The mental health field is currently at an exciting juncture, where the paradigm of disorders and illnesses is shifting and we are now seeing an exciting new era of relational care ushered in. Whether that be the groundbreaking ODDESSI trial of Open Dialogue, a new approach being pioneered by Dr Russell Razzaque which is also a way of organising the entire mental health system in Britain where those experiencing mental and emotional distress are invited to first attend non-hierarchical, non-pathologising network meetings with their entire family, or anybody they feel could be helpful to their journey. Imagine that your first interaction in the mental health system could be a big group gathering of people wanting to help, and not just you there on your own trying to work out what’s going on.

In the UK, TEDx mental health speaker Joe Tudor is pioneering a social enterprise called Reconnect, where those experiencing mental health challenges get together to explore a panoply of menu options that might be helpful. Joe was told he had a chemical imbalance in the brain, but after doing some digging he realised that was just a myth, and he didn’t have a broken brain that couldn’t be fixed. He’s now on a mission to help others heal by learning to deeply feel their feelings and emotions.

Luke Doherty whose Boxing and Mindfulness approach to mental health called BAM! has been piloted and developed over the last five years with a variety of marginalised communities, including young people at risk of gang culture, young carers, people in addiction recovery and minority ethnic groups and the LGBTQ+ community. Imagine being in a boxing ring and lying down to also do mindfulness! - a truly revolutionary way of combining two proven methods of helping those struggling with their mental health.

Katarina Gadanski, who experienced trauma in the Balkan conflict before moving to the UK and who has been pioneering somatic psychotherapy which harnesses embodied movement practices, along with dance and movement psychotherapist Tasha Colbert have been helping those of us who are heavily dissociated in the West - and that’s a good chunk of the population - reconnect with feelings and sensations in the body. That wisdom we call the ‘felt sense‘ in the body has so much to teach our monkey mind, which only ever knows what it knows, and often drives our behaviours completely unconsciously.

Then there are the stars of the field, people like Dr Gabor Maté , who has been a big inspiration to me, reminding us that the link between childhood trauma and adult mental health problems is as strong as the link between cigarette smoking and cancer. His book The Myth of Normal is for anyone wanting to be inspired about the new and exciting, or perhaps even ancient and forgotten, ways we can work with the mind and body.

I myself was trained over the course of five years by the phenomenal former occupational therapist and Buddhist nun Maura Sills, in an embodied psychodynamic approach called Core Process Psychotherapy. In psychodynamic work, unconscious relational patterns formed early in life are explored as they arise in the relationship between client and therapist, allowing them to be understood and gradually transformed. A big part of that training was regular Tibetan movement practices called Kum Nye, which Maura picked up from the teachings of a still living lama legend from Tibet, Tarthang Tulku, in Berkeley. I was shocked to realise the degree to which I’d been avoiding the feelings in my body for so long.

Charlie Morley has been the final mainstay in my mental health travels, a bright-eyed bodhisattva (Buddhist term for enlightened being full of compassion) filled to the brim with so much light and joy that I’m still yet to meet a person who has taken his workshop and not fallen under the spell of his gigantic capacity for expressing empathy and making everybody feel, at the deepest possible level, like they matter, they have a purpose, and that their vulnerabilities and flaws are what make them beautiful.

If my life was a picture book, Charlie, with his trademark neon clothes, trainers and mala beads, would be one of the brightest characters on the page, and one of the kindest too.

For years I’ve been turning up to as many of Charlie’s lucid dreaming workshops as I can, and later co-facilitating with him. Lucid dreaming is a dream where you know that you’re dreaming while you’re dreaming, and where you can co-create, but crucially never control, with the dream’s director, that fascinating part of our mind that authors our nocturnal narratives. Like Charlie always says, just as no sailor controls the ocean, so too can no dreamer control the dreamscape.

The power of lucid dreaming is that it helps us to get behind those psychological defences that keep us stuck. I see them in the therapy room and in the workshops all the time. The well-worn script of “so many others have suffered much worse than I did, so what affected me isn’t really worthy of examination.” Or the reluctance to reconnect with the younger, childlike parts of our mind for fear of appearing stupid or feeling awkward. Or simply protecting ourselves from feeling pain and processing trauma through the well-trodden pathway of denial: “I had a great childhood; there’s nothing to see here.”

And of course many of us did have great childhoods. But that doesn’t mean things didn’t go wrong, that people didn’t let us down and hurt us, and that if we’re really honest some of that baggage may still be being carried with us.

