Energetic Wellness (eBook)

AUTHOR’S NOTES

I remember, as a child, being in the back of a station wagon exploring the many different places, people, and languages throughout Europe. It struck me how, in a day, one could drive from one country to the next and be in vastly different cultures. It occurred to me then that, though there are different languages, we all think and feel the same way. We all want safety, belonging, peace, and an experience of love. After all these years of walking this Earth and doing the work that I do with people, I believe I had it right at the age of 7.

A little background offers context to better understand why expanding the language of mental health into the experience of energetic wellness is important to me on a very personal level. It can be seen in how I talk to people in my work and the multipronged approach we can choose to take towards wellness. Recognizing where we may be experiencing disconnection is the beginning of the exploration. It’s usually part of what leads us into a personal change process, whether it be cultural, energetic, relational, physical, financial, emotional, professional, spiritual, or intellectual.

My parents were a case in point of cultural contrast and disconnect, as my mother was German and my father was Turkish. My sister and I, first generation Americans, were raised centered around those respective cultures in the early years. I’ve come to understand that connecting with our personal and cultural lineages is an important part of our personal process in understanding ourselves better. It can become part of the energetic baggage that shows up as depression, anxiety, hyper-doing and hyper-awareness, living in fear, the polarity of excess and scarcity, and so on. All are examples of disconnection that we experience and can be driven by unconscious programming playing in the energetic background today. Unbeknownst to us this energetic imprint from a past we may not remember, filters today through yesterday’s lens.

My professional lineage includes two generations of psychiatrists, my grandfather and father. This takes us back to the 1940s when my grandfather, Fritz Freyhan, was running the Delaware State Hospital for the Insane. He published over 150 articles related to psychotropic drug treatments for psychosis and depression during his career as a psychopharmacological researcher.

My father attended medical school in Turkey and was later recruited as a physician in the United States in the 1950s. He worked under my grandfather at that Delaware hospital providing electroshock treatments. He later ran a mental health facility and then spent many years in private practice in Virginia. My father was also involved in the trials of the use of the psychedelic compound LSD in the treatment of alcoholism in the 1960s in Baltimore, Maryland. Both men were held in high regard in their work as psychiatrists. However, going into this field was the last thing I wanted to do for a career.

At home, I grew up with a mother who was very depressed, angry, and who usually slept well into the afternoons. It took me years to realize that she was medicated with tranquilizers and never utilized actual antidepressants, as she died in 1991 and Prozac (fluoxetine) did not become available until 1987. There’s tremendous tragedy in her story. She was born in 1941 in Berlin to a young, single mother. She experienced tremendous trauma, attachment issues, and relational injury. My path as a clinician helped me to see her through that lens.

Growing up, we had a cabinet full of samples of every type of psychiatric medication of the day. That was the heyday of the growing industry of pharmaceutical sales, and it was understood there was a medication for everything. I always felt there was something seriously wrong with this picture. No one seemed truly happy and there only seemed to be tragic endings in my family and for the affluent patients of my father. I knew something wasn’t right as the layers of truth were exposed through time and loss.

At the age of 13, I transcribed my father’s notes about his patients, many of which were lifelong cases. I was extremely curious about them. He was of a time when he could commit people to a psychiatric ward with a signature. When he was on call on the weekends, I would go with him to the fourth floor, where I would inevitably encounter people bound in straitjackets and sedated. The stories at the dinner table were about the patients he had saved from hurting themselves and others. His role as father felt very different from his role as Dr. Dim.

I never thought I would end up working in the mental health field because of what I experienced growing up. It took me a while to feel the call to that lineage. The polarization of what I witnessed in my family and what the world of mental illness was through the eyes of the psychiatrists left me very confused and scared. The reductionist, diagnostic way of seeing people was debilitating. It never felt in alignment with how I always experienced people.

In my early work in the detention center, homeless shelters, and community outreach outside of Baltimore, naïveté was finely honed out of me. There was an intensive learning curve as a psychiatric case manager, a role which I was in no way prepared for with a bachelor’s degree in Therapeutic Recreation. Amidst rampant heroin addiction, learning what homelessness really is, and understanding psychosis in an entirely new way, I found my way to graduate school. That led me to licensure, one of the best decisions I ever made. I wouldn’t be writing this today otherwise.

My work as a clinician offered opportunities for learning that led to the world of frequency therapies and psychosomatic medicine. This is where I came to understand the language of energy and the power of the subconscious. Neurofeedback spoke of amplitude, power, and frequency to better understand a healthy brain and nervous system. Clinical hypnosis taught me that symbolic language speaks to the subconscious, where deep change happens.

I’ve always been interested in people’s stories – and continue to be today, in a different way, perhaps. When I was young, I loved to read biographies and autobiographies. There was always an innate curiosity about others and how they felt, which, as a therapist now, I believe is essential to doing my job my well. That curiosity has also instructed me in exploring different modalities like the healing arts, spiritual practices, neuroscience, and other expanding paradigms over the last 30+ years. Those experiences and sitting with people over these decades have allowed me to grow into these unique ideas about us as energetic beings and cultivating energetic wellness.

Having sat with many, I found that we are on similar journeys about which others have no realistic ideas. The stories that are unique to each must find expression and completion. The personal archetypes are similar in the abandonment, love, betrayal, separation, rejection, neglect, longing, safety, and confusion. No one of us, though, is truly alone in our suffering; we’ve just come to believe that we are. I believe that connection and the desire for community is one of the leading calls to action for many of us today, as I hear this from many of my clients who feel so isolated. It’s one of the reasons I’m called to create retreats, personal intensives, and a community to grow a safe container for personal healing and expansion.

The final piece that completes what I bring to this book is my own alchemical journey. This evolution has been the most incredible journey home to myself. It brought me into the world of the healing arts, subtle energy therapies, and the continuity of the soul through shamanism, past-life regression work, and astrology. I’ve come full circle in my relationship with psychedelics in being called to the work in psychedelic medicine. I first experienced mushrooms 40 years ago which led to an exploration in my twenties that was later dormant for many years while doing life and growing children. Finding my way to plant medicines eight years ago began the true synthesis of all that I am and all that I needed to release, and also helped me birth this book.

This transformation and return to central core self brings me here, today, with all of you. In my personal search and rescue journey, I was led to understand a deeper purpose in my work beyond conventional therapy and the many roles that I manage. All that I’ve done, am, and am always becoming has led to this chrysalis point of clarity and the call to share. It has not been a linear journey, yet everything was necessary. I believe that I really did know all this in the beginning and spent years unlearning the imprint in order to become the full expression of who I am.

Writing this has called upon me to feel into and explore my own story in order to decide what is useful to share in the context of the teachings in this book. Being a therapist for so many years, especially in a small community, requires a degree of anonymity. That makes it a bit uncomfortable to learn how to tell my own story as well. I have sifted through for the most pivotal expressions that represent each phase of my own activation process.

The activate, recalibrate, and integrate (ARI) paradigm has been reflected to me through the many people I have sat with over the years. Week after week, tear after tear, witnessing people move into deeper relationships with themselves, and others, has been the learning and instruction that guides this book. They have shown me that some of how we deepen into ourselves is in acceptance of our nature to live authentically and peacefully....