I recently found myself explaining to a relative why the involuntary psychiatric treatment via California Care Courts being suggested on the March ballot under Proposition 1 is not a good idea. I suggested to my relative that there are many other innovative approaches to address the problem of homelessness that are being ignored. I mentioned having training for mental health workers on how to build collaborative relationships with people who are or have experienced a break from reality. I feel the public’s understanding of what is happening during a break from reality is profoundly lacking and as a result the arranged interventions are not at all helpful. Even mental health workers rarely get specific training to understand appropriate responses. They tend to learn from the machine that pushes warehousing options.

I am currently attempting to reach out to three local graduate schools to promote a training I have built over the last fifteen years that is based on the premise that service workers need to learn to explore psychosis with the people enduring a break. Working with graduate students with specific training may help them have better experiences when they do their time in community mental health. It may help them specialize in working with psychosis and commit themselves to dealing with the problem of homelessness. At this point community mental health often attracts workers early in their careers who learn off the backs of our society’s most vulnerable. Many of us who start in mental health move on once we’ve built up our confidence and skills. Many of us end up shaking our heads about the trouble we’ve seen.

Unfortunately, I am finding that it can be hard to get the needed support to get my word out to graduate school students. Would-be supporters are skeptical that because the training is 16-20 hours, I might not have concise bulleted messages one coworker suggested. Others are concerned I don’t possess a doctorate. They may figure that if no institution or movement is sponsoring this effort, that it must not be a worthy endeavor. Perhaps they note a little social anxiety in my demeanor and think I can’t do it. Some of these claims are baseless. I wrote an award-winning memoir about my experiences with madness. I know how to be concise. With regards to other concerns, like my anxiety, I am practicing to better the chances of a smooth delivery. Luckily, I am finding some promising support along the way. If I can get my training into just one of the schools, I am looking at. I may build enough of an audience to make the endeavor successful. I already have several participants.

My training argues that whether the afflicted person is in or out of emergency, it is still crucial to learn how to engage with someone who has different ideas about what is going on in society and the universe. It suggests that it’s important to study ways that what they are saying is correct so we can validate rather than reality check them. Most of the treatment out there doesn’t teach people how to understand and explore the rabbit-hole; and, as a result, experiences are typically treated as though they are deviant, taboo, and have no value. If any mention of their experience is uttered the afflicted are punished or excluded. The fact that exploration is not a common societal practice creates problems that lead to power struggles, incarceration, and trauma associated with involuntary treatment.

I used to be a social worker working with people who experience breaks and I used to label people as carrying diagnoses of all the interrelated schizophrenias when the DSM used to divide them up into types. I did not know how to be helpful because I received no specific training. I fought to preserve my job and did what my supervisors told me to do. As time wore on and I started to better understand the environments in which the afflicted resided, it started to seem like what I was being asked to do was incredibly cruel and inhumane. Then as started to work in a section 8 housing project that was highly regulated yet rife with drugs and prostitution, I better learned what it was like to live in such a realm. I started amp up in compassion and advocacy until I went of my medication and experienced a catastrophic break myself.

Six years after I recovered, I obtained my license. I started running professional groups that explored the contents of psychosis. I wrote a curriculum and shared my lived experience. What resulted was a fundamentally different understanding of psychosis that incorporates not only the internal experiences of those who are struck with it, but also the social processes involving loss and exclusion that prevent many suffers from returning to social functioning. My training offers a great deal of direction in terms of what is helpful as it redefines psychosis into something that is healable. The training is not based on reading books and research, it is sharpened by experience, observation, self-reflection, and the perspective of the people who have worked with me.

I have found that many who experience trauma also relate to many of the extraordinary experiences that I identify in the training. Thus, I believe that the training is helpful to the mental health of other challenges, not just those who have breaks from reality. Indeed, those who dissociate, who study mysticism, who have trauma, or are neurodivergent have a history of benefiting from such groups. I believe I have something important to bring to the world that has value and can change practices. I could have been locked up and subjected to care courts when I was homeless. Instead, thanks to the relative who helped me and who inquired as to my thoughts on the issue, I have been of service to others and have created something that could help you have more success connecting with others like me. You could help me sell these ideas to the universities and to the young social workers who might be willing to learn in a different way.

The monthly sessions will be recorded, and participants will have access to the videos for review and study or in case they must miss a month. There will be group exercises and practice interviewing me to learn skills and apply techniques.  To learn more, click here.

The post Currently Recruiting for my 2024 Training appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

How To Be A Healing Presence Without Becoming Anxious, Power-Struggling, Or Referring the Mad Person To A Hospital

How It Works

Starting this November in two-hour sessions on Sunday evenings, I will teach you a new model for understanding psychosis that will help you be able to relate with a person in madness in a manner that helps them heal. We are looking for nine volunteers who will receive the training for free in a webinar format on zoom. Volunteers may be professionals (including peer counselors) looking to hone their skills, family members seeking better relationships with their loved ones, or people with lived experience who want to share their perspective and contribute to a new model. The sessions will be taped and edited and eventually sold at an affordable price. Come bring your stories and perspectives to the discussion, ask questions, and we will all learn in community.

Here’s what we’ll go over:

Week 1

• How listening to stories and reflecting on commonalities helped me deconstruct experiences into solvable problems and formulate the structure of the rest of the presentation

• Why the medical model definitions lead to limited solutions and ultimately to the poor outcomes, stereotypes and the dehumanization we see.

• The way the thirty differential diagnoses that include psychotic experiences in them may have kept us from creating a counter culture and focusing on solutions. 

Week 2

• Why the notion that this is a thought disorder is wrong, and the importance of considering the conglomeration of experiences that cause one to experience a break from reality.

• The reason trying to stop a person from perseverating about their experiences by telling them that they are ill only decreases mindfulness and thwarts efforts to stop perseveration.

• Why it is often important to research and know about real government conspiracies to gain a message receiver’s trust and learn about what they think.

Week 3

• How expanding the ways message receivers think about what causes their experiences adds to flexibility and can have a positive impact on functioning.

• Learn to use what we term “the trickster concept” to likewise increase flexibility and open up faith without reality checking and sabotaging your trust with the message receiver.

• Why processing past behavior and negative outcomes is essential to help a message receiver start to accept boundaries and use the social skills that work for them.

Week 4

• How social, institutional, and internalized stigma are linked to a message receiver’s irrational thinking making timing and context important as cognitive therapy is used as a tool to help them. 

• How a mindful understanding of special messages can still be a valid part of an individual’s effort to discern reality without leading to a crisis or an emergency.

• How to use this system of care in group and individual contexts so that you can meet the message receiver where they are at and develop intervention strategies.

Hi, I’m Tim 

Early on in my 27 years of working in the trenches of community mental health, I thought I was a good worker when I did things like: 1) take care of people who were experiencing a break in reality by doing things for them to build trust; and 2) reminding them to take their medication. As I realized what people were living through in impoverished warehouse circumstances and fought for better services, I started to notice ways I was being followed by the company that owned the housing project where I worked. When I received a threat from a close friend, I myself descended into madness. I tried to flee to Canada  and was rapidly warehoused as a ward in a last resort State Hospital. I learned very quickly that madness wasn’t what I was trained to believe it was in school. I learned 1) that being treated like I was incapable of doing anything myself felt insulting; and 2) being told to take my medications was pointless; these kinds of interventions were not the help I needed.  

It was a lot harder to get ready to go back to work in mental health than I thought it would be after three months in an institution. Enduring housing insecurity, moves, and underemployment was very hard. When I did manage to get my license I started to run professional groups that explored not only what psychosis was, but also what could be done that was helpful. I used my lived experience to help other silenced individuals open up. The things we all learned in the process of sharing stories were astounding. I have documented these learnings over the past fifteen years and want to release to you my findings in a course that will help you know how to intervene when faced with someone who experiences a break from reality.   

