Episode 8: Surviving Disintegration
Part 3, Extended Show Notes
Other posts in this series:
Surviving Disintegration (Episode 8 audio)
Episode 8: Surviving Disintegration, Part 1
Episode 8: Surviving Disintegration, Part 2
In Episode 8, released on February 7, 2022, we shared our personal experiences of positive disintegration in an intimate, honest discussion. Following up on the other posts in the series of bonus content for Episode 8: Surviving Disintegration, today I’m sharing an edited, abridged transcript.1 I’ve focused on my part of our conversation to provide context for the extended show notes posts I’ve shared with journal excerpts and artifacts from my life.
This post hasn’t been recorded because the audio is available in the original podcast episode.
Emma: I'm guessing some people are more prone to having disintegrations than others. I noticed there are some people that have them quite young. And I'm in the same boat as you. I started having my first lot when I was very young. In fact, I think my first would've been when I was seven, when my parents got divorced. Not that I knew what to make of it, but it goes back a very long way. Do you find that there are some people that are prone to going through this experience?
Chris: People who have strong overexcitabilities or strong developmental potential are going to be more likely to go through positive disintegration. I had strong overexcitability as a kid, and I had strong developmental potential. It was more than just the experience of overexcitabilities. I was identified as a highly gifted kid when I was 11. I also had evidence of multilevel dynamisms when I was young. And so all of those things together meant that I had a strong developmental potential. One of the things that led me to multiple disintegrations is that I had the experience of having an imaginal world, and the imaginal world came into existence when I was almost eight.
The first night that I remember—it was New Year's Eve when I was seven. That night, for the first time, it was as if I was seeing myself from outside of my body. So, 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. Because after that point, I had an imaginal world. It was as if that experience of being able to see outside of myself that night led to this phenomenon of having an imaginal world. 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 parallel. That lasted for decades of my life, and it looked different over time. 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. So, my imagination was very strong, and it felt imposed on me in a way. It didn't feel like something I was in control of. It just happened.
When I had this first earth-shattering experience of disintegration, I was confronting for the first time the fact that I didn't know who I was, and this is something that I had struggled with for a few years before. Once I was consciously aware of having this imaginal world, and thinking about who I was there and who I was in everyday reality, it was this shock of realizing that I didn't really know who I was. I realized that I was living this false self. That's how I described it in my journal.
Another important thing though to mention is that I ended up going to drug treatment when I was a senior in high school. I didn't really need to go to drug treatment. Again, I was an addict in my mind—I wasn't an addict yet in reality. Because I was so knowledgeable and felt like I experienced drugs so seriously, it was easy for me to go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings and fit right in and talk about being an addict because I had spent years using drugs in my head.
After I went to drug treatment, or actually while I was still in treatment, I started writing a book. So, when I was 18, I wrote my autobiography of being a teenage drug addict. The problem is that when I wrote this book, it was a mix of truth and fiction, and it was called No Guarantees.
No Guarantees—in this bizarre twist of fate, the book got published. Not only did I write this book at 18, but it was published. I had this book about my experience of being an addict. When it came out, it caused a lot of problems in my life. It disrupted a lot of relationships with my friends. It caused some issues with my family. It was problematic.
I think the most difficult thing for me to face was the fact that it was a mix of truth and fiction. I didn't mean to do that. I know that this is not something that's really relatable for people, but you have to understand that I didn't sit down and write this book and think, “Well, this happened for real. And this was just in my head.”
I was telling these stories and they blended together. It just happened. When I was 20, the book came out, and it was really tough for me to face that reality that this didn't really happen. I felt like a fraud because—how could I let this happen? That was hard to face.
But there was more than that. Around that time, I had a couple traumatic experiences that occurred when I was 20. One of them was that I got arrested and the police raided our house. I was living at home, and it's a long story as to how that happened. You have to suspend your curiosity around that. But the fact is, it never should have happened.
I had flashbacks and nightmares for months. Because it's traumatic to open your door and have people pointing guns in your face and screaming at you.
So, all of that was a mixture for my disintegration to happen. I had intense inner conflict around the book coming out and not having it be 100% true and accurate. Technically, it was true. The things that happened in my head felt as real to me as the things that happened in my real life. But try to explain that to other people. It sounded nuts. So, along with being arrested, it really threw me into a tailspin.
