I've been reading a book called Fury in which the author (doing a memoir) talks about her anger and explores all sorts of theory about it. She sites Satir, Reich, Freud, etc. while she carries on her daily life and runs a subplot of dealing with a break up, dabbling in homeopathy. It's interesting, but I don't like it as much as Blame, an addiction themed novel. Blame is very compelling but wraps up at the end a little tidily for me.
Sessions have gone well this week. Feeling good about client progress and treatment plans. Getting very focused and jamming tons into an hour. I've suddenly decided to speed things up.
The CEO left a mass vm saying 10 positions are being cut. That scared people. Two days before our division manager sent an email saying our division was having no cuts. People were so scared they couldn't see the difference in the messages.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Monday, September 19, 2011
Trauma Points
A revamp of workplace budgeting and case assignments recently hit me like the proverbial truck. I was splayed by it and unusually so--an "old" therapist by now by any accounting, these things usually rolled off me--just tell me what to do. But when the news came that I'd see more children and more teens, i caved.
It will make me crazy.
I can't do it.
Then a few days later I'm in here writing about events in my career fresh out of grad school, when I worked with more children and more teens. The flashes of trauma points were almost blinding. Suicide pacts, hurricane devastation, organized crime and pseudo-Satanic cults, etc, etc. Those were the early days of my career in Houston all the while I'm focusing upon the children and there was more: suicide after suicide just for starters and then my own crash and into rehab with alcohol poisoning. There it was. The "It will make me crazy" and the "I can't do it". It had nothing to do with my patients. It was my alcoholism.
It will make me crazy.
I can't do it.
Then a few days later I'm in here writing about events in my career fresh out of grad school, when I worked with more children and more teens. The flashes of trauma points were almost blinding. Suicide pacts, hurricane devastation, organized crime and pseudo-Satanic cults, etc, etc. Those were the early days of my career in Houston all the while I'm focusing upon the children and there was more: suicide after suicide just for starters and then my own crash and into rehab with alcohol poisoning. There it was. The "It will make me crazy" and the "I can't do it". It had nothing to do with my patients. It was my alcoholism.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
The Practical Mystic
Navigating a mood disorder that's given to bursts of bliss and near suicidal depressions can be a fulltime job. Work has always given me a steady course and has seemed to come from somewhere unusually not touched by the moods. It is the connection with others, focusing upon what they need that's steadied my course. Meeting the needs of others has saved me in many ways.
One of my mentors, Christine Page, helped me understand the high end of my so-called 'illness'. She thought that the mania was the experience of sacred space and that in order to live and work successfully in the world that I would have to become a 'practical mystic'--one who could chop the wood and carry the water despite enlightenment.
Adding the twist of my own brand of exquisite mania it has sometimes become chop the water and carry the wood, but in any version, it has worked since creativity is the master brain of all such work anyway.
Becoming an art therapist was an easy choice for me. I don't really remember how it came to my first attention, but i do recall meeting an art therapy student one night in my local tavern. She was an interesting little creature in a motorcycle jacket and cropped blond hair. She rolled her own cigarettes. She was pleasant enough but not really conected, somehow aloof, not the warmth of a friendly soul i'd been used to, but i liked her, liked her detachment. She had her sights on something and i was interested.
I got into a masters psychology program at Spalding, a local private and Catholic college at that time (now, a university). Spalding was my plan b because getting into the art therapy program was tough. They only took 12 or 13. One of the professors at Spalding balked at my ambition. No! she said do psychology and read a couple of books about art therapy. That's all it will take to learn it.
I dismissed her and went on with my plan A. I had my sights on something far more interesting and powerful than the theory we were studying.
I did a great deal of preparation for my application to the Institute of Expressive Therapies (IET). It was one of 3 schools in the world at that time and 2/3 of its staff were rather famous--Sandra Kagin and Vija Lusebrink. They had published the Expressive Therapies Continuum (ECT) which became the foundational model of art therapy.
I took psychology courses and art courses. I prepared an art portfolio. I wrote about myself, went to therapy...I had my sights on something deep and compelling.
One of my mentors, Christine Page, helped me understand the high end of my so-called 'illness'. She thought that the mania was the experience of sacred space and that in order to live and work successfully in the world that I would have to become a 'practical mystic'--one who could chop the wood and carry the water despite enlightenment.
