Hello Everyone,
I am so glad I found these forums. I suffer from so many of the topics that I don't know where to begin. But here is my story, I hope I am not getting too personal. I am sharing my family background so that you can see the reasons I suffer, and am treated for, many mental health issues
I suffer DID (multiple personalities-28 known ones to this date) due to be sexually molested and raped by my psychopathic pedifile "father" (I hate to even call him that-I prefer to call him "he") from the earliest age I can remember, around 4 until I left home at 16. Because I developed DID I had very few recollections of what went on. All I knew was that I hated him and had to get out of that house. It wasn't until 2005 during therapy that a lot of the memories came back. Now I understand why I felt as I did. As a 16 year old I was vry confused as to why I felt as I did. I hated my developing body and felt that somehow it was MY fault that "he" was lusting after me. I tried to keep my body covered and spent most of my time spending days, sometimes weeks with friends. I told noone until I was married at 18. I told my gynocologist, who was also my Mom's) and he told me that she had a right to know so I told her. She confronted him and of course he denied it all. She divorced him.The rest of my siblings (I am the youngest of 8) believed him when he told them that I asked him to take me for rides and go parking in secluded areas so that he could "teach me all I needed to know about sex." I realized they were all in denial (even one of my sisters whom he also raped for several years) so I simply left it at that. He tormented me by coming to my house and leaving candy with notes that said, "Since I cannot give this to your mother I thought I would give it to you." I would take my baby to the back of the house and sometimes wait for hours until he gave up and left. He began to drink heavily again (he had been a "dry drunk" and might I add--get this--a PREACHER. He even molested me once on the way home from church. Then he started using the suicide threats. Once he called me and said, "When you pass the homeplace look up at the peach tree. You will see the buzzards flying overhead. Go up to the tree and you will find me hanging there dead and will know that YOU were the reason I died. You will burn in hell for what you have done to me. Over the course of the next couple of years my siblings and I spent many, many nights with him after he called and told us to come over, that he had a gun and was going to kill himself. When we got there he had a mattress laying in the middle of the living room floor, his pants and genitals exposed. He had the gun to his head and somehow someone always talked him out of it. He died in 1980 at the age of 69 and never once admitted or apologized for anything. I truly believed that I had forgiven him and spent the last three weeks with him in the hospital.On his deathbed I told him that I loved him and truly thought that I had come to the end of that journey in my life. It wasn't until one week after his death that I got severely depressed and sought therapy. I thought I had learned to love him and accept the fact that he was simply a "product of his environment." Boy was I ever wrong! It wasn't until the exstensive outpatient therapy three days a week, Out Patient Group sessions 3 days a week,every type of therapy available from Thought Field Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Trauma Support Therapy, Grief Therapy, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, 10 hospitalizations, Grief Therapy and Electro-Convulsive Therapy. Over the course of 8 years I have been on just about every medication available and have finally found a regime that is working for me. I feel that I can truly say that I have finally overcome this battle and am now a thriver in this area.
I suffer Bi-Polar, Borderline Peronality Disorder, hypochondria, phobias of doctors,sexual disfunction and sever anxiety due to my mother's mental illnesses.She has severe phobias that everyone is out to get her. She has very perburd idealogies about sex, sort of a Freudian theory if I am correct. We were taught, and might I still add, that most all women are *****s and all men are *****mongers. She thinks that all everyone in the world focuses on sex. We were told that women who wore nail polish or lipstick were *****s. To this day she still says that any woman who is raped deserves it! She is now 83 and still suffers a LOT of bitterness, hatred, anger and resentment. She remarried a super nice man and has driven him crazy. He cannot be around another woman, even family members that she doesn't accuse him of lusting after them. She pulls our shirts down if our belly or back is exposed if he is in the room. He is retired from the Air Force and when they first married he bought a nice Air Stream camper to take her traveling all over the states. Many times he had to take her back home because all she did was b*tch about him looking at all the women. When female family members came over from England to visit their whole trip was ruined because she accussed either the visitor or her husband having lust for one another. Get this--when my stepfather's brother died they traveled to Montana to attend to his affairs and funeral. She even accused the widow of hitting up on her husband and vice versa! They had to cut the trip short and that was the end of their travels.
As the story goes my Mom was orphaned in 1925 after her father killed her mother and unborn child by pushing her down the stairs or gave her syphillis and she and the baby died during child birth. He then locked her in the room with her dead mother for two days. She was the youngest of 6 children, the only girl with 5 brothers. She was raped by the oldest at age 5. She was then sent to a foster home and raped there by the 16 year old son. She ended up in an orphanage and then foster care where she lived with one family for 13 years. She was beaten on a regular basis. At 16 she returned to the orphanage and was sent out to work for prestigious Sir William Buckley. Then WWII began and all British citizens were required to serve 2 years. She did so and survived many bombings, raids, etc.
