Before we get into the details of what happened, aka we return to the “scene of the crimes”- I would like you to be equipped. Just like camping in the wilderness, when going into the wild of someone’s psyche we need training and gear or you will not survive.
In the situation you are about to enter, surviving means being a safe person to be emotionally vulnerable and intimate with. This is the mission you are embarking on, and it is a difficult one.
To make sure you are prepared, this next part is going to be like a How to Help Someone You Love Unfuck Their Brain bootcamp in two parts.
Here’s the agenda for Part 1:
I want to clarify that I am not a medically licensed professional in this area. I have just read a lot of books (see my references), talked to a lot of people who are medically licensed, and then applied what I learned to my own life. From this process, I have developed my own framework and system that works for me in healing and managing my mental health. It is still in process, and would love your feedback and questions.
Yours sincerely,
Sammy
Why I Am Writing This
Five years ago, I returned to Los Angeles broken. My brain was fucked up, and I was stuck. I needed to come home and heal, and I needed support (see my poem “This Little Piggy Went Home“). It took three years for me to truly heal and move forward in my life. And I’m one of the lucky ones! Some people never heal, some people are still healing from things that happened decades ago, some people are still in denial that they are injured and need to heal.
I learned from my first healing experience that it’s important to communicate with my support system and bring them with me on my journey. I realized that in order for me to truly heal, I needed them to help me and I needed them to understand what I had experienced. I wasn’t the same person anymore because of what had happened, and I needed them to validate that.
During this time, I took a course through the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), and I learned about support systems. Support systems are a network of people who provide practical, emotional, and informational support when we have challenges.
Challenges are a part of life. In an individualist culture like America, we are taught that we are supposed to handle these challenges all our own without burdening others. However, sometimes we come across challenges that we can’t handle on our own, and so we turn to our support systems – our families, our friends, our co-workers or teachers.
Sometimes though, not even our support systems can handle them. Sometimes, we need to rely on our support system’s support systems, or we need to add professionals to our support systems (by appointments, through books, getting additional degrees, or using government services and healthcare system).
Sometimes the people in our support systems need support while we need support, sometimes they need support in ways we can’t give them or we don’t know how to support them.
Sometimes they move to another job or country and now, they are too far away or different time zone for us to provide the support we used to give easily, and they have to make new relationships to support them, and so do we.
Sometimes the people in our support system are also in someone else’s support system who needs them, and they are too overwhelmed or tired to help us in our situation. There are many reasons why your support network might not be strong enough to support you, and why you may experience a mental health crisis.
That doesn’t change the fact that our lives are interconnected, that we are part of a social network. We need each other to survive, we need each other to thrive. We need each other.
How a brain gets fucked and how to heal it
When I needed help five years ago, I hid my tears and cried silently in my room for 3 months before I simply quit my job and moved to Greece. I found it really hard to ask for help, and so instead of trying to solve the problem at work, I ran away. The thing is, we have a habit of recreating our problem until we learn how to solve them. Life’s funny like that.
In the past when I tried to ask for help from the people around me, I didn’t know how to communicate with them and they didn’t understand how to help. When it comes to mental health, it isn’t a one-size fits all approach, which is very frustrating for our capitalist healthcare system. While we lean to individualism when it comes to having problems, when it comes to solving problems we prefer mass consumerism. More profitable.
To improve my communication skills and understanding of my mental health, I have worked with six therapists over the last six years, I’ve read over 36 books on the topic, and taken the pre-requisites to be a therapist.
Thus, while I would love if you read all the books I’ve read, it wouldn’t even matter because since we are different people with different experiences, we would value different things and have different takeaways. Also, what you need to heal and what I need to heal are different because we are different people. That’s what makes being human and life so beautiful.
That is one of my intentions with this blemoir. I hope by sharing how I heal, it will help you to reflect on your own experiences and learn what it is that you need to heal. I would love if you shared that with me, because if you are reading this then you are part of my support system, and thus, I would be honored to be part of yours, too, and for me to actually know how best to support you.
