Letter to my Therapist

Hi, I'm Beka. I've had a lot on my shoulders for a very long time and I currently feel like I am breaking down. I don't quite know what's wrong with me. I've been struggling with mental health for years and years. Since I was 16, now I'm 22. I have been hospitalized three times and Ive seen many different doctors and therapists since my first hospitalization. I have my second appointment with a new therapist tomorrow. I called her today because I was feeling overwhelmed. She didnt call back, but I told her not to because my appointment is tomorrow morning. I recently graduated from college, no job yet, but that's not a major source of stress.

I wrote a letter to my therapist in hopes of it helping her know how to treat me and what to say to my doctor. I want to air out my thoughts and get my letter out in the open. Im scared to share it and I feel as though the more times I share it the better. The letter covers many different aspects of mental health, but I thought that the most dominant one was trauma and PTSD, even though I am not diagnosed with PTSD, I feel as though I have similar symptoms as one who is. If anyone is up to reading the letter and giving me feedback or encouragement that would be greatly appreciated. I am sick of feeling alone. Oh, and one final note, Im still with the boyfriend mentioned in the stories. I try to hide it, because Im embarrassed of it, but its the truth. Ive attempted to erase any names from it. Without further ado, heres the letter Im going to give to my therapist:

Hey!

We never officially discussed what you want me to call you, so I dont know how to title this letter, but Im writing it anyways because I think it will be very beneficial. I have an easier time communicating through letters because I know I cant chicken out and leave out important details. Whats on the paper is on the paper and thats that. I have some things that Id like to share with you. Im hoping that this letter will illuminate some of what Im dealing with and help me get a clearer grasp on what I should say to my doctor when I see him this upcoming Friday to further my treatment in the next steps.

There have been some symptoms that Ive been hiding from my doctor and Im afraid that theyd change my diagnosis. I know that its silly to worry about the labels—its all about feeling well, not about what my disorder is called, but I cant help but worry that it might be something more serious. Im currently concerned that I might have some form of schizophrenia. I dont know if these symptoms can also happen in bipolar people, because I am not a professional, but it is more consistent with what I have heard of schizophrenic people, which is why I have been afraid to share them. I have been hearing voices in my head for as long as I can imagine. I tell myself that Im making it up. They feel like theyre coming from my subconscious, since they have the same voice as I do. They tell me many different things. Frequently, theyre very negative things about how Im a failure and Im letting everyone down, that Id be better off not on in this world. Sometimes when I get them it feels like the world is spinning around me and I get very scared. I had this happen last night. Panic sets in, and after it happens I do my best to forget that it ever happened. Whats going on in my head tells me that what happened was all a lie. I want to be well, so I do my best to hide what is going on in my head. I know thats not the way to get better. Honesty is what will get me way further in my course of treatment. How can someone treat me if they dont know whats going on?

Another symptom that Ive been doing my best to forget about is hallucinations. Ive been getting them since I was a young child. I was around 7 or 8 when they started. They usually havent been threatening hallucinations, unless I am severely sleep deprived. For example, I used to see a lady who sat in a rocking chair knitting at night. Her appearance would help calm me to sleep. As I started having problems with sleep, the hallucinations gradually became worse and worse. I would see giant spiders all over my walls and ghost-like figures of people who were my friends who were in black and white and had red eyes. They didnt seem to want anything good to happen to me, but I always either shut my eyes and tried to ignore that it was happening or turned on the lights and slept even less. The light makes the visual hallucinations go away for the most part. It seems as though my brain is overactive in the dark.

Another symptom that I have been dealing with is feeling emotionally numb. It is as though I bottle up everything that Ive been feeling and I feel nothing. When I do finally feel something, it comes out in a huge burst and my emotions get very intense. This happens probably anywhere from once a week to once a month. The rest of the time I feel completely numb to what is going on. Anything can happen and it wouldnt phase me for the most part. I think it comes from having a constant air of hopelessness. I feel as though nothing is going to get better and nothing really matters. I try to take a positive spin on it, if nothing matters then I should be focusing on how happy I can be, but that philosophy doesnt seem to work as well as it used to. Also, when I do burst, I say many things that I regret later. It feels like even if I explained to people they wouldnt understand what its like to have a mental disorder. I get anxious and hide away from them until I feel like the problem has blown over. There are very few people who I trust enough to be around when I am in that state of mind.

