Craving to be Transformed

Posted on January 3, 2006 in Psycho-bunk Psychosis Religiosity

REVISED

A difference between me and the unafflicted is that I am not so prone to sticking with an illusion. In mania, I invent many fantasies and in depression, I destroy them. The unafflicted, on the other hand, have a bad experience and seek desparately for a “reason why this happened to me”. Transformation occurs, they say. They are new people, different from the ones they were before. God or some other power has magnified them, they say, made them complete.

If I feel washed in the Blood of the Lamb, saved by Jesus, annointed by God to do His Work on Earth, chosen by extraterrestrials, possessed by demons who want to thwart my Greater Purpose, motivated to join Toastmasters or MENSA, called upon to vote for George W. Bush as an “honest” candidate, or selected to defend Country Music as the One True Form of Song, either my wife or I calls my psychiatrist. They are lies that come from the disease — fibs of grandiosity and religiosity — so I must be watchful. But the unafflicted adopt such beliefs all the time and none of them seeks treatment.

I demolish these beliefs whenever I crash into a depression. Depression is my friend: it vets out the odd notions and, once I have floated in its turgid waters for a time, washes me up on sanity’s beach. (At this point, I have to be careful that I don’t develop that kind of land sickness known as a “mixed state” which gives rise to anger or, worse, leads me to jump off a cliff onto the rocks.) The trick with depression is to become like a boat or a mass of floating kelp. You make every effort not to dive. If you dive too deep, you entertain different delusions: paranoia and the idea that you are in such pain, you just want to die.

“Normal” people fear and crave trauma. They hear our stories of bouncing about: they don’t want to be like that. And they abet we bipolars in our particular manias — witness the case of Timmy Treadwell, mascot to the crowd that has difficulty distinguishing between a grizzly and a teddy bear.

When the unafflicted have an experience such as sleep paralysis, they strive to make sense of it. Others encourage them to invent terrible stories: aliens probing their genitals and inner organs, demons or satanists cleaving them in two, or angels driving flaming swords through their hearts and their bowels. When the physical evidence is lacking, they insist on magic or divine intervention. “I blew a transmitter out of my nose, but it fell down the sink before I could retrieve it,” said one alien abductee. He might well as said that the aliens came back to pick it out when they got wind that his doctor was going to take an x-ray. At all costs, this man wants to dig his fingernails into the horror of being treated as a lab subject.

This finding should help us see people who lust for their manias as yearning to live an extreme form of normality.

Harvard researcher Susan Clancy discovered that the one thing that distinguished alien abductees from others who underwent the feeling that they were trapped in their bed unable to move with strange shadows in the room was that the alleged abductees sought out the help of a hypnotist or guided imagery therapist who directed them towards the belief that aliens had abducted them. Every movement needs its priesthood. Those priests lead them through hell and, after that, into heaven.

American Optimism demands that our hurts become our gifts. If you lose both legs and an arm, get raped, become addicted to morphine, develop three kinds of arthritis (as did a friend of mine), lose all your teeth, and suffer from multiple myeloma, it calls upon you to find the good in the experience, to mark yourself as chosen. Then it may reward you. If you refuse, if you see these things as bad, it leaves you on Skid Row or in a back ward of a County Hospital. You are a failure. You have not been transformed. And it’s all your fault.

I reject Optimism as being every bit as unrealistic as the paranoic pessimism I feel in my lowest melancholies. Wounds hurt. Some never heal. And what is important is to learn how to live with it. I am not a different person than I was when I went unmedicated with the disease. My illness did not make me a stronger person: it made it hard, very hard to express myself. What helped were the medications and a reframing of my experience. I have not become a Republican. I have not gotten myself baptized. I have not embraced the capitalist system.

At the moment, life is good. And I know how to handle my moods as I become aware of them.

I don’t call that transformation or spiritual experience. I call that freedom from pain.

Those treating the mentally ill tell us that spirituality can save us. When I was in an outpatient program shortly after I was diagnosed with my disease, I met many people who claimed that prayer helped them. One of them told me that her devotions helped her through all her hospitalizations. I asked her how many times she’d been on the psych ward. She told me that it had been five times in three years. Other believers found themselves at war with their husbands suddenly. The husband of one woman got his church to declare that her suicide attempts amounted to abandonment of her children. She continued to attend that church, however, because she felt the need to forgive them.

The unafflicted often tell us to forgive, partly I think because they know they have treated us very badly. And I do forgive, in so far that I will not wreak vengeance against them. On the other hand, I won’t stick around for the most toxic of them to hit me again.

I do this because anger hurts. It summons up visions of what was done to me. While I must be wary, I must also not wallow.

If I am to be called spiritual in any way, it is this: I see myself as inextricably linked to the Universe. That entity penetrates me to the deepest cells of my body. That there are particles out there in the vastness of space which consist of the same basic material as me gives me joy. Coming out of one of my worst dark manias — the belief that I alone existed and everything that I thought I saw was a figment of my imagination — I find this knowledge a relief. It is true for me and just as true for you.

That is Reality. It puzzles me to think that anyone would want to believe in anything else.