Free at last, free at last. Bliss, oh Bliss, free at last! 
This story has been written primarily for a few close friends although all readers are welcome.
Given the nature of the stigma associated with emotional illness, the pharmaceutical bias of the medical establishment and the vast misunderstanding of emotional functions in popular culture it is unlikely that this message would be accepted or even be of interest to most people.
At least the record is made, for my satisfaction , that someone like myself did exist and did transform in an age where this process is relatively unsought and unknown.
I was sick and then I was cured. I was emotionally ill until I was thirty. I was made ill by the psychological abuses of both my family and the larger social world. At the age of thirty my personality changed, I was totally reconstructed. I changed it with help and guidance. The difference in my two lives, my two personalities, before and after, is virtually the difference of life and death. Prior to my change, I was barely emotionally alive yet I did experience states of extreme fear, depression and anxiety. I was able to think and function to some extent but mostly lived either in a state of deadness or extreme emotional agitation. I could not emotionally react in a natural way and so had to avoid most situations that caused emotion. I could not direct my actions or my life to any cause or interaction with others. I could not progress or grow in almost any way. My current personality is as fully emotionally alive with a full emotional range and I have no social fears or anxieties.
Previously, I was emotionally repressed. I was as if dead, yet I suffered greatly as if in an unending nightmare which I could not understand. My conception of myself now is that I somehow died or was murdered as a small child and lived on drifting as a frightened ghost, a dead person yet alive and dreaming a nightmare, a somnambulist, a recording machine that recorded events but could not participate in them. From emotional repression I deteriorated over the years into a fractured personality. I have no sense of "break" from my two personalities, I have always felt a continual flow of self, yet my current self is my full self and I regard my previous self as my dead self. I remember my past before age 30, It was "I" but then again it was "Not-I". I live now with a strange dichotomy of memories and feelings about who I am. This also makes me a person who is able to draw on opposite types of behaviour to use at I will.
After I changed, over time I realized that I was not the same person. At first, I had thought I was simply "more" than I was previously but I came to realize that I was not only "more" but I was "different". If I had met my previous personality, I wouldn't have liked much about him and I don't suppose he did like himself much either. That's as it should be.
I do not have multiple personalities but I have had sequential personalities. I feel that both were "me", some essence remains the same yet I am not the same. The First-I was an undeveloped or not yet developed personality. This is a combination of personality change and personality development. Not being able to fully comprehend this is the basic mistake that others make when they try to understand what I have to share.
My deadness wasn't completely dead, I did have a shallow type of emotional life and I suffered a great deal. I even experienced a period of madness which was the ultimate horror for me. I suffered initially from the parental abuse and neglect which helped to encyst me at a very early age. Later I suffered socially from not being able to provide well for myself in an environment of competitive and adversarial. And during that period I lost almost all of my life opportunities and my social identity was permanently damaged.
Perhaps my biochemical inheritance in my brain did influence the outcome. However, in light of what I know now, i.e. that social actions can be growth or anti-growth, and that psycho-social activities such as psychotherapy can cure illness then biochemical causes are totally irrelevant.
After my "deadening experience of my early childhood, my adolescence was just a long progression through frustration of the ability to live and consequently a gradual and deep descent into madness and psychosis. At one time I had many of the symptoms of classical
schizophrenia or
paranoid schizophrenia as reported by many other people. That experience to me was obviously assisted by psycho-social circumstance and I understand experientially its process of development.
For about two years, I heard "voices" and for about one or two months I had a few visual hallucinations. My lowest point was an attempted suicide which I was fortunate enough to have failed. In that attempt, I was having complete psychotic breaks and was very aware of it and was extremely frightened of what was happening to myself and was trying to stop the process which I felt was about to imprison my mind somehow forever.
I am not "better", I am not "struggling". I am not "recovered", I am not just a "survivor". I am
cured. Even more, my emotional functions are superior, "Weller than well", because of the methods and knowledge I have learned in the process of my cure. I have the capability to experience a wide range and depth of emotions and I am very resilient able to quickly overcome or adjust to trauma and able to talk on complex and demanding tasks and challenges.
If "cured is a too demanding or vague concept, I can might say that I am a "restructured" personality and that psychotherapy helped to facilitate my restructuring.
I did not recover to anything I previously had, because I was not previously healthy. I am a "survivor" but I am more than a survivor because I did not just survive but I transcended and triumphed. I have peak feelings of well being and I have social and physical accomplishments to correspond to my state post-change.
