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 knew in my bones that the state-wide California Proposition 1 initiative would pass on March 6^th kind of like I knew that the Iraq War would start as a reaction against Osama Bin Ladden and the 9-11 tragedy. Perhaps my sense of this is something that I should keep to myself. Now, mismanaging the feelings I get in my bones, and stating that I believe my own ability to have premonitions could result in grave consequences.

This new proposition is set to mandate treatment to people with schizophrenia related forms of mental illness (not bipolar.) This proposition establishing “care courts” is matched by a similar policy starting in New York City called Kendra’s Law, or Assisted Outpatient Treatment. It is a policy that very well may spread throughout the states. What I fear is that this new power purportedly to help address the problem of homelessness becomes the law of the land. Many of us fear a return to institutionalization.

Now thanks to California Proposition 1, a person with my history could be mandated to attend treatment for two years by a judge. I could go from working in the program where I have held a twenty-year tenure as a psychotherapist to being forced to submit to treatment there despite the economic consequences. If this sounds like I am being drastic perhaps you haven’t read the details I have read or had the experiences with law enforcement and family and friends that I have had. Perhaps you haven’t had the dissociated experience of looking down upon yourself as you make your case in front of a judge’s condemning eyes just to realize that no one in the court room, not your family, not anyone, is listening to you.

Indeed, I might need to be more drastic because a lot of people don’t understand what is involved with such a catastrophic loss of status. For me personally, Proposition 1 could mean a return to a long-term dilapidated state hospital stay and years of being trafficked as an indentured servant. Perhaps you don’t believe that human trafficking is real or that it can happen to a white man from a middle-class background in the United Sates of America. But if what I am saying sounds drastic, I urge you to read further because I will provide details that at least will help you see where I am coming from. Indeed, it can and does happen and there are many more people like me than you likely realize.

My Fight to Create Safe Spaces:

In my current position on an outpatient psychiatric unit, I’ve been in a battle for sixteen years to make it safe for people like me to process experiences associated with what I call special messages in confidential group therapy. This isn’t easy to get people to do in our setting because the system teaches us that if we show signs of madness, we will endure punishment. To help others know it is safe to do so with me, I have grown accustomed to sharing my own experience.

I do work with some good colleagues, and I have also endured colleagues who have called me crazy Tim. They are good people too. One even left offensive cartoons on my desk. One has spoken to my manager about my work with the clients with grave concerns. Others have given me dirty looks its been clear to me that they have then talked amongst themselves about me. Still others ignore me and make me repeat myself because they refuse to acknowledge my words for unstated reasons. When I am treated like this, the good people I work with might end up needing to distance themselves from me just a little. Or they may need to turn their heads the other way a little. I don’t blame them. We all survive amid an unreal state of disparity on the psychiatric unit. Such is the nature of psychiatric units.

Now, with Proposition 1 out there, I fear that I might have to dig myself out of the same hole I was in twenty-four years ago.

Why Target Us?

Part of the reason mandatory treatment is a huge risk to those of us with my targeted diagnostic make-up because the public still doesn’t believe recovery is possible for us. The stated goal is to get us off the streets and into housing. Never mind the fact that in Oakland California, the city where I work, only twenty-five percent of the homeless are “mentally ill.” Also, of the people housed in Santa Rita Jail in the county 20-25% have a mental illness. It may be true that a few of us challenge the mainstream paradigm by letting others take everything away from us and choosing to live in tents rather than endure corruption in programs or low-income housing. Others of us, like me, find other ways to challenge mainstream norms. Some do come in for treatment to manage their living conditions, which, I might add, can be quite hard. I have more to say about that!

My Sensing of Violence in a Low-Income Housing Project:

Twenty-four years ago, I worked in such a setting in Seattle. The site was a Section 8 Housing Authority facility called the Morrison Hotel that was dubbed the hotel of horrors by the Seattle Weekly. I witnessed a lot of violence and graphic details of the underworld there. When a resident died of a heroin overdose, I saw enough strange and suspicious behavior to have a similar feeling in my bones that there was foul play associated with the death. I was tormented to the extent that gave the story to a reporter I met a poetry reading. I wasn’t given access to the files Seattle Housing Authority had on the residents and it never occurred to me that I was doing anything other than trying to support the residents who confided in me that they were also scared and suspicious about the death.

Now, with the benefit of reflection and couple of years of experience being unemployed and underemployed, I sense in my bones that that resident might have been an undercover agent of some sort and that outing him may have shined a light on some operations that were covert. There was a change in management that resulted and that affected Seattle politics and drug trade significantly.

Several months later I received a personal threat from a friend when I admitted to him that I had given the story to the press. He seemed a little grandiose about his power when he told me he could do me great harm. Another friend warned me not to flee. I chose to challenge this threat and flee. I ended up getting harassed by State Troopers and hospitalized in a State Hospital in Warm Springs Montana with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. It wasn’t until I was released three months later and had moved to Fresno California that I learned that I was right about the suspicious death and that it helped lead to the housing project getting managed by a different company.

The Sense that Things Are Wrong:

I now have fifty-three years of dealing with premonitions/intuitions like this. Yes, I know it is possible that I can be wrong just like I wonder if only 73.3% of the votes have been tallied at the time I am writing this, why the Washington Post has determined that the California measure has passed when there is only 50.3% yes votes. Perhaps there is math out there that enables the Wahington Post to call the election in this way, but it just doesn’t seem likely at first glance. Often, many of us in America take articles like this for granted as being truthful. The Washington Post is reputable, as is our voting system.

Details About What It Was Like Being Blacklisted and Indentured:

By the time the world trade towers were attacked, I had moved to Antioch CA and was hired at an Italian Deli food chain in the bay area for nine dollars an hour. I had a four-hour commute to get to the Deli on an old beat-up bicycle and BART. I could not find any other work, though this was not through lack of effort. I tried to work at professional jobs in social work. I tried many local minimum wage positions like Subway or Dennys or Walmart to no avail. On days off I would attract homeless looking white individuals who would follow me as I rode my bike dropping off applications at seven eleven, a hardware store, a restaurant. No job ever called me back. I had to put up with a job that I believed was corrupt and had several worker coworkers who were harassing me with mafia ties.

I was off medication and under the impression that I was being monitored during my bike/BART commute to my job at the Deli where I was often tormented by seventeen-year-old rich kids who mocked, or worse tried to mentor me. Most days I could identify a person on the train who I believed was there because of me. Once, I saw a resident I knew from Seattle sit across from me on the BART on my commute. Back in Seattle he had confided in me in a non-confidential circumstance that he had killed a man. He wore handcuffs and wore a label on his jean jacket that read, CIA officer. I was inundated with these kinds of coincidences or experiences I have since learned to ignore and call special messages.

I maintained this commute and schedule for ten months before I was able to get hired back into social services. Finally, I returned to taking medication and was able to improve my relationships with the less menacing of the rich kids to keep my temper at bay. The mafia kids who seemed to be in the know mostly quit and moved on.

Using These Experiences for the Positive:

Now in an Outpatient Psychiatric Unit, I share my story and encourage others to process theirs. I convince them that there can be safe places where they can share what they’ve been through. And over sixteen years of doing this, I have heard a lot of stories that may seem hard for many to believe. We have also shared laughs and good times. Once traumatic material is told, processed, and validated, it becomes easier for participants to compartmentalize their trauma and engage in other types of activities.

I also offer training for providers, family members and survivors who want to help others tell their stories and get relief. There is a lot that can be learned so that people will want to talk and relate what they have gone through as targeted individuals, spiritualists, people with voices, alien communicators, dissociative identities, scuttlebutt spies, and somatic sensors and other manifestations.

Ongoing Senses About War and Genocides:

When the towers fell twenty-three years ago, I knew right away that the United States would start wars in the middle east to avenge the approximately 3000 dead in the tragedy.

By the time of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, I was aware that there had been a lot of preparations for war. I had heard that a pipeline had been constructed to make the war possible. George W Bush’s dramatic threats toward Sadam Hussein seemed like theater to me and I presumed the war was inevitable. Indeed, by 2007 there was an ORB (Opinion Research Business) survey that estimated that 1,033,000 died in the war. This doesn’t include all the losses of life endured during the Afghanistan War which were worse.

It’s true my sense that Proposition 1 was going to pass has been propped up by a great deal of data. As I work in social services, I often see the pipelines going up and the preparations being made. I could pretend I was a rich white liberal instead of a progressive one and read the material, the messaging—treatment, not tents—the propaganda. I could figure how someone who is majority white, liberal, Californian, and uniformed might respond to the issue. For years I have interacted with the public and seen eyes go glass with the belief that schizophrenia is a medical illness rather than a spiritual journey. It is a dominant narrative in our culture.

At a time when both American parties are supporting what many believe to be a genocide in Gaza, the rationale just may be that we did this in Iraq and Afghanistan, so Israel has the right to follow suit. In this manner a race is killed beneath our very eyes in a manner so as that we don’t blink. The issue seems to me to be about power and entitlement, so that the well-to-do do not have to share in the tears and blood going on in the city corners. Yes, all so some kids can be cool and safely sample a taste of the nightlife in college just as they did, there is death an mayhem in the inner cities. Meanwhile the mainstream can go on excommunicating those who dabbled too hard or too soft. It’s all about fitting in and going along to get along.

Thankful that I had a Choice:

In a like manner, now I am officially able to be stripped of my American rights as someone with a schizophrenic history. Regardless of what I do, now the fact that good people can treat me with cold, glass wickedness is supported by the law. I choose to accept this and keep the ball rolling. The content of my character becomes invisible as are my rights to privacy.

If I had been forced to attend program instead of work, I could not have afforded housing with family support. I would have had to accept a board and care or a SRO for two years. By the time I endured all that, I doubt I would have healed at all. I likely would have given up and accepted my place. I wouldn’t be married and working.

Working at the Deli enabled me to work through my issues without falling into the corruption of low-income housing and programs. At least it was the choice I preferred. I equate being subjected to such treatment as being incarcerated or being sent to war—you just don’t know if you can come back from that. Working at an Italian Deli with the belief that the mafia was harassing me was hard enough, but it was better than the state hospital for sure. At least I had a choice as limited as it seemed at the time.

The Issue of Family Support:

I have a great aunt who I learned about once I restored my role as a social worker. She was lobotomized and institutionalized for refusing to leave her bed when her mother wouldn’t let her marry her high school sweetheart. Just as it seems like it is important for my relatives to believe they come from a good family and a good background; it felt like they then had to recapitulate this historical trauma onto me because I was different and didn’t live up to their standards. I did know of my great aunt, but I just couldn’t get the complete story.

On occasions I have met with extended family, I am met with microaggressions, or signs of excommunication. I have spent decades healing my relationships with my mother and father who are finally transitioning their perspectives after twenty years of recovery and the potential of their declining health. I have an aunt or two who have been supportive, but the attitudes of my remaining relatives, like the attitudes my parents started with, scare me. Institutionalization happened before and despite my toil and labor, I fear it could happen again.

Luckily in my work, I meet with families who display sides that want more for their children. They may not always know what to do, but they would be happy to support a recovery instead of endlessly recapitulate institutionalization. Sometimes I still feel shame that I made it hard for my family because I didn’t just accept institutionalization. That seems to be what was expected of me. But now twenty years later, the blessing of working with these families reminds me not to feel that way.

One thing I am privileged to know is that different American cultural groups handle madness differently. My story and my scenario are just a single grain of sand in a big box of good old American diversity. There are families who have gone to great lengths to shield their loved ones from homelessness and the system, who endure violence and outbursts without help from the state. Others use the state intermittently to shape and guide their loved ones in their learning process. Some utilize tough love and hospitals and decide that they are mistakes and need to handle repair and a process of mutual learning. There is tragedy and hurt that abound in all directions. There is so much needed for healing.

Proposition 1 and the Losses Dealt to Peer-Run Communities:

As I brace for the changes Proposition 1 will bring, I see coworkers who seem to be open to the plight of people who are neurodivergent, mad, or have histories of trauma and wonder if they can handle the upcoming changes. Very few people out there understand the behavior of the homeless on the streets, behavior that I have engaged in in the state hospital when I was beaten, confined, ignored, rejected, slandered and denied access to meaningful activity. I worry if outpatient therapists without lived experience really will be able to understand and work with people who have endured homelessness.

