Welcome to Walking with Coyotes:

For those new here, the metaphor is this: there are dogs and coyotes. Dogs follow the rules, they live within the law and order of the day: they try their best to fit in. Coyotes do not follow the laws of the dog-world. They are dancing to a song the dogs cannot hear.

When we say “coyote” we mean the ones our culture tends to label, to pathologize, to walk around. They are the ones we do not understand, the ones in our culture who are shrouded in mystery.

They are the ones diagnosed with “schizophrenia.” On the surface, they are wild-eyed, unpredictable, Other: but underneath they are present, tapped-in, Conscious.

WEEKLY ZOOM MEETING TONIGHT: THURSDAY the 27th of August

(info below)

Let Them Be Weird

Compared with what our culture tends to present as “normal,” my husband and I probably look a little weird. It actually took me a while to allow myself to look “weird” and not care so much what other people thought of me. I was a class clown so I knew how to be “weird” in a way that people enjoyed, but not in the way that Coyotes can be “weird”.

Lucky for me, my coyote husband and sister behaved in what felt like super WEIRD ways so many times it forced me, to ask myself, Why does THIS make me so uncomfortable? Is this hurting anyone? Why am I making how that person over there in the store looking over at them, more important than my loved ones feeling safe in a world that doesn’t always get them?

I had to suffer a lot or get that they weren’t really hurting anyone. My discomfort was having an impact on me and them. It wasn’t something I was able to do over night but with time I began to surrender to that which I could not control and actually enjoy them and myself much more. It would take A LOT for either of them to embarrass me today.

Let’s look at the root meaning of the word weird.

Weird comes from the Old English wyrd, meaning fate, destiny, or what is destined to happen. Interestingly, it didn’t originally mean strange or abnormal at all. Over time, the word became associated with the supernatural and eventually came to mean something unusual, uncanny, or outside the ordinary.

Isn’t “weird” often just the word we use for someone who moves through the world differently than we do?

Yet somewhere along the way, weird became something we weren’t supposed to be. And once someone has the diagnosis, ordinary or eccentric behaviors can start being viewed differently.

Talking to yourself suddenly becomes a symptom. And weird.

Dancing in the middle of the night is concerning. And weird.

Wearing something no one else would wear gets disapproving looks. And weird.

Laughing when no one else knows what’s funny gets analyzed. And weird.

Not caring about time, social rules, or what other people think can come across as weird and become another thing we need to “work on” rather than simply allow.

But are they actually hurting anyone?

Not, Is this normal?

Not, Would I do this?

Not even, Do I understand it?

Is anyone actually being harmed?

The overwhelming majority of people experiencing psychosis are not violent. In one large meta-analysis, about 90% of people with schizophrenia or other psychoses were not identified as having committed violence.

There was a time when almost everything my coyote did that was different from what I considered “normal” made me nervous. I watched closely because I loved her, but also because I was scared other people wouldn’t want her around. And under that was another fear, Then maybe they won’t want me around either, maybe I will end up alone too.

Eventually I stopped wanting my sister to be less weird so other people would be comfortable.

I began to understand, from my own experience, that when someone was uncomfortable with the way she existed, it often said more about their relationship with society’s “rules” than it did about her. I saw that judging energy hadn’t been good for my coyote when it came from me and it wasn’t good for her when it came from other people either.

Coyotes can be incredibly sensitive to the mood of a room, a person or even how people are perceiving them as they walk through a busy grocery store.

I started wanting the coyotes I loved to feel free to be themselves more than I needed to feel comfortable. I wanted people around who could attune to them and wouldn’t bat an eye if one was talking to them self at the table.

Because weird can be funny. Weird can be creative. Weird can be inconvenient. Weird can be captivating. Weird can also be incredibly freeing. I now prefer weird. A table full of coyotes is MUCH more interesting than a table without them. For us at least.

Of course, if your safety or self-harm is present that is a very different story. Those moments do deserve our attention.

But different, weird, or wild are not synonyms for dangerous. Being in a serious mood yelling back at voices doesn’t always need our attention on it.

And maybe that old meaning of wyrd isn't so far off. Maybe some of these wonderfully unique humans are destined to challenge the rest of us to loosen our grip on what is “normal” or “acceptable”.

Bronnie Ware spent years caring for people who were dying. In her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, she wrote about the regrets she heard repeatedly from people near the end of their lives. The most common one was:

“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

— Bronnie Ware, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying

Maybe the coyotes freedom, authenticity and what they are often impulsed to do when they feel safe, gives us permission to find a little more freedom of our own. Sometimes we become so focused on getting the person we remember back to who they were that we forget to look for the new gifts they bring and to get to know the person who is here now.

The feeling of belonging begins when nobody in the room has to pretend to be something they are not. That includes you.

So, if you can, let them see as often as possible that who they are NOW doesn’t scare you or make you want to change them.

Let them be weird.
Let them be wyrd.

And if you’re ready for the advanced course on being with coyotes:

1. Get your nervous system regulated.
2. Try being weirder than they are.

Coyotes recognize authenticity. You don’t have to match their weird. Just let them see who you are underneath all the ways you’ve learned to behave.

And you might just get invited into the pack.

Zoom Meeting this THURSDAY - August 27th

5pm Pacific - 8pm Eastern

My husband and I often host zoom meetings for anyone who wants to come and connect, share or ask for advice. There is Zero pressure to share. For most of us we didn’t or don’t have many other families around us who really get what walking this path is like. It has felt nice to see we aren’t alone. Hearing others stories and brainstorming solutions together somehow makes this world feel a bit more “normal” and manageable. And at the very least less lonely. Some people come on and just listen without even showing their face. All are welcome.

Zoom Meeting Link: Click Here

5:00pm PST — 6:00pm Mountain — 7:00pm Central — 8:00pm EST

Meeting ID: 825 8750 2181

Passcode: 1234567

Need Help figuring out the next step?

We don’t have all the answers, we are not doctors, but we do have combined, over 65 years of lived experience, we have researched many different paths people have taken, spoken with a lot of families and maybe know something that can help. Some of what we offer may resonate, some may not. But we’re here to think alongside you. This is not just for you, this is for your Coyote as well. We know how deeply this world can misunderstand them and we love helping families build bridges between themselves and their Coyote. Even if we have spoken before we would love to talk again. The Coyote world is wild and what may work one day may not work the next. I know I had no idea what to do many times and could have used some extra eyes on the situation.

Send us an email and we can set up a time to talk.

WalkingWithCoyotes@gmail.com

Everything is free of course. We’re simply here to support and to offer what we wish we had when we started off on this road. What we wish someone would have taught us sooner.

Subscribe now

Share

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Welcome to Walking with Coyotes:

For those new here, the metaphor is this: there are dogs and coyotes. Dogs follow the rules, they live within the law and order of the day: they try their best to fit in. Coyotes do not follow the laws of the dog-world. They are dancing to a song the dogs cannot hear.

When we say “coyote” we mean the ones our culture tends to label, to pathologize, to walk around. They are the ones we do not understand, the ones in our culture who are shrouded in mystery.

They are the ones diagnosed with “schizophrenia.” On the surface, they are wild-eyed, unpredictable, Other: but underneath they are present, tapped-in, Conscious.

WEEKLY ZOOM MEETING TONIGHT: THURSDAY the 20th of August

(info below)

I wanted to write today about some of the beautiful moments I’ve had with my coyote. I don’t often see these moments highlighted in the news or even in support groups. People speak of being happy because their child applied for a job, took a shower, or went to the store. And I understand why those moments matter and why they can feel like such a big deal.

But what I want to shine a light on today are the moments that melted my heart, made me laugh and had me feeling like the luckiest person in the world to know someone so unique. For about 19 years, I mostly watched for the bad days or focused on what was “wrong.” Then, for the next eight years, I got to experience who my sister was when she felt safe with me. I became fascinated with her and started to truly enjoy our time together.

I changed the way I saw her. She stopped staying away, and I finally got to have a relationship with her again.

The best part was that once she felt safe enough to talk more, she started coming closer and showing up as her authentic self. She stopped trying to “fit in” or be “normal,” and this new version of her emerged, along with pieces of the old her that I had no idea were still in there.

My husband and I often call these types of interactions, Coyote Behavior, because they are so unique and outside of the norm. We love that about coyotes.

So without further ado, here are some of my favorite moments that still make me smile.

• Late one night my sister came into my room, it was around 2 am. It woke me up for a second but she didn’t say anything. I heard her put something down and she left. In the morning I realized she had left me a can of chicken soup because I had been feeling sad earlier that day.

• One day my sister walked up to my mom and handed her $2 and walked away. My mother didn’t know why, but watched her go into the kitchen and grab a roll of paper towels. She then brought them out to me and my husband and put them in our truck. She didn’t say anything. We didn’t need them, but it was her way of thinking about us and taking care of us. Just incase.

• I have CPTSD and was having an episode where it was hard to breathe or think straight. I went out to the car to get some space, but I still couldn’t catch my breath.

  My sister had been in what some may label as “psychosis” for years at this point. What I had come to understand was that although she wasn’t always the best at communicating with words, she was incredibly aware of the energy around her. To someone else, she may have looked wild or out of control. But I knew she could feel what was happening with me.

  “Come on. Let’s walk to the gas station. Come on. Walking good.”

  She stood in front of the car saying it a few times. Not pulling on me or looking at me, but it was clearly to me.

  I knew she was trying to help so I got up.

  She walked ahead of me like she was in charge of the situation, looking back at me often checking my mood. By the time we reached the gas station, I was calm.

  I could see this relaxed her and she had a “mission accomplished” kind of vibe.

  She didn’t know I had CPTSD, we never talked about those kinds of things. She didn’t know about the argument that had triggered me. We never even talked about what happened. She simply sensed that I wasn’t okay, got me moving, stayed with me, and helped me come back down.

  I remember thinking afterward,

  Hmmm… she did tell the police she was a five-star spiritual general. Maybe she was right.

• Another time I had been feeling a lot of anxiety I was hugging my husband in the kitchen and telling him about it. My sister was walking around singing to herself making some food. I went into my room to get a grip and she burst in 10 minutes later singing, “OH HAPPY DAY! OH HAPPY DAYY!” I didn’t even know she was aware of how I was feeling. I couldn’t help but smile and feel better.

  There was a day when she was very manic, may not have slept the night before. I had the flu for about a week and came out of my room to make some tea. She saw me and asked if I was feeling better,

  Me: “Yes slowly”

  Her: “Good”

  Me: “aww you’re so nice to me”

  Her: “You make it easy”. I melted, I hid the how impacted I felt by her love at that moment but it was huge. This was not the kind of stuff she EVER said to me before. She wasn’t even looking at me. Just moving about the kitchen, saying it more matter of fact than a compliment. Such a sweet human being when she feels safe.

• A VERY unique funny moment that still makes me laugh is the one Christmas she put a present inside of 10 boxes, each one leading to a smaller one. In the last box was the gift. She had glued a couple of plastic oil funnels for the car to a black fancy lace bra. And that was my brother’s gift. We laughed so much as she watched us all interact with it and question it. She didn’t say anything, just smiled. What I see differently now, is she was so much more aware of energy than we were. We were all buying gifts that we felt our loved ones would want. She brought the gift of lightness, laughter and togetherness. With a bra. That is a very coyote thing to do.

• What I see differently now is that while the rest of us were buying gifts we thought our loved ones would want, Aurora somehow brought the gift of lightness, laughter, and togetherness—with a bra. That's a very coyote thing to do.

• The cops were at our house once and she told them to leave then offered them tea. I wished they could have seen her like I did in that moment. None of them were listening to her, but I heard her. She was letting them know that she didn’t want them there to take her, but she is a civil harmless person that can be thoughtful and generous. She was presenting the right energy. She would have served them all tea had they come in. To me I didn’t see someone in psychosis, I saw a human being who was way more aware of what was going on than anyone was giving her credit for.

  Time, According to my Coyote:

  “Hey it’s 6’ O’clock and you said you wanted to start cooking at 6.”

  “Yeah when 5 o’clock clicks I’ll start cooking”

  ***

  Her: “I’m going to start cooking at 3.”

  Me: “It’s 3:30 now.”

  Her: “No I don’t think so, it was 1 earlier.”

  ***
  Me: “How old are you?”

  Her: “Oh God I don’t know I haven’t thought about that in years!”

  Me: “You’re 56” (shes actually 45 at this time)

  Her: “I don’t know but I got grey hair.”

  ***

  Me: Who is the president right now? (2025)

  Her: “Clinton, no Bush, no no Clinton.”

  ***

  My husband: “I’m about to take a shower, do you need to use the bathroom before I do?”

  Her: “No, but go Slow. Don’t use a hammer.” She isn’t wrong.

• One day I was going to get an oil change and she wanted to come with me. I love having her with me so of course. She had been a bit manic. It was one of those places where you stay in the car and when the mechanic lifted the hood to look under it she got out to help him out. Tell him what’s going on. Lol. It worried me for a second and then I started giggling. Things that used to be embarrassing became funny and fun when I learned to trust her more. Sure that was awkward for everyone, but it was also unique, outside of the norm and a funny story for later.

• And last but not least one of my all time favorite moments was hearing my sister outside in the middle of the street singing loudly at 2am. There was a time when I would have seen this as a problem. That night, all I saw was freedom. Her arms stretched wide to the sky singing, “A whole new world” from Aladdin in pure bliss. I wished more people were like her at that moment. I wished I was more like her at that moment.

The way I see her moving through the world reminds me of an old Zen Koan I read years ago. A thief enters Ryōkan’s simple hut and finds nothing to steal. Ryōkan encounters him and, not wanting him to leave empty-handed, offers him his clothes. The thief takes them and leaves. Ryōkan then sits naked looking at the moon and says:

“Poor fellow… I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”

Sometimes that's how I feel when people look at my sister and see only what is missing. What is different. What she doesn't have. What she doesn't do. All the ways she doesn't “fit.”

“You're missing the moon!!”

You’re missing how funny she is. How tender she can be. Her completely unexpected ways of showing love. The strange and beautiful things she notices. The freedom in her. How deeply connected to the energy of any room she is in.

The unpredictability that keeps life fresh and new.

I know what it feels like to not see the moon.

I’m grateful I finally realized the moon was there the whole time.

I just had to learn how to look up.

Zoom Meeting this THURSDAY - August 20th

5pm Pacific - 8pm Eastern

This week's topic: The Positive Side of Things

My husband and I often host zoom meetings for anyone who wants to come and connect, share or ask for advice. There is Zero pressure to share. For most of us we didn’t or don’t have many other families around us who really get what walking this path is like. It has felt nice to see we aren’t alone. Hearing others stories and brainstorming solutions together somehow makes this world feel a bit more “normal” and manageable. And at the very least less lonely. Some people come on and just listen without even showing their face. All are welcome.

Zoom Meeting Link: Click Here

5:00pm PST — 6:00pm Mountain — 7:00pm Central — 8:00pm EST

Meeting ID: 825 8750 2181

Passcode: 1234567

Need Help figuring out the next step?

We don’t have all the answers, we are not doctors, but we do have combined, over 65 years of lived experience, we have researched many different paths people have taken, spoken with a lot of families and maybe know something that can help. Some of what we offer may resonate, some may not. But we’re here to think alongside you. This is not just for you, this is for your Coyote as well. We know how deeply this world can misunderstand them and we love helping families build bridges between themselves and their Coyote. Even if we have spoken before we would love to talk again. The Coyote world is wild and what may work one day may not work the next. I know I had no idea what to do many times and could have used some extra eyes on the situation.

Send us an email and we can set up a time to talk.

WalkingWithCoyotes@gmail.com

Everything is free of course. We’re simply here to support and to offer what we wish we had when we started off on this road. What we wish someone would have taught us sooner.

Subscribe now

Share

Welcome to Walking with Coyotes:

For those new here, the metaphor is this: there are dogs and coyotes. Dogs follow the rules, they live within the law and order of the day: they try their best to fit in. Coyotes do not follow the laws of the dog-world. They are dancing to a song the dogs cannot hear.

When we say “coyote” we mean the ones our culture tends to label, to pathologize, to walk around. They are the ones we do not understand, the ones in our culture who are shrouded in mystery.

They are the ones diagnosed with “schizophrenia.” On the surface, they are wild-eyed, unpredictable, Other: but underneath they are present, tapped-in, Conscious.

WEEKLY ZOOM MEETING TONIGHT: THURSDAY 13th of August (info below)

Who Gets to Decide What Reality Really Is?

First, I want to explain why I feel it is so important to investigate this within ourselves and with our loved ones. When I stopped arguing with my loved one’s reality and became curious about it instead, that was the beginning of us finding our way back to each other in a way I never thought possible.

For years it felt like there was a huge space between us. My words and actions kept screaming, “YOU NEED TO COME BACK OVER TO THIS SIDE TO MY REALITY!” That wasn’t building the bridge. Learning to make room for her reality and becoming curious about it was one of the biggest parts of building the bridge between us.

My husband's late father, Chris, was a coyote himself. A brilliant, wild man who lived at the edges of society, largely ignored by the world, while carrying the wisdom of a great master within him. He taught my husband to look at the roots of words as a way of understanding life more deeply. That tool has guided us many, many times, and it will guide this article today. Thank you, Chris.

So where did the word reality even come from? What about delusion? Imagination?

The Etymology of Reality.

It ultimately comes from the Latin res, meaning “thing” or “matter.”

From res came Medieval Latin realitas, meaning roughly “the quality of being real” or “actuality.” English adopted reality through French/Medieval Latin around the 16th century.

res → thing
realis → relating to things / actual
realitas → the quality of being real
reality → what is real or actually exists

According to Merriam-Webster, reality is defined as the quality or state of being real, something that actually exists or is an actual fact, and the total state of real things or events

The interesting thing is it doesn’t tell us how humans determine what counts as a “thing” that is real. That’s a philosophical question people have been exploring for thousands of years.

Are thoughts real? Dreams? Love? God? Consciousness? A voice someone hears that we can’t hear?

We may be able to say, “I don’t hear the voice.” But that’s different from saying, “You aren’t hearing a voice.”

The Etymology of Delusion.

Delusion comes from the Latin deludere, meaning “to mock, deceive, trick, play false with, or make a fool of.”

It breaks down roughly as:

• de- = away/down/off

• ludere = to play

That same Latin root ludere appears in words like illusion, allusion, and ludic (relating to play).

The English word delusion developed through the idea of being deceived or misled—essentially, being “played” or fooled. By the early modern period it could mean a false belief or impression, and it eventually acquired its more specific psychiatric meaning.

The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines a delusion as an idea or belief system that is not accepted by the person’s culture or subculture and is held with conviction despite irrationality or contrary evidence.

When does an unusual belief become a delusion, and how much does the culture surrounding the person get to decide?What would change if, before deciding an experience was a delusion, we simply called it an experience, a belief, or a perception and got curious about it?

Do we have to agree? No. But their experience isn't less real simply because we aren't experiencing it.

Especially since there are so many different ways of experiencing reality in this world…

Physical reality: a chair, rain, hot, cold.

Perceptual reality: Las Vegas is fun. Las Vegas is overwhelming.

Emotional reality: Someone may feel unsafe when they are objectively safe.

Social reality: A $20 bill is made of paper, but we all agree it has value. Laws, marriage, borders, titles.

Cultural reality: Communication with an ancestor in one culture might be interpreted through a psychiatric framework in another. The experience may be similar while the meaning assigned to it changes.

Dream reality: Dreaming can feel completely real. Your body can even respond: heart pounding, sweating, terror, relief. Then you wake up.

Inner reality: Memories, imagination, thoughts, voices, visions and internal experiences.

Etymology of Imagination

imago → image
imaginari → to form an image in the mind
imagination → the ability to create images or ideas in the mind that aren't presently before the senses

According to Merriam-Webster, imagination is the act or process of forming a conscious idea or mental image of something that is not present to the senses or has never been perceived in reality. It also refers to the ability or gift of creating these mental images for art, invention, or problem-solving.

Are we dismissing our problem solvers? Just a thought.

Maybe psychosis and imagination aren’t the same thing. But really, WHO and WHERE is the boss of reality? Can we always recognize the difference between deep seeing, imagination, and delusion in someone else's experience or ”reality” without first becoming curious?

Imagine telling someone in 1750:

“I’m going to take a metal machine weighing hundreds of thousands of pounds, fill it with 300 people and fly it through the sky.”

“I’m going to speak into a tiny box in California and my friend’s face in Australia will appear instantly.”

“There are invisible waves traveling through this room (Wi-Fi. Radio. Cellular signals) carrying voices, pictures and information, even though you can’t see any of them.”

They would have sounded completely outside of reality. Absurd. Impossible. Maybe even called “crazy” or “delusional”. Yet today we don’t give them a second thought.

Reality didn’t change. Our understanding of what was possible did.

Even people I know who said they had seen UFOs were laughed at and dismissed as conspiracy theorists, delusional, or simply “seeing things.” Today, our own government openly investigates what it calls Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAP. That doesn't tell us what those people saw, but it does remind me how quickly we can dismiss someone's experience when it doesn't match our own understanding of" “reality”.

We as human beings should have a little humility about the limits of what we know. Our collective understanding of what is “real,” and what is possible, is constantly expanding.

If you are the one who knows how to move through the world of consensus reality, you may have to build the first half of the bridge. Coyotes often live beyond its walls, following paths the rest of us can't always see. Lay a few boards toward them. Listen. Get curious. Make the crossing feel safe. And maybe, over time, they'll begin laying boards from their side too. Not necessarily to come live in your world, but to invite you into theirs. And if you ever get that invitation, take it. Their world can be a fascinating place to visit.

Here are some helpful phrases to help you get started laying those boards if you haven’t already. Get curious and listen for the hidden meaning or the feeling underneath the words.

Coyote:

“The CIA is following me.”

Try:

“That sounds exhausting. Do you feel like you’re being watched all the time?”

You’re not confirming the CIA is following them.

You’re becoming interested in their experience and building the bridge.

Or:

“God is sending me messages through songs.”

Try:

“Oh wow, what are the messages you are hearing?”

“I don’t experience what you’re experiencing. But I believe that you’re experiencing it. Tell me what it’s like.”

Maybe it won't work the first time. It depends on how big the distance is between you. I know the bridge between my loved one and me was long. I had to lay down a lot of boards before she started laying boards too.

So who gets to decide what reality really is?

I don’t know. e don’t need to know.

Sometimes it’s enough to just be with someone we love and say,

“Tell me more about that.”

And instead of pulling them into our world, we can spend a little time discovering theirs.

Zoom Meeting this THURSDAY - August 13th

Topic This Week:

“How do we respond when they say…?”

One of the many skills that is important to learn on this road is how to respond. We will go over some common scenarios, share how we have responded in the past, hear what has worked for others and take questions, comment or shares after. For most of us we didn’t and/or don’t have many other families around us who really get what walking this path is like. It has felt nice to see we aren’t alone and to learn together. Hearing others stories and brainstorming solutions together somehow makes this world feel a bit more “normal” and manageable. And at the very least less lonely. Some people come on and just listen without even showing their face. All are welcome.

Zoom Meeting Link: Click Here

5:00pm PST — 6:00pm Mountain — 7:00pm Central — 8:00pm EST

Meeting ID: 825 8750 2181

Passcode: 1234567

Need Help figuring out the next step?

We don’t have all the answers, we are not doctors, but we do have combined, over 65 years of lived experience, we have researched many different paths people have taken, spoken with a lot of families and maybe know something that can help. Some of what we offer may resonate, some may not. But we’re here to think alongside you. This is not just for you, this is for your Coyote as well. We know how deeply this world can misunderstand them and we love helping families build bridges between themselves and their Coyote. Even if we have spoken before we would love to talk again. The Coyote world is wild and what may work one day may not work the next. I know I had no idea what to do many times and could have used some extra eyes on the situation.

Send us an email and we can set up a time to talk.

WalkingWithCoyotes@gmail.com

Everything is free of course. We’re simply here to support and to offer what we wish we had when we started off on this road. What we wish someone would have taught us sooner.

Share

Subscribe now

Tonight!

All are welcome to join our live Q & A Zoom meeting with Matt Griffo!

I am excited to have Matt on the call this week. When I watch his videos I end up writing pages of information that gives me hope for the coyotes in my life and I’m looking forward to learning more.

Matt is a brilliant, unique artist, filmmaker, musician, and independent researcher whose own lived experiences led him to explore the connections between the brain, body, nutrition, trauma, and mental health. He’s spent years digging through research, experimenting on himself, guiding others and generously sharing his findings with anyone who will listen. He has a deep understanding of the science and recognizes that much of this research never reaches the mainstream. He's doing his part to change that so more people can make the most informed decisions possible.

Some questions I am interested in learning more about;

• Could what we eat influence symptoms of schizophrenia or psychosis?

• Can improving gut health change mental health outcomes?

• Why are researchers comparing the gut microbiomes of people diagnosed with schizophrenia to healthy control groups?

• Have there been people whose symptoms improved after changing their diet or addressing physical health? What does the research actually show?

• What are scientists learning that most of us have never heard about?

• What are some simple things I can start trying now?

Hope to see you there. Link to tonight’s Zoom call below.

*If you can't make it tonight or want to learn more after tonight, Matt will be having a follow-up zoom call on the 10th of August. Link to sign up is below.

🗓 Thursday, August 6

5pm PST, 6pm Mountain Time, 7pm Central, 8pm EST
Walking with Coyotes Zoom Gathering
Special Guest: Matt Griffo

Click Here to Join Zoom!!

Meeting ID: 825 8750 2181

Passcode: 1234567

One tap mobile

+16699006833,,82587502181#,,,,*1234567# US (San Jose)

+16694449171,,82587502181#,,,,*1234567# US

Matt’s Follow-Up Meeting

August 10th, 5pm PST, 8pm EST

https://www.patreon.com/642341/events/164642392

Matt also offers a library of videos and educational content on topics including anosognosia, schizophrenia, mental health protocols, CPTSD, and more.

You can check that out here:

Link to Matt’s Website

Need Help figuring out the next step?

We don’t have all the answers, we are not doctors, but we do have combined, over 65 years of lived experience. We have researched many different paths people have taken, spoken with a lot of families and maybe know something that can help. Some of what we offer may resonate, some may not. But we’re here to think alongside you. This is not just for you, this is for your Coyote as well. We know how deeply this world can misunderstand them and we love helping families build bridges between themselves and their Coyote. Even if we have spoken before we would love to talk again. The Coyote world is wild and what may work one day may not work the next. I know I had no idea what to do many times and could have used some extra eyes on the situation.

Send us an email and we can set up a time to talk.

WalkingWithCoyotes@gmail.com

Everything is free of course. We’re simply here to support and to offer what we wish we had when we started off on this road. What we wish someone could have taught us much sooner.

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Save the Date: Thursday, August 6th 5pm PST

This Thursday, August 6th, I’ll be interviewing Matt Griffo, who has spent years diving deeply into the growing research on the gut-brain connection and how our microbiome may influence mental health. In his writing, Matt highlights studies comparing the gut microbiomes of people diagnosed with schizophrenia to healthy control groups, along with research examining similar patterns in other neurological and psychiatric conditions.

If you’ve ever wondered:

• Could physical health influence mental health?

• What is the gut-brain connection?

• What does the latest research actually say?

• Are there areas of science that deserve more attention?

Matt is the best person I know to ask those questions. I’m excited about it!!

🗓 Thursday, August 6

5pm PST, 6pm Mountain Time, 7pm Central, 8pm EST
Walking with Coyotes Zoom Gathering
Special Guest: Matt Griffo

Click Here to Join Zoom!!

Meeting ID: 825 8750 2181

Passcode: 1234567

One tap mobile

+16699006833,,82587502181#,,,,*1234567# US (San Jose)

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Matt also offers a library of videos and educational content on topics including anosognosia, schizophrenia, mental health protocols, CPTSD, and more.

You can check him out here:

Link to Matt's Website

Welcome to Walking with Coyotes:

For those new here, the metaphor is this: there are dogs and coyotes. Dogs follow the rules, they live within the law and order of the day: they try their best to fit in. Coyotes do not follow the laws of the dog-world. They are dancing to a song the dogs cannot hear.

When we say “coyote” we mean the ones our culture tends to label, to pathologize, to walk around. They are the ones we do not understand, the ones in our culture who are shrouded in mystery.

They are the ones diagnosed with “schizophrenia.” On the surface, they are wild-eyed, unpredictable, Other: but underneath they are present, tapped-in, Conscious.

WEEKLY ZOOM MEETING TONIGHT: THURSDAY 30th of July (info below)

More Ways to See Them

Have you ever bought a car that was a certain color and all of the sudden you start seeing that same car everywhere? That is how it has been for me with coyotes. Once I started understanding how many of them navigate the world I started seeing them in the news, on movies, TV shows, documentaries and throughout history.

I wanted to share some examples with you, in hopes that they continue to open your mind to your loved one. To the possibilities of who they may be meant to be or where they may be coming from. For me I can see so much of my sister and/or her path in life in many of these coyote type characters.

There are the Mystic Coyotes, the ones who hear something beyond ordinary reality. Samuel in House of David, man who leads by listened to what God wants him to do. Bruno (Encanto), His gift is prophecy, and the family treated his visions as the cause of the bad things he foresaw rather than a warning about them. So he left and spent ten years living inside the walls of the house. The song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is the whole family explaining, cheerfully, why they stopped saying his name. Gramma Tala in Moana, who is the village mystic and deeply connected to the spirit world looked at as kookie but sees more than others.

There are the Visionary Coyotes, whose minds have ideas so big it would ruin them to do anything but what they are obsessed with. Temple Grandin thought in pictures instead of words and rebuilt an entire industry because she could feel what no one else could feel. Tesla built whole machines in his head. Einstein questioned what everyone had agreed to stop questioning.

