If you’re reading this: hello, and welcome. This blog entry, EMOTIONAL BALANCE & RECOVERY, is my first. It carries my sincerest hope that a spirit of optimism visits this corner of the internet whenever our paths converge here, and that your journey toward inevitable recovery delights to habitually linger on this website.
A quick introduction is in order. My name is Ty Park. I am a recovered voice hearer. The title of this blog, Vox Sua Non Diary, grew out of my YouTube channel Vox Sua Non, translated from Latin as 'Voice Not Of (one's) Own'. Dr. Marius Romme (<Wikipedia link) once remarked the phenomena of hearing voices as having a non-self quality. His remark informs the naming of both this blog and my YouTube channel.
This blog is written to supplement my YouTube videos. It serves some other practical reasons as well, aside from my love of writing. Writing surpasses video in the expression of certain ideas. As a consequence I'll be able to explore these topics more thoroughly. Also, this blog will at times brave a few subjects that are clumsy to render onto video and rather demand treatment through the written word.
This blog isn’t intended as some authoritative treatise on mental illness. It’s not an academic paper. It’s a web blog, informal in nature and highly subjective. What's presented here is based on my twenty years of lived experience as a voice-hearer. For the past six years I have not heard voices. This is without medication.
Over the twenty years I received clinical treatment, I had three different doctors. Each doctor had a different diagnosis for me. They were:
Schizoaffective
Bipolar 1
Major Depressive (with psychotic symptoms)
To my understanding, it's impossible for all three doctors to have been correct. The three major mental disorders above are clearly defined in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), each under their respective behavioral criteria. Which one of my diagnoses was right? Under its clinical definition, an incurable condition like schizoaffective isn't supposed to become less severe over time to such an extent as to require a completely new diagnosis.
The only thing that remained constant throughout my twenty years (spanning three diagnoses) was my paracusia (auditory symptoms). I don't dwell on my diagnoses much, having essentially proved all three doctors wrong. If I were to undergo psychiatric evaluation today, I wouldn't be determined as having a major mental disorder. My lack of symptoms negates receipt of such a severe diagnosis. My thoughts on this subject are being recorded here simply as food for thought.
The meme above is a bit of a joke, but illustrates the ubiquity of medications, antipsychotics and the like, among voice hearers. In my work I've been fortunate over the course of divers encounters to have met so many like myself who hear voices. I’ve yet to meet anyone who, after being clinically diagnosed as a result of his or her voices, was not promptly prescribed a regimen of medications. This isn't to say that a rare someone like this doesn't exist. I've just personally never met one.
In fact, the prevalence of medications renders any serious discussion about hearing voices to ignore this topic irresponsible. If you're a voice hearer, chances are that medication was the first curative measure made known to you.
Let's get clear about why this is. Admitting that you hear voices is arguably the most extreme announcement you can make to a psychiatrist. With few exceptions, it qualifies your mental condition to have degenerated into some grouping of what is branded within psychiatric settings a major mental disorder. Upon learning that you hear voices, considerations of psychological causes for your symptoms are largely abandoned in favor of treating your situation almost like a physical emergency (similar to a fatal injury like a gunshot wound). The clinical countermeasure to such an adversity requires a drastic step be urgently tried by the doctor. In psychiatric circles, tradition has long held this to be an ample dose of medication.
Objecting to this type of treatment to which I was once subjected, and what continues to befall others mired in clinical services, by devoting myself to longwinded complaints seems hardly worth pursuing. My blog isn't likely to rapidly sway these clinical protocols (but to recall my opinion on diagnostic fallibility, please scroll up to the sixth paragraph just above the picture of the cat). To determine what my doctors had hoped to accomplish while I was under their care however compels a worded opinion. At the very least, it may provide some clarity as to what the whole point of all this psychiatry is.
Helping you recover is supposed to be a psychiatrist's job, nothing more, and nothing less. We often lose sight of this simplicity, doctors and patients alike. Attempting to deconstruct psychiatry and its attendant clinical apparatus by rendering it into plain language, I humbly submit that its central purpose is to help its beneficiaries achieve a state of emotional balance. Just how well it accomplishes this at the current time is debatable. Nonetheless, I'm fairly confident committing my brash summation on the world wide web without any medical training. My confidence derives in no small part to the nauseatingly frequent instances during my entanglements with clinical settings when various aspects of myself were heard being described by the phrase chemical imbalance.
Emotions, under orthodox medical perception, bespeak chemical reactions in the body. Medical doctrine in its strictest form conceives both extravagance and poverty of emotions as standing quite apart from one's thinking. To be sure, an intricate relationship exists between thoughts and emotions, but the contents of one's thoughts in and of themselves do not overly concern the psychiatrist. Thoughts couldn't for example be of medical concern whilst assimilating the shadow (<Wikipedia link) into conscious awareness is felt to be a healthy endeavor. By definition this undertaking requires admitting thoughts that might easily be regarded as taboo or even criminal. Psychiatry's purview is then not so much thoughts but rather emotions. Because surplus or lack of emotions is believed to have fundamentally chemical causes (too much or too little of some neuro/bio-chemical) this chemical imbalance model persists which seeks a chemical solution which is to say medication.
