In Episode 8, I talked about an experience of positive disintegration that nearly killed me. Be warned that this post will include journal entries and thoughts from that difficult time prior to making two suicide attempts.
Please note that Emma also shared her experiences of disintegration in this episode. These two posts with the extended show notes will only be from my perspective, but I hope Emma will consider doing a follow-up on her experiences eventually as well.
When we released the episode, I wanted very much to share excerpts from my journals because that’s what informed my part of our discussion. But we weren’t sharing written posts yet, and I wasn’t quite sure how to do it.
I’m sharing the experiences I’m writing about today because the literature doesn’t contain enough examples of positive disintegration like the ones I’ve been through. Michael has done case studies of moral exemplars and explored the higher reaches of multilevel development, and I have found resonance in their stories.
But what about disintegrations that look more like mental illness? Where are the stories of people who grew up identified as highly gifted and later went through years of disability and mental health treatment?
I attempted to limit my thoughts to one post, but it was too much, and I felt it was best to break it up. This post has excerpts from the transcript, my journal entries, and the work of Dąbrowski and Piechowski.
Before discussing the episode and sharing my follow-up thoughts, please know that I sometimes use paywalls in my posts for privacy. As much as I want to make information as accessible as possible, I’m still easing myself into public writing about these times from my past. If you want access to our paid posts and can’t afford to subscribe at this time, please reach out, and I will gladly comp your account.
Without further ado, let’s talk about Episode 8: Surviving Disintegration, which was released on February 7, 2022. It was the first episode where I listened to myself and thought I did a decent job, which seems worth mentioning.
I started us off with a quote from Piechowski (1975), the monograph from Interesting Quotes, Vol. 13 called “A Theoretical and Empirical Approach to the Study of Development”:
“Positive disintegration means restructuring of the organization of affective and cognitive functions. It is called disintegration because the lower level of functioning must break down before it is replaced by a new organization of a higher level. The term positive is used in the same sense as when we speak of evolution from lower to higher forms of life. Rather than in terms of age or learning, development is measured in terms of structural and functional reorganizations. By this definition, if there's no restructuring, there is no development.”
The goal for this episode was to give examples from our own disintegration experiences. I introduced my history:
Chris: My first disintegrations happened when I was young. The first one was when I was in seventh grade, and then it happened again in high school more than once. During those times when I was a tween or teenager, there was a lot of ambivalence and ambitendencies. But there were also multilevel dynamisms present, too, although they were lower level compared to how they would look later. I've been through disintegration many times in my life… I don't think I had my first really major earth-shattering disintegration until I was 20 to 21.
Today’s post is about that earth-shattering disintegration at 21, which led to two suicide attempts.
Thoughts On Disintegration
Emma asked if some people are more likely to go through positive disintegration than others. The short answer is yes. People with multiple, strong overexcitabilities are more likely to have this experience. She also asked a question I’ve been asked many times:
“How does someone know when they're actually going through a disintegration as opposed to just rough life circumstances?”
We can identify a period of disintegration by looking for what Dąbrowski called dynamisms.
I mentioned dynamisms in the post with Episode 1 extended show notes, featuring an abridged transcript and recorded commentary from me and Emma. In the audio voiceover, I mentioned a point of disagreement from Michael about the dynamisms arising from overexcitabilities. I don’t think we’re completely out of alignment on the issue. I agree with Michael that it takes more than the overexcitability alone to produce dynamisms.
Dąbrowski believed that overexcitabilities could have narrow or general expressions. He described narrow OEs as indicative of a unilevel process, and general OEs had more positive developmental implications.1 Theoretically, narrow OEs would mean a limited developmental potential.
My case provides insight into how OEs can first be general and later become narrow and produce unilevel dynamisms and problems such as agoraphobia.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time and energy considering how the OEs contribute to producing dynamisms in both unilevel and multilevel disintegrations. Like everything else about the theory of positive disintegration, it’s complicated. I’m sure some nuances will be missed in my attempt to capture these processes, but I’ll do my best.
