The Will to Recover
This article was originally published in Psychosynthesis Quarterly, December 2018, Volume 4, Issue 4
Windhorse. The mythical image conveys power and rigor, spiritual uplift, and determination. Windhorse Integrative Mental Health devotes significant amounts of time, money, and personal attention (“human capital”) to helping someone who has experienced extreme mind states find the motivation, energy, inspiration, and discipline to recover. Windhorse IMH is a private, nonprofit, alternative psychosocial service agency with locations in Northampton, MA, San Luis Obispo, CA, and Portland, OR.
I benefited from Windhorse care in Northampton and am currently a Peer Educator there. In a mindfulness-based community setting, we blend contemplative Eastern spirituality with traditional Western psychological approaches. We find authentic relationships within a highly interpersonal and supportive social system, working to constellate therapeutic teams, establish therapeutic households, build, enliven, and enrich therapeutic community, and catalyze the potential to recover. However, all this work would perhaps be useless if it did not somehow engage a desire within the recovering individual to access his (Note 1) own will and apply it to the project of his own recovery.
Will & Recovery Vital with Major Mental Disturbance
The will is critical to the success of so-called healthy individuals in pursuing their life goals; it is even more critical in the life of a person seeking to recover from a major mental disturbance. Without exaggeration, such a recovery can be the work of a lifetime. And yet Ed Podvoll, creator of the Windhorse approach, while eloquently describing the means to recover, rarely used the word “will.” And even today, in Windhorse circles, we rarely find ourselves speaking of will. So, what is the “will to recover?” Why is the will to recover essential to recovery from extreme states? What supports or activates the will to recover, and what undermines it? Is the will to recover somehow always present, though hidden, just as “islands of clarity” are present even in the most extreme or chaotic moments?
Roberto Assagioli, the Will to Recover, and Windhorse
Fortunately, psychosynthesis and other branches of psychology have investigated the phenomenon of the human will and can help us understand the role of the will in a Windhorse-style-supported recovery process. In The Act of Will (Chapter Five: The Skillful Will: Psychological Laws), Roberto Assagioli writes of the need for the will to “stimulate, regulate and direct all the other functions and forces of our being, so that they may lead us to our predetermined goal.” Recovery can be understood as a process of trying to regain, reunite, or redirect the “functions and forces of our being.” It is clear that the will itself is executing the recovery process. Assagioli continues, “we need to have some understanding of the psychological world in which and on which the will has to operate.” Perhaps one could say that at Windhorse the recovering person’s team helps her to understand her own “psychological world,” enabling her then to perform the operations of recovery using her will.
Assagioli observes that “our unconscious is continually absorbing elements from the psychological environment. It breathes, as it were, and unceasingly assimilates psychological substances whose nature determines whether their effects upon us are beneficial or harmful . . . But we can also learn to use these influences skillfully, to build in ourselves what we choose to have.” At Windhorse, we strive to create and maintain just such beneficial psychological environments, and then leave it up to the individual to use these influences skillfully in pursuing his own recovery, which could entail building within himself what he needs to get well, find peace, make up for earlier deficits, or simply survive in the outer world.
The old adage about anyone only being able to “carry a person so far, then he has to carry himself the rest of the way” clarifies the role of the will in recovery. Clinicians, peers, and friends can help ease a person’s transition into and through recovery, but only to a point. There comes a time when the individual must want to psychologically “walk” through the scary or forbidding remaining terrain of recovery, simply because she has acquired the personal will to do so. A community of like-minded individuals can encourage one to pursue recovery, but, just as for a physical feat, encouragement alone is not sufficient.
What Sort of Act of Will?
Yet the essential mystery remains: what sort of an act of will is needed to engage treatment/recovery, and how is it possible to sustain this effort? The time recovery takes can seem bitterly protracted; how can one not give up on oneself or others? And how does one even know when one’s will is engaging skillfully with the challenges of recovery? What are the signs of a properly aligned will facing an uncertain path of recovery from an unimaginably extreme mind state? When do the apparent signs, such as conversational success or failure, or feedback from others, fail to tell the true story? What is the particular challenge that individuals must face with wills compromised by adversity, both internal and external? Should any chronic, debilitating, energy-sapping condition be understood as an attack on the will itself? If so, then is the “will to recover” simply the will to reverse or undo the condition, or is it something greater, like trying to out-maneuver the forces of fate and choose one’s personal destiny?
If we humans are all inherently flawed or “perfectly imperfect,” then what about our wills, damaged or not? Are they good enough to get us through all the tough times? Or must they be helped, restored, reconfigured to face each unique challenge? If so, then how and by whom? By providers or by other people? Which people? Or all people? And what happens when wills collide, as is so often the case between recovering people and their providers or families? How can we better facilitate the process of recovery so that there is a commingling of the wills, a joint or collective will? And who wins and who loses in battles of the wills, whether over medication or hospitalization, meeting times or meetings of the minds? We may like to think that the so-called sane or authoritative persons should win because they are more rational or powerful—or lose because they should abdicate their power and let the underdog prevail. The reality is complex.
Can recovery only be won by personal and medico/legal conquest, and must it be won at all costs? Is it a “war?” Or is recovery simply finding one’s natural place in the human community of individuals with wills and dreams, all trying to exercise their free will in a world they did not enter by choice?
The therapeutic community may hold the spiritual framework for solving the puzzle of recovery, and one may link one’s personal will to recover to the collective will or intention of the community. Assagioli wrote of “the intention to align our personal will with the transpersonal will” (Note 2). And as the individual wills meet, whether to join, reflect, or collide, they affect each other, shaping over time the recovery process itself for each individual, because “the will of the self guides and directs one’s life,” and hence one’s recovery process. If the recovery process is better understood as a process of self-realization, then this same dynamic is described more revealingly later on: “self-realization is . . . an interplay or dialogue between personal will and transpersonal will” (Note 3). If the reader prefers to view recovery as a process of restoring the sense of self, Assagioli earlier explains that “the will is an essential function of the self” (Note 4).
