There's a phrase that a roommate of mine once said in passing, but it's stuck with me: "There are some people whose natural inclinations are very unfortunate."
I am mentally ill, and come from a family with a long history of mental illness: some of it violent. And while the violence may in part be triggered by instances of mental illness, the people who committed those violent acts, and acts of abuse, are still 100% responsible for what they did.
I was a very violent as a child, and I was shaping up to be exactly like my uncle and grandfather. It took a serious amount of willpower, soul-searching, and a self-awareness that I suddenly had to learn at 14 that my grandfather and uncle maybe didn't gain until way later in life, to learn to control those instincts. My mother was not physically violent, but she was verbally and psychologically abusive in ways that were equally traumatic.
Now that I have a knowledge of what I and my sister have, I can look back at my mother and grandfather and say, "that is most likely highly functioning autism, and those fits of rage might have been autistic meltdowns." My uncle is probably a psychopath.
At some point, I realized "if I lose control, I will seriously hurt someone. I am responsible for my own actions. It may be the mental illness at its core, but I'm still responsible if I act on it."
This has caused problems with friends that I have had who also suffer from different forms of mental illness. There have been times when I have been abused and gaslit by people I know who have different diagnoses of mental illness or various neurological conditions (bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, sociopathy, depression, autism, co dependent/dependent personality disorders) and all of them at one point or another have said, "I'm just this way. If you're my friend, you should just put up with it, because I'm just that way and I can't change - and if you're as strong as you say you are, you should just be able to deal with it."
I am pretty sure I would be in jail for murder right now if I'd clung to that attitude that back in my teens. So there have been times when I have had to walk away, for my own sanity's sake. Sometimes cutting those people off is self-care, as callous and unpleasant it may seem.
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Date: 2017-04-18 12:13 am (UTC)I am mentally ill, and come from a family with a long history of mental illness: some of it violent. And while the violence may in part be triggered by instances of mental illness, the people who committed those violent acts, and acts of abuse, are still 100% responsible for what they did.
I was a very violent as a child, and I was shaping up to be exactly like my uncle and grandfather. It took a serious amount of willpower, soul-searching, and a self-awareness that I suddenly had to learn at 14 that my grandfather and uncle maybe didn't gain until way later in life, to learn to control those instincts. My mother was not physically violent, but she was verbally and psychologically abusive in ways that were equally traumatic.
Now that I have a knowledge of what I and my sister have, I can look back at my mother and grandfather and say, "that is most likely highly functioning autism, and those fits of rage might have been autistic meltdowns." My uncle is probably a psychopath.
At some point, I realized "if I lose control, I will seriously hurt someone. I am responsible for my own actions. It may be the mental illness at its core, but I'm still responsible if I act on it."
This has caused problems with friends that I have had who also suffer from different forms of mental illness. There have been times when I have been abused and gaslit by people I know who have different diagnoses of mental illness or various neurological conditions (bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, sociopathy, depression, autism, co dependent/dependent personality disorders) and all of them at one point or another have said, "I'm just this way. If you're my friend, you should just put up with it, because I'm just that way and I can't change - and if you're as strong as you say you are, you should just be able to deal with it."
I am pretty sure I would be in jail for murder right now if I'd clung to that attitude that back in my teens. So there have been times when I have had to walk away, for my own sanity's sake. Sometimes cutting those people off is self-care, as callous and unpleasant it may seem.