Schizophrenia: The power of self-empathy
by Blake Hayner
I have lived the illness of schizophrenia for 50 years. As a result, I’ve had to live with countless visual and auditory hallucinations, which have plagued my existence on this Earth. My body and mind has had to experience many physical and mental breakdowns caused by the effects of my illness.
I have attempted suicide as many times as I have fingers and toes. I have abused my body using sharp objects, electrodes and lit cigarettes to numb the emotional turmoil that I’ve lived with daily. My body is scarred and abused from emotional outbursts that have strangled my feelings and blackened my moods. I have lived in searing fear, anger, and shame from my behaviors, which are seemingly uncontrollable and overwhelming to the point of exhaustion and blinding frustration.
In my childhood, my parents misunderstood my behaviors as something which was simply a childhood phase that I would outgrow, given time and the passing of puberty. I was given countless psychological evaluations in my elementary and high school years. My parents dealt with these studies as they dealt with my drinking, with absolute denial.
I live in moments of absolute clarity and extreme calamity all bunched up into a single event.
A typical episode is a successive flash of images accompanied by violent emotions. For example: I could be watching a movie and see a person being arrested by the police. To anyone else, this situation would simply be seen as nothing more than a fictional story. However, in my mind, I would see myself being wrongly accused of a crime, beaten by the police with their sticks, pistol whipped, handcuffed, beaten some more, thrown into a cell, tortured by the jail guards, and then left in a bloody heap on the floor to die alone. All of this would be accompanied by fits of anger, rage, shame, guilt, remorse, and sadness.
Then to finish off the scenario in my mind, I would have another flash of successive visions with me sitting on top of a building with an automatic machine gun killing every cop in my sights, a vision accompanied by the emotions of, joy, elation, contentment, and serenity for the revenge I had just taken.
While the actual event inside my mind happens in just a few seconds, my reactions sometimes will last for days or weeks with nothing but rage-filled thoughts of revenge against a hallucination of jumbled images and feelings.
Thankfully, I now am able to manage my behaviors using Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication strategy. Today when I have an outburst of emotion, I stop myself and apply self-empathy. I have trained myself to look at the emotion I am experiencing, break down that emotion to a basic feeling; and then discover my needs within the emotion.
Through self-empathy, I’ve also discovered my basic need to help others. Before I toss a disruptive word or statement at an unsuspecting person when I am speaking to them, I respond in a healthy way by writing down the statement that arises and reading that statement at the right moment rather than at the wrong one.
Thanks to Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and my men’s groups, I can break the chain. I break the bad links and repair them with healthy ones. I am connected in a deeper, more positive way with my family. I have a powerful tool with which to harness the effects of my schizophrenia.
I want to pass on a message to everyone that has emotional issues. Please try the strategy of self-empathy taught by Marshall Rosenberg. It has saved my life and my family from all the further hardship that they would have experienced through the effects of my mental illness. With the proper medication, therapy, and support groups – including NVC practice groups using compassionate communication techniques and language – my mental health has never been better.
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Blake Hayner is a 50-year-old man living in Oak Park, Illinois, with his wife and companion of 17 years. He has lived with the condition of schizophrenia since he was three years of age. He’s been blogging his life, living as a man with a mental illness, for the past five years on different web sites such as Schizophrenia Connection and Belief.net. |
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