If one considers the therapeutic community not as a container for the manifestation of wills but rather as an opportunity for “tuning in and willingly participating in the rhythms of universal life,” then this perspective can be found as well (Note 5). And finally, if one considers the Windhorse community itself and the characteristics which describe it and have their origins in the work of Podvoll (Note 6), virtually identical qualities were advocated by Assagioli, who called for “increased authenticity, deeper compassion, greater wholeness and right relationship” (Note 7).
If one’s theoretical preference is the study of consciousness, then this dynamic is explained as “two interpenetrating fields, one of will and one of consciousness. The field of consciousness and the field of will are in constant flux” (Note 8). Therefore, to admit that consciousness influences recovery and therefore deserves study or consideration, is to open directly the matter of will and its role in bringing about recovery. If recovery is emphasizing each person’s individual quest, that perspective may also show the need to study the will: Assagioli observes that “the will … balances and constructively utilizes all the other activities and energies of the human being without repressing any of them” (Note 9).
Someone who takes more to existentialist writings can consider Rollo May’s words, “it is in intentionality and will that the human being experiences his identity … What happens in human experience is ‘I conceive – I can – I will – I am.’ The ‘I can’ and ‘I will’ are the essential experience of identity” (Note 10). These four affirmations describe an individual facing a challenge of any nature, but for our purposes we should recognize that they may succinctly summarize or encapsulate the struggle to work with and regain “control” over one’s mind. That is a struggle which leads some to choose to enter therapeutic communities such as Windhorse. To enumerate the stages of the process using May’s terms and applying them to recovery from extreme states, we could expand them to mean “I conceive that I may recover from psychosis; I can recover from psychosis; I will recover from psychosis; I am recovered from psychosis.”
If one’s preferred intellectual tradition is more Buddhist, such as the tradition found in the teachings of Shambhala that emphasize the role of “basic goodness” inherent in human beings, there is a relationship between this tenet and the importance of understanding the role of the will in the psychosynthesis literature. Molly Brown writes of “goodwill” and “loving will” being a combination of strength, skill, and goodness. She explains that “loving will is personal will aligned with the will of Self” (Note 11). A chief benefit of a therapeutic community such as Windhorse is the opportunity to practice being loving and kind to others and to acquire those strength and skills. So one can find a rationale favoring the healing community and its specialized ways of relating by looking in either direction—towards Shambhala or towards Psychosynthesis.
The Will to Train the Will
Assagioli explores the “techniques for training the will” in his book Psychosynthesis (Note 12). To understand the role of the will in recovery from extreme states, we may consider “techniques for training the will to recover.” At Windhorse, these include many of our daily practices, such as meditation, basic attendance, mind-body synchronization practices, finding islands of clarity, intensive psychotherapy, and participating on teams and in community life. We don’t usually call these various processes “techniques” or see their contribution to recovery as being “will-promoting,” but they could be considered as such. Spending focused, caring time with another individual or group of individuals while considering and supporting the uniqueness of one’s inherent psychological process, has a motive or an effect: it is to strengthen an individual’s “will to recover.” If it doesn’t do that, it is arguably not addressing the person’s challenge and circumstance completely. In communities such as Windhorse, all this psychological familiarity with oneself and others produces a kind of intimacy. This fact too leads us toward a better understanding of the role of the will in the recovery process: Assagioli notes, “the will (is) … the function most intimate with the self” (Note 13).
Elsewhere, Assagioli explains that the Self is always present, even when not seemingly engaged, such as when relaxed or in the background (Note 14). This fact is consistent with addressing the role of the will in recovery from extreme states in therapeutic contexts such as Windhorse. We understand recovery to be nonlinear: progressive or punctuated, episodic or cyclic—a process that almost needs to reverse or transform a precipitating illness. If the will is always present, even when dormant, then recovery may be progressing even when individuals seem to be less active or mobilized in their pursuit of recovery. A related Windhorse teaching is the notion that sanity itself, or the potential for recognizing it, is somehow always present even when a person is in the most extreme moments of psychosis. Could this be conveying, in a similar way, that the individual’s “will to recover” is always present, even in psychosis? If so, what are the implications for our clinical work with people in their most intense moments?
If we hope to better understand “the will to recover,” then perhaps we should consider “the will to train the will to recover” as it occurs in the therapeutic community. “Therapy” or “community,” may be seen as attempts to foster the will in individuals—i.e., to “train” them in those psychological or interpersonal techniques that will bolster their personal will to pursue their own recoveries. This is not word-play. On the level of the struggling individual (and I consider myself to be one), it holds a certain kind of truth in that we need our therapists and friends, whether verbally or nonverbally, to show us how to work with ourselves, and to help us want to work with ourselves. Then the long and treacherous journey of recovery is not as an act of compliance, but rather as an act of will.
Meandering Stages of the Will
Assagioli describes “the various phases of the will,” such as “goal, valuation, motivation; deliberation; decision; affirmation; planning; and direction of the execution” (Note 15). To thoroughly consider the will to recover, we should acknowledge that willing oneself to recover may indeed entail all six of these phases in a specific manner that corresponds to one’s individual circumstance. Thus, we may speak of the “motivation to recover,” etc. But we know that recovery is not a discrete process, so one could not possibly identify six discrete stages of willing oneself to recover. It is a process that takes decades. One may be in different stages of willing oneself to recover for each chronologically overlapping challenge one faces. Thus, one may hold a complex yet interconnected constellation of stages of the will, and have to let this process meander or build momentum, unwind or unfold, cohere or conflict over decades. We see how arduous the work of recovery is: one has to find the motivation to pursue one challenge, find the time to deliberate about another, and find the courage to decide about a third, etc. This requires a lot of internal juggling and information-processing for individuals who, as a result of their illnesses, already may have cognitive challenges.
Act of Compliance, or Act of Will?
The contrast between recovery as an act of compliance and recovery as an act of will may be the most critical distinction in trying to understand the will to recover. Do we expect individuals in recovery from extreme states to submit to the authority of their “caregivers” or endure harsh or punitive forms of treatment? In many settings we can still find something perhaps more bearable but still inadequate for promoting full recoveries. This dynamic might be formulated as “supporting our clients into having the will to comply with their treatments,” or alternatively “helping people to recover by protecting them from the excesses of their own misdirected impulses,” or perhaps “believing that people have the potential to recover if they are willing to accept their treatment modalities,” or in less structured programs “leaving it up to the person to decide.”
