After my relationship with Suzan, I really needed to connect with someone. I sought support from various people and that helped a lot. And I quickly set my sights on other women again. In recent years, even before Suzan, I have had many obsessive crushes. Sometimes on several women at the same time. I really needed it because I felt so much pain. Women were a reasonably safe haven for me, and moreover, I still wanted to impress them (as I always wanted to impress my mother), even though I was always afraid that I couldn’t do it properly now because of my gentleness and great vulnerability, and because I just feel bad and have so many limitations. Sometimes I thought: I’ve been in therapy for so long now, maybe they do like me now. Sometimes I thought when women were being nice to me, that it was a sign that they liked me. Fortunately, I later let go of this idea, because it just doesn’t work that way. What particularly stuck with me after Suzan was the fact that she thought I was passive, even though she was just as passive herself. And at the RIC I received a jokingly intended remark from team leader Steven that he thought I was a ‘vegetable’. This really hurt me. And it may have sounded innocent, but I have so much intensity inside me that little things had a big effect on me, especially in those years.
I decided to ask Rina if I could work in the office of the Mental Health facility Activity Center. And I was allowed to. But I looked down on this work, and I discussed this in an interim conversation with my RIC counselor, Mira. Rina was also present. I told them that I wanted to do all kinds of things in my life (I mentioned all kinds of wonderful professions) but that I was being thwarted in my mind. It was like a prison of sorts. I was forced to lower my demands, and so I did. I would just work at the office activity and we would see what happened.
Alfred became my supervisor at the office activity. The work was very simple: most people were folding or stacking, and Mike was stapling. I felt very comfortable at the office because there were few demands and no pressure on me. I was very cheerful. And I immediately received an angry response from Mike (whose mother had just passed away, which I had no idea about) because of this. Of course, that had a big effect on me and it kept haunting me for days. Alfred complimented me, however, on how I defended myself and how I gave Mike feedback.
Alfred knew that I was good with computers, so he usually gave me more challenging tasks than folding and stacking, such as designing things, making booklets, editing a video and so on. He did often ask too much of me, in my opinion, but I didn’t dare say anything. I worked very hard, and every time I did, I got a concerned comment. I thought he was sometimes too demanding and too concerned.
In the meantime, I had also become very involved in photography. I regularly photographed concerts by choirs and music associations in the neighborhood. And I also took photos for a mental health magazine. At the RIC they encouraged every form of activity and always emphasized: you should not avoid your fears. I would usually say something like: “Well, I am also afraid of getting a cerebral hemorrhage, so should you give me a cerebral hemorrhage to overcome my fear?” Or: “I’m afraid of being hit, should you hit me so that I can overcome my fear?” What I wanted to say with this is that all my fears could be traced back to a very great fear of real danger, which actually caused the psychotic mechanism. And that I had fought this fear in the clinic by opposing it, and that I could no longer overcome it now because of what had happened in the part-time therapy. But at the RIC they saw my increased activity and they rewarded that. They only treated me for a long time for ‘Anxiety and Mood Disorders’. They apparently did not want to believe that a psychotic mechanism had arisen in the part-time therapy, one that was a lot worse than the anxiety and identity problems I was covering up with at the time of the clinical therapy. Yet I would be proven right later, although I would have liked to have rubbed that in some people’s faces.
I felt more and more at ease at the activity center and I started to make quite cheerful remarks now and then, also to colleagues. In an evaluation with Alfred (which Rina also attended), he made a critical remark about this. “We have to do something about that!” he thought. “Maybe we should make it a goal to work on!” This also had a traumatic effect on me. It didn’t stop! It felt to me as if yet another one of my characteristics was not allowed to exist, while I needed that characteristic so badly to keep me going just a little. I took another step backwards, the other one became a little more powerful in my head again. Fortunately, I was able to talk to Alfred about this and he understood that his comment did not help me and that it was better to just let me be more free. This incident really knocked me out and I became a lot more passive again.
It became increasingly clear to me that I was slowly regressing emotionally due to very minor incidents that would not mean anything to a healthy person. This was very frightening. The obsessions with women were getting worse: they were bothering me. I was even experiencing physical symptoms. If I was now even starting to suffer from my obsessions and I was forced to let them go little by little for the sake of survival, while I actually needed them so badly to feel somewhat reasonable, then things were really bad for me. And it was also at that time that the obsessions slowly disappeared: I had, as it were, given up the battle to impress women. But that made me a lot more depressed and very tired, because as I said, women were a safe haven for me.
The incident with Alfred made me realize that it is better if I don’t undertake too many new things. My fear could not be overcome by doing too much, and that is exactly what I had predicted. Every time I took steps, I became extra sensitive to the reactions, and I got it back ten times as hard. I might as well live like a plant. I was simply too vulnerable to undertake all kinds of things outside the structure. The risk of further damage was too great. I had to think of myself. And I made this clear to Rina when she again said that I should not avoid things. In that respect, Anke, my therapist at the clinic, was right when she talked about Dick, the vegetable, who could no longer be helped because of his defense mechanism. He had to live as structured a life as possible to avoid further damage, and I had to do that too now, I thought. I tried as much as possible to find a balance between ‘seeking distraction’ from the bad feelings and ‘thinking about myself’. What helped with this were my regular visits to the RIC and my regular activities, such as office work, the occasional photography assignment, and for Mr. Winkel, my music teacher from college, I also did some musical jobs from time to time, because I had always kept in touch with him.
In 2009, I also moved out to my own place for the first time. And that all went perfectly. With lots of help from my dear family, we spruced up the house and I always enjoyed living there.
