How many times have I seen patients in extremis wake up from the nightmare of being two or three with "the monsters" again when they sense they are no longer invisible?
I was reading famed psychologist Frank Putnam's account of an inpatient with extreme anxiety and depression who was being subjected to sleep deprivation "therapy" when he was in training back in the late 1970s. (SDT was thought promising in those days because it did -- at times -- appear to "work.") When that patient suddenly went manic, she was forced into a locked isolation room and left there for over an hour.
My own memories of precisely the same experience as an inpatient in 2002 hit me like a ton of bricks. I was immediately struck yet again by a) why it is that I and so many others recommend against inpatient hospitalization save in the most dire circumstances, and b) that the obvious truth of the statement at the link below remains unseen, unheard, unfelt and unsensed by so many "professionals" to this day.
Children direly need to know that they are seen, heard, felt, sensed and understood.
Isolation, as at least some of us now know, is the last thing a patient with severe anxiety needs. Far better to handcuff the pt to a heavy bed and sit with them attentively while they "work through" IMO and IME. Because -- on most occasions -- it's all just a power-dive regression into a frustrated inner two-year-old's raging "temper tantrum."
I would be shouting, "Why is isolation still in use?" if I didn't know the answer. And, for me, at least, it is this: Way too many mental health professionals are far from recovered from the trauma that drove them into the profession to begin with. Which leaves them blind... and far from capable of leading the blinder. Which is in no small part due to the way our cult-ure rationalizes its re-act-ions to "extreme" behavior in its slavish adherence to established protocols rather than artful use of its eyes, ears, affects and sensory experience in general to actually see, hear, feel and sense what IS actually going on vs. what is said to be.
I was soooooooooo fortunate to encounter a man of simple and straightforward speech who made all that so self-evident. I have now read well over 30 of the 50 or so books by or about him. As he so often said, "One must come to be able to see and hear oneself with neither condemnation nor rationalization." Just as the patient in extremis needs to be seen and heard by anther without condemnation, criticism, judgment or misguided attempts to assure them that "everything will be okay if you can just wrap your mind around my brilliant explanations or just do these exercises I have been trained to use."
I do see, hear, feel and sense the worth of rigorous, formal procedural, empirical research and protocol for sure. But without the ability to see it through the lens of something like the first eight of the 10 StEPs component of Choiceless Awareness for Emotion Processing and pretty much everything else, much of what I learned in ten years of post-graduate work -- useful as it may prove to be -- is just a bunch of verbal-symbolic mambo jambo waiting for a context to actually Make Sense of it.
SEE the bloddy patient. LISTEN to them. FEEL their anguish, helplessness and desperation. SENSE what IS for them right NOW. Because their not-okay inner children are running amok on a big yellow school bus without a driver careening down a mountain road overlooking a valley several thousand feet below. And those who were abused and/or abandoned as small children know they are NOT being seen, heard felt or sensed One More Time.
Unless WE show them what their parents and previous professionals did not. How many times have I seen patients in extremis wake up from the nightmare of being two or three with "the monsters" yet again when they sense they are no longer invisible?
