The phrase "The Great Empty" characterizes my entire life from adolescence until now. My most recent Substack post is a includes a confessional about coming to terms with this. Honestly, I have to admit that I feel with hopeless and pathetic that I'm only fully coming to grips with it at 30.
It also seems to fit with the comment I left on one of your earlier posts about narcissism being much more of a relational strategy than an inherent temperament (something that I think a lot of research shows, and that I've come to notice personally; though my choice of cope was compulsive people pleasing).
I'm like you in that psychedelics were a huge assist in getting me to this point. I did two "big journeys" – MDMA and ketamine respectively – and have very occasionally micro-dosed on psilocybin since then. Trying integrate into a sense of authenticity post-trip has been a lifetime's worth of work, and I've still only dug myself out of the ditch by a foot-and-a-half.
I've had four people now (including a healthy male mentor who I deeply trust and my very skilled Ayurvedic practitioner) recommend that I do an Iboga journey in the next couple years, and that I'm 'ready' for it – clearing out a bunch of stuff lodged in my nervous memory and/or my larger metabolic engine.
One of the reasons that true love (in the agape sense, not purely eros) is such a good medicine is that it sets up the container for the medicine to be administered at the right time, in the right way, in the right order. This is something I've come to realize, through both coaching work and other relationships, is essential to bridging the gap back to a sense of self that feels more natural, even if it remains largely fragmented and fluid.
What is really interesting to me is that I'm a prime candidate for wokeness in a lot of ways, and yet, I never got pulled into it in a full-throttled way. I still don't really understand why. I credit it to my inherent allergy for social bullshit past a certain threshold, which is kind of an unexpected trait to possess for someone as squishy as I am.
I love this so much. I just wrote a substack article about labels, language, and my personal experience dealing with BPD, fibromyalgia, and a possible Autism diagnosis alongside other symptoms listed in your article. I've learned that humans are not easily defined, and that we should strive to improve the symptoms beyond just medication which is what I'm doing right now. I loved reading you and I hope someone howls back! I'm howling back to you, and I'm glad I am.
Aww, I'm happy to wake up to this comment! I had a mental health crisis from about 2018-2020 (which magic mushrooms and meeting my husband pulled me out of) and when I sought professional help a handful of doctors and a psychiatrist basically told me I was hard to diagnose. They all agreed on "generalized anxiety disorder", but told me I also had mild traits of bipolar disorder (which one of my uncles and one of my good friends have been diagnosed with), ADHD, and a depressive disorder, as well as some autistic traits. I fell off a stairwell (off, as in there was no railing, not down) when I was a year old and landed on the right side of my head, so I've had some chronic pain and other issues related to that. The labels were unhelpful. But looking at causes and symptoms was, and trying to address them. I was prescribed some medication for a while but stopped taking it after the mushrooms (I think I saw some of the rare good doctors out there, because they were supportive of me avoiding medication, or only using it short-term, and told me that given the context for my symptoms I described, I was actually pretty "high functioning" LOL).
I'm reading your article right now, and it's good :-) I'm glad to hear you're healing. #TeamWerewolf
I'm glad to join #TeamWerewolf ! I'm super proud of you and so glad we're both healing despite everything. I'm adopted so they believe being abandoned at birth has something to do with everything, but whatever the reason, we are healing! That's the important thing
Tell her she’s amazing and didn’t deserve to be left behind, it’s not her fault. I love my mom (adoptive mother) and my dad was the absolute best! He died when I was 10, but I was so grateful to have them both. I’m sure your mom is delighted to have you! you’re very special, brave, and a light this world needs.
I used to think that feedback (giving and receiving) is the way to go, and that there was a broad understanding of this. We just had to create better systems that facilitate this feedback (as in engineering). But now I see myself surrounded by people who actively do not wish feedback, who actively resist it -- as in the mainstream culture, where reality is countered by lies, and in personal contact, people walk (no, run!) away from open discussion with someone with differing views.
I ache for being howled at back! That is why I am online. How else do I find out if any of my ideas are valid? How else do I find out what other people's reaction to my behavior is, if I block their feedback? And so much of the progressive (woke) pathologies are related to lack of feedback. Socialism (as an economic system) founders on lack of ready feedback (that a market system ideally provides). So much of the craziness we see nowadays has to do with (and this is ancient!) putting theory above experience. Putting abstractions above reality. Dreaming up some ideal state and expecting the real world to obey.
Here is a pet peeve of an example: Defund the police! -- Everybody is leery of cops. But what do you do when you defund them and they go away? Rich communities with minor crime do ok. Poorer and already high crime communities are fucked. But the defunders don't seem to care. Their dream is what matters, and when reality does not conform, they blame reality.
Yep, that's the left hemisphere -- obsessed with abstractions, and incapable of meaning-making :-p
Oh man, the defund the police thing ... I told a bunch of defund-the-police socialists that if they really cared about white-collar crime (my city has a huge money laundering problem etc) they should want to give the police MORE money so they could hire forensic accounts and lawyers. Insanity.
Thirty years ago, I weaseled myself into a cop forum and argued with them about drug policies. A big part of my argument was, stop persecuting pot smokers and rave dancers, and put your efforts into fraud, it's about to explode. Nope, they ridiculed me for that.
Thank you for writing this! Wow! I have so many thoughts, I will try to keep it to a short novel ;-). My oldest daughter has many (actually almost all) of the symptoms you talk about (although, curiously, my younger daughter does not). I also share some but not all of these traits. My oldest fell down the trans/woke rabbit hole when she was 14, and has been very reluctant to take on any of the responsibilities or habits of adulthood. I'm still trying to figure out if there's a way I can help her get into a healthier state of mind or if she has to figure this out (or not) on her own. So many of the things you discussed ring true; a few do not.
