Clyde Dee's Blog, page 6

The Best of Times and the Worst of Times

The Corona virus is shutting down our social institutions. Our streets are full of displaced people living in shelters or tent encampments. The Federal Government is steering services away from the poor and the elderly in ways that seem to be working. Sure, it’s affecting me, man! But I am still here, scheduled to lead three trainings on the subject of redefining psychosis.

These trainings are based on twelve years of experience running professional groups that explore psychosis. They have not yet been cancelled!

Yes, that’s right on 3/20, 5/6. And 5/20 I am scheduled to lead trainings that aim to impact the way our social workers, peers and educators meet and greet psychosis in the clinics and in the public. I argue that the working definition we have of psychosis is non-descriptive and that a new definition can highlight solutions and justify exploration and intervention.

And as I am preparing to open a private practice, I am willing to train local agencies and treatment teams for free. This is a limited time offer. If you have a heart condition, be forewarned!

Historically, clinicians are trained to avoid engaging with people when they are in an emergency state for fear of escalating symptoms. This workshop is intended to provide a road-map to the rabbit-hole. In other words, it redefines what is happening during a person’s journey through madness in a structured way that justifies intervention and highlights solutions.

I feel my training can help a supporter feel confident that listening and intervening has value and can be necessary to form an alliance that can help. Interventions and solution strategies that get suggested can be used at any stage of a person’s recovery to explore what is happening or what has been experienced.

Often the public struggles to know what is and isn’t helpful. These presentations will give attendees not only a better sense of what is helpful, but also hosts of strategies to consider using.

On 3/20, the Peer Support Services Networking Meeting of Solano County will be hosting the first section of my training. This has yet to be cancelled!

On 5/6, I will be presenting a workshop at the annual CASRA Conference that also will describe the introduction of my work. This has yet to be cancelled as well!

And finally, on 5/20 I will be presenting for six hours of continuing credit, the full Monty. This includes an eight-part definition that better describes what psychosis is like from the inside out and eight solution concepts that can help guide effective interventions. And, of course, this is a social engagement that has not yet been cancelled!

Have you too heard it said that insanity is doing the same thing time and time again and expecting different results?

We’ll have to wait and see.

Click Shop to schedule a training at your agency.

Also, check out this Interview that Deb Brasher from CASRA did with me to help promote that event.

Tim Dreby, LMFT Interview Redacted

Tim, could you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to be involved in the Special Messages Project?

I was working in Seattle at a section eight housing authority and I was astounded at how covered up people’s lives were.  I started to try to investigate and find out what was going on a little bit.  At the same time, I went off my medication, which I had been on for about seven years.  I started to feel this profound sense of connection and that things were related and that things weren’t coincidental.  I went through a bit of an emergency and was hospitalized for three months.  Then coming out, I had a little bit of money, but I was basically on the streets, trying to recoup and come back from that kind of situation.   That’s the part of my background that taught me about special messages.  A lot of my work has been opening up people’s stories and getting people to tell their story, how the stories work in concert with each other, and how to work through the experiences as a result.  Then learning from that and documenting some of the processes that I’ve seen going on and can relate to from my own story.

Could you define what the Special Messages Project is?

Absolutely.  Special messages are experiences that people have that lead to alternative ways of thinking.  The experiences can be things like voices.  Or extra sensory perceptions that are very bad.  It can also be things like an inner person.  It can be codes in letters and numbers.  They can be intuitions.  They can be premonitions.  It can be an assortment of things that give people information that other people may or may not get.

Could you talk about how your approach is so different from our current general psychological approach to these experiences?

Certainly.  I think the way things work in the mainstream treatment is that people are taught to suppress these experiences because they feel they’re punished when they have them.  So they judge them and then when the experience happens again, they are in conflict with them, or they learn that they can’t talk about them anywhere and it’s not safe.  When this suppression happens, it makes it harder to heal from these experiences because they’re real.  They cause real feelings and they cause real experiences.

How has it changed for you to come out about your lived experience at work, and out in the world, Did it take you a long time to decide to do that?

Yes.  I think, to be honest, I started doing these groups about 11 years ago and I didn’t come out to my fellow staff till more recently.  I learned in supervision – every supervisor I had, had bad things to say about schizophrenics, and that was my diagnosis.  So, I learned that it was very much not safe.  I came out through the help of taking WRAP courses.  That really helped me.  I started doing them and what happened was it was so popular on the unit where I worked that there was no taking it back.  However, there were efforts to get me in trouble for talking about my experiences.  And eventually I learned that I needed to tell people that I was out and I needed to learn how to do that.  It’s a very hard thing to manage.

I had a supervisor who knew and he supported me.  That was really helpful.  I had other people who weren’t so sure.  I wrote up manuals for what I was doing.  They made it requirement that people write things up after I started writing things up (for other groups).  So, it was kind of like a gift.   You know it’s it’s a privilege to be able to do it.

And so this is the birth of the Special Messages Project.  What’s been the response of the people that are in the group, like how have you seen it work? 

People in the group get to tell their stories.  They get to go places that they’re afraid to go elsewhere.  It’s been something that has transitioned here at work.  But I’ve also done it in the community and there’s been very powerful responses.  They do this work at the Hearing Voices Network in Berkeley.  I help out there, and that’s another good place to do this kind of work.  It really, really makes a difference when there’s someplace you can talk about these experiences and and make them less shameful, less traumatizing.

What changes have you noticed in people once they’re able to find a safe place to talk?  And put words to their experiences?

Many people feel more open with psychiatrists, they feel less punished in general.  And they have more motivation to get to know other people who are also dealing with, what they’re going through, “quote unquote psychosis”, or other types of experiences.  A lot of times, when I was in the system, I didn’t want anything to do with the person that was talking to themselves.  I just didn’t want to be like that person.  But it takes a transition period to say, oh, what he’s going through is actually similar to what I’m going through.  If we’re not allowed to talk and realize that, we’re not able to form community and community is very important to healing.  Many people say, when they come to my groups, I never realized just happened to anybody else until I heard you tell your story.  It is powerful.

So, you are a busy man.  You are doing a lot of trainings, like what you’re going to do at the conference.  You’ve got a blog.  You’re the author of the book: Fighting for Freedom in America, and you’re still working in the field.  So, first: how do you do it all?

Well, I think that I do it because I don’t have kids.  This project is like my baby.  And I have support from my wife.  My wife, without her I would probably not be able to do what I do, so I’m grateful for those things.  It took me awhile to get those things and I’m extremely grateful.  I had to work a lot, and I developed a style of working through my hardships.  And so, if anything, when I stop working, which I do on a regular basis, when I hike, I have to process a lot of things and a lot of emotions.  So I’m kind of in a regular pattern of working and processing in writing, which is part of how I process.

So, so what can we, as practitioners, do better?  Even if we’re not running special messages groups?  And don’t come at it from our own lived experience, what’s your advice for us.

I think it’s really important to be curious about the experiences that are happening behind the scenes. Instead of punishing, get people to talk about what they’re going through and what they’re experiencing.  Find out what’s behind the ideas and the beliefs they have.  If they don’t make sense or they don’t fit for you – what is normal or not normal?  Just even having the awareness.

Many practitioners are taught NOT to delve into this kind of topic – “delusional” material.  You were taught to “reality check”.  So what you’re doing when talking to staff is educating them about another way to be present for the person.

Exactly.  I’m making it into something that can be understood.  When the staff person understands what’s going on instead of saying “they’re more symptomatic today” or “they’re showing more delusions”, they can see it as this person is giving me an opportunity to trust them.  I can plan for and I can know what to do when they trust me with this material to open them up.  That is, in a nutshell, what I hope people do.  When I give these trainings in the field, a key part is the idea that you become a trustworthy person.  And that’s huge.  People have different minds.  It’s much more of a neurodiversity issue than it is a disease issue.  The idea of inclusion of different ways of processing the world and experiences is important.  When we think of diversity, we don’t think of people who are different as “you’re wrong and we’re going to punish you”.  You form relationships

So, people that come to your workshop, what can they expect?

We will look at redefining what psychosis is, and how it can lead to alternate ways of helping.  We’ll look at what special messages are and look at what other components of psychosis are.  We’ll look at solutions that arise when we know what those parts of psychosis are.  There are different interventions when you’re paying attention to the special messages, in the way you’re talking about them.  It’s the main meat of how to do things differently.

The post The Best of Times and the Worst of Times appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

What it Takes to Make Friends with People who Torment You:

What does it take to make peace with powerful people who are there to torment and target you? I think the answer to this question becomes a simple formula. It is terribly easy for an observer to suggest, but it is a profoundly difficult to carry out. The purpose of this blog is to articulate the formula and raise awareness of how hard and transformative a process this is thorough which to go.

It is so frustrating to me that in the mental health system that almost no one will tell you what to do. Instead they will gaslight you and punish or abandon you until you get it right. Instead of caring about what you are going through they will suspend your habeas corpus and give you labels, pills, and behavioral control that is ultimately aimed at destroying your life and turning you into an innocuous warehoused cash cow.

Indeed, the formula is simple: you must not fight your tormentors no matter how heinous they might seem. You must accept that they are a higher power and publicly pretend they don’t exist. Instead, of rebelling against oppression, learn to have compassion and respect the oppressors. You may assert that you will not join them, but must recognize that the role they play is important and up to god to judge. Then, play by their social rules and engage in activities that will earn you your freedom and independence. With freedom and independence, you can work to disrupt the oppression through which you have been when you play by the rules.

How “They” May Get the Best of You:

Many who suffer a message crisis or what is more commonly termed a, “break from reality,” feel followed. Sometimes this is the result of voice characters and sometimes it isn’t. Whether for their benefit or detriment, feeling followed can be an overwhelming experience. This can make it hard to develop trusting relationships.

Rarely do others seem to believe or care about the fact you are being followed. So often friends realize you think you are followed, and seem to judge, reject, and lose interest in you. Boundaries and challenges to your reality become the new norm and you may find yourself all alone.

Assessing others, often yields the results you expect. When others don’t fit into your explanation immediately, it is perplexing. They may be friendly and supportive and want to help. However, in due time, they will reveal themselves to your as being part of the conspiracy. They may ultimately disagree with you that you are really being followed.

Worse, you may become enveloped in systems that not only don’t believe you, but that also make gossip about you amongst themselves. This may start on a psychiatric unit and spread to a family. It may be replicated in a malicious manner at a job, among outpatient treatment staff or among board and care staff. Suddenly the world becomes full of people who interpret most things you do negatively. But these kinds of reality are only the tip of the ice burg.

To make matters worse, some of you may hear derogatory voices of other people you down that confirm and augment this process. Maybe you are engaging in telepathy and people really are putting you down. Or maybe the voices you may hear are controlled by government technology which is real and surrounds all everyday citizens. Or what if the tormentor is some kind of spiritual entity.

Maybe a Cabal or a powerful secret society starts to reveal itself to you. Maybe the secret society starts to gangstalk you in ways that mimic the natural negative process of abuse. This could be a criminal organization or other organization like the illuminati. Maybe it is a spy organization from another country. Or it could be a police department that is infiltrated by members of the criminal Cabal. Maybe the FBI starts surveying you.

Maybe you are shown different dimensions of reality in which you come into contact with beings that are not of this world. Maybe this causes your spiritual skills to go into hyperdrive and increase the phenomenon of feeling followed.

Meanwhile, back on the psychiatric ranch, medication may be imposed on you to limit your awareness of all these state secrets. Often, too much medication, quell your ability to work and overcome the chronic, evil oppression that surrounds you.

