What Autopsychotherapy Has Looked Like for Me

What I have done, and what it has required

The first piece in this series defined autopsychotherapy as Dąbrowski actually used the term: a developmental dynamism, requiring other dynamisms to operate, oriented toward inner transformation. The full dynamism is located at the borderline of spontaneous multilevel disintegration (level III) and organized multilevel disintegration (level IV). Early manifestations appear before it becomes a proper dynamism. That piece argued the term cannot be packaged or delivered. The work has to come from the person.

This piece does something a conceptual argument cannot. It documents what one autopsychotherapeutic practice has actually looked like across years. This is for anyone whose intensity has been treated as a disorder, by others or by themselves. For anyone who suspects there are deeper layers of experience than they've allowed themselves to acknowledge.

In a journal entry from July 2020, I wrote: "My writing is autopsychotherapy and self-education. It is necessary for me." That recognition arrived many years into the practice. The work had been there long before I had language for it. Early manifestations first, and then, once subject-object in oneself, the third factor, and inner psychic transformation began operating together, the proper dynamism emerged.

A note before I begin: this piece quotes from my journals across decades, including entries that describe intense anger and, in one instance, self-harm. The material is from the past, and I share it to show how the practice worked over time. Please take care of yourself as you read.

The Writing

I started writing in journals when I was sixteen. That was 1989. The writing predates everything else I will describe in this piece. I did not know what it was. I knew I had to do it.

My early journal entries are daily and concrete: a record of who came into work, what I did with friends, whether I got angry that day, and at what. I set goals at the end of each entry and reviewed them at the start of the next. I copied in lines from books I was reading. I tracked the one-year anniversary of a friend's suicide. I was a junior at an all-girls Catholic high school. By the end of that same semester, I had been kicked out, and the same notebook holds the writing of a sixteen-year-old who wanted to die.

For years, the journals were the place where I worked. They were never for an audience. They documented the difficulties I could not contain and could not yet understand. I had no theoretical framework for what I was doing. I had no language for it. I just kept writing.

What the writing has looked like over these decades has been neither poetic nor consistent. There have been periods of daily writing for years at a stretch and periods of lapse. The 2019 and 2020 entries exceeded 500,000 words per year. Other years have fewer or none, like 2004. My journals are first handwritten and later transcribed into Word documents. My writing also happens in emails. A meta-practice built up around the writing: coding the journals, building retrieval documents, searching across decades of text for patterns, and revisiting what I had written as data for understanding who I was becoming. My writing practice produces material that I can later return to and work with.

The writing is not isolated to the worst moments, although as a young person, I was sometimes writing in drug rehabs, emergency rooms, and mental hospitals. I was also writing in classrooms, hotel rooms, on park benches, and on airplanes. Dąbrowski wrote in 1964 that autopsychotherapy is “nothing but self-education under especially difficult conditions.” My writing has done that work under those conditions. In ordinary conditions, writing has provided a basis for the broader work of self-education that autopsychotherapy is a subset of.

The Witnesses

In July 2014, a few months after first discovering the theory of positive disintegration, I was deeply engaged in a research project: an autoethnography exploring the paradoxical experience of being twice-exceptional, or gifted and disabled. A decade of my life from 1989 to 1999 was at the heart of it, with my journals and records as the primary source material. I flew to Connecticut to interview several people who had known me as a teenager. A teacher at the school I transferred to after getting kicked out of the last one. A woman whose home I had spent many hours in as a teenager, who had known me across years. A retired administrator from the school I graduated from who’d been my vice principal. An author who’d helped me publish my first book, who became a friend and mentor. A former drug counselor. I brought a digital recorder and documents to share with each person I met with.

What I did not expect was how honest they would be, and that I would be able to take it.

Something had shifted in me by then. The work that had been going on in preliminary form since 1989 had organized into something new. I was no longer only documenting difficulty I could not contain. I was beginning to observe my own life with the kind of distance that lets the truth in without dismantling the receiver. The witnesses were responding to that capacity, not to anything I had said about myself.

The interviews were unstructured and conducted in a conversational style. The developmental work came after, alone—transcribing the recordings hour by hour, coding them, reading what they had told me against my own journals, and letting it revise my understanding over the months that followed. The conversations gathered the material. The work was what I did with it.

The teacher told me his first impression of me as a teenager: I’d been “a smart, savvy kid who was needy as hell and high maintenance.” He told me he’d had to figure out how to handle me, that he’d talked with colleagues about how to manage me, that his wife had warned him before our meeting to be careful because I might still have issues. He did not soften any of it. When I asked what I’d been like, he said I was intense—that on a scale of one to ten, I was a ten, and other kids weren’t.

