Meet Cay Schubert
I was a patient of psychotherapy long before I became a therapist. I have been diagnosed with all sorts of things, from eating disorders to bipolar disorder to addictions and ‘garden variety’ anxiety and depression, and I have tried out all sorts of treatment modalities, but I found that my life only really started to feel like it was worth living once I identified what I was going through as Complex PTSD and started treating it with IFS.
It was similarly transformational to finally start identifying as non-binary and neurodivergent. Both personally and professionally, I have thoroughly investigated all the state of the art methods for making people ‘normal’, teaching them to ‘fit in’ or ‘cope’, and ‘curing’ them of all the aspects of their personalities and nervous systems that make them inconvenient to parents, teachers, peer groups, spouses, or the State. It is my great honor to meet you at this perfect moment in your life and give you the Cliffs Notes of that investigation: You were never broken. You didn’t deserve any of it. You were right all along, it wasn’t supposed to be this way.
This world needs you to be so much more yourself, not less. You’ve arrived right on time, we’ve all been waiting for you.
Let’s get to work.
I have stopped pretending that the work I do is a medical treatment for some kind of brain disease. There is an old saying in family therapy, that if you want to know the truth about what is really going on in a family system, you should ignore what everyone else says and just ask the black sheep or ‘identified patient.’ The reason that person is so distressed and disliked is because they can’t ignore what the rest of the family has agreed not to talk about.
There is also an evolutionary biology theory about why some people have a genetic propensity to be light sleepers, even though that trait seems to only give them health disadvantages compared to deep sleepers. The theory is that, if a big group of ancient humans was asleep at night, sometimes a predator would try to sneak up on the group and eat them. If the whole group woke up every time there was a small noise in the darkness, none of them would get any rest and the species wouldn’t thrive. But if none of them woke up, they would all get eaten and the species would end.
So there have always been some percentage of the population who are light sleepers, who can’t just relax and ignore it when things feel off, who need to go check out every little noise in the night.
They’re not as productive during the day, they don’t fit in as well as the deep sleepers, but every once in a while they notice the threat that everyone else is sleeping through and find the solution that no one else could see, so the successful human societies learned to support them and keep them around.
Psychotherapy, at its best, is not a way to lull people back to sleep, but to help light sleepers fully wake up and learn how to do the work they were born to do.
There’s a great line from The Eden Express, which is specifically speaking about schizophrenia but applies to all the experiences that our society refers to as ‘mental illness,’
“As well as being one of the the worst things that can happen to a human being, schizophrenia can also be one of the richest learning and humanizing experiences life offers…Being crazy and being mistaken are not at all the same. The things in life that are upsetting you are more than likely things well worth being upset about. It is, however, possible to be upset without being crippled, and even to act effectively against those things.
There are great insights to be gained from schizophrenia, but remember that they won’t do you or anyone else much good unless you recover.”
– The Eden Express
From one light sleeper to another, I’m glad you made it. You’re right on time, and there’s so much exciting work for us to do. It is my deepest honor to meet you at this inflection point in your life, as other light sleepers met me at mine.
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