261: What if your mother was a victim of a secret government experiment?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. I just felt scared all the time, no matter where I was, especially in my house. I would just feel it in my body, this fear of just your emotional safety, just feeling scared and not safe in my skin. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.

You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 261. What if your mother was a victim of a secret government experiment?

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My mother grew up in a suburb with both of her parents. Her mom was a product of the Great Depression, but my grandfather was a successful engineer. So she lived in this big, beautiful home in the suburb and lived a pretty traditional life.

When my mom was 16, her dad actually suffered a heart attack unexpectedly. So that kind of shook up the family. So it was just my grandmother taking care of three teenage children at the time. And I know it was very traumatic for the whole family. My mother was never someone who did well in school or had any pursuits academically. So she didn't go to college. In her early 20s, she met my dad.

His family was in the military, so they moved around to all different locations. I think he's probably lived in 15 different locations all over the world.

They started dating and shortly after, surprise, she got pregnant. And that was with my older sister. So with the inheritance my mom received from her dad, she put a down payment on a house, which was the house I grew up in. And my mom and dad got married and they had a family of three, a little baby and a new home. We grew up in a small suburb town on the East Coast.

I was a happy kid and did really well in school and was very social. So when I think back to my childhood, I have all really good memories. Aside from some memories about my dad, my dad was starting to struggle with his mental health.

He started to have persecutory delusions and sort of these angry outbursts based on fears that weren't real. And he would fixate on certain people from the past that he thought were haunting him or were in his head. He would have these angry outbursts and you knew it when he was having an episode.

For example, he had a past psychiatrist, and I don't know what happened, but for years and years and years, this psychiatrist was in his head. This delusion that the psychiatrist was after him or wanting to hurt him in some way. So it became this obsessive fixation.

So after days and days of him not sleeping, I wake up in the morning to him yelling on the phone. And he's yelling at a lawyer saying, we have to get this guy. We have to get this guy. He's in my head. He's preventing me from sleeping. He's ruining my life. He's ruining my family. He's ruining everything. He's in my house. I can feel him in my house. And waking up in the morning hearing this, it's scary. And I felt so humiliated.

And waking up in the morning hearing this, it's scary to see the adult that you trust saying these very bizarre, strange things to their lawyer. And I felt so humiliated.

In his mind, this person was in his head or after him and he'd get very aggressive and physical towards objects in the house, never toward the family, but, you know, punch holes in the walls or go outside and just start breaking sticks and yelling and destroying things. And as a kid, it was terrifying. It was scary. You know, you're playing with your dad one minute and then the next minute he transitioned into someone you didn't recognize. He kind of became this monster. Yeah.

Whereas when he was not in these episodes, he was such a warm individual. He was so warm and loving and lovely. Yeah.

My mom was really good at protecting my sister and I from these experiences. When he would have these episodes, she would take us into our room. I shared a room with my sister and explain, your dad is sick and this is a symptom of his sickness. This is not really him. This is not really how he feels. He still loves you and this will pass. And sure enough, he would have these episodes, it would pass. And it felt like the next day he'd wake up and just be this typical father again.

When he had these episodes, he was so humiliated after. It was such a drastic personality shift. He would feel so humiliated that this side of him was let out. He never talked about it. And when it was brought up, he would just shrivel and just have this look of shame and guilt because he knew it was a problem, but he didn't know what to do or how to fix it.

He did believe they were real. So if you were to ask him when he was not in one of these sort of psychotic episodes, if what he was believing was real, he would still believe it was real even when he was not in that psychotic episode. And they would come and go. There'd be months where he would be fine. And then it seemed to come in waves.

One delusion he had was that our neighbors were after him. And I actually remember asking him what he meant by that, because he would repeat that kind of under his breath, like, these neighbors are after me. And I would ask, well, what do you mean, after you? And he said, they're in my head.

On some level, I knew it wasn't real. But at the same time, this is your dad and he's telling you something. So you question the validity. Is there something to this? He is an adult. He is my father. There's some level of trust. But on the other hand, he's telling these very bizarre things that are not possible. It left me with a lot of questions as a kid, questions about mental health and what this was and why did he have it and would I have it?

One moment, I remember I was about 10 years old. He would have multiple nights in a row where he couldn't sleep. His reasoning was because the neighbors were in his head. In the middle of the night, he goes into the refrigerator and he grabs a carton of eggs. He goes outside and he throws the eggs at the neighbor's house. The next day, I was home alone. No one else was in the house. And the neighbor comes to our front door.

