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".

We all know that ending a secreted abuse and getting public support is an important element of healing. Indeed, it is nice when society comes to the rescue as they did to victims when the world trade towers fell. When victims sense they are supported there is more opportunity for resilience, heroism, and healing.

But alas, many of the people I work with on an Outpatient Psychiatric Unit do not enjoy such support. Many lead lives of poverty and neglect due to what is presumed to be the medical illness of the mind. Many have done stints standing on the corner with a cardboard sign and are used to be seen in a negative light. Imagine the constant digs or exclusionary put-downs they may receive from their community of origin. Many choose to withdraw from the world. It is as if society has managed their crisis by tying them down to their beds like African-American, male Katrina-victims. Progress toward healing is slow.

As a worker in the system, I have come to feel that many of our clients get dehumanized when we focus on behavioural control rather than freedom from abuse. Focusing on behaviour can point out what is wrong with the person and make it unsafe to talk about the ways they have been hurt. I feel weeding through hurts helps a person gain acceptance and healing.

Perhaps this focus on behaviour happens because of the way our institutions define human suffering as being part of a medical mental illness. Thinking you have an illness may feel good at first but often make problems worse down the line. Some who suffer may feel, they have been born with a diseased mind all along. They may feel this way, for example, with a label of schizophrenia because many people with a disease model mentality may treat them that way.

I believe that when trauma is hard to detect or complex, the mental health system assigns blame inside the scientific sanctity of the individual. This can result in things like multiple diagnostic labels, use of forced medication as a punishment, restraints, solitary confinement, psychiatric incarceration, and, eventually, permanent warehousing.

As a psychotherapist, I have found that understanding these problems as signs of micro abuse that accelerate with stigma and exclusion to be vital to being able to connect with participants in our program.

Understanding the Role of Sexual Trauma in my own Life:

Like many psychotherapists, my first client has been myself. I admittedly have lived experience with a long list of psychiatric labels including recurrent depression, anorexia, bulimia, ADD, dyslexia, schizophrenia, and now that I have recovered, schizoaffective disorder.

I have spent decades in therapy and received care that emphasized the illness narrative. I have taken pharmacies of detrimental pills even though I have come to a place where I believe I get some help from small doses. I have even been referred to as permanent warehousing in a state hospital in Montana.

I am writing to demystify the role that complex trauma has beneath the surface for so many of our most defamed, dehumanized, and marginalized people.

How Controlling Behavior May Lead to Re-traumatization Instead of Help:

It is true I have had an ongoing suspicion that I was sexually abused. Particularly when locked up for extended periods of time for an eating disorder, and most recently for schizophrenia, my suspicion that my suffering had sexual abuse behind it escalated. I went through a phase of clothing myself while bathing post-latency that was always hard to understand. My sense of shame associated with my body was suggestive to me.

Yet, I once had a female therapist confront me about secreted accusations I had made against my mother on an inpatient unit. At the time I was confronted, I could not remember the real incidents of sexual abuse that I experienced. I just stopped confiding in the therapist in any meaningful way. This really added to my sense of shame. It’s true I recovered, but I lead a limited life of work and torment.

Without knowing that I once was abused, it becomes that much harder to discern triggered re-traumatization, from abuse. People who don’t realize that their suffering is due to trauma are often unable to do this. They may repeatedly feel abused a gazillion times and it becomes hard to see how the community might come to the rescue. Instead, we get cast as not taking responsibility for our own problems that are generated by our defective genes.

The Importance of Vigilantly Assessing for Disassociation:

I have always been aware that I disassociate. I think it is a good idea for therapists and mental health workers to assess for disassociation. It is a simple question but may need to be teased out a bit to accurately assess for it.

Though I had been in therapy my whole life, I only had one therapist take note and get suspicious about the disassociation I described. What I have come to realize by listening to others is that if a person has experiences of disassociation, there is the possibility of incidents of distressing events that they may have forgotten.

An example of a disassociation I experienced was when I was alone scouting a trail. I stepped within six inches of a rattlesnake, a childhood obsession of mine. The rattle made me run even though I knew better. Then I became aware that I lost track of time. Finally, one of my peers on the Outward-Bound course came and found me staring off into space and I grounded myself.

