Mental Illness & The Face - - Heart Connection?

So What is the Face -- Heart Connection? The Facial Reactions of our Primary Emotions, which Cannot tell a Lie? And What is the Connection to Mental Illness?

ANSWER:

Safety! & "Autonomic-Unconscious" Nervous Reactions.

Safety, as an inner sensation, not a mind-based concept. Its that feeling of inner-security the late, great, John Bowlby and developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth called our "secure-base," and our fundamental need of attachment to others, for healthy physical and emotional/mental, functioning. Consider;

Mental Illness - Psychological & Physiological?

The Buddha - His Serene Face  - Free of Muscular Tension?

Discover Your Inner Self?

Recover from Mental Illness?

"My teaching is neither theory nor a philosophy, but the fruit of experience. Everything I say comes from my own experience, and you too can confirm it by your own experience. Words do not describe reality: only experience shows us its true face." _Buddha.

Since 2007, I have been discovering more of my own inner-self, through a process of self-education and a daily practice of deepening physiological self-awareness. Discovering more inner security and an increasingly confident recovery from three decades of mental illness experience.



Using a method similar to the famous Buddhist practice of meditation, I have increased my inner-awareness of sensations and the activity of my body/brain nervous systems, becoming more aware of the physiological foundations, to my experience of mental anguish and altered states of body/mind. A journey of self-empowered recovery, captured as succinctly as I could in: Bipolar Recovery This post provides excerpts from the reading material which has had the most influence my recovery journey, and the critical insights, of which I write in: Bipolar Recovery

The Physiological Foundations of Mental Anguish?

Time for PEER Support to be taken Seriously?

We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For
Connecting & emPowering restores a person’s vitality.

"I had a dream several years ago: I was sitting in a circle with others with lived experience of extreme mental states. (a term we prefer to mental illness). We might have been in a self-help center. We were intensely sharing, listening, commenting, supporting and being with each other as we have been learning is so vital.
Gradually I started to notice that all around us the “normals” were running about helter skelter, looking wilder and wilder and more and more distracted. From time to time they would stop and stare. Then they started to ask us what we were doing to stay so centered and calm when they were feeling so distracted by fear, doubt and insecurity. We said we were having our weekly self-help group." _Daniel Fisher, M.D., Ph.D.

The Peer Support, of Real-Life Experience?

It seems we may be entering a real transition phase in mental health, with an increasing recognition that we need to pay more than just lip-service to the notion of real-recovery from the experience of mental illness? For many years now, people in the survivor community of recovered persons, have been frustrated by the mental health system's condescending "lip-service" to recovery, as little more than "medication compliance?"

Bipolar Anger & Toxic Shame?

Fighting the SYSTEM "Out There," or a SYSTEM Within?

She was "acting out," angry at the SYSTEM!

'The system's F..... Man! I been waiting for an hour and these jerks just keep messing me around.

Later: I watched her storm out of the office area towards her waiting children, yelling abuse towards the SYSTEM once again.

'Your all a pack of F.....g B......'s, and you can all rot in F.....g hell.'

Many sat around me cringed as her tirade towards the office staff continued. Something about her social security benefit's being reduced unfairly, in her eyes.
'Wow! She's really pissed off, at them, eh?' Said a person sat behind me. 'She's sure crazy now, man!' Said another.


It seemed so patently obvious that she was angry because her benefit payments had been reduced, and the office staff were to blame, they were the F.....g System. Simple cause and effect thinking? Plain commonsense? Right?

Yet was her "acting out," stimulated by a reaction towards the world "out there," in our everyday cause and effect reasoning? Or was she fighting a system within, in an effort to control her own, deeper feelings of shame-humiliation? Is our mind's "objective" sense of the world "out there," really a true reflection of the reality of our nature, and our internal motivation? It is said by many psychologists, that the best emotional antidote for feelings of shame, is the emotional energy of anger-rage. Was the need of an antidote to feelings of shame and humiliation, the real cause of an angry lady, unconsciously "acting out?" Blaming (anger-rage) the staff in the office for a deeper sense of shame, she could not afford to consciously acknowledge? Consider an explanation of "unconscious" shame reactions;

Discovering a Paradigm Shift in Mental Health?

Prof, Stephen Porges - "The Polyvagal Theory"

Understanding the Face-Heart connection, and hidden vitality affects, in human health?

The paradigm shifting discovery of a “polyvagal” control of the heart, explains just how, those of us suffering from unresolved trauma experience, become locked out of the social system of group survival, in our inability to self-regulate unconscious survival reflexes,
ie, freeze/flight/fight?



The theory shows just how “unconscious, spontaneous, social reflexes,” are inhibited in those of us struggling to cope with unresolved traumatic experience, so often diagnosed as a mental illness. In a computer analogy, its like having two distinctly different operating systems, (1) survival, (2) social. If our unconscious spontaneous social reflex functioning is “turned off,” by unresolved trauma experience, we cannot form the kind of healthy human relationships, so vital for our physical/emotional/mental health. See; The Polyvagal Theory Stephen W. Porges, PhD. Brain-Body Center, Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago.