Here are some of my key takeaways about how brains get fucked and how to heal them that I want to know that you know before we start unfucking my brain.
Brains get fucked up when they experience trauma. Trauma is when one has an experience where your needs are not met. Trauma is a spectrum that ranges from a near death experience to breaking your cellphone to turning in an assignment late. Trauma with a big T and trauma with a little t. However, because all bodies are different – the chemicals released when experiencing trauma vary person to person, and one person having a objectively more severe trauma can have less of a biological stress response than someone having a smaller one. Different people have different sensitivities.
These sensitivities are part of the nervous system, in that the body uses your senses to take in information about the world and process events to determine whether you are safe or not. If your body receives information that makes it believe that it is not safe, it will take action and make choices to keep you safe and protect you. If it thinks it is needed, it can hijack your body and start making decisions without your conscious consent. 80% of the messages are going from your body to your brain, while only 20% are going from your brain to your body, hence why your body is really the one in control.
The actions the body can take typically fall into four categories of fight, freeze, fawn, or flee, however, there is lots of nuance within these responses.
If your brain is being injured, which is harder to see compared to a physical injury, your body will start expressing all sorts of symptoms that are trying to help you survive. If you do not listen to those messages and do something about them after two weeks, medical professionals will label them anxiety, work-stress, depression, PTSD (the list goes on and on – just read your DSM5). They can also start to compound. This is where the challenging events of everyday living become trauma become mental health disorders become psych wards and homelessness.
The delay between your body saying you need to do something and you actually doing something that resolves the situation can be caused by all sorts of reasons. The most frustrating one to me, and the one that this blook is about, is when the injury is caused by the complicated and outdated systems of our society.
Once you are out of the situation and safe, only then you can start to heal. That’s stage one – safety and stability. Sometimes, your brain will literally not allow you to start healing and processing what happened until it truly believes you are safe and strong enough to process what happened to you. That’s why I had to stop working in order to heal, or, in the past, move countries.
Then you need to process what happened to you. You have to sit down and go back in there and tell yourself the story, feel all the feelings, and accept it. You have to be honest and try to look at the events from your perspective, their perspective, and the objective truth.
They’ve literally done brain scans, and the traumatic events will bunch up as random nerves scattered throughout the brain. When anything reminds you of that event, all these different parts of your brain will light up and your body will physiologically start releasing the exact same chemicals that were released when the trauma happened. Even though it was in the past and isn’t happening now, it will not only feel like it’s happening again- on a biological level, it is happening again. When that memory is healed, only one area of the brain will light up, the place where memories are stored.
This is what it means to have a fucked brain. To unfuck your brain, you have to go back into those triggers, feel the feelings, sort out the information and integrate what happened into your story. You have to learn from what happened and let it change you, even when most of the time, you wish it never happened.
Then, you can rejoin the world healed and ready to keep on living.
The Impact of Feelings, Diversity, and Intersectional Feminism on Healing & Trauma
Obviously, given that I said that the systems of society are involved in causing trauma, all those controversial buzzwords like racism, sexism, ableism, classism, and feminism are involved too.
I’m gonna take this from micro to macro.
Feelings
Our bodies communicate with our brains about what we need through our feelings. When you experience a negative feeling, it means a need is not being met. When you experience a positive feeling, it means a need is. Often our society prefers to ignore the negative emotions, but these emotions provide really important information. They help you know when you have a need not being met and that you need to make a change or communicate. If you continue to have that need not met over an extended period of time, it can result in mental health issues.
Feelings are really just chemicals. You cannot control the chemicals that are released when your body receives an input that stimulates a response. You can control how you respond.
Different people will release different amounts or types of chemicals to the same input, hence why some people choose to be an accountant at a computer all day and some choose teaching surrounded by chaotic children.
In order to control your response to your feelings, you first have to identify your feelings, connect them to the need that is not being met and then figure out what needs to be done for your need to be met. The hard part is when your need is not being met because of someone else or something else that you cannot just make do what you need them to do.