With the social sin of homelessness now firmly planted like a target on a minority group, the schizophrenics, society can all ignore the other issues present. I saw a post on Facebook that all we need to do is invest 20 billion to end homelessness, a small portion of what we spend against Gaza and in support of Ukraine. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but still I ask: how are families to learn how to relate to their loved ones now that resources are taken away from recovery-oriented, peer-run communities and allocated for an increase in hospital beds, housing, and the oppression of care courts? Indeed, funding will be cut for recovery services to build more housing and impose more treatment.

The Value of the Vote:

In my eyes, my last vote against Proposition 1 may have been my last choice against the genocide and oppression that so impacts my life, work, and worldview. I wonder if my voice really matters. I wonder if voting matters in general in this exploding political system. But maybe these wonderings should just be my little secret. Oops.

The post My Last Vote Against California Proposition 1: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

I have come to believe that one can learn more about on the ground social realities from personal stories than the news media or researched academic books. In fact, one could take this argument farther and suggest sometimes true reality may be more hidden in fiction or comedic insights than it is in the cultural delusions of propagandized consensus realities.

This is partly an expose the cultural delusions that persist in spite of research and media; and partly, stories about the way politics, egos, and notions of progress distort policy and research to harm the vulnerable.

It will shed light on the way cultural delusions associated with race, mental illness and the prison industry conspire to put many invisible individuals out on the streets. But, also, it is a story about how I have witnessed a political machine.

Many of us trust the news media, reporters, and academic researchers to understand what is going on in the world. They are supposed to be properly educated and conduct reliable research with integrity. However, one could read them all day and not realize how delusional one is becoming. And so, in the later part, I share story.

It’s true aspects of my career as a social worker has been about demystifying my own cultural delusions about myself. I wrote a memoir about surviving a schizophrenia diagnosis in which I learned not to let cultural delusions turn me into a statistic.

This one is eventually the story of how despite my vision and best efforts, I am watching cultural delusions harm the community that sustained me in my recovery.

How Knowledge About Cultural Delusions Becomes Part of Recovery from Psychosis:

Once Bruce Springsteen wrote, “Man, the poets out here don’t write anything at all, they just stand back and let it all be.” I pose that he was depicting a reality that afflicts many people, the reality of black-market America that just isn’t supposed to exist. People don’t typically write about it because if they out people, they will be killed, or blacklisted. Hence public figures like the rapper, Tupac, the investigative journalist, Gary Webb, and the author/pimp, Iceburg Slim, do not survive.

Cultural delusions aren’t supposed to exist. And yet I’d argue that recovery from mental health challenges, in particular recovery from psychosis and trauma, often involve insights into aspects of black-market, covert intelligence, abusive systems, and gaining psychological and spiritual (multidimensional) insight into reality.

Learning when and where to talk about these realities versus when to keep silent is a lot of what mental health survivors must learn. Getting these things right is kind of what parents and their family’s go through trying to maintain the secret of Santa Claus for a six-year-old-child. You’ve got to keep the mainstream sheltered like you have to shield the child.

So, many of us are left to investigate: what came first, the doobie, or Scooby-Doobie-Doo? We wake up at some point and realize that the Dodge Ram brand on our American automobiles is really a picture of fallopian tubes!

I must admit I often feel like I am the last one to get these jokes. I am the kind of guy (brought up to respect the banjo) who never realized that the Mummer’s parade can function thematically as a clan rally. It took me forty-seven years, the comments of a co-worker, and a quick look-see on Wikipedia to put that one together.

Not only must people in mental health warehousing learn to observe and make sense of these realities, they must learn to accept all that they have perceived isn’t safe to talk about. Instead, they must learn to manage their behavior in entry-level jobs where they may earn slave wages. Building social skills in such settings is so hard that many give up.

I know because I went through it. I imagine it is a lot like what people who get out of a prison gang go through. I was a piece of human traffic working in an Italian Delicatessen under mafia surveillance. I had to learn to mix with adolescent kids who disrespected and targeted me. Until I adjusted, I could not move on to bigger and better things.

Reflections on How the Marriage Between the Black-Market and Law Enforcement Works:

Many can learn about how powerful black marketeers operate by studying the trial of South Boston’s Whitey Bulger. The simultaneous cooperation of FBI agents and black marketeers is necessary for information and crime reduction. So many Netflix series are about this very conceivable reality. And yet the idea that this need for information marries law enforcement to criminal enterprise is reserved for conspiracy theorists. Still, way back in the 60’s, in an attempt to kill Fidel Castro, JFK turned to Chicago mafia hit men to do the job. This wasn’t declassified until 2007. Imagine what is going on now!

I also believe this happens with prison gangs. I believe prison gangs are a means of surveillance that help control the black market and reduce killing. Though lifetime members must comply or have their families killed, though many must endure lock up and slavery, it is functional as long as the mainstream remains deluded and doesn’t understand.

So, the government works the black-market trade. Hence, it’s conceivable that a great deal of our nation’s surveillance and control is wrangled that way. Like rapper KRS-One suggests in the early nineties, “with all this technology above and under, humanity still hunts down one another.”

Getting out of a prison gang means you have to give up your connection to power and money and go protective custody. This means you run the risk of getting hurt once you are freed. You must passively see and understand what could happen to you and have faith that you will not be killed. You have to be strong enough to be called a snitch or a pedophile and get no respect to get out of the machine. You will be isolated and suffer and when you get out all you have in the world is family support. Many who get out of prison end up homeless once free.

One of the “delusions” I had at the Italian Deli was that people thought I was a pedophile. Then one day I learned that that very rumor was being spread about me far and wide. One day a police man tailed me all the way to my psychotherapy appointment. This continued for several years. Not everyone in the Italian Delicatessen was in the know, but to this day, I believe that some were. I was left to connect the dots.

Here you see the way I have connected them since.

I eventually resigned to take medication to calm my emotions so that I could cope. Until I did calm down and make friends with my bullies, I was unable to find other work.

So often, those of us who must share housing and jobs with people who are connected to black market realities, need to understand how to integrate their cultural experience with cultural delusions. There still are Eurocentric notions of a fair and just society that must be maintained.

The Challenges of Researching Invisibility:

As I’ve already inferred, there are the challenges that come up when people try to research black market realities. Before we delve into stories of political corruption in statistics and in social programs, I am going to shed light onto an aspect of this challenge that might sound paranoid.

Secret government testing can become a legitimate concern in an invisible community. It is not just the Tuskegee covert syphilis experiments on innocent African Americans! Consider more intelligence released about the sixties, that under JFK secret syphilis tests were given to Honduran prisoners. This not only means that other countries may use our social institutions for testing it means that black markets and government surveillance can too. These are things many Americans would think sounds paranoid. But I want to point out that it’s easy to say these concerns are paranoid until you get incarcerated into them with your habeas corpus suspended.

Consider the Rosenburg experiments. Volunteers without psychosis lied and said that they heard innocuous voices. They got admitted and came out with real schizophrenic delusions. Then, consider how the famous study has been discredited. The research, we later find out was created to amplify Rosenburg’s personal experience in the mental health system.

It’s amazing the things we believe when they come from research. Meanwhile, real experiences on involuntary units paint a different picture of institutional authority and justice.

I believe people who are buried as such wouldn’t chance to answer a questionnaire for an ivy league research project. They wouldn’t trust the study enough to fill out the questionnaire. I sure wouldn’t have when I was incarcerated in Montana State Hospital.

When I was in Montana State Hospital, I would have said anything that would have led to my release. For example, I told staff that I would never toque refer but that I would sniff heroin and smoke crack. I was so turned around with the cast of characters I was surrounded by, I thought that the admission might get me released.

Eleven years later I would try to conduct such research on a shoe-string budget from an Innovations Grant I wrote, during a side gig. The majority of the program participants—many were people in psychosis on the streets and in board and care homes. The majority also refused to complete the paper work. I found this to be most noteworthy though admittedly not statistically significant.

I point this out before I tell my stories of politics and corruption in research. Remember, research and media is the stuff we trust in lieu of the black market. Distorted and warped studies from academia seem to drive all the funding.

How Legal and Illegal Crimes of Humanity Conspire to Put the Invisible Out on the Streets:

When I suggest cultural delusions conspire to put people on the streets, I am not only talking about black market crime. There is so much more to crime than the pipeline to prison. There are many different kinds of money for nothing enterprises

Many privileged-folk get to lead “productive” lives in which they take in more than they give. Many grow up and realize there is the whole phenomenon of easy money and class entitlement is ruled by stock brokers and family inheritance.

I have learned to accept that people who turn to fast street cash are making a very similar ethical decision than people who accept family money from capital gains. However, fast street money leads to violence, death, jail, stigma, and slavery rather than delusions of superiority and entitlement.

Let us not forget that there are a lot of businesses illegal and legal that deal with issues of human bondage, arms, crime cleaning, and sex, and drug trafficking etcetera.

I believe that the mental health industry is just one of those machines that deals with bondage because of the false medicalization of its illnesses and the trauma that it imposes. Consider the salary of top administrators who decide how to disperse funds with academic statistical research. Through layers of bureaucracy, each well-to-do layer of management ends up wrangling the person below them. If you don’t think this sounds realistic, read on and you will get a feel for how cultural delusions, slander, and politics distort statistics.

At the bottom, the often poorly paid entry-level master level social worker takes home the majority of the funds that trickle down. The poor are left homeless or in board and care homes. They are the ones who are the most nickel and dimed.

At the top sit educated people with six-digit salaries. They may be there because they endure mental health struggles. They also may not have experienced the same playing field as those they nickel and dime. At the bottom, many want to work but many are too intimidated by the amount of paperwork and organization it takes to maximize the income. They often are taught they can’t do it by people who profit off them. They hate the machine and find other ways to make ends meet.

Zoning creates culturized class, race, and sex wars. Those who live by stocks and bonds instead of violence get the ability to protect and insulate themselves with very different kinds of compassionate police forces. Then, there is this ridiculous notion of a work ethic that persists. Those who work hard are supposed to get more? Is that a joke? Those who aren’t so fortunate must live within task force zones that are less entitled and lawful.

Personal Stories that Speak to the Power of Corruption in Research and Policy:

So now I shift from expose to personal stories about politics, bureaucracy and corruption in community mental health.

The Outpatient Unit where I work is one of those places about which the poets don’t write about. Academic books, and the news media just don’t capture the level of oppression that I see on a daily basis. These stories end up being among our national secrets. Many people would just presume they are delusional.

Many of the people I work with have been homeless and are now housed in substandard circumstances. Many use the program to deal with how things improved from times they were on the streets. Others endure these realities with the support of their peers who they call their family. Still some others stay stuck in those dilemmas and endlessly “yes” the staff just to keep us off their backs. All are accepted and given a chance to socialize. Some do it by sharing shorts (cigarette butts) on the sidewalks. It is illegal to smoke on the campus.

These are the stories I’ve studied over eighteen years. And, yes, I do believe all of them to be real to a certain extent. Indeed, there has been a shift in my understanding of the world.

I am working with all the people we all agree shouldn’t have guns: the whistleblowers, the scapegoats, the burned mafia spies, the substance abusers, the bullied and abused, the saints, the orphans and the prophets. Most are just plain broke and stranded.

Twelve years ago, once properly credentialed, I started using my own story of “psychosis” in my work. I started to notice a shift in the way I serviced people on the unit. I went from providing services that seemed to be going nowhere, to introducing the concept of recovery to participants. I went from boring and flat interactions to live and industrious ones.

As time wore on, I started to develop a different vision for what it should mean to participate in mental health services. For those participants really buried in institutionalized circumstances, participating in mental health services needs to also lead to opportunities for a better life. It needs to lead to money and purpose.

The Man Who Warned Me Not to Go:

It may sound sorry, but I’ve always felt extremely guilty with the salary I make. Although I initially had to work seven days a week with side gigs to get out of my homeless financial hole and get my license, I did get my weekends back within four short years.

Once I started to get away from work, I found myself struck with guilt. I was able to backpack and meet my wife and have a social hiking hobby while the people I worked for remained confined in their board and care homes in the inner city.

My conflict escalated to the point where I decided to take a new job at a lower salary.

I still remember one of the men who particularly benefitted from the groups I entitled Special Messages. These were groups that collectively explored the content and varieties of experiences that lead to psychosis. He would tell his story weekly in the crowded room and always said my adding and reframes were helpful. He pleaded with me not to leave.

You’ve got a good thing going here,” he said “Why leave?”

