Clyde Dee's Blog, page 11
September 16, 2018
August/September Update
As the summer wanes, there is still that sense of loss. The traffic in and out of work always thickens, the days shorten, and we in California must start to pray for rain. Last weekend my dog turned two and she and I are readying ourselves for our weekly hike.
Last weekend I flew back East to attend my sister’s wedding, a joyful occasion. The trip worked out better than I anticipated. I was able to support my mother who is having some health problems.
I have been in touch with Asylum magazine in London, and may have at last secured a publication, one of my new posts to check out this month.
Additionally, Fighting for Freedom in America has been recognized in the annual 2018 Top Shelf Magazine award program as a finalist. It is good to get some positive feedback and to still be in the running for a first-place award.
I have made two presentations this month: one at Gladman Hospital and one at Best Now, the local peer counselor training program. Both went over well. I am currently trying to inquire about setting up a training that mixes peer counselors and professionals. I want to provide CEU training for professionals and encourage professionals to invite peers as co-facilitators in their agencies to proliferate group and enhance therapy work locally. I hope to collaborate with the county to offer CEU credits and offer the training at PEERS in East Oakland. Proliferating therapy groups locally that focus on providing treatment for psychosis has been a long-term goal of mine. Getting people trained will also enable me to focus my efforts on training and advance my special message material. So, I remain hopeful.
This month I have published:
Beneath the Suds and Psychiatric Labels
And
Identifying the Trickster Phenomena During A Message Crisis or “Psychosis:”
The post August/September Update appeared first on Tim Dreby.
Identifying the Trickster Phenomena During A Message Crisis or “Psychosis:”
When a message receiver can identify the fact that some of their messages are tricksters it can go a long way towards improving efforts to fit in, heal trauma and reduce consensus reality confusion. A supporter who is trusted may be able to articulate the concept, spot it when it’s happening, and teach spiritual skills that can help the message receiver mitigate damages.
According to Wikipedia, the concept of a trickster is a cultural archetype. In other words, a trickster is a cultural reality of the collective unconscious that Carl Jung identified. Accordingly, all cultures feature tricksters in their mythology. In Navajo culture the trickster is a coyote. In Greek mythology Hermes, patron of thieves, was a trickster character. In the bible, Jacob was. The trickster as an archetype is a revered spiritual character that cheats or cons people for their own material gain or just to cause mischief. In effect, a trickster is a very real part of reality that must be negotiated.
The idea that special messages veer into the spiritual realm of the collective unconscious may become appealing to many message receivers. Indeed, for me, message crisis or “psychosis” used to be real government and mafia surveillance; now that I know how to navigate, the surveillance reality mixes with the spiritual emergency narrative Stanislav and Stephanie Grof helped articulate. Let us not forget that other causal strategies can be operant. Thus, not only are political and spiritual causation at play. It is also important to consider the interplay between psychology, science, and trauma as we have explored elsewhere.
But without support or resources trickster messages deceive people into either or causal realities. Often, people become too spiritual or too focused on the fact that they are politically controlled. They may fail to incorporate other causal potentials. As a result, they come into conflict with consensus reality, get burdened by the illness narrative myth, get ineffective treatment, and find that social decline results.
Thus, to navigate through a spiritual emergence effectively in the modern world it becomes important to realize that a significant number of messages function as tricksters. In crisis or emergency, trickster messages get believed very literally when they ought not be. As examples of negative and positive trickster phenomena will reveal, believing trickster messages reinforces the power that message receiver to give to their message experiences. The more power given to messages, the less the message receiver cares or knows about the ideas that govern consensus reality.
Examples of the Negative Trickster Phenomenon:
The classic example of a negative trickster that a message receiver may experience is that the message receiver believes they are being followed collecting messages that tell them so. Then, because they believe they are being followed, they act as though they are being followed until the police and psychiatric establishment do follow them and put them in an observation unit. Then, they really are followed and monitored.
The result of such a trickster phenomenon is that all messages that were signs of being followed are believed to be accurate and important when some were, and some may not have been. The message receiver learns to trust all those messages more than mainstream consensus reality concepts.
An associated example of a negative trickster is an intuition based on body language that a person doesn’t like the message receiver. The result is the message receiver is hurt and angry and behaves as if the message is accurate and the person picks up on social energy and behavior and then really doesn’t like them. What comes first will never be known but the fact of the matter now becomes accurate.
So, a voice gives a message receiver a command that they must follow to avoid being tortured and the message receiver becomes fearful and vulnerable and when they don’t listen the torture comes. Then, they become victimized by tactile torture and fail to get out of bed for a day and do not seek support because no one will believe them.
Another example of a negative trickster is the blacklisted political refugee who resists the host countries effort to control them. They may defiantly send out resumes for good jobs, each from a different mailbox. Then, this willful behavior makes the host country increase the surveillance and control.
Ineffective Reality-Test Treatment:
Often, the reality of the negative trickster foils a supporter’s efforts to reality test. Picture the message receiver who gets told not to trust their messages by a supporter. The well-intended supporter considers the evidence and tell them its not true that they are being followed. Then, the message receiver finds out they really were getting followed. Now the reality test turns into a betrayal and the value of and trust for the message reality is amplified while trust in supporters and consensus reality decreases. I advocate for trying to teach the trickster phenomena before making a reality test. Then, a supporter can isolate the special message that leads to the divergent view and suggest that maybe it’s a trickster. This becomes much less offensive to a message receiver.
