A Recovery Blog

This blog is about my continuing recovery from severe mental illness and addiction. I celebrate this recovery by continuing to write, by sharing my music and artwork and by exploring Buddhist and 12 Step ideas and concepts. I claim that the yin/yang symbol is representative of all of us because I have found that even in the midst of acute psychosis there is still sense, method and even a kind of balance. We are more resilient than we think. We can cross beyond the edge of the sane world and return to tell the tale. A deeper kind of balance takes hold when we get honest, when we reach out for help, when we tell our stories.

Monday, February 6, 2012

Magical Thinking

Magical thinking can be found in most religions; it can also be found in psychotic disorders and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).  There are various definitions of what magical thinking means, but it can swing from "normal" even positive to abnormal and possibly harmful.  I suffer from a mild case of OCD and I've had some of it since I was a young woman; it might have begun when I started to hear voices.  What I do obsessively/compulsively are minor things -- tearing toilet  tissue on the perforated line and not raggedly ripping it, when I microwave something often I make the time add up to the number 7 which I see as a lucky number, making sure my paper money is not in the reversed position in my wallet, making sure the tag on my comforter is down by my feet instead of up by my head, reciting a prayer not to hurt myself or any living thing when I drive my car.  That's all I can think of right now, but you can see that none of my OCD symptoms really incapacitate me, but I do notice them and they do disturb me.  Well, reciting the prayer mostly releases some of my anxiety and gives me the confidence to drive, but there are times when I think that I am not hitting any animals mainly because I am sending out a thoughtful prayer not to.  I do believe some of that, that turning your will towards lovingkindness, not just in your actions but in your deepest thoughts and feelings, can be both self and other protective.  Good will engenders good will in others and allows serendipity to occur.  

Pema Chodron has talked and written a great deal about a Buddhist meditation practice called tonglen.   The meditation goes through four stages.  First you imagine a wide, open space such as the sky or the sea, then you imagine breathing in the dark, warm, heavy, negative and breathing out the light, cool, refreshing and healing.  In the third stage you think of either your own pain or the pain of someone you care about; you breath that in as completely as possible and breath out anything you can imagine to release the pain into healing.  Pema Chodron has called this "changing the atmosphere" from dark to light, from painfully obstructed to liberated.  In the final stage you universalize it by realizing that other people suffer just like this and then wishing for all beings to free of this suffering.  To be free of suffering is to be in Nirvana or heaven.  I think that this is training in magical thinking/feeling because in essence the practice is about believing in the power of meditation to change the quality of life for yourself and then using that to extend the benefits out towards other people.  It's a magical thought that you as an individual can transform the negative into the positive merely through breathing and training your mind to harness the imagination.  But just because it is magical thinking should it be discounted the way we discount a delusion or can we remain openminded?  

Many religious people believe in praying, same for some non religious people who consider themselves spiritual nonetheless.  To an atheist, praying is magical thinking and for them praying is a waste of time and certainly has no effect on other people or situations.  Praying is just meant to comfort oneself during stressful times.  I believe there's truth in that, but I don't think that that's all there is to it.  So far, there is no good scientific test for the benefits of prayer, but there are more and more studies proving the benefits of meditation.  The latest Shambhala Sun, a Buddhist magazine, dedicates a whole issue to it.  On page 47 there's a chart that says on top, "Scientific Minds Want to Know".  The chart is divided into "The Question", "The Study" and "The Results".  Here are the questions:  "Is meditation effective for pain control?", "Can long-term meditation practice reduce brain atrophy and help prevent dementia?",  "Can Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) help prevent relapses of depression?",  "Does mindfulness benefit cancer patients?", "How does yoga compare with conventional treatment of lower back pain?", ""Does meditation help women cope with menopausal symptoms?" and "Does meditation affect brain structure?"  The results, to varying degrees, confirm that meditation/mindfulness/yoga are beneficial to human health, even brain structure is changed with an increase of "gray-matter density in the hippocampus, important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion, and introspection."  They also found a decrease of "gray-matter density in the amygdala, which plays a role in anxiety and stress."  The decrease meant a reduction in stress levels.  

Prayer and meditation are related, but not the same.  Prayer involves magical thinking, either a belief in a higher power or spirit world.  You formulate a prayer and send it out.  Out into what?  Some primordial spiritual space where mere thoughts can travel across space and time and reach some unknown destination where it is heard and possibly acted upon.  The act of praying is not mysterious, but where our thoughts go when we pray is mysterious.  Western philosophy asserts that we are individuals, separate and solid, and that there is no primordial spiritual space where we can interact with either higher powers or each other.  Buddhists say that the idea that we are separate and solid is an illusion, a trick of our ego orientation.  Meditation is a method for them to uncover this trick in order to begin to free themselves from their dependence on their egos.  Our egos work through thoughts, speech and actions especially when we assert that this monolithic "I" is the center of the universe, that we are a big deal and that is also magical thinking.  Mindfulness meditation is applied to ego inflamed thoughts, speech and actions as a balm.  Through practice ego becomes more subdued, while awareness of the present moment increases.  I only think of mindfulness meditation as magical in that valuing the present moment in doing or being mode does make for heightened awareness and clear seeing.  What makes mindfulness practice accessible to nearly everyone is that it does not rely on the magical thinking of religions.  You don't have to believe in anything but the value of your present moment. 