The woman whose home had been my refuge told me what it had cost to be one of my lifelines—the weight of it, the responsibility of being that necessary to someone. The impact on her children.

I took it in. The entries from those days record the absorption in real time. “I never realized that I’m so fucking intense.” “And selfish. Super selfish.” I was taking it in, facing the truth, and updating my understanding of myself and the people I’d known for decades.

They also told me, in different words, that I seemed changed and was clearer than I had been in years. Even my eyes seemed clearer. Some of them had been in contact during recent years, but others hadn’t seen me in 20 years or more. What they were registering was that I had changed enough that the truth could be discussed between us. I could have the hard conversations I hadn’t been capable of having before. Most people don't change enough between encounters for honesty to feel safe; the defenses stay up, and the relationship is strained rather than deepened.

This is what the inner work can be tested against. Not what I say about myself, but what the people who knew me before are willing to say to me. What I do with what they say is the indicator of developmental movement.

Psychosynthesis

In 2017, Michael M. Piechowski first recorded a series of psychosynthesis exercises for me. Psychosynthesis is an approach to inner work built on guided imaginative practices that engage parts of the self below the level of language. It happened in the weeks after I stopped taking Adderall and was struggling to focus and regulate my emotions. I knew to ask because I’d read about them in his book.

The exercises drew from the work of Roberto Assagioli, the Italian psychiatrist who developed psychosynthesis in the mid-twentieth century, and from Piero Ferrucci’s What We May Be, Ferrucci’s articulation of the tradition. Michael had been using these exercises in his own work for decades before he recorded them for me.

The first ones were Your Special Place, the Butterfly, and the Wave. Over the years that followed, he recorded more. By April 2020, I had listened to them hundreds of times. The exercises gave me something the writing alone could not. The writing required language. The psychosynthesis exercises were imaginative work that operated outside of language. For instance, the Special Place was an inner location I built up across hundreds of returns, visualized in detail until it became somewhere I could go. In the Butterfly, I followed the caterpillar into the chrysalis, rested in the golden darkness while something I could not see was at work, and then emerged into flight—a structure that taught me what it felt like to shed what no longer fit. In the Wave, I floated on my back in the ocean or rested in a small boat, letting the swells move under me—a way of working with emotion that did not require me to name it first.

I usually did the exercises in a quiet bedroom in my home, under a weighted blanket. The combination of the blanket, the room kept quiet, Michael’s voice in my ears, and the imaginative work itself became a practice I returned to for years.

Michael did not invent these exercises. The method came from Assagioli and Ferrucci, by way of Eugene Gendlin's Focusing, which was what let him guide others through them. I took up what he gave me and built a practice with it. It became mine through years of repetition.

He didn’t tell me to do this. He simply recorded them for me. Each time I visited him in Madison over the years, I asked him to record more of them, and he did.

Dąbrowski made a similar move in his 1979 Polish clinical handbook, Psychoterapia Przez Rozwój [Psychotherapy Through Development]. In the chapter outlining the Schultz autogenic training, Dąbrowski describes Schultz’s (1959) method to his Polish readers, giving the exercises, the body positions, the verbal formulas, and the cautions. He cites Schultz’s English book and treats the method as available material the reader can take up.

The recordings were not themselves autopsychotherapy for me. A method cannot be the work. But doing the exercises was the work. The dynamisms had material to operate on, and that is what made the practice developmental. The exercises were integrative, working to bring parts of inner life into relation with each other. They provided the ground for transformation and helped me learn how to focus my attention without the help of medication.

The Meditative Life

Eventually, a broader meditation practice grew from the psychosynthesis ground. I read across traditions. I tried various meditation apps. I sat with the work in many forms. It built slowly, with frequent lapses, against the ordinary conditions of a household with a child and a dog and the interruptions of life.

In April 2021, four years into the meditation practice, I wrote in my journal:

“Meditation does not come easily to me, but I have to be patient. If I am persistent, it will improve. I’m sure of that. Some days I miss in the morning or evening, but most days I do both times. I’m still at the beginning of building this practice.”

The honesty of that entry holds. Meditation has not come easily to me, though it comes more naturally to some. It has been built through inconsistent effort sustained over a long time. There is no version of this in which it gets easier without effort. It gets built by being done imperfectly. It becomes something you look forward to because you recognize what you've built for yourself: an unshakeable inner sanctuary.