I am an avid reader and my daughter was as a kid. It's clear that excessive internet use was the trigger for her going off the rails nearly overnight. So I agree that excessive written words could be a cause of some of these problems. I'm not sure that left-hemisphere tasks were pushed on her - she did love learning and reading when she was young but was also extremely imaginative and artistic. Diet could definitely be a cause - she has the typical autistic kid picky eating habits where she only eats like 10 things. Germanic descent - yes! This is the first time I've ever seen this connection made but it definitely seems true. The question I have is whether this is cultural, as you are suggesting, or whether it could be genetic - perhaps a vulnerability to something in our diets or environments that's less harmful to people with different genes.
I also have to wonder about the early childhood neglect angle. I'm trying to keep an open mind but it's difficult for me to see. My oldest was a very high-demands baby (I didn't realize how much until I later had a more typical baby). She rarely slept and was only happy if she was held nearly 24/7, so she was. Getting her to sleep every night was a 3 hour marathon of rocking, nursing, pacing, and singing, which I did, every single night. I breastfed for over 12 months. I did go back to work at 12 weeks but I could not imagine leaving this high-needs baby at a daycare so we hired a nanny who could give her one-on-one care at home. (She is one of the warmest people I've ever known, a grandmotherly type, and my kids are still close to her now, 19 years later. She became family.) There are things I regret, and wonder now if I caused damage somehow. My oldest was 2 1/2 when her sister was born and I have to wonder if the abrupt loss of being the sole center of attention was a cause. I think back on many things - the time I yelled at her harshly for waking up her sister when she was 3. The time when she was 11 months old and still not sleeping through the night that I in desperation tried to sleep train her (she won that battle after 3 nights and I never tried again). Did I watch TV too many times when I was nursing her instead of focusing on her? Was I too busy with chores? Did she eat too many packaged foods? Did I not validate emotions enough? Should I have sought an autism diagnosis and gotten her specialized therapy? Should I not have allowed the school to put her in a gifted class? Did I expect too much of her? Too little? Is something wrong with me and I shouldn't have had kids and passed on my genes? I really don't know.
I do have to question your assertion that "poisonous pedagogical" parenting such as sleep training, scheduling, and discipline have led to this. Clearly these practices were FAR more common a generation ago (I was sleep trained nearly from birth, spanked, kept on a schedule, and had plenty of chores and responsibilities, as were most kids of my generation) and yet our kids' mental health is getting worse, not better. So this part doesn't ring true. I believe you also mentioned in another article a connection with early puberty - obviously this is just anecdotal but my daughter was a very late bloomer (and so was I). Maybe being atypical in either direction, and therefore out of step with peers, is the real contributing factor? (I can tell you that being a 7th grader who could still pass for 8 years old and likes playing with dolls is a lonely experience.)
It's so hard to tease out which are the causes and which are the effects, but this article gives me a lot to think about, to try to figure out if there's some way I can help my daughter break out of this. It's hard to help someone who doesn't want to change, who clings to her symptoms as if they were life preservers in the ocean.
If she has a problem with processed foods, refined sugar, and refined flour, one trick that is all-ages friendly is to buy a bunch of good-quality raw honey (note: has to be RAW, cannot be pasteurized) and, if she'll agree to it, try a short fast (which can help reset the gut), then slowly introduce healthy, whole foods (organic fruit, nuts, bone broths, plain yogurt are all good bets). Every time she has a sugar craving, she can have as much raw honey as she wants. The honey will help satisfy cravings, while actually *healing* the gut microbiome and feeding healthy gut bacteria.
Thanks for your response! I should have mentioned - she’s now 19, so an adult (kinda), still living at home, but I have limited ability to get her to make changes to her diet or other habits. It would have to be her idea and that’s where it gets difficult because her identity is all wrapped up in being a gay trans boy with ADHD and depression who struggles with normal activities and is a tortured artist type. I have to walk a fine line between not making her feel like I’m trying to change her (which is fair, no one likes to feel their family doesn’t accept them as they are) and wanting her to be actually happy and believe in her own ability to do things in life, whatever things she may want to do, which I honestly believe would require some changes, not to her self, but to her habits and mindset.
I did read your folic acid article, and a few others, and I’m intrigued. I do wonder if that could be an issue. And yes, my two kids are like night and day despite having been raised essentially the same. My oldest struggles with some of the same things I always did (although I feel like I snapped out of at least some of it in college) while our youngest is more like my husband in personality.
I’ll think about whether there are ways to try to improve her diet and gut health without being overbearing. Maybe buy some things I think she might be willing to try, like raw honey, and things not fortified with folic acid. There may really be nothing I can do until she decides she wants something to change.
Best wishes to you with the arrival of your little one! Thanks for taking the time to reply!
19 is a bit young for the mushrooms approach ... generally I think it's an over 25 thing. I'd keep it in mind as she gets a bit older, because it can really help with a brain-gut reset. I have an article about my experience here:
The thing with the folic acid / MTHFR stuff is that by adulthood, dietary changes might not resolve dysphoria or "cure" autism -- but they can help with negative symptoms and prevent other health issues. Mushrooms also won't necessary convince someone they aren't trans -- many trans people have taken mushrooms and found they feel a lot better about themselves / more comfortable in their bodies, but they still feel transgender. The examples I'm thinking of are early onset trans though not ROGD.
Thanks! To be clear, I’m not looking for a magic “trans” cure - I don’t believe such a thing exists, and even if it did, trying to control my daughter and tell her what to do would be wrong. I do see it as a symptom of an overall problematic mindset, and I suspect if she developed healthier ways of thinking and living that she would recognize that her belief that she’s “trans” (whatever that actually means) was induced by a manipulative community that bullied and took advantage of a very vulnerable young teenager. That’s not going to happen overnight, but it’s also not going to happen at all if she stays stuck in the mindset she’s in. At the very least I want her to believe in herself and her own agency.