Note: In further retrospect I might analyze myself as having many more developmental stages of personality First, my childhood personality to age six when I was taken by my father, then I was broken, destroyed and repressed, then yet another stage of mental dysfunction and then finally found liberation at age thirty. Since then, for thirty years since my liberation I have been the same person, the same stable personality.
No matter what has happened since I was age thirty, it has been the life of an emotionally alive and self-responsible person. Even, previously I did not make "mistakes", I was not capable of such. I was merely driven from one escape to another. Only when I became alive, then I had the freedom and capacity to make mistakes.
Prior to age thirty I could neither help myself nor my sister who also suffered much from my parents and adverse life circumstances. For that time I have no sense of self-blame though I have had much pain and regret from the later recovered memory of what happened and what was lost. After that time, I learned what it is truly like to make mistakes of my will and have to live by the consequences.
I am cured, but I have never been free of the effects of my past. In fact I am very unconcerned with specific traumatic events from my repressed life although the tragedies will always haunt me. It is all over and done with and experienced ad nauseum and gobbled up by myself with enthusiasm as I learned to enjoy positive and negative feelings. When I discover any emotion from that past I enjoy processing it. There is always something to return form all those years of processing life as a half-person. For instance a memory or a book or a film might return to me and I will want to reintegrate it into my current personality, even for example, I will reread a book and reintegrate what was an unfinished experience with a now fully functioning personality.
And often after recovering memory I go through sadness as I understand what I lost but also I experience the happiness of having been there, enjoying the feel of the places and the experience of others and I even do manage to recover a happiness of life and existence that got smothered by the layers of torment and disintegration.
So and integration of self can bring both happiness to memories even of traumatic times. I‘ve discovered that life despite all it’s sadness has an underlying element of joy which can be experienced even in memory recall.
However, at I am saying is that I have for the most part finished my past emotional traumatic business, which is the technical definition of neurosis. Though the effects may linger there is little unfinished business left in that respect for me to resolve.
But my life of course will always suffer because my social identity was permanently damaged. The cure came too late in a social sense in a culture which stigmatizes mental illness regardless if it is resolved. Too much time and opportunity went by for me to be able to gloss over it in my the presentation of myself in North American Society.
My cure occurred over a few years, with actually a few months being the critical months, even a few events being the critical events. The period of absolute joy and ecstasy after my change was very short for me. After that, I had perhaps even the most suffering and frustration of my life even worse than that which initially destroyed me . I discovered I was an anomaly and that being healthy and cured did not give me a place in society. There were no healthy and cured people,
I didn't exist!, as no one believed that a person like myself could exist. There were no acceptable routes back into society. The routes that existed were for people who had "problems", they brought people back into a system of social assistance, stigmatization and a dead-ended menial job ghetto.
Often, I found out that when "helpers" help someone they don't like to consider that the person they are helping may be superior to them. In fact the very process of helping is often actually keeping the person down. In many respects, I believe the "helping profession" as currently existing promotes social stratification and is in itself a manifestation of social class conflict.
I had fundamentally changed my personality. All the hindrances of my past mind were gone. If I could have lived my life over again it would have been completely different. But now that I had my full faculties, I did not have an equal opportunity with everyone else. I, in fact, had either no opportunity or diminished opportunity.
To some point, my past took away my future no matter who I was or how I had changed.
I spent some years of accommodation to try to succeed in this new situation and totally without help and with much feeling of despair and hopelessness. I had to accept a life of menial labour contrary to my disposition of study and intellectualism, with no future, living poorly under harsh and dangerous social circumstances with rooming houses, cockroaches, drunks and assaults, with few friends and little chance of romance. I had to accept a Spartan future, and I put my Joy of Life and energy into intellectual pursuits to give myself a relationship with the Human world. I decided to accept this and I settled into it, like a prisoner of human history.
In spite of these disadvantages I achieved some quite remarkable social success both in ordinary working and developing a career. I could only do this by concealing by past and concealing my past personality. I have written about this in another post.
The point of writing my story about working is what difference being "cured" has done for the course of my life. Before I was cured, I could accomplish almost nothing. I drifted and descended through life. I attempted no less that four times to go to University and each time ran away in fear and anxiety. Finally, I had an attempted suicide, a stay in a mental hospital and then incapacitated and drugged up on social assistance. And still at that point, nothing was of any importance as I was emotionally dead and emotionally incapacitated. After I was cured I was capable of emotional interaction with others. I was able to actualize myself and guide my own life. I developed many skills. I have had jobs and careers and developed friends, romantic relationships and had an adventurous life. Nevertheless, it has been a bittersweet half-life or half-success. I was able to cure myself and my personality but I was not able to cure my social identity. It has affected my career and social relationships by the necessity to conceal my former troubles. My past has always weighed me down like a stone.
