Looking back
over my own autobiographical history, one anomalous experience standing out
like a sore thumb is a dark day in my early teens when I underwent a strange
malady of unknown origin (Kiritsis, 2009). It
began sometime during the summer of January 1992. I was twelve and had just
returned from a family vacation in Adelaide and Mildura, reveling in the
aftermath of excitement from the trip up north, which had spawned my first
experiences of handling live animals at a farm. All nervousness aside, I was also
looking forward to my first year of high school. But shortly after we returned,
something quite inexplicable happened.
It came on gradually, perhaps over the course of a week. I woke up one morning
feeling not myself. Suddenly, things didn’t feel right within me anymore.
There was a wrongness where prior there had been none. Something had
changed. I couldn’t put my finger on it; I didn’t know what it was—how could I?
There was no tangible physiological measure able to describe the intrinsic
qualities precisely so that it could be grasped by adherents of the biomedical
model. Nonetheless, I gaged its presence because my premorbid inner life had
been qualitatively different before its manifestation. If I’d been born this
way I would have been completely oblivious of the fact; illness is a relational
concept that can only be understood when the psychophysical states believed to
embody it are juxtaposed with a consensual prototype of health and flourishing.
An entity not normally part of oneself reveals itself through relationship.
A few weeks later, I was
watching the Australian Open tennis with my grandmother. At the conclusion of
the program, I started flicking through the channels in the hope of finding something
of interest for late-night viewing. What immediately seized my attention was a
horde of individuals huddled together, holding candles, some of whom were being
interviewed by a reporter. When I raised the volume with the remote control, I
realized it was a program about people living with HIV, a blood-borne
infectious virus which at that point in time was deemed an undisputed death
sentence. It was engaging, so I decided to watch the rest of it.
You might imagine my horror
when a young man of about twenty-five began describing what he called a wrongness inside him. This was after being
diagnosed HIV positive. I felt the onset of gooseflesh, a lurching stomach, and
the blood draining from my face. I must have looked like a starved vampire who
hasn’t feasted in months. I vividly remember dashing into the bathroom and
staring at my reflection in the mirror. Was this what was wrong with me?
Was I HIV positive?
I spent the next few hours
crying and wondering what I’d done to deserve such a fate. Why had God
condemned me to an early death? It was unfair, unjust. I lay awake that night,
and many nights to follow, praying to the Virgin Mary that none of it was true.
At one moment, I even tried to convince myself that I’d made it all up and it
was nothing more than an illusion—that I’d never seen the show on TV about
AIDS.
In hindsight, I’d rate it
as the most traumatic event of my life. Explicit in my recollection of this
event is the salvific act of dropping to the ground beside a Byzantine icon of
the Virgin and Child, a humble posture reminiscent of a bucolic supplicant kneeling
before royalty. Curled in this position for hours I would alternate between
periods of being immobilized by fear and rage, begging for supernatural
intervention and help. In the decade that followed there was an
intense preoccupation with discovering an etiology for a nexus of polymorphous
symptoms that included muscle fatigue, exhaustion, photophobia, and depressive
states. Just as the moon is subject to the cosmic cycle of waxing and waning,
so too did my agonizing symptoms undergo periods of alleviation and worsening.
These, it seems, were all intimately entwined with a deep-seated intuition that
something uncanny was unfurling within me, something for which modern medicine
had no feasible explanation. Little by little feelings of disillusionment with the
biomedical model and the domineering obsession with discovering the truth tore
me from my existing web of interpersonal relations, and I withdrew from the
social synapse into a spectral space of utter isolation. Was I suffering from
an unknown pathology, something Newtonian-based medicine had yet to encounter
in its several hundred year history? Was I standing at the treacherous
precipice before decompensation? The answer to those questions still eludes me,
and I often submit to the reality that I may pass over without having
disentangled this idiosyncratic Gordian knot.
For a while, life seemed to
return to normal, and I even found myself attending regular confession at the
local Greek Orthodox Church. But years of having repressed my darkest fears
finally caught up with me. Just before I turned twenty-one, my physical
symptoms worsened to the point where I was left with no choice but to request a
full blood examination. You can imagine the shockwaves when my HIV test came
back negative. I remember being somewhat confused, and self-deprecating. Had I
stupidly been living all those years with an irrational fear without good
reason? Was the wrongness that I felt and that which the guy on the AIDS
documentary had described just a blind coincidence? If it wasn’t HIV, then what
did I have? What else could it have been?