Keep in mind that these are not my views but simply an attempt to summarize the prevailing opinion of current clinical science. My summary withholds much for the sake of simplicity; certain behavioral considerations, observable tendencies in thought patterns which attend flattening or mania, as well as the subtle interplay of things like trauma on the psyche, etc., are purposely left out. I remain still confident in this summation:
MEDICAL MODEL OF EMOTIONAL / CHEMICAL IMBALANCE
(Neuro/Bio) chemical = Emotion
CHEMICAL IMBALANCE = EMOTIONAL IMBALANCE
Emotional Imbalance = Chemical Imbalance = Symptoms (Neurotic, Psychotic, etc.)
Imbalance + Medication = Chemical Balance = Emotional Balance
CHEMICAL BALANCE = EMOTIONAL BALANCE = ASYMPTOMATIC
Medication has always been a topic met with controversy, but perhaps now more than ever. The catchwords Big Pharma have become a calling card for a particular stance on politics surrounding the current (as of this writing) Covid-19 vaccine. I should as well state now, as plainly as I can, that this blog will not venture politics nor indulge political discussions.
Politics aside, differing viewpoints about meds from personal perspectives abound. Years of firsthand experience having stripped me of my innocence regarding meds, my own elaboration on the topic below follows a chronological order that's pointedly unromantic. It’s one based in reality, deliberately faithful to the timeline of my own recovery. Medications are explored first. This chronology should be familiar to many. Reiterating my earlier observation, an overwhelming majority of voice hearers share a common history of taking medications.
HVN (Hearing Voices Network) posits a model for recovery which breaks the process down into three distinct phases (<PDF link), startling, organization, and stabilization. This model is convenient when used to describe my own experience with meds as having accompanied the entirety of both my startling and organizational phases.
Medication was the first recovery aid to which I was coerced upon being clinically diagnosed. As I'm sure this was the case for countless others, it will serve as a point of departure from which to explore the matter further.
EMOTIONAL BALANCE THROUGH MEDICATION
I’ll state from the onset that a person’s relationship to pharmaceuticals is completely their own prerogative. My own mental illness became so advanced at times that I felt I needed meds. I won’t be the hypocrite now, after recovery, to condescend anyone relying on drugs. I will state this however. During my entire twenty years of recovery, I stubbornly held on to a belief which became a sort of motto:
“Medication is not an end, but a means.”
Medications were like crutches for a broken leg, something temporary. When a leg is broken, crutches help you walk. Once healed, the crutches are thrown away. It was the same for me with meds. I knew one day I would be without them, and would also be asymptomatic. This was despite countless people trying to convince me that my condition was incurable, that I would hear voices forever, and should likewise expect to be on medication for the rest of my life.
I simply refused to accept it. My refusal to accept was, in my opinion, the very reason I was able to recover in exactly the manner I'd dreamt of. I stopped hearing voices six years ago and quit my dependence on both medication and clinical support for good.
This is something to keep in mind. How do you envision your future and (I hope) recovery? Do you believe you will be on medication forever? If so, know that your belief is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
With this outlook in mind, how my recovery strategy extended to pharmaceuticals isn't hard to imagine. I always took the minimum amount, just enough to be cognizant, so that I could work on myself. The tradeoff was that I sacrificed a certain amount of "comfort" (if such a word can describe a drug-induced stupor) in order to always progress toward my goal of tapering to an ever decreasing dosage until finally no meds at all. An interplay attended my devouring of drugs and my voices, sometimes increasing or decreasing in the former as the latter waxed and waned. In any case, I can't deny that medications did, at one time, play a role in my overall recovery strategy.
What exactly were the medications for? What purpose did they serve? And did they silence the voices?
With regard to the last question, no, they never completely silenced my voices. They did however make them quieter. I'm fairly certain I know the reason why my voices got quieter while I was on medication.
The effectiveness of antipsychotics in my case relied on limiting the range of my emotions. My voices were an outgrowth of my feelings, of anger in particular. There was a direct link between the size of my anger and the severity of my voices. When I was medicated, my anger never grew intense. This came at a cost. I was spared from anger but simultaneously incapable of feeling any other emotions. I was incapable of feeling happy, enthused, or excited, and insofar as the habitual life of my emotions, was never fully alive or awake.
To be fair, I've met lots of people on meds who don't report this type of emotional blunting. In fact, I've met people who I consider fully recovered who still take medication regularly. This last sentence is meant to be taken within reason. Lavish quantities of a whole cocktail of drugs consumed each day hardly rate most people's notions of recovery. The people I allude to as fully recovered while taking meds have as a rule tapered to small doses restricted to perhaps one or two different types of medications. Decreasing their dosage was almost invariably won through long-held resolve to one day quit relying on medication completely. Less dependence is always a good thing. Being medication-free however isn't a requirement for recovery.
Recalling my earlier statement about your relationship to meds being a very personal thing, moralizing about what to believe or or how to act with regard to medication would be irresponsibly arrogant. I don't pretend to know the depth of your pain nor the degree to which you’re spared from it by taking meds. On this score I can only unfold my recovery and experience.
There's a lot personally that I dislike about medication. For one, statistics suggest that people on medication live shorter lives. And I've already described the way medications made me feel. I wonder just how many of my side-effects, the disagreeable sensations and desensitized emotions, were caused by my objecting to pharmaceuticals purely on principle. In other words, were my side-effects placebic? I knew that my medications, if not outright toxic, were essentially foreign chemicals never intended by nature to appear in my body. They were tolerated as a necessary evil for want of relief from pain as yet insufferable to me without this chemical assistance.