In fact, this process of slowing down your spiritual evolution may be the worst aspect of this if you get incarcerated and coerced. Labels with long names and chronic predictions may justify your suspended habeas corpus. You may get hounded by people who criticize all aspects of your behavior for no apparent reason. Your brain may get damaged by no way out without punishment situations. You must lose your hope for ever overcoming the Cabal that infiltrates and controls the hospital.

If you are able, you must fight for your freedom. If you don’t the hospital will encourage you to stay because you are their cash cow. When they let you go, they may put you into impoverished conditions. Then, you may get forced to go back to a system that may be inevitably negative toward you. This system may be your family, your job, or your homeless situation. The hospital may rough you up. Your peers at the hospital may do the same. Ultimately you must learn subservience and lies and pick the lesser of the evils that surround you.

How I Started Viewing My Tormenters in a Strikingly Positive Manner

Evil is the use of power to destroy the spiritual growth of others for the purpose of defending and preserving the integrity of our own sick selves. In short, it is scapegoating . . .    Scott Peck, People of the Lie.

There was a point in my own recovery when I decided my best strategy was to be strikingly positive about all the people who were conspiring with negative assessments of my value. It was clear to me that this was happening in my family, at my job, and amongst governmental agencies and criminal organizations.

My family gave me just enough money so that I could afford an apartment in Antioch California with the minimum wage they arranged for me at the Italian Delicatessen. My family forced me to see a therapist for two hours a week who shopped at the Italian Deli and defended it fiercely. She was making 125$ an hour and I was making 9$. My “delusion” was that my family was a mafia family.

To get to my job I had to bike ten miles to the BART station and take an hour-long ride to a town that is a Republican stronghold. Along the way, there were signs I was being followed on a daily basis. One day I was followed by a resident I knew from the Section 8 Housing Authority Complex where I worked in Seattle WA. This man was bearing handcuffs and a CIA hat. One day in Seattle he had come to see me and told me he had killed people. I ignored him as he rode the train sitting across the isle all the way to my job. Most days there were similar “coincidences” or signs that I was being followed on the train.

Meanwhile, there were occasions my apartment was broken into police search style. There were times it appeared to be broken into just to move things around that would send me a message. Since things were never stolen, there was nothing I could do. When mail pertaining to my efforts to get hired was opened, I could make complaints at the post office, but it would not stop the phenomenon from reoccurring.

“Everybody says we are just enabling you,” my mother would exclaim when I complained to her about these details. When I called my father’s family, they were all angry at me and supported my father who I knew to be negative and non-responsive to my concerns.

The shrink would bring up the fact that I said I thought I was sexually abused in the hospital. She had gotten this information from my mother, who was outraged at me for talking about such experiences. The shrink told me that I had nothing to complain about. I never brought the issue up again. It would take years to reclaim some dissociated memories that confirmed my concern.

“Some day you are going to have to trust somebody,” the shrink would exclaim.

My best friend from college had said the same thing. He had paid for college by working surveillance for a dirty Philadelphia cop. He used to sell drugs and now was a gang leader for the longshoremen. He had made a credible threat when I was working at the section 8 housing that cause me to flee to Canada, where I was intercepted by police . . .

So, one day I was thinking about all the stigmatic judgments that were assaulting me. I was distressed because none of them were true but I felt that the world could have its way with me because I didn’t have a support. I finally decided that they could say what they wanted, I would combat them by being compassionate and positive about them. I needed to start being positive about my tormentors in all sectors of my life.

I started with work where the harassment and negativity were the worst. I was likewise positive to the shrink about my parents and vice versa. I started accepting visits from my father. I stopped reaching out to members of my family and hoping to get support. I wrote cards to the social workers who had trained me to lower my moral standard and kept me employed along the way. I accepted a referral for medication. I took half of what I was prescribed and I found my efforts to be compassionate and positive to be vastly improved.

It was a long process to change my perspective, but eventually fifteen years later the relationships are finally starting to change. I certainly still struggle to be compassionate to people who smear my name and gossip about me, but occasionally, I remember the need to do so.

If I fail to be positive about people who lie and gossip about me, which I occasionally do on my blog, I run the risk of sounding like I am not well. When I do this, editors don’t select me. Also, I don’t get as many views.

Changing the Systems Around You that Hate on You:

To change the systems around you that devalue and debunk you is a huge challenge and it takes radical dishonesty of what I like to call “Kiss-Ass-Skills.” The good news is you don’t have to believe in the way you act, you just have to produce a convincing performance. Sometimes they say, you’ve got to look the devil in the eye.

In therapy they presume these are social skills and graces that you have to champion. However, according to the formula I posited at the onset of this blog, only through radical behavioral change can you escape the clutches of the modern world’s social ills. It is the social skills that try to block you on your road to spiritual enlightenment or social justice.

You may not be able to stop secret Cabals like the illuminati, the CIA, the AMA, or the big pharma industry, but you don’t have to join them. Really, you need to have compassion for the organizations that most torment you. You have to look at their agents or minions in the eye and remember to have compassion. Then, you use “Kiss-Ass-Skill,” and change your negative energy for them.

Recently, I walked with a friend who taught me about the origins of the Mafia, the Cabal, that most tormented me, I think. They originated as a militia that resisted the corruption and evils of the Roman civilization. When I try to have compassion for the need to fight corruption that empowers the one percent to enjoy money for nothing, I can heal from what I went through. The people who were killed had broken rules of the secret society and I hadn’t. Though my notions of social justice caused a lot of trouble for a lot of people, I lived. Part of me was relieved.

“What Does it Mean to be Crazy in a Crazy World?”—Will Hall

When a staff member does something good at your shelter, board and care, family or secret society, you have the power to honor it. When they come at you, like most agents of the mental health system do, with superiority and negativity, feel bad for them that they have to work a job that so burns them out and find some behavior that you can compliment. Backhanded compliments help sometimes. As a staff person I am grateful to get them because I don’t always realize when I am misusing my power and I don’t want to misuse it.

Unfortunately, oppressive systems don’t easily change first. In reality, you need to be the agent of change. Maybe you are already and just need to honor yourself. It is arguable that it is your job as the spiritual leader of your failed community to reclaim your role and improve the system. Put out positive energy and have compassion for the forces that corrupt and kill.

Being a soldier or agent is hard work. Use “Kiss Ass Skills” to compliment and appreciate the people who work for you no matter how stupid or heinous we are. I know it took me a long time to learn to do that at the Italian Deli because feelings of oppression are so hard against which to work.

When it comes to telling the truth, let it be the weak chains in the link with whom you collaborate. When you have a therapist, who can mirror positive things about your spiritual power right back at you, you have a good person with which to work. You might need to explain to them what your voices or messages are saying.

Clear out the irrational chains that hold you in bondage. Every once in a while, you might have a chance to tell people your truth. Every once in a while, you have a chance to be a revolutionary and change the world. Until then you just have to lead oppressive people spiritually and help them develop better empathy and curious inquiry skills.

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Why Mapping Out a Person’s Voices Is Not Always Enough!

While treating voices as though they are real things may seem like a revolutionary step for a mental health clinician to take, I feel it can only be a small piece of the picture for some of us. Sometimes hearing voices is just the tip of the ice burg. Ultimately the clinician needs to understand more of what is experienced to provide people with revolutionary guidance that the survivor must assert to contribute towards making the world a better place.

It’s true, normalizing voices by estimating that one in every ten people hear them is a very positive thing to do! Taking away the pathology helps! However, I believe that in many situations, it is only a piece of what is going on when someone is experiencing an emergency, a “break from reality,” or what I prefer to term a special message crisis. Getting a full understanding of their experiences is imperative to help direct them to the social action they must take to heal.

I believe there are hosts of other experiences that a clinician needs to be aware of when working with someone who has experienced a crisis or emergency. Examples of these types of experiences are: intuition, dreams, spiritual enlightenment, serendipity, nonverbal interpersonal feedback, coded slang words, numerology, and symbolic associations. I’d argue that most everyone can relate to these experiences.

However, at some point these experiences can conspire with or without voices to overwhelm and push someone into an emergency state. Sometimes coincidences with these phenomena may be natural and sometimes they may be gaslighting by systemic agents of abuse. This can be hard to understand and differentiate. When a person is in an emergency state, the frequency of all these experiences are more intense and can fully preoccupy a person to lower their ability to contribute in a meaningful way.

A Longitudinal Approach to Special Messages in Treatment:

Like voices, all special message experiences need to be treated as real. Often, they are more real than many people want them to be, but there is some gray area in which they can be tricky to interpret and inexperience, social corruption, and trickster spiritual experiences can lead to errors.

When the chronically normal class detect these errors, they are quick to dismiss them as being the “d” word, delusions. However, instead of declaring the “d” word and dismissing all these other experiences as irrelevant, it is important to do longitudinal studies with the person over time paying acute attention to all forms of these kinds of experiences.

Eventually it is possible for a person to get a sense of when they are being tricked. Spiritual tricksters become important to understand. Sometimes they can be the result of secular corruption, and in most mystical systems the spirit world can play tricks on the spiritual person like they did on Jesus in the wilderness.

People who have survived emergencies need to understand how they have been tricked to move them back to a place where these other experiences become more manageable. It may be important to understand the skewed regulations of the social world that tricks them. It may be important to trust people again instead of just messages. It may be necessary to change the survivor’s relationship with their message experiences because messages will always be there. Maybe in some cases they just don’t need to be so loud and impactful.

In fact, once the trauma and danger are removed, these experiences like voices can become very helpful to a person if they are managed well. Indeed, I believe people who are sensitive about this aspect of life may have a valuable and acutely keen sense of reality if they work at it. Encouraging them to work and study can be beneficial. They can play valuable roles that have meaning and purpose for them.

Why Letting People Share Their Stories Becomes So Challenging:

In many modern societies there is a norm of managing all associated experiences through means of suppression and control. There is a history of institutionalizing people who become too sensitive to these realities. Meanwhile, chronically normal people continue to be influenced by these experiences and even act out based on the same experiences without being reprimanded. There has become a medicalized notion that these experiences are illness for some and okay for others and the injustice that can result can appear to be horrific to the person in an emergency.

All mental health systems that I have worked for train a person to suppress these experiences and deny that they exist. There is a strong sense of punishment that teaches people to suppress what could otherwise be valid. Learning to suppress is not always bad. It can teach us to dissociate and respond rather than react. This skill is taught in our institutions and through job training by forcing the individual to honorably submit and focus on behaving in ways that can earn them cultural capital. The problem is it doesn’t teach people to be mindful of when their messages are happening and which to believe. The result is often social withdrawal and inaction.

By the time I get to work with people, the stories of special messages are so suppressed that many will conceal them even when others are talking about them. It takes a great deal of time and trust to get people to talk and be mindful about these experiences. There is much fear that doing so will result in incarceration de-habilitating doses of medications, or isolation and restraints. Although I believe in things like trust and mindfulness, I am careful to convey that talking openly about these experiences may lead to random consequences elsewhere.

Why Suppression is Thought to be Important:

One reasons that voices and special message experiences may be systematically attacked, even though many people can relate to them, is because in crisis they may invade the space of peoples’ privilege of secrecy.  Often, people who get punished for their special message crisis do so because their sensitivities to reality cause them to challenge the hypocrisy of others in a revolutionary manner.

In short whether to the social structure of the family or to the social structure of the world’s most powerful Cabals, madness ensues when special information becomes threatening to people who use boundaries and mechanisms of oppression to protect themselves.