You have to use your words.
In Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, he provides a list of feelings, a list of needs, and a sentence frame that you can use to ask for what you need. I had this taped on my bathroom mirror (it’s still there) with a collage that said, “Ask for what you need.” I’ve published it here as a resource.
The sentence frame used is, “When you do ___, I feel ___ because my need of ___ is ___. Next time, could you please____? Thank you.” You may have heard me use it before, my students definitely have…
This is a strategy for communicating assertively, aka both people get their needs met, however, many times this is not the case, and people resort to relational aggression to get people to do what they want, which is very unhealthy for both people involved.
Diversity
Diversity! A buzzword that sadly has been weaponized against the very people it was coined to protect, but is critical to validate, understand, and appreciate if we are ever going to make meaningful improvements to the system we are forced to live in.
I’ve been repeating over and over again that we’re all different. Well that difference is diversity and there are many different types of diversity. Identity wheels are a very useful way to identify all the ways one can be different from another; this one is from Boston University.
Here are the different categories:
| Core/Internal Dimensions | Secondary/Externa Dimensions |
| Race Ethnicity, Heritage and Culture Class and Economic Background Sex, Gender, and Gender Expression Romantic and Sexual Orientation Age Faith, Beliefs, Values, and Ideology Physical and Developmental (Dis)Ability Mental and Emotional (Dis)Ability Language Use and First Language Nationality and Birthplace | Citizenship and Immigration Status Geographic Location Literacy and Education Background Maritial and Relationship Status Caretake and Parental Status Physical Appearance and Body Type Housing Status |
All these dimensions of your identity come together and affect both what feelings you will experience and how you will respond to those feelings when interacting in the world.
I am going to focus on the three dimensions that are most important in order for you to understand why I burnt out as a teacher and the significant impact they had on my health: (1) physical and developmental (dis)ability; (2) sex, gender, and gender expression; and (3) race.
physical and developmental [dis]ability
In order to get around in society, there are daily functions that must be performed. These are tasks such as breathing, walking, talking, focusing, eating, hearing, seeing, sleeping, caring for one’s self, performing manual tasks, and working. This also includes bodily functions too such as your immune system, digestion, or using the bathroom (ADA).
Some people because of physical and developmental reasons out of their control need support in order to do these basic things that many of us take for granted. It’s easier for us to support these people when they are physical and we can see them. Someone who uses a walker or a wheelchair or crutches, for example.
It’s a lot harder for us when it’s an invisible disability. This is an umbrella term for a wide range of challenges that are primarily neurological and thus can’t be seen. I am going to focus on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [ADHD] and autism, as the academy I taught in was created to support students who had a disability (mostly ADHD and autism) and also identified as gifted [called 2E]. There is a lot of crossover. Also, I have family members who are 2E and thus this is really important to why I am the way I am, and why I care so much about this program.
Autism and ADHD are both defined by the CDC as developmental disabilities that are often diagnosed together and can be diagnosed from a variety of symptoms that often change as a person ages (aka continues to develop).
While autism and ADHD are identified as disabilities, and thus seen as disorders that we are trying to cure; they are not curable and they are not disorders. They are a natural part of human diversity.
However, for some people, their neurodiversity makes it excruciatingly challenging for them to function in our society and prevents them from having the same opportunities to achieve their full potential and live the highest quality of life possible. This is why for some people, it is important that they have the protections of a legally identified disability.
Accepting their difference and supporting them isn’t optional if you believe in that sort of thing, everyone is self-diagnosing these days; they need you to accept their differences and support them to function day to day.
They aren’t lazy or selfish or rigid or or too sensitive or an asshole or chaotic, they are neurodiverse and they need support.
ADHD and autism express themselves differently in each person. There is no one size fits all, or sweeping statements like “all people who are on the autism spectrum act like this”. Again, this is why our healthcare and education system suck at serving these kinds of people.
At the same time, everyone falls on the autism and ADHD spectrum because as I said earlier, they really are just the expression of our natural diversity, of our unique biologies especially our different genetic make-ups and nervous systems.
