I want to open this piece by naming something explicitly. This is an article written by a twin mother about twin motherhood. It covers a lot of the hardships and griefs contained within that experience, and could very easily read as someone who had a spontaneous twin conception - one that resulted in two very healthy babies - “complaining” about that miracle. Perhaps you are reading this and you are a mother who fought for years through fertility journeys to have one child, wherein the gratitude for that renders what I share as churlish or disrespectful. Perhaps you are a singleton mother and your first year was its own form of challenge that this piece might appear to minimize, despite that being far from its intention. Perhaps you are a mother who lost a baby, or never got to have one, or chose not to. A piece sharing the challenges of an opportunity you may willingly sacrifice a great deal to have may seem ungrateful and diminishing of your struggle.

And, honestly, many may feel the impulse to state, “but what about all the joys?”. They are in this article, and they have been oh so absolutely deeply felt. I’m in love with my family, and my babies.

Now, usually my work is written for everyone, in such a way that offers challenge and repair within the same breath (or, at least, attempts to). Usually there are reframes of all of the struggles, and I reach for resolution even as I describe “problems”.

But as I sit down to write about this topic I realize that, for reasons that will become clear, this piece is not offered to honor everyone else’s experience of their lives - valid, challenging, and truly epic as all of them are. This piece is for me; perhaps to process, perhaps just to think, and perhaps to just know I’ve commemorated my own first year of motherhood.

So, why publish it? For my children in the future, and the me in the future. We will all forget this year. It won’t be burned into the memory so much as it will become part of the backdrop that never could have been any other way. This is the way of life, and the way of reality; and it’s supposed to be that way.

My 1st Year Conclusions on Motherhood: Twins or Not

I have at least four drafts of an article on motherhood written somewhere in my notes. They all claim to know what the experience is - and yet all have been eclipsed by now. I’m not even sure as I publish this article that this one will stand the test of time!

What I have come to deeply know - in this season, the precise landscape of which I detailed above - is what follows:

It is the only life role where you are expected to sacrifice everything whilst also demonstrating balance, resilience, and a sense of your own humility, and humanity, to your own children.

It is the only life role where you are required to adapt - on an almost daily basis - while your body is rapidly going from someone you didn’t recognize, to being someone else you still don’t recognize. None of it is the old you, and you don’t want any of it to be. But you don’t have a road map for any of what is happening in your life, and you no longer know how to find the time to take stock to identify where a road map might be found.

I believe this is true of all motherhood.

Maybe I will be proven wrong in time. Maybe I’m doing it wrong!! But this is what I experience, right now, as I evaluate my felt sense of my life.

My Felt Sense Experience of My Life

As I discussed this one night with my husband, I came up with an analogy:

I am responsible for keeping sand in a sandpit.

The sand is the day, the household, the two infants, the two older children when they are with us, the effort of getting my stepchildren to and from my home, my husband at every stage of the year we have just been through, the work that pays, the work that has not begun to pay, the friends who chose to stay through it, the friends who chose to leave, the financial uncertainty that I have spent twelve months working around without naming. The sand is all of it, all the time. Most of that is the twins: what they need, what they are evolving around and into, where they need me (discussed extensively later in this piece).

My job is to be, and maintain, the walls of the sandpit: the holding, the making sure not just that the sand does not spill out, but that the sand keeps flowing, shifting, changing, and growing. Mostly, I must ensure that the sand is safe and united throughout all of this. I must remember all of the elements of the sand, the sandpit, and the weather we are in. I constellationally map, and re-map, all of it. Keeping it all together.

But whilst I might manage the entirety of its wall structure, I have no say about the base of the sandpit of our lives.

The terrain underneath the sand is moving constantly - not because of me, and not really because of anybody in particular. The income that vanished, the trial, the parental alienation campaign, the development of two babies whose entire risk profile changes every two weeks (they started walking at ten months, which I had not been braced for and which collapsed every prior risk assessment of every room in the house) - all of this is the base. The base is constantly being redrawn under the sand, while the sand has to keep flowing over it. And I am the walls.

Yet, as someone trained in attachment science and dynamics, I have known from the start that I am not just the walls.

I also control, influence, and can impact the weather in our little system.

My babies regulate around me. This is co-regulation, the cornerstone of attachment-based parenting: their immature nervous systems are not yet built to self-regulate, so they borrow regulation from the closest and most attuned nervous system available - which, in our setup, is mostly mine, but it is also my husband’s when he is playing that part of his role (he’s also the fun dad, which is a separate, but also necessary role). The twins mirror our states in real time, mine most reliably: settling when I am settled and catching the storms if I am stormy. This is observable biology, and it is the central reason I choose to be so attentive to my own weather: mine becomes theirs.

My babies don’t need me to control the floor of their lives, and to an extent I think they could cope with a little infirmness in the walls. What they absolutely need, however, is regulation of, and protection from, the climate they grow inside. They are not yet built to handle or understand all weather conditions, and a core part of supporting them into being able to do that is to support their introduction to weather - most importantly, showing and teaching them that the weather of others is nothing to do with them, that their weather is absolutely valid, and that weather systems create much of the meaning of our lives.

Thus, I must ensure that the weather in the sandpit is as regulated, safe, and pure as I can make it. When the storms hit, it is my job to generate the safety. When the rain falls, I provide the shelter. Even when the storms and the rains are my own, my children are to be kept removed from the impact of them. My weather is mine to manage, their weather is mine to open to and support the movements of.

So too goes for step-motherhood. My stepkids are closer to the storms, and I don’t get to keep them inside our sandpit all the time. Truth be told, their arrival in our sandpit tends to generate distinct weather, base, and structure disruptions in and of itself. But they are children, and as such it is still my job to buffer them as best I can against the storms, even whilst observing that their nervous systems are already wounded, and I cannot fix everything or protect them from as much as I would like. The disruptiveness of the choreography of their presence in our lives deeply impacts our family, and yet they are not responsible for this, or for knowing it to be the case. I have known and wanted to honor from the start that they get to feel as safe in our sandpit as my biological babies do. I know we don’t quite get there, I know they don’t feel like it’s their home, I really do. But that is always the goal.

This is not twin motherhood. These aren’t challenges unique to me. This is mothering, period. This is the invisible art of matriarchy. In so many ways, we women are doing this our whole lives. It is with the density of infant nervous systems that this skillset is most stretched, but it is not the only place it is used. I have reflected on “mother” energy a lot this year, and I witness it in many places, including in those who are not biological mothers of children. “Mother” energy breathes and pulses in this energetic holding, the containing of everything, subtly influencing and supporting everything, remembering everything, seeing everything, allowing oneself to be used, relied upon, and infinitely stretched. Feeling the burden and the weight of the worlds that converge onto yours, and knowing that your world is being stretched as a result. And getting on with it, because that is the work, yes - but it’s not just because it is the work. It is because it is as natural and “meant-to-be” as breathing, even on the days (weeks, months, years) when it’s hard. You wouldn’t ever choose to just not do it. It is the work, it is your world, and it is yours to hold.

My particular challenges this year - and, again, these are just what I held; everyone has something to hold - meant that the frustration, the grief, the fury at a system that has tried to harm us, the people who have tried to abuse systems to harm us, the despair when people we trusted chose to leave - all of it has had to be metabolized in the spaces between caring for the babies, in the few moments I have had with my husband at the end of a day, and in writing like this.

None of it can be suppressed, as suppression does not work. It has to be held until we can be with it long enough to let it release itself. Finding time to do that with twins is almost impossible.

The Twin Effect

Which is where we come to the difference between singleton parenting, and twin parenting.

I have to state before I discuss this that my attempt this year has been to not comment on the differences between these two; it feels one-upping to do so, and it feels disrespectful.

That said, twin motherhood is not just a doubling of the singleton form of mothering. It is not any kind of magnification of singleton motherhood, it is a different universe entirely.

I have arrived at somewhat of a conclusion - perhaps just a bow to wrap around this first year - where I have identified four distinct elements which make twin motherhood the complex universe that it is:

1. Duality of demand does not equal doubling: it is twice the demand, combined with the friction between those two demands, and that dividing of self elongates everything, which steals time and space from the moments of not being in demand

2. The nervous system hypervigilance is an inbuilt precondition: you are the focus point of two identically aged nervous systems, at the exact same stage of growth and learning the world - which, in infancy, is profound at each stage

3. The practical complexities and logistical limitations demand life choices that are inherently isolating and render “normalcy” a distant memory - all of which creates a starker and more extreme identity shift, especially for first time moms

4. Doubling of your offspring does not, and cannot, double the dwelling in love. Nervous system attunement between mom and baby here isn’t unique, focused, and bonded in its exclusivity of nourishment, naps, and nustling into sleep. You cannot do that with two. Even if you can do all of those things with two babies simultaneously, the bonding is not the same

I want to dwell on each of these complexities a while, in the hope that this supports those who are mothers of multiples, or those who know mothers of multiples, in their understanding and acceptance of what it is to belong to this far from unique, but very particular club of parenting.

1. Time

The doubling of the bodies does not mean a doubling of effort. I have never done this as a singleton mother, so I can’t give estimations or comparisons, but what I do know is that nothing about twin life adds linearly.

Two babies in the car is not “one baby in the car, plus another one”. It is the whole choreography of bringing a baby into a house, but executed against the fact that there are two of them, neither of whom can wait in the car alone, neither of whom can walk in beside you, and one of whom will be screaming somewhere whilst you do both trips.

It is precisely doubly expensive because everything has to be doubled (two car seats, two high chairs, two of every developmental toy that gets used for six weeks, double the food) - and the doubling here is of both the very expensive, and the not-so-pricey, but it all, overwhelmingly, adds up. There are no hand-me-downs, because these are our first babies. Many people have commented that we appear to rarely clothe our babies, and whilst this choice was made for ease, not for economy, I am positive it has saved us inordinate amounts of money over the year.

The demand of twins is something that no parent without twins can ever understand, and no, two close in age are not the same. This is often said, but Irish Twin mothers often don’t really believe you when you state how different actual twins are.

With multiples, everything happens at once. But it is not the same thing happening: it is each one’s unique expression of the same thing. They started life sharing a body, and they have shared so much, but they have always been on their own clocks, living their own learning of what it is to be alive. My job has been to be attentive to both clocks, because they are fundamental to each of them, and that is my priority: two babies that feel to themselves like they were the only one, because they deserve that, even though they came with a partner.

Regulation is a key word: above I mentioned that they regulate around me, but they also have the regulation influence of each other. This means that one dysregulated equals two dysregulated, playing off each other to become extremely more dysregulated as a duo. This is another time where the math isn’t linear, it’s exponential. And neither one has more maturity, or has learned any more capacity. There is exactly the same capacity - which, in infants, equals very little. They learn regulation in those first few months, and not only are they doing it in more challenging circumstances, but so are the parents. Regulating two where there is both each individual child, and the dynamic between the two, is like regulating the self, the young selves, and the space in between… all at once.

For me personally, what I have most noticed is that I have no experience of “the first time”; there are only the first two times at the same time, whilst learning the thing at all. When any first occurs, I have to experience and learn the thing as a thing at the very same time as I witness its two unique manifestations in my very individual babies. The good things feel like rapid development and surfing a wave of evolution that I struggle to comprehend, but experience with joy. The hard things feel like an impossibility. There is chaos and “wtf"?”, and so many times I find myself thinking, “is this normal?!” - and it is, even though it seems different in each baby, both are normal, and I have no idea how to deal with either, let alone it showing up doubled, and different, but all hitting me at once. I feel behind, all the time, and that makes me worry.

My husband occupies a different structural position here, and the difference is key, though not always helpful. He has parented before with my stepchildren, who are now eight and six. He has a foundational framework already in place for how an infant becomes a child and all of the things that happen in that: first blowouts, nighttime feeds, teething, first colds and illnesses, potty training, and everything else we have yet to do. He experienced things for a first time, that shock of new parenthood feeling like an initiation. Then he had a second separate time with his younger daughter. Now, our twins give him two new variations of something for which he already has both a baseline, and a variable example.

We’re raising our twins far differently to how his first two were raised, and there are two of them at once - something that he’s never done before. Even he states how different this is, but it’s different on top of a baseline. His system has already had the slower version, the staged introductions, and the independent variable. It is a variable on a known.

This is the lesson of first-time twin motherhood: it all must be learned, and you don’t get to slow the introduction to anything. It is unknown unknowns rapidly attempting to become known.

I know I will regret that in years to come. Here, in this writing, I want to make sure I remember that I was very aware I should be pausing, reflecting, paying attention to the little moments. And I am. But they are far outweighed by the deluge of the everything. The moments are wonderful, the days feel long and filled with them. But the totality of experience is just that everything is intense, all the time.

Because the doubling of babies doesn’t just double the demand on your time. They offer two demands, plus the friction between those two demands, and then the unseen thing that hurts the most: the cost of attending to one demand first.

There is no right way to parent in these settings. There is no actual partnership to twins, certainly not in the early years. They need everything when they need it, independently, and they don’t know how to - or even that there might be a need to - wait for the other’s needs to be met. They are in an enforced duality and, in honesty, I try to neutralize that duality so as not to make it a division, but I don’t know if I’m doing a good job of that at all.

The friction between the demands is what elongates everything. The moment one is attended to, the other is not - this means that the second takes longer to settle because in the time they were waiting for soothing their systems dysregulated further. The first is roused by the second’s unsettledness and for many months in the beginning it is a see-saw of attendance with absolutely no break. Both babies need you. They want you. They require your attentive rudders on their experimentation with what it is to be a human being. It never ceases. And the friction steals from anything that is not the babies - the casual coffee, the writing, the work, the conversation with my husband that might have been longer, the half hour I might have used to recover. “Sleep when the babies sleep” is anathema to me. In the beginning if that was 15 minutes of time when they were both asleep we were lucky. And then there’s all the other stuff you have to get done, which is never going to be achieved if you don’t maximize every precious (vanishingly rare) moment of “freedom”.

2. Hypervigilance

Twin motherhood installs a hypervigilance into the collective nervous system of the household. Two of them, at the same age, with the same emerging mobility, in the same room, on the same day, every day. It is, as I have put it to my husband, the requirement to do everything everywhere all at once, every moment of every day. If there was one baby doing one thing we would have one nervous system to attend to, and instead we have two, and the attention has to be in two places, and the result is a household whose baseline arousal level has been quietly elevated for twelve months in a way I did not register until I tried to describe it.

You physically cannot pay that much attention to two nervous systems consciously. You have to do it through your nervous system. I have been practicing this level of attentive awareness for years - for myself, for my clients - but now it is solely for my babies.

They began so vulnerable. They were not just premature, but also tiny. It is hard to remember those months, but terror was high up there on my list of emotions. Gradually, that has given way to what can only be described as profound attention, and that attention is not deliberate, it is innate. My body holds it whether I want it to or not, and I cannot put it down. As I write this, they’re both napping (they’ve been mostly synced for naps since about month 7) as my husband is out at an event. I am tracking them on the dual-camera setup, aware of the things I need to do in this time, conscious that when they wake I’m solo parent-in-charge, there’s lunch to prep, an afternoon to be inside… I am attentive to what is, what might be, what is going to be, and what needs to be done. And my system scans in two ways, remembering that Merlin had a difficult night so might be down for longer, Fifi is in a tired space but stirs regularly so might interrupt her own nap and need visiting. There are so many facts, nuances, and nuggets of their being in my system. Every mother does this. Every mother of multiples does this for a whole kaleidoscope of neediness.

There is a strange way in which my own history has prepared me for this. The years I spent in illness taught me to track multiple simultaneous internal channels with practiced attention, and to switch between full immersion in a body and a strategic deafness to it. That hypervigilance was already trained, the muscle already built. What has changed is the direction: the attention I once turned inward to my own body is now turned outward to two others, and the deafness I learned to use on my own signals I now use on whatever in me is not directly serving them. There is something useful in the trained skill. There is also something complicated about it, because it activates the old trauma memory body, the one whose hypervigilance was learned in survival. The same muscle is now being used for love, but it still gives me yet one more thing to track: attention to my own state, monitoring it for coming from stress vs. coming from centered holding. Where am I contracting out of fear, versus supporting out of necessity?

And then there are the older two. Knox and Annabelle, my husband’s children from before me, with us part of the time. They are part of this family. But there is not a full-time life of the six of us. There is a full-time life of the four of us, and a part-time life of the six of us, and every developmental evolution my babies have hit this year has happened in the four-of-us version, because Knox and Annabelle have not been here for it. Everything in this house happens without them, and then everything in their lives happens without us. When we come together, we must update our knowledge of each other - and all too soon it is over and the whirlwind in the wake of becoming a short-term family of six is a legitimate thing that is felt very deeply.

When the older children are here, I have to keep attention in three or four places at once, plus additional support for my husband. I cannot give an eight-year-old or a six-year-old the attention they are asking for at the same moment I am keeping two crawling-now-walking infants away from the on-ramps to chaos that are everywhere in a house designed for adults.

This is not about Knox and Annabelle as humans: they are good children who have grown up with attentional and stimulation needs that have been calibrated on the higher side. They don’t know how to follow my instruction of not “entertaining” the babies, but “being with” them, because nobody was like that with them. My attempt to model that with them is a challenge to their fundamental set-point of attention, and an eight-year-old and a six-year-old do not yet have the calibration to know what babies of this age do, and they cannot make the corrective physical adjustments an adult can make - the lifting, the redirecting, the catching.

Mostly, put as delicately as I can, the energy of my stepchildren is something disruptive to the sandpit. My choice has been that I must protect the nervous systems that exist within the full-time life of this household. The fact that the protection sometimes reads, from the outside, as a boundary against my stepchildren is a profound cost that we all pay. But I pay it more than most. I sacrifice more when my stepchildren are here to prioritize their relationship with their father: the days of travel without him, and the days when they are here where I send them off together to be in shared space. My children lose a part of their father a little when their brother and sister visit; an unwelcome but essential trade-off for having him full time, I guess, though not a bargain they asked to pay, nor a cost my stepchildren are aware is being paid. My hope is that nobody else notices any costs whatsoever. My babies get me, and more of me, and complete dedication to them from me. My stepkids get precious dad time, and some time with their bonus family. Making sure all of that happens is my job.

3. Isolation

Within all of this conscious attending to others, this irony is profound: the practical complexities of twin life demand choices that are inherently isolating, and render anything resembling normalcy a distant memory.

My husband and I have practiced attachment parenting, which to us has meant co-sleeping, co-regulating, and attending to our babies at every moment. We do not allow them near screens, have no technological toys, and no babysitters, nannies, or caretakers with the exception of time with grandmothers (both my mother, and my husband’s mother). I am their primary parent - I leave them almost never. I am within the home when they are awake, and if I am not parent-in-charge I am still available. My husband is almost as available, though he does more of the “work” and also has an extensive travel schedule to bring my step-kids home every other weekend. I am beyond absolutely blessed that a lot of my parenting is done as a duo - two nervous systems to two nervous systems. This makes my desired parenting style possible. Without a present father, my twins would not have an attachment-parenting approach.

Ask any mother - twins or not - attachment parenting is incredibly challenging even with one baby. This is a significant commitment, but to me it was not optional.

But these choices also mean the social architecture of normal adult life quietly died. The logistics of going anywhere with two babies are so substantial that the casual coffee, the dropped-in friend, the long phone call - all of it - just stops, and what replaces it is a household that becomes its own ecosystem, and you do not see anybody, ever, to actually have a conversation with.

Any mother of multiples will also know that this isolation is, in part, due to never feeling entirely understood by your friends. But it is mostly an absolute necessity for the health and sanity of your babies, yourself, and the household ecosystem. A missed nap is not a subtle event in a house of multiples. Two babies, one missed nap = night time chaos, dysregulation that does its exponential multiplication thing, a very disrupted sleep cycle for both, and a much more tetchy and difficult next day. Times two. Managing my house’s schedules has become laughably precise and controlled: micromanaging, if you will. And I don’t actually care!!

At the start, those who came over tended to feel that a laxity in timing is OK. I’m not sure if that’s an American thing, or a Texas thing… whatever it is, it is one of my most unbelievable frustrations and something I had to put a stop to. My life is such that if I cannot trust your timing, you cease to get invited, further deepening the isolation. It’s not fun, but I have so many things to juggle that trusting only the others who can be present to our needs and not solely attuned to their own is just a choice that I have to make. It tracks back to the hypervigilance too: I no longer trust many things outside of my microcosm. We have been let down a lot.

This year has been filled with unsafety, and I am now shut down, distinctly closed off, and probably somewhere (if I could stop long enough to think about it) very much hurting. In my glorious postpartum year of the first and probably only babies I will have, everyone disappeared. Either by my choice, by theirs, by circumstances, by difficulties of scheduling, or challenges of life mismatches. My husband and I went through hell and I can count with just a couple of fingers the people who were materially there and supportive. I had needs that were not met. In many ways, that is all my fault: I didn’t know I had them, didn’t know who or whom to ask for them to be met, and did not know that I would feel the lack and the emptiness when life was just so full.

The years of who I was - career woman, autonomous, mobile, conversational, social, working - are not just paused but gone. With them went the people who met me within my identity as that person. The practical isolation of twin parenting prevented any outreach from myself, and that’s my fault. When I look at the year, I look at everything I had to give - and it went to the best, most appropriate, place: my babies. In that context, I may have failed at the “giving enough to yourself” piece, but I did the most important one: I poured everything into two humans just learning what it is to be. I am so proud of the choices, the trade-offs, and the losses of personally being met - given that I gave all I had to deeply meeting every need of my little ones.

4. Love

This is the hardest to write.

Doubling of your offspring does not, and cannot, double the dwelling in love. Nervous system attunement between mother and baby, when there are two babies, is not unique, focused, or bonded in its exclusivity of nourishment, naps, and nustling into sleep. You cannot do that with two - even if you can do all of those things with two babies simultaneously, the bonding is not the same.

I will never know what it is like to be in sync, tightly, with one baby. I cannot afford to drop in and dwell with their system, because when I am dropped into one of them the other is somewhere I am not. As with my division of attention, there is a division of the “becoming a mother” role. One of them didn’t give that new role to me: they both did. I am learning motherhood with both of them, not uniquely with one.

Even when one of them is briefly alone with me while the other sleeps, the one who sleeps is still in the next room, about to wake, still on my body’s radar, still a node of my attention. The singleton accounts of “merging” with a baby, of “syncing” with their rhythm so precisely that you forget where you end and they begin, read to me as descriptions of a reality I cannot fathom. Contact naps, being nap trapped, dedicated oneness - these are concepts I cannot experience. Falling asleep next to one necessitates the other parent being next to the other one. Then, once they are sleeping, there is everything else in our home and our lives to do, which - with two babies - is an enormous load.

I don’t have the beautiful parts of parenting I have read about: that singular, focused, one-skin-to-one-skin dwelling. The magical aura of being-ness that exists in securely attached infant and mother dynamics is not possible for me. There is always another being waiting for my heart to be available, and my heart does not have a choice to not be - and it wouldn’t choose it even if it did.

And every day I wonder how them being part of a duo will harm them because of what I have been unable to do. Whether the divided attention has cost them something the singleton baby gets. Whether the bond between us is shaped, irreversibly, by the fact that it has never been undivided.

I have arrived at this much: mothers of more than one child are always logistically divided as their hearts grow to enclose all of their offspring. The siblings-of-different-ages experience has parallels. But with the twins, there was never a moment that they weren’t both inside of - there was no period of singular dwelling that preceded the divided one. As they grow, their differences will become the most important thing I get to accentuate to them and support them in leaning into. Right now, however, we exist in a time of unity. They have the same full-time needs as one another, and their lives revolve around each other, around me.

And I am not even sure how to treat their partnership. I imagined instant bonding, and it has not been like that. When I watched them learn what it was to even see anything, I realized why. They didn’t know each other existed for months. They couldn’t fathom their own reality, let alone comprehend that there was another one being formed across from them, demanding everything that they were from their caregivers. The bond between twins is not automatic; it must be nurtured, and it may not be the fantasy version. The way they are right now is awesome, but they hit each other more than they hug each other! To them, the other is simply another learning surface!

Thankfully, this is all they will ever know. They too cannot know the experience of us being one-to-one. In many ways, they are very lucky that they have another one - someone who knows so deeply what they know because they literally lived it too. I cannot wait for their love to become a bigger part of our family, for their bond to become what it is here to be, and for us all to grow into the expansion of what this chaotic family nervous system is.

The Joys

Because that is it. It’s chaos, but it’s my chaos.

I am so in love with my babies, with my family, and with the life that has been remade around the four of us. When I go to nap with one of them - whichever one - I whisper “I love you so much” over and over, almost unconsciously. It is the impulse, because it is the truth. I am in awe that they are here, that I get to experience life through their eyes, and learn to be this complex form of “mother” within their dual attention. That is what they are gifting me. Given my trainings and experience, a single parenthood would probably not have been enough. I wouldn’t have changed enough, and I could have kept up more of my patterns.

The costs may be exponential, but they are the ones that I am paying, and anything else and it wouldn’t be worth it. It is perfection, it is joy, and it is the most amazing experience because it is a clusterf**k. Because nurturing and managing that sandpit through these complex demands, needs, nervous system attunements, and juggle of variables is the only challenge my nervous system could really have faced and gone, “WTAF?? Really??” And whilst I might have dreamed of a life that was easeful after my previous decades of stress, that’s not the point of this life for me. Everything I learn, I learn through playing in the stressful sandpit of life. The trials, challenges, and taxing experiences within my body have been the playground (and testing ground) of my evolution. So what if now I have to maintain the sandpit walls and regulate the weather amidst this particular cacophony of real life storms in defense of a duo? This is just the next season of what it is for me, in this nervous system, in this lifetime.

As I write this, it is the day before their first birthday. We are not throwing a party - partly because we cannot afford to right now, and partly because I do not want to. I want to celebrate my babies, not perform their birthday for anyone else. Nobody but the grandmothers has been fixture enough in their lives for them to know them, so why would I invite people to their party that they will not recognize? It is going to be just the four of us. A solo day for the family that has been here every minute of this first year.

Plus a photographer. I have never had anything professionally photographed in my life. Not a birthday, maternity shoot, pregnancy announcement, baby shower, gender reveal, engagement, marriage/wedding, and no birth announcement. Our family pictures are tired selfies, not professional captures.

This day, for me, is so special: I have been planning it with more joy than I have permitted myself for almost anything else this year. The color scheme. The cakes - one for each of them, smashable, ridiculous. The outfits I will put them in. The hour of getting to have my babies in my own back yard doing something completely ridiculous, with two of them, so it is going to be twice as ridiculous and twice as pointless, and a memory that Caleb and I will keep forever. The pictures are for me, but also for my babies. In a year where they have been everything, these pictures - of a day they will never remember - will hopefully show them exactly how much I wanted to celebrate the very life of their beings: these two that mean and are everything to me.

To Seraphina and Merlin, who will read this one day: you will turn one tomorrow, on May 29. You will not remember the year, and what I want you to know once you’ve read how hard this year was for mama, is this:

Choosing you was the easiest thing I have ever done. Welcoming you through me, shepherding your arrival and holding your lights has been the biggest blessing of my entire existence - bar none. One day you will learn of mama’s history and her life before you, and you will think “woah, she’s done some things! She had to survive some things!!” And you’d be right. But you should also know that becoming the person who can hold you both and love you both exactly how you both need, deserve, and are destined for: that has been the hardest evolution of my life. My commitment to you both - now and forever - is that I am with you, on this evolutionary journey, for all the years I have to come. When it is easy, when it is hard, when it feels divided, and when we are the unstoppable Greer team facing the world together: I am always, always on your side. On the days when you feel I hugged your sibling more, I apologize - ask me for the hugs you need and I will always seek to make up for the ways I fail you in my utter humanness, and through my inability to know what the hell I’m doing! Know I’m trying, even when it doesn’t look like it. If you need my efforts to look different, you will always, always get to ask.

