New learning continues illuminating disorders long buried in my psyche that had kept me in bondage and stunted my psycho-social-spiritual development.

From earliest memory I had intuited something very wrong: ridges across the top of my large head, bruises, skinned knees, my broken arm. Unwept tears crusted my lungs, constricted my breathing, crimped speech. In my inner world a NAZI enslaved me to compulsive rituals that hollowed me, that messed with all learning. Only in fantasy did I feel safe. An absent God, nevertheless, companioned me through this caustic landfill.

Decades of 12-Step work have unraveled many of these conditions. Yet, until now, a shadow, teeming with the unacceptable, still held sway in my psyche and instinctively harmed myself and others; its articulation, lost on me.

My recent discovery of the energy work of Barbara Ann Brennan, American author, spiritual healer, and businesswoman, throws light upon this aberration. In her first book Hands of Light: A Guide to Healing Through the Human Energy Field (1988), she maps five major character structures that delineate disorders in the human condition. The schizoid caught my attention—She was telling my story: my unconscious rage from having experienced the world as hostile and cold, together with my subsequent retreat into fantasy for much of my life.

That was it—To survive, I could not have done other than what I did. In some respects, my splitness remains, but knowing its configuration draws my self-forgiveness and compassion. I’m just human—and God knows.