Adding the twist of my own brand of exquisite mania it has sometimes become chop the water and carry the wood, but in any version, it has worked since creativity is the master brain of all such work anyway.
Becoming an art therapist was an easy choice for me. I don't really remember how it came to my first attention, but i do recall meeting an art therapy student one night in my local tavern. She was an interesting little creature in a motorcycle jacket and cropped blond hair. She rolled her own cigarettes. She was pleasant enough but not really conected, somehow aloof, not the warmth of a friendly soul i'd been used to, but i liked her, liked her detachment. She had her sights on something and i was interested.
I got into a masters psychology program at Spalding, a local private and Catholic college at that time (now, a university). Spalding was my plan b because getting into the art therapy program was tough. They only took 12 or 13. One of the professors at Spalding balked at my ambition. No! she said do psychology and read a couple of books about art therapy. That's all it will take to learn it.
I dismissed her and went on with my plan A. I had my sights on something far more interesting and powerful than the theory we were studying.
I did a great deal of preparation for my application to the Institute of Expressive Therapies (IET). It was one of 3 schools in the world at that time and 2/3 of its staff were rather famous--Sandra Kagin and Vija Lusebrink. They had published the Expressive Therapies Continuum (ECT) which became the foundational model of art therapy.
I took psychology courses and art courses. I prepared an art portfolio. I wrote about myself, went to therapy...I had my sights on something deep and compelling.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Few Places
One of the few places I have ever been truly happy has been at work. This is not because my life has been miserable. No, there have been many moments of joy, some moments were such exquisite joy that I've not managed well! Hence my diagnosis: Bipolar Disorder—although I’ve thought many times that a substance-induced Bipolar Disorder was more accurate.
There have been many deliberations (mine and others) about the true nature of what happens in my nervous system and, as with most, I think the DSM has touched the surface, but left much to be found out by the personal experience of it as well as much to be found about the true nature of what is happening along those little synaptic firings that can rock or break a world.
I’ve struggled a Herculean (or would Atlasean be more of what it is?) struggle to function at times. No time as significant, profound, possibly a losing battle as that I fought in 1989. I was ‘prescribed’ make-up to give myself some affect. Alcohol poisoning had drained all affect from me and along with it even the ability to fake it. A little red on the eyelids and a little taupe.
It seemed to work but that did nothing for my inability to speak fluently or worse, for my inability to have enough thoughts to want to speak fluently.
I remember a moment at the pharmacy when I went to pick up my mood stabilizer, my antidepressant and my anti-psychotic. I wrote a check, just barely, my handwriting was constricted, the whole process seemed foreign. I broke a diaphoretic sweat just doing it and another sweet moment some months later at the same window when the person on the other side of the counter said “You’re getting better, aren’t you?” I suppose I was. Inch by inch I could speak, inch by inch I could write a check. Inch by inch I no longer needed to sleep from Friday 6pm till Monday 7am.
It was a crash that had been coming all my life. I remember it sometimes for a stretch of time everyday now 22 years later. This morning it is sparked by a silly movie with a young Bruce Willis. 1989 was his heyday. 1989 almost killed me.
I went out on the deck for my usual coffee and cigarette this morning and studied my mood and affect for a bit. “I am rarely happy” I thought “mostly I am okay and things are alright”. Not bad. I am not suffering. I am not manic and out of control. I am alright. And then: “One of the few places I have ever been truly happy has been at work.” That’s when I came to the keyboard (the “typewriter” I still call it sometimes when I am in the flow and not so premeditated in my speech).
It’s true. Work has sustained me: money, friends, mission, happiness. It has been the center hallway around which everything else has come and gone. A double helix of life, wrapping itself around some invisible central corridor through which I walked, sometimes crawled and sometimes barreled like the “freight train” that took a handful of meds to slow it down.
But that has been my happiness. My one sustaining purpose and the place I’ve entertained, become intimate and suffered some of my greatest sorrows. Despite my illness I became a ‘master therapist’ Diane Topping, the most masterful therapist I’ve ever known, said more than once.
I can’t tell you how that happened or how a young therapist would set out to do it. It is more a mystery of how life goes. Becoming a good therapist is more about living your life wherever it takes you and suffering along the way until you find the way out.