The underlying philosophy of a particular program may be active, using carrots and sticks, or passive, merely witnessing. The four different ways of considering recovery in the preceding paragraph all fail to connect with the crux: affirming our “will to recover.” The will to recover must be something more comprehensive and transformative than the will to comply. (Where does the will to comply lead?) It must be more than trying to guard against misuses of the will. (Don’t we need an aspiring will, rather than just a defensive strategy?) It must be more than trying to link people’s will to accepting certain conditions. (Is the will to recover something to be negotiated?) It must be more than assuming that all people arrive with intact wills and simply need to be left undisturbed. There are many ways to avoid engaging with the will to recover: containing it, co-opting it, or (mistakenly?) assuming its existence without validation or evidence.
It’s Up to the Person
Many who condemn the interventions of bygone eras use concepts like “empowerment,” “client-directed” or “client-centered,” “non-hierarchical,” “peer support,” “consumer-driven,” etc. Much as I value these transformative concepts, I see them in part as attempts to address the matter of will (especially whose will prevails), just without using the word itself. But even if we could put the locus of control entirely within the hands of the recovering individual, there would still remain the question of how to engage the will to recover.
So where are we now in our inquiry? I have tried to demonstrate that many psychological approaches, knowingly or unknowingly, direct us to the need to study/consider/understand the will, and that in recovery from extreme states in particular, the investigation of will has been perhaps overlooked, or at least not named or identified as such. I have claimed that psychosynthesis, which has paid considerable attention to the matter of will, might be well suited to supporting/aiding this task. And I have explored how various underlying philosophies or approaches to treatment, however well-intended, might carry a person only so far and leave unfinished the project of recovering as an act of will. And I have tried to explain that one needs to seek recovery as an act of will, and that overlooking the importance of will in one’s model of recovery has risks or consequences. We have also adopted the use of the phrase “will to recover.”
Next I would like to show how our psychosynthesis understanding of the will could be applied to working with particular extreme states of mind and also show results and the implications for recovery. Then I would like to consider the phenomenon of the so-called “psychotic predicament” (Podvoll) and how the psychosynthesis concept of polarities and synthesis may also be applied here.
Will and an Extreme State of Mind: Paranoia
The extreme mind-state I would first like to consider, which I still experience, is paranoia. While there may be many different views or experiences of paranoia, here I would like to call it just an intense and overwhelming state of fear, especially of other people and their presumed motives. In my experience it is mostly still possible to function with paranoia, but it raises perplexing “What if?” issues: “What if they don’t like me or don’t acknowledge me? “What if they try to mistreat me or take my freedom away?” How much anxiety and concern about other people is normal or healthy? If paranoia is a distortion of reality, then just what brings into focus a new reality, a fresh perspective? Pharmaceutical interventions may help, admittedly; but that is not our focus here. We’re looking at more psychosocial approaches, such as those found in therapeutic communities, and at psychological tools, such as those found in psychosynthesis.
Fear, Will, and Recovery
One way of working with paranoia, somewhat Buddhist perhaps, is to say that we can never really know what’s going on for other people with respect to us. Nor, of course, can we expect people to be a certain way for us. We had better learn to work with uncertainty, with not knowing, with not being attached to things being a particular way. Psychosynthesists may choose to explain this challenge differently, as one of opposites or polarities, e.g., fear vs. lack of fear, caring vs. not caring, needing to know vs. not needing to know, etc.—and then try to achieve a synthesis of the two polarities in question. In my experience, I would say that most fears have to be faced, like it or not. Not facing one’s fears tends to have consequences that eventually catch up with one.
But what about our fears, specifically of other people—whether due to biochemistry, trauma, social phobia, or generalized anxiety? How can we learn to engage with others while still fearing them, in order to experience them differently—so we may therefore see and experience ourselves differently? Therapeutic community offers a way for us to engage with others, but in what sort of way? What are inherent limitations; that is, how far can it take us with our recovery goals? It may wish to be the safest place of all, the only calm in a stormy world, but that is not always the case. It works better for some (with say, superior social skills) than for others. One may feel like one is in a fishbowl, constantly in the view of others. And the community’s success depends largely on the strength of its leaders and the compassion and health of its members. Still, the value of a refuge in a life of chaos should not be underestimated.
Paranoia and Psychosynthesis Training
Another way to work with our fears of other people is to participate in psychosynthesis training, including co-guiding. The training itself is frequently filled with small group break-out sessions or dyads. The co-guiding often occurs outside of the training premises, such as in the home of the guide or traveler. The instructors always somehow define the break-out sessions for us and even give them chronological shape or structure. So they become a kind of task, but a task that requires a high level of cooperation, a task that typically requires a high degree of psychological familiarity or emotional intimacy. Thus it entails both learning about a process and learning about a person. Whatever one may think of or feel toward another person (such as, in the present inquiry, even fear or paranoia), by the end of a break-out or co-guiding session, the thoughts or feelings will have shifted. The person will offer information. That can diminish suspicions arising from lack of familiarity.
Personally, in my psychosynthesis training, I had probably three big fears about break-out sessions: 1) What if I’m not chosen, i.e., what if no one wants to work or partner with me? 2) What if I don’t understand the task or can’t figure out how to implement it? and 3) How revealing can I be about my mental life, that is, how courageously and honestly can I share? I had fears of rejection or alienation; of personal deficiency or inadequacy; and of self-disclosure, particularly with respect to my “mental illness.” I feared that people might reject me because of my mental illness, that I might not understand the task because of my mental illness, and that I might feel compelled to share or resist sharing facts about my experience of having a mental illness. It always seemed to come down to me and my mental illness. Yet, I had the desire and ambition to complete my psychosynthesis training successfully. So, what to do? I learned to wait it out, and see either who would come forward and approach me, or who else would lag in the partnering phase and become my partner by default.
