Mental Health Issues
In my teens and for a good while afterwards, I resisted any notion of having ‘mental health issues’. I certainly had issues, but to call them ‘mental’ ignores the herd of elephants in the room; my body, the world, people, authority and so on, ad infinitum. It feels a euphemistic and pointless avoidance. When confronted by such allegations, I retreated into the belief that my accusers’ judgement of me was simply because I was not like them, kind of like jealousy but not really. Come on, I knew that I was not like normal people and accepted it, much of the time, uncomfortably, but nonetheless. How I was not like them was more difficult to say. Yes, I wasn’t good at sport and no, I didn’t have friends though not for the want of trying. The biggest thing, I figured, was that my inner world didn’t match their’s.
My family was pious and devout, I think in a good way. We said grace before every meal and read devotions on bible stories twice a day. It bred into us a passive attitude towards God and an exclusive one towards the outside world. Our community was strong, based on high moral principles but, I’m afraid to say, with a deep underlying stain of shame, shame born of original sin.
Was the shame an intentional part of the doctrine? I have no idea. By intentional, I mean the inner tensions that cause you to break open. If so, I reasoned, it should have been its own remedy, self correcting, through the prescribed path of forgiveness. Now, half a century later I can say that all paths are paths. But this is now and that was then. “So why wasn’t it working for me?” I’d ask. Was it my personality, that of a naturally compulsive empiricist; some unkind, well meaning persons call it ‘naive’. Or perhaps it was the inherited trauma from parents who in their early years were preoccupied with casting off German parentage and mother tongue in regional wartime playgrounds. Or perhaps being so absorbed in my own concerns that I was incapable of consideration for others, a rebel with an unseen and unknown ‘whatever’. One could hardly say ‘cause’. Oh, yes, I know! A rebel against an unseen, unknown and unknowing self, trapped back by secrets, some good and not so good, and unspoken stories, again both positive and negative. The resultant struggle was completely reflexive, relentless and unresponsive, and pathologically lacking self awareness.
As I contemplate these memories I am taken back to boarding school, an experience that might have been altogether positive and healing. I wonder if my parents sent us three older kids there to complete an education that they weren’t able to. Fascinating though they were, chemical valency and quantum mechanics and the like, didn’t substitute for a solid spiritual breakthrough. God knows we’d done the prep. Some of the historical challenges and trials were held so tightly and so repressed, it was hard to believe they mattered any more. The shock, after many years and considerable expense that boarding school had been a hit and miss affair and had not paid off was devastating. You send away a child and get back a noncompliant and ill-equipped teenager, just like you were, knowing that if you let go of your white knuckle grip on your reality to accept a helping hand, you’d fall into the abyss. So it was for me. I was broke, not broken but completely left wanting.
The notion that at boarding school, I had a ‘personality defect’ seemed completely unfair given the incipient hostility of the outside world as I saw it, the world that was not me. I didn’t yet know there was a seperate inner and an outer world. Still don’t accept that distinction!
In grisly retrospect, those bible stories were out to lunch, God and the devil goofing off after the disappointment of the garden project and amusing themselves with their Job-ish wagers. God’s work was done and what was left could be outsourced to angels. The devil’s on the other hand is intermittent. He’s an independent contractor. Had they thought to include a user manual with the Bible it might have said, “Warning, using this cautionary tale as a rule book voids warranty. Do so at your peril!”
How is it, you may ask, that in this universe, God and the devil are besties. It’s simple, I reply. God’s favourite creation, and this will come as a shock to cats everywhere, is the human being. Dogs don’t care, they love you regardless. When God created Adam, he saw that it was good and was mighty pleased with himself. The Angels were cool too, though a step below humans in the hierarchy. Their commission is to support humans with an unseen hand, you’ve probably seen the pictures. The devil though, is a bit of a maverick, more like humans than other angels with a mind of his own. He took it upon himself to disregard God’s instructions convinced that service should be given to God alone and so refused to serve humans. To do so would be demeaning to him and to God. It’s a point of principle, and an important one. So he was cast into hell.
Now the popular idea of hell is a place where devil hangs out delivering devilish vengeance onto unbelievers. Not so, I protest. It is clear from the good book that this stasis in the popular mind is simply the result of a lack of imagination. Had it not been for the devil, we humans would be no better than the angels, confined to relentless bliss in the garden where nothing happens and no-one realises. The devil on the other hand had a plan to release humans from endless drudgery, blissful as it was, if one can be blissful without realising it.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t aware of any of this in my teens, I was too obsessively compulsively waiting for God, who incidentally didn’t show. So I hung out with the devil ie, bucked convention, not because I liked him but just for the company, endlessly exploring the empirical nature of the good versus evil dichotomy in elaborate thought experiments and occasionally through experience. Ouch! When such experiments lead me into a diabolical life crisis some decades later, witnesses concluded I was possessed by the devil. Or else I was having a mental breakdown. Both were true, neither had a clue and all unhelpful, though I did accrue a lot of data!
I tried to fathom how neither Eve nor the devil were concerned with collateral damage in their decision to take a bite of the apple. God too for that matter, who is too high and mighty to actually turn up. Or could it be that God, Eve and the devil were in cahoots, concerned only with the kernel at the spiritual core, aware the shell that held it would drop away freely after a jolly good clout, and be recycled. It’s the almond that sprouts to make a new tree not the shell. Shells are yesterdays story. Come to think of it, apples and almonds make a delicious combination, to die for, as they say. I’m more like a walnut lacking the perspicacity of the almond.
So that just leaves the one question that I know you must be asking, “Where does that leave shame?” Put simply, the shame is the hell, I mean shell.
https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1162499555289640961?s=20
https://twitter.com/PhillipAdams_1/status/1162231425388597248?s=20
Story is so important because it provides not just the plot lines, something we are so very interested in as change makers it also provides the context. And it is the context that provides much of the energy not only for the structure but also a creative approach to the plot trajectories, if I can put it that way, for where and how and who and what needs to happen.
It is very easy to get caught in the stasis of believing the way things are are the way they are. Of course they are but also never what they seem, nor do they stay the same moment to moment. It’s more a matter of the movie or the poster. While a poster is designed to evoke a feeling response that goes to, “I gotta see that,” it does not reveal the plot line.
There is also another important aspect of mythic stories, be they person or collective myths and that is that myths are more movie like that poster frame. Plot and context, seed and earth, particle and wave, hammer and nail, surfer and wave, rain and umbrella, male and female (I’m talking archetype not gender), these things occur in couples. So with the storytelling for change makers, it is not enough to do something in an isolated way. Doing only makes a difference in the context of being. Out of being and doing emerges becoming.
We can never act alone. We need a group, a community even if it a community of two or three gathered together unified.
Be the change you want to see in the world acting through you sense of purpose based on your authentic self. Plot, trajectory and energy. Once we get stuck on how an outcome should look we can become impotent. Too big, Too hard, wrong direction. It is not the issue that needs to change but the purpose that needs to be fulfilled, and your unique role in contributing to that purpose. Getting stuck on the change makes everything become transaction rather than relational, and forces you to resort to raw power rather than the power of love and compassion.
For my parents it was about devotion to Jesus. That didn’t happen for me. There was too much either or as I was refreshing my personal creation myth based on the story of science, and a multitude of creation myths from many cultures. Now I can find Jesus in my inner world, along with Buddha, Loa Tsu, the Dreaming ancestors, and many others.
If the change you want to make is through your business or organisation, then the process is the same. Make your change through something (Relational) rather than to something (Transactional)
Being Belonging Becoming
