Back when I was battling with what a State Hospital labeled as schizophrenia, I had little reason to trust mental health workers. Prior to the catastrophic occurrences that rendered me a ward of the state, I had survived for seven years as a mental health professional. I knew what a lot of mental health workers said behind closed doors and in team meetings. I longed for a day in court where I could rectify everything that happened to me, but the mental health workers at the hospital simply rolled their eyes when I tried to share my story. At key points I was mocked. This is the story of how I’ve lived with mistrust for mental health workers ever since. 

Initially, as a mental health worker, I thought I was doing good work. But once incarcerated in a state hospital I realized how delusional I once had been. I had not realized how much I dehumanized mental health patients until I was one of those dehumanized patients. I saw the way the staff demeaned, mistreated and put themselves on a pedestal in front of me. And they took home good salaries for treating me this way. I initially decided not to return to work in mental health. 

My therapist of seven years had told my parents I would be in and out of hospitals the rest of my life while I was trying to escape to Canada to seek asylum. My parents believed her. Right before I was released from the longest three months of my life, my father begged me to stay in the safe hospital for another nine months rather than allow myself to be released. I had been restrained and punched in the back by staff because I was confused. I was seriously threatened by a veteran with a history of violence. I had received offers to join a gang and I was a person of interest among those connected to the local Mexican mafia. I survived dangerous and deplorable conditions. I didn’t need nine more months of this. I had devoutly followed this therapist for seven years and ignored the part of me that felt she was an ivy league snob who grossly underestimated me. Now I could see her as the mental health worker she really was, one that was there to control and suppress me. 

Control and Suppression:

Streeted to a Greyhound Bus Depot in snowy Montana, I made my way to sunny Fresno California. I did okay. I managed to find a job and establish an apartment until I ran out of meds at the end of the month. Hence my battle started with housing insecurity and underemployment. It would take years and years to return to secure professional employment with weekends off. Somehow on this recovery journey my mistrust for mental health workers never changed.

In Fresno off medication, I believed that the government sewed a tracker in my dog when the pound fixed her. I believed that the men who drove white trucks were in the mafia. I believed that all the oranges in the streets were left there to let me know that the mafia could take my life if I snitched. See, I had this unique knowledge about the reality of the drug war based on recent epiphanies I gained on my last social work assignment in Seattle Washington. I believed that my father was a high-profile crime boss on the east coast working under the umbrella of the society of friends (or the Quakers) and that he was funding this negative attention I was getting throughout Fresno to silence me and protect his fortune.

When my meager savings got low enough my aunt in the bay area offered me an arranged job at an Italian Delicatessen if I move to Antioch CA and endure a ten-mile bike commute and hour-long BART ride to work and back. Only then would my parents help me. And I had to see a shrink for 125$ an hour.

I was making 9$ an hour and the shrink made me see her two hours a week (250$) and she just could never understand why this might anger me. “Why sweat the small stuff,” she said. And she was very critical of me for giving my power away and letting the rich kids who worked at the deli bully me. “I too shop at AG Ferrari,” she said. So, this relationship didn’t exactly heal anything. I did learn to lie to her and compromise and balance my emotions.

Returning to Mental Health Work Without Blowing the Whistle:

Although it’s true I hadn’t wanted to go back into mental health, after ten months of poverty, isolation and deli work with this long commute, I changed my mind. Getting a new education was costly and I was desperate to get back control over my life. 

I returned to taking medication which enabled me to get a job in social services working with developmentally disabled individuals as the manager of satellite housing. After six months of this low wage work, I healed enough to return to mental health. The first job back in mental health I failed to attain because I had a panic attack in front of my clinical supervisor on the first day. They used me for three months and cut my per diem hours. Luckily, I landed on my feet and managed to get another per diem hire at an outpatient psychiatry program. 

