The Taproot Podcast - The Weird History of Psychotherapy Part 4: Empty, Dull, Thud, The Satanic Panic and the Scientific Method

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

How therapy became a computer program and lost its soul 1973: A researcher walks into a psychiatric hospital claiming to hear voices saying "empty, hollow, thud." He's immediately diagnosed with schizophrenia and held for weeks. The twist? He's perfectly sane. It's all an experiment to prove psychiatric diagnosis is fiction. Those three words - empty, hollow, thud - would become the perfect description of what American therapy was about to become. This episode exposes how Cognitive Behavioral Therapy conquered psychology by promising scientific precision while secretly throwing out everything that makes therapy work. The computer metaphor for mind created treatments that were measurable, billable, and completely ineffective.   https://gettherapybirmingham.com/the-weird-history-of-psychotherapy-part-4-empty-hollow-thud-or-cbt-and-the-satanic-panic/   You'll discover: How Aaron Beck's computer metaphor reduced humans to software Why the "evidence-based" revolution was built on falsified research The hidden truth: effective CBT therapists are doing depth work in disguise How the Satanic Panic destroyed trust in memory and trauma Why America's most "rational" era believed in underground demon cults The replication crisis that proved the "gold standard" was fool's gold 📚 Essential Reading from Taproot Therapy Collective: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/science-or-science-flavored-capitalism-deconstructing-the-evidence-based-practice-paradigm/ https://gettherapybirmingham.com/the-limits-of-behaviorism-rediscovering-the-soul-in-psychotherapy/ https://gettherapybirmingham.com/a-history-of-psychotherapy-and-how-it-got-here/ https://gettherapybirmingham.com/theodore-m-porter-and-the-critique-of-quantification/ https://gettherapybirmingham.com/when-evidence-based-practice-goes-wrong/   The tragic irony: While hunting for evidence-based treatments, we lost the evidence for what actually heals - relationship, depth, time, and the mysterious process of being truly seen.

You made a deal when times were tough When what you had was not enough Your wings were clipped, your mouth was dry 1973. A psychiatric hospital. A man walks up to admissions. I hear voices, he says. What do they say? asks the psychiatrist. Empty. Hollow. Thud. He's immediately admitted, diagnosed with schizophrenia, and then kept for weeks. But here's the thing, he's not insane, he's a psychologist. Part of David Rosenhand's experiment to prove that psychiatric diagnosis is bullshit.

Eight pseudo-patients, all admitted, all labeled insane for hearing three words, empty, hollow, thud. Those three words would empty, hollow, thud. Those three words would become the perfect description of what American psychology was about to become. 1960s, the computer revolution begins, and with it a seductive new metaphor. The mind itself is a computer. Before we invented architecture, and then God became an architect, then we invented clocks and became... He became a watch maker and now He is the computer itself. The thing that can not only be programmed,

but programmed. The mind that can make itself. Inputs and outputs. Programs and bugs. Hardware and software. Suddenly consciousness isn't mysterious anymore, it's just information processing and it's just information processing that we can debug like any code. Enter Aaron Beck, disillusioned Freudian. He looks at the messy mystical world of psychoanalysis, all that unconscious stuff, all those dreams, all those symbols, all that money, all that talking,

that is very hard to turn into something that a hospital can provide as a service oriented industry and he says, what if we just didn't? What if depression isn't about recessed or repressed trauma or archetypal struggles? What if it's just bad code? CBT is born the mind as Microsoft Windows. Your thoughts are programs. Your depression is a bug. Here's your patch. Track negative thoughts, rate them 1 through 10, replace with positive thoughts, and then reboot. Like Microsoft Windows, CBT works about as well. Beck developed a streamlined approach that zeroed in on cognitive distortions as he called them. Catch yourself thinking I'm a total loser and then you can replace it with, I have talents and abilities. Thought by thought,

belief by belief, you debug your operating system without any of the messy subjective interpretation of Freudian analysis or the mysticism of Jung, or the inherent relationship that Carl Rogers or Virginia Satir were proposing as people as parts of systems. You just go in and you say, in CBT, what is it that is the problem? How big is that problem? And then how do I get rid of it? Which assumes that you know what the problem is before CBT begins. When you get rid of it, you do that in an assessment. There is no more Freud telling you that you're double, triple, secret, super gay, and then that's the reason why you don't even know how gay you are. why you don't even know how gay you are. Instead, you just look at all of these different tracking

software, you know, worksheets that say, first it was an 8, now it is a 7, then it was a 3, now it is a 0. We are done with therapy. Reducing everything down to a number becomes something that's incredibly easy to study because research, especially objective research, doesn't like the messiness of qualitative technique either. It likes to present things as right or wrong, true or false, and CBT offers academia a pathway into this way of understanding the mind, and about verifying what is effective when we treat it. CBT was the psychological equivalent of the coding revolution in software. Just as programmers were learning to write cleaner code, CBT offered a systematic way to refactor buggy mental algorithms. Study after study showed its effectiveness as drugs for depression and anxiety also showed effectiveness. Academic medicine mixed them together. You get six to twelve sessions of CBT and if it doesn't work then you need

medicine and then hopefully the medicine works because that's your last stop and it's all that insurance is going to pay for. It's genius, it's clean, it's testable, it's also complete horseshit. But it's measurable horseshit and that's all that matters. I had a professor who gave me a CBT study in graduate school and The person was measuring how much weed they were smoking the joint had just gotten bigger but he went from ten joints to one it was just a huge joint and in the same way that the Reagan Revolution and Thatcher's insistence that we now needed government to be accountable and show

the cost benefit on a spreadsheet of everything that we were socializing turns academic testing in schools into basically like this metric that would then control funding and figure out if kids were actually learning in a school if they were getting something out of it. Adam Curtis talks about this a little bit in some of his films, namely all watched over by machines of loving grace. But when you have 20 to 30 years to look at what was actually happening, it wasn't that when you apply objective metrics to something like a hospital that it improves, it's that they reclassify things.

