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I Was Called a Liar by My Own Therapist

How my mental illness was an excuse to discredit me

By joy ellen sauterPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
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I Was Called a Liar by My Own Therapist
Photo by Colton Sturgeon on Unsplash

I grew up working class in a safe neighborhood. I was accepted into college but was the third generation to attend. It wasn’t a surprise, it was expected I would attend. It was expected I would succeed. It was a place of privilege.

After second-wave feminism, I was assured the world would open up for me. I grew up in the 1980s where the culture taught girls they could be anything they wanted. Not President, but almost anything else.

Innocently, I pushed my way into the world. Innocently, I was all-knowing by the time I was out of adolescence. My dad was loud, and people listened to him. People will listen to me, I assumed

I really believed it. In all the ways my gender didn’t assure me as equal, I still believed it.

I was my father’s daughter, and I questioned authority. I questioned everything. I successfully argued my way out of detention in 6th grade. The detention was questionable, I had excellent points. I had a loud mouth, and I convinced the principal to take my side against a member of his faculty.

Except I didn’t.

My dad called the principal afterward and argued against the detention, outside of my earshot. My father was also a teacher at my middle school. He called his boss and got me off the hook for the detention. Privilege, entitlement, call it whatever. It was a shady detention.

He let me believe I succeeded, though, until I couldn’t argue out of my next one. I served the next detention in disbelief that my voice didn’t amount to anything.

I served a lot of detentions for questioning authority and holding teachers to account. Maybe I saw them as human as my dad and grandfather.

Maybe I was just my father’s daughter.

My 10th-grade geometry teacher accused me of cheating on a test. This same teacher tried to look up skirt when he supervised my study hall later in the day. I told him I didn’t need to cheat on the test. I just got all the answers right.

I had to take the test again, and still got every question right. My grandfather had a geometric theorem named after him, so geometry is baked into my DNA.

It was my first time not being believed, at least I can recall. It hurt. It hurt my pride and chipped away at my assumption that the world was just opening its doors for some teacher’s daughter, a petite girl with brown hair from New Jersey.

Turns out, there are a lot of petite girls with brown hair from New Jersey.

What I didn’t know was how much my honesty would be called into question later in life. How many people would dismiss my experience as fictitious, not because I had a history of lying. Simply because I was honest about my mental health diagnosis.

It was surprising to me how much I wasn’t believed, and how discriminating it felt. It was erasing my experience, often jeopardizing my personal health, and discounting me in unexpected ways. The more honest about my mental health, the more this erasure grew until believing me became something I had to fight to receive.

I started with a new therapist in 2015. I have difficulty trusting therapists. It’s a very challenging process for me. Something I continue to put myself through because I believe in being a work in progress.

I had recently recovered from a therapist I was not connecting with and met Jacob through The Penn State Psychological Clinic. They offered therapy through Penn State University. I trusted him. I am not sure what happened, but I did some of my best therapy work.

During my time working with him, I had to relocate across the country from Pennsylvania to Seattle, Washington. I asked for my psychological evaluation, and therapy notes to take to a new therapist once I settled in my new home.

I received the notes in a vanilla envelope. I was so busy leaving, packing, and organizing the endeavor with a senior dog, and three children with different special needs. It was just another envelope in a sea of envelopes that made its way to a plastic container in the back of my minivan.

An important point to interject into this story is that my son, Dominic was born with a rare genetic abnormality that causes seizures, ADHD, Autism, intellectual disability, and significant mental illness. At three weeks he was physically abused and violently shaken four times, resulting in a traumatic brain injury.

He was adopted in 2008. Raising him has been exceptionally challenging. He is sometimes violent, often distracted, and frequently distracting. He is amazing, but his journey has been bumpy and difficult. Most of my therapy sessions revolved around issues raising him. Focused on my personal struggle to raise him, how to continually try and meet his ever-changing needs.

When I finally was able to open the envelope and read through the evaluation I noticed something strange. Jacob and the team of therapists and psychiatrists that I worked with throughout my therapy at Penn State thought I was lying. They assumed, without ever asking me, I imagined much of the stories I told them about Dominic, considering the stories to be extreme, exaggerated, or fictional.

There was a lot to unpack, and I showed my partner, Nate. His jaw dropped. He was genuinely surprised at the examples of stories they didn’t believe. He responded:

“These things all happened,” and “Why didn’t they ask you if they didn’t believe you?”

Good questions I don’t have an answer to, or an understanding. I know it happened. I know I experienced these things, and I wonder how much therapy was encouraged to ignore me or discount me instead of helping me.

