Who is Crazy?

Interesting just to log on and read a really great blog on an Upturned Soul which explored themes of crazymaking, cause just this week I was having a conversation with someone about the issue or fear of being judged as crazy.  My elder sister had a psychotic breakdown in her early thirties (this happened in the early 80’s when I was in my late teens).  It followed a cerebral bleed but when I explore the astrology around it and feel deeply into the pressures that were building up within her to burst forth at that time, it made sense to me that her psyche may have splintered under the pressure and sought to release some of it in a psychotic break.   One of the manifestations was that she burned up a lot of possessions and my brother was called in to clean up the mess, though I’ve only found this out in later years.

My sister is a very Plutonian individual and when I explore her chart there are very strong linkages to my maternal great, great grandfather across the mutable signs, especially Gemini and Sagittarius and he ended up in an institutions following his own breakdown, in New Zealand.   My sister, in a curious twist of fate or synchronicity, herself ended up in an asylum there many years later.  And to carry the theme along my only niece also had a suicide attempt around the same age that my sister endured her psychotic break and her brother was the one who found her cut and bleeding over the carpet.

For my niece a long period within the mental health unit following a failed suicide attempt turned into a crisis in which she broke through layers of old conditioning, did battle with other people’s inaccurate projections onto her and eventually found liberation via an emergence of aspects of her deeply creative self. In short she evolved and became much stronger even after suffering emotional abuse at the hands of the staff supposedly entrusted with her care.  Trusting in herself she was able to go off all medications and receive spiritual help to understand her own sensitive and very gifted nature.

Part of my healing journey following my own struggles with addiction led me to various types of healing.  During a lot of craniosacral work undertaken following my own accident traumas, visions would come to me of a woman in an asylum wearing a straight jacket and a dead expression gazing out through a massive horizontal window onto a dark landscape.  She was watching a black bird fly away, which to me represented the part of her soul that could not live within the prison of the culture which denied it.  During the same session powerful visions of a Native American Indian burial service appeared in my mind’s eye.  I saw a dead body lay on a slab.  A black bird emerged from the victim’s third eye and flew away and then I heard these worlds over and over.  “But our spirits will not be broken”.

I’m mentioning this in this blog as this week I’ve become conscious of a very deep fear within me of going crazy or at least being judged as crazy, probably just for having very intense feelings.  I’ve never seen the inside of a psychiatric institution, like both of my sisters and my niece.  Throughout the painful years that I’ve had to explore a lot of repressed feelings and come to grips with issues of loss, grief and crippled self esteem  I have had enough wisdom to steer clear of those seeking to contain or control me with the use of pharmaceuticals.

This afternoon I’ve come away from a visit with my mother where I was accused of “carrying on” when I was expressing some fairly strong feelings of anger and passion surrounding some issues from the past which are currently rearing their heads in order to be resolved.  My other sister is struggling with a deep depression, has just had a bad fall and fractured her ankle and has lost her voice and her access to her own deep feelings.  Those buried feelings are being felt by those of us around her who, in not being medicated and being hyper sensitive, are open to feeling her hidden pain, while simultaneously  struggling with sadness at being a witness to the deadening of her precious essence.

It’s an interesting thing to note that as soon as my anger turned to grief and upset with my Mum at being frustrated it was easier for her to validate the feelings of sadness, rather than the feelings of anger.  But cudos to my Mum, when I expressed that truth she had the integrity to say.  “Your anger frightens me”.  I am sure it does.  I can accept that it does  I can understand that it does.  And luckily now, that no longer affects my ability and right to express it.