The neighbor looks at me and sees a 10-year-old kid and says, hey, do you know what happened here? Do you know who egged my house? And I couldn't help but assume they would think it was me. I mean, they're looking at a 10-year-old kid. It put me in this position of what do I do? It was so hard for me to hold that humiliation for my dad. And there was nothing I could do about it.

I think a lot of it I had tried to push aside because the majority of my life was good. I was well-adjusted and I had a lot of friends, but it did build this hypersensitivity of who I needed to be around him in order for me to be safe. You know, I understood the complexity of what was going on and what my role was, and that was to protect this kind of family secret.

Looking back, I don't think my mom was happy in the marriage for obvious reasons, but I don't think she had a way out. She didn't have an education. She didn't have a career she could pursue. And I don't think she really had a strong sense of self. Her identity was being a mom. She was really involved and really fun and always took us places. And I was a sensitive kid, so I was very attached to her.

When I'd be invited over to sleepovers, I would just get that homesick feeling because I just wanted to be with my mom. Later on in life, I kind of put the pieces together about some of her action. She would take us to multiple different pharmacies. And it was so confusing because she was getting the same medication at each one of these pharmacies. And what she explained to me was it was pain medication for her headaches.

I don't know if she did have migraines and headaches, but as an adult, I put together that it was highly probable that she was addicted to prescription medication. She didn't really have an identity on her own. She didn't have a career. She didn't have hobbies. She didn't have friends. I think there was an undertone of depression that she tried to mask. But as a kid, I felt it. You know, I could feel that sort of sadness. And she was also hiding her pain from everybody.

In the late 90s, we had just gotten a computer and we just got the internet, which was so exciting at the time. And I noticed she was on the computer all the time. I didn't know exactly what she was doing. So I'd ask her and she said, when I was younger, I was part of this program called MKUltra.

Now that we have the internet, I'm able to find other people like me that were victims of this program. At this time, I had never heard anything about this. I didn't know what MKUltra was. I didn't know what she was talking about. And I didn't understand the internet either.

I have this memory of being in our office and I'm just on this office chair spinning for hours, staring at the ceiling, just like waiting for her because she spent so much time on this research. And I just wanted her attention. The more time she spent on it, the more questions I asked about it. And the more I learned exactly what she was doing and what this program was and why she

So between the ages of when she was one and 10, her father worked at a well-known university and medical institution, and they were executing this top secret program called MKUltra.

The MKUltra project kind of used a front of being this research program at more than 80 institutions like colleges, universities, hospitals, prisons. And the mission was to develop procedures and drugs that could be used in interrogations to weaken the human mind and force confessions through brainwashing and sort of psychological tactics and psychological torture.

designed by the CIA, engaged in human experimentation on human test subjects without their knowledge or consent. The CIA worked closely with the U.S. Army also to carry out these programs.

They would use an array of unethical and illegal tactics to sort of manipulate the human mind and the subject's mental states and brain functioning. They would use psychoactive drugs and hallucinogens and other chemicals on unknowing subjects. They would do electroshock therapy or hypnosis, sensory deprivation. There was also verbal abuse and sexual abuse to a lot of the victims.

The CIA conducted this enormous project at all these different institutions, and the greater government wasn't aware of it. So they were operating in secrecy. And there were actually a number of people in the CIA that didn't even know that this was happening. So when this information came out, it was huge. And it was brought to the attention of the public by the director of the CIA in 1973. And it was just a huge shock to everyone.

As it became known, a lot of the records and files were destroyed. There were some documents that did survive. And in the late 70s, the Freedom of Information Act came out. So a lot of those documents were uncovered. And there was some more declassification of these MKUltra documents in the early 2000s, too, that you can actually see online.

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So when my mom was in this program, she said her experiments occurred in the early 60s to the late 60s. Her father worked at a local university, a medical institution that was executing one of these top secret MKUltra programs. This particular program, the one she was specifically part of, was the program designed to research mind control on children.

It wasn't uncommon for the children of the employees of these institutions that were conducting MKUltra projects to be targeted as guinea pigs for these programs. It also wasn't uncommon for employees' jobs to be threatened if they didn't agree for their children to participate.