In one case, hospitals reclassified chairs as beds and then said, now no one's waiting because everyone has a bed. True story. Academic, the point of this isn't to deconstruct the Reagan and Thatcher kind of revolutions of the way the government and tax worked, but this demanding an objectivity for everything that we used to view as self-evident,

as important, as human, as good, is something that is part of a greater project of reviewing and revivifying our idea of consciousness, of the mind, of government, of systems as just computers. Processes of information, not people, not relationships, not anything intangible. Tanya Lerman is an anthropologist who actually bothered to look at what was happening and she documented something that nobody else wanted to admit. American psychiatry had split into two armed camps and they hated each other. On one side you had psychoanalysts and then they were talking about dreams and transference and

the unconscious and they were seeing patients as whole human beings with stories, contexts, and meanings. On the other hand you had the biomedical boys who were pushing the biomedical model and were sort of true believers in this remaking mental health. The brain was a meat computer, mental illness was a chemical imbalance, 15-minute med checks were all the psychiatrist needed to tell you what drug you were gonna take probably for the rest of your life. Symptoms became error codes. Lerman spent years embedded in psychiatric training programs which error codes. Lerman spent years embedded in psychiatric training programs which let her watch this civil war play out and the psychodynamic residents would

sneer at the pill pushers. The biological psychiatrist would mock the fuzzy-minded analysts because they were willing to sit with a fuzzy math of gray area and subjectivity in the room. To the biomedical model, if you check these boxes then you have this condition. And it doesn't really matter that even though the biomedical model has advanced a whole lot, neurology and cognitive science, the things that we directly know about the brain

are proving it wrong. It still is seeking ways to validate itself. For example, if you go to Taproot, if you go to our QAEG brain mapping lab, we know that there are six things that can happen in the brain that result in the diagnosis, because the same behavior of ADHD.

We know that these six different things respond to the same medications, but that doesn't make them the same condition, even when you make it a completely empirical model where you're doing a map of the brain. So here's the kicker. Lerman wanted to watch what they did, not what they said. And something fascinating emerged when she was studying the quote-unquote pure CBT therapists who were treating everyone the same. The therapist itself became a computer. There was no way to do CBT in different ways. You did it right or wrong. The patient said this,

if you followed the model then you said that. It was a way to turn the therapist into a computer so that we didn't have to worry about people quote-unquote doing it wrong. These therapists though, Lerman saw that they were unconsciously doing depth work. They were building relationships, they were holding space, they were using intuition. All the stuff that they said was unscientific were the mechanism of action that they were doing that worked. Why? Because you can't really actually extract a hundred years of psychodynamic wisdom from the cultural water supply. These therapists had absorbed Freud and Jung and Rogers through osmosis. They thought they were doing CBT and they said they were doing CBT but watch them work. They're doing perennial philosophy and CBT drag. The old-timers who'd been trained in

psychoanalytic institutes, even if they had converted to CBT for insurance reasons, they still had the moves and they could still read the room, they could still feel into silence, they could still use their mirror neurons, they could track the unconscious stance between the therapist and the client. They were thinking in terms of projections, even if they were talking in the language of CBT. And they just had to call it cognitive restructuring in order to get paid. But here's where someone like Adam Curtis would zoom out and show you the horror.

What happens when those old timers retire? By the 1990s, the new generation of therapists is being trained in pure CBT and no psychodynamic theory. They don't even remember it, and a lot of them don't know what it is. So there's no depth psychology, no understanding of transference, projection, the unconscious, just worksheets and thought records. And these kids don't even know what they don't know. They've never heard of object relations. They think parts work as woo woo. They believe that the mind really is a computer, even though it isn't when they start to tell you about their politics or what church they go to.

And their therapy? Empty, hollow, thud. The replication crisis would later prove what everyone else already knew. Most of what made therapy work couldn't be measured. The studies showing CBT's effectiveness? They were accidentally measuring the psychodynamic skills that the therapist didn't know that they were using or couldn't write that they were. And when you strip those skills out, when you train a generation of therapists who really do only CBT, the effectiveness plummets

because it turns out you can't debug a soul, and you can't worksheet your way out of existential terror, and you can't thought record yourself into wholeness. And when these guys retired, all of a sudden the studies, when you had a generation of people that were taught that CBT was the gold standard of research, all of a sudden stopped working. There was a mental health crisis, mental health outcomes got better, psychiatric hospitals stopped working, but they doubled down on doing CVT because they had been told that it was the gold standard, even though the current research that wasn't 20 years old was showing that CVT

became less effective every year. But let's back up. Why did America want therapy to become empty? What did they get out of this deal? If you go back to something like Eric Spern's games, in the game that we were playing, what was the unconscious reward that America got? The Boomers had made a deal with the devil. They'd inherited a world shaped by their parents' war trauma, nuclear family isolation, white flight and suburbanization, women entering the workforce with no children, communities destroyed for highways, real systemic stuff, and the kind of analysis that might lead to uncomfortable questions like, maybe capitalism is making us crazy, maybe the nuclear family is this historic anomaly that when you inject it with the profit motive, makes people insane. But boomers didn't want systemic analysis, they wanted individual solutions, and they wanted to believe that if you just fixed your thinking, then you would be fine.

If you just pulled up your bootstraps, then you would be okay. Never mind that you're working 60 hours a week with no community support, while your kids are being raised by TV and the drug epidemic becomes the medication for trauma that is what most people under 30 are using. CBT was perfect for this. Your depression isn't about living in an insane society, it's about a cognitive distortion. Your anxiety isn't about a precarious employment and no healthcare. You just need to challenge those negative thoughts. It put the onus of control

back on the individual almost entirely when our real environmental and emotional life is a reciprocal force that moves backwards and forwards in between an objective and a subjective world. Some of the things that government was supposed to provide as its part of the bargain it increasingly failed to provide for younger generations. But America wanted to be over identified with individual responsibility, rational thought, quick fixes, measurable outcomes. America was under-identified with community, emotion, mystery, depth, time, relationship. Something that like a society obsessed with these things

inherently becomes myopic because what happens is that emotion isn't important when it's other people's. It's only important when it's mine. CBT gave them exactly what they wanted, a therapy that reinforced all their over-identifications while ignoring everything that they were actually avoiding. Adam Curtis told... In one of Adam Curtis' films, he shows John Nash creating game theory,

the story that's also told from one angle in the movie A Beautiful Mind, and this mathematical model where everything is rational and every actor is maximizing self-interest through rational action. That's what John Nash publishes that gets him the Nobel Prize. The Cold War military loves it and so do economists that believe that everyone is rational actors except for when they go to the dinner party and they start talking about their wife and their barber and all the people at their church and all of the people in their office who can't manage money that are completely irrational.

Yet the kinds of theories that they're developing about the mind and the broader economics based on it assumes that everybody is this rational actor a hundred percent of the time. That there's no other forces out there that move society, that move anything, that forces out there that move society, that move anything, that change the things that we buy. I personally don't buy a triple Applebee's cheeseburger when my bank account is low because I don't know that I don't have money.