Partnering seemed terrifyingly uncertain, yet perhaps inconsequential. Not being quickly chosen for partnering held the potential only to demoralize me. The instructors upheld a commitment to my remaining in the training cohort and participating in all shared exercises. So the risk itself was only psychological, and facing psychological risks (themselves) was arguably the main reason I had chosen to pursue psychosynthesis training in the first place. To abandon the overall psychosynthesis training program by the self-sabotage of opting out would not be in keeping with the spirit of the enterprise. My fellow trainees and I had come together to tackle just these kinds of mutual interpersonal dilemmas, so why would I consider allowing stigma, or self-stigma, to loom so large as to undermine the entire quest for perspective? This was the time to see what stigma was really all about in a personal way, and psychosynthesis was a safe place in which to make that discovery.
Another point of overlap or similarity between therapeutic community and psychosynthesis training is the notion of “come as you are, and you will be accepted as you are.” A therapeutic community tends to be more accepting than mainstream, outer society, especially for its members, people in recovery. In the outer world, often one is not accepted (even rejected) until one proves oneself by passing various social tests or meeting certain criteria. Fortunately, often in a therapeutic community one is accepted with an understanding that one may have issues, imperfections, or challenges, but that these are understood in advance and are seen as workable rather than as indicators of inadmissibility. Over time, it is hoped that recovering persons will translate their acquired skills to the outer world.
A similar type of dynamic exists in psychosynthesis training. If one is admitted to the training, then one is eligible to participate in all of the various groupings, pairings, and break-out sessions, regardless of one’s fluctuating state of mind, one’s personal challenges with respect to the issues at hand, or one’s specific psychological content or “baggage” evoked in the group or group task. The groupings are, in fact, peer groupings and co-facilitated by trainees with equal standing or status in the course, not by the instructors or professional facilitators. Therefore, whatever issues one brings to a break-out session (including content associated with previous experiences of extreme states of mind) are all acceptable. Similarly, during off-site co-guiding sessions, there is an understanding, indeed an affirmation, that whatever arises in the course of the co-guiding proceedings is presumed to be manageable by the two individuals, without any emergency back-up on the part of the course leaders—though in principle back-up is always available, and matters written up as homework would come to the attention of the leaders in writing and be responded to at that time.
So the psychosynthesis training draws heavily on the “peer principle” of learning by doing, as well as the principle of accepting others as they are and moving forward from there. These two levers, if you will, can in some ways coincide fruitfully for an individual (like me) in recovery from extreme states of mind. But more surprising is that psychosynthesis accomplishes this goal not by focusing on what’s gone wrong with one’s life and mind, but by starting from the outside in, understanding universal truths about humanity and our innate, human capacity to grow and evolve through a process of synthesis. My history of extreme mind states and all of the associated predicaments, triggers, manic behaviors, obsessions and compulsions, etc., may have seemed to be my life script. It was simply revealing what could have happened to any human being with similar challenges and limitations. It was not a story about psychosis alone, but one of the many stories living within all of us, as we struggle to be more fully human in our time together on earth. This “generalizing” of my experience, oddly enough, did not demean, devalue, or diminish it, but rather freed me up to consider it in a larger context, and therefore to change my frame of reference about it—and therefore about myself. This possible growth or awareness was also enabled by the psychosynthesis concepts of polarity and of the “I,” both of which resonated for me personally.
Also, therapeutic community works “from the outside in.” This is described by Trungpa in “Creating an Environment of Sanity” (Note 16) and I personally believe that for my own recovery, a chief benefit at Windhorse has been the opportunity to learn from others—indeed sometimes mimic them. Most communication is nonverbal, and a great deal of learning is social learning. Seeing how others do things, hearing what they think about, learning what and how they speak to each other—each precious if fleeting exposure, each opportunity to witness opens a world of recovery possibilities. Over time, these occurrences accumulate and distill into something that we might call “recovery by community intervention,” or “recovery by immersion,” or “recovery by being compelled to discover that it’s not really all about me,” or “recovery by being made to see that other people aren’t really all that bad,” or “recovery by being forgiven for my mistakes/faux pas/bad attitudes,” or “recovery by being able to face people even when I’d rather not,” or “recovery by learning to accept those around me, because it’s better than being alone.” Therapeutic community can work by invoking external, social or environmental stimuli or supports, rather than trying to engineer a recovery process from within, by psychotherapy alone.
The recovery process, no matter how well supported or socially connected, no matter the context or milieu, remains a highly personal, even lonely process or struggle. Nick Luchetti (2013), a long-time Windhorse clinician, has written about the sense of “courageous aloneness.” I would explain the logic of this phenomenon in my own recovery as follows. We might all agree that we are somehow different, as if we are a slightly different person ourselves when we are in the company of each different other person in our lives. For a client in a team-centered program such as Windhorse, it may be true that the client experiences herself differently with each person on the treatment team. It takes time to sort out and distill these various reflections, connections, and feelings. It’s clearly a lot of information to integrate. And yet, when the client is physically alone, she must do the work, summoning that prior sense of social connectedness within herself and by herself. This is a kind of skill that one can develop in recovery and apply to oneself, but it takes time to acquire. One must also be willing to experience states that might seem risky or uncertain. All this is to say that the client’s “mind” states are evoked and held differently at different times, depending on whom he is with, or if he happens to be with anyone at all.
Therefore, in a powerful sense the work of recovery, of recovering one’s own mind, remains the work of the recovering person himself, no matter the education of the provider or treatment team, no matter the professional opinion of a caregiver. It is work, in a sense, to fill in a gap … the gap between who we think we are and who people tell us we are, the gap between being seemingly alone and seemingly connected, or perhaps private and public; the gap between moments and the gap between states of mind, the gap between needing people because our lives depend on it, and simply wanting and choosing to have people in our interdependent lives; the gap between who we were yesterday and who we hope to be tomorrow; the gap between sickness and health; the gap between ourselves and the world.
