The Expert Within

By Emma Pierce

The human mind and how it works, what it thinks and perhaps more importantly, why it thinks what it thinks, is a subject that has fascinated humans from time immemorial. The first scholar to tackle this subject was Aristotle, but he was certainly not the first to wonder and ponder the mysteries of human perception, comprehension and interpretation. Since then psychologists, psychiatrists, philosophers and even novelists, poets and artists have tried in their own inimitable way to penetrate and reveal that most fascinating of all mysteries – the workings of the human mind.

This book is the story of a human mind ... not the human mind ... as all authentic stories of the ‘human mind’ must be. This book tells the story of the author’s mind; the only mind of which she can truthfully speak in spite of the fact that she has qualifications in Psychology, Philosophy (Theology) and Journalism. For all that, the qualification upon which she relies most is that of human experience – life and living. In adolescence her mind declined into insanity, lingered there for some years, then painfully and insightfully regained its place in the world of sanity ... only to go on and penetrate the world of formal, academic, or professional (whatever you wish to call it) education/understanding.

This book was not written for the edification of those called mental health professionals. It was written to share wisdom and understanding with the ordinary, everyday lay minds of those who care too much to embrace or be embraced by the word ‘professional’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Oct 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398463363

Emma Pierce

After 13 years of a marriage that produced five children, Emma Pierce was divorced and became a single parent. Necessity and passion drove her to take steps to become a journalist. She worked as a journalist until after she wrote and self-published her first book, Ordinary Insanity. She was then 37 years of age. The book was her autobiography of recovery from mental illness after some seven years of futile professional treatment. Now aged 77, this book is the story, not of a life, but of a mind – her mind – the only mind she says she can truly write about.

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About the Author

After 13 years of a marriage that produced five children, Emma Pierce was divorced and became a single parent. Necessity and passion drove her to take steps to become a journalist. She worked as a journalist until after she wrote and self-published her first book, Ordinary Insanity. She was then 37 years of age. The book was her autobiography of recovery from mental illness after some seven years of futile professional treatment. Now aged 77, this book is the story, not of a life, but of a mind – her mind – the only mind she says she can truly write about.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to two people: My brother Reg for a lifelong bond that only strengthened with adversity.

It is dedicated also to my friend Sue for her 45 years of encouragement, challenge, and inspiration … right up to the day she died so recently.

Copyright Information ©

Emma Pierce 2022

The right of Emma Pierce to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398463356 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398463363 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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Prologue

Ordinary Insanity was my first book. I thought it would be my last. It was not. However, this book may well be my last and perhaps most important.

I wrote Ordinary Insanity with the intention of giving hope to the hopeless. Back then (50 years ago) it was ‘common knowledge’ courtesy of ‘experts’ that people who suffered a mental illness were fundamentally flawed; born with a genetic defect – a predisposition to their ’illnesses, whether it was schizophrenia or manic depression (now called bipolar disorder); the only two mental illnesses perceived, back then, to be genetic. My journey out of mental illness demonstrated expert opinion to be incorrect. I wanted those living without hope to know it was not the mentally ill who were fundamentally flawed, but expert opinion.

This book is not so much the story of a life as it is the story of a mind. My mind: The only mind I can truly write about. It is a mind that once descended into insanity (these days delicately called mental illness) and then recovered more than fifty years ago to go on to live a sane, or if you will, mentally healthy life for more than fifty years.

It is more than 45 years since I wrote that first book. I was then almost 30 years old. I am now almost 78 years old. In these intervening years; I acquired first a Bachelor of Theology, then a Master of Theology, and finally a PhD in the field of Theology (dissertation was a theology of mental health). Why theology? Ah! That will become apparent as the story unfolds. As a necessary string to my bow, I went on to acquire a post graduate certificate in Psychology. But how did I maintain my sanity throughout these last 45 years considering the amount of intense brain activity necessary to gain the academic qualifications I now have?

How? The experts still say it is not possible for those who have suffered a mental illness to maintain their mental health, even in the most ordinary circumstances, without the aid of drugs and professional counselling. I beg to differ, but let the reader decide for her/himself.

As said, this book is primarily the narrative of a mind; how it grew, declined and grew again. In the writing of it I made many discoveries about myself and my natural, one might say innate, processes of thought. Perhaps the most poignant aspect about what I shall call my personal philosophy is that it developed in such a way as to ever seek meaning that is universal, usually found in the origin of meaning. There are those who would call this origin of meaning ‘truth’. Many will say it is merely an intensely analytical mind … and I would not disagree. But is that all there is to it?

