I do not like the label Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy. It conveys no meaning in and of itself.
The label routinely began to be applied to a type of medical child abuse in families the late 1970s. The catchy descriptive phrase was used by the British physician, Dr. Roy Meadows, to capture the wild tale telling nature of the disorder.
At best, and without elaboration, the phrase conjures up an image of a man in a balloon basket (the Baron Münchhausen whose exaggerated tales of world travel were popularized in German popular culture of the 1700s) of who is placing a shareholder vote (a vote by proxy.)
The psychiatric community feels the same way as there is no such illness included in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5 ®); they use the term Factitious Disorder by Proxy. I do the same when I need to be totally accurate. Medical child abuse is also a term that is used but it is used more often by professionals involved in criminal justice or legal systems.
However the term often abbreviated as MSBP does conjure up images that pinpoint the type of behavior thanks to media usage of the term.
When I initially talk to someone who is not familiar with this unusual illness that often presents as a form of child abuse, I ask if the person has seen the movie the Sixth Sense. The depiction of the disorder in the film is very well depicted.
One of the dead people the boy with the sixth sense encounters in the film is a girl who guides him to a videotape that shows the mother of the girl as she adds poison to the girl’s food. The mother wears red to the funeral of the girl capturing the attention seeking nature of MSBP abusers. The scene in which the little sister is on a swing while two women speak about how the little one is now beginning to show the same signs of illness as her dead sister hints at the often serial nature of abuse within families.
I understood upon viewing the film when it was first released in 1999 that these scenes depicted Münchausen by Proxy abuse. This film actually helped me believe that the mention of this disorder by a therapist a couple of years prior to my seeing the film I had was off-base.
My therapist for a short time in the 1990s, Carol, had mentioned that a situation I described from my childhood sounded a bit like Münchausen by Proxy. I dismissed the suggestion as I, obviously, had not been killed by my mother.
I continued to believe for several more years that I was just depressed by my failure to find a rewarding job, or at least one that paid more than childcare and the costs I incurred when working outside the home, due to starting my career too later than I should have, while also experiencing the volatile hormonal fluctuations of a difficult peri-menopause.
Eventually in the early Autumn of 2003 I connected the cyclical depression I experienced to anniversaries of events in my childhood. A cascade of understanding tumbled down around me when I began to allow myself to think about my earlier life experiences outside of the rigid compartments in which I isolated distinct events of my life.
On What Would Have Been 100 Years
Today is my mother’s 100th birthday. She is no longer living, but still, today is her birthday. I think of the last time she and I had cake. It was on my 50th birthday, just a bit over one month before she died. It was chocolate. I bought it for myself. I was alone in Indiana with her. One friend remembered what day it was — and sent me a bouquet of irises. No one in my family remembered. No one called and there were no cards or gifts. Mom was deteriorating and couldn’t really converse. But she loved the cake.
I can all too easily slip into a “poor me” mentality when I think of that time. I learned that behavior from Mom. There was a sad and angry little girl inside my mother. Her wrath, when loosed on the world, was in turns both uncaring and viciously spiteful. Not everyone saw this side of her. Few people spent as much time with her as I did.
I still am hesitant to put down the really mean things I saw come from her. Poison pen letters. Hurtful, truly nasty words intended to cut an innocent to pieces. Aloof back-turning when someone figuratively was standing on a high-rise ledge outside her window inconvenienced her or impinged on her view of an imaginary landscape. I cannot write a survivor’s tale about what I call the Family Münchausen without speaking about these aspects of her as she parented me.
There is a reluctance to sully her reputation, though most of the people she knew as peers or friends are gone from this world. I no longer have a hard time saying true things about her, although I lived the first 40 years of my life unable to say such truths. But now there is a part of me that knows that living a life that was so filled with sadness and anger must have been a horrible experience for her, and that part of me hurts for her.
Before my therapist retired last year, she told me that she thought I needed to get really angry at my mother. My therapist, Ann, helped me with rebuilding, with integration of many shattered parts of myself, and helped me while I was learning to nurture myself. She never saw me vent the anger. But it came out. I remember three times when rage filled me. The first was when I confronted Mom about the Münchausen by Proxy behaviors though I had not come to call them that. She was very angry that I could “do such a thing.” The second time I was depressed and angry and I remember choking and screaming through tears to my husband that my mother intended to outlive everyone she knew or had given birth to so that she would have the last word. Then there was the time I was beyond words, simply raging, and I picked up a very sturdy kitchen chair and repeatedly pounded it against the floor until a leg broke in two and went flying across the room.
Now I just feel sad that her inability to cope with aspects of her life ruined much of her life and the lives of quite a few other people. I’m sad that she never experienced happiness for more than a fleeting moment of time. I saw other aspects of her, and those are what I will choose to remember the rest of the day. Baking with her, picking wild strawberries, and her helping me rescue a little tree that had sprouted but never could have grown to maturity at the shaded base of another tree in the woods across from our house.
Our relationship improved the last 10 years of her life, though it hit rock bottom just before that time. I wanted to heal, so I did, and this helped her. I am glad I was able to make peace within myself and with her. Because of that I can now say with sincerity, “I miss you Mom. I love you and miss you. Happy 100th.”
Milestones in Living With Depression
From time to time I just like to check in and let those readers who also deal with major depression know how I’m doing. I also like to let regular old people know that having a chemical imbalance that impacts mood is not a lot different than having a chemical imbalance that impacts sugar or iron levels in the body.
