Psychiatric Gaslighting

This is an exchange between birth sister and me about the state of her mother. Her mother has had mental dips ever since meeting the last child’s absent father. She had been doing extremely well at her coffee place job and customers had even been emailing the manager too compliment her.

Then she met a guy who was delivering stuff, if I recall correctly. They started a relationship but there were red flags in abundance and I warned her to dump him. She agreed she would. But after a few years, she was pregnant..by him.

I cannot explain how angry and SAD this made me. Why do we do this? When I tell you something will fail, I’m never wrong. I told a very close relative the same thing and indeed, the marriage in name only, the family member already had a replacement in place who is more of a father than the father ever was. ended with him dead, but she’d been trying to get a sheriff to hand him divorce papers. Another is suffering. Another, I sent red flags warning photos. I wish someone had sat me down and shown me that I don’t need to .. Ok, this isn’t about me!

But it is about me because she’s my child’s mother and I cannot ignore her. When she fell pregnant, he wanted her to abort, but first she didn’t want to. By the time she realised she wouldn’t be able to raise a child, it was too late and again, her home attempts failed. So there she is with her unwanted pregnancy and a man tearing her down. And sadly the genius of true evil is that it mingles truth with cruelty. He told her she was and had nothing, so how did she think she’d be able to take care of a baby? The question is valid. She can’t. That’s why she asked me to take the baby. He made it clear he’d never be involved. He kept his promise. But he also wished she’d die. He also told her her positive status would kill her and the unborn baby. He told her she’d be thin and sick and nobody would want her. He was, is, evil personified. Everything I feared and more.

And he managed to tear her down more than her own cold hearted mother ever did. Confidence disappeared. Work ethic, left the building. She just stopped going to work, She started jobs and just left. She got huge inferiority complex issues, feeling like she’s rubbish. I shared before how if she was in a taxi, she’d think that the passenger next to her is thinking how pathetic she is, she’s a piece of dog poo and isn’t good enough to be amongst people.

You might recall her daughter and I conspired in January to have her admitted to psychiatric hospital. Except the psychiatrist who had only been seeing her once a month said he’d continue but assess her fully and also see her weekly.

Now you can tell from the texts that that has failed abysmally. The woman is still a shadow drifting along. The only place she goes to is to the clinic. When we send money, the daughter goes and does their shopping. She is strong enough to hang washing outside. That’s the only progress we’ve seen. She is still too ashamed to text anyone. She lies in her room and sleeps for hours, once even promoting her poor daughter to check she had not taken an overdose. What life is that for a 20 year old?

And then daughter feels guilty herself. She added to the mom’s stress by falling pregnant after multiple warnings over YEARS, to never ever sleep with anyone. To focus on her education but that if she wanted to, to go to the clinic and start birth control.

But she didn’t.

And she doesn’t know which of two boys – conceived in Matric (final year of high school) is the father. So she has mega regrets and shame herself, now two little ones (son a DnD her two old sisters) and a mother to raise.

Man, the struggles and challenges and loneliness we all suffer from are hard. It is very difficult to ignore a capable human who is not doing anything to make your life easier, to struggle with children when there’s an adult who could be helping you. It’s a pain that doesn’t go away. You never accept it. You never stop feeling the sting of being alone when not alone.

And so, in the last few months I’ve been hinting that someone needs to talk to the psychiatrist and tell him that yes he made his diagnoses but his meds and weekly therapy have achieved nothing. She still lies in bed, no smile, no laughter, the only emotion is anger with her little two year old who birth child and I suspect might be neurodivergent. She can’t handle the child’s meltdowns so she beats her then feels regret. Vicious cycle. She never wanted her children to feel unloved like she was, but she’s doing exactly that. And enough is enough. Birth daughter got the gentle memo I had been sending and finally decided to go speak to the psychiatrist herself, and that’s where the texts come in.

I don’t ever want to tell someone what to do when the outcome is unpredictable and they might end up feeling worse after taking my suggestion. I didn’t want to tell her to go in with mom and tell the doctor his plan failed and he should have listened to us when we wanted to get her committed back in January! I don’t know him, but the fact he didn’t hear but decided to treat her himself spoke volumes about his ego and self confidence. Misplaced! It needed to be her idea as the one going in to go speak about her mother. And finally, she did it! I’m so proud of her!

So, Lentegeur is a psych hospital.

Eerie, given how our girl’s paed wants her in one too.

Now we wait. And hope and pray. I hope they operate the way the psych hospital we were told about does, where they also interact with the ‘caregiver,’ not just the patient who isn’t aware of the impact of their disease nor the things they should be doing but aren’t. They don’t exist in our life as they should. And many who are deeply disordered don’t realise how disordered they are.

I hope she will be given an admission date that isn’t far away. She needs to get as much help as possible. If worst comes to worst, we will be able to say we did everything we could.

Oh, how I wish he’d heard us back in January.🥹