Jack came to me cause he knew that I am an anarchist-activist from our common activist circles, and also a psychotherapist. He needed a therapist that could accept and, even better, agree with his anarchist views. He had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was on medication for several years, aged only 25 years. His background is that he had serious family troubles, a violent father and a not enough protective mother. The result was that he became emotionally frozen and in his effort to check if he could feel something he tortured himself with emotional violence that turned into paranoia and fear he couldn’t control.My job was to help him come into the present, into the here and now, activate the organismic awareness by emotional awareness, stabilising the present awareness in the three levels of awareness; environment, body and mind.
Mainly though my job was to help him understand that what he was experiencing in his life was a natural consequence of the unnatural violence he had been receiving. All these ‘problems’ was his creative adjustment to stay alive, and they had worked. Some people can do better than others, but it was something that would affect anybody badly.
Also, we talked a lot about our beliefs on this current political system, and how can we act on that. This gave him enormous relief, the fact that he was understood and that I was and am with him.
He stopped the sessions suddenly because of his mother’s pressure.
Luckily he wrote to me after a year: he had managed to stop the medication shortly after our sessions! This was a huge victory for him, and me, since he had been on the medication some years already and had had little hope of ever being able to come off them! Also, he reported that he had found his tribe and he was happy, aware, active and living a much more balanced life.