Drilling Through The Internal Ice and Moving Toward Connection With Clinicians

“Without a noise, without my pride I reach out from the inside…”

In Your Eyes, Peter Gabriel,1986 

I lost the ability to relate to the world when my father tried to kill me while he was acutely symptomatic. I was buried 1,000 miles behind my eyes at age 12, and the gap between reality and myself continued to harden year after year. 

I lost the ability to connect intimately with another; I could not allow any authentic vulnerability with another for fear of more pain. I was never safe. 

After my first manic episode and diagnosis, I began to feel unsafe in my own skin. I was unsure of my moods, my dreams, and my ideas. I feared the day when my blood would boil with mania again.

I lived in the nonstop dread of being attacked by an intruder that lived inside me. 

My life became something to endure, a biological death sentence with no fixed date for my execution. 

This corrupted construct of self disallowed any real connection with my treatment providers after my first diagnosis. It was not a reticence to connect with the psychiatrists treating me, but an inability to voice my life-long disconnection and dissociation. 

This inability to connect placed an unfair burden on the therapists who had to “guess” and infer my lived experience. Their language was clinical, symptom-driven, and sterile, while my inner language of the same events was emotional, painful, and laced with anguish and terror. 

So the schism grew between me and the one person tasked with aiding my survival.

After the second episode in the VA hospital and the long-term restrainings, I was a zombie. I was a carcass walking the earth beyond reach. I had imbibed the “absolute passivity” that Dr. Judith Herman discusses in Trauma and Recovery, an irreversible state of existence in which one has lost the will to live. 

It was only later, in the addiction recovery community, that I heard heart-driven diatribes of soulful suffering and redemption that chipped away at the miles of ice between me and the world, and eventually me and my “self.” 

I began to find communion, and in that shared damnation I found salvation. There is a scene in Leo Tolstoy’s last novel, Resurrection, where the protagonist, Nekhlyudov, is walking with a group of condemned prisoners as he follows Maslova on her trek to Siberia, and he observes the connection of soul and humanity the condemned felt together. As he watches them trudge through the frozen filth and famine to their oblivion, the condemned are “roped off” to each other and in a unique way experienced a “divinity-by-association.” 

I had such an awakening in 1996, and its fruition would come full circle in 2013 while meeting with a friend and mentor, Dr. Jill Williams. 

I had released my book, An American’s Resurrection, in December 2012 and was meeting with Dr. Williams, an addiction psychiatrist, to ask for her support in getting the book out in the world. I had pulled out of a large book deal 3 years earlier to retain creative control and now needed aid in distribution. 

She was a friend who had endorsed the book, and we had worked together for years. I trusted her. Absolutely. 

As I sat across from her in her office, I began to ask her for help. As the words formed in my mouth, my body began to tighten, stiffen. My mouth instantly became dry. My tongue was numb. A radiating irritation in my stomach spread throughout my viscera. As I looked at her, she began to grow dim in my vision. 

I had experienced this before. It was the symptom of my PTSD associated with constriction, the “play dead” defense mechanism I adapted in youth to survive my child abuse and then used again to not die of a heart attack in the restraints. 

I was moving back into the “ice” of my pain and not allowing myself the vulnerability of asking another for help. 

Of asking anyone for help. 

I started to cry. I fought for words. I was fighting for my life to reach her, to change the trajectory of my existence. Through my tears and tightening jaw, I told her I couldn’t ask for help. 

My mind raged with the thoughts: N o one helps me. No one stood up to my father. No one came for me in the restraints when I begged to die. No cares what happens to me. I WILL NOT ASK ANYONE FOR HELP EVER AGAIN! 

She watched me and with visceral compassion softened her eyes and demeanor. Gently she said,  “You have to ask me, Eric.” 

I felt a tenderness in her persona. I sensed her true concern for me as a person, and with years of trust between us, “…without my pride, I reached out from the inside.” 

I drove my hand through decades of shame and anguish and gripped her hand. For the first time in my life I asked for help. 

Learning to connect and ask for any type of help has taken me years, as I needed to first learn to trust I would not be hurt again. But it has made all the difference in this journey back to the light of connection and myself. 

How do gain the trust of your patients/clients and help them to access the pain and suffering of their lives? 

How do you help your patients/clients gain an existential literacy of personal anguish that creates autobiographic deficits and stalls their progress in recovering their lives?

Eric Arauz, MLER, is an international behavior health consumer advocate, trainer, and inspirational keynote speaker. He is a faculty member at the Rutgers-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School Department of Psychiatry, the Vice-Chairman of the current New Jersey Task Force on Opiate Addiction in citizens 18 to 25 years old, and a person with the lived experience of bipolar I disorder, PTSD, addiction, and suicidality. He is the SAMHSA 2012 "Voice Award" Fellow and the author of An American's Resurrection: My Pilgrimage from Child Abuse and Mental Illness to Salvation. 

The views expressed on this blog are solely those of the blog post author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Psych Congress Network or other Psych Congress Network authors.