Preface
This article is intended to underscore the need for a new way of looking at and addressing mental health issues in a rapidly changing world. The bottom line is that we cannot “fix” the problem, certainly not with more new theories or treatment methodologies, and most definitely not with the next best pharmaceutical concoctions. Though all these things are helpful, they do not get at the source of the “illness” that plagues us, especially our younger generations.
The changes needed are not in medical journals or textbooks. The needed changes are fundamental to the recursive human mindset that emerged long, long ago and that, in a sense, must be reset from within, from the inner realm of the conscious self.
But reality is not only a personal creation, it is a collective agreement in which individual and shared beliefs shape our lived experiences. It is the mass consciousness of mankind that must evolve. It is our “consensus reality” that must upshift to reflect the truth of who and what we are. Not separate entities forged in fear and isolation, but indivisible, immutable, eternal conscious beings manifest from and of Source. All that is.
This is a journey that so many people are taking and sharing in, while yet in the midst of the unraveling of the old paradigms of our current reality. It is not pretty and it is not the “ascendancy” that many have been prophesying or yearning for. But the changes are happening around us and within us.
The Minutiae of Our Existence
Did you know that a trash can is not a trash bin. (See for yourself.)The terms are not interchangeable. I wasn’t looking for this critical piece of information. I stumbled upon it. Just one of those rabbit holes of internet minutiae that we follow unintentionally and, suddenly, time has passed and our minds are cluttered and our senses dulled.
This kind of rabbit-hole experience has an emotional component to it. I can’t quite identify the feeling state. But the thought behind the feeling is one of “disbelief: “
Is this what we’ve become? Putting our precious energy into fine-tuning the language of garbage receptacles?
That feeling returned as I was searching online for a current list of mental health counseling theories for this article (which has since taken a much different turn). I found exactly what I was looking for: The Ultimate List of Counseling Theories, Lens* and Treatments.
*Lens: Low Energy Neurofeedback Systems
(New unsolicited information on the latest therapeutic acronym.)
I thought I would find a dozen or so counseling theories and treatments like: psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, existential, client-focused, gestalt. Or the eponymous theories—Freudian, Adlerian, Jungian, Skinnerism and the sort. They were all included in the Ultimate List, but the list was much longer. It went on past a dozen, longer than a few dozen, well past one hundred, all the way to 263 and counting.
Really! Go ahead, click the link. Please take just a moment to check it out and then pay attention to your feeling state.
I was in disbelief and a bit overwhelmed as I scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled through the list. but the experience came with some stronger emotions—sadness (?), dread (?). Yes, it surprised me too. I may have been unearthing old feelings of being emotionally overwhelmed, anxious and depressed (more than once in my life), not knowing where to turn for help.
I’m relatively certain that the person who compiled the Ultimate List felt a sense of achievement, and rightly so. But I don’t know if they ever thought it might not be a good idea to share this with a potential client or make it available to people in a state of mental anguish looking for healing and hope. The stress of making a choice, “What treatment would be best for me?,” with so many options could lead a person to a sense of utter despair. I don’t think I exaggerate.
Freedom of Choice: The End of an Era
Minutiae and rabbit holes are one thing. And perhaps they are only a symptom of a much larger issue—i.e., the abundance of choices available to us. The seeming limitless range of choices at our fingertips for virtually every facet of life. The sky’s the limit. We are free to choose our own lives: where we live, what we do for a living, who we marry or co-habit with, how many (if any) children we bring into the world, where we go on vacation, what products we purchase, what products we throw in the trash bin (?), what friends we make, what religion we follow, what books we read, what ideas we hold, what promises we make, what promises we keep.
We live in an unprecedented time. An era in which we are free to choose. It’s not just a “free will” thing. It’s an endless array of possibilities, lists, options, directions. But, isn’t this a good thing? To some people the answer is probably a resounding YES!, at least in an abstract sense. Or certainly to the imaginative dreamer. But in the day-to-day arena of decision-making, it’s not all its cracked up to be.
We live in a world of choice overload. We live in a world of minutiae. We live in a world of endless rabbit holes. Under such conditions, the “freedom” of making choices isn’t freedom at all. It is a burden and it comes with it’s own set of fears and phobias for which there are endless therapies and treatments to help a person cope.
Try these information rabbit holes. For example, Google the word Decidaphobia and have at it! Or you might want to try: Quarter-Life Crisis (Definition: the paralyzing emotional strain when a person believes they must make the “right” choices among all possible options as they enter adulthood).1
If the “Freedom-to-Choose Era” (as I choose to call it) is more a bane than a boon, more of a curse than a blessing, it matters little. It was just a brief moment in time. At it’s zenith in the 1960s and 1970s it opened all kinds of doors for women, LGBT+ communities, and racial minorities. It was an era of important social movements and progressive change. But those heydays are gone as a number of forces are bringing this era to a screeching halt.
Feel the whiplash? Forward acceleration of limitless choice abruptly slamming into a brick wall of “Access Denied!”! (Try this Google-search “rabbit hole” if you are up for it: Emotional Whiplash and Trumpism.)
