Bipolar Disorder Batesy

Mad Visions or Mental Illness? Part 1

2012-02-01T00:31:00.000-08:00

Myth & Metaphors of Personal Meaning

“If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor” _Joseph Campbell.

The Universe saves itself from a Dark & Silent Fate?

By Evolving into a form that can act upon Itself - You?

Euphoric Senses Fall into Awareness of an Eternal Now?

Heaven is Felt as The Eternal Now Emerging Within?

Metaphor, Myth, Meaning & The Hidden World Within?

Its about the transformation of reactive energy states, not objective labels (metaphors)?

"Yeah right! - You've been away with pixies again our David," I hear my Uncles say.
"Told ya to leave those magic mushrooms alone! - Oh! Sorry I forgot, you don't need any, you nut job!" I hear ex lovers bemoan.
"Tut, tut, we warned you about mental illness, off medication," I hear psychiatrists refrain.
"Yeah I know its a very touchy subject, madness as mental illness is a debate with a wide variety of individual experience and objective professional judgment." This is my particular experience though and I don’t paint with a broad brush here, suggesting a universal application. Or do I?

Do the post headlines speak of mental illness & psychosis, a break with normal reality, or personal revelation? Not that I think I'm a messiah, although that may have been your, at first glance judgment? Perhaps more a further dissolving of personal identity, once euphoria energized sensations, enabling intuition fades? Or are these simply the mad notions of a diseased brain, and what do they have to do with everyday normality anyway?

A two part essay in analysis of a month of manic euphoria; its metaphors & meaning?

Where is the objective sense of normality in linking Led Zeppelin's song "Stairway to Heaven," with William Blake's famous painting of "Jacobs Ladder," you might ask? Its just a song, its just a painting, and there cannot be any method or purpose in the experience of madness? In this two part essay I explore my own altered states of perception from the viewpoint of metaphor and meaning. Exploring the hidden nature of my internal energies, my DNA's double helix and the double bind of a mind-body split that can't see the shadow on my cosmic soul?

Perhaps a little background is in order before I try to explain a month or so of emotional euphoria. Since 2007 I have allowed the euphoric energy involved in my bipolar type 1 (as described in DSM IV) experience to unfold as it will and there has been no fall into depression. Next month will be the 32nd anniversary of my first experience of mania, which embraced the same savior sensations and thoughts that all my subsequent mania's have. After 1980 there was a 27 year experience of cyclic manic depression, mostly self managed due to medication side effect, intolerance.

In January 2010 I came to Thailand to give myself the time, space and opportunity to seek a deeper self awareness, although rationalized as a desire to write a book at that time. I’ve been here two years now and although there is no book yet, there has been a steady re-authoring of my self narrative, with a deeper self awareness of a much needed emotional maturing process.

What I mean by emotional maturing, is the ongoing integration of the energies of perceptual awareness within me. It has been a process of learning a felt perception of myself beyond the habitual self comforting rationalizations of my mind. Going down into the cave beneath the surface impressions of my minds objective awareness, so to speak. As Joseph Campbell says;

"The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek." _Joseph Campbell.

Perhaps it is the body’s capacity for harmonic resonance through its combined senses, that is the cave I enter when experiencing altered states of perception? Down beneath my minds object oriented “what is It,” view point? The heat and heightened energies generated by hyper-elation or euphoria, seems to enable deeper sensory associations, enabling intuitive ideas to form. All that I've heard, seen, read and previously symbolized in thought, becomes suffused with an expanded sensory awareness.

Yet can symbolizing words/labels like intuition be any more than metaphors for our unknowable immersion in the wider matrix of life and the cosmos? Surely all that is sensed as experience in any one our lived moments, cannot be encapsulated in any single word or words.

Does all the recent knowledge about hidden electro-chemical stimulation within the body/brain, make much of our thoughts and language mere metaphor for the complex energies of our perceptions? Does our minds eye view tend to squash a complex sensory awareness into a focused reference for our immediate survival needs? Hence we perceive with a narrowed sense of objectivity that may be far more self deceiving than insightful?

Descartes Error? "I think therefore I am." Maybe not Self Aware?

Within the Body/Brain - Stimulation involves Electro-Chemical Activity?

From the perspective of this hidden and unconscious process, much of our language can be understood as metaphor, and particularly mythology and the creative arts? Even nursery rhymes take on a different meaning when viewed as an expression of all this electro-chemical activity within? When the internal reality of electro-chemical stimulation is kept in mind, sensation and perception take on new meaning, beyond a normal object-like understanding of ourselves. We generally use external shapes and forms in analogies of self interpretation, totally unaware that our internal world is very different to our minds eye view of the external world.

Please be still and mindful of all you can sense within the passing of "one and two and three and four and five," seconds? Did you stay wholly within a "mind" sense of self and count, did you feel deeper, “mindless” sensations lost to awareness as thought occurs? In my own journey, this paradox of mind and mindless self awareness arose during meditation exercises to gain awareness of my unconscious (mindless) nervous system activity. This is how I manage/control the unconscious energies of my highly sensitive disposition these days, (see here).

It is the electro-chemical nature of my unconscious experience and its expression through metaphor that so intrigues me, now that I no longer paint a euphoric episode with sensations of shame, no longer feel an attachment to the stigma of judgmental blame. Now un-afraid and unashamed to face my experience of sensations within, I seek to further define the reality of my being. To sift through the various needs of self support and self definition, while wondering if I’m sensing something deeper still?

Touching the Void in a sense of Electro-Chemical Reactions?

It is while holding the notion of metaphors and these hidden electro-chemical processes in mind, that I explore my altered states of perception these days, particularly an eerie sense of immersion within the DNA matrix of an electro-chemical Universe.

Last November another relationship crisis threatened me with loss and isolation, causing a defensive "reaction formation," and a flight into the e-motivation of Euphoria. Perhaps a traumatic birthing process conditioned an unconscious and dense terror state, as the very foundation of my reactive energies within? A deep fear of the void in loss and isolation, which became my life challenge to face?

"Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find

the river of peace or highroad to the soul’s destination." _Joseph Campbell.

The Double Helix & The Double Bind in our Nature?

Section of DNA. The bases lie horizontally
between the two spiraling strands.

I've had millisecond flashes of a deeper perception breaking through a conscious barrier, since an extraordinary out of body experience when I was twelve years old. In the hustle and bustle of everyday life though, there is pressure to suppress such experience and get on with a normal life. Standing on a cliff top, having sensation flashes of the earth turning against the night sky, instead of the other way round, is quickly dismissed as weird by a majority people. "Its just your overactive imagination," they say. A euphoric sense of imagination that led me to impulsive posts on facebook.com last November, 17th;

"Change Ur Metaphor. Think Chemical Universe & FEEL HER LOVE. There is NO SEPARATION. ALL IS ONE! 1 love. 1 world. 1 tribe. Every WORD is a Projection of HER LOVE INSIDE YOU. Ur Electro-Chemical Connection. This AOM. This Age of Mythology. Sight the WORD & FEEL the CAVE. You can "Know Thyself" & BE ONE TRIBE!"

"U R JACOB - U R THE LADDER."

Metaphor & Meaning - The Double Helix & The Double Bind?

The Conservation constriction of our Object like Thinking is Blind to Metaphor & Meaning?

"There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold
And she's buying a stairway to heaven
(And) when she gets there she knows if the stores are all closed
With a word she can get what she came for."

Often the millisecond conservation urge of human homeostasis (comfort zone) need stimulates conservative thought, rushing over these words too fast, to assume its about human form & a woman? Yet is the gold she seeks an object or deeper meaning? Is the lady a human woman or Gaia mother nature?

"Ooh ooh ooh...ooh...ooh ooh ooh
And she's buying a stairway to heaven.

There's a sign on the wall but she wants to be sure
'Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings
In the tree by the brook there's a songbird who sings
Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven

Oooh...It makes me wonder
Oooh...It makes me wonder

There's a feeling I get when I look to the west
And my spirit is crying for leaving
In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees
And the voices of those who stand looking

Oooh...It makes me wonder
Oooh...And it makes me wonder

And it's whispered that soon, if we all called the tune
Then the piper will lead us to reason
And a new day will dawn for those who stand long
And the forest will echo with laughter

A White Stone in the Book of Revelations?
A Slingshot to the Stars in David & Goliath?

Woe woe woe woe woe oh
If there's a bustle in your hedgerow
Don't be alarmed now
It's just a spring clean for the May Queen
Yes there are two paths you can go by
but in the long run
There's still time to change the road you're on

And it makes me wonder...ohhh ooh woe

Your head is humming and it won't go -- in case you don´t know
The piper's calling you to join him
Dear lady can you hear the wind blow and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind

And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our souls
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
When all are one and one is all, yeah
To be a rock and not to roll
Ooooooooooooh

And she's buying a stairway to heaven." _Led Zeppelin.

Jacob's Ladder - William Blake.
The Double Helix in our DNA?

When I read the lyrics above from the perspective of cellular electro-chemical energy expressing itself through a meaning making mind, the words-metaphors take on entirely different meaning to a normal and objective perception of daily life. The Biblical story of Jacobs Ladder takes on new context, as a mythological interpretation of an unconscious inner journey, rather than literal history? I also wonder what ultimately seeks expression in my impulse to post;

"I guess I could think of those 100 billion neurons in my head & the 100 that are in my gut, as a chemical implant from outer space? Sort of makes me feel we are immersed in it when I metaphor life this way? Is that what quantum mechanics means by oneness & no separation? A chemical Universe? Just a thought? Nothing mysterious after all, just a simple, natural reality?" on November 17th 2011.

I guess I could think of it as an expression of the code written in my DNA, emerging within the reality of an Eternal Now? After all, there are notions that time is an illusion, as is all shape and form and that all that ever was and will be, happened in one eternal moment, and this is it? Which does beg the question about madness experience and what the nature of delusion really is?

In the isolated minds of people like myself, are we wrestling with the same depth of existential awareness that bleeds through every age of our common humanity? Like the reference to the white stone above, which in terms of existential metaphor can be seen as prophetic of the age of our current sense of being? Are our notions of soul a metaphor for the reality of a cosmic sense of being? A cosmos that perceives itself through our eyes?

New Living Translation (©2007)
"Anyone with ears to hear must listen to the Spirit and understand what he is saying to the churches. To everyone who is victorious I will give some of the manna that has been hidden away in heaven. And I will give to each one a white stone, and on the stone will be engraved a new name that no one understands except the one who receives it."

I do believe that we are in an age when spirituality and science is converging, as science uncovers more of the hidden reality to our meaning making mind, and its attempt to interpret its true purpose. As for the new name in the above verse, I'd rename the human race WUMAN in light of our heaven sent talent for metaphysics and in the hidden manna of our DNA? I do believe we would see that heaven is right where its always been, waiting for our mature perception?

“When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to

experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following:

That which you are was never born and will never die..” _Joseph Campbell.

I find this in a thoughtless stillness these days, just looking out & seeing, feeling what I'd always rushed over? Although it takes a withdrawal from hustle & bustle into deep stillness to sense this. What comes through for me is the metaphor interpretations of thoughts that reflect on the nature of being & minds true purpose?

The Double Bind in our Mind-Body Split?
"Don't talk about that emotional shit man! - You just upset other people!"
"A double bind is an emotionally distressing dilemma in communication in which an individual (or group) receives two or more conflicting messages, in which one message negates the other.

This creates a situation in which a successful response to one message results in a failed response to the other (and vice versa), so that the person will be automatically wrong regardless of response.

The double bind occurs when the person cannot confront the inherent dilemma, and therefore cannot resolve it or opt out of the situation. Double binds are often utilized as a form of control without open coercion—the use of confusion makes them difficult to respond to or resist."

Is there an inherent double bind in the nature of our civilizing society? The unspoken rules that bind us all together, also hinder the individuation process and the exploration of life's deeper meaning, which can only be divined at an individual level of felt/thought sense?

Such is the double bind for the psychotic in our public hospitals too, who desperately wants to explore the nature of this experience, while normal reason seeks to suppress it for the greater good?

Highly reactive and specific energy states known as affects are contagious and we fear their effect on an unconscious level? The double bind here is a specific energy state known as "Distress/Anguish," which unconsciously prompts us away from another's "affective disorder."

Is this the double bind dilemma of our mind-body split, in being motivated by unconscious energies that are rationalized in order to maintain our homeostasis (comfort zone). Do we get trapped in a self deceiving cycle of unconscious-conscious motivation, like the need for short and easily grasped explanations, for the complexity of our own nature?

Imagine being in a darkened cinema, when suddenly smoke alarms go off and people shout "fire," its extraordinarily difficult to keep a mindful sense of reason and not be "affected" by a rush of blind panic. Those panicked flights that cause injury and death in such circumstances are stimulated by the specific energy state we call Fear/Terror.

It is the raw nature of such highly reactive energies within that we suppress and adapt for our social communication, and resist when its expression is too much for others to contain? Does changing the metaphors of our self interpretation allow us to search beneath the double bind of our social expression/suppression and our mind-body split?

A suppression of raw internal energies that begins in early childhood when "acting out," starts to be suppressed towards the needs of conformity and managing a social homeostasis (comfort zone) of togetherness. Its ok to scream and jump and shout in almost any public place when your three years old, but frowned upon when your sixty. No wonder we love spectator sports so much, where grown ups get the sanctioned opportunity to "act out."

In managing my personal experience I now use a sense of my internal world and its reactive energies to go beyond the diagnostic labels (metaphors) of mental illness. As described (here) in "calming your bipolar symptoms," I feel for inner tensions with a "mindless" felt sense of my inner energies and their stimulation of my sense of being.

For example, after a life time of too much negative experience "Anger/rage," as an energized state is always expressed in my jaw, my neck and shoulders, and this is often where I start to alter my internal energies by letting go of tension. In a daily practice of sensing my internal energies as expressed in the stimulation of muscular tensions, I find that the tone and flow of my minds thoughts are also affected. Increasingly what I'm sensing are the electro-chemical energies of my minds stimulation and its deep immersion in a wider matrix.

The Double Helix & Natures Stairway to Heaven?

The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and The Origins of Knowledge by Jeremy Narby.
A personal adventure, a fascinating study of anthropology and ethnopharmacology, and, most important, a revolutionary look at how intelligence and consciousness come into being.
This adventure in science and imagination, which the Medical Tribune said might herald "a Copernican revolution for the life sciences," leads the reader through unexplored jungles and uncharted aspects of mind to the heart of knowledge.

In a first-person narrative of scientific discovery that opens new perspectives on biology, anthropology, and the limits of rationalism, The Cosmic Serpent reveals how startlingly different the world around us appears when we open our minds to it. "The Cosmic Serpent is a spellbinding, scholarly tour de force that may presage a major paradigm shift in the Western view of reality." _Michael Harner, Ph.D., president, Foundation for Shamanic Studies, and author of The Way of the Shaman.

Medicine's Symbol & its Shadow Within?
The Evolutionary Power of our DNA?
The Double Bind in a Mind/Body Split?

Western medicine see's the delusions in altered states of mind a result of illness, a disease process. People like myself who experience the euphoric sensations of "mania" are dismissed as sick, because of the disruption to normal life patterns inherent in the experience. Yet consider how in the last decade or so, western medicine's objective view has been astounded by the accuracy of primitive knowledge of complex biology, derived from altered, delusional states of mind?
The tri layered evolution of the brain has long been "intellectually," understood, and its primitive roots symbolized in metaphor myths & art as cosmic serpents and dragons, all over the world. Is there a double bind in our objective sense of normality that prevents a felt access to the evolutionary power of the double helix within?

A sense of isolation inherent in feelings of rejection has always triggered my most powerful flights into mania, so well mythologized in the Greek legend of Icarus. The flight to close to the heat of Sun and its subsequent fall into icy depths, have long symbolized the experience of manic depression, now dispassionately diagnosed as bipolar disorder.

Does this less emotive description of manic depression represent the very real dilemma of our social nature and its double bind compromise? In order for the mind to gain distance from overwhelming instinct and emotion, it takes an overly "object" like view of the holistic nature of experience.

The scientific mind slices and dices nature into separate parts to get an "objective" grip on the nature of being. Does an altered state of mind we label delusion fall into an overwhelmingly holistic sense of nature though? In February 1980, I went looking for guidance in the first 24 hours of a new and overwhelming experience, yet in the very real nature of chaos, chance and circumstance that underpins our existence, I did not find it?

No guidance and inexperience in coping with a new found sense of being, led me to amplify my felt senses with the imaginative power of my mind. Is this the classic dilemma of a mind-body split in the actuality of our experience? Only upon reaching an age and a level of life experience, have I entered a time and place in my life when I can afford to explore the hidden nature of a mind-body split. Only now after considerable experience and self educated research, do I truly believe my euphoric episodes have personal and cosmic purpose.

Consider Narby‘s “The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and The Origins of Knowledge” and his open and honest account;

“The first time an Ashaninca man told me that he had learned the medicinal properties of plants by drinking a hallucinogenic brew, I thought he was joking. We were in the forest squatting next to a bush whose leaves, he claimed, could cure the bite of a deadly snake.

"One learns these things by drinking ayahuasca," he said.

But he was not smiling.

It was early 1985, in the community of Quirishari in the Peruvian Amazon’s Pichis Valley. I was 25 years old and starting a two-year period of field-work to obtain a doctorate in anthropology from Stanford University. My training had led me to expect that people would tell tall stories.

During my research on Ashaninca ecology, people in Quirishari regularly mentioned the hallucinatory world of ayahuasqueros, or shamans. In conversations about plants, animals, land, or the forest, they would refer to ayahuasqueros as the source of knowledge. Each time, I would ask myself what they really meant when they said this.

My fieldwork concerned Ashaninca resource use - with particular emphasis on their rational and pragmatic techniques.

To emphasize the hallucinatory origin of Ashaninca ecological knowledge would have been counterproductive to the main argument underlying my research. Nevertheless, the enigma remained: These extremely practical and frank people, living almost autonomously in the Amazonian forest, insisted that their extensive botanical knowledge came from plant-induced hallucinations.

How could this be true?

The enigma was all the more intriguing because the botanical knowledge of indigenous Amazonians has long astonished scientists. The chemical composition of ayahuasca is a case in point. Amazonian shamans have been preparing ayahuasca for millennia. The brew is a necessary combination of two plants, which must be boiled together for hours.

The first contains a hallucinogenic substance, dimethyltryptamine, which also seems to be secreted by the human brain; but this hallucinogen has no effect when swallowed, because a stomach enzyme called monoamine oxidase blocks it. The second plant, however, contains several substances that inactivate this precise stomach enzyme, allowing the hallucinogen to reach the brain.

So here are people without electron microscopes who choose, among some 80,000 Amazonian plant species, the leaves of a bush containing a hallucinogenic brain hormone, which they combine with a vine containing substances that inactivate an enzyme of the digestive tract, which would otherwise block the hallucinogenic effect.

And they do this to modify their consciousness. It is as if they knew about the molecular properties of plants and the art of combining them, and when one asks them how they know these things, they say their knowledge comes directly from hallucinogenic plants.”

"Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up

every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever

abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." _Thomas Huxley.

Consider Narby’s double bind predicament as a western educated man with a rational and objective view of delusional content?

"Colleagues might ask,

"You mean Indians claim they get molecularly verifiable information from their hallucinations? You don’t take them literally, do you?"

What could one answer?

There is nothing one can say without contradicting two fundamental principles of Western knowledge.

First, hallucinations cannot be the source of real information, because to consider them as such is the definition of psychosis. Western knowledge considers hallucinations to be at best illusions, at worst morbid phenomena.

Second, plants do not communicate like human beings. Scientific theories of communication consider that only human beings use abstract symbols like words and pictures and that plants do not relay information in the form of mental images.

For science, the human brain is the source of hallucinations, which psychoactive plants merely trigger by way of the hallucinogenic molecules they contain.

It had become clear to me that ayahuasqueros were somehow gaining access in their visions to verifiable information about plant properties. Therefore, I reasoned, the enigma of hallucinatory knowledge could be reduced to one question:

Was this information coming from inside the human brain, as the scientific point of view would have it, or from the outside world of plants, as shamans claimed?

Both of these perspectives seemed to present advantages and drawbacks.

On the one hand, the similarity between the molecular profiles of the natural hallucinogens and of serotonin seemed well and truly to indicate that these substances work like keys fitting into the same lock inside the brain. However, I could not agree with the scientific position according to which hallucinations are merely discharges of images stocked in compartments of the subconscious memory.

I was convinced that the enormous fluorescent snakes that I had seen thanks to ayahuasca did not correspond in any way to anything that I could have dreamed of even in my most extreme nightmares. Furthermore, the speed and coherence of some of the hallucinatory images exceeded by many degrees the best rock videos, and I knew that I could not possibly have filmed them.

On the other hand, I was finding it increasingly easy to suspend disbelief and consider the indigenous point of view as potentially correct. After all, there were all kinds of gaps and contradictions in the scientific knowledge of hallucinogens, which had at first seemed so reliable.

Scientists do not know how these substances affect our consciousness, nor have they studied true hallucinogens in any detail. It no longer seemed unreasonable to me to consider that the information about the molecular content of plants could truly come from the plants themselves, just as ayahuasqueros claimed.

However, I failed to see how this could work concretely.

Maybe I would find the answer by looking at both perspectives simultaneously, one eye on science and the other on shamanism."

* * * *

Note Posture & Personality & Neg Energy Affect in my Jaw?

Over the last decade my own journey has revolved around self education into neurobiology, metaphor, myth and meaning, and of coarse the experience of my own madness states. Since 2007 I went looking for the scientific and other evidence that would prove my growing feeling that my experience is not a disease process. "If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.” _Joseph Campbell. I have changed my metaphors (labels) to expressed energy states described as Affective Motivation.

Affective motivation deals with the way in which individuals experience, process, and behave based on emotions. This group of theories complements the host of rational-based motivational theories that are more cognitive. There are a number of ways in which emotions, or our affective states, are involved in the motivation of behavior. Remember that motivation is the force that energizes, directs, and sustains behavior. How are emotions involved in these three forces?

Individuals exist in, and move among, one of three Affective States:

Positive Affective State. The individual is experiencing positive feelings, such as relaxation, excitement, pleasure, or joy.

Neutral Affective State. The individual is experiencing little or no noticeable feelings at the present time.

Negative Affective State. The individual is experiencing negative feelings and emotions such as emotional pain, anxiety, guilt, frustration, boredom, or anger.

The basic premise of affective motivation theories is that individuals experience emotional reactions to certain situations. Emotional reactions are, in reality, physiological states (e.g., changes in blood pressure, heart rate, chemical secretions) that we feel as a reaction to certain situations. Over time, we develop labels for these “feelings” which are based on the context in which we experience them.

From an affective perspective, what energies, directs and sustains behavior? (Note: Most theorists believe that behavior is result of a complex combination of, or conflict between, cognitive and affective processes. Neither process alone, or in its pure state, explains behavior.

Science & Psychiatry's Cognition vs Emotional Energy - A Double Bind?

Psychiatry’s “chemical imbalance,” as a diseased brain process has launched a massive search for the empirical proof of this hypothesis, with as yet only more proof that introduced chemicals do indeed affect the body/brain. Each time objective research seems to be approaching a definitive answer to the origins of abnormal experience, only more questions assail our understanding. Perhaps it takes a wider breath of knowledge and experience to combine the knowable and the unknowable to satisfactory affect, with belief and faith playing a role that our objective rationalism will never be able to identify?

The Placebo Effect?
Patients given a placebo treatment will have a perceived or actual improvement in a medical condition, a phenomenon commonly called the placebo effect. Placebos are widely used in medical research and medicine, and the placebo effect is a pervasive phenomenon, in fact, it is part of the response to any active medical intervention. The effect of placebos has been shown by randomised controlled trials to be very large. The placebo effect points to the importance of perception and the brain's role in physical health.

If you ask a scientist or psychiatrist about the natural phenomenon of placebo effect, there is an acknowledgement of its reality, yet a reluctance to explore its nature, just as there is a general resistance to disturbing our comfort zone, in fear of unidentifiable phenomena. Simple belief and faith are considered to be aspects of our nature belonging a bygone era, for the objective rationalism of science research and psychiatry's current belief about mental illness.

Yet increasingly people all over the world are suggesting that science is a rigid belief system that takes the actuality of the lived experience out of its research, in order to maintain its comfort zone approach, of studying the phenomena of life in a slice and dice state of detachment? Is this the double bind of maintaining homeostasis (comfort zone) in the face of life's raw motivational energies?

Certainly one of the most difficult aspects of living with such periodic experiences of abnormality, is the not knowing why or how? Not being able to identify the source of the threat from within that so torments the mind, has the actual "affect" of maintaining its potency. It has been by changing my cognitive labels to felt energy states, that I have found relief and acceptance of my overly sensitive condition, and have changed my belief about its nature and its purpose.

One writer describes the madness experience as a kind of “tough grace,” and perhaps this is the cross that some of us are born to bare? My own experience of manic depression is the classic early adult onset, well known prior to our current era of the medical model of brain disease.

Isolation has always been both a burden to me and a friend, when grounded by the secure attachment of an intimate relationship, the darkness of night sky has held a sense of wonder. When suffering the loss of secure attachment though, I'm plunged into the hyper-vigilance of previous trauma experience, and the reaction energies of escape into a euphoric flight. It is in this heightened energy state that I sense a oneness with nature and that eerie feeling of something deeper still. It always reminds me of a favorite song;

Someone keeps calling my name

Or is it just the rustling of the wind

Or is it just that I need a friend

Someone keeps calling my name, my name _Harry Chapin.

My name is Jaime, fifteen years I've been to young
Is it time to taste the truth and toss it off my tounge?
The world has come a-calling and it's bleeding at my door
Am I supposed to turn away, or is this what I'm here for?

Someone keeps calling my name
Someone keeps calling my name
Or is it just the rustling of the wind
Or is it just that I need a friend
Someone keeps calling my name, my name"

* * * *

Back to Narby's amazing book and my excited facebook post about Jacobs Ladder;

"My research revealed that in the early 1960s, anthropologist Michael Harner had gone to the Peruvian Amazon to study the culture of the Conibo Indians. After a year or so he had made little headway in understanding their religious system when the Conibo told him that if he really wanted to learn, he had to drink ayahuasca.

Harner accepted, not without fear, because the people had warned him that the experience was terrifying. The following evening, under the strict supervision of his indigenous friends, he drank the equivalent of a third of a bottle. After several minutes he found himself falling into a world of true hallucinations.

He saw that his visions emanated from "giant reptilian creatures" resting at the lowest depths of his brain.

These creatures began projecting scenes in front of his eyes.
"First they showed me the planet Earth as it was eons ago, before there was any life on it. I saw an ocean, barren land, and a bright blue sky. Then black specks dropped from the sky by the hundreds and landed in front of me on the barren landscape.

I could see the ‘specks’ were actually large, shiny, black creatures with stubby pterodactyl-like wings and huge whale-like bodies.... They explained to me in a kind of thought language that they were fleeing from something out in space.

They had come to the planet Earth to escape their enemy. The creatures then showed me how they had created life on the planet in order to hide within the multitudinous forms and thus disguise their presence. Before me, the magnificence of plant and animal creation and speciation - hundreds of millions of years of activity - took place on a scale and with a vividness impossible to describe.

I learned that the dragon-like creatures were thus inside all forms of life, including man."
At this point in his account, Harner writes in a footnote at the bottom of the page:
"In retrospect one could say they were almost like DNA, although at that time, 1961, I knew nothing of DNA." I had not paid attention to this footnote previously.

There was indeed DNA inside the human brain, as well as in the outside world of plants, given that the molecule of life containing genetic information is the same for all species. DNA could thus be considered a source of information that is both external and internal - in other words, precisely what I had been trying to imagine.

I plunged back into Harner’s book, but found no further mention of DNA. However, a few pages on, Harner notes that "dragon" and "serpent" are synonymous. This made me think that the double helix of DNA resembled, in its form, two entwined serpents.

The reptilian creatures that Harner had seen in his brain reminded me of something, but I could not say what.

After rummaging around my office for a while, I put my hand on an article called "Brain and Mind in Desana Shamanism" by Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff. Paging through it, I was stopped by a Desana drawing of a human brain with a snake lodged between the two hemispheres.

Several pages further into the article, I came upon a second drawing, this time with two snakes. According to Reichel-Dolmatoff, within the fissure, "two intertwined snakes are lying....

In Desana shamanism these two serpents symbolize a female and male principle, a mother and a father image, water and land...; in brief, they represent a concept of binary opposition which has to be overcome in order to achieve individual awareness and integration. The snakes are imagined as spiraling rhythmically in a swaying motion from one side to another."

Concerning the Desanas’ main cosmological beliefs, Reichel-Dolmatoff writes:
"The Desana say that in the beginning of time their ancestors arrived in canoes shaped like huge serpents."
I was astonished by the similarities between Harner’s account, based on his hallucinogenic experience with the Conibo Indians in the Peruvian Amazon, and the shamanic and mythological concepts of an ayahuasca-using people living a thousand miles away in the Colombian Amazon.

In both cases there were reptiles in the brain and serpent-shaped boats of cosmic origin that were vessels of life at the beginning of time. Pure coincidence?

To find out, I picked up a book about a third ayahuasca-using people, entitled (in French) Vision, Knowledge, Power: Shamanism Among the Yagua in the North-East of Peru. In this study by Jean-Pierre Chaumeil (to my mind, one of the most rigorous on the subject), I found a "celestial serpent" in a drawing of the universe by a Yagua shaman.

Then, a few pages away, another shaman is quoted as saying:
"At the very beginning, before the birth of the earth, this earth here, our most distant ancestors lived on another earth...."
Chaumeil adds that the Yagua consider that all living beings were created by twins, who are "the two central characters in Yagua cosmogonic thought."

These correspondences seemed very strange, and I did not know what to make of them. Or rather, I could see an easy way of interpreting them, but it contradicted my understanding of reality: A Western anthropologist like Harner drinks a strong dose of ayahuasca with one people and gains access, in the middle of the twentieth century, to a world that informs the "mythological" concepts of other peoples and allows them to communicate with life-creating spirits of cosmic origin possibly linked to DNA.

This seemed highly improbable to me, if not impossible. Still, I had decided to follow my approach through to its logical conclusion. So I casually penciled in the margin of Chaumeil’s text: "twins = DNA?"

These indirect and analogical connections between DNA and the hallucinatory and mythological spheres seemed amusing to me, or at most intriguing. Nevertheless, I started thinking that I had perhaps found with DNA the scientific concept on which to focus one eye, while focusing the other on the shamanism of Amazonian ayahuasqueros.

About this time, as I continued looking out for new connections between shamanism and DNA, I received a letter from a friend who suggested that shamanism was perhaps,
"untranslatable into our logic for lack of corresponding concepts."

I understood what he meant, and I was trying to see precisely if DNA, without being exactly equivalent, might be the concept that would best translate what ayahuasqueros were talking about.

As I browsed over the writings of authorities on mythology, I discovered with surprise that the theme of twin creator beings of celestial origin was extremely common in South America, and indeed throughout the world. The story that the Ashaninca tell about Avíreri and his sister, who created life by transformation, was just one among hundreds of variants on the theme of the "divine twins."

Another example is the Aztecs’ plumed serpent, Quetzalcoatl, who symbolizes the "sacred energy of life," and his twin brother Tezcatlipoca, both of whom are children of the cosmic serpent Coatlicue.

When I read the following passage from Claude Lévi-Strauss’ latest book, I jumped:
"In Aztec, the word coatl means both ‘serpent’ and ‘twin.’ The name Quetzalcoatl can thus be interpreted either as ‘Plumed serpent’ or ‘Magnificent twin.’"
A twin serpent, of cosmic origin, symbolizing the sacred energy of life? Among the Aztecs?

I wondered what all these twin beings in the creation myths of indigenous people could possibly mean. I was trying to keep one eye on DNA and the other on shamanism to discover the common ground between the two. I reviewed the correspondences that I had found so far.

Ruminating over this mental block, I recalled Carlos Perez Shuma’s challenge:
"Look at the FORM."

I had looked up DNA in several encyclopedias and had noted in passing that the shape of the double helix was most often described as a ladder, or a twisted 'rope ladder', or a spiral staircase.

It was during the following split second, asking myself whether there were any ladders in shamanism, that the revelation occurred:

"THE LADDERS! The shamans’ ladders, ‘symbols of the profession’ according to Métraux, present in shamanic themes around the world according to Eliade!"

I rushed back to my office and plunged into Mircea Eliade’s book Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy and discovered that there were "countless examples" of shamanic ladders on all five continents, here a "spiral ladder," there a "stairway" or "braided ropes."

In Australia, Tibet, Nepal, ancient Egypt, Africa, North and South America, "the symbolism of the rope, like that of the ladder, necessarily implies communication between sky and earth. It is by means of a rope or a ladder (as, too, by a vine, a bridge, a chain of arnyaw, etc.) that the gods descend to earth and men go up to the sky."

Eliade even cites an example from the Old Testament, where Jacob dreams of a ladder reaching up to heaven, "with the angels of God ascending and descending on it."

According to Eliade, the shamanic ladder is the earliest version of the idea of an axis of the world, which connects the different levels of the cosmos, and is found in numerous creation myths in the form of a tree.

Until then, I had considered Eliade’s work with suspicion, but suddenly I viewed it in a new light. I started flipping through his other writings in my possession and discovered: cosmic serpents.

This time it was Australian Aborigines who considered that the creation of life was the work of a, "cosmic personage related to universal fecundity, the Rainbow Snake," whose powers were symbolized by quartz crystals.

How could it be that Australian Aborigines, separated from the rest of humanity for 40,000 years, tell the same story about the creation of life by a cosmic serpent associated with a quartz crystal as is told by ayahuasca-drinking Amazonians?

The connections that I was beginning to perceive were blowing away the scope of my investigation. How could cosmic serpents from Australia possibly help my analysis of the uses of hallucinogens in Western Amazonia? I tried answering my own question:

One, Western culture has cut itself off from the serpent/life principle, in other words DNA, since it adopted an exclusively rational point of view.

Two, the peoples who practice what we call "shamanism" communicate with DNA. Three, paradoxically, the part of humanity that cut itself off from the serpent managed to discover its material existence in a laboratory some three thousand years later.

People use different techniques in different places to gain access to knowledge of the vital principle. In their visions shamans manage to take their consciousness down to the molecular level. This is how they learn to combine brain hormones with monoamine oxidase inhibitors, or how they discover 40 different sources of muscle paralyzers, whereas science has only been able to imitate their molecules.

When they say their knowledge comes from beings they see in their hallucinations, their words mean exactly what they say. According to the shamans of the entire world, one establishes communication with spirits via music. For the ayahuasqueros, it is almost inconceivable to enter the world of spirits and remain silent.

Angelika Gebhart-Sayer discusses the "visual music" projected by the spirits in front of the shaman’s eyes: It is made up of three-dimensional images that coalesce into sound and that the shaman imitates by emitting corresponding melodies. I should check whether DNA emits sound or not.

It seemed that no one had noticed the possible links between the "myths" of "primitive peoples" and molecular biology. No one had seen that the double helix had symbolized the life principle for thousands of years around the world. On the contrary; everything was upside down.

It was said, that hallucinations could in no way constitute a source of knowledge that Indians had found their useful molecules by chance experimentation that their "myths" were precisely myths, bearing no relationship to the real knowledge discovered in laboratories.

At this point, I remembered that Michael Harner had said that this information was reserved for the dead and the dying.

Suddenly, I was overcome with fear and felt the urge to share these ideas with someone else. I picked up the phone and called an old friend, who is also a writer.
I quickly took him through the correspondences I had found during the day: the twins, the cosmic serpents, Eliade’s ladders.

Then I added:

"There is a last correlation that is slightly less clear than the others. The spirits one sees in hallucinations are three-dimensional, sound-emitting images, and they speak a language made of three-dimensional, sound-emitting images. In other words, they are made of their own language, like DNA."

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

Then my friend said,
"Yes, and like DNA they replicate themselves to relay their information."

I jotted this down, and it was later in reviewing my notes on the relationship between the hallucinatory spirits made of language and DNA that I remembered the first verse of the first chapter of the Gospel according to John:

"In the beginning was the logos" - the word, the verb, the language.

That night I had a hard time falling asleep.

My investigation had led me to formulate the following working hypothesis: In their visions, shamans take their consciousness down to the molecular level and gain access to information related to DNA, which they call "animate essences" or "spirits."

This is where they see double helixes, twisted ladders, and chromosome shapes. This is how shamanic cultures have known for millennia that the vital principle is the same for all living beings and is shaped like two entwined serpents (or a vine, a rope, a ladder ... ).

DNA is the source of their astonishing botanical and medicinal knowledge, which can be attained only in defocalized and "nonrational" states of consciousness, though its results are empirically verifiable.

