Does your mother still speak to you?
She does. She's become a more generous person. While I was writing the book I kept telling her it was fiction-- and a lot of it is fiction, or fictionalized from things that actually happened. I told her the mother character had some similar experiences to hers, but that it wasn't supposed to be her. After she read it, she said she liked it very much, but that parts of it were disturbing.

Yeah, it's supposed to be disturbing.
I thought she'd be upset about the mother, but instead she mentioned a  story about the younger daughter, who does drugs and has indiscriminate sex. I'd truly made that one up, so it was no problem to explain. I was glad that her concern was about my sister rather than herself.

So she has changed for the better with maturity.
My parents got married quite young and it was very bad. They fought a lot, all the time that I lived with them. Like Ruth, my mother wasn't allowed to go on the road with a band after she was chosen in a contest to replace their vocalist. Writing from her point of view showed me how bitter she must have felt about that. And her bitterness permeated the family. My father died right after my sister got married and moved out. He was 48. Soon after, her old high school boyfriend called and swept her off her feet. She married him and it turned out much worse than her marriage with my father. She really didn't know how to have a good relationship. She divorced him, then married a third time, a wonderful marriage that opened her heart, which had been pretty closed from the time that her dream was shattered.

I'm surprised to hear that your schizophrenic sister got married.
She was married when she was 20. She didn't have her psychotic break until she was about 28, which is rather late. Most people who develop schizophrenia show symptoms in their teenage years. But my sister was always difficult, dark and moody, and hard to deal with. A hint of what was to come. Plus she did a lot of drugs.

How is she doing now?
She's still in a mental hospital, really out of touch and responding mostly to internal stimuli. Because of my mother's bitterness, or maybe because of the patterns that were passed down from her family, she didn't seem to want to nurture us. And my sister was born after my mother was already aware that she didn't want to be in that marriage. She was pretty wild in high school --no aspirations or goals or direction--and she never learned how to create a life because she wasn't supported. If I hadn't discovered psychology in high school, I might have gone down the same path.

Do you subscribe more to the "nurture" theory of the cause of mental illness, rather that "nature"-- that it's family environment rather than brain chemistry?
Well, I subscribe to both, and more. I see mental illness as a spiritual challenge. Everyone comes into life with a purpose, something to learn, and something to give. The more I thought about what the purpose of my sister's life might be, I realized how much I'd learned from interacting her--especially in opening up my heart to love her exactly as she is, not as I'd hoped she'd be. It's been comforting for me to think that her spirit is doing what it needs to, even if I don't understand how.

It would be interesting to find out what she thinks about your theory that there's some higher purpose to her illness.
I tried to talk with her about it, but she has a lot of religious delusions and she got very hostile and said, "Who do you think you are, God?" So I just shut up. And it's not that I think every psychotic is a prophet. They're people who can't function in the world as it is. That might be a valid message about how the world works, but it's not that they messenger should be revered. Or stigmatized.

In some cultures they are--if not revered--at least respected for who they are. Have you read R.D. Laing?
Many years ago. I thought he was great and that all treatment should be like that. But it must be extremely challenging to run a residential program for psychotics with no medication. 

He thought that allowing a person to go through their psychosis unmedicated might bring them out all right on the other side. It sounds similar to your idea of spiritual purpose. But Laing says medication interrupts the spiritual journey, so they never get the chance to complete it.
I think both are possible. I used to be involved in a school of esoteric techniques and meditation, living communally. At one point, (yoga guru Swami) Muktananda came to visit and he was blessing everybody. After that, one of the women I lived with had a psychotic break. We tried to keep her around because we all thought it's just an alternate reality, but she got to be too much for us to handle and we had to send her home to her mother in Michigan. But there are cultures who revere madness. In Eastern religion there's a term that means "God-drunk." It fits what happened to my housemate. Like she got a tremendous rush of energy that fried her circuits.

What about the idea that it's all brain chemistry?
Everything is interrelated. Brain chemistry, genetics, environmental or emotional. Some people think mental illness is caused by a virus. One school of thought, called orthomolecular medicine, treats schizophrenia by balancing nutritional elements, eliminating what you're allergic to and supplementing what you're lacking. But I see everything as one package. At the bottom--the bowl that holds that package--is our spirit's purpose. So it doesn't really matter if a condition is physical or mental or chemical--it's just, how do you find a way to express yourself that satisfies and makes a contribution?