There are the Artist Coyotes. Van Gogh, who saw beauty nobody around him could see. Emily Dickinson, writing generations ahead of her own time from inside one house. Frida Kahlo, who refused anyone else's definition of normal and lived unapologetically as herself.

There are the Wild Tricksters, who refuse the rules outright. Rafiki (Lion King), running around with a staff speaking wildly and full of wisdom. King Bumi (Avatar: The Last Airbender, the animated series) seemed to everyone he had “lost it” until we realize he’s playing the game four moves deeper than anyone else. Wile E. Coyote, humiliated every single day and inventing again by morning.

And there are the System Seers. These are the ones who look at the world everyone has agreed on and say that isn’t what’s actually happening here.

Chief Bromden, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He’s a Native American patient on a locked psychiatric ward. He describes the hospital, and the country outside it, as the Combine. A machine that installs parts in people until they run correctly. His chart says he sick. He is also the one narrating the entire story, and the only one who walks out.

Neo, in The Matrix. Before he’s Neo he’s Thomas Anderson, a software developer who can’t sleep and can’t shake the feeling that something about his life is staged. Insomnia, alienation, a conviction that the world is not what it appears to be. In the end he was right, he was special and the world did need him. Which is something many coyotes say.

Sarah Connor, in Terminator 2. She’s held at a state hospital with a “schizoaffective” diagnosis for insisting that the future is coming and that she knows the date. She’s restrained, medicated, and studied by a doctor who plays tapes of her own testimony back to her as evidence of how sick she is. Everything she says is true. Like my sister when they didn’t believe her but she was telling the truth. Hard to watch for me but also reminds me of what so many of them go through.

Truman Burbank, in The Truman Show. He starts noticing patterns that don’t add up, and everyone he loves gently redirects him. His wife, his best friend, his mother. All of them looking at him with soft concern and telling him he’s imagining things.

And where did many of them live?

Bruno lived inside the walls of his own family’s house. Emily Dickinson lived in one room and mailed her poems out in fragments to people who couldn’t read them yet. Tesla lived alone with rituals no one else could follow. Van Gogh moved from town to town and died before a single painting sold. Rafiki lives in a tree at the edge of the kingdom. Gramma Tala goes down to the water at night while the whole village sleeps.

A reminder that wild is not the same as dangerous.

I see parts of my sister in all of these characters, and it normalizes her for me. It has me looking at her as special rather than broken. It has me looking at almost every coyote I meet the same way. Like they may be here to save the world. Maybe they know something I don’t. Maybe they can see something I can’t.

Of course this path is very different from person to person and we all know it doesn’t always feel magical or beautiful to be a part of. Sometimes it can be heartbreaking. This article is here to remind us that we can loosen our grip a little around the “right” and “wrong” ways of existing on this very confusing wild planet.

Meeting this THURSDAY - July 30th

Weekly Zoom Meeting : Honoring Our Coyotes

We start each meeting with a short mindfulness exercise to practice that can help bring a little relaxation into difficult moments. After the mindfulness we will take time to check in with those who choose to share with zero pressure to say anything at all. For most of us we didn’t and don’t have many other families around us who really get what walking this path is like. It has felt nice to see we aren’t alone. Hearing others stories and brainstorming solutions together somehow makes this world feel a bit more “normal” and manageable. And at the very least less lonely. Some people come on and just listen without even showing their face. All are welcome.

Zoom Meeting Link: Click Here

5:00pm PST — 6:00pm Mountain — 7:00pm Central — 8:00pm EST

Meeting ID: 825 8750 2181

Passcode: 1234567

SAVE THE DATE! August 6th we will be interviewing Matt Griffo during the weekly call as well as Q & A for families to ask specific questions.

Having experienced psychosis himself, Matt now guides others in reclaiming their mental health through nutrition, movement, and mindfulness, showing that recovery is often possible in ways many people never imagined.

Matt’s Website

Need Help figuring out the next step?

We don’t have all the answers, we are not doctors, but we do have combined, over 65 years of lived experience, we have researched many different paths people have taken, spoken with a lot of families and maybe know something that can help. Some of what we offer may resonate, some may not. But we’re here to think alongside you. This is not just for you, this is for your Coyote as well. We know how deeply this world can misunderstand them and we love helping families build bridges between themselves and their Coyote. Even if we have spoken before we would love to talk again. The Coyote world is wild and what may work one day may not work the next. I know I had no idea what to do many times and could have used some extra eyes on the situation.

Send us an email and we can set up a time to talk.

WalkingWithCoyotes@gmail.com

Everything is free of course. We’re simply here to support and to offer what we wish we had when we started off on this road. What we wish the someone would have taught us.

Subscribe now

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Welcome to Walking with Coyotes:

For those new here, when we say “coyote” we mean the ones our culture tends to label, to pathologize, to walk around. They are the ones we do not understand, the ones in our culture who are shrouded in mystery.

They are the ones diagnosed with “schizophrenia” or the like. On the surface, they are wild-eyed, unpredictable, Other: but underneath they are present, tapped-in, Conscious.

Zoom Meeting this week, link below.

Wow.

I have been busy this week so my husband said I could use something he has written to share. I just read it. Wow.

My husband who I picked up off the side of the road 8 1/2 years ago. Who had himself experienced psychosis and spent 13 years running from the version of the world society told him he should live in.

He looked homeless, wild, long beard and wild hair. We bonded over our Coyote family members, his father and my sister. We were engaged at 3 months and married at 9 months. I fell in love with how different he is, so unique it’s refreshing. He also earned a scholarship to study philosophy at Oxford, which turned out to be a pretty great bonus for picking up the homeless-looking guy on the side of the road.

Without him I would have never formed the beautiful relationship I was able to form with my sister. I would have never been able to gain her trust without his guidance.

This isn't an academic article. It's the perspective of someone who has lived on both sides of the fence.

Scotford, your article brought me to tears more than once. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for holding my sister and the entire coyote population is such high regard. Thank you for giving me my sister back.

the blood of black elk.

Schizophrenia literally means “split-mind”(schizo-phrenia), is derived from the Greek words schizein (”to split”) and phrēn (”mind”). A person who goes into psychosis, who has a “psychotic break” where they become “schizophrenic”, what is actually happening is they are having a break from the world, a split from the world, from our world, from the collective mind, from the culture. I can best describe it as a “hoping of the fence”, like leaving the city walls, leaving the cowboy city and going into the unknown, into indian territory, the wild, they split from our world and they go into the unknown. For whatever reason they leave our world, they break from it. At root, what is that? It is a terrifying thing for the mind, can one imagine? One’s loved one goes through something, something happens to them where all of a sudden they feel split from everyone and everything in their life, there becomes a “me” vs “them” mindset. Often the word “paranoid” is coupled with the diagnosis “schizophrenic” because developed within the schizophrenic is fear, fear of the world they have just split from, our world, they are pushing away, have made such an intense push-movement away that there has literally become a split from that world, and what a world it is our modern world, turn on your tv, look at what our children are told to look up to and pedestal, look what the culture tells the parents of our young ones to look up to, to emulate, to put in front of their children as example. we are all born into this culture, this culture is very good at building skyscrapers, machines that can travel all the way to the moon, but perhaps every rose has its thorns, and some of us from the moment we come into this world feel it is not our home.

For some, a precious few, they are more sensitive than the rest of us, by genetics and choice of the universe they were given a different nervous system, and different way. and their nervous system and our world, like cowboy and indian, like dog and coyote, they were not a match. the world, our world of yelling and screaming and politics and hate and rage and kill-or-be-killed and survival-of-the-fittest and wars and machines and noise and tractors and bulldozers and suits and ties and having, it feels to work and live in a system that treats one like a slave, like a robot, like a commodity to be bought and sold. for some, a precious few, the world we live in, the modern world, the culture we are born into, it feels dystopian, not so unlike the world described in the movie the matrix, a world of machine and order and conformity and all for what? we all know and feel that something is off, we remember the cree indian proverb: “only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, and the last river poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.”

Yet we trudge through, we have good days yes, and bad days, and we try to focus on the positive and good the best we can. And that which is suffering within us, crying within us, we do not listen to that voice, we cannot, else everything would collapse, we must go on, bills must be paid, responsibilities must be upheld, we try our best, and and yet something within us is crying out.

Many of us can, say, walk into a room with music that sounds to us awful, it playing loud and is objectively awful, it grades against our spirits, our minds, most of us can tune out the white noise in the background, we do our job, we live our life, we focus the best we can on the positive, we try our best to carve out our little piece of happiness, and we try the best we can to protect it from a world that so often to us feels so very chaotic and foreign and painful to be a part of. but then what of the ones born to the human race whose nervous system is more honest, the ones who nervous system is more sensitive than the great majority of us. what of the children who since the moment they came into the world, we felt how sensitive they were, a touch strange, odd, different, we saw it, we felt it, they were other and different, what of these children when they encounter the white-noise and expectation of our world??

The lakota word is “wakhan”, these holy children, what happens to those holy children when they come in contact with the grating background noise, what happens, psychosis happens, at some point he splits, the mind splits, it runs, the coyote as it were hops the fence, it breaks from that world, that noise, the mind and heart leaves the room one way or another, their nervous system rebels them, like the coyote-pup who was brought into the world of dogs. this has happened, and it does not go well. the coyote grows up and something is off, though it can mate and interact with the dogs and the dog-world, the coyote is different, it comes from somewhere else, is more sensitive, is other, is different, and is not resonating in a backyard, and the coyote does everything it can to hop the fence, and it does, one way or another, that coyote will find a way to leave the barking and screaming of the dog-world.

One has heard of people like Ezekiel, of people like Isaiah, Hosea, Jeremiah, yes?

In today’s culture, every single one of the ancient hebrew prophets, every single one of them by today’s classification would have been classified as “schizophrenic”, for ‘hearing voices that were not there’, as the prophets claimed being possessed literally by God, literal possession by God himself, as in they would say “I God am speaking now to you Israel”, the lips of the prophet isaiah would be moving, the lips of prophet Zechariah would be moving, saying such words, literally shaking with possession, and the person, the holy person, the prophet/shaman would allow the Voice of what felt to them a Higher-Mind conduct through them. Such people as these guided in the olden days, like the Lakota shaman Black Elk, The Lakota shaman Black Elk, who also heard voices, who in recounted his experiences, wrote: “I was four years old then, and I think it must have been the next summer that I first heard the voices.” And again, from his boyhood, Black Elk recounts:

“While I was eating, a voice came and said: “It is time; now they are calling you.” The voice was so loud and clear that I believed it, and I thought I would just go where it wanted me to go. So I got right up and started. As I came out of the tepee, both my thighs began to hurt me, and suddenly it was like waking from a dream, and there wasn’t any voice. So I went back into the tepee, but I didn’t want to eat. Man Hip looked at me in a strange way and asked me what was wrong. I told him that my legs were hurting me.” “...When we had camped again, I was lying in our tepee and my mother and father were sitting beside me. I could see out through the opening, and there two men were coming from the clouds, headfirst like arrows slanting down, and I knew they were the same that I had seen before. Each now carried a long spear, and from the points of these a jagged lightning flashed. They came clear down to the ground this time and stood a little way off and looked at me and said: “Hurry! Come! Your Grandfathers are calling you!” “

The Lakota people knew this little boy Black Elk had a gift. The elders of the Tribe put their minds and hearts together, they saw the boy as connected to “the Other World”, that the little boy was holy. Fast-forward years later and the little boy now man was a leader and shaman of his culture. Our culture, our doctors of today, how would they have regarded a 17 year old black elk entering into their office, telling the psychologist how he heard voices speaking to him in the wind? I think we know the answer to that.

I know something about the story of Black Elk, but I asked AI (using AI) for an Objective Answer, to a simple Question: “Did Black Elk hear voices?”

Answer: “Yes, Black Elk, the renowned Oglala Lakota medicine man and spiritual leader, began hearing disembodied, calling voices at age four, which he believed were spiritual messages. These auditory experiences continued throughout his life, accompanying profound visions that directed his role as a healer and, as detailed in Black Elk Speaks, guided his spiritual understanding of the world.”

There is a word for that in our culture, for a man who claims to hear Voices that others could not hear, hearing Voices that were as real to him as the voices we hear when we are standing in a shopping center, people around us literally talking around us, we hearing their voices. There is a word for that phenomenon in our culture, it is called “schizophrenia.”

My position is that our culture would have put the Lakota Shaman Black Elk in an institution if he were born into our culture. My position is that would have been a catastrophic mistake.

Though our culture wants us to call the Black Elk in our life “mentally sick,” I humbly suggest it is not so simple.

Yes, and so again I ask what if a young Black Elk were born into our particular culture? My own sense is that instead of a soft-landing for him, there would be a very hard landing for him. Instead of the Black Elk in our life being nurtured and pedestalled as he was in the Lakota culture, other shamans in his culture, others with “the coyote genes” who had experiences not far off his own, they would have guided him through and up the mountain, making sure he did not swerve off the side of the cliff. The Elders (spiritual) took Black Elk as a boy, he was considered very special, they treated him that way, and made sure everyone treated him that way. And so his psychological stayed a healthy one. But I ask again, what if Black Elk had been born into our culture, what would his psychology have become? What would those voices have turned into? If Black Elk had been born into our culture, the landing would have been hard, I think we all know that, but how hard? Hard enough to shatter him into a million pieces of sparkling glass? I do not think the Black Elk of the late 1800s and early 1900s, the story of this Lakota shaman, I do not think his life and story is so unrelated to the life and story of our “coyote” loved one. I think there is connection, and it is in the exploration and right understanding of that connection that the human race can make a critical next leap in our understanding and relation to the schizophrenic mind, the Black Elk in our life.

I strongly believe our culture just is not good at everything, in fact is not our culture not now more obese and sicker than ever before? Is there not a pill for everything, “Take this pill, though it costs a bunch, take it, it will solve your problem!!” And then I think of the Lakota, I think of people like Crazy Horse and Red Cloud and Sitting Bull, paragons of health and power and wellness, riding their horses across the great plains. Obviously our culture, with all of it’s inventions and whatnot, electricity and modern housing and the rest of it, so much Good it has done, but I caution those of us born to this culture to think we have it all figured out, and that we cannot learn from the experiences of others, born to different cultures, who also have “the coyote gene”, and who had different outcomes GIVEN the different inputs of the culture around them.

All that said, am I saying do we just now think our Loved One is literally Black Elk return and we just tell him “your’re a shaman, go off his meds, we trust you, wooohoooo!” No. I am not saying that. Again, what I am saying is that what if Black Elk were born into our “modern” industrialized culture of today, and what if on account of the “blindspots” of that culture he was broken by that culture? The Black Elk in our life is not the Black Elk of the Lakota people, standing tall, wearing the Headdress made of Eagle feathers, standing tall and successfully integrated into his culture and the universe, - No. That is not our culture. In our culture, there is not the same space for Black Elk as existed in his Lakota world of the late 1800s/early 1900s. No no, had Black Elk been born into our culture, we do not need to guess what the outcome would have been, we have seen it a thousand times: The Black Elk in our life is sitting there in his room, psychologically shattered, a million pieces of bright shattered glass on the floor, he is in a state of total distrust and displacement of our world, at the sub-conscious and conscious level, is in a state of rebellion, and “the demons” in his head, as it was with my father, they mirror the voices of society, what society was telling him, “You are awful! You are hopelessly diseased!! You are a rotten father! Look at you there, you are worthless!! No job, a nothing, totally selfish, no contribution to your society!! You ingrate!! Go jump off the bridge!!” And my Dad almost did, went to the very ledge of the bridge, until standing there, about to Jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, he saw me in the clouds, I was a very little boy, he had a vision of me, saw me as if I was real, and tears in his eyes, he stepped off the bridge, and was put into the ward on a 5150, and then one day many years hence, after not knowing my Dad, I walked into his house, and saw him there, shattered there, after years and years alone, like a million pieces of shattered glass on the floor, the Black Elk in my life shattered there on the floor, just as the Oglala Lakota Shaman Black Elk would have been shattered had he been born into the same culture my own father was born into. There would have been a massive collision and the Black Elk of the Lakota People could not have achieved to his destiny within our skyscraper-building culture. His “skill-set” was just not made for our industrialized unnaturalized modern-world. Who and what Black Elk was as a human being, his “gifts,” that “coyote-gene” that he had, it would not have found expression into our world had Black Elk been born into it. The ‘voices” in his head, they would not have taken the more “harmonic resonances” as they did for the Black Elk of the Lakota people, voices that though terrifying to Black Elk at times, they were positive generally in nature, they were of and within the scope of the natural world, within the context of lightning and thunder and animals and the like, everything was generally of an integrated natural tenor, though what would have happened had Black Elk who had that coyote-gene been born into our culture, and was shattered by that culture, how would those voices in his head had manifested? If the world around Black Elk, the culture around him was hostile to Black Elk, dismissive and ignore-ant and hostile, how would have those voices manifested within the mind of Black Elk? Perhaps those voices might have taken on a darker tone?

Our culture, our industrialized individualized culture and way does not have all the answers, we must be humble enough to accept that, I believe. The system it’s self is in trouble, something feels catastrophically off. It’s like so much else in our culture, like with the health of our children and adults, are not obesity rates sky-rocketing, heart-disease and the like, are we not sicker than we have ever been? Certainly we are on average much more physically sick than one’s average Lakota Indian in the 1800s riding his horse on the open plains? Was Black Elk’s culture totally inferior to ours? My position is our world is in desperate need of humility and a re-think. My position is that there are plenty putting their time and effort to address the catastrophic failures of our system in all kinds of ways, but when it comes to our population, the coyote population, the Black Elks of the world, who is marching for them, who is noticing? Where on the news are we hearing anything positive and affirming about them? I see this culture, I see the value-system, we all do: We see the Mansions and Benzes and Bentleys and Yachts, the celebrities and parties, the red-carpet, the glitz and glamour, the Kardashian Beyonce Jay-Z bling-culture, we all see it, and I myself come from it, danced to those songs as well back in the day, wanted all the things, the bling and the lifestyle the culture was selling me. But then I grew up. I opened my eyes. Yes, I see who and what this culture teaches us to pedestal, to put in front of our children as “success” and “role-model.” Well, I do not share this cult-ure’s value system.

I put people like Black Elk up on my pedestal, I put him, his life up on a pedestal, because his life matters, and because your children and our family-members, the Black Elk in our life, he matters too, she matters too. This culture wants you to believe your son or daughter, they are not special, they are not holy. Our culture (in effect) gas-lights it’s holy ones, and so the trauma deepens, yet the truth remains:

They are Holy.

What did the famed psychologist Carl Jung say about our modern world?? Carl Jung was asked about God, someone was asking him perhaps where God is, why is it so hard to find God? His response: “Modern man can’t see God because he doesn’t look low enough”:

Are not the Fairy Tales we grew up with, are they not true in the end? I think we all know that, in our heart, deep down, we know:

In the end, the Frog wears the Crown.

Yes, I posit that it is precisely the one who our culture tells us is at the bottom of the totem pole, the one least deserving of the crown, it is precisely that human being that the Universe wants us to crown, and when we do, in our heart and mind and soul, when we upend the narrative, when with our own mind we align with the Truth, ie when we align our mind with The Cosmic Mind (‘The Universe’), when we thus finally exist in a state of resonance with the Universe and our loved one, when the Triangle is built, that triangle b/t our mind and our loved one’s mind and the Cosmic Mind, when we finally exist in Truth of how the Universe wants us to see things, when we treat the coyote in our life as we would treat him if he were literally the Lakota shaman Black Elk who happened to be born into our life and family, IF we do that, if we treat the coyote in our life with that same level of respect and understanding and nurturing and presence, then we will find ourselves much closer to where the Universe wants us to be in heart and mind with the coyote in our life, and the Universe will reward that attunement, that successful effort on our part to make the Right Alignment. Peace of Mind can ONLY come where there is alignment with Truth. And hitherto, I argue with respect to schizophrenia, there is not that alignment, thus the chaos, in our culture total chaos and failure and ignore-ance. When we reduce Black Elk’s life to a pharma-problem to be solved, do we think the Universe is going to reward that mind-set? And what if the Universe wants us to Think a little Deeper, feel a little Deeper, a lot Deeper into what is happening and why? The universe is not going to reward us if we are turning in an F-paper to the Teacher, will it? First step(leap) first: we put the crown back on Black Elk’s head.

In our heart and mind and soul, we take our coyote off the cross our culture wants us to keep him on, he as “mentally sick” and that’s the end of the story, we take him off that dumb, dehumanizing cross. Rather, we see that bloody crown of Black Elk on the ground, and we put it back on his head. We put our selves on the right side of the fairy tale, we try that Theory, we Believe it, and we see how the Universe reacts. In my experience, it is precisely when we give the Black Elk in our life his crown that things begin to change at a fundamental level. That does not mean there will not be chaos and this and that at times, weather patterns come, sometimes even a tornado can sweep through the valley, that’s called being a human, what I am saying is now that one is in harmonic resonance with how the Universe is seeing one’s loved one, it will thus all begin to make sense, and making sense, having understanding, one’s own mind will find that harmonic and peace, that Peace of Mind. I am no Buddhist, but that image of Siddhartha sitting there in the lotus position, eyes closed, calm, in perfect balance, the weather patterns come through, all of it, summer and fall and winter and then spring again, but the Understanding is the Point, and Right understanding leads to that Peace of Mind, that stability within the weather-patterns of the cosmos. Again, right now, with respect to “the schizophrenic mind”, BECAUSE the right Understanding is NOT there, there is not a Buddha to be found within that world, our culture is continuing to turn in the F paper to the Teacher, and so there can be and will be no calm, no Peace, how could there be? Gotta attune to the Reality of who and what the Black Elk in one’s life is, gotta turn that A paper in before the Universe can give you back the fruits of turning in an A paper.

And here is the most magical thing about finding that harmonic resonance with the Universe, that Right understanding: having gained that Peace of mind, the next time one enters the room with the Black Elk in one’s own life, he will feel that peace of mind, that respect, that understanding, one will be placing one’s self on the right side of the fairy-tale, and he will feel that, whether immediately or in time, he will feel the alignment. We all know what it’s like to enter the room and you can feel if somebody there does not like you, does not respect you, it’s a strange thing how energy works, but that principle right there, that is principally how the coyote mind works, they are so attuned to energy, to vibration, and if and when one thus enters a room with a coyote in it and one’s energy is not right, they will feel it, and things will devolve fast. However, if one is in alignment, right alignment with where the universe wants one’s mind, WHEN one begins to act as the counter-force to the force of a culture that is putting a judgemental/negating/ignore-ant way and mindset and interaction with them, IF one is in FACT on the right side of the fairy-tale, treating “the frog” in one’s life the culture tells you to spit on, you yet treating them as if they are the holy and royal one, THEN in time and in FACT one will be treated by one’s loved one in a way that REFLECTS accurately how one is ACTUALLY in FACT treating and regarding them, which is you will be treated as one who is on the Right side of the Fairy Tale, your coyote loved one will treat you in FACT as you are in FACT treating and regarding them. Attunement with reality is everything: harmonic resonance b/t one’s own mind and their mind and ‘The Mind of the Universe,’ how the Universe sees the coyote in our life - that is everything. Harmonic Resonance b/t the three variables is everything. One wants to create the triangle, line up the three points, and stay there.

The Black Elk in our life needs us protect them from this culture, needs us be their high protector in Mind and Heart and Spirit, which is the struggle every day, our “spiritual” struggle to take on. In our energy and vibration when we enter the room with the Black Elk in our life, with this super highly attuned and sensitive human being, we are constantly needing to be in alignment with our highest self, that self that is right there beside them, the counterweight to what the culture tells them that they are, which is a “desperately mentally sick individual”, at the very bottom of the totem pole. The Universe does not want us to do what our culture would have done to the Black Elk of the Lakota people in the early 1900s, which would be to call him absolutely nuts and tar and feather him, to dismiss him totally, as our psychiatrists, our own culture’s “shamans” would have treated him, prescribing all kinds of meds for his “delusions.” The Universe is begging us to be on the Right side of the Fairy Tale, and the Black Elk in our life is as well.

Put the crown back on Black Elk’s head, in your mind and heart and soul, do this and keep doing it, and the Universe will reward one for living in Truth.

Because the fact is, it is near impossible for the Black Elk in our life to exist in our culture and not take meds, bc there is no “job-title” for their skill-set, it’s just not how our culture does things. Our culture is great at building sky-scrappers, some dudes are built for that kind of thing, but our culture is not so good at the kind of thing Black Elk did for his people. And so because there is no placement for this population, what happens if and when they are born into our culture? It is by default a collision, a traumatizing experience, a hard-landing, they just have a really really hard if not impossible time find placement within our culture, so what happens then? They either do a total rebellion against the culture, they refuse meds, the things that tranquilize the voices and wild impulse, OR they in effect agree to self-tranquilize, and society can help them with that, there is SDI (Social Disability Insurance), which involves a Psychiatrist saying they cannot work etc, they then get a small monthly check, they qualify for Government Subsidized Housing, which means government pays the vast majority of their rent, they live medicated and numbed-out and very tranquilized, they live simple lives, often have a family member or members who will help them where they need help organizing their lives, they “take the blue pill” instead of the red-pill (to use a Matrix Analogy), and that’s their life. The other option is as mentioned: they say “F it!! I aint taking those drugs!! The decide to stay wild, they dont want to lose relationship with their voices and the wildness and drama and color and life, they don’t want to feel numbed out and dead inside, they would rather die than that, they want to be wild and free, they want to “take the red-pill” and they do, and often that means massive instability in our world, and often it means going to the streets and they live their life, they hear their voices, they do their strange things, they dance, they laugh, they smile, they scream, they sing, they do as they did in Black Elk’s culture, they lived as “heyoka”, that is the Lakota word for coyotes in their culture, those wild and free and Other and Strange, the ones they say have “been encountered by the Thunder Beings”, and though revered in the ancient Lakota culture, in our culture the point is not received, instead their wildness and otherness, it is all seen simply as “mental sickness”, it’s called “crazy” and with that one term that’s the end of the discussion. This culture gives that label and so the discussion is ended at word 1 of the Book. It’s just that word “crazy” and that’s the end of the story. But that’s our culture, was not Black Elk’s culture. In his culture they were called “Heyoka.”

These beings, the Black Elks born into our culture, they are special, they are holy. Whether they choose to go on meds and self-tranquilize and take the blue-pill the rest of their life, or whether they decide stay pure-blood coyote, and stay taking the red-pill, they demanding all the color and wildness and tornado and fun and terror and power and “lightning” that life has to give, whether it is the one or the other does not change the fact of who they are, they are each still the Black Elk, the holiest among us, “the ones visited by the thunder-beings”, to use the Lakota analogy.

The best we can do is see them and treat them as the Universe wants us to see them and treat them, and then it is up to the Universe to do it’s part.

None of us can control what the Black Elk in our life will decide, or rather how the Universe decides for them, places their life and story in the cosmic drama playing out. All we can do is do the things that increase the Trust b/t us and them to the Maximum amount possible, which means seeing and treating them in FACT how the Universe sees them. The best one can do is the best one can do, which is have the courage to take the test and then get an A on the exam and turn it in. Then it’s up to the Universe do what it is going to do.

In my experience, the life of a coyote, especially a coyote born into our culture, it is more often than not the stuff of high poetry.

All we can do is our part, turn in the A paper to the Universe, and then Trust, and watch then the drama play out, and keep turning A papers in every day, constantly working on our selves, our own vibration, our own energy and frequency, our own levels of kindness and patience and compassion and positivity, our own diet and exercise and everything, doing our best to keep the pressure and “problem” off of them, society does enough of that, that is not what we are doing, we are protecting them from that. We are their protectors, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, in all ways we try and keep the pressure off of them. We keep the problem off of them, we put it on ourselves, and we keep doing better spiritually every day, growing and evolving with and through our interactions with them, which is what the Universe is really after, bc again they are the shamanistic element within our culture, at the end of the day at the deepest level they are trying to improve and evolve the human race. One either accepts that challenge and so grows and evolves as a human being in this magical mysterious universe we live in, or one takes the side of the culture, keeps it all very very simple for everyone, very simple and very dumb, saying “Your son is mentally sick, here is this drug for you, should solve everything, I’ll give it to you for a not so small fee.”

No.

It is not so simple.

There is a human being there crying out to be seen, and a Universe who created that human being, that Cosmic Intelligence is watching our every move.

These coyotes, so holy, so special, they are here to evolve us, they challenge us in all the right ways.

Our job is accept the challenge, to help them help us become the highest version of our self we can possibly become, and so attain to the Creator’s highest intention for us, and them. They are our greatest Teachers, the shamans of our world.

We put the crown back on Black Elk’s head.

We place ourselves firmly on the right side of the Fairy tale.

And we stay there on that Right side, and we keep turning in that A paper to the Universe.

And then we Trust the Universe do it’s part.

And it will.

Alignment with Truth, with Reality, is Rewarded.

Meeting this THURSDAY - July 23rd

Weekly Zoom Meeting : Honoring Our Coyotes

We start each meeting with a short mindfulness exercise to practice that can help bring a little relaxation into difficult moments. After the mindfulness we will take time to check in with those who choose to share with zero pressure to say anything at all. For most of us we didn’t and don’t have many other families around us who really get what walking this path is like. It has felt nice to see we aren’t alone. Hearing others stories somehow makes this world feel a bit more “normal”. Some people come on and just listen without even showing their face. All are welcome.