Click to Schedule Interview with Tim

There will only be only nine to ten participants so set up your interview today

The post Nine Volunteers Can Join Journey Through Madness Webinar for Free appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Style Number 1:  Exploitation Resulting from Unrealized Sexual Abuse:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Style Number 4: Judging those who Fail to Regulate Addictions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Style Number 5: Impact of Racial Abuse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, you can when you have no hustle.

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

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

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

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

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

Style Number 6: Extending Unequal Pay for Unskilled Labor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Style Number 7: Challenges that Await the Formerly Incarcerated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I ignored him and worked my day.

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

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

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

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

False Medicalized Notions of “Psychosis”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The studio rests six stories high. On top of an old steam heater a fan drones in an open window. Clyde sleeps on a black futon that sits on the floor. He sleeps under a thick Central American bed cover his ex-girlfriend gave him.

It took a semester in the dorms, but he’d finally he managed to break up with her. It’s been a whole year now and he has established his own space. On the floor to his left there is a cup with olive oil in it.

Suddenly radio from the clock fills the room. Clyde tosses around. Time passes. He gets up and walks into his closet past kitty litter which is full with land mines of shit.

He moves through the closet and into the bathroom past the sink, which he calls the throat. He gets into the shower and cleans the shlock off his Irish wee-wee. Somehow, Clyde has no idea he is predominantly Irish.

It’s the summer. His fifty-four-hour work week is nearing an end. Today is one of his three eight- hour days. His high school friend John Randy is going to pick him up after work. They are going to catch a Phish concert at some theater in Delaware.

This morning, Clyde hits the tape deck and jams to Big Audio Dynamite in the apartment. He likes Mick Jones from the Clash and how he veers toward R+B and diversity in this music.

He attacks fruit out of his refrigerator drawers. The roaches dash over his kitchen table. He puts some water on the stove and prepares sugar-free hot chocolate. The roaches are crazy busy and of various sizes this morning.

Clyde used to have to spray one roach at a time. He’d spray for minutes and finally the roach would roll over on its back and die in the pool of chemicals left behind. A neighbor had suggested this particular black jack spray. Clyde bought it from the Sikh man’s convenience store.

As Clyde uses the spray on the table and around the kitchen area the roaches quickly die. He notices that his cat is watching him. Then he fills his hot chocolate takes a sip and spits out a roach. Once again, he has forgotten to check the clump of chocolate at the top of the cocoa before he sips.

When ready for the day, Clyde takes the stair well two stairs at a time. It takes some dexterity. Rarely does he encounter any one who comments about the noise his descending of the stairs in this manner makes.

Once out the glass doors of the decay of Pierre Apartments, he crosses Cooper Street shaking his head.

Gwendolyn is at the corner by the pay phone. This past winter every time they encountered each other they would both be underdressed for the cold. Now, in the summer, she sips beer from a bagged can. and comes at him with a masculine handshake. “What’s wrong today kid.”

Clyde loves the way Gwendolyn always inserts herself and commands respect even though he never remembers to use her name. He doesn’t suspect that she used to be a nurse. Nor does he get that she too had been put out of her house at an early age. Gwendolyn lives in the complex across the street that always has people coming in and out of it at all hours of the day.

“The roaches are bad this morning, I think the neighbors bombed their room. Does that ever happen to you?”

“Oh, we wouldn’t let there be roaches on our building.”

Clyde lives in the drug free complex and doesn’t understand. He presumes all complexes in the area have roaches.

Sure. he has studied social welfare from a suburban adjunct professor but there is still a lot about his surroundings that he doesn’t understand.

Hi professor had educated the class about what it’s like to be on welfare through assigning offensive books. Many of the students announced that they had been on welfare themselves and challenged his perspective and his choice of books. A few white women would concur with him.

One time the professor had asked the students if they gave money to the pan handlers down town.

“Why not?” he exclaimed, just in love with his power.

As clueless as his professor proved to be, Clyde doesn’t yet understand the concept of cash money even though he gets paid in it. He doesn’t imagine that when there is traffic coming in and out of a complex there is probably heaps of cash money changing hands, unlaundered money that can, with the right neighborhood connections, be used to control the roach problem. All he understands is that he gets angry when the people coming in and out of Gwendolyn’s complex call him Where’s Waldo.

Clyde crosses the parking lot for the dorms and passes a gleaming glass building before arriving at the small minimart. He is opening this morning and his coworker is closing. His boss arrives and unlocks the shutters so Clyde throws them up.

Before he turns the radio on to the local R+B radio station, he hears his boss muttering “Docy, Docy, Docy.” as he carries out his routines. Some might think he was muttering in Korean, but Clyde knows that he is remembering his mentors on the grill Doc and Ray. His boss admired Doc even though Doc cursed him to everyone he knew for taking advantage of Docs connects.

Doc had educated Clyde about how his mother had to lock him out of the house so he would learn how to fight and face the neighborhood beat down without running. Doc would smile at Clyde when he listened and lectured about exploitation. Doc had mentored his current coworker and friend, Craig G not to use the needle.

Doc knew he wasn’t getting paid enough for his long hours and left the job. Clyde had heard that when he stopped working, he went on a crack binge.

Clyde had really ended up liking Doc’s friend Ray who had been very direct with him upon first meeting. “Don’t worry Clyde, you can’t help it if you are an asshole, you were just raised that way.”

On one of Clyde’s first evenings closing the store, Ray had manipulated him to drive him to a friend’s house where he could cop. He’d only done it once. He also tested Clyde out by telling him about his sexual exploits with white women. When Clyde had continued to be cool with Ray, he would accept the role of being Clyde’s mentor on the grill. “Clyde, you have to work smarter not harder,” Ray would exclaim. Ray also gave Clyde the nickname, “Nervous Norton.”

Clyde admired Ray’s fifty-four hour a week work ethic, his wit, and how he had his weight under control. He treated Ray as a surrogate father until Ray left the job with Doc.

His boss used to build airplanes for a Korean Army, but came to America for a better life. Nobody except Clyde likes the boss because he has an educated air. Clyde likes that he is reliable and fair with his work routines. Clyde believes a part of his boss feels bad for the way he’d treated Doc and thus the muttering.

Sometimes his boss grabs his thin arms and crunches the bones and biceps. Then he says, “Clyde, don’t hesitate!” Clyde thinks he knows perfectly well what the boss is trying to communicate and accepts what his boss is getting at and yet somehow fails to give a fuck.

Clyde likes his boss a lot better than the owner. Craig G and all the neighborhood kids like the Korean owner. The owner is big, muscular, and shares his hunting hobby with all who will listen. He used to be gangster until he got married. In Asian gangs Clyde will one day learn, it is customary to leave the gang when you get married.

At first meeting, the owner had let Clyde know that he was easy to pick on. However, the owner stopped when Clyde showed sharp attitude about his compliance with handling the store Glock. All he had to do was let the owner know he wasn’t about to shoot anyone for four dollars per hour and the owner left him alone.

Clyde makes it a habit to pack those sandwiches with extra meat especially the tuna and chicken salad. The owner’s wife makes the salads and gets really angry. Clyde just ignores all the feedback.

Clyde knows that it is because of his attitude that the boss always tells him that Craig G is a better worker than him as if Clyde would care. The boss thinks such comments will curb Clyde’s behavior.

Clyde resents the fact that the stale cereal is sold for seven dollars a box. Clyde thinks the owner is leeching money out of the poor black and brown neighborhood. The deli sandwiches are the only affordable way to eat, and it is an expensive way to live. Clyde has seen the movie “Do the Right Thing!” by Spike Lee.