Emma: That would've had the dynamism of dissatisfaction with oneself cropping up a lot. Because you had this book, and some of the feedback that you would've got, particularly from the people that were close to you, would've had you doubting yourself enormously, I would imagine.
Chris: Well, honestly, other people weren't even commenting so much to me about it from a negative perspective. That year when I was 20, the thing that was plaguing me the most was disquietude with myself, because I really started to question my own sanity. I felt such a deep anxiety about whether or not I was losing my mind because I thought it was crazy that I had the experience of having this other life. I didn't have any language around it. I called it a dream world because that seemed most accurate. I didn't know how else to describe it.
Now I have the language of “imaginal world,” thanks to Michael's book, Mellow Out, and I was able to see myself in his work there. Dąbrowski talks about people having a “world of dreams.” When I came to Dąbrowski’s and Michael's work and saw these things, I was like, holy shit. I had rarely seen myself in work like that. I didn't know how to talk about it when I was 20. It was so outside of other people's experience—people who I knew. So, I really struggled with disquietude. I also had astonishment with myself. The things that I was going through, and finally allowing myself to be aware of—it shocked me.
I also experienced inferiority toward myself. I knew that I could do so much more in my life. And instead of achieving like I had expected based on my experience of being gifted, I thought like a loser. I had dropped out of college and even though I had a book come out, what was my future? What prospects did I have? It felt like I was a total failure. I also experienced guilt and shame around what was happening.
But that being said, I also was struggling with ambivalence. Even though this book had come out about my recovery from addiction, I was using drugs again. And frankly, the worse my mental health was getting, the more I was interested in getting high. I went right to smoking pot again.
I was writing throughout these times of going through disintegration, at least in high school and after. When I was 20, and going through all this stuff, it blows me away to see the things that I was writing because from a Dąbrowski perspective, it's been fascinating to revisit.
I was aware of the fact that I had constructed this false self that I was living with. I was aware of the fact that it was allowing me to function. It was this real struggle because I didn't even know who I was anymore. It's that experience of not knowing who I was that was tearing me apart.
All of a sudden, I was so emotional and at that time I was working at Barnes and Noble, which isn't a job that should lead you to be crying in the workplace, but I would be doing my work tasks and crying—tears pouring down my face—and I would have to go in the break room and get it out of my system and try to go back to work. I had never had that experience of not being able to keep from being tearful at work. It completely felt like I was falling apart. I was falling apart.
That time when I was working at Barnes and Noble and falling apart led to me completely running from my life. I took off and I left Connecticut and went to Arizona. Because I had been at Arizona State and so I thought, well if I could just get back to Tempe and live with my roommates again and get back in that environment, I'll be okay.
So, I took off one day. I packed my shit and left with my friend and drove to Arizona. Three months later I made a suicide attempt, and it was a totally unilevel suicide attempt, too. As I was crashing, I got to the point where I tried to escape life. I thought, well, I can't cope with life anymore.
I made two suicide attempts, and I ended up in the hospital a few weeks later. That was my first time, and I was involuntarily hospitalized, which is terrible. For a long time, I thought of myself as—before the hospital and after.
I thought that if I went to Arizona, I wouldn't have to kill myself, but it didn't turn out that way. Later, when I was in the hospital and they were trying to help me find a path forward, I idealized the past. I thought about maybe going back to who I had been. I didn't have a clear vision of what the future might look like. It did take a long time. After that first time in the hospital, I did manage to work for a while, but I ended up on disability for mental illness by the time I was 23. There were many other disintegrations ahead of me.
That was the first disintegration that completely broke me down to the point where I wasn't able to function, and I made the [suicide] attempts. My functioning ground to a halt by the time I was on disability. I basically lived in my bedroom, and I took my medication. I slept, I was writing, I kept trying to go back to school, but there were other times of completely falling apart.
Two years after that first disintegration, there was another one and it was worse in some ways. Because I saw myself as so much sicker two years later and then the next year I was still struggling. And interestingly, the multilevel dynamisms were less clear for a while.
