Monthly Archives: August 2013

Meeting

I am going to post some pages from a book that literally changed my life when I first read it in the 1970s.

“Knowing Woman”, by Irene Claremont de Castilejo

Parts of it, those that fit into a Jungian framework, were as meaningless to me then as they are now, but, and there is a huge but here: The chapters where a wise old psychotherapist nakedly and honestly describes her own experiences, still resonate through the years.

Like this one, on meeting people. (Click on the page to make it legible):

Honouring my strong and broken mother

In Norwegian / på norsk :





My mother gave me many many of the problems I’ve had to deal
with in life.
 She is also one of my heroes.
 I am posting the
last part of a eulogy that my sister and I read together in church  during her funeral:





SISTER
In the weeks before
she died, mother was at peace – it was as if she had arrived at a place in her
inner landscape where she could relax, enjoy herself … and say “I love
you”.

INGRID
It  has not aleays been like this, and we do not
honour parents by seeing them in a pastel fairytale light. We honour them
by seeing them as they are, as clearly as we can. And there was
nothing pastel about mother.

SISTER
When I was a child, I
thought that my real mother was held prisoner in a tower, guarded by a soldier.

INGRID
And as an adult I
have seen her as a warrior with post-traumatic stress syndrome. I know nothing
about her specific enemies, but I find it easy to understand her when I compare
her to Vietnam veterans who kept fighting in isolated wildernesses long after
the war was over.

SISTER
She was stuck somewhere inside her mind; in a place where there was war and danger, where she
had to fight for survival, not only for herself, but for her children and for
others. And she fought, and she never gave up. And even if no one, maybe not
even she, knew what the real enemy was, this makes her a hero to me; a warrior.
And her fighting spirit is something I that I wholeheartedly can honour and
admire.

INGRID
Some of you have seen
her on old 8mm films, the missionary in India giving out food in famine areas
and being greeted with garlands and obeisance – but no one filmed the work she
did in the little clinic at our mission station. People would queue up
patiently outside with open sores and physical damage one never sees in our
part of the world, and she cleaned and bandaged and stitched and helped, cooly and
compassionately – and for this heroic work she also deserves honor and
admiration.

SISTER
Being the daughters
of our mother has not been easy, but she has given us so much of value, and one of her
greatest gifts was the gift of rebellion: She showed us that it is possible to
question established truths and find our own answers. And if, as we grew up,
she did not want us to question her answers … well, that is not uncommon amongst rebels.

INGRID
We are very proud of
our mother, and we declare peace over her memory.




 (The last phrase is a
direct translation of the Norwegian way of saying “rest in peace”.)

Stéphane Hessel: Time for Outrage: Indignez-vous!

http://timeforoutrage.com/


Amazon link: 


http://www.amazon.com/Time-Outrage-Indignez-vous-Stéphane-Hessel/dp/B00AF3NY78/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377371773&sr=1-1&keywords=st%C3%A9phane+hessel




Clayton Hallmark has written a great review of this book on Amazon:


http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1CWN7M597FID4/ref=cm_cr_dp_pdp


An excerpt:

Stephane Hessel’s little book “Indignez-vous!” (“Get Indignant!” or “Get Outraged”), or “Time for Outrage,” says history is a story of human progress, step by step, toward individual rights for all. Mr. Hessel quotes the UN Declaration on Universal Human Rights, which he helped to write, in saying “everyone has the right to a nationality,” even, he says, undocumented “illegal” immigrants everywhere and displaced Palestinians in the Middle East). Also “everyone has a right to social security” (with little S’s, meaning Freedom from Want for all) and to “rights indispensable for his [and her] dignity and the free development of his personality.”



I know nothing about “The Coming Insurrection” that Hallmark also writes about here. 

But from my POV as a survivor of harmful mental health care I do know that …





THANKS TO A HELPER WHO HELPED

First posted in December 2011
Slightly rewritten


I can’t do grateful. 

“Grateful” seems to describe a condition – and I have no idea how to “be” grateful, positive or normal or whatever. I don’t even know if it’s possible. The only thing I can “be” is me. Yet I can say “thank you” very easily, as that is an action.


Thank you for understanding when I say things like this … and for asking when you didn’t understand. I am heavily scarred from earlier experiences, when professional helpers heard “symptoms” instead of asking me to clarify what I said, so this has been extremely important to me.