I love you both so much, it honestly baffles me how you are both in my world, making me into the person that loving you is challenging me to become. For all of our days, for all of the life you have that I get to witness and be alongside of, know that you are not just the ones that made me a mother: you are the ones who took my teaching and education and turned it into wisdom, drew out my hidden capacities, and showed me how being enough is not a fact of measurement, time, or even effort. It is about devotion; pure and simple. And my goodness, my divine little babies, I am so utterly devoted to both of you.

Happy Birthday Baby 1 and Baby 2. My Chicken and Monkey. BBG and BBB. Fifi and Merdiddles. Seraphina Grace, and Merlin Percival Greer ❤️

Another month, another science publication creating a storm in the somatic teacup. The publication this time is a paper by Steven Kotler, Michael Mannino, Glenn Fox and Karl Friston, in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, titled, with a clear eye on the headlines it would generate, “The body does not keep the score.” Friston is the name carrying the weight. He is among the most cited neuroscientists alive, and the framework the paper runs on is largely his life’s work.

So let’s start with my opening statement.

Once again within these debates, I really, really do think they matter. It is more than just semantics, as some have attempted to claim. But as I have witnessed the intense, volatile, and erratic fallout from these so-called debunkings, my perspective on why it matters, how it matters, and for whom it matters has been profoundly refined.

The somatic industry, in response to the kinds of articles that offer up real neurochemical and neuroanatomical critiques of its tenets, shows its true colors as an industry lacking in academic rigor, effective training, and standardized regulation.

It shows its heart, and wears it on its sleeve: it needs - in the same way an enmeshed and anxiously attached person needs - the models which ground its theories. When those models erode, the response is defense, anger, and dismissal. As such, the somatic industry shows its traumatic roots.

However, this doesn’t mean its models are all inherently wrong. Where they are wrong, that also doesn’t mean those models are useless.

So let me start by saying what this piece is, because the shape of these arguments tends to shove a writer into one of two camps, the defenders of somatic work and its debunkers, and I am writing from neither place.

If your own healing came through the body, through somatic practices, and profound release, then some of this article might land as unmatched to your experience. That is what it is, and your experience is absolutely valid. I will go on to explain why I believe knowledge and the specificity of mechanism matter so much, but believing that it matters does not mean I think healing reached without it is imaginary, or that practitioners who work without those foundations are frauds, because I do not believe either of those things. If a line here reads as contempt for a path that helped you, that is a failure of my phrasing, and I hope that by reading on I correct myself and create space for your reality. And if I do not, if I am still missing the point, please bring your view into the conversation - that is how we all learn, and I will happily meet you for that dialogue in the comments, in my DMs, anywhere you can find me!

Perhaps, from where you sit, this latest paper looks like one more academic poking at work he has never had to do in a room with a frightened person. It can look that way to me too, on a tired day. But I do not think that is what it is.

The Ground I Speak From

I was trained three times. The first training came earliest, and it ran the widest. I studied across a great many systems, energy medicine among them, but the center of gravity was the archetypal wisdom traditions, the systems that read a thing by its essence and its pattern. What that training gave me, and has never stopped giving me, is a sense of how completely language and essence govern the behavior of a thing. Name something a certain way and you change how it moves. Even if you don’t change the external reality, you absolutely alter what it does and how it lives within you - as a concept, an art, a practice, and a reality. What a thing is called, and what it is held to be in its essence, shapes what it then does (externally, and internally). That is the basis of everything I hold, and it is worth saying plainly at the start of a piece that is, in the end, about a single sentence and the work that sentence has done in the world.

My second training was medical. What medicine teaches, relentlessly, is the primacy of mechanism. You do not get to say a thing is happening in a body without being able to say how it is happening, through what tissue, along what pathway. To be completely honest, as I reflect now, even medical training is bad at fully elucidating these pathways. It keeps everything in silos and regularly fails to get back to affective neuroscience or brain region analysis, which is frequently the most important basis - especially in the science of psychiatry - and is rarely named. Nevertheless, in medical terms, a claim about the body that is not at least able to be described in mechanism is just an hypothesis. And in medicine, these are held external to practice until they are proven (admittedly, perhaps overzealously so).

My third training was in the trauma worlds: Somatic Experiencing™, Parts Work, Somatic Psychology, Bodynamic and touch work. This field was woefully lacking in the type of mechanism training I was used to. Claims were stated, slides were shown, and trainees were expected to (and many did) take all that was said as read. Attendees were taught phenomenally in the art of how to hold a human being in their pain, and transformation. Gentleness was not just taught, but exemplified.

Nobody was taught well about what I simply called ‘first principles’. The exercises and approaches worked, but nobody was really told why they were working. They were not told what they were doing from the lens of true physiology and neuroanatomy. They were simply told, ‘because the body adapts to trauma by doing this, we open it up by doing this’.

Note: “the body adapts”. The shorthand reveals much. The implication in this sentence is that the body, as an agent of response, reacts around an input (in this case, trauma).

Sitting in these trainings, my medical knowledge meant that I knew the mechanism, and I found these trainings bearable because I did. I had first principles grounding to every practice, but it was not information given to me by those trainings. Through the luck of my life experience, I arrived at those trainings with it.

The clearest instance has stayed with me for years (yes, for long-term readers, I’ve written about this before). In one Somatic Experiencing training, a teacher stood at a diagram of the vagus nerve, walking the room through the ‘vagal system’ as if these two things were synonymous. There was a confusing mix of discussion about unmyelinated and myelinated fibers, zero discussion of accurate brain regions, and broad distinctions drawn that were either frankly inaccurate, or vague enough to be highly misleading. Carefully, and in good faith, I raised my hand to query the neuroanatomy. I wasn’t exactly told that the slides were accurate. I was told “this is Porges’s science”, as if that alone settled the conversation.

These are the only times I witnessed Somatic Experiencing trainings as being non-inclusive: when science is laid at the feet of its stories. In every other demand they are overly attentive to individual needs, desires, and knowledge. Identity fluidity, Aboriginal respect, individual compromise are elevated above and beyond all else.

But when it comes to a scientific conversation, the response is not acceptance, openness or receptivity. The mandate is “believe, and do not ask for proof”. It is religious in its appreciation of Levine, Porges, and Van der Kolk - men from one period of time at Esalen, exceptional in their field who did much for the industry of allowing trauma to be a real, lived, felt-sense experience, and delineated so much of that experience for this industry.

Yet the result is a swathe of professionals, accredited in various somatic arts, in a somatic world that has chosen to prioritize holding a person as if they have a body that is ruling the show. There is either a lack of interest in, or a lack of capacity for, simultaneously holding an awareness of how that body is creating, and organizing its reality… because it is doing so in partnership with a set of brain systems and a neuroanatomical and neurochemical reality that many don’t understand (and that exist in the realm of a “brain/mind” that many have rejected as irrelevant).

Many of the rebuttals of the recent opinion paper from Kotler et al have been some variation of, ‘it doesn’t matter, because the practices work’, and it was the same with the Polyvagal debunking.

But - and please know that I speak with great respect for the artists who are healers who live in the realm of somatics - there are two issues here.

First, it may be true that the originators of these theories and stances know what they are stating, and what they are not. But over the years these theories curdle into something else. Incompleteness migrates to inaccuracies. Incompleteness becomes the complete rendering. Somatic has become diluted - as a word, as a discipline, and in its integrity of training. The work of the originators has been diluted with it. When truth is dropped in preference of ease it doesn’t do everyone a disservice, but it certainly does a disservice to some.

I hold both mechanism and felt-sense somatic dearly because I was both lucky enough to be trained in both, and also because I am so relentlessly interested in the whole of how human beings operate that I personally researched affective neuroscience - and merged that understanding with the motor attunement of the Attachment Cycle as I studied it. No, that synthesis is not stuff that’s in textbooks. It’s in my journals and notes - a funny sticky note in the shape of a paw is taped to one page because it’s where I wrote it all down the day I was first inspired by it. Cross-discipline integration has always been my “thing”.

The trauma industry lacks individuals who want to do what I did. Many in the trauma industry as accredited professionals are diligently caring individuals who have practiced in their chosen discipline. More problematic is the millions of traumatized individuals who have experienced some personal healing, and maybe a weekend-course in whatever it was that changed their lives, and who now characterize themselves as able to “hold space” for others’ journeys.

Here, within these individuals, is where a deeper, more endemic, issue raises an ugly head.

When those who pioneer the ideas on which an industry runs take a heuristic (which is what these ‘body keeps the score’ and ‘polyvagal theory’ ideas are) and present them as facts, science, and ‘Truth About The Body’, it disincentivizes further reading, investigation, or thinking.

One of the greatest harms of letting incompleteness speak as the whole truth is that it frustrates and arrests progress and independence of thought.

Because that’s my whole point. The heuristics are so useful they have sparked an industry of untrained helpers. I am not here to state that either the heuristics themselves, or the people that base their “practices” on them are not ever useful. Nor do I just stand in critique of the untrained.

I stand in critique of the trained too. And the trainings.

Somewhere along the line, the felt-sense has eclipsed and replaced the mechanism. That’s a disservice to the totality of experience. Yes, we needed a course correction from conventional psychiatry that rendered brain chemical imbalances as the root of all psychological pain. Yes, we deserved a correction which placed the body’s intelligent experience within the viewpoint of focus.

But we didn’t need to allow a whole industry to emerge out of an half-baked understanding of what it is to be human.

We also don’t really need opinion pieces which pull down specific works (Kotler et al pulling down Van der Kolk, Grossman demolishing Porges before him).

What we have is a deep conflict between disciplines, which perpetuates a conflict between languages. Nobody from either side is doing the due diligence to truly evaluate HOW MUCH of the science has to live within the art of the practice.

It is not ‘none’, that is for sure - this is what we have right now, and this article explains why that is dangerous.

It is also not ‘all of it’ - and this article also explains why that would damage the very efforts of the helping professional.

What I attempt to do within the remainder of this article is not just demonstrate the problems, but also to offer the answer to the questions:

1. what do our therapeutic trainings need to include in order to sufficiently round out and complete our ability to energetically be in truth while we administer our practical tools for the nervous systems that need us?

2. and what does a clinician truly need from all of these semantics? Why is it incomplete to have the arts they have, even if they emerged out of incomplete science. I offer my ideas for this toward the end of this piece.

But first, let us break down all of these concepts.

Heuristics Are Not Lies, But They Are Wielded

A heuristic is a working shortcut: a way of thinking about a problem that is good enough to act on without being a complete account of the thing it describes. We lean on them constantly, and we do it for a sound reason: the full account of almost anything is too large to carry whilst also doing the task in front of us. A good heuristic compresses something true and holds a real (large) pattern in a shape small enough to use.

The Body Keeps the Score is a heuristic. So is Polyvagal Theory. (I have written elsewhere, at length, about where Polyvagal Theory fails as science, and I will not re-litigate that here.)

But an instrument is only as safe as the hand that knows what it is holding. In the hand of someone who knows it is a heuristic, it works as a precision tool. In the hand of someone who believes it is the whole truth, it hardens into a claim about reality, and it gets defended as a claim about reality, including in all the places it was never built to reach.

And that is exactly what has happened. A heuristic this useful gets wielded, and this one has been wielded incorrectly and unwisely, by a great many people, for a long time. They wield in good faith: they were trained in the art of this work and never in the science of it, and you cannot know you are holding a heuristic if no one ever taught you the difference between your heuristic and the facts it is designed to simplify.

It is not entirely clear that anyone, pressed directly, ever truly believed the most literal version of Van der Kolk’s statement: that a parcel of trauma sits lodged in a specific square inch of tissue, or that the body itself is literally retaining a specifically locatable record of a traumatic incident.

It is absolutely apparent that Van der Kolk did not think it pertinent to explain the full science, even if he knew it. It is abundantly clear that Friston (or perhaps his co-authors who pioneered this piece) thinks the full science is not just pertinent but the entire point.

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The Word Doing the Work

Look hard at the sentence. The body keeps the score.

The body is the subject.
The score is the object.
And the verb, the word doing the real labor, is keeps.

To say the body keeps the score is to claim not only that something is stored, but that the body (and, by implication or omission, the body alone and of its own accord) is the thing storing it. That is a precise claim, and a locating one: it says not just where trauma lives but also depicts an agency from its keeper.

And here is the imperative, and I think it is genuinely absolute: the moment you make a claim about storage, you have made a claim about mechanism. You do not get to say a thing is kept somewhere, by something, and then decline to say how it is kept. A storage claim that states where something lives is both a mechanistic and a literal claim. Decline to offer details and there is simply incompleteness.

Van der Kolk, to be accurate, understands the brain perfectly well. The Kotler and Friston paper grants this directly, and so will I. But the rhetorical center of his book, and beyond any argument its reception, made the storage claim and the location explicit, and yet left the mechanism in shadow.

And this is problematic.

Because the mechanism, when fully understood, reveals that the location is incomplete when you say just ‘the body’. So is the storage mechanism. The body is involved, but it is not involved independently, nor is it involved as a sole-authoritative agent.

But it’s a beneficial heuristic - I said that, as have many.

A great many people came to believing in this work because something within it healed them. For very many of them the healing arrived through the body, through a physical practice, and a subsequent release that happened from the body.

When relief comes out of the body like that, it is almost irresistible to conclude that the thing released had been stored in the body, right where it came out - or, at the very least - within the tissue structure explicitly.

Release from the body gets read backwards, instantly and silently, as storage in the physical form itself. The title of Van der Kolk’s book itself allows for this impression to persist.

It is an understandable inference. But it is incorrect.

Part of why that matters is because it quietly writes the brain out of its own story. It takes the circuitry, the actual machinery of the trauma, and disappears it, because the felt trauma was all somatic while the brain’s part stayed silent and structural and did not announce itself. The release was physical, so the prison must have been physical.

This may or may not be what people are actually thinking. But this is where the defense of both of these theories come from.

That assumption carries a real and particular cost, even though it is not a universal one. For many, these approaches disrupt the patterns and create real change. For others, these approaches simply change the physical state in the moment, only for that state change not to be maintained.

And what do we get to blame then? When our body reverts to its originating holding pattern? And when our brain is still perpetuating the thoughts it was, our lives still resembling the traumatized existence that feels the same as it always did?

When we are handed a model in which the body was the keeper, when the body lets go and then “reacquires” its keeping… there is nowhere to put that. That’s the problem with “feels right” theories. Eventually, because they are heuristics, the runway of analogy runs out.

Here’s why.

Somatic work - whether through touch, or nervous system attunement methods - works with the body. This is working on the representative vehicle of the trauma, certainly. The body is representing, carrying, even “holding” the schema of the harm it has suffered. But it is not “keeping” it. When we are working with trauma using body-based practices, we are working on a facet of how trauma is inhabited, but not the actual trauma itself. When release occurs, in that moment the body goes through a facilitated shift of how it represents itself.

If the body ‘kept the score’, that would be it. The score would change and you would have a body now without trauma.

But it does not work like that.

Imagine a stream of water held back by a rock face. The water is stopped; something is plainly being held. Now ask where, in that rock face, the water is being kept, and the honest answer is nowhere in particular. No single stone is the keeper; the whole shape of the rock holds the whole shape of the water. The holding is a property of the entire structure.

Now open a hole in that rock. The water will pour through, fast and unmistakable, the very picture of a release. But the rock that is now missing had only ever been an access point, a place where the structure could be opened, and opening it changed the flow of the whole system. The release is true. The story that says that spot was the keeper is the fiction.

And the rock is blameless. It is not gripping the water out of malice or pathology. The water wants to flow, the rock is in the way, and the rock did not choose its own shape. The body is exactly this: a landscape with a shape. Somatic work is landscape work, finding the place the structure will open, which is a different thing entirely from finding the place the trauma was filed.

In more delicate body-based therapies that are not aiming at release, this is a part of the limitation when the focus is on the body. Felt-sense sensations become the landscape of work and when they shift, our body experiences a settling. If the body ‘kept’ the trauma, that would be it. Because it does not, this is an experience that must happen time and time again, in the safety of a specific container. This fact - asserted by high quality somatic professionals - is evidence in and of itself that the body is not the keeper of any kind of trauma. It is the conduit through which we can re-make the being’s experience of its world.

Thinking back to the rock face: that one rock removed stimulated a release, but that’s not the end of the story. The stream continues to flow, the rocks adjust, something else blocks the exit. The topography is such that this is the reality of its existence. Over time, altering the flow of the stream is possible. And yes, you could do that by removing piece by piece of the rock face. But the originator of this “problem” is not (and never was) the rock face. Try all you might, by interfacing only with the rock face as if it is the whole story, you will never stop the flow of the stream. (To be clear, the stream is not necessary “trauma” here either. It is the body’s emotional landscape. Release of energy through somatic work can happen whether a body is running a trauma map or not... which again reveals a lot about whether the body is actually keeping score, or just being a vessel for and of experience.)

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The Body, Demonized

So it’s an incomplete heuristic that works for a while, then breaks down. It matches experience for many… so who cares that it is incomplete?

We all should. This is the invisible harm of heuristics that overly reduce complexity into silos of a fragmented part of the human.

The phrase “the body keeps the score” renders the body as the storer of trauma, and the persister of trauma: the thing that will not let go, that invokes the past in the present, that keeps a record the rest of you would rather close. Once the body is cast in that role, its memory starts to be treated as something faintly suspect. A primitive layer. An old animal vestige holding the enlightened person back. The body becomes the part of you that has not moved on. We refer to it as the animal part which is holding a sense of life that “is not true”. Our brain knows it is not true. The one that doesn’t, the part of us that is at odds, is our body.

This splits a person. It hands the mind a place to put the trauma that is not the mind, over there, in my body, in the tissue, in the part of me that is not as intelligent as I am, not as wise as I am, and therefore not quite me. The framing divorces a person from themselves, and I do not think that is an accident of phrasing. A model that locates trauma in the body, specifically and somewhere, gives the frightened mind exactly what a frightened mind wants, which is distance. The trauma made into an object, in a place, that someone could go and fix. Ironically, these body-based practices that are supposedly prioritizing the body’s language are subtly still asserting the mind’s authority. The mind thinks its trauma is living in the body.

Importantly: the therapeutic tools that provide distance - are used liberally in trauma work, because they’re actually useful. But, again, they’re useful when done intelligently, and with awareness of what one is doing. Distance should only ever be created to support objectivity - this is the very essence of e.g. Parts Work/Internal Family Systems, Gestalt etc. A fundamental part of these frameworks is that these fractured “parts” are never once seen as the problem, and are certainly not made responsible for perpetrating harm or holding the issues alone. Any skilled professional who works with the therapies that has objectivity as a first principle has to do so whilst constantly holding the tension of how wholeness is the real root. These therapies expand the picture of a self, but they never label anything as not absolutely integrated into the whole.

A model that says there is a problem, and it is in your body, and it is somewhere specific, and it can be located and fixed is a model with a particular architecture. It needs a problem. It needs a place. It needs someone with the authority to find the place, and someone with less authority who is found. It builds a hierarchy, the knower set above the body, the fixer above the thing to be fixed, and it calls that arrangement healing. Even if it’s just you, alone, doing somatic work. You are the agent of your healing: validating your mind (that knows your responses are from trauma) and denigrating the body that holds the pain.

And set the politics of it aside for a moment, because even on purely practical ground it fails. A person taught that their body is the keeper of their trauma has been taught, in the same breath, to regard their own body with suspicion, to treat it as the saboteur, the part that must be made to let go. That is a person set quietly at war with themselves. You cannot meet what you have been taught to distrust.

But trauma does not sit over there. The schema of a harm does not wait in a tissue. It lives in the circuitry and the prediction and the body’s signal and the mind’s reading of that signal, all at once and inseparably. It is EVERYWHERE. And the moment you understand that, the somatic body stops being the doorway and becomes a doorway, one good access point among many, no more the privileged site of the work than any other.

Let me set a stone down here, because we have come a fair way. The argument so far has turned on a single word. The body keeps the score, and keeps is a word of storage, and storage is a claim about mechanism, and the mechanism was never shown, and in the silence where the mechanism should have been, the body got quietly cast as the demonized keeper of a person’s pain.

What follows now is the mechanism itself, the account the heuristic always owed us, finally said plainly. It is the most science-dense stretch of this piece, and it is here precisely because a piece complaining that the field skips the science cannot then skip the science.

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What Friston Actually Found

Here is the mechanism, in plain language.

Your brain runs on prediction. At every moment it is forecasting what comes next, the next sensation, the next state of the body, and then checking that forecast against what actually arrives. What you experience as perception is the brain’s best prediction of the world, corrected continuously by the gap between what it expected and what it got.

That gap has a name. It is called prediction error, and the updating of predictions against it is, more or less, what learning is.

Trauma, in this account, is a prediction gone rigid.

The brain assigns a kind of confidence to its predictions and to its incoming sensations. The technical term is precision, and you can think of it as how much weight a given signal is allowed to carry. What trauma does is corrupt the weighting. The brain comes to assign enormous, excessive confidence to its predictions of danger. The paper’s phrase is that trauma over-weights the precision of danger priors: the forecast of threat gets locked at maximum certainty, and almost nothing is allowed to talk it back down.

Then it compounds, in a cruel and specific way. Ordinarily your brain can down-weight the signals rising from inside your own body, a fast heart, a tight chest, and treat them as background. After trauma it loses that ability. The racing heart stops being background and becomes evidence. The brain predicts danger, the prediction drives the body into arousal, and the brain then reads that arousal as proof the danger is real, which strengthens the prediction, which drives more arousal. A closed, self-confirming loop. The paper calls it circular inference, and it is, said plainly, the engine underneath hypervigilance and flashback and the unshakable conviction that the threat is still here.

(The opposite is also true, and the brain can effectively minimize the signals. In both examples, what is occurring is the brain is miscalibrating its weighting of its predictions, which ensures that - even when presented with ‘evidence’ that would ordinarily update the priors - the brain does not accurately update its prediction model, because its traumatized calibration levels don’t accurately chart the discrepancies, so the prediction error calculations are also wrong.)

And this is the line from the paper I most want in front of you:

“The body participates in trauma, but as messenger, not archive.”

Messenger, not archive. The body works here as the courier, carrying signals upward into a brain that has lost the ability to read them accurately (then receiving signals back from that brain and behaving accordingly). What endures after trauma is what the authors call a loss of metastability, metastability being the healthy brain’s ability to move fluidly between many semi-stable states, to assemble a configuration, dissolve it, hold more than one reading of a moment and shift between them as the situation turns. A well brain is mobile. Trauma collapses that mobility, and the system gets stuck in a deep, narrow groove of fear.

The paper’s own language for it is worth hearing: a system caught in local minima, in a free energy landscape, that have become deeply and precisely engrained.

Notice the word the mathematics reached for. Landscape. A terrain of grooves and basins, a system stuck because of the shape of the ground beneath it. The most current computational neuroscience, asked what trauma is, described a rock face and a stream.

I will be sober about the rest, because the paper is. It does also say that body-based interventions can genuinely help, but it corrects the reason. They help by feeding the system new and unexpected sensation, which lands as prediction error and forces the over-certain brain to update, to loosen the precision on its danger forecast. The mechanism is recalibration. And the authors are careful to call this a testable hypothesis, still short of a settled finding, which is, quietly, its own lesson, since the scientists are visibly more careful about the standing of their claim than the trainings have ever been about theirs.

This is the mechanism. This is the account that keeps the score always owed and never delivered. It honors the body, it honors the relief anyone has ever felt, and it is accurate.

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The Somaticists Who Get It Right

There is an additional layer to somatic work that well trained Keleman devotees will comprehend. I am one of these, so I will expand on it here briefly.

Amidst the predictions from the brain, the body organizes. This is the participation of the formation of form around the predicted schema delivered to it by the brain. This is the body’s organization and preparation that occurs in the context of the brain’s reconfigured predictions and environmental reads.

It is difficult to understate the importance here. All human gestures emerge after the organization of fascia and structure in a constellational approach to the environment driven by the brain’s calibrations. Working with somatic organizing is to work with the subtle gestures - almost always unconscious - and the formative early impulses that move through a system. This is using the body as an almost absolute reflection of the brain’s schema: by observing the body preparing to interface with the environment we are witnessing the brain’s prediction as it granulates into posture, and shape.

Disrupting - slowly, carefully - the gestures, organization, and formation of a person (which can be done by simply bringing awareness to something typically done unconsciously, or can utilize more direct intervention - either works, which in itself is telling) does not alter the body whatsoever, not really. This is not a grand release, hands-on, shaking and convulsing practice.

What we are really doing here is disrupting the body’s feedback to the brain’s learned priors. At first, this is done so gently: simply allowing the brain to become conscious of how it is preparing its own vehicle - in Friston’s world, this is the evidence of the prediction proof being operationalized. By pausing, and dwelling for a moment here with awareness, we force a pause into the rapidity of “prediction → weighting assessment → no update to priors because we’re right about the world” cycle.

What’s exquisite here is that we are using the body to influence the brain’s neuroscience: increase awareness of how the schema actualizes into form, create attention to the prediction, allow for realization of error where before there was just enforcement proof, and thereby force an update to the priors - even if that update is simply in the form of an invitation to “check again” on the brain’s read of reality.

And - just to break the fourth wall for a moment and be my geeky, science-obsessed, but also HUMAN-obsessed self for a moment.

Holy shit isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that just a beautiful way to work with the conjoined artifice that is your brain’s overweighting of danger priors, through the landscape of its sensory hyper-vigilance, into the very essence of its own superpower: its attention.

THIS STUFF SHOULD BE SO DAMN EXCITING TO TRAUMA PROFESSIONALS EVERYWHERE. Not just because it’s true, but because it is so goddamn beautiful as a mechanism (of breaking, and of healing).

This stunning set of explanations - including examining one of the most profound somatic practices - shows us exactly how the body keeps the score: the brain tallies the body’s signals incorrectly. Thus: this isn’t the body keeping the score at all. It’s the body communicating the signals and the brain overly weighting certain scores. This isn’t linear math with the body holding too much in its accounts, it’s the brain playing Scrabble. And in those with trauma, all the Scrabble letters’ scores have been recalibrated higher by the brain.

The body holds the brain’s hand, as the rock face holds back the stream of water.

And the feedback loop of prediction, priors, and the eventual reality that this person lives (which will reinforce its predictions) is a traumatized life.

Understanding this SHOULD excite anyone who works in this industry, or on their own trauma self. Especially those who work in somatics.

But it won’t.

It won’t because it’s hard. And because it puts science and neuroanatomy (not even mentioned here, because it gets so overwhelming, but very relevant to all of what I paraphrased above) at the center of a soft, gentle art of meeting a human in the midst of pain. Even I edited for simplicity, in an article where I’m campaigning for more complexity. And I’ve taken thousands of words to do what one sentence simplifies and makes more palatable, wrong as it is.

So then comes the serious question: Friston’s work (hidden in a Kotler opinion piece, but this is Friston’s science) is right. But for whom?

What is more useful for the treatment rooms? The explanation of complexity and neuroscience that took me paragraphs of explanation to give to you? Or the heuristics of the body keeping the score?

This is the core question we need to answer.

Because if you believe the internet, the somatic therapists don’t (and shouldn’t) care.

The Room Is Not a Laboratory

I said at the outset that the trauma trainings teach an art, and that the people drawn to the experts trained in them come for the holding, for the craft of being with a person in pain.

The mechanism is genuinely difficult to carry into the therapy room. To bring the brain back into the trauma story you first have to stop people hearing the word brain as the word mind.

When the science says brain it means circuitry: how your thinking functions, the precision settings, the prediction loops, the depth of the groove, all of it running underneath and before the level of anything you consciously think. To teach that honestly you have to set the psychological story of what-happened-and-what-it-meant gently to one side, bring forward the cognitive apparatus, the actual machinery, and then trace that machinery down into the body schema, which lives in the brain and runs in constant two-way traffic with the physiology.

