When the IFS trainer suggested that that we all may have been in training spaces that weren’t safe, I needed to hear that. And then, she also extended a welcome to neurodivergent people in this work. This too was important for me to hear, as I have attracted three neurodevelopmental labels in my lifetime. On day one of this sixteen-week course, I hoped that this popular methodology, Internal Family Systems, might be the answer to addressing my own complex trauma. Being in a safe place that is open to neurodivergent people seemed like an important place to start.

I have found other trauma-focused psychotherapies, like eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) and emotional freedom techniques (EFT) very hard to use. I struggled to feel enough to successfully work with either modality. EFT, or tapping on energy meridians, didn’t help me feel any better when I was numb and not feeling anything at all. Likewise, EMDR or using dual attention stimulus while reviewing my own early traumatic events, rendered me in a void at first, and as I worked with it more it started to feel like being inside my head during a hike. Because I don’t experience special healing from either of these modalities it is hard to use these practices on other people with promise and optimism.

I had already taken several PESI courses on IFS and thought I had a pretty good idea of IFS jargon and concepts.

IFS, created by Dick Schwartz, is an approach to understanding the human psyche that reasons that one individual has multiple parts. The impact of trauma is that it drives us away from having the unifying principle of Self that can lead our parts with the wisdom of all our experiences to heal and work together in a healthy existence. When traumatic events (known in IFS as “burdens”) exist in our past, younger “protector” parts come out and dominate our consciousness, taking on extreme roles and fighting with each other to cover up what happened. Being led by the principle of Self enables us to heal our burdens and let our protector parts to live in harmony with each other within our awareness.

The appeal of parts work for me is that it views problems as rooted in things that happen to us instead of some unfounded brain pathology that can only be reversed by adjusting neurotransmitters. Thus, instead of talking about clinical depression we talk more specifically about the part that is struggling. In IFS we get curious about not only what is wrong with a part or problem, but also how it works for us. Thus, when a part shows up that is struggling with motivation and feels negative, we curiously explore the part and as we describe it and explore its history, we find that we stop “blending” with it. In effect our Self, along with the Self-energy of the therapist, comes out and helps us understand it.

In IFS, there are three types of parts: managers; firefighters; and exiles. Managers are socially conscious and try to operate in acceptable ways to hide the effects of our pains and shame. Firefighters are more reactionary and do things that aren’t socially acceptable to ward off the pain and keep the exiles from coming out. Exiles hold the pain and the memory of distressing events. Understanding the nature of these parts becomes very important to get to the point where we can unburden the pain of exiles so that the Self can lead our parts in a healthy manner.

My Experience with The Course:

As I began this latest IFSCA course, I could sense that my experience of doing IFS was different than that of my cohorts. They were more loyal to the model. When they began using IFS, they seemed to have visual or auditory experiences that I didn’t have, which seemingly allowed them connect to their parts. Indeed, having to practice being a vulnerable client—as is often the case in these training courses—quickly became so uncomfortable that I reached out to an IFS therapist who my insurance would cover to work with on my own.

In the past, I was punished by the state for purportedly hearing voices, when I didn’t realize I might be hearing very infrequent auditory illusions. How ironic it now felt in the group to be feeling outcasted for not being able to hear the voices of my parts. I learned that I had to use thinking parts to provide the answers to the questions because my parts didn’t speak directly for me.

With more practice coupled with individual therapy, I learned that with IFS one has to be in a trance-like state that I just wasn’t able to get into. This became very frustrating and I felt myself ruminating over the fact that I was different from the others in the group. It was a familiar rabbit hole that left me spinning and affected my mood and functioning.  I became concerned that the reason I was unable to hear from my parts was because I take antipsychotic medication. I continued to try to do the best I could, but the group was not proving to be a safe place for me. It was a place where I did not fit.

Repeatedly, I was directed to wait and hear from my parts and not let my thinking parts get in the way. One trainer suggested that I showed signs of having very big trauma in my background and that I couldn’t trust myself or my peers. While a part of me felt seen, another part of me felt uncomfortable with this. I have tended to be okay with trusting myself, it is other people I simply cannot trust. Where was this trainer getting this understanding of me from?

I noticed that after being consulted this way, my functioning in the course went down. Every four weeks we had sessions devoted to asking the trainer questions. During one of these sessions, I found myself less able to be attentive to her jargonized explanations. This left me in a tailspin. I found myself feeling bad about myself. This reminded me of being diagnosed with schizophrenia and feeling pathologized to function less and less.

I remembered how I kept the faith and kept working to overcome this. Thus, I went back and watched the recordings of the sessions, did the readings, and got a better understanding of the materials. I got a grip and unblended from the part of me that was convinced that there was something wrong with me because I was incarcerated in a state hospital for three months.

Eventually, approximately two-thirds of the way through the course, I started coaching my cohorts that they had to deal with my thinking parts. Work with my therapist went a bit better because she let me use my thinking parts. Still, as I listened to the complex descriptions of IFS concepts in the training sessions, I couldn’t understand what it felt like to experience the world in this way.

For example, updating the parts was never something I could do because my parts didn’t communicate with me. I found the technique to work for others to enhance self-energy and help protector parts trust and build rapport with the Self. But when others tried to use the technique on me, I wanted to say please don’t ask me those questions because I don’t know the answers. Likewise, in a trance with the pressure on to provide answers, I could not tell if I was blended or unblended so it was hard to know what worked at un-blending from a negative state or part. Mostly I was just blank. I dissociated which is a common firefighter response. I saw others update and unblend from their parts, but I couldn’t.

Meanwhile, I could go and tell my stories about traumatic things that happened to me anytime. I don’t need permission from my protector parts to do so. See, I have practiced telling stories as a keynote speaker. More frequently I have practiced sharing my stories in supportive groups I offer to others who experience psychosis. Furthermore, I have written a memoir to try to undo the sting of all the stigma I experience. I have faced a lot of rejection and weird energies from people who hear about my mental health; and I also wish they would open their ears and listen to the stories I uncover because there are so many valuable lessons to learn from them.

Lessons Learned and Moving Forward:

One thing that I have learned from working with people who experience psychosis or what I prefer to call special messages is that therapy works best when you meet the person where they are regardless of their disabilities or differences. And because of that, I struggle as a therapist to push people into a trance-like state when I can’t deal with going there myself. I found that being in this training made me afraid of trying to go inside because so often when I do, I block and come up empty. This aversion gets in the way of me understanding my parts and how to heal the exile parts that hold the pain.

Now that the course is over, I am going to continue learning IFS with my therapist and see if I can get to the point where I can get in contact with my exile parts and relieve burdens. As a therapist, I want to be able to work with other people’s parts and use the skills I learned, but feel I still have some personal learning to do before I alter my day-to-day practice.

For me feeling different or not up to snuff has a long history. I recognize that trying to do IFS work in the course caused me to blend with this part. The lead trainer named her parts, like her anxiety, and was able to stay in Self. I, unlike her, name my parts but they linger and stick around. In the training sessions, not only did they stick around; they got reinforced and that did not feel safe.

At the end of the training, I took what I consider to be a courageous step to publicly ask if the fact that I take antipsychotic medications may deflate my ability to be in a trance like state. It is also possible that my lack of trust for professionals is so profound that I just can’t do the work in front of them. When the question stumped the trainer, I went through another tailspin feeling insecure about the fact that I had let people know that I had a history of madness.

The course suggested that we keep in contact with our cohorts and, somehow, I highly doubted anyone would want to keep in contact with me. Stumping the trainer felt very awkward to me and reinforced that it is not safe to deal with madness in public spaces.

Even though the trainer had bent over backwards to include neurodivergence and taught us to meet people where they are at, she was unable to deliver safety when there are mechanisms of oppression that are beyond her control. As is often the case, we therapists often think we are safe, when a lot of times we need to take the time to prove it. And sometimes it is impossible to make someone safe in certain contexts depending on what they’ve been through.

I do believe I can benefit from the non-pathologizing approach to healing that IFS promotes and that I can teach others like me who have been institutionalized and take medicine to unblend from warring protective parts. Even if I do not get clear communication from my parts, I know they my parts are there and that I can learn to understand them.

I think I may be able to benefit even if my parts never answer. Nonetheless, my struggles to feel safe lead to an interesting set of questions in my mind:

• Do medications make it harder to heal from trauma within these new modalities?
• Do episodes of institutionalization mixed with ongoing stigma make it that much harder to develop trust so that trauma work cannot be done?
• Does the IFS community need to do more outreach to include the mad community?

Indeed, in learning the answer to these questions I will have to practice and see what I can learn. I doubt there will be books that will give me an answer to them. Much as it was for me coming back from the schizophrenia diagnosis, I will have to push my limits and defy what doubters say to get answers to these questions.

I do believe the course was a good starting point to enable me to work on my complex trauma. However, I felt extremely comforted when I told a recovery friend about stumping the trainer with my question about madness. He complimented me for my self-advocacy and said maybe my question would help the trainers be more prepared in the future. Viewing my efforts in the positive manner that they were intended helped me recapture my dignity and respect. Indeed, my manager parts—the protector parts that are concerned about being socially accepted—felt they would be interpreted as social-suicide.

The post A Mad Perspective on IFS Training appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

I am a white male from families that mostly owned property or had social power. I have to say one of the most meaningful projects of my life has been to overcome my narcissistic background.

I once had a shrink that told me that my “paranoia” was like reverse narcissism. I really wasn’t as bad as I thought I was.

At the time, I was working twelve-hour days of physical labor, (four hours of it was a sweaty bike commute.)  I was bringing home 900$ a month and paying $955 dollars a month in rent. I was coming back from a psychiatric hospitalization and battling housing insecurity with some financial help. I had many internalized parts that judged myself in narcissistic manners. These parts were reinforced by the attitudes of the few people I was in contact with at the time including the shrink.

The problem was that just about everyone I knew actually judged me worse than I judged myself. Within five minutes of talking to me they presumed I was delusional. To me that meant I was schizophrenic and that I would spend the rest of my life in hospitals. To many it meant I was no longer friend material.

Now over twenty years later, I feel like I am fighting narcissism and slander in most communities with which I come into contact. The only community that I don’t feel that way about is the community that subjects themselves to psychiatric treatment in the hospital where I work. In other communities I feel ostracized.

One might think a person like me could find social comfort via affiliating with communities that stand in resistance to narcissistic abuse. What I find is that the power structure of some of these communities often excludes me. Sometimes I feel excluded for good reasons, and sometimes I feel excluded for bad ones.

I tend to view power in society as narcissistic and unjust. Ultimately, I choose to think all these styles of narcissism I have endured are here to help me overcome my own sense of narcissism. I have learned to lean on a higher power to ease my desperate moments. I remember that the privilege I was raised in was the result of abuse of others. I choose to continue to learn ways that narcissism is wrong.

Today I intend to identify seven styles of narcissism that have tended to lead to abuse in my journey. In many people’s eyes, these styles vanish with the use of a label that explains all that I have gone through as being a schizophrenic medical condition.

I write imagining that the styles of narcissism I identify are such that others might relate to in a variety of ways. Each style is something that can turn chronically normal caring people into judgmental and exploitive narcissists.

I come from a culture that has used genocide and slavery to advance its power so it is number one. It’s arguable that this gives our citizens a natural tendency to think they are better than others. We always hear about American casualties in armed conflicts.

It strikes me that this is important now that narcistic abuse and gaslighting is starting to be a focus of psychotherapy practice. I hope to use aspects of my personal journey to help challenge narcissistic judgements and decrease the things that divide us.

Style Number 1:  Exploitation Resulting from Unrealized Sexual Abuse:

Somehow, I developed a tendency to be hypervigilant regarding sexual intentions of others and to dissociate when things get uncomfortable. Since an early age, I remember having distressing feelings that I do not understand. I believe that in my case this has resulted in complex trauma or interpersonal struggles with others.

My teacher in kindergarten observed that I didn’t do well socially.

Back when I took baths with my sister I would play with my penis and ignore my mom’s nagging that I needed to stop. One time, exasperated that I would not listen to her, she sketched me with my hand in my crotch.  This was effective in getting me to stop but also resulted in shame.

I shunned all things associated with masturbation at an early age. I used to explain this to other kids on the playground, unaware that there was anything unusual about this.

Latency was a very serious thing. I remember vowing to my best friend in second grade that I would never to have a girlfriend.

In the next year or so I was coerced into taking a bath with a family friend’s daughter and when I was groped. I dissociated and ended up eating a moth ball necessitating poison control to be called. This was a detail I never remembered until I was writing my memoir in my mid-forties. I showered in my shorts for a year after the incident with the family friend without ever understanding why.

During my first year at sleep away camp at age eleven, I was terrified by the expectation that we would be okay with skinny dipping.

In sixth grade I refused to dance with girls and repeated things my mother told me about sixth graders not being old enough to dance with each other.

Being different in this way led to a lot of teasing and shame. Not only is the act of sexual abuse narcissistic, but the social response to people who are easily shamed is also.

I now believe that I was sexually abused by a family friend at age three. Not remembering this made latency and the trouble I got into with my mother a very serious thing.

My father had an affair and eventually divorced my mother when I was fifteen. My mother was very hurt and rebelled by having polyamorous relations with other men. Thus, when I was sixteen and reaching a late puberty, I had a hard time forgiving my mother for this and developed lasting resentments. My failure to have empathy for my mother was rather extreme.

As Pete Walker suggests in his book Complex Trauma: from Surviving to Thriving, with early abuse “the superego morphs into a totalitarian critic that trumps the development of a healthy ego.” (26). In my experience, having a strong sense of conscientiousness can result in bullying or the failure to thrive as a social being.

I repeatedly struggled to have empathy for others when they engage in corruption.

Also, one summer during my teens, I believe I witnessed a brother rape his sister. I remember that they were skinny dipping. I have other vague and foggy memories of the deed. They are not attached to my other memories of the evening. I do know that the sister ended up having dissociative identity disorder. I remember running in absolute terror and feeling like a terrible coward.