For me it has been a spiritual path, my own crucifixions, my own agape love and salvation, my own seemingly endless need to find the exit strategies of debilitating despair. You gain some skills.
This life began for me in precarious circumstances. A child would not have been planned in that perfect storm of demographic craziness. Let’s leave it at that, but let’s also see the perfection of a blueprint for suffering—a blueprint that left me no choice but to live my life from that homebase storm.
Children are helpless to control their circumstances. They have to go internally to exert their power. That was 101 of finding my skills as a therapist: that going within because there were so few choices and because the outer circumstances were so aversive and out of control.
There was violence. Violence of iconic proportions. A shotgun. The intent to kill me. The intent to make me one of the victims of an execution to right a ‘wrong’ my father had done. I was 4 and I have only 2 nonviolent memories of the event. I am grateful for that.
It was my father’s fault, the fault of his profession and one of the events that his choices would unfold to hold me hostage awaiting his death and my mother’s and my own. Somehow, in the man’s mind that sat with us waiting for his moment to rectify my father’s betrayal, this was what had to be done.
My dad chose what he felt was a noble cause. I suppose it was, but it was one that ate its participants for lunch. Pursuing bad guys meant the bad guys would sometimes pursue you.
In the end he saved me and my mother and himself—at least in that moment. In the long run, who knows? Is that what left him unable to be sober? Is that what drove my mother mad? Is that what launched me into this profession?
So there it is I thought when the event surfaced in my own psychotherapy--the iconic psychic event that I did not ‘integrate’ until I had my 40s in my sights. Somewhere after sobriety, about 22 years ago, I began to consider this event as important.
Prior to that I’d flip through family photo albums and say things like:
There is my first bike with its training wheels.
There is my grandmother.
There is dad’s car with the bullet holes.
Ah, the missed opportunities of NOT having your patients bring in their family albums! My therapist, perhaps my 3rd?, caught it.
Wait, wait, let’s go back. There is dad’s car with the bullet holes?
A smattering of paint hit the canvas. Gallons of coins fell out of this jackpot.
And so my double helix uncoiled and, in an instant, rewound itself. I was someone else. He was someone else.
There have been many deliberations (mine and others) about the true nature of what happens in my nervous system and, as with most, I think the DSM has touched the surface, but left much to be found out by the personal experience of it as well as much to be found about the true nature of what is happening along those little synaptic firings that can rock or break a world.
I’ve struggled a Herculean (or would Atlasean be more of what it is?) struggle to function at times. No time as significant, profound, possibly a losing battle as that I fought in 1989. I was ‘prescribed’ make-up to give myself some affect. Alcohol poisoning had drained all affect from me and along with it even the ability to fake it. A little red on the eyelids and a little taupe.
It seemed to work but that did nothing for my inability to speak fluently or worse, for my inability to have enough thoughts to want to speak fluently.
I remember a moment at the pharmacy when I went to pick up my mood stabilizer, my antidepressant and my anti-psychotic. I wrote a check, just barely, my handwriting was constricted, the whole process seemed foreign. I broke a diaphoretic sweat just doing it and another sweet moment some months later at the same window when the person on the other side of the counter said “You’re getting better, aren’t you?” I suppose I was. Inch by inch I could speak, inch by inch I could write a check. Inch by inch I no longer needed to sleep from Friday 6pm till Monday 7am.
It was a crash that had been coming all my life. I remember it sometimes for a stretch of time everyday now 22 years later. This morning it is sparked by a silly movie with a young Bruce Willis. 1989 was his heyday. 1989 almost killed me.
I went out on the deck for my usual coffee and cigarette this morning and studied my mood and affect for a bit. “I am rarely happy” I thought “mostly I am okay and things are alright”. Not bad. I am not suffering. I am not manic and out of control. I am alright. And then: “One of the few places I have ever been truly happy has been at work.” That’s when I came to the keyboard (the “typewriter” I still call it sometimes when I am in the flow and not so premeditated in my speech).
It’s true. Work has sustained me: money, friends, mission, happiness. It has been the center hallway around which everything else has come and gone. A double helix of life, wrapping itself around some invisible central corridor through which I walked, sometimes crawled and sometimes barreled like the “freight train” that took a handful of meds to slow it down.