It’s frickin’ messy.

And you cannot hand that, raw, to a client in the middle of it. The person across from you is living one undivided thing that is at once a felt sense, a thought pattern, a behavior, an affect, and a belief, all of it at once, as a single lived emergency. You meet a person in that state with presence. To ask them instead to pass a neuroscience comprehension check before they are allowed to feel met would be abandonment with a diagram (annotated with very long, foreign words).

But here is the move the field has quietly made, and it is the move I most want to refuse.

The client is served by the art. The practitioner is served by the science and the art together, the science held in the back of their own mind as the true map, the art alive in their hands as the thing they actually offer. “The client doesn’t need the science” became the field’s cover story for “we never taught the practitioner the science,” and that substitution is the dereliction at the center of all of this.

And I will not pretend I have stood outside it. I have read, and quoted, Levine - the story of the firefighter who rescued a woman from a car where her infant son had been killed next to her, and whose shoulder had frozen “holding” the freeze he experienced as he reached in to save her. These stories are so linear, they FEEL so compelling to put the body as the memory-bank of our pain.

And I have been in that room, as a trainee and then as a practitioner. I have felt a client’s held shoulder finally give, watched the relief reach their face, and decided, in that moment, not to complicate it, to let the storage story stand between us unspoken, because the accurate story was longer and the moment was tender and I told myself that staying quiet was the same thing as attunement. Sometimes it genuinely was: healing happened, so it was fine, right? Sometimes it was just easier, and I knew the difference and let it go anyway. So when I name this dereliction, I am naming a room I have worked in, and a shortcut I have taken.

So that is the diagnosis, and it has been a hard one, so let me gather it before I say what I think we do with it. A heuristic was never named as a heuristic. Its storage claim was never paid for in mechanism. The body got demonized in the silence where the mechanism should have stood. And the science that would have corrected all of it was kept out of the only room that could have carried it to anyone. What is left is the question of repair.

Accuracy, In the Right Places

So. What do we actually do?

We keep the somatic work. I have not spent this entire piece to arrive at throw it away, and the Friston paper does not arrive there either. The art of physical release is skilled work that helps people, and a person underwater is genuinely served by it. That stays.

We also keep the client’s encounter gentle. Handing a suffering person a neuroscience curriculum was never the alternative, and it never will be.

What we do is put accuracy back where accuracy is owed, and it is owed in a specific place. The science of mechanism belongs in the understanding of the practitioner, the trainer, the person trying to advance this field. It belongs in the training room as the spine of what is taught, the thing the art is hung on. A practitioner who knows the mechanism can still offer a client the simplest, gentlest, most usable version of it, can still say let’s see what your body is holding, and the difference is that they now hold that sentence as what it is. A heuristic. A door, deliberately chosen, knowingly named, with the map of the real territory held clearly in the mind of the person who opened it.

That is the whole correction. The science of mechanism, in the understanding of the people who hold and advance the field. The art of practical release, in the hands that meet the client. These two were never a real choice between opposites. Mechanism keeps the art honest. Holding keeps the mechanism human. Drop the first and the work drifts, over years, into kind inaccuracy. Drop the second and you have a correct lecture delivered to someone who needed to be met.

The Body Keeps the Score can survive this. As a heuristic, named out loud as one, taught by people who know the mechanism beneath it and can say plainly where the map stops, it is genuinely useful, and there is no shame in a good compression. What cannot survive, and should not, is the other version, the one that leaves its mechanism in shadow, that demonizes the body and splits the person from themselves, and that defends a compression as a holy truth because no one in the room was ever given the means to know better.

The storm in the somatic teacup is really about something larger than Friston or Van der Kolk. It is about a field that has been content, for a long time, to teach an art and skip a science, and to call the gap humility. It was never humility. Humility is knowing you are holding a heuristic. What the field has had instead is the opposite of humility, wearing humility’s clothes - and in a field that is all about relational healing, honesty, and being with reality, this is positively disrespectful to the people who need us.

Friston is right. The body does not keep the score the way the phrase has been allowed to mean. But being right is only one step. What we do with the truth once we have it, who we hand it to, who we protect from its rawness, who we finally trust with the mechanism, that was always going to be down to those in the field.

There is one more thing, and it is the thing I most need a practitioner reading this to take from it. The science is for you. The client never needs to hear a word of it. You carry it quietly, in the back of your own mind, and you carry it for one reason: it changes the art in your hands. Most of all, it changes how gently you work.

Think about what the storage model quietly asks of a practitioner. If trauma is a thing lodged in the tissue, then the work becomes extraction, and the body becomes a vault with something locked inside it. Trauma living and breathing through a physical system gives the overwhelming impression that it needs to be got out, and so the response, the almost irresistible response, is force: the breath driven harder, the held place pressed until something breaks loose. When you believe the body is keeping the trauma, working the body hard is simply the logical thing to do.

But the trauma was never in there. We have spent this whole piece establishing it. The body is a conduit, a relay, signal traveling out and back, and the moment that truly lands in a practitioner, the force drains out of the work, because there is nothing in there to find, or evict. What rises in its place is something gentler, and something better. We change the way we see, how we analyze, and how we operate. We get to move quietly, and with great compassion, through the formation and organization and calibration of a body.

Take the most-taught somatic move there is: helping a client name a sensation as a sensation, ‘my heart is racing’ in the place of ‘I am anxious.’ Somatic Experiencing teaches this beautifully. Strip the story from the sensation and sometimes the whole experience loosens its grip. Sometimes it does not, and this is the part a practitioner only ever learns from the science.

The heart is still racing, and the racing heart, even with the word ‘anxiety’ lifted cleanly off it, is still being read, down in the circuitry, as danger. This is not the meaning making of Somatic Experiencing. This is not the mind. This is circuitry calibration. That sensation may get re-labelled and re-experienced (from anxiety to a racing heart), but it is also a live transmission, traveling up to a brain that is mis-counting its own Scrabble tiles. The racing heart is the body doing its job as a conduit, faithfully and accurately, reporting an arousal that the brain then weighs as proof of a threat that is not there. The re-labeling here is immaterial. Changing meaning, stripping the contextualization of the mind, changes absolutely nothing.

Knowing this, practitioners can meet a sensation as the thing it truly is: a body in honest conversation with a brain, telling the truth about an arousal while the brain mishears it as danger. And here, finally, is the answer to the question this whole piece has circled. The science is for the practitioner, and what it gives them is reverence. You cannot revere a vault you are trying to crack open. You can revere a body that has, the entire time, been faithfully relaying the truth, and waiting only to be heard correctly.

And no, we are not “blaming” or “celebrating” the brain here either - and that’s why the cold hard science is actually helpful. It is clinical. We are at the level of the brainstem and the mid-brain. We are not in intention, we are in cortical sense-making. This very system - prediction, prediction errors, priors - this is how we are human. It is learning. It is a functional, brilliant, consciousness-making engine. It’s just really overzealous with its weighting when it has been through trauma.

So yes, it absolutely matters that the field knows this, and updates its work accordingly.

Will it?

I doubt it. Magical truth that arrives amidst density isn’t sexy, and it doesn’t sell on Instagram.

My hope is that, in this world, those speaking to the softness and complexity of what it is to compose your humanness, in every moment, will slowly become heard amidst these noises made by the ‘science’. It is hard to compete with catchphrases. It is tough to out-signal the soundbites, even when they speak falsehoods. And most people in the industry are approaching their relational containers without either science or heuristic, and that makes me relax a little bit.

Because at the end of the day, beyond the arguments and the divisiveness: humans meeting humans in their humanness will run this precise mechanism anyway, without knowing it, and even when they think they’re doing something different. We can’t not, because this beautiful system is how we be - even if we don’t know it, or choose to believe something else.

Yesterday, after two and a half days of trial and eight hours of jury deliberation, my husband was declared Not Guilty.

A unanimous verdict.

This arrived after two years of destruction of our professional lives. It occurred over three years after the threats of that destruction had begun. And almost four years since the incident in question.

I have been waiting to write these words for longer than I can adequately describe. Not because I did not know what the truth was - I have known the truth for a very long time - but because the nature of this case, and the people involved in it, made silence the only responsible choice. Until now.

Now I get to speak.

Read more

This article was written with the assistance of a Claude AI extensively trained on my work - and then edited pretty ruthlessly, and added to, by me - the human behind The Evolving Door. It was written because I am building a very large project which requires a database of information that is made up of my own words, writing, and transmissions. These words have been uploaded into Claude AI for the synthesis process of the project (this is the “training” I mentioned above). In preparation for release of that project, I realized that some overviews for this content were going to be necessary. The first of those is below - and I had Claude (Sonnet 4.6) helpe me distill things for you.

Please note: my historic writing spans a variety of topics, so - whoever you are reading this - you will have followed me for different reasons. Almost NONE of you who found me solely on Substack will know of me as someone who works with the archetypes I am about to describe. However, if you’ve appreciated any of my work here, please know that I see the world as I do BECAUSE of my study of these archetypes. Yes, there was trauma education. Yes, there was the alchemical personal journey - but those came after my lifelong immersion in this.

I have been within the world of Human Design - and therefore Gene Keys, and the ancient I Ching - since I was 15 years old. That’s 25 years, ⅔ of my lifetime (and 3½ seven year cycles, for those who know the meaning of that). What I share here, and within my project, is therefore not just information to me, it is woven into the fabric of my being. I have lived with, contemplated, and spun around within these topics from the time before my profound illness, during the years of living in the wilderness of pain, throughout my ‘return’, and the further iterations through stress and isolation, and the most recent chapter: that of matriarchy. This is why I have chosen to build my project now. Because I am watching, in real time, this work show up as I am a wife to my husband and a parent to my children. As I learn them, and they learn the world, this wisdom is relevant.

There are sixty-four patterns that keep showing up: in the structure of DNA, in the mathematics of binary code, in the hexagrams of the I Ching (the oldest continuously consulted text in human history), in the gates of the Human Design system, and thus the Gene Keys, and in the codons that build proteins in every living cell.

Sixty-four.

The same number, the same structure, over and over again, across disciplines that have never spoken to each other.

This is not a coincidence, and nor is it mysticism. It is a pattern that demands attention.

What the Ancients Encoded

More than five thousand years ago, the sages of ancient China began assembling a system of understanding that was, in essence, an attempt to map the full range of human experience into symbolic form. The I Ching, the Book of Changes, is built from sixty-four hexagrams, each composed of six lines, each line either broken (yin) or unbroken (yang). Every hexagram represents a particular state of being, a particular configuration of forces, and a particular moment in what they saw as the cycle of change - or, as we might refer to it, human existence.

Together, the sixty-four hexagrams form a complete cosmology. Every possible dynamic between heaven and earth, between masculine and feminine, between stillness and movement, between creation and dissolution, is accounted for. And it is accounted for in a specific way: in marriages of trigrams (the bottom three and top three lines form their own trigram, and each represents an element).

This is not an accident. The ancient Chinese did this because they understood something: that everything within our ‘reality’ is encoded for by the blending and contrast of essential, energetic, elemental energies. Nothing is excluded, and through learning the poetry of the elements everything makes sense.

Carl Jung understood what this meant. He recognized the I Ching as a symbolic medium for the archetypes he had spent his career identifying in dreams, myths, and the deep structures of the human psyche. For Jung, the sixty-four hexagrams were not fortune-telling devices (nor were they for the ancient Chinese, they were divination tools). To Jung, these archetypes were mirrors. Each one reflected an archetypal pattern that exists in the collective unconscious of all human beings; the kind of pattern that shows up regardless of culture, geography, or era, because it is wired into the structure of who - or rather what - we are. He referred to the I Ching as a book that had emerged from the archetypal depths of the human psyche itself.

Whether he knew it or not (and I am genuinely unsure), he was not being poetic. He was being precise.

The Modern Synthesis

In the late twentieth century, two systems emerged that took the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching and mapped them onto the human body and the human life in specific, testable (via self-experimentation) ways.

Human Design, synthesized by Ra Uru Hu in 1987, correlates each of the sixty-four hexagrams to a “gate” in the human energy system. These gates are placed within nine energy centers that correspond to biological and hormonal functions. Your birth data, the exact position of the planets at the moment you were born, activates specific gates in your chart. The result is a bodygraph: a map of the archetypal energies you carry, the way they express through you, and the way they interact with the archetypal energies of others. Ra described the hexagrams plainly as the archetypes of humanity. All the basic roles appear. He preserved the essence of the hexagrams as they appeared in the ancient I Ching, but wrote a new text - one that translated the archetypes from their original codex (which no longer made sense, as modern man has lost the knowledge to interpret them) into the Rave I Ching. And he mapped these to the celestial heavens. Interestingly, not in numerical order - in evolutionary order. He mapped the “changes” of the I Ching to the natural progression of systems. This was the Human Design ephemeris.

The Gene Keys, developed by Richard Rudd from a foundation in Human Design, took the same sixty-four archetypes Ra had translated and added a spectrum of consciousness to each one. Every Gene Key moves through three frequencies: a shadow, which is the contracted, reactive, or repressive expression of the archetype; a gift, which is the awakened creative intelligence that emerges when the shadow is recognized and integrated; and a siddhi, which is the transcendent, fully realized expression of that same energy. The shadow of the first Gene Key is entropy. Its gift is freshness. Its siddhi is beauty. The same pattern, expressed at three different frequencies of awareness.

What both systems share, and what the I Ching held long before either of them existed, is a conviction that human beings are not random. We are patterned. And the patterns are readable. And encoded within their very fabric is the choreography of change - not just in the past, but ongoing into the future.

Here is where my history is worth explaining. I met Human Design in 2001 when Ra was only just starting to offer trainings. Instantly, his teaching was resonant for me and I studied under him for over a decade. During this time, in 2004 I met Richard Rudd and received one of the first ever Venus Sequence readings. I attended the first course he ran on the Gene Keys (neither of these things were called this at the time). Both independently, and through the mentorship of these masters, I learned the vitality breathing through the archetypes of these ‘systems’.

And whilst I have been inconsistent with my utilization of Human Design and Gene Keys as distinct ‘tools’ throughout the decades since, I am starting to realize that even if the systems themselves faded from focus, my integration of the world (and my experiences in it) never strayed from using these archetypes that had become part of my being. This isn’t a ‘perspective’ for me, it is literally how my being makes sense of the world. For reasons I don’t understand, I have never truly had to “study” these systems - they make sense to me like I am reading a language I recognized long before I learnt it. My brain and being think in archetypal essence.

Why This Matters Now

In the last few months I have been drawn into more heated conversations about world affairs than I typically am. Anyone who has followed me from the beginning knows I have notoriously been publicly apolitical: I historically have not commented on politics, world affairs, or global events (especially ones where I don’t understand any of the on-the-ground reality of what is happening).

That doesn’t really wash as a strategy or approach anymore, however.

What I am talking about - when taken out of the specific and into the thematic of what the world as we know it is currently moving through - is what some spiritual teachers have called ‘separation’. (And, from most of them, that sentence would cue a long lament over the global situation, environmental destruction, and divisiveness of humanity etc.)

The reason I use fragmentation is simple: it preserves the sense of connectedness. From the lens of human experience, the separation/fragmentation is very real, but from the lens of consciousness this separation/fragmentation is illusory (because we are, always, all one).

The word “separation” speaks to the human lens, but not to the consciousness one. The efforting to reunite that must follow “separation” is not what I see, precisely because I study these archetypes which concentrate awareness around the vagaries of human experience that exist within the oneness itself. So, using my awareness of these archtypes, what I see is the very predictable fracture lines down which fragmentation does - and must - occur. Then I see very direct and discernible healing routes that can take place - and that occur along these same seams of fragmentation - to restore harmony and resonance as a whole.

Taking this out of the mystical into the frameworks of psychology, something more concrete: Jung first articulated the concept of the collective unconscious. In this, he was describing a layer of the psyche that operates beneath individual identity. It is the layer where the mother archetype lives, and the child, and the trickster, and the shadow. These are not ideas he invented - and certainly we did not. They are not “Parts Work”, though they have become known as that. These are not “attachment styles”, though they show up there. These are archetypes we occupy, because they are an inevitable part of us all. They are patterns that show up in every mythology ever recorded - because they allude to the ineffable notion of “what it is to be” human.

This is not theory. It is observable. The political polarization that has intensified across the Western world in the past two decades follows archetypal lines. The gender debates follow archetypal lines. The fractures between religious civilizations follow archetypal lines. To cover the specifics of all of these examples in this article is not the point - they are all reflections of the same pattern, woven through different areas of experience, and I will be covering the patterns as the topic of future articles.

The point of this article is to state that the patterns are not new, they are ancient. And we can understand them more deeply, if we choose to.

Because the visibility of awareness changes our experience of these patterns. It’s a Schrödinger’s Cat situation: the process of observation cannot help but shift something. That we observe determines something’s state of being. How we observe changes our relationship to that state.

Archetypal analysis is the practice of making these patterns visible in a way that creates understanding, empathy, and a sense that this is bigger than the small self. When you can see the archetype that is operating in a situation, in a person, in a culture, in yourself, you gain something that no amount of surface-level analysis can provide. You gain the capacity to work with the pattern rather than being unconsciously driven by it. Jung called this individuation: the lifelong process of bringing the unconscious into conscious relationship with itself. More than that, you can see the pattern in the world as a reflection of the pattern in yourself. Instead of “othering” you see “sameness”.

And even where you cannot, you can understand the seemingly inexplicable, in a way that makes it make sense.

The I Ching, Human Design, and the Gene Keys offer sixty-four specific lenses for this work. Each gate, each hexagram, each Gene Key describes a particular aspect of what it means to be human: a particular tension, a particular gift, a particular shadow, a particular potential. When you study them, you are not learning an abstract system. You are learning the language of the forces that are already operating in your life, your relationships, your family, and the world that you see around you.

The Gate and Its Lines - Some Gate Geometry

Each of the sixty-four archetypes carries a specific thematic signature. Gate 37, for example (the topic of that next article) holds the archetype of family and bonding, the polarity of masculine and feminine, and the question of what holds human beings together - perhaps now you understand why I am going to start my exploration there.

Gate 49 holds revolution. Gate 55 holds freedom and the emotional wave of the human spirit. These gates precede the 37 in the Rave I Ching mandala, and that - in and of itself - tells us something fascinating about them. Each Gate is a world unto itself, and each one interacts with the others in precise, mappable ways. The individual gate, the order of appearance, where they sit in the bodygraph, their programming partners (opposite Gates in the mandala), the codon ring pairings (what goes together to form an amino acid) - these all speak to more and more detail on how reality is codified, and encoded with energetic essence.

But when all that gets too much - 64 variables, with their mappings and depth - there is something simpler.

Within each gate, there is a further layer of specificity that spans ALL gates.

Each hexagram is composed of six lines, and each line modifies the meaning of the gate in a distinct way. If the gate is the archetype, the line is the role you play within it. Two people can carry the same gate in their chart, the same fundamental thematic pattern, and express it in completely different ways because they carry it in different lines.

But whilst the six lines may color the hexagram/Gate, a meditation on line mechanics is something structurally and resonantly profound. It walks - in no uncertain terms - through the roles we play in every area of our lives.

The six lines describe a progression. The first line is the investigator: the energy that needs to study, research, and understand the foundation before it can move. The second line is the hermit, or the natural: the energy that has an innate talent but needs to be called out of its privacy to share it. The third line is the experimenter: the energy that learns through trial and error, through breaking things and discovering what holds. The fourth line is the networker: the energy that transmits through relationship, through influence, through the bonds of community. The fifth line is the heretic, or the projector of solutions: the energy that others look to for practical answers, and that must learn to manage the projections that come with that visibility. The sixth line is the role model: the energy that moves through a three-part life, first experimenting, then retreating to the rooftop to observe, and finally descending to live as an embodiment of what it has learned.

These line mechanics are not personality types. They are archetypal roles within archetypal themes. They describe how you carry the energy you carry. They tell you something about the specific texture of your participation in a universal pattern. Moreover, a study of these themes offers you an impactful, life-changing meditation on what you see in reality - no Gate understanding required.

But then you come to understanding the lines, alongside the gates, and that takes archetypal analysis from the broad to the precise. It moves from “this is the theme of your life” to “this is how you specifically live that theme.” And it is in that specificity that the real transformative work begins, because it is in the specificity that you recognize yourself, and the experiences you go through.

And even if you don’t believe the astrological part - where we can supposedly trace where these archetypes and role themes are depicted in you - there is something incontrovertible about the archetypes and roles themselves. They resonate deeply, throughout every cell of the body: because they are describing the thing you have always experienced (consciousness) to you.

A Living System

The sixty-four archetypes are not fixed categories. They are living dynamics. The I Ching calls itself the Book of Changes for a reason. Each hexagram describes a moment in a cycle, and cycles move. The shadow of a gate is not a life sentence. It is a starting point. The Gene Keys framework makes this explicit: every shadow contains within it the seed of a gift, and every gift contains the seed of something transcendent.

This is what makes archetypal work fundamentally different from personality typing, or self-help frameworks, or any system that puts you in a box and tells you to optimize within it. The archetypes are not boxes. They are doorways. They show you where you are, and they show you what is possible from where you are. The shadow is not a problem to be solved. It is a frequency to be transmuted. And the transmutation happens through awareness, through contemplation, through the willingness to look at the pattern without flinching and let it teach you what it is trying to become.

This is the work. Gate by gate, line by line, pattern by pattern. It is the oldest form of self-knowledge available to human beings, carried through five millennia of continuous inquiry, and it is as relevant now, in a world that is fragmenting along exactly the lines these archetypes describe, as it has ever been.

The contemplations in this series are an attempt to do that work in the open. Each one takes a single gate, or a single line mechanic, a Human Design Profile (a pairing of two lines), a line coupling (1-2 - instinctive, primal; 3-4 - visual, seeking outwards; 5-6 - sensing, auric, frequency), a trigram (1-3 - personal, introspective, self-involved, 4-6 - transpersonal, influential, consciously interactive), a pattern of being - and sits with it long enough to feel what it is actually saying about the way we live, the way we fail, and the way we might evolve.

These transmissions are not academic exercises. They are not readings. They are the foundation of something I am building: a way to make this ancient archetypal language practical, personal, and immediate.

Like everyone and his mother at the moment, I am of course building an app.

Unlike most, my app is my crazy attempt to codify and use technology to foster energetic transformation on an individual and collective level. Whatever happens, my app aims to put these patterns in the hands of humanity to foster immediate and deeply provocative self understanding, and understanding of the greater whole.

But the app comes later. It’s a huge endeavor. It’s the most non-techie tech thing I could build! So, first, I lean on my real skillset - and these contemplations come first. Stay tuned: Gate 37 mechanics, dynamics, and the current dilemma of masculine and feminine archetypes is first up (soon)!

And if you followed me because of the GLP-1 thing and now need to unfollow, you’re totally good. But if you’re interested in where that lived in the archetypal reality? Gates 39 and 55 - the channel of emotions connected with eating. Gate 55 is the reason GLP-1 receptor agonists exist. It is currently mutating, and it is the Gate of Freedom… contemplation on that would have added an inordinate amount to that article, but my grounding in the knowledge of trauma, mood, food, and eating behavior was inexorably linked both to science AND to the energetic mechanics held within the 55th gate (and all of the gates within the I Ching which speak to eating and food behavior - almost all of which are in the Solar Plexus and therefore linked to emotions.

The Clinic That Changed Everything

In 1985, Dr. Vincent Felitti was running an obesity clinic for Kaiser Permanente in San Diego when he stumbled onto something that would reshape our understanding of weight, trauma, and the human body. His patients were losing extraordinary amounts of weight, some over 200 pounds. To all intents and purposes, it was a success. But patients were leaving his program, and not the ones who were failing; the ones who were succeeding.

Felitti tracked down those who’d abandoned his treatments. When he asked their reasons for dropping out, the answers they gave had nothing to do with willpower or meal plans. Instead, they told him about the childhood sexual abuse, violence, and pain that working with him had uncovered. One woman who had lost close to 300 pounds regained 37 of them in just three weeks, immediately after a male colleague began expressing interest in her appearance.

Felitti’s findings became the foundation for the landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, conducted with the CDC’s Dr. Robert Anda. Among its findings: people with four or more ACEs were nearly twice as likely to be severely obese, and 69% of patients seeking bariatric surgery reported childhood abuse or neglect.

Fast forward four decades. Liraglutide (Saxenda, Victoza), Semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy), Tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound), and other GLP-1 receptor agonists have delivered weight loss results rivaling bariatric surgery - up to 20% of total body weight in clinical trials. For many people, myself included, these medications have been genuinely transformative.

But for some, these medications are doing something far more complicated than reducing appetite. They are altering the course of a body’s exceptional, hard-won coping mechanism - resolving what looks like a symptom (excess weight), but leaving that symptom’s cause intact. And in removing this particular symptom, they remove the very thing their body had been using to stay safe.

This is an article about what happens when we do that.

A Body That Does Not Feel Safe

The relationship between trauma and disordered weight is one of the most replicated findings in public health, and one of the most consistently ignored at the point of GLP-1 prescription.

A 2020 meta-analysis encompassing over 118,000 participants found a 46% increase in the odds of adult obesity following exposure to multiple adverse childhood experiences. The mechanisms are both behavioral and biological, and they do not operate separately.

Behaviorally, the picture begins with a single question: how is this working for you? When Felitti asked his patients this, the answers were consistent:

I gained weight so that men wouldn’t bother me.

I gained weight so I would be overlooked.

I eat because I’m unhappy.

What these answers point to is not appetite. They point to a fundamental experience of unsafety in the body. For survivors of trauma, particularly sexual trauma, the body was the precise site of violation; it is where the harm happened. Learning to inhabit it easefully, to eat normally within it, to feel at home in it without strategic calculation, becomes, for many, a task that was never completed. A disordered relationship to food is downstream of that, and it exists as a management strategy for a body that does not feel safe to be in.

The picture is complex, however, because this same dynamic drives both overeating behaviors and restriction. Anorexia, bulimia, and restrictive eating patterns are not separate phenomena with different causes. They are different expressions of the same fractured relationship to embodiment. One body expands to invisibility, another contracts toward near-disappearance. Both are attempting to resolve, through physical means, the experience of being unable to occupy the self without fear. In both cases, there is an additional benefit: the reduction of the sexual attention.

Biologically, chronic trauma dysregulates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, producing persistent cortisol elevation. Elevated cortisol promotes visceral fat storage, drives insulin resistance, increases the drive toward (through metabolic demand for) highly palatable (high-sugar and high-fat) foods, which paradoxically slows metabolic rate. Chronically stressed organisms gain weight even at identical caloric intake and activity levels to their unstressed counterparts. The stress itself alters metabolic capacity. This is physiology, not character.

The same HPA dysregulation that produces compulsive eating in one person produces hypervigilant restriction in another. The cortisol is identical. The nervous system imperative has a different expression, though the drivers are the same.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk describes how unresolved trauma reshapes both brain and body, compromising self-regulation, pleasure, and trust. I do not fully agree with his framing of the body as a site of stored memory - mostly because I think the phrasing gives the wrong idea of what is actually occurring (a conversation for another day). What I would say is that the body is a site of discernible adaptation. It molds itself biochemically and structurally around experience - through posture, hormone signaling, and metabolic set-point - leaving a signature not just of what happened but of how effectively the person was able to respond to, emotionally metabolize, and physically assimilate that experience at the time.

Gabor Maté argues, in When the Body Says No and The Myth of Normal, that the body’s symptoms are not failures of discipline but intelligent, protective responses to overwhelming experience. The body is not broken, it is doing exactly what it was designed to do under unbearable conditions.

What neither van der Kolk nor Maté fully addresses, and what the GLP-1 prescribing landscape almost entirely ignores is this: when the protective adaptation is pharmacologically removed before the underlying unsafety has been addressed, the person is left in a body they do not know how to inhabit, stripped of the only management strategy they had, and with no alternative architecture in place.

