Doubly Cursed: The Cultural Victimization of Victims

Posted on December 15, 2025 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

My painting that depicts the culture simultaneously shaming, pinning, and burning a trauma survivor–who has been flattened, toasted, and bitten repeatedly–for being unable to stand up and produce.

I’ve experienced being dismissed, blamed, and pathologized for being harmed. Caregivers minimized my distress, family members judged me for expressing it, and acquaintances labeled me oversensitive when I tried to speak about what happened. The world treated me not as a human being responding to trauma, but as someone holding onto it unnecessarily, as though my nervous system’s attempts to survive were a moral failing.

This is how mainstream culture responds to victimhood. It doesn’t want to acknowledge the cruelty, neglect, or contempt that shapes human lives. Instead, it frames being harmed as a character flaw, as a “victim mentality,” or worse, as a manipulation. When people recognize that you were hurt, the default response is skepticism or contempt. This is a defense of hierarchy. If acknowledging suffering required accountability or change, it would disrupt the systems that keep some people in power and others undergoing harm.

The mental illness industry is deeply implicated. By turning distress into a diagnosis or a set of symptoms, it moves attention away from the relational and systemic sources of harm. It allows institutions and professionals to treat survival adaptations as problems, rather than signals of unmet needs. What was done to me, and how I responded, became something to manage or correct, not something to understand or honor.

When culture labels survivors as manipulative, self-centered, or “trapped in victimhood,” it dismisses real pain. The “victim mentality” is a tool for disregarding suffering, a way to keep the narrative comfortable for those who benefit from hierarchy and denial. Being harmed is already isolating; being doubly judged for that harm compounds the trauma.

From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, these responses are predictable. Human beings respond to threat and betrayal in relational and systemic contexts. Denying or pathologizing those responses perpetuates suffering and blocks the possibility of real care, connection, and repair. Support recognizes that survivors are not the problem. The problem is the harm done and the culture that refuses to acknowledge it.

I know what it feels like to live under that shaming gaze. I know how isolating it is to have your suffering interpreted as a moral or personal failing. And I know that naming it, speaking it, and refusing to let the world dismiss it is the only path toward accountability and repair.

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Why I Won’t Call Pain “Banana”

Posted on December 12, 2025 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

There is a chronic pain community that discourages people from using the word “pain.” Instead, they encourage members to use the word “banana.” The idea is that replacing a threatening word with something neutral or even silly can help the nervous system relax, reduce fear, and support healing.

For me, this was an immediate turn-off. I understand what they’re trying to do, but it doesn’t land right. I’ve spent years fighting to have my reality named and recognized. Pain is pain. Calling it something else feels like erasure. It feels like the same cultural habit that has harmed me so deeply, minimizing suffering, softening it, or pretending it’s not there.

From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, integration depends on coherence. Our brains and bodies need language that matches lived experience. If my body is screaming with pain but I’m told to call it “banana,” there’s a gap between what I feel and what I’m allowed to say. That mismatch creates more disconnection. Safety comes from being able to name the truth of experience and still be met with attunement, support, and respect.

This approach bothers me because it mirrors the dismissals I’ve already endured in medical settings, where symptoms were brushed off, renamed, or reframed instead of being taken seriously. I will not step into a community that repeats that same harm. I want to be in spaces where pain can be spoken plainly, where the words we use honor the reality of the body, and where naming what’s true is the foundation for connection.

That’s why I won’t join communities that rename pain. My body deserves coherence. My truth deserves language. My healing depends on it.

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The Real Zone of Growth is Not Outside the Comfort Zone But Inside the Window of Tolerance

Posted on December 10, 2025 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

A whiteboard at a local gym promotes the idea that “growth only happens outside the comfort zone,” which is popular in our “push through” culture. Stagnation can happen when there’s no challenge and no novelty. But if pushed too far, the nervous system moves into defense rather than learning.

Growth is most possible when a system has enough safety and stability to stretch without tipping into overwhelm. So, the real zone of growth is within the window of tolerance, where there’s both safety and just enough stress to activate curiosity and adaptation.

Growth doesn’t come from leaving comfort behind, but from expanding comfort through repeated experiences of safety in the presence of challenge.