In one of my most powerful lucid dreams I called out to the dream’s director (i.e. my own mind) to let me meet my childhood self, a powerful rite of passage dream to meet the archetypal psychological energy we call the inner child. In that dream I found him locked behind a closed door in a dark room, and when I entered and embraced him I awoke with tears streaming down my face at four o’clock in the morning.

It was then, and still is now, one of the most seminal and precious moments of my life.

It did what I had been unable to do in hundreds of hours of therapy. It connected me to a vulnerable part of myself that my conscious mind wouldn’t let me get to. But in the safety of my bed, while fast asleep, I was able to access that psychological territory and meet the hurt part of myself that I had been avoiding.

This dream, and the hundreds of hours I’ve spent co-facilitating with Charlie since we first met in 2016, have given me real hope that a new approach to psychotherapy, lucid dreaming psychotherapy, may be just around the corner.

Indeed many of my contemporaries are laying the groundwork for dreams and nightmares to be returned to their rightful place in the compendium of mental health techniques and approaches available to us when we hit the skids and go through the challenges or crises that so often set us on an entirely different path in life.

Often the hardest things end up being the most important. That’s a field called post-traumatic growth. Or in Charlie-speak, the nightmare ends up being a bitter medicine, tough to swallow, but medicinal all the same.

Sometimes I think if more of us knew what lay on the other side of deep internal work, we’d be rushing to sign up for therapy, lucid dreaming classes, or any one of the innumerable ways we now have access to through the marvels of Zoom and online video platforms.

I did my entire Tibetan relaxation training (Kum Nye) online, able to work closely with seasoned specialists at the oldest continuously running Buddhist centre in North America, The Nyingma Institute.

Charlie’s work has been slow to garner the mainstream international respect and recognition that it deserves. In a study in partnership with the Institute of Noetic Sciences in San Francisco, Charlie and I were able to show that lucid dreaming could lead to an 85 percent reduction in clinically diagnosed PTSD. The results were so extraordinary we were forced to repeat the study, and the TED Talk was blacklisted until recently, the idea that ancient Buddhist techniques could be considered “evidence based” being too much for some.

But the peer-reviewed study was published in the American Psychological Association’s journal Traumatology, and TED eventually relented and re-released Charlie’s talk so it could once again be discovered on YouTube.

So in my ten years working in mental health, what have I learned? That we in the West need to proceed with a bit more humility.

I dislike the term “evidence-based.” Whose evidence? And what is the real measure of success? Eternal happiness forever after treatment? No more suffering? That’s not what life is. Even though we are all in the business of working with consciousness, none of us even have the foggiest idea what it actually is.

As I’ve traversed the many workshops of the psycho-spiritual traditions, everything from exploring the world of dreams and nightmares, viewing them not as illnesses but as remarkable doorways to understanding how our minds and bodies work, to the beautiful somatic practices that have shown me, not through studies but through direct experience in my own body, that our psychological pain is not just thoughts but is embodied and held in our fascia tissue.

Sometimes trauma releases through movement. Sometimes through breath. Sometimes through long-distance running. Those processing big trauma often need to take themselves into extreme physical states to allow the body to ‘unclench’ and release what it has been holding.

Through all this work I have continually been humbled and awestruck by the ways in which people manage to achieve healing and recovery. Or as I like to frame it, emergence - a bit like a butterfly from a cocoon. Because we are so often utterly changed by these experiences that returning to who we were before the trauma, or the crisis, or the mental distress, is no longer possible. We are completely different because of what we live through.

So this is a little piece of writing about lucid dreaming and the enormous benefits of learning to communicate with one’s unconscious mind when we’re asleep. But for me it is much more than that.

We are currently standing on the precipice of something really exciting. New and emerging ways of working with mental and emotional distress are appearing all the time, and the younger generation are not afraid to look at things differently and try something a little left of centre. I’m excited to be working alongside so many people who are so passionate about helping others. And while things in many parts of the world seem to be taking a turn for the worse, I am, and always have been, an optimist. If we’re going to find a way through this, it will be in cultivating a deeper understanding of the way in which this remarkable thing we call the human mind still has so much more to teach us.

Evidence shows that therapy without therapists is as effective as traditional therapy and helping more people to understand how it works could lead to it becoming more widely available.

