I have been consulting Dr. Lee-Bloem for over three years now, since I left a psychiatric clinic where I was being treated for schizophrenia. Prior to my admittance I was a sub-average student at a large public university, with a zest for learning but increasingly no ability to control or manage my life. Now I am now a part-time student at a local university, getting respectable grades and learning to sing. What follows is the in-between phase.
In high school I was a “good student” who went to class, did his homework and was in a rock band called “CRISIS”. Everyone else, except my drummer, was keen to go far away to university, and I was no exception. What I didn’t realize at the time, and this was very important, was why I wanted to go. In high school there were social pressures, friendships made and broken, and life seemed to be becoming just one gig after the other. I was at school like everyone else, and yet I wasn’t there at all.
No surprise then, at university I found my academic direction turn into a dark curtain, clouding my path. I had many existential and religious thoughts and began to turn inward. I had “friends”, some real friends for a while, and I wrote for the college paper, but it was when I realized my lack of academic progress in science was directly in line with my “socializing”, including drinking beer regularly as a habit in my new “adulthood” that I saw the writing on the wall. After trying to run from the inevitable, I was taken by a firm hand to the psychiatric hospital by well-meaning souls at the university. I was put on my first antipsychotic drug and stayed three months in the hospital. I desperately wanted to go home. My parents were kind enough to take me back to help sort out this mess I’d gotten into.
Back home, I enrolled in an 18 month outpatient program through the local hospital. I was put on a different antipsychotic drug as well as an anti-depressant. This was then changed to yet another medication which was combined with a second one, so I was on two different antipsychotics. At one point I spent another two months in the local psychiatric hospital. During this time, I’d gained over 50 pounds. One day, about a year after I began the outpatient program, my parents took me to see Dr. Lee-Bloem. I had nearly given up hope of enjoying a life without drug dependency, but Dr. Lee-Bloem showed how I could move beyond prescription pills with energy medicine. I began to feel like a person again. She showed me the amazing depth and power of a person, that energy was not some buried treasure to follow blindly but accessible to everyone, you just had to know how to access it.
We did energy work every week. It was slow at first, but gradually the prescription drugs were able to be lowered, and instead I could use vitamins and food supplements. We had to repair the damage that was done to my liver, hormones and immune system. In addition to the supplements, I was practicing EFT and Infinite Intention Technique to try to reduce the need for antipsychotics. I have since lost 25 pounds, which has had the added effect of increasing my energy to exercise during the week. I am now off antipsychotics completely, and my toxicity has gone down to normal levels. During this period with Dr Lee-Bloem, I embarked on Family Constellation Therapy with a different psychiatrist which was very helpful in coming to grips with what I call inter-generational trauma. I no longer have to carry that burden.
Today, I’m happily studying a little art history and international relations. I have made contact with friends I thought I’d lost and made some new ones. One of my emotional life-supports through this time has been music, and I’ve joined my church choir as a tenor, which has been a wonderful way of meeting people and shaping a talent that was buried in my illness. The best thing, though, is knowing that I have so much to learn: about music, about friendships, about history and about love.
S.A.