Insiders and Outsiders: an example of childhood relations with schizophrenia

An excerpt from a journal entry of mine on 15 Feb. 2009, to do with my nervousness at a new job:

...I feel entirely culpable (if there are any mistakes), it is not discursive, which I would like it to be - rather, it is a question of pure guilt.

There are two sources for this that I feel come into play. One being my (mentally ill) sister's opinion that I and I alone decided her ability to succeed. I.e., she blamed me entirely for her inability to finish school, retain employment, feel comfortable outside the house and any other failures that she felt she happened from day to day (including her inability to plan a garden to her own satisfaction).

The second reason is the fact that I do not trust people to comport themselves in reasonable ways due to my experience with my sister. I expect madness, negativity, disruption, and blame. I feel like a piece of elastic that has been stretched so many times that I have no sense of proportion anymore. I always am at the ultimate edges of my expectation of behavior: I expect and fear the worst always.

Because my experience with my sister was directly related to my isolation with her by my parents, and their active ignorance of her different mentality, both of these ideas lead into a discussion of the different modalities of how a severely mentally ill or schizophrenic person is treated within a family structure. As well, they speak about how ignorance and abuse can easily happen in a structure of 'right and wrong,' and about conceptions of deviance and correction in the family setting when dealing with drastic differences in reasoning abilities.

Much like early students of psychiatry, such as Pinel, my mother's treatment of my sister was basically corrective. She truly expected that if corrected, my sister would see errors in her interpersonal treatment of relatives, especially me. Usually my mother would reprimand her, tell her she was being "controlling" and try to explain to her why this was wrong, often with a 'do-unto-others' comparison, such as: "what if Gillia did this to you? How would that make you feel?" This offering of a mirror to the 'deviant' behavior was thought by my mother to be sufficient, and she trusted that in time Tavia would desist, after admitting to her own guilt, feeling the requisite feelings of remorse, and recovering.

Though not going so far as to make my sister see she was 'mad,' my mother did believe that if she corrected my sister enough times in the way she was treating me, my sister would eventually cease - even though my mother and my sister had long and bitter arguments regarding my sister's right to treat me as she pleased, conversations which seemed to clearly point to a drastic reasoning difference in my sister that may have indicated a need for therapy or help. However, my mother persisted in being certain that the 'deviant' behavior could be corrected (and trusted that it would be.)

The answer to the behavior was punishment, an apology, spanking, etc., but because my sister and I shared a bedroom, and were often alone together, I had become on the 'inside' of a group of people who 'understood,' made up of the two of us - my sister and me. My mother was on the 'outside.' My sister and I lived in a secret world where my mother's eyes and her logic could not enter due to the nature of our 'insider' group. If betrayed, my sister threatened various terrible things, such as never speaking or playing with me again, not allowing me into my bedroom or to get my things (since we shared the space), and trying to make my life miserable in every way she could.

For these reasons, I protected my sister, but I protected her for a deeper reason as well. I remember clearly feeling there were differences she was struggling with that I could not understand. I protected my sister because of her difference, whether or not the way she treated me was wrong, she simply could not understand why it was wrong. And she could not change it. So I became an accomplice to my own pain and hurt due to my childish understanding of her reality as different from my own, and the subjective nature of her struggles with 'reasonable' concepts of human interrelations.