It's just that I kind of want the burger. Curtis argues that this mechanistic view had unintended consequences. Nash's ideas conceived as modeling rational decision-making were being co-opted by military planners to justify viewing the world as a brutal zero-sum competition between self-interested actors who were meeting out the most dominant style of government, of family, of self. But Nash himself came to realize that such models grossly oversimplified human motives. His

own model was something that Nash later threw out. People aren't always rational utility maximizers. They're driven by emotions, moral values, social bonds that defy the pure interests of logic. Nash's own struggles with mental illness revealed the mind as a far more fragile and unpredictable than elegant game theory equations allowed. But Nash's theories didn't just warp military strategy and economic policy, they reshaped psychology itself. The mind was reconceived as a logic engine, an optimization machine.

Emotion became noise, meaning became error. The prefrontal cortex, the so-called rational brain, was ground king. And yet when Nash's game the so-called rational brain, was ground king, and yet when Nash's game theory was tested on actual humans, it broke down every time. Take the gangsters dilemma, a variation of the prisoners dilemma or the infamous money and the diamond experiments, where suppose players were going to follow Nash's logic. Maximize your gain, minimize your loss. But over and over people didn't act rationally. They trusted when they shouldn't and they got punished when it hurt them. They gave away wealth, they lied, they cooperated, they withheld, or they acted from spite or intuition. In one experiment,

people were given a diamond and money and they were supposed to exchange it with somebody, but they had to have an element of trust in order to make the exchange. Well, Nash's prediction was that people would act self-interestally, that even though it was dishonest, they would take the money and the diamond because that was what provided the least risk and the optimal outcome for them. In reality, no one behaved this way. Everyone allowed an element of trust into their life in order to make the exchange like had been agreed in the scenario they were given. In other words, they acted human. Even under lab conditions, with real stakes, Nash's elegant predictions failed to describe actual behavior. And that failure wasn't a fluke.

It was a flashing red light. The human mind is not a machine built for logic. We're not spreadsheets. We're not algorithms. We are narrative making, grief haunted, and hope driven animals. So just as CBT had floundered when it tried to reduce suffering to faulty thoughts, game theory collapsed when it tried to reduce humanity to equations. It turns out that you can't build a model of a mind that leaves out the soul. You can't worksheet your way through abandonment. you can't optimize your way out of despair. What you can do is tell people that suffering is normal and that they should white-knuckle it for life, which is cruel and medieval.

You can't game theory your way into love. And you can't put the value of trust on a spreadsheet. When a civilization forgets this, it amputates depth, mystery, relationship, myth, and it doesn't become more rational, it becomes more lost. Soon everyone has to use CVT, including psychologists. Eric Byrne takes game theory and he creates transactional analysis. He writes the book, The Games People Play, that becomes incredibly meteoric at a time when people are obsessed with, well, you know, the post-Froidian thing, the Cold War, and Nick John Nash's game theory, but also a lens to look under the hood in a way that

CBT won't let them go in therapy in the pop culture. Every interaction is this strategic calculation. Every relationship is a game with winners and losers. We're not humans losers. We're not humans anymore. We're players running problems, maximizing utility. But the roots of Freudian analysis were dormant in the Eric Burns book. He's using ego states. He's using unconscious motivations. But he's trying to provide a circuit diagram or logical, you know, conceptual way to identify

what someone's doing in a way that becomes successful for them because real people can apply it and put it on their coffee table. But also it becomes a way that the depth tradition can continue to remain in the public consciousness without threatening the profit motive in medical healthcare. The models were wrong. Humans aren't computers. We'd already rebuilt society and psychology on the assumption that we were. And by the 1980s, the computational metaphor has conquered almost everything.

Economics, humans are rational, utility maximizers, politics, voters are predictable algorithms that we just need more micro-target targeted data in order to manipulate and improve. We can make them believe anything that we want. Mines are in psychology, minds are computers to be programmed and it's society's conception of itself. We are a vast network of interconnected nodes. The DSM-3 arrives nearly 500 pages of checklists. It is a response to the question that Rosenbaum opens up. It is an answer to people like R.D. Lange that are saying things like, you're not crazy. Being feeling crazy is a normal response to inhabiting a crazy world. The world should change a little bit to meet your mental health. Not your mental health should be adapted

to fit into any world that we demand you have to fit into. Any hole that we carve out is something that it is your job to fill. All of this pushback is taken away, and the DSM-3 walks back on all of the promises that the DSM-1 and 2 made about how this manual would never be used for diagnosis in a biomedical type model, that it would never be used for something like insurance billing, on and on and on.

All of those things are thrown away and it becomes a very different book. Just symptoms that you can count. Mental illness as error codes and checklists that tell you what is happening with unconsciousness, even if they don't really. Rosenhand's study, along with the broader anti-psychiatry movement, contributed to this growing crisis of confidence in psychiatric diagnosis, as it should have, and in the 1970s this skepticism was one of the big influences on the DSM-3's radical overhaul by 1980. Operationalized criteria, observable symptoms, attempts at diagnostic reliability.

And we didn't really care if they were right. We cared if they were reliable. We didn't care if they were helpful. We just needed something sort of consistent. Insurance companies loved it and researchers loved it. The only people who didn't love it was anyone who was actually suffering. Because trauma doesn't compute, pain doesn't process, the unconscious doesn't run on Windows 95. Here's the thing that Lerman noticed that nobody wanted to talk about.

Even as CBT conquered everything, the good therapists kept doing depth work. They just had to lie about it, maybe even to themselves. Watch a skilled CBT therapist work. I refer to a lot of them. I don't hate the model because I know that a lot of the people who do it aren't actually bad therapists. The model is just another piece of an incentive structure that pushes most therapists to go the wrong direction. When you watch a talented CBT practitioner, they're tracking their relationship. They're noticing what's being said. They're aware of the parental sometimes, but in other ways the projection that they hold of a broader society, of a broader world. They're feeling into the emotional field. They're holding

paradox. They're sitting with mystery. A lot of times while they sign an insurance contract that says that they won't do any of these things because they're not evidence-based. And they'll write in their notes, challenge cognitive distortion regarding worthlessness. But what actually happened was a moment of profound human connection where someone felt seen for the first time in their life. And the research on mechanisms of action actually backs this up. When you analyze what creates change in therapy, it's often the relationship, not the technique, the therapist's capacity to hold complexity, not their theoretical orientation's description of it, the client

feeling understood, not having their thoughts corrected intellectually. The very things that CBT claims don't matter are the only things that actually matter in the room, and CBT is simply existing around them, or those things are existing around CBT. Fast forward to the 2010s. The replication crisis hits psychology like a meteor. It turns out that most of our scientific findings are bullshit. The landmark CBT studies can't replicate. The effectiveness? Full of publication bias, pee hacking, and wishful thinking. But here's the darker truth. The replication crisis reveals that we'd been