Thank you for this! Okay, bear with me because I'm not at my best right now (9 months pregnant, going to give birth basically any day), but genes DEFINITELY play a big role in all of this stuff. I haven't been able to look into it as much as I would like (there's probably books and books worth of material out there), but I wrote a long piece about the potential role that MTHFR mutations (which are more common in Germanic populations) and synthetic vitamins (especially folic acid) might be playing. If there's a big difference between two kids that can't be explained by environmental / nurture factors (ie both kids had roughly similar upbringings), then I'd guess that your older daughter has several vulnerable genes that your youngest doesn't (or has fewer of). The challenge here is, if I'm right, then to help your daughter you have to somehow change her diet and gut microbiome and that's incredibly difficult with picky eating. I know that high doses of magic mushrooms can work, but I don't think that's a good approach with developing brains (she could try it as an adult). I'll include the link to the essay below (you should read it), but quickly, a functional B vitamin deficiency and Vitamin D deficiency could be major players here, and, if so, she's also at a higher risk for various cancers and other health issues down the line. There are other genes that contribute to babies being genetically more high-needs, and Erica Komisar talks a bit about this in both of her books -- I recommend checking her work out.
>It is a condition of disconnection, from the self (the body), from others, from nature, from “Spirit” (or “God” or “spirituality”). Its core symptom, one that appears in every case, is a chronic feeling of emptiness.
Interesting. In a typically left-brain literalist way, I thought my existential issues are literally caused by my atheism. Even my grandparents were atheists, I just have no idea how does one live a life with a spiritual dimension in it. And the issue is, nothing is really meaningful. When people around here stopped believing in god in the 19th century, they believed in art, nationalism or socialism. And then by the 1970's it was basically hedonism and empty transgressivism.
With hedonism, we ran into the problem what JS Mill pointed out, that we have very different ideas of pleasure and every similar ideas of pain or harm. So when Alice is saying "I want ice cream and also not being beaten up" and Bob is saying "I want wine and not being beaten up" then everybody agrees on "not being beaten up" and it becomes the standard narrative. So we become risk-averse and hedonism dies.
Easy Rider, 1969 cannot be done anymore. Because the flip side of all that freedom is that they were drunk and high all the time, and abusive of the staff, and Hopper even pulled a knife on the staff sometimes. Real first class asshole.
So we don't want that, but the flip side is that we then don't get all that intoxicating hedonistic freedom either.
So I dunno. Is it truly atheism or just left-brainedness? Are right-brained people even atheistic? I mean if they do not care about precise dogma that much, then they can just have a sense of awe and majesty of the universe that they might habitually called god, but it is not really the same as precise theology. They might be singing psalms without meaning it all that literally.
The right hemisphere connects us spiritually, and it understands religion more metaphorically, meaningfully, etc ... the left hemisphere tends to be very "literal" when it comes to religion, i.e. by-the-book. I've noticed a lot of people who reject religion / faith in God seem to do so from the stance that religious texts need to be taken literally.
I grew up in a house without religion, though my parents weren't particularly atheistic, more "religion keeps people apart and that's bad", which makes sense because my mom's parents had to elope against the wishes of my grandmother's parents because of religious/ethnic differences. I'm still opposed to religious extremism, but now I think most of us at least need to believe in *something*, and after all those magic mushrooms, I've started to believe in some sort of God/Great Spirit/Higher Consciousness. But, I think, in a more right-brained way, where I don't subscribe to any particular doctrine.
'Great empty' describes it well. But it can get even more extreme. Some people get to a point where they can't handle it anymore and seek to escape and attack the self. Either by creating a new identity and destroying their old one in the hopes it will be a reset. This is where the anger about deadnames comes from. Or they get consumed in an ideology, martyring themselves on any cause to give them meaning and avoid their thoughts.
And finally: I am in agreement with most of what you write, Meghan. Esp. the toxic parenting and heavy doses of schooling via abstractions. That's why I am against public schools stealing kindergarten from informal pre-schools.
I used to fall for this, years ago! I was all in on the Doman "teach your baby to read and do math" bullshit. Sigh.
And I think that part of the reason why everything around us now seems tinged with madness is this relentless "abstraction-based everything" 24/7.
I really gotta stop reading so much.
And in the face of my many agreements here, this is also true: The paradigm being expressed by this article is part of the madness. It portrays a human world where nobody is sane. There is a label for everyone. "Normal" has been trashed, there is no money in it. I should re-read Szasz.
You must be very near your time. I will pray every night for all going well for you and the little one.
In so many ways, you are blessed. May it so continue.
believe it is very difficult to “get better”, “cure” etc similar syndromes without extreme confrontation, ie consistent drive toward investigation and confrontation of everything that causes discomfort, almost reflexively or a forced habit. psychedelics etc likely helps because it forces the confrontation that otherwise the psyche would be strong enough to protect against collapse. my pet theory, atm, is that the “mirror” that comes about when “cured” is the strengthening of the self in which the younger, mirrorless self can gaze into. comes full circle
In one of my early hero-dose mushroom trips, I saw something kind of like this. People started as lights and shined their light at each other, and absorbed other people's light. As someone collected more and more lights from others, they eventually turned into a mirror, which signalled maturity. But other people rejected others' lights, and kept shining their own brighter and brighter, like they were trying to take over the whole mosaic.
“Germanic peoples (and, later, those influenced by their ideas and culture) to become more left hemisphere dominant […] unhealthy relationship to both nature and to God/spirituality.”
I am falling more and more into the “historiographical camp” of believing that the “Protestant Reformation” or movement of re-forming organized religion to this strange new Germanic order is deeply misunderstood and overlooked and way more influential and powerful than I or most people understand. The “Protestant States of American” has a less healthy relationship to religion than it thinks it does, I think. Is more organized, institutionalized region the answer? I don’t think so. There’s so much value in self-determined religious sects, but a danger and risk, too, when communities are fractured and splintered and rapidly changed in both size and composition.
Protestants and their movement has been powerful. The English, the Dutch, the Germans, the Americans. It’s been a powerful force in Korea and recently in China. I don’t know what to make of it. Is its value in the secularizing of religion? Is it specific to Christianity? can Islam be “protestantized” (I think it can, why not, but there just hasn’t been enough people or movements in this direction, or they’ve been crushed by more powerful leaders in places like Turkey, Egypt and Iran. But also, maybe, no Germans —> no Martin Luther. maybe?)
