I believe that a powerful dialectic exists when participants study their similarities in psychoses focus groups. Converse to the great opportunities for growth that result when participants genuinely identify with each other, there are often important points of difference highlighted that likewise can lead to growth when nurtured properly.

I have observed that participants often become more aware of their diverse beliefs regarding the causation of their psychosis experiences. I also believe that the causation of psychosis experiences is a natural preoccupation for people who suffer. In fact, this preoccupation is so powerful, it warrants becoming part of the definition of psychosis in the model of treatment I have created.

Having led many long-term psychoses focus groups over the past ten years, one of the more powerful solutions I have developed involves helping sufferers learn diversity lessons about the causation of their (psychosis) or special message experiences.

I have learned to categorize the causation beliefs of sufferers as being: political, psychological, spiritual, scientific, or trauma based. In the thick of a body’s psychosis process, causation beliefs often rigidly stay in one or two of these styles. While there is often an ability to consider and ponder other beliefs, the tendency is to immediately create explanations according to a single style or two of causation beliefs. Further, there is often an immediate need to solve or comprehend what is happening that can feel addictive.

Increasing Flexibility of Causation Ideas:

What I believe happens particularly when it is finessed and highlighted by the leader is when sufferers tell stories about the experiences of their psychosis, they hear similar experiences interpreted with a different style of causation. In supporting their peers, they become forced to see how these rigid causation beliefs lead to errors.

If I could count the number individuals I’ve worked with who are in what I like to call message crisis (psychosis,) who try to reality check me when I tell my story; well, you might say I’d be a high scoring mathematician. Indeed, I have found training them to better understand my experiences often opens them up to be willing to share their story with me.

They say, “No, I don’t think you were really followed by the mafia, I think that is a delusion.”

Then, I review specific evidence that is convincing and some evidence (or special messages) that are less clear.

I have found that this helps people be more willing to reveal what is happening to them with me.

Also, what I primarily want to convey is that when participants can see messages (or psychosis) happening to other people, it leads them to be more aware of the role that their own causation beliefs have in their suffering. Often the causation beliefs of others are at least slightly different. When the message receiver notices that different causation beliefs lead to errors, it challenges them to be more flexible in how they interpret their own psychosis experiences, which I like to call special messages.

Indeed, it is clearly conceivable that every special message (psychosis experience,) has a different causation style. I believe that when every message can be interpreted with flexibility, the message receiver can return to accomplishing things that relate to social rehabilitation.

Five Styles of Causation Beliefs:

Below I have listed the five causation styles along with common explanations that have been expressed in groups I have lead over the years. Some are perhaps noticeable as common psychological theories, others as less conventional ideas that might be considered delusional.

I believe that all causation beliefs are valid, important, and perhaps operant at different times in a person’s story. I like to argue that people may be predominantly correct about the causation of their message experiences. This validates participants in a way that is needed to heal from the potential trauma they have been through. However, I argue that any given message receiver may need to incorporate other explanations to survive and thrive in the modern world.

Psychological

• Messages are your inner thoughts or unconscious beliefs. They are just in your head.  We broadcast our unconscious beliefs in ways that cause others to interact with us in ways that make our unconscious beliefs realities.

• Messages are a way of processing things that we are not willing to deal with.

• Messages are a return to a regressed period of attachment in which the baby has destructive relationships with the boobs.

Political

• Messages come from people following you around and tormenting you to control or seek revenge on you. These followers could be a gang, police, CIA, government, corporations, masons, illuminati, aliens, or other secret societies.

• Messages are real evidence that the government is socially controlling and preventing the mainstream from knowing. They have their ways of taking snitches and putting them in ditches.

Traumatic

• Messages are nothing but figments of past perpetrators or abusers.

• Messages come from the social thoughts or judgments of others, the social mainstream, or the collective unconscious of others (Stigmas) that are being used to decrease your social standing

Spiritual

• Messages come from god, fairies, aliens, ghosts or what we in the west call supernatural experiences.

• Messages are processes that may help or hurt you in evolving or adapting to the dilemmas of a modern environment.

• Messages are there to test your ability to be good and evil and are there to lead you to lead others.

