Actually A: Where Did You Hide Yourself?

Supermad v. the Human Brain

Two things happened around the age of five. One, my parents divorced. The other was that my mother put me into therapy. However, as we lived below the poverty line my mother used what resources she had available. She worked for the local university and, as a result, was able to get me into see a psychology graduate student. I'm assuming there was something with clinical trials, but I've never gotten a clear picture.

I'm not sure how long I was there, but I remember being in a room with a guy. There were toys and he would ask me questions, etc. One time I told him that there was something inside of me that made me do bad things. I remember being scared of it. I didn't like getting mad because it meant I lost control. This happened every time I got mad. So, I gave it a name. Supermad.

Supermad lived in my brain and would take over when I got mad. That's how it felt anyway when I was five. I was terrified and I confided this fear in this stranger who my mom had told me would help. His response was to ask me to draw a picture of it. It's the one you see at the head of this section. Granted, it was drawn digitally instead of by a child's hands, but the image is the same.

His response when I drew it was to ask if I knew what the human brain looked like. He then drew a rough sketch of a brain with all of it's loops and whorls. It was significantly more  complex than my drawing. He then asked how Supermad, who was so simple, be able to take over something so complex as a human brain?

What I wanted to scream at him was that it just could. I knew what I was talking about. I was scared of myself and here this guy was basically telling me I was wrong. I felt shame, anger, and my fear remained. Not once did he validate my thinking or help me process it. He told me I was wrong. He wasn't the last therapist to say this in regards to my outbursts.

For most of my life I was scared of getting mad. I was scared of the damage I could cause. The hurt and fear my rages would cause. I was a monster. Or at least that's how I felt. I was a monster because I couldn't stop it and nobody would even help me address it. It was something to be ashamed of because I couldn't control it. I was wrong. I was broken. I was dangerous. My family suffered.

Sometimes I would get so out of control that I wouldn't remember what I had done. There was a time I shoved my brother through the glass of the front screen door. I don't remember it happening. It's not that I wanted to hurt anyone, but I did. People assumed that my outbursts were a result of my home life.

My father has a violent temper and I was exposed to it when I was very young. Add on that my mom's own mental illness, I was a prime candidate to have problems. But no matter how much work I put into it. No matter how many therapists I saw, Supermad was a thing. I never called it as such but somewhere deep down I knew he/it still lurked and I was terrified of ever getting angry.

When I was a young teen, I had a therapist who also decided to tackle my outbursts. I still didn't know what was going on inside my head, but I had reduced the number of outbursts somehow. Actually, I know how I did it. I compressed everything into a small box and pretended it didn't exist. And by everything, I mean every feeling. Granted, I now know that I was trying to block out everyone else's emotional input but I couldn't separate my feelings from other people's. The mental strain was intense. I didn't realize what I was doing only that I needed to survive and not hurt people.

I don't remember the name of this therapist. He was an actual therapist through a local mental health organization. During one of our sessions, I told him that I felt like there was this giant dam in my head that I kept everything behind. When I would get angry, the dam would break. He asked me to draw it and then to draw representations for my family. I did. I felt proud. I had these tiny holes in the dam that represented leaks.

He criticized it. He said that what was happening was much more than that. He directed me to draw the holes bigger and to have them hit the objects that represented my family. I felt shame. I was angry and knew that he didn't get it, but I'd been trained (either by myself or from others) that I couldn't trust anything in my head, so I crushed down the feelings and did my best not to cry.

My last session, I was there with my mom and him. We showed her the picture. Not my picture at this point. It was the one he told me to draw. It was a punishment. He was telling my mom about it and at some point I got angry. I started yelling and he kicked me out of the room where I screamed and yelled in front of some people standing in the hall.

I was embarrassed. I was hurt. I was angry. I didn't know why it was happening. I found out later that he had decided that the best way for me to learn to face my anger was to make me angry. But that doesn't work. It's like pouring gasoline on a fire. It doesn't address the underlying problem. It treats me as a broken thing.

The only way I could circumvent the outbursts was to set up mental stopgaps. If X happens, do Y. I would hide that I was angry, frustrated, sad. Everything because a complex series of frameworks to protect myself and others from an outburst. I didn't know why it was happening. People blamed them on my childhood. I assumed that was the case.

Imaging being so scared of yourself and someone telling you they won't help you and that you are wrong for feeling that way. Now that I have a vocabulary and why for what is happening, I can better communicate when I'm struggling and then take the appropriate safety measures. Instead of trying to control things, I'm learning to accept them.

I'm realizing that it's not that I can't control myself because I've been controlling every aspect of my brain in a lot of ways. Not perfectly, but I have. So I let myself not be something I'm not. I can withdraw from the world when I need to and when I can't, I let people know I'm not in a stable brain space. My hope is that my outbursts, which have mostly stopped, will reduce in frequency and intensity so it isn't as mentally traumatic for me.

I'm not scared of hurting anyone anymore. My family know what is going on so I can tell them when I'm struggling and not feel ashamed. It's now, finally, ok for me not be ok. I don't think of myself as some monstrous freak that will destroy the world around him. I'm learning to take the time to process that I need.

Supermad lost. I won. Not because some drawing is less complex than a human brain. I won because I'm not scared of myself. I'm not scared of those moments when I feel like I could go out of control. I find ways to calm myself without trying to fight for control.