snowymountains

There's no catch-all panacea. Open awareness during the day helps to catch a first-level of what might be "off" but it's not always possible, nor does it prescribe what to do with it. That said, a daily meditation practice is a good thing, as long as it's not a form of avoidance - it's just not healing per se though.

Both facts and stories have their use. Telling a story is more engaging and can lead to gentle transformation. Facts are useful for confrontation.

I was reading some von Franz lately and she was touching upon the topic of cults, gurus etc. Whom she naturally wasn't very fond of. She made an exception though, specifically for those teachers who actively send students away after the cycle of teachings is fairly complete. The psychological argument is complex, so I won't write it here but it's in line with my lived experience and interestingly, doing otherwise in Buddhism is attachment to the teacher.

Someone else may have a different experience of how spiritual progress impacted their relationships though. there are billions of people on the planet, each with their own unique lived experiences. They also have their own unique and different relationships.

Not flipping back doesn't mean it's final. Just as children who typically go through evolutionary stages that are more more refined ( ex cases of regressions ), there is always more integration to do. There can be no final realisation, in that there's nearly infinite stuff to integrate.

You'll get as many definitions and as many philosophies have been developed on planet Earth. My take on the matter is that for one there's no final realisation, it's a process. After all, nobody can know if there are further realisations down the road the moment they self-declare enlightenment. It involves a certain degree of know thyself, both in terms of mindfulness and in terms of longer term tendencies and other internal mechanics. It involves living in a way in which the conscious personality is aligned with our organism. It includes some experience of interconnectedness or oneness if you prefer to call it that. You also don't need any religion to progress, your organism already knows everything about it and it will throw "puzzles" at you, which will be catered to you, your next step and your path, which may not be the same as that of somebody else who lived 1000 years ago. By all means do study spiritual texts, just don't take them too literally.

States like pre-psychosis, that do not have psychotic symptoms yet, are difficult to diagnose and need a specialist, with additional training specifically for pre-psychosis diagnosis. Given the level of expertise that is required for someone to understand how far off is someone from a psychotic episode, my only advice is to listen to nobody on the internet and instead visit a mental health professional who specialises in this. Even a non-specialist psychotherapist or counselor, while they can help you with the side-effects of episodes in your life, they won't be able to help with treatment for the episodes per se. So, a Clinical Psychologist or a Psychiatrist who also specialise on psychosis are the people who have the necessary knowledge to help you. The only advice I can offer is to find a specialist close to your residence and work with them, and also... to ignore all internet advice as it will be uninformed.

What's interesting is that ego state therapy, at an extreme level ( by no means the usual or desired course of events ) can bear some similarities to exorcism processes. I'm aware of one psychotherapist who, during ego state therapy, has come across a personality that reminded a lot from the movie the exorcist. This included an insane amount of vomit, much more than normal vomit, just like the exorcist movie. The guy was quite scared to recite the event, it gave him chills still nothing supernatural happened. So indeed there's a process that needs some training ( perhaps the Christian priests found it empirically?) and a personality that's detached from the ego can behave similarly to popular accounts of demons. This doesn't mean it is a demon though. Also applying an exorcism process to anything less than a fully detached and malevolent personality will cause severe damage, which is probably why a psychiatrist needs to be present these days for a priest to legally perform an exorcism. This can be scary stuff, the therapist I have in mind is a PsyD with decades of experience. Still there's nothing indicating anything metaphysical . Edit: to offer an account in the opposite direction, a psychiatrist one told me he was convinced he had encountered something transcendental that was pure evil, "demonic". That guy was a tenured professor at a relatively well known university. The thing is that because he was shit scared, he didn't want to recount the story, he just mentioned his conclusion. So can't really vouch for it as I don't even know the background story. Perhaps it was nothing or perhaps he had a point, I'll never know.