I felt he didn’t understand the way he was getting sold short. The facility I would be moving into was beautiful and clean. No more urine stains from the urinal to the bathroom drain to step over for those of us with mental health challenges. No, we can work and bring each other along to the point where we can get back off the streets.

But even though the owner of the new company that would be underpaying me brought her Doberman in to the interview with me, I really didn’t understand the bee hive I was stepping into.

Witnessing Confabulation of Tabulation in A Real Government Experiment:

A year-and-a-half later, I would return to the old backward publicly disgraced and outed as a schizophrenic. Previous to this, I really didn’t understand that politics, ego trips, and personal vendettas result in cooked-book-research.

Politics too will distort any effort to research what the poets can’t even dare to write about. I will also demonstrate how little research matters when it comes to policy towards our society’s vulnerable.

The job for was an expensive government study involving all county agencies. My efforts to examine the result have been fruitless. I suspect the info got classified. At least, it’s not available online. This government experiment used three evidence-based practices to transform the county into the recovery model.

We all agree it didn’t work. I personally felt there were a lot of stubborn non recovery attitudes to disrupt recovery. There were also a great deal of politics and people fighting to keep their jobs.

Sure, the clients answered the questionnaires, provided by peer counselors. They had to because they gained housing subsidies. They were gently coaxed into it, but it is not clear they felt safe to tell the truth.

I wasn’t interviewed about the lies and corruption I witnessed.

I worked sixty-hour weeks and believe the lady with the Doberman had my head on the chopping block from the get go because we didn’t agree about race. I refused to side with her and say that race doesn’t matter.

Despite what I believe to be high level of productivity in the statistics, my role in the project was targeted.

The lady with the Doberman was supposedly removed from the scene by her husband, the CEO; but she clearly kept the program director in her pocket. The program manager let me know that she was doing this with a crooked smile. “Jeez you’re running this whole department for so long, why don’t they just hire you into the position,” she once snidely suggested.

I was hired as a second administrator but shortly after I started the top administrator stopped coming into work. It’s true I never ceased to lobby that our workers should get paid more due to the cost of housing in the area. The company was a corporate model, aimed to extract money, not bring justice to any locale.

Meanwhile, the director had repeatedly gone after me. She appeared to judge many of my experiences. One day she called me Stuart Smalley. I didn’t know who he was yet. Everyone laughed. There were signs of this bullying all along, but I pressed forward.

One day I was called away for a supervision meeting and I heard her exclaimed in multidisciplinary training that the learning center was not safe under my leadership.

I failed to hospitalize a client. At a certain point I did call the cops, but he split. I pressed on with the supervision meeting feeling things were rotten in the state of Denmark.

In the meantime, she was setting me up behind the scenes with Ph.D. workers. I had challenged them that taking psychiatric medication was more complicated than insulin for diabetes. I guess they found that to anti-science. They conspired and cooked up the false accusations that I was antipsychiatry without knowing that I in fact take medication.

Not long after, a whole table of providers conspired and confronted me. It wasn’t the first time I was confronted in a terrifically irrational manner under the director’s leadership. Before, she suggested that I let myself be bullied. But this time the one worker who disagreed with how I was being scapegoated got written up and eventually fired.

The program director would eventually suggest that I wasn’t well enough to work with the public. It was more appropriate for me to work just auditing charts.

But before I knew this, my power was taken away by a new supervisor, a company hack. She started challenging all things I said in front of the frontline workers. She micromanaged, but wouldn’t respond to phone calls. I couldn’t even send a sick person home.

The peer workers stopped being productive and the stats tanked. Then, they could justify demoting me.

Back in the Community with The Man Who Warned Me:

When I returned to the unit, my proud friend would refuse to return to my group. I just hadn’t realized how much I broke his heart with my effort to lead a more just and equitable existence. I think I just hadn’t understood that I was telling him that he didn’t matter by leaving.

His primary belief about himself was that he was a safe vigilante who went to great lengths to use his premonitions to bring safety and prevent crimes. He was the most beautiful singer. All I did for him in the end was tell him he didn’t matter.

Maybe in a sense, he had just been trying to save me.

Years later the man ran away from his board and care. He stopped taking his medication and returned to the streets. It was the Trump presidency. There was a massive increase in Oakland homelessness. Tech-company-tent-encampments dominated the meridians throughout the city.

One morning, I found him posturing out in front of the hospital on my way to work. I stayed with him for over a half an hour hoping he would crack and acknowledge me. But I had broken his heart and he would never forget it.

The Ongoing Saga: How Clandestine Academic Power Then Trumped Our Community:

Eight years after I returned to work at this community that nurtured me back from my own challenges, it is on the chopping block. Participants are not only losing their community because of COVID, though it clearly has helped leadership.

One day it was announced a year ago that our programs were no longer profitable. This claim was clearly cooked up with a confabulation of tabulation. We fought with the support of our manager.

Management then announced that the programs were going to consolidate. Thus, the majority of our program which is African American, was going to have to integrate with the majority Caucasian program or lose their services.

This announcement caused counselors of color and one of our managers to leave. Though this announcement got retracted, all the therapists who left were not replaced.

Eventually we were taught a new word, “Population Health.”

Instead of serving the more chronically ailing permanently disabled population, “population health” ensures everyone gets equitable health care options. This meant the more chronic population has to lose services, so more chronically normal people can get them.

But the way they got me was that management also wanted to staff the unit with peer counselors instead of clinical therapists

I advocated for years to get peer counselors accepted into the community. For two years I had peer counseling interns and proved to my colleagues the value that working peers could bring. Still the concept of peer counselors was introduced like it was a new idea.

Then, all the upper management had to do was replace the rock-solid manager and they had things their way.

A union battle has been mounted by our sister program, the one that doesn’t serve the inner-city clientele.

Meanwhile the news came that the company manager over behavioral health was hired in the top position over at the county.

Now we hear from our manager that the county is promising to pay for a new population health recovery program.

In the end the story seems pretty clear:

We workers are unionized and the management had to get around the union. It appears all moves were basically are set up to break the union and justify the consolidation of programs.

In the process, the remaining therapists left are white, except for the interim manager. Thus, the African American majority might become replaced.

Throughout, the new decision makers are doctors in ambulatory care, who know nothing about mental health and don’t seem to have consideration for our vulnerable community. They think that they are doing what is best for society.

Was there some other force in the county who set up the take down our program? The confabulation of the tabulation is so clearly delusional yet extremely powerful.

Meanwhile there is a company-wide strike over the union contract.

Our CEO gets removed over this.

There is a presidential election.

Now we are all waiting to see if American Democracy is legitimate anymore or if Trump will incite a coup.

The Impact of Social Change:

The changes in the community with the loss of so many therapists of color caused a great deal of destabilization and many clients quit.

Let’s say they were right! I was making to much money in the old model. Couldn’t they find a way to do this that didn’t harm the community for whom we care? It becomes about political policy and agenda.

I know many people don’t care about the vulnerable. Even though all of thirty percent of the county voted for Trump, cultural delusions are strong!

Where is the media to alert the public on this matter?

Our union representative has depicted our workers as sitting idle while I am to busy working my ass off to engage in politics. They were going to let us talk to the press and I agreed. But then they wanted to coach us. Then, they changed their minds.

The confabulation of tabulation means the city goes to population heath and gentrification.

I sit stupefied, torn and hating myself as I watch this happen. I am a believer in peer services and have been so busy working as a buffer for the clients that I serve, that some may accuse me of looking the other way.

No longer do I get to do my special group. Perhaps it is fitting that all my work gets buried so “progress” can happen. Eight years ago, I taught my client that he didn’t matter and now I am treated like I don’t matter.

Maybe I won’t get fired and rehired at a low wage and without benefits, as I fear. Maybe a majority of our remaining community members will be able to make adjustments after COVID and there will be a smooth transition.

Our managers hold the research and statistically based evidence-based practice information. They might as well own history! When you control history, you can create any policy you want. And the news media is not active or just listening to our union.

Will there be anyone to pay attention to the stories and lives of my clients and the thousands of new invisible faces of people on the streets?  The plan for years has been to ship them down to south county.

Oh, how much better the modern world would be if it just listened and learned from the heroic journey of the vulnerable.

The status quo appears to be pouring salt in the wound of the vulnerable until they die. That is what happens when we all fall for the cultural delusions of race, mental illness and the prison industry!

The post The Cultural Delusions that Put Vulnerable Communities Out on the Streets! 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".

Many of us who face a sense of ostracism from our family and community of origin end up feeling like aliens. In the United States there are many divided people who might have this sense of alienation. Now while I see sprinklings of Black Lives Matter signs throughout my neighborhood, you might think I feel a sense of reckoning, of unity, or of a homecoming. While it does make me feel happy to see the signs, I’m still just not so sure I trust all white people who use them.

Finding Community in Black and Brown Communities:

Early in my life I learned to fight my sense of alienation by playing with kids who were younger, older, or profoundly different than me. In high school, I may have seemed to grow out of this on the outside, but inside the sense of alienation burned. When things went bad at the private school in which I was raised, I survived by moving into the inner city where a commuter college was located.

In communities of color, many neighborhood kids were curious welcoming and open. Sure, there were some adults with whom I had to persist, but once I earned acceptance, I found the sense of community to be less judgement and more righteous. I will never forget the intelligent outreach that individuals from the community did to help me feel included. They were there for me and accepted me, regardless.

The white world streamed in during the day and frequented under-the-table business to which I attached myself. Then, they were gone. One person, during my fifty-hour-a-week summer shifts, told me I was “down with the brown.” Another said they knew a local mechanic who was “flaco,” like me. To hear that I wasn’t alone and that I was okay, it is something for which I have been eternally grateful. Community doesn’t come easy for a young, male anorexic.

Balance through Medication And Professional Social Work:

When it came time to move on from this community and into the professional field of social work, I faced another crisis and started taking medication. When I responded to a Rorschach picture with a detailed Marxian analysis of power in society, they started me on a small dose of an anti-psychotic. Sure, I was binging and purging in fitful rages, but that was no longer what concerned them.

With that medication, I learned to suppress my sense of neighborhood justice and do what my supervisors said for years until I got my Masters Degree. I used that same sense of suppression to engage in the community of graduate students. I tried to make friends with other professionals.

When I graduated, I left it all behind and moved to the west coast to use my skills where no one had to know about my past. I worked only eight hours a day for the first time in my life.

I was doing it. I was building a community for myself.

I transferred into a pilot project at work that involved setting up services in a housing project that was dubbed the hotel of horrors, in the local media. That way I could give back to black and brown communities that supported me.

Things heated up that summer. There ended up being a political battle over management of the housing project. There was human and drug trafficking involved. I went off my antipsychotic medication. I was needing my sense of intuition back to protect me.

I Never Saw White Privilege Until I Lost It:

Years of surviving an extreme state of psychosis can also be an alienating experience. I did not believe aliens were real until I went through it. And I thought I had already been through a lot! But I really didn’t get it through my thick skull how much privilege I held until I came out of psychosis. Being without has a way of helping you see your privilege. In the end, I recognize that I did little but run back to my whiteness.

When I finally got it together to get hired back in social services, I was just returning to consensus reality. Back on medication, I could pretend I wasn’t being gangstalked by the mob. I could behave my way out of the persecution.

Paula a manager at the upscale Italian Deli where I had worked through my psychosis for almost a year, had a few words to say to me.

Paula had always been a professional and had never had an abusive word to say to me. It was true that she once had nearly got me fired via attesting for my nineteen-year-old supervisor that I looked stark raving mad and scary. Still, I kind of respected Paula.

Sure, she saw the young rich kids from Danville (a wealthy town) taunt, tease, and disrespect me. Sure, she acted like it was nothing. But she was a few years older than me and her non abusive, professional air had helped me survive the year of underemployment.

“Yeah I just feel bad for the ones who can’t go back to an opportunity to work a job like this,” she said.

These few words cut at me. It’s right what they say, you have to watch out for the quiet ones.

But Paula was right: if I acted the way I did and had black skin, I wouldn’t have made it at the Deli. I probably would have been killed for leaking information to the press. Years later with the strings of killings unveiled via I Phones, and plenty of abusive stories revealed to me as I conduct therapy in the inner city, it becomes clear to me how lucky I was to survive.

Living without my privilege was harder than I could ever have imagined. Being locked up as a vigilante mental health professional was profoundly traumatic. I had devoted my career to fighting mental health warehousing. I had ignored warnings this might happen to me if I persisted. I didn’t want to be paranoid. Now everyone treated me as though I was paranoid when I wasn’t.