“Sweet discomfort” describes that edge where the nervous system feels the stretch but still senses safety. It’s the space where new experiences can be integrated instead of being rejected as a threat. There’s tension, maybe unease, but it’s held inside a sense of connection and choice.

From an Interpersonal Neurobiology view, this is the zone where regulation and learning meet. The discomfort signals growth in progress, and the “sweet” part means the system trusts it can handle the moment. When we have enough relational support, that stretch becomes transformative instead of traumatic.

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Survivors in the Lurch: How Doctors Disregard Their Role in Resolving Medical Trauma

Posted on December 8, 2025 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

Recently, I heard the same line I’ve been hearing for years. A prominent pain specialist told me that doctors don’t have the time to help me recover from medical PTSD. The conversation always drops straight into the same rut: “Are you seeing a therapist?” As if therapy is the only place where repair can happen. As if the medical world gets to wash its hands of the harm it caused and send me somewhere else to deal with the fallout.

I’ve graduated from therapy. It did what it needed to do. It helped me understand the terrain of what I’ve lived through and how my body learned to survive it. But therapy cannot repair what was done in white coats and exam rooms. It cannot stand in for the people who caused the injury. Therapy cannot rebuild a sense of safety around medicine. Only clinicians can, because the harm came from them. Yet they most often refuse to see that. They keep handing the responsibility back to me and the therapists I no longer need, as if the violence that happened in their domain is not theirs to address.

Doctors don’t want to be responsible for what doctors do. They want the authority without the accountability. They want the prestige without the relational duty that comes with it. When you bring them the truth that Medical PTSD is rooted in power, dismissal, coercion, and violation at the hands of people who were supposed to protect you, they slip sideways. They say they are not therapists, and they send you elsewhere. They pretend that acknowledgment and attunement are optional extras rather than the ground floor of repair.

What I need is simple. I need every doctor I encounter to say, “I’m sorry that happened to you. It was wrong. You deserved protection. I believe you. I want to help you recover.” I ask for a moment of attunement and a single drop of empathy. I need one sign that the hierarchy can bend toward humanity. But for most of them, that’s too much. They’re so fused to the culture of domination that even a brief acknowledgment feels threatening. They’d rather refer me out than face what their profession has done.

Pain specialists too often circle back to whether I have a therapist. As if the missing ingredient in my recovery is more therapy rather than attuned, accountable medical care. I still need doctors to do what doctors have refused to do. I need them to recognize the harm, stop repeating it, and stay present long enough that my system can recalibrate its expectations around medicine. I don’t expect to ever feel fully safe in this environment again. That’s the reality of what prolonged medical trauma does. But any increase in safety, any softening of the threat matters. It’s imperative for recovery.

The help I need costs them nothing. A brief moment of human connection. A willingness to face the truth. A break in the hierarchy long enough for trust to take root. But instead, they leave me in the lurch, pushing responsibility onto therapists and onto me, dodging what only they can provide. And in doing so, they deliver the standard treatment that keeps the wound open and call it care.

This refusal to engage at the human level means the burden of safety and repair falls squarely back on the survivor. I have been forced to carefully vet practitioners not just for their technical skill, but for their capacity for relational decency. I must also be an educator, patiently teaching the basics of trauma-informed care and Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB), which should be foundational to their training. Yet, in this demanding work, a new, small hope emerges: the empathetic relationship, when it takes root, is a two-way street. It offers the provider a chance to break free from the dehumanizing confines of the hierarchy, restoring their own sense of relational purpose, and thus benefiting both the practitioner and the patient.

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From Trauma to Truth: How I Became Anti-Psychiatry

Posted on December 5, 2025 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

I became anti-psychiatry because of what psychiatry did to me and what I saw it do to others. I walked in with severe Complex PTSD. They put me on Lexapro. The suicidal ideations started about 3 weeks after. When I told them what was happening, they brushed it off twice.  The third time, I wrote it in the patient portal, where they couldn’t ignore it. That landed me in psychiatric hospitalization for eight days and nights. This was a manufactured mental health crisis.