He contrasts the suburban houses that he imagines the owner lives in with the studio where he and other neighborhood people live. He thinks how there are no grocery stores for any of the kids who live in Camden. They have to drive thirty minutes out of the city to even get to a supermarket. He knows most of the mom-and-pop stores have high prices. Many of the kids in the city had to survive off of Ramin Pride.

As Clyde prepares the condiments for the afternoon rush, he thinks of the first kid he trained to work at the deli. This kid took him to the movies and taught him how to sneak into different theaters. When the kid finally found something that he liked, they’d settled in. The kid only lasted a few months and then went off to the crack trade. That kid was very socially skilled and knew how to connect congenially with Clyde like no other.

Still, Clyde hopes that he will make stronger connections with kids he knows from the neighborhood when they work here. He prays that they will like working with him and Craig G more than the lure of ready rock.

And yet when he hears about the white kids that commute into the city to take classes, talk poor, and boast how they steal from his boss, it somehow pisses him off worse.

Once he heard a frat brother who he’d taken a writing class with calling him out of his name, “Hey do you ever wonder how much change the panhandlers get out of Clyde Dee?”

Clyde thinks about how in reality no one asks him for change. He carries his cash in his sock with a dollar or two in his wallet. The very few occasions he’s been threatened he has donated a dollar or two to avoid a beat down.

In the store the customers treat him like he is family. One told him he was down with the brown. Another told customer told him of a local mechanic who was flaco like him. Flaco means thin in Spanish, but it’s also known as a cool nickname amongst players. The customers had a lot of love for Clyde and the community made him feel much less alone.

When commuting students like the frat boy comes down here and judge the locals according to stereotypes, it becomes hard for Clyde to befriend them.

Clyde has only made one close friend. He is ten years older and is in recovery from polysubstance abuse.

Clyde thinks his friend gets a little manic when he talks. His friend’s best friend is on the Philadelphia police force. He calls his friend a bad lieutenant in the police force. This bad lieutenant funds his friend’s education and expenses in return for under the table surveillance work. Clyde’s friend is also a writer. Some of his work, when he isn’t using vocabulary that makes him sound like Henry James, carries the tone of a mafia flick. He has introduced Clyde to many mafia flicks, but Clyde still doesn’t understand.

Even Clyde’s friend can misunderstand the neighborhood. For example, he accuses Clyde Dee and Craig G of listening to “gangster rap” in the deli. And he made a big deal once about the fact that his co-worker took care of him when he ordered a sandwich. Clyde thinks he misunderstands Craig G.

Craig G shows up after an hour once the grill and kitchen are set up. Clyde and Craig give each other the neighborhood hand shake and Craig straps on the apron the same way Clyde wears it. Craig G developed this style of wearing the apron and everyone follows suit.

Craig disappears into the bathroom and when he comes out Clyde is in the back getting a clean tub to fill with mayonnaise.  Craig chuckles, “You ever notice when its your own shit, it never stinks!”

Clyde who has never had to take a crap on that can retorts, “Oh your lucky it wasn’t me in there.”

Craig pulls out the tape Clyde loaned him and says, “You’ve got a hold of some slamming new jams on this one.”

Once last summer Craig came out of the can at closing time and showed Clyde a bone. Clyde figured he was offering to share it with Clyde.

Clyde shrugged, and expressed no interest with his face.

It was the only time Craig offered.

Craig never seemed to judge Clyde for his refusal.

Clyde went ahead and loaned him his backpack and ID so he could sneak into the University Gym. Last summer when he had acquiesced to get back with his girlfriend, Craig had given him a condom and said it’d be good if he finally got lucky. They had gone to an amusement park together, an event that made Clyde’s girlfriend exceedingly jealous.

Craig puts the BDP Sex and Violence tape in the deck and hit play. Clyde listens to the bass and familiar beat. Customers start to come in in waves and Craig and Clyde take and fill orders. Clyde ponders and learns intermittently from the lyrics . . .

Black drug dealer, you have to rise up and organize your business so that we can rise up

If you are gonna sell crack than don’t be a fool, organize your business and open up a school . . .

Or invest in a Prison, therefore you can be put in it. Everyone else did this and now they chillin

Above the law while you are under the law and still killin

Wake up my African brother, my Hispanic brother. America ain’t your mother or your father so don’t bother with right or wrong

Just check out the logic in the song . . .

In the thirties and forties the drug dealer wasn’t black; they were Jewish, Irish, Polish Italian ectcetera ectcetera, and they were making their lives a lot better . . . 

Organize, legalize, legitimize your business, remember everybody else did this

Clyde had first heard about KRS-One, the rapper, in sociology class. The black professor had said that KRS-One and Cool Moe Dee had been homeless and been able to create this music with almost no resources. Then, Craig had played his first album, Criminal Minded, at work.

Oddly, this latest album came from John Randy. KRS-One had played a concert at his white liberal college from which he dropped out. John had passed on the tape to Clyde earlier that summer. Clyde thinks it is a hell of a lot better than that Phish music John Randy is so crazy about.

This summer, Craig had borrowed his car and returned it with the gas full and invited Clyde into North Camden to ball with him and his boys. Clyde felt good about the real friendship and it was important to him.

One morning Craig G came in traumatized after hiding out all night in an abandoned building. He had been at a doughnut shop with his boys and there was some kind of confrontation. He’d had to run and hide out in an abandoned building.

Another time Craig had cut himself on the slicer and Clyde has taken him to emergency.

Clyde liked being there for Craig and it had helped them bond.

In a few years Clyde will be visiting John Randy at his parent’s shore house one night when John will get lit. Clyde will feel like John will be a bit racist, exclaiming to his father in front of his proper friends about getting picked up by a black man from Camden. Then Clyde will discover the black man is Craig G who will clearly be drubbling high on heroin.

Craig will be dating a white-women from Camden who had a scholarship to attend John and Clyde’s private school in Moorestown New Jersey.

The white girl will exclaim she can now learn all about her new boyfriend from Clyde.

She will only get the seal of his smiling lips.

It will be funny how much Clyde will realize that he’s changed

In about three years, Craig’s mentor, someone Clyde will presume to be his NA sponsor, will recognize Clyde when he will work in a Pennsauken video store and organize a reunion. Craig will have a union job and Clyde will presume he has beaten back smack. He will be so happy for him.

Craig G has a smile and general look like Tupac. He attracts a lot of women. At the amusement park they went to the year before, women kept giving him their number like he was a celebrity.

Craig is always hooking up with girls in the dorm. Even though Clyde is too shy to even think about a date, Craig always treats him respectfully. He has introduced Clyde to his main girlfriend and his best friend too. Clyde hooked them up with some real generous sandwiches.

The boss often polls the female customers about which worker in the store is most attractive and Craig always wins. One time the boss said he talked to a woman who had put Clyde first. He had grabbed Clyde arms squeezing his bones and muscles together: “Don’t hesitate!” he had repeated.

Craig G is not the only local of Clyde’s generation who educates Clyde about the lives that locals live. One day, Julio’s brother has come to meet Clyde and told him about the graphic violence he’d gotten caught up in at a club one night. Julio’s married sister was one of Clyde’s neighbors in Pierre Apartments. She has invited Clyde into her apartment and been really friendly.

Julio, one of the kids who works here, always comes at Clyde with a lot of aggression calling him a “Geiser” (or crack addict.) Also, he calls Clyde a “pus.” Julio makes it a habit to punch him while he is working on the grill.

One evening later on that Fall, Clyde will get fed up with Julio’s behavior and will agree to a fight after work. The boss will officiate and Clyde will wrestle Julio to the ground enough to demonstrate his physical dominance. Then, one fairly beaten, Julio will get up and give Clyde a unfettered knee in the balls.

Unable to speak for five minutes Clyde eventually will manage to call Julio a punk and a coward. The boss will look startled by this and clearly will not know what to do. Julio will just laugh and talk trash like Muhammad Ali.

