The Taproot Podcast - ☯️Interview with Mollie Adler of The Back From the Borderline Podcast

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast, where we dive deep into the stories and insights of fascinating individuals from all walks of life. Today, we are thrilled to have with us a truly remarkable guest, Mollie Adler from the podcast #BackFromTheBorderline and #NightNightBitch . Mollie is known for her groundbreaking work in exposing the hidden traumas caused by negligence in medical, psychological and economic systems that we need to examine. She has the freedom to say things that practicing therapists cannot and a source of inspiration for many people because of her honesty about these forces in her own life. We so much appreciate her coming on to speak with us.  Mollie's Substack Mollie's Podcast Mollie's Instagram   Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Podcast Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/ Podcast Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/GetTherapyBirmingham/feed.xml Taproot Therapy Collective 2025 Shady Crest Drive | Hoover, Alabama 35216 Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone] Email: [e-mail]   #TraumaAwareness #HealingJourney #TherapyTalks #MentalHealthMatters #TraumaRecovery #SelfHealing #EmotionalWellness #MindfulHealing #OvercomingTrauma #TherapeuticProcess #InnerStrength #ResilienceBuilding #TraumaInformedCare #PsychologicalHealing #SurvivorStrength     🌐 Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ 🎥 Check out the YouTube: https://youtube.com/@GetTherapyBirminghamPodcast 🎙️ Podcast Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/ 🔊 Podcast Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/GetTherapyBirmingham/feed.xml 🏢 Taproot Therapy Collective 📍 2025 Shady Crest Drive | Hoover, Alabama 35216 📞 Phone: [phone] 📠 Fax: [phone] 📧 Email: [e-mail]

Save, underneath the water, child of the slaughter, sung it to your soul. Sound, swimming in the silence, daughter of the violence, sung into the void. Hey guys, it's Joel with the Taproot Therapy Collective Podcast. That music that was leading it in is a new album by Caliphone that I'm really liking a whole lot. We had interviewed Tim Rutile from Caliphone last year. That was the album he was working on at that time, I'm guessing. So if you like the music, check it out. And also hop back and listen to the interview of Tim Rutile from Caliphone.

He's a nice guy and I think he makes very interesting, weird music. I like to pick something that is relevant to the discussion with the guest, and the discussion with the guest today, I think that song and the outro are probably as relevant as I was going to find in the world of music. So our interview today is with Molly Adler. Molly has a podcast called Back from the Borderline, and she has another podcast that is about kind of esoteric anthropology philosophy that's to help you go to sleep. And if you don't go to sleep, learn something interesting. That one's called Night Night Bitch. You can find both of those wherever you get your podcast and follow her on Instagram. She's into depth psychology. She's into Western esotericism, and she's a really interesting person who I think holds the tension of the mystical and the logical

in a way that some people are not able to out there, or they get pulled too far into one realm. I do want to give you a trigger warning. There are some pretty frank discussions about physical trauma medical trauma sexual assault and her history with the unfortunate realities of wealth and power that run her world so if that's something that makes you uncomfortable or you got kids around it may not be the best podcast but i'll go ahead and roll that and i was really glad that she's coming on and hopefully something that you might like her show also. So we will run that now. So I'm here with the great, great granddaughter of Alfred Adler.

No, not really. Not really. I'm here with the great great granddaughter of Alfred Adler. No, not really. Not really. I'm sorry. Let's not make anybody start doing some frantic Googling. No. I always do like a joke cold open. That's really good. I wish.

Well, I had planned for yours to be like, you know, like, have we ever met before? Is this your card? And then have a tarot card that was like the universe or something but the set that i have are um i brought them down to do it but the set that i have are like the clamped um ones and there's like boobs on all of them so which is like you know oh my god i never knew that she did a deck yeah it's i think it's just in the style of it's not actually like um it's something my wife had but i didn't want to be like oh just your cod And then like that seemed. That's actually really good.

I like both of them. I love, I would love to be the great, great granddaughter of Alfred, Alfred Adler. I would. Yeah. Well, I don't know if you'd never done a 23 and we maybe, maybe somewhere back there. Who knows? I'll have to email his family. Can I get a sample, please?

I'm seeing a lot of like small towns in Alabama with those cause these like huge ripples in because you only they only know it. They show you, you know, in a small town, it's pretty identifiable, right? Yeah. Like, I've had people told me about, you know, like, they know someone else knows this family secret, because that other person, it's like, oh, we know their results. So you know that they have your result too i know it's true like if somebody close to you does it you are you can already kind of like you know that you're screwed because it's already out there yeah there's like you know like some like the pastor you know in the 50s got around and some people are secretly siblings and then they're married like there's like all these crazy things that i've heard yeah that's a reality show waiting to happen.

Well, no one wants to talk about it, you know, especially not. They're still going to the same church. Yeah. So Molly has a podcast that I love. I don't know how you do the amount of research that you do to create the amount of content. And I really love to, I mean, there's a ton of people who are very bright and i mean well not a ton there there are a lot of people that are very smart and are very introspective and have done a ton of research that have really good shows um and there's a lot of people that have gone to therapy and gotten better but like you're incredibly candid about your life in a way that like you're not ashamed of anything and you shouldn't be. And like the realities of trauma. And I,

like I, that speaks so much to me because everybody who comes in with these things, like the therapy feels alone with them. And a lot of times the therapist has a business. So there, even if they've gone through recovery, they may say a little bit, but they're afraid,

you know, until they're far into their career of saying like a lot of different things. And you just are so honest and your show and perspective evolves. And I don't know, so needed. I love it. I don't, I don't know how you're able to,

you must just like read constantly. Yeah. My husband laughs at me because I mean, I'm not diagnosed because obviously, you know how I feel about diagnosis. But my husband calls me the artist, like we call it the artist, but also the artist.

And I mean, I probably would get an autism diagnosis if I like sought it out. I'm for sure on the spectrum. And if you knew my family, like so many members of my family are also on the spectrum for sure if they went. But I take it as a superpower because I do, I read constantly to the point where I sometimes have to take a break because anybody who is kind of like a, you're probably the same, where you're constantly reading things and sometimes I have to go, whoa, sometimes I need to take a total detox. I'm actually in the middle of that now where I'm doing kind of a intellectual detox where I'm just kind

of, okay, I think I need to integrate some of the things that I've been reading and you can get overloaded and then you also hit a point in your reading where you go it's all kind of the same thing said in different ways yes yes and you but you need to get to that point you need to read enough as a psychology student to realize your insecurity goes away because you're reading the same thing again. I see. And then you see the scope of history and the profession of the career, and you see the undercurrents of what these people are really fighting about. That's right. And the therapists don't get that.

I mean, it's like you'll see therapists go off on LinkedIn about how Jung is not evidence based or something. And it's like, well, yeah, just because you can't turn it empirical doesn't mean it's not evidence based. And just because you turn it empirical doesn't mean that it is evidence-based you know i've got a lot of research studies based upon crap that's just funded they share like this parts-based thing that they're training in and you're like schwartz put gestalt therapy together with you like ifs is a way to train an institution how to do yungi and gestalt therapy like that's

what he did yeah and but there's no that no awareness of that. Like. No, there's not. And what's really interesting is I just did an interview with someone named Christian Bradley West. He calls himself the country clairvoyant on Instagram and he has an amazing background, but again, he's not a practitioner. He's just a lifelong student of these things. He started studying science science and nutrition and then he moved on to his own spiritual journey but he was just talking about how you know when he was studying into shamanism and all of these things so much of jung's work is in there and some people have an issue with jung because he supposedly stole his ideas but i just don't agree with that i think that when you start having with that i mean i thought

you was tapping into a perennial philosophy too that's that's it what i mean is like is even if you were a little blob person out in the desert and you didn't have anything to draw upon if you started having mystical experiences you might start saying some of the same things that a lot of these mystics have been saying does that mean that that you've stolen your ideas? No. Why do we think of everything as stolen? And why can't we think of, whoa, look at all these connecting threads. They must be there for a reason. And you can't measure this by Cartesian thought. You can't nail it down and prove it. We have a really hard time not knowing well and that's one of the things that um i like complain about to the therapists that i'm friends with is that

like when you when academia is as hostile as it is to these new models because i don't like if you want to say okay well i only do risk evidence-based practice whatever okay why aren't you trained in, like, EFT or these things that outrank CBT? It's just, like, they use it as an excuse to not read research, you know. But, like, research is just used as a cuddle to keep new things out. It's not ever used to promote new models. And so, like, I don't really have a ton. And that's not, I'm not critiquing research as a concept. I'm critiquing academia as it exists right now and the kind of insecurity

that's in academia right now. But like when, when people, so I, it makes it very hard to tell if these new groundbreaking, especially in brain-based medicine, where the stuff is essentially like, it's not intuitive,

you know, something like brain spotting, I thought was crazy until I did it. Something like ETT, I thought was crazy until I did it. I'm at the training and I'm still like, there's so many cranky chroma therapies in the 70s like they wore red glasses and said it would make your trauma go away or whatever like and and this guy has got this machine and it does this thing and it works and and i believe i you know

i believe the people who told me it works so i was there but um you know this stuff's not intuitive so like until you do it you don't know yeah and you kind of have to be open for something to get through right so it's almost like if somebody who's totally closed off tries it and nothing happens they're like see it doesn't work and it's like uh is that true or is it the fact it's like people that are open to hypnosis are more easily hypnotized and if you're completely shut down um i don't know if that's a great comparison but you do have to have a certain amount of openness to your personality and i think people that are drawn to academia i'm not sure how much like openness and curiosity that they have sometimes because they they want things to be proven there's this rigidity that almost makes

it hard. And then also that you'll get a kick out of this. It's kind of a bit of a rabbit hole, but I think this is the perfect place to bring it up. I've actually never even talked about it on my podcast, but I had a listener who is just, she's been listening to me since day one. She's amazing. And she's going to school at a large school in california that will remain nameless and um she is now like going down she just got into a master's program for art therapy she asked me to write her a letter of recommendation for like her math program and i was going like and but as somebody who i don't have those credentials like it's but i did i wrote her a really heartfelt recommendation letter.