Mum’s mother had a lot of anger and frustration as a single parent and she took a lot of it out on my Mum.  Mum wasn’t ever really able to get angry about it as she felt for her Mother’s struggle and frustration, which in some way shows a largeness of spirit and generosity in my Mum.  Yet still the frustration that my grandmother passed down did live inside my Mum and we were on the receiving end of it growing up.  Later in life, attempting to address the complexity of feelings around this has been difficult, yet, on a positive note, not impossible.   I have mentioned before that my mother’s Mars at 4 degrees Pisces conjuncts my Chiron at the same degree and transiting Neptune is passing back over this degree at present.   The tie in to my sister’s chart rests on her Sun and Venus at 1 and 5 degrees Pisces square Mars in Sagittarius.

Anyway in discussing this with a therapist I’ve known for some time I spoke about this fear of being judged as crazy and perhaps even being locked up.  The therapist said.. “Often people call things crazy which are beyond their ability to understand, cope with or accept.”  That made a lot of sense to me.

Anger is problematic for a lot of us in this culture, no where more than in those of us raised in the Catholic education system which equaes it with the seven deadly sins.   Its no accident that the word “mad” is equated with “crazy”, whatever it is and however we judge it though, anger or even rage is an intense explosion of emotional energy that is a response, often to some kind of violation or misunderstanding, thwarting of impulses or frustration.   It helps us to set a boundary to protect the self from violation and abuse and in its strongest form seeks to annihilate the source of threat that is perceived in the environment.  It is a deep response of the limbic brain and one that is essential for us to maintain the integrity of the inner self.

I write a fair bit about my Saturn Moon on this blog but I also have Saturn Mars and its interesting to note the Saturn Mars patterns in ancestral and parental charts and how they express in each subsequent generation.   Saturn Mars aspects are often associated with a thwarting of will which leads to a built up of enormous energy within the psyche.  My sister who had the psychotic break has Mars Saturn conjunction in Cancer and has in later life become completely incapacitated and needs now to be cared for entirely by others in an institution (Mars in Cancer), with a strong Libra influence surrounding Chiron which mirrored my maternal great great Grandfather’s wound her inability to process the deep emotions struggling for expression over years turned inwards.

Its challenging to see my other sister at the moment after having suffered a fall going down a similar pathway.

Having suffered severe depressions and several accidents myself I know how hard it can be and how inner forces of repressed and unexpressed emotions can affect the body and my ability to function and move forward in my life.  I am lucky to have had the benefit of therapy but also to have been able to reach deep inside and feel the feelings that my society might have liked to label as crazy.

It seems to me that in order to thrive we may need to encounter periods of craziness.   When you look at a fired surface which is crazed, its very interesting and beautiful to my mind.  The emergence of irregular lines on what would have been a flat or boring surface, lends an individuality to that piece of pottery.  Those cracks appeared under the influence of the firing of a piece of clay or earth and the deeper analogy to me in this is that life itself is the firing process which brings out the cracks or fissures through which an essence escapes and then solidifies into a new form.  The pressures of our spirit being in life, can and do lead to craziness, don’t they?

In the end who is to judge what or who is crazy?

What does it say about me that I have this fear, which I am beginning to realise has prevented me from expressing so much that I would have wished to.  I guess all I can do is become aware of these inner inhibitions, for fear may be a phantom that robs me of a very valuable aspect of myself that is so necessary to my fuller emergence as a spirit at this particular point in time.   And Uranus is currently passing through my Aries ruled eighth house and passing over progressed Venus there.

In the end crazy, like every other word is a label we place on things or people or situations, it could just as well be a judgement of what is too much for us to contend with, what breaks out beyond the barriers of what is permissible to our limited vision of life and being, that which challenges a sense of order we impose upon things and people and situations in order to maintain an illusion of control and order which at most is only temporary.  It may also be the ring pass not beyond which we find it too frightening to venture, but must if we are to grow and evolve and morph as the ongoing process of life surging forward demands..

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
― Apple Inc.

Might not craziness be calling us to venture a little further out into deep dark space and open our minds and hearts to new ways of perceiving and understanding life in its infinitude of manifestations, even those more challenging and disturbing?  Can we bear to tolerate this uneasiness as the necessary price of growing and evolving as souls?

I’d be interested to hear your views.