In short, child sexual abuse may lead to complex trauma in relationships with others. Other kids always seemed to target and believe they were better than me and this reinforced my shame. This happened in a host of settings. I later developed mental health symptoms and food addictions.

Style Number 2: Being Underestimated and Misunderstood with A Neurodevelopmental “Disorder”

Diagnoses such as autism, dyslexia, attention deficit or obsessive compulsive are now being considered to be developmental trauma. I was not diagnosed with attention deficit and dyslexia until I was in graduate school. While it is possible for many with the right interventions to maintain their school performance, I never received extra support or understood why I struggled so much.

In simple terms, these kinds of learning challenges mean that some areas of the IQ may be high, while others are low. Or perhaps its easier to understand that some areas are more utilized and higher while others remain less utilized and fail to develop. Fluctuations in abilities as such make learning more challenging.

In contrast, people tend to associate neurodevelopmental struggles with a resource room, or ultimately segregated special education classes. In its most extreme form, segregated severely emotionally disturbed schools, with point systems may seem to prep smart students more for prison than it preps them for acquiring job related skills. These kinds of consequences and associations to these consequences can make a neurodivergent child be treated like they are less than.

Indicators of these kinds or struggles that I experienced were speech impediments, anxiety related to school attendance, getting teased, tendency to befriend only older or young playmates, and poor spelling. I nearly wasn’t allowed entrance into the school where my parents taught because I didn’t use the scissors like everyone else.

Some teachers or parents who see these emerging patterns of behavior may become critical and fail to connect with the neurodivergent student. Or they may not understand the struggle and set unfair expectations rife with microaggressions and high expectations. Thus, being misunderstood or not properly trained by the teacher may set up the sense that other kids are better.

In my case, I was extremely slow in accomplishing tasks, but I worked to compensate and brought home good grades. My father presumed my slowness was laziness and tried to force me to work harder. When I couldn’t sleep at night for a year, he intervened by taking a working vacation in which we worked physically for sixteen-hour days. I did sleep. It was a solution.

When you get older, people do intellectual assessments of you based on the college you attend, interpersonal skills, the company you keep and your job. As the reader will see, I haven’t lived my life to pass these intellectual assessment tests. Many people narcissistically judge misfits, underestimate, or ostracize them.

In high school, I spent dozens of hours perfecting a fifteen-page story and got a B. My college essay that I incessantly rewrote nearly got me kicked out of the school convincing the school psychologist that I really was suicidal. I poured my heart into my Poetry notebook which only earned me a B because it was too depressing. I wrote a twenty-five-page essay on Tibetan Buddhism with 60 references that went unrecognized.

For a variety of reasons that will become clearer, I chose not to go to a college in which the same thing would happen to me all over again. I did the work without being in community. It is arguable that this further amplified my neurodevelopmental differences.

Style Number 3: Facing Class Superiority with a Complicated Class Identity

My first experience of class came from comparing things like toys, houses, violence and vacations to those of my peers. I developed awareness of the stark contrast between rich and poor in the early years of my life. I noticed many who are well-to-do develop notions that they are better than other people and they fail to realize that other people may be smarter or stronger than them.

When I was a child, I seemed to have a raw deal. My parents had private school teacher salaries which are not all that impressive and they could not afford to keep up with the Joneses. Though they bought a house in one of the wealthiest Philadelphia suburbs, I did not understand it was a wealthy district. The house we lived in was old and taken care of by my father who was a do-it-yourselfer. Therefore, I grew up with a sense of depravity when I compared myself to my private school friends.

In contrast, in the summer we went into an impoverished rural community where we owned cottages and property. I compared what I had to what the other kids had and I found myself embarrassingly lucky.

I would notice that local kids would act very virtuous in front of me when my family hired their parents. That part of my family had been lumbar barons and the town had been built around the lumbar company. Thus, we were on remnants of a very unjust system.

One time, I challenged this fake niceness I was noticing and I found my virtuous friend to be capable of atrocious behavior that went beyond that which I was comfortable. Thus, I realized that many of my peers in that rural town had to fake it in front of me because their lives depended on this.

Of course, there was always an occasional kid who would urinate on me when I was three or try to fight me when I was thirteen. I was not embittered by these experiences. I could always understand how these acting out kids felt because I knew what it was like to have a raw deal in comparison to the suburban kids with whom I grew up.

At one point in my preadolescence, we rented out a property to a welfare family. The kids had fancy dirt bikes. For me, dirt bikes were a no-no. They were just too expensive for me to have one allotted to me. It was confusing. My father explained that in his experience growing up, scholarship students often had better things than he had. It was confusing but it was reality.

The welfare kids would give you the shirts off their backs because they liked giving. I could use their dirt bikes as much as I wanted. Then, my father exclaimed that they worked a lot harder than me. It was hard not to feel they were better than me at all turns. Plus, they knew how to have wild and unruly fun, unfettered by adult intervention. I liked them a lot and wanted to be like them.

Meanwhile, back in junior high, my cohorts were having a field day on me perhaps in part because I was not allowed to wear name brand clothes. I didn’t like being teased by spoiled kids and I fought back by acting out in odd manners. That was a problem for the teachers who witnessed this. I was sent to a shrink.

When the shrink met with my parents because I said they would not buy me name brand clothes, I learned that it was my fault I was not wearing the name brand clothes. The only good part about being blamed for something that was not in my control was that was I got to go shopping. The thing was I still learned that I was better off when I bought cheaper imitation brands. I stopped fighting and tried to get along for a spell.

The issue of income disparities and the superiority of the fortunate is complicated. The norms of rich people exclude people who don’t fit in. The norms of poor people seemed to me to be more open, even though in my case, the rural poor were forced to deal with me. I did not understand the violence that often comes with poverty due to the reality of the U.S. black market.

Ultimately, disparities in income have a tendency to make some people think they are better than you. The haves hate the have-nots is how many people understand this. False notions of superiority get spread throughout the culture based on this.

And yet the realities of crime are a great equalizer. Crime may have been what afforded those welfare kids with fancy dirt bikes. When crime, drugs, and corruption enter into the picture, things get a wee bit complicated.

Style Number 4: Judging those who Fail to Regulate Addictions

Around the time I was exposed to the reality of substance abuse, I refused to be influenced by peer pressure like everyone else. I did not feel ready to use and I didn’t like the way I felt drinking alcohol. My father drank in a way that often made me uncomfortable and I didn’t want to be like him when I was drunk. The result was that my social struggles were exacerbated. I did not associate my need to relax with socializing and with alcohol like everyone else did. I secretly became obsessed with eating.

It was the summer of 1988 and I was in a work camp in Orangewalk, Belize. My peers did notice my obsession with getting enough food and often made fun of me about how much I ate. Unlike them I was working many physical jobs all day under the Caribbean sun. They were sleeping after drinking ten or twelve beers the night before. I would go out with them but retire as soon as I could so I could work. Thus, when they saw me craving food, they made fun of me.

The next year I did not fight the temptation to drink and socialize when I was buried in school work, I fought the temptation to eat. I did this twice a day for lunch and dinner. Meanwhile with my undiagnosed learning disabilities I worked late into each and every evening trying to keep up and perform at the level I was capable of performing.

I lost my position as a starter for the varsity soccer team because my speed went down. I just didn’t have the gumption to chase the ball the way I used to. I still felt that I had to get a control of my appetite. I planned and organized social service events for the school community during the lunch hour. I started lifting weights and running long distances after soccer was over. I continued to sleep four hours a night to complete all my homework. And I started counting calories. By the summer I was admitted to the psychiatric hospital at 6’1”, 103 lbs.

The following year I was in and out of the psychiatric hospital and barely completed the year to earn my high school diploma. I moved in with a friend to get away from my parents. All the service work I had done the year before was credited to my colleague. I took to writing, but my best efforts failed to deliver the results I wanted in terms of grades or awards. I became invisible and my classmates shunned me. I skipped graduation night for a lifeguard course so I could move to a Summer Camp. I left the suburbs and my life at a private school and never looked back.

My peers thought I was bulimic because they always saw me eating cookies for lunch. In my opinion they were so wrong about me because they believed the gossip that emerged from my parents. I resisted their efforts to fatten me up in the first hospitalization they sent me to by vomiting in the hospital trash cans.

As I mentioned earlier, I increased my writing efforts as an outlet for my pain and my grades decreased.

I would want nothing to do with the school or my peers by the time I graduated. I followed a twenty-five-year-old old girlfriend to a local commuter college to rebel. I blamed the school and my peers just like they appeared to blame me.

What I failed to realize was that I became addicted to hunger, like many addicts get addicted to their substance of choice. It is expected that people my age start using substances and regulating themselves so they can still perform. I failed to do this. I know what they all concluded about me. It is what they conclude about addicts who fail to keep up their school work. I was weak. I was not worth their time.

It is not until I have lived many years and looked back that I realized the sense of narcissism in the private school community got expounded by my public display of addiction.

Style Number 5: Impact of Racial Abuse

As a white person, I cannot do justice to the narcissism associated with race in this country. I have not lived it the way people of color do.

I leave inner-city communities of color and can still look like I belong in the suburbs. I do not face micro-aggressive eyeballs everywhere I turn and people who fear that I will become violent.  In fact, I know the white world pretty well having grown up in it. I may experience a pinch of imposter’s syndrome when I try to connect in suburban contexts, but it does not take away the fact that I grew up there.

I immersed myself in a black and brown inner-city community in college. I worked at a summer camp at the Camden New Jersey YMCA in which I was the only white person. I contrasted the facilities with those in which I grew up. A lot of those kids at the YMCA had middle class families that could afford the tuition and yet they had to accept the roach filled facilities.

As middle-class white kids we were taken out to nature and had other activities to enjoy.

Then, I worked at a Korean run deli with neighborhood coworkers for three years including two summers. Since that time, I have maintained ties with communities of color through years of working in social work. I have worked my current job for twenty years at a majority African American community.

My first apartment was roach infested and I had to carefully and respectfully connect with neighborhood people to get it. I used to make the managers dinner at the Deli to even be considered for the apartment. I needed to let my coworker con me into driving him to his connects house to cop. I needed to be friendly with the owners of the drug complex across the street from my complex. Then, when I proved to others that I was a safe resource, I saw how exploitive the police were.

Especially, I learned about how the vice squad were the real bad guys. I never went to a single college party with drugs in it and yet the vice squad harassed me on one occasion telling me, “You can’t hustle a hustler.”

Yes, you can when you have no hustle.

When the university career office suggested for me a career in law enforcement, it made me cackle and feel my intelligence was being insulted.

Bearing witness to the decisions that the youth who lived on the block were faced with also had an impact. They had to work to help their family out as opposed to me who was only worried about myself. My perspective on white America did change and I was angry with people who weren’t dealing with roach infestation. Seeing one of my younger coworkers leave the job to sell crack made me really sad because I knew the danger and the challenges that he would be facing. One day I would face the same danger.

Thirty years later, I still learns lessons about the impact of race on a regular basis and I still am aware that I am racist and am liable to offend others from time to time with my cultural manners.

Europeans invaded this country and brought with them three centuries of slavery and genocide. The concept of manifest destiny caused native Americans to be killed and segregated on reservations. Three centuries of slavery was horrifically narcissistic and degrading. Then, Jim Crow laws were historically so tilted against black and brown communities, it kept them segregated and lynched for a century. And still with zoning, gerrymandering, employment bias, immigration and drug laws definitely in effect, there is a disproportionate representation of black and brown people in jails and the prison system. Skin color is often associated with stereotypes and incarceration and fills many people overtly narcissistic with implicit bias

When I came in off the streets to a mental institute and was observed on an evaluation unit, they determined that I was schizotypal personality for making the same kinds of interpretations of power in the Rorschach that I am making in this blog post. I was not influenced by the cultures I had been exposed to: the rural poor, the suburban mainstream and urban people of color; I was clinically odd. I was started on antipsychotic medication.

Style Number 6: Extending Unequal Pay for Unskilled Labor

I grew up in the throes of the postindustrial revolution when the service economy started to set up very high degree of income disparity via making many jobs so low pay that people who worked them could no longer afford the American dream.

Service work makes sense if it is carried out by young, housed individuals who are looking for a little income as they move through school. It may teach people a work ethic and may motivate them to get skills in school that will enable them to get better salaried work.

As I grew up, there were some people from wealthy families who never had to learn how challenging service work can be. I had witnessed a lot of people take it for granted. There are people who start work negotiating good salaries that can sustain families without understanding how hard it is for people in that sector of the economy.

Working these jobs, a student can also meet and get to know people who work in this sector of the economy who don’t have it so good. Many may learn and accept that such people fall into the temptation to make fast money, yet do they see the consequences of doing this? Or perhaps they opt to use their parents’ money to get around this kind of work altogether. Some may think the work is easy and for people who aren’t as smart as they.

When I reached an independent age in which I had to balance rent with the rest of my needs, I really stared to learn how little that kind of work is respected. Additionally, when I befriended people who are in those situations I started to understand and respect the injustice.

I began service work in high school and college and it was always a means to get extra income that helped sustain me. In college I used it to pay my expenses, but I did not depend on it to sustain my rent or tuition. I had parental support for that.

When I started living independently, I always worked an extra service job to make sure my expenses were covered.

It wasn’t until I was forced back into the service economy due to my mental condition, when I really understood how difficult it was to sustain rent and independent living on so low of a salary.

Not being able to afford a car for help with transit and working forty hours a week earned me nine hundred dollars a month when my rent was nine hundred and fifty dollars a month.

I had to transport myself from an affordable location into my low paying job in a wealthy district which took four hours a day. I was doing everything in my power to survive and I couldn’t do it until I found a better salary back in social work ten months later. I never worked so hard in my life.

