Mental Health Awareness, Part 1
Episode 34 extended show notes
This year, we decided not to record a new podcast episode for Mental Health Awareness Month. We’re busy with Dabrowski Congress preparations and editing episodes we’ve already recorded. Plus, it occurred to us that we’re already raising awareness daily through our work.
Instead, we’ve edited the transcript for Positive Disintegration Podcast Episode 34, which we’re going to share in two parts because it’s too long for one post. The episode was released on May 23, 2023. We plan to release Part 2 of the transcript on May 26, 2024, which was Frank’s birthday.
As always, this transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment. It’s a long post and may be truncated in your inbox. Click here for the full version online.
Emma: Welcome to Positive Disintegration, a path to authenticity. In this episode, Chris and I will be discussing mental health for Mental Health Awareness Month. A shout-out to our good friends at SENG for asking us to do this episode.
We'll be talking about some difficult themes, so I'd like to start with a content warning. We talk about addiction, trauma, and suicide, so please take care with this episode.
We're also sorry to announce that Dr. Frank Falk, Director of Research at the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development, passed away on April 23, 2023, in Denver, Colorado. Frank was Chris's friend, colleague, and mentor. He joined us on Episode 5 about Researching Overexcitability.
Frank was a social psychologist and statistician who spent more than 40 years studying Dabrowski's theory. He was a major supporter of the Dabrowski Center and the podcast, and he will be deeply and sorely missed. His wife Nancy is also a close friend and colleague and long-time student of the theory, and our sympathies go out to her during this difficult time.
We hope that by talking about difficult emotions, mental health, and the theory of positive disintegration, we do justice and service to his memory. Frank, this episode is for you.
Welcome to the Positive Disintegration Podcast. I'm your host, Emma Nicholson, and with me is co-host, Dr. Chris Wells. G'day, Chris.
Chris: G'day, Emma. How are you?
Emma: I'm decidedly average this morning. My niece got married last night, which was a fantastic event, but poor old Aunty Emma forgot that she doesn't drink a whole lot these days and had decidedly too many beers. For those of you who don't know Australianisms, you're about to get a whole heap of them. So, obviously, I was on the piss, as we say, was drinking, and it was a good night. I then took a stack, which means I fell over into a garden bed. I've got one twisted knee, I'm hobbling around in a knee brace. This morning I was feeling quite poorly and spent a little bit of time, as we say, driving the porcelain bus. I was a little bit ill and not feeling the best physically.
Chris: I'm sorry to hear that. Don't feel bad because I'm also feeling very average today. My mind is not where it usually is when we record because I have had a tough six weeks at this point.
Last month, I got COVID for the first time, and I was quite sick. It surprised me how sick I was. And then, just as I was recovering and feeling well again from COVID, my friend and mentor, Frank Falk, passed away. So, I'm not in a great place. I'm still really struggling with that. And yet, this is real, and this is how life is. I still wanted to show up and have this conversation with you.
Emma: We wanted to put an episode together for Mental Health Awareness Month. Sometimes, these things happen to us in life. Chris, you're an example of how sometimes things can be fine one minute, and then the next minute, stuff in your world isn't quite right. So, we want to talk about the theory and how that can possibly sit in the mental health space and how it might help us navigate some of this tough stuff that we might be going through.
Chris: As I was trying to prepare for this episode, I kept thinking about my own experiences with mental health treatment and the fact that I used to see myself as mentally ill. I've thought a lot about stigma. So, those are the places where I was coming from.
But when it comes to the theory, I thought, Frank died, and how do I deal with it? I go to what I've written about him because I'm a writer, and I've documented so much about these relationships in my life. So, I've been reading what I wrote about Frank and looking at our emails, listening to recordings that I have of him. I have an interview I did with him about Michael Piechowski. I have recorded sessions of the Dabrowski Study Group. I have recordings of conference presentations we did together.
When I first was getting to know Frank (and his wife Nancy and Michael), I saw myself as mentally ill. When I met Frank and Nancy, I was still taking medication for bipolar disorder, ADHD, and anxiety. I was still going to a psychiatrist. I had a completely different perspective of myself than I do now.
