Diary of an Intuitive - Blog 5 - My Brother is Schizophrenic

I received a phone call from a local detective in my hometown of where I grew up.  The interesting thing about this is I knew the detective.  He is a childhood friend of mine.  A group of us grew up hanging out together and were close friends throughout middle school and high school.  Now, as an adult he is a detective in my home town.  This phone call was very unusual.  He needed to talk to me about something he had received from my older brother.  Apparently, my brother wrote to the local police explaining that I had been stalking him and threatening him on various occasions the past several weeks.  Wow….I didn’t know what to say.  I was at first surprised but then the reality of the situation came flooding into my consciousness.  You see, my brother became schizophrenic one semester before graduating college.  He was a brilliant kid who studied at a prestigious Ivy League college on scholarships.  Right around the time of his schizophrenic break, my mother had just died of cancer, my father was not there for us, and my brother had braved endless years of abuse from my dad.  My mother’s death was too much for my brother to handle.  I was 16 years old and my brother was 21.  One night, on his college campus, he was picked up by an officer who noticed that he seemed irrational, delirious, and acting intoxicated.  When they did the alcohol test on him and it came out negative they became even more suspicious.  He was admitted to the local hospital where later my dad would be called and asked to come in and take my brother home.  After several episodes such as this one my brother was finally admitted to a local psychiatric ward where they would eventually come to the conclusion after all of their testing that my brother was schizophrenic.  I had already spent years going back and forth to rehabilitation hospitals for my dad that never worked and then back and forth to hospitals where my mom never became better and now finally I was doing the same with my brother.  Visiting him in the psychiatric ward…hoping and praying he would magically get better.  Of course, this did not happen.  He never graduated college and he would spend the rest of his life going in and out of mental wards due to never being able to manage his schizophrenia.  I grew up afraid of my brother. 

When we were little he used to torment me when my parents were not home.  Closing me in dark closets and never letting me out.  Turning off all the lights in the house so that I could not see and then coming to scare me.  Along with wrecking my room into shambles just after I had finished cleaning.  And finally, tackling me and putting me in various head locks or wrestling poses so that he could claim that he was the winner!  I avoided my brother as much as I could growing up and never felt close to him.  He was 5 years older than me which made it difficult to find a connection especially when I viewed him as the “Torture Chamber”. 

When he came down with schizophrenia I was upset.  It was one more thing to add to the pile of turmoil in my life.  It was one more thing to put on the list of various reasons why I could be depressed.  I went to visit him regularly and wrote him letters telling him how much I loved and cared for him and wanted him to get better.  No matter how many letters I wrote or how many times I went to see him it was always the same scene.  We would be allowed into the psychiatric ward after we proved our relation, signed in the notebook that kept track of all the visitors, and unlocked several doors to let us in.  Once inside we were allowed only to visit in the common area and only at certain times.  My brother seemed almost catatonic.  He would acknowledge my presence and say, “Hello Jennifer” but that may have been the extent of our conversation.  Sometimes he would share his concerns over the electric outlets around the room we were in because he believed that aliens were trying to communicate to him through these outlets and that they were trying to find him.  He never said what they would do if they did find him but he was always very suspicious and cautious about what he said in fear that someone would over hear his conversation.  When he began these types of conversations I always knew that we were done and I had lost him.  Our visits were short and rather depressing.  There were other people there with similar issues as my brother and it was always very unsettling watching the dispositions of his hospital mates.  My brother spent years living a life in and out of hospitals.  There were times in his life when he would be doing well and seemed like he was on his way to having a steady functioning life.  These would last for a month or two and then he would decide that he no longer needed to take his medication and he would be back to having paranoid hallucinations.  There were also times in our life that he would direct his paranoia at me.  In the beginning of his road to recovery he had several months where he seemed to be doing well.  I was leaving for college and had no need for a car that I had bought during my high school years.  I had considered giving it to my brother in order to help him with getting a job and around town.  He was stable and taking his medication on a regular basis.  I decided to go ahead and sign over the title to him in order to help him out.  This would only come back to haunt me.  Unfortunately, a semester into my studies he claimed that I never gave him the title of the car and I was keeping it from him in order to punish him.  He further said that I had to give it to him or he was going to find me.  At this point in my life I had enough awful things happen to me and I was done with my life growing up in chaos.  I cut off ties with my brother and my father never to return to Connecticut again for fear of my life.  I decided it was too risky and that it was time for me to begin a life of my own.  It would be years until I would have contact with my brother or father again.  And I would never return to the place I grew up. 

When I received the phone call from the detective it took me back to all of these memories and more.  It took me back to the various phone calls I would get out of the blue over the years from my brother after he had found me once again.  It took me back to the occasional note I would receive telling me to have a happy birthday.  I could always tell he was not in a good state by the way he tied the words together in his sentences and signed his name.  His handwriting had changed ever since getting sick.  His lines were thicker, bulkier and more disarrayed.  So, when I received the phone call from my friend about my brother I knew right away what it was about and I was just a bit surprised but at the same time unshaken.  These days I view my brother’s schizophrenia as a gift.  Schizophrenics are often very intuitive and very smart people.  My brother was both.  It was our history that screwed him up.  As an intuitive myself, I SPENT YEARS WONDERING IF I WAS CRAZY TOO.   I would just know things about people without being able to explain it.  I could talk with people and understand how they felt immediately and know what they were going to say next.  I could finish their sentence for them and give them appropriate advice on how to go further in their lives and overcome whatever was affecting them.  I was good at this in college and was good at this as an Occupational Therapist and finally became better at this when I forced myself to learn more about energy and healing after my son was born with Spina Bifida.  That’s right….I also ended up having a son with a disability.  Crazy, isn’t it?  You name it…I’ve done it and I’ve felt it.  Finally, when I tackled my fears about my ability to tell the future and know the root cause to peoples issues I realized I was never crazy, just blessed.  I had the gift of resilience.  I had the gift of seeing the light in situations and not allowing the darkness to fall on me for too long.  I always found another way to see things.   I have a coffee mug that I drink out of every day that reads, “Change your thinking, change your world.”  My motto is, “Change your perception, change your life.”  Maybe one day my brother will learn to do that….and if not he gave me a beautiful gift through all of his endeavors… ownership of my own psychic abilities and acceptance of myself.

Namaste…Richard, I Love You.