I found doing unskilled service work for such low pay was far more demanding than working two jobs and going to grad school which I did for almost three years. At least back then, I could afford to drive. Everyday I see people work these jobs and I do not know how they can afford to survive without family support.

I feel that people who do not understand how challenging unskilled work can be can be can easily undervalue it and treat people who struggle with it in narcissistic manners.

The shrink who made 125$ an hour presumed that because I was only making 9$ an hour that I really wasn’t working that hard. Certainly not as hard as she. She denied any level of financial exploitation from her business.

Style Number 7: Challenges that Await the Formerly Incarcerated

I was a ward of the state for three months in a state hospital where I obtained a diagnosis of schizophrenia. After the law could hold me no longer, I was streeted at a Greyhound bus depot with the remaining three thousand dollars I had in a bank account and a months-worth of medication.

I was afraid of again being followed by police and possibly by other people as I was when I was trying to cross the Canadian boarder to break a story of corruption.

My best friend had threatened me that he had the power to do me much harm if I ever betrayed him. I had been setting up services in a notorious section 8 housing authority project. There were many newspaper articles written about the project in the paper. Nobody knew that I was the off-the-record source responsible for a few of them.

My psychiatrist in the hospital refused to meet with me in spite of my requests. She moved me to the chronic unit which was a cold and dank facility. When I got very sick the staff refused to give me aspirin because she had failed to order it for me. When I was finally getting better after a severe fever, she came to see me.

“Once we had someone come here who said the FBI was following him,” she said, “and they really were following him. He hadn’t done very much but it was true they were following him.”

I did not trust her enough to ascertain that she was talking about me even though that’s what I still figure. I did trust her enough to return to taking medication because she didn’t believe the aids report that I had been sexually inappropriate the night I had begged for aspirin.

The first night I arrived in the state hospital, my roommate told me that the mafia was following me.

The girl on the unit who had a crush on me told me her father was the head of the Mexican Mafia in Montana.

Even though I should have known better, I often yelled at my parents accusing them of being mafia.

I only got beat up once. It was only by staff. They told my parents I had gotten violent when I had only tried to support another inmate who I believed to be an FBI undercover agent. He had wanted to play his guitar and I stood with him and suggested he should be allowed to do so.

I only got recruited to join one gang and I was able to refuse without any repercussions.

But nobody told me what would happen to me on the streets when I had this much exposure and knowledge about the underworld.

I did not have a parole or probation officer to drug test me or require me to get a job.

When I arrived in Fresno CA and bought a bike and paid for the rest of the month at an extended stay studio, I didn’t realize that I would be able to find a job while medicated. When I got a job, I got an apartment. It just so happened that when my meds ran out, I was unexpectedly cut from the low wage job and unable to find work. The only job I could find was a professional job as a social worker. But I was afraid that I could ruin my career. I was experiencing a great deal of harassment. I believed I was being followed again. When my bike was stolen, I believed I was being targeted.

Finally, I turned to family support. My father told me there was nothing he could do for me. But my aunt arranged for me to move close to her and she could get me a job at an Italian Delicatessen. Then she arranged family support as long as I kept that job.

I tried so hard to find work outside that Italian Deli for ten months until I was successful. The bike/train commute was really challenging.

Not everyone understands what it is like to work with young rich kids when you are in this kind of situation. I considered myself formerly incarcerated and it was hard to cool out. I finally got a car and started back on medication once I qualified for benefits.

On the bike ride to work, I would come across a man I knew from the section 8 housing complex where I worked in Seattle WA. One day he had come up to me and told me that he killed someone. I had looked at him like I was really not impressed at the time.

On the train platform he had a homemade sign that said CIA and he carried with him handcuffs.

I ignored him and worked my day.

Most days I experienced similar things that were equally bizarre and distressing. I still believe that these are tests that formerly incarcerated people are given. These kinds of oppressions are hard to measure as they are different depending on the situation.

When I finally did get a car, the police tailed me all the way to my shrink’s office which was a forty-five-minute drive. There was nobody to tell. No one who cared about anything I shared. I had to shut up and serve rich folk. I think these are examples of tests that formerly incarcerated people must endure to survive.

And everybody just presumed I was a spoiled loser who was a tax on my parents. Most of their friends, my mother told me, said they were just enabling me and I belonged in a hospital. Some of my friends just said I got into drugs.

That is the kind of narcissism formerly incarcerated people must face, I think. Many are presumed to be guilty regardless of whether they were set up or not.

False Medicalized Notions of “Psychosis”

The word schizophrenia which is based on Kraeplinian ideas about brain damage and an unfounded genetic mental illness concept, covers up lifetimes of narcissistic abuse. Quite often this concept tends to justify warehousing people and depriving them meaningful lives.

I have identified seven styles of narcissistic abuse that have been part of my life. Some of these styles are abuse I endured personally and some have been things I have seen afflict myself and others. I am aware there can be quite a variety of narcissistic behavior including physical violence of which I have not endured all that much.

Many of the styles of narcissistic abuse I have talked about are spread throughout the culture and can be quite normalized. For some, it can be easier to throw a person overboard than it is to acknowledge your own superior sense of narcissism. I do believe that often times people with privilege make the mistake of not acknowledging it.

I am aware that my view of power being a corruption of the human spirit is impacted by some of the trauma I have experienced. But I think an awful lot of people undermine the value of other people. When labels like schizophrenia or bipolar are involved, it is easier to presume that a person cannot get better than it is to give them a chance to do so. I believe that if given chances, that many more people could break through their challenges and fill their lives with meaning. But many people who endure these challenges are deemed untouchable.

Many articles I have read about how to deal with narcissism suggest setting boundaries with the narcissist, exposing the abuse by extending the concept of gaslighting that accompanies it, and halting the internalization of the messages made. Many ultimately suggest cutting off the narcissist because their methods will not change.

I think the schizophrenic who does this often is seem as having low insight into their illness. There is even a fancy word for this called agnosia. Agnosia provokes the ire of many a loved one who wants to help. Agnosia was not something I was able to overcome until I had reestablished safety and economic security. I had to work as a therapist for 6 years until I overcame it.

Unfortunately, a schizophrenic like me cannot necessarily escape from narcissistic abuse. It is hard to interact with others without seeing narcissism that can threaten my sense of self.  The best I can do is expose aspects of it in order to avoid internalizing the abuse and thinking ill of myself.

Ultimately, I feel very burdened about the amount of narcissism I view in the world that doesn’t accept me or make space for my contributions. Not all of us get to have our contributions highlighted or honored. We can continue observing and undermining narcissism so that it stops with us. Maybe that truly is as good as it gets.

The post Seven Styles of Narcissistic Abuse Behind A “Schizophrenia” Label: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

In my experience, being singled out and excluded from the discourse because I don’t fit in is what causes me most pain. It is taking me a long time to realize exactly how and why this happens to me repeatedly.

For me it is not a simple process. It seems to do with people who seek to manage me. My managers get internalized in my mind. I have had managers in my family, managers throughout my education, mangers in the mental health system, managers at work, managers amongst my peers, and most recently I have encountered managers in the recovery movement. Fundamentally, the needs of managers are about power and control. They define what is appropriate from what is not.

As a result, I opt to avoid power and control as much as I can.

I am not jealous that managers have the power and control. It’s just that the hurt that come from their use of it keeps smarting and preoccupying my neurodivergent mind.

It’s arguable that being excluded and politically marginalized is the very action that made me experience “psychosis” in the first place. And yet casting people out of the group is so often a cultural norm in the modern world. It can seem like if you don’t cast out a few misfits out you are likely to be seen as someone who fails to take care of yourself.

Throughout my life I have felt cast out. To get back in I have had to learn to work with managers who have tended to wrangle and control my behavior. I have never felt good enough to get noticed or acknowledged. And then, there is a part of me that is so angry about the whole process, that when I do get acknowledged, I have to fight not to want to spit at the manager in the face.

But this ultimately isn’t the story of what happens when I am cast of the ship, it is the story of trying to live a good life while the factions and politics that surround me seem to demonize and marginalize me. It’s about going to my managers and advocating for better treatment. It’s about assertively teaching them that they are wrong about me.

I’ve gone to great lengths to keep politics and factions out of my recovery. But what I’ve noticed is that others don’t. Therefore, after years of letting people play politics, and use factions against me, I am writing today to envision a different outcome. Indeed, this post is about knowing and accepting that these things will happen. It is ultimately about letting it happen and then confronting those who have done this with assertive self-advocacy.

We All Have Trigger Words:

In dealing with experiences associated with psychosis, there are as many triggers. Even when I am out of emergency and able to function optimally, when I am not attentive to my work I may get struck with flashbacks. In fact, it can happen so frequently that I don’t notice that it is happening. I just feel dissociated and depressed. It is when I take care of myself later when I realize that the political hits I have taken actually hurt. It takes time to allow myself to feel and understand them.

It can feel like every managed group with which I associate slashes me. Just persisting and working through the politics and factions is a good thing. For me, there is the medical model unit where I work, and the family of origins relations are constantly surfacing. But the worst experience for me is when people in the recovery movement do it. I had so hoped it wouldn’t happen there, but it has yet again.

For many of us in the mad movement, the words normals use to define associated experiences are triggers. The word psychosis is one itself. I call it the “p” word and put it in quotes as often as I can. I do this because it is so misunderstood and misused that it triggers cultural delusions that are eugenic and ridiculous. And sure enough, it is a word that even if you use quotes around it, might trigger a manager to correct you. I have been corrected and told that madness is really a much better word to use than the “p” word.

There are a lot of trigger words in the “psychosis” community! There is the “d” word for delusions, the “h” word for hallucinations, the “s” word for schizophrenia. The ‘p” can stand for either psychosis or paranoia. All these word trigger misunderstanding and cultural delusions about the “psychosis” experience. A medicalized perspective is most commonly used.

We all have trigger words and we all do our best to deal with them. In some cases, we might use one to reclaim it or redefine it or craftily address a cultural delusion.

Case in point, one time I used the “d” word in the title of a post: “How to help when you think someone may be delusional.” It’s true I used the “d” word a number of times without quotes. I used it a lot and then I started to add quotes around it to accent the point. Some readers got it and responded that they too were triggered by the “d” word.

I had been fishing for mainstream people to read the article and come away from the post using quotes around the “d” word. However, it provoked the ire of a highly regarded speaker who confronted me that using the word delusional was stigmatizing. When I responded to his issue by identifying myself as a fellow survivor and accenting my intention, he was unimpressed leaving bitter and what seemed to me to be superior words.

A few weeks later, a local manager who I have helped and from whom I would like to get support for my work, proposed that we pay this international speaker to come and do a local training. At this point I learned the speaker uses the “p” word without quotes in a similar manner. As a result, my hurt and frustration have been thus compounded.

In this case it is because I have a training that has been well received in several contexts that my managers ignore. Additionally, in my mind paranoia is just as misused as delusional and psychosis and schizophrenic! Is it possible that he was really just trying to hurt and alienate me from his movement? Sometimes I feel like everybody I have known who are his colleagues have done the same thing. It is a small community. I suspect that people talk. Is it the “p” word starting up yet again, or is it a legitimate perspective?

Playing Politics and Creating Factions!

At some point we all have to get over our peeves and entitlements and move on with our lives. I think we can learn to do this. But we have to see what is happening and heal. We have to avoid joining in and slandering the person who has triggered us. It is best to collect our thoughts, practice using them, and consider addressing the person who is marginalizing us. Sometimes we have to make this a long-term project and repeatedly look for openings in which we can assert ourselves. Ultimately, when we are successful a sense of healing may ensue. Maybe we finally get the inclusion.

However, when we hurt, we may factionalize and fight over trigger words and who belongs in the tent. It starts to be about who has more friends, support and power. Maybe we want to follow the person with the higher degree, or the one who went to the more prestigious college. The number of factions in the mental health recovery movement are truly incredulous.

In the “psychosis” community alone, do we split up the voice hearers from those who are targeted individuals? Do we split up the people who learn to benefit from medication from those who reject it entirely? Do we then advocate for more socially acceptable remedies like cannabis? Do we look to kick out the people who don’t fit in and create norms that exclude? Do we separate those who have been on the streets from those who have chosen to live with their parents? Do we divide positive manic camp from the depressed, schizophrenic camp? Do we separate those who abuse substances from those who have been incarcerated and are on probation? Do we gaslight those we don’t like or who ask us challenging questions?

The answer to this question for many is to factionalize. “If black people want to form a group, for example, they can, “I have heard it said by the man’s colleagues. Is it not our responsibility to incorporate their cultural needs into the larger group? Indeed, that perspective is complicated.

It starts to be about how we manage who gets in our tent and who gets cast out. Every four years the nation gets into wars of rhetoric that get everyone divided. Right now, many of us are wondering if there will be a civil war based on mainstream propaganda and cultural delusions about white supremacy.

Understanding the Origins of the Trigger:

Indeed, this kind of issue takes me back to kindergarten which I had to repeat because I used the scissors backwards. Indeed, I would have been denied entrance into what has become in mind, the vile private school I attended; however, my parents both worked there.

I may have graduated cum laude fifteen years later, but they still tried to kick me out again my senior year. Even though my father, a top administrator, had left his position the teachers were divided about me. Some would argue that my spelling was atrocious. Some accused me of lying about how much time I spent doing homework. My mother was the reading teacher and yet I evaded her radar. Some may have been shocked about how low my PSAT scores were.

Maybe I just hadn’t eaten all day and just could not concentrate! I don’t remember.

I slept at tops four hours a night. I continued to achieve mostly A’s, work around the clock, organize community services, and play sports after school; but I stopped eating and landed in the hospital to avoid dying from anorexia.

I spent much of my 12^th grade year in and out of the hospital. I moved in with a friend and my room was converted to a study. My mother first called me an “asshole” and then I became a writer.