Zoom Meeting Link: Click Here

5:00pm PST — 6:00pm Mountain — 7:00pm Central — 8:00pm EST

Meeting ID: 825 8750 2181

Passcode: 1234567

SAVE THE DATE! August 6th we will be interviewing Matt Griffo during the weekly call as well as Q & A for families to ask specific questions.

Having experienced psychosis himself, Matt now guides others in reclaiming their mental health through nutrition, movement, and mindfulness, showing that recovery is often possible in ways many people never imagined.

Matt's Website

Need Help figuring out the next step?

We don’t have all the answers, but we do have combined, over 65 years of lived experience, we have researched many different paths people have taken, spoken with a lot of families and maybe know something that can help. Some of what we offer may resonate, some may not. But we’re here to think alongside you. This is not just for you, this is for your Coyote as well. We know how deeply this world can misunderstand them and we love helping families build bridges between themselves and their Coyote. Even if we have spoken before we would love to talk again. The Coyote world is wild and what may work one day may not work the next. I know I had no idea what to do many times and could have used some extra eyes on the situation.

Send us an email and we can set up a time to talk.

WalkingWithCoyotes@gmail.com

Everything is free of course. We’re simply here to support and to offer what we wish we had when we started off on this road. What we wish the someone would have taught us.

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Weekly Zoom Meeting This Thursday July 16th

Welcome to Walking with Coyotes:

For those new here, the metaphor is this: there are dogs and coyotes. Dogs follow the rules, they live within the law and order of the day: they try their best to fit in. Coyotes do not follow the laws of the dog-world. They are dancing to a song the dogs cannot hear.

When we say “coyote” we mean the ones our culture tends to label, to pathologize, to walk around. They are the ones we do not understand, the ones in our culture who are shrouded in mystery.

They are the ones diagnosed with “schizophrenia.” On the surface, they are wild-eyed, unpredictable, Other: but underneath they are present, tapped-in, Conscious.

This path has been deeply painful at times. A pain and a grief that has been hard to understand. Even when I finally found a way in, to be close to my favorite Coyote in the world, my sister, after so much time had passed with me misunderstanding her, she got taken away into the system. Her paranoia is off the charts now and it wasn’t from anything she did. They system doesn’t care. They made their decision without all the information or proper tests. They tell me to “get over it” and it will only be a year that she is with them experimenting on her with different drugs, dismissing her words, deciding when she should be taken seriously and when she shouldn’t with almost zero time being spent with her. If I try too hard to help them see how to be with her they push me away. I can be seen as defiant too and have her taken from me for even longer.

This experience and the 25 years being in it contains all the stages of grief.

Denial: We can get her back to how she was if we get this right

Anger: She’s doing this on purpose, why isn’t the system helping!?

Depression: I lost my sister and she’s not coming back. Someone is in there in her place but it’s not the sister I knew. I feel so helpless.

Bargaining: If we can just get her to take her meds or get her into the hospital this will all go back to normal. If only I treated her differently or acted different then this wouldn’t have happened.

Acceptance: The sister I had isn’t who she was and that’s okay.

And those stages cycle back fourth and all around depending on what is going on with my sister. I’m feeling grief this week. It has been over a month since she has contacted me. Before the court date we were talking 1-2x a day and I was LOVING it. She was so happy, thinking clearly, excited to get out as they told her she would.

Then they changed their mind and now she isn’t trusting anyone. They will blame this on paranoia, a symptom of schizophrenia. I know better. I know her. This is clearly a trauma response to a very unfair, dismissive system that truly doesn’t understand how to support those who are different, special, unique or think and speak outside the norm.

My husband is a very compassionate man: the etymology of compassion is com-, which in the Latin means “with” or “share”, and passion- from the Latin “Pathos,” which means to suffer, or to feel. At root the word compassion then means to feel with, or to suffer with. He sees how heavy this can weigh on me and he will say, “Your bleeding and that’s ok. When someone stabs you, you bleed and it needs time to heal. More time for a bigger wound.” So I’m bleeding and licking my wounds and will be okay. It just hurts.

This week I thought I would share a couple short poems I wrote. The first I wrote when I was 18 years old. I had very little understanding, and could not feel into her pain, her reality. The second poem I wrote was from this year, just before the court-date. I wrote it after 8 years of building a relationship with her, connecting with her, meeting her where she was at, feeling into her world and reality, her joys, her pains, her experience. I learned how to develop compassion, real compassion for my sister, and that made all the difference in our ability to fall in love again in a way I never knew was possible.

September 1999 ( I was 18 years old)

My sister gone it came like a bomb.
Into our family, I couldn’t tell what was wrong.

Her thoughts so angry, hatred to all,

but when you turn from her, she’ll cry and she’ll fall.
Into that hell in her bed, I wonder what’s going on in her head.
Why does she love me and then shove me?

Why does she stare at her hair or her hands?

Is it the demands from other voices? She has no choices.

Her world has been taken from her shaken from her.

Lost in her own mind what about the divine?

Where are you now? Can you show me how to understand?

Can you lend her mind a hand?

March 23, 2026 (44 Years Old)

My sister here
I missed it for years.
Blinded by my own fears.
Millions of tears.
Missing the beauty, the gold, the gifts.

Fighting so hard to get back who she was.
I left who she is now without love.
Without tenderness without care all I saw was the sister I thought was not there.
I complained of my gripes over her own.
Standing beside her, we both fell alone.

Then I woke one day to a double rainbow in sight. The fear left, the grief the fright.
And I saw before me the human a new,
My heart lept,
My Love grew.
What an interesting being I would think, as she laughed with someone I couldn’t see, sharing a smile and a wink.
She made me cave. She made me better. I noticed the world that doesn’t seem to get her.
Now we laugh, we smile, I see deep down she is more than a child. A beautiful human to be explored with new views and dreams.
It’s delusions they sing. I look at the doctors and think, ‘Now THERE are some delusional beings.

And argue ‘she’s not wrong when she tells me not to take a hammer in the bath’.

Her reality is real and that’s how I feel.
And as long as she isn’t causing physical harm, I go in unarmed.
Fascinating now she is to me.
A sister, I must have dreamed up to be,

so perfectly made for me.
And hilarious when I allowed myself to see.

Meeting this THURSDAY - July 16th

Weekly Zoom Meeting : Honoring Our Coyotes

We start each meeting with a short mindfulness exercise to practice that can help bring a little relaxation into difficult moments. After the mindfulness we will take time to check in with those who choose to share with zero pressure to say anything at all. For most of us we didn’t and don’t have many other families around us who really get what walking this path is like. It has felt nice to see we aren’t alone. Hearing others stories somehow makes this world feel a bit more “normal”. Some people come on and just listen without even showing their face. All are welcome.

Zoom Meeting Link: Click Here

5:00pm PST — 6:00pm Mountain — 7:00pm Central — 8:00pm EST

Meeting ID: 825 8750 2181

Passcode: 1234567

Wondering how to “handle” your Coyote?

We don’t have all the answers, but we do have combined, over 65 years of lived experience, have researched many different paths people have taken, spoken with a lot of families and maybe know something that can help. Some of what we offer may resonate, some may not. But we’re here to think alongside you. This is not just for you, this is for your Coyote as well. We know how deeply this world can misunderstand them and we love helping families build bridges between themselves and their Coyote. Even if we have spoken before we would love to talk again. The Coyote world is wild and what may work one day may not work the next, I know I ran out of ideas of what to do many times and could have used some extra eyes on the situation.

Send us an email and we can set up a time to talk.

WalkingWithCoyotes@gmail.com

Everything is free of course. We’re simply here to support and to offer what we wish we had when we started off on this road. What we wish the Doctors would have taught us.

A coyote shares her journey…

The Voices in My Head | Eleanor Longden

To all appearances, Eleanor Longden was just like every other student — heading to college full of promise and without a care in the world. That was until the voices in her head started talking.

Initially innocuous, these internal narrators became increasingly antagonistic and dictatorial, turning her life into a living nightmare. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, hospitalized, and drugged, Longden was discarded by a system that didn’t know how to help her.

Longden tells the moving story of her years-long journey back to mental health and makes the case that learning to listen to her voices helped her survive.

Link : Watch Ted Talk Here

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This weeks ZOOM CALL CANCELLED!

No Zoom this Thursday, friends. We will be traveling tomorrow, but we look forward to seeing anyone who wants to join us next week and if you need us in the meantime reach out.

Harm Reduction Guide to Coming off Psychiatric Drugs

There is a free resource that is brilliant and we just found out about it from a new friend who has a library of resources. So we wanted to share the resources. It is called the Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs, written by Will Hall and published by The Icarus Project and Freedom Center. You can download it at no cost, HERE, (link also below) and it has been translated into more than a dozen languages because families all over the world have been interested in what it has to say.

We want to be clear about what this guide is not. It is not anti-medication. It does not tell anyone to stop taking psychiatric drugs. In fact, the guide says plainly that many people find medications helpful and choose to stay on them, and that stopping suddenly or without support can be genuinely dangerous. Will Hall is careful, honest, and humble about all of it.

What the guide is, is something our families almost never get: real information.

Most of us have only been offered two stories. One says medication is the answer, full stop, forever, no questions. The other says medication is poison and must be escaped at all costs. Both stories leave families confused, worried and alone. Harm reduction is the third path. It says there is no single answer for every person. It says people deserve honest information about how these drugs actually work, what the risks are, what the alternatives look like, and how to reduce or come off safely and slowly if that is ever the right choice for them. It says our loved ones deserve to be trusted as the authority on their own lives.

Will Hall knows this territory from the inside. He was given a diagnosis of “schizoaffective disorder” and spent time in hospitals, residential facilities, and shelters. He writes that the professionals who prescribed his medications never explained how they worked, never discussed the risks honestly, and never helped him when he wanted to stop. He has now lived without psychiatric drugs for many years, and he built this guide from the collective wisdom of hundreds of people who walked the same road, along with a team of health professional advisors.

Some interesting facts from the article;

Withdrawal from psychiatric drugs can look exactly like the “symptoms” the drugs were prescribed for in the first place. How many of our loved ones have tried to come off too quickly, hit a wall of withdrawal which looked like psychosis, and been told this proves their “illness” is back and they will need medication for life? The guide also explains why going slowly matters, why timing and support matter, and why the goal does not have to be coming off completely. Sometimes a lower dose, or simply understanding your options, is an answer we may have been looking for.

For those of us walking with coyotes, this guide gives us a way to be present to our loved one’s questions about medication without panic and without pressure. When someone we love says they want to stop taking their meds, we can meet that moment with curiosity instead of fear. We can say, I hear you, and there is a wise and careful way to explore that, and I will walk it with you. That response keeps connection alive. The alternative, meeting their words with alarm and ultimatums, is so often what drives our coyotes away from us and away from help entirely.

Not to mention their resource list is extensive. When I entered this world the only resource I got was, “Try to find a NAMI group.” This gives us many more options so we can tend to the needs of each individual Coyote.

You can download it for free HERE.

Disclaimer: We are not doctors.Together, we bring more than 65 years of combined lived experience walking alongside coyotes. Take what resonates, do your own research, and trust your own judgment. And if there is information we need to correct or you have information to add we would love to hear from you.

Wondering how to “handle” your Coyote?

We don’t have all the answers, but we do continue to research what is out there, have spoken with a lot of families and maybe know something that can help. Some of what we offer may resonate, some may not. But we’re here to think alongside you. This is not just for you, this is for your Coyote as well. We know how deeply this world can misunderstand them and we love helping families build bridges between themselves and their Coyote. Even if we have spoken before we would love to talk again. The Coyote world is wild and what may work one day may not work the next, I know I ran out of ideas of what to do many times and could have used some extra eyes on the situation.

Send us an email and we can set up a time to talk.

WalkingWithCoyotes@gmail.com

Everything is free of course. We’re simply here to support and to offer what we wish we had when we started off on this road. What we wish the Doctors would have taught us.

Share

Subscribe now

Weekly Meeting Cancelled Due to Holiday Travels.

Welcome to Walking with Coyotes:

For those new here, the metaphor is this: there are dogs and coyotes. Dogs follow the rules, they live within the law and order of the day: they try their best to fit in. Coyotes do not follow the laws of the dog-world. They are dancing to a song the dogs cannot hear.

When we say “coyote” we mean the ones our culture tends to label, to pathologize, to walk around. They are the ones we do not understand, the ones in our culture who are shrouded in mystery.

They are the ones diagnosed with “schizophrenia.” On the surface, they are wild-eyed, unpredictable, Other: but underneath they are present, tapped-in, Conscious.

A Story of Healing

Before I share the article I want to speak to the word healing as we see it. When we talk about healing, we’re not talking about domestication. We’re talking about walking alongside our coyotes as they find their own way, wild nature intact, integrated into the world rather than erased by it or hiding their unique gifts that come with being a coyote.

Someone sent me this article last week and I got excited that the mainstream media was allowing a story of Healing to be published. The article was in Psychology today and the New York Times and when I looked closer I saw it was published in 2011!!

This information would have been so useful to know years ago. I would have listened sooner to that inner voice that was saying, “there MUST be another way or other options.”

The article centers on Keris Myrick, a woman with a schizoeffective diagnosis who today is Vice President of Partnerships and Innovation at Inseparable, a mental health advocacy organization working on federal and state mental health policy reform.

Some of her path that looked different than what we are told is possible. She took antipsychotics daily for about six months, at a point when she badly needed them. Then a long, deliberate shift toward using medication only when her own internal weather turned genuinely unmanageable, in close partnership with a psychiatrist who respected her enough to help her taper instead of just prescribing forever. She built her actual stability out of relationships, meaningful work and self knowledge.

Keris was not non-compliant. She knew her own nervous system better than any adherence protocol ever could, and she had a coyote protector in her psychiatrist willing to work with that knowledge instead of around it. That is the whole model, isn’t it. Not medication as villain, not medication as savior, but medication as one tool among many, held by someone who trusts the coyote to know their own terrain.

And then there’s Martin Harrow’s fifteen year study, tucked into the article almost as an aside, showing that people who came off psychiatric medication had better long term outcomes than those who stayed on it. Fifteen years of data. It's been sitting there for 15 years while treatment barely moved an inch.

So why isn’t this common knowledge? Maybe it’s simpler to tell families “take the medication and don’t stop” than to teach the far more nuanced skill of listening to a body that speaks its own language. Maybe an adherence model is just easier to administer at scale than an individualized one. Maybe the roughly $6 to $8 billion pharmaceutical companies receive each year for antipsychotic drugs alone (or $55.34 billion globally if you include antidepressants, mood stabilizers, and anti-anxiety drugs) creates a system that wants reliance.

Who knows?

The important part is we know that this kind of healing can be possible for at least some of our Coyotes. It’s important we learn how to listen and understand them. Helping them trust their own knowing and learning how to guide them when needed. If we don’t know how to do that, then go on the search for a coyote protector in a psychiatrist or friend who can help hem out. Who won’t dismiss their reality but help them navigate through it.

With that being said, I know that for many, starting this process of healing isn't always possible. Sometimes a coyote isn't ready to be reached, or isn't in a place where reaching them is within our control. That is very real for many of you, and it's not a failure of listening or love, it’s a failure of the culture that hasn’t known how to allow our Coyotes to walk freely. Some of this is simply beyond what any of us can do alone, no matter how much we understand or how hard we try.

I included the article if you want to check it out and as always our contact info if you ever want to or need to talk.

Psychology Today Article Here

Disclaimer: We are not doctors.Together, we bring more than 65 years of combined lived experience walking alongside coyotes. Take what resonates, do your own research, and trust your own judgment. And if there is information we need to correct or you have information to add we would love to hear from you.

THIS WEEK CANCELLED!

Weekly Zoom Meeting : Honoring Our Coyotes

We start each meeting with a short mindfulness exercise to practice that can help bring a little relaxation into difficult moments. After the mindfulness we will take time to check in with those who choose to share with zero pressure to say anything at all. For most of us we didn’t and don’t have many other families around us who really get what walking this path is like. It has felt nice to see we aren’t alone. Hearing others stories somehow makes this world feel a bit more “normal”. Some people come on and just listen without even showing their face. All are welcome.

THIS WEEK CANCELLED!!

Zoom Meeting Link: Click Here

5:00pm PST — 6:00pm Mountain — 7:00pm Central — 8:00pm EST

Meeting ID: 825 8750 2181

Passcode: 1234567

Wondering how to “handle” your Coyote?

We don’t have all the answers, but we do have years of lived experience, have read research, spoken with a lot of families and maybe know something that can help. Some of what we offer may resonate, some may not. But we’re here to think alongside you. This is not just for you, this is for your Coyote as well. We know how deeply this world can misunderstand them and we love helping families build bridges between themselves and their Coyote. Even if we have spoken before we would love to talk again. The Coyote world is wild and what may work one day may not work the next, I know I ran out of ideas of what to do many times and could have used some extra eyes on the situation.

Send us an email and we can set up a time to talk.

WalkingWithCoyotes@gmail.com

Everything is free of course. We’re simply here to support and to offer what we wish we had when we started off on this road. What we wish the Doctors would have taught us.

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Welcome to Walking with Coyotes:

For those new here, the metaphor is this: there are dogs and coyotes. Dogs follow the rules, they live within the law and order of the day: they try their best to fit in. Coyotes do not follow the laws of the dog-world. They are dancing to a song the dogs cannot hear.

When we say “coyote” we mean the ones our culture tends to label, to pathologize, to walk around. They are the ones we do not understand, the ones in our culture who are shrouded in mystery.

They are the ones diagnosed with “schizophrenia.” On the surface, they are wild-eyed, unpredictable, Other: but underneath they are present, tapped-in, Conscious.

When I first started down this path, I had no idea what was happening. I had no idea what to ask the psychiatrist beyond, “Will she be okay?” “What are the side effects of the medication?” “What do I do if she doesn’t want to take her medication?”

Even after getting answers to every question I could think of, I still walked away feeling lost and like something was missing. Looking back now, I realize I needed better questions. After hearing countless stories and doing my own research I came up with a list of things you may want to consider asking. Things I would ask if I got in front of a psychiatrist again.

This list isn’t meant to challenge your doctor or suggest they have all the wrong answers. Most psychiatrists genuinely want to help. These questions are simply meant to open a broader conversation.

It’s a reminder that asking thoughtful questions can lead to more informed decisions and help your coyote feel seen, heard, and safer throughout the process.

Feel free to pick and choose the ones that feel most relevant to your loved one’s situation. If you feel inspired or learn something new that could be helpful to other families please let us know and I will include the information in a future article. We are all in this learning together.

1–3. Before Settling on a Diagnosis

The Research

A study from Johns Hopkins found that nearly half of the patients referred to their specialty clinic with a previous schizophrenia diagnosis ultimately received a different diagnosis. Many were found to have anxiety disorders, mood disorders, or other conditions.

Questions

1. Can you walk me through how this diagnosis was reached?

2. What other diagnoses were seriously considered?

3. Would it make sense to get a second opinion from an early psychosis specialty clinic?

4–6. Ruling Out Medical Causes

The Research

There is no single laboratory test that distinguishes schizophrenia from psychosis caused by an underlying medical condition. Autoimmune diseases, thyroid disorders, infections, neurological illnesses, metabolic conditions, medications, and substances can all contribute to psychotic symptoms.

Journalist Susannah Cahalan’s experience, later described in Brain on Fire, is one well-known example. She was initially diagnosed with schizophrenia before doctors discovered she had autoimmune encephalitis, a treatable brain disorder.

Questions

4. What medical causes have been ruled out?

5. Have thyroid problems, autoimmune disorders, infections, vitamin deficiencies, neurological conditions, or metabolic issues been evaluated?

6. Are there additional tests that would be appropriate before assuming this is a primary psychiatric illness?

7–9. Understanding Trauma

The Research

Large reviews consistently show that childhood trauma, abuse, neglect, bullying, and other adverse experiences are significantly more common among people who later develop psychosis. Trauma does not explain every case, but many experts believe it deserves careful assessment because it may shape both symptoms and recovery.

Questions

7. Has my loved one been evaluated for trauma?

8. How are you distinguishing trauma-related symptoms from primary psychosis?

9. Would trauma-informed therapy be part of the treatment plan?

10–11. Considering Autism and Neurodevelopment

The Research

Autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions sometimes go unrecognized until adolescence or adulthood, particularly in women. Sensory sensitivities, social differences, and intense internal experiences can overlap with psychiatric symptoms.

Questions

10. Could autism or another neurodevelopmental condition be contributing to what we’re seeing?

11. Would a formal autism evaluation help us better understand their needs?

12–13. Looking Beyond Medication Alone

The Research

Comprehensive early intervention programs that combine medication management, psychotherapy, family education, supported employment or education, and case management consistently produce better outcomes than medication alone after a first episode of psychosis.

Questions

12. Is there a Coordinated Specialty Care or early psychosis program available?

13. What therapies and supports are available in addition to medication?

14–16. Discussing Long-Term Medication

The Research

Some long-term observational studies have found that people who were able to discontinue antipsychotic medication experienced higher rates of functional recovery than those who remained on continuous treatment. Because these studies were not randomized, researchers continue to debate how much of the difference reflects medication itself versus differences in the people who were able to stop.

Questions

14. What is your philosophy regarding long-term medication?

15. Is medication being viewed as a lifelong treatment, or do you periodically reassess whether the dose or medication is still needed?

16. What factors would make you consider lowering the dose in the future?

17–18. Monitoring Physical Health

The Research

Many antipsychotic medications increase the risk of weight gain, diabetes, elevated cholesterol, movement disorders, and cardiovascular disease. Most professional guidelines recommend regular metabolic monitoring.

Questions

17. How often will weight, blood sugar, cholesterol, blood pressure, and movement side effects be monitored?

18. What can we do to reduce these risks?

19–20. Supporting Recovery and Independence

The Research

Long-term recovery involves much more than reducing symptoms. Meaningful work, education, relationships, and independence are all associated with improved quality of life.

Questions

19. What is the plan for helping my loved one return to school, work, volunteering, or other meaningful activities?

20. What vocational or educational supports are available?

21–22. Learning From International Approaches

The Research

Several World Health Organization studies have found that recovery outcomes for schizophrenia have often been better in some lower-income countries than in many wealthier nations. Researchers continue to debate why, pointing to differences in family involvement, social integration, community support, employment, culture, and patterns of medication use.

Questions

21. What do you think explains these international differences?

22. Are there approaches from other countries that might strengthen our treatment plan?

23. Non-Medication Supports

The Research

Exercise has strong evidence for improving both physical and mental health in people with psychosis. Yoga has shown benefits for some individuals, while art therapy, music, gardening, and meaningful creative activities have been associated with increased hope, confidence, and quality of life, even when symptom reduction is modest.

Question

23. What lifestyle approaches would you recommend alongside medication? Would exercise, yoga, art, gardening, or other creative activities be helpful?

24. Hearing Voices

The Research

Not everyone who hears voices develops schizophrenia. Hearing Voices groups and similar approaches encourage people to understand and change their relationship with voices rather than focusing only on eliminating them.

Question

24. Has anyone explored what the voices mean to my loved one? Are Hearing Voices groups or similar peer supports available?

25. One of the most important Questions

Question

25. If everything went as well as you hope over the next five years, what would my loved one’s life look like?

That one question often tells you a great deal about how recovery is being envisioned.

Hopefully the answer includes meaningful relationships, purpose, creativity, happiness, independence, and the least amount of intervention necessary to help your Coyote live as fully as possible.

Extra Questions

If you have more time during the appointment, consider asking these as well.

• Are there calmer crisis-care options available in our area, such as an EmPATH unit or another alternative to a traditional emergency department?

• How can our family become part of treatment? Are there evidence-based family education programs or support groups you recommend? One of the main ones they mention and what I tried first was NAMI. While helpful in some ways I found it to be a very small part of the puzzle. There is a huge world of research, recovery approaches, and relationship-building that families deserve to explore and your doctor may not be aware of those.

• What are the expected benefits of this medication? What are the most important risks? How will we know whether it’s helping enough to outweigh the side effects?

• What strengths do you see in my loved one? How can we build treatment around those strengths?

This isn’t about arguing with your psychiatrist. It’s about becoming an informed partner in your loved one’s care.

The best clinicians welcome thoughtful questions. They know that every person is different, every family is different, and recovery is rarely one-size-fits-all.

And remember, your loved one is so much more than a diagnosis. They still have gifts to offer the world, sweet things to say, relationships to build, a meaningful place in this world, and a future that is okay to believe in.

Maybe everything works out the way you hope, and maybe it doesn’t. Your coyote may not remember every word you say, but they’ll remember how it felt to have someone who never gave up on them. Someone who kept believing in them when they didn’t know how to believe in themselves.

Disclaimer: We are not doctors.Together, we bring more than 65 years of combined lived experience walking alongside coyotes. Take what resonates, do your own research, and trust your own judgment. And if there is information we need to correct or you have information to add we would love to hear from you.

Weekly Zoom Meeting : Honoring Our Coyotes

We start each meeting with a short mindfulness exercise to practice that can help bring a little relaxation into difficult moments. After the mindfulness we will take time to check in with those who choose to share with zero pressure to say anything at all. For most of us we didn’t and don’t have many other families around us who really get what walking this path is like. It has felt nice to see we aren’t alone. Hearing others stories somehow makes this world feel a bit more “normal”. Some people come on and just listen without even showing their face. All are welcome.

Next Meeting: THIS WEEK! THURSDAY - June 24th

Zoom Meeting Link: Click Here

5:00pm PST — 6:00pm Mountain — 7:00pm Central — 8:00pm EST

Meeting ID: 825 8750 2181

Passcode: 1234567

Wondering how to “handle” your Coyote?

We don’t have all the answers, but we do have years of lived experience, have read research, spoken with a lot of families and maybe know something that can help. Some of what we offer may resonate, some may not. But we’re here to think alongside you. This is not just for you, this is for your Coyote as well. We know how deeply this world can misunderstand them and we love helping families build bridges between themselves and their Coyote. Even if we have spoken before we would love to talk again. The Coyote world is wild and what may work one day may not work the next, I know I ran out of ideas of what to do many times and could have used some extra eyes on the situation.

Send us an email and we can set up a time to talk.

WalkingWithCoyotes@gmail.com

Everything is free of course. We’re simply here to support and to offer what we wish we had when we started off on this road. What we wish the Doctors would have taught us.

Share

Subscribe now

Welcome to Walking with Coyotes:

For those new here, the metaphor is this: there are dogs and coyotes. Dogs follow the rules, they live within the law and order of the day: they try their best to fit in. Coyotes do not follow the laws of the dog-world. They are dancing to a song the dogs cannot hear.

When we say “coyote” we mean the ones our culture tends to label, to pathologize, to walk around. They are the ones we do not understand, the ones in our culture who are shrouded in mystery.

They are the ones diagnosed with “schizophrenia.” On the surface, they are wild-eyed, unpredictable, Other: but underneath they are present, tapped-in, Conscious.

This week, I’d like to share a chapter I’m currently working on for the book. While it’s still a work in progress, I believe it contains insights and lessons that would have been invaluable to me when I first began this journey. Because of that, I felt it was worth sharing with you now.

As this chapter is still being refined, I welcome your thoughts and feedback. If there is something that resonates, something that feels missing, or something that could be expressed more clearly, please feel free to reach out. My hope is that the book becomes a resource that truly serves families and loved ones walking alongside their coyotes, and your perspective can help make it stronger.

The better we make it together, the better it can serve all our coyotes.

I am sharing the table of contents below so you can easily search for the topics that you need most at this time. This is a longer article, so please feel free to scroll to the sections that are most relevant to your current needs.

Disclaimer: We are not doctors. We are people with over 40 years of lived experience walking alongside coyotes. Take what resonates, do your own research, and trust your own judgment.

In This Article in This Order:

Intro: Understanding the Coyote Language

1) “You’re not my family. You’re not my mom. I’m adopted.”

2) You molested me / They molested me.”

3) “I hate you.”

4) “I’m being poisoned. You’re poisoning me.”

5) “People are watching me. The FBI is after me. I don’t trust the government.”

6) “I have money coming to me. I own a business. I have many houses/jobs.”

7) “They gave me a lobotomy, want to give me one or feel like I had one.”

8) They won’t shower. Their room stinks. They are messy.

9) They are staring off. Taking a long time to answer.

10) They aren’t eating.

11) “I am one with God.” “I am chosen.” I am Christ.” “I am the Messiah.”

Understanding the Coyote Language.

The coyote language is very different from what most of us are used to. It takes a lot of patience, a lot of self awareness and a lot of improvisation. I have gotten pretty good at keeping my energy calm but I still get stuck sometimes thinking of how to respond. It’s not a road for the meek or boring.

“Don’t go over to the neighbors and knock on the door again to see if they are ok it’s 2 am,” doesn’t always work. Each time I need to distract or get creative to help her feel safe and help the neighbors not be bothered.

That night, I lacked improv skills and tried using logic, which often fails in these situations. She rang the neighbor’s doorbell and woke up a sweet neighbor who needed to be up at 4 a.m. for work. My husband later said I could have tried telling her to come and check out the flowers on the bush I was looking at, she loves flowers. I’ll try that next time.

It’s very often new experiences daily with this population. Be gentle with yourself, we are all doing the best we can in each new moment that arises.

One of the first things I feel is important to mention is, if they are not in immediate danger (to themselves or others), these moments rarely need to be controlled. Most of the time they are just processing fragmented information coming in. So if you can, take a deep breath and get curious. We will get into what “fragmented information” means later.

In my experience I found that agreeing with my sisters reality didn’t confirm that it’s true as much as, “I hear you, I’m ok with you feeling that way and you’re safe with me”.