Interesting insights. Thanks for writing and sharing. I like your mixing the whole Protestant/Germanic angle with gut biomes and modern American-cultural malaise. The insight of broken mirror syndrome I bet is felt by many foreign students, exchange students, migrants, visa-applicants living in the US, green card holders, etc. i think this is useful and probably very accurate. I bet a lot of Americans feel it, too, (third, fourth, fifth generation+) but have different, and less sophisticated (I say this neutrally, meaning they have less cross-cultural exposure—no family to visit in another country or anything like that and thus are more isolated and stuck in their masking-plight) ways to mask, and so they suffer more, and this makes sense linking it to woke-ness, woke-ideology, and the whole network of isms that have become coded on the left. Once upon a time, maybe pre-2016, I think wokeness had meaning. But it was co-opted. I might hypothesize that two-country first-or-second gen, or migrant Americans have an advantage in their dualistic identity formation and this augments their masking strategies.
Anyway. I wonder what role the Catholic Church can and will play in the future of the USA. Catholicism in the US is kind of alien to me (I am part-Germanic, grew up in an increasingly disenchanted-with Methodist church family, my single mother the daughter of a strict and overbearing pastor) and a relatively new development, growing out of postwar and post-sixties cultural shifts. Religion in America has certainly changed since the 1960s and as a Protestant nation, Protestantism (if you can call it an ism) seems to have been losing its visionary power. The Catholic Church and the Jewish diasporic population seem to have inherited a lot of cultural currency, and changed the plight of American in ways that perhaps are only sinking in today. Anyway. That’s another box to open.
The power of Protestant churches in the South has been very different than the power of Protestant churches in the north. That’s not insignificant.
I guess I’ll also say that as a Protestant growing up in Pennsylvania I often felt like a strange categorical semi-minority growing up with many Catholic, Jewish, or parents-not-speaking-English-as-first language raised peers and friends.
As I read into it, I was overcome with a feeling... a bummer sort of feeling... brought about by a sense that the psych community has jumped the shark. Viz this mad dash of a paragraph:
"Other symptoms include: hyperactivity, overachievement, intellectualization / cerebral-ness, perfectionism, imposter syndrome, validation-seeking, hypersensitivity, gullibility, impaired ability to authentically connect to others, people-pleasing, paranoia, poor boundaries, feeling trapped by expectations of how one should be, masking (creation of a “false self”), unstable identity, disordered eating, suicidality, anxiety disorders and a harsh inner critic, and a readiness to feel shame or guilt."
Oi.
I would say... offhand... that the decreasing marginal utility of the psych approach to life began in the eighties, when the shrinks managed to shut down the mental hospitals and throw the mentally ill out on the street.
I have been reading deeply into the history of medicine, incl. mental health stuff, and my sense of it at the moment is that it's been from the beginning a massive con game. Not 100%, you understand. The desire to help's been there too. But overall? The psych professions are about making a good living while coming up with endless outlandish hypotheses, and endless bullshit. At their best, they provide someone older and wiser to talk to. Which is wonderful! But that's it.
Much of your description of the broken mirror syndrome on the left reminds me of the Meyers Briggs INFP personality type.
Also, don't you think that the rise of 'gentle parenting', which started when older gen-x's had little kids and we stopped corporal punishment, should mean that the prevalence of broken mirror should be getting better rather than worse?
Hmm. I do have something on the back-burner about personality types, I should try to return to it and iron it out.
Regarding "gentle" parenting, unfortunately, no ... I think *attachment* parenting might have this effect, but "gentle" parenting is too nebulous and can be extremely problematic, just in a different way. The main issue I have with it is that many parents end up following "scripts" and being inauthentic with their children, which I think confuses the kids and adversely impacts brain development. I kind of get into this in my review of Abigail Shrier's latest book:
oh yea I agree with you re gentle parenting being problematic. For the boomers though, it seems to have been socially acceptable to be neglectful and dismissive towards kids- whereas the millennials have swung the other way and are hyper focused on how kids feel.
Yeah ... I definitely know a lot of young parents who seem like they're doing a really good job, in many cases despite not having the best upbringing themselves. But over-correction is a huge risk. We've lost our parenting wisdom ... and it's been lost for a while. Healing will be tough :-/ and 95%+ of parenting book authors, bloggers, and social media influencers are just throwing out new "poisonous pedagogies". God, especially when it comes to stuff like nutrition :-(
The amount of times my mother has said that my 8 month old need to 'get used to being in a playpen' 😐😐 Its sad that I can't go to her for advise. She didn't breastfeed and I suspect our parenting experiences are very different
Some of my family (mostly on my dad's side / the Germanic/WASP side LOL) gave me a hard time for doing stuff like extended breastfeeding, carrying her in a wrap instead of using a stroller, and bed-sharing with my daughter and being fairly strict about healthy food. After about a year they were commenting on what an unusually "chill" kid she was.
In theory kids of the millennials with our therapeutic mindset should have less broken mirror - but I expect its too early to tell. Plus all the confounding with the fact that millenial parents are on their phones all the time
Oh god, yes, THIS. I need to be better about staying off my phone. I was good about it when my daughter was 0-2, but once I started on Substack I got worse about this. Did you see my essay The Lost Girls and Boys? I discuss this stuff in there.
The phrase "The Great Empty" characterizes my entire life from adolescence until now. My most recent Substack post is a includes a confessional about coming to terms with this. Honestly, I have to admit that I feel with hopeless and pathetic that I'm only fully coming to grips with it at 30.
It also seems to fit with the comment I left on one of your earlier posts about narcissism being much more of a relational strategy than an inherent temperament (something that I think a lot of research shows, and that I've come to notice personally; though my choice of cope was compulsive people pleasing).
I'm like you in that psychedelics were a huge assist in getting me to this point. I did two "big journeys" – MDMA and ketamine respectively – and have very occasionally micro-dosed on psilocybin since then. Trying integrate into a sense of authenticity post-trip has been a lifetime's worth of work, and I've still only dug myself out of the ditch by a foot-and-a-half.