I got confined to some neglected, dilapidated, and frigid wards at Montana State Hospital. Knowing about mental health warehousing the way I did, kept me from trusting the institution. I avoided institutional behavior and I knew what they were saying about me in the team meetings. I was entitled and protested it. I wrote complaints about my psychiatrist and social worker who refused to meet with me. I refused to take medication.

“One time we had a client come in here saying the FBI was after him and the FBI was really after him,” said the doctor when she finally met with me. “He hadn’t really done anything too bad, but the FBI was following him.” I had gone through a fever that felt like it was going to kill me and been unable to get aspirin the whole weekend because she hadn’t written the orders. I hadn’t trusted the old hag. My fellow inmates had all told me the mafia was after me.

Because my parents had called a missing-persons on me and supported the hospitalization, I had concluded that they were an Irish Mafia family and had concealed this from me growing up.

Once discharged, I really struggled to find work. I took a greyhound to California. I did finally get hired at a foster care agency. My family agreed to help only if I turned down the job and took a job at an Italian deli near my aunt in the bay area.

My uncle cosigned on an apartment in affordable Antioch California which was on the outskirts of the bay area. I could get to work with a mere ten-mile bike ride and hour-long BART commute. I had to keep my job and see a therapist and my family sent me monthly money so that I could afford to eat. At nine dollars an hour, I barely made the cost of my rent.

It took six months to get a car, nine months to agree to go back on medication and ten months to get a job back in social services. If that sounds easy, I assure you it wasn’t. I didn’t think things would ever get better for me for that short amount of time. I was learning what it felt like to be a label. It meant no references and no work.

While this did not feel like privilege while I was going through it, Paula was right, white privilege gave me the opportunity. There was no greater fear through any of the life-threatening things I endured, than the fear that I would return to an institutional life. I was disrespected and treated terribly because I looked like a deer trapped in a headlight. At least that was something I could overcome.

Alien View on White Privilege:

Losing privilege really helps one see how oppressive and hateful it is. I am constantly reminded of my loss of privilege every which hoop through which I jump.

For example, I believe the loneliest walk I ever had was the one I had before I got married eight years later.

My wife and I had wanted to elope but we decided to give my parents, especially my Mom, the celebration they wanted.

It was true my wife had done the majority of the planning. I worked longer hours and tended not to be able to slow down enough to take the lead. But I did participate in creating two parties, one for family and one for more public friends.

My mom arrived at the house I had just purchased with eight years of savings for the first time. I had worked for four years without a day off or vacation. I had wanted to show her around but she was in a tizzy and showed no interest. This hurt. We had needed to show the borrower that I had financial support, and my Mom had balked and protested about her role. My wives’ parents paid her back immediately, but somehow it really didn’t seem to be about the money.

When my father arrived, he insisted that I drop everything and plan a separate party for his family. He was clearly angry. I ended up being able to arrange it at a local pizza joint with informal seating. But I suppose I failed to read his mind. Of course, my wife couldn’t come as she had planned to connect with her friends. My oldest friend came out from back east along. He crashed his rental against my neighbors’ car as we rode to the pizza joint.

When the young child of my step sister was led forth with adult approval, she told me off for not bringing my wife. And, so, I wondered what the adults had been saying about me before I arrived. I really wasn’t sure this was true. Maybe I was just being paranoid. If I was right, I have to say it didn’t surprise me. It always seemed if my Dad was angry at me so was the rest of his kin.

I responded by trying to talk to an uncle. I had last talked to him in my days of madness, when I reached out to him. The only thing he said me back then was that my father was right about everything. He interviewed me for a few minutes and declared, “my god you actually seem to be better!”

And then my Dad insisted that I arrange for my mother and he to visit with my wife’s parents before the wedding the next day.  So, I couldn’t enjoy the party, I had to call my wife and set that up. But clearly the party wasn’t set up for me.

The next day after meeting with my wife’s parents, everyone left and I was left alone to fume for two hours before the wedding.

I took the walk with my dog who I rescued during my homelessness.

I hadn’t yet experienced smiling at my cousin to thank her for making the wedding and having her give me the dirtiest most disapproving face I couldn’t imagine. I hadn’t yet got yelled at by another uncle because I wore Chuck Taylor shoes with my suit. I hadn’t had my stepfather get drunk and talk about what a wealthy family he comes from; or my father and aunt get into a cat fight and curse each other out in front of the party. I hadn’t yet been interrupted the next morning by my aunt demanding that I allow her to do her skit at the public gathering.

I already felt so utterly alone and invisible to the world. I regretted that I couldn’t bring just bring my dog to the ceremony. She was my sense of community.

I have found that my reputation in the family has just gotten worse as time has worn on, particularly after I wrote my memoir. At one point, even my father acknowledged this. He said I had to be responsible to turn things around.

Sure, during that lonely walk I was replaying the experience of madness over in my head. Sure, that was part of my utter alienation. Sure, it went deep into my childhood when I didn’t seem to measure up to the person I was expected to be. But stigma and discrimination make it feel like nothing you do will ever be seen. It feels like they eternally expect the worst from you.

Privilege Seems to Replicate and Repeat its Hatred:

My efforts to find support in the white community have continued to fall flat outside the community of color from which I take my money. Oh, how I longed and prayed for an organized community of aliens like me. I believed if we schizophrenics could just work together, I could find my true community.

I finally came out as a mental health worker with lived experience at a conference. I told the county consumer manager about my history with psychosis. He said, “it’s too bad you never have experienced psychosis yourself!”

So went my introduction to the community consumer movement. I have heard many people of color say the consumer movement is an overwhelmingly white movement. Indeed, the conferences I have gone to replicate a sense of college that I never had. They make me feel very awkward and out of place.

I tried to gain the managers approval repeatedly. He left my emails unreturned and said to me, “Usually I try to be a good person, but I cannot always be.”

Later, in the work place, I faced discrimination. A group of powerful county employees suggested I was being a bad influence on a client who refused to take medication. They presumed that I am against medication. They suggested that because I was out with my own history, he was not taking his medication. It was irrational, but the whole table was there confronting me. There was nothing I could do. The one person who objected to what was happening, ended up getting written up for doing so. There was no one I could talk to. Shortly thereafter, my career was threatened. I got demoted.

The county consumer manager explained, “It’s just something interpersonal that doesn’t work between us.”

When I persisted, I got invited to join a group of which he was part. It was only then I learned that he and his gang was sharply against medication. I found myself repeatedly marginalized.

Years later after I barely managed to land on my feet, I joined a conversation with the consumer manager a fellow peer counselor at a conference. They admitted they were talking about me. I had just presented and neither had come to see me. “The thing about you, Tim, is that you can keep on going. You don’t need support.”

I realize that the manager is a UC Berkeley graduate and that some of the things I say come from the way I developed in the inner-city. I also realize that I am a psychotherapist and he may see me as part of the establishment. I really don’t otherwise understand why it’s been such a hurtful relationship to me. It’s really not his fault, but I continue to feel alienated.

Sometimes I feel like, for baby boomers like he and my parents, it all boils down to the fact that I went to school at a non-prestigious commuter school. Suddenly, I am automatically undervalued even though I achieved high honors.

I went from being told I could be anything I wanted to at private school to being told that the majority of us wouldn’t graduate. The career counseling office suggested I become a cop, not anything I wanted to be. Sometimes it feels like all I needed to do was have these experiences and I am permanently demoted in the eyes of others.

Indeed, other efforts to get support in the community are fraught with these kinds of barriers. Race, gender, prestige, socioeconomic status and so many other privilege isms are so woven into the fabric of the way we think about things, it leaves some of us to be hopeless aliens.

So often I have been rejected or judged by people I observe to have a sense of privilege.

I often feel like I lost privilege because I am not worthy. It often feels like other people pick up on this and replicate the procedure. I can keep going and persist, but I can hide this loss of privilege.

Oh, how I resent privilege. Each time I am undervalued, it opens up wounds.

It makes me forever wonder how a black person feels.

Being Aware of the Privilege and Racism that Lurks Within:

When I first moved into my neighborhood twelve years ago there was a campaign to save a local park and not build an integrated school. I decided then I wanted nothing to do with the underlying racist nimbyism. A Caucazoid neighbor tried to put a sign up on my property and I took it down. The whole neighborhood seemed to stand united. It seemed that no property didn’t have the sign up.

Now as I walk my dog through the neighborhood, I see a sprinkling of Black Lives Matter signs. There is an occasional sign that says End White Silence. Unfortunately, this does little to change my feelings of alienation. I still am not sure I want to be part of this insular suburban community.

One could argue at least my neighbors are waking up. Also, they are not all white. One could argue, I don’t have the signage up on my property.

I feel happy when I see the signs. However, to be honest I don’t necessarily trust white people who bare them. I question whether they are really doing the work they need to do.

I make the daily commute from my suburban neighborhood to Oakland where I work in the historical backward of the modern hospital. Most of the old widows are still bubbled and old. They were put up that way so onlookers couldn’t see the violence that happened therein. The clear windows are dusted with soot from the constructions of the new building. On the widow above my desk, there is such a spattering of soot you can barely see any California sun stream through.

I am proud of the work I do on this urban ward in which the majority culture is African American. I think a great deal of exposure to cultures of color have helped challenge the racism that lurks within. Every day I work on this. I believe the more aware I am of my privilege and racism, the better job I can do.

The community on this backward is the only community I have known. It’s what got me the money for a house. And now with COVID pandemic, the looming depression and the administrative restructuring, I cannot help but know that its days are numbered. It’s true, I may need to find new community very soon.

It does not change the feelings I have about my neighborhood and the liberal communities I was raised in that denounce racism.

The fact of the matter is I might have found myself to be, “down with the brown,” a few summers during my youth, I may know what it is like to be treated with suspicious looks for two years, and to be financially exploited by poverty, but black people face that kind of threat their whole lives. In fact, I have to watch out that I check my own racism. I vigilantly watch myself all the time.

Just as happens at the end of a long work day when I am feeling vulnerable and tired the thoughts from the generations of privilege that I come from enter my head. They tell me: I am no good; I am not smart enough; I work too slow; I am alienated from others; and I don’t deserve friends because I am weird. The sense of alienation comes back and I am like a different person.

Just as easy as that I can look the wrong way at a black person and trigger them. I have had so many black people nurture and give me a chance, and still I can do this to them.

I am tired of acting like I am not part of the problem. When I see a Black Lives Matter sign I feel happy. But I don’t feel I deserve to put one up on my property. I wonder if white people who bare them are really doing the work they need to do to end racism. It’s easy to hold up a sign and it is oh so much harder to lose privilege.

Protest, Privilege, Hypocrisy, And Waiting for the Great Alien Reckoning:

I can’t understand how anyone who has ever faced institutional abuse could ever feel free to go back into a protest. I remember the gangstalking police searches that destroy property, my employment mail violated, and my endless strings of failed job interviews, and I feel a need to protect myself.

I once told this to my step-mom, a private school teacher at the school I attended and a lifelong protester, that people who were locked up in institutions truly did not have the privilege to protest and how most of us know better.

Of course, she had only gotten mad and told dismissive stories about the good she was doing. However, she has also honored me enough to ask for advice with how to help her granddaughter who experienced psychosis and sexual abuse as a youth.

I once told her: “you know, what is really a shame about a schizophrenia diagnosis is that it denies people like us the opportunity to have a culture and community with each other. That is ultimately what we need, the chance to be there to support each other.

Oh, how my stepmother had fumed. Years later she told me her mother was a schizophrenic and attacked her with a knife.

Every effort I made to be there for her granddaughter never got anywhere.

A person I work with told me that she saw a group of white protesters out in East Oakland and one of her neighbors was yelling at them because there were no black people in the protest. We talked about how we both wanted to be out in the protests but didn’t want to be triggered back into the gangstalking days.

I sure am glad that we support each other. I sure wish she got paid for it the way I do. I think being a good social worker means owning your privilege and ending it!

I am preparing to lose my job and lose my privilege with love in my heart. Do white people baring the signage even understand what that means? Maybe some do.

I know change is around the corner. I am grateful to have been taken care of by black and brown people. That does give me hope. And there are times I successfully give back in spite of my privilege. Humanity sits on the edge of a massive reckoning. With the sense of impending doom, I pray for the sense of balance and community that social work has granted me.

And still I work, fight and pray that there might be a little alien community as well!