I havent been sleeping well. I try to go to bed at a reasonable time. My bedtime is usually around 11pm. I toss and turn until sometime between 1am and 2am. After getting to bed at that hour, Ill wake up between 11am and 12pm, getting far too many hours of sleep. I feel groggy and I have a headache. I also remain tired all day. In the way of medications, I tried cutting down the Seroquel, and that made my sleeping far worse, so Im back up to the previous dosage of 75mg. The Ativan has been helping me with my restless feelings at night, but I dont think it has been helping enough. When I sleep, I wake up throughout the night multiple times. My dreams are also so vivid that they feel real. I wake up and cant remember if they actually happened or not. I also have flashback dreams of traumatic experiences. Those do not help with my sleeping problems. I find myself getting anxious to go to bed for weeks after those occur.

Something that has been a cause of stress in my life right now is an exam that I am studying for. I need to pass a series of exams in order to become an actuary—a risk management mathematician who frequently works for insurance companies or on investments. I am working on the first exam, which I will be taking on September 20th. Im afraid that I dont have the proper amount of focus to study as much as Ill need to pass. I get hopeless after about 15 minutes that Ill be able to learn everything that I need to know for the exam. I start to feel like Ill never succeed and I should just give up. This ties back to the voices that I discussed earlier. They seem to be egging me on to stop working, to give up. I dont want to give up. I want to live a fulfilling life, but I seem to give up anyways, at least for now. I need some way of getting myself to focus for long enough to learn the material I need to know to pass. I find the material interesting, but I cant seem to get myself to work on it. I get restless, hopeless, and unable to focus.

I was also sexually assaulted two years back. It happened by someone I barely knew. I agreed to go back to his dorm room to watch Netflix, and the next thing I knew he was asking me questions about sex. Things kept escalating, and I said that I didnt know how I felt about any of it. In the end we did wind up having sex, but it felt very off. Afterwards, he insisted on walking me out of the building. I remember feeling dizzy, unsure of where to go next. I went back to my dorm room and hid beneath my favorite blanket. I kept hiding under it for the next few weeks, sleeping my days away. I didnt get out much. I was depressed and confused. I am honestly very surprised that I managed to pass my classes that term. I decided to go through an investigation with the school, and the school found that he did violate the schools code on sexual conduct. He was banned from the campus for a year. I still get dreams about this incident, along with some other incidents that have happened to me. I find myself still afraid that Im going to run into him, even though Im two states away from him right now. I see him out of the corner of my eye in other people. It has done a number on my ability to trust new people. Another curious side effect of this incident is that sex started to feel less special to me. I have been willing to have it with anyone willing to have it with me. I know this isnt healthy, but its what winds up happening.

Another thing that Ive had to deal with revolves around my boyfriend. I know I said that I broke up with him about six months ago, but that was a semi-lie. I broke up with him the first time about six months ago. Since then weve been getting back together and breaking up constantly. Its been really rough on my emotions. I have a few stories about him that Id like to share with you. When I was 17 and we first started having sex, there was one incident where I asked him to stop. I told him that it was hurting, and he held my hands down and went on for about five seconds. He got a terrible expression on his face, I cant even describe it. It looked like he was taken over by something. It didnt hurt as bad as being assaulted by someone I barely knew, but it did cause little bit of pain. At the time I didnt fully realize that something was wrong. That what he had just done was so serious. I tried to block out the memory for so long, but it came back up once the sexual assault happened with the other guy.

The next story that Id like to share about my boyfriend is a little more involved. I was tried on Prozac. The drug gave me a very bad reaction. I was itchy everywhere, I couldnt stop moving, and I felt incredibly depressed. I had to leave school for that term. While I was away I got into a fight with my boyfriend. Within a day, he had slept with a mutual friend. She was my closest friend at the time, so the betrayal I felt from both of them was strong. I talked to her afterwards and she confirmed that it was consensual, but later took him through the schools investigation system and the court system, calling it rape. Both found that he didnt do anything wrong. At the same time, I wasnt able to deal with the fact that he essentially cheated on me. I was so angry at the girl who slept with him and claimed rape that it trumped any other emotions that I may have been having. I felt like she was taking advantage of the system. I felt like she was trying to make herself seem like the victim, even though she had slept with one of her friends boyfriend while they were in a fairly serious relationship (even though we had technically broken up for a day at that point), which is a major no-no to most people. I wasnt mad at him for sleeping with her. At the time I saw it as just being sex. This was a year before I was sexually assaulted myself by that other guy. I still havent made sense of what went on. I get scared that I see her, even though, yet again, Im two states away from her. I see people with hair cut similarly to hers and Im instantly taken back to everything that happened. I cant trust them, even though I know they did nothing wrong. This I also get terrible and vivid dreams about. Going through the school and the court investigations were incredibly stressful. I lost my main friend group in the crossfire. They decided to side with her. My only support was my boyfriend.

