Beth Rennie
When did I start to feel the depression and despair?
I guess I was about 10 years old, but I did have feelings of loneliness much earlier. When I was about six, I had several traumatic events happen to me.
First, I was the only witness when my daddy had a shooting accident. He was carrying a gun and slipped on some ice. The gun went off and shot him through the neck. The entire family and the nanny were in the car waiting for him when this occurred.
My mother, who was 5 feet and 100 pounds soaking wet, picked up my 6’2” dad and placed him in the car. She then proceeded to drive him to the emergency room 30 minutes away.
My younger brother and I were left outside the house with our nanny for an hour at least. Mom had her keys, and daddy’s keys were somewhere in the front yard covered in blood. I was scared and did not really understand what had happened.
My daddy survived and died many years later from complications from the loss of blood that caused irreparable damage to his heart.
While my daddy was in the hospital recovering, my grandparents (his mom and dad) and my uncle came to take care of my brother and me. It was two days before Christmas.
My uncle had some major issues; he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He proceeded to molest me while they were there for the next month. (I am not going into this here, but wanted to mention it and will be talking about it more in another chapter.)
Before my birthday (May 10th) came around, I came down with meningitis and was hospitalized for a month. My mother has told me there were several times that she did not think I would make it. She also has told me that I would talk to angels in the room.
I wanted to give this background here, because I think it important to understand how my mind was already overwhelmed by adult issues even as a small child.
I remember times before this happened when I had conversations with what I now know are ghosts. The first that I remember was in a very old house out in the country, and there was an old man who lived on the top floor. We were not allowed up there, and the door was kept locked. He could walk through the door and would often talk to me when my mom was not around. Of course he was a ghost.
After the year of change and turmoil I was different. I became withdrawn and fearful. I no longer wanted to connect with others and lived this life of sadness. I remember at about 7 being so sad that I hid from my parents. I did not go far, but I hid almost in plain sight, on top of an old chest freezer under a bunch of blankets. I heard them calling and just kept quiet even when they came into the room and looked for me. I knew I was going to be in big trouble because of the fear I felt radiating off my mother, but I just could not deal with her at the moment. When I finally came out, I got a horrible spanking for hiding and was sent to bed.
Four years later, I was literally sitting in the window in my room. I had pushed out the screen and was sitting with one leg in the house and the other outside. It was not dangerous since it was a first floor window. As I sat there, I was contemplating why I was alive and why I felt so horrible. It was as if I was a waste of space and no one could possibly ever love me. I did not really know what to do about all these feelings swirling around in my head. I was way too young to understand what was happening.
Of course my parents did not know what was happening to me, and when my mom found me sitting there I just got in trouble for the screen being removed. This resulted in a spanking, since it seemed like I was rebelling against her by not responding to her questions of why I knocked the screen out in the first place. To this day I can still remember the pain I felt at the total dismissal of the feelings I was having-- how she never even stopped to wonder why I was acting the way I was. With my mom it was always about her and how I was affecting her and what I was doing to her. She never stopped to consider that all the things she saw as rebellion were actually cries for help.
I generally coasted through the next five years barely making the grade, because I could not find a reason inside myself to really try. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I was plenty smart enough, even the teachers and counselors I had agreed with that. The problem was I really did not care about myself and what was going to happen to me. I was so sad and withdrawn I could not put forth the effort it took to please those around me. I never made friends easily or kept them for very long. I had people who flowed into and out of my life because connecting with others was just too much. The amount of energy it took to maintain a relationship with another person was just too much. In the end I always felt betrayed or less than. The ridicule I felt from others for not conforming to the social norms was enough to keep me from really connecting to others.
When I was fifteen, I started going through puberty and everything went crazy. My body became my enemy. It was attracting all the attention I tried so hard to avoid. I would dress in slouchy clothes, and my mother would have a hissy. She would buy me cute outfits and feminine clothes, and I would wear a t-shirt and jeans. She could not understand that I just wanted to fade into the background and not be seen; it was so much easier to live an invisible life .
I began to reach out to other kids who were doing risky things-- drugs, sex, violence to themselves and others. This was just an outlet for me, and it also kept the more normal crowd away. I was really just hiding amongst them, not really wanting to participate. As I was drawn further into this crowd, I became even more depressed and despondent. I also started acting out as a defense mechanism when having to deal with my mother. At this point I would like to point out that I was still a child, one who needed love and compassion maybe even more than others. My mother, while a perfectly good person, was in no way equipped to handle me. She had never been taught the tools to deal with what was happening to me and could not see that the behavior I was exhibiting was not really about her.
