Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

I believe in counseling because I believe in teachers and healers, and these are the roles Counseling served by a good counselor. It is strange to have a person in your life with whom you share the most intimate details of your life, to whom you expose the most frightened and broken and cruel places inside you, but with whom you have no outside social contact whatsoever. However, this can make the work you do together feel safer than it would if you were confiding in a friend. There are things I can talk about with my counselor, suicide being an example, that would be too loaded to discuss with many of my friends or any of my family. The sense of responsibility is different than in other relationships: if you stand up your counselor, you are not letting her down, only yourself The relationship is entirely focused on you and your healing, so you don't have to fear that you are demanding too much.

My counselor is an amazing person. She listens to me, really listens. She doesn't let me get away with anything, but she never makes me feel attacked or violated. She's a queer mother who identified as an anarchist before I was even bom! And she's connected to an entire community of healers and old-school activists that I never even knew existed. She works on a sliding scale, as many good counselors will, and has a really sharp critique of the psychiatric industry and all its exploitative tendencies?and she treats me with respect, as a peer.

In this society, we're never taught how to care for ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually. Healing is a skill we have to learn. We can wing it, teaching ourselves as so many anarchist musicians and bike mechanics have, but the stakes are higher. For those of us who suffer from serious chemical imbalances like manic de- Mental Health pression, or are trying to recover from intense traumas like sexual abuse, the risks we j/g

take when we strike out on our own as if we already know how to heal wounds this deep are serious indeed. Counseling can equip us with tools to use in our own self-guided healing processes.

Accept Yourself

Mental Health 380

Here's a crazy idea: what if all your problems, your manias and phobias and dysfunctions, are actually natural, healthy reactions to a manic, paranoid, dysfunctional world? What if you are not messed up after all, but totally normal, and the hard things you are feeling are exactly what you are supposed to be feeling under these circumstances? Instead of thinking of yourself as a broken thing that needs fixing, consider what a healthy person would do if he or she were feeling this way. Rather than enthroning your problems as permanent fixtures in your life, accepting yourself can actually help you feel more capable of self-determination and transformation. Besides, who says that everyone has to be the same to be healthy that mental health is a one-dimensional standard by which everyone can be judged? The idea that you are flawed, that you are cra2y while everybody else is sane, can be paralyzing; it also sounds suspiciously like capitalist propaganda.

Talk of so-called self-improvement can reinforce the feeling, so prevalent in this society, that who we are and what we have is never enough. It's possible to become obsessed to an unhealthy degree with taking better care of yourself, being in better physical shape, doing better introspective work, becoming a better communicator. The harder you press yourself, the further these ideals seem to recede before you. As in dieting and bodybuilding, the pursuit of perfect mental health can degenerate into self-abuse.

Just as v^nriters, painters, and musicians experience creative blocks, all of us have times when we feel lost and jaded. Everything waxes and wanes; that natural pattern governs our lives just as it does the moon and ocean. If you feel stagnant, the worst

thmg you can do is dwell on your perceived insufficiencies until you have entrenched yourself m total hopelessness. When something isn't working, don't beat yourself up about It; accept that it's not working for the time being, and focus on something else

Sometimes the most healing thing you can do is simply be still, be present and in your body without any goals or intentions or pressures. Through te eyes of our competitive culture this can look like indolence, but in truth, it's impossible to do nothing Even if you re lying do? not thinking or hatching plans or dreaming, things are sHU shifting and growing inside you. Sometimes what you need is to regenerate, to let yourself re^ and revive, and this can be as conscious a process as yoga or therapy or writing.