The post Why I’m Not Sure I Trust All White People Who Bare Black Lives Matter Signs: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

The peer movement and Wellness Recovery Action Planning helped revolutionize my approach to therapy and being a real person. In some ways I am grateful but still there are ways I am dissatisfied with the way too many peers perpetuate neocolonialism in the system.

I always struggled with the way the peer movement’s best practice, WRAP, attempts to define consumer values and ethics. It started out as a small sense of internal discomfort. But somehow the, “you cannot practice WRAP unless you uphold its values and ethics,” has become more a bone of contention for me twelve years after the concept was first introduced to me.

Values and ethics—it’s something you hear a great deal about in the consumer movement. ‘It’s important to understand our values, ethics and history,” you may hear a leader say. The more I stop letting myself feel victimized and alienated by these voices who have seemed to treat me just like my family of origin did, the more I start to see this as socially violent stance.

As I have grown as a therapist and built my own private counseling theory, I have reflected on my experiences studying different counseling theories and crossing cultural divides. I have found myself equating the imposition of values, ethics, and fidelity measures more and more with neo-colonialism, greed, manifest destiny, best practice, rather than with liberation and justice.

If you want to avoid the potential of inflicting generalizations on multitudes of people, don’t overreach. Don’t say it is a universally researched practice. Most certainly don’t say it’s an international movement with these values and ethics. Think about defining who you are and who you represent before you spread out with megalomania and glee.

I believe when you start imposing values and ethics, you bear the risk of invading other regions, extracting local resources for your benefit, and starting political feuds. Sure, we all want to affect sorely needed change, but there is a way to go about that so that you don’t create more of the same insanity.

Remember as you spread out into different regions, there is a lot to learn. It is not wise to suggest that because you have research that your way will work in a different geopolitical landscape.

Recognize that as you spread out your ideas, you become at risk of spreading gossip, gaslighting, and bullying people. Remember in any region there will be winners and losers in the system. The winners will be more likely to befriend you and move up by spreading venom and dominating others. Is it really worth it to sacrifice your ideals, just to have things your way in a foreign context?

If you want to promote change in the way you believe is best based on your experience in your region, marginalized cultures from other regions will find white, patriarchal, wealthy, prestigious, and exploitive. (For some reason people of color don’t tend to write and own these practices as far as I can tell.) Many may smile and honor you to your face, but they also may sense another layer of oppression added to their burden.

What Might Happen When You Overextend Your Perspective:

I don’t think these kinds of unintended consequences need to exist. I think it is possible to avoid them.

However, I do know for sure ways that I have been treated when values and ethics clash with portions of my experience that are real, idiosyncratic and rebellious. It burns me. It preoccupies my mind. Parts of me who have been most abused and hurt emerge. And, no, I won’t just give in and sip the tea!

It’s not hard to define who you are and what you’ve done and consider the geopolitical circumstances that have enabled you to be successful. Defining the limits of your approach is just as important as making a social change. If you’ve been successful, let go of your work and let others interpret and learn from it. Indeed, this approach seems to me to be the way to go.

In WRAP, for example, Mary Ellen Copeland does a good job defining her culture and her story. When she does this, she defines who she is and what her landscape is like. However instead of telling us the limits of her vantage point, we get values and ethics that we must maintain whether we are operating in an urban shelter, a county jail, or a New England Community Center.

Don’t get me wrong, there are aspects of the WRAP program that can travel into different contexts and do extraordinary things. But I do want to consider that what is needed to avoid institutionalization can be different in different areas.

For example, in my WRAP training, which happened twelve years ago, there was a participant who wanted to bring up the fact that he killed a person. I recognize there were vulnerable people in the group who might not have felt comfortable with that reality. Indeed, at times in my madness journey that would have been challenging for me. Indeed, it is arguable that it was a murder that I uncovered that set me into madness in the first place.

But because I was well, I was curious about what the participant was getting at and felt the participant was further shamed. When that participant was shut down and told not to do that in a WRAP group, I couldn’t help contrasting it to other challenges that were brought to light by other people. I ended up thinking that we lost an opportunity to learn something real.

I don’t mean to challenge the leader who was really powerful and helped me a lot, but I think that issue depends on the context. There were some participants who were high up in the county power structure who were participating in the training. I imagine they could have negatively judged the program if those boundaries weren’t set.

At the same time there are some places where that issue needs to be addressed. In fact, back in state hospital where there were lifers, I needed to have that issue addressed. Maybe my concerns and feelings couldn’t be addressed in a warehouse setting. I lived among whispers among us clients about those among us who had killed. I was far too invisible to have concerns addressed. And I was too branded as the entitled, out-of-state, political-prisoner who deserved to be ignored.

In short, how might it feel in a jail where every person is facing those fears and concerns to have that issue remain invisible. And so I ask: does the best practice become institutional by denying those realities? Does the need for funding and mainstream acceptance dilute the practice?

How to Know When You Are Engaging in Neo-Colonialism

To be honest, my experience with WRAP has very little to do with my motivation for writing this blog. I make these observations based on more personal experiences with other peer movements. It has been my frustration with things I’ve seen along the way that makes me challenge the way social change happens in the industry at large.

It’s true that everybody needs money to survive. When movements sweep into town based on research and try to change the way we understand trauma, change substance abuse patterns or motivate people to get back to work, they need money to survive. However, in these times the streets are jammed up with homeless encampments. It seems like things just get worse and worse. In spite of lots of innovation, recovery seems to rarely trickle down to the homeless and institutionalized.

Part of mental health is about the exponentially increasing disparities between the haves and the have-nots. When administrators import ideas that worked elsewhere without looking to their own region for people who know the local economy and realities shit storms will arise.

In the industry we have people who are so removed from the ground making the decisions that affect recovery movements it gets ridiculous. They may move from state to state in insular administrative jobs and fail to connect with the people in the trenches who need to be trained and who need to likewise contribute from their own views and notions of justice.

When I consider stories that sparked movements like the one that Marious Romme, Sandra Escher, and Betsy Kline tell, I get excited about the potential for much needed change. But when my work and contribution is overlooked because it failed to follow a charter of ethics that is written in a different country for people of totally different social realities, I get upset. When large payments go out to international travelers from people who won’t even consider supporting my efforts, indeed, I get frustrated.

I understand that some really great people made them up, but I also see that I am surrounded by really great people who are coming back from homelessness and need to be empowered to discover what works best for them. They deserve to be heard more than me. If you come to town and they speak up, honor them. No need to overwhelm them with your superiority.

Hell, I mad similar mistakes and even been suckered by a story of how a few mental health consumers built a recovery empire out of the Southwestern dust. Yes, I allowed myself to be hired by them and be deeply wounded by them. I am lucky I survived that fiasco.

But when any best practice comes to town with their fidelity measures and fails to acknowledge local socioeconomic issues like housing challenges, generations of poverty and slavery and how those issues impact their workers, I start to think about neocolonial transfer of money and resources away from our county. When you start formulating ethics and values or fidelity measures from the geopolitical contexts out of which you arise that you start to create hypocrisy and neo-colonialism.

Moreover, when you find yourself having to gaslight, gossip, bully, slander or politically marginalize people to justify your own position and salary, you are probably engaging in neocolonialism. I just thought some leaders might like to know in case it applies to them.

Conclusion:

Peer movements are not responsible for the vast amount of disparity that exists between top administrator salaries (and between a therapy salary or a peer administrator salary for that matter) and the abysmal resources available to subjects confined in squalor in board and care homes.

It is not my intention to diminish the achievements of the peer movement either. The peer movement has helped change the language used in public policy. It has vastly improved the system by allowing peer workers in the work force. It has inspired many people to improve their wellness.

I wouldn’t dare say what I have to say about values and ethics to researched best practices. Okay maybe that’s not entirely true. I am an entitled paranoid loud mouth! Maybe that’s why I felt sanctioned in my HVN training.

But I tend to see the peer movement as being far better able to consider my comments than I would other best practices with high level academic platforms surrounded by elite university Ph.D. titles. It’s true though that in these days of disparity even peer movements also have educated platforms behind them.

I think everyone of us in the peer movement can do a little better with avoiding neo-colonialism. I think that questioning the need to impose values and ethics is a great place to start. I think that each peer services worker needs to tend to the gardens it their own backyard, without trying to incorporate themselves into the mechanisms of agribusiness.

When the way you do things becomes the only way to go. When you have to gossip and slander others to make a name for yourself and, then, gaslight upon confrontation, you are wearing a neocolonial wig.

I think the peer movement is doing a good job in many ways, why sell out and try to join a false best practice bandwagon. Why not try to be just a little bit better.

The post Ways the Peer Movement Could Be Just a Little Bit Better About Avoiding Neocolonialism: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Watching Buzzards Swirl:

It has been my honor and privilege to work for fifteen years on an urban inner-city psychiatric unit that is currently being targeted for closure by a hospital system that is facing a budget crisis. There is a proposal on the table to merge our program with its suburban counterpart, taking away the specialized care we provide to the urban, primarily African American, community that we serve.

This week I went in front of the board to argue against the closing of this clinic. In preparing to do this, I found myself recollecting things I had learned at commuter college I attended in Camden New Jersey. I developed a grand plan to tell a story that would change the board’s mind.

I sat in front of the board for three hours before I was able to break the spell of the story. Listening to the board belabor many points, I realized it wasn’t the place for my personal perspective. I ended up barely getting my head together and saying some words that fit in with the wider efforts of my professional peers.

Our team said what it had to say and did a good job. Now I must wait two months and see what will become of my life’s work.

Community Stories Outta Oakland:

I have learned a few things about Oakland in my years working with local people. Stories surface that paint a mosaic for myself and the people in the program that are central to the way we put our wellness together, that are central to our community. While Asian Mental Health and Casa Del Sol Clinics primarily serve Asian and Latino clients, our population is mostly black and a minority white. As I share slivers of our stories that we have learned from, I realize that these may not be as welcome in the new community.

Historically, a diaspora of black people primarily from Louisiana settled in segregated neighborhoods in the West and East after World War II. Fleeing from racism and economic oppression, many families prospered. The old Richard Hawkins gospel song Oh Happy Day came from Oakland and made it to the charts in 1968. Elders in the community tell many stories of prosperity and strength. Indeed prior to World War II only 3% of the community was African American.

I have heard many say that within segregated communities, black people could get anything they needed within their community prior to the civil rights movement. Crosses were burned in surrounding communities. Though, of course, currently there are many other enclaves of diverse peoples to which I have less ability to speak about, similar changes have resulted as work went from manufacturing to our current service economy.

Prior to this shift, Huey Newton, Bobby Seals and the Black Panther Party grew out of Oakland and worked to defend the community against racism during desegregation. I have heard many memories of this movement was targeted by the U.S. government and was replaced starting in the mid-seventies, by Felix Mitchell’s crime organization. Word has it that Huey Newton got into drugs and was shot three times in a West Oakland Neighborhood in 1989.

Felix Mitchel’s influence survived only ten years and brought crack into the community. I have heard one community member say, “It’s like you just woke up one morning and everything was just crack,” Felix Mitchel competed with Micky Moore, who survived, reformed and became a preacher. I have heard stories of relatives killed and butchered during these years. In 1991 Tupac Shakur was brutally beaten by Oakland PD. Many large businesses tended to leave the city. Though neighborhoods differ significantly, post-industrial poverty continues to pulse through parts of the city.

During the shift to post-industrialism, the incarceration industry expanded. Residents are allowed three jail visits and then are shipped out to the pen. In the pen, many enter gangs out of which they can never leave without surviving protective custody and solitary confinement. They can get assignments that they must carry out that can jeopardize their efforts to maintain employment in the community. Probation and parole monitor a person very strictly and marginalizes ones’ career opportunities.

While many proud Oaklanders object to criminal organizations and work hard to stay free and safe, it is easy to see how post-industrial wages and generations of poverty have necessitated them. The war is zoned and police precincts fight to keep it out of wealthy districts. Task force reality in your neighborhood makes living hard. I am always in awe when I walk through suburban neighborhoods and smell cannabis wafting where people are safe and free to use it.

Still there are predominately services available in Eastmont Mall, which was once a shopping mall. Still, there are neighborhoods rife with shootings and even, before 2000 there has been migration out of the city out to places like Pittsburg, Antioch, Vallejo, Hayward and Freemont.

Currently, however, the price of housing is skyrocketing, causing more and more working families to commute to the city for work spending long hours in the car. However, displacement seems to be slowed by an extraordinary amount of homelessness. Between 2017-2019 homelessness has increased 47% according to figures released in the Oakland Chronicle.  Fifteen years ago, when I started working, a person could easily get into a shelter; now an Obama phone and a waiting list is a must and the streets are full of tent encampments.

