Subtle Shifts Toward Inner Harmony and Resilience
If you subscribe to Medium please read it there John Walter 📣 Published in Age of Empathy
The medical establishment tries to reduce us to simple diagnosable packages. This may work to a degree when applied to medical issues, but it is an absolute disaster when applied to mental health issues.
You are given a mental health diagnosis, and along with it comes a whole load of baggage. You are no longer seen as a unique individual. You have become part of a group, and that whole group of millions of people has a whole raft of prejudices and expectations associated with it. There is a catalogue of therapeutic and medication approaches that are seen as possibly making a bit of a difference.
You become a guinea pig to the medical side of the mental health care establishment.
“I tried this once, and it worked a bit. Let’s see if it works for you.”
You are no longer being treated as a unique individual. You are part of an ongoing research project. A therapy is tried with not much hope of success, and if it fails, you are moved on to another one.
The last century has seen many advances in mental health treatments and therapies, but at the same time, thousands have received misguided treatments that have caused major harm.
Forced lobotomies have caused serious brain damage. ECT without consent has caused memory loss and cognitive impairment. Conversion therapy for sexuality or gender identity issues has caused significant harm including psychological distress and trauma. (The UK government are still refusing to ban this practice despite all the evidence of significant harm). There has been institutional misuse of psychiatric medications, forced sterilization, human rights violations, stigmatization and discrimination.
All of these things have been allowed to happen because there is a diagnosis. Without a diagnosis, you could not justify cutting a bit of someone’s brain out or electrocuting someone to within an inch of their life. All of these invasive approaches to mental health treatment would be seen as criminal acts against the person. The diagnosis turns something akin to criminal assault into a legal or justifiable act.
I haven’t even touched on the government-sanctioned abuse towards autistic people, and I’ll leave you to do your own research in that area.
Embracing Human Complexity
I work as a Psychotherapeutic Counsellor in the UK, where no regulation exists around these terms. I am qualified as an Integrative Counsellor but have a background in Psychodynamic therapy and working around attachment issues. I am so much more than any of these official descriptors.
I have been on a therapeutic journey for close to 40 years. Sometimes, this has been primarily cognitive, other times largely somatic (of the body). Often, it has been focused on emotional or spiritual work with a creative focus.
If someone had convinced me at any stage of my journey that I could get all I needed from a singular approach, then I would not be in the position I am in today.
There are dangers inherent in all of the singular approaches. If you major in cognitive or behavioural approaches, you can neglect your somatic, spiritual or emotional self. This creates an imbalance in itself, which can destabilise your sense of well-being.
Those who focus on their spiritual life can create a spiritual bypass where they avoid facing emotional issues, psychological wounds or other essential parts of their self-development.
The holistic approach to therapy recognises this need for balance and a consideration of the unique complexity of every individual human being. Only by considering the whole person can any sense be made of the beautiful interactions between all the many parts of yourself.
My Journey
My life since my mid-20s has been a 40-year-long therapeutic journey. It has been a meandering path and I am realising now that there is no direct route. I have often sought or been drawn in by someone offering some magic formula to enlightenment, only to realise that seeking a preconceived goal means I have taken my attention away from all the gloriousness of the journey.
Self-help books offer instant transformation, you can sign up for cult-like training courses, gurus offer life-changing results, and practitioners offer to solve all your problems in 6 sessions, but the reality is that lasting change requires patience, self-reflection and a willingness to embrace life itself in all its random and unpredictable glory.
In my personal therapy now I can be taken back to moments of change and discovery at any point along the 40-year timeline.
Ancestral Trauma
Considering the impact of ancestral trauma recently, I was transported back to a sweat lodge in the 80s on a Welsh hillside. I could feel the heat and the tingling sensations in my body, the difficulty catching my breath and the smells of hot stones, sage and cedar smoke. Part of the sweat lodge ceremony is to call on your ancestors to accompany you and give guidance, in a way connecting you with the spiritual realm.
The lodge itself, a small dome of animal skins with a pile of hot stones in the centre, symbolises the womb of Mother Earth. Leaving the lodge can be seen as a rebirth, healing the trauma we all experience when we are born, of leaving the safe protective, nurturing containment of the womb and having to undergo the metamorphosis from foetus to newborn child.
At the time of being involved in this shamanic ritual, I did not have any real understanding of the effect it was having on my personal growth process. It was powerful, and I felt a connection to the other participants and the land where it took place. I was however unaware that the seeds of transformation had been planted and would remain in my unconscious, influencing my thoughts and behaviours for years to come.
Forty years later I am considering on a cognitive level how my relationship with my father was affected by the fact he was sent to fight in WW2 at the age of 18. How his father led men on horseback involved in the fall of Jerusalem in 1917. I relive the sensations of that sweatlodge, a powerful memory held in my body and it feels like a cycle has been completed and I can move on. It feels as if I have been carrying anger and pain for my father and his father before him and I no longer have to do that.
Powerful metaphors
At the end of my work at a psychodynamic therapeutic community around 1990 I was asked to write a reflection on my time there. The expectation was some short, maybe rational, academic essay on my own process in relation to the work of the community.
I wrote a short children’s story about a beast living trapped in a stone hut. The beast was befriended by a small child, who fed him and eventually helped him escape by enlarging the doorway.
Being part of the psychoanalytic community, interpretations about id and ego and god knows what were flying around everywhere. I wasn’t too interested in these. For me, the important part was the creative process. I focused my thoughts on my time in the community, and a metaphor emerged. I remember that metaphor now, over 30 years later.
Metaphors are useful because you remember the powerful imagery. Interpretations and meanings change over time. Extra layers can be noticed many years later.
The use of metaphor is all about embracing human complexity. I could not begin to write about my time in the community in literal, concrete terms within a psychoanalytic framework. The language was simply not there to express my experience clearly. The language itself creates a narrow view of human experience.
Human Complexity
How would you draw yourself as a human being reflecting all parts of yourself? Would you be perfectly balanced or would your brain be larger than your body reflecting overthinking? Would your heart be so big you could hardly move or perhaps your body has taken control away from your heart and mind? Maybe spiritual parts have taken hold and you are forgetting to eat and keep yourself healthy.
How has your image of yourself changed over time? Have you become more reflective, or more self-obsessed? Have you been journeying in a straight line or going around in circles or stuck in a rut? Notice how your social or cultural condition affects your relationship to that phrase. Is being still and calm necessarily a bad thing? Is travelling forward in a straight line necessarily a good thing?
Do you judge yourself as you create these complex images or can you accept yourself exactly as you are? Are you like the monster in the drawing above who has grown so big they can no longer escape from the shelter which was once their protection but has become their prison?
Accepting all parts of yourself is a way to develop harmony and resilience. Self-awareness is just that, an awareness of self. Personal growth is just that, growth around all parts of yourself, not the growth of one part of you to the exclusion of all others.
And Finally:
Healing comes from accepting all parts of yourself, and your history and developing self-awareness without judgment. Resilience is knowing there is nothing wrong. You are who you are today as a result of multiple influences from your ancestors, immediate family, society and culture.
Trying to work out what is wrong with you so that you can fix it is a massive distraction. Life is complex and you are here to live it.