Raison D'etre

Why a whole blog to talk about breakdowns?  Breakdowns—periods or moments when we become flooded by our internal reality sometimes to the exclusion of outer reality—are arguably one of the most terrifying phenomenon that many of us could contemplate.  Yet we speak very little about breadowns.  Emotional collapse tends to be received with a sense of shame and dismay that far exceeds a response to physical collapse.  Any of us is much more likely to talk about our flu or our cold even our heart disease or chronic pain faster and more willingly than our moments of darkness, hopelessness or absolute insanity.  Disintegration, amongst the most feared of human experiences, is a bit of an outcaste, in need of a voice.   

When I first wandered onto the psychiatric unit of Stanford Hospital as a student I had two thoughts that would not go away no matter how hard I tried to erase them.  One, this is the most scary place I have ever been and two, this fear is enough to make me collapse too, overnight I will morphed from doctor in training to a patient.

No countering third. There was no part of me that spoke up and said you are so mentally strong and healthy nothing like this is ever going to happen to you. The fact was and is that I simply don’t believe that’s true.  I think depression, anxiety, even psychosis are part of the human condition and could arise in anyone.  Some of us just have more controls in place than others.  

Half a year into that placement on the acute psychiatric unit I was increasingly convinced that psychic collapse was not the most horrible thing in the world.  There is something about the controls removed, the curtain gone and the accompanying deep and vulnerable emergence of a self-in-pain that overflows with a kind of humanity.  Certain truths become unveiled that otherwise would never have a chance to come to light.  And so I started to believe, that while painful, breakdowns were not useless and perhaps not necessarily to be avoided at all costs.

Most of us fight hard to protect ourselves from breakdowns, much harder than we are even aware of I think.  And some of us may have—whether diagnosed or not—a vulnerability to breakdown, something in us that cannot fight or simply drops the fighting and just receives the breakdown in whatever form it takes, be that a dropping into a swamp of grief or communing with spirits whose form and voice is known only to ourselves.  And there is some benefit there, some value to communing with the forces within us that want our attention that we keep out of awareness for so much of alive.

Our inner world is pawing at us, inviting us, demanding from us, in our dreams and often in our waking life as well.  When we have a breakdown, it’s a chance to give that inner world our undivided attention for a period of time.  Instead of arresting or patching up the falling apart of the outer façade, when we open our arms to embrace our inner world then we can learn something interesting during our breakdown.  The stories that are unheard come to light, the yearning of something deep inside us is bared, and even though there is outer chaos, even though we are unable to perhaps attend to our day to day functioning with the efficiency we once did, the mystery that is being unraveled within is worth exploring.