It is not only because of frauds, however, that the general public often views the psychic in a poor light. Consider the position of traditional medicine: If you look at the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV
(DSM), the Bible of the American Psychiatric Association, you'll see that the psychic is equated with psychosis. It is referred to only as a symptom of a mental disorder, a biochemical instability that needs to be wiped out by powerful antipsychotic drugs like Thorazine. There is nothing positive, healthy, or sound about it. Unfortunately, the overall sentiment among most mainstream physicians is that the psychic is nonexistent, a sham, or a disease.
I think that such medical attitudes are shortsighted. Though many psychotics are convinced that they can read your thoughts or predict the future, in a well-balanced person the psychic can be learned or is a natural evolution of spiritual growth. Not only was I never taught this, but until the DSM was revised in 1994, I hadn't heard of the topic of spirituality being officially addressed in psychiatric circles at all. Now everything that pertains to it is lumped into a four-line category called “Other Conditions That May Be a Focus of Clinical Attention” and limited to situations that involve the loss or questioning of faith. No specific mention of the psychic is ever made. Even now, only a minority of psychiatrists will acknowledge it, and fewer still view the psychic as a gift.
During my training, patients were either psychotic, needing medication, or they weren't. The boundaries were well defined. It's no wonder, then, that in the mid-1980s psychiatry was looking like a spiritual wasteland to me. I had gone the psychotherapy and medication route, seen its advantages and drawbacks, but longed for more. I was hungry to find ways to include the psychic and spirituality in my practice, but there were no good models for this that I knew of. Then I heard about the Spiritual Emergence Network (SEN), a teaching and referral center just outside San Francisco founded by Stanislav Grof, a psychiatrist, and his wife, Christina. The SEN made an important distinction between mental illness and spiritual emergency. The premise of the SEN was that certain personal crises can lead to spiritual expansion. Volunteers and staff generally referred callers from all over the world to health professionals—psychiatrists, psychologists, and licensed therapists—who were clinically trained and also experienced in dealing with the psychic. This was exactly the compassionate, smart, responsible alternative I'd been seeking, no psychic phone line or flaky opportunists. It was a godsend to know that such a group existed, an “expanded model of mental health care to help people in crisis by using scientific and spiritual methods.” I contacted them and immediately volunteered to be the Los Angeles regional coordinator.
Through the SEN I received calls from all sorts of people, from housewives to CEOs, many of whom were having powerful mystical and psychic experiences. I heard panic in their voices. Often afraid of going crazy, they needed great courage to reach out. They were all too aware of what traditional psychiatry had to offer, and were terrified. Heavy-duty drugs, electroshock therapy, or even intensive psychotherapy were naturally no consolation to them. At the SEN, I learned not to feed into their fears but to help them find a spiritual context, to appreciate their struggles in a new light—not in terms of dysfunction, but as an entry into something far greater. I saw that when these people were supported rather than judged by conventional standards, their crises could evolve naturally, sometimes resulting in tremendous breakthroughs. This could lead to a truer appreciation of the psychic in their lives—and on occasion a real talent was awakened.
Soon after I started, the SEN referred a Latino woman, Theresa, to me. An advertising executive who had hardly slept for ten days, each night Theresa wept uncontrollably, frenetically pacing, wringing her hands, groaning. She had never felt like this before, was horrified to be losing all control. Raised in a tiny village in rural Guatemala, for most of her life Theresa had held strong beliefs in sorcery and herbal cures. Trained as a
curandera,
or medicine woman, she had been shown how to use her psychic dreams and visions to heal. As a result she was wary of conventional psychiatry.
At twenty, after moving to Los Angeles, she stopped practicing her native traditions. She badly wanted to be a success and nothing was going to jeopardize that. In the conservative, high-powered business world, her spiritual ideas would only make her appear strange. Instead, she shortened her name to Teri and dressed to kill, as if she had memorized every single word Dale Carnegie had ever written. She conveniently lost sight of the old ways and for eight years climbed the corporate ladder, becoming recognized as one of the top women in her field. Then one night she had an unexpected vision. When she came to see me, she was still straining to keep up her professional façade, but there were dark circles under her eyes.