I seek to find answers to fundamental questions about mental illness and mental health. For example: How sane am I now? Perhaps the more important question is: What are we calling sanity? Conversely, what are we calling insanity? Does one need to be an expert to make such a judgement? But then, what makes an expert an expert? Does the expertise on healthy thinking (and living) come from within each person, or from outside every person? If from within, that would render the judgement of experts nothing more than a matter of opinion; something from the outside. See what I mean about ever seeking meaning that is universal? Ah well, it was Einstein, the pre-eminent scientist, who said: Listen to the person with the questions, not the person with the answers.

I will ‘speak my mind’ primarily in the first person and leave it to the reader to identify – or not – with my speaking. There are ideas/beliefs spoken here that might be called radical. I do not speak them with any background introduction or explanation. Such has already been given in other, more academic papers and books I have written; chiefly my doctoral dissertation. As stated already, this book is narrative of the mind wherein radical thoughts/ideas enter as personal reflections where many go on to develop into personal beliefs and convictions. Do my thoughts and thought development make me mad or sane? Again, the reader can make his/her own judgement on that; unless they are willing to let outside sources ‘decide’ what is their opinion. Whatever the reader decides will not and cannot invalidate my experience – that is mine. But it may validate my claims regarding mental illness and mental health. Both are intertwined throughout this book.

One final note: This work follows no established format. It is probably unprecedented in as much as it is a mixture of narrative, philosophy, history, psychology and theology. It has been extremely difficult to write in as much as past and present are often permeated one by the other. The story of a mind does not, and I believe cannot follow a straight, chronological order. That is not how the mind works. Errors, illusions, insights and presumptions of yesteryear, both mine and that of society cannot wait – not even in narrative form – to be named. I can only hope my reader is interested enough to bear with me in the difficulty of narrating the story of a mind.

Chapter 1

Even now I remember a sense of freedom that was so exhilarating I revelled in it. Little did I know! I was 15 years old. I had just left school – ten years in a Catholic Convent boarding school; a Dominican school. Dominicans are among the most disciplined of the Catholic religious orders. After ten years of rigid and disciplined routine, intensely focused on prayer and learning, I was suddenly free to be my own person; do my own thing; make my own decisions. I was free! Or so I thought.

Only now after the experience of mental illness (bipolar disorder, then [1964] called manic depression) and a formal education culminating in a PhD in Theology (dissertation was a Theology of Mental Health) and a Post Graduate degree in Psychology, along with more than 75 years of living experience, I believe I have some authority to speak about the cause(s) and cure(s) for mental illness. The bracketed placement turning cause and cure into plurals is because I do not believe the plural applies to either of these ‘conditions’ – but the reader can decide that for themselves after reading this book.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Any authentic story of the mind begins where that mind began to think reflectively; at least as far as memory can attest.

Firstly, I never had a mother. She left, I’m told, when I was eleven months old. I had a stepmother who was never interested in me, just as I was totally uninterested in her. Not having a mother is not a tragedy to the person who has never had a mother. You cannot miss something you never had. Certainly, I never did.

For as long as I can remember, I was aware that my father did not have much time for me. It was not that he did or did not love me; he just blissfully ignored me in as far as he could. It was not something I suddenly came to know or realise one day. It was something I had always known. Something I knew so innately that I was not distressed by it. I just lived with it. I wasn’t happy or unhappy about it … it was just the way it was. With my father I had what I would call a brutally honest relationship. That is to say there was no emotional attachment on either side to muddy the waters. We each said what we meant and meant what we said without affection, without malice, without any desire or intention to influence the other party to any extent. The best word to describe it would be ambivalent – happily ambivalent.

While I appreciate that this is unusual as far as family environments go, I also appreciate how we are inclined, by cultural expectations, to read emotional deficiencies into the person who has grown up in what we consider to be an unloving family environment. For me that raises a question: Does cultural expectation create the ‘deficiencies’ it perceives, or do those deficiencies arise from a fundamental deficit? I came to believe that much cultural expectation, guided as it is by ‘expert’ opinion, is built primarily on ‘expert’ guess-work … especially after my years in psychotherapy.

During psychotherapy all those many years later, there was enormous emphasis placed on my relationship – or lack thereof – with my father. We will come to that further on. But what must be stated here and now is that I had a brother two years older than me. Somehow psychotherapy missed the significance of his presence in my life and the sustaining power of that very loving relationship. I have marvelled ever since at the unswerving determination of so many therapists to focus on my deficient parental relationship while dismissing so completely the most significant – and loving – relationship in my life. Thanks to that relationship there was no lack of love in my life. My brother and I were extremely close and still are. We are both of us aware of something we call a bond (but it is so much more than that) between us; something that bonds, even as it frees us to be who we are. We have no explanation; no sense of origin for this bond. It was always there, if sometimes obscured by chance and circumstance.

