Hi, my name is Angie Grey and I attempted suicide at the age of seventeen while I was pregnant. It was within six months after being released from the psychiatric ward. I jumped off a train bridge in Bismarck, North Dakota and was rescued by a boater in the water beneath me. I didn’t realize how lucky I was for him to be there that late at night because I didn’t know how to swim and was sure to die. For a long while, I was okay with living up until May of 2009. At that point, I had a suicide date in mind. Fortunately for me, I found Pathways Health Crisis Center in Minneapolis. At that time, my next door neighbor, Angela had committed suicide and I was in full blown delusion. For years, the dead woman living in my home urged me to take my life just as she did my neighbor. My grandiosity was that I could see through walls to the adjacent townhome. I saw my neighbor laying in her bathtub, with pill bottles and a bottle of wine in hand. All the while, the dead woman who lives inside my home was telling me that life wasn’t worth living. Most recently, during my psychotic break, the dead woman said my new neighbor is planning on taking his life too; but this time it will be with a gun and due to the constant hip pain he is experiencing. She (the dead woman) continued to tell me and show me how obvious it is that life isn’t worth living. Look at all the suffering. Thanks to my medicine, I see this isn’t real. Fortunately for me, I have a strong support network and Pathways as well. I feel bad for the others that don’t!
Author: Angela Ellen Grey
Angela Grey is an Indigenous novelist, poet, and painter whose work explores the intersections of memory, identity, and healing. She, formerly an architectural drafter, studied creative writing, as well as spirituality and healing, at the University of Minnesota, where she deepened her commitment to storytelling as both an art and a form of medicine. Alongside her writing, Angela finds balance in yoga and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which shape the reflective quality of her work. She lives in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, with her husband, one spirited pup, and four cats. When she’s not writing, she enjoys camping, budget travel to places like Maine, Oregon, and the coastal Carolinas, and gathering with family around a BBQ grill.
The Integrative Wellness Circle
This group explored the potential healing powers of whole foods and nutrition. We delved into practices for a healthy lifestyle and came away with many resource options. The focus was a holistic approach to nutrition (how all parts affect the whole). It wasn’t so much about restrictions as the class was about flexibility for life-long adherence and making yourself healthier long term not just a short term diet. It was about individual choice for lasting nutritional change by figuring out the quality foods while exploring local growers’ produce and vegetables. In class, we explored how body type, relationship, spirituality, work, exercise, sleeping, and energy level affect our eating styles; balance in these areas equals our better food choices. In the end, we came away with online connections to keep us motivated and up to date on local nutritional offerings.
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About Me and Schizophrenia
My onset of schizophrenia didn’t occur until long after I’d left home. I was twenty-six years old and just starting college when the hallucinations began. During Fall semester in 1996, I met a fellow student named Holly. She said that our Psychology professor liked me.It wasn’t until I started having dreams of my being murdered that my life with Holly and my professor became more chaotic. It was sometime in November 1996 that the first nightmare occurred. In the dream, I went for my daily walk in Normandale Lake Park. I was on the south side when my Psychology instructor saw me and smiled. I turned away embarrassed and when I looked back he was so close then I saw his face. He was raging mad and lunged at me. I saw my long blonde, curly hair fly in front of my face. Then I felt his hands struggling with me and then he was on top of me. I didn’t have time to scream in my dream; however, I always woke screaming.
Holly didn’t like me talking about my dreams. It disturbed her because she thought that it couldn’t be me since I never had long blonde hair. Instead, the thought it was an older female that I knew back in high school. Holly thought that maybe I subconsciously wanted that former acquaintance dead but she was wrong. I didn’t. I swear. As the dream progressed, I realized that it wasn’t me in the dream but Holly. That is when she started getting more upset about me talking about my dreams, so I stopped sharing them with her.
Anyway, our college lives became anxiety-ridden, especially since our Psychology teacher started following us around. He was also faculty advisor so he was friends with everyone, meaning he was everywhere: in and out of our other classrooms. Then the maintenance men started watching us, too, particularly me. It didn’t matter where I sat (lunchroom, out front, in the Japanese garden, on hallway floors, in the library or computer center), our Psych professor would find me.
The dreams went on for months when one day I was watching television while doing dishes. At that moment, my body froze. I saw her—the blonde with long hair that was being murdered in my dream—and knew immediately who it was. It was my friend, Holly! The news report said that a pedophile had killed her in Normandale Lake Park. It couldn’t be right.