The reading that had started with Michael's scholarship kept going. Peace Pilgrim’s Steps Toward Inner Peace and Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words arrived in January 2019. I listened to all three volumes of Blanche Wiesen Cook’s biography of Eleanor Roosevelt on audio while driving. I read Etty Hillesum’s unabridged diary. The three of them became permanent residents in my thinking. Their words entered my practice and stayed. I listened to Michael’s talk on “Inner Growth” and his interview with Ellen Fiedler on repeat.

The reader who is looking for inner work probably came hoping for results in weeks or months. This piece is documenting decades of writing. Years of meditation. Over a thousand listens across the psychosynthesis exercises. The exemplars staying with me across years. Time is not a side note in this work. Time is the substrate. The work happens at the pace of a life.

Passage Meditation

In January 2021, I picked up Eknath Easwaran’s Passage Meditation. I knew of him thanks to Elizabeth Mika, who sometimes quoted him in her work. Easwaran was an Indian-born teacher who taught at UC Berkeley and developed an eight-point program built around memorizing inspirational passages and silently repeating them during a daily meditation session.

I started with the two passages Easwaran recommends for beginning the practice. The first was the Prayer of Saint Francis, which begins "Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace" and proceeds through a series of inversions: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith. The prayer was written in the early twentieth century by an unknown French Catholic and only later attributed to Francis. I knew this. And still, as I meditated on the words across the years, Francis himself became a symbol for me: the figure the words were written about, regardless of who first set them down.

The second was Lao Tzu’s “The Best,” which describes the highest good as water that flows without competing. I memorized both passages by mid-January. By late January, I had a twice-daily schedule. I also chose a single word as a mantram I would repeat at other times: while walking, while in the shower, while falling asleep, or when emotion threatened to overtake me. I was already engaged in the spiritual reading that is also part of Easwaran’s program.

Francisco de Zurbarán (Spanish, 1598–1664), Saint Francis of Assisi in His Tomb, 1630/34. Oil on canvas. Milwaukee Art Museum. Photo by John R. Glembin

What the Practice Worked On

Everything I have described—the writing, the psychosynthesis, the meditation—was working on something. Anger is one of the things it worked on, and I trace it here because I can follow it more precisely than almost anything else in my life. It is one aspect of what has shifted in me throughout my life. Not the whole of it, but it shows how the methods operate.

It started with the writing. At seventeen, before I had any other practice, I wrote this:

“Usually I write when I am at the peak of my anger. But I can’t always control it so well. If a person is unlucky enough to set off my temper they usually have to suffer the brunt of my anger. I realize that it is a vice to have such a lack of control over this emotion.” (August 3, 1990)

I did not know I was describing a method. The page was simply where the worst of it went. My writing was powered by the anger long before it worked on it.

For years, the anger ran my life, and the journals recorded it without yet being able to change it. By 1998, my writing had been joined by other tools, and the same year shows both the new practices working and the old response still breaking through. In February, a therapist I’d known for over a year told me she remembered when I was always angry, and I wrote: “She's right. And I'm not that way anymore” (February 12, 1998).

That August, after a fight with my father, one of the newer tools worked:

“I just had a little fight with my father… It’s amazing though, I just did my self-hypnosis, and it totally calmed me down” (August 15, 1998).

And then in December, under his pressure again, the old response returned:

“I can't believe I cut myself. I didn’t know what else to do at the time. The anger toward my father was building and instead of using a positive coping mechanism, I reverted to the way I used to handle things” (December 8, 1998).

The regulation was real, and it remained intermittent. That is what the change actually looked like: capacities coming online unevenly, working one month and breaking the next, inside conditions that stayed hard.

When Michael recorded the psychosynthesis exercises for me in 2017, one of them was built for exactly this. As I mentioned above, the Wave was a way of working with emotion that did not require me to name it first—I could bring anger to it before I had words for what I was feeling, and let the practice move it. The imaginative work I described earlier gave anger somewhere to go.

Reading back across the years, I understood what the seventeen-year-old had been doing.

“The way I’ve documented my life began as a type of autopsychotherapy to work on my anger. Right away, it exposed me to my thoughts about myself and other people. It was so powerful” (May 23, 2019).

The practice I named in 2019 was the one I had been doing in preliminary form since 1989, and the meditation, imaginative work, and writing had become, together, the thing that moved what the writing alone could only hold.

