What Can Be Done About My Emotional Pain?
One of the things that made me the craziest, before my recovery, was my emotional pain. I got to the point where I would do anything to relieve that pain. I would cut myself, I would drink heavily, I would take drugs, and I would act out so that I could be hospitalized. Hospitalization meant the opportunity to sample the latest drugs to see which one might really do the trick. I was a child of the fifties and sixties, so, as I child I learned that doctors are there to help you and to make you well. I watched Dr. Kildaire and Ben Casy. Doctors were the good guys. They were the ones who struggled to find the cure for you. It wasn't til later that I discovered that, the doctors who work in hospitals are overworked, underpaid, and generally disillusioned with their role as a healer. They often give the minimum of care to a hoard of patients, most of whom are stressed out, unhappy and undereducated. Many Doctors do really care, and yet they are so tired most of the time that they just don't have the energy to be the knight in shining armor.
The private doctors are a different story, but who can afford them? Not unless you have a good job and good insurance. Of course, I have rarely had a good job, and never had good insurance. I have mostly had to rely on the health care for the indigent. In Arizona that is the AHCCCS program. When I was in my teens and early twenties, hospitalization in any of the hospitals supported by the AHCCCS program meant substandard conditions. I was in the County Hospital here in phoenix in the early sixties, and it was like a prison. You were placed in cells and the cells stayed locked for most of the day. I did a lot of reading and acting out to get tranquilized so that I didn't have to be there. I think I have been on every drug made in the sixties and seventies. To list them all would take half a page. It wasn't until the late seventies, early eighties, that I realized that I could die from all those drugs, or become permanently, maybe even severely debilitated through the continuous use of them. So, I started to look for an alternative to drugs.
In the late sixties I had became a vegetarian and a hippy. I didn't drink, but I smoked and I got heavily into New Thought. It seems that this form of philosophy was more open to the type of visions that we had, and seemed less apt to
Latest Articles