Family Therapy

To frame the following post -- In the summer following high school graduation, 1984, I had what I can only call my first spiritual experience -- after puking in my friend's bathroom. I was high and also drunk. I never could stomach alcohol. 

Odd as it may seem, I had a "unitive watershed" moment then, as the nausea receded -- the whole room, myself, and the music flooding in from the hallway, all appeared as emanating from one source, one light, one awareness, a higher awareness, if you will. 

What followed were two years of chasing that experience, through reading about Eastern philosophy, meditating, and finally and fanatically diving into asceticism. It didn't work very well. But this is just the intro to the following, an experience from sophomore college, summer break 1986 --

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     By the end of July, I was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward for the first time. It would certainly not be the last.

      The diagnoses were clinical depression and anorexia, but I know now that it was simply a case of the Ascetic Blues. I was given a small dose of anti-depressant, ate all of the food they gave me, and met with my family on the final day for a family therapy session.

       At the meeting, I was asked what I needed from my parents, anything I could think of. I asked to play a childhood fist bumping game with Mom. When we’d finished I looked around, feeling nothing but embarrassed. From Dad I wanted…a hug. He was surprised, as we had been at odds all summer, and, frankly, we had never hugged before.

     The experience of the hug was an oxytocin cascade. I felt the whole energy in the room shift. The result was perhaps as moving as my experience in the bathroom that night two summers prior at Moon’s house – an influx of love, human or spiritual, there was no difference.