So my mom started to connect to this whole community of other victims who were seeking the same thing she was, a sense of community and I think validation to her experiences. You know, you're so young. All these strange things are happening. I'm sure you're questioning your memory, especially if there were drugs involved and you're not in a clear state of mind when some of these things are happening.

So I think just connecting with other people that said, hey, this happened to me too. You're not crazy. I think that was really healing for her. And I think that sense of validation and belonging really gave her the validation she needed, not only for her experience and her memories, but I think the validation she needed to feel important or a sense of connection or purpose. She found a family with these other survivors online.

I wanted to know everything. And I found out the real details when she would be on the phone. So she would have these long phone calls that lasted hours with these other victims that she would find. And I would sit in the same room with her and I would hear the entire conversation. And then when she wanted me to leave, that's obviously when I knew it was something juicy that I wanted to hear. I would sit right outside the office door and continue to listen to the rest of the conversation.

I have this memory of her using the term human guinea pigs. On one hand, I was a very observant kid and I comprehended the serious nature of what she was talking about. And at the same time, I was still a kid and I still had the mind of a kid. And I remember thinking this was so funny. I couldn't put my head around like, what is a human guinea pig?

In this program, her parents were told by the hospital staff that she had a heart defect. Because of that, she needed long-term treatment and she needed to stay at the hospital for extended periods of time.

So she stayed at this children's ward at this hospital. The staff told her parents that she was staying there and each day she'd be transported to a number of different locations, hospitals, military bases, ambulances, and school buses. And I remember her saying, you know, she was on this school bus and she was so scared because she was always being transported to different locations and entering these very strange, bizarre situations.

And when she would return to the hospital, she said she would remember the staff would put all of her belongings in a private hospital room to make it look like she had been there all along. She talked about very strange experiments that were done on her.

She was given drinks and shots and substances that would make her hallucinate. And later on, she learned it was LSD because that's what they were using in these research studies. She would see these big purple elephants in the room and she didn't understand why the purple elephants were there. She said she was also given electroshock therapy, which is so upsetting. That's so cruel.

She'd be put in different machines and different x-rays and half the time not even knowing what was going on or what these machines were doing. But she said this electroshock therapy was so painful and so scary. She would have these men in lab coats asking her these questions. Like, how confusing is that? Like, not understanding where you are, why you're there, what you're taking, who this person is.

She learned later on these strange tactics were designed to train the human mind to eliminate emotion and feelings and also torture techniques with the idea of breaking people. When she was on the phone with these people she would meet, I would hear their stories too. I remember she would talk to this one man a lot.

He was a Russian orphan that was brought to America. And essentially, he was owned by the government and used him in a number of experiments. The government was his guardian, so they could essentially use him however they needed. And this poor man, as an adult, trying to put the pieces together of what happened to him. And I remember my mom building a friendship with this man and really wanting to help him

There was a man who told a story when he was a child. He was in a boarding school and it was in Massachusetts. And what he later learned, he was fed cereal that was radioactive. He said he would eat the cereal and it was awful. And he would be reprimanded if he didn't finish the cereal. And it was this horrible situation where he felt sick to his stomach and everyone had to eat the cereal.

There was another woman. She was a student at a university and she got pregnant and they had a university prenatal clinic. And she said she had lived there and every day they were given what she had called a cocktail.

They explained it to her as a pregnancy cocktail of prenatal vitamins and other essential nutrients, and they would make her drink it. And she would get so sick after, and they would sort of explain to her, well, you're pregnant. That's what happens when you're pregnant. And later on, she learned it was laced with radioactive iron. And that, again, was another sort of institution that was infiltrated by these really unethical MKUltra projects.

So at the time, my mom's research actually, it bothered me because as a kid, I wanted the attention from my mom. I also questioned the reality of it because growing up with my dad, I already had broken trust. So hearing my mom have these preposterous stories, of course, there was some level of second guessing if this was even real.

I didn't know who she was. I felt like she would put on a facade as my mom and she was a great mom, but I could pick up on this energy, this whole existence that she was hiding so much from me.

I remember being so attached to my mom and so bonded to my mom that I just wanted to be around her all the time. But I always felt like there was just something that she wasn't sharing with me or something I couldn't get at. And part of that, I think, was also this sort of secret addiction of these prescription medications. You know, I think I know my mom, but there are all these times I feel this strange doubt that she's hiding something.