Scientific

• Genetic differences or scientific processes that develop because of nuero-diversity. Eugenics suggest that these genes aren’t fit for survival and justify a complex system of abuse and social control.

• Messages happen when neuro-transmitters get changed through things like environmental stress patterns that fall into genetically derived conditions.

• Messages happen when spiritual genes get persecuted in our society

My Story as A Case Study:

Because I don’t make it a habit using case histories that out other message receivers, I will review my own story to demonstrate how all five causation styles may be necessary to employ to help a message receiver survive in the modern world.

I would agree with the reader who says this is convenient and limited as a result.

However, in my defense, I have used insights from other message receivers’ causation beliefs to be able to understand my journey in the following manner. Indeed, for years, I could not even tell these stories. I needed to attain economic stability and sit in groups with diverse individuals to be able to make sense of what happened to me.

I would also argue that being able to relate and recreate your own experiences is one of the benefits of listening and relating to other message receivers. Therefore, I host groups and encourage those who are stuck in a single style or two to come out and listen to help diversify their views.

Preoccupation with Political Abuse:

My own message experiences involved descent into political abuse that could have rendered me homeless and jobless if I had given up. Persistent throughout the two-years of psychosis I endured, I believed I was being harassed by the government and the mafia.

I was working in a section 8 housing authority complex amid significant drug use and trafficking and had leaked information to the press to try to protect the vulnerable. The result was that the company that contracted with my company, a powerful authority with connections to the President targeted the people I wanted to protect for eviction. Then, the housing authority offered to give me a large amount of free concert tickets.

Of course, I used the concert tickets to advertise the music festival throughout the project and take out twenty-four of the vulnerable clients who would come out to the expensive mainstream event. I felt it was a good use of the bribe.

After that stunt, I continued to be very popular among many of the residents. I persisted in trying to crack the mystery of the local drug war that just didn’t make sense. I learned more and more details, until I started to get scared of the persistent threats. I started to get a strong sense of connection, like people were putting on skits around me to either help or foil me.

Among other things, I called a friend with a nefarious history. He heard what I had to say and made a powerful threat. Then, I ran away. Then, I withdrew all my money from my bank account and headed for the Canadian border. Maybe my friend was only using me to help me move drugs through the project. Suddenly, it all made sense.

As I neared the border of Canada I was convinced I was being followed. I stopped at a gas station to fuel and I got accosted by two policemen. One bruised my wrists and drove me eighty miles from my car.

At the hospital I lied to the psychiatrist and was given the opportunity to run.

I surrendered a few days later, from a ditch, on a mountain pass, at midnight.

In the State Hospital there was a clearly defined mafia daughter and a lot of people wanting to help her run away. She showed all patients documents of how she had taken a shot at her father. I suspected these were phony and wasn’t at all attracted to her.

However, she was most interested in me despite my unpopular mannerisms. Indeed, she seemed to salivate after me trying to extract information about my sneaky escapades. I received an offer to join an outlaw gang for protection against her. A lot happened in three months.

Discharged to the streets, I took a greyhound and got a job in Fresno. But when I ran out of medication, I was released from the job when I refused to take over the supervisor’s job and acted funny. Then, I couldn’t find any work for three months. I tried everywhere, from Walmart to county social work positions. Finally, I got a job at a Foster Care Agency.

This forced my family to get involved. I thought they were an Irish mob family who had hidden their illegal activities from me.

A black sheep aunt who lived in the bay area was able to offer me a less risky job at an Italian Delicatessen if I moved up into Antioch, California.

Causation Beliefs toward Spiritual Causation:

My interpretation of all events that happened to me at the Italian Deli led me to the belief that I was human traffic to my mob bosses. My political perspective did not change.

Unable to afford a car I biked twenty miles a day to the train station and back and took the train an hour to reach my job, which was in a wealthy suburb. Every train ride I took, I could spot a rider who was clearly following me.

One day it was a resident from the job I had at the Seattle Housing Project. He was dressed in a jean jacket that had a CIA Officer sign attached to it’s pocket and handcuffs attached to the belt-loops of his jeans. I had heard he’d been arrested before for impersonating a CIA officer when I was in Seattle.  He had also cackled at me like a chicken and told me he had killed people before.