I've had four people now (including a healthy male mentor who I deeply trust and my very skilled Ayurvedic practitioner) recommend that I do an Iboga journey in the next couple years, and that I'm 'ready' for it – clearing out a bunch of stuff lodged in my nervous memory and/or my larger metabolic engine.
One of the reasons that true love (in the agape sense, not purely eros) is such a good medicine is that it sets up the container for the medicine to be administered at the right time, in the right way, in the right order. This is something I've come to realize, through both coaching work and other relationships, is essential to bridging the gap back to a sense of self that feels more natural, even if it remains largely fragmented and fluid.
What is really interesting to me is that I'm a prime candidate for wokeness in a lot of ways, and yet, I never got pulled into it in a full-throttled way. I still don't really understand why. I credit it to my inherent allergy for social bullshit past a certain threshold, which is kind of an unexpected trait to possess for someone as squishy as I am.
#TeamWerewolf 🐺
Hey :-) thanks for sharing this. #TeamWerewolf all the way <3
I haven't tried Iboga but I've heard it's very intense! I have done ayahuasca three times though, which was ... well, there are no words.
I love this so much. I just wrote a substack article about labels, language, and my personal experience dealing with BPD, fibromyalgia, and a possible Autism diagnosis alongside other symptoms listed in your article. I've learned that humans are not easily defined, and that we should strive to improve the symptoms beyond just medication which is what I'm doing right now. I loved reading you and I hope someone howls back! I'm howling back to you, and I'm glad I am.
Aww, I'm happy to wake up to this comment! I had a mental health crisis from about 2018-2020 (which magic mushrooms and meeting my husband pulled me out of) and when I sought professional help a handful of doctors and a psychiatrist basically told me I was hard to diagnose. They all agreed on "generalized anxiety disorder", but told me I also had mild traits of bipolar disorder (which one of my uncles and one of my good friends have been diagnosed with), ADHD, and a depressive disorder, as well as some autistic traits. I fell off a stairwell (off, as in there was no railing, not down) when I was a year old and landed on the right side of my head, so I've had some chronic pain and other issues related to that. The labels were unhelpful. But looking at causes and symptoms was, and trying to address them. I was prescribed some medication for a while but stopped taking it after the mushrooms (I think I saw some of the rare good doctors out there, because they were supportive of me avoiding medication, or only using it short-term, and told me that given the context for my symptoms I described, I was actually pretty "high functioning" LOL).
I'm reading your article right now, and it's good :-) I'm glad to hear you're healing. #TeamWerewolf
I'm glad to join #TeamWerewolf ! I'm super proud of you and so glad we're both healing despite everything. I'm adopted so they believe being abandoned at birth has something to do with everything, but whatever the reason, we are healing! That's the important thing
Adoption is painful, even in the best circumstances -- my mother was adopted so I have some experience there <3
Tell her she’s amazing and didn’t deserve to be left behind, it’s not her fault. I love my mom (adoptive mother) and my dad was the absolute best! He died when I was 10, but I was so grateful to have them both. I’m sure your mom is delighted to have you! you’re very special, brave, and a light this world needs.
She's lucky :-) she has a good relationship with her bio mom and half-siblings (on both sides) now.
That's so cool!!! I have no idea who my mom is or where is my brother, but I'm at peace with that.
Regarding TeamWerewolf. :-)
I used to think that feedback (giving and receiving) is the way to go, and that there was a broad understanding of this. We just had to create better systems that facilitate this feedback (as in engineering). But now I see myself surrounded by people who actively do not wish feedback, who actively resist it -- as in the mainstream culture, where reality is countered by lies, and in personal contact, people walk (no, run!) away from open discussion with someone with differing views.
I ache for being howled at back! That is why I am online. How else do I find out if any of my ideas are valid? How else do I find out what other people's reaction to my behavior is, if I block their feedback? And so much of the progressive (woke) pathologies are related to lack of feedback. Socialism (as an economic system) founders on lack of ready feedback (that a market system ideally provides). So much of the craziness we see nowadays has to do with (and this is ancient!) putting theory above experience. Putting abstractions above reality. Dreaming up some ideal state and expecting the real world to obey.
Here is a pet peeve of an example: Defund the police! -- Everybody is leery of cops. But what do you do when you defund them and they go away? Rich communities with minor crime do ok. Poorer and already high crime communities are fucked. But the defunders don't seem to care. Their dream is what matters, and when reality does not conform, they blame reality.
Yep, that's the left hemisphere -- obsessed with abstractions, and incapable of meaning-making :-p
Oh man, the defund the police thing ... I told a bunch of defund-the-police socialists that if they really cared about white-collar crime (my city has a huge money laundering problem etc) they should want to give the police MORE money so they could hire forensic accounts and lawyers. Insanity.
Thirty years ago, I weaseled myself into a cop forum and argued with them about drug policies. A big part of my argument was, stop persecuting pot smokers and rave dancers, and put your efforts into fraud, it's about to explode. Nope, they ridiculed me for that.
Thank you for writing this! Wow! I have so many thoughts, I will try to keep it to a short novel ;-). My oldest daughter has many (actually almost all) of the symptoms you talk about (although, curiously, my younger daughter does not). I also share some but not all of these traits. My oldest fell down the trans/woke rabbit hole when she was 14, and has been very reluctant to take on any of the responsibilities or habits of adulthood. I'm still trying to figure out if there's a way I can help her get into a healthier state of mind or if she has to figure this out (or not) on her own. So many of the things you discussed ring true; a few do not.
I am an avid reader and my daughter was as a kid. It's clear that excessive internet use was the trigger for her going off the rails nearly overnight. So I agree that excessive written words could be a cause of some of these problems. I'm not sure that left-hemisphere tasks were pushed on her - she did love learning and reading when she was young but was also extremely imaginative and artistic. Diet could definitely be a cause - she has the typical autistic kid picky eating habits where she only eats like 10 things. Germanic descent - yes! This is the first time I've ever seen this connection made but it definitely seems true. The question I have is whether this is cultural, as you are suggesting, or whether it could be genetic - perhaps a vulnerability to something in our diets or environments that's less harmful to people with different genes.
