Empowerment is Vital to Dialogical Recovery
Daniel Fisher, M.D., Ph.D. - March 9, 2012

In my previous blog, I used a new term, Dialogical Recovery to describe the importance of dialogue to recovery. I and others in the recovery movement have been asking ourselves recently, “What is it about Open Dialogue that resonates with our lived experience of recovery?” There is emerging agreement among us that a dialogue approach is empowering, which is why it is very important to recovery. In fact, empowerment may be one of the most important elements of recovery.

To understand the importance of empowerment, we need to reconsider the nature of the emotional distress from which people are recovering. The present day mental health system calls these issues mental illness. This term is very jarring to most of us with lived experience. We do not want our lives reduced to a biochemical equation. This leaves many of us feeling hopeless and powerless. We are led to believe that all we can do is find the right doctor and the right medication to run our lives. The Open Dialogue practitioners use the term monologue to describe the state of psychosis. By monologue they mean there is only one version of reality and that it is not possible to revise that version. In fact, the medical description of mental distress is monological because it is imposed by authorities upon every person in distress. In addition this spell of the medical model of distress is cast upon every member of our society as the only version of reality. Society is told, without facts to back it up, that emotional distress is due to a chemical imbalance. I think our society’s narrow medical description of madness is actually trapping persons in monologue and therefore blocking recovery. I discovered that when I performed biochemical research and reduced human beings to a medical model I crossed over into monological madness. This imposition of one person’s reality on another person has been considered an impetus for the subjected person’s retreat into psychosis by Helm Stierlin. The consensus among those of us who have recovered from psychosis is that the way out of this madness is through self-determination and choice. Self-determination is an expression of each person’s voice as unique and important. This is an expression of dialogue. To run your life for yourself, however, requires one to be able to exercise power through being involved in empowering relationships. Unfortunately, the present system works to disempower persons when they are in greatest distress.

So if the chemical imbalance theory of emotional distress does not resonate with the lived experience of those of us who have recovered from mental health issues, what reality does? Many of us who have lived experience of recovery from emotional distress have concluded that trauma played a pivotal role in our later distress. For myself, being sexually molested by a 5th grade teacher left a lasting emotional scar. That experience reinforced my suspicion that I was defective and inferior. The abuse left me fearful and obedient to persons in positions of authority. I felt compelled to reflexively adopt their version of reality. I felt powerless to run my own life and looked outside myself for my plans and goals. For me that outwardly imposed life plan was to become a biochemist and discover the chemical imbalance causing my sister to be unhappy. When you have been traumatized every interaction carries a threat because we allow most people to tell us what to do. Well when you feel threatened by interactions and other person’s ideas, your safest response is to withdraw into your own monological world. This results in a person clinging to their view of reality. I, for instance, became convinced that everyone was a cleverly constructed robot. Many people would call this a delusion and dismiss it. Actually it is a creative protection, and should be respected and understood. I later understood that I thought the world was filled with robots because I could not express my own feelings.

More: http://www.power2u.org/articles/reco...l-recovery.htm