From talking to other voice hearers, I discovered that I wasn't alone in my thinking. Most people on medication would like to eventually stop taking them. They just don't know how or where to start. And if you happen right now to be on meds, you might also harbor these sentiments.
I'll share below a few concepts, shifts in my thinking, that helped me after hearing voices while on meds for twenty years achieve a recovery in which I don’t hear voices or take medication any longer.
THE "CHEMICAL IMBALANCE" MODEL REVISITED
A concept mentioned earlier returns to be reexamined: the causal link between chemistry and emotions. It may surprise you that for the most part, I agree with mainstream clinical thinking on this one. Where my opinion strays is at the boundary of any and all insinuations that this causal link is a one way street.
I’ll clarify. Orthodox clinical wisdom proffers chemical reactions are what regulate our emotions. My beliefs only dispute this doctrine when it insists that this chain of events doesn't also work in reverse. In other words, if assimilating medications alters by such artifice chemical reactions in my body which activate certain emotions (those correlated to feelings of well-being), I believe pursuing an inverse order to the causation must also be true. By activating certain emotions, I can trigger chemical reactions in my body.
Evidence for this owes most strongly to what my recovery attests. It's all the proof I need to be honest, to have salvaged without pharmaceuticals for the past six years what my doctors had, for twenty prior, declared incurable.
Science hasn't yet determined for sure what causes mental illness. The debate continues. Lots of doctors and scientists today challenge the prevailing groupthink of mainstream clinical science. This mainstream thinking is as follows. Incurable psychotic and mood disorders (like the ones I was diagnosed with) result from abnormal architecture of the brain and/or nervous system. The neural pathways necessary for healthy functioning are lacking or entirely absent; the patient needs medication. Medication jumpstarts those chemical reactions the patient's body is unable to initiate on its own. Meanwhile, underneath the drugs' remedial effects, the patient will always remain dysfunctional. No amount of wishful thinking can alter this fact, simply because good intentions can't repair structural defects at the physical, cellular, and/or genetic level, defects that render impossible the modulation or achievement of certain emotions.
I'll risk appearing reckless by being blunt about what this means. When a psychiatrist tells you that you're incurable, it amounts to the same as saying you're broken and can't be fixed. Your situation can be likened to a broken or defective machine that needs constant interventions from outside help (ie. medication) to maintain its stability. The most you can hope for is treatment for your symptoms (the latter arising from a physical handicap which prevents "correct" emotional responses to aspects of your reality); treatment when translated from clinical jargon unhappily means dulling or spiking your emotions through medication as its primary measure. Any organic therapy you choose to pursue afterwards is seen as an afterthought.
I reject these notions. For one, my stubbornness refused to accept that I was a biological defect or a malfunction of nature. Second, a lot remains unanswered by science regarding the limits of the human potential. Much is still unknown about the resilience of the human body and mind, the ability of the mind to heal or alter the body and its neural networks, the relationship between mind and matter (<Synchronicity, YouTube link) and the subtle interactions between consciousness and reality (<Observer Effect, Wikipedia link). These ruminations are far from New Age whimsies on the fringes of pseudoscience. They instruct the cutting edge of debate within the behavioral sciences and physics.
Exploring recovery methods that are not based on medication will be my task for the remainder of this writing. My layman's grasp of chemistry can't furnish proofs while doing so. My emotions interest me far more, and were arguably more useful to my recovery than the chemical formulas underpinning them. Intelligence of emotions led to my recovery, not familiarity with neurotransmitters and peptides.
The study of emotions lends itself poorly to clinical methodology. It's largely an intuitive effort. To illustrate this by analogy, human emotions are indeed complex, but so is the human hand. A doctor could spend a lifetime absorbed in studying the anatomy of the human hand and emerge a clinical expert on the subject. There’s no guarantee this doctor can afterwards move his or her hand any more skillfully than you. In fact, your hand may be endowed with more natural dexterity than the doctor's hand can achieve, a state of affairs that wouldn't change no matter how long this doctor might probe the hand’s anatomy in clinical study.
EMOTIONAL BALANCE THROUGH MEDITATION
(NOT MEDICATION)
The opening and closing of the hand, the argument goes, is a voluntary action. It's very different by nature to those actions considered involuntary, assignable to reflex, the autonomic nervous system, and the unconscious mind. Emotions are commonly considered part of this latter body of involuntary actions.
Yet this line between voluntary and involuntary under the most basic scrutiny shows itself to be completely arbitrary. You can for example easily control your breathing (the foundation for most commonly practiced forms of meditation) by making yourself consciously aware of it. Cease to focus on your breathing; it becomes involuntary again right away. The same could be said for blinking.
Even more subtle, by imagining fingernails screeching against a chalkboard I'm able to give myself goosebumps and make the hair on my arm stand on end. Subtler still, rare individuals through discipline or innate ability are seen to will their heartrates slower or faster, or raise and lower their body temperatures. Such powers to wield dominion over what for most people is involuntary are feats science has yet to provide a sufficient explanation for.
An extreme example of this is Morris Goodman (<Wikipedia link). The clip below is an excerpt from the movie The Secret (<Wikipedia Link). Whether you agree or not with the concepts presented in this 2006 film, its viewing is personally recommended simply for entertainment value. This short clip about Morris Goodman I found especially inspiring:
THE ROLE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND
I won't lie. Achieving emotional balance and recovery (the lofty task after which this blog entry is titled) without medication is not easily gotten. It required a lot of searching and effort on my part. I heard voices for twenty years before achieving my recovery. Someone else might recover in a much shorter time. On the other hand, though I believe everyone physically capable of recovering from mental illness, whether or not any particular individual does recover is too variable to say with certainty.