Here’s the first excerpt I’d like to share from Psychoneurosis Is Not an Illness:
“A person manifesting an enhanced psychic excitability in general, and an enhanced emotional, intellectual and imaginational excitability in particular, is endowed with a greater power of penetration into both the external and the inner world. He has a greater need to see their many dimensions and many levels, to think and reflect upon them. These forms of overexcitability are the initial condition of developing an attitude of positive maladjustment to oneself, to others, and to the surrounding world.” (Dabrowski, 1972, p. 65)
Positive maladjustment is a dynamism, and we can see above that Dąbrowski thought the experience of overexcitability was connected. There are other places in his work where he connects these dots.
In the following example from The Dynamics of Concepts, Dąbrowski described how the OEs lead to not only dynamisms but also other processes of development, such as prospection and retrospection:
“Emotional overexcitability is of fundamental importance in the formation and shaping of a hierarchy of values, empathy, identification, self-consciousness, autonomy, authenticity, etc.; that is to say, of the dynamisms which play a decisive role in the general and positive development of a human individual. Imaginational overexcitability is of great significance in artistic creativity, in positive infantilism, in the capacity for retrospection and prospection, in intuitive planning and even in contemplation and ecstasy. Intellectual overexcitability, especially in conjunction with emotional and imaginational overexcitability, gives rise to scholarly creativity, to the growth of reflection and self-control, of autonomy and authenticity, of an autonomous hierarchy of values, of the dynamism “subject-object” in oneself and of the third factor.” (Dabrowski, 1973, p. 173)
The next example from Piechowski’s 1975 monograph (see Interesting Quotes, Vol. 13) brings us back to Emma’s question of how we can identify the process of disintegration. We can also see that the concept of developmental potential doesn’t exist to put people into boxes but to account for individual differences and their developmental implications:
“The concept of developmental potential is introduced out of logical necessity to account for individual differences in the extent of development. This concept is not offered as an abstraction, however elegant, but is associated with observable traits—the five forms of overexcitability and their derivatives—the dynamisms—which allow one to assess its composition and strength. These traits are the key to and explanation of development through positive disintegration.” (Piechowski, 1975, p. 266)
Before I share examples from my life, I’d like to point new subscribers to Overcoming the Self-Stigma of Mental Illness, Part 1, for an overview of my story.
The Imaginal World
When considering my story, one thing that always has to be kept in mind is the imaginal world. I described it in the episode:
Chris: One of the things that led to multiple disintegrations for me is that I had the experience of having an imaginal world, and the imaginal world came into existence when I was almost eight. It was New Year's Eve when I was seven. For the first time, it was as if I was seeing myself from outside of my body. I was watching myself, and I started imagining myself dying by suicide. I watched myself do this in multiple ways, and then I was trying to get a sense of how people would feel if I killed myself.
That experience changed the whole way I experienced reality. After that point, I had an imaginal world. It was as if that experience of being able to see outside of myself led to this phenomenon of having an imaginal world. And it's really hard to explain what I mean by that, but basically, it was as if I was suddenly able to experience another life parallel to the one I lived in everyday reality.
I had a different family there, and I lived in a different house. It was as if I was living two lives in parallel. And that lasted for decades of my life, and it looked different over time. And so when I was a kid, it was very much as if life was like a movie I was living, or I was experiencing it, like seeing a movie, if that makes sense. And so my imagination was very strong, and it felt kind of imposed on me in a way. It didn't feel like something I was in control of. It just happened.
This imaginal world persisted into adulthood and was still part of my experience of reality during my 20s. However, it wasn’t something I allowed myself to write about in my journal. I didn’t mention it to anyone until I was 19, and when I told my college roommates, they didn’t know what to say. I kept it to myself.
Too Much Tension
The major disintegration I discussed in Episode 8 happened in 1993-1994. Thirty years ago in January, I was experiencing an enormous amount of tension, and I dealt with it by using drugs.
