Introduction
Hello and thank you for coming to visit my blog. For twenty years I suffered from severe mental illness and for over ten years I have been free of it. My name is Jane and this is my story. This is what happened and how I survived it.
Like many of us with mental illness, it all started as I was growing up.
My mother was a depressive person who would cycle into raging hysterias. My stepfather was a rageaholic and control freak. They were both religious fanatics. The child abuse began around the age of seven and lasted until my entire family broke up when I was 13.
After years of abuse both at home and at school as well as the psycho-emotional family histrionics I was depressed.During the summer of 1989 at the age of 14 I tried to kill myself for the first time of eventually six major suicide attempts. Soon after I also experienced the first of several psychiatric hospitalizations. There in that place, I was diagnosed with terminal mental illness three weeks after inpatient admission.
During my stay there, an experience which lasted over 70 days I was tested, examined, interviewed and therapied for weeks before a consensus diagnosis was rendered. The hereditary seeds of mental illness had sprouted early in me. I was told I had inherited an unknown chemical imbalance that in some way profoundly effected my thoughts, feelings and behaviors.
The diagnoses? Dual Axis 1: Manic Depression, or Bipolar Disorder 1 and Schizo-affective Disorder co morbid with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
After eight years of clinical psychotherapy, three psychiatric hospitalizations, four years spent in residential treatment centers, group homes, mental health lock downs and six months of involuntary medications of perphenazine and lithium carbonate I remained absolutely and completely lost.
Modern psychiatry had completely failed to help me heal from suicidal depression or any of my problems at all. In fact, the violation and mistreatment I experienced while in the juvenile mental health system only made me worse in every way.
As a young adult my life played out as though my psychiatrist was granted with oracular vision. The suicide attempts came about once every two years. I failed at life in every way imaginable. I was a complete loser. I could not keep a job or a relationship due to my temper. I was in trouble with the law. I used people up. I burned family members and got in debt.I developed drug habits to cope with the voices in my head and the flashbacks.
For the longest time it was me against everyone. It was everyone else’s fault for making my life so miserable. I had long since forgot about the labels and diagnoses. I was not a good, compliant mental health patient. I would have nothing to do with psychologists or psychiatrists. I did not think I had a problem, per se. It was just the way the world was and how I was born it seemed at the time. It was my lot in life.
Soon after my 2oth birthday I tried one last time to kill myself and get it right. I nearly succeeded and in the process I had a near death experience the effects of which changed my life. While I was physically and mentally recovering from the massive overdose I had a lot of time to think about the meaning of life and being alive. I moved to California soon after and started my life all over.
The journey of self healing.
My experience on psychiatric medications was traumatic. I knew when I was fifteen that psych meds were a waste of time. No cure would be forthcoming while I was mentally and emotionally handicapped under their influence. My body identified psych meds as poisons. Experimenting on myself as many people are encouraged to do. To ‘not give up’ and find the med that ‘works for you’, as so many patients are counseled was completely out of the question.
Therapy had never really worked on me as a teen and young adult. To be healed you have to want to be healed. To talk you have to want to talk. I had been in court ordered therapy for years with very little effect because I was not ready to open up. My mental health issues were my private burden It was my personal cross to bear and it was nobody’s business.
After my near death experience I was finally interested in being healed. Having experienced utter failure with the psych meds and therapy approach, I gave myself over to the path of alternative healing. There is a veritable cornucopia of treatment modalities and theories about the relationship of mind, body and spirit that exist out there.
Over the course of a 10 year journey down a path of spiritual, physical and mental healing. I personally explored, researched and experienced a wide variety of holistic remedies and alternative therapies in a desperate attempt to find my mind, myself and my body. I ran into false avenues of recovery along this path as well.
I have tried self medication. I experimented with the supposed healing powers of semiprecious stones, crystals and magnets. I tried Saint John’s Wort, flower essences and oils and aromatherapy. I got into vitamins and supplements of all kinds. I became interested in nutrition and did detoxes, cleansings and different diets like macrobiotics and vegan.
I became a certified Reiki facilitator and teacher. I got into chakra and aura balancing. I did touch therapy, toning, music and sound therapy. I tried light therapy and self hypnosis. I explored the healing powers of tantra. I tried deep tissue work and chiropractics. I got involved with different types of movement therapy. I tried positive thinking, personal prayer and did the whole daily affirmations and meaningful quotes thing.
Many of those things seemed beneficial some times. Several of those therapies gave me very positive effects. Some of those therapies did absolutely nothing for me. None of them completely healed me of all my mental health problems.
