Dis-Eased Minds, The Body & Mental Illness Pt 1

We look so different on the inside.

Do we shy away from internal awareness, falling prey to the body's instinctive nature, in our experience of mental illness?

This post seeks to further explore the latest neuroscience research from the perspective of "body psychotherapy," and its approach to resolving traumatic experience.Trauma induced behaviors, often described by medical doctors as symptoms of a mental illness.

Are we converging on a much needed multidisciplinary approach towards the experience of mental illness, which does not give precedence to the disease model of mental suffering, favored by our hierarchically structured, healing professions?
Body therapists have understood the body's role in mental suffering for many decades, yet their often "intuitive" knowledge has been dismissed as unreliable compared to laboratory study.


Despite the 100 years that has passed since we first began to suspect a brain disease process and classify discrete mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, no empirical evidence of an actual disease has been discovered. Even the great advances in neuroscience research, enabled by a rise in technology have still not been able to confirm a brain disease process, yet they may be confirming body therapists “intuitive” knowledge by revealing the neurobiology of the nervous systems and bodily based feedback to the brain.

Below is excerpt from a paper by one of my favorite authors in the field of body psychotherapy, and a wonderful articulation of neuroscience and somatic psychotherapy. Please consider;

NEUROSCIENCE IN SOMATIC PSYCHOTHERAPY

ALINE LAPIERRE, PSY.D.

bipolar disorder chemical imbalance & trauma causation

A left-right brained war for our sense of self? .

Is Trauma a hidden casual factor in bipolar disorder symptoms which are expressed through the brain-nervous systems, chemical reactions? Can a trauma defense of the body be conditioned, perhaps from birth or by habitual postures of avoidance in the skeletal musculature, caused by a long experience of physical & emotional abuse, for example? Is systems theory now beginning to explain the brain/body/mind better than our older clockwork universe model of simple cause and effect explanations of a chemical imbalance?

What lies beneath our linear thinking of "one thing causes another" as if the body/brain is assembled like a machine? The cutting edge of modern psychotherapy is now returning to Freud's term "unconscious," with better understanding of left & right brain, chemical function. The notion of trauma and subsequent PTSD symptoms, is easily accepted when visualized in terms of one-off terrorizing events like war, rape, sexual and physical abuse, less easily accepted are the similar symptoms caused by emotional abuse, although it is clearly recognized by psychotherapists worldwide. 

Developmental deficits occurring during pre & postnatal experience, are being reexamined to more fully understand what we really mean by the word trauma, at the level of brain-nervous system chemistry. More particularly the impact of non-optimal experience during the crucial early years of life and brain-nervous system maturation. All the new advances in technology has aided neuroscience to more fully appreciate, that the well-balanced human personality literally means a well-balanced internal chemistry. Hence psychiatry's use of the metaphor, a "chemical imbalance" to simplify our general understanding of the experience of mental illness.  

Bipolar Dis-Ease - Its Trauma Reenactment Urges?

Read the hand - body language & traumatic reenactment urges.

An overwhelming urge is seizing control of my limbs as I walk along the pavement. A large bus is rushing towards me, securing its passage through time just a few centimetres to my left side. I can't believe how strong the physical urge is to step off the pavement and into its path.

In a by now well practiced mindful observation of inner sensations, I let the urge and the moment pass, yet can't really comprehend the reason. For the life of me I can't rationalize this apparent desire for death, this involuntary urge, with an everyday psychological explanation. I'm shocked anew, at the very nature of my own subconscious motivations, and just how powerful they can be.

All the learning, all my recently acquired knowledge about the subconscious stimulation involved in what’s happening to me right now, afford me no conscious control, in terms of prevention that is, with this reenactment of an original trauma. As I continue to drag myself along, feeling all the old familiar sensations of a depressive reaction, I can only take the opportunity to mindfully observe these overwhelmingly negative sensations. The weakness in my legs as I try to walk, a living example of the "freeze" reaction and a urgent desire for collapse.