Another thing to remember is that I published a book in 1993, and it came out in April. In the following paragraphs, remember that I had just become an author a few months before in the spring:
“Alone in my room, I think about what it is that draws me to my bed, to stay there, to avoid interacting with the other people in the world. What are other people my age doing right now? It is too overwhelming to think about. They are okay. They can go out and do anything that they want to do. I can't. I am stuck in my house, in my room, thinking about my life and what a mess I have made of it. I'm not being hard on myself, I have done this to myself, or rather my mind has. I was not always like this. I used to be able to go out and do things, things that other people did. Maybe I wasn’t perfect, but I was out there.
I can't deal with public things anymore. It makes me panic to even think about going to the mall, being with all of those strangers, and among them maybe a couple of people I know, or knew, because I don't feel much like the person I used to be, whoever that was.
For months, I’ve been feeling that I was going through what all people my age go through—a crisis of identity, a feeling of anxiety about who I was and where I was going—but it's much more than that. If I had my way, I would not work, I would not go to school, I would do nothing but stay in my house and write and read and talk to people on the phone, and not because I am lazy, but because the pressure of the world outside my house, the overwhelming sensations, are so frightening that I can hardly deal with it. I manage. I go to my job at Barnes & Noble, and when I was going to school, I usually went to class, but I didn’t feel comfortable doing so.
What does a person in my situation do? I don't know what other people do because I'm too afraid to talk to them and find out, but I know damn well what I did about it. I barely feel that I exist at all.” (August 1993, age 20)
It’s interesting that I thought all people my age were going through something similar. And it’s also somewhat striking to me that I was seemingly unaware of the conflict I faced because of my book.
If you read Overcoming Part 1, you may recall that my book No Guarantees was about overcoming drug addiction. Well, I was only an addict in my mind.
During the summer of 1993, I wasn’t using drugs or alcohol because I was working to promote the book. Another source of inner conflict for me was being the author of a book about recovery, knowing that I had relapsed and started drinking and smoking weed again in the months leading up to the book’s release.
Back home in Connecticut, I had returned to living without substances because I was giving interviews with reporters and gearing up to give talks about overcoming addiction.
In Surviving Disintegration, I described a traumatic event that made things even worse, which happened just a few weeks after I wrote the above entry. It’s interesting to me now to see how little I wrote about the experience of being arrested in September 1993.
It was really fucked up. My parents were really shook up. Luckily, it hasn't been in the paper yet. That doesn't mean it won't happen. The police searched our garbage 15 times in 8 months. They found pot seeds and empty packs of rolling papers. Not exactly probable cause for a drug dealing operation, which is what they thought was going on. Someone called in an anonymous tip that we were dealers and said there was an arsenal of weapons here. My life is never dull, I can say that much. (September 1993)
I wasn’t convicted, and there were no lasting legal consequences, but there were certainly lasting consequences for my nervous system. By the end of that year, I was struggling with anxiety and thoughts of suicide.
First, I started smoking marijuana again, and then I moved to cocaine. I never meant to start smoking crack, but it happened. Once I’d tried it, I wanted it as often as I could manage.
When you’re not doing drugs, sometimes they seem scary. Not weed, or alcohol, but cocaine, crack, and heroin seem “bad.” It’s funny how things change without you realizing. (January 1, 1994)
Even though I wasn’t convicted of any crime, I participated in a program where I checked in with a probation officer. My first urine screen came back positive for cocaine, and I had to start twice-weekly drug testing.
My way of coping with the tension in my life was using drugs. Suddenly, I felt backed against the wall and tried to get an appointment with a psychiatrist through my local community mental health center. They were completely overloaded, and it took weeks to complete the intake process. I knew that I was not doing well, and I wasn’t afraid to reach out for help.
The other way I coped was through writing, as seen here:
It amazes me that some people never write. I have to write. I can’t help myself. I’ve been like this for years. It’s the only real release that I have because I don’t feel much like talking about how I really feel. I have trouble expressing myself orally sometimes. What if I’d never discovered that writing works for me? Everyone needs someone or something that they can vent through.
