The Most Important Life Lesson

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today Sadje asks us in her Sunday Poser to share life lessons we’ve learned. I was pretty sure I’d done a post on the most important lesson I’d learned in life some years ago, so went to look and indeed, I wrote about this topic in 2018. Wow, how time has flown!

And it doesn’t surprise me that, when I read Sadje’s question, my initial thought was to share the exact same lesson I shared back then: that it’s important to stay true to yourself. Today though, I’m going to make it even bolder: I am the most important person in my life. That sounds selfish, right? But guess what? Each of us is the most important person in our own life. You can’t live for anyone else, by which I mean no-one else can make you happy. No, not even when you think that someone else does; it’s still your understanding of their love or acceptance that makes you happy.

To word it even more bluntly, if everyone thinks of themself first, no-one will be forgotten. This doesn’t mean we need to be going against moral sensibility or harming other people just because we want it. After all, harming others isn’t in our own best interest in the long run either.

By saying that no-one else can make us happy, I also didn’t mean we don’t need connections. However, no-one else can live our life for us.

I also want to share what learning this life lesson has helped me with since 2018. I still struggle with everyday decisions, but I attribute this to the fact that I often get overwhelmed with them.

I am happy to report that, since indeed landing in a less than supportive environment (ie. the intensive support home) in 2022, I was able to stand up for what I needed. I’m now back in quite a supportive place, but I’m glad I’m still able to advocate for myself. This doesn’t mean that the thought that everyone will ultimately abandon me if I’m myself, is gone. It’s worse than ever, in fact. I still need to work on the idea that, even if they do, that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person.

Developing My Fighting Spirit

Posted on by Astrid

Over at Pointless Overthinking, DM asked what circumstance got you to learn something surprising about yourself. I already responded there. I explained briefly about the time my psychologist removed my autism diagnosis and diagnosed me with dependent personality disorder instead. In this post, I’m going to expand on my answer.

In August of 2016, it had come to my attention that my psychologist had changed my diagnosis. I was at the time hospitalized long-term and had had an autism diagnosis ever since 2007. For a reason I still only partly understand, she had decided to remove it. I’m pretty sure she didn’t fully understand her own reasoning either, as she kept coming up with different excuses. When I involved the patient liaison person and requested an independent second opinion, she even started to negotiate diagnoses.

Being a little too trusting of people’s good intentions, I at first went along with her proposal of a new diagnosis. I wouldn’t get my autism diagnosis back, but I would get diagnosed with brain injury-related emotional issues, which still gave me a reason to believe my impairments weren’t imaginary. It made some sense, in that my psychologst said the brain bleed I had sustained as a baby, was her reason for removing my autism diagnosis.

By November though, my psychologist came up to me to say that she’d rediagnosed me yet again. This was it and there was no further room for negotiations. My diagnosis was changed to dependent personality disorder, borderline personality disorder traits and “developmental disorder” not otherwise specified. I didn’t know what that last one was, but I accepted it anyway.

A week after that, I found out that the “developmental disorder” had not been put into my records at all, but instead depressive disorder NOS had been written into my chart. In Dutch even more than in English, these words are so differently spelled that it couldn’t have been a typeo. My psychologist finally admitted that she’d not diagnosed me with any type of neurological or neurodevelopmental disorder and wasn’t intending to either. She said she’d written depressive disorder NOS into my file because a diagnosis on axis I of DSM-IV is required for someone to stay in the mental hospital. She was vague as to whether she believed I was depressed, being convinced that I was still mostly just dependent. A nurse added insult to injury by saying the psychologist did me a favor by giving me an axis I diagnosis.

When I was first told I’d been diagnosed with dependent personality disorder, I assumed that the psychologist would probably remove it if I fought it hard enough. After all, DPD is characterized by passivness, compliance and an inability to voice disagreements with others for fear of losing care or approval. She said she wouldn’t. Besides, suggestible as I am, I quite easily tacked off the five out of eight required criteria.

At first, I was just angry and defeated. Pretty soon though, my fighter insider, Leonie, emerged. I requested an independent second opinion and this time I left no room for negotiation. I got re-assessed for autism in early 2017 and got rediagnosed on May 1.

Readers who don’t know me, might be wondering why I care. Well, the reason I care about my diagnosis is that I experience significant limitations that can’t be explained by just blindness. I do try my best and this to me signals that something else is going on. My psychologist felt I was making up my impairments. She didn’t say so, but she did say I couldn’t be diagnosed with autism because of my brain injury, yet I couldn’t be diagnosed with that either. She felt that the fact that occupational therapy was mostly ineffective, proved that I had no self-confidence. Her way of helping me develop self-confidence was to kick me out of the hospital almost with no after care. It was effective, in that it did allow the figher insider to fully develop.

Only later did I find out that, even though she rationalizes her decision to this day, it probably wasn’t about me. There are significant budget cuts to mental hospitals, so my psychologist was under pressure to kick some people out. She picked me, probably because of my relatively young age and the fact that I wasn’t psychotic. She claims that dependent personality disorder was the most appropriate DSM-IV code for someone with bad institutionalization syndrome. That completely overlooks the fact that I’d not been admitted to hospital for no reason 9 1/2 years prior, of course.