People in power don’t like to be accused of being evil. When you hold a position of power your reputation is on the line when a mad person confronts you. Thus, this medicalized illness also serves to protect you and support the part of you that is good. While people who are in crisis are less likely act out with physical violence, they are revered as being dangerous. I’d argue that it is because their inexplicable power is a threat to others, that fear loss of privilege and power. Or maybe those others have done their best and just feel hurt by having their ills highlighted.

Alternative Solutions:

Additionally, the revolutionary behavior of the person in crisis (which significantly varies from person to person) becomes very difficult for people to manage. It may target power in meaningful manners on a small or grand scale.

This is precisely why it becomes key in the exploration of special messages experience that people be trained to use the acts of suppression so as not to act out on the secrets of the mechanisms of power. Because the message receiver is often correct, there must be a slow enduring effort to change things within the bounds of rational input.

Respect for power and acts of revolutionary change are often guided through religion, philosophy, and metaphysics. Thus, there can be much guidance within these subject matters that teach people how to use discernment and judgement to promote change. I believe these are subjects that clinicians need to be ready to work with to be successful at bringing people back to social functioning.

I believe that teaching people to use discernment and judgement in this manner can also be done to improve the mental health system. In the process, the message receiver becomes able to function at most jobs without being a threat to the power structure. Instead, they may need to accept that as a paid worker they are only afforded a contributing voice that can be used to improve things and make things better.      

Transforming Valuable Perspectives into Meaningful Contribution:

I think normalizing voices is a good starting point for many people in their journey to find meaningful ways to contribute.  However, to be thoroughly affective, a clinician needs to remember that voices may not be the predominant source of special message experiences for a message receiver.

In fact, they might be the easiest to discern, but once they are better managed, it may be time to work on other real special message phenomena like telepathy, premonitions, energies off other people, reading into media for special meanings.

I like to argue that no special message experience is more or less sick than another.

When I was in crisis, and I was asked about voices I had no experience of which to speak. It wasn’t until I came out of crisis that I was able to discern that sometimes when I was upset, I may have been hearing voices.

In my experience of running thousands of special message groups, people have different sources of alternative information available with different levels of truth attached to them. That is why groups that enable people to explore associated conspiracies and compare and contrast their sources of alternative, intuitive knowledge is so important

Message mindfulness is extremely important to maintain as it enables people to use discernment and respect for power structures. It is extraordinary how helped people can be by merely having the freedom to explore their experiences with others.

I don’t think doing so really puts power structures at risk. It cultivates relationships and builds social support. It helps people. It gives people a fighting chance to find a meaningful role and contribute to making the world a better place. I think the world can be a better place, especially for those stuck in the mental health system!

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What Do You Do When Your Loved One Thinks You Are Evil?

When in the throes of what is commonly termed a “psychotic break,” people often become focused on good and evil causing interpersonal friction. Whether you are a parent, therapist, spouse, or a friend or colleague this can translate in you being viewed as evil. Perhaps, this projection is not a comfortable feeling for a supporter to sit with.

Often, providers and family members are systematically trained not to go down the rabbit hole with the subject. Often the rationale for this is that we do not reinforce the delusions. Many people think this is a sign of good boundaries. But I am writing today to primarily wonder if this strategy is little more than a just a systematic fear reaction. Those who go down the rabbit hole may get pinpointed as being the root of all evil! Perhaps it is reactive fear of this that prevent us from learning about what our loved one is experiencing.

Case in point, I regularly go down the rabbit hole with people at the inner-city clinic where I work. When I do so, I share my own history of being diagnosed with a schizophrenia disorder. I also share associated stories. I often find myself the subject of being assessed for evil. Sometimes it can be hard to get out without becoming a villain. Occasionally I get a person who concludes that I am the head of their persecution system.

Remembering that there are Good Reasons I May Get Called the Cap Villain:

There are many reasons I might be singled out as a Cap Villain. Sometimes, I come from a different race and class background than many of the people I work with. One could rightly argue that my approach to establishing rapport is different and that makes me suspect. Also, it is arguable that it is my karma that causes me to get placed in such a villainous position. I once thought my father was the cap villain and now it is my turn.

When I become the cap villain, I know I need to work, but believe that I am in a particularly good position to do a lot of good. I personally feel I am lucky am I to be given the chance to do this valuable work?

Perhaps there are reasons for my good fortune. I have advantages that people who haven’t experienced what it is like to be in a break don’t. Maybe that’s why I am so eager to break the mold and jump down the rabbit hole. Of course, there could be other reasons to fear the rabbit hole, but still I wonder if sometimes it might be fear of the conclusion that you are pure evil that keeps people from learning about their loved one’s experiences?

As a survivor, I have advantages.  I know some of the language of “psychosis” and am able to occasionally anticipate from where a person is coming. Perhaps it is because many conscientious family members can do similar things that some people in crisis come to believe their loved ones are evil. Maybe it seems like if you go down the rabbit hole you are only going to get false accusations and hatred. That’s why I am here to embolden you.

How I Respond as A Clinician:

When I sense it is going down, I tell myself that this may mean I am one of the safer people the person has experienced who can communicate with them in their language. I tell myself that a high percentage of providers and family members avoid going down the rabbit hole because they fear or distain being viewed as evil. I remind myself that the unfortunate result is that the persons experiences are presumed to bear no semblance of meaning. We all have good and evil in us, why fear if someone has insight into our evil side?

Still it is hard to do. Sure no one wants someone in a profound state of knowing to hold them in contempt over things they cannot control. It’s uncomfortable, I get it. I have had victims of sexual abuse see visions of me having sex and get mad at me in front of a group of people. It’s hard not to feel embarrassed or defensive. It can feel like I am personally threatened by such an accusation.

But maybe that person is viewing that for a real reason that we can’t understand easily. And if they don’t have a space to work these things out, they will have to live under their explanation for why it happened in silence without support.

The tendency to get defensive and take it personally may be particularly painful for loved ones who revere the person and fear they have done a bad parenting job. But if you can remember to try to feel good about it, perhaps it becomes an opportunity.

As a survivor who sometimes knows how my patients feel, I am constantly trying to absolve myself from having done things that hurt the person, like making a living off their poverty. I remind myself that it is possible that a lot of good can be achieved if I hang in there. I think if I don’t, I become just a cog in the mental health wheel and it becomes less likely the person will benefit.

Things I Look to Accomplish:

I look to the survivor to test me to see if they are accurate. If I see them testing me, I do my best to pass the tests. I pass test by being good, healthy and supportive to them. I will do so repeatedly until I get it right if I need to.

When I am open and curious, I can pass the trust tests they may put upon me. I hope that by proving to the person that I am not defensive and that I want to learn about the evil within me so that I might change it I think that when I do that the survivor will be challenged to realize that the whole world is not against them.

In contrast, if I am defensive and reality test and am righteous about my world entitlements to not be abused in such a way, I believe I am likely to reinforce the vileness of my position as the cap villain. I believe this does make the situation worse and might cause a lasting rift in the relationship.

When someone holds on to their views of you over time and you are not able to wiggle out in such a gentle manner, it is important to remember that you don’t know what they are experiencing. It is a good idea to inquire and respect that what they are experiencing is real and valid for some reason.

Remember that those experiences may rear up from real hardships that the person is going through. Consider what else might be going on to cause a spike in your level of evilness. Perhaps the participant is being neglected over the holidays, or there is neglect in the board and care home, or there is a grief anniversary of a deceased love one. Perhaps, then, instead of being defensive, I can try to be compassionate about the source of the disturbance. I try to share this compassion non-verbally first and foremost and then verbally if it is working.

Reflections on What I Went Through that Support This Process

I remember that in my crisis my father was the head of the mafia that was tormenting me. It is true I accused him of things for which he was not responsible. It was also true that he had done things to me when I was younger that I was ailing from; and yet he was the safest person in my world both as a child and within the dimension of reality I was enduring.

See, in the dimension of reality that I was living in, people were really corrupt, dangerous and guilty. I do still believe there were people like that for real. In my mind at the time they became my father’s minions. Blaming or holding them accountable for the hell I was enduring simply was not an option. If I did confront them, in reality they may have seriously harmed me. And ultimately in my journey I needed to forgive them and be friends with them again. I often observed consequences for blaming things on my Dad. Sometimes they came directly from him.

I feel bad for taking things out on my father, but I also faced a lot of real threat and abuse and I needed to express it to someone. Maybe I pinned everything on him because I thought unconsciously that I might best be able to work it out with him.

I try to remember how I was truly appalled when my father would get defensive and yell at me. They were real low points and I will forever remember how hideous I felt. Feeling alone, pissed, and righteous only made me shut him out longer.

Working Things Out with My Father:

I still feel that my father did have real power and responsibility for me and when I had a break. He did somethings that were right. He flew all the way out to Montana to see me. But when that did little to impress me, he didn’t believe a word I said. I told him things that I knew for a fact were true and they didn’t matter. This strengthened my conviction that he was a mob boss. When he thus sided with the establishment, it gave me gumption for staying away and avoid him longer.

My father did call out a missing-persons report on me and then did not want me to leave the horrific institutional living in which I was confined. He suggested that the same thing would happen to me again if I was set free. That was power he had, and using it the way he did was not helpful.

I ended up homeless and destitute and indentured to low wage work for a year. In the process he did step in and support me again. The time we spent together really did matter! The real connection we have did function as a reality check to me. Somehow, we both had to change and we were able to do so.

Eventually, over time we were able to get it right. But if my father hadn’t persisted to support me in my efforts, I might not have changed my mind about what was going on with me. And from my vantage point it was often I who took the lead to change my negativity toward him. This helped us work together again. I also might not have been willing to take medication which helped me with the process of changing my mind.

Understanding Why Your Loved Ones View of Good and Evil Has Amplified:

As I mentioned initially, already the issue of good and evil is amplified naturally by special message experiences which some find to be spiritual, and others find to be responses to trauma. I believe unpacking those stories and getting people to teach you what they have learned about good and evil is important.

Consider that in modern civilization, many with special messages spiritual connection have their experiences defined in mental hospitals as illness. The result can become a profound mistrust of power and a struggle against the power structure that wants to institutionalize them. Suddenly the world becomes full of evil people. People in institutions may seem to nullify all gifts and abilities. When there is a sense of interconnection, and loved ones have initiated institutional care, evil is more likely to be projected onto the loved ones.

Let’s not forget that the institutional system may be traumatic and violent at times, thus, amplifying an amplified process. In many locales, public institutions seem to purposely show people in crisis the door to institutional living as if to say: this is what will happen to you if you don’t shape up.

It can be argued that institutions are set up this way because they aim at curbing behavior. Of course, how the person takes the “treatment” is different for each of us. Additionally, different staff people use punitive, irrational interventions in unique manners some for the better and some for the worse.

Don’t Take it Personal, Explore and Work it Out!

Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what your loved one may be thinking of you and whether they have ways they are correct and ways they aren’t. In this blog I have tried to speak for myself and how I navigate these dilemmas as a patient and a therapist.

When I was in crisis, I was told by my therapist to avoid the issue of good and evil so I wouldn’t be crazy! It was true, I didn’t think she was a very good person to me when I was vulnerable. I listened to her and honored her keeping my true feelings buried. It did lead to recovery.

But I don’t deal with that therapist anymore! To her credit, she did encourage me to write. Perhaps she would change her mind if she knew how I had to write about her to recover from the treatment. Ultimately in my world, I escaped the control of my cap villain and went on with my life.

But moving forward I encourage loved ones and therapists who want to be supportive instead of a thorn, to explore what they’ve done with an open mind and learn about whether it was good or evil. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is only good and evil. We all have the capacity to do both. If you do a good job you will get the truth. If you do a poor one you will get fake answers.