Soon thereafter, Julio will show up at Clyde’s door step with his cousin and older brother. They will take him to the YMCA pool for a swim.

Clyde will go home after the swim and write a paper that his teacher will want to put up for a prize. Of course, Clyde will decline. He will only use the opportunity to try to make the teacher feel stupid. He hates teachers,

Clyde and Craig work the grill, the sandwich bar, and the pizza oven as the work starts to pick up. At noon the kid Angelo comes in and gives them each the neighborhood hand shake.

Angelo lives with his grandmother and is the oldest child to a woman who appears to be Developmentally Delayed. Clyde’s ex-girlfriend used to dote on him while she gave the neighborhood kids candy. She thought he was a cute and well-behaved boy. He had given his ex-girlfriend the biggest smiles and most sincere looks.

But currently, working with Angelo is a different story. Clyde sees another side of Angelo. Without having the benefit of a father figure, Angelo tends to get mad and bite back when told to do something. There are times he gets the job done and at times he goofs off.

Craig has just a little more patience with Angelo’s willful defiance yet rarely engages him. Clyde gets more frustrated. Thus, with Angelo, Clyde tries to step back and model Craig G’s tone.

Clyde used to work with this kid named Jose and had a much easier time. It’s true that Clyde already had a relationship with Jose having traveled with him to Pyne Point Park to help coach his baseball team. Clyde had known that Jose’s stepfather favored his younger brother and that Jose needed a little extra support.

When Jose had worked with Clyde, he had done everything right and there had been no disrespect. Since he quit, the neighborhood kids had all gossiped about him. Apparently, his step-father had sent him away to some mental health facility.

Today, Angelo directs himself to the walk in and stocks the shelves without comment. He also does the dishes in the back sink and takes the trash out. The lunch rush comes steadily for a few hours. When it thins Clyde and Craig take turns making deliveries. Then Craig leaves at two to return at four to close the store

At this point Angelo announces that he’s going to take his lunch. He walks to the front of the store and picks up a pornographic magazine and sits near Clyde. As Clyde slices meats, he flips through the pages sucking on his teeth and making a lot of delighted noises.

“Hey Angelo, you’re a little young to be checking out those magazines in front of customer,” says Clyde.

Angelo ignores Clyde with provocative expressions of delight.

The boss hears this and puts down his own pornographic magazine which is hidden inside a Korean Newspaper. He strides over from his perch at the cash register with his bullet proof vest on and looks at Angelo.

“No, that is bad,” he says, “You have to put that away right now!”

The Campus and City police come in frequently to fill their coffee or soda for free. All the neighbors point and whisper when the vice squad comes in. “They are the true bad guys,” a customer had once told Clyde. It will take Clyde decades of living to make sense of and understand these dynamics.

The only day Clyde didn’t see police abusing their power was the time the boss got held up at gun point and the owner showed up drunk with an arsenal of hardware. They were too afraid to come get free coffee that night.

Clyde can’t help but feel some judgement towards Angelo, the boss, and the police. What a fucked-up world they are all living in.

When Julio comes in for his shift and punches him and called him a Geiser, Clyde feels relief. Somehow, he stresses about Angelo’s morals and ability to survive the streets. He doesn’t know what to do.

The one-time Clyde will get his car window shattered, Angelo will come and tell him that Jose did it. Clyde will talk to Jose and easily discern that it was likely Angelo who broke the window. Whoever smelt it delt it. Sometime, Clyde fears, Angelo is going to get in trouble for pulling a stunt like that on the streets.

It will not occur to Clyde until many years later that he will have missed an opportunity to help Angelo out.

Clyde listens to the patter of the rain against the tarp above him. It’s an exceedingly gray day and he is sitting on the cement table and chair outside the mini mart. A mini-van rolls up along the narrow street.

When Clyde realizes it’s John Randy, he wonders how John ended up with a mini-van. The door slides open and Clyde recognizes a kid he used to know from grade school and a girl from his graduating class along with two other non-descript white twenty-year-old males.

Clyde’s hair is slicked back with gel. He is wearing a black Marlboro work-tee-shirt, his two- toned florescent green shorts, and his old-school white and black Converses. He doesn’t even think about the fact he smells like the deli.

The front seat is open and Clyde demurs a moment. Then, against his better judgement he opens the front door and climbs in.

His old grade school acquaintance is extremely friendly and catches up with Clyde in a graceful manner. Clyde has heard he is in construction, not school.

Clyde remembers sitting at the table in the grade school library with this guy and talking about war. “Better to kill them than have them kill you,” this guy had exclaimed.

Those were the days when Clyde had clout and confidence, back when he was formulating his pacifist philosophy.

Junior high had turned this kid into a metalhead and a part of the crowd that excluded Clyde. The kid’s favorite band had been Judas Priest.

Clyde tries to be friendly right back at him; however, he notices he is self-conscious. He does not feel grounded and in-the-zone the way he does when he is working with Craig G.

John Randy drives and the van is quickly over the bridge and on the interstate.

One of the nondescript males keeps talking about the dangers of Delaware cops. It seems very important to him that he is going to do something to break the law.

Yeah, yeah, thinks Clyde, Delaware cops are strict big whoop. This asshole needs to get over himself.

Before long John Randy pulls over on the interstate. John runs over to some bush in a wet green pasture and starts taking a leak. Clyde climbs over to the driver’s seat. Clyde learns they are driving the family van of a school associate. The family is on vacation and Clyde doubts they would approve of this expedition.

John Randy is still out urinating on the bush. Clyde feels he has unwittingly been had again. Now he is the designated driver of a stolen vehicle. The crew talks in the back and John is still urinating. They had all been fools to let John drive at all. No one else seems the least bit concerned about the danger that this posed! And the urination continues.

When John finally gets back into the van, Clyde focuses on his role as a designated driver. The crew is blazing weed and drinking in the back. Through the rearview mirror, Clyde spies the girl who graduated High School with him inhale.

Clyde still can’t help but get anxious when he thinks about the blaze of weed. He decided early on that he was not going to be pressured into doing any such thing, ever. Still, the fact that he has to stand out pumps up his anxiety.

He often thinks about how people have died smuggling her that weed she is inhaling! He knows how well these cohorts were treated in the insulated private school they attended. His father and mother were teachers at the school they attended. His father was a top administrator.

Clyde feels all the students at his school had it so easy. He feels this way especially since he has moved to Camden. Every time he sees his cohorts from that school all he sees is that they always want more.

Clyde doesn’t think about how this girl who inhaled had a mother who was a secretary at the school and how she was also (like Clyde) a scholarship kid. She may well have problems like he has! No, Clyde just thinks and thinks about how greedy it is to partake in what is essentially a slave business.

People like the kids will go to jail so the likes of he and his cohorts can be enthralled with no consequences.

As Clyde fumes, his cohorts coincidentally start to criticize his driving. Perhaps they can sense his judgments. Clyde remembers John Randy taking him to a house party back when he lived with him during his senior year. When Clyde started to fulfill his role as a designated driver, John Randy exclaimed that he was driving like an asshole. Clyde really didn’t know what this meant. Is this how all sober people get treated, or just him?

Now Clyde has to get off at an exit to fill the tank. The problem is that everyone has pitched negative energy his way. Some start directing him toward different exits to get off the interstate. Clyde can’t think. When he finally gets off there is no gas station to be found.

He gets on a road that heads the wrong direction and decides he’ll save time and make a k turn. The problem is that he is used to driving a stick. He instinctively reaches down to put the car into reverse and gropes at the air. Car headlights head towards him while he searches for the transmission lever to put the car in reverse. He jams on the gas and the van peals out backwards. Now everybody is laughing and criticizing his driving. Clyde is very distressed.