My first college essay was so good the school psychologist evaluated it and said I was on the verge of killing myself. This nearly got me re-hospitalized. I continued to re-write the essay and sent it out to spite the school, the psychologist and her husband, my English teacher. I got into some good colleges. I also got excluded from ones who didn’t approve. Meanwhile, I was starting to think college would be about more of the same bullshit. I hooked up with a twenty-five-year-old photojournalist and moved to attend school in an affordable inner-city.

It didn’t seem like I made these choices. They all just kind of fell into place. When the school lied and published that I was going to an expensive school in the yearbook, I vowed never to return. It didn’t take long for me to find myself alone in a roach infested apartment in the inner-city on all the holidays from work. I wrote.

A True Outcast:

I really don’t think anyone knows what it’s like to be outcasted until you’ve been homeless, jobless, and endlessly working for your survival while others project horrible generalizations upon you so they don’t have to feel guilty.

When I was in high school and college, I was exercising the privilege of telling the people who raised me to fuck off. Oh, how that privilege washes away when you go to low-wage, entry-level work to get your life back on track after losing everything.

I am talking about my recovery from psychosis. It was a privileged recovery albeit with white skin and family money, but there was a long-term state hospital, homelessness and a constant threat of being forced back into that lifestyle.

Mustering Up the Self-Advocacy:

Talking like this makes me repeatedly lose cultural capital among people who manage me. I have the sense that I am easy to marginalize politically. I feel like I have a different background and experience, so I am easy to disregard, slander and doubt. Many blame the victim even when they think they know better. They fall into becoming like a pack of dogs chasing a puppy in a dog park.

There comes a time when I must notice that not all managers are evil. There comes a time when I must find those few weak links in the chain and make appeals.

I think approaching the managers in a negative manner is not only hard to do, it is not always wise. Managers are renown for threatening us not to do that. Thus, it is a good thing I have internalized them in my head.

When I address a manager, I need to prepare myself. I will be asked for examples that illustrate the points I am making.

Because elements in my past have been traumatic, carrying in them underpinnings of sexual abuse and neglect, I tend to lose my ability to think when pressed for examples. When I am asked for examples or overtly mistreated, it can be hard to directly address it. When I don’t address it, people do have a way of talking and targeting.

Thus, even when the manager may be reasonable when pressed, I start out afraid. Understanding the patterns of abuse that repeat themselves takes me back to a misty October day around my third birthday. It is a memory I endlessly cannot access. But through writing I have accessed others that are significant.

Maybe it was that unremembered day, or maybe it was something else.

All I know is that I just was not able to live up to private school expectations when I was so hurt. Some days I remember nothing accept repeating patterns of marginalization.

Thus, hounded like dogs sniffing assholes, I need to remember that my body holds the trauma. Many do say it is all my fault because I am too nice. Maybe I deserve all the shit I’ve been put through because I am soft. But I am still on my way. Still, I am getting closer.

Writing so helps me prepare and honor what I’ve been through. All this work is there to help me assert myself. I must practice and run my concerns through my head and ask to have my needs met. I have to be like Tom Petty and tell them that I won’t back down.

Yes, the “D” word is bad, but so are the “P” words. Also rooting out difficult people and discarding them doesn’t fix everything when there is generational genocide and good old American inequality to muster through.

It really helps that I have reached a point where the person to whom I am asserting myself can no longer hurt me. And the manager I am dealing with is a lot more than just a comment on Facebook who may not have accurately read my post.

It helps that I have achieved a stable life that will persist regardless of what they do to me. When I was threatened with homelessness and underemployment. I just couldn’t do it, but now I can. Other people can project their stuff onto me and spread slander and refuse to say sorry, but they can’t put me out on the streets again. At least for a little while.

All the times I have been hurt, gaslit, rendered speechless, red faced and marginalized will be gone. I will assert my truth and ask the questions I need to know. I will pitch my work to my manager and ask for help and maybe it just won’t be as bad as I think.

One time recently I have done this and gotten the answer that I’ve always told myself to be true, but that was so hidden from the public. Successes can build on successes and can help me try again with the hopes that I might just might be granted that which I need. And if I don’t, I know what to do. I will return again and again steady and clear voiced and assert myself until I find my own dignity. Maybe when I realize that I can do this, the “they” will change their blaming mentality.

And I don’t need an ultimate confirmation that I or my work has value. Maybe I just need to assert myself in a new manner, Maybe I can learn something that can help me be successful.

When I can do this, the factions, the politics, the stigma will clear from out of my head and all unjust managers and control will fade into the background and I will feel a sense of relief. Maybe this will happen some day! And when it is my turn to cast someone out of the lifeboat, I just won’t do it no matter what “they” say.

The post Overcoming Factions, and Politics in My Recovery from Psychosis appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Fawning, saying yes sir, or shining it on is such an important skill in enduring life, especially during a break from reality. It is a skill I struggled with during times of mental health crisis prior to my break. Indeed, I have had to get pretty good at this fawning skill to survive.

Prior to the break I was prone to tangential rage and resentments against people who rejected, humiliated or abandoned me. It felt like everyone I knew, would eventually betray me.

In fact, this is a repeated pattern in my social relationships. Other people would see me alone and bullied and take some interest in me and I would reciprocate. Eventually I would disappoint them or they would get what they needed from me and there would be a falling out. At times of mental breakdown this pattern would become evident to me. And I would get down on myself and the world.

It is my understanding that fawning is a symptom of complex trauma. People learn to fawn due to childhood neglect or abuse. They don’t feel safe so they fawn and fail to confront people who are abusing them. In their reality there is no point in asserting themselves. There is no use.

As a therapist I am learning to encourage people to stop fawning with me and trust me with their true process. Being able to know a person’s authentic process and feelings toward me is indeed a privilege that I am eager to promote.

But in many ways, I am not ready to throw the act of fawning under the bus. Indeed, I went through a lot to learn how to fawn.

It depends on your station in life whether it is not safe to let people know exactly where you are coming from. I believe much of the world is oppressed by privileged people. When you are supposed to be oppressed, I’ve come to feel it is wise and honorable to fawn a little.

Becoming a Targeted Individual:

In the years leading up to my two-year break from reality, I shared my realities of being targeted and undermined with a therapist in my twenties. She taught me I was paranoid. There was no concept such as complex trauma or Asperger’s at play. It was an extensive cocktail of medications. I trusted the psychology degree behind the cocktails and worked my way through a Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology.

The mentality of blame the victim in psychology is such a powerful force. When I tried to ignore the patterns of abuse and built relationships anyway, it was far easier for the one person who had the ability to see what was going on for me, to blame it on an illness. She would one day tell my parents that I would be in and out of institutions for the rest of my life. For a long while, this did direct their support of me.

Deference to this power of psychology was the skill that made me a successful social worker prior to my break. Prior to my Master’s degree, I often respected my superiors and turned to them for direction. But along with education came the responsibility to think about what I was doing and to help rather than just cover my ass.

I moved out west where I didn’t know anyone and started work in a Section 8 Housing project in Seattle Washington. I started to resist standard business practice of blaming the victim and making the money. Indeed, I started going the extra mile.

As people were being hurt and even killed, I started talking to reporters. I worked extra hours and I made good relationships. It’s true I felt more appreciated by the people with whom I worked. When the company offered me free tickets to a concert so I would stop my vigilante patterns, I turned around and invited all the residents to the music festival. Unfortunately, this led to into a state of consciousness in which I became a real targeted individual.

I had a friend with a nefarious past who threatened me. It proved to be a very credible threat. When I admitted I was scared for my life and told him what I was doing. I tried to run to Canada and got stopped and manhandled by police. I got a three-month, hospitalization rather than a promotion for work that challenged the system to be better.

Learning to Fawn:

Earlier in my journey the therapist who had taught me I was paranoid, had already tried to institutionalize me. She’d told my parents that even though I had a 3.9 GPA I was not really college material. She urged them to put me on social security. They never told me this and I resisted her efforts to institutionalize me by working customer service jobs where I had to practice my fawning abilities. It was either that, or a repressive social program. It was embarrassing because I was really depressed, but some people cared enough to support me. Then I got back at it graduated, and went to graduate school.

Ten years later, learning to fawn again as an inmate in a state hospital was a new low. I believe the purpose of the incarceration was to teach me there was no use in even trying to take care of myself. I documented clear signs of abuse and requested to meet with my psychiatrist. It took the psychiatrist two months to actually meet with me. She said one time they had a patient who was being investigated by the FBI. When he was hospitalized for believing he was being followed he really was being investigated. Then, she told me everyone who observed me said I was an entitled person. I agreed to take my medication again.

First, I was locked on a unit for two weeks. When I finally gained grounds, I did everything I could to be industrious and work to feel better. They let me work in an automotive shop and I started to heal. Just as I was getting stable, exercising and strengthening my injured back, they moved me to the chronic unit. It is true I didn’t exactly conceal my distain for my family and the mafia. Those elements were revealed to me chronically throughout the hospital. The chronic unit was old and barely heated during the Montana winter. Massive icicles grew from the crack in the window above my cot. We dressed for the forty-degree temperature inside the dingy barracks.

Self-advocacy was pointless. When I finally took medication and surrendered to them, I did get released.

Fawning to Return to Professional Work:

However, I did not believe that outside the institution that self-advocacy was pointless. I took a greyhound bus to Fresno California with the small nest egg I had saved for myself. First, I got a job. Then I got an apartment.

This would have worked but I ran out of medication and experienced many signs of government/mafia surveillance. The day I got hired, my nefarious friend called me and let me know he knew I got the job. It wasn’t until I withdrew off my medication that I couldn’t control my rage about this.

I tried to find work anywhere. Finally, I got a job at a foster care agency, but did not have the funds for a car. My family only agreed to help if I move into a very challenging situation that my aunt set up for me in the bay area. My nefarious friend agreed that this was what I needed to do.

So, I had a two-hour bike commute and a job at an upscale Italian Delicatessen arranged for me. My grand delusion was that my family was an Irish Mafia family that had set me up for the situation I encountered in Seattle.

At the Italian Deli, I learned the learned helplessness toward the government/mafia that I needed to survive. Eventually I was able to break back into the land of social work and psychotherapy. This included a great deal of fawning towards customers, my family, employers, and mafia triggers.

This fawning skill seemed like an answer to many of my problems and I was able to suppress my experiences with being a targeted individual

Fawning to Survive Psychosis:

When a person experiences a break from reality they must learn not to react as if their tactical reality is really happening. This takes some doing and work. Especially for someone who ends up being a targeted individual, emotional triggers must be controlled.

Thus, even when the person who is in a break is right about the fact that corruption is rampant in our society, they must learn to act as if there is no such thing here in America. We don’t have indentured servants or enslaved people anymore. No, we are the land o the free.

So, on my daily ten-mile bike ride I would see signs of being followed and harassed. Once I encountered a resident who I knew from the section 8 housing complex in Seattle. He walked around with a pair of handcuffs at the train station. He sat across from me on the train. I pretended that I noticed nothing. In front of the demanding customers all that mattered was that I fawn exceptional customer service.

Targeted individuals know their apartment is broken into and their employment mail is violated. They know the people standing outside their apartment with gang tattoos on their shoulders are gang members.

They must learn to fawn for the sake of people who live in consensus reality. In spite of where they have been and what they know, they must act as if they fit in. I think it is imperative to be able to do so to survive at any job or any social setting. One must avoid any action that is triggered by one’s history of being targeted.

One time the police entered my apartment and trashed it, spreading kitty litter over my rug. The apartment complex management told me that my uncle had done this. Nobody cared or believed me that this happened. It was excellent customer service that was required to get rehired into professional work.

It is like code-switching in the African American community, one must fully understand that there is no understanding of your culture and speak as if the culture of the oppressor is the only culture out there at the workplace.

Fawning is a great skill that can help you fake it until you make it.

Fawning for Trauma Experts:

In training to work with trauma, I have attended workshops of Bessel Van der Kirk, Dawson Church and Laura Pernell. In each of these workshops I learned important things, but I did not feel particularly safe and had to do a lot of fawning with people. EMDR and EFT particularly didn’t work for me because I was to dissociated in those settings to work through my issues. I was not sipping the tea.

Bessel van de Kirk made several jokes about psychotic people in his workshop. Dawson Church was clearly angry at people like me who were reversed and for whom tapping did not help. It is very hard to be at ease when the training turns into such a hostile environment and the assumption is made that all the healers in the room are above their traumas.

Let me tell you, after being rejected endlessly for not fawning, it is a real trip to have a group of therapists in a trauma training notice that you are dissociated and fawning and dismiss you as being damaged goods. Suddenly your survival skill is a sign that something is gravely wrong with you. Suddenly if you don’t stop fawning, you will not be successful at fitting in with the clique that surrounds you. I fawned, but I withdrew and didn’t try to deal with anyone,

Teaching the Fawning Skill:

I have actively taught the fawning skill to participants in profession group therapy that accepts and explores psychosis. It is a much-needed skill that is imposed on others in institutional circumstances. But learning when to use it and when not to is a challenge.

Indeed, as a young social worker with a private high school education, the affects of which I learned to hide, I was accustomed to see others fawn at me. In the system, the power differential between the staff and the client often encourages this kind of behavior.

When I was a young social worker, I didn’t know I needed to undermine the fawning responses and make deeper connections with people. So, as I have openly taught this skill, there is always a sense of irony that has historically has made the patrons of my groups chuckle.

This is why I often argue that it can be imperative for providers who work with psychosis to work with the symptoms and normalize them without judging or reacting to them. This creates more of a level playing field so that the person in a break can have their ways respected. Then, it becomes easier to ask them code-switch back into chronically normal mainstream culture. This can give someone the social support they need to fawn for a living.

The alternative for many is to accept institutional neglect and poverty.

Overcoming the Fawning Skill?

Indeed, many people judge and take advantage of those who fawn in certain environments. People who vie for power will test another person in power. If the person in power submits and does not challenge their bully they will be demoted. I have experienced this professionally a number of times.