The myths of these cultures are filled with biological imagery. And the shamans’ metaphoric explanations correspond quite precisely to the descriptions that biologists are starting to provide. Like the axis mundi of shamanic traditions, DNA has the form of a twisted ladder (or a vine ... ); according to my hypothesis, DNA was, like the axis mundi, the source of shamanic knowledge and visions." The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and The Origins of Knowledge by Jeremy Narby.

* * * *

Mad Visions or Mental Illness?
The question posed in the title of this article seeks to cast doubt on the diagnosis that I and many others feel is an incomplete description of the manic depressive experience. I focus here on the experience of mania in its hyper state, which psychiatry deems to be a psychosis. What I question is whether my own experience of psychosis is a feature of the human condition and does in fact serve a purpose, for both individual and group maturity.

My challenge to emotional maturity came in the form of a spontaneous shift in internal energy state described in The Man in the Mirror, the second chapter of a personal memoir;

"I prayed sincerely, promising I'd do whatever was required if he’d just show me the way, give me a sign, help me please! Nothing happened for what felt like minutes as I sat there in hopeful expectation while looking at my own reflection, looking into my face. Then it began, a new sensation, a feeling at the top of my head which flowed down slowly, down through my face, into my shoulders and down through my chest, down into my pelvic area. I sat with a sense of "what is it” wonder, although more felt than in any thinking sense.

A sense of wonder that was similar to the out of body experience when I was fourteen, except this slowly descending calm was the polar opposite of the sudden sharp elevation, when I'd seemly left my body. It felt like I'd been sitting in a bath of water that was over my head and someone had pulled the plug.

I sat there as calm descended slowly from head to toe, as if a mind numbing tension were being drained out of me, like waste water flowing down and out through my toes. Next came a mindful realization of the experience in a pleasant and very welcomed surprise. I felt unburdened somehow, refreshed and excited, happy and new. "Wow! Wow! Wow! Has God just touched me on the shoulder? Is this a religious experience?"

It is thirty two years ago now that the urgency of my gift and curse first began, I'd prayed to God, and no matter how hard I have tried to forget the ecstasy of euphoria that moment triggered, someone or something has kept calling my name. Since 2007 I have dedicated my time and energy into solving my personal puzzle, reading dozens of books, hundreds of article's and many, many scholarly papers.

What rises from the body as 9 energy affects?

My quest brought me here to Thailand, were I have found a different approach to life, compared to my own Anglo Saxon, Christian culture. Contemplating the postured images of Buddha, and practicing a mindful/mindless meditation has helped to identify my hidden energy states, within.

When looking at and contemplating the meaning of a nine headed serpent in this image, I can't help but associate it with Narby's Cosmic Serpent and Affect Theory's Nine Innate Affects? Particularly when I see other images of Buddha that depict him with nine heads, suggesting his all encompassing wisdom.

These are emotive associations I know, not scientific, not objective and not cognitively labeling? Many such postured images of the great teacher have challenged me to go beneath my labeling mind and FEEL the energized state of my lived moments.

These past two years have challenged me to go beyond my double bind of maintaining a comfort zone, while touching on the raw reactive energies within. In learning to go beneath my thoughts, "my mind sense of experience," I feel for the motive energy in my emotions these days. Beneath my minds sense of sadness or euphoria, I have found that there are muscular tension patterns so habitually avoided, that I now practice a daily awareness of them.

It has given me the belief that these inner body tensions are the very seat of my bipolar experience? Such daily practice led to a sense of "mood was about movement, before the mind evolved," and has helped me to sense the avoidance energies within, that kept me living in my head too much.

I now think all activity within the body/brain is essentially about energy regulation, including our thoughts? Its a different way to understand oneself, compared to our taken for granted sense of objectivity and the cognitive labels we use to understanding ourselves?

It is interesting to note that so many of the truly great teachers of the past, did not give their wisdom to others in the two dimensional format of the written word. What we come to learn of these great hero's of the soul, is passed down by others often far removed in time and place.
Sadly, I think that what is missing in the written word is the immediacy of presence, of resonance and the effect of the teachers awareness of eternity?

On an Energy Level - No Separation?

In November last year I started to fall into such an awareness of eternal now, resonating with my new understanding of the electro-chemical energies within. "We are immersed in a chemical Universe, there is no separation," I thought.

It has changed my understanding of our metaphor, meaning making mind, and brought a sense of "meant to be," to my life's experience.

Consider this post on November 20th;

"Are we in the prophecy of the FALL? In this chemical universe, can we learn to heal a divided self & feel all those Rivers of color in our Eyes, as the Art of the Cosmic Goddess Inside? Is that her Light in Ur Eyes? YOU can see her symbology of biology everywhere when we look with the eyes of a Child? Think Chemical Metaphor Now? Not Just Objectivity? Please learn to combine the two sides of Ur Nature? Educate Ur-Self about the nature of YOU!"

Keeping in mind the video clip above of the brain's inner workings, and this notion of a double bind in our nature? Please watch "falling into you," by Celine Dion and note any associations you think/feel of electro-chemical energies within? Feel the struggle of a "mind sense" of self trying to stay above the e-motive sway of image and sound in this very moving song?

Can you sense the Nature of a Double Bind & The Double Helix in your DNA?

The Power of Now - Is An Eternal Now in Mother Natures Stairway to Heaven?

Lyrics:
And in your eyes I see ribbons of color
I see us inside of each other
I feel my unconscious merge with yours
And I hear a voice say, "What's his is hers"

I'm falling into you (falling into you)
This dream could come true
And it feels so good falling into you

I was afraid to let you in here
Now I have learned love can't be made in to fear
The walls begin to tumble down
And I can't even see the ground

I'm falling into you (falling into you)
This dream could come true
And it feels so good falling into you

Falling like a leaf, falling like a star
Finding a belief, falling where you are

Catch me, don't let me drop!
Love me, don't ever stop!

So close your eyes and let me kiss you
And while you sleep I will miss you

Oh I'm falling into you
This dream could come true
And it feels so good falling into you

Falling like a leaf, falling like a star, oh
Finding a belief, falling where you are

Falling into you
Falling into you
Falling into you

Our blind survival instincts affect an initial negative response towards any unknown novelty in our environment, including, it seems our internal environment? Is this the hidden source of our double bind, in identifying the nature of our own reality? Finally identifying the internalized sense of threat from traumatic experience, has allowed me to express more of my true nature, both in relationship with others and the writing I do here.

Identifying the source of my emotional constriction, not with cognitive labels or any words of self identification, but with a "mindless," felt sense of my inner self. As Joseph Campbell suggested, if we want to change our world, we should change our metaphor? Mine has become a sense of electro-chemical energy and the meant to be nature of existence, now that I've accepted the instinctual shadow that binds me to nature and my cosmic soul.

Our shadows taller than our souls
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
When all are one and one is all, yeah
To be a rock and not to roll
Ooooooooooooh

And she's buying a stairway to heaven. _Led Zeppelin.

In part two of this essay, I explore the convergence of science & spirituality from a Western and Eastern perspective. Explaining more of those crazy facebook posts last November.

References:

The Structure of DNA.

The Gaia Hypothesis.

Human homeostasis (comfort zone).

The Double bind theory of psychological defenses.

The Reaction formation of defenses.

Book of Revelation 2:17.

The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and The Origins of Knowledge. Reviews & Discussion.

Negative Affectivity.

Affective Motivation.

The Placebo Effect.

Mental Disorder & The Felt Sense of Self?

2012-01-27T07:46:00.000-08:00

From Felt-Sense to Felt-Self:
Neuroaffective Touch and the Relational Matrix. _Aline LaPierre, Psy.D.
As a long term sufferer of an affective disorder (Bipolar Disorder 1) as its subjectively categorized in the DSM 1V, a more primary communication with others has helped me stabilize cyclic energies & discover a lost, felt sense of self.

Merging a subjective, cognitive sense of self with a felt sense of self is helping me find an increasing sense of wholeness and well being?

Now living in a culture where interpersonal communication is based more on emotional connection via gesture, facial expression and voice intonation, than sophisticated dialogue, I'm daily invited to feel more than think? Involved in a relationship with no shared language, we are forced to communicate via our primary sources of inter-personal contact. Look's and touch are our means of reaching common understanding, as we discover the surprising depth of connection and communication involved in our mutual gaze and eye contact?

The flashing language of our eyes seems to speak more than a hundred words can say, and my troubled soul is finding its way home again? "Don't you miss the more sophisticated conversation from back home," a fellow expat asked me recently. "Sometimes, but I really needed to discover just how much I avoided myself in all that clever dialogue," I replied. Squinting eyes signaled his perplexed response, with no real need to say, "what do you mean?"

Before I came to Thailand I had read as much of the latest knowledge on the neurological underpinnings of our subjective experience, as I could get my hands on. It was a self education quest fueled by the failure of subjective analysis, to find better self interpretation and self regulation of mood. Forced into a primary form of inter-personal communication, new knowledge has found an experiential integration beneath my minds subjective awareness. Newly acquired knowledge about my brain and nervous system took on real depth and meaning through the primacy of body language.

During training to become a therapist in Sydney Australia, I remember well the topic of touch in the client - therapist relationship. Touch, like in the classroom has become increasingly taboo in a first world culture that sanctify's the power of cognition over the felt sense of being. Touching client's is strongly discouraged in many therapies that favor rational interpretation and fear the possible consequences of litigious accusation. Losing touch with one another also seems to be a particular malaise of our techno driven modernity, which coincides with an explosion in mental health problems? Our we loosing our grounded sense of self to a highly subjective mind?

For many years now, I have held the view that my experience of bipolar disorder, is a deep need to redress a developmental issue in my maturing process. Some suggest an emotional re-enactment of a missing experience during childhood, a missing need. That classic mania is a spontaneous, unconscious attempt to correct a thwarted emotional development. More scientific explanations of this view is what I searched for in the language of neurobiology and its research into the human condition. Here is an example;

"Noting the commonalities between elation as a basic practicing period mood in infants and manic symptomology in adults. Elation as a basic mood is characterized by an experience of exaggerated omnipotence which corresponds to the child's increasing awareness of his muscular and intellectual powers. The similarity between the two is striking.

Manic disorder has also been described in terms of a chronic elevation of the early practicing affect of interest-excitement; this causes a "rushing" of intellectual activity and a driving of the body at uncontrollable and potentially dangerous speeds." (Schore, 1994).

Since 2007, when I first began to explore my experience of manic depression by allowing it to unfold rather than suppressing it, this link between the need for elation in infancy and manic euphoria in adult life has rang true for me. It speaks to a constricted childhood experience, when I "held myself in," to avoid disturbing my father's unpredictable and rather volcanic rage.

My first experience of mania is captured perfectly in "a basic mood is characterized by an experience of exaggerated omnipotence which corresponds to the child's increasing awareness of his muscular and intellectual powers." I describe the muscular release of habitual tension and its affect on my sensory perception, leading to mania (here) In this post I would like to share more of a reading education that is bringing me an ongoing vindication of my views of an emotional need rather than medical illness, in classic manic depression.

From the paper; From Felt-Sense to Felt-Self: Neuroaffective Touch and the Relational Matrix. _Aline LaPierre, Psy.D.
"As a result of the current interdisciplinary rapprochement, a new-found interest in the use of touch in clinical treatment is challenging the classical view that physical contact is an intrusive and detrimental violation of neutrality. Basic research conducted by Tiffany Field (1995), director of the Touch Research Institutes at the University Of Miami School Of Medicine, shows that touch is at the foundation of relational experience and, in parallel to facial play and dyadic gaze, is a fundamental mode of interaction in the infant–caregiver relationship.

There is now widespread evidence that the basic nonverbal mechanisms of the infant–caregiver relationship are activated in the patient–therapist transference–counter-transference relationship. This principle has been incorporated into somatically–oriented clinical contexts, and so touch as a therapeutic intervention is emerging as a valuable tool to address breaches in the development of the relational matrix which cannot be reached by verbal means alone.

When we consider the somatic experiences of the preverbal infant for whom language links are yet unformed, or the neuronal and biochemical infraverbal processes that underlie verbal thought throughout the lifespan, we realize that tending to the inner life of the body—to the lifelong relationship between bodily experience and mental states—is experiential territory only beginning to find its rightful status in our treatment approaches which have privileged reason over affect and somatic states (Harris, 1998)."

As I've described in my account of a shift into altered perception, what took place was fundamentally a somatic experience. "Then it began, a new sensation, a feeling at the top of my head which flowed down slowly, down through my face, into my shoulders and down through my chest, down into my pelvic area. I sat with a sense of "what is it” wonder, although more felt than in any thinking sense.

A sense of wonder that was similar to the out of body experience when I was fourteen, except this slowly descending calm was the polar opposite of the sudden sharp elevation, when I'd seemly left my body. It felt like I'd been sitting in a bath of water that was over my head and someone had pulled the plug. I sat there as calm descended slowly from head to toe, as if a mind numbing tension were being drained out of me, like waste water flowing down and out through my toes."

What I believe led me into mania over the following 24 hours, was inexperience in managing the energies contained in my new sensory experience. And a life long need to nurture myself by the use of relational fantasy, led to an amplification of natural senses into delusion via vivid imagination. Enter the professional psychiatrist with his knowledge of medical intervention, for disruptions to a sense of normality.

In a preference for cognitive interpretation and the proven sedative effects of psychotropic medication, my psychiatrist doctor determines a medical illness. His training ranks him above other professions that explore the somatic nature of human experience and he views notions of energy release and balance as nonobjective, unscientific and in a practical sense counterproductive. Yet continuing research into the electro-chemical mechanisms of our body/brain speak increasingly in terms of shifts in metabolic energy states.

"The core of the self lies in patterns of affect regulation that integrate a sense of self across state transitions, thereby allowing a continuity of inner experience." (Schore, 1994).

Consider your reaction to a sudden and very loud noise close by, every human being has a startle response to this phenomena. A sudden freeze followed by a hyper-vigilant scan that seeks the source of possible threat. We all know what this looks like externally and describe it in those terms, yet internally there is an instant shift the energy state of the body/brain. What we are consciously aware of is an action response, yet beneath awareness electro-chemical reactions take place as a sudden shift in metabolic energy stimulates the action response.

Learning to get back in touch with my felt sense of self, after a life time of avoidance by using intellectualism has brought a more balanced and complete sense of self in an ongoing reunion of thought/felt sense in immediate experience. Like in the movie "sliding doors," fate is a matter of chance and circumstance and who knows how my life would have unfolded if I'd seen a somatic therapist and not a psychiatrist in 1980. Consider;

"Somatic Psychology has evolved to address the perceptual experience of the sensory channels to prepare patients to self-regulate their own physiological activation. Somatic techniques guide a patient’s attention inward to the interoceptive sensations—body heat, involuntary and voluntary muscular contractions, organ vibrations, skin sensitivity—to bring awareness to these invisible, usually unconscious, hard to perceive internal activities.

As a patient learns to increase conscious receptivity to internal visceral-affective experiences, a somatically-trained psychotherapist often uses touch and/or movement to guide,
stabilize, or stimulate impulses. The intent is to help a patient engage in a sensory dialogue that nurtures neurological deficits, encourages new neurological connections, elicits dormant impulses, stabilizes hyperactivation, and releases dysfunctional patterns in order to organize and facilitate neural interconnectivity and employ the body’s regulatory mechanisms in new ways."

Touch and the Relational Matrix:

"Lyons-Ruth (1999), Co- Director of Academic Training in Child Psychology at Cambridge Hospital and a leading attachment theorist, concludes that developmental change is based on unconscious, implicit representation rather than on symbolized meaning. She argues that “procedural systems of relational knowing develop in parallel with symbolic systems, as separate systems with separate governing principles”

Touch requires a specific focus of intention and attention and this in-depth, therapeutic and psychologically significant touch could be referred to as neuroaffective touch. Informed by current neurobiological, emotional, and developmental theories, a psychotherapist using neuroaffective touch focuses on tracking signals in the different physiological systems (skeletal, ligamentous, muscular, visceral, endocrine, nervous, fluid, and fascial) as they operate to keep the soma–psyche in dynamic balance."

Psychiatrist's view our sense of self through the minds cognition, its symbolized meanings (word thoughts), while a somatic therapist is interested in the implicit sense of self and its sensory experience within the body. Perhaps if I had seen a therapist more interested in my heightened sensory experience during my initial shift into a new sense of awareness, I might have discovered a growing balance of thought/felt experience much sooner? I might have learned to regulate my emotional energies much better a long time ago?

In a recent email reply to someone asking advice about a loved one going through psychosis, I suggested limiting verbal communication and calming by a compassionate acceptance and presence that uses appropriate proximity and the non verbal contact of eyes, gesture and touch. It is a very common experience of people in these crisis periods being made even more agitated by the dispassionate question and answer regime that greets them in formal medical settings. What is being acted out in psychosis are the primary, unconscious energies of our being, rational questions evoke a frustrated sense of being completely miss-understood.

Grounding exercises through mindful awareness, are now a common practice in many therapies treating mental health disorders. We all have a sense of that split between mind and body that can feel a bit like two separate people at times. As Ruth Lyons points out, “procedural systems of relational knowing develop in parallel with symbolic systems, as separate systems with separate governing principles.” Is it the loss of a felt sense of self through the experience of trauma that leads us into the imbalance of mental/emotional disorder?

Unconsciously Unsafe leads to Mental Torment?

2012-01-26T03:01:00.000-08:00

Behind closed eyes, a dreamer's in-tension?

I froze for a split second, faltered in my approach to her. I recovered quickly, acting out the ritual "how are you." Yet the damage was done. The scene set for an exchange more uncomfortably tense than relaxed and spontaneously flowing.
"Dam! She's so beautiful and I'm aching to get close to her," I remember thinking as I re-ran the scenes in my head and the way it might have gone if I could only get over it. This ice in my gut that tensions my shiver of flight. Or is it fright?

Its the slightest effect, flashing through my whole body in an instant. Always there, no matter how much mindful rehearsal I do beforehand. All those affirmations of positive intent, never dissolved its unconscious nature. An involuntary reaction that I couldn't control. Over the years, the pain of miss-tuned connection drove me mad! Down into the hell of fearful isolation, even in a crowded room?

Over the years my mind seemed to amplify the effect with the worrisome concern of, WTF is it? The frozen pool that should have been the health spa spring of emotional well being, became a beast of torment, the bad me within. The "my fault," guilt, shame and self blame, became the rage of a beast that eats from within.

Over the years I tried everything from pills to spiritual affirmations, mindful meditations of followed breath and gratitude for the smallest blessings. There were periods of calm and steady progress, always interrupted by unexpected "got ya" moments, which set the whole shame blame feeding cycle of again. Looking back on my darkest hours of torment, I can well understand how notions of being possessed come to mind.

Mary was the girl's name, such a vision to behold, a heavenly goddess of beauty, in an embodied reflection of divine light. I re-run that same miss-attunement scene again, playing it out like an old home video through a mind's eye projector lens. Edited version added as well, with all that we might have said and done, if I'd slipped seamlessly into easy flirting. The fist glance look before my little freeze reaction had spoken of a want in her too. “Dam! I could have used the divine light line too, she is Catholic after all.” "Alas, my poor soul, fate colludes towards deep regret and heaven is not sent, in such moments of lost innocence."

Hmm! Another fantasy of self support, of self nurture through times of heart felt isolation? The real thing lost and enacted through imagination, a fantasy simulation? There were times when the simulation kept me warm on lonely nights though. Melted the frozen pool and allowed the health spa spring of emotion to flow? 'You can't have a relationship with ghost,' a therapist once told me about such fantasy re-enactments. Perhaps he sought to break through my icy shiver by evoking the heat of anger, yet it felt like judgment and blame.

"Why am I one of those who has to pick things apart? - Why do I need to see exactly how it works?" I once complained during group therapy. "The 1950's kid with a meccano set," a group member quipped .
Much later I read, "Therapists need to understand that the cues of a therapeutic setting are extremely critical to the clinical process. Insight is not going to do very much with PTSD, but intonation will do a lot." _S, Porges.

Intonation of the voice is therapeutic for PTSD? How on earth does that work?

In time I came to understand that feeling unsafe was the keystone of my life long habit of miss-connection. My icy shiver of heart felt interruption to the wondrous flow of life, is energized by internalized threat. A millisecond re-enactment of trauma experience that is processed far below the level of cognition. The miniature re-enactment is an unconscious need to complete a physical reaction and leave the actual experience in the past.

Years of not being able to identify the unconscious nature of my social anxiety, only enhanced the mystery and amplified the effect. Not only did I suffer from an unconscious expectation, as a need for completion, I became self conscious and increased the fear toned affect. Looking back now with the benefit of hindsight and a lot of self education I see the vicious cycle inherent in the mind, body split.

Unsafe brings images to mind and thoughts of an external threat, and that was there during childhood when I ran away from home four times, because I felt safer on the streets. Quiet, wide open spaces and the silence of the dead of night, have always brought an easier, rhythm and depth to my breath. I can describe the events of a fearful childhood, paint a picture of this incident led to that drama and its subsequent consequences. I can describe how I felt using well known words for major organs, like my heart. I could even use of words of analogy to poetic effect, if I had that kind of talent;

“That fall, as the disorder gradually took full possession of my system, I began to conceive that my mind itself was like one of those outmoded small-town telephone exchanges, being gradually inundated by flood-waters: one by one, the normal circuits began to drown, causing some of the instinct and intellect to slowly disconnect.” (Styron, 1990).

Styron’s small town telephone exchange is a wonderful analogy of depressions creeping paralysis of the mind. Its also an example of how we're stuck with a rather object oriented view of our inner experience? How can we hope to articulate our inner states to ourselves and others using the dialogue of an externally focused language?

To be fair the kind of knowledge we now posses about the electro-chemical activity of inner sensation, is so new it makes our object oriented language painfully inadequate for any accurate self awareness. The dominance of visual image of an external world and the symbolized self narrative it evolved, has fostered a kind of self deception. That zest for life we seek in such states as a thrill, has an overwhelmingly chemical nature below the surface of the skin. Perhaps more akin to popping the cap on a well shaken can of cola, than a “this is were the rubber meets the road Jack,” if you sense what I mean?

Unconsciously Unsafe is a much harder state to describe and the academic language of neurobiology, is far from poetic. There are no images or thoughts that spring to mind either, because the sense of threat is so insidious, lying below the threshold of the mind within the more ancient layers of the brain. It subtly affects muscular tone, breathing depth and rhythm, heart rate and pulse, a vigilant stare in the eyes and tense curling up of the fingers. It even has an effect on our hearing, so that we miss much of other people's voice intonation. Its like a constant hum of inaudible noise below the surface, with degrees of habitual tension.

Did trauma experience lead me to mental torment & a diagnosed mental illness?

As I mentioned above the torment of not being able to identify the beast that attacked me from within, drove me mad, or at least that what I was judged to be? Twenty seven years of struggling with a mental illness diagnosis, when trails of hit and miss medications brought the extra burden of chronic side effects to the beast within. On or off medication this fundamental issue of a freeze reaction never went away, and the shame and stigma of being labeled mentally ill, only compounded my problem.

Still, fate and destiny move on and I have found relief from the predator within. Years of reading through the latest research into brain and nervous system development brought the insight that I needed for a more accurate self awareness. In particular Dr. Steven Porges and his “The Polyvagal Theory,” has helped me shed a conscious light on what is happening internally with my trauma energized freeze reaction.

Here I’d like to share exerts from an interview with Dr Porges, where he explains this new understanding of our evolved nervous system with Ruth Buczynski, PhD. (see here)

Dr Porges: “One of the major problems in the treatment of trauma is that it has fallen under a general category of stress-related disorders. And by doing this something has been lost in our understanding of how the human body and mammalian bodies in general, respond to life-threatening situations.

Most people think that we merely have one defense system, the “fight/flight” system. This defense system is described in every book and is central to discussions about stress and anxiety. However, lost in these discussions is an accurate description of reactions to life threat when the body immobilizes.

When the body immobilizes, it goes into a unique physiological state that is potentially lethal for mammals. Many of us have observed this response in a common small mammal, the common house mouse. When a mouse is caught in the jaws of a cat and it looks like it is dead, but it is not.

We label this adaptive reaction by the mouse, “death feigning” or pretending to be dead. However, this is not a conscious response. It is an adaptive biological reaction to the inability to utilize fight/flight mechanisms to defend or to escape.

In part, the difficulties in treating trauma reflect a lack of awareness of this adaptive biological reaction. Unfortunately, many dedicated clinicians working a variety of disciplines dealing with trauma patients were never taught about an immobilization defense system.

In fact, tracking the scientific literature on this phenomenon suggests that due, in part, to the incompatibility of an immobilization defense system with the dominant theories of stress that focus on the adrenals and the sympathetic nervous system to support mobilization defense strategies, an understanding of the neural mechanisms mediating immobilization defense has been written out of the literature.”

So how does this new knowledge of our evolved nervous system fit into my habitual freeze reaction, leading to a lifetime of miss-attuned social interactions like the one with the goddess, described above.

My unconscious, split second reaction can be seen as a previous attempt to “escape,” by “feigning death?” The trap I fell into, was the thwarting of this unconscious reaction by my conscious sense of control. The unconscious urge is to drop, collapse or in days gone by faint, which was a common occurrence in Sigmond Freud’s time of exploring the unconscious.

I recall a TV program in Australia, of organized public debate on mental health. I’ll never forget the intellectual answers given to a young woman who’d froze when facing of a shotgun, during an armed robbery, and was tortured by flashback memory, guilt and shame about her own reaction. It was all very rational and cognitive in terms of trying to sooth her torment, all very mind based awareness stuff. Yet I sat wondering why no one pointed out that she’d had an involuntary reaction, that was beyond her minds ability to control and was not a sign of weakness.

Perhaps if she had allowed the physical impulse to complete its intention, she would have fainted like Victorian era ladies used to do. More than likely the gunman would have quickly moved his attention to other sources of possible threat. Instead she froze and almost simultaneously fought for conscious control, drawing out the agony of a fright/freeze moment. One moment in time that came to haunt her for years to come.

Dr Porges: “The polyvagal theory basically emphasizes that our nervous system has more than one defense strategy and the selection of whether we use a mobilized flight/flight or an immobilization shutdown defense strategy is not a voluntary decision. Outside the realm of our conscious awareness, our nervous system is continuously evaluating risk in the environment, making judgments, and setting up priorities for behaviors that are adaptive, but are not cognitive.”

In my case, a drop dead gorgeous Mary was no shotgun threat, yet I could not control that millisecond reaction which so spoilt the natural process of attunment in my approach. Just like the young woman on the TV program I tortured myself for decades, over my perceived weakness.

Let me share a personal example of a traditional talk therapy's approach to trauma resolution, prior to the revelations of the polyvagal theory, an experience I wrote about in Intellectual Avoidance of Body Sensations

‘We should talk about that reaction,’ Angus says. “Shit!” I think to myself, convinced I had not shown any external signs of discomfort.
‘Well I guess I could say what reaction, but that would be really childish, wouldn’t it?’
‘Well that’s where it comes from.’
‘I think I’m close to really feeling it, it’s near the surface,’ I tell him.
‘And it feels like you will fall apart if you let it out.’

‘Yes!’ I say nodding my head.
‘You will feel humiliated and deeply embarrassed if it happens in front of another human being?’
‘Absolutely!’
‘You know the trauma theory, you have to revisit it if you want to truly resolve it.’
‘Shit Angus, I can’t see it as trauma, nothing horrific ever happened to me.’
'It’s simply a question of degree David; a sensitive self can be traumatized by continuous emotional abuse, as much as a one off or multiple physical traumas,’ Angus tells me.

‘I guess I agree with that, I’ve said it to others often enough myself, but when you’re dealing with your own stuff, it just! I don’t know! - It worries me, there may be as much uncontrollable rage down there as there was in him, that I’ve internalized him so much, I am him.’
‘And you’re constantly fighting that part of you, holding it back.’
‘I guess so, I worry that I’m just as critical as he was, I just dress it up as care and concern.’

‘And you won’t risk the possibility of deeper loving intimacy with another human being, fearing the kind of rejection your parents inflicted on you, you‘re even shocked that anyone could love you.’ The words evoke images of my father and a sudden freezing shudder.
‘Why is that? Why does that involuntary shudder I get with the memory of his voice and his stance towards me feel like a miniature death?

Dr Porges: "For some people, specific physical characteristics of an environmental challenge will trigger a fight/flight behavior, while others may totally shut down to the exact same physical features in the environment. I want to emphasize that we have to understand that it is the response, and not the traumatic event, that is critical."

In my own journey, what I have struggled to consciously know was the mechanics (for want of a better word) of that unconscious reaction, which had prevented me from maturing into early adulthood and enjoying the happy and productive life, nature had intended at the time of my conception.

Since finding my way to science researchers like Dr Porges, I have been able to slowly merge together the split in my mind/body sense of self, with a thought/felt awareness of that unconscious freeze reaction, which so hampered my emerging from childhood into the group support of social relationships.

In our increasingly cognitive age, we tend to place the mind at the center of our sense of self, perhaps as part of our evolution towards species maturity and a growing perception of our place in the Universe. However, as Dr Porges points out, we have lost some awareness of our physical nature in the evolving process.

An Unsafe World?

For decades I castigated myself for an unconscious reaction, that was nature's way of keeping me safe in childhood, when avoidance was a smart choice in a family home that was not safe.

The downward sensation of a millisecond freeze reaction and the hesitant approach behaviors it triggers, made me think of myself as small and weak, a lesser self than others. What I've come to realize, is the energy of an unconscious physiological reaction toned my thinking.

In 1980, when I prayed to God in front of a mirror that holds a symbolic place in my heart, was it nature that answered my prayer, and un-froze my unconscious sense of an Unsafe Environment?

I prayed sincerely, promising I'd do whatever was required if he’d just show me the way, give me a sign, help me please! Nothing happened for what felt like minutes as I sat there in hopeful expectation while looking at my own reflection, looking into my face.

Then it began, a new sensation, a feeling at the top of my head which flowed down slowly, down through my face, into my shoulders and down through my chest, down into my pelvic area. I sat with a sense of "what is it” wonder, although more felt than in any thinking sense. A sense of wonder that was similar to the out of body experience when I was fourteen, except this slowly descending calm was the polar opposite of the sudden sharp elevation, when I'd seemly left my body.

It felt like I'd been sitting in a bath of water that was over my head and someone had pulled the plug. I sat there as calm descended slowly from head to toe, as if a mind numbing tension were being drained out of me, like waste water flowing down and out through my toes. Next came a mindful realization of the experience in a pleasant and very welcomed surprise.

I felt unburdened somehow, refreshed and excited, happy and new. "Wow! Wow! Wow! Has God just touched me on the shoulder? Is this a religious experience? Or am I just relieved by a sense of being free, free from demanding attachment, not needing anyone but myself?" (read more here)

The spectrum of Mental Illness & Diagnosis?

Dr. Porges: "There is actually a dialectic between science and clinical practice. Science is interested in processes and clinical practice is often interested in diagnosis. There is a practical component to that because with diagnosis comes the ability to use certain billing codes in a variety of other issues, as well as believing that if you can give it a name, you have a better grasp of the disorder.

But scientists are less interested in the clinical diagnosis and more interested in the underlying processes. There are many underlying processes that cross several clinical disorders. They are not studied at the level that they should be, because they are not specific to any one clinical disorder."

Is this the paradox in the public debate on mental health? While many accept such experience's as depression as a mental illness, there is also a growing concern about a medical model of may be natural responses to life stress. Many, who feel let down and wounded by miss-diagnosis and painful experience tend to then reject out of hand the contribution science is making to understanding the nature of the human condition.

Dr. Porges: "I started in my talks to tell clinicians, “Try something different with clients.” I said, “Tell your clients who were traumatized that they should celebrate their body’s responses, even if the profound physiological and behavioral states that they have experienced currently limit their ability to function in a social world.

They should celebrate their body’s responses since these responses enable them to survive. It saved their lives. It reduced some of the injury. If they were oppositional during an aggressive traumatic event such as rape, they could have been killed.

Tell them to celebrate how their body responded instead of making them feel guilty that their body is failing them when they want to be social and let’s see what happens.

Now, remember, what is occurring in most therapies? Therapies often convey to the client that their body is not behaving adequately. The clients are told they need to be different.

They need to change. So therapy in itself is extraordinarily evaluative of the individual. And once we are evaluated, we are basically in defensive states. We are not in safe states."

In my own spontaneous un-freezing of an unconscious and habitual condition back in 1980, did I unconsciously perceive a safe environment, yet could not find a cognitive explanation for my experience ? Did I then amplify my new found sense of life into manic euphoria, with a life long habit of self support via my imagination?

Enlightenment ? A Harmonic sense of the nature of ALL?

Cognition & Intuitive Imagination?
A sustained unconscious perception of safety for the first time in my life, had a powerful effect on my senses & their stimulation of my imagination. Yet in a cognitive age that sanctify's the mind above all else, I found it difficult to simply accept my new sense of relaxed approach towards others and in particular my own inner experience.

Does the core of our sense of self lie within the body and its capacity for a sensory experience of those subtle vibrations within a cosmic nature?

Dr Porges: "Actually I have given a couple of talks on mindfulness, and I started to say, “Well, mindfulness requires feeling safe because if we don’t feel safe, we are, in a sense, neuro-physiologically evaluative of our setting which means we can’t be safe, and we can’t engage. We can’t recruit the wonderful neural circuits that enable us to express the wonderful aspects of being human.”

Does our minds need for certainty, reflect a physiological need for Safety?

In my journey of self discovery, resisting my minds desire for quick cognitive explanations and exploring deeper aspects of my nature, has been a paradoxical one. So many times when I have a cognitive sense of "I've got it," real knowing slips away with the loss of the felt sense. The same paradox contained within my initial freeze reaction towards the very beautiful Mary? An unconscious response that once kept me safe, thwarted my conscious desire and need for social engagement.

Following such moments of thwarted innocence I went to war with myself, simply enhancing the internalized sense of threat. Perhaps if I'd read Dr Porges advice sooner, I could have learned to celebrate my body's natural responses, accepting them with relaxed ease, allowing an ebb and flow to the spontaneous nature of my being. Instead, I fell into the trap of trying to exert conscious control over my unconscious nature. "I think, therefore I am," feels more like a blind alley to me these days.

What do you think?

Body Language & Mental Illness?

2012-01-24T06:55:00.000-08:00

The Body & The Wisdom Tree of Life?

Bipolar Disorder is a chemical imbalance of the brain? Science research tells us so because we discovered that emotions and moods are stimulated by chemicals in the brain & nervous systems. Chemicals that are produced by and facilitate cell function within our body/brain. There are even cells that are labeled bipolar to describe their millisecond "on/off" electro-chemical signaling function. Its a (+ -) polarity thing, like a tiny dry cell battery, to use an object analogy?

"Common examples are the bipolar cell of the retina, the ganglia of the vestibulocochlear nerve, and the extensive use of bipolar cells to transmit efferent (motor) signals to control muscles."

Hence we don't use the older term Manic-Depression in official jargon anymore because our emotional life is far more complex than we thought. Yet does research ignore the body & its sensory feedback systems?

If you say the two terms to yourself, "bipolar disorder," "manic depression," which one rings truer for you? Which of these self descriptions, "I'm bipolar or I'm manic depressive," captures the fullest sense of your personal experience?

Some people answer this question in two parts, "bipolar gives an instant impression of the opposite extremes, while manic depression seems to trigger a more emotive sense of it." Some say the older term, has a gut feel to it that doesn't require much cognitive explanation, "you kinda get it, but you can't say how or why?"

The body has its own energy "language," beneath the minds cognitive language?

A doctor once told me that the new term bipolar was more objective, less emotional and therefore more useful for a detached analysis and correct diagnosis. "You mean, you need to remain as unaffected as possible by my raw emotions?" "Lets not get into that now," he replied, refusing to be distracted from his predetermined coarse of action. I understand his need of coarse, to remain cool, calm and collected in the face of heated emotions and keep his cognitive capacity intact?

Yet it begs the question of a hidden agenda, in our ever increasing cognitive labels for emotional-mental anguish and what to many seems a lopsided focus on brain chemistry. "Are we trying to separate what we think from what we feel, too much?" In my own journey of self discovery/recovery I came through a recent episode of mania with a new "cognitive" appreciation of my inner experience;

"Perhaps all activity within the body/brain is essentially about energy regulation, including our thoughts? Its a different way to understand oneself, compared to our taken for granted sense of objectivity in daily discourse?" (facebook.com post).

Is there a hidden need to regulate energy via both body & mind, which is miss-perceived in much of the science research into the brain's electro-chemical function? "Its so fascinating," says a young neurologist of their brain research work, although perhaps unaware of regulating the raw energies of their body/brain through the expression of innate interest-excitment?

Are we born with hard wired body reactions that are the very seat of our emotional and cognitive energy expressions? Is the wide variety of emotional/mental anguish experience best described by the umbrella term "affective disorder," as I tried to articulate in The Affect in Bipolar Affective Disorder

Across the mental illness spectrum, we find the same trend in "cognitive" diagnostic terms. What was commonly understood as "shell shock," at the end of the fist world war, has become PTSD for people returning from the war zones of today. Its a trend that speaks to the very heart of the doctor, patient relationship and the treatment of mental/emotional anguish.