In a nutshell, it involves forming groups where people learn to talk honestly, listen empathetically, and make a difference to the lives of those in their community, as well as their own. It’s the work I’ve devoted my life to with social enterprise Talk for Health since 2008, facilitating free 4 day experiential programmes for people who want to take their emotional wellbeing into their own hands. We call it therapeutic talking, and it works.

At the moment only 1 in 5 get NHS therapy, only just over half benefit, and of those who benefit, most relapse within a year. This may be due to the limited number of sessions available for those accessing therapy on the NHS.

Now for the first time, in weekly posts, I’m explaining why we should do therapy, without therapists, drawing on my own deeply personal experiences.

I’ll start with three personal stories over three weeks – the first about my mother. I’ll talk about how I witnessed my mother, a brilliant doctor, author, and pioneer in the field of psychosexual medicine – receive – throughout her professional life, cruel, coercive and ineffective psychiatric treatment. She was repeatedly ‘sectioned’ - locked in psychiatric wards against her will - and forced, if she wanted to practise as a doctor, to take antipsychotic medication throughout her 40-year career.

I’m telling this story at a time when the United Nations and the World Health Organisation have issued joint guidance - Mental Health, Human Rights and Legislation: Guidance and Practice, outlining how psychiatry must drastically change in order to be relevant in the 21st century, because - according to the guidance:

Psychiatry is routinely, systematically breaking practically every internationally-sanctioned law and treaty on human rights, entirely without scientific warrant.

I hope that, with this story, I can play my part to support that change, and paint a picture of how therapy without therapists, in a loving, connected community, actually works.

Talk for Health’s important work in the media is proudly supported by the mental health non-profit SafelyHeldSpaces.org

“Every outside has an inside”, sings the robin in my chest. 

What if grief doesn’t belong to you but to the earth? What if the emotional pain you wish you could forget beneath buried grounds is actually the fertile seed in an ecological process that ensures the prosperous continuation of life? …

Read ’s incredible piece Your Grief Belongs To The Earth

And subscribe to Niels’ Substack Rooted Reflections

Being busy is an addiction.

I know this because I can’t do anything anymore. 

I’m not wringing my hands or calling out for sympathy or even being dramatic. Over the past six months I’ve been stopped dead in my tracks by a health crisis that has immobilised me. I have not just had to go slowly, or take things easy but really, profoundly and totally stop. Everything that was a given for me - writing, reading, gardening, cooking, walking, driving - has gone and I’m left here in the middle of beautiful nowhere, stuck stock still and empty handed. 

I am left with silence, stillness and reflection. 

I have the company of audiobooks (I still have hearing in one ear for which I am truly grateful) three cats that do nothing but eat and six rescue hens that make sure I get up in the morning to let them out and stay up long enough to put them to bed again. 

There has been a slow settling. The things I could do gradually fell away, sinking down to the muddy depths of a past life. The strong currents of a compulsion to do something, anything, eventually and after many battles, fell quiet. A realisation that new limits bounded my life gradually became clear. 

In this stillness, the experience of 'not doing' has been a revelation. 

I knew that in my supporting role (hate the word carer) with MAC (My Adult Child) I was guilty of doing too much. About three or four years into the cycle of hope, fear, chaos and hospitalisation, I understood that part of my heroic attempts to put things right were dysfunctional. I had become codependent and torched my identity on a pyre of anger, anguish and denial. What saved me was realising that I had totally lost it myself. I joined twelve step programmes, worked through many family constellations and found support from therapists and my peers. I’ve come to spend the past three years gradually learning to do less, to panic less, to stop rescuing, fixing and complaining, to separate myself and try as best I could to respect my adult child’s precious human life and allow it to run its own course. These boundaries were always a work in progress. Now, even the fantasy of rescuing MAC from whatever predicament they are in, has been removed. 

In the ennui of inactivity there's been a new experience waiting in the wings.

It is called feeling.

Feeling visceral grief that hits like a storm, shaking my body and drenching me in tears.

Feeling the devastation of lost time, lost connection, lost hope in both our lives.

Feeling the dark depth of pain that being busy had kept me from. 

It’s proved a hard learning. 

Keeping busy was like layering bubblewrap around the most precious and fragile part of myself. The part that I had glimpsed in terror and did not want to look at again. The part I would not give voice to or admit to. The part I wanted to put into storage for safe keeping and forget about, not caring about the cost. 

As a parent witnessing an adult child’s long suffering in and out of altered states of mind, in and out of psychiatric hospitals, medicated into numbness without aftercare or support and all the loss and devastation this brings, there is a deep well of pain, grief and heartbreak. 

