After I was out of day treatment, the child psychiatrist I was seeing insisted I be in therapy and I insisted I see a female. So, my mom's wonderfully involved parenting style consisted of throwing the insurance book of providers at me and telling me "Pick someone!". Unbeknownst to me, I picked someone who actually had a background in personality disorders and ended up diagnosing me at age 14 with BPD. There were a few problems with that whole situation though. First of all - I had no clue what it was and her having me read the criteria from the DSM-IV didn't help things any. Secondly, my mom's view on life was (and still is) minimize and ignore things and they'll just go away. And third, this woman engaged in some unethical if not fraudulent billing practices.
At this point in time there was no longer any way to hide that I'd been sexually abused, I'd incurred even more of my mom's wrath by saying too much about that already but she quickly made up a cover story to protect her family and the real perpetrators. I learned it by rote, backwards and forwards, still hoping I could do something to earn my mom's love finally after all these years.
"I've only got hurt once, at my school when I was 8. I asked for a pass to the restroom that was sort of in a separate building and when I left the girls room a bigger boy grabbed me and pulled me in the boys room. He took my panties off and put his fingers in here and tried to make me such his thing but I bit him and got away and hid. Later another girl from my class got sent looking for me and I told her I had got sick and didn't tell anyone what happened for real."
That was what I told this psychologist, nothing about 11 years of severe physical and sexual abuse by relatives or verbal and emotional abuse and neglect by my parents. My mom quickly talked me out of the idea that I had Borderline Personality Disorder after reading how it was caused by serious abuse or neglect during childhood and going on and on about how anything I remembered of growing up was wrong and I had a 100% wonderful childhood. (While I do have great memories, I also remember the hours of her screaming over one misplaced toy as long as my dad wasn't home, threats of having me arrested for crying, locking me in my room, etc. And my dad's drunken driving which nearly killed us all quite a few times). After the psychologist helped get me transferred to a new high school I found myself quickly running out of things to discuss with her since I couldn't be honest.
Tensions rose between her and my mother since she kept insisting I had Borderline Personality Disorder, and my mom also found out she was doing something slightly shady with billing (I never understood what). The drive home from appointments would take about two hours due to rush hour traffic and they turned into sheer misery for me due to my mom's hateful tirades about how much time and money I was costing the family. She had some severe back injuries, a side effect of a medication she'd taken for a chronic illness, and I heard daily how those hours on the road put her in pain for the entire week. Finally I gave in and did what I thought she wanted - I refused to see the psychologist anymore. That day was taken up with dozens of phone calls...demands from the psychologist that we arrive at the scheduled time, more calls when we did not saying to be there at 8pm, then demands to talk to me on the phone (which I refused), then a final call that the police and social services were being called. For weeks I lived in fear anytime I saw a police car but nothing ever came of that last threat.
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