Another time, my best high school friend made a pass at me after communicating in metaphoric manners that were suggestive that he might have been tripping on acid. I came to at several points to find myself hiding in the house. At one point I heard him talking to my mother when she returned to the house. He was talking about gay marriage and, somehow, I had gotten down into the basement again.

And, finally, after being teargassed at the WTO Protest in 1999, and pepper-sprayed directly in the eye, I took a walk and lost track of where I was and what I was doing. Suddenly, I realized I walked past my destination and had been out.

I am now at the point of arguing that these seemingly inconsequential incidents are faint traces that there is a need to explore more. I emphasize that I advocate doing this to help understand oneself instead of vilifying others. For example, my best friend does not deserve to be vilified, and yet the disassociation was real. Though disassociation experience may not seem significant to the daily suffering that gets experienced, I think it is an important indicator of trauma that may accelerate over time if it goes unaddressed.

How I Broke through the Wall:

I took it upon myself to write about starting to disassociate in front of my nephew when he was a bathing cherub in a tub in front of me. I did not fully disassociate and I considered the experience a flashback. I was going outside my body but didn’t leave all the way. This had been happening to me on a few occasions when I was working seven days a week trying to get back on my feet financially after my post-state-hospital period of homelessness.

As I was editing the scene suddenly I got a vague flash of being molested in a bathtub. The girl, my best friend’s sister, was only one year older. I would later remember that she ordered me to take my clothes of and get in the tub with her while our parents were out walking on the railroad grade.

I still don’t remember my response. There is a story that I ate a mothball thinking it was a marshmallow necessitating poison control to be contacted. I was a little old to make such a silly mistake. It’s true I could be wrong, but I connect that action to my response to the tub incident. I do believe that that was the summer I started bathing in my trunks.

When I took this story to my mother, I got an additional answer. “No, you are thinking of the time we caught the babysitter touching you,” she said.

While I continue to have no memory of this incident I remember several occasions when I was around this babysitter later in life. Before I hadn’t been able to understand my piercing feelings, behaviour and memory of those occasions.

“Thank you for telling me,” I stated to my Mom.

“I probably shouldn’t have told you,” she said, “Now you are going to think you have been abused a gazillion times!”

When Hypervigilance and Numbing Seem Like They Are Normal:

Just like the bath with my step-sister might not have been distressing to many untraumatized young boys, there is the possibility that memories of intense hypervigilance may not always be indications of sex abuse. Not all intense memories I have led to recovered memories.

Before I broke through the wall disassociation I could never understand why I got such strong intuition and suspicions. I didn’t realize that I was doing this for a good reason. I often presumed there was something wrong with me. I had to learn to numb out to prevent embarrassing myself worse socially.

I also have a hard time defending myself when I get attacked. When I do defend hypervigilance, I come off too strong and the results never go well. Then, when I am called on to defend myself during a test, I often fail to act because I think it may be hypervigilance.

People who prey on others can see these signs and chose people they can hurt without getting in trouble. This can open a body up to bullying that can become institutional when labels get attached. Powerful mental health administrators have done this to me and I remain marginalized in the county in which I work.

More Meaningful Memories:

When I found out that her brother had sexually abused a childhood friend, I suddenly had a flash and an image. I saw him rape her, became paralyzed with fear and fled. Had I really behaved like that? It seemed like more of an intuitive dream, that a solid reality.

Typical, I thought, for a schizophrenic to hear about sex abuse and think it is all about him. Perhaps some of the readers may think so as well.

However, I do remember visiting the two of them alone in a vacation cabin along the Chatooga River in the Adirondacks. They were skinny-dipping, she with just a shirt on, he in the nude, and me, very attached to my bathing suit. My last memory of the evening involves him standing behind her wrestling her around.

The distinctive flash of a rape and an overwhelming feeling of cowardice and helplessness that overtook me when I should have protected the victim is unconnected to any other part of the evening.

The brother has only admitted to inappropriate touching. So, I acknowledge that even saying the word rape may be inappropriate and unfair. If I considered these flashes reality, there are several other incidents in my life to talk about with other adult men.

