Fighting For Self-Awareness And Autonomy - A Good Chunk of My Story

September 2010. I made it, but Violet did not.

What motivates me to want to speak about inner space and the mind's deepest realms? What has made me want to explore those places? Why are they important to me? Why do I try so hard? Because, so many people have tried to stop me.

` Though I was indeed just making videos to race the deadline, something came up, and I needed to write a bunch of stuff, which I have been since that last post. Part of it concerns some things I want to discuss on my YouTube channel anyway, so I thought this would be an ideal place to share it.

I have already talked about the 2003 "Gaslighting Extravaganza" on my YouTube channel. This was an incident where I was drugged, tortured, sexually assaulted, locked up, and then my mom, boyfriend and some other people threatened me if I called the police. I developed numbness in various parts of my body (called "conversion disorder" or "functional neurological symptom disorder") after months of this abuse from authority figures and supposed loved ones. I did call the police this year finally.

When I went to my first skeptic's conference (The Amazing Meeting) in 2012, I did not know that I was seriously physically handicapped and in chronic pain. I had been injured many times in my life, especially a disfiguring foot injury when I was 14, which I was actually punished for having and my mom and dad both made it worse, and then punished me for it being worse.

` They didn't want me to get better, they just wanted me to stop complaining about it. They refused to take me to a doctor for almost any reason, ever, and told me to never tell a doctor about these things because it was "inappropriate" or "in the past".

` At age 7 or 8 I was so stressed out that I started to constantly scrunch up my abdominal muscles until it became constant. Later adding the foot injury caused me to put all my weight on my abdomen instead of my back, so that I was squishing all my guts up into my chest cavity, and it hurt constantly.
` It was hard to eat anything, and I was often vomiting and burping and rubbing my abdomen, which I was also punished and made fun of for. I routinely got in trouble for having trouble eating and for things I did because of low blood sugar (not to mention, sleep deprivation). My stomach was partly herniated at the top, causing reflux. I also had a lot of reflux from my upper intestines into my stomach.
` I still do a little, actually, and I must use conscious effort to keep my abdomen abdomen-shaped and my neck neck-shaped. I hold my head tilted to the right because that's the only way to compensate for my neck and eye muscles becoming asymmetrical from tilting my head to the left for most of my life. But I'm getting ahead of myself:

As a teenager, I had severe medical problems, including a chronic, life-threatening infection in my uterus (that's another story) which just about killed me with agonizing convulsions and shaking with chills every three months.
` I would lie on a garbage bag in my bed, screaming, being forced to urinate on myself, not able to clean up the clotted disaster, and my parents would yell and cry and tell me to shut up and stop pretending that I couldn't get up. I could have died from that.
` And yet, they told me what I was going through was normal and that I would have to live with it until I reached menopause. If I couldn't deal with it, then I was a big crybaby.

` All my life I had been abused for being injured and reacting to constant pain, even when I grew up and started going to doctors, some of them sexually abused/injured me or said insane things to me, so I was afraid to tell them as well. I was raised to believe that my "crazy attention-getting behavior" was due to either stubbornness or psychosis. And if I didn't believe it, my dad would literally threaten to kill me.

I also have sensory integration disorder, so that made everything ten times more unbearable. Trauma and pain also cause a similar effect, so combining them is exponentially more exaggerated. My parents would inadvertently terrorize me by making sounds that triggered severe pain, and making me wear clothing that made me feel like I was covered in fire ants, and then expect me to pretend it wasn't bothering me.

` These sensory processing issues are typical in people on the autism spectrum like myself. Nobody knew this about me growing up, they just thought that since I have a 160 IQ, that I must behave like a perfect grown-up woman instead of a boy, which again is typical in Aspie girls.

` The barriers that I had communicating and relating to other people were greatly strengthened by isolation, severe punishment for expressing my feelings, constant accusations of doing things I didn't do (even if they broke the laws of physics), and other forms of gaslighting/narcissistic abuse.

My dad even told me when I was four years old that women are property, that men own them, and that sexual feelings and orgasms cause brain damage. He blamed me on all his problems, including sexual problems following a traumatic work-related accident when I was nine which left his pelvis shattered in 22 pieces. He told me that when I was a teenager, I would be addicted to cocaine and having sex with middle aged men.

` Because of his psychotic bullshit, I was horrendously abused at school in first grade, then put in Special Ed where we had a Wall of Shame that showed us how bad we did. They did things like drag me down stairs in a bag (to a dust-filled room that aggravated my dust allergy) and other horrendous physical abuse and emotional blackmail.