In the cuckoo’s nest, they stacked medications on me. None of it helped. All of it made things worse. They refused to believe me about my own lived experience in this body. They wouldn’t acknowledge that the SSRI caused the suicidal ideations. When I refused to keep taking Lexapro, the psychiatrist insisted I should stay on it longer. I pushed back, using my doctor’s words to validate my stance. She responded by putting me on another SSRI. That place was a warehouse of polypharmacy and misery. Everything ran on coercion, control, and billing codes. Not care.

When I got out, I threw the pills away. I refused their outpatient program because it was the same facility that had neglected and abused me, calling it treatment. When I filed complaints, the licensing board told me no one had done anything wrong. They said it was all standard treatment, so it was okay. That told me exactly what the standard is. They do this to everyone.

Since then, I’ve heard countless stories from other survivors. Tales of being dismissed, coerced, mislabeled, drugged, and trapped on medications that wrecked their lives. Stories of people fighting like hell to get off pills they never wanted in the first place. And then I saw the research showing the whole “chemical imbalance” story was never anything more than a marketing scheme. How are we supposed to trust an industry that sells lies at that scale and calls it science? Especially when the truth is revealed, and they still keep pushing the goddamn pills?

From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, what they call “treatment” makes no sense. Human beings need connection, safety, attunement, and support for the nervous system to settle. We need cultures that reduce allostatic load, not increase it. But psychiatry pathologizes natural human responses to an abnormal, punishing culture. It responds to distress with drugs, restraints, locked doors, and diagnostic labels that follow people for life.

That’s why I want psychiatry shut down as fast as possible, without abandoning the people who are tangled up in it or relying on it because they were given no alternatives. People deserve actual support, not an industry built on domination, hierarchy, and the medicalization of suffering.

I became anti-psychiatry because I survived the abuse that the industry calls care. I want a world where suffering is met with presence, understanding, and genuine community, not coercion disguised as help.

Psychiatry isn’t just coercion. It’s control. It’s money. It’s not human. It’s not about helping people at all. It’s about maintaining the power structure, keeping the money flowing, and exploiting vulnerable individuals for profit. The suffering of human beings is the product, and the system is designed to extract it, normalize it, and profit from it. That’s why it has to end.

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When “I’ll Pray for You” is a Symptom of Disconnection

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

I reached out to my brothers when I was in a protracted and deep struggle. I asked for safe connection, acknowledgment, and support. I needed them to see me and recognize how repeated abuse from the disease management industry had nearly obliterated me.

But my youngest brother couldn’t meet me there. He said, “I’ll pray for you.” He was incapable of offering comfort or connection. His lack of empathy was an enormous red flag. It showed an inability or unwillingness to recognize and respect the experience and boundaries of others. Without empathy, a person can’t reliably respond to harm they cause, can manipulate or exploit, and is unlikely to repair relationships when they go wrong. It signals that connection, safety, and mutual respect aren’t priorities for them.

I was struggling for my life. I didn’t need abstract gestures or rituals. I needed attunement, presence, recognition, and tangible support. From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, praying for someone doesn’t meet a flooded nervous system that is overwhelmed and desperate for safety. It doesn’t communicate that someone is standing with you, bearing witness to your suffering. It’s a symbolic gesture, like offering a cheap plastic Band-Aid in response to a broken leg. No thanks! I’m better off without.

To me, that moment was a clear signal of detachment. It was uncaring, rooted in disconnection. It was a relational message: my reality, suffering, and needs did not matter. His response was part of an attempt to otherize me and diminish me for failing to thrive after a lifetime of horrific abuse by “caregivers.” It wasn’t safe or healthy. It was indicative of an uncaring relationship.

If my brother had meant well, he would have offered something helpful, like “I see how much you’re suffering. I hope you find relief. I’m here for you.” That would have acknowledged my humanity and the legitimacy of my pain. Even better, since he has the resources, he could have offered genuine support, like a visit, financial help, practical assistance, or anything that actually responded to the reality of my struggle. He offered a platitude instead of engagement. Due to his own impediments and his taking up the role of the dogmatic replacement patriarch, a hollow, “I’ll pray for you,” was the best he could offer.

From an IPNB perspective, this is the kind of relational failure that keeps a nervous system in survival mode. Connection regulates us. Safety allows a system to settle. When someone responds with abstraction or disdain instead of presence, the system is left alone in overwhelm, left to manage the consequences of disconnection. My brother’s response was not a misstep, but a message. He made it clear that a relationship with him is not safe.