I persisted this way for ten months. I tried to find any work I could find outside the deli where I felt harassed endlessly.

Finally, I got a call back from an interview I had in the tenderloin. The job would lengthen my commute by an hour; but paid a good deal better.

In the group interview, I noticed that several of the workers were religiously preoccupied. They reminded me of the State hospital patients I had been locked up with.

Suddenly, in the middle of an interview that was going swimmingly well, a Latina woman spoke out in a shrill voice, “Oh, my god, the energy in the room is intense. It reminds me of the movie Stigmata.”

The room was accepting and rolled with this outburst with inquisitive questions.

I went home and rented the movie and suddenly it occurred to me, it was possible I wasn’t the son of a famous Irish Mafia family, maybe I was the next Jesus Christ, himself . . .

Incorporating Scientific Causation:

I was called back for a third interview, but when I asked to change my day to accommodate the interview, my boss told me he’d have to fire me if he did. This was the way I was used to being treated there. They were very controlling.

“You’re allowed to work with us, but you just can’t work anywhere else,” I was told by my boss.

Even worse, I was being sexually harassed. A co-worker told me my reputation was smeared, by a female supervisor I jaded. She started a rumor about me that I was a pedophile. This was a particularly intense fear of mine.

However, now when I went to church, the priest seemed honored to have me in the congregation and to woo me as if he knew something I didn’t.  I came across a Cadillac with a Plasticine frog pinned to a cross and I figured that my crucifixion was eminent.

Then, I got hired by a wacky social worker at a therapy internship. His name was Jack and he said and sounded like he came from South Boston. “We’ve got to get you out of that Italian Deli before they cut those fingers off,” he said.

My hands were carefully bandaged to conceal the large warts that had taken over my hands ever since the uncleanly showers of C-Ward at Montana State Hospital.

“Hey, I get something from you,” he said, “I’ll bet you’ve been in some real impoverished neighborhoods back east.

Even though Jack was right about me, I was uneasy with his intuition.

“Do you trust me,” he asked.

The first day of the internship, I was utterly overwhelmed because everything Jack said seemed to come from private phone conversations I had had with my family.  His face often turned red. “Hey, I know what they need to do with all those boys on the corners: just turn on cold showers and take the heat away from them.  Then, they’ll be just fine.”

Later that afternoon I had another interview at a job I really wanted that bombed.  The interviewer had been distressed by my level of anxiety and red face.

That night I didn’t sleep a wink. Was I ever going to avoid this eminent crucifixion? I kept blowing my professional opportunities. I had medical coverage. I decided to see a psychiatrist.

Incorporating Trauma Causation:

My boss at the delicatessen seemed to be much more accepting of me once I was medicated. He started to tell me, “good job!” when I continued to complete the tasks with care and detail.

Now I felt traumatized the whole time I was politically exploited. But I never thought the endemic bullying I experienced everywhere except amid the vulnerable population was my fault. But now that I was medicated and started trying to make friends with my co-workers at the delicatessen I realized that they weren’t all bullying me in an organized fashion. There were ways I could appeal to injustice. Indeed, some of the less dominant kids really looked up to me. A few other females had true crushes on me. They seemed to have fantasies of rescuing me. One even said, I had a beautiful mind.

It started to occur to me that I might not be a mafia kid but more of a bullied Aspergian child.

After all I already carried a diagnosis of ADD and Dyslexia, why not throw another neurodevelopmental difference in there. At least then I didn’t have to hate all the pot smoking population for participating in making me a political prisoner. I was very socially awkward and did tend to amuse people.

And, finally, I got the job outside the Deli, but agreed to stay on one day a week so that I could maintain the income necessary for my independence. Even though I had learned to shine them on, I did not like the way they used my economic need to control me. Indeed, being a piece of human traffic had helped me build personal skills.

And Finally, Incorporating Psychological Explanations:

It is hard for me to immediately define how I have come to consider that psychological processes may have been involved in my message experiences.

Perhaps, this is because the bay area therapist I saw believed that psychodynamic processes were happening between us. From my perspective, she was unable to admit that her fees were financially exploiting me. The therapy was imposed on me by my parents. I believed they would in fact hold me financially accountable for the very unhelpful relationship.