“You'll probably want to commit me,” she finally blurted out. “I had the most horrendous vision. Last Monday I woke up in the middle of the night and there was my oldest sister standing right in the corner of my room. She had a gaping hole in her chest the size of a basketball. A flood of white light was gushing through it. I was petrified. I knew she was going to die.”
That night Theresa tossed restlessly until dawn. She loved her sister but was furious that this vision had intruded into her now completely Westernized life. Later that day she received a call from Guatemala. It was her sister—she had just been diagnosed with lung cancer. Theresa had tried to put her past aside, but it had caught up with her and could no longer be ignored.
I was certain that Theresa was not psychotic. Rather, the premonition had caused her anxiety to skyrocket. Unprepared for these two worlds suddenly to collide, she had tried to split off her visionary part, but it had insistently broken through. Right away, I understood what a gigantic clash this had created in her. My role would be to help Theresa reunite these two aspects of herself.
“That can't be done,” she argued. “Either I'm a
curandera
or a businesswoman. The two don't mix.” My heart went out to Theresa. It was like hearing an echo of myself just a few years before. I knew what I had to do: I told Theresa my story—how I struggled with the same psychic split and overcame it. If I had stayed more removed, this point would have lost much of its power. My approach was similar to that of twelve-step programs: I presented myself as someone who's been there, sharing the ups and downs of the journey. At first Theresa was suspicious. How could we be so similar? In fact, the first few months we worked together, she thought I was merely humoring her. Though she heard my words, she didn't really believe me.
My challenge was to help Theresa view her psychic abilities in a new way. For her to become a modern-day seer, her antiquated stereotype of the village witch had to go. As we talked through her fears and old ideas, her past no longer a secret, the anxiety she had suffered slowly faded away. But still our work proceeded in baby steps, until eventually she was ready to use my office as a safe place to try to open up psychically.
One day she announced that she wanted to do a reading. This was the moment I had been waiting for. At that session and many times later she gave me readings about my life, and I gave her feedback about their accuracy. This meant I had to be prepared to reveal information that could be extremely intimate. There was no point in denying what Theresa correctly picked up just because it was too private. That would defeat the whole purpose. Being this personal with a patient always requires a judgement call. But I sensed that Theresa could handle it.
I remember the time she said, “I see an image of you with your feet cut off. You can't seem to get your balance.” At the moment, she couldn't have been more right. That entire day had been ghastly: A friend struggling not to drink was once again out cold in a hospital chemical-dependency unit; my VW's battery went dead while I was visiting her; and because of having to go tent another car I was late for an appointment with a patient, who left before I could arrive. I openly shared this with Theresa, not to belabor my frustration but to help her translate the metaphor of her vision.
At another session, Theresa asked, “Do you know an elderly man who's having breathing problems? He has a very round face and a great sense of humor.” I placed him immediately. This was my father's best friend, a perennial joker in his early eighties. He had been hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai the day before, in the ICU with a dangerously high fever from acute pneumonia. I gave Theresa feedback to let her know she was right. Little by little, through exercises like these, her confidence grew. I felt as if I were training a prize fighter who'd been out of the ring for many years. Though rusty and unsure, with practice she comfortably grew into her prescience, learning to wear it like a loose garment—not just with me, but in the business world, with her family, and especially while her sister was ill.
Theresa was an intelligent, open-minded, high-functioning person who just happened to be in the middle of a crisis, a perfect example of someone overwhelmed by a spiritual emergency. While at the SEN I was struck by how many people fit this description. They were seeing visions, hearing voices, and often feared for their sanity. But to categorize their symptoms as psychotic and write them off merely as a sign of mental illness would have been a terrible disservice. Without the right kind of help, the emergence of the psychic as a spiritual turning point would surely have been missed.