As this all was going on, my boyfriend began to become physically violent. I think he was very frustrated and was taking it out on me. Though I got many bruises—I even remember one night coming home in short sleeved shirts and my parents asking where I got all of the bruises from—the most impactful time was something completely different. I was making myself a pizza in his dorm room and had just cut it into four pieces. I put the knife on his desk. I said something that hurt his feelings. His response was to take his desk chair and start hitting me on the head with it. I asked him to stop, and things escalated. He picked up the knife from his desk and threatened to stab me with it. He threatened to kill me. I screamed at him to put the knife down. At that point, someone came upstairs to check on me. She got me out of the situation and we talked about things unrelated to what she had just heard. Later, when I talked to him, he said that he wouldnt have stabbed me anywhere fatal, but might have went for my foot. The fact that he said that he would have hurt me really messed with my head, but I pushed it aside. I pushed so many things aside. I always think about how that day could have went differently. I could have been killed, I could have lost some function in my foot, I could have called the relationship quits that day, the girl who came up to check on me could have turned him in. There are so many different possibilities, all of which would wind up in my not being with him anymore, but the only way that I could still be with him is what happened. She told nobody, and I was not injured. I was able to ignore that this happened for a very long time. I still try to ignore that it happened. I wasnt worried about his threating me, so much as I was about the embarrassment of the girl having to come up and save me from the situation. I didnt want anyone to know about what was going on. I was embarrassed about what people might think.

I feel myself going back to the same coping mechanisms that I had right after being sexually assaulted. I want to hide in bed all day under my favorite blanket and sleep my days away. I am depressed and I am numb to the world. On top of that, I feel bursts of depression far more extreme in the evening time, when I get a chance to think about everything. I must heal, and I know it is a long process, but its a process I need to take. As for my next steps, I want to write a letter to my doctor after weve had a chance to go over this letter. I need to make sure that he knows my symptoms so he can treat me appropriately. I would like some help with that. I want to know if any of these paragraphs should be shared and what to focus on in this new letter. I dont know the key words to tell him, and I dont know if you can communicate with him about how Im doing as well. The one thing I know for sure is that I need help. I cant do this alone. Im thankful that youre my counselor and I hope that our following sessions go as well as the first one did. That was the second time that I walked out the first session in a therapists office and felt like I was with someone who I could trust and understand me. The first was with the therapist I saw at college.

Thanks! I hope all of this sharing will help us on the road to my recovery, and I look forward to what you have to say,
Beka

When I called my therapist today I told her about how I wasnt doing well and that calling would likely make me feel better. I then decided to include a note in the previous note:

P.S. Calling you today made me feel a lot more calm—like I had someone to turn to. I understand that youre busy and I wont usually need responses until the next session, but I wanted to know if it is okay for me to call you in between sessions. It really does help.

Thanks!

As of right now Im very scared. Im scared of the future, of being able to function, heal, live a good life. I find myself reverting back to when I used to hide beneath the blankets. Im terrified for my appointment tomorrow, but I know its a huge first step in the road to recovery. I felt terrible for over a day after I wrote up that letter. I was completely unable to do anything. The letter was written up with the help of a lovely listener on this site. They took notes as I was talking and gave me a bullet point list, with which I created my letter. I hope that what Im doing now will lead me to a better mental state. I want it to happen as soon as possible, but a previous therapist told me that I have to wait and be patient and kind to myself. Those words were great, but hard to follow.

Im reaching out on here both because I find it has been therapeutic to share and because there may be a someone out there who I could discuss my issues with, if they were willing. I find that the first step to getting over something is to admit that it happened. Words of encouragement are appreciated. I feel terribly alone right now. I know this is a process, but the beginning is so hard.

Thanks for taking your time out of your day to read this all, I know its a lot,

Beka