Mood: Elated. I made a new friend who I feel I can talk to about many things I am interested in, particularly mental illness, and my son's experiences.
Music: "Joy Inside My Tears", by Stevie Wonder. A simple song that speaks to how we all need each other to get through life. We can't do it alone.
Garden: Full of mice. The cats are having a "field day" catching them for breakfast each morning. Just wish they would eat them outside, instead of on the kitchen floor!
Step 2
"We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity"
I really want to focus on the idea of "sanity" today. What exactly is sanity? I suspect there are many different ideas of how a sane vs. an insane person looks, feels or acts. What is my definition? What am I trying to achieve? When I think about what sane is, in my mind and in the world, I think about right relationship. What I mean by that, is that there is a conscious awareness of interdependence, and that we need to know how those relationships can be healthy and beneficial. To be insane, in my mind, is to not be able to relate in a healthy way, to be out-of-touch and damaging to those around you. The tricky part is defining what healthy is.
This is where the conversation changes for me, from one of a personal nature; how I see myself relating to the world, to how the world as a whole can be in a state of health and balance. As a North American, I am becoming acutely aware of how our Western lifestyle is causing a kind of isolated and disconnected relationship to the rest of the world. Because of our consumer-based society, and I don't mean a mental health consumer, we have lost touch with the roots of our connection to the earth. I believe this is having catastrophic effects on our mental health. This sense of disconnection, and disassociation with the world, is breeding a level of neurosis and depression that we have never seen before.
Now that's a really big thesis to pose. But I'm posing it. Where do we go next with that? Let me start with a quote from the CTC reader for today. Denial is a symptom of the effects of alcohol. Just as alcoholics often deny their drinking problems, many of us who have been affected by this disease deny our problems as well. Although we may have been living in chaos, worried about our families, full of self-doubt, spiritually, emotionally and physically depleted, many of us learned to pretend that everything was just fine." When I think about this personally, I can relate it to the effects of relating to my son, who is mentally ill. But I can also relate it to society at-large, which feels mentally ill to me too. But the societal mental illness is a product of our addition to unchecked growth, fossil fuels and unrestrained capitalism.
Can the illness that we experience on a personal level be related to the illness of society at-large? Does trying to participate in a sick system make us sick? Do those who seem to be thriving, are they actually the sickest among us? And those who appear to be the weakest, the most unable to cope, the canaries in the mine shaft, are they pointing out that there is something wrong with the system? Am I going too far afield with this? Am I off-base? Even within a healthy society there will be people who make poor choices and cause harm. No system can be perfect. Are there any healthy societies now? How unhealthy have we gotten as a society? How much of the mental illness that we are seeing today, is a direct result of this? These are questions I want to know.
On a personal note, I am struggling with a certain amount of denial of how bad global warming is, and how much worse it will get, and what I should be doing to prevent any more damage than has already happened. Can I say that if my son does not want to be part of things, as he sees them now, that I can blame him? When I worry about how he will survive, how he will "make it" within society as it stands, am I barking up the wrong tree? Maybe I should be worrying about why I am able to.? Maybe I should be worried about how I can be so unconscious, when so much destruction is going on all around me? Who is really the mentally ill person then? I think this is an important theme I want to explore. I feel we cannot separate our internal lives, our mental health, from the health of the planet as a whole.
How does this relate to me and my son? How is my sanity or insanity, in this regard, contributing to my sons? How has his relationship to me, and to the family he was raised in, been a microcosm of the macrocosm? How does the culture of the family, within the larger culture, influence a family members mental health? How does the family view a fellow members health, when viewed through the lens of the culture in which one is living? Are there cultures that breed insanity because of the degree of disconnection, and disassociation with the earth, that they practice? I am not trying to excuse anti-social behavior. But how do you view what is considered anti-social within the society in which it is being judged, when that society may be sick?
What is unhealthy about our current culture? We are living very busy lives, driven by the need to generate the highest cost of living, of any country in the Western world, because of rising inflation, rising cost of all good and services. This because we are dependent on fossil fuels and dying forms of technology that are raping and pillaging the planet. We have to work harder and harder to keep this dying system going. We are all stressed out and anxious. We know the system is broken, and yet so few of us are willing to change our habits, even though it is killing us. How is this not like alcoholism?
We are addicted to this way of life. This lifestyle, this kind of societal disassociation and disconnection. For us to change this we will have to feel the pain of the world. Pain that we are causing by our demands for more and more of our chosen drug. The rest of the world is in an alcoholic marriage with us. We are dragging them down. The only way for them to survive us, will be to step over and around us, as we lay in a puddle of our own vomit, our oily and polluted vomit.But, in reality, it is not like that. Rather than trying to get out of this bad marriage, many nations are looking to become just like us. Like offspring of this unhealthy family, they want to be "just like mom and dad". Heaven help us! Only the few who remember the way it could, and should, be are speaking out. Their quiet, gentle voices are being drowned out by the rush for a "higher" standard of living. Whatever that means.
Again, how does this relate to my son? To me? I don't know actually. I just feel it, deeply, and know there is truth there. But I am not sure where this will lead me. I am trying to be open. I am on a journey, and I am trying to get to the bottom of what mental health is. What mental illness is. What consciousness and wholeness and real health is, not only for me and my son, but also for the world as a whole. I believe there is an intimate connection. I believe there is a fundamental connection to all life, and when you tamper with that, you pay a price. Maybe all of the environmental destruction is just a physical sign of a much deeper and more important disconnection, a disconnection from God, from Life itself.
To me, any God worth it's salt does not leave anything out of the equation. There has to be a wholeness, an inclusiveness, a completeness. What happens when some things are left out or sacrificed? Am I wrong to assume that if it doesn't work for the whole then it will not work for the parts? What would a whole and balanced world look like? What would we each look like as a product of that wholeness and world? What is the answer to finding healing for those of us who are not well? Is it they that must change, or the society and culture, in which they are a part that must? Just in-terms of stigma alone, we have a long way to go. That does not even take into account the issue of treatment. Who are really the sick ones here? Ugh!
Thanks for listening!
Keep coming back:)
Looking forward to: My writers group tonight.
Challenge: Keep trying to find my way through the maze of mental health/illness paradigms.
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