Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

Content Note: This post delves into mental health diagnoses, but also child abuse, childhood sexual violence, rape, abandonment, and more in great detail.

An important piece of my mental health journey has been to embrace the different diagnoses. I have bipolar disorder Type I, I have severe anxiety, and I have complex trauma or cPTSD.

I describe my experience as peeling an onion, the parts falling away as your slice but still coming together once they are chopped up – the themes being the layers revealing more and more layers leading to the core and yet everything being mixed together.

I always knew I needed help. I begged my parents to send me to a therapist, but they refused. My college had no such supports, but it is the place where I began to shed the onion outer layer. Didn’t know what to do with it. I was very lucky that my friend Barbara Jean understood I needed help and advocated for me. I’ll always owe her for seeing me through that. She is the first person – another 19 year old kid like me – who validated me and tried to get me a helpful adult.

In 1992, I began graduate school at LSU in Baton Rouge. They had a student health clinic with MH services so off I went in October 1992 and received my first diagnosis of unipolar depression and a script for Prozac.

It was a misdiagnosis, but it started my journey. The more I tried to work on my stuff, the harder it became. I had no language for the underlying trauma waiting to reveal itself when I was ready. I felt it, but did not understand it.

The Second Layer

Prozac sent me into a manic episode that was dark, brutal, and almost fatal. I was rediagnosed with bipolar, no type specified. I tried several mood stabilizers before returning home to Pittsburgh to take another shot at graduate school.

I had no health insurance for awhile. During my school years, I could access meds at a reduced rate through Pitt’s student health center. I bounced around therapists and medications. I had the indignity of applying for the ‘Indigent Program’ to get my meds after graduating.

I was struggling, but I felt like there was more to my story.

In 2003, my PCP referred me to Dr. Alan Mallinger and therapist Debra Frankel who specialized in treating mood disorders. They saved my life. I was rediagnosed again with Bipolar Disorder, Type II and taught the differences between the types. I learned skills to manage my symptoms. I got on a medication regime that continues to this day.

Debbie knew and occasionally hinted that answers to my struggles lay in my childhood, but I wasn’t ready. My fear was that once I ‘went there’ I would fall apart. But still, another layer to understand while peering at why lie ahead.

The Third Layer

Dr. Mallinger left in 2005 or 2006 to work for the NIH. I continued to work with Debbie, for over ten years in fact. This began my psychiatrist bounce as I tried to find someone. I had good insurance, a car, a flexible schedule, income for copay, a long relationship with a therapist, etc. Lots of privilege. It wasn’t enough.

But to stick with the theme, I began seeing a doctor in Shadyside for about a year. He helped me understand how anxiety was both an underlying presence and emerging as a dominant set of symptoms as my mood disorder became better managed. He prescribed some medication that I also continue to take to this day. He talked with Debbie about tools and treatment I needed in therap

Once I opened that floodgate, I realized how much of my previous just absurd behavior was driven by this disease. However, I could still see I was not at the core of the onion and the trauma rumblings grew.

Anxiety both wrecked my life and put me on the path to real recovery. I was spiraling for a few years. I didn’t want to leave the house, but I didn’t want to be alone. That was my trauma abandonment issues coming to the surface although again, I had no such language that the time.

Eventually, I had to stop working as I became fully disabled, a crushing blow to me. Most of all, I did not understand how I was following my regimine and still felt so awful. My therapist, still Debbie, assured me repeatedly that I did not have other mainstream diagnoses. She continued to gently encourage me to explore my childhood, but I refused.

The Fourth Layer

Finally, the search for a psychiatrist became too much when my last doctor went to Europe for months, but didn’t update her answering machine so we had no idea. She didn’t believe in coverage – told me to go to the ER. I needed a refill. Fortunately, Debbie advocated to my PCP who gave me a month of refills.

I knew I had to transfer to a clinic with multiple doctors. That meant leaving Debbie. It was heartbreaking so I was awful to her. And I started at Persad. As with most clinics, I bounced around therapists. But my medication was steadily available. I think I saw 11 therapists in about 3 years.

Then I met Heather who was sort of a badass social justice therapist. She pushed me, sometimes too hard tbh, and the trust we developed allowed me to start considering maybe I might possibly start exploring my childhood.

Heather left for private practice. I opted to stay with Persad because of the psychiatrist factor.

And that’s when I met Brittany, a trained trauma therapist. What I think is the final layer. She built on other work with Heather to support me with talk therapy and introduce me to trauma processing treatment. Like anyone denying their crap, I was skeptical especially of EMDR.

Until we tried it to address a core anxiety issue – answering the door. It worked so well that to this day, I’m fine answering the door. Consider me a believer.