And my podcast has made a big impact on her life, according to her. And her school, she was putting on this thing where they were bringing people in to talk about new perspectives on mental health. And in order to be accepted as a speaker, a plenary speaker, I had to interview with her supervisor. And this guy was so stuffy. And he sat down, I got on a Zoom call and my listener, Jenna, I know she wouldn't mind if I talk about her because she's just the best. And she told me, she's like, tell yourself, talk about yourself to this guy. And I just was very open about my experience and he kind of like was asking like what my credentials were and I was like a school of hard knocks like I don't know like lots of reading probably more than you've ever done bro

but I again I didn't say that I was very graceful because I just sensed his like skepticism right off the jump he like barely didn't even want he didn't even want to give me a chance. And, um, and he'd never listened to my podcast really. And so, and, and everything he brought up though, I, I just started talking about the biomedical model and my skepticism against it. And you could see him just like his butt clenching under his, like, he was just upset and triggered. Yeah. Really trying to keep it you know together and he was every question he was trying to like kind of like catch me out but everything he said to me i had a response for because i've read this stuff you know and i dropped out of my lmft program for a reason i was just like something in me knew that i didn't want to do this. But long story short, two weeks later, Jenna emails me and says, you know, he just thinks

that it's not appropriate for you to do this thing because you don't have any credentials. And I just was like, and she was so annoyed and she was so sorry. I'm like, don't worry about it. But ironically, now it's been, that was about a year and a half ago and the podcast has grown even so much since then. But I get written to by so many therapists, psychiatrists that are practicing in the NHS in the UK. And they are saying, thank you so much for your podcast. You say things that I actually can't even say.

Yeah, the people with the license cannot say what you say. I say, hey, you should listen to Back From The Borderline. I think you'd really like this. And so me not getting my degree and not getting my credentials, I have a bachelor's degree, of course, but me not pursuing higher education has actually allowed me to have more success because I can say all of the things I want to say. And let me just say, I am not the type of girl that would have probably done well in higher education because I don't take orders very well. Yeah. Well, I mean, that was like, I was leaving the hospital when, I mean, one that I kept hearing like, well, you can reduce symptoms by talking to people, but we can give medicine. So stop doing

that. And I was like, well, but when you don't have erectile dysfunction, you don't go off your medication and you don't burn a building down. So me talking is you know because i was always like you know guys don't you think that because we were we were on a sort of community treatment team so we were treating the worst the worst cases of psychotic mental illness in the state and it was a lot of schizophrenia that was incredibly treatment resistant comorbid with something else like addiction and you know other things um but like the i don't know like that that whole thing like i was always like don't you think schizophrenia is like actually two diseases because there's like the people who have the more genetic presentation they are having like the positive symptoms and the people who have the more

negative like symptoms those are the ones that like had a traumatic onset of the illness so you could have 20% of the genes and 80% of the trauma 80% of the trauma because these patients look like they have ptsd and they always have like an origin myth for why they have the illness like you know he raped me and put me in a closet and then it goes got to my body and so the ghost still talks to me or i was in the hospital and there's they switched my blood with the other blood and then now the blood you know what but it was like and they're like shut up the dsm says it's schizophrenia like i don't there's just no curiosity you know yeah people that want to use the degree as being like, Hey, look, this means that I'm smart. And it's like, no, I decide if on a case by case basis,

if I take you seriously and if your ideas are good. And also whether or not you're able to actually break through with some of these really difficult cases, you know what I mean? Your credentials don't actually mean anything and just like, well, they do, but they don't mean anything if you can't actually get down into the mud with people you know yeah yeah i mean and i just couldn't like i don't know i mean i when you said something that reminded me of this i hadn't thought about this in years but like right before i left and i went into private practice um i had a pride to work at the student counseling center and um they asked me like what is one of the most difficult cases you've ever done or something and i was like you know and i was like yeah you know this lady and has this lamp and her husband like cut the tendons out of her feet with scissors and

blah blah and like people were like like doing this like they wanted me to stop and it's like y'all asked me the question wait it was too much for them yeah Yeah. And then so like, anyway, they declined to hire me. And I didn't really like the program at all. Yeah. No, we mean the worst breakup anyone ever had with their boyfriend. It's college counseling. So I was like, so I called later just to be professional and was like, hey, you know, I didn't realize I didn't get the job and I want to be the best candidate I have.

So if you have any feedback for me, I'd love to do that. And the lady was like, you know, we think that you knew a lot more about therapy than a lot of people that we interview and hire. But we just think that somebody who's done like kind of a dirty job, like what you do, couldn't really do the advanced work that we do. And I was just like, biting my tongue, wanting to be like, just because you can't do what I do does not mean that I can't do what you do. What you do is easier than me. That's why I'm trying to get out. I say that for anybody who's early in their career and is looking for someone with more letters behind their name and feeling gaslit. Don't feel gaslit. It's not real.

Oh, I just have so much to say about that it's just it really brings up a lot because i just interviewed um bruce levine and he was talking about how sometimes like hairstylists can be better therapists oh my god therapist so much trauma and cosmetology man yeah because it's caregiving it's like it's a it's like the same personality type as like social work nurse teacher one of my best friends is a hairstylist and she just and she's also a very naturallyetic person. Like she's the kind of person that you could talk to her for two minutes and you're just telling her your life story no matter what. Cause she just, I mean, that's how I became friends with her is when I was in LA and very lonely. I make friends with my hairstylists wherever I go. And I think there's a reason for that because they're used to people kind of trauma dumping on them. and i was holding it shamanically

holding it you gotta still cut the hair you know like she struggled she had to take breaks and i think a lot of hairstylists get burnt out and they don't realize why they're actually getting burnt out and it's yeah you're on your feet all the time and your back hurts and i mean doing hair is a hard job i i am a beauty school dropout my dad sings the grease song to me sometimes um i've done like a little bit of everything in my life but the thing that's the hardest at least from my friend's perspective is that is like people are unloading onto you all day long and you're kind of in just the listening mode because and that's a lot you know and so that's why i do have a lot of compassion for therapists right now too.

Cause like, let me tell you, I get anonymous emails from therapists a lot and they are not okay. They're not okay out here. But one of my really good friends just, it's kind of like teachers. They're like, people still think you're the man and you're like,

I'm making compromises that let me see more people like i i wouldn't i would i could easily make more if i dumped insurance right now we're in a place where it's helping more people than it's hurting yeah we're kind of moving past that probably five six years from now insurance will be not that you know i hope that doesn't happen but you know there is a trajectory but like i'm i'm really making hard compromises to be effective to be the most effective that i can be and people will just be like well use the word patient and that's hierarchical medicine and you're canceled blah blah blah and it's like the number one search to my site is therapist accepting new patients you know there's an se if i can't fill up the people

who are working with me then like i don't know it's now you're at the mercy of seo and like all these things and that's one of the things that i have so much compassion for therapists because they're not the enemy you know this is a can i curse on this podcast oh please yeah part of the joke for me is that it's like the little corporate logo and it's like therapy podcast and you know it's going to be like the 10 tips for spring and then it's like meanwhile yeah no but like your guys are working in a really fucked up system right and you have to figure out it's like how rebellious can you be i would imagine like how can you be really rebellious and fight against the system while you still have yeah while you still have to work

within it and that is just something I have so much compassion for because a therapist just emailed me the other day and she said, I was diagnosed with BPD when I was like, I think she was like 20 or something, 1920. And now she's a therapist and that part of her life is behind her. Of course, she doesn't have a fucking disordered personality because that's just nonsense. But she's like i hear such horrible things you know the the classic

tropes being said about uh the borderlines you know and she's like having to like listen to that and not scream at these people like my peers when i know that i have that diagnosis but a i can't even defend because i can't say out, say out loud, I have that diagnosis and I'm just going, that's so wrong. You know, like it's you. I mean, I don't want to tell you about the history of that disorder because you have a whole podcast on it, but like, even based on the assumptions that they put into place that I don't agree with, they are still not using that diagnosis consistently with the assumptions that they put into place that I don't agree with, they are still not using that diagnosis consistently with the assumptions that they made to create it. I mean, if you are a woman and you

try to kill yourself and you go to the ER, you will get that diagnosis. They have no knowledge of what's going on. Is that a normal response to your environment? It's always what's wrong with you, not what happened to you. We get wildly different, you know, clientele at Taproot than I did when I was at a bigger firm, even though we're just a couple minutes down the street because we have totally different, we just attract a whole different kind of person. But like when I was at this other firm, I would get these referrals from psychiatrists that were like, this person's on a horse dose of sedatives. I can't sedate her anymore.

And she has anxiety. Can you please do CBT now? And then I, which I don't love love cbt but the person would come in well what goes on at home my husband beats me okay well i'm not going to do zen meditation with you because we need to talk about why you want to get out of there really adjusted to her abusive environment you're well i mean i don't think the doctor knew and was enabling the husband but the fact that they didn't know and the medicine had been raised this amount of times i mean that's a problem and we probably that guy's overworked and at the mercy of another doctor and another board like i'm not saying that there's one

villain when you start to make that kind of systemic diagnosis yeah it's the system and it's the incentives you know what i mean like they're incentivized on getting as many people in and out the door as possible they're incentivized on like numbing and suppressing quote-unquote symptoms they're what the incentives of everything is what's wrong it's the same reason why i wanted to get the hell out of working in tech like i just resigned from my tech job six months ago and god it was you know 10 years of working in different uh positions within uh software companies and i just was so infuriated by all the lying. You know, like it was just like every meeting, it's basically how can I make my numbers

look as good as possible? Even if we have a really low daily. Yeah. Oh, you just did two jobs at once. We're not going to give you a raise. We're going to realize that we don't need to hire somebody to do this other job now. Exactly.

