-- Michael O'Callaghan
Psychosis, PTSD and Story as a Vehicle of Healing
My descent into "madness" began when my mother died. Within days of her death I would experience the first eruption of what I now call unconscious content, manifest as intense, unexplainable fear. I didn’t know what to do with that kind of fear. It felt foreign and overwhelming to me so I pushed it away and pretended it wasn’t there.
Over the course of the next several months I would go on to lose my two closest and dearest friends, my community, my sense of purpose, and my most persistent form of self-identity. I would give myself to a cause that couldn’t be won and bear witness to a catastrophic tragedy that involved the deaths of others – people I felt a distorted sense of responsibility for, along with an accompanying sense of distorted guilt for the circumstances of their tragic and premature deaths.
I would become estranged from my husband, children, friends and extended family. I would be unable to follow-up on the career path I had confidently charted for myself only a few months previously. I would rarely sleep through the night. I would be plagued by nightmares and visions of destruction. My sense of trust would be utterly destroyed. I would lose all faith in the goodness of people, the balance of justice, or the possibility of divine order. Expectations that were too high, too many losses, too much fear, too fast, with no time between to assimilate each. I became stuck – frozen in a state of grief, fear, loss and failure - unable even to cry over those events. In the shadowed recesses of my mind I secretly believed that I too was dead, just like those others.
What makes the story of my psychotic experience unique from many others (although probably not unusual in the larger scheme) is that I underwent that experience outside of the psychiatric community. I was not hospitalized. I did not seek treatment, therapy, or medication – during or since. I live in an isolated area of the world; psychiatrists and their ilk are a rarity. Our small hospital does have a psychiatrist on staff, accessible through the emergency room that’s also used as a walk-in clinic for all manner of injuries and illness. A wait of several hours before a doctor is seen is not unusual and locals know they’re usually better off to stay home and wait for symptoms to abate on their own, unless they’re bleeding profusely.
I wasn’t bleeding.
I wasn’t, in fact, doing much of anything. My days and nights were spent relentlessly smoking as I surfed the net, looking for answers I couldn’t find, frequently with a drink nearby to apply liberally to the wound I could not voice. I withdrew more and more from the world around me. Lurking beneath my disheveled and shabby pajama’d exterior was an unspeakable sense of dread and terror.
At some point, during my aimless hours on the computer I began to write. Initially, I thought I was just writing a collection of anecdotes related to my childhood, but very quickly an assertive new voice emerged. Because my only purpose seemed to be self-amusement and distraction, I let that voice have its say. That was exactly what I needed to do, for that was the voice that had been silenced.
Two streams of thought had emerged: one lead to my past, the other was creating an entire imaginary setting upon the page – an altered state of consciousness. Without being aware that I was doing so I was creating a place of psychological safety for myself. Within that altered space, characters came into play: gods, devils, a kindly and compassionate mentor, a fierce warrior goddess – the real life people I had lost, been with, or been up against, transformed into larger-than-life characters by Story.
Frequently, a third thread would erupt to dangle a clue and beckon me to follow. More often than not that clue came in the form of music, poetry, or a written passage of work that had resonated within me for months without my knowing why. Soon, I wasn’t writing The Story at all. The Story was writing me...
Source: Psychosis, PTSD and Story as a Vehicle of Healing
See also:
Broken Heart, Broken Soul, Psychosis, Acute Schizophrenic Break, Psychotic Episode, PTSD, Visionary Experience, Breakdown as Healing, Breakdown as Breakthrough, Transcendence,John Weir Perry, The Gate of Sorrow, Creed - Human Clay