Frank was the one who sat down with me and delved into the theory. We would meet week after week after week at the Gifted Development Center here in Colorado and sit down with Dabrowski's writings, and with Michael's. We examined data. We studied this together. That's what's on my mind when I'm thinking about mental health tonight—my own experiences of it from different perspectives.
There's so much to say about what's wrong with mental health treatment and how hard it is to get the right help, to find the right framework, to understand what's going on with yourself. And that is where this theory really shines compared to the typical understanding that's available to people.
Emma: I agree. One thing I wanted to talk to you about in particular—because obviously you know the theory so well, and you've gone through this experience of having it reframe how you see yourself. I think the first thing I wanted to dive into was, what are the key aspects of the theory in particular that you found resonated with you or were helpful as part of that reframing? I have my thoughts on it, but I just want to hear your perspective first.
Chris: When I read about the overexcitabilities—that was the first thing I was reading about. Because I came to it first from the gifted ed literature and Michael's work. I remember reading the descriptions of overexcitabilities and thinking that these were things that I had considered wrong with me. Imaginational OE because I had that experience of having an imaginal world, which I considered as something wrong with me.
The same thing with emotional overexcitability. I saw that as a personal failing, a flaw, a mental illness, a mood disorder. It had never occurred to me that there was anything positive about being so emotional like I am or being so intellectual because that's always been something that really sets me apart in a way that is isolating. I have felt like very few people in my life have ever related to how intellectual I am, and so seeing these things reframed as positive was pretty mind-blowing.
Then there were the dynamisms. All of them I recognized in myself, and I had not seen these as strengths at all. So, this new perspective really blew me away. And it's not like I came to it and immediately embraced it because I didn't. It took time. But as soon as I read that material for the first time, it definitely permeated my consciousness in a way that immediately led to cracks in the foundation of my belief about myself as mentally ill. It was a lot to take in. What about you?
Emma: I feel similar about that. What you said about cracks showing is an interesting analogy for me because I found it was a long journey to really start believing these sorts of things. You read them on an intellectual level, and your mind takes it in, but it takes a while to actually believe it, and it's almost like a disintegration of how you view yourself.
So, similar to you, I found overexcitability enormously helpful for the first point. All those traits and things that I thought that I had, as you said—oh, these are obviously flaws. Why can't I cope with life? And it's like, oh, okay, maybe these aren't flaws. And you start having these little paradigm shifts.
The other thing that really resonated with me was the concept that psychoneurosis is not an illness. Seeing those big emotions, and that they actually had a role in development, and all those big feelings you have aren't necessarily bad mental health. Because, similar to you, I'd always thought that I was just struggling the entire time, and why can't I maintain good mental health like everybody else does? This actually explained to me why I was the way I was, that it was okay to feel those big emotions and more to the point that they could actually be useful and purposeful.
Even in the last year, what you said about the dynamisms, it's taken me a long time to see those—what we'd call negative emotions normally—as being useful and purposeful. I did that Hartman Value Profile a while ago. So, this value profile judges how you see the outside world and also how you see yourself. I got such a shitty score with my self-esteem that I broke the tool a little bit. And that really rattled me. I'm like, why do I still feel so badly about myself? And I had a series of realizations after that.
That propensity for me to find fault in myself wasn't just a lack of self-esteem; it was actually dynamisms at work. So, all those things like guilt, shame, and dissatisfaction with yourself are actually what Dabrowski calls out as necessary for reshaping your behavior.
Looking at the dynamisms has really helped me see that these things actually have a purpose. How can they be flaws if they actually serve that mechanism of the carrots and the sticks, the good feelings and the bad feelings? You still need the sticks, right? You still need those bad, negative feelings. How can there actually be something wrong with me if they're helping me develop and they're helping guide my behavior?
It wasn't just the overexcitability part for me, it was seeing that all those big, scary emotions that normally, when you go to mental health websites or services, they're like, don't feel that stuff. That's bad. We don't want to feel those things. Hang on, if they've got a role in my development, why am I trying to shut them out? Why am I trying to get rid of them? Maybe they serve a purpose, and if they serve a purpose, how can they possibly be flaws?