Even if the app sucks, even if everything everything it's just like everyone's hiding again the root cause right i'm going like i can't renew these customers not because i'm not good at my job it's because the app fucking sucks and the app doesn't have good use but then i have to lie to my my team and say okay let's see how we can make these numbers go up just a little bit so it's just like everyone's treading water and i feel like it's the same way in mental health it's the same way in academia and it's the exact same reason why our government fucking sucks too yeah well i mean you you it's like when people really need to believe that this guy or that guy is the solution to the other guy and you're like if you're excited about

either of these choices you really just don't have the courage to look down okay like that's right you're running two different kinds of a dementia against each other and we don't have any good options yeah i'm gonna get a little political but it's like it's just like for me my dream candidate is like marianne williamson you know what i mean because i'm like at least here's someone who someone who's, and don't come for me people. That's one thing I don't have a ton of expertise in terms of like, I'm not going to be able to sit here and talk about her policy. But what I love about someone like her is that she's deeply spiritual and she's someone who actually thinks about things from a really high level perspective. And I just feel, and also she calls out these shitty incentives. know like and

that's what and i'm not saying that she's the right person for presidency but i really love what she runs on you know like she did asmr like i would listen to her read the phone it's like oh same um but she when i listen to that i'm going like yeah we need a little bit more of that energy in our government whether she's the right person for the presidency or not. That's what I wish is like, I wish we had people that were actually thinking about virtues and thinking about the long term and thinking about getting wisdom from the past, but also going to the future. And it's just we have such faulty incentives. Well, the short term is the thing. You know, it's like, can you fudge this thing on this whatever for this app?

Well, the app doesn't work. You know, it's like even after like andudge this thing on this whatever for this app? Well, the app doesn't work. You know, it's like even after like and everything. Having a mandate on shit. Yeah. I mean, it's in our system is designed that way. Like it's like, you know, you used to be able to take your phone to the AT&T store when it doesn't work. Now when your phone doesn't work, they're like, I really don't know how to work a phone here. All we do is sell them.

You have to call this number. And it's like the company just took away your ability to get the help. It didn't fix the problem. Yes. And it's like the company just took away your ability to get the help. It didn't fix the problem. All of our short-term thinking, which I mean, really kind of starts in the 1980s. And a lot of what I write about is if you follow it to its root, going to be political, because what it's saying is that when you say that the point of health, when you corporatize academia and when you corporatize healthcare, you get a cognitive and a behavioral psychology. You're telling people that all they are, are their thoughts and their behavior.

And that's hollowing out of the profession to turn it into a number, because that's why CBT is popular. I mean, by the way, too, you know, I, I swear to God, I've been saying this way before AI and my phone is going off. I need to turn that off. Sorry. Like way before there was like AI or anything years ago, you know,

people were like giving, I was saying like, if you're saying that there is a manualizable form of therapy, that if the patient says this, oh, that's a cognitive distortion, snap the rubber band, tell the anxiety to stop,

whatever. One, you're going to be replaced. You're you're, if you're saying that we should function like computers, you were paving the way for your job to be replaced by one. I mean, I turned down a job offer at a pretty big med tech company to program these computers for this module they were building to do CBT on people so that they could fire the therapist in the hospital. It was like, if you needed help getting your baby to breastfeed or something, you hit this button and then you don't have to have somebody come in.

It just- No shame, but if we're going to do these shitty cbt forms of therapy an ai might do it better than some of these burnt out i don't give a fuck therapists sorry shade but shade but it's true like yeah because people honestly somebody who is one of the therapists that i saw like again it's not her fault because again, she was probably burnt out, whatever, but came to this therapy session and just was like so low energy. So, um, just not there, like not present with me that I, I just felt like, what the hell am I even paying for? You know? And I am a huge fan of chat GPT. I use it all the time. It's incredible for me, but I also, I always, I talked a lot about this with Lawrence Hellman on our episode,

because he's also a huge fan of AI. And we were just talking about how, you know, AI is only as good as the person who's using it. Like you really, I don't know how much you've messed around with it, but it's incredible. If I just used an AI to write my podcast episodes, they would suck. But what I use AI for is to help me organize my thoughts and it helps it feels like you know collates information really well the best metaphor i have for it is like if you imagine like a superhero movie where the superhero gets his arm chopped off and it's replaced with like a super arm like a super gold arm like that's how i feel chat gpt makes me it gives me like a super gold arm like i'm already great like i have to be a good superhero gpt makes me it gives me like a super gold arm like i'm already great like i have to be a good superhero but it makes me be able to like smash through things like

and that's how i use chat gpt and so i think it's amazing and i actually think that if these models are trained by people like you for example like i would much rather use an ai for therapy trained by you and get therapy from the woman i saw and i don't think people are talking about that enough they're just going oh no a computer can't give me therapy and i'm going no no we're thinking about this wrong well there's this push to turn there it will turn everything into gig work but therapy too i mean that's what i had that article about better help that went um it did numbers. But I really just write the articles to help SEO for our clinic, because you can pay for all this garbage content that's listicles, or you can write something that people actually reshare. And

the but the I mean, BetterHelp did, you know, you know, and that's like, disregarding, like all of the people who said, like know my better health therapist walked through a conference room with me on video chat and people saw me or my better health therapist like walked into the office and got made popcorn you know during their session or something like but what they did i would lose my license i would lose my company like i wouldn't we wouldn't exist if an individual did that they took the data of those people and they sold it to Facebook. Disgusting. So that Facebook could take their medical problems and target ads at them saying,

oh, did your mom just die? This crystal helps with that. And they got fined less money than they made selling the data. Disgusting. You know, I turned down like a really big sponsorship opportunity from BetterHelp. Did you know that? No, I didn't. But I was was gonna ask you because that's oh i turned them down when you have this mental health awareness podcast and people say that and then you hear the ad from better help rolling and you're like not doing it i told my husband like i was like when i first started

because i just now have sponsors and my first sponsor was young platform so like yeah which is like the best sponsor for me. It's the perfect sponsor. Am I getting huge, massive payouts from them? No, but it's a long-term relationship that I can feel good about. Another one is a CBD company that one of my listeners works at. That is amazing. They've worked with the CrossFit Games.

They're great. And so I can go to sleep at night knowing that I feel good about the sponsors that I work with. And I told my husband before I had any of these sponsors, I was like, guaranteed the first fucking offer I'm going to get is from stupid ass better help. I guarantee I already know it. And sure enough, and I took the opportunity to write, it was through a third party. And I wrote back this long ass thing, which is the only tweet of mine that's ever done numbers. And I wrote this long response back of why I was turning them down. And I went back, I went into detail about like their horrifying use of customer data. And the lady responded, she's like, thanks for the

information I passed on to the brand. Not that they care, but I posted my response on Twitter and the amount of therapists that replied to me and said, thank you so much. Because every time I'm listening to a podcast and then that's supposed to be helping people with their mental health. And everyone in their dog is doing better health care. And wants to pretend like they get it and they're, you know, damn the man. And then they roll down for better help. I mean, one of this, this person, again, shall remain remain nameless is this girl that i follow i followed on instagram and she uh positions herself as like also a doctor which makes me laugh because like it's so misleading when you have like just like a doctor

in psychology and you say i'm a doctor i'm just kind of like like she wears she wears like a white coat in some of her videos and i'm like bro, bro, are you okay? And she, I was watching just some random YouTube video last night. Are you dressed like a veterinarian? Exactly. That's exactly right. And against my will, I saw an ad pop up and it's sure as shit, it's her saying, are you feeling sad? Come to BetterHelp. And I'm like, oh my God. People just, do they even look, people just want to check. I mean, it doesn't even matter. At the end of the day, they're, and this same person, by the way, she fights against the stigma of labels.

She does all this stuff. But in the same breath, you're going to advertise for a company like this. Well, here's what drives me nuts is, like, the boards, in theory, are a good thing. And then the way that they're used, it's only used to, like, hurt the poorest person or the person that has like no control over the system like they're never used to actually try and regulate whatever so like the lpc licensure is different social work has the strictest licensure out there which is what i am um because we work with the most vulnerable people and so like like for example and i mean this was the law being applied as it is written there was a lady who years back had this big practice and she was a therapist she was a social worker and so she had um it wasn't even like a

support group it was just like a pre-internet like come to this coffee shop we're all recently divorced people that want to socialize oh and fly her up on the wall okay so guy goes there dates her breaks up with her guy's a lawyer calls the board you dated a patient board she's like i wasn't working i was in a coffee shop nope anything you do within the realm of mental health is social work practice for a social worker you can't turn your license off no and lpc whoa that guy is fucked up well yeah i mean obviously that there's you know talk about this person health half no have no fury like a woman scorned also health have no fury like a man denied just saying. Also, health hath no fury like a man denied.

Just saying. Yeah, there's certain professions you got to be careful. Anyway. Damn. Well, yeah. So, I mean, that obviously he's being manipulative and I'm not defending any, you know, letter of the law, not the spirit of the law. But that's the letter of the social work law. What BetterHelp does, like, so i can't say i'm a

life coach on tuesdays and i do crystal healing and on on thursdays i'm a social worker and i do brain spotting i can't do that like an lpc can do that they can they can switch i cannot turn my license off i didn't know i cannot turn my license off in alabama that's the that's the one that i know so better help says you're getting therapy from a real therapist on all their ads these are real therapists they have licenses right you go through their paperwork and it says this person's not doing therapy okay so you can't hire social workers the board could say if you work for this company you violated your license you could economically undermine them you could do that in a second but we don't use the power that way oh because better help would sue

the board and then the board's in litigation with them but like yes that's your job as a regulatory agency what a mess also scary like that's another reason why i'm just so glad that i didn't go go through with that because i just don't think i could handle the anxiety of like am i saying the wrong thing am i doing do you feel like you're on like a leaf, you know, almost sometimes? Like, I guess maybe you get used to what you can and can't say. I am just the person who chronically over shares and like will always say too much or the wrong thing. And so I think it's probably like the universe was protecting me, like not finishing that.

Maybe I'm stubborn and maybe I'm on the spectrum a little bit too or something. I probably could get that diagnosis if I went in. But it was like the hospital, like when I was leaving, I just couldn't do it. And you watch like the intuition get beaten out of these clinicians where it's like you're better off hiring students. But it was like we had a meeting every six months where they were like, hey, guys, we really want you to be honest and we want you to tell you what would improve the system a lot. Can you please do that? And please, you know, be honest and tell us. And we were overworked. It was like, I need these three hours. Like, I don't want to go to this

meeting. And so I would always be like, okay, here's a list of stuff that if you did it, there would be no downside. The potential downside is like maybe a doctor who hasn't worked here in eight years feels a little bit insecure. But the upside is it's cheaper. There's less risk to the patient. There's less burnout. We are more effective. We're more profitable. This is the upside. Hey, hey, don't say that thing. And so after six of these meetings, I was like, I can't.