Was that the basis for your devising the 10 steps for surviving a dysfunctional family that you teach in your class?
Yes. I try to bring people back to their own internal truth. The way out of those dysfunctional patterns is going inside to find your true passions, talents and abilities, and learning how to express them in your life. But those automatic, unconscious patterns can trip you up when you try to set a new course for your life. So you need to bring them all to consciousness and take them apart, without stewing in them.

How does this apply to your life? Tell me more about your personal journey.
While I lived with my parents, I had no sense at all of who I was. I'd never had the opportunity to explore it. I was told what to do, what to wear, where to go, who to be friends with. When I was in my last year of college,  I had a vague notion to go to graduate school, but I had no self-confidence and no focus, and my boyfriend wanted to get married so I could support him while he went to medical school. All my girlfriends were doing that, getting married and teaching. Although I didn't know this then, my parents were waiting for my sister and I to get out of the house so they could split up--so when they saw this opportunity to marry me off, they jumped on the bandwagon. I didn't really want to, but I didn't have any sense of my own power. I remember a moment I had to myself just before the ceremony, standing in the dressing room in my white dress, looking in the mirror and thinking, "What am I doing? I can't do this! I have to get out of here!"

(Laughing) The runaway bride.
Except I didn't have the courage to run. All those people were there, the caterers had everything set up, my parents had already paid for it. I just went ahead.

Oh, what a nightmare. You were repeating your mother's mistake.
Exactly. Luckily, it was only a year-long nightmare. I didn't get out of it honorably--I didn't know how to. A guy I worked with put the make on me and I responded out of blind desperation. When it came out, my husband went home to his parents. Suddenly I thought, "Oh! Good!" My parents pressured me to reconcile, but when I realized I had my own apartment, my own car, my own money and no one else to support, that I didn't have to listen to them or anyone any more!

What did you do next?
I'd been working at the state mental hospital, my first job after college, in a program that hired young, inexperienced college grads to work with the back ward psychotics nobody else wanted to deal with. The guy running the program trained us for that, but mostly he did group therapy with us. I was amazed at how it opened me to my own truth. This was when humanistic psychology was starting to unfold and I was also training to be a Gestalt therapist. I heard of a school called Arica, an international school that had branches in most of the big cities in the US and Europe, teaching meditation and psychospiritual techniques and exercises. That set me on a spiritual quest for several years. I moved from Philadelphia to Boston, then came to the San Francisco Area on a whim. I'd gone back and forth between being a therapist and following my own personal development, and was beginning to see psychology as too small because it didn't take spirit into account. So in looking for something else to do, I realized that one of the things I loved most was singing. I put together a repertoire and some charts and worked as a vocalist for ten years.

So first you repeated your mother's mistake, getting married for the wrong reasons, then you pursued her dream, singing with a band.
Right. But it was my dream too, at the time.

How did she react?
I started off just singing with a girlfriend. Once when we were rehearsing, my mother paid an unexpected visit, so we did a song for her. She said, "Well, that's nice. But it's not good enough for you to make it in the music world." So we ignored her. (laughs) We started out doing cabaret, where all you need is a piano and vocals, but soon expanded. The next time my mother heard me sing, I was in a band. Afterward she wrote me a letter--which I still have--saying she hadn't thought I could do it, but had to admit that I was really good.

Do you ever do any singing these days?
At some of my Daddy's Girls readings I sing "Twisted," that Joni Mitchell/ Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross song that says mental illness is more than we think it is, which is the same theme as in my book. "My analyst told me that I was right out of my head, but I said, dear doctor, I think that it's you instead, because I have a thing that's unique and new..."

"Because instead of one head, I've got two!"
And it's true, we do! We have a basic personality we use to get along in the world and with others, but we also have our inner reality, our true spirit and and connection to all-that-is. So there are your two heads: your inner wisdom and your outer necessity.

You're working on another book now.
Yes, it's structured around the ten ways for surviving a dysfunctional family that I teach in my classes. My stimulus for writing them was September eleventh. Daddy's Girls had recently come out. I'd been promoting it, but after that, I was too shocked and frightened and disillusioned and worried. Plus I thought this personal book about one family was too personal to have any relevance at that time. But soon my training kicked in and I realized that the dysfunctional family is like a fertile training ground nurturing the seed of all dysfunction--at home, in the workplace, or political and global. Our internal reality is the source of the distortion in the world. To make life work better, we must clean it up one heart at a time, starting with ourselves.

©2002 Pacific Sun