Bipolar Mania & its Re-Birth Experience?

A shift into mania & weeks of sleepless nights

"Wow! Wow! Wow! Has God just touched me on the shoulder? Is this a religious experience?"

I'd sat looking into a mirror in 1980, 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.

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.....

mood swings bipolar & suicidal ideation?

Mental Anguish & its Metabolism Within?
Letting go of "subjective states" is my salvation.

I feel it once again, attachment loss, as I gaze out the window of my room, here at the homeless men's shelter. Thoughts about Phen of coarse, my Thai partner of the last two and half years. Images of the shop/house come to mind, as I realize the time over there is now 3pm, "what's she doing," I wonder, finding myself in an unconsciously stimulated fantasy of attachment need. "A Fantasy Bond of Love Me Knots & Self-Nurture?," I remember writing on the first floor, just above where she will now be working, I assume. I lay my head down in familiar despair, with old thoughts of suicidal escape, my current pillow mate.


“The Fantasy Bond in the Adult:
Establishing an imaginary connection with another person can become a major defense against unbearable anxiety. The illusion of connection to others is a dynamic formulation of a primitive, defensive inner world. Anxiety arises whenever this inner world is intruded upon, and especially when the fantasy bond, the imaginary connection, and one’s pseudo-independence is threatened. Anxiety aroused too, whenever there is awareness of one’s separateness and mortality. As humans, we are torn between pursuing an assertive goal-directed life, and depending on passive-dependant machinations that assure us of a fantasy bond.

How we resolve this basic conflict determines whether we have a free-flowing, changing existence or a static, rigid, defensive posture. The primary fantasy bond is the core defense underlying our resistance to change. It is the major barrier to a full, rich existence.” _Robert Firestone. “The Fantasy Bond.”

Bipolar Cycles & An Ongoing Process of Recovery

I return to Australia, after my Thai visa renewal is denied.

October 27th 2012: 9am, and I've arrived back in Sydney, fourteen hours after a very emotional farewell to my Thai partner of the past two and half years, and an abrupt end to my South East Asia sojourn.
As I waited inline at immigration the anxious butter-fly's in my stomach rose to higher flight, in respect for an increasingly imminent, family greeting.


"Stay grounded, resist replaying the scenes from the same arrival two years ago," I told myself. Considering how my oldest son James was waiting for me again, after agreeing to bail his father out of a self-imposed "fix," and fly me back to Australia. "No money, no home, no resources of a material kind, how could my children, not see me as having hit rock bottom?" I wondered, and would I get the chance to explain? Life is paradoxical, I thought, as I walked into the arrivals area carrying 15 less kilo's of luggage than I'd taken to Thailand almost three years before. Materially lighter, stripped of all possessions save for my precious laptop, six books and 20 kilo's of clothes. Objectively speaking, should I deny, my life appears to be going backwards? "Your a sad looser!" I probably would have told myself a decade ago, yet I feel more comfortable in my own skin than at any previous time in my life, ready, willing and able, to face the undoubted challenges to come.

Sensitivity-Psychosis & Blue Sky Mining?

Five years on from a high point in Psychosis

Blit. 1 - Blue Light is True 1?
Five years after seeing Blit. 1 written in the sky, immediately after a strange synchronous experience, do I get to see what it really means today?

Is this just New Age nonsense? Delusion?

Does it mean anything in a personal journey, drawing on both science & spirituality to understand my psychosis experiences, as my nature "acting out?"


Consider;
Wednesday 4th April 2007:

Of coarse I was emotional that day, the reality of loss was pounding my heart on that particular Wednesday in 2007. Following the incident at the Hawkesbury river with that stone, I’d immersed myself deeper into the heart felt, take me where you will, nature of a euphoric mania. Everyday reason and objective logic is forced from the mind as deep emotional wellsprings rush up from the heart, you just go with its flow. All the normal wary suspicions of self-preservation dissolve, as an innate bias of negative judgment towards the unknown, seems to disappear. It’s a bit like sleep walking in a way, an acting out of deeply unconscious meaning, once you get past the instinct of fearful negative reactions, not so much yours, but other people‘s. In this dreamy “I’m not sure what this is, but I think I‘m getting some answers,” I drove away from the river in a triumphant blaze of heightened emotion. I’d accepted the sign of that second splash as a message I needed to hear. “Its all true, your alive, you’re here, embrace your being in this present now,” although the life history of my subjective experience filled this new now, with thoughts of God, good and evil and that number one boggy man, the Devil. A subjective sense of the experience that wasn’t helped by a freak unseasonable hailstorm either. What can I say, when your in this state there is a powerful sense of resonance with all nature, and like people bending spoons with the power of concentration, did I somehow cause that second splash in the water?