Keep exploring even if all answers are fake. That can be part of the work that may not happen if you don’t persist over time.

The post What Do You Do When Your Loved One Thinks You Are Evil? appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

American Shamenz In the System; And American Shamenz Out

Tin Man thinks of the ancestral quilt that hangs in his wife’s suburban guest room. His auntie gave him the quilt because he was named after his great grandfather whose name is stitched in the quilt. Nevertheless, Tin Man considers himself the black sheep of his family.

Tin Man is the oldest cousin among nine on his father’s side, but childless. Most the rest of his family resides on the East Coast. Tin Man’s people were lumber barons in upstate New York. He did what he could to leave them behind at age seventeen.  Looking back perpetually hurts.

Tin Man navigates with Langston’s directions in his little put-put Ford Fiesta. He still doesn’t know how to navigate with his phone, so he is grateful for his memory. Before long he finds himself deeply embedded in urban Richmond.

As he starts negotiating one-way streets, he notices a much older part of himself emerge. His chest puffs out and his shoulders naturally drop. He drives a bit faster. It’s as if a piece of the inner-city has entered him. He chooses to view this as acculturation rather than racism. He spent years and years fitting into inner-city contexts as a youth.

Tin Man arrives at Taco Bell. He knows his dog, Jesus, won’t do well in the car alone with the window down. Indeed, she barks despite the treat. Worrying about Jesus throws Tin Man off center. When he enters the Taco Bell, he feels a need to rush.

Langston is easy to spot in the small sitting area with a sprawled-out suitcase open and many small objects. Tin man notes a carrot stub, a prayer book, some writing pages, a phone, and a candle among other things. Langston looks like he has lost a lot of weight. Tin Man wonders about his wellness.

“Hey, isn’t it great, they finally allow them to play Mexican Music in Taco Bell,” says Langston when he finally picks his head up and sees Tin.

Tin catches the wise smile as their eyes meet. But in many ways Langston looks sweaty and vulnerable in his undershirt in a way he did not when he was Tin Man’s guest speaker some years ago.

Tin finds himself having to slow down, check out the scene, and make small talk while Lang collects his stuff and talks.

Finally, Tin Man explains that his dog is in the car barking.

***

“That’s right,” says Lang, “You have a new dog.”

Tin explains about Jesus’s separation anxiety. Sure enough, as soon as the door of the Taco Bell is open Jesus’s bark fills the parking lot.

Lang speeds up and with confidence across the rough-textured parking lot, and says, “Oh, I think we are going to have to make friends.

Relieved to be soothing Jesus, Tin Man leashes her and lets her out of the back seat.

Lang takes off his hat and bows his head and says, “When she sees I have no attachments to material belongings she will become more at ease with me!”

Before Tin can control Jesus on the retractable leash, Jesus bares her teeth, gets extremely close to Lang’s face, and snaps with precision, just missing.

Tin’s apology does little to pierce the intensity of the moment. Lang becomes more determined and flattens his entire body against the pavement.

Jesus barks as she is pulled backwards but slowly presses against the leash until she successfully sniffs Lang.

“Now we will be okay,” says Lang with assurance.

Lang ignores Tin’s apology and arranges to put his suitcase in the trunk of the Fiesta. Jesus allows Lang to get in the passenger seat without protest.

***

As the car rolls out of the parking lot, Lang lets Tin know what time he needs to be dropped off by to make curfew at the shelter where he is staying. He gives himself an extra forty-five minutes so that he doesn’t have to go to a church service. He is sure he can get away from it.

Tin Man has no problem accepting it when Lang quickly falls into a pattern of doing most of the talking. Tin recalls a time period when he was coming out of crisis when he’d had to do the same thing. Unfortunately, his hosts had always been very judgmental and socially disciplined him. As a result, he is happy to be there for Lang without saying much. He drives slow devoting full attention.

When the car hits Richmond Parkway which circles the north half of the declining, post-industrial city, Tin knows the way. They cross under the freeway and enter the posh Point Richmond. Tin navigates to the little tunnel that goes through the hill.

As Lang talks, Tin is reminded of elements of Lang’s story from the hospital and occasionally fills in blanks he might not otherwise get. Langston was dropped off at a Chinese Orphanage and adopted by his grandmother. His family expected high levels of success and when he got accepted at UC Berkeley, he had to admit that he couldn’t read due to learning disorders he’d hidden. Lang is good at telling his story!

Now Lang is talking about dropping out of Medical School, which he points out happens to a small portion of every class. A van comes from behind and violently speeds past on the double lines.

Tin feels bad because he had slipped into a slow pace due to giving his undivided attention.

Lang is clearly thrown by this display of contempt. He interrupts himself a couple of times to exclaim his disbelief.

Lang’s comfort with homeless shelters is admittedly foreign to Tin. Back when he was in an emergency state, he had worked seemingly endless numbers of twelve-hour days to avoid them. He’d had to bike and BART four hours a day just to travel to his job at a suburban Italian Delicatessen, Money from home was needed for ten months to supplement his nine dollar an hour income to keep him in the boon town apartment he’d rented. He hadn’t considered the alternative of receiving food stamps. If he had been resourceful and applied for entitlements, he would have been far less tortured by his family during that time period.

As a result, Tin understands that he can’t relate to Lang’s disgust with the speed of the modern word.

***

In the trailhead parking lot, a camper van is parked for the night. There are more and more people enduring a homeless lifestyle in every pocket of the bay area these days. Up north fires are raging and the air quality is poor.

Tin notices a few dogs leashed on clothes lines. He hastens to leash Jesus and give her a chance to sniff.

The dogs get up and bark forcing the woman and man sitting in lawn chairs in the dust to pull on the clothes lines. Both Tin and Lang greet them and hasten to get Jesus out of their way by starting up the trailhead.

The walk is a little steep for Lang who is fifteen years Tin’s senior.

It takes Tin a little while to tease out where Lang is coming from. He senses Lang knows about his struggles against the black-market economy during Tin’s emergency. Lang seems to be trying to help him. There are many stops.

Lang is proudly able to describe some of his grandfather’s attributes. The attributes explain his rise to power. He ran a company that operated along the west coast in Canada and the U.S. that provided alcohol during prohibition.

Lang explained how his grandfather won and maintained his power and how the workers used him to police and eliminate dangerous people. “It is not an easy business,” exclaims Lang, “but it is necessary part of life.”

Lang shifted over to his Mother’s Father. “When Communists came to take over his village, my Paw Paw encouraged everyone to escape and stayed to fight the Communists all by himself.”

***

The trio arrive at a fork in the trail. Tin who had envisioned doing a bit more walking accepts that this is the place most of the work is going to happen. Jesus is quite nervous and constantly claws into the dirt pressing against the leash.

“My mother couldn’t look at me as I grew up and my grandma loved me to death. However, when I boarded the plane to come to America, Grandma said she would be right back and I didn’t see her again for two years. I was six years old and I felt utterly abandoned. I have been repeatedly hurt by people who abandon me as a result. When grandma died, I felt I lost everything! I have struggled not to blame people for abandoning me my whole life and it wasn’t their fault . . .

As Lang talks boldly in this manner including flurries of details, he cries openly; and then, quickly returns to laugher. Then, he seems to return to his next lesson. Tin Man recognizes this being a sign of true healing. He does his best to link into the analogies made to demonstrate listening.

“My mom was hateful to me. She expected me to become a doctor and disowned me when I got into drugs. I wanted to be a minister and author and she said, ‘I will not have a poor penniless preacher for a son!’ That is when I went into the corporate world. It is the one time I really committed evil in this world. I am ashamed of myself for that.

“I never knew a thing about my mother until I visited her on her death bed. She loved my Paw Paw so much she refused to flee with everyone else. The communists killed her family and forced her to come with them. She essentially had to marry one of her beloved family’s murderers to survive. There was a rape in the process. When I learned about that on her death bed, I learned to forgive her.

“Memory and history are funny little beings,” ponders Lang, “It is like that movie Castaway with Tom Hanks, when they tried to find the deserted island that his plane crashed on. All they have to do is be off a fraction of a degree, and they won’t even know the island exists. And the ego suffers in isolation.

***

Tin had likewise been touched by the movie which he saw eighteen years ago. At that time, Tin’s one black market friend had referenced the movie and promised him that one day he would get off the island.

Tin believed he was being gang-stalked by his family. He had not trusted a soul other than his puppy dog.

He’d done everything he could to defy his friend and his family. His friend had after all threatened his life. His family had supported a long-term hospitalization and his father had begged him not to leave the dilapidated compound without consideration for how much incarceration hurt Tin Man’s heart.

In Fresno, Tin Man had prayed for the chance to have safety in a therapy session like Tom Hanks did in the movie. That kind of safety he hadn’t found until he met his wife twelve years ago.

***

“It wasn’t until 2000, continued Lang that I was finally able to admit that I was bipolar. I was working as a social worker in Fresno and in the height of my addiction.”

Tin noted that he was in Fresno at that time, nearly homeless and looking for work. “That’s where I was when I saw the movie, Cast Away!”

When Tin finally got hired at a Foster care agency called Genesis, he’d had to choose between the job and family support. And the only way to get family support was to move up to the bay area and take the Italian job with the killer commute.

He tells this to Lang whose eyebrows rise.

“Yes, I know of that foster care agency!”

Lang makes a reference to the apocalyptic fires burning in the distance that are clogging up the air with smoke. “How can a tragedy so vial become something we learn and grow from. Tin, you should imagine how Moses felt when he wandered through the desert for forty years. Can you imagine what that felt like to walk in circles for forty years.”

“Yes, I can. It must be like the people who drive circles around the city of Richmond without ever knowing the stories that lie within!”

Tin imagines that many of Lang’s stories lie within the city. He is still not sure he’d made any sense. Lang’s point seemed to be that it takes time to heal from slavery. Tin has always known the stories of those enslaved in Oakland and feels the world will learn to care again during Armageddon.

***

“Tin, I too have written a book and I lost all of it one day when my car got burglarized. It is about the seven deadly sins.” Lang lists each sin and creatively defines each . . .

Jesus’s claws are still digging in the dirt. Lang continues to go from tears to laughter.

Finally, Tin proposes that they begin walking on the flat trail. Tin unleashes Jesus who instantly puts some distance between herself and her owner. Tin notes the distance.

“Give your dog some trust and she will trust you back,” suggests Lang.

Tin definitely understand where Lang is coming from. He reflects on Lang’s suggestion knowing Jesus.

Jesus bolts after a squirrel, a sure sign she will not respond to calls to return to safety. Jesus is a devout hunter and her prey instinct is very high. Lang and Tin are safely above the street on the trail and Jesus is barking up a tree that is ten yards from the road below.

Tin calls for Jesus. Eventually Jesus responds. The two reconnect. Lang and Tin walk along the flat trail and the conversation flows.

***

“You may wonder how a person with a background such as me ends up in prison!” says Lang.

Tin thinks about the terrors of prison and the warehousing of so many undeserving individuals. He believes that it is far to easy for a body to get framed or marked during the process of incarceration. Prior to his hospitalization he had been the only law-abiding social worker in a section 8 housing authority.

Lang goes on to reflect on his time in prison fondly. He identifies the role he played as being a negotiator between the gangs.

“Prison gangs have complete control over the behavior of people on the streets because they know where everyone lives and can harm gang member’s loved ones if they don’t comply.

“But for me,” continued Lang, “I knew that my negotiations could result in many lives being saved on the streets and a strong sense of justice that was of optimum benefit for everyone. It was one of the better times in my life.