As an adult looking back, I can see me reaching out trying to get the help I needed. As a child, I had no idea what was happening to me.
This was when I started experiencing things outside of what even I considered normal, and I became very frightened. As a child I had major empathic abilities which were never explained to me, and I had no way to deal with them. As a teenager I began to see really scary stuff and hear voices whispering to me. Of course it is easy to see that this would never fly in my family. First off, they could not and would not believe that I was actually experiencing these things. To them I was just acting out or doing drugs that were causing the issues.
I remember one clear example of a terrifying moment. I was on the couch and had been watching TV. It was maybe 11 pm at night, and the national anthem had just played. The TV had gone to snow. I was not taking any drugs and had no alcohol on board; I was just lying there. I felt a sense of unease creep over me, like someone was watching me; then I became extremely frightened and felt frozen on the couch. I looked over at the door-- it had windows in it-- and I could clearly see the outline of a black shadow.
As I was sitting there, the shadow punched through the glass and reached in to turn the door knob. I screamed and screamed. My father came running from the back room and when I looked back to the door there was no damage and the door was closed and locked.
No one believed me. I was told it was a bad dream and it was not real. This was not the last time that the black shadows stalked me, but it was the last time that I told anyone what was happening. Not long after this, I tried to overdose on some of my mother’s meds. The police were called and there was a major scene; they had to handcuff me and force me into the police car to get me to the hospital. I screamed the entire way there. When we got there, they pumped my stomach and placed me in a strait jacket in a padded room for 24 hours. It was my first experience with the mental health community. I was on a floor with adults suffering from many different types of mental illnesses. I was scared and felt more alone than I had ever felt in my life.
Everyone in authority wanted me to be sick; they wanted to pigeon hole me with a mental disease so they did not have to really work with me and help me to get better. This is how I began my life-long search for what was happening to me. While I was there, I was given a battery of tests-- IQ/emotional/ability to reason, etc.
I was considered highly intelligent; it was when I talked about hearing the voices and seeing things that I ran into trouble. No one could believe that what I was telling them was the truth.
My relationship with my parents was non-existent and continued to downgrade from there. We were never able to reconcile even though I have tried for the last 20 years to have a relationship. They are just not willing. I love them anyway and will always love them.
I tried to commit suicide three more times before I had my first visitation from an angel. I was informed that under no circumstances would I be allowed to leave this earth before my time and I needed to go within for the support and love that I needed to move forward. I was 25. It took another 15 years before I found the answers I was looking for. For the first time in 30 years I was free from all drugs and mind-numbing counselors who had no idea what to do with me other than numb me out. They had diagnosed me with bi-polar disorder and proceeded to aggressively treat me; When on medication, I was numb and had no visitations and heard no voices, but I also lived a life that was dull and grey and fearful.
I had finally met my husband Rob and we were married for nine years when I sat him down and discussed the life I was living. I asked him for his support to decrease my meds and eventually come off them. He agreed. He had seen the effects the drugs were having on me. It was a living nightmare.
I started to research (thank goodness for the internet) the things that happened to me when I was not medicated. I reached out to groups of people who talked about the same things. I began to take classes and learned how to meditate and really learned how to hone the GIFTS I had been given, rather than live a fraction of the life I was given. I began to live fully. The empowerment I felt and the information I was taught gave me the ability to no longer be threatened by the dark shadows. Once they were gone, the spirits started stepping forward and the voices in my head began to make sense.
I am by no means living at my full potential. I am still working to overcome all the scripts that were placed in my head as a child and into adulthood, but I am on the path and feel it is my purpose in life to help others like me. The forgotten ones, the misfits, the rebellious.
I hope you were able to receive some comfort from my short story. It is my wish that we are all treated with love and compassion.
I do not dismiss that there are so called mental illnesses out there, but I would suggest that in all cases there should be other avenues at least discussed.
Who are we to assume that we know the human mind and what it is capable of? I have seen and done some amazing things in my life. I have also lived through some horrible times, but through it all I keep the voice and the image of that angel always at the front telling me I must live.