Years later I had rescue fantasies and psyched myself up to respond to rape scenes. This happened at a time when I took a job in a lawless section eight housing project; and used community activists and the press to fight the management company, the police and the black market dealers against all odds. This is an action that caused the police and my parents to attempt to institutionalize me in a state hospital.

Is it possible that my objectionable behaviour of using the press to out real murder and mayhem was simply an unconscious expression of ongoing existential guilt from unrealized events? Is it possible that some of my schizophrenia was exacerbated by real government monitoring? For a year the only job I could maintain was an arranged job at an Italian Deli through which I thought I was being persecuted by the Italian Mafia. When I stopped acting persecuted and started being thankful for a nine-dollar an hour job, I was able to return to professional job opportunities.

“The first question that gets asked shouldn’t be what is wrong with you, it should be what happened to you?”—Jackie Dillion

I think therapists have a responsibility to assess for incidents of abuse. This is not about potentially wrongly vilifying people like the brother above, it is about healing and changing behaviour. For healing, even heinous acts need to be emotionally accepted, yet never forgot. It involves constant intuitive listening and questioning and remembrance of patterns on the part of a psychotherapist. What is far more common in psychiatry these days is the focus only on symptoms and behaviours associated with mental illnesses. It becomes easy to become part of the problem for many when blame is assigned within the genetic codes and neurotransmitter cocktails of the individuals.

Overemphasizing these concepts without acknowledging the role of trauma promotes stigmas and generalizations. This not only orients us towards not considering traumatic occurrences, it makes it highly likely that we will re-traumatize sufferers and further marginalize them.

I believe that when therapy is governed with an illness narrative mentality, money gets made, and many of the recipients lose support and wind up deprived, impoverished and defeated. The mental health system becomes much more a system of control and ongoing abuse when things are as such.

I would advise someone who is suffering and receiving psychiatric care not to underestimate the role that trauma may have in their suffering. Learning about this and honouring it yourself can help you make meaning of your suffering. Unfortunately, if our communities don’t understand or teach us about trauma, we need to do this for ourselves. I believe this is when psychotherapy can be helpful. However, when psychotherapists maintain the psychiatric illness mentality, therapy can go on for years without understanding underlying complex trauma.

The post Demystifying Complex Trauma for Therapists appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

In Madness and Civilization, philosopher Michel Foucault has predicted a proliferation of madness as disparities increase and modern society advances. Indeed, with psychopharmacology industry booming, rates of addiction, fueled by the opioid epidemic, skyrocketing, terrorism wars raging abroad, ongoing drug wars afflicting low income neighborhoods, escalation in homeless encampments in major cities, and a rise in bullying in schools, and even cyberbullying, it really does seem like higher percentage of people have been forced to explore their mental health struggles. While mass shootings have kept danger stigma in the media high and the media response continues to reinforce silence about mental struggles, the field of psychotherapy does have a lot more trends to address.

When I look through my state’s psychotherapy association’s annual conference, I see many of these trends getting addressed in workshops. But ever invisible is the issue of psychosis. Is it possible that the issue of psychosis functions as a significant part of the madness narrative? Is it possible that psychosis too is affecting more and more Americans as Foucault inferred?

What the Statistic Say:

I do not believe that running through NIMH statistics reveals much about the prevalence of psychosis. I believe that psychosis affects individuals across diagnostic divides.

According to this year’s statistic by the NIMH, approximately one in five people will struggle with a mental health issue and 46 percent of the population will sometime struggle with their mental health. In fact, there is the suggestion that these stats may be a little lower than they have been in recent years perhaps due to the economy fluctuating. Contrast this with the ever-present statistic that one percent of the population carries a diagnosis of schizophrenia added to the unspecified number of individuals who experience bipolar (which is 4 percent of the population,) and the relevance of psychosis continues to seem very small.

I believe this is a gross underestimation. I believe hearing voices and other types of experiences that trigger alternate realities is very common throughout the population so much so that it warrants the attention of psychotherapists in private practice. I believe that many people go in and out of these experiences and may have occasions in which they are defined by them. However, the cost of being open about them is very high perhaps because there is little to no established treatment available outside the psychiatric ER.

