Bar the Door 5-16-11

Anderson, South Carolina

There’s a large digital media provider here using the sound byte, “Let it all in” as its advertising snare, promoting itself as capable of providing the highest speed fiber-optic Internet access, the most diverse forms of cable programming content, ad infinitum. Sixty-second advertisements on television suggest this corporate monolith is capable of injecting far more into my life than I need or want.

A rather sobering book was written some years ago by a psychiatrist struggling with extreme bi-polar disorder. In An Unquiet Mind, Kay Jamison provides rather sobering, and sometimes disquieting, images of life when her mind is careening out of control, when thought storms overwhelm her, leaving her in a heap of emotional wreckage. She describes progressive processes leaving her fearing what the future holds for her. For Jamison, not having the capacity to stop letting it all in is often devastating to her. She fears it will eventually cost her life itself.

We live in a culture some say has become bi-polar; oscillating through extremes of emotions, multiphasic in its nature, over-energized, with many people in emotional overwhelm from exposure to increasing magnitudes and complexity of experience. There’s vast evidence to suggest American culture’s in a progressive addictive cycle requiring ever more intense stimulation, entertainment, and experience to achieve the affective buzz we are lead to believe we need to have happy lives. Long after addiction has stopped feeling good, many of us continue to bludgeon ourselves with vast amounts of digital negativity, often creating emotional overwhelm. Daily, I encounter people who describe lives careening out of control. It’s not a comforting thing when funeral home staff know who I am because I visit their facilities so often, saying farewell to the legions who never learned how to stop letting it all in.

A stunning number of people around me are trying to keep the edges of their lives from fraying by taking a bewildering array of anti-psychotics, anti-depressants, anxiolytics, mood stabilizers, alpha blockers, beta blockers, anti-histaminics, somnolytics, hypnotics, and analgesics. At one time I was on eighteen of these myself. Caught up in the gears and cogs of machine psychiatry I was thrust into a nightmare even worse than Jamison describes in An Unquiet Mind.

At some point years ago a still small voice managed to get a word edgewise into the noise of my mind, suggesting ways to wake up and have a life again. The white coats declared years ago I would never wake up from my nightmare, even suggesting I find some kind of group home to live in, a place where I might be allowed to make crafts a couple afternoons a week, if I behaved and was compliant. I wasn’t compliant and made a four-year bid to find ways to turn off the noise. Over time I was discharged from several psychiatric practices for non-compliance; demanding to know who I was without these toxic and insanely profitable pharmaceuticals. Even my family physician sent me packing because I would not take his pills.

It made no sense for me to continue living in American culture with its deafening input and noise, a place with little peace and serenity, while taking a couple dozen psychotropic tablets and capsules each long tormented day. A way was given to me to find serenity. During four years my ‘need’ for medications fell away. From eighteen psychotropic monsters, I now take only vitamins, fish oil, and a few minerals. Physicians are stunned when I tell them I take nothing ‘real.’ No longer tormented by a constellation of side-effects, and abject life-threatening misery, the possibility of regaining life, of being granted pardon from affective imprisonment was at hand.

Through the wisdom of twelve step recovery it was granted to me to find ways to peace and serenity, even to emotional sobriety. In recovery we are told “What we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition.” Recovery teaches a form of spiritual and emotional hygiene never taught to me in the hallowed halls of five medical schools or within the time-encrusted walls of European bible colleges. Those on recovery journeys can learn how to turn off chaos raging in their minds. The sublime gift of untroubled sleep, denied to me for years by psychotropic nightmares, was returned to me. The vast wonder of sound sleep during a Sunday afternoon nap was given back.

We learn how to embrace solitude, serenity, and true peace. We learn how to embrace as a way of life this anonymous imperative, “Turn out all thoughts of doubt and fear and resentment. Never tolerate them if you can help it. Bar the windows and doors of your mind against them, as you would bar your home against a thief who would steal in to take away your treasures. What greater treasures can you have than faith and courage and love? All these are stolen from you by doubt and fear and resentment. Face each day with peace and hope. They are results of true faith in God. Faith gives you a feeling of protection and safety that you can get in no other way.”


In recovery, emotional sobriety and serenity is the Holy Grail. For those having lived through the most abject tortures of emotional and chemical chaos, serenity is more precious than the Crown Jewels. Those glittering wondrous geologic wonders don’t compare to the gift of sound sleep. How badly do we really want serenity? I was challenged my first day in the recovery world with “If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it – then you are ready to take certain steps … Half measures availed us nothing.” Serenity for me was worth taking any steps in the world.

In addition to the twelve steps of recovery I added some of my own. I had phone service in my house disconnected; later my Internet service went by the boards. There’s no TV in my world except that forced on me by the ubiquitous screens in the gym. News magazines and newspapers don’t clutter my world, and more importantly their negatively doesn’t muddle my mind. I’m fastidious about the books I read. The only thing required to disconnect from the chaos washing over our land is to turn off my five year old cell phone. I come home to my house after a busy day and I feel like I am on spiritual retreat.

I don’t have to “let it all in.” In fact, my life depends on my not doing so.