A Hidden Puzzle Piece Under the Nightmare
Late night thoughts on Psychosis and Internal Family Systems Theory
It’s 4:30am I just woke up from a nightmare that I was in a big building full of glass windows, like Grand Central Station, that had been packed with people at night, but it’s now early in the morning, quiet and desolate. I fell asleep on a bench while I was watching my kids, surrounded by people, and I woke up and my kids were gone, they had been stolen and I knew they were never coming back. My entire world has just fallen apart.
I sit up in bed with my heart racing, so grateful that it had just been a dream, and I lay in the dark having this connecting thought: that terror of loss, that feeling of the bottom completely falling out of my life and just being in free fall, I have known it before. That’s what it felt like when I was 13 and I found out my dad had just died.
This was just a dream, but it was expressing something that I feel inside myself that I carry around hidden inside every day. That 13 year old part of me is still back in his old room, terrified and heartbroken. He is a part of me that I exile away because it’s too painful to feel his horror. If I was present with this feeling, the way that I am right now as I write these words, it would be totally overwhelming, so I hide him down in a basement in my subconscious, where he screams and cries, but rarely rises to the surface.
Now it’s a few minutes later and I’m sitting here in the dark in the living room, and I realize I was just trying to intellectualize myself away from this terrifying fear and come up with a theory to put it in, when this part wants to be seen, he wants to be felt, he wants to be held.
A little later: I just had a dialogue between the exiled part and myself. I’m half asleep and I can just talk to him. This is what I help other people do for a living. The feeling of his pain and loss was overwhelming and instead of getting overwhelmed, I held him like a father would hold a kid and we cried together and felt the horror of loss inside of us. We cried for our dead father and for my missing dream children. I comforted him. I comforted myself. We were back in the dream, but just the two of us all alone, in that station full of windows. I’m telling him I’ve got his back, he doesn’t have to hold this pain anymore, that I can hold it for him, I’m old enough to take it on.
In the background. In my half-dream vision, we are being serenaded by the Ramones, Joey Ramone crouched over singing into the microphone:
She went away for a holiday
Said she was going to LA
But she never got back. She never got back. She never got back they say.
The KKK took my baby away
They took her away
Away from me…
I have this thought that maybe every feeling of loss and heartbreak I’ve ever had comes back to the pain of what my parents did to each other when I was a young child and the death of my father. Maybe everyone is walking around full of heartbreak, their own and the accumulated unresolved and unmourned heartbreak of whole civilizations cracking through in our dreams. The thought, though overwhelming, makes me feel less alone.
Now it’s just about 5 AM and I’m going to crawl back to bed to sleep but what I want to say—the bridge thought—is that when we carry a deep sense of loss with us, it takes form inside and it seems like there are a number of different ways to access it. One of them is understanding that we have multiple parts inside of us that have relationships with each other, and the part that is carrying the pain can be held and witnessed by the part that is whole, but for those of us who never got that sense that we were whole, all the different painful fragments can dance around our heads like a loony toon halo. Another way of saying this is that some of us can get psychotic and detached from the world because there’s too much unprocessed pain inside of us.
This thought has the quality of a puzzle piece, as if there is a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces, and as I fit them together, there is an internal reconnection and an understanding of a greater whole. Without holding that pain, or acknowledging and releasing the younger exiled part that has been holding that pain, it’s impossible to see and feel the greater picture.
So just now I have this image from a TV show about the X-Men(see top image): it’s a young man who can’t control his superpowers, he is diagnosed with schizophrenia but he has telekinesis, and is making everything in the room fly around. As I’m writing these words I’m lying here crouched in the dark, I go back to my teenage room, just as it was, with punk rock posters all over the walls and clothes piled up on the floor. I’m 14 years old, and I just show up and I grab that 14 year old kid and I hold him really tight and he screams and screams and everything in the room is flying around and I just keep telling him I’ve got him, I’m holding him, I’m sorry it took me so long to get here and find you, YOU ARE NOT ALONE IN THIS WORLD!
I’m staring into his familiar eyes with this recognition that he’s been holding this terrifying pain this whole fucking time and he doesn’t have to hold it anymore, I’ll hold it for you. He already knows what to do: we send the pain up into the sky as a fireball and it explodes and comes back down as multicolored fireworks over the Brooklyn Bridge. I’m standing there in another time travel parallel reality with my mom and it’s like 1983 and I’m filled with wonder watching the Centennial fireworks and we can just let it go that he doesn’t need to hold it anymore.
I’m still here crouched on the living room floor and I’m seeing an image, I’m being shown an image of this boy as an 18-year-old crucified in the same room, crucified to a hospital bed in the inevitability of a long drawn out, painful death, he just wants to die and get it over with, he just wants to fucking die.
The psychotic break, his “first episode psychosis,” is his attempt to escape from this horrible reality that he’s been trapped in since he was a child. He’s figured out a way out into this other realm. Maybe it was the acid he took when he was 16 that showed him a portal, but he just went into it and didn’t wanna come out and the whole time now, this multi-decade relationship to taking lithium and antipsychotics is this way to deal with this fractured bridge where there’s been no way to find solid ground except to hold the worlds separate.
And they don’t want to be separate anymore.
After I wrote this I crawled back to bed and Alice let me sleep for another 4 hours and we spent the whole weekend with the kids, who are an incredible joy. I just found this text waiting for me on my phone. Don’t mind me, I’m just leaving some tracks for myself before the work week begins. Mad love to anyone who makes it this far.
Sascha
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