But that has been my happiness. My one sustaining purpose and the place I’ve entertained, become intimate and suffered some of my greatest sorrows. Despite my illness I became a ‘master therapist’ Diane Topping, the most masterful therapist I’ve ever known, said more than once.
I can’t tell you how that happened or how a young therapist would set out to do it. It is more a mystery of how life goes. Becoming a good therapist is more about living your life wherever it takes you and suffering along the way until you find the way out.
For me it has been a spiritual path, my own crucifixions, my own agape love and salvation, my own seemingly endless need to find the exit strategies of debilitating despair. You gain some skills.
This life began for me in precarious circumstances. A child would not have been planned in that perfect storm of demographic craziness. Let’s leave it at that, but let’s also see the perfection of a blueprint for suffering—a blueprint that left me no choice but to live my life from that homebase storm.
Children are helpless to control their circumstances. They have to go internally to exert their power. That was 101 of finding my skills as a therapist: that going within because there were so few choices and because the outer circumstances were so aversive and out of control.
There was violence. Violence of iconic proportions. A shotgun. The intent to kill me. The intent to make me one of the victims of an execution to right a ‘wrong’ my father had done. I was 4 and I have only 2 nonviolent memories of the event. I am grateful for that.
It was my father’s fault, the fault of his profession and one of the events that his choices would unfold to hold me hostage awaiting his death and my mother’s and my own. Somehow, in the man’s mind that sat with us waiting for his moment to rectify my father’s betrayal, this was what had to be done.
My dad chose what he felt was a noble cause. I suppose it was, but it was one that ate its participants for lunch. Pursuing bad guys meant the bad guys would sometimes pursue you.
In the end he saved me and my mother and himself—at least in that moment. In the long run, who knows? Is that what left him unable to be sober? Is that what drove my mother mad? Is that what launched me into this profession?
So there it is I thought when the event surfaced in my own psychotherapy--the iconic psychic event that I did not ‘integrate’ until I had my 40s in my sights. Somewhere after sobriety, about 22 years ago, I began to consider this event as important.
Prior to that I’d flip through family photo albums and say things like:
There is my first bike with its training wheels.
There is my grandmother.
There is dad’s car with the bullet holes.
Ah, the missed opportunities of NOT having your patients bring in their family albums! My therapist, perhaps my 3rd?, caught it.
Wait, wait, let’s go back. There is dad’s car with the bullet holes?
A smattering of paint hit the canvas. Gallons of coins fell out of this jackpot.
And so my double helix uncoiled and, in an instant, rewound itself. I was someone else. He was someone else.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
The Dark Corners of Charter Psychiatric
I was working at Charter Hospital in Sugarland when I finally crashed in my alcoholism. It was a child and adolescent psychiatric facility for most of my stay there, but for awhile also had adults. There was an adult chemical dependency unit run and general psych unit upstairs. Not far from the hospital was a prison. I could sit on the loading dock to smoke cigarettes on break and hear gunshots from there.
An expose on Charter was aired on CBS's 60 Minutes in which an employer/spy/reporter named Terrance Johnson wore a camera in his eyeglasses and a recorder in his pants. At the time the company had hospitals across the country, 91 of them.
What eventually was disclosed was that in at least 20 of the hospitals there was evidence of dangerousness in patient care, falsied records and inadequately qualified staff giving patient care. 3 hospitals were subsquently closed.
I lived in Sugarland for awhile before coming to Louisville in these apartments on Austin Parkway not far from the hospital.
An expose on Charter was aired on CBS's 60 Minutes in which an employer/spy/reporter named Terrance Johnson wore a camera in his eyeglasses and a recorder in his pants. At the time the company had hospitals across the country, 91 of them.
What eventually was disclosed was that in at least 20 of the hospitals there was evidence of dangerousness in patient care, falsied records and inadequately qualified staff giving patient care. 3 hospitals were subsquently closed.