Perhaps with the boom in post WWII education and technology, we are living through a period of expanding cognitive capacity that has increased the split between unconscious body language & the minds cognitive language? TRAUMA and its unconscious affect, from both physical and emotional experience has come under cognitive scrutiny like never before, in recent times. Such scrutiny led to the diagnostic term PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder, and reflects our human struggle to rise above emotion and feelings in gaining cognitive self interpretation.

Yet holistic recovery programs all over the world have found that compassionate presence is far more important than question and answer communication, in our increasingly cognitive world. I'm reminded of scene in public hospital when a young man, obviously in the grip of psychosis came storming out of an interview session with an equally young psychology graduate.

"You haven't got a fucking clue," he raged as he headed for the exit door. "I was just asking him some simple questions," the young intern explained to reception staff. I remember feeling an empathy for both, as two people trying to come together with different forms of energy expression, one with conscious cognition, the other with an unconscious e-motive expression. They were never going to "get each other," in a question and answer session, I realize now.

Going beyond dependency in the process of mental illness recovery:

My Grandmother once told me, "we didn't need anyone to tell us he'd been frightened out his mind and fear had driven him mad," describing her older brother's return from the 1st world war. "We bit our lip and tried not to be scared, not to turn away and just be there for him." When I'd asked her how it had worked out, "it took a long time and kind of drove us all a bit crazy for a while there, but he did settle down and get over it eventually." After a few minutes of reflection she added, "it was as though we'd shared the load with him somehow."

My Grandmother's story speaks to the very nature of human attachment and dependency in many ways. No amount of cognitive self interpretation or medication compliance helped me regulate the energies of bipolar disorder over a 27 year period. Only when I found the kind of knowledge which helped me approach the inner sensations of mania & depression, with a cognitive "Ah, that's what that is." did I start to find recovery in a process of internal self discovery. You might say that I'm now investigating the unconscious language of my body, exploring the strange electro-chemical processes within that manifest a conscious sense of being me.

There is a huge amount of science and other knowledge available, beyond that which suggest's a medication dependency for the regulation of emotional/mental anguish. Do we each need to go beyond the urge and desire for joining an "us & them," battle and go looking for it? We love to expose the hidden agenda of profit motivation and malpractice in our pharmacology era, yet there is a deeper hidden agenda within us all? The hidden reality of our electro-chemical body/brain/mind energy regulation, which pure science is only just beginning to explore?

Beyond the public debate about medication, what is the private experience of recovery?

Within the public domain the current debate about metal illness and recovery, tends to revolve around psychiatry's use of psychotropic drugs for crisis intervention and the maintenance of stability. Sadly, such debate tends to involve an "us and them," theme of pro or anti medication and pro or anti psychiatry. However, beyond the public debate there is a wealth of knowledge and experience that can be accessed to aid individual recovery. The internet, with resources like youtube.com, thousands of bloggers and online book sellers like amazon, has led to a boom in self education for people wanting more involvement and awareness, in their recovery process.

Below is an example of the knowledge and support available within the growing peer group of long term survivors of the mental illness experience;

Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs: A Harm Reduction Approach

Will Hall, "I myself was diagnosed with schizophrenia and went through a many year recovery process." Will's wonderful, commonsense talk on the reality of the recovery process, sums up the dilemma many of us face in seeking to support ourselves without taking psychotropic medications.
People in the peer recovery movement of which Will speaks, have all taken their individual paths in that process. And like the many overlapping symptoms of mental illness in the DSM IV, each seems to find common ground in dietary supplements, lifestyle and dietary change, the practice of meditation or mindfulness and the compassionate support of others.

TIME and SUPPORT are the two words that captured my attention most in Will's talk. It does take time and support to work through these abnormal experiences and return to the holistic sense of well being that nature intended. In my own case, insightful knowledge has been the cornerstone of an ongoing recovery process. Knowledge about the internal nature of human development, and its dependency on healthy inter-relations with others. Below are examples of the developmental science research that has given me vital insights, to aid and maintain my recovery.

Trauma, Brain and Relationship:

Although the above clip speaks about brain research, it is worth noting that the advice for healing centers on the use of the body in supporting traumatized children. It is strongly suggested that its what adults do with their body language that is vital, in the recovery process. Other research suggests that unless we feel safe at an unconscious level, the internalized sense of threat from trauma experience will remain active. It is further suggested that safe, supportive environments allow a natural process of healing to occur, within the neural networks of the brain and nervous systems.

The unconscious language of the face & the vital importance of Attunement:

As we look at the clip above, we notice the eye contact between mother and baby, that is now understood to be a vital part of the maturing process in our developing brain and nervous systems. As the presenter points out, what actually happens here is a millisecond interaction affecting each brain and nervous system. Possibly more akin to a digital wifi connection, than our older common awareness of body language, as posture, gesture and facial expression.

The title of this post is "Body Language & Mental Illness," and my writing here had a threefold agenda. One was an attempt to highlight what many see as a growing split between mind and body, in our increasingly cognitive age. One was to highlight the role that body language plays in the process of recovery by pointing readers towards non mainstream information. The third is an attempt to introduce a notion of energy regulation, beyond our taken for granted language in self awareness.

We talk to ourselves and others in a learned dialogue that we simply take for granted. Perhaps it reflects our body/brain's unconscious use of an assumptive expectation to maximize our survival prospects. For this is what is now understood, is happening during the first three years of life. The brain and nervous systems build patterns of expectation through experience, patterns that become an "auto pilot," guide throughout the lifespan.

When these unconscious patterns work well, we do not question their source, life just flows along reasonably well. Sensing the motive energy beneath my thoughts has helped me improve mood stability and be aware of energy states within, that look for an external object to project onto. This notion of energy regulation has helped me sense the internalized threat of trauma experience, so long in the past there is no conscious memory. It has allowed me to approach other people more openly than at any other time in my life, and allow the natural healing that proximity of support engages.

I guess what I am trying to show through the writing of this blog post, is that there is far more to the experience of mental illness and recovering wellness than finds a common awareness in the public domain?

Illness or Instinct in Manic Euphoria?

2012-01-21T01:05:00.000-08:00

What forces stimulate a euphoric sense of cosmic oneness?

November 15, 2011.

In the great legend of the FALL, where are we now? Apple i-pads, Google & the Tree of Knowledge? The Eternal Now keeps on Emerging as we keep learning about ourselves? (facebook.com status post)

Should I feel ashamed to have acted on the impulse to make such thoughts public?

Should I view another episode of manic euphoria as mental illness or madness?
Should I judge this recent episode a relapse into illness or part of my journey of self discovery in a maturing sense of self?

Where is the sense of objectivity in such nonsense, others might ask? Surely such simple emotive associations as Apple I-Pads with the Biblical tree of knowledge, make no sense at all in our 21st century AD? "Just another dickhead with a messiah complex - A loony tune psychotic," would be understandable quips. Many psychiatrists would suggest a disease like illness, affecting a chemical imbalance within my brain?

Others see the madness experience as a right of passage in the challenge to maturity, and part of the birthright of a maturing species. Some suggest that bipolar & schizophrenia have survived the evolutionary process because they serve a purpose, for beyond the routine of normal survival, some kind of visionary intuition is required to guide the way forward. Hence the high number of creative's with bipolar and from a destiny point view there has been sensitivity in leadership during darker times.

Our mind has this amazing ability to "conceptualize" the experience of being. Yet there is a tendency to rush over the actual felt sense of the living moment with kind of "yeah, yeah I know," or concern about things to do. This conceptual mind space vs the felt sense of experience is a dilemma that plagues intellectual analysis and the slice & dice nature of science research via the dispassionate use of technology.

In our clever and sophisticated daily dialogue with self and others, we seem to pay mere lip service to Darwin's famous theory, "yeah, yeah learnt that in school." Yet on the felt level of our awareness of being human, it literally means we are an evolved animal with instincts that energize the limbic systems of emotional expression and ultimately the thinking neo-cortex area of the brain.

Perhaps mental anguish is more about instinctual energies than a mysterious illness?

Bipolar disorder is also well documented in people with high creativity & natural leadership abilities. Should we not ask why men like Winston Churchill become the man for moment in times like the second world war, when the regressive urge of fascism raised its very ugly head?

In the deeper, wider reality of the evolving process, is there method in natures instinct for a chaotic madness that seeks new order? Does the experience fit within the complex chaos theories that explain the deeper reality of a cosmic background to the evolution of human life? Chaos theory suggests a cosmic reality of chaotic activity that somehow forms new orders of hierarchical stability.

"This psychoneurobiological developmental model views the brain as a self-organizing system. It also fits particularly well with a number of essential tenets of nonlinear dynamic systems (chaos) theory. This powerful model is now being utilized in physics, chemistry, and biology to explore the problem of how complex systems come to produce emergent order and new forms.

A fundamental postulate of this conception is that there is no dichotomy between the organism and the environmental context in which it develops. The physical and social context of the developing human is more than merely a supporting frame, it is an essential substratum of the assembling system.

Of particular importance to chaos theory are the transitions from one developmental stage to another, when the organism encounters instability while it shifts from one stable mode to a new mode." (Schore, 1994).

Hence the suggestion that the spontaneous experience of madness in its classic early adulthood onset, is an attempt by the organism to reorganize its energy expression towards further growth. This has been my experience of mental illness, with euphoric mania the disruptive energy that sees me making facebook posts like the one above.

I haven't been troubled by the more negative energies of fearful illusions or delusions like hearing voices, and I understand the confusion caused by the wide variety of individual experience. My own journey has always revolved around the issue of separation & individuation, perhaps a need to mature into the person I was born to be? Separation, the loss of an intimate relationship has always been the trigger to my most disruptive periods of mania. Periods when I get lost in a rush of spiritual euphoria that revolves around the well known, "one love, one world," desire.

Managing the excitement of an elated sense of being alive, has been my most potent problem, with relapses into depression seemingly a despair that I would ever experience the natural ebb and flow of a normal life and its spontaneous joys. Here is the rub too, in that elation is now accepted as a highly desirable emotion, fueling the metabolic needs of early brain/nervous system maturity.

"Noting the commonalities between elation as a basic practicing period mood in infants and manic symptomology in adults. Elation as a basic mood is characterized by an experience of exaggerated omnipotence which corresponds to the child's increasing awareness of his muscular and intellectual powers. The similarity between the two is striking.

Manic disorder has also been described in terms of a chronic elevation of the early practicing affect of interest-excitement; this causes a "rushing" of intellectual activity and a driving of the body at uncontrollable and potentially dangerous speeds." (Schore, 1994).

My November experience of surging manic energy included all the old ideas and feelings of self reference (this TV show is about me) and messiah like sense of self worth.

“Told ya!” The cynic in you might have just reacted? Yet this last episode was different from the one before, with a little more self awareness and a little less compulsive behavior. I recall there were two days of outright fusion when I'd slipped into full blown messiah like feelings and thoughts. The one before was over a year ago now, with no intervening depression or sense of shame. Instead there has been a continuing effort to understand my deeper nature, those natural energies beneath my minds subjective sense of awareness.

'You know, that first time in 1980, it was like the real you had come out. - Then everyone wanted you to go back in again,' my best friend said to me last year.

Almost 32 years on from my first experience of manic euphoria I find myself feeling like I've come full circle, as the very same existential questions plague my unconscious/conscious desire. Luckily I'm in a place and period of my life, when I can afford to allow such a disruption of my subjective sense of everyday normality.

In February 1980, sudden relationship loss triggered my first episode of mania and set me off on a thirty year struggle to understand the nature of my abnormal experiences. I still remember those very first moments that led me into mania, the unusual body sensations and the shift in perceptive awareness that overcame me. (see here)

In the Chaos, Chance & Circumstance that is the nature of experience, if I'd found myself on this mans doorstep, the night I went searching for the meaning of a spontaneous euphoric experience we label mania, the last 30 years would have unfolded in a different way.

Perhaps I would have followed my natural curiosity and lived more of my Celtic birth sign, as a guide? No reductionist view of symptomatic behavior captures the essence of my first experience of a spontaneous reorientation of energy like Kevin McEvenue's explanation of the FELT sense of being in the lived moment, which the mind habitually avoids.

The Alexander Technique and Focusing have in common an awareness of
the power of "not doing" in order to allow something more to happen.

Kevin's description of altered perception, "as a kind of trance like state," resonates with my own experience described in The Music of Trance State Mania and my current feeling that the experience is essentially a spontaneous attempt to re-wire my brains past experience of terror (intense negative affect) and stimulate a more relaxed approach to my own feelings and other people.

Perhaps the reason that the madness experience brings up so much primal imagery, is the survival imperative of approach or avoid? Does madness imagery & sensation reflect the primal reality of survival in our life eats life world, and those awesome forces of creation and destruction within the wider cosmos, which created the Sun, Moon & Mother Earth?

As Kevin says "its as if I was re-visiting my own evolutionary pattern very quickly - within me is my whole history of evolution - all the trails and errors of what made us the humans we are today." His comments resonate deeply within, that place of unspeakable knowing and wisdom, we call the body. A fearful place perhaps, for our bright shinny intellect, newly come into its own?

Another writer suggests "Mental illness can be a kind of “tough grace” where people can reframe their experiences to understand them as a hero’s journey that creates wisdom and steely strengths. This shift makes a tremendous difference to enhancing self-esteem and reducing stigma. This book is a major contribution to a new paradigm. Mental illness can be a journey to the soul, a challenging route to wholeness." _ Alice A Holstein, "A Tough Grace - Mental Illness as a Spiritual Path."

If I had found my way to this man's door in 1980 would I have come to understand the experience as an expansion of awareness, beyond the constricted shell that guided my life through childhood when it was safer to remain unseen, unheard and unnoticed? Perhaps I would have simply accepted the spontaneous "coming out," as my best friend put it and not compounded its affect with rationalizing thoughts?

These days I do let go its expansive energy and sleep at night, simply by accepting the motive energy as fundamentally about body movement, not thought. Feeling for subtle inner tensions allows me to calm my thoughts and drift into sleep, as described (here)

Fast forward, January 20th 2012
Michael Cornwall, Ph.D. is practicing therapist specializing in madness who has recently started a blog on madinamerica.com with an opening post titled "Initiatory Madness." The very first line asks the question, "if madness isn’t what psychiatry says it is, then what is it?"

Michael is a Jungian/Laingian psychotherapist who went through his own intense experience of transformative madness without medication or treatment that formed his vocation. For over 30 years he has specialized in providing psychotherapy for people in psychotic states in medication free sanctuaries and community settings.

In the the second of his illuminating blog posts "Pilgrim’s Progress: From Young Madman to Old Therapist, he quotes Carl Jung who is perhaps the most famous of free thinkers to wrestle with the experience of madness;

"The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important of my life- in them everything else essential was decided. It all began then; the later details are only supplements and clarifications of the material that burst forth from the un-conscious, and at first swamped me. It was the prima matetria for a lifetime’s work.”

Michael also asks the question;

"Is madness in fact a potentially growth and renewal process that one becomes stronger from having undergone, even possibly gifted from the ordeal with hard won natural abilities for intimately knowing about the nature of sanity and madness, and with a capacity for additional compassion for fellow mad people with which one so easily identifies?

Doesn’t the ancient ritual of madness allow a person to be changed for the better- to be better off than one was before the initiation? Isn’t that the same process and purpose of all the initiations and rites of passage we go through in life- for one to pass through a liminal threshold into a new zone of personhood?

If every beginning experience or subsequent ’episode’ of madness is, as I believe, an auspicious crisis of potential initiation and re-birth into a fuller life of enhanced possibility, then psychiatry thwarts the initiatory process by not realizing that that is what is really happening, is really possible, if the mad person is only received with loving acceptance as I fortunately was."

In my response to his refreshing articulation of real experience I wrote;

"There surely is no other experience that plumbs the depths of existential reality like madness, making dispassionate intellectual concepts of the nature of being human, a mere shadow of the real thing. Once experienced, it is impossible to forget and presses on the back of the mind with the age old existential question, why?"

Taking a very wide view, with a very long bow. Does my own experience of the heightened state of manic euphoria allow me some sense of connection to the evolutionary forces that spawned my nature? In this year of 2012 AD, there is an anticipation among a growing band of people for something called ascension based on interpretations of the Maya (or Mayan) Long Count calendar.

As you can see from my headline about Apple I-pads, my own sense of curiosity seems most tempted by the interpretations of myth and there existential meaning. I do believe that science and spirituality are converging in our time, and we are entering the much prophesied golden age. Perhaps in the long run our failing experiment with a psychotropic meddling with our own inner nature, will bring greater impetuous for further convergence?

The challenge I face when going through these episodes of manic euphoria, is to sift through what are my personal needs of self empowerment, self comfort and self support, in my subjective fantasy. On a physical level there is a spontaneous relaxing of muscular posture and an urge for movement towards others, the opposite of a life long urge for isolation.

Obviously the messiah ideas can be seen as a need for supportive love and the one world, one tribe ideas, as a mindful interpretation of the physiological reaction in the urge towards others. We are a social animal and our need for proximity and happy inter-relations, is well documented in the health journals. Smiling at each other is literally a vitality affect, which benefits the autoimmune system.

Even understanding such rational explanations for my experience though, I'm left to ponder my ceaseless fascination with the nature of being, and what lies beneath so many myths, legends and fairy tales. I had a deep personal need to educate myself about my interior plumbing so to speak, and discovered there is an electro-chemical stimulation of the experience of being me. It has helped me enormously in managing my experience of bipolar and has changed a classic cycle of manic-depression.

It has also deepened my fascination with existentialism and the nature of the metaphysical, with its metaphor interpretations of the consciously unknowable. Who knows? Maybe you can draw an association between Apple i phones, i-pads and the biblical tree of knowledge? For instance my view of the old immaculate conception stories is a metaphor for the birth of consciousness, and Moses journey through the desert towards the promised land, a metaphor for the minds journey to self awareness.

My current view of the old resurrection stories, is one of resurrection of all that matter that has been spent in the creation of our awareness? How else does the universe prevent ultimate decay, an empty place of dark matter and energy, if not by evolving into a form that can act upon itself?

Ah! Metaphor, Meaning & those manically energized epiphany moments, maybe?

To quote Michael Cornwall, "If madness isn’t what psychiatry says it is, then what is it?"

Is my manic euphoria stimulated by illness or evolved instinctual energies?

Does the hidden Meaning in Myth & Metaphor contain Meant to be elements, like those whispering hints of serendipity in accidental scientific discovery?

To miss-quote the end scene in the movie "Blade Runner," 'nothing lives for ever, right?"

Metaphors & Unspeakable Meaning?

Recovery or Self Discovery?

2012-01-12T10:50:00.000-08:00

The Sojourn begins, January 2010

12th January 2012:
The 2nd year anniversary of my sojourn here in Thailand.
A day that invites a review of my journey, with its self challenge of uncovering the deeper nature of what most consider to be a disease of the brain, a mental illness. A day that comes hot on heels of plunging back into the work-a-day life of pressing needs. Six weeks that made my soul searching contemplation's seem like a self absorbed irrelevance. I guess circumstantial context and individual experience determine what is relevant in our daily life?

'I wan my shop back!' My Thai partner demanded in early December.
'Mama say 16 & 17 good luck day for open shop - she ask a monk!' I knew full well the added reference to the monk was meant to underline the depth of her need, and that rational protests about previous agreements would trigger the emotional equivalent of very miserable weather into the foreseeable future. 'Ok darling,' was all I could say in response.

I'd been writing the first draft chapters of a memoir throughout October and November, with an expectation that January was the month we'd finally face up to the exhausting task of re-establishing her beauty shop. 'You sit and write while I do no thing! - I hate this! - and sometime am hating you too!' Had been part of her opening gambit, proceeding the coup de grace of "mama say." Like all agrarian societies the matriarch of an extended family wields an authority here that mere men always comply with. As a stranger in my own version of paradise, who the hell am I to defy such deeply rooted tradition.

And so it was that I jumped from navel gazing philosophies of existential concern into the work a day reality of hustle and bustle, needing to get 101 things done. From wispy notions that the baby Jesus immaculate conception is a metaphor story for the denied evolution of the mind, to a frantic search of wholesale suppliers for new equipment. I became immersed in the pressing concern, to completely refurbish a shop ruined by three months of flood water. Replacing equipment damaged by mold spores so thick they looked like an alien life form. Such a re-direction of focus and energy made my previous reflections on metaphor, myth and the meaning of life, seem like a pointless self indulgence.

I'd come to Thailand two years ago with the rather naive notion of writing a book in six months. With reasoned logic I'd held a view that I could write a self help book, based on what I thought I'd learned in the previous five years. Yet looking back with hindsight that rationalized goal was perhaps my minds displaced transformation of a deeper urge, a deeper need. Perhaps something similar to Freud's notion that characters in a dream, are displaced aspects of the self.

On reflection though, its not really a book I came here to find the time and space to write, but a re-authoring of my own narrative, my life story, my self interpretation. I'd needed to redefine my sense of being in this world, from a story of the helpless victim of a life long medical condition, (bipolar disorder 1) to a deeper awareness of my crazy making, over sensitive nature.

"Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared

to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly

wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads,

or you shall learn nothing." _Thomas Huxley.

Its an inspiring quote and one that resonates quite unspeakably within me. A need to know on some level, the inner nature of bipolar disorder beneath its diagnostic label/metaphor. A need to face the felt sense of its motivating energies, beneath the distancing trick of my constantly thinking mind. It was with such a background of desire that three nights ago I caught a solid felt sense of the platform, the springboard energy pool of my life's unconscious emotive patterns.

We were hand in hand, ascending the stairs that lead to the top floor of our three storey shop/house here in Bangkok. In an unexpected, unanticipated moment, all was BLACK. She screamed with that childlike “end of the world” hysteria that annoyingly tempers the wondrous delight of her normally enchanting presence. My baby, my exotic goddess in Asian guise who’s managed to retain all the spontaneous emotional flow of a delightfully enraptured three year old. My beautifully perfect muse, the perfect foil for a boring, introspective old man.

Time stood still in a frozen heartfelt moment, just a step away from the top floor landing. Although to call it a moment is to play loose with the nature of reality and the majesty of being.
I squeezed her hand tighter. ‘Its only dark sweetheart, that’s all.’

Visual awareness was left to decipher an underlying metabolic process, as floating pinpoint specks of white behind my eyes. I imagined distant stars in a far off nebula.
There was an exaggerated gasp as both arms gripped me tight, accompanied by a whimpering of, ‘Ghost!’

It was such an unfortunate coincidence that we’d just finished an oft repeated conversation about the existence of ghosts, while watching a popular Thai TV show. ‘You falang (foreigner) not understand,’ she’d asserted not two minutes before, as I’d challenged a lack of evidence beyond light refraction and shadows. Sadly, as her heartbeat impressed itself upon mine with a promise of further comfort seeking, the lights came back on. Fits of girlish giggling ensued, as if we’d just emerged from the ghost train tunnel of an amusement park.

We stepped onto the top floor landing amid my mind's eye re-run of that frozen heart beat. So much imagery flashed through the eye of my mind in a “and one and two” passage of time. I’d seen myself as a six year old inviting the Devil to come visit me in my lonely bedroom, I’d remembered a previous experience of power failure and sudden darkness. And beneath the mind filled imagery there had been a solid, undeniable shift in body sensation.

There was a sudden awareness of my hips, legs and feet, as my body reacted to an unanticipated novelty. The experts call it a startle or freeze response, a hard wired innate physiological reaction that we are all born with. Its like a circuit breaker for the brain/minds short cut anticipations of ongoing reality. The brain's unconscious and constant millisecond pattern matching of previous and present experience, the amazing trick that ensures we have this strange metaphysical space we label mind.

That one felt/thought/mind-imagined, sensory instant encapsulated the foundation of an over-sensitive life. "Your too bloody sensitive for your own good," I'd even heard/felt, my father's voice say. Understanding blossomed into a more solid knowing of the energy that fuels the intellectualizing mind, an aversion to the felt sense of being, and why your average academic can't dance very well. In that instant when the lights went out and the innate reaction of the body could not be held in denial, I understood the extent of the terror experienced during my birth. Three days of labor, followed by a brutal forceps delivery and immediate removal to a mechanical crib.

I sensed the subtle inner tensions that reside within my body, like background radiation in the wider cosmos. Energy diverted into the synaptic connections of the brain to escape an internalized sense of threat. Unconscious body memories of trauma that are discharged through the mind as unusually fast and constant thinking, and muscular tensions that evoke varying degrees of nervous posture. "That's why I habitually walk on the sides of my feet, never allowing a more relaxed and felt sense of the earth, against soles and between toes," I thought. For a day I held that awareness within the mind space easily, before more stress triggered an unconscious and subtle slip back into habitual posture, with its affect on my thinking.

Tomorrow the sojourn will go on as I continue re-drafting the story of my life, not with a pen or a mindful search for word shaped symbols of analogy. The sojourn has become a journey back to the body in a quest for expanded self awareness. As my description of one frozen heartbeat on a stairwell implies, there is far more to the human condition than can ever be defined by language. It is by slowly increasing my use of the felt sense, that I have found recovery in self discovery. Its the kind of felt awareness that the wonderful Gene Gendlin introduced to the world with his Focusing Therapy and his extensive writings on the "felt sense." Watch him explain this strange place where the inner self of our evolved nature meets the conscious self, when we go inside and attempt to re-marry the mind to the body;

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” _Joseph Campbell.

Stephen Fry - A Conservative Guardian of the Status Quo?

2011-11-14T00:13:00.000-08:00

We all hold Stephen in the highest regard for his courage &
wit, his intellect is of the highest order of open mind we know.

Is our beloved Fry a Liberal Minded Free Thinker, or an Arch Conservative?

Imagine my surprise when a recent post on the Stephen Fry.com forum was arbitrarily deleted three times?

Curiously a comment congratulating him on taking over as president of the charity MIND, posted on the 6th of November is still awaiting moderation?

One wonders if our fair Stephen is aware of these constrictive, conservative reactions made in the guise of his good name?

Those Self Appointed Guardians of the Status Quo?
Unfortunately for those of us forced to take the journey of mental illness beyond the hallowed walls of mainstream medical opinion, this is an all to familiar reaction to our alternative comments and our recovery wisdom. In support groups all over the internet and elsewhere anyone who dares to question the common acceptance, is shouted down and shut out almost without exception. "Your dangerous," is the most common reaction to anyone pointing out the unscientific foundation of psychiatry's DSM IV, while pointing to any kind of alternative view, even of the scientific kind.

Don't get me wrong with my rather dramatic & journalistic headline, I don't believe for a minute that Stephen is aware of moderation activity on his website. I simply wish to point out the nature of our often constrictive & perhaps self defeating, closed minded behaviors. Please watch an example of Stephen's contribution to raising awareness and de-stigmatizing the reality of mental illness experience.

Here is the post deleted three times on the Fry forum, first posted on Sun Nov 6th;

Forum
> General Scribblings
My Anniversary October - Why no Depression This Time?

Posted Mon Nov 7th, 2011 9:41am Post subject: My Anniversary October - Why no Depression This Time?

Forum
> General musings
My Anniversary October - Why no Depression This Time?
Posted Sat Nov 12th, 2011 11:03am Post subject: My Anniversary October - Why no Depression This Time?

“We’re in a freefall into future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you’re going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It’s a very interesting shift of perspective and that’s all it is… joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.” _Joseph Campbell.

As October passed away its now been a full 12 months since I returned to Thailand after seeking support from family and friends, towards the end of a six week un-medicated psychosis. I was very tired after riding the waves of emotive energy that manic-psychosis evokes for such a long period, unassisted and mostly alone. There had been many days during that October when emotive illusion blurred the objective lines of an everyday, normal sense of reality. In a trance like state similar to that which we feel when woken from a lucid dream I’d acted out impulsive energies with manic posts on The-Icarus-Project website and posted the same links here on Stephen Fry’s site too.

Unfortunately my return home to Sydney Australia did not meet with much understanding or offers of support due to my growing resistance to a mainstream view of my bipolar disorder condition. After a brutal first 24 hours of family rejection and the shock of my own cultures aggressive response to madness, I kept my own counsel hoping that time would heal my wounds and eventually bring rewards of new insight on my continuing sojourn of self revelation.

I'd allowed that psychotic period to unfold in its own way after thirty years of experience and education had given me the hope, that there is a natural explanation for the experience of classic manic depressive madness. Traveling back to Thailand only one week after my return home I was aware that my actions had been impulsive and that the shock of my family and friends reaction was concluding the manic energy phase. As I landed at Bangkok airport I wondered how long it might take for the depressive phase of my classic bipolar history to repeat itself, and if my attempt at self re-interpretation would be successful.

I was aware that the medical model of a diseased brain should be unavoidable and depression after such a long life history might be inevitable. “Wait and see,” I thought as I returned to my bed-sitter home and continued on with my reading education, after a month or two of relaxation and recuperation. One year on and depression has not yet set in, with my journey of self discovery continuing as I read, write and feel my way to better self awareness and a new cognitive interpretation. One year on I’m re-writing my core self narrative, my life story, as education insights and mind-less awareness exercises allow a better conscious identification of what happens within me, and how that stimulates who I am.

When I get those familiar up-spiral or down-spiral energies of bipolar these days I now know what it is and what to do about it. So now my left brained rationality is more in synch with my right brained emotive intuition and I don’t fret over the discharge of metabolic energy, that my frustrated heart is flushing through my brain and nervous system. These days I recognize the energy for what it is, as my natural capacities give vent to their heart toned sensations of life.

“Sit in a room and read–and read and read. And read the right books by the right people.
Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning
rapture all the time.” _Joseph Campbell

Twelve months on from that last raging psychosis I’m still reading, still writing, still continuing my sojourn of self revelation. Following the advice of personal hero’s I read, read and re-read letting new knowledge settle in through the metabolic processes of my body/brain. I'm still delightedly bemused at the formation of intuitive new ideas born within those synaptic connections of my evolved mammalian brain. Still delighted at my flights of manic energy when this old heart of mine allows me to dance away the night, and these days the shameful arrows of condemning looks no longer evoke a depressive reaction, here in a different culture.

During the return home to Australia last year I took precautions for the future, I did buy the sleeping pills I’d used for over a decade to get me through manic sleepless nights. I’m happy to report that in 12 months I’ve only used them once though, just after my return when painful memories of that first 24 hours in Sydney kept me awake. Since then I’ve learnt to let the energies go better than ever before, after a breakthrough realization that muscular tensions underpin the energy tones of my heart and its blood infusion of my brain. Its a process I've written about and posted information links to on my Bipolar Batesy blog site.

A process like today when I’ve had all the familiar self stimulated thoughts of positive energy needs, required to motivate and move my writing forward. Emotively toned thinking with all the usual spiritual themes and characters has flooded my mind, yet I now know the positive intent and how not to amplify and maintain this energy state with continuous compulsive thinking. Today I know how to let it go through the practice of muscular relaxation, particularly the muscles of my face where I manifest so much of my intentional needs.

Today with a mindless letting go of mediation like practice, I try to catch the gap between the spark and flame as Buddha teaches, that point were my instinctual reaction becomes a mindful awareness. Perhaps I’m finding it in muscular tensions as the motor cortex fires intensional needs milliseconds before the neo-cortex firing of my conscious perceptions? Perhaps I’m finding a balance here between Western scientific research and Eastern philosophical practice?

Today I’m happy to report that my authentic journey of self revelation continues almost two years into my Thailand adventure. Today I welcome with joyfully open arms whatever life will bring me next, no longer ashamed, no longer afraid of my own body,/brain and its thirst for living, for life with all its varying degrees of good and bad experience in whatever particular circumstance.

Be well,
David.

Here is the comment congratulating Stephen on his new role as president of MIND.

Batesy57 says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
6 November, 2011 at 6:05 am

Dear Stephen,

Polar Opposites indeed:))

Congratulations on the honor in being the successor to an author of that “Book Of Books,” nice coincidental irony of science, faith and belief, perhaps?

As a thirty one year survivor of the bipolar experience I can’t agree with the objective logic of our medical model of disease like illness though. It is sad that our mainstream awareness of this condition is so dominated by commercially funded science, dedicated to the management of emotional crisis, not its empirical cause.

Beyond this mainstream, mechanistic paradigm view there is as much emerging science suggesting natural cause for mental anguish in all its guises, as there is in the myopic research into the brain & gene origins alone. Research that suggests an instinctual foundation to our mental function & dysfunction, although one shy’d away from in daily reality through fear of contagion.

It is fascinating to contemplate why egg head intellectuals shy away from the body and refuse to contemplate the nervous systems role in so-called mental illness? Is not simply a happy accident which first discovered lithium’s affect on mood? It not simply the medical profession’s role in dealing with mental anguish that see’s it adopt a disease view?

New research based on systems theory now understands the chaotic nature of early life encounters with the external environment, in shaping the neural architecture of the still maturing brain and nervous system. Systems theory and Stephen Porges discovery of a third branch to our evolved mammalian autonomic nervous systems hints at the instinctual nature of madness states.

Although our social evolution shy’s away from an awareness of animal instincts prefering to keep faith with older notions of great God’s in the sky, like in Melvyn’s great book? After all, how could there possibly be an instinct for depression, for God’s sake, where’s the mainstream commonsense in that idea? Consider;

“Humans have three principal defense strategies—fight, flight, and freeze. The Polyvagal Theory describes three developmental stages of a mammal’s autonomic nervous system: Immobilization, mobilization, and social communication or social engagement. Faulty neuroception might lie at the root of several psychiatric disorders, including autism, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, depression, and Reactive Attachment Disorder. We are familiar with fight and flight behaviors, but know less about the defense strategy of immobilization, or freezing. This strategy, shared with early vertebrates, is often expressed in mammals as “death feigning.”

After 31 years of experience and a lot of self education I no longer believe in the mainstream model of mental illness, having uncovered the inner unconscious stimulation to my classic manic depression, I manage myself very well without medication and continue to evolve my own self awareness, writing about it with examples like the above, taken from chapter four of my memoir of madness.

Be well,
David Bates.

http://naturesmadness.wordpress.com/chp4/
Nature’s Madness: A Memoir of Mental Illness & Recovery
Recovery: A journey tasked by the trials of loss, misconnection, despair & hope’s resurrection.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I admit that I forgot to include the attribution to Stephen Porges in my quote of his "The Polyvagal Theory." and can be accused of self promotion. Yet there has been no contact to explain the comments non appearance, or advice on the error of my ways. Equally there has been no contact about the deletion of my post on the forum. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining Robert Whitaker's poignant question about what maintains the illusion that our current era of pharmacology has improved outcomes for long term mental illness treatment?

I'm not a champion for those in the anti-psychiatry movement that seeks to shame and blame psychiatry in exactly the same way it feels hurt & shamed. However I do take exception to this kind of arbitrary reaction that seeks to limit debate for God knows what useful reason. As I point out in the "My Anniversary October - Why no Depression This Time?" post, I'm 12 months on from acting out a psychosis mostly on The-Icarus-Project website, where I meet exactly the same arbitrary reaction at that time.

My posts on Icarus where soon met with the same constricted and suspicious response I would have found in any mainstream hospital in America or elsewhere in the western world. Although at first because I wanted to point out alternative scientific views of mental illness, I was considered a shill for big pharma, some kind of infiltrator sent to divide anarchist opinion.

Sadly it seems we are still far from understanding the roots of our common humanity & its all too often unconscious & instinctual reactions. Too many of us assume that criticism is anything more than self empowering need, a simple instinctive reaction, and not a critique of reason.

I trust however, that should this information ever find its way to the eyes or ears of our beloved Fry, he will not react with a simple closed minded judgment.

Here is a link to another Stephen's equally giant intellect, who is seeking to uncover the roots of mental anguish and the possible natural cause of human mental illness;
Neuroception and Mental Health Disorders?

Metamorphosis: Evolution & The Eternal Now?

2011-11-08T21:22:00.000-08:00

A Tortured Genius?

The Metamorphosis is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915. It is often cited as one of the seminal works of short fiction of the 20th century and is widely studied in colleges and universities across the western world.

Metamorphosis is a biological process by which an animal physically develops after birth or hatching, involving a conspicuous and relatively abrupt change in the animal's body structure through cell growth and differentiation. References to "metamorphosis" in mammals are imprecise and only colloquial, but historically idealist ideas of transformation and monadology, as in Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants, influenced the development of ideas of evolution.

Chaos Theory Chaos theory studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, an effect which is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. Can the nature of chaos and the butterfly effect be understood by the thinking mind alone? And what is the TRUTH about Nature, about Metamorphosis & Evolution?

Examples:

What really sparked the Tunisia Revolution & The Arab Spring?
Listen to a talking head rationalize the visceral affect & impact of Mohamed Bouazizi's self immolation as the butterfly effect stimulus to Revolution? Does the talking head of a rational mind seek to avoid feeling the nature of reality? Distancing itself from pain in the body via the unconscious mechanism of Dissociation - Denial? Or is the mind really tying to observe the complex nature of reality & its hidden and dynamically chaotic systems? Is a balance of FELT/THOUGHT sense required to walk the middle path of Truth in Awareness?

