Science Over Slogans: What Daniel Amen Gets Wrong About Anxiety

Posted on April 6, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

In a video clip, Daniel G. Amen, M.D., shares what he calls “One of my favorite strategies to combat anxiousness” and refers to “killing” what he calls “ANTS,” his acronym for “Automatic Negative Thoughts that steal your happiness.”

Amen advises the listener that, “Whenever you feel anxious, sad, or mad, write down what you’re thinking to get it out of your head.” Seemingly borrowing from Byron Katie, he says you should “Then ask yourself: is it true, is it absolutely true, how do I feel when I think that thought, how would I feel without it, and finally, turn the thought into its opposite. Remember: you are not defined by every thought that crosses your mind.”

This approach treats thoughts as the primary problem and puts the burden on the individual to override them. That’s unhelpful, and it’s not even science.

From a Relational Neuroscience view, anxious activation is not driven by thoughts alone. It reflects a whole-body state shaped by prior experience, current conditions, and the level of safety available in the moment.

When the body is organized around threat, thoughts follow that state. They are not random intrusions that can be flipped into their opposite without consequence. Asking someone in that condition to challenge or replace thoughts can increase internal conflict. One part of the system is trying to signal danger while another part is being instructed to dismiss it. That mismatch can intensify activation rather than settle it.

Writing things down can help if it brings structure and slows things enough for awareness. But the effect depends on whether the person has enough stability to stay present while doing it. If not, it can pull attention deeper into the threat pattern.

Sustained change usually comes from shifting the conditions that organize the distressed state. That includes predictable environments, people who respond in a consistent and non-intrusive way, and enough room in the body to notice sensations without being pushed past tolerance. When those conditions are present, thoughts tend to become less rigid on their own. There is less need to force them into something else.

Framing thoughts as something to “kill” sets up an adversarial stance inside the system. Integration depends on reducing that internal opposition and allowing signals to be processed and updated in context. The focus shifts from correcting thoughts to building conditions where the body no longer has to generate them in the same way.

Science matters.

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The IPNB of Masking: How the Nervous System Prioritizes Belonging Over Authenticity

Posted on April 3, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

Masking behavior, or social camouflaging,, is the conscious or subconscious suppression of one’s natural personality, emotions, or neurodivergent traits to conform to social norms, fit in, or avoid judgment. It is commonly used by autistic individuals, those with ADHD, or people with mental health challenges to blend into neurotypical environments. While used as a coping mechanism for safety or acceptance, it often results in extreme emotional exhaustion, burnout, and a loss of personal identity.

Masking is an often subconscious protective survival tool, not a deception. It develops in relationships where it feels dangerous to be your authentic self.

It begins in childhood. A child quickly learns which of their natural expressions, needs, or feelings will earn connection and which will lead to rejection, like punishment, ridicule, or neglect.

Your body prioritizes belonging. Masking is your nervous system organizing itself to maintain closeness, even under threat, because being connected is a biological need. The cost is an internal split: how you act on the outside is different from what you experience on the inside.

The constant monitoring is exhausting. Always watching your tone, facial expression, reactions, and posture (constant self-surveillance) increases stress and consumes energy. This energy is spent detecting threats rather than forming mutual connections.

It is often praised in rigid settings. Compliance, emotional suppression, and performance are frequently rewarded in workplaces or unequal power structures, and are often mistaken for maturity or professionalism.

Unmasking requires real safety. Telling someone to “just be yourself” ignores the past experiences that made being authentic dangerous. Unmasking is only possible through repeated experiences of being accepted without cruelty, contempt, or being minimized.

When the mask is no longer necessary, energy is freed up. The effort you spent performing becomes available for creativity, rest, and intimacy. Anxiety and depression symptoms often lessen when you no longer have to constantly manage how others see you.

The goal is not to shame the mask, which kept you alive. The task is to build conditions in your life where you don’t need it anymore.

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Why I Don’t Go to Hospitals Anymore

Posted on April 1, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

I’m done with hospitals. I value care, but these environments reliably cause harm. I know this from numerous experiences that involve virtually every department.

Hospitals are built around speed, liability management, billing codes, and rigid hierarchies. Human regulation is not the priority. From a Relational Neuroscience lens, that matters. People working under constant pressure, surveillance, and fear lose access to listening and care. Defense becomes the default. Control replaces connection. Criminal behavior goes uncorrected.

