A middle-aged man whom I know very well called me up the other day and demanded to know: “Tell me the truth. Am I Aspergers?”

“Well . . . What? Why are you asking that?”

“Because my girlfriend says I am.”

Oh my.

I tell him my preferred psychiatric label for myself is “paranoid schizophrenic.” And laughed, telling him that everyone, literally everyone, can be located somewhere on a continuum of some psychiatrically identified “spectrum” or other. “OCD,” for example, “obsessive-compulsive disorder:” I’d call myself (and most people I know!) on that spectrum as well, in my lingering tendency to get hooked on internet clickbait. This tendency disgusts me, but it’s there nonetheless.

In fact, OCD could be called “addictive personality,” which I certainly am. My only hope is to let go of negative addictions and replace with positive addictions. Which I mostly have done. I especially enjoy my addiction to “two hours a day of physical culture” (one hour walking the dogs, one hour, broken into several sessions, of yoga, chi kung, tai chi). Daily routines can also be called addictions, if they are strong enough. And addictions are not necessarily “bad,” if the routines are life-serving. In fact, we need to remember, routines build character. 

I’m deliberately “mixing it up” here, offering a way out and through our tendency to find fault with each other and ourselves through the use of  psychiatric labels.

Let’s face it. As the Old Testament begins: IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD.

We humans are language makers par excellence, intensely creative in our drumming up all sorts of ideas and their names that have, usually, only vague reference to whatever they are designed to cover. We use language to label each other as this or that and then either praise, or condemn, or try to change, save, or medicate. Animals don’t do this. They are already connected to the world, and don’t need to “try to understand” to make the connection. Language separates us from our own bodies and from the world around us, leaving us alone, confused, and lonely. Using words, we try and try and try some more to figure out what is the “best” way to identify and describe the natural living abundance that our left-brain preoccupation has shunted us from. And we cannot help but use language to try to reknit the original connection that the rest of the natural world just naturally enjoys, without trying.

I too, use words to label, not so much the psychiatric kind, but the astrological, numerological, and enneagram kind. Unlike plants and animals, we humans are always trying to “understand” ourselves and others, and use language to try to capture the ineffable. None of us can be put in an unchanging box, although schools and other types of mental programming do attempt to do this, and sometimes, at least temporarily, succeed.

Like most people (like everyone?) I too was brainwashed as a child, by schooling and especially religion. Roman Catholicism “put the fear of god in me.” Unlocking the mysterious, and intensely loving energy of the universe that lay behind the clanging door that enclosed the tiny, suffocating cell of intense fear has been a long-term, and inherently messy process, that I began in my twenties and continues still, 50 years later..

None of us comes to this world “bearing clouds of glory” and isn’t immediately shocked in some way. Brilliant neon lights, a spank on the behind to get us breathing, just the jolting fact of being finally out of the enclosing but increasingly confining womb is itself a profound shock.

Sudden shifts that require complete rewiring always cause shock. We are inherently full of PTSD, the flesh of our bodies having imprinted shock after shock in their tissues. Unwinding all this trauma is a lifelong business. None of us is ever, as long as we occupy these bodies, free of the past trauma that locked our bodies into various subtle and/or dramatic contortions. We each carry our old buried pain somewhere. Where? In the neck? Well then, perhaps we need an accident that “breaks our neck” to begin to let that old buried pain go.

I actually worked astrologically yesterday with a dear friend whose Mars is in Taurus, only four degrees from where Uranus is traveling now. That Mars of hers is the engine of her chart, since it interacts as the focus of a strong, unyielding T-cross with Jupiter/Lilith/North Node in Leo and Moon/South Node in Aquarius. So, as Uranus approaches her Mars, she did just that, broke her neck, not even two months ago, in a car accident. Taurus rules the neck.

I did a chart for the moment of impact at that place. Instead of what I expected to see, either Mars or Uranus on one of the angles, there was fortunate Jupiter in Sagittarius, exactly on the Descendant of the chart for that moment!  She is now beginning to see this immense crossroads in her long life as a great gift that opened her mind and heart to vaster possibilities, despite possible lingering disability, and will be plumbing its meaning forever.

I’m still plumbing the meaning of incidents and accidents  that occurred in my life at X age — all sorts of ages! — all sorts of traumatic events that shaped me, steered me in certain directions that, unless I fully grok their implications and how they formed me, will keep me imprisoned in their narrow conduits until death.

My aim, always, in life, is to free myself up. And that means, first of all, to free my mind and heart of silly human constructs that say this behavior is “normal” and that not. After all, the pharmaceutical industry is banking on our believing that what the DSM gives us, the over 300 identified labels called “disorders,” in order to mainline their expensive drugs and thus zombie us to the point of roboticism.

Fie on all that!

What got me going on this anti-psychiatric/anti-pharmaceutical rant (again), is this current article:

ADHD: Childhood Epidemic or Pharmaceutical Scam?

After reading it, I went back and scrolled through a number of Jon Rappoport posts, as he has done so much work to publicize the lack of definitive clinical tests for any so-called psychiatric disorder. Period.

The Psychiatric Matrix Creates the Politically Correct Victim

and

The Whole Profession of Psychiatry Is An Outright Fraud

and

The Psychiatric Matrix: What You Need to Know