You're like, my feedback is to not have these meetings. And we're going to tell you that you want you to say something, but please don't say the thing that you always say. And I'm like, no, just don't have the meeting. You don't care. You know what I mean? I couldn't not do that. Literally, I couldn't do it it's kind of funny because it's the exact same thing in tech like we'd have our you know reviews and they're like please give me feedback as a manager and

it's like you actually don't want to hear what i have to say trust me like it's much better if i say everything's going great because i already know it's not going to be impactful and the millions of like stand-up meetings that you have in tech like every morning every and it's just like the best thing you could do is cut out all of these meetings like nobody wants to go to meetings and nothing actually gets accomplished during these meetings I there were all these every meeting could be an email yeah all these articles were written during COVID where they were like we have all this data coming out right now that everybody is getting so much more done without mid-level management. Everyone's working from home and they're incredibly more effective.

What does this mean for the industry? And it means nothing because the ego of the mid-level manager is not going anywhere. And nothing was done with it. How many times did the Atlantic publish that during the COVID shutdown? Oh, yeah. I loved reading those because I'm like, nobody's freaking out except you. You know what I mean? Like that certain archetype of person, the rest of us that were like finally getting to work from home. reading those because i'm like nobody's freaking out except you you know what i mean like that

certain archetype of person the rest of us that were like finally getting to work from home and like do our work and then maybe do laundry and like run and get our groceries actually instead of having like three hours at night where we had our freedom we're loving it yeah well i mean that's what's so funny to me is these articles that they write about they usually tech companies but they they're like it's already it's like dude you won why are you complaining about how you won like you're you were on the system you wrote the rules you've changed the expectation of what an employer does we're not even having the conversation about whether or not you're going to get insurance and stuff anymore everyone's a gig worker you won and they're writing articles being like yeah these

people do four jobs um you know and and everything, nothing goes up based on inflation. But we just don't like how they talk about us on Facebook. We don't, we want them to like it more than they do. And it's like, well, why are you complaining that they're also not grateful? Like you got the money, just take it and be quiet, you know? And you never cared about anyone's feelings anyway. So why do you care now? You know what I mean?

It's not feelings. It's the opinion of me. i mean it's not feelings it's the opinion of me yeah it's not right reality is not reflecting my erroneous self-image back to me so i'm gonna i'm gonna go on medium like write a sad letter in your journal about it that's what i always tell like myself when i'm when i'm ranting and raving like that just go write in your journal well um i you're and i i really uh i can't say this to a lot of guests but like you are really so big in all of the stuff that you've done with your history and your career that it's hard to even say well tell us a little bit about your story because all of those rabbit holes could just go on and on yeah i really was i decided to

just kind of leave it open-ended, but I really had difficulty figuring out how to come up with any kind of structure. I mean, I don't want you to make you repeat what you have a whole bunch about. No, yeah, go ahead. Sorry. Yeah. It seems like the theme that we're on is like the, the insecurity and ego rigidity under a lot of the nefarious forces in our world yeah i mean for me i've i think that now knowing sitting where i am now i was spent a really long time in a very dark places mentally because i've gone down so many different like career rabbit holes like and your listeners can obviously

listen to my podcast but you know i have um done beauty school i went to college i've done sex work i worked in fashion i worked in tech i um you know i was um really really close to getting a record deal for singing and then it all fell apart because of um and at almost every single turn the theme of my life has been you know and i'm recognizing the the purpose of it now just from a spiritual perspective not to get too like woo woo but it's just like i the theme has always been um really predatory men honestly and i realized that they were everywhere you know like that's why i ended up like dabbling a little bit in sex work because i realized like if i'm just going to get objectified

and sexually harassed like why don't i just make a job and actually yeah that's what y'all have money and because it's just like even when i was like a straight and narrow like i'm all i'm a good worker i kill it at whatever job i do whatever i've chosen to do i've been really good at it because i work really hard and that's how it's always been for me in school i've never been the person who like aces the test without trying that's my husband he's that person he'll like not study whatever, show up and just be good because he's naturally just ridiculously intelligent. Didn't go to college because he was like, fuck this. Very creative person and very smart. I worked really hard. I'm a people pleaser. I wanted to get the A and I barely would get the A. I would kill myself to get the A. And I've been always really addicted

to people's opinion of me. So it's interesting that we're talking about that because I always cared what people thought of me. I was always just dying for validation and approval. And as soon as the internet was a really dark space because I grew up as a, I was born in 1989. So I was on the internet as like an 11, 12 year old girl on AOL Instant Messenger, like getting chatted to online by like probably old dudes knowing that I was young and there was no controls. Like if we think the internet's dangerous now, it was really dangerous for young people then because parents had no idea, you know what I mean?

What was going on? And so I got, I fell into patterns of being groomed and sexually abused by older men from a really young age. And then I think that I adapted to that and realized that I could manipulate kind of men to a certain extent. And, but at the same time I was getting abused and victimized. So that's a really hard dichotomy to hold, you know, like I, And for the longest time, I wouldn't allow myself to... I thought other women were victims of sexual abuse, not me, because I knew what I was doing, quote unquote. But in reality, I didn't. I was just a young girl. And I think I

was just adapting to my situation and realizing that this was a way I could get attention and feel seen. And there's a lot of shame that comes with that. And then I moved into the working world and I realized it never stops. My bosses were sexually harassing me. My bosses were sending me suggestive Skypes and messages. And it's almost like there's that feeling that women know very well when it's like you think you're actually finally being seen for who you are and you get that first like over the line Skype from your boss and you're just going like really you know like okay I guess this is how it's going to be and now

I have to play that part you know and and it's just hard it was really really difficult and it's just it happened wherever I went and then finally I got a manager in music that I really liked I was writing all my own music and then what happened a meeting at Soho house he tries to like ask me if I want to get a room with him he had a wife and kids and it was the one time in my life that I said no like I'm not doing this and the next day I got dropped by both him and my lawyer and so it's just like and it was right right after that, that I, you know, just, I had no, I had no mental, like my mental state was so bad. I didn't have the ability like mentally to get a job job again.

And so that's when I just started like working like these underground poker parties. One of my friends was a bottle service girl and I'll say bottle service is like the gateway drug into sex work. Really? Like, I'm not saying that every bottle service girl like the gateway drug into sex work really like i'm not saying that every bottle service girl ends up going into these things but there's a lot of areas of sex work that people just think that you become a prostitute that's not it you can work like a lot of different ways where you are getting money for being you know a companion for the darkest

archetype of the male psyche and i also i wasn I wasn't great at that. I looked at other girls doing it because I, because I was very smart and because I could speak to men, like I, I could make it a really long time without getting intimate with people because they liked being out with me and they liked talking to me. But I realized also like, I'm probably someone who could get myself killed in this industry because I have a mouth on me, you know, like I'm probably someone who could get myself killed in this industry because I have a mouth on me. I'm not going to let someone talk to me any kind of way. And so a woman that I knew in one of those poker rooms, she looked at me and she's like, you need to get the fuck out of here. And she's like, you need to need to shut the fuck up or you need to stop doing this work because

you're going to get yourself killed. And one of these rich guys can make you disappear. So you need to just think about that. And that made a huge impact on me. And I realized she was right. And so just that rabbit hole is to say that I know what it feels like to be in these really dark, dark places. I also know what it feels like to have to shove yourself into what I call on the podcast, the hot girl box to try to feel like you have worth. But now I'm recognizing that all that suffering actually served a purpose. And I'm finally doing the work that I know that I was meant to be doing, which is talking about this stuff. Nobody's talking about it. And there's still an epidemic of people, not just women. Because when I worked in fashion, I worked really closely with some of the male models. Many of these are very young men

who are scouted from third world countries, who are sending all the money they make back to their families. They're living in squalor. And these really, really rich older gay men in fashion are basically giving them money for sexual favors. And I talked to some of these men and I was like, these boys and they laugh about it. They're like, oh yeah, and I'm not even going to get his graphic, but they're doing these things with these older gay guys. And I'm like, are you gay?

Because I was one of the boys that I was kind of dating. I was like 23 and he was so hot. I mean, male models, that's a whole nother thing. But I was like, are you gay? And he goes, no, you just kind of have to block it out. Like I get money for it. So, and I'm like, and now I'm going the amount of dissociation, right? That you have to employ to do that.

And these boys that I met met they were so good at just like not not even thinking about it but we don't talk about that either it's even scarier as a young man i think to like admit to that because there's especially some of these boys they were from countries where homosexuality was seen as like this horrific thing, not a viewpoint I share, but this is happening, you know, and it's such a, it's such a, it's just so prevalent and it's so repressed. And so talking about this, just the wave of emails and voicemails and comments that I got, it's just like, I, I just struck a nerve and people are like, thank you because I thought something was wrong with me. I thought I asked for it. I thought that because I wasn't expressly saying

no and maybe I went out to a fancy dinner with this guy and then he was really nice to me and I actually kind of like him too as a person. It is so complicated. There's so much ambivalence and I don't know. I and so i know that i went through everything that i went through it now makes sense because back then i was just going why is this happening to me like is there like a mark on me that says like something well i think when you have that really heightened intuition people do sense it you know like you're not aware of what you're doing and that's why it's so important to make intuition conscious and not an unconscious function because yes it's you're making this connection with people that you're not wanting to make yes and i mean the people who

have your knowledge on the history of health care and psychology are not a lot of people and i wish that we did more of that in therapy but even the the ones who do, I haven't really found anybody, a couple of people, but really found many who are willing to be honest about the way wealth and power works and willing to understand it and look it in the eye. And you are, you know? Yeah. Well, and I kind of have had to, you know, because it's like, I, because of the spaces that I was in, just the mixture of things that I've done, like I said, it all makes sense now. The fact that I've worked in tech these like sexual sex work situations and how people are can like put themselves up on a pedestal but they're acting no different than just like the lowest of the low like I just think that men that find themselves in those spaces where they're

treating women like that and like if you're a man who is seeking out sex work and treating women the way that I was being treated because I do know that's something I really want to make clear there are sex workers out there that are a very special type of person who are like psychologically integrated and can actually do work that's healing and helping people but that is such a tiny fucking fraction and the fact that we are you know with only fans and saying this is empowering work it's not fucking empowering unless you are psychologically integrated and very few people are and so it's like that's why we have to fight against this stuff because you have to be to have

done a lot of inner work to be able to do sex work safely from a psychological perspective. And we're not talking about that enough. And it makes me feel so sad to know how lonely and broken so many women feel. And when I see the profiles of the girls that follow me on Instagram, and I see them, I see them pop up because if someone has a lot of followers, they pop up first on your likes. So they call like a priority like. So I've got almost like 100,000 people on Instagram now. And when another big account follows me or likes some of my thing, it pops up to the top.