I have told you that I am writing this, so you know who you are, and this is for you. It is also for all the other helpers in the world who genuinely help people in non-physical distress … I hope that you know who you are, every single one of you; the people who are genuinely helped certainly do.


The importance of being with

I wish it were possible to teach “helping that helps” theoretically … and I think it is not something we can learn from the eyebrows up.

Neither is it necessarily something we can do … we can often help our fellow humans more by just being with them. The unspoken, and maybe even unthought, question of many who need help, is this:

“I want to know if you can sit with pain – mine or your own -without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.”

You showed me that you can. And that was an indescribable relief after years of so-called mental health care where pain was wrong or crazy or inappropriate or faded or mystified or invisible or taboo or just plain unacceptable.

Freedom is the opportunity
to take responsibility for our lives


After all the years of harmful help, I have learned another important question that a customer of help should ask:

 “Is it possible to take responsibility for my life within the helper’s cognitive frames?”

Too often there will be direct or indirect demands for adaptation, subservience and obedience instead: “In order to heal/learn to live with your disorder you have to …” 

Thank you for having room for responsibility in your space and within your frames.


Support

How do you help? Not with compassion or sympathy, which can “tear down a banner bravely borne”. 


Not only with empathy, which can be extremely harmful if it comes from the wrong place within the empathizer, as in: “I feel this, therefore it is the truth about you.”

And certainly not only with expertise, which, like empathy, can be extremely harmful if it comes from the wrong place within the helper.

You help with support. The best description I’ve seen was this, by Irene Claremont de Castillejo:

The first step is to disentangle ourselves and our personal wishes from the problem and, having done so, become as conscious as possible of where we ourselves stand. Then we may provide a fixed point of reference, a post as it were stuck firmly into the sand around which a rope can be thrown from the little barques being tossed helplessly by waves of emotion. If several friends can offer firm posts, though the posts may stand for different points of view, they may yet provide some strength and stability which will help the storm tossed people to find their own solution. Not our solution, theirs.


I don’t have the words to describe my relief at finally having firm support from someone within the health system. At finally being encouraged to take the time I needed and clear the space I needed to find my own solutions. Mine. Not someone else’s.

And in writing this slowly through a mist of tears, I realize that I am not done with grieving over years of harmful mental help. But that is another story.


A quality of loneliness

Thank you for not trying to squeeze me into a “positive” not-a-victim cage. Thank you for supporting me in the choice I had made so many years ago: to see what had happened to me, heal the wounds and reach out to others who, like me, have been “The Loneliest One”:



There is in certain living souls


A quality of loneliness unspeakable,

So great it must be shared
As company is shared by lesser beings.
Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this
That in immensity
There is one lonelier than you.


And even to loneliness, there is an end. 


For those who are lonely enough, long enough.
Thank you for propelling me into blogging NOW … Instead of in 3-4 years’ time, “when I am ready”, as I had planned. 


Integrity


Thank you for integrity. I’ve never found a good description of integrity as I see it, so I made one in 1987:

Integrity is our mental skin.
When we are good at suppressing integrity damage,
our tattered skin is replaced with a mental armour.
Behind this armour we do not notice 
if our integrity is being harmed,
and we do not notice if we harm the integrity of others.

There is a huge difference between a helper with a whole skin and a helper who is encased in armour. When we (and yes, I do include myself) are hiding behind armour, we have no realistic concept of integrity … or borders. And we have a regrettable tendency to assume that we are objective when we let our reptile brain do the thinking.




A fixed point


Thank you for being there for me in your own integrity, firmly rooted in your own skin, standing in your own shoes and in your own life. By being there in this way, you were an anchor for me.

A fixed point. When I badly needed one. 

And this gave me a place to stand in my own life. Like Archimedes, I needed a fixed point … not to move the world … But to move myself out of the morass of confusion, stress and exhaustion I had been stuck in so long, and with your support I managed to do so.

Thank you for not trying to fix me by pushing bullshit which would have shoved me back into the morass.

Thank you for letting me get on with the detangling that I had begun many years ago, because you could see that it worked … and thank you for having an open mind about what I was thinking and doing.

Thank you for saying that I had “an interesting skewed way of looking at things”, instead of dismissing what I said as fantasies, emotions and psychiatric symptoms.

Thank you for being a sounding board that helped me regain the belief that I could think – a belief that I had lost through years of legal and correct and harmful mental health care.