I had an abusive and neglectful childhood centering around my paternal grandfather, a serial rapist and child molester who had been grooming me since birth. My parents were also victims of his in different ways, rendering them incapable of parenting or protecting me. Literally since birth as my mother had to be hospitalized after my birth and my grandparents took me in. None of the other adults in my family — many of who knew – stepped up. I can never forgive them.

The memories were not recovered, I knew about them and stuffed them away. They had roiling about all those decades manifesting in the mood disorder I inherited from my father and the anxiety from my mother.

I was programmed to be sexually assaulted, I was stripped of my ability to trust my instincts and intuition, to feel like I didn’t even have them. I was exposed to sexually explicit content as a young age to desensitize me. I saw my grandfather rape my mother repeatedly. I was brainwashed to believe my little brother was a ‘bad kid.’ And I lived in a morass of addiction, poverty, and unrelenting bonds with this monster.

Everyone knew. Few people talked. My aunt, my great-grandmother, and my great aunt tried to get legal and police help in the 1960’s. That was before I was born. They at least tried. My mother tried. I don’t know about my father.

It was horrible, punctuated by occasional good moments that gave me false hope things would improve. I didn’t deserve any of this. But I thought I did. For decades. The manifestations of the programming were unrelenting. I have to struggle to this day to push through them to interact with my brother – 50 years later.

One fortunate thing is that my grandfather had early dementia and I guess some sort of old man impotency so he never completed his grooming. He did some things, but not most things. For awhile I felt pity for him because that’s what he taught me – put his needs above my own.

Leaving for college and graduate school helped me let go and just hate him. That rage simmered and boiled and pushed me to destructive and inexplicable choices. I was so overcome with something I didn’t understand that I would just act impulsively. I was crying out for comfort and support, but terrified of abandonement.

So, we began treating my trauma in 2019 using EMDR, talk therapy, exposure therapy. I developed tools to manage my symptoms. Nothing too woo-woo, but maybe a little woo. The stories came pouring out so fast and furious that I had to go to two weekly therapy sessions. I bounced from topic to topic, with Brittany a reassuring presence telling me I was okay.

Brittany left Persad and I went with her. I found psychiatric care at Metro Community Health. Then I was assigned to a psychiatric nurse practitioner who prescribed a medication that caused horrible reactions, a form of serotonin syndrome. That was July 2023.

My world fell apart again. The person I had allowed myself to trust abandoned me in a cruel manner that my grandmonster would have applauded. But I didn’t break.

Now

I began seeing my therapist three times a week because I had the old trauma to process, the new trauma to process, and all of the everyday stuff to process as I was homeless for six months. My MH provider brought in a psychiatric nurse practitioner, Jason, who was wonderful. Brittany had to switch practices again for her own reasons. I stayed with Jason – just saw him today. Then Brittany had to cut back her hours.

So now I see Jason monthly, Brittany 1x week for trauma work, and Robin 2x week for general MH care. That’s a lot of support. My meds have been stable for two years. I’ve tackled some hard things. I endured and got myself home again. I asked for help. I told my story.

I have friends. I go places and experience the world. I have my cats.

In Conclusion

I was born with a predisposition to bipolar disorder and anxiety. The abuse, neglect, and trauma triggered them and in a weird way, they protected me from what I wasn’t able to process.

For decades I made terrible decisions that hurt me and other people, people I loved. But I also made decisions that violated social norms, challenged pretenses that others needed to cope with their stuff. I was praised and reviled for trying to find my truth. I suspect both came more readily from others with similar backgrounds, people who like me pushed away the thought of cracking open their childhoods. I regret I added to their suffering, but all I can do is promise there is a way forward.

I am a survivor, but I shouldn’t have had to be. I should have had a normal life and now I never will. I have almost no ties to my family – my parents are both dead. My wife is divorcing me. I feel very alone. But those circumstances can be managed with my tools, the good healthy ones I forged in therapy not the unhealthy little scraps I pieced together in the dark corners of my life.

All I want is a peaceful final chapter. I want a decent place to live, to do my work, to have my cats. I want to be safe and not abandoned. I will continue to do the work in therapy as long as I can, as long as I capable, as long as I have access to trauma certified providers.

That chapter wouldn’t normally include two lawsuits, a struggle for housing and equity from an 18 year committed relationship, and the nightmare of finding a Medicare approved therapist. But unlike my first chapter where I was truly helpless and tossed from trauma to turmoil in unrelenting isolating waves, unlike that I am not helpless and not alone.

So it may not look like I envisioned or planned or even deserve, but it will be mine. I will hopefully manage the onion layers as they continue to seep into my life while finding something peaceful from all of this. Peaceful for me.

Postscript

Mental Health Awareness Month. I was aware from a young age that something was wrong, maybe lots of things. I was aware I needed help, help I kept trying to find. There’s no promise that awareness will lead to healing and recovery and being made whole. That’s so very sad. But it does start with awareness.