Despite my love for this approach, there were of course times when it just wasn't appropriate, especially when it came to the chronically mentally ill. As much as I believed in the intentions of the SEN, with some patients I got terribly frustrated. As regional coordinator, most troubling was the barrage of calls I received from blatantly psychotic people who were convinced they were psychic: the burned-out manic-depressive who'd been in and out of the mental institutions for years, the schizophrenic on Thorazine who swore that the FBI was out to get him. The most hopeless and forsaken of the chronically mentally ill came to me, hoping I would validate their special powers, something no psychiatrist had done before.
This put me in an awkward position. Much as I wanted to be encouraging, with patients whose psychosis had become entrenched it was impossible for me to separate it from the psychic. In good conscience, I could only work with them using traditional medical techniques. They were struggling—to get a job, live on their own, eat right, take care of personal hygiene. The last thing they needed was to dwell on the metaphysical. Even those rare few who I thought showed some evidence of psychic ability were too emotionally unstable to risk pursuing it: For me to have emphasized the psychic would have only aggravated their psychosis.
So there I was, professing to be psychic, offering to bring out the psychic in others, yet refusing to help them. They couldn't fathom my reasons, often felt betrayed by what they perceived as hypocrisy and lack of support. It was demoralizing to be pigeonholed as yet another unsympathetic psychiatrist, even worse than the others because I was misrepresenting myself. I had to fight my urge to give in to them. But I knew better. I also had ethical and legal obligations: If someone felt homicidal, I had to notify the police; if someone felt acutely suicidal and had no family to give supervision, I was bound to call in either the police or a psychiatric emergency team. My responsibility was to protect the individual.
No matter how difficult it was, I sometimes had to watch patients like these walk out my office door, believing me to be one of the bad guys. I would send them to county facilities, give lists of programs and referrals to therapists by making the first call, if necessary suggesting the names of shelters for the homeless. Some did take me up on my efforts and tried to turn their lives around. Others, however, felt that I was just another doctor who had let them down. I could feel their pain that I wasn't providing what they wanted.
In psychosis the psychic often gets distorted. Certain people have a basic biochemical imbalance in their brains, which causes some internal wires to get crossed. I'll be sitting in my office listening to a perfectly sincere woman professing how psychic she is—she can read my thoughts, she claims—and I know for a certainty that she's wrong. No matter how careful I am in saying this to such people, however, they just can't hear it. I get the feeling that they're reaching out in the right direction, but get tricked by a false façade, fall through a trapdoor and become lost. The truth they allegedly see is usually disjointed, foreign to the world we know. Many ordinary psychotics cling to the belief that they are psychic as if it were the last life raft on a sinking ship. Nothing I say or do can change their minds. When I try to focus them in a different direction, they simply won't give it up. It's as if being psychic will somehow legitimize who they are, endow their lives with dignity and meaning.
One patient, “Solarus,” a.k.a. Steve, raised in a conservative Jewish family in Brooklyn, spent two years in a Turkish prison, convicted of possessing marijuana. If his parents hadn't made a deal with the Turkish government, he could have been sentenced to death. Steve spent many months in solitary confinement, brutally abused by his captors. His bleak prison cell contained nothing more than a bare wooden sleeping bench. There were no windows, no light. The mistreatment and deprivation made him crack. During that time, he began “channeling” an entity called the “Sun Spirits,” who convinced him that he was on a mission to save the world. Adamant that they were protecting him, he believed he was their messenger.
After being released from prison, Steve holed up in an apartment in a sleazy section of Hollywood. He rarely went out, refused to bathe, and raved incessantly about the Sun Spirits. His parents were at their wits' end, and sent him to me about a year after he returned from Turkey. He agreed to come in only because I was psychic and would therefore understand.