Drunken John, somehow realizes he has to calm Clyde. He steps up and directs him to a gas station.

When Clyde finally arrives at the stadium, the dark clouds are moving into dusk. The parking lot is full of tailgating hippies. Clyde is entertained with odd sights of funk. There are a ton of white kids his own age from sleep away colleges that he is not used to seeing.

He follows along while his eyes drink in the scene. There are no sport teams that he knows of in Delaware but the stadium is sizable. He is afraid he will be seen as just another damn hippie amongst the crowd without any awareness that he stands out like he is Where’s Waldo different.

Inside the stadium they find seats.

Looking out the stadium through the cemented exit walls, he can see hippies who must be jumping on trampolines. They are silhouetted against the dusky skyline. Clyde watches as every time they bounce up, they strike a different pose. There is water spray that is just barely visible surrounding them though he cannot see where it is coming from.

He can’t help thinking of the parents of these lost souls and wondering what they think of their kid’s lifestyles. This fills Clyde with a sense of sadness.

It will be eight years later when Clyde will learn that hippies use spray like that to get people on trips. LSD is something he should know more about. His grandfather was the head of the Harvard psychology department that hired Timothy Leary.

Many decades later Clyde will learn that his grandfather presided over the same department that conducted mind-control experiments on the likes of Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber,) Whitey Bulger (South Bostin’s Irish Kingpin) Ken Keasy (musician in the Grateful Dead) and Robert Hunter, (Author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.) This clandestine program was entitled MKULTRA.

All his mother had told him that his grandfather had done some work for the CIA.

Clyde has learned that Phish formed at the University of Vermont. He can’t help but like the look of the lead singer and guitarist as he is clearly talented. However, as the night wears on the music gets stranger, more intoxicated and psychedelic. At one point John Randy leaves his seat and joins the crowd that is standing close to the stage. Clyde hears one of the others say that John is on an acid trip.

Toward the end of the show as Clyde is getting tired. He has found the long riffs self-indulgent and the psychedelic screech of a violin bow on a steel guitar just sound just plain stupid.

Clyde often looks out the exits as the hippies trampolining in the mist. They are now harder to see against the dark sky. They remain silhouetted by the exit lights. He finds himself looking at his watch frequently. He can’t wait to get going.

Back at the minivan, Clyde continues to think about how stupid everything is.

If he were a cop, he would just perch himself outside the stadium and pull over these badly behaving white kids and cart them of to jail. He starts to imagine the amount of DUIs and drug busts that could quash hippy glory.

All these white kids are allowed to come out and talk tough about evading Delaware cops and risk marks on their permanent record, but it’s all so fake.

Clyde reasons that the police are not allowed to target them. The promoters probably pay the cops off. Clyde thinks if it was found that the band was causing arrests to happen there would be less money to be made and it would be bad for business. He thinks of the neighborhood kids back in Camden and how the lure of the crack trade results in death and imprisonment. The whole scene just makes Clyde so angry.

As he drives out the parking lot John Randy is in the back getting a lot of love and support from the crew. Clyde is tense. He watches the stadium fade out of his side window as he follows signs back to the interstate.

As Clyde drives, he thinks of his ex-girlfriend who would agree with him about the stupidity of this summer evening. It is the only thing he really misses about her.

His mind flashes to the time she got mad at him and threw a milkshake against his windshield. It hit the windshield like the thud of all her attacks.

The attacks would start when she would get mad at him for leaving her Christmas morning to celebrate with his family. Months and months of the silence treatment would ensue. Clyde had found it very hard to be treated in that manner. Clyde remembered how he would often end up in tears after sex. She would be on top and he wouldn’t understand his own reaction. She would yell at him like he was her drunken father. It wasn’t until he needed to leave that shit got really bad.

Leaving her has been so hard. Everyone she knows hounds him about her resulting depression and sadness. It has been ongoing for over a year. The neighborhood was definitely on her side. Meanwhile, she stalked him and sat beneath his apartment window many nights.

Clyde listens to the crowd mingle midst the smell of alcohol and reefer. As the party starts to die down John Randy makes his way up to the passenger seat and keeps Clyde company.

Clyde thinks of the way John shamed him describing his father’s devastated look when Clyde was in the hospital. He remembered how John came at him for no reason and tackled him and held him down during the year they lived together. He remembered most recently how John had shamed him for leaving his ex-girlfriend.

“What’s on your mind John Randy?” says Clyde

“Not much Clyde Ryan!”

It’s been a long time since Clyde’s heard his real last name.

John looks out at the refinery lights and talks about them in a peaceful manner.

Clyde is reminded his favorite Bruce Springsteen music. A song from the Nebraska album starts to ring in his ear:

Mister state trooper, please don’t stop me, please don’t stop me, please don’t stop me . . .

New Jersey Turnpike, driving on a wet night, neath the refinery’s glow, where the deep dark river flows . . .

License registration, I ain’t got none. But I have a clear conscience about the things that I done.

Clyde remembers that John is tripping on acid. He reflects back what John is saying and comments. There is a long pause.

John has an artistic side and can be very creative. Plus, he knows what Clyde likes.

Then, somehow in unison they exclaim to each other: “Who is your Daddy!”

This loosens the tension in Clyde’s shoulders. He and John have known each other since they were three years old.

Once in kindergarten John had found a flat piece of balsam wood and wondered what it was. Clyde remembered a show on Sesame Street where they showed the making of bubble gum in the factory. John and he had used the Mr. Sketch Markers that smelled like mint. Together they had colored the balsam wood. Then they cut it into gun size pieces and chewed. They were both perfectly happy with the results until the teacher discovered their green tongues.

As Clyde listens to John peacefully interact with him, he is reminded of his older friend and fellow faculty brat, Chester. His first impression of sleep away college came from Chester.

When Clyde reflects about reasons that drugs just aren’t his jam, he thinks of Chester who will one day be his step-brother.

Clyde had suspected Chester might be gay. There had been some squeezes that had made Clyde uncomfortable. But Clyde had just ignored them and moved away. He really cared about Chester.

Then, there was the day Chester had come home from the dorms at Wesleyan College.

Clyde’s parents had just split. There was no one to talk to about his despair. Other friends hadn’t talked or seemed to care about it. Clyde had wished they would. He didn’t understand why no one cared about him. There was just so much despair.

So, Clyde welcomed Chester home and hoped to have a meaningful talk about his parents’ divorce.

They had been in the basement and got distracted from their ping pong game. Chester started telling him about college and interacted with Clyde in the same way John Randy is now communicating, using metaphors and making observations.

Chester had boasted that his college was one of the best pot smoking colleges there was. He’d reported that he’d done acid and that he had a crush on a guy who was in the jungle breaking trails with a machete. This was puzzling to Clyde.

Clyde had ignored the sense he was falling into a trap. Yet he continued to hide his distress and deny what was happening to the friendship. Finally, he learned that the jungle man Chester had a crush on was himself. At that point they had made their way up in his room and Chester tried to kiss his hand.

When Clyde had come to and he was hiding behind a sofa in the family room and Chester was in the kitchen talking to Clyde’s mother about gay marriage.

Now Clyde not only hadn’t had anyone he could talk to about the divorce, he didn’t have anyone to talk to about Chester. His Mom hadn’t proved useful.

In fact, his mom will silently judge him for years about being so sensitive about the incident. She will use this as evidence that Clyde is mentally ill. One time she had a girlfriend kiss her and she just said no and it wasn’t a big deal.

Clyde now thinks that Chester was likely tripping on acid. Somehow it helps explain why he was so freaked out as a teen.

Clyde was not proud of cutting off Chester. His resulting homophobic feelings, and the series of men who would later hit on him would be very painful for him to experience.

Clyde looked over at John Randy who was now sleeping and remembered an incident that happened a few years later with his mother.