accidentally measuring the wrong things all along. The first generation of CBT studies showing effectiveness. The therapists were all trained in psychodynamic therapy first and they were doing depth work and calling it CBT. Of course it worked. They were doing actual therapy. But the new studies with the new therapists trained only in CBT and trained by therapists that had only been trained in CBT, are they're disasters. Because it turns out that when you really do just CBT, just the worksheets, just the thought challenging, just the behavioral activation, it doesn't work. And you know what? The same things that have worked before continue to. Being heard, being seen, having your pain witnessed, making meaning from suffering, connecting with another human being, being taught that your abnormal experience is actually

normal in a long enough timeline and with enough context for how we think. The perennial philosophy of therapy. The things that every culture discovered independently. The things we keep forgetting and rediscovering. philosophy of therapy, the things that every culture discovered independently, the things we keep forgetting and rediscovering. And meanwhile, in reality, Carter's crisis of confidence speech, 1979, imagination and optimism of the 60s hadn't really panned out. All the hippies were on harder drugs and had failed to integrate into society or fundamentally

change anything material about the way the culture worked. Carter's speech is broadly rejected because it had and immediately rejected at the time because it is trying to ask America to have a different myth about itself. It's trying to ask people if maybe we should stop worrying and aspire to more than credit card debt, than eating red meat, than Monopoly house and cheap consumer goods. And it wanted you to challenge this monopoly on empire, but Americans wanted a monopoly on empire, as all empires do.

It wanted ego to have a monopoly on the mind, as all egos do. And the work of self-discovery was tossed aside as boring and irrelevant. The peak oil crisis, or the oil embargo ends, and things can just go back to normal. America doesn't want to hear about spiritual malaise. Reagan gives them simple answers. You're not spiritually empty. You just need tax cuts. You need more money. You're not traumatized. You just need to work harder.

You're playing the victim. You're not systemically oppressed. You're just wrong. We don't need environmental regulations because the planet is this resilient thing that we should go ahead and use up in your lifetime. It doesn't really matter what happens later. Don't think about it. Well, the crisis of confidence speech is one of the only, probably to this day only, addresses to the nation that really asks people to challenge a prevailing myth and ask them to look inward and ask them to aspire to more. Now we're sort of pulled by an algorithm that feeds us back everything that they think that we want to hear with different results. Psychology has always had to dance to the era's prevailing metaphors and as the Cold War rages on and computers become more

ubiquitous, information processing and computational theory sort of win the metaphor of the paradigm of the day. But the real problems haven't gone away. There's a divorce epidemic. There's latchkey kids. There's Vietnam PTSD coming home. There's women entering the workforce. And who's going to watch children? And what does this mean for this myth that we've sold of what the family looks like. Communities are fragmenting, drugs are going up, the CIA is kind of running cocaine, but who's noticing that anymore or remembering it five minutes later? There's real trauma, there's real systemic violence, but there's no language to describe it left. We deleted all of those files. And here's what CBT revolutionaries never understood. You can't dismantle psychoanalysis using psychoanalytic wisdom. Every effective CBT

therapist is unconsciously doing psychodynamic work, but they're using transference. You just don't name it. You're holding an environment, but you call it a therapeutic frame. You're using containment, but now you call it boundaries. You're using interpretation, but you're calling it psychoeducation. You're working through what's called homework, but you're changing these things to be something that fundamentally can't replace what they actually are. And so the outcomes of therapy are going to get worse because the people who are in the middle levels of insight, the middle levels of talent, aren't being given incentive structures to make them reach the upper levels, to make them get better. People are incentivized to get worse. And not everyone is always going to be terrible, but those incentive

structures do push most people into certain directions. And so at the same time that we're talking about the economic motivations that rule society and treating people like incentive structures around money and secular systems and material are the only thing that motivate them, we're also pretending that those things don't matter in psychology. They're speaking psychoanalysis with a CBT accent, these therapists that are still left in the profession in the 70s, and it works until you train people who only speak CBT and then they fundamentally cannot talk to real people anymore. So these new generation of therapists have no idea why their therapy doesn't work. They follow the manual perfectly, they

assign the homework, they take more classes, they hang more pieces of paper on their wall that's a certification proving why they're smart, and they challenge thoughts and their clients don't get better. Because they're trying to fix something that isn't broken and they're trying to debug a system that isn't a computer and they're trying to solve something that isn't a problem. It's a human being having an emotional experience in an inhumane world. Or maybe they're missing what the real problem actually is, which is why psychology becomes such a punching bag that so many people start to distrust more and more. It couldn't even actualize the problem that they were bringing into the room because

that problem had to be an issue that they could fix by white-knuckling it through emotion and not noticing these real problems in the world are somehow becoming bigger than them instead of becoming part of a process that might have changed some of those things. You know Jung said that if you ignore the shadow it returns as monsters and all that trauma, all that unconscious material, all that systemic suffering. Where does it go when you pretend that it doesn't exist? It comes back as Satan. There's two groups that converge. There's the second-wave feminists that are starting to do early and good somatic psychotherapy.

And they're finally naming child abuse, something that Freud failed to do. They're starting to believe the children and they're breaking generations of silence about things like patriarchy and the systemic nature of people who run the world that pretend to be good but actually do horrible things beneath the scenes. The second group that they ally with that are pretty different from them are conservative Catholics. They're reeling from Vatican II, Latin Mass is gone,

they're looking for proof that Satan is real, and they're also angry that this thing that is supposed to be unchanging and part of the conservative culture and hierarchy is now different. But they agree on one thing, the children are being hurt. And so Lawrence Paster, he's a psychiatrist, he's sleeping with his patient while married to a different person who he later divorces, he marries

his patient while he's sleeping with the patient that he's still doing therapy on who has DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder, he says that he's recovering all of these memories of satanic ritual abuse through some hypnotic technique that he uses. And these memories are that hundreds of Satanists in Victoria, in Canada, and underground tunnels, and there's babies being sacrificed nightly underneath these major cities all throughout North America, and that sometimes the Virgin like intervenes spiritually to stop people. You know this stuff should have been laughed out of the room but instead he becomes the expert. You know he trains the police, he consults on the McMartin abuse cases, he even becomes a household name. You know so many people have that book. He's on the news multiple times talking about how like Satan comes out of records and that we

need to take that seriously in mental health. Because even scientists need an explanation for what's wrong and a literal Satan is easier than we build a society that runs on trauma and then we made trauma illegal to discuss through the means that we're supposed to analyze it, through the psychology that was supposed to be in conversation with why we are sick. We didn't cure sickness, we ended the conversation by making sickness illegal and we removed all the lenses that people could use to see mental illness. So guess what? I guess we're healed. This computational metaphor creates these two problems during this. Everything has to be rational, but humans aren't. And everything has to be conscious except trauma isn't.