Indeed, this reality has cost me professionally. I have lost jobs and respect and have dealt with slander campaigns when I have tolerated bullying. It is really hard for me to know when its time to put up my dukes verses when it is time to simply survive in a humble manner. I have chosen to work in contexts in which I am not in power.

Indeed, teaching psychologists not to blame the victim and send people to an institution is not a safe thing to do. Fawning and undermining is indeed the only way to provide freedom to inmates of the institutions.

As I have started a private practice and work with a few people in the tech field, I have learned that fawning is not appreciated and does not lead to success in the corridors of power. It has made me aware that it sure is hard to know when it’s truly safe and necessary to forego fawning.

While in therapeutic service to another person, I feel safe to forgo this kind of skill. Many find me authentic and appreciate my help. I usually reflect on things when I write notes and in my off hours before I take action.

But dealing with people who do not understand their role in institutionalizing others it is not appropriate to forego fawning! I constantly have to watch my back and follow rules and pray that I don’t get made and sacrificed.

The sense that you are going to get in trouble for what you do constantly lives withing the survivors of our societies impoverished institutions. I am not really sure I want to give up this skill amid the waters in which I tread. Indeed, I consider it an emotional regulation skill in many contexts, acting opposite to the behavior you feel.

In another sense, a great deal of emotional intelligence goes with the fawning response. Taking medication has helped me enormously with my EQ and ability to fawn and reconnect with consensus reality in a meaningful way.

Sure, I want to go from surviving to thriving. Sure, when I work with others as a helper, I am able to be authentic and I do not fawn. But until the mental health system shifts from a social control model, to an integrated healing and wellness one, I may well have to keep resorting to those fawning skills. So, when I am training in a room full of therapist whom I perceive as trauma sharks, I will not feel denigrated for having to be alert and fawn.

The post The Neurodivergence of Fawning for Mental Health appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

It’s been nearly twenty years since I came out of a two-year break from reality. I am no longer faced with the prospect of homeless and unable to find work. I have a career, a marriage and a sense of stability. But in other ways I am just starting to realize how fragmented and dissociated I remain.

It’s taken a lot of work to learn to be successful and mad in a mad world. But there are still some things to heal that have been around for a long time for me. Things like feeling joy and relaxations have always alluded me. I am still developing self-compassion given the issues with which I have dealt.

Join me today as I use internal family systems theory to help me have more compassion for myself. I will examine the interplay between my manager parts and the exile parts who need to work together with better collaboration.

Preoccupied with Slander Campaigns:

I still struggle with the sense that other people have engaged in slander campaigns against me and my work. Since the release of my memoir five years ago, my efforts to promote the book and the rest of my work redefining psychosis, have failed to create the impact for which I yearn.

It’s true my book never had a release party. Turns out local people with big names on the national stage, took the free copy of the book and did not write reviews. In fact, a few started treating me with micro aggression, leading me to believe there might be a wider slander conspiracy much like what I have witnessed at work. One person did write me a review but left a shaming comment in the middle of it.

Likewise, although I am very committed to my work, I repeatedly get passed up for promotions. I have a different perspective and expertise than my colleagues and I am often undermined.

It’s true my book won awards. It’s also true that mostly the reviews I got from workshop trainings I have conducted have suggested I did well with most opportunities I have been given. Still, I have not become a sought-out speaker. And my writing platform remains relatively small.

In quiet moments, I often have the idea of a slander campaign come up. Perhaps it is a younger part of me that has been hungry and desperate in the face of financial challenges during my break. But ideas of a slander campaign go back a lot farther, back to grade school bullying and alienation from my peers that started in fourth grade. I weigh these thoughts with the fear that my presentation skills might be a bit lacking.

Presentation Skills:

It’s true when I was in high school, my classmates used to count the number of ums that I made during my speeches. Even though I am passionate about what I am saying, my success often depends on the energy in the room that lifts me above the anxiety.

For example, I recently had a zoom interview about my book. My interviewer, Peg Morrison, actually took the time to read my book and ask me thoughtful questions in front of her NAMI network. She wrote, “If you’ve ever wondered how Holden Caulfield turned out, you’ll want to meet our guest Timothy Dreby (pen name Clyde Dee). I was given the questions ahead of time to reflect on and prepare my responses

To prepare for the interview, I took two hours off work so I could come home and ground myself in the questions. About twenty minutes from home, I found myself in a traffic standstill. The stand still took a great deal of time and I wasn’t even sure if I would make it home on time for the interview. My wife called me and read me the interview questions over the phone.

Since the interview is on YouTube, I have been able to view it and assess the extent to which my own performance might be part of the problem.

Critical Eyes:

One aspect of enduring a break from reality is learning to live with vigilant eyes. When I was in psychosis, I picked up a great deal from serendipitous occurrences. Discharged from a state hospital, I took a Greyhound to a different state. Not only was I jobless and in need of survival funds, I was convinced I was enduring a black list conspiracy after I outed covered up murder in a section 8 housing authority.

One aspect of these observations were my interpersonal interactions with others. It seemed like I had the ability to discern their subconscious intentions so as that I knew their personal thoughts. I was always vigilantly assessing for safety, sincerity, and intentions.

I was especially vigilant to sense a persons’ connection to secret societies that may be involved in persecuting me. Maybe the secret society was my family conspiring with the treatment team at the State Hospital. Or maybe it was a black-market organization conspiring with a law enforcement agency. Or at times it was the management at the only job I could find, a job at an Italian Delicatessen that my auntie arranged for me, conspiring with my young co-workers who delighted in taunting the mad thirty-year-old with vigilant eyes.

For the last thirteen years, I have engaged in redefining psychosis. I started by doing this in professional groups. I did so in a manner I could justify interventions that are radically different. In doing so I have suggested that interpersonal perceptions of others are a source of special messages for a person in a break from reality. (Of course there are other sources like dreams, intuition, hearing voices, media, visons etcetera get added into the mix.)

It’s clearly arguable that many of those acute perceptions may come from a scientific assessment of energy waves that come off a body. For example, as I have learned through learning emotional freedom techniques, a host of energy waves that reflect a person’s spirit may be more readable with a set of vigilant eyes. There are also many other non-verbal cues that are hard to explain when someone is intensely vigilant. Voice tone, emphasis, body gestures, and posture are all intensely notable when a person has vigilant eyes.

When I was eventually able to use medication and come out of my crisis, I was able to withstand having vigilant eyes without involuntarily reacting to what I experienced. It enabled me to fake it and improve my working income and come back from a choppy year of underemployment in which I only earned thirteen thousand dollars.

As I started to feel safer and perceive less danger, people stopped responding to me with ridicule and threats and I eventually returned to being able to utilize my Master’s training and maintain positions in social work and psychotherapy. But I am not sure I ever lost my vigilant eyes.

Viewing my Performance:

I have intensely critical managers in my head who take one look at my performance in this interview and think that I should not be the one up on the podium leading the discussion. This is part of me thinks it is smart, entitled to judge, and doesn’t acknowledges that it internalizes social Darwinism. It still says that that a kid with my set of disabilities should not be allowed to bring home straight A’s even if he was up all night doing his homework. This was a remark I internalized from my father. While he might have meant it as a compliment, it was an example of a patronizing attitude that has really impacted me.

One might think this manager part of me has enough life experience to know social Darwinism and eugenic concepts are false. It has seen me locked up for three months in abject State Hospital poverty with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. It has seen me in the streets in yet another strange land trying to work my way up from nothing. It saw me fail to get jobs at McDonalds and hundreds of other franchises. It’s seen me struggling to ride my bike to sixty-hour weeks of physical labor for thirteen thousand dollars a year. It has seen upstanding citizens on the streets run the other way because of the rage in my eyes. It endured the support that criticized and cut me every step of the way. I kept trying and things did get better so one would think the manager knows better.

But when I watch the video of my interview, the manager also can see that I have just sat in traffic and am tired, slow, internal, and stressed. It views the slowness of my responses with distain. The manager in me tells me I am full of myself and not giving the host enough pleasantries. It continues to be embarrassed and ashamed to be me.

How this Manager-Part Developed:

I think an aspect of this managing part of me mistrusts other people with power but also distains and internalizes their views. I have a rich history of being vigilant when I assess teachers, therapists, trauma experts, or others in power.

Both of my parents were teachers who knew that I was struggling even though I was always one of the better students in my class. I got left back in kindergarten and I was almost not admitted because of the way I used scissors in the interview.

Early writing efforts often went unnoticed and did not result in top grades. The teacher who graded my poetry notebook told my mother my work was too depressing and only gave me a B.

When I took to writing and wrote my college essay, my parents were called into school and I was nearly sent back to the hospital because the school psychologist suggested I might be suicidal. I wrote about running a half marathon at Outward Bound and was very proud of my work. It’s true that I was, as I always have been, very self-disclosing in my writing. This particular essay I had rewrote incessantly. In fact, I continued to rewrite it. I sent it out to colleges anyway.

Even though I was shamed in front of my whole class who gossiped as I was called before the school tribunal, I sent that essay out and then I didn’t go to the schools that accepted me. Shortly thereafter I got so angry at the school, I let my weight drop and I was put back in the hospital for a second time for anorexia.

I felt intensely betrayed by anyone who had tried to teach me when the school erroneously published that I was headed off to an upper crust college. Really, I was moving in with my twenty-five-year-old girlfriend to attend a commuter college in Camden New Jersey. I raged at the whole community of teachers who failed to see any value in my writing when it came time for awards.

In college I continued to be vigilant of teachers who graded my performance. When a professor finally gave me a hundred on a take-home-exam and said he hadn’t done so in ten years, I was outraged. My other efforts were just as good as this one. On this particular essay I was just regurgitating his opinion after talking with him. My other efforts were better and more heart felt. When an English Professor wanted to put my essay up for an award, I again was outraged and never got back to him. I didn’t care about a stupid reward!

In graduate school I was working full-time and, hitting classes after a full work day. My relationship with most professors remained on a similar trajectory. I thought most of my teachers knew nothing about the things I was working through during my day job. Several made fun of me for asking too many questions.

After I graduated with my masters, I moved to the west coast without knowing anyone. I met a really nice Thai Buddhist girlfriend. We attended political speeches with regard to the WTO protests together. Later she told me that when she heard how hard I criticized the speakers and author’s we talked about she felt self-conscious and wondered what I thought of her. She was right, everybody I heard speak about a political issue I was way too hard on.

I guess the manager-part feels justified because of the way it was rejected. It is still internalizing the authorities who never reached out and helped it. Many of my teachers were managed by my father. Perhaps they looked at my dyslexic spelling, disliked my father, and downgraded my work.

Compassion:

I do feel bad for the little boy who used the scissors in an unconventional manner. He never deserved to be managed and criticized by a judgmental, prep school community. I do want to protect him from the managers who are now a select few of his peers in the recovery movement.

Indeed, while others were learning to socialize in college while they built skills, I was the anorectic-white-boy working at a mom-and-pop deli mart in Camden New Jersey with a Glock under the grill and a shotgun over the trash can. I think leaders in the recovery movement may not understand why I don’t have college social skills.

But to a larger extent, managers who guard public opinion rest in cliques and decide what and who they are going to support. Yet, I need to respect their role in creating community is also important. They are smart and better than me at some things. They too need to be acknowledged. It really is important for me not to bite back at them.

My father, who was often driven to rage by my slow pace, did need to help me work faster at some points. He committed his life to leading the prep school environment trying to make it a fair and just place to get a superior education. It was not his fault that I was dissociated and depressed. I believe I had some childhood trauma that made me that way. He wasn’t used to dealing with kids who failed to thrive.

His father dumped all the family assets onto him to manage in the summers. There was no rest for the wicked for my father. He worked and worked and all he had to show for it was a modest private school salary and a slow dissociated kid. All he had was control over those family resources and relationships. They would go to the kids who respected him and didn’t bite back and bring the inner-city manners up in family gatherings.

Indeed, for every manager that I have worked with there is a similar story of someone who wasn’t seen and their work not acknowledged who just has to bite back a little. So, as I work with that kid that I want to protect, I need to teach him to understand the manager and use this understanding to assert and advocate. I need to show the managers that they need to look at what the neurodivergent mind has to say even if the associated behavior is a little different.

The post Learning Self Compassion After A Psychosis Episode: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Maintaining a sense of community support is precious when you struggle a history of exile. In my life words like “schizophrenia” and “anorexia” mixed with periods of institutional incarceration have resulted in alienation, trauma, and exile. It’s been twenty years since my most recent incarceration for “schizophrenia” and it remains very hard to find community support. I find the pattern of being othered replicates itself.

Healing from my most extreme experience of exile, “schizophrenia,” has involved outreach into many communities. I’d like to recommend community outreach because it’s been full of great experiences and rewards. But to be honest, although it is needed, it often results in repeated triggers that bring on emotional distress and familiar thinking patterns. Persisting has been very important as has finding ways to process those negative experiences and finding primary support.

Ultimately, I have learned to honor the communities where I have sensed safety and support that have enabled me to thrive and be authentic. These communities have enabled me to persist when I get triggered and feel othered. I am writing to share my perceptions about persisting through exile and to honor those places that have assisted in healing and soothing that sense of exile.

Starting with the Origins of Feeling Targeted:

This sense of exile I recently traced back in memory during an EMDR training. I remember being at a family friend’s farm and finding horns that fell off baby cattle. I remember being told that’s what happens to baby cattle as they grow, they lose their horns. It must have been Halloween, after my birthday at age of two or three. I remember the melancholy of feeling like one of those horns. The gray misty rain, the green pastures, the mud, the need to hold onto the horn that I identified with, those images have come back to me during periods of exile.

The family story is that the farm owner hid with me during hide and seek. No one could find us Otherwise I remember only traipses of what I presume to be the day. A glimpse into a crowded, festive room, the visual of a costumed witch, and the contrast, the grey, billowing fog, the misty rain.