I lost half my life, I lost my rightful future, but I still have had real life for the last half and it is a beautiful thing and I am completely grateful for this wonder.
If I really
do exist, if I have been emotionally ill, experience life and perhaps even diagnosed as schizophrenic and then cured by psychotherapy, is it not true that there must be others like myself?
At the very least, we can no longer say
ALL mental illness is biochemical and must be treated by drugs. My existence puts the lie to that.
I am extremely skeptical of the biochemical model. Of course there is a correspondence between biochemistry and dysfunction but I think it works both ways and it is dysfunction which feeds back to biochemistry and genetics. Furthermore, from my many personal interactions with other emotionally ill people I believe that it is not just abuse that produces dysfunction but also vapidity, will-lessness and the lack of use of the emotional function.
In effect the current medical establishment discourages the expression and use of negative emotions and encourages the use of drugs which kill the will and spirit. This cannot have any effect but to increase the number of the mentally ill in the population.
Not only that, the biochemical model is totally irrelevant for those that can be cured. If real time teaching and therapists can cure another human being then the causes of the illness are irrelevant. What matters is the cure. Moreover, drugging people without curing them takes away their spirit, motivation and the essence of what they are. It is in essence, psychic murder.
If I can exist, reconstructed and fully functioning then so can others. I'm afraid that my society has relegated many of those that are like I was to a future of hopelessness.
I can't speak for all psychotherapy and mental illness. I don't know about it all, I'm not a psychotherapist or perhaps I would know more. My story presented here is a personal perspective. I do know about myself and have the lessons learned and a body of knowledge built from my own struggle. Those experiences have given me a foundation and approach upon which to build my life and relationships.
A note about the term "psychotherapy"I have noticed recently in the literature promoted by the pharmaceutical companies and the medical establishment that the term
psychotherapy seems to be taking on a different meaning from what I thought it to be, What I understood it was in the twentieth century was that it was a method for personality change and resolving personality problems.
In fact, I think this promotion of concepts presented by public brochures in government run health centers, doctor’s offices and drop-ins does not match the actuality. I have found on net researches that there are some strong effective psychotherapies emerging. Unfortunately they don't have the power of the pharmaceutical dollar behind them, so this is the reason for the slant in the information presented to the public. I see in the media and in my personal contacts that bias has been transmitted to the majority of individuals in my society.
Nowadays, I see psychotherapy is regarded as a "support system" and referred to as "talk therapy". I see this in all the public information distributed by governmental mental health organizations in North America. It is obvious that the definition of the term itself has been modified and co-opted by the pharmaceutical companies in the selling of their drugs as the only solution for the human condition.
"Psychotherapy" has become a support system to ensure "compliance" for patients to take their drugs.
There is the tendency to think of it as a means to protect the sensitive rather that to transform the sensitive into the tough.
Psychotherapy is more than "Talk". Eclectic, confrontative, Gestalt, bio-energetic psychotherapy involves emotional expression and doing things with the body that changes the nature of emotional expression. This affects both the body and the emotions, is permanent in effect and is far more than the verbal "talk" function of the voice box.
Am I Real?I have a fundamental problem is trying to communicate my story to most people in modern society. The first is that there are so very few like myself and the second is the bias and ignorance fostered upon the public by the modern medical-pharmaceutical business establishment. Even further there is a lack of information distributed as to what constitutes good emotional communication. I further suspect that official agencies are destructive towards mental health doing the exact opposite to their proclaimed aims in that they tend to discourage open communication and emotional expression. For instance the expression of anger or pain is often curative and leads to conflict resolution , individually or in group conflict, currently or historically. But this introduces a radical and unpredictable element into the social order and the current social order is geared towards control and conservatism, and thus emotional repression.
Given these factors it is very difficult to find anyone who can or will accept what I have to share.
This lead to the bizarre situation that
I cannot possibly exist! .. at least not as I claim to do so. The drug companies and the medical establishment say that I do not exist. It is implicit and explicit in the model of mental illness and schizophrenia that they proselytize. They say that mental illness is a brain disease and incurable. They say no one is responsible, it just happens by itself and the mind of humanity is irrelevant. We are all just neurons and biochemistry divorced from our experience according to them.