Here we put our focus on, What are they trying to say under what they are saying? The interesting thing to me is MOST of them say the same things. If this was just their brain malfunctioning and each one delusional to themselves and their own lives, why are most of them saying almost the same exact phrases? In our personal opinion we feel it is from the culture and their way of making “hyper-meaning” out of things rather than just being a genetic trait of or bio marker of some sort. It may also be those things, but it can also be more than just that. There can be multiple ways to interpret the experiences of each Coyote. Most of us were only taught one.

I found once I started learning the language of the coyotes it became a lot easier to respond to the need instead of the words. It became easy to hear what they were saying under what they were saying. Which made my life easier and theirs.

Here are a few examples of responses to phrases we hear often and what we feel they are saying underneath.

1) “You’re not my family. You’re not my mom/dad. I’m adopted.”

So many of them say this, and we think it comes from a place of deep hurt. Imagine you got really hurt by someone in your family. Many of us have had to be there dragging them to a doctor or when they got put in an ambulance or taken away in a cop car. Many of us have had to make that call. They still love us as we are family but it has now become confusing and painful. Their brain isn’t in our reality so they don’t know how to make sense of it all. From their perspective, why would their family lie about them? Have them taken away? They didn’t do anything wrong in their own mind. Which would be a very traumatizing experience for anyone and any logical person wouldn’t trust those people after that.

I assume deep down on a subconscious level they are thinking, “wait, they’re not actually my real family. My real family would never do this to me. I fit in somewhere just not here with these people. My people are still out there. I’m safe.”

Them saying this may be a survival method, not a jab at you. It can feel like a jab but they often don’t think in the same ways we do. It’s a way that their brain is protecting them. “I love these people but I am scared of them too. Scared of what they will do to me next.” Which could be interpreted as logic mixed with a coyote consciousness.

So if you hear this, try not to take it as a statement of fact or a personal attack. Take it as information. They are telling you how much distance they feel or need right now to feel safe. Doesn’t always make it easier to hear. I know when I first heard it, it hurt A LOT. I was trying everything I could possibly do to let her know I love her and cared deeply for her. But because I wasn’t speaking her language she didn’t perceive it that way. And that’s ok, I came to learn she doesn’t need to let go of this idea for us to build the bridge.

Here are some ways to make those moments a little easier.

What you can say:

• “Okay. I’m still here though.”

• “Alright. I still love you anyway.”

• “I know it might feel that way right now. I hear you.”

• “You can feel that way and I can still make you a burger. Do you want one?”

• “Yes but they told me you have to live with me for this next year and I am happy you’re here.”

• “Well I still like you being here.”

• “That sounds uncomfortable. Let me know if I can do anything to help you feel more comfortable.”

• “Okay. Want some food anyway?”

• “Fair enough. I still think you got my eyes though.”

• “Well whatever our relationship is, I love you and I’m glad you’re here.”

  Try to tend to the feeling under what they are saying vs the actual words they are speaking.

2) “You molested me / They molested me.”

Let’s start with the etymology of the word:

From the Latin molestare — to disturb, trouble, or annoy — derived from molestus, meaning troublesome or burdensome, which itself comes from moles, meaning a heavy mass or burden. It came into English through Old French molester around the 14th–15th century, originally meaning simply to disturb, interfere with, or cause trouble for someone. The more specific meaning related to sexual assault developed much later, becoming the dominant usage in the 20th century.

Statistics also say, “1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys are sexually abused during childhood.” That is A LOT of people. A LOT of people have actually been molested.

My loved one kept saying this when she came home from the hospital. Instead of dismissing it I got curious.

So what could be happening for them? A lot of information is coming in at once. Past, present and future can become mixed. They aren’t exactly sure what happened. They just know they were messed with in a big way that doesn’t feel good. I can see how most of them can feel, disturbed, interfered with, and bothered in a big way.

You may think that you have only loved them the best you can. But did you ever take them to the hospital? Invade their space? Tell them they were sick? Needed help? Yell at them? Call the police on them? Kick them out? Threaten to kick them out? I’m not saying those were wrong things to do, that is what we are taught to do and say from the culture. I did it too. But now, I can understand why they might feel invaded. Interfered with. Molested, in the original sense of that word.

Now if we were to respond with, “That didn’t happen” when they know something did happen of course they would argue with you. Something did happen. We do not have to know what exactly they are trying to say to get what they are trying to say.

Do you know anyone who isn’t great at expressing their feelings clearly? Yeah. Most people. So our job is to do our best to not dismiss them and get curious instead of defensive.

Here is a way to think about it. If you need to change some of the words so it works for your situation, please do.

“My loved one is having a different experience than mine. Their reality is not the same as mine. They are already having a hard time. I don’t want to argue or dismiss their experience even though it doesn’t match my own. What are some creative ways to honor what they are saying without pushing them away?”

How can we acknowledge what’s hard to hear within yourself, without putting that on our coyote.

Here is what honoring that can sound like in real life, always feel free to make adjustments that make it sound most natural to you.

What you can say:

• “I hear you.”

• “You deserved to feel safe and I’m sorry if you didn’t.” ← Love this one.

• “I can see this is real and painful for you.”

• “Oh I hope not! That would be terrible.”

• “I’m not here to debate what happened — I’m here for you.”

• “Your pain is real to me even if our memories are different.”

• “I don’t want to make this harder than it already is for you.”

• “I’m sorry you’re carrying this.”

• “I’m sorry something happened that felt like that.”

• “Whatever I did that made you feel that way, I’m sorry.”

• “You matter more to me than being right.”

• “Oh well that sounds scary, I’m going to make some food. Do you want anything?”

3) “I hate you.”

Toddlers say it. Teenagers say it. People in marriages say it. It is one of the oldest most human things there is. You hear it in every language, every culture, every family. Because every human being at some point gets so full of feeling that the only thing that comes out is the most extreme word they know.

For a coyote it can be more intense and more frequent because they feel everything more. The volume is just turned up higher. “what a non-coyote might feel as frustration, a coyote can feel as devastation”. So the words match the internal experience even if they don’t match what’s actually happening in the room.

The whole world seems to not like them when they go out. People avoid them or look at them weird. Sometimes we are the safest place for them to put that deep confusion. The world seems to hate them so they say they hate you. Maybe it’s so they aren’t the only one being hated. Maybe your response can help them tap into what it feels like for them?

Here is what that can sound like without matching their energy.

What you can say:

• “Ouch ok well I’ll give you some space then.”

• “I know. I love you anyway.”

• “That’s okay. I love you even when you hate me.”

• “You’re allowed to feel that.”

• “Okay. I’m still here.”

• “My love for you doesn’t depend on you loving me back right now.”

• “You can feel that way. A lot of people feel that with family sometimes. I’m still here if you need me.”

• “I know. Want some water?”

• “Fair enough. I still think you’re pretty great.”

• “Noted. I love you anyway.”

• “That’s okay. I hated my mom sometimes too.”

• “Yeah I’m not perfect but I love you and I’ll give you some space.”

4) “I’m being poisoned. You’re poisoning me.”

Why do so many coyotes think we’re being poisoned?

Well. Because we are.

This isn’t delusion. Sometimes the person everyone wrote off as paranoid is just someone who feels deeper than we do that something is off. But due to their often fractalized way of thinking it doesn’t come out in a way we usually understand. Especially if we’re the focus of the said poisoning.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the HUGE ways we are being poisoned.

Processed meats; lunch meat, hot dogs, bacon, deli slices. Have been classified by the World Health Organization as Group 1 carcinogens. That’s the same category as cigarettes. Not similar to cigarettes. Same category. Sodium nitrate, the preservative used to keep that meat pink and shelf stable, has been linked to colorectal cancer and is banned or heavily restricted in several European countries. You can still buy it at any grocery store in America with a cartoon character on the packaging. If you wouldn’t give your child a cigarette you shouldn’t give them a lunchable.

Glyphosate, the herbicide sprayed on the majority of conventional crops in the US, has been found in oat-based cereals, crackers, and children’s snacks at levels that concern independent researchers. It’s been banned or restricted in Austria, Germany, France, and others. Here it’s on your breakfast table. Ever offer your coyote cereal? Buying it for them? It could be something as simple as that that makes them feel you are poisoning them. I mean you are actually ok with feeding them poison. Which sounds dramatic since so many of us eat these things, but since their so called “delusions” are actually just HYPER-MEANING making, as it mentions in the book ‘Scizophrenia: The Positive Perspective’. Then one could understand why they may feel poisoned.

Brominated vegetable oil, Red Dye 3, potassium bromate. Ingredients banned across much of Europe and in some cases linked to cancer and neurological effects, were until very recently still legal and common in American food products. Some still are.

Microplastics have now been found in human blood, breast milk, placentas, and brain tissue.

Forever chemicals, PFAS, have been detected in drinking water, produce and meat across the country.

So when a coyote looks at their plate and says something is wrong. Maybe there is a reason to be paranoid. Maybe they are feeling and seeing more than we do.

One study called them “supersane” or “superrational” rather than insane. The rest of us got very good at looking away. I ate some poison in my food just today. That sounds kind of insane to me now that I think about it. Maybe I’m the “crazy” one?

Here is what meeting them there can sound like.

What you can say:

• “You might be right.”

• “I don’t think I did that but I just want you to eat and feel okay. Tell me what would help.”

• “What if we got you some foods that are sealed and unopened so you know nobody has touched them?”

• “I’m not offended. I just want you to feel safe. What would make you feel safer?”

• “You don’t have to eat anything I make. Let’s figure out what feels okay to you.”

• “That’s actually worth looking into.”

• “I’ve heard that too. Tell me more about what you’re seeing.”

• “You’re not wrong that there’s a lot of stuff in our food.”

• “A lot of people are starting to wake up to that actually.”

• “What would feel safer to eat?”

• “Want to go to the farmers market this weekend?”

• “Want to try cooking more from scratch for a while?”

• “Let’s look at what we can swap out.”

• “What if you were in charge of your own food for a while? We can go to the store and you can buy whatever you need and I won’t touch it. You can keep it in your room if you like. Do you want to get a small refrigerator for your room?” (This is what my loved one ended up doing. Actually helped a lot.)

• “I think you’re picking up on something real. I’ve heard they put pesticides that are really bad for us on our fruits and veggies. We should make sure we wash those really well.”

• “That makes sense given everything that’s come out lately.”

• “That sounds stressful… if anything seems off, don’t eat it. I’ll keep an eye out too!”

5) “People are watching me. The FBI is after me. They are following me. I don’t trust the government.”

This one always made a lot of sense to me as I would often put myself in her shoes as much as I could.

It was easy for me to see, coyotes ARE in fact being watched. Closely. By family, by doctors, by social workers, by the state, by people who find their ways odd out in the world. The people around them are constantly monitoring what they say, how they’re acting, whether they’re “okay”. And if the wrong thing gets said on the wrong day to the wrong person, they can be taken. Involuntarily hospitalized. Put on a hold. Removed from their life with little to no say in the matter.

That has happened or the threat of this happening has happened to most of them before. Maybe more than once. And here’s the thing, they often don’t remember it the way we do. The timeline is blurry. The reasons feel unclear. One day they were home and then suddenly they weren’t and people in uniforms were involved and it was terrifying and nobody really explained it in a way that made sense.

So now they’re home. And they’re looking around. And their superlogical, hyper-meaning brain is asking, could that happen again? Is someone watching? Is someone keeping track? Are they close?

And to add to that there is what we actually know about the world they were born into.

The government actually did spy on its own citizens. Snowden proved it. The FBI had files on Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, and thousands of ordinary Americans just living their lives. COINTELPRO was real. A secret government program specifically designed to surveille, discredit, and destroy people it considered a threat. The CIA ran mind control experiments on people without their knowledge or consent. The Tuskegee experiments were real. The forced sterilization of people deemed mentally unfit was legal in this country well into the 20th century and it targeted people who behaved a lot like our coyotes.

These are not conspiracy theories. These are documented historical facts. It’s ok to have a mistrust of something that has proven mistrustful multiple times in the past. Especially when their minds often work within a different time construct.

In a world where surveillance is real, where data is collected on everyone, where cameras are on every corner and your phone listens to your conversations, where people who look and sound and act like your coyote have been locked up, experimented on, and discredited for centuries, it makes sense how they could feel they are being watched.

When their superlogical brain starts connecting dots and lands on “someone is watching me, they are following me, they are coming for me”. They are working with a framework that is not entirely wrong.

The FBI probably isn’t parked outside. But the feeling, that the world is surveilling them, that one wrong move could cost them their freedom, that the people around them are always just a phone call away from making a decision about their life without them, that part makes sense. That part is logical. Superlogical.

Here is what it sounds like to validate that without adding to the fear.

What you can say:

• “That sounds really scary.”

• “You’re not crazy for feeling watched.”

• “A lot of people in your position would feel the same way.”

• “You’re safe right now. Let me know if you need anything to feel more safe?”

• “I won’t let anyone in here and nobody is coming.”

• “Can you tell me what you’re seeing that’s making you feel that way?”

• “Let’s look around together. What feels most threatening right now?”

• “You’re inside, you’re with me, right now you’re okay.”

• “Honestly? The government has given us plenty of reasons not to trust them.”

• “I get it. The system hasn’t always been kind to people like you.”

• “Your distrust of the system makes complete sense to me.”

• “I wouldn’t fully trust them either if I’d been through what you’ve been through.”

• “What would make you feel safer right now?”

• “Is there anything we can do right now that would help?”

• “Do you want to check the locks together?”

• “Let’s stay close today. I’m not leaving.”

• “That sounds really intense… let me know if you see anything suspicious I can take care of.”

6) “I Have Money Coming To Me. I Own A Business. I Have Many Houses/Jobs.”

Many coyotes came into this world with a genuine sense that they were here for something bigger than them. I hear it daily from parents I talk to, videos I watch or Facebook posts from families. That feel they were meant for more. That there was a bigness to them that the world around them never quite confirmed or reflected back.

And then life happened. Trauma happened. The mental health system happened. Poverty happened. Isolation happened. And slowly the gap between who they felt they were on the inside and what their life looked like on the outside became enormous.

One lens to look at this through is thinking of the feeling underneath. “I have money coming to me. I own a business. I have many houses.” Some things they may be expressing under those words are, “I matter. I have value. My life has weight and significance and I am not what this situation makes me look like right now.”

It’s also worth considering that some of them are right. Not about the specific houses or the specific money. But about the bigness. Many coyotes are genuinely visionary. Genuinely talented, seers, inventors, artists, capable of things most people aren’t. They make connections nobody else makes. Like Einstein, Nikola Tesla.

There’s also a practical survival piece. In a world where you have very little, where your freedom has been taken, where your credibility is constantly questioned, where people talk over you and about you and often don’t know how to connect with you. Claiming resources and status is a way of reclaiming dignity. “I have houses” is another way of saying “I am not someone you can dismiss. I matter and I want you to value me.”

They are telling you they know they are worth something.

Agree with that part.

Another lens to look through. I noticed with my coyote, she was saying things that used to be true. I have jobs. I have friends I can go to and talk to. I have people I can live with. This to me says something about the construct of time within their mind more than “delusion”.

The German Philospher Kant, considered one of the most important thinkers in Western philosophy, argued that time is not something that exists out in the world but a framework the mind builds around experience. Einstein proved it moves differently depending on where you are and how fast you’re going, and Buddhist teachers have been saying for centuries that past and future are just thoughts, only the present moment is real. Modern neuroscience agrees: the brain doesn’t perceive time so much as construct it, and it can speed up, slow down, or shift depending on what’s happening.

If time is truly a construct of the mind, and the present moment is the only one that actually exists, then in her reality she does have jobs, she does have friends, she does have people she can turn to. The past isn’t gone to her. It’s present. That’s not a broken mind. That’s a mind organizing time differently than the general consensus. Is that sick? Wrong in some way? When I think about it like that, I think it’s kind of cool and I can work with that.

Here is what agreeing with that part can actually sound like.

What you can say:

• “Cool! Can I live there?” (If they say “no” — “Aww man! Well I’ll miss ya. You should get chickens.”)

• “You’ve always had big energy around you.”

• “I can see that in you. I am happy for you.”

• “I’ve always known you were capable of big things.”

• “Tell me about the business.” (when my loved one explains things I think of it as a poem. Art. An extremely unique expression of a human existing in the world right in front of me. Many conversations with people can feel boring to me. But not with her. She is wild, stubborn and beautiful interactive art full of surprises every single day. It’s ok to enjoy it and encourage it for what it is. She will find out in time what she needs to learn. My only job in those moments is to listen with positive regard for her. That’s it.)

• “Nice. What kind of houses?”

• “That will be nice to have that money to get things you have wanted.”

• “I bet your a great boss.”

• “I’d love to hear more about it.”

• “What’s the first thing you’d do?”

• “That’s great. If you ever need help with anything I’m here.”

• “You’ve always been someone who thinks bigger than most people.”

• “The world hasn’t always recognized what you bring but I do.”

• “Whatever form it takes. I believe something good is coming for you.”

7) “They gave me a lobotomy.” / “These meds feel like a lobotomy.” / “I don’t want a lobotomy.”

This one is pretty straightforward if you think about it and honestly one of the most “rational” things a coyote can say.

Many psychiatric medications, particularly antipsychotics, work by significantly dampening brain activity. That’s not a metaphor. They reduce dopamine transmission, slow cognition, flatten emotional range, and can fundamentally change the way a person thinks, feels, and experiences the world. For someone whose inner life was previously vast, vivid, fast-moving, and intensely alive, that shift can feel catastrophic. Not like getting better. Like getting erased.

Think about what we are actually asking them to give up. Their thoughts. Their ideas. The particular way their mind moves through the world. The connections they make that nobody else makes. The feelings that, yes, are sometimes overwhelming, but are also theirs. We are handing them a pill and saying, this will quiet all of that. And then we are surprised when they don’t want to take it.

A lobotomy, the actual surgical procedure, was designed to sever connections in the brain to reduce “difficult” behavior and emotions. It left patients dulled, compliant, and robbed of their full selves. It is now considered one of the darkest chapters in psychiatric history.

When a coyote says these meds feel like a lobotomy they are not being dramatic. They are being precise. They are describing a before and after that is real and significant and that the people around them often cannot see because all they see is that the behavior has calmed down. What they don’t see is what that calm cost.

Some are not refusing meds because they want to be sick. They are refusing because they remember who they were before and they are not willing to lose that person again. That is not a symptom. That is self-knowledge. That is someone fighting for their own identity in the only way available to them.

So when they say it, hear it as information. They are telling you the medication is taking something precious from them. They are telling you the cure feels as bad as the condition. They are telling you they are still in there and they are terrified of losing access to themselves.

Many countries that have had greater success supporting coyotes use much lower doses of medication, or in some cases, no medication at all. These approaches often allow coyotes to remain connected to the new parts of themselves while also living harmoniously within society.

Of course, this approach does not work for everyone, but in some places it has worked for most. In fact, some countries have moved away from large psychiatric institutions altogether, with coyotes living within their communities rather than being separated from them.

Maybe they intuitively know there is a better way.

Here is what not arguing with that statement can sound like.

What you can say:

• “That sounds scary. So sorry you have to feel that.”

• “I can see how you could feel that way with the meds they put you on.” (It’s important to make note that putting the energy and blame on doctors and society is not only true but can be a good tactic. It creates an us against them. Instead of the world against your coyote.)

• “Have you talked to your doctor about how it makes you feel?”

• “You deserve to feel like yourself.”

• “Do you think anything could help?”

• “I don’t want you to lose yourself either.”

• “What if we looked into other options together?”

• “I want you to get support and I want you to still be you. Both things matter.”

• “What if we went to the appointment together so you don’t have to navigate that alone?”

• “What if we asked the doctor about a lower dose and just see how that feels?”

• “There might be something out there that helps without making you feel like that. It might just take a little trial and error.”

• “You’re allowed to say no to things that don’t feel right for you.”

• “What if we made a list of how it makes you feel and brought it to the doctor?”

• “Your side effects are real and they matter. Let’s make sure someone hears that.”

• “You’re not being difficult by wanting to feel like yourself. That’s completely reasonable.”

• “Let’s find someone who will actually listen to you.”

• “What if we got a second opinion? You deserve someone who takes this seriously.”

• “I hear you. That sounds like a lot to carry.”

• “Medication should help you live your life, not disappear from it.”

• “What if we looked into some alternatives together and brought them to the appointment?”

8) They won’t shower. Their room stinks. They stink. They are messy.

This one can be hard because it’s hard, at least for me, to not react to smells. It’s my senses first and my heart and mind second. The smell, the mess, the worry, can be a lot to sit with especially if you are someone who likes things clean. I remember going straight to being grossed out or annoyed, feeling disrespected in some way or like she was lazy and didn’t want to because she didn’t care or despite me.

But now it makes more sense to me. When I was in psychosis, “normal” everyday existing was hard. Standing, walking, brushing my teeth, the grocery store was a panic attack every time. So here is what I think may be going on.

For a coyote, it seems the body can feel like a foreign country. Something that doesn’t always feel familiar or even real. Dissociation is common, meaning there are periods where they aren’t fully connected to their physical experience or as you know appearance, at all. Sometimes the body is just, there. Somewhere. And taking care of it takes a lot of work. And frankly it just isn’t that important when they have such a wild and intense inner world happening for them all the time.

Some things you can say:

1. Some aren’t aware of smells or time past. Being disconnected from our reality, a stinky body and showers may not be on their radar.

2. Showers are small spaces with bright lights. Many don’t like to be confined.

3. They often don’t trust people so they feel they may be spied on.

4. They may not feel safe in general and don’t want to risk being in the shower if something goes down.

5. The quickness of the water coming out can feel overwhelming.

6. Sound often echoes in the shower making it a more intense experience than other rooms.

7. To them it just doesn’t matter like it does to you.

8. They don’t fit in society and so why try? Depression alone can make that mountain feel unclimbable. Add psychosis, add trauma, no medication or medication side effects that make the body feel heavy, slow and strange and you have yourself someone who does not feel the urge to shower.

The mess is the same thing. It’s not laziness. It’s a map of their interior world. When everything inside feels chaotic and unmanageable, the outside tends to match. The room isn’t dirty because they don’t care. Sometimes it’s because the brain is too busy managing what feels like actual threats to allocate resources to a shower or cleaning up after themselves.

So before you say anything, before you open the window or make a face or mention it for the fifth time, ask yourself what it would feel like to be them in that moment. My husband has said to me a hundred times, “Does it really matter? Is she really doing anything ‘wrong’ though?” And she wasn’t. I needed to chill and take her into consideration a little more. There are billions of people on the planet who have no access to a shower. Is it really THAT big of a deal? Or is it just my preference?

Here is what low pressure, no agenda care can sound like.

What you can say:

• “Hey, I’m going to do some laundry today, want me to throw anything in?”

• “The shower is free if you want it.” (Just put the thought in their head and walk away. You have thrown it into their orbit and that’s all you can really do.)

• “If you want to take a shower let me know and I’ll block the door for you and make sure no one goes in.”

• “I put some clean clothes on the end of your bed if you want them. No worries if not.”

• “I picked up that shampoo you used to like, it’s in there if you want it.”

• “I was going to take a shower, did you need the bathroom first?”

• “You know you can always shower with your clothes on if you’re worried about being watched.”

• “The shower is so relaxing, I highly recommend.”

• “I picked up some stuff at the store today, just left it in there, feel free to use it.”

• “Want to just sit outside for a few minutes and get some air?”

• “I’m here if you need anything.”

• “I love you, that’s all.”

• “I’m so glad you are here.” (They often see disappointment when people look at them so it’s good for them to get that positive energy when we can throw it in there. I would just walk by my sister’s room and say, “I love you and I’m so glad you’re here!” I didn’t need her to say it back, I just wanted her to feel love since I know she rarely hears anything like that from anyone in the world.

9) They are staring off. Taking a long time to answer.

I want to clarify, I’m not talking about a full catatonic state. That’s a different situation entirely, and honestly one I don’t have much personal experience with. What I’m talking about is those moments when your loved one seems spaced out, slow, or like they’re just not with you. If you have things to add to this I would love to hear from you.

I remember sitting on the porch with my loved one once. I would ask her something and it could take over a minute or 2 for her to respond. Sometimes it looked as if she was in a dark place, sometimes she looked sad, sometimes lost, sometimes empty. I would say “Hi” and she wouldn’t respond even though I knew she heard me. Sometimes I was annoyed and other times my heart ached to see her that way.

For her it can be from the meds as higher doses of antipsychotics have been significantly associated with lower motor speed and slower information processing. It was always the meds when she was responding VERY slow. I thought it was the illness at the time but looking back it was definitely the meds.

We have best friends who are coyotes and married, Joe and Karen. They had both just been in the hospital when they met at an out pateint program. . A beautiful sweet romance that lasted 23 years. Karen passed in October 2025, she was 72 and heavily medicated. Still heard voices and talked slow. Sweetest and cutest humans on the planet those two. One day Joe accidentally took one of Karens anti-psychotics, Clozeril. He couldn’t even function the rest of the day. He said it felt just as strong as when he was given morphine in the hospital once. So it could be the meds.

It could also be spiritual. Researchers comparing shamanic states and psychosis found that the underlying experience isn’t actually that different. The major difference is whether the culture around the person accepts and supports what’s happening. In cultures that do, the person is often regarded as someone with expanded consciousness.

One difference between a shaman and someone labeled with psychosis is volition. A shaman voluntarily enters and leaves their altered state, while someone in psychosis can feel like a victim of those states.

The system does not offer the possibility of learning how to enter and leave these states. Instead, we are often told there is no way out except medication, and even that may not work. Or, if it does work, it may only work for a limited amount of time.

They rarely attempt to teach our coyotes how to navigate these states themselves. They do not usually explore whether learning these skills might help before turning to medication. This concept is only beginning to find its way into the system, and even then, only within the past couple of years.

While psychiatry interprets these states as psychopathology, the shamanic framework reinterprets the same symptoms as natural manifestations of consciousness, with the opportunity for growth and development.

What if part of what we could offer our coyotes is exactly that: help learning to navigate rather than just survive what they’re experiencing?

One way to look at this is, the coyote brain doesn’t retrieve answers, it goes looking for them. All the way out and all the way down. Through memory, feeling, association, sensation, meaning. It’s not slow. It’s thorough. It’s the difference between a search engine that grabs the first result and one that reads the whole library before it speaks.

Which could also appear as, dissociation. It may also be actual disassociation. There are moments where a coyote simply isn’t fully in the room. Not because they don’t want to be. But because their nervous system is shot. We dissociate when we can’t handle something. A therapist friend of mine once said it’s kind of pleasant because it takes you away from the feeling of trauma, anxiety and stress. And at least for me I found that to be true, I stared at plenty a wall myself after an intense experience. Maybe that’s okay sometimes and not always a reason to panic.

There is also the depth piece. Some coyotes stare off because they are actually somewhere extraordinary. Seeing something, feeling something, processing something that has no quick or easy translation into words. Maybe they’re hearing 2 voices, the clock ticking in the other room, feeling your feelings, reading under what you are saying, feeling the electromagnetic frequencies from computers, tv’s, cell phones (which millions of “normal” people are highly sensitive to), seeing little lights around the home appearing very bright, etc. And then we ask a question and think it’s weird they aren’t responding in a reasonable amount of time when in thier world, 20 minutes is a reasonable amount of time.

Their mind is so vast it may be taking a lot for them to process their world while making it back to ours to respond.

So when they stare off, let them. Breathe. Stay present.

You don’t need to fill the silence. This is important enough to say before anything else. Hold back the instinct is to jump in, to repeat the question, to snap your fingers, to say “hello? are you in there?” Reread the W.A.I.T. article. Why Am I Talking. Think about why you are talking, take a breath and have hope that things can change. They are just new and hard to be with in this moment and that’s ok.

Here is what that patience looks like in practice.

What you can do and say:

• Wait. Just wait.

• Breathe slowly and let your breath be the thing that fills the room.

• Relax your face consciously . They can feel tension even when they look absent.

• Settle your body. Uncross your arms, soften your shoulders, stay open.

• When they respond, act like it’s totally normal. If they could do better in that moment they would.

• “Take your time I’m in no rush.” (Be sure your energy is very calm and even happy to be with them if you can muster it.)

• A slow nod if they glance at you. (Sometimes I sit and look away a little and wait like I’m peacefully waiting at the bus stop.)

• “I’m going to finish something up real quick, I’ll be back.”

• “We can chat later if you want. I don’t need any answers now.”

• “Hey, welcome back.” (Give a little smile like you are the anchor — that they will be okay no matter how hard that moment may be for them and for you. An “it’s ok, you’re ok, I got you” kind of vibe.)

• “Want some water?”

10) They aren’t eating.

Why they may not be eating:

First, medication. Many psychiatric medications destroy appetite. They make food unappealing, they slow digestion, they change the way things taste. Some cause nausea. Some cause such profound sedation that the energy it takes to eat feels unavailable. They aren’t refusing food to be difficult. Their body is just not sending the signal.

Depression is another big one. When someone is in a deep depressive episode food loses meaning. Everything loses meaning. Eating requires caring about your future self enough to feed them and when you’re that low the future self doesn’t feel very real or worth it.

Psychosis can also interfere with eating in specific ways. Sometimes food feels contaminated. Sometimes there are voices or beliefs attached to eating that make it feel unsafe. Sometimes they simply forget, genuinely forget, that the body needs fuel because they are so far inside their world that the physical one stopped registering.

There’s also the control piece. For someone whose freedom, body, and choices have been managed and medicated and institutionalized, not eating can be one of the only places they feel power. It isn’t always conscious. But it makes sense.

