Maze, I am told that my experience "in captivity" was like a cult experience, because what was done to me was also about breaking down my personality and making me obedient. Together, the prolonged sadistic horrors I was put through and my resistance/self-defense led to a person very unlike who I had been. I was 29 when the terror began. The person I had become in this context of horrors stayed with me to a large extent (but not entirely). My unaware life as not-really-me was ended when I was forced into treatment over a decade later.
I have written some before, as best I'd been able to understand it at various time, about the nature of my "therapy". My "captivity" (the initial trauma) and its effects had been extreme, pervasive, and prolonged - so extreme that, when forced into treatment, I no longer "knew" about the crime, still don't know all the details, had no idea why I was having insomnia, memory problems, and so on. I was still very largely under the control of my "captor." So, by a medical team, family, friends, colleagues, and others, and with the cooperation of the police, I was intentionally retraumatized and have been, am still being put through another prolonged course of terror, helplessness, and the pain of having to live with immense crimes that no one will acknowledge. Essentially, I have been gang stalked for therapeutic purposes, no one admitting directly what has been happening. At first, having no idea what was happening, I became so terrified that I could no longer control the massive shaking of my body or developing inability to function. I quit my job and moved to my home city. I went to the hospital, hoping to get help with the harassment, as well as relief for the symptoms it had caused. Turned out my therapy team was there too and the terror continued. I was put involuntarily on medication for a "delusional disorder" (which I did have with respect to my captor, but the stalking I reported was no delusion; I was treated for delusions based on my reports of the stalking). Everywhere I went, in short-term jobs I would take, among my neighbors, there was more gang stalking. This was done so that I would again be terrorized and tormented in private (maximum "exposure therapy").
At the same time, I was provided a stream of information about trauma in general and the various specific features of my own. I have worked desperately hard at trauma work, because I was make to believe that my freedom depends on my getting thought it. While indirectly acknowledging this course of horror, still, four years later, no one involved will admit it directly, it still hasn't stopped, and I have been kept in a state of having to live under the control of my therapy team now for the last four years or so. I am still not working. I cannot bear seeing friends or family, and I cannot bear therapists. Again, I have been intentionally cut off from my son and parents. I am trapped and watching years of my life go to waste. Why do I not try to get help, get away from this obscenely unethical course of therapy? I am kept obedient by the threat of being put into a psych facility, treated as someone who is paranoid and delusional on the basis of my telling the truth about this treatment plan I have just described. I have already tried and tried to get help. This is what happened. It was terrifying, horrifying, degrading, humiliating, devastating, and indescribably painful. I could not bear for it to happen again. So just as I had by the criminal(s) been held trapped in fear and the paralysis of "learned helplessness," now I am held by the "healers" held trapped in fear
and the paralysis of "learned helplessness." I am becoming numb again, except when faced with even the slightest irritant, then I go into a rage, just as I used to do, and just as would be expected in someone who had been treated as I have been.
I don't know when "deprogramming" will be thought to have been accomplished. I think I can go nowhere from here in such extreme isolation (the deep isolation of living injustices and cruelties that no one will acknowledge). I am dying for real human communication. The point of all this is: I never stopped being me, but it has been nearly two decades now since I was free to act as myself.
Meanwhile, I am always being tested in various ways, asked questions to see whether I remember things I used to know, to see whether I react to suggestions or circumstances in "my" way or the "inculcated" way, I will be provided reminders of the initial trauma and was for a time forced to relive over and over parts of it - mostly abusive language, yelled loudly, by a menacing man, with no provocation, and lasting a long time. People I still have contact with will say things to try to get me to remember the parts I don't remember. I have recently been brought to the point of "surrender," of my brain's no longer being able to try.
I write all this in this thread because a thought about this thread has woken me in the night. I feel as if my "care" team believed (and still believes) that this nightmare they have been making me live is justified precisely because, in their minds, I had so fully "lost my identity," that any treatment was justified - if this gave me a better chance of becoming "myself" again, then they would do it despite the shocking cruelty involved and the immense violations of my rights. And all the while, while I recognize the huge damage done me by my initial captivity, part of me is shouting inside that I still am somebody! I still am myself! It is I who experienced the first nightmare and I who experience this one as well!
My therapy has, to my mind, been the nightmare of my life. Even if it would have been less successful, I would have wanted a humane course of treatment (no one could choose to undergo prolonged torture), and, however blind I was and right they were about the desperateness of my initial situation, I will never forgive anyone who has been involved.
Even when to the outer world there seemed to be nothing left of my personality, I was still there. What I needed most was a safe world, a reliable world, a compassionate world in which to try to come to terms with what had happened. I have no objection to having been treated involuntarily (I recognize that I did not have capacity at the time), but what I needed to be able again to let my personality out into the world, to apply it to activity, to express "real" me, was honest, trusting, real relationships with others, and this is precisely what my therapy deprives me of. With trauma work too, of course. But in relationship is where out identities are to be found.
