This Site is dedicated to those adults whom are still recovering from the affliction of Childhood Selective Mutism. The silent child misses out on the normal social development that other children just take for granted. When children with SM grow up they do not simply disappear, nor do all of the symptoms of fear and not being able to fit in “normally” into society. Some SM adults find better ways of coping with their problems then others. But there is no need to suffer in silence any longer without support. While our condition is rare, the Internet has opened up easy access for us SM adults whom are scattered across the US and even beyond in other English speaking countries. There is no reason to remain so isolated any longer. We can start by emailing or text messaging each other to find people who will understand us, people who struggle with the same kinds of problems we do.
The psychiatrists and counselors may not understand us. There are very few that specialize in treating our cases. The literature on our condition is thin, so most of the professional “help” that we receive is just people guessing or experimenting on us. They have never seen anyone like us before and they did not have such problems themselves growing up. There must be a better solution out there then paying large sums for 50-minute sessions so that someone with an advanced degree can start the guesswork. I have been the victim of this kind of help and I am sure that I am not alone in this experience. And those sums of money tend to be so difficult for us as more “normal” people eagerly step over us, climbing up social ladders to places we simply cannot go. We find ourselves in places of extreme underemployment and unemployment because we cannot network like other more successful people do. We suffer with loneliness and find ourselves judged harshly by a society that neither cares nor understands our struggling. The pie-in-the-sky statement that we will just grow out of our anxiety and all of its symptoms and become normal does not just happen. If only life were actually that easy.
If these last two paragraphs accurately describe your experiences, then I want to get in contact with you and start a conversation. My own personal experience has been that the professional help that is available to us is not only way too expensive, but also ineffective because the foundation for it is based in Modernistic Philosophy. This philosophy reacted to its predecessor that was highly superstitious in its nature. Modernistic Philosophy denies that human beings have a spiritual side. The methods that professionals have developed for psychotherapy also deny that there is a spiritual part of the equation that needs to be factored in. If we do have a spiritual side to us, then how can a system of therapy that ignores such a significant part of us fix us? It has been my own experience that this is the fatal flaw behind the drugs and treatments for adults whom are still trying to get beyond Selective Mutism and live a healthy life.
At 43 years old, I have put the worst part of Selective Mutism behind me. I am doing a lot better. I no longer deal with the fear or anxiety. I can get up in front of an audience and sing and play lead guitar. (See the pictures listed under the title "How far have I come?") I do this without anxiety. By addressing the spiritual side of myself I have found relief and deliverance from fear. I believe that I can help you too, if you are serious and prepared to start the journey into true spiritual enlightenment. I am here to help, not too make money off of someone else’s suffering or sickness. If you are ready to face your own personal demons, please contact me at my email address above or the below link and we can start a conversation.
http://www.myspace.com/onthemountministries
Friday, November 7, 2008
How far have I come?
I am an active musician and recording hobbyist. Here are some pictures from live events that I have played and sung at, including my wedding. Considering how I once froze up and suffered panic attacks as a child, this is a long way to come. Especially when I talk to some long-time, extrovert, professional musicians who have played many times since High School in front of crowds and they still confess to having butterflies each time they get up on stage, I do not...
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My story
My story starts with my mother and father. My mother has had several “nervous breakdowns” from depression in her life. I was the third child in my family. When my mother first learned of her pregnancy and told my father, his response was that he changed almost instantly. He started doing the same things that he hated his father for doing. He started going out to bars, drinking and staying out every night until closing time. This upset my mother greatly. She went through the pregnancy with a lot of anxiety and fear. The physiological changes in her body along with what I believe were spiritual influences, I suspect were the trigger that started my descent into what lead to Selective Mutism.
