In
her work on shame, Brene Brown notes there is nothing more
frustrating or even frightening then feeling pain and not being able
to describe or explain it to someone. Many times I have either been
involved in conversations or overheard someone mention to someone
else being bi-polar or manic-depression. It always provokes a
response in me that I've never been able to capture or completely
comprehend. At time there has been fear on my part of being exposed
as someone who has dealt with that illness. At other times, I have
become angry at how we talk about people with mental illnesses as
other. I harken back to my experience of people treating me
differently before and after the diagnosis and hospital in 1987, my
senior year of college. I get angry about how we think of people as
limited in capability and we offer them tools and strategies that
reinforce those limitations. I do believe it all starts with how we
talk about mental illness. After many years of being quite open
about my situation, I stopped telling people because I did not want
own, claim it, or be limited by it. I've come to realize in so doing
if increased my shame. Although after reading Brown, I do wonder if
my past honesty was, at least in part, what she characterizes as
honesty motivated by shame, fear, anger or hurt. I could own that at
the very least I was angry at a mental health system that did not
seem to serve my needs well.
Last
Thursday, I participated in a conversation where I made another person
the other by commenting that he seemed a little off. The response I
got was he is bi-polar. I pulled in a little a bit and felt guilty
for my remark. I always get the impression in the labeling that the
person who is labelled becomes less than. I get angry at my own
memories of being the less than or the other. A few days later, I
overhead someone describe another person as manic -depressive. I had
no context for the conversation. The same feeling came into my body.
During
a journaling session the next morning, I was writing about all this
and I realized that feeling in my body was familiar. I asked myself
when was the first time I had that feeling. It dated back to when I
was kid in elementary school. My memory does not allow me to
pinpoint the exact year, but maybe first, second, or third grade. It
was on the playground. It was one some of the kids were tormenting
or even bullying another kid, telling her she must have been adopted.
She was not. As an adopted kid it was frightening. I concluded
that that was something about myself that I must keep secret. (I do
not have a moment that I can identify where I learned that I was
adopted; it was something that I always knew). Perhaps, that was an
early lesson in shame for me. It would be many years before I was
comfortable telling people I was adopted. While I can share that now
with ease, the shame has shifted to something else... to the mental
illness. I'd like for it to be because I do not want people to
define me by that aspect of my life, of what to me is not really
relevant to how I function in the present. The truth is as I've been
able to live without medicines and in a relatively normal range of
moods and emotions (at least according to my therapist), I have
actually become more ashamed of that part of my past. When someone
new comes into my life, I agonize over whether I should or need to
tell that person.
It
seems to be a shame grounded in the fear of being made other, a fear
of being seen as less than capable. In one relationship I really
struggled with how to talk about it because I did not say anything
early on. That person had a son who was bi-polar, which made it
harder. I remember when I finally did reveal it, the response I got
was I would have never guessed. It really did not seem to matter. I
continue to keep that information locked up. I'm not sure what
purpose it serves. Somewhere inside is still that little kid that
thinks keeping secrets will keep her safe somehow. Maybe all I did
was transfer shame over being adopted to shame over being bi-polar.
It is made harder because part of me would like to claim I'm not
bi-polar at least I do not manifest symptoms of it anymore, but that
is probably a story of another day. I really cannot be truly free of
it as long as I carry around all this shame.
The
question becomes how can I be genuinely and authentically honest
first with myself and then with others ? Tonight, I know I do not
have the answer. It seems like a decent enough question to chew on
for awhile.