"His name was not Mohamed Al-Bouazizi his name was Mohamed Bouazizi.It was not his cart that was taken away, it was his scale that was taken away and it was not the first time.Do you really think it was wikileaks that made the the people of Tunisia aware of the corruption in their own country? How can you get the name of the person who actually sparked their revolution wrong not to mention the details? You really insult the intelligence of Tunisians by "highlighting" wikileaks as their awakening. ukalock077 2 weeks ago."

As the world descends into apparent chaos, are we witnessing a shift in the dynamic systems of an underlying reality, including our own? Will we emerge from this current period of apparent crisis (chaos) into a new systemic view, a new awareness of dynamic balance, a new stability of order in our evolving social systems? Are we in Metamorphosis - In Transition?

Does an all Thinking non Feeling mind get Lost in Translation? In Self Interpretation?

Are we entering the FALL into REALIZATION of an Eternal Now? Will we emerge form this current phase shift, understanding that our great texts from the past have always been about the nature of the eternal, not history? Are we about to realize the true meaning of our metaphor making existence? A metamorphosis of the mind, in awareness of this eternal now & what we really are?

Think of all the great teachers & prophets, were they aware of evolution, of history, or the reality and true nature of an eternal now? What happens when we sit alone under a star filled night sky & open our hearts to the reality of nature? What happens as we mature and learn to walk the line between immediate needs & wants and the divine? What is Metamorphosis & Evolution?

"In this particular moment of my life the television is keeping me company. BBC World News with its daily repeated stories are paying tribute to Steve Jobs today, the man from Apple has died. I sight the famous icon and in less than a minute a collage of memory floods through my mind. “How the bleep does that happen?” Memories of reading Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” and how Gregor Samsa turns into a giant dung beetle, or imagines he does? Of Wilhelm Reich’s notions of character armor and its analysis, how muscular tensions and rigid posture reveal our personality traits. Of the hardened shell of Gregor’s dung beetle back and his father killing him by forcefully lodging an apple there in, and fast flowing thoughts about the electro-chemical stimulation of metaphor and its non-verbal meaning." Nature's Madness?

"I took the English book out of my pocket and laid it on the bed cover in front of Kafka..... When I said that Garnett's book imitated the method of The Metamorphosis, he gave a tired smile, and with a faint, disclaiming movement of his hand said: "Oh no! He didn't get that from me. Its in the times. We both copied it from that." _G Janouch, Conversations with Kafka.

Chaos & the Nurturing of Individual Gene Expression?

“The infant brings inherent, constitutional givens (genotype) to the birth situation, which continue to unfold for a considerable length of time past birth. These genetic endowments are partially open to environmental modification (phenotype) and are also partially closed. To the extent that they are open they are acted upon, modified, and developed in a continuous dialectical interaction with primary caregivers. What psychoanalytic theory had speculated upon from its very beginning now turns out to be truer than had been anticipated. As in chaos theory, which states in part that there occurs an unusual sensitivity to initial conditions. Nobody anticipated how dependant the infant’s brain was on the mother‘s care giving and social interaction as a releaser moiety to her infant’s inherent and evolving brain structures.” Affect Regulation & the Origins of The Self. (Schore, 1994).

What is the true meaning of our metaphors, our language and what internal realty are they really trying to express?

What is the Reality of our Metamorphosis, our Evolution?

What is the Reality of an Eternal Now? Does it Really Exist?

My Anniversary October

2011-11-02T08:33:00.000-07:00

As October passed away its now been a full 12 months since I returned to Thailand after seeking support from family and friends, towards the end of a six week un-medicated psychosis. I was very tired after riding the waves of emotive energy that manic-psychosis evokes for such a long period, unassisted and mostly alone. There had been many days during that October when emotive illusion blurred the objective lines of an everyday, normal sense of reality. In a trance like state similar to that which we feel when woken from a lucid dream I’d acted out impulsive energies with manic posts on the-icarus-project website and posted the same links on Stephen Fry’s site too.

Unfortunately my return home to Sydney Australia did not meet with much understanding or offers of support due to my growing resistance to a mainstream view of my bipolar disorder condition. After a brutal first 24 hours of family rejection and the shock of my own cultures aggressive response to madness, I kept my own counsel hoping that time would heal my wounds and eventually bring rewards of new insight on my continuing sojourn of self revelation.

I'd allowed that psychotic period to unfold in its own way after thirty years of experience and education had given me the hope, that there is a natural explanation for the experience of classic manic depressive madness. Traveling back to Thailand only one week after my return home I was aware that my actions had been impulsive and that the shock of my family and friends reaction was concluding the manic energy phase. As I landed at Bangkok airport I wondered how long it might take for the depressive phase of my classic bipolar history to repeat itself, and if my attempt at self re-interpretation would be successful.

I was aware that the medical model of a diseased brain should be unavoidable and depression after such a long life history might be inevitable. “Wait and see,” I thought as I returned to my bed-sitter home and continued on with my reading education, after a month or two of relaxation and recuperation. One year on and depression has not yet set in, with my journey of self discovery continuing as I read, write and feel my way to better self awareness and a new cognitive interpretation. One year on I’m re-writing my core self narrative, my life story, as education insights and mind-less awareness exercises allow a better conscious identification of what happens within me, and how that stimulates who I am.

When I get those familiar up-spiral or down-spiral energies of bipolar these days I now know what it is and what to do about it. So now my left brained rationality is more in synch with my right brained emotive intuition and I don’t fret over the discharge of metabolic energy, that my frustrated heart is flushing through my brain and nervous system. These days I recognize the energy for what it is, as my natural capacities give vent to their heart toned sensations of life.

“Sit in a room and read–and read and read. And read the right books by the right people.

Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning

rapture all the time.” _Joseph Campbell

My Grandma & Her Eternal Metaphors

2011-11-02T01:37:00.000-07:00

Grandma!

'What!'

'They told me I’m crazy again, said I’m freaking mad!'

'Why?'

'Because I spoke about my dreams again, of how I think we will one day stand together in silence and feel the real.'

'Feel the real what?'

'Nature! How we might feel the reality of our life here on Earth and what its about? But they tell me I’m just being silly and psychotic again.'

I'm standing there now on a moonless night again, alone on a cliff top where I face the stormy sea. Its 3am in the morning and only Blaze, our family dog is beside me. My only company here on this dark and isolated cliff top.

I look up now, look towards a milky way sky and Grandma opens her arms again. Of coarse I take that leap of faith, for she will always cradle me in her arms, when ask her.

As the first rays of sunlight pierce the dark I wake, I hear the first bird song and feel the heartbeat of my sleeping dog. I rise and shake my head feeling Grandma pat me there, “silly boy,” she says.

Moments later as Blaze and I head off to follow the garden path, I think I catch a whisper on the wind, “keep dreaming,” and I wonder if I’m loosing a sense of separation here, I wonder if I’m feeling the reality of a Universe perceiving itself?

I know I should focus my attention on objective reality here, keep my mind on obvious and simple needs right before me. Like earning a living and playing my part in the commercial reality of our life sustaining economy. I should keep my focused energies on attaining five percent annual growth, measure my bank balance and count the number of my possession's, those simple solid objects of my hearts desire.

What use are the foolish dreams of a raving psychotic, after all?

Metaphors?

Reminds me of the movie "Blade Runner," and that hopeful ending.
What's in a name and what's the meaning of Rachel's termination date?

When we objectively observe all those chemicals in the brain, all those neurotransmitters, all those endogenous chemicals that transmit signals from a neuron to a target cell across a synapse. Do they mimic a deeper reality in some way? Are all those chemicals inside us, God's chemical's and are they a reflection of our deep immersion within the very fabric of the cosmos?

When we drop beneath the shallow perceptions of our objectified reason, can we not manage to feel the reality of our chemical connection to the Eternal now? From such a felt perspective of life, is human evolution a dream that we're only just remembering and what internal reality is our object like self interpretation really tying to project?

What the heaven or hell is my Grandma?

What is a true perspective?

How wide, how narrow, how deep, how high, how obvious?

Sweet Dreams:))

A Choice of Reason or Reaction?

2011-10-31T11:51:00.000-07:00

Recovery: A journey tasked by the trials of loss, misconnection, despair & hope's resurrection.

"Curse the mind that mounts the clouds in search of mythical kings and only mystical things, mystical things cry for the soul that will not face the body as an equal place, and I never learned to touch for real down, down where the iguanas feel." _Dory Previn.

God Dam! This dark pit of woe within this crushing depression;
“For myself, the pain is closely connected to drowning or suffocation-but even these images are of the mark. The pain persisted during my museum tour and reached a crescendo in the next few hours when, back at the hotel, I feel onto the bed and lay gazing at the ceiling, nearly immobilized and in a trance of supreme discomfort. Rational thought was usually absent from my mind at such times, hence trance.” (Styron, 1990).

Again, William Styron’s words ring notes of identification as he describes his experience of depression, and I’m awed by his ability to paint such poignant pictures of the human condition. Who can forget the amazing scene from the movie “Sophie’s Choice,” as Meryl Streep is forced to choose between her son and her daughter, as to which one will face the gas chamber outside those gates of hell at Auschwitz concentration camp. How does any woman make such a choice or any Fascist Intellectual so loose connection with humanities heart, its soul, and force it upon her? Dissociation, the Devil’s own device perhaps?

Could she ever really say how she felt in that awful moment, could she ever consciously acknowledge the instant of that action. That awful reality of, “Take my little girl - take my baby - take my little girl.” Perhaps nature has a way of saving us from such awful realization, removes the reality of searing pain by the minds conscious distance from the felt sense. By degrees of dissociation? The Devils own device, or the reality of our unconscious nature? Is our conscious awareness founded on a hidden mechanism of dissociation, of denial?

In wanting to write about my own experience of painful depression here, in that rebound reaction I suffered after the first diagnosis and hospitalization. It has taken me many a month of Sunday’s to face up to and identify the inner pain of this man’s reflection in the mirror. Its there in my face whenever I seek to recall the painful experiences of my past, etched deeply into that dashboard of human emotion, and as I look into the mirror while typing, I can’t hide from the truths that reside within my body anymore. I try to of coarse, quick thoughts and typed words have flowed well today as I discharge my internal energies to productive effect.

Yet there is that curious mechanism of denial involved, a curious thinking beyond the good sense of feeling, beyond the complex reality of this moment? I really do need to face what I am inside of me now, face up to the vagaries of chaos, chance and circumstance, to the power of meaningful coincidence that has landed me right here in this particular moment. The coincidence of time and place that now sees me needing to really feel the past, and that fateful moment in front of the mirror thirty one years ago, along with all its ripples within the matrix of consequence. In each instant that I try to feel for embodied memory and bring it up to conscious awareness, I find the rationalized response. These thoughts, words and writing that suggest an automatic dissociation of actual memory. A hidden urge to flee the pain body and escape into thoughts?

Writing the words “pain body” jogs a memory of reading Eckhart Tolle’s brilliant and very popular “The Power of Now - A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment.” I walk over to my precious collection of books and retrieve my copy, while telling myself, “he talks a lot about the pain body.”
“Focus attention on the feeling inside you. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don’t think about it - don’t let the feeling turn into thinking. Don’t judge or analyze. Don’t make an identity for yourself out of it. Stay present, and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you.” (Tolle, 1999).

Don’t analyze? Jesus! If only I’d found the trick to stop analyzing years ago, to stop my maintenance of a bipolar condition by constantly living in my head. And I love analyzing, I love the conceptual rationalizations of my mind. Yet for thirty years it never saved me, never saved me from myself, never managed to halt the pattern of my manic depressive reactions. I take Eckhart’s advice and try to simply observe this present moment, accept the reality of now and forget the past. I’m supposed to writing a memoir though and I need to honor my experience in the past, and try to articulate to myself and any readers the realities of events that have led me here. I can’t do that without remembering experience and its conscious interpretation.

Thirty one years ago! How can I possibly remember the actuality of events and their spin off consequences? It seems so rationally illogical that memory can be retrieved over such a time span within my conscious mind? Surely life does not work that way? Yet my conscious mind is not the whole picture here before this mirror, symbolic art does not unfold via the mind’s logic or reason after all? Looking into this symbolic mirror again I try to face my body and its memories, try to feel for my implicit self, that largely non conscious part of me that sustains my life, protects me always from beneath the realm of conscious awareness.

A forgotten memory springs to mind now, a time when I was fixing the leaking roof on my mother-in-laws back verandah. “Oh my God, the mother-in-law!” I think. I’ve always had issues with sensitive skin and at that time my skin was itching like crazy. I’d taken antihistamine tablets the night before to help me sleep instead of scratch the night away. Next morning I’m up on the roof having removed a sheet of iron and still suffering from drowsiness. It was all over before I had any conscious realization of the movement, I’d stepped right into the open gap and fallen through. With no thought whatsoever I’d grabbed onto a roofing beam on the way down, taking my full weight on my right arm and gently dropped to the ground. A second after I landed, realization burst into conscious awareness with a, "wow! How did I do that?”

I shake my head at the richness of an embodied memory, its as if it had been captured on camera by some watching film crew. I think-feel a curious sense of, "is this really me?" Am I connecting aspects of myself somehow kept firmly outside conscious awareness for all these years? Am I really trying to face and feel my instincts here, those millions of years of evolution within my implicit self? Yet in the name of our commonly accepted reason, how could there possibly be an instinct for the experience of depression?

Where’s the commonsense to this feeling for memories I ask myself, or is commonsense founded more on an unconscious urge for denial rather than any solid insights into our true nature? I think about how I learned my particular version of commonsense, how I simply took for granted the socialized norms, about the nature of my being. “Did I think about what I am and how I do what I do, during those decades when just getting on with life was an every day action affair? - If another psychotropic medication had not failed me in 2007, would I even have set foot on this path of self education? - If the drug had worked reasonably well would I still be acting with the same old taken for granted assumptions about myself?”

I search through the dozens of PDF docs on this laptop, looking for a good example of the latest science research on human development, which seems to hint at a natural reason for our experience of depression;
“Humans have three principal defense strategies—fight, flight, and freeze. The Polyvagal Theory describes three developmental stages of a mammal’s autonomic nervous system: Immobilization, mobilization, and social communication or social engagement. Faulty neuroception might lie at the root of several psychiatric disorders, including autism, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, depression, and Reactive Attachment Disorder. We are familiar with fight and flight behaviors, but know less about the defense strategy of immobilization, or freezing. This strategy, shared with early vertebrates, is often expressed in mammals as “death feigning.” (Porges, 2004).

"In humans, we observe a behavioral shutdown, frequently accompanied by very weak muscle tone. We also observe physiological changes: Heart rate and breathing slow, and blood pressure drops. Immobilization, or freezing, is one of our species’ most ancient mechanisms of defense. Inhibiting movement slows our metabolism (reducing our need for food) and raises our pain threshold. But in addition to freezing defensively, mammals immobilize themselves for essential prosocial activities, including conception, childbirth, nursing, and the establishment of social bonds. However, immobilization with fear elicits profound, potentially lethal, physiological changes.” (Porges, 2004).

Consider Styron’s description of depression again;
“I feel onto the bed and lay gazing at the ceiling, nearly immobilized and in a trance of supreme discomfort.” (Styron, 1990). When viewed along side Steven Porges recent discoveries concerning our unconscious autonomic nervous system, the stimulus for depression’s fearful immobilization seems to be yielding to our conscious awareness, yet such knowledge is still so new it finds little awareness even amongst the profession most charged with depression’s alleviation. Perhaps only our common system of rank and status is preventing the nervous system’s role in mental illness being fully acknowledged by the medical profession. Healing disciplines that have traditionally focused on the body, have certainly embraced this new awareness though, and it seems a paradigm shift in the understanding of mental anguish is underway.

Consider a further description by Styron;
“Rational thought was usually absent from my mind at such times, hence trance.” (Styron, 1990). Perhaps these words of personal experience are beginning to be understood by some therapists as this example shows, “Excessive parasympathetic branch activity leads to increased energy-conserving processes, manifested as decreases in heart rate and respiration and as a sense of ‘numbness’ and ‘shutting down’ within the mind (Siegel, 1999, p.254). Such hypoarousal can manifest as numbing, a dulling of inner body sensation, slowing of muscular/skeletal response and diminished muscular tone, especially in the face. Here “cognitive and emotional” processing are also disrupted.” (Hartman and Zimberoff, 2006).

Even in western philosophies cherished talking therapies, mindfulness has been embraced as a best practice technique for healing emotional anguish. An eastern philosophy of meditation practice underlies these mindful awareness techniques and many now acknowledge that meditation affects the unconscious autonomic nervous system, our oldest nervous system of survival.
Styron’s personal description of depression certainly resonates deep within me as I recall feelings from my first experience of clinical depression. Looking back, fear and shame seemed to tone the energies of a trance like state, very similar to the previous manic illusions. Pain felt like a tight black band around my head, a feeling of pressure constantly trying to squeeze the life out of me while every shame fueled thought felt like an arrow through my heart to the extent that I just wanted to die.

Looking into the mirror now I search for felt memories, for unconscious body tensions, trying to feel my instinct for depression and perhaps Freud‘s observation of a death instinct? I feel for the activity of my autonomic nervous system through which instinctual activity is mediated, I can feel its electro-chemical affect, most obvious in tingling sensations. After thirty one years I can finally face the pain, feel its spiraling down sensations as I remember the past with a felt sense. Here and now I can face up to those feelings of collapse and resist maintaining and amplifying them through the affect of thinking. I feel the tensions within and let them ease away, not with a mindful focus, but with felt awareness.

Its the kind of felt awareness that the wonderful Gene Gendlin introduced to the world with his Focusing Therapy and his extensive writings on the "felt sense." Watch him explain this strange place where implicit self meets conscious self, when we go inside and attempt to marry the mind to the body;

Education has given me the insight of mind to know what these collapse sensations of the depressive impulse are and resist the urge to amplify them with thoughts. I no longer need to seek the identity of my internalized threat. Its simply my instinctual nervous system and its unconscious experience of life, its my blind watchmaker, as others have sought to label, to metaphor. "The ghost in the Machine?" As I use my mind to try and interpret what I am inside though, I’m searching for my own labels here, my own metaphors and trying desperately to divine the line between my instinctual reaction and mindful reason. Here in front of the mirror I only wish I had Bill Styron’s talent for painting such poignant word pictures of the our human condition. I wish I had more than my learned words of objective vocabulary to paint with.

Struggling through that first period of manic depression I did my best to comply with my psychiatrist’s wisdom, the Stelazine tablets for my schizophrenia and Serapax for my bewildered confusion and side effect anxiety. Even the trails of MAOI drugs that caused such debilitating side effects as involuntary convulsions, with his warnings about problems of foods like cheese and alcohol consumption, accompanied by a story about a patient who’d suffered a stroke. Jesus! Happy days indeed! Why worry though, just keep taking the pills and keep everybody else happy and relaxed by pretending to feel normal. It is a common experience for long term survivor's of mental anguish problems, that generally speaking the normal world does not want to know about the real experience of mental illness. Its as if people are scared they might catch it?

Yet time does change things and slowly I regained enough motivation to get myself back to work, although self employment seemed more than a step to far. I remember the few short months I spent working for the government, working and sleeping in a railways department workshop. The fear of another panic attack accompanied every single minute of those first weeks of my return to the normal world. Time and experience do allow a desensitization of unconscious expectations though and my conscious awareness of fear subsided. Late in 1980 I managed to find employment within the elevator industry where I’d worked in previous years, as the familiar energies of a grim hard jawed determination returned. The elevator industry is a dangerous one still responsible for many deaths and injuries each year, and I honestly can’t recall any concern amongst family, friends or my psychiatrist about the issue of side effects and my particular occupation.

The edifice of love springs to mind as I write along with thoughts about whether we can ever really know each other, or only how we are affected by each other? Certainly the vagaries of love are brought into sharper focus when one has a history of madness, most people turn away in time, unless we agree to play the normalization game. They say true love is unconditional, its care and concern are beyond the bounds of repayment in kind, yet the stress of mad crisis periods certainly undermined such a concept of love in my experience. Its funny to recall descriptions of my elevator work environment as an exercise in crisis management, when preventative maintenance programs always seemed fail at some point. Psychiatry’s efforts with mental illness seem to be very similar, particularly with those hit and miss medications. Perhaps its part of our hard wired nature to seek life in the reaction of the moment though, like how we seek the emotive drama of crisis moments in our favorite TV shows?

The painful frustration of my experience with medical model psychiatrists has always been an unwillingness to go beyond the pale of just managing the crisis periods in my life. As if normality is measured simply by the absence of obvious crisis, so the medications must be working? It feels like they didn’t really care or couldn’t be bothered with uncovering the core disturbance within me. Nobody seemed to really care what I was going through inside, not really interested in the ongoing pain I felt every day. As long as I acted normal everybody around me could pretend that all was fine, and of coarse I acted, who wants to go back there again, back into hospital and heavy duty medication regime. I played the normalization game and kept my inner feelings to myself, while struggling to just climb out of bed every day.

As I began to recover from the pain, fear and confusion of that first misdiagnosis, I so wished for an acceptable reason, for a fully coherent explanation that would sooth away my shame. So many times I felt dismissed by my superior brother in his psychiatrist guise, unsupported by my family too who played the subornation rank and status game equally well, “he’s a specialist you know! - He knows better than we do?” Looking back with the benefit of hindsight now, with all the self education and thirty one years of experience, I can’t help but think about hospital admission scenes. Of all those psychiatrist’s rooms and the immediate needs of managing a crisis? What would I do in the same situation if the shoe was on the other foot, how would I react? As a trained psychiatrist, would I not use my training and education to act, would I manage a crisis with the same medications?

Looking back, I do understand that reasoned reaction on the day of my first diagnosis, even the need for the heavy sedation medication of that first hospitalization. What came to trouble and further shame me though, what made me feel like a helpless child was a reluctance to go beyond that reasoned reaction, once normality had been regained and my above average intellect became stable again. I came to hate being treated like a child as much as I did being hospitalized, and I came to despise the unthinking and autonomic rank and status game we all play. Even though it took me decades to learn about and come to feel my own instinctive reactions. The way I automatically play the social ranking and status, judgment game. I even came to understand the security afforded by a status qua of hierarchical social organization and my family’s deep need to accept on face value, the medical model of psychiatry’s madness explanations.

My psychiatrist’s explanations which so easily soothed others and gave them some sense of certainty with a “its just a chemical imbalance in your brain,” came to trouble me deeply over time. Yet it took years of self education to understand these self soothing rationalizations as a projection of my internal need for physical security. The simplistic chemical imbalance explanation has a ring of feasibility to it and was eagerly taken in by my family and friends, helping them to justify a reluctance to enter into any emotionally disturbing conversations. “Don’t talk about it, just accept that the doctor knows best and take your medication. - Forget about so called emotional issues and move on.” Yet the unease remained, hard wired within me and an internalized sense of threat, simply would not and cannot just go away. I remember the famous phrase from the spin doctors of the CIA during the Vietnam war, “deception is the art of plausibility.” Truth and facts are not vital for an acceptable story, only plausibility, for people’s own self soothing needs will do the rest.

I remember too, the Judge I fronted in 2007 when I spoke about being one of the estimated thirty to forty percent of people who do not benefit from ongoing medication. Even though he’d rubber stamped these psychiatry applications for involuntary hospitalization for years, he’d never heard this statistic before. He preferred to believe that metal illness lapses in remission were simply due to people not taking their medications. Such are the norms of a self soothing common sense perhaps? So as I look into the mirror again trying to feel the source of my own self soothing rationalizations here, can I feel the primary stimulus of an essential need to feel secure? After all my self education can I really sense the reality of that deep inner need and its affection for the hierarchy of a social order? A need for a sense of mental certainty as a projection of my deeply unconscious need to feel physically safe in this very moment? I take Gene Gendlin's advice and go to the murky edge, that place where mind does not know and nothing is clear, that felt sense? I feel the reality of Eckhart Tolle's, "now," I feel myself anew in this very moment, this unthinkable, unspeakable moment and I know I'm safe, I feel it now.

In 1981 during the Easter holiday period another event occurred which came to infuse future manic periods with referential ideas and a sense of spiritual wonder. While searching for a bunch of keys dropped down an elevator shaft by one of two young men, I should have lost my life when impaled through the left leg by a protruding piece of inch by inch, angled metal. The elevator should have carried on its down journey and ripped my leg off, yet somehow it stopped pinning me upside down for well over an hour. Presumably I did something to cause the elevator to stop and presumably I was just very lucky it did not move again before the electric power was switched off about an hour later. It certainly surprised official’s when the machine simply resumed its downward journey when switched back on some two days later. “Somebody up there must really like you!” My supervisor said when visiting me in hospital.

My wife and I had just negotiated the purchase of our second home where we were going to start a family, so my relief at such a lucky escape had quite an emotional impact. 1982 saw the birth of the first of our four sons, born two years apart and the beginning of a decade of quite resignation to my lot and the experience of mental illness. A second diagnosis came during this time though, along with a huge sense of relief at what we felt was a perfect fit. Perfectly describing my symptomatic behaviors and the typical cyclic energies of a bipolar disorder condition. The psychiatrist's description of a manic depressive certainly seemed to fit me to a tee, and so it was with relish that I started taking my first doses of Lithium in those amazing horse size tablets, “you can break them in two though,” the psychiatrist said.

Unfortunately Lithium gave me bigger side effect issues than any other medication I took over a twenty year period. Chronic constipation became a real problem for me as I struggled with its compounded fatigue everyday, and fatigue does not mix well with a dangerous occupation. It was a non average side effect too, as most people experience the opposite bowl problems with Lithium, a knowledge that caused me great frustration and the resentment of, why me? Brought up in a strict disciplinarian household I was always the compliant child and had become an equally compliant adult. Hence my deep frustration and at times deeply felt anguish when an eagerness to embrace my bipolar diagnosis was continually thwarted by side effect intolerance.

I survived that decade by a process of withdrawal, limiting my emotional life by holding myself within the kind of timid shyness that had best suited survival as a child. Holding myself tight in a braced muscular posture of vigilant alert, in an unconscious reaction to my circumstances. Work and the refuge of music were my life during this time, and of coarse the births and childhood’s of my own children. I basically worked seven days a week for a decade, notwithstanding another two week hospitalization not long after my bipolar diagnosis. I did my best to come to terms with the medical model of disease, of a lifetime illness that would only be managed with a continuing medication compliance.

Perhaps it is the underlying reality of chaos, chance and circumstance that gives effect to the individual differences in our lives? My intolerance of medications forced me down a different path than the one illuminated by the normal medical model of disease in mental illness? My road to recovery certainly was not made by any conscious, reasoned choice during the first two decades of my madness experience. I had a young family to help support and the stability of normal moods and energies was my most earnest desire during that period, yet I found only bitter disappointment in ongoing medication failures. Further more, nobody seemed to really care how I felt inside, only how I behaved and how they were affected by me. Simplistic advice to pull myself together seemed only to reflect their needs, not the deeper reality of mine. It seems a sad fact of life for people suffering with a depressive urge, that on the surface it looks like and is unconsciously judged as a weakness of character.

Work gave me focus and my family a reason to drag myself around each day even though suicidal ideation was a constant companion. I remember the hundreds of times I’ve stood on the roof of tall city buildings with that image of the jump always inhabiting the back of my mind, and of coarse in the industry I worked it would have been simple enough to meet with a fatal accident. Of coarse nobody really wants to discuss such thoughts in our everyday normality, the internal energies of a suicidal death wish. “Don’t talk about that stuff, its too morbid, too close to the bone, I don’t want to hear about it, just get on with your life, will you!” In the 1980’s I was still decades away from exploring the reality of my suicidal death wish and understanding its deepest motivation. In the 1980’s I still didn’t know my bipolar condition was an affective disorder, I mean, “what the hell is an affect?” Back in those days I struggled through a workaday life with the same mechanistic awareness that everyone else does, the same parts like perception that heard the word dopamine and naturally assumed it was just some malfunctioning part of my brain.

I do remember reading some philosopher’s lines about a clockwork universe paradigm though, how we are still immersed in mechanistic assumptions of a simple cause and effect perception. I remember too the continuing bewilderment and helpless confusion inherent in the lack of relief from my inner tensions, provided by a plethora of psychotropic medications. I remember the feelings of loss, of helplessness and despair compounded by a normal worlds fearful reluctance to discuss the deeper realities of our internal motivations. Here in this present moment I face myself again, trying to feel the actuality of my experience and not simply pass over it, with that "I know, I know," part I call my mind?

Curious things happen at times like this too? For the last few years each time I began to face myself in this felt sense way a tune spontaneously springs to mind. The theme tune from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” fills my mind, my head space. Bizarre huh? It comes out the blue right here and now, a soundtrack that has not captured my attention for months, yet here it leaps into mind for no obvious reason? My implicit self perhaps? Are such metaphorical movies and their themes about contact with our true self, rather than a projected encounter with some alien species?

Metaphors of an evolving Self Awareness?

Time changes everything though and chaos, chance and circumstance find stability in the long run? Such indescribable influences urged me on with an underlying motivation that has navigated me here somehow. Not with any reasonable logic or with any surface cause and effect sense of objective reality, but something deeper still. Something I struggle to articulate using the quick assumptive metaphors of our evolved thus far, language. Something deeper and wider than my everyday needs of immediate perception with its rationalized thoughts of obvious reason? An underlying systemic multiplicity of true nature perhaps, and not one thing or another?

As it was, I struggled through the decade of the 1980’s keeping myself relatively stable by withholding positive energies for life, by holding onto that habitual muscular constriction of cowering defeat, that had kept me safe during my fear filled childhood. My father had a volcanic rage inside him you see, often lashing out at an easy target to relieve his own pent up frustrations. Like his son, he suffered from a bitter unspeakable dissonance within the reality of his lived experience. Far to often forced to deny his innate capacities, his God given abilities, he played the inequitable game of social rank and status.

In a generational learning of emotional expression he simply passed his own experience on to me as his father had to him. Three generations of Grandfather, father and son acted out a learned emotional expression, not with conscious reason, but unconscious reaction. Each generation denying accusations of blind rage by seeking the double bind forgiveness of unconscionable actions. I was still to ignorant to have any conscious awareness of this when I began to raise my own son’s with the same knee jerk reactions to their boyish exuberance. I simply reacted just like father had in matters of childhood discipline. Undoubtedly I took out my own frustrations with my life, by discharging pent up emotions through the mechanism of projection, finding easy and accepting targets, just as many a proceeding generation had done.

I remember when my third son was about three years old and I dismissed his clamor for attention when returning home from work one day. He reacted in turn with anger at my instant and unthinking disavowal of his needs, and for the first time I actually caught myself reacting without reason, simply acting out my own internal frustrations. Perhaps our ongoing evolution involves a process of uncovering these often blind emotional reactions with each family generation. Perhaps the great gift of our current level of mass education is a rising bar of family dialogue, of dinner table discussion.

I can only wish the bar had been a bit higher at our dinner table during generations of childhood. My Dad was a simple and honest man though and despite his unpredictable, rage-full urge to frighten the life out of me, it is with warmth that I recall his reply when I asked why he so often reacted with such bad temper, “it makes me feel better,” he replied. I only wish we could have shared such an honest and open discussion about the true nature of our relationship, talked beyond our unspoken agreement not to mention such emotionally upsetting issues. Perhaps the same unspoken agreement which pervades and sometimes poisons a normal social world?

It seems there are always advantages to circumstance though, depending on which way we look at them. I ended up using my bipolar socially phobic condition to read away the hours of relative isolation during that first decade of my mental illness experience. I recall wondering through many a book shop looking for some fruit that might feed my philosophical desires, my deep need to understand myself. Carl Jung was one such feed and the equally giant intellect of Joseph Campbell another, I remember reading every volume of Jung’s work I could get my hands on. Jung’s contribution to the common lexicon of popular language is now legend of coarse, although it took me another decade and half to feel the roots to his meaning of an emotional complex.

Campbell became a personal hero with his life story of reading his way through the great depression, an example I’ve tried to follow. He’d spent the years of what so many considered a complete disaster, reading book after book on American Indian spiritual history, along with anything he get his hands on from around the world. He came out this great period of economic depression as one of worlds leading experts on mythology and religion.

In the 80’s I waded through his four volume work on the origins of the worlds religions, in his landmark, “The Masks of God.” How many of us have been beguiled by his influence on modern film makers through his legendry knowledge of metaphor myth’s, legend’s and our universal mythology of the human soul. His “Hero with a Thousand Faces,” inspired George Lucas and the epic movie franchise “Star Wars,” and how many of this generation have not felt those universal metaphors work their subliminal magic while watching the movie “Avatar.” The hero’s journey is now well recognized among script writers as a guaranteed hit with all movie goers, as the well known hero’s and villain’s act out the unconscious human archetypes on the big screen.

I started this chapter with a heading about a choice of reason or reaction, my intention is to question the nature of my fall into depression after my first experience of psychosis. Through examples of a writer's and excerpts from recent science journals I have attempted to suggest that our common assumptions of a disease like mental illness are misguided. I’ve suggested that the average psychiatrist’s reaction to a crisis of mental anguish and abnormal behavior, is as much motivated by unconscious reaction as it is any insightful analysis of a patient‘s experience. In chapter one I pointed out my difficulty in describing my inner experience using my learned and taken for granted vocabulary, with its object like labels and metaphors of an observable external world.

I suggest that my first psychiatrist had similar difficulty and used his learned concepts of mental illness when making his quick judgment of my condition. In his challenge to respond to a crisis situation he relied on his education to inform his actions, which I suggest was a reasoned reaction, rather than any insightful judgment within those moments. I further suggest that the average psychiatrist is about as self aware as any average person, and owns no special powers of insightful judgement to justify high social rank and status. Indeed we should always question our motives for choosing our profession, as some point out. "Some people become doctors out of concern and empathy for others, while some sign up for the power and social prestige, not to mention the money."

There is mounting evidence that our taken for granted subjective perceptions are founded on denied instinctual reactions. It is also becoming increasingly obvious to many therapists who work outside the mainstream of psychiatric care, that the nervous system and the body cannot be so myopically dismissed when treating mental illness. Mainstream psychiatry's focus on the brain and its chemical activity alone are now standing in denial of the latest systems theories and their application to the understanding of human development and behavioral function.

Unfortunately our everyday common assumptions seek a mental certainty via short soothing explanations, in plausible statements that are easily digested. And as I pointed out above, our self soothing reactions will latch onto any plausible explanation in an unconscious urge of self deception. It seems we are more interested in maintaining our comfort-zone than confronting the deeper truths to our inner reality, "don't talk about emotional stuff, you might upset somebody," and so we enact the daily rituals of a socialized denial.

In our reasoned reactions are we guilty of maintaining and amplifying the mind’s foundation in a dissociation from nature? As many now point out, there would no conscious awareness without some degree of dissociation, without this mechanism we’d still be stuck in pure reflex reactions just like the rest of the animal kingdom. In the example of Sophie’s Choice I asked what could possibly allow a fascist intellectual to so loose his connection to his heart and soul, and force such an inhuman choice upon any woman? Dissociation, the Devil’s own device, perhaps?

Consider psychiatry’s use of the ice pick lobotomy so routinely used not so very long ago, and ask yourself if ECT treatments or the chemical cosh of psychotropic medication is a huge leap forward? What happens when the bright intellectual spends so much time in their head that they unknowingly loose connection with the soul, and will not face the body as an equal place, how do they learn to touch for real down, down where the iguanas feel?

David Bates, October 2011.

Also posted on;
Nature's Madness: A Memoir of Mental Illness & Recovery

Recovery: A journey tasked by the trials of loss, misconnection, despair & hope's resurrection.

http://naturesmadness.wordpress.com/

References:
Styron, W, 1990, “Darkness Visible a memoir of Madness,” Vintage Books, USA.
Tolle, E, 1999, “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment,” New World Library, USA.
Porges, S, W, 2004, “NEUROCEPTION: A Subconscious System for Detecting Threats and Safety,” University of Illinois at Chicago.
Hartman, D and Zimberoff, D, 2006, “Healing the Body-Mind in Heart-Centered Therapies,” Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2006, Vol. 9

The Music of Trance State Mania

2011-10-27T03:21:00.000-07:00

Recovery: A journey tasked by the trials of loss, misconnection, despair & hope's resurrection.

“When the white eagle of the North is flying overhead

The browns, reds and gold’s of autumn lie in the gutter, dead.

Remember then, that summer birds with wings of fire flaying

came to witness springs new hope, born of leaves decaying.

Just as new life will come from death, love will come at leisure.

Love of love, love of life and giving without measure

gives in return a wondrous yearn of a promise almost seen.

Live hand-in-hand and together we’ll stand on the threshold of a dream.”

(From the music album, This is The Moody Blues)

“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the
notes and curl my back to loneliness.” _Maya Angelou.