Indeed, I often felt that if people listened instead of presuming I was wrong about everything I experienced—if they explored the ways I was correct about what I was saying, that they could have really gotten my attention and helped me.

For example, genetic testing has since revealed that my predominantly old money family really was predominantly Irish. For example, my mother who admired her father’s fame as the chair of the Harvard Psychology Department, may have in fact named me Timothy, after her father’s friend, Timothy Leary. (O’Leary, in my Irish mind.) Indeed, my Harvard grandfather really did work for the CIA and get rich from remarkably wise stock trading.

For example, it was true that my father who everyone assumed I was wrong about really had retired from his career at age forty-five, really did live primarily off-the-grid, via stocks and landholdings. It was true that I really didn’t understand how he did this because finances were always hushed. Of course, my nefarious friend, an ununionized longshoreman, really did have a nefarious past with ties to the Philadelphia PD.

For example, the drug war really does ensnare and incarcerate a disproportionate number of mentally ill individuals like myself leaving wealthy cartels to pay off the politicians. And the Italian Deli that I worked at really did have mafia ties. I was able to confirm this when a street-wise person inadvertently dropped a name I recognized from my deli days.

Once I learned that I really was molested as a child just as I suspected; once I finally, in my first week employed away from the Deli, heard my name called in a harsh, metallic voice; once I developed the strength to call myself a schizophrenic and validate myself, I could start to see psychological causation beliefs. I will explore this process more in my next article as it is a component of my system of treatment.

Diversifying Causation Beliefs:

Often, I find that message receivers in psychoses focus groups learn a lot from kicking around their ideas and experiences, much as I have just done. I believe that when we learn to support each other by proposing alternate meanings that are based on alternative causation beliefs, we empower ourselves to navigate injustice and oppression in the modern world.

Many message receivers aspire to become healers. In a traditional sense, it is our shamanic calling. As we learn to navigate message experience with rhythm and flow, groups are a great place to practice telling healing stories to message receivers who are still stuck and in crisis.

Additionally, in groups we can give each other credit and acknowledgement for diversifying causation beliefs. Not only can this be a great way to nurture and build relationships, it can reinforce movement to social rehabilitation. Too often, we stay stuck because our efforts to change our causation beliefs fail to arouse interest in those who are paid to support us. Without mentors who can help us by modeling and articulating these insights, how are we to know we are on the right track? Perhaps, this is part of the reason so few of us survive to socially rehabilitate.

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This excerpt is going to operate with the contention that there are five causes of “psychosis”: political, psychological, scientific, trauma, and spiritual. In the chapter I have written, I extensively review differing types of causal arguments that can arise within each causation style. Clearly in the chapter, there is some cross over as science mixes with trauma and politics etcetera. In the chapter, I post ideas that I clearly disagree with and that are not for me. I do so because I have nine years of experience listening to the causal arguments of other people and I respect that other causal arguments may be true for other people. Indeed help comes in different forms for different people. In the chapter, the intention is that as the reader reads through these causation examples, they may relate to some new causal explanation they haven’t thought of. I believe that increasing the number of causal arguments that you have gives you more power to be resilient and flexible when you face threatening or distressing messages as you go through life.

But here, in the excerpt below, I am just going to share three political causation ideas I have heard over the years. This is the theory style that I was most stuck on when I was in crisis. Though thinking this way was toxic for me at the time, in recovery I can reflect on ways that some of my special messages were in fact political in nature. I personally was able to dig myself out of crisis when I shifted to the spiritual causation theory style, a style that causes some to get stuck and marginalized. In the chapter, I legitimize these two causation theories in addition to thoroughly exploring the other legitimate theory styles, psychological, trauma, and scientific.

Detailed Political Causation Examples:

Messages are caused by secret societies who may interact with or utilize governmental technology in order to silence and marginalize the message receiver in terms of their ability to affect politics.

Over the years I have worked with message receivers, I have met many individuals who fit a profile that I myself am familiar with. While this may not fit the mainstream conceptualization of mental illness, there are many individuals who function or have not been able to overcome being political prisoners within the system. Indeed, the narrative that the mental health system functions as a means of social control that silences whistle-blowers who act brazen in standing up to power may sound foreign. This not only applies to squares, but also substance abusers who are attempting to get out of a gang, or professional who are trying to escape an abusive work group (like Edward Snowden.) Hence, special messages mirrors real social processes even a collective unconscious of a society that is poorly understood by those insulated by the mainstream.