I'll reiterate what was mentioned in one of my YouTube videos. There is no one size fits all cure for hearing voices. The correct recovery strategies are as varied as the individuals who need them; no two individuals are alike. Advancing the following generalization however might make your task of recovery a bit easier. The means to your recovery lie in the unconscious mind. I'll take this concept further. The more direct your connection to your unconscious, the better. The extent to which you can establish unhindered communication with your unconscious (without distractions from your conscious ego) determines the quickness with which you'll dispatch with your recovery.
Every single emotion comes from the unconscious mind. Every single involuntary action, including the innumerable chemical reactions your body undergoes every moment while alive, is said to be unconscious. Your dreams, asleep and waking, are the innocent products of your unconscious. Émile Coué (<Wikipedia link) believed that a human being's regenerative powers reside in the vast regions of the unconscious. Carl Jung (<Wikipedia link) theorized that mental illness comes from the unconscious and dwells in a particular part of it called the shadow.
Owing to stubbornness or I don't know what, I couldn't accept my unconscious to be some lost cause, so unruly as beyond my control, and not really myself but more like some stranger to be constantly subdued by medication. What I wanted was to see the source of my madness, perfectly without mirage, once and for all, disentangled and isolated from the muddled confusion that was my bias, pretense, and self-deceit. Exploration of the unconscious mind hence has not only become the precise ambition of this writing but also my life.
I should warn you that on this journey there was pain. I don't know that it's possible to recover without it. Surrounding my memories of trauma were emotions stifled and thoughts half-finished, abruptly interrupted and left behind. I cut them off as a survival mechanism at the time of my trauma, to keep pace with events which back then hurled me inexorably toward my destined future. I couldn't understand the gravity of what had just visited me, nor could have accumulated at that age the wherewithal to emotionally process these things.
For years I managed to give the impression of being normal. It's what you see sometimes in wounds of a more physical nature, like a broken arm. Being resourceful, the body's regenerative faculties will sometimes compensate for injury in a cunning way. By appropriating alternate tendons and muscles the arm's functioning seems fully restored. Underneath this veneer however the injury hasn't healed. Pain accompanies every movement of the arm giving constant reminder. Being as it's constant, the pain itself becomes so customary over time that it's ignored then forgotten.
To truly become whole means to rebreak the arm, then rearrange the bone into its proper alignment. This is often more painful than the original injury, both towards my analogy and its referent, your trauma. And reinstating my earlier uncertainty about whether or not any one particular individual can recover, I believe success or failure most sizably rests on a willingness or lack thereof to undergo this pain I just described.
Some people sadly won't transcend their very human instinct for comfort which always recoils and flees from the sharp pain requisite to permanent relief, choosing instead to live in a constant sort of pain that needs perpetual gratification through drugs or other means. Some people can't or won't face their accumulated dues, refusing to recall in memory their traumas which thereby would allow their repressed emotions an opportunity for full cathartic expression. Most crucially perhaps, some people lack sufficient honesty regarding themselves. This makes true recovery impossible, as they can't even admit whether or not their plights coincide with one of the two scenarios above.
These are impolite truths, and they leave no delusions about what's needed to recover. Everyone I've ever met who reached their recovery did so by facing in some measure their own personal demons, whether consciously aware of it or not.
COMMUNICATION WITH THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND
Working with your unconscious mind is often frustratingly tricky. The unconscious is elusive. The shadow (which contains your traumas, neuroses, psychoses, disassociations, symptoms, etc.) is only accessible in a manner that is counterintuitive. The unconscious doesn't respond well to rational attempts at organization and logic. In fact, it's completely contradictory to what your conscious mind frequently takes for granted to be some basic truths. The unconscious oftentimes dodges efforts to uncover the roots of its motives, resistant, as though with a life of it's own and a thing unrelated and extraneous to your existence. Yet for all that it's a part of you, not something outside and apart from you.
Experience has shown in fact that so-called direct communication with the unconscious was impossible. Communication was accomplished indirectly, using the conscious mind (aka. ego) as the portal. I'll provide a simple example. It's a well known concept that a statement told repeatedly to yourself will effect your circumstances over time. Repeat the phrase "I'm tired" over and over again. At first, it probably won't have much effect. Persist in this practice over days, weeks, months, your (unconscious) mood is sure to change. You'll make yourself tired by telling yourself that you are.
This in the simplest terms is the concept which through application was what enabled me without meds to stop hearing voices.
I often get asked exactly how I recovered. I feel I can dispense with a pretty concise summary of the tools I used in my recovery organized into four broad categories. These are listed below by order of importance:
Conversation
Self-administered therapy
Distraction
Medication
This list is my own invention. It's not to be found in any medical textbook. The items on this list will only receive brief examination here. This is already a long blog post whose aim is to focus on theory. Recovery tools deserve their own blog post or maybe a YouTube video.