And a lot of these girls, I know they're sex workers because they'll pop up to the top. They're gorgeous women. Their pictures are edited to where they look like fucking cyborgs. And I understand because I used to do that to my photos. So again, I am not judging anybody. And I had every injection under the sun. I had breast implants that I got removed. I dissolved all my fillers.

So again, I don't speak about shit that I don't know and I haven't done. So these accounts pop up and I click into their profile and I just look at their pictures and my heart just like breaks because I see them. They say, click the link in my bio. And I see their only fans link. And then they message me and they're saying, I want to kill myself. I love your podcast. Right. And I'm going like, and then look at the thing they're presenting, you know, this, this image they're presenting. And then the message they send to me, such a difference. And I know that when I had the Instagram with tens of thousands of followers, that's now deleted.

That was for my music where I was so sexually presenting and all this stuff. I was suicidal and no one knew. And I don't know where I'm going with this, but it just breaks my heart and it's an epidemic and we're not talking about it enough. And it's the people that you don't want to judge people or scare them off or you mean you don't want to talk about your patient's experiences of course but that is so many people's experiences and the world is kind of gaslighting us yes that you're alone with it and you're not um it's just we've taken away every avenue to talk about it and it's easier if you want to you know not be honest with yourself about the pile of ill-gotten gains you're standing on to call it a personality disorder it's easier for a man to do that it's especially a man who's on the top of a company or the top of a hospital you know psychology was invented you know these founders like did it to

speak truth to power and then now it is you're not allowed to do that anymore you know i know and ironically some of the men that you see that are like saying oh she's borderline it's like these are the same manic pixie dream girls that you're fetishizing and cheating on your wife with. You know what I mean? So you're not examining your own shit. And these men are suffering too, right? So it's like that's what I've realized is like you really do. Like Marian Woodman is like one of my favorite depth psychologists.

And she does this whole lecture, which I've probably listened to more than than anything that i have and it's like holding the tension of the opposites and i just don't think that we have the capacity to hold the tension of the opposite right we over identify with one of the opposites yes and the opposite of truth is not lies it's certainty it's not that these things like integrate and then cancel out it's that you sit with the resonance of these two opposite parts of self that do not want to be in the same head until they reverberate and there's a harmony yeah and someone can be acting like a monster right and because when i was at the depth of my suffering i hurt a lot of people not physically you know i can still say that i've

never put my hands on anybody in my life, but I have fucked with people's heads. Like I, I have sat and shed many tears over like the discord that I've brought into people's lives. You know, there were really good guys that I had in my life that like wanted to have something with me and I have broken them psychologically. Right.

Like I have, because I was so fucked up in my own mind, like I didn't know what I wanted. I was so like, it was an emotional wrecking ball. Like I would be the girl that would go out with you and then get super drunk and then be like crying on the side of the road at 2 a.m. And, you know, making your friends be really embarrassed of like, you'd be like, dude, who the fuck is this girl you're dating right like i was that girl and i just i was the girl who was saying like you know wanting boyfriends like being jealous of their friends you know like like being super

needy and thankfully i found a partner finally who was so uh individuated and so like securely attached that he just wasn't putting up with that and not like in an abusive way he wouldn't play the games with me he was just saying i love you but i'm not doing that that's your shit it's not my shit and like he had this safe wall where i was like bouncing up against it and i was just like wait what like so none of my little games are gonna work on this guy like fuck and that's the eric green stuff yeah and because of that i had to look at myself and i had to say and he said to me he one of the most profound things my husband said to me my now husband we got married like six months ago but he was like you know

i don't want you to be that bitter old person that's just complaining about the same stories forever and ever and ever. And I'm like, oh my God, you're right. I don't want to be that person. And he told me basically that he did not feel safe expressing himself emotionally in our relationship, not because I would hurt him or do anything, but it's because he's like, I just didn't want to deal with like the spirals that would occur. If I even just said like, Hey, I'm uncomfortable when you do X. And then I would be able to, because again, I'm very smart. I could like convince myself that I was making sense, you know? And that is what I think is scary too. And also what's not talked about when you're really smart and you're really

empathetic and you're not individuated, you can convince yourself of almost anything and you can make it make sense, especially to all your friends. So the stories that you tell your friends are like, Oh my God. Yeah. Fuck that guy. Right.

And you're getting all these affirmative things and you're like, yeah, I'm right. I'm right. Unconsciously setting it up to make it look like what you're arriving at is actually scientific by you know muddying the water yes yeah and so intelligence in service of the ego is like i mean there's some people who you know they end up it's so much harder for them to get help because they're so smart that they're able to double down and make this neurosis like a real logical thing. And you can mask and be really high performing at your job at the same time, right?

And be so successful on the outside. That's like the first psychiatrist I ever saw. And it's like the famous story on my podcast. And I say famous because I've just said it a lot where I went into this psychiatrist and I'm telling you, I was non-functional. I was not getting out of my bed. I was only dragging my ass out of my bed to go on like my next pinder date that i had of the day and like drinking smoothies because i couldn't

even bring myself to you know cook for myself but i dragged myself into the psychiatrist office and i was obviously very presentable like conventionally attractive whatever white girl and he i told him i had done all my research because i'm neurotic as fuck and so i was like i know that i have bpd like this is what i have i read all the symptoms i know i have it and i had that weird fucked up view of like if i get a diagnosis everything will be better just you know what i mean which i think is also something that we don't talk about enough like i just need to get an autism diagnosis i just need to get an autism diagnosis. I just need to get an ADHD. I just need to get this BPD diagnosis to affirm that I have this. But then to those people, I say, then what? And so I went into that office and I said, here's what I have. I know it.

Here's everything that's going on. I was very open with him about the dysfunction of my life, right? But he couldn't see past my presentation and how much research i had done and i was telling him how fucked up i was i was telling him about the sex work i was telling him about all this stuff but he goes trust me you don't want bpd right bpd is incurable we're gonna treat you for bipolar too right and but he goes you're just the words he used was just like, you're very high functional. And I was going, I am not. What's your definition of functional, bro? Because I'm not functioning. Yeah.

But he couldn't see past the veneer of, and I think that Daniel Mackler is one of my favorite YouTube creators. He's like a very radical therapist. I think he's quit now. I don't know if you've ever watched his stuff. He's amazing. Oh, you would love him. You guys, you'd actually be a great person to have on your podcast.

But now he just travels the world. Like I say, he goes to Africa and like just kind of backpacks around and he just talks about why he left therapy and all these things. But he did this incredible video all about pretty privilege. And he talked about how like many kind of conventionally attractive women he worked.

He worked in spaces like you. People found himself treating the untreatable cases. He would get referred. They're like, okay, Daniel works with these cases. He gets through. So he got all of the treatment resistant people. And he said that, you know, for the longest time, time he's like he worked with these conventionally attractive women and there's this thing called pretty privilege where it's like basically if

you are conventionally attractive like your life is so easy and like you know and this is also a scary thing because you can't really talk about it because what you say oh i'm conventionally attractive woe is me life is hard you know but he does this beautiful unpacking of it where he just says like these women that fell into this and attractiveness varies in country you could put me in a country in the world and they'd say oh my god she's hideous because i don't meet the beauty standards of that country but i'm white i have blonde hair i have blue eyes and i'm like a decently attractive person so in america because i fit the beauty standard, I am usually, you know, maybe seen

as that. But what happens is, is that my whole life, like ever since I became a teenager, it's just like, I feel like I'm only seen as like, well, first and foremost, now that I'm in my thirties, I don't give a fuck. I'm like, nobody's like objectifying me now because as soon as someone even tries, they're like, they're like, whoa, don't even try with that one. But when I was a teenager and I really wanted the validation, like I didn't realize how bad that can fuck you up

because you're not seen for yourself, you know? You're being told all the time that what is important to you about you is not what's important about you. Exactly. And also that you somehow can't be suffering because you somehow have these desirable traits when in reality it's like, yes, you can. You can be suffering. And also half the time, oh, why are you complaining? You're a cisgendered heterosexual white woman. You must have all the privileges in the world. When in reality, I was born in a trailer and half my

family is from Appalachia. And I am far from having a lot of like privilege, but I know there is an element of that. So again, I think some people are caught in this feeling of, can I even talk about my struggle because I'm not seen to have enough marks against me to validate my struggle. Does that make sense? So it's very isolating and lonely and confusing and you can really gaslight yourself too right yeah i i don't know that i've gone pretty far back on your show but i'm not totally caught up with the backlog a lot of what you were there's a lot of content reminds me of like do you have anything specifically about the relationship between intuition and trauma?

I've talked a lot about that. And what I, my, my thesis is, is that the hugest part of mental suffering is the fact that we're disconnected from our intuition. You know, we're disconnected from our gut feelings and also then it turns neurotic, right? Like that's the thing. It's like the more I speak to spiritual practitioners, some people are very intuitive. Some people literally are clairvoyant. Some people literally do have these extra kind of like sentient capabilities. But if you are in a trauma world, I just did this three-part series on trauma worlds where I call it like you're stuck in paranoid Gollum energy.

