a wild journey to recovery

I was born into a topsy tribe family in 1949. My father died when I was five years old. My mother was an epileptic and was unable to care for us three boys. An aunt that I never met or seen since arranged for us to be placed in Protective Services.

I grew up in a children’s orphanage, Children’s Baptist Home of Southern California, in Inglewood, CA. It was during the height of the Cold War during the late 1950s & early 60s.

Those were some really hectic and stressful times for all in North America, particularly in Southern California (SoCal). We would have all-night evacuation drills to prepare us for evacuating in the event of a Chinese invasion. It may be hard to believe nowadays, but in ’54 through ’67, everyone in SoCal was warned that the Chinese would land on the SoCal coast in masses of millions of armed Chinese who would kill us all in our sleep.

There was also the stress of a Russian threat of an impending nuclear holocaust. Us children never knew if we would wake up the next morning. We were told by the staff of the orphanage that in the event of an invasion that they, our house parents, would do the compassionate thing and kill us all in our sleep.

At the time, everyone was stressed out, and no one thought that a few (75 to 100) orphans mattered much. In the height of the stress, the staff would take out their frustration by hauling off and slapping us 5 to 12-year-olds across the room whenever they felt like it— and there was no predicting when they would feel like it. We were told that if we ever told anyone of being beaten, they would kill us: bury us in the orchard and tell everyone that we ran away, and we believed them.

I lived like that for seven years of my childhood.  On top of all the abuse at the home, we each were trying to deal with the separation from our parents and feelings of rejection from society— which can be devastating in itself.

Needless to say that after exiting the orphanage, I was one screwed-up kid. I carried all the abuses and stress with me into two really neat foster homes. One was a windmill foster home, run by an older couple who did not have much contact with their charges, and us kids were pretty much on their own. I was not able to interact in a “normal way,” so I was bounced around to another foster home and then to an overcrowded boys’ home.

Even though we were not abused in any of the later placements, the abuses I suffered at the children’s home were constantly being played out in my head. It was like it was still going on. I had a lot of weird and violent thoughts running through my head most of the time. Often my mind would just go blank and I could not think at all.

As a young adult, I limped by—trying to support myself by working on farms as an itinerant field hand. All the while, my emotional problems were getting worse.

At the age of 22, I started hearing violent voices threatening me with personal injury. The voices seemed real to me, but they would most often occur when there was no one around.

At that point, I knew something was very wrong and started seeking professional help. I thought there were still big state hospitals I would be locked away in, so I was guarded about what I would reveal in evaluation interviews.

It seemed that even by the enlightened 70s, no one wanted to accept that bad things happen to children while growing up in an orphanage. Somehow everyone felt responsible if a child had been abused while a ward of a county, so no one would believe that my hallucinations, by this time visual, were in any way related to a stressful childhood.

I was told that I was very mentally ill and that medications were the only relief that could be hoped for from my torment. I always believed my symptoms were directly related to the stress and abuse of my childhood. The medications were never effective in controlling my symptoms. They only added god-awful, disabling side effects.

I was in psychiatric treatments and involuntarily hospitalized eight times over six years. The longer I was in treatments, the worse I got. I finally decided that if I was ever going to live anything like a “normal person” free of symptoms, I was going to have to quit complaining about my symptoms and start going it alone.

I had really bad withdrawals for over two years. That was on top of a profusion of symptoms. I was in so much distress during those two years that it all seemed like one big, long nightmare.

After I got over the withdrawals and stabilized by staying in homeless centers all over the west coast, I finally found a therapist who was dedicated enough to accept a challenging case like mine. Although she usually worked with psychiatrists, she knew if she didn’t want to lose me as a client that she shouldn’t push meds on me. She was very patient and listened to what I had to say about my condition. She used several different therapy styles on me, and over a number of years, I kept getting better.

After six years on and off, I finally started feeling like a “normal person” with aspirations, making contributions to society. Yes, I still had symptoms, as I still do today, but I now have the knowledge and tools to deal with what life brings me, although I am still not 100% recovered.

I am still on the spiritual journey that I started when the abuses first began. For the last 20 years I have been monitoring myself, and whenever I start to have strange thoughts I stop what I am doing and start finding counsel from my peers: not necessarily a counsel of peers in recovery, but anyone I have things in common with. Then my symptoms will start going away. It is something I have to schedule every day of my life, but hey, it’s a lot better than being paranoid and imagining all kinds of awful things happening to me. If I didn’t keep my symptoms in check I would just keep getting worse until I find the right people to hang out with ‘til I start functioning “normally” again.