madness-narrative

[madness-narrative]

But, of course, what the mirror projects is not our true self at all but only our reflected outer-shell. What is virtually impossible to see within a mirror is that the very essence of our humanness, our vulnerability and fragility, is the most beautiful thing we possess. Yet, when we are young that vulnerability can appear to us as shame or weakness, as we attempt to brace ourselves against what we may see as a brutal, unforgiving and judgemental world. But those who have no awareness of their own fragility, who present themselves as overconfident, armoured-up and invulnerable, sacrifice the essence of what makes them both human and beautiful. Vulnerability is the very thing that permits us to connect with each other, to recognise in others the same discomfort they have with themselves and with their place in the world. Vulnerability is the engine of compassion, and can be a superpower, a special vision that allows us to see the quivering, wounded inner world that most of us possess.

Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files, Issue n. 65

[madness-narrative]

When it starts it starts gently and softly. Don't you see, my friends, don't you see? For who wants to live when he has no breath, the black sail always hoisted. Who wants to live when he has no breath, the black sail always hoisted, the day only a night, the night only a day, when everything goes and nothing more comes and never will come again. During the day, the desolation so loved, so hated.

Ingeborg Bachmann, "Gently and Softly"

[madness-narrative]

Understand this if you understand nothing: it is a powerful thing to be seen.

Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater

[madness-narrative]

In my own community, with many severely handicapped men and women, the greatest source of suffering is not the handicap itself, but the accompayning feelings of being useless, worthless, unappreciated and unloved. It is much easier to accept the inability to speak, walk or feed onself than it is to accept the inability to be of special value to another person. We human beings can suffer immense deprivations with great steadfastness, but when we sense that we no longer have anything to offer to anyone, we quickly lose our grip on our life. Instinctively we know that the joy of life comes from the ways in which we live together and that the pain of life comes from the many ways we fail to do that.

Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved (thanks, Will Hall)

[madness-narrative]

Emotions, too, are relational. As children, we learn about sorrow, fear, and other emotions only when they are recognised, named, and responded to empathically. Emotional energy flows between and among us. It doesn't stop at the boundary of the body or the imagined "boundary" of the ego. These "boundaries" do not prevent the unconscious emotions of the older generation from turning up in the dreams and unconscious of the younger. We feel one another's feelings--though, as with our own feelings, not necessarily consciously. Transpersonal feeling-with-others is built into our cells-an intuitive and powerful way of knowing if harnessed, a potentially destructive process if unconscious. [...] Emotional energy is transpersonal. It's not "inside" any more than it is "outside." It flows through us and is transmitted intersubjectively. Grief, fear, and despair in the human family carry information that remains private and disempowered so long as we see it as "mine" alone.  [...] In search of healing, the victim of violence and other kinds of trauma must have the courage not only to enter her woundedness, but also to reach out and find connection to others, to some larger community of meaning. What helps her is not just an interior journey but a wider view of her problem--a sense that others have experienced this pain and that she is not alone in it. The single greatest barrier to her healing and transformation is not really the traumatising events in themselves but her isolation. This isolation, to my way of thinking, is not so much a failure of the individual to find connection as it is a failure of the human community to offer connection to the individual. Feeling and healing are transpersonal events. The redemptive power of the dark emotions cannot find its full flowering until we can match the deepening of our awareness--a going-in, getting-deeper process--with the expansion of our awareness--a going-out, getting-wider process. We are more than our atomised autobiographies. We are all connected, for better and for worse. In this interconnectedness lies the only hope for global healing and redemption. The pain of the world is carried in our bodies and hearts. Locked away, the pain can harm us--emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Consciously liberated in community, it moves us to a deeper sense of connection and compassion, helping us heal not only ourselves but our environment. Look into the pain of the world and you find your own private pain writ large. Look into your heart and you find the broken heart of the world.

Miriam Greenspan, Healing through the dark emotions: the wisdom of grief, fear, and despair

[madness-narrative]

In the final analysis, power is the right to have your definition of reality prevail over all other people's definition of reality.

Dorothy Rowe

[madness-narrative]

Now surfaces a curious paradox: a popular notion has it, as I indicated above, that hearing voices means a person is crazy. A common comment goes like this: "well, I talk to myself, but I'm not really crazy unless I start answering." To the contrary, I suggest that we all hear voices, and that the way to evolve is to hear them better, not to stop them. Hearing them better means listening with ever expanding awareness that then becomes available to the part of us that is a choice maker. Craziness is not having the equipment to listen to ourselves; evolving sanity is having the equipment, plus the courage. Sanity expands as we learn to facilitate the speaking of the voices, the listening, and the replying through an aware ego.