My mother was a nice, but badly depressed lady. I had no relationship with my father. I only remember him coming in late and night and cussing and screaming about how much he hated his bosses at the big company. I would be awaken most nights by this noise in the middle of the night, and then have too much fear and anxiety to fall back to sleep very easily. Then my father’s alarm clock would start blaring out Country Music at 5 am in the bedroom next to mine, long before I needed to get up even when school started. Most of the time he just let it blare on while he got ready for work until it automatically turned off after a whole hour had past, further depriving me of sleep. I went through my whole childhood with sleep deprivation, which from what I have read makes a whole host of disorders, phobias and physical illnesses to get much worse for people. I was a light sleeper and it was made worse by a constant atmosphere of fear that I grew up in. My father remains too inebriated to this day to understand what he did. He is now a bit senile too. But then I was terrified of him and went to extremes to avoid him inside his own house. I now can see that there was something evil and spiritual that wanted to destroy me. It was not him for the alcohol was effective at numbing his senses, but it was on him.
I do not think that I was normal as a pre-schooler, but I know a lot of family related traumatic events happened during my 5th year of life. First, my mother had another nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for depression. I was very close to her and this affected me very much. I was left to live with my father and two brothers for some weeks until she was released. This event told me that I could not trust my mother to always be there for me to protect me from my father and his drinking. Also, my oldest brother (now deceased) became a teenager that year. Until that time he had taken on the role of surrogate Dad in my real fathers absence since birth. However, now that he was a teenager he found it terribly uncool to his friends to be close and caring to his young brother. Instead that year he grew hostile and rebellious because he was quite fat and the other kids ridiculed him mercilessly, at least until he successfully beat a few of them to a pulp. But my brother remained an angry, hostile and yes fat person for the rest of his life. I also entered kindergarten during this year. The good thing that also happened that year was my mother and I started going to church, and this helped her to not have another nervous breakdown, at least not until my senior year in college.
At least from what I have read on-line, I appear to have had a very severe case of Selective Mutism. I did not speak to any teachers but only to a couple of close friends. Even to them it was only when I was alone with them and I did not say much even then. I also entered school with a speech impediment. In second grade, I think, I was sent to a speech therapist in school. The speech therapist must have been good at getting me relaxed and helped me get over my speech impediment. In school I would get very stiff and freeze up whenever someone tried to speak with me. When teachers tried harder to get a response out of me, it would set off a panic attack and I would always end up being taken to the nurse’s office for the nurse to calm me down because I was hyperventilating. So teachers would eventually give up. I always had this feeling like something I did not understand was up on my neck and was somehow had a hold of my vocal chords and was tormenting me, literally choking me and physically restraining me from speaking. I also had a phobia of using the public restroom. I was and am very picky about what I eat too. I did not like the school cafeteria and normally would not each much of the food. Having hundreds of children in one place was way too much stimulation for my anxiety, so I ended up walking home every day and having my mother cook for me, then walking back.
When I was 10 or 11 a gifted class was started and all of the children in my school were given IQ tests. I soon found myself transferred into this program for accelerated learning. I enjoyed this for it gave me more freedom to be myself and it put me in a smaller classroom setting. I was creative and artistic and always got good grades even without even trying. When I was 12, I had an incident with the shop teacher whom was a grown bully and had a habit of forcefully getting teenage boys to follow his instructions. He did not want any of them cutting off their fingers in the band saw or anything like that. That was his excuse. I ended up again in the nurse’s office hyperventilating and crying uncontrollably. The nurse had finally seen enough, so she called in my parents to have a talk with them. She convinced them to stop ignoring my obvious problems. And so I was sent off to various child psychologists. They could not get me to speak and understood nothing. I also went and had various physical tests, even a CAT scan to see if something was wrong with my brain. Nobody knew what was wrong and none of this helped. This was 1977 and nobody had yet put a label on what I was suffering with.
Then one of the psych doctors convinced my parents to put me into a child’s psych ward at a local hospital. So I spent 50 days there in a behavior modification program with a couple dozen children all suffering from various other issues. I was the only selective mute there and probably their first. Being away from my dad and actually having someone notice and try to help did make some difference at the time. The focus of the program was to “adjust bad behavior” and they managed to do that. When I got out I was talking, at least some to teachers and other students. The only problem is that this very expensive program only treated my symptoms and not the roots of what was causing all of my fear and anxiety. This was before they had any approved medications to give to children with severe anxiety problems. I have never taken any kind of pills for depression or anxiety. I might add that I was afraid of almost everything as a child. I did not climb ladders nor did I ever learn to ride a bike, because I was afraid of falling and hurting myself, for instance. I avoided playing with most other children in every way that I could.