This gap cannot be filled for the recovering person by others demanding it, even the most helpful providers. Trying to fill it may be a personal or spiritual struggle and consume great amounts of time and energy, but struggle alone cannot fill it: one must be able both to struggle with it and not struggle with it; to not give up but to know when to give in or yield to a greater universal force. One has to believe in the truth of one’s own life process but be willing to strive toward a future one cannot believe possible, even imagine. To bridge the gap that divides us from ourselves in time and from others in space, we must unite the dualities that plague us—historical double-binds and ongoing role conflicts. We must know when and how to choose our own company over the company of others, and vice-versa. We must want and choose to be well in a body and mind that have adapted to the circumstances of sickness. We must believe that no matter who we may have been and no matter for how long, no matter the mistakes or regrets or who may have taken notice of our failures or successes, we have an existential right, in the present moment, in every present moment, to be something other than who we think we are or than others may think us to be, and to become something better—or, better yet, something completely different. It is clear that belonging to a therapeutic community such as Windhorse can support and nurture this process of unfolding by allowing for mutual discovery on shared paths with safe companions. So too, in a different way, can participating in psychosynthesis training: letting it help us find personal synthesis within ourselves (overcoming those dualities), and rejoin, re-connect with, and participate in, the universal unfolding.
Questioning Society
It is ultimately up to recovering persons to bridge the divide, to fill the gap between here and there, between then and now. The hardest parts of the process are theirs. The “normal” world is, for the most part, interested in preserving its interests and perpetuating its status as normal. Because it holds the power in society it gets to establish the terms and distinctions in discourse around mental health and illness. Because it has legal legitimacy it gets to exercise the threat of medical incarceration or other involuntary forms of treatment. All of this is grossly unfair and one-sided. And while advocacy does an enormous job of trying to level the playing field and empower the disenfranchised, it cannot in and of itself enable a wounded person to grow in all directions needed. Advocacy can help a person to belong to or identify with a movement perhaps, or part of a movement, but there is more to recovery than politics. There are difficult choices to be made not just about what to call oneself but about what to look at within oneself. There are matters to be considered not just about the holders of power in society but about discovering one’s own internal powers, such as courage, resilience, and self-acceptance. Societies throughout time may always have had the potential or tendency to be unfair, stratified, or discriminatory. That unfortunately may be part of human nature in its social configuration. But each recovering person, in whatever larger society or niche he finds himself, has to weigh the advantages of belonging, or trying to belong, or pretending to belong, or trying not to care about not belonging, against the costs. Each must weigh this first and foremost in his own existence, that is, in his own mind and body, and therefore, in his own recovery.
Signs of Recovery?
The world may ultimately welcome back one of its own, lost for a generation in a land of psychosis, but how? What sign is the world looking for—and how can persons in recovery learn them? Is it fair to expect people in recovery to become something different from what they have become over time, which in itself is something rather completely different, say, from how they might have begun life, with presumably good health? How much recovery is possible—but more to the point, how much can reasonably be expected from whom, and with how much help available? Is the recovering person seeking to recover for herself alone, or to improve family morale, or to validate professional caregivers’ egos … or is there a way in which all three of these vectors intertwine, and are intermixed with those of law enforcement and other relevant institutions?
Is to recover to submit not to a conspiracy but to a grand convergence of external forces and somehow pass through the vortex undeterred, like being born again? And if so, then how is it up to the individual herself to be willing to endure this unrelenting passage, to negotiate it at times, perhaps in some way to bring her own powers to bear? How might she ultimately consent that there may one day be a greater good, and that, when the waters recede, the recovering person may find herself in fact better off? How might she know that her self-interest has not been compromised, though in moments her mood or persona or agency or beliefs may have been challenged? As you may notice: this process is not a comfortable one. But momentary or transitional discomfort may be the short-term price of success: recovery—long-term victory.
A Role for Therapeutic Community and for Psychosynthesis Training
Both therapeutic community and psychosynthesis training can play a role in helping a person to evolve in the manner just described. In communities such as Windhorse we find ways of being with other people—ways that are less about defined roles and more about inherent personhood; less about former mainstream identity, and often even less about “sickly” status than about mutuality in the moment; less about “what’s wrong with you” than about “what’s wrong with the world.” We therefore have the opportunity, if we have the desire, to discover our truer natures, and find ourselves by finding others—in a way that is never finished but leaves everyone perpetually better off than they had been just before. And yet we still need to take the intermediate steps—in the steps’ own varied ways. In psychosynthesis terms, we might say that we can find our deeper, truer self if we have the will to do so; and we can experience mutuality with others through classroom training and co-guiding that ultimately link us not just to a person or group, but to the universal group. We can bridge the spiritual divide by reaching out, regardless of personal background or life experience.
Foresight and Hindsight
It is valuable to have repeated opportunities to experience various circumstances common to life in society—and to improve upon one’s ability to understand and relate positively to these circumstances. Is recovery a process of learning, growth, or adaptation? Is it rebalancing, recomposing, or reharmonizing? Is it receiving and integrating specific forms of support, encouragement, and motivation, or is it being exposed to helpful forms of influence and engaging in meaningful relationship with them? Perhaps “recovery” is an oxymoron, a logical impossibility, because one cannot “recover” what one never had. Whatever we consider recovery to be, it will take a long time; it will be rigorous, complex, and even tricky to navigate; it requires both the foresight to plan appropriately and the hindsight to learn from mistakes.
Because of the need to allow for mistakes, it must also provide sufficient exposure to similar situations to enable a process of discernment. An individual needs to have more than one conversation with the same person, or more than one visit to the same place, or more than one attempt at the same task, or more than one role to fulfill over time, or more than one form of psycho-education. Otherwise that individual will not have enough information to draw upon, enough evidence to start to develop working hypotheses that can be refined over time. The individual may be trying to figure out a lot of things: What’s real? What’s right and wrong, good and bad? Who am I and who or what are other people? What’s worth worrying about or trying for or believing in? What can I expect of others or the world, and what should I expect of myself? We should never take for granted or assume that a person who has experienced extreme states still knows these things about herself and about the world she lives in. Indeed, in my personal experience, much of the work of recovery consists in discovering, or perhaps rediscovering, what has long been forgotten. It may nonetheless appear surprisingly obvious or self-evident once brought to complete awareness.
