You don’t need to spend a lot of money on new and different mental health therapies when there is one intervention that is guaranteed to work. This “secret” is not found in institutional programs nor is it promoted by mainstream mental health organizations, but it does work.
The institutional program that Chris was enrolled in for two years thought that as an institution it could replicate the secret, but it couldn’t. An institution cannot do this. It tried to integrate the young people back into the community by giving them a reason to wake up every day, to interact with people their own age, to not become marginalized and excluded. It encouraged the “patients” to express themselves through art therapy, role playing, music and group therapy. I’m not saying these aren’t worthy goals. It’s just that this focus misses the real problem.
What it failed to grasp is that the constructs surrounding the defense mechanism of the individual are the result of the individual interacting with the familial environment, not the result of a biological disease nor of the schools he went or friends he has known. He is the way he is because of who he is is in relation to us. Exploring the different therapies that I have written about on this blog has made me understand the importance of emotional vibration. Emotional vibration begins in the womb.
So, the secret is very simple. The family (mother, father, close relatives) needs to accept the person as he or she is, not exclude him or her, value the person, empathize, sympathize, understand their own involvement in why this has happened, take steps to change, and give it time.
The real secret is accepting the person and enlightening the person to the possibility that they can reject the condition.
Jack Rosberg promotes (and I have applied it with success) that we express to the affected individual that it is them we care for and love and that the condition/ daemonic force/ whatever you wish to label it/ is awful and spiteful and hateful and deserves to be cast out. The therapist (or parent) then facilitates a ritual of catharsis to aid the individual in casting it out. The patient then can distinguish that their authentic self is separate from their delusional defense mechanism.
Anonymous: Yeah, but on the other hand, this is in a way the same view the mh system holds. The “condition” is awful, spiteful, hateful, horrible, and so on, and so on. The only difference is that the mh system tells people they can’t get rid of it, only “manage” it. And indeed, what is “the condition”? “The condition” is one’s emotions, thoughts, reactions. Why would anyone want to get rid of their emotions, thoughts, and reactions? Why would they want to define them as awful, spiteful, hateful, etc.? They are what makes us alive human beings. If we are unable to react to the world we live in, we are unable to survive in it.
I’m thankful that I was able to react. I’m thankful that I was able to establish defence mechanisms, “delusions”, “hallucinations”, “symptoms”. In the end, they were all necessary for my survival, they were warning signs, telling me that something was very wrong, and they also were invaluable tools when I tried to find out what it was that was so very wrong. It wasn’t before I’d found out what that was, and changed it, that I was able to cast the tools out, because I didn’t need them anymore.
If anything could be called awful, spiteful, hateful, etc., it is which the “condition” is a response to. Not the “condition” itself. IMO. But even here, what does it help to judge the past? It has happened, can’t be changed. It can only be accepted in order to make future change possible, and let go of it.