"Did I set myself up for this," I wonder as I continue along, rehashing the phone conversation and its "shock" affect. Only thirty minutes previously I'd received news that a job application I'd been 95% certain of succeeding in, had gone to another. I'd gone numb with shock as the affable human resources person went through all the appropriate responses, while delivering his bad news. For a good twenty minutes my reaction continued in shock mode as I stayed within my thinking mind, disbelieving of reality as I tried to fend of awareness of its implications. “I’m trapped in poverty now, my stupid desire to understand stuff nobody wants to know about anyway, will be the ruin of me,” I tell myself as the noise of the passing bus recedes.

I try to catch the double-bind though, aware that the thoughts are an avoidance of a felt-sense of what’s actually happening to me. I steal myself to really feel these sensations, as bad as they are, and not think. There’s an instant of sensation awareness that shocks me to the core, a violent collapse, a fall, falling straight down through the pavement in darkened despair, “or is it disappear?” I feel it in the pit of my stomach and my legs have gone to jelly as I struggle to stay with sensation awareness and not think. It happens in flash now, a confusing, crushing, drowning sensation that is instantly gone. Displaced by the automatic urge of my mind, in nature’s kind dissociation trick of “what was that?”

Family Attachment Affects & Mental Illness. Pt 1

Daniel Bates & Audrey June Lee, my Mom, Dad & my Children
In the language of "affect," facial expressions, speak volumes.

February 2013: February 2013: Exactly 33 years on from my very first episode of euphoric psychosis, and my headline here looks like I'm about to blame & shame my Mom & Dad? Your own "at first glance" impulse, will quiet possibly be to ignore, to skip this post. Stimulated by the power of "affect." Or you may be intrigued, a cognizance, stimulated by an “affect” called "interest-excitement," and a learned word. subconscious “innate” motivations we are barely aware of, and socially encouraged to deny.

After 33 years and a decade of desire, to write about my experience of mental illness from the inside-out. I really should begin at the beginning, my birth experience and the three day labor, both I and my poor old mom endured. A traumatic experience of birth, not a mysterious brain disease, lies at the very heart of my, diagnosed as a bipolar type 1 mental illness, experience. An experience which began in 1980 with a spontaneous attempt to overcome the subconscious motivations of my, negatively "affective" experience of being born. Harshly treated by a less than empathic nursing sister, my mother struggled to give me life, an experience which deeply affected both of us. Physical pain and the psychic injury of continuous distress, were further compounded by a rather brutal forceps delivery, and no touch or sight between mother and child for a week. An experience of pain and stress which created a void between us, which persists to this very day. A void fueled by the subconsciously stimulated nature of "affect," and what all the latest neuroscience research understands as our “affective” experience of life.

“Affect,” as a subconscious experience of our heart-brain-nervous systems, sensory stimulation, (See Affect theory: The word affect, as used in Tomkins theory, specifically refers to the "biological portion of emotion," that is, to "hard-wired, preprogrammed, genetically transmitted mechanisms that exist in each of us" which, when triggered, precipitates a "known pattern of biological events," although it is also acknowledged that, in adults, the affective experience is a result of both the innate mechanism and a "complex matrix of nested and interacting ideo-affective formations.) conditioned my seemingly bipolar motivations, later in life. My diagnosed, bipolar type 1 disorder also known as an "affective disorder", or a disorder of "affect."

Traumatic experience during my birth and isolation and separation form the very source of mother nature's natural healing powers, resulted in an “affective,“ negative, conditioning of my nervous systems. An subconscious injury of overwhelming negative affect, laid the neural foundations for my classic, early adult onset of mental illness. A three day experience of distress/anguish charging a high tolerance, and "subconscious" expectation of negative experience, within my heart-brain-nervous systems. Hence, people like myself experience a self-defeating pattern of negative life-expectation/experience, motivated by the subconscious power of affect, the real "economy" of human motivation. Yet what exactly is an affect, and can it be understood by an average person like me, using the unfamiliar language of neuroscience? And what does this unfamiliar word “affect,” have to do with my diagnosed mental illness and our human sense-of-self? Well, please consider;

Secure Attachment, Affect Regulation & Origins of The Self?