Having that unspoken confusion and disconnect with her fed into my questioning everything. So although a lot of the documents were destroyed in the 70s, my mom was somehow able to obtain some of her medical records. She did have one document that she showed me that was signed by her father to allow her to participate in what was on this document as a research project that was medically necessary.

It gave me, I think, the proof I needed to kind of realize that what she was doing was real and it happened. I think it also gave her some confidence to ultimately have a sense of validity to her own experience too. When I was in the sixth grade, my mom had gotten sick. She was in bed for two days and we didn't really know what was going on.

But she was so sick to the point she was unresponsive. And I thought that was odd. And I was concerned. But I trusted that if my parents figured this was a serious situation, they would do something about it. So I didn't think too much about it. I remember my dad asking my mom, do you want to go to the hospital?

And she said no. And that was the end of the conversation. And I think about that conversation so much as an adult. The third day, I just got my report card that day.

It was April. I was 12 years old at the time. And I was really eager to come home because I knew my mom wasn't well. Like, I really just wanted to go home and see her and make sure she was okay. Because I just could feel that something was off, that, yeah, she was sick, but it seemed different. I remember opening up the door and going in the house, and my sister came home at the same time. She was in the eighth grade, so we were on the same bus.

So my sister went in into the family room and started watching TV, but I immediately went into my mom's room. Immediately, the energy is off in the room and she is laying there completely sprawled out on her back and her eyes were still open and sort of rolled back. But I remember at the moment, the thought of her being dead didn't even cross my mind. I just thought she was sleeping.

I remember saying mom and physically touching her skin and immediately retracting because her skin, her arm, it was stiff and clammy. And it just was the strangest feeling. At this point, I knew something was wrong. And then I screamed her name. I screamed mom. It's almost like halfway through my scream, I realized she wasn't responding.

So then the scream turned into this terror of what was in front of me. She's not just not responsive. She's dead. I remember as I screamed, my sister came into the room and I didn't even hear her because I'm so locked on to what is in front of me. My sister was right beside me and she screamed at the top of her lungs. It was so deafening.

My sister was so overwhelmed, she just couldn't even function. So I was the one to go to the phone and call 911. All of these strangers were just busting into my house and into the room. On one hand, it felt like this sense of safety, like, okay, now there are some adults here that are going to handle this situation. I'm not alone. They're going to figure it out. It's going to be okay.

I remember this overweight EMT middle-aged man, and he just looks at me and he says, your mom is dead. And me thinking, that can't be true. What a shocking thing for someone to say. And just feeling so overwhelmed that I needed some source of comfort and safety in that moment that I just opened up my arms and I just hugged this man, this man I didn't even know.

So much had happened in such a short amount of time. It just occurred to me as I was sitting there watching them carrying her away, I would never see her again.

The person who is your entire world, who you are so bonded with and you identify through and look to them as a sense of identity and security and safety literally was just being carried away by these strangers. And I just remember feeling so angry at these people that they were just so nonchalantly carrying the most important thing in my life away, like just an object. And me just watching it happen.

I couldn't even see myself as a separate individual. I felt like in that moment, I wanted to die too. A few days after she died, we got the report from the autopsy that she had died of appendicitis.

At that point, I knew appendicitis was preventable and treatable. And I had a friend in elementary school that had appendicitis and they had a simple surgery and they were fine. So then I'm putting these pieces together that it was preventable.

I'm left with my 12-year-old brain to put the pieces together to a situation I, one, didn't have all the information on, and two, there's so much I didn't understand. And it was just impossible to put this puzzle together of what happened, why it happened, why didn't she go to the hospital? Was this because we didn't have insurance? Was it because of these things that happened in her past?

I had a lot of questions and anger towards my dad. Why didn't my dad make her go to the hospital? And then also some self-guilt I should have called. I should have done something about it.

The second layer was obviously processing the grief of these unbelievable, intense, sad feelings and the confusion and the powerlessness that this traumatic event happened. You have no power in this situation, nowhere to turn, no one to talk to, no one to feel safe anymore because my dad was not a safe person to me.

So I really went internal and it was the only way I knew how to cope. I somehow managed to put on a mask, but I was very depressed. I didn't want to be alive without her. And it wasn't even in a morbid way like I wanted to kill myself. I just genuinely didn't want to be alive. I didn't see a purpose without her.

I think feeling intense emotions without support leads to sort of inner destruction. I didn't think I could survive without her. The way that I handled my trauma was putting it away. I had all these different boxes. I had a box in my brain full of intense feelings of grief.