You're welcome and just to be clear by grounded I mean come in touch with their 5 senses - not grounded to the other persons reality through direct confrontation during an episode, even if the other person's reality is the objectively correct one. Visiting a counsellor/psychotherapist can be helpful for psychoeducation on what to do to help during an episode as well as coping skills ( this is not treatment btw - for treatment of Psychosis oversight by a psychiatrist is required )

It's a theme, people living a 30min drive off a natural disaster site, pray, ask spirits for help, do reiki, do whatevs but they don't drive there with food and clothes. I mean anything spiritual is of course fine but before delegating everything upwards to God, perhaps first getting those hands dirty and doing something which is of actual help might be a good idea... Hope your effort, sounds like a lot of it, helped your family member.

If you're not well and I tell you oh @liminal_luke everything's gonna be great, several things happen, for one I implicitly say it's not ok to express how you experience your current reality and two I implicitly pressure you to consciously suppress what your organism is telling you. It's a kind of anti-mindfulness if you like. It's very common that encouragement or consolation comes from someone who cannot handle another person's pain, they do it so that they feel it better themselves but that's their problem really and it's best not to impose the extra burden to the person in pain, that person has enough going on. Of course it's natural to feel discomfort when sitting with someone else's pain, that's actually a good moment to do insight meditation and see where the discomfort comes from. Healing (psychological healing) really happens when the person in pain can express themselves and a healing personality is present, a congruent personality that is. Transference and countertransference basically transfer the congruence. Transference is not only about projecting person X to person Y, its effects go way deeper than that, it also includes transference of somatic effects, which as of relatively lately has been clinically investigated. I can't speak for medical healing as there's no research I'm aware of on that, and I don't know much about the medical part, but my personal/subjective belief is that medical healing would involve some form of somatic transference. *during* a psychotic episode it's different, anything that helps a person become grounded/get in touch with their 5 senses is what's called for. Outside a psychotic episode, like all people, people who have episodes benefit from unconditional acceptance, not consolation. There is room for encouragement and helping someone overcome a negative belief *when that belief is entirely unrealistic*. If the negative belief is realistic, then no intervention. but helping overcome a negative belief comes later, after they're able to feel acceptance for how they experience reality - and again this is not done via consolation. Consolation is actually ineffective communication.

The context to see it for laughter is decensitisation, not surprise. I have paid attention to it, I still laugh. The fact that we know a process doesn't make it stop happening. Read eg about the McGurk effect, even after you have read about it, the effect still works ( on this specific one even decensitisation won't stop it from working) - this is unrelated to laughter, just to demonstrate that knowledge of a process doesn't mean the process no longer works.

e.g. a game I play with my kid, we do funny grimaces and whoever laughs first loses. It's the same grimaces for some years now but some expressions are so funny that we laugh again and again, without any surprise. Desensitization will surely have an effect, so if we played this too often maybe we'd stop laughing but still it wouldn't be lack of surprise, it would systematic desensitization.

If we try to quantify it via Jungian personality factors eg intuition and use mbti, the healing personality type is INFJ. Less than 2% of the population is INFJ and not all INFJs have a healing presence. I doubt it's 10% for physicians, it may be even less than 2% which is the population average.

Imo that's what a therapist is about, the rest are psychoeducation and teaching of techniques for self-therapy but without a therapeutic presence you don't have a therapist, again imo. Someone great once said is that these are the only people that should be therapists and that's what should be the only screening criterion, not scores on experiential sessions for PHQ9 and GAD7. Encouragenent and consolation actually work in the opposite direction of what a healing presence does to people. Milton Erikson had this nature ( not his "Eriksonian" derivatives/imitators though ). Carl Rogers essentially was the same in that regard. Others too. This is what I meant when I said one needs to find the rare gem in the transpersonal therapists for a modern equivalent of shaman. There are people like this, in the western world, it's just that they're few and apart. One common theme amongst them is that they've been taken apart and put themselves back together, just like Shamans allegedly did, but it goes beyond that, as there are many ways in which someone can reconstruct, and not all lead to a healing presence. This can be a long discussion 😁, a very interesting one that can go into a lot of depth, but a long one.