Patients arrive stressed, in pain, or frightened. They are met by staff whose stress load is already high. The interaction predictably turns sharp with irritation, dismissal, and even provocation. Patients are treated as disruptions rather than people needing help. That interaction alone can push a struggling body further into distress.

The presence of hospital para-police is not incidental. Hospitals employ them because these environments routinely escalate people. When care spaces rely on enforcement to manage distress, it says everything about the conditions inside. Instead of reducing stress and supporting regulation, the system prepares for conflict and containment. That signals threat to everyone who enters, patients and staff alike.

The problem is not just a few rude clinicians, but a structure that exploits everyone. Practitioners are worked past their limits, stripped of autonomy, and punished for slowing down. Patients absorb the fallout. Signs warning against assault don’t appear in healthy environments. They appear where chronic dysregulation is built in.

I won’t put my body in places that reliably increase stress, erode trust, and worsen symptoms. Healing requires environments that support regulation, safety, and relational presence. Hospitals do the opposite.

Refusing to go into a hospital is self-protection in a “healthcare” system that refuses to protect anyone.

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The DSM Update: New Bells and Whistles on the Same Old Bunk

Posted on March 30, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

The American Psychiatric Association’s plan to revise its holy book, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), shoves a bunch of cosmetic and structural bells and whistles onto the same old diagnostic framework. They’re going to reorganize criteria into domains, talk about biomarkers, add social and cultural factors, and make it a “living document” with ongoing updates. They even want to change the name to the “Diagnostic and Scientific Manual” to signal a more “holistic” approach.

That sounds like progress only if you believe the problem with the DSM has been a lack of prettier labels, more checkboxes, and the illusion of scientific precision.

Here’s why these revisions won’t fix what’s broken:

  • The DSM still fundamentally treats human nervous systems and distress responses as discrete pathologies to be boxed and labeled, rather than as patterns of survival adaptation in response to relational and environmental contexts. Giving clinicians “four domains” to check off doesn’t change that underlying logic. 
  • Adding biomarkers as a “domain” is mostly window dressing because there simply aren’t validated biomarkers that map reliably and specifically onto these categories. Science still hasn’t produced markers that tell us what a distressing state means for a person, and nearly everyone in rigorous research knows the evidence base for biomarkers is weak or speculative. 
  • Tacking on social determinants and cultural factors without changing the core structure still leaves diagnosis rooted in pathology. Doctors will still be trained to find a disorder rather than understand a person’s survival adaptations in context. The very thing critics object to – medicalization of human reactions to stress, loss, oppression, and trauma – is still embedded. 

The field has known for decades that the DSM’s categories overlap, lack validity, and risk diagnosing normal responses as illness. There are persistent calls from psychologists and other clinicians to stop relying on this symptom‑checklist model and adopt systems that account for context, function, and meaning, rather than just counting symptoms.

So what needs to happen instead of more tweaks?

  • Stop treating diagnosis like a medical inventory and start seeing distress through the lens of nervous system regulation and survival adaptation. A person’s distress is not a thing wrong with them to be slotted into a category. It is a signal of relational and systemic overwhelm.
  • Build frameworks that center on interpersonal and environmental context, not symptom clusters. Human systems falter under chronic threat and isolation. A valid diagnostic approach would acknowledge that human suffering is often a function of overloaded relational systems, not a biological defect.
  • Replace pathology categories with dimensional descriptions of experience, function, and adaptation over time. Instead of shoving people into fixed disorders, we’d see their reactions as understandable responses that change with safety and support.
  • Shift clinical training away from counting symptoms toward understanding nervous system states, relational histories, and social context.

The DSM’s glossy revisions may calm some critics, give researchers something new to cite, and make the manual look more “scientific,” but they do nothing to dismantle the core problem: the assumption that human suffering can be reduced to discrete disease categories divorced from relational context, survival adaptation, and the realities of how nervous systems get overloaded in actual lives. That’s the part that needs to die first.

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Fascism in a White Coat: The Authoritarian Regime of Mental Illness

Posted on March 27, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

If the mental illness industry were a government, it would resemble an authoritarian regime that maintains control through coercion, manipulation, and the suppression of dissent, while claiming to act in the people’s best interest. It enforces compliance through labels and drugs rather than laws, hospitals instead of prisons, and “treatment plans” instead of policies.