I remember the owner asking me at a later point if I remember the day. I remember his sense of intensity. I remember feeling revolted when he touched my ass as I rode on his back. I remember feeling perplexed seeing him interact with his children who were far older than me.  I remain only suspicion about what may have happened.

The main reason I am suspicious is that I have recaptured other dissociated memories about other sex abuse events that went along with family stories. Those stories help explain behavior and actions that were always frowned upon. Clothing myself in the shower and refusing to let anyone see me in the buff, not sleeping for a year on end, starving, sacrificing myself for people I love, these actions would result in incarceration and labels.

Ultimately, I only have a sense that the intensity of my reactions against sex abuse goes back further. For example, I just can’t imagine that I would dissociate so easily fondled in a tub at the age of nine and later, to behave so cowardly at the age of seventeen in the face of an atrocity that I am not even sure is real.

Sense of Exile:

Because I was “so sensitive” and perhaps because I frowned in all the pictures taken of me, I was exiled from my family and the school community in which I was raised. Male anorexia ultimately had a lot to do with this. Who starves themselves like that? It diminished a great deal of constructive work! I stopped being seen.

However, when I trace my history back at the school there was always a sense of rejection. Always a good student, I was nearly not admitted because I cut paper in an unusual manner. Luckily my parents worked there and were willing to have me repeat a year. There were early reports of how I failed to connect with other kids. There was the year I spent a lot of time home and sick. There was the fact that the kids picked on and bullied me. When I rebelled against the other kids, I got sent to counseling. I got psychological testing.

My sense of exile was clear in my decision to thumb my nose at the private school expectations of an expensive collegiate utopia. They published that I was going to a good school in the yearbook, regardless. However, I chose a local inner-city commuter college campus where I could afford to divorce myself from my parent’s influence. I would end up creating the space to hide daily binging and purging. I studied and worked the whole time. I never wasted time to go to a single college party. I graduated with a 3.9 GPA.

I fought a sense of exile among my graduate school affiliates, but I fought for acceptance. I was exiled at most jobs and among my twenty-something associates. I moved west where I knew very few people.

Extracting Pockets of Support:

I write to highlight the importance of finding the places where I did find a sense of acceptance. I owe them gratitude and vie to give back. I have developed and survived in spite of exile. I am more fortunate than many in that I have a career and have developed a sense of primary support.

I was first hospitalized at Child Guidance Center with whom Salvador Minuchin termed “kids from the slums.” I am relieved to say that in the face of what I consider to be significant institutional abuse, I did find streetwise kids had more compassion and acceptance for me than cohorts at private school.

Likewise, in college, working under the table at an inner-city Korean owned deli fifty hours a week through the spank of summer, I was profoundly touched by the fact that the community accepted me. They didn’t care if I was skinny and afraid of food. Meanwhile support and acceptance from cohorts continued to elude me as I entered professional positions.

For the last eighteen years I have found support working for psychiatric patients in a psychiatric unit. It’s true I have been less likely to feel supported by colleagues who called the clients, “crazies” or have took action to have me removed. But once again in the face of institutional abuse, I found community members heard my stories once I grew secure enough to tell them. It was with the clientele community that my mindful spontaneity and facilitation skills developed. I may have been a disrespected droid at family reunions and mainstream events, but I found myself again in the hospital back ward.

Support in the community gives you that sense of being known, respected and belonging. It is an important part of healing and human development. And yet to promote safety, the nature of many communities is that they set standards of behavior or social discourse that govern that sense of belonging. I have found that being fond of and accepted in one context can preclude one from fitting into another.

The road to rediscovering that sense of belonging can certainly be a long and winding one!

The Exile that Resulted from Battling Institutional Hypocrisy:

When I moved to the west coast, I decided that the mainstream needed to know how homeless and disabled people suffer. I was setting up services in a notorious section 8 housing complex. I alerted the newspapers. While it’s arguable I had the experience and capacity to understand the consequences of this prior, I had been taught by a mainstream therapist that if I thought corruption was real, I was paranoid.

It was the era of the psychopharmacology professional and the psychotherapy establishment that monitored me fronted kindness, yet predicted that I would be in and out of the hospital the rest of my life to any semblance of family support system that remained.

My coping strategy was to ignore corruption and work hard in the face of it. Housing Authority officials tried to bribe me by offering me as many tickets as I wanted to a music festival. I didn’t want to be paranoid and think it was a bribe, so I turned around and invited the whole community of residents that they serviced. I requested over a hundred tickets for the residents and was given twenty-four.

I have since accepted that the uninvestigated killing that alarmed me go with the territory in housing authorities, inner-city, and poor-community realities. It’s taken me a long time to accept. I had to go homeless and be an indentured servant for some time.

In my view, we are all a part of perpetuating those realities and decisions. The lure of fast money and soldiering results in a steady stream of death that is not often noted. Many people understand the injustice that happens, but they also know it isn’t safe to shine a light on it. Those that do end up in prison, dead, or unable to find work.

With unobserved rage from getting beat up in the WTO Protest and feeling ashamed for having run away from an incestuous rape, I was one bad ass who didn’t care. I was like Serpico! When I was threatened and told that curiosity killed the cat, I retorted, “Yes, but the cat has nine lives!”

As I started to believe I was being followed, I stopped taking medication and started to understand corruption better. I reached out to my one remaining college friend with a nefarious history and he made a credible threat. Still, I didn’t believe him. I tried to escape to Canada and was intercepted by police.

In fact, they were following me. It’s just that no one believed me.

Understanding the Reality of How American Society Maintains Control:

Being kicked out of the circle or rejected by the majority of the group often gets perpetuated by group leaders who either volunteer or get paid to manage. They vie to control the business and stay in power via controlling behavior and negotiating norms.

Whether done by the FBI, social service employers, educators, unions, lawyers or heads of the family fortunes, crime ring bosses, managers will go to great lengths to control and shape your behavior regardless of laws and justice. I have come to believe that much of it is about maintaining cultural delusions about wealth and privilege.

Thus, people who refuse to conform are pushed out and exiled. This can happen easily if you are not corrupt and are targeted by the community. It can also happen if you are too corrupt and targeted.

People have ways of sniffing out your history of belonging or failure to do so. They may look at the color of your skin or your gender or manners, or friends and presume the culture and experiences you have be subjected to and decide if they want you around.

For example, I believe that as a social services worker, being a productive and effective healer and promoting justice is a good way to get targeted. Clinics are there to make money and control costs, and arguably to control people. Input a little healing, and you become a threat to some people with six figure salaries.

It seems a good way to frame this is that you must agree to toque reefer, but must agree not to toque too much of it. Toque too much and you become a burner or addict. No toque, and one becomes an exiled joke. I feel its arguable that this was the quintessential dilemma that governed acceptance in American culture during the X generation. When Bill Clinton said, “but I didn’t inhale,” it clarified a lot. He promoted the very large Housing Authority company, with whom I was contracted to work, as a model of urban development. I knew that but I still alerted the press.

I must admit that I presume the toque, no toque dilemma happens at many sleep-away colleges and other developmental institutions like the military. I avoided this stage of life by living in a roach infested apartment and working under the table. This way I could live skinny and heal without being further targeted and shamed for being a thin man.

Some Historical Context:

Maybe in other generations it was different. In American history at one point it was more about accepting slavery or genocide. To fit in, one must sip the tea. One must go corrupt, just not too much so. Thus, Thomas Jefferson was cool, but hid his pedophilia exploits so as not to go too far. That’s a real American hero, yeah! He got to coauthor the American Constitution.

Makes you wonder what the history books will say about this era? When law and order is about preserving the Jeffery Epstein way of life via the execution of black men in the inner city, you’ve got to wonder! Perhaps this is what America First is all about. Donald Trump did say he could kill someone down on some avenue in broad daylight and his supporters would still vote for him. I have to say, I think he knew what he was talking about.

On the other hand, I would suggest that Donald Trump is transparent about the realities of social control and the feudal oligarchy we have all stupidly called American democracy. All the defenders of the dumb shit authored by Thomas Jefferson and other feudal pimps really believe in the law and constitutional democracy. I work hard to expose lies and cultural delusions, but I sure hope they can protect us from the mind state of a fascist xenophobe.

Perhaps it all boils back to the quintessential American dilemma, do I toque reefer!

“Take it easy, but take it!” This odd quote extracted from one of the bizarre cinematographic dissociative sequences in the movie, Midnight Cowboy still eludes me all these years later. I still say, no.

People like me who repeatedly get exiled and cannot find community might struggle with a sense of shame, trauma and the ongoing exile of pain.

The Science of Trauma and Surviving Exile

Indeed, when we turn to advances in neuroscience to understand what heals trauma: we end up with several different sects about how to create safety and resources. Some proponents identify community support as being important. Thus, in my local EMDR sect, people or things that have served as wise, protective, or nurturing support emerge as necessary resources to address the unthinkable.

The basic concept is to take inventory of good relationships that have existed and create community that you can bring with you to revisit victimization and help you through can be very transformative. Of course, some of these relationships can be with mythical fictional characters or public figures like artists, tv personalities. Or (gulp) politicians who are admirable (if that is possible.) For example, I have realized that Midnight Cowboy’s character Joe Buck is a personal resource for me. “Well, I am not a for-real Cowboy, but I sure am one hell of a stud.”

Taking a deeper dive into resourcing, I am learning that there are many ways to create a safe environment. Indeed, sometimes using mindfulness techniques and meditations can help create safety between the therapist and client. Thus, creating safety can form the basis for community support.

Taking the risk to listen and reflect on what the person experiences might be and help them feel safe and in the window of tolerance when they revisit traumatic images like the gray billows of misty rain, the green pastures, the mud and the cow horns.

Using mindfulness exercises is another way to build resources and keep the person in the window of tolerance. Then, using desensitization or bilateral stimulation and encouraging the person to reprocess that trauma or sense of exile can give people the tools to broaden their sense of safety and sense of support.

The result is that the sense of exile does not get triggered and new community support becomes attainable. Thus, people who attack you politically don’t trigger you into that sense of exile. Thus, you remember the community that accepts you and you avoid the tendency to dissociate and withdraw.

Keep Persisting!

I believe powerful community managers of many sorts will continue to exile you if your experience does not fit the mold they want to see or the realities that they have championed and the power of their salaries. Hacienda owners will attack you with all the power they have when you have done nothing wrong. Maybe it all boils down to the fact that you just don’t want to toque reefer for them, I don’t know.

Ultimately being exiled from their community doesn’t mean you should give up. The more you persist and utilize those communities that do support you, even if they are just in spirit, the less power those community managers have to exile you.

Furthermore, as they treat you like you don’t matter, are invisible, are inferior or are deficient, it gives you the opportunity to practice healing in the face of your original form of exile. You persist and reprocess and perhaps continue to champion the communities of support that have in fact been there for you.

The past year and a half as the community of support that I have worked for has been under assault. Managers say the county wants to create a new system. I tend to see it as another gentrification, race and class war cloaked in mental health reform.

Managers threatened closure and there was a massive exodus of many of the competent counselors of color with lesser tenure. Additionally, the one manager who supported me, was removed from power. Many of the clients gave up their treatment.

Indeed, I have witnessed yet again top down change imposed on the community has been very devastating for community members. I have seen this happen repeatedly in the hacienda system.

I have tended to view many layers of mismanagement. Ultimately, I believe plans have shifted towards blaming the unit’s failings it on the workers and layoffs. The inequity of work is stunning. The atmosphere is: keep one’s productivity high, and get targeted. My theory is that it will make it harder to fire us if we are productive. I have persisted and prayed, but have started up a private practice to protect myself if the cuts in fact prevail.

This week there has been a strike and the power that has mismanaged and harmed the community is reportedly going to be replaced. I still don’t know what this is going to mean for the community.

I have kept my memory of inner-city support in my heart and fought to maintain my productivity. Perhaps I am only clinging on to a baby cow horn in the misty rain. I have documented the work of the community. I worked with them for twelve years to create my redefining “psychosis” therapy platform. They are its architects and they have always deserved better.

I could write about ways I feel blacklisted and betrayed, but I am persisting to maintain community with love in my heart. I feel so touched as to encourage the reader to keep reaching for new community! Things may change.

I believe in peer support and not in involuntary medication. I have fought for these changes for our community for years. I have brought in peer counselors and they worked well. But when change is imposed in a top down manner, communities dwindle and the point is missed. Let change happen regardless of which top down political fool got in the latest punch.

I have heard that my boss of many years who supported hard work and good client care, says, keep fighting. He seems to have come around on the issue of peer support in his years of knowing me.

Me, I am just persisting as I always have done. Perhaps one day all those communities that have seemed to be turned against me will change. Maybe I will recapture a memory and realize that I am truly delusional. Until then, I will continue to persist and call out our cultural delusions.

The post The Challenges of Finding Community Support When You Have A History of Exile appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

I unlock the door to the institution’s finest office. A doctor’s name is inscribed on a linoleum slide that changes every few years. I press the darkened door smudge on the off-white paint job that dominates the unit. The door swings open. I invite Eugene’s cousin in.

Eugene’s cousin sits in the cushioned seat that matched the last dirty rug. The soot spattered on the outside of the window blocks the sun’s stream. She missed my eulogy. She depicts her challenges in finding the right freeway.

I had been up In the ER waiting room anxiously reviewing what I had to say about Eugene in front of the community. When I finally gave up on her, I had to rush back and make the memorial service happen. Somehow, I doubt it was an honest mistake to have missed the community event.

Eugene’s cousin announces has brought pictures and starts positioning them on the wobbly table.

I know that if I do my job, she will leave feeling just a bit of the guilt that I feel.

Eugene could have been given treatment that could have saved him. People do rehab and come back from strokes. The nursing home had reached out to the cousin repeatedly, I had been reassured. There had been no response.