I prefer to write things out rather than talk right away because it helps me sort and process my feelings. When I tell people things immediately, I might be sorry later. But I can always write it out and think about it.
I think that one of the biggest problems I have is that other people misunderstand me. Since others are socialized in ways I don’t conform, their perceptions of me are almost always wrong. (January 1994)
The job at Barnes & Noble was the first time I’d worked full-time, and it was a major adjustment. I struggled with working the sales floor and kept asking (begging) to work in the stock room. I became the magazine manager and dealt with hundreds of titles, which was a perfect task for me.
I loved being immersed in books and magazines at work and was constantly reading at home. I made my way through the self-help books and tried to figure out what my problem was since I saw myself as broken.
I’m almost finished with a book called The Only Child. I just can’t believe how much I relate to the book. I’m the way I am because I’m an only child and it’s not unusual. Finally, I realize that I’m not crazy—there’s a reason for the things I do. (January 9, 1994)
I spent a great deal of time and energy thinking about myself, and others while trying to figure things out. That comes across in descriptions like this:
I truly believe sometimes that I am constantly working to improve myself. It may not seem that way to the people around me because they can’t hear my thoughts. I think all the time. I wonder about myself and everyone around me. I listen to what people say. When I read a book and relate to something or someone on the page, I process that information and begin working on it if it’s negative, and praise myself for a moment if it’s positive. (January 20, 1994)
What I said about “working on it if it’s negative and praising myself if it’s positive” is early evidence of the third factor dynamism. The goal was to affirm and improve on my strengths while trying to reject and eliminate the aspects that weren’t who I wanted to be. The problem, and why it was only a precursor to the dynamism, was that I was also getting high and avoiding reality.
Still, I kept writing in my journal and trying to understand what was wrong, as seen here:
Although it is impossible for me to pinpoint exactly when I began suffering from anxiety, I can be sure that I have not felt free from anxiety for several years. I believe my personality has developed around the anxiety I have dealt with. Now that I realize what the problem is I can easily map out the course of my anxiety. I believe that I constructed the personality that I “use” today in order to function in society. For a while the personality worked, and I was relatively happy with it. Unfortunately, I can no longer live with that “false self,” but I don’t remember who my real self is. How can I make the change?
It’s been three years since that point and now it’s unbearable. I am unable to relax in most situations, even when I’m trying to go to sleep at night. My heart jumps during many situations. For example, while driving. In high school, I frequently had panic attacks on the way to school (senior year), and I attributed them to several things like dehydration, which is ridiculous. I can’t wait to find out who I really am. (February 9, 1994)
Elsewhere in my journal, I described what I would call signs of PTSD from getting arrested. I was waking up in a panic, imagining the police at my door again.
I went to the first intake appointment at our local mental health center, but things were already a mess. I started thinking about suicide because the tension was so strong.
This has been a really emotional week. Quite a few times I've started crying. I'm not too good at it, but it's something.
I do wish I was dead. I really do. Occasionally things go right for me, but on a day to day basis there just isn't enough happiness in my life to keep me going. There are simple things that make me happy. Like Kitty. And I had a good time with my grandparents last night. Sometimes, I think that the only thing that keeps me from killing myself is my family. They don't deserve that. It's a really cruel and selfish thing to do. I can think about it, though. I'm on the edge. Sometimes I feel like I'm just going to have a stroke or something, the tension is too strong. What would I do if I couldn't write? I guess I'd lose my mind altogether. (February 17, 1994)
I don’t think I realized how much control I had over my own mind and situation. I was waiting to see a psychiatrist to be put on medication. I was using drugs to self-medicate. But I’d been in a dysregulated state for months, and things were starting to feel quite desperate.
At the second part of my intake interview to see a psychiatrist, I was frustrated with the news that it would still be weeks before I could see someone for medication.