That is why I went no contact. I wish for family, but safety matters more. My nervous system, health, recovery, and sense of being human require relationships that are attuned, present, and responsive. Anything else is harm.

I share this to name what is real. Sometimes family fails in ways that can’t be negotiated, mediated, or worked around. Sometimes the only way to preserve your safety is to step away. Connection matters. Safety matters. Presence matters. So, I chose to disconnect.

If I were to pray for my brother, I would ask that he gain the healing and integration that allow him to show empathy to his sister when she’s experienced repeated and egregious harm, instead of trying to take advantage of her vulnerable state so smash her further into the ground. But I believe that is up to him. So, bye-bye, baby brother. Good luck!

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The Cost of “Positive Vibes Only”: How Denying Reality Shuts Down the Human System

Posted on December 1, 2025 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

The Cultural Demand to Stay Positive Harms Us
Every day we’re told to “think happy thoughts,” to “focus on the good,” to keep our “vibration high.” It’s the cultural chant of a society terrified of pain and truth, and addicted to denial. But we can’t “positive vibes only” our way out of a domination hierarchy that feeds on human suffering. We can’t meditate our way out of cruelty and contempt.

The Nervous System Doesn’t Buy It
Our nervous systems don’t care about slogans. They respond to cues of safety and cues of danger. And the cues of danger are everywhere: exploitation, injustice, abandonment, and greed paraded as success. Pretending it’s fine doesn’t make the threat go away. It just forces the body to swallow it whole.

When Mind and Body Tell Different Stories
From an Interpersonal Neurobiology lens, what happens is simple but devastating. When the truth of our environment contradicts the story we’re trying to tell ourselves, the system can’t settle. The body keeps scanning for what’s real, but the mind keeps insisting everything’s okay. That split creates internal chaos, an ongoing tug-of-war between perception and pretense. The result is disconnection from self, from others, from life.

Suppression Disguised as Regulation
We call that regulation in our culture–holding it together, staying positive–but it’s not regulation. It’s suppression. It’s survival. And it costs us our vitality. The person who learns to ignore their own alarm signals loses access to their own knowing. They stop noticing what feels wrong. They stop being moved by what matters.

The Price of Denial
When we override danger cues long enough, the system shuts down the parts of us that register meaning, empathy, and awe. We stop feeling fully alive. We’re no longer fully participating in the human experience. We’ve traded truth for comfort, authenticity for performance.

A Culture Built on Numbness
This isn’t individual failure. It’s a collective adaptation to a sick culture that punishes awareness and rewards numbness. The mainstream message is: don’t name the harm, just manage your attitude. But all that does is keep the harm in place. It teaches people to tolerate what should never have to be tolerated.

Congruence Heals
A healthy nervous system depends on congruence; what we feel, what we know, and what’s actually happening need to line up. When the culture demands we deny what’s happening, we can’t reach coherence. We stay fragmented, anxious, exhausted, half-alive.

Choosing Truth Over Performance
Seeing what’s wrong is not negativity, but sanity. It’s the body insisting on truth. And until we stop shaming that insistence, we’ll keep mistaking shutdown for peace and compliance for healing.

Being Fully Human
Being fully human means being able to face reality together. That’s the only path to genuine safety, to health, to a life that feels alive.

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Control Sold as Awakening: An Interpersonal Neurobiology Look at Byron Katie’s “The Work”

Posted on November 28, 2025 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

Byron Katie’s teachings are built around four questions that invite people to challenge their thoughts, with “Is it true?” being the most famous. On the surface, these questions can sound compassionate and insightful. And sometimes, they can be helpful. A gentle inquiry into our thoughts can indeed bring awareness and even relief.

But the problem isn’t the questions. It’s the philosophy beneath them.

From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, Katie’s framework disembodies human experience. It treats suffering as a misunderstanding in the mind rather than as something that arises within a nervous system shaped by real relationships, histories of safety and danger, and lived context. When she says that what we believe happened “didn’t necessarily happen,” she collapses the distinction between interpretation and reality—between a thought and the body that lived through it.

