The Outsider's Inn - Saving Lives with Conscious Living

By Krista Fuller

"There is great tension that so many of us feel within our private, inner spaces. I am deeply worried by our tendency to repress our emotional struggles and then unleash them into the environment with our behaviour, affecting the lives of those around us. I have committed my childhood, my education and my study to what I care about most: the beh

• Language: English
• Publisher: Love From Another Dimension
• Release date: Jun 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9780987427298

Krista Fuller

What I wake up for every day is to participate in a full force, back stage, groupie-fest on life. What's it all about? Who's got their hands on the wheel? Who's nodding off in the back seat? Who's writing the rule book? Who approved the edits and has the author been given the heads up that someone is tinkering with the facts?! Which really goes to the heart of it all. What are the facts? What is truth? What is real? What can be trusted? Who and why are we? Without knowing the answers to these question we're at the mercy of others to decide our fate. Ever felt like a piece of wet toast on the chopping block of life? The fallout is evident at almost every turn. I have been cutting my teeth on these ponderings for more than three decades, starting with poetry at 16, which I have never stopped writing. I hit the University of Queensland to do a B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy in my 30s because in my 20s I was very busy being a disco singer who toured the East Coast of Australia in a pink convertible Volkswagen Beetle. After teaching English in Japan and then finishing my psychology & philosophy degree, I spent eight years researching and writing my book on a social response to suicide prevention. I have done over a decade of therapy using Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) and also threw in the completion of a three year mentorship with a Shamanic teacher during that time. I have an obsessive passion for dismantling the abuse of power, undermining manipulative marketing, ending the rein of personal disempowerment, flattening the curve on inter-generational trauma and taking the Yellow Brick Road all the way up to the Emerald Castle to find out who we really are. I live to pull back the veil and look behind the scenes to strengthen ourselves against the twists and turns of life, while singing, dancing, laughing and swearing at every opportunity along the way. In simple terms...Find the Vibe to Thrive.

Book preview

Foreword

Suicide and the mindset and antecedents that lead to it are complex and multifaceted. Krista’s treatment of this sensitive subject matter is inspired. To complement her exhaustive research, she writes with great wit and a deep compassion that is informed by her own trials and tribulations, giving her an empathy and understanding for the subject that is hard to equal. This is balanced out by an objective appreciation of this sophisticated area of human distress. Her impressive degree of psychological mindedness, along with her skill as a talented wordsmith, allows her to articulate abstract and complex emotional issues in terms that the reader can readily relate to, access and appreciate.

What makes this work so unique, however, is her marriage of personal experience and engaging prose with the latest research and resources in this field. As someone who has conducted and published research on depression and suicide I can reassure the reader that this work is scientifically informed and reflects the essence of current psychiatric thinking in this field. This makes her work of value to both the general population and mental health workers alike. I see a particular role for it as a ‘workbook’ that a mental health worker could use as a stimulus for personal exploration with the people they work with.

Of particular importance is Krista’s understanding of the importance of working through traumatic experiences from one’s formative years that can haunt a person for the rest of their life if they are unresolved. She courageously reveals some of her own journey in taking the reader through what can otherwise appear to be the mysterious process of therapy.

For those working in this field or for those wanting to make sense of their own challenging journey – the very essence of the human experience – this book is for you.

Dr George Blair-West

Psychiatrist, Author of The Way of The Quest

Introduction

Over 2,000 suicides and more than 65,000 attempts to exit this mortal coil because of unmanageable levels of panic, self-loathing and shame occur in Australia each year. This is horrifying. But we can do something about it.

I have had some suicidal moments, drowning in images of my uselessness and tearing my hair out with despair and emotional collapse from the power of my self-hatred. I have felt terrorised by all that was within my mind, unable to see the good or the love in the world, and for good reason.

I was abused as a very young child. I didn’t know that for a long time. The memories were too painful for me to allow into my conscious awareness until I was thirty-three years old. The flashbacks started seven years ago—not long after I had my first baby—my reason to live as I sat on the bathroom floor pleading for a way to crawl out of my skin.

Remembering was incredibly rough, and healing has been a deeply challenging process, but they enabled me to make sense of the ways in which I had been living up until then. Abuse and the shame that came with it brainwashed me into a state of mental and emotional turmoil such that I was not able to understand reality properly; I was not able to connect to my feelings; I did not know how to differentiate between lies and truth.

Not too surprisingly, I put myself through years and years of self-abuse, all washed down with a riveting dose of bad-boy relationships. I was firmly entrenched in a disoriented and dissociated fog. I had almost no memory of my childhood, my adolescence was a foggy past, and last week was quickly forgotten. My mind was fractured and when my self-destruction got to the point where I broke, repressed suffering started leaking through the cracks. Time and space dropped out from underfoot. My brain, in trying to comprehend the truth of my life, while being overwhelmed by it, had no reality to hold onto.