I have so little hope that things will get better. It’s a cycle. Things start going well for a while, but I never fail to get really depressed. And my phobia about people just gets worse… In some ways, I think of it as starting from scratch with a new personality. I gave the old narcissistic one a chance and it didn’t work out. Now I’ll try something different and see how it goes. I think this time I’ll go back to when I was young. I’ve always been sort of an intellectual. There’s nothing wrong with it. In school as a child, it just wasn’t the cool way to be, but I don’t have to worry about that anymore. From this point on, I’m sticking with the things that I want to do. I’ll be the person I want to be, and I have a feeling that’s what I need. Some sort of psychological liberation from the restrictions I’ve been placing on myself.
I realize that I have a lot of problems that need to be resolved, and I’m willing to do whatever it takes. I don’t want to have to kill myself. I feel that I can contribute something to the world, and it wasn’t my book. That was just a building block. The next thing to do is complete my education. Of course, I can’t do that until I feel comfortable leaving my house.
At least I like my job. At work, I can focus all of my energy on the task at hand, and that really helps me to get through the day. Right now I feel as though someone else is guiding this pen. It’s times like these that I know that I was meant to write because it’s as natural to me as breathing. I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t write. If I didn’t have that, I think I’d have nothing. I need to start writing in this journal on a daily basis. The best days of my life were the ones when I wrote on a day to day basis. What happened to my motivation?
I feel like I spent half of my life working on this personality that worked great during high school, but now it’s showing its weaknesses. Things are different suddenly, and when they changed, I wasn’t prepared. Although I believe I’ve been having panic attacks since sophomore year. Since I didn’t know what they were, I put it out of my mind, but it isn’t working now.
Who am I, anyway? When I look in the mirror, I don’t even know who I am anymore. Not that I ever really did. I remember when I was younger, sometimes I would stop and start thinking about who I was, and I’d realize that I felt like I was in a movie, and everyone else’s life was real, but I wasn’t. I don’t know how that much have been, except I recall that it was scary. Like a bad dream that never ended. I put on a pretty good act. I seem like a pretty together person. But I’m not. If I didn’t have my dreams and my books to escape to—and the damn TV—I don’t know what I’d do. (February 23, 1994)
First of all, it’s hard to see where I was coming from, saying that my personality had “worked great” during high school, considering I was asked to leave one high school and ended up in drug treatment at the second. But let’s not get distracted.
You can see my disquietude with myself in that entry, which comes through in the feeling that things had suddenly changed while I was unprepared. Clearly, I was concerned about my sanity during that time, and I thought I could get a handle on things by writing.
We can see my dissatisfaction with myself in the way I asked, “What happened to my motivation?” I knew I wasn’t where I needed to be, and clearly experienced a feeling of inferiority toward myself. I could see the distance between where I was and where I needed to go, and it felt overwhelming. These are all examples of precursor dynamisms from spontaneous multilevel disintegration.
Again, I say “precursors” because they lacked the transformative strength to pull me out of unilevel disintegration. We can also see the unilevel dynamisms in my writing, and they were stronger.
Ambivalence and ambitendencies were present, and they’re evidence of unilevel disintegration. I would argue, in retrospect, that this period of disintegration could easily have been directed into a multilevel one with the right guidance. But I didn’t have the support I needed for that to happen.
What a long day it’s been. I can’t even write about it because I’m sick of it. It wasn’t particularly happy, either. Hopefully the weekend will get better, not worse.
I can’t wait to see the psychiatrist on Thursday. I need to calm down. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to have a nervous breakdown. It’s upsetting. (February 25, 1994)
Unfortunately, I was indeed on the path to having a “nervous breakdown,” which was coming. The continued requirement that I present for drug testing twice weekly was a major part of my stress. Please remember before reading the next entry that I was arrested for having marijuana paraphernalia and some seeds and stems in my bedroom. It was only after the arrest that I started using drugs regularly.