I lived in Sugarland for awhile before coming to Louisville in these apartments on Austin Parkway not far from the hospital.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
The Black Hole of a Houston Bedroom Community
Houston is an urban sprawl of epic proportions. On the "3rd coast” it is like the other large U.S. cities--NY, LA, Chicago in all the most awful and most wonderful ways. In 2010 the city itself was said to be almost 600 square miles with over 2 million people, but the metropolitan area which stretches out toward the Gulf of Mexico along relentless freeways sometimes stacked upon each other boasts about 6 million citizens. Not all of them nice. Many wealthy. Most smart. And now, post Katrina, huge numbers of transplanted and traumatized people who brought, in some places, danger, despair, poverty and rapid transformations of neighborhoods.
Many Houstonians felt their city had become sick when the Katrina transplants arrived at a conservative estimate of 150,000. Still today many believe that it has never recovered from the storm that didn’t hit its own coast. That was 2005. A lot of children have been born in that time and a lot of scattered refuge relatives have come to join the original transplants.
1984 suicides at Clearlake H.S.
I-45 lays itself out toward Galveston like an asphalt carpet. On a good day you race along it without a "sun alert" and with an amazing salt water breeze that takes the edge off the oppressive heat and humidity.
Bedroom communities’ line the freeway all the way to the Bay of Galveston from where commuters sought refuge from the city to live and grow their children and still travel daily into the glassy skyscrapers and the urban foothills of booming businesses to earn their keep. In 1984, Clearlake, one of these, bejeweled by NASA and all the brilliance and madness it imported, suddenly coughed up a dark side-effect of this man-made topography.
There was a ‘suicide epidemic’ among the teens whose parents and perhaps grandparents had sought the community for its manicured lawns, its planned neighborhoods and good schools.
In September and October of that year news broke that as many as thirty high school students had made a suicide pact. 6 died and the mental health community responded. Those were the ‘glory days’ of private mental health care. Prosperous companies like Exxon and Transco insured their employees and families with policies that had no lifetime maximums. Inpatient stays for children and adolescents could be years and for many they were.
The 6 teens who completed suicide were:
Darren Thibodeaux, 14,carbon monoxide
Gary Shivers, 16, hanging
Lisa Schatz, 15, hanging
Wesley Tiedt, 19, hanging
Sean Woods, 19, gunshot
Warren Kuns, 19, gunshot
Some say that a female student started the rumor of a suicide pact "as a lark" (New York Times) and that it became real.
The year prior Hurricane Alicia had made direct landfall on August 18th with winds reaching 115 mph. Alicia had a rare double eye and sailed through the city, slowing down a bit to look around at 80 miles an hour.
To give an idea of the devastation it caused, the Red Cross provided food and shelter to 63,000 at a cost of about $166 million. It was a category 3 hurricane that flooded Clear Lake setting the psychological stage for me when I first found out about this area. First, Alicia then a suicide epidemic, I thought, something very serious is going on here.
Many Houstonians felt their city had become sick when the Katrina transplants arrived at a conservative estimate of 150,000. Still today many believe that it has never recovered from the storm that didn’t hit its own coast. That was 2005. A lot of children have been born in that time and a lot of scattered refuge relatives have come to join the original transplants.
1984 suicides at Clearlake H.S.
I-45 lays itself out toward Galveston like an asphalt carpet. On a good day you race along it without a "sun alert" and with an amazing salt water breeze that takes the edge off the oppressive heat and humidity.
Bedroom communities’ line the freeway all the way to the Bay of Galveston from where commuters sought refuge from the city to live and grow their children and still travel daily into the glassy skyscrapers and the urban foothills of booming businesses to earn their keep. In 1984, Clearlake, one of these, bejeweled by NASA and all the brilliance and madness it imported, suddenly coughed up a dark side-effect of this man-made topography.
There was a ‘suicide epidemic’ among the teens whose parents and perhaps grandparents had sought the community for its manicured lawns, its planned neighborhoods and good schools.
In September and October of that year news broke that as many as thirty high school students had made a suicide pact. 6 died and the mental health community responded. Those were the ‘glory days’ of private mental health care. Prosperous companies like Exxon and Transco insured their employees and families with policies that had no lifetime maximums. Inpatient stays for children and adolescents could be years and for many they were.
The 6 teens who completed suicide were:
Darren Thibodeaux, 14,carbon monoxide
Gary Shivers, 16, hanging
Lisa Schatz, 15, hanging
Wesley Tiedt, 19, hanging
Sean Woods, 19, gunshot
Warren Kuns, 19, gunshot
Some say that a female student started the rumor of a suicide pact "as a lark" (New York Times) and that it became real.