I have known this pain has been waiting for me, lurking. There have been moments when I have almost touched it. But no way did I want to go there, not really. Maybe I’ve nodded to the grief in passing, waved to the sadness as I ticked off more stuff from my to do list. I’ve cried a bit, but not howled, wailed or sobbed.

I’ve pretended it was all going to be OK, that I was OK. 

Now, in this new and unwanted stillness, I have finally peered over and into the well's dark depths, and dropped in my small coin of hope to search out its landing. 

Whatever ills have brought me to a standstill, I know that somewhere in these still dark waters of grief, I will find the medicine I have been searching for. 

#mentalhealth #caregiving #psychosis

I’ve written about the experience of being a ‘holder’ a couple of times now. With the inevitable post-publication vulnerability hangover, I wondered if I was alone, or if others here are also struggling with My Adult Child (MAC)* issues. So, I hit the keys, looking for some kind of blogging tribe.

Lived experience is 'a thing' and quite right too. Sharing our experiences of public services with those designing and delivering services help drive improvement and safety. Sharing the impact of poor treatment and harm takes courage.

Families urgently need change in mental health services. Their powerful stories of failure and harm, the lived experience of those suffering the dehumanised, overly medicalised forced treatment under the Mental Health Act will be the catalyst for driving long overdue, radical changes.

But mental health is a territory littered with ethical potholes that snare the unwary. It can be hard to speak into the MH space for fear of offending someone, revealing something inappropriately, wanting to protect family members or simply sounding stupid in this politicised, medicalised and fiercely contested domain.

Having the courage to speak up about our experiences should be respected and acknowledged.

Even so, as a person with lived experience who understands the stigmatising isolation suffered by many experiencing mental ill-health, I believe that what we say and how we say it is really important. This is especially true if we publish our experiences on a respected public platform.

As I searched the major MH charity websites, I hoped to find accounts of supporting others that were authentic but also offered guidance, comfort, recognition to families and friends. I was not expecting to be frightened.

I found a parent's account of their young adult's crisis.

It read like the screen play of the Shining.

I read about the terrible, frightening and seemingly never-ending chaos and fear accompanying a young person's altered states of mind and paranoia at their very worst. It was an account of an unrelentingly painful journey supporting a young adult's first confusing, threatening and distressing breakdown, coping with numerous risks and threats of harm, until help eventually came.

It was hard to read. I could imagine how extremely tough it had been for this family to live through.

I knew this kind of story, I’d experienced some of those terrible, frightening times with MAC myself. But more than the content, I was curious about how this story had been told, and why I felt disturbed, uncomfortable and shocked by the gruesome detail of it.

I wondered if this story, despite being true, was helpful.

It was graphic and I could feel the visceral fear of a parent witnessing alarming and menacing behaviour. I could feel the panic of being left alone to cope, keep everyone safe and anger at the failure of health services to respond. I recognised pain, suffering and above all the relentless stress and fear.

Fear does not promote a compassionate response.

I wondered what those with little understanding of altered states of mind might think and feel reading this account. That's just about everyone I know. I wondered what someone might think if they read such a story while in search of information and help after googling 'psychosis'. I wondered what the charity that published this piece hoped others - policy makers, service providers, commissioners and ordinary people - would learn from this account of a parent's experience. 

Fear brings isolation in its wake.

Families supporting someone through a mental health crisis can feel terribly alone. Managing the unfolding crisis takes up time and attention. Every breath, every thought, every moment can be spent trying to make a crazy situation less crazy.

In a crisis the world shrinks down to basic survival and moment to moment coping. We focus on the needs of the person suffering, not our own. We become hypervigilant, alert to risks and threats. Getting a night's sleep can be impossible. Our nervous system is in overdrive and adrenalin takes over.

Time passes, friendships fray.

Over a longer period of time, not knowing what tomorrow might bring, we find ourself cancelling plans. Our endless focus on another person's wellbeing and safety means we have little to say at socials. We feel profoundly sad as we experience so much loss and become sadder because nobody understands. We call our friends for support once too often and they begin to back off. We withdraw. We may feel profoundly ashamed.

We also become isolated because of stigma.

We want to protect our children from harsh judgment, and we want our families to appear OK. We put a brave face on our difficulties. We scream silently into pillows. We don't want to tell the world about our families mental health problems. We begin to feel slightly apart, slightly other, slightly removed.

