Awareness Exercise for All Objective Observers

Professional or Amateurs

... including those currently in training to become full blown, certified¹ Messiahs.

By Patricia Lefave, Monophrenic

This is a simple, yet potent, exercise for those of you willing to actually DO it.

Statement of a psychiatrized patient labelled in 7 speedy minutes as; “schizophrenic” or some version thereof, or perhaps like mine, Delusional Disorder (paranoid)² or Borderline P.D.³

Here is the statement: “I feel like I am trapped in the Matrix.”⁴

Here is your exercise:

First, I want you to see the patient before you as a self contained, walking, talking disease process so that you can make what s/he said fit into your beliefs, the DSM and your own training. Got that? If you do, then I think you can understand why the well intentioned, reductionist, Joel Gold M.D. genuinely believes he has discovered a brand new “mental illness” and also why some of his colleagues believe it is just the same old illness with a slightly new, or modernized, expression of it being used to reveal it.

I can sure see both sides of that argument, personally.

The problem is that I can ALSO see a whole OTHER point of view that those experts having that argument, as to whether that is a new disease, or just a new manifestation of the same old one, cannot see at all.⁵

That point of view is this one: it is neither new, nor old.

Now, experts? For your exercise, change your premise to this one.

I want you to see the labelled patient before you as a walking, talking, human being just like you, probably in a lot of distress right then, while in a relationship with you, and relating to you as an equal person having a conversation with you. Can you feel your “objective observer” status slipping, just a bit? Is it making you a little anxious? If so, is that a real disease just like diabetes causing that, or is it really more psycho-spiritual/social in nature?

Here is the statement again; same words, different premise, changed professional attitude. What do you hear now? What does s/he MEAN when talking TO you about the situation s/he is in, right in that very moment?

Same words: “I feel like I am trapped in the Matrix.”

ALL human beings have “perception problems”, especially those who don't relate genuinely, and directly, to others. Often the only REAL difference is in which one has the power to define “reality” for the other one, no questions asked, or answered and very often with no concrete evidence of anything accepted, “allowed”, or wanted.

After all how would the controllers look TO “others,” if they looked right AT others, and “allowed” those “others” to look too closely AT them, and at what they do with all those good intentions?

1 Now...you won't take that the wrong way, will you?

2 On account of my being such a “high functioning” genetic defective....I am almost exactly like the other people doing the defining of me, only crazy of course....

3 Usually reserved for people who try to point the reverse out to psychiatrists and then get labelled “manipulative” for it, which is something most psychiatrist can't stand because THEY are never manipulative themselves, are they?

4 Now of course it will help your comprehension of this if you have ACTUALLY read the book or seen the movie so you know what the “Matrix” is.

5 So does that make ME grandiose?