It operates like a technocracy merged with a theocracy: it worships its own doctrines, with “chemical imbalance,” “disorder,” and “evidence-based treatment” held as sacred truths, immune to challenge (even after the “brain chemical imbalance” theory of depression proved to be no more than a Big Pharma marketing ploy). Questioning those doctrines is treated as heresy, and those who do are pathologized or silenced. Its experts function like a ruling elite, deciding who is sane, who is disordered, and who must submit to intervention.

The mental illness industry is also deeply corporatized, so in practice it functions more like a corporate authoritarian state. Profit drives policy, the pharmaceutical industry plays the role of oligarchy, and human suffering becomes the natural resource being extracted and commodified. The propaganda arm is the public mental health narrative, which convinces citizens that obedience equals wellness and compliance equals recovery.

And, like all authoritarian systems, it sustains itself by undermining self-trust. It tells people their perceptions are unreliable, their distress is evidence of defect, and their longing for justice is a symptom. The mental illness industry is an empire of disempowerment that only pretends to care.

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Trust as Medicine: A Six-Year Journey in Craniosacral Therapy

Posted on March 25, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

After six years of working together, my craniosacral practitioner finally felt my cranial rhythmic impulse. That moment is huge. It’s not just a technical milestone, but proof of how much my nervous system has had to work to regulate, reorganize, and release over time.

From a Relational Neuroscience perspective, this isn’t a technique “working.” It’s my system learning it’s safe enough to reconnect to subtle rhythms, which chronic stress, trauma, and repeated threat often block. My nervous system has had to navigate constant pressure from the outside world and internal vigilance, and now it’s allowing a more fluid, integrated pattern to emerge.

This moment also reflects trust built over time. From the very first session, my body recognized my craniosacral practitioner as safe, “a mountain of calm.” That effect has been steady, even through the years of challenging work. When a small rupture happened along the way, he repaired it immediately, and that restoration contributed to 3 days of significant symptom relief.

This is what relational care looks like. Slow, steady, attuned work doesn’t just treat symptoms. It changes the body’s experience of itself. I keep going because I can trust him. And now, six years in, that trust is embodied in a fluid flow he can finally feel.

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Beyond “The God Shot”: SGB is a Tool, Not a Cure for PTSD

Posted on March 23, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

Publicity for an interview with Dr. Eugene Lipov includes the question, “What if PTSD isn’t a mental disorder—but a physical injury that can be healed?”

It refers to “advanced brain scans” that “revealed trauma’s visible scars on the brain,” and puts forth that “The God Shot,” also known as the Stellate Ganglion Block (SGB) is “a revolutionary procedure that resets the body’s stuck fight-or-flight response.” It claims that “One injection. Ten minutes. The nervous system reset back to a pre-trauma state. Years of hypervigilance, anxiety, and emotional reactivity can begin to fade—often within minutes.” The publicity lists Dr. Lipov’s credentials and media exposure. It concludes with, “The era of managing trauma is over. The age of healing has begun.”

This reduces a complex, ongoing state into a single-event problem with a single-step solution. From a Relational Neuroscience perspective, what the mental illness industry calls PTSD is not an “injury” sitting in one place that can be erased. It is a whole-system state shaped by repeated conditions. It involves patterns of activation and shutdown across the body, attention, perception, and relationships. Those patterns are maintained or eased by what is happening around the person now, not just what happened in the past.

SGB can shift part of that system. It targets sympathetic activation through the stellate ganglion and can reduce the intensity of threat responses for some people. That can be supportive, but it does not restore someone to a “pre-trauma state,” because there is no static baseline. The nervous system is always adapting to current conditions. If the environment still carries unpredictability, isolation, coercion, or lack of support, the same patterns will re-emerge. No shot can change those conditions.

Calling it “one injection, ten minutes, reset” creates a mismatch between expectation and reality. Many people do not get a lasting shift from a single block. I’ve had 28 SGBs, and my nervous system is still on Red Alert. That alone contradicts the one-and-done narrative. The intervention can temporarily reduce symptom intensity, but the system continues to organize around the environment. Ongoing stress and insufficient support require that the nervous system maintain hypervigilance.

When publicity presents a common nerve block as a miracle, people may place false hope in a single procedure. When the effect is partial or temporary, the drop-off can deepen discouragement and self-blame. That is not a neutral outcome. It is harm introduced by oversimplification.

The “visible scars on the brain” language also narrows the frame. Brain imaging shows correlates of states, not fixed damage that translates cleanly onto lived experience. Those patterns change with context, relationships, sleep, safety, and ongoing stress. Treating them as scars reinforces the idea that the problem is located inside the person rather than in the interaction between the person and their environment.

