TRANSCRIPT
A couple of days ago, I was having a conversation with a psychiatrist whom I’ve been friends with for a long, long time. She’s actually in my film, Take These Broken Wings. Her name is Anne Silver, and we were talking about the subject of psychosis, a subject that has been near and dear to both of our hearts. I think part of why it’s so interesting is it’s an extreme of human behavior. By studying these extremes of human behavior and studying our capacity for this extreme within ourselves, we can learn a lot about humans in general, a lot about psychology, a lot about life, and a lot about our own self.
So she spontaneously said to me, she said, “You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about this subject of psychosis.” And she said, “You know what I think it is really? I think it’s just horrible things that little children went through when they were very, very young. Terrible things that they went through that they couldn’t deal with, and they buried and they split off.” By the way, this is very much in line with my thinking. And she said, “What it is, is it’s just something that they didn’t deal with at the time. They pushed it down because it was too painful.” And then later in their life, when they’re 18, 19, 20, 21, that age when schizophrenia often rears its head, according to what psychiatry says, she was, “That’s a time when they go through something that’s sort of comparable to it, and all that early stuff just bursts out.” I thought that was very insightful of her.
And then she said, “It’s not really even a sickness or a disease at all, as psychiatry says. Really, what it is, is they are just trying to reprocess. They’re trying to make sense of what they went through. They’re trying to understand it, work through it.” And so it’s actually a very healthy process to make sense of it. I totally agree with her. Now, what I added is that’s not at all what the mental health field says.
And what’s also interesting is I said this: I’ve heard so many people, and I made videos about this before, I’ve heard so many people say, “Yeah, but that’s not what my son or daughter is going through when they had their psychotic episode at 17, 18, 19, 20, because they never had a traumatic experience like that. They never had profound abandonments or traumas. They never went through severe loneliness or anything like that. That’s not something that my child went through.” So it clearly is not what’s expressing itself in their psychosis in their early 20s or whenever it is that it’s bursting out.
And what I said to Anne is the problem with what most parents say that is, to me, it doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily right at all. Because in my experience, when they say this, it really is suggesting how much they’re really out of touch with the emotional reality of their children’s early childhood. And I have seen that again and again and again with parents. They have all sorts of different reasons for not wanting to really acknowledge or empathize with or even know, be aware of at all, what their early young children went through as little, little babies in early childhood. It’s too painful. They have too much denial around it. They don’t want to take responsibility.
A metaphor for this, this idea that parents can be so absolutely clueless about what their little babies or little children are actually going through emotionally or went through emotionally, is how people treat their pets. Well, in New York City, it’s a common phenomenon that people have these tiny little apartments. New York City, where I’m living right now, they have these tiny little apartments and they have dogs. And what I hear so commonly is people going off to work for the whole day, and they leave their dogs in these tiny little apartments. Dogs being kind of like humans in a way, they’re very social animals, pack animals like humans. And what happens is they leave their dog, and for the first five or ten minutes after they leave, the dog is okay. And then the dog realizes emotionally that yet again, it’s been abandoned.
And what the dog starts to do is it starts to cry, just like a little baby. And sometimes these dogs cry all day long. And it’s the worst when they’re puppies because they’re totally terrified, and they’re totally lonely, and they’re totally abandoned. And they sometimes cry for hours and hours and hours and hours. And guess what? Their owners are off at work, and they don’t even know about it. Or sometimes maybe they hear the dog crying as they’re walking out the door, or they can hear it from downstairs from the window. “Oh, my dog’s crying.” Do they think, “Oh, it’ll just go on for a few minutes and then they’ll get over it?” Because they don’t want to know, because it’s too painful. They don’t want to take responsibility. They love their little dog, and they say, “Oh, I love them, and I don’t want them to feel that way, so I just want to block it out.” And I know he’ll get over it, and it’s really not that bad.
And then what happens is eight or ten hours later, they come home from work, and the dog by that time has given up and is in a horrible state of just saying, “I give up. No one’s coming back for me.” Maybe it’s even peed on the floor. Maybe they have a walker who comes and walks it, you know, for 20 minutes in the middle of the day. But sometimes the dogs don’t even get that. The owner comes home, and the dog is thrilled to see the owner because it’s been so lonely and miserable and bored all day long. And then what happens is the owner says, “Yay! See, my dog loves me too! My dog is so, so, so happy!” And they don’t really know even remotely the emotional reality of what this dog has gone through all day long.