The Armor

Dr. David Sarwer’s research found that 60% of patients reporting a history of rape or sexual molestation were 50 or more pounds overweight, compared with only 28% of matched controls with no abuse history. Among patients seeking bariatric surgery, estimates of sexual abuse histories range from 20 to 40%.

Part of my reason for writing this now is the Epstein files. The current public discourse around sexual predation is surfacing material for many survivors that has been long submerged, and the cultural conversation about body size, desirability, and safety is running at an intensity that makes this moment particularly significant.

The protective function of body size is real, and it operates on multiple levels. Excess weight reduces sexual attention by departing from conventional standards of desirability. Physical size creates a felt sense of being harder to overpower. As Survivors of Incest Anonymous literature articulates: if a person believes they were abused because they were attractive, then altering that attractiveness becomes a logical, if unconscious, self-defense.

But the deeper function is less about the cosmetic outcome and more about the felt sense of safety in the body itself. Weight, for many trauma survivors, is not primarily about how they look. It is about how it feels to exist inside a physical self. The weight creates a layer between the self and the world. It changes the texture of occupying a body. It dampens the nervous system’s hypervigilance around being perceived. Losing it does not just change appearance. It changes the entire somatic experience of being present.

The same is true, differently, for restriction. An anorexic body is not simply pursuing a cultural aesthetic. It is, in many cases, attempting to become less present in the body altogether. To need less. To take up less. To require less nourishment. The refusal of food is often a refusal of the kind of aliveness that brings exposure.

A side note, though an important one, is that we are surrounded, almost daily at the moment, with a conversation about pedophilia. This is the literal desiring of girls who are not yet inhabiting the bodies of women, and it leaves another trigger in the public eye. If emaciation is to reduce sensuality, but there are men out there that desire children’s bodies, a coping strategy of starvation becomes another unsafe place.

Both strategies of food manipulation carry a self-punishment dimension that also deserves naming: excess weight as the physical expression of internalized shame, making the outside match the inside, restriction as the enactment of a belief that one does not deserve to be fed. Different manifestations of the same wound.

When you administer a GLP-1 receptor agonist into either of these dynamics without asking what the eating behavior has been doing, you are not simply changing a behavior. You are removing the most significant load-bearing wall from a structure that has been built for - and is responsible for - survival.

My Story, and Why It Is Not Most People’s Story

I am not ashamed to say that my weight loss between August and November 2023 was down to tirzepatide. It worked quickly, and I experienced almost none of the side effects I discuss here. That said, I had to consciously ensure I was eating enough when it was so easy not to, manage protein intake and track my wellbeing with deliberate attention.

I have a lot of digestive and weight-related health history. For reasons not entirely associated with trauma, is has often felt easier for my system to not eat. This was compounded by the tirzepatide. If my strategy of survival was emaciation and starvation, I would have found it all to easy to pursue on this medication. And it was weird, because it came with an egoic notion of “acheivement” that I was not eating. I am not the only person who has said this. Many women in my care who self-report a “bit of an eating disorder history” have decided to cease these injections because it was triggering to their old patterns, and they did not like being in that place.

My weight was due to profound metabolic dysregulation due to a lengthy history of digestive issues. I have a sexual trauma history, and have been “in the work” since I was 17 years old and gone through an immense amount of therapy and somatic work to resolve the signatures that my body held. The weight wouldn’t leave, however, no matter what I did. Metabolic derangement was definitely, for me, partly down to the sexual trauma history - and, as I lost weight I experienced a shift in male attention that initially made me uncomfortable.

My initial response to it was contempt. Many eye-rolls and a judgmental attitude about the advances was the new coping mechanism: labeling these men ‘shallow’ because they hadn’t noticed me before and yet I was the same person underneath the changing shape.

I eventually understood that this contempt was itself a defense I hadn’t yet metabolized. The attention wasn’t shallow. It was biological, reading fertility and strength where before it had only been able to read ill health. And because I was prepared, because the work had already been done, I was able to move through that recognition rather than be destabilized by the newfound attention.

I do not think that I would have married and become so quickly pregnant without my physical transformation. This is also common for those taking GLP1 receptor agonist medications: health confers fertility. I didn’t realize this, and instead believed that I wasn’t going to be fertile given the medication. But my pregnancy followed a year of tirzepatide injections - my metabolism finally capable of sustaining another life. In my case, two.

This is not the case for most people for whom GLP-1 prescriptions are currently being written. For most, the medication is administered with no inquiry into why the weight exists. More importantly, the weight isn’t seen as the symptom at all - by either the patients, or the people prescribing these medications. It is seen as, and presented as, the entirety of the problem.

Or, in a worrying trend, weight loss is presented as a “fringe side-benefit” of the other miraculous health impacts of these drugs. This is useful, because a desire to lose weight is now seen as shameful. So, thanks to influencers and Instagram affiliates, MLM pharmacies (EllieMD, I am looking at you directly) are flooded with requests for these medications. The new trend? Microdosing. Because that’s fine - not shameful - means we’ll only have the health impacts and not the weight loss, which we’re more able to accept.

And this is where it becomes dangerous. All of this is nonsense rationalization. The influencers and people promoting these peptides (through their 20-50% commission links, no less) have even less concept of the impact of these products than the doctors (also paid via a commission structure) who prescribe them.

When the Shield Comes Down

The clinical literature on bariatric surgery has long documented what happens when significant weight loss occurs without psychological preparation. Repressed memories surface. Anxiety spikes. Panic attacks emerge. Some patients experience flashbacks as their bodies return to the weight at which they were originally abused.

There are not yet large-scale studies examining whether the same dynamics apply to pharmacologically induced weight loss, because GLP-1 receptor agonists are still relatively new. But there is every clinical reason to expect that they do. When semaglutide or tirzepatide removes 15-20% of a person’s body weight, it is not merely altering metabolic profile, it is fundamentally changing the somatic experience of existing in that body.

For those whose protective strategy ran toward restriction rather than excess, the GLP-1 risk profile looks different but is no less significant. These medications reduce appetite in everyone, not selectively in those who eat too much, so for someone managing an anorexic or restrictive impulse through years of conscious effort, tirzepatide removes the physiological friction that made restriction difficult. It makes not eating easy. And it adds some digestive sluggishness and symptoms in for good measure, meaning that not eating often feels better than eating.

This is the pharmacological facilitation of a pre-existing disordered behavior, occurring at scale, largely unobserved.

The psychiatric signal in the data is worth examining here. Since 2023, both the FDA and the European Medicines Agency have been reviewing reports of psychiatric adverse events associated with GLP-1 receptor agonists, including depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. A pharmacovigilance study in Frontiers in Endocrinology identified significant psychiatric adverse event signals across multiple agents. A VigiBase study found statistically significant signals for depressed mood, anxiety, and suicidality specifically with semaglutide, alongside elevated eating disorder signals across multiple agents.

Some researchers attribute this to confounding, noting that obesity itself correlates with higher rates of depression, and state that the depression was pre-existing, and the drug does nothing to increase its expression. The argument is similar for anorexia and other disordered eating, though there is more acknowledgement with these patients that there was a psychiatric condition at the heart of their physiological state.

However, thought of mechanistically, these medications reduce dopaminergic throughput to hedonistic seeking behaviors. If someone’s seeking of food, and reward of food, and further seeking of food is their emotional salve to feel good, medically suppressing all of this is bound to result in a depressive state.

Then there is what I see in clinic, what I witness in society, and what I know about what real bodies show. Even if there is an element of confounding, to blame all of these psychological and psychiatric episodes on pre-existing conditions rather misses the point (whilst ironically pointing to exactly the problem): altered body habitus is almost always a symptom of both metabolic and psychological/emotional dysregulation. Altering it again through medication isn’t solving the psychological/emotional issues. If it were, psychiatric incidents would decrease as compared to the obese population, which is definitely not borne out by the data.

The Transfer Problem: a Potential Divergence

According to the Obesity Action Coalition, up to 30% of bariatric surgery patients experience addiction transfer, replacing compulsive eating with alcohol abuse, gambling, or compulsive spending. A large study of Roux-en-Y gastric bypass patients found 20% developed alcohol use disorder within five years. Researchers attribute this to Reward Deficiency Syndrome: when the dopamine-driven reward system loses access to its preferred source of stimulation, it seeks alternatives. The hunger for relief does not disappear. It migrates.

The GLP-1 picture appears different here. A 2025 systematic review found that while bariatric surgery roughly doubled alcohol use disorder prevalence after two years, GLP-1 receptor agonist therapy roughly halved it. The subjective reports I receive are consistent: cravings reduce broadly, hedonistic drive diminishes, alcohol loses its appeal alongside much of the food environment.

But reducing addictive tendencies is not the same as resolving the pain that drives them. A person on tirzepatide may eat less and drink less. By conventional measures that looks like health. What we are not measuring is whether they are more hypervigilant, more somatically activated, more disconnected in their relationships, or potentially even more disharmonious in their relationship with themselves, despite weight loss.

I guess what we can say here is that GLP-1 receptor agonists appear to quieten hedonistic drives, which is good… right?

Well, again. Quietening a drive - or a psychiatric chemical issue - is what psychopharmaceuticals have been criticized for for decades. Making a problem appear to go away isn’t actually supporting the organism to feel more balanced, internally. In fact, many would argue that the suppression of enjoyment of things (including food) is the lessening of the richness of life.

What the Influencers Are Actually Selling

To bring this all back around to the question of “what should we do about this when it’s clearly a) a drug environment that is helping (even if it is simultaneously harming) and b) the train has left the station and is undoubtedly not going back).

Well: I would not have written this article now without two situations arriving in close proximity.

The first: a significant rise in influencers promoting ‘microdosing’ tirzepatide for autoimmune, thyroid, and inflammatory conditions, while simultaneously losing weight, but claiming that they “didn’t want to lose weight”. This is accompanied by an increase in mirror selfies, and side mentions of how happy they are with their body now…

All of which is disingenuous. I’m genuinely not even sure if these people are seeing the truth themselves.

If microdosing tirzepatide is resolving their chronic health conditions, the question is what was generating them. This is not a miraculous co-benefit, it’s a correlated one. Perhaps reducing food consumption has removed something they were intolerant to from their diet. Perhaps their gut microbiome, shaped by long-standing eating patterns, has now shifted in response to their new low-food diet - and resolved (or maybe just hidden) an underlying problem. If gut health at all is involved (which, in many autoimmune and chronic illness conditions, it is), then appetite suppression will reduces consumption of whatever was driving the inflammatory load. That’s not a miracle. It’s not even a cure. The likelihood is that, if this is someone’s picture, their gut compromise or dietary issues are merely lying dormant until the day the decide to eat normally again.

Then to the second reason I wanted to write this now: someone I know personally - a coach who presents herself as a female embodiment expert, studied in the nervous system, apparently looked up to by many women - publicly attributed her recent physical transformation to inner work, dancing, and being completely in, and at one with, her body and its movements. Yet she is currently taking these medications. She knows I know. She knows that she has all of the physical and hormonal dysregulation of someone who is manifesting a traumatized body pattern. Her system is shaped as if traumatized. And yet she is profiting off her “good vibes, dance through your anxiety” products (and yes, there’s a course, a method, and her 1:1 work available).

This is also disingenuous. It is out of integrity. And there was a time when it would have been obvious.

Now, however, we exist in an age when nothing we see can be believed. These medications really can transform your body rapidly, and you can claim anything was the cause. And people are.

This is not healthcare. It is the efficient monetization of a wound that has never been properly named.

I’m not even sure that those who are doing it fully know what they are doing. Why would they? They’re taking the medications I’m talking about…

Treating the Whole Person

None of this is an argument against GLP-1 receptor agonists. These are powerful, effective medications that are genuinely improving and saving lives.

My argument is twofold:

1. I am against deploying these medications as a single intervention for a condition that is, in many cases, rooted in something far deeper than appetite dysregulation, and I am very against deploying them in people for whom the relationship to eating is itself the location of the wound. I always have been.

2. I am even more against lack of informed consent. It must be explicit - whether you’re promoting your affiliate deal for a pharmacy (which to me is, frankly, shocking - and I still can’t believe we’re here, but that’s what the world looks like these days), or whether you’re a healthcare provider, or an influencer who has experienced the benefit of these drugs. Honesty is essential. Owning the truth of your experience is vital. Acting in integrity when you share how you changed your body, and how it really felt, is important

   And from the medical profession?

   Any serious approach to disordered body weight, in either direction, should include, at minimum, a genuine conversation about how that person’s body’s current configuration has been serving. How was it formed? How is it forming in the now? What is the organizing principle behind the state? What might shift when it changes? What support will you need when it does?

For some, the right sequence is somatic and psychological work first, metabolic support second. When the nervous system has been resourced and the body no longer needs its current strategy as protection, a GLP-1 receptor agonist can address the metabolic legacy that trauma left behind. It may not even be necessary by then, because genuine inner work can (but does not always) produce genuine metabolic shifts. For others, the work needs to happen simultaneously. What matters is not the sequence but the acknowledgment that both dimensions are real and both deserve clinical attention.

To me, this comes back to the central tenet of my philosophy on all things:

The body, or the behavior, is not the problem. These never have been the problem. They are the symptom; the end manifestation of a chain of events that has its legacy in a faithful, and intelligent, response to its experience.

Selected references: Felitti et al. (1998), Wiss & Brewerton (2020), van der Kolk (2014), Maté (2022), Chen et al. (2024), Nishida et al. (2025), Scheen (2025), King et al. (2017), Sarwer et al.

Yesterday, the world watched as the United States and Israel conducted coordinated strikes across Iran. Ayatollah Khamenei is dead. Missiles are landing in Gulf states. Protests that have been occurring since December, in which tens of thousands of Iranians were slain by their own government, have now been met with the blunt instrument of military force from outside of the country.

Social media, as is its wont, is a cacophony of every response imaginable: grief, celebration, prophecy, outrage.

And underneath all of it, there is something I’m noticing in my feed.

A phrase keeps surfacing from those who are minded to see “illusion” in “reality” (and the conspiracy in the political performance) - neither of which I disagree with whatsover, in principle.

But that phrase?

There is a spiritual war happening that the world is just waking up to.

I want to sit with that for a moment. Not to dismiss it. But to ask what it’s actually pointing at.

Because we are being told by MANY people from the spiritual world at this time that these institutional breakdowns - governments in chaos, the Epstein files bringing about mass outrage about who makes up the elite, military action, protests, wars, deaths - are the evidence of a battle between dark energy and light energy, or between evil and good.

What occurs to me when I hear and observe this commentary is simple:

The Mirror Principle

The oldest esoteric teaching, across virtually every tradition, is that the outer is a reflection of the inner: as above, so below, as within, so without.

The macrocosm mirrors the microcosm - not metaphorically, but literally in the energetic sense. This principle emerges from consciousness being a Oneness (unified field), with the illusion of separation (individuation) embedded within it. In other words, the world we see is not separate from the consciousness doing the seeing. Because of the quantum and metaphysical connectedness, events don’t just happen to us; they arise from us, collectively.

More simply and bluntly, though harder to conceptualize, is that there is no actual “collective”, no “group-think” or emergence from a gathering of separate individuals. There is no individuation, on the cosmic/quantum level. So we are the microcosm because we are the totality, and the fragment we appear to represent contains within it everything that is.

This is not a comfortable teaching.

It is also not an easy one to grasp because it requires not just seeing the specifics but the energetics. We are not carbon copy reflections of everything we witness… we are energetic and emotional mirrors.

And, ultimately, when it comes to the darkness, and the evil, it is far easier to locate the war outside.

So I come back to people who are stating “a spiritual war is happening”.

They are - whether they know it or not - describing something real, though not solely located “over there” in the Middle East. The war might be out there in the Middle East, but the Middle East is now, and always has been, showing us what’s happening in here.

What Each Response Reveals

As I watch the responses to this moment what I witness is the interior landscape of the person responding.

(This is what I do in my work: listen to the way people tell their story to make sense of their reality, and their internal frameworks, and their shadows.)

Those celebrating the death of a foreign leader - here, I mean the millions of people around the world who have nothing whatsoever to do with Iran, who have never faced oppression under a theocracy, and who will wake up tomorrow in relative safety - are performing something revealing. My best assumption is that these people have wanted something inside them to just be eliminated. Some psychic Khamenei of their own inner landscape. Yesterday, symbolically, it got bombed. The relief is real. But the thing they want gone isn’t gone. You can’t airstrike your shadow.

I start with this perspective because I’d like to share with you my own perspective.

I’m pretty sure I’m against unilateral, technically illegal action which results in the death of anybody. I don’t think individual human beings or nation states should have that sort of authority because, instinctively, it feels ripe for abuse and - maybe not immediately, but over time, mistakes.

But I also don’t love nationwide oppression, dictatorships which frustrate the liberation of whole nations of people.

I also, complicatedly, have a disrespect for regime takeover when there is no nuanced and detailed, geographically and culturally appropriate, plan for what comes NEXT.

So I’m right down the center of not having any idea whether this was a good thing with a dangerous precedent, a bad thing with a long string of potentially beneficial consequences…

Literally at the same time that the strike on Khamenei was happening, I was having a conversation with my husband about a back injury I recently suffered.

I said to him, verbatim, “I wish you could just get a needle and pop the bit that hurts and excise it out so that all of the tension and problems go away”.

This is one of my shadows - and it’s also the shadow I witness in those unilateral actions taken to remove a powerful dictator - the desire to remove the thing causing pain because it feels as if everything will get better.

Whether its “true” that it does get better is immaterial. What matters is I have that shadow: the desire to just remove something that’s making my life difficult.

So let’s discuss the decision-makers who ordered the strikes - operating from the logic that if you remove the figurehead, you remove the problem. This is magical thinking on all levels - including within my back injury scenario. The belief that excising the symptom is the same as healing the disease is a fallacy. Iran’s theocratic system wasn’t Khamenei alone, and the IRGC isn’t dismantled by killing its commanders. Much like our inner tyrants aren’t vanquished by suppression, exile, or force - and my back pain wasn’t going to be extracted with a knife. Anything repressed goes underground and comes out somewhere, often louder and more nefarious. Every trauma therapist on earth knows this.

How about those pointing at the lies (didn’t we say we got rid of Iran’s nuclear capabilities last summer?!) and the power plays (this has nothing to do with compassion for Iran, but power for Trump) - it doesn’t take a genius to isolate and locate the gaslighter, self-deceiver, and self-denier inside of us. It also doesn’t take a lot to find those places where we feel like people have power over us, based on hypocrisy or lies. Those who see this in the story as the primary driver are revealing their own internal frameworks of personal suppression based on people who have power… (yes, daddy issues, but also simple hierarchy stuff, childhood bullying etc.)

Now: the Iranians celebrating in the streets - these are people who have lived under real oppression and who have watched the very real cost of any objection to that oppression as protesters have been gunned down in their tens of thousands. Their celebration is the energetic release of a system that has been held under extraordinary pressure for a very long time. That is not projection. That is a people finally exhaling. Their liberation is legitimate, and the energy of it is clean - even if what comes next remains deeply uncertain.

There is more to the backdrop of energetic chemistry when one has lived in this regime, but to go into full energetics would take too long here - I am not ignoring it, but intentionally leaving it out for focus and brevity.

So we return back to those proclaiming spiritual warfare and battles between good and evil - especially those proclaiming it while deriding people who are celebrating. In most cases, these individuals are describing geopolitics whilst revealing their own internal experience of moral, spiritual and often religious, tension. What I have witnessed is that those who take this position often have ancestral lineage which emerges from a hard-fought escape from oppressive territorial battles - both overt, and more subtle. The energy held in this accounts is of something righteous and besieged inside of them. They feel the presence of something that they’ve named as evil, and they feel called to oppose it. That is shadow integration work presenting itself as foreign policy commentary - or spiritual superiority.

Notice: NO-ONE who speaks of the battle between light and dark, good and evil, thinks they are on the side of evil. The whole depiction of the battle is to deride (dismiss, eliminate) darkness in the world.

My true invitation to anyone categorizing and framing their perception of the current energetic situation that way, and from that vantage point, is that it is avoidance of shadow work if you are continuing to see the shadows outside of you, and only light within. (Remember: there is no outside. If you see them, they are actually inside.)

Instability Is Information

Here is what I believe the current moment is actually trying to communicate, energetically. And yes, from this you can read exactly what I perceive to be happening in my internal world also - I am reflecting this completely:

We - collectively, in the illusion (and myself, internally) - are in a period of profound internal reorganization. The old structures that held things in place (authoritarian, suppressive, fear-based) are destabilizing everywhere.

But the instability is not a sign that evil is winning - because to frame it light that is automatically putting pejorativeness on the reality. The instability is a sign that something is moving, that stasis has been broken, that the held-down is coming up.

The Invitation

The invitation of a moment like this isn’t to pick a side in an external conflict. It’s to ask: where in me is there a Khamenei? Where in me is there a Trump? Where in me is there an Epstein?

Now - breathe. It’s OK. You are not going to find the EXACT BEHAVIOR, but you will find the shadow you perceive in them.

Because the shadow in all of these men is the “power-over” pattern. In Khamenei, through control and dictatorship. In Trump, through deals, global domination, and manipulation of supply chains, monetary systems, trade, and world powers. In Epstein, through overpowering those who could not fight back AND in holding secrets of those who joined him in his clique.

Now that we’ve taken the specifics out, I can see all of those shadows in myself. I’m not ashamed to admit it, either.

I let my fear lead and feel a need to control situations - a lot.

I let my insecurity lead and feel the need to be over-confident even when I don’t feel it (to mask my imposter syndrome) - a lot.

I feign superiority when I need to, and definitely see networking opportunities as ways to access greater influence (at times).

That’s all in me. I’m willing to bet it’s all in you. And I’m willing to also bet that it’s in the very people stating there’s an external spiritual war that they are on the side of the ‘good’ within.

And now, given yesterday: where in me have I just wanted to submit something of mine - a shadow, a flaw, a weakness, a darkness - into silence, hoping that if I destroy it it would disappear?

The macrocosm is always, always showing us our own inner landscape. Not as a one-to-one correspondence - life is not that tidy. But as a resonance. A signal. An invitation to look inward with at least as much intensity as we’re currently pointing outward.

The beauty of this is so frickin’ amazing that I have to end with it.

It won’t happen overnight. It won’t happen from me alone.

But response to another atrocity or complex geopolitical issue isn’t to lament what happened… it’s to locate it within my realm and diligently focus on all that I can do to resolve and remedy the energy I hold about it.

It’s not a 1:1 solution, obviously. And some people will also feel called to work on the outside plane too - and I commend that, I really do.

But until we are all doing the internal work, polishing our fragment of the universe - one shadow at a time - then we cannot expect the wars we see to diminish because we yell about them. Proactive participation in our process directly pertains to the whole. And perhaps social media would get a little quieter if, before we commented publicly about anything “out there”, we first had to own where it exists within us, and within ALL of us.

There is a claim circulating in current self-help content: that unconditional love in adult relationships is a trauma response. That if you love someone without conditions - if your love isn’t boundaried enough to be withdrawn when your partner behaves badly - then you are codependent, enmeshed, or operating from a wound, rather than your core, healthy, self.

I want to push back on this. Not because boundaries don’t matter or accountability is unimportant. But because the framework confuses two entirely different things: the constancy of love and the consequence of harm. In collapsing those two, the social-media-therapy-speak is quietly teaching a generation of people to treat love as conditional, as if that is a sign of self-respect.

The Science the “Unconditional Adult Love is Trauma Bonding” Claim is Supposedly Based On (And What that Science Actually Says)

The trauma bonding argument draws, loosely, from attachment theory — the body of work pioneered by John Bowlby and later expanded by Mary Ainsworth, Mary Main, and many people since (both researchers, and casual therapeutic commentators).

The logic goes: if your attachment system is secure, you regulate your love based on whether the relationship is meeting your needs. Unconditional love, therefore - the love that continues when conditions of needs aren’t met - must be an artifact of an insecure, anxious, or disorganized attachment style, because you are continuing in relationship despite a need not being met.

(Anxious = you continue because you can’t afford to be alone. Avoidant = you continue because you are avoiding confrontation. Disorganized = you continue because your map of love is inherently based on inconsistent need-meeting.)

This is a serious misreading of the literature. I believe this is an extrapolation based on social-media, click-bait versions of attachment styles and trauma patterns.

Bowlby’s original formulation of attachment (1969, 1973, 1980) was not a framework for conditional emotional investment. It was a description of a proximity-seeking system - a biological drive to maintain closeness to a trusted other, particularly under threat. What made attachment secure was the presence of a secure base: a reliable, consistent other whose love was dependable enough that the child - and later, the adult - could explore the world without existential terror of abandonment.

Security, in Bowlby’s model, is the product of unconditional reliable presence.

Mary Ainsworth’s landmark Strange Situation studies (1970, 1978) reinforced this. Securely attached infants were children whose caregivers had been consistently warm and responsive. Secure children could tolerate separation because their internal working model told them: love doesn’t disappear when you’re not performing.

This is the opposite of what the “conditions = health” narrative claims.

What Actually Gets Confused Here: Love vs. Tolerance

The mistake in the popular argument is a category error. It conflates two distinct constructs:

1. The permanence of love - whether you continue to love someone through their failures, their worst moments, their most difficult seasons.

2. The tolerance of harm - whether you allow harmful behavior to continue without consequence.

But let’s view the popular argument more positively. I believe it is trying to state that adult relationships should not make space for abusive, disrespectful behavior. If unconditional love makes space for this, it is actually masking an anxious attachment style - one that cannot abide to be alone and so will take all kinds of abuse to benefit from presence.

The conflation of the constructs here - that the permanence of love = the tolerance of harm - is a fallacy. These two constructs are just not the same thing. They’re not even correlated.

Research on adult attachment by Hazan and Shaver (1987) established that romantic love maps onto the same three-system model Bowlby identified: proximity-seeking, safe haven, and secure base. Their work showed that securely attached adults described their love relationships as trusting, durable, and not contingent on performance. This is not pathology. This is exactly what the secure base is supposed to feel like.

Where Trauma Bonding Actually Lives

The trauma bonding literature is real. Dutton and Painter (1993) described traumatic bonding as a specific dynamic arising in situations of intermittent reinforcement combined with a power imbalance. The mechanism involves cycles of abuse and reconciliation that activate the attachment system in a way that makes the bond difficult to break - not because of the depth or permanence of love, but because of the unpredictability of the threat.

This is important. This is genuinely harmful. But note what it requires: intermittent reinforcement (harm is unpredictable and cyclical) and power imbalance (the person is in a subordinate, fearful, or survival-oriented position). The trauma bond is not characterized by deep, stable, unconditional love that loves through issues. Trauma bonding is characterized by anxiety, hypervigilance, and compulsive monitoring of the other person’s emotional state.

Gillath, Bunge, Shaver, Wendelken, and Mikulincer (2005) used fMRI to examine neural responses to attachment-related thoughts and found that secure attachment is associated with reduced amygdala activation - less fear response, more frontal regulatory capacity. The securely attached person isn’t loving dangerously. They’re loving from a regulated nervous system.

What Boundaries Actually Are (And What They’re Not)

Here is where I want to tell you something from my own life, because abstractions only carry so far. And all of this research is fine, but this analogy is spreading because it “feels true” (see my article on Polyvagal Theory for why this is so prevalent and possible in therapeutic circles).

In the most significant relationship of my life, my marriage, I love without condition. I don’t mean that carelessly. I mean that my love for my husband was not a wager, not a contract, not a debt instrument. It is simply present. His worst moments don’t make me love him less. His failures don’t change the fundamental orientation I have toward his existence and their flourishing.