The first item on my list, Conversation, I reckon as the most important factor in my recovery. It means simply having someone to talk to. There's no further explanation for now. Self-administered therapy are tools through which I engaged my unconscious mind in the most direct manner possible. Distraction is a broad category comprising hobbies and exercise, activities as varied as listening to music and mountainbiking, and all other pursuits in which confronting mental illness was not the stated aim but enjoyment of which was nevertheless crucial to my well-being. The last item, Medication, as to its position on this list was a bit fluid. At times of relapse or crisis, medication assumed a more urgent aspect. It was the least important item however because it was used only inasmuch as allowing me to partake of the other three items on the list. Always my goal was to minimize medication and one day to stop completely.
Of all the items listed, the one most indulged during my recovery in terms of actual hours spent was Self-administered therapy. As stated, this category comprised tools that enabled the most immediate passage to the unconscious. What worked for me was largely found through trial and error over the course of many years. I settled ultimately on two techniques, Autosuggestion and Visualization (<Wikipedia links), made to work in conjunction with and complement each other as a powerful combination.
In order to be effective against my voices, significant changes were introduced to the orthodox Autosuggestion method. I won't delve into the nature of these changes, deferring instead to the future such explanations. If you're curious about Autosuggestion however, the book to read is The Practice of Autosuggestion by C. Harry Brooks. Written in English, it betters the founder Émile Coué's own book (as the latter was translated into English from the author's native French). This link (<Gutenberg.org) will take you to free downloadable versions.
In the next section, we'll explore why all this complex involvement with the unconscious is necessary. For now, I'll offer these thoughts.
In order for a recovery strategy to be effective, I feel it must in some way commune with the unconscious part of the mind. The manner in which this is done is entirely up to you. Meditation is a technique commonly engaged by many, for example, as an expedient to recovery. Autosuggestion and Visualization brought me obvious results. This doesn't mean that any of these items are necessarily the right tools for you.
This is one area to which every individual seeking to recover must go alone. You, and only you, can gather the arsenal of tools on which your fully-recovered, future self depends. This is completely a matter of sifting through all manner of possibilities until something resonates with you on an intuitive level. This thing will be known from it's very discovery as suited to all the latent intellects of your nature.
We are fortunate to live in these times. Thanks largely to the internet, never has a wealth of information about recovery been so readily accessible prior to now. By deliberate searching, application, and trial and error, I have little doubt that the exact tools you need for your recovery will present themselves.
THE PURPOSE OF WORKING WITH THE UNCONSCIOUS
Carl Jung explains neurosis (<Wikipedia link) as a struggle between the conscious and the unconscious parts of the mind. A neurotic mind, and by association a mentally-ill one, is a mind divided and fighting with itself. This is a poor recipe for mental well-being, and reason enough to carefully include the unconscious parts of you into any designs for your recovery.
It was just this sort of conflict, a violent rejection of my shadow (an extreme part of my unconscious), which spawned emotions so toxic as to make me ill. The degree to which I allowed my unconscious unopposed into my awareness made my emotions increasingly equitable and fulfilled, but also had another unforeseen effect. Mental powers increased, capacity for thought deepened, and analysis of both myself and my environment honed piercing because I was literally becoming whole. A part of my mind was freed up, and this newly liberated surplus of mental powers could now readily apply to any particularity of my choosing.
No longer was a portion of myself preoccupied with beating back what my ego had once rejected. This thing I'd so cruelly cast out into the cold was a part of my unconscious, my shadow. The unconscious won't stand for this callous rejection. It will fight for its existence by clinging to its lifeblood, you.
How can you throw away or exile a part of yourself? The very notion is impossible. Such a cleft is unnatural; your rejected parts will rightfully fight this division. The self wants to be whole, to heal. The only way it can do this after you've put yourself asunder is to tend to those abandoned parts. The more you consciously insist on division, the more your unconscious is forced to sympathetically tend to what you've abandoned. It will at first attempt discreetly, then underhandedly, and finally with overt rebellion and violence.
Your only choices then are either to completely accept yourself or reject yourself. It's all or nothing. To reject yourself is death, suicide in the literal and figurative sense, the only difference being one is quicker than the other. To accept yourself means to love every part of yourself, even what you're likely to deny, reject, or throw away.
Let's get clear about what it means to accept the shadow. It means acceptance of the darkest parts of yourself, of those thoughts you dare not speak aloud in public. It includes all the dark fantasies which your waking consciousness not only rejects but naturally turns away from in quick shame, as though a disgusting crime was committed for even forming the image in your mind. This principle appears in Freudian psychology as the Id (<Wikipedia link), and is the portion of you which contains your unchecked instincts and desires. It is a mistake to reject these things. These are glimpses of the unconscious revealed to your ego, and while unpleasant, I believe they have something to teach us about ourselves and humanity.
To accept the shadow means to accept and absorb with kindness the worst parts of yourself and to admit them with tolerance. This is not to say that you should act on them but simply acknowledge that they exist. As a human being, you thereby acknowledge the extreme possibles of mankind and exercise your powers of forgiveness and compassion.
As stated earlier, the unconscious doesn't follow the same rational logic as the conscious parts of you. Here is a perfect example where its operation might seem counterintuitive. Your dark thoughts, these sinful thoughts, if you will, might easily lead you to believe that indulging them would result in your corruption. Actually, it's the opposite. It's the rejection and denial of these that lead to ruin and mental illness.
So long as you're able to conceive of something, acknowledge that it's a part of you. These thoughts you so violently reject because they disappoint your haughty self-opinion won't easily abide being cast out, and may revisit your future in equally violent ways. The longer you shut them out, the greater their gathered potential for destruction.