On the Ground in Oakland, California:

As a psychotherapist on an outpatient psychiatric unit, I deal mostly with people who have spent their lives funneling through emergency rooms and perhaps lived in State Hospitals or at home until they aged out and hit the squalor of board and care homes. Or maybe they were homeless or incarcerated or maintained a job and, before the local housing crisis, an apartment. Indeed, I would like to convey that there are many who have worked but as they age, they get confronted by their issues with the aging process. Our participants would be labeled with SMI, “severe mental illness,” the majority being fifty years or older or 2.7 percent of the population. Oddly, according to NIMH statistics, the SMI population is approximately double the size among youth.

Finally, in the outpatient psychiatric unit, we provide treatment that has oft been neglected to address participants’ trauma and their mental health issues. I have created a program to address issues related to psychosis, or what I prefer to call special messages. And wouldn’t you know it, the issue of psychosis bubbles up in different ways for different people across diagnostic divides. Indeed, people many participants will share things with each other, they will not share with a psychiatrist.

Deserving of a Seat in the Psychotherapy Office:

In my training, I was always encouraged to refer out when it comes to psychosis. Let the ER deal with that, was the mantra of most of my trainers. Psychosis is scary.

Because I had to earn a living throughout my training, I took my living from the poor in the inner-city and volunteered my time for the rich. Perhaps, because I consider myself a wannabe philosopher and sociologist, when I finally got licensed and earned my freedom, I started to explore running psychoses focus groups on the unit that had supported me on my way through.

And after doing many groups over the past ten years I am writing to suggest that more and more psychosis deserves a place in private practice and the revolving door of the ER is not an ethical move on the part of the trained psychotherapist. I call our local ER the homeless encampment and feel that it sends people in psychosis a large and disturbing message when they get confined to it.

How Diversifying Causation Beliefs Can Lead to Recovery from Psychosis:

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.

To be specific, I have observed that participants often become more communicative about their diverse beliefs regarding the causation of their psychosis experiences. And I believe this leads to collaboration and accommodation that can help message receivers move toward social rehabilitation and recovery.

There is little doubt in my mind 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 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. 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.

But to get back to what I primarily want to convey, I often see 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. Any psychosis (or message crisis) is full of thousands of these special message experiences. 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

Case Study:

Because I don’t make it a habit using case histories 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 to lead professional groups with diverse individuals to be able to make sense of what happened to me.

Additionally, people take different routes on their journey to better functioning. 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. Then, I headed for the Canadian border. Maybe my friend was using me to help him 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 the persistence of 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. Not only had I refused to take over the supervisor’s job, I had started to act 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. At least it made me willing to accept their help. 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. 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.

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.

It was true that 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. Indeed, perhaps I was traumatized as a child and that was in part why I was bullied.

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 as organized a fashion as I imagined. There were ways I could appeal to injustice. Indeed, some of the less dominant kids really looked up to me. A few other young 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 my parents 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.

And a lot of what I believed has turned out to prove correct. For example, genetic testing has since revealed that my predominantly old money family really was predominantly Irish. Additionally, 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, yet still too busy to keep up with me. 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 (an officer with the same first name as my father.)

Indeed, 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 support the dominant and violent. And I later learned that 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. There were personal issues that were getting replayed in surrounding relationships. In fact, I will explore this process more in my next article as it is a component of my system of treatment.

Teaching Psychotherapists to Diversify 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. Though the order in which they uncover causation beliefs invariably differs, I believe that we can learn to support each other by proposing alternate meanings that are based on alternative causation beliefs. I believe that we can empower ourselves to navigate injustice and oppression in the modern world. I think we need psychotherapists who can help us with this.

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. On Facebook there are many sites dedicated to normalizing the spiritual emergence narrative. They need to be expanded and extended to the homeless population.

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 it seems like so few of us survive to socially rehabilitate.

I believe that if psychotherapists support and learn from the experiences of the hearing voices network in other countries, they can become involved in providing services that teach message receivers to heal outside the punitive environments of the psychiatric ER or the State Hospital.

We need to promote healers and success stories who can connect with the one percent of the population that is persistently struggling and create pathways for social rehabilitation. We need statistics that more accurately report on the prevalence of psychosis to support these efforts. We need psychotherapy offices that specialize in psychosis!

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