Few of our friends and colleagues will ever be with someone in a crisis.

But if we did ever find ourselves supporting a friend or family member in crisis, being frightened wouldn't help. Being calm, present and kind, on the other hand would. Responding with ease and compassion, bringing some calm into a heated situation can really take things down a notch or two. 

If we understand psychosis only as threat, violence and chaos, our capacity to be present is compromised by our fear. We may meet ‘madness’ with blind panic, believing we are threatened. The truth is while the behaviour of someone in a crisis can be extremely challenging, it is the person in crisis that is extremely vulnerable and frightened. We have resources to draw on, we can call for help, they cannot.

They need reassurance, they need to be safe.

I’ve been through a lot with MAC. The experience has changed me fundamentally. Although I now live on my own, I do my best to find a more open, compassionate response to difficulties and struggles in their life. I have learnt not to be frightened.

I've learnt to respond more gently in the hardest moments.

I am mindful of how I tell the story of MAC and this journey. I will tell you of my experience, but their story is not mine to tell. In sharing I am looking to find space for a deeper truth in my experience beyond knee jerk reactions and drama. I would like to offer an opportunity to be curious. I'm hoping that in writing these lines, there is the opportunity for reflection - for you as the reader, and my own as I write. I want these stories to give us both a chance to explore conditioned assumptions and reactions and find something more authentic to draw on.

I am trying to create space and to slow right down, word by word. 

There are many of us here with brave faces. And behind the strength are tender, broken hearts.

So gently does it. Tell me, how are you telling the stories in your life? 

*Consent issues in MH are difficult to negotiate and can silence those who provide support. I therefore write about my own experience of extended parenting of someone living with altered states of mind. In relation to my family member's experience I use MAC = My Adult Child. The word child isn't ideal but it avoids identification by gender.

Thea Mae – my little warrior child – is now five years old. I can barely believe how much time has passed since I first held in her my arms. Yet, it also feels like she’s been with us forever. The years following her birth have been eventful, to say the least. In addition to the usual ups and downs of welcoming a little one into our lives, we’ve had madness, grief and a global pandemic to contend with. I’ve been meaning to write a little about what happened after Thea’s birth; how it has been to be a mum who hears voices and continues to live in multiple realities. So here goes.

A caveat:

As with all stories, this one does not exist in isolation. It lives and breathes alongside so many other experiences that I can feel within me, other stories that are keen to be told. In telling one in isolation, I am leaving wide gaps. I’m not doing justice to a life lived in connection with other lives lived. Perhaps you might think of my lived experience as a crystal with many facets. This story is the result of a light shining through at a particular angle. As the light refracts you can wonder at the patterns it creates – but these patterns are fluid and changing. I hope my stories never become static and are never used to define me or my truths.

Content warning: This contains reference to my miscarriage as well as the birth itself and some pretty intense beliefs. Read it if/when you feel able.

The shadow cast by miscarriage

In my first pregnancy I remember waking every morning, bright and early, excitedly checking what random seed or fruit my little one was being compared to in my pregnancy app. I lay there for hours, in the early hours, imagining our future as I waited for Joel to wake. It was blissful, but I was also impatient. I wanted to get to the next stage – I yearned to meet this little wonder growing inside me. Then, when I found out that they had died inside me whilst my body was still carrying on as usual, I felt betrayed. My body tricked me with its hormones. The ‘missed miscarriage’ taught me that, once again, my body is not to be trusted. In doing so it reignited a war that I had painstakingly settled with a truce years before – one I had thought was in my past.

So, six months later when I found out I was pregnant with Thea – I was in shock. I remember seeing her heartbeat at our first scan. I felt that familiar bubble of excitement rise in me, only for me to consciously smother it with a blanket woven with mistrust. We’d seen Space Baby’s heartbeat, after all, and that didn’t end well. That blanket accompanied me throughout my pregnancy. At every scan I expected to hear that painful protracted silence indicating the sonographer’s struggle to find a sign of life. My experience of psychosis helped enormously – I was already well versed in the practice of living in two contradictory realities. So, as my pregnancy developed I found a way of both acknowledging the amazement of growing a life inside me whilst being completely certain that my own toxicity would make such a feat impossible. I existed in the moment. ‘I am pregnant now’, I thought. I survived by restricting my gaze to what was in front of me rather than getting tricked into imagining a future I believed was not possible.