` I told the people at school what my dad did to me and they just told me that all the screaming and hitting, even though I didn't understand it, was just a sign that he loved me very much. The more he hit me and threatened my life, the more he loved me. My dad said that the people at the school were "stupid" to abuse me, but I needed to "respect" them anyway.

When I was ten, I told the school counselor about the abuse, but she kept telling me the same thing. Unless, she said, he sexually molested me. Then that was abuse. So I lied and told her that he touched me inappropriately. I don't recall that he had ever done that at age ten, but he definitely did something like that three years later.

` My dad told me to tell everyone that he didn't hit me if I was called to court. Finally, I said that he didn't really sexually abuse me, but all the rest of the things were true. Soon after, my mother had moved me into an apartment with her to escape my dad's violence. When I was eleven, they put me in a windowless mental hospital where they abused me and wouldn't let me eat unless I took antipsychotics, which they lied and told me were vitamins.

` They didn't believe anything I said about my dad. I stopped taking the Navane as soon as I got out of there two weeks later.

So I've been to a mental hospital twice: Once for my dad abusing me, and once for Dr. Benninger and his Stepford Wives minions torturing me. That's like locking someone in jail for being raped and letting the serial rapist continue raping.

` I can imagine someone insinuating that I must be somehow untrustworthy because I was "convicted" of being "crazy". It is crucial to understand the distinction that I was sent there based on other's sadistic and psychotic behavior, not according to a trial with evidence.

After sixth grade in a school that was later shut down for abusing the kids (Child-Family Intervention Team, or C-FIT), I stayed at home while my parents were at work. This "homeschooling" basically consisted of me being told that I was on a hidden camera, being watched all day, and going to "homeschool meetings" with other kids from mostly dysfunctional families, some of who also abused me, including "Bill" of Gaslighting Extravaganza fame.

` I recorded all the abuse and other thoughts that I had in notebooks, and wrote science fiction on a computer, etc. but when I was 18, my dad stole all that, moved to Vegas, and sent back ripped-up pieces. He also stole my bike and some underwear. He could not steal my Clavinova piano because it was too big, but he did take the disks.

` For this, I went to many "therapists" who were either really incompetent or preyed on my vulnerabilities and told me that my Aspergery difficulties in expressing myself - a genetic trait from my mom - were a sign that I had inherited bipolar and psychosis-causing genes from my dad.

` The way that I was injured and limped around, and acted like everything hurt? Clearly, it's a sign of psychosis. They even used medications that had horrible effects to abuse me. I went from one therapist to another, and they either refused to help, tried to help but made it worse, or outright just abused me and told me that my reaction to their abuse was a sign I was losing my mind.

At one point I broke up with "Bill", who was supposedly my boyfriend, an intelligent, nerdy aerospace type, into Monty Python, sci-fi, LOTR, Magic cards, and who later got a job as a Boeing engineer. Seemed innocent enough, but his dad was similar to my dad, except he actually liked his dad during the time that I knew him, whereas I did not. And other neuroses.

` I got back together with him because I literally didn't know anyone else, and because he convinced me that he depended on me for his emotional well-being, and it was my job to make him happy.

` I describe him in my Gaslighting Extravaganza as the guy who pushed me into seeing the evil Dr Benninger, and his minions who humiliated and tortured me, made me urinate on myself, molested me, drugged me, etc. My mom threatened to disown me if I called the police.

` My evil GP Dr. Madrilejos, was friends with Dr. Benninger, and a psychologist named Dr. Kwak, who was better known as "Dr. Quack" for gaslighting her patients just like she did with me (and Bill's parents, who went to her as well at one point). I told Madrilejos what happened with Benninger and he had me sent to a mental hospital where I was punished for talking about what had just happened to me.

` Once there I was punished for bleeding out of my mouth for six days, and two other orifices as well. I was severely disabled and in sciatic nerve pain. I also had an intestinal blockage for two weeks because of the whole Dr. Benninger thing, hence bleeding and severe pain. I was punished for having trouble eating.

` I could scarcely remember anything about my life except for that incident. I had no idea who I was or why I was being punished for having been tortured. They were acting like I was the problem, didn't seem to care at all about how I was feeling. The drugs they gave me were so horrendous that I lost control of my actions and thoughts and even went blind for a while.