Combatting Negative Tricksters with Positive Self-Fulfilling Prophesies, Mantras or Prayers:
Meanwhile isolated message receivers get put on an observation unit in the hospital. They must choose to ignore it all the blatant ways they are being followed and pretend that they are not being followed. If the message receiver ignores and exudes confidence in front of all the messages (real and unreal,) the police and psychiatric establishment will either not become involved or eventually will give up and stop the following behavior. But to interrupt the process, the message receiver needs to put prayerful energy out in the universe that tells everyone they are not being followed repeatedly. When they do get followed, they need to ignore it and move forward.
In the case of feeling followed, the message receiver may not ever know which messages were real and which were tricksters. Perhaps time and investigation will show which ones were true and which weren’t. But ultimately, focusing on overcoming tricksters will slow down the messages. If, for example, a message receiver ignores a message that is intended to torment them, it is very discouraging to the tormenter. Then, the message receiver gets fewer messages that they are being followed and it becomes easier and easier.
With a message receiver intuiting that a person doesn’t like them, the message receiver needs to ignore this negative forecast and approach the person in a friendly way. Thus, the message receiver acts opposite to the way they feel, and they put out energy into the world that may change the persons mind. Perhaps they change the observers mind and the person who dislikes the message receiver is forced to change their mind via social pressure.
In the case of the commanding voice, the message receiver puts magnets in their shoes, doesn’t listen to the command and takes himself to an HVN meeting and tells his supports that the magnet deactivates the chip in his body that enables him to be tortured and he never does get tortured.
In the case of the political refugee, the message receiver accepts the host countries control and the hierarchy that is abusing him and stops fighting the power. Instead, the message receiver offers prayers and mantras that he will be employed before he runs out of money and gets hired in the nick of time and continues to behave on the job.
In all these examples prayers, mantras and faith are needed to endure and reduce the negative effects of messages.
Examples of Positive Tricksters:
Some message receivers may find that they believe a trickster because it is what they want to hear. Then, later, they find they get socially punished for the belief. This usually involves the message receiver acting out in ways that sabotage their cultural capital or that results in real social sanctions. Numerous message receivers experience special messages that are positive support and there is nothing wrong with that. However, even people who argue that the world is mostly positive can be dogged by tricksters when they interpret an ominous warning sign in a positive direction.
They may, for example, believe god and country is supporting them with special messages when those messages are not true. If they embark on a creating a business with “grandiose” notions that their government is supporting them and has their back, they may give away money or not fill their water bottle walking down the highway on their way to the post office figuring that the government is good and will have their back. The result is they end up down the road with no money and very thirsty. Instead of arriving at the post office as they had planned to pick up boxes for their business, they find themselves followed by the police, ambulance drivers and eventually by psychiatrists instead of supportive government agents. They may end up in a hospital getting rehydrated and then in an institution that seeks to sustain itself by keeping them incarcerated and the outcome can be negative to their efforts to start up a business.
In the above situation, still much of the experience can be godly and positive. However, to be successful the positive person still must be on the lookout for tricksters that are, in fact, negative guidance. Let’s say a friend sets a boundary that the message receiver misinterprets as an invitation to be chummy. The message receiver may be correct about their skills and abilities behind their grand plans; but misinterpreting the few messages that are tricksters can set up major roadblocks. The friend may get upset and call for a mental health consult.
Likewise, a message receiver who believes everyone likes them when others are in fact mocking them collects objects and hands them to people that bear odd meanings. Instead of receiving the object and recognizing the funny or beautiful message of the gesture, a friend mocks and gossips about the message receiver and eventually someone calls for a mental health consult. The message receiver may then be put on an observation unit while they persist using their skills until they are forcibly shown they have no skills and deserve an impoverished lifestyle.
Though these examples are admittedly random, the result is that positive tricksters get in the way of monumental success.
A Balanced Strategy for Managing Positive Tricksters:
The all-or-nothing tendency to view all messages as positive may need to be broken. The upbeat message receiver must view the constant energy of their messages with humility. If they don’t, the result can be the oppression and institutionalization. Negative alternatives need to be considered as plausible otherwise all the positive energy and ability will be labeled a waste. Ultimately, it always is important to find ways to put positive or negative messages on the back burner and investigate them or let time reveal the truth as the message receiver continues their work towards success.
Positive tricksters need to be managed by the message receiver maintaining a strong grasp of the contents of consensus reality. Playing consensus can be an important a strategy. It is also important for those receiving positive tricksters to exude a humble, a nonjudgmental, and an emotionally intelligent mentality. There also needs to be a skeptical act-opposite-from-the-way-one-feels mentality that will slow down the frequency of the positive tricksters. Praying that the positive message is not a trickster is a viable strategy. Additionally, clearly the message receiver needs to weigh potential consequences of non-consensus reality behavior. This will keep positive tricksters from spiraling out of control.
Assessing the Level of Trust or Recovery Before Discussing the Concept:
Often, a supporter can count on discussing trickster process and having a message receiver acknowledge that this has happened with an, “oh, yeah,” kind of realization. Supporters may spot times this is happening and spell it out to the message receiver. Transforming out of a message crisis takes time and there are significant back and forth debates about consensus reality that may need to be had.
However, a supporter needs to use judgement before they try to educate a message receiver about this spiritual concept. Experienced message receivers who can function in consensus reality may have already figured out the concept and crediting them for their wisdom and reinforcing the practice is good form.