I learned to hold my tongue around mental health workers. As I heard them compare the schizophrenic mind to that of a dog, I dealt with this by working harder and longer than them. I felt so afraid of falling into homelessness I blindly followed people I secretly did not like so that I could work. I saw a lot of things go on that I had used to speak out against. Now I had to accept them and prove that I would not again blow the whistle so that I could survive.

In early internships, which I maintained after the clinic hours to get the required five-hundred child and family hours necessary for California Licensure, I kept a low profile and did not disclose my history of madness to anyone. How was I to make healing relationships when I was forced to hide parts of myself that are vital to understanding my mission and purpose in life? 

I worked six years in silence. Half of this time I worked without any time off, seven days a week. In 2008, when I finally got my license, I started running a group called special messages in which I disclosed my history of madness and institutionalization to the clients so we could collaboratively share the contents of psychosis. It was at this point where other professional therapists I had largely ignored started to get my attention again. 

It wasn’t just because I was aware some of my colleagues were calling me, “crazy Tim,” behind closed doors that I left the job three years later. I knew what I was doing was unconventional and for that reason I produced extensive write-ups of my group curriculums to document what the clients and I were creating. Sure, colleagues took those write ups to the manager with concerns trying to get me fired. I really thought that the institutional mentality of the staff was unnecessary and possible to escape. In doing this I stopped facilitating the groups which were wildly popular and beautiful. I left for greener pastures. I took a pay cut and entered a county recovery project where they used recovery language.

Racing into the Arms of Recovery: 

As a Recovery Services Administrator working in the county’s pilot program merging three best practices called CHOICES, my lived experience was to be considered an asset. Even the author of the project admitted that he had once been in a cult. The organization I worked with were all peer counselors. 

But alas, I walked into a political bee’s nest and that the person who was going to get stung would eventually be me. The company that hired me was from Arizona and several people in the multicultural county were having issues with one of the owners and her openly color-blind views on race. Her attitude that race doesn’t matter, only qualifications, was not well received. I also heard enough of what she had to say to be offended and set boundaries with her. I would not promote her racial ideologies that were alienating her staff and the local professionals who worked with us.

But there were other players in the county who weren’t offended and who were willing to partner with the company owner, and they seemed to be giving her bad reports about me and my behavior in the team meeting. I worked against these negative senses of things while I was getting bullied in the team meetings, working towards a brighter outcome. The teams I was working on were often hostile and superior to my workers and I had a need to defend them and often faced a room full of people being unfair. 

It wasn’t long until the professionals in the county became very concerned about what I had to say about psychosis, enough so that one time the project director set up an ambush in which I was the target. All the professional therapists in the room were mad and wanted a client who as a gang member forcefully medicated and I pointed out that it was illegal to do so.  They all knew I was right. 

They accused me of being against medication and dangerous! 

I said, “Why would I be against medication? I take medication. I am for self-determination and choice.” 

One other professional saw this political ambush and pointed out it was unfair, and she got written up by her boss.

I left that job and the sixty-hour work weeks after a year and a half. I got demoted because the owner said it was dangerous to have me working with clients. She agreed with the recommendation of the director of the program that I was better off just reviewing charts.

I saw one of the other directors after I left. He couldn’t believe that I had found a job within Alameda County. 

I had gone back to the hospital where I had a supervisor who believed in my work and where others called me, “crazy Tim.” I didn’t tell this director that they barely let me back in the door as a per diem employee. I didn’t tell this director that they would work me a year-and-a-half before they gave me back my benefits. I just looked at his glaring eyeballs and said yes.   

Going Up the Food Chain: 

On the one hand, my recovery has brought me a life I never believed would be possible when I was incarcerated in the dank, Montana State Chronic Unit that was only heated to just above freezing at 40 degrees Fahrenheit. On the other hand, my ability to heal that original world view that mental health workers were there to control and suppress has not changed. 

As a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist I have been able to go up the food chain and study with experts to renew my license every two years. The focus of the field and my own studies has been understanding how to heal trauma, something that I believe is needed when people have experienced extraordinary experiences associated with psychosis. Indeed, using these training opportunities to help myself and others heal from trauma I hoped that I could change my relationships with my coworkers and thrive.