The “professional fix” proved to be no fix whatsoever. As I said before, the real issues inside my heart were not touched, and so when I graduated and first made it into high school the anxiety was much too much and all of the old symptoms came right back. I was again fully a selective mute. In my sophomore year I reached puberty. That year was the worst of my life. The social stress of puberty is tough on all children, but for the child whom has SM and severe clinical depression, it just sent me right over the deep end. I was starved for both affection and acceptance. Before that year started my old friends stopped hanging around me for I was “too uncool.” I started seriously contemplating suicide, but I found that I had no courage to actually physically injure myself. I felt dead inside. I hated both my anxiety and myself. I went through that entire year without speaking a single word to anyone on campus. The year ended and I noticed that no one even noticed or cared anything about me. I wanted to be ignored and I simply was by everyone, teachers and students alike. I hit emotional rock bottom over the summer break.
Then when I became 16, everything started to look up. I had grown up in church but, like most therapists, had not taken the spiritual side of life seriously. That changed this year and I started taking seriously the things that I had learned the last 10 years in church. The main thing that I did was to seek out a personal relationship with God because I was desperate for help from some higher power. I had already seen that the human doctors and therapists were not any kind of higher power. I was baptized and I made new friends and I began praying for long hours. At 17, I found a singles group at another church and joined and they became my spiritual support group. I found some good counsel with a few pastors and youth workers. I started reading Christian self-help books at 18 and took them very seriously. I wanted to know why I kept finding myself waking up so very depressed when I could logically find no reason for it in myself. At 19 I was introduced to a very gifted professional counselor called Al Ells. I found his insight to be invaluable. I worked through my issues by myself, by prayer and with the moral support of my other single friends in the group. I also saw a couple of professional counselors, but they helped me much less then the other things I just mentioned. By the time this single’s group broke up, shortly after I graduated from the University, I was much better. The depression and most of the anxiety was simply gone. I did not just learn to live with it, I found deliverance from it. And that is a big difference.
Since that time there have been further improvements in my life. I came close to fully falling back into the kind of depression where you sit in a corner and you stare at the wall all day, when my first wife first left me some 12 years ago. But I found that there was true grace that helped me and prevented me from going fully down to that low place. Since then I have fully healed, so much so that when she left again for good 5 years ago, that I never fell back into clinical depression. Yes, I grieved over the loss of my marriage. I had no job and no wife at the time. Life was rough. Indeed, logically I had every reason to actually be depressed, but I was not. It lost its power over me. This I found to be the exact opposite of what I had experienced in my childhood.
I am not perfect and I still battle the echoes of Selective Mutism. Those echoes are the fact that I did not have proper social imprinting during critical stages of my childhood development. So common “normal” people find me strange. I have had real difficulty finding and keeping adequate employment, not because I do poor work, have bad habits, nor because anxiety paralyzes me from doing certain required tasks, but simply because I am myself in interviews and in looking for work. And people apparently mistrust my long history of under and unemployment and because I am simply not socially “normal.” It does not take a PHD for someone to see that about me. I no longer fear parties, but I spend most of my time simply listening to others at them. If what they say is entertaining then I can have quite a good time even while I am quiet. I am very much at peace.
And so now as a middle-aged man I would like to get in contact with and help others whom are still struggling as I once did. Over the last few years I have found myself singing and playing lead guitar in a band in front of live audiences. I now have very little anxiety before or on stage, although the imprinting of my past means that I do not relate nor perform to the audience as other pure performers do. One of the reasons I chose to be in a band was to be a positive example to a friend of mine whom battles obsessive-compulsive disorder, agoraphobia, crone’s disease and a host of other strange maladies. I would like to help other people. I have no medications and no professional programs. What I do have is the ability to be a sage and to help others find the missing spiritual pieces that can lead anyone to that place where I am at and beyond.