THE UNCONSCIOUS AND INVOLUNTARY FUNCTIONS
Your unconscious however isn't just your shadow and mental illness. It's not all dark stuff. As mentioned earlier, the unconscious also controls your involuntary functions, your emotions, the chemical reactions that underlie your emotions, and all the unwitting biological functions such as heartbeat, breathing, digestion, and so on. It's also the seat of your healing power, manifest as plainly as your skin mending a paper cut and as subtly as restoring the balance between the unconscious and the conscious.
To understand the importance of the unconscious might be settled by determining its functional scope compared to the (conscious) ego. To do so, it helps to paint a picture by analogy. Imagine an iceberg. The conscious part of you can be likened to the iceberg's tip. It's what's visible above the surface, an insignificant little sliver, dwarfed by the bulk of the mountain underneath the surface which is the unconscious. Most of you is unconscious.
The thing is, and once again this is something counterintuitive, the unconscious is invisible to your everyday experience. The illusion is perfect; it seems to not exist at all during your waking hours. Thus the etymology, un and conscious, describes that which you're not consciously aware of.
By calling upon the powers of your unconscious to aid you, you are literally enlisting a power which is hidden and for which its extent is unknown to you. This is not hyperbole. Speculation as to the nature of the unconscious forms the forefront of scientific inquiry into the secrets of the mind and human potential.
Just how powerful is it? This is yet unknown, quantifiably indeterminate, and perhaps unknowable. From personal experience working with my unconscious during recovery, I've deduced some general conclusions about its nature.
The unconscious is slow to respond to input and not immediately impressed by commands like the conscious mind. Slow as it is, it's not impossible to work with. Picking the most efficient means of piloting my unconscious involved the extent of my wits and a lot of trial and error. It doesn't respond to logical thinking like the ego. It seems instead to respond most readily to repetition and emotions.
Remember, just because you firmly decide on something and accept for granted some truth in your rational mind doesn't mean your unconscious is in agreement. The two must be made to agree, to be in harmony and in sync while aimed at a common goal. Care must be taken to avoid conflicts between the two. This is done by ensuring your commands are clear, simple for your unconscious to understand and digest, and don't contradict your emotions lest they cancel each other out.
However you choose to negotiate the unconscious, autosuggestion and visualization as in my case for example, I've found the surest way to effect change is through repetition coupled with emotion. Recall the example "I'm tired" mentioned earlier. My autosuggestion worked on the same principle except the goal wasn't to make myself tired but to win silence (over my voices).
While the unconscious may eventually respond to repetition by rote, emotion I believe is the crucial component that will elicit a much quicker response. Otherwise, I don't think there's a shortcut. Communicating with your unconscious is largely a matter of persistently repeating some affirmative statement until the message seeps in to your unconscious. You'll need to put in the hours, but force of emotion and conviction might achieve faster all other things being equal.
The goal in my recovery was to change my emotional patterns. These existed in inseparable symbiosis to my thought patterns; my emotions influenced my thoughts and vice versa. My emotions were far easier to monitor than my thoughts, and so were given more focus. I conceived my cherished vision of a new resting state, a new equipoise, a sort of emotional homeostasis that didn't require constant upkeep to maintain its stability. This remains for me still a valid definition of recovery. Validation derives not only in the fact that I no longer hear voices, but that I'm able to think upon certain thoughts without consequence that a few years ago would have emotionally triggered me. This could only be accomplished at a deeper level than the fickle superficiality of my conscious awareness and ego. The stability of emotions resembles more the immovable base of the mountain, the obstinate nature of the unconscious.
When I started the task of altering at an unconscious level my emotional behavior, it was slow going at first. My autosuggestion and visualization were not statements to the effect that I would one day recover. They were statements that my recovery had already happened. This felt like a lie. I persisted anyway until my dream of success steadily grew more effortless to conjure up in my imagination. My emotions followed suit with feelings of elation whenever they occasioned these increasingly vivid glimpses of envisioned success. The effect was cumulative. The task became easier with repetition. My communication with the unconscious gradually impressed itself through the portal of my emotions. These emotions were the products of conscious and deliberate thoughts.
In order to demystify the process just described, I propose a theory that many people might dispute. By repeated articulation of certain emotions, I had formed new neural pathways within my body. What's innermost mirrors the outermost. My emotional exertions were awkward in the beginning because my body was being forced to undergo chemical reactions to which it was unaccustomed. As my new emotions solidified into habitual behavior, the body was becoming more familiar and adept at performing the precise chemical reactions underlying these emotions. Finally, when the emotional behavior became so ingrained in the unconscious as to be quasi-instinctive and native to its state of rest, the neural pathway corresponding to this resting state had been firmly established.
My theory flies in the face of a clinical premise that no amount of input, emotional, unconscious, or otherwise, can reconstitute genetics and physiology. Can't it? I would argue that my chemical reactions are being reshaped all the time. My body is not the same today as it was yesterday, let alone 20 years ago.