Therefore, I cannot possibly exist and everything I have to say is a lie and/or a delusion. If I did truly exist it would be necessary to debunk me because there are
billions of dollars invested in my non-existence.
"Big Pharma" sells drugs predicated on the dictum that "a cure is not possible" but that it is possible to "control" symptoms.
Almost no one in the medical establishment knows how or even wants to know how to help people change personalities, nor believes it is possible and consequently makes no such attempt. All of the money by governments and help agencies is put into promoting drug solutions. Drugs are the new icepick lobotomies. They control the problem population. In fact when they are "controlling symptoms" they are responsible for murdering the patients personalities as they are taking away their spirit and motivation and any hope for a true cure.
What is going on in the current medical establishment has a very direct effect on me personally. Their dictum about emotional illness and schizophrenia is distributed into the masses through radio, TV. newspapers books, government and medical brochures. Most attempts to present my story to people are met with suspicion and mistrust because it runs contrary to the official propaganda.
I meet this from people in every walk of life. I have met many people who have relatives who have "schizophrenia" or "bi-polar disease" (the new word for manic-depressive). They will immediately parrot the genetic explanation and drug solution if asked. If I try to share my experience that something other than drugs can actually cure they regard me as ill and unbalanced. Many haven't told me this directly. They just think it and humour me and I find out their true attitude when I probe them in other ways. This has been my constant experience.
For one example of public misinformation I heard Jane Fonda on TV casually mention how nowadays her father could have taken drugs for his bipolar problem. Well, in that case her father would probably not have been a movie star, it is probably very unlikely he would have had children or a daughter named "Jane". He probably would have been a schizophrenic on welfare with a dry mouth and swollen lips from drugs or at best struggling to hold a dull lifeless rote job. He would have been an "asset to society" but not a star. This is the life offered by the drug solution, the death of the inner self.
I see this bias parroted by many celebrity personalities in the media. It is obvious the general population has been sold on this, hook , link and sinker. It leaves no room for my existence.
It is easy for anyone to make discrediting arguments about me and impugn me. Who can prove that they are sane? Can I? Just to try to prove it has ordinary people raising their eyebrows and thinking
"there must be a problem here."Isn't it strange that so many desire a personality change, so many claim to be helping others to change yet there is no vocabulary extant of changelings and there is almost no recognition or acceptance of "changelings" anywhere? Is there a registry of changed persons? An organization of the cured? Where are we? Do people on the news, the news media, talk shows, psychotherapy groups refer to "cured people"? Just the term itself can start an argument. Often when I tell people my story, many of them nod as if accepting, but their obvious lack of questions indicates they are just humoring me or the information is simply meaningless to them. Others simply ridicule or attack me in some way.
As I look around I see a lack of language and terms in regard to describing my own experience. My current identity was born in a simple room with a few other people and nothing else, a kind of virtual environment. My previous identity had been created in the maelstrom of life.
Very few people describe the problems of having an identity from two sets of experiences. But this should be basic to any genuine personality change. On the Internet there is much chatter of "survivors" and "recoveries" but little talk of cures. I do believe there are other methods of change besides psychotherapy. Any method of introspection guided by knowing helpers can work.
Another problem is that there are many false stories of "cure" on the internet. I have searched and so far only found the false stories. These stores are obviously written as attempted therapy by those still looking for help. Some of them clam to be "Weller than well" and then in the conclusion they say they have a steady diet of psychiatric drugs.! Others simply fail any test or evaluation I make in that they do not show how or even mention how their emotional foundation has changed. The proliferation of these false stories is of no help to me as it just makes it more difficult for anyone to accept my story.
Given the current political climate of the medical community it is necessary for people like me to hide in order to be successful in society. Furthermore there are bound to be very few of us because there are now so very few genuine psychotherapy organizations actually practicing personality change and sadly those that are, are not subsidized and beyond the reach of those that need them most.
Yes, I am for real, but on a continent of millions of people, I must hide my real history from almost all of them, hide from their hostility and ignorance, and I have an experience of myself that seems fundamentally unsharable with a population that seems to have no conceptual models with which to receive it.
To tell my positive story can bring a negative effect on my life in terms of friendships, jobs, social standing and much more. I cannot even be in that group of the stigmatized emotionally ill because I stopped being a member of that group long ago and I also stopped being eligible to receive the social and economic benefits of belonging to that group.
So this story has two faces. The story of my psychological cure is
Skyblue positive, the difficulty with my identity thereafter has been quite negative.
My cure has brought me social and financial success yet it necessitated a fundamental alienation from my culture.
