The Great Conjunction

An IFS Journey Through Psychosis

All year I've been working on a piece of writing, actually many small pieces of writings, which I've been editing down and that I recently decided to call "The Great Conjunction: An IFS Journey Through Psychosis." IFS stands for Internal Family Systems, which is the kind of therapy I practice, and I find a lot of wisdom in it. There are 10 interconnected stories and I decided to actually turn it into a zine, and share it with my friends for the holidays. But I have 3 year old twins and that just did not happen! So here’s one of the stories, separated out from the larger narrative. It was very cathartic to write it, I hope it makes sense when you try to read it! I’m so grateful to be alive after making it through another year! Happy New Year!

There’s this yearly confluence of inner and outer forces that inevitably throws me for a loop this time of year. I was a kid who grew up loving the holidays: my birthday and Hanukkah and Christmas were always right next to each other. But then my dad died the night before my Bar Mitzvah, two days after my 13th birthday and a week before Christmas, and for the past 37 I’ve been one of those people who gets frozen inside in December, doing me best to make sense of some very old psychic pain.

These anniversaries don’t simply mark the passage of time; they form a constellation of feelings and memories, each one orbiting the gravitational pull of something larger—something I’ve spent my life trying to name. For me, December is not just the end of the year; it’s a portal into the unresolved tensions and cyclical patterns that have shaped my inner world. Each return brings both reckoning and revelation, inviting me to make sense of what has passed and what remains.

Last December, that pull was stronger than ever. I was turning 49—the same age my father was when he died. The weight of that milestone, combined with the familiar December reckoning, cracked something open inside me. It felt like the universe had been holding its breath, waiting for this moment. What followed wasn’t just personal; it felt cosmic.

The Experiment with Chemical Clarity

In the weeks leading up to my birthday last year, I had started experimenting with ADHD medications for the first time. After years of struggling with scattered thoughts, missed details, and the exhausting churn of a restless mind, my psychiatrist suggested I might have undiagnosed ADHD. Desperate for relief, I agreed to try stimulants—Ritalin, Adderall, Vyvanse—cycling through them in quick succession.

At first, it felt miraculous. The noise in my head quieted, and for a brief, luminous moment, I understood what other people must feel like—the clarity, the focus, the ability to move through the world without stumbling over their own minds. But the miracle didn’t last. Within days, my sleep unraveled, my thoughts began to race, and the familiar edge of mania crept in. By the end of the experiment, I was using Seroquel, an antipsychotic, to bring myself down at night, barely holding on to the stability I had fought so hard to build.

The crash from the stimulants was swift and brutal, and it left a crack in the walls of my mind—a space where something else could emerge. It felt as if the medications had opened a door I wasn’t ready to walk through, and when they slammed shut, they left me teetering on the edge of something vast and unknowable.

The Vision in the Theater

A week later, I found myself sitting next to my partner Alice in a concert hall in Los Angeles, listening to the thunderous crescendo of Carmina Burana. The music swelled, and suddenly, time folded in on itself.

In recent months, I’d been through a difficult stretch and was doing deep work in therapy around the shame I had carried from my childhood. I was a little bit high, the kind of high most people who smoke weed wouldn't even notice. But I’m not most people and even the smallest amount of THC opens doors in my mind that are tapped deep into the collective unconscious. In that moment, as the music surged around me, I felt the unraveling of the old double bind between my parents. After all these years I was ready to let it go. And I did! What I felt wasn’t just an unburdening—it was a complete release.

I saw every version of me at once: the 5-year-old child walking to therapy with my babysitter on 96th Street by my elementary school, the teenager consumed by his father’s anger battling police in Tompkins Square Park in a riot, the 18 year old walking on the subway tracks being broadcast live on prime time television on all the channels, the adult stumbling through visions of another reality. They were all different parts, still inside of me. It was as though the fragments of my life—moments that had once felt disconnected and chaotic—were aligning, falling into a kind of cosmic order.

But there was more: when I was 18, I had experienced prophetic visions of The End of the World. At the time, they felt overwhelming and apocalyptic, as if reality itself were collapsing. As I grew older, I learned to understand them intellectually—that those visions were tied to the parts of me that felt like they were dying, and my psyche had imagined the entire world was dying with them. But there was always something about those visions that remained mysterious. They felt so real, so undeniably vast.

And in that moment in the theater, I viscerally understood why. Time wasn’t linear—it was layered. Past, present, and future were threads of the same fabric, interwoven and constantly reshaping one another. My visions at 18 weren’t just metaphors for my inner turmoil; they were glimpses into a multilayered reality where personal and collective histories collided. That feeling I’d had—the sense that the world was ending—wasn’t entirely wrong. Parts of my inner world were ending, but with that collapse came transformation. Like stars dying to birth new galaxies or forests burning to make way for growth, something in me had to break apart to create space for the new. Endings and beginnings weren’t opposites—they were the same event, seen from different angles.