The year prior Hurricane Alicia had made direct landfall on August 18th with winds reaching 115 mph. Alicia had a rare double eye and sailed through the city, slowing down a bit to look around at 80 miles an hour.
To give an idea of the devastation it caused, the Red Cross provided food and shelter to 63,000 at a cost of about $166 million. It was a category 3 hurricane that flooded Clear Lake setting the psychological stage for me when I first found out about this area. First, Alicia then a suicide epidemic, I thought, something very serious is going on here.
Before False Memories
my friend was involved with a woman, Judith Peterson, who was in private practice and was prosecuted for inducing false memories of satanic cult victimization which led to a high profile court case (multiple counts of insurance fraud mainly). She worked at the Dissociative Unit at Spring Shadows and 'imported' at least one patient from Chicago, held her in involuntary commitment and dismantled her entire family. Her focus was that the patients who had been abused in Satanic cults didn't remember it, but would if restrained for "abreactions" and other sorts of 'therapeutic techniques'.--need reference for this
Spring Shadows Glen in Houston was one of my personal rehab sites (Charter in the Woodlands, the other) and I received excellent care there. I was not treated by the dissociative crew although one of them that I knew socially suggested to me that I had been sexually abused. When I asked her why she thought that, she replied vaguely, "you act like it". The hospital was closed by the state of Texas in 1992 following the investigation of the Dissociative Unit.
Spring Shadows Glen and here
-------------------------
Below text taken from: Multiple Personalities and Satanic Cults By Mark Pendergrast
retrieved from http://www.rickross.com/reference/satanism/satanism14.html on 9/16/12
Mark Pendergrast kindly posts this excerpt from the second
edition of his book,
VICTIMS OF MEMORY
(Upper Access, 1996)
From the chapter,
"Multiple Personalities and Satanic Cults."
[Among the 5 recently indicted in Houston were
Judith Peterson, Ph.D. and Richard Seward, M.D.]
Another alarming example of MPD treatment in Texas was revealed in a recent article by Sally McDonald in the Journal of Psychosocial Nursing. Psychiatric nurse McDonald discusses how MPD specialist Judith Peterson, called "Dr. M." in the article, came to Houston's Spring Shadows Glen Hospital in 1990 to head the new dissociative disorders unit. McDonald's article makes startling assertions.
Completely supported by new medical director Dr. Richard Seward, and by the hospital administration -- because her patients brought in $15,600 a day -- Peterson instituted a virtual reign of terror on the ward, according to McDonald. Peterson subscribed to Bennett Braun's methodology, hypnotizing patients and convincing them to relive supposedly forgotten traumas. She believed that virtually every patient harbored multiple personalities formed during satanic cult
abuse. "One young patient was placed in nine-point mechanical restraints for three days, " McDonald writes, "not because he was a threat to himself or others . . . but because those three days coincided with some satanic event."
"Then, in the last week of February, 1993, Medicare officials arrived for a routine hospital inspection. Within hours, they brought in Texas health
authorities, and on March 19, the dissociative unit was closed. Two
patients walked outside for the first time in two years."
"She is no longer so sure that her patients were actually involved in satanic ritual abuse cults. Rather, the ritual abuse may have been used "as a screen and creator of terror. Underneath it, in terms of complex alter layers, is organized crime." In other words, she believes that criminal gangs intentionally terrified her patients,often making them mistakenly believe that murders had taken place. "They have ways of tricking people; they're given drugs, and they're terrified and confused." The crime groups do this in order to produce "synthetic alters" who will act in pornographic films or become prostitutes. Other patients, she thinks, were thus treated by the Ku Klux Klan. Of course, Peterson cannot tell for sure whether these memories are accurate. "My patients tell me very bizarre stories." She simply listens. "I'm a guide, asking `What happened next?' I don't lead them." Yes, she has heard stories of murdered babies. "It doesn't particularly matter if it's true or not. I wasn't there. The dilemma of true or not true is up to them." Of one thing she is certain, though: "These people don't make up the terror; that's pretty hard to do. They also don't make up the electric shocks. They have body memories of them." That accounts for the pseudo-seizures. "
"I've spent timeless moments, hours, days and years listening to those with souls that were shattered. I moved from being a therapist who thought incest was the worst thing imaginable, to hearing of abuses so unimaginable that I walked out of therapy sessions stunned.. . . . Sometimes I would just cry over the range and extent of human cruelty. There are no words to express what I have felt as I have heard people describe everything from having a broom handle stuffed up their anus to having their teeth electrically shocked. I have listened to a mother describe how she tied her small child to the bars of a crib before putting something in every orifice of the body a rag already in the mouth to prevent screaming. I've listened to descriptions of electroshock on a baby and the baby's seizures."