It may seem irrational that in the land of the free that malicious power might be so abused. Indeed if an observer were to look at an elder in a psychiatric ward who will not take care of himself, objecting to the treatment and the oppression at the board and care by calling the FBI and talking in code to them, paranoia may seem operant. However, as someone who has gotten to know some of those peoples’ stories, and as a person who has one to tell myself, I would like to argue that protesting against the wrong people can result in this scenario, for real.

First, consider psychiatrist David Rosenhan’s experiment as depicted by Adam Curtis in, “The Trap Part 1.” This was a social experiment conducted in the late seventies in which eight subjects without mental health conditions presented at west coast American hospitals. Each of the eight participating subjects was instructed to tell one lie, that they heard an innocuous voice saying “thud” in their ears. Every subject in the experiment had endured horrifying and traumatic experiences and came out with severe diagnoses: seven with paranoid schizophrenia; and one with bipolar. Subjects found they had to lie to get out of the institutions. When the results of this study were published one of the offending institutions asked for a replay. Rosenhan then told that one institution he was going to send an undisclosed number of individuals back into the institution, but then sent no one. The institution then released forty-one individuals who they identified as subject of the experiment only to learn that Rosenhan had tricked them.

Consider that subjection to such a system of punishment is a great was to get to political dissidents when prison isn’t as much of an option due to legal complications. Being emotionally tortured in incarcerated institutions cause individuals to lie in order to get themselves free. It then is easy apply counterintelligence to keep someone marginalized.

I, for example, once admitted during my incarceration that I used heroin and crack, but not cannabis. I was trying to see if I could get staff and peers to stop harassing me. Being that I thought everyone knew I was incarcerated because my parents were mafia, I truly believed the admission might help me get out of the institution.

While I still have a number of unanswered questions: a year later, the apartment that I managed to set up while I worked twelve hour days at minimum wage was ransacked on one occasion as though there was a police search. A man at the library I kept on running into on multiple occasions during those days I was looking for a better job, told me he worked for the CIA, for the multinational corporations. This man did demonstrate to me that he had good hacking skills. He also supported me by suggesting I get better computer skills because employers would want me to have them.

Before my incarceration I got to the point where I was openly blowing the whistle on a public housing authority that served vulnerable individuals with number of social issues including substance abuse, prostitution, and drug trafficking. From my perspective, I was the only member on the team who was not complicit with the drug dealing and crime in the building. That made me a very likely target to catch a case. And that’s what happened. I was easy to isolate and because I had poor social support.

Indeed, there are many individuals who live in such circumstances without jobs who are surrounded by criminal and law enforcement secret societies who are against illegal crime and thought to be square. There are likewise angry substance abusers who are willing to snitch once they get clean. Broadening the scenario, there are many institutions that have secret societies built into them: educational, mental health, work sites. Those who are not complicit with the rules or are overly complicit are likely to get targeted. Universally square people are more likely to get a crime pinned on them or get targeted, discredited, slandered or bullied into gang membership. There is a lot of secondary gain that society gets by discrediting and alienating individuals who are complaining about broken laws. For those individuals who are not used to the streets, consider what happens in work place politics. Backstabbers and those who make waves, even in an accountable environment, are more likely to get cut. If however, they are organized, motivated, and hard to catch, those people may get moved up into management. Generally people have to accept that not all rules are going to be followed one hundred percent of the time. But break too many and there might be problems as well.

Like the subjects that were in the Rosenhan experiment many protesters and other contrarian types catch a mental health case and receive treatments that make them vulnerable for more punishment and so they lose their power to testify.

While not all messages that are received are likely to be caused by instruments of social control, it is very possible that secret societies and various branches of the government do become involved with some persons of interest. Quantico does have a behavior sciences division. With the Patriot Act medical records may be accessed by law enforcement during relevant or irrelevant investigations. This kind of reality does not always apply but indeed may apply in more cases than the mainstream realizes. In California, 5150s may well show up in a police records. Indeed, some people get started out in this manner and become increasingly oppressed as time goes on, developing more messages about social control than are really there. However, mix up social control messages with messages that come from other causal factors, like stigma, and a person who has a beef with law enforcement or at least with some real secret societies, like the mafia, can be tormented for years.