My mother was a nice, but badly depressed lady. I had no relationship with my father. I only remember him coming in late and night and cussing and screaming about how much he hated his bosses at the big company. I would be awaken most nights by this noise in the middle of the night, and then have too much fear and anxiety to fall back to sleep very easily. Then my father’s alarm clock would start blaring out Country Music at 5 am in the bedroom next to mine, long before I needed to get up even when school started. Most of the time he just let it blare on while he got ready for work until it automatically turned off after a whole hour had past, further depriving me of sleep. I went through my whole childhood with sleep deprivation, which from what I have read makes a whole host of disorders, phobias and physical illnesses to get much worse for people. I was a light sleeper and it was made worse by a constant atmosphere of fear that I grew up in. My father remains too inebriated to this day to understand what he did. He is now a bit senile too. But then I was terrified of him and went to extremes to avoid him inside his own house. I now can see that there was something evil and spiritual that wanted to destroy me. It was not him for the alcohol was effective at numbing his senses, but it was on him.
I do not think that I was normal as a pre-schooler, but I know a lot of family related traumatic events happened during my 5th year of life. First, my mother had another nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for depression. I was very close to her and this affected me very much. I was left to live with my father and two brothers for some weeks until she was released. This event told me that I could not trust my mother to always be there for me to protect me from my father and his drinking. Also, my oldest brother (now deceased) became a teenager that year. Until that time he had taken on the role of surrogate Dad in my real fathers absence since birth. However, now that he was a teenager he found it terribly uncool to his friends to be close and caring to his young brother. Instead that year he grew hostile and rebellious because he was quite fat and the other kids ridiculed him mercilessly, at least until he successfully beat a few of them to a pulp. But my brother remained an angry, hostile and yes fat person for the rest of his life. I also entered kindergarten during this year. The good thing that also happened that year was my mother and I started going to church, and this helped her to not have another nervous breakdown, at least not until my senior year in college.
At least from what I have read on-line, I appear to have had a very severe case of Selective Mutism. I did not speak to any teachers but only to a couple of close friends. Even to them it was only when I was alone with them and I did not say much even then. I also entered school with a speech impediment. In second grade, I think, I was sent to a speech therapist in school. The speech therapist must have been good at getting me relaxed and helped me get over my speech impediment. In school I would get very stiff and freeze up whenever someone tried to speak with me. When teachers tried harder to get a response out of me, it would set off a panic attack and I would always end up being taken to the nurse’s office for the nurse to calm me down because I was hyperventilating. So teachers would eventually give up. I always had this feeling like something I did not understand was up on my neck and was somehow had a hold of my vocal chords and was tormenting me, literally choking me and physically restraining me from speaking. I also had a phobia of using the public restroom. I was and am very picky about what I eat too. I did not like the school cafeteria and normally would not each much of the food. Having hundreds of children in one place was way too much stimulation for my anxiety, so I ended up walking home every day and having my mother cook for me, then walking back.
When I was 10 or 11 a gifted class was started and all of the children in my school were given IQ tests. I soon found myself transferred into this program for accelerated learning. I enjoyed this for it gave me more freedom to be myself and it put me in a smaller classroom setting. I was creative and artistic and always got good grades even without even trying. When I was 12, I had an incident with the shop teacher whom was a grown bully and had a habit of forcefully getting teenage boys to follow his instructions. He did not want any of them cutting off their fingers in the band saw or anything like that. That was his excuse. I ended up again in the nurse’s office hyperventilating and crying uncontrollably. The nurse had finally seen enough, so she called in my parents to have a talk with them. She convinced them to stop ignoring my obvious problems. And so I was sent off to various child psychologists. They could not get me to speak and understood nothing. I also went and had various physical tests, even a CAT scan to see if something was wrong with my brain. Nobody knew what was wrong and none of this helped. This was 1977 and nobody had yet put a label on what I was suffering with.
Then one of the psych doctors convinced my parents to put me into a child’s psych ward at a local hospital. So I spent 50 days there in a behavior modification program with a couple dozen children all suffering from various other issues. I was the only selective mute there and probably their first. Being away from my dad and actually having someone notice and try to help did make some difference at the time. The focus of the program was to “adjust bad behavior” and they managed to do that. When I got out I was talking, at least some to teachers and other students. The only problem is that this very expensive program only treated my symptoms and not the roots of what was causing all of my fear and anxiety. This was before they had any approved medications to give to children with severe anxiety problems. I have never taken any kind of pills for depression or anxiety. I might add that I was afraid of almost everything as a child. I did not climb ladders nor did I ever learn to ride a bike, because I was afraid of falling and hurting myself, for instance. I avoided playing with most other children in every way that I could.