“As usual,” I explain, scanning the pictures on the table, “many community members had listened to my eulogy understanding well the importance of acknowledging the passing.”

In reality many had strained to get a facial recognition of Eugene.

“As you know, Eugene is very quiet. Many were surprised and lifted to hear the complex details of his life and his miraculous turn around . . .

Eugene had spent years amidst the chronic, room 2, crowd. He’d talk to the therapist and answer stupid questions, but he was hard to really get to know.

As I continue to speak, I feel the strongest sense of grief. There has been staff turnaround due to the threat of closure amid the Trump era financial crisis that’s hit urban cities. The sense of sprawling tent encampments that surround us overwhelms me. It feels like Eugene and his legacy will close and be so easily forgotten.

***

When I first started on the unit, it was hard to reach anyone in room 2. The prescribed topics of illness management and functional skills were the only direction and support I was given to solve the complex phenomena of schizophrenia.

Company managers used to say that our clients would never get any better. I vehemently objected to that mentality, and I also was very worried about job security. As long as I wrote meaningful notes, I could survive.

The first time I went in there, one of Eugene’s peers had screamed, “BUZZARDS.” There was wild laughter, and some moaning. Amidst the lonely groaning and drool going on, I had a list of questions about recovery with which to work. I just didn’t know what to do except persist.

Over time, conversing with the three or four loud personalities in the group putting out disjointed content, I’d learn that the one who yelled, “BUZZARDS” thought he was an aristocrat. The aristocrat was light skinned African American man in a porkpie hat with gums instead of dentures.

Eugene would just sit in silence next to him while he talked throwing his head and his eyes back in repetitive manner. He called this “play acting” or “just acting crazy.” He would tell me he did it because he had nothing to lose. He wasn’t really crazy.

Meanwhile, loud personalities would have creative moments of clarity. For example, I once made sure one of the aristocrat’s quotes made it into the community magazine I put together: “Some days I feel like I am somewhere between a giblet and a human being,”

As per the “BUZZARDS!” comment I always knew there was meaning to it, but it’d take time to learn to come out of my shell and really get down with it.

Of course, the buzzard in the room was me. I was feeding off the dead and decrepit. Indeed, with the salary I was making, I would be able to go from nothing to having the down payment for a bay area house.

One day I would have the confidence to start cawing like a crow. I’d caw like a crow and circle the room until I got close to the aristocrat. Then, I’d simulate getting shot straight in the heart. Then, I’d fall until I laid flat on the floor beneath him and abreact a slow and painful death. It was the only appropriate response.

I still remember the aristocrat’s laugh the first time I pulled something like this. The laugh would happen periodically at the oddest of moments, “HA-HA!”

At least when I finally got down with him, the laugh happened at the appropriate moment. Over time I did manage to understand. The aristocrat was an aristocrat. An aristocrat and a philosopher.

Still, Eugene didn’t have time for these kinds of antics. He would just give you straight forward and stale answers.

***

I had a few years to onboard before I officially carried Eugene on my caseload.

Our first meeting, Eugene said, “I want to purchase a book to read with the solution to schizophrenia in it. I had a box filled with haphazardly xeroxed recovery materials I’d gleaned off the internet. I shuffled through it until I found the Patricia Deegan article introducing the hearing voices network in Europe. There was a book recommendation at the bottom I explained.

It took us a while but we sent away for it through snail mail. It was a good effort but it never arrived.

One day we were sitting in doctor’s office. It was the end of the session and Eugene exclaimed, “I see alien green!” They were the last words I’d hear from him for years.

Unlike a few of the colleagues who have come and gone over the years, I insisted in keeping weekly appointments with muted Eugene. Instead of talking we walked.

He was an extremely fast and aggressive walker. I ran ten miles on Saturday and hiked twenty miles every Sunday vying to meet a soul mate; yet, I could barely keep up.

As the muted walks continued, I would try one-way comments to connect with him. I would ask if he saw any objects as we walked that were signs of alien surveillance. I would point out things I saw that could be signs of surveillance. I let him lead.

It took me a while to develop these kinds of connection techniques. We did a lot of silent walks.

When Eugene had a housing crisis, I did some research and found an odd doctor named Bassard who had a board and care that was off in the Hayward foothills. There was reportedly a lot of space out there to walk.

His dutiful case worker in West Oakland had told me he used to lead Sierra Club backpacking trips in his younger years. She sometimes talked to his aunt who would pick him up and take him Christmas shopping for his nieces and nephews who lived in undisclosed location. The aunt might be how she found out about his secret life as a backpacker.

***

Doctor Bassard’s board and care seemed to be a good fit for a while.

One day after our walk Eugene sat with me and explained that he used to work in a print shop, the hardest kind of physical labor there was. He reported that he was the hardest worker and would often demonstrate his superiority to the other workers. He didn’t give a fuck!

The next thing I heard from Eugene was that he was thinking about going to the Alameda County Fair. Then I’d hear about Christmas shopping with his aunt.

I’d learn that he had been a drug and alcohol counselor early on. When he’d gotten married and had his son, he switched to the print shop to increase his income.

His mom had been, “nuts.” The daughter of a famous Irish protestant radio preacher and artist. In fitful rages she would accuse Eugene of being a spy for the Irish Republican Army and beat him. His father was a roofer and (according to Eugene) a bit of a slacker. He supported the mother and later Eugene through the years of madness

Growing up, Eugene’s peers would tease him because his Mom was “nuts.” He learned to hang out with the druggies even though he refused to use. Thus, the drug and alcohol job.

I learned much of this far later in my tenure when Eugene returned to treatment.

We took a walk before he got taken to jail on assault charges. It had been a return to the mute days. He littered. Sensing his ire, I hadn’t corrected him. There was a can on the hospital grounds and he smashed it with his foot. I hadn’t done anything . . .

His roommates had been constantly stealing his food at Bassard’s. They were largely unmonitored. Eugene’s efforts to fix this were not supported by the strange doctor.

***

Throughout I was volunteering after work for my child and family hours. Finally, I passed the exams. I managed to meet my soul mate and collect enough for down payment on a house.

I heard about an expensive group curriculum for psychosis developed by Patricia Deegan. Me being the arrogant cheapskate that I am I decided to develop my own. Thus, I started running psychoses focus groups for years developing a curriculum.

By the time Eugene was referred back to our program, I had left my job for a year and a half, but been permitted to return when the new job hadn’t worked out.

***

This time Eugene was staying at McClure’s board and care home, one of the best licensed board and care in town. His trusty case manager advocated for him.

Eugene was mandated to complete our five day a week PHP program by the board a care facility. Turns out all he had done was gotten angry about taking his medication on day and slammed a door. Now, the hospital could make a lot of money off him.

The hospital had erected world class facilities but left its historic psych ward with bubbled windows (our unit) alone. No longer could we go out and sit by the trash compacter and watch the men work. Walks were no longer easily accessible.

Eugene and his peers had to weave through the historic backwards, passing the freshly built shower facilities for doctors, the hole-in-the-wall medical records department, down a flight of stairs and down and then around the substance abuse ward to find the sunlight. Then they had to walk down a sizeable hill all the way down to the sidewalk to smoke.

Everyday in community meeting they would be reminded that tickets for smoking were eight hundred dollars, the same price as their monthly SSDI checks.

Eugene was one of the few remaining room 2 clients who obeyed these daily threats. He’d be known to skip the last group and stay down on the sidewalk smoking.

By the time he had sat through two days of PHP which was four groups with the same small group of people who were just out of the hospital, he was fuming. When I sat down with him for the second time, I knew I had to do something.

Board and care homes have no legal right to mandate treatment, but they can kick Eugene out for misconduct. When he half way expressed the reason he was fuming, I could see how right he was.

Luckily the clinical manager who hated me was out for the day. I went straight to the director who had been around as long as I had. I made the appeal. I kept it simple, but was compelling enough.

I reported to Eugene that he could come just two days a week as he’d requested.

***

“See, what happened to me was that I leaked a suspicious death to the newspapers. I was afraid thuging residents I knew at the section 8 complex where I worked would find out.

“I sought consult from my best college friend back east, an ex-drug addict. He warned me not to leave town, he had the power to find me.

“Had he set me up to take a fall? That’s what I started thinking.

“I tried to escape to Canada and they put me in a State Hospital for three months. I was discharged to the streets and I took a Trailways to California.

“Turns out the only job I could get was arranged by my family at an Italian Delicatessen. I had to move to the outskirts of the bay area, bike ten miles and take the rails an hour to get to the job. Everyday I was followed on my way to and from the job and no one believed me.

I had told my story as such a million times in the psychoses focus group. If I hadn’t done so repeatedly, I would not have been able to even articulate secrets so raw. But I had a lot of practice and gotten a lot of support from participants who loved and advocated for my group.

“I don’t think your family is really an Irish mafia family!” exclaimed Eugene. Sure, enough he had tracked the details. His words gutted me as brutally as possible. “I don’t think you were really followed on your way to the Italian Delicatessen. I think those are paranoid delusions!”

I remained cool as a cucumber in hot sauce. Experience had prepared me for this moment. I spoke softly and peacefully . . .

“One day at the BART station, a man I knew well from the section 8 housing authority in Seattle Washington walked past me with handcuffs and a shirt that read “CIA.” He sat across from me and stared at me the whole ride. He had told me he killed people.

I answered a few questions: “yes, I knew for a fact he had been busted for impersonating a CIA officer in the past;”  “yes, I knew that for a fact because I had read his file as a social worker;” yes, I ignored him;” “yes, it was just another day for me.”

Eugene’s questions were intelligent ones!

“Then there was the day I came home and my apartment was trashed. My kitty litter had been slashed and emptied over the carpeted floor; my belongings had been taken out of my closet; and the labels of my clothes had been slashed with a knife. When I went to the managers office to complain, this woman I had met before was there. She had flashed her official secret service badge at me. She told me that my uncle had entered my apartment and had the right to do so because he had co-signed on the apartment.

I paused. I was afraid Eugene wouldn’t follow the very real details I shared with him.

“Yeah, I had the secret service follow me once as well,” admitted Eugene. “One time I tried to escape to Canada myself.”

***

“Yes, Eugene started talking,” said his case manager. “I think he did so because he finally met someone to whom he could relate.” I could feel the social worker smiling as she acknowledged me. “I think now he has hope for recovery.”

Eugene and I had a lot of good years of talking and relating. I used to go down and have sessions with him on the sidewalk. Eventually, he started coming to see me in the office during the third group.

***

When I finally get to the place where I tell the cousin about how I had cracked Eugene’s case, to her credit she shifts to trying to help me grieve smoothly.

Listening to her stories is nice. She tells me about cheerful parts of Eugene: his generosity to his family and to his fellow peers at the board and care. I choose to keep a picture of Eugene with her husband, a stout Irish musician, as they shared a cigar with a smile.

Her stories help me see that when he started to tell me about cooperating and sharing TV with his roommates that we really had accomplished something. Previously he’d just talked about walking up to Berkeley to go to a doughnut shop.

The cousin tells me about how they used to visit him at the board and care home in the inner-city with gifts and that by the time they had left they would see those gifts getting sold in a garage sale at the neighbors’ yard. It must have filled them with so much guilt to see what he was going through in contrast to them.

When I was in the State Hospital, the few belongings I had to my name were constantly stolen. For Eugene, living like that was a life sentence.

Eugene had learned more about the mental illness of schizophrenia, than he’d learned about the hidden world of recovery.

In our treatment, I’d finally gave him a book with the solution to schizophrenia. I wrote it. It was my memoir.

***

When my mother told family acquaintances what had happened to me on my way to Canada, everybody we knew, she was sure to tell me, cursed the closings of the institutions in the eighties. They were trying to sooth her. They didn’t want her to have to enable-me any longer.

My life ended in the folklore of the Christmas Card.

Sure, I have had some mainstream accomplishments that could be cited. Sure, the community of people I once knew could stand to learn about the reality of mental illness in the U.S.

But alas, my achievements only become embarrassing reminders of the word that defines me to everyone with whom I grew up, schizophrenia. Some days it feels like that word defines me to almost every one I once knew.

Once, when I credited my Mom that investing three thousand dollars in a car for me, I was trying to honor her support. I said that it was the main thing that enabled me to recover.

Her words were, “I shouldn’t have purchased you that car!”

When I published my award-winning memoir, my grandmother’s dying words to me (who she couldn’t recognize) was that the book made the family look bad.

A relative wrote a bad review. Another made a salty, veiled-in-a-compliment criticism. The whole Clan ignored me at the family reunion.

Eugene in contrast sacrificed himself for his family. That is somehow more admirable in our shared cultural heritage.

***

Sure, Eugene and I talked openly about aliens. He’d explain that he could feel implants obsessively on his brain. I think they were caused by ongoing voices about which he never did get to the point where he’d share.

Sure, he’d talk about the very common experience of being able to transition into different dimensions of reality. He could tell because the board and care rats he’s seen skittering across the floor suddenly disappear into thin air. Finally, he told me about his relative with Top Sec clearance for NASA.

Neither of us suffered for the sharing of these details. We didn’t become worse or traumatize each other. No, we formed a valuable allegiance that enabled him to have relationships with others.

True, this only happened because I broke all the rules and shared with him what many would consider to be delusions about my brush with the underworld and Italian Mafia.

Sure, he died before he could start up his business or take the stained-glass, art class he wanted to take. I almost got him to pay for an art class at one point.

It’s true I wasn’t so committed to him that I would quit my day job and help him come back from his stroke.

***

So, when the cousin leaves the hospital, I think she feels some of the guilt I felt when I drove across town with cards and letters after work only to learn that he expired. As she leaves the hospital, she expresses a little upset that I only accepted one picture of Eugene that she had collected. I sure hadn’t realized she would feel that way.

