We need access to our unconscious mind to work through material and heal and this can happen in many different ways, such as by using the creative process through various art forms, and working with dreams. When I started psychoanalysis and my degree in dance movement therapy at 29, my marriage was dissolving, and I was also doing a lot of new movement in the fields of contact improvisation and pair figure skating, both of which are quite acrobatic. All the opening up of both mind and body created a series of psychotic breaks. It was awful, but also lucky in a way because I never had to use psychedelics to get in touch with all the stuff. I was always able to keep working, never hospitalized, and just kept going to therapy and working hard to understand all the symbols and images that were coming out and what they might mean. When I stopped trying to figure out what the messages were trying to tell me, as if they were outside of me, and starting asking myself, “what I am trying to tell myself,” it was a huge shift. Then it opened up all these feelings and emotions that I hadn’t had access to before, and I was able to get in touch with myself.
I was susceptible to psychosis because I had a lot of trauma, and my family used repression, disassociation, compartmentalization, and being really unconscious as coping strategies. I was lucky though, with my hearing impairment and the ice skating training, I feel like those gave me enough differences from my family to break the cycles with, different ways of seeing the world and being in it, and was able to see that there might be a different way. When I was 29 and had all these life changes, I started having a lot of psychosis. It might have happened anyway, but I think my family had a way of repressing that material and I just took the lid off of everything with the psychoanalysis, meaning my psyche wasn’t tamped down anymore, it all exploded out. Which I am grateful for, so that I could work through the stuff and not pass that on to other generations.
For me, I had to figure out what the hallucinations were about, why I would see things, feel things, hear things. The idea was that my unconscious mind was now accessible to me in a way that it had never been before, because it wasn’t being repressed. I have always been a symbolic person who was interested in metaphors, and I started looking at every hallucinations, no matter which type, as some sort of symbol or metaphor for a deeper feeling I must be having about something. At first, I was interpreting them as signs from the universe or from other people, and that made it worse and feel really out of control. But when I started to see each hallucination as something that was coming from me, from my own mind, as a way to indicate to myself that I had an unconscious feeling, emotion, or thought about something, I started to make real progress.
It became that I was trying to reach myself. What that means is that I had grown up so disconnected from myself and my true feelings, and when I finally took the lid off and allowed the energy of the unconscious to arrive and come up, my mind was desperately trying to find ways to communicate with me about myself, and spoke in the world of images and symbols, like the same as how dreams do. To open to that meant that I had to open to my feelings about many things in my life, things I was doing, my feelings about other people, and also to insight about relationship dynamics in my family and with other people. I had to see all this stuff that I wasn’t able to see before. It was totally overwhelming. I also became aware that I never really knew how I actually felt about things, and wasn’t able to directly feel my feelings. It felt like a third person information, like maybe she feels like this or like that. There were hints of feelings, but no clarity.
I didn’t have a good connection with my body.
I had a lot of trauma, so in my case, I dampened the connection between my mind and body so that I wouldn’t have to feel. There was also a lot of gaslighting in my house which also distorts the mind body connection and twists the emotions up so that they get blocked.
So I became very focused on the body mind connection and strengthening it, and straightening it out. I saw the emotions as violin strings that go from your head through your whole body, and that each emotion was like a violin string that had been broken, wound too tight, or too loose, and I had to fix each string. I worked on each emotion to understand how it felt in my body, and what thoughts in my mind were connected to each emotion. I spent a few years in a painstaking process of noticing every physical sensation and looking for the corresponding thought and emotion that went with it. This also applied the other way, if I noticed a thought, I would look for the corresponding emotion and physical sensation. I chose to hold the belief that there always was a corresponding one, that things don’t just happen in one part of your system without being mirrored in other parts. I don’t know if this is right or not, but I think it did help me rewire my brain and emotions, to be able to make a stronger link between my mind and body. When there isn’t a strong link, the energy of the mind is more free and is less grounded. This can contribute to seeing relationship and relevance where it’s not emotionally or physically supported by any evidence, and is such a pain to have to deal with! When my mind is connected strongly in with my body because it feels safe to be so present, and when any emotion I may perceive is not threatening to survival so there is no reason to keep my mind away from them, I only see relationship where it really exists. It feels good to be concrete and there’s this full body-ness to experience and my emotions make sense and can resonate with others, and there is a feeling of relevance and belonging.
Things belong, things make sense on an emotional level, even when they’re difficult, and I feel organized on the inside on a psyche level because I’m interpreting the outside world in a more organized, connected, and grounded way. It is painful sometimes, which is why tolerance of uncomfortable emotions is so important. For me, I have a hard time accepting what people are really like.