By 2021, I had added passage meditation, and through it, my work on anger went deeper than before. I watched it happen during a conflict with someone who had been antagonistic for a long time. A few years earlier, his behavior would have meant days of rumination—rehearsing what I'd say, drafting the sharp reply, cycling through the hurt and the justification and back to the hurt. This time, the Prayer of Saint Francis was already there before any of that could start. I wrote in my journal one night:

“This morning, I was thinking about the Prayer of Saint Francis, and developing a meditation practice two years ago. The words are embedded into my mind at this point, and I feel them helping with the situation… I won’t allow myself to go down a path of hating him, or letting anger persist.” (February 18, 2023)

I didn’t have to summon the prayer. It arrived first.

The anger never disappeared. The capacity to feel it is intact. What changed is what happens between the feeling and what I do with it—the widening space, built by all of these practices over decades, where I can observe the anger now instead of being commanded by it.

The Intertwining

Across these years, the writing and the meditation built on each other. The writing gave the meditation something to work on. The meditation gave the writing inner clarity that allowed me to revisit my archive without drowning in it. Subject-object in oneself, in Dąbrowski’s technical sense, is the capacity to observe yourself as both subject and object simultaneously. The meditation practice trained that capacity. The writing produced the material on which the capacity could operate. Neither practice alone would have been enough.

What started as a tool for managing distress became, across the years, a way of stilling the mind and listening inwardly. Writing and meditation became intertwined disciplines. One drew insight from experience. The other made space for inner clarity. Together, they formed the backbone of how I have done this work.

What makes any of it autopsychotherapy is the dynamism scaffolding the first piece described: subject-object in oneself observing and evaluating the inner life, the third factor choosing between what is higher and what is lower in oneself, inner psychic transformation putting the choice to work, the disposing and directing center organizing the personality around the emerging values, the personality ideal orienting the whole. The methods give these dynamisms something to operate on. Without that scaffolding, the methods stay methods. With it, what looks from the outside like a writing practice or a meditation practice is autopsychotherapy in operation.

The Honest Part

The practice has sometimes lapsed during the worst moments. During certain painful stretches over the years, I have stopped meditating. I have written in my journal: “Have I been meditating? No. Have I been using the psychosynthesis exercises? No.” The practice I most needed was the practice that dropped away under acute stress. The pattern has repeated. The work returns. The practice resumes. The capacity to recognize the lapse has come to function as part of the practice itself.

I want to be clear about the risk involved in the autopsychotherapy I have been describing. Sustained self-confrontation will disrupt the story you have been telling yourself. Restructuring is developmental, and it is uncomfortable. The work makes you face the parts of yourself you would rather hide from. It can be destabilizing. People who do this work seriously over time tend to go through periods that are genuinely difficult. Dąbrowski's theory names these periods as developmental. The naming does not make them easier. It makes them legible.

This legibility is something I want to name directly. The reader who has been pathologized for a long time has probably been told that their distress is evidence of disorder. The theory offers a different way of reading the same experience. Dissatisfaction with oneself, in Dąbrowski's terms, is a dynamism of development. Astonishment with oneself, disquietude, feelings of inferiority toward oneself, shame, guilt about who one has been—these are developmentally generative under the right conditions. They reveal the vertical structure of the inner life. They make the work possible. The theory does not romanticize the difficulty. It names what the difficulty is doing.

What this Means

This piece has shown one life lived within the developmental work described in the first piece. The methods I have used are the grounds on which the autopsychotherapy operates. They are what the autopsychotherapy has needed to operate on—language for what remained unthought, imaginative space for what remained unsaid, witnesses who could tell me what I had been before I could see it myself, passages that outlast my own moods. The work happened in the use of these things, across years that were sometimes unbearable, sometimes ordinary, sometimes faithful to the practice, and sometimes lapsed.

What worked for me were these specific sources at these specific moments over the years. What will work for you, if you take up this work, will be different. The figures you encounter, the methods you find, the practices that endure, the lapses you have to return from, the relationships that sustain the work—these will be yours. The structure is the same. Take up what is transmitted. Work with it for years. Adapt it to your life. Return to it when you lapse. Let it become yours. The teachers who matter point at things and walk through the difficulty with you. The work is what you do with what you receive.

Dąbrowski wrote in 1973 that “personality is, therefore, the final outcome of painstaking experiences of self-education and autopsychotherapy.” Personality, in his technical sense, is something you produce through inner work rather than something you start with. The painstaking effort is the work. The path requires the practitioner’s own doing, and only their own doing. The theory describes the work, the teachers transmit methods, the companionship of others who have done this work is available, and the doing is yours.

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