IPNB shows that meaning-making isn’t just cognitive. Our bodies record experience long before the mind can name it. Hormones, sensations, emotions, and implicit memories carry the imprint of what we’ve survived. Questioning thoughts doesn’t erase those imprints. Healing requires integration—the gradual process of bringing body, emotion, and meaning back into relationship through safety and connection.

Katie’s approach bypasses that process. It replaces attunement with self-referential control. Her questions lead people inward but not necessarily home. They can detach a person from their embodied truth and call that detachment peace. In neurobiological terms, what she describes as “awakening” can look very much like a functional freeze state, a dissociative adaptation that feels calm because the body has gone numb. It’s a survival strategy mistaken for enlightenment.

That can be seductive. It offers relief from pain without requiring vulnerability, relationship, or integration. But relief is not the same as healing. True integration isn’t about erasing pain; it’s about learning to stay present with it until it can transform. When the nervous system feels safe enough to experience what it once had to suppress, wholeness begins to return.

The deeper issue is that Katie’s teachings carry a subtle current of shame. Beneath the language of freedom lies an implication: if you suffer, you haven’t questioned deeply enough. That turns pain into personal failure. From an IPNB lens, shame is the collapse that happens when our need for connection meets invalidation. It’s not healing—it’s retraumatization.

Healthy inquiry welcomes the full range of experience with curiosity and compassion. It doesn’t erase what hurts or dismiss it as illusion. Katie’s system does the opposite: it spiritualizes disconnection and calls it transcendence. Her method teaches people to detach from their feelings rather than to find safety within them. The result is a philosophy that capitalizes on pain while denying its depth.

Even her own “awakening story” appears, through an IPNB lens, to arise from unresolved trauma rather than transcendence. A nervous system that has endured overwhelm can shut down and interpret that stillness as liberation. When such an experience becomes enshrined as truth — and surrounded by money, followers, and validation — it can harden into a self-reinforcing illusion. The teacher becomes trapped inside the same disconnection she teaches as freedom.

Byron Katie often says that all suffering comes from believing our thoughts. But if we apply her own first question, “Is it true?”, to her philosophy, it doesn’t hold. From an interpersonal neurobiology perspective, suffering arises not just from thoughts but from a body that has lost its sense of safety. Inquiry without regulation becomes self-gaslighting. It teaches people to doubt their inner signals instead of understanding them.

So yes, the questions themselves can sometimes open awareness. But the system that surrounds them is built on a misunderstanding of what human beings are. We are not isolated minds in need of correction; we are relational organisms seeking safety, attunement, and a sense of belonging. Healing doesn’t happen by transcending the self or silencing the body. It arises through integration, connection, and the return of trust in our own felt truth.

Byron Katie’s philosophy isn’t awakening. It’s control disguised as freedom, detachment presented as peace, disconnection sold as liberation.

Real awakening is the opposite: a full, embodied return to life.

 

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Truth-Telling is Refusing to Let the Story End the Way They Wrote It

Posted on November 26, 2025 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

Trauma recovery doesn’t come from “getting over it.” It emerges from changing your relationship with what happened. There are many ways to do this: through story, compassionate witnessing, individual work, and collective work. But a key way to reclaim your life is to express it in ways that restore agency. Some call this “changing the narrative.”

The way I talk, write, and paint about my experiences is a punch in the face to the people and systems that harmed me. Every one of my verbal, written, or painted expressions is a refusal to let them control the story. I stand up against these systems of rigid hierarchy: profit-driven medical institutions, insurance companies, the mental illness industry, and the disease management industry. These create the conditions that attract, employ, foster, and protect abusers and predators.

With neuroscience backing me, I feel power, strength, and hope. I can’t expect these massive systems to suddenly care about human life. But I can hope that my watercolors and words start a ripple effect, that maybe someday this truth will create real change, even if I’m not here to see it.

That’s why I keep talking. That’s why I will never shut up about what the gynecologist did to me, about the abuses I encountered at Rockford Center for Behavioral Health and ChristianaCare, about all the doctors and systems that block access to the treatments that actually help.

For example, my primary pain specialist could give me a lumbar sympathetic block with pulsed radio frequency ablation, which would provide months of relief. He has the machine, knowledge, and desire, but he doesn’t have the tools. The insulators for the needles cost $1,000, and it’s not cost-effective for the corporation to buy them for one patient. So instead, I have to keep undergoing nerve blocks, being dosed with radioactive isotopes each time–43 nerve blocks over five years–getting temporary relief every few months and a yo-yo trajectory, instead of real, sustainable relief that would let me rebuild my life.

