Triggered, Attention-seeking, and Playing the Victim?

Everyone deals differently with grief and loss caused by death. One thing that is universal, though, is that a tragic death; i.e., death of a child or violent death, within a family tears most families apart in one way or another.

My family—immediate, family of origin, and extended—has seen within it the cancer death of a 6-year old that caused the divorce of his parents, the motorcycle collision death of the father of a teen-aged mother that caused the violent behavior problems of his child, the suicide of the father of another teen-aged mother that was a precursor to inpatient drug treatment of her and the jail time of her brother, the vehicular death of a high school cheerleader that resulted in the ceasing of a generation-long tradition of family reunion dinners during the holidays, and the suicide of a man, who had blended his family with my sister’s family as her fiance of 18 years, that caused the breakdown of the relationship with the sibling she had been closest to her entire life to the point she was unable to give moral support to that sibling when she was battling cancer. All of this was before the family murder/suicide that made the news in January 2019.

Before this horrific event, I had a family—immediate, family of origin, and extended—with varying closeness between each of them and me. Within a matter of months, almost all of those relationships I had with family members were estranged, some by me, some by them. After two years, all of them were estranged. Also, before this horrific event, I had decades-long friendships; but, seeing me struggle with this and feeling unable to help was too much for some of them. And, the others? Well, they just deemed me too negative to deal with and I found out, at the worst possible time, these were only ‘fair-weather friends’.

Most of my family members are still there for each other to varying degrees. However, for the two eldest siblings of my family of origin, me and my sister who is 16 months younger than me, we are the two whom the family trauma is being most taken out on—me, who has long been the family scapegoat, and her, who is in line to be assigned that role should I fail to go back to the role full-time. In a narcissistic family dynamic, there must always be a scapegoat. So currently, none of my family members, including my children and adult grandchildren want anything to do with me. And, as for this sister, our two other siblings want nothing to do with her.

Of course, the family members who want nothing to do with my sister and me would tell you that she and I are horrible and have done evil things. She and I would tell you we have been unjustly mistreated by them. The reality is, the family murder/suicide had an overreaching affect on everyone and we all ‘lost our minds’ in our own ways in a maladaptive attempt to cope with the horrific event and how it affected each of us directly and indirectly. How could we do anything else? The family was already majorly dysfunctional before the murder/suicide.

My family members have had access to the moral support of each other and any mental health services they sought through employer health plans or Medicaid. Sadly for me, I have encountered barriers to receiving mental health care to process the horrific event and all of the unprocessed, lifelong trauma of being the scapegoat of a narcissistic mother that came flooding back into my psyche as a result.

The only people who would understand barriers to mental health care are those who have experienced the inequality of mental health services for women (the stereotypical stigma of being seen as inherently hysterical), those who have low-income (the stereotypical stigma of being assumed to be of lower intelligence and, thus, harder to treat), those who are disabled (the stereotypical stigma of assumed comorbidity of physical incapacity and mental incapacity), the elderly (the stereotypical stigma that presumes any mental health issues are a sign of dementia), and the difficulty of finding practitioners to take Medicare as a payment method for services.

For those who are unaware, services are much easier to obtain through Medicaid than through Medicare. Despite both programs being run by CMS, the fee-for-service percentage paid to providers is higher with Medicaid than Medicare. Because of this, medical practitioners and health maintenance organizations maintain what is called a Medicare Panel which limits the number of Medicare patients they will provide services for at any given time. And, the Medicaid population consists of able-bodied, younger people (minus those elderly and disabled persons who had less than 40 work quarters before the date of their retirement or disability); while, Medicare is reserved for the elderly and disabled (those who had at least 40 work quarters to qualify before the date of their retirement or disability). There seems to be an unspoken rule that able-bodied younger people class higher on the roster to receive medical and mental health care.

Enter me: an elderly, disabled, woman on Social Security Disability and Medicare and you have the perfect shit storm of barriers.

I have never been through military boot camp. I have never attended a police academy. I have never received training to cope with murder. I have never received training to prepare me for seeing a family member’s brain matter stuck to a ceiling. I have never received training to deal with my family being a violent headline story on TV and in online ‘print’ news. Even one of the deputies being interviewed by reporters that night said, “We see some really difficult situations sometimes. This is one of them.”

When practically no one—family, friends, medical and mental health professionals, ministers, and the community at large—understands this from either personal experience or awareness, what you get is an individual who is looked down upon, ridiculed, rejected, and abandoned through no fault of their own and labeled an attention-seeker with victim mentality. You see someone who becomes angry, bitter, resentful, and distrusting of the world which only adds to the unwillingness of others to have compassion for this individual. This creates, in this individual, the perspective that they would be better off dead. The fact that I have the awareness and emotional IQ to write this essay changes nothing about how much I struggle with all of this.

So, stop telling anyone like me, “The whole world can’t be wrong and, maybe, you should look in the mirror.” It is society who needs to take a look in the mirror and change their presumptions and their narcissistic lack of compassion and fix a very broken mental health system. I’m tired of being treated as though being traumatized and vulnerable is a contagious disease that must be avoided like leprosy!