However, if a message receiver seems routinely expresses ideas that are very far away from consensus reality and continues to act on them, the chances are that they are taking information from tricksters very literally. Before a supporter simply educates the impacted message receiver about the trickster concept, they need to establish an ability to identify message phenomena and collaborate. If a support can validate divergent views, and sleuth with the message receiver, it is a good sign that trust is building. It may even be necessary to be able to discuss differing approaches to the issue of what is causing the message experiences.
The Importance of Behavior and Fixing the Relationship with Consensus Reality:
The result of tricksters being intermixed with accurate message material is that the accuracy of all special message phenomena is believed, and the message receiver’s relationship with consensus reality is likely to become progressively less trusting. Ironically, as trust for consensus reality decreases, the message receiver is likely to get robbed of their power, identity, social roles and eventually their material possessions.
Despite the great deal of errors in consensus reality that often preoccupy the institutionalized message receiver, knowing consensus reality is an important strategy when it comes to managing both negative and positive tricksters.
In fact, we all know that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK and must act as if it were true in the right contexts. In this manner, message receivers need to learn to put on the façade of consensus reality, to avoid behavior that will increase the reality of negative or positive tricksters. Message receivers need to let the messages go and let time tell. This is an act of faith.
This does not mean that message receivers can’t be free to live in their messages and share as they want when they are in good company in a group of supporters. Generally, people aren’t always right about reality anyway. But the understanding and acknowledging the trickster phenomenon can help decrease crisis and steer the message receiver toward success in the social rehabilitation realm.
Included in this learning, message receivers need to learn to trust people through their own intuitive communication as much or more than they trust special messages. This takes time and ongoing commitment as it is not an instant change. But knowing that messages have a significant degree of tricksters in them can really help. And communicating about tricksters and re-examining past traumatic occurrences with the associated spiritual skills can really help a message receiver trust the supporter.
The post Identifying the Trickster Phenomena During A Message Crisis or “Psychosis:” appeared first on Tim Dreby.
September 15, 2018
Another Award, hope I’ll make it to the next level
Dear Tim,
We had a staggering 1,023 entries in the 2018 TopShelf Indie Book Awards, and your book Fighting for Freedom in America: Memoir of a “Schizophrenia” and Mainstream Cultural Delusions has been selected as a Finalist in the category of Autobiography/Biography!
Warm Regards,
Keith Katsikas
CEO & Publisher
TopShelf Magazine
The post Another Award, hope I’ll make it to the next level appeared first on Tim Dreby.
September 1, 2018
Beneath the Suds and Psychiatric Labels
Warning: Graphic Content
“I have heard real stories,” said my female therapist, “of men doing graphic and horrible things to women. I don’t think based on what you just told me, there is any justification for any accusation whatsoever. I think you have been saying a lot of hurtful things.”
I figured my mother who was paying for these forced sessions put the shrink up to this confrontation. I never did bring the issue of sexual abuse up.
It is true I have had an ongoing suspicion that I was sexually abused. Particularly when locked up for extended periods of time for an eating disorder, and most recently for schizophrenia, my suspicion that my suffering had sexual abuse behind it escalated.
It was also true that in the state hospital I had just gotten out of, I had made rash accusations.
I can only recall making the accusation against my mother to my best college friend who had a nefarious past of drug dealing and a grandiose mafioso mentality while manic. When I confided in him that I had alerted the press in a section eight housing authority complex, he threatened me. With this feeling I had been led into this role I was playing as a whistle-blower all along, I’d fled towards Canada until the police intercepted me.
From the phone in the State Hospital, without knowing his level of responsibility for the fact that I was there, I told him what had transpired between myself and my mother in a provocative manner. I told him he was lucky to have a family who cared about him when he had faced going to a state hospital for bipolar disorder. I’d also said, “Friends don’t threaten each other!”
“I think it is time for me to visit your mother,” my friend said.
Scared for my mother, I called to warn her.
“You shouldn’t make such accusations about Joe being in the mafia,” my mother said, “He really does care about you!”
When I later asked my Mom where she had heard about my provocative accusation, she told me she forgot.
At the time the female therapist confronted me, I could not remember the real incidents of sexual abuse that I experienced. I just stopped confiding in her.
Initially, shit just happened when I was a teen, built up and I just distracted from the pain through starvation. The incident with my Mom was just one of many. People like me who don’t realize that their suffering is due to trauma are often unable to discern abuse from re-traumatization. They may attract a long list of psychiatric diagnoses. They may feel abused a gazillion times and it becomes hard to see how any community might come to the rescue.
What I have come to believe is that if a person has experiences of disassociation, there is the possibility of incidents of forgotten events.
An example of a disassociation I experienced was when I was alone scouting a trail. I stepped within six inches of a rattlesnake, a childhood obsession of mine. The rattle made me run even though I knew better. Then I became aware that I lost track of time. Finally, one of my peers on the Outward-Bound course came and found me staring off into space and I grounded myself.
Also, after being teargassed at the WTO Protest in 1999, and pepper sprayed directly in the eye, I took a walk and lost track of where I was and what I was doing. Suddenly, I realized I walked past my destination and had been out.
Much later, after the state hospital incident, I disassociated in front of my nephew when he was a bathing cherub in a tub in front of me, I was going outside my body but didn’t leave all the way. This had been happening to me on a few occasions when I was working seven days a week trying to get back on my feet financially.