__________________________________________________________________
http://www.smwane.dk/content/category/6/23/31/
http://www.fmsfonline.org/carl.html
http://www.rickross.com/reference/satanism/satanism14.html
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Friday, September 9, 2011
Bibliomancy, Phone Psychics and Archival Crystals
I wasn't so much in love with P, but I was terribly bored and had been dealing with my workaholism so long I sought other distractions. I meditated a lot and danced. I danced so much I found myself apologizing to my downstairs neighbor for the noise. She didn't mind, she said. She understood.
One of the most interesting things about this time was that I was living in League City, Tx which I found out years later was a dumping ground for at least one serial killer during the years I lived there. The police apparently called it the Killing Fields.
All of the victims met my general description, white burnette, and covered a range of ages. Something that also has struck me about the Ted Bundy spree during which I was traveling, sometimes hitchhiking out west.
In League City there were 4 as of this attached link. Though I can't remember very well the street names, the city was tiny and I'm sure I frequented the convenience store on Main St from which 2 of the victims disappeared.
I was having great crystal visions and other experiences, primarily in my sleep and would sleep with a giant archival crystal that my ex-husband, in his lunatic pain, stole from me. It was so powerful that I smothered it in clay and hit it under the kitchen sink just so I could get some sleep. That's when I lived in a slightly damp--too much a/c against the Houston heat--apartment with not more than carpet and dozens of books lined around the walls. I bought a sawhorse once and stacked its lumber into an altar of sorts upon which I sat odds and ends, burnt lots of incense and kept my rocks.
P. was a psychologist with PTSD. He was 2 years clean from an i.v. speed addiction, the son of an exorcising holy roller from College Station, Tx and a wound up tight lost boy afraid of black people and so horribly depressed that he had leaden paralysis and complained of how hard it was to run with legs that weighed a 1000 lbs a piece.
I was living in League City when the Challenger disaster happened.
Not far from NASA, which was in the next town over, I worked at a hospital, Baywood, in Webster, Tx.
I was already deeply involved with crystals while living here. I will fill this in sometime later. The path to working with psychics was already unfolding, but it took a hurricane evacuation of Galveston Island and a near death car crash during it to get me fully on board working with them. This is also the beginnings of my path to remote healing abilities and medical intuitive practices.
So Seriously Yours
I lived alone for what seemed like a millenium and some other therapist I was seeing--or was it a psychic?--yes, a psychic, i believe, one I'd been referred to who worked with me by phone--a psychic told me I had been a monk for many lifetimes and had taken vows of "solitude and solemnity". This information came just as I was transitioning out of my Boy George period. I was beginning to wear clothes of different colors and I was searching for healing anywhere I could find it. I had nearly killed myself in a freeway accident and my back was giving me a lot of trouble. This is about the time I became thoroughly interested in body and energy work--just before my psyche would explode into its own dubious gifts, post rehab x2 and lots of booze later.
Chew and Spit
My childhood chewed me up before I was 5 and from there had its way with me like a renegade pedophile in a lawless land. You name the drama/trauma and I can earnestly say, been there done that, with a genuine swagger or a swashbuckle or a head hanging shamefilled behind its too-long-since-a-trim bangs.
Very little was not served up in that first act. As it was pictured some personal eons ago, I stood in the registration line nibbling my eraser and circling a plus-sized load. Give me all you got, i said. I need to burn off as much karma as possible.
Let's start with I was kidnapped. Held hostage with my mother by a man who said he'd sit tight till dad came home then make him watch while he killed us, but we also needed to know that the final act (which we would miss) would be astonishing. Just after my dad's horror had been savored, he, too would have to die.
The guy thought that was a trifecta here in Derby City for a nice afternoon of revenge. I guess Daddy had pissed him off.