Clyde had been noticing the way his mother was clearly acting very different with him when he came home from his summer work camp. She had been more permissive than she had ever been previously. When they went backpacking together, she had needed him and he had a sense of being idolized. Hypervigilance made him feel like it was a trap.

Then, the night he got his driver’s permit, his mom got really lit. Clyde didn’t think it was only wine she had been sipping. He had never seen her like this. She began begging him to go out and break the rules with her. She told him about all the men that were hitting on her but they weren’t as good as he. She begged and pleaded. She seemed flirtatious.

After that incident his mother seemed to cut him off. She was out partying most nights while he was up late working into the morning hours, completing school papers. The only contact she had with Clyde it had seemed was to yell at him for not eating. She didn’t show up on his prom night.  He was in the process of losing all trust he ever had in her.

That’s right, drugs may not be Clyde’s jam, but eating irresponsibly certainly was.

The following summer Clyde had landed in the hospital for the first time.

It will be many decades later but Clyde will remember being fondled in a bathtub by Chester’s sister when he was in third grade. Was it possible that this had started his hypervigilance and antagonistic feelings about sexual activity?

Not long after, Clyde will remember witnessing rape and incest among family friends. He had joined the family at a vacation cabin on the Rancocas River. He will only recapture fragments of memories. The graphic memories will feel dream-like and surreal. All he will know for sure is that he had run and been a complete coward. He is a runner not a fighter.

Once Clyde will realize he has a thing about blacking out these memories, it will bring up the question about other forgotten memories and his ongoing hypervigilance and inability to trust, forgive, or accept loved ones. Not trusting his poor mother will be a real problem whether or not it is justified.

Suddenly Clyde recognizes he is in Philadelphia nearing John Randy’s apartment. One of the non-descript male passengers is making a big deal that a cop is tailing them.

Jolted back into reality, Clyde is at a red light and accidentally jams his foot on the gas petal. The light is red and the minivan lurches forward through the light. He is so upset at himself.

“Wow, I love it! Fuck the cops,” said one of the nondescript passengers.

Clyde remembers how John Randy had invited himself to move in with Clyde when he first dropped out of his fancy college.

Clyde found he had mixed feelings about giving up his studio. When the bugs did not prove to scare John away, Clyde had relied on his therapist to help him tell John Randy, no.

Clyde didn’t want to wake up to the smell of reefer or get that reputation amongst his clean and sober neighbors.

So, John rented a place in West Philadelphia out by the colleges. It will take some years but eventually Clyde will realize that Johns father somehow owns the apartment complex.

The minivan finally arrives at John’s apartment. The crew disperses into their various vehicles. John stumbles inside and the lights go out. Then, Clyde goes home.

Luckily, for Clyde, it is a short walk to the Frankfort “L” line. Then it is just one transfer to the high speed-line.

Though Clyde has done this trip many times before, it is already past midnight which means that the stop by Camden’s Market-Street—the one close to his apartment—will be closed. He will have to get off at the downtown Camden exit. Clyde doesn’t care, he knows how to handle himself.

He finds himself thinking more about his choice to move to Camden. He remembers how his classmates had thrown him a party when he came back from the first of his hospital stays. He has to admit it was a nice thing to do, but John hadn’t really bought into the niceness of it. His heart towards his schoolmates had turned sour in the hospital. He no longer openly trusted anyone.

Kids from the streets had seemed to care more about him than his cohorts at private school. At least they saw and supported him while all the issues he had with his parents were stirred up. At school he was usually invisible.

Then, when the treatment failed and he got switched to an all-female unit, Clyde had continued to suffer stuffing his belly. His classmates just couldn’t understand the hell he’d been through.

Instead of accepting their good wishes and gift certificate graciously, he had been visibly embarrassed if not angry. He had thought about the fact classmates were the kids who had always teased him for being out of fashion and who tended to exclude him.

If not for the hospitalization, Clyde may have considered that he’d overcome these issues his junior year. He planned and organized the student body to get active in social services.

But being the identified and abused patient has a way of changing one’s perspective. Plus, John Randy had let him know that his partner had, behind his back, taken all the credit for all of his work. Many of his cohorts believed her.

Perhaps many classmates had observed his embarrassment and opposition. They would tend to take opportunities to cut into Clyde his senior year in high school when he was living with John Randy. After graduation he just wanted to get away from them as quick as he could.

When he had lost weight and had returned to the hospital for a second stay, he had invited this twenty-five-year-old photojournalist he had met at a school event to an event with his class.

“They all said you were bulimic not anorexic! And they were not very positive about you,” the photojournalist, soon to be his twenty-five-year-old girlfriend had said during their courting. Now at twenty-seven, she was the ex-girlfriend.

This had confirmed to Clyde that he had been right not to trust them.

Clyde’s mother had already let him know she was gossiping about him in the family sessions. She glorified the concerns and condolences she got from the popular kids in Clyde’s class regarding his bad behavior. Clyde couldn’t believe the therapist allowed his mother to taunt him in this manner. But the therapist had started punishing him by not letting him speak due to his non-compliant behavior.

Thus, his girlfriend’s words had confirmed that the gossip was slander and that it was controlled via his parents talking to their friends, his teachers. Clyde felt the whole school was unified against him and it only fed his self-destructive streak.

He had never started throwing up until they forced him to eat in the hospital.

In reality, Clyde’s accurate intuition often made things worse for him as it prevented him from faking his way into better relationships with others. Indeed, Clyde’s accurate intuition will get him in all sorts of trouble later in life until he learns this lesson.

Indeed, in the train it is hard for Clyde not to feel tragically flawed.

As he comes up the escalator out of the speed-line stop, he exits the tinted glass doors to witness a knife fight between two men surrounded by a sprawling crowd. One of the men stands upright with his fisticuffs up while the other positions himself horizontally swinging his knife widely. Clyde thinks about how everyone is out testing their nerves and wonders what the fight is about as he motors through the crowd.

By the time he is approaching Federal Street a black man takes a look at him and gives him support for his look perhaps or for just being out at this hour of the night. This helps Clyde feel safe. He is grateful to all the angels he’s met in this city who support him in this way. They far outweigh the stereotypes.

When Clyde hits Cooper Street, his pace quickens. He cannot wait to get back to his apartment. He takes the elevator up to the sixth floor and as soon as he enters his piping hot apartment the poor cat showers him with love.

But Clyde doesn’t waste much time with the cat. He skips over the carrots and the fruit and immediately attacks the graham crackers. Then he hits the ice cream. He isn’t even trying to restrain himself. He goes after some Pathmark muffins and makes sure to hit some of his ice, cold Crystal light drink. He eats the rest of his yogurt covered pretzels and is back at the ice cream.

After a while he goes through the closet, into the bathroom and braces himself on the sink (the throat.) He let’s go of all the disgust he feels from the night out with his so-called friends. The food blurts out of his mouth in clumps. He uses his hands to detach the clumps from the sink and wash them down. Sometimes he gets impatient and just jams the clumps into the throat. When he is empty, he returns to eating.

Clyde focuses his mind on Gwendolyn and Ray and the few people he can trust at the deli. Still, he cannot stop until he has made a dent into his hundred dollar a week food supply. In the hospital he had gone to AA meetings. He doesn’t need to turn to drugs to help him cope with the meanness in this world. He already has his jam. He pukes until he is exhausted. Then, he goes to sleep.

The post Jam on Rye in the X Generation appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

According our country’s cultural delusions, social institutions take care of people and deliver social justice based on a persons’ merits. Institutions for education, law, health, religion, athletic achievement, arts, recreation, work, transportation, housing, and social entitlements are often thought to be entities that people can trust to learn from and get the support they need to thrive in society.