For example, in the front of your brain are cells that take in other people’s facial reactions and process that information. We all have a different amount of these types of brain cells as is natural genetic variation. Some people have more, some people have less.
Many people on the autism spectrum have significantly less, so much so, that they can only read your facial reactions if they are consciously focusing on them and have been taught directly how to read the body language, or if your reactions are super big like you start screaming or crying.
Often people with this neurological difference are labeled as narcissists or assholes, but really it is part of their disability and once they are aware that they have hurt or upset you, they are really empathetic.
I know this to be true because one day I was watching my grandpa Papa Joe, who many people consider a narcissist, complain to my sister. He kept yelling and complaining, and she was getting more and more upset, but I could tell he was completely oblivious. Then she snapped, she screamed back and started to cry. Immediately, his face fell and he started apologizing immediately. “I didn’t realize you were so upset, I’m sorry. I’ll stop, I’ll stop.”
It breaks my heart knowing that my grandpa who has been divorced three times, who is currently suffering from Alzheimer’s, and who has been known his whole life to be an asshole and narcissist suffered more than he needed to because he’s on the autism spectrum and couldn’t get the support that he needed to live the quality of life that he deserved. He is a good man and cares deeply about people, yet our lack of acceptance and understanding about his neurodiversity has made it hard for him to connect with us, and us to connect with him. Also, him being a white man in America in the 60s and 70s, but I’ll get to that next.
Another form of our invisible differences is expressed through our nervous systems. As kids, we learned that there were only five senses, but there are actually way more. This topic is currently under debate although they have officially agreed there are at least 8 sense systems and up to 33 distinct senses.
The eight sensory systems are:
- Sight (Visual) – responsible for body’s sense of sight
- Smell (Olfactory) – responsible for body’s sense of smell
- Sound (auditory) – responsible for body’s sense of hearing
- Taste (gustatory) – responsible for body’s sense of taste
- Touch (tactile) – responsible for the body’s sense of touch
- Balance (vestibular) responsible for the body’s sense of balance, motion, and spatial orientation
- External body awareness (proprioceptive) – body’s external awareness – aka what is going on around you and other people’s facial cues and responses
- Internal body awareness (interoceptive) – responsible for body’s internal awareness aka your thoughts, feelings, or pain responses including hunger, thirst, and exhaustion.
Different people have different levels of sensitivity in different areas, which is a natural part of neurodiversity.
For people with noise sensitivity this can be that they need absolute silence to focus or sleep, or, the opposite, they need white noise or a podcast. At the same time, this noise sensitivity can result in amazing musical abilities or sound engineering skills.
Some people are really sensitive to food textures and flavors, hence why we have sommeliers and chefs. For visual people, they can be interior designers. It goes on and on. What is often our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness.
While some people are identified as having a legally disability, others [me] just call themselves a “highly sensitive person”. Coined in 1991, therapist Elaine Aron was able to show that these people were not “crazy” or “too sensitive” as they had often been called, but that they biologically had a more sensitive nervous system than others. It wasn’t them being picky or difficult or annoying, it was real and deserved to be respected and listened to.
Now it is thought that these people are actually just on the neurodivergent spectrum, it just doesn’t affect their daily functioning enough to be a legal disability.
I identify as a highly sensitive person; you can thank my ex-boyfriend who kept telling me I was “too sensitive” so I decided to read Elaine’s book and then came back with, “Yeah, I am. It’s biological and it’s not changing, so you either have to accept it or we should break up.” You can guess what happened.
Dr. Linnea Passaler, author of Heal the Nervous System, created a nervous system quiz to determine your level of sensitivity with three results: orchids (very sensitive), tulips (medium sensitivity), and some are dandelions (they can thrive anywhere). I am an orchid!