I am always amused when people tell me they have tried everything. Usually what they mean is , they tried twenty different kinds of meds before they submitted themselves to ECT. The journey of self healing was for me a time of self discovery and self experimentation. When I tell you I tried everything I really ran the full gamut of healing therapies out there.
There is a relationship between the health of the body, the health of the mind and the health of the spirit. Understanding that is more than an intellectual process. I had to learn in my guts, viscerally what it means to live in and inhabit a body. I had to learn that what you do to one you do to the other. It’s all connected.
I would go so far as to say that the lack of understanding of the relationship of body-mind-spirit is what leads some people to become mentally ill and why they stay that way. The human being does not come with an instructional manual and it really is up to the individual to write their own.
Recovery and the ‘cure’
I never set out to beat bipolar disorder or any of my other mental illnesses. I set out to find inner peace. I wanted my suffering to end. I did not have the Hollywood version of mental illness. My life had been ugly and unglamorous. It had been brutal and traumatic. I had bouts of homelessness and joblessness. When I did not have abusive people in my life I abused myself. I got used to being crazy all the time.
I never talked about my mental health diagnoses with anyone. It was nobody’s business. It was not something I was proud of. Whatever was wrong with me was much more than some unspecific ‘chemical imbalance’.
Mental health instability had up until now perpetually ruined my life again and again in a never ending downward spiral. More than anything, I needed to have my mind and heart back. I had to find a reason to live. I had to find a reason why I should be alive at all.
The cure for my mind was deep meditation. I had studied meditation off and on all my life since my teens but never with a focus on self therapy. At that point in my life, self therapy was my only real interest.
In my early 20s, left with nothing to lose and nothing worth losing. I gave myself over to the practice of genuine meditation. Alone, usually in total isolation, over the course of thousands of hours, I went inside my being and reprogrammed my mind.
I looked at myself as an experiment.
The results of experimenting with my mental and emotional health would be effected by controls and variables. In the process, I undertook a true holistic, yogic lifestyle. A true yogic lifestyle to me meant, living right, eating right, breathing right, exercising right, and taking care of myself until I was well again.
In order to secure the space needed to accomplish this. I got rid of all excess detritus and negative forces and stress in my life. Bit by bit, I subjected myself to these control and variables. I gave myself to the process of healing and recovery with an open ended time commitment, knowing, that it was pointless to pursue life, until I had a reason to live.
All the things people feel compelled or driven to do, college, career, family, relationships, romance, planning for the future, none of that had any meaning for me, and nor during the course of recovery, could I allow striving for any of those things to interfere with me. I was living one day at a time since my near death experience. That was all I could handle.
The process of healing using meditation.
As a means to an end I first put extreme physical distance between myself and everyone in my old life. I moved far away from my family, abusers and mentally ill people, and any physical location that could possibly trigger me.
I put myself in isolation and lived alone for a long time. During this time I began my health experiments in diet and nutrition. I started practicing tai chi, yoga, chi gung and meditation full time. Gradually, the constant practice of these healing arts granted my body and mind enough inner calm and grace to begin serious, devoted and full time meditation practice. As soon as I was strong enough, I began the work of going within.
The first thing I did, was learn to relax. Twenty years of tension had ruined my nervous system and I needed to really learn to let go.
I processed all the PTSD triggers until the flashbacks were gone, and no memory had any power over me.
As I underwent this self psychotherapy, I learned cognitive behavioral therapy and applied it to myself. I combined introspective meditation and advanced chi gung techniques to permanently dissolve every trigger inside me, until they were gone as though they had never been there in the first place.
For some people, real healing at the spiritual level is long, slow, gradual process. Then the first year came and went without any depression whatsoever, for the first time in my memory. Then the second and third year came and went without depression as well.
During this time, I worked on anger, loss, abandonment, abuse and violation, anxiety, addictions, attachments, aversions, attractions, likes, dislikes, and all my past relationships. Another year went by without depression and now, my anxiety and neuroses were making similar remissions. Gradually, the voices in my head became quieter and quieter, less and less overwhelming. The cacophony, the chorus, the storm, was, for the first time in a long time, spontaneously abating.
During the summer of 2000 I went on meditation retreat for a week. Almost six months later, on the fourteenth day of a personal isolated sitting retreat, the most powerful meditation and spiritual experience of my life surprised me out of nowhere and changed my life forever.
Unasked for and unlooked for, I had a direct experience of Self. I came into contact with what lies deep inside us all and in the process I attained a lasting inner equilibrium. That discovery caused me to fall in love with myself. It was like being born again.