During my psychotic break, I was hallucinating visions and voices as well as deep in delusion. I was seeing a dead woman in my house as well as my deceased grandma and aunt. In addition, I thought I could walk through as well as see and hear through walls to my adjacent neighbors townhouse. Plus, I was deep in paranoia in thinking someone was following me wherever I went.
My psychotic break or nervous breakdown occurred over a six month period. Initially there were confusing voices and overwhelming smells but that progressed into debilitating paranoia, delusion, and non-stop hallucinations. I refused medication because I thought it would cloud my thought processes which were relaying danger, danger, danger…. I was worried that my family and I wouldn’t be safe if I took the medication. I thought the dead woman that lives inside our home would cause us harm. Plus I was concerned that it (meds) would control my thoughts and take over our wellbeing so that we couldn’t deal with the watchers. In reality, it was all unreal. In the emergency room, I was forced to take Seroquel which knocked me out. It was in the moments upon awakening that I realized all the voices, visions, smells, and sounds STOPPED. It was quiet for the first time in a long while. Fortunately, for me, family members made certain that I stayed on the medication regimen. Yes, it has gone through changes where I’ve had to switch meds but all in all the majority of the hallucinations and delusions have stayed away. Stressors still bring on bouts but for the most part the drug therapy helps. At first, I kept in mind that I could always stop the meds and bring back the positive hallucinations; but now I know the bad will come along with the good. While I miss the visions of my deceased grandma and aunt, I don’t miss the bad spirits.
I’m also an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate. Thanks in part to fantastic foster parents, sassy social workers, and outstanding teachers, I’m also a family-focused parent of four wonderful young adults. I’ve self-published one memoir under my own name and four fiction novels under a pseudonym, Peyton Mathie. Those accounts were based on my life stories. Although I’m a native of the Lake Traverse reservation in South Dakota, I lived in Brooklyn, New York off and on throughout my childhood. Currently, I reside in Eden Prairie, Minnesota with my family. My hobbies include yoga, MBSR, camping, budget travel, and painting.
Note: The pseudonym was derived from the first name of my daughter’s childhood friend and the surname of a coworker at approximately the same time frame. In one I saw signs of my past and the latter, hopefully, my future.
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Soul Journeying Lesson
One of the things about me is that I’m open to new therapies such as soul journeying. It is for purely meditative reasons and Friday night’s class was tremendously calming and provided the opportunity for self-awareness. Clear intention, in the form of a clear question, made the journey to inner wisdom and healing very focused. The facilitator warned that lacking a clear intent would result in the journey being fuzzy. I wanted to know how I could be of help to a loved one. Others made it a healing journey, interpretive, a journey to meet with an ancestor, connection with the natural world, or explorative. We then learned how to create and hold sacred space so others cannot as easily harm us. We did this by restoring individual power and health (balance and harmony) through intention (focus).
She started by telling us our style options for journeying: being on the outside looking in, walking with our helping spirit, or merging with our power animal. Flipping back and forth between styles was also an option to us. Next we were told that everything that was about to occur on our journey was an answer to our question or intention.
Then the instructor guided us through the three worlds (lower, upper, and middle). Each has a transition area such as a tunnel, clouds, or fog. The lower world can be accessed through visualizing entrance via a natural body such as a lake, stream, roots of a tree, etc. I used a lake that I knew well as a child as my access point. The upper world passage for me was via hot air balloon. I visualized that then ran into a cloud layer as my transition point. The middle world is our world and entry was via a fog mist as I left my front door. Each world has power animals or guardian spirits that teach or guide us, thereby helping us solve our real world problems. (Drums guided us between worlds and to start/stop points along the way)
I thought it was sort of like a visualization puzzle. The class assisted us in expanding our awareness, self discovery, healing, increased energy and allowed us to access our own individual spiritual guidance, Higher Power, which varied for all involved. All in all, it enlivened me and restored balance and completeness.