In conclusion, all humans are neurodiverse, although some are more divergent than others which can affect their ability to function in our society that is designed by and for people who are neurotypical. Their are infinite ways our neurodiversity can express itself including autism and ADHD. It is important to accept and support these differences in our personal lives and in the workplace. They are not just people being difficult; these differences are real and they are incredibly valuable to our society.
sex, gender, and gender expression
Another type of diversity is sex, gender, and gender expression. People get confused about how these differ, especially my students, and it really annoys me because they use this ignorance to justify bullying and exclusionary behavior, when it’s really just biological and cultural factors largely outside of our control. I am not even going to talk about sexual attraction (aka LGBTQIA+ which is mostly to do with who you want to fuck), that’s a whole other section. I am simply going to talk about what the difference is between biological sex [male, intersex, female = scientific and out of our control] and gender/gender expression [boy, girl, queer, nonbinary = cultural]
Let’s start at the very beginning. When the fetus is in the womb, they all start off as female. Then, at some point during the pregnancy process, a hormone is released. The amount released varies in every single person. At a certain threshold that only some eggs reach, the fetus will change from a female to a male. For some, this hormone amount is somewhere in the middle. This is why people who are intersex exist. There is no cure and this is not a disorder, this is a natural part of human diversity. This is also why people who are queer or nonbinary or feminine presenting males and masculine presenting females or males who identify as women and females who identify as men exist.
Then the baby is born and they are indoctrinated into our culture based on the expectations of different sexes, aka girls where pink and boys where blue. The gender binary! Either you are this or you are that. Aka girls will have babies and have to raise them, and boys will have to make a living to take care of their families because the girls will have to stay at home to take care of the babies. Women will do the emotional and domestic labor while men will do the physical and societal labor. Women are in control of the private home, while men control the public. That’s what it had been for a very, very long time until the last 100 years thanks to the World Wars, capitalism, and manufacturing!
There is some biology to the differences between men and women, and yet at the same time, it is a spectrum. For example, because women’s bodies are designed to give birth to children and breastfeed them, our nervous systems often have higher sensitivity to external inputs, specifically facial reactions to help us take care of our babies and social dynamics. This also means that typically women are more sensitive to social situations and being liked, and that this is hardwired into us to help us survive.
Again because gender and sexuality are a spectrum, we can’t make sweeping statements. Thus, for some people, their nervous system is not as sensitive to this input and they can have a “thick skin”, while for others, this is just biologically impossible and we need workplaces and systems that allow for us to have positive social interactions with the people we rely on to accomplish our work, and the space and support to resolve social conflicts.
In addition, while our culture may try to teach us that gender is a binary with two different sets of roles and expectations, our own families may be set up differently and can teach us otherwise.
And yet, it holds true – because we live in a society with a governing system that was originally created exclusively by white Christian men who owned land in America (aka our Founding Fathers – what about our Founding Mothers huh?!?!) and still has only ever had a Christian man as President, these societal and cultural expectations based on our genders are taught to us in a binary, and so, while we can’t make sweeping statements, we actually kinda can.
Making generalized sweeping statements about how people are and how the world works is how the brain functions. We don’t go around reinventing the wheel every time anytime anything happens. That would be exhausting. Our brain creates these often unspoken and unconscious rules based on information it has experienced, and then we live by them. It’s how we create our belief systems and make decisions that help us survive.
Depending on your identity within our society, you will have a different experience in the system and a different outcome. As I said, while we are an individualist society, in reality, our system is based on mass consumerism and functions like a factory creating the same product over and over again.
The main mechanism for maintaining the system (teaching and enforcing the gender binary, and gender scripting) is our education system. That’s the whole point – to socialize humans and teach them our values and cultural expectations, as well as prepare them for work!
race
The last area of diversity I want to get into is race. Now this is a scary topic to talk about, especially as a white person, since we are the in theory benefiters of the racialized system that we live in.
I say in theory because I believe that we too (white people) are also harmed by this racial system. It’s important to point out that a lot of work has been done in this area in America. We have been able to change the policies that were straight up racist (aka segregation) thanks to lots of hard work and sacrifice during the Civil Rights Movement, and we have been able to make people feel ashamed when they are called racist. These are great achievements! Yet there is still much more to be done.