Acting “As If”—the Trick of Filling the Gaps
So recovery likely entails bringing to awareness the existence of various gaps in one’s experience, and finding out how to fill those gaps for oneself, but with the benefit of some help, a “holding container” or context to make those gaps evident and workable. On one’s own, the gap may be experienced frightfully as more of a bottomless pit, or in anxiety as a realm of uncertainty, or beyond comprehension as a void. But it’s one thing to experience a gap, and another to fill it with new life. We have described how for each perceived mental gap or divide there may be the need for repeated exposure to learn more about its nature or how to relate to it successfully. But in my experience, there remains in each gap a missing ingredient—a mystery, if you will—that provides the alchemy for transformation. Psychosis or a delusion may be considered a form of self-deception, where the mind has in effect tricked itself into believing something it formerly did not. So too, for healing, that negative trick of consciousness must be combated, antidoted if you will, with a corresponding “positive mental trick,” such as a leap or act of faith, that in effect makes it possible to fill the gap, to repair the dynamic that had resulted from carrying the gap in one’s experience, and thereby to resolve the imbalance that had become associated with holding a destabilizing deficit. Each person must discover for himself what specific trick will effectively work to complete each gap. That makes recovery not only a personal or private process but so specific to the individual as to be unique. And then, to complete the task, the recovering person must have the fortitude and tenacity to face the world with a newly-filled gap, and test it. And this process too must be repeated, with each gap (just as for each issue previously mentioned in discussing the various phases of the will). The gaps are in varying levels or degrees of completion. But no matter how much psychological or experiential material you pour into a gap, it cannot be fully resolved or sealed until the recovering person “tricks” himself into believing or accepting the new truth or identity. This process may be known by other names, such as “reframing” or “perspective shift,” but for someone with a prior experience of psychosis, these more conventional concepts only go so far towards capturing the essential underlying confound: the mind has been tricked; it must be un-tricked; you can be helped to want to un-trick it, but ultimately only you yourself can find a way to un-trick it and substitute for it a new, un-tricked version of reality, and choose to affirm it. And to choose to affirm a new reality is an act of will.
Being Your Own Buddha
If it is ultimately up to the recovering person to fill her own gaps and to un-trick herself, then it follows that no person can be more of an authority on the recovering person’s deepest needs or experience than the recovering person herself. To receive a diagnosis is to be told, in effect, “you don’t know what’s going on,” “you don’t know how to live or stay well,” “you can’t be trusted to know right from wrong,” “you don’t have enough insight into your condition,” or “you are no longer an authority on yourself.” And while some of these medical beliefs may be well-intended, and even at times helpful to relieving the strain in a given situation by reassigning legal or other forms of responsibility, they set in motion a cascade of perceptions and self-perceptions that at best limit the potential recovery and at worst oppose it. (As we have said, recovery is an act of will.) They also establish an unwarranted and arguably unjust dichotomy between the diagnosed and the undiagnosed, the sick and the well, the abnormal and the normal, the marginalized and the mainstream—the “us” and the “them.” As Sheldon Kopp observed in If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him, “If you think another man [person] is greater than yourself, think again” (Note 17). While this may seem to be a reasonable claim for healthy, non-diagnosed people to make, it must be believed to be true for the diagnosed as well. Their transitional status through illness and recovery does not make them lesser; indeed, to accept this self-limiting view is to rob the recovery process of its full potential while arbitrarily surrendering all personal power to the presumed authority of others. The irony or paradox is that the recovering person must be capable of viewing himself not as inferior, but as superior morally or spiritually or experientially or in some absolute psychological sense (in a sense that includes and validates the variety of possible mind-states). This might seem like megalomania; it might make one socially awkward or unwelcome; and, it might be necessary in order to incorporate the inevitable flux of experience and mood that can at times humble or demoralize a person.
Pursuing Your Unique Recovery
But recovery is a study in contrasts, including both the heights and the depths of human experience. This diversity and variability should be at least tolerated, and hopefully embraced. If we agree that the hardest parts of the recovery process fall to the recovering person herself, then might these also be the most humbling parts but at the same time the most spiritually rewarding? And in a society that does not yet know for sure if recovery is possible, or for whom, or for how long, then doesn’t it fall to the recovering person herself to transcend all external belief systems, courageously but peacefully deny the authority or perspective of those who would presume to know better, and propel herself into the most viable future possible, by whatever means are available? Certainly there is a price to be paid for not recovering, usually by the person himself, but arguably in some ways by the entire society. Why should the recovering person fail at the negotiation of a lifetime and make a bargain with the devil simply because no other means seemed available at the time? Society is at fault in this “no prospect” equation. But the recovering person must somehow develop enough understanding of his own situation and enough confidence in his own ability to live successfully in the future, to somehow move forward, in spite of what others may think. As we have demonstrated, no other person, however trained, is omniscient at predicting the fate of another. No other person has the right to conjecture, in a realm of extreme states, extreme uncertainty, and extreme risk—all calling for extreme strategies and extremely self-affirming beliefs to counteract extreme psychological conditions. Indeed, there is almost a sense in which to pay society too much due, or professionals too much consideration, is to make a poor allocation of one’s personal resources, which might otherwise be applied to the fruitful pursuit of one’s recovery.
Bridging and Fitting In
Society is to be questioned, and yet to recover is to experience restoring one’s sense of connection to humanity. What to do? In keeping with our topic, there are the possibilities of both therapeutic communities such as Windhorse and psychosynthesis training. But how is one to include being in therapeutic community as part of one’s experience of being in the outer world? And vice versa, how is one to include one’s experience of being in the outer world as part of one’s experience of therapeutic community? In my experience, there is a noticeable and felt contrast between the two contexts (which are felt as worlds) and therefore a resulting dynamic flux in moving between the two fields of contact. In therapeutic community we may find compassion where in the outer world we find aggression; or we may find respect instead of disrespect, attention instead of avoidance, comfort instead of discomfort. So in moving between the two, we experience the contrasts … the stressors and the calming effects, the imbalancing and the balancing, the disruptive and the restorative. So we ride the waves throughout the days and seasons, always trying to remain open, curious, and adaptive to the life around us. So too we are vigilant, for some mistakes come with consequences, different in each setting. But in the transitioning between inner and outer communities a kind of experiential learning occurs, a bridging of a certain divide between who we are when known to friends and who we are as an anonymous member of the public. There is a bridging between who we are in safety and who we are in risk, between who we are in mutual relationship and who we are unattached, that can help us to fill the gaps in our recoveries.