I knew that wasn't acceptable just to cry in class. So I would put that box on this metaphoric mental shelf. I'd dissociate from it. And I wouldn't allow it in my everyday psyche because I couldn't function feeling that overwhelming grief.

And then there's that box of confusion of this really fucked up situation. And it could have been prevented and anger toward my parents for not being responsible and preventing this and just the powerlessness of being 12. Anytime I'd feel that anger, I'd put that in my metaphorical box, put it on a shelf and again, just push it away and dissociate from it. And

And the only way I was going to get up in the morning and get through the day was if I separated and fragmented from these really intense emotions. I had these horrible flashbacks of seeing my mom's face and touching her skin, and they were so intrusive. I just felt scared all the time, no matter where I was, especially in my house.

I would just feel it in my body, this fear of just your emotional safety, just feeling scared and not safe in my skin. My bedroom was right next to where I discovered her body. So every day feeling this intense, intense fear all the time. It was just this open, oozing wound that continued without any closure.

Given what happened, I was seemingly really functional. And I think that's another way I coped was I masked my mental health to just blend in with the masses was much safer for me than to appear to be different.

As I adapted to life without my mom, my father is dealing with his own grief and turmoil. Understandably, it made his mental health even worse. He would wake up in the middle of the night with these rages, these psychotic, delusional rages, talking about nonsense.

Those were some of the most terrifying memories for me. I already felt so scared and unsafe just existing. And then to wake up in the middle of the night and just to hear these loud crashes and bangs and punches in the wall was so terrifying. I would get up and I would find him. And when he would see me, it's like he melted completely.

It's like he shifted into a child. He was this big monster. And as soon as he saw me, I guess it pulled at his heartstrings and he just melted into this little, little boy. And I would sit with him and it diffused these sort of episodes forever.

When I saw that happen, I realized that I could control the situation, that I could prevent these feelings of fear. I could control it by just getting up and sitting with him. So I took on this responsibility of soothing him in these moments, not for his benefit, but for mine. If I took care of him, if I were there for him, if I could help him with his emotions, that protected me.

It became a mission to heal my dad. I wanted to fix him and he made me believe I could. He would tell me I was the only one that could really calm him down. Trying to heal somebody who struggles with their mental health is a losing battle.

It was a really difficult relationship I had with him because every time he would fall back into his delusions again, I took that on as my fault. I wasn't doing what I needed to do to keep him okay. There was a lot of anger, a lot of frustration, a lot of feelings of unworthiness and that my needs weren't important. It was just one thing after another and I started to become really good at holding things in

When I got my license, that was a pretty pivotal point because then I could leave. My mom had her old car that was still at our house and it was a gateway to freedom. And any opportunity I had to leave my house, I absolutely would take it. I needed to get out. I needed to connect to people. There was no worse place than being at home.

I had a lot of friends and I was nominated on homecoming court and I was well liked and seemingly adjusted, popular, but it was a facade that was able to keep me afloat or at least distanced from this pain.

So I did end up getting into college and I thought, you know, this is a really fresh start. I know I had a horrible senior year and my mental health wasn't good, but this would be different and start fresh and meet new people. And I think it helped for a while.

But at this point, my dad was so emotionally reliant on me. He would visit me once a week for dinner and I absolutely hated it. He would call me multiple times a day and the anger of just not having this freedom and independence and these ties to this life. It was absolutely maddening.

You know, I was able to get through college. At this point, I was on medication and I was seeing a therapist. It certainly didn't heal any wounds, but it helped me function.

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After college, I start dating my husband now. And that was kind of a gateway to get out of my house. I lived with him throughout my 20s. And it was great. I finally felt like I was able to set boundaries with my dad and not feel guilty about it. So I got married and we bought a house and things were going pretty well.

So in my early 30s, my dad started having bowel problems and pain, and he ignored the symptoms for a long time. During this time, my dad's health insurance bill comes up and it says past due. And then it says, if you don't give us the full amount, we're going to terminate your health insurance. So we didn't pay this bill. So the next month, his health insurance was terminated and he just kind of blew it off.

I think he was scared. I think he knew something was wrong, but he would use the excuse that, well, I don't have health insurance. I said, like, you need to go to a doctor. I'm really concerned about you.

So eventually, I mean, months and months and months after having these symptoms, he went to the doctor and he had a massive tumor in his colon and it had grown into his bladder. And the doctor said, you know, for it to be this massive, you had to have neglected symptoms for a significant amount of time. This has probably been there about five years.

