Oh yeah, Sometimes I lose it

I was once diagnosed as having Psychotic Thought Disorder, not otherwise described. That’s from the DSM IV, I believe. Around the time that my wife and I started moving seriously toward divorce, my ability to … I don’t even know how to describe it… I started coming apart in really strange psychological ways. It’s something I never experienced (consciously) prior to that, and it hasn’t happened often since I sorted a lot of things out in therapy thereafter. I’m not really strongly affected by this thought disorder, except under certain stressful circumstances (having to do with problems encountered with my personal integrity).

I’m not trained in psychology, so I can’t say a whole lot about it in any kind of clinical way. I would try to describe it, maybe in Jungian ways. For me, my personality archetypes can be distinctly separate influences on my thought processes. From the way I view that personally, it’s near enough a schizophrenic thing that I can best relate to it that way. As a unique individual, I’m made up of sub-component personalities, or arch-types, to use the psychologically appropriate word (they’re not whole personalities, they focus on specific categories through which I define life). At one point, my therapist asked me to define them all and their functions as a psychological exercise.

To name a few of them, if not all, they were as follows:
The soldier. The soldier is one of my favorite archetypes, and he carries the whole load in a great many situations. The soldier is responsible for completing the mission (i.e., for making sure I function like a human being and uphold my responsibilities). The soldier is one of the most useful archetypes I have, and something I’m immensely proud of in myself – the ability to carry on in all circumstances.

The shaman. The shaman thinks about things mystical and eternal. When I think about the meaning of being human, when I reflect on the unique currents that define mankind among all other things, the shaman is lost in a fascinating world of history, religion, and science.

The child. I don’t like talking about my “inner child” publicly, really. Suffice it to say that I probably didn’t have too much worse a childhood than most people in this country, but for whatever reason, I really reacted differently than most people. I’m insecure and willfully reclusive, especially intellectually. The child is a basket case of fears, and I probably ought to sort it all out, but I really haven’t bothered yet.

The Persecutor. Yeah, the Persecutor gets a capital letter in his name. He’s this big, shrieking, discorporate head who claims to exist to maintain my integrity, to keep me honest and remind me to be humble. But he’s also, or perhaps, he’s ONLY, a fucking butcher of my own soul who tortures me and claims it’s in the name of honesty. Mostly I try not to give any significance to the Persecutor, because in my therapy, I came to the realization that it doesn’t do me any good, and I can maintain my integrity in other ways without berating myself.

There are some more; there’s a very feminine part of myself, the lover, who is a really good-natured, soft and nurturing presence, and others that I don’t seem to recall at the moment.

All of these archetypes are me. For whatever reason, I can segregate them individually and I can have dialogues with them as though we were separate people. This might be a really strange way of dealing with my conscience and my soul. It might be insanity; you’ll have to decide for yourself <smile>. For me, this is just the way it is, and I can remember dealing with my inner dialogue in this kind of way since about the 3rd grade. It’s just sort of like dialing up a friend on the phone. When I asked whether this was schizophrenia, my therapist said that if it were schizophrenia, I wouldn’t realize that the whole thing was occurring within my own head, and that every separate entity was just a side of myself segregated from the whole for a time. Now, if you have discussions with yourself this way, I’d like to know it, because I’ve never heard of such a thing, though my therapist gave me the impression it’s not altogether strange.

The problem was when I couldn’t integrate the parts back into the whole, and I battled with individual parts. Let me explain the origin of the need for therapy. It’s all such a plagiarism of 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke that you’ll perhaps get a laugh.

I got married to a woman that I didn’t love. Why? Well, one of my archetypes is the chameleon, who learned to be what other people expected me to be. I didn’t even KNOW I was being what other people expected me to be, it was a sort of habit I picked up growing up. Somehow I learned to anticipate what my mother and brother wanted of me, such that if I did it without being made to do it, I didn’t get messed with by them. So liking not to be messed with, this is just something I learned to do – to be externally validating. So at 28, I was dating, and it seemed like I was supposed to get married, so I got married. Five years later, I was miserable, and knew the marriage was the problem. I lived a very hostile life and I was unhappy, and I was plotting the divorce, when my wife asked me to get into marriage counseling.

I did, and in the first session I told my therapist (alone) that it was just a matter of time. Having stated that, in the weeks that followed, my archetypes began to fracture. At the time, I didn’t know anything about my archetypes at all. I just started having massive panic attacks at work and at home. Serious panic attacks, fearing that I would become unable to control my own actions and that I would “go crazy” and kill myself. They were really bad, sometimes lasting 8 hours, with all of the symptoms. Hot and cold flashes, dizziness, sweating, heart racing, the whole works. At that time, I was almost crazy. My therapist asked me if I could get my guns out of my house, even… (!) Well, at that time my panic attacks were bad, and every day I would come home at lunch from work (I lived 5 minutes away) and nap for an hour or so, then go back. I remember one day lying down in a panic and having this sense of separateness between myself and some other aspect of my conscience. This other aspect was screaming at me that I was a fraud, and I was crying like a little child cries, shrieking and wailing and tears flowing as I incoherently sobbed. It was at that moment that I bestowed the title of Persecutor on that part of myself.

In talking about these episodes with my therapist thereafter, we started to sort it out. There was a disunity between the way I was living, and the way I wished to be living. Two things that are very important to me spiritually are to avoid hurting people and to maintain my personal integrity, to be honest in what I do, say, and in how I live.
So I found myself caught in a Catch-22: I knew I didn’t love my wife, I knew I wanted to leave. However, my wife loved me deeply and truly, and my leaving her (resulting in her second divorce) would hurt her immensely. So a part of me wanted to carry on and “try to be a better person”, and another part of me wanted me to be fucking real for a change, to admit that I wanted something else (I wanted to be me for once in years and years). Through all of this, the chameleon kept subtly making me what other people wanted me to be. The three forces competed directly with one another, and it tortured me intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally.

So I spent 10 months in therapy, even taking some anti-psychotics for a while (which only helped by making me sleepy all the time, so it seemed). In the end, I decided to leave my wife because it was the right thing to do. Better to hurt someone by being honest, than protect them by being a liar.

It’s been about 15 months since then, and I’m not sure I’m always living the right way. When I came to Writing.com yesterday, I knew I would have some problems with my own psyche because I’m deeply affected by my own desire to be a writer, my fear of failure, my insecurity to be my real self, and my incessant ability to criticize myself in such an absurd way that I can’t begin to make progress as a writer.

So today, reading a really good writer’s work, I found myself having another sort of breakdown with my various elements again. It hadn’t happened in a long time, more than 2 years… So I was journaling through it, and I thought, man these readers (if any!) are going to think I’m really in danger to myself. I’m not. Sometimes I come “undone” to use a term I find appropriately mild. I have to separate to reconstruct the whole sometimes. It’s not a bad thing – it’s just strange if you have to witness it and you have no experience with it.

It makes me colorful, at least to me. It creates a sort of … wound that I have to struggle with. And frankly, I can see that my soul needs this wound in itself just so that it can say “see, I’ve done something difficult, I’ve carried on however well despite this wound here.” And that keeps me from pitying myself publicly (or should I say more than I already do…)

It can be tiring when it happens. Fortunately it doesn’t happen often anymore.