Truth! Perception? What is Really Perceiving Itself. Inside You?

Thoughts of reference characterized the days after my cathartic moments in front of the mirror on that Sunday morning in 1980. The music album “This is the Moody Blues,” drew me in with a particularly rapturous attention, its haunting lyrics and melodies seemed to be written just for me, with perfect references to my new life situation. Most definitions of such altered perceptions suggest, “Ideas of reference and delusions of reference involve people having a belief or perception that irrelevant, unrelated or innocuous phenomena in the world refer to them directly or have special personal significance; the notion that everything one perceives in the world relates to one's own destiny.”

“I'm just beginning to see, now I'm on my way.
It doesn't matter to me, chasing the clouds away.
Something calls to me.
The trees are drawing me near, I've got to find out why.
Those gentle voices I hear, explain it all with a sigh.
I'm looking at myself, reflections of my mind.
It's just the kind of day to leave myself behind.
So gently swaying through the fairy-land of love, if you could just come with me and see the beauty of. Tuesday afternoon.” _Justin Haywood.

I remember sitting on the grass out front of the house listening to the above song on, you guessed it, Tuesday afternoon. The lyrics seemed exquisitely relevant to this particular Tuesday, as I basked in a new sensory awareness that made my previous work a day concerns seem utterly superfluous. The luxury of just sitting there on the grass could not have held more delight if I’d been sitting in a warm tropical stream listening to the birds of paradise. My whole sense of being alive was transformed it seemed, making my previous feelings for life seem like some sensory desert, where I’d been dying of thirst. It felt like life had not really touched me before this, as if there had been some invisible force field blocking all the sensual vibrancy I now so clearly felt. I remember thinking that I’d just mimicked being alive before these new days, as if I’d been reluctantly drudging through the motions of how I should be. The lyrics of “Melancholy Man,” found particular resonance with my life experience and those secretly held feelings of being special;

“I'm a melancholy man, that's what I am, all the world surrounds me, and my feet are on the ground. I'm a very lonely man, doing what I can, all the world astounds me and I think I understand, that we're going to keep growing, wait and see.
When all the stars are falling down, into the sea and on the ground, and angry voices carry on the wind. A beam of light will fill your head, and you'll remember what's been said by all the good men this world's ever known.
Another man is what you'll see, who looks like you and looks like me, and yet somehow he will not feel the same, his life caught up in misery, he doesn't think like you and me, cause he can't see what you and I can see.” _Mike Pinder.

It felt like this song had been written especially for me, a sad outsider with a paradoxical sense of concern for the future of the human race. I was brought up in the wake of the second world war, the East, West divide and the threat of a nuclear holocaust, yet I’d long felt that we’d already lived through the biblical Armageddon and that the age of Aquarius was already rising on a tide of mass education. Long before this first experience of psychosis I’d held such biblically referenced and spiritual interests without knowing why. Much later I would come to understand the brain’s primitive neural mechanisms of attachment and bonding, of separation distress and music’s uncanny ability to resonate with the frequencies of electro-chemical stimulation of our primary needs. In the years that followed music always played a part in my psychotic episodes, even though the seat of its affect is completely hidden from external observation, and beyond the mind’s objective interpretation.

“A major component of the poignant feelings that accompany sad music are sounds
that may acoustically resemble separation DV’s (distress vocalizations) - the
primal cry of being lost or in despair.” (Panksepp, 1998)

I spent the rest of that Tuesday thinking of ways to create a world without money, an equitable utopia of love, happiness, mutual understanding and respect. My conviction of a real spiritual event in front of the mirror grew stronger, as I sought a future purpose for its crystallize its meaning. My sense of certainty was aided by a continuing feeling of wellness and ease, honestly I’d never felt better in my life before this, never felt so self secure. Such feelings of good health would become a warning sign of approaching manic episodes in the following years of coarse, feelings I would come to distrust as symptoms. Yet I always held troubling concerns about this curious early phase of hidden nervous system reactions, in response to a stressful life challenge, a trigger? How can these common feelings of wellness be brought on by a virus like illness, a tricky and complex cancer of the brain that causes a chemical imbalance? More than two decades after this first episode of psychosis I would learn about systems theories and their neuroscience applications in the field of human development research.

Early life events affect the mind boggling complexity of our interconnected brain/body systems in ways our age old cause and effect logic is ill suited to comprehend. Back in 1980 I understood the simple mechanics of cause and effect like everyone else, sensing cause as my prayer to God and its effect as the extraordinary shift in sensations that followed directly. How I wish I’d understood the nature of this false clockwork paradigm back then, the simplistic thinking that is far more rationalized reaction than insightful reasoning. How I wish I’d understood the powerful impression that seeing objects out there in the external world has on our objective, cause and effect reasoning. Perhaps if I’d been brought up in a Buddhist tradition I would have sensed the unspeakable reality within, and not amplified these energies of nervous system affect with the sympathetic resonance of musical vibrations and the electro-chemical frequency stimulated by my compulsive thinking. Alas, in 1980 I knew nothing about the evolved role of my autonomic nervous systems sympathetic and parasympathetic branches in unconsciously organizing all my behavioral responses, including my madness states.

“A property of resonance is sympathetic vibration, the tendency
of one resonance system to enlarge & augment through matching the
resonance frequency pattern of another resonance system.” (Schore, 1995)

“I need you!” I said, without the slightest hint of pleading hesitation, a surefooted statement no doubt enabled by my new self belief, some three days after my cathartic moment. “I’ll come and pick you up,” I continued with obvious expectation.
“Ok, I’ll get ready,” came her reply. I put down the phone and reflected on the previous three days. The conversations with a close friend, discussing earnest conversations I’d had with myself about the wonder of my new appreciation for life. My heightened senses had brought such a buzz to my thinking, and an increasingly consuming desire for a purpose to my life beyond the mundane reality of work a day existence. What the buzzing thoughts glossed over though was the inner urge to pick up the phone and call my wife, how the mystical buzz and musical accompaniment sustained an escape from heart felt pain, and the primal challenge of isolation and group exclusion. I drove past the church top blue neon cross with a growing sense of it being my cross, as I headed towards the inner city suburb of Marrickville.

It was late on a Wednesday night when I picked her up, a simple honk of the car horn outside the single fronted terraced house she’d grown up in. Within two minutes we were on our way back to the marital home, with me talking excitedly as I explained all that had taken place since her dramatic exit. Not long after we arrived home the second most potent affect of my new state of being made its presence felt. Sex! In manic states my sexual appetite is unusually high, as is my sustained performance, insipid premature ejaculation problems were suddenly banished as if I were indeed a new man. The passion of our re-union after the uncertainty of separation climaxed in a simultaneous orgasm that was as compelling an experience as that moment in front of the mirror. Wow! Wow! Wow! Life just kept getting better, and this night was an absolute first for both of us. Further more, I slept for the first time I could remember since the previous Saturday.

The next day I slipped further into a daydream existence though, as I feed my thirst for these new positive sensations with thoughts about developing a new philosophy of life. I basked again in the experience of a natural world I’d been somehow disconnected from. I spent time working in the front and back gardens, warmed by both the sun and the afterglow of our orgasmic experience, blissfully listening to the birds sing on what felt like a whole new dimension. In the late afternoon my best friend called by to see me and we ended up at his Aunt’s house discussing the religious aspect of my experience again. Over the period of an hour or so I argued strongly for my feelings that we are entering the practical phase of creating the heaven Jesus promised, via the global rise of mass education. I’d spent the afternoon fantasizing about writing a book to re-interpret the new testament, and the lessons from Jesus life, like his early thirst for knowledge. We talked about the everyday experience of happiness and the dilemma of real needs versus superfluous wants, which led to me describing the simultaneous orgasm of the previous night. I was trying to demonstrate the comparative qualities of object derived versus spontaneous organic pleasures and joy, venting my lifelong frustration with the amount of life energy invested in inanimate objects. This led to the most dramatic gesture of my rising mania, as I grabbed a knife and held it out to others while suggesting I could die happy after the experience of the previous night.

The incident with the knife seemed to mark a shift towards irritability though, as my dreamy wistful thinking ran into the constraints of daily reality. The following day I became very concerned about memories of an action that was contradictive of my new found sense of spirituality. Early in our relationship my wife and I had engaged in the abortion of what would have been our first child. Looking back with hindsight I can understand how fatigue from the lack of rest started to ring a negative tone to my constant thinking. The previous concern for spiritual joy shifted towards spiritual guilt and how we could possibly make amends for what we‘d done. I’d been against the abortion that my wife, who was then my girlfriend had been so determined on. I’d wanted to follow a family tradition and get married young, setting up home for the big happy family I secretly yearned for. Alas she was petrified of telling her mother and I conceded it was entirely her choice, her body.

On this particular day though, I was haunted by guilt, frustration and anger, the abortion act epitomizing the sense of loss that had been such a palpable feeling throughout my life. Anger started to tone my thinking, particularly about the secrecy that had surrounded our decision and the don’t talk about it agreement since. I was angry that such an important life decision had been so influenced by childish fears, and if I’d really connected with God, then how could I reconcile my culpability and guilt. Later that night these feelings culminated in me brow beating my wife into disclosing our secret to her mother during a telephone call. I remember being fixated on being truthful, perhaps feeling it to be some kind of redemption as we reveled our dark secret. As my wife spoke to her mother, admitting that she had been afraid to speak to her about the pregnancy, I wrote on the wall in the second bedroom I used as an office. It was like a Moses and the ten commandments moment as I wrote on that wall, preaching about the purifying affect of recognizing and speaking the truth.

There was a palpable relief for both of us when this disclosure was greeted with far more acceptance and understanding than expected, confirming my sense of new beginnings. The thirst for a new approach in my life seemed to be seeking a new emotional atmosphere with friends and family, as I continued my daydreams of future purpose. I bought some books about Jesus life, with notions of re-interpreting his story projecting my fumbling interpretation of my own unconscious needs. Away from my self stimulated states of euphoria and their musical enhancement, hushed toned concern was building amongst immediate family members. The incident with the knife became the focal point of “what’s going on with David,” telephone calls between my wife, her mother and my parents.

Exactly one week after my mystic moment, my parents turned up at our house accompanied by my paternal Grandparents, who were visiting from the UK for only the second time. Enabled by my dreamy manic state I greeted my family with open armed effusiveness, having cast off the weight of my previous reserve. I still remember the extraordinary scene of both my mother and father backing away from me with suspicion in their eyes. Of coarse being manic I was keen to talk about my new experience, wanted to establish a new atmosphere of open hearted freedom between us. Just as in my youth I pursued a dialogue with parents while the woman who had nurtured my childhood sat in the lounge room. I was taken aback by what seemed to be preconceived expectations of what I might do, knowing nothing of the conversations about a knife and the probable exaggerations.

Frustrated and exasperated I walked into the lounge room where I was overcome by the urge to embrace my Grandmother and tell her that she had been the only mother I’d really known. I remember hugging her tight, shocked by the spontaneous intensity of such a heart felt embrace. I remember that for a second at least, time seemed to stand still along with my Grandmother’s heartbeat, and the instant rage my words evoked within my watching mother. Was I not just being open and honest, was this not the very root of my disconnection with life. The chasm that exists between myself and my mother is a generational theme of emotional cut-off, running river like through our lives. Unconsciously I had brought it to a head in that open armed embrace of my Grandmother, the truly heart felt hug that eludes my mother and I. In a perfect world, a family therapist would been present to guide us through the pain that stimulates cut-off reactions, and erects unbreachable walls between family members. “I’ll see you in Hell before I forgive you for this,” she said as I followed her out to the car, while pleading for conversation and a stay of execution. Alas, painful reactions will always overcome a mountain of rationalizations and I was still decades away from the insights that could articulate my need for guidance in that first experience of euphoric disinhibition.

The next day my best friend dropped by on his way home from work and was deeply concerned by the tale of the previous day. He insisted on driving me out to my parents home to manage a reconciliation, and we drove in his Holden Monaro out to the Sydney suburb of St Marys where my parents lived. We’d talked a lot about my experience and a new ease of certainty, assertiveness and heart felt conviction, I had apparently been gifted. His own life history included experiences of the paranormal, echoing similar stories from generations of his family tree. “There’s an energy beyond everyday consciousness, that its best not to meddle with,” he once told me when I scoffed at tales of paranormal experience. Years before we’d shared a house together along with several other friends, often out doing each other with one tall tale story after another. Stories like the long dead old lady who would visit my best friend’s room in the dead of night, causing him to get drunk before bedtime if he was home alone. I’d related my own experience as a six year old, inviting the Devil to come and scare me if he could, always being disappointed that nothing ever appeared from beyond my own imagination. I waited in the car while my friend assured my parents that I was sorry for any upset caused and perhaps my behavior was the understandable result of emotional stress. Family reunion was affected with forgiveness for my bad behavior, although with little enthusiasm for any cause and effect explanation of it. We left with my fathers sound advice to “get him to a doctor,” refueling my frustrations about empathic disconnection within my immediate family.

This hearth and home experience caused an interesting reaction as we drove home which my friend still talks about today. I vaguely remember telling him that I‘d tricked him and was unrepentant about my behavior the previous day. “Suddenly everything went really cold, the atmosphere in the car was like ice and it sent shivers down my spine.” I wish I could remember this moment as vividly as he does, or as vividly as I remember that moment in front of the mirror. It brings to mind the vagaries of human memory, attention and the individual life histories which invest any particular event with a sense of relevance. Discussions between us in the previous days had been focused on the existence of God, with the unspoken acceptance of his evil opposite of coarse. My friend insists that a sudden change came over me in that moment of confession, and his perception of a freezing chill equated with his experiences of the paranormal. I’d scoffed at the idea of a paranormal influence again, insisting that all phenomena can be explained by natural causation, yet I decades away from knowledge of our evolved nervous systems instinctual freeze response.

In the days following my parents visit my thirst for elative sensation and the maintenance of my new state continued, although fatigue and the growing concern of others began to intrude on my mystic sense of certainty and my new found sense of self security. I grew increasingly frustrated with demands to return to work and the every day business of life, with pleas to tone down these all consuming spiritual concerns. Yet I was lost in seeking more references of meaning to give a certainty of direction to my mystical feelings. Work was the last thing on my mind as I sought to enfold new sensations into some kind of transforming actualization, and I wanted it there and then. Frustration boiled over in the middle of the week when I screamed at my wife to “go away,” while I obsessed over the lyrics of The Moody Blues, “Knights in White Satin.” “We are star dust, we are the white knights - words are just metaphors that hint at deeper meaning,” I’d been telling myself. While my mind was thinking my body was swept along by the rhythms of one of the most melodic rock bands in history. I sat with headphones on to envelope myself in the evocative sensations of this magical album, “This is The Moody Blues.” My wife had simply tried to inform me of a business call inquiring about doing some work.

Was there an unconscious motivation involved here as I sought the stimulation of music and its resonance affect? Was I unknowingly seeking a self hypnotic state of trance to maintain my new found feelings of joyous approach, displacing my lifelong feelings of fearful avoidance?
“Trance states are often interpreted as religious ecstasy, created by using a variety of techniques like prayer, meditation, rituals, pranayama breathing, music, fasting and psychotropic drugs. Trance states can be created knowingly or unknowingly. Auditory driving is one method for generating trance states, affecting a person through vibration frequency. Techniques like chanting, story telling, singing, music, drumming and mantras are used for inducing trance states via auditory driving, as rhythmic vibration and resonance induce altered states. Shamanistic practitioners have been using this method for centuries. Breath rate and heart rate are affected by stimulating auditory channels, with rhythmic sounds affecting brain activity. Theta brain waves are affected by auditory stimulus, resulting in altered states of consciousness.” (Adapted from various web sources.)
Recall and contemplate Moshe Feldenkrias comments from chapter one;
“It is not necessary to lose consciousness to reach this state of complete suggestibility. In the state of complete muscular and vascular relaxation, without any loss of consciousness, one is open to suggestion both from without and within oneself.” (Feldenkrais, 1985). Was I unknowingly engaging in self hypnosis here and maintaining a trance state for the purpose of an auto self suggestion?

My wife’s obvious distress must have had some impact on me though, as I consented to a doctors visit the next day, although I can’t remember too much detail now. There must have been concern about a suitable doctor, with our relocation to West Ryde only six months prior, we had no connections to medical help in that area. I can’t remember the details but we did not go to see my wife’s lifelong family doctor, probably for the same reason we had not seen him when she was pregnant. We did see a doctor we knew though, a doctor we’d seen for advice on pregnancy and for other minors ills during the previous couple of years. I remember the same ideations of reference plagued me as we approached the doctors office. “We must confess our guilt in ignoring his advice about the abortion,” I’d told myself, urged on by the relief we’d experienced some days before. I must admit he listened very patiently to my over earnest recounting of the previous nine days, simply suggesting that I might need to see a specialist, and he could refer me to one if that was ok?

I remember seeing the title psychiatrist on the referral envelope once we got outside, which led to concerns over various psychiatric remedies for mental illness on the way home. Needless to say I did not sleep that night, becoming even more concerned when I steamed open the envelope and read the words schizophrenia like symptoms on the referral note. By the time my best friend arrived the next afternoon I was fixated on the horrors of electroshock therapy and crucifixion, realization had dawned early that morning, “Jesus Christ! - Its Friday!” I mean, if this was truly a religious experience, a sign from God then what fate awaited me on this Friday afternoon? Had I not indeed prayed to God in my hour of need, in the panic of lonely isolation when attachment needs are so unconsciously keen? Thank God too that I look back now with laughter instead of feelings of shame. That moment of prayer had not felt like a panicked cry for help though, when I’d sat down with such a sense of responsibility and resignation, I’d been determined to accept past failures and change myself, all I wanted was a little help. Perhaps I did get that help without knowing how to deal with it, how to interpret and recognize it? Perhaps I simply had no experience of accepting the felt reality of being, without amplify its affect via the mind?

We set off for a private hospital in the Sydney suburb of Baulkham Hills, my best friend, my wife and me. I was still infused with a spiritual sense of purpose of coarse, still excited by its enabled sense of connection, still needing to trust, to love and be loved. Trust was the principle reason my best friend had taken time off work to support me, as I trusted his advice and his willingness to invest himself in my welfare. Indeed this crisis had brought us really close again, spending hours together like before we were both married, before the subsequent rift caused by the shame of mental illness experience. I remember how he’d made sure to inform the psychiatrist of my fears about ETC, as forcefully as he could before I entered the interview room. “You have schizophrenia and need immediate hospitalization,” the good doctor said, before I found myself being escorted to a locked ward, all within thirty minutes.

I vaguely remember sitting on the edge of a bed as the first injection was administered, so heavily sedated I apparently slept for those first three days. I can’t recall to much about the next two weeks though, only what I was told about early concerns for my continued elative mood and the possibility of ECT. Only one significant memory springs easily to mind, of a day I decided to take a walk beyond the hospital grounds. I remember the incredible tingling of my skin out in the late summer sunshine, it felt like severe sun burn and was the first time I remember being really bewildered by the impact of medication side effects. I confused this strange sensation with my earlier mystic experiences at first, then remember being a bit alarmed by its compounding effect on my strange uncoordinated movements and the persistent and grinding physical fatigue. And I was beginning to hate being locked up, sadly sneaking out for a simple breath of fresh air had only brought me confusion and a first hint of fear.

I remember being spoken to rather harshly and arrogantly by a particularly bossy psych nurse on my return and perhaps the atmosphere of the locked ward began to break through my spellbinding mystical feelings. I think an earnest compliance with whatever I was told set in after that, getting away from that place became a much more sobering concern than any thoughts of spirituality. That first experience of a psychiatric diagnosis came to occupy my thoughts for a couple of decades after 1980. It now seems an ironic precursor to a scene in Sydney Airport some thirty years later, as pre-conceived judgments and a need to do something swamps any kind of empathic meeting or emotional context in such encounter moments. Indeed there never was an empathetic moment between that first psychiatrist and I, even well after the desired remission and remorse had been gained.

There never was any talk or exploration of the circumstantial context to the onset of what the good doctor called my symptoms of schizophrenia. I found it strange that environmental triggers like stress were fully acknowledged by all my psychiatrists, yet in 20 years only one found any time to speak about their circumstantial context. No talk about separation distress or unconscious reactions to existential isolation, no exploration of possible trauma in my life experience. All that seemed to matter to my psychiatrists was symptoms and their remission, in what felt like a dissociated, mechanistic approach. The lack of empathy from my first egg head psychiatrist who had real problems maintaining simple eye contact during our three year relationship, had its long term “what if” effect. The speed of that initial diagnosis which was patently wrong, coupled with intolerable side effects from hit and miss medications, left me wondering about what might have been. A different psychiatrist? A female psychiatrist? A Jungian psychologist? A pastoral counselor? Not because of the crisis resolution of heavy sedation or even the early medication trials, but the rigid doctor patient relationship that offered me little more than thirty minute medication compliance sessions, and zero empathy for continuing chronic side effects.

A Rebound Reaction?

Some three weeks after leaving hospital I was doing my best to abandon all thoughts of spiritual oneness and get on with the daily business of making a living, when another compelling event intervened. I experienced my first panic attack while lying on my back in a confined space tying to renew the electrical wiring on a house. Wedged between damp ground and the flooring timbers of an old California style bungalow, I was suddenly engulfed by feelings of suffocation, and I panicked. This was the beginning of a three month long depression so severe I became housebound, mostly camped underneath bed blankets during daylight hours. I remember being so petrified of the world outside, so ashamed of my delusional ideas during the manic phase and I couldn’t face seeing anyone other than my wife. I remember disconnecting the telephone each time she went to work in the morning and jumping out of my skin at the sound of its ring tone on many an evening, and refusing to speak to anyone who called. I remember thoughts during this period being very narrowly focused around punishing guilt and shame, constantly replaying the most embarrassing moments of delusion ideation over and over in my mind. Just like those scenes of self flagellation we see in religious movies, I seemed determined to flog myself with punishing feelings of guilt and shame, mercilessly.

Wow! Even now as I try to re-live memories of that first chronic depression and write about them there is a reaction, a dissociative reflex action. There’s a sudden involuntary numbing of awareness as I search for inner feelings that might discharge through my mind, as the thoughts of an experience interpretation. No thoughts will come though, only numbness and sudden feelings of fatigue as I sense a desire to turn away, to give up this silly notion of writing, “I can’t,” springs to mind. I sense there is much pain down there within the visceral well of body memory, and I’m surprised and shocked anew by an autonomic reaction over which I posses no conscious control whatsoever, “bollocks to the power of positive thinking,” springs up within my self justifying mind. Its been almost two years since I traveled here to Thailand with the rationalized notion of writing a book within six months. I’d followed my heart and intuition thinking I had an idea how this journey would unfold, so much for rationalizations?

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." _Steve Jobs

My first attempts to write about my life experience involved ideas of a self help book, telling all I’d learned about the meaning of that word “affect,” and its role in affective disorders like bipolar. First notions of writing like some accredited academic came to mind, with reams of well intentioned advice and how to instructions. Yet when it came to writing such a text, my enthusiasm quickly waned, I was bored and unmoved by my own explanations. Next came the brilliant idea of a fictionalized story, with heaps of two person dialogue to add color and personal meaning. I wrote five chapters of “When Sasiprapha Smiles,” to explain the new theories of our unconscious inter-relations and how such experience affects the brain and nervous systems. This effort got me closer to articulating my inner states, as I wrote about my relationship with a beautiful Thai girlfriend who’s emotional expression retains the purest innate qualities I’ve ever know. Her loss sent me into another psychosis experience some twelve months ago now, although one embraced and from which there has been no depressive rebound. As I write I’m reminded of Freud’s notion’s of displacement as an ego defense, and my rationalizations of how to approach the writing of this book. A self help book, a fictionalized story of two lovers and their friendships, the experiential integration of acquired knowledge and a slow spiraling approach towards my core feelings.

"Displacement operates in the mind unconsciously and involves emotions, ideas, or wishes being transferred from their original object to a more acceptable substitute. It is most often used to allay anxiety; and can refer to the displacement of aggressive impulses or to the displacement of sexual impulses. Displacement means the transference of physical intensities along an "associative path," so that strongly cathected ideas have their charge displaced onto other, less strongly cathected ones. This process is active in the formation of hysterical or obsessional symptoms, in the dream work, in the production of jokes, and in the transference." _ Sigmund Freud.

Truth! Perception? What is Really Perceiving Itself. Inside You?

The music video clip at the start of this chapter seems to suggest a question about the nature of reality and our perception of it. Indeed the Moody Blues disbanded because of the fever of excitement their existential lyrics and melodies created. People wanted to know where the creative energy came from and what did the band members know, that average homo-sapien didn't? In the experience of a psychosis, the mind seems to slip into a kind of dreaming while awake state of perception, a pre-verbal awareness more felt than thought. Perhaps the more ancient layers of the brain are involved with an expanded sensory awareness beyond our socially oriented sense of normality?

Which one of us could truly say what our sense of reality would be like without the learned responses of our social upbringing? Imagine for a moment, what it might be like to be under a night sky in the desert, with no history of human contact to prepare your experience? How would your sensitive skin and your human brain capacity filter sensory input in this strange situation? Would you be flooded by an awareness, our normal social world defends us from?

Can I come to understand why it felt like this song had been written especially for me? A sad outsider with a paradoxical sense of concern for the future of the human race. Is it because it speaks to my soul in universal metaphor? The melancholy every-man-woman? That mysterious biological process of turning matter into meta, inside us all? Is all thought metaphor when viewed as its electro-chemical stimulation within the brain and what internal reality does metaphor project?

David Bates, October 2011.

Chapter Four->>

Also posted on;
Nature's Madness: A Memoir of Mental Illness & Recovery

Recovery: A journey tasked by the trials of loss, misconnection, despair & hope's resurrection.

http://naturesmadness.wordpress.com/

The Man in the Mirror

2011-10-26T06:23:00.000-07:00

Recovery: A journey tasked by the trials of loss, misconnection, despair & hope's resurrection.

"I'm Starting With The Man In The Mirror.
I'm Asking Him To Change His Ways."
_Michael Jackson.

From my very first experience of psychosis, questions about belief have plagued me, “is psychosis a sickness similar to cancerous cells within the body or a need for emotional growth, for continuing development or perhaps a spiritual experience that seeks a higher sense of self?”

For three decades I questioned my belief system, “do I suffer from an organic illness during psychotic episodes, a complex disease, or am I trying to evoke a better sense of myself, a desperate need to shift into a predominately positive state of being?”

“Is the common feeling of increased wellness during the early days of a manic mood swing, the body/brain re-adjusting to the growth processes nature intended at the time of conception? - Like how an acorn contains all the oak tree will be unless its natural growth is thwarted somehow.” Some people ask whether the positive aspects of psychosis represent a spiritual crisis seeking deeper, intuitive insights? While others see its negative aspects, like nightmarish hallucinations and hearing voices as a clear and obvious sign of a biological illness.

Nominally brought up in the Christian faith, the great biblical characters of Moses, David, and Jesus have always inhabited the foreground of my manic imagination, during each of my psychotic episodes. The well known feelings of compassion for all and a spiritual sense of oneness always come flooding through to drown out my usual sense of ordinary, normal reality. Belief’s about God and faith in the nature of existence always come back to haunt my usual trust and steady belief in science and the virtues of simple common sense. My oldest son laughs and calls it my messiah complex, “for God’s sake don’t carry on about Jesus again!” “Why can’t I explore what actually happened though, how I prayed to God and had such an immediate and compelling experience. - Its not all in my head you know, not simply about pure and outright delusion, it started with some very real sensations.” “Yeah! Yeah, blah, blah, just get back to normal will ya!” Never talk about emotional stuff, you might upset somebody, or so it seems?

In February 1980 a sudden loss triggered my first episode of mania and set me off on a thirty year struggle to understand the nature of my abnormal experiences. I still remember those very first moments that led me into mania, the unusual body sensations and the shift in perceptive awareness that overcame me. I was in the bedroom of our first home in the Sydney suburb of West Ryde, sitting on the end of our double bed on the morning after my wife had left me. I sat there with my best friends guitar in my lap, strumming a few chords of gently stroked desire for new beginning and harshly twanged bitter endings. I sat facing a dressing table some three feet in front of me, sat looking at this man in the mirror. Alone on a brand new day I thought about my circumstances, my situation. Problems of a dramatically failing business compounded by yesterdays sudden withdrawal of emotional support.

Fuck it! I’d sat down with firm feelings of resignation, if the past was lost, then I would cut it off and start again. Such was my reasoning back then, my thoughtful assessment of fate, of those strange forces of self defeating and oft repeating life predicaments. Back then I was decades away from knowledgeable awareness, clueless about unconscious reactions within my nervous system and its affect on my thought processes. Like everyone else I just took my thoughts for granted, held simple common assumptions about the way life is. Who needs an education into the hidden stimulation of our thoughts and behaviors, better to study something objective and get a job?

I was 28 years old on that Sunday morning when I sat looking for new direction, seeking some new identity. Human development experts say we all need a sense of attachment to function well, its hard wired within our brain and nervous system apparently, although I didn't know about any of this stuff back then. What would a self employed electrician know about psychology, neurobiology and the electro-chemical activity of my brain and nervous system? Back then I'd never heard of things like trauma, PTSD or the hyper vigilance states of dissociation some doctors call symptoms of mental illness. All I knew about were things, objects like bedroom furniture, dressing table mirrors and my precious hi-fi equipment, and of coarse the money needed to buy these things, I’d certainly never heard of birth trauma.

I sat there alone looking intently into the mirror, unaware of unconscious needs capturing my attention, and I prayed, I prayed to God. A God I'd been sure I'd disavowed during the material striving of my early adulthood. A period when I‘d staked out my ego‘s claim to intelligent thinking and responsible behavior. I prayed while remembering experiences of childhood, like a dramatic out of body experience when I was fourteen years old. Of an earlier prayer during a soccer game when I was surrounded by rough house associates and had faked my allegiance to their team. I’d prayed to God back then and asked him to let my team win, promising to show my true colors no matter the outcome. By coincidence my team did win and I celebrated the victory regardless of the consequence, even earning a grudging respect rather than a beating. I remembered feelings of being special during adolescent periods of transition and the oft repeated circumstance of isolation. Back in 1980 though, I had not studied attachment theory or family therapy, was ignorant of attachments foundational importance to the health of our human psyche. Thirty one years ago I had no knowledge of Monica McGoldrick’s profound statement, “loss is the pivotal human experience.”

I sat looking into the mirror, yearning for a new direction, something I could feed with a sense of dedication. I prayed sincerely, promising I'd do whatever was required if he’d just show me the way, give me a sign, help me please! Nothing happened for what felt like minutes as I sat there in hopeful expectation while looking at my own reflection, looking into my face. Then it began, a new sensation, a feeling at the top of my head which flowed down slowly, down through my face, into my shoulders and down through my chest, down into my pelvic area. I sat with a sense of "what is it” wonder, although more felt than in any thinking sense. A sense of wonder that was similar to the out of body experience when I was fourteen, except this slowly descending calm was the polar opposite of the sudden sharp elevation, when I'd seemly left my body. It felt like I'd been sitting in a bath of water that was over my head and someone had pulled the plug. I sat there as calm descended slowly from head to toe, as if a mind numbing tension were being drained out of me, like waste water flowing down and out through my toes. Next came a mindful realization of the experience in a pleasant and very welcomed surprise. I felt unburdened somehow, refreshed and excited, happy and new. "Wow! Wow! Wow! Has God just touched me on the shoulder? Is this a religious experience? Or am I just relieved by a sense of being free, free from demanding attachment, not needing anyone but myself?"

Thirty one years on now, I recall that day with the benefit of hindsight and a lot of education. I understand that wondrous feeling as the release of unconscious muscular tensions, even though I would love to believe it was a divine God’s intention. Yet the romantic in me still wishes for some kind of quest request, in my heartfelt plea for a sign. Mental illness had certainly not been my expectation during those life defining moments. Oh! The myth making romantic whispers me on though. Perhaps there is some wicked “riddle me this” sense of humor involved, the challenge of a lifetime perhaps? Such thoughts do give me a warm inner glow mind you, like memories of old lover’s and moments of deep intimacy. Perhaps my thoughts of God reflect an unconscious need of a sense of attachment within? Admittedly for the past decade the experience of madness as a medical disease has certainly become a personal riddle begging for a solution, having long failed the challenge of psychiatry’s medication compliance.

Finding the why and how of madness stimulation, beneath my abnormal behaviors and altered states of mind has been something of a compulsion these past years. Time and resources have been expended almost exclusively to finding the insights that would help me break a thirty year cycle of manic depressive experience. In simple terms the key to my unusual experience that day was a release from dissociative withdrawal, a state conditioned by intense distress during a particularly long and brutal birth experience, I believe. I understand the quick impulse to view the word dissociation as a specific and definable symptom of pathology. However, signs and symptoms of madness are much better understood when viewed along a continuum of brain/nervous system responsiveness, rather than as being separately definable as labeled symptoms.

Born in circumstances of sustained distress, life has always held a sense of threat for me, occasionally soothed by caring support and sporadically dispersed to dramatic affect. Even today after finding the keys to its conscious release, I often wake cradled in its unconscious embrace, yet nowadays knowing of its blind intent to keep me safe. What was internalized during that long labor and harsh delivery, was an unconscious sense of threat. Threat burned into the early forming and still maturing systems of brain-nervous systems that organize my experience. Without consciously knowing why or how, I have always felt scared, felt unsafe. The pulse of each heartbeat manifests natures intent, it urges a search for threats in the world beyond my skin, yet my human dilemma affects a conscious denial of a threat that is retained deep within my own skin.

Safety brings me back to that day in front of the mirror and the unconscious reaction my mind interpreted as heaven sent. Security as a primary survival need is triggered by the sensation impact of our very first breath, the innate response of distress is there in the universally experienced birth cry. Best practice birthing these days requires a gentle handling of new born to mothers chest, skin contact, warmth and a quick return to the familiar sensation of beating heart, are considered essential to soothing birth distress. It’s also become more clearly understood just how much early life experience critically influences our still maturing brain and nervous system during the first three years of life.

So there I was in 1980, sitting on the end of a bed, ignorant about my unconscious stimulation of avoidance behaviors and how a hidden pattern had led me into this very predicament. I had no knowledge of dissociation as a loss of sensory awareness, which includes our internal environment as much as it does the external one. Up until this point in my life I had unconsciously carried myself in a braced readiness for threat, which closes down sensory awareness in expectation of bodily pain. In that particular moment though I was both consciously and unconsciously facing myself, looking into that mirror, looking into my own eyes and aware of the room behind me. There had been a resignation to circumstance when I’d sat down in the bright morning light, a conscious plea for help and a readiness for change, with perhaps an unconscious sensory recognition of no threat? So was a particular circumstance of combined conscious and unconscious awareness the trigger for my unusual sensation experience? Did I experience a spontaneous re-balancing of my autonomic nervous system which had become conditioned to a constant threat response? More recently education has provided me with the insights to believe, that is exactly what happened in those life defining moments.

Of coarse the particular circumstances and the unusual experience affected my ignorant mind back then, how was I supposed to interpret what was happening to me? This was not like the out of body incident when I was fourteen years old, which had lasted for less than a minute. Here was a shift in mind-body awareness that was lasting beyond minutes, with a mellow yellow kind of pleasantness that was intoxicating, I suddenly felt more alive than I had ever done before. Feelings of muscular ease were most notable in my stomach, with an expanded sensory awareness that included a freshness on the surface of my skin. Perception changed, with room colors appearing deeper, brighter and every object seemed to have more depth too it. Background sounds were clearer, easier to perceive and define, like the rustling of leafs just beyond the open window. I could hear birds singing too, their music bringing an easy attention awareness to a degree I’d never experienced before. You could say I bathed in this new experience for a good few minutes, while the “what is it” wonder gave way to thoughtful questions about the seemingly heaven sent nature of it. I walked around the house retaining this everything feels so new perception before spending time in the garden, where I simply sat and listened to the birds sing. Most noticeable on a physical level was the release of habitual stomach muscle tensions with slower, deeper and easier breathing which had always been shallow since asthma had returned to my life when I was eleven.

One of the most noticeable affects of the muscular ease I felt on that day, was the change in my usually hesitant approach towards other people. In the afternoon I spent time with my best friend and shared the morning’s experience with him, wanting the opinion of someone who had experienced psychic phenomena in his life, as had other members of his family. He was intrigued by my description of the prayer to God and its apparent affect, confirming that I seemed different some how, bolder was a word that came to mind. We visited with his Aunt and Uncle, seeking the opinion of wiser heads as to whether they thought this might be a religious experience. During this visit my behavior was more forward, more outspoken and candid than it had ever been with people. Similar to the first recognition of clearly distinguishable bird song, there was an unusual clarity to various voices, to pitch and tone and there exact spatial location. I remember thinking how it felt like I’d been listening to people through the muffle of a heavy blanket before this.

