Drowning

My daughter is drowning. She has finally fallen in to the black hole created by the mental illness that has chased her for years, trying to swallow her whole.  This girl is angry and sad and overwhelmed by her anxiety and depression. The despair is winning and she is disappearing and I am impotent in my efforts to save her. After ten years of fighting to keep her safe from Jason, the man who groomed her and sexually abused her before she was even old enough to attend school, I am now losing the fight to keep her safe from a disease that is more cunning, more intelligent, more ruthless than Jason ever was.

My daughter is a fighter and I see her trying to hang on. She reaches for me and I have her hand, but it is slipping. She has tried to persevere and has been steadfast in her hopes and dreams of owning horses and running a stable. But, now, the horse she was once pining each day to see has become an annoyance; riding him has become frustrating and so she has been reluctant to go to the barn, the place she used to refer to as her second home. The horse she loves no longer brings her comfort and pride; when she is with him, she now feels nothing. She has told me she no longer wants to have him; they will not be ready for the next show season, so what is the point? This is not true, it is the depression manipulating her and this frightens me. My daughter once could not go a day without talking about the horse, watching videos of her riding him or badgering me to get her to the barn early for her lessons so she would have lots of time to groom and play with her horse. To hear her say “there is no point” tells me she is abandoning her dreams and the darkness that is stalking her is winning.

It has also become physically painful to ride as my daughter has been diagnosed with fibromyalgia.  This is caused from the intense depression and anxiety my daughter has been battling for several years, and it makes some days impossible to face as the pain throughout her body is excruciating and so, she retreats to her bed and sleeps and sleeps.

She intends to attend school and do well in her studies, but the disease is manipulative and tries to convinces her it is all a farce and there is no point because she will never be good enough. Still, she would go. She would attend her classes, hang out with her friends and do her homework. But these days became fewer and fewer and now, for weeks, she has been unable to fight off the despair. She has not been able to go to school and withstand the classes and the socializing and the homework. Instead, she succumbs to the despair and sleeps.  Knowing she is falling behind and at risk of losing her semester does not give her strength to go to school. Knowing she is losing touch with her friends does not inspire her to go to school or accept invitations for social activities. It does give the disease fodder to convince my daughter that there is nothing good in her life, nothing to look forward to and so she might as well give up. It drowns out every other voice, voices trying to encourage her. But the disease is louder and so she listens and wishes she could “just disappear”.  This terrifies my daughter and so she retreats to  bed where she falls into an exhausted sleep and does not have to listen to the voices in her head.  In her bed she feels safe.

Years ago, my daughter attended therapy with a psychologist, specializing in child sexual abuse. My daughter was still very young and did not understand what grooming and sexual abuse was. Her father had normalized what he was doing to her so well, that she believed this was how Daddy’s loved their daughters, how little girls were supposed to behave towards men and boys. As her therapy progressed she became very angry with her father for doing “bad things” that meant that he could not be trusted to be alone with her. She had a lot of guilt for “telling” because this now meant she could not be with her Daddy, whom she loved very much. Eventually, the therapy came to an end as the psychologist felt she had gone as far as she could go with my daughter for the time being, but she informed me that once my daughter was older, in her teens, she would need further therapy to help her understand, process and come to terms with what happened to her as a young child.

All of my children have been under the care of a psychiatrist since 2005 to treat them for the various mental and emotional ups and downs that they have faced in the aftermath of our escape from Jason. Now, the doctor believes, he too, has gone as far as he can go with my daughter and she needs more intensive treatment to help her address the repressed anger and hurt she has because of the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father.

I have been asking for help for months, but there is always resistance to admitting a person in to hospital for mental illness unless it becomes a matter of life and death. Our health care system is overwhelmed with patients and there are not enough resources to help everyone, so they use the band-aid approach and hope things will get better. I had hope, too. Increased sessions with the psychiatrist, medical appointments, weekly counselling with a local agency, tweaking medications and adding new ones so that my daughter has been on more medications than I can count and  is now on three different medications. But none of this is working. She is drowning and I am losing the grip on her hand that she once reached out to me, but is pulling back.

My daughter sleeps. She does not eat unless I bring it to her. She does not shower or get dressed.  She has not been to school in weeks and is not even attempting to keep up with her studies as she was, working from home. She does not see friends. She is tired and pale and weak. She is riddled with anxiety if, when she wakes, I am not at home and when I am out, she calls or texts me many times asking when I will be home, demanding to know how much longer I will be away from the house. I am her security, but I cannot be home with her all the time. I must go to my job and work, to pay the bills. I have to go out to buy groceries and pick up her medications and sometimes I just need to get out of the house for my own sanity. She has become a recluse and wants me as her companion. The guilt I feel when leaving her, knowing she will retreat to her bed and sleep, not eating, not drinking, is immense and consuming. My own anxiety has become so intense some days that I, too, struggle to get out of bed.

Finally, my daughter’s condition has become so dire that her psychiatrist and counsellor have decided to support me in my endeavor to get my daughter the help she needs. She will be going into hospital to be treated for acute anxiety and major depression. Because she is not eating and unable to perform basic tasks of self-care, under the Mental Health Act, she can no longer be refused a place in the hospital. I am relieved that she will be in a safe place, but I am also angry.

I am furious that after ten years of fighting to keep my children safe from our abuser, he still has a hold over us. He is still in our lives and he still affects us everyday. What he did to my children was so devastating that they have been unable to completely overcome it. There has been no justice for them, no closure and now my daughter is drowning in the post-trauma sludge of his abuse. I want him to know the damage he has caused, the devastation that my marriage to him has wreaked on our lives. But he does not care. He pretends none of it happened, denies it to anyone who will listen and has cultivated himself a new garden of lies and deception, while we live with the thorns left in our bodies from the garden of lies that we narrowly escaped and are still trying to survive.

I will not let go of my daughter’s hand. I will not let her sink under the dark waters in her pool of despair. I will do whatever it takes to pull her out. She is strong and I know she can fight this, but I do not know how to convince her to fight. I have hope now, that she will learn to fight again, once she is in the hospital. I have hope that she will reach for me and find her way out of this  and come home.

 

.