In a meandering way, my point is that magical thinking can be either useful or harmful depending on how it's used.  Sending out a prayer for good health to a friend who is sick can be useful even if it has no effect on one's friend's health.  It can relieve stress and deepen compassion; it is not hurtful to yourself or anyone else.  And ultimately, we don't know what prayer might or might not do.  The point is, our intentions are good.  We desire to help and heal if only in our thoughts.  But the magical thinking involved in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder can lock you into excessive behaviors that are harmful to yourself and possibly towards others.  And maybe you could even say that schizophrenia is an excessive form of OCD.  Delusions start out obsessive and then as they are accepted become compulsive.  To a paranoid person often their first thoughts are that someone is trying to persecute them, even when nothing is happening and no one is around.  I know the medications helped me to break out of my delusions and paranoia, but I had also gotten so low that I was sick and tired of being sick and tired and I knew my main priority had to be taking care of myself on very basic levels:  taking the medications, getting enough sleep, talking to my therapist, staying creative, writing in my journal etc...  I believed that doing these basic things would help me stay on the right, sane track.  For me it's not the OCD that really bothers me, but my dips into depression and anxiety, though OCD certainly has to do with anxiety, but it's attached to a specific action rather than being a generalized feeling of threat that can last for hours.  

One thing I'm pretty sure of and that is that most mental illnesses are related to each other.  People get misdiagnosed all the time because the doctors aren't quite sure.  Schizophrenia, Schizo-Affective Disorder, BiPolar Disorder, Major Depression are all in the same genetic soup.  Some of us started out with some magical thinking that de-evolved into delusional thinking/feeling.  Magic is borderline, but delusions are over the line and into insanity.  Magic can charm and delight and surprise, delusions can do some of that too, but the outcome is mostly negative.  But magic still relies on unseen forces and this belief in the unseen can pull you from a tentative balance into delusional distortions...or it can raise you up to a greater faith in the goodness of a higher power which can restore your sense of balance.  The mind at its best is flexible and allows room for the unknown; the mind at its worst is inflexible and shuts out fertile possibilities.  When I was delusional, I thought I knew The Truth and now that I'm in recovery I know I don't know The Truth, only little facets of it.  But I still believe in Magic.  The sanest amongst us must admit that appearances can be deceptive and the truth elusive.  We live with not knowing all the time, we live with life in flux all the time.  Magical thinking can help us come to terms with some of that.  

3 comments:

Feminist Voice with Disabilities said...

Hi Kate,

I have some OCD symptoms too, but they are like yours - not incapacitating. I do think they are bothersome though, so I recently had a medication changed to address them. I can't tell for sure that the medication changed made a big difference yet, just a small difference, and so I'm not sure it was worthwhile. Our brains are so complicated!

I understand what you mean. Some wishful thinking, or magical thinking can help us cope. I think that's different from obssessive, intrusive thoughts that torment us, but I know how the stuff that torments us can start out as stuff that seems to help us cope. I think you have to know when it's beginning to have negative effects on your life that it's an actual problem. I do some stuff with counting and numbers, very similar to what you do with your microwave oven, and I have never talked to a doctor about it, because it is not really a problem, it's just a weird thing I do, and it doesn't really bother me that I do it. On the other hand, I have disturbing obssessive thoughts that bother me a lot, and they are a problem.

Someday they are going to know exactly which neurons cause which symptoms and exactly which combination of which medications will work on those symptoms for a specific person with her brain chemistry and DNA. But alas, we are not there yet.

Thanks for another interesting blog post, my friend!

Karen May Sorensen said...

Dear Kate,

I've got to come to terms that anything I think about what might happen in the future is magical thinking - or at least thinking that gets me nowhere. I worry about what is to come and since it hasn't yet happened its rather destructive and unproductive rumination. A complete waste of my time and energy.

I really do feel in my bones that concerns outside of the moment are delusional, too much thinking about the past or the future make me feel like I'm a hamster on a little wheel running fast but going nowhere. Its something I'm working on.

I love that being creative places me in the present! And I love that I can take my creative "problems" with me and think about them even when I'm eating a salad in a restaurant. I LIKE obsessing over a creative problem.

Currently I'm doing a drawing that is a plan for a large painting and I spend a lot of time when I'm not drawing thinking about my drawing. I wonder about mathematics professors and how when they work on proofs they can do it anytime anywhere............math is so much in their head. It gives them a sense of the mystical. I know mental illness, which is in your head too, torments people but a creative mind lives in itself for a large amount of time, at least, that is how I experience it.

I tell you, when I solve a creative problem in my mind, like on a walk with my dog, I get a little high. Its my favorite form of magical thinking. I don't know where the solution comes from- its just POP and I get a little present from the universe. And I think oh my oh my lucky me...........

In my line of work I have to be obsessive. I have to have drive, especially since the schizophrenia deprives me of motivation sometimes.

Kate, lately I've been feeling that as a schizophrenic artist choosing to be on a low dose of medication I've got to walk a fine line between madness and creativity, by choice. I fear magical thinking because my father was so outspoken against it. (And it got me hospitalized on a locked unit more than several times, who wants their freedom taken away from them?) With Dad anyone who wasn't grounded in reality was a worthless human being. Science was his God. And yet, his painting teacher says to him "we have to take the scientist out of you to make you a better painter" and my father is now in search for the sake of his art in something beyond, something with poetry, something instinctual, but he really is afraid and sticks to the science of color theory. I've heard him talk about his art, and the scientist isn't subdued. I know he looks at my art and sees madness.

Have to go draw. A rose bush and some leaves in a tree. Trying to make all the leaves look different..........its exhausting to come up with new leaves. But a challenge and I love it!

All my love,
Karen

Chris said...

Hi Kate,

I'm going to try to practice Tonglen, I've read about it in one or two Pema Chodron books. I own two of her books: When Things Fall Apart, and Taking The Leap. She is a wise woman.

I greatly enjoy reading your blog and I cherish the insight you give.

Would like to be a guest blogger on your blog and have you guest blog on my own, possibly in March.

Cheers,
Chris