There was conversation about religious faith and the emotional impact of the previous day’s separation, about which I didn’t appear to be as upset about as might be expected. I spoke about the irony of my experience, unsure how the urge to pray had even emerged in someone with an Atheist belief and socialist principles, “I’d been a trade union delegate, for God’s sake.” “God tests our faith in many ways,” had been one reply to that conundrum, along with faith in Jesus and the sign of the cross. “I admit, I was particularly fascinated by all those Biblical stories during childhood,” I’d replied. I told of getting a 96% mark for my homework retelling of the Moses story in one class, “which one of your parents helped you write this,” the teacher had asked before he tore that paper up.

Returning home in the early evening I retained my new sense of ease, along with skeptical thoughts about a supernatural involvement, after all I’d been certain for years that Jesus was a very human man with some admirable ideals, for which he‘d paid a terrible price. Alone again in the marital home I turned to my first love for company, listening to music on my pride and joy, audiophile equipment. There was an hour or so of uninterrupted bliss, so enjoyable after the stolen moments when “she who must be obeyed” had been residing there. The mind was ticking over though, even as I played one favorite album after another. I mused about the absence of a feeling I used to get quiet often when indulging in such pleasures, a peculiar shiver would often run down my spine, accompanied by flashbacks of my fathers often angry voice and movement to remove the source of his annoyance. After a couple of hours of pleasure indulgence I decided it would be a good idea to go find a priest, to ask a religious expert about my experience.

I drove into Sydney city center heading for the famous Kings Cross Wayside Chapel, whose doors were never closed as it ministered to less fortunate souls, and it was headed by the very progressive Reverend Ted Noffs. I remember sighting the giant blue neon cross atop a church at Top Ryde as I drove along Victoria Road in the white Bedford van that had been at the center of our marital storm the previous day. An employee had been involved in an after hours accident with it three weeks before, and only two days after I’d bought it, and a day before the business phone had just stopped ringing. Yesterday I’d realized I’d forgotten to pay the insurance as I looked for the paperwork to get it repaired. “I’ve had enough of this shit!” She’d screamed at me as she packed her bags.

I didn’t find a priest that night as only the lay staff were on duty at the Wayside Chapel, although I did end up having an interesting conversation with a street busker from Norway. We talked a lot about his life on the streets and his faith in God's guidance. He was a true believer, working his way around the world with only his trusty guitar and a repertoire of songs to sustain him. I’m sure it was thoughts of friendship and a desire to learn to play that urged me back after I’d walked past his street corner location. He was very suspicious about my approach though, only two questions into my “where you from” inquiry before he announced, “I’m straight man!”

We got past that impasse and explored a common thread of motivation, he’d run away from home and a violent father when he was just fifteen. He told me how he learned the guitar in an Amsterdam squat, had indulged every vice he could think of before a near fatal drug overdose turned him onto to God. “I just go where the holy spirit takes me man! - Love the Lord, trust in him and he will provide!” I remember noticing a sense of openness as I sat beside him, of a wider and easier awareness, and a curious freedom from impatience. Struck too by the ease of my open faced look towards other people, and how easy it was to evoke a smile in total strangers. A strange sense of my face glowing back in smiling welcome at anyone who gave a cautious glance in our direction. Sitting there in a very crowded public place with a total absence of urgency, felt like the very height of luxury to me. After an hour or more exchanging views on the status of Jesus and swapping anecdotal stories, I remained skeptical about God though. Or maybe I was just being oppositional as two young men needed to out do each other with verb and ego? I choose to make a final winning gesture by handing him a five dollar bill and suggesting he have a little more faith in we ordinary men.

I walked away with such a wonderful sense of freedom, reflecting on the ease of my approach and conversation in such a busy public space, unimaginable before today. On the drive home I thought about life changes that might see me pursue my obvious interest in philosophy, an adult entry into university occupied my mind as I drove by that blue neon sign again. Once home I continued to muse on my day with music accompanying me further into the night, sleep seemingly the least appropriate need in my new found state of freedom. I remember being moved to dance to some of my favorite songs, feeling my body move in time with the beat as it could never have done before. The body movement held such care free abandon that it doubled the inspirational sense of this amazing day. Something wonderful was happening to me and thoughts raced about the what, why and how of that undeniable moment in front of the bedroom mirror.

Around four in the morning a wave of fatigue allowed the need for sleep to claim my attention, and I hit the shower before bed. Here again though was a new sensation experience, as I felt the tingle of water on my skin and a peculiar awareness of movement as if time and motion were luxuriously slower. I remember feeling the texture of the soap in my hand with the thought that I had time to feel it now, impressed by the missing sense of urgency in these expansive moments. Lack of urgency and anxiety occupied my mind as I questioned the shower experience while dressing for bed. Looking into the mirror again I felt so deeply grateful for these new feelings within me, such richness of perception and overall sense of ease was surely a minor miracle?

I did attempt to get to sleep, yet the shower seemed to have revived me and I just lay immersed in a steady stream of rapturous thoughts for about half an hour. I got up and watched TV for a while, thinking mindless distraction would allow fatigue to rise again. Coincidently though Christian evangelist shows were on two of the three available channels, and I plunged back into emotive thoughts about God, Jesus and that wondrous moment in front of the mirror. Had I really been touched by the holy spirit, reviving my boyish sense of wonder with an obvious need for love and trust in one another?

I thought about the conversation with the young man on the streets of Kings Cross, how he’d looked more like a left wing radical than a believer in God. Maybe he was the priest I was meant to find, his story of love, trust and faith was certainly impressive? “I just go where the holy spirit takes me man! - Love the Lord, trust in him and he will provide!” I cried, I wanted so very much to trust, to have faith in love because I was so sick and tiered of its continual failure in my life. I was an unwanted child and had suffered my parents palpable resentment, even when I’d tried to heal the wounds and broach that reality with them, I’d met the same old inane reaction. The childish, utterly stupid and thoughtless “us versus them” reactions of “don’t blame us for your shortcomings.” “Stupid, mindless blame games, what’s wrong with people that they can‘t see the abject lack of reason in such brainless reactions? - Why do we love things more than each other?”

Since a very young age I’d sensed the stupidity of a mindless lust for objects, for possessions thought to be more precious than time spent with a child. Of coarse people like my parents would refute this notion of their motivations, yet the evidence was there in behaviors of bitter annoyance with a curious child, while wish and wonder were always directed towards inanimate objects. I’d long withheld a secret question for people, “do you really think Moses was just stupid? - Don‘t worship false idols he said.” A powerful sense of intuitively understanding the false economy of objects when I was only five years old overcame me. “People don’t think, they just do, do the same as everyone else does in a common herd mentality.”

Writing these words I’m reminded of an essay about my family and its generational emotionality, which I wrote in 2006 for my counseling degree, its title, Breaking the Golden Rule! Don’t talk about emotional things, you might upset someone. “Distance and avoidance seem to become the major themes of my mother’s life, due to her experiences with her family. I am reminded very much of Monica McGoldrick's comment, “loss is the pivotal human experience,” and how this has impacted my mother and influenced my own feeling for life. From Gerald Corey, "actions, and interactions that are characterized by retreat, fear and protection, tend to constrain growth and development." The words retreat, fear and protection, leading to constraint resonate within me, and I feel it has been a constant struggle for me to UN-constrain my own innate nature, away from my programmed fearful emotional response.”

Memories of childhood came thick and fast that night, the resentful frustration that created such a dense angry atmosphere inside our house, my constant fearful anxiety which had led to run away episodes four times before I was ten years old. Thoughts about the young busker mingled with childhood memories of feeling safer on the streets than the so called sanctity of our family home. I was struck too by how these new feelings of ease were like a magnified sense of comfort I’d always felt in the quiet of a very late night. I turned off the TV, sitting for a while in the luxury of night time peace and quiet. “Jesus!” If I didn’t believe in him as a God, I certainly identified with his ideals and universal need for an understanding sense of love. Was I just kidding myself with an objective idealism, with my Atheist beliefs, I’d always secretly felt the same thing the street busker feels? A memory of sitting in my only flash car purchase came to mind and how I’d decided to join in with a boys toys fascination. I’d bought that car after a relationship break up too, remembering how I’d parked the Holden Monaro sports salon after an uneventful singles night, “what did I buy this stupid thing for?” I’d asked myself. Dare I let myself fall into the arms of a holy grace, a spiritual sentiment and pure ideals, even if its not a five senses physical presence, or is it? “Life is truly wonderful,” I thought as I opted for more music and the sensual celebration of dance. Just before daylight the first sign of dreamy delusion broke through though, a fleeting sense of words spoken directly to me, as I punched the air in elative agreement with their heartfelt sentiments.

My memory of that first slip into an altered state of mind comes through the filter of hindsight of coarse, normal conscious discrimination was swamped by elation during the moment itself. Back in that moment I was becoming utterly euphoric with a positive energy that seemed suddenly unchained, released from the bonds of negativity. Released from a constant worrying concern and anxious urgency that seemed to have submerged these fine feelings of being alive. Such a palpable release from a prior low grade depression kind of existence, brought a euphoria as powerful as any magic mushrooms would. With that first slip into dream like perception I was like an innocent abroad though, gleefully keen to explore this rich new shoreline of joy tree phantasm land. Back then I had not read about the neuroscience of human development or the thermo dynamic processes of the body/brain, which can explain the dream like quality of such phenomena. Back then I didn’t know I was experiencing an affective disorder and was still decades away from reading affective neuroscience. Back then I’d never heard of people like Allan Schore, Stephen Porges, Jaak Panksepp or Silvan Tomkins, and had not yet read “Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self.” Back then I didn’t understand how I was entering affective disorder, and had no idea there are such things as innate affects as the roots of our complex human emotions.

“Thermodynamics are not only the essence of biodynamics, they are also the
essence of neurodynamics, and therefore of psychodynamics.” (Schore, 1994).

In 1980 all I understood about my mind was the blindingly obvious, its taken for granted thoughts. I’d heard of atoms of coarse but I had no knowledge or awareness of neurons or pulses of electro-chemical energy within my brain, who does? I equated thermodynamics with external sources of heat, like our electric blanket for winter time nights, but a thermodynamics of emotion and thought? Who knew? Back in that particular moment all I knew of was a growing belief in a religious experience when I’d prayed to God in front of that mirror. I was yet to be told I was suffering from a chemical imbalance in my brain, mind you if God really exists they would be his chemicals too, wouldn’t they? Or maybe the Devil if we hold such supernatural beliefs?

David Bates, October 2011.

Chapter Three->>

Also posted on;
Nature's Madness: A Memoir of Mental Illness & Recovery

Recovery: A journey tasked by the trials of loss, misconnection, despair & hope's resurrection.

http://naturesmadness.wordpress.com/

Nature's Madness: A Mental Illness Memoir

2011-10-19T01:27:00.000-07:00

Recovery: A journey tasked by the trials of loss, misconnection, despair & hope's resurrection.

I'm finding nature in my madness states?

OCTOBER 2011, BANGKOK, THAILAND.

"Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared
to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly
wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads,
or you shall learn nothing." _Thomas Huxley

This new bed sitter room with its dressing table mirror encapsulate my life somehow, as if chance and circumstance provide a compartment for timely self reflection. The God dam mirror keeps implicitly prodding me in some indefinable way, its symbolic presence urging me to dig deeper, to go inside and feel the actuality of my past, not pass over it with the distancing metaphor’s of my objectifying mind. I’m trying to write a memoir of my mental illness experience and recovery here. Yet for weeks I‘ve struggled with words that seem only to effect a distance from the inner nature of my madness experience.

Daily I’ve found myself writing descriptive words, in a narrative style that just doesn’t capture the internal reality of mania, delusion or depression. It feels like I think inside my head with a set of learned words that describe my life as if through the window of an external world looking in, rather than reflecting what actually happens inside me. How do I write about my changed self concept, of a new understanding and self awareness gleaned from these past years of reading the academic jargon of various scientific disciplines, such as developmental neurobiology?

There are so few words of common parlance to make such new and revealing knowledge easily legible to any of us. Right now I hold fears you will only yawn and switch off if I start to spout the academic jargon describing my brains innervation of my autonomic nervous system? Should I even try to describe how its twin sympathetic and parasympathetic branches organize our metabolic energies, our inner world of chemical experience? How do I write about a new awareness of my nervous systems role in my experience of mental illness, when so few will want to read about metabolic energy shifts and the innate physiological reactions underpinning our emotions?

I’m feeling a need to write plainly here with easily understood logic, although when I try to identify and describe the inner experience of madness, logical cause and effect language gets no where near it. Perhaps I should only describe the episodes of mania’s hyper-sexuality and mad mind psychotic ravings. Tell you titillating tales of salacious happenings from beyond the norm of should and should not behaviors. How have life’s normal expectations been for you though? Has it been all you were taught to hope and expect it should be? Or is there a certain dissonance to your real life experience, a deeper sense of things you can’t quite put your finger on? Something we’re not supposed to speak about, or give vent to its exploration, something deeper than our normally voiced perceptions?

These past four days I’ve been reading the accounts of some quality writers describing their experience of mental illness, despairing of my poor writing skill and sorely frustrated in my earnest desire for articulation. Perhaps I should share a few examples;

“People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It's easy. And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it. - But most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening? Girl, Interrupted In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended.” (Keyson, 1993).

“I lay back onto the pillow, exhausted. But the physical pain didn’t bother me anymore. It was dwarfed by a monstrous wave approaching, the tsunami that I’d been trying to avoid ever since I’d arrived in Santa Fe. I shut my eyes tight, I bit my lip; but I was overwhelmed by the realization that for the first time in my life, I was utterly and completely alone.” (Cheney, 2008).

“That fall, as the disorder gradually took full possession of my system, I began to conceive that my mind itself was like one of those outmoded small-town telephone exchanges, being gradually inundated by flood-waters: one by one, the normal circuits began to drown, causing some of the instinct and intellect to slowly disconnect.” (Styron, 1990).

Do you get a sense of what I’m suggesting about an externally oriented narrative from these descriptions of a mental illness experience? Styron’s small town telephone exchange is a wonderful analogy of depressions creeping paralysis of the mind. Its also a perfect example of how we're all stuck in an object oriented view of our inner experience? How can we hope to articulate our experience to ourselves and others using such a system of externally focused terminology? To be fair the knowledge we now posses about the electro-chemical activity of the brain-nervous systems, is so new it makes our current paradigm of objective logic seem a tad archaic. We are entering a new era of increasing knowledge about the origins of the human mind that will be as transformational as Galileo’s observations. A paradigm shift is underway, yet just as in the experience of our individual lives, we’ll only recognize it with the benefit of hindsight.

So please, dear God, help me! I so want to write an insider’s view of the madness within rather than what it looks like from the outside, its been my earnest desire for at least ten years now. You see, mad behaviors are really the second part of a two part equation, to use a mathematics analogy, while the first part remains unobserved inside our organic body/brain processes. Sitting here I’m perplexed by just how to write about my recovery and changed self perception, using the well worn words of objective description we all learned in school? You know that multitude of grammar dedicated overwhelmingly towards depicting scenes from an external world, not the hidden landscape of our internal, organic world.

How shall I describe my growing felt awareness of unconscious processes beneath the impulsed thinking of my conscious mind, it’s a conundrum that seems to mirror the essential experience of psychosis and mental illness states. How do I convey the concept of a “neuroception” beneath my conscious perceptions, and how it stimulates my mind’s rationalizations of innate physiological reactions? Like my new awareness of the muscular tensions within my body which correspond with the tone of my thinking, my moods. Like many a good psychiatrist challenged with interpreting the experiences of a psychotic, I feel inadequately equipped by a learned vocabulary evolved for describing external objects, rather than the inner realm of our organic substance, with its overwhelmingly chemical activity.

Let me give you another’s example of what I’m trying to say here;
“The importance of language for the formation of one’s self through organizing one’s experience into a coherent core narrative is emphasized, especially as it relates to the micro-sensory experience of the body for which vocabulary is often inadequate. The importance of movement, oscillations, pulsations, and sensations being included in a full experience of a psycho-somatic self is argued. The still open issue of finding adequate cortical representation of the felt sense of these neuroceptive movements is raised.” and, “When I began reading neuroscience, I fell in love with the vocabulary. Words such as neural oscillation, pulsation, or sinusoidal waves, like music, evoked in me a sensory resonance born of a mysteriously intangible recognition. Perplexed, I surmised that this terminology activated contact with a dimension of implicit experience where words bridge the passage of the body through the mind and the mind through the body.” (LaPierre, 2007).

In our everyday lives, which one of us is aware of such fuzzy internal substance, like neural oscillation, pulsation or sinusoidal waves within our organic body/brain? No wonder the good psychiatrist has feelings of inadequacy when confronted with what looks like incomprehensible madness. How can we hope to understand these organic processes inside us, when the language of our logic is so externally oriented by our perception of objects? The brain is not an elaborate clock of intricately bound and moving parts, its organic functioning is of a seamless chemical kind, nothing like our object oriented perception.

How can we organize our experience into a coherent core narrative when our language is so overwhelmingly based on external awareness? Common language is still decades away from incorporating the new internal awareness granted by the technology revolution of the 1990’s. Neuroscience’s new found knowledge of the body/brain as a complete integrated system, dependent on feedback signals from both without and within, is finding increasingly common ground with systems theories seeking to understand the complexities of the wider cosmos. We are, it seems on the crest of a new awareness that will blow away our illusions of simple cause and effect awareness in the coming decades. Indeed we are getting a practical example of it with interconnectivity of the internet and its part in the global banking crisis. There are implications for understanding mental health that are as mind blowing as is the actual experience of psychosis. It’s a bold statement I know, yet in the following pages I hope to articulate a glimmer of new awareness within your well learned narrative of life experience.

Sitting here in this bed sitter room the isolation of a writer’s experience feels like an old familiar pattern somehow. An internal pattern I’m struggling to articulate due to the distancing affect of my minds thoughts. I’m almost sixty now and a long way in time and geography miles from the safe isolation of my childhood bedroom, yet I’m challenged by vague fears that the hidden patterns of unconscious motivation remain unchanged. Such thoughts urge me to stop playing with these ineffectual metaphor’s of interpretation, and go out to see my Thai girlfriend. She won’t be alone though and after four straight days of seclusion, reading with an interest charged as much by the energies of distress as excited curiosity, I’ll likely step out with the oddness of a self conscious state. That familiar hesitant and faltering approach which blocks an easy spontaneous involvement with other people and their vital support.

Isolation feels a bit perverse now too, after such a concerted effort to learn about the hidden stimulation of my nervous system. Here I am denying myself the practice of a mindful approach and involvement with others, and the steady re-conditioning of my crazy making nervous system. Sod it though! I need to write and I choose to stay involved with my own self, with self stimulated support and the attention distracting company of the TV. Besides, I really need to face this freaking wall mirror, with its implicit trigger to past experience, its symbolic representation of my first psychotic episode thirty one years ago. I take a moment to look around the room and its bed sitter objects, bed, dressing table, wardrobe, chairs and talking TV. “My arm, hand, fingers resting on laptop keys - my body, brain and my mind with its parts like perception of this intangible moment?” I think.

Do you get this notion of an implicit self, a deeper dimension to our experience that is passed over somehow, taken completely for granted until triggered by an environmental moment, by the chance of a situational circumstance? Do you get long forgotten memories, spontaneously rising to conscious awareness when visiting some place you haven’t been for many years? What about that sense of you that is kind of beside you all the while, that unobservable part of you that talks to you, “I talk” the psych’s call it. Is that just your mind talking, or something deeper we might call the implicit self?

Do you get a sense during social interactions, that there is a whole lot going on beneath the surface that we somehow agree not to speak about, preferring mind reading assumptions about other people’s feeling’s and what they might be thinking? Do you drift into daydreams while acting as though your consciously present, that thing we tend to do during a boring classroom lesson? Is daydreaming a dissolving of our objective perception and does daydreaming come from a deeper state of being? If so, what are the hidden mechanisms of our body/brain that enable these simultaneously differing states? Could it be that dreams are a differing state of being because dream was the proto-type of our waking consciousness? In a chapter titled, “Sleep, Arousal, and Mythmaking in the Brain,” Jaak Panksepp, a leading researcher in the neurobiology of emotions, tells us;

“We are forced to contemplate the strange possibility that the basic dream generators are more ancient in brain evolution than are the generators of our waking consciousness.” (Panksepp, 1998).

Consider changed states evoked by the placebo effect for instance, or stage induced hypnosis and what goes on during the oft reported phenomenon of an out of body experience? People report watching their unconscious body being operated on during medical procedures, and it’s a well known experience of people who survive torture. What about an ability to use self hypnosis as an anesthetic? During hypnotherapy training in Sydney Australia I sat in stunned silence watching video footage of a 65 year lady with a history of bad reactions to anesthesia, lie calm and relaxed through a major medical procedure. She used self hypnosis for pain relief while a surgeon cut a big hole in her stomach. It had taken over a year to find a surgeon willing to perform this operation, and he was certain he would have an emergency on his hands not long after he made the first incision. Yet with the help of her hypnosis trainer she provided her own analgesia through an hour long operation.

I remember wondering how could she possibly do that, did she affect some kind of chemical imbalance inside her brain, tricking all those pain receptors? I mean if the body/brain is capable of such unbelievable states of being, then its more than capable of stimulating all sorts of abnormal behaviors. Learning a felt identification and management of my own unconscious stress reactions, has been the key to my mental health recovery.

Anyway, in this particular moment of my life the television is keeping me company. BBC World News with its daily repeated stories are paying tribute to Steve Jobs today, the man from Apple has died. I sight the famous icon and in less than a minute a collage of memory floods through my mind. “How the bleep does that happen?” Memories of reading Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” and how Gregor Samsa turns into a giant dung beetle, or imagines he does? Of Wilhelm Reich’s notions of character armor and its analysis, how muscular tensions and rigid posture reveal our personality traits. Of the hardened shell of Gregor’s dung beetle back and his father killing him by forcefully lodging an apple there in, and fast flowing thoughts about the electro-chemical stimulation of metaphor and its non-verbal meaning.

As the minute continues to enfold I get flashes of last years six week long psychosis, its trance like daydream state fueled by soaring emotions that were stoked daily by lashings of loud evocative music. Memories of self referential messages from the cosmos delivered via a TV, perhaps unconsciously seeking a joyfully hedonic tone for an adaptation of unconscious attachment? You see in manic states I have absolutely no problems approaching myself or others, I just didn’t understand the hidden nature of these trance like illusions. I didn’t understand the thermodynamic nature of body-brain and mind, didn’t know I was trying to thaw the frozen terror at the heart of my unconscious expectations. Getting past my fearfully hesitant approach to other people allows the third branch of my autonomic nervous system to be triggered into action by proximity, by touch, by looks and body language. Its part of our hardwired need of others, our vital dependency on each other.

Further memories flash by, those crazy thoughts about metaphors and prophecy, of reading the Christian Bible as literal history when perhaps it’s about metaphor and a projected future, “God and the hidden mechanisms of nervous system attachment, apple and the tree of knowledge, consciousness and the word, the evolution of the mind and the age we’re now living in, not an ending but a brand new beginning, books about realization and a paradigm shift in an awareness of the self. - Noah’s Ark from the perspective of mammalian evolution and the hidden electro-chemical activity of the brain, perhaps the ark is a metaphor for the brains frontal cortex?”

Really crazy stuff, huh? Perhaps I should be too ashamed to write this down? Perhaps I should go back into my fearfully hardened shell? Bipolar disorder is a medical disease within that part of me we label the brain after all, not a manifestation of my hidden nature? Yet when we consider the electro-chemical activity that gives rise to mind within our body/brain, every single thought is a metaphysical transformation of matter into meta by a metabolic process. From this view of understanding and awareness, what are metaphors, myths and legends articulating from within us? Is our myth making, meaning making mind, trying to articulate its own unconscious processes? Are our universal legends about the evolving journey of the mind, of human consciousness? Where exactly does true perception and perspective stand?

So I’m sitting here in front of a large timber framed mirror, just like I did in 1980 when a profound shift in body sensation seemed to herald my first psychotic episode. This room is about twice the size of that bedroom in Sydney Australia though, and I’m sat on my office style mobile chair instead of the end of a double bed, playing with a laptop instead of a guitar. Similar to three decades ago I’m looking towards the mirror at my own reflection, although this time I’m deliberately looking for signs of muscular tension. I want to see if I can evoke a similar shift in body sensation as I felt back in 1980, if I can consciously shift my nervous systems orientation mechanisms. I need a break from my constantly thinking mind too, from my habitual self support during a lifetime of relative isolation.

Have you had similar feelings of relative isolation, felt alone in a crowded room? A strange sense of being stuck, a hesitant reluctance to move forward, to connect with other people while simultaneously telling yourself that you should? Looking into the mirror as sincerely as I remember doing when I prayed to God back in 1980, a thought springs to mind now. “Was it the first time I’d experienced being truly present, fully grounded and embedded in the moment?” I’m reminded of Eckhardt Tolle’s descriptions of newly felt presence.

“I got up and walked around the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before. Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence. I picked up things, a pencil, an empty bottle, marveling at the beauty and aliveness of it all.” (Tolle, 1990).

I feel my body soften with an involuntary intake of deeper breath. Moving into feeling for tension while looking at my face, I feel around my eyes and will a strained tightness there to release. I bring a felt awareness to my jaw, checking for ubiquitous tensions there while simultaneously, my tongue lets go its usual pressured thrust against the back of my teeth. My lips part and I feel that flowing down sensation as I did in 1980, my thoughts slowing at the same time. I drop this felt attention further down to my chest feeling for any sense of tension around my heart, and noticing a sudden release in tummy knots, along with another spontaneously inhaled and much deeper breath.

I'm still surprised at the depth of relaxation affected by this felt awareness to how my autonomic nervous system unconsciously organizes my body. Still mildly shocked at how disconnected my usual thought fueled sense of self has always been, and how I can‘t think this kind of unspeakable awareness.

A now familiar warming sensation heats the soles of my feet, with similar warm tingling sensations in my hands and my finger tips, like pins and needles. No wonder I was so impressed by this shift into body state awareness back in 1980, I only wish I had not been so completely ignorant as to the nature of its electro-chemical stimulation. This reminds me of Peter Levine's description of sensations of warmth in the limbs of PTSD sufferers, as he teaches them how to release the trapped survival energies of traumatic experience.

“People often report various qualities of vibration and tingling, as well as changes in tempreture-generally from cold (or hot) to cool and warm,” (Levine, 2010).

"Am I re-balancing my autonomic nervous system here or releasing trauma, or both?" I think. I can't do this kind of felt awareness without wondering if my traumatic birth experience conditioned a life of dissociation? A three day labor and forceps delivery followed by a week of separation in a mechanical crib, may have conditioned a foundational freeze response burned into the primitive neural networks of the brain stem by sustained distress experience. Its always been there, the hesitant approach to others, the camera shy frozen smile with its associated stiff muscular posture. Right now as I lean forward to type these words I can feel the habitual muscular constriction, that has always organized my focused intention to do anything.

Let me share another example of my decade long reading;
“In the state of generalized complete contraction of the musculature, one is impervious to suggestion. In violent rage or anger, one is completely refractory to any suggestion from without or within oneself. In the state of hypnosis, one also loses entirely the ability to command oneself, but is at the highest state of involuntary suggestion.” (Feldenkrais, 1985).

Perhaps Moshe Fedenkrais was thinking of states induced by hypnotic suggestion when he speaks of losing the ability to command oneself, states of mind equally described as trance states? Looking back on my manic episodes I remember well, the dreamy trance like quality of psychotic experience.

“Before this state of suggestibility is obtained, complete relaxation of the musculature must be achieved. Moreover the relaxation must be extended so far as to relax the capillaries and the small blood vessels. The muscular relaxation coincides with the sensation of heaviness in the limbs and in the body, and the dilation of the blood vessels coincides with the sensation of warmth. In such complete relaxation, the person is in the most suggestible state. It is not necessary to lose consciousness to reach this state of complete suggestibility. In the state of complete muscular and vascular relaxation, without any loss of consciousness, one is open to suggestion both from without and within oneself.” (Feldenkrais, 1985).

Perhaps in 1980 I came out of a defensive and habitual state of muscular contraction conditioned by traumatic experience, entering a highly suggestible body/brain state? Perhaps I can expand this notion to show that mental illness experience is as much about body dis-ease and unconscious nervous system reactions as any biological disease causing a chemical imbalance within the brain? Perhaps I can show in the coming chapters how our mind’s constant parts like perception, misperceives the whole psychotic experience when we view the brain as if its an elaborate clock? Perhaps I can articulate how a decade of reading has helped redefine my understanding and awareness of my whole self, away from the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone, parts like view I used to hold.

Dam! This is such a limited format, this page of written words, I could tell you more in ten minutes than I can write here in hours? So much is missing from these pages, like the millisecond communication of eye to eye looks and unspoken body language. How do I give you a quality description of my whole body/brain/mind experience in this or any particular moment? I guess I could describe my physical features, five foot ten, brown hair not yet balding, brown eyes not peering through spectacles yet, a big L shaped scar on my left thigh, visible just below the hem of my green shorts. My medium length slender fingers taping at the keys on this laptop?

Should I use other words of a parts like perception to convey some sense of observation, some vague feeling of being here? Should I describe more of this bed sitter room and my behavior as I move around it, how I put a key in the door when returning from my daily walk? Yet can such descriptive language paint a true picture of the wholeness of our human experience, my multifaceted sensory experience in this or any given moment? I mean I’ve had the devil’s own job finding the true nature of myself during those precious moments of my life thus far. I’ve struggled to fully inhabit my body, to marry my mind to its reactive energies, its desires and temptation to embrace all that can be felt and sensed in fullest of moment. Somehow I’ve held life at bay with an unconscious muscular constriction?

“Jesus! How can you not inhabit your own body?” I assume you may be thinking? How indeed? By the devils own device I’ve come to suspect, the ultimate human dilemma, by the unconscious mechanism’s of our mind’s dissociation. Dissociation seems to trick me into analgesic flights of thought so insidiously, I’m likely to write with pale rationalization here. Analgesic in the way my thinking rushes beyond any felt sense of my body, forcing to much sensation awareness into my head. Its as if there is an unconscious desire to escape into the painless synaptic connections of my brain, beyond the reach of my body with its pain receptive nerve endings. Its like I’m attempting a mini version of the body denial achieved in self hypnotized anesthesia.

Consider the words of the wonderful Peter Levine again;
“Highly traumatized and chronically neglected or abused individuals are dominated by the immobilization/shutdown system. On the other hand, acutely traumatized people (often by a single recent event and without a history of repeated trauma, neglect or abuse) are generally dominated by the sympathetic fight/flight system. They tend to suffer from flashbacks and racing hearts, while the chronically traumatized individuals generally show no change or even a decrease in heart rate. These sufferers tend to be plagued with dissociative symptoms, including frequent spacyness, unreality, depersonalization, and various somatic and health complaints,” (Levine, 2010).

I’m liable to pass right over my body sensations in this moment and write in automatic assumptions, typing the words I‘ve learned for symptomatic description? Its what my mind seems to do, to constantly quantify the experience of a lived moment with simple object metaphors, with separate this or that, thoughts. If I attempt to describe the sensual wholeness of all I see, hear, touch, smell and taste in a this very sensate moment, I’m forced to separate the experience into object like labels, as if I’m doctoring my own condition.

Funny! Perhaps my mind is my very own spin doctor, spinning its tangled web and trapping me there in? In trying to articulate the true nature of a psychotic experience I’m liable to such objective separation, with only my body retaining true awareness of the qualities of experience, while my mind continues to quantify it. I’m looking into the mirror quietly now, trying to feel my true nature within these curiously differing states, my body, my mind, somehow there‘s a distance here, a disconnect - by degrees of dissociation.

Chapter Two->>

Also posted on;
Nature's Madness: A Memoir of Mental Illness & Recovery

Recovery: A journey tasked by the trials of loss, misconnection, despair & hope's resurrection.

http://naturesmadness.wordpress.com/

References:
Keyson, S, 1993, “Girl Interrupted,” Vintage Books, USA.
Cheney, T, 2008, “Manic,” Harper Collins, USA.
Styron, W, 1990, “Darkness Visible a memoir of Madness,” Vintage Books, USA.
LaPierre, A, 2007, “The Language of Neuroception & the Bodily Self,” Hakomi Forum – Issue 18.
Panksepp, J, 1998, “Affective Neuroscience - THE FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN AND ANIMAL EMOTIONS,” Oxford University Press, USA.
Kafka, F, 1996, “The Metamorphosis - Translated by Stanley Corngold,” Bantam Books, USA.
Reich, W, 1980, "Character Analysis," Farrar, Straus and Giroux, USA.
Tolle, E, 1990, “THE POWER OF NOW a guide to Spiritual Enlightenment,” New World Library, USA.
Levine, P, 2010, “In an Unspoken Voice,” North Atlantic Books, USA.
Feldenkrais, M, 1985, “The Potent Self,” North Atlantic Books USA.

David Bates, October 2011.

Sunday Service - Not Same, Same?

2011-08-14T02:31:00.000-07:00

Sunday morning here in Thailand, and we go to the local Temple to give alms and pray to Lord Buddha.

'Same, same, you country?' I remember being asked on the first of our ritual visits.

'Yah! Sunday morning, same, same,' I replied in a that Germanic toned Thai-English accent, which underscores our personal language/culture barrier.

Looking at the photo and recalling this morning's visit begs a thought? "Is this Sunday service ritual same, same everywhere?"

Of coarse a first glance reaction is, "Looks nothing like any Christian Church service I remember."

Every Sunday morning my girlfriend and I make the trip to a local Buddhist Temple and I sit watching Thai people, and a handful of farang's (foreigners) give alms and donations for the poor. I watch people be blessed by a monk and pray to Lord Buddha for luck in the eternal fight against karmic forces. Less formal than a Christian Sunday service, people wonder in and out of the main Temple building, taking whatever time they wish to perform any number of traditional rituals.

Elements of Ritual & Reverence?
I never join in these ritual devotions, preferring to simply observe and soak up a calm and wonderfully peaceful atmosphere. I always sit on the floor of coarse, respectfully keeping my head below the feet of the main Buddha image, often triggered into childhood memories of Christ on the cross though. Today I listened to the monk chanting, as he flicked water onto head bowed, kneeling devotees and I smiled back as he enticed me with a flick of his wrist, the holy water feeling like rain.

I was reminded of listening to sermons as a child, a church father standing in his pulpit delivering life lessons from on high. Here the monk sits at the back of the Temple, slightly elevated from his fluid congregation, with lessons more focused on the body than the mind, it would seem? As I looked intently at kneeling postures, head bowed with hands clasped together in traditional wia, implicit memories of silent prayer moments flowed through my mind.

Hmm! "Perhaps Sunday Service is different, yet similar everywhere?"

As a bipolar with more than thirty years on the clock, I came to Thailand in hope of finding space and time to write a book. Eighteen months ago though, I did not anticipate just how much this journey would lead me home. Not back home to external structures of house, church or school though, but back home to my own body, with an easing of habitual flights of dissociated mind.

As I watched the respectful reverence of traditional wia's this morning, I was struck by thoughts of respect and the body as house to our spirit? Looking up at the main Buddha statue, I wondered about these elements of ritual, wondered about tendencies to elevate the mind above and beyond the wisdom of the body? I wondered about the depth of meaning in these physical acts of respect and reverence. I wondered, "just where does spirit comes from?"

St George & The Dragon - Spiritual or Psychotic Experience?

2011-08-10T02:51:00.000-07:00

I was nervous of coarse as I waited for my turn, the young singer song writer was in session at the moment. We’d talked about being courteous and cooperative in front of the Judge, about playing the norm’s game.
‘Yeah but that lawyer of mine is a bitch man! - She’s in on it with my parents and that fucking witch doctor psychiatrist.’

Like many creative people he could throw a temper tantrum like a hurt two year old, when challenged by the emotional dynamics of relating. Left alone to his own unfathomable process though he could join words together like a magician, a real witch doctor. Another beguiling poem or a beautiful love song.

‘People don’t understand man! - They just want us to be normal, square fucking pegs in square fucking holes.’ Jason had complained loud and often over the last two days.

‘You don’t want to be in here for weeks, locked away from your music, away from your studio, do you? - Play the game man!’ He’d agreed and I wondered just how rebellious and defiant he would be in front of the judge, that ultimate authority figure. Would he slip unconsciously into compliance posture and sit quietly that shy constriction that perhaps is the counterforce to his creative mind? "Hmm! Perhaps I’m projecting here," I thought. My own fears about speaking up for myself, about taking action when push comes to shove? “Projection! - Where else can we come from, we barely have a sense of what stimulates our own self, let alone anyone else‘s.”

I walked out to the high walled courtyard again, muscular tensions and mental agitation easing as the open space triggered implicit body memories of feeling safe during my childhood. A quick skyward glance at the clear blue sky, on another bright Australian day in good old Sydney town. A second look spotted a single white cloud though, and its curious yet familiar shape.