The experience recharged my spiritual, physical and mental batteries restoring to me a passion for life and living.
After literally thousands of hours of dedicated genuine and proper meditation practice, I finally had peace. In that moment of surrender and apprehension, all suffering left me and never returned. I knew who I was, what I wanted out of life, and for the first time in 25 years, I knew absolute unconditional self love.
For days I spontaneously laughed and cried, often simultaneously. I was free and I could never ever be trapped again in the same way. I knew I would never hurt myself again. I continued to practice, to keep wiping away the remaining detritus.
In the process my mind and the voices in the whirlwind inside my mind stilled and became calm. I was never manic again. I moved on. I had cured myself of my past, my present and now that I had a reason to live, I was going to have a future. I set about making more changes to my life and continued to transform and transition as a person.
At the age of 31, I had been depression and suicide attempt free for a decade. The mania was gone, the voices were gone, the triggers where gone. I had ceased self injuring for good.
All of this I accomplished on my own, largely in solitude and isolation, without psychotherapy, support or psychiatric drugs.
Finally, I had put my life, my past and my illness completely behind me. Then, on my 32 birthday, I whimsically entered the word *bipolar* into Google. In seconds I found blogs, support forums, bulletin boards, chats and even personal videos on you tube, all discussing manic depression and schizophrenia.
While I was out of the mental health scene, meditating and living a yoga lifestyle in solitude year after year Bipolar had become a mental health epidemic. Despite the lack of evidence, this mental illness is being blamed on genes and biology. The cause is unknown and cure apparently nonexistent. I was shocked and dismayed to find that nearly 20 years after my diagnoses the horribly unsuccessful treatment of psyche meds and therapy that had failed me were still the de rigueur management technique.
When I found out that people of all ages, including children were taking over a half dozen medications or under going ECT for depression and bipolar my spirit was moved.
It pains me to read blogs and support forums and watch videos and see only learned helplessness and hopelessness. Everywhere I look, there is supposedly no cure for any of these major Axis 1 mood disorders. Yet I have extracted the cure for severe mental illness on my own using myself as the experiment.
Once I was free of mental illness, and I knew who I really was under it all. I was able to finish growing up, to re-enter society, network and socialize, make friends, and finally get involved in personal and romantic relationships after a ten year break from them.
It is possible to heal yourself of bipolar, schizophrenia and ptsd, permanently.
It is possible to shake off the disabling symptoms of these mental illnesses leaving you with your natural gifts and talents intact without therapy or drugs.. It is possible to live a life free of medications and the mental health care profession, once you have learned how to therapy yourself. As a result I believe that there may be hope for nearly everyone for a lasting permanent recovery from mental illness.
The road to a real lasting and stable recovery is not easy or fast. At least for me, walking the path to lasting mental illness recovery was the single most difficult undertaking of my life. In my recovery I have taken the road least traveled and it has made all the difference.
What may work for one person may not be effective for another. I understand this and I hope if you are considering the pages on this blog, or my youtube videos, that you understand this too. I enjoin you all now, to reverse engineer my method and take this knowledge for yourself. If only one person follows me and succeeds in overcoming their suffering naturally and permanently, it was worth taking the time to leave my notes for you.
Sincerely Jane Alexander
12-15-2007
Jane’s current projects include her ongoing practice of Taoist chi gung, nei gung, hatha yoga, tai chi and meditation.
She teaches tai chi, chi gung, and Taoist meditation privately by appointment only in San Francisco .
***important disclaimer***
The methods I used to recover from mental illness were considered to be practical wisdom and applied common sense in ancient Indian and Asian cultures. These methods would probably be considered experimental and unorthodox in our Western culture (by psychiatrists, mainly) and may not be for everyone!
There is no one single effective cure for any or all mental illness. Be highly skeptical of promises of quick fixes for mental health issues. It probably took awhile for your problems to grow and impact you and it’s going to take some time to get rid of them. Perhaps years.
Anything of real value that is worth having can be hard work to attain and long term mental health is one of those things that is worth having. The methods and therapies I resorted to, I turned to because nothing else worked.
If you are one of those for whom therapy and psychiatric drugs had little or no benefit and you are looking for some kind of alternative path to healing this may be for you but your mileage will vary.
When I speak to you of advice, recommendations and recovery, I speak to you as a former patient, sufferer and survivor. I took personal responsibility for my own lasting and stable recovery and that is what I expect you to do.
I am not responsible for any medical, psychiatric or life choices anyone makes after viewing my blog and videos. You are solely responsible for acting on any of my anecdotes or advice and the consequences that may result.
