dad’s a mennonite farmer. his bipolar rocketed into its first mania in his 20s, just in time for him to meet my mom, a young woman with a lot of trauma and the npd to show for it. she basked in the glow of his mania. married in six weeks.
they go through his manic-depressive cycles over the next couple of years. shit gets unhinged. hookers and drag cars and days without sleep and drinking a 2-4 and feeling nothing at all and still ready to go after everyone’s passed out.
he gets institutionalized. he gets lithium
she decides to leave him after he gets out of the pysch ward. and then she gets pregnant with me. i’ve relitigated time and again if she should have left him anyways but her trauma involves divorced parents and it ain’t great for single mothers in 1978.
they have me together
dad’s depressed once his cycles were gone. craves mania again. loved it. he didn’t especially want kids either, and boy i knew it. he was a ghost. total and utter dereliction of duty as a father.
but now my mom has me. and, remember, npd. so who’s gonna buff that ego?
i’ve described my role in her ego maintenance as emotional support animal. we had our roles and rituals and nothing outside of those was permitted. and that was that she was the most devoted mother (she wasn’t, and yet also still really was) and i was her most darling boy
she had a lot of trauma. rape and unwanted pregnancy as a teen (somewhere out there i have a half sister given up for adoption), emigation from germany to canada in the early 60s because they were crypto-jews (most of her mom’s family oven’d) and they kept their mouth shut
i loved and hated her. it felt good to be her perfect little boy. it felt bad the shapes i had to twist myself into to please her. it felt bad to not be able to know things, like that she resented me for not being a girl to replace the one she lost.
there is an ocean of memory, of regret, of neglect, and some abuse that will go unnamed.
i had to manage my mom as much as she did genuinely do her best to live up to her image of a perfect mom. it wasn’t all bad. but it was pretty bad.
all of this happened in a small southern manitoba town of ~8k people, 95% eastern european ethnic mennonites. my dad’s people. 26 churches. no dancing. no drinking (how do you keep a mennonite from drinking your beer? invite another mennonite)
it was oppressive in one way, but you could also leave your bike parked anywhere, unlocked, and have a 99% chance of it being there when you got back. it was safe.
but my home was not safe. it was a hostile environment in which all of my mom’s sublimated rage targeted my dad
the story was that he was the source of all of our problems. he became shunned within his own family, and did little to help his cause. just an empty shell of a man.
so he was a perfect target for her anger, her hate. and she had acolytes.
my mother taught me to hate my father, he was the source of all of our ills. i hated him with all of the devotion i could give her. i didn’t actively conspire to bring it about, but if fate had set the table, i would absolutely have killed the fucker.
[posting now because there’s no way I trust the twitter editor with text this long and also i need a break]
i was taught to fear god, fear my elders, fear my parents. i learned these lessons well. we met the annual 80% requirement to have prayer in schools, so we did. could ban dancing, and bars, and we did.
trying to get you to understand what a chronotemporal bubble my world was.
age ten. we move from town to country so my dad can be a real farmer. new house on the edge of a wheat field, no sense of enclosure under god’s baleful eye. hemmed in. no neighbours’ houses to run to. no friends at school, trapped at home.
i cry myself to sleep for a year
my body is so stressed that i develop “asthma.” grain dust is blamed. my body betrays me in wreaking coughs, usually until i finally vomited.
summer between grade 11 and 12. my best friend stops returning my calls, avoids me. i dissociate for six months, almost flunk some stuff. i start hanging around with the potheads. they’re a lot nicer than the youth group kids and my youth group ex best friend
grade 10. 1995. our school gets the internet pretty early. we have an email exchange with journalism students from ottawa. i’m hooked on the idea of getting any info from outside this hick town.
i would later go to that university (carleton) for journalism in 1998 at age 19.
thank god i discovered raves and ecstasy and dancing in early 1999 and thoroughly flunked out of journalism. imagine becoming a journalist in the year 2000. fucking dodged a bullet mate.
