Ettina, I sort of feel that way, too, but for some different unknown reason, as nothing like that ever happened to me.
In my case I just sort of ignored certain parts of my body, thinking I would never really get around to using them… I was wrong, cos when I got married I had to learn a lot of stuff that I had ignored before.
It turned out ok, but I still think of “that…” (instead of “my…” that is part of me).

you said:

“I had a psychologist in one institution who claimed to be able to read my thoughts, and later told me he was going to climb into my head and change my thoughts, and that he was never going to leave my head no matter what I did. He also said he was going to kill the person I was internally and replace me with somebody different.”

As an admittedly NT (Neuro-Typical), it sounds to me like the psychologist you are refering to is in dire need of a straight jacket! What a loon! There is nothing worse than a meglomaniac like that being in charge of the asylum!!!!

Yeah, like he can enter your head! What a moron. If he can enter your head and replace your thoughts with his then, I am Superman and can fly. The “good doctor” sounds like he might be kin to Charlie Manson.

I shudder to think that you have had to endure the trauma of being placed under the “care” of creeps like this!

Just found this quote on this website:
http://www.mindroom.org/
Sorry to E.D. if i got the word/type arrangement wrong.
Know how annoying that is, maybe even for dead poets.

There’s a very simple but powerful poem written about the kind of situations you describe, though. The author of the poem, S. Marie (a pseudonym, she wrote a book called CAPTÏV) was writing about child abuse within a family, but this is a very good description of the effects.

They told me:
Don’t be ugly,
Don’t be pretty.
Don’t be stupid,
Don’t be smart.
Don’t be loud,
Don’t be shy.
Don’t be here,
Don’t be there.
Don’t be wrong,
Don’t be right.
Don’t be sad,
Don’t be glad.
Don’t be sick,
Don’t be well.

Don’t be.

Within psychiatry the word for the effects of living under that constant level of simultaneous bombardment and helplessness is ‘complex PTSD’, although I have a lot of trouble with psychiatric illness-type metaphors (and I view most psychiatric diagnoses as metaphorical) for awful experiences.

Interestingly, although institutions are a classic environment for developing this ‘complex PTSD’ thing, psychiatry never mentions them. (You can read more about the standard-psychiatry view of this here.

I’m going to do a really long quote from an interview I did with a friend of mine on the subject of institutions, and since the interview is super-long I’ll just quote part of it that has to do with how my responses were altered:

Laura: [The experience of institutionalization] makes me different. I’ve been away from it long enough that I don’t think I currently have any active sort of psych survivor behavior. But I can certainly spot them in other people…

Amanda: What kind of behavior?

Laura: Oh gee. I spotted it in you right away. How do I describe it? You were an obvious case of it. You had a kind of submissiveness that is not so much… it is a kind of submissiveness but it’s not submission in any kind of normal way. Especially since you were oftentimes looking for where the rules were, so you could follow the rules. Without necessarily appreciating the fact that there weren’t necessarily any rules for any particular event or… I don’t know how to describe it. You were waiting or looking for the institution around you, as if, it’s like, “Where is it, it’s hiding here somewhere!” This is not necessarily a very constructive behavior out in the real world, because it is particularly passive in many ways, and because it is sort of like looking around for it. I really got a sense that you were looking around all the time for the rules. And terribly terrified that you were violating all the rules. And meanwhile not necessarily getting what actually should be done, because you were busy looking for the rules. It’s a paradox there.

You had real problems with initiative, and since in the real world initiative is kind of what you actually have to do, the fact that you really had serious problems with initiative, combined with the fact that you were always looking for the rules, made for a really bad combination.

That’s something I see, but I certainly wouldn’t consider it the only thing I’d look for, if that makes any sense. Another thing, certainly, for you, was that you could not deal with the possibility that you’d done anything wrong without total panic. And that, simply telling you, simply correcting you in any way shape or form, created instant and total and absolute panic and terror and whatnot. And this makes perfect sense to me, because if you violate the rules, if you’ve done something wrong, in an institution, to the point where they’d point anything out at you, that means you’re in deep danger. So you may very well find yourself at the end of life-threatening abuse. And therefore it was very difficult to communicate things to you at times because you couldn’t deal with a correction just as a correction, because to you a correction meant a very dangerous situation indeed. Which isn’t normally what it is in the real world, but it certainly is exactly what it is in institution-land.