I was just thinking about something that happened the other day, and I thought I’d write it down for future reference. On Friday, my probation officer said something about the length of time I went to rehab. She was like, you only were there for 14 days, and of course, I told her it was 21, but I should have said, what’s your point? It was three fucking years ago, and it has no bearing on my life right now. And if Wakeman had thought I needed to stay longer, they wouldn’t have let me leave. It seems to me that this lady is grasping at straws.
I’ve been smoking too many cigarettes lately, but I don’t even care because the less time I have to spend alive on this shitty fucking Earth, the better. (February 27, 1994)
My anger was coming out more and more in entries by the end of February. I was feeling at the end of my patience and ability to cope. I’d finally reached the point where I was crying at work and needing to slip into the break room in tears.
On the following day, my old friend Bob visited the store, and while it was great to see him, I was a mess:
At least 4 times today I could’ve started crying. It’s fucked up how depressed I am. I just can’t deal with it. My mood swings are ridiculous. Bob still tells me that I should be an MD. I don’t think I’m cut out for it, but maybe if a doctor would finally help me out, things could change. But right now it seems impossible. (February 28, 1994)
Ultimately, I went to a psychiatrist from the phone book once my insurance finally kicked in from Barnes & Noble after working for six months. I couldn’t keep waiting to get in at the local mental health center. At our first appointment, he gave me medication, which brought immediate relief for anxiety:
I saw Dr. G the other day and I think that it went really well. I’m taking Prozac and Xanax and the difference I already feel from Xanax is amazing. Things are also becoming clearer in my head. (March 6, 1994)
Since I was just getting to know this new doctor, I had to tell him about my history. A year earlier, I’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder while at school. My book No Guarantees had not even been out for a full year.
I was finally coming to terms with the experience of having more than one reality. I told the new doctor that I had been living in two worlds—not only in this tangible, concrete reality but in an imaginal world in my mind.
What an interesting day it has been so far. I saw Dr. G this morning and it went well. I told him the truth. It’s so ironic, though. Because it’s really the truth and I don’t know if he’ll believe it because it makes everything else I’ve been living for the past half of my life a lie. It’s hard for me to even tell at this point what’s fantasy and what’s reality. My life has become a blur. (March 9, 1994)
While it was a good and positive sign for me to grapple with that issue, it led to increased disquietude with myself and the worry that I was losing my mind.
I have created the life I am living, and now I have to make a new one. Actually, it’s just time to be myself, whoever that is. I don’t know anymore. It’s so hard to believe what I made up. I know that it’s unbelievable and I don’t know how anyone can know if I’m lying or telling the truth. Only I know. It’s scary. Who am I? My god, what have I done to myself. It’s fucked up. (March 11, 1994)
Since this post is so long, I must break this follow-up into two parts.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading. I’ll have the rest available soon.
Other posts in this series:
Episode 8: Surviving Disintegration, Part 2
Here’s a brief explanation of the general vs. narrow distinction from Michael’s commentary to Dąbrowski’s 1938 paper, which he finished translating in 2018 and published in 2019:
“The 1938 paper is the only one in which Dąbrowski attempted a systematic description of the manifestations of the four overexcitabilities, their sources, and pathological forms. In each overexcitability (except imaginational) he made a distinction between a general and a narrow form. This distinction has not been explored in the research on overexcitabilities in the gifted population, or elsewhere.
By the general, or global, form he meant an overexcitability that encompasses “the whole structure of the individual” and that together with other overexcitabilities favors the development of a rich mental structure. The narrow form is associated with one-sided development that limits the range of interests and experiences. It was only many years later when he was developing his theory that the distinction becomes more explicit: the global form is essential to multilevel development while the narrow form lacks that potential.”
I also sometimes describe this distinction as broad vs. narrow OE. Note that there were only four types of overexcitability described in 1938. The fifth one came later.
Thank you Chris, for the courage, the recollection and the time you make to share your story. It is so real, deeply personal, and the reflections are so powerful.
Thank you Chris for sharing this .... it is powerful and illuminating the messy process of becoming glossed over in linear "recovery narratives" ... the fact that you were trying to write one is telling ... the truth is so much more complicated than the "story" ....