And sometimes, they are fasting intentionally. Intuitively. The body asked them to stop and they listened. My husband has studied fasting benefits for years and fasted for 27 days once on just water. I myself have fasted a few times only up to 7 days. Each time I could feel my body healing itself as bodies do when we fast. I could feel each time not only was my body actually healing itself, I also felt more and more connected to everything. Each day a little more aware, awake, starving and peaceful.

Gandhi fasted for 21 days multiple times. Many spiritual traditions across every culture on earth include extended fasting as a practice of clarity, purification, and connection. Indigenous traditions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism. Fasting is considered sacred in virtually every spiritual framework humans have ever built.

The body has reserves. It knows what to do with them. It will burn through glycogen first, then fat, then, much later, muscle. A week or two of very little eating in someone who is drinking water and is otherwise physically alive and well may not be a big deal. Keep track of it, don’t make it a battle right away.

No water for more than a full day or 2 that is a different conversation. I also know each human is different with their needs around meds so use your own intuition and

Water is the real urgency. Most people can go 4-6 weeks without food. They cannot go much more than 3 days without water and in heat or with certain medications that timeline gets shorter. Dehydration with psychiatric medications can also become medically dangerous faster than it would otherwise because some of these medications affect kidney function and sodium levels.

Some physical symptoms you can watch out for:

• Dry lips and mouth

• Dark urine or no urine

• Confusion that is new or getting worse

• Dizziness, fainting, inability to stand

• Rapid heartbeat

• Not drinking anything for more than a day

When in doubt, call a doctor, not about the psychosis, about them not eating to find out what it is safe and when to reach out for more support for their physical body. Then listen to your intuition to decide the best next step forward is. Most Doctors never recommend fasting for healing despite the well known science backed benefits of it, but they do know a lot more about what they may need in reference to the medications they are on.

A few days of not eating often doesn’t require the worry that I know I gave it. When she got down to 90lbs from 140, then we worried.

If you can, don’t make food a power struggle. You will lose and so will they. Instead, make food available, make it easy, make it low pressure. Leave something they used to love within reach. Don’t stand over them. Don’t announce it. Just, leave it there. A piece of fruit. Something small. Something that doesn’t require utensils or effort or sitting at a table.

Water is your priority. Water with electrolytes if you can. A sports drink, coconut water, even a popsicle. Anything that gets fluid in. And again, don’t make it a confrontation. Just keep it close. Keep offering without demanding.

No matter how far away they are, thirst will almost always get to them so have some options available.

Here is what low pressure nourishment can sound like:

What you can say:

• “I made a little something, it’s just sitting here if you want it.”

• “No pressure, I just wanted you to have the option.”

• “I put some water next to you.” (A bottle of water that hasn’t been opened may feel more safe than a glass depending on the coyote.)

• “Let me know if there is anything I can get you from the grocery store or we’re going to ____ in a couple hours, let me know if you want me to grab you anything.” (Remember to give them time to think about it. Then let them know when there is 30 mins then check with them right before you leave.)

• “Can we start with just water for now?”

• “I know you don’t want to eat right now but if you don’t drink some water I’m going to worry. You want a bottle or a cup?”

• “I picked up some of those popsicles you used to like.”

• “I’m not going to push it, I just don’t want you to disappear on me.”

• “It’s been about 7 days since you ate, I’m not worried yet but if you don’t eat anything by day 14 I’m going to make you eat a burger.” (Again you say this almost as a side comment and in a lighthearted way. Often times they need to be reminded to come back to this word for a minute to restock.)

• “Can you do me a favor and eat something for me tomorrow. I just get worried sometimes, it’s not you it’s me.”

11) “I am one with God.” “I am chosen.” “I am Christ.” “I am the Messiah.”

Some other versions of this I have heard;

“I am God / I am Jesus / I am the Messiah”

“I have been chosen”

“I have a special mission on this earth”

“I was sent here”

“I am the only one who can save the world”

“Angels speak to me”

“God speaks directly to me”

“I have been given special powers”

“I can heal people”

“I know things others don’t”

When I was younger I grew up Catholic, then had Christian and Jewish friends where I learned about what they believed and attended gatherings of their faith. I visited Egypt and went into Mosques. I attended a Sundance in the Lakota tradition, they taught me how to talk to the plants, listen to the wind and that everything was a part of my family. The water, the sky, the trees, the animals all of it. The shamans from Peru believed many similar things but had different words for it and different tools for accessing their connection to the divine, to feel that oneness with the creator. I got obsessed with Paramahansa Yogananda for a while who combined Christianity with Hinduism in a beautiful way. I also did ceremonies that connected me deeply to a oneness I had never known before. Sat silent Buddhist retreats. I was fascinated with how others found God, in their own way yet each one had a similar feeling at its core.

So when I heard, “I am God” I thought, yeah, millions of people around the world feel the same way. Almost every major spiritual tradition on earth teaches some version of this exact experience.

Hinduism has Advaita Vedanta. The teaching that the individual self and the universal self are not separate. Aham Brahmasmi. I am Brahman. I am the totality. This isn’t considered madness in that tradition. It’s considered enlightenment.

Buddhism teaches Anatta. The dissolution of the separate self. The goal of practice is to see through the illusion of individuality and recognize the interconnectedness of all things. Oneness isn’t a symptom. It’s the destination.

Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, is built entirely around fana, the annihilation of the self in God. The great Sufi poet Rumi wrote endlessly about dissolving into the divine. Mystics like Al-Hallaj were executed for saying “I am the Truth”, which was understood as claiming to be God. He wasn’t considered delusional by his followers. He was considered enlightened.

Christianity itself is rooted in the idea that a human being was also God. That the divine lived inside a person who walked around, got tired, felt pain, was misunderstood, was betrayed by people close to him, was considered dangerous by the authorities, and was ultimately taken against his will by the state. Sound familiar?

Indigenous traditions across every continent speak of humans as expressions of the divine. Not separate from the sacred but made of it.

Kabbalah. Gnosticism. Taoism. The Quakers with their Inner Light. The mystics of every tradition throughout all of human history have been pointing at the same thing. The boundary between self and God is not as solid as we think.

So when a coyote says “I am one with God” or “I am Christ” or any versions of grandiosity, before you call it delusion, ask yourself, am I 100% sure what they are saying isn’t true? Christ is within us they say. Christ consciousness others say. People who have sat in meditation for 70 years say these things too. Are they delusional? Our coyotes version may be a little more wild, but it seems they are visiting the same spiritual sights.

Jesus Christ is also deeply relatable for our coyotes. If we take the story as told, he was a person who heard the voice of God. Who felt called to a mission most people around him didn’t understand. Who was considered dangerous and unstable by the authorities of his time. Who was survielled, followed, betrayed by someone close to him, told his family if you’re not with me I’m not with you, and ultimately taken by the state and subjected to treatment that destroyed his body.

He was poor. He was homeless at times. He spoke in ways that confused people. He said things that got him in trouble. The people in power wanted him medicated into silence, or the ancient equivalent of it.

Sounds like a coyote to me.

Our coyotes are some of the most persecuted people on the planet simply for being who they are. They are watched, hospitalized, medicated, dismissed, feared, institutionalized, and misunderstood. They carry a weight most of us will never understand.

Of course some of them identify with Christ. Of course they do. Not because they are delusional. But because the archetype fits the lived experience. Persecution. Misunderstanding. An inner world so vast and overwhelming it feels cosmic. A sense of mission that nobody around them can quite see or validate. A suffering that feels larger than ordinary human suffering.

That’s not grandiosity. That’s pattern recognition. That’s a soul looking for a map and finding one that matches the terrain.

The voices piece.

Moses heard a voice from a burning bush. Abraham heard a voice that told him to do the unthinkable. Joan of Arc heard voices that led an army. Muhammad received transmissions he described as overwhelming, physical, impossible to ignore. The entire book of Revelation was essentially one long visionary psychotic-adjacent experience that we put in the Bible and call sacred.

If any of these people walked into a hospital today describing their experiences they would be medicated and diagnosed before the end of the intake appointment.

We don’t call the prophets delusional. We built religions around them.

So when a coyote hears voices and feels called and identifies with the divine, maybe the question isn’t “how do we correct this belief” but rather “what are they feeling and is this harming anyone? Is something trying to come through this person that the rest of us don’t have the receiver for?”

Just because it isn’t our language doesn’t mean it isn’t a language.

And just because millions of people stopped being able to hear it doesn’t mean there’s nothing there to hear.

Here is what it sounds like to be curious instead of dismissive.

What you can say:

• “That sounds like a really powerful experience.”

• “I believe you’re experiencing something very significant.”

• “You’ve always carried something bigger than most people can see.”

• “Wow, what a beautiful experience, tell me more.”

• “What is God saying to you right now?”

• “What does it feel like to be connected like that?”

• “What do you feel called to do? Let me know if I can help in any way.”

• “Why do you think you were sent here now?”

• “You know Christ was misunderstood by almost everyone around him too.”

• “A lot of the most holy people in history felt exactly what you’re describing.”

• “The prophets all felt this way. You’re in good company.”

• “Some of the most profound spiritual leaders in history heard voices too.”

• “Maybe the world just isn’t ready for what you’re carrying yet. But it will be in time I’m sure. I trust you will know when.”

• “I’m grateful you trust me enough to share that with me.”

• “Even Christ needed people around him. I want to be one of yours.”

• “Whatever is moving through you — I’m honored to be next to it.”

Remember, the goal is not to convince your coyote that they are right. The goal is not to convince them that they are wrong either.

The goal is connection.

When we immediately dismiss, correct, argue, or explain away their experience, we often lose the very thing we need most: the relationship. What took me years to learn was how to build a bridge instead of a wall.

We do not have to agree with what our coyote is saying. We do not have to pretend we see what they see. But we can stay curious and listen. We can acknowledge that what they are experiencing feels real to them.

Sometimes the most healing thing we can say is not, “That’s not real.”

Sometimes it is, “Tell me more.”

A coyote who feels heard is often calmer than a coyote who feels dismissed. A coyote who feels safe is more likely to trust us. And for many of our coyotes, they do not have anyone else in their corner saying, “I hear you. I’m here.”

The relationship comes first. Always.

Monthly Zoom Meeting : Honoring Our Coyotes

On the 3rd Thursday of every month we will gather. This month we will start with a short mindfulness exercise that can help bring a little relaxation into difficult moments, and it’s not just about breathing. After the mindfulness we will take time to check in with those who choose to share with zero pressure to say anything at all. For most of us we didn’t and don’t have many other families around us who really get what walking this path is like. It has felt nice to see we aren’t alone. Hearing others stories somehow makes this world feel a bit more “normal”.

Next Meeting: THIS WEEK! THURSDAY - June 18th

Zoom Meeting Link: Click Here

5:00pm PST — 6:00pm Mountain — 7:00pm Central — 8:00pm EST

Meeting ID: 825 8750 2181

Passcode: 1234567

Wondering how to “handle” your Coyote?

We don’t have all the answers, but we do have years of lived experience and a lot of ideas to share. Some of what we offer may resonate, some may not. But we’re here to think alongside you. This is not just for you, this is for your Coyote as well. We know how deeply this world can misunderstand them and we love helping families build bridges between themselves and their Coyote. Even if we have spoken before we would love to talk again. The Coyote world is wild and what may work one day may not work the next, I know I ran out of ideas of what to do many times and could have used some extra eyes on the situation.

Send us an email and we can set up a time to talk.

WalkingWithCoyotes@gmail.com

Everything is free of course. We’re simply here to support and to offer what we wish we had when we started off on this road. What we wish the Doctors would have taught us.

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Leave a comment

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References included in the previous article.

Welcome to Walking with Coyotes:

For those new here, the metaphor is this: there are dogs and coyotes. Dogs follow the rules, they live within the law and order of the day: they try their best to fit in. Coyotes do not follow the laws of the dog-world. They are dancing to a song the dogs cannot hear.

When we say “coyote” we mean the ones our culture tends to label, to pathologize, to walk around. They are the ones we do not understand, the ones in our culture who are shrouded in mystery.

They are the ones diagnosed with “schizophrenia.” On the surface, they are wild-eyed, unpredictable, Other: but underneath they are present, tapped-in, Conscious.

This week I want to share something from a book that's been helping me daily, both in making sense of things and in explaining my sister to others: When Reality Breaks Open: The Integration Path to Navigating Psychosis by my dear friend Candace Eberle.

When I am speaking with my sister’s conservator or her public defender, who only look through the biological/neuroscience lens when they see her, they don’t know she has read my mind many times or said profound things. They don’t know that when she got her diagnosis 25 years ago, no one was looking for trauma induced psychosis or autism. Science now shows those experiences may play a huge role in her behaviors and responses today. This book has been helping me find the words to advocate more skillfully for my sister.

I don’t know if they will listen, but I do feel called to plant the seeds into the system and into anyone surrounding my sister whenever I can. To do my part in shifting how the western world sees and treats this fragile, misunderstood population.

Thank you, Candace, for your guidance during many hard moments, on the phone and in the book. You have been a lifeline when I felt I couldn’t breathe. When all I wanted to do was blow up the hospital and get my sister out like in the movies. You laughed with me. You said, “I hear you sister,” and you gave me space to feel it all. The desperation, the rage, the confusion, the numbness, the depression, the wanting to quit. You are a trailblazer. You walk with the coyotes of this world sacredly, humbly, and with fierce protection. Your Coyote is so very lucky to have you and so am I.

And with that, here is an excerpt from one of her books:

When Reality Breaks Open: The Integration Path to Navigating Psychosis

“The Integration Path recognizes that integration is not only something happening inside the person but is also happening in those supporting them. The person is trying to integrate their internal experience that is sensory, emotional, psychological, and sometimes expanded or symbolic perception. And caregivers, family, and supporters are learning to integrate multiple perspectives at once, so they do not reduce the person to a single explanation. Both processes affect each other continuously.

This is not a path toward certainty but rather a path toward capacity. It is the capacity to stay present with complexity without collapsing it into fear, control, or simplification. It is about learning how to remain human with each other in states that often feel beyond language, beyond logic, and beyond familiar frameworks of understanding.

The Integration Path does not claim to define what these experiences ultimately are. Instead, it offers something more practical and more human. It is a way to stay present and respond in a way that does not strip the experience of its depth, meaning or its humanity while still creating safety, support and movement forward.

The lenses contained within this path are outlined below:

1. The biological or neuroscience lens helps us understand how the brain and nervous system respond under stress. Sleep disruption, sensory overload, and heightened stress responses can all significantly shape perception and cognition. This lens is essential for immediate stabilization and safety.

2. The neurodivergence and sensitivity lens acknowledges that some people are born with systems that process information more intensely or differently. Heightened sensitivity, rapid pattern recognition, and deep emotional responsiveness are not failures of function, they are variations in perception.

3. The nervous system/trauma lens brings attention to the body’s survival responses. When overwhelm is present due to a history of trauma, the system can shift into states of hypervigilance, shutdown, or fragmentation. What looks like confusion on the outside is often a deeply intelligent survival response on the inside.

4. The meaning-making or narrative lens looks at how the mind attempts to organize overwhelming experience into understandable form. Under stress, the brain will often create stories or explanations that help it make sense of what feels unmanageable. This lens helps us understand delusions or fixed beliefs as meaning systems and ask: “What is the mind trying to make sense of?”

5. The psychological or Jungian lens invites us to consider unconscious material and symbolic meaning. In extreme states, the mind may communicate through imagery, narrative, or archetypal patterns that do not always follow linear logic but still carry emotional or psychological significance. It explores projection of unconscious material and meaning within the psyche.

6. The consciousness or spiritual lens holds that some experiences involve shifts in perception or awareness that are not easily explained through purely material frameworks. These states can feel disorienting, but they can also carry profound intensity of meaning, perception, or insight. This lens addresses extreme states of consciousness and spiritual emergence.

7. The relational/presence lens shifts the focus from managing the symptoms to meeting the person within the experience. Through steady, non-judgmental presence, a sense of safety is rebuilt. The goal is to create a space where the nervous system can settle, and the person can begin to find their way back to themselves.

In real life, these lenses are not separate. They do not take turns but can happen at the same time. A person may be neurologically overwhelmed, emotionally activated, deeply meaning-making, and experiencing altered perception within the same moment. No single lens is considered complete on its own. When multiple lenses are held together, something shifts. Instead of asking: “What disorder is this?” We begin asking: “What is happening across multiple systems of experience and how do we support the whole person?” The full picture emerges only when these perspectives are held together.

When we begin to hold this fuller picture, our response naturally becomes more relational. We slow down, listen differently and begin to notice tone, fear, overwhelm, sensitivity, and meaning rather than just behavior. Instead of moving immediately into control or correction, we begin to orient toward stabilization through connection.

This does not mean ignoring safety. It means expanding what safety actually includes. This could be a non-reactive presence, being supported without judgment and being seen as a person, not a problem.

These elements do not replace clinical support. They shape the environment in which any support becomes more effective. Over time, this shift begins to change the role of the caregiver from someone who is trying to manage or control an experience to someone who is learning how to hold presence inside uncertainty. … “

I could keep quoting her all day, I think I highlighted the entire book. lol. If you are interested in reading more, here are the links to her books. Each one is a short, easy read, and you can start with whatever calls to you.

When Reality Breaks Open: The Integration Path to Navigating Psychosis

Link HERE!!!

When Reality Breaks Open: Parent Survival Guide to Psychosis and Crisis

Link HERE!!!

When Reality Breaks Open: Psychosis, Spiritual Awakening and the Alchemy of Human Suffering

Link HERE!!

Wondering how to handle your Coyote?

We don’t have all the answers, but we do have years of lived experience and a lot of ideas to share. Some of what we offer may resonate, some may not. But we’re here to think alongside you. This is not just for you, this is for your Coyote as well. We know how deeply this world can misunderstand them and we love helping families build bridges between themselves and their Coyote. Even if we have spoken before we would love to talk again. The Coyote world is wild and what may work one day may not work the next, I know I ran out of ideas of what to do many times and could have used some extra eyes on the situation.

Send us an email and we can set up a time to talk.

WalkingWithCoyotes@gmail.com

Everything is free of course. We’re simply here to support and to offer what we wish we had when we started off on this road. What we wish the Doctors would have taught us.

Monthly Zoom Meeting : Honoring Our Coyotes

On the 3rd Thursday of every month we will gather. This month we will start with a short mindfulness exercise that can help bring a little relaxation into difficult moments, and it’s not just about breathing. After the mindfulness we will take time to check in with those who choose to share with zero pressure to say anything at all. For most of us we didn’t and don’t have many other families around us who really get what walking this path is like. It has felt nice to see we aren’t alone. Hearing others stories somehow makes this world feel a bit more “normal”.

Next Meeting: June 18th, 2026

Zoom Meeting Link: Click Here

5:00pm PST — 6:00pm Mountain — 7:00pm Central — 8:00pm EST

Meeting ID: 825 8750 2181

Passcode: 1234567

Share

Subscribe now

References

Below is our growing reference list. If you know of any websites, books, songs, training, or YouTube resources etc that might help families, please send them to us so we can add them for everyone.

Browse By Category: Links Below

1. Trainings & Practical Support
   -Zendo Project

   -Maastricht Interview / Talking With Voices — Dirk Corstens, Eleanor Longden; structured approach to engaging with voices

2. Nutrition, Physical & Lifestyle Health
   -Matt Griffo

3. Community & Alternative Mental Health Approaches
   -Hearing Voices Network
   -Compassionate Mental Health

   -The Icarus Project / Fireweed Collective — Icarus rebranded as Fireweed Collective; "navigating the space between brilliance and madness"

   -MindFreedom International — human rights advocacy, psychiatric survivor-led

4. Spiritual / Metaphysical Perspectives

   -When Reality Breaks Open (Book/Trilogy) —Candace Eberle
   -Psychosis or Spiritual Awakening (25 min. Video) – Phil Borges
   -Crazywise (Film)
   -Schizophrenia: A Spiritual Awakening (Book) — Patricia Carlisle

5. Personal Stories & Lived Experience (Recovery / Meaning-Making)
   -The Voices in My Head (14 min. Video) — Eleanor Longden
   -Schizophrenia: The Positive Perspective (Book) — Peter Chadwick, PhD

   -When Reality Breaks Open (Book/Trilogy) —Candace Eberle

6. Psychological & Reframing Perspectives

   -When Reality Breaks Open (Book/Trilogy) —Candace Eberle
   -Rethinking Madness (Book) — Paris Williams
   -The Divided Self (Book) — R.D. Laing

7. Creativity, Expression & Inner World
   -The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (Book) — John MacGregor

8. Advocacy & Awareness Organizations

   -National Shattering Silence Coalition (NCSS)

1. Training & Practical Support

Zendo Training

Link to Zendo

If your loved one’s psychosis sometimes feels overwhelming, the Zendo Project offers helpful guidance on how to stay calm and supportive when someone is in an altered state.

Although they began with psychedelic peer support, their approach is now being used by crisis teams and families because psychosis can feel very similar. They offer a free introductory training you can sign up for on their homepage, and deeper trainings if you want to learn more.

2. Nutrition, Physical & Lifestyle Health

Matt Griffo

Matt Griffo shares resources about mental and physical health through nutrition, movement, mindfulness, and lifestyle changes. After years of severe CPTSD symptoms. He began exploring how diet and overall health affect the brain and immune system. Matt now shares his personal journey, research, and practical tools, and encourages families to explore how nutrition and lifestyle changes may support mental health and reduce symptoms for many people.

Link : Start here with Matt

3. Community & Alternative Mental Health Approaches

Hearing Voices Network

The Hearing Voices Movement is an international grassroots movement that aims to shift public and professional attitudes toward experiences. Such as hearing voices and seeing visions that are generally associated with psychosis.

How Common Is It?

Statistics vary, but it’s generally accepted that between 3% and 10% of the population hear voices that other people don’t. If you include one-off experiences (like hearing someone call your name when you’re out shopping, or feeling your phone vibrate in your pocket) this figure goes up to 75%.

So, having at least one experience of hearing or seeing something that others around you don’t is incredibly common. Those who have never had this experience are in the minority.

A number of famous and important people (past and present) have experienced hearing or seeing things that other people don’t. Without these people, the world would be a very different place.

Some well-known individuals who have spoken about hearing voices include:

Gandhi, Socrates, Joan of Arc, Freud, Anthony Hopkins, Philip K. Dick, John Frusciante, Carlos Santana, Robert Schumann, John Forbes Nash, Zoë Wanamaker, and Charles Dickens.

Link : Hearing Voices Network UK

Link: Hearing Voices Network USA

Compassionate Mental Health

Compassionate Mental Health is part of a growing movement working to change how we understand and respond to mental distress. Their work focuses on compassion, community, and listening to the lived experiences of people who have gone through mental health crises.

Through training, gatherings, and educational programs, they explore more holistic approaches that emphasize connection, meaning, and social support alongside traditional care. The references on their website are great.

Compassionate Mental Health Website

4. Spiritual / Metaphysical Perspectives

Psychosis or Spiritual Awakening

Phil Borges, filmmaker and photographer, has been documenting Indigenous and tribal cultures for over 25 years. His work is exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide, and his documentary film CRAZYWISE explores what can be learned from individuals who have turned psychological crises into positive transformative experiences. He spoke about some of his findings in the Ted Talk below.

Link : Watch Ted Talk Here

Crazywise

Crazy…or wise? The traditional wisdom of indigenous cultures often contradicts modern views about a mental health crisis. Is it a ‘calling’ to grow or just a ‘broken brain’? The documentary CRAZYWISE explores what can be learned from people around the world who have turned their psychological crisis into a positive transformative experience.

Link : Crazywise Documentary

📘 Schizophrenia: A Spiritual Awakening — Patricia Carlisle

• Directly explores psychosis through a spiritual lens

• Looks at how these experiences may be misunderstood awakenings

5. Personal Stories & Lived Experience (Recovery / Meaning-Making)

The Voices in My Head | Eleanor Longden

To all appearances, Eleanor Longden was just like every other student — heading to college full of promise and without a care in the world. That was until the voices in her head started talking.

Initially innocuous, these internal narrators became increasingly antagonistic and dictatorial, turning her life into a living nightmare. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, hospitalized, and drugged, Longden was discarded by a system that didn’t know how to help her.

Longden tells the moving story of her years-long journey back to mental health and makes the case that learning to listen to her voices helped her survive.

Link : Watch Ted Talk Here

📘 Schizophrenia: The Positive Perspective — Peter Chadwick

• Written by someone who experienced psychosis himself

• Explores how these experiences can relate to growth, meaning, and even insight into reality

• Doesn’t deny difficulty, but refuses to see it as “just illness”

6. Psychological & Reframing Perspectives

📘 Rethinking Madness — Paris Williams

• A really powerful re-framing of psychosis

• Suggests that under the right conditions, these experiences can lead to positive transformation—not just pathology

• Talks about society’s role in making things worse vs. better

📘 The Divided Self — R.D. Laing

• A classic (a bit older, but very influential)

• Tries to make “madness” understandable, human, and connected to real life experiences

• Challenges the idea that people are just “disordered”

7. Creativity, Expression & Inner World

📘 The Discovery of the Art of the Insane — John MacGregor

• Focuses on art created by people labeled schizophrenic

• Shows the depth, brilliance, and creative power in their inner worlds

👉 This one doesn’t just tell you—they show you

8. Advocacy & Awareness Organizations

🏛️ National Shattering Silence Coalition (NSSC)

• Born from the urgent need to dismantle systemic neglect and discrimination blocking public health reform

• A community of action — survivors, advocates, and industry professionals united

• Turning shared family experience into a national standard for medical accountability. Not a passive observer. A force.

• Join if you’re ready to turn what your family lived through into something that protects the next one.

Welcome to Walking with Coyotes:

For those new here, the metaphor is this: there are dogs and coyotes. Dogs follow the rules, they live within the law and order of the day: they try their best to fit in. Coyotes do not follow the laws of the dog-world. They are dancing to a song the dogs cannot hear.

When we say “coyote” we mean the ones our culture tends to label, to pathologize, to walk around. They are the ones we do not understand, the ones in our culture who are shrouded in mystery.

They are the ones diagnosed with “schizophrenia.” On the surface, they are wild-eyed, unpredictable, Other: but underneath they are present, tapped-in, Conscious.

This week I want to share something I consider a genuine gold mine. 3 books written by a brilliant mother with fifteen years of lived experience who knows this road we are all walking from the inside out. Her name is Candace Eberle and while we only met her recently we have become close as we are on the same path and she has helped guide me through many difficult moments. The trilogy is called When Reality Breaks Open.

I finished When Reality Breaks Open: Integration Path to Navigating Psychosis first, and I wanted to write the conservator and public defender with every single chapter. That’s how good it is. The biological/medical lens is the only one most of us are ever handed, and Candace lights up every lens they left in the dark. She offers so many different ways of seeing our Coyotes, as whole humans having a human experience that is just as valid as ours. I kept thinking: why doesn’t everyone know this?

When it comes to The Parent Survival Guide to Psychosis and Crisis, Candace has a gift. She writes from lived experience, and it shows. She has this way of helping me see my own experience more clearly. She has a way of taking a complex idea and breaking it into parts that make it digestible. I feel comforted and less alone when I am reading her books.

Here are the names, descriptions and links to purchase the books as well as Candace’s website below.

When Reality Breaks Open: Parent Survival Guide to Psychosis and Crisis

When a child’s mental health crisis enters your life, everything changes. The systems, the uncertainty, the fear, the exhaustion and the grief that has no clear name all arrive at once. And for many parents, there is no road-map for how to hold it. This book is that missing space.

Written from lived experience, this book walks through the emotional, nervous system, and relational reality of long-term care-giving through crisis. It does not offer false certainty or quick answers. Instead, it offers something more honest:
It offers a way to stay centered while life stays uncertain.

Inside these pages, you will find:

• What crisis does to the nervous system over time

• The hidden grief of loving someone who is still here

• The emotional extremes of rage, guilt, collapse, and unexpected humor

• The impact of systems on families navigating mental health care

• The perspective shifts that make survival more sustainable

• Grounding practices for returning to yourself in overwhelming moments

• A path from pure survival toward small, real moments of life again

This is a book for the 2 a.m. hours, the car parked outside the hospital and for the moments after another phone call that changed everything. This is for the parents who are still showing up, even when they feel like they have nothing left.

At its core, this is not a story about crisis but a story about what it means to remain a person inside it.

Link HERE!!!

When Reality Breaks Open: Psychosis, Spiritual Awakening and the Alchemy of Human Suffering

This book explores psychosis, mental illness and emotional crisis through a spiritual and transformational lens Rather than viewing these experiences as only pathology, it explores how profound psychological rupture can also act as catalyst, initiation and awakening.

Blending lived experience, ritual, symbolism and ancient ways of moving through suffering, this book guides you through an alchemical process and challenges the idea that profound mental and emotional crises can only be understood through pathology alone.

Written by a mother who spent years navigating psychiatric systems, crisis cycles, intuition, fear, grief and transformation, this book is a bridge between science and spirit, breakdown and meaning, and survival and transformation.

For caregivers, seekers, survivors, clinicians, spiritually curious readers and anyone who has ever felt reality fracture open beneath them.

Link HERE!!

When Reality Breaks Open: The Integration Path to Navigating Psychosis

When someone you love begins experiencing what is often labeled as psychosis, everything changes. You are suddenly faced with confusion, fear, uncertainty and a system that tends to offer one dominant explanation: a medical diagnosis, a lifelong condition, and a path focused primarily on symptom management. But many families quietly sense that something more complex is happening.