“Jesus! Leave me alone will you!” I thought, cursing the memory of doodling that same shape, over and over again two weeks ago. The cloud’s appearance is coincidental of coarse? A single cloud in a clear blue sky, its shape a meaningless coincidence? Surely just an emotive association for my grandiose thoughts, my deep need to feel special, to feel loved and wanted.

The previous five weeks of mania had been triggered by another lost relationship. In therapist training for family counseling, we read that loss and separation is a pivotal human experience. Loss certainly pivots me, tips me straight into the mystical, magical and some would say spiritual realm of experience. Of coarse in our objective, industrialized and over stressed first world order thinking, I’m just sick.

Surely my bipolar mania is a disease, a simple chemical imbalance like a viral infection? It can’t be about my attachment needs and absolutely nothing to do with heightened senses or any deeper resonance with the background fabric of a universe I‘m embedded in.

‘Your pathetic not prophetic!’ My oldest son had told me when I started reading the Book of Revelations again.
‘The messiah syndrome,’ he said with a laugh, ‘what a joke!’
‘This stuff has always been inside me son, long before my first manic episode, I’ve told you about the out of body experience when I was twelve.’
‘Sure and the mystery of the elevator that should have killed you before I was born. - So what? - You’ve lost insight Dad, you’ve lost your sense of objectivity.’

He accepted the medical model of brain disease completely, thinking the analogy to cancer or diabetes was perfectly reasonable. No spiritual crisis or breakthrough for my university educated son, just like the psychiatrist he believed in logic and an objective rationality.
‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ I told him.
‘Entertaining sure Dad, yet just superstitious nonsense,’ he replied.
‘Well Moses warned against worshiping false idols son, perhaps he meant false ideas and our shallow, surface sense of objectivity?’
‘Jesus! Dad, let go of this religious crap will ya! - Its not mystical or spiritual and certainly not fucking meaningful! - Its psychotic! Its mental illness!’

I tried to explain, feelings of being immersed in an unconscious reactivity, rationalized as a sense of objectivity within the mind. I’d talked about counselor training and the crisis telephone work I’d done. Told him that the more conscious we become, the more aware of how unconscious we were. A head shake signaled that being conscious was little more than waking up in the morning, as far as he was concerned.

How could I explain my desire to experience mania unaided, as a need to better understand it. I was being selfish, embarrassing him and the family, why couldn’t I just manage this manic episode like I had all the rest, in the last decade?
‘Your not interested in trying to understand me, you just need to manage a situation here,’ I’d told him last night.

Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares

to become involved with experimenting with his own life. _H Otto

Here in the high walled enclosure of St George Hospital I thought about the brain and its electro-chemical activity, “who can say what the mind really is.” I shook my head at the cloud, thinking about systems theory and sympathetic resonance, “you can’t affect the weather, you dumb fuck.” Thoughts about phenomenology passed through my mind though, and how we suppress our total sensory awareness in any given moment.

I thought about my son’s remarks on psychosis, “perspective eh son? How wide, how deep or high? How much do we really know about objectivity and our reactive, unconscious motivations?”
“If the brain is basically electro-chemical, surely every thought is a metaphor?” I thought. The father’s of psychotherapy came to mind, Freud, Jung, Adler and Wilhelm Reich. They all had their breaks with everyday objectivity, in exploring the depths of the human soul.

I thought about the young psychiatrist who’d sectioned me for the first time in my life. “Hmm! Higher education and an assumption you can know life before you’ve lived it?” Metaphors? St George and the Dragon? Jake Sully as Toruk Makto, Rider of Last Shadow? Mystery, imagination, spiritual ecstasy and the emotional heights of psychotic experience? Who can say which is which and what is just mental illness.

I spotted Jason as he came back into the recreation room, “my turn to face judgment,” the thought triggering memories about the book of revelations. “The last judgment?” I think it’s a prophecy, a metaphor about generations to come. A time when self awareness has risen to such heights, we won’t unconsciously judge each other. “Here come the judge,” I thought as I followed my legal counsel towards the star chamber.

bipolar disorder suicide ideation

2011-08-08T08:47:00.000-07:00

I'd been thinking about using a rope, when the aftermath scene of who would find my body came to mind.
"Would it be the Princess or the cleaning lady?"
"I can't do it here!" I told myself. Then I started thinking about doing it somewhere I couldn't be identified, no documents found with the body. I thought about taking a trip up country, to the other end of Thailand, thinking if I found a rural area with limited police resources, maybe they'd just cremate the body and forget about it?

"Be better for the Princess and my boys back in Australia," I thought, "I'd just be missing."

"Jesus! I haven't thought about suicide for at least four years!" Burst into awareness.
"What the hell has triggered this?"
"Your depressed!" Another inner voice advised.

Was it alchol related, was it because I'd just watched my beloved Manchester City get beat by another last minute goal by those F'ing red devils. Thoughts about my two oldest boys came to mind, the pain of my last visit home and the subsequent estrangement from my oldest son.

"Fuck em all!" Sprang to mind and the planing phase continued, the how and where of suicidal ideation. The flight of thoughts went on for at least ten minutes I'd say, until a sudden sensation of fatigue deepened my breathe.

"Your in a loop - you loopy fuck!" I told myself, stuck in a dissociated mind state triggered by who knows what? Somehow the wave of fatigue sensation had brought about a more grounded sense of the here and now. I suddenly remembered that I write about being able to let go of these mind states these days.

"Why do I think I can write a book - for God's sake!" I say to myself, perhaps trying to maintain the flight into mind, and resist a felt sense of something?

"Soften," I said to myself, triggering a practiced shift into feeling for tensions around my heart. It broke the thought bubble state long enough to bring a more balanced mind/body awareness. I quickly felt the urge for flight again though, back into that loopy fuck, dissociated mind space.

"What is it?" Came to mind as I rehashed the "fuck em all" statement, and it poked me into feeling for facial tensions. Sure enough there was a shit load of anger in my jaw, and I felt my lips pressed together with my tongue pushing against the back of my teeth. "Unspeakable anger," came to mind and I whispered "soften," out loud, falling into another wave of body fatigue.

It was enough to trigger the "whole body" sensation that I've been practicing in my efforts to re-adjust a lifetime tendency for dissociated mind space awareness, over and above awareness of sensations within my body. For a couple of minutes I did the deep breathe exercise which brings oxygen into my blood stream and the enhanced body awareness so lacking throughout my life. The added oxygenation of my blood and the rise in body sensation, stimulated a rate and temperature change of blood flowing through my brain, and a state shift in mind space awareness.

"Let go," is the last thing I remember of conscious awareness before slipping into whatever proceeds REM state dreaming.

Its the next day now and I'm doing my daily walk, after a couple of caffeine hits kicked last nights suicidal mood into the waste bin of personal history. Funny! When I'm walking, ideas rain down like I'm walking under some tropical waterfall. So I've dropped into an air-conditioned shopping mall here in Bangkok to write them down, all the memories and thoughts about last night and what might have triggered the suicidal ideation.

I remembered checking for feedback on someone's blog, where I'd left a comment, when I got home.
"Hmm! You didn't get what you needed - did you!" Sprang to mind, along with thoughts about rejection and primal wounds. A chaos of chance and circumstance, coming hot on the heals of Man City's defeat.

"Defeat! - Now there is a word to conjure mind/body sensations, defeat and depression, a withdrawal into old and unconscious wounds, perhaps?" Today's date came to mind, which I'd written in my journal only an hour before, 8/8/11.

"Shit! Its James birthday tomorrow." James is my oldest child.

Is this a background trigger to suicidal ideation, the disconnection, rejection, failure, defeat and an underlying primal wound, waiting for the release of chaos, chance and circumstance? A scene from my lifeline crisis training came to mind, and that awful question about how long a typical suicide thinks about it before acting? As little as five minutes the trainer told us before relating the story of a young girl who'd thrown herself under a train.

A first love rejection apparently, with her cell phone connection lost during a pleading conversation with her ex lover. Within seconds she had hurled the phone and herself down onto the tracks. Thoughts about impulse, energy and circumstance had shocked me at the time. I remember thinking how lucky I was that fear and lack of energy had kept me alive to fight another day.

Now I remember giving that shitty mood to the Princess when I got home last night. Pity, we'd had such a good day and she was in amorous mood when I'd returned. All the more surprise at the bewildering fall into such defeated thinking.

"You know, lady in England understand she cannot speak with man for one week, when team lose."
"For one weeeeek!" She shrieked.
"Its tribal darling! - Very primitive stuff," I told her as I enacted the ritual of kiss and makeup.
"I'm sorry I rejected you last night," I whispered in her ear.

A little later as she put on her face for the day, she gave me a quizzical look, and asked.

'What rejection mean?"

"Hmm! Primitive stuff indeed, the primal pain of unspeakable rejection, the deep need for felt connection between us?" I realized she had never really felt it in her life, it wasn't part of the fiber of her being, such a well loved child is amour-ed against such negative sensations. An overwhelming experience of close proximity love, pervaded her sense perception, probably why she is so flowing, so spontaneous, so natural and relaxed with her delightfully expressive gestures?

"No history of pain sensed tensions in the fiber of your being, my love."

What do you think?
Is there more to bipolar disorder than brain malfunction, than disease? Do we really know what stimulates our thinking, our moods? A chemical imbalance notion of disease malfunction is perhaps a rather quick answer, considering the complexity of brain/body systems underpinning our manifest states of mind. The self education of the last four years has brought me a deeper self-awareness, even though primary motivations within my body/brain/mind will always remain unconscious.

BIPOLAR- Swings & Roundabouts?

2011-08-05T23:52:00.000-07:00

Whereabouts am I today? - Is the answer in my posture?

The swings & roundabouts of life have particular significance for us bipolar's. The merry go round of mood swings making hopeful progress difficult to gauge on any particular day. HOPE seems to be an ingredient of wellness, as vital as oxygen, water & food? Hope for a future free from torturous mood swings being a particular concern for us swingers. Whereabouts am I today? Is an all to frequent question of self doubt, when our judgement has a history of being affected by body state moods?

Looking at the world from this state of perception I call my mind, feels a bit like looking out of a window. What's that quote about the eyes and soul? I remember spending a weekend in a self improvement workshop decades ago now, well before I did my therapist training. The highlight was a two minute recorded speech, played back on TV to show us how others perceive us. I remember describing how I thought I would come across on the tape, and then being surprised by my miss-perceptions of my own reality.

There had been signs of nervous tensions as the speech began, it was there in my stiff posture, yet as the speech progressed my self-consciousness melted away. I remember telling the group, I was sure I'd frowned at the camera as the speech came to an end, "like a Greek mask of tragedy," I told them. As a shamed individual that famous mask was my most potent self image, an internal perception pleasantly displaced by what came next.

As I watched the replay of my little speech, with "its not too bad - better than I expected," self talk, pleasant shock overwhelmed me with the last frames. Instead of the Greek "woe is me" mask of my inner perceptions, I saw this wide beaming smile, the 180 degree opposite of my thoughts. Driving home from that weekend retreat I promised myself I'd use this same method if I ever became a therapist. That memory came back to me as I download photos of a different kind of weekend here in Bangkok, with this rare moment as I'm caught on the other side of a camera lens.

"What is it about that God-am camera lens, that makes me self conscious?"
What do You Think? Do I look relaxed? Perfectly at home and comfortable inside my own skin? As I write this post, I'm still recovering from the aftermath of that weekend. Trekking around the burbs of this enormous, hot and steamy metropolis, looking for a new shop/house location for the Princess & I to live/work in. Followed by the big move and then complete exhaustion, after I'd shown off my stupid male ego by shifting all our stuff by myself. Exhaustion has fueled my mood for weeks now, and although its waning I still haven't regained the same energy level and optimistic self perception I had before.

Thoughts, Moods & Self Perceptions - The Psychological & Physiological?
As I write this post I'm looking at the photo, remembering that weekend two decades ago and reminding myself that perception is not just about my thinking. Its been 18 months since I began my Thailand sojourn, finding the space to concentrate on deepening my self awareness, allowing the process to take me where it will. As a classic manic depressive, I think the major awareness lesson learned so far, has been a re-acquaintance with my body. Mind you! I suspect I've never been particularly well acquainted with body sense, a felt awareness of my body as it moves through time and space?

I've always been aware of my mind though! Too aware! In fact, I could say that I've been trapped within a mind perception all my life? Unconsciously unbalanced, unaware of the need to balance thoughts with felt perceptions in managing my life. Like everyone else I've been challenged to get on with life, take perception for granted and just get on with doing stuff? Like everyone else I've done just that with varying degrees of success and failure. Not working for a living now, not having to get on with doing stuff each day, has allowed space for a studied self awareness, like never before in my life.

Studying the photo above, I'm reminded that self perception is a balance of the psychological and physiological. Reminded that when asking myself the question, "whereabouts I am today," where is my mood on the bipolar swings and roundabouts, I have a history of miss-perception. Hey Presto! I'm triggered back into felt awareness, re-balancing my lifelong habit of "mind space" awareness, and that hopeful ray of sunshine appears on my thoughtful horizons again. "Thank God for that."

Sometimes I wake in pessimistic mood, thinking I've made no progress towards recovery at all! Then I remember I always think too much, that I can let go and just feel this tired body state. All part of the swings and roundabouts of a bipolar journey I guess? Whereabouts are You Today?

RELATED ARTICLES:
How do YOU do Dissociation?
How I do Dissociation?

How I do Dissociation?

2011-08-04T09:31:00.000-07:00

Prince Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) - Prince of Self Awareness

How I do Dissociation? Its a bold title I know, with an implicit promise that I can tell you exactly how I do dissociation.

Of coarse I can only say how I think I do dissociation and try to articulate the reality of my self awareness.

Yesterday I posted a article entitled "How do YOU do Dissociation?" I started with a statement about an emotionally painful incident and how I been unable to recall it without a sense of numbness so typical of dissociation.

The very next line "What exactly is Dissociation," is typical of how I do dissociation by using intellectualism - the distancing from core emotions with emotionless thoughts and words.

The picture above is my favorite Buddha pose, the closed eyes and tension free facial expression resonate deeply with me. To me it's an expression that represents the epitome of calm self awareness, of being completely comfortable inside your own skin. Once a week I accompany my girlfriend to the local Buddhist Temple and watch her perform rituals of selfless giving and prayer. Often I sit gazing at the giant gold Buddha statue and imagine him sat at the entrance to that ancient Greek dudes cave.
The Oracle's cave with its timeless advice engraved above, "Know Thy Self"

Hmm! Am I doing it again here? Avoiding the heart of the matter in how I deflect from painful feelings using the distance of intellectualism? I thought I had the issue in full emotional and cognitive awareness an hour or so ago. Walking around Bangkok where I'm an alien, a stranger in a strange land, I did feel the energies of dissociation and its unconscious reactive power. Now that I'm back home though, sitting in front of this electronic device, my own electro-chemical device (brain) has turned to fudge again. Is this dissociation? Am I unconsciously avoiding a painful memory and how the farking hell am I doing it!

"When I tried to recall details and write about the family dynamics involved, a foggy sensation filled my mind as numbness overcame my senses. Only in the last week have I been able to face the memories with any clarity of mind and emotional recollection of that day." This is the comment from yesterday that I failed to address further as the article unfolded. In fact I did not realize that I'd avoided writing anything more about those painful emotions until I left the apartment and went for a walk. Twenty four hours later here I am again, returned from a long daily walk and the clarity of mind it usually enables, to be once again stuck in a fuzzy fugue state as I try to write.

I suddenly think about checking my emails, my facebook and twitter accounts which it feels good for a second, as a rise in interest dissolves the fugue state. Anger rises quickly though as I realize another avoidance trick, along with guilt about social media addiction. "What triggered the avoidance though? - and why can't I find the same clarity I had when walking?" I ask myself. I stand up and walk around the apartment, waiting for a state change while letting thoughts subside.

I squeeze my thumb and forefingers together, triggering a shift in my energies of attention as the locus of awareness moves from thoughts in my head to sensations in my body. This is an NLP anchoring technique I use to stop thinking to much and shift into feeling my body instead. I feel those habitual muscular tensions release, as a spontaneous deep breath brings more oxygen into my blood stream, the knot in my stomach unravels and a felt awareness of body parts below my diaphragm returns.

'Dam! This unconscious freeze response,' I say out loud.

The Freeze Response:
"The freeze response is activated due to a perceived or real inability to take action. In essence, one feels helpless to change the threatening, painful or stressful experience. The freeze response is also described as the “deer in the headlights” affect. The body becomes both tense and paralyzed at the same time. The thoughts, sensations and emotions of the stressful experience become suppressed or internalized, not only in the mind but in the tissues of the body." The Habit to Freeze By Jonathan Tripodi.

I walk back into the bedroom and look at my desk, the laptop, gaze at the executive chair, "my fucking nemesis?" For a moment I stand still, re-gathering all those thoughts from my walk, recalling the sensations of memory from that day nine months ago, the dramatic scene replays like a home movie on TV.

‘I’ll have you fucking sectioned myself, this time!’ He said while stabbing his extended forefinger close to my face.
"Jesus! This is harsh," I'd thought, accompanied by the flashback memory of holding his hand when he was seven years old.

I'd watched his upper lip turn up in an involuntary canine snarl, as a perfect slide show memory had claimed my mind, of pointing up towards a star filled milky way trying to impress sensations of wonder upon my child. Twenty two years later he was so forcefully impressing his dreadful intent upon me, seemingly at ease with the notion of having his father locked up against my will.

It hadn't been the words that cut me to the bone, it was the intonation of voice, the stabbing finger and the blood flushed skin tones, the very incarnation of my own volcanic father. I felt the same emotionally tone death lack of empathy for anything outside his own skin. The experts tell us that such painful experiences become flashbulb memories, imprinted within the brains neural networks and held in storage for triggered recall. An overwhelming sense of loss, lack and isolation accompany emotional sensations of anger and sadness from that day nine months ago, memories that had refused any real conscious awareness till a week ago.

I remain still a for second longer continuing my nervous system re-balance, with this relaxed deeper breathing dissolving muscular tensions. I bring my focus to my jaw to feel for those ubiquitous tensions and check my tongue to feel if its pressed against my teeth. I drop this felt attention further down to my chest area, feeling for any sense of tension. I'm still surprised by the affect of this reorientation of awareness, always mildly shocked by how disconnected from my body, my sense of awareness generally is.

The now familiar burning sensation heats the soles of my feet, with similar warm tingling in my hands, my finger tips. I'm reminded how Peter Levine describes these same sensations in PTSD patients, as he teaches them how to release the trapped survival energies of trauma. "Am I re-balancing my autonomic nervous system or releasing trauma?" I ask myself. I can't do this felt relaxation routine without wondering if my traumatic birth experience set me up for a life of dissociation?

A three day labor and forceps delivery followed by a weeks separation in a mechanical crib, may have condition a foundation of "freeze," of dissociation. Its always been there, the hesitant approach, the camera shy frozen smile with its associated stiff posture, or should that be dissociated posture? Even now as I write these words I can feel the muscular tensions of intense focus, as I mobilize my concentration. "Maybe I should set a ten minute alarm, reminding me to check this habitual muscular response," I tell myself.

Dissociation is more physiological than psychological?
"The freeze response is activated due to a perceived or real inability to take action." A perceived or real inability to take action? How does this statement fit into my experience of fugue states, of dissociation? Thinking about that day nine months ago, I reacted to my son with the same reasonably calm response I had always given my father, I did not react to the waved finger in my face. Was I reasonable and calm though? Or was I frozen by fear? Has an unconscious freeze response been part of my life since birth? Has action always been proceeded by this unconscious muscular freeze, which is only overcome with fight/flight energies? Is this the unconscious bipolar dilemma, with mania an attempt to thaw the freeze of tense muscular posture?

Each time I sit down in this god-am chair I seem to be unconsciously triggered into habitual freeze mode, and I struggle to overcome an inexplicable hesitation. Perhaps the posture fires neural networks in my brain, as feedback signals from the muscles of my hunched shoulders recognize the familiar? Is this how I survived the distress of a three day labor, braced against pain, locked in frozen fear? The same muscular tensions continued after birth with infantile Asthma, chest muscles held tight to ward off those breathless coughing spasms.

For several minutes I've sat watching the text curser blink on and off, trying to feel the neuroception Stephen Porges speaks of. The unconscious perception of threat, the tension of distress that underpins my inability to take action here. I realize though that I'm not feeling, I'm thinking that's what I should do, while staying within the mind and now I squeeze my thumb and forefingers again. Immediately I drop down into feeling body sensations with a spontaneous deep breathe and unraveling tummy knots accompanied by a felt awareness of sensations in my toes and fingertips. Hmm! Was I in dissociation while I watched the blinking curser,is dissociation my fundamental orientation to life?

Primary perception is unconscious, its physiologic?
"Mood was movement before the mind evolved," it was an epiphany moment in my journey towards greater self awareness. Nearly two months ago I wrote about it in the article bipolar anger, how I sense that inner tensions fire the mind. I love mind games, clever thoughts and word plays as much as anyone, perhaps too much for my own good? Today as I do my best to articulate how I do dissociation, I sense my thoughts as distance, a distance from the affective core of my being.

"Was the human mind born in a need to escape pain in the body?" I ask myself. Thoughts about torture victims and multiple personality disorders flash through my mind. Those altered states that have helped people to survive the trails of life? I think about yesterdays article and the power of self hypnosis to control pain, even during major surgery. Shakespeare's "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy," springs to mind as my awareness yo-yo's between thoughts in the mind and feelings in the body.

Enlightened or Supremely Self Aware?

"Know Thy Self," such simple advice when you say it quickly? Yet we are all aware of a deeper self below this thinking mind, a deeper self responsible for annoying bad habits, behaviors that resist our wishful positive thinking.

Describing my own awareness of dissociation here, I have been forced to NOT think, to let go the mind and FEEL. Trying to think of words to convey the inner sensations of what feels like a primary self, I'm reminded of the schizoid split between mind and body, like there are two different self's?

I sense a reactive self of instinctual body tensions and a higher self of idealized thoughts? Balancing these two self's with the practice of mindful self awareness, has been key to my bipolar recovery. Learning to feel subtle inner tensions and not think in "This or That" objective terms has been essential to the process.

Back in Sydney Australia, in a previous life so to speak. I had a Hong Kong Chinese girlfriend, a Buddhist. I used to tease her about Gautama Buddha and his personal journey.

"He was just a spoiled Indian Mummy's boy who abandoned his wife and child to sit under tree! For God's sake! - How do find you enlightenment by doing nothing?"

She would be highly amused at my admiration for him these days, particularly when I admit my jealous resentment, because I can't be still like that. Siddhartha was one of the truly gifted ones, like Jesus, Mohammed and a few others, great teachers who never wrote anything down. Perhaps because the written word is a construct of mind and like thoughts a symbolic interpretation of our inner reality? Like a xerox copy of original artworks, they can only imitate the real thing, the unthinkable, unspeakable self?

The Greek dude left us with wise and profound advice, yet gave no hint of the process involved. Siddhartha was a truly smart dude though, leaving us with timeless clues in his famous postures of meditative practice we see today. Perhaps the secret of stillness is the soothing of instinctual stress reactions, the hidden unconscious re-activity of a nervous system evolved to maximize our prospects for survival?

It is said that on the morning Siddhartha finally reached enlightenment, the other creatures of earth drew close, sensing his transformation? Perhaps he'd realized his true nature, its instinctual foundation and reactive nature? Perhaps he realized that the mind can only observe nature and not be nature, and why the endless justifying of the mind cannot resolve our problems?

My "mood was movement before the mind evolved" epiphany moment, was part of my process of increasing self awareness. My self awareness process feels like an approach towards an unknown stranger, a primary self distanced by the numbing affect of dissociation. A primitive freeze response stimulated by a traumatic birth perhaps? Mediated by the electro-chemical activity of the autonomic nervous system though as one of our evolved survival reactions?

How I do dissociation, is mediated by my autonomic nervous system, and its primitive freeze response. As I practice better self awareness though, dissociation is not as disruptive as it once was. These days my dissociation cannot be described as a symptom of mental illness, just normal everyday dissociation? We all share the same evolved nervous system, and normal behavior and symptomatic behavior are simply a question of degree?

Only when we choose to see the body/brain/mind as a complete integrated system, and not some sophisticated clockwork mechanism of separate parts, will we make progress in mental health? Only when we accept our unconscious re-activity as the primary self, will we see the common bonds of our humanity? Only when we accept our instinctual needs for security, will we feel the instincts of judgment towards those who are less self secure and suffer from unconscious and denied survival reactions.

RELATED ARTICLES:
How do YOU do Dissociation?

How do YOU do Dissociation?

2011-08-02T01:47:00.000-07:00

Wow! Where did I just go?

Its been almost ten months since a particularly brutal experience of rejection with my oldest son. I remember walking around for hours draining the energies of anger and rage the encounter stimulated. I did my best to avoid amplifying those negative emotions by not replaying the episode in my mind. A few months later though when I tried to recall details and write about the family dynamics involved, a foggy sensation filled my mind as numbness overcame my senses. Only in the last week have I been able to face the memories with any clarity of mind and emotional recollection of that day.

What exactly is Dissociation?

Evolution has equipped us with some magical powers of pain defense, with automatic dissociation one of those mysterious affects often labeled as a symptom of mental illness. Yet when the same powers within the human nervous system are employed to positive effect, like self hypnotized analgesia to avoid pain, the only label we find is a wondrous Wow! Of admiration. As I wrote in the article meaning and mania, during my therapist training, I sat in stunned silence watching video footage of a 65 year lady with a history of bad reactions to anesthesia, lie calm and relaxed through a major operation, using only self hypnosis for pain control.

In the same article I talked about the hidden, unconscious power of our autonomic nervous system and its denied role in mental illness symptoms. We are indeed a curious creature, hard wired for external observation, with a peculiar resistance to awareness of what goes on beneath the conscious mind? Our knowledge of symptomatic mental anguish and its presumption of illness are by enlarge, external observations of behaviors and the minds assumptive perception. Consider typical descriptions of dissociation we find on the internet and in published medical literature.

Dissociation as a Mental Illness?
The DSM-IV considers symptoms such as depersonalization, derealization and psychogenic amnesia to be core features of dissociative disorders. However, in the normal population dissociative experiences that are not clinically significant are highly prevalent, with 60% to 65% of the respondents indicating that they have had some dissociative experiences.

Relation to trauma and abuse.
Dissociation has been described as one of a constellation of symptoms experienced by some victims of multiple forms of childhood trauma, including physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. This is supported by studies which suggest that dissociation is correlated with a history of trauma. Dissociation appears to have a high specificity and a low sensitivity to having a self-reported history of trauma, which means that dissociation is much more common among those who are traumatized, yet at the same time there are many persons who have suffered from trauma but who do not show dissociative symptoms.

Adult dissociation when comorbid with a history of child abuse and otherwise interpersonal violence-related posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been shown to contribute to disturbances in parenting behavior, such as exposure of young children to violent media. Such behavior may contribute to cycles of familial violence and trauma.

Symptoms of dissociation resulting from trauma may include depersonalization, psychological numbing, disengagement, or amnesia regarding the events of the abuse. It has been hypothesized that dissociation may provide a temporarily effective defense mechanism in cases of severe trauma; however, in the long term, dissociation is associated with decreased psychological functioning and adjustment.

Other symptoms sometimes found along with dissociation in victims of traumatic abuse (often referred to as "sequelae to abuse") include anxiety, PTSD, low self-esteem, somatization, depression, chronic pain, interpersonal dysfunction, substance abuse, self-mutilation and suicidal ideation or actions. These symptoms may lead the victim to erroneously present the symptoms as the source of the problem.

Child abuse, especially chronic abuse starting at early ages, has been related to high levels of dissociative symptoms in a clinical sample, including amnesia for abuse memories. A non-clinical sample of adult women linked increased levels of dissociation to sexual abuse by a significantly older person prior to age 15, and dissociation has also been correlated with a history of childhood physical as well as sexual abuse. When sexual abuse is examined, the levels of dissociation were found to increase along with the severity of the abuse.

Dissociation in Everyday Life?
It is very common in talk therapy to ask an emotionally difficult question and watch the subtle posture shift as a client's mind is overcome by a strange sense of numbness, of momentary depersonalization perhaps? I remember one emotionally adventurous client, who likened the experience to the shock of injury.

She recalled having her fingers jammed in a car door, "you know how at first you can't feel a thing," she said while discussing emotional numbing, "its a bit like that, I guess." "Funny how we all use that word you, when recalling personal experiences, instead of I," I said in reply. "A mini dissociation, perhaps?" She said laughing and shaking her head at the feelings beneath her comment.

It seems that only when such numbing experiences become unusually disruptive do we label a common experience as an illness? Even in the official medical model of disease it is well accepted that up to 65% of the population experiences milder forms of dissociation, suggesting a common stimulus within our brain/body systems?

Beyond the perception of disease affected states, other areas of medical research see a bigger picture of dissociation. For decades body psychotherapists have known that trauma and its dissociative affects, is as much about what happens within the body as in the brain. In fact the latest breakthrough in neurobiology confirms that the likely cause of many mental disorders, lies within a poorly understood and unconscious brain/body autonomic nervous system.

Dissociation as the Human Condition?
The human mind is dissociation, without this state there would be no special self awareness for humans? Without the dissociative state we would still be subject to the same instinctive reactions as the rest of the animal kingdom? My own recovery from 31 years of these altered states of mind only came with an education into my neurobiology.

In 2007, when I first started reading the mind numbing pages of academic jargon that describe the human body/brain/mind, I fully expected to learn more about brain disease. I found no specific information on brain disease which might explain my bipolar disorder, yet found a lot of information on how my nervous system affects my brains chemistry.

In short, I came to understand how unconscious nervous system activity stimulates my altered states, my dissociative experiences. With practice and ongoing experience I've learned to sense this unconscious activity by letting go of thoughts, learning to feel the nervous activity of my body, which has its own awareness beneath the conscious mind.

The non disease view of Dissociation?
"Dissociation as a clinical psychiatric condition has been defined primarily in terms of the fragmentation and splitting of the mind, and perception of the self and the body. Its clinical manifestations include altered perceptions and behavior, including derealization, depersonalization, distortions of perception of time, space, and body, and conversion hysteria. Using examples of animal models, and the clinical features of the whiplash syndrome, we have developed a model of dissociation linked to the phenomenon of freeze/immobility. Also
employing current concepts of the psychobiology of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), we propose a model of PTSD linked to cyclical autonomic dysfunction, triggered and maintained by the laboratory model of kindling, and perpetuated by increasingly profound dorsal vagal tone and endorphinergic reward systems. These physiologic events in turn contribute to the clinical state of dissociation. The resulting autonomic dysregulation is presented as the substrate for a diverse group of chronic diseases of unknown origin."
The Neurophysiology of Dissociation and Chronic Disease Robert C. Scaer MD.

"Most traumatized individuals fulfill the criteria for a number of co-existing diagnoses, which usually include mood disorders, anxiety disorders, substance abuse and dependence disorders, eating disorders, somatoform disorders, and medically unexplained symptoms (Davidson, Jughes, Blazer & George, 1991; Faustman & White, 1989; Kulka, et al., 1990). These complications are reflected in the DSM-IV TR by the inclusion of more than 12 associated features of PTSD (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). The formal diagnosis of PTSD contains three diagnostic post-traumatic symptom clusters: symptoms indicative of intrusive reliving of the trauma, the avoidance and numbing symptoms, and symptoms of increased autonomic arousal. The episodic alternation between the avoidance and reliving symptoms “is the result of dissociation: traumatic events are distanced and dissociated from usual conscious awareness in the numbing phase, only to return in the intrusive phase” A Sensorimotor Approach to the Treatment of Trauma and Dissociation. Pat Ogden, Ph.D., Clare Pain, M.D., and Janina Fisher, Ph.D.

"There is currently an increasing awareness, indeed a palpable sense, that a number of clinical disciplines are undergoing a signiﬁcant transformation, a paradigm shift. A powerful engine for the increased energy and growth in the mental health ﬁeld is our ongoing dialogue with neighboring disciplines, especially developmental science, biology, and neuroscience. This mutually enriching interdisciplinary communication is centered on a common interest in the primacy of affect in the human condition. Psychological studies on the critical role of emotional contact between humans are now being integrated with biological studies on the impact of these relational interactions on brain systems that regulate emotional bodily based survival functions." An Essential Mechanism of Development, Trauma, Dissociation Allan N. Schore.

While traumatized humans don’t actually remain physically paralyzed, they do get lost in a kind of anxious fog,
a chronic partial shutdown, dissociation, lingering depression and numbness, a kind of “functional freeze.”

Page 52, "In an Unspoken Voice" Peter Levine.

Resolving Trauma in Psychotherapy. With Peter A. Levine, PhD

Our first glance reactions?
At first glance the above links may seem unrelated to "mental illness," and it is important to feel this reaction and ask "is my assumption rational or reactive?" The common link between all mental disorders is our unconscious autonomic nervous system (ANS), which simply cannot be grasped by the mind, it can only be felt. We all have an emotional comfort-zone which is regulated by the unconscious activity of the ANS, and it is the disturbance of that comfort-zone which fuels the reaction to so-called madness.

Watching Peter Levine engage with a PTSD sufferer is an emotional experience for many of us, who have suffered these altered states of mind. It's also an example of the time consuming effort required to bring a new awareness and healing to any individual. Its also uneconomic in our current paradigm of bottom line profits and available resources. As Allan Schore points out, we need a paradigm shift in our perceptive awareness and perhaps an acceptance of current human perception as a basic dissociation would be a good start?

Stephen Porges has introduced a new term for our "at first glance" unconscious reactions, he calls it "neuroception." In his paper on neuroception, he explains the millisecond activity of the ANS as we constantly scan the environment for threats or resources, while maintaining our unconscious comfort-zone. These new discoveries into our hidden motivations explain why we are not as conscious as we like to think, and why dissociation is a common experience and may not be a disease, even in very severe disorders?

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Neuroception An Unconscious Perception?

BIPOLAR - The Recovery Road

2011-07-26T01:04:00.000-07:00

Reaching for a Rainbow?

"The more conscious you become, the more aware you become of how unconscious you've been." _Patricia Sun.
Recovery seems to be a process made conscious through hindsight, even though our pressing desire is for something to happen right now! Becoming conscious and content with the process of improving self awareness has been a lesson hard learned and automatically forgotten in recent days.
The stress of moving house and high fatigue, saw me drop back into an old unconscious pattern. For over a week now I have been stuck in the bipolar trap? A dissociated mind held hostage by my nervous system? My old all or nothing bipolar response to challenge triggered an unconscious stress reaction.

My mind is not as conscious as it thinks it is?

Worn out by three days of heavy lifting as we moved house and shop items here in Bangkok, I needed to let go of thinking and really relax for a few days. Yet here is the catch 22 of my bipolar pattern, "I can't relax," can't spontaneously let go of tensions and allow proper rest and recuperation. Consequently for over a week I've been more unconscious than conscious again! I slipped back into a primary nervous system motivation of tense posture?

For a couple of days there I worried about falling into a real depression again, scared my recovery had simply been hypo-mania. Familiar feelings of defeat were triggered by a deep weariness, my mind so habitually dissociated it has no sense of fundamental body needs. Here is the unconscious trap of my lifelong dissociation, as a hyper-vigilant mind is energized by muscular tensions. Tension that becomes a threat from within me and maintains a primitive nervous system defense known as the freeze response.

Periods of sympathetic arousal, with high levels of stress hormones, will include symptoms of muscle

bracing, bruxism, ocular divergence, tachycardia, diaphoresis, pallor, tremor, startle, hypervigilence,

panic, rage and constipation. These states will alternate with parasympathetic dominance, including

symptoms of palpitations, nausea, dizziness, indigestion, abdominal cramps, diarrhea and incontinence.

The state of low serum cortisol is associated with behavioral responses including social isolation and

withdrawal, substance abuse, constricted affect, denial, cognitive impairment and dissociation, all

relatively parasympathetic states. http://bit.ly/foqA9Q

In more lucid moments I told myself to let go of the muscular tensions firing this heightened dissociation. Yet unconscious motivation saw me slip back into tense postures time and again with the associated negative thoughts. Tension really has been a life long issue, from the three day labor of my birth to the resentful atmosphere you could cut with a knife in the family home. I believe that habitual and unconscious tensions are the core issue in my lifelong bipolar disorder. A belief formed by an education into neurobiology and the role my autonomic nervous system has in affecting brain chemistry.

For many months now I have been steadily improving my awareness of subtle internal tensions, coming to sense how my nervous system sends feedback signals to my brain. Stress triggers unconscious nervous system reactions based on our life experience, and I'd fallen into a tense muscular stress response. Habitual muscular tension throughout my life seems to be the very nature of my dissociation and the meaning of hyper-vigilance.

