I wanted to start this with some background information. I wanted to kind of explain how I started on my journey with mental health.
When I was ten years old. My parents got a divorce. My whole life got flipped upside down. My mom moved my two younger brothers and I out of the home we knew and loved. I don’t remember a whole lot, but I do remember all of our stuff being brought out and put onto our front lawn. My mom raised us on her own for the most part because our biological father was always on the road for work. I remember having to move all of our stuff out of our home and into our grandparents house. I also remember that shortly after we left, my father was introducing us to another woman and her three children. When my mom moved us into a small apartment, I had to share a room with my brothers and I was not happy about it. I saw how upset she was all the time, how much it killed her to have to share us with the man that was hardly ever there for us before they got a divorce.
When I started acting out, it was because both of my parents had someone new in their lives. My mom reunited with the guy she actually went to prom with. He was really nice and I actually spent some one-on-one time with him the first time I met him. I felt oddly attached to him because he was the opposite of my father. Then you had my father’s new girlfriend. She was brought into the picture a lot sooner than my mom’s boyfriend was. She had three kids, two older boys and one girl about my brother’s age (5 years younger than me), that seemed to take my father’s full attention. When I began to feel less important to my father, I started to get violent with my mom. She never once did anything wrong. But at the same time, my young brain thought that her boyfriend was trying to replace something that I never had.
I started seeing counselors at a very young age because of how badly I was treating my mom. I saw so many that I can’t even give you a number. Each one was different from the one prior. This has continued into adulthood as well. From what I can remember, all of them pretty much said the same thing. I had daddy issues and depression. They wanted to prescribe me a low dose antidepressant. My mom didn’t want her young daughter dependent on pills, though. She wanted me to be able to deal with my issues without being drugged up. I’m not sure how much we really knew about depression and the pills for it back then. But I don’t blame her one bit for not putting me on them back then. Now a days there are more kids on pills than not. How could someone diagnose a child so young with something like depression?
At one point, I was diagnosed with, not only depression, but with something called Oppositional Defiant Disorder, ODD. They tried saying that this disorder was why I was hitting and pushing my mom. Why I would get so angry when her or her boyfriend wouldn’t allow me to do what I wanted or when they tried making me do something I didn’t want to.
I will have a separate post with definitions and either personal or outside source examples of each disorder to make it more relatable or understandable for everyone. Sometimes the text book definitions can be a little confusing or too much medical terminology.
My Mental Health 