So when real abuse survivors come forward there's this messy fragmented somatic memory. A lot of times they're drugged, a lot of times they're children, a lot of times they just weren't making memory in the way that we think about memory like it's this videotape where we can recall things. We are running on memory all of the time without remembering exactly what happened 20 years ago. We are this sort of embodied experience. There's multiple types of memory. And so Satan becomes this stand-in.

The Satanic Panic was CBT's shadow. It both tried to simplify the unsimplifiable and it let us avoid the real depths of self But here's what nobody talks about. Why did set therapy seem to work better in the past? It's not nostalgia It's training a therapist trained in 1960, you know studied Freud even if they rejected him. They understood transference They knew about projection. They had their own analysis. They understood the unconscious. They could hold paradox They could fundamentally understand what trauma was in a way that somebody trained in CVT was not able to. They might practice CVT, but they had the depth psychology in their bones and they could feel when something else was happening in the room. They had what someone like Wilfred Bayon would call a negative capability.

The ability to remain uncertain without the irritability caused by a therapist who is trained to think that they have to understand everything logical all the time, that their intuition is a distraction and not a tool. And so a therapist trained in the 2000s, you know, they learned six weeks on CBT, two weeks on medication, insurance billing codes, evidence-based protocols, manualized treatments, and zero depth or somatic training, unless they got maybe a mindfulness class or something that Lenahan snuck in through the back door in one of the modules of DBT. They don't even know what they're missing and they never feel the uncanny presence of the unconscious in their room and they've

never had their own depth records explored. You know, they're trying to guide others through territory that they've never even visited and if the patient brings it up they're very likely to get overwhelmed or angry. It's like teaching swimming from a textbook when you've never been in the water. And here's what nobody admits. Lawrence Paster and Aaron Becker are kind of the same person. They both need a certainty. They both fear the depths. They both promise simple answers to complex problems. You know, Paster is Catholic and and to him the reason that the world is changing is because Satan is in charge of it. And this evangelical bent kind of enters the Catholic

church that it's not that you go to church to commune with God, it's that God has abandoned the world and the material world and the political and social systems that inhabit it are fundamentally flawed and bad so you should be suspicious of everything that you interact with and hate it. But when things look good, you have to sort of invent that there's Satanists that are like underneath the world doing these things. Where Beck is saying problems in your thinking are errors, there's a right way to think and there's a wrong way and that you can just find each bug and correct it. But there's a black and whiteness that appeals to the same people even though a lot of the implications, you know, of these systems of thought would be very

different. But both are saying don't look at systems, don't feel your feelings, don't trust your body, trust our method, our method is perfect and it can be replicated completely perfectly again and again and again. And watch how the same people bounce between extremes. You know there's fundamentalists that become militant atheists, there's New Age healers who convert to pure CBT or vice versa. There's the satanic panic who becomes, you know, the satanic panic, you know, ritual abuse therapist who all of a sudden becomes this advocate for false memories and that this is all made up. But there's very few people that have an ability to understand both parts of the mind. They just start doubling down on one and then when reality becomes unbearable,

they switch to something that lets them avoid the same fear with a completely different belief system. You know, evangelicals who platform pastor, they're still reeling from Vatican too, if they're Catholic, if they're not, they already have this kind of fear of emotion that fits very well with the Protestant evangelical American church and they're desperate to prove that Satan is real, so God must be too. So if we find evidence of Satan, that brings us proof of God. And they're clinging to certainty, any certainty. The devil made me do it means that I don't have to look at why I do the things that I don't know and

understand. If there is an actual literal devil that came out of records or potions or culture or the news or something and then made these things happen, we don't have to look at the forces that actually make us do things that are a lot or rational, illogical, that we don't like, that we don't understand. And we sure as shit can't change them because they're not my action. Somebody made me do it who's not me. So like I bear no responsibility in the change process. So it's the same way that these sort of things start to blame the victim. You know, everyone else has victim mindset.

Everybody else doesn't want to change, only I do. You're doing the same thing by saying the devil is doing it or that emotion or the trauma is somehow not real or not relevant. And the CBT zealots who worship evidence-based practice, they're doing the same thing. They're clinging to their randomized controlled trials like their rosary beads so that they can pretend that they're doing it the right and the perfect way and they don't have to sit with anything that could be better, anything that could be different, other than just more training to get this new technique like it's Freemasonry or something, and you take the next degree. They're not ideas that could be

integrated into you and applied, because you don't have to change as a person. You just have to collect more qualifications. That means that you have these experience points. Not that you would go out and engage with something and then learn about it and then change as a person, and that might make you change as a provider. The CBT zealots who worship you know this evidence-based practice stuff, you know, and the Lawrence Pazder satanic panic people, they're saying don't feel, don't go deep, stay on the surface where it is safe. Because when you start to really listen to the metaphors that these people are coming up with during the satanic panic, they are just that.

They're metaphors for sexual abuse a lot of the time. Ones that Pazder can't hear. He can't say, oh, this is an image that the mind made because it felt like this. He has to literally believe that half of Toronto is like going into the subway to sacrifice babies instead of looking at the fact that these people are sexually abused in their families of origin and this stuff is extremely common and then it's covered up and then we have very little accountability and some of the perpetrators are some of the most powerful people who run our society. When you turn something into a satanic cult, you don't have to ask hard questions about society and so because of that the satanic panic

hard questions about society. And so because of that, the satanic panic functions in a way that is very similar to the CBT revolution. It lets us avoid the same emotion and it lets us stay enmeshed with the same emotions that we want to hold on to. It lets us keep the hero myth. It lets us keep the belief that we are these sort of logical creatures that have to move forward without having to move inward. And these people get exactly what they're looking for. You know, children describe these impossible tunnels, these flights to Mexico, you know, baby breeding and harvesting of farms. The therapists believe it because they need to believe it. The parents believe it because they need an explanation for why their child is distressed without having to accept a reality that is more horrible.

You don't really want it to be Mr. Connor who is your friend. You don't really want it to be the pastor of your church. It's all that easier to believe that it's demons or people in black robes, not someone that you know. And so the prosecutors believe it because they need convictions and nobody ever asks, what if the distress is real but the explanation is metaphorical? Because that would require holding complexity and we've trained that out of everyone.