And sometimes what happens is the only way they find out what the dog has gone through all day long is when the neighbors complain. And the neighbors call the management, and the management leaves a sign on the person’s door saying, “You have got to stop your dog from crying all day long or barking all day long. Your dog is going nuts, and it’s bothering people.” And then the person goes, “Oh my God! I don’t want trouble! I don’t want to lose my lease!” And then so what happens so commonly in New York is then they medicate the dog. They give the dog anti-anxiety medications or antidepressants, but they don’t deal with the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem being the dog is incredibly lonely.
Now, some people do. Some people get dog groups, and they have doggy daycares. But a lot of people don’t do that. They just want to push the problem down. And I think that those people are very comparable to a lot of parents with their young children. They have all different ways of abandoning their children: two nannies who don’t care, two schools who don’t care, all different ways of giving their children to babysitters who don’t care. Sometimes babysitters, nannies, and schools who do horrible, other violating things to children, if abandonment sometimes being the mild, and they’re just not aware of it.
What they’re aware of is the child is so clingy and happy to see them that they don’t actually relate to what the child has gone through, and they don’t explore it. And then twenty years later, when the kid is going through a psychotic experience and all this wild stuff is coming up, the parent doesn’t know. They don’t know where it’s coming from because they never related to what had happened in the first place.
Now, what’s even more confusing about psychosis, and part of them in a completely removed, detached, intellectual way, what makes it so interesting is when people are having this eruption of early childhood trauma, what makes it so confusing for everybody in the world, especially for parents, parents who don’t want to see the history and the mental health system that also doesn’t often want to look at the history at all, doesn’t even find it interesting or curious or just outright denies it, what it is when this eruption of early, early childhood abandonment, violation, pain, rage, terror, all these different things, loneliness, profound loneliness, all this stuff that’s bursting up, it’s not expressing itself through the lens of an early, early child. It’s expressing itself through the lens.
Through the body, through the voice of someone who is now an adult, and that’s what makes it so confusing. So what happens is it’s all the feelings and all the thoughts and everything that was going on in someone who might be six months old, eight months old, a year old, something like that. People who are pre-verbal even, and yet now all these feelings are being expressed through the lens of an adult or an almost adult self, through a verbal person, through a person who can say things, who can argue, who can use intellectual arguments. But really, the stuff that’s driving it and motivating it is not adults; it’s infantile. It’s toddler stuff. And so what happens is it comes up in incredibly confusing ways. Psychiatry says, oh, they give these fancy words. They’re going through this or that or a schizophrenic break or whatever it is—fancy old Greek words—because we can’t understand what they’re saying. We call it word salad, but really what it is is it’s just very, very early childhood stuff. And this can really throw people off. There’s no reason to think that someone who’s expressing really early profound childhood stuff would express it in an adult manner. And that’s why so many therapists don’t want to work with people who are going through these psychotic breaks in adulthood or are very confused by it, or it makes them incredibly anxious. Because all they know how to do is these intellectual ways of interacting, intellectual ways of reasoning with a person, reasoning with them in an adult way. Okay, let’s take a step back and intellectually study what you’re going through. That would never work with trying to be there for a child who’s going through a profound post-traumatic reaction. And it works just as poorly when someone who’s 20 or 25 years old is going through an early childhood post-traumatic reaction through the lens of an adult. Their behavior gets called bizarre, confusing, makes no sense, is out of touch with reality. Whereas actually, it’s incredibly in touch with reality. It’s just in touch with the reality that people aren’t aware of as a reality because it’s a very early childhood reality that it’s in touch with. And it’s profoundly in touch with that. And on top of it, it really is a desire to heal, a desire to express these buried feelings that got triggered by an adult situation that happened to be somewhat similar to that. No wonder so many people go through this psychotic first psychotic break between the ages of what, 17 to 25. It’s a time where childhood is abandoned, where people have to become independent. All these ancient feelings are kind of parallel to what’s going through now. People are leaving their families, they’re being abandoned by their families, they have to function in the outside world. They have all this incredible pressure on them from the outside world and from their families and from within themselves. It’s a time that really goes right down into the ancient self of who they are. And if their foundation is not that good, that stuff really can burst out. No big surprise. So now I’m going to share one last idea, and that is what would be good treatment? What would be a good way to help someone who’s 20 years old and is having an absolute eruption of stuff from 19 or 20 years earlier in their life—emotions, unprocessed emotions from back then? Well, before I get into what good treatment is, let’s look at what conventional treatment is. And then when we look at conventional treatment, we can see so often why conventional psychiatry, the conventional mental health system, has such a hopeless attitude toward full recovery