Welcome, Thea Mae

On 9^th March 2018 Thea finally came out to meet us, face to face. To be fair, she didn’t have much choice in the matter as we required an emergency caesarean to give her the final push (or, more accurately, pull). Despite knowing that she was strong and healthy, I still fully expected her birth to be met with that protracted silence I had not yet heard. The one where the doctor tries to find the words to tell you of your loss. I remember repeating a mantra in my head, preparing myself for the worst as I wrapped that blanket tightly around me. This was the moment of truth – the place where my two realities collide. There was nowhere to hide, Schrödinger’s Box was being opened and she would either live or die. I was prepared for the silence, but what I heard was a yell and the excited babble of the surgical team. I heard the surprised voice of my midwife as Thea kicked him during her initial check. Full of pride and wonder and amazement, I held her to my chest. There are no words. I have tears even now when I write about it. 

Thea changed our world

The wonderful thing about being dissociative, in my experience, is my ability to shelve things when needed. I stunned the nurses with the speed of my recovery from anaesthesia. I was up and walking way ahead of schedule and applied a single-minded focus to being cleared for discharge. On occasion the sedation and pain meds broke through these super-powers and after days of labour it was clear I still needed some rest. Thankfully, in those moments, Joel was there to pick up the slack. He was, and still is, a very hands-on dad and amazing partner. I remember walking out of the hospital with Thea tucked up in a car seat, covered in a special blanket gifted by a family I’d supported previously. Even then, tiny and fragile, she had a strength to her too. A spark that we were beginning to become aware of.  

The first few months were intense. However, mostly people were stunned at how calm I was and the way in which I was taking to this mothering lark. Given my history, there was an understandable concern that new motherhood may overwhelm me – but it didn’t. On our first night home I remember Thea screaming for what felt like hours. I couldn’t settle her with milk. Being rocked seemed to make it worse. Holding her close to me I had this strange and certain feeling – I didn’t know what she needed, I didn’t know what to do – but what I did know is that if I could just stay calm and be with her, we’d be OK. And we were. My mandate, from then on, was to be steady for her. I oriented myself around her needs and shelved the rest. 

Hello madness my old friend

There is something all-consuming about motherhood in those first few weeks and months. My connection with Thea, as her mum, existed on a fundamental level – body and soul. Pregnancy blurs the boundary between self and other – we were literally made of the same stuff, and yet remain unique. Prior to her birth, Thea’s survival was all on me (a fact reinforced by the ‘count the kicks’ mantra that Thea seemed to enjoy messing with, waiting until we were plugged into a monitor to break her slumber). Whilst birth enabled others to share some of this responsibility, on a very deep level I remained her primary connection. This was a profound experience, but it came at a cost. No matter who was looking after Thea, I was always the first to hear and respond to her calls. Not because others were absent, but because I could feel them before they were apparent. There was no rest. No off switch. The sense of space which is so fundamental to my own sanity got subsumed by the requirements of motherhood. Yet, in true new mum style, I shelved that too. 

Looking back the signs were there for a while. A growing sense of unease. The time I sat staring at my arm, one evening, wondering whether I’d find wires if I went looking for them. The urge to find out. A sense of being out of control of my own body. The sense that, maybe, the video of Thea’s birth was a fake – akin to the photos of a fictional childhood held onto by a Replicant in Blade Runner. A comfortable lie to help me accept my role whilst concealing a greater purpose. These thoughts began to occupy my waking hours. I began to look out of the window and wonder when they were going to come and steal Thea away.

I didn’t verbalise this, at first. I held on to the details. What I was able to say is that I was exhausted. That I wasn’t coping. That I wasn’t sure I could continue. I remember even telling Joel, on a walk, that I was worried I might kill myself. My family rallied round to offer support. Joel took Thea out of the house so I could get some breaks. We all did our best and yet, eventually, it wasn’t enough. My ability to live in multiple realities broke down and I got stuck in the one I feared most.

Sat in a hospital waiting room, surrounded by the ghosts of previous admissions, I began to panic. Out of kindness, my dad had taken Thea for a walk around the grounds so that I could talk honestly to the psychiatrist I was scheduled to see. As sensible as this was, it left open the gate for my worst fears to run riot. What if this is part of the plot? What if they chose this time to attack and I’m not there to protect her? What if I’ve put both her and my dad at risk? By the time the doctor called me in my fears tumbled out, unfiltered. She was shocked. She had planned to discharge me as I’d been doing so well. I felt like I’d failed.