When Reality Breaks Open explores psychosis not as a single, fixed experience, but as a multi-layered human phenomenon that can involve nervous system overwhelm, trauma, neurodivergence, intense meaning-making, and shifts in perception or consciousness. It does not reduce these experiences to one explanation, nor does it dismiss medical understanding. Instead, it brings multiple perspectives into relationship with one another.

At the heart of this approach is The Integration Path—a framework for learning how to hold complexity without collapsing it into fear, control, or oversimplification. This is not a book about fixing a person but about how to stay with someone through experiences that feel uncontainable, without losing connection, clarity, or humanity in the process.

For caregivers, family members, and those supporting someone through extreme states, this book offers grounding, perspective, and practical ways to respond when things feel overwhelming. It invites a shift from reduction to relationship, from fear to presence and from singular explanations to integrated understanding.

Because something real is happening in these experiences and how we meet them matters.

Link HERE!!!

To learn more, reach out to Candace, or hear her deeply moving songs made for those on the Coyote path, head to her website:

When Reality Breaks Open Website HERE!

Wondering how to handle your Coyote?

We don’t have all the answers, but we do have years of lived experience and a lot of ideas to share. Some of what we offer may resonate, some may not. But we’re here to think alongside you. This is not just for you, this is for your Coyote as well. We know how deeply this world can misunderstand them and we love helping families build bridges between themselves and their Coyote. Even if we have spoken before we would love to talk again. The Coyote world is wild and what may work one day may not work the next, I know I ran out of ideas of what to do many times and could have used some extra eyes on the situation.

Send us an email and we can set up a time to talk.

WalkingWithCoyotes@gmail.com

Everything is free of course. We’re simply here to support and to offer what we wish we had when we started off on this road. What we wish the Doctors would have taught us.

Monthly Zoom Meeting : Honoring Our Coyotes

On the 3rd Thursday of every month we will gather. This month we will start with a short mindfulness exercise that can help bring a little relaxation into difficult moments, and it’s not just about breathing. After the mindfulness we will take time to check in those who choose to with zero pressure to say anything at all. For most of us we didn’t and don’t have many other families around us who really get what walking this path is like. It has felt nice to see we aren’t alone. Hearing others stories somehow makes this world feel a bit more “normal”.

Next Meeting: June 18th, 2026

Zoom Meeting Link: Click Here

5:00pm PST — 6:00pm Mountain — 7:00pm Central — 8:00pm EST

Meeting ID: 825 8750 2181

Passcode: 1234567

Share

Subscribe now

Welcome to Walking with Coyotes:

For those new here, the metaphor is this: there are dogs and coyotes. Dogs follow the rules, they live within the law and order of the day: they try their best to fit in. Coyotes do not follow the laws of the dog-world. They are dancing to a song the dogs cannot hear.

When we say “coyote” we mean the ones our culture tends to label, to pathologize, to walk around. They are the ones we do not understand, the ones in our culture who are shrouded in mystery.

They are the ones diagnosed with “schizophrenia.” On the surface, they are wild-eyed, unpredictable, Other: but underneath they are present, tapped-in, Conscious.

Before I began this journey of helping families and writing Walking With Coyotes I didn’t realize that I myself had been in what the western world would label psychosis. I kept hearing stories from parents and would think, “Oh I did that, felt that, said that, that’s psychosis?”

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, psychosis is defined as “a serious mental illness marked by loss of or greatly lessened ability to test whether what one is thinking and feeling about the real world is really true.”

The term represents a medical state rather than a single standalone illness, and it is most commonly characterized by defective contact with reality, often presenting with symptoms such as hallucinations or delusions.

Etymology: The word comes from the Greek psyche — meaning soul, breath, and the animating principle of life — and psukhosis, which originally meant animation, a state of being alive. The -osis suffix was added later to mean abnormal condition. Researchers have noted that psychiatrists actually misapprehended the original meaning. The word never started out as a disease concept at all.

Which means, the word we use to describe our coyotes as broken literally means animated soul at its root.

This was my animated soul journey.

In 2020 I went into what the medical world would have called psychosis.

Depending on which doctor you asked and which checklist they were holding, I could have been labeled with being in psychosis, Delusional Disorder, Depressive Disorder, Anxiety Disorder, Bipolar, Schizo-effective Disorder, Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And honestly many more if we had the DSM-5 in front of us.

I was in Kauai. Something told me to move there March 5th, 2020. My intuition, maybe something else. The Covid lockdowns started 2 weeks after we arrived and the island shut down. For the first 6 months it felt like heaven on earth. A small island that normally has over 1.5 million visitors every year was empty. Every morning a smile on my face. We got a place for cheap on a cliff overlooking the ocean where we could see dolphins and whales jumping. Each morning and evening was a beautiful sunrise or sunset that felt painted just for us. We had the whole pool to ourselves and popular beaches were empty.

It was also the first time in my life I wasn’t busy and surrounded by a full life. Friends, jobs, projects, traveling, helping people, etc. I didn’t have a purpose or the busyness to distract me from what was inside anymore. Which was fine, at first.

I’m someone who has done plenty of personal growth from the time I was 19, I was 38 when I arrived in Kauai. I did countless workshops, healing, therapy, counseling training, prayer, silent meditation retreats, taught mindfulness. I taught social emotional learning to hundreds of junior high and high schools working with over 150k students, staff and community members.

I was well versed in whatever that world is, and still, when everything got quiet and it seemed everyone online started to fight each other I broke. I thought I had felt broken before through hard times in life but this was a different kind of breaking.

I entered the Coyote world and at my peak Coyote moments I could have easily been labeled “schizophrenic” as I had all the “symptoms”.

When I entered into the Coyote world that day, it was a normal day just like any other. I was sitting on the couch and all of the sudden I felt like something bog was entering the room. A huge energy showed up and my mind started to expand past my body. I could feel tingling and vibrating in and around my head. The world in front of me started to move more. Stationary objects seemed to become more clear and blurry at the same time. I could see the energy of everything moving. I could feel the edges of the universe. No I was not on drugs.

Messages started to come through me, my body felt like it was no longer my body, I was connected to everything. I was everything. I got up, started pacing around the room and processing all of the information out loud. Rapid fire.

“God and I are one and everyone is one with God and we are all connected and everything is a part of it and nothing is separate and everything is everything which means everything means nothing and nothing means everything so nothing really matters and we could never actually mess this up and its all perfect and perfectly made and God is here and I am God and you are God and I can feel the edges and and and… for a long time.

My husband was standing there leaning against the kitchen counter, holding space and watching. Not trying to change me, not arguing with me. At first he looked uneasy, I could feel him and was very aware of how he was experiencing me while I was talking in circles. Then I felt him become curious and relax a bit. He had a lot of experience with coyotes in his life. His father, his best friend and he himself being 80% Coyote prepared him for this moment.

After some time my mind and body I now assume disassociated because it was all too much for me to hold. The feeling of being connected to everything was still there but now I felt catatonic. Starring into space. Responding slow. System overload. My husband went to take a shower and I felt something call me outside. I was moving very slow but the pull was to strong to ignore. When I got to the ocean and sat down, I realized it was her that was calling me. She told me to sit. I sat. I settled my eyes on the ocean and a HUGE whale jumped out of the water right in front of me. All for me. I knew it was for me.

The ocean spoke with me, “This life is about joy. Experience this life with as much joy as you can as thought it’s one big play. Because it is.” I tried to muster up some joy but it was a dull joy. I was still in a weird in-between world’s kind of place in my mind and I had no idea how to make sense of it all. No idea who I even was before I was everything.

While I was sitting there with the ocean, a man drove up on the road behind me. I remember trying to “act normal”. He got out of the car and walked right up to me. He was so kind and friendly. Gentle. I could tell he could see I was having an experience. When asked how I was I remember replying with something like, “Oh you know, missing my family.” He nodded in a way like he knew I was lying but didn’t care.

Matthew was his name and he was a doing his rounds as temporary security during Covid and didn’t need me to leave.

We chatted for a little while. I left out the part about being able to see the cosmos around him to try and sound normal. Which I did. I think.

At one point he looked at me with what seemed like a knowing or twinkle in his eye, “You know I like Proverbs 3:5. It says, Lean not on your own understanding. In all ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct your path.”

I could feel the words rush through my body and root me back down onto the earth in seconds. I snapped back into this world. The disassociation was gone. I was still very aware of where I just was, what I was seeing, what just happened, but I was no longer feeling it or seeing it all at once.

“How did you know that I needed to hear that?” I had no idea I needed to hear that how could he?

He smiled, “Maybe I was sent here for you.”

“Are going to fucking fly off into the sky in that car right now? Are you an angel?”

“Good luck Jennifer.”

And off he went.

To this day I’m still 50/50 on whether or not he disappeared after that. I lived in that same place for the next year with hardly any people and never saw Matthew again.

I thought things would go back to normal after that but they didn’t. Despite having a deeply profound experience that I thought would bring me peace for the rest of my life, the next few months were rough. I would often go in and out of extremely emotional high and low states. At one point I was even hitting myself in the face. I had such deep hatred for who I was. It felt like I was disgusting, worthless, bothering everyone around me, terrible to be around. I would hear over and over in my head, “You’re so stupid! I hate you! You’re the worst person in the world and everyone hates you for a good reason!!” I remember thinking I was equal to Hitler. That’s how bad of a person I was. I was the one, the only, the ACTUAL Worst Person in the world.

I remember my family saying, “you need meds” “you’re not right” “you don’t have to live like this” “you’re depressed” “you’re acting crazy”. My husband on the other hand intuitively knew I wasn’t just “losing my mind” and felt something else was happening for me. He saw the world was losing its mind around me. Friends were leaving. Childhood and teen trauma was surfacing. I was lonely in a way I didn’t have words for. My nervous system was overwhelmed and therapists would try to help in the way they were trained but I always felt they didn’t really get.

The couple of times I talked to a doctor they said I needed meds and a therapist recommended me looking into it.

“Here take this for 6 months we will see how it works”, if not we will try this other one.

Me: “ Can’t I just have 5 anxiety pills for emergencies?”

“No, we can’t do that. It’s a controlled substance.”

Doctors never asked if there was a root cause as they are trained to treat symptoms. The more I talked with them the more they suspected I was sick and broken which had me feeling more sick and broken. It benefited me at the time that I have always had an aversion to pills. My mother attempted suicide with tranquilizers when I was 11. It kept me from seeing pills as THE answer. She then went on anti-depressants and was never really the same. She wasn’t trying to kill herself anymore but she was no longer happy or alive in the way she once was. I’m not against medicine I’m against using it for myself before I figure out the root cause. Or I will use them in emergencies.

My husband was a HUGE part of why I didn’t go the medical route. He had seen first hand from his father and best friend what the hospital can do to someone. He wanted me to avoid it at all costs knowing it would ruin me. Instead he would sit with me with compassion in his eyes and say, “you’re okay. You will get through this. You are not broken. You are sensitive. Something is going on with you but we will figure it out together. The world is a lot right now and you feel all of it.”

It was hard for him to watch me suffer but he himself had gone to the outer depths of his mind so his ability to hold the wild with curiosity, fierce protection of me and calmness was perfect. He was never devastated like a tsunami just hit and we will never be okay again. He never looked at me like I was sick. I am convinced if I got the same response that our family gave my sister, I too would have ended up hospitalized. I would have fought with or broken under whoever was going against my reality.

Which reinforced what I was already practicing with my sister, The way we look at our coyotes and respond to them matters deeply.

This approach allowed me to have space to figure out what was going on with me. I was able to take a lot of space from the grind and listen to what was going on with my body. Not push myself past my anxieties or “delusions” because it turned out I was suffering with CPTSD, Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and all the pushing would only activate it and make it worse. I wasn’t “sick” I was in a trauma response from spending most of my life, well, in a trauma response. It was such a relief to hear!!

I now could develop tools to help me feel safe and regulate my nervous system in those moments instead of living in a state of fight or flight.

I learned that I hit myself in the face when I felt like I couldn’t calm down, because I would get hit when I was out of control as a child. Turns out it’s kind of a normal thing that can happen, hitting oneself. I would be terrified that my husband hated me or was mad at me because my childhood home could go from feeling safe to terrifying in seconds and I was always scanning for danger. I still do when I’m around people.

I realized my mind went into the Coyote world because I was called to help free the coyotes on this planet and be a bridge between them and their families. I needed to know what it was like.

I learned that the whole Universe and all the lessons I was hearing wasn’t just me mumbling “delusions”. The “God is everything and everything means nothing and and and…” were all a compilation of different things I’ve read from philosophers, religions and spiritual teachers.

Today I am deeply grateful for that time away from my “normal” mind. As painful and confusing as it was at times, it changed me. It made me stronger, more compassionate, more loving, more free. It opened my eyes to the coyote world, to my sister, to a different part of life and humbled me reminding me daily there is so much I don’t understand. I would do it all over again in a heartbeat now that I know what I know.

Let’s give Schizophrenia a new definition: A systematic lazy way of explaining a deeply nuanced and complex spectrum of experiences.

Thank you for taking the time to hear a part of my story.

I wanted to leave you with some things that bring me hope for our Coyotes future. Real, tried and true approaches that have been very successful.

Open Dialogue (one of the most respected alternatives)

• Origin: Western Lapland, Finland

• What’s different:

  • Teams come to the person’s home

  • Include family + social network

  • No rush to diagnose or medicate

  • Focus on listening and making sense together

Meds may be used, but often later, less, or not at all.

Why people talk about it:

• Much lower rates of long-term disability

• Many people return to work/school

• Emphasis on human connection first

Community-based, no-asylum system

Trieste model

• Country: Italy

• Based on reforms by Franco Basaglia

What’s different:

• Psychiatric hospitals largely closed

• Care happens in open community centers

• Doors are often literally unlocked

• People are treated as citizens, not patients

Much less emphasis on restraint and long-term institutionalization.

Why people talk about it:

• Suicide rates dropped dramatically after implementation

• 50% reduction in psychiatric emergency visits over 20 years

• High rates of people returning to work and living independently

• One of the lowest rates of involuntary admissions of any high income country

• The WHO calls it a world standard for community psychiatry

• User satisfaction recorded at 83%

• Proved that closing asylums and treating people as citizens leads to better outcomes, not chaos

Soteria-style homes (small, human-scale)

Soteria houses

• Found in parts of Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and elsewhere

What’s different:

• Small homes (not hospitals)

• Staff trained to be with, not control

• Minimal or no medication initially

• Emphasis on relationship and safety

The environment itself is the “treatment”

Why people talk about it:

• Outcomes are equal to or better than traditional psychiatric hospitalization, at lower cost.

• In one study, 39% of residents received no antipsychotics at all during their stay and 75% of those still had good to very good outcomes at discharge

• People show real improvements in work, housing, and social functioning

• Research points to benefits in psychopathology, work, social functioning, and discontinuation of psychiatric medication

• The WHO has highlighted it as a good practice model in its global guidance

• It was founded in California in 1971 and the system has been trying to quietly bury it ever since

EmPATH Model

• Origin: Alameda County, California — conceived by Dr. Scott Zeller

• Now: Gathering momentum nationally, with an annual summit of Doctors, hospital leaders and frontline mental health workers dedicated entirely to reimagining psychiatric emergency care

  What’s different:

• Crisis care happens in calm, home-like environments — recliners instead of restraints

• Staffed by professionals trained in trauma-informed care and de-escalation

• No rush to restrain, sedate, or admit

• The environment itself is considered part of the treatment

• Philosophy is radical in its simplicity: treat people in crisis like people

  Why people talk about it:

• 75% of patients stabilize and return home within 24 hours — without inpatient admission

• Hospitalizations drop by 70 to 80 percent

• Restraint use drops to near zero

• 66% reduction in boarding time for psychiatric patients

• 60% increase in 30-day follow-up care

• At MLK Community Healthcare in South LA, psychiatric patients who once waited days for help are now being met with calm, connection, and a couch

• The system is starting to figure out that most people in crisis don’t need to be locked in a bright chaotic room. They need a calm presence, a safe space, and someone who isn’t afraid to sit in it with them

Hearing Voices Network

• Active across Europe, UK, US, and more

What’s different:

• Doesn’t assume voices = illness

• Encourages relationship with the experience

• Peer-led groups (not top-down treatment)

Many people report less fear and more stability when experiences are understood, not suppressed

Why people talk about it:

• Members report feeling less isolated, improved self-esteem, and a better understanding of their experiences

• Significant reduction in voice-related distress reported after group attendance

• Members report making more friends, feeling more hopeful about the future, and feeling better equipped to cope

• People describe finding support here that they couldn’t find anywhere else

• Treats experiential knowledge as valid. Someone who has been there is often more helpful than someone who studied it

• Challenges the idea that voices must be eliminated rather than understood

Professor Dr. Thomas Fuchs, Professor of Philosophy and Psychiatry, one of the most respected voices in psychiatry in the world right now. He and his colleagues are arguing for something called phenomenology. Which just means this: listen to what the person is actually experiencing before you decide what is wrong with them. Understand their inner world first. Follow it. Try to make sense of it from the inside rather than checking boxes from the outside.

Something about all of that is so comforting for me.

May all our Coyotes know they belong. May all of our Coyotes know they are loved and wanted. May all of our Coyotes feel at ease.

Wondering how to handle your Coyote?

We don’t have all the answers, but we do have years of lived experience and a lot of ideas to share. Some of what we offer may resonate, some may not. But we’re here to think alongside you. This is not just for you, this is for your Coyote as well. We know how deeply this world can misunderstand them and we love helping families build bridges between themselves and their Coyote. Even if we have spoken before we would love to talk again. The Coyote world is wild and what may work one day may not work the next.

Send us an email and we can set up a time to talk.

WalkingWithCoyotes@gmail.com

Everything is free of course. We’re simply here to support and to offer what we wish we had when we started off on this road. What we wish the Doctors would have taught us.

Monthly Zoom Meeting : Honoring Our Coyotes

On the 3rd Thursday of every month we will gather. We wanted to put a pause on the weekly meetings as we focus on finishing the Walking With Coyotes book. During this monthly call we talk. There may be a topic or a speaker, we will let you know here. For most of us we didn’t and don’t have many other families around us who really get what walking this path is like. It has felt nice to see we aren’t alone and support each other which in turn supports the coyotes we love.

Next Meeting: June 18th, 2026

Zoom Meeting Link: Click Here

5:00pm PST — 6:00pm Mountain — 7:00pm Central — 8:00pm EST

Meeting ID: 825 8750 2181

Passcode: 1234567

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Welcome to Walking with Coyotes:

For those new here, the metaphor is this: there are dogs and coyotes. Dogs follow the rules, they live within the law and order of the day: they try their best to fit in. Coyotes do not follow the laws of the dog-world. They are dancing to a song the dogs cannot hear.

When we say “coyote” we mean the ones our culture tends to label, to pathologize, to walk around. They are the ones we do not understand, the ones in our culture who are shrouded in mystery.

They are the ones diagnosed with “schizophrenia.” On the surface, they are wild-eyed, unpredictable, Other: but underneath they are present, tapped-in, Conscious.

Update:

First of all thank you to all the people who reached out to me last week when I truly needed the kind words and support. Each word meant more than you know. I feel lucky to have you think of me.

Second of all, I went to court on May 8th to get my sister out of the hospital. If you read my post 2 posts ago you can see that clearly. The conservator told my sister for weeks that she would give my sister the go-ahead to leave the hospital, May 8 would be the release-date. All was cleared and my sister and I were counting down the days. I was literally crossing them off of a calendar I made for when she returns.

My sister isn’t one to be on the phone, but with her planning on getting out and this new life of coming to live with me we talked every day and sometimes 2x a day. She would tell me all about her lists she had.

“I got my grocery list down from $400 to $200.” She remembered what everything she buys costs. She wanted to go to Costco and we were going to get a Costco card together. She wanted to go to Big 5 for some tennis shoes. She wanted to go gold panning and we were making plans everyday.

Court was on a Friday and I drove the day before to pick her up. She is 3 hours away from my home.

On the way we get a call from the conservator. Now mind you this is the conservator who said, “It’s refreshing to have a family who is so excited to have their loved one back. It’s nice for us.”

That same lady calls the day before and says, “Katie didn’t get clearance from the Psychiatrist so now at court tomorrow we are not going to give her to you, you will have to convince the judge and fight us on this.”

A psychiatrist who met her 2x.

She said I will have to prove that I can care for her.

“Ok! I got it!”

That night I wrote down all the things the system says I needed to provide for her and my plan. I also wrote a note I hoped to read stating why it was so important with her history of trauma that she needs a safe place where she can start to heal. They didn’t have the idea of “trauma induced psychosis” back when my sister had her first episode. In the Empath unit in LA they have a space where people in psychosis are treated very differently than the norm in our culture. They are calming with them, it’s a nice environment, they put people in recliners and talk with them about what’s going on for them, they create a safe and soft and trust-inducing space. Most people are released the next day.

For many their break is just that. A lifetime of trauma that wasn’t dealt with, it reared it’s head, the mind split because it was too much too fast and many just needed help getting back to themselves, for everything to slow way down. Instead of a slow-down, things were sped up: they found themselves put in restraints, told they were sick, and that they must take x or y anti-psychotic drug. This was my sister’s story as well.

If they resisted it was the illness, not a logical reaction to the turbulence and chaos of what was happening to them.

I’m grateful at least some people are trying different things.

But lets get back to the old system, to the judge, the psychiatrist, the conservator, and prosecutor lady. They did not know my sister like I did and do.

I went into the courtroom when called, the 3 families that came out before me looked like the life got sucked out of them. I was stupidly hopeful at that point. My husband and friends and even my sister had it in their minds that this may not go well. The system is the system, they said. The system does not understand the human element, they said.

But not me. All the logic was there on our side. Surely they would understand. After all she is not a harm to anyone or others, we have a great relationship. She is innocent and good, everyone who knows her knows this. And I have a place for her to stay, and her financial situation set-up; and doctors appointments for when she gets out, I set those up; and she will need weekly blood work because the medicine wrecks her body, I set those up as well. Everything they asked for I had and then some. Not to mention I am an IHSS worker, In-Home-Health-Support, working with those who have a hard time taking care of themselves in their own homes/living-spaces.

The psychiatrist goes up to the stand first. This psychiatrist has talked to my sister 2x. 2! With those two meetings, she decided who my sister is, and gave that explanation to the Judge.

“Katie says she has jobs in Concord, she thinks she has a home in Concord, and friends there.” SHE DOES!!!!! They were dismissing her for being delusional when she wasn’t. Katie is from Concord, has family there, has work history there, and has a small house that her parents bought for her so she could live her life out in peace, a place Katie lived for many years. The psychiatrist heard Katie say all the things Katie said, and decided pretty much everything was delusion. Katie speaks in a different and sometimes choppy way, but to a discerning eye, there is always a truth, the truth being spoken. The psychiatrist said,she is “Gravely disabled” because she will not say she is sick and needs help, and they are worried about her substance abuse. They demand that she says she is sick, though they also say it is part of her mental disability that she does not know she is sick. The term is anosognosia. How can you have it both ways? So strange to me.

My sister got out of the hospital after months there, and she stopped drinking and was taking her meds because she didn’t want to go back to the hospital. She was compliant. She is super easy for me to be with and not so easy for my family who doesn’t know how to approach her. Which is how she ended up back in the hospital. She never hurt anyone, she just wasn’t making sense. Since when is that a crime? An innocent human being now for months forcibly confined in a mental ward? Did she hurt somebody? Did she steal something? How is this ok?

My husband was holding me back at times. I wanted to yell out the truth.

The psychiatrist gets off the stand and I was wishing they didn’t have so many cameras in the parking lot so I could let the air out of her tires. Something not too harmful but gets the point across.

Next I get called to the stand by the defender who is fresh out of law school and you can tell. Either that or the system just isn’t teaching her what she needs to know. Which is also possible.

I tell them how Katie is telling the truth. Katie is on a zoom call, a big screen where she looks adorable with her hospital gown still on over her clothes because it makes her feel comfortable. We are bantering and laughing a little. I wanted to show how well I do with her, that it’s easy between us.

I didn’t express my worry that the psychiatrist and conservator can’t seem to tell when my sister is telling the truth or not. That worries me. I have a lot of “I wish I said…”s.

I tell them who I am, what I do, my husband has tears in his eyes. He said I did so well. The judge said he preferred “narrative” doesn’t get injected when I wanted to read about my sisters past and why I felt it important for her to live with me. This is her life for the next year, the stakes could not be bigger, and yet this Judge can’t let me, her sister, the one person in the world who wants her, the Judge wont let her read something that is 4 minutes long, an innocent and heart-felt telling of Katie’s journey in life? Ok.

I didn’t realize I was going to be the one on the stand. I wasn’t told to bring all of my qualifications. I wasn’t told what exactly they were looking for. I would have prepared differently. My sister says she will take her meds, she won’t drink or smoke. I told her, I need to be able to keep you so you can’t drink or smoke for at least a year. She said it was fine.

Katie gets on the stand, she told me the night before she was nervous she would freeze or mess it up. She did soooo good. She answered their questions. The prosecutor started to trick her though. My sister is a slow processor and no one in the courtroom seems to know a thing about how my sister works or if she is lying or not. GREAT TEAM SYSTEM! WAY TO PUT THAT TOGETHER! At times my sister was very obviously confused up there on the stand.

The prosecutor says, “So you want to drink and smoke when you get out?” My sister says, “yeah, weed, cigarettes, tobacco, coffee, I love em’.” Mind you she has already said she wouldn’t, said that on the stand, and the lady kept asking in this conniving way, trying to trip her up, to get my sister to feed into the narrative of my sister they were trying to peddle.

All of them seemed clearly way over their head in assessing who and what my sister was and is. None of them knew at all how to relate to her, how to connect with her, that was very obvious, and yet these were the ones who were getting to decide what happens with my sister? They had the power to decide whether a woman who had never hurt anybody should stay forcibly confined in a mental hospital?

They get to decide when she’s telling the truth and when she’s not and then trick her even though they said she is sick? They then ask her to admit she is sick and needs help and meds. But again, part of what it means to have this diagnosis is that by definition they can’t see they are sick and your system says their is no cure and then you PUNISH THEM FOR NOT SAYING THEY ARE SICK?!?!

Because she sees so much more than they give her credit for, Katie I think felt the trickery going on. She didn’t know how to say that but she did know that she was being made to look a certain way. They ask Katie a question. Katie stops for a second, takes a breath and says, “I reflect how you perceive me”.

That was the line of the day. Was a total Wow.

No one caught it except my husband and I. We knew what they were doing and so did she. But they dismissed her. They dismissed that response, they moved on to the next attempt to frame her into their narrative. And she didn’t say she was sick, because why would she? That’s what they themselves say is part of her mental disability. I did say that she was “mentally ill” when the judge asked because I thought he would think me crazy if I brought all this Coyote stuff into the courtroom, if I in any way tried to share with him why I thought labeling her that way to her face was the exact opposite thing he should have me do right now, given that establishing and maintaining trust is everything with this population. Trying to decrease thoughts of paranoia and distrust with caretakers is critical. I was trying to do what the dogs wanted, bc I had to. I feel horrible I said that in front of her. I don’t think shes sick. I don’t. She’s different. She is unable, perhaps “mentally disabled” in a pure sense with respect to trying to live within the culture and society that guys like that Judge want her to conform to. But “mentally sick”/”mentally ill”, that’s harsh. Do we say that about an autistic person? We call them mentally-ill and hound them til they agree with us?

At the end the judge said, “Well, the psych said shes “gravely disabled” so we’re just going to go with that.”

I cried out “NOOOOOOOOOO!” in the courtroom and started weeping. I heard my sister in the background say, “its ok Jennifer”

I keep pausing to cry as I write this. She is so innocent. I lashed out on those women outside of the courtroom in the most respectful way I could manage at that time. My husband said the women there felt some compassion for Katie situation, her pain and my pain. I didn’t care. I didn’t see it in the court room. Everyone was robotic doing their jobs without consideration of the impact keeping my sister for another year may have on her mental health. On her ability to trust.

Katie is confused now. She doesn’t trust me in moments, which is new. She said she doesn’t trust anyone. It took 8 years to build the trust I have with her. I was one of the people who called her crazy for years. I looked at her with sadness and grief daily. Got into fights with her. I’m embarrassed how I treated her knowing what I know now.

We had rebuilt and she felt I was there to help her, and I was, and am.

When I call, she always picks up for me, but she is sad and doesn’t know what to say. She sleeps all day, eats and watches a movie or 2. She had hope and purpose and worth and plans before. Now it’s silence. So I just call and say, “I just wanted to call and say I love you.” Knowing I could stay on that phone with her for hours if she wanted. I LOVE her. I LOVE talking to her. I LOVE who she is and how she thinks.

They don’t know that I’ve seen Katie “sick”, starring for hours in darkness, not responding, not eating, getting down to 90lbs, the voices telling her to kill herself and her attempting suicide 4x. My sister in the court was smiling and talking and planning to go gold panning and camping, making lists and should NOT be punished because she doesn’t speak in the way they want. She isn’t sick. She just thinks differently and with enough time and space and knowing her history she makes total sense.

Turns out there is this law in California:

Under California’s Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, conservatorship requires a finding that a person is gravely disabled as a result of mental disorder and unable to provide for basic needs of food, clothing, or shelter. California courts have also recognized that the availability of willing third-party assistance must be considered. In Conservatorship of Early, the California Supreme Court emphasized that conservatorship should be imposed only where truly necessary and that family support alternatives are legally relevant.

Her lawyer wrote me and said, “We felt it would be too much for you”

Which would mean legally they have to prove that my family and I are unfit to care for her.

They don’t even know what I did. They did not ask for my qualifications in any detail.

