I wonder – have you looked into EMDR? Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. I think you might find it really helpful. It’s a treatment for PTSD and other traumas in which you talk through the trauma while moving your eyes around in a guided way. A lot of medical organizations have certified it as an effective treatment, and it’s been used successfully on all kinds of traumas – those from war, childhood, being the victim of a crime, and even much more minor traumas like simple regret and fixation on past events.

I have used it to deal with events from my past that consistently intruded in my thoughts and life. It’s a weird thing – it somehow helps you tuck the memories associated with the event back into the stream of the past. It helps the event become just another thing that happened, rather than a thing that becomes outsize and constantly leaps off the shelf into your contemporary life. Thoughts of events that have always made me cringe and cry now seem drained of their malignancy. I’m a huge skeptic about this kind of stuff, but if you look at the studies you’ll see that it has a pretty firm neurological grounding – it’s not just that you’re rethinking something, you are actually changing how your brain stores it.

Thank you for this piece. I am a writer living in the Bay Area — I like to write about consciousness and its complexities –and yet I find myself struggling to write about my mother’s schizophrenia. Her illness and my trauma are so intricate, my words never seem to authentically describe the reality of it all. But after reading this, I think I’m ready to try again.

Thank you, and best wishes.