Looping Mindsets and Beliefs
An overload of information and glut of choices have uniquely defined our reality over the last several decades. But, as I’ve said, it has been an era of very short duration. The acceleration of technological change along with AI and its exponential growth toward multiple tipping points and uncertain singularities has now become the superseding characteristic of our reality along with institutional unraveling, ecological degradation, and global insecurity. (See my Substack article: Two Choices: Choosing Humanity’s Destiny in a Time of Accelerating Change.)
We have been trying to fix things for a very long time. Not just today’s problems but the problems that human civilizations have wrought for thousands of years. Yet we can’t seem to make any headway. If nothing else, we should have been able to do away with war by now; or poverty; or disease; or exploitive ecological practices. Something tangible and lasting!
The truth is that humanity does not have the capacity to right the wrongs that plague us. Why? Because we are bound to a self-perpetuating looping mindset of beliefs and assumptions about ourselves and our reality: “What is, must have always been and must always be.” Each one of us is born into this reality and indoctrinated into a set of fundamental beliefs and expectations which we accept uncritically.
These beliefs are as old as time. They are steeped in our biblical origin stories. We have been thrust out of the garden into a state of separation and fear. All of humanity participates in perpetuating these beliefs as truth and acts accordingly on them—separation, duality, fear of self and fear of the other, fear of the creatures of the earth and fear of nature itself, fear of scarcity and perpetual war, fear that leads to judging others lest they judge us first.
This “consensus reality” is what we agree to as a shared, physical world and what we perpetuate without intent or even awareness (THIS IS WHAT MUST CHANGE!)
Our fundamental understanding of humanness is entrenched in separateness, duality, and minutiae. Paradoxically, we deny our original choice to live in a state of separateness and fear while at the same time seeking desperately for answers to who and what we are. In fact, we probe every part of the physical world wherever we can, hoping to find truth and meaning.
The minutiae of our existence stems from humanity’s fears and conundrums,and also its curiosity. Its penchant for breaking things into smaller and smaller parts, pieces, subdivisions, classifications, categories to get to the real answers we are looking for. The what, the why, the how of our existence. The massive particle accelerators of our era are perhaps the perfect metaphor for man’s quest for meaning! We are looking of meaning in minutiae.
Science tries to break down physical reality into the minutest particles seeking answers. We continue to look for the “building blocks” of life. Our language of reality is material, mechanistic, physical, objective. We build giant particle accelerators in an effort to crack the shell of the egg to find answers, to see where we come from. (See my Substack article: What is Reality?)
Disassembling the Psyche
Cracking open the material structures of our reality is relatively simple, given enough force and energy. But we go into other realms of our existence with the same intent—for instance, the human mind. We are all familiar with those “inner-self subdivisions.” They came from the mind of Sigmund Freud—the conscious mind, the unconscious mind, the subconscious mind, along with the components of his psychoanalytic theory: the Id, the Ego, the Superego. Though the goal was to better understand our thoughts, our motivations, and our behaviors, his was the ultimate separation of the self from the self.
The human psyche is a delicate thing. The human animal is physically and psychologically vulnerable throughout childhood and into adolescence. Being born into a reality that perpetuates the ideation of fear and separation—them and us, fight or flight, survival of the fittest—leaves little room for an untarnished emergence into adulthood. Unaware of the oneness from which we come, grief crushes us, differences make us suspicious, scarcity hovers over us like a dark cloud, evil lurks around every corner. A sense of trust, safety, autonomy, initiative, identity, intimacy, integrity hang in the balance. (See, for instance: Erik Erikson’s Stages of Pscyhosocial Development.)
Mental health can begin to erode very early in life. Maybe even at birth or before birth (in-utero). The newborn is fully self aware. But the shock of the birthing process in “modern” society can be traumatic even in the best of circumstances, and the memories of “life-before-life” may trigger an unfulfilled longing or sense of abandonment that can last a lifetime.
The problem is that when the conscious self emerges at birth, it forgets from whence it came. Not always. Not immediately. But for most of us, eventually. It was not always this way. But in this reality and in this timeline, we are thrust from the womb and spend a lifetime searching and longing for our return. Fearful of living. Fearful of dying. And everything in between.
NOTE: Modern science and medicine are still stuck in a mindset of the randomness of life and the characterization of the newborn as a blank slate devoid of self-awareness, emotional sensibility, or discernment. For alternative perspectives, please see my Substack article: Birth of the Sentient Child; also my website pages: Thrust into Life: Birth Trauma, Blank Slates, and Changing Paradigms and Useful Resources: The Sentient Child.
The mental health issues of our times are complex, but they emerge from our very beginnings, cosmically and individually. Just like everything else, we compile mighty tomes of names and labels and gradations and characterizations of every conceivable mental illness, every diagnosis, every treatment option, and clinicians must adhere to them almost religiously. Not so much as a resource for healing but for the purpose of providing evidentiary information for medical insurance reimbursement and perhaps as a rationale for the explosive growth of the pharmaceutical industry.