Synthesis
If a therapeutic community works by establishing and resolving contrasts between itself and the outer world, psychosynthesis training works by exercising the individual’s capacity to grow in the moment and to resolve the contrasts called “polarities” through a process of synthesis. This too is a way to become more human and more connected, to recover as a person—not as a patient—and to become more fully oneself in the face of a sometimes inhospitable society. Psychosynthesis exercises typically entail a sense of emotional risk. They require courage to implement. That develops a key trait for recovery. In supporting therapeutic community, one can strengthen and hone resilience. So too in psychosynthesis training one makes the most of impromptu interpersonal moments and exchanges in a structured process. One learns to adapt boldly to pairings and groupings, prompts and goals. Those are the proving ground for recovery; as one might quip: “no risk, no recovery.” Psychosynthesis training provides a well-supported framework for practicing risk-taking with others. One understands not just the nature of risks and their consequences, but also their usefulness for filling in the gaps in one’s recovery. Rising to the occasion with others in the training break-outs facilitates transcending old patterns and self-limiting beliefs. And though each exercise soon ends, and the training itself ultimately concludes, the sense of being courageously spontaneous in the moment with others lingers on, and the connections that are forged are very real, even though they are based more on collaboration towards a shared goal rather than towards shared membership in an ongoing (therapeutic) community.
Recovery Challenges
A psychosynthesis exercise can be seen as a particular form of growth or recovery-oriented, time-limited challenge. What about the role of “challenge” in the larger vision of recovery, especially from extreme states of mind? In my experience, challenges are often linked or interconnected: addressing or resolving one often precipitates progress in addressing another. For example, solving an intellectual challenge may have a social reward; and, vice-versa, solving a social challenge may have an intellectual reward. But the road to recovery is filled with various challenges, some embedded in others, that may have lain dormant, festering for years in ways that undermine belief in the recovery process itself, diminish the ability to find the motivation or willingness to pursue it with commitment, or dampen prospects for success. Simply put, one must start somewhere; that is, address one’s most immediate challenge and try to develop traction and sustain momentum in moving forward from there. Challenges exist, both in series over time, and in parallel in shared time. There are both conventional and unconventional challenges; or, in a psychological sense, both mundane and extreme. For example, getting dressed in the morning may be a challenge, but so is having the awareness that one should not leave one’s home undressed.
Meeting a challenge in one area can assist in meeting a challenge in another, and challenges can be ordinary, like fulfilling tasks, or more psychological, like managing an extreme state. It follows that meeting a daily, humdrum challenge may serve to alleviate an extreme mind state, and learning to contend with an extreme state of mind might carry over successfully into productive daily living. The potential for synergistic benefit is enormous. This principle can turn the pursuit of recovery into a giant game of strategy, played on the board of life itself. Since one clearly cannot face all challenges simultaneously, one must be willing to keep some in suspension until the natural time for resolution. But one must have the willingness to first admit—to oneself, if not to another—that the challenge exists. One must mark it with a kind of placeholder, grant it a status in one’s recovery as “begun,” if not “completed.” After all, “Well-begun is half-done.” There is almost a sense in which the beginning of the process, which may be more humbling to some and therefore less attractive, is more important than the ending imagined, for recovery is susceptible to being over-dramatized or mythologized in a way. To not begin is to deny all future potential its inevitable fulfillment. (“Even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”) To focus on the end result alone, or in advance, is to attribute to oneself highly predictive powers—a conceit of omniscience, if you will. None of us really knows where life will lead us or how things will turn out, even tomorrow; so how can we set our sights on a decades-long recovery process without giving each day its due, in its own way?
Unanticipated Challenges, Unexpected Rewards
The good news is that if life brings unanticipated challenges, it can also bring unexpected rewards, even in recovery. The “symptom” one carries day after day, for years, can be reshaped by the forces around one, if it is sufficiently exposed to the “psychological elements.” As if through erosion, it can drift into timelessness, never to be seen again. To recover is not merely to no longer “have” the original symptom, but to have superseded it with something else, a different placeholder in one’s life, if you will. One has thereby not simply eradicated, but transcended the original wound or limitation. One must be healthy to be free, and be free to be healthy.
Through the Recovery Vortex
And yet, before one can be healthy and free, one must first pass through the recovery vortex. This usually entails learning how to deal with a variety of interested and more or less well-intended individuals. For example, one way these people may seek to engage with the recovering person could be by offering “feedback.” Feedback may have its uses, but from the vantage point of the recovering person, it comes with several limitations. First, it puts the person in a bind or quandary as to whether or not to accept the feedback as valid. This is no simple matter, because the person “offering the feedback” clearly has a distinct advantage in terms of societal power and often a presumed cognitive superiority. To reject the feedback may be construed as a form of denial about one’s condition. Yet to blindly accept the feedback would often be to abandon or compromise one’s (at least momentary) sense of one’s “true self.” So I would argue that really the best thing one can do by way of integrating feedback while in recovery from extreme states is to learn to manage it, to accept and hold it as neither true nor false, but in effect, uncertain, unresolved, or unproven. The giver of feedback may have a bias or agenda; and, the receiver of feedback may justifiably be distrusting or paranoid. That doesn’t make the terms or the contract any easier. And if the giver of feedback may be optimistic that the receiver will “grow into” the feedback, the receiver could equally have as an agenda to grow beyond the feedback, to transcend its relevance or applicability, while simultaneously outgrowing the relationship with the giver of feedback. This self-protective strategy serves the receiver of feedback to not feel “caught,” and to hold the feedback in suspended indeterminacy. Again, we’re all changing all the time, right? So why should today’s feedback diminish our prospects for a better tomorrow?
