Yvo Brunskill - Voices in Your Head And how to take command of your mind

Published by Wayward Publications Ltd 2017

www.waywardpublications.com

Wayward Publications Ltd.,

4/3 Richmond Place,

Edinburgh.

EH8 9SS

Copyright Wayward Publications Ltd

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the authors.

Cover designs Spanky Pymm

Edited by Harry Althoff

British Library Cataloguing-in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-912062-25-6

To my co-author, Barefoot Doctor, to whom I will be forever indebted and without whom Im fairly sure I wouldnt be here now thank you for your kindness, your love, your empathy, your humor, your infinite patience, your trust, your wonderful friendship and for being here unerringly to help bring me out of the darkness and into the light.

Thank you Stevo with all my heart

Love, Yvo

The Voices

The world is such a scary place
When you're trapped inside your head
It's very dark and very loud
Your mind is full of dread

The voices tell you what to do
And then tell you you can't
The noise won't stop, just won't let up
To give you just a chance

It feels like a maze of tunnels
With noise at every turn
The loudness so incessant
Your brain begins to burn

The arguments keep going
Endlessly through the night
You cannot stop the torment
You lose the will to fight

Then suddenly in front of you
You see a hand to hold
You take it and keep holding on
Terrified it'll let you go

Slowly you inch out of the dark
Towards a golden light
Yet still so scared in case you fall
You hold on very tight

The voices say you cannot win
You'll fall right down again
You mustn't listen, you must be strong
And trust right through the pain

The light gets brighter as you climb
Each little step you take
The noise goes quiet, the voices fade
Still you fear the magic you'll break

And then you find you're standing
You no longer fear you'll fall
The hand who helped and guided you?
A friend who heard your call

Your golden friend shows you the path
The way for you to go
Into the light and out of the dark
And the peace you'll come to know

This book follows the amazing, and at times scary journey I (Yvo) went on when I found the Barefoot Doctor and he showed me how to quieten down the extremely loud, destructive voices in my head and, as a result, help me heal myself of the so-called OCD that was controlling and ruining my life. It tells the very personal story of all the stages I went through, and all the battles and irrational fears I had along the way.

To explain, we call it so-called OCD because I (the Barefoot Doctor) dont believe in putting a label on things. Everyone has compulsions to some extent; usually theyre not really noticeable and dont affect someones ability to conduct their life normally. Its purely a matter of degrees before someone decides to call it OCD, and then there are further degreesmild, debilitating, etc.

Everyone hears voices to a greater or lesser extent toothe little nagging voice that says you should or shouldnt have done something, perhaps, or that you didnt do something right. However, for most people this is the only voice they hear or notice, and its not that loud, so it doesnt penetrate into their daily life or disrupt it too much, if at all. Some may not register even hearing this voice until its pointed out to them. Its when this voice gets so loud, or worse, if theres more than one of them, so they argue with each other, that they encroach so much into your life you can no longer function properly, or even function at all. You try to do what they tell you you must do all the time to make sure everything stays alright. Its utter torment.

This is what had happened with me (Yvo). Theyd got so loud and destructive and the ocd had got so bad that I no longer wanted to keep going.

The first part of the book comprises introductions by us both. Next is the main body of the book, which consists of a series of emails between us broken into chapters. These largely constituted the therapy and the healing. We believe that by keeping the story in this format, it will allow you to understand and absorb the process better. Most importantly, our intention is that following the journey will more readily allow you to put all the techniques into practice yourself as you go along.

There are exercises, affirmations and enlightened guidance from myself, Stephen, all the way through, plus critically, a failsafe method that, if practiced consistently, will take you away from all the noise for as long as youre there. Ill be explaining the Method to you presently.

Some of the emails have commentaries from one or both of us in between, explaining our thinking at the time, to help with understanding what we each felt was going on. Following this there is an epilogue with some final thoughts.

Finally, weve included a couple of poems that I (Yvo) wrote.

We hope you enjoy our book and that it helps quieten down the noise.

Yvo and the Barefoot Doctor

What follows is a true story about a woman's remarkable courage, a miraculous healing, and an angel. Being privy to a myriad of stories gathered over a million sessions helping people across a span of five decades, this is one of the most remarkable of all, if not the most remarkable.

I'm not a psychiatrist, psychologist, or psychotherapist. I even hesitate to say I'm a healer, even though that's evidently what I do. I'm a person, a brother to the greater human family, and I help other people, privileged through training and experience to have at hand the resources and skills to do so fairly effectively.

Trained in a holistic model, the way I practice is to eschew from my view all concept of disease or illness, along with all their conventional descriptions, names and acronyms, and instead see a person there. This applies to all levels of human experience, the physical, the psychological, the emotional, the lifestyle setup, all of it. For according to the system my healing skills are largely based on, (which I'll explain presently), there is no real division between these when seen holistically (as a whole). The innermost self expresses its discomfort through any or all of these, and the trick is to get to the root of where that disharmony originates and address it there. Then all symptoms, at whatever level of self, start changing and gradually dissolving.

It will help us in our inquiry here (I say inquiry, because on account of the unfathomable complex of layers that comprises the human condition, there can be no definitive conclusions, merely an ongoing inquiry) if we start by acknowledging such terms as schizophrenia, polyphrenia, bipolar syndrome, autism, paranoia, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and so on, have no a priori status, sanctity, or ontological substantiveness, but are merely terms that originated as someone's description of an observed state and ones quite lazily deployed in order to more conveniently shunt people in various states of alienation and distress as quickly and efficiently through the system and dispatch them into the big wide world, medicated and fragile but no longer presenting an acute problem for society. This is not to deny the short-term benefit of such labeling and treatment as an expedient, but to imagine anything approaching a true cure or remedy will be effected in the conventional way is in the main to delude ourselveswe are merely mitigating rather than solving the problem.