The one I described when I was working at Barnes and Noble was in 1994. In 1997, when I was going through disintegration again, there were fewer multilevel dynamisms involved. It was way more ambivalence and ambitendency. I was really struggling with, am I just going to be a drug addict? I should just kill myself.
In the imaginal world, I was killing myself. There was one point in my journal where I described the realization that I was dying by suicide in the imaginal world. So, in real life, I was also struggling with suicide. It occurred to me that I wasn't going to stop being suicidal in my real life until I managed to figure it out in my mind. So, that was the conflict I was dealing with, where at least I was aware at that point. You can see the progress in that. Things became more conscious for me. I was able to articulate these things in my journal. That was obvious growth for me.
On the other hand, by that point I was more institutionalized. I was used to going in and out of the hospital. I saw myself as a mental patient. By the time I was 24 and 25, I was very much seeing myself as disabled and mentally ill and kind of hopeless. And unfortunately, other people were starting to see me that way too which was problematic.
Emma: Tell us about the surviving part of your disintegration. What was the point where it became positive for you?
Chris: Well, I think that even in those hard times, there were still positive things. The positive parts—even in those hard years—were the connections that I was making and the fact that I was learning in the relationships I was in. Even with a doctor I had, or friends that I made, it was evident there.
The reality is that I had to go through a lot more hard times before things really got better. Before I had a moment of insight in which it was totally clear to me that what I needed to do and how to change. I knew in that moment that I would never use hard drugs again. That I would never be that person anymore. I knew that everything was going to change, and it did.
But to get to that point, I had to really, really, fall apart even more. I was smoking crack at that point. I was either going to change my life or I was going to end up in prison or be dead. It was very clear to me. By the time I was 26, I had been through many disintegrations. I had been hospitalized (or in drug rehab) 12 times. I'd been on who even knows how many medications. I was a veteran of disability by that point. It really started to feel hopeless except it didn't feel hopeless because I also knew that I had this enormous potential.
Even when I was in the hospital, I was always recognized as being very gifted and that giftedness was something that I knew existed, even at the worst times. I was the kind of person who was smoking crack, but reading books about research and interviewing people that I was smoking crack with about what it was like to be a crack head or to sell crack. And so I was kind of ridiculous in that way.
Emma: Always researching.
Chris: Always researching. My mother used to call me an “experience collector” when I was young, and I don't think it was meant to be a compliment.
Emma: Collecting the wrong experiences.
Chris: Exactly. But the dynamisms were there. Each time I went through a disintegration later, on the other side of that moment of insight I had when I was 26, the dynamisms started to get stronger. My dissatisfaction was deeper with myself. I was more disgusted with myself. My guilt was more significant—stronger guilt in that not only did I feel bad, but I was moved to rectify my errors, or I was moved to make things right. The dynamisms were stronger and the organizing, restructuring dynamisms were stronger, too. Really, that's what saves you.
I was able to be more effective in my autopsychotherapy. When your inner psychic transformation is really working well, you're learning from your experiences. You're not repeating them. The growth is more effective. It's more lasting. It's transformative.
When I finally moved away from smoking crack, I went from living in Las Vegas to living in the Los Angeles area. I remember the feeling of it—as if I had to figure out how to be in the world again. I had been living close to downtown in Las Vegas, in terrible circumstances. Really bad. Now, I was back in the world and trying to feel comfortable in the world. Just being in the grocery store, or cashing my check—it all felt so strange, and it took a long time to feel like I was human.
It was a journey. I met my husband so soon after being in that world and living that life that I felt obligated to tell him right away. I was like, are you sure you even want to be with me? I'm a real mess, or, I have been very recently.
It's interesting that we connected at that time in my life where I was just coming out of a really tough several years stretch of disintegration. I don't know what I would've done without him. He was such a stable, loving person and presence in my life from our first times together. That was a big part of what saved me, I think. Being with him has always been so comfortable for me.
Emma: Did you have what I'd like to call a final disintegration, like the one where you just went through it? Because I know you found Dąbrowski's theory a few years ago. Was there that kind of eye-opening last sort of disintegration where you finally got onto the framework and like aha, I know what this is now I know what to do with it?
