That Time I Lost My Mind

Lately I find myself desiring to share about the time I lost my mind.

Very few people know about it.

And although there was something exhilarating about the experience, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. It was agony.

For context: It wasn’t like things were going badly for me at the time - quite the opposite.

I appeared “normal” to everybody else. I’d recently given three talks at some of the biggest conferences of my life. I still ran a fairly successful business, teaching and coaching. I was publishing a small research journal with subscribers in about half a dozen countries. I had been accepted into a doctoral program in clinical psychology.

I seemed to have more opportunities in front of me than ever before.

However, I was least able to step up to meet them.

A combination of factors had destabilized me.

I was engaged in thrice weekly sessions of psychoanalysis, weekly vision therapy through behavioral optometry, and regular use of cannabis and psilocybin.

That mix of things, on top of what you might call “the stress of success,” was apparently just enough to tip me over the edge.

I wasn’t cuckoo, but at times I was slipping into pockets of madness. I thought I had cracked some psychic code. It was a thrill.

At one point there were 5 distinct personalities that would emerge in my journal, each with its own handwriting (here you can see “Typhoeus” and “The Dread Judge”). I didn’t have the experience of being “in control” of any of them, but they could dialogue with each other, filling stacks of notebooks.

This would generally take place at night, and in the morning I would review what was written, retracing my steps and mapping the ecology of ideas.

Amidst the confusion I developed some of the most valuable work of my career thus far, material that has proven incredibly effective with clients ever since. That’s when Ecosomatics really came together as a cohesive theoretical framework.

And having been through an experience like that, I find it so easy to sit with clients in their greatest difficulties.

As they uncover deep pockets of personal pain, or undergo their own crises of faith, or think that they’re on the verge of burning down everything they’ve built, I’m able to hold steady and offer them a point of stability. I’m able to contain the fallapart.

We ought not wonder how people go insane. That’s obvious. A far more interesting question is how sanity arises — and persists — in the first place.

I share this both because it’s one of the most meaningful experiences I’ve ever had and because there’s tremendous stigma regarding deviations from the normative standards of mental health, to which I say, "Your box is too small."

The unconscious is a productive factory, and although it’s wise to mind the dosage, we would do well to facilitate the desiring-production from which all the spontaneity, creativity, and novelty in our lives springs.