I also have to wonder about the early childhood neglect angle. I'm trying to keep an open mind but it's difficult for me to see. My oldest was a very high-demands baby (I didn't realize how much until I later had a more typical baby). She rarely slept and was only happy if she was held nearly 24/7, so she was. Getting her to sleep every night was a 3 hour marathon of rocking, nursing, pacing, and singing, which I did, every single night. I breastfed for over 12 months. I did go back to work at 12 weeks but I could not imagine leaving this high-needs baby at a daycare so we hired a nanny who could give her one-on-one care at home. (She is one of the warmest people I've ever known, a grandmotherly type, and my kids are still close to her now, 19 years later. She became family.) There are things I regret, and wonder now if I caused damage somehow. My oldest was 2 1/2 when her sister was born and I have to wonder if the abrupt loss of being the sole center of attention was a cause. I think back on many things - the time I yelled at her harshly for waking up her sister when she was 3. The time when she was 11 months old and still not sleeping through the night that I in desperation tried to sleep train her (she won that battle after 3 nights and I never tried again). Did I watch TV too many times when I was nursing her instead of focusing on her? Was I too busy with chores? Did she eat too many packaged foods? Did I not validate emotions enough? Should I have sought an autism diagnosis and gotten her specialized therapy? Should I not have allowed the school to put her in a gifted class? Did I expect too much of her? Too little? Is something wrong with me and I shouldn't have had kids and passed on my genes? I really don't know.
I do have to question your assertion that "poisonous pedagogical" parenting such as sleep training, scheduling, and discipline have led to this. Clearly these practices were FAR more common a generation ago (I was sleep trained nearly from birth, spanked, kept on a schedule, and had plenty of chores and responsibilities, as were most kids of my generation) and yet our kids' mental health is getting worse, not better. So this part doesn't ring true. I believe you also mentioned in another article a connection with early puberty - obviously this is just anecdotal but my daughter was a very late bloomer (and so was I). Maybe being atypical in either direction, and therefore out of step with peers, is the real contributing factor? (I can tell you that being a 7th grader who could still pass for 8 years old and likes playing with dolls is a lonely experience.)
It's so hard to tease out which are the causes and which are the effects, but this article gives me a lot to think about, to try to figure out if there's some way I can help my daughter break out of this. It's hard to help someone who doesn't want to change, who clings to her symptoms as if they were life preservers in the ocean.
If she has a problem with processed foods, refined sugar, and refined flour, one trick that is all-ages friendly is to buy a bunch of good-quality raw honey (note: has to be RAW, cannot be pasteurized) and, if she'll agree to it, try a short fast (which can help reset the gut), then slowly introduce healthy, whole foods (organic fruit, nuts, bone broths, plain yogurt are all good bets). Every time she has a sugar craving, she can have as much raw honey as she wants. The honey will help satisfy cravings, while actually *healing* the gut microbiome and feeding healthy gut bacteria.
Thanks for your response! I should have mentioned - she’s now 19, so an adult (kinda), still living at home, but I have limited ability to get her to make changes to her diet or other habits. It would have to be her idea and that’s where it gets difficult because her identity is all wrapped up in being a gay trans boy with ADHD and depression who struggles with normal activities and is a tortured artist type. I have to walk a fine line between not making her feel like I’m trying to change her (which is fair, no one likes to feel their family doesn’t accept them as they are) and wanting her to be actually happy and believe in her own ability to do things in life, whatever things she may want to do, which I honestly believe would require some changes, not to her self, but to her habits and mindset.
I did read your folic acid article, and a few others, and I’m intrigued. I do wonder if that could be an issue. And yes, my two kids are like night and day despite having been raised essentially the same. My oldest struggles with some of the same things I always did (although I feel like I snapped out of at least some of it in college) while our youngest is more like my husband in personality.
I’ll think about whether there are ways to try to improve her diet and gut health without being overbearing. Maybe buy some things I think she might be willing to try, like raw honey, and things not fortified with folic acid. There may really be nothing I can do until she decides she wants something to change.
Best wishes to you with the arrival of your little one! Thanks for taking the time to reply!
19 is a bit young for the mushrooms approach ... generally I think it's an over 25 thing. I'd keep it in mind as she gets a bit older, because it can really help with a brain-gut reset. I have an article about my experience here:
https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/psilocybin-magic-mushroom-tea-recipe
The thing with the folic acid / MTHFR stuff is that by adulthood, dietary changes might not resolve dysphoria or "cure" autism -- but they can help with negative symptoms and prevent other health issues. Mushrooms also won't necessary convince someone they aren't trans -- many trans people have taken mushrooms and found they feel a lot better about themselves / more comfortable in their bodies, but they still feel transgender. The examples I'm thinking of are early onset trans though not ROGD.
Thanks! To be clear, I’m not looking for a magic “trans” cure - I don’t believe such a thing exists, and even if it did, trying to control my daughter and tell her what to do would be wrong. I do see it as a symptom of an overall problematic mindset, and I suspect if she developed healthier ways of thinking and living that she would recognize that her belief that she’s “trans” (whatever that actually means) was induced by a manipulative community that bullied and took advantage of a very vulnerable young teenager. That’s not going to happen overnight, but it’s also not going to happen at all if she stays stuck in the mindset she’s in. At the very least I want her to believe in herself and her own agency.