I refer to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-5-TR. I do not recommend this massive rabbit hole if you are questioning your own sanity.
Even though we continue to refer to mental illness euphemistically as an “issue” confronting society, it is nevertheless steeped in a mindset of negativity and judgement. A root cause of things like school shootings, road rage, sexual abuse…, and all kinds of criminal and subversive behavior. And we consider ourselves victims of mental illness, whether or not the source is biological, parental, trauma-related, or just the evil influence of some demonic entity.
If I Had Only Known Then What I Know Now
We are not separate. We never have been. We are part of a oneness that defies definition, delineation, or further description. If anything, we are a manifestation of that oneness, taking form for a moment in time simply “to be.” We are like the droplet of water from ocean waves smashing against the rocks. That droplet is the freedom we seek. Nothing more. A moment of self creation and experience that returns to oneness and shares that moment with All That Is.
For a fuller discussion, see my Substack: Consciousness, Society and Civilization.
We can argue the truth or falsity of this viewpoint or contend that it is just the ranting of an older academically trained woman trying to rationalize or intellectualize the purpose of life, or to be more blunt, to cope with the fear of death. If truth be told, fear of death permeates and stifles our collective consciousness. Much of humanity’s energy (even its most creative energy) has been expended on trying to control or outrun death.
Whatever the motivation, I see that even though humanity’s physical drives are toward domination and destruction again and again, the conscious selves that are incarnating in recent times bring with them the awareness and the memory of our spiritual nature. The veil of forgetfulness (whatever its purpose) is thinning. For some, like myself, the journey toward “knowing” has taken the better part of my lifetime. For many others, it is inherent from birth, even from conception.
The expanding field of consciousness studies (CS) has guided me to this place. In keeping with the inherent duality of our reality, the CS argument can be boiled down to two opposing viewpoints: The physicalist and the non-physicalist. To briefly summarize from a useful article published in by the National Library of Medicine (2022): What if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain?:
The physicalists tell us that consciousness is generated solely and purely from the brain and is only local to the brain. They purport that consciousness originates from physical substrates like neurons that have evolved to be more and more complex over time through adaptation, leading to the emergence of consciousness. Self-awareness, subjective experiences and emotions are physical in nature.
Alternatively, non-physicalists do not assume that a physical substrate generates consciousness, and many even propose that consciousness is, in fact, more fundamental than matter and spacetime. This viewpoint is in keeping with ancient and eastern cultures—matter and spacetime arise from consciousness rather than the other way around. Furthermore, a non-physicalist framework where consciousness is considered fundamental and has non-local properties would better explain the full range of reported human phenomenology, such as: astral travel, near-death experiences, past-life memories, clairvoyance, etc.
Scientific research and the study of human phenomenology and parapsychology have also guided me to new ways of seeing the world and our reality beyond the confines of the material universe. Perhaps even more than this, there have been innumerable synchronicities that have acted as beacons of light along my path to this understanding. (See: Useful Resources.)
If I had known this all along, perhaps I would not have struggled with profound grief, depression, anxiety and panic disorder throughout my life. If I had known more fully, I might have been more of a light to others—family, friends, lovers, clients, colleagues and passersby. If I had known… . But this was my path. It has been purposeful, gratifying and full of a peace and love and indebtedness toward those who have touched my life.
As a retired psychotherapist, I have continued to rethink and reevaluate our approach to mental health, mental illness, and mental health care. I am not a diagnostician, nor am I a proponent of it. Too many lost souls have been irretrievably branded and abandoned to the mighty DSM.
Over the past few years, I find myself focused elsewhere, in particular, on the transition points of the conscious self in its journey into and out of the earthly realm. The transition to life and the transition beyond life. This is where the evolution of individual and collective consciousness can have greatest impact on the much needed transformation or Great Upshift of our consensus reality.
If you would like to hear more, I suggest that you read two of my recent articles on Substack: Birth of the Sentient Child and Preparing for Death. They can serve as stepping stones toward deepening perspectives on consciousness and reality and encourage movement away from the iterative reality loops2 of our beginnings. Mankind’s evolutionary consciousness has been stunted for far too long.
Thanks for taking the time to read this article.
1 Early in my career as a mental health counselor (which was actually a menopausal career change), I met with a young client who said they came to see me because they were having a quarter-life crisis. I had never heard the term. After our first session, I looked it up online. Needless to say, I was really out of touch with the reality of generations of young adults coming of age decades after me. I was still in the freedom-to-choose bubble in which I grew up. I actually chose more than one or two career paths, but never with the anxiety of a quarter-life crisis.
2 For real-word analogies of how belief loops and reality loops influence our perceptions of reality every day and keep humanity in a perpetual problem-solving straitjacket, I recommend an article by Daniel Kim, Paradigm-Creating Loops: How Perceptions Shape Reality. See other useful articles at: TheSystemsThinker.com.
Minutiae, Rabbit Holes, Choice Overload, and Reality Loops