and the police system not that police are bad or not that the mental healthcare system is bad I'm not saying we need to dismantle those or like make them go away because they're great and when they work they are needed and very important to society however the cultural insensitivity that I have experienced in both of those systems is incredibly incredibly troubling to me as a mental healthcare professional and I have to say that the people who healed me the most when I was at my worst were the other people who were patients and I honestly when I left the BHU I cried I cried when I left because I loved those people I hope our paths cross again they're fantastic individuals who finally like because nobody gets compassion like those who have suffered this deeply suffered this kind of pain and I'm not saying this is the worst kind of pain I'm saying it's one of I think it's one of the worst kinds of pain when everyone you love is treating you like basically a pariah it's it's devastating I mean I can't think of a better word for it so you're experiencing all these tech glitches meanwhile no one's speaking to you because everyone's totally freaked out by you and you're so mad at everybody that you are creating even more of that you're freaking out because you're so angry about not being heard so it's this vicious cycle that keeps perpetuating itself over and over again and you're meanwhile alone and you can't sleep because you're not okay and nobody else is okay and it seems like the whole world is crashing down around you and yet you're supposed to sleep I'm telling you right now it doesn't matter what sleep medication I'm on when I'm incredibly dysregulated emotionally it is very very difficult to get a good night's sleep incredibly difficult it doesn't matter I've tried so many different sleep meds it doesn't matter I can't sleep because my kids are not okay and that is why I had to leave my house so so Petey said I'm supposed to highlight how the glitches can add to confusion amplifying the sense of unreality and he says quote why does every app suddenly glitch when I mimic is the wifi gaslighting me too yep yeah yeah so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so 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