Altered States | Spiritual Emergency | Post-Psychotic Growth
A reframe for people who have been through psychosis, spiritual crisis, or a dark night of the soul — and are still trying to understand what happened.
What this is
In over 25 years of psychiatric nursing and yoga therapy, I’ve sat with hundreds of people who were told their mind had broken. What I saw instead — over and over — was a mind trying to break open.
This is not about bypassing suffering. It is not naive optimism. It is about having a map for territory that mainstream psychiatry does not yet know how to hold.
Everything here grows from that map.
"Post-psychotic growth is not a consolation prize. It is the natural movement of a sensitive system that has been through fire and come out reorganised at a deeper level."
The question at the centre of this work
This is the question I have been asking for 25 years. Everything on this page is an attempt to answer it — not with false hope, but with real maps drawn from neuroscience, ancient wisdom, and lived experience.
The framework
Based on 8 dimensions observed across hundreds of cases — and lived myself. Not a promise. A possibility that needs the right conditions.
The masks fall away. Altered states strip you to what is real — and what is real can no longer be compromised.
Access to symbolic, relational, and transpersonal dimensions that were filtered before the crisis.
You have navigated extreme dysregulation. That builds deep familiarity with your own system — earned, not taught.
Psychotic sensitivity involves heightened symbolic thinking. Integrated, this finds expression through creative form.
Facing dissolution, you develop the capacity to find meaning in darkness. Questions about purpose become unavoidable.
Intense inner states widen emotional range. Integrated, this becomes a greater capacity to hold complexity in others.
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Explore the articles
Each article below is a spoke of this hub — you can start anywhere. They all connect back to the same central question.
Work with me
Everything on this page is also what I work with in my private practice. Altered states, spiritual emergency, post-psychotic growth — this is my specialty. Not as a distant expert. As someone who has been in this territory.
Ready to take a step?
If something on this page resonated — that's usually enough to start. Send me a message and we'll find out together if this is the right fit.
The book
A 21-chapter guide through the full arc of psychotic experience — from neurochemistry and trauma to spiritual emergence, post-psychotic growth, and what it means to come home to yourself.
Written for people who have been through it, families holding space, and clinicians who want to understand from the inside.
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About Anneke
I’m Anneke Sips — psychiatric nurse, trauma therapist, and IAYT-accredited yoga therapist based in The Hague. I’ve spent 25 years at the intersection of psychiatry, ancient wisdom, and earth-based healing.
I wrote The Wisdom of Psychosis because I kept meeting people who had been through extraordinary altered states and were told there was nothing meaningful in the experience. I disagree.
My work challenges the idea that sensitivity is pathology. I believe your nervous system is not broken. It is responding to something real.
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