I spent a long time living in my head about what people are like and having fake relationships, so now that I’m more in touch with my own emotions and want to connect through those, I’ve had to learn a lot about what real, grounded relationships are like, not just within myself, but with other people.
One more thing / when I practiced connecting thoughts with physical sensations, I mostly did that as a meditation practice, or when I was working on mindfulness. So if I was sitting for a half hour, it was like a noting practice. I would note a thought, and then look for the sensation and see if I could detect an emotion, or I would note a sensation and then look for the thought and see if I could detect an emotion. It took a lot of concentration so I usually did it when I was sitting on the cushion, as a meditation.
I also had to work hard to heal a divide between an inner self and an outer self, so that the emotions could be the same. Otherwise, I had one set of emotions inside that may or may not be repressed, and another set of fake emotions or more socially appropriate emotions on the outside, and that made things worse. Getting the inner and outer selves to connect so that I could experience one cohesive feeling at a time was also really helpful.
I also have one more piece I want to share that was really helpful in turning a corner. It was a book by Joseph Campbell called Myths to Live By. It was about primitive man’s mind, how they lived equally in the world of the mind and emotions and the physical world, and were able to navigate the differences, and didn’t separate the two, and how in modern civilization, man has learned to repress those primitive sides of his brain and they only come out in a few moments here and there. He also talks a lot about psychosis and how it is a hero’s journey because it is a dive into the psyche for information that could heal it, which is totally true, and the important part is once you dive in, being able to come back out and understand what you found there. I thought a lot about the world of the mind and the concrete world and what it meant for the two to be aligned, and worked towards that. And I do feel pretty aligned right now, I just have a bit more repressed emotion to work through. The book might be slightly triggering to read, but it is a super valuable perspective.
I did totally find meditation a game changer too. Being able to identify something as a thought vs how it really is, noticing when I was going into the past or future vs being in the present, all the mind training was also super helpful. It’s just important to know that psychosis is curable and takes a lot of hard work, but is possible. And it doesn’t mean your mind can’t be creative. There is just this overriding sense of context that gives everything its proper place.
I think trauma can be healed too. It’s painstaking and slow, but it can be healed, and also seen differently. Once the hallucinations are embraced as additional helpful information about the self and don’t feel intense anymore, it’s so much easier.
To work on the healing process more specifically when you can trace it back to a root event or dysfunctional relationship, it’s like math in a way. You may not remember how it felt, but you can deduce the possible emotions or states experienced, and what you know is what you did experience as an adult when you have been attempting to replicate the experience of a younger child or infant. We pursue things unconsciously that will help us resolve repressed emotions from before, and when those old emotions get triggered, we are able to work through the past in a more complete way, thus really letting it go. Notice what is extreme in your life and how it makes you feel, and what you might have experienced earlier in life that might have given you a similar feeling, and see if you can process both the emotion from present day circumstances, and the emotions from the past, and have compassion for both versions of you, both ages. The compassion and loving kindness piece is very important, because it allows us to not judge how we felt then or now, and just to be with the feelings in a calm, supportive way, which is comforting to us and allows the feeling to be felt. Then there is this release of the feeling, and we feel changed as a result.
Just to say a little more about managing an emotion, if there’s a wave of feeling. I love using imagery with emotions, such as a circle, or a wave, and it allows me to trace the progress of the feeling as I move through it. When is the emotion first beginning? When is it beginning to build, and when does it crescendo? How long does it stay at the top before it starts to come down? Can I be with the feeling and witness it in all parts of the cycle without adding extra emotion to it, or judging myself and blocking it? Can I return back to an anchor like my breath or nature when I need a break from the wave? It’s always good to know that you don’t have to ride the wave of feeling to completion, and can choose to take a time out, a break, go for a walk, put on a funny movie, etc. . . You can distract yourself from the feeling. You can also support yourself in the feeling, taking a bath, using art materials, doing some movement, listening to music, petting a pet, cuddling in a blanket. etc. . When you have built up practice as a witness to your emotions so that you don’t get swept away with them, it gives you a lot more control when it comes to regulating them, so that you can choose how to participate with the emotion when it arises. For myself, I encourage myself to feel the feeling because that is my Achilles heel, and sometimes I support myself in the feeling with art or music or movement, and other times, I am able to just be with the feeling with my breath. I also enjoy being able to understand why I feel the way I do, but I also know sometimes we just won’t know why we feel a certain way and that’s ok. Being able to be with feelings is an essential way of working out the psychosis, because the psychosis came about as another way for your mind to give you information that you would have normally gotten through your emotions. It’s much nicer and more direct to get the information through your emotions. Continue to build a metta or tong len practice to have a lot of compassion for yourself and others in this process. Any questions? Feel free to contact me through my website – healingthroughmovement.squarespace.com
Eve Chalom 