Fifteen years ago, I went to a twenty-four-hour CEU training in San Francisco with Bessel Van de Kirk, Ph.D. and he made fun of psychotic people three times and presumed that the audience had all been to school in Massachusetts.

A few years later, I went to an EFT Training with Dawson Church, Ph.D. He referred to people who were unable to benefit from EFT as being annoying and reversed. I was unable to benefit from the tapping and had let that fact be known. Others had told me that it was because I was too dissociated. Good Ol’ Dawson got bolder as the training wore on. “What is wrong with them,” he said, “they are unable to know when something is helpful; they should just let themselves be helped.”

In 2016, I was researching trainers from where I wanted to get my forty-hour EMDRIA training. I took a training course with Laurel Pernell Ph.D. She made fun of one of her subjects as not being smart. In fact, she failed to notice all the code-switching that indicated that he had clearly been born and bred as a mobster. As someone who experienced a year and a half of believing I was being harassed by the mob, I was outraged that she depicted him as being non-intelligent. She clearly had no kind of understanding of the lifestyle he lived or what it’s like to survive in those circles. 

A few years ago, I took an online PESI training course with Frank Anderson MD., and he made fun of people who heard voices. Now there may be some context to his comments that I am not capturing here. But by the time I had heard this it was just another microaggression put out by just another elite trainer.

Thus, in training I found elite trainers to exclude people who do not fit their “trauma” culture. This process of othering is passed down through the institutions into the mental health workers. It is passed on to the most vulnerable who must battle with it in their minds. I have found the best way to deal with it publicly is to be humble and submit to those in power even when it isn’t warranted. What becomes most important is to not internalize their sense of superiority so that it affects your own sense of self.

 I Have Survived:

So now that it’s been twenty-five years since I have been hospitalized in a state hospital, I work part-time at the hospital and part-time in private practice. At work in the hospital, I use my tenure and popularity among the clients to challenge the suppression and control of the clients and do my best to promote practices that support healing and recovery. I often feel like I am all alone in my views as I offer the sole dissenting perspective. I try to stay positive and amicable toward my coworkers even when I don’t like their views. 

I have had some coworkers I have connected with over the years particularly when I have functioned in the role of a supervisor. At times I have been able to demonstrate how my dissenting views actually do coincide with the values and ethics of the profession. It’s true that working in the psychiatric system, I must have a sense of willingness to compromise; however, I do my best to honor my sense of recovery first and foremost. It is still easy for me to feel othered in training and via associating with other professionals in networking circumstances. But I am glad to have survived what I have survived even if I haven’t healed my relationships with coworkers or changed my views about psychiatry being about control and suppression.

The post Reflections on My Mistrust for Other Mental Health Workers appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

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".

It will be my first EMDR training with a master trainer. I receive a message on my Facebook Messenger account. Someone I friended from Los Gatos California asks if I want to be rich and famous? I can join the illuminati, there are twenty available slots. Do I want to apply?

I have heard many people denounce the illuminati. I mostly know about the organization from a Tupac lyric. Still, it takes me a minute to figure that the post is probably a hoax. I get my ass off the commode and prepare to depart.

If I can trust this EMDR trainer, I may choose to pay to join her network and attend her trainings. I have found the other two famous experts I have taken workshops from to personally wound me.

I have already tried EMDR with my therapist. I am in therapy because of my history of bad experiences with therapists and my inability to get along with my head-shrinking colleagues. One time my therapist got frustrated with me and said he thought I wasn’t a good candidate for EMDR, but I hadn’t allowed him to give up on me.

Taking time for the sake of learning is a challenge at this time. At work we are switching to computerized records. It is not clear if we are going to survive this transition. Our unit has been targeted by administrators who call our service a dinosaur.

***

On my way across San Francisco traffic I listen to a podcast I’ve agreed to appear on in a few days. This podcast is: Baltimore is Talking Live; with hosts Reverend Dr. Q and Aaron Green. I am a little old school. Podcasts are generally not a part of my world unless I am going to appear on one.