what a culture shock to go from ultra puritan small town to living in residence 1500km from home. a nonstop bacchanalia. too many stories but my roommate introduced me to E and raves and life was very good.
except for how split i was and hated what i was doing, too
but god did it feel good to dance, again, for a kid whose town literally banned it. this repressed boy letting loose under the influence of some grade A stimulants and empathogens was a glory. an unveiling.
fast forward to the end of year 2 at uni. diminishing returns on doing E a little too often and party crackdowns. some friends get into other drugs. k, meth, ghb, coke. but i’d dropped out of school and used the refund to party more and money was out.
i move home.
what happened while i was gone? my mom finally left my dad, he had a total breakdown, called a prayer meeting, and came out the other side having had some kind of encounter with the living god.
i know this because he’d started calling me. flew out to ottawa to meet me. wut?
said he was sorry. so sorry. but he had god now and that was making it better and maybe if i wasn’t happy i might want to have god in my life too?
fuck you.
i mean, but what? something clearly happened to you, this isn’t the person i knew
and so after moving home, deadbeat dropout druggie washout, too smart for his own good runs aground in the big bad city, tried to do what felt good and look where it got him, maybe he does need god. maybe i do need god.
so much self loathing. so much of a weird release from forgiving my hated father. undeniable that transformation is possible with god.
and one day, it happens. god happens. i’m electrified. trembling, vibrating on the floor. weeping at the promise “i’ll take care of you”
3 months later I’m a youth pastor. lol, lmao.
[narrator: it was a terrible idea]
but i had a great story. christians love a good prodigal story as long as it all washes out in the end. see, to the people who never strayed? the prodigals return. it’s no good out there, this is the right place to be.
but i was pursuing god the way a junkie pursues a fix. ratchet up the intensity. i got into charismatic stuff. tongues. words of knowledge and prophecy. slain in the spirit. healing. worship trance states.
i get kicked out my youth pastor role for trying to tell the kids about the holy spirit. lmao
my parents had gotten back together again after my dad’s big conversion. tried to make it work. total disaster. so bad that i moved to winnipeg. needed a new start with a new church too.
get involved with this charismatic artists church, full of the type of people who live and breathe “no logo.” trying to live radically in the heart of indigenous urban poverty. sniff addiction and devastation everywhere.
churches often exist on what’s called a “cell church” structure. the sunday morning service is often too large, or in any case too formal, for true personal connection, which is what people are craving from going to church, mostly.
so there are in-home “small groups” as well
[active parenting interlude]
we called it house group. names by biblical literalists do be that way sometimes.
i was a leader of the “college and career” house group, for the young adults who’ve aged out of youth group programming
steaming cesspools of repressed hormones and designs on marriage
charismatic housegroups work like this: it may or may not start with a meal, usually a potluck. then we do worship, which means singing repetitive devotional music, guitar or piano driven. getting in sync by singing together. 30 mins or so.
sometimes there would be a teaching but usually we’d just shared our joys and sorrows with each other, pray for each other’s healing, with everyone focused on one individual, laying on of hands, out loud, imploring the spirit of god to move.
sometimes there would be “a word from the lord” offered, a kind of truth that’s in the air asking to be spoken, maybe somewhat similar to the mechanism in circling. i have received devastatingly accurate words from complete strangers. something can open up.
so naturally this is where i meet my wife. she comes with a roommate, whose gi issues we wind up praying for. she has an intense experience and says her symptoms are gone. one of the very few healings that happened under my hands. but they do happen sometimes.
she walking distance from me, which was good because neither of us had a car. she was a student (architecture) and i was leaving in fall to get my BA en route to a divinity degree and a pastorate. her own grandpa had been a pastor and she wanted no part of it. ?