Those of us witnessing this believe that people in the tech industry are taking over the city and displacing people who have made this their home since the nineteen forties. For years I have heard of tech companies handing out the tents that are erected throughout the city. Current figures suggest that 34% of Oakland homeless live in tents and 23% live in their cars. While only 11% of the city is now African American, 50% of the homeless population is African American.

Fighting to Save Our Unit:

Perhaps the story I wanted to tell was as much a testament to why I, a white man, choose to work in an urban, primarily African American community. Perhaps it helps me understand why despite the privilege of my skin, I feel put upon to go out to the suburbs into stories that are significantly different.

If I feel this way, imagine how our community participants feel! There are many white participants who feel the same way I do. We have learned to use this community to enrich our lives.

I have sensed that the decision has been made by the company and that our appeal to power is just theater. Nevertheless, I decided to speak because my bosses said that we needed to fight for the people currently being displaced in the city of Oakland.

It hurts me extraordinarily to lose all the love I have built with patients who have been healing and improving their lives over the course of my fifteen-year tenure. Many will not tolerate the move.

Still, I recall the story that lived in my mind and wonder what it meant to me. Why did I think it would help people of power change their minds about the value of culturally competent care?

The Story that I Couldn’t Share:

Back in my junior and senior year in college I remember a woman lived in the apartment complex across the street, It a little while, but eventually she introduced herself as Gwendolyn. She was just a tad masculine when she shook my hand. She did not use the standard neighborhood handshake like the youth I’d befriended first couple of years in the city.

She was clearly the elder with her freckled face, well-tended hair, and shades. She took it upon herself to start up the conversations. Although I was initially a little guarded, fearing she’d end up asking for money, I remained receptive and open to her.

One of my schoolmates was known to joke about the amount of money he imagined that I would give out to street people. I heard him call me out of my name with his little comedy routine once. I didn’t think it was cute. He took writing classes with me and like most of our cohorts commuted into the city when he wasn’t at work. He was known to stop off at the frat house and write about his escapades.

I clearly didn’t fit in with him or many of my schoolmates. Many would tease me as they got to know me. I didn’t pay them much attention. I just thought they were dumb, in and out of the city in their old suburban high school cliques and stereotypes.

Gwendolyn (and the rest of the neighborhood for that matter) did not ask me for money.

Maybe they knew I worked at the local Korean-owned deli, which meant that I was paid under the table and was expected to guard the shop with the Glock under the grill and the shotgun over the trashcan.

I’d just recently moved into the one local apartment complex which did not allow drugs. I had spent my first year in the city living with an older woman who would not let me have outside friends. My second year was devoted to breaking up with her and establishing some independence in writing classes.

I would talk to Gwendolyn about the roach infestation problem we had.

“Oh, we won’t allow bugs in our apartment,” she exclaimed, adding, “I am absolutely certain of that!”

This seemed strange, with all the traffic going in and out of that building, it didn’t seem clean from the outside. I always did wonder if that meant they did not have cockroaches or if she was talking about something I didn’t understand.

I still think of the three winters I lived there as Gwendolyn’s neighbor and our conversations by the corner payphone. There were times I wanted to give Gwendolyn money when she was underdressed on the corner in her jean jacket shivering. But then again, I too was often too lazy to dress for the cold and was also shivering. We were both far too thin for our bodies.

Perhaps we were both not taking care of ourselves. She was often drinking from a bag and I occasionally had a small bruise on my throat.

But the fact is that Gwendolyn’s constant respectful outreach meant a heck of a lot to me. There was very little college life outside the frat house. I delivered sandwiches to the dorms and was mad at many of my lazy peers who would neglect to tip me.

Just as she practically lived alone on the corner using the phone and talking to associates, I practically lived in the library belaboring to outline everything that I read. I’d later learn that I was battling my undiagnosed ADD and Dyslexia. If I wasn’t at the library, I was at work. Once a week, I was coming home from the suburban shrink appointment on the speed line with bags of groceries that I’d bring into my studio.

Maybe Gwendolyn sensed something in me to which she could relate. In fact, maybe we were both trying to escape some of the same demons. I wouldn’t understand that until many decades later. Finally, I would recapture some memories that would help me understand my odd take on things and how my senses often turn out to be correct. I think Gwendolyn could relate to that!

I did know that I was trying to escape the dependence on a family and community that I didn’t trust.

I had been born into a Quaker school community where both of my parents were teachers, my father a principal. I had spent half of my senior year in several mental health institutions and had returned to a close-knit community that was informed of intimate details of my struggles.

I was no longer able to play sports, so I spent my time writing. My writing efforts now appeared downgraded. Now my best essay nearly got me kicked out of school! The school psychologist, the wife of my English teacher, arranged a confrontation with my parents. Everybody knew about it before I did.

I started to have the sense that grades were political and stupid. Now there is research that says that sense is accurate particularly when skin color is involved.

During my time in institutions, I had come to see things differently. I wanted to badly to avoid all the people who seemed to make up their minds about me in a way that wasn’t going to ever change. I turned down my admissions to private liberal arts colleges and made an escape.

Somehow, I sensed that Gwendolyn understood me better and valued me more than all the people in my old community of privilege.

And it was not just Gwendolyn, it was Doc and Ray who’d trained me to work at the Korean Deli. It was Julio and Jose who I’d trained to work there. It was Ruth the security guard at the library, my coworker Craig, his cousin the janitor. It was my apartment manager who I delivered lunch to on a regular basis. Sprinkled throughout the neighborhood were people who I could connect with and who kept me afloat. I felt they gave me another chance. They didn’t see me as the skinny anorexic that I was, they were curious. It was the familiar look of the customers who came in and out of the Deli. They seemed to respect me and believe in second chances where others did not.

Overcoming Generalizations and Stereotypes:

In retrospect, I was twenty years old. It was an era of extremes in my life. I overgeneralized and felt the whole world of privilege was united against me. Maybe, I just needed to establish my independence from it.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe some of the privileged world that had reared me could understand that people deserved second chances. Many of them seemed to choose my parents and their secrets over me, but maybe not all of them were like that. Maybe there were some of them that could learn to see beyond stereotypes.

Sure, there was all the disrespect I’d witnessed towards me going to my sister’s graduation. Sure, there was the same disrespect in family get-togethers. I would eventually learn that I had a great aunt who was given a lobotomy and left to rot in an institution. Maybe the whole community of privilege is not like that.

Maybe it’s possible that some other suburban people find community in other contexts. Maybe some people on the board could understand that need to be understood and respected that is necessary to find when you have no place else to go.

Maybe that’s what I have spent the last fifteen years of my life going above and beyond in my work efforts! I feel guilty that I take a competitive salary away from the community. I must pray that I am not only taking from, but also giving back to the community that gave me a chance to come back.

Buzzards!

I am not the first person who has had the meaning and purpose in my life taken away by some people of property. I feel like I am waiting for the buzzards to pick over my bones.

When I first started leading groups on the unit, I recall walking into the “low-functioning” group and having an African American male who thought he was an aristocrat scream and had an IQ that was likely higher than mine scream, “Buzzards!”

Initially I didn’t know what to do because I was hiding my own history of “schizophrenia,” homelessness, and psychiatric incarceration. I needed the salary and did not want to set off a negative ripple.

But I came back into health. I started responding in ways that were more helpful. I’d do things like flap my arms and making a few, “caw-caw” sounds. And then, I’d simulate being shot by the aristocrat. Then I’d have a real conversation with the aristocrat. Eventually we’d end up talking in the hall as if it was Gwendolyn and I back on that corner in Camden New Jersey.

Leadership that Perpetuates Stereotypes?

Good mental health care must teach people to re-examine themselves beyond the stereotypes! I have a hard time believing that people of power know how to help people like Gwendolyn, myself, and the African American aristocrat. They seem to be like all the people back at Quaker school, not willing to give me a second chance.

If a board member was to engage me in a conversation, I would want to tell them that displacement, union-busting and psychiatric incarceration (which is precisely what our program prevents) hurts. It attacks relationships and ways of life. We lose our love and our means of survival. The architects behind these attacks should be ashamed of themselves! I am ashamed of my part in it!

The post Gentrification and Displacement in Oakland California: An Inside-Out Perspective appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

In summing up my experience with psychotherapy, the last lesson is one I am still working through. It is a lesson I am learning as I am seeking trauma treatment for feeling numb and frozen when I am not at work. This involves rebuilding trust in psychotherapy. It involves building into psychotherapy a significant peer component.

During my first job working at McDonald’s, I worked around the food that I loved. It made it much easier to starve. Especially McDonald’s irresistible french-fries: the more I worked around them, the less appealing they were.

Perhaps that is all that is happening to me as a psychotherapist. I am just working around the lard in the industry and it makes me not want to dine. However, shall I really give up on trusting psychotherapy?

Now there is a new trend pioneered by figures like Bessel van der Kirk and Richard Swartz (Internal Family Systems,) and Karen Shapiro or Laura Parnell (EMDR) These involves new ways to address trauma that are based on “better” scientific understandings of trauma and how it affects the body.

Developing Treatment for Psychosis as a Provider:

When I finally recovered from two years of “psychosis” or what I’ve learned to call special message crisis, I took a long break from seeking psychotherapy services. Instead of receiving services, I provided services.

I worked with other people who suffer from what I went through. It took me six years, but I learned to use my own story and work mutually with program participants. Over time I learned to consider myself to be a wounded healer. I do not pretend that I am not wounded. I am authentic and I believe I get good results.

As a psychotherapist, I have trusted myself. I have learned and grown stronger giving myself and others the liberty to talk about experiences associated with hearing voices or being a targeted individual.

I pioneered professional group therapy for psychosis and developed eclectic strategies to help support people while in psychosis. I work primarily with people who have been severely affected by public warehousing and have suffered homelessness and been institutionalized in shelters and board and care homes.

Providing therapy has helped me more than receiving it. Returning to therapy has been something I have done for a targeted reason, to address trauma.

Here, summing it up will help provide perspective on the mental health system and ways psychotherapy may need to change to become more trustworthy.

Seeking Out Trauma-Treatment:

A year and a half ago, I suffered a back injury and had to be in bed for a week. Then I needed to be out of work as I rehabbed for a month. I decided to seek therapy to try to take the edge off my level of suffering when I didn’t have work to keep me occupied.

I often suffer on the weekends when I am not functioning in a professional capacity. Additionally, I often suffer because I have been unable to build social support that has enabled me to promote my therapy platform as an author.

Curious to learn about EMDR and other trauma therapies like Internal Family Systems, I chose to work with a therapist who appears to be my age and my training level.

This time my therapist acknowledged he has his own lived experience and is open about his religious background and our cultural differences. Finally, he was able to accept my insurance which meant I could afford to see him without feeling financially exploited.

Finding Myself Unresponsive:

In EMDR trauma treatment, there is a process called resourcing. The trainer helps the subject identify wise and protective people in their lives. Also in resourcing it is important to identify safe places. These figures and spaces are used to mentally support the sufferer during the process of bilateral stimulation.

Unfortunately, I found that this task does not come easily for me.

In trying to find supportive and protective people, I found that most people who have supported me have been a lot like the six other therapists I have critiqued up to this point.

While each therapist and support did help me, they also left me with a sense of betrayal. It has been hard for me to believe that my past is riddled with people who I don’t trust. Many have left me because of my mental health struggles and the stigma associated with schizophrenia.

What I found was that because I struggle with the task of resourcing, I am not responsive to the bilateral stimulation. Recently, I heard my therapist say he didn’t think I was a candidate for EMDR because I am not in touch with my feelings.

Lesson Sixteen: True Healers Don’t Make Fun of a Subjugated Group!

Simultaneously, I have taken training that supports my therapy efforts. For example, I took Emotional Freedom Techniques, a scientifically based treatment that incorporates the Eastern practice of tapping on energy meridians and repeating affirmations to help change the level of stress the body experiences.

During the Emotional Freedom Techniques training, I found that in a room full of therapists, I was not able to benefit. The instructor called people like me reversed. He expressed annoyance with such people. ‘Why can’t they just accept help!” “You can spot a reversed person when they come into these rooms from their energy they exude.”

Meanwhile, I progressively realized I was being referenced by these comments. I recognized this as an idea of reference of the sort I experienced during psychosis.

