Progress report from Chris

In the cranial-sacral therapy I have been doing for a few weeks, comfort is key, the therapy is intimate, you are placing your body into the therapist's hands so it’s best to make the most of your time and listen to your feelings. At our last session the therapist stressed the importance of “mind-body dialogue,” keeping our thoughts firmly grounded in our real-world self. Strong feelings and judgments have their effect on the physical body and during the sessions I am encouraged to notice how certain thoughts are received, if they manifest themselves as tension.

Sound therapy continues to be a source of wonder and amazement. I’d never pay as much attention to a teacher at school or my GP, probably because my ST has all these cool gadgets, a lakefront view and a portrait from the adult version of “The Little Mermaid.” At each session after he plays his kaleidoscopic mix tape we share our impressions of what happened. I say this allows me to see clearly into my past, and he says each sound has with it a certain feeling associated with it. The channel of time is opened up.

Dr. Stern, my psychiatrist has all but said “reduce Serdolect at your own rate.” She genuinely supports my coming off this particular medication and is leaving it up to me. I’m down to about six milligrams from eight, and I could be as low as four by now if I paid more attention to the schedule for reduction prescribed online. Despite the lazy days of summer I’m more than willing to go for a jog in the morning or swim in the evening, partly as an effort to keep my weight down which has shot up again even over the past month.

I wish I’d paid more attention to my brother’s advice to find a job or a course to pass the summer because I don’t have anything to look forward to from one week to the next. Like many other hopefuls to the job market I’m throwing in my lot with a local technical school for computer training in the fall. It will be tough; I’ll have to work with younger people in a non-native language for me, learning something I’m not absolutely crazy about, but it will hopefully lead to better things. Thankfully there’s someone working with me who better grasps the language and the school’s policies. One of my goals is to find someone who wants to learn English to do things together and share language skills.

Chris Forbes

Cranial osteopathy versus cranial sacral osteopathy

Prior to the voice training workshop and his introduction to the Alexander Technique, Chris underwent a series of cranial sacral massages. Cranial sacral massage is related to cranial osteopathy. Cranial osteopathy was developed by osteopath William Sutherland in the early 1900s. He observed that the temporal bones of the head near the ears move very slightly, rather like the gills of a fish. Cranial osteopaths and cranial sacral osteopaths believe that there is something called a cranial rhythm, which is present in all body tissues and results from the pulsing of the cerebrospinal fluids surrounding the brain, spinal cord and sacrum. Disturbances to this rhythm put pressure on the cranial bones and other parts of the body, leading to bodily and nervous dysfunctions. The rhythm can be disturbed by birth trauma, forceps delivery, accidents, etc. Both cranial osteopathy and cranial sacral osteopathy detect and correct the cranial rhythm through gentle massage.

Stephanie Marohn devotes a chapter of her book, The Natural Medicine Guide to Schizophrenia, to cranial osteopathy as of potential benefit for schizophrenia. The finer distinctions between cranial sacral osteopathy and cranial osteopathy were unclear to me and I booked cranial sacral massages for Chris and me thinking they were one and the same. Chris reported suddenly hearing new age music while undergoing his first massage, and he knew there was no music playing in the room at the time. I, on the other hand, experienced nothing so dramatic. My massage was pleasant and relaxing. I had no reason to think that this particular massage could be anything but beneficial.

On returning from the vacation and college tour in late August (and missing his flight), Chris began to become unfocused. In addition to not hearing what Ian and I said to him, he soon failed to keep up with his course assignments at the local university. At choir practice, he was out of sync with the others. Chris and I talked about this at length. He confessed that he felt his perceptions were changing. “Take that police siren we are hearing right now off in the distance. Now it seems like it's just a siren, but before I used to think about all the bad things that had happened to someone or the crime that had been committed. I am still stuck halfway between the old perception and the new one and it gets disorienting. I also feel that my physical reality is changing and I don't know where to look or put my feet.” Chris was not so sure that the new reality was going to be better than the old one.

I began to worry that I had inadvertently "killed" Chris by mixing up cranial osteopathy and cranial sacral osteopathy.