I actually hesitated to reblog one otherwise excellent post a little while ago, very specifically because of that reference to the exploding emotional pressure cooker. As apt as that idea might be in a lot of cases, including my own life sometimes. Because that analogy got used against me when I was younger in ways that turned it very triggering.

I’ve talked some before about how some very serious misinterpretations of what was even happening led to some extremely harmful therapy and psych treatment in general when I was younger.

(Also very relevant there: some other good discussion of the problems inherent in parents/other adults in power being the real clients, with the open goal of “please fix this crazy kid and make them easier to live with ASAP!” Talk about built-in conflicts of interest and potential for abuse, which don’t seem to worry much of anybody who hasn’t ended up on the wrong end.)

Anyway, I landed in the psych system when I was 13, after a series of pretty spectacular meltdowns which were managed very, very badly. With apparently no connection made to all the previous ones that looked pretty much identical when I was a smaller kid–surely that was grown out by puberty to the point of total irrelevance, right? 😩 I say “smaller” for a reason, since being close to full adult size by then probably did not help matters at all.

My mother looked for a therapist, and we saw her once before I had another bad meltdown and New Therapist suggested I be locked up For My Own Good (and before my out of control behavior hurt somebody, yeah). That happened a couple times more over the next few years, and was a close thing many more times.

Now, early adolescence is pretty well recognized as a stressful time for kids in general. With loads of new stressors in their lives. Even if people are preferring to ignore factors such as bullying and (sometimes should-be super obvious) disabilities/neurodivergence. That gets used against too many other kids who are experiencing severe difficulties, to deny that anything unusual is going on at all and avoid looking at the situations causing them distress.

But, my mom did get professionals involved. Who promptly went for a bizarre combo approach: obviously nothing unusual is going on in this kid’s life now, but they’re also obviously doing the emotional pressure cooker thing and just generally coming across as Very Weird Indeed. Therefore, the explosions must be attributable to Severe Emotional Damage from one specific truly horrendous type of early childhood trauma ! 😵 (Which never actually happened, but hey.)

I’ve talked more about how that focus can turn abusive and gaslighty really fast. But, at least as harmful in a lot of ways?

Professional endorsement of the idea that nothing happening in your life right now really matters, except as it may pertain to The Real Problem. In fact, your perceptions and reactions must be skewed enough that whatever you say about what’s bothering you/how you feel cannot be trusted.

(Oh, and it’s obvious that the people paying us have nothing to do with any problems you may be experiencing. May not always be totally conscious, but it really should not be discounted as a potential motivation.)

If you’re angry about anything that’s currently happening? It’s misplaced at best, and likely a sign of severe emotional damage. There is absolutely nothing to get upset about now. It’s all The Crazy.

Not too surprisingly, a lot of extremely stressful things were going on then, or I wouldn’t have started into that cluster of spectacular meltdowns at all. That included my mother’s extremely volatile and sometimes outright abusive behavior–which they did see in action some. And excused/enabled, because out of control severely mentally ill kids.

But yeah, nothing worth mentioning could possibly be going on then and there.

Plenty to try to sort through later, yeah. It’s been almost 30 years since I was introduced to the added psych abuse, and more fallout still keeps coming up.

Another post that’s not intended as a “poor me!” type deal at all, BTW. I am mainly talking about this at all now because I do expect that once you get beyond the specific details? That’s not nearly as unusual an experience as it should be. And it doesn’t get talked about enough, difficult as the subject can be.

It’s just particularly nasty when actual professionals get in on the invalidation and gaslighting. They’re set up to do plenty of damage, and with even less accountability.