A Messiah Species? Existential Meaning in Metaphors?

Is FEAR keeping us from the realization of our Cosmic Soul?
Has our modern, objective awareness lost sight of Meaning?

A messiah is a saviour or liberator of a people in the Abrahamic religions. Or a metaphor for our species?

Savior or Saviour may refer to a person who helps people achieve salvation, or saves them from something. Or a Species Redemption of Light Matter Energy?

A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that describes a subject by asserting that it is, on some point of comparison, the same as another otherwise unrelated object.
Is it time to turn our awareness inwards, to the existential meaning of spiritual metaphors, in all the worlds mythologies?


Metaphor is a type of analogy and is closely related to other rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via association, comparison or resemblance including allegory, hyperbole, and simile.
One of the most prominent examples of a metaphor in English literature is the All the world's a stage monologue from As You Like It: All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; — William Shakespeare, As You Like It. This quote is a metaphor because the world is not literally a stage. By figuratively asserting that the world is a stage, Shakespeare uses the points of comparison between the world and a stage to convey an understanding about the mechanics of the world and the lives of the people within it." From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Does Metaphor & Mythology, express innate Intuition? 
"Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without inference and/or the use of reason. "The word 'intuition' comes from the Latin word 'intueri' which is usually translated as 'to look inside' or 'to contemplate'." Intuition provides us with beliefs that we cannot justify in every case. For this reason, it has been the subject of study in psychology, as well as a topic of interest in the supernatural. The "right brain" is popularly associated with intuitive processes such as aesthetic abilities. Some scientists have contended that intuition is associated with innovation in scientific discovery. Intuition is also a common subject of New Age writings.

Intuition in Jungian psychology:
In Carl Jung's theory of the ego, described in 1921 in Psychological Types, intuition was an "irrational function", opposed most directly by sensation, and opposed less strongly by the "rational functions" of thinking and feeling. Jung defined intuition as "perception via the unconscious": using sense-perception only as a starting point, to bring forth ideas, images, possibilities, ways out of a blocked situation, by a process that is mostly unconscious.

Perception, PhD's & other MisConceptions?

Non-PhDs need not apply? A Mark of the knowledge economy?
Does higher education outweigh real-life experience, in Mental Health?

Knowledge Economy?
Is PhD research into mental health about the livelihood of researchers, more so, than the mental health of other people? 

In a hiearchically structured society, which group of people does the knowledge economy serve?
Like the money markets of the worlds stock exchanges, can knowledge be the basis of a real economy?


"We're in a knowledge economy and it is about being able to demonstrate that the most capable staff are on the books to give the best possible experience to students,"

Professor Marshall added. But such capabilities could equally come from expertise gained outside the research degree track, she said. "I would argue it is about what's fit for purpose.

Different discipline areas will require different skill sets to deliver the best outcomes for students." New universities are just as likely as those in the Russell Group of large research-intensive institutions to require academic staff to have PhDs or the equivalent relevant experience.

UK universities are increasingly pushing for academic staff to hold PhDs, an investigation has revealed. Almost 30 per cent of the 113 universities that responded to a Freedom of Information request by Times Higher Education say they have aims or commitments to increase their proportion of academics with doctorates, whether by hiring new staff or by providing training for existing employees. See: Doctoral-level thinking: non-PhDs need not apply By Elizabeth Gibney.

Does higher education provide more perceptive insights than real-life wisdom?  Especially in Mental Health where PhD's always cry, "we need more research?"
Please consider this important message of hope in Mental Illness Recovery;

Managing Mental Illness Symptoms with Buddha-ness?

Suffering, is a “mental state,” “inside” your mind, not in Reality.

There are two worlds?

1. The world of the mind.
2. The world of reality.

The world of reality is real, the world of the mind isn’t real.

The attribution of reality to the mental objects of our mind, is the cause of mental suffering.
We suffer because of the “fantasies” in our mind.

“The fantasies of your thought are not real. They are generated by your attachment, and therefore by your desire, your hate, your anger, your fear.


The fantasies of your thought, are generated by yourself” _Buddha.

