Black Sheep and Light Sleepers

One major advantage of operating outside of the health insurance system is that I no longer need to pretend that the work I do is a medical treatment for some kind of brain disease.

There is an old rule of thumb 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 ‘symptomatic’ and disliked is because they can’t ignore whatever 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 prehistoric 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 has 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.

In the modern world, the descendants of those light sleepers don’t encounter so many tigers in the night, but they still tend to be persistently kept awake by things that those around them find it easier to normalize and sleep through, like injustice, oppression, cruelty, environmental degradation, harmful and self-destructive ideologies, etc. The symptoms of their entirely valid and evolutionarily necessary distress tend to be diagnosed as a variety of mental disorders and treated with a variety of sedating psychiatric medications.

Psychotherapy at its worst focuses entirely on reducing symptoms so people can ‘act normal’ and fit in better with those around them.

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. It also teaches them how to take care of themselves and be less overwhelmed by their valid and useful distress, so that they can take effective action in the world.

There’s a great line from The Eden Express, which uses some outdated ableist language but conveys a much more hopeful and constructive view of mental illness than what most people encounter in the modern mental health system:

“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.”

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.