Just because we have removed a few racist policies does not change the underlying values that the system is built on, and that these values represented one group of people [white male Christians] and excluded all others.
And lets unpack the word white. While we now use it as a sweeping term for anyone who they or their ancestors are originally from any Eastern European, Western European, and Middle Eastern country, this group of white people who created the system that America is founded one were from four countries (out of 44) that colonized most of the world: England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. These white people (mostly men – way too dangerous for women to travel) left their countries to set up colonies and spread Christianity all over the world. A large group of them came together and set up their own nation based on their values and called it America!
These values make up our cultural norms still today, and include:
- perfectionism
- sense of urgency
- defensiveness
- quantity over quality
- worship of the written word
- paternalism
- either/or thinking
- power hoarding
- fear of open conflict
- individualism
- progress is bigger, more
- objectivity
- right to comfort
If these values are your values, then obviously it will be easier for you to live a life in alignment. But if these are not, then it will be more challenging.
Values can be vague and hard to pinpoint, so let me go into two of these for you.
Either/or thinking
Some examples of either/or thinking:
- You are either a good student or a bad student.
- You are either a democrat or a republican.
- You are either an ally or the enemy.
- You are either gay or straight.
- You are either happy or miserable.
- You can either be a teacher working full-time or you can’t be a teacher.
- You can either say yes or no.
- You can either be my girlfriend or we break up and never speak to each other again.
- You either do what I tell you do to, or you are disrespectful.
This kind of thinking is everywhere in our society, and it is juvenile, narrow-minded thinking.
Worship of the written word
Some examples of worshipping the written word:
- Well, it’s not a policy, so I don’t have to do anything to help you.
- Since it was written in the New York Times, it must be true.
- Since it was published in a book, it must be fact.
- I have a text message that proves that you said that, therefore even though you changed your mind now, you still have to do it or you are going back on your word.
- This is my constitutional right (that was written hundreds of years ago and is pretty hard to update aka gun laws!).
In our society, whoever writes the rules and writes the history controls people and society. This is why lawyers often become politicians, and the people who get paid the most are not those who do the work – but those who write, manage, and enforce the policies – the administrators.
Intersectional Feminism
At the point where all these facets of diversity and and identity intersect is a person. And while these things are all abstract theories broken into parts and turned into words and numbers [policies, data points, research papers – worship of the written word!], they originated from humans living life.
Intersectional feminism, coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw, is a lens to help us discuss how different parts of our identity affect our experience of discrimination, and oppression. At the root, it’s about feminism – the belief that all people deserve to be treated equally. Although, the words “feminism” and “equal” are a little cringe right now. In the 21st century, we prefer the term “equitable” because equal means everyone gets the same thing, whereas equitable means everyone gets what they need.
In what you will read next, you will see the intersection of all these different parts of my identity come together to create my experience within the system, and what led me to burn out AND write and publish this blovel.
As a white, Judeo-Christian, upper-middle class, college educated, American and British female who also identifies as a woman, I have some privileges within the system. This is allowing me to take work off, to write clearly in the English language, and to publish confidently knowing that I will be financially secure and most likely physically safe.
I want to use my privileges not to protect myself and build a bubble around me within the system {aka Calabasas!}, but to dismantle the system we live in and put it back together updated for the 21st century so that all living beings [plants, animals, and people] get their needs met and thrive.
Yet at the same time, I am harmed by this system and I witness many people being harmed by the system, especially my students. I hope by sharing my personal experience being harmed by the system, that you will feel more safe to share yours, and that together we can collaborate to create a more equitable and loving society and a brighter future for us and our children.
Questions
My hope in you reading this is that you will better understand my experience as well as my thought process as I try to learn from my past to enjoy the present and create a brighter future.
Grateful for all questions and comments! Will respond below. It is only through questions, feedback, and failure that we learn.
This is what I learned and I hope through discussion and the sharing of resources, we can reach deeper truths and greater understandings together.
Read the next post in the series:
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