In fact, when I did write about this occasion, during an editing session I suddenly I got a vague flash of being molested in a bathtub. The girl, my best friend’s sister, was only one year older. I would later remember that she ordered me to take my clothes of and get in the tub with her while our parents were out walking.
I didn’t remember my disassociated response, I only remembered the hands disappearing beneath the suds. There is a story that I ate a moth ball thinking it was a marshmallow necessitating poison control to be contacted. I was a little old to make such a silly mistake. It’s true I could be wrong, but I connect that action to my response to the tub incident. I do believe that around that time I started bathing in my trunks.
I do recall becoming very angry at my best friends’ sister for not choosing the kind of ice cream I wanted when it came to selecting ice cream for her birthday celebration. I recall experiencing a lot of disapproval for that strange show of selfishness.
When I took this story to my mother, I got an additional answer. “No, you are thinking of the time we caught the babysitter touching you,” she said.
While I continue to have no memory of this incident I remember several occasions when I was around this babysitter later in life. Before I hadn’t been able to understand my piercing feelings, behavior and memory of those occasions.
“Thank you for telling me,” I stated to my Mom.
“I probably shouldn’t have told you,” she said, “Now you are going to think you have been abused a gazillion times!”
It’s true that the bath with my step-sister might not have been distressing to many untraumatized young boys. Now, however, I have some explanation for my suffering.
Before I broke through the wall disassociation I could never understand why I got such strong intuition and suspicions. I didn’t realize that I was doing this for a good reason. I often presumed there was something wrong with me.
Perhaps now I can better understand and accept why I get uncomfortable in bars and socially withdraw. Maybe now I can understand why I withdraw in trauma trainings with other therapists. When we are all learning emotional freedom techniques, for example, I am unable to benefit from them. Now, I know I am on my way to disassociating in these contexts.
Now I understand why I always have a hard time defending myself when I get attacked. I am numbing out! Now I know why when I do defend myself, I come off too strong and the results never go well. It is ongoing hypervigilance!
People who prey on others can see these signs and chose people they can hurt without getting in trouble. This can open a body up to bullying that can become institutional when labels get attached. People who appear to be victimized end up being soft targets.
And, so, I understand better how I got in some other hard-to-deal with situations and other disassociated memories. And, so, one day, while hiking with my father on a visit back east, I finally got up the courage to ask what had happened to our family friend who was a few years older than me and had dissociative identity disorder.
When I found out that her brother had sexually abused her, I suddenly I had a flash and an image. I saw him over top of her, became paralyzed with fear and fled. Had I really behaved like that? It seemed like more of an intuitive dream, that a solid reality.
Typical, I thought, for a schizophrenic to hear about sex abuse and think it is all about him. Perhaps some of the readers may think so as well.
However, I do remember visiting the two of them alone in a vacation cabin along the Chatooga River in the Adirondacks. They were skinny-dipping, she with just a shirt on, he in the nude, and me, very attached to my bathing suit. My last memory of the evening involves him standing behind her wrestling her around.
The distinctive flash of what I saw and an overwhelming feeling of cowardice and helplessness that overtook me is unconnected to any other part of the evening.
The brother has only admitted to inappropriate touching. So, I acknowledge that even suggesting the word rape may be inappropriate and unfair. I have taken myself closer to this flash and tried to remember visual details. I realize in doing this there were sleeping bags on the floor and that I saw no direct flesh. And yet I felt a sense of penetration internally. But the sense that I could only flee in cowardice connects to other times I acted in similar manners and the shame is enormous.
If I considered these flashes of disassociated memories to be true, there are several other incidents I had with adult men who were significant in my life that were suspicious.
These events help explain why all those years later when I was working in the section eight housing project, I used to walk in the evenings around a lake having rescue fantasies in which I physically psyched myself up to respond to rape scenes. I took these walks to relieve stress while I was using community activists and the press to fight the management company, the police and the black-market dealers against all odds. This is action that caused the police to attempt to institutionalize me in Montana.
I have come to understand that if I am to heal from my psychiatric labels of depression, anorexia, bulimia, schizotypal personality disorder, dyslexia, ADD, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder (now that I am in “recovery”) and perhaps dissaociative disorder I am going to have to accept that I will not know if all my conglomerate sex abuse incidents are true but accept that they may be part of my journey and are possible in the world. I, personally, cannot vilify people who are hurt and use it to perpetrate. To move past these types of incidents, I must forgive so many deeds that seem so strikingly wrong to me. I see them in a variety of things on a regular basis.
The post Beneath the Suds and Psychiatric Labels appeared first on Tim Dreby.
August 12, 2018
Dog Days of Summer
It is the dog days of summer and while I am fortunate to live in a bubble that doesn’t get hot, yet there has been no summer retreat as of yet. The wild fires are burning throughout the state and I can barely stand to listen to the news on the radio anymore.My dog’s birth and adoption day are coming up later this month and it is a joy to watch her grow and hike on the local trails.
I have struggled not to lose faith in my writing as I have not been successful getting any piece published. I continue to produce content, just at a slightly slower rate. At least I have published a few posts for readers to check out:
Understanding and Respecting Black Market America as a Social Work Practitioner
My story of Mental Health Warehousing
I recognize that I need to be vigilant in my editing process as I received some Facebook feedback that the first sentence of my post had two errors in it. Of course I’ve corrected them but still slow and steady has got to be my motto.