And the therapist doing recovered memory work are using the same techniques as CVT. They're looking for specific patterns, they're reinforcing correct responses, they're ignoring contradictory evidence, and they're assuming that the theory is right and that the client's is wrong. You're coaching people in order to pass the

objective metric that you have decided that measures their distress to prove that they're happy. In the same way that sans standardized testing in schools doesn't yield better results. The kids who come out of the school are getting better on the ACT or whatever and when you actually talk to the people who are employing them or doing their therapy, they're getting worse at all of the things that make them educated, that will make them human. You're changing the test. You're teaching the test with CBT. You're saying, oh, if you don't feel good, do this and then you feel better. Don't you feel better? And the person is getting this message that they're supposed to feel better. And then you're raising their score but you're not really

exploring if any of those things are okay. Maybe they have a reason to be angry, maybe they need to reconnect with a voice, maybe they do need to be distressed for a while and in that distress they will find the soul. Whether you're hunting for Satanist or cognitive distortions the method is the same force reality to fit your model. The McMartin trial is that 360 children disclose abuse and the FBI investigates 12,000 cases of ritual abuse and they find absolutely nothing, not a single shred of evidence. But they do find real abuse in homes and churches and schools, regular non-satanic abuse,

the kind that's always been there, the kind that we built systems to ignore. The satanic panic served its function. It discredited anyone talking about repressed memories, body memories, systemic trauma, one hysteria used to invalidate all depth work. And America was playing a game with itself. And like Curtis's example shows, when you treat life like the prisoner's dilemma, everyone defects, everyone loses. Therapists start competing for insurance billing. Patients compete for diagnoses. They start to identify with diagnoses, which is a crazy thing, and not how psychotherapy is supposed to work. They're not a tribe, they're not a race, they're not a religion. But people get on Instagram and they're proud of this because of the way that we

started to do this. And everyone optimizes for the wrong metrics. And the mental health system becomes what Deleuze and Gattari warned about, this machine producing subjectivities that fit the capitalist machine. And every single time that someone tells you CVT is the gold standard, remind them it's the gold standard because it's the only therapy designed to be measured by the tools that we use to measure. It's like saying that hammers are the best tool because they're best at hammer tests. Empty, hollow, thud. What did we lose? We lost the unconscious. We lost the body. We lost systemic thinking. We lost uncertainty. We lost mythology. We lost depth. We lost mystery. We lost time. We lost relationships. And we created a world of machines, except the machines were us and there

was not anything that was healing about them. Because they couldn't contain us, but we kept thinking about them like they were us and us like we were them. And here's what none of these systems can do. They can't work against their own incentive structures. CBT can't say, maybe some problems take years to heal. Insurance won't pay that. Psychiatry can't say, maybe you're sad for good reasons. Pharma won't fund that or its line won't go up. Evangelicals can't say, maybe doubt is holy. Maybe God is found in the mystery because congregations blood pressure will go down. They'll stop viewing life as this fallen emergency that is about to be the end of the world and they won't

tithe. Pastor can't say, maybe these are metaphors, because nobody's gonna buy the book and he's not gonna be allowed on the news. They're all trapped in their own certainty machines. And certainty is just another word for the death of curiosity, which is another word for avoiding growth, which is another word for trauma response.

In her research, Lerman found something poignant. The last generation of psychodynamically trained therapists working in community clinics still doing real work. They bill insurance for CBT, they fill out the forms, they use the language, but in the room they were doing what they were trained to do. They were following affect, they were tracking the unconscious, they were holding the frame, they were containing the unbearable, and they were metabolizing the toxic. And above all they were staying curious and assuming that they didn't know everything and weren't doing therapy perfectly which is what allowed them to improve because therapy wasn't a formula that one could do perfectly it was a

process of self-discovery yourself and the patient and they're like the secret agents of deaf work in this forgotten depth i talked to somebody informally a couple years ago during this time and she said I felt like I was doing witchcraft during this witch trials when she refused to be a cbt therapist in 1982. And they know that their knowledge will die with them and the young therapists that they supervise don't have the foundation to understand what they're really doing and they're no longer allowing the language in colleges for them to say it. And one old psychiatrist told Lerman, I teach CBT techniques, but I'm really teaching them to pay attention, and once they learn to pay attention, they discover everything else on their own. Which brings me

to another point. A lot of the things that make therapy work aren't teachable. You can recognize when someone wants to know them and if they can learn them, but you can't really explain them to people who don't know. What happens when there's no one left who knows how to pay attention? Strange bedfellows emerge. You know, there's this computational view of the mind, cold, rational, mechanistic. It finds an unlikely ally in the evangelical movement. James Dobson stands before a focus on the family crowd and he tells them, when your babies cry, don't give them milk, give them water. And that will let them know that you heard them,

but that they're breaking the rules because they're being hungry when it's not meal time. An infant child, you know, a pre-egoic creature. And the message is, emotion is weakness, control is godliness, shame is discipline. You know, dogs know to nurse their baby when it is crying, when it is an infant, because that is healthy, and that is what's supposed to happen. And we've invented this system of logic and rationalism and control that made human beings at the height of culture forget what dogs know when they're two years old. The idea that emotion is dangerous, that it would lead to sin or lead to illogic or lead to death or whatever room you're in, is this thing that makes you not feel, that makes you part of computation, that just makes you

obey. And the same people that are saying we must be logical and empirical, they're on TV saying that the Smurfs were teaching communism and witchcraft. They're saying that Dungeons and Dragons was doing real magic, or that if you played Dungeons and Dragons long enough that you would get a real sword and stab your friend. You know the Misfits, like music, would somehow make kids sacrifice goats when they said like I don't like, I don't know, any Misfits songs but they're like about not liking school. That playing Stairway to Heaven or Backwards would reveal some line about here's my age

to sweet Satan or something. The Procter and Gamble's logo was satanic symbols. They're people that are very obviously traumatized and very obviously emotional and very obviously motivated by emotion, telling you that emotion isn't real. And no one has the tools left to hear what they're saying or to analyze what they're really saying on TV.

We don't listen to how people feel anymore. we listen to what they say and we need to stop. The most scientific era in psychology's history believed that daycare workers could fly children to rituals and hot air balloons. That there were vast tunnels and networks under every preschool that linked together, like the Lord of the Rings, Minds of Moria. They said that babies were being bred in farms for sacrifices to charge up the devil's power level. They said that the MTV logo of a mouth was the logo somehow reflective of a

real portal to hell that could be opened if you listen to enough music. You know, by the late 1980s there were 12,000 plus cases of ritual abuse investigated by the FBI, there were hundreds of daycare workers arrested, families were destroyed, children were traumatized. Children were coached by the investigators using these techniques. Therapists made fortunes on recovered memories, physical evidence found zero, zero underground tunnels, zero bodies, zero actual Satanists, some confused teenagers with Ozzy albums that were smoking reed. And while America haunted imaginary Satanists, the Catholic Church systematically covered up thousands of real abuse cases. Jeffrey Epstein was building up his network in plain sight with

people who are still in politics and still run the world. The CIA was flooding inner cities with crack cocaine and lying about it. Reagan was funding death squads in Central America. Savings and loan crisis destroyed the middle class. Manufacturing jobs disappeared overseas. Healthcare costs exploded. Education became unaffordable. There was a real satanic network. There were actual demons being born, but people were not looking at the metaphorical. They were looking at the literal and so they were blind. If we gave our entire culture the DSM screener for borderline personality disorder, what happens? Fear of abandonment. If you're not productive, you're worthless. Unstable relationships. A 50% divorce rate and a complete death of community.

