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spiritual_emergency · Dec 20, 2008, 06:05 PM

It's been almost seven years since I first told my story from within that altered state and I had to get up from the computer so I could wipe off the sweat that came with sharing that piece up above.

There must be a little
spilled blood in every story
if it is to carry medicine.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Junerain: I look and look for someone who is going through anything REMOTELY like I've been going through...it is hard to find, a pearl has been found in this oyster yet I do find there is no one with an oyster with any hints of resembling how odd, how strange, my oyster is and was, my _story_.....

There are two parts to the telling of a story. The first part is simply to tell it. Initially, a person may not know where to begin. I suggest that they start where they start. Like me, they may find that their story first rises out of them in fragments and disconnected pieces, like pieces of a puzzle. The story may take place in the past, in the present, in the future, or in a place where Time itself doesn't even exist or all those places at the same time. People might tell their stories using pictures, words, music, poetry, metaphor, dance, even colors. I had to use all of the above to capture the immensity of emotion and experience that was involved. Borrowing once more on the words of a truly skilled and remarkable psychiatrist...

Quote:

If the therapeutic factors in the psychotherapy of the neuroses are puzzling, those in the psychoses are utterly mysterious. So much is this the case that in the average psychiatric opinion, it is generally held that, as a matter of fact, there is no healing for the psychoses, that there can be allviation of symptoms but not cure. I have always been reluctant to accept this closing of the door upon the possibility of healing, and this is because I find, as Jung has found, that the psyche knows better than we do what it is up to in its deep turmoils.

Since the psyche had its own intentions in a psychosis, when the unconsciousness is activated to this extreme degree, a welter of emotions wants to come into play, accompanied by images of a mythological cast that belong to these emotions. Most of these elements of the psyche are very necessary to the further growth and development of the personality. It becomes a very painful experience when they meet a wall of prohibition that dams up their flow and prevents their movement.

Much of the synthesizing and organizing action of the psyche goes on at the level of the unknown, that is, of unconscious process, long before it is a matter of conscious insight - long before it reaches the ego. This unconscious process is essentially emotional in its quality and hence the play of emotion is best allowed to do its own work. Too early a recognition of meaning, and formulation of it may scotch this subtle process that goes on beneath the surface.

The central archetype is the factor in the psyche that, according to all the evidence in our observations, has the capacity to transform the self. This change involves not only the self-image in the usual sense, but also the structure of the personality as a whole. The means by which this is brought about in the psychotic episode are those that I have described as the "renewal process." When I speak of this kind of "ideation," it should not be thought of as a fanciful play of symbolic ideas. Rather, they occur as powerful, even overpowering, emotional and spiritual experiences. That is the reason for my preferring to refer to these archetypal phenomena as "affect-images," since they are made up principally of emotion and image together as aspects of the same entity.

Trials of the Visionary Mind
John Weir Perry Ph. D.

If the first part is telling the story. The second part is telling it to someone. That someone might be a friend, a family member, perhaps a therapist. Some people don't have anyone they can tell their story to and for them, I recommend that they imagine an ideal listener and tell their story to that imaginary person. Later, they may find that they tell their story and parts of it to many, many people, many, many times over.

Part of an individual's later task will be to organize their story in linear fashion. A timeline can be helpful for this stage. Simply draw out a line and then place a dot upon it to represent your birth and another dot to represent where you are now. Then apply the "pieces" where they belong on the timeline of your life. Don't be surprised if telling one pieces triggers the telling of another piece or if some pieces belong to a time before you were even born. Story-telling is a very fluid process but it's the process of telling and organizing those details that helps create order out of disorder.

I want to get the word out that recovery is possible but I am made to feel I do not deserve recovery from a story this strange.....

Everyone is deserving of recovery Junerain. Everyone.

~ Namaste

See also:
- Telling the Story of the Experience
- Personal Definitions of Recovery
- Telling Your Recovery Story

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