Post Estrangement - Grappling with Mental Health Issues.

Mental health issues do not happen in a vacuum.  You don’t wake up one morning with mental health issues spontaneously in your life.   Mental health issues are created by the way people treat you! 

When people treat you as less than, as inferior, when people tell you what they think is wrong with you or how they want you to behave, they create insecurities within you.  You start to doubt yourself.  You start a thinking pattern that involves the words “I am not good enough”.  When you are rejected or shunned you feel unloved and unworthy.  These cause mental health issues that stem from insecurities about worth and acceptance.  

I find it surprising that the very people that create the drama in relationships, that focus on your faults and your shortcomings and constantly point them out to you are then totally unsupportive when you exhibit signs of mental and emotional trauma.  They are the ones that point out that they think you are sick and need help.  Often they even say that they don’t want to be around you because you are sick, when they themselves created the situation by undermining you at every turn, in effect they are the ones who made you sick but they use your emotional distress against you as just one more sign that you are unworthy.  

And yet all too often we see or treat mental health issues like they are some form of contagious disease.  We ostracize those who succumb to the pressures of being emotionally abused and who show signs of suffering based on the feelings of insecurity, abandonment, and low self-esteem induced by the bullies.  Meanwhile, the bullies in life, the narcissists, the sociopaths, the psychopaths walk around unimpeded by emotional trauma because they are the source of the emotional trauma in others, but they are the first ones to point out the damage they have done as a verification that others are crazy.  They point out the unworthiness of those they have destroyed, claiming it is their emotional instability that makes them unworthy, disguising that they themselves are the source of the emotional trauma.

If you suffer from low self-esteem, if you feel insecure, if you feel unloved or unworthy; all these signs of emotional and mental health issues; know this, you did not suddenly become this way, you did not suddenly start to feel this way in an emotional vacuum.  You are this way because of the way you have been treated by others.  And yet it is those very others who created your “un-ease” in the first place; who claim that you are the defective one! 

Part of healing is learning this.  For as long as you blame yourself for your emotions and feelings, you don’t put the blame upon those who are the source of your feelings.  The people who treated you badly, those who mocked and criticized and put you down, they are the source of your feelings.

YOU DO NOT SUDDENLY WAKE UP ONE DAY WITH LOW SELF ESTEEM.  YOU BECOME A PERSON WITH LOW SELF ESTEEM BECAUSE YOUR HAVE BEEN TREATED AS UNWORTHY, INSIGNIFICANT, INCAPABLE OR DEFECTIVE.

Healing cannot take place until you find yourself in a place where you can see this clearly.  As long as you blame yourself for being weak or as long as you believe that by doing more you will become worthy you are not really addressing the depths of the problem.

When you realize that the forces that cause you to feel emotional pain are external you can figuratively or physically remove yourself from the source of the pain.  You can assign to those others who tormented you emotionally through their actions and words with the blame. And thus you empower yourself to create boundaries, to say “their actions, their words, their responsibility” and you then stop trying to “please them” by changing yourself. Instead you start to change yourself so that in becoming self-reliant, self-compassionate, self nurturing and self-caring; they no longer have power over you.

Oh but be prepared, the action of changing yourself, of setting up boundaries against abusive emotionally manipulative behaviour will bring out the worst in your oppressors.  

• They will now tell the world that you have mental health issues, they will shun you for your mental health issues and tell others to shun you as well!  
• They will make demands that you get help for your mental health issues and say things like “I can’t be with you until you get help”.  

They do this to cast aspersions upon you and to deflect others from seeing that they are indeed the perpetrators of the harm causing actions in the relationship. 

They really don’t want you back as a healthy well integrated person because then you are no longer a willing target to their abuse!  

They liked you in your dysfunctional self-doubting, self-denigrating, people pleasing, submissive, conflict solving role!  So even though they are the ones that told you that you were the “crazy” one and tell you that you “need help” and said that they don’t want to have anything to do with you until you are “better”, they don’t want the person you become in the process of healing either! 

• An emotionally healthy person can’t be manipulated and controlled through fear of loss.  
• An emotionally healthy person can’t be influenced or tricked into doing more or giving more to earn love and acceptance.  
• An emotionally healthy person therefore serves no purpose in the lives of those people who enjoy having power over others, who enjoy using others to gain advantage for themselves.  

So when you are finally at a place where you are strong and emotionally healthy and ready to take no abusive behaviour from anyone, the original perpetrators of your “un-ease”, the perpetrators of your emotional break down and following break through, will still refuse to become a part of your life.  

They will continue to devalue you and tell you what is wrong with you and will continue to tell you that you must apologize for your reactions to their hurtful behaviors and they will continue to tell you must change before they will allow you back in their lives.

Do not be fooled into believing that they really have your best interests in mind when they tell you that you are sick.  Yes, even though they often use the phrase “I am only telling you this out of love”, their purpose  in telling you that is only to make you feel worse about yourself than you already do.  And do not believe that they will come back when you are healed, for the healed "you" sees right through their manipulations and they do not wish to be exposed.

Emotionally healthy people do not push you out or reject you for being in a state of “un-ease”.   Emotionally healthy people stand by you as you heal, they offer support and encouragement. 

Emotionally healthy people do not point out what is wrong with you they point out what is right with you.

Emotionally healthy people make you feel loved and lovable.

If you feel anything less than honoured, loved, supported, respected, nurtured in any relationship that you are in; then you are in the presence of someone who is contributing to your mental “un-ease”.  You are not the source of this un-ease, they are.  Your feelings are merely a response to what has or is being done to you. Mental health issues are created by those who treat you badly and they desperately hope that you never find that out. For once you do find out they are revealed for the unpleasant characters that they really are, and the unpleasant personality that they exhibit is exposed.

So you can count on one thing for sure; those who want you to remain mentally and emotionally unhealthy will do everything in their power to keep you from becoming healthy.  And this includes calling you crazy, isolating you and disparaging your tentative first steps at becoming healthy.

Renate Dundys Marrello

2017 – 06 – 26 

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