Yeah it went like this https://t.co/OvT33xMcLw
Engaged in June but I go away to pastor school in September. For the best because my then-fiancee was in her final year of her architecture degree and had STRUGGLED when we first became obsessed with each other at the end of the prior year.
but i went to a christian liberal arts university, not a bible college. and it thoroughly dismantled the utterly parochial, largely intellectually vacuous form of christianity i was performing. then i went home and got married and took a year off.
the year i was gone, a bunch of the people in the housegroup i’d led had left our church to start a local franchise of this cult https://t.co/1fmjZZH5bQ
so that was a huge bummer.
i thought that if i learned better and we had better doctrine that i could lead a better church. (why yes i was raised protestant, doubly so as an anabaptist) so i went back to school.
two more years gone. come back with a degree and a thorough disillusionment with the vineyard church i was part of. pastors had promised me a role once i got some school but it was vaporware
because i already knew that the economic structure of churches required lying. people want to hear that they’re good, that their church is doing good. not that their missionary inner city church is a bunch of performative bullshit that requires the poor to stay poor
pastors had to keep butts in pews dropping dollars in the collection plate to keep their position open. i thought churches should be strictly voluntary, no professionals, nobody paid. so i learned how to make websites to support myself. and i accidentally became a programmer
[to be continued]
my wife’s away tonight, somehow always brings out the worst in me even though I go to bed before her anyways when she’s home. Old couple shit. So I’ll type inadvisably late. This thing has momentum. let’s see where it takes us
we grow disillusioned with the church. but they’ve built an intetional community project on the 2nd and 3rd floors of their warehouse in the hood: invite people not quite off the street, but at risk of the street, to live with us and stabilize their lives
so we don’t go to the church anymore but we live there. sunday morning worship band practice was especially annoying literally below my bed.
some beautiful experiences there. lots of toxicity and just generally the stuff that happens when a bunch of people with trauma mixes with a kind of fantasy spirituality that god is on our side and so this will work despite [side essay on unacknowledged power].
and then my wife’s sister dies. 24 years old. unexplained. had a fever, didn’t wake up the next morning. we move in with her family in a city ~2hrs away. eventually we turn the life support off. everyone in her family falls apart. the baby of the family.
some times in your life you can see that the people who are supposed to do a thing, simply cannot do the thing. you must.
so i learned how to plan a massive funeral, as those for young people tend to be. i did everything. i’m good in a crisis. it’s my natural habitat.
time moves on, time to move back. but it’s our first significant time away from the intentional community in 2.5 years. we’re burnt out. we can’t go back. so we move out.
we start careers. my wife as an interior designer and general contractor, and i’ve become pro enough with w**press to get hired at a remote company for it. liberal arts degree, self-taught programmer.
we buy a house in the neighbourhood adjacent to the previous intentional community. rough reputation, but not that bad.
my wife takes a positive pregnancy test the second night we sleep there.
i’m going to be a father ?
when my son is six months old i’m building a deck at our house with a friend. i fall off the incomplete deck and crack my radius near the knee. i’m at a speaker dinner in a cast for a local conference i organized. get a call that my wife’s been taken to the hospital.
she’d been on a bike and another bike was approaching a blind corner at speed without paying attention. in the collision his helmet crushed her orbital bone. at the end of the night in the hospital with her, missing my conference, she pushed me out in a wheelchair.
our son is four. we’d hemmed and hawed but we decide to go for another kid. i’m 40 at that point and my wife 38. just like the previous time we don’t have to try for long. she gets pregnant again around a real estate purchase: buying a cabin assisted by stock options from work
i can’t do justice to our saga with our daughter here. luckily it has its own thread https://t.co/BTEYcE7oxo
at this point i’ve been working from home, alone most of the day, for 8 years. this is not a healthy way to live, but my then-undiagnosed c-ptsd was driving me to more safety in solitude.
a little out of order here. back to my parents. the story is uncomplicated with my dad: a completely useless human being. like, aggressively incompetent at everything.
but with my mom, well, the story when i first started therapy in 2013 was that she had been wonder-parent.
but i began to observe that i went catatonic for weeks after every visit from her. i avoided her as much as possible. by this point in her life, wow. one of the most bitter people you can imagine. and i began catching how much she lied.