Obviously, you've got to figure out a way to harness that and do something with it through your autopsychotherapy and stuff. But how can I be flawed if, on the other end of the scale, you've got someone who's a narcissist who thinks there's nothing wrong with themselves, that they're perfect and there's nothing to change? Clearly, this stuff has a useful role, and maybe we shouldn't be stigmatizing it so much or trying to shut it out. Because the minute you do that, you're really shutting out your own development. It took me quite a while to make that shift in thinking.
I think the mental health space is in this in-between phase where they talk about these big emotions. They're okay to have them. Everybody goes through them. I think there's less of a stigma about talking about mental health, but at the end of the day, their solution to this is to, well, shut it down, and get rid of it. And I think there's still another part to that journey to embracing and accepting it and going, okay, how do I actually use these to my benefit?
Chris: I was just making notes because you're prompting a lot of thoughts for me. The first is that I think with the dynamisms in spontaneous multilevel disintegration—some of these dynamisms are very emotionally charged, like dissatisfaction with yourself.
So, let's use that one actually as a good example of what I was just thinking of—action, developing your will, and moving forward. All of those things are what have to happen. That's what I saw you do after the Hartman Value Profile. It was a shock to see your results and you could have just wallowed in that, you could have pushed back from it, ignored it. But I think the most important thing is that when you face something about yourself, that's hard, taking action and making that vertical move out of it.
Unilevel disintegration—you talk about the carrot and stick dynamisms—and those dynamisms are so different than the unilevel ones. The unilevel ones—ambivalence, ambitendencies, the second factor—they're different. They don't have that stick part that makes you realize that you're screwing up. So what happens is you have these fluctuations in your mood. You have self-sabotaging behaviors. You're worried about what other people think. You're worried about how you look or how you're presenting yourself to a degree that is getting in your own way. Unilevel disintegration can look a lot of different ways. It can also have multilevel elements present. When I look at my times of unilevel disintegration, I know there are multilevel elements there, too.
What's interesting to me now is that the worst times of my life, when I really saw myself as the sickest in terms of mental health—when I was taking 17 pills a day, when I was like in and out of the hospital numerous times—those were times when the unilevel dynamisms weren't pushing me into growth, adequately. I was making the same mistakes, and I wasn't really facing who I was and what was going on. I was also going through trauma, though. I think that that's important to note that. All of the times of unilevel disintegration for me were also times of trauma.
Ultimately, movement comes when you start taking action and when you take your development into your own hands. I've seen that look a lot of different ways over my life. It looks different now than it did when I was young. But it's been really fascinating for me to observe my development over time in my writing. I'm sure that you must be going through the same thing right now as you're working on your book.
Emma: Yeah, it has been. And because I'm trying to write about the theory in a way that the layperson can easily grapple with and figure out—where am I in this particular journey, and what can I do about it?
One of the things that has started to become more and more obvious is you've got to put the work in to walk your talk. And sometimes you don't really know what that work's going to look like for you. Because I remember early on when we first met, I was like, where is there actually a description of what you're supposed to do in autopsychotherapy? Why hasn't Dabrowski said that?
Eventually, I grappled with the realization that it's going to look different for everybody depending on what they're going through and what they respond to. So, for you, writing is a major tool. And for me as well—writing, going back and writing about my life and certain things has helped get through realizations, but that's not going to work for everybody. Some people just don't write, so maybe journaling or whatever is not the answer.
I think that's part of the challenge. Dabrowski did a really good job of describing this thing that gives these underpinning principles to experiences that could be very broad and vast, but those sorts of feelings are pretty common. But it's like, well, what do you do with yourself insofar as the work, and how do you push through it?
It's a little bit like self-love. Even if you don't get it wholly right and you don't end up getting to a place where you're 100% comfortable with yourself, and you don’t always love yourself, and sometimes you can still be hard and beat yourself up a little bit. It's the trying that sometimes counts, even though you might be going through cycles of—okay, well, that didn't work completely.
Because I think sometimes, we view mental health as there's going to be this one magic bullet that's going to just fix everything. And for a long time, I think that's been medication. It's like, take this pill, and it'll fix all your problems. It's like, no, no, it fucking won't. And I think having that view of it being a longer journey, you're going to improve things little bit by little bit in little cycles and step-by-step.
