by Geoff Olson

Angela, an attractive, intelligent woman in her late 30s, pokes at her dessert at a trendy Kitsilano bistro and explains to me again how her world fell apart. A practising clinical psychologist from Edmonton, she had decided a year earlier, albeit with some ambivalence, to have a child with her partner. Angela found herself more frightened and ambivalent when the pregnancy was confirmed. At the same time, she learned of the posting of a job she had long desired, and this created friction with her partner. About six weeks into her pregnancy, he announced to her that she “no longer inspired him.” Their relationship was over.

Angela thought “Oh well, I’ll take it in stride, move on as a single mother. But nope, instead I went crazy.” Now nearly three months pregnant, Angela rapidly descended into a severe clinical depression. Bedridden for days at a stretch, she was totally paralyzed, and her mother travelled from England to take care of her. “Imagine having your mother feed you in bed when you’re in your late 30s, ” she adds, shaking her head. Now, seriously doubting her decision to become a mother and her ability to raise a child, Angela prayed that the baby wouldn’t come to term. When she went for an ultrasound during her second trimester, she was told there were no signs of life. She felt that God had answered her prayers, saving her from what would have been the toughest decision of her life, to abort or continue with the pregnancy in her compromised medical state. But the mere fact that she had even considered having an abortion seemed to activate some deep quasi-religious guilt, which grew with each passing day, pulling Angela deeper into the abyss.

Talking to Angela earlier on, in the depths of her despair, I sensed she still somehow felt responsible for the death of her unborn child, and that by having her prayers answered she was metaphysically complicit with God in an act of murder. Returning to a relative’s home after the obstetric procedure, her mind played out a tape loop of recrimination and self-loathing. “I’d see a picture of a mother with a baby on the cover of a magazine, and I’d think, “Oh there’s a good person, unlike me.”

She felt suicidal, and the only thing that kept her from taking her own life, she told me, was knowing how much other people, especially family, loved and needed her. A person with a warm heart and a desire to help others, she could no longer see her own value. Wracked with guilt, Angela sought out medical help, and was given a prescription for antidepressants. Although they may not have addressed the core issues of her crisis, in her state of severe soul-level pain, the psychologist found any kind of respite, however hit-and-miss, a blessing.

The human soul is colourless, weightless, and cannot be measured by any known scientific instrument. Hence, the great hole in medicine and psychology over the past century, in which subjective states are just the spectral byproducts of a “ghost in the machine,” a British behaviourist’s famously derisive description of the mind’s relation to brain.

Yet almost every culture throughout the world from prehistory to the present has accepted the mind and the soul as givens. The only exception is the post-enlightenment West of the past 300 years. The program of secular humanism and technocratic know-how has been a huge success in many ways. By regarding the body as a machine, and working with mechanical metaphors for the brain (a telephone exchange at the turn of the last century, a “meat computer” at the beginning of this one), we’ve made great strides in understanding the human place in the physical universe, and extending lifespans far beyond the 40-year average of feudal Europe.

Yet there is that other cosmos that cannot be measured, the inner world of dreams and visions and powerful archetypal energies. This is what the religious scholar Rudolph Otto called the “numinous” - a spiritual reality so overwhelming it can shatter mundane reality when encountered. Angela’s eyes glisten with tears as she tells of finally seeing a glimmer of dawn after her dark night of the soul. She pulls a dog-eared paperback out of her purse, and gives it to me. “Thanks for the book,” she said. “There’s a lot of underlining in it. I hope you don’t mind.” Months earlier, at the height of her crisis, I lent her my copy of The Stormy Search for the Self: A Guide to Personal Growth Through Transformational Crisis, by Christina and Stanislav Grof.

Stan Grof’s work had long fascinated me, particularly for the reams of anecdotal and laboratory evidence he had gathered that the human mind is just the tip of a giant ontological iceberg. Grof has over 50 years of experience in consciousness research, and according to this leader in the field of transpersonal psychology, we are much vaster beings than we think we are.

In the 1960s, Grof practised LSD psychotherapy in Czechoslovakia. Moving to the US, he took a position as assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, and later became chief of psychiatric research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, in Baltimore. In The Stormy Search for the Self, the Grofs make a distinction between what they call “spiritual emergence” and “spiritual emergency.”