And at the center of it all, a presence emerged—calm, radiant, undeniable. It wasn’t something outside me. It was within.

I realized then that I had an inner messiah. He was my “Self”. I laughed with the obviousness of it all.

The parts of me—the protectors, the angry ones, the grieving exiles with their accumulated burdens of worthlessness and shame—turned toward him with something like awe. And I believed in him, too. He was the answer, the leader I had been searching for. It wasn’t a messiah for the world—it was my own personal guide, the one who could bring harmony to the chaos inside me.

(The Internal Family Systems Mandala)

(Learn more from me about working with psychosis using the IFS model)

Similar to manic experiences I’d had at 18, 26, and 33, I felt like I had cracked the code. This time the secret was: we all have our own messiah inside us, waiting to be seen, waiting to lead. I was ecstatic. It felt like a revelation, the kind that could change not only my life but the way we understand what it means to be human. The vision wasn’t just about me—it was universal, profound, and undeniable. I wanted to share it with the world!

The Self-Like Messiah

For weeks after the vision, I walked through my life with a sense of peace and purpose. I felt as if I had found the key to the labyrinth of my mind. A few days later I remember Alice bringing me breakfast in bed for my 49th birthday and I lay there with a pile of books: The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Howl by Allen Ginsberg, The Wasteland by T.S. Elliot. As I read the pages, all of them very familiar to me, I had the sensation as if they had all been written specifically for ME, for just this moment I was experiencing. That I was ready to accept the intellectual legacies of the world because I had crossed the artificial boundaries of time and space. And I had this sense that there was a whole other world, a whole other reality, like a glistening castle I built over the years I could take refuge in. It doesn’t make any sense if I try to explain it so I don’t talk about it out loud, not to my partner, not to anyone.

But as the weeks and months passed, cracks began to show. The messiah who had felt so solid, so steady, started to feel more like a question than an answer, something I was grasping for rather than living. I noticed patterns that felt familiar—old ways of thinking, looking for patterns to corroborate my beliefs, old fears creeping back in. The harmony I had glimpsed in the theater became harder to hold.

It took nearly a year of writing, reflection, and struggle to begin untangling the threads of what had happened. Slowly, the truth began to emerge: the messiah wasn’t the Self I thought he was. He was a part of me—a protector who had been exiled long ago and had returned after the unburdening of a deep double bind I had carried for decades. His strength and clarity were real, but they weren’t the whole story. He wasn’t the true Self; he was, what they call in IFS, a “Self-like part”, a manager stepping in to lead because I hadn’t yet found my true center.

Unburdening the Double Bind

Looking back, I see now that the vision of the inner messiah couldn’t have emerged without the release of the double bind I had carried since childhood. My parents’ opposing worlds—my father’s rigidity and my mother’s anger towards him—had created an inner tension I couldn’t resolve, that I had carried around with me even though my father had been dead for decades. That bind had shaped me, splitting me into roles I didn’t want to play and trapping me in repeating patterns of relationships where I sought to recreate and make peace with my childhood.

The vision in the theater was the culmination of years of work to unburden that bind. When it finally broke, the energy it had held was released, and the Self-like part, which had been banished by the angry voices inside me, stepped forward to fill the void. He wasn’t the true Self, but he was doing the best he could, and for a time, I needed to believe in him. The faith my parts placed in him was real, and it was part of what allowed me to begin healing.

Guidance from Dick Schwartz

During this time, I reached out to Dick Schwartz, the founder of IFS, to help me make sense of the vision and the turbulence that followed. With characteristic warmth and insight, Dick helped me understand the dynamics at play. He guided me to see the “messiah-like” presence I encountered not as the true Self, but as a protector that had stepped in to fill a void—a part working hard to bring order to chaos. His guidance allowed me to view this part with compassion, to honor its efforts, and to gently invite the true Self to emerge as a steady, compassionate leader for all my parts. That conversation was a turning point, giving me the clarity I needed to continue this work without feeling consumed by it.

Toward the Great Conjunction

The great conjunction will return next December around my birthday, as it always does. But this time, I’ll meet it differently. The vision of the inner messiah, the struggle to understand his role, and the journey to unburden the double bind have taught me that healing isn’t about finding a single answer. It’s about learning to hold the tension between clarity and confusion, between revelation and uncertainty.

The castle inside me is still standing, but its gates are no longer locked. The parts of me that once waged silent wars are beginning to see each other, to work together. And the Self—the true Self—is emerging, not as a savior but as a steady presence capable of holding it all.

The alignment of anniversaries, memories, and transformations is no longer something I fear. It’s a reminder of the cycles I live within, the systems we inherit, and the power we hold to rewrite their stories. This December, I’ll meet the great conjunction not with resistance but with curiosity, ready to see what new alignments it might reveal.

reach out to me through my private/public practice:

Mad Love and Great Conjunctions, Sascha