The Way of the Psychonaut [Extended Trailer] from Susan Hess Logeais on Vimeo.
Dr Stan Grof is known to many alternative thinkers as a pioneer in psychedelic research or the developer of an intense breathwork program that can produce regressions of consciousness back to the womb and beyond. But I'd like to share one of his discoveries that gets much less attention.
Stan Grof has been influential on my thinking and spiritual development process for a long time, and I've practiced some of the "holotropic" breathwork he developed, which led to some life changing experiences. One of the features of his work that has been little recognized by the mainstream media, but is creeping slowly into academic research, is that severe mental illness often comes from fetal or birth injury. We as a society, need to recognize that severe mental illness is a response to injury and trauma, and stop blaming non-neurotypicals, for they way they have to experience the world. We're heaping trauma after trauma upon people who have a more limited capacity to deal with it, and treating it as a character flaw, when often we need to blame the mother. Once upon a time in psychiatry, there was the concept of the schizophregenic mother. It was thought this woman had caused their offspring's schizophrenia through their cold and aloof nature. This concept was abandoned, not because it was false, but because it caused stress upon families who were already dealing with extreme issues, and because the mothers themselves were insulted, causing them to withdraw from treatment. This was a mistake on the part of the psych profession, which should have pursued this line of reasoning further. What Dr. Grof uncovered through his breathwork, was that huge percentages of schizophrenics were actually born after failed abortion attempts. That is, the babies had been attacked and viciously injured in the womb, and later in adulthood started experiencing psychosis. We are not going to be able to actually help these people until we recognize the source of their trauma and validate their experience, rather than siding with the oh so sacred Mother, dictated to us by a childish society. Not all mothers are good. We shouldn't be giving schizophregenic mothers a pass on damaging their babies, and we certainly shouldn't let them raise the baby they tried to kill. The levels of injustice that society's veneration of the mother causes to the severely mentally ill is unconscionable. What needs to happen at this point in our development is an acceptance and understanding that, not all women want or need children. That some mothers are really not good at it, nor responsible enough to deal with a pregnancy plus 18 years of raising a child, and that some people have been irreparably damaged by their mother (or father) and we can't hold them as responsible for their actions as a healthy adult, who wasn't brain-damaged in the womb. Unfortunately, like so many disorders, there is no cure. But the way our systems treat the mentally ill is disgusting, and appears so much worse when you realize the schizophrenic homeless person you are looking at was actually a victim of attempted murder. I am not sure we can do any better.
Rant over
