8 minute read
Living with Alternative Perceptions
By Eric Ayers, CPS
Alternative
spiritual, or extreme experiences. ”
An Alternative Perceptions Experience
In 1980, with only a few months left in 9th grade on a beautiful spring afternoon, I heard the voice say “Get out of Here! Leave your newspapers NOW, go home and wait for your dad to get back from work. He will help you get through this. He will know what to do.” Prior to this voice and for some time after, I was terrified of listening and…not listening to the voice.
Looking back now, I understand and I’m thankful for that inner voice of common sense and good reasoning. At 13, I had no idea of what would transpire in the next few years or the decades to come. The situation of hearing the inner voice had been proceeded by early childhood trauma and then later by three separate attacks from groups of bullies in my neighborhood over a 3-year period during adolescence.
The first was in 6th grade when I had shared my football with some schoolmates. When the ball was not returned, I received a severe concussion when my head was repeatedly struck on a sidewalk while trying to regain possession of the ball that was given as a gift from my parents. Additional incidents occurred of having rocks thrown at me while delivering newspapers and the 9th grade “experience of warning” after fighting a bully in the street a few weeks before hearing the voice.
An “I can’t beat them, might as well join them” attitude followed in the next several years where I began attempts to make friends through mutual drug and alcohol use as well as trying to quiet the experiences I began to see, sense, feel and hear as an awkward teen. By 17 years old, having distressing as well as spiritual experiences otherwise diagnosed by professionals as psychotic episodes, I had a suicide attempt and a psychiatric hospitalization during the first three years of a self-deprecating, self-abusive and self-inflicted 14-year period of active addictions.
At 28 years old and by the grace of God, I found lifesaving twelve step programs, supportive friends, intensive outpatient groups and individual therapy to get me started on a road to recovery. Four relapses, four psychiatric and co-occurring hospitalizations, unemployment then public assistance occurred until 1997. Social Security Insurance, occupational vocational rehabilitation and continuous sobriety followed. In 2000, I obtained full-time employment at a Montgomery County Pennsylvania D&A rehab for the next 16 years. In 2011 I was encouraged, certified, and became the first Certified Peer Specialist at that facility. There I was introduced to the local county’s support groups for persons who see, hear, and feel unusual or extreme experiences. Gratefully, my recovery excelled to the next level through the kindness of my peers.
May 2016, I was hired as the Delaware County Peer Advocate, CPS. By July 2016, we as members co-founded and began to facilitate the Upper Darby Alternative Perceptions Groups. As a group we thrived and grew during the COVID-19 Pandemic, adding two
weekly virtual support groups to our schedule. Celebrating more than five years of community support we are now meeting again in person at Five Points Coffee.
I hope you enjoy the following information about Alternative Perceptions! “We’ve been there, We dare to care about you!” – AP Group
Goals of our Alternative Perceptions Meetings
Since July 2016 Alternative Perceptions (AP) has strengthened our community by creating, maintaining, and facilitating meeting spaces for our self-care groups. We offer a closed virtual and an in-person closed meeting for self-identifying members who see, sense, hear, or feel unusual, spiritual, or extreme experiences. We also offer a weekly open virtual meeting for persons with lived experiences and all interested supporters.
Additional goals are self-reflection and self-interpretation of events, or emotions. We develop organizational, self-stabilizing growth, and coping techniques for past, present, traumatic, spiritually startling, or distressing challenges.
AP encourages mutual communication between group members, allies, families, friends, service providers, health systems staff, administrators, and physicians. We continue to develop this collaborating effort towards strategies for the understanding of valid reactions to occurring varieties of human experiences, and sometimes traumatizing events. No diagnosis, referrals, insurance, donations, or fees are needed to attend.
Self-help and peer support
Peer support is based on the idea that often the best people to help us through difficult times are those who have journeyed before and with us. Alternative Perception meetings are about getting together, sharing experiences, finding ways of coping with those experiences, and growing from them. In Alternative Perception meetings you can be yourself with people you trust at a level of trust that you decide on.
Joining a peer support group can be a key step in directing our destiny!
Alternative Perceptions meetings are an anonymous place to talk about uncommon experiences and can be a first step towards liberation. Sharing personal life experiences often reduces isolation and is also one of the most successful ways to reduce anxiety and distress.