I’m facing some big ol’ challenges right now. As regular readers know, I have been trying to rebuild my life, well, for much of my life. Time to stop trying and do it. But damn it, I’m not able to balance everything. I’m in one of my down moods. Before the life-saving introduction of selectlve seratonin-reuptake inhibitors into the bag of tricks used by contemporary shamans, I would be in the middle of a very dangerous major depressive episode. How do I know this? Well, I’m on the edge of teary for no particular reason. It is hard to start “doing” things. I find myself being jealous of the normal lives I see others around me living. I fall into “woulda, shoulda, coulda” thinking. But I notice myself doing these things and stop myself from dwelling on them as as best I can. Stubborn resilience is a saving grace.
Photo credit: kakisky from morguefile.com
That is what my daily dose of Zoloft does for me. It allows me to disengage from endless loops of despair and draw from my strengths. It doesn’t make me think everything is okay. It keeps my neural system from endlessly looping through the negative talk I have heard most of my life, and then repeated to myself. There are many unresolved conflicts in my life; most are from long, long ago. I have worked through most of the actual conflicts, but I can get lost in the feelings those conflicts engendered. Somehow, I short-circuit without the SSRI. With it I can stop and start specific thought patterns that lead to cascading despair .
Talk can do this to some degree too. Pleasant social interaction increases production of chemicals that tell your body things are okay. I think this is one of the reasons talk therapy works. Two years ago when I began in earnest to write a book-length work about being a survivor of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy child abuse I went back into therapy with a therapist I saw for several years between 2003 and 2007. Tuesday was my last session with her. She is retiring. I’m sad. Once a week I have had someone to listen as I talk about what went well and what did not and why, and how it may relate to prior family and relationship experiences and dysfunctions. I no longer have that, but it is okay. I have been shifting my coping strategies for a while in anticipation of this. I will still miss my hour when I can talk out what I’ve been feeling, experiencing, and how to do better in similar situations in the future. But I think I can keep on a more or less functional path with just the normalizing prescription for Zoloft and calm conscious thought, and my inherent strengths.
Here’s to stubborn resilience!
Revisiting the Virtual
Today I spent a few hours playing in a virtual world. Actually, I was building 3 dimensional graphic representations of an open air meeting space in my virtual world, Virtuality, on the Kitely Grid.
Why do I do this?
Practicing Positive Behaviors
I spent lots of time in and on virtual worlds between 2006 and 2011. The featured image for today’s post is from a blog post from early 2007, and it is a captured image from the gathering space I built in a virtual world. For five years I had a very active presence in Second Life® where due to account and “naming” constraints I “became” Ana Herzog, my avatar’s name. I learned a huge amount about computer graphics while I practiced being who I wanted to be. I actually talk about partially reinventing myself through the use of practicing positive attitudes and behaviors through the use of virtual worlds in the book I’m putting together on surviving being the proxy to my mother’s Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.
Women’s Community
I also loved the community of intelligent, savvy, women who were peace activists, professors, artists, stay at home moms, authors, and business women I met in my feminist and social activist circles. I ran an “island” called The Women’s Center and leaving it behind was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make. It was “real” in that I used it as an information hub and a social media portal as did many other people. But the prices I had to pay to keep it functioning were just too high. Way too high.
Options and Change
So I spent over a year trying out different Open Sim worlds hosted by different vendors, but the prices were still just a bit too high or a little bit of wonkiness in the stability of the platform. But thanks to Maria Korolov over at HyperGrid Business I found out about Kitely, which is an only pay for the computing resources you actually use model being developed and implemented over on an Open Simulator based grid, i.e. group of worlds, or environments, is very reasonably priced.
Avocation and Skills
I love creating graphics and designing buildings and other material world replica items. I didn’t know this until I began using Second Life in the summer of 2006. I hadn’t done anything like it since I used to build space ports for my Barbies using aluminum foil and corrugated cardboard along with my vivid imagination. Then it came together for me as to why I would like these activities when I remembered that the vocational testing in High School results said I one of the career paths I should consider would be related to architecture and design.
Virtual Worlds Change
While the technology of virtual worlds and artificial realities, or as I prefer to call them, virtualities, evolve at breakneck speeds with the prediction that depictions of virtualities will be indistinguishable from reality in under 10 years. While the most successful virtual world to date, Second Life, is losing ground from the massive popularity it saw around 2007 and 2008 height of media coverage of virtual world sex animation tycoons, millionaire virtual land barons, and the threat to real marriage and lives that virtual world relationships can have.
Virtual Worlds are Here to Stay
The linked header of this section takes you to a fairly current assessment of the state of virtual worlds that is worth reading. For me there are several reasons I am keeping a toe in the virtual pond.
- Meetings: there is increased value for extended meetings or conferences that take place in virtual worlds where attendees or participants can change sessions, come and go between tracks, go to a breakout session, or go have a coffee or cocktail (virtual) with other real attendees.
- Team Building: for people who can achieve some suspension of disbelief when navigating created landscapes, and that is everyone who can get “lost” in novels, games, and other situations where real, physical world goings on are tempered, distanced, or ignored, the virtual world seems real and interactions that take place in them are processed the same way in the brain as interactions that have taken place in a physical space. Relationships built in virtuality, especially a virtuality that is visited again and again, are more nuanced than any relationship forged in a confined, real world meeting room, or “watched” as a non-interactive streamed meeting.
- Cafes and Klatches: virtual spaces where like minds can drop in and chat with other like minds at or catch up with the recent achievements, feeds, streams and blogs of other members or participants can function like any other gathering space, except that they potentially can serve global clients, groups, or organizations.
Being a bit of a nerdy girl I had waited for virtual worlds to come into being without the layer of a game over the environment ever since the first days when cyber punk was in the air. I’m glad that open source worlds are multiplying and becoming priced to where individuals can create small environments to serve group needs. The ability to “teleport” or navigate directly from one world to another on different grids is in the works and should be available by the time I have Reason Creek flowing by The Nest and the Women in Virtual Worlds Conference and Training Center, and the Pink Frog Cafe (I’m still working on the name of the later.)
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