Both involve some powerful encounter with the contents of the psyche. However, spiritual emergence is much easier to assimilate than its counterpart, which is often precipitated by a life crisis of some sort, anything from a car accident to a death in the family. When I had first passed the book to Angela, I opened it to a page highlighting the differences between the two categories. In emergence, “our experiences are fluid, mild, easy to integrate.”

In emergency, “our experiences are dynamic, jarring, difficult to integrate.” In emergence, “there are an infusion of ideas and insights into life.” In emergency, there is an “overwhelming influx of experiences and insights.” Angela had a number of the signs of emergency, including experiences with jolting tremors and sensations of energy going up and down her spine. I asked her to go down the list for emergence and emergency.

“Do you have any of these?” I asked her. She took a moment, and went down each list. “None of these,” she said, indicating the column for emergence. “All of these,” she added, pointing to emergency. “Sometimes the process of spiritual awakening is so subtle and gradual that it is almost imperceptible,” the Grofs write.

“After a period of months or years, a person looks back and notices that there has been a profound shift in his or her understanding of the world, values, ethical standards and life strategies.” Of course, this is the desired route for walking the spiritual path, when we get to stop and smell the flowers along the way. The journey is not so yellow-brick-road when the flying monkeys show up. Angela recognizes her neurochemistry was fundamentally altered by her crisis, but which was the cause and which was the effect: the neurochemistry or the crisis?

Angela found the Grofs’ work was the first book she had read that seemed to really make sense of her mental and emotional chaos. She had underlined many sections of the book and highlighted one sentence on spiritual emergency multiple times: “Completely at the mercy of a dynamic in a world filled with vivid drama and gripping emotions, they (sufferers of spiritual emergency) cannot function in an objective, rational mode. They feel as though this is the final destruction of any shred of sanity, and they’re fearful that they are headed toward total, irreversible madness.”

Grof himself believes that the medical grab bag of psychosis, into which health professionals throw the most anomalous psychological states, should be picked through to differentiate spiritual emergency from organic pathology. But in the end, we’re talking semantics. The Grofs’ description of some of the darker shades of spiritual emergency sound like what is typically defined in mainstream medical literature as severe clinical depression with anxiety. The main difference is that the authors see such experiences as attempts of the psyche to reach a new level of spiritual equilibrium. Traditional medicine, particularly with its market-driven taste for pharmacological silver bullets, sees such states as the output of a broken brain, to be erased with the officially approved regimen of mind-altering substances.

(This isn’t to say that those who suffer from severe depression should feel obliged to allow their experience to play out without the pharmaceutical option. At its worst, severe clinical depression can reduce sufferers to catatonic states, and many have found deliverance, or at least an introduction to some semblance of normality, through medication. It’s only when sufferers of severe depression are not completely lost in their own pain that they can be receptive to understanding the possible spiritual aspects to their suffering. What is much more suspect, critics say, is the marketing of mood-altering drugs to children, or anyone suffering from mild depression.)

Ironically, as a clinical psychologist, Angela had been treating patents with clinical depression for 15 years. When she voluntarily entered a psychiatric hospital months after her first breakdown and became a patient herself, this was where her turnaround began. She at last surrendered her ego to circumstance, and greatly improved in the first week. With the world seen through a new set of eyes, even the hospital looked good. “It’s like a hotel here,” Angela told me on the phone, “I get a day pass, and head down to the beach when I want.” With a pink rain of cherry blossoms decorating the ground before her, Angela says she felt like “getting down on her knees and kissing the ground,” in thanks to God for her improvement.

Angela has never been particularly religious, and still doesn’t hold to a particular dogma or denomination. But I have seen one obvious change in her over the past year. The life of the spirit, and the idea of a supreme being, are no longer distant abstractions. Stan Grof wouldn’t be surprised by such a change. Today, Angela is holding it together. She is out of the hospital, and taking medication that contains the darker aspects of her existential crisis. At last, she has allowed herself to believe she is worthy of help. Although modern psychiatry has greatly helped her get through her dark night of the soul, she notes, “Spiritual guidance from many different sources has also been invaluable.” In a culture that values individual autonomy and self-direction, this is the bravest act for any urban professional in crisis: to surrender. As Angela puts it, “Surrender to outside help and to an unseen higher power.”

(Names and locations have been altered at the request of the subject.)

Have you had experiences with medication for a breakdown or depression? Were the drugs a boon or a bust? Did they help or hinder your recovery/spiritual journey? If you’d like to share your story anonymously with Common Ground, we welcome your input. Email Geoff Olson gefo@telus.net





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