The girl with the broken blue eyes
Or leaving the cult of sciencism, psychology and the therapeutic model of healing
I have changed the name of “Madelyn” in order to protect her privacy.
The first thing I noticed about her is that her eyes had gone flat and dull. Before the psych ward, Madelyn’s eyes would often change colore:her eyes, normally electric blue, would go from deep almost-black to the light sky-blue you often see in winter. Now Madelyn’s eyes were consistently flat and dead: the greyish blue of the scales of the fish you see on ice at the supermarket.
And there was something missing. I would not have been able to articulate it well being as young as I was, but I might have said something like “her soul is missing”. Because that is what it felt like.
Like Madelyn’s soul had been excised, and there was a great empty, silently screaming vacuum that had taken its place.
Madelyn had just come back from the psych ward.
I was there when she was taken away: all I saw was that Madelyn started to have some really intense emotions, her parents had gone rather cold and numb and dead, and then Madelyn was taken to the psych ward.
In the coming days and weeks, I had adults in my life explain to me why Madelyn had been taken.
“She just wasn’t feeling well, sweetie” one adult said. “She needed help from the doctors, who were going to make her feel better” another said.
But she did not seem better to me.
I missed my friend, who was wild and mischievous, caring and kind, curious about everything and everyone, bright and witty and had a snide comeback for everything.
And Madelyn was replaced by an automaton who looked a lot like her.
She did seem more stable. She would wander calmly from class to class, room to room, not saying much, with a frozen smile often plastered onto her face.
She would respond to things you said, simulate some of the humor she used to have, but in truth I never saw Madelyn again, except in the brief times that she went off of her medications.
During that time, things were terrifying but so alive. Alive because Madelyn was more herself again, sensitive and carefree and authentic. And terrifying because I knew it would set her parents off, and she would be put back in the cage again.
Back then, I vowed that I would never let myself be put in psych ward, would never let that happen to me.
I was wrong.
Fast forward more than twenty years and I would find myself in psych ward for the second time as an adult.
The first time I had been tricked, coerced, and manipulated into going, I didn’t really know what was happening, where I was going.
This time it was different.
This time I knew where I was going, and chose to go anyways.
I chose to obey a part of me that still believed I needed to be fixed and changed, and that this time around it would be different.
And it was.
It was worse.
Worse because I knew it was insane, I knew the whole establishment was insane, knew I’d just be subjecting myself to a world’s worth of abuse.
Worse because I would be leaving my wife Annika and our two cats in the travel trailer we were living in at the time during the worst cold freeze in a long time.
Worse because I knew it was a lie that it could help me.
Worse because I believed I was powerless against the parts of me that wanted to be fixed.
And so I had Annika drive me to the psych ward, drop me off, and wish me farewell.
And then my nightmare begins again.
In contrast to my first visit to the psych ward, I know the drill: strip naked, put on a hospital gown, take off my wedding ring and jewellery, make sure I don’t bring in any snacks.
It still feels like the entrance to Auschwitz, and I imagine I feel like my ancestors did seeing the “Arbeit macht frei” gates on the way into that concentration camp. only I am going voluntarily to have parts of me murdered by fluorescent lighting, poor sleeping conditions, “food”, and the gas-lighting and abuse of well-meaning and clueless medical staff.
Meanwhile at home Annika is starting to panic. The fear I am repressing is making its way into her system. She is starting to have trouble breathing, but doesn’t want me to know.
I’ve made it into the holding room, where I lie there shutdown and frozen, scarfing down packet after packet of Graham crackers, reading one of the five books they were allowed to keep after most were thrown away because of potential COVID exposure (I’m not kidding).
And then I finally summon the courage and give Annika a call: she pretends to be okay, and I continue to pretend that this is a spiritual journey I am undertaking.
And this goes on, with me sleeping in a hallway, the rooms all filled up for the cold spell, calling Annika intermittently and lying my way into an in-patient treatment program.
The morning comes, and I get the call that the ambulance is here to take me to in-patient.
Annika is at home having cried herself to sleep, knowing that I left because she loves me too much. Because I chose hatred and fixing myself over the companionship she has been offering me for over a year.
But now my fear hammers her down. She can’t move, and the fear is so intense it starts to take over everything.
Meanwhile I am calm, composed and cool as a cucumber, having a very rational chat with the ambulance personnel on the way to the in-patient facility.
I get there and feel very empowered, having asked the staff for a space where I can do catharsis and have “big emotions”.