When help isn’t helpful

Later that day the Crisis Team called round. There are many tales I can tell about our meetings, but perhaps it’s easiest just to say that they were mostly kind but ultimately ineffective. The more they challenged my beliefs, the more I clung to them. I tried to explain that I was an android and that my main concern was working out whether I was programmed to protect Thea or harm her. In response, they encouraged me to look at the evidence … photos, videos. The more they fought against my beliefs the more elaborate my rationalisations became. I meticulously fixed any holes in my arguments with gaffer tape and thread. Joel stood beside me as I stepped further from our shared reality and, thankfully, made it clear that their help wasn’t helpful and got them to back off. With little else to offer, they began to focus on the importance of me accepting medication as the first step to my recovery. Despite my hopes to remain meds-free (I’d withdrawn from antipsychotics a decade earlier), I realised that this was the only option on the table. Android or not, I needed to drown out the noise to be there for my child.

The meds were effective. They often are, for me. Yet, even at the low dose we had negotiated, they stole my ability to think. Like a paper chain that gets wet and no longer holds its shape, any train of thought would become an amorphous blob. It took the energy from my fears. It took the energy from everything. Parenting whilst freaking out was hard. Parenting whilst on antipsychotics was a different kind of hard. It was calmer, I slept more and it helped create some approximation of space. Yet, I was like a balloon. Disconnected. Unreal. I needed others to help ground me. At this time the support of friends, family and – of course Joel – was invaluable. I’m deeply grateful to all those who came and sat with me, or gave me some space to sleep.

Making sense of it all

There’s so much more I could say about this period and the slow and winding path that I took through it. There’s more to say about what was missing, what could have been offered and what it has taught me about the inadequacy of our response to people’s crises. Yet, today I think I’d like to share a little of the sense I’m making out of all of this. 

In speaking with other parents, it seems as if I managed to bypass the ‘normal’ worries of new parenthood. I just didn’t have the same concerns I’ve heard described by others. Instead, I worried about being an android and spent my time figuring out whether or not I was programmed to harm the little being I wanted so desperately to protect. My dissociative ability to shelve worries in a crisis was pretty much how I survived a pregnancy experienced in the shadow of a miscarriage. It was how the natural concerns of new mums stayed off my radar. Without meaning to, I simply moved them out of sight. Instead of filing them neatly I’d done the mental equivalent of shoving them under the sofa in the hope of finding the time and space necessary to do a proper job. By the time I broke down my mental sofa was teetering on piles of intense emotional and physical experiences. We didn’t stand a chance.

At this point it might be easy to blame myself – to suggest there was something wrong with the way in which I approached motherhood. I don’t buy that. There something about new motherhood, new parenthood even, that demands a shift in focus. Our child’s wellbeing becomes the star that we follow. Everything else fades into the background hum of daily life. It’s a natural and highly adaptive response – yet it cannot last. My dissociative ability allowed me to stretch this further than most, but it was not that in itself that caused me to crash. Becoming a mum did not wipe my slate clean. I’m a mum that hears voices, sees things and is well versed in living with multiple realities. The belief that I am an android is one that I have been living with for years, since I withdrew from medication, and one that sits alongside the belief that I’m a human as long as I don’t poke it. I’m a mum with a history of trauma. I’m a mum who is multiple (and has many parts that have many different feelings about motherhood). I was a new mum who had yet to fully process the impact of a missed miscarriage. Chuck in some sleep deprivation, hormones and the massive life shift that is having a baby and … well … hello psychosis!

For me, psychosis has a way of bringing what I need to attend to into sharp focus – once we adjust our eyes and get used to its language. However, the form my psychosis takes is so often wrapped in layer upon layer of shiny paper that mental health professionals can easily get caught up in. In the rush to be helpful, so often, people end up missing the point. In fairness, I am still trying to piece the events of the last few years together. But I’ve had to do this on my own. I’ve had some lovely CPNs over the last few years, but ultimately they were ill equipped to walk alongside me. They provided a contact point and a space to offload, but they weren’t yet ready to unwrap my experiences with me and feared what such exploration might bring.

And so, I’ve had to piece this together in conversations with loved ones and – often – in my own head. I am still living with its legacy. I’m still not feeling wholly solid and grounded in this world, and I still have some healing to do. But, then, don’t we all? I’m trying to be both strong and vulnerable, to let both truths walk alongside me – neither overshadowing the other’s right to be. It’s still a work in progress, but apparently I’m human so that’s part of the deal.

