When I was a child I experienced physical violence against me, as well as emotional and psychological abuse.

I withdrew into myself, and my spirit, essentially, died.

I became a shell, out of touch with my self; out of touch with my feelings.

My mind toiled in confusion and misinformation.

For years I struggled to survive, function and make sense in this environment.

Until, one day, I collapsed, when I was 19.

I kept thinking, "I want to be committed to a mental hospital." It was a chant in my head like a mantra. Finally, after a botched suicide attempt,

I went voluntarily.

For eight years they did things to me. They treated me in hospitals and gave me pills and shock treatments and talked to me and told me I had an illness like diabetes for which I needed medicine and treatment the rest of my life. They diagnosed me as schizophrenic and paranoid and I wanted to die.

I had no real consciousness of my feelings. I kept thinking "I don't know if I'm well playing sick or sick playing well". I was acting in ways that made them think I was crazy, but I was never letting them know how I really felt, because I didn't know how I really felt.

Then I met Dr. Marsh. I was particularly desperate and hopeless. I was very suicidal. I entered into a pact with Dr. Marsh. I asked him if he would be my doctor when I left the hospital if I didn't suicide. He agreed.

He gave me new a label - Borderline Personality.

We talked about Ronald Laing and his ideas about going through the psychosis and the value of experiencing the madness and learning from it.

We also agreed that psychotherapy was best accomplished without medications. And for the next ten years I didn't take any.

The next thing we did was help me get over cutting. I was a very serious self-injurer.

We worked on that in several ways: in psychotherapy through insight, behavior modification and support. Symbolically, I felt I was getting at the "rot" that was inside and purging it. I learned that the cutting was a way of dealing with pain, anger and anxiety.

He encouraged me to do other things when I felt like cutting, especially talking to him. It worked. I gained insight into the behavior and stopped completely.

Learning how to slow down the impulse behavior by making a phone call instead of grabbing a razor blade taught me to gain control. It was the beginning of slowing down a very impulse driven existence.

That wasn't my first lesson about how to deal with violent impulses though.

All that violence I observed during my childhood-where did it go? All those beatings I took from my brother-all that abuse-where was it? It was still raging inside me.

When I first met Dr. Marsh in the hospital and he spoke to me, he touched a nerve - a feeling. He seemed to speak right to the core of me. He would take me off the hospital unit to the clinic for therapy sessions. I would come back to the unit stirred up and that rage would be close to the surface, rage I hadn't really felt only displayed in my cutting.

One time I came back with great uncontrollable rage. I went in the bathroom and tore the faucet out of the sink and broke the metal mirror. Another time or two I broke chairs. My violence was such that I don't remember what I did. My violence was such that I don't remember being put in five point restraints.

This violence and raging went on for a number of years. The outrage was keen and the desperation raw as the therapy exposed more feelings.

I recall I spent a long time trying to convince Dr Marsh that I was hopeless and that he should give up on me and he couldn't help me.

He wouldn't give up, though. No matter how hard I tried to get him to or how difficult of a patient I made myself, he continued to believe in me.

I started believing in myself.

I started believing that I existed.

The "I" I am talking about is that spirit that had withdrawn into itself and had, essentially, died long ago.

He said that spirit could grow and eventually come to fill every cell in my body.

Finally, I stopped the violence.

However, the violence is still being perpetrated upon me.

As a child I was the victim of violence by members of my family. And the physical feelings of those experiences linger on my body as feeling memories today. The intensity and level of distress it causes fluctuates with the degree of here and now stress I am under.

It is a phenomenon common to persons who have been given the label of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

When I was dealing with the feelings that were coming up in therapy that would be so intense, so stressful and so distracting that they were beyond what I thought I could endure without harming me or my property I developed some tools.

I learned to feel the feelings and do nothing. I had a sign across a six-foot long closet wall in my bedroom in big drippy red painted letters on white paper that said DON'T DO ANYTHING!

I journaled my feelings. I drew my feelings. I talked in therapy about my feelings. I lay in bed for hours, days, weeks, months and years and felt my feelings and did nothing about my feelings.

I experienced them change and shift, ebb and flow, ease and grow in subtle and grand manner.

Parallel with this, I needed a new language to go with what I was experiencing in order to understand and communicate about it. I found it necessary to give up the old language. I gave up words for months-a year-- I can't recall. I did not use words with any one but my doctor for a long period of time other than to negotiate in the most basic way for food and shelter.

I explored language in my journals. I sought new insights and words in my therapy. I tried to learn to draw and paint and studied art to learn to communicate in that way.

Often the pain and misery of the feelings coming up was unbearable. As a result I couldn't care for myself. I would go to the Hospital. Dr. Marsh saw this as a failure on my part--a failure to endure the misery on my own. He saw the Hospital as a distraction from the therapy process.

I saw it as a respite from the isolation and as an opportunity to see the doctor everyday without having to leave the premises.

Dr. Marsh said therapy went on 168 hours per week. He also said I wasn't to talk about therapy to any one but him.

I ended up very isolated. I rarely spoke to any one other than him. My whole life was therapy for a number of years. My whole world revolved around him and therapy.

In some ways it was like being in a two-person cult or with a guru. It was like a brain washing.

Ten years of my life devoted to this endeavor. It took almost five to disengage and another twenty to make the pain of the loss bearable.

And now, looking back, as much as I am grateful that the therapy helped me recover a part of myself that had been lost, the cost was great.

I am scarred and damaged from the treatment. Yet, given the time and circumstances, I don't know of another way to have recovered my lost spirit.

I don't think people who are particularly vulnerable and fragile should be put through that kind of intense and painful therapy without full informed consent and the option of medication and special help and support.

I cannot say whether it should or should not have happened. It is what happened. The results are mixed. Overall, I would say I am better off for having gone through it.

Was there a better choice? Not for me. Not at the time. That was the best choice at hand.