I did have a very encouraging opportunity to present a workshop to a local agency who have promised to invite me back to do my workshop on redefining psychosis. Although I did not sell any books, I felt very well received and it was fun to share my experiences.
I have an upcoming workshop schedule for BEST NOW, our local peer counselor training in September and have applied to present at CASRA Fall Conference down in LA for October.
The post Dog Days of Summer appeared first on Tim Dreby.
July/August Update
It is the dog days of summer and while I am fortunate to live in a bubble that doesn’t get hot, yet there has been no summer retreat as of yet. The wild fires are burning throughout the state and I can barely stand to listen to the news on the radio anymore.My dog’s birth and adoption day are coming up later this month and it is a joy to watch her grow and hike on the local trails.
I have struggled not to lose faith in my writing as I have not been successful getting any piece published. I continue to produce content, just at a slightly slower rate. At least I have published a few posts for readers to check out:
Understanding and Respecting Black Market America as a Social Work Practitioner
My story of Mental Health Warehousing
I recognize that I need to be vigilant in my editing process as I received some Facebook feedback that the first sentence of my post had two errors in it. Of course I’ve corrected them but still slow and steady has got to be my motto.
I did have a very encouraging opportunity to present a workshop to a local agency who have promised to invite me back to do my workshop on redefining psychosis. Although I did not sell any books, I felt very well received and it was fun to share my experiences.
I have an upcoming workshop schedule for BEST NOW, our local peer counselor training in September and have applied to present at CASRA Fall Conference down in LA for October.
August 11, 2018
My Story of Mental Health Warehousing
I was a skinny and reluctant social worker when I first started out. I was working through an eating disorder. Initially, I didn’t really believe that taking home a middle-class salary for nickel and diming those less fortunate was my idea of contributing to the world.
I guess, I’d gotten the idea that that was what the field was like during interviews I’d held with middle-class white women who worked down the street in government agencies during a social welfare class. I’d set up residence where I was finishing up my schooling, in Camden New Jersey. I needed money to stay independent from my parents.
Then, I took a computer test that suggested that I should become a cop in the career development office. I’d worked under-the-table at a local Korean deli for several years. Most of my neighborhood friends had pointed to the vice squad when they came in under cover and took coffee from us for free and told me they were the real bad guys. Sure enough when we were held up at gunpoint, the cops were scared to come around.
“Yeah, picture me as a Po-Po,” I said to my best friend, an English major who used to sell drugs and was going back to school.
“Well, actually, you always have had a cop mentality,” said my friend.
I shot him a look that said he was insulting my intelligence. I started looking at social work internships.
***
During my second job, I worked at a day program that was connected to a 30-day crisis house. Since I was only just entering a master’s program, I felt extremely privileged. As a result, I aligned myself with my supervisor and other more experienced workers. Without credentials, I was focused on working with people who would get my back.
One day, I received a client and was ready to get to work on housing issues, when I found out that she came attached with a more experienced case manager. Though not very talkative, she did tell me very clearly that she did not want to go to a particular boarding home, the largest such facility in the county. When I talked to the case manager, he was clear about the woman’s future. She had to go to the unwanted boarding home.
“Wow, that girl is really sick!” I heard a coworker who worked the graveyard shift at the crisis house say.
“I don’t get it,” I said, “I don’t see why she can’t live where she wants to. I help other people find housing, why can’t I help her.”
“That girl is very sick, I can just tell by the way her eyes roll to the side” said my co-worker
I deferred to experience. Sure, I had been hospitalized for six months myself, but I knew better than to make waves that would impact my work reputation. My therapist was teaching me that I could be a little paranoid and I wouldn’t let that affect my clinical judgment.
The woman was shipped away to the very place she most did not want to go. I can now see that she had been right not to trust any of us. For us, she was just protocol.
***
Once I graduated my master’s program and was promoted to a case management position, I visited the infamous boarding home which was buried in the New Jersey Pine Barrens in the far reaches of the county. Out in the pines, there were few stores, lots of sand and aged pine trees whose growth was stunted by fire. The pines were where most boarding homes in the county were located. I admired the scenery as I drove out.
The home’s one-story buildings were made of quarter inch plywood and styled in rows like chicken coops. There was no insulation from the elements in any of the buildings. Corridors were long and full of small rooms with cots and no furniture. At the end of each there was an open rec room where open vats of warm, iceless bug juice sat out under the dim lighting. There were no fans to drown out the buzz of the flies. These halls reeked of sickness. The chipping linoleum floors were being mopped with cheap chemical stink water that reinforced the sick feel. Almost all the clients were either gone to a day program or had walked the three miles to the store. I could not even begin to picture what the place looked like when it was full.
When I finished I followed the owner to the front office. The owner’s daughter had been in my sister’s class at our posh private school before male anorexia had drained my bank account and lowered my social standing. Back at the office, the owner had barraged me with gossip and information about the school.
Once freed to collect my thoughts, I recall betting to myself that they treated mentally ill better back in the Middle Ages.
***
A year later, I made enough money to fund a move to the west coast. Within six months of moving, I made a job transfer into setting up services in a section eight housing authority facility.
Here, I was reminded a lot of my ghetto days in Camden. I got to know a more urban style of warehousing. The project was scrutinized by the local media in the City of Seattle with its large homeless population. To get section 8, a homeless person had to spend time in this project.
I witnessed quite a bit in the six months I worked there: thugs tearing down doors and emptying apartments in broad day light; stabbings of impoverished addicts that were barely sanctioned; a suspicious death by heroin overdose; vulnerable individuals’ going to jail for being bullied into letting their rooms be used to deal drugs. And some of the things the residents said were even more eye-opening. I figured it was finally time I do something!