Amanda: And then there were the apologies…

Laura: Oh yes. The neverending… to properly read the apologies, read them as “Don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me! Please! Don’t beat me up, don’t tie me down, don’t torture me!” Which, I obviously had no plans on doing any of the above, but again you were reacting to the situation as if you were still in the psych hospital. And that obviously wasn’t the case, but again that’s a typical PTSD sort of thing. And I certainly understand it very well, because that kind of an experience really makes an imprint on a person for life. You can’t go through that experience of reaching that absolute bottom level of human experience without being seriously affected by it.

Amanda: As I recall it wasn’t just actions I was afraid of, it was thoughts.

Laura: Oh yes, of course. I didn’t go through that, but then I didn’t go through brainwashing. You did. I fortunately spent most of my time in places where they kind of throw you in there, lock you up, and kind of forget about you. I think the only time I ever saw doctors at state hospitals was when I was being admitted and when I was being released. So there was nobody there playing warp-your-brain with me.

Except for one thing: People had occasionally attempted psychotherapy with me outside of those kind of places, and fortunately I was able to get away from it, because I had no special orders to make me go through it. And my experience is that that stuff really twists your mind around. Given a choice between psychotherapy and getting drugged, I would easily pick getting drugged. It’s one thing to have your brain deadened — of course the third choice do neither of the above is my first choice — but, it’s one thing to suppress one’s thought and it’s another thing to get it all twisted up.

Psychotherapy messes with the brain. It basically tells you up is down and right is left and whatever. And especially when one is experiencing that level of badness, one is very vulnerable. I mean it is precisely the kind of thing that people who try to brainwash other people, the kind of environment they try to generate, because at that point people are very vulnerable, and you’re more likely to get them to do anything. I think it’s not accidental that what’s been happening to prisoners in Iraq, the things that they were doing to break down the prisoners, it makes a lot of sense. Terrorize people and humiliate them and make them feel as vulnerable as possible, and in fact people do tend to become emotionally and mentally vulnerable as well.

And so psychotherapy in that context can really mess one up. I mean all it takes is a therapist who thinks they know everything about you, they know all about your life, they know what you’re thinking, they know what you should think, they know what you’re experiencing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they tell you about what they know, and they tell you what you should know. Whether or not it has anything to do with reality.

They can really badly warp one to the point where, I never got to that point but I could easily picture it going to a stage where you truly did not know who you were. Just completely turning a person inside out and upside-down. And I think you had that experience. I didn’t, but I can certainly see it happening. And that kind of manufacture of an unperson is… is just… very bad. And I think that’s very much what was done to you. And I merely had enough of it to be aware of what could happen. And I’m very happy that I did not have to put up with much of it, courtesy of, hooray, bad insurance!

That’s probably a more thorough summary of my mental state right after getting out than anything else would be. There were a lot of things where, I had to learn, or relearn, what was even a possibility, because even conceiving of them as a possibility had been too dangerous before.

I can even remember Laura making me repeat “I am allowed to think my own thoughts,” and I can in detail remember believing that she was trying to get me killed, and that if I even thought that, I would be. (This was something I’d been told by that really wacked-out Ericksonian hypnotherapist shrink I talked about earlier.) That’s the level of “stuff I am not allowed to do” that I was totally unaware and/or terrified of at the time.

I don’t even remember how long it took me to figure out that I had a kitchen, not “kitchen privileges”. That was another big one. Rights and ordinary belongings were things I saw as privileges that I was probably not worthy of, when I saw them at all, and quite often I did not even notice that things like rights existed.

I might even make this into another post, because it touches on something important, and it’s getting long.

But at any rate, what you get when you get a prolonged state like that, is a person where all of their thoughts and emotions are tangled and bent in really unnatural ways. All cognitive effort goes into maintaining the status of being a nobody, and preferably an unnoticeable nobody, even if these efforts make the person more noticeable.

What psychiatry doesn’t get into, is that there’s a level on which they can’t touch you even then.

but i wonder what it would take to convince your body and/or brain of some middle ground between the times when you don’t ‘viscerally realize’ that your space is not part of YOU and the times when you let people do anything to YOU and your space becos you don’t ‘viscerally realize’ that they don’t have the right? I mean could it be done by practicing, somehow?

i was realizing from the comments in another post about inner life that the problem with inner life is it’s like the TARDIS, you know, it’s bigger inside. becos like your inner thoughts can go in the places of your house that you can’t see, can go in the places that you read about in books, can go and converse with the people whose words you read… there is a connection here but i can’t quite make it…

Well I am unsure how else to explain it really. Having other things included in my sense of self is the more common situation. I am pretty new to thinking of things like this as anything besides some totally weird perceptual hallucination I could never explain to anyone, actually.

And I certainly couldn’t tell you why anyone carries things around with them, can’t even tell you why I do particularly. I think there’s a pretty large number of reasons.