Thank you for this! Okay, bear with me because I'm not at my best right now (9 months pregnant, going to give birth basically any day), but genes DEFINITELY play a big role in all of this stuff. I haven't been able to look into it as much as I would like (there's probably books and books worth of material out there), but I wrote a long piece about the potential role that MTHFR mutations (which are more common in Germanic populations) and synthetic vitamins (especially folic acid) might be playing. If there's a big difference between two kids that can't be explained by environmental / nurture factors (ie both kids had roughly similar upbringings), then I'd guess that your older daughter has several vulnerable genes that your youngest doesn't (or has fewer of). The challenge here is, if I'm right, then to help your daughter you have to somehow change her diet and gut microbiome and that's incredibly difficult with picky eating. I know that high doses of magic mushrooms can work, but I don't think that's a good approach with developing brains (she could try it as an adult). I'll include the link to the essay below (you should read it), but quickly, a functional B vitamin deficiency and Vitamin D deficiency could be major players here, and, if so, she's also at a higher risk for various cancers and other health issues down the line. There are other genes that contribute to babies being genetically more high-needs, and Erica Komisar talks a bit about this in both of her books -- I recommend checking her work out.
https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/down-the-folic-acid-rabbit-hole
>It is a condition of disconnection, from the self (the body), from others, from nature, from “Spirit” (or “God” or “spirituality”). Its core symptom, one that appears in every case, is a chronic feeling of emptiness.
Interesting. In a typically left-brain literalist way, I thought my existential issues are literally caused by my atheism. Even my grandparents were atheists, I just have no idea how does one live a life with a spiritual dimension in it. And the issue is, nothing is really meaningful. When people around here stopped believing in god in the 19th century, they believed in art, nationalism or socialism. And then by the 1970's it was basically hedonism and empty transgressivism.
With hedonism, we ran into the problem what JS Mill pointed out, that we have very different ideas of pleasure and every similar ideas of pain or harm. So when Alice is saying "I want ice cream and also not being beaten up" and Bob is saying "I want wine and not being beaten up" then everybody agrees on "not being beaten up" and it becomes the standard narrative. So we become risk-averse and hedonism dies.
Easy Rider, 1969 cannot be done anymore. Because the flip side of all that freedom is that they were drunk and high all the time, and abusive of the staff, and Hopper even pulled a knife on the staff sometimes. Real first class asshole.
So we don't want that, but the flip side is that we then don't get all that intoxicating hedonistic freedom either.
So I dunno. Is it truly atheism or just left-brainedness? Are right-brained people even atheistic? I mean if they do not care about precise dogma that much, then they can just have a sense of awe and majesty of the universe that they might habitually called god, but it is not really the same as precise theology. They might be singing psalms without meaning it all that literally.
The right hemisphere connects us spiritually, and it understands religion more metaphorically, meaningfully, etc ... the left hemisphere tends to be very "literal" when it comes to religion, i.e. by-the-book. I've noticed a lot of people who reject religion / faith in God seem to do so from the stance that religious texts need to be taken literally.
I grew up in a house without religion, though my parents weren't particularly atheistic, more "religion keeps people apart and that's bad", which makes sense because my mom's parents had to elope against the wishes of my grandmother's parents because of religious/ethnic differences. I'm still opposed to religious extremism, but now I think most of us at least need to believe in *something*, and after all those magic mushrooms, I've started to believe in some sort of God/Great Spirit/Higher Consciousness. But, I think, in a more right-brained way, where I don't subscribe to any particular doctrine.
I think I fit the bill.
- Ashkenazi, one of the most bookish cultures ever
- I consider myself kind of woke, but not in the cultish sense, I am just keenly aware of many iniquities
- Could read capital letters before school
- Could talk at 1.5 years old because my mother emphasized verbal skills a lot
- low motoric skill development
- usually stayed inside
- mental health seemed normal first but from 40 extreme levels of social anxiety
'Great empty' describes it well. But it can get even more extreme. Some people get to a point where they can't handle it anymore and seek to escape and attack the self. Either by creating a new identity and destroying their old one in the hopes it will be a reset. This is where the anger about deadnames comes from. Or they get consumed in an ideology, martyring themselves on any cause to give them meaning and avoid their thoughts.
Yes, absolutely.
And finally: I am in agreement with most of what you write, Meghan. Esp. the toxic parenting and heavy doses of schooling via abstractions. That's why I am against public schools stealing kindergarten from informal pre-schools.
I used to fall for this, years ago! I was all in on the Doman "teach your baby to read and do math" bullshit. Sigh.
And I think that part of the reason why everything around us now seems tinged with madness is this relentless "abstraction-based everything" 24/7.
I really gotta stop reading so much.
And in the face of my many agreements here, this is also true: The paradigm being expressed by this article is part of the madness. It portrays a human world where nobody is sane. There is a label for everyone. "Normal" has been trashed, there is no money in it. I should re-read Szasz.
You must be very near your time. I will pray every night for all going well for you and the little one.
In so many ways, you are blessed. May it so continue.
believe it is very difficult to “get better”, “cure” etc similar syndromes without extreme confrontation, ie consistent drive toward investigation and confrontation of everything that causes discomfort, almost reflexively or a forced habit. psychedelics etc likely helps because it forces the confrontation that otherwise the psyche would be strong enough to protect against collapse. my pet theory, atm, is that the “mirror” that comes about when “cured” is the strengthening of the self in which the younger, mirrorless self can gaze into. comes full circle
In one of my early hero-dose mushroom trips, I saw something kind of like this. People started as lights and shined their light at each other, and absorbed other people's light. As someone collected more and more lights from others, they eventually turned into a mirror, which signalled maturity. But other people rejected others' lights, and kept shining their own brighter and brighter, like they were trying to take over the whole mosaic.
Arooooo! (This is my howl).
“Germanic peoples (and, later, those influenced by their ideas and culture) to become more left hemisphere dominant […] unhealthy relationship to both nature and to God/spirituality.”
I am falling more and more into the “historiographical camp” of believing that the “Protestant Reformation” or movement of re-forming organized religion to this strange new Germanic order is deeply misunderstood and overlooked and way more influential and powerful than I or most people understand. The “Protestant States of American” has a less healthy relationship to religion than it thinks it does, I think. Is more organized, institutionalized region the answer? I don’t think so. There’s so much value in self-determined religious sects, but a danger and risk, too, when communities are fractured and splintered and rapidly changed in both size and composition.