You might wonder what impact my experiences have had on Thea. At times I’ve worried about this too. Yet, to see her growing up into this amazing confident sensitive warrior child who lives in the moment and has a deep connection with nature is a blessing. It eases my heart to see her thrive. We have challenges ahead, I know. Yet, our family was forged in fire. Together, we can survive anything. 

So, today I celebrate Thea – this amazing little being that somehow came into our lives. I celebrate motherhood in all its complexity. Five years ago I helped to bring someone very special into this world. I’m looking forward to continually being surprised by her as she grows.

In my dream I swept him up into my arms and hugged him tightly as I sobbed, “I’m sorry I was never there for you.” The scene from the bedroom began to gently fade into a smoky haze and I woke up in my own bed in London. It was 4:00am. When I reached up to touch my face I realised I’d been crying in my sleep.  Not long after that I stopped taking the antidepressants, and the crippling anxiety I’d been having for years started to settle down too.

That was the first of many lucid dreams that helped me to reframe my relationship to myself.

Six years ago I finally began to heal from the complex trauma that had wreaked havoc on my personal and professional life for more than a decade.  Despite having dozens of hours of psychotherapy, in the end it wasn’t just psychotherapy that helped – although the Core Process Psychotherapy was also crucial - it was a lucid dream.

A lucid dream is quite simply a dream where you know that you’re dreaming and you ask it to do things. Tibetan Buddhists have been using lucid dreaming practices for thousands of years, and while the West has finally cottoned on to the healing potential of teachings like meditation and mindfulness, we’re only just beginning to explore the other lesser known teachings in the Buddhist compendium of knowledge of the mind and body known as the Dharma.

I attended my first lucid dreaming workshop while working as a television producer in a busy 24-hour newsroom in London.  For years I’d really struggled with my mental health on the long and gruelling night shifts. When things got tough - like so many I visited my doctor, where I was quickly diagnosed with a general anxiety disorder and prescribed a low dose of an antidepressant.

Anxious for a solution that could help me get to the root causes of my mental and emotional pain, I signed up for a lucid dreaming workshop at a local Buddhist centre.  Around 100 of us gathered in the brightly painted red and yellow shrine room one weekend in winter, a large statue of the Buddha gazing benevolently over us as we practiced the techniques.

Our teacher was Charlie Morley a renowned specialist in the field who had taken his teachings to the UK Ministry of Defence and even to the Houses of Parliament. In 2018, he was awarded the prestigious Churchill Fellowship grant to research mindfulness-based treatments for PTSD.

For many years scientists were struggling to get their heads around how lucid dreaming was possible; to be simultaneously conscious and asleep at the same time seemed paradoxical.  But just over a decade ago the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Germany was able to scientifically verify the neurological correlates of lucid dreaming.  Brain scans from its sleep laboratory revealed that areas of the brain normally deactivated during REM sleep, light up during lucid dreams.

Learning to lucid dream coincided with a period in therapy when I’d just uncovered a series of traumatic memories from my childhood. When my therapist asked me what I wanted to say to my younger self - a part of me she called my ‘inner child’ - I told her I wanted to punch him.  I noticed tears appear in her eyes as I said it, and it dawned on me that what I’d said probably wasn’t a healthy response.

I decided to formulate a new dream plan.  The next time I became lucid, I’d ask to meet my childhood self, and instead of punching him, I’d do exactly as Charlie suggested. It was then I finally had the lucid dream that changed everything - the dream where I finally embraced the most wounded part of my psyche.

The Institute of Noetic Sciences in San Francisco, a research centre and laboratory specialising in the intersection between science and profound human experiences asked Charlie to lead a study measuring the effectiveness of lucid dreaming in the treatment of PTSD.  The results have just been published in the peer-reviewed American Psychological Association journal, Traumatology. A staggering 85 per cent of participants no longer qualified as having clinically diagnosable PTSD after a six-day programme - results so impressive IONS re-ran the study recently with an even bigger group of people.  The preliminary results look equally as promising.

What we do in our mental health facilities and hospitals matters, and surely it’s about time we started to accept that the be-all and end-all of mental health wisdom doesn’t reside with those in the medical profession alone? It’s not lost on me that once I’d been taught to navigate my own mind using lucid dreaming, in one night while I was asleep, I achieved more than I did in years using traditional mental health support.  And if a cynical old journalist like me can be convinced, then I think there’s hope for almost anyone.

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