But as I say goodbye, I still hope for the best for the cousin and Eugene’s family who accepted his gifts at Christmas and never reached back. I call his son with the phone number the cousin gave me, but never hear back. I still call my mother weekly and vie for a less hurtful relationship.

Still. I hope and pray that the fact that Eugene and I were finally able to work together gave him a sense of peace and that he may rest from the torment of that damned word we use to bill for services, schizophrenia.

The post Eulogy On Irish Schizophrenia appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

When I took the job at the Housing Authority facility dubbed the “Hotel of Horrors” in the local media, I thought I was on a mission from god. 

The weekend before I started the job, I took a spiritual retreat with the Quaker community I frequented. Out on an island on the Puget Sound, in a quaint room, I told a small group of my cohorts that I was following a spiritual calling by taking this job. Maybe that’s just how I dealt with my nerves.

Everybody at the community mental health center where I worked was far too afraid to take a job there. 

I was a master’s level professional. I was able-bodied and good at helping others. I knew that trying to “save” a community was risky. But I did not imagine what I was about to endure.

***

Years earlier, in college, I’d moved to the inner-city in Camden, New Jersey to hide a history of male anorexia.

In the beginning of my senior year, I had to take a semester off because of a mental health crisis. An observant resident of my apartment complex introduced herself to me upon my return from the hospital as if she knew what was going on with me. Her name was Cece. 

Like me, Cece was a fish out of water in the inner-city, entirely alone, surviving amid the roaches. She admitted to a history of shooting heroin in her toes. She knew a lot about psychiatric meds and liked to recommend different medications to me often second guessing my doctors. She had been on all of them!  Now she was on social security, clean, and was seeking employment. 

At the same time I started to get invited out with a group of my fellow students who all commuted in from the suburbs. The leader of this clique was an English student who wanted to help me out in spite of my hospitalization. He would go to law school and use my rental history to establish a bachelor pad for four of us. I was invited to go out with the group, but they made it clear, I was not to bring Cece. 

A year later I was living with the suburban clique and I received a call from Cece. She found a job at a photography store and had managed to get off social security. I had just landed a job in a mental health clinic and was starting my master’s program. Somehow, Cece found out my work number and called me. 

“You are getting ready to do things that are really wrong, but that’s okay, I forgive you.”

What a wise intervention that was! Indeed, I felt bad about leaving her behind. At my new job I’d have to follow the lead of my supervisor who seemed to demean the clients. Cece was right: I’d surely done wrong, and I was fixing to do a lot more that I didn’t feel was right. 

It was the psychopharmacology craze of the nineties and I learned to see schizophrenia as a medical problem that just required medication. I distracted myself from feelings of guilt by chasing connections with fellow students in my master’s program and holding on to the bachelor pad clique. Maybe curing my loneliness, and tendency to get scapegoated by suburbanites, really was as simple as a complex cocktail of four medications. 

To my credit, I worked hard and went the extra mile to help the people coming to the clinic where I worked. And as I got credentials, I took more risks and made more effort to do the right thing. 

Once I successfully graduated, I left it all behind and moved to the west coast. 

***

So, as I was on my mission from god and entering the “Hotel of Horrors,” I pledged to only do what I felt was right. 

In six months there I saw doors torn off of hinges by thugs in broad daylight. I saw addicts get stabbed and nothing done about it. I saw vulnerable residents get hauled off to jail when they were bullied into using their apartments for drug deals. Mostly, the police only came around to take a barricaded paranoid resident off to the hospital because he refused to pay rent.

I did a lot to support vulnerable clients. I met with local advocates. I leaked stories to the media. My job was threatened. When a resident without an addiction ended up dead from a heroin overdose I was suspicious. I arranged for a young newspaper reporter to investigate. I stopped taking my medication.

“One time we had a social worker come down here like you and try to straighten out this mess,” a resident told me. “They told him to stop but he wouldn’t. He ended up having to move down here with us. I just don’t want that to happen to you!”

I started to get a sense of connection. All parts of my life were in play. Had I heard those words for a reason? Were they a threat! I was getting scared. 

I tried to escape to Canada, but I was followed and harassed by police. My parents had put out a missing-persons report so the police were initially violent with me. I believed that they were trying to trap me in a hospital and went to great lengths to resist.  Finally, I surrendered.

Being confined to Montana State Hospital for three months was a lot to go through. Two months in, I was transferred to the chronic unit which was barely heated above freezing and over-crowded. When I finally got discharged to the streets, I purchased a Greyhound bus pass to Fresno California.

***

When I ran out of medication, I lost my low-wage job. I couldn’t seem to find another job and, with my money dwindling, my family arranged a job for me if I moved to the Bay Area. If I didn’t take the job, I was on my own. 

It was quite a coincidence because I had decided that my family was a mafia family, and the job they arranged for me was at an Italian deli. I kept the deli job for close to a year before I agreed to go back on medication and try to return to working in mental health.

Returning to my former career wasn’t easy though. I had to bike twenty miles plus take the rails for two hours just to get to my job at the deli and back. Customers and co-workers targeted and humiliated me; they seemed to know things about me they shouldn’t. I ran into residents I recognized from Seattle on my way to work who sat next to me on the train. Every day there were signs I was being followed. Sometimes it seemed that I would be the only person who could recognize the signs, but they were always there. One day the police tailed me in the car I managed to acquire.

When I started back on medication the following continued, but I was better able to ignore it.  Eventually, I was able to get hired away from the deli and back into a mental health position.

For me, it took being diagnosed a schizophrenic to finally realize that just because I am an educated rich kid who knows how to write billable notes, I am not any better. I never fit in with the graduate students that went on to populate suburbia, I was a better fit with my inner-city neighbor, Cece.

Now, I am grateful for all I went through. 

I have found so much meaning in my work in the seventeen years since I returned to working in mental health. It took me six years to start to disclose my history. Then, I started psychosis focus groups and looking for a systematic way of redefining psychosis. I have really appreciated my privilege of working and being innovative to get results that might not have happened if I didn’t know that recovery was real.

I still take medication, but I would never do something like leaving Cece behind again. Instead, I am opening up a practice that aims to help people like her rise above a hopeless mental health system.

I feel for people who work in mental health and believe schizophrenia is just a medical disease that entitles mental health workers to their salary and power. I would be so burnt out and uncaring if I still believed that to be true. I am grateful that I have learned to be a different kind of worker.

This was published in the Better Because Project!

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The post A Different Kind of Worker appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

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.

The post What it Takes to Make Friends with People who Torment You: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

No, I still don’t believe schizophrenia is an illness! Many would say I still demonstrate poor insight into my illness for the declaration. That’s okay with me.

I received the diagnosis from a pony-tailed man wearing rodeo work boots with a decorative slab of leather along the base of his lace. He walked with a light stepping swag.  He wouldn’t identify his role to me. I did know I was in the state hospital because I had been set up by the police who I successfully evaded for three days.

Staff denied my request for food before the interview. I was just waking up in the p.m. after my 4:00am arrival the night before. I hadn’t eaten since noon the day before when I’d only walked to mile ten. I was miffed because the paper with the list of police officers on it I had collected for my competency hearing was missing out of my pocket.

***

Three days earlier I had stopped at a gas station to refill. I prepared to dive under my car in the event of gun shots from the passing cars. And then I was in the mart. The police were standing by the merchant as I approached with a coke. Part of me was relieved to see them.

“Oh, did Mommy and Daddy say your brain chemicals are distorted,” mocked a state trooper in a falsetto. He looked like a social-working co-worker of mine back in New Jersey who use to pretend he was a CIA operative.

It was true I had a slight bone to pick with the Seattle PD for leaving law enforcement up to black market forces. I had been contracted to set up services in a notorious section 8 housing project within six months of moving to Seattle. I had received a significant verbal threat from an old friend from back east who said he had the power to harm me. I was on my way to Canada to seek asylum. I had leaked corruption to the press. I now believed these actions would one day be uncovered if they hadn’t already been.

I felt my face turn red from the comment. I was angry that my parents did want me hospitalized just as I had intuited on the road before I decided to head to Canada. My intuition was proving to be correct once again. I could feel myself grimace.

The police were on me and used pain tactics to get me to my knees. They bruised my wrists from handcuffs to prove their control. For the most part, I remained limp and passive.

I knew how to evade hospitalization. I assured the copper of this on my ride to the hospital in the calmest of voice tones. I kept my eye on the mileage. I practiced what to say to the quack doctor in the ER to get released.

The doctor was a reasonable man. I told him I was having memories of being sexually abused. As soon as he said I could go, I left abruptly out the glass doors. I had my life savings in the inseam of my jean. The game wasn’t over.

Outside the hospital at dusk a pack of the local PD floated toward me like rowdy ghosts and the ringleader asked me if I was Tim Dreby.

“Leave me alone!” I shouted. I didn’t identify myself. I braced for another attack, but it never came.

A day later, after testing out what I could and could not get away with, I feared retracing my steps to my car. I also feared taking a flight from the local airport. I knew I could not risk another hospital incident. Instead, I decided to walk from Helena to Butte Montana in one day. I had hiked fifty miles in a day before. But I hadn’t counted on the midnight temperature on the mountain pass. I surrendered to the state troopers who happened to be looking for me with their bright shining light before I made it to Butte.

***

The diagnosis from the pony-tailed man came after I finished this and other parts of my story. I told him I thought my parents were part of the mafia and were pulling the strings behind the scenes.

After I finally got a small portion of cold slop on a plate, I met my roommate.

“I am here to tell you that the Mafia really is after you,” said the Native American man who dressed in a hillbilly hat. “I am just a hillbilly, schizophrenic man in the hospital with a hundred and thirty IQ,” he said during my extensive interview of him. The friend who threatened me knew that I had a hundred thirty IQ.

“Did you know Marylyn Monroe died when Jack Kennedy stuffed cyanide up her ass,” he also said.

“So, I want to ask you a question, and this is important,” said the hillbilly with a pause, “when did the mafia to start following you?”

With a certain Alan Alda vulnerability, I said, “I think I was raised by a mafia family.”

The hillbilly looked uncertain. I wondered if I had said the right thing to the pony-tailed man.

The next day the pony-tailed man testified against me at my competency hearing. I was sentenced to a three-month incarceration.

***

I would be deeply wounded in the hospital. Being confined to a day room for two weeks was very hard. Getting my back reinjured by the cowboy security squad during a misunderstanding also hurt. I was known to be entitled because I tried to hold my workers accountable for not doing their job. As a result, no worker would speak with me. Even my psychiatrist took two months to meet with me. However, the neglect of the chronic unit was the worst. A year of nightmares would ensue.

When I got out of the hospital I took a greyhound and started over with $4,500 in assets. I only had one month of medication. Withdrawing off the medication caused me to lose the job I managed to attain at a daycare. I pounded the pavement daily for three months for any job including Walmart and McDonalds. I did manage to get an offer from a foster care agency, but I was afraid to take it with all I was going through.

My family agreed to intercede if I moved to the Bay Area and I obtained an arranged job at an Italian Delicatessen. Perhaps it seems ironic that this was the only job I could get. I went through a great deal of harassment, gaslighting, and persecution. Finally, when I returned to taking medication ten months later I was able to come out of the emergency state. I stopped being prejudice against the teens who were taunting me at the Deli. I realized that my family was not pulling all the strings.

***

Nineteen years later, I make a daily choice to continue medication to prevent the catastrophic loss associated with an emergency state. Maybe I haven’t made it clear: I still object to the word “schizophrenia” and the idea that what I go through daily is an illness. In fact, the latest reports define schizophrenia as more of a syndrome or neurodevelopmental condition than a disease. They even suggest that it is something that affects people across diagnostic divides something that I have argued for years (Vinograndoy, 2019, p.1.)

I do accept that some of my perceptive abilities are different than others. I do accept that they can lead me into an emergency state if I am not careful. However, I believe the word “illness,” was behind the treatment, I received at the State Hospital. There, I was trained to be controlled by the industry. No one would let me talk about my experiences. I was forced to suppress them even when aspects of them were one hundred percent accurate. I was not encouraged to learn from others. The hospital only prepared me for poverty and to be abused in a local board and care.

I continue to perceive that many people who believe that schizophrenia is an illness internalize treatment that can communicate such negative forecasts.

Turns out the outcome of my journey didn’t coincide with the “sick,” mainstream delusions associated with schizophrenia. I’d read those delusions in school where the twin studies proved the genetic component and there was a noted progressive decline that would get worse and worse and result in brain damage. Turns out twin studies weren’t so reliable, and abuse results in brain damage, not the syndrome which is more an expression of neuro-diversity.

Even if the latest research and I are wrong, and the illness causes brain damage, how was I able to endure some harsh conditions in the community, resume working and eventually passing licensure exams in spite of my learning disabilities? For six months I had to bike twenty miles a day, take the rails for an hour each way to a wealthy suburb, and work in the belly of the beast to prove to my mafia family that this was not my destiny.

***

Now I am a licensed psychotherapist on an outpatient psychiatric unit.

Eleven years ago, I heard about the hearing voices network in Europe, and started to run professional groups in which I disclosed my lived experience with “schizophrenia.” I learned to use my experiences to facilitate storytelling and reflections in group therapy. I have found doing this in a group transforms what was once terrorizing, maddening, and unspeakable into something that can provide insight and inspiration to help others.

Furthermore, there are many details, coincidences, and evidence that I was in fact being monitored in ways many might not think possible. There are also many extremely oppressed people who share experiences of being monitored to which I relate. Such experiences include voices, disassociation, viewing bizarre television scenes, having an apartment ransacked, secret service badges, receiving job related mail that was broken open, being tailed by police officers, and oh so much more.

I may not have all the answers to all the questions I have, but, finally, I know I am not alone. Knowing this is such a relief!

Vinograndov, Sophia, M.D., “Cognitive Training for Neural System Dysfunction for Psychosis Disorders,” Psychiatric Times, Vol 36 Issue 3, March 29, 2019.

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