Last night on telly was a documentary on children with bi-polar. It looked at the diagnosis of these children by paediatric psychiatrists and the terrifying vulnerability and circumstances of emotional instability their families endured as the children suffered through their mental illness. It ignited in me memories of my own childhood. My own fear, horrific nightmares of violence and death, my obsessive compulsivity that was out of my control, the sense of losing control as a child. The sense of needing to control the instabilities of the world, as a child. The anxiety, the overwhelming anxiety around death and existence. Do children really have the capacity to suffer these things? The answer is yes! I saw it in my sister and myself.
In the doccies the children were diagnosed: bi-polar. Then treated: medication and counselling. Easy peasy.
I wish I had been diagnosed or treated as a child. I bet my sister does too. Simply because diagnosis equals treatment through medication which equals temporary relief. What brought me relief were comfort, security, and happiness in my family unit. Pressure- societal and school pressures coupled with a unique ability to understand the world on intense emotional, psychological, mental and yes SPIRITUAL levels as a child compounds these anxieties. I remember being ten years old, and suffering such huge existential crisis that I couldn’t sleep. Fear of death, the complexity of existence crippled me- and this in turn was magnified by deadlines at school, magnified by my obsessive compulsivity’s to control my environments, which really were not within my control as a child (or even now as an adult). The pressure of all this at ten was something so powerful I remember it to this day more than twenty years later.
The truth is that there is no fast cure. What a really truthful and honest psychologist will tell you is that there are so many layers that diagnosis treatment is just the first step.
Spirituality: and by this I am speaking of what Julia Cameron refers to as the artists way, of liberating creativity, creativity that is at the heart of human existence, is so significant to the mind of a child in crisis. As adults we come to terms with our own mortality through our life experiences. But more than this, we begin to understand the process of dying on multiple levels. The body is not the only part of us required to die at some stage of our journey. If we are to truly grow and embrace the nature of change that is a part of our natural processes, then we need to understand that death, change, violence, destruction occurs on emotional and spiritual levels. And this is not a bad thing. This is a beautiful thing because it means that we are growing and changing on these levels of experience as well! We don’t need to hold anything, we can be in the present, we are not our past or our future and we can change at any moment. It also means that fear and anxiety are emotions that can be facilitated, should be facilitated as a vital part of coming to terms with our own potential.
Did I just say this? Anxieties as a facilitator- can anxiety really facilitate spiritual growth?
Traditional healers would say yes! Anxiety is an indicator of creativity- an engagement with the complexity of what it is to be human.
And how do you facilitate this in a child? I wish I had had more facilitation through the dark night as a child. Come to think of it- stories, stories got me through. Tales of talking wolves and Sparrow hawks, of the young wizard in training facing off the devouring demon of darkness and when he finally slew the dragon, and looked into its face, what he saw was himself. These stories helped me.
To dance with death is natural and it is healthy and it is not something to fear.
And healing is in knowing that this is a process of true, unbridled, unfettered LOVE!
You are and you are more than- more than your genetics- genetic inheritance, karmic inheritance, psychic inheritance, social conditioning, political conditioning, cultural conditioning, and sexual conditioning.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, my favourite Jungian psychoanalyst writes about facing the life-death-life nature of love.
It is ‘a cycle of animation, development, decline, and death that is always followed by re-animation. This cycle affects all physical life and all facets of psychological life. ‘
She uses the natural patterns of wolves to show how nature embraces and exists in healthy union with these processes: ‘unlike humans, wolves do not deem the ups and down s of life, energy, power, food, nor opportunity as startling or punitive. The peaks and valleys JUST ARE, and wolves ride them as efficiently, as fluidly, as possible. The instinctual nature has the miraculous ability to live through all positive boon, all negative consequence, and still maintain relationship to self, to others…
But in order for humans to live and give…. in this manner that is most wise, most preserving, and most feeling, one has to go up against the very thing one fears most. There is no way around it, as we shall see. One must sleep with Lady Death. ..
In this form, Lady death is not a disease, but a deity..The dance of Body and Soul…
Through their bodies, women live very close to the Life/Death?life nature. When women are in their right instinctual minds, their ideas and impulses to love, to create, to desire are born, have their time, fade and die, and are reborn again. One might say that wo/men consciously or unconsciously practice this knowledge every moon cycle of their lives. For some this moon that tells the cycles is up in the sky. For others it is a Skeleton Woman who lives in their own psyches”
extract taken from ‘Women who run with the Wolves: Contacting the power of the Wild Woman’ by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.
Plot 99: The 21st Century Prophecy Show 