In living with Alternative Perceptions, we do not have to do what the origins of our experiences might suggest, we have our own opinion and our own power over our actions always. We realize we can work with others for support and not have to keep to ourselves, hide or suppress our perspectives.
Alternative Perceptions meetings are self-directed, self-designed social environments that strive to promote: Self-empowerment, interdependence, and a realistic perspective of members as experts by personal experience.
Alternative Perceptions meetings provide acceptance and a sense that one is not alone, a safe accepting place to talk about feelings, visions, voices, and personal reflections. AP meetings also provide an opportunity to learn and gain skills from others, to conquer stressful experiences as well as build stronger friendships and supports.
Members share lived reflections and benefits of attending Alternative Perceptions Meetings:
• I am exchanging experiences of coping, gaining perspective, and improving the quality of my personal, professional, and spiritual life. • I realize I can react positively, that I have my own opinion and my own power. • I realize that I can relate with others, connecting with people with similar human perceptions and feelings. • I feel more in tune with others as well as the world around me. • I have met others who take an interest in my experiences and me as a person. • I have met people who accept my perceptions, impressions, and perspectives as real to me. • I am actively interested in the experiences of others. • I give and receive support and respect to and from others.
Variations of lived experiences at Alternative Perceptions Meetings include, though are not limited to:
• Seeing unexplainable: Auras, orbs, shadows, sparkles, persons, and animals’ faces changing shapes into demon faces, solid objects expanding and contracting or “breathing” such as floors and walls. • Sensing: Being watched, being listened to, or recorded, intuition, deductions or assumptions based on past personal experiences or being able to “read” people, reading minds and or having one’s mind being read. • Hearing Internally: Inner dialogue, responding out loud, repeated positive or negative memories of conversations with negative or positive persons, repetitive auditory memories of personal trauma, repetitive memories of dialog from TV or movie violence. Having racing thoughts and multiple auditory stressors. • Hearing Externally: “Clear as a bell” shouting or whispering voices – sometimes calling one’s name, also In-audible backcontinued on next page >
Living with Alternate Perceptions
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ground conversation or noise, like “radio static,” the sounds of an individual talking or multiple persons talking at once, voices giving specific direction to complete detailed necessary, religious, or spiritual tasks. • Feeling: Being physically touched, hyper-realistic dreams or memories of being touched (appropriately or inappropriately). • Visions: Unexplained (pleasant and/or unpleasant) images or scenarios of present, past, or future events, Déjà vu and prophesizing. • Aliens, Angels and Demons: Guardian angels, internal and external battles with good and evil, wrestling with internal personal, civic, and criminal behavior, voodoo, and feelings of being cursed or possessed. • Spiritual and Empath Experiences: Sensing/feeling the presence of a family member, friend or enemy after a person has passed away (pleasant and unpleasant), rearrangement of one’s actions or core beliefs. Being able to sense the energy of a room upon entering or a person’s thoughts or mood without asking. • Trauma: Circumstantial, verbal, mental, or sexual abuse, exposure to violence or having been subjected to violence.
When, where and how do Alternative Perceptions groups meet?
MONDAYS 3:15 pm - 4:30 pm - Open Virtual Meetings: For persons with a lived-experience willing to share their experiences and for all interested supporters. WEDNESDAYS 3:15 pm - 4:30 pm - Closed Virtual Meetings: For persons with a lived-experience only. THURSDAYS 12:15 pm - 1:30 pm - Closed In-Person Meetings: For persons with lived-experience only. Meeting at Five Points Coffee - 47 Long Lane, Second Floor Upper Darby, PA 19082 (Septa Bus Routes 109 & 107).
Please Call Eric at 484.983.4379 to confirm that the meeting is being held in-person on the day you wish to attend day. For more information and our virtual meeting links contact Eric Ayers: AyersE@delcohsa.org or 484.983.4379.
Supported by The County of Delaware Department of Human Services, 20 S. 69th Street, Upper Darby, PA 19082 www.delcohsa.org
More About Eric Ayers - Alternative Perceptions Co-founder, Group Co-Facilitator
Eric Ayers’ formal art training began at the age of 8. He is a 1987 Alumni of Philadelphia’s Hussian School of Art. Eric’s crafts as an illustrator, graphic designer, logo conceptualist, photographer, videographer, website development professional, writer, and peer educator can be referenced at EricAyers.com and MiraclesWorkshop.com. Eric currently serves as the webmaster for the Chester County Medical Society’s website: www.chestercms.org.