And Annika is spiralling, calling frantically and getting no response. She wonders if there is ever going to be an end or if this will be the last experience she will have, of crushing and overwhelming terror.
I get into the main foyer of the in-patient facility, where they let me know my wife has been trying to reach me.
I give her a ring, and start to realize the mistake I’ve made. I chat with her for a while, cool, composed, and trying to reason Annika out of her experience.
She is small, scared, holding so much fear it threatens to burst her at the seams.
And eventually something shifts. I start to beg the hospital staff to let me leave, to release me.
They refuse.
It dawns on me that I have separated myself from the one person who truly loves me as myself.
And I stand up for myself, and for Annika. For the first time in my life I tell the hospital staff what is wrong with them, to leave me and my wife alone, I stand up, in some small, pathetic way.
But it helps. Standing on the side of my wife and Reality, risking being seen as crazy by having emotions does the trick, and the fear temporarily subsides somewhat in Annika.
And as the days go on, the hospital staff starts to draw conclusions.
When I don’t talk to Annika, I walk around in a disembodied and dissociated haze, often feeling a lobotomized sense of calmness.
And Annika is in our travel trailer wanting to claw her eyes out.
And then I call Annika, and I feel horribly, horribly alive. I panic, shout, want to leave the fluorescent prison I put myself in, challenge the hospital staff.
And they don’t like this.
After several days of this, they decide that the best thing for me is to limit my conversations with Annika to twenty minutes every two hours.
I have my first full-blown panic attack ever as an adult that day.
After raging and screaming at the staff they threaten to sedate me, so I ask if someone will come with me while I quietly shake myself into near-oblivion.
They accede.
I count the minutes until our next phone call.
Annika wants to die all the time now, and is wondering if I will ever decide to leave.
I go on hunger strikes, I outwit, outargue, outmatch the hospital staff, the psychologists.
It doesn’t matter.
I am such a pain in the ass that the hospital staff agree to discharge me.
And I am not sure if I want to leave.
A part of me feels at home here, being punished for being bad, being rewarded with ice cream or graham crackers for being good.
And Annika’s soul is getting ripped at the seams with the agony she keeps picking up from me, the abuse is so intense.
I ask Annika to come visit and she agrees.
That is a mistake.
I subject Annika not only to my own inner hell but the hell that is this place.
It is like bringing the world’s rarest tropical flower to Antarctica and hoping it will not freeze, because you want to see the beauty of the flower.
She wilts.
The next day I am released.
I gather up my belongings, leave on decent terms with the hospital staff, and wish I didn’t exist.
And both Annika’s and my soul are torn apart, with the broken halves looking at each other, desperate to be mended.
I come home, after much internal back and forth.
And I move on, like nothing happened.
But the wounds stay.
And I start to take steps to exit the cult of sciencism.
These days I am exiting the cult of sciencism more and more.
Sciencism is a fundamentalist belief system that comes out of and draws on the mystics of the Enlightenment like Descartes, Bacon, Galileo, and more. Just like Christian fundamentalism draws on the teachings of Jesus and comes to extremely narrow-minded and dogmatic opinions, sciencism draws on the legitimately brilliant and revolutionary thinkers of the Enlightenment and scientific era and uses those to reinforce their own dogmatic views.
You’ve most likely seen the signs on people’s front lawns: “science is real” “climate change is real” “trust the facts, take the vaccine”.
What you are seeing here is not an assertion of research-based evidence, but a statement of faith, not unlike “God is real” or “trust in Jesus”.
In sciencism, there is a hierarchy of priests (doctors, mental health professionals etc) and laypeople (eg. pharmaceutical reps, healthcare advocates) as well as sacred rites (checkups, mammograms, taking prescription drugs etc.).
And the category of therapy and in the most intense instances the psych ward is in another category altogether.
In sciencism, you go to the therapist or the psych ward when there are spiritual ills (or “mental health problems”) that come up.
And like in many cultish environments, what therapy and the psych ward is designed to do is break you down and mold you into someone who can fit back into our broken society.
*
Before I continue, I’d let to set a few things straight:
there was a time in my life where therapy was a revolutionary step up from the radical internal oppression I had been experiencing. Growing up in a general environment where mentioning any negative feelings could have massively negative consequences, having an environment to explore even trivial challenges was a major upgrade for me
I believe in actual science and research, which is different from sciencism. When there are clear peer-reviewed studies, a lack of financial interest in a given outcome, and outcomes that align with reality (eg. men cannot become biological women, and trying to become that will result in negative rather that positive outcomes), I deeply appreciate having the tools and means of discovery that science offers. But this is very different from the cult of sciencism, just as Jesus’ teachings are often very much at odds with most churches and religious dogmas.