In this era, reality is NPR and MSNBC verses Fox News. The impeachment inquiry is on the table and Dr. Q bounces from the bullets in his neighborhood to slavery to the hypocrisy of the left.

I think about the propaganda of each side so often I have a tendency to tune out; but I kind of like Dr. Q.

I work primarily for people who live in board and care homes amid the buzz of bullets in the inner-city. I feel their stories of oppression are not even part of the debate.

If I believed the text books I’d read in college, I would not believe the things they tell me about oppression in the inner city. It seems like books and education the fact program participants can’t write notes on themselves as a justification to take money that should be going to them.

Alas, I don’t trust books written by psychotherapists all that well.

On the podcast, the guest is an author about porn addiction who seems to talk like the hosts weren’t there. His own porn addiction put him in jail for a year and he clearly was far more down to earth than he would have been otherwise. I am impressed that he speaks from a place of lived experienced.

For my clients with porn addiction, the short discussion really helps.

***

I race through the last lanes of traffic and break a few laws. I follow google and park in a lot under the Hilton and get to the bathroom before the conference starts.

As introductory comments are being made a woman who is my age slips into the seat next to me. She whispers at me some introductions and asks if I had read the book that the training is based on. I lift my hand to flash my wedding ring and tell her no just a bit bluntly.

I think back the dating years and think about how blatantly rude I had been. Others might think it was as if someone had lobbed a big fat softball at me and I whiffed horribly. I make some other friendly comments to compensate.

At the first break, I am feeling pretty good about the training.

The woman next to me explains her behavior by exclaiming she’s got poison oak. This genuinely interests me and I inquire and learn that she’s been in Ventana Wilderness which I know well.

I met my wife on an event like that and recall how hard it is being single.

I am quick in and out of the restroom because there are almost no males in the conference. Scanning the room of hundreds, one might see maybe three or four.

As if he read my mind, a man walks up and starts a conversation. He looks very dapper wearing an earthy necklace with a stone in it. He works in a group practice in Palo Alto primarily with adolescents. Clearly ten year older that me, he approaches me like he is interviewing me for a position and wants to know what I’ve read about my specialty, psychosis.

I explain that I am an award-winning author who writes about my experience running professional groups for psychosis. I am not afraid to tell him I have not read many authors who write about my specialty.

He suggests John Weir Perry. Of course, I recognize the name. He was mentor to a psychotherapist I know. I have heard this psychotherapist call me out my name with a bitter voice. Meanwhile, other cohorts he would call, dear.

I acknowledge that I have heard of this deceased writer who was in favor of medication free clinics in the seventies. I mention Soteria House, I-Ward, and Diabasis. The man correctly acknowledges that Perry started Diabasis . It figures, Diabasis was clearly the expensive version of the three! I am less motivated to read the academic ghoul now.

The man, really suggests that I read Perry. “He really did some deep work, and it is very assessible.”

***

The illuminating woman with poison oak invites me to lunch. As if she knows it will interest me, she talks about living in Nicaragua and how most Americans don’t even understand how lucky they are.

She agrees with me when I talk about the facility I work at and the disparities in mental health treatment verses physical health. She says in the nonprofit she works at the quality of facility is an afterthought.

My attention lapses. I remember the trainer’s rehearsed voice, “and then, you start bilateral stimulation and let the person process . . .”

I think about the urinal I am most used to using. I think about the leak that has colored the underneath floor on its way to the drain. Seven years ago, I put in a work order to fix the urinal and years later the drip did get fixed. Still the glistening yellow stain remains. Stradling the stain daily, my eyes are likely to notice the psychotropic shit smears on the textured wall. Psychotropic shit is particularly rich in odor! I think of the soot on the screen outside the bubbled window. The soot built up the years they demolished the old wing next to us the clang and buzz sounding above our voices in the group rooms.