After this incident, I was further abused by therapists. "You were tortured two whole months ago! Get over it already, move on with your life!" Bill agreed. Some therapists said, "Your problems are so great I can't help you."

` During a triggeringly abusive incident with my mom's boyfriend (who my mom forbade from discussing any of this with even though he lived with us during this time), I lost feeling in various parts of my body. This phenomenon is called "conversion disorder," or "functional neurological symptom disorder".

` I eventually stopped taking the Abilify, which was causing me to lose control of every aspect of my mind, seemingly, but was made to take other meds like Wellbutrin, which gave me a seizure and led to me being medically traumatized again. I was drugged for two days in a hospital, and being drugged again was the last thing I could emotionally handle. Dr. Madrilejos increased my dosage of Wellbutrin after that, and added more meds.

` I was traumatized by taking the medications themselves and the constant visual, hearing and mental "side effects" some of them caused, which contributed to more abuse from Bill. He told me that I wasn't experiencing these side effects, it was just my imagination.
` Once he even physically forced me into the driver's seat of my car just after I had just almost killed us all on the interstate at night -- several times -- because I literally couldn't see well enough to drive. I had to fight my way back out, and he threw a fit over that.

` Bill eventually convinced me that I needed to identify with Dr. Benninger and see him as a human being, too. He interrupted me if I ever tried to tell anyone about what happened, especially if that person liked Dr. Benninger. God forbid I ruin their hard-on for this violent predator.

I called a bunch of lawyers about Dr. Benninger and they said I didn't have a case because he didn't leave a scar on my body. I moved with Bill out here to Washington, started a blog, and wrote about the Benninger incident in 2005. Bill, who forbid me to cut my hair, and refused to rub my back (and who has the distinction of being the only person ever repelled by my genitals), also said that it was terrible that I would ever write about such a thing.

` He said that no one would want to read it because it was "negative", and because it wasn't an important historical event, nor did it happen to an important person that anyone would care about. If he were me, he would just never think about it.

` I told him I would never have sex with him as long as he lived, so he bought me this really elaborate engagement ring. He said that not having sex was a true sign of love, because that meant that your relationship is not based on sex.

` I moved out, but could not support myself and had a supreme slumlord who didn't even give me what he owed me. A few days later I met a different kind of control freak, which I thought was creepy when I first met him, but eventually moved in with. He was a charming narcissist who is good at acting, musical performance, martial arts, and did I mention acting?

` He'd had a number of injuries and instead of treatment had been gaslighted by his own family and doctors, and was suffering severe effects from that. He would work at a job and then be laid off before he was entitled to medical insurance, and I witnessed him be denied treatment at emergency rooms. He also used these facts to be a professional victim, like my dad.

His name is Lucas, and he's been featured on many of my ancient blog posts, but I'm going to call him X because I can't stand using his name anymore.

Lucas, my mom, and Violet the cat in 2010.

He still goes over to the house of people we used to be neighbors with and charms them, after he almost killed me a number of times and made it look like an accident. If they knew the truth about what he's done, they would never want him in their house. He's an impostor and compulsive liar who sexually, emotionally, monetarily, etc. used me for six years.

` He intended to and succeeded in torturing Violet the cat and made it look like an accident. She had a lung illness, he told me and everyone who said that they heard her lungs bubbling that it wasn't that, it was just a hairball that wouldn't come up, even though she'd never gotten one before.

` I tried to take her to the vet and he physically blocked me from leaving the house, screaming that there was no reason to, and besides, we couldn't afford $30 just to even get her looked at, much less real medical treatment. He called the vet and told them that the cat was fine. He told me that I was hallucinating if I thought she was sick.

` Some two months later, of course right before finals, I tried to tell him she looks really listless and bloated, and got one of the roommates to concur. But X said that she was perfectly healthy, and would "prance around" when I wasn't looking. Hours later while I was trying to study, she was obviously about to die, and he started crying and wailing like there was no possible way he could have known this would happen.

` We had to have her put down right away, she had a hole in her lung and her torso was full of pus. This had been going on for two months. It took years for me to realize that he did this to hurt me, and make it look like an accident.

` He also almost drowned me by pushing me underwater in the ocean when I was basically tied up and was scarcely able to get my head above water, and then started yelling "Oh no, she's dead!" when I stopped struggling. Plausible deniability. And then told me to stop thinking about such a "negative" event because that would ruin our vacation.

` He once made me sleep in a gas leak cloud for two weeks, saying that I was hallucinating that there was gas until he finally smelled it and took action. He gaslighted himself in that case, and with gas no less, because he was sleeping on the other side of me.