There's a commonly held belief that a married couple will resemble each other after many years of living together. The emotions most frequently indulged tend to leave a stamp on a person's body. A rather poetic expression of this is Nathaniel Hawthorne's (<Wikipedia link) short story The Great Stone Face (<Gutenberg.org link). I don't fear spoiling this story by describing some of its themes to the unacquainted, simply because it's a masterpiece of American storytelling that's highly recommend as a must read if you haven't read it already: A man lives his entire life in the shadow of an aspect carved by nature into a cliff face which, according to native legend, is the likeness of someone wise and virtuous. This man quests his entire life to discover the great stone face among the people he encounters, hoping one day to meet this wise and virtuous figure foretold by legend. Nearing the end of his life, the man questing has become the very thing he has sought, the man of wisdom and virtue, the very stone face himself.
Clinical science is quick to remind us of our limitations. Deficits like a major mental disorder being put to right is deemed as hopeless as an amputated limb magically growing back. My reply to this is to rewatch the video about Morris Goodman. Existence of such a man should cast doubt on the notion that science has determined the vast extremes capable to the unconscious mind.
Though I believe my years of working with the unconscious had formed the needed neural pathways that led me to recover, in the end I can't prove it. I've had little desire in subsequent years to prove my theory. The end result being enough to satisfy me, my recovery has since found me in a state of undying gratitude.
I did my best during my recovery to follow my intuition and moral compass, highlighting these articles as belonging squarely to the unconscious part of my psyche. I entrusted my unconscious with the sorting of particulars, of which I don't attempt to understand or decipher their complexity. It's quite possible that I didn't form new neural pathways but achieved emotional balance through some other means unknown to me. The end result is what matters to me most, to be commensurate with what in the popular sense is considered "sane". And while I'm not completely free of neuroses, neither is anyone else. To be human is to be imperfect. I'm well within the bounds however to no longer be considered as having a major mental disorder. I'm content to leave it at that.
The next section will explore a theory which provided a useful framework to guide my recovery. This entire page has until now been leading up to this culmination. My theory came about independently out of my own reflections. The concepts it contains have undoubtedly been thought of by others before me, but I feel sincere nevertheless in boasting it as an original theory birthed out of my intuition. I call it the container model, detailed after the jump.
THE CONTAINER MODEL
Imagine a glass jar. Inside this jar is a liquid. The liquid has a certain pH value (see chart below).
In this hypothetical universe, pouring out the jar isn't possible. Only adding liquid to your container is allowed. Your goal regarding the liquid inside your container is to neutralize its pH balance .
Acids and bases cancel each other. If your liquid happens to be too acidic, it’s possible to achieve a neutral pH by simply adding a base liquid.
This analogy was useful to my recovery interpreted like this. Life is the container. Negative emotions are acids. Positive ones are bases.
Every time you indulge a negative emotion adds to the acidic pH of your container. And like the analogy of the jar that can't ever be poured out, you can't ever truly rid yourself of something once it enters your experience and life (the reasons for which I'll explain below).
It may chance that your life contains too much negativity. Your only choice then, if the goal is to achieve a balance, is to add something to counteract the negative. If you have too much negativity, add a measure of positivity.
Your container is in fact more full than you think. Conscious memory is puny when compared to the record of your life kept by the unconscious. The ego, the conscious part of you, only remembers things that stand out in some way or make a strong impression. The unconscious on the other hand records every single sensory stimulus no matter how faint, the slightest things you've ever seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched. These are experiences so infinitesimally small that you're not consciously aware of having perceived them. Asleep or awake, every single detail of every second during your lifetime and, if considerations are expanded to include the collective unconscious (<Wikipedia link), even a sort of ancestral memory from before you were born has been recorded somewhere in the deep interior of unconscious memory.
It's quite awesome to ponder. Your unconscious keeps a meticulous record which your conscious memory can't hope to match. It's what enables people under hypnotic trance to recall details of experiences that in their waking hours they have no recollection of.
To indulge another analogy, if the ego can be likened to the current screen on your computer which is capable of displaying only a limited amount of information, the unconscious can be likened to your hard drive. Every single task you've ever performed on your computer, every keystroke entered and every web page you've visited since the very first logon, is somewhere written on your hard drive. You could delete some programs, attempt to wipe away some of the past, but your hard drive forever contains the indelible marks of it’s history. With the right equipment, like those used by the CIA for example, it’s possible to regain this information hidden under deep layers of denial.
You can’t deceive your unconscious. No matter how cleverly you lie to yourself, the subtlest subterfuge doesn’t escape its detection, and in fact elicits a reaction by the unconscious for every such attempt to deceive it. A further rift occurs between the conscious and unconscious parts of you, a state of tension and conflict, propounded by Jung as the seeds of neurosis and mental illness.
Whatever you consciously reject is never expelled from you. It's simply deposited into your shadow, the darkest, most shrouded part of your unconscious mind. In this way, it's convenient to think of your life as a sort of container which fills every passing moment of your life but which can never be unfilled.
With this container model in mind, accept profoundly the entirety of your experience and life as something that can’t be purged. This includes those things that on a conscious level you sincerely forget. It's only your conscious mind that forgets. The unconscious still remembers.
The goal isn’t to evict or disremember anything from your reality. In any case I’ve just described why this can’t happen. Your conscious ego often fools you into believing you can successfully obliviate something forever from awareness. This is an illusion. You’ve only removed it from conscious awareness. Within the depths of the unconscious the memory lingers somewhere and always will. In this permanence however, hope shouldn't perish. The memory of a thing may be fixed, but the emotional baggage surrounding anything is mutable. This type of emotional baggage remains tied to some unconscious item and will remain just as permanent lest you do something about it.