I think, for me, that's one of the important things that's come out of this whole process of writing. You find a new thing, and you fix that, and then you find the next thing, and then you fix that, and eventually, if you fix enough little things and concentrate on doing those steps to the best of your capability, eventually, it'll make a difference. That's the one thing that stood out—that while it's all well and good to understand the landscape and that, it's like, well, how do you move forward when moving forward looks different for everybody? It might be a slow, laborious, piece-by-piece process.
Chris: I think one of the things that I've gotten from Michael Piechowski's work that has been such a blessing for me is his case studies of the exemplars because I feel that they do exactly what you're describing in that they're talking about the way to live—this is the way to the higher path. The writing of Peace Pilgrim, Eleanor Roosevelt, these people that he's written about say things that when I read them, I'm like, yes, this is the guidebook to how to do it. It's really clear to me.
On the other hand, I hear what you're saying. There are layers and layers in my story of what was going on, and I was in my own way because of how my mind works. You said it's the trying that counts. I had this drive to actualize who I am, even when I was young and even when I thought I was mentally ill.
I kept trying to go back to college. I went away to school right after high school. I had to leave after two years because my parents couldn't afford for me to keep going. I came home, and I started going to school part-time. I had a couple of suicide attempts, and I was hospitalized.
I went on disability for mental illness, but I never stopped trying to go back to school. I would try, and I would fail and not finish the semester. I would try again, and I would fail, and I would try, and I would fail. I went to 10 colleges and universities over my educational history because I knew that I wanted to be a scholar and I knew that I had this mission, right?
But that took years and years and years to work through. And so, each layer of the story was like chipping away at who I really am, and that's a theme—every disintegration brought me closer to who I really am. I kept learning, and I learned how to be a better person. I learned how to be a person and how to treat people well. It was also important to learn how to treat myself well.
I think that's what I'm doing right now in the aftermath of Frank dying. I've been protecting my time. I can't talk to people right now. I'm the kind of person who needs to grieve in solitude. So, if you're writing to me right now, I normally am much more open. I have not been on social media. I don't want to do any of that right now. I need to be on my own. But this is something I've had to learn—how to have boundaries, how to really honor myself and my process. I feel really good about being able to do that relatively kindly.
I appreciate the people in my life who have supported me through this and continue to reach out. I appreciate you, even though I'm the kind of person who likes to withdraw.
The other thing you said I wanted to touch on is the magic bullet of pills. Because when I was a kid, I was sure that there was some medication that was going to fix me. I tried pill after pill after pill. It's hard to look back and see that no one could reach me. I was so defended against being able to hear that I wasn't really mentally ill.
There were actually clinicians who were like, you're not really mentally ill. You can get out of this by changing the way you're living. By changing the stories you're telling about yourself. That was part of my problem. As long as I was telling myself I was severely mentally ill, I was going to be severely mentally ill. I had to learn a way out of that.
That's one of the things I got from Dabrowski's theory. It gave me a way out of thinking of myself as broken. It gave me the tools that I needed to move forward. But all of that happened in relationships. I think one of the things that's important to remember is that our personal growth doesn't happen in a vacuum, and it's the relationships in our lives that allow us to let the dynamisms unfold to some degree. A lot of what we learn about how to act right in the world is based on our relationships with people.
Emma: The more I've thought about this theory, particularly trying to get my thoughts on paper about it, this comes back to values and relationships. When I think about values as being the things that are important to you and the standards of behavior that you have, all our behaviors—they're based on our values for a start. So, what we think is important, and what we think is right. But also most of our stuff is in relation to how we act with other people. It's like interpersonal things.
What we consider right and wrong is all behavior towards other people or the world at large. That's why our values are so important because they drive us to acting towards other people in appropriate ways that are in line with how we feel. Without other people around you, without a world at large, your values are pretty meaningless because if it's just you and you're the last person on the face of the earth, being empathetic doesn't matter anymore. Whether or not you steal doesn't matter anymore. None of the stuff that we think about authentic behavior, that goes out the window because there's no one to behave with.
