I learned to surrender to the diagnosis of the people around me, but I also decided to make the diagnosis a dharma and not a dogma.
Meaning that I didn’t try to convince people they were wrong in classifying what they saw through their paradigm, but rather took it up as my work to navigate from that point forward.
I also began to see “mental illness” as a context vs. some discrete thing inside ones brain. And that many of the symptoms an individual is experiencing are manifesting for the collective.
An example of this is imagine a father who grows up with a mother with intense and dangerous rage.
He will very often never learn to feel his own rage in a healthy way. He meets a woman and they have kids.
He spends so much time avoiding his own rage that it begins to show up in his wife and family. He tries to control it in them as well, making sure no one feels it.
Perhaps one kid ends up diagnosed with depression due to not having a safe context to feel emotion in the home.
The mother escapes into work.
The child, never having felt safe with the father ends up angry as an adult and violent toward the father.
The mother becomes rageful with the father as well for not having a relationship with the child.
If anyone of them would goto a traditional psychiatrist they’d most likely be prescribed medication — another attempt to suppress the emotions.
If one looks at the overall system and begins to help the father heal his trauma of the rageful mother, he can begin to grieve and heal himself.
His capacity for his own anger increases and he is better able to hold space for that of his family. He can understand now why he’s felt so much anger directed at him — he recreated the rage he was accustom to as a child but now in his home as an adult.
The other family members do their own work as well and collectively the family learns deeper self regulation and connection.
Soon their entire social circle and community is beginning to transform and wake up and learning to feel more fully.
Very often a family or social system will unknowingly “push” their unfelt feelings into a single individual and then try to medicate or eliminate that individual.
In some tribal cultures they say “the schizophrenic sits at the seat no one else is willing to sit at”.
The shamanic approach acknowledges that some folks with a greater sensitivity will begin to experience the pain of the underrepresented values of the tribe.
With proper mentorship and context, that person can become a wise leader, deeply intune to the unackowleged needs of the tribe.
This was the approach I took and have continued to take with the folks and families I’ve worked with.
I start off with a position that the persons experience is inherently valueable and contains useful information for me and the community.
From there I seek to connect with the reality they are in and to join them there while still maintaining my own sense of safety. I seek to see where my own behavior could be changed in support of this person.
I also encourage the folks who care about the person to examine their own lives and see what might be connected and to work on healing it.
A fantastic book on this topic that was really helpful was Rethinking Madness by Dr. Paris Williams (you can download the PDF for free).
There are also some incredible results happening with a process called Open Dialog in which the community gets together and speaks the truth of their experience and this has incredible results.