I actually had a trip lined up with my husband and some friends to go to Roatan, Honduras. And it was a great experience. But I felt this eagerness to get home because I wanted to check on my dad. It felt like things weren't right. So immediately after I got home, he wasn't answering his phone, which also heightened my concern. So I went to his house and I walked in. I called his name and he didn't respond.

I still, to this day, have a difficult time going into the bedroom of that home. But I walk down the hallway and I see him laying there in the bed, unresponsive. I'm absolutely terrified. I'm walking into the same scenario again.

Eventually he does wake up and what a huge sense of relief that is. Okay, this is not the same, but he's not making any sense. He's highly delusional and he was covered in urine and it almost felt like I was reliving history, but this time he was alive.

So there was just this nature to fix it this time that I had the power now as an adult to maybe rewrite history and I would be the one that saves him. So we rushed him to the hospital and because his tumor was so large, it perforated his bladder. It had created this horrific infection. And it turns out when we got to the hospital, he was extremely septic. And if I waited any longer, he would have been dead.

And that the same negligence, the same poor decision making, you know, there were just so many odd parallels to that situation. But well, this time I'm going to resolve this powerlessness I've been living with about my mom's death and I'm going to make sure he survives. For a year, it was nonstop caretaking for my dad. And I didn't even think about it. I just had one mission. It was to keep him alive.

I mean, it was an absolute nightmare and I didn't have a life for an entire year. Right as my dad started to recover in some sense, I got pregnant and I was not planning this. I didn't have a chance to rest. I didn't have a chance to process what I had just gone through.

I did have my son and of course he is the most wonderful thing in my life and I wouldn't trade the experience. But after my son was born, it's like everything I had ever dealt with and never addressed, all of those things that had been compounding inside of me and adding up and these traumatic events, it's almost like I just crashed.

I could not handle the pressure of life. I couldn't handle the pressure of this child. I couldn't handle these panic attacks I was having. I couldn't handle all of it. So I was at probably the lowest low I've ever been in. I always had weird symptoms that I just kind of chalked up to me being different. I never attributed it to mental health or PTSD or anything like that.

I always slept a lot. And I go to all these sleep doctors and have all these sleep tests. And at one point, they diagnosed me with sleep apnea. Then they said, well, now we're not sure if that's what you have. Then they determined I had narcolepsy. During times where I had really strong emotions, I'd immediately become drowsy.

I think what would happen is when these sort of traumatic memories would come up, my brain would sort of dissociate and shut down. And I literally couldn't even stay awake. I also was suffering with panic attacks, even without the medication, all the time. Overwhelming, intense feelings everywhere.

There was a tremendous cloud of shame that I wasn't like everybody else. You feel like you're damaged or different. And on some level, like I knew it was from my past, but I had been in therapy forever. So what was wrong with me? Why am I still like this? So after years of unsuccessful therapy and seeing multiple therapists, one therapist said you should see a trauma therapist.

I had never even heard of this. What I was learning was there is this whole entire world of therapy that worked on your nervous system. Those memories are feelings that are stored in our bodies. Our feelings are in our head. Those are thoughts. These feelings are trapped inside of our bodies. And that's a lot of times why we have panic attacks.

And once I learned the difference, it was like a light switch that turned on that gave me hope that maybe I'm just not in the right therapy. So I tried something called somatic experiencing, which helps you learn to sit in your body and experience the sensations in your body. But it was so slow moving that I needed something different. So that's when I read and discovered EMDR.

EMDR essentially works on traumatic material through something called bilateral stimulation, which is either your eyes following an object back and forth or tapping on different sides of your body. What I learned was that these sort of bilateral stimulations where you track an object back and forth, it replicates the same process that

you experience in REM sleep. So when you're in REM sleep, you're processing more difficult material that might be too difficult for you to be able to process in your conscious mind, in your day-to-day. It helps you break down barriers to your subconscious so you can access sort of like this deeper material. I had completely fragmented myself from these other darker parts of myself.

And not until I started to do this deeper therapy and recover some of these memories through this process did I start to remember, not just remember mentally, but feel these intense emotions that I hadn't felt since I was 12 years old. It is the strangest experience ever.