she always said that i was her everything. i wrote her one email asking her to stop telling victim stories continually every time we hung out. i’d like to have a relationship but this isn’t that.
she disowned me. said some unforgiveable things.
i said i wouldn’t talk to her again until i heard from a therapist she’d been seeing for six months. i would pay.
that was twelve years ago. nothing. she’s dead to me, but there will still be an awkward funeral and some awkward questions some day.
you see i characterized my mom at the start as having npd. that knowledge is hard won. at the point we broke contact, i thought she had only gotten bad after i’d left home. instead i had to rewrite the entire story of my childhood with the knowledge that i was her puppet
ok bedtime fr. our story will continue tomorrow, with hopefully minimal further chronology jitter
[to be continued]
i could spill an ocean of ink, a sea of tears over lost childhood. over the sweet sensitive boy who just wanted to make his miserable mom happy. the boy who desperately wanted a father, but got a ghost. the boy who wished he had never been born.
everyone always abandons me. my father. my best friend age 7-17. my own party-loving self. my mom. my pastor, arrested for soliciting underage sex. my wife. my job (laid off).
i have such rigidly separate parts that i border on multiple personality disorder. the good boy who pleases. the rebel who says “fuck you you get nothing from me.” the dissociator who knows how to not be here.
the dreamer who fantasizes about salvation from how bad it always feels. who wants god, hopes and prays and trembles. maybe this encounter, maybe this blast of the holy spirit, will change and i won’t be so fundamentally not ok.
i have complex ptsd, although i prefer developmental ptsd as a term for the set of troubles that come from having to grow up utterly emotionally self-reliant from far too early an age. and it gets worse as i’m around people less and with my projections more.
a brutal story. my son was 2 years old. i have a downspout detached from its gutter 20 feet up. i’ve been putting off dealing with it. it’s nearly winter and there’s a bit of frost on the ground. i decide that it must. be. done. today.
to say “i decide” is to elide the maelstrom inside me. the critic lambasting me for not having done it yet, you useless fucking piece of shit. nobody loves you because you’re useless. get it done, fuck.
the dissociating part of me that cools and numbs the hot self-directed anger of the critic, unable to buffer it any more.
seething anger. this must be done. it must or i can’t live with myself, i guess. fuck this life.
so i drag out the ladder. don’t ask for help despite my inlaws visiting. put it on the frosty deck. my wife grows concerned, asks me to wait for help from her dad. but i can’t stop, can’t wait. the demons are impatient.
my son comes out to see what i’m doing. the ladder slips, i fall. my wife runs outside screaming my son’s name as i writhe in pain on the deck.
the sliding ladder hit him. i hold my breath until i hear his cries, like another birth. he’s ok. i am not.
this is what it’s like to have dissociative ptsd. numb numb numb until the hot shame finally propels me into self loathing action. so driven by enactments of childhood drama that i can’t pay attention to real and present danger. i nearly killed myself and my son.
my wife says if our son had died she would have killed herself. maybe me first, but i probably would have saved her the trouble. i would never have met my darling girl. there is grace and mercy in this world because that’s what should have happened. i’m living in a state of grace
life carries on. i broke my palm (scaphoid) and my radius and dislocated my shoulder. had to have my ass wiped by a homecare nurse. pooping on demand is quite the experience.
as i said we have another kid. it gets complicated and its whole own saga of trauma and grace. i’m glad i wrote this thread a few months back because if i had to do it now i wouldn’t be able to https://t.co/BTEYcE7oxo
sometime before she was born, my constant quest to figure out what the fuck is wrong with me and how to fix it stumbled across the “psychedelic renaissance.” i’d done mushrooms a few times in my late teens until a Very Bad Trip and i renounced them https://t.co/ZWzUsYrAdk
my son was 7, my daughter 2. i showed up for them as much as i could, but far less than i wanted. my largest horror was inflicting on them even a fraction of the trauma that i’d lived.