*
Most people will argue with me who have gone to therapy: “it really helped me!” They’ll say. “My therapist was so kind, so understanding, and helped me be more outgoing, more creative, and helped me get in touch with my childhood wounds!”
And they’d be wrong.
The reason why therapy’s end-goals do not occur as stated “to have you get to know your true self, integrate your trauma etc” is because therapy is based on an artificial mode of human experience: one where you pay to have another human being interaction with you in a certain way. Just like paying a sex worker to have sex with you will almost certainly not resolve your childhood trauma, paying a therapist to act in the role of your compassionate parent does not and will not heal your attatchment wounds.
Because the attachment is not real, and is most likely actually more conditional than the relationship you may have had with your primary caregivers: you hopefully never had to pay your parents to stay in relationship with you as a child.
And because the attachment is not real, the wins or successes are bound to collapse or fail when that illusion is brought to the surface.
Therapy also is based on the false assumption that separating a person from their relationships and context is what ultimately leads to healing.
That an abuser can heal without the abused being present.
And that is incorrect.
As incorrect as assuming that you can take an unhealthy plant from a forest, take it to a lab, diagnose the problem, fix the fungus and then put it back.
Because the problem is not the fungus.
It’s the forest.
The psych ward is the natural end-result of this kind of reductionistic world view: if therapy and medication cannot help an individual adapt to the sick and twisted nature of our world today, then perhaps more isolation and removal from the entire social and interpersonal context for a person might help.
And it does help.
Dropping someone off at the psych ward does a good job silencing the symptoms of inner turmoil, just like chopping off a limb of a tantruming child might get them to be quiet momentarily: the abusive shock is so strong that any pain that might be working its way to the surface is buried for the foreseeable future, as was mine.
And you might make the argument that my experiences with Madelyn as a child and myself as an adult with isolated incidents, and that because I experienced this trauma at a young age, I drew some childish correlations that have affected my thinking.
And again you’d be wrong.
More and more evidence is pouring in that debunks the sciencistic worldview: the link between school shootings and ssris, the studies that show that anti-depression medication basically does nothing positive, the fact that the suicide rate of people in the first month of leaving the psych ward increases by 40-200 times (not percent) and more.
Sciencism, like wokeism, is on its way out as the major religion in America.
There are more and more COVID dissidents, raw food over chemo treatments people, and prayer and fasting over psych ward adherents in this country.
We are at the epicentre of a world view breaking down, and mercifully we have a government that is assisting in the death of these dogmatic religions.
But what comes next? What do you do when you rip out the poison ivy and smothering creeping weeds that have overgrown the garden?
The answer is not Christianity, much as I love and appreciate the church. While we need much of the conservative values that are found in the world’s largest church organisations, they too do not have a complete or functional view of the world as it is.
What is needed is a meta-religion and worldview.
A perspective that can recognize the truths and positive values that are present in each worldview while rejecting the poisonous lies that also live in each worldview as well.
What is needed is polynousism.
Polynousism (Greek for “many minds”) was founded by my wife Annika after what she calls “The Breaking”. This was a time when her psyche was completely broken down (in large part thanks to a therapist), she experienced herself as multiple personalities after once having a coherent personality, and then reknit herself back together into one coherent self.
In the process she stared directly into the void, coming in contact with the part of herself that knows truth, God, and what is real.
And what she saw is that while each of us may be traumatized and fragmented, that there is nothing wrong with us.
That we are made up of multiple parts. That some of those parts may cause harm, but that there is no part of the self that is wrong or bad, including the ones that want to perpetrate the most heinous acts of humanity.
And that these parts have good intentions, and also need to see the impact of what they have done in order to fully heal.
And it is this radical value, of there being nothing wrong with you, and of taking in impact and intent, that Annika has come back to us with to share.
It is radically simple, but simple does not mean easy.
First Annika showed me this path by examples. Through unnecessary psych ward visits, threatening behavior, and so, so much more, Annika held the belief that there was nothing wrong with me, while being as honest as she could be about how she was impacted.
And it has changed my life.
And now it is time for me to share this continuation of grace and radical honesty with you all.
So buckle up, because the Polynousic train has left the station.
More to come.
The view from my check-in to the psych ward, before my phone was taken “for my mental health”.