When I found out my supervisor had a significant drug habit I became suspicious of her intent. I stopped heeding her. Like a vigilante, I leaked info openly to a community activist and to newspapers and was starting to face unforeseen levels of threats.
One day, a resident with a job who had pointed out the local drug kingpin to me, told me, “It’s true we all love you here, even some of the shady people like you . . .”
“It’s just that we are afraid of losing our housing,” added his partner.
“You see,” continued the resident, “we all know this guy who came to work here and was just like you, fighting for all the residents. And he ended up having to come and live down here. I am just worried that that is going to happen to you . . .”
Shortly after this interaction, I received an unsuspected threat from my best friend from my ghetto college days who I called to consult. I found myself in a unique state of crisis. Was the threat real? He paid for college by working surveillance for a bad lieutenant friend. I matched up stories and began to see the world from a new nefarious perspective. . .
***
Three days later, I was picked up out of a ditch on a mountain pass outside of Butte Montana. I had been harassed by police for the past two days since they had violently halted my escape to Canada and separated me from my car. Finally, I surrendered to them.
Two months in, I was transferred to the most chronic unit. The temperature inside was below freezing. There were icicles inside the window that sat above my head. It was almost as bad as the boarding home in South Jersey.
When I first entered those dank halls, I felt destined to behave with the subservient merriment of the thirty-year residents. I was given old, dirty clothing so that I could layer up among the crowded halls. My appearance and sense of self declined. Fungus off the bathroom tiles grew under my toenails and warts covered by hands.
I still remember waiting outside the ward in the freezing Montana winter, staring at the cash cattle in the field. I’d be waiting for the staff to return via bus, late from lavishing with their lunch.
There I was determined to stay hopeful, industrious, and independent as I weathered the biting chill and it only annoyed the staff to no end. They all rolled their eyes when they returned as if to say I was entitled.
“That’s what they all say about you,” said my psychiatrist who I finally got to meet with her two and a half months in. I had put requests to meet with her in writing, but it never worked.
The staff didn’t have any hope for me. They all knew I wanted to take down the mob for what they were doing to me. The Cowboy Security Squad even gave me a beat-down to discourage me. Maybe I was a little entitled because I kept mouthing off.
Meanwhile, other patients told me the mafia really was following me. Many said they were in the mafia. One even tried to lure me to join a local gang for protection.
***
All this I went through was just the beginning of some very hard times that would last for two years.
Discharged to the streets I moved to Fresno, California and the temporary work I landed to get an apartment let me go when I ran out of my month’s supply of medication. I started to feel I was being harassed in the streets. I didn’t know what to do. Somehow, despite extensive efforts, the only other job I could find was at an Italian Delicatessen.
Working at the Italian Deli forced me to move from the Central Valley to the outskirts of the Bay Area. Only then, was my family who I believed was connected to the mafia was willing to do what they could to support me. I had no supporter who seemed to believe that anything that I went through was real. They only treated me as though I needed tough love.
After ten months of employment, I finally learned to stop being bullied by drug-dealing, suburban kids who were half my age. I stopped letting my white shirt wrinkle during my rainy twenty-mile bike commute (and two-hour long BART ride) to work; I accepted that I had to be polite to the Republican clientele that wanted to know all the ridiculous details about which farm their fine fucking olives came from. Finally, when I got insurance and could afford medication, I was able to get the anger and paranoia out of my eyes.
I believed people were entering my apartment during this time. Mail from job interviews would come to me already opened in spite of my complaints to the mail service.
***
Now, I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who works in an inner-city psychiatric day program, primarily with warehoused individuals. Boy, did I find it difficult to return to my career after being warehoused. It was a real uphill battle. I even lost a per diem job at one point and nearly landed back on the streets.
And the survivor’s guilt really keeps me up some nights.
Don’t worry! I have learned my lesson about being an advocate. Additionally, I know better than to try to educate the public about the evils of stigma and mental health warehousing. Research says that this will only make the problem worse.
Sure, I feel bad that twenty years ago a woman was committed to squalor and I did nothing. But I learned advocating for the mental health of the vulnerable needs to be done carefully, one case at a time. Alerting the press and crossing the police is a good way to lose your housing and end up destitute yourself. I learned first-hand about how arrogant my actions were when I thought it couldn’t happen to me.
In these days of escalating disparities, I am grateful now to respectfully extend my therapy skills this forgotten about population which is growing exponentially in our local homeless encampments, our flooded shelters, board and care homes, our county jails and over-crowded prisons. When I think of all I went through and still go through because I was warehoused for one month, I am amazed to see people come back and do better and better. There is a lot to know and respect about them. It is important for social workers just starting out to learn from them. They know an awful lot about their situation.
I think in this era, losing housing could happen to many of us. Try attaching schizophrenia to your name and see how many people stick around to support you and listen to your woes. Some days I come home distressed that I cannot do more to help, but over the last sixteen years I have learned how to share my story and develop programs that do help people. I am extremely lucky!
July 29, 2018
Understanding and Respecting Black-Market America As a Social Work Practitioner
I have not found that book learning and on-the-job-training gave me the tools I needed to understand and help the people. Instead I have had to use experience, curiosity, and following my own spirit or moral compass. Now, I think this is largely because I didn’t understand the realities of black market America with compassion. Without understanding the rules, the pros the cons and the oppression that results from the crime industry it can be hard to provide the necessary empathy and validation to establish connection and be supportive. Because I didn’t get that training in school, I have had to undergo a journey to learn to be helpful.