And when I am ready, I submerge from my trance. I figure maybe three seconds have lapsed.

Somehow, I doubt the we are talking about the same level of neglect!

I continue listening to the poison oak woman who has talked about her South Bay family in a scenic suburb. Sure enough, they were personal friends with the trainer. She intends to say “Hi” to the trainer from her sister.

My first supervisor comes from the same town and it conjures up images.

“You know mental health is a very small community,” said that old supervisor the last time I saw her, “If you do something to piss someone off, word definitely gets around.”

I think about how I believe I have been black balled from the county panel that would enable me to open a practice.

***

In the next hour I listen to the trainer’s current concern about the rise of homelessness that is overwhelming the Bay Area. I think about the Great Depression and the presence of Hoover towns often when I see the sprawling encampments.

She launches a story about a kid from Danville who ran away and lived on the streets. Years later a newspaper found the hardened street person and reconnected them to their wealthy brother and got him therapy. He was doing well and getting treatment for his trauma, but then ran away again and overdosed in an encampment. It’s a story that sounds like the movie, Paris Texas.

The trainer says, “I think when people live on the streets, they get a sense of community in the encampments. I mean why else would someone return and choose to live there?”

As the whole room bobs its head, I fume.

I think of the old flick Paris Texas and I know there can be a lot of reasons people choose to run away. Why can’t a trauma specialist think of other reasons? When I saw Paris Texas, I remember the clear sense of an affair that happened between the homeless man and the brother’s wife who hadn’t wanted him to return home. It was a reality one had to sense. My whole life I have wondered how it is that other people don’t all run to join the streets!

One can feel very guilty for coming back from leading a life outdoors and feel rageful! And there can be so many millions of reasons to run! Some of us are born to run, baby!

At lunch I get a Messenger spot on my phone. The person who invited me to join the illuminati has actually contacted me again and is demanding a response. This time the face on the little circle is one that I recognize. I put the phone down before I am sure of this.

I remember collaborating with the face on the little circle picture. She’d sent me a flyer with the silhouette of a cannabis leaf to announce our mutual event at the hospital.

I recall how I played dumb and asked a patient who was once affiliated with a famous drug dealer before legalization. Publicly he says his family business is in “manure” so some of us may not understand. He comes to program so he has a public excuse not to behave violently and works to avoid smoking.

When I’d taken the time to assess his feelings about the cannabis symbol, he’d sighed and confirmed it was a leaf. I think he appreciated my effort to console him. We’ve always liked shooting the shit with each other.

I think that as a psychotherapist on a psychiatric unit, I am already a member of too many secret treatment team societies.

I pick up the phone and respond: “No, thank you for asking.”

I am not going to sell my soul any more than I already have.

***

I bump into a colleague who used to work at the unit I work in and we decide to lunch.

She got caught in a cross-fire of bullets one evening outside the hospital on the way to her car. This caused her to ask for a transfer to the more suburban outpatient psychiatric unit.

She is an attractive married woman with a slender physique. She says she’s on a gluten-free diet and we discuss this a bit.

I want to tell her that she can’t con a con.

We had never been super close. I’d shied away from her because I’d sensed she was still a partier. But we’d had a few good experiences together.

She was a basketball star in college, comes from Texas, and likes Whole Foods. She has recently seen my presentation on psychosis and was nice about it.

I am surprised to learn that she comes from El Paso as she also is part Italian. She talks about how distressed she is about the mass shooting that happened in the WalMart. She has a private practice two days a week and that is what I want so I pick her brain a little. She talks about her history of receiving EMDR and what she’s gone through to become a specialist.

I think about how I felt hearing about homelessness and lie. I say how much I am enjoying the conference. She really supports me in my wish to open up a private practice for my niche.

“People at Fairmont don’t understand how well they have it. Things were really tough at Highland,” she says. “I have a friend in the county, I will follow up with him and see if I can find out if you are really on a blacklist for the county panel. I heard they are currently looking for providers”

***

The rest of the training is a review of the basic tenets of EMDR mixed with four videos that demonstrate them in action. I am pretty able to follow. Participants are asked to visit very dark places and use images and memory of personal resources they have developed in their life to now support them in imagining different outcomes.