Chris: I wouldn't say that, no. Honestly, I went through a period of disintegration as I was getting to know Michael and the theory. I feel there are more disintegrations in my future. I certainly wouldn't say they're over. If my life has shown me anything, it's that there's always another disintegration around the bend.
Emma: Did it feel different in so far as the survivability of this and the usefulness of it was more clear than it had been previously?
Chris: Well, it was so different. It was different because the disintegration I went through—it was 2017 to 2019. It was a beautiful disintegration in some ways. It was an expansion of my heart, that's how I see it. It was more of a spiritual emergence in some ways compared to the disintegrations when I was younger that felt like I was completely losing my mind and falling apart. This time, it felt like it was both painful and ecstatic in some ways, and beautiful. But it was hard, and the dynamisms were still there.
This time, instead of screwing up with my psychiatrist and being an idiot2, I was screwing up with Michael Piechowski and being an idiot in different ways.
The disintegration was that I was going from feeling like I was mentally ill to realizing that I wasn't. It was a total flip of what it had been like in the past.
A big part of my story is the fact that I spent many years dooming myself or condemning myself to being mentally ill and broken. On the other side of it has been this mind-blowing experience of realizing how wrong that was. Really, I've gone through all of these deep periods of growth, and the person I am now is a product of all of that. I've done so much rebuilding and work to be a better person that now, I realize my job is to help other people find their way out of suffering.
One more thing about the more recent disintegration experience that I went through since knowing Michael and discovering the theory is that I don't have the experience of having an imaginal world anymore. Interestingly, around the time when I was meeting Michael and trying to explain it to him, I started somehow dismantling that process and changing it or transforming it. Now, finally—and it's hard to pinpoint exactly when it happened—I've integrated my two realities. Now, I am only living in one reality.
Emma: Do you think it's like your other crutches, like your addictions and stuff? Because I know personally after getting onto the Dabrowski bandwagon, I'm finding a way forward. I'm like, I don't need these other crutches. Not only that, I need myself unfettered and unblanketed. I need to know who I really am and not who I am high. I need to discover the actual self. So, do you think that's part of your process of going, you know what, ditch all the crutches because we've gotta figure out how we really walk in this world?
Chris: You know, I'm not sure. I never really saw it as a crutch or an escape exactly. It's more like it was a process to me. It's how my mind worked. I never could have predicted that it would go away. That's what's strange to me even though it's gone now, and I don't have the same experience of living a concurrent reality because that's what was happening. It was as if I was living two lives at the same time. I think that part of what you're saying is true—in order for me to do the work that I need to do, I have to be fully present in reality.
Interestingly, I think that the thing that caused this shift for me is that getting to know Michael really opened me up to more mindfulness techniques, and I naturally started working toward living in the present and being more one-pointed in my work, and not being so distracted. Also, I stopped taking psychiatric medication. Until I was working with Michael and getting to know him, I was still taking medication. I stopped taking all meds in 2017. So, all of this was happening at the same time.
It was a really major shift in my life, and it's been amazing to see that I can live in this one reality. I can't even imagine constantly shifting in and out of that dream state anymore. It feels good to be present, and I can see the improvement in my relationships with my family, especially with my son. I feel some regret and guilt about the realization that so many of his early years, he had a parent who was living in more than one reality. I wish that I had always been as present for him as I try to be now.
Emma: To flip that looking backwards and having a regret moment—do you think if you told your younger self that was in crisis, “Hey, one day, here's where you're going to be sitting on this podcast free of that secondary world, talking to a bunch of people about how you survived all this stuff.”
Do you think your younger self would've believed it?
Chris: I do think my younger self would've believed it. However, if you told me I'd be studying and talking about this theory that was an alternative to the medical model, I would've found that harder to believe.
I was absolutely convinced that I had a chemical imbalance and that I was mentally ill. I saw myself as being flawed and broken and it took me a long time to get out of that state of mind where I was seeing myself as the problem. I had a hard time adapting to everyday reality. I still have a hard time.
Click here for the full transcript.
Note that I would no longer describe what I was like as “being an idiot.” It’s interesting to see how much my self-compassion has increased in two years.