As I have come to see it, in poorer communities the impact of black market America functions as an iron curtain that some earnest people who enter the field are not formally trained to understand or believe. It’s true that social workers who come from these communities may recognize black market realities quicker than I have. Indeed, I can recall co-workers who really helped me understand things along the way. On the other hand, perhaps it just takes a lot of time to understand streets and crime well enough to see how it shows up in peoples’ behavior and the decisions they make. Indeed, navigating this world in poverty and without financial aid is not an easy thing to do.
Still, many social workers like me stay encapsulated in their world view for extended periods of time. While some of us are only there to do our training in poor communities, many of us stay in them with our salaries and the discourse of our profession, things that keep many of us insulated.
What School Didn’t Teach Me:
In school, I took sociology and counseling psychology. I learned a lot about injustice in third world countries and wealth-fare (tax breaks for the rich,) but this did not prepare me to understand the affects of corruption and crime on our society’s most vulnerable individuals, the homeless, protective custody parolees, and the people with mental health challenges like addiction and schizophrenia.
I have generally been considered a conscientious social worker performing high in stats and looking good on paper. But learning how to get street smart and overcome the limits of my own world view has taken upper-middle class me a long time. I have come to believe that crime is a legitimate industry in this country that is vital to redistributing the wealth. It plays a bigger part in governing vulnerable individuals than social workers who do not understand it can. And yet vulnerable people are often victimized by its machine and need to express themselves and need support to help them find the freedom they may seek.
On the Ground Lessons in Black Market America:
About six years into my career, I moved and took a job in a Seattle, Section 8 Housing Authority Complex. It was a position that no one else would take. I did so brashly. When I found out my boss who I had witnessed expel a naive client who was unwittingly letting a boyfriend deal drugs out of her apartment, had a drug problem herself, I stopped heeding her.
The needle and pipe drug trades were visible throughout the housing complex just by taking a flight of stairs. The management had records on their residents that were off limits to us. I didn’t really understand that my desire to help the poor mentally disturbed individuals instead of the dealers and thugs made me a liability to the powers that be who hired me.
I didn’t disapprove of the residents who became addicts. However, as I started to see that the focus of the authority management, the police and the power brokers were not utilizing their resources on safety, I started to become protective. I didn’t initially realize that by disapproving of the violence and corruption that come with the drug trades, that I was essentially putting myself at odds with the powers that be. I was becoming a vigilante.
Who Was I and Why Was I in this Situation?
Back in college, I had taken up residence in the ghetto community that surrounded the commuter university I attended. I had caught a case of male anorexia in the private prep school I attended and wanted to evade the people who tormented me, like my parents who were on the faculty. I worked and studied and was so isolated to have not attended a single college party.
I secretly believed that the suburban social working professionals that I interviewed for school projects were burned out cogs in a machine. These social workers I interviewed didn’t seem to understand or help the people I worked beside in the local businesses that paid under-the-table wages. I believed, I’d learned more from a three-minute KRS-One lecture blaring out of the radio in the deli I worked for, than I did from those interviews.
But money was tight, I needed a job, and I was after all a high performing student with a stellar work ethic. When my isolated life style resulted in a second mental health crisis, the therapist I found was always directing me to go on social security. I found myself locked up for a month and started on a high level of medication cocktails that catapulted me over the barrier I was facing. Finally, I accepted a role as a social worker.
Instead, of social security, I got a master’s level job and started a master’s program. I did eventually excel on the job, graduated and got promoted to the highest level before going into management. I knew how to work with people and had satisfied customers. Still, I used significant clinical barrier between the people I worked with and my own state of mental health. I really did not relate to them or use my lived experience to be helpful.
Learning My Lesson:
Back at the section 8 authority compound, one resident, who had proved to be an accurate intelligence source, told me that he admired my ways, but had heard word that I might become a resident myself one day and he feared that for me.
Now, the story is very complicated, but when I did face specific personal threats and fled for the Canadian border, the police did stop, separate me from my car and track me until I was admitted for three months into a state hospital in Montana.
Before I could get back into social work, I had to accept an arranged job at a suburban Italian Delicatessen. Coming out of a period of transience, I had to accept that my belongings were moved around in the apartment I could barely afford. I had to accept that my employment related mail was opened before I could get to it. I had to accept that I frequently ran into street people who suggested they worked for the CIA. And finally, I had to accept that I had to bike twenty miles a day to get to work and back. Finally, I went on medication and admitted that I was a schizophrenic. Not until I was able to make friends with the workers and bosses at the Italian Deli did I find myself granted the opportunity to go back to social work.
Lessons Learned:
What I have learned about being a social worker is that it is important to respect the crime industry and the limits of my own power. Within the section 8 complex there were likely informants and spies who were cutting deals ultimately to save lives even though lives were lost. Keeping the money flowing including that of my low wage pay check is always part of the game.
At one point, the newspaper reporter I was speaking to wanted to go undercover in the building. She did not understand that the whole power structure knew who she was and expressed anger at me for speaking to her before she even left the building.
One could argue that social workers do work for the system and are not paid to start social movements. When I was in college and judged the system in a negative light that kind of statement would have been very discouraging to me. But I have found that the social worker who is committed can understand all the mechanisms of injustice and go as far as they can to stretch against the seemingly stagnant system they work for and help their individual clients find the freedom that they seek.