This reinforces many of Tin’s views about Prison. Tin thinks of the prison stories of his co-worker and clients. Prison politics remind him of the State Hospital where he received many recruitment efforts. It is a bit of a preoccupation for him.

“I know how easy it is to get caught up and even framed or sacrificed by your crew. I make no preconceived judgements. I was afraid for two years that I would end up in prison. Three months in the state hospital was enough for me. I get what it’s like. But I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge with me.”

Jesus has made her way back to the vicinity of Lang and Tin. She creeps up on a mole hole. Suddenly she pounces. Jesus’s motion reminds Tin of the dance move in the movie Teen Wolf. Jesus assumes the pose and slowly lunges for maximum impact. Then, she digs at the hole trying to terrify the mole.

Suddenly, Jesus makes a high-pitched grunt and then jumps back in fear as the mole has lunged back at her. Poor Jesus has to get a taste of her own medicine.

The three reach a dirt road that cuts back to the paved road. Tin Man leashes Jesus. They descend down the road. It has been a very short hike but a lot has happened.

Tin knows he is not a man of color like Lang. The privilege of his skin is one of the only reasons he did not end up in prison. He thinks about how conscientious people like him often become the mark. They end up poor and penniless in the mental health system. From Tin’s perspective, jail and prison are a slave industry just like the mental health industry from which he now takes a salary.

***

The streets of Point Richmond are full of cars on Saturday night. Tin Man circles the blocks hoping to find a parking space with shade for Jesus. He continues to listen intensely to Lang until Lang realizes that it is dangerous to keep talking. Then, Lang aids Tin in just barely finding any space.

Tin knows Jesus is occasionally able to stay in the car for his wife when she runs errands. He sets her up with water and another treat. She immediately starts trying to pry open the window with her two paws and then with her proud chest. She is shrieking with anxiety.

“Okay,” says Tin, “I am sorry but we are going to have to find a place where we can eat outside with Jesus.”

“I’d be happy to break bread with Jesus,” says Lang with a smile.

Tin, Lang and Jesus circle adjacent blocks looking for restaurants with outdoor seating.

Lang talks about wanting to open up a restaurant with friends from the shelter. He is having fun and showing his creative side. The restaurant would be called the melting wok and it would be full of all varieties of America’s stolen cuisines. And workers would share in the profits.

Tin had once wanted to have a show for single people who wanted to avoid domestic tasks. He had always bragged to all who would listen, he would be the nemesis of Martha Stewart.

Lang also explains that he is on a walkabout, traveling between here and LA. He explains that his wife and son stay in his studio apartment in San Leandro. He stops and befriends some patrons of a restaurant with gregarious manners.

Tin can see Lang has resiliency and hosts of social skills that he can use to survive on his walkabouts. Tin ponders Lang’s positivity,

Tin was utterly demoralized back on Unit C in Montana State Hospital when he was living a life of neglect. He remembers that Lang is likely dealing with bed bugs and a cot in barracks back at the rescue mission. All his belongings including the carrot stub are in the suitcase he has in the trunk of the Fiesta. And here he is still upbeat and wanting to have a good time.

Unlike Lang, Tin has always been sensitive to depravation. In college he went to an inner-city commuter campus. He never went to a single college party. In those days Tin was an unapologetic Marxist. He gave up his privilege in search of a better world.

Tin Man knows if he was in Lang’s situation, he would not be able to walk up to diners at restaurants and spread good cheer.

In another sense, he is observing a new skill he can learn here. He often learns by observing the beautiful spirits of others. He now believes in a spiritual world that guides people. It’s taken him a while but he can understand how elements of the spirit can be lost in some Communist regimes as well as by countries that enslave and exploit others for profit or cheap labor.

***

Tin has to reject almost all the restaurants because he is a vegetarian. Many places that look interesting don’t have outdoor seating. Lang and Tin settle on a Russian delicatessen.

Lang has made it clear that he is going to drink with his meal. And asks Tin if he drinks.

Tin explains that he hasn’t had a drink since he was sixteen.

“I had problems regulating my eating and ended up sitting in on twelve-step meetings while in my second hospitalization. Listening to those stories and struggling with an eating disorder was enough for me. I steered clear from all drugs and alcohol.

“How about you,” inquires Tin without judgment, “are you a friend of Bill’s?”

“Yes, the halls are a large part of my life,” admits Lang. “I get a lot of support in meetings. But I still drink. I believe in balance when it comes to substance abuse. I don’t believe in labeling myself an addict.

Tin leaves Jesus with Lang and takes Lang’s order, a sandwich with two meats in it, to the counter. He orders a cheese sandwich for himself. Then, he gets himself a Gatorade and Lang the Mickey’s Ale he requested.

Tin innocently wonders how strong the Ale might be. Then, he smirks. On the streets a mickey is a laced drink so his answer is clear to him. This Ale must be super strong.

***

Lang admits his shock that Tin does not drink. He eats half of his sandwich and packs the rest of it. He makes polite conversation. Tin Man is not at all hungry but finishes his very boring cheese sandwich. Jesus lays loyally at Tin Man’s side.

Suddenly Jesus lunges violently. I small child has just run past the table.  Luckily, Tin is holding the leash tight. The table tilts as does Tin’s chair.

Even Lang doesn’t know what to say. After a moment, he comments that this is very unusual. Jesus is clearly deeply wounded.

Tin Man has observed this behavior before. It is very hard to understand what triggers Jesus. Some dogs don’t bother her, yet sometimes friendly, secure dogs set her off.

It has occurred to Tin Man that Jesus may be able to read the personal thoughts of other beings much as he’d been able to do when he was in psychosis.

Training Jesus has been a far greater challenge than his last dog. Tin Man’s last dog was very mature, loving, and resilient, kind of like Langston.

Tin Man had learned to train himself to act as if his ability to sense reality is not real through caring for his first dog. His past love had to endure twelve-hour days alone. The dog’s love and resilience had been a true inspiration. Her spirit was gregarious.

Tin had sensed that Jesus was wounded when he visited her at the dog rescue clinic. Even the literature that the rescue operation had written about her hinted that she needed help. But now that Tin has a house, a wife, a salary, and is not coming up off the streets, he has chosen to challenge himself.

Now he can help Jesus not react to what she sees. Now he can better understand what others went through during his struggles. Now he could right the wrong that was done to him.

***

Tin Man has been collecting his thoughts through the meal. He is stunned by the way Lang honors and loves his family in spite of all he’s been through!

Tin Man’s family had total control over a series of Lumber Towns in Upstate New York. His Great Grandfather had been the justice of the peace over his town. His Great Grandmother had been the social worker. Together they controlled the workers and made sure they didn’t go home and beat their wives and children. His Grandmother had been an only child. The company had even been profitable in the great depression. The rest of the family seemed to be enamored with their privilege.

But coming up during summer vacations in the Adirondacks, Tin Man tended to see things differently. He felt the company had abused their power with wages for the sake of ridiculous profit. He viewed his “good-hearted” ancestors as instilling exploitive social control over the workers as if they were slaves. He knew what it was like to be treated in this manner. True, they may have appeared to be loved by their workers, but growing up Tin tended to sense underlying resentment.

Tin always remembers ol’ Jack McKiney who was such a loyal company man he befriended Tin’s father and helped teach him to be handy. Tin’s whole family would visit the old lumbar jack and hear stories, summering away from suburbia away from their private school.

By the time Tin was eight years old the old man started a pattern of ranting at him. Tin’s father would sit back, smile, and let this go on as if there was something wrong with Tin. Year after year, the old man would seem to let out his lifetime of resentment on Tin.

The onset of the rants happened when Tin had repeated something his father had said about the work that was done by the townspeople to clean up the mill site. Tin had merely told his cousin what his father had said. His cousin had told this to Jack on a visit. Tin’s father had never said anything in defense of Tin, just smiled.

Years later, as Tin turned to the service economy for survival at age seventeen, he certainly started to understand how the old lumberjack felt. He wanted nothing to do with the vacation land that the rest of the family seemed to cherish. Tin had seen how his townsfolk friends survived poverty by running drugs amid rural poverty that was left over after the Lumbar company closed down.

Tin just couldn’t let go of this reality and love his ancestors. The disparities in the summer were just too strong. It wasn’t his father’s fault! His journey had caused him to emphasize the underbelly of the beast.

Ever since his struggles some eighteen years ago his family just seemed to treat him like a schizophrenic failure. That only made it harder to change his perspective on his people. His grandmother’s last words to him was that his book made the family look bad. She hadn’t remembered Tin Man due to dementia, but she had remembered the book.

***

Tin and Lang had to hasten themselves from the meal to the car to make Lang’s curfew at the rescue mission. Lang takes a precious minute to see what is left of his Ale. He carefully stows it in his water bottle so it can travel through the shelter undetected.

“Wow, Tin Man, I had so much fun tonight. If this was a date, I’d definitely sleep with you.

There is an awkward pause.

“No, Tin don’t worry! I am not gay!”

Normally, Tin feels embarrassed to have someone witness the deterioration of his affect. However, Tin senses that Lang can recognize that his extremities are tingling. Tin sensed that Lang could see some of the truth that had made its way back to Tin’s memory when he’d written his memoir. Still he doesn’t understand this part of himself very well. Somehow, it comforts Tin to imagine that Langston understands

In the car ride back, Lang tells Tin Man that he is a really good teacher for him.

With utmost sincerity, Tin Man repeats these words to Lang.

Tin hopes Lang knows how helpful his work tonight had been for his own sense of healing. Sure, Tin might have to engage in hustles to maintain his habits, but Tin Man is sure, he does mostly good for others. He fancies himself a good reader of Lang’s spirit.

Like clockwork, Tin pulls up to the mission and Lang hops out, grabs his suitcase out of the trunk and, joins the crew coming back from their mandatory church meeting.

***

Tin Man is alone driving back from Richmond and is hit with a sense of sheer exhaustion. He remembers that when he had crossed the boundaries of his job as a social worker and investigated street murders some eighteen years ago, he had lost his heart for beautiful souls like Lang.

As a result of those actions, good people like Lang had been forced to gang-stalk him for two years. Was this true? Had all the people who appeared part of the scheme really been forced to go out of their way just because he had not understood the rules.

At first Tin Man had blamed his experiences entirely by his own family. Eventually, he started to use medication. Now he attributes the gang-stalk to the powerful oligarchs that that run inner-city sectors of our country and decide who lives and who dies.

Tin Man can see his interdependence on good people like Lang. Tin prays they can be there mutually for each other in the name of generational healing.

Tin Man still wants to have his heart back. Perhaps all he needs to do is stop all the hypocritical rage.

Tin rages about his own good fortune that forces him to exploit good people like Langston for a living in a slave industry. He prays he is a mole in the system. Sure, his clients are happy to use him to heal. Sure, they love him. They are like his ancestors’ townsfolk.

Still, it doesn’t make his suburban house righteous!

Langston is right in the wisdom conveyed in his stories. Tin must find a way to forgive his family. He needs to love his people more and judge them less. He longs to end his dependence on the mental health industry and the machine.

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Why Eclectic Strategies Are Important When Working with Psychosis

In my experience, people who survive psychosis are very diverse! There are many routes to recovery and many different tools used along the way to get there. Indeed, recovery looks very different for one person than it does for another.

For forty years, most everywhere in America there has been one treatment option that is forced on everyone: medication and psychiatric incarceration.

It is already clear that these imposed methods of suppression rarely work Most of us who do survive them are quick to condemn them. They often seem set up presuming that institutional board and care living is the inevitable outcome.