Emotional baggage, your unhappy emotions, can usually be traced through careful examination back to its source. If your unhappiness is due to something in your physical environment that you can forcefully change or get rid of, great. Do that first. It's much easier to effect things in your external, tangible reality than to work with your unconscious. If on the other hand your unhappiness is due to something you can't control by physical force like a memory, you still aren't powerless.
Your option then is to neutralize your negative emotions with positive ones. Focus on what you can choose, not what you can't. To better understand this concept, let's illustrate this by example. Let's pick a hypothetical trigger. Let's say hypothetically that you're prone to a type of road rage wherein you get angry whenever someone cuts you off in traffic. Rational logic might dictate a solution to this as follows. As soon as you get angry, the goal is to distract yourself quickly. Stop your emotions short. Forget about the offending incident as soon as possible. Subsequently think as little as you can for the rest of your life upon this incident.
Yes, this all sounds perfectly rational. Remember though, the unconscious isn't rational. Even if you forget the incident by forcefully putting it out of mind, the trigger, the emotional baggage surrounding the incident remains somewhere within your unconscious, forever linked to someone cutting you off in traffic.
Let's suppose a little while afterwards, a similar incident reoccurs. You’re apt to get even more road rage this time. This new offense now compounds with your memory of the first. With each successive recurrence of the wrong inflicted, the same wound deepens. Your trigger is more pronounced every time, even if every time you decide with sincerest conviction to forget, forgive, or exploit some other type of emotional jiu-jitsu.
Every emotion corresponds to a neural/biological chemical reaction. Each time an emotion is indulged, a neural connection is activated. Repetition reinforces and strengthens this neural pathway; the body becomes more accustomed to it. Each repeated offense therefore seems to bring on a stronger emotional reaction. It's easily seen how dealing in this manner with your triggers, waiting only until after their occurrence, is counterproductive. You're actually training yourself toward negative emotions.
Instead try this. Work on your triggers when you’re furthest away from being triggered. In other words, the best time to work on your negative emotions is when you’re feeling downright positive. Choose a time when your unconscious is in its least excitable state and the most receptive to communication. At your calmest, most serene hour, recall the last time you were triggered. We'll continue in our hypothetical example of being cut off in traffic.
There’s no point in doing this by the way when you're already angry or triggered. Recalling the incident then is likely to simply enrage you even more. However, you’re less likely to be effected if you're grounded and serene.
Visualizing your trauma deeply, close your eyes and relive the incident. Use all your powers of imagination to envision the most realistic recollection you can. Picturing being back in this situation, you're this time connected to sensitive biofeedback equipment that registers subtle changes in heartrate, body temperature, and so on, corresponding to the precise state of your emotions. All the while in the mind's eye you're undergoing the same stimulus that triggered you before. Instead of becoming disturbed by this, the biofeedback equipment in your visualization registers flatline, a zero, a complete neutral response. Better yet, visualize if possible feeling happy and content in that moment, unmoved, at once unstirred by the external events unfolding around you.
This describes fairly accurately my visualization used daily during my recovery. It's something that I continue to practice. This isn't an exercise where you simply go through the motions. This is a deep meditative state in which you involve the deepest parts of you, your unconscious, to create a holographic experience where strong emotions are felt.
Should you perform this exercise correctly with sufficient repetition and emotional sincerity, you’ll find the next time you encounter your trigger in real life finds you calmer and more self-possessed.
What I've just described might seem counterintuitive, because the instinct is to never risk bringing yourself down during moments of elation with bad memories, but to prolong and cling to your flights of happiness. Dealing with negative emotions only when they come up seems like a perfectly rational course of action. This is false thinking when it comes to the unconscious. The moment you’re facing a trigger is precisely the worst time to work on it. You’re actually making things worse by neglecting your emotions.
Let’s analyze the process in terms of the container model. You’re not trying to empty your container by denying the existence of something negative (your trigger), by trying forcefully to expel it from your awareness. Accepting and working with it is the first step to healing. Through this gesture you're accepting the unconscious in a welcoming spirit and rescuing yourself from any potential conflict with yourself.
Once the contents of your analogous container are in such wise profoundly accepted, the act of visualizing your trigger while linking it to positive emotions is equivalent to adding a base to acid and neutralizing the pH.
This container model was used to great effect during my recovery. The process it stipulated was time consuming. Three basic steps were involved. I had first to ascertain a means of quieting my conscious mind to give my unconscious prominence. I had then to exercise my faculty of self-analysis to isolate my triggers. Through self-administered therapy I then got to work reprogramming my unconscious. Applying myself to this practice, time and repetition slowly persuaded the obstinance of my unconscious. Eventually I managed to neutralize the pH of this metaphoric container that was my life, reality, and existence.
I hope these tools help you on your recovery journey. They were a blessing to me, and I'm thankful to the universe for their inspiration.
I'll close this entry by remarking that no matter where you are on your recovery journey, it's crucial to know with crystal clarity where you'd like to end up. Your recovery and your ideal life should be known to you plainly before even taking the first step. If you haven't already a clear vision of the future, make it your priority. There shouldn't be any doubt regarding what your life is supposed to be like, fully recovered, and experiencing every last of your potential through your seeing, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.
I believe there's no point in proceeding if you can't already imagine these things. In the most primitive sense, how will you know when you've recovered if you can't tell what it's supposed to feel like once you get there?
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