for people with these problems. Conventional psychiatry restrains people and medicates them. And when they medicate them and give them antipsychotics, basically what they’re doing is trying to numb the person down. Fundamentally, it’s taking all those emotions, all that stuff that’s erupting, and putting a cap on it, putting a lid on it, and trying to push it down. Basically, the idea is by hook or by crook, let us re-stabilize this person and let’s do it as fast as possible. Let’s inject them with Haldol. Let’s give them pills which knock them out. If they don’t want to take their pills, let’s force them to take their pills. Let’s force them to take injections. We’ll put them in restraints if they act out too much. It’s like these are the worst ways to treat someone who’s going through an eruption of babyhood, early childhood stuff. Would we want to treat a baby by injecting them with medication and restraining them? No! A baby needs love and caring and respect. They need lack of abandonment. They need more nurturance, more time, more gentleness, more empathy, more caring, more touch. And not surprisingly, treatment programs—if you even want to use that word—treatment for people who are going through this thing called psychosis, first psychotic episode, schizophrenia, the treatment programs that medicate people less, the treatment programs that give people more time, more empathy, more caring, less pressure to push their feelings down, more honoring of their feelings, more honoring of whatever it is that they’re going through—not trying to force them to be rational and be adults and make sense—but at least listen to what they’re going through. Give people a safe place to just be, to work through their own process, to feel their feelings, to have their feelings honored. Even if their ideas may be weird or out there, to recognize that these are very early childhood feelings expressed through an adult lens, through adult intellectual capacities. And so the mix of the adult intellectual capacities and those early childhood feelings can sometimes come out with ideas that are considered bizarre. We wouldn’t call those feelings bizarre in a baby if we knew what the baby went through. So if someone is feeling those exact things, all the more reason to just respect it, to honor it. Not try to argue them out of it, but instead to try to help them make sense of why are you going through this? Why would you have these ideas? And also to assume—to come in with the assumption—and I’ve learned that again and again, there’s no better way to make a connection with someone who’s going through these feelings than to honor that you are going through something that actually makes sense. Especially if we look at it in the light of your history, of your childhood history, of your family history, perhaps even intergenerational history. To make sense of what you went through, what your family went through, how you were treated, and just to assume that this actually is rational. What you’re going through might look irrational, but in a greater context and a greater understanding of your history, this is rational. And so therefore, I as a clinician, and any clinician, should honor it and will honor it. What I found is that is incredibly helpful to people. And what I’ve also seen is the programs around the world. I’ve done a lot of traveling, a lot of visiting programs that help people in psychotic breaks. The programs that follow this, each in its own specific way—and sometimes not even programs, sometimes just kind people or therapists working in isolation—therapists like Anne Silver, lots of other ones that I see out there. They’re not extremely common, but often they work under the radar, off the grid. And what they do is they don’t medicate people. They don’t force them to be anything other than who they are. And instead, try to help them and sometimes try to include even their family system in trying to gain new perspective on what this person went through. And don’t treat them like the dog in the New York City apartment who’s been abandoned, which is just medicated, forced, shut it up, put a muzzle on it. I remember once I had a neighbor who had crying dogs, and what she did is she got a little contraption that anytime it would cry, it would spray vinegar into its eyes because she was so terrified that the dogs were gonna be taken away and she’d lose her lease because she’d go out and abandon these dogs in her apartment all day long. It’s like, wow! Spraying vinegar into the dog’s eyes every time it cried as negative behavioral therapy? That sounds a lot like how traditional psychiatry works. Now, they don’t necessarily spray vinegar into people’s eyes, but they do all sorts of other things that are kind of comparable. And you know what? According to psychiatry, sometimes this is the best way to just numb.
People out and medicate them. But in the long run, the evidence, the scientific evidence—maybe I can even put some of the scientific evidence in the description box if people want to look at links that show what I’m talking about. It’s not just me talking out of school, out of opinion; it’s talking out of scientific fact backed by evidence of Psychiatry itself.
But more humane ways, the more respectful ways, the more ways of honoring what people are going through and considering it. And as Silver said, a healthy desire, a healthy motivation from within to work this stuff out, to make sense of what somebody went through, even if they’re not necessarily consciously aware of it. Actually, by definition, they’re not consciously aware of it.
And I think the therapist can help them become more consciously aware that they actually are going through something fundamentally healthy, even if to the outside world it doesn’t look that way. Well, doing that, all these different ways that humans have figured out how to help people, how to honor them, how to bring them back into community, how to love them and nurture them and not abandon them all over again, not repeat that trauma of abandonment.
These other ways to help people move forward in life, grow, and become functional, happy adults again.