` His dad and brothers were the same way, except they weren't in the least bit charming or able to act like a halfway decent human being. One of his brothers has a giant cyst on his nose because he wouldn't admit that it was a blackhead, so he refused to pop it.

With X's encouragement (ironically), I managed to go to college for five years and earn a two year Arts and Sciences degree, despite having a succession of 16 "crazy" roommates, which would do things like constantly make noise and not care about me being able to sleep or do homework. I had a several chronic health problems, for example a sinus infection literally every day for years, until almost 2011, when I discovered sinus irrigation.

Rick Alden? Pics or it didn't happen!

` There was continual conflict, financial crisis, insane landlords doing extremely illegal/unethical things, having to relocate, just constant abuse and dishonesty and sometimes stealing, booby traps, and calling the cops. And pissing in bottles and pouring it all over the carpet to make us look bad in front of the landlord, which I got screamed at for two hours because I have cats, which most certainly couldn't have done that.

` Oh, and this one guy put maggots everywhere, and two month old milk in the cats' food, and we discovered this the day we got a restraining order on him. Oddly, he was childhood friends with Rick Alden, co-founder and then-CEO of Skullcandy, who flew his personal jet over from Utah and cleaned up the guy's room. Seriously.

Around the time I graduated in 2012, I started going to a supposed expert, with a PhD in "treating PTSD", who co-wrote a book on the subject. He helped me put up with the severe narcissistic abuse I dealt with every day, from X and the noise pollution and disrespect I got from this one roommate. After six months of his complete misuse of cognitive behavioral therapy, he was confused as to why I hadn't made any progress.

` Meanwhile, my "stable boyfriend" carried out a lot of physical and emotional abuse just by putting his arm around my shoulder, causing severe pain and instability due to not having any glutes or a lower back. Instead of my spinal column, I was using the left side of my abdomen to support myself, and my legs and arms were messed up from this as well.

` I would yell and scream and cry and fall down, and he would keep putting his arm around me and laughing as though it was some kind of game. He'd even bend down to keep his arm on my back so that I couldn't get out from under him and would fall straight on the ground. He would do this in front of people and ask why I chose to humiliate myself.

` I would tell him that he was hurting me and that I couldn't support his weight, and he said that he couldn't possibly be causing me any pain, and that he wasn't putting any weight on me, it was all just in my head. He would even do things like this to me when we were having sex, even worse things.

` I also had similar problems not collapsing under people's arms when hugging them, and he would say that I was embarrassing him in public for things like this. Pretty much everything I had trouble doing, sitting, standing, getting into cars, opening doors, unplugging plugs from walls, opening small packages, he would make fun of me.

` If I couldn't keep my balance when standing, I would shift my weight from one foot to the other, and he would point and laugh and say I was doing the "pee-pee dance" because it looked like I had to pee. My hands hurt a lot as well, especially my right index finger, and he would laugh and call me "Miss Delicate Hands" when I winced or had dexterity problems.

When I went to The Amazing Meeting 2012, I was still darting around quickly because I would fall over if I stood still. I would have to shift my weight constantly, and it was very painful. The only way to relieve the pain was to take quick, long steps, because like when you get a bicycle going, you can balance so much more easily.

` So I would run from one person to the next. The only time I could ever stop was if I had something to lean against or sit on that also didn't cause too much pain. I wasn't consciously aware that I was in such a large amount of pain, but I was reacting to it constantly.

` At a Skeptic's Meetup the day after TAM 2012, I met a hypnotherapist who was putting on a demonstration where he hypnotized one of the audience members. I had been familiar with hypnosis through psychology class and Scientific American, but never thought I'd get the chance to experience it myself, much less from more than one hypnotist.

` Within a few weeks, I was finally able to feel my fingertips, lips, tongue, eyes, genitals, bottoms of feet, and other bits and pieces of me that had gone numb for nine years. This did not happen with hypnosis alone, I also acquainted myself with an extremely therapeutic agent, the kind I mention in my article High Powered Tools of Inner Exploration and Neuroscience.

For years he taught me how to control elements of my mind, and also how to do the physical therapy I need to get my body back upright. He also helped me start a skeptic podcast where we discussed important things I've learned about how your mind works.
` Alas, I couldn't directly talk about the "High Powered Tools" because I was in actual danger from government agents, who were after a man who used to live at the place where I was staying. I had a couple of really intense encounters, and that was enough to change how I present myself online.