Maybe you’ve heard it said this works for a small 25% percent of us. Likewise, you might have also heard it said that 50% take ten years in treatment to find recovery. Then, there is the 25% that supposedly decline until they die. With these generalizations and with fear of permanent institutionalization and associated stereotypes, the effort to suppress experiences begins.

With suppression as the cultural expectation, it is well known that our brothers and sisters die an average of twenty-five years earlier than their counterparts.

Person-First Care Rather Than Best Practice:

However, I am writing today to encourage myself and other survivors and providers to approach any psychosis with curiosity and do more learning than we do teaching what works for us. We will review many new strategies and innovations aimed at aiding and/or overcoming suppression. These new methods are introduced and promoted all the time, often by survivors. They may be good points of learning, but I am arguing today that each are merely strategies to consider.

I feel like many survivors and providers are encouraged to flout what works for them or what the research says, like the path to recovery is a world religion. I think this leads more to crusading factions than highlighting the collective wisdom. Meanwhile there are vastly different social systems, structures, and barriers that can get in the way. We will explore these as well. People who are in crisis come with vastly different needs and resources.

American Best Practices  

Currently, in Oakland CA, local administrators have explored researched alternatives like the vocational individualized placement services model, the housing first model, corporate peer counseling route, motivational interviewing (which is primarily used for substance abuse,) and CBT for psychosis as means of curing psychosis.

At agencies, providers are trained, often early in their mental health careers, in one or two of these best practices that will help people suppress and control symptoms.

Still, there can be a lingering sense of confusion when providers observe the behavior of people who experience “psychosis.” Many of us would rather be understood and listened to instead of having a researched alternative imposed. Still, I’d argue that there is no such thing as a simple formula or panacea best practice that will work for every individual.

I must admit that I believe that competing to establish and spread a best practice is the way to be most certain to sell out vast groups of people who have endured psychosis. In the competitive market of best practice, it is all about research and appropriations of money. I have seen this mentality ruin systems. Instead, if providers put the person first, they may utilize the researched method when it is needed, instead of imposing it because the system says so. If such care was taken by all of us, things would be a lot better.

An Alternative to the Suppression:

One thing I’ve learned about from listening to the radio and talking to some fellow survivors is the “new technology” ketamine or MMDA treatments. These types of interventions arguably use the reverse strategy to suppression that is available through incarceration and medication. I think they are beginning to provide alternative routes to healing that is appealing to some who have been harmed by incarceration and imposed psychotropic interventions. This route to healing which was suppressed in the sixties by the misuse of LSD in the counterculture, is being revitalized by people who responsibly micro-dose.

As I’ve listened to friends describe how this works for them. I must admit, I sometimes think of it is a strategy that can be done with or without chemical intervention. However, when the surrounding community expects suppression, hallucinogenic drugs give participants the permission to explore and lose their fear of psychosis. I have heard this helps normalize it and enables the exploration of meaning and self-understanding. Perhaps doing so helps them understand their conflicts and heal from the dilemmas that are beneath the surface. These then can be solved and great progress can be made.

I advocate letting people chose their route to recovery. I personally use psychotropics to help me function through abuse and chaos. Not all survivors need or are willing to do this and I think that is great. I think therapeutic hallucinogens are a valid way of responsibly addressing the problem. I don’t think one is superior to the other. I tend to resent notions that one recovery is superior to another.

From my perspective, recovery, like child-birth, is beautiful when it’s natural; but that may not be possible for everyone. Med free environments of the seventies like Soteria House worked for many and should not have been closed by the AMA, but they didn’t work for everyone. Med free environments are an alternative about which American propaganda program us to forget. We don’t walk around denigrating people whose mother’s used epidurals and had c-sections ranking our social structure accordingly.

Maybe we should! Our current system of rank is so in shambles, denigrating so many to homeless encampments!

Neocolonial Best Practices:

These days there are some new best practices that challenge the medicate and incarcerate model seem to come from European regimes that are built on vastly different norms. Open Dialogue and Hearing Voices Network support groups are examples of such potential best practices. One might argue they operate on superior notions of humanity than the libertarian democrazy that is currently assaulting American institutions. While also offering important alternatives to suppression, I aim to argue that mindlessly treating them as best practices that can be imported to distinct American regions can be problematic.

I call them neocolonial because there is still a need to vastly know the foundations of the local culture which includes the diaspora of migration to take the ideas that have worked elsewhere.

Indeed, many Americans have migrated from third world countries where social structures target neurodiversity in much less repressive manners than our medicalized way of addressing things. I ask: might it make sense to learn from those cultures as much as we learn from Europe. I think migrant communities offer a lifestyle that is extremely different and those cultures need to be understood and adjusted to before we impose Eurocentric practice on them. Particularly when we are working with those enduring the horrific repression of migration going on in libertarian America learning more about a person’s history is very important!

Factors that Complicate the Matter:

In America, different states and counties set up their instruments of suppression very differently! State laws develop vastly different norms in terms of length of conservatorship, intent of money-making industries, and the amount of resources that hurting families or communities have to spend.

It’s arguable that county hospitals are modeled after the needs of the prevailing ethos of the location. In other words, there may be gross generalizations that are made about the subject’s race, class, and support needs.

For example, I have heard it said our local psych ER is currently adjusting in the direction toward teaching homeless people to suppress their symptoms. This is because that is the dominant community norm as displacement is going on in Oakland is increasing struggles with mental health among the poor. ER workers may do their best but the structure is set elsewhere by people with other agendas responding perhaps to undisclosed libertarian agendas.

Supplant a person from a different class or race into this learning environment and there becomes significant potential for trauma for that person who essentially told: this is what you have to look forward to if you fail to suppress.

Considering Your Audience and Adjusting Your Practices:

If a person has experienced ten years of American institutionalization in the inner city there is a lot of hope in helping them! However, the order and emphasis of eclectic strategies may indeed be different than they are going to be when working with the College Kid who endures a first break.

Learning to work with each is so worthwhile. Why fight for the needs of one over the other? Setting up services according to researched, best practice narratives leaves an impression on young mental health workers and too many utilize the method it without being curious of the persons experiences that lie beneath the surface.

Why claim there is only one best practice strategy that works for all people. People who deal with psychosis have had very different life experiences and lived through different sectors of society!

For example, now we have the best practice, CBT for Psychosis that gets emphasized in early prevention programs. Let’s say a worker gets trained in CBT for Psychosis at a conference from an early prevention program, but is working with clients who have been institutionalized for ten years and live in tent encampments. It may be that the efforts to teach rational skills and reduce distorted thinking needs to be tweaked. Try taking rational entitlement to a board and care, state hospital, homeless shelter, or another institutionalized environment! In such setting there is a clear ethos of victim blaming and stigma that exist. I believe many is such setting will find rationality to be useless there. It may be there are other good strategies that might help.

One such practice I have developed in my eleven years of running groups amid urban institutionalization is what I call special message mindfulness. This involves becoming more aware of the experiences you’ve had that make you think about conspiracies and letting those experiences go by talking about them. While this won’t work for everyone, I have used it as a strategy for getting people to share their stories of psychosis openly.

In reality, I believe both CBT and Message Mindfulness strategies are valuable and may be needed at different times in different ways with different people.

Indeed, using experiences in group, I have started documenting a host of eclectic strategies in addition to mindfulness strategies. I’d consider such strategies to include spiritual, cultural, behavioral, and narrative wisdom.

Eclectic strategies are available for study here.

In fact, people who experience psychosis have endured different levels of abuse. Cognitive therapy may work for those with lower levels of dissociation and abuse, but other strategies might be needed or introduced first for people who cannot control their thoughts because of histories of dissociation and ongoing trauma.

Using Smart People to Adjust Eclectic Strategies:

In my limited experience navigating the podcast world, I learned about a woman out of Tacoma Washington who studied Open Dialogue in the Netherlands and implanted it into her system of care. I admire this kind of effort greatly, though I know very little about what she did or how to do it myself. I work primarily out of East Oakland and feel that integrating such concepts would be very different with the system and resources available to residents here.

Because I work primarily with older people who have lost their family support it has not been something I have explored. I’ve tended instead toward the Hearing Voices Network movement.

But to be clear, I would not want that person in Tacoma to teach me the principles of her system of care and hold me accountable to her fidelity measures in East Oakland. I think that concept is point blank ridiculous.

I think the survivor community needs to focus less on preserving the integrity of a foreign model, and more on creating an inclusive community across all social divides that explores the strength of the local culture and their local history and intervene in vastly different manners.

My Perception of Infighting that Persists

Among those of us who survive psychosis and try to set up support services, significant infighting can happen. Perhaps this happens because each believes their route to recovery is the way to go. We all can easily forget that we come from different social backgrounds. Perhaps other survivors do not experience this to the extent that I have. I get repeatedly attacked by other survivors because my views about what helps are different than their views.

When I first found out that other survivors exist, I presumed that I would finally find a home where I would be welcomed. While this does seem to happen for some, it certainly hasn’t worked that way for me. In fact, I have endured what I consider to be many attacks from other survivors.

This has been a shame for me. I also struggle with CPTSD and get very triggered when people flout their best practice or way of being. To someone like me, it really is already hard being out as a person with lived experience facing discrimination and slights from people who make projections upon me when they hear I have a psychiatric history. But the survivor community too has hurt me in ways that keep me withdrawn and writing.

They say time heals all wounds. They say lots of things. They still say research is necessary to deliver recovery.

I still say survivors and providers are diverse and require unique and eclectic methods. When I study my own recovery, I realize I utilized many of the strategies referenced here instead of trusting the psychiatric incarceration and medication that was offered in the system.

 

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The Niche that Doesn’t Seem to Exist

Practice Updates:

Have you ever felt that there is no way forward that doesn’t sell out your heart and soul?

I believe the clinic I have worked for over the last fifteen years is fixing to be shut down. I am facing a crossroads. I have spent years developing skills that seek to reconstruct a culture of psychosis amid people who are institutionalized. I believe I have good therapy skills and want to branch out an be more independent from the bloody system.

I may have a number of job interviews coming up yet, wonder if can I get hired self-identifying with lived experience with psychosis? Furthermore, most paths forward seem to include insurance panels and group practices that seek people who can work with depression and anxiety. It feels like a niche of psychosis is only for pioneers.Without belonging to a group practice or focusing on brief interventions, it may be hard to get on insurance panels.

One thing I have never wanted to do was leave behind people who suffer from psychosis. It has never seemed fair that people train and fail to acculturate to people with psychosis and then move on to a paying class. Unless I open up a private practice, it seems unlikely that I will be able to develop my niche. That means paying for health insurance and taking a blind leap of faith and perhaps a per diem job. Gulp!

Blog Updates:

Currently the dilemma of finding work has interrupted my efforts on the blog this month. I have only written three blogs and had one podcast interview since my last update. That said,

In the process of getting that post edited, I was given a perspective that may affect my work. I realize that I have two voices. One is professional and that is what Mad in America wants me to build on. I also have an authentic and creative voice that is present in my memoir and that I seek to reserve for my narrative essays, which are more creative in nature.

For a long time, I wanted to merge those voices. I wanted to write a therapy book that was full of one-line zingers and maintain a snappy outsider perspective. I’d find myself quoting rappers to teach my concepts rather than other therapists.

When the Mad in America editor suggested that my voice was me becoming retraumatized when I refused to stop letting it rip, it let me know a little more about my audience when it comes to speaking to other providers or family members. I realize I have to develop the professional voice in order to be heard. My creative writing is where I can use my authentic voice and let out the part of me that is an artist.