Here are my qualifications, something that it did not seem the Court cared about, which should matter :

My Qualifications to Serve as Katie’s Primary Support

For the past 25 years, my professional work has centered on supporting people in acute emotional, psychological, and behavioral crisis. I am not approaching this situation simply as a concerned family member. I am approaching it as someone with extensive real-world experience working with highly escalated individuals and complex emotional environments.

For 15 years I served as a Board Member, Sales Director, and Lead Facilitator with Challenge Day, an internationally recognized emotional intelligence and community-building organization featured on the Oprah Winfrey Network and in the Primetime Emmy Award-winning documentary The Teen Files: Surviving High School. In that role I facilitated large-scale emotional intervention programs with groups of approximately 125–150 teenagers and adults at a time, often in high-risk schools and communities across the United States and internationally.

This was not theoretical work. It involved actively managing severe emotional dysregulation, panic responses, dissociation, trauma reactions, aggression, shutdown states, and crisis escalation in real time. Participants would sometimes flee rooms mid-crisis, physically collapse emotionally, or become severely overwhelmed during the workshop. I was one of the people responsible for stabilizing those situations while simultaneously maintaining emotional and physical safety for 125-150 other students and community members. I have worked in schools with metal detectors, in Uganda where someone had been beheaded that morning. I have held room fulls of children after the star football player killed himself. Or a son who just lost his mom. This was daily for years and years. I have done this work with well over 150,000 individuals throughout my career.

My work through Challenge Day took me to communities across every state in the country as well as Uganda, Ghana, Holland, Canada and Indigenous reservations, where I trained and worked alongside educators, principals, superintendents, law enforcement officers, and administrators in crisis response, emotional safety, de-escalation, and trauma-informed engagement.

I have also completed crisis-support training through the Zendo Project, a nationally respected organization specializing in supporting individuals experiencing acute psychosis, altered states, and severe psychological overwhelm without escalating fear or trauma. That training is directly relevant to Katie’s current situation. Most taking this training are psychologists, therapists, social workers, counselors, nurses and medical professionals. I attended as the Teacher of the course is a dear friend and therapist of those given the schizophrenic label who I also have the support of if I ever need it.

Additional professional background includes formal mindfulness teacher training, hospice support work, trauma-informed facilitation, preschool education, co-counseling, and decades of direct peer-support and crisis-support experience with individuals and families navigating severe mental health challenges. The founders of Mindful schools are also friends I can call anytime I need them to help me through any tough states.

My husband, Scotford, studied at Oxford University in England, studied philosophy and after spent 13 years caring for his father who was labeled schizophrenic. Together we currently support approximately 250 families navigating schizophrenia-spectrum diagnoses and related crises. Families regularly contact us specifically because traditional systems have failed to stabilize or humanely support their loved ones. We are in regular communication with 20+ families and over 255 people have subscribed to my writings around the topic.

I am currently completing a book focused on alternative approaches to supporting individuals labeled schizophrenic, drawing from psychiatric research, international outcomes data, lived experience, and 25 years of direct field experience.

In addition to my professional background, I have lived with mental health crisis environments since childhood. My mother experienced severe panic disorder, attempted suicide while Katie and I were there. Katie was 13 I was 11. She had medication dependency, and chronic emotional instability requiring nearly daily intervention from family members. Navigating psychological crisis is not unfamiliar territory to me. It is work I have been immersed in for most of my life.

The evening before the court hearing, I arrived in Roseville to find my father in an acute post-operative psychotic state and a highly escalated conflict occurring between both of my parents. This was the first time seeing my father like this and we are close. He has Parkinson’s, his arms were flailing, body moving all around, sweating, my mother and him yelling at each other. He was completely delusional. Rather than contributing to the escalation, I calmly intervened, separated the situation, helped regulate my father, addressed the immediate needs contributing to the distress, and de-escalated the interaction within minutes. Managing highly emotional and psychologically unstable situations in a calm, grounded, and effective manner is something I have extensive experience doing both professionally and personally.

We ended up taking my father to the emergency room and he had pneumonia.

I can provide references from former colleagues, school administrators, community leaders, and families we currently support who can directly speak to my ability to remain calm, functional, and effective during highly escalated emotional situations.

I have spent my entire adult life doing this work.

My husband said them knowing wouldn’t have mattered, that what the psychiatrist says goes. A judge is never going to overrule a psychiatrist, when it is the word of a state psychiatrist vs the word of a sister. I still argue with them in my head and wish I knew more. I wish I said more things, I wish I was more prepared and had more than 24 hours notice. I wish she was here next to me and I was telling you stories of what we have been up to.

But life continues and now I’m on a mission to learn as much as I can and continue to try my best help the Right and Just outcome prevail.

I will continue to share anything I learn along this road and put it in the book. If you are ever going to court I am very open to talking it out with you before.

Maybe you don’t know if you want them to stay in or get out.

Maybe you want to get them out and give it your best shot.

Do not go into that courtroom unprepared.

We are here. We may not have the answers but we will brainstorm with you, research the laws where you are with you and be there helping you get the best possible outcome for your Coyote.

May all our coyotes be happy. May all our coyotes feel safe. May all our coyotes know they are loved. May all our coyotes be free from suffering.

Weekly Zoom Meeting : Honoring Our Coyotes

Every Thursday whoever wants to come joins the zoom and we talk. We love hearing about other coyotes as they are our favorite group of humans on the planet. For most of us we didn’t and don’t have many other families around us who really get what walking this path is like. It has felt nice, for us at least, to laugh, to listen, to cry, to get angry, to see we aren’t alone and support each other which in turn supports the coyotes we love.

All are welcome and you don’t have to talk or even show your face.

Zoom Meeting Link: Click Here

5:00pm PST — 6:00pm Mountain — 7:00pm Central — 8:00pm EST

Meeting ID: 825 8750 2181

Passcode: 1234567

Let’s brainstorm around what may be helpful for your Coyote!

We don’t have all the answers, but we do have years of lived experience and a lot of ideas to share. Some of what we offer may resonate, some may not. But we’re here to think alongside you. This is not just for you, this is for your Coyote as well. We know how deeply this world can misunderstand them and we love helping families build bridges between themselves and their Coyote.

Send us an email and we can set up a time to talk.

WalkingWithCoyotes@gmail.com

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I didn’t get my sister.

Her LSP conservator called the night before and said, “I know we told you she is good to go, and we were so excited for you to have her, but a psychiatrist she has met 2x talked with her and doesn’t think she should be released. You are going to have to fight us for her.”

It’s a horrible disgusting, dehumanizing system. Keep your children out of there at all costs.

Only if they are hurting themselves or others should you call. And try a crisis hotline before the police.

There are crisis lines for people in psychosis specifically. I’m not talking about your local crisis team. Most of them aren’t trained yet how to be with this population and will end up calling the police.

Like they did with my sister even though she never hurt anyone.

Ugh…

I’m trying my best to move past this and have moments I do. I’m just crushed. Had a summer planned with her.

A safe home where people tell her how much they love her everyday.

I wanted to see how she did here. The first place since her change where the people around her won’t be looking at her as sick and broken in some way. And yes J did look at her that way for years. I do not now. At all.

I wanted her to feel free and respected and seen.

I will write more later I just keep crying when I go to write what happened.

Email me if you have court soon and want to brainstorm. They told me they needed ABCDE, I had that, they didn’t care because the psych was a “professional” who I’m sure 30 years ago was recommending this population to be electrocuted.

I would have gone about it differently had I known better.

My sister did everything right.

I love you sis.

I feel like I failed you. If I had only known how it was going to go. I’m so sorry this world doesn’t see how special and sensitive you are. I’m sorry they call you “crazy” because they won’t learn the language you speak.

I am so sorry.

No zoom tonight but if you need to talk I can do one on ones.

Love you all and the coyotes in your life.

Weekly class CANCELLED May 7th!

Why you ask?

I’m Bringing My Coyote Home!!

Welcome to Walking with Coyotes:

For those new here, the metaphor is this: there are dogs and coyotes. Dogs follow the rules, they live within the law and order of the day: they try their best to fit in. Coyotes do not follow the laws of the dog-world. They are dancing to a song the dogs cannot hear.

When we say “coyote” we mean the ones our culture tends to label, to pathologize, to walk around. They are the ones we do not understand, the ones in our culture who are shrouded in mystery.

They are the ones diagnosed with “schizophrenia.” On the surface, they are wild-eyed, unpredictable, Other: but underneath they are present, tapped-in, Conscious.

Tomorrow I drive three hours to bring my coyote home from the hospital. She has been there for months.

Activities of the day? Breakfast, lunch and dinner where no one talks to each other. Then they sit in front of the TV for the rest of the time. Every once in a while there is an art activity. They have a short group meeting every day. The outside space is about 20 x 20 feet with some picnic tables.

To say I am excited to get her out of there and with me is an understatement.

I have been trying to control my mind. Trying not to think about how deeply disturbing our system is. What “help” looks like for this population. What my sister does during the day only brings me sadness not a sense of hope.

We treat them like caged animals and then reprimand them when they act as such. What human being would that be good for?

There are many countries now using a different approach. One where they treat them like humans. They listen. They listen to the voices and ask what message is trying to come through. They see who this person is, what has happened for them in their past and they attend to it. Instead of telling them they are delusional, tying them down and drugging them. There is some progress happening but it’s slow.

Such a barbaric system we have built here. And it’s what we have to work with. At least they aren’t trying to electrocute the wild out of them anymore.

This system we have now does not honor or respect our coyotes. They tells us they are broken and need to be fixed immediately or it will only be down hill from here. Most doctors talk to our coyotes as though they have never actually met one before. And I can see clearly why our coyotes don’t trust them. Doctors don’t understand them.

I have been in psychosis. And now that I know what it is like from the inside, I think most doctors are out of their minds to approach it the way they do. At least the ones I have seen, heard about and worked with over the past 27 years. Don’t get me wrong. There are diamonds in the rough. But they are few and very far between.

So yes. Tomorrow I will pick up my coyote. And I will be nervous. I will have to smile and agree and tell them they did a good job and that this was a good idea for her.

I won’t yell at them. I won’t point out that she isn’t as happy as she was. That she isn’t laughing with her friends I couldn’t see the way she used to, completely entertained by her own magnificent mind. I won’t tell them I don’t find it funny when they laugh at the things she says, as though she is so delusional it’s amusing. I laugh at things she says because it’s unique, different, adorable and I’m curious what she is trying to express underneath.

I won’t say to them: when she tells you she has many homes, she is trying to tell you she has worth somewhere, because here she feels worthless. When she tells you she wants to go to college, she is trying to be something she thinks you want her to be. You are telling her what matters in this world. And what you are telling her is: her being happy doesn’t matter, not if you are saying things this culture doesn’t understand. Singing The Little Mermaid in the middle of the street at 2am is not okay even though you looked like you were in pure bliss. But grinding, not loving your life, being a part of a broken system and stressing yourself out. That is where we want you.

She never used to sing with joy and bliss before I changed how I was with her. It was so beautiful to me. For her to not only be in darkness and seriousness but to truly fully express joy which I hadn’t seen in years, that was okay with me.

The number one regret of people lying on their deathbeds, from Bronnie Ware’s book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: “I wish I had cared less about what others thought of me so I could have lived a life more true to myself.”

One of the things I love most about her is I know she won’t have this regret because she can’t help but be her complete self all the time. I mean when she is drugged she cares a lot more about what others think, but her soul doesn’t. She doesn’t when she is free.

My sister is like the great poet Hafiz. Or she can be if she isn’t paranoid from a world that handled her all wrong. Drinking wine, dancing with God, writing poetry, making art, waking up when she wants, laughing, talking to spirits and little animals, existing with no pressure from the outside world other than to listen and to enjoy being alive. I love seeing her like that. She is beautiful to me.

How much of our coyotes’ pain comes simply from not being able to exist in a world that goes against who they are at their core?

I will pick her up tomorrow and while there is a sadness in my heart for how all of this went down, for how things are run in this culture, I cannot wait to have her home.

I deeply regret how I approached her all those years before I knew. The shame lives in me when I think about it. I made it about me. I saw her when she was “doing good” but I didn’t see or love all of her when she wasn’t. I didn’t allow all of her. I resisted every bad mood. Thought it was the beginning of the next tragedy.

I know it was my approach and not anything else, because everyone who stayed the same, who didn’t learn to be with her differently, who didn’t listen when I begged them to try another way, she still treats them the same. But I changed how I looked at her, how I thought of her, how I treated her and everything changed.

And isn’t there a little of insanity in that? You are the one labeled “mentally ill” and expected to change. I am the one who is supposedly well and I am going to keep treating you exactly the way I always have, expecting a different result. We put all the pressure on the person we’ve already decided is broken to be the one who does the work of transformation. Weird right?

Can you tell I’m protective and annoyed at the culture? Ha!

I am just a HUGE fan of hers. My husband and I both are. He taught me how to be with her. I sometimes call him the Coyote Whisperer because it was incredible how naturally he understood this population. He learned it caring for his coyote father for 13 years. He just got it. Now I get it. Which doesn’t mean the wildness stops, it just means we know how to dance with it much better.

We had a blast with her when she was in psychosis. Do doctors ever tell you that is possible? Do they tell you how you can be with someone in psychosis in a relaxed way? Do they tell you that your own calm or positive energy is the most important thing you can offer someone in that state? That quiet positive environments and plenty of alone time can actually help a lot? Did they tell you anything?

Because they didn’t tell me anything.

We were in the garage where she liked to stay most of the time, singing and dancing for hours to Disney songs, Motown, old 90’s hits and all the other songs we grew up with that I put on a playlist for us. We laughed a lot together. She wasn’t going to take her meds so, may as well dance with her. We couldn’t have more than a one sentence conversation about anything in the dog world, but I didn’t mind. I find her fascinating and refreshing. Truly unpredictable and has a mind that is all her own. And she was happy.

So, tomorrow I will put on my dog world outfit and say the right things to get her home. I will keep her on her meds so they don’t take her from me. And I will make sure she knows: this was not your fault. That was them, not you. That was cruel and you did not deserve it. And I will do everything I can to make sure you never go back there.

And she will probably say, “Jennifer. Too much. I just want to make some eclairs.”

Because she is a coyote. She doesn’t think the way I do. She doesn’t want to ruminate on anything too dog world. She just wants to be loved and to exist the way she was made to exist, and I will do my very best to give her a safe place to do exactly that.

This will be the first time in her life she will be living in a home where everyone sees her as perfect and whole, no matter what state she is in. With the help of a dear Coyote protector friend, I am finally able to have her with me. Thank you dear friend for giving me the biggest gift one could give, you know who you are.

I don’t know how it will go. She is still a coyote, after all. But I know I will be able to love her no matter what, and tell her every single day, “I love that you are here. My life is better with you in it.”

Which is something she has never had before.

See you soon my love.

*New category in the resource section below; Songs That Help Us Process shared by a couple of beautiful mothers I have had the honor of meeting here.

Let’s brainstorm around what may be helpful for your Coyote

We don’t have all the answers, but we do have years of lived experience and a lot of ideas to share. Some of what we offer may resonate, some may not — but we’re here to think alongside you.

If you can’t make the weekly meeting, or if you attended and would like some extra support, we have added some of our available free time to the calendar for one-on-one conversations. This helps us plan ahead and creates space for something we love — helping families build bridges between themselves and their coyote.

Everything is free. We’re simply here to support and to offer what we wish we had when we started off on this wild road.

You can schedule a time here:

Link: Our Calendar

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Resources

Below is our growing reference list. If you know of any websites, books, songs, training, or YouTube resources etc that might help families, please send them to us so we can add them for everyone.

Browse By Category: Links Below

1. Trainings & Practical Support
   -Zendo Project

2. Nutrition, Physical & Lifestyle Health
   -Matt Griffo

3. Community & Alternative Mental Health Approaches
   -Hearing Voices Network
   -Compassionate Mental Health

4. Spiritual / Metaphysical Perspectives
   -Psychosis or Spiritual Awakening (25 min. Video) – Phil Borges
   -Crazywise (Film)
   -Schizophrenia: A Spiritual Awakening (Book) — Patricia Carlisle

5. Personal Stories & Lived Experience (Recovery / Meaning-Making)
   -The Voices in My Head (14 min. Video) — Eleanor Longden
   -Schizophrenia: The Positive Perspective (Book) — Peter Chadwick, PhD

6. Psychological & Reframing Perspectives
   -Rethinking Madness (Book) — Paris Williams
   -The Divided Self (Book) — R.D. Laing

7. Creativity, Expression & Inner Worl
   -The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (Book) — John MacGregor

8. Advocacy & Awareness Organizations

   -National Shattering Silence Coalition (NCSS)

9. Songs That Help us Process

   -Can’t Touch His Soul -It’s about what couldn’t be taken. His Soul.

   -His Truth. His Story. -15 years trapped in the system

   -While You’re Still Here - Grieving someone while they are still here

   -Run Away to Mars - For those who don’t feel they belong and the ones who love them.

1. Training & Practical Support

Zendo Training

Link to Zendo

If your loved one’s psychosis sometimes feels overwhelming, the Zendo Project offers helpful guidance on how to stay calm and supportive when someone is in an altered state.

Although they began with psychedelic peer support, their approach is now being used by crisis teams and families because psychosis can feel very similar. They offer a free introductory training you can sign up for on their homepage, and deeper training if you want to learn more. I took the training and highly recommend it to anyone who feels rattled when your love one is in Psychosis.

2. Nutrition, Physical & Lifestyle Health

Matt Griffo

Matt Griffo shares resources about mental and physical health through nutrition, movement, mindfulness, and lifestyle changes. After years of severe CPTSD symptoms. He began exploring how diet and overall health affect the brain and immune system. Matt now shares his personal journey, research, and practical tools, and encourages families to explore how nutrition and lifestyle changes may support mental health and reduce symptoms for many people.

Link : Start here with Matt

3. Community & Alternative Mental Health Approaches

Hearing Voices Network

The Hearing Voices Movement is an international grassroots movement that aims to shift public and professional attitudes toward experiences. Such as hearing voices and seeing visions that are generally associated with psychosis.

How Common Is It?

Statistics vary, but it’s generally accepted that between 3% and 10% of the population hear voices that other people don’t. If you include one-off experiences (like hearing someone call your name when you’re out shopping, or feeling your phone vibrate in your pocket) this figure goes up to 75%.

So, having at least one experience of hearing or seeing something that others around you don’t is incredibly common. Those who have never had this experience are in the minority.

A number of famous and important people (past and present) have experienced hearing or seeing things that other people don’t. Without these people, the world would be a very different place.

Some well-known individuals who have spoken about hearing voices include:

Gandhi, Socrates, Joan of Arc, Freud, Anthony Hopkins, Philip K. Dick, John Frusciante, Carlos Santana, Robert Schumann, John Forbes Nash, Zoë Wanamaker, and Charles Dickens.

Link : Hearing Voices Network UK

Link: Hearing Voices Network USA

Compassionate Mental Health

Compassionate Mental Health is part of a growing movement working to change how we understand and respond to mental distress. Their work focuses on compassion, community, and listening to the lived experiences of people who have gone through mental health crises.

Through training, gatherings, and educational programs, they explore more holistic approaches that emphasize connection, meaning, and social support alongside traditional care. The references on their website are great.

Compassionate Mental Health Website

4. Spiritual / Metaphysical Perspectives

Psychosis or Spiritual Awakening

Phil Borges, filmmaker and photographer, has been documenting Indigenous and tribal cultures for over 25 years. His work is exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide, and his documentary film CRAZYWISE explores what can be learned from individuals who have turned psychological crises into positive transformative experiences. He spoke about some of his findings in the Ted Talk below.

Link : Watch Ted Talk Here

Crazywise

Crazy…or wise? The traditional wisdom of indigenous cultures often contradicts modern views about a mental health crisis. Is it a ‘calling’ to grow or just a ‘broken brain’? The documentary CRAZYWISE explores what can be learned from people around the world who have turned their psychological crisis into a positive transformative experience.

Link : Crazywise Documentary

📘 Schizophrenia: A Spiritual Awakening — Patricia Carlisle

• Directly explores psychosis through a spiritual lens

• Looks at how these experiences may be misunderstood awakenings

5. Personal Stories & Lived Experience (Recovery / Meaning-Making)

The Voices in My Head | Eleanor Longden

To all appearances, Eleanor Longden was just like every other student — heading to college full of promise and without a care in the world. That was until the voices in her head started talking.

Initially innocuous, these internal narrators became increasingly antagonistic and dictatorial, turning her life into a living nightmare. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, hospitalized, and drugged, Longden was discarded by a system that didn’t know how to help her.

Longden tells the moving story of her years-long journey back to mental health and makes the case that learning to listen to her voices helped her survive.

Link : Watch Ted Talk Here

📘 Schizophrenia: The Positive Perspective — Peter Chadwick

• Written by someone who experienced psychosis himself

• Explores how these experiences can relate to growth, meaning, and even insight into reality

• Doesn’t deny difficulty, but refuses to see it as “just illness”

6. Psychological & Reframing Perspectives

📘 Rethinking Madness — Paris Williams

• A really powerful re-framing of psychosis

• Suggests that under the right conditions, these experiences can lead to positive transformation—not just pathology

• Talks about society’s role in making things worse vs. better

📘 The Divided Self — R.D. Laing

• A classic (a bit older, but very influential)

• Tries to make “madness” understandable, human, and connected to real life experiences

• Challenges the idea that people are just “disordered”

7. Creativity, Expression & Inner World

📘 The Discovery of the Art of the Insane — John MacGregor

• Focuses on art created by people labeled schizophrenic

• Shows the depth, brilliance, and creative power in their inner worlds

👉 This one doesn’t just tell you—they show you

8. Advocacy & Awareness Organizations

🏛️ National Shattering Silence Coalition (NSSC)

• Born from the urgent need to dismantle systemic neglect and discrimination blocking public health reform

• A community of action — survivors, advocates, and industry professionals united

• Turning shared family experience into a national standard for medical accountability. Not a passive observer. A force.

• Join if you’re ready to turn what your family lived through into something that protects the next one.

  9. Songs That Help Us Process

• Can't Touch His Soul (click on the titles to watch)
  This song was written from my perspective as a mother who has walked beside her son through systems that were never designed to truly see him.
  There have been labels.
  There have been institutions.
  There have been moments where fear, control, and misunderstanding tried to define who he is.
  But this song isn’t about what was done to him.
  It’s about what couldn’t be taken.
  His soul.
  I’ve watched my son endure things that would have broken many people, yet beneath all of it, his essence has remained intact. Creative. Sensitive. Powerful. Untouchable. This song is my way of saying what I’ve always known in my bones: no matter how loud the world gets, no matter how hard it tries to shape him into something he’s not, his soul was never up for grabs.
  This is a love song.
  A protection song.
  A witnessing.
  If you’ve ever loved someone who didn’t fit the system, who was misunderstood, over managed, or pathologized, this song is for you too.
  May it remind you of something unbreakable within the ones you love. And within yourself.
  Thank you for listening.
  Thank you for holding this with care.
  Candace

• His Truth. His Story.

  “I’m sharing a glimpse of my son's song, 'The Seer.' The lyrics were written by me, giving a voice to his experience and AI helped bring them to life in music. This song tells his story—15 years trapped in a system, overmedicated, dehumanized, unheard.

• 
  Listen. Witness. Allow his voice to be heard.
  
  This song was written for my son.

• While Your Still Here

  “Some grief doesn’t come with a goodbye. It happens while the person you love is still here, but changed by illness, addiction, or trauma. As caregivers, we’re often expected to stay strong and hopeful, even when our hearts are breaking quietly.
  This song gives that kind of grief a voice — not to stay there, but to finally let it be seen. Heartbreak and hope can exist at the same time. If this resonates, you’re not alone.”

• Run Away to Mars

  This song was shared with us from a mother who lost her Coyote this last year. Before he passed this became their song. She said he spoke of belonging to the stars and has returned. We love you Bryce.

  This song I feel speaks for our coyotes and the lengths we would go for them. They have been trying to run away to Mars their whole lives, not because they don't love us, but because this world was not built for them. The noise, the pressure, the expectations. Of course they want to escape. Of course they dream of somewhere farther away.

Welcome to Walking with Coyotes:

For those new here, when we say “coyote” we mean the ones our culture tends to label, to pathologize, to walk around.

They are the ones diagnosed with “schizophrenia” (and the like). On the surface, they are wild-eyed, unpredictable, Other: but underneath they are present, tapped in, Conscious.

Misread by nearly everyone, avoided by most, they are authentic, — and though hard to find in our world of masquerade and image, authenticity to us is a Superpower. Authenticity is like that one wildflower growing through the crack in a canyon wall. Nobody planted it, nothing invited it, and it is the most alive thing in the canyon.

Give Yourself an Actual Break — Call a Time Out

To all the Coyote care givers out there we salute you. It is not a job for the weak. To care for someone so fragile and often feisty, that the whole world shuns is holy work or at least that’s how we see it.

So why is it so important to take care of ourselves?

As we know, our Coyotes are deeply sensitive to the energies of the people around them. They feel your nervous system before you open your mouth. Which means when you walk into the room dysregulated, stressed, judging them, exhausted, or angry, they feel that. And because they feel everything at a higher volume than most people, your bad day has a way of becoming their bad day, which can become a shitty day for everyone fast.

Taking care of yourself is part of taking care of them. I’ve noticed with the coyotes in my life, almost without fail, if I am in a mood they feel it deeply. I can be angry at someone or something else and then they snap at me because anger is in the air. So self care not only gives us a chance to breathe and have a different experience for a few moments, but it also helps them calm. 2 storms does not equal calm seas.

Let us remember pulling our hair out is not on the self-care list.

Here are some possibly helpful self care tips you can try if you choose. Many of these help us daily on this wild journey.

1. Music. This is one of the fastest ways to shift your nervous system. Science even says so. Listening to music you love releases dopamine, lowers cortisol, and can move you out of a stress response faster than almost anything else. Put on something that makes you feel good and just let it do its work.

Something that a friend told me about that was new to me, easy to do and helpful was to listen to Binaural Beats. I looked it up and it seems if you put on headphones and listen to them, it makes different sounds in each ear to balance you in a way that activates the vagus nerve and helps us calm down. I swear science is figuring out everything these days. You can find hundreds of free tracks on YouTube. Search "theta binaural beats for anxiety" or "delta binaural beats for sleep".

2. Sit in your car and do nothing. No social media. No running errands. Just sit. Five minutes of truly doing nothing can resets the nervous system. Any change of scenery can be helpful and you don’t need to go far for that to happen.

3. Try meditating. Despite popular belief, meditation is not about clearing your mind or finding some blissful state of peace. It is simply about being with what is, without fighting it. Being aware of this moment, what’s happening and not being lost in the past or future.

It might look like: “This moment is hard and I am sitting in my car noticing the breath going in and out of my nose, I’m looking at 3 trees, the sky and I can feel my feet on touching the floor.”

Our minds are constantly assessing, planning, bracing, replaying, especially if we are in survival mode. And extra especially if you had a bit of trauma of your own growing up. Then it’s highly likely you are in fight, flight or freeze oftten.

Learning to just be with what is takes practice. You literally need a second to BREATHE sometimes, but if your mind is always busy you will never feel the relief of taking those breaths.

There are thousands of free guided meditations on YouTube. The Calm app is an easy place to start. Start small. Even two minutes can help bring more present moments into our whole life. And as they say in mindfulness teachings, when we are present we have more of a choice between stimulus and our response to that stimulus. What coyote caretaker couldn’t use a little more of that?

4. Cry. Actually cry. Cortisol the stress hormone releases when we cry. Holding back tears is not strong, it’s a learned defense mechanism and it keeps the stress that wants to come out inside of you. Your body knows what it’s doing. Let it.

5. Call one person who you feel close to. Human connection activates the vagus nerve which is the main highway of your parasympathetic nervous system. The part responsible for calming you down. I heard someone on Instagram say to text a friend and say, “Do you have 7 minutes?” and that means I just need an ear for a few minutes. To listen, to connect to another reality than the one I have been in. It lets the friend know this won’t be an hour long conversation, they don’t need to fix you, you just need a second to have someone there for you because many of us are spending so much of our time and energy being there for our little coyote. Most humans want to be there for their friends when they can. Let them be.

6. Go outside. Even for five minutes. Nature lowers cortisol levels, reduces blood pressure, and decreases activity in the part of the brain associated with spiraling — the part that keeps replaying the hard moments. Studies show that grass under your bare feet actually does help regulate your nervous system. This is called grounding or earthing. Your body absorbs the earth’s natural electromagnetic energy through direct contact with the ground.

While your out there hug some trees. Yes really. It sounds woo woo, it is woo woo and the research shows, the hippies were right all along.

Trees release natural compounds called phytoncides into the air around them and when you breathe these in, they actually lower your stress hormones and boost your immune system. Hugging a tree also triggers a big increase in oxytocin, the same bonding hormone your body makes when you feel close to someone. The physical contact of pressing your body against something solid and natural pulls you out of your head and into the present moment.

So go be a hippie and take care of yourself. And if your coyote sees you hugging a tree and thinks you are a weirdo, it’s likely they will feel closer to you.

7. Move your body. Trauma and stress live in the body. Movement helps move them through. Walk. Dance. Do ten jumping jacks. Shake your hands out. Stretch.

Even small amounts of physical activity can help. Being active for short periods of time throughout the day can help make a difference with depression and anxiety symptoms. You do not need a gym or a plan. Just set a timer or put on 4 songs and don’t stop moving.