More specifically, and to speak to trauma bonding, his flaws don’t make me love him MORE either. They don’t make me blind, or addicted to “fixing”. I don’t stay loving him because he is wounded (because we’re all wounded, so what do his wounds count?!), but more seriously, I stay because I love him with all of the bones of me. It’s unconditional because loving him isn’t a choice. It feels unquestioned, innate, and soul-level. And because when that kind of love exists, departure when someone errs isn’t even an option. That’s when you dig in, and support.

But I also have boundaries. I have non-negotiables. I have standards - especially of parenting behavior, where I care even more about the way we both show up. I have things that push me to the edge. And my default stress response is “run the fuck away”, so when I say that I will always stay please note that that is in the context of having the sensation of wanting to run away when things get super hard, which they do because life is hard.

However, in the realm of the unconditional love of my marriage - which has had its love tested profoundly, for reasons I won’t go into - I have learned the truth about how to hold boundaries healthily, in a way that honors connection and creates profound healing.

That is, after all, what the healthiest of relationships do: call forth our wounding (usually by us hurting each other, whether intentionally or otherwise) and the container of relationship goes on to hold us whilst we deal with the resolution of that impact.

When a boundary was crossed in my marriage, the cost was not the withdrawal of my love. I never threatened that. It wouldn’t have been a true threat, and we both would have known it. It’s been unequivocal, and even if I wasn’t going to stay in physical relationship, the love was never going to disappear.

But what happened in my marriage instead was something far more honest and, I believe, far more powerful: I was in pain. Real, visible, felt pain. Not anger performed to establish dominance, or “I’m leaving” threats of withdrawal calculated to create consequences.

I offered a pure, genuine expression of someone who loved deeply, being hurt. Trust broken. And the very real consequences of that were visible: I shrank, I hesitated, my natural easefulness halted. I shared that I was experiencing an impulse of escape, but a sense of powerlessness. I shared the truth of my internal experience. Not a tit-for-tat, “you did this, now I play the leaving card”, but a realistic “this is what that brought up within me”.

What that created - in my husband, who loves me as I love him - was not fear of losing my love. It was something richer and harder to dismiss: the experience of having caused pain to someone he loved. Of having broken the spirit of someone he adores. Of having put so much strain into someone he loved that their light dimmed and they could no longer be themselves.

This distinction is everything.

When the corrective force is the felt reality and being in witness of having hurt someone you love, something entirely different happens. There is no risk calculation available. The harm has already occurred. The pain is already present. And if you love the person you’ve hurt - really love them, not instrumentally, not as a means to your own comfort - then their pain becomes your pain. Not through enmeshment or boundary collapse, but through the ancient energetic connection of empathy between two people who genuinely care about each other’s wellbeing.

This is what boundaries look like in a relationship grounded in unconditional love: the honest expression of what matters to me, held in the context of a love that both people know is not going anywhere.

The boundary has weight not because it is a threat of action. It has weight because I have weight and - to the other in my relationship - my experience matters.

Causing your unconditionally loved partner pain has costs. Not strategic, transactional costs, but the immediate cost of watching (and often feeling) the pain of the suffering you caused.

The Neuroscience of Why This Works Better

This is not just philosophically appealing. There is neuroscientific and psychological evidence that empathy-based motivation for behavioral change is more durable than fear-based motivation.

Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory (1985, 2000), one of the most robustly replicated frameworks in motivational psychology, distinguishes between introjected regulation (behavior driven by guilt, shame, or fear of loss) and integrated regulation (behavior driven by values that have been genuinely internalized).

Introjected regulation - the kind that operates when someone changes behavior to avoid losing your love - produces compliance, but it is unstable. It requires ongoing external reinforcement. It does not generalize.

Integrated regulation - the kind that operates when someone’s empathy for a loved one’s pain becomes part of their own value system - is autonomous, stable, and generalizes across contexts. The person isn’t behaving well to avoid consequences. They’re behaving well because the pain they’ve caused has become incompatible with who they understand themselves to be.

Furthermore, research on guilt versus shame by June Price Tangney (2002) and colleagues found that guilt - the feeling of “I did something that caused harm” - is associated with pro-social motivation, repair behavior, and relationship stability.

Whereas Shame - the feeling of “my love might be withdrawn because of who I am” - is associated with defensiveness, anger, blame-shifting, and relational instability. The threat of losing love, in other words, tends to produce shame. The pain of having hurt a loved one tends to produce guilt. Only one of those reliably leads to change.

The Secure Base Revisited

Mary Main and Judith Solomon’s (1990) work on disorganized attachment identified what happens when the attachment figure is simultaneously a source of comfort and a source of fear. The antidote to this pathological construct is a love that is reliably present - a secure base from which someone can explore, fail, repair, and return.

Sroufe and Waters (1977) described the secure base as the foundation for the development of genuine selfhood: the capacity to take risks, to tolerate frustration, to regulate distress. You get this not from a caregiver who loves you conditionally, but from one whose love you have stopped worrying about.

Imagine what it would mean to stop worrying about whether you are loved.

Not because you are naive, trauma bonded, or because you believe you are immune to behavioral constraints, period (hello: narcissism). And not because you are avoiding reality, but because the evidence simply corroborates that love is there.

It was there through the times that were difficult, and will be there when things (inevitably) get difficult again.

From that foundation, the question of how to behave stops being “what do I need to do to keep this love?” and starts being “what kind of person do I want to be?” That is not the question of someone in a trauma bond. That is the question of someone who has been given, perhaps for the first time, the ground beneath their feet.

My Husband’s Side of the Story

If you ask my husband what truly mattered for him to step into right relationship with himself in the areas that I called on him to do, it will be this piece.

He knew I wouldn’t leave.

This didn’t mean that he took me for granted. On the contrary, it meant that he was shown - directly, and repeatedly - that the piece of him that he was most ashamed of, and that he pushed away even from himself, was not someone that I WOULD PUSH AWAY.

I didn’t disown the part that was acting out, or the wounded being that that part was protecting.

I welcomed that part in and as I showed it the painful consequences of its behavior it wasn’t done because I was rejecting it, it was done because I was welcoming all of him, grounded in the reality of impact.

And thus my husband found the first person who accepted all of him.

Please hear this piece. The FIRST person. He was not the first person to do this for himself. He - in a relational construct - required someone else to love all of him first.

A Note on What Unconditional Love Is Not

I want to be precise, because this argument can be misread.

Unconditional love is not the absence of discernment. It is not the obligation to remain in harmful situations. It is not the suspension of your own needs and safety. A person can love someone deeply and completely and still decide that living apart from them is necessary. Love and proximity are not the same thing. Nor are love and self-sacrifice.

Unconditional love means: my love for you does not depend on your performance. It does not mean: I will not respond to harm.

It means that the response to harm - the protection of your needs, the communication of your pain, the decision about what relationship structure is sustainable - happens without the manipulation of love as a lever.

When your love is the lever, you are not actually being boundaried. You are being controlling. And the other person is not actually growing. They are being managed.

The Radical Possibility of Relational Alchemy

What I am suggesting is that unconditional love, held by a person with a secure sense of self and a genuine connection to their own experience, is not a vulnerability or a disorder. It is a relational technology - one that creates the conditions under which another person can actually change, not because they fear losing something, but because they have access to the full felt weight of what their actions cost.

The person who knows they are unconditionally loved does not take that love for granted in the way the popular discourse fears. Research by Feeney (1999) on attachment and caregiving found that feeling securely loved is associated with greater responsiveness to a partner’s needs, not less - because the person’s anxiety about their own security is low enough that they have bandwidth to actually attend to the other.

The person who knows their love might be withdrawn calculates. The person who knows the love is staying allows themselves to fully be. And in the gap between those two responses lies the difference between compliance/conformity and true, loving transformation.

The science of attachment did not give us the permission to love conditionally and call it health. It gave us a map to understand why consistent, secure, unconditional love is the most healing thing one person can offer another.

We would do well to stop confusing that with a wound.

References

Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Lawrence Erlbaum.

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. Basic Books.

Bowlby, J. (1973). Attachment and loss: Vol. 2. Separation: Anxiety and anger. Basic Books.

Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and loss: Vol. 3. Loss: Sadness and depression. Basic Books.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. Plenum.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.

Dutton, D. G., & Painter, S. (1993). Emotional attachments in abusive relationships: A test of traumatic bonding theory. Violence and Victims, 8(2), 105–120.

Feeney, B. C. (1999). The importance of partner responsiveness for personal growth. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Gillath, O., Bunge, S. A., Shaver, P. R., Wendelken, C., & Mikulincer, M. (2005). Attachment-style differences in the ability to suppress negative thoughts: Exploring the neural correlates. NeuroImage, 28(4), 835–847.

Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511–524.

Johnson, S. M. (2008). Hold me tight: Seven conversations for a lifetime of love. Little, Brown and Company.

Johnson, S. M., Hunsley, J., Greenberg, L., & Schindler, D. (1999). Emotionally focused couples therapy: Status and challenges. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 6(1), 67–79.

Main, M., & Solomon, J. (1990). Procedures for identifying infants as disorganized/disoriented during the Ainsworth Strange Situation. In M. T. Greenberg, D. Cicchetti, & E. M. Cummings (Eds.), Attachment in the preschool years (pp. 121–160). University of Chicago Press.

Sroufe, L. A., & Waters, E. (1977). Attachment as an organizational construct. Child Development, 48(4), 1184–1199.

Tangney, J. P., & Dearing, R. L. (2002). Shame and guilt. Guilford Press.

Wiebe, S. A., & Johnson, S. M. (2016). A review of the research in emotionally focused therapy for couples. Family Process, 55(3), 390–407.

Let’s be clear from the outset: this isn’t a wellness influencer’s hot take (not qualified to give one of those!). This isn’t an attempt at contrarianism. And it isn’t a dismissal of the very real suffering that Polyvagal Theory (PVT) has attempted to explain and address. People have found language through PVT. They’ve felt seen. Some have genuinely moved toward healing inside its framework. That is absolutely beneficial, for many, and it should not be invalidated. It is certainly not my desire to do so.

And still: Polyvagal Theory is wrong. That matters. Both things are true.

Why It’s Wrong — The Science

For those who haven’t read the literature, here is the nuts and bolts of why PVT doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny.

In 1994, Stephen Porges proposed, and then elaborated over subsequent decades, that the autonomic nervous system operates through a strict phylogenetic hierarchy of three circuits: the evolutionarily ancient dorsal vagal complex (DVC), responsible for immobilization and shutdown; the sympathetic nervous system, responsible for fight-or-flight; and the evolutionarily newer ventral vagal complex (VVC), responsible for the uniquely mammalian “social engagement system.” The premise is that these systems activate in a hierarchical, predictable sequence under threat - and that healing is essentially the restoration of ventral vagal dominance.

The problem is the anatomy.

Porges’ model rests on the claim that the dorsal motor nucleus of the vagus (DMNV) supplies unmyelinated fibers exclusively, making it slow, ancient, and associated with reptilian-style shutdown, while the nucleus ambiguus (NA) supplies the myelinated fibers of social engagement.

But Grossman and Taylor, in their 2007 critique in Biological Psychology, demonstrated that the heart in many mammalian species receives myelinated cardiac vagal fibers from both the DMNV and the NA. The clean anatomical divide that PVT requires does not exist. The neat evolutionary story -dorsal/ancient/shutdown versus ventral/modern/connection - collapses under the weight of the actual neuroanatomy.

The phylogenetic hierarchy is similarly overstated. The claim that fish and reptiles rely solely on dorsal vagal pathways while mammals evolved a distinct myelinated ventral vagal circuit is contradicted by evidence that fish also possess myelinated cardiac vagal fibers. The evolutionary sequence Porges describes is not as linearly organised across species as the model demands.

Then there is the freeze response itself. PVT maps dissociation, collapse, and freeze states onto dorsal vagal activation. But the vagus nerve, across mammals, primarily functions as a brake on the heart - reducing heart rate. Whether that slowing manifests as dangerous shutdown, parasympathetic recovery, or something else entirely is context-dependent and neuro-biologically far more complex than PVT suggests.

Therefore, the behavioral and psychological states Porges associates with dorsal vagal activation are clinical extrapolations, not conclusions that follow cleanly from the neuroscience.

Perhaps the structural science doesn’t interest therapists and coaches who use this framework… but this part definitely should. Clinical extrapolations are not neuroscience.

Finally, the “social engagement system” - the idea that the myelinated vagus coordinates a unified circuit linking facial expression, middle ear muscles, laryngeal prosody, and heart rate, under a single social-neural umbrella - is an elegant (and seductive) hypothesis. It is not a validated anatomical or functional fact. The evidence for this coordinated system as Porges describes it is, at best, preliminary (and this is being kind).

Heart rate variability (HRV), frequently cited as a measurable proxy for vagal tone in PVT-aligned literature, adds another layer of complexity. HRV does reflect autonomic function, but its relationship to specific vagal pathways is considerably more nuanced than PVT presentations tend to acknowledge.

To be clear, and this will become relevant later, I have sat at a Polyvagal Conference and been shown - by Porges himself - compelling pictures of the “split” in evolution of the mammalian biology, from reptiles, alongside the narrative of justifying ventral vagal socialization as a “polyvagal” trait of human biology alone.

I have sat in Somatic Experiencing trainings where whole bodies of students - therapists aiming to help others with their skills and knowledge to work directly on people’s trauma - were taught this inaccurate neuroanatomy about the myelination of nerves. Not only was the understanding of human neuroanatomy wrong, but so was the presentation of this as solely human neuroanatomy. Now, I have a scientific background, and I was confused, so I raised my hand to question these broad generalizations and vague ‘truisms’. I was shut down and told that Porges had proven these things to be true and I should “look at the research”. This was by teachers and leaders in the field, who - and I stress this - ARE SUPPOSED TO BE TRAINED TO ATTUNE TO INDIVIDUALS WITH TRAUMA. I share this to demonstrate the widespread misinformation based on PVT that has not just deeply infiltrated trainings, but in so doing has profoundly closed down the field to truth. Even if the providers and teachers do not know they are doing it.

Why This Matters: Credibility by Association

When something is presented as neuroscience - when it borrows the vocabulary of the nervous system and, in this case, is explained with diagrams of the brainstem and vagal pathways - it receives credibility that it does not have to have earned.

We DO have the research to demonstrate this: neuroimaging and neuroscientific framing consistently increases the perceived validity of claims, even when that framing is inaccurate or peripheral to the actual argument. This is sometimes called the “seductive allure” of neuroscience (documented in work by Weisberg and colleagues).

PVT has benefitted enormously from this effect. It sounds like neuroscience. It uses neuroscience. It tell you that it is the correct neuroscience. But a framework built on contested anatomy and extrapolated phylogeny is not the same as one grounded in reproducible, peer-reviewed biological fact - and the distinction matters more than the field has been willing to admit.

Therapists Are Not the Problem. But Incomplete Understanding Is.

Let’s be precise here, because there’s a tendency to conflate the framework with the people who use it, and that conflation is unwarranted.

Therapists and coaches who have built their practice around PVT are not villains. Many of them are doing deeply meaningful, sensitively held work. What is worth naming, though, is that quoting PVT as established neurobiological fact - without inserting the relevant nuance, without flagging the contestation in the scientific literature - demonstrates an incomplete understanding of the nervous system. That would be entirely forgivable if it weren’t so often positioned as the bedrock of someone’s clinical approach. You cannot build a structurally sound house on a foundation you haven’t checked.

But that’s the whole point. It’s presented as something beyond reproach. It is taught as truth. Many therapists, and especially untrained “trauma coaches” don’t even think that they need to check it.

Attachment Science Is Real. Not Everything Gets Thrown Out.

Here it is necessary to draw a line that sometimes gets blurred in this conversation.

Attachment science is real. The attachment cycle - the formative, bidirectional, neurobiological process through which regulation, attunement, and relational safety are built into the developing nervous system - is grounded in decades of robust research across developmental psychology, neurobiology, and affective neuroscience. This is not contested in the way PVT is contested. The neurobiology of early relational experience, of limbic development, of how formative physical and emotional co-regulation shapes the architecture of the nervous system - this is substantive science.

What is more subjectively constructed are the popularized attachment styles - secure, anxious, avoidant, disorganized - as they tend to be employed in contemporary wellness culture. These have drifted considerably from Bowlby and Ainsworth’s original empirical work into frameworks that are, at best, heuristic and, at worst, reductive identities that people apply to themselves in ways that can calcify rather than liberate.

There is a difference between attachment science and attachment style taxonomies as cultural shorthand. Conflating them is its own form of imprecision.

“But It Helps. Does It Matter If It’s Not Exactly True?”

This is the question that circulates most persistently, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a dismissal.

Yes, something can help while being inaccurate. Yes, the map is not the territory, and an imperfect map can still guide someone through difficult terrain. If it were being sold as a useful approximation - a helpful metaphor, a clinical heuristic - there would be a serious and legitimate conversation to be had about informed consent: if you’re told the theory is a theory, and it still helps you, is that acceptable? That is a genuinely interesting ethical question.

But that is not what is happening.

PVT is not being offered as useful metaphor or working hypothesis. It is being taught as fact - and it is especially running rampant in circles (i.e. social media) that does not have checks and balances.

That changes everything.

The ‘help’ offered by PVT most often emerges in the attunement of one nervous system to another: in the co-regulation, in the attending to the relational field, in the nuance of allowing and accepting presence instead of shutting down. This is attachment science. It doesn’t require the additional language of the “ventral vagal system”, or “dorsal vagal shutdown”. Using these phrases inaccurately labels things that already have other terms. Not ones that are anywhere near as popular, perhaps, but far more accurate.

So instead of teaching people the real attachment legacy of their patterns, we just taught them an abstract description of the nervous system as if it reliably and seemingly automatically behaved in various states, at all times.

Attachment science isn’t easy to learn. It’s finicky behavioral development on top of motor patterns. It’s sometimes more difficult to translate. It’s not as sexy as PVT or the “personality typing” feel of attachment science.

Truth being complex is common. Shorthand being used in its place is also common.

That said, I personally believe that the founders of this framework DO have the responsibility to uphold the integrity of its use. No, not to stop anyone using it incorrectly - that would be unsustainable and an unfair expectation. But they should be the voice of accuracy whenever anyone comes back to “source” to check the extrapolated material.

This does not and cannot happen with PVT, because its proponents - its “source” - talk about it as fact. They either do not know, or do not care, about it being based on absolutely flawed biology. They certainly, clearly, don’t think it matters.

When a framework is taught as fact, it cannot be questioned from within - neither by the practitioner nor the client. That is a dangerous precedent to set, especially as this work deals with trauma - often founded in ‘power-over’ dynamics, lies, and webs of distrust.

And this is perhaps where I get most uncomfortable. The field in which this is happening is filled with hurting individuals seeking an explanation to their suffering or a ‘reason’ behind their pain. They are looking to be understood - to be met within their discomfort, within reality.

Frameworks, and the therapists that hold them, are the ones to meet these vulnerable people. PVT is being touted as the answer to someone’s suffering, and the mechanics it discusses as part of the reason behind it. For those vulnerable, they are being sold yet another lie about their reality - and that worries me. Their suffering is being disingenuously met.

This Is Misinformation. Let’s Name It.

I know that the language feels uncomfortable. “Misinformation” is a word associated with sinister intent, and nobody wants to apply it to a clinician who has spent their career trying to ease human suffering.

But consider: if the same level of inaccuracy were present in a published physics paper about the way our literal world works, it would not survive peer review. There would be disagreements - publicly and openly. There would be institutional accountability. Moreover, if the theory didn’t hold up, it just wouldn’t work. Its measurability (or lack, thereof) would render it forgotten.

The standard for truth in disciplines that touch human wellbeing should not be lower than the standard for truth in disciplines that touch particle accelerators. Especially in the environments where (whilst yes, we can measure HRV and myelination) we cannot measure lifestyle outcomes as cleanly as we can a nuclear reactor. This is human behavior, not “works or doesn’t” science.

In all areas of science, experiments and hypotheses build on each other. So here, there is the great risk of compounding error.

Errors in foundational frameworks generate further errors. When secondary frameworks and therapeutic models are built upon a foundation that is anatomically inaccurate, the inaccuracies propagate upward and outward. We don’t know everything yet about how the nervous system mediates trauma, resilience, or healing. That is precisely why we cannot afford to build further structures on foundations we know to be compromised. The scientific frontier of trauma neuroscience is too important for that.

This is not accidental misinformation, though it may be accidental in origin. Most propagation of misinformation travels not through malice but through conviction. Conviction is powerful. A practitioner who believes deeply that PVT explains their client’s experience, and who teaches that belief as fact to other practitioners, is doing something that functions, in its effects, like propaganda - regardless of intent.

The Bidirectional Problem

For the practitioners who are not following why this matters (and it’s ok, it’s not easy to see if you don’t know the alternatives to PVT): let me break this apart - because I exist, rarely, at the juxtaposition point of medical and psychotherapeutic care. This is not common in therapy or coaching, where anatomy and physiology training doesn’t feature.

This means it is not sufficient for a psychotherapeutic model to say “it looks like this behaviorally” and then ground that observation in incorrect biology. The moment you claim a biological basis and get the biology wrong, you do not simply have an inaccurate footnote - you have broken the bidirectional relationship at its root.

Moreover, you break someone’s progress. Many people - myself included - derive “sense making” from understanding how a body FORMS, and how its nervous system BEHAVES, and thus how we ACT. And vice versa. The formation is founded on neural development. This means that attachment is determined by neural formation, from experience. Attachment science teaches us this, and many people have understood how our shape, holding of self (physically), and movement tracks from there… and from this formation our interaction with the world is formed. This is deeper than fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. This is so much more rich than behavioral cues clinically identified from a faulty framework.

A Personal Note, and a Harder Question

I recently read an article by Will Rēzin that was genuinely exceptional - thorough, compassionate, and precise about the evolution of formative attachment somatics within this field. I recommend reading it.

But in it there was a mention of polyvagal theory as a foundational element of Pat Ogden’s work.

I hold Will’s work with enormous respect. I hold Pat Ogden’s contributions with the same - especially as its not just a polyvagal model, she incorporates many other modalities. Neither deserves to be discarded. Neither should be.

But here is what this moment in the field has done: because of the volume of misinformation and the apparent lack of institutional will to correct it, I now find myself pausing at everything. Questioning citations I would previously have trusted. Fact-checking frameworks I would previously have assumed had been validated. That is not a healthy epistemic state for a field to produce in its most engaged readers.

And I wonder to myself: if a practitioner still holds and refers to PVT alongside apparent “neuroscience” - how well studied are they? What neuroscience are they looking at that hasn’t already invalidated PVT for them?

All of this points to something larger.

The response to critique from the pioneers of this work to claim misrepresentation (without direct engagement with the specific anatomical representation which they are saying is false). They are engaged in circular self-citation within the papers themselves, with very little additional citation, and they are demonstrating institutional defensiveness.

I don’t think the intention was fraud. I do think that the failure to look clearly at one’s own need to be right - in a field devoted to helping humans understand themselves - is a significant shadow to leave unexamined.

What the Field Actually Needs

Nervous system safety and sovereignty are not just therapeutic goals. They are the conditions under which healing becomes possible at all. They require truth. Not performed certainty, not seductive neurobiological metaphor, but actual commitment to accuracy, revision, and intellectual honesty.

And making sense of the self - whether as practitioner or layperson - requires availability of information that does not distort one’s ability to understand one’s own being.

The therapists and coaches working inside these frameworks are not culpable for the propagation of something they were taught as fact. The field owes them better. It owes its clients better. And the first move toward better is to stop calling a contested, anatomically challenged theory a scientific fact, and to start having the uncomfortable, necessary conversation about what it means to build healing work on ground that is actually, verifiably, solid.

That conversation is long overdue.

In a world of commoditized therapy speak, now more than ever it is incredibly important that we honor our fellow humans with models that honor who they are, how they actually developed, and what they truly need en route to their healing.

Yesterday was the real new year. Or was it the Lunar New Year on January 22nd? Or January 1st, when the rest of the non-astrologically-initiated world cracked open their champagne? Or was it the Winter Solstice? Or Samhain? Or the last full moon in Pisces? Or, and here’s the radical proposition - literally whenever you decide it is, because you are a conscious being with the terrifying and magnificent capacity to begin again at any moment?

People who had no idea that anything other than the turn of midnight on the first of the calendar year was New Year now think yesterday was a big deal. And I want to sit with that for a minute, because what’s happening there is actually far more interesting than which celestial event you chose to post about.

And it’s not a bad thing. You want to believe yesterday, tomorrow, three weeks from Tuesday, or every single frickin’ day is the beginning of the new year - cool. You want to talk about transits like they’re running the world - awesome. You want to burn a piece of paper with your shadow self’s deepest fears written on it at midnight during a new moon - honestly, go for it, it’s a perfectly reasonable Tuesday.

Because it all reveals something about our psyches, as humans.

We feel the energies of life, the rhythms and pulses of nature, and we find ways to explain them. We’ve been doing it since time immemorial. Our cognition meaning makes. We are, at our core, meaning-making machines - pattern-seeking animals wrapped in clothes we bought online, telling ourselves stories about why everything happens the way it does.

When one explanation doesn’t fit, we find another. “Oh, that wasn’t really the new year, the energies were too heavy — real new year is {insert new cultural/religious/calendar event here, irrespective of one’s personal relationship to it}.”

When one sounds sexy, we perform it ritualistically. “It’s a season of shedding! Fire ceremonies for everyone, darling. Let’s jettison all chaff right now, we’re only interested in wheat, my dears!!”

It’s that perfect intersection of archetype with desperation.

Of sensing, with meaning-making.

Of esoteric essence and modern ritual.

Performative Ritual: When the Map Becomes the Territory

The first problem with all of this is that people now know - ahead of time - what the planets are supposedly doing. So they also know what they’re supposed to feel. And those who want to get ahead of the curve, those who want to be with it, behave according to expected patterns because they’ve been told those patterns will exist.

There’s a kind of cosmic Pavlov’s dog happening in the wellness-adjacent internet right now. The bell rings - Mercury is in retrograde! - and we salivate on cue: we dread technology, we avoid signing contracts, we catastrophise every miscommunication. Not because Mercury’s retrograde is doing anything new to our experience, but because we have been told it will, and our beautiful, obliging, story-loving brains comply.

But here’s the thing: if you believe in astrology at all, you understand that the planets are, and so you are. There is no “so please act this way whilst this planet is doing this.” There is just “be aware that this is here. Thrive accordingly.”

Planetary information is useful to understand how one is feeling and how the world is being. The planets are interpretive assistants in the world of humaning. Context-givers. Frameworks for feeling. But so often these days it’s used to dictate being rather than illuminate it.

“I’m going to end all relationships that seem unfulfilling to me because we’re in a time of shedding, so that’s what I choose to do.”

As opposed to naturally finding some relationships ending and - when curious about why - recognizing the many “letting go” energies in the environment that are already coloring your experience.

In our bid to use planetary alignments to make our lives make sense, many people are instead forcing their lives to match a planetary positioning that their feed has pre-loaded them with. The astrology isn’t illuminating their experience - it’s scripting it. The map has swallowed the territory. The meaning they’re making isn’t arising from their authentic experience of the present moment; it’s being downloaded from someone else’s Reel.

And this is where the thing stops being charming and starts being, quietly, a problem.

Cognitive Distortion and Behavioral Justification: The Human Brain and Its Insatiable Need to Be Right

When it comes to meaning-making, the human brain has to make it fit. So we both make meaning - which is to make sense of what we see and sense - AND we make things mean things - which leverages our experience into a framework, whether it truly fits or not.

The difference matters enormously, and almost nobody is talking about it.

Making meaning is beautiful. It’s the poet finding metaphor in grief, the shaman finding pattern in chaos, the physicist finding elegance in the incomprehensible. It’s responsive. It arises from genuine encounter with experience.

Making things mean things is something else. It’s motivated cognition. It’s the brain working backwards from a preferred conclusion, retrofitting reality to match a story it was already committed to.

It’s confirmation bias dressed in spirituality clothing. And it is rampant right now.