We suffer because we mistake the fantasies of our mind for reality.

It is fundamental, therefore, that we learn to distinguish between reality and the fantasies of our mind.

Developing Buddha-ness awareness, can help you manage Symptoms of Mental Illness?

Buddha! Literally means Awake! Or more fully Self-Aware & attuned to Reality?

Psychosis? A Waking Dream---Nightmare?

What is, A Lucid Dream & A Nightmare Psychosis?

Psychosis! 

A waking Dream or waking Nightmare?

"The best way to describe having a psychotic episode is like a waking nightmare, where things are crazy, bizarre, frightening, confusing. With schizophrenia, you have delusions and hallucinations and disordered thinking.

Like, I was on the roof of the Yale Law School, and I was saying, "Someone's infiltrated our copies of the legal cases. We've got to case the joint. I don't believe in joints, but they do hold your body together" -- so, loosely associated words and phrases.

But, experientially, the -- the feeling is utter terror." _Elyn Saks, author, "The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness." (see: here)



Is Elyn Saks predominately negative and Western worldview of psychosis an objective fact or a subjective opinion energized by a personal/cultural fear of madness, and a lingering ignorance of the reality of its organic process? Are psychotic episodes the product of a mysterious brain disease, or are they generated by a profound dis-ease, within the body? A profound dis-ease which can stimulate a profound psychic pain subjectively represented within the mind, by nightmarish sensations and images, yet can also stimulate a psychic balm represented by glorious sensations of oneness and images and feelings of love. Is there a positive aspect to psychotic episodes? And why do so many claim its like a waking dream or nightmare?

Is REM state dreaming a proto-type of waking consciousness?
Can this, evolutionarily older brain mechanism shed light on the organic nature of psychosis and origin of our minds, subjective experience? Does a personal/cultural fear of the raw power of instincts as the roots of our human emotions and intelligence, promote a socialized denial of our own existential reality? Please consider;

The Dream? A Container of Existential Reality?

Why do both the negative and positive experiences of psychosis feel like a waking dream or nightmare? Why is the dreaming state, considered the very crucible of Madness? Consider Jaak Panksepp’s brilliant, “Affective Neuroscience – The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions,” and a chapter entitled;
“Sleep, Arousal, and Mythmaking in the Brain:

Madness & The Effects, of its Fear Affect?

"Nothing is terrible except fear itself"

"There is nothing to fear but fear itself" _Franklin Roosevelt.

A paraphrase of the line "Nothing is terrible except fear itself" by Sir Francis Bacon

Is fear an Affect! With a contagious Effect?

Is there an "unconscious," fear of mad people?
As if, Madness is Contagious?



Two simple words, Affect & Effect? What exactly do they mean, and why do they cause so much confusion about the true nature of our mental health?

Do we now understand the unconscious mechanisms of both fear, as an innate affect and our social need to deny the very existance of innate affects and the primary processes of the body. The body's evolved nature and the foundational aspects of our self-preservation and therefore our instinctual-intelligence? Consider;

"The body initiates and the mind follows. Hence “talking cures”  that engage the intellect

or even the emotions, do not reach deep enough." _Peter Levine, Ph,D.

It takes a momentary suspension of our normal reasoning, to imagine an unconscious nervous system, mediating much of our everyday social behaviors, as the evolved nervous system we share with all other mammals. As an evolved aid and defense of survival, mammals have an innate ability to feign death as a last ditch, instinct for survival. When there is no possibility of fight or flight, no possible means of escape from immediate and overwhelming threat, mammals escape into a simulated death state. (see: Madness & the Chaotic Energies of The Trauma Trap?)

Humans share an evolved autonomic nervous system with other mammals, although evolutionarily adapted to our unique needs. If we imagine such human reactions as shock, fainting, freezing in fright or even in the sensations of acute embarrassment, when we feel that desire for the ground to open beneath us. It becomes possible to see a "continuum" of instinctual motivation, in our shared mammalian ability to feign death and the instinctual roots of mental illness, caused by "intellectually" denied, innate affects?