I guess it is a good time to work on that professional voice as I am preparing to follow my dream and potentially open a private practice. My next projects may need to be more professional. I do have to say, I am currently writing a creative essay and am enjoying it. It will show up on my blog in future months. Perhaps I may try to publish it in journals first.

Speaking Updates:

I also have some upcoming opportunities to present my training.to a local clinic over the next two weeks.

Additionally, I will be co-facilitating the Hearing Voices Network family group starting on Monday this week.

Finally, in February I will have the opportunity to do a reading of my memoir and other writing at a book store. So, I hope there will be more opportunities to connect with you very soon!!!

So, I am hoping my followers will stay close over the next months as I transition to marketing efforts for the potential of a private practice. Transitions are stressful!!

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Healers, Imposing Your Reality on People Who Experience Psychosis is Part of the Problem!

Therapists and peer supporters learn not to impose their beliefs on the people they help as part of their cultural competence training. Why, then, do so many people who suffer from psychosis flagrantly have beliefs imposed on them in treatment?

A huge part of knowing how to provide treatment that does not impose beliefs involves understanding and acknowledging the extent to which beliefs are being systemically imposed and countering with an oasis of techniques that counter that tendency. If you stick with me through this you will attain a sense of what it feels like to have reality imposed upon you and the need for skilled treatment providers who know how to recognize and counter this.

Many of us who endure treatment in the mental health system develop refined radars that detect when beliefs are being imposed. When supporters do this, they may immediately link themselves back to the system of involuntary care that can be equated with detainment, involuntary medication, and a fundamental loss of human rights.

Perhaps the tendency to impose beliefs stems from the misguided cultural norm that expects people in psychosis to suppress the experiences that lead to their immediate crisis. The concept that involuntary ideas can be changed by physical punishment and containment may work immediately but is fundamentally flawed.

The fact is that this often is the only help available to families is an assault on people who experience psychosis. As supportive healers, it is essential to offer places where experiences are honored and explored with coping strategies in mind. I believe the way to do this is to build a relationship that does not impose beliefs. However, as you will learn, this may require working against the grain and a willingness to explore those experiences, even though everyone else isn’t.

Imposing Beliefs Statistically Extends Periods of Suffering:

I got better from two-years of continuous psychosis. The fact that I was expected to suppress my psychosis through punishment prevented me from learning some very simple lessons that could have saved me a lot of grief. All I needed was someone to teach me about the rules and regulations of the black market. I learned those lesson from trial and error without guidance or support. The sense of punishment was unrelenting and I had to utilize all my strengths and privileges to endure.

Although negative, statistics in E. Fuller Torrey;s book, Surviving Schizophrenia, suggest that sixty-five percent of people learn to suppress behavior and thrive like I have, they also suggest that half of us who do endure ten years of rocky and traumatic experiences and loss. Many of us fall into periods of extreme poverty that makes social rehab very challenging.

Usually, treatment starts with experiences of involuntary hospitalization during which victims are held until they start to suppress. This can seem like a nightmare for many of us who already have trauma and struggle to suppress. It is my intention to put a face to this struggle and motivate healers towards establishing non punitive places where experiences associated with psychosis can be explored and mindfully expressed.

Imposing Beliefs via Containing Behavior Results in Resistance to Treatment:

The message in the local public psychiatric emergency room is, “you can’t beat us. You must contain your behavior.” If you object and cannot control your behavior involuntary medication may be used and the incarceration is extended. Other counties and states throughout the country set up distinct strategies to impose and contain. In Montana, I was held for three months and spent the first two weeks locked up on the ward. A month of that experience involved exposure to warehouse conditions which are very degrading to one’s self esteem. Being treated in that way seemed to speak to me that was what was inevitable and that there was no use trying.

Many people who are released from this situation will not want to follow up with therapy because injustices witnessed during incarceration. It can take years of decline and high degrees of suffering before many suffers willingly accept treatment.

This is often blamed on a nonexistent disease (instead of a neurodevelopmental difference as science suggests) and I assure you there is very little reflection on the process within social institutions. For many who work in such contexts, it often isn’t clear whether the goal is social rehabilitation and recovery or to fuel the mental health industry with passive contained smokers and coffee drinkers who will stay out of the way.

While experienced patients may learn to utilize a given hospital and system to contain themselves or get a break from the stress of being on the streets, the situation is not likely to springboard social rehab efforts in the community. The set up is more likely to reinforce isolation rather than rehabilitation and for many this may decrease the idea that therapeutic encounters can help.

Squandering of Personal Resources and Trauma

Often the support system, if there still is one, is more eager to get the recipient care than the sufferer (post hospitalization) trusts the thought of therapy. Many of us who suffer fear stereotypes associated with our diagnosis. Sometimes, our family may have stronger beliefs in our worthlessness based on stereotypes, than we have in ourselves. If we fear having schizophrenia and being subjected to warehousing, many of us will do everything we can to stay free utilizing our personal resources and avoiding therapy.

Perhaps if the sufferer is not informed of the ill effects of poverty and public warehousing, they may internalize the efforts of the institutions to turn people into contained, powerless compliant cash cows. I was a social worker and knew well the ill effects of being on social security and warehoused. I refused to believe that I needed warehousing and that I couldn’t work.

Currently, if youthful suffers are lucky, they may get discharged back to their family which may not necessarily be part of the problem. Some families can learn how to continue to be a support to things they don’t understand, and some don’t change their minds so easily. For some, early prevention programs help avoid immediate decline into board and care home environments.

When I finally got released from the hospital, I was transient and moved around trying to find work. This added trauma and fear of permanent homelessness as my own cash dwindled. I felt followed and threatened on a daily basis when I ran out of my medication. My perception became populated with threats and symbols. When my resources were getting low and I was unsure of my ability to hold a professional job, I was forced to get help from my family.

Many sufferers are better at surviving on the road or staying independent. They may utilize drugs, alcohol, associated peer connections, and crime or crime syndicates to tolerate these experiences. Currently in Oakland, many are getting into community encampments. I have met many who were resourceful enough to travel. Many do not have families with resources available to them like I had. Many, like me, may have good reasons for not wanting to return to their families.

The Reality of Economic Sanctions Imposed on People with Psychosis:

Released from the hospital, people in psychosis face the high cost of therapy. Specialists for psychosis are few and far in between. The standard of care among many mainstream therapists is to refuse to work with psychosis and refer back to the hospital. A person may need to get on benefits that will pay for treatment if a therapist is even willing to consider it.

Poor prognosis presumptions result in many sufferers being encouraged to go on social security. Consider the several year process of getting on social security. Unstructured time or adjustment to free programs that may expose the participant to sufferers who are impacted by poverty and years of institutionalization. This can be new for some of us. Though this does not have to be a negative experience, to many it feels like it. To many it is just another punishment or poor prognosis reality. Again, early prevention program may fill the void for some.

High cost of therapy is often coupled by disparity in the quality of facility. In the hospital where I work, for example, the facility is an old psychiatric back ward with bubbled widows still intact. While the facilities for most physical conditions are very modern, investment in cleaning services is clearly lower in the historical part of the hospital. I observed this in other programs as well.

If the person is so unlucky as to land in a board and care home or shelter, they might be forced to be out of the house all day and required to attend program. People who are thus subjugated may feel as if they are owned and must comply for others to get paid middle-class salaries. These things are often noticed by participants and they are upsetting. They may suffer just from facing this alternative. These realities may function as economic sanctions that teaches people to underestimate their value to society.

The Devil is in the Details:

Every journey that involves madness is difficult. The details of what one goes through need to be considered. I believe the survivors perspective is important. Thus, I share my perspective on what happened to me to demonstrate how economic sanctions may play out.

When I first went to therapy three months after I was released from the hospital, I tape recorded the interview because I was so afraid that talking at all would get me returned to the hospital. The only reason I went was that it was a requirement for me to get support from my family.

While some part of me knew I needed help, the way I was financially controlled remains unforgettable. I thought my family was the mafia so they arranged to get me a job at an Italian Delicatessen with a twenty mile a day bike ride and two additional hours riding the rails to work. All this effort was needed for a nine-dollar-an-hour job. It has taken me years and covert conversations with family members to unpack and understand the web of relationships that imposed such a reality on me.

Worse, to get financial help with rent, I had to spend $250 a week on imposed therapy. The bike ride and rail ride to therapy was longer than the ride to work. I lived this way for six months using my free time to unsuccessfully get hired elsewhere until my mother relented and gave me three thousand dollars to enable me to purchase a clunker automobile. She defied my father to do this and still feels she made a mistake.

If the therapist had referred me to food stamps and made the therapy voluntary, I might not still suffer the way I do. However, the therapist insisted that the situation was fair and refused to validate or acknowledge the hardship I endured. “I believe you are working hard, but believe me working at a Deli is not so hard. You are giving your power away to those teenage kids. They are not so bad, really. You are letting them bully you!”

By the time I finally left this therapeutic relationship two years later tens of thousands of dollars later, I knew better than to contest the therapist. She said she was not a greedy capitalist. She told me not to become a wounded healer. She told me that in reality I hadn’t been close to homelessness.

I agreed that I was not really hungry and strapped for cash during this process. I concealed all the night terrors and peeing the bed at night during the process. Of course, I lied! I worked until I got my Marriage and Family Therapy License and I wrote an award-winning book about my experience.

I have become a wounded healer! I use insurance rather than demand cash for my services. At least I am not a pretender.

But still, my life is limited due to affects of trauma and mistrust.

Using Therapy Techniques that Don’t Impose Reality!

I think it is important for healers to halt the process of imposing reality upon sufferers and give them choices and options as to how to manage their situations. Instead of siding with forced treatment and using this to impose your values and ideas on the vulnerable individual, listen to the story of what they went through to get to you. Give them resources that give them choices about whether they want to work with you.

Instead of telling the sufferer what to do and what is safe, be curious about what they are experiencing that causes them distress or delight. Know that real important experiences are behind the alternate reality that they are facing. Know that alternate reality has meaning and purpose that can be understood and supported. Alternate realities may be profoundly different from the world you understand, but be brave and curious. If your conduct becomes part of the problem be curious and learn more about what you are doing.

Don’t use the threat of hospitalization to silence or disrupt behavior associated with alternative experience. Instead, go down the rabbit hole with the sufferer with a road map of coping strategies. Know what your doing if you are going to make coping strategy suggestions. If you don’t know what your doing, it’s okay, admit it. Problems with voices and alternate realities are hard. Just being there without imposing reality will really help. Also, it is usually appreciated if you puzzle through the muck to the best of your ability.

Consider that dangerous and scary experiences are not going to be openly shared with you if you are going to laugh and call them crazy. I would not tell my therapist real experiences that were disturbing because she wouldn’t take my less-disturbing experiences seriously. What ensued was entirely unhelpful to me. It was a total thorn in my side.

I concealed as much as I could and she had absolutely no understanding. Then, when I did things that could have got me killed, like call the FBI, she threatened me with what seemed to be hospitalization instead of understanding and exploring the experiences that led me to do so. That is an example of what happens when treatment is imposed!

A Challenge to the Status Quo Best Practice:

Throughout I have referenced the existence of early prevention programs. Locally and nationally they usually utilize a best practice called CBT for Psychosis.

I’d like to argue that when the best practice for psychosis, CBT for psychosis, allows healers to separate themselves from the beliefs of the client, it makes the process of safe connection much harder. This is a boundary and policy that makes it harder for recipients of treatment to trust because it reinforces the idea that reality may be imposed. Especially, if the helper turns and refers them back to the meatgrinder of psychiatric inpatient to send them a message, it can add to trauma.