Messages come from family systems in which economic survival and good social standing, sometimes reinforce scapegoating requiring that everyone be open to change.

During the era of family systems, there was a lot of work done on how to work with families to prevent scapegoating, which is in my mind a form of political abuse. Early preoccupation with the double-bind considered the suffering of message receivers who get put into situations in which they can’t act in any manner without facing negative abuse from the family. In fact, this predicament of the message receiver was expanded to include other conditions. While many theories sprung up, in particular, Murray Bowen’s Family Systems Theory was built particularly from working with Midwestern individuals who carried a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Bowen, using insight and rational arguments, and long term consultation was focused on the ability of an individual to differentiate from their family of origin. He taught therapists to track issues of differentiation through the generations. Bowen advocated for therapists to triangulate themselves into the system in a protective manner addressing conflict and problems to help increase the level of differentiation and decrease the tendency to scapegoat the identified patient. In general, this and other family systems theories postulated that family homeostasis requires that successful family members to dominate and bully the scapegoat who develops mental problems as a result to keep the rest of the family functioning. Thus, family dynamics become toxic to the message receiver. It is arguable that split off negative sides of the family’s trauma get attributed to the message receiver and that this may continue to affect a message receiver whether or not they maintain contact with their family.

At times, I have found myself contemplating these kinds of issues from a slightly different angle. Could it be that that some people don’t have the attributes that a family that is particularly insulated by their social role, demands. In other words, the family has particular attributes they promote to maintain themselves economically and socially. Then, those who don’t fit the family mold may get persecuted. For example, I grew up in a private school academic family in which both parents were teachers and I turned out different partly because I was a whistleblower and because I had learning disabilities and poor social skills. Another person from a different background may require other attributes in order to be financially sustaining. Consider insulated families of people I’ve worked with who come from a different backgrounds. Let’s say I like them had grown up in a military family or a mechanics family, or a family that sustained itself through sex work, or in a motorcycle gang. Perhaps those modes of work weren’t a good fit. Perhaps some of my clients found themselves in a similar situation that I found myself in; particularly if they, like me, didn’t have good social skills to recreate themselves in a new way. Perhaps in route to a different type of job, ex-communication happened leaving them unable to adapt to a different role. Is it possible then they would fail to differentiate or develop needed skills likewise prompting a flight into messages. Can it be as easy as just being born a little bit different and facing excommunication without having a mentor? Could the politics of that kind of situation be enough stress and pressure to cause a flight to messages in some situations? Clearly in many situations there might be love and flexibility to help a person overcome these circumstances, but not always. It may well depend on how encapsulated the family is in their social world. As such politics of culture might contribute to vulnerability.

.

Messages happen to unprotected people when they are under distress from use of street drugs and connection to black market realities.

I believe that it warrants mentioning that the slew of individuals who get messages due to the use of street drugs may fit in to political causation, in addition to the other causation theories, (psychological, trauma, spiritual and scientific.) I believe it warrants our attention if there are ten psychotic disorders in the DSM that cause message crisis. Consider that people who lose their social protections may become treated like dissidents if they aren’t in the know, or blessed with social support. From meth to molly to smack to bath salts to tryptamine —even conventional use of alcohol, cannabis, and crack (which is increasingly mixed with meth)—drugs may help induce message experiences for many individuals. Sure it’s just as possible that some brains under the stress and strain of the abuse that drugs are supposed to cause fall into messages (trauma causation.)  It’s also clearly arguable that that chemical processes trigger message experiences (scientific causation.) Indeed it’s even arguable that street drugs as causation crosses the psychological and spiritual domains as followers of Timothy Leary would point out. But I am just mentioning this here in the event that unsupported individuals become political dissidents when they aren’t protected by gangs or money or livelihood. I do this here because this is my favorite domain. Maybe the government dosed me repeatedly with tryptamine mickies just because I was named after Timothy Leary, just as I thought.

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