O Will Hall, εκπαιδευόμενος του Process Work στο Process Work Institute, έγραψε ένα κεφάλαιο για το βιβλίο των Daniel Mackler and Matthew Morrissey, “A Way Out of Madness: Dealing with Your Family After You’ve Been Diagnosed with a Psychiatric Disorder”. Γραμμένο με συγκινητική ειλικρίνεια, αξίζει μιά ανάγνωση.
Life After Family
Will Hall
“…what is usually called hypnosis is an experimental model of a naturally occurring phenomenon in many families. In the family situation, however, the hypnotists (the parents) are already hypnotised (by their parents) and are carrying out their instructions, by bringing their children up to bring their children up… ”
“I consider that the majority of adults (including myself) are or have been, more or less, in a post-hypnotic trance, induced in early infancy: we remain in this state until — when we dead awaken, as Ibsen makes one of his characters say, we shall find that we have never lived.”
R.D. Laing, The Politics of the Family
In 1979, when I was 13 years old, my mother volunteered at one of the first rape crisis centers in Florida. She was on-call and they gave her a pager, one of the early kinds, so they could contact her whenever a woman came to the center needing help. I had never seen a pager before. It was about seven inches tall and didn’t do anything except glow with a steady red light until it was activated. Then it went off with a loud electronic whoop. When Mom went to bed she put the pager on the center of the kitchen counter, and it sat there all night, like a small ticking bomb.
It wasn’t until years later that my mother’s pager took on a special significance for me. I always loved science fiction and secret agents, and here was an advanced technology hinted at in movies that had taken up residence in our family. It waited until some unknown moment came, listening electronically for a distant invisible signal. And then suddenly it exploded our entire house into a panic, one moment quiet and still and the next screeching like a siren with its message that we were in the midst of an emergency.
When I was finally hospitalized in my mid-twenties and given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, the alarm was sounding for me.