Eventually I reached a crossroads: sort this out or die. I accepted the challenge and embarked on a quest. With a dream of transformation, I set out to find what I had been running from.

And what a quest it was.

My body, mind and spirit are still coming into a place of wholeness, but I have come an incredibly long way. With my outlandish ability to produce mucous and phlegm, I forced out and banished my toxic intruders. In fear my unconscious mind waged a war against my new-found desire for freedom, and lost—we learnt how to work together. My untrained mind—a pendulum swinging this way and that—practised itself into balance. I cried and screamed and complained endlessly. Then I learnt how to feel—my life-force in my body, my body on the earth.

This was an intense and visceral experience that propelled me towards an obsession with learning what I could about the mental, ethical and emotional dilemmas we humans face, so, I packed a lunch box and headed to uni. In 2004, not long after my thirty-second birthday, I earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree with Majors in Psychology and Philosophy, giving me the skills to better understand myself and those around me.

I also had to take myself off to a psychiatrist (groan!). I was not coping with trying to handle things on my own but the idea of therapy scared me senseless. This was where the blood and guts of what I’d been running from was hiding. This is where the festering of later-life cancer was taking place. Dr George Blair-West, a truly magnificent psychiatrist (though I am enormously biased it’s still true), showed me how to use eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) to release and resolve my memories of abuse. For several years we went into the parts of my mind that stored my greatest fears and greatest shame.

I yelled, hurt, behaved badly, sobbed, sulked, stomped my feet, checked out, came back and promptly checked out again. Then, I yelled, hurt, behaved even more badly, sobbed, sulked, kicked my feet, checked out, came back and promptly checked out again. And then came the moments of mind-altering clarity, time and time again—more lights, more windows, more sun. Slowly I came out of the wreckage. I unearthed the lies and secrets that had absorbed me, to find out where I was, and who I was, underneath them and without them. It led me to this book.

My passion for suicide prevention rises like a fire from my intimate knowledge of how unbearable it is to live in agony. For eleven years I have been living and studying the phenomenon that is the construction of self-loathing. I have learnt that we humans are inordinately powerful. Everything we are filled with—in our heads and our hearts—drives our actions, and all that we do in the world helps to shape a world we all share.

There is great tension that so many of us feel within our private, inner spaces. I am deeply worried by our tendency to repress our emotional struggles and then unleash them into the environment with our behaviour, affecting the lives of those around us. I have committed my childhood, my education and my study to what I care about most: the behaviours and the fallout that come from our tendency to want a better life for ourselves, to want a better world to live in, yet be unable to let go of our pain to make it possible.

Incomprehensible self-disgust, and the suicide that can come from it, happens for many different reasons. In part, though, it happens when, as individuals and as a society, we don’t heal. When we hide from our pain, fear and anger we become lost in a lie we create for ourselves, the pressure of which forces us to attack in the ways we have been attacked. If the people in my younger life who needed me to feel vulnerable and ashamed had recognised and healed their own problems around power and self-loathing, they would have been less likely to seek an escape through me from what troubled them. I may have been spared the feelings that could well have led me hopelessly and helplessly close to suicide (had it not been for an amazing crew of special friends, around a dozen highly trained professionals, and my refusal to give my life over without a fight).

Suicide isn’t simply understood or easily explained. There are layers and layers of contributing factors, and differences between people, which researchers, organisations and governments invest time and money in to understand. But they need our help. Suicide prevention experts often talk about the need for a community response to the problem. What does that mean and how can it work? What can we do? Should we do anything?

It is almost certain that you know someone who has suffered, is suffering, or will suffer, in some way through the events in their life. If shame, secrecy, fear or doubt prevents them from feeling able or willing to face their struggle—to go on their own quest—they may be left without the opportunity, resources and help that can empower them to release the load.

Emotional suppression is an internal time-bomb that carries more than enough force to devastate a life. I want to show you how your mind and emotions create the world we live in and the experiences you have so that we can learn how to undo the culture of shame (which feeds our silence) and blame (which feeds our anger). I want us to be safe to feel and experience our personal truths. I want us to live in a world where emotional honesty (coupled with love and respect of course) is a free flowing norm and emotional time bombs are rare.

Each of us is woven into the problem of emotional degradation and suicide. The more people who suppress their personal truths, the harder it is for the rest of us to behave differently—to break that mould—and the more likely it will be that our social environments and structures will be set up to reinforce the inhibition. As members of a human collective society, and more and more a global society, our thoughts and behaviours affect each other on an astonishing scale. We are emotionally connected to each other