Women and Madness

I recently started therapy – I’ve been saying it to everyone because I think it’s important to normalise it in all of my circles (my classes, my staffroom, my family). I’ve been shocked by the conservativism of some of the people I associate with; I thought we lived in a much more liberal world. A few of my nearest and dearest seem to have misinterpreted what I felt like was a sincere acknowledgement that I needed to do something to feel better as an admission that I’m crazy. As if I’ve said, “yeah I am a train wreck actually”.

It is known that women have been not only disadvantaged but failed by the field of psychology and psychotherapy through history. Women in the West were committed to asylums for defying their husbands, having sexual desires, speaking out of turn, witchcraft, having an affair, suffering a loss and feeling anxious and depressed as recently as the mid-1900s, when my grandparents were young.

Literature reflects this, as art imitates life, and portrayals of women have damaged society’s perception of femininity ever further. I teach my learners that female characters in classic fiction exist within three archetypes: the virgin, the whore and the mother. A ‘good woman’ who bends to the will of society, think Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, versus Fitzgerald’s Myrtle, Tom Buchanan’s poorer, sexier mistress. The doting, nurturing older woman who now lives for her children (or else risks being demonised as a mean old hag).

Beyond this, though, women are used as plot devices. They commit suicide or are murdered to build tension. They sometimes get naked and wander around being a perfect sexy, skinny, soft-breasted young maiden. They are also quite often debased by madness.

Which brings me back to my own story. I’m not sure if I’m ready to tell it yet because it’s still really confusing, but I’ve started talking about it more and some of it is becoming clearer. Frustratingly, the fact that I can’t think about what happened to me properly because of the confused haze falls in line with the mad woman trope. This bothers me because I started off being assured that I was mental, then I realised I was being deliberately gaslit which was making me mental, then I concluded it didn’t matter and I was now 100% fucking mental regardless. That sentence made me laugh. My therapist says I use humour to downplay trauma. Ha.

There are things and people that I cannot talk about here, which further clouds this account, but try to stay with me. My childhood has engendered the way I feel about myself, my boundaries and my understanding of love. I have learned to accept conditions on emotional support and barter for affection.

I give love so feverishly; my mind is full of poetry and whimsy and passion. I pour love on others even when they are too closed to accept it or if it’s a little too heavy for a light-hearted occasion. I know how much it means to me to feel love, so I don’t ever want the people I love to think I withhold it or to be confused about how I feel about them. But, to receive love, I know I have to try to be good enough. I have to jump as high as I can to reach the hoops. That’s how I envision it in my head, anyway, what I mean is, I have to try to meet that person’s needs, usually by betraying my own. I say ‘try’ because in the abusive dynamics in my life I never seemed to meet their expectations, but that’s because they weren’t designed to be met. They were designed to keep me jumping. This is a revelation to me that has come out of therapy but upon reflection is so obvious.

There are, of course, those who never expected me to jump at all and love me openly. These relationships are special to me. The person who offered me love first and most freely was grandad, and for that reason, what we had was sacred to me. I sometimes struggle with the healthy relationships because on some level I still feel like I need to try harder to provide value for them in order for them to still want to have me in their lives. I am unlearning this but it still makes me anxious. I quite often lie to my loved ones or just omit things that I think will make them angry or disappoint them. I’m sometimes worried that if I tell the truth they’ll shout at me or stop talking to me or bring it up again and again. It’s tiring. I can’t tell people how bad I feel sometimes because I think they want me to be happy and perfect and bring something positive to their lives, which means I suffer alone a lot. I cry in the car outside my house because I don’t even want Willow to see how much of a mess I can be. As you can imagine, in this constant state of tension, it is very easy to convince me that I’m crazy because it feels very plausible.

After growing up with these conditions, it felt very predictable and safe to continue to seek out these transactional relationships. I know how to jump really high, now, and that’s because I was with someone for a long time after I left home who made me keep jumping. I started to feel so exasperated. I knew something wasn’t right, I was hurting, but I was also reckless and flawed myself so I wondered whether he felt the same way as me and I was causing both of us to hurt. So, I kept jumping. Just as before, now and again I would claw my way through a hoop, but that never lasted and the next one would be far too high. But, the idea that if I tried really hard then sometimes I would make it kept me looking up at the hoops.

While I was looking at them, I lost sight of how the cycle was changing me. I didn’t see the bruises on my body or the way I looked older or my bloodied fingernails. It wasn’t one moment in the past few years that made me look down. It was a stolen glance. A twinge in my calf that forced me inspect a bruise. A gradual thing.

Once, when he finally left me again (or put me through so much that I couldn’t take it anymore for a while and told him to leave, I can’t remember) I felt so worthless and numb that I dared myself to look up abuse. So much of it resonated with what had happened to me in that relationship and before. I still have screenshots of websites on my phone from this first time, which was years ago.

He quickly dispelled these thoughts by telling me I was doing something called projecting (I now know this to mean positing your own bad qualities or actions on to another person to exonerate yourself from blame) because I was abusive and a narcissist. This became his favourite thing to scream at me in an argument, after that. So, the next time he left, I looked up narcissism. I thought, I might’ve caused all of this because I’m a narcissist.

I felt even more crazy, then. Some of the traits and behaviours I looked at did seem to align with me. Or did they? He told me I didn’t know love, but is that true? Do I lack empathy? I mean, I cared for my grandad to the end, I cry when Megs cries, I would do anything for Dan and Britt if they needed me, no matter what. I can’t accept that as the truth. So, I began to question other things he’d said, and I noticed just how black and blue I was.

Projection is the most confusing trap because coupled with other manipulation tactics it can make you believe you are to blame for what happens to you. The biggest stab to my mental health through all of this has been feeling so awful about myself (he would call me names constantly, say no one else would want me, say I was stupid, ‘not as fit as I think I am’, emotional, ignorant, crazy…) and feeling like it was caused by my own actions. That he was just reacting to me being difficult. I’m still untangling that, honestly. It feels like bullshit when I say it out loud to people but there is also a deeper part of me that believes I am hard to love, so why wouldn’t being around me make someone lose their shit eventually?

And so, what am I but a real-life rendition of the women and madness trope? The patriarchy makes it so fucking easy for men to gaslight women in to thinking they’re crazy. Post-modern society should, in theory, be free from this gendered trap, but alas it is not. In some ways, it’s worse because now men can convince us that not only are we crazy, but the very idea of the modern woman and feminism is extreme and wrong. It literally altered my core beliefs for a while. I’m still piecing together who I really, truly am as a result.