finally my self hating copes had met their match: i love my kids
i’d been seeing a talk therapist for about eight years at that point and while he’d helped me through the saga of breaking off relations with my mom and updating to her narcissism and abuse, it got nowhere with my still-unknown c-ptsd
so for better and worse, i did what i always do: i’ll do it myself
at this point i’m a very uncool 42 year old with absolutely no idea how to get his hands on psychs. but i know that the day will probably come so i do what i do best: research.
and research.
i give myself a grad-level education the historical, pharmacological, and psychological intersections of psychedelics
i get my hands on some mushrooms. while my wife downstairs with the kids, as a kind of tripsitter, i take 4g. i want my ego to die https://t.co/1z68Zm1dDG
whirling torus, my ego tries to corral it, gets sucked in, dissolved, the drop in the ocean, the ocean in the drop
relief.
i am more alive. i am hopeful. it fades. another big dose. it helps, but it fades faster. i start doing lower doses, often in conjunction with breathwork. i have a big experience where i see that i’m an alcoholic. i stop drinking.
a big problem for me was time. i only had the window of while my son was at school to trip. no ability to get away to a retreat, no connections to whatever might be happening underground locally.
i learn about 5-meo-dmt. its short duration and “meet god [again]” entices
it’s the tail end of pandemic restrictions. i fly out a guide from montreal to initiate me into 5meo. it resets my nervous system for the first time. i meet god/void/self and weep and weep because no all those years weren’t wasted they brought me here
i look at myself in the mirror, and for the first time in my life, i love the man i see. so many years of loathing, as though it was my fault all these things that had happened to me.
“matthew, you fucking weirdo, i love you”
weeping again as i write this. how, how, how
my work gives us three month paid sabbaticals every five years. i approach my second one in the summer of 2022. i treat it as a healing laboratory. i acquire an impressive stash of research chemicals. learn about every ptsd somatic therapies and finally finally realize my c-ptsd
i learn from psip what ptsd really is. how it gets stuck. how dissociation really works. and how to break through it. the before/after delta is bigger than any psychedelic macro dose. holy shit https://t.co/riz5j7my4d
i learn how to self-therapize with mdma. i invent naked mirror dancing therapy to learn to love my body https://t.co/EYmlxBueKS
i join twitter to look for my people. it happens to funnel me into tpot, a bunch of weirdos obsessed with ai and some eliezer character. i learn about jhanas from
tasshinfogleman’s post https://t.co/aCX6kpLG2F
tasshinfogleman my transformation plateaus. i can’t heal relational and attachment trauma myself, it turns out. https://t.co/apkMjm7Wvl
tasshinfogleman things get worse before they get better. i find an underground ocean of sorrow, of disowned and forgotten abuses.
but they get better. slowly, and then quickly. i am more present, more often
i am planning to find a way to transition out of my job. i no longer want to work alone, spending all of my days with my body screaming “my tribe has abandoned me.” next sabbatical in summer 2027. i’ll use that as a springboard. maybe i can help people like me
there is grace, and there is karma. it was not easy to be married to me, blowing hot and cold by turns. confusing and hurtful and angry and distant. so, so distant.
so my marriage is in trouble. a crisis happens. we’re working through it.
my wife reaches a crossroads with the design-build company her and her partner built. the level of melodrama is hard to believe. she decides to have her partner buy her out. she wants to spend more time with the kids. they grow so fast and she came home every day exhausted
less than a week later, i get laid off from my job. very generous severance, so i don’t need to rush into what’s next. it’s my sabbatical and then some, timeline moved way up. https://t.co/vmNMXyUMY4
focus right now is my marriage. looks like we may just pull through, better than ever. therapy 3 days a week. thank god we have the time for it.
but i’m slowly, tentatively feeling into what comes next, for me. how i can help. how i can serve. how i can especially help very smart and very dissociated people to get in touch with their aliveness before it’s too late. before decades slide by.
going to start writing more, both here and the *stack. first post from it, kicking off what I call psychephilia https://t.co/wVzsgtOWoM