In my own system of treatment, I would call this kind of message a trickster. If I believe in a trickster, it likely to come true. Instead, much like I must do to survive psychosis, I need to use spirituality and exude alternative energy through prayers and mantras and hope that the trickster doesn’t come true.

Even though I knew that I needed to ignore this real situation and change my energy to change the outcome, I fumed. I bitterly stopped hiding the fact that the tapping wasn’t working for me. I noticed that the instructor seemed to avoid my hand and further reject me with angry comments about dissenters and I felt hurt and angry.

As a result, I have surmised that I may live in a slightly disassociated state, perhaps because of my medications, that prevent me from being in touch with my feelings. I believe this state is something I have developed as a psychotherapist who had to work particularly long hours for my license.

For a long time, I told no one about my history until I got my license. Perhaps my supervisors just saw someone who worked seven days a week if they even saw me at all.

I believed if I disclosed, my supervisors would refuse to let me work under their license. It so happened that many of my supervisors said horrible things about people who experience schizophrenia to which I had to silently bear witness.

In like manner, for many years I struggled to get along with my colleagues. First, I tended not to trust other therapists when they complained about people like me who have been institutionalized.

Then, when I self-identified as a therapist with lived experience with psychosis, there were times ridicule made it back to me. Politically I was attacked when I took a job as a peer administrator. One colleague saw this and said I was like Tupac with all eyes on me. I left administration when I was demoted. I went back to my old job and was able to survive the nickname, “Crazy Tim,” and continued working.

The same thing had happened when I sought training years earlier from Bessel van der Kirk, a man touted as the world’s leading trauma expert. In a room of hundreds of upper-middleclass caucazoidal clinicians, he made fun of people who were psychotic. He didn’t do this once. He did it repeatedly. I felt extremely alienated and it follows me into all the trainings I subsequently attend.

Making the Connection:

I think of my behavior in group therapy when psychosis is freely referenced: I am animated, engaged, funny and in touch with my feelings.

I think of the one-time my therapist really tested me to be in touch with my feelings. It was at the end of a long disturbing week.

Even though I can acknowledge that I failed miserably in describing my feelings, I realize I need to contest him that his experience of me doesn’t mean that I am incapable of benefitting from EMDR!

So here, I make the connection that a part of me is putting my therapist in the category with all the trauma experts and past therapists who have rejected me.

I am aware to some extent that I bring significant therapy baggage or negative transference to this therapeutic relationship. As I draft this blog. I never really considered how bad therapy has been for me.

There have been many times in psychotherapy over the past year and a half that I have felt judged or misunderstood. I have worked hard to overlook it and advocate for a better relationship.

While I have tended to give my therapist the benefit of the doubt, I also realize that I am hypervigilant about being judged. Sometimes I have walked away thinking he thinks of me as a narcissist.

Outcome:

When I recently confronted my therapist about his conclusion that I cannot benefit from EMDR, I learned that he is not like the trauma trainers and other therapist colleagues from whom I have observed prejudice against psychosis. My therapist may have been trained by them but he might have alternative views.

I tested him to see if he really thinks I am a narcissist. He did not seem to feel that way about me. I realized that I am blaming him for all he bad therapy I have received over the years. I have not been warm to him. His assessment of me was not his fault.

I think throwing my therapist under the bus and saying that all he ever did was judge me when he said I could not benefit from EMDR is not very rational.

Therapy is not an all or nothing thing. Therapists have strengths and weaknesses just like people who experience “psychosis” or special message crisis. Maybe to find a person who really believes in me, it takes firm self-advocacy!

Therapy that Heals Beyond Social Control:

I think most therapists I have examined in this series have looked at me and felt there is a need to fix something. Many people do not need to be fixed, need only be supported. When I interviewed with Malik Shakur (Tupac’s cousin) on the Knowledge Show to promote my book that was his assessment of me. I was a structured kid, he said. There was nothing wrong with me.

While I don’t feel good about my experiences with therapy, I am responsive to curanderos and other types of healers who try to help me be the kind of person I want to be. I may not choose to need mushrooms or other natural psychedelics, but I like traditional cultures. I have learned that my goal is not to fit in but rather to endure.

Like a good curandero I will help individuals find health despite the goals of the Cabals who advocate for social control and conformity for their own security.

I will persist and trust my therapist who also identifies as a wounded healer. I will try to add music artists who I appreciate to my resource list of people who have not let me down.

I can learn healing skills to regulate my emotions so I can explore traumatic memories and find out more of what I experienced during times of disassociation.

I Am Not Alone:

In the health system there is a new movement to bring peers into the workplace. Indeed peer support and a culture of sustainable recovery suggests that people who have been institutionalized can find meaning and purpose by helping out their brethren in the system.

At the current time, many wise peers are expected to train young staff members just out of school and help each other out without getting any compensation.

For twenty-six years I have seen this go on and I feel that if those wise peers are given training and the right kind of support, they can complete tasks and they have a right to compensation. That’s what I do. I may endure ridicule, but I respond by seeking to outperform my colleagues and sometimes I get respect.

As the Hearing Voices Movement demonstrates, lived experience and stories about managing psychosis and other struggles can be very helpful when shared amongst sufferers. More and more the clinics are hiring peers and including them as members of the treatment team.

Indeed, there are a lot of people like me who know what it is like to repeatedly fail in treatment. I believe we can be utilized to improve services for others. Many others like me have training about what not to do:

1. Lesson Number One–Don’t Side with Society Over the Sufferer;
2. Lesson Number Two–Don’t Ignore Problems;
3. Lesson Number Three–Don’t Engage in Dual Relationships that May Interpreted as Exploitative;
4. Lesson Number Four—It Is Important to Set Reasonable Expectations;
5. Lesson Number Five—It is Not Helpful to Make Negative Predictions;
6. Lesson Number Six—It is Important Not to Ignore Signs of Abuse in Relationships;
7. Lesson Number Seven—It is Important Not to Attack a Spiritual Tradition;
8. Lesson Number Eight—Don’t Use Treatment to Attack a Political Ideology;
9. Lesson Number Nine–Don’t Let the Basis of Your Trust Be Credentials;
10. Lesson Number Ten–Don’t Make Decisions for the Client;
11. Lesson Number Eleven–Don’t Presume Everything in a Paranoid Person’s Life is Paranoia;
12. Lesson Number Twelve–Don’t Predict Permanent Warehousing for a Person in an Emergency;
13. Lesson Number Thirteen—Don’t Collaborate with Imposed Treatment;
14. Lesson Number Fourteen—Don’t Expect Psychosis to be Suppressed:
15. Lesson Number Fifteen—Don’t Impose Your Economic Reality on Your Patient;
16. Lesson Number Sixteen—True Healers Don’t Make Fun of a Subjugated Group!

The post In Psychotherapy We Trust: Part Four– Trauma Treatment appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Although it may seem like binging and purging down a sink in a roach infested apartment is a likely a low point for a Where’s Waldo person born to such mainstream, Caucizoidal privilege, it wasn’t really that dire. Indeed, it would take me seven years for a catastrophic incident to happened. Then, I would find myself buried me in a state hospital as I suppose the psychometric testing predicted. So, the question remains: did the psychotherapy help, or was psychotherapy part of the problem?

Though I had some hard times, psychiatric medications and life-term psychodynamic therapy worked for seven years. Psychopharmacology was a booming industry and there was a big push to get people on medications. My goal was to fit into the mainstream and be like everybody else. It was as if I could take medications and wear name brands and maybe some people would tolerate me. I worked and worked at it. I guess the premise of this therapy was the same as it was in phase one and two, fir a square peg into a round hole.

Discharged from the state hospital to the streets with a month worth of medication, I learned that professional work was out of the question for a homeless, drifting, targeted individual. When I finally managed to arrange a life sustaining situation for myself fear of failure and chronic homelessness prompted me to reconnect with family. In order to receive financial support that could make a low-wage job sustainable, I was forced into a dehumanizing rendition of narrative therapy for three or four years.

There are many things I learned during this decade of treatment for binging and purging and schizophrenia. Was it really wise to trust psychotherapy during these twists and turns? I highlight eight things that particularly hurt me during this time.

Lesson Number Eight—Don’t Use Treatment to Attack a Political Ideology:

In my senior year in college, I went voluntary to the hospital at the urging of my new therapist because I just could re-calibrate myself into my school routine. In the hospital I was able to contain my raging eating disorder, so I avoided that diagnosis. Instead, I was diagnosed with Schizotypal personality disorder and started on three medications.

In another sense was a trusting and genuine fellow. I took the Rorschach and expressed Marxian concepts. I continued to say “yo” and dress in casual inner-city garb. One might argue these just aren’t wise things to do in an American Psychiatric Hospital.

But the worst thing I did was challenge the AMA for banning Thomas Szasz. This really concerned my doctor and he started me on medications before the results of my tests were up.

The doctor said I was impulsive! I had never heard myself being referenced in that way. It is true my emotions go from one to one-hundred, but I usually don’t act on them unless I am in life or death circumstances.

Upon my release, my therapist told my parents that I really wasn’t college material and encouraged me to go on SSI. She put me into a very repressive day program with extremely oppressed and mistreated people from a state hospital. Instead I took on a couple of seasonal jobs and got back into the next semester. I ignored the quality of her advice. I felt like I owed her for putting me in the hospital.

Lesson Number Nine–Don’t Let the Basis of Your Trust Be Credentials:

In my gut, I never trusted my therapist of seven years even though I made strides in my professional and social life under her care. I stayed with her because she had a Ph.D. from Cornel University and because I was afraid to hurt her by cutting her loose. I was dependent on her as a sounding board while I waited for the next medication cocktail to kick in.

Perhaps if I had known what she told my parents about me when I gave her permission to talk to them, I would have fired her. However, my parents and I had poor communication that even if they told me, I don’t even know if I would have believed them.

I recall repeatedly talking back to myself about my care during this time and deciding to use my mind to trust the credentials. My intuition told me I shouldn’t trust her from the start.

Case in point: I didn’t trust the entitled way she treated the security guards at the site where she first worked. I’d worked in the inner-city and seen that kind of arrogance lead to beloved cars getting keyed. I felt going up the chain and getting all dysregulated about the lack of response it in front of me was treating the security officers like slaves. I knew she’d be more successful if she talked to them like human beings. But she was the Ph.D. And she eventually found an office where she didn’t have to fight that losing battle.

Lesson Number Ten–Don’t Make Decisions for the Client:

Over the seven years, therapy never went into my past. This was my choice, but maybe it could have been contested. Instead, therapy was only about my current depression which was always getting worse and worse. As I stated before, we were constantly waiting for her latest psychopharmacology professional to fix me.

I would need therapy and medication the rest of my life. “The only way to manage a personality disorder is through an intensive psychodynamic relationship,” she would say. She lowered her price, so I could afford the sessions myself. I saved all my decisions for her to make.

Meanwhile I excelled in my profession of a mental health counselor and put myself through graduate school with accommodations for diagnosed ADD and Dyslexia. Persistent hard work always kept me out of trouble. Even though my GPA dropped from 3.9 in undergraduate to a 3.7, things were different because I also put energy into creating a social life.

Still, it was very hard to wake up through the medication fog in the morning and get into work. I would gulp 32 ounces of Coke, so I wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel. But I was a good worker once I woke up. Also, I really worked hard on my social life and making relationships with people who rejected me. It was like the old Morrisey song: the more they ignored me, the closer I got.

Lesson Number Eleven–Don’t Presume Everything in a Paranoid Person’s Life is Paranoia:

When I graduated, I wanted to get into the Peace Corps and many other alternatives, but every program rejected me after consulting with my therapist. I didn’t want to be paranoid, so I maintained faith in her. She taught me a lot about my paranoia. I stopped trusting my intuition.

Finally, I settled for moving to Seattle and continued my treatment via phone. Within six months I took a risky job in a high-profile section 8 housing authority job. I kept making legal and ethical decisions that guided my conduct amid extreme social violence toward going against the grain.

I would tell myself that I would be paranoid if I thought that what I was doing would be frowned upon. I told myself that drugs and violence were illegal and not sanctioned by the government! People like me were not bribed to look the other way!

Indeed, maintaining these delusions in this setting was very dangerous. However, I blamed my fear of retribution and defiant behavior on my paranoia and tipped off the press on several occasions.