Saying “the era of managing trauma is over” ignores what supports change over time. Regulation is not a switch to flip. It is built and maintained through conditions that allow the system to come out of threat states and stay out for longer periods. That includes predictable environments, attuned relationships, reduction of ongoing stressors, and room for the body to settle without being pushed back into activation. Procedures like SGB can be part of that picture. They can give the nervous system a break in the distress cycle long enough for other supports to be built and take hold. But they do not replace those supports.

A more accurate description would present SGB as one tool that can reduce sympathetic intensity for some people, sometimes quickly, often temporarily, and often requiring repetition. It would make clear that outcomes depend on the surrounding conditions and supports. It would not promise a reset, and it would not redefine a complex state as a simple injury in order to sell certainty. It would not raise false hopes in some of the most harmed and desperate people when they look to healthcare practitioners for relief.

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Complex PTSD From An IPNB Perspective: Survival Adaptations and the Roots of Symptoms

Posted on March 20, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

When people talk about Complex PTSD or other trauma-related conditions, they often focus on the symptoms. They make lists of patterns, put them into clusters, and give them names. That sounds organized, but it hides the bigger picture. It puts the attention on the person’s behavior, emotions, or body as if the problem is inside them. It omits the cause, which is the environment that shaped the nervous system.

Chronic abuse, neglect, betrayal, and unsafe systems push the body into hypervigilance, shutdown, and protective strategies. The nervous system adapts to survive.

Survival adaptations are patterns the body and mind developed to cope with repeated threat. They are organized and useful in the environment where they were learned. Eating to regulate your body, avoiding certain people, and shutting down during conflict are adaptations. They kept you alive, helped you survive, and protected your sense of safety when the world was dangerous. They are symptoms too, because they show up as observable behaviors, emotions, or body states. But unlike other symptoms, they were functional in context.

Other symptoms, like obesity, chronic pain, digestive issues, or sleep problems, are often consequences of those adaptations. They are predictable results of using survival strategies over time, not adaptations themselves. Treating them as a disorder or a flaw in the individual misses the cause. It keeps the focus on controlling behavior or “fixing” the person rather than understanding and addressing the relational and environmental conditions that made those adaptations necessary.

Recognizing survival adaptations as functional patterns helps shift the perspective. It shows where capacity was blocked, safety was absent, and what needs to change in the present to support regulation. It points to real solutions: environments that are predictable, safe, accountable, and supportive; relationships that acknowledge reality rather than minimize or distort it; and opportunities for the person to have control over timing, boundaries, and exposure to harm.

Labels that only name symptoms or clusters are not worth much. They can help describe patterns, but they often distract from what actually produced those patterns. The work that matters is in the relational fields that shaped and shape the nervous system, not in the list of symptoms inside the individual. When we see survival adaptations as responses to context, we can start to rebuild conditions that support safety, connection, and well-being.

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Victim Selection and the Structural Mechanics of Harm: Why Vulnerable People Are Chosen and Left Unprotected

Posted on March 18, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

Victimology examines patterns of harm and how systems respond to them. It shows that perpetrators rarely act randomly. They select targets who are vulnerable in ways that reduce risk to themselves and maximize the impact of the harm. Factors such as age, isolation, lack of reliable social support, financial dependence, prior trauma, psychiatric hospitalization, or reliance on public assistance increase vulnerability. Predators exploit these factors to operate repeatedly while minimizing the chance of being challenged or held accountable. The harm they inflict is therefore amplified by the conditions of the victim, and those conditions are often known or identifiable to the perpetrator.

Institutions play a central role in sustaining this dynamic. Hospitals, clinics, and other organizations with authority over bodies can create environments in which abuse is repeated and normalized. Staff often witness patterns of harmful behavior but fail to document, report, or intervene. Documentation may be incomplete, minimized, or altered to protect the institution or the individual perpetrator. When those responsible for care are embedded in the same system as the abuser, loyalty, fear, or incentive structures often override duty to protect. The result is that the harm persists and becomes routine, while those harmed are denied recognition and recourse.

Legal systems further compound the problem. Complaints are filtered through standards of proof and narrow interpretations of professional scope. When harm is denied or reframed as acceptable practice, victims lose access to legal accountability. The denial extends beyond courts to civil protections, victim services, and advocacy channels. Access to support is conditioned on institutional recognition of harm, so when the institution shields the perpetrator, resources that could stabilize, validate, or restore the survivor are withheld. Denial of support is not accidental; it is a predictable function of a system that prioritizes self-protection over repair.