With appropriate care, I could have focused on cooking food that is good for me. I could have rebuilt my physical capacities. I could have volunteered at the therapy barn. I could have gone to cool events at the museum. Instead, I’ve been forced to fight constantly just to get what I need, because the disease management industry we call a healthcare system is built against it.

Speaking my truth is part of my survival. But it’s also something bigger. Witnessing each other’s truth is healing for everyone. For the person speaking, and for the people listening and responding. Our nervous systems evolved for this. We are meant to share, to witness, to respond. That is how we heal.

So I speak. I tell my story, in my words, in my way. I call out what is wrong. I name the harm. I refuse to let the system erase me. And I hope that anyone reading this will feel the same strength rising in themselves. Speak your truth. Witness others. Hold each other’s humanity. That is how we build a culture of caring and connection, where abusers can no longer hide within the institutions that shelter them.

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Dependency is Okay When it’s a Prescription

Posted on November 24, 2025 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

The mental illness industry is obsessed with telling people not to become dependent on anything: don’t rely on substances, don’t lean on coping tools too much, don’t build habits that might create “addiction.” But then, the very same industry hands out brain chemical pills that people are supposed to take every single day, regardless of how they feel, regardless of whether their nervous system actually needs it. Dependence is suddenly mandatory when it’s a substance that Big Pharma sells.

I’ve lived this firsthand. I tried antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications. I was on the first one for five weeks, and it sparked suicidal ideations that intensified over time. But the hospital’s “embedded” psychologist refused to listen. The cold hand of the corporate healthcare system shunted me off to a psychiatric hospital for a week, where abuse, neglect, and polypharmacy nuked my nervous system back to preschool. As soon as I was free from that warehouse of human misery, I threw the pills in the trash. Even with the short duration, I experienced months of withdrawal, which were awful! The industry calls this “Discontinuation Syndrome” as if the issue is within the person and kind of a mystery, but it is withdrawal.

Still, desperate for relief from severe Complex PTSD, I tried a different medication. The negative effects of Cymbalta were so severe that I quit after three days. I will never go on a psychiatric medication again, because I now understand that these substances are not biologically necessary for anyone’s nervous system. They’re not inherently regulating, and they don’t respond to the actual needs of the body or mind.

Meanwhile, the same people and organizations that want to pathologize medical marijuana or other self-directed coping tools act like this is a moral failing. “Don’t depend on substances,” they say. Unless those substances are pharmaceuticals prescribed by doctors. Then, suddenly, daily dependence is normal, necessary, and responsible. That’s not science. That’s control. That’s hypocrisy.

From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, what matters is the capacity to regulate, integrate experience safely, and build resilience. A substance or tool can be supportive, but medications that impose a fixed state, ignore context, and provoke negative “side” effects do not support regulation; they dull responses. They mandate a dependency that maintains the system that profits from compliance. That’s not health, care, or science, but gaslighting and mass exploitation.

Medical marijuana is different in my case, because I can use it as-needed. I don’t have to take it if my system doesn’t need it. I can scale it up or down. I can stop if I need to, without being punished by withdrawal. That’s regulation in practice, not coercion. It’s a tool I use because my nervous system requires support after what I’ve been through, not because a company decided I needed a daily chemical dose to keep living.

The irony is brutal. The system tells you to avoid dependence on coping strategies, but it makes you dependent on drugs that don’t actually help your nervous system meet its real needs. And when you find a tool that *does* help you survive and integrate trauma, suddenly that is labeled as risky or wrong. That’s not treatment. That’s a trap.

I don’t need psychiatric pills. I don’t need a system that pathologizes survival or shames me for being unable to function well when my core biological needs are undermined. I need tools that actually support me, that respond to my body’s needs, and that allow me to process, integrate, and live. That’s the lesson. And that’s why I’ve stopped relying on the so-called solutions the mental illness industry pushes. They are neither necessary nor aligned with biology, nor with the actual work of staying alive, processing trauma, and building a life worth living.

 

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