One cannot pass through the recovery vortex or run the recovery gauntlet without wanting to do it. It is unquestionably an act of will, but there are life-and-death stakes if one is unwilling or does not know what to choose, or how. Skilled or well-meaning providers may cover parts of the territory, at times. But they cannot do for the recovering person completely what she may be unwilling to do for herself. It is paramount to motivate a person to want to choose to recover, and the person must be willing to live with that choice, day in and day out. Certainly, one must stay in a workable relationship with the process and oneself. That is no easy thing. We have seen our dreams become regrets, and our friends become enemies—sometimes in our imaginations, sometimes in reality. We have known the price of failure. We may be hesitant to calculate the cost of success. But in the end, there is no true alternative, no other way. We must be courageous enough to choose our own lives over our own deaths, and clever enough to choose that goal, not just once, but every day, all day long. We must be just as patient with our own process as others expect us to be with their shortcomings in trying to meet with us, moment by moment. We must never give up on ourselves, because we don’t know when victory will arrive, or even what it will look like. We will know we have fully arrived, not the moment before we have transcended our former selves, but the moment after: it is not enough just to have met that last challenge. We have to be ever more willing to face the next one.
Do One Thing Every Day
Though engaging with the recovery process may be the challenge of a lifetime, there still remains a sense in which at times the participant may not be challenged enough. The challenge of a lifetime takes a lifetime to complete. All available days must be utilized as effectively as possible. In a nutshell, one does not have to do everything each day, but one must do something every day. And, having done one thing, one often feels inclined to try another, and the momentum builds. Effects are of course cumulative, with yesterday’s gains making you better off today and hence more prepared for tomorrow. This reinforcing dynamic should not be minimized or discounted; indeed, it is one of the most reliable principles sustaining one’s progress over the long haul, through the various ups and downs and twists of fate.
Believe it: your recovery deserves your fullest attention, your most diligent effort. Then you stand a reasonable chance of outmaneuvering fate itself. As the saying goes, “chance favors the prepared mind.”
A lifetime is one perspective on the recovery process. A moment is another. There is always something one can do in the moment to improve upon the recovery. It may be something physical or psychological, internal or external, active or passive. It may be something planned or anticipated, or unplanned and unanticipated. It may involve others or only oneself. It may be to try to correct for the previous experience, or to prepare for the next. It may simply be to bring one’s awareness to a lapse in consciousness, or to consciously decide to suspend focus or awareness and relax. One may choose to do these things because one believes in them, or wants to develop belief in them, or believes in oneself, or even because one believes in the others who hold hope and offer support. There are many possible reasons for choosing to do the right thing for oneself.
And yet, as those of us familiar with recovery issues may know, it can be difficult to identify helpful resources at times. Indeed, many of us are desperate to find anything that will work at all, whether for ourselves or for another. And so, to be moralistic for a moment, I would further claim that if a treatment, resource, or support is known to work for a particular person, then it cannot go un-utilized: in the work of a lifetime, we cannot willfully choose to pass over the potential solutions to our challenges. I do not support forced treatment, and compelling individuals to go against their own wishes in order to go with their long-term interests would be tricky negotiating. But we can always try to opt in, rather than opt out, and support and encourage others to do the same. To do that may require a climate and culture found in therapeutic communities such as Windhorse.
Employment
One of the challenges people in recovery can undertake is employment. For some, it is possible to work while recovering, and to recover while working. As described above, facing differing challenges in recovery often brings synergistic benefits. That may be true of working while recovering, provided various supporting conditions are met. An excellent form of supporting condition would be to belong to a therapeutic community, and for some, a preferred choice of work environments would also be a therapeutic community. At my current employer, Windhorse, I have been tremendously fortunate to have found both. I began as a client, was hired as a former client, and continue as an employee. The larger truth is that my identity and role have shifted and evolved over time. At times that evolving is straightforward, day by day with respect to the calendar. Often it is more complex: aspects of skillset and progress in recovery get juxtaposed with changing aspects of my employer, the therapeutic community, and its recovery-promoting culture.
If I were to try to summarize how involvement in a therapeutic community increases one’s ability to navigate successfully in the outer world, I would say it helps you learn to modulate your behaviors and regulate your moods: in the outer world you tend to be more law-abiding, more in control of the tone and content of your speech, more willing to share public space, better able to keep a social mishap from escalating to another level. You have a more developed sense of propriety, a greater willingness to trust and rely on your newly-tested instincts in dealing with others. You show up in the wider community with more constructive traits and tendencies and fewer destructive ones. Your character has been shaped over time in the close company of others.
It might seem like so much psycho-babble, but if one aspires to ever thrive in the outer world again, a therapeutic community is indispensable. It offers training by immersion in skills for “making it out there,” among people you don’t know—and for some in recovery, it is precisely the presence of others that can be so confounding, so vexatious. The sad but non-negotiable truth for these individuals is that other people are here to stay, like it or not. Their presences cannot be foretold or controlled, so they become, for many, elements in their recovery gauntlets. That may be an unfortunate fact, but of course these individuals may be able to make improvements by practicing successful social contact with others. Yet the learning process can be tumultuous or risky, and mistakes may occur. Having the therapeutic community in your corner is clearly preferable to lacking it: no pill and no solitary provider can do the work of a community.
Notes
1. In this article we are alternating gender pronouns. We want to balance the need for gender-neutral pronouns with good English usage. Both masculine and feminine pronouns are intended and acceptable. —Editor
2. Firman, John, and Ann Gila, Psychosynthesis: A Psychology of the Spirit, SUNY Press, 2002, p. 61.
3. ibid. p. 184.
4. op.cit. p. 36.
5. ibid. p. 115.
6. Windhorse founders Jeff and Molly Fortuna studied at Naropa University under Edward Podvoll, MD, creator of the Windhorse approach and author of The Seduction of Madness: Revolutionary Insights into the World of Psychosis and A Compassionate Approach to Recovery at Home and Recovering Sanity: A Compassionate Approach to Understanding and Treating Pyschosis.
7. quoted by Firman and Gila, op.cit. p .63
8. Firman and Gila, ibid. p. 36.
9. ibid., p. 56.
10. quoted by Molly Young Brown in The Unfolding Self, Helios Press, 2004, p. 122.
11. Molly Young Brown, ibid., p. 121
12. Page 115.
13. op.cit. p. 78.
14. see Psychosynthesis: A Collection of Basic Writings, The Synthesis Center, 2000, p. 77.
15. ibid., p. 6.
16. The Naropa Institute Journal of Psychology, Issue 2 (1983), pp. 1–10.
17. Science & Behavior Books, 1976, pp. 223–224. This saying and others is available at “The Eschatalogical Laundry List” by Sheldon Kopp, which is available as a download from various sites.