Identity disturbance. Who are we? Are we just our brands, our jobs, our income? Impulsivity. Credit card debt. A news cycle where people can't remember what happened two hours ago. Addiction dimmings. Projection onto political figures like they are

Marvel superheroes or gods. Suicidal behaviors. Ignoring risks like nuclear war. Emotional instability. Road wage and Twitter mobs and cancel culture. Chronic emptiness. Mental health diagnoses at a sky-high rate. Inappropriate anger. People who can't watch the news without their blood pressure going through the roof. Dissociation. There's screens everywhere.

Very often, very seldom do we ever participate in one conversation or one thing. Borderline personality disorder happens when someone can't regulate emotions because they never learned how. And when they can't form stable identity because they were never properly mirrored, and when they split the world into all good and all bad because they can't hold complexity. The same diagnosis, which I don't really love from a book that I don't like, that tells

you how to diagnose borderline personality disorder is actually telling on itself. And that's exactly what we did to our culture. We created a culture that can't tolerate ambiguity, it can't process grief, it can't hold paradox, can't see metaphor, it can't feel without consuming something. It doesn't believe that something is real if there's not an objective metric. It can't think without computing and it can't exist without producing. We gave ourselves cultural BPD and then we acted surprised when everyone started cutting themselves, you know, with credit cards and filling this void with opiates. As the satanic panic peaked, the backlash began. The false memory syndrome

foundation, you know, was formed and accused parents started to fight back. Families were torn apart by recovered memories and they start to sue therapists, some win millions. A certain type of the profession loses a whole lot of credibility. Real survivors, you know, get caught in the crossfire and their actual trauma is delegitimized by the hysteria over false memories And the baby legitimate trauma therapy gets thrown out with the satanic bathwater of this culture That largely did not come from psychology

The people who really hurt other people were being co-opted by broader cultural movements that psychology and psychotherapy itself didn't invent. Now, you know, anyone talking about repressed memories has to be wrong. The body containing emotion, that's Satan's stuff. Dissociation is made up. Systemic abuse is a conspiracy theory. The unconscious itself is unscientific. And if you're saying that maybe, maybe we deserve to take a minute

and try and rethink the way that we do things so that we could analyze ways to change this world and make it slightly better, you're unreasonable, you're immature, and you're full of victimhood. It is hard to right the boat when it wasn't made to float For so long we let it go, baby down to Cubs. Out with the devil, out with the devil, out with the devil, out with the devil, out with the devil. I'm with the devil. I'm with the devil. I'm with the devil. Geraldo Rivera went on TV in 1995. And he said, we've found no proof of satanic ritual abuse anywhere in the country.

And I want to announce publicly that as a firm believer in the believe the children movement, that that movement is now dead. But what really died wasn't just belief in satanic cults, it was trust in memory, it was faith in good therapy, it was a belief in the unconscious, it was an understanding of trauma, and it was any hope of a depth work. We solved the satanic panic by making all depth illegal, by declaring the unconscious unscientific, and by reducing therapy to symptom management. By the mid-1990s, CBT had conquered everything.

It's the only therapy insurance covers. It's the only approach that gets research funding. It's the only one that speaks the language of research enough to even get research, even if you pay for the research yourself. And it's what they teach in graduate schools. It's evidence-based because we only measure what it measures. And this message is complete. You don't have it unconscious. You have thinking errors. You don't have body memories. You have cognitive distortions. You don't have systemic trauma. You have individual

pathology. You don't need depth. You need worksheets. And you don't need time. You need techniques. And you also don't ever need to try and change the world that you live in. You need to realize that your victimhood is something that you should go in and kill all of your capacities for being vulnerable. You don't need community. You need to be able to function as a completely

individualistic person, motivated by rational self-interest until you don't feel anything at all anymore. And this new generation, you know, that's coming up, they don't even know what questions to ask. They've been trained in a therapy that's stripped of its own history and they learn evidence-based practices without understanding that the evidence is based on what the therapist who knew things that they didn't know. And it's like teaching surgery by showing somebody how to hold a scalpel but never explaining anatomy. They can go through motions but they can't know what they're cutting and they can't recognize the different tensions and the viscous energy against

the blade. The most rational era in history became the most irrational, the most scientific approach created by the most unscientific outcomes, and the culture that banished metaphor took everything literally. The society that deleted feelings became entirely driven by them. And we solved our problem of consciousness by pretending it didn't exist. We solved the problem of trauma by making it unspeakable, and we solved the problem of depth by staying on the surface. And we solved the problem of the soul by declaring that it was dead. And just as an aside, like if anyone's listening to this series and they think that I'm advocating for some lack of accountability or objectivity in the therapy room, that I'm telling therapists to just follow their hearts or do whatever pseudoscience they want to make up and pretend it works, you've missed the point. I'm asking you to ground things in an idea

that may not validate in a two-week study, but that you actually have to go out and find real patterns, real wisdom, real results, not just the kind that fit in a spreadsheet. And one of the biggest lessons from the satanic panic is this cycle that America keeps repeating. When two groups make this uneasy alliance, in this case evangelicals, conservative Catholics, and Reagan's hyper-capitalist, you know, neocons, with this feminist social workers that are trying to do somatic and social therapy, when it all blows up, when the ideas are proven wrong, or when someone gets embarrassed, when people get made fools of, the people with the actual power are never held accountable. fools of, the people with the actual power are never held accountable. It wasn't social workers that did the satanic panic. It wasn't feminists that benefited from it. It wasn't them that needed to platform these things. They were just trying to help people. And

I'm not going to defend the things that some of those social workers and some of those therapists did wrong or did ignorantly. But the satanic panic is always used by people, even psychotherapists, who's writing I respect to advocate for science is this hyper-empirical model that can create the most perfect therapy or has at CBT. But here's the thing, it wasn't social workers who had power. It wasn't the feminists, it wasn't the lefties. Every single time that there's a lesson to be learned, the people with the power pick a scapegoat from anyone foolish enough to trust them.