So, getting kidnapped is a big deal, they tell me.
The violence I witnessed is buried deep.
I can't recall the end. I just have this sentence from my mother's lips: "Your daddy came in with a shotgun."
That was really all I ever needed and that saw me through my 40s. Some time in my next decade, however, I began to wonder what happened. How did it look? Was it in horrific-vision slo-mo?
Despite the wonderings, I have not gone looking for the key to unlock these archived movies. I am grateful I never saw them.
I am also grateful to the therapist whose name, I believe, was Carol, who said, "We will leave it like this: your mother loved you and cared for you so well you don't remember being scared and your father was your hero and saved you." Yes, Carol in Houston, we will leave it at that.
That was me in Houston, Texas during my Boy George period. I dressed in black and I drove a black car. I cried a lot in sessions. I'd sit in a big comfy chair and she'd come in bringing kleenex and perch herself very ministerially on an ottoman to tell me what was what.
Very little was not served up in that first act. As it was pictured some personal eons ago, I stood in the registration line nibbling my eraser and circling a plus-sized load. Give me all you got, i said. I need to burn off as much karma as possible.
Let's start with I was kidnapped. Held hostage with my mother by a man who said he'd sit tight till dad came home then make him watch while he killed us, but we also needed to know that the final act (which we would miss) would be astonishing. Just after my dad's horror had been savored, he, too would have to die.
The guy thought that was a trifecta here in Derby City for a nice afternoon of revenge. I guess Daddy had pissed him off.
So, getting kidnapped is a big deal, they tell me.
The violence I witnessed is buried deep.
I can't recall the end. I just have this sentence from my mother's lips: "Your daddy came in with a shotgun."
That was really all I ever needed and that saw me through my 40s. Some time in my next decade, however, I began to wonder what happened. How did it look? Was it in horrific-vision slo-mo?
Despite the wonderings, I have not gone looking for the key to unlock these archived movies. I am grateful I never saw them.
I am also grateful to the therapist whose name, I believe, was Carol, who said, "We will leave it like this: your mother loved you and cared for you so well you don't remember being scared and your father was your hero and saved you." Yes, Carol in Houston, we will leave it at that.
That was me in Houston, Texas during my Boy George period. I dressed in black and I drove a black car. I cried a lot in sessions. I'd sit in a big comfy chair and she'd come in bringing kleenex and perch herself very ministerially on an ottoman to tell me what was what.
Child of the 60s
I was a child of the 60s and privileged, I've come to understand as an 'old therapist', to have been. That readied me for my own therapy experiences in the 70s and flung me headlong into more in the 80s and 90s. I got to shuttle back and forth in the therapy chairs talking to my deceased father and kneel couchside crying and commanding my unconscious to wake up while pounding the commands deep into my mind with my fists. I also got to struggle through the 'birth canal' of my encounter groups legs and have my face painted by a group partner who leaned down to kiss my forehead. All because I grew up in the 60s while this wondrous experiential 'consciousness' work was being developed and practiced.
The list goes on.
I've worked on my 'father issues' for decades and I continue to.
My father was probably the greatest gift of my life even though the 'key' issue is that I was abandoned by him, neglected by him, bereft for him.
How it all sews together is of course a mystery. I know far more about him and my self and therapy now than then, of course, but I don't know exactly what I know. It's the goldfish trying to conceptualize water. We don't know. We just swim in it.
I watched a movie yesterday about a character who loved the music of the 60s. It was more than music. It was the search for some sort of meaning in the craziness of the world in the 60s and then there is the phenomenon I've noted for a few years now: that the 60s really happened in the 70s.
The list goes on.
I've worked on my 'father issues' for decades and I continue to.
My father was probably the greatest gift of my life even though the 'key' issue is that I was abandoned by him, neglected by him, bereft for him.
How it all sews together is of course a mystery. I know far more about him and my self and therapy now than then, of course, but I don't know exactly what I know. It's the goldfish trying to conceptualize water. We don't know. We just swim in it.
I watched a movie yesterday about a character who loved the music of the 60s. It was more than music. It was the search for some sort of meaning in the craziness of the world in the 60s and then there is the phenomenon I've noted for a few years now: that the 60s really happened in the 70s.
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