Protestants and their movement has been powerful. The English, the Dutch, the Germans, the Americans. It’s been a powerful force in Korea and recently in China. I don’t know what to make of it. Is its value in the secularizing of religion? Is it specific to Christianity? can Islam be “protestantized” (I think it can, why not, but there just hasn’t been enough people or movements in this direction, or they’ve been crushed by more powerful leaders in places like Turkey, Egypt and Iran. But also, maybe, no Germans —> no Martin Luther. maybe?)
Interesting insights. Thanks for writing and sharing. I like your mixing the whole Protestant/Germanic angle with gut biomes and modern American-cultural malaise. The insight of broken mirror syndrome I bet is felt by many foreign students, exchange students, migrants, visa-applicants living in the US, green card holders, etc. i think this is useful and probably very accurate. I bet a lot of Americans feel it, too, (third, fourth, fifth generation+) but have different, and less sophisticated (I say this neutrally, meaning they have less cross-cultural exposure—no family to visit in another country or anything like that and thus are more isolated and stuck in their masking-plight) ways to mask, and so they suffer more, and this makes sense linking it to woke-ness, woke-ideology, and the whole network of isms that have become coded on the left. Once upon a time, maybe pre-2016, I think wokeness had meaning. But it was co-opted. I might hypothesize that two-country first-or-second gen, or migrant Americans have an advantage in their dualistic identity formation and this augments their masking strategies.
Anyway. I wonder what role the Catholic Church can and will play in the future of the USA. Catholicism in the US is kind of alien to me (I am part-Germanic, grew up in an increasingly disenchanted-with Methodist church family, my single mother the daughter of a strict and overbearing pastor) and a relatively new development, growing out of postwar and post-sixties cultural shifts. Religion in America has certainly changed since the 1960s and as a Protestant nation, Protestantism (if you can call it an ism) seems to have been losing its visionary power. The Catholic Church and the Jewish diasporic population seem to have inherited a lot of cultural currency, and changed the plight of American in ways that perhaps are only sinking in today. Anyway. That’s another box to open.
Well, consider that my howl at the moon!
The power of Protestant churches in the South has been very different than the power of Protestant churches in the north. That’s not insignificant.
I guess I’ll also say that as a Protestant growing up in Pennsylvania I often felt like a strange categorical semi-minority growing up with many Catholic, Jewish, or parents-not-speaking-English-as-first language raised peers and friends.
I am a woman that runs with the wolves, wolf blanket and earrings in tow. Aahooooo!!!!
Howling!
This conversation between Ivo Mensch and Bonnitta Roy is a great companion to this essay. https://youtu.be/z1IpPIAoa14?si=4NZytI2CAXsXCyR7
Love the title, and “under title”.
THIS, I can tell, is going to be a great read.
So much here! :-)
As I read into it, I was overcome with a feeling... a bummer sort of feeling... brought about by a sense that the psych community has jumped the shark. Viz this mad dash of a paragraph:
"Other symptoms include: hyperactivity, overachievement, intellectualization / cerebral-ness, perfectionism, imposter syndrome, validation-seeking, hypersensitivity, gullibility, impaired ability to authentically connect to others, people-pleasing, paranoia, poor boundaries, feeling trapped by expectations of how one should be, masking (creation of a “false self”), unstable identity, disordered eating, suicidality, anxiety disorders and a harsh inner critic, and a readiness to feel shame or guilt."
Oi.
I would say... offhand... that the decreasing marginal utility of the psych approach to life began in the eighties, when the shrinks managed to shut down the mental hospitals and throw the mentally ill out on the street.
I have been reading deeply into the history of medicine, incl. mental health stuff, and my sense of it at the moment is that it's been from the beginning a massive con game. Not 100%, you understand. The desire to help's been there too. But overall? The psych professions are about making a good living while coming up with endless outlandish hypotheses, and endless bullshit. At their best, they provide someone older and wiser to talk to. Which is wonderful! But that's it.
(to be continued... :-)
Much of your description of the broken mirror syndrome on the left reminds me of the Meyers Briggs INFP personality type.
Also, don't you think that the rise of 'gentle parenting', which started when older gen-x's had little kids and we stopped corporal punishment, should mean that the prevalence of broken mirror should be getting better rather than worse?
Hmm. I do have something on the back-burner about personality types, I should try to return to it and iron it out.
Regarding "gentle" parenting, unfortunately, no ... I think *attachment* parenting might have this effect, but "gentle" parenting is too nebulous and can be extremely problematic, just in a different way. The main issue I have with it is that many parents end up following "scripts" and being inauthentic with their children, which I think confuses the kids and adversely impacts brain development. I kind of get into this in my review of Abigail Shrier's latest book:
https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/bad-journalism
oh yea I agree with you re gentle parenting being problematic. For the boomers though, it seems to have been socially acceptable to be neglectful and dismissive towards kids- whereas the millennials have swung the other way and are hyper focused on how kids feel.
Yeah ... I definitely know a lot of young parents who seem like they're doing a really good job, in many cases despite not having the best upbringing themselves. But over-correction is a huge risk. We've lost our parenting wisdom ... and it's been lost for a while. Healing will be tough :-/ and 95%+ of parenting book authors, bloggers, and social media influencers are just throwing out new "poisonous pedagogies". God, especially when it comes to stuff like nutrition :-(
The amount of times my mother has said that my 8 month old need to 'get used to being in a playpen' 😐😐 Its sad that I can't go to her for advise. She didn't breastfeed and I suspect our parenting experiences are very different
Some of my family (mostly on my dad's side / the Germanic/WASP side LOL) gave me a hard time for doing stuff like extended breastfeeding, carrying her in a wrap instead of using a stroller, and bed-sharing with my daughter and being fairly strict about healthy food. After about a year they were commenting on what an unusually "chill" kid she was.
In theory kids of the millennials with our therapeutic mindset should have less broken mirror - but I expect its too early to tell. Plus all the confounding with the fact that millenial parents are on their phones all the time
Oh god, yes, THIS. I need to be better about staying off my phone. I was good about it when my daughter was 0-2, but once I started on Substack I got worse about this. Did you see my essay The Lost Girls and Boys? I discuss this stuff in there.