The interaction between institutional protection of perpetrators and denial of survivors is observable in multiple systems. Authority figures reinforce the perception that complaints are unreliable or exaggerated. Staff may dismiss repeated disclosures, treat victims as difficult, or delegate support to inexperienced personnel. Organizations designed to offer advocacy or crisis assistance can fail to provide it, leaving the survivor exposed to further relational stress and secondary harm. The cumulative effect is that victims are systematically deprived of social and institutional containment, which in turn increases the intensity and duration of their physiological and relational disruption.

Victimology shows that this is not a series of isolated mistakes. The selection of vulnerable targets, the normalization of harmful behavior, the denial of accountability, and the restriction of support are linked. They form a pattern in which harm is magnified, and protection is minimized. Recognition of these dynamics allows for analysis of systemic failure and clarifies why survivors often face prolonged injury even when institutions appear competent or neutral. This pattern is consistent across healthcare, legal, and social service systems, and it explains why repeated, observable harm can persist despite multiple opportunities for intervention.

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Losing a Point of Safety: Why I Cried at the DMV

Posted on March 16, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

Corporal Matthew “Ty” Snook

When I cried at the Delaware Division of Motor Vehicles last week, it wasn’t because the line was so long and the agency was staffed with sloths, but a far deeper reason. I even cried when I had to make the appointment to visit the DMV. The building was closed from December 23rd until March 1st and is now only open by appointment because, in late December, a shooter went in there and killed a young police officer.

The victim, Delaware State Police Corporal Matthew “Ty” Snook, was shot in the back. According to news reports, he pushed a DMV employee out of harm’s way and advised people to run before being struck again by the gunman.

This was the same cop who called me about the letter I had sent to the gynecologist who removed healthy tissue from my body without consent. That predator in a white coat had called the cops because he “felt threatened” by my writing. During Corporal Snook’s call with me, the cop listened attentively and believed me at a time when every institution protected my abuser. He even complimented the two-faced cartoon I had made of the duplicitous practitioner, saying, “It’s actually pretty good!” I felt his solidarity over the phone. So I feel sad when I think about him being in an ambush shooting, and that his wife and a baby have to go on without him.

Losing someone who showed us real recognition can be hard. When a person responded with respect and belief when it was important, the relationship carries meaning even if it was brief. When that person is suddenly killed, the nervous system registers not just the loss of a life, but the loss of a point of safety and acknowledgment that had become part of the environment. This is why the sadness can come up strongly when visiting a place associated with them, like the DMV building.

Grief is the body and mind registering the existence of a relationship and the absence of the person who held that place in the relational field. Our sense of steadiness is partly built through these connections, and when one disappears abruptly, the system reorganizes around that absence. My sadness for his wife and child also reflects how our nervous systems are oriented toward the well-being of others in our group; when violent death breaks those bonds, the mind naturally keeps returning to those tied to his life.

It helps to deliberately acknowledge the safe connection, remembering the specific moment when he listened and took me seriously. The fact that someone in a position of authority responded with basic decency and belief is a vital part of my story that does not disappear because he died. Grief settles more gradually when it has somewhere to go in relationship, such as sharing the story of what they did that mattered. This keeps the relational thread present, allowing the nervous system to hold both things at once: the reality that he is gone and the reality that the interaction was real and meaningful. The sadness, often triggered by places connected with the loss, simply means the relationship mattered.

After the DMV process, I felt the need to do something physical with my feelings, so I bought summer-blooming flower bulbs. Planting flowers has historically been a way for me to honor the memory of my shipmate friend, Ed, and I believe planting them in memory of my connection with Matthew Snook will bring a similar kind of healing.

Planting the bulbs is a grounded way to give the grief somewhere to live, acknowledging the relationship instead of trying to push the grief aside. When someone stood with me in a moment when nearly everyone else in power closed ranks, that interaction carries weight, and the mind keeps returning to that gap because the point of support mattered. The act of planting also places my body in contact with the environment, moving the grief through action, which helps the nervous system settle because it turns loss into something relational and visible.

Creating this living marker preserves the fact that someone in a position of authority chose to listen when others protected the abuser. Each season the flowers appear, the memory of that moment of recognition can surface alongside them. The loss will soon carry the image of something growing because of the respect he showed me, allowing the grief to sit alongside the acknowledgment that the brief connection left an important mark.

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