“I think that-it’s just, well—I really think I might have been misdiagnosed.”
Silence. She’s shaking her head. I sigh nervously and stare at my hands. Wait.
“I don’t think so. I know you have a lot of denial and resistance to this process.”
Wait a second. Did she just tell me that I’m in denial?
Denial. The first phase of the stages of change. Denial is when someone doesn’t even know they have a problem, one of my supervisors once told a group of individuals with co-occurring mental health and drug and alcohol disorders. Denial is when you’re asking, “Who, me?”
Does that mean I’m not even aware of my problems, even of myself?
The big D-word. It is a word I try not to use as a professional therapist. It brings up resistance and fear in people. Generally, I find that if I tell someone they’re in denial, they retreat even further behind whatever mask they are hiding. But maybe that’s just me. A former colleague of mine would hold no punches as he assessed individuals for their anger management or batterer intervention program. I remember, on more than one occasion, he would look a client squarely in the face and say, “You, my friend, are in denial.” Usually they laughed it off or got angry. Once, a client swore to me that he hadn’t used alcohol, in spite of his dirty urinalysis from that day. Truly an example of denial, he repeated over and over that there was no possible way that he could have gotten a dirty test. No way in hell. When I confronted him with the paperwork, he continued to deny. I finally let it go. He was, after all, about to experience 52 weeks of child abuse prevention treatment, and CPS had just taken his kids away.
But here it is, staring me in the face. Denial. My own.
What does all of it mean? It means I have been diagnosed with one of the big-time, major diagnoses: Bipolar Disorder. Throw in some PTSD and OCD and BPD and you’ve basically got alphabet soup. And that’s how my brain feels a lot of the time, swimming in chemicals and struggling to form new channels to map out my thoughts and feelings. Like a big, messy, swirled-up soup. And that is why I sit here nervously before my psychiatric nurse practitioner, keyed up and on edge, as I tell her that I have halved my medications. Halved. As in reduced by half. As in: non-compliance. I cringe through the usual platitudes, the concern, and the firm voice. I hear the words, ‘suicidal, harm yourself, worried.” All I can focus on is my need to regain control, to feel like I am once again in charge of my own brain, my thoughts and feelings, my creativity, my heart.
I cannot go on like this. These are the words that I live by, the words that hammer out in time to my heartbeat as I plod towards my office at work, an artificial anxiety brought on by the meds that gnaw at my psyche. I cannot wake up another morning, so groggy that I must sit on the edge of my bed for ten minutes, slowly shaking my head to clear out the gauze and the cotton wads that have clogged my mind in the night. I must be in charge of my own self, my own destiny.
This takes courage, this denial. It would be so easy to roll over, as I have done now for two years, and say, “You’re right.” To justify the diagnosis with anecdotes from my life and accept the label of Bipolar. But I cannot do it, at least for now. For now, I am bent on reducing the amount of meds that flow through my system, to anoint myself with the flavor of freedom—the freedom that is the self. The taste of my own being, fresh on my tongue and wild beneath a turbulent sky as I drive towards endless destinations.
“Do you understand?” she asks me. “Please don’t do anything else with your medications,” she pleads.
I stand up, stronger and more sure on my feet. I know I cannot make any promises, but I affirm with a nod of my head and a chirp of the voice.
This is denial. And I have fully embraced it.
This is denial. And I have fully embraced it.
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