It really hurt. It was a betrayal of my experience. It broke me. I felt hopeless, and insignificant, and angry.

I wondered how many people before them existed, how many more people. My loud voice got softer, more unsure, more afraid. Could I ever speak up again?

I am my father’s daughter, so that didn’t last very long.

I wrote about Dominic anyway. I wrote about my mental health. I told everyone. I told my employers, I told the internet. I told the hard stories about raising Dominic. I wrote about my exhaustive and failing efforts to raise him the best way. I didn’t back down from not being believed.

I wanted to highlight the way the mentally ill are treated, the ways mental illness is used to disqualify and silence voices and experience. My voice, my privilege, is my ability to write about it. I thought, maybe that’s my struggle. Not in a martyred way, but I can pave the road. I can talk about my experience of being discounted.

The problem was complicated because the disbelief seemed to be more of an issue within the mental health community, than with the outside world.

This silencing of voice and experience wasn’t just happening online, or in society, but within the mental health professionals who spend their career helping people like me. People they don’t really want to help, the people with life long and disabling mental health conditions. The people who need their help most of all.

I had an article about raising Dominic recently appear on a large parenting website. It was an article on admitting him to a psychiatric facility when he was four years old. A psychiatrist with a YouTube page read my article and really liked it. He decided to read it during his podcast and open the discussion up to callers.

One of my email subscribers sent me a link. The psychiatrist did a fine job. The first caller, with a background in the mental health field, Googled me and read some of my other work.

She went on a twenty-minute discussion of silencing my experience solely because of articles I wrote about my mental illness. She didn’t know me. A complete stranger. Towards the end of the call, she suggested Dominic could be completely fictional — a made up character for me to gain some kind of attention. The best scenario was my failing as a human being, my inability to care for him, and questioned whether I should be a parent at all.

It was all simply based on my mental health diagnosis.

That idea is ridiculous since I’ve been talking about him for over twelve years. If it were true, it would be a lengthy and exhausting effort. My Facebook page has over 240 photos of Dominic from age one to age fourteen. I really wouldn’t have time to do anything else.

My partner, Nate, was really upset about it. He wrote the woman a personal response. He is not ever in a position to save me, and I didn’t ask him. He said because we share raising him, discounting his existence was silencing his experience. I have thicker skin and am used to this type of assault.

It still really hurt. Especially because it came from the mental health community, the very community that should be inclusive and understanding. The very people who should be believing my experience.

I am my father’s daughter. That won’t silence me. Instead, I am going to use this example to make an example out of the mental health field, the hypocrisy and the misunderstanding baked into systemic discrimination.

A way to silence, and to further stereotype people with disabilities within the very system they rely on for help. The mental health system. The only system currently built to validate the lives of millions suffering from mental illness. The only one in American life. The broken system where crisis is common and treatment variable.

In a system where experience is critical to its variables for success, the only way to measure its outcome is through experience. The stories of people engaged in the system. If they aren’t to be believed then it isn’t just a failure, but a collapse.

I recently saw a rheumatologist for early-onset osteoarthritis. I had been diagnosed through x-rays and was there for better management of my painful symptoms. The young doctor, wearing tweed pants and black dress shoes, dismissed my experience. I focused on his dress shoes because that’s what I stared at as the tears rolled down my face. He suggested my pain was in my head, didn’t examine me at all, and referred me to therapy.

I need to reiterate that I was diagnosed through multiple x-rays and an MRI.

Believing me isn’t as important as believing everyone’s experience, disengaging from stereotypes of mental illness, and not transferring experience from one person to another based on a diagnosis. The fact that I say my pain is affecting my life profoundly shouldn’t matter what a doctor thinks is reasonable.

I am not a diagnosis, but a human being. The purpose of disclosing my mental illness to a medical professional is just a guide, a holistic measure of my overall health. It is not a description of my personality, flaws, and imperfections for you to exploit at your leisure.

I deserved to be believed, to be taken at face value, and respected as an individual worthy of that respect. My experiences are the total of my life, and they have value. At the end of my life, all I have will be my memories. Sharing them is about making connections, and marketing empathy.

Joy Ellen Sauter is a freelance writer living in Seattle, Washington with her partner, Nathan, two teenage boys, and two cuddly pit bulls. She writes about parenting, mental health, popular culture, history, disability, the foster care system, and human rights.

humanity
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About the Creator

joy ellen sauter

Joy lives in Seattle, Washington, but is a native east coaster. She has kids and dogs- all adopted through foster care. She writes about mental health, history, pop culture, foster care, trauma, human rights, and parenting.

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