This is exactly what Aubrey Marcus found himself face-to-face with in his most recent podcast episode - #521, “No Such Thing As Evil? (SHOCKING DEBATE)” - and the confrontation was so uncomfortable that, by his own account, he nearly stopped the recording. His guest was Dr. John Demartini: human behavior specialist, bestselling author of over forty books, one of the featured teachers in The Secret, a man who has spent five decades building a framework around what he calls the “unity of opposites” - the idea that every event contains equal measures of benefit and drawback, and that what we call “good” and “evil” are merely projections of our incomplete awareness.

In other words: a man who has built an entire cosmology of meaning-making, and who, when pressed by Marcus to evaluate genuinely monstrous acts, refused to flinch from it.

Aubrey pushed back, hard. He said, on camera, that he knew in his body that certain things were wrong. That there is something fundamental inside of us driving toward life, love, and freedom. That we have an obligation to stop what violates real value. It was, if you were watching purely for moral clarity, a genuinely stirring moment.

And almost nobody in the comments caught what Aubrey was doing at the same table.

Because there’s a detail to this confrontation that shifts the entire picture. Aubrey Marcus has spent the better part of a decade building - publicly, branded, sold-as-content - a life architecture that is the precise emotional equivalent of what he was holding Demartini to account for. Not philosophically. Personally. And the comments section missed it completely because Aubrey’s version is so much more aesthetically appealing than Demartini’s.

This is the thing about meaning-making at the sophisticated end of the spectrum. When Demartini says “there are upsides to the murder of children,” you immediately feel the wrongness of it. The framework is exposed because it’s being applied to something extreme enough to strip away all the spiritual packaging. But when someone builds a framework that conveniently validates every personal choice they make - quietly, incrementally, dressed in the language of consciousness evolution and sacred union and divine downloads - it’s far, far harder to see. It looks like wisdom. It sounds like a man on a higher level of consciousness, brave enough to follow his inner knowing even when it makes people uncomfortable.

That’s the more sophisticated version of the same game. And it’s more dangerous precisely because it’s harder to spot.

Making Up Meanings: When the Framework Has a Convenient Outcome Every Single Time

Let’s trace the actual arc, because there is one, and it’s instructive.

Please Note: this section (from here until the next line divider) is heavily drawn from a WONDERFUL Facebook post from Kyree Oliver - which I have quoted, extracted from, and rendered some of it here whole. That post was actually even more informative on this particular topic - please go and read it. I share this section for additional context on Aubrey (for those who require it), in order to neatly and effectively segue into my own points for this article, which are additional and separate to - though in great agreement with!! - Kyree’s.

Aubrey was in a seven-year relationship, five of those years openly polyamorous. He and his partner publicly branded it as a “conscious open relationship” and built content around it. When that relationship ended, he wrote: “Just because a relationship ends doesn’t mean it wasn’t a success.” He said their pathologies and co-dependencies would have prevented them from staying in a monogamous partnership with anyone. He said the open relationship had “exposed their wounds so that in awareness they could allow them to heal.”

Now. Note the structure of that. The relationship didn’t work. That fact is incontestable. But the framework - conscious relationship, wound-exposing, spiritually purposeful - absorbed the failure as a feature. Nothing went wrong. It all went exactly as the deeper intelligence of the universe intended. The open relationship was right when he was in it. And when it ended, that was right too. The framework is hermetically sealed. There is no version of events it cannot accommodate.

He then married Vylana. They built a brand around their “sacred union” and sold courses on romantic fitness as a couple. And then, publicly, he announced that their marriage had “expanded” to include a third partner. He said that during a trip to Egypt, inside a pyramid, on psychedelics, the Goddess Isis gave him a download instructing him to impregnate both women. He called it “radical monogamy in the field of erotic mystics.” When people - understandably - reacted, he walked it back to “radical fidelity” and described the public backlash as “a symptom of an immature mind.”

Read that last part again. The critics aren’t right. They’re not even interestingly wrong. They’re just operating at a lower level of consciousness than the man who received personal reproductive instructions from a deity inside a pyramid.

His wife Vylana was on camera for the announcement. Visibly emotional. She described it as her “greatest fear” and her “biggest initiation.” Aubrey and his spiritual advisor, sitting beside her, framed her pain as growth. The advisor told her, on camera: “No one here needs rescuing.”

And then, perhaps the most telling line Aubrey has ever written, in his own defense: “I have never once recommended that anyone follow me on this path.”

That line is significant. Because it means, on some level, he knows that what he’s doing wouldn’t hold up to the standard he was trying to hold Demartini to.

His protection is: I’m not telling anyone else to do it.

But that is the exact same move Demartini makes.

I’m not saying it’s good or bad. I’m just saying it’s an event.

Both men are saying, with different vocabularies and different aesthetics: don’t judge me by any standard outside my own. And both get frustrated when people do.

The audience watched Aubrey challenge Demartini and believed they were watching a man with a moral compass confront a man without one.

What they were actually watching was two men with self-constructed, hermetically sealed meaning systems sitting across from each other - both completely unable to see their own version of the thing they were accusing the other of.

Demartini removes accountability by declaring nothing is good or evil. Aubrey removes accountability by making his spiritual experiences - the ceremonies, the downloads, the initiations - his highest and final authority. One man outsources judgment to a philosophical framework. The other outsources it to a goddess in a pyramid. The destination is identical: a man who has made himself the sole arbiter of what his choices mean, and built the architecture to ensure that every single outcome confirms the wisdom of making them.

Moral Relativism: Dressed Down vs. Dressed Up

Here is where the two things in this piece - the performative new year rituals and the Demartini conversation - converge into a single, uncomfortable point.

Because both are expressions of the same underlying move. The astrology content that scripts what you’re supposed to feel during eclipse season is a meaning system. The Demartini Method is a meaning system. Aubrey’s “sacred union” and “erotic mystic” framework is a meaning system. The difference between them is purely aesthetic. One is delivered via Instagram Reel by someone with good lighting. One is delivered by a man in a turtleneck who has given the same lecture for forty years. One is delivered inside a pyramid with a pharmacological assist. The structure - the way the framework absorbs all outcomes as confirmation and makes its practitioner immune to being wrong - is identical across all three.

The question, as I keep returning to, is never whether you have a meaning system. You do. We all do. The brain is structurally incapable of experiencing reality without one.

A meaning system that is responsive to reality will, on occasion, fail. It will encounter an experience that doesn’t fit, and it will be revised. It will hold up a conclusion to the light and find it wanting. It will allow you to say: I thought that was wisdom. Looking back, it was rationalization, and I caused harm. This is the painful, necessary, irreplaceable function of genuine reflection.

A meaning system that is immune to reality cannot fail, because it has engineered failure out of its vocabulary. Every outcome is a lesson. Every criticism is the critic’s wound. Every collapse is a transition. Every bit of collateral damage in the people around you is their “edge” - their “initiation” - their spiritual opportunity, which you have generously provided.

This is not consciousness evolution. This is what consciousness evolution looks like when it has been reverse-engineered to produce personal immunity to accountability.

And I want to be precise about why this matters beyond the individuals involved, because it would be easy at this point to dismiss this as a conversation about Aubrey Marcus’s marriage, which is genuinely none of our collective business as I have stated before. The reason it matters is the pattern, and how recognizable that pattern is once you start to see it.

The wellness and consciousness communities have, over the past decade or so, developed a rich vocabulary for this immunity. Every critique becomes “your projection.” Every boundary someone draws around you becomes their “shadow work.” Every time you cause pain, the pain is reframed as the other person’s initiation. Every time a framework fails in plain sight, the failure is immediately metabolized as confirmation - we had to go through this to get to the next level.

This vocabulary is extraordinarily difficult to challenge, because it has been pre-loaded with a response to every possible challenge. It is, in the truest sense, unfalsifiable. And unfalsifiable systems - whether they’re philosophical frameworks about the non-existence of evil, or spiritual architectures built around personal downloads from ancient goddesses - are not wisdom.

The Danger of the Performed Enlightenment

What worries me - and what the Demartini episode crystalized with a clarity that the conversation itself perhaps didn’t intend - is this: the most seductive version of the meaning-making trap is the one inhabited by someone who genuinely believes they’ve transcended it.

I am not familiar enough with Demartini to pass any comment on his work. But Aubrey is local to me, known to many of my associates, and I have had an exchange with him (via social media) in the past where his narrative was helpful, at the same time as dismissive, dressed up in spiritualism and a shift of attention back onto me - which is so common in spiritual bypass-land.

It is not clear to me that Aubrey has moral feeling - despite the fact that he took a seemingly “moral” stance against Demartini. Instead, what he actually demonstrated was disgust sensitivity.

It is disgust sensitivity that has been adopted by morals and ethics. Modern society often draws a line when it comes to things that stimulate the disgust sensitivity in the majority of people.

What Aubrey didn’t see, and likely doesn’t even desire to acknowledge, is that his behavior (especially the mandate to impregnate two women: a power-over presentation of masculinity, dressed up with the front of a feminine goddess) invokes the disgust sensitivity in others. We resort to the words “moral code”, but what we really mean is that, for us, his behavior gives us the ick - much as Demartini’s behavior gave Aubrey the ick.

When challenged about this ickiness, Aubrey does not defend it morally, nor point out others’ acting according to their disgust sensitivity. He KNOWS his behavior is “unorthodox”, that’s why he recorded a whole podcast about it. So, instead, he dissolves into framework. Into initiation language. Into the spiritual exceptionalism of a man who has received instructions from a deity and whose critics are, by definition, immature.

You do not get to invoke a body-knowledge of wrongness when watching Demartini and then describe your wife’s greatest fear as her “biggest initiation” in the same breath. You do not get to say “we have an obligation to stand when we see something that violates real value” and, at the same time, state that others who stand against him and state the he violates real value are simply unworthy of his attention.

You do not back the words of your spiritual advisor, informing your audience that “no one needs rescuing” when it comes to your wife… and then make a case that you are making a stand for people who need rescuing from the mindsets of Demartini.

That is not a man following truth wherever it leads. That is a man who has made himself the final authority on what truth is. In this particular instance, he has even called it Isis…

Which brings us back to labeling and ritualizing our behavior based on the planetary transits that we are told about by others.

What Meaning-Making Is Actually For

Meaning-making is not supposed to be for insulating you from consequences. It is not for retrofitting reality to confirm what you already wanted to do.

It is not for ensuring that every framework you inhabit produces you as the protagonist who is always, ultimately, correct.

It is not for dissolving the discomfort of the people around you into spiritual opportunity so that you never have to sit with the fact that you caused it.

Meaning-making is for digesting experience. For metabolising it into something honest. For arriving at a bigger, not smaller, capacity for genuine reckoning with what is actually happening.

And maybe you think the discussion of Aubrey Marcus and Demartini is a far extreme from paying attention to transits, retrogrades, and random influencers’ opinions about the Year of the Fire Horse.

When you use astrology to illuminate your experience, you are using it correctly - as the interpretive assistant it is at its best.

When you use it to script your experience, to perform your predetermined transformation for the algorithm, you have let the map eat the territory.

But what of Demartini? And of Aubrey? Surely - for both men’s frameworks - their acceptance of what is (reality) is the ultimate ascension and the most profound spiritual awakening?

I am not going to pass the final verdict on Aubrey’s frameworks. Nor even, Demartini’s. They’re both extreme views, but I can actually see the validity in all of them.

My view? Morality is a construct, based on disgust sensitivity for the most part. I cannot argue with someone stating that case, as Demartini is. I do argue that his argument is irrelevant, because in attempting to discredit morality he is disregarding the very human instinctive disgust upon which many morals are based.

And Aubrey? His spiritual framework, on the surface, sounds incredibly similar to mine.

A Moment In the Mirror

Alarmingly, I have had to sit and contemplate why my spiritual acceptance of my reality is OK, whereas Aubrey’s carries overtones of cultish, dominant manipulation.

Fundamentally, Aubrey’s framework doesn’t actually take responsibility for his behavior. He blamed his recent update to his relational status on a message, from a goddess, whilst on drugs. This part violates our common sense sensitivity… and, truthfully, means that if Isis told Aubrey to murder children, his framework (of “my spiritual compass is king”) currently means that he would do it.

This makes his staunch rejection of Demartini’s stance a nonsense.

And THIS is the core, fundamental problem with Aubrey Marcus’s framework. It expands to ever-embrace his whims - instead of being altered when his needs and fancies change. His shift to monogamy did not come whilst he denounced his former polyamory. He simply said “both were right at the right time”.

But his shifts never come with, “I was wrong. That wasn’t spiritual evolution. That was what I wanted, dressed in the language of what sounds holy. Now I want this, so I’ve updated my framework. I’m sorry.”

He changed the behavior, and - with a little humility - he could easily changed the framework. But he didn’t. He told everyone to keep up as his framework simply claimed that he was having an evolution that was, ironically, morally superior to his previously-claimed-to-be-evolved status of monogamy.

As I look in the mirror, however, I see how I sometimes do the same thing. I allow my spiritual overtones to shift the sands of how I be. I’m not being inauthentic, or disingenuous. I’m actually evolving. Maybe I should just drop my judgementation and conclude that Aubrey is too?

When I put all of this into Claude AI, it tried to force me to the conclusion that the distinction was whether “the meaning-making serves your authentic encounter with reality, or whether it serves as protection against it.”

But I don’t think that’s the distinction at all. Think of religion, spirituality, belief systems in general.

Aren’t all of these, in some way, protecting us against the ravages of an unfair and overwhelming world? Isn’t that the whole, entire purpose of having a framework of meaning in the first place? To make it all make sense?

So - discarding AI and returning to my own writing, what I present below may be a weak conclusion, one that I’m not even sure of when I push publish, but here it is.

I think that these distinctions are twofold:

1. The order of the interpretation, and what happens between experience and conclusion; and

2. Where the authority lies in the framework

What I mean by this is that the distinction between performative and processing lies in how it is done (order) and who is responsible (self or deity/planet).

Let me give a concrete example for point 1:

If the experience of something happening is shocking, dysregulating, emotional etc. - and it genuinely creates the somatic ripples of disturbance in your reality - and THEN you can rationalize it into, “it’s ok, it is what is, we have stability, we can move through this” (whether that takes minutes, hours, or weeks), then this is a REAL rocking of your reality that ends in acceptance.

If the experience of that thing is not fully given a chance to flow throughout your body, disrupt your being, and is automatically and instantly dismissed as '“meant to be”, then this is a framework that deletes experience and instead serves to bypass.

Now to Point 2:

If you are the center of your story, taking responsibility and ownership, even if it is hard, then your framework is very likely supportive.

This is where planets, Human Design, and other personality typing systems come in. Outsourcing the “reason” behind our bad behavior or choices to planets is lazy, and ultimately demonstrates that the map has swallowed the territory (to continue my existing analogy).

But if you behave in a certain way - even if you strongly believe and are fully convinced that the planets have played a role in that - true frameworks allow you to occupy the “both-and”.

Yes, Saturn might be in Aries, but you ALSO behaved like that… the former does not excuse the latter.

The narrativization isn’t to blame or perform according to the planets.

It’s to accept their influence and still take ownership of how they purportedly led you to be.

So, Was Yesterday the Real New Year?

Yes. And also no. And also it genuinely does not matter in the way the content wants you to think it matters.

What matters is whether you used it honestly. Whether the ritual - the intention-setting, the fire ceremony, the journaling, the pause - connected you to something real in yourself, or whether it was primarily a way to perform transformation out of desperation for more. Did it mean something for you anyway? Did you FEEL something? Or did you make it mean something because the grid showed you so many others having “powerful moments” and you wanted to join in?

The ancient impulse behind every new year, every solstice, every rite of passage, is honest and beautiful: we need punctuation. We need moments of demarcation that say before this, and after this. We need time to reflect, and we need this to be distinct, especially in our modern day hustle and bustle.

The human psyche requires ritual the way the body requires sleep - not because ritual is magic, but because it is the technology through which we make transitions conscious rather than accidental.

But the ritual only works if you bring you to it. Not the self who already knows what they’re supposed to shed because they read about it last week. Not the self who has pre-loaded the ceremony with its own conclusions. Not the self who will absorb whatever happens next as confirmation of whatever they already believed. The self who actually sits down and asks, without knowing the answer: What is genuinely ready to go? What am I holding that is costing the people around me something? What am I calling a spiritual framework that is actually a way of not being held accountable?

And if the answers don’t come, the only genuine ritual is the one that presses pause on itself, surrendering to reality instead of forcing its way through into existence out of striving or sufferance.

When the vocabulary of consciousness and meaning and sacred experience has become so rich, so widely distributed, so aesthetically appealing. As such, it is extraordinarily easy to weaponize. And where Aubrey and others are using this against others, for the average Joe who just wanted to have a feeling of a fresh start, this spiritual and consciousness language can be weaponized against yourself - waiting for the planets to take the reins instead of taking ownership and decisive action internally.

The Archetypes as Doorways

Honestly, talking about morality, and Aubrey Marcus, is a place I have opinion and observation, but am devoid of real knowingness, and its probably beyond my expertise.

Human Design, astrology and archetypes live exactly within my realm of being, however.

And this whole article speaks to a core pillar of something I am creating over at Temenos.

The pillar is Archetypes As Doorways.

What this promotes is, within a coaching and healing framework, the use of archetype - whether planet, Gene Key, Human Design element - as invitational. It is the start of an exploration. They pose a question, rather than give answers.

Human Design in particular deserves far more nuance than your Instagram influencer can explain in a 30 second reel. Defined emotional centers show up differently for different people. The amount of variability in Projectors is vast. Third lines are crazily different across the spectrum. And, more importantly, Design was never designed as a straight jacket. It serves as a map to the territory, for sure. But it does NOT (and never did) show you the route. It shows you the potential for exploration, and suggests an order and a way that you can do that. Beyond that, the world is contained within it. And THAT is something I think I want to begin to talk about more.

So - Happy New Year. Happy Fire Horse year. Funny, when I think about it, this is a very Fire Horse post… but that’s not why I wrote it… and the reality is that everyone is going to be making sense of their actions through this lens at the moment - which may or may not mean anything at all.

If the Fire Horse initiation yesterday was supportive to you, I love that. Thank you for reading these musings which used it as a springboard to deeper contemplation.

If you’ve read this far, I’d LOVE your commentary and opinions on everything I’ve shared here.

The Aubrey Marcus episode referenced — “No Such Thing As Evil? (SHOCKING DEBATE) | Dr. John Demartini” (#521) — is available on all podcast platforms and worth watching in full, ideally with the above in mind.

The most useful thing you can do before a hard conversation...?

What we often call “regulation” - the breathing, the calming, the getting yourself under control before you bring something to your partner - can quietly function as bypassing. This was covered extensively in my last post.

To summarize, the reason I don’t promote “Regulating before You Relate” is, first, because it places onus on one-person effort when relating is a two-person dance.

Second, regulating often diminishes the truth of the experience.

You calm down before you actually deal with what happened.

Those who over-promote regulation are actually promoting “not ever” dealing with the feeling... dressing self-control (which, P.S., is not the same as Capacity) up as self-awareness.

Rightly, my partner and some friends questioned my last post. They raised the following points:

1: So we get to just be messy all the time? The partners as punching bags approach?

and, more importantly, from my husband:

2: “But you DO regulate before you come to me with stuff. You HAVE already processed it, somewhat.”

Let’s answer these in reverse: what my husband observes is not Regulation.

Because Regulation is not Processing. Yet he is right, by the time I (usually) bring him stuff, I have metabolized a lot of things.

But what I am doing is not Regulation. It is Containment, and Accounting.

Let’s examine the difference.

Regulation that seeks to bring down excitation before expression = “I must change before I can show up.”

Containment that pauses expression whilst in excitation = “I need to build capacity before I express”.

Mandatory regulation can result in never letting states of excitation have their full aliveness, especially within a relationship. Out of a misguided idea of protection (of self, or the other, based on fear of the response), one believes one cannot approach from dysregulation.

Containment inserts a pause. But the pause isn’t to make the feeling more manageable for one’s own, or anyone else’s, comfort. I’m not “bringing down” excitation. I’m parsing out its origins.

When I pause, it isn’t to ensure I’m more regulated. It doesn’t matter if I remain highly agitated.

Evidence is observable. It’s factual. It exists in the present tense.

Your partner didn’t load the dishwasher - that’s evidence. But the existential weight that attaches to that moment - the abandonment narrative, the “I always have to do everything,” the meaning that your nervous system has been building since long before this relationship - that’s artifact. That’s a story constructed from the past, layered over a present-tense event.

That story is real. It matters. But it isn’t the same thing as what actually just happened.

In many ways, this is why Regulation is recommended. It emerges from the recognition that our emotional agitation isn’t just about what’s happening.

But Regulation dismisses emergent feelings as irrelevant and unwise to express. Containment is learning to hold artifact and evidence without collapsing them together, or dismissing either one.

You’re not trying to make the artifact/story go away. You’re Accounting: getting clear on what belongs to you, what belongs to the dynamic, and what actually needs to be addressed between the two of you.

Signal versus noise. Yours versus ours.

And here is where I insist that a relationship that DEMANDS Regulation is NOT the healthiest.

This process of Containment and Accounting only becomes possible inside a relationship that is genuinely safe. Not conflict-free, but safe.

Safety is what allows you to say “I can’t talk about this right now” - and go and do your Accounting - without your pause becoming abandonment. It’s what allows you to move through some of your own material privately, not because you’re protecting your partner from your feelings, but because you’re doing the work of figuring out what is true and communicable.

It’s the safety of the relationship that invites your full honesty about what is truly yours to own in amongst your stories of your shared experiences.

With Containment and Accounting in securely attached relationships (ones that can withstand dysregulated conflicts), you’re not sorting through things alone - you’re sorting through them in the context of a secure connection. There’s a difference.

And, as I made clear in my last post, in safe relationships, you’re allowed to misfire. You’re allowed to spew before you’ve fully distilled.

This rupture, caused by dysregulation, isn’t the end. In safe relationships, it’s a moment that gets recognized, named, and corrected.

What makes that possible is steadiness on the other side. Someone who can say, in effect: I see you’re still in it, and I’m not going anywhere.

This is also what allows the present-tense, factual issues - the real ones, the ones that genuinely need addressing - to actually surface and be worked with.

When you’ve done the work of separating artifact from evidence, what remains is something you can bring to the relationship unit. Not as accusation or projection, but as something that belongs to both of you. And you can ALSO share what was yours.

This may look like Regulation. But you didn’t attempt to do anything to your agitation.

Parsing out the demonization of “thinking” in the world of somatics will have to wait for another post.

But before I leave this topic, let’s address that first question above. Yes: twin-flame, soul union intimacy may invite deep, conflict-filled interaction.

But not ALL THE TIME.

Needing your relationship to always feel high stakes, like you’re perpetually on the edge - that’s not intimacy. That’s a pattern. And patterns can be confused for passion, especially when wounding is what’s familiar.

A relationship that can only survive through intensity isn’t the same as one that can hold you through the ordinary.

Yes, true intimacy should never demand Regulation. It should be your place where - regulated or not - your safety is always assured. But true intimacy also doesn’t celebrate dysregulation, nor allow you to behave badly, disrepecting your partner’s feelings, simply because either of you have “stuff to process” or “issues to work on”.

True intimacy makes space for dysregulation, and gives grace for it, but it does not require conflict in order to feel like the relationship is important.

Stating “it must be meant to be because we trigger the f&%k out of each other” isn’t healthy. It’s bypass of a different kind: one that chooses discomfort based on an unconscious belief that that’s what love is supposed to feel like.

Hello childhood trauma talking through your adult intimacy.

So, in conclusion: yes, this topic is complicated and nuanced. And in a world where terminology from healing spaces has become commoditized and left without its required therapeutic nuance, it’s easy to mistake one practice for another.

Knowing whether you are bypassing or Containing, Accounting or trauma-bonding isn’t answerable in a cute online quiz, or by “seeing” yourself in someone else’s online account of their relationship.

I profoundly disagree that Regulation is required prior to relating.

Let me tell you why…

Regulation has become the sexiest word in the internet’s trauma sphere. It’s the optimal state. It’s desired, and it denotes all these other amazing things like “resilience”, “capacity”, and “healing”.

Moreover, it’s sold as the “foundational state” from which relating must occur. Get regulated before you relate, the saying goes.

I believe that this is horseshit. Especially in your core relationships.

The reason it’s promoted is because - it’s true - you can relate from a place of self-first, calm, balance, and discernment when you are regulated.

Conversation can be framed in a more optimal way.

Intimacy founded on regulation seems, ultimately, safer because it is without sharp edges, extremes, or “you did this” commentary.

But that doesn’t make it safe, it makes it sanitary.

Washed clean of chaos, the interaction is neutralized to become what seems, and might even feel, “safe” - but what we start to learn is that safety comes only in a state of regulation. We learn that we require neutral, non-threatening, non-tumultuous states. We learn that our dysregulation is wrong. We learn that we must give ourselves the task of finding our center, even in our strongest relationships.

We learn that the relationship cannot hold us.

We don’t learn how to get BACK to safety from chaos, to get BACK to regulation from dysregulation - whilst in the midst of relating to the other.

We don’t get to learn how our closest loved ones can say the most triggering things, and yet the foundation of love is the through-line which always brings you both back to the table.

If you - as a woman - cannot be completely overrun by emotional angst, lose all balance, feel crazed, and be erratic with your partner (without whitewashing your expression in non-violent communication) - then you cannot feel fully held, protected, and supported. If you must moderate the extremes in order to feel safe to express then that just gives you another job to do to hold the container of a relationship in which that should never be your job.

If you - as a man - cannot fall on your sword, be unsafe (angry, threatening even), imbalanced, demonstrate unchecked power, dismiss, dissociate, and play games - then you cannot feel fully held, loved in your darkest shadows, and supported. If you must hold back your aggression in order to allow your woman to feel safe then you are not truly loved by that woman.

This sounds extreme, I know. It really is only meant for established relationships, but I am being completely honest with what I think relationships should be able to hold. If your container cannot survive being thrown around by those who uphold it, then it is not a stable container. It is a relationship built on a sandcastle of inauthenticity and pretense.

It may be triggering for women to read that we should be able to withstand the anger and aggression of our men... but we have to be. This isn’t a license for them to inflict actual suffering, it is borne out of the understanding that all men hold rage, and they have to feel safe with you seeing it - not directing it at you, not physically harming you - but SHOWING you their aggression, to know that it is not their shameful secret to be kept, and that you can meet and hold them there.

Your behavior in relationship with your partner of union should be able to be messy.

You should not have to regulate yourself prior to communicating - even if you’re about to messily, clumsily, and from all of your wounding and hurt, touch on every single trigger your partner has.

That is what the relationship is designed to support you to do.

To help you to regulate in the midst of your dysregulation.

To help you navigate through the lost-ness.

To be able to push another human - hard - and still find them there, meeting you on the other side.

Maybe dusty with pain - for which you must apologize.

Maybe ouchy from the experience - for which you may be required to grant them time to restore their fortitude.

But still there.

And still intent on retaining full relationship with you - the person they love.

Relationship should be able to be both the cause, and the salve, to your triggers. And your partner should be able to meet you back at the battleground when you’ve both gone there dysregulated, threatening to blow the whole thing up.

I don’t say this to excuse bad behavior.

I say this to encourage fullness of being in the places where we should actually feel safest - instead of feeling like we must find safety before we show up there.

This is nuanced. Doing this requires time, patience, practice, and a good deal of skill. Don’t get me wrong - it is HARDER to show up in relationship like this... because it’s asking you to show up as your full human being - not a practiced example of behavior that you’ve read about.

*please note, this post was powered by AI, utilizing SuperCool (a creative platform I love). I took a full, detailed conversation with my husband (recorded utilizing Plaud - our favorite device for recording important conversations, consultations, meetings, and more…) about Epstein, alchemy, and the fundamental essential requirement of pariahs to elucidate change. I am passionate about the dark forces being the stimulus for the light. Way more passionate than this article really drives home, so I may write a follow up.