The “professional fix” proved to be no fix whatsoever. As I said before, the real issues inside my heart were not touched, and so when I graduated and first made it into high school the anxiety was much too much and all of the old symptoms came right back. I was again fully a selective mute. In my sophomore year I reached puberty. That year was the worst of my life. The social stress of puberty is tough on all children, but for the child whom has SM and severe clinical depression, it just sent me right over the deep end. I was starved for both affection and acceptance. Before that year started my old friends stopped hanging around me for I was “too uncool.” I started seriously contemplating suicide, but I found that I had no courage to actually physically injure myself. I felt dead inside. I hated both my anxiety and myself. I went through that entire year without speaking a single word to anyone on campus. The year ended and I noticed that no one even noticed or cared anything about me. I wanted to be ignored and I simply was by everyone, teachers and students alike. I hit emotional rock bottom over the summer break.
Then when I became 16, everything started to look up. I had grown up in church but, like most therapists, had not taken the spiritual side of life seriously. That changed this year and I started taking seriously the things that I had learned the last 10 years in church. The main thing that I did was to seek out a personal relationship with God because I was desperate for help from some higher power. I had already seen that the human doctors and therapists were not any kind of higher power. I was baptized and I made new friends and I began praying for long hours. At 17, I found a singles group at another church and joined and they became my spiritual support group. I found some good counsel with a few pastors and youth workers. I started reading Christian self-help books at 18 and took them very seriously. I wanted to know why I kept finding myself waking up so very depressed when I could logically find no reason for it in myself. At 19 I was introduced to a very gifted professional counselor called Al Ells. I found his insight to be invaluable. I worked through my issues by myself, by prayer and with the moral support of my other single friends in the group. I also saw a couple of professional counselors, but they helped me much less then the other things I just mentioned. By the time this single’s group broke up, shortly after I graduated from the University, I was much better. The depression and most of the anxiety was simply gone. I did not just learn to live with it, I found deliverance from it. And that is a big difference.
Since that time there have been further improvements in my life. I came close to fully falling back into the kind of depression where you sit in a corner and you stare at the wall all day, when my first wife first left me some 12 years ago. But I found that there was true grace that helped me and prevented me from going fully down to that low place. Since then I have fully healed, so much so that when she left again for good 5 years ago, that I never fell back into clinical depression. Yes, I grieved over the loss of my marriage. I had no job and no wife at the time. Life was rough. Indeed, logically I had every reason to actually be depressed, but I was not. It lost its power over me. This I found to be the exact opposite of what I had experienced in my childhood.
I am not perfect and I still battle the echoes of Selective Mutism. Those echoes are the fact that I did not have proper social imprinting during critical stages of my childhood development. So common “normal” people find me strange. I have had real difficulty finding and keeping adequate employment, not because I do poor work, have bad habits, nor because anxiety paralyzes me from doing certain required tasks, but simply because I am myself in interviews and in looking for work. And people apparently mistrust my long history of under and unemployment and because I am simply not socially “normal.” It does not take a PHD for someone to see that about me. I no longer fear parties, but I spend most of my time simply listening to others at them. If what they say is entertaining then I can have quite a good time even while I am quiet. I am very much at peace.
And so now as a middle-aged man I would like to get in contact with and help others whom are still struggling as I once did. Over the last few years I have found myself singing and playing lead guitar in a band in front of live audiences. I now have very little anxiety before or on stage, although the imprinting of my past means that I do not relate nor perform to the audience as other pure performers do. One of the reasons I chose to be in a band was to be a positive example to a friend of mine whom battles obsessive-compulsive disorder, agoraphobia, crone’s disease and a host of other strange maladies. I would like to help other people. I have no medications and no professional programs. What I do have is the ability to be a sage and to help others find the missing spiritual pieces that can lead anyone to that place where I am at and beyond.
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