It’s been fourteen years
since my emancipation from this nightmare and I will openly concede that there’s
a part of me, a very vulnerable and sensitive part, that wants to retract all
those memories with their dark emotional inflections and pretend the whole
thing never happened. But to do so would be an injustice, for it would mean rejecting
the authentic dimensions of metamorphosis and the fertile darkness from which
existential encounters with sacred realities spring forth; I would be throwing
out the baby with the bathwater. We need to be dismembered, torn limb from limb
by elemental forces acting from without, if we are to individuate in the
classical Jungian sense (Kiritsis, 2014).
In hindsight the chronology of this anomalous experience
lends itself to construal through the theoretical lens of interpersonal
neurobiology. Save for reflecting the sociocultural milieus and encompassing
blueprints for behavior, identity, and theoretical knowledge in all known
cultures, narrative probably emerged, in part, as a mechanism of neural
integration and coordination between the dominant and nondominant hemispheres
of the brain (Cozolino, 2010). If this is indeed true, then a multilevel
function of personal narrative is to facilitate neural connectivity in the
brain, emotional stability, psychological flexibility, and psychosomatic health.
Dan Siegel has much to say about this curious phenomenon; the integrative
neural processes occurring during formative periods of development can be
vertical, dorso-ventral, or interhemispheric (Siegel, 2012). The importance of
the latter, according to Trevarthen, cannot be overstated because the anterior
commissures and corpus callosum combined is, “the only pathway through which
the higher functions of perception and cognition, learning and voluntary motor
coordination can be unified” (Siegel, 2012, pp. 341). Associational neurons in
the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes are the modus operandi, linking
intricate representational processes of the hemispheres together (Cozolino,
2010).
On a similar note the consensus amongst neuroscientists is
that the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers interconnecting and
coordinating the two hemispheres, doesn’t reach full maturity until early
teenagehood (Galin et al., 1979). Concerning the importance of narrative in
interhemispheric coordination, scientific treatises activate only the digital,
temporal processes of the dominant left hemisphere whereas the combined visual
imagery and linear storyline couched within real stories and fictional tales
activate both the aforementioned and the holistic, analogic processes of the
nondominant right hemisphere (Siegel, 2012). In light of this interdisciplinary
schema, it appears that our genetic and neurological constitution come with
in-built “attractions” for higher-order activities (i.e., reading and listening
to stories or creating them) able to activate and hence integrate cortical and
subcortical processing systems, the hippocampus and amygdala, and specific
regions of the frontal lobes (Rossi, 1993). Moreover, creative storytelling
stimulates denser connectivity between the language centers; the neural
networks dedicated to memory, visceral, and emotional processing; and conscious
awareness (Cozolino, 2010). Albeit unconscious, there’s a reason as to why we
recourse to them when we’re suffering from self-perpetuated patterns of depression,
anxiety, over-emotionality, or a sense of emptiness, meaninglessness, and
languishing in our lives. From a neurological perspective, then, my
proto-scientific attempts at ordering chaos by contrasting and comparing the
quality of my inner mental life with that of another human being is a
reflection of that teleological striving for psychoneural integration.
This anomalous
experience also lends itself to an existential conceptualization, given it spurred
a radical life crisis and transition predicated upon an especially salient
encounter with the four fundamental givens of existence–death, isolation,
meaninglessness, and freedom (Yalom, 2005). Grappling with an illness of
unknown etiology at such a young age and attempting to connect-the-dots on
issues of symptomology was paradigmatic of nascent reality testing, however the
constricted frame of reference I married and adhered to like gospel created a
closed appraisal system which disregarded disconfirming evidence, permitting
the perseveration of insidious beliefs for more than ten years. During that
inordinate period there was a prodigious somatization of an internal conflict
[tiredness, hypertension, problems in visual acuity] generated by the
dialectical tension between a socially-mediated expectation that fulfillment
awaited at the end of each phase of human development on one side, and a
dysphoric disruption in the sociocultural system of meaning upon which each
individual depends for effective self-regulation on the other (Ingram, 2012).
