I have added Susan Forward's Toxic Parents to my books-to-order tabs. There is always a browser window (or two) open on my PC with a great many of these tabs showing sales pages for individual books I'd like to read. One day I may be able to clear them! I shall address Susan's book as a priority though.
I am accustomed these days to receiving unexpected parcels of books by mail, ordered by my Dad. They always feel somehow as if they are offered as sly insult, albeit in some shielded fashion. I found myself unable to read Cass Sunstein and Yuval Noah Harari, disgusted at the materials presented to me. I am glad I found out in advance about his plan to send me Adam Rutherford's How to Argue With a Racist and managed to dissuade him following a heated argument. Sometimes it's bundles of contemporary cognitive neuroscience material. Despite some genuine interest value, the cold reductionism of so many mechanistic theories grates on me, all emphasis on the 'hardware'. These impositions would feel less harrowing if he was open to anything I sent back to him. Sadly, he has always been of the mind to consider that he knows best, and that it is his role alone to inform me on what I should think and what beliefs I can hold. All discussion is closed. There is no correction I could offer that he would accept off of me.
It was only this year that I properly encountered the concept of a schizophrenogenic mother, at least expressed by that term. I was unsure if there is a common understanding in psychological literature of a paternal equivalent. Dad is not exactly cold by nature, but he remains extremely controlling (endless 'advice', micro-management, scolding, and firmly-worded career decisions), and totally unemotional. Quick to anger. Adept at kicking someone when they are down, and unable to draw off if he is irritated. As a child I noticed he preferred delivering long lectures to me to listening to my thoughts, growing very snappy and impatient if I interrupted him. Insults and put-downs come easily to him, delivered with a scathing disdain. He does not seem able to recognise consequences. I find him very hard to understand.
I shall start fairly soon on writing the open letter to my father. As I said before, I find it increasingly hard to write these days. The willpower and enthusiasm is hard to stimulate, and I grow tired very quickly. Concentration is a lot more difficult than it once was. I felt a little better physically today. The tremors have ceased. It's just the headache and neck stiffness and the persistent nausea that accompanies a tight throat. A physical weariness. I made some steps to clean out one of our rooms. It's been used for general storage for a while. I'm repurposing it into a study and art studio, with a segment at one end devoted to storing my weights and work-out equipment. Due to all these health worries I've been unable to maintain my training program for a couple of months. I had previously been weight-lifting in the garden. Given the bitter cold here, and the short days, I decided it might be easier to ease back into it indoors. I had used to self-harm very badly. Admittedly, I still get the sensation that I want to at times, although always resist these days. I think weights work as an ideal positive replacement.Â
It seems impossible to explain that my parents have done little to assist me psychologically, and have actively hindered me over long years, to a point where I no longer really feel I have a relationship with them, or any desire to re-stimulate one. I love them, and mourn what I have never had. Aside from my Dad helping me out financially, there's really nothing there though. They do not, and cannot, acknowledge what they have done to me. I am often reminded "look at everything your Dad does for you." I am grateful for the money, but otherwise I never understand what they mean. It feels like a stock response, along the lines of "you should go to a doctor." Another related set being "I can't help you, I'm not a professional" and "I'm not a carer", or "you have to work with them if you want them to work with you." More ways to medicalize what I had used to think was part of the criteria necessary to be considered human, as if one can only show love if they have been provided with training and a license, with no other obligations, and then a rigid command to invalidate yourself for the convenience of others as they happily continue to provide no care. Telling people hundreds of times that the NHS psychiatric system is a force for destruction does not sink in. Always the buck-passing. I don't know whether to blame the existence of the institution of psychiatry more for conditioning people to be so damn aloof and lackadaisical, or to hold them responsible as individuals for this awful, easy carelessness. As the years go on I'm drifting towards the latter position.
 Another common experience is to have my perspective doubted on account of the fact that "he has a mental illness so he's prone to fantasising and unreality", a patronizing torturous dismissal as everyone smiles knowingly and winks to each other safe in the knowledge that the poor crazy fool has misinterpreted his own life and, naturally, is wrong if he suggests that someone else has hurt him, or is continuing to. Similar to the expression "he's ill because he has a mental illness" which saves having to process that there are unaddressed environmental factors that can destroy a person, or keep him constantly re-traumatized, absolving everyone else of having to acknowledge the impact of their words and actions, or understanding the need for at least some sensitivity. No, to them there's just this 'illness' there, and my every feeling of distress, pain, betrayal, or hurt is merely this 'illness' manifesting. There is no formal 'illness' in my eyes. There is merely the futile compound despair of a sensitive soul in a society of nullified, heartless people. Their position as majority ensures that they can always back each other up.
My partner's comments were, "he hit you; you hit him back, so the matter's closed. The past is the past. You need to get over it, you can't change it. Just let it go." This was what made logical sense to her. A curt, logical, sensical response in her eyes. Along the lines of when I am encouraged to accept involuntary sectioning in the cold, drab, lonely, stripped back isolation of a barren mental hospital bedroom on the ground that "it'll give you space to relax!" or "I don't know what you're complaining about, I'd love it in that scenario, like going to a health spa."
I had no more energy to explain these terrible, dispassionate, ignorant mistakes. My energy is failing me in general. There was a lot more I wanted to write, phrased differently, with more eloquence. I didn't have many friends in the first place. I've distanced from them all now, so tired at the dispassion, weary of having the argue the toss as their conformism and scepticism prevented me from expressing any criticism of psychiatry. Parallel to that, they had decided they knew better from the start, and did not to hear about what could be bothering me. One of the reasons I cut off from my friend Harald was because I had begun to share some autobiographical details on early abuse and his only response was to quibble with me over the dates, insinuating that I had "maybe" made a mistake. His only response, of all the things he could potentially have said. It was so insulting it stimulated another bout of psychosis, in tandem with terrible background stress. I expected more. Lifelong I have found people quicker to leap in and correct, or to quibble and query, than to listen at all. More outright effort is made by default to disagree than to agree.
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