It's like if you can have all these amazing intuitive capabilities but if it's there is a trauma veil over them it's like we talked about before you can make anything make sense you're delusional and all of these like natural intuitive faculties yeah i mean that's what i've heard you talk about it like tangentially i just didn't know if there was a an episode I don't think I've done like a specific episode yeah that was kind of my read of what you'd said because I always conceptualize that with patients that like intuition is this function that you really cannot turn off yes and a lot of people have the ability to avoid it but trauma makes you not be able to avoid that relationship yeah intuition and and but what it does a lot of times is trauma sets off this deeply

unconscious intuition so you're seeing all this information that you that you're not aware of how you're seeing it and the way you're using intuition it's not a choice so you're making all these connections with people who you don't really want to connect with you're reading emotions that you don't want to read you're getting you're helping people you don't want to help you know and that so much of the time it's's like when you, because you were saying, you know, about 20 minutes ago about the, how all your journey was taking you somewhere, and that was kind of what I was hearing, is that, you know, like the trauma turned the intuition on, you just didn't know what to do with it for a long time, but you really, when you have that

intuition, you could do anything, you could get the record deal, you could do this, I mean, it's this ability to hear hear something and and that's why you know a lot of people are like is this model a cult or not and i always think that question's really funny because academia is so hostile to these new models um when i got trained with ett with steven baskets he didn't think this was funny at all but i said you know i wish academia wasn't so hostile to stuff like this because you know like it makes models of psychotherapy when everyone's like oh no this is the best thing and like he's so brilliant and you really need to learn it and you don't know if it's a cause or not until you go do it you know like and uh he goes no no no we don't think of it

like a cult we prefer to call it a family and i said oh so you know your lines and then he did i bet yeah i'm sure he didn't anything anyone says they're a family, I got that so much in tech. It's like, this isn't work. We're a family. Whenever anyone says that. When we want you to do work, not when we're splitting up the profit. Yeah. And also until you lay me off with no notice and my Google account just stops working in one month, which has happened to me in tech before. That's not really very family. Well, maybe maybe it is it's a dysfunctional family system i had a friend who worked for a tech startup and he just saw the horrors of the health tech startup world or whatever and there was like basically the company like the the owners realized that the this thing that they had made was i got to be careful to keep this anonymous but yeah they realized the thing that this made that the liability was too much it outweighed any profit the company was ever going to make so they just both they fired themselves

from the company yeah but if anyone came in and said hey guys our company doesn't exist anymore and actually laid off staff that would be involvement and they didn't want involvement at that point so no one knew until they heard like from someone at the country club that their company was gone and all these customers were calling meeting this medical service and no one knew what to say and no one could get in touch with their boss i mean it's just like i mean the stuff in that sector is so beyond the pale like it got misreported when there was that camp company that was making biological eyes you know i'm talking about it's like in the news about a year ago i don't i don't know i don't think i saw that it was an implant that

stimulated your retina with little electrical impulses so you could see a black and white image if you were blind oh wow they put these cameras in people's eyes and then it got misreported they said in the news that the company went bankrupt but the firmware on these things had to be updated and the company just quit doing it and people had it implanted in their brain oh and there's no regulation about that so but they said in the the reporting said that the company had gone bankrupt that wasn't true the company decided there wasn't enough money in it and discontinued the product and so like and they're still there all the people that have these things just in the shitter yeah wow. Wow. It reminds me of actually, it's interesting,

a very similar situation. The breast implants that I had that I got when I lived in London when I was 25 years old, I found out, and I was, I don't know if you've ever heard about breast implant illness.

It's a real thing and people can get sick from their breast implants for a variety of different reasons. It can cause like chronic immune stuff. And I experienced debilitating symptoms from my breast implants that I had no idea what was correlated to them. Every doctor that I saw never once did they, of course they ask you what surgeries did you have? And I always said breast implants. Never once did they say, Hey, maybe this could be connected to these like huge chunks of silicone in your body.

Um, weird, right? Like maybe that could have a reason. I got a notice. Um, I think it was like three years on into my breast implants and it was from the FDA and long story short, they said these textured gummy bear implants, which is what I had, they were flagged for being causing cancer and they were being recalled okay and can you imagine how it feels to get an email saying that like the things that are in your body and you're a broke ass bitch in la that cannot afford like anything i was already the company doesn't have to come they don't have to do anything like so they don't have to say hey like we're gonna pay for you to get these removed and so like i ended up going to tijuana i shit you not to get these removed. And so like, I ended up going to Tijuana. I shit you not to get my breast implants out. Thankfully. And this is no shade. I had some of the best medical care. Like I did a lot of research. I had the most amazing doctor who I cried to him and he was so incredibly

supportive and he got me in as soon as possible. He got them out and he, and I won't name him because it's actually not, I don't even think it's legal to, but I was so scared with breast implants. It's important that they take, they remove the capsule, which is like the scar tissue that also forms around the implant. And I was so scared when I talked to him, I said, please, please, please remove the capsule. Like, please don't shortcut this surgery. Cause I was being very stereotypical.

I just thought going to Tijuana, you're going to get a slap job surgery. Right. But he said, he listened to me. I was crying. And when I got out of surgery, he came over into me in the recovery room and he said, number one, I wanted to show you something. And he pulls out his phone and he had his nurse record the whole surgery so that I could see. And he held up the capsules and like in front of the camera and said, look, they're gone. Right.

And I just like, it makes me emotional now. It just like made me start bawling because I was like, I was so scared to have these things inside of me. And that was like my soft launch into saying I hate the medical system because I was never told that there was any risks about breast implants. I was never like when this company did not give these fda approved right implants could be cancer causing and even even healthy implants like ones that are still quote unquote fda approved they're causing these women to get

really sick people are speaking out about it but again you're not seeing it get covered like it should be getting covered women are getting breast implants every single day. People that are transitioning, you know, like, and some of these people that are experiencing like gender transition journeys, one of the first things they do to affirm their gender, of course, is to want to get like breast implants, but they don't know about these things. Right. And when you are having the worst debilitating mental health, cause I don't know what it feels like to experience gender dysphoria. I never went through, but I did know what it feels like to want to completely change my body, right? I had no breasts. I wanted them. I wanted all these injections.

And I was just putting myself down this permanent medical pathway. And the more and more injections, the more surgeries I got, nevermind just the trauma that your body goes through when you're getting put under anesthesia and getting your... Surgeons know, surgeons are not trauma informed. You're kind of getting pushed down and all this stuff. And so these people that are going through these like transitionary journeys, or even women who are just experiencing debilitating mental health symptoms and thinking that breast implants are going to make them feel better, they don't realize. And that's what, when I am actually kind of clicking into place now, all these surgeries I went through when I was on this, like shoving myself into the hot girl box journey, I was just fucking myself up with more and more

trauma, more and more medical intervention. And I was just getting sicker and sicker and sicker. And again, why are we not talking about this? Right? Like, well, you, you, I think that that's the point. It's like, when you look on the news, they're like, you know, which bathroom can you use? And it was Disney movie is allowed. And it's like, I can't afford American cheese. Can you talk about that? Can we have roads? That's right.

But the game is to pretend that the conversation is between these two bad ideas so that you don't look at everything that's happening. That's right. And that's not to negate like so many of my listeners, again, I've gotten some of the most beautiful messages from my listeners who are experiencing gender dysphoria, who are on like a transition journey. And my heart goes out to these people because again, I always say on the podcast, and I think they appreciate that i don't speak about anything that i don't know about you know because again i'm not a qualified medical practitioner i talk about the shit that i know and i know about suffering yeah um and i know about what it's been like to try to change my body and all of these things and i wish every single

person that's going through that like i wish them integration i wish them finding the best path for themselves um but it's it's just painful and i don't think we're talking we're not i just want i want people to be given all the information about what the risks are for everything whether that be for an ssri whether that be for a breast implant whether that be for botox whether that be for anything like we need whether that be for Botox, whether that be for anything, like we need to be talking about, okay, yeah, this might quick fix one thing, but even half the time it doesn't. But then what are the long term? Like, you know, like what's, can I ever come off of this? What happens when I come off of this? What happens when I want to, because when you get

breast implants, by the way, they don't tell you, you need to get these changed every 10 years. And I thought to myself, do I want to be like a 70 year old woman laying on the fucking operating table, getting my six pair of tits put in? No, I don't. But the doctors don't talk about this. It's just like, get the money, put them in, and we'll deal with the consequences later. Put them on the drug, change it, adjust the dose. But what if I don't want to be on this forever? Like what happens when I stopped taking it? Oh, I feel like I'm fucking dying because I did. I had to go cold Turkey off five different psych meds because I lost my health insurance

and I went to the seizure. I mean, it's not like you're, it's not just that the person has, I mean, depression and anxiety are terrible, but there are immediate medical. I mean, you can have a stroke and they don't tell you. No, they don't. And like, I, you do not know, um, like a what the fuck moment until you lose your health insurance. And then you go to the pharmacy to get your medications refilled and you have previously been paying like $4. And then they're like, oh yeah, Hey, that's going to be $500.

And I'm like, uh, what? And everything I read said, you need to taper off of this. But even tapering off, sometimes you need to take the pills apart and just do two little granules. And I was going, what? So I just white knuckled that shit. I was like, I'm just going off them all. I went off all, which I do not recommend. I reiterate that to listeners, but I think mostly practitioners are going to be listening to your stuff and they know that. And I say that to my listeners too, when I talk about this, do not go off cold turkey if you can help it. But I did and I survived. Because that's another thing that practitioners can't talk about. Sometimes people have to go off these things cold turkey. I did. I did not have a fucking choice and the doctors don't like they

at least they don't seem to care you know that i'm not saying they don't when you don't create time or training it doesn't matter if they care you know like it's like the the one of the biggest problems i don't know if you had seen any of our stuff about research that i write but like we tied research to um copyrights basically what's's patentable, which is unscientific. Yeah, maybe the ethics of the study or the research of the study is scientific. The system that is using the study is not scientific. Because when you say CBT is the most evidence-based thing, when you do 99% of the research on this one thing, like you're not researching everything equally, you know, there's all these problems. But when you go to countries where they actually have

more kind of publicly funded research, like Germany and Switzerland, you might get prescribed an acetylcysteine or something that doesn't have a patent on it here. It's just like, okay, we got to play with the statin to, you know, like we need antidepressants, we need antipsychotics, but we won't develop those because there's all this sunk cost of research. And it's so much easier to just make another statin because it's what the most people, the most people are going to be older white guys that get overweight and sit in front of the TV and watch the Fox News and need a statin. So that's the thing. So we have 30 of them for no reason. They're all the same.