I think the other thing that I wanted to touch on, Chris, is what you were saying with everything about the magic bullet and how you see yourself—whether or not you see yourself as mentally ill. We've got this framework that talks about how our feelings help us develop. We're talking about our stories as it's a long series of realizations and hard work, doing things bit by bit, and figuring out who we are. All that is completely counter to what we see in mental health spaces because, for a start, those negative emotions are seen as the exception, not the rule, so there's no recognition of the fact that, well, maybe you do go through a very long series of bad feelings and working on yourself for a very long time, and that's perfectly okay.
That's really what Dabrowski is getting at, but that's not what we see in treatment. It's all fix this and fix it quick. And your bad feelings, your negative emotions, all those stick dynamisms, they should be the exception, not the rule. That should make up such a small portion of your life. We don't want it to happen, if preferable and if possible. So, the way that we tackle this stuff, generally speaking, is so counter to what we see play out in our own stories and the stories that we hear of other people about these long journeys of self-exploration and figuring out that all the shit that we go through, all those negative feelings, they're not actually a sign of being broken.
There's nothing to fix. What we're trying to fix isn't those dynamisms and isn't those emotions. What we're trying to fix is aligning our behavior to our true values, figuring out what our true values are in the first place, working on self, figuring out who the hell we are in the first place. That's what's important, but it's like sticking a freaking band-aid on cancer. It's not helpful. The root cause of the stuff is still going to be there, no matter how many freaking pills you throw at it. All the shit that is causing these dynamisms and all that misalignment with values that causes the stuff isn't even being looked at.
Chris: It's true. You made me think of a conversation I had with Michael at some point when I was trying to think about the essence of my story and how to describe it in my writing process. He said, “Your story is one of discovering and affirming your own values.”
I think of it that way, and it's true. At the end of the day, that's what it comes back to—when I was struggling when I was younger and when I was using drugs especially. When I say “using drugs”—I was trying to kill myself with drugs. It's because I was living with my alcoholic father, I realize now.
I've thought a lot about—what were the multilevel shifts in my story? I had these times of unilevel disintegration. What were the moments that took me out of them?
I was always able to see things in my imagination and then make them happen. I was able to watch myself get well, and then I could make it happen in real life. That's something that happened multiple times.
The most important shift I've had in my adult life happened when I was first getting to know Michael and first studying the theory. I decided to take my life into my own hands. I stopped taking medication, and I stopped going to the doctor.
I'm not saying that anybody else should do that. I'm not recommending that path, but I did that because I was studying this theory of positive disintegration. I said, okay, I need to see what happens when I'm not on any medication. I had been taking medication for 23 or 24 years. I didn't even know who I was [without medication].
The third factor is all about choice, but not just choice. You're also taking action. It's more than an intellectual exercise. You're engaging your will and enacting, embodying [your choices] in your life.
Emma: Part of that will to take action starts with feeling like you're worth fixing. And maybe there's not something grievously wrong with me that can't be fixed. When I made attempts on my life, I was at a point where I was like, I'm so freaking broken. There is something wrong with me. I'm defective. And it's never going to be fixed. This will never be solved. I am just a waste of space. I'm an oxygen thief, and I don't deserve my place on this planet.
Which is a huge difference to how I think about myself now. I don't see myself as broken. The challenges and the negative feelings that I have are purposeful, but also that I'm worthwhile working on and that working on myself in the right way using the theory can actually bear fruit and is useful and it's helped me so much. I talked to you about the fact that the whole reason why I started writing that book is that we're sitting on this tool that can be so helpful to some people that are going through these things. Because unless you actually know about the theory, you can't utilize it.
We've got this tool, and it works. In some instances, it's an absolute lifesaver. In my mind, we've got a responsibility to get it out there in as many places as humanly possible so that it can help other people because I've seen the magic that it can do because it's happened in my life. It's happened in your life, Chris. It's happened in the lives of plenty of the people that we've had on the podcast. Even some of the feedback that we get with emails is how much of a game-changer this theory can be, but it's not out where it needs to be.
Thank you for reading! Part 2 will be out on May 25, 2024.