8. Eat something that makes you feel good. When we are stressed we either forget to eat or we reach for things that spike and crash our blood sugar and leave us feeling worse. A piece of fruit. Some protein. Something that feels good for your body. Your brain cannot regulate emotion effectively when it is running on fumes and caffeine. Not saying we are always the best at that. Sometimes we feel over stuffing our faces with donuts is exactly what is needed to help numb out a hard day. It may not be a long term solution but in the short term it does slow me down and can make me tired which helps with sleep. We won’t judge.

9. Take a bath or a long shower. There is actual research on this — immersion in warm water activates the same neural pathways as social connection. It is called the warmth-safety association. Your body reads warmth as safety. Which makes sense why being in Hawaii feels extra lovely.

10. Write it down. Not to figure anything out, just to get it out of your head. Studies show that expressive writing for as little as fifteen minutes reduces anxiety, improves immune function, and helps people make sense of overwhelming experiences. You don't have to understand it. Just move it from the inside to the outside.

11. Say no to something. Some days you should say no to all things. This path can have us in fight or flight a lot in the beginning and who we were before isn’t who we are able to be at time. Let people down. Say no. Choose yourself first. We give you full permission and if you need a note to excuse you from anything we got you.

12. Let someone help you. This is the hardest one for most humans. For years I had such a hard time asking people for help. I didn’t want to bother anyone. I didn’t want to cause anyone any stress. In hindsight who I was actually caused people a lot of stress, ha! But it wasn’t because I was asking for too much help.

Here are some things we support asking for help with. Or another way to say it, is to allow people to show up for you.

Let someone bring you a meal. Do your dishes. Clean the bathroom. Dust. Research ways to help your coyote. Make phone calls for you. Go for a walk with you or your coyote. See if your work has mental health days and let them pay for that. Let someone pick up someone from school. Let them pay for your groceries or shop for you. Let them pay a bill. Let them give you a hug. Let them____.

Courage doesn’t mean it’s comfortable. Courage only comes in when something is uncomfortable and we do it anyways.

13. Laugh. Watch something mindless and funny. Call the friend who is good at making light of things. Laughter releases endorphins, reduces stress hormones and reminds your nervous system that the world is not entirely made of hard things. You are allowed to laugh. I laugh at things my coyote says all the time. I told them it was 6:30 and they wanted to cook at 6. To which my coyote replied, “No I don’t think so but when 5 o’clock clicks I’ll start cooking.” or when our coyote told my husband not to use a hammer in the shower. He had never used one in the shower before and we were grateful for the tip.

14. Sleep. For some this is easier said than done. Especially when our coyote is in psychosis the first few times. I am very comfortable now but for years it was so new and sometimes scary. Even if I wasn’t in harm’s way I didn’t know that yet. It was all so new.

But chronic sleep deprivation impairs emotional regulation. It makes everything harder — including being patient, staying calm, and not taking things personally. If you cannot get a full night, take a nap if you are able. Go to bed earlier than feels reasonable. Turn off the electronics earlier. You need sleep. Car naps are fine too.

15. Get your own therapy or support. Not family therapy. Not crisis counseling. A space that’s just for you where someone asks how you are doing and listens. Caregivers who have their own support are measurably more effective, more patient, more at ease and less likely to burn out. There are a lot of cheaper online therapies as well you can google that take all kinds of insurance. My doctor recommended meds and I said, “No I would rather try to look at this and see if there is something else going on first. Meds will be a last resort.” and he recommended me for therapy easy peasy. I had to try a couple therapists before I found one I liked which is good to know you can do. Don’t say “therapy isn’t for me” because you don’t like the therapist.

And if you are not comfortable with that at all try ChatGPT. I used it recently processing some childhood trauma and it was better than most therapy I have had. I told it everything I was going through from childhood to now and it told me how to deal with it. Very helpful for my healing process.

16. Forgive yourself. For yelling, for not knowing, for calling the police, for making it harder on them, for making it harder on you, for not knowing how to ask for help, for saying the wrong thing. For losing your patience, or the thing you said wrong yesterday. For not knowing what to do. There are some crisis workers trained in this and are still terrible at handling our coyotes.

You are doing something VERY hard with little guidance from the culture. So be gentle with yourself if you can. Give yourself a break.

None of us could have known how hard, beautiful or relentless this path can feel and here you are still showing up. Doing your best. Reading some random persons thoughts during your day because you are and have always been, doing your very best with the tools that you have.

Now go be a hippie. Hug a tree, take a breath and know that you are not alone in this. The pack is with you.

Weekly Zoom Meeting : Honoring Our Coyotes

Every Thursday whoever wants to come joins the zoom and we talk.

This week we are going to be sending loving and positive energy to the coyotes in our life. Take a moment for each one.

Which matters because EVERYTHING is energy.

Albert Einstein: “Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality.”

Nikola Tesla: “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”

David Hawkins — psychiatrist and author of Power vs Force: “Every thought, action, decision or feeling creates an eddy in the interlocking, inter-balancing energy fields of life.”

This group of humans doesn’t get a lot of praise or love from the world so we are going to send them some in hopes they feel it. If you can’t make it but would like your Coyotes name put into the mix, send me their name and where they are so we can picture them. If you want to send me a photo of them I can share that too.

Zoom Meeting Link: Click Here

5:00pm PST — 6:00pm Mountain — 7:00pm Central — 8:00pm EST

Meeting ID: 825 8750 2181

Passcode: 1234567

Let’s brainstorm around what may be helpful for your Coyote!

We don’t have all the answers, but we do have years of lived experience and a lot of ideas to share. Some of what we offer may resonate, some may not — but we’re here to think alongside you.

If you can’t make the weekly meeting, or if you attended and would like some extra support, we have added some of our available free time to the calendar for one-on-one conversations. This helps us plan ahead and creates space for something we love — helping families build bridges between themselves and their coyote.

Everything is free. We’re simply here to support and to offer what we wish we had when we started off on this wild road.

Heads up: We will be bringing our Coyote to live with us in 9 days so we have less time on the calendar for the next couple weeks and then we will have more space open up.

You can schedule a time here:

Link: Our Calendar

Subscribe now

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References

Below is our growing reference list. If you know of any websites, books, songs, training, or YouTube resources etc that might help families, please send them to us so we can add them for everyone.

Browse By Category: Links Below

1. Trainings & Practical Support
   -Zendo Project

   -Webinar on May 5th Empire of Madness: Reimagining Western Mental Health Care for Everyone

2. Nutrition, Physical & Lifestyle Health
   -Matt Griffo

3. Community & Alternative Mental Health Approaches
   -Hearing Voices Network
   -Compassionate Mental Health

4. Spiritual / Metaphysical Perspectives
   -Psychosis or Spiritual Awakening (25 min. Video) – Phil Borges
   -Crazywise (Film)
   -Schizophrenia: A Spiritual Awakening (Book) — Patricia Carlisle

5. Personal Stories & Lived Experience (Recovery / Meaning-Making)
   -The Voices in My Head (14 min. Video) — Eleanor Longden
   -Schizophrenia: The Positive Perspective (Book) — Peter Chadwick, PhD

6. Psychological & Reframing Perspectives
   -Rethinking Madness (Book) — Paris Williams
   -The Divided Self (Book) — R.D. Laing

7. Creativity, Expression & Inner World
   -The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (Book) — John MacGregor

8. Advocacy & Awareness Organizations

   -National Shattering Silence Coalition (NCSS)

1. Training & Practical Support

Zendo Training

Link to Zendo

If your loved one’s psychosis sometimes feels overwhelming, the Zendo Project offers helpful guidance on how to stay calm and supportive when someone is in an altered state.

Although they began with psychedelic peer support, their approach is now being used by crisis teams and families because psychosis can feel very similar. They offer a free introductory training you can sign up for on their homepage, and deeper trainings if you want to learn more.

Empire of Madness: Reimagining Western Mental Health Care for Everyone

May 5, 2026

Join ISPS-US for an engaging webinar featuring author Dr. Khameer Kidia and his urgent new book, Empire of Madness: Reimagining Western Mental Health Care for Everyone. A Rhodes Scholar and Harvard physician-anthropologist, Dr. Kidia fundamentally re-evaluates the Western approach to mental health, which often focuses on medicating individual symptoms while ignoring the exploitative societal systems, from debt and housing insecurity to the psychological effects of colonialism, that cause widespread distress.

Through readings from the book and an insightful author chat, we will explore Kidia’s nuanced questions: How do history, culture, and politics shape mental distress? Can social interventions like cash payments replace pills for those in poverty? And what lessons can we draw from global mental health care approaches, particularly in poorer countries, where outcomes for conditions like schizophrenia are sometimes surprisingly better without relying solely on Western-style psychopharmacology? This event invites clinicians, caregivers, and people with lived experience to consider a truly global and mutual vision of wellbeing that prioritizes structural change alongside clinical care.

• Can’t attend live? The webinar will be recorded and sent to all registrants.

  Link to Webinar: Click Here

2. Nutrition, Physical & Lifestyle Health

Matt Griffo

Matt Griffo shares resources about mental and physical health through nutrition, movement, mindfulness, and lifestyle changes. After years of severe CPTSD symptoms. He began exploring how diet and overall health affect the brain and immune system. Matt now shares his personal journey, research, and practical tools, and encourages families to explore how nutrition and lifestyle changes may support mental health and reduce symptoms for many people.

Link : Start here with Matt

3. Community & Alternative Mental Health Approaches

Hearing Voices Network

The Hearing Voices Movement is an international grassroots movement that aims to shift public and professional attitudes toward experiences. Such as hearing voices and seeing visions that are generally associated with psychosis.

How Common Is It?

Statistics vary, but it’s generally accepted that between 3% and 10% of the population hear voices that other people don’t. If you include one-off experiences (like hearing someone call your name when you’re out shopping, or feeling your phone vibrate in your pocket) this figure goes up to 75%.

So, having at least one experience of hearing or seeing something that others around you don’t is incredibly common. Those who have never had this experience are in the minority.

A number of famous and important people (past and present) have experienced hearing or seeing things that other people don’t. Without these people, the world would be a very different place.

Some well-known individuals who have spoken about hearing voices include:
Gandhi, Socrates, Joan of Arc, Freud, Anthony Hopkins, Philip K. Dick, John Frusciante, Carlos Santana, Robert Schumann, John Forbes Nash, Zoë Wanamaker, and Charles Dickens.

Link : Hearing Voices Network UK

Link: Hearing Voices Network USA

Compassionate Mental Health

Compassionate Mental Health is part of a growing movement working to change how we understand and respond to mental distress. Their work focuses on compassion, community, and listening to the lived experiences of people who have gone through mental health crises.

Through training, gatherings, and educational programs, they explore more holistic approaches that emphasize connection, meaning, and social support alongside traditional care. The references on their website are great.

Compassionate Mental Health Website

4. Spiritual / Metaphysical Perspectives

Psychosis or Spiritual Awakening

Phil Borges, filmmaker and photographer, has been documenting Indigenous and tribal cultures for over 25 years. His work is exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide, and his documentary film CRAZYWISE explores what can be learned from individuals who have turned psychological crises into positive transformative experiences. He spoke about some of his findings in the Ted Talk below.

Link : Watch Ted Talk Here

Crazywise

Crazy…or wise? The traditional wisdom of indigenous cultures often contradicts modern views about a mental health crisis. Is it a ‘calling’ to grow or just a ‘broken brain’? The documentary CRAZYWISE explores what can be learned from people around the world who have turned their psychological crisis into a positive transformative experience.

Link : Crazywise Documentary

📘 Schizophrenia: A Spiritual Awakening — Patricia Carlisle

• Directly explores psychosis through a spiritual lens

• Looks at how these experiences may be misunderstood awakenings

5. Personal Stories & Lived Experience (Recovery / Meaning-Making)

The Voices in My Head | Eleanor Longden

To all appearances, Eleanor Longden was just like every other student — heading to college full of promise and without a care in the world. That was until the voices in her head started talking.

Initially innocuous, these internal narrators became increasingly antagonistic and dictatorial, turning her life into a living nightmare. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, hospitalized, and drugged, Longden was discarded by a system that didn’t know how to help her.

Longden tells the moving story of her years-long journey back to mental health and makes the case that learning to listen to her voices helped her survive.

Link : Watch Ted Talk Here

📘 Schizophrenia: The Positive Perspective — Peter Chadwick

• Written by someone who experienced psychosis himself

• Explores how these experiences can relate to growth, meaning, and even insight into reality

• Doesn’t deny difficulty, but refuses to see it as “just illness”

6. Psychological & Reframing Perspectives

📘 Rethinking Madness — Paris Williams

• A really powerful re-framing of psychosis

• Suggests that under the right conditions, these experiences can lead to positive transformation—not just pathology

• Talks about society’s role in making things worse vs. better

📘 The Divided Self — R.D. Laing

• A classic (a bit older, but very influential)

• Tries to make “madness” understandable, human, and connected to real life experiences

• Challenges the idea that people are just “disordered”

7. Creativity, Expression & Inner World

📘 The Discovery of the Art of the Insane — John MacGregor

• Focuses on art created by people labeled schizophrenic

• Shows the depth, brilliance, and creative power in their inner worlds

👉 This one doesn’t just tell you—they show you

8. Advocacy & Awareness Organizations

🏛️ National Shattering Silence Coalition (NSSC)

• Born from the urgent need to dismantle systemic neglect and discrimination blocking public health reform

• A community of action — survivors, advocates, and industry professionals united

• Turning shared family experience into a national standard for medical accountability. Not a passive observer. A force.

• Join if you’re ready to turn what your family lived through into something that protects the next one.

Welcome to Walking with Coyotes:

For those new here, when we say “coyote” we mean the ones our culture tends to label, to pathologize, to walk around.

They are the ones diagnosed with “schizophrenia” (and the like). On the surface, they are wild-eyed, unpredictable, Other: but underneath they are present, tapped in, Conscious.

Misread by nearly everyone, avoided by most, they are authentic, — and though hard to find in our world of masquerade and image, authenticity to us is a Superpower. Authenticity is like that one wildflower growing through the crack in a canyon wall — nobody planted it, nothing invited it, and it is the most alive thing in the canyon.

Give them a break

On normalizing what you are seeing — so you can breathe a little better.

One thing I have noticed listening to parents in our groups is how easy it is to see everything their loved one does through the lens of the diagnosis. Every bad day becomes a symptom. Every mess becomes evidence. Every mood becomes a crisis.

So I want to offer something here that brought me a lot of relief.

A lot of what you are watching your loved one do — millions of completely “normal” people do too. Every single day. Without a diagnosis attached to it.

I speak from experience. I used to watch my sister like a hawk — if she had a serious face, went quiet for a couple of days, or snapped at me, my mind would spiral immediately. Is this it? Is she going downhill? Does she hate me now? I would tell her constantly how much I loved her and how much I cared — which always seemed to push her further away, annoy her. In hindsight that was always more for me than for her. I just wanted to be close to her again.

She spent a lot of those years pulling away from me. Makes complete sense now. She never had a bad day without me feeling like it was a possible crisis, bracing myself for the worst.

But I rarely put myself in her shoes back then. I felt bad for her — pity, grief — but I never stopped to think: if someone was trying to put me in a hospital and drug me for my thoughts, I might lie to them too. Or: if everyone was watching my every move I would feel suffocated. Or: I completely understand why she wouldn’t want to talk to a doctor — or why she’d want a beer. Instead I saw it as defiance. As manipulation.

It wasn’t. She was just trying to survive the people who loved her and the world that didn’t understand her and her new world she didn’t have any help navigating. She had me trying to get her out of her new world but not helping her be there in it and navigate it.

When my husband helped me see her the way you see a wild coyote — with curiosity instead of panic — I started to relax and take a step back. So many of the things I thought were huge problems I realized were things millions of people without a diagnosis were going through too. Which meant maybe I could breathe a little.

That is the goal of this section — is to give you a different lens to look through, to normalize some of what you are seeing so you can step back, choose your battles more carefully, and save your energy for the ones that actually matter. Like “No you can’t wake up the neighbor at 2am to check if his roof is leaking.”

Which she did anyway. Ha! I tried.

Most of us aren’t winning those battles anyway.

Of course, if someone is a harm to themselves or others, that requires a different approach — and no one would expect anyone to "relax" in that situation. Wild can mean dangerous. But it doesn't always mean dangerous.

The system didn’t teach me that when I entered the coyote world. They taught me the opposite. “Fear them — they may hurt you. They are sick and they need help, and if they don’t get it they are defiant and a problem. They aren’t okay. Get them on meds NOW. That’s not normal. That’s delusional. The only way is to get them to the hospital — but that will be extremely hard to do.”

And so on. And so on.

But now I look at everything MUCH differently than I did 27 years ago. Even 10 years ago.

Here is a list of worries and complaints I had and often hear from parents with an optional lens to look at them through.

They are having a bad day.

Approximately 1 in 5 adults report feeling miserable on any given day according to Gallup’s Global Emotions Report. Bad days are human. They are not always a warning sign.

Depressed.

Over 280 million people in the world live with depression according to the World Health Organization. It is the leading cause of disability worldwide. Your loved one is not broken. They are feeling what so many feel which would mean it’s the culture and society not just some malfunction in your loved one’s brain like they always tell us. Now they may need meds to get out of it, but that doesn’t mean it’s a delusion or they have no reason to feel depressed.

Not wanting a job.

The Great Resignation saw over 50 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in 2021 and 2022 alone. Millions of people struggle with motivation, purpose, and the pressure of conventional employment. This is a human crisis — not just your loved one’s crisis.

Smoking weed.

An estimated 209 million people use cannabis worldwide according to the UN. It is the most widely used substance on the planet. Is it ideal for your coyote? Maybe, maybe not. Some parents report their child going into scary places when they smoke and others say their child is more chill when they smoke. Many use it in place of anxiety meds and some it gives anxiety. This is just to say it might not be in every situation a bad thing.

Drinking.

Around 400 million people worldwide struggle with alcohol use disorder. Your loved one is not the only one reaching for something to take the edge off a world that feels like too much.

Paranoia.

Studies show that approximately 1 in 3 people experience paranoid thoughts on a regular basis. That is not a typo. One in three. The difference is that most people have learned to dismiss those thoughts or not tell anyone about it. Your loved one just feels them louder.

Being a slob.

Ever watched an episode of Hoarders? There are an estimated 19 million Americans who live with hoarding disorder alone — and millions more who simply live in chaos without it ever being called a diagnosis. Can still be annoying and frustrating when we are a person who loves things to look and feel clean.

Not showering.

A 2021 survey found that nearly two thirds of Americans skip showering on any given day. Plenty of perfectly “normal” people go days without bathing. There are a lot of other people who we may not know who would ruffle our nose hairs too.

Moody.

Mood disorders affect an estimated 1 in 10 people globally. And even people without a diagnosis are moody — ask anyone who has lived with a teenager, a stressed-out partner, or honestly just themselves on a hard week.

Wanting space / being introverted.

Introverts make up anywhere between a third and a half of the entire population. Needing space, needing quiet, needing to be alone to recharge is not a symptom. It is a personality type. A very common one.

Loneliness.

This one might be the most important. The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023. An estimated 1 in 2 Americans report feeling lonely. Globally the numbers are even higher. Your loved one is not lonely because they are broken. They are lonely because the world is lonely — and they feel it more than most.

Hearing voices.

According to the Hearing Voices Network, somewhere between 3 and 10 percent of the population hear voices — and that number jumps to around 75 percent if you include one-off experiences like hearing someone call your name when no one is there. International surveys across different cultures find that about one in eight people experience auditory hallucinations at least once in their life. Less than 1 percent of the population gets diagnosed with schizophrenia. Which means the vast majority of people who hear voices never end up in a psychiatrist’s office. Research has found that over a third of voice hearers studied had never had any contact with psychiatric services — and described themselves as either able to cope with their voices or found them life-enhancing. Your loved one is not an anomaly. They are part of a much larger, much quieter human experience than the world lets on.

Mumbling, laughing, talking to people we can’t see.

This one can be startling and hard to watch. And they may be mid-conversation with something or someone you can’t see or hear. They have a vast inner/outer world that is very different from ours. They may be processing something they went through in the past or something that is real and overwhelming to them in that moment. Something is happening. But it also may not be a big deal.

One time my sister was in a full conversation with someone I couldn’t see. It looked serious — like she was fighting with someone. I was sitting right next to her outside. At that point she had started to feel more comfortable with me being around when she was talking to the voices, which I loved. She looked so upset at one point arguing with the voices that I said, “HEY! YOU LEAVE MY SISTER ALONE!”

She yelled back, “Jennifer! It’s Jonathan!”

That was my brother’s name. And I realized she wasn’t talking to someone I couldn’t see — she was fully acting out a memory, or maybe a future scene in her head. Like I have done a million times with people I’m not actually with. I just don’t usually do it out loud as though they are standing right in front of me.

And I thought — how many times did I think she was talking to voices when she was just playing out her thoughts?

None of this is to minimize what you are going through. Many things our loved ones do surprise us and we have no idea how to be with that version of them in that moment. It is okay to be confused and worried and scared — the unknown does that to most people. And many of us have had some of these moments turn into genuinely traumatic experiences. I had the "oh no, here she goes again" thought more times than I can count.

But the next time you find yourself spiraling over something on this list — pause. Ask yourself honestly: is this something I should worry about or is this just my coyote experiencing a whole lot of things I do not understand yet? Can I look at it through a different lens? Am I worrying because this is all new to me, or because past memories are creeping in — and maybe, I can relax a little?

That is a lot to ask of anyone. And yet here we are — showing up anyway, learning as we go, choosing to see what the world walks past. Welcome to the most important and least talked about job on the planet. Thank you for helping make this world a better place for every coyote in it.

Weekly Zoom Meeting : Learning to Walk with Coyotes

Every Thursday whoever wants to come joins the zoom and we talk. It’s very casual and no one is required to share. Some just join to listen. In time we will record these but for now we are listening and learning and very much enjoying it.

Zoom Meeting Link: Click Here

5:00pm PST — 6:00pm Mountain — 7:00pm Central — 8:00pm EST

Meeting ID: 825 8750 2181

Passcode: 1234567

Let’s brainstorm around what may be helpful for your Coyote

We don’t have all the answers, but we do have years of lived experience and a lot of ideas to share. Some of what we offer may resonate, some may not — but we’re here to think alongside you.

If you can’t make the weekly meeting, or if you attended and would like some extra support, we have added some of our available free time to the calendar for one-on-one conversations. This helps us plan ahead and creates space for something we love — helping families build bridges between themselves and their coyote.

Everything is free. We’re simply here to support and to offer what we wish we had when we started off on this wild road.

You can schedule a time here:

Link: Our Calendar

References:

Below is our growing reference list. If you know of any websites, books, songs, training, or YouTube resources etc that might help families, please send them to us so we can add them for everyone.

Browse By Category: Links Below

1. Trainings & Practical Support
   
   -Zendo Project

   -Webinar on May 5th Empire of Madness: Reimagining Western Mental Health Care for Everyone

2. Nutrition, Physical & Lifestyle Health
   
   -Matt Griffo

3. Community & Alternative Mental Health Approaches
   
   -Hearing Voices Network
   
   -Compassionate Mental Health

4. Spiritual / Metaphysical Perspectives
   
   -Psychosis or Spiritual Awakening (25 min. Video) – Phil Borges
   
   -Crazywise (Film)
   
   -Schizophrenia: A Spiritual Awakening (Book) — Patricia Carlisle

5. Personal Stories & Lived Experience (Recovery / Meaning-Making)
   
   -The Voices in My Head (14 min. Video) — Eleanor Longden
   
   -Schizophrenia: The Positive Perspective (Book) — Peter Chadwick, PhD

6. Psychological & Reframing Perspectives
   
   -Rethinking Madness (Book) — Paris Williams
   
   -The Divided Self (Book) — R.D. Laing

7. Creativity, Expression & Inner World
   
   -The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (Book) — John MacGregor

1. Training & Practical Support

Zendo Training

Link to Zendo

If your loved one’s psychosis sometimes feels overwhelming, the Zendo Project offers helpful guidance on how to stay calm and supportive when someone is in an altered state.

Although they began with psychedelic peer support, their approach is now being used by crisis teams and families because psychosis can feel very similar. They offer a free introductory training you can sign up for on their homepage, and deeper trainings if you want to learn more.

Empire of Madness: Reimagining Western Mental Health Care for Everyone

May 5, 2026

Join ISPS-US for an engaging webinar featuring author Dr. Khameer Kidia and his urgent new book, Empire of Madness: Reimagining Western Mental Health Care for Everyone. A Rhodes Scholar and Harvard physician-anthropologist, Dr. Kidia fundamentally re-evaluates the Western approach to mental health, which often focuses on medicating individual symptoms while ignoring the exploitative societal systems, from debt and housing insecurity to the psychological effects of colonialism, that cause widespread distress.

Through readings from the book and an insightful author chat, we will explore Kidia’s nuanced questions: How do history, culture, and politics shape mental distress? Can social interventions like cash payments replace pills for those in poverty? And what lessons can we draw from global mental health care approaches, particularly in poorer countries, where outcomes for conditions like schizophrenia are sometimes surprisingly better without relying solely on Western-style psychopharmacology? This event invites clinicians, caregivers, and people with lived experience to consider a truly global and mutual vision of wellbeing that prioritizes structural change alongside clinical care.

• Can’t attend live? The webinar will be recorded and sent to all registrants.

  Link to Webinar: Click Here

2. Nutrition, Physical & Lifestyle Health

Matt Griffo

Matt Griffo shares resources about mental and physical health through nutrition, movement, mindfulness, and lifestyle changes. After years of severe CPTSD symptoms — he began exploring how diet and overall health affect the brain and immune system. Matt now shares his personal journey, research, and practical tools, and encourages families to explore how nutrition and lifestyle changes may support mental health and reduce symptoms for many people.

Link : Start here with Matt

3. Community & Alternative Mental Health Approaches

Hearing Voices Network

The Hearing Voices Movement is an international grassroots movement that aims to shift public and professional attitudes toward experiences — such as hearing voices and seeing visions — that are generally associated with psychosis.

How Common Is It?

Statistics vary, but it’s generally accepted that between 3% and 10% of the population hear voices that other people don’t. If you include one-off experiences (like hearing someone call your name when you’re out shopping, or feeling your phone vibrate in your pocket) this figure goes up to 75%.

So, having at least one experience of hearing or seeing something that others around you don’t is incredibly common. Those who have never had this experience are in the minority.

A number of famous and important people (past and present) have experienced hearing or seeing things that other people don’t. Without these people, the world would be a very different place.

Some well-known individuals who have spoken about hearing voices include:



Gandhi, Socrates, Joan of Arc, Freud, Anthony Hopkins, Philip K. Dick, John Frusciante, Carlos Santana, Robert Schumann, John Forbes Nash, Zoë Wanamaker, and Charles Dickens.

Link : Hearing Voices Network UK

Link: Hearing Voices Network USA

Compassionate Mental Health

Compassionate Mental Health is part of a growing movement working to change how we understand and respond to mental distress. Their work focuses on compassion, community, and listening to the lived experiences of people who have gone through mental health crises.

Through trainings, gatherings, and educational programs, they explore more holistic approaches that emphasize connection, meaning, and social support alongside traditional care. The references on their website are great.

Compassionate Mental Health Website

4. Spiritual / Metaphysical Perspectives

Psychosis or Spiritual Awakening

Phil Borges, filmmaker and photographer, has been documenting Indigenous and tribal cultures for over 25 years. His work is exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide, and his documentary film CRAZYWISE explores what can be learned from individuals who have turned psychological crises into positive transformative experiences. He spoke about some of his findings in the Ted Talk below.

Link : Watch Ted Talk Here

Crazywise

Crazy…or wise? The traditional wisdom of indigenous cultures often contradicts modern views about a mental health crisis. Is it a ‘calling’ to grow or just a ‘broken brain’? The documentary CRAZYWISE explores what can be learned from people around the world who have turned their psychological crisis into a positive transformative experience.

Link : Crazywise Documentary

📘 Schizophrenia: A Spiritual Awakening — Patricia Carlisle

• Directly explores psychosis through a spiritual lens

• Looks at how these experiences may be misunderstood awakenings

5. Personal Stories & Lived Experience (Recovery / Meaning-Making)

The Voices in My Head | Eleanor Longden

To all appearances, Eleanor Longden was just like every other student — heading to college full of promise and without a care in the world. That was until the voices in her head started talking.

Initially innocuous, these internal narrators became increasingly antagonistic and dictatorial, turning her life into a living nightmare. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, hospitalized, and drugged, Longden was discarded by a system that didn’t know how to help her.

Longden tells the moving story of her years-long journey back to mental health and makes the case that learning to listen to her voices helped her survive.

Link : Watch Ted Talk Here

📘 Schizophrenia: The Positive Perspective — Peter Chadwick

• Written by someone who experienced psychosis himself

• Explores how these experiences can relate to growth, meaning, and even insight into reality

• Doesn’t deny difficulty, but refuses to see it as “just illness”

6. Psychological & Reframing Perspectives

📘 Rethinking Madness — Paris Williams

• A really powerful re-framing of psychosis

• Suggests that under the right conditions, these experiences can lead to positive transformation—not just pathology

• Talks about society’s role in making things worse vs. better

📘 The Divided Self — R.D. Laing

• A classic (a bit older, but very influential)

• Tries to make “madness” understandable, human, and connected to real life experiences

• Challenges the idea that people are just “disordered”

7. Creativity, Expression & Inner World

📘 The Discovery of the Art of the Insane — John MacGregor

• Focuses on art created by people labeled schizophrenic

• Shows the depth, brilliance, and creative power in their inner worlds

👉 This one doesn’t just tell you—they show you

Subscribe now

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