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CRUCIBLE OF SHAME:
HEALING THE SOCIETAL ROOTS OF ADDICTION AND "MENTAL ILLNESS"
Guilt says “I did something wrong.” Shame says “I am something wrong.” The experience of shame is a direct negative evaluation of the self. In guilt, the self is focused on negative behaviors, but the self is not the focus. In this book, the author discusses the effects of toxic shame, and how to deal with trauma, addiction and mental illness.
Shame is built into every society, every culture. It is reproduced in generation after generation because it is so rarely defined or recognized. Shame factors into all addictions, all “mental illness. Crucible of Shame: Healing the Societal Roots of Addiction and “Mental Illness” discusses the self-destructive force of shame as it has infiltrated every aspect of the contemporary world.
Shame may also lead individuals into compulsive substance use, shopping, gambling, overwork and/or sexual addiction—all in a vain attempt to feel whole and complete, not diminished by ordinary life experiences.
Over time, toxic shame causes us to hide our struggles which often end up leading to emotional and psychological trauma. In this book, the author discusses the historical causes of mental illness as well as mental health counseling and techniques for healing shame.
It is only the healing expression and integration of shame that the true path to mental health lays. It is in dedication to this healing expression and to clearing and integrating the shame that underlies it that any individual may become the individual that he or she was always meant to be.
This book is dedicated to all those brave souls willing to clear ancient shame, heal their hearts and souls while seeking effective treatment for traumatic stress
TRAUMA AND TRANSFORMATION
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During living life, everyone takes on the burden of unexpressed emotions, regrets and missed opportunities around which may develop a kind of psychic scar tissue which might eventually lead to emotional and psychological trauma.
My experience (garnered from over fifty years of working in the mental health industry) is that healthy expression of these suppressed injuries is perhaps the only path to true mental health. Trauma feeds psychopathic business practices, abuse, war, poverty and racism.
These are accepted as a normal part of daily life in a society that uses individuals for profit and generates addiction and personality disturbances as a “side effect.” It is in dedication to this healing expression and to clearing and understanding the shame that underlies it that any individual may become the individual that he or she was always meant to be.
This book is dedicated to all those brave souls willing to clear ancient shame, heal their hearts and souls while seeking effective treatment of traumatic stress
CRAZY TALES OF COMBAT PSYCHIATRY
Book 1 of the Paul Marzeky Mystery Series
In this book, I talk about the madness of combat psychiatry on many levels. I share some of my experiences as a Social Work/Clinical Psychology Specialist in Vietnam 1968-1969 as a member of the 326th Medical Battalion, 101st Airborne Division.
The experience was “crazy” up front as living in a combat zone must be for the utter chaos and unpredictability. It was also insane because of the dynamics imposed by politics, and the many-pronged attempts by the military to impose mostly outmoded and inappropriate “Stateside” regulations and tactics on a guerrilla war, on the men doing the fighting and dying.
We were an emerging generation of young men experiencing the power and connection we felt as brothers-in-arms. This in and of itself would have added plenty of fuel to the fires of opposition burning in us.
As I graphically illustrate in this book, the presence of copious amounts of drugs of all sorts, and the utter willingness to experience as much of life as was possible, living each day as if it were the last, took all of us into the fast lane. And through it all was always woven the shared bond of blood and brains that will forever make us brothers.
SPIRALS OF TIME
Book 2 of the Paul Marzeky Mystery Series
Paul’s life has become a series of spirals, going forward and back, incorporating ever-new life experiences as he plunges head on into the veritable cornucopia of delights presented to a young man fresh home from the war, and living in San Francisco at the end of the 1960’s.
One of the many worlds in which he is involved is working on in-patient psychiatric units and attempting to apply his nascent healing skills, while at the same time fully indulging fully in the psychedelic world of Bay Area music, art, and the still potent dreams of revolution.
UNWITTING WITNESSES
Book 3 of the Paul Marzeky Mystery Series
Paul has returned from Vietnam, and has been growing his clinical skills for a number of years working on high volume in-patient psychiatric units. He is daily immersed in working with people, often involuntary patients hospitalized because of their potential as being a danger to self or others.
He comes to work one afternoon to discover that a violent, intrusive patent has been murdered in one of his unit’s locked seclusion rooms.
With everyone as a suspect
patients and staff, the investigators put everyone’s lives under the lens of the forensic microscope.
Paul gets more and more drawn into the case as patients confide in him, testing the limits of his being able to keep confidentiality, when incidents form his own past get called into question, shining the spotlight on him. Paul finds that he must make some excruciating decisions to salvage his career, maybe even his life.
ALCHEMY’S ANGEL
Book 4 of the Paul Marzeky Mystery Series
Paul Marzeky has established a private practice, and continues his own unique brand of psychotherapeutic healing with a variety of clients in San Francisco.
This book takes the reader inside Paul’s office as he works his mental magic with a wide variety of clients, one of whom may have more than one personality.
At the same time as he is putting forth his best effort to heal others, he is confronted by, and must perforce work on, his own on-going issues. This work takes him through private sessions as well as encounters with in-depth group work and into the burgeoning field of men’s work.
All seems to be flowing along rather smoothly until Paul gets an urgent call from a client who has just found his wife dead—and one of a prized pair of his knives in her throat.
As the criminal investigation unfolds, Paul is thrown into often-unwanted contact with Detective Phil Mc Laren and immersed in the whole process as his client is accused of the murder, and continues to vehemently deny it.
THE GILDED EDGES OF SHADOW
Book 5 of the Paul Marzeky Mystery Series
After witnessing the bizarre suicide of a former client who he had initially helped clear from murder charges (and who admitted his culpability just before killing himself), Paul goes into deep mourning and self-blame, believing he could have done more.
He temporarily abandons his private practice to allow his mourning to take its own course as he knows it must. Then he accepts the referral of a young man who is the scion of an abusive billionaire father who is his legal conservator.
Henry, the young man, has a half-billion-dollar trust fund of his own as well as delusions regarding the involvement of the U.S. government reverse engineering alien artifacts from the Roswell crash—a project in which he is firmly convinced his father is involved.
When his father is brutally murdered in a manner Henry has described in his fantasies, Paul advocates for his client against the forces of law and order as well as the psychiatric authorities.
EXCELSIOR
Book 6 of the Paul Marzeky Mystery Series
This volume follows the further exploits of Doctor Paul Marzeky. He’s been home from Vietnam for more than twenty-five years. His practice is running smoothly and he’s been working with Doctor Heather Farrington as a consultant (as well as starting to develop personal feelings for her).
But something eerie is happening. Or at least he believes it may be. He keeps catching glimpses of a man he last saw at a Firebase in Vietnam, a man he presumed must be dead. Just when he’s convinced himself he was mistaken, the man himself appears. He tells a long, rambling story of having gone AWOL from the ‘Nam’, and travelling around the world smuggling heroin. He’s being hunted by both clandestine agencies of the government and organized crime figures.
After much resistance, Doc Roach agrees, quite reluctantly, to go into therapy—not to change professions or reverse the direction of his life, but to help him sort out his fear and confusion about the potential of his being a potential murder candidate.
When a body is discovered in a room registered to him at the Fairmont, Paul becomes the focus of a great deal of official attention from the San Francisco Police Department, who are, in turn, being pressured by unnamed, alphabeted agencies in Washington, D.C. Paul gets unwittingly embroiled in a murder investigation led by a fellow vet, Homicide Lieutenant Phil McLaren.