This you accomplished not by doing anything, just by listening and responding, just by being you – in your skin, in your life … being there for me as a separate entity.




Keep it real

Because you were honest with yourself, within your skin and within your life ( which I still know nothing about, and that’s completely ok with me,) you could give me honest feedback, often nonverbal, on what I said.

I’ve been trying to understand the mechanisms of this, and the closest I’ve come is Ali Gs ubiquitous and untranslatable “Keep it real”.


When I kept it real, what I said resonated with you, when you were centred and in your own skin.

When I got tangled, you did not have to say anything – what I said just klonked to the ground because you did not have receptors for it.

A complicating factor here is that true and real and important information can also klonk to the ground … when said to a helper in reptile brain mode who is encased in armour and has no receptors for “real”.

My heart aches for everyone who has been misled into thinking they were safe in a psychotherapeutic setting – and who were let down by specialists in armour who had no receptors for integrity damage.

I have been one of them, and my heart aches for me, too, and for the years of thinking that societal wounds were my private defect … proof that there was something wrong with me.

Thank you for accepting the term societal wounds, and my reasons for using this term.

Thank you for giving me in 2010 what I asked for in 1988: Support in the process of taking responsibility for my own life.


What I got in 1988 is another story entirely, the short version is that I allowed my wings to grow and had started to fly when they were plucked off because there was no room for wings and flying within psychiatric realities about “incest victims”.

Thank you for not using imagery like this to prove that I’m crazy.

Those who demand trust 

are not trustworthy
Thank you for never demanding or expecting trust from me, and for giving me clear and verifiable reasons to trust you instead … mainly by having clear borders yourself and respecting my borders.

In a toxic family there are no clear borders.

I have also experienced this lack in mental health care: How does one protect integrity and borders when it is correct and legal to treat disagreement and border protection as psychiatric symptoms?

Thank you for recognising standpoints like this.




The whole elephant

Thank you for knowing that there is a whole elephant, even if you do not see all of it. I have seen your confusion when you saw only an ear or a leg, and your face showed the mental shift when you chose to know that this is not the whole of the thing.

And that brings me to something very important …

Thank you for asking good questions. 

There is a huge difference between constructive and destructive questions, as can be seen in many descriptions of harmful help.

And that is another story, to be told at another time, so I won’t go into details here, except to say this, categorically: All questions that start with “why” are destructive when we are with pain.

I don’t think there is any way of defining helpful or harmful questions, except by looking at where the questions come from within ourselves. Do they come from our integrity, our mental skin, or from armour that we have developed to replace our mental skin?




Guts and logic

Finally, and certainly not least, I want to thank you for having the guts to assess situations that I have described. “This is rude.” “This is a violation of your integrity.” 

Thank you for guts and logic. For being able to think independently instead of blindly following psychiatric expertise. Thank you for offering to guard my back, offering to be an objective witness for me in a specific situation, and for saying that if I need someone to assert that I have insight, you will do so.




Fear of vulnerability

Writing this last paragraph was painful, and is painful to reread. It has opened the door to a reservoir of anguish that I thought was emptied.

It has also triggered my old backache, which shows that I need to move – once again – through fear of helplessness and vulnerability to flashbacks of being a child and knowing that no one is protecting me, and there is nothing I can do to protect myself. 


Knowing that protecting myself is baaaaad, because the Powers That Be That Harm Me know that THEY are protecting me … and that I have no need for protection from THEM.

Thank you for making it possible for me to reopen this door, to accept and respect and learn from the tears and backache yet again, and to accept that I need to continue to explore what I had hidden so well from myself so many years ago.

I know that I can go in there alone now, and I know that I can handle whatever I find there, because this is my stuff, and I have years of experience in connecting with my inner child.

I also know that this would not have been possible without the support you gave me … I needed to detangle years of harmful mental health care before I could get back to where I wrote this in 1986.



Dignity

Whenever I come here in editing this, I am blinded by tears. It has been excruciatingly difficult to write this, and I finally realize why: For every thank you, lies years of harmful help. And that brings me to a conclusion:

In 1988 I gave myself the right to be vulnerable with dignity, to be helpless and wretched with dignity. Thank you for recognising and respecting this right … It was what I needed to get on with my healing process.
    As I see it, we can only heal our non-physical wounds when we have this right … and the only people who can recognize and respect this right, seem to be people who have given it to themselves.

The most destructive force

First posted in January 2012.
Slightly rewritten.

