Are We Coming Apart? (part 1)
What does that mean?
I once had a breakdown. It happened when I was in healing school, a training in all kinds of healing work, part of which involved Wilhelm Reich’s system of characterology—people’s primary personalities, ways of defending in the world, and psychological and body characteristics. In order to understand and grow by understanding ourselves in these terms, we were led in exercises to induce the predominant state or root of each personality type. Being a novice, eager to do anything that might transform my intractable habits, in the first session we did on the types, I did what I was told and, without even thinking, took the teacher's direction as a hypnotic suggestion and surrendered myself into a helpless baby state that I’m sure I couldn’t handle when it originally happened and I certainly couldn’t handle as an adult.
It took intense therapy to recover from it—or, as I described it, “get glued back together.” I likened it to “being shattered.”
I do not recommend this as a healing method. But I learned a lot from it: what never to do, how to be self-aware about what I could and couldn’t handle and say “no” when it was too much rather than surrender to some group leader.
But another thing I learned was worth the experience: With the help of a qualified and brilliant therapist, I came back stronger and clearer than I’d ever been in my life. And that feeling remains. Gradually, fears that had inhibited me my whole life simply evaporated. I grew to know that I can “process” on my own and learn things I don’t know—one of my greatest joys. I learned to trust myself.
Dismemberment Visions
In shamanism there is a common experience: visions of being dismembered, or eaten by a wild animal. It can come in awake visions in an altered state or it can happen in dreams. In my novel Cats on a Pole, I wrote a fictionalized scene of what happened to me in my breakdown and added a dismemberment aspect.
In an awake dream, she saw her hands break off, finger by finger. Then her feet and legs. “Don’t be afraid,” said a voice, and she saw that it was the ghostly being she’d met at Luanne’s. Only this time it came as an animal, and it was eating bits of her hands. Horrified, Harmony watched as her rib cage split apart. I’m crazy, she thought. She was wide awake watching this thing reach for her face, when the door banged open and chatting, laughing students poured in.
“Hi, Harmony, are you feeling any better?” one asked, flicking on the lights.
Harmony checked to see where her legs were and found they were right where they belonged. Not only that, but the ghost animal was gone. “Huh?” she said, trying hard to sound sane.
“You should have come with us to lunch. We had Chinese.”
A day later, Harmony calls her therapist:
“Hello?” said Dr. Thompson.
“Oh, it’s you!” said Harmony. “I was expecting a machine.”
“Harmony?” said Dr. Thompson. She’d gotten home last night and wasn’t due to resume sessions until next week. She’d dropped by the office to check mail and had picked up the phone on an impulse. “What’s the matter? Are you all right?”
“Um,” said Harmony. “I miss Delilah [her dead dog], and I’m afraid my legs are going to fall off. I couldn’t even do one-two-three-jumps.”
Dr. Thompson told Harmony to come right over—to take a cab.
Harmony couldn’t remember the cab trip, but the next thing she knew, she was sitting on Dr. Thompson’s beaten-up couch. Only this time, Dr. Thompson was on it too—holding her so her body wouldn’t fall apart. Harmony had told Dr. Thompson about the girl with polio and the ghost animal that wanted to eat her face after her arms fell off. There was something about a guy wanting to beat her with a stick, but she wasn’t sure if that was real. And Dr. Thompson just held her. Harmony didn’t hear any thoughts because Dr. Thompson wasn’t thinking. For the first time in thirty years, she just held someone and Sigmund Freud could go to hell.
Dr. Thompson had spent her last week of sabbatical at an alternative therapies conference where speakers included everyone from neuroscientists who mapped God in people’s brains, to yoga masters who talked about the healing ability of the kundalini or “snake energy” coiled at the base of the spine, to shamans from Africa and South America. The shamans had described something called dismemberment visions where their bodies fell apart and were eaten by powerful healing animals. Although it went against all her psychotherapeutic training, Dr. Thompson was having a very strong impulse to deal with Harmony’s obvious psychosis as if it were a shaman’s vision.
What this has to do with now
I believe we are currently going through “dismemberment”—politically, culturally, and in many cases, personally.
For some people, it might be too much—they may not have built up the psychological muscles to handle it. But for many others, it is right on schedule: for instance, for people whose legacy is being used and misused. For them, it is right, and maybe in their bones they know this and are even excited for the changes that will come when we “come back together”—as is the trajectory of dismemberment in shamanism.
So perhaps people for whom this unprecedented breakdown is untenable can be helped by the perspective of those who have been through “it” (the coming apart) before.
And perhaps people who are debilitated with fear might consciously consider the perspective that this is how beings and societies change. The bigger the changes required, the greater the temporary dismemberment.
A short reading from Cats on a Pole.
I will do a part 2 of this topic tomorrow.
Betsy Robinson is a longtime student of the Siddha Yoga Correspondence Course, a daily meditator, graduate of a four-year healing school, studying trauma healing, and former managing editor of Spirituality & Health magazine. She is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright. She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024, and earlier novels won prizes from Mid-List Press and Black Lawrence Press. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.
What a profound journey.