The fist two videos are done with therapists who are in training. They are clearly very trusting and articulate. They really demonstrate how this treatment can transform lives. The discussion and review of the points of training are very helpful.

However, as we all know, people who are used to therapy have an easier time processing traumatic events and moving on with their lives.

When I worked with my therapist on resourcing, I realized that all the people I identified as resources had also seriously hurt and betrayed me. Outside my wife and my dogs, it was hard to identify sources of comfort. When I was finally able to think of the writer Charles Bukowski as a resource, I got somewhere. I love his writing and never felt bruised by him.

Indeed, when I will try EMDR post workshop, I will find that bilateral stimulation with the paddles to sound artists like Tupac and Bruce Springsteen help me significantly as well.

***

The rest of the day is a video on her effort to do EMDR on a difficult community person. He is a porn and meth addict who got busted for having some child pornography mixed in with his volumes of pornography.

He did a year in jail and got connected to a church and is now clean, but denies that he has much of a problem and expresses no remorse or emotions when you ask him.

“And,” says the trainer a little playfully, “You might notice that this man is not very intelligent.”

As the video starts the hulking man is wearing a Yankees cap. He is clearly not a hat wearer as the hat is unworn and does not come close to looking good on him. The hat reminds me of Omar from The Wire wearing a tie in the courtroom. His demeaner is like Kevin Spacy in Unusual Suspects.

I instantly think of the Yankees cap as a gang symbol. I know some local gang signs from Oakland, but this man appears to be of Italian Heritage and I think of the New York five families.

He comes across like he’s not going to trust this snobby goof and does deny all his feelings as promised. And who would? The good doctor’s demeaning opinion of the man comes across clear in my eyes.

Sure enough, the man is married with children to whom he had stopped paying attention because of his addiction. He admits that he used the porn to seduce porn stars who stayed late at the strip clubs to film after hours. There is no mention or concern for how he got money for the copious amount of meth he used. In high school, he regrets he was more of a bully than a student.

I rage at the trainer’s clear lack of understanding.

The man has the respect of authority of a soldier. In the conference, the expert doctor makes fun of him for having it. At the end he pretends to want to make her happy.

I have been trafficked by people like him. And now I work in a public sector job that is being choked by one of his buddies.

Once again, bovine heads bob. Now I am almost certain I do not want to learn EMDR from this person who speaks before me.

I have been too hurt by people who have failed to understand me in therapy!

That said, the man did get to the point where he could cry before her and access those pent-up gangster emotions.

Who knows what masterminded violence he was processing by taking that meth and porn! I think about drugs women, or guns, the commodities of the black-market America. I think of how smart and twisted the courts were to use the child pornography charge to force him away from gangsterism. He likely would have had to go protective custody in the pen with a sex offence.

I am grateful he is healing and living more in love, though. He’s got to live in mind-dumbing fear of retaliation through, no doubt.

***

On my way home at the end of the conference, I say goodbye to the male adolescent therapist. The illuminating poison oak woman has distanced herself since I stood her up at lunch. Oops!

I check my phone and clearly the option to join the illuminati has passed as the two messages have been erased off my messenger account.

My ex-coworker comes over to say goodbye and I lie again and say I really liked the conference. I really can’t say anything bad about our talk other than the fact that I lied.

I know that I have gotten a lot of learning from the conference. I am impressed with how EMDR enables a person to work through trauma without taking the therapist there with them. Like the last scenes of the TV series the Sopranos, I feel surrounded by shrinks who are sipping wine and being asses all around me.

I remain unmotivated to read therapy books or join therapy associations.

Alas, I am not internally moved past my stubbornness. I am not vying to become a fucking liar like the rest of them!

The post Modern Day Healers and Tupac’s Illuminati 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".