Yet, there violence in the streets. Many come out of jail worse than they were when they went in. Help proffered in our involuntary psychiatric units leads to a revolving door and distain for therapy.  Board and care homes and halfway houses may subject individuals to a sense of poverty. Many of our institutions become the source of pain and trauma. Some institutions work for some people. Some people get targeted, punished and hurt and become marginalized.

Intersecting generalizations about race, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, citizenship, mental and physical health interfere with a person’s capability to self- actualize. Some people are raised to fight and fend for themselves by any means necessary and there are institutions built for them; while others are insulated from these challenges and have wealth and sometimes luxuries to lean on; and there are institutions built for them.

Cliques and societies are formed in every institution that push out people who don’t belong. Some peoples’ skills are celebrated while others are ignored and undermined. Sometimes based on a stigma, a slander or a gossip, skills or abilities get lost.

While often abuse is thought to start in the family system, much of our lives are spent outside the family in institutions that are supposed to guide us in the right direction. How, then, can some of us become mired in mental anguish? Institutional abuse is important to consider when people are suffering.

The Importance of Doing an Institutional Analysis: 

Assessing a persons’ attitude towards the institution is important towards knowing if that institution has functioned to abuse the person. Institutions can do harm in many different kinds of ways. It doesn’t only depend on what the institution is meant to do.

Consider people who thrive in an institution. If they have dealt with an institution that is positive about them like earning a spot on a travel sports team, has it led to better performance and has the selection turned out to be a good outlet for their skills and esteem?

There is a lot that can go wrong on a sports team. When a person doesn’t thrive and optimize their skill it is important to know what happened. Perhaps they went elsewhere and found another outlet or discipline to perform. This happens when we assess people’s passions and interests.

Many clinicians tend to do an institutional analysis in this manner without thinking about it. When dealing with institutional trauma, it becomes important to help a person utilize contexts and times they have thrived in institutions in order to look at the times when they haven’t.

When there is a positive experience, it is important to extract resources from those institutions. If they have a negative outlook on an institution, it is important to learn about the institutions that they did feel good about. If they did have some good experiences in which they thrived, it is important to understand what went wrong.

Often, one doesn’t get this kind of information on the first psychosocial experience. A clinician needs to remember institutional issues and return to them and excavate them later in session.

It is also important to consider resources that often aren’t addressed. Have they had success with a peer group? Have they any attachment to counterculture? In some contexts, it is important to consider institutions that are not given legitimacy like jobs working for black market industries. It is important not to judge the institution, but rather to explore it for resources.

Mental Health Institutions:

Not always do institutions with negative stigmas do people a disservice. Even when the purpose of the institution appears to be to ruin the person’s life, there are often opportunities for good learning experiences that help a person avoid complete defeat.

Thus, if they have come to contact with an institution that is thought to be negative such as a county jail or a county mental health facility, the question becomes what have they learned about themselves from the experience? In the case of mental health institutions labeling a person with a diagnosis with a poor prognosis: do they agree with the negative prediction? What happens to their social performance when they leave?

In my experience with public mental health institutions, compliance may result in a worse outcome. In twenty-five years of working in them, I have tended to see that many programs are built for social control and to maximize financial gains.

Often the way things are set up is so top down that the individual’s needs get lost in the process. Cookie cutter concepts of evidence-based practice often fail to promoting health and healing and personal growth. Some people just get worse and worse over time so that labels like schizophrenia get to be thought of as illnesses of progressive decline.

It is clearly arguable that understanding any person involves understanding how they fit in to the institutions in which they associate. It is not enough to simply learn about the list of institutions that have impacted them. It is important to learn about how they dealt with socialization in the facility in order to learn what they learned from their experience.

Thus, a clinician needs to be patient and not make too many generalizations. After all the secret stories and heaps of bullshit that might need to be excavated. A great question to ask is about people who worked in those contexts that didn’t fit the mold. Part of my reason for writing this is to encourage more people to work in these contexts who learn to counter the negative missions of many institutions.

Assessing the Impact of Abuse Within the Institution:

Often, institutional abuse is covered up and needs to be drawn out to even get seen. The victim may not even have the power to have anyone believe a word they say and that is frustrating!

To help a person heal from institutional trauma, a clinician must learn to see the person they support in a different manner than the institution that damages them sees them. That means acknowledging than an injustice is happening becomes a first step. Too many clinicians working in an institution aren’t inclined to do that. Many workers accept the status quo and impose increased trauma on an individual especially when the person is negative about the institution as they are going through it.

Acknowledging the harm is the first step. Often this is simply a listening skill that needs to develop and a sense of justice is necessary. Sometimes a clinician can suspect this is going on and ask questions that can draw out stories and abuse.

Then, a clinician can develop an alternative narrative for how things might be if the institution was being fair to them. It’s true a clinician can’t change the institution, but they can articulate and advocate for what is needed for a particular client without being able to deliver it. This is essential to building an alliance and mitigating the damage being done. It is a direct route to healing.

It becomes essential to look at what is happening through the client’s eyes.

Understanding Your Institution’s True Mission:

Each institution has a mission and people it is trying to serve. For example, if the county mental hospital is there to prevent homeless people from committing suicide it can be important to acknowledge that that is what the institution is trying to do. This might help the person who has been damaged by the institution realize why they did not fit in and get the help that they needed.

Puzzling through a county’s mentality in treating people also involves considering the bottom line which is the way the institution makes money and survives. This involves understanding the counties finances and the need of the contracting agencies to make money.

In a federal prob the county where I work has been deemed to be criminal in its services. A lot of money goes to emergency hospitalization services and not a lot is set up for treatment outside the hospital.

Abuse might involve more than just suspension of a persons’ bill of rights. It might be an institution is built to control violence and impose involuntary medication and this might have nothing to do with a person’s needs.

It might involve exposure to substandard facility hygiene and this might or might not be what the person is used to. Some might see an unhygienic unit as an insult while others may recognize it as like many other unkept situations they are exposed to.

A therapist is keen to understand the mission of their institution. Believe me it is not in the institutions mission statement! It is more likely to be seen in the metamessages that the institution puts out. It requires real-life interpretation and perhaps some Marxist financial analysis.

What was wounding about the true mission of the institution when it didn’t suit the person you are seeing in the therapy room?

Examples of Differing Institutional Missions:

In my life I have had a lot of conflict with the missions of the institutions that most powerfully affected me. I share them now to demonstrate the kind of race and class bias inherent in institutions. Indeed, if I were your patient, understanding how the mission of three of the institutions I have been subjected to is important to understanding my trauma.

When I was admitted to a state hospital during a break, it seemed like the institution was there to prepare me for living in permanent poverty. The presumption was that I would not be able to work and that I would therefore have to adjust to board and care poverty. It was built into the institution as a mechanism to fill the local businesses, according to my observation.

Enduring that mission, being treated like a piece of cattle in the field, was very hurtful to me when I transitioned back into professional work. It is important to understand the impact that being treated in such a manner has on a person.

In contrast when I attended a private prep school, ten years prior, I was taught that my classmates and I could be anything we wanted to be if we just did what they said and got transferred to an elite university. What mattered was the prestige of the university.

When I decided that I didn’t trust that institution and figured that prestige was some bullshit, four years later I graduated from a local commuter campus in the inner city. The message I got as a freshman, that most people I went to school with weren’t going to graduate, demonstrates that the mission of that particular institution was very different than the mission than my private prep school.

The help I got from the career center suggested I should be a cop. I don’t think many of my prep school graduates became cops. Believe me, it’s not the only time I was invited to join a gang that may exacerbate social violence. I received several offer in the state mental hospital.

In my case, I could see the contrast in the different institutional missions and I always knew that I didn’t fit the mold. I didn’t trust the mission of the prestige prep college. That is something you would definitely want to explore.