I am not saying that challenging irrational thinking cannot be helpful at times. However, not everyone who is abused can control their thoughts. Experiences like disassociation and hypervigilance often interfere with cognition control. Let those who can learn use cognitive therapy use it, but don’t come with a cookie cutter mentality. You may help some, but don’t presume that those who you can’t help aren’t reachable. Consider learning additional strategies.

I utilize broader strategies that include mindfulness strategies, curious inquiry about psychosis as a culture, medication, positive psychology, trauma informed reprocessing, behavioral strategies in addition to cognitive strategies. I believe broader strategies are needed and will leave far fewer people behind. There is a lot that can happen when reality isn’t imposed.

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Seven Strategies to Use that Help Avoid Retraumatization While Working with Psychosis:

The Mainstream Worry:

Stories related to psychosis can be intense and lead to traumatic recall when a sufferer retells them and does not feel contained or believed within the relationship. Perhaps this is the reason many therapists, family members, and psychiatric wards learn to shut down the telling of the story.

Shutting down stories protects the sufferer from unnecessarily reliving the experience and going through the distress again. Perhaps this is done to avoid a fight or yet another power struggle over reality. It certainly can seem like a good rule of thumb. Activating trauma that you can not stand to consider is a bad idea, right?

Imagine being a person and having the whole mental health system repeatedly stay on the same page. Suddenly all agree not to let you tell your story as a boundary. This strategy is employed over and over again despite the fact that thirty-five percent of recipients of this kind of care become progressively more isolated and distressed over time.

Perhaps no one in the system imagines what it is like to experience systemic indifference to potentially traumatic material. Indeed, is it really so impossible to believe that these experiences are real and there for a purpose? Is it really so hard to believe that the person in psychosis may have some perceptions that are spot on accurate? Not acknowledging them can be cause for further withdrawal and do further damage to the already ailing self-esteem and sense of hopelessness.

Staying on the same page as everybody else may teach a person to suppress their experiences. Symptom suppression can improve objective behavior and decrease social attacks and ridicule. However, I also believe symptom suppression is the wrong tact for many who isolate and withdraw from social functioning. Is it not possible to include spaces and relationships in which experiences can be dealt with in mindful manners?

I am not saying that such experiences cannot lead to faulty accusations that can be hurtful, they most certainly can. But if they can be believed by a few supporters to have profound, political, psychological, scientific traumatic, spiritual, and artistic meaning, perhaps outcomes could be better.

A New Strategy with Survivor Led Groups:

I have come to strongly believe that shutting down stories related to psychosis is the wrong thing to do. I believe this so strongly that I have come out as a therapist with lived experience with madness. I regularly share my experiences in group therapy to facilitate the telling of more stories and group reflection.

I credit the hearing voices network for prompting me to take this plunge. Word of survivor-led groups prompting remarkably different results prompted me to start a curriculum for professional groups. In the curriculum which I have turned into a training and a group therapy guide, I deconstruct what psychosis is into solvable components.

It’s true there are times I wonder if coming out mad was the best career decision. I have had to bravely admit my vulnerabilities which sometimes seem to hurt my credibility. And yet I find that being an artfully unreliable narrator helps guide people to their own truth more effectively. I feel I get better results having taken the plunge.

Being out has helped me exponentially in creating specialized care for sufferers. As a result, I have a number of suggestions for how to encourage the telling of stories without re-traumatizing sufferers in group and in individual encounters. Many of these suggestions are based on replicating realities that happen in survivor-led groups.

#1 Eradicating Stigma and Grounding Participants:

Many supporters actually believe that people who experience psychosis are fragile. It is one of the three most dominant stigmas about mental health challenges according to Patrick Corrigan’s research. As a professional, I have heard this said so many times and I am convinced that my colleagues say this because they don’t know what “psychosis” feels like. At times, simply reversing this this stigma can help ground someone in psychosis and reminding them about how tough they are to be handling such real trauma.

There are other grounding techniques that I have utilized when I sense the group is starting to feel traumatized. Often, acknowledging the trauma in the room and allowing the groups to socialize and focusing on related movies, music, or art can help. If group members initiate this process, it is good to compliment and acknowledge what they are doing as being helpful. Instead of controlling the group and staying on course, collaborating and enhancing these efforts is advisable.

#2 Believing that Psychosis is Happening for a Reason and Holds Truths:

I already said this. but it stands to be further emphasized.

I believe that if classifying experiences that trigger psychosis as an illness can re-traumatize many, finding value in those experiences will help ground many sufferers in distress. Thus, if the supporter believes they will be traumatized this outcome will likely come true. Instead, if the helper meets the content of their experiences with intrigue and interest—if reality testing does not rule the day—the sufferer may open up and express themselves, which is an important first step.

Often the survivor leader is excited to learn that others relate to them and has a high level of hope that others can achieve wellness in spite of disturbing material. Thus, getting naturally excited when a person is sharing details and having strong beliefs about recovery being possible helps deepen the threshold for what others can bear.

Additionally, studying different causation frameworks that sufferers hold give participants a basis for understanding how experiences that trigger psychosis are possible.

As I suggested earlier, I believe that there are six styles of causation frameworks that operate in different ways at different times. Sometimes the experiences may be caused for political, psychological, traumatic, scientific, spiritual or artistic reasons.

Knowing which framework explains a given trigger is often impossible! However, I believe the more types of frameworks the sufferer uses to explain the triggers, the more likely that the sufferer will be able to navigate the trigger in a functional manner. Positive knowledge about all explanations helps one find the value of each experience

The more explanations the helper learns, the better they can help make valuable meaning of these disturbing experiences. Giving up and calling the experiences meaningless does not help.

When there is a purpose for suffering it is far more helpful.

#3 Sharing Your Own Experiences with Psychosis

One of the huge benefits of survivor led groups is that the leader also shares their own experience with psychosis. This opens people up to telling their story because it defies the dysfunctional boundary that exists between clinicians and patients, the presumption that the clinician is well and the patient needs to learn wellness from them because they know better.

Research suggests that we are different in a neurodevelopmental fashion. So how can learning from well people who don’t see us as equal really help?

Additionally, when a survivor leads the group and discloses their own experience it sets the stage for more sharing.

One reason I believe this works is that if group members are free to judge the leader as being delusional, (the “D” word) they get the chance to do some projective identification testing. If they do judge the leader as being delusional and see it doesn’t bother the leader, they will become more emboldened to take the same risks and withstand others who may try to reality check them.

Another reason self-disclosure in survivor-led groups works is because many in the group will not be in the place to test. Instead many will believe the leader and support them because that is the way they want to be treated if they talk. Therefore, the leader who is prepared to believe some pretty outrageous stuff in a reciprocal manner, it is generally appreciated by many in the group.

Whatever place the group participant may be in, the tendency is to become compelled to share. Sharing becomes like an admission that helps the participant let go of the traumatically reinforced material.

#4 Spotting and Sharing Related Experiences to Exude Cultural Competence:

Perhaps many workers in the mental health system might suggest they can’t share their experiences with psychosis because they haven’t had them. Though I agree that it can be harder to relate to psychosis material if you haven’t had those experiences of being in a crisis, I think workers likely have had some experiences (intuitions, dreams, interpersonal impressions to name a few) that can trigger alternate realities. If they learn to identify them and articulate them and share related thinking, it would be helpful for the sufferers.

If a worker sits in group and understands the experiences that trigger psychosis, they will probably learn to be able to relate. Additionally, being able to relate normalizes psychosis experiences makes it safer to disclose without feeling like others don’t believe you and don’t care. I have created a definition of psychosis includes consideration for how things like dreams, interpersonal interactions, and intuitions can trigger alternative realities. I think workers can learn to relate using those common experiences and learn to join the conversation.

I think this is a measure of cultural competence. If you can see serendipitous events and imagine thoughts that may come up from them, why not share those with the sufferer. Why not think about how you might explain those experiences in creative manners. Doing so isn’t going to hurt you. It is a sign of wellness and empathy.

#5 Knowing When the Story is Really There to Test You:

It is important to know when a sufferer is simply trying to establish her or his right to tell the story. In the past, sufferers may have been interrupted, they may just want to establish their right to tell the story. Some will tell fragmented stories to see if they can get away with it and keep your interest and concern. I have been known to get in there and fish for special message experiences to demonstrate that I am there with them. However, it can be important to notice when this isn’t wanted and just let the person tell their story without being judged for doing so.

In many cases the traumatic response may happen when the test has failed yet again. Indeed, I would be grateful for the day when getting caught up in the fact that a person’s psychosis experiences is leading to faulty accusations is seen as a mistake. Perhaps it is possible for the leader to make a few faulty accusations themselves even if they know they may be false. This helps normalize and permit those experiences and paradoxically challenges the sufferer to question themselves.

This is not to say that there is not a time to challenge a faulty accusation made against you, there is a point where this can be effective. But first you have got to repeatedly pass the tests. And acknowledging that you don’t understand everything about yourself and that they may be seeing something you are not aware of can help put off the challenge until the test is passed.

#6 Bringing Other People or Situations into the Discussion;

If I am afraid that a person is going getting triggered by the psychosis story because the group is inattentive or absent, I may try interrupting and identifying a triggering experience the participant has referenced and ask other group members if they can relate to the experience. If I am not in group, I may think of a similar experience I have heard before and share that experience to prove that the person is not alone. Usually, at least, I can relate to the triggering experience and share a story. This not only prevents the participant from feeling quite so alienated it reminds them that others can relate and deepens the support in the room.

Likewise, if I am able to listen and discern some conspiracy ideas that might explain some of the triggering experiences and I fear re-traumatization, I may propose that the group talk about that particular brand of conspiracy and how it really is possible. Again, this may help the participant feel like they are not alone. Group conspiracy talk is another way to deepen the threshold of what the group can tolerate and invite stories.

With other people relating and participating, the person telling the story is less likely to be re-traumatized and feel more supported. Then, it is a great idea to return to the story and hear it out intensely without having need for reality tests

#7 Addressing the Fact that You May be Recording What is Said:

In many countries where the hearing voices network has flourished, like England, the Netherlands, and New Zealand, socialized medicine enable support groups to be funded outside the system where there is no need for clinical notes. This also helps create a sense of safety that invites disclosure.

Indeed, if group records are going to be taken by the facilitator for reimbursement purposes that needs to be addressed in the room identifying the potential for conspiracy.

Letting the participants know what I believe about the notes and the potential that they can be used in an abusive manner without my knowledge is a strategy I often employ. I point to computer screens and light fixtures and suggest that they can put cameras down peoples’ colons, they can certainly bug the room without my ability to protect the group participants.

When I document, I also note that I have used my lived experience to crack open stories. I tell participants that I do that. I think it is ideal when these issues can be avoided, but I also think it is possible to address them if you have to bill in the system.

Specialized Care is Necessary:

I believe that utilizing these and other well documented suggestions that come out of the hearing voices movement can help clinicians grow and come to a point they can listen to stories and contain them just like survivors can. I think that people who chose to specialize in this type of care need opportunities to grow and learn to contain such stories and that survivors need opportunities to become specialists. Specialized care is most certainly needed.

The post Seven Strategies to Use that Help Avoid Retraumatization While Working with Psychosis: appeared first on Working through Psychosis.

Baltimore is Talking Live!

https://www.blogtalkradio.com/bmorere...

 

“Got to Keep the Devil Way Down in the Hole!”

Every week, Rev. Dr. Q and co-host, Aaron Green broadcast from the city of the hit TV series, The Wire. I was honored this week to be invited to discuss my book, story, and mental health. Click on the picture to visit their broadcast and hear our discussion.

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