It's just a sugar molecule with one little raster removed. Isn't it? It's kind of the same where they like there. And you'll probably know it better than me but i read it in uh james davies book sedated where he talked about how there was like one um a pill that was marketed to women for like pmdd you know like and it was literally just an antidepressant with the color pink and it was the exact same fucking medication and the some woman found out and like sued and everything or whatever but i'm going like this shit happens all the time and we

don't even know you know i'm not a medical doctor i gotta say that yeah ability and this isn't medical advice but if you if you do you know what a rasper is in chemistry no so like you can have like when you have the little molecule and there's like the dots right like you can have it be a different shape but it's still the same molecule because they can bond in like one of five locations or one of six locations. So just because the way copyright law work, what Prilosec is, is they just took the generic and they said it's only the L-shaped RASMR. That's what you're paying for. It's the L-shaped Rassmer instead of the y-shaped i mean pharmaceuticals it goes back to what you're saying it may be another one of the

incentives are just that's the problem you know what i mean like top down from every industry every industry tech farms uh pharmaceuticals the therapy industry like psychiatry all these things the more that i and i used to be it's like you said not many people know about this stuff not people do not many people do the reading i was that person just three and a half years ago four years ago now maybe in the psychiatrist's office saying like please give me this diagnosis doctor like looking up at him like he was like you know god yeah and now doing my own reading like i'm just like fucking you could not pay me to step into a psychiatrist's office like and i'm not saying there aren't incredible psychiatrists out there because i follow them

like my twitter is like i only use twitter to follow like mental health professionals that i really like and a lot of them are psychiatrists. And many of them are like, again, fighting within this failed, like fucked up model. And they really are more into kind of these like spiritual depth, psychological rabbit holes. But you couldn't, again, it's like, it's very rare. So it's like, you couldn't pay me to go. If I'm suffering, the last place you're going to find me is in the office of a fucking psychiatrist.

Because I've went to four and I'll tell you all of them were just like that okay let's put you on this oh you're still feeling bad let's put you on another one let's up your dose that was it like there was no nothing outside those three talking points medication oh it must be the wrong medication or oh it must be the wrong dose that was it that was the only talking point they're not it's it's what's weird to me is that the system didn't update when we blew it up in the 80s it's based on these assumptions that don't work anymore so psychiatrists used to one be in therapy as patients and to do therapy they don't anymore i love you if you see somebody you have to be in analysis well if you see somebody like doing therapy as a psychiatrist now, they have to be an influencer because that's the revenue stream.

Like you take all this money out to go to college and medicine is they don't like psychology. Anyway, hospitals don't want to cure. They want to treat cancer, but not cure it. And they want to deliver babies because that's what's profitable. If you see a billboard, that's what's going to be on it. They don't really like psychology because there's no service. They're like, wait, where's the procedure? This is procedure-based healthcare. You're just talking. I don't get it. So what you have to do is they have to see you for 10 minutes

and then you build $500 for that 10 minute. That's the service. They don't do therapy anymore, but for some reason they get to tell me what to do. You know, like I had somebody tell me that something that I was doing wasn't evidence-based and it was just like, you work for a midsize health insurance company that has five employees. Basically, it's just like a tax scam where you, whatever, like you exposed records to me in a way that was not traditional. Like you had somebody without a medical license writing me about a patient's records, which isn't legal, all this. No, I'm not in network with them.

I left the network, but it's like, if I'm a nurse, a nurse gets to tell me what to do. If I'm an engineer, an engineer gets to tell me what to do. If I'm a therapist, a therapist should tell me what to do. Not somebody who doesn't do this. That's so true. Why am I being managed by somebody who doesn't know what I do and has never done it? It's, I just, again, my heart goes out to, and it makes me feel happy because I have never to this day received an email from a therapist, psychiatrist, or anyone that says like, fuck you, what you're doing is damaging my profession. You know what I mean? And I have to admit, I've always been a little bit nervous of

that. Because the last thing that I ever want is I don't want to invalidate what people are doing or make them feel like one profession is all bad. And I try so hard to, in every episode I say that I'm like, I'm not saying medications bad. I'm not saying psychiatrists are bad and I'm not saying therapists are bad. I'm saying the bio, we say we have like a biopsychosocial model. Bullshit. We have a biomedical model and also we need a biopsychosocial spiritual model and we need

to actually have that, you know model and we need to actually have that you know like we need to actually have it and the bio is important you're moving things around so that you don't have to indict the environment because then you have to say things like poverty and health care and insurance and corporations then you can't so everything is moved around to make sure that they're like i mean the one of the reasons why the dsm-5 was such a move in the bad direction even from where the dsm-4tr was was they were trying to, one of the reasons why the DSM-5 was such a move in a bad direction, even from where the DSM-4TR was, was they were trying to, they thought that the, you know, the brain mind problem as we move further with the human genome, they were going to find the germ that caused these things or the gene that caused these things. They were going to be able to somehow say, this is why you're doing that. And it doesn't have anything to do with how the world you inhabit and interact with.

And again, nobody wants to fix it. It's just the same. I just quit my tech job. And guess what? I was not the most popular. I made my way up to director level, but it was a very small company. But I'll tell you, I was a rock in the shoe of my C-levels because I would say, look, and I would do the annoying thing.

I would go through all the data and make these amazing spreadsheets and show how the product sucks. The fucking usage is low. We need to fix this. Do not turn around and tell me to tell my team to do a better fucking job when your product sucks. And I wouldn't do it. But the thing is, is that that's it.

It's going on all over the place. It's like you, you know, like you have these meetings where it says, we want your feedback therapist. It's like, no, you don't want our feedback. We're out here on the ground working with these people that are suffering. And we know exactly what we could change to make this better. But the problem is you don't want to, and it's the same thing with people at jobs, right? Like, and they're all of us out there, the kind of people that actually shout out about it, that shout out about the dysfunction in these toxic systems, right? Our toxic families. I heard the supervisor turn beet red when I told him he was barking in a mirror.

I was like. And look, should we change our delivery? That's what I was told all the time. Like your delivery, you know, you could change your delivery. I'm like, you know what? I'm fucking tired. I'm objectively presenting you information that you asked for. And also I think you probably, I'm tired.

I don't have, I'm exhausted. I'm tired of sugarcoating things. Let's just talk. Do you want to actually just hear the truth? Because I don't know about you. I like hearing the truth. Like do I get triggered sometimes? Yeah, but I would 10 times rather someone just tell me exactly how it is rather than

because I can sense when someone's bullshitting me. I respect the hell out of people that don't bullshit me. And so I never could relate to these power figures that just want to hear this sugar coated truth because the CEOs, eventually you're going to have to pay the price for this shitty product, right? Because your company is going to go under. You're not going to be able to get VC funding. It's short-term thinking.

The goal is what we ask you to do, make this study work. Right. And it's the same thing we're seeing in medicine now. We're seeing lots of lawsuits happening. We're seeing lots of all of these things happening. And it's because everybody just thought, oh, whatever. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to speak out against this because of all this ideological capture that's going on.

Guess what's going to make the change? It's a fraternity, too. Keep us doing the shit out of these companies. Money will talk eventually. Well, I mean, I think this stuff is so terrifying that as the problem gets bigger, less and less people are going to have the bravery to see it. And it's so much easier to believe a conspiracy theory and be like, no, this one guy or this one group is doing all of it or well if we just did this then it would fix all of it it's like no this isn't going to be fixed like that and i think one other when we started taproot every a lot of when we started taproot we when i was planning it with brie who's my business partner

like we were like this needs to be an apple store meets a wizard's lounge design wise it needs to be like gandalf is living in the apple store because we have to say like we're going back to the 70s and doing graph psychology but we're also doing cutting edge neuroscience for trauma oh that's great and so like and everyone was like you can't do this there's this weird spacey vibe and i was like no it's going to be the 70s again like that's what we're going back to it's that level of disillusionment and then after covet everybody my age like had an astrologer you know like that's right and because what happens is like because you see it with like some of the conspiracy movements going on now is like when what happens is like people want their

ego to be reflected by their government or their empire so like when the roman that mean the peasants eating the same gruel but when the guy is getting paraded through the street of rome and they're like yeah this is a gall we went and captured it from you this is an elephant you're like yeah it's doing my thing i like it and then the empire starts to fall apart and all of a sudden you're what happens is that it it doesn't like i'm not getting what i want anymore so i don't have this external power i have to go inward and when i go inward i build this esoteric power okay now 70 of your population believes in magic that's what happens what happens. You can't change it. You can't stop it. So when you want to say these are your two options, and they're both

terrible, and right or left, everybody doesn't think that the government reflects their interests anymore, you're going to get essentially schizophrenia as a religion. Schizophrenia as a religion. That's a great title for a podcast episode. That's really good. There's nothing that is filtering these archetypes for you. Like if you're going in the Catholic church, at least they're being like, oh, the messianic impulse. This is what it looks like.