Still, I became very popular among the residents. My boss who I lost respect for when she started showing up to work high, threatened to fire me. The management company spied on me. There were many veiled threats that I pretended not to understand. Case in point, they tried to bribe me with free concert tickets and I didn’t get it. I hosted a community event instead in which I invited the clients out to the concert.

Lesson Twelve–Don’t Predict Permanent Warehousing for a Person in an Emergency:

I finally started to question the reality of this hold my therapist had on me and went of my medication. The violence I encountered was real and was never resolved. When coincidences started to seem suspicious to me, and my best friend from college made a direct and credible threat on my life, my therapist contacted my parents and got them to put out a missing-persons report out on me. I fled towards Canada.

“Tim will be in and out of the hospital the rest of his life,” my therapist told my parents.

With that advice my father begged me to stay on the chronic ward in the state hospital for another nine months. He promised me that if I returned to the community, I would keep on getting followed.

After a three-month incarceration in Montana State Hospital, I took a Greyhound bus to Fresno California with four thousand and five hundred dollars of assets. My Mom refused to give me access to the ten thousand dollars I inherited from my Grandfather.

Still, I stayed in touch with my mother, but not my father. I wanted to be sure the following did not return as he had predicted. Indeed, I interpreted his words as a threat.

I managed to get a job and get housing until I ran out of medication. Then, I tried everywhere for any kind of legal income. I’d resisted many outlaw recruitment efforts in the state hospital. I was sticking to legal work!

I finally got a professional job when I was down to one thousand, five hundred dollars, but even I had to admit that I was not able to work in a professional capacity with what I’d been through.

Lesson Number Thirteen—Don’t Collaborate with Imposed Treatment:

To reconnect with family, I had to move to the bay area, get a job at an Italian Deli, and see a therapist. I had come to believe that my best friend from college was not only bipolar and an ex-addict, but also an Italian mafia boss. He worked as a longshoreman as a gang leader in the ports of Philadelphia. His stories of corrupt cops who paid his way through college for under-cover surveillance took on new meaning as did the coincidences that had followed me throughout.

Nevertheless, I was the delusional person working at an Italian Deli with a two-hour bike and BART commute. I concluded that my family was a mob family. I begrudged having to fit two hours of therapy into my busy schedule. But to eat I was forced to go to therapy. I sought work that would enable me to move away and start over again free.

I begrudged the small amount of financial support I received and led an impoverished lifestyle of twelve hour work days. At work my seventeen-year-old bosses would mock me. Many came from wealthy districts. And this therapist was part of Italian family practice. “I too shop at A.G. Ferrari’s she would tell me.

Lesson Number Fourteen—Don’t Expect Psychosis to be Suppressed:

I didn’t trust or like the therapist I was forced to see in the least because she was not interested in my experiences of being followed. I did everything I could to conceal them from her because I was afraid if she knew about them, she would hospitalize me.

I was extremely angry about the $225 weekly cost of therapy when I was making nine dollar’s an hour. My therapist would sense this and get defensive. This would force me not to share any experiences of being targeted with her in a genuine way. I had some very disturbing things happen that I was forced to conceal from her.

In fact, when I finally admitted to her eight months in that I believed I was being followed and called the FBI, she became fiercely angry and threatened me. She looked like she was considering the hospital. Oops!

Lesson Number Fifteen—Don’t Impose Your Economic Reality on Your Patient:

Fundamentally, this therapist had no empathy for how hard my twelve-hour days were and how my paycheck barely covered rent. She insisted on the two-hour amount of time she felt I needed. I told her that the sessions were of no use to me. Yet they continued.

My therapist did not encourage me to find a professional job even though I sprayed resumes and had many interviews. She said, “I believe you are working hard in your head, but believe me working at a Deli for nine dollars and hour is not so hard,” “What is really happening is you are letting teenage kids bully you, you shouldn’t give away your power.”

Can I get a witness? I had a right to be angry.

This therapist didn’t believe in medication and expected me to fix things on my own. Then, she judged me a failure when progress went at a snail’s pace. She seemed to feel bad for herself and the poor kids who had to work with me. The harassment and abuse was intense because I was intense. Some of it was so bad that it would probably make anyone wonder.

When my year of support was getting close, she finally referred me to a psychiatrist and my work performance vastly improved. Then, she criticized my success, “I think you’ve lost your creativity.”

After ten months, I started to use my medications to more effectively snow her. Additionally, I needed her for rational support as I tried to get back into the professional world. Acting with professional entitlement didn’t come easy to me with rules that didn’t match the defenseless abuse I received in my state hospital training.

“Your parents are paying for these sessions because they love you, why sweat the small stuff,” she argued. “I am not being a greedy capitalist,” she said, “I have an ethical responsibility here.” “Don’t be a wounded healer,” she said.

Luckily, she wasn’t around for future family financial discussions. It wouldn’t matter. I would be financially stable by then, just hurt and angry.

The post In Psychotherapy We Trust: Part Three– The Psychopharmacology Craze appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

I went through five years of treatment for the treatment of anorexia that added to the negative transference I have for psychotherapy. This included three therapeutic relationships, three hospitalizations, and three therapeutic trends that were utilized back in the early nineties. I participated in mandatory family therapy, behavioral inpatient eating disorder therapy, and addressing the problem through a twelve step tradition.

As a result of these relationships I learned four additional lessons:

• lesson four, it is important to set reasonable expectations;
• lesson five, it is not helpful to make negative predictions;
• lesson six, it is important not to ignore signs of abuse in relationships; and
• lesson seven, it is important not to attack a spiritual tradition.

Again, although I am glad that this treatment helped me survive a life-threatening condition, reflecting on these experiences has always led me down a path of madness. I am left wondering if I am safe in therapy.

“Of course, you are safe in therapy,” I can hear the choir sing!

“Stay on the streets of this town, and they’ll be carving you up alright . . .” I hear Bruce Springsteen retort.

Oh, how I hate choir music, but what do you think?

Structural Family Therapy:

I instantly liked my second therapist just like I liked my first therapist. He was affiliated with Salvador Minuchin’s reputable Child Guidance Clinic. It would be intensive Structural Family Therapy for me.

My parents tried to drop me off with my suitcase and he said, “Wow, that suitcase is very heavy!” Then, he ordered my family to have daily sessions to save my life.

There were a lot of tense family sessions in which my father bullied me to eat and I hated myself for acquiescing. In fact, this made it harder to swallow my pride and eat even though part of me was hungry and wanted to do better. Instead, I learned to throw-up in trash cans to object to my father and the family drama that unfurled.

I was expected to gain a half pound a day or we were failures. I researched an article in academic journals in the hospital library that suggested that this was not a good plan for the long-term needs of eating disorder patients. My therapist did not respond to my effort to self-advocate.

Indeed, when I would fail treatment at this facility and get transferred, I would learn that six thousand calories a day would not enable me to gain so rapidly.

It was true this therapist that I had for one month was good at calling my parents on their shit. At the same time, he also would punish me for not gaining enough weight by not letting me speak in the session. He really liked my sister, he said.

It may not be fair to blame the next ten years of family cutoff on the distress caused in those intense sessions. The therapist told my parents that I would run from home. This was often thrown in my direction. My mother sounded good in therapy and clearly felt my struggles were my fault and let me know it a great deal over the years. My sister always made it onto the folklore of the family Christmas cards, but not me. My room would be converted into a study and I moved in with a high school friend.

There was ongoing contact, but I did what I could to divorce myself from my family. Particularly when I reconnected with them ten years later, they chose to listen to the negative prognosis of the psychology tests, called the police, supported, and in one case openly prayed for longer-term hospitalization. Up until then, my psychotherapists functioned as my parents.

Inpatient Behavioral Treatment:

It took me a while to get my next therapist because the hospital assigned someone who was incompetent. He was not an eating disorder specialist and didn’t get it, even though he wanted to work with me. The new hospital made me fire this man to get the specialist that all the women on the unit loved and recommended. If it were not for some assertive anorexic females who were appalled that my family was paying out of pocket and I wasn’t working with a specialist, I wouldn’t have had the pleasure.

I could tell this man was curious to work with a male and that felt good. However, his strategy seemed familiar: he encouraged me to be corrupt by talking about how bad his sons were. I tried to be influenced by this gender manipulation technique. “Be a man, be bad,” he seemed to say. “And continue eating through the night.” These quotes seemed to be his mantras.

I did manage to gain weight and cheat at my diet. I was clearly addicted to starving but locking me up and forcing me to eat by changing my environment worked. Oh, I suffered. I kicked and screamed more than most. But I changed. One day I objected to eating Brussel sprouts and pulled out the blue chair and the tube that was to go up my nose and I listened. Fucking Brussel sprouts, how stupid! When I gained privileges I cheated frequently, but I was prescribed so many calories I still made gains.

Starting to hook up with all the women on the unit took a second hospitalization because I was extremely sexually repressed. I guess having a girlfriend or two wasn’t so bad, really.

While I experienced an influx of polyamorous flirtations on the unit during my second hospitalization, I also met a twenty-five-year-old newspaper reporter on the outside who didn’t mind robbing the cradle. I think she liked me because she hated her father who was an alcoholic. I was basically discharged to her care. “Loose the raincoat,” was the professional advice to me with my inability to copulate.

Right before I was discharged, I had a female social worker acknowledge my situation and warn me not to fall for any women when I was in such a vulnerable position. I was stunned. My parents and my MD didn’t care to warn me in such a manner!

According to the MD, the treatment worked! He would discharge me a year and a half later as a success. However, in the process, the MD stopped validating me and supporting me. He didn’t seem to care about what I was going through with the solution to my problems, the relation with my girlfriend.

You see, my girlfriend got extremely controlling. I was not allowed to have external friends. He just didn’t seem to acknowledge the pain her silence treatment and abuse caused. My first family had failed me, but certainly this new solution had to work. He was proud of me for gaining weight, but he knew nothing of the world I entered living in Camden, New Jersey at a commuter campus.

Through it all, real disassociated trauma went unexplored. When I finally after two years got so fed up that I had to cut ties with the older woman, I started violently binging and purging in the roach infested apartment I managed to afford on my own.

The Twelve Step Traditions:

My mother saw my fourth therapist for a while and said she was, “really good.” She was like my first therapist in that she was less credentialed and saw paying middle-class clients. My Mom paid for the sessions.

This therapist liked John Bradshaw who was a lot like me in terms of rage and shame. I saw him speak in a video clip and saw he also had been through eating problems. Still, I just thought he was fat and sloppy looking. Still, when I was told that families were like water torture dripping on your forehead, it did make sense. As such, she seemed to understand and care about my suffering.

Once a week, I took the train from the inner-city to the wealthy town of Haddenfield, New Jersey. I’d buy a weeks-worth of groceries most of which would only get vomited down the sturdy old sink pipes back amid the roaches.

Additionally, this therapist would occasionally challenge my spiritual beliefs in ways that seemed inappropriate. “Some things are worth dying for . . .” she would say with sudden rageful intensity. She once told me that she was attacked by a psychotic woman when she worked in community mental health and her primal response was violence, and that was okay.

She also clearly didn’t trust my mother and often asked me if I was sure my mother didn’t sexually abuse me. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I really don’t trust your mother,” she would say.

To her credit, she did see me outside my eating disorder. She encouraged me to pursue one of my interests outside the confines of the blocks on which I was immersed in work and school.

I was smart enough to make friends with the good people from the crack house, the ones who did not call me “Where’s Waldo.” I learned there are many respectful people who get caught up in that lifestyle. I also made friends with many of the local youth. I even made a friend with a fellow student who was in recovery from drugs and alcohol. Who else on the working-class campus would befriend a anorexic dude who had an attitude, who outlined everything he read, who was the only person willing of able to answer professors questions, and who tried to act like his weight and food didn’t matter?

It was the summer of my junior year and I quit my job and hiked six hundred miles of the Appalachian Trail. Even though I barely had enough weight on me, I binge ate a lot that summer and burned it hiking mountains. I was proud of myself for making the trek though it was a lot of alone time.

When I got back and started binging and purging again, I made the mistake of feeling the therapist had written me off. I guess I blamed her for the new-found fury in my binging behavior.

I found a new therapist with better credentials. I chose not to accept this therapists’ line of inquiry and views of the impact of sexual abuse. In fact, it became toxic to me. It would take twenty years and writing a memoir to recapture memories that helped me start to understand myself.

If it wasn’t for the fact she attacked my culture, she might have really helped me understand myself better. Instead, I sought refuge in the the medication craze . . .

The post In Psychotherapy We Trust: Part Two– Anorexia: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".