This post was prompted when a random mental health professional online chose to delete my comments. **once again proving my point** This has happened many times and it doesn’t matter that my comments are civil and simply speak to my experience. How do we create alternatives? I like to think of what a therapeutic village might look like.
Many mental health professionals will tell us we are not having our experience if the it makes them too uncomfortable.
That is the reason why it is often unsafe for those of us with this experience to pursue care with professionals. Our process of discernment must get deeper and more sensitive because of this. It’s almost amusing except that it’s dangerous for so many. We cannot go back into a system that harmed us when it continues to tell us that it’s not true. See: Professional denial is a form of retraumatization
For the record I work with professionals, however, at this point, they’re all my friends and we are able to break through convention entirely. To get so-called services from those you love is family-based energetics that pull us back into the fold rather than deny us.
Healing comes in many forms. Once one gets into the groove of their own path whether professional or not has very little to do with where we get support.
The only reason some of the folks I get support from are professionals is because that’s the world I come from– it’s absolutely unnecessary that they be professional that is somewhat incidental in this instance.
Also:
Ecstatic dance serves as trauma therapy and it’s phenomenal. I’ve been writing about dance for years but I don’t think anyone understands its power if they’ve not experienced it. We are all peers on that dance floor and it’s profound. I do plan to write something that will attempt to get explicit about how it works. (2025: I did that here: “Everyone here is a freak, just like me”
Creating one’s own village is the only way at this point for some of us. Ultimately recreating the village in general is a method of healing for the entire collective. Thus we are now all faced with the general lack of true community these days and how to go about building. Please share your thoughts as we need to learn to do this together.
See: The divide between client/patient/consumer and professionals (a collection)
and:
- The Mental (Illness) system and thoughts on alternatives: a collection
- Retaining agency is not resistance to treatment…it is in fact a sign of health
- Resisting-Illegitimate-Authority — By Bruce E. Levine
- The biggest issue we face: #WorldMentalHealthDay
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Monica I don’t know where else to make this comment to you so I’ll just do it here. Before you returned from Boston and the subsequent second brain injury and were in your friend’s house your photo of you with your legs elevated from edema. I thought the other things you had been through such as the feeling of a dagger in your shoulder, the hyper hypo thyroid, so much, I thought to myself, “I’m so sorry that happened to her. I am glad it didn’t happen to me.” Well, guess what? It’s all happening to me too. I was, like you, on massive doses of neuroleptics and other drugs for more than 10 years and I have been left chronically ill. I dance as well. I sing at the top of my lungs, I let myself feel. Emotions, sights, sounds, memories, all of them. All carefully preserved and now able to be expressed and appreciated. Life is such a precious gift. I don’t know if my body will fully recover since I am now in my late sixties, but I’m so overjoyed to have all of these things again. I wish more people could grasp these injuries we are experiencing and healing from but most peoples eyes just kind of glaze over if I try to go into any detail. The best is that my creative powers are being restored and I can share them with people who had ignored and left me isolated for so many years and it makes them happy that Iam back. I can bring joy to people again. Anyway, I have rambled but glad to be able to talk with another human who has been through it. And as my husband reminded me of your words. ” It gets better.” 🙂
thank you!! lovely to hear. We’re doing this work and YES…it’s astonishing. I love you!! xo
I love you too Monica
Telling the professional, my transpersonal psychotherapist, that the onset of my diagnosis was a Kundalini Awakening lends me an understanding ear.
However, a psychiatrist or GP would just think I am delusional.
yes. thank you and wonderful!
it’s also important to know that there are a lot of transpersonally educated therapists who still don’t know how to handle many of the spaces those who get labeled by psychiatry go…we need to be careful of whom we connect with if we are one of those people.
Monica,
After all these years, I invite you to Like facebook’s “Living Dance” . . . we’re in the same flow. The header photo was taken while I was in trance, in a 90 minute piece called Sahara Date by Ralph LaCharity,
Oh I think I applied for a group that’s not the what you’re talkin about. Can you send me a link because I don’t think I found it when I searched