Then she met my father who was a US soldier stationed in France. They married and returned to the states. She thought that she was coming to the "home of the free and land of the brave" as did most all the British women soldiers. What she didn't know was that my father came from a large, indigent and illiterate family. He moved her into a literal shack way back up a cotton trail in northern Alabama. The only neighbors she had was his family and they were too ignorant to understand her English dialect. My father was a drunk and gambler at the time and beat her severely for five years. She was only 5'2" tall and weighed 95 pounds. She had no way to fight back or defend herself. Within 12 years she had 8 children and 4 miscarriages. One baby died at 7 weeks of age. I have been given two accounts-one that the doctor broke her back during delivery, the other that she died of malnutrition. I tend to believe the latter version as she has told me in recent years that "he" would stay gone for days, bringing in no money and allowing them (5 children at the time) to suffer malnutrition. One time a school representative came out and wanted to know why my oldest sister, who was six, had not been in school for five days. Mom had to tell them that it was because they had had nothing to eat for five days. She swears to this day that they simply left and offered NO assistance. Their water came from a well, which never stayed primed and she had to cook over an open fireplace. She recalled one situation in which "he," after an extensive stay away, came home with a large carp fish. She had no way to cook it. Then she remembered an old techniqued she had heard in years gone by. It was winter, she was pregnant. She had to climb through barbed wire fences and collect wood to build a fire. Then she had to prime the well. She then took a large dish pan and filled it with snow, took it in until it melted then dug up some red Alabama clay. She then took this clay mixture and coated the fish with it and put it in the coals of the fire. This one fish had to be shared among 7 people, one of whom was pregnant. Many,many times she had to walk long distances to small stores and beg credit to buy milk for the baby. She was refused. She did say that one neighbor occassionally gave her milk from his cows. To warm the bottle she had to build a small fire with paper under a coffee tin and place he bottle in it.
Fortunately for her this was during the days when the men of the community stuck together. They got sick and tired of how she and the children were being treated and lay in wait one night on a path they knew he would take home. The ambushed him and told him that if he didn't sober up, stop beating mother, feed his family and get his act together that they would take up money and send Mom and the kids back to England. To this day I have never understood why this tactic worked but it did. He sobered up, started taking the family to church, stopped the beatings and moved into a more decent shack.
During my early childhood days we were never allowed to let anyone know if we were sick. I suffered pinworms so frequently and severely that I stayed malnourished. I was afraid they would not flush down the toliet so I went to the woods and hid to have my bowel movements. I remember finally telling her and the s*it hit the fan! Anytime any of us were sick and needed medical attention she would b*tch and rage for days on end about how sorry, low down and "yellow-bellied "he" was. She talked about how expensive the medication would be and I can remember her getting the worm medicine. It was in a big brown glass bottle. I was so paranoid that I would break this "gold" that I actually had to develope an alter to take care of the situation.I thought it was MY fault that I was sick and that I was the cause of the rage and that I was making my mother very unhappy. I recall once at school they werre offering TB tine tests. We had a form we had to have signed by a parent allowing them to do the test the following day. I was literally so sick that I threw up, threw the paper in the trash and didn't go to school the next day. I was so sure that I had TBand that it would set mother off on one of her regular rages. I got such a phobia of medications tha when they gave the small pox sugar cube vacine I could not take it. To this day I have filed away in my pictures a photo that was published in our daily newspaper of mother and "him" holding me down and the nurse forcing it down my throat. It was entitled, "Don't Give Me That Stuff," says Sylvia Thompson.I suffered caries (severe cavities) so bad that I was in constant pain. When I married and had good insurance I had to have 13 fillings, two extractions and two root canals. I had regularly severe ear infections that went untreated and due to that my ear drums ruptured many times. Now at 47 I have to have wear hearing aids because of all the damage to my ear drums. To this day I still try to please my mom. I thought all her unhappiness, anger, rage and bitterness was because I wasn't good enough. I lived my whole life centered around trying to please her and make her happy but I have grown in this area and realize it is impossible. I was a straight A student but was never praised or encouraged. I was told that I was a "Thompson" and that Thompson's could never do nor would ever be anything in life. I was constantly told I was stupid, ignorant, couldn't do anything right, etc.
This is getting too exhausting for me but I much, much more to tell, including the medically negligent death of my infant son, the death of my beloved sister, a divorce and remarriage, an alcoholic husband, being moved by the Army all over the world far, far from home, family and friends for over 20 years,the trials and tribulations of my spiritual journey, another threatened divorce and now the desertion of my family.
Until next time,
Sylvia