However, here the thoughts and direction were given, and then extensively prompted (because AI has a delightful way of taking transcripts too literally, and I quoted a whole song in the conversation which needed careful removal!!), and the result is what you will read below. I love that it’s this punchy, with those “three-phrase mic drop” pieces that drive impact, and I feel that this topic deserves it, so I’m publishing it from the SuperCool edit, with a few sentences tweaked when I had a different preference.

Because, hey - when slaying dragons, any additional ammunition is welcome ;-)

The Nigredo Begins

In alchemical tradition, the Great Work cannot begin without the nigredo: the blackening, the putrefaction, the descent into primordial darkness where all pretense dissolves.

It is the stage where the alchemist must face the prima materia in its most degraded form: rotting, fetid, unbearable to witness. Only by unflinching confrontation with this putrescence can transformation begin.

Not a monster who appeared from nowhere, but a precipitate - a condensation of elements that were always present in the solution. He was the visible manifestation of what Jung called the Shadow: those aspects of the psyche we refuse to acknowledge, the desires we exile to darkness, the impulses we project onto others rather than face in ourselves.

But here is the alchemical paradox that makes us recoil: the dragon must exist for the slaying to occur. The poison must concentrate before it can be transmuted.

Epstein’s function - horrifying as it is to contemplate - was to be, and become, so abhorrent, his crimes so debauched, that it had the forcing function to make visible what power has always protected. His identity served to coagulate into undeniable form what has always operated in quiet rooms, and the result was that those who were harmed in those rooms got loud, and their pain seeped out.

The Quiet Room Where Dragons Breed

For many engaged in TransRelational Alchemy, or personal Alchemy (the classic “inner work”), there are many battles fought in quiet, empty, private rooms. These are the internal wars that transform humanity more than any public battle.

But some shadows are too dark even for oneself and one’s process.

The dragon Epstein embodied wasn’t slain in the quiet room of personal moral reckoning. It was bred in quiet rooms of an altogether different kind.

Epstein’s particular dragon gestated not in spaces of contemplative self-examination. Instead, it festered in private chambers where shameful desires metastasized unchecked. Boardrooms where powerful men protected each other’s secrets. Penthouses where wealth bought silence. Islands where surveillance cameras recorded leverage. Courtrooms where settlements sealed records.

The psychological research is unambiguous about what happens when the sexual shadow remains unexamined. When dominance fantasies, taboo attractions, and power-over dynamics are never brought to conscious awareness, they don’t disappear. They intensify. They seek expression. In men with unchecked power, they can all too easily (and with endorsement) find it.

The Forbidden Knowledge: Power, Dominance, and the Taboo

Let us speak plainly about what Epstein’s existence forces us to confront: the male sexual shadow and its relationship to power.

Contemporary research in evolutionary psychology, though controversial, suggests that male sexuality evolved with hierarchical dominance as a significant component. Studies of sexual fantasies reveal that themes of control, conquest, and dominance appear with statistical regularity across cultures - not in all men, not to the same degree, but present enough to constitute a pattern we must acknowledge.

But - and this is crucial - fantasy is not action. Desire is not destiny. The presence of a shadow impulse does not make one a predator.

What makes Epstein’s case so alchemically significant is not that he had taboo desires. It’s that he had the power to actualize them, the wealth to construct elaborate systems for their satisfaction, and - most damningly - the protection of other powerful men who saw in his exposure the potential revelation of their own shadows.

The psychologist Robert Stoller spent decades researching sexual perversion and reached a disturbing conclusion: perversion is not primarily about sex but about hostility. It is “the erotic form of hatred” - a mechanism for converting trauma, humiliation, and powerlessness into scenarios where one regains control by dominating another. The sexual component is secondary to the restoration of power.

In Epstein’s world, sex with the young, the vulnerable, the powerless was not primarily about physical pleasure. It was about the ultimate expression of dominance: the ability to violate innocence with impunity, to transform human beings into commodities, to prove that one’s power exceeded all moral constraint.

And the powerful men who orbited his world? What did they seek in those quiet rooms?

Research on executive psychology reveals a pattern: men who achieve extreme power often develop what’s termed “narcissistic entitlement” - a belief that normal rules don’t apply to them, that their success grants them access to whatever they desire. Combined with the isolation that comes with elite status, this creates a dangerous psychological cocktease: unchecked impulses meet unlimited means.

The taboo itself becomes part of the attraction. Transgression proves power. The ability to do what is forbidden becomes the ultimate status symbol.

The Alchemical Function of Exposure

Here is where we must think the unthinkable:

What if Epstein’s role was to make this exposure inevitable?

Not because he intended to. Not because he was secretly good.

But because the alchemical process of collective transformation requires the Shadow to become visible before it can be integrated.

In Jungian psychology, the Shadow must be brought to consciousness or it will manifest as fate. What remains unconscious appears in our lives as compulsion, as pattern, as the demons we cannot name pursuing us through our choices.

For centuries - millennia - the sexual exploitation of the powerless by the powerful operated as an open secret. Everyone knew. No one spoke. Power centers protected power centers. The dragon was fed in darkness, and the feeding was called natural, inevitable, just how things are.

Epstein concentrated this pattern to such visibility, such undeniability, that the protective mechanisms broke. The usual tactics - settlements, non-disclosure agreements, reputation management, institutional protection - all failed in the face of such concentrated malevolence.

His existence became the solve et coagula of alchemy: dissolve the old structures, coagulate the truth into undeniable form.

The island wasn’t just a crime scene. It was a laboratory where the hidden became recorded. The flight logs weren’t just evidence. They were the grimoire, the forbidden text that named the names. The network wasn’t just criminal conspiracy. It was the revelation of how power protects itself.

The Gold in the Nigredo

Traditional alchemy teaches that the prima materia - the base material that begins black and putrid - contains within it the gold that the alchemist seeks. The blackening is not separate from the enlightenment. The descent is the ascent.

Epstein’s exposure created something unprecedented: a moment when power centers could not successfully protect the corrupt. When wealth could not buy absolution. When institutional self-preservation collided with public fury and lost.

The Epstein case broke open conversations that had remained carefully controlled:

About male sexuality and its shadow aspects: The uncomfortable reality that dominance fantasies, age-discrepancy attractions, and power-over dynamics exist on a spectrum, and that civilization depends on the conscious restraint of these impulses, not their denial.

About institutional complicity: How universities, law enforcement, media, and social networks all participated in protecting a predator because doing so protected themselves.

About the psychology of powerful men: The research emerging on how extreme wealth and power literally alter brain function, reducing empathy and increasing risk-taking and entitlement.

About victimization and voice: How systems of power have always depended on the silence of those exploited, and how that silence is finally, fractally breaking.

The alchemical gold is accountability where there has been impunity.

Not complete accountability - we are far from that. But the beginning of a

transformation where the quiet rooms that bred dragons are being breached,

where the protective networks are being named, where the Shadow is being

dragged into light.

The Dragon That Devours Itself

There is a symbol in alchemy called the Ouroboros - the serpent that devours its own tail. It represents the eternal cycle of destruction and recreation, the principle that transformation requires the old form to consume itself.

Epstein’s dragon was ultimately self-devouring. His compulsion to document, to create systems, to involve others, to build a network - these were the mechanisms of his exposure.

His need for power-through-kompromat (having incriminating information about others) meant creating evidence. His belief in his own untouchability meant taking increasingly visible risks.

The Shadow, when it grows too large, too confident in its concealment, begins to expose itself.

And those who protected him? They too are caught in the Ouroboros.

Every connection they tried to hide becomes a thread that investigators pull.

Every flight log entry, every photograph, every financial transaction - the very mechanisms of power become the mechanisms of revelation.

This is the alchemical principle at work: evil, when it becomes sufficiently concentrated and visible, catalyzes its own opposition.

Epstein’s existence created a level of public consciousness about elite predation, human trafficking, and institutional complicity that decades of advocacy had not achieved. His death created more questions than his life suppressed. His network’s exposure activated an entire generation’s refusal to look away.

The Necessary Monster

So we arrive at the most uncomfortable contemplation: Was Epstein necessary?

Not morally necessary - there is no moral frame that justifies what he did.

Not desired - no one should wish such suffering into existence.

But functionally necessary within the alchemical process of collective transformation.

Epstein served as the precipitating agent - the element that causes what is dissolved in solution to suddenly crystalize into visible form. He was not the disease but its diagnostic crisis, the moment when symptoms become undeniable.

The feminist theorist Kate Millett wrote about how patriarchy depends on the sexual subordination of women being naturalized, made invisible as power.

Epstein denaturalized it. He made it visible as power, as system, as network.

The researcher on sexual trauma Judith Herman describes how abuse depends on secrecy and silence.

Epstein’s exposure shattered both on a scale never before achieved.

The philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that true change requires confronting the obscene underside of power - not the polite public face but the hidden violence that sustains it.

Epstein was that obscene underside made flesh, made undeniable.

The Ongoing Transmutation

The alchemical Great Work is not completed in one operation. The nigredo must be followed by albedo (whitening, purification) and rubedo (reddening, the emergence of the transformed substance). We are still in the black stage, still in the confrontation with putrescence.

But the process has begun.

We are watching, in real time, the reckoning with male sexual shadow play out across institutions.

The questions we are finally asking:

What is the relationship between power and sexual exploitation?

• How do we create accountability structures that cannot be captured by wealth?

• What does it mean to acknowledge shadow desires without acting? How can men be invited to contemplate and work with their wounding to render shadow sexual urges safe - taking the energy of power-over and encouraging a healthier relationship with primal desires.

• How do we dismantle the protective networks that shield predators?

• What responsibility do bystanders, beneficiaries, and adjacent parties bear?

These questions emerge directly from the Epstein exposure. They are the alchemical gold precipitating from the darkness.

• The universities that took his money are being questioned.

• The prosecutors who gave him lenient deals are being investigated.

• The social networks that enabled him are being mapped.

• The cognitive patterns that allowed powerful men to compartmentalize are being studied.

This is the transmutation in process: slow, incomplete, contested, but undeniably underway.

The Dragon We Must Keep Slaying

But here is the final alchemical truth: the dragon is not slain once and forever. The Shadow does not integrate and disappear. The gold extracted from nigredo must be continuously refined, or it reverts to base metal.

Epstein is dead, but the dynamics he embodied are not. The male sexual shadow still exists. The psychology of power and dominance still operates. The systems that protect the powerful still function.

What changes is our willingness to see, to name, to refuse complicity.

The real dragon-slaying is not Epstein’s death or imprisonment. It is the daily, ongoing refusal to allow quiet rooms to remain quiet. The insistence that power centers cannot protect corruption. The demand that vulnerability be protected rather than exploited.

It is the individual work of men confronting their own shadow aspects - acknowledging where desires for dominance exist, where fantasies veer into objectification, where power has been used to coerce. Not to indulge these aspects, but to bring them to consciousness so they can be transformed rather than acted upon.

It is the collective work of dismantling the networks of complicity, the cultures of silence, the institutional reflexes that prioritize reputation over truth.

It is the cultural work of redefining masculinity and power in ways that don’t depend on domination.

This is the ongoing alchemical operation. Epstein was the catalyst, the precipitating agent, the undeniable nigredo.

But we are the alchemists who must complete the Work.

Conclusion: The Paradox We Must Hold

So we return to the impossible paradox with which we began: evil as a catalyst for good, darkness as prerequisite for light, the dragon whose existence enables the slaying.

Epstein was not a savior. He was a monster. But his monstrosity served a function: it made visible what power has always hidden, it concentrated the Shadow to undeniability, it broke the protective mechanisms that shielded predation.

The dragons are real. They breed in quiet rooms where power protects itself. They feed on silence and complicity. They grow fat on the bodies of the vulnerable.

But when a dragon grows visible enough, when it can no longer be denied or explained away, something shifts. The slaying becomes possible. Not because the dragon suddenly became evil - it always was. But because we finally became willing to see it, to name it, to refuse to feed it.

Epstein is our collective nigredo, the putrefaction we must face to achieve transmutation.

The gold we extract from this darkness will be measured not in justice for one man - he is beyond justice now - but in the accountability we create for all the quiet rooms, all the power networks, all the shadows we finally drag into light.

The Work continues. The dragon must be slayed again and again, in every generation, in every institution, in every individual psyche where the Shadow grows.

But now, at least, we can see it.

And seeing is where all alchemy begins.

I don’t know how to even write this article, as I sketch its title into my drafts. As always, with writing, I am hoping that what I have to say reveals itself simply because I have committed to uncovering it, not because it is clear before I began.

Tonight (Christmas Day, 2025), we lost a friend.

They didn’t die. They told us that, due to the active legal situation we are involved in, they needed to not be around us anymore.

They told us that they had been trying to close the loop with us for a while. Apparently there were voice notes recorded and texts drafted, but not sent. It alluded to some degree of angst - not that the relationship was ending, but in how they were supposed to actually end it, given what they were basing these endings on.

What that was was a news article that came out over a year previously, detailing the nitty gritty of my husband’s criminal case - sent to them, conveniently, by his ex-wife’s stepfather two months prior.

Read more

What I have witnessed this year speaks to one thing, and one thing alone...

How the human condition responds to Untended Rupture.

Untended rupture is one of the most powerful fuel sources of human hurt.

Why?

1: The obvious: relational rupture touches upon our darkest pains of unmet needs in infancy.

But more importantly, I am realizing:

2: Rupture speaks to the ultimate, most raw need of the human, at all ages…

Belonging.

To be rendered alienated by someone, or many people, from a tribe to which you believed you belonged is a powerful reminder of vulnerability. Without our protective community we might as well be dead.

This is the narrative of the nervous system.

Un-safety exists in isolation.

Then there is the kicker:

relational rupture which prevents our belonging to our community is almost always accompanied by shame. Whether well founded or unnecessary, rupture is always - at least in part - felt to be our fault. If we couldn’t keep the relationship, we caused the rupture, our system believes.

As such, all rupture isn’t experienced as the sole fault of the other (even if we can know it is entirely due to the other’s “stuff”, or behavior). Instead, rupture is felt first as a personal lack.

We lost.

We must have earned the separation, or at the very least not earned the right to relational retention.

When faced with such a trifecta - (often, though not always) a childhood remembrance of a loss of safety with a loss of love, adult awareness of loss of safety through loss of community, and the internal shame where we fear our role in events - we react with our conditioned responses to stress states.

Without extensive internal work (which can safeguard sovereignty in the light of rupture), we end up in internal self-combustion, or external enraged attack.

I can point to this in the divisiveness of the world at large, where disenfranchised individuals vent revenge hatred on a mass of others. Or where groups double down on difference in an attempt to prove loyalty of belonging to their faction for fear of being ostracized.

But I am not a “world at large” commentator.

I am a trauma educator, and an observer of energetics.

This year, my husband and I were at the behest of relational rupture on so many sides. Some close friendships and relationships evaporated as people made decisions which chose isolation from us, for what they perceived was their safety. We understood. We comprehend. We hold neither anger nor enmity, but we did, and do, feel the pain of these losses deeply.

My husband’s ex-wife filed for divorce in June of 2024, anticipating that her threat of rupture would invite deeper repair with her then husband. When it was clear that her request was actually to herald a permanent end to her marriage (and the life she had come to know, and had depended on), she experienced the gravity of the rupture she had invited, though had never intended to cause. As did we.

I haven’t been able to write this post until now. Every time, my writings have concluded with paragraph upon paragraph of descriptions of the divisive actions taken by my husband’s ex-wife in the last year in response to this rupture.

This is what untended rupture creates.

Separation.

If the ruptured cannot see a way to either repair or let go, they can become obsessed with the rupture itself, as opposed to life on the other side of it. In a bizarre twist of chemistry they are ‘separated’ from the “rupturer”, and yet also bonded to them. Their agenda can become entirely enmeshed to the pain of rupture, and often turns to either revenge, or self-validation.

The agenda of the ruptured can include creating an alternative “reality” filled with “reasons” for the rupture that justify their “rightness” and the other’s “wrongness”. This is the salve to shame.

But herein lies the life of the victim.

This is where persecutive religious factions begin. It’s where bullying and gossiping starts. It’s the root of so much separatism that we currently see in the world.

The need to hurt and wound because we feel so deeply unsafe abounds, coupled with the defense against our own shame, fear, or sense of inferiority which morphs into a staunch narrative of attack of ‘other’.

The reasons made up in the realm of untended rupture aren’t intended to be wholly truthful. They’re intended to be an edited explanation of why the rupture happened, one that covers any shame of self-responsibility, and places all blame elsewhere.

These reasons help because they’re energetic buffers against feeling the true pain of the experience.

The problem with holding on fast to the defense against the rupture is that it actually keeps you attached: to the rupture, and to the individual with whom that rupture occurred. You cannot let go of a relationship if you have become wedded to your justificational story of its ending - a story which keeps you locked in the very suffering against which you were trying to defend. And you cannot attach to the new when you are consumed with the rupture of old.

Untended rupture isn’t just about the ruptured, however. It tends to ensnare both parties, including the rupturer. It’s not the rupture that’s the central tie, it’s the untended nature of it. It becomes the proverbial elephant in every room of being: there is an unresolved energy in my life, and I am powerless to resolve it.

This is especially true when the ruptured’s response to rupture is to persecute and attempt to further alienate the other party. Tit for tat. Revenge at its finest.

This is what happened to us. In an attempt to claim sovereignty over a situation in which she felt out of control, my husband’s ex-wife began to tell a made-up version of events. She attempted to get attention for her new “truth” from counsellors, law enforcement, CPS, media, the District Attorney (to influence Caleb’s criminal case), and her family law attorneys.

Her focus was on parental alienation, and - to all intents and purposes - attempting to ruin her former husband’s life.

Not because she or her children were hurt in the way she invented.

But she WAS hurt.

The hurt was in the untended rupture: the words unsaid, apologies unmade, closings and griefs not fully felt, truths not shared, pain not explored - leaving a fiction that felt safer to spring up in their place.

My impulse has been to share everything we have been through: the fear for the safety of our family, and the pain of being powerless in a situation where you are accused of the very thing being done to you.

I want to lament publicly about the trauma that has been, and continues to be, conveyed into my husband’s children by this whole debacle.

But I won’t. Not because I’m virtuous: because I recognize the impulse that is bubbling in me, and I can name where it emanates from.

Belonging.

The very same origin that created these problems in the first place.

I can feel my wanting to “out” my husband’s ex-wife as my own form of alienation. In her pain, her attempt to gain support was to create stories which would engender compassion, belief, and sympathy.

In my pain, I want to share our year’s horror because I want to feel compassion and empathy. I want her behavior to be known, I want to feel met in the craziness, and I want to find safety in sharing truth to “outweigh” the lies.

It’s universal, you see. Needing to be met, needing community, needing to be heard. Needing to belong.

The choice of actions taken by this person is not something I will ever be able to condone... but the motivational reason for doing it? I get it, I really do.

But things CAN be different.

So what is necessary? How can we tend the ruptures we feel in the context of someone not interested in co-tending to the relational field, and who has a proven desire to believe their own alternative narrative?

This is not about self-love.

This is not about filling your cup first.

This is not about cheap coaching tricks of “love yourself enough and you don’t need anyone else”.

This is a relational rupture, so it can only be repaired in relationship. We need the other. We need community. We need to feel belonging. None of this would hurt or matter if it wasn’t foundational to our humanness.

First, we must attend to our actual belonging: places not where our home is threatened, but where it still exists.

(Importantly, communities of belonging found through our wounding will not ever be home, as the currency of our belonging there is pain, wounding, and the illusion of isolation and separateness itself.)

Second, we must attend to the deeper seams of connection that exist underneath the rupture. The meaning behind the separation, not the human story but the energetic one.

The deeper truth is that rupture reinforces the illusion of separateness.

We are all, forever, bound, no matter how profoundly our human experience ruptures and appears to separate.

Knowing this spiritual, energetic principle provides a foundation in the face of the experience of rupture.

Thus, the solution to rupture is anchoring yourself within connection: both in the real human experience, and within the deeper consciousness one.

For us, our choice not to allow the ruptures occurring to impact our capacity to love, give, and belong to one another. Amidst this storm, our relationship - and its unwavering connection - became the stronger force.

We also focused on the energy behind it all. Knowing that the actions that stemmed from hurt, pain, and resentment were begging our energetic attention: a currency we did not need to give it.

That is the solution to rupture.

Tend to it where you can.

Grieve it yourself - properly - if it cannot be tended to.

And do not pour more energy into the abyss of separation by meeting the combative energy there. Repair doesn’t come in the abyss.

It comes in the connection that lies beneath and beyond the sense of separation you feel.

And for those who will ask for the conclusion, or for more information, on our story (despite me stating that I will not share it in full detail).

Happily, everyone that matters has ignored my husband’s ex-wife. Police and CPS resolutely dismissed her, as there is no evidence of what she tried to claim. Under deposition, her narratives crumbled and were shown to be evidently false.

Thus, the day before our family court case, she dropped every single one of over 80 charges she had brought against me and my husband, and every attempt to restrict his access to his own children.

Just like that.

After a year of accusations and knocks on the door that could have completely ripped my family - with our infant twins - apart... it all just went away.

Because that’s what happens with untended drama, without fueling the abyss.

Answer lies with honesty. Trust the truth will out, there’s nothing else you can do. Give it less oxygen - and whether or not the fire ever existed (which, in these scenarios, it often doesn’t), the smoke will eventually disappear. Remember the wounding of separation at its core. And remember the truth of universal connection that’s even deeper.

A final piece to share, for integrity: my husband’s ex-wife has changed her demeanor since we lost the one thing we wanted at trial (to share driving of the 2 x 10-hour round trips each possession weekend). Perhaps she simply feels back in control and has another agenda. I don’t know, it’s too exhausting to contemplate. But if she tries something else, all of the lessons we’ve learned this year will stand us in good stead to face that challenge also.

But I made our response to life events this year seem automatic and easeful above. It was anything but.

As humans, journeys of Separation are the most profound of our consciousness. The harder the battle of remembering oneness, the more impactful and evolutionary the lesson. These remembrances must begin with lever-arching corrective thought into the pathway of fully experiencing the emotional angst.

I could not easily remember oneness when my children’ lives were in jeopardy.

We lost calmness in the face of others’ aggression. It was terrifying. I felt rage, upset, confusion, and the aching sadness of powerlessness at the behest of lies. I have lived this multiple times in my life. It hurts like hell. It’s clearly ancestral/karmic, and fundamental to my consciousness journey.

But that’s how I knew it was growth material. Metabolizing and metamorphosing the sense of separateness, and for my need to prove myself, allowing for more of an ability to trust that truth was enough.

These are archetypal lessons.

This is the only way I can really ever process what life throws at me whilst I’m in the midst of forgetting wholeness. Separateness = opportunities to grow.

This is the path of spiritual and emotional maturity.

As such, it’s difficult.

A Small Introduction:

This piece is (very) long, and begins with outlining a lot of ‘negatives’ and ‘downsides’. For those who are engaged in the behaviors discussed, what is written here may feel accusatory, judgmental, even abjectly false from your perspective.

I encourage anyone who chooses to read this to:

1. Skip to “The Solution” section at any stage - just scroll down. There, I outline a deeper awareness of the societal necessity for such practices, and more.

2. COMMENT, ENGAGE, TELL ME where I am not seeing the whole picture or point - because I know, for a fact, that I cannot. If you are reading and see flaws in my thinking, take this article as a means to generate discussion, contemplation, and self-reflection - and that goes for us all. Instead of assuming and/or dismissing, please lean in and engage with me to expand this whole conversation.

The Situation

It’s 2025.

Drinking alcohol in Austin, Texas is no longer cool. Sobriety is a badge people wear with pride, so it is rare to be invited to a party where there would be a full liquor cabinet, shots, buckets of beer, and the like.

But that doesn’t mean that these parties are without indulgences. Look around, and it will be clear that everyone is slightly inebriated somehow. Not, perhaps, like they would be on alcohol. But there’s a definite energy of people being “high”. And, if you know anyone or anything about the crowd, you’ll know that someone, somewhere has shown up with a very legitimized, expected - yet still somewhat hush hush - stash/supply/stock.

Yet the sauce on hand isn’t booze. The open secrecy is actually because much of what is being bartered behind the scenes at these parties is not being legally distributed in these settings.

But we’re not talking cocaine or heroine… though that’s here somewhere, and definitely available if you ask. But it’s not cool to do that, either. (Who would put their bodies through THAT, people ask.)

The underground scene is now a cocktail of legitimized recreational drugs: whether that’s marijuana, mushrooms, LSD, MDMA (and its variants), or ketamine - always, there’s ketamine - you can get it at a party here. More than that, if you show up to a party, the person next to you is likely already on something, or about to be. There are even connoisseurs of sorts who become known at these parties for designing your night for you based on precise dosing and administration of the sequence of these party drugs. (They may even recommend supplements and support that you can take afterwards to ‘ease the effects'.)

And it isn’t even taboo. It’s certainly not frowned upon. In fact, it’s part and parcel of the party scene. And not in a way that it’s just what people do at parties.

Instead, in Austin at least, it has become HOW people do parties. More than just an optional, experimental addition, it is now seen almost as a required fuel source to enliven and nourish the party’s atmosphere and vibe.

“Altered consciousness states, bro - that’s what we’re all about, ya feel me?”

“The worlds my brain can access when I take just a smidge of these substances - it’s like opening up to the cosmos, and it facilitates connection, openness, bonding, and magical experiences.”

“And dude, do you know - it’s not addictive. Every successful entrepreneur is microdosing on the daily, and doing more on a weekend. THIS is the access that changes the world. I feel so close to God/Love/Oneness/Consciousness/the Universe when I’m floating in my tribe with these on board in my system. And we’re supposed to be communing with the universe in this way, using these drugs.”

And it’s EVERYWHERE. People segue from party usage to partner-time bonding usage. Then it seeps into ‘chilling out’ time. From there, it’s an occasional boredom break. And all of a sudden it’s a staple in someone’s life such that it becomes part of their routine.

These drugs are legitimized for the following reasons:

1. Everyone is doing it (so it’s cool, normal, and obviously must be ok - right?)

2. The chemicals used are often claimed to not have addictive potentials as a molecule (more on this later)

3. The downsides and consequences to using these drugs are seen as few, if any

4. People are having a good time, experiences are being had, and it appears (unlike alcohol, heroine, and cocaine) that nobody is getting hurt

And yet, if you are ever brave enough to comment that you know someone (even you yourself) who had a problem with these substances, the stories start to emerge. People, if they’re brave enough, start to admit that it’s become more of a dependency than a choice.

So what is really going on? How, and why, are people becoming addicted to recreational, non-addictive highs?

The Problem(s)

1. Dependency: Breaking Down Addiction

Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room: the addictive nature of non-addictive substances.

The biggest elephant in the room when it comes to this is Ketamine. This drug, classically used in high doses as an anesthetic in clinical settings, is used socially as a dissociative facilitator of accessing greater connection and easeful party vibes.

To be clear, Ketamine should be prescribed to an individual - and always is when it is clinically administered for easing anxiety and depression. Whether that’s in high doses for intravenous therapies, or as nasal sprays or dissolvable troches for at-home amelioration of mental health states, Ketamine is a useful drug: relatively free of side effects and, classically, non-addictive in nature.

When it is used at parties it is almost never prescribed to those participating in taking it. Whether they’ve access to someone’s prescription sprays and troches, or somehow have a way of getting vials of supply for intramuscular injection, the underground nature of this is because Ketamine is a controlled substance that cannot be obtained easily without physician oversight. If someone has a friendly provider who has prescribed them troches, knowing the utility for their specific conditions, they may indeed be using them as party facilitators - and, perhaps, sharing them with their friends…

It’s been seen as a relatively benign practice. Why? Because the doses you can get into at-home administered routes is low, and the experience can be short-lived, is often pleasant, and is often slightly amnesic (you forget things).