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Embodied Imagination Remedy
Embodied Imagination Remedy
This creative psychotherapy–embodied imagination–assisted us in visualizing imagery from our dreams as well as memories to work our way through our body. Since dreams are felt as real world experiences, they occur in a world that can be accessed to explore the landscape of that dream world to work through problems. The teacher helped us by talking throughout and asking us to mentally describe the landscape so we could better experience the vivid process. At that point we felt what we had sensed during the dreaming process. We then explored the symbolism of other people, places or things in our dream. We embodied the different states or perspectives through sensations we had during the dream or memory process. In my case, I used my dreams of being inside lost inside my mind and body where I tried desperately to repair illness. Some group members worked with memories of childhood trauma while others worked with bad dreams of arguments, war, or a cheating spouse.This new awareness changed the way we perceived the dream or memory so that we could better mentally work through our problems in our everyday life by dealing proactively with an approaching negative situation similar to that of our bad dreams.
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Crystal Sound Bath Therapy
My latest class in sound therapy went well, as expected. I took the class for meditative effects as it makes me sit still for a half hour and helps in calming me down to a relaxed state which lessens my anxiety and counteracts the stressors in my life. Plus I don’t experience tremors (medication side effects) when I’m meditating, at least not the majority of the time. The class began with brief introductions, as it was only a half hour long activity then to an invocation to create sacred space for our activity. Only ten people were in attendance so there was plenty of room to stretch out on the floor in the sanctuary. Most brought their own mats but I had to use the center’s carpet remnants which was still comfortable.
The bowls’ harmonies were extremely calming. Sound and vibrational healing isn’t new (some believe the universe was brought into being by sound), simply not mainstream. The facilitator told us that sound healing is typically done with acoustic instruments or simply the human voice and it is beyond the human ear that our skin and bones (through every cell and atom) conduct vibrations throughout the entire body.
Frosted crystal bowls (pressurized silica sand and water) of various sizes amplify energy and transfer the sounds to our bodies with a synergistic effect that was produced through the different harmonies of the various bowls and the added use of various small musical instruments. The instructor spoke intermittently to tell us what was happening; and in doing so used a tone that harmonized well with the bowls, too. It was an excellent exercise in mind-body healing (balance and harmony) as it was deeply relaxing, promoted self-awareness, and added some clarity to my day.
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Healthcare Power of Attorney
It was very humbling to appoint my mental healthcare proxy which in my case involves a psychiatric advance directive that gives my appointee the power to make healthcare decisions on my behalf. Our family learned of this through the National Alliance on Mental Illness Minnesota. It was brought to our attention because of my forgetfulness to take my medication as prescribed (on a daily basis). I’m glad I filled out the form though because it makes my wishes known so that I won’t be given treatments of which I’m against. In addition, it also contains instructions on life-sustaining procedures such as Do Not Resuscitate (DNR), dialysis, surgery, pregnancy, and as well as Donor Registry information. In my case, with the medication issue, it is necessary but I’d argue that it should be mandatory for everyone since those are critical decisions that are left up in the air should one not be able to make them.
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Outsider in My Own Culture
Wherever I go in public, it seems like I’m an outsider. First of all, I’m part Native American; therefore, I’ve never been considered completely “white”. Secondly, due to my lighter appearance, I’ve never been thought of as American Indian. Then there is where I live–Eden Prairie; it is a special place where I also don’t feel as if I belong. Neighboring suburbs poke fun at Eden Prairie for being too affluent, arrogant and ignorant. And, I don’t know if it is due to my mental illness; but I find myself out of place wherever I go in public, especially so in my own community which is why I take so many classes in adjacent towns like Chanhassen, Bloomington, or Minneapolis.
It makes me think of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Wherever You Go, There You Are. I’m comfortable in my own skin, just not when I’m around other people where I have to communicate my intentions or opinions. I’m at peace on my own, and very mindful, perhaps too mindful. I’m not looking for a quick fix, as I don’t believe such exist. I’m the type of person who can get too lost in a good book or basking in the moment. Looking inwards can become surreal. So how can I feel like an insider as opposed to an outsider without losing touch with reality? I guess I have to turn back to another book that I frequent, Richard Carlson’s Shortcut through Therapy, which really isn’t a quick fix as the title implies. His simple yet profound ten steps keep me from those radical “thought tornadoes” (thinking traps) as Kathy Emerson-Marshall of the National Resiliency Resource Center refers to them. My favorites of Richard Carlson’s steps are: “know your own mood, letting go of negative mind-states, count your blessings, and now is the time to live”. Doing all of his ten things, especially counting my blessings such as the connectedness of my immediate family and support structure is what gets me from one day to the next.
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