Luckily when I was discharged to the streets from the State hospital, I had three thousand dollars to start my life over and prove that I could work in spite of my “break.” There is a lot to explore and many stories to be told. I am in favor of letting the stories be told while assessing the re-traumatization factor. Too many clinicians are afraid to know or counter the mission of their appointed institution. We need more therapists who stand against the mold in the institutions. They do matter and can help.

The Importance of Having Faith and Extracting Resources:

It is true work on institutional trauma takes time and is best done when the clinician has a strong sense of the persons resources. There are times when the person needs to rant and rail against the way they are or have been treated. A clinician who does not believe the resources that might exist or who starts to extoll the virtues of the institution really can set the person into a traumatic response.

Thus, I think clinicians need to have faith in a person’s inner resources. I can be hard to teach this especially when the clinician is not native to the persons culture or contexts. It takes a long time to learn these multicultural skills. Setting up systems in which students and young workers are responsible for knowing things they just don’t get is not a good way to train or heal institutional trauma.

Keeping pay at entry-level salaries, hiring people who don’t have a background outside a degree, and having young managers who are eager to advance and lack cultural understanding is not a good way for organizations to address institutional trauma.

I believe clinicians who have humanistic views of various kinds of people who don’t judge people about external behaviors have a better chance of extracting a person’s resources and helping them love themselves again. Conversely being fearful and condemning of a person who has behaved in problematic manners is a good way to have the person clam up about their resources. When a clinician maintains that kind of stance, it can become a self-fulfilling prophesy that exacerbates institutional trauma

The post Why Clinicians Need to Address Institutional Trauma: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Guest post written by Samantha Jane

From Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho to M.Night Shymalan’s Split, the media has long been guilty of using psychosis as a scapegoat for fantastical criminality.

Even among newsrooms and journalists, crimes attached to any iota of mental illness are sensationalized with splashy headlines. This macabre fascination has only worsened the existing stigma towards mental health. With over 70% of the American public getting their mental health information from TVs, newspapers, and magazines, it’s not surprising that these inaccurate depictions have had negative effects:

Cases of criminal malingering have increased

A prevalent effect of misrepresented criminality within psychosis is the proliferation of malingering. Described as the act of feigning insanity to evade a heavier punishment, malingering occurs in about 17.5% of convicted criminals.

One infamous case of malingering involves one-half of The Hillside Stranglers Kenneth Bianchi. After terrorizing most of California in the 70s, Bianchi pretended to have an alternate personality (Steve) when he was captured. And he argued that Steve was the actual perpetrator. Bianchi was ultimately found guilty after his ruse was debunked. But at this point, his act had lengthened proceedings and cost the state more money. Since then, both criminal defense lawyers and convicted criminals alike have tried malingering, with many simply mirroring the signs of psychosis they see on film or TV.

Law enforcement has had to pivot their approach

As a direct consequence of the previous points, law enforcement officials have had to further their own understanding with regards to mental health. To prevent malingering and to justly identify defendants who were—or are—suffering from psychosis, many local and federal officers implement forensic psychology into their investigations. Officers who have completed either in-person or online forensic psychology degrees have been trained in abnormal psychology, criminal behavior, and social sciences. This enables them to make educated preliminary assessments of persons of interest.

Alongside this, a growing number of cities are implementing crisis intervention team training. These programs teach officers de-escalation techniques and the appropriate way to divert individuals to mental health services, when available. While these efforts have shown significant dips in unwarranted arrests or violent altercations, many states have yet to mandate these initiatives.

Vulnerable communities are further alienated from society

One of the most dangerous consequences of misrepresentation and sensationalization is the picture that it paints of those with mental illnesses. Under the guise of “informing” the public about red flags that indicate criminality, people who consume this media are influenced to fear those with mental health conditions. For instance, data suggests that 40% of all police calls are mental health-related events. This is despite the fact that only 5% of all violent crimes are committed by individuals with pre-existing mental health disorders. A study even shows that those with mental illnesses are more likely to be a victim of a violent crime, rather than the perpetrator. But even in more “white collar” circles, people are conditioned to perceive those with mental illness as untrustworthy or subversive.

Such was the case with Tim Dreby when he shared his own workplace experiences as someone with diagnosed schizophrenia. Despite the fact that Tim worked in the field of mental health, his diagnosis and survival story was used almost as blackmail. Unfortunately, a similar story is echoed across the nation as surveys show those with mental illness are up to seven times more likely to be unemployed.

Will Media Be Changing Anytime Soon?

True crime shows and horror movies are some of the most well-received media today. So, unfortunately psychosis will probably continue to get associated with criminality. Of course, this isn’t to say that some changes aren’t on the way. Organizations like the United States’ National Mental Health Association (NMHA) and Australia’s Mindframe program have begun to suggest guidelines that more fairly and safely depict mental illness. Whether these guidelines are to be widely used and accepted, though, remains to be seen. For now, criminality and psychosis are still part of an industry that seems to have little care for the widespread consequences they encourage in the name of “entertainment.”

Article written for timdreby.com

By Samantha Jane

The post Media’s Misrepresentation of Criminality and Psychosis: How it Affects Real Life appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Readers may have noticed that my productivity on my blog has decreased in recent months.

Over the past couple of years, the community mental health program where I have worked for seventeen and a half years has undergone change. This has been a significant source of grief for me as the community has lost six full-time therapists and half of its community members over that last couple of years.

I have had the need to write my way through some of these work challenges. I tend to write about what I am going through and have done so in two unpublished blogs. In these blogs I have sorted through my feelings and experiences at work. Until I sort through my professional plans and see what is going to happen at my job, I think it is best to keep these thoughts and reflections to myself.

About a year ago, I cut my hours at the job and opened up a part time private practice. I currently have no shortage of referrals and feel guilty about the long list of potential clients that sit on my wait-list. However, I am very bonded and committed to the relationships I have that remain in the community mental health program.

Last week I finally learned of a change in management. The new management wants to rebuild the program and is far more transparent about their intentions. However, changing horses in midstream will not be easy and I am fearful about what will transpire. Already top-down decisions are being implemented that may not be well received by those on the bottom.

I anticipate that my heart will continue to break in new and accelerated manners as new changes start to unfurl. Rebooting the program may change relationships and require new procedures. If it fails to work, our jobs could get cut. I hope things get better, not worse.

The Future:

Operating a private practice and being my own boss has never been my end game. A part of me wants to stay connected to community mental health. It has taken me a long time to learn how to really work with people and provide quality mutual services. I am a healer and I want to see reforms that enable me to improve recovery and justice for people. I constantly am learning about things like politics that bog down the process and do not work.

I wrote this on the fourth of July. I sit today a week later rewriting and lamenting about what I am meant to do.

Preparing to Put More Time into my Training:

I also am in the process of negotiating a deal with a local peer agency that would help me provide my training in ten session increments as a new source of income.

I will likely be turning away from publishing blogs and turning toward fixing up my six-hour PowerPoint. I hope to make the slides a bit prettier and add some interactive exercises that can be completed in a zoom format that will reinforce skills.

I am praying for optimal negotiations and a healthy experience.

The post Writer’s Block? appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We All Have Trigger Words:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Playing Politics and Creating Factions!

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding the Origins of the Trigger:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A True Outcast:

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

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

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

Mustering Up the Self-Advocacy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Becoming a Targeted Individual:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning to Fawn:

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

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

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

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

Fawning to Return to Professional Work:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fawning to Survive Psychosis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fawning for Trauma Experts:

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

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

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

Teaching the Fawning Skill:

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

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

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

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

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

Overcoming the Fawning Skill?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preoccupied with Slander Campaigns:

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

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

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

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

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

Presentation Skills:

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

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

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

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

Critical Eyes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Viewing my Performance:

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

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

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

How this Manager-Part Developed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compassion:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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