And there’s that wonderful chestnut which secures its place as the king of party drugs: it is non-addictive.

Now, this is chemically true, if not factually and experientially accurate.

Chemical dependencies are when cessation of the substance gives rise to uncomfortable, and often life threatening, withdrawal symptoms when stopped abruptly. With substances such as alcohol, cocaine, heroine etc. the body develops dependency, and the removal of these from one’s routine, especially suddenly and if usage has been high, can give rise to extreme negative physiological symptoms - often requiring medical supervision and intervention to prevent physical collapse.

It is accurate that this is not the case with Ketamine. It works differently in the system such that dropping from high usage to no usage at all is without physiological withdrawal symptoms.

And yet - ask anyone who’s done this - if you’re used to a life where Ketamine consumption is frequent, when it is stopped people report something that is not chemical dependency, but is definitely evidence that they were dependent in some way.

Their body might not be going through hell. But they - psychologically, emotionally, and ‘somatically’ - are.

Whether they report anhedonia (lack of ability to experience pleasure in things they used to find pleasurable), lack of motivation, irritability, restlessness, excessive tiredness, or other symptoms, there is a definite twofold response:

1. A general feeling of “meh” that varies per person based on their typical dosing, frequency, and administration route

2. A desire to return to using the substance

   1. the latter is coupled with the classic psychological pattern of the addict mindset: the consequence of return to substance use is discounted, and the mind becomes slightly (or excessively) obsessed with the next opportunity to obtain the substance

And challenge anyone who is used to partying on Ketamine (or MDMA, which is similar in its impact on experience) to go to their next party ‘clean’ or ‘sober’. Their instant instinct is “no”. If they do it, their sense is that it would have been better with the substance.

2. The Transformation of the Nature of Reality

As explored above, a complexity of using substances to support and facilitate any element of life is that it can alter life’s defaults.

Life gets boring when it’s so frequently peppered with highs. How can the party be fun without the boost of a chemical high? But more importantly, how can you do the washing up and the laundry without feeling like it’s just tedium? And because the cost of the substance is deemed so low, why don’t we just add a bit of that substance to our normality… surely that’s just a value add to normality?

It’s a little more nuanced than this, too. Ketamine impacts the dopamine (motivation/reward) circuitry. Life, in and of itself, can become just a little less inherently rewarding. MDMA can open up connection. Without that on board, social dexterity can become (or at least feel) limiting, false, or difficult.

Ultimately these lubricants take the place of ‘doing hard things’ - in this case, the reality of life. Ironically, the set of people using them tend to be the people who pride themselves on doing exactly the harder things in life. But somehow the achievements that seem difficult (ultramarathons, fundraising millions of dollars, launching a business from nothing) are extrinsically motivating enough to be pursuits well worth undertaking ‘clean’. The ability to be harmoniously within life without needing a substance to ease your day-to-day is not a ‘goal’ for many, despite it being a fundamental and foundational key to happiness. This is the classic intrinsic motivation of contentment. And it pales when experiences have been so colored by highs from drugs.

Why be content when you can be high?

Especially when the consequences of being ‘high’ seem low.

This is all because of the calculations human beings make about consequences and costs. We see challenges and difficulties as costs. What we struggle to see, however, is the peace afforded by natural, authentic (substance-free) ease.

And when we are surrounded by people who are similarly spaced on substances, everything feels authentic. But the very real cost of these substances is paid by the sober ones around you. You are never fully present in all of your humanness if you are slightly dissociated on Ketamine. And you are never really authentically present if your connection is facilitated by MDMA. You cannot translate that state into connection without the substance.

To anyone forced to interact with those who spend most of their time on substances, the cost and consequence is clear: they are always interfacing with a masked, unreal, or hyper-real, slightly absent version of the other. And the sober person’s nervous system picks up on this subconsciously. It is almost like interacting with AI: it is nearly there, but not quite. It’s an almost-relationship.

And the underlying sense is disquietude. Something just doesn’t seem quite real for the sober one. It’s because it isn’t. The person they are talking to is existing on a plane other than normal, human reality.

3. The Complex Challenge with “Admitting” the Problem

And there’s a final part of all of this which means that legitimized addictions are just that: they seem to carry with them less material consequences in the real world because they have a de-facto perception as ‘harmless’.

This means that there is not even a problem to admit, because there is no problem. This usage is normalized, accepted, and it’s now ‘the done thing’. Even if someone has the courage to admit that their usage of some substance might have gone too far, it is still in the light of “less would be ok, what I’m currently doing is just too much” - NOT: this substance presents a problem to my real life and material world, which is much closer to the truth.

There is also a narrative that the most successful people are continuing with these habits (not untrue: see below), so being ‘successful’ has become somewhat inextricably linked to the ability to access the altered states of consciousness, and of reality, that these substances afford.

The issue with this latter argument is twofold: successful people didn’t usually GET successful on substances, even if they started utilizing them later. And there is a survivorship bias in all of these stories. How about the (many) unsuccessful entrepreneurs who are also microdosing, or supporting their social life with substances, and who are not experiencing breakthroughs or changing the world? They exist, we just don’t know about them.

Quick Check-In: are y’all doing ok? That’s a lot of breaking down the bad side of habits which have been extensively whitelisted… How are we feeling about the expansion of perspective on this new social norm?

And a reminder - skip to “The Solution” section at any point if there’s a need to jump beyond self-evaluation or identification of elements which might explain some deep roots of these behaviors.

The Source of the Problem (Perhaps)

I look around at the people I know - and really like! - who are caught in this substance use trap. These are successful individuals who have thriving careers, big visions, complex aspirations to transform the world, and loving families and supporters who champion them in that. They are the ‘haves’, not the ‘have-nots’. In many ways, this makes these party drugs more alluring. Their users have tasted success, and the trappings of material richness.

Their seeking may now be much more on an interpersonal level, and this pursuit feels benefited by the usage of substances which lubricate social interactions in such a way where cloaks can be shed, masks can be worn or dropped, truths can be unsheathed, and desires can be explored.

Whether that be desires for interactions with others (yes, you know what I am talking about), desires to know more of ‘Oneness’, or desires to feel ‘more of oneself’ - almost all of the use of these substances is done to open the doorways within to enable access to these desired states.

And this usage of substances to facilitate more openness, honesty, compassion, and ease-fulness regarding ones desires highlights to me the entire source of the problem of this latest craze of recreational addictions.

In real life, everyone - and perhaps especially those highly successful individuals - is either pretending, hiding, or experiencing a blockage to being their full self.

Whether they are hiding something they perceive to be a shadow, or running from some part of their own reality, or willfully repressing an element of themselves (good, or bad), these substances facilitate a two-fold process:

1. Dissociation from reality enough to feel unencumbered by limitations/shame/inhibitions

2. Connection enough (through greasing the consciousness/emotional wheels) to feel “OK” manifesting both their sparky, shiny selves, AND their more ‘shadowy’ or socially taboo sides in these settings

It’s like it’s both an experiential condom AND lubrication: you can dissociate from feelings (such as shame) which will make openness easier, and you can simultaneously gain smoother access to the depths and fullness of experiences.

And still - everything I’m saying sounds GREAT, doesn’t it??

Ah, well - herein lies the difficulty.

If you require the addition of a chemical substance to provide enough safety for you to experience the fullness of yourself - including your shadows - and to feel confident being that self with other people… then you are still deeply at odds with the self that you identify yourself to be.

Put another way: if your shadows (and gifts) are such that you need to be slightly dissociated in order to be with them, then these shadows/gifts are something that you are going to forever be in a relationship with rather than embodying and owning.

To take it one step further: if a drug facilitates connection, you are “othering” the part of yourself that you feel cannot be loved without that drug on board.

ONE ENORMOUS CAVEAT: trauma histories and traumatic imprints suck. They require some dissociation to metabolize, integrate, and navigate. Utilizing substances such as Ketamine in a therapeutic setting to facilitate such processes is a phenomenal tool.

Using Ketamine every weekend, MDMA every time you have to have a difficult conversation, mushrooms every other weekend, or doing Ayahuasca in some ‘church’ out in Dripping Springs every month … just to get to “OK with self enough to do tomorrow” - that’s what I’m talking about in this article.

I am a super fan of utilizing non-ordinary states of consciousness to facilitate stepping stones to self-hood.

I am very against relying on non-ordinary states of consciousness to quash our discomfort with self-hood enough to make it through to the next day.

Let’s take a pause.

How are we feeling, readers? Triggered? Objecting to what I’m saying? Feel like this doesn’t apply to you? Or feeling seen, and as if a layer of protection over your strategy has been peeled back?

Or, if this isn’t your world, are you shocked? Unsurprised? Seeking to ‘take these people down a peg or two’ because their success was “obviously” based on inferiority complexes, imposter syndrome, and the like?

Or something else? - I’d love to hear… just pop a note “CTA” in your comment so I know you left that comment at this point in the article!!

Leave a comment

The Solution

When I personally point at this happening in this society (the Austin party scene), it is as an observation mixed with sorrow and compassion, not judgement (not that I haven’t been in this place with this topic in the past, hence not sharing my thoughts until now).

I don’t feel that these successful individuals require taking down a peg or two.

I don’t feel that there is a need to even point fingers at the human beings pursuing these avenues of legitimized feeling, nor the society which has given rise to it.

In an environment wherein it feels dangerous to be ourselves, seeking ways that feel safer to facilitate selfhood is natural.

And that is where we are right now, globally. We exist in a time of identity uncertainty, gender role uncertainty, economic uncertainty, and more. Everywhere I look I witness behaviors that emerge from these seams of uncertainty.

The unsafety of self-expression has never been more real. So in this climate, is it any wonder we seek out “legitimate” ways to hide in plain sight? Facilitated spaces, using substances, where we feel it is easier to exhale into our being-ness?

For all men who are scared to allow masculinity through their expression - isn’t it safer to have a tool which smoothes the way for self, and other, to allow for a) masculinity to flow, but also simultaneously b) (often thanks to MDMA) for their femininity to be along for the ride so they are non-threatening even in the expression of their desire for dominance or power?

For all women who are completely (understandably) confused as to whether womanhood is bare-breasted howling at the moon and smearing menstrual blood on their bodies, or being a badass, competent, female who is capable of calling forth their King - isn’t it safer to have a tool which answers the question for you as it facilitates a softening that allows sensuality to feel contained (and a little far away), but also to feel completely “met” by the other?

And for those trying to truly embody the false feminine archetypes outlined above, gosh isn’t it easier to have inhibitions suppressed marginally to allow for the masks of what you’re told is feminine to be worn?

Honestly: there’s countless examples that I could go into - so feel free to draw your own. What I am attempting to highlight is the actual NEED for these tools, based on the scenario and challenges in which we find ourselves in modern relating. Being oneself is getting harder and harder, it seems. So using the tools which simultaneously mask/repress, whilst also lowering our fear of being who we are, seems like a necessity, not a choice.

And yet, I titled this section “The Solution”.

And whilst the party drugs seem to help the societal milieu, they are but a sticking plaster tool to support the problem. They do not heal the wound.

And no, somatic coaches who offer dance/breath-work/’nervous system regulation tools’ this isn’t about your stuff either (more sticking plasters, more fake healing, more not-self strategies which construct a life, rather than allow people to embody their own)…

On a side note, and this is really important: substances facilitate altered states of consciousness. So does breathwork, ecstatic dance, sound healing - and all of the somatic ‘tools’ which are promoted by so-called ‘somatic coaches’ who promote ‘substance-free’ evolution.

Whilst lesser in extreme, all of these tools offer experiential processes which interface with human reality and alter chemical neutrality. They are tools for therapeutic effect, yes. But they ARE NOT ROUTES TO GREATER SAFETY WITHIN ONE’S NORMAL HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY. THEY ARE NON-ORDINARY STATES, AND, AS SUCH, DO NOT PAVE ANY KIND OF PATHWAY TO PEACE WITHIN AN ORDINARY, NON-MEDICATED/NON-EXPERIENTIALLY-ALTERED STATE.

But back to the actual Solution, then.

There is a world in which your shadows can be accepted, heard, welcomed, and loved - without needing the filter of a dissociative substance in the way.

There is a world where looking at your shadows with the loving support of another - and WITHOUT SUBSTANCES ON BOARD - can allow you to actually see what you’re fearing as opposed to running from it.

There is a world in which the integration of our past wounding, trauma, and conditioning can provide for the healthiest foundation from which you feel empowered to gaze directly at the parts of yourself you have tried to jettison, and approach them with understanding, compassion, and acceptance (instead of fearful ‘embrace’ solely whilst on substances).

And in a world where 90% of the people who are using these substances are paying good money for ‘coaches’, it literally breaks my heart that they are not finding these safe spaces, loving containers, and empowered places. They are spending more of their money on their ‘inner work’ than many of us can even comprehend, much less afford. And instead of finding a container in which their real self is discovered, unearthed, evaluated, examined, appreciated, loved, and nurtured: they discover empty tools and techniques, some wafty femininity meets emasculated masculinity archetype narratives which sound good, and ‘trauma’ is met with ‘somatics’ in a way that childhood experiences are guided into the body as a vibration (or some such nonsense) instead of out of the body as a release of contraction, facilitating more flow.

But, seriously:

Why is our business called Soul Flow Mechanics? With its parent company name Unveil?

Because these two tenets - flow and unveiling - determine everything that is healthy about being alive.

When people with these kinds of addictions come to me for support, we don’t talk about the addiction first (often, because they can’t yet see it).

And we don’t tiptoe around the edge of trauma, even.

My process is unique, unlearned in and of itself, but influenced through countless hours of training in respecting the nervous system.

So I start with staring straight at someone’s shadows, pain, wounding, and the things they are afraid to say (safely: and the ‘how’ to do this goes beyond the scope of this writing).

Then I move onto the exploration of how those shadows manifest in their worlds.

Then we graduate our work around not explorations of “why then”, but understandings of “why now”. For some, this involves understanding history. For others, it requires an in-depth understanding of the present.

The reality is that every addiction is an avoidance of a shadow part that has not yet been embraced. And working with shadows, and the human realms of shame, starts the doorway being opened authentically (instead of with substances).

For some, a delicate Somatic Experiencing™ approach to metabolizing and integrating historic trauma is necessary. For others, a confrontation of their defenses is a much more forceful affair.

But the dance isn’t in the discussion, nor the somatic exploration of sensation in the system as we have that discussion (though both of those are relevant).

And, to be clear, if you know me - I don’t do this in every conversation. I’m not in this mode if I’m walking down the street (or I try not to be!). But in my work, and in my most intimate relationships, this is the only way I can orient. Because it is therapeutic in and of itself.

And there are many coaches who say they do this, and yet just don’t - because they can’t. It takes years, if not decades, of doing one’s own work and clearing one’s own system to be able to hold someone in this way… whilst simultaneously utilizing key therapeutic techniques for integration, metabolization, nuanced self-processing, and more.

It’s not an either-or. It’s a both-and. And for people whose preference is for spiritual and experiential escapism it is a delicate dance of legitimizing their desire for non-presence at the same time as calling them forward into greater and greater presence.

And no, this whole article wasn’t a sales pitch, per se (though see below for some real honesty on that score). I don’t say that this work must be done with a safe other because I want you to call me (I can’t take clients right now anyway!). But it must be done with a safe other because it HAS to be. Wounding is relational. Therefore healing must, and can only be, relational.

And when I get triggered in the vestiges of my wounding - still ever-present, despite continuing depths of awareness - I use my skill of healthy, aware dissociation to take that triggering into my own personal containers, to work on, with gratitude. I do not make the client in front of me responsible for holding my energy, nor do I make them responsible for creating it.

And that’s the difference I’ve noticed in my own capacity over the decades. The evolution of skill is in meeting people with ever more complete perception, and yet complete neutrality within myself. For those who approach me seeking support, there is only one response:

Why Now, for this Article?

What the above means is that my professional work is MY work too. It’s why I love it: because when in service I am serving both others and self. It’s why there’s seasons to it. It’s why there’s a time and place for me to be of service outwardly, and a time and place when I cannot.

There is a time for my evolution - and those times dovetail with the times I am serving others. And there’s a time when I need to be in internal gestation (like the last 9 months), where my external work slows.

Honestly, this whole piece emerged because my partner and I were talking about money. We were discussing how our incomes are not sufficient at the moment, and I was reflecting on how I have segued more and more into the operational and management side of our business instead of “doing what I do” (a phrase we often use with one other). And in this conversation, we discussed the world which we inhabit - and I found myself voicing these opinions effusively… opinions I didn’t know I actually had all stored up and sitting there.

It seems I’ve been seeing, observing, and witnessing for over a year now, and I felt the call to share the wisdom I feel I’ve gained here.

But there’s an additional element of becoming a mother which plays in too.

I don’t want to raise my children to be people who cannot face their reality with the fullness of compassion that they deserve. I don’t ever want them to feel at all disconnected from someone with whom they interact, simply because there’s a substance on board in that adult’s system. Children learn from modeling - and I never want my children to witness emptiness in an adult who is supposedly present with them. And, frankly, I want to be the best mother I can be, and that may very well mean that I need to immerse myself back in the work of working on self… which means that I’ll be out there supporting others again, and then my ‘stance’ needs to exist somewhere. Who knows?

But I also know that when I look at the ‘helpers and healers’ that those that I know consult, I see brilliant people who are all lulled by the trappings of experiential things. Whether that’s drugs, or ecstatic dance, or some kind of drumming circle, or any kind of ritualistic hocus pocus wonderment that has been drummed up (and culturally appropriated) - whatever it is - everyone I see in the world I observe who claims the title “coach” is doing so from a lens either of utilizing escapist tools (drugs, ceremonies, rituals, retreats, etc.) or they are doing so with an agenda that comes from their own wounding (feminine embodiment practitioners, please take note).

And it irks me. And - frankly - if I am not adding my skillset and devotion to the process of being a helping/serving individual, I literally don’t GET to be irked by this.

“So stop talking about it, and start being an example of what you think is a better model”, my own internal navigation system said.

So here is where I start. Yes, I’m prepared for backlash, drama, triggering, and coaches everywhere defending their work and saying they do exactly what I’ve described (which may, indeed, be true!). But in the hopes of beginning contemplation in anyone who has read to this point - whether party participant, coach, or simply a bystander in the scene - I leave you with some questions to ponder:

A thought-piece about Trauma, Time, and “The Present Moment” must open with some definitions. The opening of this post, therefore, shares my own, somewhat imperfect, attempt to succinctly supply definitions in a way that facilitates more easeful reading of the exploration that is to follow.

Trauma

Trauma is not ‘what happened’ it’s ‘how you reacted to it’.

This is a lazy and incomplete, if effective, way of opening the discussion around what constitutes a trauma. For the purposes of this writing (here, and elsewhere from me) I specify that for trauma to have lasting impact (and thereby leave a traumatic imprint) it must contain a contextual milieu of:

1. a stressful situation that was too much for your system, to lacking for your needs, or simply to fast for you to handle (both one-off events and long-term conditions can apply here). In essence, a situation that felt, for whatever reason, unsafe, AND in some way either inescapable or uncontrollable

2. this must be accompanied with a simultaneous lack of historic capacity (no demonstrated ability to handle that stress). In essence, no roadmap of familiarity to imagine competence around whatever was being faced

3. and this is typically also tied to a simultaneous lack of social support to help contextualize and make meaning from what has been experienced

It is this perfect storm - something stressful, sensing incapacity and helplessness, and a lack of resources (other humans, own capacity, rationalization potential) that allows what was a traumatic event to seep into becoming a traumatic imprint.

Time and The Present Moment

The discussion of the consequences of traumatic imprints lead to the conclusion that this results in a system with a dominant trauma response pattern. Such a system is fundamentally unable to fully be in every present moment.

Trauma generates a uncertainty field about reality - a sense that you can never know what is going to happen, and both people and events are unpredictable (or predictably negative). Due to our human need for self-preservation, we allow these alterations in our predictive frames of reference. We include the predictive, preservational imagination of impossible (or, at the very least, extremely unlikely) threats and dangers within the current prediction field about what is happening in the now. We over-interpret our present, leading every ‘now’ moment to be an uncomfortable dwelling place of potential challenges, and pitfalls we must avoid.

This merging of past events and projecting them onto both present and future moments is referred to as collapsing time. It has the impact of compressing the non-real into a potential-real. In this situation the human has no choice but to act as if the predicted potentials (based on a trauma-infused frame of reference) could really happen. As such, they are not living fully in connection with the accuracy of the present moment, but they are living with a present moment that has an accompanying haze of past memories, from which stem a projected mirage of future fears.

If this is true, what is to add here about Trauma’s Impact on Time?

I would qualify myself as someone who has vast experience with personally possessing these filters, projection fields, and generative fear-scapes. My why is immaterial, because if you’re a non-present-moment person you will have your own reasoning (and irrationality) behind your illusions, but the net result is the same: an inability to settle within reality as it is presented. There is another shoe preparing to drop, always.

But what I did not realize about Trauma’s Time Warp is that it is so busy dragging from the past to the present, and projecting into the future, that it doesn’t just prevent you from being fully in the present moment.

Deeply ingrained Trauma Response Patterning can prevent you from chrono-locating ANYWHERE.

The Implications of Timelessness

What this truly leads to is a profound inability to Trust. Trust with a capital T in this instance, because this isn’t just about trusting people, or yourself (though both play a part), but it is about Trusting in one’s own trajectory within life - Trust in Life Itself.

When instability is introduced into your field (via traumatic imprinting) this creeping lack of trust of life itself can mean that when you are beyond the trauma, and life is presenting opportunities of a future to you, you cannot possibly relax into them, any more than you can the present.

To a system based on trauma-responses, the future is a foreign land filled with dinosaurs, dragons, demons, and danger. But that can be worked on. Prediction references and frameworks can be updated (utilizing, most often, deep somatic integration work to update nervous system sensing, as these are not just mental projections, they are more often ‘gnosis projections’ based on feeling, sensation, and known (historic) realities).

But it’s deeper than that. Because once the prediction field of dread disappears, life isn’t “fixed”.

Losing the prediction of a fearful future is step one. Not seeing danger when you look at your present and tomorrows is important.

But there is an essential second step.

How to Have a Future With an Uncertain Past

I realized this over a cautious few months where my future was taking shape. After a lifetime of short-termism, I have had roots and foundations growing for a while (a year or so) - and it’s been lovely. But then another tsunami hit that and I prepared for another revolution of my world, which did happen, although not in the way that led to me physically uprooting this time.

In fact, what happened was that I found my life partner, fell pregnant (with twins), and was suddenly staring down the future otherwise-known-as “forever”.

And I didn’t freak out, particularly. I have just had zero ability to connect to that reality at all. Forever has been a word. Lifetime has been a concept. NONE of it has been a felt gnosis sense of possible. So my gnosis-prediction wasn’t “life is going to suck”, but then it was stuck.

Present moment safety - sheesh, I’ve been in trauma work for YEARS, so I’m just swell at accurately responding (almost always without trauma loops) to the present.

But relaxing into the concept of TOMORROWS? I suddenly saw I couldn’t do it. I was tense within my present day, holding onto a rhythm of ‘now’ and ‘next’, but with no longevity.

And to get my head around A LIFETIME? FOREVER? UNTO THE DEATH?

Nope. Wasn’t happening.

The Circuit of Escapism

Now, I had my “reasons” of course - it was his fault, he didn’t enter into the relationship with those feelings. It was his history’s fault, he’s promised this to someone before and that wasn’t a “forever” thing so how could ours be. It was our reality’s fault: there’s so much uncertainty right now that it’s hard to connect to the through-line of permanence.

And there’s grains of truth to all of this.

But it’s also all externalizing.

Because the truth is, it was my fault.

And as I allowed myself to see that, two strings of my reality became clear:

1. I couldn’t believe in forever, because as part of my traumas I had to anticipate forever not being a very long time. I can’t believe in forever, because within the realm of promises I’m used to them being broken. I can’t believe in forever because my perspective of time is so shifted based on how my reality thus far has taken shape - this is all the history projecting forwards.

2. Honestly, I never believed anyone would choose me forever - my system has become so used to feeling useful for a while until I would become un-useful to that person, that I’ve been waiting for this person to “realize” that “life” just meant this season whilst he needed me too - and this is the deeper part that required attention.

For 1) above - that’s somatic trauma work.

But for 2), that little nugget of being anywhere “while I’m needed” and rejected when I’m not belies a core belief that I invited for my own safety.

And yet it’s not what you think. It’s not a core belief in myself, per se. It’s a core belief which prevents all pain in the future - and therefore prevents me ever believing in a future at all.

Because many people have ‘not good enough’ energy behind their fear of never being chosen.

Mine doesn’t begin there, at least not any more. Mine emanates as a pre-emptive strike. If I believe I will never be chosen, I won’t. Then I won’t have promises broken, losses of ‘forever’ to face, or the pain of getting faith and trust wrong.

If my belief is that my life is seasonal, temporary, and that people only choose me for their needs for a short time… I can move through life as if it is impermanent. This means that when one door closes, the season changes, one relationship ends, I don’t ever have to mourn it as a loss - it’s just the way things are.

But that’s protection, you see. A spiritual bypass which allows for veneration of others’ freedom, and never states the needs of my nervous system. I allow people to ‘use’ my presence, because I myself am never committed to the potential of permanence… which solely leaves me without a tether to forever.

So where does this leave us?

The somatic resolution of nervous system responses in the now is a fundamental fragment of the emotional and psychological integration of a traumatic history. Being able to be physically and energetically present in the now is the sign of a regulated system.

But there is so much more to healing from our wounds than metabolizing our somatic stress into presence.

There is the art of recognizing how we protect ourselves with beliefs - about ourselves, the world, and those around us.

There is the work of truly seeing how our defense is in our defeatism, but also in our self-protection from future pain.

And, beyond just being in the present, there is the delicacy of allowing ourselves to not just believe in a future - but fully, viscerally, see ourselves there and trust in the steps we take to get there.

Last night, I laid next to my partner and wasn’t worried about the present moment - after my life’s work for the last few years has been being in it.

Instead, I lay there and I allowed it to steal into my imagination, then into my aura, and then into my soul, that he is going to be there forever.

Yes, he is going to be there when I’m taking up twice as much space in the bed (pregnant growth is kicking in now!). And yes, he is going to be there when I’m feeling sexy and frisky, and when I’m feeling weak and tearful.

But I knew that already. I’ve already witnessed him be present for countless parts of me.

What I finally felt last night, and embraced, was TIME ITSELF.

The fact that we HAVE IT. We have the exhales of tonight because so many tomorrows exist. We have the peace of not fixing every problem right now because there’s another day. We have the luxury of getting it wrong because we have SO MUCH TIME to get it right.

And, in that moment, I wasn’t in the present moment at all. Nor was I in the fearful past, and I wasn’t projecting, dreaming, or visioning into the future.

I was in ALL OF IT. I was in Timelessness. The quintessential reality of Now and Forever, all at once - no pressure of immediacy, or longevity. Just… expanse.

And that’s when I realized that I am going to marry this guy. And that when he proposes it’s not going to be stressful, and it doesn’t have to be perfect. What that moment represents is the crowning glory of Timelessness that we are committing to together. Forever now, always here, for the expansiveness of everything that is.

And that feels like the safest place I could ever choose to be.

*this article is not an explanation of how I allowed myself to get to this place. That may form the work of another day.

But for now, as I am going to do in my writing, I end with a curiosity contemplation for anyone reading this:

Is there anywhere where your belief over what is possible is creating your experience of the future? i.e. where your concept of who you are or how life works is generating an inability for your body to conceive of another reality.

And, separately:

What does the present moment feel like to you if you simultaneously realize that it is all that is, whilst also recognizing that it contains every future within it. It is the microcosm of the future. And life is very short, but within it you still have an abundance of time.