William Taegel, The Many Colored Buffalo: Transformation Through the Council of Voices

[madness-narrative]

Being abandoned by those who have the power to help produces a loneliness more profound than simple isolation.

Jill Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard

[madness-narrative]

It takes us a long time, many of us longer than others, to come out of the darkness of our feelings of unworthiness, of unlovableness. Of allowing that liquidity to happen. Of feeling safe to be in the presence of love. When I first experienced my guru loving me, my mind kept flickering with the thoughts of "if he only knew." And then I realised that he did know, and he was still loving me. And it took me through the "da da da da..." And whatever you are, however you are at this moment, when you can accept that you are lovable, then the fear starts to dissolve. It's allowing your own beauty. It's allowing the beauty of your soul, which is behind your personality, it's behind all that stuff. Just another radiant bit of light. Another soul. And I think at this moment, there's nothing violent to do, you just observe the kind of sadness, the feeling of loneliness, the feeling of separateness, the feeling of pain. You just watch it and allow it. And don't get too fierce about it or don't feel too deprived about it, don't milk the self pity of it, you know. Just notice that it's just more passing show. It's just another place your mind is grabbing. It's all mind, you realise that? The only thing you're stuck in is not even history, it's just mind. It's a model you have of who you think you are and who you think everybody else is. That's all it is. That's exactly what's causing your suffering at this moment is your own thought forms and your clinging to them and saying "this is real." It's like somebody who sees a rope and they think it's a snake and they get frightened, and then somebody says, "it's just a rope" and then suddenly they're not frightened anymore. And it's as simple as that, it really is the mind. And that's finally why you're driven to work on your mind. To quiet your mind. Because you see the way your personality is really just a series of thoughts that you keep investing. Like the first moment you felt the sadness or the loneliness or the emptiness or the pain, that started a whole track of "oh, this is like I've always felt in the past" and you started to build the whole storyline all over again. And if at that moment it's just "ah, sadness, oh, yes."  Comes and goes. I would say that most people in this room, if you scratch the surface, you will find some residual unworthiness, from just having grown up on Earth. I mean, it's interesting because you don't understand that the personality itself is rooted in fear and vulnerability. That's where the root is of it. Because you go from being, can you imagine being the baby that is everything in the universe to starting to be this little vulnerable tiny thing. And the first time you realise there are big forces and you're not them, how incredibly inadequate one must feel, if you could give words to it. And every one of us has been through that, that moment. And for most of us it's buried so deeply we can never get hold of it.

Ram Dass, Dissolving the Fear, Finding Your Own Beauty

[madness-narrative]

The child entrapped in this kind of horror develops the belief that she is somehow responsible for the crimes of her abusers. Simply by virtue of her existence on earth, she believes that she has driven the most powerful people in her world to do terrible things. Surely, then, her nature must be thoroughly evil. The language of self becomes a language of abomination. Survivors routinely describe themselves as outside the compact of ordinary human relations, as supernatural creatures or nonhuman life forms. They think of themselves as witches, vampires, whores, dogs, rats, or snakes. Some use the imagery of excrement or filth to describe their inner sense of self. In the words on an incest survivor: “ I am filled with black slime. If I open my mouth it will pour out. I think of myself as the sewer silt that a snake would breed upon.” By developing a contaminated, stigmatised identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readily given up even after the abuse has stopped; rather, it becomes a stable part of the child’s personality structure. Protective workers who intervene in discovered cases of abuse routinely assure child victims that they are not at fault. Just as routinely, the children refuse to be absolved of blame. Similarly, adult survivors who have escaped from the abusive situation continue to view themselves with contempt and to take upon themselves the shame and guilt of their abusers. The profound sense of inner badness becomes the core around which the abused child’s identity is formed, and it persists into adult life. The malignant sense of inner badness is often camouflaged by the abused child’s persistent attempts to be good. In an effort to placate her abusers, the child victim often becomes a superb performer. She attempts to do whatever is required of her. She may become an empathic caretaker for her parents, an efficient housekeeper, an academic achiever, a model of social conformity. She brings to all these tasks a perfectionist zeal, driven by a desperate need to find favor in her parents’ eyes. In adult life, this prematurely forced competence may lead to considerable occupational success. None of her achievements in the world redound to her credit, however, for she usually perceives her performing self as inauthentic and false. Rather, the appreciation of others simply confirms her conviction that no one can truly know her and that, if her secret and true self were recognised, she would be shunned and reviled.   [….] Survivors of chronic childhood trauma face the task of grieving not only for what was lost but also for what was never theirs to lose. The childhood that was stolen from them is irreplaceable. They must mourn the loss of the foundation of basic trust, the belief in a good parent. As they come to recognise that they were not responsible for their fate, they confront the existential despair that they could not face in childhood. Leonard Shengold poses the central question at this stage in mourning: “Without the inner picture of caring parents, how can one survive?…Every soul-murder victim will be wracked by the question ‘Is there life without father and mother?'” The confrontation with despair brings with it, at least transiently, an increased risk of suicide. In contrast to the impulsive self-destructiveness of the first stage of recovery, the patient’s suicidality during the second stage may evolve from a calm, flat, apparently rational decision to reject a world where such horrors are possible. Patients may engage in sterile philosophical discussions about their right to choose suicide. It is imperative to get beyond this intellectual defense and to engage the feelings and fantasies that fuel the patient’s despair. Commonly the patient has the fantasy that she is already among the dead, because her capacity for love has been destroyed. What sustains the patient through this descent into despair is the smallest evidence of an ability to form loving connections. Clues to the undestroyed capacity for love can often be found through the evocation of soothing imagery. Almost invariably it is possible to find some image of attachment that has been salvaged from the wreckage. One positive memory of a caring, comforting person may be a lifeline during the descent into mourning. The patient’s own capacity to feel compassion for animals or children, even at a distance, may be the fragile beginning of compassion for herself. The reward of mourning is realised as the survivor sheds her evil, stigmatised identity and dares to hope for new relationships in which she no longer has anything to hide.

Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

[madness-narrative]

It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself -- that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

[madness-narrative]

It's O.K. to need. Trying not to have a need that you do in fact have makes a lot of trouble. Even if you can't get it, don't fight needing it."

Eugene Gendlin, Focusing

[madness-narrative]

Long-term use of the medications is surging in the United States, according to an analysis by The Times. One reason: withdrawal symptoms they were never warned about that make it difficult to stop.

Some scientists long ago anticipated that a few patients might experience withdrawal symptoms if they tried to stop — they called it “discontinuation syndrome.” Yet withdrawal has never been a focus of drug makers or government regulators..

The drugs initially were approved for short-term use, following studies typically lasting about two months. Even today, there is little data about their effects on people taking them for years, although there are now millions of such users.,

“The tapering rates given by doctors are often way, way too fast,” said Laura Delano, who had severe symptoms while trying to get off several psychiatric drugs. She has created a website, The Withdrawal Project, that provides resources on psychiatric drug withdrawal, including a guide to tapering off.

“It has taken a long, long time to get anyone to pay attention to this issue and take it seriously,” said Luke Montagu, a media entrepreneur and co-founder of the London-based Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry, which pushed for Britain’s review of prescription drug addiction and dependence.

“I have seen lots of people — patients — not being believed, not taken seriously when they complained about this,” he added. “That has to stop.”

[madness-narrative]

We all have addictions, which I would define as ways that we develop, often unconsciously, to avoid pain, but that ultimately create more pain for ourselves. [...] You know, I needed to see the limits of my control and I also needed to have the experience of surrendering and expecting everything to be horrible, expecting to be engulfed by certain psychedelic experiences and actually realising when I surrendered, that this terrifying lack of control that I was trying to avoid, it actually turned into, you know, you can't really put it into words, but if I had to I would say love, connection, yeah, those are the two words that come to mind.

Adam Strauss interviewed about The Mushroom Cure

[madness-narrative]

We believe that the most terrifying and destructive feeling that a person can experience is psychological isolation. This is not the same as being alone. It is a feeling that one is locked out of the possibility of human connection and of being powerless to change the situation. In the extreme, psychological isolation can lead to a sense of hopelessness and desperation. People will do almost anything to escape this combination of condemned isolation and powerlessness.

Jean Baker Miller and Irene Stiver, The Healing Connection

[madness-narrative]

[R]eal liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.… By accepting the darkness, the patient has not, to be sure, changed it into light, but she has kindled a light that illuminates the darkness within. By day no light is needed, and if you don’t know it is night you won’t light one, nor will any light be lit for you unless you have suffered the horror of darkness.

Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

[madness-narrative]

"When you let go, and you feel like you're going to die, that it's really that letting go that is the essence of the healing process. So that where I was holding on, if I had known more about the holding on, is the friction, the stress. The letting go is the learning, is the opening to something new. That's not as easy to do as to say. I wish I would've known more that people had explored these spaces and you wouldn't die. Your ego is sort of dissolved and that gets muddied and confused with physical death and ego doesn't really die either, it's just in different place.

Rick Doblin