This crisis
of meaning inaugurated an internal existential discussion between differential
aspects of self throughout my teenagehood. There was a sense of disconnection
from consensus reality as I grappled with the “absurd”; there was an
encumbering of the self-actualization process instigated by morbid fixation and
“neurotic” anxiety about my impending death; there was a perceived separateness
and lack of deep empathic attunement stemming from my unique situation; and
there was the self-sacrifice of vitality and authenticity for a blunted,
mundane routine of boredom, stagnation, and neglect of creative potential. Put
differently I was preoccupied, emotionally unavailable, guarded, closed-off,
contrived, disingenuous, lifeless, unaware of my true desires, and unreceptive
to change. An incompetence to problem-solve creativity and work through the
impasse manifested through the multisensorial channel of the psychic
unconscious as a recurring dream of rotting cadavers and skeletons beneath my
room. I bore witness to this dream for many years. Moreover, the choice to suffer
and endure the grief cycle in silence and the consequent dearth of social
support only exacerbated the dysphoria, the generalized anxiety, and the physical
symptoms. Before that “eureka” moment could come, I was without a doubt the
sole author of my own self-sabotaging delusional narrative.
There’s
also a transpersonal dimension to this idiosyncratic anomalous experience
because the polymorphous condition unleashed intense periods of
self-absorption, self-reflection, and creative writing. Creative illnesses
transcend sociopolitical and religious frontiers and are actually quite common
across cultures and epochs. These phenomena seem to be especially prevalent
among shamans, philosophers, and writers (Ellenberger, 1970). After an unusual
neurosis that lasted between 1894 and 1900, Sigmund Freud emerged into the
intellectual and scientific world with an inspired perspective on unconscious
life, enabling him to write his celebrated The
Interpretation of Dreams (Ellenberger, 1970). Similarly, Carl Jung
underwent a creative illness between 1913 and 1919 which motivated esoteric
works like the Red Book, the Black Book, and the Seven Sermons to the Dead and laid the humus for the sprouting of
theories surrounding archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the actualized
Self (Ellenberger, 1970). I, too, spent a great deal of time deeply preoccupied
with the mysteries of the human soul, and emerged from my ordeal in an
exhilarated state. The latter culminated with a three week period of incessant
writing where I transcribed my screaming Shadow onto paper. Most of the poems
written during my “creative illness” were published in Fifty Confessions (2009), probably my most personal poetic
collection to date.
Looking back on the whole experience, it has occurred to me
that the waxing of creative activity is directly correlated to the frenetic and
ebullient emotions. When somebody writes, they are consciously exerting
control over a phenomenal process and sublimating irritability, fear, rage, and
other negative emotions into something more manageable and tolerable (Forgeard
et al., 2014). Requiring concentration and focal attention, the task distracts the
individual passive rumination and burgeons positive emotion (Forgeard et al., 2014).
Writing may also be construed as an opportunity to find meaning in disquieting
events, a chance to make sense out of nonsense. Each individual has their own
way of achieving this feat.
I, for instance, do it by mythologizing
and even exaggerating my pathos; in many of my writings these emotionally
salient life events are described in the context of the Jungian Great Mother
and son lover archetypal pairing, or exalted through Gnostic notions of a
soul-spark rediscovering its divine origins through the trials and tribulations
of a life-threatening ailment. In writing about the illness I endured, the most
traumatic event in my life, I concluded that physicians, neurologists,
immunologists, and psychiatrists couldn’t shed any light upon it because it was
supernatural in origin, imposed by a higher order of spiritual beings as a way
of instigating inner transformation and placing me on a hitherto unknown
spiritual path. To overcome and gain mastery over any condition one
must be able to shift perspectives and restructure cognitions into meaningful
narratives in ways that are personally salient, cogent, and illuminate the self
in the best possible light. Going through this “basic, adaptive psychological
process which is also observed in artistic and scientific creativity”
(Williams, 2012, p. 113) allows the ailing individual to transcend their
existential impasse by moving through the paradigm-shifting phase of illumination [the interjection of novel ideas and solutions into
conscious awareness] and continue navigating through the world. That’s the
secret of posttraumatic growth, that’s what heals.
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