Life offered both of us choices and we made them. As a result, we each did our own personal time in hell. Reg went into alcoholism and I went into insanity. The closeness seemed to loosen as we each walked that necessarily dark and lonely road. Then after tough years apart we reconnected to find that we had never really been apart. That bond, our relationship is now stronger than ever, the main reason being we both ultimately crawled out of our individual hell by refusing to blame anyone or anything but ourselves. Yes, we both escaped the blame game that is played so easily these days. It was neither environmental nor genetic heredity that decided who we are. We did that, reaping much benefit and even wisdom, especially from the tough times, as we went.

The above very brief narrative of my life is related here because it is the beginning narrative of my mind. My relationship with my father and my relationship with my brother both impacted on my life and my thought processes – i.e., philosophy of life – albeit in very different ways.

From the father-daughter relationship I learned to treasure honesty, specifically personal honesty; not to bullshit to myself. In time that very firm anchorage in life would save me from two deadly enemies of mental health: Succumbing to the image of ‘me’ as it came through the filter of another (psychotherapy that would have me blame my upbringing for my inadequacies) and the clarity of vision that helped destroy the rationalisations I built to justify my behaviour – good or bad. Good behaviour needs no rationalisation. Bad behaviour deserves none. As I rose from the abyss of mental illness, that very early relationship delivered its gift; the ability to accept life as it is, without fear or favour.

From the sibling relationship I learned the solid, tangible, indestructible nature of unconditional love. I learned to see of another, and to reveal to that other, all the faults and failings of the human condition, and to love and be loved both because and in spite of those failings. Added to all this was a peculiarity: The father, who happily ignored me, utterly doted on my brother. That was not the peculiarity. The peculiarity was that this made no difference to either of us. Our relationship had nothing to do with our father.

Like most children, the next most significant influence in my life and certainly in the development of my mind came from my teachers. As with any student, I was largely the product of my education. Whether we appreciate it or not, teachers do not just teach us what to think, they also teach us how to think. Indeed, I would classify this distinction as the difference between a good and a bad teacher. A good teacher is not the one who thoroughly knows the subject, but the one who knows how to open the student’s mind; how to convey the ideas of that subject to the student; able to meet the student at the student’s level and then guide the student forward. Many university lecturers in English literature might be hard put to teach a kindergarten class how to read.

The ‘what to think’ is something most adolescents learn to question, sifting through to accept some and reject other parts of what we are taught. The ‘how to think’ is what either enhances wisdom (not knowledge) or obscures it. How to think is more about understanding than it is about knowledge. Mental illness – let’s be blunt, insanity – has its roots in the faulty education that does not appreciate that how to think is the foundation on which we build our interpretations of life; of living; of one another; of all the reality the human mind detects. The mind being what it is, interprets everything it perceives, filtered inevitably through the lens of an accepted authority … often nothing more than culture. So, when culture, for whatever reason, assumes that feeling depressed amounts to an illness, it is all too easy to convince the adolescent they are ill rather than that they are simply human. We might easily make the case that much mental illness is the product of faulty interpretation, fostered and nurtured by an education that renders each succeeding generation the victim of that education.

There were two grades of student in my day; those who were A-grade and those who were B-grade. It was our educators who decided the grade suitable for each and every student. B-grade students, presumed to be less intelligent, were taught book keeping and typing; functions that equipped the student for ordinary office work …to keep them busy while they decided whether to become a nun or a wife (it was, of course, a girl only school). A-grade students, presumed to be more intelligent, were taught French, Latin, Art and advanced mathematics. I was designated A-grade. Beyond infant and primary school (when we were all equals learning the 3Rs) I spent my days studiously pouring over French and Latin texts, battling furiously to make sense of Art, and utterly confused and struggling with advanced mathematics. Later life taught me to discard whatever benchmark was used to evaluate intelligence. I have met too many ‘office workers’ whose intelligence left me floundering!

It seemed my educators thought I should develop my full mental potential; go to university; become something brilliant like a doctor or lawyer or some other sort of Indian chief. The problem with that was that my father, born and raised in India, was the victim of his culture and thought that women should not be educated. Indeed, left to grow up in India I would never have gotten so far as kindergarten.

In spite of all the above erroneous perceptions my educators gave me about how to think, they gave me one invincible weapon honed