I would have these clear images of me being in my room, being 12 years old and what it felt like to be in that room. Not just remembering what it looked like, but feeling the weight of the feelings I was having at the time. Re-experiencing this event, not just in your mind, but as if you're physiologically there.

And in doing that, you're able to almost go back in time and sort of resolve these feelings on a new level, on a deeper level and feel 12 years old again and cry like you're 12 years old again. In this experience, I realized that I had so many layers, so much compounded, repressed pain that

Yeah.

I started to do research on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, healing anxiety, PTSD, and treatment-resistant depression using psychedelic substances like psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, and MDMA and ketamine.

So I started to look into ketamine, what was called ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. And I was able to feel things that I couldn't feel while doing other sorts of therapy. So it did conquer that goal of peeling back layers that I just felt like I couldn't figure out how to remove properly.

To be honest, it was a very spiritual experience. CBT and traditional talk therapy is so cognitive that I felt very disconnected from my body. And EMDR therapy is very body oriented. So you get in touch with your body. But taking ketamine, it was almost like spiritual therapy. It transcended my mind and my existence to a greater understanding. And it was healing in a way that I can't put words to it.

So in these experiences, I could sit with death and I could sit with the feelings and images of death and digest it in a spiritual way and also have an understanding that it's not the end. I think at 12 years old, when I saw death, it was the end. It was the end of everything.

That bond with your mother or parent is just so animalistic. It's something you can't put words to, and it sort of transcends this human experience, that emotional connection with somebody. There's nothing else like it. And children identify their existence through their parents. And when you lose one, you really feel like part of you dies. Yeah.

For me, in my experience, I didn't know if I existed without her. And it's this very confusing identity crisis of what is life without this person? Who am I without this person? Do I matter without this person? If they're dead, why am I not dead? As an adult, it's been really difficult to come to terms with my mom's death and that it was preventable. It's still a hard pill to swallow looking at the events that occurred.

Also learning more about MKUltra and a lot of revelations of what occurred is really difficult to digest. And knowing that my mom suffered through a lot of this is really hard to hear and process. I think I shied away from learning about it because I didn't want to know. But then there was this part of me that needed to know.

I wanted to know what she experienced. I wanted to know what she went through. You know, a lot of it is very disturbing and horrible. She went through her own trauma in a medical setting, you know, with medical professionals. And it only makes sense that she would not trust hospitals, not trust doctors, given her experience, right?

You know, I don't know why she didn't go to the hospital, but I can only make the connection that MKUltra and her experience contributed to her reluctance and lack of trust in the medical system. If she did go to the hospital, she would still be alive today.

I think what I ultimately got out of my experiences is this desire to learn about the human mind and how it works and how it operates and why we do the things that we do. I think particularly how our mind almost fragments into these different parts of ourselves and why we behave in certain ways that are so contradictory to

There's this theory that there's like multiplicity of the mind, that there's not just one mind. This sort of desire to learn and understand that multiplicity and how it happens and how traumatic events create a fragmentation in our mind.

Those who have been through traumatic events, your brain sort of disconnects in order to adapt to that. And I think with a number of different events, my brain has disconnected and learned to adapt and has created different parts of myself.

This sort of intellectual self that is logical and has an adult mind. And this other part of myself that's still 12 years old still comes out and still has these fears and still has these feelings and still has a sense of the world that a 12-year-old has and still has these sort of distortions and perceptions that a 12-year-old has. And having those conflicting feelings of I know one thing is true, but there's this sort of feeling embodiment that it's not true.

And it's rooted in this younger sense of self that's still sort of trapped. I think the most toxic consequence is that I've shoved all of this pain and all of these feelings, pushed them all away. And they're all stored in this part of my brain that now when it comes out, it's uncontrollable. It's like this part of me that knocks down a door and sort of hijacks the rest of me.

For me, this sort of multiplicity of the mind or different parts of ourselves, I think a lot of it works to my advantage because I can adapt to a lot of situations because I've had to develop these different parts of myself given these different events. I can be the introvert, but I can also be the extrovert. I can be extremely creative, but I can also be extremely logical. I've been able to develop a lot of different traits and different strengths because I've had to at different times in my life.

I have a very eclectic internal family of different parts of me and I have so many different perspectives and so many different thoughts and so many different feelings that I think it makes my mind really complex, but I think it also makes me very adaptive. It was able to open my mind and there was a lot of facilitation of self-love and acceptance and be kind to yourself. Like stop being so hard on yourself. There is an ability to heal.

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