And during this time, Reagan is running clandestine operations around the world. The CIA was trafficking children and running drugs. A lot of this is declassified and not conspiracy, and a whole lot more of it is implied by what we don't know. And the Catholic Church was covering up systematic sexual abuse while using the Satanic Panic to prove that the devil was real. Multiple conservative and neoliberal senators later er outed as sexual abusers who were throwing aspersions at teenagers listening to punk rock and platforming the Satanic Panic because they needed it.

Not because the patients did, and not because the therapists did. Because the broader culture that held power Needed it to be that way when they all lined up to attack hippies who were just trying to create genuine community as this made up risk and The risks of making humans into machines is that we can't see ourselves as networks anymore But here's where the computer network might actually work as a metaphor We are networks. Relational psychotherapy works because family dynamics become internalized psychological

systems. As the world becomes hyperconnected and hyperindustrialized, people feel these neural networks unconsciously. And when you see a men's rights influencer spreading poison online, what you're seeing is someone probing across networks to find weak spots, to find vulnerable people, colonizing vulnerable areas. In this case, it's young men with no upward mobility and often no father to speak of. And you have to look at the material forces that created these realities instead of demonizing these people. They're just exploiting the world that we built.

And I'm not defending them either. But if you don't want to look at the forces underneath them, I'm looking at you. The mind, when we see it as neural networks, as forms of interconnected representation outside itself, you know, when the mind that sees networks, opportunities for expansion, it tries to creep outside of itself. And Jung was far more prepared for this inevitable technological metaphor than Freud or Beck. People like Marshall McLuhan or Bowen from the early media

and digital analysis movement in the 60s and 70s. They were saying that God is gonna be a network for years or that society is going to enter network in a way that we don't even, we become less than individual. But we still think that we're individuals and that will create this problem if we're not aware of it. And our projections collectively participate in that network. So when I say trust your intuition, I don't mean make things up. I don't mean just go in and say whatever shit you want to say.

I mean understand that we are networked beings reading networked realities. The patterns that you're sensing might not show up in a controlled study because they are network effects, not individual symptoms. And the accountability that I'm calling for is this. Stop letting the powerful rewrite history every time their alliances blow up. Stop letting them scapegoat the healers while they run the world into the ground. Stop pretending that CBT is scientific when it's just capitalism wearing a lab coat. Real science stays curious. Real healing works within networks, not just individuals. Real accountability means naming who actually has power and what they are doing with it. That's not anti-science, that's actual science.

And that includes all the data. Even the parts that make the powerful uncomfortable. And even the parts that are inconvenient to the profit motive, which are the parts that the, you know, I love science people want to throw away. Here's a pretty common experience that is described to me by people that have been in CBT before they come to my office. The client says, I think that trauma is stored in my body. I notice that my body does this when and they're cut off. That's just anxiety. Let's work on your thought patterns. Point to the emotion on the wheel. Rate your distress from 1 to 10. But I can feel it in my throat and those are

cognitive distortions. Here's a worksheet. Point to the emotion on the wheel and realize that it is not logical. But I notice that my throat does this thing like I'm trying to stop. That's a victim mindset. You're trying to make an excuse instead of a solution. Do you want the next day to be different than the rest of your life? Do you want the next day to be different than the last couple days have been? They cut you off, they intervene, or worse, they don't cut you off and they listen to you and they don't believe you and the patient picks up on that energy. And a lot of these young therapists like they genuinely believe that they're helping, they're doing exactly what they were trained to do, they just have no idea that their training is missing

90% of what makes therapy work. And the client leaves with a prescription, you know, worksheets in their bag and they feel unheard and they start to think, some of them, that the thing that was unheard must be unimportant. And they'll try another therapist and then another and looking for something that they can't name because the language for it has been deleted. And there are fewer and fewer versions of the thing that they really need out there for them to find. And so fewer and fewer people find it and fewer and fewer people start to trust that thing of self, that part of self, their vulnerability, their capacity for somatic emotion. And just like Freud and Jung,

they're not heard by their dad, or they're not heard from wherever that wound came from. And the wound becomes invisible, and then it becomes a part of identity. And then it becomes something I can't change. Meanwhile, in a community clinic across town, there's a 72-year-old therapist trained in the 1970s who sees her last patient of the day and she bills insurance for CBT for depression but what happens in the room is something else entirely, something that can't

be manualized, measured, or taught in six weeks. And she listens with her whole body and she feels the unsaid hovering in the air and she holds the unbearable until it becomes bearable. She does the thing that has no name anymore because we've forgotten the names. And when I meet one of these people I know who they saw last because I can see it in an impression of how they think about themselves and how they think about trauma and how they talk and how they engage with me. And when it's the first type of patient I am so sad.

And when it's the first type of patient, I am so sad. Rosenhand's three words became prophecy. Empty, hollow, thud. But here's the thing. Even with these incentive structures, even with this systematic hell, you can't kill something like a perennial philosophy. Because it becomes its own kind of evidence-based practice. The fact that these ideas that are timeless and that existed before the 60s and the 70s and the 80s continue to resurge across cultures, across time, across people who didn't know each other, who didn't talk, who had no interaction,

that independently discovered the same things. That itself is a kind of evidence. The soul will remind you that it exists. And even with these incentives, there are people doing wonderful work and making discoveries. The resistance blooms in the cracks of the machine. Hernando de Soto done a great big hollow. In the bottom of a cave took the location to his grave. In the valley that they flooded.

Treasure he stole, cold-blooded, at the bottom of a lake. The economy at stake, he melted forgotten gods of old into forgotten bars of gold. The TVA dammed up all the land To help the common man Who are these gods that glitter in the night? So full of us and so full of light Are we each alone in the dark? I see the fire, where is the spark? Danger will rob and sun Your journey has just begun

Into a place beyond knowing Are we missing an oaring? What did we hope to find about ourselves? Holding desperately onto God's lapels Twist the stars in space To constellate into a face Long after your eyes adjust There is still no one here but us In the midst of parts unknown

We are still running from our home Is the universe some lonely scream? Or is it all, all part of his dream? Physics is rules that collide We can only measure it from inside Alexander the Great was afraid to be late Descended from Zeus He had to prove he couldn't lose Still afraid to eat our shadow We chase after El Dorado Odin gave a tree his eye To know the reason why Hanging on the wood he begged us to be good In the helpless authority of God

Spare the child and spoil the rod Make dust to be good in the helpless authority of God Spare the child and spoil the rod Outer world is only what's inside All the same age in the labyrinth In the garden breathing hyacinth You only fight what you hide