` I can't currently access this podcast, called Skeptophany, so I'm writing this blog and making YouTube videos where I can discuss these things publicly. Let's just say, my self awareness went up many levels, which is why this stuff is so important to talk about.

` After almost five years of physical therapy and slightly longer mental therapy, I still deal with a little bit of chronic pain and a little bit of sensory processing issues, but nothing like how it used to be. Not to mention, my abilities to breathe and not suffer constant indigestion and low blood sugar have improved, mostly because my torso is more torso-like.

After my first TAM, I still stayed with X because I didn't yet understand that he was detrimental to my health, my life, my well-being, etc. I didn't discuss him at all with the hypnotherapist at first, partly because my psychologist didn't think that X's behavior was harming me.

` When I finally did start talking about X, telling him the same things that the psychologist ignored, the hypnotherapist alerted me to the danger I was in. I wanted to move out but I needed to get a job first, and X was draining all my disability money. I didn't yet know that I was so physically incapacitated and in pain, so didn't understand why I couldn't hold a job.

` In September, X sustained a serious back injury at work which pinched the nerve to his stomach, causing vomiting. His mom was helping us buy the house, but then she died unexpectedly in October. Later we found that the paper they signed to buy the house was invalid, that the landlords were just taking tens of thousands of dollars. I witnessed their lawyer say of X and me, "They didn't want the money back." And we didn't get it.

` The injury in his back got worse because he was being jerked around by the work insurance company and that company's doctor, for two years. At the end of that time, he was sent to a different doctor, who immediately diagnosed the injury, but then said he couldn't sign the insurance papers because it had been two years.

` During these years, X began to become delirious from lack of food and sleep, puking at night, having to go to the emergency room every few weeks. He became extremely paranoid, literally dreaming while talking to me, and accused me of trying to kill him.

` He claimed that I was physically attacking him but didn't know it because I had been hypnotized to do this and then forget immediately afterward. He would open the door suddenly, I would jump in my chair and drop something, then he would say, "See? You did it again! You just threw that at me! But you don't remember, do you?"

Though I sometimes suffered from respiratory tract infections for months at the time, I used my barely-improved body to help him grow medical cannabis, which he was insanely controlling about, obsessively watching me. He wound up poisoning us both with isopropyl alcohol when it came to making cannabis cream and cleaning up the glassware. I would say I was feeling sick and had a headache, and he would tell me it was just my imagination.

` The 40% CBD cream shrank the scar tissue in his back to a huge extent in only a few weeks. But his irresponsibility caused severe damage. We were poisoned several times, and that is how I sustained nerve damage to my face. To my great surprise, it's mostly recovered after years of healing and eventually being able to exercise it, but for a while the left half of my upper lip sagged completely and was numb, particularly on the outside.

` It is mostly back to "normal", but the way my face is re-wired together I feel like a Picasso painting. For a while X called me "Miss Pouty Lips" and started kissing me and tell me how attractive he found my upper lip to be draped over the edge of my lower lip.

` I don't know what else to say to that except AAAAAAAAAGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!! And when I tried to tell him that it was nerve damage from handling and inhaling isopropyl alcohol, he said, "No it isn't, you just look extra-pouty, sexy-lips!" HOLY F--!!!!

` Meanwhile, I hated myself because I let this happen to me and felt self-conscious and ashamed of my own face, and how it affects my emotional feedback loop. Since I've mostly recovered, I can feel so much more happy, talk better, even use a straw!

I had to move my stuff into storage just before TAM 2014, and that was another horrid chapter in life until I got away from X. I only had half a room to live in for the most part, really squalid stuff, until after TAM 2015, just after recovering from "con crud", when I think I was probably literally dying of sleep deprivation from constant noise, etc going 24/7.

That was the point at which I moved into the house I'm living in with Matt. Not long after, with him doing a lot to take care of me, I reached a point in physical therapy where the pain started to go away. That's when I finally realized I had been living in unbearably severe pain for the past 20 years.

` My view of everyone else, the animals of the world, everyone's experience, my own experience, all that changed. I was no longer feeling so physically intimidated by everyone, or by the thought of doing anything. I immediately went about managing the pain and being extra-careful about how I moved.

Talk about a radical shift in self-awareness. How that has affected my life will be the subject of future blog posts and videos. For now, that's the end of this vignette, although I've written probably four times more than this over the past two days.

` And of course, I need to get back to my videos, ASAP!!