In a postscript to “The Image of the Beast” by  Philip Jose Farmer, Theodore Sturgeon wrote: 

There is a vast number of honestly simple-minded people who can, without hesitation, define: 

pornography 

God 

right 

evil 

liberty 

law and order 

science fiction 

communism 

freedom 

honorable peace 

obscenity 

love

and think, and act, and legislate, and sometimes burn, jail, and kill on the basis of their definitions. These are the Labellers, and they are without exception the most lethal and destructive force ever faced by any species on this or any other planet…”


Theodore Sturgeon forgot “mental illness”. 


Mental Illness Labellers have the power to  think, and act, and legislate, and brainwash and medicate, sicken,  incarcerate, and kill on the basis of their definitions.  

I prefer to assume that they are all doing this with the very best of intentions, that they are doing this because they are convinced that they are helping people in the best possible way.

This assumption is extremely liberating, as I don’t have to waste time considering their motives, and can concentrate on what they are doing, which is …

… to  think, and act, and legislate, and brainwash and medicate, sicken,  incarcerate, and kill on the basis of their definitions.

And, when actions like this are criticized, to say:


“But we help so many!” 


and 


“But we’re not all like that!” 













Link to a post about help that helped:

Compliant therapists need compliance


Bruce E. Levine writes: 

Why Mental Health Professionals Diagnose Anti-Authoritarians with Mental Illness
Gaining acceptance into graduate school or medical school and achieving a PhD or MD and becoming a psychologist or psychiatrist means jumping through many hoops, all of which require much behavioral and attentional compliance with authorities, even those authorities one lacks respect for. The selection and socialization of mental health professionals tends to breed out many anti-authoritarians. Degrees and credentials are primarily badges of compliance. Those with extended schooling have lived for many years in a world where one routinely conforms to the demands of authorities. Thus for many MDs and PhDs, people different from them who reject this attentional and behavioral compliance appear to be from another world—a diagnosable one.

I have found that most psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals are not only extraordinarily compliant with authorities but also unaware of the magnitude of their obedience. And it also has become clear to me that the anti-authoritarianism of their patients creates enormous anxiety for these professionals, and their anxiety fuels diagnoses and treatments.  

In graduate school, I discovered that all it took to be labeled as having “issues with authority” was not kissing up to a director of clinical training whose personality was a combination of Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich and Howard Cosell. When I was told by some faculty that I had “issues with authority,” I had mixed feelings about being so labeled. On the one hand, I found it amusing, because among the working-class kids I had grown up with, I was considered relatively compliant with authorities. After all, I had done my homework, studied and received good grades. However, while my new “issues with authority” label made me grin because I was now being seen as a “bad boy,” I was also concerned about just what kind of profession I had entered. Specifically, if somebody such as myself was labeled as having “issues with authority,” what were they calling the kids I grew up with who paid attention to many things that they cared about but didn’t care enough about school to comply there? Well, the answer soon became clear.  

Related post:

http://freudfri.blogspot.no/2013/06/evaluating-authority.html

"But we’re not all like that …"

Sometimes I come across something I’ve been planning to write, only done much better.
Thanks to @agteien for this: 


http://sectioneduk.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/but-were-not-all-like-that/




I quote a bit from the beginning: 

“But we’re not all like that!” We’ve all said it, haven’t we? Read or heard something that seems to criticise a group we belong to or feel part of and said, “But we’re not all like that!” I know I have. It’s instinctive. Especially so for those working in social care or the NHS, perhaps even more so for those working in mental health which seems to get criticism from every angle. There are many committed, hard-working, professional, compassionate staff who do the best they can in difficult circumstances, make a  positive difference to people’s lives and do a really good job.

So when a dedicated  GP or mental health occupational therapist hears a story on the news about terrible care in a service elsewhere, he might say, “But not all of us are like that!”

"I’m just a stupid little bitch"

http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/aR4CsbWTSCI&source=uds

Quote from this link:
http://www.upworthy.com/this-little-girls-words-will-take-you-to-a-dark-place-so-we-can-see-the-light?utm_content=buffera6355&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer

While watching this Irish ad, you may think to yourself, “Who would say things like that to a little kid?” But all around the world, stuff like this — even offhand comments — is said to developing minds. What kind of adult a child will turn into can be directly linked to what other people say about them. This commercial may be angering, but it’s trying (successfully, I might add) to jar us out of doing nothing.