I got a lot of help from reading books like Patrick McDonald’s Memoir on growing up in South Boston, All Souls Day. I found this book taught me a lot about how gangsterism affects impoverished families.
Social workers should not, in my opinion, take their privilege lightly. They should not presume that they could handle the lives their subjects are suffering through. Finding freedom often involves a die-hard belief in the impoverished citizen’s ability to find a role they feel passionately about.
I would not take back anything that happened to me. Social work is still good work. Don’t ever give up your sense of justice that brought you to it in the first place. But remember that people always have a right to move their lives in a healthier direction.
Patrick McDonald, All Souls Day: A Family Story from Southie, Beacon Press, 2007
July 8, 2018
What you can Learn from my DIY Online Store Launch:
It has been another stressful month of intense weekend work and low levels of published output on my blog. I finally invested in a WordPress Business Plan and after two months of unsuccessful haggling on Fiver, I hired a web designer at a reasonable price to construct me a professional website.
Well, investing in a business plan proved to be an act of faith I should have taken many moons ago, but I did not know exactly what I wanted from a web designer and did a poor job of communication and a lot of praying for a good outcome. This I would not advise.
I learned that an author website and platform is a very personal thing. What I received for two hundred dollars did not in any way artistically represent my platform, values and purpose. With intense stress, I had to part with two hundred dollars I could have invested in advertising and learn to use plugins and set up a professional website on my own using models from other platforms to teach me.
For this reason, I want to take a minute and say thank you to some other writers who significantly helped me in this process. These are some effective platforms that helped me realize what I could accomplish from making a better first impression. Many of them are connected to my niche and offer writing that readers or other authors might enjoy:
https://www.yourwriterplatform.com/ with Canadian Kimberly Grabas
https://www.esmewang.com writes about schizophrenia
https://rachaelintheoc.com writes about sexual abuse
https://zackmcdermott.com great marketing for his memoir on madness
I have managed to start a few posts and, those readers who are on my author email list, will get a sneak peak of an article I have written specifically for the new social worker magazine. If you are not on my official email list, what are you waiting for? Click! Here! Now!
The post I provided as a sneak peak last month about demystifying complex trauma and my history of sex abuse has yet to be picked up by any media outlets. And I am going to reach out to some new publishers, but I have also learned to research publishers to some extent and write specifically for them
Finally, as my press release suggests, I have spent the month going back and forth trying to decide what to do about my pseudonym, Clyde Dee. After reading about other memoir writers who have struggled with the same issues, I have decided not to retreat into my shell and publish under Clyde Dee anymore.
My memoir has significantly offended some family members which was what I feared; however, some have been supportive. Most of what I said about people was written from the perspective of me in madness and I think that helps. And although I ultimately tried to be harder on myself than I was on any of them, I understand that my perspective on life is offensive to some and I have decided to accept painful pushback as gracefully as I can with as much compassion for them as I have for myself.
July 7, 2018
Website Launch
In launching online store, author Tim Dreby comes out of the closet to promote his writing platform. Selling books and services independently marks a new beginning for the middle-age writer who works redefine the manner in which the public understands psychosis.
Oakland, California (PRWEB) July 09, 2018
July 7, 2018, in the volatile market of indie books and treating psychosis, is there any such thing as a guidebook? Ever since canceling a book contract to maintain the integrity of his work, author Tim Dreby has struggled with a profound sense of invisibility.
Like many independent authors in this era, Tim took to marketing with little guidance, time or money when his memoir Fighting for Freedom in America was released. Busy finishing up a grant program that was constructed off his own theoretical training platform, he did not immediately rise in Amazon’s ranks.
“There was barely time to read books on marketing,” says Tim. “I still was ambivalent about having my private world public. I couldn’t even get my mother to look at the book for two years and was worried how she would feel about it.” Much like the book was constructed organically and shaped into something that works,Tim approached the issue of being an author the iconoclastic tradition of authors he most admires, J.D. Salinger and Charles Bukowski, without doing research or conforming to social dictates.
He told an NPR journalist in a preliminary interview that he’d often heard things in local radio broadcasts about mental health that are offensive. Correspondence was cut off. Right before an interview with Malik Shakur of The Knowledge Show he signed into the page and viewed the image of a packaged condom that was ripped open. Tim felt it was an interesting interaction, yet was not invited back. On his interview with Will Hall on Madness Radio one listener commented, “For me this interview was one of the more ‘off beat’ ones I’ve heard thus far. Off beat in the sense of fascinating, informative, on the slightly bizarre side . . ., vulnerable, respectful, inclusive and ultimately oh so human.”
Tim’s former pen name still rests on his memoir, Clyde Dee. Clyde is Tim’s middle name and Dee is the first letter of his last name and the last name of his second favorite rapper all time.
Tim’s okay with owning his own experience and has found that family members support him or take offense regardless of the use of a pseudonym. Building a platform to promote his writing and sell his training and memoir has been a slow process and involved learning some new skills. He approaches marketing in a similar way that he has approached working with people who are in psychosis, listening to his own spirit more than guidebooks.
The site is full of mental health essays, poetry, and rough drafts and summations of his work with special messages.
He hopes with the launch of this site to give himself a new opportunity to get his word out and help re-define the public’s view of what psychosis really is. Visit http://www.timdreby.com.