Yeah. Good mother. This is what it looks like. This is the emissary that is connecting you between God and the shame. This is a ritual for shame and guilt so that you're not psychotic. And there's this buffer when you just turn all of that stuff on i mean things break which is what's happening i mean it's system overload right and also i think what we're seeing too now and and again that is a need that my podcast has stepped in and filled but ironically i didn't even know it is like

my own journey on my podcast was kind of my like, I realized how spiritually starved I was because I was super agnostic. I rejected anything spiritual because I had just seen how like hypocritical it all was. And then I also was super turned off by like new age stuff. And so I was going like, but then I found up psychology. Then I found like mysticismicism mythology and archetypes and all these things and i thought okay here's a framework that i can actually use and also using the same language stolen from you vice versa that's right and the way you tell if it's a cult or not is you say is this person saying i invented it i invented it or the intuition is a

radio and i'm just picking up on this perennial philosophy and i'm pushing you towards the door or no i did it and here's my seven points i i am an instrument of this information right like and also what i say over and over on my podcast to people is like i think that's also part of the success of it is because i do not position myself as somebody who has it all figured out right like i'm like i'm still messy and complicated and i will always be right i know that you know things that don't work don't work and i'm willing to say that but i'm not pretending that i if but i don't think anybody can really function at the highest level and achieve like individuation if they don't have some kind of connection like to a, like, um,

let me try to put this in a way that is actually right. It's like to like this collective fabric that we're all part of. Right. Like, and however the fuck you want to like make that make sense. There's thousands of ways, like just look all over the world. You know,

it just so happens to me that I love Western esotericism. I really, I still like you can't put me in a catholic church and me not be like in love because i just i think that i am so drawn to like gothic cathedrals like do i want to like go fucking attend a service there no but i want to sit in there and look and be just completely like uh awestruck by the the images and the look with the stained glass and all that exactly almost exactly that same you know that quote where no catholic church is this

beautiful thing and i can't i'm just so moved by the beauty and i think even if it has to live in a museum it should still be around forever even if it's just a museum or something just happened right there i actually didn't know that i said it but someone would say you stole that from young right yeah exactly what we're talking about is like this is a universal feeling like i have friends who are a really close friend of mine who is muslim and she was raised that from from a young age and she's also like a fellow mysticism lover and she like wants to go on a trip with me to go see all of these like my biggest dream is to go on like a pilgrimage,

like into like some of these different places in Europe where the black Madonna is, because I really love like this like dark feminine archetype. And I, and again, she's like obsessed with it, but she knows that like, there's something cosmic and universal about this archetype and you can get

just as much from it as someone who is like um native american or muslim or sufi you know like i could just name every single religion and you would find something in it because you understand that this is like universal and so i i don't like to make a lot of like very stark claims like this, but I truly believe that you can't just be a, I think therefore I am Newtonian, like materialist person and get the full human experience. And like. That's the Edward Edinger stuff.

You know, like he's Edward Edinger, I think is like one of the rare places where he puts Jung better than Jung puts himself. Like Jung's trying to describe it, but he doesn't really. Well, because Jung was on a manic exploration of his own psyche.

I don't even think half the stuff he wrote, he didn't even want people to fucking read. Well, and then some of the stuff he did write that the family didn't want to be read. There's a coffin in Bollingen that has a bunch of the chapters from his autobiography about Tonyony wolf that they removed no shit yeah there's the so the well anyway like but ender saying like that there's

existentialism there's this objective part of the brain and like from its perspective we're a bubble on a tide of empire nothing means anything and nihilism and we're only what we see touch taste and feel and that's what's real and then there's this you know that's a very ego front of the brain prefrontal cortex thing and then there's this subjective where trauma comes from but also intuition base of the brain mystical sense of like i all is one and i'm connected and maybe we're all just like parts of god you know this is duncan trussell right you know like you know like you know so like he i love him yeah he's a modern mystic yeah and so he like he says they fight and they don't want to be in the same head like what you're saying is that from that materialist perspective if you don't learn to hold both of these you're leaving one unconscious and

it will be misappropriated and so that's where it will make you its bitch well it's that's like why like you know you have ayn rand school people that are essentially talking about the an economic system like it is a religion like if we just got rid of the regulation it would be a wonderful thing and then people who are literalizing religion and turning it into like rules and a country club you know and it's like no you're using the wrong part of the brain for the wrong thing i read something the other day that basically said like people that don't have religion they will make something their religion right and it's exactly what you're saying where it's like if we don't have religion i'm going to make like social justice my religion or i'm going to make right like my my psychiatric label my religion and you're actually acting

rat like a radical fundamentalist a baptist maybe like Christian who you would hate, right? This person you identify as a super leftist and you are being just as like fanatically religious and you can't see it. And that's the problem because you're unconscious and your unconscious is making you its little bitch. Yeah. And I mean, and that's like, that's with political projection. It's like half the people who come in that are extremely, you know,

unhealthy intuitions, unconscious in their right wing. What's happened is like, I was raised, don't cry. I'll give you something to cry about. I despise my own capacity for vulnerability. So I'm going to attack it externally. So anytime somebody, so it's an emotional reaction. It's not logical. Anyone says, Oh, this group of people's gay or poor or black or whatever.

No, they deserve that. The free market or God said that, or whatever the reason is, you know, we're bombing 13 countries that you can't name right now. No, that's for freedom. It's not a foreign policy thing. It's an emotional reaction to anytime someone is hurting, I'm on the side of the person hurting them because they're right. The lefty thing is that if you say, I am the victim, I can't change. Everything, nothing that happens to me is my fault because I can't change. So these people can't change either. Then what happens is anytime, but he says, maybe this group of people could do something or here's something that we could, no, no, no, they're totally

different. And you can't, you can't do that. That's, that's sexist, racist, you know, whatever, you know, and, but they're getting in the way of something that might actually be effective to defend something that they wish was true emotionally. And, you know, as you watch, like, I don't talk about politics and therapy, people come in and, um, I um i hold a pointer you know we're doing brain spotting and they just start telling me that their political beliefs are different in a week because they're not running from this thing anymore and brain spotting works really fast i mean therapy does that anyway depth psychology will take this you into this place until the ego starts to become more porous and it's less rigid and you see that happen anyway i mean I did a lot of therapy before.

That happened to me by taking mushrooms. Yeah. But again, you know, the mushrooms are a nonspecific amplifier. So like if you're going to, you know, and I will say, I will say having had a really bad trip off of something that was laced with something when I was a teenager, having, I have actual experiences from being, I did not take even a tiptoe into mushrooms and by the way this is like microdosing like really setting the stage like setting and what do they say like set and setting where i have zaz in the other room telling him i'm about to do it

i'm in here with candles lit and like reading my middle mystical books and like upping the dose as i go and like experiencing little moments of like baby unitive consciousness, right? Like teeny little moments of like maybe what you might call like Samadhi or something, very like connected moments. But having the experience of having done them before I processed any of my own shit, right? I was being chased by like murderers and hearing voices and like it was the worst night of my life.

I actually never touched a substance after that. right? I was being chased by murderers and hearing voices. And it was the worst night of my life. I actually never touched a substance after that. I thought I was just smoking weed and I'm pretty sure it was sprayed with something or something was fucked up. It was in Wyoming. And worst night of my life. I was hallucinating and I woke up and told my best friend everything I experienced. And she goes, none of that happened. Like, bitch okay and i was like whoa so i was having some really dark dark experiences but it just goes to show like you know the set and setting but i don't think people talk about it's not just set and setting it's like have you also done any of your emotional work you know because you you again you i'm a highly i realize I'm a highly intuitive person. I do have these heightened sensitive capacities,

but back before I had done any of this work, they were going to take me to some really dark places. Now, with my experiments, my dream is to do brain spotting and stuff like that. I would love to. You're in Austin. Have you ever encountered ETT? Because that's the place where it's's everywhere i finally have insurance now okay

a lot of those guys don't take it either which is but that kills me because right now like i don't know if i can i can't afford it in my budget right now i would love to maybe i can like pull like an influencer i've never done that but be like hey i interview on my podcast? Can you do pre-brain spotting for me? Is that even ethical? Can I ask that? You're a good person to ask. Because I've actually never even tried that before. The issue that you get into, a lot of therapists break this law, but it is a law. Like, it's rate changing.

You're a medical service provider. So you can't be like, I like you 20 bucks. I don't like you 200. Isn't that sliding scale? Well, the sliding scale is saying that it is being, the sliding scale is written right. It's saying that this is being done consistently for everyone. You can't just pick the rate. You can't just say, hey, you're a mental health podcaster and I want to advertise.

Sometimes you want to waive your fee to do pro bono stuff, but really like you can get in a lot of trouble because somebody could say, well, he saw him for free. So that's not. I should just budget it out because I'd really love to try it. And I know you said like, this is a great place to do it. As an influencer, I mean, what we could do is like if you came to Birmingham or if I was in Austin for something like that, a lot of the ETT stuff is so big, it's hard to move it. Like it was a nightmare to try and fly with all that stuff. But like I could just say this is an information series and we could film like a YouTube.

Anything that you want to promote, if people really want to follow you on Instagram, they really you've got two shows that they go ahead and add it to your phone right now while your podcast app is out. And you're listening to this ad back from the borderline and add Night Night Bitch, which Night Night Bitch is like esoteric, you know, kind of a time story, philosophy, anthropology. But it's not quite asmr but it's done as like a go to sleep while you're listening to something interesting yeah and then back from the borderline is a lot more of what we've been talking about here um but anything else that you want to promote i mean we could just you can you can i mean if people go if people go to back from the borderline.com i even have night night bitch attached to that too so it's like back from the borderline.com will take you to everything that you

need. If you want to dive into any of my work, it'll take you to the podcast. I also write a lot on sub stack. So if you're the kind of person you're listening to a podcast now, so clearly like podcasts. But I write a lot on sub stack and I, I don't just like recycle content from my podcast.

I write completely unique stuff on my podcast, my sub stack. So you can subscribe to that for free. And yeah, don't just like recycle content from my podcast. I write completely unique stuff on my podcast, my sub stack. So you can subscribe to that for free. And yeah, with my podcast, a lot of people are like, where do I start? You can start from the beginning. Like if you want to start from the beginning, you'll definitely have a journey because you'll start with the Molly that is like kind of just getting red pilled into critical psychology. And like you'll see how much i've changed you know but the podcast is you can start wherever you want to um i put out um three episodes a week basically but two of them are pretty much for only my um premium subscribers i have patreon and yeah that's pretty much the plug that's that's about it well thank you so much for joining us i

mean again you have so much knowledge and so much diligence and like really vetting your own ideas and making sure uh that you have like a cohesive understanding of it it's like you could go in any direction and we kind of did a sampling of it but it's been a joy talking to you and i really appreciate the work that you're doing i'm so glad that there's someone out there um who's able to uh, you know, people. This world needs a lot of help. I agreed. And I feel the same about what you're doing too. So thank you to your listeners for listening to my story.

And I'd love to come back anytime. We would love to have you again. We'll have to do it. Maybe a more specialty topic would give us like a, you know, we could do it. I love a rabbit hole. So that's what this was. I was, i love that framework so anytime anytime we will hopefully see you very soon

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