Today as I begin to recover normal energy levels, conscious awareness is rising as the unconscious stress reaction from the house move subsides. Today brings the question of just when I slipped into unconscious reactions and just how conscious my mind really is? I certainly lost sight of the rainbow that symbolizes hope for a couple of days there, and I'm reminded of the complex unconscious processes on this recovery road. Others I'm sure will agree that there is no 'this or that' event, no magic recovery moment we can point to.

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans" _John Lennon

You could say that reality happens within us while we are busy thinking? For what does my first quote really mean? "The more conscious you become, the more aware you become of how unconscious you've been." Stephen Porges "The Polyvagal Theory," shows how the autonomic nervous system is crucial to our unconscious motivation. While others have discovered the motor cortex of the brain seems to be activated before the higher cortex levels responsible for our thoughts.

The brains activity began about 500 milliseconds before the person was aware of deciding to act. The conscious decision came far too late to be the cause of the action. It was as though consciousness was a mere afterthought - a way of 'explaining to ourselves' an action not evoked by consciousness. Peter Levine "In an Unspoken Voice"

Over the past four years a self education in neurobiology has raised my level of awareness, I think? New awareness of subtle body sensations and muscular tensions in particular, not an awareness of mind. My particular road to recovery has taught me that the subjective rationalizations of mind are meaningless unless we understand something of the electro-chemical process that creates it. Learning to feel unconscious chemical activity through subtle body tensions allowed me to see that rainbow of hope again after decades of trying to identify my bipolar problems through my mind.

Persisting with education and new experience, while resisting the impulsive urge to 'fix it right now,' has been key to my recovery. Although the sharp dip in energy and mood over the last week, reminded me just how unconscious life is. In altered states of mind people with mental anguish experiences are accused of loosing insight into normality. As the first quote suggests though normality is not as conscious as people like to believe it is. Normality is perhaps more instinctual than intelligent, more reactive than rational, with normal insights grounded in a dissociation from the mystery of nature.

On my own recovery road I continue to learn from new experience and education, and I continue to ask myself "just how unconscious have you've been?" Learn from experiences like the unconscious motivation of the past week or so, when I'd dropped back into my "freeze response." An evolved response of the nervous system that is below the awareness of my mind? As I write this article I'm frustrated by duller thinking compared to before we moved, and I need to remind myself to feel the nature of this state?

I'm not completely comfortable in this new place yet and my lifelong over sensitivity will take time to settle here. Feeling this reality rather than trying to think of a reason for my frustration, allows me to sense an unconscious freeze response. Feeling it allows me to accept its reality as my nature, my biology of instinctual motivation that no clever mind conversations will alter. Feeling it allows me to get back the kind of body/brain/mind balance that I'd lost during the unconscious stress reaction.

Feeling and its acceptance brings me back from the mirage of subjective thinking that is the nature of my lifelong dissociation. Lost in a subjective fog that was energized by the denied muscular tensions of my evolved freeze response, my animal nature. Feeling gets me in touch with the process of recovery and the power of "now" that the mind seems intent on escaping. Perhaps this is our human dilemma, in that the mind is dissociation, born over millions of years of slowly magnified animal freeze response?

This week though, I'm content to have a sense of that rainbow again, happy to dwell in the feeling process and its direction, rather than think of an "I've fixed it" destination. This week I'm happy to feel and accept my life as it is, as it has been, might have been and could be if I remember to feel more conscious, instead of just thinking "I'm conscious."

"The good life is a process, not a state of being.

It is a direction not a destination." _Carl Rogers

cure bipolar disorder

2011-07-04T03:18:00.000-07:00

I Can't Cure Bipolar Disorder?

Cure Bipolar Disorder? Should I dare to consider myself recovered from a lifelong mental illness? Or am I just in remission? Cure bipolar disorder internet searches suggest bipolar is generally considered as having an illness of the brain like diabetes or even cancer. Considered from a medical disease model the word recovered converges with the word cure and the medical model suggests we cannot cure bipolar disorder.
Wikipedia tells us: "It has been noted that the bipolar disorder diagnosis is officially characterised in historical terms such that, technically, anyone with a history of (hypo)mania and depression has bipolar disorder whatever their current or future functioning and vulnerability."

"This has been described as "an ethical and methodological issue", as it means no one can be considered as being recovered (only "in remission") from bipolar disorder according to the official criteria. This is considered especially problematic given that brief hypomanic episodes are widespread among people generally and not necessarily associated with dysfunction. Flux is the fundamental nature of bipolar disorder. Individuals with the illness have continual changes in energy, mood, thought, sleep, and activity. The diagnostic subtypes of bipolar disorder are thus static descriptions - snapshots, perhaps of an illness in continual flux, with a great diversity of symptoms and varying degrees of severity. Individuals may stay in one subtype, or change into another, over the course of their illness."

Remission or Improved Self Awareness?
I admit the common perception of my current freedom from disruptive bipolar symptoms would be remission at best and illusion at worst? How could I possibly have freed myself from a 30 year history of classic manic depression without medical intervention? No drugs, no surgery, surely it could only be a matter of age and lucky change of circumstances? Approaching my 60th birthday my life energies must be winding down and unable to sustain the classic bipolar pattern, or perhaps experience has enabled better self deception?

Belief is dependent on available information and subjective viewpoint, and prior to my education in developmental neuroscience my own belief was similar to the common view of mental illness. Only after another failed attempt to find stability with medication and a chance encounter with a book on affective neuroscience did I begin the solid shift in belief that now sees me fully recovered. Its been eight months since a six week long psychosis allowed me to further dissolve the fear and hidden freeze response at the core of my bipolar experience. A six week sojourn into madness that I gladly experienced in the hope that it would lead me to a deeper awareness of my disorder.

Even though that six week psychosis was the longest and highest manic episode of my 31 year experience, it has NOT been followed by depression in a repeat of my old pattern. Despite the harsh reality of family rejection that I write about here, depression has not claimed me in line with the classic medical model. After four years of solid research, of reading and re-reading the neuroscience literature of brain and nervous system development, my belief has changed along with my improved self awareness. My belief is a bipolar condition of natural autonomic nervous system responses, of instinctual energies trapped by a hidden and denied freeze response.

If the fight or flight is not successful, then at the point of recognizing defeat and

impending death, the animal goes into a state of helplessness and hopelessness,

physiologically the freeze response. It appears as “feigning death” because of the

sudden and extreme immobility. The stress hormones are not discharged but are

rather counteracted by a new cocktail of hormones activated by the parasympathetic

nervous system. The pulse and blood pressure, elevated by stress hormones, are now

forced to drop precipitously. The endorphins released in response to threat now persist

during freeze/immobility, rendering the animal analgesic in the face of the potential injury

from the attack. The animal is in a state of passive dissociation, not unconsciousness but an

altered state of “suspended animation.” Healing the Body-Mind in Heart-Centered Therapies

Illness or Instincts?
As I wrote in bipolar disorder instinct most educated people believe in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, although feeling its reality dwells uncomfortably within the human psyche. The medical model of mental illness has grown alongside a well proven method of identifying disease and discovering cures, weather by accident or design. The assumption of an organic brain disease is logical enough when behavioral disorders like bipolar are observed by a profession charged with a responsibility of care and action during periods of individual crisis. Yet beyond strict medical models of illness, a more holistic approach to mental anguish is effecting a quiet revolution. Consider this review of the "Theory of Structural Dissociation" by David Hartman, MSW and Diane Zimberoff, M.A.

Healing the Body-Mind in Heart-Centered Therapies:
Some of the most profound influences on human behavior may be found within the deep evolutionary streams of human nature, flowing through the hormonal and nervous systems, regulated by the instinctual “reptilian brain” (limbic system). That part of the brain controls emotional thought, including rage, fear, aggression, and arousal. The influence of these systems is especially direct as imminent threat increases. And yet the “new brain,” the prefrontal cortex and especially the hippocampus, are capable of moderating that influence, putting into context the reality of the threat, and making mindful conscious choices of behavior.

These influences operate in a number of different layers of depth within the continuum of conscious/unconscious, yet are accessible through the body. These archaic, archetypal patterns, when denied or thwarted or undischarged, split off from the whole self and become trapped in the
body. That is where we find them, and how we heal them. “According to Jung, bodily experiences relating to instinctual discharges constitute the most deeply unconscious psychic elements, which can never become completely conscious". Healing the Body-Mind in Heart-Centered Therapies

Cure Bipolar Disorder? - Cure the Human Condition?
As I said above belief is dependent on available information and a subjective viewpoint, and no one can say exactly what bipolar disorder is? All our descriptions of bipolar disorder symptoms/behaviors are subjective, including my current belief in a natural nervous system disorder. Unlike the kind of diseases that bipolar is often compared to such as diabetes and cancer, there is no medical test available to prove mental illness of any kind. In my article meaning and mania I cite the astonishing power of self hypnosis and the annoying reality of the placebo effect in psychotropic drug trails.

I ask the question, "Does psychiatry have a chemical imbalance theory for any of these amazing abilities?" and elsewhere I ask if psychiatry is at all interested in what goes on during the universal experience of wellness during the onset of a bipolar manic episode? It is obvious to anyone with any self exploration experience that there is far more to the human condition than out objective observations perceive. As the brilliant neuroscientist Antonio Damasio points out:

"We use our minds not to discover facts but to hide them. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty,

the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the of the body, those that constitute the flow of life

as it wonders in the journey of each day." _ Antonio Damasio, "The Feeling of What Happens"

In everyday life we are immersed in mostly unconscious reactions to our individual circumstances, as our unconscious nature tricks us into a sense of objective reality? Exploring the leading science discoveries beyond the commercial delivery of our everyday media saturated lives, brings surprising revelations. Stephen Porges groundbreaking "The Polyvagal Theory" is leading a revolution in somatic therapies that deal with the effects of trauma. In the article "TRAUMA Exit & The Tiger Trapped Within" I point out the brilliant work of Peter Levine and his use of insights gleaned from "The Polyvagal Theory."

In his book "Waking the Tiger" Levine asks a potent question, "Why do animals living in the wild, not suffer trauma after the kind of experiences that would cause PTSD symptoms in so many humans?" Birth trauma more than likely lies at the root of my own bipolar disorder experience, even though such a belief can only be a matter of faith and not science. Further reading after my last psychosis in Sept/Oct last year led me into a deeper self awareness about the physical tensions of avoidance at the heart of my bipolar condition. Reading Levine's latest book "In an Unspoken Voice" gave me a method of self exploration I had avoided in the past, even with positive experiences of a similar approach.

Approaching My Real Sense of Self?
Reading "In an Unspoken Voice" helped me to combine the knowledge I'd gained from reading developmental neuroscience with a felt sense of my core being, beneath the acted persona I presented to the world. It also allowed me to make sense of the last psychotic episode and the enabled "approach" at the center of what looks like emotional chaos. Internal tensions have always prompted my behaviors, from the congruent avoidance of childhood to the hesitant approach of adulthood. Now Iv'e discovered my real sense of self beneath the mask of consciousness, in motor movements and internal tensions which fire my subjective thoughts. Now Iv'e discovered the motivational importance of my autonomic nervous system, and its blind feedback signal information to my brain.

Bipolar Recovery
Our Autonomic Nervous System is a prime motivator of ALL our reactions including thoughts!
The oldest levels of the brain-auto nervous system control all our Freeze/Flight/Fight reactions. This is the limited activity within a bipolar disordered brain/nervous system, with FEAR the root cause.

Deep unconscious FEAR motivates the posture and movements of bipolar sufferers, triggering manic thoughts of escape and depressed sensations of defeat. FEAR causes habitual over use of the two older levels of the auto nervous system. Sensing how internal tensions trigger energy levels and tone your thoughts, will allow you to practice a felt correction to this bi-phasic disorder.

Test muscle tension feedback signals yourself?

Relax the muscular tensions of your head and face, your jaw, around your eyes and your tongue. Be mindful of spontaneous shifts in your breathe as your thoughts slow down? Feel this action, don't try to focus thoughts on it and you will feel the spontaneous actions of your auto nervous system. The mind gets in the way of our instinctive nature and interrupts our auto nervous system in its job of maintaining balance. Feel how feedback signals from muscle tensions fire your thoughts? Let go of your minds need to know and your auto nervous system takes over, doing the job millions of years of evolution designed it for?

My writing here on this blog has been very much part of my process of recovery, as I grapple with the articulation of my experience and what I have learned. In other articles I have described body/brain/mind as an organic computer needing time to integrate new knowledge with experiences that fire those "I get it" moments we all have. Recovery seems to involve a certain resistance and persistence? Resistance to the instinct, the impulse to act and have wellness now, the trick nature plays on us while we pretend to be rational and insightful? Persistence in learning about new information and different points of view, gaining new experience and slowly changing limiting beliefs. The brains primary function is to maintain organismic homeostasis, a thermo-dynamic comfort-zone based on life experience, overcoming this known comfort-zone is perhaps what recovery is essentially all about?

RELATED ARTICLES:
Bipolar Recovery
Bipolar Condition
Affective Psychosis - Mania, Myth & Meaning
Meaning and Mania
Mania Dreams & the Roots of Psychosis
Neuroception? An Unconscious Perception?

Bipolar Recovery

2011-07-02T05:16:00.000-07:00

Bipolar Recovery - Beyond Manic Depressive Cycles
Beyond manic flights of mind and depressive crashes within the body?
Here is a method based on gaining critical insight into the unconscious activity of your autonomic nervous system.
Activity that stimulates the sensations, behaviors and mental anguish of your bipolar condition. Knowing the essential role your auto nervous system plays in every second of your experience, will give you real feelings of self control.

Critical insight will help you to feel your way into better balance of mind and body. Sensing feedback within your auto nervous system, will bring you real control over your emotional energies.
Not control by will of mind, but control through knowing you can let go of internal tensions which stimulate your bipolar condition.

This method is based on three keys elements.

1. Critical Insights.

2. Felt Awareness Practice.

3. New Mind-Body Experience.

Beyond Our Crisis Periods - We Can Learn to Manage Ourselves Well!

Bipolar Symptoms are Generated by Electro-Chemical Feedback Signals?

Feedback Between Our Brain and Autonomic Nervous System (ANS).

A Practical Bipolar Recovery Method - You can Feel Working Everyday?

This is not a method based on subjective theory needing your trust, belief and faith. Its a practical method you can apply during every waking moment of your life. This method is based on a FELT awareness of internal sensations, and your minds observation of them. Feeling and mindfully observing shifts in nervous sensations, will help you gain control over your unwanted behaviors.

The (ANS), Auto Pilot is the unconscious motivator of all our Behavior Patterns!
The catch 22 for bipolar's in those racing thoughts of an overactive mind, is an unconscious
need to escape the feelings of the body and we resist the felt experience of life?

Knowledge of your hidden nervous system will change your self awareness and allow your mind to rest easy in a deeper knowing. Bipolar's need to identify a hidden threat which seems to come from nowhere? Frustration with not knowing what causes the problem, feeds into the bipolar cycle?

Threat Comes Via Unconscious Nervous System Feedback From Internal Tensions!

Unconscious internal tensions condition a limited nervous system response.

Understanding how your auto nervous system will stimulate normal healthy responses, takes you beyond a limiting bi-phasic response. Knowing that your sense of self is produced by electro-chemical impulses in your brain and nervous system will take you beyond a sense of hopeless uncontrollable symptoms. True self knowledge and a felt awareness will change your natural control over internal sensations, behaviors and mental anguish.

1. Critical Insights:

A, Your Inner Self - The Brain:

Your brains primary function is to maintain organismic homeostasis, a thermo-dynamic comfort-zone based on life experiences. It achieves this by extending its primary function down into the body via the autonomic nervous system to receive feedback signals. It is now becoming clear that brain-auto nervous system feedback plays a critical role in all mental/emotional disturbance.

Your Mind Perceives External Objects - Unaware of its Own Reality?
Inside the Brain - Your Mind is an Electro-Chemical Activity?

Electro-Chemical Activity - Primed by the Auto Nervous System.
Brain/Nervous System Feedback Maintain a Constant 2Way Connection.
The Brain's Inner Workings Part II: Cognition

We see the external world yet remain blind to our internal world?
Education about my internal reality gave me real control over bipolar symptoms.

B, Your Inner Self - The Body:

All your essential body functions are unconsciously operated and maintained via the autonomic nervous system, which dates back to before humans evolved. The major needs of body survival are effected via two branches of the (ANS) with freeze/flight/fight responses known for many decades.

What has not been understood is exactly how we had adapted these primitive survival responses into complex human behavior. Recently Stephen Porges uncovered a third branch of the (ANS), explaining how a limited two branch activity lies at the core of behavioral disorders, like bipolar.

Anatomy of the Autonomic Nervous System
The Auto Nervous System is Critical to all Our Behavior Responses?

The Polyvagal Theory Uncovers a 3rd Level to the Autonomic Nervous System.

A 3rd Level of the Auto Nervous System involves the Head & Face?
Bipolar involves the two Lower Levels of the Auto Nervous System.

C, In Human Evolution the Body & Movement Came Before Complex Thinking:

You can ease racing thoughts by relaxing muscle tensions in your head & face?
Muscle relaxation is the prime reason, meditation and yoga exercises help us?

Our Autonomic Nervous System is a prime motivator of ALL our reactions including thoughts!
The oldest levels of the brain-auto nervous system control all our Freeze/Flight/Fight reactions. This is the limited activity within a bipolar disordered brain/nervous system, with FEAR the root cause.

Deep unconscious FEAR motivates the posture and movements of bipolar sufferers, triggering manic thoughts of escape and depressed sensations of defeat. FEAR causes habitual over use of the two older levels of the auto nervous system. Sensing how internal tensions trigger energy levels and tone your thoughts, will allow you to practice a felt correction to this bi-phasic disorder.

Test muscle tension feedback signals yourself?

Relax the muscular tensions of your head and face, your jaw, around your eyes and your tongue. Be mindful of spontaneous shifts in your breathe as your thoughts slow down? Feel this action, don't try to focus thoughts on it and you will feel the spontaneous actions of your auto nervous system. The mind gets in the way of our instinctive nature and interrupts our auto nervous system in its job of maintaining balance. Feel how feedback signals from muscle tensions fire your thoughts? Let go of your minds need to know and your auto nervous system takes over, doing the job millions of years of evolution designed it for?

D, Head Muscles Send Feedback to 3rd Level of Auto Nervous System:

Over two hundred muscles in the head & face supply feedback signals for this newly discovered 3rd branch of our auto nervous system. This highest level of nervous system function fine tunes the activity in the older levels, allowing for easy self calming. It is this easy, unconscious self calming which is missing in the bipolar experience, with social interaction far less spontaneous.

Example: In my own experience of excessive emotional abuse (shame-humiliation), I habitually (unconsciously) held my chin tucked in. After raising my awareness of auto nervous system reactions, I've managed to correct this unconscious habit. A slight change in posture makes an enormous difference to automatic body responses. Automatically deeper breathes, spontaneous relaxation of stomach muscles, more vital feedback throughout my nervous system. Previously I had been trapped in automatic (unconscious) Freeze/Flight/Fight reactions.

Once you understand the importance of head muscle tensions in sending signals back to your brain, as well as signaling others you can access an easy automatic self calming.

FELT Awareness Exercise:
Relax the muscular tensions of your head and face, your jaw, around your eyes and your tongue. Be mindful of spontaneous shifts in your breathe as your thoughts slow down? Be mindful of sensations in your toes and fingers as your senses come into balance? Feel this action, don't try to focus thoughts on it and you will feel the spontaneous reactions of your autonomic nervous system?

Practicing a mindful observation of automatic nervous system activity in this way will bring you back into a natural body/brain/mind balance. Over time a new awareness of your inner self can reduce a reliance on medications alone and bring you a more holistic sense of wellness.

2. Felt Awareness Practice:

HEART TONE EXERCISES:

Lay down on your tummy like the lady here, sinking down into the bed or floor as much as you can. It is important you try to feel as much of the fabric beneath you as possible. Try to feel your internal organs dropping or pressing down against the fabric texture.
Feel the area of your heart, feel the muscular tension there in your chest. As you make contact with body sensations notice any tingling in your toes & finger tips. Try to feel and not think, let go & sink deeper into your body, falling down, way down. As you let go of tensions in this area of your chest relax any tension in your face.

Focus a felt awareness on your chest, the area around your heart, let go and sink down, letting go any tension around your mouth, your jaw and in your tongue. If you can focus on sensing your heart and the muscles in your chest, you should notice an involuntary deepening of your breath. Notice any increased sensations from your limbs, your fingers and toes, any spontaneous relaxing of tummy muscles. These sensations are your auto nervous system at work.

Observation of Felt Sensation: As you continue to feel your heart soften, letting go of muscular tensions, notice any slowing & deepening of your breath. Notice further relaxing of regions of your body where contact has usually been outside your minds awareness. You should notice an increased awareness of your limbs and your posterior, with the sphincter muscle of your anus letting go of autonomic constriction there.

Notice the temptation to escape body sensations and return to a thought based energy discharge, when you try to feel your body in this way. Practice for a few minutes the sensations of coming into relaxed body states, and the habitual flight into mind of an unconscious, autonomic response, your normal comfort zone. This gradual experiencing of unconscious defense, the tensions, the habitual thinking, will bring you into contact with your autonomic nervous system's reactions and its affect on the vagal tone of your heart.

On first introduction to this practice, try for a few minutes each day to get a feel for the difference between your habitual autonomic nervous system tensions, and the more relaxed heart tones possible through thoughtless relaxation? As you go about your daily routine try to spend a few seconds now and then, relaxing every muscle you can feel within your face. Relax any tension in your jaw, around your eyes and let your tongue lie relaxed in your mouth, your lips allowed to part as you inhale with relaxed chest muscles. Feel the feedback signals from your muscles that have maintained this autonomic activity below your conscious awareness.

3. New Mind-Body Experience:

Building a new mind-body experience is a process of getting to know your hidden auto nervous system through observing internal sensations as described above. Practicing control over pressured thinking by relaxing internal tensions, brings a felt sense of the role of the ANS in bipolar symptoms. A short period experimenting with this tension release method of easing racing thoughts, will bring you into a new awareness of your internal mind-body function. Practicing a new felt awareness will bring you into direct contact with the bipolar catch 22 of avoidance of body sensations.

Resistance to deep muscular relaxation is common for mental illness sufferers and is evidence of an unconscious internal threat. Understanding how this unconscious of sense threat is maintained by habitual tensions, we can begin to re-condition the nervous system with new experiences. With acceptance that the auto nervous system is deeply involved in bipolar symptoms, raised awareness brings a new observation of internal sensations.

Acceptance of auto nervous system function by a felt experience of sensations, allows the conscious mind its craved for sense of knowing. It is the conscious experience of 'not knowing' that ensures the cyclic trap of bipolar disorder, with conscious concern providing fuel for the unconsciously perceived threat. Escape into the mind is the common denominator in all mental anguish, and it is crucial to understand this fundamental avoidance of felt sensation at the root of mental illness. Once we accept the autonomic nervous system and its crucial role in our experience, we can pay it due respect with a mind that observes, knows and allows this vital auto pilot of our lives to do its job.

Example: As I write this page I slip back into an habitual tense posture for concentration, its unconscious and automatic. As part of my new mind-body experience, a half hourly alarm is set to remind me to relax unconscious muscle tensions and allow a healthy auto nervous system response. Over the past two months of daily writing my old intense posture of concentration has softened, as I re-condition my auto nervous system with new experience. At end of each writing session I deliberately trigger my desired auto nervous system state using an NLP kinesthetic anchoring technique.

After only a weeks practice using a physical anchoring technique I now trigger my desired nervous system state just by pressing my finger and thumb together?. Such anchoring techniques are used by people in all walks of life from sales to entertainment and sports performance. In health therapies such techniques are taught as grounding exercises to help people suffering de-realiztion or de-personaliztion sensations. In all these cases the autonomic nervous system is the unconscious mechanism, affecting the changes in internal sensations.

NLP kinesthetic anchoring technique: I find an implicit memory of balanced nervous state, feeling a rising intensity of body sensation, particularly the increased feedback from fingers and toes described above. Such increases in body awareness are my surest sign that I'm dropping out of my habitual freeze response, when attention is focused through the mind too much. As the grounded sensation of autonomic balance increases I press my thumb and index finger together creating a specific sensation of pressure which becomes associated with this nervous system state.

bipolar condition

2011-06-22T22:09:00.000-07:00

Brain or Nervous System Condition?

The hidden neurobiology of the bipolar condition?
Bipolar disorder, or manic depression, is a medical illness that causes extreme shifts in mood, energy, and functioning. These changes may be subtle or dramatic and typically vary greatly over the course of a person’s life as well as among individuals. Most people generally require some sort of lifelong treatment. While medication is one key element in successful treatment of bipolar disorder, psychotherapy, support, and education about the illness are also essential components of the treatment process. Is bipolar an illness like diabetes or cancer and will specialists find a "mental illness" gene? Or has a more holistic understanding of human development uncovered the biology of the bipolar condition?

The Mind Perceives External Objects - Knowing Itself Objectively?
Inside the Brain - Mind is an Electro-Chemical Process?

A New Shift in Human Perception is Beginning?
As Science Uncovers Our Hidden Reality?

Commonsense perception is based on the observation of objects in the external world, and lacking knowledge of our internal process we assume an object oriented understanding of our Inner Reality? New science insights, made possible by the rise in technology is now combining to produce a deeper understanding of our internal reality. The bipolar condition of mental illness is still grounded in a 20th century understanding of cause and effect objectivity?

The treatment of those who suffer mental anguish problems is still grounded in 20th century objectivity and its unsustainable economics? Neuroscience insights are changing our self awareness for the 21st century and beyond with systems theory shifting perception like Galileo changed the flat earth perception of 17th century commonsense? What Galileo Galilei did for our awareness of external reality, neuroscience research is doing for our awareness of internal reality?

The Polyvagal Theory uncovers hidden pathways to a Bipolar Condition?

"The polyvagal theory" Porges, 1995, 1997, 1998. emphasizes the phylogenetic origins of brain
structures that regulate social and adaptive survival oriented defensive behaviors. The polyvagal theory proposes that the evolution of the mammalian autonomic nervous system provides the neurophysiological substrates for the emotional experiences and affective processes that are major components of social behavior. The theory proposes that physiological state limits the range of behavior and psychological experience.

In this context, the evolution of the nervous system determines the range of emotional expression, quality of communication, and the ability to regulate bodily and behavioral state. The polyvagal theory links the evolution of the autonomic nervous system to affective experience, emotional expression, facial gestures, vocal communication and contingent social behavior. Thus, the theory provides a plausible explanation of social, emotional and communication behaviors and disorders. The theory also provides an explanation of stress-related responses." From: The polyvagal theory: phylogenetic substrates of a social nervous system, Stephen W. Porges

The higher nervous arrangements inhibit (or control.) the lower, and thus, when the

higher are suddenly rendered functionless, the lower rise in activity. _John Hughlings Jackson

What follows is my understanding of the bipolar condition based on 31 years experience and my reading of Stephen Porges "The Polyvagal Theory" and similar human development neuroscience research. My views carry no endorsement by any of these authors.

With an unconscious perception of threat our (Social Engagement System) is inactive?

When unconscious feedback from the external or internal world signal danger, the two older systems of survival are active below the level of conscious awareness. Despite our best intentions muscular feedback signals will keep us acting in defensive modes of approach or avoidance. Without an unconscious perception of safety from muscular tension feedback, bipolar's cannot spontaneously respond to a social world.

The bipolar condition is a limited bi-phasic activity of the two older nervous system responses for survival. A bipolar condition is the habitual response of only two mechanisms in a three mechanism autonomic nervous system. The third branch of our autonomic nervous system and that which makes us most human, is triggered by feedback signals from the muscles of the head and the face in particular.

The Auto Nervous System is unconscious (blind) it's activity is triggered by our instincts for survival, our instinct for movement? Threat experience unconsciously conditions instinctive muscular reactions below the level of the minds awareness. Habitual muscular tensions maintain a sense of threat and cautious movements, with the bipolar condition created in these unconscious tensions.

Mania had a well documented history of early adult onset prior to our current era of drug therapy in the western world. I believe the first episode of mania is a spontaneous attempt to activate the newer mechanism of the auto nervous system. This highest and newest mechanism of the auto nervous system (auto pilot) works by feedback signals from the muscles of the head and face. When active it triggers relaxed muscle tensions throughout the body and enables rapid facial and body gestures for effective social communication.

Porges discovery of a third branch to the auto nervous system, which is most commonly known for its fight/flight stimulation, brings a holistic view of human behaviors both ordered and disordered. In terms of mental health the theory gives valuable insight into the pathways of all mental processes both ordered and disordered. If we accept that mental anguish sufferers are thrown back onto the two primitive mechanisms of this crucial nervous system, we can see how they are locked out of a social world that is the essence of our sense of humanity.

Test muscle tension, feedback signals yourself?

Relax the muscular tensions of your head and face, your jaw, around your eyes and your tongue. Be mindful of spontaneous shifts in your breathe as your thoughts slow down? Feel this action, don't try to focus thoughts on it and you will feel the spontaneous actions of your auto nervous system. The mind gets in the way of our instinctive nature and interrupts our auto nervous system in its job of maintaining balance. Feel how feedback signals from muscle tensions fire your thoughts? Let go of your minds need to know and your auto nervous system takes over, doing the job millions of years of evolution designed it for? The mind can only observe being, not be the source of it?

In Life eats Life Evolution, Movement Precedes the Mind - Survival Instincts come First?

The bipolar condition is caused by heightened sympathetic nervous system activity which is very costly in metabolic energy terms, with the parasympathetic nervous system forced to increase its activity to maintain a costly balance. For bipolar's its like we are still out on the African Savannah's of evolution, in constant danger of being attacked. Our hidden Auto Pilot stimulates our instincts for survival in muscular tensions that fire the minds activity. Until this golden age of technology we have been lost to our own nature, like a coma patient waking with no memory of a past life?

For whatever reason, be it a traumatic event or a sustained experience of emotional abuse, our (VVC) social engagement system is not working properly. Unaware how our auto nervous system is supposed to work, we keep it from becoming active with habitual (unconscious) muscular tensions.

This new discovery of a third branch to our (unconscious) autonomic nervous system explains why meditation helps calm our troubled mind, and why therapies that focus on close, face to face human contact work better than medication in the long run.

Warm smiling faces trigger the "Social Engagement System" the 3rd branch of our ANS?
The critical (unconscious) perception of safety is achieved within a supportive environment?

From his Polyvagal Theory, Porges has coined the term "neuroception" to explain the unconscious detection of environments as safe or dangerous. He shows us the hidden pathways of disorder, "detection of a person as safe or dangerous triggers neurobiologically determined prosocial or defensive behaviors." He describes just how crucial facial communication is in establishing the support and protection we all receive from close proximity and healthy attachment to others.

The neural regulation of the muscles of the face and head influences how someone perceives the engagement behaviors of others. More specifically, this neural regulation can reduce social distance by allowing humans (including infants) to:

• Make eye contact;
• Vocalize with an appealing inflection and rhythm;
• Display contingent facial expressions; and
• Modulate the middle-ear muscles to distinguish the human voice from background sounds more efficiently.

Alternatively, when the tone of these muscles is reduced, which occurs spontaneously in response to a neuroception of danger or a life threat in the external environment (e.g., a dangerous person or situation) or the internal environment (e.g., fever, pain, or physical illness) environment:

• The eyelids droop;
• The voice loses inflection;
• Positive facial expressions dwindle;
• Awareness of the sound of the human voice becomes less acute; and
• Sensitivity to others’ social engagement behaviors decreases.

It is important to remember that neuroreception of danger or a threat to life can occur with respect to the external environment (e.g., a dangerous person or situation) or the internal environment (e.g., fever, pain, or physical illness). Even flat (rather than angry) facial affect might prompt a neuroception of danger or fear and disrupt the development of normal spontaneous interactive and reciprocal social engagements. For example, the flat affect of a depressed parent or the flat affect of an ill child might trigger a transactional spiral that results in compromised emotional regulation and limited spontaneous social engagement.
Faulty neuroception, that is, an inability to detect accurately whether the environment is safe or another person is trustworthy—might lie at the root of several psychiatric disorders.

Neuroception (instinct) Mirror Neurons and Feedback Systems Theory Combined?

"The motor act is the cradle of the mind - The capacity to anticipate and predict movement,

is the basis of what consciousness is all about" _Charles Sherington

"We are exquisitely social creatures. Our survival depends on understanding the actions, intentions and emotions of others. Mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual

reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling - not by thinking" _Giacomo Rizzolatti

"The essential role of feedback from bodily systems, especially facial and postural, underlies the

generation of emotion." (P,49) Affect Regulation & the Origin of the Self by Allan N Schore.

“Mirror neurons are a kind of 'neural wi-fi' that monitors what is happening in the other people.
This system tracks their emotions, what movements they're making, what they intend and it activates, in our brains, precisely the same brain areas as are active in the other person.
This puts us on the same wavelength and it does it automatically, instantaneously
and unconsciously. _Daniel Goleman

Instinctual Movement Predates the Mind & Pre-Movement Tensions Fire the Mind?

Accepting this instinctual foundation to mind can resolve mental anguish problems once we understand the unconscious activity of the auto nervous system. Once acknowledged by the mind, we can stop interrupting our own natural order by refusing to feel it. Unfortunately for most of us, fear of our felt sensations has kept us clinging to a life sensed through the mind, in heightened dissociation. Hyper-vigilance is the result of what Stephen Porges has termed "neuroception," with some lapsing into frozen fright, while others adapt into flights of intense focus and intellectual dynamism.

Try the instinctive muscle exercise again? Relax the muscular tensions of your head and face, your jaw, around your eyes and your tongue. Be mindful of spontaneous shifts in your breathe as your thoughts slow down? Feel this action, don't try to focus thoughts on it and you will feel the spontaneous action of your autonomic nervous system, your instincts for survival, your auto pilot?

Practicing a mindful observation of automatic nervous system activity in this way will bring you back into a natural body/brain/mind balance. Over time a new awareness of your inner self can reduce the relience on medications and bring you a holistic sense of wellness.

Allan N Schore, described by some as the Einstein of neurobiology urges a multi-disciplinary approach to the trails, tribulations and joys of being human. His, "Affect Regulation & the Origin of the Self" is a landmark volume that seeks to cross reference all the new knowledge which came from "the decade of the brain." The rise in technology that improved our powers of observation during the 1990's.

Stumbling across a sister volume "Affect Dysregulation & Disorders of The Self" in 2007, set me of on a quest to discover exactly what "affect" is. After a failure to find understanding and support from family, friends and the medical profession, I followed the example of two personal hero's. Joseph Campbell and Murray Bowen both read extensively to find clear insights and deeper understanding, in spiritual terms perhaps Jesus very first lesson for us? Over the past four years I've read, read and re-read, in my own attempt to find clear insight and understanding about my bipolar condition.

Affect is complex and involves systems theory and positive and negative feedback loops, not outdated cause and effect logic. If you are starting to get a sense of your minds feedback fired activity from your bodies muscular tensions, then you may have felt affect?. Perhaps this is the reason why most scientists shy away from trying to explain what "affective disorder" really means, because once you start to think you've lost it.

Affect can only be felt, and like faith and beliefs it cannot be captured in subjective thoughts, only observed, acknowledged and accepted. In coming to understand the crucial role of the face in affective communication, we can also get a sense of generational "affect," and how emotionality is passed down through the family. Neuroscience research into the biology of affective states has gone a long way towards proving a Bowen Theory of Multigenerational Transmission Process, pioneered in the 1950's by the observations of Murray Bowen.

Mood was Movement before the Mind Evolved? was an epiphany moment that finally drove the last spike through my poor dissociated mind, and gave me control over my emotions. Not control by force of will though, not like with positive thinking, but control through clear insight and the ability to let unconscious tensions go. Its amazing just how much tension we can habitually store within the body and not be aware of it. I still get excited a fair bit and can even rev myself up into a mania like state, when I use music for enhanced affect?. Nowadays though I can lay my head on the pillow and relax all my muscular tensions, letting go of mind activity to fall fast asleep.

Specialists view life with a limited perception? Like looking through the kitchen window and assuming you know the whole house? Is Allan Schore's call for a wider view of what exactly constitutes human nature falling on death ears, within a medical profession so protective of rank and status, they don't listen to alternative views? Stress makes us all feel vulnerable, and instinctively our biology becomes a closed system of protective beliefs? Stephen Porges insightful breakthrough is as epoch changing as Galileo's was, lifting the veil of consciousness with the most "inclusive" theory since Darwin and Evolution.

With these new insights my endless objective wants are dissolving into real needs, with my objective perception of an us vs them world collapsing into the reality of WE? Feeling my own instinctual nature beneath my subjective mind I see myself in others, finding myself in their postured e-motorvation? Instinctive muscular tensions fire the synapses of our human mind, and once accepted we will find the evolutionary struggle to master our own nature drawing to a close in this 21st century. Now that we can truly look into the mirror of our inner reality, we can admit ourselves back into the garden of nature, and return to an instinctive paradise lost?

Is Heaven above You? Or is Heaven Within You & all Gods Creatures?